I spent time with our team over the last few days putting our plans for 2008 together as well as reflecting back on 2007. The past year has been an interesting year to say the least. It was a year filled with many accomplishments and blunders on the way.

2007 accomplishments

• Strategically, we finally focused our core services on the areas we felt can help our clients the most. That has been somewhat challenging, since it meant dropping some of the services we offered since the first days of the company. But the benefits of this focus have been tremendous. I guess no matter how much you read about the importance on focusing your service offerings, vp, and entire business approach, it is a whole other ball game when you are in the midst of running a business.

• We focused a lot more on our blog. Early on, posting was spotty. And frankly most of the posts lacked direct interest to our reader base. We decided to stick to a regular schedule and to only post good, quality, interesting and relatable content. Our blog now receives around 15-20k per month on average with some months tripling that number.

• The biggest development of all though was two bundles of joy, AbdulHameed and Selma, joined the family of invesp

Amazing results for conversion rate optimization

While the average conversion rate for most ecommerce sites remains around 3%, our clients averaged 14.56% for their landing pages. Ayat and her team have done an amazing work for all of cour clients. We are extremely proud of this average. We hope the new year will bring more success to our clients.

2007 Blunders

• Lack of focus on some of our service offering caused marketing confusion. I have to take full blame for this one.

• Inconsistent staffing levels caused some of our team members to have to pull lengthy hours to bring some projects to success.

• Unreliable contractors caused us to lose one contract and learn a very valuable lesson about spending time to research closely the people we work with.

Goals for 2008

One of the things we did over the last couple of days is sit together as a team and come up with our goals for the next 2008. In the past our goal setting exercises focused on shorter time periods (three months at a time). The team decided to come up with goals to accomplish by December 31st of 2008. These goals are not going to be easy goals but at the same time they are not going to be impossible to achieve.

One of the mistakes we did in the past when coming up with our goals was defining too narrow of goals. Here is a sample of some simple goals we had early 2007:

• Publish [a number of] white papers
• Conduct several seminars on the topic of conversion optimization
• Increase RSS membership to 1,000 subscribers

While these are fine, I learned that goals should be more general. For example, each of the items above is a way to actually help increase exposure. So, for setting goals for this year, we tried to follow a different approach. Each of the goals we came up had a Stakeholder holder next it. Some of our Stakeholder include

• The owners of the company,
• Staff
• IT infrastructure
• Marketing group
• Clients

Each of these Stakeholder has different interests that need to be addressed in 2008. For example, our owners want to see an increase in revenue. So, the goal next to their name is increase annual net income to $xx amount. We went a little further and next to each of the goals, and we defined a general execution plan to achieve the goal. So to achieve the desired level of income, we had to land xxx number of projects. We finally we defined specific measurable means for measuring the success of the goal. Here we take the execution plan of landing x number of projects one step further to say that we need to land x number of projects with net income of a certain dollar amount. Finally, each goal had an owner who will be responsible for the execution of the goal and making sure it will be delivered by the end of the year.

 The journey has been amazing as well as rewarding. I am looking forward to 2008 hopefully with fewer mistakes this time around!