It's the end of the year and that inevitably leads to a lot of podcasts and blog posts on reflection, planning and goal setting. I know that as creatives, a lot of us get very uncomfortable with making concrete plans or setting solid goals because... what if we fail? But planning is what allows us to build a business that reflects our values and the life we want to lead. Because as small business owners, our businesses are intertwined with our lives. Planning gives us the opportunity to be intentional with how our life and our business come together - something that doesn't happen in a private sector or government job setting. So let's talk about that in this month's subscriber only episode!
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
It's the end of the year and that inevitably leads to a lot of podcasts and blog posts on reflection, planning and goal setting. I know that as creatives, a lot of us get very uncomfortable with making concrete plans or setting solid goals because... what if we fail? But planning is what allows us to build a business that reflects our values and the life we want to lead. Because as small business owners, our businesses are intertwined with our lives. Planning gives us the opportunity to be intentional with how our life and our business come together - something that doesn't happen in a private sector or government job setting. So let's talk about that in this month's subscriber only episode!
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
Speaker 1:
Hello everyone and welcome to the December edition of the premium subscriber version of the Anshie Looked Up podcast. I'm your host, melissa, as always, and as always, I just want to thank you all for being financial contributors to the podcast. It means a great deal to me and this this last month was actually a bit of a milestone because we hit five subscribers, which may not sound like many, but to me it's huge, and every single one of you is so important in this process. Five subscribers means that the podcast brings in around just under $25 Canadian a month because Buzzsprout and Patreon both take a little cut, so I don't get all the money, but I get most of it. And this is a big milestone for me because virtually every monthly invoice for the podcast whether it's our email invoice or podcast hosting or website hosting comes to around $22 to $24. So having five subscribers means that now I am officially able to have one invoice covered by this premium subscriber option, and that's huge for me. That's anytime you can hit a milestone like that, it's something to celebrate. It may sound small in the grand scheme of things, but it makes a real difference and I just wanted to let you all know that because I was very excited. It was very exciting for me and that really, I couldn't have done it without every single one of you. Every single one of you of the five of you mattered, and so that's very exciting. So thank you all. It was a very nice Christmas present.
Speaker 1:
So this month I thought that I would talk to you all about planning. Big shocker, it's December, I know. So we're talking about planning today, and the reason I wanted to talk about planning is because, obviously, this is the time of year where we all sit down and we think about what happened over the year and we think about what the new year might bring, not just in our businesses, but in our personal lives as well. I think it's just a very human thing to do, and I think that humans like having milestones and markers and ways to measure things, and that's essentially I mean. When you think about it, december 31st is a very arbitrary date. It's what we in the Western world have decided is our end of the year, and it's really no different than if you have a business that's incorporated, where you may have a very random and arbitrary start date to your financial year. So, having said all that, it's the time of year where we like to sit back and we like to think about the past and we like to think ahead to the future.
Speaker 1:
So most of you I'm assuming all of you really, although I'm not 100% sure run your run businesses, so you're not doing what you do as a hobby. It is something that you want to have be profitable. It's something that you need to contribute to your financial life in a meaningful way. And so, yes, not a hobby. Nothing wrong with having hobbies. We need to have hobbies. That is part of a healthy life. But in this instance, we are talking about businesses here, and in order to have a healthy business, it does need to be profitable or on the road to profitability when we first start out. It's pretty unlikely that we're going to be profitable right off the bat. That's okay. But you want to be on the road to profitability and we want it to be able to support us in the way that we need it to support us financially, and that's going to mean different things for everyone, and that is why planning is so important.
Speaker 1:
I was very hesitant on whether or not to use the word goals in this podcast, because I do know from speaking to other friends who are creatives or run creative businesses that the word goal is. Some people equate it to the word resolution, and I know I hate the word resolution. It makes me very uncomfortable. It makes me feel like if I didn't complete a resolution, that I've failed, and I think some people feel the same way about the word goal. Personally, I love goals. I don't I just the way I think about them. They just make me. There are things that I like being able to achieve. I like being able to check off boxes and be able to say, yay, I did this. So I am big when it comes to goals, but I wanted to. It's going to be very hard to get through this episode without using the word goal, but I wanted to take the pressure off here and I wanted everyone to think about the New Year in terms of a plan.
