Like conducting an end-of-year performance review for your team members, conducting an end-of-year review of your company’s performance can help you glean insights about where your company is currently at and where you want it to go in the future.
These reviews can include anything from reviewing your finances to realigning with your original mission and vision, but according to the members of Young Entrepreneur Council, there are a few elements you’ll want to be sure you don’t miss.
Below, they discuss nine of the elements you’ll want to include in your company’s end-of-year review and why, as well as how doing so can help set you up for a better new year.
Members pictured from left to right.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. A Culture Check
A culture check includes any churn or HR issues that arose and can be addressed with culture changes. We have a number of company culture goals and practices in addition to end-of-quarter financial goals. Are we taking enough time off? Are we communicating? Are there trends in corporate culture that we should consider in 2023? Checking the pulse of your culture is as important as your finances. Poor culture and poor performance are more closely linked than you would think. Poor culture leads to churn, which affects performance and loyalty. Conducting regular culture checks or end-of-year audits has really changed my business, my teams and my bottom line. – Matthew Capala, Alphametic
2. Realignment With Your Mission
The end-of-year company review should include all of your financial metrics and goal tracking, but don’t forget to review the basics—why are you in business and are you fulfilling that purpose? Mission creep is a real problem that growth-oriented companies face when they pursue too many low-hanging-fruit opportunities. To ensure your company maintains its focus on achieving its mission, you need to evaluate what the company has done in the past year and identify which investments you’ve been making that should 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 one. – Jonathan Prichard, MattressInsider.com
3. A List Of Challenges And How You Overcame Them
When I conduct an end-of-year 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 ahead. But when you’re in the thick of things, you need to remember what got you there in the first place. This is why it’s so important to take stock of your successes—they remind us where we’ve been and how far we’ve come. Sure, they can also inspire us to keep going and do even better next time around. But more importantly, they remind us that we can do it—that when the challenges came up this time around, we had the tools in place to overcome them just as well as we did last year. – Brian Greenberg, Insurist
4. Mistakes Made And The Lessons Learned
The one thing I always include in the year-end review of the company is an outlook of the mistakes made throughout the year and the lessons learned. This helps refine our strategy formulation and execution processes, which in turn facilitates our progress. By reflecting on the mistakes and our key takeaways, we eliminate the loopholes from our processes and ensure that we don’t repeat the same mistakes again. The findings set us up for the coming year and provide us with the insights to do better by making informed decisions. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
5. A SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis is always included in our end-of-year review 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 also highlight any potential areas of improvement for the coming year. Conducting a SWOT analysis at the end of each year helps to ensure that we are always aware of our current situation and how it may be affecting our business. It also allows us to identify any new opportunities or threats that may have arisen over the course of the year. By taking the time to review our company’s SWOT regularly, we can be sure that we are always prepared for whatever the future may hold. – Sujay Pawar, CartFlows
6. Feedback On Your Team’s Performance
The end of the year is a great time to take stock of your team’s performance. There are a lot of things that you can do to get feedback from your team, but nothing is more valuable than asking them for feedback on themselves. Surveys are one way to get this feedback. As you’re going through those responses, it’s important to remember that every employee has their strengths and weaknesses. – Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Marquet Media, LLC
7. A Review Of The Company’s Systems And Best Practices
Conducting an end-of-the-year review of a company is vital to consistent growth. One of the things I’m always sure to include in the review is an analysis of the systems of the business. Part of that means interviewing key employees about how well the standard procedures of their roles work in the real world. Sometimes systems need updating due to the ever-changing business landscape, so it’s crucial to stay relevant by updating best practices and standard procedures companywide. Getting the feedback of those who do the work daily can provide valuable insight into how to increase efficiency as well as team member job satisfaction. Another way to analyze systems is with customer reviews. Looking for patterns of negative feedback is one way to achieve the insights needed to optimize systems. – Richard Fong, Trustable Tech
8. Client Successes And Failures
When conducting our end-of-year company review, we focus on two things: client failure and how we can learn from it, and client success and how we can replicate it. It’s important for us to analyze both what went wrong and what went right over the past year in order to understand why some clients were unsuccessful and what we can do to improve our service, and also to identify what made some clients successful and see if we can apply those same techniques more broadly. – Samuel Thimothy, OneIMS
9. The Number Of Opportunities Missed
When conducting an end-of-year review of my company, I always include the number of opportunities that we missed in the year. Competition has become fierce no matter the industry or niche you target, and the opportunities to grow your operations are scarce as is. So, when you finally come across one that shows potential, it’s best not to let that slip away. So, reflecting on the past year and assessing the opportunities that we missed enables me to visualize the progress we could have made toward our ultimate goal. This drives me to stay more vigilant, plan better and strive to ensure that we don’t repeat the same mistakes in the next year. – Jared Atchison, WPForms
