Drawing a Line in the Proverbial Sand: Business Goals for 2025
We are in our third year of business—a fact like an ambush. The memory of taking that giant leap off the cliff of steady 401k employment into the abyss of entrepreneurship feels like a fever dream ago. Three years have gone by in a flash of excitement, panic, consternation, hope and revelation. To channel the momentum we’ve generated, each January we devise new business goals to fine tune our processes and keep moving steadily forward. We ask ourselves what concepts will make our work life smoother, and we decide together what direction to steer our business. The new year offers a ripe moment to implement lessons we’ve learned from the previous year (see The 2024: Gametape Review) and to set new business goals.
Here are a few concepts we’re front-loading in 2025.
Boundaries
This year one of our goals is to set firm, concrete boundaries with our clients. As we dig into our third year of business, we’ve started to emerge from the tailspin of 1. Doing work for free or for deep discounts for friends and family 2. Agreeing to provide any service howsoever vaguely in the orbit of our offerings 3. Letting the client dictate our workflow, timeline and overall design process. 2025 is the year we draw a proverbial line in the sand.
In reviewing the Gametape, it’s easy to see how—in the past—we’ve contorted our processes and retrofitted our prices and offerings to accommodate various clients. After all, we conceived of our business as a one-stop-shop, so in some ways, we feel that to do right by our clients, we should assist them as comprehensively as possible. And of course, we want our clients to succeed, so if we know how to help them—even if it’s beyond the scope of our official services—we want to. Do you clean gutters? our clients may as well ask us. Do you repair refrigerators?
We can learn! our client-pleasing hearts sing in unison.
This is a slippery slope. When we agree to take on services that are not technically on our menu of offerings, we end up spending way too much time in the uninhabited no-man’s land outside of our workflow, which means, we ultimately end up devaluing our time. In the past few months, we have taken a long hard look at our offerings, and we’ve drawn up a list of what creative work we actually enjoy doing. If we continue taking on projects that we don’t specialize in and don’t really enjoy, then why did we start this business in the first place? Limiting our offerings and standing firm in our pricing are a few strong boundaries we plan to stick to in 2025.
Transparency
In another lifetime, not so long ago, we were both teachers. If there’s one thing we learned about teaching, particularly at the college level, it’s that you must attempt to conceive of every possible scenario that may befall you or your students before the semester begins and put it in the syllabus. The syllabus served as a primary reference, unwavering guide and preview of what was to come. It gave our students a window into how the class functioned and what we’d be studying, but it also served as a framework for what we expected from our students. It was a moment of full transparency, so that any student could drop the class in the first few days of the semester if they realized they couldn’t meet the course standards.
The model of the syllabus has inspired us to focus our energy on developing a new level of clarity for our potential clients and to determine, before diving into a project, if our client is a good fit. If our clients are going to trust us with their businesses, we owe it to them, before they sign a contract, to be fully transparent about how we work and what they can expect from our processes. This past year, we learned that just because a client comes to us with a problem that we can solve, it doesn’t mean we are automatically a good fit to work with them. As much as we need to set boundaries and avoid tackling every job that comes our way, we need to provide our clients with a roadmap for our processes and our expectations to lay the groundwork for establishing strong partnerships.
Sustainability/Scalability
We are a small company—a roster of two. We have to be smart about how we use our time and our resources. We’ve started to streamline our processes, snapping down the tarps of our workflow. This has been no easy task, as we offer a range of services, including photography, videography, web design, branding, and strategic planning for social media and marketing. However, if we want to succeed, we have to make our offerings manageable and repeatable with a roster of two.
Some days this seems impossible. Running a company involves so many administrative tasks, not to mention the creative heft. We understand that to build a repeatable workflow, we have to identify how long each project will take, build a standard workflow and block off time on our calendar to complete it. To this end, we have started scheduling clients several weeks out, so that we can devote our resources to one project at a time and finish the work within a shorter time frame. As we move forward, we are also looking to build new partnerships with other small business owners and entrepreneurs so that we can outsource the work we no longer have time or energy to do ourselves. Part of being sustainable is knowing what to contract out and coming to terms with the fact that that as our business grows, we can’t possibly do everything ourselves.
To 2025…and Beyond!
This year is about putting up boundaries, but also, about letting go of the reins a bit. In some ways, this feels like a contradiction. The more boundaries we create, the impulse is to hold on tighter to whatever we can control. In the days since Cowbird’s inception, we’ve learned how to run a small business by actively doing it. It seems sometimes that trial and error (and trial by fire?) are idioms that aptly describe the process of missteps and successes that we’ve experienced. Even on the dark days, we can confidently say that we’d rather be here, figuring it all out slowly at Cowbird Creative, than working in jobs that don’t challenge us, allow us to activate our creativity or bring us joy. We’re excited to see what 2025 will bring and how implementing these business goals will help us grow.