Lessons from 2020: Sales, Setbacks, and Surprises

We’ll gladly join the masses of people saying that they’re so glad that 2020 is over! And it isn’t so much that we expect the pandemic and all of the issues that come with it to just disappear with a new year, but more so that we’re now able to reflect on the year and kick everything in gear for 2021. 

For us, 2020 was a whirlwind, but it was actually our best years ever. Of course we still dealt with setbacks just like everyone else, but we changed up the way we did things at the beginning of 2020, and it had a profound impact on how the year played out.

So what did we change? What actually happened for us in 2020? And what lessons did we learn that we’re carrying into 2021?

Our 2020 Strategy Adjustments

In previous years, we would sift through our records from past years and then use those to plan the next year. As you can probably imagine, this was super meticulous. We’d set goals, break those into tasks, assign due dates, and lay those tasks out for whole quarters in advance. Then, we’d stick to it and never divert from it. Sure, it helped for a long time, but it wasn’t flexible enough to allow for leeway to cope with the unexpected, which is why we decided to switch it up.

We recently explained our new strategy in depth in this blog post, but to quickly recap, we generate a three-star system where we would assign our products a star rating based on how much income they brought in for us– the higher the profit, the higher the rating. Using this system, we were able to evaluate how much time and effort a product was worth.

We were all about stable income in 2020, so we ended up cutting certain projects out completely, freeing up tons of time and space, which helped tremendously and also allowed us to launch a brand new product, The Creative Template Shop. You can read more about the star system here.

How We Set Goals

Once we established what actually needed our time and attention with the star system, we went through and set our quarterly goals, but this was the first step instead of doing an overall revenue goal like in the past.

Because we based our time and effort off the percentage of profit each product was expected to bring in, we constantly reassessed where to put our time and effort each month as things changed. Previously, if a product wasn’t performing well, we would fix it in order to reach our goal. This time, we went with the flow and focused more on the products that were performing well.

There is a risk to this since sometimes things may get fleeting traction and then fizzle out, but we had several years of data that gave us a rough idea of how each product was performing long-term. The one product that was an estimate was The Shop, but our rule was that it had to at least perform as well as the product it was replacing (and, boy, did it!).

The Results

Our business grew by 40% in 2020, which was 15% more than our goal! Even more, our profit was 32%– 12% higher than our goal. For a year that was focused on stabilizing, having had 40% growth was ridiculous in the best way, and it was all thanks to us focusing on what was working. 

By the end of Q1, we had only met one of our goals for how much each of our four income streams should make. The Creative Template Shop was one of those that didn’t meet the goal, and that’s only because it actually 4Xed it! Then, it doubled again by the end of the year. To say we were surprised is an understatement.

Focusing on Overall Success Versus Individual Goals

Two of our statistics from 2020 were very interesting. One of our goals was to increase the lifetime value of our students, and we did this by adding a simple upsell on our most popular product. The average successful conversion rate is 2-3%, and we ended up with a 30% conversion rate! Another one of our goals was to bring in 5,000 new students. We only hit 50% of that, but the fact is that we managed to 3X the lifetime value of each. 

All this to say: Don’t get caught up in the nitty-gritty of what projects didn’t work. Instead, focus on the big picture and how your business is performing overall. Some of our products didn’t reach their goals, while others blew them out of the water, leading to our fantastic growth and profit margins.

The important thing to remember is that it’s crucial to reflect on what worked for you in 2020 and then carry that over for 2021. In fact, because we know that reflection is so important, we created an End-of-Year Reflection Journal to help! It’s a 3-page fillable PDF for you to use when reviewing your business goals and stats from the year before. 2021 just started, so it isn’t too late!

If you become a member of The Shop, you can download this journal and every other template we have available, including future releases, for only $47/month.

Here’s to reflecting on 2020 and making 2021 the best year yet!