In this episode of Lessons from a Quitter, I share my 2024 year-in-review, reflecting on a season of rest, reevaluation, and recalibration. After scaling back my business to focus on two key launches, I explored what truly works for my clients and aligned my business with my own values and needs. While my income dropped, I leaned out expenses, prioritized family, health, and clarity, and discovered the power of trusting myself through life’s seasons. I discuss lessons on embracing change, defining success on your own terms, and creating a career that aligns with your life. Join me for inspiration and growth!
2024 Year In Review
Ep. 337
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Show Transcript
Hey, welcome to Lessons From A Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are, if ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.
Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. Happy new year. Welcome to 2025 Craziness Crazy talk and look at me being on top of my game and having my year-end review as the first episode of the new year. I'm so excited to do this episode. What's interesting is a couple of months ago I was like, I don't think I'm gonna do a year in review this year. I've done one every year. If you've listened to the podcast, I actually like to be really transparent about like how much I make and if you've listened to the podcast, you know, I talk a lot about my lows, like my highs and lows, how I fail.
I think it's important to not just give kind of um, you know, the social media highlight reel of all the good things that are going on, but really the struggles because let me tell you, entrepreneurship is a struggle. I feel like it's like one big struggle and it's fantastic and hard and beautiful and so I like to talk about it. Actually, part of the reason that I didn't wanna do a year review, I was sort of like, eh, I think we're over it. I might not do one this year. And then my friend Claire Paltrow, she was ving me and she was like, are you gonna do one this year? Let me know 'cause I wanna listen. And I was like, I should just do it. So I'm sort of winging it. I actually, you usually go more in depth and like outline it. And so this is gonna be a little bit more broad brush strokes, but I think it's still important because a lot happened this year for a lot of us.
And so I feel like why not? Let's talk about it. So start of 2025, let's talk about 2024 for lessons from a quitter. Okay, so if you're new here, I have a membership called the Quitter Club and that was my main kind of offer, my main product coaching container that I had throughout last year. And it is a club where I help people kind of create careers that they don't actually hate, careers that they love, like where they stop really all the burnout, they quit the things that aren't working and then figure out what they wanna do and whether that's to stay at in the career they're in or to find something new. I knew that was gonna be kind of the main thing that I was gonna sell. It was gonna be the main product in my business last year. For me, I didn't really realize that this maybe I did as I was going through it, but looking back, I was in a place for lack of a better word of burnout.
Not the burnout that you would normally see in the sense of like you're working too much. That wasn't what it was. It sort of at actually started in towards the end of 2023. I think maybe it was like it had been four or five years into my business. I think a lot of people collectively we have been feeling a lot of like heaviness in the world. You know, I think there's just a general feeling that, I don't know what the word is, just lack of motivation maybe. And I think I was feeling it collectively with a lot of people. I think there was a lot happening in the world over the last year that felt really heavy on my heart, which really didn't inspire a lot of wanting to take action and wanting to build a business. I think for me it was just maybe a natural progression of like years and years of selling the same thing and doing the same thing.
And you know, having the podcast and stuff, I think it's just natural to kind of go through highs and lows of motivation. And I also think that a membership is a thing that is what I'm seeing now is a little bit more difficult to sell and run. The backend of it is a lot more difficult than the group programs that I had where everyone starts at the same time and ends at the same time. There's more logistics involved, which requires more backend work, which is not the work that I love so much in my business. And so that required me to manage more people, create more systems, which again is not the stuff that I really like doing, is not really my forte. And so I found myself doing a lot of stuff I don't like to be doing in my business. And so I think that OB obviously also added to it, but towards the end of 2023 was when I sort of felt a little lackluster.
I also think adding to that, it's fascinating where you sort of have to look at yourself and feel like, I know we all try to dissect and figure out what's going on, quote unquote, and this is sort of why I wanna talk about this is I don't know if the cause of it is that important as the fact that it was there. You know, this was also a time where I was starting to realize, you know, maybe I'm going through perimenopause and there's some hormonal shifts and that causes you to feel maybe not as motivated or kind of not have the same energy that I had. And so I don't know, I don't know what the reason was, but the reason I bring this up is because one of the most beautiful things that I've learned through thought work and one of the things that I think has been the biggest gift to me is not needing to rush out of feeling something in order to feel better, being able to sit with my feelings even if they're hard feelings and not have to get myself to a place of like feeling good all the time and feeling motivated and feeling wonderful.
And so I say all this to say like I didn't really spend a lot of time being like, I wonder why this is happening and how do I get myself more motivated and how do I push myself to do more? I sort of just realized like, okay, this is the season we're in right now. We are in a place where it's not kind of a go, go, go foot on the gas, I wanna grow this business. I just don't feel like I want to. I really wanna take the foot off the gas, I wanna give myself more space, I wanna spend more time outside of the business. I wanna spend more time with my family and doing things that bring me more joy. And that's what I did honestly in a lot of 2024. Let me just acknowledge that I'm extremely privileged to be able to do that.
