2020 INCOME REPORT (+ OUR 2021 GOALS) (Transcript)

Every month, I’m peeling back the curtain and sharing the ins & outs of my monthly revenue.

These income reports are an in-depth and honest look at how much my business earned, what it cost, and how many hours it took me to do it.

In this episode I’m wrapping up 2020 add opening up my books to show you how we fared.

I’d like to wrap this up by sharing that my hope for 2021 is that it is truly our best year yet. We learned SO much in 2020, and I know that if we apply those lessons this year then we’ll be in good shape.

This is a transcript of Work Less, Earn More, Episode 54. Listen to the episode here.

Gillian Perkins:

We became entrepreneurs because, more than anything, we want freedom. We want to be in control of our own schedule, income, and life. But unfortunately, that isn’t always the reality of being a business owner. I’m Gillian Perkins, and I’m on a vision to take back entrepreneurship for what it’s supposed to be. In every episode, I’ll share with you how to get the most out of every hour you work, so that you can work less and earn more. Let’s get to it.

Hey there, and welcome back to the podcast. In today’s episode, I’m going to be sharing with you my income report for 2020, including how much I earned, how much I spent, and how many hours I worked and my team worked. I’m also going to be getting into our plans for 2021 and what we’re hoping to achieve, and some challenges that I foresee. And the reason I’m going to include that in today’s episode is because I don’t really want to dedicate a whole separate episode just to that, since it is a little bit self-centric.

Before we get into any of that, though, I just want to take a moment to say that I truly hope that despite all of the challenges of 2020, that you had a good year. Obviously, it was a crazy year, and I’m sure that many of you who are listening faced some big challenges. But I hope that whatever you faced this past year, that you were able to learn from those things, that you were able to come out stronger on the other side, and I hope that, also, you didn’t just face challenges and overcome them and learn from them, but that you also experienced some other just purely good things that came out of this year, that came out of maybe the challenges, but maybe just came out of you working on your business or relationships that grew stronger as you spent more time with your family. And I just know that that is possible, and I hope that that was the case for you. But if you’re still looking for some good things that came out of 2020, bet you can find them.

I also hope that 2021 is your best year yet, and that you, right now, are making plans, or maybe you’ve already made some plans about what you want to do this year, what you want to achieve. And if 2020 taught us anything, I think it taught us to expect the unexpected. And we have no idea what 2021 will really hold. It could be better than 2020. I hope that it is. It could be worse in some regards. It certainly will be different, and I’m sure that there still will be some significant challenges that come with 2021. But we’ve learned to expect the unexpected. And so as we’re making our plans for this next year, I think we all have learned to hold our plans a little bit more loosely and embrace the unexpected, perhaps.

So, I hope that you have some goals, some plans that you are excited about and that you are looking forward to, and I also hope that you are open to being a little bit flexible and to looking for the good in whatever the situation is. So with that being said, let’s get on in to talking about 2020 and the numbers behind that year, and my income report, how much I worked, and all of that. Okay, so starting from the top of my profit and loss statement, we are starting with other income. So, this is income that wasn’t earned from products we directly sold ourselves, but affiliate revenue and ad revenue, things of that nature.

Affiliate Program

The first line item that I am seeing here is our affiliate program revenue. So, this is revenue from programs from companies that we are an affiliate partner with, so we promote their products and they give us a cut of the sales that are generated. And in 2020, we generated about just over $43,000 in affiliate revenue. And that is up significantly from 2019. I’m going to be comparing all of the 2020 numbers to 2019 numbers to give you a bit of context. And in 2019, we earned just shy of $20,000. So, we’ve more than doubled our affiliate revenue this year, so a really big uptick there.

In fact, you might be interested to know what some of the affiliate programs that we participate in are. One of them is Amazon, but that is not the one we earn the most from. In fact, we earned less than $2,000 from Amazon in 2020. Some of the other affiliate programs include The Virtual Savvy. We earn affiliate for their virtual assistant training course. ConvertKit. Teachable is our biggest affiliate. We partner with a few other smaller course creators. We partner with our hosting company, SiteGround, and we also partner with Self-Publishing School.

