7 Steps on How to Evaluate Your Business Performance

Before you even start, agree with yourself that this activity is aimed at improving your performance in the future, approach this with self-compassion and no judgement.

The purpose of this exercise is to identify things that can be improved. There is no need to feel bad about yourself or judge yourself.

You can’t change the past; self-judgement is an illusion that you are taking responsibility for your perceived shortcomings. Acceptance of not being perfect and willingness to change things for the better is much more holistic approach to improve your current conditions whether in business or in life.

Truth to be told we can’t help ourselves but judge. It happened to me, for a short period of time I was dreading even to do this exercise, only by doing it I’ve realised how many opportunities are available for me.

For this exercise you would need the timer – set it for 15 minutes – no more.

You may do several sets of this step, especially, if you do an annual review.

Write down everything that comes to your mind – don’t try to analyse it. Remember, no judgement. If you had a list of your goals for the year or month you can compare how much you have achieved and write down.

For instance, my annual goal was to write at least 12 blog posts a year (one a month) – it turned out that I wrote only 4!!!. Achievement rate is 25%.

My initial emotion was disappointment in myself. In the beginning of the year, I even ran the course “Write 12 blogs post per year” – ironically people who implemented the course got at least 12 blog posts written. This and 9 more mistakes are listed in my article “10 Surprising Lessons Learned From Failing in 2021”

After you’ve written down all the mistakes. Take a break, go for a walk, or enjoy a cup of coffee/tea.

Look at the list you’ve written and see the commonalities among the “mistakes” and it will determine your categories. It can be around productivity, boundaries, self-integrity (keeping word to yourself).

You can group them according to the cause of the mistake – not enough planning; or not executing ideas.

You can group them by frequency – repeating mistake, or if the mistake was left unattended for a long time.

For instance, for me, optimising my websites was an activity that I’ve been postponing year after year.

The front page of my website from a temporarily placeholder turned into a long-term feature.

Remember no-judgement rule. The moment negative emotions start creeping in become curious how you can turn these things around.

Looking through the list of “mistakes” and reasons they were made you can evaluate what your tripping point is. Most likely it is one or several of your habits.
Write down your findings. The act of writing brings more clarity.

During this process I’ve identify 9 big “mistakes” that I’ve made in 2021 and my “Achille’s heel” in business is the lack of execution. I am constantly learning new ways how to become visible to your clients, and I teach my clients to do this, and by implementing my suggestions my clients get outstanding results. My weakest point was not implementing all those activities myself.

In theory I know how to become a 6 or 7- figure business owner but I never applied all my knowledge for myself.
The exception is my Pinterest account.
Last year I invested in the membership by Meagan Williamson and learned a lot about Pinterest. This time before offering any solutions to my clients I embarked on a journey of mastering Pinterest myself.

I’ve reached my magic goal of having 100K monthly views, even got a nice acknowledgement from Pinterest itself.

I did this for some of my clients – taking their Pinterest from 0 to 5K views in a couple of weeks.

When we don’t judge our shortcomings but decide to turn them into our strength magic happens.

I always believed that I am not creative enough for Reels or TikTok but last summer I’ve decided to change my perception of my creativity and embarked on a Reel journey – it started with my article “How to fall in love with your Reel strategy”

The aha moments will start popping up the moment you start writing your “mistakes” allocate a separate space in your notebook to record all these insights. They will be necessary to shape your next steps.

Collect all your aha moments and form possible action steps.

For instance, one of my ahas was around my YouTube channel – it didn’t grow the way I hoped even though I posted a lot of videos. It dawn on me that it was because I used it primarily to promote my event, and while the topics were valuable they were practically invisible because people were not searching for the topics that I used in my titles. If I want to grow my channel, I need to allocate some time for the research and create list of topics before I start even filming the video.

When you are an intuitive and creative entrepreneur you are bombarded with intuitive hits and ideas all the time, and you create your content on the fly guided by your inspiration. To get better results you need to structure your creativity. While it may seem restrictive, it brings substantially better results.

Looking at the list of action steps – prioritise them according to the impact level on your other goals. What needs to be done first in order you can work on your other goals.

For instance, allocating time for writing my blog posts makes it easier to create content for my social media platforms.

Having clear structure of my services gives me clarity about the content that needs to be created.

Allocate time for planning, scripting, filming, and editing videos.

Which means that action #1 that I need to do is to structure all my services so I can plan content for my blog posts and put time blocks for content planning and executing.