Sales Planning for Creatives: Turn Goals into Action with Google Sheets | Lauren Weber | Skillshare

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Sales Planning for Creatives: Turn Goals into Action with Google Sheets

teacher avatar Lauren Weber, Artist + Quilter + Gardener

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:40

    • 2.

      Class Project

      1:16

    • 3.

      Why Planning Matters

      1:46

    • 4.

      Spreadsheet Basics & Template Overview

      6:15

    • 5.

      Setting a Baseline

      4:41

    • 6.

      Annual Goals (The Big Picture)

      8:48

    • 7.

      Monthly Goals (Multiple Revenue Streams)

      11:28

    • 8.

      Monthly Goals (One Revenue Stream)

      5:49

    • 9.

      Plan: Turning Goals into Tasks

      7:01

    • 10.

      Accountability & Scheduling

      1:52

    • 11.

      Tracking Sales

      3:50

    • 12.

      Tips, Pitfalls, & Adjustments

      4:44

    • 13.

      Final Thoughts

      1:37

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About This Class

Do you have big sales goals for your creative business, but feel stuck when it comes to actually making them happen? Sales planning doesn’t have to be complicated, and it definitely doesn’t have to take the joy out of your creative business. In this class, Lauren walks you through you a simple, creative-friendly way to plan your yearly sales goals.

Join Lauren as she walks you through the exact sales planning spreadsheet she uses in her own creative business. She'll show you how to take a practical look at your goals to create focus, direction, and planning with a purpose.

In this class, you’ll learn how to:

  • Estimate your annual goals by looking at your business' calendar and capacity

  • Break your annual goals down month-by-month based on what you sell

  • Account for seasonality, busy months, and personal life

  • Estimate sales across different revenue streams, including: product, service, workshop/teaching, and print-on-demand sales channels

  • Turn sales goals into goal-driven tasks

  • Reflect, adjust, and adapt your plan as you bring in sales each month

The spreadsheet system is simple, flexible, and creative-friendly. It's designed to make numbers feel less overwhelming and more supportive for your creative business.

You'll need: 

  • A Google account/access to Google Sheets

You'll be creating: 

  • a monthly action plan (or to-do list) based on your sales goals

Who this class Is for:

This class is for creatives and small business owners who:

  • Feel overwhelmed by sales goals 

  • Have big sales goals, but don’t yet have a plan for how to get there

  • Want to be more intentional with their time, energy, and daily tasks

  • Sell products, offer services, teach workshops, or have multiple creative income streams

No advanced business or spreadsheet experience required. Creatives just diving into the small business world are more than welcome to follow along!

Class Resources

You’ll receive:

  • A downloadable PDF with access to a Google Sheets sales planning template

  • Step-by-step instructional videos for setting up and customizing the planning spreadsheet

  • A printable monthly task checklist worksheet

All resources are for personal use and can be reused year after year.

Getting Started: 

If you’re ready to turn big goals into a realistic monthly plan, grab a cup of coffee and jump into the first lesson!

Let’s break your sales goals into manageable steps and create a planning system that supports your creative life, without overwhelming it.

Music Attribution: Stock music provided by VsevolodPankratov, from Pond5

Disclaimer: This class reflects Lauren's personal experience as a creative business owner and is intended for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, legal, or professional advice. Results will vary, and Lauren Weber, Garden Girl Studio, and Skillshare are not responsible for any outcomes related to the use of this material.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Lauren Weber

Artist + Quilter + Gardener

Teacher

Hi there! I'm Lauren Weber, the owner and artist behind Garden Girl Studio.

I'm from upstate New York where my surroundings continuously inspire me. If I'm not creating in the design studio, you can probably find me hanging out near my garden.

I've been quilting and making artwork for as long as I can remember. I made my first quilt when I was 8 years old with a little (..okay, alot!) of help from my mom. Even at a young age, I quickly learned all of the "quilting rules" so I could test them, break them, and make them my own. Can you tell I was a future art quilter in the making?