Like I understand that not everybody can take their foot off the gas and people really do need to, you know, work harder and make the money that they need to make to support their family. I realized for me, like in my business, I could take my foot off the gas, I could decide that I wasn't gonna go so hard. And that's one of the beauties of having your own business and not working for someone. And I realized this was kind of a lesson I learned in 2023, but I was getting caught up in what other people in my industry were doing and in you know, vanity metrics and in numbers and thinking like, well I have to hit a certain amount or I have to make a certain amount to sort of, I don't know, prove myself or prove that I'm good enough or prove that I'm a good enough entrepreneur.
And I remember thinking that actually throughout this year, like, but if I don't do more launches and if I don't sell more products and if I don't do this stuff, I may not hit what I hit last year. And I remember that the thought wasn't, oh, like I need that money in order to make my business run or to pay people or to whatnot. It was that, what am I gonna tell everybody? Or like what if I can't say that I made the same as I made the year before? And that was kind of an alarm bell of like, okay, so maybe that's not the best reason to do what you're doing. Like I don't ever wanna run this business as a way to prove myself to people. I realized like for me a lot of this business, like I would prefer to have more of a lifestyle business than to scale.
Not to say that I never want to scale, but I don't love managing people. I don't want a big team. That's just never been the thing that I've wanted to do. And when I've gotten a taste of it, I've realized it's absolutely not what I wanna do. And so I realized like if I'm doing this for my own lifestyle and I'm doing this to be able to make the money I wanna make, would I be willing to make less and work less and sell less and have time to really like do other things to bring me joy and to deal with a lot of these feelings or the hormonal changes I'm going through or whatever else is going on in my life. And it really quickly became apparent that like that is what I wanna do. And so that is what I did. And another thing I'll say that's scary about this that I noticed and I know a lot of my clients go through is that one of the hard things about giving into an emotion, whether that's grief or depression or sadness or you know burnout or whatever it is, we are sort of trained to fear these feelings because I think that we think I'll never get out of it.
Like what if it never comes back? And I did have that feeling like I thought no, if I take my foot off the gas, what if I'm never motivated again to wanna do this? And I had to sit with that and I had to answer that question for myself like, yeah, what if I sort of got to the place? I was like, yeah, that is a very real possibility and then maybe we shut down the business or we completely pivot or I don't know, I don't know, but it is what it's like I can be okay with that too. I think when I got myself to a place where I was okay with that, I think sometimes we say like, okay, I'm gonna take my foot off the gas, I'm gonna rest or I'm gonna give myself this time to recover in the hopes that it'll ramp up.
Like in the hopes that I'll get that motivation back in the hopes that I'll feel better sometime. But I realize like that might not come and I can't put a timeline on it. I didn't wanna say like, okay, well I'll give myself rest for three months or six months because then it's gonna get me to be super motivated and like I'm gonna hit the ground running. I'm not saying that you can't do that, like give yourself rest because you're gonna have to come back. But for me I sort of had to accept it may not come back and like, would that be okay? Could I be okay with that? And when I made my peace with that when I was like, yeah, it might last a year, two years, three years, it might not come back, maybe I'll just feel like this. I have no idea 'cause I don't really know what's going on.
Like I said, I don't know if it's the hormones, I don't know if it's just the collective what's going on in the world. I don't know if it's just because of the business. I don't really understand the cause of it, but I do know that this is how I feel and I was like, all right, we're just gonna let ourselves be unmotivated. Now to pause there and say it obviously wasn't bad enough where it was like I couldn't work, I sort of became very strategic about this of like what is the bare minimum I gonna have to do to be able to keep this business alive? And I don't mean bare minimum, like phone it in, like I definitely give a lot to my clients, but I really kept thinking like, how can I take things off? How can I not maybe do more right now and on the backend stuff, how can I simplify?
And so that is what I did for most of 2024, to be honest with you guys. I got rid of every other product. So while I was doing the membership in 2023, I also was doing one-on-one coaching. I didn't have a ton of spots but I had about five clients on rotation, like I would add more people in. So I was doing high ticket one-on-one coaching. I also had launched a small group program where I was helping people launch their coaching businesses. So I had a program called Beginner our Business bootcamp that I launched. And so I was doing these like other revenue generating activities and in 2024 I decided like, I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna be a business coach so I'm not gonna offer this program. Again, that was helping people launch their businesses. I stopped all of my one-on-one, like I finished out the clients that I had and then I didn't re-up anybody and I didn't sign anybody new.
And I decided for my membership, which I had the previous year, I had been doing not only two annual launches but I was doing monthly launches. So every month I was launching and I think that for sure added to my burnout, but I was bringing in monthly members and you know, members were coming and leaving and there was a lot that was going on with that. And so I decided I'm not doing that either. I was like, I can't do that, it's too much for me right now. And plus I sort of realized that through that process that the people that were coming in that were coming in annually were the ones that were the most benefited by the program because they gave themselves enough time to actually implement and learn things and get coaching and you know, be inconsistent and come back. And so the people that were there for like a month, you are not gonna change a lot in a month.
And so one of the goals even for my clients was to heavily incentivize people, people to join for a year if they're gonna join so that they give themselves the time and space to actually create the things they wanna create. And so what I decided kind of Q1 of 2024 was that I was only gonna do two launches this year. I did a couple of things in the beginning of Q1 actually like I think I did one or two monthly launches before I sort of got to this point. But once I did I sort of realized like I'm only going to do these two launches, which were in April and September, October. And that was what I did and I took so much time off. I took I think total about eight weeks off throughout the year. I took two weeks off to go to Switzerland in Germany with my family.
