[00:00:09.040] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.380] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.660] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.780] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.850] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast, where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back.

[00:00:23.400] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:23.930] - Gordon
In fact, welcome to our new season. We are now on season five. Who knew we were going to get to five seasons? That's amazing. This is a project, for those who don't know, that we started in lockdown in the UK. When we weren't able to do much, we thought we would start to record this video to basically keep an archive and a history of what we've been up to and what we've been doing, and also sharing our knowledge and experience with people who want to watch. And yeah, here we are in 2024, brand new season, and you should have probably already seen the artwork. It's all now red and lovely. So thank you for that. We would like to apologise for last week's episode. We had a bit of a technical issue, so it didn't actually come out when it should have come out. It got delayed by a few days, which meant that we were wishing you a Happy New Year and hoping your Christmas was going well and talking about New Year coming up. And in fact, it had already come up by the time we got the actual episode out. It's funny, isn't it? All the really easy, what you think is going to be an easy episode with three minutes or so, turned out to be the most frustrating. But anyway, let's get on with our topics for the day. Taylor, New Year, what are you going to talk about?

[00:01:51.210] - Taylor
I'm going to talk about goals for the year. So I think the new year is always a nice time to reflect on and look back at the goals that you'd set many, many, many months ago and see how you got on, how life changed, how what you thought your year was going, how you thought your year was going to go change drastically, completely. You ended up doing something you didn't think would happen or didn't expect, which can be both a good or bad reason. For me, it was getting back to my business and building that back up again to a level that I can start scaling up a bit. For next year, for 2024, looking ahead thinking, what do I want to achieve? What did I not achieve last year that either I want to carry forward into this new year or actually I think, okay, it's been a year, I haven't done anything. I'm just going to leave it and put it to the side. Maybe come visit it later on if I find time, but at this point, just kill it off at the moment. So for me, my goals are to have a better work-life balance. I really enjoy playing tennis, squash, and just being active. So I want to make sure that I can keep that up. Sometimes when I get really busy, I neglect the fitness side of things. I don't set enough time aside to have a break and that causes other issues, things like burn out, stuff like that. And then the other one is scaling up my business. I want to see if I can hit a new goal for the revenue that I bring in, but also building up the monthly recurring revenue that I earn so that I don't have to do as much. I can earn the same amount of money for doing less hours. And the way that I can do that is by selling products and things like that, that you can scale very easily by doing it once and selling to a large number of people. So that's going to be my focus for the year is scaling up Snippet Club, building new products for that, releasing new tutorials. And yeah, just grow that a lot more.

[00:04:24.400] - Gordon
That's very good. So are there any goals that you achieved last year that you're very proud of?

[00:04:31.530] - Taylor
I think for what I had been through and the revenue and things like that was very similar to the previous year, so I didn't drop down in that regard. I think that I did better than I expected for Snippet Club, but at the same time didn't do as much as I'd wanted to. I had a couple of snippets that did very, very well, and I get sales in a couple of times a week, maybe. And I want to continue that, continue that trajectory, really.

[00:05:14.460] - Gordon
Snippet Club was an interesting one for you because the audience that that website is aimed at helped to dictate a product or a couple of products, and also a way that you can actually sell to them. So instead of just having the lifetime, sorry, the annual subscription and having access to everything, you were allowing people to purchase things on a 'per snippet' basis, which is something that the audience told you they wanted and something you did. And because of that, everyone gained from it.

[00:05:50.890] - Taylor
Yeah. And it's something that I want to... I'm going to be rebuilding the architecture for the website to allow for me to be able to sell any snippet as a one-off cost, because that seemed to do pretty well. And it's interesting to experience that and see that the way that I thought it was going to work ended up being actually I did better from the one-off snippets because I think it's part of the building the trust. People buy the one-off snippet, go, "Okay, let me have a look, see what this is like." And then when they have used it for a while, they go, "Okay, well, now I want to upgrade to the membership." And so it's, looking back, it probably was a good idea to do that, but obviously, hindsight is a great thing. So if I'd known that before, I would have built that from the beginning. But it's something that I can iterate on and hopefully scale up more for the new year.

[00:06:57.780] - Gordon
Very good. Anything else you want to say on that?

[00:07:00.880] - Taylor
I don't think so. I'm going to be continuing travelling. That's also on my list for this year. Hopefully, I'll hit 12 of 12 cities this year. I got eight last year because I started obviously a couple, like six months in. And we are going to WordCamp Europe, which is going to be exciting.

