Reflecting on 2022 – A Year of Growth, Collaboration, and Personal Triumphs

As this year is ending and 2023 is already on the horizon, I reflect on the blessings that 2022 has given me.

Listen as I share client and personal wins, growing my team and myself, and great books I read and listened to this year.

Of course, I cannot close out the year without a reminder to set up Google Analytics 4 sooner rather than later.

Thanks for listening and supporting me in 2022. Wishing you and yours a wonderful end and beginning. 

‘Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte

‘Stolen Focus” by Johann Hari

‘The Love Song of W.E.B. Du Bois” by Honoree Fannone Jeffers

‘The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah

‘The Sum of Us” by Heather McGhee

‘The Emotionally Healthy Woman” by Geri Scazerro

Snipd

Craft

Readwise

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Collab with Kiva.

See you next time!

Are you ready to take massive action in your business and harness the power of data in your decision-making? Let’s chat 👇🏽

Podcast Transcript:

Kiva Slade 0:01

Hello and welcome to Collab with Kiva. I'm your host Kiva Slade. From the marbled halls of the US Congress to my racing themed office chair. I've learned that there is no perfect path to the life of your dreams. My journey over the past 20 years has included being a Legislative Director for a Member of Congress, Policy Director for a nonprofit, stay-at-home mom, homeschooling mom, jewelry biz owner, and now the owner of a service based business. Whether your journey has been a straight line, or full of zigs and zags. Join me and my guests as we share insights, hope and lessons learned from our female entrepreneurship journeys. May the collaborative sharing of our stories be the tide that lifts your boat, let's dive in.

Kiva Slade 0:56

Welcome to another episode of Collab with Kiva. This will be the last episode for 2022. Yes, I can't believe that we're saying the end of 2022. 2023 is on the horizon. And, hey, what kind of year do you want it to be for you? So as we close out this year, if you're on pretty much anything, you're starting to receive your kind of reflections back, okay? Spotify, Audible says mine is coming. You know, soon there'll be the Instagram nines. Like there's all these things that everyone kind of gives us as a look back to the year that we just had. And I don't know about you. But I always tend to get surprised when there's those look backs of the people who have passed. And I'm not trying to make this morbid, but it feels like I forget the people that have passed throughout this year. And obviously I'm talking about celebrities, i.e. famous people, because that's who those kind of recollections always incorporate. And it's always shocking to me, like I can remember when that news broke. But somehow in my mind, I think it's further away than it actually is or did not happen in this particular calendar year. So I don't know if I'm the only person who's like that. But whenever they do like that, that video montage, I'm just like, really, that was this year, I'm always stunned and surprised by myself or my memory, or lack thereof. So I have received my Spotify one, I think I listened to it, like, over 11,000 minutes of music and something. So that was like more than 60% or something like that in the world. Now, mind you, my 18 year old had over 100,000 minutes of music. Yeah, he was in the top 1% on Spotify. So yeah, we're gonna have to talk to him about what his intake looks like. But I just so many of those are kind of flowing into our inboxes. So I thought I'd take this time to for this episode, just kind of a little look back over my last, you know, 12 months of 2022. And what that has looked like at my business The 516 Collaborative and in life. So this is not like an any sort of order, like chronologically starting in January, or any order of importance. So let's just get that out there immediately.

Kiva Slade 3:41

So some of the highlights, I guess, I'll share from this year have been I remember starting with a consulting client. And one of the first things when I asked her like, Oh, what are you hoping to get out of this partnership with between the two of us and she's like, I really like to sell this business. And I was like, Okay, I didn't see that one coming. But the more I learned about her business, and I thought about a colleague of mine, who was like, Oh, I wonder that would be a nice add to her portfolio. And I connected the two of them. And literally, the one sold the business to the other. And it really just made me really happy to be that kind of conduit, I guess, between the two of them because they did not travel in the same circles. But now the one who had more than one business has been able to offload that one to another business owner and her partner who it really just fits so perfectly with what they already have. So seeing that just result of that work that I did with her and helping streamline some operations things and just talk through some of the things that were going on in the business to me like future improvements, and then that sale, it just was such a warm feeling for me. So that's kind of one of my business highlights, I have worked with some really amazing women this year, who have hit seven figures, mid, you know, six figures. And just between my fractional COO work and consulting work, I've just truly been blessed to work with so many amazing people, and just see the strides that they've made during our time together. So that has all been wonderful.

Kiva Slade 5:37

I have added new teammates, Susanne, who's my Ops Assistant, is an absolute dream come true and so excited for the work that we're doing together. And then also Fay who does a lot of my graphics, and she is so super like lightning quick. I really feel like I'm like, hitting, like complete and ClickUp to assign the task and girlfriend is already like, here it is, let me know if you want any changes. I'm like, DAG, that was fast. So I'm grateful for both of them in my business, and just the work that we do together in order to serve not only my business, but also my clients. So super excited about that. When I look back, I've done 43 podcast episodes this year, with pretty awesome women who are doing all kinds of things from helping writers to helping you plan to like what happens to your business if something happens to you. In addition to that, I remember starting off the year with Brianne who talked about vocals and our voice. And that was just a very powerful episode and just so much that we have touched on this year, and you know, women who work with authors, women who have written books, you know, women who are brand identity strategists, so many different things that come into play as you are a business owner that you may not also automatically think about or you may not realize that something that you might be doing now in corporate and you've been thinking about, hey, I want to stretch myself, I want to spread my wings and go into business for myself, you may not have known that this lateral pathway from the amazing work you're already doing exist in the in the entrepreneurial space. And I love the stories that have been shared during those podcast episodes to actually open us up to those possibilities.

