My 2021 Review: Revenue, Wins and Learnings
This year I’ve decided to publicly publish my 2021 review.
I strongly believe in “creating in public” and I’m always encouraging your guys to do that, so I want to make sure I am doing the same thing in my business as well.
When I was first starting my business I used to find these sorts of posts from other successful business owners hugely inspiring. They used to help me see what was possible with my business and gave me something to aspire to. So I hope that documenting this review may do the same for some of you as well.
Before we start I want to say that nothing I’m sharing here is done in the spirit of bragging. I am not a bragger at all, in fact I feel a little uncomfortable posting about my revenue. But the reason I have made a decision to do this is to try and inspire others to see what’s possible when you go after big goals. I always try to be open and transparent - and that’s the spirit in which I’m sharing this post with you.
I also try and be a role model for other women (and particularly mothers). Lots of the revenue posts I have read in the past have been from men and I want to try and show women that it is possible to be a mother and a successful business owner. You CAN have it all and you can do it in a way that works for you and your family.
But whenever I talk about revenue I do inevitably get messages from people saying it’s a bit crass or that I shouldn’t be doing it (and I especially find this with a number of my ‘real life’ friends and family). So if you are the sort of person who gets triggered by people sharing their revenue/income or things like that then this probably isn’t the right blog post for you so perhaps just jump out now. :)
So I am going to break this post in four parts;
the wins I’ve had this year
the things I’ve learned (i.e. the things that perhaps didn’t go according to plan but I still learned from!)
my revenue from 2021
some thoughts moving into 2022
A word of warning - this is going to be a long post so grab a cup tea and strap yourself in!
Wins
OK let’s start with some of the wins from the year. Here they are (in no particular order).
Team Growth
One thing I have never wanted in my business was to have staff - but this year my team has grown a bit, which has been hugely helpful and has meant that a lot of things have got done that I’ve been putting off for some time now.
Paul (my husband!)
One of the biggest changes this year is that my husband, Paul, started working with me in the business in February. Paul finished up in his corporate job and didn’t have much interest in going back in to another corporate role. After 20 years of working as a senior manager in financial services he needed a break! Luckily we are in a financial position where he could take some time to think about what he wanted to do next.
At the same time I had reached a point in my business where I needed some help from someone high level who I could trust and Paul has a skill set that I don’t have. He is extremely detail oriented when it comes to operational matters and finance and has the patience to work through things that I can’t be bothered with (e.g. our website migration this year). So he offered to come and help me in the business for a while, which has been such a huge help. We have achieved a lot of operational improvements this year as a result of his involvement in the business - more on that below.
Paul has also used 2021 to explore options for what he wants to do next with his career. He’s just launched his own YouTube channel on finance and crypto, has met with various people throughout the year about Board and consulting roles and he is also working hard on his biggest passion in life - Jiu Jitsu - so he spends a lot of his time training for that (when we aren’t in lockdown at least!).
From a personal perspective life has been completely different for our family this year. Having Paul around all the time is so fantastic for everyone - especially the boys. He is there to help with school pick ups and drop offs and around the house generally but he and I have also had heaps of lunches out this year and just been able to spend our time exactly how we want to.
Our family is living an enviable lifestyle that many people dream of and we are hugely grateful for that.
Jodie (virtual assistant)
I have continued to work with Jodie as my virtual assistant again this year (after a brief disastrous hiatus, which I’ll outline below in the learnings section). She works about 10 or so hours a week for me (on average) and is responsible for lots of the day to day administration of our courses and student support such as:
letting people in our free FB group
email support
invoicing
helping me with posting on blog, YouTube, social media etc.
other admin support that I need
Jodie works as a contractor for me and runs her own VA business for other designers and creatives.
Kate (SketchUp student support)
In January I hired a second virtual assistant, Kate, who joined me part-time (in a contract role) to help with support for my SketchUp Course. She works around 5-10 hours per week (on average).
I found Kate via a recruitment process from within my SketchUp student cohort. Kate is an ex-corporate accountant who lives in Adelaide and is a Mum trying to get her own design business off the ground. She has been a huge asset to my business this year as she largely deals with all SketchUp course emails and queries in our student Facebook group. That course pretty much runs itself these days and Kate is a big part of why it works so well.
Lessons from team/hiring in 2021:
Hiring people on a contract basis works well for me as I don’t want the responsibility of PAYG employees. I like that they are essentially running their own business and providing me with a service on contract - this takes the pressure off me having to manage them or be responsible for their careers, progression or professional development.
