2022 Year in Review

Structure

Hi Bestie. This is a long ass blog post, so before we start, I want to share how it's going down.

We will start with an intro and on what my goals were and where my mindset was in January 2022. Then, I'm doing a month-by-month breakdown of revenue, so we can discuss launches and promos. In that section, I'll have a lesson learned from each month.

Below that, I'll have a section on expenses and profit before turning to goals and intentions to 2023, which should be fun because then I'll have those thoughts as the starting point for this same blog next year.

Intro

I almost stopped writing this about five times because it was dreadfully boring to be honest. But I typed away thinking it might be helpful to someone. Very honestly though, I thought it a necessary exercise for myself going into 2023 annual planning. 

With that out of way, let's hit it.

Some goals I noted in January 2022.

• 25 PR spots per quarter
• Focus on podcast downloads and growth
• Strive for $15,000 in monthly revenue

Beyond those, my main intention was revenue consistency .

A "PR spot" could be any promotion we get outside our own channels except like similar tags on social. This is mainly getting on other people's podcast and participating in bundles and summits. It could also be guest blogs, publication features, and the like.

"The comeback year" is about the best summation I could give for 2022. After bringing in $140,000 in 2020 and dropping to around $95,000 in 2021, I had to do some digging to make some serious changes. Most of those changes happened in fall of 2021 with the launch of Profit Rx.

Here's a simple growth to see the growth of the business. The step back in 2021 didn't feel great, but one step backward, two steps forward. If I can continue to average a three to one growth trajectory, I'll be happy.

I moved from a primarily course-based business model to a membership model. My primary intentions for 2022 were revenue consistency month-to-month, growing the membership, and passing my 2020 revenue level.

Check, check, and check. 

While I didn’t hit my big number goals, more on that in a moment, I did meet each of these intentions. On the theme, of consistency, I think this graph shows a lot:

January was a high month. Then, the next six months, I made between $9,400 and $13,800 each month. In Q4, we saw a consistent uptick, doing $17,000, $22,000, and $19,000ish in the last three months respectively.

Looking back, I’m pretty pleased with how 2022 turned out despite being fairly short of my original revenue goals. I consider this more of a lesson in goal setting than failure. In tracking my numbers more diligently than ever and preparing for my monthly profit reports on the podcast, I’ve learned a lot and have gotten much better at making projections in my business.

My original revenue goals for the year were:

• Good: 200,000
• Better: 225,000
• Best: 250,000

And, I wanted to hit $15,000 each month in revenue.

With that in mind, I’m going to share my revelations, tweaks, launches, and the like in a month-to-month format.

January

In November, 2021 I launched, for the first time, my signature program, Profit Rx. The original price point was $75 per month. This set me up with about $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) coming into 2022. 

I’d set a goal to hit $15,000 in revenue each month. With the MRR, I knew I’d have to make $9,000ish in additional sales each month. That was pretty lofty, probably too lofty.

But, I made it happen in January mostly due to the launch of the Contract Vault, which brought in $6,500.

More on the Contract Vault

I’d been wanting a high-converting, low-ticket offer in my business for a while but just hadn’t cracked the code. Essentially, I wanted something that would sell so well organically, that it’d bring in new leads and trickles of revenue everyday with minimal effort on my own part.

I already had a contract course, called Unf*ck Your Contracts priced $300 but not frequently promoted. I sold maybe 5-10 of them in 2021.

Mid-January, I was brainstorming creative ways to hit my $15,000 figure, I thought, let’s try a contracts thing. I dropped the price all the way to $30, so ten times less. I had a handful of business friends tell me they thought it was a terrible idea. I did it anyway. And I had another key realization.

No one wants to take a course on contracts. People just want contracts to work.

So I re-messaged the thing too. It went from “a contracts course with contract templates” to “a bank of contracts templates with optional course videos.” While the price is what made the Vault a no-brainer, the message shift also made a world of difference, I think.

And with that, I achieved my goal, a high-converting, low-ticket offer that brings in new leads each day. We sold 1,118 Contract Vaults in 2022.

A quick note, we just rebranded the Vault. It is now the Contract Club. Yay! The rebrand is a story for another post.

Lessons Learned

• Low ticket high volume can sometimes be the most profitable route.
• Sometimes it's all about the messaging.

February

This is where the cracks started to show on my lofty $15,000 per month goal. I made a bit north of $9,000 in February, so I set a goal to do $20,000 in March to get to my average of $20,000. Spoiler, that didn’t happen. But I had a good reason behind this goal setting.

