What Actually Happened in My Business in 2024

Your social feeds are probably flooded with perfectly curated end-of-year highlight reels right now. But transparency has always been one of my core values, which is why I believe in sharing both the wins and the struggles in business. In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on my 2024 - from teaching at Yale to navigating client transitions, from my son heading to college to realizing my systems needed a refresh (and yes, somehow keeping my sourdough starter alive through it all).

You'll learn practical lessons about adjusting to major life transitions while running a business, the real impact of focusing on SEO content, and why sometimes a "maintaining" year is exactly what you need. Plus, I'm breaking down my exact year-end review process so you can apply it to your own business reflection.

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EPISODE 148.
Read the show notes and view the full transcript here: https://erinollila.com/what-actually-happened-in-my-business-in-2024/

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🥳 To celebrate the launch of the fourth season of Talk Copy to Me, we're doing FOUR short episodes this week 🥳

If you haven't listened in to the first two episodes, be sure to check it out after you listen in to this episode. Guest experts joined me on the show to talk about what marketing trends need to stay in 2024, as well as share their marketing predictions for 2025.

I'll be back tomorrow to continue this conversation (yay to more behind-the-scenes content!) Make sure to tune in if you want to hear me break down my goals for 2025.

Here's info on your host, Erin Ollila
Erin Ollila believes in the power of words and how a message can inform – and even transform – its intended audience. She graduated from Fairfield University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and went on to co-found Spry, an award-winning online literary journal.

When Erin’s not helping her clients understand their website data or improve their website copy, you can catch her hosting the Talk Copy to Me podcast and guesting on shows such as Profit is a Choice, Mindful Marketing, The Power in Purpose, and Business-First Creatives.

Stay in touch with Erin Ollila, SEO website copywriter:
• Learn more about Erin’s VIP intensive options if you’d like to learn more about how you can hire her to help you with your marketing efforts
• Visit Erin's website to learn more about her business, services, and products
• Come chat with Erin on Threads, Instagram, or LinkedIn

