Here's the thing, like a lot of people I was severely affected by everything that happened in 2020, and there is still time for it to get worse.
#COVID19 and some of the business impacts of that drastically affected my "normal" work, I had a number of projects canceled and put on hold starting in March. Then in May I had another major client decide to stop working with me, just before major family changes.
I was planning, starting around November of 2019, to take 3-6 weeks of time off starting in mid-May. That was when I had work lined up for the summer and fall in 2020. That all changed, and at the same time my other projects were being put on hold, or at least there wasn't as much interest in the type of offerings I was making.
The cause of this was a few fold, one the number of webinars that started to be offered was flooding the market, and while they were very low quality, there was just too much noise for my offerings to get traction.
Getting Low on Funds
So, since there was no work and my products weren't selling, I started selling my time again to re-fill the coffers. This brought me back to the gig-economy, but I was VERY VERY LUCKY. I reached out to a colleague that I met many years ago at a conference, and he needed some help with projects that I am an expert in.
If you aren't great at "networking" I highly recommend this free course. He has a series of non-scammy or slimey steps that build a valuable practice.
These were a couple of small things, but it was the first new money that I had in a while, and I started to feel good again. Then something awesome happened, we landed a large project, large enough that by the end of Q1 in 2021 I will be back in the black!
Where does this leave this project?
Well it was on hold, and I really haven't made any appreciable progress since April of last year. But now that I have locked in some real revenue, the books are starting to look healthy again and my mental health seems to be improving, its going to be moving again soon.
There will be a few weeks, starting in January, that I will be spending just trying to figure out what I was doing and whether or not I still want to be going down that path.
My goals are essentially the same, and I think I can get there.
No more loafing for #noloafing
All of these posts will be tagged with the #noloafingmoney so if you want to see what I'm doing over there, that is the place to do it.
The goal
The goal is to build a product or series of products that allows me to scale. The financial goal is to build a business that has a monthly revenue stream of $5k with less than 20hrs worked on average by the end of 2020
The Why
If this is your first time here, thanks for stopping by. I wrote my first post on this topic in November 2019. They all have a "special" tag, so you can find them all here: #noloafingmoney. If you want to see where this all started, its with this post, Money and the Gig-Economy.
Be sure to follow along and leave a comment below!
Cheers,
NL