A few years later, I went to university to study plants and design. Plants, flowers, nature...what can I say? I've always been drawn to that garden expe... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Have you ever set a really big goal for your small business? Maybe you thought to yourself, I really want to make $5,000 this month. Or I want this to be my best year ever. And then you immediately thought, Okay, but how do I actually make this happen? If you're creative with revenue goals for your business, but you're not sure where to start, then this class is free. I'm Lauren. I'm an artist and small business owner. I am not an accountant or financial advisor. Trust me, I would much rather be painting or sewing. But I am a small business owner who wants to continue making a sustainable living from my artwork. I've learned sometimes the hard way that having big goals is the easy part. Turning those financial goals into a realistic action plan, that's sometimes where we get stuff. That's why I'm sharing my go to annual revenue planning spreadsheet with you in this class. This class is not about financial advice or guarantees. It's about finding clarity. I'm going to walk you through the exact spreadsheet that I use in my business to break down big goals into small, doable monthly tasks. So I can understand where I need to focus each month in my business. This really helps me turn vague ideas into goal driven, actionable steps. Because the numbers don't have to be scary, and they definitely don't have to be complicated. This spreadsheet helps break everything down so you can get a clear idea of what it will take to achieve your goals. Inside this class, we are going to take a look at your big picture revenue goals, what you want to make in the year. And we're going to break that goal down month by month. Then we're going to connect those goals to actual tasks that could help move your business forward. This system works whether you sell products, offer services, teach workshops, or have other creative revenue streams in your business. The system is totally flexible and creative friendly. Class project is to create a monthly action plan. There is absolutely no need to share your revenue numbers. Instead, we're going to be sharing the key tasks, our to do list, our plans moving forward to help our dreams become a reality. I'm going to be providing a simple planning sheet that you can use to list key tasks that you want to tackle this month. You can prioritize those tasks into actionable step to support your goals. This class is for creatives who want to be more intentional with their time, their energy, and their daily business tasks, especially if you've ever felt overwhelmed by numbers or you're just unsure where to start. By the end of this class, you won't just have a spreadsheet. You'll have a roadmap, a way to connect your creative dreams with real goal driven steps. Plus, you'll have a planning system that you can come back to again and again, year after year to help move your business forward. So if you're ready to turn your revenue goals into an action plan, grab a cup of coffee and meet me in the next lesson so we can turn your ideas into an actual plan. 2. Class Project: For your class project, you are going to be creating a simple to do list based on your action plan that you created from your revenue spreadsheet. No need for sharing your numbers. This is about progress over perfection. You don't have to hit your numbers every year. We don't even need to know your numbers. Those are totally for you. This is going to be about focusing our business and honing in our sales so that we can hit our goals, not about comparison. So I just want to know what your strategy is going to be. And you're going to put it into this little worksheet that I'm providing for you so that you can keep it front of mind as you're working throughout the month to keep yourself motivated. You can find your planning checklist worksheet as well as the spreadsheet template right in the project resources section of this class. To think about, what are you working toward this month? What actions are going to support that goal? These are the things that you're going to add to your worksheet. And as a reminder, upload a photo or screenshot or a type summary, any little notes that you might have that you want to share with us in the class project gallery. I would love to see what's keeping you inspired and keeping you motivated as you work through the year. And it can also be a place for accountability where you can say, Hey, these were my action items, and I totally got it done. So share your inspiration, your worksheet in the project gallery so we can cheer you on together. In the next lesson, we're going to talk a little bit about why it's so important to set goals and have it backed up with a game plan. 3. Why Planning Matters: In this lesson, we're going to talk about why it's so important to come up with an action plan for our big goals. Now, I am a huge fan of setting some fun goals. But it's important that we have an action plan to back it up because what's a goal without an action plan? How are we going to actually make our dreams into a reality? Having lofty goals is great. It's exciting. Who doesn't love saying, I'm gonna make a bazillion dollars this year, right? What I want you to think about in this class is how we're going to get to the Bazilion dollars. Planning is going to give you focus. It's going to give you clarity, and it's going to give you a direction to take your business. And if things aren't working, it's gonna tell us when we need to change our focus or change our direction. And that is half of the battle. Spreadsheet is going to turn your vague goals into realistic numbers that you can use as a benchmark for what you need to do and what tasks need to get done each month in order to keep your business moving toward the goals that you have set. Looking at your numbers is going to help you decide exactly what you want to focus on and where you want to prioritize your day to day tasks in your business. As a reminder, we are not chasing perfection. It is okay if the plan changes. In fact, it likely will change. It's a matter of taking notes and getting realistic expectations for what we can achieve in our business. So we're going to learn to look at our goals in a practical way, in a way that keeps our feet just a little bit on the ground. I mean, we can set some lofty in the sky goals, but we need to keep our feet touching grass so that we can build a plan that we can actually follow. Next lesson, we are going to start talking about how to actually use this spreadsheet. This is a spreadsheet that I use every single year in my business, and I'm super excited to share it with you. I'm going to walk you through it step by step. We're going to talk about how to get started with spreadsheets and what you need to do to get started. 4. Spreadsheet Basics & Template Overview: In this lesson, we're going to go over some spreadsheet basics. I don't want anyone to worry that if spreadsheets just aren't their jam, I know a lot of us are artists. I'm an artist, too. I'm not super big into numbers. I know that things can get overwhelming really quickly, so I just want to give a good foundation for how to use this basic spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was created to be simple, to be usable. I didn't want to make a spreadsheet that was going to be so overwhelming and so difficult to use that it would be easy to give up. This was not meant to be hurdles. So let's go through a few spreadsheet basics so that we can set some goals and have a plan for our upcoming year. I'm going to start by showing you how to access your spreadsheet and a few navigational tips for how to use Google Sheets and a couple quick how tos. If you go to the class resources, you're going to find a PDF document that is going to give you access to your spreadsheet that we're going to be using in this class. When you open it up, you're going to see that there's a link right here that says you can access your template at the following link. Go ahead and click on it. It's a live link. Once you click on that link, you're going to see this message, and you're going to go ahead and click Make a copy. This is going to bring you into Google