You see, in the last year or so, I ran my business with bigger launch cycles. I’d tell myself “well I only made $5,000 this month, but I have a big launch coming up.” If the big launch didn’t pan out, now I was really SOL as I’d likely let my accounts drain in the meantime with an intent to make it up later.

I set an intention to be more goal oriented on a tighter timeline, once per month. This would keep me more accountable and less complacent. And ultimately, this mindset and effort is what helped, in large part, bring about more consistent revenue month-to-month. I simply set the target too high.

In February, the push to $15k included a promotion for what we called the Tax Season Playbook, which was a new version of my old, free Tax Challenge. Now, we’ve included that content across two different programs, the Bookkeeping Blueprint and the Tax Toolbox.

My hope was to sell 100 Playbooks at $50. We ended up with 35 sales, so quite a bit short, which was the difference between actual revenue and goal revenue.

Lessons Learned

Revenue pushes each month do help me stay motivated, but it also helps me figure out what will and won’t sell. To improve in 2023, we will capitalize on what did work and scrap what didn’t work, or re-message the things that didn’t work like we did with the Contract Vault.

Here’s hoping the Tax Toolbox and Bookkeeping Blueprint take off in 2023.

March

In March, I decided to try something new to address a few potential retention issues I saw in Profit Rx. First of all, many folks simply weren’t attending our coworking calls and Q&As. They just weren’t active participants. (We’ve implemented new strategies since to help with this) Second, some people made it clear they wanted the content in the program but more so on an on-demand basis rather than having an intent to go through it like a course.

To help with retention issues, we introduce a lower tier to Profit Rx at $30/month. I simply called it the content-only tier. We offered this as a downgrade option to our members so they could keep access to the content for when they needed it without access to the support in the program.

I did a mini-launch for this with an “anti-webinar.” It was essentially just a pitch where the marketing message was “join me to learn about an awesome, new low ticket offer.

Here’s a snapshot of the membership of the content-only tier for March and the rest of the year:

As you can see, the membership made a bell curve of sorts. We promoted it for a few months and then stopped. I’ll discuss that more in the coming months.

We also had $2,200 in affiliate revenue for the month of March, which helped us get up to $12,000 for the month, a far cry from that $20,000 I'd hoped for after falling short of the February goal. This is when I knew we weren't getting the average up to $15,000 anytime soon.

Lessons Learned

A low-ticket, high volume business model seems like a viable strategy for my business as evidenced by Vault sales (350 over three months) and the content-only membership.

Also, 25 PR spots per quarter would be a stretch. We hit the goal in Q1, which was a great way to kickstart the year. It felt like the business was everywhere. But it felt unsustainable moving forward without more strategy around the goal. For 2023, we've updated this goal to getting, consistently 5 PR spots per month. January will probably be a couple higher.

April

Part of our content-only launch spilled into April. We had 10 folks join on the annual plan and did little other promotion beyond that. Revenue for the month was close to $10,500 with almost 80% of revenue coming from the two tiers of Profit Rx. It was otherwise a chill month.

Lessons Learned

This month I discovered something I now call my baseline revenue. It’s the amount you, or I, can reasonably expect to make each month with little extra effort. In other words, what do you expect to make doing what you would normally do each week? For me, that’s a weekly podcast episode, a guest spot on someone else’s podcast every few weeks, a weekly email, and about 3-4 social media posts per week.

Determining baseline revenue can be a huge help in budgeting because you have a better feel for what you have to spend. It’s easier to find this if you have recurring revenue offers. Otherwise, you will also need to consider trends in peak and slow seasons.

May

In May, I made an intentional choice to not really push to pass baseline revenue. Instead, we focused on some promotions and projects that’d pay off down the road.

One project was launching our affiliate program. By year end, we were consistently paying out $500 in affiliate commissions each month resulting in, around, $1,000 in additional monthly revenue. Our goal in 2023 is to double this, and I’ve assigned this as a KPI (key performance indicator for my marketing manager).

We also ran a couple of affiliate promotions to segments of our email list in May which would provide payouts in later months.

Lessons Learned

Sometimes you gotta just let your audience breathe. This is something I chatted with my friend Claire Pelletreau about on one of our podcast interviews. She said she’d be concerned about list fatigue if she were constantly promoting like I was to hit that original $15k monthly goal. 

I replied that it was a legitimate concern and was something I balanced along with my monthly push goal. If I weren’t at all close a week out, I’d scrap it. If I were really, really close, maybe I could just send a few DMs to follow up on past leads. It’d give me something to reach for, but I wouldn’t prioritize immediate revenue over long term drawbacks.

June

June was the peak of our content-only tier membership growth. We’d participated in a few bundles and summits where our contribution was a free month inside the membership. This is something I probably won’t do again for two reasons.

