Business Year in Review 2021: What worked and what didn’t

It’s that time again! I’m so thrilled to be sharing my business income, reflections, successes and fails for the 2021 annual year.

Every year, I dive deep into what worked and what didn’t in my business so I can share it with you in this post. It’s one of my favorite blogs to write every single year and although I can’t believe we’re already here doing it again – I’m so excited about it!

I’ve always felt that it’s important to share some of the behind the scenes of my business, because it’s always been one of my favorite ways to learn from other entrepreneurs!

Getting an inside look into their planning and growth can help you facilitate the same things in your own business. Also, learning what mistakes they made along the way reminds us that we’re all in this “figuring it out as we go” ride of entrepreneurship together.

Let’s get down to it!

HOW MUCH MONEY BYTE BODEGA MADE

I’ll be honest in that I am a little nervous about sharing these year-over-year results.

As business owners, we’re pushed to constantly grow, improve, scale, level up, hustle harder, and everything else in between.

If I’m being totally honest, I could have grown our services more and brought on more clients if I wanted too. But I intentionally chose not too. So the business’s income decreased a tiny bit, but essentially stayed the same.

Instead, I decided to work on some of the projects that I’ve had in the back of my mind for a long time now that allowed me to create a new income stream and diversify from client-work a bit. More on that later!

The important point I want to make here is: Don’t allow hustle-culture to make you do things you don’t feel called to do.

I didn’t feel called to take on more client work. So I didn’t.

Some might look at these numbers and think I failed or lost momentum, but in reality, I grew a whole new piece of my business that never existed before. That new piece of my business can help me grow exponentially next year.

Taking a one year pause to (basically) make the same amount of money in order to have the potential for incredible growth in the next?

That’s a strategic business decision. Not a failure.

My monthly income stays pretty stable month to month because we primarily focus on retainer services here at Byte Bodega.

So other than a client joining us or leaving us here or there, we basically know what we can expect to come in each month. Proof that you can have a stable income as a freelancer!

SUMMARY OF MY YEAR

It was an absolutely insane year for me personally. Especially because I tend to run my life on a much lower-frequency than I find most other people do.

I know it feels like everyone tends to say that at the end of each year, saying that they’re going to “slow down” next year because this one was just “so crazy.”

But I truly had a lot happening.

So much so, that my personal life really took priority over my business in a lot of ways.

Then again though, this is exactly why I started my business – So that I had the freedom to do that if/when I want too.

Here’s what projects my team and I were working on internally + a little about what I had going on personally:

• January: Conducted data-research + created an online course (The VA Blueprint!) outline based on the results
• February: Created all my course launch materials + announced the program (started house hunting!)
• March: Launched the course, worked 7 days a week to create the course content
• April: Welcomed students into the program + held space to support them
• May: Traveled back to Pennsylvania twice for my best friend’s bachelorette party + bridal shower
• June: Traveled back to Pennsylvania for my best friend’s wedding (finally got an accepted offer on a house!)
• July: Increased our Pinterest management prices, bought a house and moved
• August: Setup an evergreen sales funnel for my online course
• September: Experimented with paid advertising for the course + visited friends in LA
• October: Testing + tweaks for course funnel
• November: Wrote updated website copy for the company website
• December: Finalized website updates and intentionally resting

MARKETING + CLIENT WORK

Throughout all of 2021, we worked with a total of 15 clients. This is a combination between stand-alone projects and our retainer clients we partner with month after month.

This is less than last year’s 19 clients, mainly because I put so much energy into diversifying away from client work that I wasn’t taking on new clients at all for more than half of 2021. We just continued our partnerships with our current clients.

Focusing a lot of my energy on creating course materials caused me to take a step back from blogging, which isn’t something I wanted or had planned. But I knew that our students and my course content needed my full attention and I couldn’t reasonably manage both without totally burning out.

I’ll have published 16 blog posts by the end of the year. For a weekly blog, this is honestly really crappy consistency.

That’s why in 2022, I’m shifting to the goal of bi-weekly blog posts. I took the time and energy I needed to create a passive income stream in my business, and now I need to refocus and share it with people through the blog.

So I’m going to do just that!