I took three weeks off in the summer. I took for the first time in my business, I closed the business for the two weeks of the holidays, which I'd never done before. I took like a week here and there for different vacations, things like that. I would bring in guest coaches into my membership and I would do different kind of things to give myself that time off. I took a ton of time off that wasn't just like, like single days. Fridays, Mondays I really probably worked less than 20 hours a week. I would say on most weeks I worked about 20 closer to launches. I did work like I would say the month before the launch, the two or three weeks before the launch I was working 30 to 40 hours a week. But other than those times I really was working 20 hours, maybe less on a lot of the weeks.
I still did a good amount. One of the things I wanted to do was be on a lot of podcasts. I've done like 12 or 13 podcasts this year. I'm trying to look at my notes. I did also experiment with some stuff like I tried my hand at uh, Facebook ads and I got some good data there. I created an evergreen process that I was starting in the end of 2023. And so I started implementing that in 2024. I experimented with some social media stuff, some so like reels. I started doing some more like working with an agency for a little bit. But even that, that was mostly towards the first half. And then I even kind of slowed all that down and I was like, okay, I just wanna see how I can simplify my business. I simplified the contractors that were working for me, it's now really me and two part-time VAs that helped me just with like kind of uploading things and keeping the podcast going.
I did put the podcast on YouTube, so if you're watching this on YouTube, this did happen this year and I kind of stuck with recording it in a professional studio and putting it on YouTube. So it's not to say that I didn't do anything in the business, I did experiment with some new stuff. I have really thought very deeply about where I want the business to go, what is working. I tried to really look at like what was working for my clients and what isn't, how do I get them better results? I spent a lot more time thinking about where I want that, like how I can tailor the business to make sure that I am giving them faster and better results, how I wanna implement that. But for the most part, like outwardly what you see is I did two launches and that's it.
And I pretty much got rid of everything else in the business for this year. As a result of that, I did make less than I made last year. So in 2023 I think I made right around 200,000, like 203,000 or something like that. And then this year, I don't know the exact numbers because I'm recording this at the end of November and I'm launching a goal setting workshop right now, but it'll be around 110,000 a hundred, 1,015, which to be honest works for me. Like I also limited a lot of the agency work that I was getting. Uh, I limited a lot of the kind of what I was paying out for other people to help me kind of run the business. And so I leaned out a lot of the expenses I had and I realized for doing two launches with a couple of other like you know, like this goal setting one that I'll talk about and some things in the beginning of the year, it really worked out for me.
Like I'm really happy that I did it because I really gave myself a long period of time of doing not a lot of resting, of giving myself time to show up with my kids. I'm giving myself time to like read and nap and be at home and spend time with my family and really work on my health, which is one of the things that I really wanted to work on, like managing my own hormones and figuring out what I wanna do with that. So looking now forward, I will say though that even though I didn't put the expectation that I had to sort of bounce back from this or bounce back from the burnout or whatnot, I will say that in the last month I have felt myself sort of come out of whatever fog I was under. I have felt myself become really excited and motivated in a way that I haven't been in a really long time about the business.
It's not to say that I wanna do it the same way that I was doing it, but I think I've just gotten a lot of clarity around what is important to me and where I wanna take it and how I wanna help people and the types of connections I wanna create. And I feel like I hadn't had that in the last year. I feel like maybe I was just running on a hamster wheel and doing all the things I thought I should be doing. And so I didn't really have the time and space to figure out what I want. And I think this year gave that to me. And so I'm super grateful for that. I'm super grateful for the rest. I'm super grateful for the fact that I showed myself that I could take my foot off the gas and it could still be a viable business and it can be a business that works for me and that it doesn't have to be what works for everybody else or what everybody else is doing.
It's funny 'cause I feel like going into this holiday season right now is November 26th, so we're going into Thanksgiving. By the time you watch this, it's obviously gonna be January, but I've always felt like by the time I go into the holiday season, I'm so exhausted and so spent. And so the holidays typically I do love the holidays, but I just feel like I never have the energy to do the stuff that I wanna do or I really like it. There's a lot of shoulds, like I feel like it's just like kind of trudging through it. And this is like the first holiday season in a lot of years where I'm like so amped and I have so much energy and I'm so well rested and I'm so excited and there's so many things I wanna do with the kids. And so I'm excited about that.
I'm excited to feel this way. Um, I'm glad that it's here again. I don't know how long it'll stay. I don't know if by January I'm gonna be like, you know what? I'm back to not feeling this. But I think that like the biggest lesson that I've learned throughout this year for myself is, well a couple of lessons. One is that however you feel is fine. Like it's just a season and like everything else, those seasons will come and go and you don't know when they're gonna come and go and you don't know how long it's gonna take. But if you sort of allow yourself to ride those waves and really just be with yourself, it will take you to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And I think that has sort of solidified my own trust in myself and my, like my trust in taking care of myself that like, hey, if I find that I'm in a place where I need rest or I need some more tenderness in my life or I need some space, I'm the person that will give myself that.
