Goals for 2025
My goals for this year might are going to be a little more modest than last year since I’m now running a business on top of wanting to add to my skillsets, but it does seem like 3 is a magic number for goals.
Continue to be in business in 2026! Whether spoken out loud or not, I think this is the goal of every business owner and it’s definitely going to be taking up a lot of my time. I have clients to serve, new clients to meet and bring in, payroll to run, invoices to generate, send out and receive payment for, taxes to pay, computer infrastructure to maintain and more. It’s do-able, but definitely going to take up a lot of my time.
Improve my understanding of the energy usage of the buildings that I work and the energy code that governs the work that I do. This is an ongoing interest for me and last year it was my intention to do this through Passive House Certification, and while that might happen this year I’m not hanging this goal on that. PH has a time commitment and cost that I’m not sure I can afford at this point. I have been taking shorter courses on sustainability and the energy code and in the next month or so I should be completing a course that would give me the designation of Home Energy Rating System (HERS) Associate. HERS is the method by which modern codes judge the efficiency of a building and whether or not their performance meets the code. In practice a HERS Rating is a bit of a black box that is created by a third party HERS Rater and the impact of design decisions on the rating is not often well understood by the architect, homeowner or builder. Taking this course should help open that black box in my practice, which in turn will help provide better service to my clients, thus reinforcing goal #1 for the year.
Continue to improve my communication style. I had felt that I had made improvements on this throughout the end of 2024, but it only takes one presentation to not land well with a client to make you realize that communication is a critical skill that needs to be able to react to feedback and the changing world. There’ll be more of this on my Instagram as I work through ideas.