SketchUp Course
A few updates on my SketchUp Course for 2021:
In January I remade the course for the latest version of the software (2021 version). This was a huge undertaking and took a lot of time but we are still one of the only SketchUp courses on the market that stay up to date every year when SketchUp updates their software - so this has become a point of difference for us.
The course is becoming well known in the market place as the ‘go-to’ course for designers and architects who want to learn SketchUp, which I’m very proud of.
I was approached this year by SketchUp themselves to talk about collaboration opportunities - including being a guest speaker at their annual conference. Unfortunately the conference was cancelled in 2021 due to COVID but this is something to continue to explore for 2022.
The SketchUp course is still our largest revenue source in the business. This worries me from a risk management perspective and I want to continue to diversify our product offerings this year to reduce risk around this.
Paid Advertising
In February I got rid of my paid advertising agency. I had been working with them for about a year but was starting to be unhappy with the results they were getting.
Paul is also a numbers/spreadsheet/data kind of person and he was fairly confident he could teach himself how to do paid advertising - so he took over the role that the ad agency used to do. This was pretty impressive as we have seen a growth in revenue in 2021 and we have also saved about $6,000 per month in agency fees that I used to pay. So this is a huge win. Paul has also learned a lot of skills in teaching himself how to use all the paid advertising platforms.
Paul also launched us in to new advertising platforms - especially Pinterest - and has worked with account managers at Facebook/Instagram and Google to improve our advertising on those platforms as well.
I implicitly trust Paul to spend our advertising dollars wisely and I didn’t always trust an agency to do this for me. Much of our traffic and leads come from paid advertising so it’s a critically important part of the business and our revenue.
Has been a tricky year on Facebook/Instagram for paid advertising as the iOS14 changes have seen lots of businesses really struggle to get their ROAS tracking properly (return on ad spend). So this has been something Paul has put a lot of time and effort in to learning over the year. You can see below in revenue section for some info on what we spend on advertising each month.
Shop/Website Migration
Another big project Paul took on this year was to migrate our store front from Kajabi to Shopify.
One of the big issues I had been having since my courses launched was that I have a very diverse international audience and all my course prices were in USD. My Australian students/clients didn’t like paying in USD and I also really wanted a way for anyone around the world to change the course prices to their own currency. It felt like the ‘modern’ way of doing business online. So this had been a huge frustration for me.
So Paul did lots of research and we worked through a few different options of platforms (including a stint using SamCart for a month or so) before settling on Shopify.
It’s been quite a learning curve to get Shopify working well, however, as it’s really a platform designed for physical e-commerce stores - i.e. for people who are selling physical products not digital products (like us). So we have had to spend a lot of time thinking about how to create the backend to make it work for us. And when I say we I mostly mean Paul :)
But this has been such a game changer for us this year and it is great because:
people now have the ability to purchase in their local currency (a massive win)
it integrates better with paid advertising platforms - e.g. Facebook/Google
it looks more professional - we have a proper storefront built out now with our full product suite all laid out really nicely
it has a sales cart that most people are used to using these days - i.e. so many people have stores built on Shopify that the consumer experience feels very natural (= higher sales/conversions for us)
it integrates with lots of payment gateways - e.g. Google Pay, PayPal etc. - which is important as it gives people options for how to pay
It has been tricky to get Shopify to integrate with Kajabi and Circle (where my courses are hosted) but Paul has set up lots of Zaps (in Zapier) to make this process work. That took time to get working correctly.
Business Coaching Program for Designers
This was a huge project for this year. After many, many months of thinking about launching a coaching program I finally did so in July 2021.
The main reason I created this program is because every day I was being asked whether I could provide business coaching. The issue I had in the back of my mind is that coaching people 1:1 isn’t at all scalable and I already had a business model that was scaling really well (in the form of my online courses). However I am passionate about helping support people in growing their businesses and so eventually I caved in and created my group coaching program called ‘The Profitable Designer’.
Some wins from the program:
We had about 140 clients come through the program
The content and platform was extremely well received - clients really enjoyed it and those that took action made a lot of progress with their businesses
I taught myself to use a new platform to host this program - called Circle. This platform is a bit like a cross between slack, Facebook groups and Kajabi. I absolutely love the platform and it’s been a game changer for my business content.
