My 2024 financial goals and business plan

What I want to do in my business this year, the money I want to make and how I'm making that happen in Q1 and Q2

Last year I had a lot of fun checking in with you regularly about my business and financial plans for the year. This year I’ll be doing the same—and adding something new: a quarter-by-quarter plan on the basis of my goals.

In this post, I share my goals for my business in 2024: what I want to achieve with my business this year, what I want to experiment with, the exact money I want to make and the plans I have. I’ll also share how I’m working on these goals in the first and second quarter of this year.

2024 business and financial goals

Make money without chasing the numbers, write without focusing on conversion

When I created my list of business goals for 2024 I started with the money and number goals: what I want to make exactly this year, the number of sign-ups I’d like for Marketing without social media, the number of paid Substack subscribers I’d like.

And then this goal popped into my mind that made all of that seem paradoxical, to say the least. As I wrote in my post on choosing enough, there is a paradox to business for me: my business is a business, and one of the reasons I run it is to make money. But I know that chasing the money and the numbers makes me feel the very opposite of how I want to feel in my business. It makes me feel cramped, scarce, anxious—instead of expansive, joyful and spacious.

This goal is a reminder of how I want to feel in my business this year. I want to make money and keep an eye on achieving my annual goal, but in a light way. Similarly, I want to write and create, without wondering whether my writing or experiments will lead to conversion or sales.

Sell 5-15 spaces for Marketing without social media

My minimum goal for Marketing without social media, my new group programme that is currently underway, was 5 sign-ups. I’d settled on 5 because that felt like a big enough group to add a community element to the programme. With 5 sign-ups I’d make 5x €800 (minus payment fees) which felt like the minimum I needed to make running the programme feasible.

Once 4 people had signed up I decided to go ahead with the programme, which felt like a huge relief.

Towards the end of the launch I tweaked the number of participants for the programme: 15 felt like a lot of people to really get to know, to communicate with and support at once. Instead I settled on 10 as an intimate community is really important to me. In the end, 7 lovely people signed up and I’m so pleased to have them on board.

I’ll write a full review of how the launch went, what I’d do the same and different in the future next month, so stay tuned!

Run my group programme Marketing without social media in March-July

Because I’d set myself a minimum number of sign-ups, I wasn’t even sure yet at the beginning of the year whether the programme would run. I felt fairly confident: around thirty people had signed up for the waiting list and lots of people had shown interest in the programme.

Based on the number of people who’d signed up for the waitlist and on how interested people seemed in the whole topic of marketing without social media, I felt fairly confident.

But I also felt terrified.

In one of the behind-the-scenes podcast episodes I describe how sharing about the programme and launching it without knowing whether I’d get enough sign-ups to have it go ahead was especially scary.

It triggered an old story in me and a voice that said “what if you fail and everyone will see?!?!”. I dealt with that the best I could, but deciding to have the programme go ahead in the first weeks of February was such a relief.

I’m more interested in fostering the people that are already on my list, rather than focusing on growth.

Continue to foster community around Female Owned

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