Reflections on 2011

Like many I take the time between Christmas & New Year to review the last 12 months and lay out my plans for the next 12 months. Some people call making plans as resolutions, the problem with resolutions is they are hard to keep and generally by the middle of January they’ve been largely forgotten.

A number of years ago I made a profound discovery when I decided to give up smoking. Up until then every time I decided to stop I would get terrible cravings within an hour and be a short tempered rat bag within 2 hours, with everyone telling me to go have a “fag”. Logic told me that if I could manage to go to sleep for say 8 hours or stop smoking a couple of hours before I went to the gym, there had to be a way for me to stop. I decided to see how long I could go without a cigarette. My normal routine was to have one or two on my way to work, another when I got there etc. So that morning I said to myself “I’ll wait till I get to the office” and when I got there I said “wait until 10” etc and broke down the day that way. The amazing thing was that no one noticed for a couple of days, then I everyone was asking when I had quit, and I said “I haven’t, I’m just not smoking at the moment” and 20 years later I’m still a smoker, it’s just 20 years since I lit one up.

I came to the same conclusion about New Year resolutions, by making a big announcement about your intentions, you’re bound to fail. If however you do as I do, and look back at the last 12 months you will generally find a large number of things that you’ve done which are pretty cool and very few which aren’t. My advice is to concentrate on the good things and say in 2011 I’m going to do more of that.

In my case in 2009 I said to myself that in 2010 I wanted to see Deanem Collections become an established debt collection agency, and we've done that. I said I wanted to increase our turnover by a minimum of 50%, (we increased it by 75%). I took advice from friends & colleagues and asked how I was going to achieve it and was advised to carry on as I was but to start writing a blog, which as you can see I’ve done. The only goal missed was on the number of sales staff I expected to employ, I had wanted at least 3 and ended up with 2.

My goal for 2011 is to keep growing Deanem Collections and the best way forward is to take over another agency. So if you hear of one for sale let me know.

I hope that 2011 brings you good health, happiness & prosperity.