I created a HUGE amount of content in a very small space of time (but this also lead to burnout, which I will talk more about below).
Overall the program was a big success and I’m so happy I made the decision to launch it and give it a try. But there were also a lot of learnings from this program and after much consideration I actually decided to close the program after about 4-5 months of running it. Because of this I ended up refunding about $84,000 in fees that clients had paid upfront (e.g. for annual payments in advance). More about all of that in the learnings section below.
Business Short Courses
In November I re-launched the business coaching platform I had created as individual business short courses. These courses have been a massive success so far and the business platform I built in Circle is now working really well as a business community hub for designers.
I’m really looking forward to building out more of these short courses during 2022. I would also love to host more community events, perhaps a virtual business summit for designers. I have lots of ideas to explore around supporting designers and architects with their business.
Professional Development
I continue to be obsessed with learning as much as I can. I do this in both a free and paid capacity.
In terms of free learning I have continued to listen to heaps of audiobooks and podcasts on my daily 5km walks. I also watch heaps of YouTube videos and read blogs and other articles. I have all sorts of methods of finding great content to consume. I continue to make time daily to read and listen to a wide variety of material and this is a huge part of keeping my business (and me!) moving forward.
What I continue to know about professional development is that it is a MUST. I spend a huge amount on professional development programs, as you can see below, but these are invaluable to me. They help me think in different ways, stay on top of latest ideas from clever business owners, see how other people run their online courses, make new ‘business’ friends and so much more. I strongly encourage everyone to invest an uncomfortable amount of money in professional and business development each year.
Here are the paid programs I did this year:
The most expensive was Taki Moore’s ‘Black Belt’ group coaching program which was $2400 per month. I joined this in January and for the first few months I found this a really helpful and inspiring program. However, as the year went on the program started to frustrate me. For me the marketing strategies they were teaching were far too pushy and salesy and not aligned with how I like to do business. They also had a big push on growing large businesses with large teams and I am keen to grow a moderately sized business with no team (besides my lovely VAs!). So that aspect of the program didn’t work well for me either. My contract with them was for a year (and it was a very expensive year!). I did learn quite a bit throughout my time in the program - but one of the main learnings was probably that coaching isn’t the right business model for me (more on that below).
I also signed up for Stu McLaren’s Tribe program for the second time. This course is about how to create and launch a membership program. I took this course for the first time about 2 years ago and I learned a lot when I first did it. I decided to take it again this year as I wanted to launch my business coaching program and decided that having the structure around me would help me get that done. Unfortunately I really didn’t learn anything new by taking the course again so this was probably a bit of a waste of money really. But I did get the business coaching program launched - so it was a win from that perspective!
90 day year with Tod Hermann - I discovered Tod Hermann as part of Taki’s program. The concept of his 90 day year was interesting to me so I decided to join his course. It ended up being a fairly basic course on productivity. It was a bit of a disappointment for me but I do always find it interesting to see how people run their courses and the quality of what they are producing. Mostly what I learn is that I have a very high standard for my courses and tend to deliver much better value that other creators :)
Towards the end of the year I took Ali Abdaal’s ‘Part Time YouTube Creator Academy’. I have a goal in 2022 of growing my YouTube channels so thought I would take a few courses to help me get up to speed on how to do that. I thought his course was very good in many ways. It’s packed with content and he brought in a lot of other YouTube creators to interview, which I found the most helpful part of the course. The actual content of the course was fairly basic. I always realise when I do these sorts of courses that I know so much about all of this stuff already! But it was a good refresher and I did learn quite a bit that I will be implementing on my channel in 2022.
Just after I paid for Ali’s course Matt D’Avella launched his YouTube course. Matt D’Avella has about 3 million YouTube subscribers and I really like his channel. Although Ali’s course was about $2000 or so, Matt’s was about $300 or so. It was by far and away better value than Ali’s course. The content was similar (in terms of actual knowledge) but Matt’s course had a much higher production value. I also much preferred that Matt’s course was self-paced as I completed all the content in a couple of days vs having to have the content in Ali’s course drip fed to me over 6 weeks (which I find quite annoying as I work fast and just want to get it done). I would say Matt’s course was the best one I took this year - I really enjoyed it!
Overall the approximate cost of my professional development programs for 2021 was $33,400. The reason I’m sharing this number is to show that professional development is VERY expensive. But in my opinion it’s essential if you want to grow a successful business. You should always be seeking out new people to learn from and paying them is the only way to get their best insights. It’s also one of my favourite things to do as I am a passionate lifelong learner. I also learn so much from seeing how other people run their programs and normally get lots of ideas for things I want to do (or not do!) in my own courses.
