– BY MADDIE CRAIG | 2023
The holiday season often brings out beloved old traditions - baking classic Christmas cookies from grandma's recipe, decorating the tree with ornaments from childhood, gathering around to read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas as a family. Revisiting and embracing these nostalgic traditions helps infuse the season with cherished memories while often creating new special moments as well.
In a similar way, reexamining the origins and early days of your business can provide that same infusion of inspiration and growth. Just as holiday traditions link the past and future, your original business vision and early plans connect where you’ve been to where you’re headed.
Revisiting Your Roots
It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day aspects of running a successful company and focus predominantly on goals, growth, and the future. But carving out time for intentional reflection on the early stages of your entrepreneurial endeavor can be rewarding.
Pull out your initial business plans, market research, vision boards or notes from those critical first hiring decisions. Recall the energy and vision that drove you in those early phases. The core identity of a business takes shape in those founding moments and reconnecting with that original spark can be powerfully motivating.
Ask yourself - what underlying mission, values or purpose defined the business in those critical first days? Has growth or scaling led you astray from any early priorities? Review your systems, offerings and operations through the lens of those formative ideas.
Gaining Inspiration From the Past
Reminiscing on your business origins may fill you with inspiration and clarity and re-understanding early challenges provides perspective on how far you’ve come.
Revisiting old plans may reveal ideas or even entire projects that have stalled amidst rapid expansion. You may uncover target markets or partnership opportunities you moved on from while focused on survival.
In this way, reflecting on the early days provides invaluable perspective, inspiration and actionable ideas to reinvent for the future. It roots you back in the purpose-driven foundations whilst catalyzing fresh innovation.
Blending Old and New
The holidays, after all, fuse aged traditions with new memories into something special. Make embracing the origins and history of your business an annual tradition as well - pull the plans, pore over early vision boards, and reminisce on the wild ride to get where you are.
Identify what core values, ideas or offerings from the early stages still represent the heart of the company. And explore what old concepts might now infuse fresh thinking, reworked to propel your continually evolving and growing organization into the future.
Meet The Author
Maddie Craig is the founder of Blue Cypher Bookkeeping, a detail-oriented bookkeeper, and definitely a “numbers nerd”! She is passionate about helping organizations understand the full story of their financials and using it to make more confident decisions and grow strategically. She has experience working with a wide array of clients, including small businesses and non-profit organizations. When not crunching numbers, she and her husband enjoy traveling, being active in the community, and sharing their love for good food with friends and family.