Business Goal Tracking for Week 2 of 2022

In January 2022, I’ve set three overall monthly goals and three weekly habits to help me meet my revenue and workshop enrollment goals for 2022. This is my accountability report for how I did against these goals between 1/8/2022 and 1/14/2022.

Monthly Goals:

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

Weekly Habits:

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

Week Overall

This was not my most productive week ever. There was a lot of email catching up to do from my long winter break, plus DPR2 was not in school (omicron concerns). I recorded two podcast interviews, which were long scheduled and enjoyable but not present in my priorities list above.

However, it was an unusually interactive (read: fun) workweek because I had about half a dozen calls scheduled between the podcast interviews and university clients and I did an event for prospective grad students at my alma mater. I also really moved the ball forward with scheduling work for this semester, which I’m very pleased about.

After a couple of my calls this week, I was super inspired to plan/create new content for this spring. I have a vision that I’ve lacked in previous years. But that is not one of my top priorities! If I want to get it done, it will have to come after I connect with university clients.

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

I think I’m on track to reach this goal by the end of the month, though maybe not quite as soon as I would like.

This week I reached out to just about all of the clients I had listed in my updated CRM spreadsheet as having expressed interest in working together in 2021-2022 (excluding those I worked with last semester who don’t want repeat work so soon). I do have a few more to knock out by the end of next week. I’m also feeling slightly under-confident that my CRM captured everything, so I’d like to go through my email inbox and calendar from the last couple of months with a fine-tooth comb to make sure I haven’t missed anyone.

Next week, once I’m finished with the clients I was already in conversation with, I’ll start reaching out to other clients who have worked with me in the past year or two, including anyone who made a bulk purchase of a tax workshop last year.

Monthly Goal 2: Publish my annual tax return workshop

As I announced last week, I published How to Complete Your Grad Student Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!) on 1/3/2022.

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

I did not work on this goal at all this week. However, I gained nearly 100 mailing list followers just this week, so the opt-ins that I updated last week are pulling their weight. It really helped that one of my websites with a strong opt-in form got a lot of traffic/attention in a viral (you know, for Academic Twitter) thread this week.

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

I mostly did stay on top of incoming communications. I was happy with how fast I got back to some university clients with info they needed from me (and they were appreciative). I don’t think I let anything important lie, though next week before EOD Friday I should really do a sweep of my inbox and clear out everything. I do think I have a few non-urgent emails that I need to respond to from Thursday and Friday.

One great thing I did this week was compile an FAQ document about the bulk purchases of my tax workshop that I can send interested clients to. It definitely shortened the text of my emails!

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

I’m really glad I expressed this as an explicit goal because I might have neglected to check in on the two outstanding invoices I have. One client requested another form from me, which I sent in, and I also got an email confirmation from the other client that they had all the info they need and the payment is moving forward.

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

On Monday 1/10 I wrote and scheduled one Tweet for each day between 1/10 and 1/18. I don’t normally batch Tweets like this but I think it worked well.

I wrote and scheduled an email to my mailing list about tax updates for 2021 and my tax workshop.

Goal Tracking

I decided to switch up the format of my goal tracking. I’m not going to track monthly progress but rather annual.

My revenue is really a super lagging indicator as I am sometimes not paid for months after I complete work (see: two outstanding invoices from 2021—one is from September!). I still want to track revenue, but I thought of another more current-time indicator of how much business I’m doing that I’m going to include in these updates: tax workshop enrollment numbers.

The number of people enrolled in my tax workshops is literally the number of people I’m serving in one big area of my business. My goal for 2022 is to enroll 5,000 people in my two workshops, How to Complete Your Grad Student Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!) and Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. People can enroll as individuals, which is immediately reflected in my revenue, or through bulk purchases by universities, which are reflected in revenue much later.

5,000 people in my tax workshops is for sure a “Best” goal from the Good-Better-Best Framework I shared in an earlier post. It’s an audacious goal! It’s about an order of magnitude more people than I enrolled in 2021. But there we are! I want to challenge myself this year.

Annual Revenue to Date (as a percent of “Best” revenue goal):

• Advertising — 0.50%
• Community membership + tax workshop sales (individual) — 0.38%
• Public speaking — 0.75%
• Sum — 1.77%

Cumulative Workshop Enrollment to Date (5,000 is “Best” goal): 31