Year in Review: What worked & what didn’t in 2023?
What's inside this post: Hide
This post is going to be a little bit different!
On a quick superficial note, you can see in the video that I have a little bit of a change in my office decor & I've got some plants on order that will be here to spruce things up and make things a little bit more green, which I'm really excited about!
It’s the little things, man.
––But I also have a confession to make about something I'm not super proud of. 😬😂
The power of a 'Word of the Year' (or lack of!)
I always thought picking a word of the year was a waste of time… and so I've never done it. There! I said it. 😮💨 Phew.
Until 2023, that is! I know that seems mind boggling to many of you, because I've actually been running my business, in some capacity, side hustling or otherwise, since 2015. To say that I haven't picked a word or theme for any year previously, seems rather odd, in retrospect. Or at least from my standpoint now.
The reason was because I thought it was a waste of time.
The reason I thought it was a waste of time, was because for me it actually was! But only because I would pick a theme that sounded good and then I'd totally forget about it. It wasn’t driving anything I was working toward, doing, thinking about, etc.
So it turns out, if you pick a word and you don't infuse it into everything you do that year, –then yes– it is a total waste of time!
The impact of focusing on 'Strategy' in my business in 2023
That said, in 2023 I picked a word of the year: “strategy.” I wanted to grow more strategically. I wanted to work more strategically. I wanted to plan more strategically. And, funny enough, I did all of those things!
Now that 2023 is over, it’s time to take a look at what choosing a theme for the year actually did for my business.
I'll show you some of the things that I'm proud of, what I learned, what didn't work, what did work, what was tough, what the biggest & smallest money-makers were, –all of the things.
I've been a graphic designer since 2006. And I've been running my business since 2015. Come along and learn with me because we're all making mistakes. Obviously. Hopefully you can learn from mine.
Reflection Tools & Resources
But before I go through that with you, let's peek at where I'm pulling these reflection questions from in case you want to do this alongside me, or do your own review! You can get a lot of what you’re seeing in today's video from these 3 affordable sources.
Artist of Life Workbook, from Lavendaire
(Not an affiliate link; I’m just a fan!)
A friend recently recommended it to me, so in Nov. or Dec. I bought the physical copy of the Artist of Life workbook. …But because I'm a total nerd/weirdo I just cannot force myself to write in it. It’s SO pretty! 😂 Partly because the physical copy also came with a digital version, which I've been using on my iPad. That said, if you’re like me & love having physical planners but struggle to ruin them with messy handwriting or find it easier to write digitally, you can buy the digital-only workbook version here for $20-ish & save yourself the same guilt.
Either way, I highly recommend it! It has great reflection questions, and I've really been enjoying going through it.
Free New Year Workbook, from Paige Brunton
🆓 Free (Not an affiliate link; I’m just a fan!)
I’m also using some of the questions from her basic business planning strategy for the new year. Her little workbook is just a PDF download that you can get for free here. It has 20 or 30 questions in it, that line up with with some of the reflection questions in the Artist of Life Workbook linked above.
Notion organization templates, from Jules Acree
Then I've adopted all of that into a template system in Notion & I've really been enjoying that so far! This year I’ve had a desire for flexibility and customizability of the organization space I’m using, plus my ClickUp space has become cluttered & my VA is already familiar with Notion so I'm using Notion more and more every day these days.
You can buy the templates from her, if you’re interested in the full system. Once I get mine set up, I’ll give you more of a peek at what that looks like. Specifically, I bought the Down to Biz Notion pack and the Design Your Year Notion pack from her shop. I also bought Nourish Notes for personal stuff, from her company’s website, Homebodies; I haven’t set up that last one yet though!
watch me fill out the review on high-speed! (start at timestamp 2:37)
Filling out the review, myself!
Now, let’s fill out this review questionnaire & then we can talk about some of the things that I wrote down!
2023 Achievements & Challenges
What am I most proud of?
