This week, Collective Results is celebrating an exciting milestone. It’s our two year business anniversary!
I’m so proud of the Collective Results dream team and what we have achieved together and with our clients over the past year.
In January of 2022, we published a strategic plan for Collective Results. The strategic plan helped us solidify who we wanted to be as a business and where we wanted to go over our next year. It’s amazing to me to look back over the year and see the progress our team has made on this plan as we continually develop this business.
One of our strategic pillars is sustainable growth, and we have been making great headway on this. With our growing team, we have been able to serve more clients and have a greater impact. One year ago, we had served 8 clients. Over the past year, we have served more than 25 clients. We have been able to offer strategic planning, program evaluation, quality improvement, program design and planning, research and data collection, grant writing, and training services, and just about everything in between. We’ve worked with agencies across Ontario and with province-wide networks. We’re gaining a better understanding of the market every day, and that’s helping us to offer services at prices that are affordable for our clients and that help us build a sustainable business. Over the next year, we are going to be working through some really interesting questions about how to structure our growing team so that we can do more good work as effectively and efficiently as possible. I’m really excited to see where we go with this.
Under our innovative practices pillar we’ve been focused on developing quality products, fostering creativity and innovation, and staying on top of our game. We’re constantly finding new and improved ways of doing things, generating new ideas, and implementing our ideas towards better practices and products for our clients. We’ve developed new processes and invested in new software that has further improved the quality of our products and we’re looking at creative ways to make more space as a team to innovate. More to come on that in a future blog!
Under our people and culture pillar we’ve been focused on recruiting and retaining the best people, prioritizing our health and wellness, and giving back. I am absolutely in awe of the dream team that has rallied around our vision of helping organizations do good work better. One year ago, there were five of us. Now there are fourteen (nine core, and five casual). This team is brilliant, dedicated, and supportive. We have shifted over the past year to approaching most of our projects in small teams, and this has allowed us to make the best use of our diverse skill sets and allowed our relationships to flourish. We have been implementing practices that prioritize our team’s health and wellness so that we can support people as humans and show up at our best for our clients. We have also participated in a number of opportunities to give back to our communities through participating in fun runs, fundraising events, and volunteering.
For me personally, the past year has allowed me to have a substantial mindset shift about this business. Early on, and even a year ago, I was very reserved when I talked about the business. When people would ask me how things were going, I would respond by saying things like “It’s great, but who knows what the future will hold”. I was tentative to admit to myself or others how well things were going. What if this was a terrible idea? What if it suddenly failed? What if I wasn’t cut out to run a business? I had some serious self-doubt going on. And, in fairness, there is actually nothing wrong with not overrating your abilities. If you have doubt, research shows that you are more likely to work harder, work smarter, and learn more. What I am realizing, though, is that my doubts were placing limits on my expectations and dreams for this business. The past year has taught me to shift my mindset to one of growth. Under this growth mindset, I can allow myself to be confident that, by learning and working together, we can figure anything out. Now, when someone asks me how things are going, I respond with “Things are great.” and when they ask me a question I don’t know the answer to, I respond with “I’m not sure, but I know we’ll be able to figure it out”. Now I’m realizing that I don’t need to limit my dreams for this company. If we can dream it, we can do it. And we have some big dreams. I hope you’ll continue to follow our journey as we work towards each and every one of them.
Until next time, keep doing the good work!