Transcript

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Hey friend, and welcome back to the third of the four episodes I'm doing to kick off season four of Talk, Copy to Me. The past two days, we've been hearing from other experts on what they think needs to stay in the past and not find its way back into our marketing playbooks, as well as the predictions that they have for what's really going to work well in 2025. We're going to do something a little bit different for today's episode and tomorrow's my goal with this episode is to review my year in 2024, because here's the thing as business owners, we often see. Other people's highlight reels, even if we're not looking for, for them, right? They assault us on social media. We, um, get them in our email inboxes and. That's okay. Like, I like highlight reels, and I like case studies that show projects that went really well. There's nothing wrong with those. But what really helps us, or at least what I believe really helps us, is hearing the full story. Which, what experiments worked and which were kind of awful. But most importantly, why? Why is what we should always be asking in business and marketing? We may be able to tell that a launch worked because we hit income goals, but how did we hit them? Why did we pick that number? Why did the efforts that we put in in our marketing get us to that number or for the failures? What failed? Why did it fail? What could have been differently? It's really important to. Dig deeper, which I know is everyone's favorite AI content right there to dig deeper into it, um, to determine the lessons that we take from them and how we make decisions for our business in the future. So that's my job today. Not because I have this all figured out. We all know that I don't., but because I know how valuable it is to learn from real experience and. Because even though it's the end of January, I have yet to review my year and it was a big goal of mine to get that done. So, whether you're just starting out in business or you've been at this for years or decades, I hope that my journey in 2024 gives you some practical insight that you can apply to your own business. In the past, I have always tried to do some year end review and some goal setting., I approach goal setting a little bit differently than some people. I try to set the majority of my goals for the year around October, forget about them, do the normal holiday craziness, and then review them as soon as January starts, which has been a good process for me. However, Didn't really have a good review process , every year. I've kind of just piece mailed my review., some years I've done a really great job with data and looked at it from more of a qualitative way. Um, and other years it's just been qualitative. Now, the trouble with this is that some years I take great notes on how the year went and others, like 2024, I do a really bad job of, remembering what's kind of happened, jotting notes down on my wins and my losses. So, before I got started reviewing my year this year, I have spent my non client time this month creating a year end review process. So that way, next year, not only do I have great data and information to, to look at, but I'm also set up with a system that I can go step by step to get a reflection that makes me happy and that I can really have a good understanding of whether the year was successful, not just because I think it was, , looking at my income figures, let's say, but because I know I've reviewed what I want to review over the course of the year. This year, like I said, I developed a process, and I'll kind of review that right now. It starts with reflect, a reflective review. The first step I do is I look back in my asana folder where I kind of keep notes on my, you know, annual goals and how I've broken that down over the quarters and months to see whether or not I have saved Any type of inspiration from other people on how they've done this process, after step one, I had to actually determine what it is that I wanted to review. So I have broken this down into different categories. For me, my review covers my clients, my customers, and I separate those differently by the clients being the people I work with for the services and the customers being people who purchase my products, the affiliate relationships I have, whether it's my own affiliates or if I was affiliates for someone else's business. The referrals that I have or referral network that I've built, the tech and the tools that I use for my business. Then I break it down a little bit further into the finances, which I think everyone jumps into first. And I don't think that is a good place to start in your, in your year end review. I also want to see the time that was worked, the learning opportunities that I involved myself in, the visibility efforts, the marketing metrics, and just a general qualitative review. So, I actually started with that, the qualitative review, because I thought to myself, Well, let's just get out all my thoughts, you know, as a person with ADHD, sometimes that's the harder thing is to remember all of the things , so I think the easiest way to do this, if you're going to be doing it for yourself is to have a good journaling process or note taking process throughout the year. I have created tasks in my own. Project management software where I can actually regularly jot down some wins and some struggles and just some notes about what happened throughout the month. So I won't be in a situation. Next year, like I am right now, where I'm like, wait, what happened in March? I don't even remember March of 2024. With the information I did have. I did start at January. Where was I in January of 2024? How did I feel? What was I hoping for? For me, I started the year coming off a very challenging year the year before. I was sick for the majority of 2023. With everything as little from a common cold to pretty severe mono. And that was a challenging year for me. I started to feel better toward the, the last month or two of 2023, but still, when I started 2024, I. I don't think I had the confidence that it was actually