Business Anniversary 2022: Year in Review
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I have done a year interview post every year in my business, except for in 2021.
Why?
Well, because honestly, I did not have the best year…
I didn't much like working in my business in 2021, and we also had seven months of lockdown. by the end of the year, I was pretty ready to just leave it all in the rearview mirror and focus my efforts forward…
But so you have the headlines I'll quickly give you the Spark Notes version of 2021.
We had more problems kind of outta left field in my business than ever before. Marketing and sales strategies that had worked beautifully for years suddenly weren't working anymore,
there were a lot of changes which we had no control over…🤔
which greatly affected our business.
And…for the first year ever, I did not grow in my business.
I had almost the exact same revenue in 2021 as I did in 2020 💰
We also had balls dropped within my team, a lot more than usual, and I spent the year kinda looking backwards and catching balls instead of looking forwards at where we were supposed to be going.
I definitely felt super stressed and frustrated for honestly, most of the year in 2021.
So let’s leave that friend behind us! Sashay away 2021… and enter 2022!
My goal for 2022 - Joy!
In 2022 my goal was to find the joy 🎉 in my work, and anything which did not align with that - programs, content, team - had to go.
A month-by-month recap of the last year
So with that goal in mind, I embarked on the adventure that was 2022, and what an adventure it was - here’s the month-by-month recap!
December 2021
In December, 2021, I moved to the UK. I’d actually set up the business before I actually moved over here but December was moving month! Check out the tour of my neighborhood and why we quit Germany here!
January 2022
In January, we had a big changeover in our team. We hired some people. We let some people go, to make sure that we had the team members in place that were helping us go in our new direction for the year.
We also got set up with a new accountant and found a new lawyer. It was wholesale change Chez PB HQ!
I also spent my time unpacking into our new apartment! BTW - I picked the apartment, specifically, because it was basically move-in ready, which I loved! (More time enjoyin’ less time in Ikea is always a good thing!)
February 2022
In February, we did our big Square Secrets Business™ launch. Now, this is one of our main events in the year and we were super excited for it, but it turns out that this launch made just about the same revenue as the previous ones...whomp whomp…
We’re not talkin’ full disaster - it was still over six figures, but it wasn't growing…
Now, it wasn’t a massive surprise, because the reason was that our marketing strategies had been hit in 2021 and we were still trying to figure out how to get those back on track… therefore we knew our email list hadn’t grown, and so our launch revenue was unlikely to either… and we were right (your audience is suuuccch a big indicator of the likely size of your launches!)
Plans for launching a course, product, template in your future? Find out if it has 6 figure potential with my quiz!
Of course in February I managed to sneak in a bit o’ time on the slopes too!
March 2022
I hosted my mastermind friends, AKA business besties! at my new place in London and we had such a wonderful time.
There were a lot of tears. There was a lot of chat about business. There was a lot of afternoon tea.
and there was also a lot of me learning (again and again) the lesson that, you need to find things that bring you joy in your business, and do more of ‘em!
Cuz if you don't, you're not gonna wanna run the thing. And if you don’t want to run the thing… what’s the point?!
This led me to decide I was finally going to do the thing which I’d wanted to do for a moment…
and that was to start talking about course creation and course launching!
Seeing that I'd been successfully creating and launching courses 👩💻, for a good number of years and really wanted to talk about a new topic, it seemed like the perfect fit!
Now I had debated whether or not I should do this or if I should just stick to my niche and stick to the thing, which I’m known for…but I determined in March that more important than that, is running a business which brings me joy!
April 2022
I had my first moment of absolute panic when my husband and I were at a movie… not cool Paige 😬 (see thoughts on business and mental health later!!). I realized that our evergreen revenue had been down for a little while because of the hits to our marketing strategies in 2021, which again, we were still working on fixing.
And then I realized that our payment plans from a launch quite a few months prior would be ending soon.
And that's when I realized (after panicking 😱 !) that I really needed to do something to make up for lost evergreen revenue in the following couple months!
So I brought my longest, serving team member over to London ✈️
and we had such a lovely time just getting to know each other, hanging out… and putting our heads together on how to solve our revenue issue (solution - a bunch of mini sales and a longer-term strategy that I’ll get to later - this one relates to that $200K in an hour I’ve been bangin’ on about!)!