And I think that is so different than what so many of us were raised. And I feel like for so long I had ignored so many of my own biological needs, right? Like so many of my own physical needs of like sleep and eating and go to the bathroom when you need to. It's like you are just working and you're working until late at night and you're pulling all nighters. And I feel like I've had to reestablish that trust that like, no, I will take care of you if you need rest, we'll rest If you need to like go slower, we'll go slower. And I think that has opened me up to feeling excited to maybe taking more risks or taking more on, because I know that I can take my foot off the gas if I want. So I feel like just learning that like this feeling isn't something to be scared of.
It's not something to run away from and it's not a problem if there's nothing wrong with me. It just is like how I feel and I can work with myself. That was the biggest one. The second one, which is one that I'm learning over and over again and I think I'm gonna keep learning is like truly trying to deprogram myself from doing what everybody else is always doing or what I think other people should be doing or what I should be doing or how I should be measuring up. And I think that will continuously creep in because we are, you know, it's in the water that a fish swims in. Like, let me explain that analogy. You know, like a fish doesn't know it's swimming in water. I feel like it's in the air we breathe. Like there's comparison, there's social media, there's people talking about all these amazing things they're doing and it's natural to feel like I should be doing that.
And it takes a lot of conscious efforts for me to constantly be like, but is that what I want? Is this something I wanna do? What do I wanna do? And I think I'm getting better at listening to that voice and really realizing like my situation is different than other people's. I have different privileges, I have different weaknesses, I have different demands on my time. You know, like I'm gonna be different than a 23-year-old entrepreneur who doesn't have kids and can, you know, work whenever they want. I'm gonna be different than somebody who has to make ends meet and support their family and support their parents. My time and energy, everything is gonna be different for me. And so I really have to decide like what it is that I want for my life and what do I want for this year. And I think that is something that I constantly have to reassess every single year of like reminding myself like, oh, the reason you started this business is to do it the way you want to.
So what is it that you want? And I think I will still probably get caught in like, but they're scaling or I should have a business that makes this much or whatnot and I just constantly have to bring myself back. And so I feel like I did that this year. The other things that I think I have learned is that like, again, all of this stuff is in seasons and it's never like all or nothing. Like I think I always thought like if I take my foot off the gas, everything's gonna fall apart and I'm gonna lose everything. And it was a good reminder that like, no, it's not, no it's not . Like there's such a spectrum here and you can decide constantly. Like it's almost like this pendulum, you can decide when you wanna go this way or that way. You can decide when you need more and when you need less.
And none of it is really that sky is falling type of, you know, freak out that your brain thinks it is. And it's always good to be reminded of that. Other than that, I guess the other lesson that might be good to share, even though I say this all the time, and I think I say this a little too much in my group and they get freaked out because it always sounds like I'm gonna move on to something else and I'm not. But I think it's important because so many people follow me or you know, listen to this because they want to find the thing that they wanna do, like the thing that is their dream career. And I try to talk about it all the time as to like, there is not one thing. There's so many things you can do. And I think that this has been a really interesting time in my business because for so long I felt like I am unbelievably passionate about this work and I wanna go full steam ahead.
And I really felt like this is what I need to be doing and I can't see a time when I wouldn't be doing this. And I think that the last year and a half has really helped me, you know, get a taste of my own medicine of like all of it is open to changing. And it's not to say that I'm not going to do this, I am, and that this is in no way saying, I still feel very passionate about this, but I have realized like just like everything else, it's 50 50 and just like everything else, there might come a time where it's like, all right, this chapter has served a beautiful purpose and I've learned so much and maybe it's gonna be time to move on. And I'm not saying that again. I know sometimes I shouldn't even like talk about this, but I do think it's important to talk about things honestly because I think a lot of people have those thoughts and then they think like, why am I just not motivated enough?
And I don't think it's about motivation or they think like, this is obviously not the thing I'm passionate about if I, you know, even think about walking away. And I feel like in entrepreneurship everybody feels like walking away all the time because it's so hard. And so I just wanna like, I guess relay that. I think for me this has been an eye-opening year to realize like, you can love something, you can be passionate about it and it can, you know, maybe come to a point where you're like, I'm done. I've done it, it was great, I learned a lot and I'm ready to move on. And it was good for me to kind of grapple with that because that is a scary thought because when you've created something that is so wonderful that you do love that people are getting results from that you're making money from that's working, it can be really scary to think like, but why would I want to choose something else?
And I think for me it just helped me sort of realize like there just are infinite lives that I can live. There's so many ways that I can create this business in the way that I want. There's so many things that I can do over the next 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years and this is just one of 'em. And so I sort of take it as it comes. That was what sort of happened in 2024. I will say in 2025, who knows, I don't have a crystal ball so you can join me for my year and review next year and see if, if, if it actually panned out. I do feel much more driven to grow this community and grow the membership and grow some other things I have in the work. I feel a lot more excitement kind of seat back into different ways in which I can help people.
I have really thought about what are ways that I wanna connect with people and so how can I bring that to fruition? And so I am really excited to kind of get back in and do a lot more this year from a place of creating something that I want, not just scaling things that I think I should be doing. So that's where I'm at. That was my 2024. It was a great year. It was a hard year. I think it was a hard year for a lot of us, but I learned a ton about myself, I learned a ton about my business and I'm excited to see where it takes me next year. So that's my year end review. I hope that was helpful. I always love hearing what other people go through. I always love hearing people's businesses and numbers and launches and all that stuff and so I try to be a little bit better about sharing that.