Financial Planning + Accounting
We continued working with our financial planner (started in late 2020 with this). He has helped us future plan our finances and investment opportunities both with our personal assets as well as in the business. As my business grows it’s becoming more and more important to have good financial advisors around me.
We changed accountants this year. I used to work with an excellent account but she was more suited to smaller sized business (at least I felt that). My new accountant acts in more of a ‘virtual CFO’ type capacity and does really helpful tax planning and reports for us.
Estate Planning
This is not strictly related to my business but it is tangentially related and was definitely a win. We reviewed our wills and estate planning with an exceptional lawyer, Lucy Percy, who specialises in estate planning. Lucy worked with us entirely online (she is in Melbourne) and we have redone our wills and estate planning so we now have all our ducks in a row. We were feeling worried about this as we hadn’t done our wills since we first got married - about 17 years ago (and before we had children!). So this process has left us feeling much more confident that the boys will be well looked after if anything happens to us.
Health + Energy
Finally are some notes on managing my health and energy this year. I know it seems weird to have a category about my health as part of a business review but I am pretty much a solo-entrepreneur. If I’m not performing at my best (health-wise) then my business will suffer and so taking care of my health and energy levels is critical to the success of my business. This is definitely something I want to create more content about throughout 2022 as I think it’s so important for people to consider and factor in.
Here are a few wins from this category for 2021:
This was my second year of being alcohol free. This still remains one of my biggest changes in life over the past few years and is honestly a secret superpower for me. Giving up alcohol has had a flow on effect to so many other parts of my life - e.g. getting up early, sticking with other healthy habits, reducing my anxiety levels - so many things!
I continued working with my trainers Miguel and Jane at TRX Group Training. I have been doing this for over 3 years now and I am extremely consistent with this. I train with them 6-7 times a week and I absolutely love it! I have made some fantastic friends and I really enjoy the training that we do. To stay consistent with exercise it’s so important to find something you enjoy doing.
I also got a Peloton bike this year! I have been lusting after one of these for YEARS! But they hadn’t yet launched in Australia. So as soon as I heard they were coming to Australia I purchased one. It was a pretty expensive purchase but over the years I have really loved spin classes so I knew I would enjoy it. I didn’t use it as much as I would like in 2021 but since January started I have been using it every day and I’ve really got the bug for it now!
Towards the end of the year I decided I wanted to improve my sleep so I replaced scrolling on my phone at night in bed with reading a fiction book on my Kindle. This has made a big difference to the quality of my sleep.
I started meditating around the middle of the year and have consistently been doing it every single day for about 4 months now. I do this every single morning when I first wake up for 10 minutes. I use the Headspace app for this.
I continue to get up between 4-5am each day (including weekends). This continues to be a massive contributor to my success as I get so much done in those early hours.
Things that didn’t go well (+ learnings!)
OK so let’s move on to some of the tings that didn’t go quite so well during 2021 and some of the things I have learned from those experiences.
Legal Issues
Early in the year I had two stressful legal issues to deal with:
the first was a lady in Canada who was copying my work. Someone from my community pointed this out to me and the more I investigated the more I found of things she was blatantly copyrighting. This included Instagram posts word for word, blog posts word for word, course titles and lead magnets - all sorts of things. The worst discovery was a blog post that I had written all about personal stuff related to my daily routines - e.g. when I got up in the mornings, how I spent my time, thing I did with my kids. I found my entire blog post copied on her website word for word - as if all the daily routines (and chidren!) were hers! It was very creepy….I got my lawyer to send her a cease and desist letter and this shut her down immediately. I have never been worried about people copying what I do. Nobody can copy me or my personality - but if I do happen to discover anyone doing this I’m certainly not going to let them get away with it. In the future I would probably just contact them myself and/or post their stuff to my social media to expose what they are doing. I don’t think going through legal avenue was necessary in hindsight.