healthy at that time. I think I still felt like my health was precarious and it was something I should just be very cautious with. So that I think really did influence my jump into 2024 , it was also an interesting year as it relates to just family life, you know, I, the 2023 into 2024 school year was the first time that I have ever worked at home without children. In the all of the years of my business, I say this because I really think that made a huge difference into my 2024. I, even though, you know, it includes some of 2023 in there, I had to figure out how to. Adjust everything in my life, especially in my brain, because . I've really gotten used to the habit of working at night while everyone was asleep, , working at during random spots in the afternoon and. While I had some set work time, it was hard to just sit down during the day and expect that creativity to just show up with me. So, I would say that the entire first half of 2024, even the second half, but we'll get there in a second, was me needing to reset expectations to create new, schedules for myself and figure out capacity in a completely different way. You know, you think I'd be really excited about finally being at home without my kids, , and, and having the ability to work so I can just enjoy my family outside of work hours, which was exciting, but it was so difficult for me because not only was it a mindset shift that was required, but I needed to cut into my working hours just to make it happen. My youngest child's preschool was on the other side of my town, it took me over 20 minutes to drive her to preschool every morning and over, you know, obviously 20 minutes to go back in the afternoon to pick her up. In addition to the time that I had to wait, because obviously you can't just pull up to the door and have the Children come right out to you. You need to get there before school ends. So I would say that I spend at least, Two and a half hours every day where I could have been working just playing the role of a transporting mother and that was hard because I think everyone in my life personally or professionally heard that my children were in school and expected that I had all of this free time when in fact I had very little time that I could devote to actually working because half of my work day was cut off so. Again, it was great to dip my toe into working at home without children, but it was very difficult for me. What got better in 2024 was that that said child was able to go to the elementary school near my house with her sibling, and I no longer had to bring her back and forth to school. So where half of my workday was gone in the beginning of the year, once September rolled around, I. earned all of those extra hours. So I will say this year has been so much better than last year as it relates to working because I am able to sit down at my desk and I do have the time that I need to really get my my work done in an efficient manner so that I can enjoy my Children after school and so that I can, you know, get enjoy my work during the day as well. Another thing that really played a significant role in the ability that I had to work was my oldest child. He was a senior in high school, which meant I spent the first quarter of the year helping him apply to schools. And I always tell people, like, I don't think until you have a child this age, you realize that this is actually like a true part time job. But it is, and, so many people have come back to say but isn't that your kid's responsibility? And it is. He, he did an excellent job applying to school. He did all of the work. I didn't actually do any of the like work for him. However, you know, you're pulled in as a parent to, um, filling out financial aid forms, filling out college forms, helping him understand processes, reviewing application essays. It took so much of my time, just the application period. I assumed that once you got accepted to school, it would be easier. But no, there was a period of having to decide which school to go to, and assess offers of financial aid. Uh, financial aid was a nightmare, by the way, because last year, FAFSA, of course, changed their entire process. So, we won't even go down that rabbit hole, because that was wild. Once he picked a school, then I thought it would be so much easier, but it was not. It was even worse. There's an entire parent onboarding process to college these days, but I had logins for myself. I had to go to courses on like parent orientation. I actually had to physically go to his school for a parent orientation, and his school is hours away from my house. All of this I wanted to do, by the way, but I say that because throughout 2024, I didn't understand how all of this work actually affected my own capacity. If anything, I felt more frustrated with myself that I wasn't getting certain things done in the timelines that I wanted to have them done. In addition to his own stuff, there were the other children. I volunteered in that preschool classroom once a week. So I was there for a few hours once a week. So never mind the fact that I spent hours in the car every day. I also spent another hour or so in the classroom. I mean, I don't really need to explain I am just saying this that I didn't realize how much it affected my own personal work capacity. But now that I can reflect back on the year, I can say 100 percent it majorly impacted the time that I have and the work that I was able to do last year. Since we're kind of talking about how, or we were supposed to be talking about how I started the year, I will say, um, the word that I chose for my word of the year was revive. And I'm, I'm not sure how I feel about how I did with that word.. I went into the year again, exhausted and overwhelmed from 2023. And I wanted to feel like that joyous, excited feeling again by in my work. And I thought the word revive would help that so much. There are some ways that I think I did revive so much, but I think. Part of reviving was also me figuring out what wasn't working. So it was like coming back alive and realizing I needed to make a lot of , adjustments before I got to