I grew my YouTube channel to nearly a thousand subscribers! I think I actually would have hit 1,000 if I had planned appropriately in the fall of Q4 and been more consistent with posting videos, but I basically dropped off the face of the planet in December and that was outside of my control with holiday plans and unexpected family visiting. I basically prioritized my personal life first in December, and THEN focused on projects that I really wanted to get done before 2024, at the expense of my content marketing. So that was a purposeful choice or compromise that I made.
I hit my email subscriber growth goal for the year and surpassed it, which was awesome!
I soft-launched my small membership in July, and I've got a bunch of wonderful ladies in there right now that I absolutely love and adore hanging out with.
I stopped posting on social media in 2023. Actually, I may have stopped this some time in 2022, so I don't really remember when I actually purposefully stopped versus when I just stopped caring because I didn't have or want to make the time. Anyway, ––doesn't matter; social media was NOT a priority at all this year & it felt good!
I made about $15,000 in affiliate income, which is the most I've ever made an affiliate income in the eight years I've been running my business. So that feels like a win for me.
I also made $5,000 in digital sales from the digital template sales, mini-courses, –those kinds of things. So I'm really excited about that! Especially since the bulk of those sales came in, in the last half of the year. So that's really fun & exciting!
I also took months off of client work, –not in a row, but a lot of months off from working on custom projects for other people. So, I actually only took client work for about half of the year and I got to use that extra time to work on my own projects, such as setting up the membership and launching it, creating more productivity & process-related templates, including my much-anticipated client portal system in Notion and in ClickUp! –– I did a lot of things that were taking up too much space in my brain to continue sitting on the sidelines & finally checked them off the list.
I doubled my total revenue. This was mind-boggling for me! Taking on less custom work & still doubling my income?! Using the Profit First system has REALLY helped me with financial planning.
I also hired a part-time VA (a virtual assistant). So now I do have some help! At this point in my business, I tend to easily get distracted by shiny object syndrome & go off onto a little squirrel brain trails. I have a thought or an idea and I want to act on it right away. Then I drop other things that need to be taken care of in order to do the thing that will have the best longterm results for my business. Hiring my virtual assistant has been awesome to help keep me on track when I don’t realize I’m going off the rails. It’s forced me to create a place to write this stuff down so I don't lose the thoughts, and can work on them later.
How did my life evolve this year?
I worked nearly every day outside of my vacation days. That was a little too much for me. It didn't burn out & I'm happy about that, but I could see how it could turn into that. I want to prevent burn-out from happening or current habits from spiraling out of control. So this is something that I want to keep an eye on.
I took some time off for vacation and for family visits, about 2-3 weeks in total, time which I was almost entirely clocked out for days at a time, did no actual work & only occasionally checked my email. 😂 That’s the most I've ever taken off from my own business & it was in back to back quarters, actually. We finally went on vacation for more than half of that time, too. My husband and I went to Nova Scotia this year, which we loved.
I was also sick a lot, so 2023 was a rough year for me. I felt like my overall health declined. I don't have an answer to the ‘why’ quite yet, but I've got appointments scheduled & am on that journey now.
Lessons Learned & Ways to Improve
What worked well?
I raised my pricing for custom projects twice to keep up with my up-leveling skill set.
I also raised the price for 1:1 sessions to help limit the number of them, because while I love doing them, I just can't allow my calendar to fill up anymore.
I launched my small membership! I’m still super excited about it and I’m really happy with it so far.
I’ve only used YouTube and my blog for marketing, so I'm not doing anything else. I'm not running ads and not posting on social media. I'm relying on referrals, blog, and my YouTube channel, and it's working wonderfully!
I got some extra exposure from guest posts, which was really exciting and fun. Always love to do those guest interviews.
What didn't work well?
This is an interesting one. What was disappointing and what good came from it? I don't want to just dwell on the negative.
I wanted to record a course in December, but family decided to come visit kinda last minute notice, and some other things dropped in my lap that meant it had to take a backseat. I'm still really excited about it, but at least I was able to launch the membership!
I also was not as consistent on the blog or YouTube as I would have liked. I still grew just fine, —more so in the last half of the year when I was more consistent but it wasn’t the end of the world & that proved that it’s okay not to be perfect. I didn't need to show up every single week for 52 straight weeks in order not to lose my audience. That said, I did see a decrease in my momentum &/or audience growth in the skipped weeks, so I want to be a better planner in 2024.
