What no one tells you about running a 6-figure business: 2019 year in review
Last year I released a year in review of my 2018 numbers, and you all loved it so much that I wanted to do it again this year with my 2019 year in review. This is my chance to be open and transparent behind the triumphs and struggles of running a 6 figure business, because it’s both the best and worthwhile journey you can ever be on, while putting you through the lowest of lows that will force you to grow in ways you never imagined.
I don’t know about you, but 2019 felt like a completely unexpected twist. It felt like challenging thing after challenging thing was thrown at us. It feels like the whole world is going through an upheaval of sorts, as we all wake up to the realities of climate change, politics, the foundations of our economies, and what our world will look like in the years to come.
I had a very specific vision of how 2019 was going to go, and by the end of it, I was somehow nowhere near that vision, yet never closer to it. This probably makes no sense to you, but hopefully will by the end of this post.
You see, at the beginning of 2019, I had some major goals that would result in me making $250,000 or $300,000 of income, maybe more.
I started focusing on and learning about building a million dollar business, because I figured it was the next step.
From 2014 to 2018, I had gone from a negative $20,000 a year business to a $200,000 a year business, and if you’re not growing, you’re dying, right?
So I listened to podcasts about growing a million dollar business. What would it look like? How do you learn how to become a CEO (because when you grow a business that big, you have to have a team)? How do you learn how to manage a team properly? How do you hire said team? How big does your team need to be? What does your weekly schedule look like?
And on and on and on.
The more I listened, the more it seemed like a million dollar business means (and excuse me while I interpret these lessons through my own personal beliefs about hard work, time, self worth, and alllll the other things I’m working through in therapy 😅):
you definitely have more time freedom, but the time you do work is mostly spent managing your team and coming up with new ideas
the best part about having a team is that you come with an idea and THEY make it happen
the worst part about having a team is that they depend entirely on you for their income, and if you don’t show up, they can’t feed their families
100% of the women I listened to said that they hired a team to help them in their personal life as well, including nannies, daily housekeepers, and personal chefs or meal services
The more I learned about how most million dollar businesses are run, the more I realized I don’t want a million dollar business.
P.S. I am aware that this probably makes me sound incredibly entitled and privileged, and who the fuck am I to complain about making more money than some people will see in their entire lifetime, but this is the judgement that I’m willing to risk for the sake of transparency.
What if the part that I like about my job is not coming up with the ideas, but creating the ideas?
What if the part that I like about my job is that I can work independently, not have several meetings a week (← my personal version of hell), and not have the pressure to HAVE to make several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to pay my team?
What if I like shopping for and cooking my own food, and don’t want to hire it out just to save 3 hours a week? After all, I believe that cooking is an essential human skill that everyone should have, and while it’s based on an innate need for survival, it can serve as meditation time and spreading love to yourself and your family.
What I’m saying is that in 2019, I came to the huge realization that while I would love to make a million dollars a year in my business (I mean, who wouldn’t?!), I would rather focus on already having enough instead of always striving for more.
That want of more without defining what it actually means, the feeling of constantly needing more that pervades almost everything in our media and everyday messaging that’s based on the never ending hamster wheel of never, ever having enough?
I’m fucking over it. OVER 👏🏻 IT 👏🏻.
I refuse to believe that I’m not enough (it’s something that’s coming up over and over again my therapy sessions) and that I don’t already have enough, and I refuse to be a part of the messaging that YOU all see that you’re not enough, too.
You are not broken or something to be fixed. You don’t need to follow someone else’s definition of their dream life, you already know what you want your dream life to be. Someone else doesn’t know a secret that will magically change your life, and someone else doesn’t know the right way for you to achieve your dreams.
You already have the vision inside of you, you just have to learn a few new skills and develop your own self confidence to make it happen.
You are enough, and you already have enough.
This is the headspace that I’m writing this year in review from, as well as how I’m planning for 2020.
My word of the year for 2020 is unapologetic, and that’s exactly how I’m going to show up in my business this year. It might not look like what I planned at the beginning of 2019, but to be honest, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt this happy and free.
I might fall flat on my face, but I also might spread my wings even wider and fly farther than I have before. That’s a chance I’m willing to take!
After that sermon from the mountaintop, let’s move on to my 2019 numbers, updates, and what’s coming up in 2020:
Income
The first thing you need to know in your business is where is your income coming from AND how much is it.
Why is this important? Click here and read the income section from last year for a summary.
