5 Ways I Achieved My Best Month In Business

I am still pretty new to this business life, April marks only my 5th month of being self employed and focusing on Greene Creatives full time. I remember when I listened to all the business podcasts and followed so many women in business on Instagram, seeing them talk about goals and what they were looking to achieve in certain quarters I used to think “wow, how do they think that so far forward?”. To help me with this I decided this year I wanted to work with a business coach and since December I’ve been working with the lovely Kat Horrocks which has been unbelievably helpful.

Kat made me set goals for the year and one of them was to hit a certain income amount so that I can go back to paying myself a salary again. Last month I not only hit the goal, but I surpassed it and although I still can’t believe I did it so quickly into the year I know I’ve put a lot of work in since January so the other side of me also feels like it’s deserved.

Today I wanted to share everything I have done this year so far to contribute towards this month and to help me hit it more than once.

1. invested In A Coach

As I’ve said this year I have been working with a business coach and this is definitely where laying the foundations started to help me achieve this income goal. First of all, Kat encouraged me to set the goal in the first place and she also told me that it was more than possible. She really helped me see that with setting goals you don’t need to have every quarter until 2025 planned, I already know what I want to do with the business. Setting goals just means breaking this down into achievable tasks for the month, quarter or year.

Kat has also helped me a lot with mindset. To be honest, mindset work isn’t something I had heard of until last year when I was researching a lot of business owners. I noticed a few of them talked about mindset a lot and I wondered what it is. After looking into it more it is something I am so interested in now and believe that it is something everyone should work on. In my industry I teach business owners to show up a lot for their business, and I have come to the conclusion that this is practically impossible when you aren’t in the right mindset. 

Kat helped me to show up for my business by helping me identify my imposter syndrome and how to deal with it. I still have days where I doubt myself but I now know it’s the stupid inner critic in my head, what I’m thinking isn’t real life and I have tools to combat this now.

2. I Diversified My Income

When Greene Creatives was my side hustle, and for the first couple of months of being self employed, all I felt like I was doing was putting out client fires. I had so much client work to do I would just go from one task to the other trying to stay afloat. Now, I am not complaining, it is absolutely amazing to have the opportunity to work with so many businesses local to me here in Dundee as well as across the UK but I knew it wasn’t sustainable. This is why when I launched my website I added a shop where I could sell digital products with the first being the content calendar. This then meant that people landing on my website who liked my work had an entry level product to buy to test out working with me.

I realised too that I needed to try and make my services more accessible. Not everyone can afford to work with me 1:1 and this meant I was missing a huge audience. Not only that, I do genuinely want to help as many small businesses as I can. Out of all of my services I am asked the most about social media, so I decided that the best way to reach more people and help them with this was to host online masterclasses. So far this year I’ve hosted two successful masterclasses and the ticket sales contributed to diversifying my income.

Putting these classes on and exposing myself to a new audience also led to more client work, including smaller projects for the attendees but also, through recommendations of attendees, I was approached by other companies about doing corporate masterclasses.

Some of my services are local to me in Dundee and by doing the above it allowed me to do what I wanted, help business. By having different services and offers it really helped me to have that income but better yet help others, all while building an audience and creating a wider network around the UK. 

3. I Made Time To Work ‘On’ My Business

This "working on” phrase was also new to me when I started researching business owners, but now I totally get it. If it is new to you, basically it means not working on projects for your clients or working on the day to day tasks that keep your business ticking over. It means working on projects solely for your business that contribute to your bigger picture and goals.

As I’ve said before I had absolutely no time to do this at the start, but I now make it a priority. I block out a Thursday to just work on projects for my business and I don’t do anything for clients on this day. If I didn’t do this I wouldn’t have had the time, or creative brain space, to work on the masterclasses and digital products that have added to my revenue stream.

My goal for Q2 is to work towards having two client free days a week and I have started to put things in place to achieve this, like working with a virtual assistant.

4. I Worked On Growing My Audience Not Just In Dundee

One of my goals for the year is to create more longer lasting content. Instagram is great and all, but it is a platform we don’t own and if we do all our marketing activity on it and it disappears tomorrow how else do we communicate with our audience? I also knew that in order to reach a wider audience than the one local to me in Dundee, I needed to find ways of reaching them.

This is something I preach a lot to clients so I decided to take my own advice. This year I have started these blogs and doing more email marketing with a monthly edition The Creative Conversation. This is where I share my low down on marketing topics and little snippets from me on the reality of being a small business owner, but ultimately this is me connecting with my audience, who are also business owners, on another level.

I have also started to work on my niche and I have changed up my messaging on social media. I am trying to get across more of my ‘why’, why I do this as a job and why people should want to work with me. I really believe this has opened me up to a new audience and the last month I felt as though everything I have been working on ‘clicked’ and started to pay off.

5. I Worked Hard… But Not Too Hard

I feel like this is really important to get across. Working too much and burning out is so glorified online, but it is such an unhealthy habit to have. Before I went self employed, I 100% hit burnout and it was not a nice place to be. I was so up tight, tired, stressed and anxious that looking back I’m like “why did I not go self-employed sooner?!” but there were a lot of contributing factors to that. Anyway, my point is I don’t want to ever be like that again.

I do struggle still with feeling like I need to work really hard to make money, and you do, but you don’t need to be chained to a desk to make money. I do work hard, some days I work late and sometimes I pick things up at the weekend but the difference is now I do it because I want to, not because I need to.

In March I actually took a random day off during the week and it was great. So much so that Kat has set me a goal to do this more often. I want to remind myself that I’m lucky enough to work in a business that means I can pick it up and work whenever and wherever I want to and it’s hard to train your 9-5 brain this, but I’m getting there.

I think some people may be like “why is she sharing this?” but to be honest I don’t care. I share everything I do to inspire and help other business owners. Even if it is just one person who reads this and gets an idea of how they can add something to their business to improve it then my job is done. 

As always, I’d love to hear your business stories, any feedback or just a good old chat so please do feel free to drop me a DM.