Sheets. If you're not familiar with Google Sheets or you don't love Google Sheets, you can always change over the file type by clicking File, Download, and you can change it into Microsoft Excel document if you'd prefer Microsoft Excel. If you want to make additional copies of the spreadsheet, which isn't always a terrible idea, you can go up to file and click Make a copy. I tend to do this at the end of the year when I want a whole new spreadsheet for the following year. So in December, I might go ahead and make a copy of all of this year's numbers so that I can use them to reference the following year. A few spreadsheet basics. In Google Sheets, if you want to click into a cell and to start typing, you're going to go ahead and double click. You'll see that the cell gets highlighted, and then you can go ahead and type into it. This spreadsheet is a little bit more complicated than just starting any old spreadsheet because I've created some auto formulas so that the numbers auto calculate. So you'll see that as you start inputting how much money you brought in, say, last year in January, these numbers are auto totaling, so you can see there's a formula here that I've already created. You don't have to worry about this. It's already there. But what I am going to recommend is you avoid any cells that have a yellow colored background or really any colored background. And then once we go into another view, you can see at the bottom of your spreadsheet are a whole bunch of tabs. These are all additional spreadsheets that you can use throughout the year to track data. We're going to go through them one by one. Don't when you first open the spreadsheet, you're going to notice that there's this annual view. But if you click into say January, you're going to notice that there's some other colors. Again, these are all auto populating cells. So try not to type anywhere you see something colorful, including colorful text. You'll notice that your 2026 goals are going to auto Import here where you see these colorful numbers. And so if you go ahead and try to change this number or put it in manually, it's going to break the calculation. I haven't locked any of these formulas. So if you are a spreadsheet guru and you want to go ahead and change things up, that's totally fine. Go for it. But if you're new to spreadsheets, I'm going to recommend avoiding any cells with a colorful background or with colorful font. To navigate to different tabs, you simply hover over it, you'll see that it turns a slightly different color, and then you can click. If you want to change the text here, just double click it, and then you can go ahead and change this to whatever year or date you need or if you want to relabel it something else, that's totally fine, too. If you want to add new cells in the sheet, since these are auto populating, what I'm going to recommend is you're going to hover over these are columns going down. And these are rows going across. You're going to hover over the row above anything that's totaling. So let's say you have a different revenue stream here that I didn't list. You're going to right click and you're going to insert one row above the bottom one. This is going to help make sure that this is still summing everything. If we go ahead and we insert one row below, the sum is going to stop above this, so it's no longer going to be summing everything in the column. So if you want to add something new, I'm going to recommend going above that total and then clicking right click Insert one row above. If you want to undo something, like, if I no longer want these two cells here, you're simply going to hit Control Z, Control Z. Or you can hit this undo button. At the top of your screen. The way that this spreadsheet is set up is there is going to be an annual view where you can take a look at your previous year's numbers. You can set your goals for the upcoming year, and then as the year progresses, you're going to be actually tracking. It's going to be auto calculating for you. I've got it all pre set up with formulas, but it's going to be tracking how you are actually bringing in money and if you're getting close to meeting your goals. We're going to do this by going through monthly view. There are actually 12 tabs here, one for each month of the year so that we can go through and really break down the different categories of our business and what we're selling. And how we can actually meet these goals. So we're going to actually come up with a plan for how much we need to sell in order to make those numbers happen. Much like making a piece of artwork, we're going to be looking at the big picture first. We're going to be filling in some of our annual numbers, our annual goals, and then we're going to go ahead and break down the details step by step each month. And I'm going to show you step by step how to fill out each of these sections so you can come up with a plan for your year two. You're afraid that something's going to get messed up or that you're going to wreck a formula, just simply make a copy. Again, you're going to go to file, make a copy. That way, you've got a backup. And of course, you can always come back to your PDF and make a brand new copy for yourself if you're worried that you're not familiar with spreadsheets or you're afraid that the formulas are going to change or if you want to experiment a little to see if you can take this spreadsheet to another level and really personalize it for your own business, then that's fine. I'm just going to recommend making a copy so that you can play around with it without actually impacting the original formulas. So in the next lesson, we're going to start by inputting the numbers for our previous year. So we're going to take a look back historically at our numbers. I'm going to be creating a fictitious business here for you so that we can have a good example, and we are going to start inputting numbers so you can see exactly how this spreadsheet works. 5. Setting a Baseline: Now that we've been introduced to Google Sheets and how spreadsheets work, let's take a look at our revenue history. So we have a good foundation and a good place to start before setting our annual goals. And when I say revenue, I mean just money coming in for your business. Not expenses, just sales. Lesson, we are going to jot down last year's revenue numbers if we have them for each product category. That way, we have a benchmark and something to reflect off of before we set this year's goals. So to get started, I'm going to give you a business example. In this case, I am going to pretend that I have a art print business. We're going to call it Laurence Cozy Paper Co, where I sell art prints. I teach workshops, and I sell some of my artwork on print on demand. So based on Lauren's Cozy Paper Co, super cute, let's go ahead and fill out our numbers from last year. To get started, you're going to go ahead and you're going to fill in the categories, the product categories in your business. When you fill these in, if you fill them in under 2025 actual or whatever the year is actual, they will auto populate in 2026 goals. They're going to autofill in this 2026 actual, and they're going to autofill in each of the monthly tabs, as well. So to get started, we're going to do custom art services. So maybe we make custom pet portraits. I'm going to put this in all cabs. Custom Art services. Okay. And when I press Enter, you're going to see that this auto fills and it even autofills in here. Okay, in our January view. Next, we are going to also teach workshops locally in this business. This physical product, I sell art prints and greeting cards, so we're going to keep physical product. I am not going to sell digital products at the moment or commissions, but I am going to have a print on demand service, so we're going to go ahead and put POD in here as well. Now, we're just going to ignore digital products and commissions in case in the future, maybe that's something that we're going to take on. Examples of commissions might also be if you are an affiliate sponsored. So if you are an Amazon affiliate or if you affiliate for some of your favorite small businesses, this is a place where commissions could go, or perhaps you teach online. That could be a place where your commission income could go. But for now, let's