It turns out that 2023 was more impactful than I thought it would be. It’s brought clarity, affirmation, realisations and tons of growth! One of the biggest affirmations I’ve personally had is to always remain authentic to who we are, even if that means sometimes saying no to new opportunities. These are just some of our milestones from 2023.
We have doubled the business yet again: I cannot believe that if we continue like this we will be a £1million business in 2024! We have amazing customers who are people we all love working with. This year has given us more clarity and the realisation that while there is work we could do, it’s also work that a lot of other companies can do, so we’ve focussed on doing the work that we know we excel at. We’ve just launched a new service, ABM Strategy-as-a-Service which within days is already in demand.
To sales or not to sales: The business has doubled year on year but it’s grown organically and I wanted more control over our growth by bringing in sales people to secure new business. I found some great, successful new business sales people, but couldn’t settle on our working structure. I spoke to others to figure out what I was missing and came to realise that our success has come because our customers work directly with us and we have all been successful marketing leaders in our own right and our empathy for our customers is a lot of the magic sauce that has made us successful. I decided not to bring in sales people yet, and that clarity quickly established a revised working model and growth plans which has already brought in more new customers than we’d set targets for.
No office – regular team offsites: This became the year we institutionalised our team offsites as “how we do business”. The team is based all over the UK, and while we could have an office in the south people would have to travel 2 hours a day, and more importantly it would create a north / south divide and I would risk fracturing our amazing culture and limit our hiring to a small area. Instead I’ve made the conscious decision to invest in the team every 3 months, hiring a house where we all want to live and work together for a week, and it’s paying dividends. Newbies immerse themselves into the team and our culture strengthens the team. There are no divides or subcultures. We work on company / go-to-market (gtm) strategy, and every time we meet I invest in developing this small but oh so mighty team with our coach Karen Ancell.
If you force it, it will probably be sh!t: For our June offsite I set the goal we needed to define our gtm services and messaging using our authentic voice. We had some tricky conversations and couldn’t align. Giving ourselves time to sit with the challenge and have bite size discussions paid dividends because at the October offsite we sailed through and established our messaging, personas and target accounts using the bold language our customers use when they talk about us and the successes we’ve brought them.
Our team has grown and so’s our leadership: I am thrilled to have welcomed Rachel Teare, a highly experienced, senior marketing leader to our team. When I first met Rachel I knew she was the perfect fit for our team and that has been validated time and again already. With Rachel on board I’ve now also established a leadership team with her, Rebecca Johns and Rebecca Jones and established the solid foundations for our growth. We’ve grown further with our associates which gives us even more scale, and now even have an intern. We’re always looking for smart marketers 😉.
Bold and proud: Finally this summer we launched our social channels with curated and now created content to share knowledge and learnings to marketers. In 2024 we’ll proudly launch our marketing plan using our bold and authentic voice and the voice of our customers. Our only challenge has been to encourage customers to share the successes we’ve helped them achieve and that’s because they don’t want their competition to know or the improvements we’ve made are so significant they don’t want to highlight they weren’t performing before. But we’ve found ways in which we can share their successes which we’ll be launching next year!
And bold and proud is how I’m looking at 2024. We’ve got aggressive growth targets, we’re expanding our business and service offerings and are looking at a team offsite in Europe to inspire the next stage of our growth and expansion plans.
Thank you to our customers for trusting us to do the work that we do and for working with us to make the impacts that we make. To my team, you inspire me every day with your awesome achievements, thank you!
Wishing you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas and a fantastic New Year!
