New Years House Keeping: 5 Things We Do at the Start of a New Year as a Creative Agency
The start of a new calendar year is a great opportunity to recalibrate your business and team. After some time off, team members and clients alike come back feeling refreshed and ready for new beginnings. Here are 5 “house keeping” tasks we do to make sure we capitalize on the momentum of the new year.
1. Set up new time tracking logs
Since our retainer logs for clients are organized by year, we take this opportunity to set up the one that will be used for the upcoming year. If there was something we noticed didn’t work in the previous year, this is the best time to adjust and pivot. For example, ensuring logs use brand colors to ease differentiation between them. We are also experimenting with an “hours chunk” method, where we chunk hours by quarter and instead of waiting for the total hours to reach a maximum number, we wait for it to reach 0 — equilibrium.
2. New client roadmaps
Whether it is a larger content roadmap, or a list of goals and projected projects to work on per month, we make sure we have a good snapshot of our year. This includes pre-scheduling any tasks we know will happen, like reports, holiday videos etc. We also add status trackers to help us keep track of where we are at in the process of production. By solidifying these roadmaps as a living, breathing document, we can ensure that there is less confusion on a large scale (scope of the year) to a minute level (scope of a task).
3. Content strategy analysis
As mentioned, the new year is a fresh opportunity to pitch and follow through on change. We go through our client’s brand (mostly social content and website) and see what can be improved. Some years, we focus on certain things (like in 2024 we focused on the transition from Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1). Other times, we see if a design has became stale or overused and needs to be refreshed (like Instagram templates or a website homepage).
4. Internal goals mapping
Like a new year’s resolution, we set some broad goals or things we want to accomplish for the year. These can be small goals, like revamping a page on our website, or larger goals like landing 2 RFP’s or launching a templates site. Similar to the roadmaps we make for clients, we scope out what we want to do this year, whether we work on it piece by piece, or find the time to dedicate to it.
5. Reintroduce ourselves
The last thing we do is to repitch ourselves to those who don’t already work with us. We feature team members or create ads about what working with us is like. We share a peak into the people you would work with and our philosophy.
If you don’t know us, hi! We are Hueman.
Based in Rancho Cucamonga, we are an award-winning studio that combines strategy, positioning, and people-centered design to create powerful brands, websites, and visuals that engage your audience and help you grow. Put simply, we believe the best design is centered around people and have been helping grow businesses, non-profits, and mission driven organizations since 2006.