Collier’s 2021 Learning Report
Each January, I reflect on my wins and challenges from the past year. Like you, 2021 handed me some curveballs. I needed all of the focus, determination, and grit I could muster last year, but looking back on everything I’m proud of how I showed up personally and professionally. I want to share with you today what I learned from my annual review.
As you read this, I want you to know that my goal with this report is to reinforce my own learning and to practice what I preach to so many of my clients. Perhaps reading this encourages you to take a step back and reflect, or keep persisting towards your own goals despite unexpected obstacles. What I don’t want to do is inspire comparisons or self-judgment. Mark Twain told us that “comparison is the death of joy,” so please take a deep breath and let this short blog post go if reading this makes you feel lesser than you were before.
Each year, I structure my annual review around a series of questions:
- What was the story of my life last year?
- What did I learn from pursuing my goals?
- What impact did Coeffect make last year?
- What will I work towards this coming year?
I help nonprofit executives and founders of social enterprises leverage data to make a greater impact, so it’s important to me that I base my annual review on data. In preparing for this post, I looked at information from my time tracking tool, my CRM, accounting files, post-project surveys, and other sources. This data was crucial… I found that my emotional experience of the past year (quite challenging) was detached from my actual results (quite positive). In this blog, I’ll share some of the most important facts blended with my emotional reactions, and highlight the lessons I’m taking away from 2021.
What was the story of my life this year?
Early 2021 was all about career survival for me. The pandemic combined with the uncertainty around the 2020 election left me with a thin pipeline of projects, and I took on several client engagements that weren’t great fits to cope with the scarcity. Clearly, something about Coeffect needed to change. In April 2021, I joined the Consulting Success coaching program. Throughout the rest of the year, this group of coaches forced me out of my comfort zone and led me to take more disciplined action on working on my business, in addition to working for my clients.
Some of the most valuable things this coaching program encouraged me to do included: Documenting 12 new processes standardize how Coeffect works; creating 20 educational videos helping my clients build their data skills; refining the questions I ask when engaging new clients; and creating a more effective scope of work template.
Ultimately in 2021 Coeffect — comprised of myself and a team of 11 talented professionals — supported 34 different client projects. We surpassed our revenue goal, with gross sales of $222,000. For the first year ever, I paid my team more than I paid myself. And we also gave back, donating 60 hours of pro bono consulting time through Social Venture Partners Denver and other community organizations.
In addition to working on my business, I spent much of 2021 working on my home. My wife Melissa and I finished renovating our kitchen in May (pictures here). We also painted my home office and installed a breezeblock entryway.
While 2021 was a work-filled year for both of us, Melissa and I managed to sneak in some time for rest and adventure. In early 2021, I took a backcountry avalanche safety course. That knowledge served me well on a handful of back county snowboarding trips, and many hiking and camping adventures during the summer. In total, I spent 18 nights in a tent last year, including car camping in the Grand Teton National Park and a four-day backpacking trip through the Grand Canyon. Despite the ongoing pandemic, Melissa and I also attended three weddings (all in Phoenix, Arizona), and took two other trips to visit family and friends in California.
What did I learn from pursuing my goals?
At the beginning of 2021, I committed myself to several goals, and I want to share my results and what I learned from pursuing them. Every quarter, I reviewed these goals and gave myself a rating from 1 (completely failed) to 10 (hit the goal out of the park). My final ratings for the year are listed below, followed by some of the indicators I used to know whether I was on track and some of the most important lessons I learned.
Objective 1: Be uncommonly focused and strategic with Coeffect. [9/10]
When I defined this goal, some of the intended results I identified included reducing my networking/interviews with non-clients, rating my projects by mission alignment and impact, hosting regular post-project retrospectives, refining my sales process, and reaching $175 — $200K in revenue. So what were my actual results?
