My Monthly Review - May 2022
I have been publicly sharing my monthly business reviews since January 2022 (scroll to the bottom of this post to see my others).
This is a reset process I go through on the first of every month to review the month that has just been and to plan for the month ahead.
I highly encourage all of my clients and students to do a similar process each month as it helps keep you accountable and see what is working and isn’t working in your business.
If you want a free checklist to use you can grab that here:
If you aren’t regularly tracking what is happening in your business then it’s very difficult to assess what’s working, what isn’t working, what progress you are making (or not making!) and how you can improve.
My review process normally takes me about 20 minutes to complete each month and when I look back on my previous entries I’m so grateful that I have a record of what has been happening so I can look back on how far I have come!
A quick note before we start…
I share this information publicly because I’m a completely open book and want to encourage and inspire other women and mothers about what is possible with their businesses.
When I was starting my ow business I used to follow a few business owners who did something similar to this and I found it hugely inspiring and helpful as it showed me what was possible in my own business.
However, I’m aware that some people find the sharing of business results and revenue numbers triggering, so if that’s you then I suggest you skip this post and jump in to some of my other free content instead :)
Here’s my review from May 2022.
Looking back - review last month
Revenue
Revenue for May was $103,469
Social Metrics
Email/newsletter subscribers: 35,595
Instagram - TLDC: 64,000
Instagram - CLR: 6,905
YouTube - CLR: 6.82K
YouTube - SketchUp: 286
Facebook Page Follows: 22,143
Facebook Group: 8,200
Twitter: 163 (I literally never look or post on this - probably will stop tracking from next month)
Pinterest Follows: 10.1K
Pinterest monthly views: 1.5 million
LinkedIn Follows: 393
Website visits: 24K
Bounce Rate: 73%
Top 3 Wins Last Month
Moved Dad to his nursing home and cleared his unit ready for sale (absolutely massive project)
Continue to write my daily blog posts - 5 months of this now!
Business and revenue has remained respectable despite me hardly working this month + the current economic and political climate
Notes from Last Month
What went well, what didn’t go well…
Sometimes life throws you curve balls and this month has been (another!) one of those for me. I do feel like I spend a lot of my life having significant curve balls thrown at me - but I’m a very resilient person so I take most of this in my stride. :)
I just re-read my monthly review from last month, which I always do before writing these notes, just to see what I had planned for my upcoming month and whether I had achieved what I had set out to achieve. This month I’ve done almost NOTHING on my list. But I have a good reason for that.
This month my 88 year old Dad needed to be moved to a nursing home quite suddenly. He had been starting to struggle living by himself and was having more and more falls. It was dangerous for him to continue to live alone. He decided he needed a few weeks of respite in a nursing home to take a break and get some rest. But in the lead up to the respite he realised that he really needed to move to a nursing home permanently.
So my month was spent helping him do that, which has been an absolutely massive project that has involved:
Researching, visiting and finding him a nursing home he would be happy with (we found a lovely one that’s a few minutes down the road from where I live)
Getting him packed up and moved - not easy to choose what to take with you when you’re going from a 3 bedroom unit to one room! Very emotional for everyone.
Getting his unit packed up and ready for sale - he has 88 years of stuff and he’s a bit of a “collector” so there was SO much stuff to sort out and find homes for - e.g. via donations, sending to antiques dealer, selling and rubbish. I’ve spent hours and hours a day at his unit for weeks on end this month.
Dad is settled now and so far is mostly happy in his new home. Some days he has complaints but that’s to be expected I think. The work on getting him moved is now also largely over as well, which is a relief as it has been totally exhausting!
But because of all of that I have barely worked again this month. This comes off the back of last month where I had taken most of the month off as well, which you can read about in my review of last month if you’re interested. So it’s now been 2 months where I have probably done, on average, about 2 hours of work per day. Despite that my business is surviving well and most key metrics have grown this month, albeit not by much.
The main metric (and the most important one!) that is down again this month is revenue. My goal is to always get over $100,000 in the month, which I have done and so I’m happy, but this month I have really just creeped that in.
But honestly given everything that’s going on in the world and people’s currently levels of uncertainty, combined with the fact I haven’t been as focused on my business as normal, I’m actually happy with where revenue has landed for the month.
I’m keen to get stuck back in to work in June, now that my Dad is settled and I can focus more on my work. However, I also know that I have my next brain surgery looming as well and I’m not 100% sure when my doctor will set that for. It could be quite soon, so that could throw another spanner in the works for the coming months as well.
One thing I’m 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 of only working a few hours a day, like I’ve been doing recently, and most of my revenue and growth across my social platforms continues to grow or at least stay stable.
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 so many client projects while my Dad was needing help and we were packing up his unit.
So that’s one lesson that’s so important from this - keep revenue diversified and not tied to my time. This is a core focus for my business growth over the coming period (once my brain surgery is over!). I want to expand out the offerings in my business and I have lots of exciting projects I would like to try out and share with my community.
