Excel Love

It’s a few weeks into the New Year, and like many of our colleagues in the small business community, we’re filled with optimism and excitement about the year ahead.  We were at our desks early the Monday after the New Year, coffee cups filled to the top and eager to dive in.

Year-end is a natural time for business owners to stop and reflect.  You have twelve months worth of data at your fingertips  to look at, analyze, evaluate and can start to map a course for the year ahead.  But taking time to do so requires pressing pause on the usual multi-tasking that is second-nature to entrepreneurs (press pitches, meetings with technology team, developing marketing materials, internal operations, networking— just another typical Monday!). It’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day that we often forget to make time to take a more holistic view of where we are and where we are going.

For us, we’ve spent these last few weeks heavily immersed in strategic planning mode. We’re in the midst of rolling out Urban Interns nationally (stay tuned for news of our West Coast launch) and are creating new products to help business owners more efficiently.  We will admit, at least initially, it was hard to force ourselves to sit down and take time away from “running” our business. We’re entrepreneurs—we like to spend our time pounding the pavement and making things happen.  Dare I even say we rely on the rush to keep us moving forward? We know this must sound familiar.  Certainly the same is not felt when spending hours upon hours in front of Excel spreadsheets. (Now, in full disclosure: Lauren loves Excel. It brings her back to simpler days in investment banking when it was all about how many pivot tables and vlookups one could fit in a model. For Cari, she’s still figuring out how it works. Excel is not a heavily relied upon tool in law firms! Thank goodness for partnerships.)

But, nonetheless, we did it. We’ve rolled up our sleeves, dug in deep into our data, had some great brainstorming sessions and mapped a plan for the coming year. Said differently for those fans of Michael Gerber’s entrepreneurship classic, E-Myth, we took time out of working in our business to work on our business. We’re excited about our “finished product,” which is a combination of a marketing and product development plan, and feel confident that it will propel us forward in the coming months. 

This process was beneficial not just for the obvious reason that we now have an action plan for the year on which we can set more short-term goals and metrics against; but the act of reviewing our accomplishments to date and knowing that we’re only doing more of that in 2010 has been really invigorating. We came out of it totally energized and positive about the future, and empowered that, more than ever, we’re going to be the ones shaping it.