As the new year is upon us, I thought it might be nice to take a little retrospective over the last year, 2019.
There have been a lot of changes on the personal front, the biggest of which was welcoming my newest baby to the world. I went from having one kid for almost nine years, suddenly jumped up to three with the birth of my identical twin sons in February of last year, and then six months later found out that another one was on the way.
He got here in April of this year. He’s a generally very happy baby with a smile for anyone he meets, and he loves to show off his huge dimples.
It was tough, being honest, having four kids, three of them under the age of two, and trying to run a business. It forced me to make some changes in order to keep things chugging along, and to that end our team grew.
I learned to delegate tasks better, having experimented with a few services to help me provide quality work for my clients, but I couldn’t find anything that provided the right mix of quality, timeliness, and affordability. Fortunately, I was able to find two people to help keep pace with Nextwave’s growth.
The first was Colette, who at this point has written more blog posts for our clients than I can even count. Having a good, steady, quality writer was a huge burden off my shoulders. There was so much article writing going on that I sometimes found myself getting burned out and falling behind while putting off other tasks for clients when I was doing it all myself. Getting Colette onboard was a huge deal.
The next was Erin, who started off helping manage social media accounts and grew to take on more responsibilities. She’s currently handling a giant workload for one of our top clients. She’s increased the amount of billable work we can handle, which has a direct impact on the bottom line. This, again, has freed me up to focus on other aspects of the company.
Speaking of other aspects of the company, I decided to make a big push into digital marketing this year. I poured hours into study and joined an outstanding group of fellow digital marketers, where people don’t compete, but actually give tips and advice willingly in order to help other people succeed and grow.
We’ve already run a few campaigns and have at least three more lined up. Digital marketing, web design, and social media management are the three services we intend to really push going into the next year. My goal is to get busy enough with the social media and digital marketing services that I’ll be able to hire a person to handle each department by the end of the year.
And that’s where we have been in 2019 and where we are going in 2020. To all of our clients, I thank you for another year of growth, and I wish everyone a wonderful, prosperous, and happy new year 2020!