Speaker 1:
Okay, because I think when we use the word plan first of all, one of the things I love about planning for our own businesses is that planning allows us to create our business around our personal values, and I think this is a huge part of why so many of us do what we do. We found the corporate world or the private sector where we worked at one time to just not be the right fit for what was important to us, whether it was our ethics, whether it was our family values, whether you know. Whatever it may be, it wasn't flexible enough for us, and so that's why we went off on our own. Maybe you're just really stubborn and you don't like telling people. Having people tell you what to do that is part of your value system, and so this is why I love planning, because it really allows us to shape our businesses around what's important to us.
Speaker 1:
I also one of the reasons I didn't want to use the word goals and I wanted to stick more to planning is that I think one of the things that is very easy for us all to get caught up in, too, is comparing our goals, which tend to turn into measuring sticks, against those of other businesses in our niche, or that our friends own, or family or whatever. And then we get, we lose sight of what's important to us, and that's why I kind of wanted to refer to it more as planning, because I think it's easier to keep the focus on what is important to you, and it's really important to remember this Success is different for every single one of us. What success means to you may not be what it means to me, and that is okay. In fact, that is how it should be. That is totally normal, and so when you focus on the plan, it's easier not to get caught up, or rather, it's harder to get caught up in what everybody else is doing, and it's easier to focus on what's important to you, and that's why I really love the planning stages. It's where I get to shape what my business is going to look like for the next year, and that is incredibly exciting to me.
Speaker 1:
As part of that, I do goal setting, and I do think that there are some very large benefits to goal setting. Again, it is a measuring stick, but it's a measuring stick that's relevant to you. That's what you have to keep reminding you. Your goals need to support the overall plan for your business. The overall plan for your business supports your value system and what's important to you, so you do need to have a way to measure whether you are going in the right direction. So that's important, and that's where goals can help. Those measuring sticks that goals provide give us an indicator if we're heading in the right direction. I like data, I like being able to measure. Not everybody's as nerdy as me, I totally get that, but I do like to be able to see those numbers, and I like to be able to. When I reflect back on the year that was, I like to be able to look back at the numbers from the year that just happened, the year before that, and see if I'm going in the right direction, and I think that's really important. And I think that's really important.
Speaker 1:
Now, the key thing with goals is that you can change them. You can change them, you can get rid of them, you can add new ones. The only thing that has to be consistent with your goals is that they need to support what your overall plan is. So if your overall plan is to for 2024, is to make your business more flexible, then your goals need to reflect that. And if a goal is no longer reflecting that overall plan, that overall objective, then it's no longer a good goal and you can get rid of it guilt-free. It's not serving you, and I think that's where people get a little stuck with goals.
Speaker 1:
It's perfectly okay to abandon a goal. If it's not working for you, you can get rid of it. It's also perfectly okay to change your plans. People do this all the time. You don't want to do it too often, because then it just becomes a little too much to just. It starts to feel chaotic. But if a plan is reflecting the values that are important to you right now, then you should keep it.
Speaker 1:
But the goals as to how you achieve that may change and life happens. This is the thing. Life happens. We get ill. A family member gets ill All of a sudden, a partner or a spouse has an opportunity that might require a move across the country. You may have a child who was going to go to university next year, but now they've changed their mind and they're going to stay at home, or they're taking a gap here. You may have an elderly parent who needs some extra help. So you know, plans can change and your goals can change to reflect that. Goals are simply a way to measure if you're going in the right direction.
Speaker 1:
And so that's what I really wanted to focus on with planning this year is I really wanted to remind you that your plans again reflect your value system and what you want your life to be, because one of the important things when we run a small business as sole proprietors or maybe you are incorporated, depending on the size of your business, is that our businesses are very much a part of our lives. I don't like the phrase work life balance because I think when you're self employed and you own your own business, it's not possible for all the parts of your life to be balanced. Instead, they're intertwined and there are times where, anytime you look at your life, there are times where certain parts of your life require more attention than other parts of your life. You know, if you've just had a baby, your baby requires all your attention. Your business may not be the priority. If you've got a 15 year old who's fairly self sufficient, then you know you can put more time and energy into a specific aspect of your business instead. It doesn't have to revolve around children. It could be something like the fact that next year you want to take a sabbatical and you need to plan for that in your business. What's going to happen to your business when you take that year to go traveling or to immerse yourself in a cause that's really important to you? Or whatever the case may be? Maybe you want to create a business where every month you take a week off, you take a week away from your business to focus on something else in your life.
