How To Apply What You Learned In 2007 For Continued Success in 2008

Kristen’s post about putting the holiday slump to work for your business was a timely reminder that 2008 is fast approaching and before we know it, we’ll be into a new freelancing year and wondering just what happened to 2007!

If you want to make the most of 2008 from your freelance business perspective, now might be a great time to dust off the business plan and see what needs adjusting. If you’re one of the many freelancers who is thinking “why do I need a business plan? It’s just little old me”, then let me ask you this…

Do you still want to be freelancing this time next year? If so, then how sensible would it be to make a plan right now for this to be so?

Unless you’re just starting out, you now have one more year’s worth of experience under your belt to add to the plan for 2008; reflecting on the past year is a great way to revise your plans for the future.

The following 5 questions (with further prompting questions to guide you) might be ones you want to consider when thinking about your goals and business plans for 2008…

What have you achieved this year?

~ in relation to what you’d planned to achieve
~ that you’re most proud of
~ despite difficult challenges

Reviewing your successes is not only a fantastic feel-good exercise and motivator for the year to come, it can also help you deconstruct your successes in preparation for the next question.

I asked FreelanceSwitch’s editor Collis for some of his achievements

• Planned: Writing a book How To Be A Rockstar Freelancer – “Last new year I decided I wanted to write a book, the topic changed but a book’s a book right?”
• Difficult: Launching Freelance Switch – the best freelancing site out there (of course I’m biased) – “It turned out to be a lot harder than I thought to make money blogging, but we launched, grew and brought FSw to profitability this year”
• Proud of: Managing a successful inaugural year of Blog Action Day – “Definitely proud to have helped coordinate the event and am looking forward to doing it all again in 2008!”

What’s worked for you and what hasn’t?

~ from a marketing perspective
~ from a work/life balance perspective
~ for your clients’ perspective
~ from your colleagues/partners/co-workers point of view

Collecting the insights and the “so whats” from your experiences this year, can uncover all sorts of hidden gems that you may not have realised at the time. Analysing what has worked and what hasn’t enables you to do more of the things that work and fewer of the things that haven’t. For example, here are three common mistakes that folks seem to make year after year because they don’t review the effectiveness of what they’re doing:

• Wasting money on advertising that has brought you very little business
• Offering services that none of your clients use or seem interested in
• Spending too much time on business admin because of inefficient processes

The following are things that have worked for Jonathan Fields:

• Investing in information and education to become “significantly more remarkable” at what he does
• Continuing to work “on” his business and apply his copywriting and marketing skills to his own businesses which has proven highly effective in generating new clients largely because they saw what he was doing with his businesses and asked him to do it for them.
• Being highly selective with who he takes on as clients and charging substantial fees to work on only projects which fire his imagination and are worth taking time away from his own businesses.

But Jonathan has found the following didn’t work quite so well:

• Balancing his energy and taking care of his health on top of all the additional challenges of the year.

Quite rightly, Jonathan believes that “your health fuels your mind and body and without them, there is no profession” so is making these a higher priority.

Where do you hope to be this time next year?

~ Having answered the initial question, is this the business you really do want to be running?
~ How will you know you’re there?

Without wanting to limit what you can achieve in 2008, having some targets to shoot for is a simple way of keeping you on track and guiding your business decisions. Setting measurable targets with interim milestones is also a clear way to tell whether you are on track or not.

When I first asked myself this question a few years ago, I had left the rat race and re-trained as a personal trainer and health coach. The answer shocked me into action (and yet another career change) and made me realise that in order to get where I thought I wanted to be, I’d have to do all sorts of things I didn’t really have the appetite for. Good job I realised at that stage before spending thousands of dollars to get there and then realising that “there” wasn’t really where I wanted to be!

This is where Leo Babauta would like to be this time next year:

• Continuing to write on his very popular blog, Zen Habits
• Becoming a published (in print) author

If you carry on as you are, are you likely to get there?

~ If the answer is no, what do you need to do differently?
~ If the answer is yes, could you stretch your goal?

If what you are doing is working, then there’s probably no need to change it. If however it’s not, then the beginning of 2008 might be the time you begin to think about how to change it. Which of your actions are taking you closer towards where you want to be? Which ones seem to be taking you further away?

If you don’t know, then maybe this is one of the first things you need to think about changing…

What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned this year which you’re going to apply in 2008?

A year older, a year wiser. Running your own freelance business is – and should be – an ongoing learning experience. The playing field and rules of the game change constantly and I’d like to bet that most of you feel far more alive and exhilarated running your own freelancing business than you ever did as a corporate rat. I know I do!

However, your learning and experience is only valuable to you if you apply it. It’s no use filing them away in the recesses of your brain or in a remote, unaccessed part of your hard drive to review later…go back and review them now and see what you can apply to your business for 2008.

This is what Skellie has learned this year…

“To be satisfied with the work I do, even when I don’t fulfill the maximum number of jobs I can do in any given week”. She said…”In the past, I’d think: “If only I was more productive, if only I didn’t waste so much time, I could really transform my income.” While we can do simple things to be more productive, there comes a point when you’re simply doing as much as you can. I’ve set a more realistic benchmark of weekly work, and anything I accomplish above that is a bonus. It’s helped me to be proud of what I’ve accomplished instead of being ashamed of what I haven’t.”

And on that fantastic note from Skellie, why not take a minute to answer the questions above, celebrate your successes and wins in 2007 and make your plans to achieve even more of them in 2008?