Now (sidenote) I'd wanted to do a team retreat for a really long time, but the pandemic happened right when I was actually gonna go plan the thang.
So finally having her over was such a joy! We had a fabulous time exploring London. And replanned alll of our launches for the rest of the year. It felt wonderful to be working together to solve an issue and off the back of that I felt much more confident going into the months that followed!
We also had another team reshuffle… annnnd I also had my first of many, many international weddings in the month of April!
May 2022
In the month of May, I created Content for and served the darlin’ new members of my Course Launch Collective. (New to it? It’s a coaching program all about launching an online course!)
We also had one of our team members fully focused on getting our affiliate program running. This is something that we knew we were gonna be doing in October for our big Square Secrets Business™ launch, and we spent months and months and months on getting it ready.
So in May we started pitching and doing one-to-one calls with affiliates (we had no idea how it would go at the beginning!)
I was on most of those calls, to onboard and welcome our new affiliates and the early signs were great (buttt it was super time consuming, so we were still nervous about whether the effort would give us the results we were lookin’ for… jury was out!)
In May we also had another wedding (the second of the year) a wedding, which I was a bridesmaid in abroad.
So again, that meant more trips away from London… you noticing a pattern yet?!
It's moving to London and not being in London that much.
June 2022
In June, we started implementing what I call our email only sales (can you feel the air quotes?!)
These were an effort to make up for our lost evergreen revenue.
Annnddd… thrilled to report that we had some fantastic success with them.
We actually did $28,000 in sales in seven days on a $35 product! (here’s the BTS on that) 💰💰💰
June was also the month that I took over the YouTube channel from one of my team members. So one of my team members had been really heading up the content in my business for quite a few years. But we decided that we wanted to make a switch. I genuinely love content creation and it just wasn't in her capacity anymore to be doing it.
So we decided perfect! I was going to take over the content creation.
It definitely felt like a lot to figure out how to, after my 2-year hiatus!, be producing 2 pieces of content every single week. But I genuinely love doing this part of my business, so much, and again, finding the things that bring me joy is what I was going for this year!
So I took back over the YouTube channel and all my content and basically made it my own again.
July 2022
In July I had my third wedding abroad of the year! So again, was not in London…
I then got a crazy sickness 🤢, just the day before this wedding and then I was out of work for two weeks straight!
Now I should clarify, since I started my business, I've not taken a single sick day, and that's not because I'm a hero (honest!), it's because I just don't get sick. I dunno… I’m lucky!
So being flat out for two weeks was just the craziest thing… outta nowhere but it is what it is.
I did manage to file my taxes (my leeeasst favorite bit of the year so delighted to have that done!), continued creating content for this channel, and also served the members of my Course Launch Collective program (that last one certainly perked me up again!.
Now, I should make mention that I learned something in running this program, and that is that running an online course and running a coaching program are two very different beasts in the amount of time that it actually takes you to manage the thang!
With the coaching program, I was loving having direct one-to-one interaction with my students because in my course I don't get that so much. But it was also definitely a learning curve in terms of how you manage your time to be able to serve that many people in such an intimate capacity.
It took a lot of energy and time to be reviewing their work, producing new content and everything else.
It was definitely a lot in the month of July on top of being sick!
August 2022.
The weddings continued…
I went back to Canada, for the second time that summer,
and then had two weeks vacation in between two of my best friend's weddings.
Now you can have too much of a good thing, amahright?! Like I’d legit had enough of weddings.
So from this point onwards I just stopped going to all of them because I realized I was never actually in London anymore and I really needed to prioritize being home and getting work done! (Adults gotta adult!)
On my two week vacation, I admittedly spent a lot of time on YouTube.
We did a little road trip through Canada too, which was wonderful!
But the thing which I was actually the most stoked on was just finding a lot of YouTubers who I personally really liked, who were having really interesting intelligent conversations in their channels, and also got obsessed about YouTube gear!
I also got to grab dinner with fellow Country woman and Youtube Kween Louise Henry - always a joy!