TRAVEL, TIME-OFF + LIFE UPDATES

Thankfully, travel opened up for us a lot more so that we could get out of the house this year. (Thank you, vaccine developers!)

I didn’t do a ton of “fun” traveling this year because we were focused so much on my best friend getting married and visiting family + friends we hadn’t seen in over a year. So that’s where the majority of our time off went!

I’m so grateful to have been there to celebrate with her at every step of the way and to squeeze my family members in person.

Here’s a sneak peek into my moving and travel adventures!

For the entire year, I took 40 work days off. So about 8 weeks of vacation.

That’s not including the 7 days a week I worked in March to create the course content for the Virtual Assistant Blueprint. So it’s a little less than that in reality.

But between all the random half-days and “I don’t want to work this afternoon” days I took throughout the year – It probably about evened out.

WHAT WORKED IN 2020

The biggest thing that worked this year was the creation + beta-launch of my signature course: The Virtual Assistant Blueprint.

My primary goal of 2021 was to create a passive income product that supported aspiring Virtual Assistants and it went so well!

I launched the course in the Spring to validate the concept (to confirm people were actually going to buy it!) and surpassed my goals. Since then, I’ve turned it evergreen so I can make sales with it literally anytime.

Remember how I said that this year wasn’t about client work? It’s because it was about developing this program.

We also worked to improve and shift our Pinterest Marketing strategies because a lot has changed on the platform within the last 12 months. So we spent a lot of time re-strategizing with clients about how to make the future of the platform work for their businesses.

Things I enjoyed working on:

Recognizing what you enjoy and what you don’t in your business can help you create a vision for what you want your future to look like. Sometimes we forget that we have the power (to a certain point, anyway) to build our workday around the things that bring us joy.

• Creating online course materials
• Learning about evergreen marketing funnels
• Holding Q+A Calls with course students
• Raising our service pricing
• 1:1 Coaching Services for full-time VAs
• Decreasing the size of my team
• Taking a step back from client work and allowing my team member to shine in serving them
• Buying our first home
• Being the MOH to my bestie!

WHAT DIDN’T WORK IN 2020

Part of the fun of business is that things absolutely do not always go to plan! You have to learn to roll with the punches and not attach yourself to the results of your business.

This is sort of an overarching issue, but I had a much quicker timeline planned for our course than I actually experienced.

I realized throughout the year, that I didn’t really account for all of the personal things we had going on this year into my business planning. All those times that I wasn’t going to be able to focus as much energy on it as I thought I was going too.

What I mean is: I didn’t schedule in rest + vacation time.

Originally, I had planned to be actively promoting and marketing my course in Quarter Four (Oct-Dec). In reality, I was spending time finalizing our evergreen funnel and updating our website messaging.

So I ended up being a full three months behind schedule on my marketing initiatives between just normal delays + my time off.

I’m allowing myself some space on this though, because we’ll be able to hit the ground running in the new year knowing that everything is setup and ready to go to support our new, incoming students.

I also let the blog fall to the wayside as I worked on all these other projects. Like I mentioned before, I sort of did this intentionally. Nonetheless, blogging only works if you do it consistently and that’s something I fell short on this year.

Things I DIDN’t ENJOY WORKING ON or avoided:

• Creating idea pins on Pinterest (IYKYK)
• Blogging consistently
• Writing website copy
• Instagram as a whole
• Feeling overwhelmed and constantly behind due to project delays
• Traveling a lot in a very short period of time
• Moving into our first home (because moving sucks no matter what)

CHANGES IN 2022

The biggest change I’m anticipating in 2022 is pausing all new, client-based work.

This isn’t something I’ve entirely set in stone yet and it might change throughout the year. However, I’m planning not to take on any more clients for the foreseeable future so I can make more time and space for my course students.

The future of Byte Bodega looks like more educational resources for VAs, so that I can help awesome people like you start online businesses.

THANK YOU, YOU’RE AWESOME

Seriously, you’re freaking amazing.

I’m so grateful for you, because you’re the reason I’m here writing and sharing this right now.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t have any purpose behind what I do. So thank you for being here. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for us!

Thank you to the incredible Paige Brunton for her Business Anniversary Reviews that inspired this post. If you’re interested in learning about anything and everything there is to know about Squarespace, she’s your gal!

Here’s to 2022!