In hindsight, how was 2019?
Good bye 2019. It was nice unfortunate painful a disaster interesting knowing you
How will you remember 2019?
Personally 2019 was a bad year for me. There were deaths and mental illness issues in the family. My wife completed her masters this year at a college that I can only describe as totally incompetent, and made the family’s time hell. They were the big issues, and then there were the small, everyday challenges.
We are so glad that 2019 is over. It is a year that we just want to put behind us, close the doors, and move on.
But was it all bad?
Fortunately I belong to a business development and support group. This month a small group of us had a “retreat” and a time to reflect on 2019.
Being honest, I knew how I thought about 2019, and it wasn’t pretty. But I had nothing better to do, so I started the exercise.
The task was quite simple, list the top 10 achievements for the company and individually this year. Once we had completed our own list, we shared to top couple of wins.
The amazing thing for me was that it wasn’t that hard for me to identify some big wins. After all, 2019 was the year in which:
we released CleverLogger
CleverLogger actually took years to develop. We had a couple of nasty set backs and had to restart a couple of times. To finally have a product that was market ready was awesome.
But it is one thing to release a product, it is a totally different thing to how it would be received.
The second big win for 2019 was
users LOVED CleverLogger
We knew we had it right when a FaceBook group for GPs had someone ask which brand of temperature logger people recommended, and the first page of responses were “CleverLogger”.
In fact, the number of support calls we had this year that ended with people upgrading to CleverLogger was amazing. It looked like we had solved the key problems that most of our users had with monitoring temperature and temperature loggers.
but it wasn't just about products
At the start of 2019 Amber joined the team and quickly took care of getting orders out on time, customer support and basically running the office.
By midyear, however, CleverLogger was really starting to take off, and it became obvious that we needed to grow the team. We now finish the year with 2 more people in the team.
I’m not a believer in company growth for the sake of growth, but I think it is awesome when small companies can help support more people in the local community.
Which also means we are paying more taxes, and I look forward to the better quality roads and healthcare that this will now result in.
In the end, it wasn’t that hard to come up with 10 achievements that had occurred in 2019. Then in the sharing time, I realised that many of the other member’s wins were also mine. I ended up with nearly 20 things on my list.
I then came back to the office and did the exercise again, but as a whole team. We filled a whiteboard with the amazing things that had happened in 2019.
But what about YOU ?
As much as I find it interesting to think about my own achievements, the purpose of this post is to actually turn it around, and ask what have you achieved in 2019?
Take the time to reflect either by yourself, or with your team, on what have been the major achievements of 2019.
Don’t limit yourself to work. Include personal achievements.
And it doesn’t have to be achievements that you brought about directly. It could be external factors that just made life easier or simpler. It could be the fruit of last year’s labours.
Once you have your wins, celebrate!