But yeah, buckle up because there's some good things coming in 2025 and I'm excited to find better ways to get people faster results and get people into careers that they actually love. And so I'm working on that and stay tuned. All right, my friends, I hope that your 2025 is off to a great start and I will be back next week for another episode.
Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitter club and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.
Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. Happy new year. Welcome to 2025 Craziness Crazy talk and look at me being on top of my game and having my year-end review as the first episode of the new year. I'm so excited to do this episode. What's interesting is a couple of months ago I was like, I don't think I'm gonna do a year in review this year. I've done one every year. If you've listened to the podcast, I actually like to be really transparent about like how much I make and if you've listened to the podcast, you know, I talk a lot about my lows, like my highs and lows, how I fail.
I think it's important to not just give kind of um, you know, the social media highlight reel of all the good things that are going on, but really the struggles because let me tell you, entrepreneurship is a struggle. I feel like it's like one big struggle and it's fantastic and hard and beautiful and so I like to talk about it. Actually, part of the reason that I didn't wanna do a year review, I was sort of like, eh, I think we're over it. I might not do one this year. And then my friend Claire Paltrow, she was ving me and she was like, are you gonna do one this year? Let me know 'cause I wanna listen. And I was like, I should just do it. So I'm sort of winging it. I actually, you usually go more in depth and like outline it. And so this is gonna be a little bit more broad brush strokes, but I think it's still important because a lot happened this year for a lot of us.
And so I feel like why not? Let's talk about it. So start of 2025, let's talk about 2024 for lessons from a quitter. Okay, so if you're new here, I have a membership called the Quitter Club and that was my main kind of offer, my main product coaching container that I had throughout last year. And it is a club where I help people kind of create careers that they don't actually hate, careers that they love, like where they stop really all the burnout, they quit the things that aren't working and then figure out what they wanna do and whether that's to stay at in the career they're in or to find something new. I knew that was gonna be kind of the main thing that I was gonna sell. It was gonna be the main product in my business last year. For me, I didn't really realize that this maybe I did as I was going through it, but looking back, I was in a place for lack of a better word of burnout.
Not the burnout that you would normally see in the sense of like you're working too much. That wasn't what it was. It sort of at actually started in towards the end of 2023. I think maybe it was like it had been four or five years into my business. I think a lot of people collectively we have been feeling a lot of like heaviness in the world. You know, I think there's just a general feeling that, I don't know what the word is, just lack of motivation maybe. And I think I was feeling it collectively with a lot of people. I think there was a lot happening in the world over the last year that felt really heavy on my heart, which really didn't inspire a lot of wanting to take action and wanting to build a business. I think for me it was just maybe a natural progression of like years and years of selling the same thing and doing the same thing.
And you know, having the podcast and stuff, I think it's just natural to kind of go through highs and lows of motivation. And I also think that a membership is a thing that is what I'm seeing now is a little bit more difficult to sell and run. The backend of it is a lot more difficult than the group programs that I had where everyone starts at the same time and ends at the same time. There's more logistics involved, which requires more backend work, which is not the work that I love so much in my business. And so that required me to manage more people, create more systems, which again is not the stuff that I really like doing, is not really my forte. And so I found myself doing a lot of stuff I don't like to be doing in my business. And so I think that OB obviously also added to it, but towards the end of 2023 was when I sort of felt a little lackluster.
I also think adding to that, it's fascinating where you sort of have to look at yourself and feel like, I know we all try to dissect and figure out what's going on, quote unquote, and this is sort of why I wanna talk about this is I don't know if the cause of it is that important as the fact that it was there. You know, this was also a time where I was starting to realize, you know, maybe I'm going through perimenopause and there's some hormonal shifts and that causes you to feel maybe not as motivated or kind of not have the same energy that I had. And so I don't know, I don't know what the reason was, but the reason I bring this up is because one of the most beautiful things that I've learned through thought work and one of the things that I think has been the biggest gift to me is not needing to rush out of feeling something in order to feel better, being able to sit with my feelings even if they're hard feelings and not have to get myself to a place of like feeling good all the time and feeling motivated and feeling wonderful.
And so I say all this to say like I didn't really spend a lot of time being like, I wonder why this is happening and how do I get myself more motivated and how do I push myself to do more? I sort of just realized like, okay, this is the season we're in right now. We are in a place where it's not kind of a go, go, go foot on the gas, I wanna grow this business. I just don't feel like I want to. I really wanna take the foot off the gas, I wanna give myself more space, I wanna spend more time outside of the business. I wanna spend more time with my family and doing things that bring me more joy. And that's what I did honestly in a lot of 2024. Let me just acknowledge that I'm extremely privileged to be able to do that.
Like I understand that not everybody can take their foot off the gas and people really do need to, you know, work harder and make the money that they need to make to support their family. I realized for me, like in my business, I could take my foot off the gas, I could decide that I wasn't gonna go so hard. And that's one of the beauties of having your own business and not working for someone. And I realized this was kind of a lesson I learned in 2023, but I was getting caught up in what other people in my industry were doing and in you know, vanity metrics and in numbers and thinking like, well I have to hit a certain amount or I have to make a certain amount to sort of, I don't know, prove myself or prove that I'm good enough or prove that I'm a good enough entrepreneur.