Speaker 1:
Or I was reading not too long ago about a couple who decided that they were only going to work three quarters of three out of the four quarters of the year in their business and they started to plan and build for a business that could function nine months out of the year. So instead of having a 12 month year, they have a nine month year and I thought this was so interesting and the fourth quarter they reserve for travel and they go and live, in an extent, in a in another country for an extended stay. That was something that was really important to them. They wanted to be able to go spend time in another country and extended amount of time in another country and really immerse themselves in the, in the culture, and they couldn't do that on a two week vacation or a one week vacation or whatever the case may be. So instead they completely rejigged how their business works, and that's the beauty of being self employed. However, it took planning. Okay, they they thought about what was important to them. This was something that was really important to who they are as people. This is a core value of theirs to be able to experience other cultures and understand people in different parts of the world better, and so they set about to make a plan within their business to make that happen.
Speaker 1:
What I'm trying to say here is that, again, I'm just emphasizing the fact that planning is about incorporating who you are Into your business and what's important to you in your business, and building a business that reflects your values. Goals are simply the measurements we use to make sure that we're on track, and so I think maybe, if you look at goals from that perspective, it frees you up a little bit and makes you a little bit more relaxed about them, because the important thing is the end objective, which is to have a business that fits with your life, or to have a business that is making six figures by the end of the year, or to have a business that Allows you to work from home, whatever it may be. So once you put those plans in place, once you've got a plan for where you want to go, the next step is to break it down into steps or mini goals that are gonna help you get there, and I had actually, I was gonna say I had a friend, but she's still friend, but she was the original cohost of this podcast, lisa Bolton, and she is really big on the idea of reverse engineering, how you, how to get from a to b, and she really made me a convert to this way of thinking. But essentially you look at what the end objective is and then you work out all the steps that you need to get there. So maybe your end objective is that you want to be earning I'm just I'm using money because it's an easy measurement one but you want to be earning ten thousand dollars a month in your business, okay, and maybe right now you're only earning Five thousand dollars a month, so that's a big jump. So you need to figure out how you're going to generate an extra five thousand dollars in income every month, and so you need to think about okay, well, if I break down five thousand dollars, that's an extra twelve, fifty a week, and you could break it down even further into what that would mean per day. And you need to sit down and think about okay, so I need to make this much more per day.
Speaker 1:
What are some things I could do that would bring in that amount of revenue? Or it could be I need to crochet this many more Pieces, or I need to work on my marketing so that more people know that I exist or something. But I like being able to break it down to something very tangible, like I need to more clients. If each client pays me twenty five hundred dollars a month, right there, I have my five thousand dollars. Okay, how am I going to find two new clients?
Speaker 1:
I need to think about who my audience is. Who are my existing clients? Maybe they have friends who I would be a good fit for. Could I approach them and ask them to recommend me to their friends if they know of anybody who's looking, maybe I could start by putting out something on LinkedIn that lets people know hey, I'm taking on two new design clients this year, or I have space for two new design clients this year who want to have me on monthly retainer. If you're interested, please let me know. So start you start thinking about all the different steps you can take to Get those additional two new clients. Maybe is posting in some Facebook groups. Maybe is sending an email out to your newsletter list and letting them know that you're taking on new clients. There's lots of things that you could do. Think about it. Maybe five thousand dollars is a little more complicated for you in that you don't think you have one revenue stream that could generate that kind of income. So maybe for you you need to start thinking about Other revenue streams.
Speaker 1:
So let's say that you're somebody like Heather who sells large scale paintings. Again, while one painting might be quite expensive, may not be easy for her to sell one painting a month. So how is she going to generate this additional $5,000? Is it realistic for her? I'm using Heather as an example. I don't know the numbers of her business, so I am completely making this up right now, but I just wanted to kind of give you an idea of how it would work. So maybe the idea of selling one more painting a month isn't something that she's 100% confident in being able to do, or maybe it's just not realistic. So she needs to think about other ways that she can generate that income and maybe she needs to create additional revenue streams. So maybe she's going to start selling prints she already does sell prints. Maybe she's going to start teaching art classes, or she's going to create a line of greeting cards, or she's going to start approaching gift shops in her local trading area and asking them if they would like to carry her prints. Maybe she's going to start an Etsy shop, and so those are ways that she can start planning for this extra $5,000 a month.
