Episode 72: Why Giving A Performance Review for Yourself can Help Running A Small Business
Even if you’re the boss to your own business, have you ever given yourself a performance review? While some may think being their own boss doesn’t require them to assess their performance in running their businesses, Fiona shares the reasons why it’s important to do so. Listen to today’s coaching episode now to learn the important questions to ask when doing a performance review.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Conducting a performance review
Questions asked in a review:
What were your initial goals for the last 12 months?
how are you responsible for helping the business get through covid and use data where possible?
What are you most proud of then? Which areas do you feel you could have performed better at in 2020?
How aligned to the brand values was the business externally?
Which areas of the business took too much of your focus and which areas were neglected this year?
How healthy financially is the business right now?
Conclusion
Resources mentioned in this episode
Episode transcript:
I'm your host, Fiona Killackey, founder of my daily business coach. Let's get going.
Hello and welcome to Episode 72 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast.
Now, before I get started, I just want to say a massive, massive thank you to every single person who has taken the time to leave a review or share this podcast with friends. I am just shocked at how many people are downloading it, where they're downloading it. It's literally all over the world and that has come from people sharing it and people, you know, talking about it, telling friends about it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Like, I wish I could just reach out and give you a massive hug. I know COVID time, so that probably wouldn't be allowed, but yeah. Just wanted to start and say thank you so, so much.
So today's podcast episode is a coaching one. If you're new here, I run three types of episodes, quick tips. They come out every single Tuesday morning, Australian time, and then I run long episodes every alternate Thursday. So one of those is coaching and the other one is interviews with small business owners. So if you are new here, make sure you go and you binge on all the goodness that's come before this episode, after you listen to this one of course. All right. So let's get stuck into today's coaching episode.
It might be a little bit confronting for some of you. It could, you know, conjure up things that you thought you'd sort of said goodbye to when you left the corporate world. But it's something I think is really important for small business owners, particularly leaders of companies where you are the CEO, you’re the MD. Other people are looking towards you, whether they're virtual assistants or contractors or staff in-house. But yet really important question to ask yourself. So let's get stuck into it, shall we?
All right, so what I'm going to talk about today, and I'm almost well, I am laughing because I know some people listening to this will be like, “God, no, like, no, no, no. I did not want to think about that.” But I want you to think about the last time and be really honest with this. You may have never done it the last time that you did a performance review. Yes, I said it. Performance review. I know those words could make people feel all types of way. And really they can remind us, especially people like me who used to work in corporate and left that life of kind of people having to go through these huge kind of database entry sort of projects that you had to do in order to prove how great you've been in the last six months or 12 months.
Also, the rating system, I mean, as a manager, often I went through, you know, different companies in the UK and Australia and having to write your staff according to things. And sometimes, you know, that was really confronting to might really have locked somebody as a person. But when you sat down and looked at their performance, you know, maybe there were some areas they just were not good at or were not really taking initiative on. And so performance reviews, whether you were on this side of the manager giving the review or you were the person getting the review, you know, there's sort of like not everyone loves them.
It's almost like you have to do an exam at school either way. And so when I ask that question, you know, when was the last time that you did it? I know that there'll be people listening to this being like, “no, don't want to listen to these. Don't want to have anything to do with performance reviews. I run my own business. Why do I need to do that?” Or “I don't have any staff. So that's not a thing for me.” But I would firstly say, you know, that's totally OK to have those thoughts and kind of have this ickiness thought when you think about performance reviews and they can, you know, bring up all sorts of things, including, you know what, we're not doing well or the things that we're sort of hiding or avoiding or kind of putting under the carpet, so to speak, you know, it's not the easiest thing to own up to being part of the problem in any area of your life, let alone the business that you run.
But having worked with, you know, thousands of small business owners, I know that self-awareness is a huge part of a successful business, understanding how you, as the leader perform well, the things that you always avoid, the areas that you really potentially could outsource or delegate. All of this comes under being self aware. And a huge part of that comes through things like performance reviews.
Now, as somebody who owned the business, you might be thinking, well, like, I don't have anyone above me. You know, I am the top. And so how do I give myself a performance review? Now, this time of year is a great time to actually look back on last year or even, you know, the start of the year.
How have you gone for the first few weeks of the first month or so that you've been running this business? How have you kind of eased back in from holiday if you were lucky enough to take a holiday or depending on where you are listening to this in the world, you know, how are you doing in terms of lockdowns or new restrictions that have forced all sorts of craziness and chaos to happen if you are having to now work from home or get your staff to work from home or deal with suppliers or manufacturers where you can't actually go in and see the product.