the second legal issue I had was related to a company I hired to find me a full time virtual assistant in the Phillipines. I had been working with Jodie part time for a year or so at this point but with Paul coming in to the business we decided that between what he and I were both doing we could make use of a full-time VA. Overseas VAs are also much cheaper than those you hire in Australia. I still can’t say much about this matter - but the basics were that I hired a company to help find me an overseas VA, the person was a complete disaster, I nearly had my IG account shut down based on some of her actions, the company turned out to basically be incompetent and then when I tried to back out of the arrangement with them they tried to make me pay them out for a full year of services! It was a complete joke quite honestly - but the people running the company turned out to be terrible bullies and were very threatening so it was quite a stressful period. Again my lawyer got involved and the matter eventually went away - but it was a really awful experience and it completely put me off hiring VAs from overseas (despite the fact most of my business friends have extremely successful arrangements with their overseas VAs). So I went back to Jodie with my tail between my legs and she luckily took me back :)
SketchUp Course
A few learnings from my SketchUp course this year:
I have been contacted multiple times this year from people with disabilities who want to take the course, most particularly deaf people who need the course to be subtitled in order to be able to take it. The course doesn’t currently have subtitles and isn’t really very accessible at the moment. As the mother of a profoundly disabled child I feel quite ashamed about this and so I’m definitely going to make sure this is a priority when I remake the course during 2022.
in 2021 we also had to stop sending the welcome ‘surprise’ packages that we used to send to new students signing up for the SketchUp course. Unfortunately due to COVID the international postal system is now a bit of a disaster and packages weren’t arriving at all or were arriving so many months down the track that people were already finished the course! The pack was just a bit of fun really and everything that’s included in the pack is also included as a digital download so nobody is missing anything really. A few learnings here:
it’s great to be able to send something to people in the mail when they sign up for a digital product BUT it’s expensive, logistically demanding and unnecessarily environmentally unfriendly (i.e. to send printed material that is also available digitally).
it’s been great sending the packs and seeing these posted in our FB group and on social media but it’s not essential to the quality and fun of the course and many people didn’t want them anyway (mainly due to the environmental wastefulness).
Business Coaching Program
As mentioned above I launched my business coaching program in 2021. The program was successful and my clients really enjoyed it and (most importantly) made a lot of progress. But I really didn’t enjoy it and actually ended up in a rut as a result of it.
Here’s what I learned:
business coaching isn’t the right model for me. I don’t like having specific things in my diary (e.g. coaching calls), in fact I really rebel against this and it’s one of the main reasons why I left my corporate life behind. I don’t like having to be in specific places at specific times. As a result the online courses model works much better for me as I can create courses and launch them when the timing is right for me - not because I have it in my diary.
I found the constant content creation for my clients utterly exhausting and overwhelming. As I am the sort of person who really over delivers in everything I do I was creating far too much content. This wasn’t only overwhelming for me, I felt it was overwhelming for my clients as well. One option could have been to scale back the content rather than shut the whole coaching program down, but this didn’t quite feel right to me as I had made a commitment to my clients around what I was going to produce for them
The business coaching model is problematic as you have people of all different levels in the same program. During our weekly coaching calls I would always feel bad when I was answering beginner/basic questions about my clients that were more experienced. I would worry they weren’t getting value from the calls and I would overly worry about ensuring everyone was getting what they needed all the time - this became quite stressful for me.
For the entire 4-5 months the program was open I never felt I could switch off. I was either delivering some content, planning for some new content, worrying about making sure everyone was making enough progress, taking on the burden of whether people were succeeding in their businesses - it was a lot. This constant feeling like I always was ‘on’ lead to me becoming extremely burnt out and I found myself starting to not look forward to getting up each morning. Given I normally love what I do so much I knew this was a really bad sign and that something had to change.
It was an extremely difficult decision to make but after thinking about it for a long time I decided to close the program and morph the content to our business short course platform model instead. This was so difficult to do as I was so worried about letting people down and about damaging my reputation. All of that is extremely important to me. But I tried to make the decision in the best way I possibly could and keep as many people happy as I could.
The way I did this was by telling the truth and being open and honest about my decision. I explained the problem to my clients, I gave them options, I gave them access to free content - I did everything I could to keep people as happy as possible (given I knew I was letting them down).
Some people had signed up for annual payments and so we ended up having to refund those people - which cost about $84,000. But this felt like the right thing to do and although it was quite a big financial loss it was worth it for my mental health.
Out of the 130 or so people we had in the program at the time I decided to cancel it I only had one person who complained and felt they had been hard done by. I felt like this was a positive outcome from a decision I found tremendously difficult to make.