Here’s my breakdown for 2018, and remember that this is actual income generated in my business, and doesn’t include sales taxes (all figures in Canadian):
2019 doTERRA income = $140,920.30 (-20.8% from last year)
2019 Brand, Build, Blog income = $25,055.18 (+15% from last year)
2019 One Drop income = $1,635.08
2019 Branding + website design income = $3,125
2019 Affiliate income = $105.89
2019 total income generated = $170,841.45 (-14.4% from last year)
This is a 14.4% decrease from 2018, which, to be honest, I’m not even upset about.
If you follow me on social media, you’ll know that 2019 was a struggle with my anxiety. I took about a month off of work in September into October as I fell hard into debilitating anxiety. I spent 24 hours a day on the couch, only showered once every 2-3 days, ate barely enough to keep me alive, and couldn’t leave the house.
Realizing that I needed help, I started on anxiety medication and went off of CBD oil, resulting in a 24 hour panic attack that was one of the worst days of my life.
I wasn’t that much better in the lead up to the fall, either. Looking back, I could see how hard August was, as I tried to work through it, desperate for the week off I had booked at the end of the month … and knowing that it wasn’t going to be enough.
Since then, I’ve started weekly Cognitive Behavioural Therapy sessions, have continued taking my medication (which is helping so much) along with Copaiba essential oil every 3 hours, and meditate every morning before I start work.
I’m able to sleep through the night again without waking up in panic, something that I couldn’t do just a few months ago, and my appetite is much better.
I managed to launch Brand, Build, Blog at the end of November, and I was SO PROUD of myself that I did. 8 weeks before that I couldn’t leave the couch, and there I was, actually doing live videos and not falling apart.
I realized in 2019 that you truly have nothing if you don’t have your physical and mental health.
There is no shame in taking prescription medication for your mental health, even if our health industry tells us that it’s all a sham and “there’s no such thing as serotonin deficiency”.
I say fuck that. Have most of those people dealt with anxiety so bad that they couldn’t have a shower without hyperventilating? How about being able to change a load of laundry from the washer to the dryer without getting dizzy? Or walking 10 minutes to pick their child up from school, something they’ve done hundreds of times but all of a sudden can’t do with spiralling into total and utter panic.
Anxiety meds have given me back the ability to go to the grocery store, go to a restaurant with my family the day before Christmas Eve, and go on dates with my husband. I went into the Apple store on a Saturday, albeit with a freak out beforehand, but I still did it.
I have my life back, and if you feel guilty for doing what you have to do to live a healthy and fulfilling life, I say be unapologetic in claiming your life back without worrying what everyone else is screaming on social media.
I mean, don’t do heroin or be an alcoholic, but if “evil” pharmaceutical meds is what it takes, so be it.
Rant over. Wow, that came from nowhere! Sorry about that, but I’m not deleting what I just wrote, even when my logical brain is telling me it doesn’t need to be in here.
Onwards and upwards!
What started AND stopped in 2019
In late spring I heard about a new website and service called One Drop. Basically, it’s like Creative Market meets doTERRA, in that you can subscribe to the website for one monthly or yearly fee, and in turn get as many downloads you want of beautiful doTERRA based essential oil photos, graphics, images for social media, business building trainings and strategies, and more.
People love my graphics, and I love making pretty things, so I applied as a contributor and was accepted. I took half the month of June and all of July to create and upload amazing photos and graphics.
In July, doTERRA’s regular BOGO happened, so I spent my time making BOGO graphics and animated videos that were downloaded hundreds of times.
I knew when I signed up for this new service that it would be an experiment to see how much in commissions I could generate, but to be honest, they were much lower than what I was expecting.
I worked an entire month and a half, all my full time hours, and made just over $500 for almost 3,000 downloads 😐(it worked out to 18.8 cents per download).
Reminder: my doTERRA business averaged almost $12,000 of income per month, so if I was going to take a huge amount of time to do something else, it had to make over $500 a month.
While I love the idea of One Drop, it just wasn’t worth it, to me, to be a contributor.
If I’m going to do something, I want to be all in, and after 6 months of being in One Drop, it just wasn’t it for me. If you’re a One Drop member, you’ll notice that my entire library has been deleted.
If you’re looking for a few extra hundred dollars of income each month, and take beautiful photos or can do amazing graphic design, I urge you to apply to be a One Drop contributor! Try it out for yourself, it might just be up your alley.