So whilst you might be still planning out, it's a really good time to also plan out when you're going to do your performance reviews of yourself. And I know it might still sound like such a weird thing. Like, of course, I'm going to review myself really well. I'll give myself, you know, the top star rating. But I've got some ideas in mind that I'm going to talk about today. And I've actually got a downloadable PDF that will help you go through all of this.
So if you want to access that, make sure you look at the shownotes, the link will be there. It's just mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/72. And I'll go through that PDF in today's episode. But if you're in the car, if you're elsewhere, you can definitely grab that at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/72 and work on it when it suits you. But yet we are at the start of a new year. People are planning and planning for what they want to achieve this year, planning for not new staff or casual staff or planning the work from home strategy. And the list just goes on and on and on. But amongst that list, I really wonder and I see it all the time.
So I know that most people don't do this is how often are we spending time reflecting on and planning for how we, as the leaders of the business, can improve to make the next 12 months or whenever you're planning this, you know the best that it possibly can be. And think about it, if you were an employee, chances are you would have one, if not two reviews of your performance per year at some companies I've consulted two or some companies I've actually worked at. It was a quarterly thing at Amazon. It's a 360 degree-like review system where anyone can give you a review of your performance at any time of year whenever they want, really. And I know that I think a while ago The New York Times wrote up a piece about how horrible that is and everything else. I've got my own ideas around Amazon, but when I work there, it was in the UK. It was a good ten years ago. Now, that was a really great process that I thought that that we actually could give, information or reviews about our peers or about our manager and I was always giving positive stuff.
I'm sure maybe there was some people that were doing negative stuff because they were just having a bad day. But, yeah, I thought it was a really great way to get peer feedback without the very formal kind of review process that happens in most places. But anyway, we don't do it. Most people don't do it when they run their own small business. They don't give themselves a performance review. So let's say you've been running your business for, you know, five or six years. If I'm into my 6th year now and let's say you've never done any one of these, you've never done a performance review for your own self as the leader ever.
So that's five or six or ten or twelve missed opportunities to really dig down on the areas that you excel in and uncover or kind of remind yourself of the areas where you really have room to improve or where it really would benefit you to bring somebody else in or outsource or, you know, delegate certain tasks or certain areas of the business that you just don't enjoy doing or that you always procrastinate on or that you know, and this is the uncomfortable thing. Sometimes you’re just not that good at, you know, like you’re just not that great at.
And so this is what a performance review will pull up how often are you gifting yourself a full performance review in your business? Like, really, if you're honest, think about it. Have you ever done that as the leader of your own business? How often are you sitting down and assessing how you might be the one that's getting in the way of things progressing?
And again, this can be quite, you know, vulnerable and quite confronting to be like, hmm, it's actually me that stuffing up this process or it's me that is not in tune with the rest of my team. And just as importantly, you know, to go a bit more positive. How often are you celebrating the things that you're doing?
Well, you know, especially skills or the tasks that you once might have thought was super impossible to conquer. And now they're just part of your day-to-day reality and you haven't actually stopped to be like, well done. You've really excelled in that. You've really grown in that area since you started your business. And look, no one’s business is perfect and no one is perfect. You know, no business owner is the perfect business owner that gets everything, you know, perfectly done from the day they started to 10 years, 20 years in. No one's like that. I work with people at all stages of business. And I can honestly say that people who even outwardly look like they've got it all together, even inwardly when they've got, you know, fantastic processes, fantastic teams. And I get the privilege to see that stuff. They're still grappling with some areas of the business. I mean, that's why we grow so much as business owners. If you've been employed all your life and then you start running a business, you really realise how much stress and how hard it can be at times in your business.
But also on the flipside, how incredibly liberating and empowering it can be to run a business as well. And look at me asking all of these questions, and you're listening to this podcast. It's not to lay a guilt trip on you or make you feel, you know, oh, my gosh, I'm so behind. Another thing that I'm supposed to do, it's purely a wake up call that when it comes to, you know, planning out a great year for 2021 of any year, we as the leaders of the business, really need to also be accountable to planning for our own improvements, our own tweaks or our own changes. And if you haven't listened to it, the tip episode before this episode 71, which came out a couple of days ago, is all about accountability and how you're actually going to stay accountable. And I think that is a big thing that can result from doing a deep dive like a performance review. So in some cases, like I said before, it could be that you do this and you realise I have to delegate that stuff. I just can't keep trying to do it myself. And that might be getting a bookkeeper, getting a financial adviser to really help you invest any kind of profits or other things that you have going on for others. It could be that doing this brings up the fact that I'm really going to take ownership of this area of the business this year, such as marketing or my finances, or I'm really going to, you know, do some employee engagement work and really make sure that I've got a fantastic team culture happening, perhaps that it brings up. You're really going to understand more your email marketing, because you know that that is a huge driver of sales feed. I haven't actually taken the time to really investigate how we could tweak and change that to get even better results. Or maybe it's just about knuckling down on the 20% of your business, such as your top stuff is your top customers or clients or revenue streams that possibly bring in 80% of your revenue. If you've read Tim Ferris, if you've read many, many business books, they will talk about the 80-20 rule, the idea that 80 per cent of your revenue often comes from your top 20 clients and customers. Now, when I used to work in retail brands, we would often look at these top tier, you know, these however many thousands or hundreds of customers are responsible for the bulk of our incomes.
