Possums!

Yay! Welcome back to my monthly tradition where I review my life & business & share behind-the-scenes numbers as well.

I’ll cover:

  • life blessings & challenges
  • what I’ve created in my business
  • how much revenue generated
  • my goals for next month.

You can read previous monthly reviews here:

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My first two month holiday!

I took off December & January as holidays for the first time.

I’m not really a workaholic anyhow – I only ever work about 10 hours a week, and I’ve never really taken many holidays because I like working and it feels sustainable.

Last Christmas, I decided to try taking off a month off over school holidays as an experiment. I had a bonza time – and also found that I had a lot more clarity from doing it.

So I thought I’d try doing it for two months this time and seeing what that was like.

Spoiler alert: I LOVED IT! Ha!

How I prepped my business so I could holiday for two months

  • My two part-time assistants worked through most of Dec & Jan (one only does Customer Service emails, the other is my general VA/Online Business Manager (OBM) who does everything else).
  • We had a 10 day office shutdown over Christmas which both assistants had off.
  • One assistant had more time off, the other covered for her.
  • I stockpiled blog posts & emails so we had content to go out weekly on schedule
  • I set priorities for my OBM to work on while I was away. I tried to make them as measurable as possible. For example, to prep 10 Business Success Series blog posts for publishing.

Here’s the content schedule we had:

I pre-wrote the blog posts before I went, and then my OBM published & sent to the mailing list each week. We probably could have batch created it even more by having my OBM pre-schedule blog posts & emails, but that’s a level of planning achievement we’ll attain another time. Haha!

How my holidays went:

Holidays were bloody wonderful. We ended up going on TWO holidays (totally unheard of in our homebody world!)

We stayed in an old Queenslander cottage for a week in Maryborough where my parents-in-law live. We spent time with them, went to a wildlife park, wandered around the beautiful parks, marvelled at the old historic architecture and took the kids to the water park. It was godawful hot and the cottage didn’t have airconditioning, but we still enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.

Then a month later, we stayed in Hervey Bay at an Airbnb with a pool and was only two blocks from the beach. It was THE BEST. The kids spent most of the day giggling in the pool, and we all went swimming together as a family. We raced barefoot after ice cream trucks and peered in rock pools and fed a huge sea turtle and had the quintessential summer beach holiday. It made our hearts so happy.

I think I’m actually really good at holidaying, guys. I think I could get addicted to this!

Visitors!

My Wild Bushman Dad came to stay for a week over Christmas as usual. The girls love their annual “build a gingerbread house with Grandad” tradition. We didn’t do much tourist stuff as Covid cases were skyrocketing, but it was still good to spend time with my Papa Bear.

I also got to see my high school best Dan at last. We haven’t seen each other since we graduated 21 years ago as we’ve both been traipsing about Australia/the world. Dan was like a brother to me and such an important part of my teen years. It was so beautiful to see him, meet his wife & daughter, and for our families to connect together.

Pandemic-y things:

  • After largely living in a Covid-free bubble the last two years, our state government opened our borders and we finally have what everyone else in the world has: Covid everrrrrrywhere. I’m grateful that our state was able to eliminate Covid until we could get vaccinations and reach 90% vaccinated levels. That’s an enormous privilege. And I still wish we could have kept our bubble.
  • I got my booster shot! Heyoo! So excited! My husband had to wait a little longer and got his today.
  • My kids got their first vaccination as soon as Australia opened it for their age group.
  • Our kids’ school holiday was delayed by two weeks so they didn’t return to school during the peak of the Omicron wave.

Other things I did on holidays

I fully let myself… go... these holidays. No productivity. No pushing to be anything but lazy. A real summer holiday!

  • I got addicted to an app called Pocket Styler, a fashion styling app. Fashion is usually not my jam, but it is my eldest kid’s, so we did it together, and it was bloody fun.
  • I played 800 levels of Water Sort Puzzle, another stupid app.
  • I got addicted to Wordle, like the rest of the planet. Smug moment: I haven’t lost once yet!
  • My husband & eldest kid watched the complete set of Harry Potter movies. I tried, but they are still too scary for me. I’m a delicate petal!
  • I watched a lot of Christmas rom coms.
  • Read a lot of trashy books awwwwwww yissssssssssss.
  • We walked a lot, with my kids on bikes and skateboards.
  • I didn’t socialise much outside of my family, but did have a lovely picnic at the river with my kids’ friends.

