Founder's Thoughts – 2022 Year's Reflection
This Year’s Reflection
As the year draws to a close, I feel the calling for some headspace and reflection. This is the time of the year, when I take a day to sit with myself, and think about all the achievements, and all the defeats of 2022. This ritual helps me process all that we’ve been through as a company, and generates the creative energy for goal setting, and planning for the upcoming year.
This post is about the achievements and the defeats of 2022 as a company Founder. I am planning to write a separate one about the goals and plans for 2023, which I’ll share in January.
Overall, 2022 has been an incredible year of growth and development, with many successes, but also a few defeats. I am feeling super grateful and happy about this year’s company results, as I write this reflection post in December 2022.
Since the beginning of 2020, Visuable has been going through a rapid growth phase propelled by the pandemic, which pushed the entire world online, and made everyone, including their mothers, want to buy a website from us. This phase lasted for the entire 2 years, and during this time we’ve all learned a lot about expertly managing projects, delivering outstanding customer service, hiring great people, innovating on the fly, and working together as a brilliant dream team.
When entering 2022, I’ve been thinking to myself that we’re finally a fully trained, and well set-up team, ready to slow down a little, and enjoy a quieter pace of the established phase.
In January, we learned that one of our very first employees, who was holding a key role across several areas of the company, was moving on. This very experience prompted me to reevaluate the business structure, assess risks, and come to the realisation that 2022 was not going to be about slowing down at all, but rather about rebuilding Visuable even bigger, better and stronger for the future.
Restructuring, Recruiting and Promoting
At that time, Visuable was 7 people, 3 leads — Lidia, Inka, Sarah, Noemi, Efi, Sergio and Carmen. We used to have 2 teams (the ‘design team’ and everything else, which we used to call the ‘business team’).
With a goal of dismantling the so called ‘business team’ and restructuring it into a few separate, smaller and more focused teams, I’ve started recruiting, hiring and promoting internally. This year alone, I’ve brought on board 5 new hires, 5 new partners, 2 new assistants and promoted 2 people internally.
Sergio from Portugal, who used to be our Marketing Officer stepped up as an Accounts Lead. Sergio was already involved in project bookings, as part of his marketing role, so heading our newly shaped Accounts Team turned out to be a natural progression for him. He jumped straight in, and started delivering greatness. Together, we’ve worked on creating better processes and workflows and turning the Accounts department into a well structured and perfectly systemised center of customer service excellence. Sergio is now leading our Accounts Team, writing expert marketing articles for our blog, while also utilising his superb marketing skills to deliver SEO and Mailchimp marketing projects for our clients.
In March, I hired two part time people as Marketing and Accounts Assistants. One of the new hires unfortunately did not move past the internship stage, and we’ve parted ways. However the other one, Alisa from Finland, turned out to be an excellent fit. For the first 9 months, I’ve bounced Alisa around different newly established teams, while giving her a variety of roles, challenges, and responsibilities. She faced all of them head on, and eventually settled in the role of a Brand Marketing Coordinator. Utilising her very many talents, Alisa is now responsible for delivering our own communications strategy, creating content for our CSR campaigns, putting us up for awards, delivering marketing projects and advising new potential clients on the best packages for their needs, and she is doing a fantastic job.
By April, I’ve brought on board 4 copywriting partners, so that we could expand our capacity for delivering copywriting projects, which until now, was very limited. The copywriters brought on board the next level of writing expertise, and improved the quality of the copywriting projects that we are able to deliver. Throughout the year, we’ve built a very strong relationship with 2 of the partners, who now deliver excellent content writing for our clients.
June brought about 2 new designers. I was only looking to hire 1 at the time, but since I’ve found 2 great designers, I ended up hiring both of them. Since we always have more than enough design work to deliver, I felt that taking the leap with 2 designers will be worth it in the end. Eleni from Greece, and Zeynep from Turkey, turned out to be brilliant in their own ways. We’ve settled Eleni as a Design Specialist in our design studio, and Zeynep as our own internal Brand Design Assistant, so that she can help us transform the way we communicate across our marketing channels.
