I don’t normally write end of year recap articles. I did one in 2019, which I read the other day and thoroughly enjoyed reading back on my reflections and plans back then, just before the pandemic hit.

A lot has changed since Covid. Like many people, Covid temporarily changed by business and work life. And ever since, it has felt like a battle to get it back to my 2019 vision of what I could be. And I finally feel like I’m on track for that, despite the generally terrible macroeconomic climate and AI upending everything.

I’m going to break this down into 3 sections and each sections. The 3 sections are:

1. Life
2. Fitness
3. Business

Life

The year can be summarised as relaxed with a decent amount of travel and family time.

A few highlights:

• Did a solo trip to NZ in Feb/March for a month. Had a fantastic time catching up with friends and my sister, hiking in the mountains and volcanic hills, mountain biking, swimming in the sea etc.
• Family trip to Sri Lanka in August for 3 weeks. Really enjoyed it, and was fantastic to see the country that my parents in law are from.
• Trip to Croatia in October for 1 week to get the last of the sun before needing to hibernate for the winter
• Had a great time seeing my daughter and her band perform in their first public performance

Fitness

I’ve always exercised a lot and as I get older, it’s becoming even more important. I feel like I’ve been getting fitter recently with improved strength and running pace.

A few highlights:

• Did my first-ever half-marathon in May
• Gravel bike rides in the Esher common area
• Maintained a consistent cadence of strength training at the gym
• Clocked some decent stats in Strava
  • 1326km total distance
  • 210 active days
  • 246 hours
  • Ran 497km (up 132%)
  • Biked 366km (up 4%)
  • 65 hours weight training (up 386%)

Business

This year has been a year of two halves. The first half went well and I was super busy and surpassed revenue targets. The second half wasn’t so great. But overall, revenue was up on the previous year.

A few highlights:

• Continued to focus on building, growing and narrowing the focus for Automation Sprints
• Refined the positioning and target market, including doubling down the focus on building automated/integrated systems for marketing and membership teams
• Completed a big client redesign project in the first half of the year
• Revenue up 17% on 2024
• Moved my personal site from Wordpress to Ghost (and loving it)

2026

I usually don’t set annual goals, as I don’t find them to be effective. Instead, I think about the direction I’m heading, if I need to course correct and some areas to focus on. There are 3 areas I’m focusing on for 2026.

Focus on “organic marketing”

I’ve always done organic market, but this year I’ve been tempted to try other forms of marketing, such as cold outreach and paid advertising. Every time I research what’s involved in these forms of marketing, I get a bad feeling my stomach. Paid advertising is incredibly expensive and the cost per client doesn’t make economic sense for my business. And cold outreach feels wrong on so many levels. I want people to come to me because they are keen to work with me. I would rather not be pestering people trying to convince them to work with me.

But how it exactly do you get people to come to you? It’s definitely not easy, but it’s always how I’ve done it.

When I was focused on Drupal consulting, I built a brand that people knew by teaching Drupal in public via my popular blog and two self-published Drupal books. Essentially, I identified a painful problem that a relatively small number of people had to tried to be as generous as I could in helping them solve it. In this case, it was that learning Drupal development had a very steep learning curve and the existing docs and tutorials assumed knowledge that people didn’t have, and therefore skipped countless steps. Helping solve this problem meant that people knew my work, which did lead to paid client work.

And this is how I’m going to approach it in 2026 with my automation services. I’ve already identified a small group of people who have a specific problem that I can help, and I will do everything possible to be as helpful as I can too them. This will both be in public on the Automation Sprints blog, on this blog, on LinkedIn, in YouTube videos and 1 to 1 conversations.

Here’s a run down on what my organic marketing efforts are going to look like in 2026:

• Practical and tool-specfic tutorials on the Automation Sprints website and YouTube
• Extracts of the tutorials shared on LinkedIn
• Insights, patterns and principles (generally tool agnostic) as guides on Automation Sprints
• Extracts of guides shared on LinkedIn
• Field notes and in-progress thinking on my personal site (this site!)
• Weekly newsletter with key insights and links to related tutorials

This is a summary of my content system:

• Website: library
• Newsletter: conversation
• LinkedIn: amplification
• YouTube: demonstration
• Personal site: archive of thinking

Build more tools

I’m a builder by nature. I’m at my happiest in a work context when I’m building solutions for problems (either mine or my clients problems).

Rather than everything being hidden in private client projects, I want to build a handful of automation and AI tools. I have a few ideas on what they’ll be, and will write about them on this blog as the year progresses.

Be helpful to a small group of people

As I mentioned in the organic marketing section, I’m focusing my efforts on a small group of people. Some might call this a target market. But I think it’s more granular than that. These people exist in the following places:

1. Current and past clients
2. People I’ve worked with (colleagues, freelancer, and agency partners etc)
3. In a few communities I’m a member of
4. On LinkedIn
5. In my local business community

There are obviously a lot more places where you could find people to work with. But these are the places where I’m going to focus on connecting with and helping people.

My wife joining

My wife Vaani has joined me to help grow Automation Sprints. She's helping with positioning, social media strategy, purposeful brand development and bring clarity.

Vaani has built two successful businesses and mentored numerous business owners in her sector. I'm super excited to be working with her on it this year - two brains are definitely going to be better than one!

Wrapping up

In an uncertain world and challenging economic times, it’s even more important to focus on what matters. And for me, I have to always remember that starts with living the best life possible, and maintaining fitness. Only then can I build a good business.

I’m looking forward to 2026 and continuing to build slowly. Nothing flashy. No hustle. Just slowly, steadily, keep working on what matters and what will have long-term impact.