One, if folks signup for a free trial where they will be autocharged after month one, they have to provide payment details up-front. People, understandably, don’t want to do that in bundle offers and in other scenarios where they’re getting lots of stuff included in one price already paid. When we require payment detail, we get a lot fewer signups from these PR activities. It’s essentially trading more leads for more immediate revenue, BUT…

Two, retention in these cases tends to be terrible. I need to do a better job tracking this, but it’s always apparent in the first month or two after folks' free months end. The cancellations begin to roll. For this reason, the trade off of leads for members likely isn’t worth it.

Lessons Learned

The best audience growth and conversion strategy is likely to just get the leads and then go back to slowly nurturing them through the podcast, weekly emails, and social content. Retention is much better when people make a very conscious decision to join a subscription offer.

July

This was a relatively unremarkable month. We didn’t do any promotions. I did two 1-on-1s, brought in some affiliate revenue, and started preparing for our affiliate launching of Amy Porterfield’s Digital Course Academy which would run the end of August through early September.

Lessons Learned

I doubt I learned this lesson in July, but it’s something I’ve thought about this year, so we’re just plugging it in here. Here’s what I’ve learned. 

Within two days, I can usually tell if an offer, promotion, new course, etc will be a hit. There’s always signs. Are people buying? That’s the biggest one. But also, am I getting email replies? Are people asking questions in the DMs?

If it’s crickets, it’s either:

• The wrong offer,
• The wrong time, or
• The wrong message

The Contract Vault example above was a great one of a wrong message pivot. Wrong offer could be selling a course when people just want a training or a training when people just want a 1-on-1 service. And wrong time is obvious.

The counter to this is that sometimes we have to ask ourselves “Is it one of these three or did I just do a shitty job promoting this thing.” That’s what I ask myself before I totally scrap anything.

If a promo is falling flat two days in, I can then run through this analysis and decide if I want to make some tweaks to get back on track, lower expectations, or just scrap it altogether. In 2022, I did each of these at some point.

August

After a few years, I’ve noticed August has been a consistently solid revenue month. My guess is that it’s the end of summer break, new school year, all that kind of thing, almost like new years 2.0. I’ve started doing some impromptu promotions in August.

For this one, I did a push for one-on-one clients, which brought in $5,000.

We also started a mini-promotion to bring in new, annual members into Profit Rx.. Most of those sales actually came in September.

This revenue push was needed to make up summer deficits really from increased expenses spent on Drag Tax (more on that below) and also to save for fall investments. August ended up being the highest year-to-date revenue month at almost $15,000.

Lessons Learned

Keep planning some kind of promotion in August. It’s a good month to sell but is also early enough not to take away from our big, late fall launch, but also keep it flexible. Which way are the winds blowing in July?

September

In early September, we wrapped up our affiliate launch for Digital Course Academy. I’d say it went just ok. We have 4 affiliate sales on our goal of 10. With a $1,000 per sale commission, that’s nothing to sneeze at, but we did do quite a bit of build up. My lesson learned came from this launch. Also note that payouts for this started in October, so the revenue doesn’t pop up until then.

We also closed our Profit Rx launch for new, annual members where we had 4 folks join as annual members at $1,000.

The last thing I did, which was technically in August, was a little Birthday promo for my book. My birthday is August 31st. I offered a one day only, five dollar discount on my book, which I’d never done before. That brought in about $400 in revenue that hit in early September. Total revenue was close to $13,000.

Lessons Learned

It’s probably not worth doing a big launch to my whole list on a topic not directly related to what I usually teach. If I promote Digital Course Academy again, or similar programs, I’ll probably do a light launch or solely discuss it with my membership members.

October

October was an interesting month because revenue, almost $17,000, was high, but the main thing we tried didn't really work.

We brought in $1,500 for one, 1-on-1 service, $3,500 from the Digital Course Academy launch, and almost $3,000 in Contract Vault sales mostly due to some new affiliates.

Q4 is always my highest revenue quarter. It was great to kick it off with a new highest revenue month.

Most the revenue came in from other people promoting our programs or for launches done in previous months. What we promoting to our own audience in October was a free trial of Profit Rx. We only had around 40 people signup, which was wild to me for a $100/month membership.

Lessons Learned

Free trials didn't work great as bundle contributions. And the free trial also didn't work when promoted to our list. In fact, when we launched the $100/month membership in December we had more people signup to pay and join then we did during the free trial.

I've accepted that free trials just don't work well, or I'm very bad at promoting them. Either way, we're scrapping it as a strategy moving forward.