And I remember thinking that actually throughout this year, like, but if I don't do more launches and if I don't sell more products and if I don't do this stuff, I may not hit what I hit last year. And I remember that the thought wasn't, oh, like I need that money in order to make my business run or to pay people or to whatnot. It was that, what am I gonna tell everybody? Or like what if I can't say that I made the same as I made the year before? And that was kind of an alarm bell of like, okay, so maybe that's not the best reason to do what you're doing. Like I don't ever wanna run this business as a way to prove myself to people. I realized like for me a lot of this business, like I would prefer to have more of a lifestyle business than to scale.
Not to say that I never want to scale, but I don't love managing people. I don't want a big team. That's just never been the thing that I've wanted to do. And when I've gotten a taste of it, I've realized it's absolutely not what I wanna do. And so I realized like if I'm doing this for my own lifestyle and I'm doing this to be able to make the money I wanna make, would I be willing to make less and work less and sell less and have time to really like do other things to bring me joy and to deal with a lot of these feelings or the hormonal changes I'm going through or whatever else is going on in my life. And it really quickly became apparent that like that is what I wanna do. And so that is what I did. And another thing I'll say that's scary about this that I noticed and I know a lot of my clients go through is that one of the hard things about giving into an emotion, whether that's grief or depression or sadness or you know burnout or whatever it is, we are sort of trained to fear these feelings because I think that we think I'll never get out of it.
Like what if it never comes back? And I did have that feeling like I thought no, if I take my foot off the gas, what if I'm never motivated again to wanna do this? And I had to sit with that and I had to answer that question for myself like, yeah, what if I sort of got to the place? I was like, yeah, that is a very real possibility and then maybe we shut down the business or we completely pivot or I don't know, I don't know, but it is what it's like I can be okay with that too. I think when I got myself to a place where I was okay with that, I think sometimes we say like, okay, I'm gonna take my foot off the gas, I'm gonna rest or I'm gonna give myself this time to recover in the hopes that it'll ramp up.
Like in the hopes that I'll get that motivation back in the hopes that I'll feel better sometime. But I realize like that might not come and I can't put a timeline on it. I didn't wanna say like, okay, well I'll give myself rest for three months or six months because then it's gonna get me to be super motivated and like I'm gonna hit the ground running. I'm not saying that you can't do that, like give yourself rest because you're gonna have to come back. But for me I sort of had to accept it may not come back and like, would that be okay? Could I be okay with that? And when I made my peace with that when I was like, yeah, it might last a year, two years, three years, it might not come back, maybe I'll just feel like this. I have no idea 'cause I don't really know what's going on.
Like I said, I don't know if it's the hormones, I don't know if it's just the collective what's going on in the world. I don't know if it's just because of the business. I don't really understand the cause of it, but I do know that this is how I feel and I was like, all right, we're just gonna let ourselves be unmotivated. Now to pause there and say it obviously wasn't bad enough where it was like I couldn't work, I sort of became very strategic about this of like what is the bare minimum I gonna have to do to be able to keep this business alive? And I don't mean bare minimum, like phone it in, like I definitely give a lot to my clients, but I really kept thinking like, how can I take things off? How can I not maybe do more right now and on the backend stuff, how can I simplify?
And so that is what I did for most of 2024, to be honest with you guys. I got rid of every other product. So while I was doing the membership in 2023, I also was doing one-on-one coaching. I didn't have a ton of spots but I had about five clients on rotation, like I would add more people in. So I was doing high ticket one-on-one coaching. I also had launched a small group program where I was helping people launch their coaching businesses. So I had a program called Beginner our Business bootcamp that I launched. And so I was doing these like other revenue generating activities and in 2024 I decided like, I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna be a business coach so I'm not gonna offer this program. Again, that was helping people launch their businesses. I stopped all of my one-on-one, like I finished out the clients that I had and then I didn't re-up anybody and I didn't sign anybody new.
And I decided for my membership, which I had the previous year, I had been doing not only two annual launches but I was doing monthly launches. So every month I was launching and I think that for sure added to my burnout, but I was bringing in monthly members and you know, members were coming and leaving and there was a lot that was going on with that. And so I decided I'm not doing that either. I was like, I can't do that, it's too much for me right now. And plus I sort of realized that through that process that the people that were coming in that were coming in annually were the ones that were the most benefited by the program because they gave themselves enough time to actually implement and learn things and get coaching and you know, be inconsistent and come back. And so the people that were there for like a month, you are not gonna change a lot in a month.
And so one of the goals even for my clients was to heavily incentivize people, people to join for a year if they're gonna join so that they give themselves the time and space to actually create the things they wanna create. And so what I decided kind of Q1 of 2024 was that I was only gonna do two launches this year. I did a couple of things in the beginning of Q1 actually like I think I did one or two monthly launches before I sort of got to this point. But once I did I sort of realized like I'm only going to do these two launches, which were in April and September, October. And that was what I did and I took so much time off. I took I think total about eight weeks off throughout the year. I took two weeks off to go to Switzerland in Germany with my family.