Kiva Slade 7:44

You know that there are options that are out there that take into consideration that amazing work that we're already doing and allows us to build on our skills and our abilities. So that's been wonderful as well. I completed a course called ‘Building a Second Brain’, which was pretty phenomenal. I thoroughly enjoyed, like the whole course. And I am still utilizing that you know the precepts that were taught in the things that I do. And if you are interested, Tiago Forte has a book called "Building a Second Brain". I'll make sure that that's in the show notes. And his course runs, I believe, quarterly now. And it's a great community. And just seeing how different people are using different means to do this. Some people use Notion. Evernote, a host of different apps and things but ultimately realizing that our brains are not designed to multitask like we think they were. And I'm reading a book. No, I'm listening to a book now. Let me see if I can pull it up. "Stolen Focus", which is really interesting, because the term multitask actually came from a task that computers were doing. It wasn't applied to humans, but we've applied it to ourselves and often wonder then why we're feeling like totally tapped out totally stretched. Like we're that rubber band that's been pulled so tight that you know, any additional movement, it's going to pop and building a second brain really helps.

Kiva Slade 9:45

Have a container a place for those. All those other thoughts that you have and all those other things that you might be working on. That you can keep them together in basically a when you need to access them, you can go there and access them instead of like, trying to dive in and do all the research right now, maybe there's like, like I have a podcast episode coming up on leading and lagging indicators. And I've notes on it, you know, so when I have little bits, I have my notes, and they're kind of all compiled in my second brain in a project. And so when it comes time to actually write it out the episode, I'll have all of that to pull from. But I don't need to spend all of that time right now trying to do that, because I'm not doing the episode right now. So really looking into a way to store that information, so that you access it when it's time. And then I have like, previous episodes and things. So like, you can also pull from, you know, like, a did a presentation like so pulling from those notes and adding that in. So really thinking about kind of accessing the information that you need when you need it instead of trying to hold all of that in our brains and multitask. So building a second brain was amazing, which of course led me to some amazing tools like Craft, which is what I use. It's so super user friendly. And I just love that interface that it's very clean, it's very minimal. And I absolutely just, it's just set up in a way that makes my heart sing. Then also, I think it's called Snipd, but it's S N I P D and I'll make sure these links are in the show notes. But if you're a heavy podcast listener, like I am, sometimes you're like, I listen to podcasts in the car often. And when I'm doing that there's oftentimes there's, there's something that I want to write down. But I'm driving and so totally not supposed to be doing that so Snipd, it lets you A) it has some AI in it. So it will automatically if you submit that episode to them, if no one else has previously done this, it will create based on AI, snips, audio clips of the podcast where they feel there were obviously good points. And what I do then is that's actually connected to my Readwise account. So I send the snips to my Readwise account, which then gives me the text of the audio clip. So I'm always able to pull those back up. And sometimes that turns into, you know, content or it turns into something else. But it's like now I have that written out version of the audio clip, which is so super helpful. So it's free in it, you know, pulls in all the podcasts like Apple, Spotify, and things of that sort, but it's just so helpful to have like those little highlights from it. Because again, you should not be trying to write down notes while driving.

Kiva Slade 13:08

Okay. So in addition to that, um, let me think here. So, books, that's another exciting thing. So this year, I have read and listened to, I'll be very clear, I am an avid audible user. But when I was looking to hire, I think this was in May, I literally was asking people who made it to the second round, like, what was their favorite book, like I really want it to know something about them. And Susanne recommended "The Nightingale" by Kristin Hannah. And The Nightingale is set during World War II in France and oh my goodness, I listened to this on Audible, many drives and the storytelling is so compelling and it's a fascinating story of women in their strength during a time of war, and the things that women have had to do and endure throughout the course of history. And these two sisters and I don't want to give it all away but it's an amazing read. So, I also read listen to "The Sum of Us" by Heather McGhee, which for those who don't know, my Bachelor's is in political science so like politics has always been a thing for me. And "The Sum of Us" really looks at from from a whole perspective as a society, how politics has been used in many cases to drive a wedge between groups of people who actually have very shared and common interest. And it really delves into stats, numbers and so many different aspects like one area of Richmond and in which there are a heavy concentration of minorities, and it's near so many of the factories and you know, the other side that doesn't think that this factory stuff impacts them. When studies were done in terms of air quality, like those living in the ritzy area were just as impacted as the others. And it's like, you think, though that you are separate from some issues, and really you aren't. And so it's a, it's an amazing listen/ read around our shared values, and how we actually will, based on what we've allowed to happen in many cases in this country, is the division is so wide that we don't even see how we are connected and how we have the shared interest. And that if we've worked together, we could actually cause major upheaval in the system and how things are done in a good way. So if you're really into numbers and digging deep into the why, behind some things, it's a really good book to look at.

