Top Mistakes We Made In 2022...

We will be the first to admit that we make plenty of mistakes. We’re human and they’ll happen. But where we pivot this thought to a positive is that we reflect (often!) on our mistakes and how we can improve. If you find yourself either making similar mistakes a bit too frequently or perhaps larger ones, we suggest taking a read through some of ours and the lessons we took from these experiences.

If you’re someone who does any sort of writing (emails included!) for clients, or even for your own business, don’t rely solely on your own proofreading to always catch errors. Chances are that some will slip through. To offset this, we’ve installed Grammarly which is a free spelling + grammar proofer that takes the pressure off.
We’ve learned to schedule 15-30 minutes after a client meeting to do our own debrief and write down all of our notes in an organized fashion. This will reduce the chances of a missed task or deadline and is just a best practice to implement. While we tend to take notes on paper during meetings, during our debrief we will upload everything into Asana, or at the very least, rewrite our notes. We had a few meetings earlier this year where we missed a few deliverables, and have since done this every single time.
While we may have learned this a few years ago, it still rings true each and every year. If you aren’t sure about something, just ask. We CAN NOT believe how often we’re faced with people circling back with us after a meeting asking for clarification on something. It’s actually mind-boggling. This is the harsh truth: clients would rather you ask for clarification at the moment than come back to them later that day, or even a week later, asking for them to re-explain something. They’ll wonder what you were doing with the time they’re paying for while you didn’t understand the task. Just pull up your big kid pants and ask them.
Lastly, and one of the most important ones for any business owner, is to not commit to a deadline if you aren’t 100% sure you can meet it. First of all, it makes you look unprofessional and that you can’t follow deadlines. Regardless of the reason (illness and emergencies aside, because you can’t control those things), there’s no excuse for not meeting deadlines. If you’re finding that projects are taking longer than you anticipated – that’s fine. It’s bound to happen at some point! We suggest either touching base with the client and asking for a revised deadline, or re-arrange some of your other work. If you’ve just full-out overcommitted yourself, then short of shifting deadlines, you’re going to buckle in for some long nights. With that said – sometimes that needs to happen. You also then will learn how long certain things will take and how to better structure your time.

There are going to be lessons each year that will humble you and perhaps bring you to your knees. Those are the ones that will make or break your business – if you can recover gracefully, with respect for yourself and your clients, they won’t mind as much that you made a mistake. But if you aren’t learning from them and continue to make simple mistakes that shouldn’t have happened in the first place, you might want to re-evaluate why you’re doing what you are. There’s a lot of competition out there so we all need to be on our A game the majority of the time. As my business coach would say…