Best Books I Read

I read 34 books in December & January. Here’s my favourites of them:

How much money I made while holidaying in December & January

I made AUD $64,500 in two months while on holidays. Down from our usual monthly average, but still a totally rad income for someone who spent inordinate amounts of time reading trash and lolling about in a pool! Ha!

Where that income came from:

E-course income breakdown:

  1. Marketing Without Social Media: USD $4,554
  2. 40 Days To Create & Sell Your E-Course: USD $4,433
  3. Work Less, Earn More: USD $3,318
  4. Sales Star: USD $2,721
  5. Money, Manifesting & Multiple Streams of Income: USD $2,301
  6. 40 Days To A Finished Book: USD $1,349
  7. Mini workshop: Behind The Scenes of A Multi-Millionaire’s Finances: USD $255

(Note: E-course breakdown is in USD, total for all e-course income is in AUD).

Bonus Free Money!

I made some freeeee money as well which is always fun. We have Awards credit cards. We do all business and personal spending on them, and pay them off every week before interest is charged (interest is only charged monthly, but I’m risk adverse AF hahaah!). We earn points from the spending which we can use to either get free electronics or homewares, or get cashback. We used the cashback option this time, so got $250 of free money deposited into our accounts. Hooray!

I also use the free Honey app when buying online to get the best deals and coupon codes on purchases. I love using it just for that feature – it’s fairly often it will find a $10-$20 saving for me. On top of that, you can get rewards on your earnings, so I scored a $40 giftcard from them. NOICE.

Blog posts I published

Interviews

Current list of software I use to run my business:

  • Kajabi for most things in my business:
    • selling through their shopping cart
    • teaching my courses through their learning management system
    • running my affiliate program
  • ActiveCampaign to send all our marketing emails.
  • Optin Monster to create all the pop-ups, reminder windows & lead magnet forms on my website.
  • Calendly to screen interviewers and book in interviews.
  • Xero is my accounting & financial management system.
  • I host my WordPress websites on WPEngine.

More tools of the trade here if you find that kind of thing useful!

Goals for February

Life:

  • Settle back into work routine & get my kids settled back into school
  • Start weekly Pilates again (and tea and cake at my favourite cafe afterwards)
  • Finish my Goal Getter Life workbook planning for the year
  • Schedule school tours
  • Get investment house organised

Business:

  • Finish my Goal Getter Biz workbook planning for the year
  • Do a live round launch of a course
  • Complete a Project 10% on Pinterest
  • Mostly… get back into the swing of creating again and decide on what I want to do next!

Transcript Time!

Leonie Holiday Review and Business Insights [0:00]

    • Preparation for taking a two-month holiday from work.
    • Personal experiences and reflections during the holidays.
    • Business updates, including income sources and performance.
    • Goals and plans for February and beyond.

Family Holidays in Queensland! [4:10]

Personal Updates and Pandemic Reflections [6:57]

Leonie’s Personal Reflections on Holiday Activities [9:45]

Leonie’s Income Report and Future Goals [13:32]

Read Along Here!

0:00 – Leonie Dawson
La la la, la la la, Leonie Dawson refused to be categorized in that podcast. Oh my god, fireworks. Other celebratory explosions. Yay, we’re back. Leonie Dawson refused to be categorized. The first episode for 2022. Today I’m going to share with you my December and January review.

0:22 – Leonie Dawson
What I did in the last two months of taking holidays. How much I made.

0:29 – Leonie Dawson
All that fun stuff.

0:30 – Leonie Dawson
If you want to go see the visuals of all of this, there’s going to be charts and links to all the things, leoniedawson.com forward slash Jan 2022. So this is this like whole like review thing.

0:41 – Leonie Dawson
It’s a tradition that I’ve been doing since April last year. Oh my God. We’re heading close to a year of it. And it’s where I like to kind of take you behind the scenes in my business and my life. And share kind of behind the scenes numbers as well, cover like life, blessings, challenges, what I’ve created and my goals for the next month as well.

1:04 – Leonie Dawson
So I’ve really just been on a two month holiday. It feels really weird talking to you, like it feels like it’s been forever, like it’s so good to catch up, hi.

1:16 – Leonie Dawson
For me, I took off December and January like as a holiday for the first time ever in my business, I mean, I’m not really a workaholic. I only ever work about 10 hours a week. I’ve never really taken holidays before because I really like working and it feels totally sustainable. For me, last Christmas, I decided to try taking off a month over school holidays. That was like Christmas 2020.

1:41 – Leonie Dawson
And I thought I’d take a month off as an experiment and I had a bonzer time.

1:47 – Leonie Dawson
I also thought I had a lot more clarity around my business from taking that time out. So I thought for this Christmas I would take two months off and see what that was like,

2:00 – Leonie Dawson
Spoiler alert, I loved it.

2:02 – Leonie Dawson
Now if you’re wondering like how I prepped my business so I could holiday for two months. So I’ve got two part-time assistants. Together they work about 25 hours a week. They mostly work through December and January. They usually have holidays at other times. One of them had holidays during part of it. It’s totally fine because I’ve got the two of them. They can switch tasks together, which is cool. One of them usually does the customer service emails and the other is my general VA or online business manager who does everything else. And we also had a 10-day office shutdown over Christmas that both my assistants had off. Before I went on holidays, I stockpiled and really batch created blog posts and emails so we had content to go out weekly on a schedule.

2:54 – Leonie Dawson
And I also set priorities for my online business manager to work on while I was away and I tried to make them as measurable as possible.

3:03 – Leonie Dawson
So for example, one of those priorities was to prepare 10 business success secrets series for blog posts for publishing. So I had already written the content and she needed to turn it into a blog post and add a whole a bunch of things into it, edit, update, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, we had a content schedule spreadsheet set up. If you go to leoniedawson.com forward slash Jan 2022, you’d be able to see that. And I just pre-wrote all the blog posts before I went.

3:34 – Leonie Dawson
Then my online business manager would publish and send to the mailing list each week.

3:39 – Leonie Dawson
And we probably could have batch created it even more by having my online business manager like pre-schedule blog posts. And emails. But that is definitely a level of planning achievement that will attain another time.

3:53 – Leonie Dawson
So that’s how I prep for going on holidays.

3:56 – Leonie Dawson
In terms of how my holidays went, holidays were bloody wonderful.

4:01 – Leonie Dawson
We ended up going on two holidays where we left the house which is totally unheard of in our kind of homebody world.

4:10 – Leonie Dawson
So we stayed in an old Queenslander cottage for a week in Maryborough where my parents-in-law live, they’re only about two hours from here and we spent time with them.

4:22 – Leonie Dawson
We went to a wildlife park, we wandered around the beautiful parks and gardens they have there, marveled at the old historic architecture. It’s like, I like to joke with Maryborough that you just don’t really think much of it.

4:36 – Leonie Dawson
I didn’t really think much of it, I just thought it was like another like regional town in Queensland. And then you go into it and you’re like, oh, holy shit, this is stunning because it’s this old historic town with a lot of really beautiful architecture. And so, my joke is always like, it is not the shithole that you think it will be. And I say this as a born and bred Queenslander, I’ve got to own it, you know.

5:06 – Leonie Dawson
Anyway, it was just gorgeous.

5:07 – Leonie Dawson
I love that old architecture, it’s where the author of Mary Poppins was born and they have a museum there actually where she was born in the same building where she was born and you could walk into the room where

5:22 – Leonie Dawson
she was born a hundred years ago. It’s just bizarre and beautiful and really well done.

5:28 – Leonie Dawson
So anyway, I loved having that time in Mariborough. It was also fucking god-awful hot and the cottage didn’t have any air conditioning but we still enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.

5:38 – Leonie Dawson
And then a month later, And we went and stayed in Harpy Bay, which is about two and a half hours from here.

5:45 – Leonie Dawson
It’s close to Maribaba on the coast. And we stayed at Airbnb with a pool and it was only two blocks from the beach and it was the best.

