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!

It’s a joy to be back!

Thank you for sharing this journey with me.

Love,

FREE GOODIES:

BOOKS:

COURSES: