The 1st January 2014 is a significant date for Katie & Jane; our first birthday!
On reaching this milestone and nearing the end of our first
year we wanted to reflect on the past 12 months, our best & worst bits, the
moments that mattered and the important things we've learnt.
In November 2012 Jane & I were reading everything we
could get our hands on to fill our brains with positivity & confidence. One
of our favourite inspirations was Sir Richard Branson (of course!) and little
did we know when reading Screw Business As Usual by the man himself that just
under 10 months later we would be featured by the team at Virgin Unite as entrepreneurs
and be working with Virgin Trains. What a great first year journey!
When we started with our social media mission 12 months ago,
we knew we would be competing in a saturated market so we had to do things
differently. We went with our intuition that in the near-future, the percentage of social media
management taken in-house rather than outsourced to agencies would increase and felt there was a
place for researched, bespoke and tailored social media training (without the
jargon!) for in-house teams so they could make informed decisions about social media. We were sure that training delivered by the two of
us who had not only created & delivered social media strategies but also
managed & ran the social media activity on the ground could be very
valuable for a company. Only time would tell if our
intuition was right!
Without losing our passion for this concept, we pushed on through
the naysayers and people we met who told us we should be running
Facebook & Twitter accounts for other people’s companies and are now proud to
have worked with a variety of companies this year, from exciting start-ups, national brands and the likes of Virgin Trains and Inner Me who understand
the value of placing social media knowledge within their own teams rather than
outsourcing. So... our intuition was right!
In other areas of the business, we are very proud to have
self-funded Katie & Jane and it feels great that we have worked together to
reinvest in our business for long term growth, not just on the social media
side but with app development too. One of the greatest reliefs of the year has
to be that Jane & I really are a great team, we thought we were, but this
year has absolutely proven it. We both are in tune to the same goals, so we
both work with a steely determination to get there – and we have a huge amount
of fun on the way too!
Although we both want tomorrow, today, we are learning how
to balance moving forward at pace, while making sure we reflect on our learnings
and keep our focus too. We keep positive, bounce back from setbacks and always stay
true to ourselves. So many people seem to equate business success with financial gain,
but honestly the freedom of creativity, building your own dream instead of
someone else's and creating something that someone else is prepared to invest
in are the monumental achievements that keep us striving forward.
We have learnt so much about the app world this year, from
our tracking and monitoring of current trends, to mastering the search for a
great developer that ‘gets’ your project and goals. There have been setbacks along
the way on our journey so far, but we haven’t given up and our first app will hit
the App Store in early 2014. Seeing it for the first time was our most
memorable highlight of the year. A huge amount of work has gone into creating
our first app (of many!) and it’s currently in beta testing and looking very
good! Being a team of two Virgos, with Jane’s unbelievable eye for detail and
our high standards it's taken a while for us to be completely happy with it and
we want to make sure we bring out a product we are proud of, so stay tuned!
Last but definitely not least, we both love our blog. It was
a surprise to both of us how much we’d get out of writing about our work, life
and play. We love to hear people tell us what they've gained from reading our
blog and it can get slightly addictive looking at our reader numbers! We're
really looking forward to writing many more posts in 2014.
We're also really excited to be kicking January off to a great
start at Birmingham’s Innovation Centre as part of their e4f (Entrepreneurs for
the future) initiative, so here’s to 2014 and year number two!
Happy New Year,
Katie x
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