Right. Once I got back from vacation, I had one major task on my plate, and that was to update my Square Secrets course to the new fluid engine version of Squarespace!
I am absolutely thrilled about this development in Squarespace.
Fluid engine is incredible.
But anytime that Squarespace updates things, I admittedly am like darn, because it means a lot of work. And so I basically recreated this course for the third time.
I also found out in this month that my longest serving team member was going to be leaving me (cue the Adele!). She had implemented what we do in our business, in her husband's business, and their course launches took off to the tune of like $60 K launches. Seriously freakin’ cool!
I genuinely, genuinely could not be happier for the two of them. They're the most lovely humans, and I'm absolutely thrilled for them that they have this business model for their own lives as well, especially at a time when they're building an amazing house too.
She very, very kindly gave me many, many months notice in order to hire a replacement. And so in this month we also started looking at who were we going to be replacing her with.
September 2022
I hopped on a plane to go on a trip I had been waiting for, for literally years.
Going to Necker Island to meet Richard Branson!!!
I filmed a little room tour and I also filmed a little overview of all the lessons which I had from going to Necker Island. Make sure to check ‘em out!
Prefer to read - you can check ‘em out here (the room tour), and here (what I learned from my new buddy Rich!)
Also in September, we had another launch of my Course Launch Collective, then what we were focusing to see on was preparing for our Square Secrets Business™ launch in October.
So to rewind a moment, all summer, we'd been working on creating this affiliate program behind the scenes. One of my team members was working solely on that and so September was when we started going into the pre-launch phase for this affiliate launch!
That meant that I had about 12 zillion phone calls in my evenings coz I'm in Europe
Aannddd, as much as I don't love having to do calls at 9:00 PM multiple nights in the week it was really exciting to see that we had so many affiliates who were so gung-ho on promoting the course!
Now, September was also, however, a leettle bit stressful… Once I came back from Necker, I took a look at our numbers for the first time in a little while and realized…
we hadn't sold as much as planned, from the fact that I was so distracted going to all of the weddings and being abroad for so long (cue second panic!)
We hadn't actually run a launch in quite a few months, which meant when I looked at my bank account, it was a little bit less healthy than it normally was.
I thankfully had a wonderful therapist, legit cannot recommend therapists enough, who pretty accurately said, I think your business is destroying your mental health.
To which I was like, yeah, I think that's a real thing.
but thankfully working with my therapist really helped me get through that!
And the other thing which helped stop feeling such high levels of stress was to be focusing on my work and not having my life taking over, running the show, and traveling constantly!
In September. We also, unfortunately, had to switch bookkeepers and accountants. We had loved the people we were working with in the past, but something had changed with their licensing and they couldn’t service us anymore, so we had to make a switch.
If you've run a business, you know that making switches like this or making any team switches just takes a lot of time and effort! Nooott my fave thang to do, but that’s life!
October 2022
Now, October was the month that I had been waiting for all year. It was the one that we were the most looking forward to.
We’d been literally building towards our affiliate program for months. We had one team member just fully focused on that. So a huge amount of time and capacity in the background of our business was dedicated to making this thing work,
… and… turns out our little gamble there paid off.
To the tune of $200,000 course sales in an hour of that launch and $400,000 in total 💰💰💰
Get the full BTS low down on that here!
November 2022
In November, we ran a Black Friday sale for the first time in a looonnng time.
We sold my Scale with Content Strategy course on Black Friday pricing, and again, the month was filmed with a lot of YouTube filming and a quick there n back to Canada!
December 2022
As I am recording this, I am doing more YouTube filming, getting ahead so I can take a few weeks off for Christmas 🎄!
I need to make sure that I've batched far enough in advance to make sure that content still keeps coming out on the blog, and the Youtube channel, even as I'm sippin’ egg-nog and enjoying a German Christmas!
See this post on how I use an editorial calendar in Asana to organize alll my content so I can legit take proper time off and the content keeps rollin’!
Obvs, the other thing I’m doing this month is planning for next year.
There are so many things from this past year that I would and would not do again in the future, and I'm making our game plan of what exactly is going to be happening all of next year…
Marketing in 2022 - what worked, and what didn’t
I always like to recap what went well and what didn't go well on the marketing front when I do my annual reviews!