I took three weeks off in the summer. I took for the first time in my business, I closed the business for the two weeks of the holidays, which I'd never done before. I took like a week here and there for different vacations, things like that. I would bring in guest coaches into my membership and I would do different kind of things to give myself that time off. I took a ton of time off that wasn't just like, like single days. Fridays, Mondays I really probably worked less than 20 hours a week. I would say on most weeks I worked about 20 closer to launches. I did work like I would say the month before the launch, the two or three weeks before the launch I was working 30 to 40 hours a week. But other than those times I really was working 20 hours, maybe less on a lot of the weeks.
I still did a good amount. One of the things I wanted to do was be on a lot of podcasts. I've done like 12 or 13 podcasts this year. I'm trying to look at my notes. I did also experiment with some stuff like I tried my hand at uh, Facebook ads and I got some good data there. I created an evergreen process that I was starting in the end of 2023. And so I started implementing that in 2024. I experimented with some social media stuff, some so like reels. I started doing some more like working with an agency for a little bit. But even that, that was mostly towards the first half. And then I even kind of slowed all that down and I was like, okay, I just wanna see how I can simplify my business. I simplified the contractors that were working for me, it's now really me and two part-time VAs that helped me just with like kind of uploading things and keeping the podcast going.
I did put the podcast on YouTube, so if you're watching this on YouTube, this did happen this year and I kind of stuck with recording it in a professional studio and putting it on YouTube. So it's not to say that I didn't do anything in the business, I did experiment with some new stuff. I have really thought very deeply about where I want the business to go, what is working. I tried to really look at like what was working for my clients and what isn't, how do I get them better results? I spent a lot more time thinking about where I want that, like how I can tailor the business to make sure that I am giving them faster and better results, how I wanna implement that. But for the most part, like outwardly what you see is I did two launches and that's it.
And I pretty much got rid of everything else in the business for this year. As a result of that, I did make less than I made last year. So in 2023 I think I made right around 200,000, like 203,000 or something like that. And then this year, I don't know the exact numbers because I'm recording this at the end of November and I'm launching a goal setting workshop right now, but it'll be around 110,000 a hundred, 1,015, which to be honest works for me. Like I also limited a lot of the agency work that I was getting. Uh, I limited a lot of the kind of what I was paying out for other people to help me kind of run the business. And so I leaned out a lot of the expenses I had and I realized for doing two launches with a couple of other like you know, like this goal setting one that I'll talk about and some things in the beginning of the year, it really worked out for me.
Like I'm really happy that I did it because I really gave myself a long period of time of doing not a lot of resting, of giving myself time to show up with my kids. I'm giving myself time to like read and nap and be at home and spend time with my family and really work on my health, which is one of the things that I really wanted to work on, like managing my own hormones and figuring out what I wanna do with that. So looking now forward, I will say though that even though I didn't put the expectation that I had to sort of bounce back from this or bounce back from the burnout or whatnot, I will say that in the last month I have felt myself sort of come out of whatever fog I was under. I have felt myself become really excited and motivated in a way that I haven't been in a really long time about the business.
It's not to say that I wanna do it the same way that I was doing it, but I think I've just gotten a lot of clarity around what is important to me and where I wanna take it and how I wanna help people and the types of connections I wanna create. And I feel like I hadn't had that in the last year. I feel like maybe I was just running on a hamster wheel and doing all the things I thought I should be doing. And so I didn't really have the time and space to figure out what I want. And I think this year gave that to me. And so I'm super grateful for that. I'm super grateful for the rest. I'm super grateful for the fact that I showed myself that I could take my foot off the gas and it could still be a viable business and it can be a business that works for me and that it doesn't have to be what works for everybody else or what everybody else is doing.
It's funny 'cause I feel like going into this holiday season right now is November 26th, so we're going into Thanksgiving. By the time you watch this, it's obviously gonna be January, but I've always felt like by the time I go into the holiday season, I'm so exhausted and so spent. And so the holidays typically I do love the holidays, but I just feel like I never have the energy to do the stuff that I wanna do or I really like it. There's a lot of shoulds, like I feel like it's just like kind of trudging through it. And this is like the first holiday season in a lot of years where I'm like so amped and I have so much energy and I'm so well rested and I'm so excited and there's so many things I wanna do with the kids. And so I'm excited about that.
I'm excited to feel this way. Um, I'm glad that it's here again. I don't know how long it'll stay. I don't know if by January I'm gonna be like, you know what? I'm back to not feeling this. But I think that like the biggest lesson that I've learned throughout this year for myself is, well a couple of lessons. One is that however you feel is fine. Like it's just a season and like everything else, those seasons will come and go and you don't know when they're gonna come and go and you don't know how long it's gonna take. But if you sort of allow yourself to ride those waves and really just be with yourself, it will take you to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And I think that has sort of solidified my own trust in myself and my, like my trust in taking care of myself that like, hey, if I find that I'm in a place where I need rest or I need some more tenderness in my life or I need some space, I'm the person that will give myself that.
And I think that is so different than what so many of us were raised. And I feel like for so long I had ignored so many of my own biological needs, right? Like so many of my own physical needs of like sleep and eating and go to the bathroom when you need to. It's like you are just working and you're working until late at night and you're pulling all nighters. And I feel like I've had to reestablish that trust that like, no, I will take care of you if you need rest, we'll rest If you need to like go slower, we'll go slower. And I think that has opened me up to feeling excited to maybe taking more risks or taking more on, because I know that I can take my foot off the gas if I want. So I feel like just learning that like this feeling isn't something to be scared of.
