How I'm Starting the Year as a Business Owner
It’s January - both exciting and exhausting as a small business owner. I love a fresh start, an opportunity to set new goals and get excited for the future! I also hate pulling out all the tax info and admin work that comes with running a business. Truly dread the number crunching, jump through hoops, fill out forms and gather docs aspect of running a business sooooo much. 😣
But I thought since the blog is so back 🤩 I would do a little post to capture what I’m doing in case you’re a small business owner too, and just want ideas or inspo.
Okay, so obviously there’s the boring stuff like tax prep but I want to focus on how I’m “evaluating” my year.
Stats
I’m looking at all the platforms I sold on last year and checking what my top sellers were by items sold AND revenue because those two inquiries sometimes result in slightly different lists. This data point might not make a difference but it could also show me something I wasn’t expecting.
I was very pleasantly surprised by my top sellers this year on my website - they weren’t what I was expecting because I was really just going off vibes and what I thought I had sold the most of - AND I had totally already gotten in my head and created this full narrative of how I was bummed about the best seller when IN REALITY the product I thought was top wasn’t even the best seller soooo moral is: just look at your numbers. They don’t lie lol.Traffic sources. I’m checking out where leads are coming from AND where conversions are coming from. Basically what is working well to get people to my shop and is it the same medium that is getting people to purchase. Sometimes these are the same, sometimes they’re not. It can help you ask more questions and figure out what investigate further.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of this info because I had a lot of “direct” traffic and I’m struggling to know how much is truly people coming directly to the site or if it grouping traffic from my email marketing and my direct links on IG stories into this category. If you have insight, hit me up. My current approach was to work backwards and take at a look on my email marketing platform to see how much revenue it is claiming it generated and take that from the “direct traffic” stats - and then assuming the remaining amount is probably a mix of truly direct visits and things I’m linking manually on stories. I am also going with the assumption that whatever Shopify is claiming on analytics was traffic from FB or IG is when people use the shop feature or Linktree in my IG bio but not 100% sure about that either. Of course the main thing is a general idea of what is moving the needle most for lead generation and conversion but I would really love if I could break down this “direct traffic” number to be a little more granular.On Faire, I also like to see how many retailers purchased more than once in a given year or who have been repeat purchasers over the years. Looking at things like order volume and timing also helps me better prepare when to add new products to my wholesale site and that helps me back up further to know when I need to have supplies ordered and photos taken to take full advantage of the prime seasonal shopping windows.
On Etsy, things have become pretty predictable and the same listings continue to do best year after year, just flip flopping on which is top. I do like to look at how my sales compare year over year to see if there are any trends in the 4+ years we’ve been in business on this platform now. Etsy ads is something I have to watch closer and don’t really do a big deep dive on at the end of year currently. The success rate of Etsy ads has really ebbed and flowed over the years.
General numbers. My husband created an amazing spreadsheet that allows me to compare all platforms revenue in a variety of ways and we both scour over it several times a week just to keep tabs on things so at the end of the year it is nice to draw our final conclusions from that time period and celebrate, dig deeper, and usually add another sheet to this massive spreadsheet with more data points we want to track. This spreadsheet has been my biggest tool for motivation to chase revenue goals over the years.
Heart CHeck
Just as much as the numbers tell the story of the business, so does my attitude toward it. When things are going good in the business it radiates through me. When I’m feeling stuck, it can feel overwhelming fast. The entrepreneur journey is certainly full of ups and downs. With each passing year, it gets a little more rewarding and a lot more challenging. I think each step of growth for the business has been so wildly intimidating, yet I’ve conquered them. And the longer it goes, the heavier each step feels because of this intimidation. Not sure if that makes sense. You’d think with each step of overcoming fears and figuring things out that I’d be more confident in that skill but four years in, it is like this monster [the business] is just growing and it is not this little thing anymore, so there’s more on the line if I screw up.
At this current moment, I don’t like a lot of things about the business and I’ve felt stuck for the better part of 2024. I’m starting to see a bit of light at the end of the tunnel and feeling clearer about what I DON’T want, just very fuzzy on what I actually DO want things to look like.
So I’m analyzing how I want to feel about the business when I’m working in it. This requires breaking down the pain points in the business and seeing what I can do to address them in the coming year.
One of the pain points is my email marketing. Yes, yes, I was using what I’m told is “cutting edge” but the cold hard facts are: I don’t like the user interface at all, even 26 months in. And I use hardly any of the features I am paying for. I can go back to a service that is half the price, much simpler to use, and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that apparently don’t matter anyway seeing how I haven’t made use of them in over two years!
Another pain point is admin bookkeeping stuff and I am working to get the bulk of this outsourced.
Burnout. It has been a wild ride to start business for a product BEFORE it becomes super trendy and then navigating the rise and fall of mainstream popularity. The extreme burnout that comes from trying to meet demand by scaling at warp speed and then becoming drown out in all of the noise as soon as you start to get a grasp has pushed me to my absolute limits in the past 15 months. Much of this past year was spent grappling with burnout. So I need to “love” the business again. Because it is my livelihood. And I do love entrepreneurship, so I don’t want to throw in the towel or start over, I just need breathing room haha. I’m reevaluating product categories for the business and what sparks joy for me, because this is where I can shine and “sell” with ease. I think I make up a lot of rules or create like barriers in my mind around what the business should be and this year I want to incorporate more fun into aspects like content creation and selling strategy.
Less is more.
Overlapping with my personal goals and ideas for 2025, I am wanting to slow down in the business as well as my personal life, and embrace a “less is more” mentality. I made the decision to lower prices at the start of the year, I am doing less new products that are handmade by me directly and fewer, smaller launches in general. Smaller, slower pace content sessions. Really just not chasing the moon or “growth” in the sense of bigger revenue goals or expansion. If anything, smaller business, with revenue goals that are “just enough” not goals that will add to my stress level or take additional time away from my husband and kids.
I would love to connect with other small business owner and hear how you’re planning for the year ahead or evaluating last year as you map out 2025. You can DM me on IG! @theamateurapron
And if I’m going to talk about my business, I might as well link it lol graceandgrandeur.com