It happened: We didn't hit our revenue goal last month

A candid look at a business "failure"

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For the past six or so months, I’ve been chasing a high financial goal: If we want to make ends meet for our family each month (with a mortgage, childcare for two kids, student loans, now paying for our own health insurance, and beyond), we need to make $18,000 per month before taxes and business expenses. If we want to make enough to add to our retirement accounts and save, the number is higher still.

That’s not a small amount of revenue for a freelance writing business! And at the moment, the coaching side of my business is not heavily monetized. (This is on purpose: I needed time to build new programs and curricula. But it’s also a little bit painful financially.)

I knew I was chasing a high bar. $18k of writing revenue equates to at least 12 assignments per month for me, if not more. I’ve brought on a few new writing clients, upped my rates with clients I already have, and set a hard cap of $550 as the absolute minimum I’ll take for a shorter story. But still, it’s a haul. Each month, I’m scrambling to land assignments to make up that last $3,000.

I’ve also written about how the more I slow down, the more I want to slow down. If I’m honest, I don’t feel motivated to work quickly right now. I’m settling into a new pace and it feels good to stop working at 2 pm to go for a hike. I’m enjoying working without a fire under my butt. I’ve been feeling much more ambitious about non-work things, like gardening and baking. When my husband mentioned last week that we should probably dial up the volume on work in September, I balked. I absolutely do not want to work more than I am.

And yet, this slow down — coupled with the toughness of meeting that high financial goal and it being summer, in addition to a few of my clients closing up shop last month — meant that July’s end-of-month financial meeting was a fresh hell.

We didn’t make what we needed to make. At the end of the month, our revenue numbers were $11,000. That’s $7,000 under our goal.