I don’t know about you, but I always feel better when things are cleaned and organized. I’m not only talking about my house, but also my business. There’s something about having a clean desk and an organized business plan and documented goals that just makes me feel better about life. So here’s what we have “cleaned up” this year in JHLS world…
This year was a rebuilding year for JHLS. As we make our way into the fourth quarter, we review our numbers and reflect on the year as a whole. We are currently adjusting and re-aligning our goals accordingly to finish the year strong. This year’s theme was all about cleaning out the old and bringing in the new.
Here is a quick recap of some of the things we’ve been working on this year, and what we have planned for fourth quarter. We have decided that spending less time and resources on old, outdated systems that don’t provide the flexibility, agility, and convenience that we need are no longer worth our time.
A New Look – One of our biggest successes this year was launching our new website. Although our website doesn’t match up to a Fortune 500 business website, we’ve come a long way from the old Blogspot website. We are also proud to have designed, developed, and even currently maintain our website from 100% in-house resources. We kept true to a simplistic design with bright, attractive colors, and a tone and personality that is a part of our brand.
Additionally, we are constantly improving our website, adding resources, events, and constantly adding new content, refreshing existing content, and creating and developing new campaigns to attract new leads and drive new business.
If you haven’t checked out our website yet, feel free to look around. And we welcome feedback and suggestions!
A New Way to Work – Although time management, scheduling, and planning have always been our core strengths in managing client projects and internal projects, we knew we needed a more efficient way to operate and track time and resources spent on each project. Therefore, we’ve implemented a new task and project management system that allows us to manage every step of the buying cycle and even the project cycle, from managing contacts and leads to project deadlines.
A New Relationship Approach to Clients – Although we do still occasionally take on the small, “one-hit-wonder” projects, we are more interested in developing long-term relationships with clients. Long-term, ongoing projects make up approximately 90% of our weekly workload; therefore, it only makes sense to allocate most of our resources and shift our focus to support our clients, to provide higher quality deliverables, and to simply serve them better.
A New Team and New Faces – Because we’ve taken on more larger, long-term clients and projects, we obviously need a team for support. We now have our own team of 8 content writers to help with workload and project overflow, and to contribute expert knowledge into content surrounding niche-topics or even high-risk topics, such as technical, medical, and legal content.
So What’s Next?
Although it’s been a busy and somewhat challenging year for JHLS, we aren’t slowing down! We have a few events coming up that we are pretty excited about.
September 2016 – Julie Anne Gniadek, our owner and founder will be attending the PMI Global Congress conference in San Diego, California. As a certified and professional project manager, Julie plans on learning more about the newest trends in project leadership and project management, and how to bring home some new and creative ideas and strategies to JHLS in order to better serve our clients.
Julie is also excited about meeting and networking with other like-minded project managers and entrepreneurs.
October 2016 – In January 2016, Julie gave a live presentation to a small group of local business owners on “How to Manage Content and Social Media the Easy Way“. Since this presentation was such as success, the team at JHLS will be giving this presentation again via a live webinar on October 7th, 2016.
Check out the details of this webinar, and register today for free by clicking here.
November 2016 – In November of this year, Julie will be reuniting with the HubSpot team at their annual Inbound Conference in Boston. Although Julie is already Inbound marketing certified, the digital marketing landscape is constantly shifting and changing; therefore, attending this year’s Inbound conference will allow her to apply what she learned from lectures, events, and even from other marketers and entrepreneurs to not only serving clients but also to grow and expand JHLS.
Paving the Way for 2017…
By finishing 2016 on a strong and positive note, this only paves the way to future growth and success in 2017. Although we are still in the process of strategic planning and goal-setting for 2017, we promise that 2017 might just be one of our best years yet.