Year-End Reflections For 2023:

Milestones and Things We've Learned

I suspect that most people reflect on where they are in life at this time of year. As a business owner, I reflect on the state of things in my personal life, professional life, and my business' life as well.

In my mind, my business has a separate life outside of myself. It helps me not to take things personally and allows me to separate my personal and business life.

As someone who has primarily worked from a home office for over 20 years, I've learned that separating the two is an important thing.

Milestones

1. This year, we marked 20 years since we started creating websites and logos, as well as providing other marketing services for small and new businesses.

2. This year, we revived our own content marketing initiatives, publishing over 30 new articles that have been read thousands of times over the past year.

3. We were busiest this year with website design and redesign projects with existing and returning clients. Several new sites went online this year, with a couple of them held over to the coming year.

4. We were involved with several smaller digital marketing initiatives this year. We'll be sharing more about these projects in a future article.

5. It was exciting for us to find ways to include AI in our workflow, particularly in copywriting. We also look forward to welcoming AI into our design and image-processing processes.

Things We've Learned

1. Social media marketing is changing, and not for the better. With all the polarization of content on the various platforms, it will get tougher for small businesses to get their message out there.

2. Self-employment and entrepreneurship need to be promoted more often to people as a career option. In Canada, we are seeing the lowest number of new business startups in decades while business closures continue to increase. Teaching entrepreneurship in high school and related business skills in college would change this trend over time while giving those who start their own business better skills to be successful.

3. You need to have a vision that you can grow towards, but that vision needs to be flexible. More on this in a later article as well.

4. You need to stay positive and realistic. Much of the news makes the world seem bleak and as though nothing will get better. You need to ignore that, ignore the naysayers and try not to feed your own self-doubts. Focus on your successes and tweak what needs tweaking. Be realistic. Things take time.

I want to thank all of you who have supported us at ORP since we started in 2003. It's been a grand journey, and we have you to thank for it.

All the best to you and the people you love for the coming year.

As always, you can fill out the form below if you would like to schedule some time to discuss your website and digital marketing needs.

Sincerely,

Mitch Ross,

President/Creative Director

ORP.ca

Providing web design and digital marketing solutions to businesses, NGOs and rural communities since 2003.