I never got ahead or batch writing, recording, editing & publishing my blogs and videos. My VA & I did plan the content topics way ahead of the publishing schedule which was a big step forward, though! So I knew what I was going to do every week, but I still often struggled to get it done on time, most were done the week before it went live, sometimes just 1-2 days before it went live, so that by itself was a little bit stressful.
My time management could have been a lot better! Anna, my virtual assistant, helped me immensely, but I still have lots of room for improvement there for sure.
Some educational purchases I've not used yet and don't have time to start or finish for a while. My takeaway from that is that I have some mindset issues to work through, but I know I wanted to do it otherwise I wouldn't have purchased it. Now I know that I have it available when I do have the time. So I can make the time to do the thing, but now I also just have a lot of things to do.
What did I learn this year?
My takeaways are similar to the things I just mentioned, but I also learned:
I can run a stress free business that I love and still be financially stable. 2023 was a wild & scary year for a lot of people across the globe. For me though, I’ve just felt fortunate that that’s not been my experience this year. This year was a really tough year for a lot of people, and I do not take my experience for granted.
I can make good money, without working myself to death & being stressed. Since I more than doubled my revenue this year, it was the best year I've had so far. I’m now even more confident that I can have a good year without being stressed about having a good year.
I need to manage my time a lot better. This is a big one for me, because I am not so good at managing my time these days. I feel like I have squirrel-brain to the max. —Think Doug from the movie Up.
2023 Business Performance & Financial Review
My main takeaways are:
I still need to manage my time a lot better. I find that I still go down rabbit holes a little too easily.
I still love what I do, I love my business & I love my audience! Nothing felt too hard or stressful or unfortunate for me this year. No mistakes made or failures experienced this year have changed my overall feeling about my business & its success or growth plans. It only got even better for me this year!
I got a lot of great feedback & validation this year from students & my audience in general, that they genuinely enjoying my teaching style, which is incredible & validating! Seeing that constant feedback encourages me to keep putting in all the effort, because these YouTube videos, especially when they go along with a weekly blog post, ––they ain't easy! And they are super time consuming, so I really do appreciate the feedback. Thank you!
What did I not like about running my business this year?
I actually didn't have much to add here and it was really hard to think of anything to add to this list!
I had too many meetings on my calendar, in general. That is still a work in progress, and it’s already a lot better now than it was by Q3 of 2023.
I had so many new ideas and I tended to feel scattered or chaotic while trying to juggle too much at once. This is a very common complaint of a lot of entrepreneurs; not just myself. So I don't feel bad about it ––it’s just who we are, and I think that’s what keeps us going down this path! But that is definitely something that I need to create a better system for.
I need to brain dump the idea, so that I won’t forget it, then go back to what I need to work on at that time that’s already been planned or scheduled. Then, when I can make the time, I can pick up those ideas later, and that will also give me time to marinate on whether ALL of those ideas are actually good ones for MY business, or just spur of the moment sparks that will fizzle with time.
I lost track of my systems, and things began to feel messy by Q3 and Q4. That's typical throughout the year, but this year, it happened a little earlier? I think partly because I brought on my VA in August. So it was like at the start or middle of Q3, and introducing that team organization was a hiccup I wasn't as ready for as I thought I would be? 🤪
I wasn't as consistent with my content marketing as I had liked to be, which I've already mentioned. YouTube videos take a lot of time to film, edit, and post a readable version on a blog. So again, this stuff takes hours to do, right? Just because what you see is a video anywhere between 8-45 minutes long, does not include the time it took to film, edit the video, transcribe the video into a readable blog post, then edit the blog post, post it, create all the thumbnails, optimize the YouTube video for the channel, ––all the things.
Right now I'm not at the point yet where I want to spend the money to hire it out. It's really hard to find a good video editor that knows your content well enough to know what to keep vs edit out in your content. So I would rather allocate that money and attention to my assistant instead, at this point. Basically, I'm not yet at the point where I want to have both.
What did I hate working on?