What CONTINUED in 2019
In 2019 I wanted to focus on marketing and building the student base in my Brand, Build, Blog course (BBB). In case you don’t know, BBB is a branding and blogging course for wellness entrepreneurs who are NOT tech savvy.
In late 2018, I invested $10,000 US (over $13,000 Canadian after the exchange rate) to learn how to scale my course by setting up evergreen funnels and an automated webinar.
I still launched BBB twice in 2019, in April and late November/early December, which earned me $17,905.90 in income (plus another $3,072 in early 2020 from payment plans started in December), but I also earned $7,915.71 through the automatic funnels.
I’m super pleased with these numbers! Even if it wasn’t the $67,500 I wanted to make at the beginning of 2019 (those were pie in the sky, not grounded in reality numbers 😂), my BBB income increased by 15% (actually, it increased by 32.6% if you factor in the payment plans paid out in early 2020), and that entire increase was passive income after I set up the funnels.
Best of all, I welcomed 59 new students to my course which is 4 years old this year, totalling over 220 students since it was released in 2016. That’s nothing to sneeze at!
I have no plans of stopping BBB anytime soon, and will be updating it in May or June of this year (always have to keep up with new technology!). Current students get lifetime access to all these updates, and I’m making it even better for them.
My 2020 goal for BBB is 51 new students that should bring in $29,600 in income.
What’s coming in 2020
Alright, I know I said it last year, but this year it’s finally happening:
A website template shop just for wellness entrepreneurs is coming in Spring 2020.
You all keep telling me you love my style and you love my website, and I’ve had multiple requests to do custom website design. While custom work takes up too much time for me right now (although it’s not something I’d totally say no to in the future), this is my way of being able to support you while doing something that I absolutely love.
When my anxiety was super bad in October, but I still pushed myself to do “some work”, the only thing I wanted to do was play around with my website. It was at that time that I asked myself “then why the hell don’t you do more of this?!”.
At this point, I am aiming to release 3 website templates by April 2020, designed with all of you health business owners in mind, with the functions that you need to grow your businesses with less stress.
Depending on how the launch of these templates sell, I might hire someone to help design 3 more templates to be released towards the end of 2020.
My 2020 goal for website template sales is 50 templates for a total of approximately $7,450 in income.
Major announcement #2: by the time my new website launches (should be done by end of Feb 2020), I will be offering one-on-one business coaching on a limited basis.
This is something that kind of popped into my mind in November, like “I think I might want to take a few one-on-one clients”, and within 48 hours I had someone ask if they could hire me. Yep, it happened just like that without me even telling anyone.
My new website will outline my business coaching services (it’s not going to just be for anybody, I have a very specific journey I want to coach wellness entrepreneurs through), so you’ll have to be patient if you’re interested in that.
My 2020 goal for one-on-one coaching clients is just 5 people for a total of $24,000 in income.
Depending on how I do, especially with my anxiety, over the first half of 2020, I may end up launching something brand new in the fall, but if I don’t, I’ll do another launch of Brand, Build, Blog.
If everything goes according to plan (but when does it, really? LOL, I’m not necessarily expecting this to happen), my income in 2020 should be somewhere around $190,000.
On another note, I didn’t blog a ton in 2019, and I missed it! I got caught up in my mastermind, and the person running it who said that I don’t need to create more content, but use the stuff i already had.
Well, I realized in late 2019 that writing is like therapy for me, and I truly did miss sharing my knowledge and opinions in this way.
My 2020 goal for blog posts is 18, and I’ve already made my editorial calendar for the year with notes on what I want to share with you! 5 years after starting to blog on all things wellness business related and I’m still not tired of it, it must be love.
doterra in 2020
There have been big changes in my doTERRA business at the end of 2019, but I’m going to devote an entire blog post to that coming next (click here to read it). Sorry for being such a tease and giving you no details, but stay tuned!
Expenses
Just like with the section on income, there’s an entire, in depth section on my expenses in my 2018 year in review (click here and scroll down to “expenses” to read it).
Total 2019 business expenses = $57,493.83
That means my total 2019 net income (what I pay taxes on, and the rest I get to “take home as pay”) = $107,592.70
Most of my core expenses stayed the same from last year, although I added in a few new pieces of software to support my evergreen funnel for Brand, Build, Blog.
I continued working with my bookkeeper, and he’s still one of the most important people on my support team.
All in all, with the new software and the new people I hired below, my expenses now run me about $2,000 to $2,500 per month.
What was new in 2019
In the beginning of 2019, I knew that I needed help in my business. I just couldn’t keep doing it all myself, and things were falling between the cracks.