[00:07:19.760] - Gordon
We are. I'm going this time. It's going to be very exciting. So if you're going to be at WordCamp in Europe, then please look us out and come and say hello. We'd love to speak with you.

[00:07:30.140] - Taylor
Yeah, I know quite a few people that are going to be there, lots of my friends.

[00:07:33.220] - Gordon
Oh, well, that's good.

[00:07:34.520] - Taylor
So, yeah, it should be very very good.

[00:07:36.630] - Gordon
So my topic today is a little bit of a mixture. I am just about, as of tomorrow, going into Pantomime. It's something I do for fun. It's a local amateur production. And this year we're doing Dick Whittington, and I am the Dame. So I've been rehearsing for the last three and a half months or so, and it all culminates to performances which start tomorrow and go on for a week. So we've got 10 performances coming up. So fingers crossed, that's all going to work. But there's two things that have come out of this. One is that I've got the video website, the online video library that I created with Taylor. And there's a function that I wanted to add which wasn't necessary at the time, but is going to be necessary now, and that is for people to be able to purchase the videos on the website. Now, this is something I've always wanted to add, and it was thought about at the beginning, but I didn't need the functionality until this time. So now is the time that we get to build that and then check it out, make sure it works, and then deploy it. So that's a really important thing that we're doing over the next few days. And hopefully it will work because I had some problems last year where people were unable to make orders properly, and it was a bit of a nightmare because I was trying to deal with being in the pantomime and also dealing with these orders that were failing and people getting frustrated and so on and so forth. So that, I hope, will be all sorted. And it got me thinking that maybe now is a really good time just to go through processes, go through your customer journey. If you've got systems in place that allow customers to do something, in my case, buying something and then receiving the product as a digital product, just check it all works. Because the last thing you want to do is to go through the year expecting everything to be working as it should be, and then finding out that actually there was something wrong and it wasn't working because this expired, or you needed a new token, or this bit of code wasn't working anymore. And it's really important that you get all that sorted. So now, beginning of 2024, start of the year, is a really good time to do that. Just have yourself or someone you trust and know go through a system that you rely on for your business, that you rely on for your organisation, whatever that might be, your club; and make sure it's doing what it should be. Is your enquiry form working? Why do you not check these more often? Because if you find that there's an error, you're going to stop yourself getting enquiries. And that's a huge downside to your business. You need those enquiries coming in to be able to get more business. So just check they work. It's a simple matter. Just go onto your website, tap in a little form and fill it in, send it off. Do you receive it? And if you are sending the customer something in return, does the customer receive that? Very, very simple. But now is a really good time to check those processes, make sure they work. And if they don't work, look at why they don't work and look at what you can do about it. Maybe upgrade it, maybe change it. Maybe what you have in place at the moment is not the right thing for your business as it stands now; maybe you need to change it slightly. So that is something that I I really recommend you go and do. And I also recommend that you check your internal procedures as well. So things that you have systems in place that are internal, not customer facing but something that you do for yourself. Your to-do list, does it work properly? Does it put things in the right place? Does it give you the information you need at the right time to get those to-dos done? That's a very simple example, but I think you can probably think of things in your business, your organisation that you can look at and just check to make sure they are all working. One last thing. Now might be a really good time to check your website, not just for processes, but for content and for the look and feel. And does it still reflect your business as you are and how you want it to be in 2024? And if it doesn't, well get in contact with either Taylor or myself, the Creative Tinker or Drayson Design, and we'll have a look at it for you. We'll give you an idea of what can be done and what the cost will be. And if it's something you want to go ahead with, then we'd be happy to take the business on for you and give you a really good start for 2024. That was it. That's all I have to say. Anything you want to add?

[00:12:37.590] - Taylor
Don't think so.

[00:12:38.880] - Gordon
Thank you for joining us. Welcome to 2024 with "This Week With." We're looking forward to doing this all the year. We've got statistics that we've always wanted to put on the website, which is something that I think is going to be one of our goals for the first part of this year, right?

[00:12:57.080] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:12:57.470] - Gordon
So we're going to try and get that done so that we can look and see how many episodes we did in a season and what we talked about, some of the topics, some of the word clouds, that sort of thing. That would be nice, wouldn't it?

[00:13:08.580] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:13:09.260] - Gordon
So thank you for joining us. As always, we can be found on YouTube and on Facebook. Please like, share and subscribe.

[00:13:17.690] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:13:22.760] - Gordon
That's it. A nice short one for the beginning of the year. Please join us again. We'll be with you next Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:13:34.180] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:13:36.770] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:13:37.150] - Taylor
Bye.

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