I can't say that I really hated anything about this year. I really thought hard about that. I could not think of a single thing. I'm really grateful for not having anything on that list.
What was tough to manage or deal with?
Feeling sick so often. I tried a bunch of different things, but found it really hard to pinpoint what triggered it. Nothing life or death, but it really did hold me back from doing some basic everyday things because I wasn't sure how my body would react. I’m thankful for the experience though, because I think it’s given me a totally new perspective on how I need to take care of myself.
Managing my time was really tough because, again, I have so many big projects and ideas that I really want to work on but there's only so much time in the day.
One large factor is my work schedule. Since I’m flexible, I flex my workweek around my husband’s unusual work hours, because his ‘weekends’ aren’t on both Saturdays and Sundays; it’s always split between a weekend day and a week day, which for me, means that I typically only have 4 full week days if I want to spend time with him on his days off. That's been a little hard to navigate, and for those of you with a significant other that work unusual hours, you know what I'm talking about!
Deciding what to work on and when was a big issue for me, simply because I wanted to work on ALL of it. But trying to manage doing all the things is hard and difficult and you (we) should not do that. 😂 I should not have either, and I think if I hadn’t tried to do that so often last year, I would’ve been able to accomplish or finish more of my wish lists.
Taking care of myself, mentally and physically. Just making sure that I am making time for self care, so I can continue to be here for you!
What did I avoid doing, but should’ve done?
Updating the SEO on my website. That was something I had really wanted to do earlier in the year, and now it's January of the following year and I still haven't done it yet because ultimately it took a backseat to everything else I worked on instead. I don't know if I was avoiding it on purpose necessarily, but I definitely didn't purposefully give it the priority level required to get it done.
Updating the design of my site. My website is technically “old” in terms of the age of the internet & not fully taking advantage of Squarespace’s many new updates as I’ve prioritized basically everything else, before my own site. Many of the main pages needed to be redesigned, some more than others and I was ready for a refresh on some of the styling too. I finally started in December of 2023, actually, but it's still a work in progress.
Task management cleanup. I really need to schedule time throughout the year to continually audit my softwares, organizational methods & task management, so I can wrangle them back under control periodically throughout the year, ––rather than in bulk at the end of the year. Waiting that long makes it feel daunting! Ideally, this might look like minimal cleanup 1x a week or 1x a month, bigger cleanup 1x a quarter if needed, then an audit of what’s working or what’s not working at the end of the year to help simplify everything down to JUST doing what we need, and nothing else.
I need to get better at batching my content marketing. I’ve avoided this like the plague. I just did not ever want to sit down to record topics back-to-back-to-back, because I hadn’t planned my time for that. When I put it off until 3-4pm in the afternoon, that's not when I’m finally ready to do multiple videos. 😂 If I’m actually going to batch properly, I need to sit down some time before lunch and get it all done by 4p or 5p so that I have time left in the day for other things. Also, at the end of the day, I'm starting to feel rushed because I know my husband's going to come home & the house won’t be quiet enough to record anymore. And when he gets home, I’m mentally switching gears anyway, thinking about what we're going to do for dinner, or making time to take my dog for a walk before it gets dark. ––I'm not in business mode anymore at that point and it’s harder for me to focus on whatever I’m working on.
How did I feel in the business this year?
The three words that immediately came to mind were confident, comfortable, and excited. I can't really complain about anything, because those are all really positive.
What do I want to change?
My time management, consistency, and delegation. You see a theme here??! 🤣 I feel like I've mentioned those themes once or twice already.
What felt like a time-suck, –or wasted money?
Buying courses & just sitting on them for too long. 1 or 2 of the courses I purchased this year, I bought knowing I did not have time to take them when I purchased, but I wanted to have them available when I could make time. That said, in order for them NOT to be wasted money, I have to actually go back & do the lessons –finish the courses. Sometimes if I let a whole year, or part of a year, pass when I've done that it feels like wasted money because I didn't actually use it in the same fiscal year it was purchased. So that's something I struggle with, even though intellectually, I know that's not necessarily the case.
