We Are Approaching the Last Quarter of 2020 – Our Review of the Year So Far.

What a year 2020 has been so far. It’s probably been one of the most challenging years that most of us have experienced. We may have experienced challenging events at other times but 2020 has seen us face a prolonged challenge that may have affected or still be affecting us physical, emotionally, financially and for a lot of us it will have changed all or some part of how we do business.

Change of Plans

The 2020 pandemic meant that we had to put a halt to some of our plans. We put new services and offers out there to help others. It gave us the drive to try things we hadn’t planned to before, which worked well and it spurred us on to do things outside of the business that we had been talking about for a while but made us realise we need to live our best life while we can and just do those things.

At the start of the year we re-did our office so that we could run Build Your Website in a Day workshops from there. Just as the office was finished, lockdown started! We didn’t want to be defeated so we ran a couple on Zoom which went quite well but they weren’t as we had envisaged so we have put them on hold but we didn’t want to be beaten and we approached the business in a different way.

We ran our Zoom Wednesdays Website and Branding Surgery during the height of lockdown to provide support and guidance for those who were having to adapt their business and bring more of it online but who didn’t know how to do it and needed a sounding board which they found in the form of Chris! We also reduced all of our plans by 50% in April. This was something we had never done before and probably won’t again but it felt right and we welcomed 20 new Ready Steady Websites® members, many of whom wouldn’t have been in a position to work with us without the offer.

We also took the leap and decided to run a free challenge. We had been discussing it for a while and in July we ran our 12 Day Perfectly Planned Website challenge for the first time. It went so well. We had over 300 people on the challenge, over 170 of those joined the Facebook group and others were accessing the resources via email. We welcomed 12 new members to Ready Steady Websites® at the end of the challenge and we had so many messages of gratitude from others who were really happy about the improvements they had made to their website to help improve the all-important online side of their business. We felt really enthused at the end of the 12 days (and a bit tired from all the Facebook lives!).

Changes Outside the Business

In July and August we took more of a look at the non-business side of our lives and decided we needed to make some changes there too. We started swapping a lot of our toiletries for natural products with no plastic packaging and where we couldn’t go completely non-plastic we have switched to re-fillable options to reduce plastic use. We already use quite a lot of natural cleaning products, but we are researching how to improve the rest of those as well.

We also decided it was time to make a purchase we have talked about for ages and we bought a VW Camper Van (it’s the one in the photo). We don’t make the most of the beautiful country we live in and we have planned some trips to take next year to visit some stunning places around the UK. We are already keen tent campers but a little bit of added luxury will make longer trips easier. 2020 has already been dubbed the year of the staycation by some and I think that might be the case for many next year too. Indoor days out are tricky for us at the moment as well because I am on the at risk list and I am still being advised not to go inside places unless necessary, so the camper van is going to be great for a bit of shelter for autumn picnics when you just can’t trust the weather! This has been a dream of ours for a while and 2020 has encouraged us to follow our dreams and make the most of life.

Reach Out and Achieve Your Goals

We still have some goals we are yet to meet this year and over the next three months we are going to up our game and strive to achieve them despite the challenges in our way this year. We have reached out to some lovely people to help us achieve these goals and the response has been amazing. If you have any goals you are still yet to achieve that we might be able to help you with, please reach out to us. We love to help and we are always looking to develop partnerships.