5 Mistakes We Made Last Year…
If you’re the type of person that loves to learn from other people’s mistakes rather than making them yourself, then girlfriend, this blog post is for YOU!
2021 was a mixed bag of very high-highs and really low-lows for Branded Beet. We saw a higher revenue than either of us expected but also experienced burnout in Q4 that we are still coming out of. In full transparency, there were days we felt like we could build an empire and have our busts carved from the finest marble-followed by days that we wanted to light a massive dumpster fire and toss the whole thing in and watch it burn as we laughed maniacally at our own insanity. It sounds dramatic, but guys, it genuinely felt like that.
So what do you do when you come into a brand new year with all of that rollercoaster energy? Well, we decided to make a list of the mistakes we made in 2021 and use that information to flip the script on 2022. You only need to be a human to understand that life gives you many opportunities to mess up as well as an equal number of chances to learn from said mistakes. We also made a list of lessons we learned and our highlights of the year but we’ll save that for next week because this week is all about the shit show friends. And yes, we realize it’s February already so we’re a little late on the whole New Year’s resolution trend. However, it took all of January for us to figure out how to move forward with clarity and intention…better late than never right?
Without further adieu, we now present to you, The 5 Biggest Mistakes We Made in 2021:
#1 Saying yes too much
Don’t get us wrong- we are total yes people. Which is why we said yes to just about every opportunity that was presented to us in 2021… and while the majority of them led to great outcomes, we realized taking things through a filter first would help us weed out the ‘extras’. Slowing down the yes, and learning to ask ourselves questions like, does this serve us or our community; does this help our business or business relationships; is this going to take us further towards or away from our big picture goals; is it in alignment with our brand values? Simply by putting this step into practice, we’ve already saved time and energy.
#2 Undercharging
Anyone else relate? Of course you do! Figuring out how to price services is right up there with advanced calculus…it’s freakin’ HARD! We’ve had to ask ourselves really challenging questions about how to continue to run a profitable business and also take home a paycheck. Recognizing our value and not being afraid of putting out big numbers is something we’re really striving for and is still very much a work in progress… any tips?
#3 Messy boundaries
Our home and work lives bled together a LOT this past year. There were some real moments of mom guilt that kept us feeling like wtf are we doing this for… especially when our kids literally asked us to quit working so much :( Definitely a dagger to the heart. Running a successful business while also wanting to be a present mom/wife did not go great in 2021…big props to our husband’s for helping us navigate uncharted territory. Now that we can see what didn’t work, there’s an opportunity to draw some better boundaries around how we work and when. Like putting our phones on airplane mode all weekend or ending the work day at 4pm and only doing work at the office.
#4 Too much time in the weeds
Client work damn near killed us this year. We love our clients so much (and all the cool things they are doing) that we started to sacrifice our personal time (insert boundaries here) by getting so dialed in on the day to day work, that we often forgot to look up. Spoiler alert, this did not serve anyone well. Spending too much time in the weeds prevented us from looking ahead and making solid plans for where we want to take the business. So this year, we are looking to find the ‘who’ instead of figuring out ‘how’ to do everything ourselves. Mom problems amiright?
#5 Not sharing enough with our community
You know about the shoemaker’s kids right? How they never had shoes because their pappy was always making them for everyone else? Yep, that’s us. When you publish an average of 10 posts a day to social media for clients, it turns out that it’s very hard to keep up with your own social presence. Which is a bummer cuz your girls have been up to some cool shit! Jokes aside, it really is an area we feel needs major improvement. We want to build a community around our business that serves and showing up on social more is one way we can do that. We’ve had an average of 1 post a week in the new year, which is 10 times as many as last year… look out world, here we come!!
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And that’s it- our top 5 mistakes of 2021. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this and had a take away or two…if you’re like us and need to learn lessons on your own, we get it and we are cheering you on from the sidelines of whatever dumpster fire you’re thinking of lighting today. Just know you’re not alone friend.
XOXO,
Jenn + Nikki
PS~ Next week we’ll share some highlights from 2021 because it really had some good moments.
