How in the world is it already December again?? I could have sworn I was just setting out my intentions and goals for 2019 and somehow it’s all coming to a close already. I’m not complaining though. This year has been a magical one over here at Sweet Horizon and we are just bursting at the seams with all the great things that have happened this year as well as a few more we still have in the works.
Instead of setting some monthly goals this month, I instead want to focus on the biggest and greatest things that have happened to this little business in 2019 because I’m so stinking proud of all we’ve accomplished. We are so proud of how this business has grown, all the incredible projects we’ve worked on, and all the wonderful people we’ve met. If 2020 is half as great we can’t wait to get it started!
While this business has solely been my baby for the last three years and I’ve been the main face of most of our business platforms, this year really marked a change in how we operate. Mike asked me earlier this spring if he could play a larger role in the business since he was already helping with so many behind the scenes ventures. You can’t imagine how thrilled that made me to hear. Even better, with our marriage at the beginning of November we were official able to start saying “we are a husband and wife team”. Ah that sounds so good I can’t even believe it’s real! Our wedding day was such a dream and truly the greatest day of our lives and I’m so so grateful to have the world’s most supportive husband that wants to be included in all of my business endeavors.
Adding to the upgrades in this little business is also the fact that I finally have an office. We bought our very first house together and I turned the 2nd largest bedroom into my office. While it’s certainly not as clean as it may look on my Instagram feed, it has already served as a space where I can spread out, freely create and create messes, and work on multiple different projects at once. This office has already inspired many projects this year and hopefully will inspire many more to come.
I made the decision earlier this year that I was going to take major steps in upping my game this year, so with that I turned to some experts in the field to help me get there. In the spring I took the Designer Workshop from With Grace and Gold and learn so much from those amazing ladies on how to better represent my company online, market myself with social media, and elevate my entire client experience. I got some incredible one-on-one attention and advice from them each week to help take my business to the next level. More recently I did a mentor session with Kadie from Drop Cap Design and I can’t begin to tell you how incredibly helpful she was and how many ideas she had for my business just during an hour long phone call. She literally blew my mind with all of her advice and I’m still working through all the ideas she threw my way. Lastly, I’m currently enrolled in Jenna Kutcher’s Instagram Lab just because Instagram has been a platform I have continued to put on the back burner. Even now I haven’t quite put in the time to sink my teeth into this course but I know that when I do it’s going to be a game changer!
Back in January I had the idea to start turning some of my long form blog posts into podcasts as a way to give you all a different medium to soak up all this content. Thus the Broadening Horizons Podcast was born. Life got a little crazy this year and I didn’t end up posting as much as I wanted to (heck, I didn’t post on the blog as much as I wanted to either, but I’m learning to give myself some grace where that’s concerned. All in all, I’m crazy proud of how the podcast is turning out and regardless of how few episodes there currently are, you all have been listening! So thank you thank you thank you! I have dozens of new episodes to bring your way in the new year so I hope you’ll tune in!
One of the best things I’ve done this year started because I was getting super lonely working at home by myself everyday. I literally just decided to start DMing fellow designers on Instagram that I new worked from home as well and say something like “hey, I’d love to chat sometime with you and just talk about work and life as a entrepreneur because holy cow it’s hard sometimes!” Of course I said it more eloquently than that but you get the picture. And honestly I got a resounding “OMG YES PLEASE!” from pretty much all of the people I reached out to. I’ve made some incredible friends in the industry now and we catch up every month or so. Plus it’s so so nice to actually know some of the people on my Instagram feed now.
I’ve made a lot of changes to the way that we do things around here this year and with that came a lot of changes to our services and products. We’ve done some shifting around to find what works best for us and what best serves our clients. We cut out our paper products (they may comes back at some point because I just love them so), and have focused solely on our service packages, adding new things like e-commerce sites to our design work and drone footage to our wedding videography work. We are hard at work right now to bring some products back to our shop with some themes for bloggers and wedding photographers!
This has been a wild year for us and over all it’s been kind of a whirlwind. It’s weird to look forward to the holidays as a way to relax, since usually the holidays are hectic, but for us we are taking it easy this year and enjoying some downtime with family! We hope you all have had a wonderful year and that you get to enjoy some time off as well!
I hope you enjoy the free background this month! As you can tell by the moodboard, this month’s background was greatly inspired by cozy knits and all things comfy while it snows outside! For the free background there are versions for your computer, tablet and phone wallpapers. Just scroll back to the top and sign up to our newsletter receive your free download!
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