I also joined a membership, which I've not engaged in as much as I would’ve liked, and then canceled my membership in it as of this year.
see the certificate issued by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; play the video to hear a blurb about that process at timestamp 24:00
What felt like time &/or money well spent?
Hiring my virtual assistant. Hands down! That was one of the best things I did all year.
Trademarking my business name. I actually paid for that in 2022; I hired Paige Hulse of Creative Law Shop to help me with that process because I just did not want to do it by myself, and I actually got the trademark in mid 2023, a year later. It takes a long time these days! So THIS year, a year after I started that process, it finally felt like money well spent. Actually, you can see the plaque on my bookshelf behind me in the video for this post!
My new office furniture. I ordered a couple of new bookshelves. That's one of them right there in the corner, behind me in the photo. There's another one that kind of matches it on the other side of the window, and that extra storage space allows me to declutter the corner shelf of stuff like notebooks and baskets full of office supplies & other miscellaneous junk, at least in the view of what you get to see behind me & what I see most often behind me in client calls, etc. So I’m really excited about the office furniture! ––And my new plants. Did I mention my new plants? I'm really excited about my new plants!
Setting up the membership and investing in the software to run it, spending time getting to know my members, ––all of that feels like money well spent! I love helping my members. I love to troubleshoot with them, I like to see them every month on our live group calls. It's just been a really positive and great experience for me.
Cleaning & reorganizing the rest of the house. We're in an old 1890s New England farmhouse & it’s been partially renovated before we moved in, …but we’re not impressed with the results. Nothing is efficient or functional for the size of the space, there’s ZERO storage or space for ANYthing! It’s perfectly livable, but it’s one of those things that takes up space in my brain & clogs it with additional to-dos, or can’ts. So in the interim, before we began the renovation process, I bought some temporary storage furniture just to get us by until we can fix the many irritations, ––which makes me ridiculously happy and it freed up brain space for me.
Looking Ahead: Goals & Aspirations for 2024
What do I want my life to look like in 2024?
My word of the year, ––and I probably should have started with this–– is wellness, both in my business and in my personal life. I really want to focus more on taking time for self care and forming better habits that will move me toward that, both in my personal life and in my business life.
I also want fewer meetings on my calendar. It's not that I don't love meeting with people –I actually do! But I just had so many meetings last year. I often had at least 1 or 2 meetings, 3 or 4 days out of the week! And that really does put a damper on my productivity levels, because I feel like I'm constantly running up against a clock where I have to stop and refocus to do something else. That's not great for my productivity, so I need either fewer meetings or to batch them more efficiently.
I also want fewer client projects, or at least the same amount of client projects. Last year, I only did custom client work for about HALF of the year and I would like to repeat that this year, so I’ll have lots of time to dedicate towards the education side of my business, which I'm also really excited about.
I would like to set aside time to work on my projects again this year, so I have dedicated time to create more educational content
I also want more time totally off of work and away from my desk. I’ve developed a bad habit of working every single day of the week, even during the weekends. As I mentioned before, working with & around your significant other’s work schedule can be tricky when you can be more flexible than they can. When he's home on a Saturday or Sunday AND on a Friday or Monday, I find myself trying to catch up on one of the days that I missed during my actual work week, which often means I tend to work every day, even on weekends, for at least an hour or two. That's NOT a habit that I want to keep. I want more time away from my desk, so when I wake up in the morning, my office is not the first place I sit down & my email is not the first thing I check.
I want to create time for hobbies again! I do love my work, and I do love my job, but I also need to make sure that I prioritize myself and my free space. My business is a hobby too, in a way, but it’s not my only love in this life and in order to live my ideal life in 2024, I want to pick those back up again.
I need to get better at delegation. My assistant and I will sit down and decide what additional things she could do or what I need to drop entirely.
I want to set up better funnels for my passive income sources. Now that I have some digital products, I can set up funnels to help guide my audience a little bit more effectively, and direct them to the various places they can get more help from me. I did buy a course for this specifically, and I want to actually finish it & implement.
What would I do in 2024 if I couldn't fail?
Grow my YouTube channel to 2,000 subscribers this year. If I could get more than 2k subscribers, that would be amazing! But realistically, based on my past growth I'm pretty sure I reach 2,000 this year and gain another 1,000+/- in the next 12 months.
