I'm a one-person office, so I took myself on little corporate retreat to review my strategic plan and firm up goals I'm working on for this year. Since the CFO (me) denied the request to hold this planning meeting somewhere with a beach and a great view from the conference room, here I  sit in my home office to take stock. The exercise is as simple as blocking off some undistracted time for reflection.

 

It's rewarding to look back on the year and quantify goals met, and a great exercise to look for concrete steps I can take to continue the upward trajectory of my consulting business. I took a cue from the grant proposals I write for my nonprofit clients and thought about the measurements of impact my "funders" (i.e. prospective clients) might want to see.

 

To start, I set up a matrix that included client name, number of employees, lives touched (number of clients served by the agency), extended lives touched (often families or communities that benefited, like children who are better off because a parent had access to mental health services), and finally the agency's field of work. Then I took stock of everything I produced in the past twelve months and noted client satisfaction. I also measured dollars and cents, attendance, program growth, etc. where I could.*

 

Obviously, some of this is not hard data. But the guesstimates and the exercise of thinking about who directly benefited from my work and who benefits down the line was both rewarding and revealing.

 

To give my simple little Excel sheet some personality and meaning, I then fired up the creative side of my brain to spell out why all this should matter to a prospective client. Voila, presenting the annual report of Elaine Finn Consulting...

It's a quick read, click here to have a look.