In January I worked with the amazing HR and wellness expert, Laura Bourne, to help me hire 2 new assistants. If you need to hire someone, just work with an expert to hire the right person the first time!
I’ve worked with 2 assistants in the past, and to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing when I hired them. Those turned out to be expensive mistakes when months later I realized they were not the right fit.
Laura helped me hire the right person the first time, and although the one assistant wasn’t the right fit (we kind of knew she might not work out from the get go), I still have my one main assistant.
Suzy is amazing and works 10 hours a month for me. She’s lovely and supportive, the yin to my yang, was a rock during my bout of anxiety in the fall, and gives me great ideas and feedback. I can’t wait to see how our relationship evolves in the next year!
The second new person I brought on in 2019 was Pinterest expert Meagan Williamson.
Pinterest is the highest source of traffic to my website, and has been for years. It sends me about 5 times more traffic than Facebook, and about 8 times more traffic than Instagram.
In 2018 I tried to hire out my Pinterest and Instagram, but ultimately I decided that I needed to do my own Instagram (it felt icky having someone else write my posts!), and the team I had hired was WAY too expensive for just Pinterest management (coming in at about $1,300 a month 🙄).
Then I was referred to Meagan, and I’m so glad I was. Meagan is the best when it comes to Pinterest, and we have so many things in common that I’ve even come to calling her a friend. Go follow her on Instagram to soak up all her wisdom and knowledge which she’s shares almost everyday.
She and her team manage my entire Pinterest management, and at the end of 2019 I added in new Pin creation, as I couldn’t keep up. This means that I email Meagan when I write a new blog post, and her team takes care of EVERYTHING else associated with handling my Pinterest account and growing its’ traffic.
My traffic from Pinterest has increased 300% from 2019 over 2018, as has the number of people opting into my email list, so it’s been well worth it.
We experimented with Promoted Pins (think Pinterest ads) for 3 months in the fall, which went so-so. I’m still trying to figure out if that resulted in more sales of my course, but there’s probably no certain way of knowing other than to ask new students!
The third person I invested in was funnel ninja Margo Carroll. I’m working with Margo to design a forever funnel for my email list. What’s a forever funnel? I’m so glad you asked!
When most people sign up for my email list, it’s through free content upgrades on my blog posts. They receive the download or resource … and then nothing else! That is, unless I happen to send out an email about a new blog post, but in 2019, blogging took a backseat for me, and months went by without me sending anything.
But I’ve spent years blogging, and have over 40 amazing blog posts that were just sitting there on my website doing not much unless someone took the time to go digging for them. Enter: the forever funnel.
Margo and her team wrote a 44 email sequence that will be sent out once a week after someone joins my email list. That’s right, when someone new joins my list (in a few weeks, we need time to set it all up), they’ll receive almost an entire year of free resources from me to help them build their wellness business.
Hiring Margo wasn’t cheap, but it’s totally been worth it already from her amazing customer research (she took a month to interview and survey current customers and non-customers alike, the differences between the two are astounding!) and the fact that they’ve written over 100 pages of emails.
Now myself and my assistant have to move all that content into my actual email program, but that’s not hard compared to the weeks of writing it would have taken me.
We’ll meet up in another month or so to look at the data and analytics to make sure people are loving it, but I have high hopes that this email sequence will help all my hard work in blog posts over the past 4 years continue to educate more people!
What’S COMING THIS YEAR
At the end of 2018, I invested in an expensive, time intensive mastermind that forced me to get my foundation set up to be able to sell my BBB course on autopilot, and it was totally worth it. I learned so many new skills. Much of 2019 was spent getting those foundations set up, as they can take weeks or months to do each part.
I had the opportunity to continue with that mastermind, but to be honest, I wanted to see what I could do on my own.
I looked at a different mastermind, one focused on scaling your business with more ease, but as my business is pivoting this year, I needed some time to get those new offerings up and running.
I realized that I was using masterminds and expensive coaching as a placeholder for my own confidence and just trying new things! I committed to myself that 2019 would be the year that I didn’t invest in high end coaching to give me a chance to depend on my own knowledge and focus just on implementation.
Closer to the end of 2020, I’ll look into that mastermind on scaling your business to see if it’s still a good fit, and 2021 will be the year that my business most likely will take a big step forward in revenue.
I’m completely comfortable with 2020 being a rebuilding year, with the focus being to build out these new offerings. If all goes to plan, I’ll be creating 2, if not 3, brand new offerings this year to round out my product suite (which is a TON of new major things to launch in one year, so we’ll see how this goes). They’ll all work together to support wellness entrepreneurs at various levels of their business.
My offerings will be:
Low priced offering: Website templates (coming Spring 2020)
Mid priced offering: Brand, Build, Blog
High priced offering: One-on-one business coaching (coming Spring 2020) + possible group program/mastermind (possibly Fall 2020 or Early 2021)
Other than investing in a mastermind closer to the end of 2020, I don’t plan on any HUGE business expenses in 2020. Since it’s a rebuilding year that I don’t know will be a success or not, I’m being fairly conservative with what I spend my money on.
I am doing a photoshoot at the end of January, as it’s been 2 years since my last one and I need updated photos for social media, but other than that, my rule is no investing in big things for my confidence, but only for helping me implement.
As I alluded to before, if my website templates seem like they’re selling alright (tentative goal of $5,000+ by August), I may consider hiring someone to help me develop 3 new templates by year end.
Otherwise, it’s business as usual for my business expenses!
Personal Goals
Last year I said I wanted to try working 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, which I didn’t really try doing until after my “mental breakdown” in the fall. Since then, I’ve been very aware of how hard I’m pushing my body and mind, and am now totally OK with not working 40 or 60 hours a week.
My work days generally don’t start until 9:30 or 10 am, as I make time to eat a proper breakfast, read a bit, and meditate.
My work days generally end at 3 pm, and I take time to nap or to read.
To be honest, I’m kind of worried I’m lazy now. I’m not used to NOT working as much, and over the holiday break I don’t think I even got out of bed before 9 am between Boxing Day and January 6th (this is where having a 7 year old who is obsessed with his iPad pays off). But guess what? My anxiety was way less and I even found myself feeling happy. So working less can’t be all that bad, can it?
Now that I’m not working as much, I’m reading WAY more books, and it’s been glorious reminding myself how it feels to get lost for hours in a story.
I read more books in November and December than I had in the past 2 years, and I’ve already read 3.5 books this year (I’m writing this on January 27th). And they’re mostly fiction, not a ton of self development or business books anymore! I’m just not that into them right now. How many different ways can you be taught how many different strategies until you realize you’re going to be further ahead just doing the damn thing instead of reading about it? Fiction is way more fun, and it takes me out of my head and to-do lists for a little bit each day.
My personal goal for the year is to read 24 books, and I’ve downloaded the Goodreads app to keep me on track!
Also, just like working less hours, my family and I are going to do something we’ve been saying we want to do for the last 5 years but always managed to find an excuse not to do it: take a road trip to the East Coast of Canada.
We’ve done some research and booked it in our calendars for August 1st. We’re going to be gone for about 10 days, driving included, and are going to hit up Montreal, the Bay of Fundy, Halifax, and PEI.
Nothing but the 3 of us, piled into our car, a loose schedule, and wide open spaces. I can’t wait.
Goal #3 is something that is totally boring and adult, but I realized in November last year that I need to get a move on.
My 2020 retirement savings goal is $10,000.
In 2019 I paid off my $22,000 car loan 3 years early, and it turned out you all loved that, too, because it was one of my most popular posts on Instagram last year 👇🏻
That was my last big piece of debt, so now I can actually focus on saving for my future.
When I worked at a bank, like an eternity ago (real time: 8 years ago), I talked all day, everyday about how much people needed to have saved up for retirement.
Then I never went back after my maternity leave, and while I’ve kept up my measly $100 a month automatic deposit to my RRSP account (retirement account here in Canada), I haven’t made much progress towards my retirement goals.
At my age, and the fact that I don’t work at a “real job” with a pension, I need to be putting WAY more away, so I’ve committed to a minimum of $10,000 a year.
I’m pretty sure I overpaid on my income taxes this year and will be getting a few thousand dollars back as a refund (I won’t know for another month or two until I complete my taxes), so that should give me a good head start towards my retirement goal for this year.
My next goal is finally something fun (other than our family trip), but is so huge that I don’t know if it’s actually doable.
My 2020 “fun” goal is saving $20,000 for a home renovation.
I fully recognize that a home renovation itself isn’t “fun”, but having your dream house is, right?
We moved into our house about 2 years ago, and both my husband and I have agreed that unless things drastically change, this is most likely our forever house.
We love our house and where it is. We know our son will go to elementary and then high school just blocks away (and he can totally walk, uphill, both ways, in the snow, just like I did).