I’ve also invested in hiring Virtual Assistants based in a different timezone, so that we can respond to our clients around the clock, even when it’s after hours for us. Since so many of our clients are based in the USA, making such an investment would help us improve the response speed and ensure better customer experience. I hired our first VA at the beginning of the year, and even tho things were off to a good start initially, and we were very happy with the performance, eventually, we were let down and had to part ways. I’ve extracted a few lessons from this experience, so that we have better experience dealing with VA’s in the future. When I hired our second VA, I was much stricter and clearer when providing tasks, setting expectations, and planning schedule. It’s been a few months with a new VA, and so far, so good. I am hoping we can keep it this way.
Finally, in December, I promoted Efi from Greece, to a Projects Lead. Efi has been doing an excellent job as Creative Coordinator for a few years now, and as a result have grown, matured and was ready to step up into the leadership position. I am super happy with Efi’s progress and I look forward to seeing how she evolves as I task her with new challenges in the coming year.
Today, Visuable is 12 people, 4 leads — Lidia, Inka, Sergio, Efi, Noemi, Carmen, Alisa, Eleni, Zeynep, Stephanie, Diana and Danika. We have 5 teams, and clearly defined roles and responsibilities at all levels, from Directors and Leads, through Experts, Coordinators and Specialists, to Assistants and Trainees. Everyone knows what they should be doing and how to serve our clients in the best possible way. Also, we’ve built an amazing culture of learning and support, and it’s brilliant to see just how excellent our more senior people are at training, mentoring and guiding the new joiners.
We have a world class design, copywriting, and marketing projects delivery expertise. We’ve honed on our approach to customer service, and developed a personalised experience throughout all touchpoints of the customer journey – from the very first enquiry, all the way to aftercare.
Training, Developing and Innovating
Since the team has grown so much this year, it was also the time to start investing into building the company's Knowledgebase of training videos that cover everything from answering enquiries, through conducting customer calls, all the way to writing CSS code. We’ve also invested in buying industry expert training courses, to help the team expand horizons and acquire new knowledge.
As part of creating a record of how we do things, we’ve also worked on improving the processes and making them as efficient and streamlined as they can be, so that anyone can follow them easily, and they bring us the desired outcomes. We’ve also done an all round upgrade of hardware and software that we use to operate, so that we can serve our customers better and faster.
We’ve worked hard on improving the brand experience when it comes to client communications, developing new ways of responding to enquiries, communicating throughout the creative process, and eventually offboarding successfully completed projects.
We’ve launched a new website design range called the ‘Squarespace Frameworks’ which is aimed at clients who don’t require our signature bespoke approach, and like the idea of great design, speed of delivery and value for money. Take a look at those beauties below:
Hessonite for Creatives – click here for access Password: Hessonite123
Safire for Consultants – click here for access Password: Safire123
Peridot for Consultants – click here for access Password: Peridot123
Rose Quartz for Creatives – click here for access Password Rosequartz123
Dia Mond for e-commerce – click here for access Password: Diamond123
We became a Certified Mailchimp Partner and launched our Mailchimp offering, which includes an entry level Mailchimp Expert Call, a comprehensive Mailchimp Kickstart package, as well as Template Design and Automation set-up services. This range turned out to be popular from the get-go, and I am excited for our team to help even more clients with their digital marketing needs in the coming years.
I’ve also re-launched my Brand Mentorship offering, to now include 2 comprehensive processes – The Strategic Direction and the Creative Direction. I am personally very excited about those, as I look forward to engaging with more 1:1 consultancy clients in the upcoming year.
Brand Building, Awards and CSR Campaigns
As a company, we’ve worked hard on tightening the focus of Visuable strategic and creative direction, resulting in a transformation of our communications strategy, with major improvements made to our blog, newsletter and social media strategies. We’ve created a new Visuable brand video and organised 2 team photo-shoots. We’ve launched CSR campaigns that created social impact in the world, while engaging the team, and have also been recognised for our efforts through awards and exclusive event invitations.
Awards
We’ve won a Web Excellence Award for best Agency Website Design
We’ve been selected as one of #smallbiz100 and been invited to the House of Lords
Lidia was named one of 100 most inspirational business women by f:Entrepreneur Magazine
Lidia and Visuable were selected as a finalist in Great British Entrepreneur Awards
Campaigns
Through our campaign Ukraine l, Break Free! we’ve promoted a variety of ways in which anyone, anywhere in the world can offer financial aid to people in Ukraine.
As part of our campaign All Souls Welcome! we’ve raised awareness about LGBTQ+ community workplace issues, created our inclusivity policies, and became pronouns inclusive.
