THE $300K YEAR THAT WASN'T
Half-way through last financial year (aka December 31st 2020, for us here in Australia) I was on-track for a $300K year in this here business
Psst, if you want to catch my reflections on past financial years, you can find them here and here)
I’d made $144,620.31 in revenue ($79,010.48 of which was profit 🥳) and I had plans to scale.
Problem was, I was also smack bang in the middle of a felt-sick-the-whole-damn-time pregnancy.
To put it in context, my obstetrician was still stitching me up and popping pain relief tablets up my bum (yep, they don’t tell you about *that* little chestnut in the brochures...) when I declared I’d never felt more glorious, requested a very large dinner, and started plotting my return to Thursday morning hill sprints.
In short, while I’d had my most profitable 6 months in business (note that I didn’t say "best" — more on this later!), I felt like this:
Realising I had a choice between hitting an impressive financial goal *or* giving myself adequate time to writhe around on the bathroom floor every day (*ooo* sexy), I chose the latter—
And, on my first day back at work in 2021, closed my books and let that $300K dream die a happy death—
Knowing the only money that would come in for the rest of the year was scheduled payments for my group programs plus whatever I’d make from the beta launch of the the Social Proof Sidekick (I'd had grand plans to build out a glorious evergreen funnel for this product, paid traffic and all, after the beta launch was done, but only got a super-duper-low-key one up and running before I rolled off on mat leave. Traffic has been abysmal, but conversion rates have been excellent!) and any sales of The Mirror Journal.
Ipso facto, by the time the financial year wrapped on June 30, my numbers had slowed right up, coming in at just $183,362.48 of revenue and $76,557.70 of profit.
Juuuust in case you’re eyeing off those figures and thinking I’ve got a low profit ratio, it’s worth noting that my own salary accounted for $73K of my expenses, so I still consider this profit margin a win!
It means I only spent $32K on everything else, from product design (which was the biggest expense, at just over $13K, and worth every penny) to software subscriptions, Stripe fees, VA costs, and everything in between.
→ Quick side note while we're on the subject of expenses: ThriveCart was BY FAR the best business tool I bought myself this year. It makes optimising checkout, offering upsells, calculating relevant taxes, splitting profit in partnerships, and tracking your data ridiculously, *GLORIOUSLY* easy, and I literally badgered their sales team to allow me to become an affiliate for their lifetime offer (and am clearly not afraid to admit it ). So, if you’re looking for a platform that does all of that, may I suggest you check it out here.
All in all, I actually earned about 1.5k less than last financial year, and had just over 3k more in expenses (excluding salary).
Obviously the aforementioned shitey shitey preggo feels were the biggest factor in where my numbers ended up, but it’s also worth noting the change in USD to AUD exchange rate meant I earned approximately 10 cents less on every dollar compared to last financial year, which works out to about $18k in total.
Am I disappointed I didn’t at least crack the $200K mark?
Honestly, yep: a little, for no other reason than it seemed like such a sure thing at the start of the year.
But you know what?
I reckon it’s so important to consider finances as just one aspect of success... after all, what’s a pile of money *really* worth if you’ve had to become a burnt-out shell of a human in order to get it?
Business for me has never been about growth at all costs, but rather a way of working that supports the life I want (or need) to lead at any given time.
And, while I didn’t necessarily want to spend *quite* so much time on the bathroom floor these past 12 months, the fact that I could do it without worrying about work piling up while I was down for the count was such a relief—
Which, in its own way, was a glorious thing.
As I reflected on all these numbers, I got to thinking that "best" in the online business world has somehow come to mean "most profitable"—
My best launch.
My best project.
My best year—
Even if *getting* those profits costs you (sometimes dearly) in other ways.
So, can I double-dare you to take some time out to define what ‘best’ *actually* means for you?
Maybe it's a launch that attracts the kind of humans who are a dream to work with...
Or a project that lets you flex your creative muscle in new and exciting ways...
Or a year that wraps around you like a big, warm, hug, lifting you up instead of wearing you down.
Seriously!
Think about it.
Write it down.
And then delight in chasing after that thing, regardless of how it stacks up to the 'bigger is better' mentality.
To setting your own course (...and knowing more than you might've ever wanted to about post-birth pain management)😉