AOK Group's Year in Review: 2020 Vision Check
2019 for us at AOK Group was an eye-opening year, filled with lots of stretch opportunities and evolution. We’ve found that it’s very hard to assess growth with day-to-day, or even month-to-month reflection, in comparison to the perspective that a birds-eye view on the year can provide.
In order for us to properly look back on the year, we built out a reflection framework (which you can access as a Google Doc) that allowed us to look at our business from a panoramic view.
We hope this template will benefit you and your team!
Here is a quick look at 2019 by the numbers:
As visualized above, we had a wild year by the numbers with 52 decks created for 34 new clients and 18 returning clients-- adding up to a whole lot of file storage on DropBox! We enjoyed adding 4 amazing team members, bringing our team's total to 11. We joined a handful of new accelerator programs as mentors, and we were proud to support the fundraising of $26.5M in seed and Series A funding for our clients. Above all, what we’re most proud of is that 42% of our founders in 2019 were female to 58% male founders across our client base-- reflecting our dedicated effort to help grow female-founded companies.
For the first time in 2019, around half of our clients grew strictly on revenue (which we love to see!) rather than with venture backing. Although this meant slower growth, they weren’t over-leveraging capital that pushed unnecessarily accelerated growth. Because of this, they ran leaner operations, defined more crisp KPIs, and confirmed a more authentic product-market fit. We are not saying that fundraising is going anywhere–and supporting that important endeavor is a large part of our offering--but we thought the trend shifting among our client cohort was worth noting.
If you’ve been meaning to look back on your own year, you can use our template below to get you started.
We’d love to catch up if you’re a past client or hear from you if you’re a friend or mentee. With the speed of business today, it’s so easy to jump into a new quarter and not really think through where we hope to create change going forward.
If you'd like to share your reflection using our template with us at Lexie@theaokgroup.com, we would love to have a quick, expectation-free chat about your 2020 goals.
In order to write your answers in the Google Doc, you need to make a copy of the document to your own drive. If you need assistance, there are step-by-step directions under the header photo in the template.