2023 Annual Review: Revenue, Wins and Learnings
In 2022 I decided to start publishing all the behind-the-scenes and ins and outs of my business here on my blog.
As part of that I made the commitment to publish a monthly review which included all my revenue, social metrics, expenses and what I’ve been working (you can read all those monthly reviews here if you’re interested).
This post is a summary of all of the posts from 2023 and a roundup of the revenue I made during the year, what I learned and some of my thoughts as we head into 2024.
Why I do these posts…
When I was first starting my business I used to find these sorts of posts from other business owners hugely inspiring. They used to help me see what was possible with my business and gave me something to aspire to.
I also try and be a role model for other women (and particularly mothers). Lots of the business posts I have read in the past have been from men and I want to try and show women that it is possible to be a mother and a successful business owner. You CAN have it all and do it in a way that works for you and your family.
But I have to admit that hitting publish on the reviews each month does make me feel a bit uncomfortable. As my business grows I worry the posts come across as ‘bragging’. I also worry that some of the business and revenue goals that I have been hitting start to feel unattainable to lots of my community - and therefore make the posts overwhelming rather than inspiring.
Whenever I talk about revenue I also worry that it’s a bit crass or that I shouldn’t be doing it (including for personal safety reasons) - so for that reason I’ve decided to stop posting theses reviews publicly from this point forward.
But before finishing up with the posts I wanted to provide one final summary to round out 2023.
Before we get started - if you are the sort of person who gets triggered by people sharing their revenue/income or things like that then this probably isn’t the right blog post for you so perhaps just jump out now.
Summary of 2023
2023 has been another massive year for me - both personally and professionally.
Let’s start with a quick summary of the main things that happened…
🧠 I survived and recovered from the third major brain surgery I had in 18 months (as well as a number of other smaller, less invasive procedures as well).
👴🏻 my Dad passed away :(
💸 best ever revenue year in my business with over $2.5 million in revenue. My goal was to hit $2.2 million for the year, which I had hit by November, so I was very pleased with that.
💻 created and launched my new business templates for designers, which have been a HUGELY popular new product range for designers in my community.
🏖️ relaxing family holidays to Gerringong, Anna Bay and Byron Bay
🏡 more than 11,000 students in my SketchUp courses around the world
🤳 passed 100,000 followers on Instagram (now at 136K as of writing this)
🚀 More than 27,898 courses and templates sold (since starting my online business 4 years ago) - a crazy number!
💭 created daily content for my community
🏡 have been working on our new build project - which should be completed early-mid 2024
🥳 enjoyed my life, business and what I’m putting out into the world - which I think is the ultimate sign of success
Overall, given the fact that many months of my year were (once again!) spent recovering from major brain surgery, I’m pretty happy with how the year has gone.
And with that summary out of the way, let’s have a look at a brief overview of each month this year.
January
January revenue was $194,028
Wins/learnings/what happened:
Strong revenue month to start the year
Wrote daily blog posts (after doing the Ship 30 for 30 program for the second time)
Good balance of relaxing and being productive while the boys were on summer holidays
February
February revenue was $152,041
Wins/learnings/what happened:
Lived through another major brain surgery 🧠
Felt pretty good during my recovery - which was a result of having gone into the operation as fit and healthy as I could
A strong revenue month which mostly all happened on autopilot while I was recovering (which taught me the power, one again, of my online business model and what happens when you’ve spent a long time putting value out into the world)
March
March revenue was $193,752
Wins/learnings/what happened:
Planned out remainder of 2023
Crossed over 11,000 students in my paid courses, which felt like a huge milestone for my business. I can’t believe how many students I now have across my course offerings. 🤯
Got back to training after my brain surgery (much faster than I was expecting)
Our old house was knocked down, ready to start the new build!
April
April revenue was $122,531
Wins/learnings/what happened:
Family holiday to Anna Bay
Huge overhaul of my TLDC website and shop interface including updating all mockup images, reorganising all my blog posts into topic pages and generally making everything easier to access for my community
slower revenue month, which I put down to having changed our ad campaigns, Easter break and me being on holidays (so not putting as much attention into content creation)
May
May revenue was $136,127
Wins/learnings/what happened:
Spent most of the month building new templates ready for launch during EOFY sale
Lead magnet updates and relaunch to site
Completed my house selections + drawings (for our new build)
June
June revenue was $236,547
Wins/learnings/what happened:
New design and business templates created and launched
Completed a range of website migration and back end system upgrades (boring but necessary)
Updated existing business short courses and closed down my Circle platform to improve my students’ experience
July
July revenue was $243,812
Wins/learnings/what happened:
Spent most of the month on our new build design to get all the selections made and finalised
Was able to spend time with my Dad in his final days without worrying about work or asking employers for “permission” to be with him - another reminder of why I love the business model I’ve built so much.