Here’s some good things that happened this month:
I continued to write a daily blog post almost every morning. I do this between 4.30-5.30am before my training session and have done so for nearly 5 months now. Very happy with the consistency of this and I really enjoy this early morning writing period.
I have got back to being consistent with my Instagram posting. BUT I have dropped back to only posting once per day, rather than twice like I used to. I have found this much more manageable and I haven’t really noticed much of a drop in follower growth or (more importantly) engagement. I’m focusing on better quality posts, less often, and that is working well. Some followers have said they actually prefer less content as they find too much content overwhelming - so that was interesting feedback.
I have managed all my other customer service stuff in less than an hour each day - which is a really manageable amount of time for me. Yes, even with a business of my size I still do almost all my own customer service emails and messages myself! :)
Anyway - my summary on business stuff for this month is that basically I haven’t completed any of the projects I set myself for the month. I’m OK with this as my Dad was my priority this month and that’s much more important than business. All my projects are still in my project plan in Notion and so my aim is to readjust the timeline on these and then knock these out during June, assuming my surgery doesn’t go ahead this month.
From a personal perspective we are still also trying to work out what to do with our home renovation project. Last month I thought we had a plan - that was to do a big extension on the back of the house. But throughout this month we have rethought those ideas and decided to scale things back again. We go up and down on this constantly!!!
Our current thinking:
Our lifestyle at the moment is financially stress free. The renovation we had planned would require us to take out a mortgage to cover the cost of it. While this would be totally affordable - do we really want to have a large mortgage again? We don’t think we do - there’s no need to put ourselves in that situation if we don’t really need to.
Do we really need such a big house - as per the extension design we thought we were going to do? Our current house is already more than 300 sqm and while we do have specific needs in our family - especially accommodating Hugo and his needs in his wheelchair - it seems silly to pay for extra space that largely won’t get used, at least in the short term (e.g. a specific carer wing). It also feels a bit unsustainable to create such a large house if we don’t really need it.
Doing the scaled back renovation is easier for approvals - we can pretty much get started right away as there’s not much that needs to be approved.
The house really needs to be fixed - there are more and more leaks and issues appearing, we have to make a decision and get started with something or it’s going to fall down!
Health and training wise - I’ve been on a new eating plan for the past month or so. My trainer felt I wasn’t gaining as much strength as I would like because I wasn’t eating enough, especially enough protein. So I’ve been strictly tracking my Macros for nearly a month now and seeing some great results so far.
I’m not 100% happy with how I look yet - I’m very critical about that side of things (as most women are!). But I have gained a lot of strength since I have increased my protein intake and pleased with some of the results there. Last week I did 40kg chest press with the bar, which I have done before, but not as easily as I did last week. I am also now starting to do proper pull ups without a band. I have been able to do chin ups without a band for a while now, but never strict pull ups with hands over the bar - so that’s a good milestone as well. My legs are also getting stronger - especially with lunges. I have been surprising myself with some of the things I can do that I used to find incredibly difficult. So it shows that eating more and focusing on macros and especially protein is great for strength training! I’m interested to see how that continues to improve over the coming months (although I’m also aware that my looming operation is going to put a spanner in the works with this as I’ll have to take quite a few months off training to recover from that).
So overall this month has been slow for work and really more about my Dad. Hopefully next month will be a bit of a more normal month and I can get on top of all the strategic projects I’ve been wanting to do, but haven’t got on top of yet.
Looking forward - plan this month
Focus this month:
Get on top of my planned out strategic projects. I know what all of these are - they are mapped out in Notion. Need to reset the due dates and get stuck in.
Projects this month:
☐ Update SketchUp webinar and automation funnel + advertise this better (and put more value in it)
☐ Create business short course webinar
☐ Update short course platform
☐ Update ads - more reels style ads
☐ Weekly video posting to YouTube
☐ Create renovation project plan
☐ Continue daily blog posts and Instagram posts
Goals this month:
☐ $150K in revenue
☐ SketchUp webinar remake
☐ Business course webinar
☐ Update business course platform
☐ Daily blog posts
☐ Daily posts to Instagram
☐ Weekly YT videos
☐ Finalise renovation drawings
☐ Create renovation project plan + start boys’ wing
What would make this month amazing?
Complete the strategic projects I’ve set myself
Finalise renovation plan and get started with that
Create more content in order to generate more leads for my courses and programs
If you would like to follow my business journey you can read my other monthly reviews via the links at the bottom of this page.
And if you would like to download my free Canva template to conduct your own monthly business review you can do that here:
Courses and Templates for Designers and Architects
DO YOU WANT TO….
Improve your professionalism?
Find more clients?
Bring in more revenue?
Create better systems and processes?
Then check out my business courses and templates for designers and architects.
These courses and templates leave you with work done - not just a long list of things you need to do next. We have a really strong focus on taking action and getting things created that improve your business.
Enjoy the rest of your day!
Clare x
Dr Clare Le Roy
