Similar to conducting a year-end performance review for your team members, conducting a year-end evaluation of your company’s performance can help you understand where your company is today and where you want to go in the future.
These reviews can be anything from reviewing your finances to realigning yourself with your original mission and vision, but according to the members of Council for Young Entrepreneursthere are a few elements that you definitely don’t want to miss.
Below, they discuss nine of the elements you’ll want to include in your company’s year-end review and why, as well as how you can do it to prepare for a brighter new year.
Members pictured from left to right.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
Table of Contents
1. A culture check
A culture check includes any churn or HR issues that have occurred and can be addressed with culture changes. In addition to the financial targets for the end of the quarter, we have a number of corporate culture objectives and practices. Do we take enough time off? Do we communicate? Are there trends in corporate culture that we should be aware of in 2023? Controlling the pulse of your culture is just as important as your finances. Bad culture and poor performance are more closely linked than you might think. A bad culture leads to customer churn, which affects performance and loyalty. Conducting culture checks or year-end audits on a regular basis has really changed my company, my teams and my bottom line. – Matthew Kapala, alphametic
2. Alignment with your mission
The year-end business review should include all of your financial metrics and tracking goals, but don’t forget to review the basics: Why are you in business and are you fulfilling that goal? Mission creep is a real problem that growth-oriented companies face when they pursue too many low-hanging fruit opportunities. To keep your company focused on achieving its mission, evaluate what the company has done in the past year and identify investments you have made that need to be reconsidered because they don’t support the company’s mission. You may even learn that you need to revise your company’s mission because you’ve outgrown the original mission. – Jonathan Prichard, MattressInsider. com
3. A list of challenges and how you overcame them
When I do a year-end review, I always make sure to include one thing: a list of my team’s biggest challenges and how we overcame them. At the start of a new year, it’s easy to get excited about the possibilities that lie ahead. But when you’re in the middle of trouble, you have to remember what got you there in the first place. That’s why it’s so important to take stock of your successes – they remind us of where we’ve been and how far we’ve come. Of course, they can also inspire us to keep going and do even better next time. But more importantly, they remind us that we can do it – that when the challenges arose this time, we had the resources to overcome them as well as we did last year. – Brian Greenberg, Insurer
4. Mistakes made and lessons learned
The one thing I always include in the company’s year-end review is a preview of the mistakes made during the year and lessons learned. This helps refine our strategy-making and execution processes, which in turn facilitates our progress. By thinking about the mistakes and our main points of attention, we eliminate the loopholes in our processes and make sure we don’t repeat the same mistakes again. The findings have set us up for the year ahead and provide us with the insights to do better by making informed decisions. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable shapes
5. A SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is always included in our year-end evaluation, as it provides a comprehensive overview of our company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This helps us identify areas where we need to continue to focus our efforts and highlight potential areas for improvement for the year ahead. By conducting a SWOT analysis at the end of each year, we ensure that we are always aware of our current situation and how it may affect our business. It also allows us to identify new opportunities or threats that have arisen during the year. By taking the time to regularly review our company’s SWOT, we can be sure that we are always prepared for whatever the future holds. – Sujay Pawar, CartFlows
6. Feedback on your team’s performance
The end of the year is a good time to take stock of your team’s performance. There are many things you can do to get feedback from your team, but nothing is more valuable than asking them for feedback about themselves. Surveys are one way to get this feedback. As you go through those responses, it’s important to remember that every employee has their strengths and weaknesses. – Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Marquet Media, LLC
7. An overview of the company’s systems and best practices
Conducting a year-end evaluation of a company is essential for consistent growth. One of the things I will always be sure to include in the review is an analysis of the company’s systems. Part of that includes interviewing key employees about how well their position’s standard operating procedures work in the real world. Sometimes systems need to be updated due to the ever-changing business landscape, so it’s critical to stay relevant by updating best practices and standard operating procedures across the company. Getting the feedback from those who do the work on a daily basis can provide valuable insight into how to increase team members’ efficiency and job satisfaction. Another way to analyze systems is with customer reviews. Looking for patterns of negative feedback is one way to gain the insights needed to optimize systems. – Richard Fung, Reliable technology
8. Customer successes and failures
When conducting our year-end business review, we focus on two things: customer failure and how we can learn from it, and customer success and how we can replicate it. It is important for us to analyze what went wrong and what went right in the past year to understand why some customers were not successful and what we can do to improve our service. can apply the same techniques more broadly. – Samuel Thimothy, OneIMS
9. The number of missed opportunities
When conducting a year-end evaluation of my company, I always include the number of opportunities we missed in the year. No matter what industry or niche you focus on, competition has become fierce, and opportunities to grow your business are already scarce. So when you finally come across one that shows potential, it’s best not to let that slip. So by looking back over the past year and assessing the opportunities we missed, I can visualize the progress we could have made toward our ultimate goal. This drives me to be more vigilant, plan better and strive to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistakes next year. – Jared Achison, WPForms