Speaker 1:
Now, the important thing to think about when you set a dollar value goal is that it's very rare that any of us go from, let's say, $5,000 a month to $10,000 a month immediately on January 1st. It's probably more realistic to think to yourself that you're going to start in smaller increments, hopefully at the beginning of the year, and build your way up, and so maybe, if your initial goal shouldn't be to be earning $10,000 a month as of January, maybe you want to start with something smaller, break it down into even smaller chunks. In January, I would like to earn an extra $1,000 a month, and in February I'd like it to be an extra $1,500 a month, and by March I'd like it to be an extra $2,000. And you know what I think after January, february and March, I'm going to have some good systems in place or some good revenue streams in place, and so I'm hoping for April that I'm going to be able to generate an extra $3,000 a month, and by June I'm hoping I'm on a roll and I'm going to be up to $5,000 or $6,000 extra a month.
Speaker 1:
So, the idea being that by the end of the year you're consistently hitting $10,000 a month, but recognize that it may take you a while to ramp things up, whether it's a money goal. If your goal is to create new streams of revenue, maybe you start with one revenue stream in January and you get that up and running and you get it to the point where it is. There's systems in place to support it and it's starting to tick along and do well, and maybe that takes you a quarter, maybe it takes you two quarters, but you don't start the next revenue stream until that first revenue stream is moving along in a way that's sustainable and in a way that you're comfortable with, because anytime you add a new revenue stream, there's a learning process that goes with it. So those are the things you have to think about when you're reverse engineering in order to support your plan, and so once you start doing that, it gets a little bit easier. But just recognize that whatever you're planning to do, you're not going to go from eight or you're not going to go from zero to 100 kilometers an hour in one month. It's extremely rare and that it that can create problems in its own right. So that's something to think about as you work on this plan. Sometimes, when we grow too fast, it creates a whole new set of problems. We kind of talked about this in the Going Viral episode last week.
Speaker 1:
So yes, reverse engineering, it's a great way to Create the steps that need to happen in order for you to achieve this big objective. So that's what you want to do for the next year. I think that would. I think that's a really great way to start planning without getting too wrapped up in actual goals and milestones and markers. Instead, think of it from the perspective of what is it I want my business to look like a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, and I also Want you to remember that it is important To understand that at any given time in our businesses, we might be required to pivot, and we might be required to pivot hard. Think of COVID. That required a whole lot of hard pivoting. I'm sorry, every time I say pivot, I think of Ross from. It's hard not to so.
Speaker 1:
In other ways it may be more of a gentle course correction, but the idea being that you do need to remember, you need to allow for some flexibility and Just because something changes and you need to make a course correction. It doesn't mean that you failed. It doesn't mean that at all. It just means that you are changing as your life evolves, because that's what our lives do they evolve, they evolve, plans change and we need to be able to be flexible with them. So always have in the back of your mind if this doesn't work out, where else might I go? And that's part of planning. You know plan a, plan B, plan C and just when you feel like you're prepared and when you have a game plan For different scenarios. It makes it much easier to go with the flow of life and it also makes it easier for you to grab on to opportunities when they present themselves, because sometimes opportunity sometimes the very best opportunities present themselves at the very worst moments and Especially if you don't have a plan in place for how to to manage them. So Keep that in mind when you go through your planning.
Speaker 1:
If the goal of your business is to be flexible, or if the goal of your business is to give you new opportunities or to be able to do different things, just remember that a great opportunity present itself. Presenting itself should be part of your Objective of being a flexible business because you want to be able to grab those opportunities when they come up. It's also perfectly okay to abandon things that are no longer serving your business. So something is no longer fitting or vibing with your, your internal values. It's okay to get rid of it. It's just not working for you anymore and that may mean closing a business. That may mean Changing how a business functions. That may mean focusing on something different within that business. It may also mean bringing people on to help you take care of the pieces that Maybe are still integral to your business but that no longer work for you. So you hire somebody to take care of those, while you focus on something that's more in line with what you want to do.
Speaker 1:
So that is what I wanted to talk to you all about this week and for December, as you sit down to think about these things, as we wrap up the year and we get ready for the new year. And, yeah, if there's one key takeaway I want you to take from this, it's to remember that as small business owners, as creatives we are, first of all, we're creative and, second of all, we are in a position to shape what our world looks like, and that it is what planning is all about is about shaping your business and your life To fit for you and to fit with your values and to fit with who you are as a person and to fit with your family, whatever your family may look like. So with that, I hope this was helpful. I hope it was maybe a little bit inspiring. I hope it wasn't too all over the place.
Speaker 1:
With that, I want to wish you all a very happy holidays and A very happy, healthy and prosperous 2024 Whatever prosperity looks like for you, because it's different for all of us and To thank you all once again for your support this year. It has been so wonderful I I Can't tell you how much I appreciate it. So with that, that is it for December, and I will talk to you all again in the new year. Happy holidays, you.