- 250 business development conversations completed, translating to 94 high-value conversations, 48 project opportunities, and 33 new projects won, with an average fee per project of $4,850
- Total revenue of $221,896
- All projects rated by market alignment and potential for impact
- Post-project retrospective conversations completed for 70% of my projects; and post-project surveys received for 84% of my projects.
One of my biggest learnings this year was that I needed to improve my pre-sales positioning and messaging to get more consistent kinds of projects. More consistency in the kinds of projects Coeffect wins makes it easier to deliver projects efficiently and delegate across my team. While my messaging and sales process is stronger now than it’s ever been, I still have a long way to go to improve my marketing and pipeline. I experimented with cold prospect outreach this year, which was wildly unsuccessful. However, I found that my email list (which I’ve grown organically over the last 5 years) is a powerful asset. I’m going to invest more in my monthly resource roundup newsletter this coming year, and will also be more deliberate in tracking my sales & marketing experiments.
Objective 2: Build the Coeffect Community. [8/10]
When I defined this goal in January 2021, some of my intended results included hosting three book clubs and convening three other Coeffect gatherings throughout the year. My actual results included:
- Completing three book clubs with friends, reading Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, Asking Questions by Bradburn, Sudman, and Wansink, and the Qualitative Coding Manual by Saldana.
- Participating in a Community Activation Accelerator brilliantly facilitated by my friend Arika Virapongse.
- Hosting a “Coeffect Content Founder” community to serve as beta-testers and to provide feedback on training content I’m creating.
- Mailing Thanksgiving care packages to many of my clients and collaborators again last November.
The ongoing pandemic has proven to be a mental barrier limiting my willingness to gather and convene the Coeffect community. I’m also recognizing that the traditional way of executing consulting projects (one project for one client) doesn’t require or incentivize community building. In 2022, I’m hoping to prioritize visiting my clients in person more regularly and will experiment with more cohort and group-based consulting structures where community-building comes more naturally.
Objective: Strengthen my Subject Matter Expertise. [10/10]
Some of my intended results included reading the three books noted in the last goal, as well as Evaluation Roots by Marvin C. Alkin. Ultimately, I did not read this last resource but replaced it with watching many hours of video lessons on consulting strategy, sales, and marketing provided by the Consulting Success program.
I learned more from these resources than I can list here. Hosting book clubs with others proved to be a very effective way to keep me accountable for learning, and identify the strengths and limitations of each of these books. I’ll absolutely be hosting more book clubs in the future.
Objective: Take meaningful Covid-safe adventures. [9/10]
My intended results for this area included visiting several national parks, including the Grand Canyon, Canyonlands, Grand Teton, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and Death Valley. In reality, I was able to visit the Tetons, Black Canyon (albeit for one night), and enjoyed an epic backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon. In addition, Melissa and I went on several other backpacking and camping adventures over the summer.
From this I learned the importance of planning ahead — many of the most exciting (read: backcountry) experiences at these parks demand knowing when an application window is opening, planning an itinerary, and putting in an application or reserving sites many months in advance. While submitting applications last winter was a pain, I realized that having these trips planned far in advance forced me to make time for adventure when life gets busy. I’ll definitely be planning some more trips for 2022!
Objective: Declutter my life. [5/10]
My intended results for this area include cleaning out and redesigning my home office, decluttering my closets, reorganizing my backyard shed, and purging Coeffect’s files and to-do lists. In actuality, I reorganized my office to de-clutter, pared-down some Coeffect files, and have cleaned one closet but fell short on the rest of these.
Amidst the other goals here, this was the one that got left to the wayside. I’m reflecting that I have very little downtime during my working days, and my non-working days are often called for with the home remodeling projects or adventures noted earlier. In 2022, I need to be better about delegating within my business, and intentionally planning some months to be travel and project-free to accommodate cleaning up and catching up.
What impact did Coeffect make last year?
One new aspect I’m including in my 2021 learning report is a summary of the impact Coeffect made this last year. One of the things we coach our clients on is how to tell their impact story with data, and I’m excited to share our own.