just keep it simple. We're Oh, let's go ahead and type this right. Where we are doing custom art services as our service based business, we're going to do workshops. We'll have physical products and royalties. So let's go ahead and fill in a few numbers. If you're filling in brand new numbers, you're just going to double click into the cell. So I'm going to say January of last year, I did $600 in custom pet portraits. I did $200 for workshops. $800 in art prints. And on Print on Demand, we made $150. And you're going to go ahead and do this for your whole calendar year now. If you do have data, say, from a previous year, I'm going to fill in March through December here. You can just highlight these cells March through December. And realistically, next year is actually going to be auto populating down here. But for now, this is what we're going to use. You're going to right click Copy. And you can also do Control C for copy. So copy. And then you're going to fill in March through up here. Select the same cells. Right click Paste special values only. That way, the formulas don't come with you. And that's an easy way to fill in your numbers. And again, these are going to auto populate and because no, it's in yellow. That's because there's formulas for everything with these cells. But if you right click and you do the copy, and then the paste special values only, it's not going to drag the formulas. It's only going to bring the physical numbers that are in those cells. So next year, when you go ahead and reset your numbers, this is going to be a good way to fill in this chart quickly because time is important. Reminder that as you're setting your actual numbers for last year, this is a judgment free zone. We're here to grow. If the numbers aren't what you wanted them to be, that's okay. We're here to make a plan. If you have incomplete data, also, okay, fill in what you can. No big deal. If you have never sold anything before, again, it's okay because next year, you're going to have numbers. This is the part of the project where we are just going to do our best. The numbers that we have will help us try to set a benchmark. It's a starting point for how we can grow our business. So in the next lesson, we're going to talk about how we can set realistic goals based on last year's numbers or what our expectations are for going into the coming year. So let's jump on over so we can start dreaming big and thinking of some goals for the upcoming year. 6. Annual Goals (The Big Picture): In this lesson, we are going to start setting some annual goals. This is the time when it's okay to dream a little bit big and to think about what you want your year to look like. What's your ideal numbers going into this upcoming year? Don't worry, we're gonna break them down step by step to make sure they're realistic. But for now, I want you to look at each of your product categories or each of your revenue categories and determine about how much you want to make. You're gonna be looking at a combination of last year's numbers, plans you have for this upcoming year. And seasonality, if you think there are going to be ebbs and flows in your business. We are going to be breaking these big goals into concrete numbers, so don't worry right now we are just making estimates. And there's a couple ways that you can go about making these estimates. The first one is you can go line by line. You can go category by category. If you have some specific numbers and specific goals that you want to hit for each of your revenue streams, jot them right down. You can go one by one. And sometimes I do this. I know that there are certain revenue streams I want to boost and some I might want to slow down, and that's totally okay. Another option is you can set an overall just broad bump up. You can say, I want to increase my revenue this year by 5%, 10%, 20%, whatever the percentage is that you want to grow in your business. And then you can go ahead and fine tune little areas and say, Uh, is this really going to be realistic? Am I going to be able to make as much as I want to make in all of these subcategories? Are there ebbs and flows in my year? Am I quieter in the summer, busier in the fall? And you can kind of adjust from there after you set an overall increase. So let's walk through a scenario or two so that you can see how I would work this spreadsheet if it were my business, and I was creating numbers and setting estimates for my yearly goals for each of my revenue streams. I want you to take a peek at last year's numbers. I want you to notice where they increase. For example, in this spreadsheet, you can see there's a spike in February. That's because last year in this Lauren's cozy paper Co, we had an event in February, and in fact, we're going to note here that we're going to do that same event. We're gonna have a Valentine's Day. Market event, okay? And you can see there's a spike in May, and that was probably because of a Mother's Day event or just a spike in sales online for spring. Take a note at the ebbs and flows throughout the year, right? There's a little bit of a low in the summer, not uncommon, people get busy during the summer, and I often take a vacation in July. And you'll notice that I left these open sales here for you to just take some notes from the year. Are there launches that you have planned, maybe quarterly launches, things you want to add to your website? Are there markets that you have already planned that you know that you're always going to do the Small Business Saturday? Event in your neighborhood. Do you see that there's a lull here, and maybe this year, you want to try to plan for, like, a summer workshop series? Maybe kids are out of school and you want to try to come up with some good functional programming to keep them busy during those summer months and to boost your revenue streams. Whatever you have planned for this upcoming year, whether it be launch dates, maybe you want to do a quarterly launch, quarter launch on your website, or whatever it is, put it in here, take some notes that we can actually take a peek at what our calendar is realistically going to look like, what we have time for, and how it's going to impact our year. Now, if you don't have any revenue numbers for last year or if your business is brand new, don't worry. We have something for you, too. In general, if you have a brand new business, I want you to think about what plans you might have or what visions you have for your upcoming year. Are you going to have a website launch? Are you going to be doing markets in person? What plans do you have? What do you picture your year looking like? And is it seasonal? Are there certain times during the upcoming year that you are picturing yourself having more sales or a boost in sales, and I want you to note it down. From here, wherever you see the white cells, start in putting your numbers. You can do this a few different ways. If you see last year, we made $600 with our Pet portrait, custom art services. Maybe this year, we want to increase that, too, and I think $720 is realistic. And last year, we did $200 in workshops in January. Let's see if we can get one more sign up and maybe make. $240. And you're going to slowly fill out this chart with numbers that you think are achievable. Maybe to start, you put in 20% more than last year or 10% more than last year, whatever your growth is. So it looks like we made in this business 25,000 last year, and maybe this year, we want to hit 30,000. To do that, we need to increase everything. By about 20%. I'm gonna go ahead and copy in here 20% more. I've already calculated out. We're gonna do values only. Okay, and that would get us to about 30,000. I'm looking at June, July and August and saying, Well, but if I have vacation, maybe I got to bring my custom art services down. And I'm not gonna take on any commissions in July because I know I'm just not gonna have time, given that I'm on vacation. Maybe you're gonna say again, I want to increase my workshops for these months, and we're gonna try to bump that up to 400 a month. Go ahead and fill this out. Try to keep it realistic. Don't go from $600 all the way up to $14,000. Set numbers where the expectations are going to be achievable. If you don't have a baseline, if you didn't have any numbers from last year, no