The next line item on the profit and loss is the ad revenue from YouTube. So, this is money that YouTube pays for the ads that are shown on the videos that we create. And in 2020, we earned just shy of $78,000. To be specific, it was $77,724 in ad revenue. And compared to 2019, the prior year, we earned $53,000. So again, a pretty significant uptick there, about an additional $24,000, which is a fairly similar increase to the increase we saw from 2018 to 2019. So, that is continuing to grow at a very steady rate.

Quite a few people have asked me if with the pandemic and more people at home, if we saw ad rates change, because I know that a few YouTubers who talk about money on the platform shared that they had seen a big increase in their ad rates. Personally, I didn’t notice a big increase in ad rates. I simply got more views on the channel, due to the growth of the channel. I wouldn’t really attribute it to the pandemic specifically because, obviously, I continue to get more views every year, just due to the marketing strategies, the content strategies that we use. So, we saw exactly the increase that we expected to see, and it didn’t seem to be very much affected by world events, although I’m sure it was affected both positively and negatively.

Product Sales

So now, the next section of the profit and loss is revenue from product sales. Now, there were quite a few smaller programs that we sold in 2019 that we didn’t sell in 2020, and vice versa. However, the two main programs that generated the bulk of the income were the same for these two years, so we’ll talk about those ones first. In 2019, we had earned $50,000 from Channel Launch, our YouTube strategy program. And then in 2020, we earned $93,000 from Channel Launch. So, we almost doubled the revenue from that program, which I’m so pleased with, because we were continuing to make more and more tweaks to the funnel throughout the entire year and work on increasing the traffic, but we never saw a point where we suddenly were getting much better results. And so, we felt like we weren’t making any progress. But now, looking at this year end number, I can see we made a whole lot of progress and, in fact, almost doubled the result.

Startup Society

The other number that is the most significant source of revenue would be the revenue from Startup Society. In 2019, we earned $154,000 from the program, compared to 2020, when we earned $211,000 from the program. So again, a pretty significant increase there. And again, I’m so pleased with that, but kind of for the opposite reason. We tried some new things with that funnel that honestly didn’t work, some new strategies that we tried to implement, marketing strategies that just didn’t work as well as what we were doing in the past. And so, we’ve had to make some changes.

So, I am just delighted that we actually ended up earning more money from the program, due to a couple big launches that we did, and then also just increased traffic and increased growth of the audience. And so, that’s just an amazing blessing, and I really was kind of expecting that number to be lower than in 2019. But it has increased, and we’ve learned so much about what doesn’t work, mistakes that we will not be making in this coming year, to hopefully increase this number even further.

Video Creator Academy

So now, a pretty big number here is a product that we launched in 2020, so we’re not going to compare it to 2019 at all, but it was Video Creator Academy. We launched it and we earned $47,000 from the initial launch, which it was a bigger launch than we were expecting. We were planning on having a very small beta launch for this more premium program, but it went off really well. And again, learned so much, both about the marketing strategies, improved my email copywriting skills, which is always a plus, and we were able to create this new resource, Video Creator Academy, to share with our YouTube students to help them create even better videos, and therefore grow their channels even faster. So, it was just a big win-win-win, and we learned a lot during the launch, as well. And $47,000 of profit doesn’t hurt.

Okay, and then we have a couple smaller programs that I’ll mention but, again, not really compare them to 2019, because we didn’t sell all these programs in 2019. But we sold a program called Pro Quality Videos On A Budget that is a really inexpensive program that we sell as a Tripwire product. And that earned $12,600. We also sold Plan Your Business For Profit for about $1,500. And then Attract Paying Customers, another Tripwire product, for $5,454. So all told, our product sales amounted to $372,746. And that is compared to $217,000 that we earned in 2019.

Total Gross Profit

And then coming down to the total gross profit in 2020, we earned $494,000, just over $494,000, compared to 2019, when we earned $290,000. So, this is about a 70% increase compared to the prior year. An increase that I feel very happy with, especially considering all of the craziness that was going on, and the fact that I wasn’t working for about three months of the year. There was three months of the year when I was completely out of the office, not working at all. We’ll get into that a little bit more in a little bit. But almost half a million dollars earned, which is by far the most money I have ever earned.