Through our campaign School Days for Girls Dreams, we’ve joined forces with CAMFED again on international day of a girl, and raised nearly £700 for girl’s education.
As part of our Small, Smaller and the Smallest campaign, we’ve curated a list of small businesses we admire and love buying from, and gave them all a shoutout on our social media platforms to help them reach more clients everywhere.
Through our Black Friday #weareout campaign, we’ve explored environmental and societal consequences of Black Friday, while sharing ideas on how to enjoy Black Friday sustainably.
Team Building, Co-Working and Online Experiences
We’ve made efforts to connect as a team on a personal level. In May, we all met in Bristol for a Team Building Retreat. It was a fantastic few days during which we organised a team photo-shoot, co-worked, enjoyed lunches and dinners, and took a canal boat cruise through the river Avon.
Throughout the year we’ve also had a lot of fun at online team building events – Origami Art, Circus Performance, Drink and Draw, and Tarot Reading, which was a great way to bring the team together while working remotely.
In December, I’ve decided that the best Year End Bonus for our remote team will be a travel budget, so I’ve allocated $500 per person for 2023, that each team member can use to travel anywhere they like, as long as they’re traveling together with one more member of the Visuable team. This bonus aims to enable more in-person interactions and co-working experiences that we all crave as a remote team.
We’ve also given everyone a pay rise this December, to ensure that our employees salaries are not affected by the rising costs of living due and inflation that is currently affecting people everywhere.
Launching Brilliant Brands and Websites
In 2022, we’ve secured 477 bookings across our existing and new clients portfolio. That’s nearly 500 times we’ve heard ‘YESSS, we want to work with you!!’ from our clients, which is just amazing!! That’s also 66 more YESSS’es than in 2021, which brought 411 bookings. And that’s a whole lot more YESSS’es than in 2015 (our first year in operation), which saw me delivering the very first 12 brand photo-shoots to amazing clients in Bristol. Those were the very first clients who trusted and believed in me starting a company out of nothing other than just my laptop, my camera and a strong passion for my idea, and saw the future in the Visuable brand. Thank you for being the very early adopters of what followed... Our brand journey have unfolded in the most incredible way since then, initially expanding our service range into websites, later into branding, and eventually launching worldwide and building the most amazing team of digital creatives.
In 2022, the 8th year running of Visuable, the dream team behind the screens all around Europe, have served our globally based clientele across all timezones extremely well, delivering beautiful branding, website designs, bespoke illustrations, marketing collateral, as well as setting-up membership platforms, implementing SEO strategies and kickstarting our client’s new Mailchimp accounts.
With such an incredible amount of work that happened at Visuable this year, our team have handpicked just a few favourites from this years’ creative work. You can view the live websites by clicking on the graphics below:
Final Words
On a personal level, in April 2022, I’ve also completed the MBA Degree and the Chartered Manager Certificate, which I’ve been working on since 2018. Four years later, I can confidently say that those programmes have helped me transform from a self-doubting creative entrepreneur, into a confident business leader that I am today. They have helped me transform not only myself, but also the entire company, with all its operational infrastructures and the delivery teams. It has been a long journey that stretched me to think more strategically, opened my eyes to bigger possibilities, and taught me how to be the leader that Visuable and its team needs. The skills, knowledge and behaviors that I’ve gained during the process have enabled me to shape the correct vision, culture and values, develop better organisational structures, and implement high performance strategies, all while leading through ambiguity and uncertainty, with a calm head under pressure. I believe that the successes of 2022 are largely thanks to the fact that I knew how to not lose my mind, when things didn’t go as planned; and also, thanks to the amazing team that I already have on the ground, leading the way at Visuable.
Despite some difficulties, 2022 has been a truly incredible year of growth and development. I am closing this reflection feeling content, grateful and ready to conquer 2023.
— Lidia
P.S. Many Thanks to all our amazing clients.
Happy Holidays! You’ve been the heart, mind and soul of Visuable this year. You’ve inspired, challenged and pushed our team’s creative boundaries, allowing us to expand our design and digital skillsets. Without you, it would not have been such a fantastic year, so thank you for being here with us.
As our gift for you, we’ve prepared Vouchers that you can use towards purchases with Visuable between now and 14th of February 2023. To get the codes, subscribe to our newsletter through this link.
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