5:54 – Leonie Dawson
The kids spent most of the day giggling in the pool.

5:58 – Leonie Dawson
We all went swimming together as a family. We raced barefoot after ice cream trucks. We peered in rock pools. We fed a huge sea turtle. We had a quintessential summer beach holiday. It made our hearts so happy.

6:10 – Leonie Dawson
We fed like the sea turtle was a like we didn’t just like go up to a wild sea turtle and force-feed him or anything.

6:18 – Leonie Dawson
We fed lettuce to one that had been rescued at this place. Anyway, it was really cool.

6:24 – Leonie Dawson
It was really cool. I’ve never done that before. Anyway, I think I’m actually really good at holidaying. I think I could actually get addicted to this.

6:33 – Leonie Dawson
So that’s really fucking nice. We also had some great videos. Visitors, my wild bushman dad came to stay for a week over Christmas as usual. The girls love doing their annual build a gingerbread house with granddad tradition. We didn’t really do much touristy stuff because covid cases were skyrocketing at that time and it felt very uncertain, unsure, but it was still really good to spend time with my papa bear. And I also got to spend I also got to spend some time with my high school best friend, Dan.

7:04 – Leonie Dawson
We haven’t seen each other since we graduated from school 21 years ago, which is just ridiculous.

7:10 – Leonie Dawson
We’ve both been, I’ve been traipsing around Australia, he’s been traipsing around the world.

7:14 – Leonie Dawson
Dan was like a brother to me when I was a teenager and such an important part of my teen years, so it was really beautiful to see him and meet his wife and his daughter and for our families just to connect together. It was just one of those magic little moments.

7:32 – Leonie Dawson
I feel like, you know, in terms of like life and business updates, like I feel like I have to like add in like pandemic related updates into that because it’s different for people worldwide, right? So for us, after largely living in a COVID free bubble here in Queensland in Australia, the last two years, our state government opened our state borders and we finally have what everyone else in the world has. Like COVID is, everywhere now and they are no longer doing lockdowns to contain it or anything. And I’m grateful that our state was able to eliminate COVID until, you know, we could get vaccinations and reach like 90% of the population is now double vaccinated, which is amazing.

8:19 – Leonie Dawson
And that’s an enormous privilege that most of the rest of the planet didn’t get to have. And I still wish we could have kept that bubble because living like in a pandemic is fucking stressful.

8:34 – Leonie Dawson
It really is. Over holidays, I also got my booster shot which is like the third dose. I was in there two hours like on the day that Australian government allowed me to go back in. I was there.

8:54 – Leonie Dawson
I was there because like Australia didn’t get vaccinations until much later than the rest of the world so we’re just being able to get our booster shots now. My husband’s just got his as well, my kids got their first vaccination as soon as Australia opened it for their age group and my kids school holiday was delayed by two weeks by the government so they didn’t return to

9:21 – Leonie Dawson
school during the peak of the Omicron wave.

9:24 – Leonie Dawson
So that’s where we’re at with that.

9:26 – Leonie Dawson
We’re all vaccinated as much as we can be and just hoping for the best. Really? Just hoping for the best. All right. Other things I did on holidays. You know, I fully let myself go these holidays.

9:44 – Leonie Dawson
I let myself go. I was full sloth.

9:47 – Leonie Dawson
No productivity, no pushing to be anything but lazy. It was a real summer holiday. I got addicted to an app called Pocket Styler, which is this like fashion styling app. And you know me, fashion is usually not my jam, but it definitely is my eldest kids. So we did it together and it was bloody fun. I also played, and I’m shit you not, I played 800 levels of another stupid game called Water Sort Puzzle. I just had to move colors around. I don’t know. I was just being a basic bitch, guys. And that’s fine. Usually I actually don’t play games.

10:25 – Leonie Dawson
I don’t play games on my computer or my iPad because I just don’t because usually I’d prefer to be working if I was going to be on the computer or the iPad you know so or doing something else but you know it was a holiday so I was like whatever I’m gonna do whatever.

10:46 – Leonie Dawson
I also got addicted to Wordle like the rest of the planet and I feel so fucking smug that I haven’t lost one yet.