Expenses

Okay, so now let’s move along and talk about the expenses. And then we’ll talk about how many hours I worked and the team worked to earn this money. So, I think the single biggest expense that increased from the prior year was our advertising and marketing expense. And to be honest, I would consider this one of my biggest lessons, i.e. mistakes, of 2020. I invested fairly heavily into Facebook ads. And we certainly earned a lot of this money back, but what I learned through this process was just the fact that our funnels were not where I really wanted them to be. Our sales systems were not where I really wanted them to be. And we could have learned this lesson with organic traffic, which is free, which we have plenty of, and instead focused our attention on improving our funnels.

And I did have a strategic reason for this. I wanted to be working on diversifying our traffic sources so that we weren’t so heavily dependent on YouTube traffic, because that is our biggest source of traffic. And of course, it is dependent, to some degree, on the favor of the algorithm. So, I wanted to diversify. And so, I wanted to get into paid advertising. But, we really should have worked on improving our funnels first. And so, we’ve taken a step back from the Facebook ads. We’re no longer spending much money at all on those, just, again, so that we can double down on the area of the business that needs the most work right now.

So, it was a kind of expensive mistake, $60,000. Like I said, this money wasn’t entirely lost. We earned most of this money back in terms of course sales. But it still is money that we could have kept in our pocket. So, let’s move on to the next item, which is our banking and merchant service fees. And I’m seeing here that we spend just shy of $17,000 on these, compared to $9,000 that we spent in 2019. This is a number that I’m 100% fine with going up, because it’s basically the payment processing fees that we pay to payment processors, the companies that are processing credit cards for us. And it goes up in pretty direct correlation to our profits. So, our profits went up almost 100%, 70% over the past year, and these fees also went up somewhere between 70% and 100%.

I spent $9,000 on continuing education and training, compared to $3,400 that I spent in 2019. Both years, I purchased probably about the same amount of smaller training programs, but in 2020, I did buy a quite expensive training program that I participated in throughout the year, that I have, at best, a mixed review of. I did learn some valuable things that I do think have more than paid me back for the cost of the program, so that’s the good news. But I didn’t have the best experience with the program, unfortunately.

Next up is an expense that went down, which is good news, right? So in 2019, I spent about $14,000 on copywriting services. But in 2020, I spent only $2,300 on copywriting services. And they were very different sorts of services. In 2019, I paid people to write sales copy for me, and related to the creative part of the work and the strategic part of the work. But in 2020, most of this copywriting service that I paid for was just writing services, where people were writing articles for me or were writing content for Startup Society, and things like this. And it wasn’t so much creative or strategic marketing work. And so I felt like I had a much better handle on the marketing strategy side of the business. It was more in my hands and less in someone else’s hands. When I was trying to outsource some of that decision-making, I didn’t find that that worked very well for me. There were some aspects that worked well, and I did recoup my investment and even earn a profit from my investment, but I still am finding that I’m getting better results just writing for myself.

Another thing that I spent significantly more money on in 2020 was graphic design services. In 2019, I spent just $1,500 on such services, but in 2020, I spent $3,400. So, more than doubled those graphic design expenses. And this was an area of the business where I feel was a really good place to invest because it allowed us to save a lot of time as a team, while spending really a small amount more. And so we were able to more focus on the areas of the business that are really our areas of expertise, instead of wasting our time working on graphic design, which most of the core members of the team, it’s not their areas of expertise.

I spent a little bit more on bookkeeping, $5,300 versus $4,600 in 2019. I think that this was mostly just because we had more transactions to process. So, again, something I’m happy to spend money on because it’s a direct correlation to profits. Something that I spent a little less on was “other services.” Basically, I spent less on random freelancers on Upwork, because we built out our internal team a little bit more. So in 2019, I’d spent $2,400 on various freelancers, whereas in 2020, I spent just $1,200.

