An end of year review is an important time for startups to sit down, put pen to paper and take stock of things that went well, and didn’t go so well, the previous year.
Alexandra Kammer is the cofounder and chief diversity officer at Aivy, a recruiting software company aiming to help companies achieve better candidate selection. Here, she gives her top tips for how startups can carry out an end of year review.
Gather your management team together
Decide on a time and place to meet for the end of year review, whether online or in person. Look at what the company plan was for last year — including KPIs such as ARR (annual recurring revenue), customer retention rates or customer satisfaction scores — and take stock of where you haven’t reached a goal. Discuss why; could you have had an influence on the outcome or done something better? Were mistakes made and what did you learn from them?
It’s a good idea to do continuous reflection throughout the year. In Aivy’s case, we have an all-hands meeting every six weeks where teams reflect on their successes, their ‘fuckups’ and learnings. This is helpful for the end of year review; each department head collates this feedback and brings it to the meeting for discussion.
You can pull together all this information into a Powerpoint presentation and use Notion to create KPI dashboards that link to different data sources; for example, your sales software.
Look at the numbers
Assess which financial metrics are most important for your business. For us as a business that’s looking to become profitable, we look at ARR and assess how close we are to that goal. We also look at our performance with regards to:
- Customer retention rates
- Marketing conversion rates
- Conversion rates within the product, for example number of customer self-onboardings within the free trial
- Customer ratings and feedback (how they used the product, what they liked about it, where we can improve)
Beyond finances, we also look at talent retention: for example, we assess how long employees stayed in the company on average, which employees have recently left and who joined. We also assess employee feedback. At the beginning of Q4, we send out a survey to employees asking for feedback about how happy they are at work, whether they feel psychologically safe in the workplace, and how benefits could improve. Recently, this told us employees wanted to have more visibility on who is paid what, so we are currently working on a transparent salary structure.
Celebrate the wins
Encourage your management team to look back on the last year and share some key successes — for us, that includes celebrating awards we won and successful partnerships with companies we established throughout the year. It’s important to make a point of celebrating the wins, especially at a time when we are dealing with an unstable economy. Not only does it motivate people to continue working towards those goals, it also helps to keep the atmosphere positive while discussing mistakes and failures.
Plan a company-wide end of year meeting
Share your assessment of the year with the rest of your team, and inform them about how the company has performed in terms of finance and product development — as well as how things have developed within the teams. Make the occasion joyful — we hosted our end of year review at our annual Christmas party — and interactive, leaving space for employees to ask questions.
Decide on next year’s goals
Based on how you performed this year against certain KPIs, make predictions on how the next year could go in the best case scenario — and what you would need for that to work out. For example, “if we hire this many people, then we will be able to boost our sales performance by this much”.
Decide on a handful of goals — keep them as few as possible to keep your focus sharp — and display them somewhere for employees to see. As a remote company, each employee has their own personal dashboard on Notion where they can see the overall company goals, and also write down and review their own personal goals.
Remember personal goals and company goals aren’t always the same thing
Even if your company hasn’t performed as well as you hoped this year, that doesn’t mean that you personally haven’t taken big strides. If you tried something new this year, or did something that was bold or risky — even if it didn’t work out — that can still be a win on a personal level.
On the subject of... end of year reviews
1. Are your OKRs not working? Maybe you’re doing them wrong.
2. Tips for an end of year review — from 13 business leaders.
3. OKR vs KPI: What’s the difference, and which one is best for goal-setting?
4. A concise breakdown of what your end of year review should include.