Kiva Slade 16:38

I also read "The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois" by Honoree Jeffers. At first, the book might frighten you. I don't have it in front of me, but it's like yay, thick. I mean, it's, it's a pretty thick book, but an amazing story of the South and slavery, the enslaved the enslavers and Native Americans so much that it just happens in genealogy and ancestry. And, again, women, and what happens and the things that take place and you will get caught up in their stories, you'll want to sit at a table and like these characters can come to life for you. So that's another good one. "The Emotionally Healthy Woman" by Geri Scazzero is another one that was pretty life changing for me this year. For those who might find themselves as people pleasers, as you have difficulty maybe saying no or exercising boundaries, this book is for you. And it's really that book to make you do some self introspection, I'll just say. So, those are some amazing things, I think business wise, and then sort of personal with the books.

Kiva Slade 18:13

Two other amazing things that happened this year were my daughter, and I did like a home mini vacation in South Carolina. And we went to Charleston, and we hung out at the beach, and we ate and we just did really fun stuff, just the two of us. And as for those who might have younger children, you're like, I would absolutely love some, you know, like time alone and not necessarily with your child. When they get older, like she was, was it after a birthday, heading no after her birthday. So like, at that point, 20. Like, it's just, you almost relished. Like when they were actually younger. Um, but it was a beautiful time together and just to see, just to hang out and do so many fun things with her.

Kiva Slade 19:03

And then also, like, you know, took off from work, like, because it's my business and just to be able to be present for that time was awesome and wonderful. And same with my son. We had to transport his car back to school for his second year. So he and I did a road trip. I would say I drove but even though I taught him how to drive, he drove the entire 13 hours and was like: I can drive. I can help. And he was like, I'm good. I was like, okay, fine. So that was wonderful. You know, we got to see parts of South Carolina, Georgia, like, you know, just things that we hadn't driven through before and so that was great and wonderful. Got him all set up in his apartment, because he moved off campus this semester. And, again, just time when with, you know, my now adult, baby boy in that one on one space. And his friends, I remember when I was helping him move in, one of the young ladies he knew, she was like, Can I talk to your mom? She was trying to cook something in her new air fryer and she's like these potatoes didn't come out, right? What should I have done. So I'm like in her apartment trying to help her troubleshoot her air fryer issues and things. And I think that's just one thing that you also come to realize, or at least I have, as my kids have grown older is that you, you already know that you never stopped being a parent. But there's still so much that you can impart even after they're over 18. That is, it's just necessary needed information, like how to properly air fry potatoes. You know, I did use his Instant Pot and like cooked meal before I left and all of that good stuff for him and his roommate. So it was really wonderful time.

Kiva Slade 21:04

But again, with my business, being able to take that time off and be present for my kids is super important to me. And it was a wonderful time. So those are some of my highlights. It's not going to be you know, like Spotify ads and everything else. But those are definitely some highlights. When I look back through the year that just was, or still is technically speaking, I think the last thing is Google Analytics 4. At that time I am recording this there are 194 days till July 1st 2023, when Google is going to start reporting to your Universal Analytics account. Over this past year, I've received two certifications, one from Google and another one from Data Driven, because I just felt like Google certification did not go in depth enough. No offense, Google, and to the different parts of Google Analytics 4 because the setup is totally different than Universal Analytics. So it's just me beating the same drum. I've been beating probably for the last several months that everyone who has a website should truly look to have Google Analytics 4 installed and installed properly. I've seen some improper installations. And people who don't take their installation far enough, because they're only trying to set up the bare basics. So that would be my last I think highlight, which will continue to be like a drum beating message as we go into the new year to get it done. Like stop dragging your feet people. This is so super important. And yeah, stop dragging your feet. And so those are my highlights looking back at 2022. I'd love to hear what yours are, feel free to share. Again, I'll make sure that links to things that I mentioned are in the show notes and have an amazing end to 2022 and most spectacular start to 2023. Thanks for listening. Bye.

Kiva Slade 23:19

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Collab with Kiva. Each of us has a different path. And I hope that this episode gave you some takeaway that has left you inspired and motivated to keep pressing forward on your unique path. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. And of course, your reviews on Apple are greatly appreciate it. You're a small business owner, ready to start making data-driven decisions in your business. And you know that without the data, you're really just guessing, make sure to visit my website, the516collaborative.com. And let's schedule a time to talk to make sure that you can harness the power of data in your business. I'll see you next time. Bye

Meet Kiva Slade - the Founder and CEO of The 516 Collaborative. With a unique background in high-power politics on Capitol Hill and sixteen years as a homeschooling mama, Kiva found her calling in the online business world as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs looking to build the business of their dreams.

Kiva's work began behind the scenes, orchestrating the back end of businesses and managing teams. But her inner data diva couldn't help but notice that small businesses needed help harnessing the power of data for growth. So she and her team set out to uncover and tidy up the data required to enable clients to grow their businesses confidently and easily.