A check-in with my business and financial goals for 2023

Behind the scenes in my business, sharing my lessons and numbers

In April, I wrote about the business and financial goals I’d set myself for this year. Five months on, it’s time for a check-in and to share how I’m doing on reaching my goals in my business, including the money I’m making. I’m also sharing some lessons I learnt around growing my newsletter list, making money in general and booking clients.

This post is a detailed one, so grab a cup of tea and settle in—or scroll down to the goal you’re most interested in 😉

My 2023 business goals

#1 Make money with my business every month

When I wrote my first 2023 goals-post in April, this felt like a very vulnerable goal. I was just coming out of a year of recovery and recalibration, emerging from a period of clinical depression and gaining trust that I could indeed have a fulfilling life, and business, while at the same time having the rest and space I need. Setting this goal felt important to me at the time, a kind of promise to myself.

I’m pleased with not setting a monthly goal here, as in a particular amount. Accomplishing it would take very little, really: even a €2 donation would have been enough. That took the pressure off me considerably.

Progress with this goal so far: eight months in, I’m on track with this goal. And as I wrote in April, 2023 is looking to be the best financial year in my business to date.

A note on setting goals and having control—or, dealing with the black box

2023 isn’t the first year that I set business and financial goals. But it’s the first year that I genuinely feel good about the goals. Partially this is because they felt based on something, rather than random numbers just picked out of thin air. But this list also feels good because the goals feel do-able.

The tricky thing with goals is that there is a limit to how much control we have over achieving them. I used to only set goals that I knew I could stick to: goals around saving money, for instance, or around how movement I would get. I knew I could stick to the goals because I’d achieved them before, or because I could use my willpower to reach them (which, by the way, I’ve learned to not use anymore, because as great as willpower can be, it has run me into the ground multiple times over the past decade).

Real goals, goals that feel expansive and exciting, are much harder to control—especially when it comes to money. Despite all of the advice out there telling you how to make six figures, how to book X number of new clients, how to make sales in your sleep—all of that advice leaves out that when it comes to making money as small business owners and freelancers, there’s only so much we can do. You can pitch as many projects to potential clients as you want, but not have a single one accepted. You can share about your art all over the internet, and not make a single sale. You can write amazing newsletters and have amazing mentoring skills, and not have a single person signing up.

This is hard. And we all go through it. With all of that advice out there—with people making it look so easy—we might think it is our fault. Obviously, we’ve not gone about it the right way. We need to work more and harder. We need to implement a new system. Hire another coach. Redo our website.

But there’s only so much control that we have over making our goals happen. I often think of marketing, gaining (paid and free) subscriptions and booking clients as a process that has a large black box in the centre.

The only thing I can control is my input. The newsletters I write, the way I share about my mentoring, how and whether people find me is what I can control. But whether people subscribe to my newsletters, upgrade to paid, book a mentoring session—very little control. It depends on so many factors that I don’t know about but that influence people’s decision-making: their own financial position, their energy levels, their plans for today, this week, this month, the way they’re currently feeling about themselves and their business, the wellbeing of the people they love and much more. That’s the black box.

I love thinking in terms of the black box, because it takes away any feelings of self-blame. It allows me to show up in the world with my business in a way that feels good and serves me, without tying the worth of how I show up in with the results.

#2 Launch paid subscriptions on Substack

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