Here’s My Plan to Make 2022 Our Shop’s Best Year Ever

AS WE’RE WELL into a new year, I want to talk about the significance of getting ready to squeeze the absolute best out of this fresh new start — with nothing but space and opportunity to create a better year than the previous one. Onwards and upwards, right? Especially after this last busted-ass year we all just struggled through. So here’s what I do to help us have our best year ever.

Usually I take off the week between Christmas and New Year, mostly because this is the only time of the year I don’t receive a thousand emails per day. Back in the day, I’d jet the fam to an exotic location to take a breather. But for this past holiday, we just stayed around the house and I spent a chunk of my time working on the plan to make Media 1 better for the upcoming year. (My wife absolutely loved that… so much better than a week in Cancun.)

But seriously, if you’re gonna have a great year, you’ve got to get your plan together! I went over our sales for the past year, P&Ls, debt schedule, etc. You know, all that boring stuff you can’t study on a surfboard. But there’s really much more to it than that. It’s not just how much you accomplished last year and how much more you want to accomplish this year. You have to look at a plethora of nuances that will make your business — and your life itself — better than they used to be. Business owners are funny like that, never satisfied with the status quo, always looking for more. To me, that’s an amazing thing. That’s what makes us perfect business owners! One must have a growth mindset. Never stagnate.

For example, M1’s vice president Rick and I bought a new 30,000-sq.-ft. facility on 2.5 acres last year and we invested a stupid amount time and money hooking it up. It does not look like a typical signshop; it looks more like a New York advertising agency. We designed it that way on purpose. If clients are to trust us to present their brands, our place had better look tight, right?

For our original clients — 36-some years we’ve been doing their signs — they’ve seen us go from working in my mom’s garage to a 1,200-sq.-ft. place, then 6,000, then 19,000. Now they walk slack-jawed through this huge building and ask us: “Did you ever think it was going to be this big?” In all seriousness, we give identical answers: “Hell yes we did. How do you think it got this way?”

American football icon Vince Lombardi coined one of my favorite quotes: “The man on top of the mountain didn’t just fall there.”

If you haven’t already, get your thoughts together, research what part of this business you love to do, then balance that with what makes you the most money. Go after that client. Dream as big as you want. Then put small processes into place that will eventually materialize that dream. Step by step, always improving, make 2022 your best year yet.

That’s damn sure what Rick and I will be doing.

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