worries. These are a few questions I want you to ask yourself. To get started, what realistically would you like to sell this year? And again, I want you to go ahead and put those product categories up here. Maybe you just want to do Custom Pet Portraits. And that's it, and that's all you want to do. I have a number of income streams in my business because as a full time artist, that's how I keep my business going. But I didn't start with a whole bunch of income streams. I started with one. And it's okay to start with one. And all I want you to focus on is this first row here and how much you think that you can realistically make with your pet portraits or your jewelry or whatever it is that you're making and your business. What realistically do you want to sell and how much time can you commit to it? Is this going to be a part time gig for you? Is this something that you're looking to make into full time, maybe in the second half of the year? If you have a full time job, you might not be able to be a full time artist yet. I just want you to be realistic with the numbers that you're setting because it's really easy to feel disappointment when you're not hitting these numbers, when we can set realistic expectations for how much time we have, how much product we can make in that time, and how much time we have to devote to marketing because as much as we love to create, we also have to come up with a plan for how to actually get it sold. Along those same lines, how many events are you planning to do this year? Are you planning to and by events, that can be a digital event, where are you updating your website monthly? Are you updating your website just around the holidays? Are you planning to do farmers' markets this year, where you're going to be going out weekly, or maybe you just have a couple pop up markets with local shops? And as a new business owner, do you already have commissions lined up? I know a lot of times when you're starting something new, like when I first release a product, find that I have, like, a whole lineup of people that want that brand new product. Like maybe I'm making custom bookmarks, and I have a lineup of friends or family that are already in my queue. Perfect. Put it in. When do you think you'll be able to get them their custom work by? So these are all the things that you can factor in as you're setting your 2026 goals. Put them into your calendar view so that you can get an idea of how you can shape this upcoming year. These numbers are not a promise. This is a planning target. We are using these numbers to create a plan. And once again, keep in mind that these numbers might change as we go. There's a chance that you're going to get partway through the year. You're gonna get to April and say, Oh, my goodness, I don't think I can take on any more pet portraits. I'm already booked up from March and I just don't want to overcommit for May, and you're going to say, I'm not taking any additional commissions this year. Or you're going to say, Oh, my goodness, I was just invited to collaborate with a local art gallery, and now I have two workshops. The point is that these things change. And it's okay to go ahead and update as things come up as more events come into your schedule. We're not going to worry about this chart down here. These are going to be your actual numbers. They are going to autofill for you throughout the year from your monthly view. So in the next lesson, we are going to go ahead and start using our monthly view tabs. We're going to pick a month and start filling in our goals and how we're going to actually achieve annual goals. And we're going to look at our monthly view to see each of our categories and how we can break down those large figure goals into smaller bite sized numbers and to see what we would actually need to do in order to achieve these goals. 7. Monthly Goals (Multiple Revenue Streams): In the last lesson, we talked about setting some annual goals. Whatever your goal that you set, we need a plan. So now we're going to break this year down month by month. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at the monthly view tabs in the spreadsheet. This will give us a realistic picture of what we need to sell each month in order to achieve our monthly and ultimately annual goals. Let's start by looking at how the monthly view spreadsheets function, and then we'll work through an example based on our business Laurence Cozy Paper Co. Keep in mind, in this monthly view tab, there are a few auto calculations that you should be aware of. The first is that your revenue categories are going to auto feed from the last year's revenue in your annual tab spreadsheet. So whatever categories you put in there, they are going to auto feed into all of your monthly view tabs. Next, your goals are going to auto Import from the annual view tab. Each of the monthly view tabs so that you can reference it in order to see how much you would need to sell in order to meet your monthly revenue goals. Next, you are going to list or add more detailed services, products and offerings under each product category, so we can get a real time view of how you're going to make money each month. Once you break down each of your revenue categories into more specific services, products and things sold, you're going to estimate the quantity that you're going to sell each month and prices for each of those listings. That way we can estimate how close we are to meeting our goals. Can see that once you add the quantity and price, the spreadsheet is going to auto calculate a revenue estimate for you so that you can see how close you are to meeting your goals. The spreadsheet is also going to auto calculate each category's total and your monthly total, and it will auto feed right back into your annual view, so you can see how close you are to making your yearly goals. Let's walk through a couple of examples. Let's go ahead and since there was such a spike in May and we want to hit some big numbers in May, let's break down how we're gonna hit those goals. The first thing I want to show you is that your 2026 goals are going to auto import for every category that you have in your business, which is great because then this is going to give us a look at how we're going to hit this $4,500 that we set for ourselves in May. So to get started, we need to actually look at what we're selling. So under our services or our custom portraits for line item one, I'm double clicking in, and I'm going to start typing in all of the things that I sell without caps on. Custom Pet portrait. Another customer service that I'm gonna offer is custom family portrait. And you are going to go ahead and fill out the rest of this chart. I also am going to plan a Mother's Day greeting card workshop. I also want to try to collaborate and do a spring watercolor Workshop. For physical products in my online shop, I sell eight by ten art prints with this Laurens cozy print C. I'm also going to do an 11 by 14 art print. And if you have, like, multiple designs, you can say eight by ten cat print, eight by ten dog print, eight by ten mushroom print. You can go as detailed as you want with these physical products. I'm keeping it simple, but feel free to really get into it. And you can keep some sections blank. So again, digital products, I'm leaving blank. We don't need it right now. Maybe my business will grow into digital products someday, but for right now, I'm good. I'm also going to put down here, we're going to skip commissions. We're not going to be affiliate associates yet in this business. But in this business, we will have a print on demand site, and a print on demand site could be anything from red bubble, spoon flower, those types of Society six, those types of print on demand sites. We're gonna go ahead and list, and that's a source of revenue for our business. I want you to look at what you charge for each of these items. So for custom pet portraits, maybe I charge $250 per pet portrait. And you can do on average. If you have add ons, just pick an average number, okay? No big deal. So if I'm selling custom pet portraits, how much do I need to sell of each of these in order to hit 14 40? And how many do I actually realistically think I can sell? How much custom work, do I have time for this month in the month of May, given my