Business Goal Tracking for Week 1 of January 2022

January 9th, 2022 | Add a Comment

In January 2022, I’ve set three overall monthly goals and three weekly habits to help me meet my revenue goal for 2022. This is my accountability report for how I did against these goals between 1/1/2022 and 1/7/2022.

Monthly Goals:

Pitch all potential university clients my speaking services and/or tax workshops
Publish my annual tax return workshop
Update all my read magnets and lead magnets for tax season 2021

Weekly Habits:

Review all communications with university clients and respond as necessary
Send invoices and check on payments as necessary
Write and schedule promotional email(s) and Tweets

Monthly Goal 1: Pitch all potential university clients my speaking services and/or tax workshops

I updated the spreadsheet I use for customer relationship management, which I had let fall woefully out of date. I had a bit of a mental block around doing that for some reason, so I’m glad I finally tackled that.

Monthly Goal 2: Publish my annual tax return workshop

I am proud to announce that I published How to Complete Your Grad Student Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!) on 1/3/2022! I did most of the work for it (with a contractor’s help) in mid- to late-December so this is a little bit of a cheat but it was really important to get this out in the world this month.

Monthly Goal 3: Update all my read magnets and lead magnets for tax season 2021

I’ve updated all of my tax opt-in incentives and their follow-up email sequences this week, for example:

Next week, I’ll tackle the articles on my website.

Weekly Goal 1: Review all communications with university clients and respond as necessary

I didn’t do amazingly against this goal. This week was mostly about keeping my head above water and responding to people who seemed to need an urgent response. I am officially still on vacation and have an out-of-office autoresponder up… But some people are back to work and needed things from me. I’ll have more time for this next week. Bringing my CRM spreadsheet up to date (above) helped me asses what needs to be done.

Weekly Goal 2: Send invoices and check on payments as necessary

I want to make this an all-year habit starting this month. I’m not so great at staying on top of sending invoices, and I really shouldn’t let it go for longer than a week after delivering work. Ideally, I would send them immediately.

I only had one invoice to send, and I sent it!

At the start of the month, there were four outstanding invoices from work performed in 2021. I received two of the payments this week, and I checked in with the two remaining clients to figure out what the hold-up is.

I was not pleased that those four payments for work performed in 2021 didn’t come in during 2021. Because I use the cash accrual accounting method, I couldn’t count them toward my 2021 revenue. I would have hit a vanity revenue metric if they had come in on time. Ah well, they’ll count toward my ambitious 2022 goal!

Weekly Goal 3: Write and schedule promotional email(s) and Tweets

I have a lot to promote this month: my annual tax return workshop, How to Complete Your Grad Student Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!), and my quarterly estimated tax workshop, Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. I’m writing emails to my entire mailing list, emails to interested parties on the mailing list, and emails to workshop participants. This week, I needed to send one broadcast for the quarterly estimated tax workshop, which I did.

I also published at least one tax-related Tweet for each day between 1/1 and 1/7. I upgraded my Hootsuite account to allow for more advanced scheduling than the free version had, so I’m going to try to batch these going forward.