that joyous period., there are little ways though that I think revive really came into play., one of them is that at the end of the year, which I'll talk about this more in a second, I recommitted to doing SEO for my own website, so I was able to revive. I started and that was really exciting, so I would say the word revive was an interesting word. And in many ways, I think I did. It did really guide me throughout the year. Now I'm ready to talk about the wins and the struggles of 2024. I know, I've kind of already talked about both of them. Have you noticed that this episode is getting to be a little bit disorganized? Sorry. I guess that's behind the scenes for you, right? Like, best intentions of how you'd like to organize things. But, um, Squirrel Brain just has me, like, bopping around from things that I want to actually share with you. So. We're going to start with the wins and these are both big and small things, which I think is so important to pay attention to if you do this for your own business. One of my big wins was just general professional growth and recognition. I was able to return to Yale University for my third time. Yes, my my third time, , to teach a class of fellows in the summer about SEO and using it for, their businesses that they were starting. It, it is one of the highlights of my year to go to Yale and teach this class. I meet the most incredible individuals who are doing so many amazing things,, for the world and it's just so nice to be part of that I'm just really grateful that they invite me back year after year to continue to do that. And I hope they will again in 2025. I also had a few speaking engagements that were great., I was in Andrea Jones Social Media Day Summit. I did a really incredible webinar with Contently, , about the future of SEO. It was just at the start of so many shifts where in truth, no one knew what the future of SEO was, but the conversation and the, you know, hypotheses that we have based on true stats and research and information was really, was really interesting and fun for me to be a part of. I also led some trainings in private communities, , one for financial advisors and another one, , within Bev Feldman's kit accelerator program. At the end of the year. I was also accepted into Cornell University's women's entrepreneurship certificate program. Yeah, we'll talk more about how that happened., I didn't think I'd be going back to school this year, but now I'm apparently an Ivy League school student to get my certificate in women's entrepreneurship. I just finished right now, actually, I know it's 2025, but I just finished my first course of the certificate program and it was really interesting., In regard to business, I actually had a bunch of clients that I loved working with this year. One of them was Tony Howell and Company, and I actually did like a case study ish couple podcast episodes with Tony I will link to in the comments., in addition to Tony, I worked with companies like, , Austin Dogtown and Texas Cider Keeper, and for some of the content companies I worked with, shout out to Descript and Contently. It was great creating content and creating SEO strategies that I could implement with Contently. I also completed season three of the podcast, which was. Incredible. you know, when you start a podcast, I don't think you have any general idea what the future of your podcast holds. You hope that it's going to become a thing, right? But to just say that I am three complete seasons of content on the podcast is something that I think is pretty incredible. And I mentioned this earlier, but something I'm personally very excited about is that I I had a major push in SEO content on my own website. You know, I mentioned my word of the year is Revive, and I don't even remember how or why, but at some point in like mid or late October, I opened up, um, my WordPress Post area and I was like, what are all these drafts? I had like 50 something drafts in there and I'm like, they can't all be good, right? Let me tell you I think maybe half of them are really good Pieces of content that are so close to being finished. I just never finished So my goal was to create as much content as I could from the content I already started to creating and never finished In the end of the year, I published 18 pieces of content on my blog, Just from October to December. So, I was able to create a lot. The content was really good and all of them have major SEO street cred right now. Now, as for personal milestones, I've already talked about how my child going to college, I was so proud of him. Just through the transition of everything, graduating high school, applying to schools, and getting into schools that were really hard, getting, um, merit based scholarships, actually physically leaving the nest and going to college, I'm proud of myself for surviving that, because it's really, really hard when your child Leaves the home, you know, all of a sudden the dynamics just very different. But, but yeah, I'm super proud of everything that he has experienced and all of the changes happening in his life this year., in addition, my daughters have had some really cool wins. One of them made the competition team in our dance group. Another one is trying a whole bunch of new sports and moved into kindergarten. We booked a vacation to Disney World, we got new appliances in our kitchen, I expanded my garden last summer, and I actually kept my indoor plants and my sourdough starter alive. Yes, pat me on the back next time you see me. I read 120 books last year, which was significantly less than the year before, but I think anyone can see that 10 books a month is pretty incredible, and one of the biggest things personally is that I turned 40 last year and my family threw me a surprise party, which was incredible because I'm not easily surprised and I was, and it was just so lovely to celebrate with the people that I loved. So I think that's all of the big wins from the year. So let's. Let's do a little bit more of a reality check, some of which I already covered. The work life juggle was extremely hard for me last year, even though