schedule. I'm going to say that I can sell two custom pet portraits, and I'm going to have time for three family portraits. And I think there's gonna be more family portraits because it's May, and maybe it'll be a nice Mother's Day gift, and more people will be ordering. And, of course, with pet Mamas out there, we're gonna offer some, you know, pet mama services around Mother's Day, too. And in putting this spreadsheet, you don't need to worry about these calculations. It's going to auto format for you. This gets me to 14 75, which is higher than our annual goal. So we're on track. If I can sell two custom pet portraits and three family portraits, then perfect. Let's go ahead and do another example. For our lectures and workshops, how much are we going to be charging per person for these workshops? Let's say for our Mother's Day greeting card workshop, we're gonna charge $35 per person based on supplies and the fees to run the workshop. And for our spring watercolor workshop, we're gonna charge $45. So how much of each of these do I need to sell in order to hit, again, this goal of 14 40? Oh, I think we changed it earlier. That's high. So let's go ahead and I'm looking at this. And this is going to happen, okay? You're gonna be looking at your goals and being like, I can't hit 14 40 in May, but I can hit. Let's see. This is my actual. We want to get into our goals to make sure you're in the right one. Instead of it being 14 40, let's go ahead and we are going to plug in 750. This looks realistic to me, okay? So it's okay to keep switching. I want you to really take a solid look at what you actually think you can make from each of your revenue streams month by month, Mother's Day workshops. $35. So let's say that we think we're gonna get eight attendees because it's just a greeting card workshop. But for the watercolor workshop, those tend to be more popular based on, like what you know about your business and your past history with workshops. Let's say you think you can get ten. Okay, perfect. We're getting close. We're at 7:30 here, so that's a little bit low. So maybe we need to sell 11. That would bring us to 775. Once we have these numbers, we know how we're going to need to collaborate, how we're gonna need to market the event in order to try to get these numbers so that we can actually hit our decisive goals. Let's do one more. Let's go to our physical products. You're at an art market. What do you need to sell to actually hit that $1,400? And again, these art prints might not be art market. It could be on your website. It could be a total from your markets and your websites. But let's look at how many we would need to sell in order to hit $1,400. Let's say that our eight by tens are $25. They're matted, they're nice, they're beautiful. They're G clay. They're gorgeous, right? $25. And our 11 by 14 is again, nicely matted up $40 apiece. Our greeting cards, which we think might, you know, do well around Mother's Day, spring, baby showers, you name it. We're gonna sell those for $3.50. Okay? So how many of each of these do I need to sell in order to hit 14 40? Let's say, based on last year's numbers when I did a similar art market, I think that I can sell 30, 30 of these art prints. Where am I getting these numbers from? Personally, I use square. They will give me analytics. So if you do not yet have something that can auto input these analytics where you can see, Okay. Last year in May, I did X number of items. I'm gonna recommend you sign up for something. I don't use a fancy square. I paid for my card reader, but after that, I'm not on a pro plan. I'm just using the free version, but it gives me great analytics. I can see by category, the number of items I'm selling so that I can actually keep track of these numbers and continue growing. It's gonna take you a smidgeon of time? To fill in each of the items you sell? Yes, but is it worth it? Uh huh. It's gonna save you time in the long run, and it's gonna ensure that your business is growing. So I totally recommend it. 11 by 14 so these are a little bit bigger, maybe a slightly higher price point. Let's say we sell 15 of these. And it's greening card season in the springtime. So let's say we're gonna sell 26. This gets us to 14 41, where we want to be to be hitting those numbers. Now, are we going to make these exact numbers? Maybe not. Probably not. But these are our goals. So we're going to be thinking about which of our art prints we want to be featuring on our social media pages. We want to be thinking about the email marketing that we're gonna be doing in order to try to hit these numbers. This is going to give us a decisive goal and a benchmark for what we need to be marketing and what we need to be doing in order to make this number happen. It's not a magical I'm gonna make $1,400 this year. No, I'm going to sell 38 by ten art prints and 15, 11 by 14 and 26 greeting cards, and then I will hit my numbers. Okay, one more because I know that a lot of artists do print on demand. I know I in my real business, I do spoonflower. What I'm going to recommend if you're doing a print on demand revenue stream, and if you've been doing it for a minute, you know approximately what you make each month, okay? You know if you're making $5 a month. You know if you're making $50 a month. You know if you can hit $180 a month. Whatever this number is, I want you to just put in an average. Let's say that your average is $180. Awesome, great. And you're just gonna itemize it as one, okay? Because it can be really tricky unless you have a print on demand site where you're only selling a couple line items where maybe you're only selling cell phone cases. In that case, you can do, like, you know, cell phone case. Case. And then you can input, like what you actually make from it and get a set number of cell phone cases that you would need to promote on Pintst or on your social media wherever it is. But I find that the line items, for example, if I'm selling on Spoonflower, it could be a duvet cover. It could be fabric. It could be rolls of wallpaper. There are so many different items and so many different patterns that they could be selecting. Unclear. So I just do an average and I try to hit that average. And then I make a mental note in my action plans to make sure that I am promoting this on Pinterest, on my Instagram accounts, and so on. Now, if you're feeling overwhelmed, take some things off of your plate. Maybe this is too much. I've shown you four different income streams simply because I know that there are a diverse number of artists here who are going to want to know how to use this for their business and their plan. When I first started, one income stream. You start with one. And what I'm going to show you next is if you are, let's just say a product based business, or you only do digital prints, or you only do one thing, how you can alter the spreadsheet, to just do one type of thing, and to still have the same results where you can come up with a plan for your business. So join me in the next lesson, and I'm going to show you how we're going to do an example of just product based business. If all you do is sell product, I'm going to show you exactly how you can alter the spreadsheet. 8. Monthly Goals (One Revenue Stream): In this lesson, we're going to walk through an example for what to do if your business only has one main revenue category. Like, you only sell physical product, you only sell digital product, or you only do services. I'm going to show you how you can adapt this spreadsheet to turn the multi revenue product categories into just categories that you can use within your super focused business. The good news is you can totally adapt this spreadsheet, whether you have one revenue stream or multiple revenue streams. Simply going to adjust our revenue stream categories to B, product categories, service categories or whatever fits within your business. Now, let's dive in and give an example. In this example, I'm going to be showing you how I would adapt the spreadsheet if I only sold physical product. Get started, I'm going to change all of these product categories in my last year's actual so they autofill for the rest of the spreadsheet. So in my business, I'm going to be selling art prints. I'm going to have a greeting card category. I'm going to have a sticker category. And then we're going to have a bookmark category. And if it's bugging you to have commissions and royalties here, just change them to other or just leave them blank. It's not a big deal. Now, these are going to be the main income streams of my business, and you can see they auto filled. So in my goals and my actual revenue, and even in my monthly view, we're gonna have just line items for art prints, line items for greeting cards, and line items for stickers. Let's go ahead, and we're gonna set some numbers in here. I'm going to copy and paste in some pretend numbers for us. We are going to past values only. Okay, so let's say that this was my business. I sold last January $600 in art prints. Perfect. We're gonna again set some goals same way, and you're just gonna start filling them in. You're gonna just lick into your cells, and you are gonna just start populating. You're going to note that maybe you have an event. You've got a February Clothing Expo. You're going to note all of the events that you have here. Maybe you want to do a UO website launch. You're going to feel the same way, and you're gonna set your goals. I'm going to go ahead and fill in some numbers here because this is the exact same way that we filled in last time. These numbers that I'm setting in are actually just 20% more than the numbers up here. But go ahead. I want you to look at your year and what you think you can accommodate, again, keeping in mind everything that you have planned throughout the year. Once you have this all filled in, we're going to go ahead and move to our monthly view. You can see that this has changed because instead of having services and physical product and digital products here, we now have our actual product lines. So because we're just a product based business with this Laurence print coo, I can put all of my different types of art prints here. So, in this case, in item one under art prints I'm going to do mushroom print. Eight by eight by ten. Okay. Then we're going to do line item two. We're gonna do mushroom print. Instead of eight by ten, I'm going to do 11 by 14. And so on. You're gonna fill in all of your prints here. And you can copy and paste from month to month, too. If you don't want to rewrite all of these from month to month, you can just take, you know, so my bookmarks here. We're gonna just select them. I'm gonna hit Control C, or you can right click Copy, move into February, scroll down to your bookmarks, select. Then just put paste, and they'll come right in for you so you don't have to retype them every single time. We are going to establish our price points. So for our mushroom print, again, we're gonna do $25 for the smaller print. 25. Our bigger prints are 40. Okay. And you're gonna set your prices for all of your products. Now, how many of these would I need to sell in order to hit $720? Well, I'm gonna need to sell mushroom prints are popular, especially at the smaller size. So I'm gonna say we're gonna sell nine. Bigger size, maybe not as popular. I'm gonna do two. Everyone loves flowers, so we're going to do seven and six for the bigger size because they're more popular. And there we go. I've hit 720. Play with these numbers. Maybe you think you're gonna sell ten of the smaller size, and you're only going to sell one of the bigger size. Keep playing with these numbers until you've hit your goals. But make sure that you stay realistic. Can you actually hit these numbers? Are these numbers that are realistic for you in your business and your capacity? If not, you might need to lower your goal. And it's okay to go back and uh, you know, I really don't know how we're gonna hit 720. I think we got to make this 500. That's just realistic for me and my business based on what, you know, we did last year. You know, I'm gonna be putting more effort into my stickers. That's okay. Then you come back down and you say, Okay, 500. Then let's just, you know, bring down our bigger prints here. I think we can sell the smaller ones, and you can bring these numbers down until they are realistic for you and your business. And again, you're going to just do this all the way down. Okay, so I've gone ahead and I've filled in all of these. And I'm at 18 75 with my goals, and my overall goal for the year was 18 20. These goals again, 18 20. This was our goal. This is what we were trying to hit. So right now, the numbers that we have estimated are reaching or in this case, exceeding our goal. Now we know how to adapt the spreadsheet, whether your business has multiple revenue streams or just one super focused revenue stream. In the next lesson, we're going to chat about how to reflect on our goals for each month and how we can take these numbers, reflect on them, and list tasks that will support our goals as we work throughout the month. 9. Plan: Turning Goals into Tasks: In this lesson, we're going to take our monthly goals, and we are going to reflect on what tasks we would need to do in order to support our goals throughout the month. There are three main topics I want you to consider as you jot down your tasks and your marketing notes. The first one is production tasks. Things that could fall under production could include ordering tools and supplies, booking venues or locations that you're going to need for your workshops or for selling your products. This includes tasks that you need to do in order to produce the products and the services you offer, like actually making your physical product. Next topic is administrative tasks. This includes answering emails and inquiries. This could be website updates, shop updates, updating the inventory in your square system, photographing the products that you just made, or even just tracking inventory and seeing what you have available. The third topic are your marketing tasks. I want you to think about what you need to do in order to get your products in front of people. This could include emailing your list, scheduling your social media posts, uploading to Pinterest or YouTube. This could mean booking more events, markets, pop ups with local shops, or collaborating with other businesses. And the things I listed are not all inclusive. You could have tasks that go beyond this list. This will just give you a good place to start as you're thinking about what tasks you might need to do in order to sell your products and to stay on track this month. Let's walk through an example of how I would reflect on my goal numbers and how I would list tasks that might need to get done in order for me to have a chance at selling the products and services that I'm trying to sell. So you can see here I've pulled up our small business. We have a lot of goals here. We want to try to sell some custom portraits. We want to have a couple workshops, and we have some physical product, as well. So what I want us to note here are, how are we going to try to sell these services, these workshops and these physical products? What is our action plan? What is our marketing plan gonna look like? A few questions you need to ask yourself. How were you picturing getting these services, these physical products sold? Are you planning to have a pop up event? Are you planning to collaborate with another business? Are you planning to upload listings to your website or to your Etsy shop? So let's start by taking a look at our services. We want to sell some custom pet portraits, some custom family portraits. Maybe that means that we want to make a blog post on our website. And then after we make our blog post, maybe we want to email our list to promote. And we want to do some Pinterest pins. Maybe we also want to reach out to a local shop. Like a local boutique, for advertising. Hmm. Collaboration. Maybe if a pop up one day at a local cafe and you say, Hey, come buy a coffee, and we'll chat about how we can do your custom family portraits or your custom pet portraits. Whatever it is, jot it down here. Jot your ideas down. Even if you don't wind up getting them all done, start writing down here, all of your ideas for how you can start reaching these numbers. For your workshop, are you hosting it yourself, or do you need to find a workshop space. Maybe you want to collaborate with an art gallery. Maybe you need to start doing promotions on a radio station. And maybe you want to collaborate. You're