5 Steps To The Perfect Year End Review For #EventProfs

How can you cap off your year in the best possible way, and start 2015 on the front foot?

A huge Christmas bash is probably your number one choice…but professionally speaking, you should probably consider the ‘year end’ review.  Don’t have time in December?  Don’t worry, do it early January instead!

Why is a year end review so important?

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” – Benjamin Franklin

Without a plan, you’re much more likely to fail; and to create a decent plan, you need to base it on a solid foundation.

As mentioned earlier in December, taking the time out to meet with the whole team will help you to reflect, reconnect, strategize, set goals and plan your tactical execution.

These are essential elements for any event organiser to look at if you want to build on your successes from 2014, avoid making any of the same mistakes, and ensure your whole team is on the same page when making decisions next year. Let’s dig into the 5 things you should look at in your end of year review.

Review 

The first thing you’ll want to do is to look back at 2014. Ideally, you should ask your team to come with plenty of ideas before the review meeting takes place, so that it gets off to a flying start.

In the 2014 review meeting, you should look at 3 things in particular.

Successes: Celebrate what you did well! Did you reach and exceed your attendee numbers? Did you save money on a venue? Did you create a clever new format that everyone loved? Was your customer service team incredible this year?

Make sure everyone in the team finds at least one achievement they’re proud of, celebrate it as a team, and see how it can be codified as a best practice, to be repeated and improved upon next year.

Things to Improve: Nobody is perfect. Make this part of the meeting about things and processes, not people. How can mistakes be avoided, processes improved and which tactics simply didn’t work as well as you’d hoped? Again, try to get at least one idea from the whole team, and celebrate it as a way of moving on, learning and growing as a team.

ROI: This is essentially about efficiency – of time and allocation of resources. Has something you did produced good results, but taken an inordinate amount of effort to achieve? Is it really worth doing again? This is where looking at Return on Investment can really help you prioritise better than only looking at absolute results.

Reconnect

The next stage of the year end review moves up from tactics and processes to one of values and strategy. Here you should look at two critical components:

Mission: Some people might talk about purpose here too, and although they’re distinct, so long as you’re talking about ‘mission’, ‘purpose’ and even ‘values’ you’re on the right tack. It’s simply important to take the time to remind yourself and your team about why you do what you do – beyond making a profit.

Having a clear mission or purpose invigorates everyone, makes the day-to-day grind worthwhile and helps get us through tough spots, so it’s great to discuss in your year end review, to ensure it’s fresh in everyones’ mind for starting 2015.

Customers: Who do you put on events for? Why do they come? Would they miss you if you stopped? These are some of the fundamental questions you should be asking at the end of the year.

In addition you should be checking whether your actual data support the personas you created. Has your customer demographic shifted? Now is a great time to re-evaluate your ideal customers, update those personas (or create them if you don’t have one!). 

Strategy

Ok, so now you’ve looked back, time to take those reflections and start looking forward to 2015, and this time we start at the top: your strategy. Let’s break it into four parts.

Customer Needs: All good strategy needs to start with the customer. Luckily, you’ve just updated your personas so you’re off to a flying start! However, you need to delve a littler deeper again. To base your strategy on customer demographics isn’t that useful – you have to base it on their needs. What does your event provide they can’t get elsewhere? How does it scratch their particular itch?

Once you’ve answered this question, you’re a long way down the road to a successful event strategy.

Another nice way to look at it is, if you overheard your customer trying to describe your event or events to their friend, what would you want to hear them say about you or that event? Your strategy should then be to create a company and event that would match their description.

Company Needs: While it’s top priority to cater to your customer, you can’t forget about your own needs either! What do you care about? Is it growth, profit, revenue, market share or something else entirely?

Metrics: “You are what you measure” is common phrase these days. Once you’ve answered the above two questions, you need to put in place metrics that keep everyone focused on your agreed strategy.

For example if you care about growth, maybe you’ll focus on month-on-month ticket sales and not talk much about cost; if you care about profit then cost-per-acquisition may be much more important.

SWOT: Finally, you have to recognise that you never operate in vacuum, so it’s always worth undertaking a classic SWOT analysis to think about your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats in 2015.

Set Goals

Next up? Everyone needs something to aim for! So it’s time to agree on some goals, which we’ll again break into three parts:

Audacious: If you’re really going to break the mould and be an exceptional company, running the best possible events, and attracting the most ambitious and capable staff then your goals should be big, ambitious and exciting.

SMART: You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time Bound. While it’s important to have stretch goals (as described above), they should still be SMART, so you don’t chase the wrong things, or set everyone up to fail.

Milestones: It’s also important to break goals down into small chunks so you can see incremental progress (or course correct if the progress isn’t there, before it’s too late). The timeframe for milestones will depend on your team and the goals, but they would probably be weekly or monthly, and at most quarterly.

Create a Plan

Last but certainly not least in the year end review process, you need to actually turn all of your brainstorming and ideas into a plan! How do you actually execute your strategy and achieve your goals? Think about these three things.

Team: Does your current team posses all the right skills needed to execute on your vision? Do you need to hire more bodies? Or do you have enough manpower, but they need training and up-skilling?

Tactics: What specific ideas do people have? Should you focus on email marketing or social media? Should you outsource production or bring it in-house? Do you need new software or a new website? This is a great time to brainstorm specific tools and campaign ideas to test for next year.

Processes: Go back to your notes on successes and mistakes from 2014. Can you put in place specific workflows; reviews or sign-off processes; collaborative tools or other things that will help you sustain best practices and avoid bad ones?

Got all that? Great! You’re probably all set for the best year yet! Time to crack open the Bucks Fizz and celebrate…

Why not go one step further and get it all down on paper with our One Page Event Plan, which helps everyone in the team stay on the same page (literally!) when they’re at their desk. Just download it below (no email required).