How we’re really, really nurturing those customers and so that could be something that you that you derive from doing a performance review.
It could be perhaps learning how to really sit and stick to your boundaries and stop feeling walked over by your stuff or your suppliers or your clients. It might just be giving yourself a chance to celebrate, really celebrate everything that you have done. Like I said before, really learning things, growing in certain ways.
If you were an employee of your business, how would you rate your performance, your skills and the areas for improvement? Now, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, this all sounds like a good idea, but I don't even know how to get started then. Like I mentioned before, I've got a PDF. You can download it at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/72 and it's just an at a glance owner performance review and literally it's, it's a single page. It's not going to take you hours and hours, but it goes through a number of questions. And I'm just going to read out those questions now to get you really thinking about how you add. Answer honestly for your own performance review.
So the first thing to think about is what were your initial goals for the last 12 months?
So obviously you can do this in life as well. But in business, what were the initial goals? So, you know, you've got three goals. I always try and get my clients to just limit it to three, just three things. So you're not going to get, you know, sidetracked by shiny new object syndrome, but you've got those three goals. You would list out the three goals. And then the second question to that is how close or far was the business from achieving these goals and why?
So you might have one goal that was, I don't know, income related or revenue related. And hopefully you would also have a profit goal there. But let's just say you had a total revenue relation related goal. You might think, well, we didn't hit it because largely due to COVID-19 and say we're in the hospitality industry, we actually had to shut down for seven months. Or on the flip side, you might think, well, we had this goal, but COVID-19 hit and actually I was in the industry that did really well, you know, which sounds really awful. But there's definitely been some industries that have done well out of people being in lockdown, such as home with, you know, a lot of people were at home thinking, oh, OK, I really need to just this place up or like one of my one of my clients, one of my past interviewees that's come onto the model business coach podcast, Sean Woolsey. He talked about how they had a standing desk. And, you know, before covid here, they weren't selling a huge amount of them. And then once covid hit, they're just sending them out constantly. So you want to think about what were the initial goals last year? One, two, three. And then how far or close was the business from achieving those and why was that? And then, you know, you might have a whole question around what impact has covid-19 had on the business? Every single business out there, it would have been impacted in some way, negative, positive in the middle by covid.
It could be that you had staff who realised they don't want to work in the industry that they're in anymore. I know there's been a lot of people I've heard of who have decided to, you know, finish up the job that they were at or completely change direction or it's made them realise that they love being at home with their kids and actually they need to change their their work life to have that.
The next question then is how are you responsible for helping the business get through covid and use data where possible?
You know, try not to make this performance review emotional because just like you are, if you are a manager to staff internally somewhere. So my last employed job at about nineteen staff underneath. I hate saying that underneath me but I had 19 staff that I managed or teams had three main teams and those 19 staff. And you know you don't want to be emotional when you're giving feedback, you want to look at the data, give facts, show you know, clear examples of when something didn't go to plan, why it didn't go and have that discussion and be really open and transparent the same way when you're doing your own performance review, how are you responsible for helping the business get through 2020 and use the data?
You know, maybe we were in hospitality. And actually I came up with the idea of doing hampers and we were able to scale that. Or maybe you decided that instead of running events, you're actually going to do these online and you really took the time to learn how to do those. Well, for example, you're sort of thinking about what are you most proud of, about your performance this year? And it could have been I was a fantastic boss and I really went out of my way to help, you know, the mental health of my staff. It could be I'm really proud that the business just survived. You know, I'm proud that we didn't go under because a few stages I thought we would, for example.