My Dad passed away 30 July :(
Hit a few business milestones:
Crossed 10,000 students in my SketchUp courses
Crossed 100K followers on my Instagram page
August
August revenue was $172,814
Wins/learnings/what happened:
August was a bit of a rough month after my Dad passed away. We had his funeral, which went as well as could be expected and after that I took some time to myself to just be quiet towards the start of the month.
Started a new content challenge - posting 42 pieces of content (by myself) every day to see what impact it had on community growth and business/revenue growth (the outcome of this experiment was that the more content I created the better the business did overall)
Created new content and ads about the templates I launched in July
I launched a new SketchUp Tips Instagram page, which grew to over 1,000 followers in a few days
Finished the lighting and electrical plans for our new house
September
September revenue was $243,614
Wins/learnings/what happened:
Ran my content challenge for the month with some very successful results (more content = more revenue and audience growth)
Big focus on my health and fitness - specifically eating really clean
Another strong revenue month - for two key reasons:
Firstly we payed around with some things with the ads including increasing ad spend a little bit. ROAS was higher than normal with some ads performing at a ROAS of 10x.
Secondly I ran my content experiment for the entire month where I posted 300 pieces of content a week. This drove a lot more organic leads into the business and no doubt impacted revenue as well. Hard to measure the performance of organic content - but the relationship between more content and more revenue was quite clear.
October
October revenue was $224,026
Wins/learnings/what happened:
Continued creating a lot of content
Planned for the Black Friday sales
Did 10 chin ups in a row for the first time ever (a fitness goal I had been working on for a long time)
Launched a new Instagram page (One Person Online Business) - but quickly closed it back down again (for reasons I explained in this blog post)
November
November revenue was $413,427
Wins/learnings/what happened:
Biggest ever revenue month in my business due to a strong Black Friday sale
Completed 10 week health/fitness challenge with good results
Furniture, lighting and all other orders placed for our new build
December
December revenue was $219,890
Wins/learnings/what happened:
More than doubled revenue compared with December of 2022, due to deciding to run a short Boxing Day Sale.
Completed 2024 planning
Downtime and holidays with my boys - including our annual trip to Byron Bay
Other stuff about 2023
I hit my annual revenue target for 2023 of $2.2 million. In fact, in the end the annual revenue was more than $2.5 million - crazy! 🤯
I also crossed over $7 million in total revenue in just over 4 years, which is also so unbelievable. If you had told me 4 years ago that this is what would be happening I would never have believed you!!! It shows what’s possible with courage, discipline and hard work.
The more content I create the less we are spending on paid advertising for my courses and templates - the good news about this is that I love creating content (it’s the part of my business I love the most) so moving into 2024 I’ve got lots of plans for how to create even better content for my community
I continue to love the journey of building my business. I love creating things that I hope will help other people in some way and I love the game of business itself. This is what drives me each day - not trying to make more and more money. The money is obviously an amazing side result but what makes me happy and fulfilled is the content creation side of things and helping other people - that’s what gets me up each day.
One thing I continue to be incredibly grateful for is how my business model supports the ups and downs and challenges of life. I can work for 8 hours a day on my business or I can take a few months off and only work a few hours a day, like I’ve done quite a bit of this year. But despite this my revenue and growth across my social platforms have continued to grow in 2023. If I had still been working as a designer through all of this I would have found life so much more stressful and I would have taken a massive revenue cut as I wouldn’t have been able to take on many client projects with all the personal and health challenges that have been going on this year. So that’s one lesson that’s so important from this year - keep revenue diversified and not tied to my time.
Going back through my monthly reviews I noticed that I really talked about the same things each month - which shows the power in consistency and just doing the same (sometimes boring) work day in, day out. Sometimes business isn’t that glamorous and is just getting the daily non-negotiable work done.
I continue to love the quiet of the early mornings - it’s such a great time of day for me and I’m definitely the most productive at that time of day.
Looking towards 2024
I wrote quite a bit about what I’m planning for 2024 in this post here. But here’s some of the stuff I want to do in 2024:
I want to make a new website and update my branding - create the ‘grown’ up version of my brand
I want to create even more and even better content for the design community
I want to make my content more about the community than it is about me - feature other designers and their businesses and projects they are working on. Make this more of a content hub for the entire design community rather than only me sharing my thoughts and opinions
Looking forward to moving into our new home 🥳
Thanks for reading and catch you in my next post :)
Clare x
Dr Clare Le Roy
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