#97 – 2023 Reflection + Year in Review

Hi, Friends, 

2023 is coming to a close, and it’s time for my annual blog post reflecting on this year, lessons learned, and preliminary thoughts as we head into 2024. 

First, I offer my gratitude to our team, clients, and community. 2023 marked our 9th year in business, and we wouldn’t be here without any of you. As we say, we don’t sell balloons or coffee. We sell services and experiences to help leaders and organizations better serve their communities. Our work is unique and nuanced – because of that, we need people like you who understand our mission, the need, and that it takes a community. For that, we are grateful. 

We grew our four pillars of service in 2023:

• Data-Driven Family Empowerment
• Strategic Implementation
• Workforce Development
• Data-Driven Corporate Social Responsibility

Growing these divisions is good for our business but also good for those we serve. We are thrilled to highlight just a few of our client’s wins from this past year:

• In conjunction with our 16 partner schools, we served 12,000+ families through our family empowerment work. 500+ of those families completed at least one financial literacy session. 
• We helped test and build a strategy that enabled one of our non-profit partners to secure their first earned-revenue partnership in 35 years.
• We worked with a large municipality to help them distribute $4M+ to a variety of workforce development organizations.
• We partnered with two of the top seven largest school districts in North Carolina to help them reimagine their family empowerment efforts at the district level. 

We also began building tools tailored to the unique needs of our clients. Specifically, we are creating interactive budgeting tools to help our clients make financially savvy decisions. We are also building interactive dashboards to help clients make data-informed decisions based on a wide array of variables – email me if you want to learn more about these tools (greg@scherm.co). 

Beyond client wins, we also focus on giving back. We do this through our SchermCo Cares initiative, where we reinvest 1% of the funds/time from each project back into the communities we serve. We’ve invested more than $46,000 through this initiative since 2014. 

From a governance perspective, we moved our Family Empowerment work to the SchermCo Foundation to support its long-term growth. Thus, we now have a fully functional non-profit separate from the LLC’s work. 

From a fun perspective, we introduced The Schermy’s at our 9th Anniversary celebration.  

We also shared new content and insights on our podcast and through our blog.

It was a good year for the Square Pizza Pod. 

• We trademarked Square Pizza Pod ™. 
• We served up 14 new slices of the podcast. 
• We interviewed 12 new leaders of color from across the country. 
• Mathu interviewed two Black male Principals to understand their education experience and perspective leading schools. 
• We surpassed 100 episodes of the podcast. 
  • In celebration of the 100th episode, I got to join Eric Thomas’s podcast. 

On the blog:

• We shared two posts on how our family empowerment work is driving better student outcomes:
  • #80 – Family Empowerment Leads to Positive School Performance Outcomes.
  • #95 – Family Empowerment As A Means To Improve School Outcomes Overall: A Data-Driven Perspective.
• Alex shared about how her experience at the Ritz connects to our philosophy on customer service.
• Jia shared about her experience and reflections after completing Leadership Charlotte
• Taylor shared about her transition from a teacher to a consultant and her learnings along the way.

For me, 2023 was a year of personal and professional growth, which wasn’t always linear. I learned a lot about my leadership style (good and bad), our team, and contentment. I didn’t hit my PTO goal, but I did get the opportunity to attend the Aspen Institute and participate in a powerful leadership seminar. You can read about my experience here.   

I also want to thank my team and our business coach for pushing me to be a leader, communicating ideas that will improve our organization, and simply being themselves. 

As we approach 2024, I’m excited about what I know is ready to go and the surprises we’ll inevitably encounter. Our team is prepared to help you and your organization better serve your community. Whether through our family empowerment initiative or your next strategic growth plan, we understand the power of data, equity, and implementation in the social-impact space.

We’ll see you in 2024. 

More to do. More to come.®

Action Steps

1. Please leave a comment below and share some of your takeaways from 2023. 
2. Leave a note below and let us know what you hope to accomplish in 2024.
3. Please consider sharing this post if any of it resonates with you.