It's not something to run away from and it's not a problem if there's nothing wrong with me. It just is like how I feel and I can work with myself. That was the biggest one. The second one, which is one that I'm learning over and over again and I think I'm gonna keep learning is like truly trying to deprogram myself from doing what everybody else is always doing or what I think other people should be doing or what I should be doing or how I should be measuring up. And I think that will continuously creep in because we are, you know, it's in the water that a fish swims in. Like, let me explain that analogy. You know, like a fish doesn't know it's swimming in water. I feel like it's in the air we breathe. Like there's comparison, there's social media, there's people talking about all these amazing things they're doing and it's natural to feel like I should be doing that.
And it takes a lot of conscious efforts for me to constantly be like, but is that what I want? Is this something I wanna do? What do I wanna do? And I think I'm getting better at listening to that voice and really realizing like my situation is different than other people's. I have different privileges, I have different weaknesses, I have different demands on my time. You know, like I'm gonna be different than a 23-year-old entrepreneur who doesn't have kids and can, you know, work whenever they want. I'm gonna be different than somebody who has to make ends meet and support their family and support their parents. My time and energy, everything is gonna be different for me. And so I really have to decide like what it is that I want for my life and what do I want for this year. And I think that is something that I constantly have to reassess every single year of like reminding myself like, oh, the reason you started this business is to do it the way you want to.
So what is it that you want? And I think I will still probably get caught in like, but they're scaling or I should have a business that makes this much or whatnot and I just constantly have to bring myself back. And so I feel like I did that this year. The other things that I think I have learned is that like, again, all of this stuff is in seasons and it's never like all or nothing. Like I think I always thought like if I take my foot off the gas, everything's gonna fall apart and I'm gonna lose everything. And it was a good reminder that like, no, it's not, no it's not . Like there's such a spectrum here and you can decide constantly. Like it's almost like this pendulum, you can decide when you wanna go this way or that way. You can decide when you need more and when you need less.
And none of it is really that sky is falling type of, you know, freak out that your brain thinks it is. And it's always good to be reminded of that. Other than that, I guess the other lesson that might be good to share, even though I say this all the time, and I think I say this a little too much in my group and they get freaked out because it always sounds like I'm gonna move on to something else and I'm not. But I think it's important because so many people follow me or you know, listen to this because they want to find the thing that they wanna do, like the thing that is their dream career. And I try to talk about it all the time as to like, there is not one thing. There's so many things you can do. And I think that this has been a really interesting time in my business because for so long I felt like I am unbelievably passionate about this work and I wanna go full steam ahead.
And I really felt like this is what I need to be doing and I can't see a time when I wouldn't be doing this. And I think that the last year and a half has really helped me, you know, get a taste of my own medicine of like all of it is open to changing. And it's not to say that I'm not going to do this, I am, and that this is in no way saying, I still feel very passionate about this, but I have realized like just like everything else, it's 50 50 and just like everything else, there might come a time where it's like, all right, this chapter has served a beautiful purpose and I've learned so much and maybe it's gonna be time to move on. And I'm not saying that again. I know sometimes I shouldn't even like talk about this, but I do think it's important to talk about things honestly because I think a lot of people have those thoughts and then they think like, why am I just not motivated enough?
And I don't think it's about motivation or they think like, this is obviously not the thing I'm passionate about if I, you know, even think about walking away. And I feel like in entrepreneurship everybody feels like walking away all the time because it's so hard. And so I just wanna like, I guess relay that. I think for me this has been an eye-opening year to realize like, you can love something, you can be passionate about it and it can, you know, maybe come to a point where you're like, I'm done. I've done it, it was great, I learned a lot and I'm ready to move on. And it was good for me to kind of grapple with that because that is a scary thought because when you've created something that is so wonderful that you do love that people are getting results from that you're making money from that's working, it can be really scary to think like, but why would I want to choose something else?
And I think for me it just helped me sort of realize like there just are infinite lives that I can live. There's so many ways that I can create this business in the way that I want. There's so many things that I can do over the next 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years and this is just one of 'em. And so I sort of take it as it comes. That was what sort of happened in 2024. I will say in 2025, who knows, I don't have a crystal ball so you can join me for my year and review next year and see if, if, if it actually panned out. I do feel much more driven to grow this community and grow the membership and grow some other things I have in the work. I feel a lot more excitement kind of seat back into different ways in which I can help people.
I have really thought about what are ways that I wanna connect with people and so how can I bring that to fruition? And so I am really excited to kind of get back in and do a lot more this year from a place of creating something that I want, not just scaling things that I think I should be doing. So that's where I'm at. That was my 2024. It was a great year. It was a hard year. I think it was a hard year for a lot of us, but I learned a ton about myself, I learned a ton about my business and I'm excited to see where it takes me next year. So that's my year end review. I hope that was helpful. I always love hearing what other people go through. I always love hearing people's businesses and numbers and launches and all that stuff and so I try to be a little bit better about sharing that.
But yeah, buckle up because there's some good things coming in 2025 and I'm excited to find better ways to get people faster results and get people into careers that they actually love. And so I'm working on that and stay tuned. All right, my friends, I hope that your 2025 is off to a great start and I will be back next week for another episode.
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