Annual Business Review: Vibe Check

Written by: Cheryl Koranda

This month in the Longarm League, Jess sat down with League member and friend Shelly Moore of Ma Tante Quilting for another great discussion. Shelly is a regular guest here at the Longarm League. She’s continually moving forward in her business and there’s always something new and interesting to learn when she joins Jess for a chat.

Previous topics have included brand photography, building a successful email list, reviewing SewTites leader magnets, launching The Panto Shop (now run by fellow League member Erynn Truex), and quilt photography, including Shelly’s signature course on the topic, Beginner Quilt Photography (which I highly recommend).

This time the discussion focused on annual business reviews.

Their conversation gave me some new ideas and insights, so today I’m sharing my takeaways from the call, and giving a peek behind the curtain into what our members will be receiving with this call by sharing a free download with you. Let’s dive in!

First up - timing. It’s only November, so why are we talking about annual reviews now? It turns out now is a great time to be prepping for your annual review. Having your books in order will make it so much easier to have the info you need at your fingertips when you want to do your review, instead of being daunted by a big backlog of work before you can get started. This might be just the motivation you need to catch up on bookkeeping if you’re behind. 🙋🏻‍♀️

Usually the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a business performing an annual review is looking at the numbers, and that’s an important component, but it’s not the only approach. One of the fun surprises early in Jess and Shelly’s conversation was learning that Shelly’s process has evolved over the years she’s been in business, and she now takes a more emotion-driven or “vibes” approach to her annual review.

If you’ve worked with agile product management in the corporate world, questions like “What went well?, What didn’t go well?”, and “What should we change going forward?” probably sound pretty familiar. These are the same types of questions Shelly’s asking herself during her annual business review, and I love it!

Sometimes our emotions are telling us something went a certain way, but having this type of simple framework can really help us dig a little deeper and see how well our emotions and perspective are aligned with more concrete data. It’s so easy for one negative thing to outweigh multiple positives, so most of us will likely see that there was a lot more good in the year than bad!

And kicking off your review by asking yourself, “What went well?”, “What didn’t go so well?” and “How did I feel throughout the year?” will give you new insights into your business and be a great starting point as you shift into looking at your numbers.

As mentioned earlier, reviewing your numbers is still an important part of your annual review. As you’re looking at your financial statements and client data, you can keep the vibe check going by asking yourself questions like, “How do I feel about this?” or “What can I learn from this?”

While I normally ask myself what I want for my business in the coming year and think about some of these questions informally, I’m excited to put this simple framework of questions down on paper and take a little more time with the answers to have all the info in front of me instead of just swirling in my head.

Taking a vibes approach that pairs emotional and analytical components sounds like an awesome combination for gaining a more comprehensive understanding of where your business has been and where you want it go in the year ahead, and I can’t wait to try it. But first, back to that bookkeeping!

If you’d like to add a vibe check to your annual review, we’ve created a template that includes the questions talked about in this post. Longarm League members are receiving this template along with the full recording of Jess and Shelly’s call this week, but we’re making the template available to everyone!

Enter your email below to get your free copy of the Vibe Check Annual Business Review template. Tip: You can upload the PDF template into a tool like Goodnotes to jot down your answers on your tablet.

If you'd like access to the replay of Jess and Shelly's discussion and our additional Business Insights Template for tracking client data, we'd love to have you join us in the League! You can learn more here.