I just wish we had a bigger kitchen and in my dream world, it looks very different from the one we have now.
So my dream is about a $150,000 renovation to add on a new kitchen on the back of our house, plus build a main floor master bedroom beside it.
We have a fairly low mortgage for our age (it’s only about $180,000), and while I would like to be mortgage free, I don’t treat myself often and I really just want a kick ass kitchen of my own design, plus it would be nice to be able to walk around the bed in our master bedroom without squeezing myself in the 2 feet between the foot of our mattress and the wall (our bedrooms are super tiny).
Minimum I’d need to save is $50,000 (with the other $100,000 being added to our mortgage), but I’d LOVE to pay for the entire renovation in cash, so any extra I make I’ll be squirrelling away in a high-yield savings account (do those even exist? 😂).
When we get to 3 years from now and can start the renovation process, I can decide then if it’s worth it to invest a chunk of that into my retirement account OR use it for the renovation. Options are good.
Continuing from 2018
At the end of 2018 I started becoming interested in living a less-waste life. I started to invest my bigger income into products that would create less waste over the next few years, like beeswax wraps and cloth “paper towels”.
A major goal for myself and my family was to take this “zero waste” journey more seriously in 2019, and we definitely worked hard on that.
Some of the things we invested in:
cloth handkerchiefs* for myself (instead of paper-based kleenex)
cloth eye makeup remover pads* (instead of cotton based throwaway ones)
a portable bidet for our main bathroom (we bought the Tushy and highly recommend it!)
re-starting our CSA produce deliveries that we stopped in 2017 so we could focus on local, organic produce
bought local, organic, grass-fed meat
purchased other meat from our local butcher where we took our own glass dishes to store it, or they wrapped it in butchers paper (instead of grocery store meat wrapped in styrofoam and plastic wrap)
started shopping for more items at our local bulk food store, where we could take in our own reusable containers
a 100% metal safety razor* (in rose gold, no less!) that will last for the rest of my life (no more plastic razors, plus it’ll save me so much money in the long run!)
silicone ear swab* instead of throwaway Q-tips
bamboo toothbrushes* (that can be composted)
biodegradable dental floss* (that can be composted)
a travel bamboo cutlery set* and silicone straw that I keep in my purse for eating out (so I don’t need to use plastic cutlery or straws)
*I bought all these items at a local zero-waste store so that I could save on shipping and support an amazing small business and friend
Of all the changes we made, the bidet was the most amazing and unexpected one! We got a bidet because we stayed at an AirBNB in 2018 that had one, and our son LOVED it.
Aleks is 7 years old now, and uses about 10 feet of toilet paper every time he goes #2. Seriously, I keep telling him he doesn’t need that much toilet paper, but he’s worried about getting poop on his hands.
We were going through a family sized package (12 rolls) of “green”, recycled toilet paper about every 2-3 weeks.
After installing the bidet in August? I think we’ve only bought one package of toilet paper since then, and I’m not even kidding. It made the BIGGEST difference.
Warning: if you have little ones in your house, you’ll most likely have cold water all over the back of the toilet seat (since their bum doesn’t cover the whole seat when the spray happens), which can be quite the surprise when you sit down, but it’s a small price to pay to save the forests from my son and his need to protect his entire body from getting poop on it when he wipes his butt.
Coming this year we’re going to plant a new tree in our front yard, as well as start to re-naturalize our almost 3/4 acre yard. This means we’re going to start replacing our grass and horrible landscaping with native plants that would naturally grow in our area of Canada, which will help support local species of animals and insects.
That’s it, that’s all for 2019. Like I alluded to above, this post doesn’t include all the major changes that are happening for my business and myself in 2020, the rest of that info will be coming in a few weeks in my next blog post.
Thank you for letting me review my year with you all reading. Writing posts like this are very therapeutic for me, and helps me to review a full year when it feels like “nothing really happened” other than my anxiety.
So many good foundations were laid in 2019 and will continue on being strengthened in 2020, which will set up 2021 to be the next year that my business explodes again.
Ashley of a few years ago would expect that every single year in business should be a growth year, but the older, wiser Ashley knows, like any good farmer, that you get a healthier and bigger harvest when you let a field go fallow every few years to allow itself to be nourished and rest. That’s me in 2019 and part of 2020.
Resting, re-evaluating, and reviewing that everything I’m doing is filling myself up, along with filling all of you with my knowledge and experience.
Thanks for being alongside me on this journey!
