Our first year; a 2022 Reflection
As 2022 ends and 2023 begins, we take the advantage of the winter’s holiday rest to reflect on the year: what happened, how it went, and what we want to change moving forward.
--
Poet & Scribe’s 2022 was an exciting, challenging, and educational year of beginnings.
The first half of the year was focused on shaping & defining the business. We created our website, processes, defined our goals and target audiences, and made sure everything was ready for our launch in June 2022.
One of the most challenging aspects has been our physical distance apart, waiting for news & progress on immigration visa. Jonathan spent most of the year in North Carolina; Sandra spent most of the year in Spain. Creating our vision & goals while giving form to our business, thousands of miles apart, in different time zones was not the easiest.
Despite the challenge, we successfully launched in June!
We offered two services: Web Design and Coaching. We focused first on finding clients for our web design services, consciously leaving our coaching services in the background.
Our Five Valuable Lessons
In the second half of the year, since launching, we learned 5 Valuable Lessons that is reshaping Poet & Scribe in 2023:
- 🥶 In the discussions with many potential first web design clients, we found we had misaligned expectations in need, ways of working, and budgets.
- 😰 Finding web design clients is a lot of local networking that we don’t have, as we’re still transitioning between countries, cities, homes; moving away from a decade of friendships and established networks.
- 😵 The two differing services created confusion when pitching with clients, as they tried to understand what we do & services we offer.
- 🤔 Web Design Services & Coaching have vastly different processes, marketing, timelines, clients, etc. that unnecessarily complicated every aspect of the business.
- 🥴 Workload was not evenly distributed between the co-founders. Our service offering relied more on the experience & skills of one, rather than both. This imbalance led to feelings of overwhelm for one & uselessness for the other.
As the months went on, these lessons were impacting us more negatively than we’d like. So:
😩 Multiple vulnerable discussions about how things were going led to two simple realizations: something wasn’t working and something needed to change.
🥳 The great thing about running our own business is…we can change things if they’re not working! Throughout December & January, we’ve been working on the new direction of our business. We started to feel energized again, with the what and why we’re doing this.
Next week we’re excited to share where we’ll be pivoting to, our new service offers, while “going live” with an adjusted website to reflect the changes.
2023’s going to be an exciting year! Challenges will come, we’ll adapt as need be, continuing to learn as we do; keep moving forward.
Follow us on LinkedIn to keep updated with what we’re doing!