10:55 – Leonie Dawson
My husband and my oldest kid watched the complete set of Harry Potter movies.

11:00 – Leonie Dawson
I tried to, but they’re still too scary for me, really.

11:05 – Leonie Dawson
I am a delicate petal.

11:06 – Leonie Dawson
I also watched a lot of Christmas rom-com movies, which is so funny and so cringy all at once. I read a lot of trashy books. Yay! And we did a lot of walking, like, My kids, my youngest wanted to go on her bicycle and my eldest wanted to go on her skateboard. So we just went on a lot of walks like that and I didn’t really socialize much outside of my family but we did have a really lovely picnic at the river with my kids friends as well. So all up I read 34 books in December and January. My favorites were One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston which is a surreal kind Dreamy, LGBTQIA plus romance. I also loved White Tears, Brown Scars by Rumi Hamad, which is a really important anti-racist education by an Australian journalist. There’s a book called The School by Brandon James Murray. I did have a look. You currently can’t get it in America. I don’t think it’s being distributed over there because it’s an Australian book so far.

12:13 – Leonie Dawson
But I loved it.

12:15 – Leonie Dawson
It is a non-fiction fiction book and it shares the heartbreaking and tender stories of a classroom and the kids in it by an Australian teacher.

12:24 – Leonie Dawson
I just loved it.

12:25 – Leonie Dawson
The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood was a hot, nerdy romance. It’s one of those TikTok made me buy it kind of romances. It was great. The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory, all of her romances are top-notch and every time she brings out a new one, I’m like, fuck yeah, I know it’s going to be great because Jasmine’s written it. I also loved The Charm Offensive by Alison Kochrun, C-O-C-H-R-U-N, and that was a scrumptious gay romance. I loved Come Home, India by Jim Terry, which is a graphic novel memoir by a Native American cartoonist. And last one was Everything is an Emergency by Jason Adam Katzenstein, which is a graphic novel memoir by a person with OCD. So, a lot of romance, a little bit of nonfiction and a little bit of graphic novels.

13:20 – Leonie Dawson
That is my tickety-boo. Now, if you want the links to any of those, just go to leoniedawson.com forward slash Jan 2022 and you’ll see the full list there and all the pictures from my beach holiday.

13:32 – Leonie Dawson
Right, so the part where you’re probably waiting is how much money did I make while holidaying in December and January and just being a sloth in a pool? So, I made $64,500 in two months while on holidays. That’s down from our usual monthly average, but still a totally rad income for someone who spent inordinate amounts of time reading trash and lolling about in a pool. Now, in terms of where that income came from, all my e-courses brought in around $26,000 in Australian dollars. My goal gather planners brought in about $10,000. I have a passive income business that I don’t do anything with that brought in about $20,000. My shares and ethical managed funds, we didn’t have any increases this month. The value went down quite a bit, but that’s fine and to be expected because these are long term investments that go over time. It’s not always going to be a home run every single month. Investment property brought in around 4,400.

14:40 – Leonie Dawson
As an affiliate for Kajabi, if you go to tinyurl.com forward slash Leone Kajabi, that’s my link. I got about $4,000 from that. Kajabi is the platform that I use to run my whole business, basically.

14:54 – Leonie Dawson
All of my courses are on there, all my shopping cart, and it’s just been so valuable for me. And lastly, I have my Calm Christmas Planner on Etsy, and that brought in about $100 as well. So, awesome, really. I’m so grateful. I’m so grateful that my business still brings in money even when I’m not working, even when I’m just being peak sloth. Now, if you’re interested, I do do a breakdown of my e-cost income breakdown as well in terms of my bestsellers. So, Marketing Without Social Media just managed to be my bestseller. $4,554 in sales. Then 40 days to create and sell your e-course which brought in $4.4k. Work less and earn more brought in $3.3k. Sales star brought in $2.7k. Money manifesting and multiple streams of income brought in $2.3k. And 40 days to a finished book brought in $1.3k. And then my mini workshop behind the scenes of a multimedia millionaires finance which is only seven bucks brought in 255 bucks so all up pretty rad really. Now for those of you who really like math those numbers aren’t going to count aren’t going to calculate to the like AUD $26,000 income because that was in US dollars those sales and then they get converted to Australian which is where you get a much higher conversion rate here in Australia.