Something I spent a lot more on was tax preparation. So in 2019, I spent $425 to have my taxes done. In 2020, I spent $1,700 to have my taxes done. Honestly, neither year was I happy with the tax professional and the services that I got. Prior to this, I always did my taxes myself, but now I file as an S corporation, so my taxes are a lot more complicated, and I don’t feel like it’s the best use of my time. And I used two different accountants these past two years, and I just didn’t have the best experience with either of them. So, I am probably still looking for a new tax accountant, and we’ll see how that pans out in 2021.

Okay, the next one is a little one, but it’s no surprise. In 2019, I spent $570 on meals. And then in 2020, I only spent $167 on meals. So, a really significant decrease there, and that’s because most meals that are business expenses are when you are traveling for work, and I didn’t do much traveling in 2020. I spent a very similar amount on office supplies, $2,800 in 2020 compared to $2,900 in 2019. However, for some reason, the other office expenses went up. I spent $1,800 in 2020 compared to just $400 in 2019.

And then we come to a very significant expense, and that is software and subscriptions. So, these are all of the expenses related to running the website, running our email services, and some various other miscellaneous software that we use like Help Scout, Asana, Toggl, and also some video editing softwares, and things like that. So in 2019, we spent about $16,500 on the software. And then in 2020, we spent $19,000 on software. So, not a huge increase, but a fairly significant increase. And this is mostly because the email list grew. And the larger the email list is, the more we have to spend on email marketing software, and that tends to be fairly expensive.

We spent a fairly significant amount on photography, $2,100 in ’19 and then $2,300 in 2020. Podcast is a new significant expense. So in 2019, we spent just $4,000 on it, and this was at the end of the year when we were preparing to launch the podcast. That was our initial investment. In 2020, we invested $20,400 into producing the podcast, so that was a pretty significant expense. And as I’ve mentioned in past episodes, the podcast is, to some degree, still an experiment. And I am holding it loosely, because it’s not something that I am emotionally attached to, but I think it’s something that I can do to give back and to really share teaching and training with people who might not otherwise have access to business training. And so, I want to keep doing it for just all of you listeners. And then we’re always working on seeing how we can make podcast more profitable.

Something new that we are going to be doing in 2021 here is that we are actually going to start streaming the podcast live inside Startup Society. So you, as a listener of the podcast, you’re still going to get access to a very similar experience every single week, but if you want to get more involved with the podcast, you can become a Startup Society member. And in doing so, you’ll be able to watch me stream the podcast live every week, which has a double benefit: both you get the video aspect of the podcast in addition to the audio experience, but you also get to participate live, including asking your own questions directly to me at the end of every episode. I’m going to be wrapping up every episode with a live Q&A session to make it more interactive, to benefit the Startup Society members, and give them the opportunity to participate with the podcast. Anyway, this is all an aside. But we’re continuing to play with the podcast and how we want to best utilize it to serve both the customers and my audience at large, and also the business.

Video Production

Okay, so let’s move on. Let’s talk about how much we spent producing videos. So in 2020, we spent $21,000 producing videos, compared to 2019, when we spent $13,000 producing videos. Now honestly, both of these years, I experimented a fair amount with the help that I was getting, both in terms of the editing and also having people actually help me with the production side of things, and doing the filming, hiring the videographer, things like that. And I’ve come full circle and I’m back to doing most of it myself, with just an assistant helping me shoot some B roll, and stuff like that. So right now, we’re at not quite an all-time low, but the lowest that producing videos has cost in quite a while, basically since when I first started outsourcing my editing. And interestingly, I’m also working with the original editor that I started working with at the very beginning, too. So, that’s just a cool little full-circle moment.

But I’m glad that I tried out some different things in 2020. I learned a lot about producing videos and really improved my videos in a lot of ways, both just from creating videos myself, but also from working with these different professionals. And so just to be clear, that $21,000 we spent, that was both for actual production services, hiring the videographer and things like that, and also for editing both for YouTube and also for our paid programs.