I did not so much think that it was, as it was happening., in addition to, my personal life, there were some client transitions that made my business a little rockier that really had nothing to do with me. But yet they affected me, one of my clients ended up getting an entire company buyout, , which affected my contract. Throughout the transition and change my role really became unnecessary another company that I worked with that I really had a great partnership with had some staffing changes, which should be only temporary, but they did affect a lot of work that I did with that client last year and even into this year, at no fault of my own and not necessarily with the ability to plan for these losses. I mentioned that part of this revive word of the year goal was to audit my own business, and I would say that this is a struggle for me this year because. A few years ago, I did update my processes and systems, and I was very proud of the work that I did. I'm not suggesting that they're, bad now, but what I will say is, it was very evident to me that throughout the past couple years of having those systems, The little tiny touches that I did to them made things a little messier, or it made some of the things that were automated be more manual., another thing is that I had started to move a lot of my systems into Airtable, which is something I'm excited about and I wanted to do, but I haven't completed that process. So I spent the end part of the year living in multiple places. And what I mean is, , I'm managing my podcast in. Asana and Airtable, and Dubsado, so, I'm using three different systems to manage one process that could all be done on Airtable. And just like the content I mentioned, you know, SEO wise, my Airtable bases are about like 85% 90 percent done. They just need that, like, you know, the historic data, or they just need some adjustments to actually be in good working manner. So that's a priority for me to make sure I get those things all set and completed so I can successfully leave behind old systems and run my business in one strategic area., Let's talk about a couple missed opportunities to before we leave the struggle section, I tried to review the goals that I set for myself at the beginning of 2024 and one missed opportunity that was pretty significant was my podcast guest pitching in previous years. I was on a lot of podcasts as a guest and I loved doing that. It had a pretty decent ROI for me in regard to attracting some new leads, getting some clients into my business and overall just good business visibility. So last year I think I set a goal that I was going to pitch X amount of podcasts per month. Do you want to know how many podcasts that I pitched in 2024? Drum roll. Zero. I pitched zero podcast. I was very fortunate that the podcast I was on in 2024 that like recorded and went live. I was invited on because it was still very important for me that I had some visibility, but I did a very poor job on doing any pitching for myself. So. I am going to have to work on that this year. Again, if you are a podcaster and you're listening, I am absolutely looking to be a guest on more shows because I love doing it. I just didn't put in the effort to, you know, get that process going and getting on more shows. I bet right now, you're probably thinking, okay, we've done the wins. We've done the losses, but we haven't actually talked finances yet. I will put them right smack dab in the middle. Last year financially was a win and a struggle. I am very pleased that my income stayed about the same as the year before. I definitely had a different client load which was strange to me because for every single year in business the amount of money that i made creating content has always been much larger than the money that i made doing copy however, last year, again, because of those Staffing turnovers and just project changes I actually made more money in copywriting than I didn't content and that was my first out of like almost like nine years making more in copywriting so it was just weird I would say like nothing wrong with this it was just strange for me when I reviewed all of my finances to kind of see. What went well and what needed some adjustments for the future?, so my income stayed about the same, but one thing I was very excited about was actually that I had lowered my expenses without necessarily trying to do so I saved a little over 4, 000 in expenses last year, which to me is super exciting., because. I just made better financial decisions in general and didn't overspend because I was already doing pretty good, I think, with the expenses that I had in the past. So I would be very happy to stay about that same scope of expenses in 2025. Okay. The final thing I'm going to talk about is learning. So specifics as in what courses did I take and what did I learn as well as are there any lessons that I learned? For professional development. One thing that I did was I joined Maggie Patterson staying solo group for a community connection, and that has been a lovely community to participate in. I find a lot of value in. The program being led by Maggie, as well as the participants in the program, and connections that I've built that way., I've also, taken a lot of courses that I think have been really helpful. I mentioned Bev Feldman before, and I did complete her KIT Essentials Accelerator program. That was great for me to really figure out how I was using kit. And I found out I could be using it a lot better. So I started to make a lot of improvements within my own email marketing systems. And it's been really great to have her help in doing that. If you ever get a chance or you're interested in kit, I highly recommend working with Bev., I also, Decreased my, my short term learning, meaning like small products that I may have purchased. And now that I'm looking at them overall, I can see that there is some definite trends., Damaju, you won out. I, I bought a lot of your courses last year and I took and implemented a bunch of them, including her 4x4 form. footers, her, , burnout base reset at the end of the year, her air table support