The first thing that we did this year was that we moved our blog off of Squarespace. Pauses for gasps of horror!
Yes, I know, I know. Wait for me to explain …
You know how I said that in 2021 there were these random out-of-left-field changes that just kept hitting our business?
Well, one of them was that our blog traffic took a serious hit and we did not know what it was or why it happened, or what we could do to get our blog traffic back.
So we moved our blog off of Squarespace.
We moved over to a Showit website and a WordPress blog, left it there for a few months, and realized… drum roll purlease… 🥁🥁🥁
It made literally no difference.
Our traffic was the same when our hundreds of blog posts were on Squarespace and when our hundreds of blog posts were on a Showit website and WordPress blog!
I think it’s beautiful that I actually had to test this experiment in a way because it finally gives proof to the whole Squarespace sucks for SEO thang.
When I moved it to a different platform, it was the exact same traffic as before. So clearly where the website was or where the blog was hosted didn't actually make a difference to the SEO and the traffic.
Now, we're still not exactly sure to be honest, what exactly happened in 2021 and the reason that the blog traffic took a hit in the first place.
We looked into some Google trends.
We were trying to figure out if it was something that we were doing or the content we were producing or the trends going on in the internet…
We honestly still haven't figured out the actual reason.
But what we did figure out and finally prove was that where your blog is doesn't seem to make a big difference for the actual traffic to it.
The next thing that happened on our marketing front was me taking over the YouTube channel!
And when I took it over and went on vacation and when I got so stoked on YouTube, I decided to really get into researching and figuring out what exactly we could be doing to really grow this channel.
Now. Previously what we had been doing made logical sense to us. We took our blog strategy, we did it on YouTube… simple!
But it turns out there's actually a lot of YouTube specific strategy and a lot of data that’s very helpful that you get insideYouTube that you can't get on a blog.
So we're still in the process right now of implementing all the things that we're learning, and of course, we're taking courses on YouTube.
Anytime I wanna learn how to do something to my business, I go find the expert. I take a course on that thing. That's the way which we learn and implement things in my business!
So there's still much more that we have to do on the YouTube channel, but genuinely, I feel like I've really found something which I'm super stoked to build and that is just such a joy.
Again, coming back to 2021, there were not so many things in my business that I was stoked on. And this year, building this channel has been such a joy!
Then of course the fourth thing that we did in the marketing area was our affiliate program, which… absolutely smashed it.
We are stoked about the results, and that is definitely something that we're gonna be doing into the new year!
Next, let's talk about the feelings in the business.
This year was so much better than 2021. I felt like I was in a solid place. My team was in a solid place. I no longer felt like I was just running around catching 10 balls, which were constantly dropping.
I genuinely, absolutely love the humans that I'm working with, and I'm also loving my work again.
Also because again, finding things in my business, which bring me joy, has been a focus of the past year and it's definitely, definitely worked!
But I don't wanna paint at all sunshine and roses. There was definitely a good amount of anxiety this past year. When I look back at my planning for this year - for example when exactly we placed launches and which launches we were doing and everything, I totally realized I did not plan that very well.
It was definitely a struggle to try to figure out how to fit in all these launches when I'm going to a bajillion weddings abroad! 💒
So that was a bit of a challenge, but next year I only have two wedding invites - halleleuja!
and that's fantastic!
The other feeling, that I had this year was one of relief!
We had spent like six months pouring so much time and effort into setting up a really legitimate affiliate program and there was so much relief when it worked!
At the beginning of the year, I was trying to decide which marketing strategy we were really gonna be focusing on.
The affiliate program was definitely a gamble - knowing we’d need to put so much time and effort into it before we knew if it would pay off,
But it did! And in style! And so, I realized I made the right decision, which was also a great confidence builder - I can be faced with a big challenge, find a solution, implement it and have some seriously cool results!
Lessons for 2023
Spacing out launches
The first thing, which I'm definitely, definitely changing for next year is spacing out our launches. So we have one per quarter, and not just letting my like life and travel schedule dictate things!
Now maybe that sounds odd because normally I talk about building a life-first business, but if I don't launch for so long, it leads to stress in my life, which is not a good thing. So it is life first, just in a different way than you might think!
