2025 Lessons Learned: Systems, Celebration, and Sustainable Growth
As 2025 draws to a close, we find ourselves in a moment of professional reflection. This year brought a mix of challenging uncertainty, exciting growth, and deep, rewarding work. Through it all, we learned that sometimes the most important lessons are the ones that help us maintain clarity, connection, and energy when the path ahead isn't always clear.
Here are four key lessons that shaped our approach and sustained our work at Quire throughout the past year.
1. Creating and maintaining good systems and boundaries allows for our best work
It may seem counterintuitive, but protecting your time and energy is not limiting, it’s liberating.
While the instinct during uncertain times might be to constantly open the door to every possible opportunity we learned the opposite holds true. By establishing and maintaining strong working systems and boundaries, we created a protective structure around our team and our focus.
This year, in particular, was marked by a great deal of external uncertainty. By committing to our established processes, the “work” was still the “work”. These systems provided the reliable rhythm we needed to produce high-quality work, regardless of the surrounding environment. We stayed aware and informed but were deliberate about not letting external anxiety dictate our internal productivity or perspective. Ultimately, protecting our bandwidth freed us up to give our best attention and effort to our clients and projects, not our residual energy.
2. Celebrating our community, partners, and clients is fuel for the work
Despite the heaviness and hectic nature of this year, we made a conscious decision to pause, look outward, and celebrate the incredible people in our orbit. This wasn't just a nice thing to do; it proved to be incredibly encouraging and energizing for our team.
We executed this in a couple of specific ways:
The Quire Honor Roll: At the end of spring, we launched our “Quire Honor Roll” to shine a spotlight on four individuals and groups who are truly spreading light in their communities. These were people and organizations committed to changing narratives, exemplifying extraordinary leadership, and bringing vital new perspectives to Birmingham and beyond. The process of reflecting on and publicly celebrating this impactful work was deeply encouraging. It provided a powerful reminder of the good being done, both close to home and further afield.
Summer Happy Hours: During the summer, we hosted two relaxed happy hours at one of our favorite local spots, Adiõs. We invited a mix of past clients, partners, peers, and friends of Quire to join us for an early break from work. There was no formal agenda, just dedicated time and space for good conversation and connection. We loved making new introductions for people and came out of each event feeling renewed. It’s easy to keep your head down when busy, but connecting meaningfully with others is a vital reward of our work.
3. Rest is required for true sustainability
If good boundaries define the work, then intentional rest sustains the workers. Following a particularly hectic spring that included completing two of our biggest client projects to date, we understood that we couldn't simply sprint into summer.
We leaned into the need for rest and internal focus. We allocated time to crucial internal work: testing and trying new systems, capturing learnings and refining processes, and strategically preparing for upcoming fall projects. Crucially, we also simply slowed down a little bit.
For those familiar with Birmingham, you know how quiet things can get on Fridays in the summer, especially around Innovation Depot! We embraced that relaxed pace by moving our dedicated work-from-home day from Tuesday to Friday. We also prioritized personal time, ensuring our team could take necessary time off to travel, visit family, and truly recuperate. This intentional shift helped us transition into the fall feeling refreshed, prepared, and ready for the next wave of work.
4. Insights from our work can redefine our perspective on internal growth
Sometimes our research for clients directly impacts our company and how we work. This happened this year through the Birmingham Black Business Census where we uncovered a learning that was both professional and personal for us.
Through the census, we uncovered a compelling data point: local Black female business owners were less likely to have employees than their male counterparts. After the project ended, this finding stayed with us and has been turning our wheels since. We began hypothesizing why this might be, digging into secondary research on the topic, and shaping our questions for future projects and conversations with business owners.
This finding resonated deeply because Quire is a Black woman-owned business with one other full-time employee. We also employ people in part-time and intern roles and work with contractors where additional skills are needed. The challenge of scaling a small business and the complex decisions involved in hiring—and getting it right—are very real to us. Recognizing that this is a documented challenge for many female business owners in our community validated our own experience and underscored the importance of building supportive networks and resources for strategic growth.
Moving Forward
2025 reinforced the idea that success isn't just about output; it's about the foundation you build beneath the work. Good systems create stability, celebration fuels the spirit, and rest ensures longevity. As we look ahead to 2026, we are carrying these lessons forward, committed to working sustainably, celebrating generously, and continuing to learn alongside our incredible community.
