2025 Strategic Planning

-- by Jessie Gabriel

Running a business often involves a never-ending to-do list. There is always more we can be doing to improve our product, increase brand awareness, grow our client base, refine our values, and develop our team. I frequently find myself in constant task management, which doesn’t leave much time to attend to the bigger questions. 

In 2023, we started a new practice to address this. We had our first strategic planning meeting for the following year. Since then, we have held quarterly team offsites to revisit that plan and other big picture items. We are incredibly lucky to be able to do this. For those of you who have not yet been able to carve out that time this year, we wanted to share how we went about things this year, in hopes it might short circuit the process for you and your team. 

Revisiting the 2024 Objectives. 

In preparation for the meeting, each of us put together a presentation on what we accomplished in 2024. This can be tied to 2024 objectives, if you put those together. But even if you didn’t, there is a lot of value in scanning the year and reminding yourself of all you did (well and not so well). It's easy to forget where you were when the year started or what you did in the first quarter. For me, looking at the year gives me a great perspective on where we killed, where we could have done better, and where we might want to change things up for next year.  We also all over index on what is most recent, forgetting some critical learnings early in the year. You can also take this opportunity to go back even further. Seeing the growth of, and change in, our business since launching in 2020 (the number of clients, the revenue, the type of work, the number of funds launched the deals closed) hits me hard. 

Celebrating 2024. 

Chances are that 2024 didn’t go exactly as you’d hoped. There may have been some things that went even better, but also some places where you fell far short of your goals. Fine. Chances are low that you aren’t giving enough attention to your fails, but chances are pretty good you are glossing over your wins. If you kept your business alive in 2024, then you have things to celebrate. If you met payroll every month this year, celebrate. If you paid all of your vendors in full and on time, celebrate. If you kept hold of your best team members, celebrate. If your revenue grew year-over-year, celebrate. If you launched a new product, celebrate. If there was one thing you did better in 2024 than you did it in 2023, celebrate. The point is that there is real value in taking time to acknowledge and celebrate what you did in 2024, even if as you read this you can’t help making a mental list of all the places you fell short. . . . 

Returning to Vision, Mission, and Values. 

One of the hardest things with did in our 2024 planning session was to start honing our vision, mission, and values. This seems like it should be easy. You know who you are and what you’re about! But putting it into succinct and coherent sentences is surprisingly hard. We took out our 2024 document and reviewed it with fresh eyes. The vision and mission held up well, but there were some tweaks. How I see the business has evolved in the course of the year. Then there are our values. I know that we are very much about something and that that something is very different from most of our peers. But how do you condense that in a way that accurately reflects the values the company genuinely holds most dear? One thing I read when exploring the concept of company values was that they are often most useful when times are tough. When things are going pear-shaped, what value do you act from? Be honest. These are not aspirations, these are the values your actions truly reflect. Even if you’ve never done this before, you can start by just jotting down some things that initially come to mind. This year, I have kept a running document where I have dropped thoughts about our values that have been triggered by different situations. It’s been fun to revisit that document and start shaping it into a public-facing statement of who we are as a company. 

Creating 2025. 

With a clear sense of where we’ve come from and with our vision, mission and values fresh in our minds, now we are ready to create 2025. How did we do this? First, we went through our 2024 objectives and decided which of those objectives we wanted to carry through into 2025. Second, we took the kepers and tweaked them so they felt aligned with 2025. Third, we looked for holes in that list. These really came out of what we learned in 2024 and where we want to be better in 2025. The process this year felt more focused than the year before, which I imagine will be the case every year (fingers crossed). In each year of business life, we get clearer on who we are and where we want to go, which feels very cool. Along the way, we kept asking ourselves: is this objective exciting? As Erica pointed out, we don’t have to answer to a Board of Directors (well, I’m the Board, technically). We don’t need to set objectives that we are confident we can meet. We can aim high. Our phrase for the day was “aspirational, but achievable.” 

And hey, if all you had time to do for 2025 planning this year was to read this, that’s great too. We can’t do everything. There’s no bonus for pummeling yourself over all the things you didn't’ quite accomplish in 2024. If nothing else, take a few minutes to release 2024 and all of its baggage. You already had those learnings, now let them go so you start 2025 as a wide-eyed babe, ready to conquer this new world.