The main lesson I learned from all of this is that this is my business and I need to be happy and enjoy what I am doing. There is no need for me to be running programs that I don’t enjoy as there are other business models that will work both for my clients and for me (e.g. the business short course platform that we now have that is working well for everyone). If I don’t love what I’m doing this will also eventually come through to my clients as well and I fear if I had forced myself to continue running that program eventually it would have become something that I dreaded.
I’m really happy I tried the business coaching program as if I hadn’t I would probably always wonder whether this was something I should be doing. So although it didn’t turn out the way everyone may have wanted, it was a huge learning experience for me this year.
Instagram Lockout
Early in the year I got locked out of my Instagram account for about 10 days - largely due to the debacle with the overseas VA. A few learnings here:
keep growing my other platforms so that if one ever gets shut down or disappears then I don’t lose my community/audience
don’t share Instagram (or other) login details with others, ever, full stop.
save Instagram posts (and all other social media or content) elsewhere (e.g. Dropbox) so if something does happen to the platform you don’t lose all the content you’ve created.
Keep building my email list! The way I continued to communicate with my community while my account was shut down was via my email list, which is very strong and has a large community on it.
Free Content - inconsistent
This year I wasn’t as consistent with my free content as I would like to be. I was extremely consistent with Instagram (which was great!) but my blog and YouTube went through phases all year. Moving in to 2022 I want to get back to being far more consistent with all my platforms. I really identify with the title of ‘content creator’ these days and with that in mind my job really is to create content - so that’s what I want to really focus on in 2022.
Having said that I was proud to do a 30 day reels challenge on Instagram during the year - which was a great learning experience. I also posted for 30 days in a row to my YouTube channel early in the year and this created a lot of growth for that channel. I learned that the more you post the more things happen on the channel! So time to get back to all of that in 2022 :)
Burnout
Towards the end of the year I did suffer from my first ever bought of burnout. I always work extremely hard and I’m very used to that sort of pace but the stress of launching and running the business coaching program in 2021 really took it’s toll on me. I knew I was in a state of burnout as I found myself spending more time watching Netflix and procrastinating than I did working, which is very unlike me!
To get over this I decided to pretty much take December and January almost entirely off. I needed to just completely de-tune and detatch from my business and rethink my priorities. I have been doing bits and pieces here and there and lots of planning and thinking about the future of the business and I am now feeling completely re-engergised and excited as we head in to 2022.
My focus for 2022 is to have more time off built into my week. I am going to pretty much spend my mornings working and then take afternoons more as ‘flexible time’. If I feel like working that’s great, if I want to go to lunch with Paul that’s great, if I want to lie in bed and watch Netflix that’s great too! My business is at a place now where we make good money no matter how much work I do each day. It’s a very fortunate position to be in. So my focus 2022 is on being kind to myself and avoiding a state of burnout again.
Revenue
So that all brings us to revenue. You’ve probably already scrolled down to this part first (I know I probably would!) so if you have done that then I would encourage you to still read the parts above as I hope there’s some helpful lessons for people in that brain dump of thoughts. :)
My total revenue for all online course and digital product sales in 2021 was $1,640,985 (AUD)
This number does not include the $84,000(ish) that we refunded for coaching program clients after I shut that program down. So with that included it would have been more like $1.72 million.
I do also make a very small amount from Google and YouTube advertising but I haven’t bothered to add that up. It’s normally around $100-200 per month. So let’s say that from that I also made a few thousands dollars over the course of the year.
Here’s a few notes on my revenue for this year:
Although I was happy with my revenue and obviously this is a fantastic result I didn't hit the revenue goal I set myself for the year (of $2 million). This has made me reflect on whether it’s a good idea for me to actually set revenue goals at this stage in my business. I’m the sort of person who likes to hit goals I set myself and so in a way I feel disappointed by my revenue for last year (which I know is ridiculous!). This has made me wonder whether I should be setting a goal at all around revenue - but in the end I did decide to set a 2022 revenue goal as I feel it’s important to have something to strive for. So I’m going for $2 million as the goal for 2022.
Besides December (see below) we did over $100K every month. This is now our ‘norm’ baseline each month, which I still pinch myself about!
