2019 - Growth mode...

Over the Christmas period I spent a fair bit of time reflecting on the past year, as I’m sure lots of people did. I read a blog post of mine from December 2017 (see here ) in which I wrote about how excited I was for the year ahead. It was definitely an eventful one.

My littlest baby was born on January 12th 2018. We are celebrating her 1st birthday this weekend, and she is growing into a lovely little girl. The first year is always difficult (in my opinion) and with two other kids running around, the past 12 months have been particularly tough. My wife had a caesarean which meant that she couldn’t pick the baby up or drive for 3 months. She then had an umbilical hernia to contend with, so the first few months of 2018 was a pretty intense period.

It’s also been a busy year from an Engage perspective. As we launched in the summer of 2017, we had the first wave of annual reviews starting in the summer of 2018, so we needed to get the procedures and methodology in place to prepare for them. These seemed to have worked well so far, and the process is now a fairly smooth one. Now that the initial bulk of them have been completed and the remainder rolled into business as usual, we are able to move forward into growth mode for this year.

The main focus since day one was to put ourselves in a position to grow the business at the start of Jan 2019, and here we are!

We start this year in a strong position, but ready to take Engage to the next level. We have to continue to evolve, to develop our relationships and our brand. Someone somewhere wrote that “only the paranoid survive” and this is something I definitely believe. I want to make sure we’re never too comfortable. That we don’t think everything we do is brilliant, because there is always so much to learn and to improve still.

From a personal perspective, this year shouldn’t present the same challenges as last year. There will not be any more babies, no office moves and no major new business projects. The sole focus for me is growth. Growing with the right clients, the right people and the right relationships. I’ve done my due diligence and worked out how many more client families we can manage without diluting the level of service we strive to provide.

We’re a third of the way there, and only hard work will allow us to reach those numbers by the end of 2020. Bring it on!