Choose a different product for black friday 📆
The other thing that we're gonna change with our launches is if we do Black Friday, it’s not a hundred percent decided yet, we're definitely gonna do it with a product people already know, not something where we need to a whole pre-launch event in order to explain the thing, coz I think something that was a little bit challenging for us this year during that launch was getting the attention on our launch event at such a busy time of the year!
have more launches of more established programs 💰
Two out of our four launches this year were launching a new untested program, which brought me so much joy, but at the same time, it's probably best just do that once in a year when we start a new thing, as opposed to giving so much of our launch space to a brand new program!
Coaching programs are much less scalable 📈
The other thing which I realized this year when it came to running a coaching program was that almost no matter what clients pay, it's never gonna come anywhere close to the revenue that you can make with an online course, which is just so much more scalable.
I am absolutely so, so pleased that I ran a coaching program twice this year because there are so many things that you learn when you serve people one-to-one.
And it was an absolute joy to get to know my students so deeply in that process.
I also definitely think that when it comes to launching an online course, you should have served people in a small group or one on one capacity on that topic beforehand, because you really find out all their challenges and difficulties and roadblocks that they're going through (which makes any eventual course you put together sooo much better).
But I will definitely be placing my focus in the future more on courses and less on coaching.
Do more email sales ✉️
The other thing which we're going to continue doing into the new year is doing our little email-only sales to make up for our lost evergreen revenue until we get our traffic fully back to where it was before.
Keep my dream team 🎉
The other thing, which I would love to do this year is to keep a bit more consistency with my team.
Last year we literally switched almost everything that you could switch into business, like bookkeepers, accountants, lawyers, and then actual team members as well.
And it just takes so much time.
Onboarding, offboarding, switching things over, and getting people access to stuff just takes a really long time and is not the most efficient use of my time - truth talk, I do not love it either!
So I really feel like in a good place with all the team that I have and I'm really looking to moving forward with those people.
Not chasing revenue for revenue’s sake 💵💵💵
The next thing, which I'll be focusing on in 2023 is not pushing for more revenue, for more revenue's sake.
I really want to have a purpose for the growth that I have in my business. Previously in my biz, I really wanted to make a million in a year so badly just because it was sexy! And a tad for my ego, let’s be honest!
And then over the course of the past couple years, I've realized that that literally makes no sense. I genuinely do not care about hitting a million for a million’s sake.
When I go do my annual planning, if it happens to be that the million is the thing that makes sense for another reason other than just making a million in a year, then I will totally be going for that.
But I'm definitely not in it anymore just for the ego trip.
I am in this now for running a fun business, which I enjoy running,
changing the lives of students,
and truly making a workplace that my team loves working in.
I definitely wanna go for a slight little bit more growth because I do really want to take up my team on a fantastic trip together, and we're not quite at the revenue goal to do that yet, but I hope to make that happen next year.
planning in vacay 🏝️
The next thing I want to do in the new year is to plan actual vacations once a quarter. My husband used to be a teacher, meaning that he had vacay at set times, and so when he was off, I kind of felt like, oh, well I wanna be off too.
I would just automatically have someone who encouraged me to take time off work, whereas without him having his set vacation this year, because he wasn't in his teaching job anymore, we just didn't really take vacation!
And so there wasn't any proper relaxation away from everything and I would really love to have that in the new year…
Actually being home for 5 minutes! 🏠
The next thing I’m planning for in the new year, is actually being in London!! I joined a field hockey team and found an amazing horseback riding place and tennis lessons, and I would like to actually be there for my teams and actually attend the things, that I’ve signed up for as opposed to constantly being gone!
I haven't actually done the full calculation on how many days I was here…
but it was not as many as I would've liked it to have been.
It also makes filming stuff for the Youtube channel, wayyy more complicated when you're constantly on a plane.
So yeah, that was 2022.
The highlight was definitely the $200 K in an hour!
Make sure to check out the BTS of that “overnight success”.
Spoiler alert. It took almost a full year to make that happen.
Then definitely watch this video where I share with you all the juicy details and behind-the-scenes of how exactly we managed to pull off that launch!
