2022 in review -- what we built, what failed, what we're taking into next year

2022 was the year we stopped being a startup and became a small business. That shift is harder to describe than I expected. A startup has the excuse of figuring things out. A small business is supposed to have figured them out. We have not fully figured them out, but the excuse has a shorter shelf life now.

We grew from four clients to eleven. Revenue roughly doubled. We brought two full-time people onto the team. We lost three clients, two to budget changes and one to a decision we should have handled differently.

What worked

The monthly performance reports we started in September changed our client relationships. I wrote about this separately, but the summary is: telling clients clearly what is happening and why is not just good service, it is the main reason people refer you. We sent the first reports not expecting much. The referrals came within weeks.

The decision to focus on retainers over projects also paid off. It meant slower initial revenue growth on a few accounts but much better visibility into what we could spend on headcount. We made two hires in the second half of the year that we could not have committed to on a project-only revenue base.

We built internal tools for backup and monitoring that reduced the time we were spending on site maintenance. That freed capacity for higher-value work.

What failed

We took on a client in April whose business model was not clear to us at the time. We found out three months in that their product had regulatory problems in several states. We ended the relationship but the prior work was a loss.

We should ask harder questions before onboarding. What does the business sell, who buys it, what is the regulatory environment? We added those to our discovery process.

We also tried to run a small content marketing experiment for ourselves. Blog posts, this journal. The journal is working, slowly. The blog posts we tried and abandoned because we did not have capacity to do them well and half-done content is worse than no content.

What we are carrying into 2023

The things that worked: monthly reporting, retainer focus, internal tooling, being honest with clients earlier when something is not working.

The things we are fixing: better client qualification before onboarding, a clearer process for when a relationship is not right, and more deliberate thought about the kinds of work we want to do versus the kinds we default to because they are familiar.

Two years ago I would have framed the year as wins and losses. Now I just think about what we learned and whether we are applying it. 2022 was useful. On to 2023.