My original plan was to take some time off during the last week of 2008. Of course, rarely do things go according to plan. Instead, we spent the last week of 2008 reviewing our past year activities, evaluating their success and failure and coming up with new strategy for 2009.

Back in January of 08, I sat down with the team to come up with a list of goals we planned to achieve for the year. We wanted to measure the results we achieved against original plan. As expected, we were able to meet most of our targets and missed some of them completely. Running a business is continues to educate us. Some of the main things I learned last year:

1. Don’t set too many goals: we had total of 20 business goals during 2008. Some were critical to the survival of Invesp such achieving and maintaining certain sales volume, others were less important such as setting a target number of webinars to hold. While each of these goals was achievable in itself, trying to hit 20 different goals for the year was overwhelming. I recognized that I was asking a lot of the team and it was simply not sustainable. So back in August, we cut the number of goals in half. That might have been one of the best decisions we made last year.

2. It is all about the ROI: There is no room for activities that generate little or no ROI. Activities that you cannot clearly trace the ROI for should be watched carefully. In a time when we can measure everything, I detest someone saying that he cannot quantify how much money an activity is bringing to the business. If you are asking to spend an x amount of dollars, you better be able to show me how much money I am getting back for my investment. Many times it is a simple task of tracking and there are plenty of CRM applications out there that will help you do just that.

3. Outsource when it make sense: in our early stages we tried to do many things in house. We simply did not want or could not afford to pay the costs. That is another valuable lesson of 2008. We are excellent at conversion optimization. But there are many marketing activities that we do not specialize in. Outsourcing these activities to companies who specialize in them helped us grow tremendously during the year.

4. Outsource to the right company: this deserves a blog post by itself. We outsourced some of our SEO work to an offshore company. And although the company is run by a well known SEO expert, his team did not deliver. Even worse, the SEO team did things that we are not proud of to get links. We canceled the contract and learned a very valuable lesson.

5. Partner-up with the right company: a valuable lesson from another big mistake of the year. We bundled our services with two partners during 2008. At the time, it seemed like a good way to increase the suite of services we offer to clients. But cultures did not match. The level of services these partners provided was below what our clients expected. Lost a little bit of money there to learn yet another lesson.

6. Hire the right people: This is an area where we struggled but made very good progress. Invesp had grown at some point from a two man operation to close to 20 employees. Our management was not well prepared to manage such growth. I made some horrible hiring decisions in 2008. We streamlined our hiring process at this point. Our motto for 2009 is manageable growth.

7. Setting goals can be a waste of time. Almost everyone I know sets goals for the company. We used to review our goals on a quarterly basis. That is not enough. We are moving to a monthly review to make sure no one drops the ball.

As I look at 2009, I am cautiously optimistic. I know that there are many voices out there that are telling companies to invest more in marketing. That might make sense to some companies, it depends on the situation and general statements like that can be misleading. So, how about you? What are you big lessons from 2008? How do you think 09 is going to turn out?