Training & Coaching
In partnership with SVP Denver, Coeffect provided coaching to 14 different nonprofits on how to create their organization’s Theory of Change. This framework provides an essential foundation for these organizations to measure their impact. A couple of the important outcome and satisfaction indicators we collected after these cohorts conclude include are listed here:
92 pct
Organizations that reported increased knowledge about a Theory of Change from participating in this cohort
75 NPS
Net Promoter Score of cohort participants (compared to an average NPS of 62 for consulting firms)
In addition, we asked our participants for open-ended feedback on what worked well, how they’re using their Theory of Change going forward, and what we could do to improve. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from a participant:
“We have been able to use the Theory of Change in a lot of our work since we last spoke. We have updated the verbiage on our website, use it to apply for grants, and for our annual report. The program was extremely helpful and we were lucky to be a part of it. We even got a new partnership out of it!”
Consulting
In 2021, like in prior years, the vast majority of Coeffect’s work came in the form of custom consulting projects for nonprofits. Coeffect worked with 34 small and mid-sized nonprofit organizations last year, delivering projects in three different areas:
- Impact strategy, including helping organizations establish their Theory of Change
- Data Collection and Analysis, including designing measurement tools and helping teams collect data to answer important questions
- Data systems, including helping teams make informed choices about which data system(s) to use, and implement data systems like Salesforce to organize key information
We received post-project surveys from roughly 80% of our clients for whom projects ended in 2021. In those surveys, we ask our clients to select which kinds of results were most important to them. The most often-selected benefits indicated were:
In addition, we asked each client to rate their team’s strength in the areas they selected before and after our project. On average, Coeffect’s clients reported significant gains on the five most commonly selected outcomes.
Finally, we asked our clients if they had experienced any financial, time, process efficiency, or personal benefits (for example, reduced stress) from our projects. While we expect our projects to lead to improvements in each of these areas over the long term, we were pleased to find that some of our clients were experiencing these benefits as soon as the projects were completed:
Some of the quotes from our past clients I’m particularly proud of are listed here.
“I couldn’t be more satisfied with working with Coeffect. Paul and Hillary truly exceeded my expectations in every way. They were a joy to work with and completely brilliant with Salesforce. They learned our organization and what we needed quickly and solved our biggest problems within our budget and ahead of schedule.”
“You did much of the research that our team did not have the time or expertise to take on. You did what we needed in a quarter of the time it would have taken to do in-house.”
“This project changed my perspective from daily logistics to seeing the bigger picture of what we do”
Team
Finally, I want to acknowledge the huge contribution Coeffect’s team members have made. In 2021, Coeffect engaged 11 other individuals in various roles to support client projects and internal administration:
- Kurt Wilson, Ph.D.
- Robin Arnett
- Harrison Ackerman
- Marc De Ocampo
- Hillary Shaw
- Matt Krusemark
- Nick Takamine
- Ryan Barret
- Jennifer Howard
- Abby Johnson Holm, Ph.D.
- Gwendolyn Thomson
Coeffect paid this team collectively over $74,500 for their contributions to our client projects. I’m looking forward to relying on my team more (and paying them more) in the year ahead.
What will I work toward next year?
I’m still contemplating my personal and professional goals for 2022. Personally, three things I’m certain about include taking a mini-sabbatical during the month of February, finally completing my home renovation, and executing a marketing plan.
Related to that last goal — if you’ve read this far, you might enjoy the Coeffect newsletter, Information | Insight | Impact. Each month I curate 2–5 of the most timely, well-written, and free data and evaluation resources from across the web and highlight them to help you collect better data and tell compelling data stories. I also include some fun personal updates from time to time. Here’s the link to sign up if you’re not already on it.
Are there any ways I can help you achieve your goals in 2022? Even if it’s as small as sending you regular accountability reminders, or promoting your work through Coeffect’s channels, I’m here for you.
With gratitude, as always,
Paul