So that's the next question. What are you most proud of then? Which areas do you feel you could have performed better at in 2020? And again, this is not a guilt trip. This is not a like oh my gosh, she's making me think about how crap I am. Not at all. But it's really thinking about, you know, what could you have done better? Maybe it's that, you know, I don't know, maybe it's that you didn't jump online quick enough or that you, you know, really thought it wouldn't impact you. And so you were a bit complacent about things and then think, how are you going to amend that for the next twelve months? And again, just one or two or three bullet points there. You know, how are you going to if you're, for instance, saying we really could have done that email marketing more, we could have been better at that, then it's like, OK, I'm going to take a course to help me with that or I'm going to delegate that to somebody who really understands email marketing and can help us.
The next thing to think about, and this is really important, is how aligned to the brand values was the business externally. So. OK, how are we really showing up for our clients and our customers or our suppliers and manufacturers, how will we really align to the brand values that we set that I as the business owner set? And then how aligned to the brand values was the business internally? And that's a huge thing that I talk about with my clients. You can have these brand values that if you're really great about, but you can just, you know, be posting on social media and be like, yeah, always so about women empowerment. And then internally, you know, your staff are stressing out or they're really bitching about each other or this is gossip culture. So you want to think how aligned to the brand values with the business externally in the last 12 months and the same question, but internally. So even if it's just you working for yourself, if you're about, say, freedom, that's one of my key brand values. And internally, you're working day and night and never taking weekends off, then you're not actually living up to that internally. And so there's a misalignment there. So those are the two questions about values.
The next question is, which areas of the business took too much of your focus and which areas were neglected this year? So really thinking about that, and it could have been that you really let non impactful things take up too much of your head space. So comparing yourself worrying about the latest social media app to come out worrying about, you know, what other people are saying to you around your business as opposed to sticking to what you know about your business. And then I said, where are you putting too much focus? Or maybe you put all this focus on, you know, I don't know, your particular social media channel or a, you know, a new software system for your point of sale. And actually, you could have just stuck with the one that you had. You know, we were you procrastinating by doing that? Sometimes we can look to what's new, what's shiny. Oh, I should totally change my email platform because we're actually just worried about actually diving into what we have and cleaning up the mess there. And then which areas were neglected. So was it you know, the staff culture was neglected. Was it that we you know, we just went too hard, too fast and we neglected, you know, looking after our staff, for example?
Then you want to think how healthy financially is the business right now? And how have you or your work in the company contributed to this outcome? So, again, not laying guilt, celebrating when you've got the wind celebrating and putting that in. And then just one clear statement, which is your overall performance review statement. And this, you know, might take you a little bit of time to get succinct, but you just want something. Like I said before, this PDF is just one page.
So it's not, you know, heaps and heaps of writing, but one statement that kind of gives you a path forward or gives you some something to reflect on your own performance from the last twelve months as the owner or the leader of your business.
So, again, this podcast episode is not set out to make you feel guilty or make you feel you haven't done enough or make you reflect on all the bad things that you think that you are doing in the business.
It's really and also on the flipside, it's not to try and make you, you know, be more productive or more ambitious or more like hashtag killer or hashtag hustle, hustle, hustle. I mean, I hate the word hustle, but rather it's a reminder to stop, to reflect, to analyse what's working, what isn't, and hopefully use this to set yourself up for a fantastic, you know, 12 months, 24 months, whatever it is ahead in your business. We definitely can look at our staff if you're lucky enough to have staff and think about, oh, they're not doing this right or they're not doing that right. Or on the flipside, be like, oh, my God, they killed it. They're just doing so well in that area. I love, you know, for instance, with this podcast, I love the team that work on my podcast and shout out because I know they're listening to this because they will listen as they edit and make the show notes. I love them. I just record this in my office. I send it off and magically it all appears and it's not magic. It's these two people that are working really hard and getting it done. And I am so, so, so grateful for them. So, you know, you can often look at your staff and see the negative or positive and have thoughts around them, but we're not necessarily looking at ourselves in that same manner. So this is what today's coaching episode is really about. You know, how can you be the best leader for your business, even if it's just you and you haven't got anyone else yet really thinking about that? And I try and do this for myself and I trying to actually do it every quarter this year. I've usually just done it like once or twice.
And there's definitely huge areas that I need to improve on as a business owner in my business so that I can be the best possible leader for the staff that I do have and create a really great business that aligns internally and externally to my brand values. So that is it for today's episode. As I said, the PDF, you're at a glance owner. A performance review can be found at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/72 if you don't remember that or you listen to this and later on you're like oh what was that. Feel free to send me a DM. You can do that at @mydailybusinesscoach on Instagram or you can email us any time. hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. Now if you do enjoy these podcast episodes and you're thinking I'd really like to actually work with Fiona on my business, I do run business coaching one on one or group coaching. And you can find out all about that just over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/shop. So I hope to connect with you soon. Thanks for listening. Bye.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