The next line item is exactly the same from 2020 to 2019, and that was my salaries and wages. I paid myself $56,400 for each of these years, and then we paid another $5,000 in payroll taxes on top of that. And so basically, these are wages that I pay myself for being an employer of the company for the hours that I work. And what’s cool about this is because I work a more limited number of hours, I’m able to be allowed to pay myself a bit less since I’m not working any sort of insane hours that I need to compensate myself for as an employee. And for that reason, I’m technically very replaceable. But obviously, as the owner of the business, then I earn significant additional profit to that. And of course, these things show up on my profit and loss statement, technically as an expense. But since this is money that I get to keep in addition to the profits that the business makes, I considered this to be technically part of the business’s profits.

Okay, we’re almost to the end of this, but the next group of expenses relates to my team and how much I paid the team. So in 2019, we paid a total of $39,000 out for our internal team, compared to 2020, when we paid about $75,000. So, that is obviously a very significant increase. I mean, it’s basically doubled from one year to the next. But I could not be more pleased to be spending this money and supporting these different freelancers in running their own businesses, and also be getting this help that allowed me to increase the business’s revenue by such a large percentage. And I’m just really honored to be working with these people and to be sharing some of the business’s profits with them, as well.

The final line items I’m looking at here are $3,800 spent on telephone and internet expenses, compared to $1,500 in 2019. And then, this one makes me laugh, in 2019, I spent $6,800 on travel. In 2020, I spent $356 on travel. So yeah, practically nothing. But I think we all know that’s just how 2020 went. Okay, and then finally in 2019, there was $3,500 of categorized expenses, versus 2020, where we had just $2,000 of categorized expenses. So apparently, we are getting better at organizing things and keeping things in their proper boxes, so that’s good news.

All right, so all told here, these expenses add up to in 2019 we spent $190,000. And then if we add my wages back into that, then we actually spent $134,000. Then in 2020, we spent technically a total of $312,000, but if we add my wages back into that, then we actually spent $256,000. So, a pretty significant increase. We went from $134,000 last year to $256,000 this year. However, this is an increase that is actually very similar to our increase in our revenue, so I’m fine with this number. Of course, I would always like to see expenses lower. And the main thing that I see that could have made our expenses significantly lower this year would have been if we hadn’t invested in paid advertising. However, I am still very happy with this number overall because it means that our total net income this year was $238,000, compared to $156,000 last year. And that is just a great year-over-year increase.

Time Spent

Okay, so that brings us to the end of the income report. And now, let’s move on and talk about the hours that I and my team worked. So, let’s start by talking about the team. The team worked a total of 3,449 hours in 2020. And that worked out to an average of 66.3 hours that we worked collectively per week. So, that includes everyone on the internal team, including myself. It doesn’t include some other freelancers and agencies that we outsourced too, though. As I mentioned before, this isn’t a very clear or distinct line. In the business, it is, because the internal team is the people who are aware of our internal operations and are involved with those operations, whereas the people who aren’t included in this number are people like graphic designers or video editors who they aren’t really aware of the operations aspect at all. The work that they do is simply completely separate from the internal work we’re doing.

And so, then I want to share with you some of the most significant projects that team members worked on that took the majority of the hours. 590 hours was spent on customer service emails. Then we have another 452 hours that was project management. And then 266 hours on content management. $131 on implementation and general VA tasks. 131 hours on video editing. 130 hours producing and launching Video Creator Academy. Another 130 hours spend reviewing and auditing content that other team members had created. 130 hours spent managing Startup Society. And then 123 hours engaging on social media. And 122 hours in meetings.

Okay, so now that you understand what we collectively spent our time on, let’s talk about the hours that I worked myself, and what I spent that time on. And I think that while it is interesting to look at how much the team worked, and I think that especially if you have a small business right now and you’re thinking of expanding your team, that could be really interesting to you. But as it relates to my income, the hours that I personally worked are a little bit more interesting because they more directly correlate to the profits earned. And because it is my business, it is interesting to see how many hours I as the business owner had to work to earn that money.

