Simplified Year-End Assessment for Solopreneurs

Doing an assessment each year is an excellent way to recognize your achievements and growth, both personally and profession lly. It's also a way for you to evaluate where you are currently, compared to where you want to be to map out how to get there.

Project management practices encourage doing lessons learned after every project and your year-end assessment can be a lessons-learned exercise for your entire year.

If you are a solopreneur, you may find the year-end assessment to be overkill. h is why I created an assessment geared toward the solo online business owner so you can look at your personal and professional growth as an entrepreneur and determine what you need to do to improve for the next. Let's take look.

Recognize Your Achievements

Take some time to look back at where you were a year ago compared with today. How are yo feeling about your business? Do you fe l like you have made progress in the last year? f so, wr te down where you made progress and how you feel about it.

Then take some time to reflect on what you’ve learned regarding setting goals, moving toward those larger goals and how your life is different from last year as it pertains to your business.

Once you have done that, consider where you are now, compared to where you would like to be one year from now. his is a great time to evaluate your daily life to determine if the life you are living is the life you dreamed about when you started your business.

If not, write down the difference between your reality and your dream life. valuate f your dream life is attainable and what you need to do differently this year to get closer to that goal.

Assess Your Skills

The next assessment you can do as a solopreneur is to evaluate your skill set. When I w rked in IT, we did annual reviews of our skillset for management to utilize each of us to our potential.

Ensuring that you are working in your area of expertise or on the work you enjoy and want to do is critical to the success of your growing business. By hones ly evaluating what you love, hate, are good at, and bad at will help you to determine how you want to build your team in the future. Not only that, but by doing this evaluation, you can evaluate your skill gaps which may shed light on why you might still be struggling.

Lastly, you can categorize the skills and tasks you do by role in your organization. This wil help you create job descriptions for positions you would like to hire out now or in the future.

Evaluate Your Systems

Your last assessment looks at your systems to determine what you have built and what still needs to be completed. Systems can include things like automation, funnels, onboarding of clients and so on. It can also mean internal micro-systems like repeatable processes, workflows, cheat sheets and templates.

Creating a template for something like content creation, for example, could make producing content faster and more convenient making a more efficient and consistent content creation cycle. These mi o-systems can save you time and money and can help you make money faster because you get your work done and out to the world faster.

The Bottom Line on Year-End Assessment

The bottom line is that doing a year-end assessment is not just for big companies, and even solo business owners should do an annual evaluation. It will elp you recognize your growth and determine your gaps in systems, skills and even your dream lifestyle So grab ur assessment toolkit and use them to evaluate your business for a better new year.