16:35 – Leonie Dawson
So there you go, some more you know, geography, money systems, amazing.

16:39 – Leonie Dawson
I also made some free money as well, which is always fun. So in two ways, we’ve got an awards, we have awards credit cards, so we do all our business and personal spending on them and then we pay them off every week before interest is charged. Interest is only charged monthly, but I’m very risk adverse and I just like just keeping them paid off at all times.

17:03 – Leonie Dawson
So what an awards credit card is, is that we earn points from the spending which then we can use to either get like free electronics or homewares, those kinds of rewards, or we can get cash back like they actually just give us money back into our account. So we use the cash back option and so we got 250 bucks of free money deposited into our accounts just for using those credit cards even though we don’t pay any interest on them.

17:28 – Leonie Dawson
I also use the free honey app, H-O-N-E-Y, when buying online to get the best deals and coupon codes on purchases. I love using it just for that feature. It’s fairly often that I’ll find like a 10 to 20 bucks saving on an online order. And on top of that, you can get rewards on your earnings. So I earned a $40 gift card from them as well.

17:51 – Leonie Dawson
Nice.

17:52 – Leonie Dawson
Nice.

17:52 – Leonie Dawson
I love a bit of free money.

17:55 – Leonie Dawson
I had a bunch of blog posts published while I was away. Including how to get booked on podcasts and interviews. We did our usual great annual workbook giveaway for non-profits. So if you’re a non-profit organization or you know of one that would like to use our workbooks with your clients, feel free to contact us and we’re happy to give them to you free of charge to use with clients.

18:20 – Leonie Dawson
We also, my online business manager Zita did a guest post for me called How to Set Goals when you are and miserable and burnt out and I fucking loved it so much.

18:31 – Leonie Dawson
I also did my 2021 business review and how much I earned, my favorite books of 2021 and I also did my November business and life review.

18:40 – Leonie Dawson
So, if you go to leonidolson.com forward slash blog, you can catch up on all of that. And I was also interviewed on the Follow Your Curiosity podcast and 50 Shades of Gender podcast. Now, I do share a big list of all the software I used run my business. If that is something that you’re into go to leonidawson.com forward slash jan 2022 and you’ll be able to see them all there. Now my goals for February, I think life-wise I just want to settle back into my work routine and get my kids settled back into school, start weekly pilates again and then have tea and cake at my favorite cafe afterwards because that’s really important part of the workout routine. I want to finish doing my goal get a life workbook planning for the year because I’ve been doing them for I think this is my 12th year. You know I wrote them for myself really to help me set goals for every single area of my life and business and they’ve just been such an integral part of my year and makes a huge difference to what I get done. And so you know even though nearly 500,000 people have now used them mostly like I’m grateful that I made them just for me like I’m super grateful that you guys love them too yay but they’re my jam like they’re they’re so important to me anyway I didn’t do them over January which I usually do because I was busy being a fucking water sloth guys and so I’m gonna get that done because it will help you feel so much more aligned and I need to do a couple of like life admin things. I need to maybe start having a look at high schools for my eldest daughter and start looking at school tours. We’ve got to get our investment house organized and yeah, crack on really. And in terms of business, I want to do my Goalgetter business workbook planning for the year, do a live round launch of a course, so I’ll let you guys know about that ASAP. I also want to complete another like project 10% I’ve talked about these before but where we try and improve the results in our business by 10% this one will be on Pinterest because it’s a really useful search engine like I don’t think Pinterest is a social media I think it’s more of a search engine and it can bring in quite a bit of traffic. Mostly I just want to get back into the swing of creating again and you know decide on what I want to do next. Anyway it is a joy to be back. I think I might have to do a like entrepreneur and car talking shit episode you know so that we can just absolutely hash out everything and more but this is just a nice way to say like hi I’m back I hope you’ve had you know a great time over like this last period of time and if you haven’t I’ve totally get it as well like fuck me but I’m glad that we get to share this journey together and I’m glad that you’re here and thanks for being with me alright big hugs

It’s a joy to be back!

Thank you for sharing this journey with me.

Love,

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