So anyway, in 2020, I worked a total of 946 hours. So if we divide that by 52 weeks, we will find that I worked an average of 18 hours per week, which is obviously very successfully within my goal of working about 20 hours a week. However, I will be the first to admit that I didn’t work 20 hours most weeks. Most weeks, when I worked, I was working more like 25 to 30 hours. But I also took a lot of weeks off. I counted them up, and in total, I took 11 weeks completely off, where I wasn’t working at all. There were also a few weeks when I worked a little bi, but about 11 weeks that I was not in the office at all. And so then the rest of the weeks, I was working a bit more.

Now in 2021, I only have six scheduled weeks off. And that’s more typical for me. In 2020, obviously, I took a few months off for maternity leave, and that’s why my out-of-office hours were so high. But in 2021, I’m hoping to not work more hours in total, but instead just work fewer hours most weeks when I am working. Okay, so what did I spend all this time on? The thing that took the largest chunk of my time, I was actually surprised when I looked at this, was creating and launching Video Creator Academy. It took 88 hours of my time. So, something that I thought might be interesting to do, because I often mention that when I look at how much I worked on a project one month and how much I earn from that project in the same month, we can’t really tell how much I’m earning per hour for that work, because often I’m doing the work and then earning from it months later.

But now that we’re at the end of the year, we actually will be able to tell for a few of these numbers how much they paid me. But before we get into that, let’s talk about how much I earned on average for the hours that I worked. So, I worked 946 hours. I earned a total of $238,000 in profit. So, if I divide that, then I find that I earned an average of $251.59 per hour. So, now we can look at some of these projects and see how much they paid me. So for example, we created and launched the Video Creator Academy, and that brought in $47,000. So, if I divide that $47,000 by the 88 hours that it took me to create and launch the program, I’ll know exactly how much I earned per hour.

So for that work that I did, I just ran the math, and it looks like I earned $536 per hour. So, that was a great use of my time, because I earned almost twice as much as for the average hour that I worked other than that. My next biggest time expense was actually this podcast. I spent about 82 hours working on this podcast. Now, this isn’t a number I can run very well to figure out how much I earned per hour that I worked on this, because we’re still working on figuring out the best way to track the income from the podcast. We are tracking it to some degree based on people who use coupon codes that they hear on the podcast, and things like that. But I know that the podcast is producing more than we’re getting from just those numbers, so unfortunately, I can’t run that number.

Now after that, I have some time that unfortunately got divided up across a few different categories, so it’s actually more than I spent on either of those things, I realize now, but it’s producing YouTube videos. So in total, I spent 160 hours producing YouTube videos. So in fact, that is the largest expense of my time. It is also definitely the thing that brings in the majority of the customers. And so, I’ve talked about this before, but it’s what I consider to be the business’s prime mover, the primary thing that moves us forward, that drives our revenue. The more, better videos I make, the more, new customers we get, the more dollars we earn. So while I cannot directly figure this one out, I know without a shadow of a doubt that the majority of our customers originated from the YouTube channel. And so, it is going to be these things that I earn the highest amount of revenue per hour that I work from.

After that, a few other things that took a significant chunk of my time include Startup Society funnels, which took 38 hours, team management, which took just 36 hours, email marketing, which took 35 hours, and administration that also took 35 hours. To be honest, when I’m looking at all of these numbers, they all seem kind of small compared to the big impact that some of them have, like we generate most of our sales directly from email marketing, and yet I only spent 35 hours on email marketing for the entire year. That seems pretty crazy to me. It also seems crazy that I only had to spend 36 hours this year managing my team. Of course, that is mostly due to the fact that I have an amazing integrator, Courtney, who really takes care of that entire task for the company. She does a great job of managing our team.

Validate
Okay, my voice is giving out, and also, this episode is getting rather long. But before we wrap it up, I do want to touch on a few of our 2021 goals just briefly. So, the first thing is we are launching a brand new program to guide entrepreneurs to validate their business ideas, because this is the biggest mistake I see new entrepreneurs and, honestly, even entrepreneurs who have been at it for a while making, where they’re just pouring themselves, pouring their time, pouring their energy, and definitely also a lot of money, into business ideas that are unproven. So, they have a business idea and, as is the case with all entrepreneurs, they are driven to turn that idea into a reality. They are motivated. They are inspired by their idea. And that is amazing. But oftentimes, it blinds us to the reality of whether or not our business idea is really viable in the market, whether there’s really demand for the product that we’re trying to sell.

