Historically, I’ve closed out each year by sharing a summary of how I spent my time that year (previous years: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019) but this year I thought I’d do something different.
Keeping within the same theme, I’m going to reflect on major achievements this year and will share what I’m looking forward to in 2024.
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Major achievements
I’ll be honest, I didn’t have a year full of major accomplishments and milestones. I didn’t release any new products or courses. I simply continued to improve on what I’m already doing. And you know what… I’m really happy with that! Company profit is up about 18% YTD. I thought it might plateau this year and this just goes to show the value of staying focussed and doing a few things really well.
I get asked quite often if I’m going to expand my services into other software tools like HubSpot, SalesForce, Monday, ClickUp etc. But I prefer to focus on what we as a business use every day, which is Asana and Pipedrive.
This year I’ve continued to refine how we offer this support. I hired a friend of mine here in New Zealand to help on the Pipedrive consulting side; this has been great as I was previously the only Pipedrive expert in this time zone. I also updated my Master Asana and Master Pipedrive video courses with new content and updated features.
Besides this process improvement, a few notable achievements for this year include:
- Started reselling subscriptions. At the start of the year, I began reselling Asana and Pipedrive subscriptions. This means customers can buy their licenses through me; we offer better pricing than you can get purchasing directly. This is essentially a brand new source of revenue that I didn’t have before. It’s a lot lower margin than the consulting services we offer, but it often yields higher revenue. It’s been fun putting the automated systems in place to support this new revenue stream. And as we continue to sell licenses, this is generating a healthy volume of annual recurring revenue that strengthens the businesses as a whole.
- Started building our house. After purchasing a section of land about 18 months ago, we finally broke ground on the build this November. It’s been a long lesson in patience as we’ve had to wait for the construction and engineering drawings to be completed and to get the plans approved by Auckland Council. It feels SOOO good to finally see construction work actually happening.
- Achieved a happy balance of work and play. On a personal note, I feel really happy with the work-life balance I’ve achieved this year. I work about 35 hours a week on average and because I start my day early, I’m usually done by about 3:30-4:00pm leaving me with plenty of time to hang out with the family in the afternoons. By building out the team this year, it’s meant I’m not the only person helping clients now and if I take time off, customers are still being looked after.
What’s next?
This might sound boring but my goal for next year is basically to keep doing what I’m doing; stay focused and keep improving.
There is one major project on the horizon that I’ll be starting to tackle in 2024.
- Rebrand my consulting business. I’ll be keeping PaulMinors.com up and running. But I plan to separate the consulting arm of my business out to a new brand (probably Minor Workshop). The goal here is to remove myself from the brand so I can step back more and more in the future.
- Grow the team – Later next year, I plan to put a new salesperson or team in place and hire a COO to manage daily operations. That way, the business is less reliant on me and I can focus on things only I can do.
- House build. And of course, we plan to finish building our new house. It’ll be a tight timeframe to get in before Christmas next year but we’re going to do our best