Q1 Goals - Checking in and Planning for Q2
With the April holidays behind us and the beginning of April already here, it's time for another goals check-in! How did you do on your goals in Q1? Have you planned your Q2 goals? I recently started working through Market Beautifully's Asana for the Entrepreneur and so far I'm loving it. I'm a big fan of Asana and Haley's course outlines how you can use Asana to plan your quarterly, monthly, and weekly goals. I'll definitely do a review when I'm finished with it!
Here is an update on how I did with my Q1 goals:
Grow freelance income.
Confession, I did not grow my freelance income in Q1. I decided to scale back just a little, to focus on building a new income stream (which you'll be hearing more about in the coming weeks). This was as actually originally slated for my Q3 and Q4 goals but I shifted some things around to better scale my business and diversify my income. While planning is essential to running and growing multiple side hustles, it's also important to be flexible and willing to change things around when needed, just make sure you consider how changing one goal might affect your time allowance and accomplishing your other goals! My freelance income was actually a bit less than normal in Q1 to give me extra time to focus on new projects, I even had to fire a client that wasn't a good fit and didn't align with accomplishing my larger goals for the year.
Grow Etsy shop sales.
I did put more focus on my Etsy shop in March. One of the strategies to help accomplish this goal is to create more stock products for my shop. I created those products in March and will be listing them in the shop early this month so this goal is getting pushed into Q2. Not ideal - definitely going to be focusing on this more as it meets my larger goal of diversifying my income.
Grow and monetize Hustle & Flo.
This is another goal that shifted and got pushed to the back burner. Although I have been focusing on content and promotion for this site, I have not dedicated the time to do research and develop a monetization plan. This is another project that is getting pushed to Q2 and will require more focus. My two big goals for the year are increasing freelance income and diversifying my income so this and my Etsy shop are two important pieces to accomplishing those goals that I need to focus on, in addition to my new projects.
Overall for Q1, I definitely let my personal life and traveling overshadow my focus on the business. That couldn't really be helped. I'm a big fan of work/life balance so I was not going to sacrifice valuable time with friends and family to make sure I was ticking everything off on my to-do list, and as a result, I didn't hit all of my Q1 goals. In Q2 we don't really have any travel planned so we are already talking about doing a self-imposed hibernation to work and do a spending freeze.
And that brings me to my Q2 goals, which are a lot more ambitious than Q1, knowing that I'll have more time to focus on my business:
Launch new projects.
I am at a point with my freelance digital marketing management services for small businesses where I have to start scaling my business. There are only so many hours in the day and my service based freelance work means that I will either hit a ceiling in income because I don't have enough time to take on more clients, or I will have to increase my prices in order to make more money. So, it's time to start working on other sources of income that don't require as much of my time. What that looks like for me, at least right now, is coaching and online courses. I've been working on building an online course for small business owners who understand that they need a marketing strategy for their business, but who don't have the budget to outsource for services like the ones that I currently provide. This online course walks small biz owners through everything from branding to developing a content strategy to creating some simple sales funnels. I'm really excited about this course as marketing can be a big pain point for business owners who just don't have the time to spend learning how to be an expert marketer. An online course requires a lot of upfront time and energy, but once it's launched, I can shift my focus to promoting it. This course allows me to sell to many more people than I would ever be able to actively manage.
Grow Etsy sales.
Continuing with the theme of diversifying income, I'm looking to grow sales of custom products from my Etsy shop, but to help me scale my businesses I am also looking to increase sales on instant download digital stock products in my shop. Similar to the online course, creating stock products requires an initial time investment of creating and listing the products, but once that's done it requires minimal attention for upkeep and I can focus on marketing the shop. I set a more specific and measurable goal around not only the sales goal but also a production goal of stock products for myself, this will help me to see if I am on track to reach my goal throughout the quarter.
Monetize Hustle & Flo.
I've wanted to monetize this website since I started actively posting again at the beginning of 2018. I haven't monetized a site through ads and sponsored posts before so this goal will require me to spend some time researching and setting up services and processes. I have been procrastinating on this goal for a while but I expect once I get it set up, it won't take much to start bringing in some modest income from this stream.
Those are my main goals for Q2! Again, quite a few of these are holdovers from Q1. I'm going to look to complete those goals that weren't met last quarter while simultaneously launching a new project so it should be a very busy and productive quarter!
What are your goals for Q2?