We had our best ever month in the business in November 2021 with revenue of $237,437 for that month. This was the first time I’ve broken the $200K/month mark. It was a good feeling :) This was mostly due to the Black Friday sales, which is the only sale I do each year on my courses. The reason I don’t like to discount my courses is I never want my existing students/clients to feel that someone else is getting a better deal than they had. I feel strongly about looking after my existing paying clients as my first priority and then looking after people who are yet to come in to my inner circle. Despite this I also know that sales work (in terms of driving buyer behaviour)…so I publicly let people know that my only sales each year are on Black Friday and I feel like this is a fair way of doing it. That way people who really want to get a savings know to wait for Black Friday. Most people recognise the value in my courses anyway though so it certainly doesn’t stop people purchasing throughout the year.
Our worst revenue month in 2021 was December, which was $65,088. This is a pattern we know now as we have had slower months in December for the past few years now. I really need to do something more about this for 2022. This year I had good intentions to create a new ‘plan for 2022’ short course/workshop to launch in December as a way of helping people get organised for the upcoming year (and obviously to also boost sales for December) but I found out about my brain aneurysms throughout December (see notes below on this) and didn’t have the bandwidth to do that. This year we need to get a bit more organised for this lull/slower period.
Overall I’m thrilled with how the business is going and I pinch myself every single day about the revenue that is coming in from products that I’ve created all by myself and put out in the world :)
It’s also important to just make a few notes about expenses as revenue isn’t the only picture in a business of course. The great thing about my business model is that it doesn’t have high expenses so we do make a healthy profit from the revenue that comes in. Our biggest expense is paid advertising (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Google ads). On average we spend about $30,000 per month on advertising. We also have normal sorts of software/subscription type expenses which probably add up to about $5,000 per month for us (I haven’t been in to add them up so this is just a guess) - so this gives you a bit of an idea of what sort of profit margins we have in the business.
Some thoughts moving in to 2022
Before heading off I thought I would document some of my thoughts moving in to 2022 and some of the things I want to achieve this year.
in 2022 I want to document my year as it happens rather than have to go through and think about it all in a review like I have had to do for this post. It has taken me ages to put this post together as I’ve had to think about every single thing that has happened this year. So I’m now documenting my journey regularly using the online ‘Day One’ journal. I’m not great at journalling and talking about my ‘feelings’ but I am really enjoying documenting what I’m doing, our statistics, things I want to try - that sort of thing. So I want to continue that throughout 2022.
Here are some of my other goals for this year:
Remake my SketchUp Course for 2022 version (once this is released)
Grow my SketchUp YouTube channel (post 2 videos per week)
Grow my Clare Le Roy YouTube channel (post 2 videos per week)
Create and launch a signature online course around how to build an online business
Create more business short courses for designers and release these regularly
Create more free, helpful content across all my platforms (Instagram, Blog, YouTube) in order to grow the community and help more people - I really identify with the title of ‘content creator’ these days and want to lean in to that more this year
Revenue goal of $2 million (AUD) - seems achievable, especially if I go ahead with the new signature course about building an online business.
Finally - this is going to be a year of ups and downs for me I would say. Towards the end of last year I found out that I have 3 brain aneurysms and a spinal fistula. As a result I am going to have to have a number of brain operations during 2022 and long periods of recovery. So although I have lots of goals for my life and business this year (as I always do!) I am also conscious that I have no idea how this year is going to go and what my health is going to be like.
So my main focus heading in to 2022 is to be kind and gentle on myself. I am going to rest more, take my recoveries as I need to, not work as hard all the time, enjoy my life and have more fun! But I am also going to continue to be my ambitious, hard-working self as well. I will try and reach as many of the goals I’ve set myself as I can - but if I don’t reach them then that’s completely fine as well!
The thing I find the most fun about running my business is the actual journey of building a business and learning new things. So I’m going to continue to just enjoy the journey I’m on, achieve what I can and not take it all too seriously :)
Thank you for reading to the end!
So that’s about everything I wanted to jot down as part of this 2021 review. This has actually been a really cathartic experience for me to document it all and write out some of my thoughts about how I feel the business has progressed this year.
So if you’ve read this far then well done :) I hope some of what I have shared has been helpful. If it has then please email me or DM me on Instagram and let me know or feel free to share this article with other people who you think may find it interesting. I would love to hear from you!
Courses and Templates for Designers and Architects
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Improve your professionalism?
Find more clients?
Bring in more revenue?
Create better systems and processes?
Then check out my business courses and templates for designers and architects.
These courses and templates leave you with work done - not just a long list of things you need to do next. We have a really strong focus on taking action and getting things created that improve your business.
Thanks again for reading and enjoy the rest of your day!
Clare x
Dr Clare Le Roy