ticket system., dumb is a great teacher. I really always enjoy everything that she creates. Also highly recommend buying anything from her. Speaking of air table though, I also bought a few things from Koli James, which was great to implement, , like her podcast hub, her client and sale tracker, which is really just an overall business tracker, and her, Content hub, um, that we actually had an episode about on the podcast. So there's a lot of air table trainings that I had taken and yeah, I think that was it. I mentioned that I stumbled my way into an Ivy League school at the end of the year, which is exactly what happened. Apparently, years ago, I signed up for a wait list, for. A funded program for individuals to take an entire certificate program through Cornell University on entrepreneurship and. Randomly, one day in December, I was, as I was sitting at parent teacher conferences, waiting for my turn to talk about my children's, you know, elementary education. I got an email that said, Hey, are you still interested in applying? We're about to open up a new cohort. And I thought. Yeah, sure. I mean, I don't, I didn't, I didn't think much about it, but I responded. Yes. They sent me the application. I'm pretty positive. I completed that application right there in the hallway of the elementary school. And immediately forgot about it. And then a few weeks later, I was notified that I would be taking classes at Cornell university in 2025. So that's what I mean. I completely stumbled into an Ivy league school. I was not expecting that I too would be going to college this year, , like , my child is, but I just finished my first course out of my certificate program. I'm just about to start my next course. So while I am talking about 2025 now,, You know, this all started in 2024. So I was very excited that I did have this learning opportunity kind of handed to me at the end of the year., and proud of my own. I should I should adjust that. I'm proud of myself for applying and putting in the effort I did to apply and then getting accepted into the program. I did learn some lessons in 2024, , I took notes here. So as if you notice the shift in tone or me looking down, it's cause I actually have some notes., one system and processes need regular refinement. I mentioned what I set up. Well, a few years ago was still working for me, but I was able as I worked through them to see that there were some glaring holes or things that needed fixing and adjusting. So. I have to do that work now to make sure that I'm proud and pleased of all of my onboarding and off boarding and client management systems. SEO is the way to go. I literally said that so I could be corny., I was really excited to see this like recommitment to self SEO. I do it for clients all the time. I have never doubted my ability to rank., I write. Good content, quality content, things that are helpful. I have all of the ideas in the world, but I just don't sit down and do it. So. Latching on to those posts that I had already started and just never finished was a really great way to get momentum and to see things shift as it, as it relates to things like , lead acquisition, ideal client fit, making sure that the right people actually found their way to my website, and I only have a teeny bit of time where I'm able to actually see results from. So I will definitely follow up maybe midway through the year. So you can see at least a solid nine months of, what things have been like SEO wise when it relates to numbers, that's been a big lesson that I should just sit down and finish the things I've already started, which I think relates back to the air table comment. I just mentioned before. I need to finish what I start. Um, another thing I've learned. I've mentioned this a few times is the vital importance of capacity planning. What took me so long to get this episode out was that I started the year trying to create this process, right? Like, how do I review my year? And I had to pause that process to do an entire audit on my own capacity, , How many hours do I actually have to work?, what type of work can I get done during those hours? Am I being smart about the hours that I do spend working on certain client projects? Can I refine them in any way? Do I need more time? So. I have done that now for this year, and that was super eye opening to me, the lack of time that I had in my, in, in, I guess, regard to my expectation of the amount of time I would have. So, I mean, I think that is it. I've talked for too long already. Um but, , just a few big picture takeaways from this conversation. I think that overall, it was a really good year that things can be improved upon, but I'm very proud of the things that did go well., and. I'm just giving myself permission to take the time to figure out the best ways to move forward in business, which is exactly what we're talking about tomorrow. My plans for 2025, how my business will shift, and it will shift, , , what the goals I have for myself for the year are and how I plan to achieve those goals and why. Remember, we started this. Episode talking about the importance of asking why. So I hope that you come back and join me tomorrow to learn about, my expectations for my own business in 2025. And I hope that this episode gave you some inspiration for your own business. If you have not done these year end reflections for your business, I do it now. You don't want to make it all the way to February and say, Oh, I never reviewed 2024. Forget about it. I'll just. Do it next year, set aside some time to reflect on the year, whether you just do a quick qualitative journaling and move on, or whether you really like take out those spreadsheets and bust out that calculator and, get that nitty gritty detailed analytics of what 2024 was like for you, because Best decisions you make in your business are all based on having good sources of information. So reflect, take notes, so that way this time next year you have all of the information you need to make better decisions about, , the future of your own businesses. All right, see you back tomorrow where we'll keep talking copy.