How to Make 2023 Count: Don’t just Grow – Evolve!

PART 1

At the beginning of every year, we generally have the ‘all or nothing’ mindset. And usually people have the same desires every single year: to lose weight, make more money, improve our health, quit a bad habit or take up a new activity.

Our goals are all about doing more, having more and being more ( though we are often already at capacity).

And what generally happens is we set our resolutions and they’re set from a place of what we currently don’t have AND think that we need to have to be happy, to be a success.

As soon as we come up with these new wants, we start running towards achieving them without thought of whether we have the capacity or capabilities or even if it is good for us and those around us.

And as we slowly kick our goals, we grow and adopt a ‘growth mindset’  We keep growing, growing, growing, and trying to add more in and being okay with challenges

The question is:

Are we evolving, our capacity and our capability to be able to meet everything that we want to do and all our new goals?

This is why we see every year, business owners burning out because they haven’t evolved their capacities and capability to match their goals either in their personal or professional life or both.

That was me for two and a half years. Since the day COVID hit, boom, my small family business EasyFit doubled overnight. It was non-stop and I just kept paddling like a little duck, trying not to drown.

Initially, we just thought that business growth was just temporary. But we were wrong. EasyFit has kept on growing and growing. People’s need for convenience, nutritional healthy meals and saving time never slowed down.

At the time, I had no idea of how much I needed to evolve personally to be able to stay ahead.

The unexpected business growth we experienced meant we needed to hire more staff to keep up with demand: making and delivering fresh meals to 100 clients (including gyms) a week. As the business was growing, I was not evolving and building my skill level I was using the old-fashion pen and paper formula for a lot of administrative work as I’m not very tech savvy. This put a lot of pressure on our business system and my life, as I was doing a lot of tasks myself.

I would also handle customer care myself by talking to every single new client and delivering the meals myself to them this has proven to be a great strength in building the business yet has been challenging for my two children.

By July 2022, it was time for me to evolve. The time had come for me to do things differently. It was time to look for resources to allow the business to grow and reach the targets we set, without burning out during the process.

So the first step I took on my evolution journey, was hiring a business and mindset coach and the learning curve has been huge ever since. I had to start doing things completely differently. I had to stop operating the way I was used to, pre-COVID. This meant creating a new website to be able to handle the spike in demand. I also had to hire more staff and of course train and manage the new team.

Choosing a theme to guide me –  Evolution

An eye-opening moment I had was when my coach Francinne suggested that I pick

a word or a theme as a guiding star for myself and my business to be able to pull me forward. That word would be what would lead me to achieving my goals and give me a moment of pause before going back to my old habits. Because when times get tough, it’s so easy to go back to what we know, and our old ways of doing things. For me, old habits include doing things myself, manually as by nature, I try to avoid technology as much as I can. That’s how I decided that my word, or my ‘theme’ for 2023 was going to be ‘evolution’ as opposed to ‘growth. In other words, I was going to increase my capabilities and capacity so that my business can get to the next level without having to sacrifice my personal life or my health.

Ever since picking ‘evolution’ as my theme for the year, I haven’t looked back. Our business has gone from strength to strength and I have a healthy work-life balance (most days).

Basically, ‘evolving’ has allowed me to work on my business instead of constantly putting out fires from the moment I got up in the morning until I went to sleep.

‘Evolving’ has also allowed me to discover what a successful business needs, how to find the right people to join the team, who have the same values and vision as I have and how to use technology to eliminate all the time-consuming and tedious tasks. All this of course was not an easy journey and it was definitely not a linear process. It involved a lot of trial and error and making mistakes along the way.

The biggest change ‘evolution’ allowed me to experience was bringing in another chef Sophie, to work alongside my mum Margherita so she can concentrate on doing other things in the business. Another big change was using software to manage the 50 participants of our five-week challenge, something I used to personally manage manually before. If it wasn’t for software, I would have never been able to run challenges again.

‘Evolution’ also allowed me to manage challenges better. The biggest challenge was to become more selective about the business tools I was going to use. As the business kept growing, I kept on being recommended new ‘push-button’ solutions. So I really had to learn to take a step back, not make any impulsive moves and quick decisions, and ask myself first ‘do I really need this?’ ‘Will this serve me or my business right now?’ ‘Is this going to solve my problem this week?’

But the word ‘evolution’ has allowed me to achieve much more. In fact, more than I could ever imagine possible. And I’ll share them with you in part 2 of this blog. In the meantime, I invite you to think about how you can make 2023 count for you and invite you to pick a word or theme for the year, that will keep you on track and help you through the ups and downs life throws a you. I can’t wait to hear about your success story!