And so, I just see so many people wasting a lot of time, energy and money on ideas that are completely unproven. So, we’ve created a new program to guide people to validate their business ideas so that they can get proof that their business idea is valid and is a good idea that is actually in demand by the market, that will actually be able to be turned into a success, generate those first sales, earn their first thousand dollars, and have confidence to be able to move forward with their business. If that’s something you’re interested in, the program is kicking off in just about a week after I’m recording this.

So if you’re listening to it shortly after it’s released, then there’s probably still a few days before this first class of the program launches. You can go to gillianperkins.com/validate to learn more about that. We would certainly love to have you join us. If you are an entrepreneur yourself or you want to start your own business, and so far you’ve seen limited success, you are not yet consistently earning more than a thousand dollars per month, or maybe you haven’t made any money at all and you’d like to work with my team and me to validate your business idea. Again, you can just head to gillianperkins.com/validate to learn more about that program that will be launching very soon.

Some other things we’ll be working on this year include reorganizing and updating the curriculum in both of our two core programs, Startup Society and Channel Launch. We will also be launching another program called The 100K Mastermind, which is for entrepreneurs who are a bit further along in the process. They’ve already validated their business idea. They’re ready to move on to building an evergreen sales machine to generate passive income each month and create more consistent revenue. And specifically, to take their business from earning just a couple thousand dollars per month and inconsistent income to consistently earning $10,000 per month or more, so that they can reach that six-figure mark.

And I’ll wrap this up by sharing with you our revenue goal for 2021. So as I shared with you just a few minutes ago, in 2020, we earned just shy of half a million dollars, $492,000 in gross revenue. In 2021, with these new projects and products that we will be launching, our projected revenue is $972,000, which will be a 95% increase compared to this past year. Now obviously, this is very ambitious. And personally, I find that I set ambitious goals every year. Sometimes, I reach them, but more often, they just serve as the high bar that I’m striving towards. And typically, I’ll get about 50% my way to the goal. So, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in fact this next year I actually earn something more like $750,000, which obviously would still be an amazing goal to reach. But the goal that we are putting down on paper is to cross the $1 million mark, because $972,000 is just too close to a million to not strive to hit that seven-figure mark.

All right. Well, my voice is about shot, and I am teaching a live workshop tomorrow morning for Startup Society, so I’m going to wrap this up. But thank you so much for joining me for this episode. And as I mentioned earlier on … Well, two things. One is, if you would like to participate live in future recording sessions, then be sure to head to startupsociety.com and become a member of Startup Society, because when you do that, not only will you get access to our entire Startup Success curriculum, which is the most high-quality and affordable business training on the market, and you’ll get to work directly with me, ask me questions on a regular basis, and get access to our live events, but you will also get access to the live recordings of this podcast, and get to as your questions after each episode.

And then the other thing I want to mention is that, yes, Validate will be kicking off for the inaugural class here in just a few days, so visit gillianperkins.com/validate if you are trying to get your business off the ground, maybe you’re struggling to earn your first thousand dollars, or maybe you haven’t earned any money at all and you want to figure out if you have the right business idea, a good business idea, a business idea that can be a success, before you invest a whole lot of time and money into this idea. Again, just go to gillianperkins.com/validate to learn all about that new program.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Work Less, Earn More. Now, here’s what I want you to do next: take a screenshot of the episode you’re listening to right now, and share it on Instagram Stories. And when you do, make sure you tag me @gillianzperkins, so I can see that you’re listening. Sharing on Stories is going to help more people find this podcast, so that they too can learn how to work less, earn more, and take back their lives. And if you really love the show, then head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a review to give it a boost. Not only will this help the show out, but it’s also going to give you the chance to win a 12-month membership to Startup Society. Each week, I’ll be picking one winner. To enter, all you need to do is post your review on Apple Podcasts, and be sure to include your Instagram handle so we can send you a DM if you win. Okay, now let’s wrap this up. I’m Gillian Perkins, and until next week, stay focused, and take action.