Year in Review: 2020

Well, 2020 has been one heck of a year. As a small business owner running a small company during a pandemic, this has been a very large learning experience.

In addition to dealing with a pandemic, my small business is a tax and accounting firm. This meant we had to contend with deadline extensions, new legislation, and the need to advise clients on how to continue running their companies in the midst of a pandemic.

Going into this year I had several balls in my court. I started the year off with a plan of what I wanted to accomplish with my business, I had a great team, and I started to invest in our marketing…. Or at least I thought all of those balls were in my court.

My word of the year was sustainable (you can so laugh at this point) and I was looking forward to finding ways to get to the point that I could work a normal workweek year-round. The goal was to hire a few more employees, promote another, and build a leadership team to help the company grow.

2020 was going to be our best year. To be honest, I can’t say it hasn’t been our best year, even though it didn’t go according to plan.

I have been flipping through my business journal to see what was going on in my head about the day-to-day side of the business. I keep this journal in my Google Docs and try to write a few times a week about what is going on in the business, things I am struggling with, and where I am/we are doing well. (It is awesome reading a note to my future self making sure I do something different, then seeing the note and changing that thing that my past self dealt with.)

We did have several huge issues come up during the year, some of which was because of the pandemic, and others just part of running a small business. Nothing ever goes exactly according to plan and that is one of the awesome things about running a small business. You need to be flexible and ready to toss all of your pretty plans into the digital shredder.

Our greatest strength for the pandemic ended up being that we were already completely virtual. We started as a virtual firm, which meant that all of our processes, client communication platforms, and work could be done remotely. This kept us running even during the shutdown, stay-at-home orders, and folks needing to quarantine just in case (it was a false alarm, thankfully).

Still, there were lessons to be learned from 2020:

• Even a virtual team suffers from not meeting in-person at least once a year. The team-building that happens at an in-person retreat needs to happen. Once the pandemic is over, we will need to schedule an in-person event and bring the team together to reconnect. The pandemic crashed our usual in-person company retreat scheduled for the last week of July. Our retreat gives the team an opportunity to get together and strengthen its bonds, along with generating creativity to solve problems within the company.
• You cannot plan enough for the unexpected with a small team. I am talking about things like employees needing to take unexpected time off for surgery, having to do remote learning with children at home, and all sorts of other 2020-inspired events. As the owner of the business, this means you need to build in extra capacity or pick up the slack. I am aiming for extra capacity for our team.
• Being able to hire is not guaranteed. We have had an open position for 4 months and I had to scrap our 2021 plan to account for the position not being filled. While we still have the seat open and want to fill it, the honest answer is we can’t hire from January to April. This has been the hardest lesson for me to learn: You will not always be able to find someone who has the correct skills, can work from home, is in the correct location, and fits in with your company values. Our industry does have a drastic talent shortage that is only going to get worse in the next few years and I need to truly understand what that means for our company.

Overall, 2020 was a good year in that we learned a lot, our firm is thriving, and our clients are happy with our work. But it didn’t go according to plan, and while that’s to be expected, learning from what doesn’t work turned out to be as important as anticipating and preparing for what you can only guess might come.