As I mark the end of my first calendar year in business, I realize that I have spent quite a bit of time preparing for 2018. At the start of the 4th quarter, I attended a mastermind retreat where we focused on what was next for our businesses.
We used the book Double, Double by Cameron Herold, to create our vivid vision for what our businesses and our lives could be like in three years. As I pondered what I wanted, I realized that I wanted to focus more on slow and sustainable growth over 2018 — the kind of growth that would allow me to dramatically increase my take home pay.
I already pay myself a reasonable salary, but over the last year I’ve been working on my money mindset. Through this, I’ve come to see money more as a tool to accomplish the things I want for me and my family. I’ve also come to equate money with freedom. The end result is that I want more usable tools and freedom!
To accomplish this goal, I need to slowly increase my monthly revenue throughout 2018 until I reach approximately $24,000 per month. This is about a 40% increase from my average revenue this year, so it’s definitely ambitious but still very achievable.
I did a bit of backwards math here by starting with my desired take home pay and then figuring out taxes, regular business expenses, contractor expenses, and any major planned expenditures for the year.
I used a few resources to figure out my ideal personal budget including Tim Ferris’s. This was very helpful in determining what that take home pay should be. The goal here is to figure out all the things you’d add to your life if you had the funds. The final number was higher than what I pay myself now but not quite as high as I imagined. However it allows for some healthy savings amounts and added luxuries like a part time personal assistant/household help, weekly massages, and slowly replacing my wardrobe with only things I love.
After this helpful exercise, I sat down to consider how to start. The first thing I realized was that I need to increase my team support in very strategic ways. I already have an amazing assistant who is invaluable for my business, but I need more of her time. I also need to increase the basic admin support for both of us, so we could focus more of our time and energy on the truly specialized aspects of the work and not waste time on any lower level admin tasks.
I also considered what the next additions to the team would be as revenue increases. I noticed a need many of my clients have is additional graphic design for their established brands. Many of them don’t need a designer regularly so having this available within my packages would be a great add-on.
Similarly, I do a lot of content drafting of blog posts, opt ins, landing pages and email sequences. While creating these with clients is something I am good at and enjoy, adding a copy editor to help make them even better would be a great addition to the mix. This isn’t essential now, but as the business grows it will help me provide even more value to my clients.
After all of these plans, as tempting as it was to start increasing the client load immediately I decided to make the fourth quarters focus optimizing and streaming our current systems and processes. My business grew very quickly and is mostly referral based.
As such. I haven’t spent as much time as I should have on systems like lead follow-up, client onboarding, and off-boarding, but, as I switch from primarily a solopreneur with limited team support to leading a small team, these systems will become essential to ensure that I continue to provide excellent service to every client all the time.
I also evaluated my offerings to ensure they match the new direction we are heading. With a focus on scaling and sustainability, it became obvious that I will need to eliminate my smallest
package as an option for new clients and watch another offering closely over the upcoming months to ensure it continues to fit into the new plan.
I also took steps to finish transitioning my last few hourly clients to packages and reassessed each client to ensure they would be served well in the future. I’ve been very cautious and intentional about the clients I’ve taken on so this was a pretty painless process.
The end result was a very thoughtful and well laid out plan with specific next steps to start executing. The fourth quarter has been a slow and steady march towards completing a variety of projects intended to set the team up for a strong and successful start of 2018.
A few of our action items are:
- A detailed task list of what we provide for clients as well as clear processes for who and how they get executed.
- A deliverables deadline list so we can clearly communicate common turnarounds to clients and ensure they understand how long things will take to complete.
- An updated onboarding process including a welcome packet, contract templates and a clean actionable system for the entire team to follow
- A revenue plan for 2018 with specific monthly targets to consistently stair step the revenue from the current average to the desired average. Again the focus here is sustainable scaling to ensure we do not sacrifice quality or sanity in the process.
- A detailed analysis of current capacities of all team members based on existing client workloads. This allowed me to determine what capacity, if any, we currently had to add clients as we approach the start of 2018 with all the foundational pieces in place.
Going through this process was invaluable for me. I’ve assisted clients with this exercise many times, but never completed it for my own business. This process brings so much clarity it’s amazing! It also helps solidify what your business needs in order to accomplish those next steps, whatever they are.
I am so excited to see that 2018 holds and to move towards my goals. As I progress, I’ll be sharing lessons learned with all of you, I also encourage you to comment with your own 2018 goals as well as any questions on this process!