Grow my email list to 5,000 subscribers. With recent growth, I feel like that’s a realistic number to aim for.
Grow my membership, and add more exclusive educational material in it.
Create and sell my website template(s) this year. I’ve got BIG dreams for what I want to offer, and I haven’t seen anything else quite like it, so we’ll see how that goes!
Those are all BIG goals, and they don’t include my smaller ones so I don't know if I'll be able to tackle all of that in one year or not but I'm definitely going to try! So stay tuned & I'll check in next year to see how things went.
What am I not willing to do/experience to have my ideal year?
I'm not willing to experience burnout, stress, or bad health. Getting sick again is not an option. Forgetting to move my body because I get too busy is not an option. Cannot allow myself to get burnt out or stressed because I’m not taking better care of myself.
Doing too much myself. I need to drop a few things that are either redundant or can be done by my VA. I need to make time to audit my tasks to see what I actually need to keep doing and what I can drop completely or delegate.
What was the biggest money maker?
I know everybody's curious!
Client work was my biggest source of income this year, making up about 50% of it, ––even though I only worked for half of the year on client projects.
Affiliate income was the second largest this year, for the first time EVER in my 8 years of business. So that was really exciting & totally unexpected. I had not anticipated that or planned for it, it just sort of happened!
If I can repeat both of those percentages this year at a minimum, I would be very happy.
What was the smallest money maker?
This was digital sales for me this year, but I'm actually really happy with that number! Because it really only represents about 6-ish months worth of actual sales, so that's pretty incredible to go from maybe $1,000 to $2,000 all year, to almost $6,000 in about 6 months! Especially when you consider that none of my templates cost more than $200/ea, as of time of recording, and most of them didn’t even launch until the summer, or later in the year.
This was definitely a small win for me, and again, ––not planned. But it just goes to show that you NEED an audience to sell low-ticket products, because you need those extra eyes in order for the average conversion rate to make the effort worth your while.
What’s next?!
Whew! That was a little longer than I thought it would be, but I'm happy to be able to share all of that with you. Last year was a really good year, overall. I had very minor complaints, in the grand scheme of things.
There wasn't anything super stressful other than just my own lack of planning, because I just get so damn excited about everything! All of my ideas that take up space in my brain get me excited to show up for you (& for me), but I want to work on them, like yesterday ––and all day until it’s done–– so I have fun with them, but if I can rein that back in, I think 2024 will be a much more effective year.
I took Business by Design by James Wedmore three years ago now, and I really feel like I'm at another turning point now where I need to redesign what my business looks like. It’s time to redesign the way that I want my business to feel, look and run.
So it's time for some tweaks there!
Also, as of posting, I have my sizing kit Oura ring on to test & find the right size. So the real ring is currently on its way to me! Really excited about that. It's going to contribute toward my wellness journey by helping me figure out what feels stressful to my body vs my mind, and develop some better mindful & healthy habits this year. Really putting my money where my mouth is on this one! If you're interested in learning more about the Oura ring leave a comment below, and maybe I’ll do a review after I've been using it for a few months.
If this candid review was helpful for you in finding your own planning resources, learning how I did this year, and seeing some inspiration, let me know in the comments!
I never want to share something like this with the intention of it sounding like, “Oh, look at how awesome I am!”
My goal is always to share what’s realistically possible or attainable with a bit of determination, consistency & focus. I loved watching these kinds of videos when I was first started my business, because I wanted to know what the goals could even be.
Being a 9-5-er for most of my adult life and then moving into entrepreneurship in 2015 after about 10 years being an employee in someone else’s business, ––I didn't even know what to aspire to!
What's too big of a goal? Is there such a thing, really? What's realistic to achieve in a year? Two years? Five?
To see something like this where I can say I reached my specific goals this year, and they weren’t mind-bogglingly HUGE or scary, to share what did or didn't work, what am I learning about myself along the way, ––I really hope that's helpful for you and that I'm not just like blabbing on for 6,000 words. 😂
Anyway if this was helpful for you, please let me know in the comments below.