gonna collaborate with the art gallery. Maybe you're gonna do cross promotion on your social media. Maybe you want to create a Facebook event. Start thinking about how these workshops get in front of your audience. You got to ask yourself, how am I going to make it known that I have this workshop? It's going to be a fun experience, and how are we going to get it in front of the right people and then start jotting down different ways that you think you can get that done. For physical products, this could mean taking photos of your new products. This could mean updating your website, store slash Es shop. This could mean updating your square system with new listings. This could mean booking a market. And it doesn't need to be all of these things. It can be just one of these things. But start thinking about what you need to do in order to sell all of the prints, all of the greeting cards, all of the physical items that you want to sell. And then how are you going to market it? Are you going to announce your list? To your email list that you have a shop update, maybe you need to have, like, a three email trigger system coming soon. Soon sale now, and live now we'll say live now. We don't want them on sale yet. And maybe I don't miss out. Might want to have PintrisPins. You're gonna start going through and deciding exactly what you need to do in order to sell each of these tasks. And it might not just be an overwhelming thing. Maybe you have one brand new art print. Maybe your dog art print is the only one that needs to be photographed. Okay? You're going to get real specific here about what needs to happen in order for you to be able to put your product, put your services, put your workshops in front of people. And if you're ahead of the game, you can even look to the upcoming month to see what actionable steps you can get ahead on before, you know, you enter the next month. This goes along with that whole workshop, like, Did you already book a space? Well, I have workshops next month. I better reach out now to make sure that that space is already booked so that I'm not struggling a week before my workshop to make sure that I have a space for people to attend. And maybe in your action plan notes here for your custom portraits, you need to do a supplies check in inventory check in. Do you need to order more paint. Do you need to order more canvases? Make sure that you have everything that you need in order to set yourself up for success this month. And just break it down. Item line by item line. Take notes about which of those items. It doesn't have to be all of them. Take notes about which of those items you're going to try to use to advertise this to put this in front of your audience. Once you have a whole bunch of action plan notes and marketing notes listed, I want you to get out to your planning worksheet. In the next lesson, we are going to take all of these tasks and all of these ideas, and we're going to add them to our calendar and to a to do list so that we can stay accountable and on track as we are working toward our goals. 10. Accountability & Scheduling: In this lesson, we are going to talk about how we can use planning tools like a checklist, two deglit or calendar to keep ourselves on track and accountable as we're working toward our goals each month. Now take the tasks you listed in your spreadsheet. Make it to do list. These tasks are going to help give you a direction for what projects you should be working on in order to set yourself up for success. I like to use a dashboard calendar where I can list out my week, all of my different revenue streams, and I can prioritize my tasks. But if you don't have a planning dashboard, this planning worksheet that I'm providing in the class resources will totally work too. So you can list your priorities up above. You can list all of your revenue streams and the tasks and the marketing notes that you need to do in order to achieve your goals. Add them to your calendar. Now any important dates and deadlines right in your calendar and use the tasks you listed to organize your weekly and daily schedules. That way, you can chip away at your to do list. Make a plan. Get it written down and try to create a daily calendar, weekly calendar, monthly calendar to keep yourself on track and to hold yourself accountable. This plan is the most important part of the system because it's going to be what drives your goals into reality. We can sit here and say, I want to make a bazillion dollars this month, but if we don't actually set a plan and, like, work toward it, it's going to be hard to achieve. So instead, give yourself some tasks that can help set you up for success so that we have a chance to hit our goals. Now, can we guarantee success? Well, no, but we can take notes about what's working, what's not working, what we might need to adjust so that we can adapt for future months as we continue to learn and grow our business. And the next lesson, we're going to chat about what to do when we start actually making sales, how we can track it in our spreadsheet, take note, analyze it, and adapt moving forward. 11. Tracking Sales: It's really important to track your numbers. This is the first step, but actually achieving these goals and seeing how you're doing and where we need to make adjustments is going to be so vital and so important. So what I want you to do is whenever you make a sale or at the end of a big event, input your actual revenue what you actually made into your spreadsheet. And if you're not already tracking your sales, this would be a good time to start. Personally, I use Square for, like, my big market events. I've already input all of my items in there, so I know exactly how many items I sell. I know how many art prints I sell. It's already calculating these for me. Use tools that are going to make your life easier, whether that be your website analytics from your shop or another financial analytics tool to just help you keep track of your sales. If all you have is a notebook, that's fine. Write it down in a notebook. However you do it is totally fine. Personally, I like to automate it to save myself time, but you do what works best for you. What's really important is that you actually write your revenue in your spreadsheet. Let's take a peek at what these May revenue streams could look like. Let's say that I did get some pet mamas for May and Mother's Day, and we really did sell $500 worth of pet portraits. And maybe we had two custom family pet portraits at 3:25, which brought us to 650. And then partway through the month, I had an additional sale for 350 because they wanted my standard price is 325, but they wanted a gilded details add on, so that brought the price 25-350. So overall, I made $1,000. And you're going to see here I'm at 1,500. Perfect. My goal was 14 40. And you're gonna want to see if these actual numbers are meeting or exceeding your goal numbers. We're just going to be continuously adding as we go, okay? And you're gonna just track these numbers. Let's say here that we had six actual sign ups instead of eight so we only made $210. And for our spring watercolor workshop, we had 12 sign ups, which was higher than we expected. So we made 540. So we still hit our goal, but the numbers weren't exactly what we thought they were going to be. But now in the future, I know how popular my watercolor workshops are. So if I am looking for what types of workshops to do in the future, maybe watercolor workshops are a way to go. We're taking notes to grow our business. We're taking notes to make future plans. Ultimately, all of these little numbers are going to add up. To your monthly total. And then when you go back into your annual view, you can see here in May, it's already starting to calculate, so you can see what you're making. I've only filled in two of our revenue streams, and our goal was 3810, but we're already on our way. So you're going to fill out through the whole year so you can see ultimately the big goal of making the annual numbers that you were hoping to achieve to grow your business from the previous year. So, these will auto populate. You don't have to fill them in. Every time you fill in your numbers. Here, it's going to auto calculate for each category, and then these categories are going to create a monthly total for you. This monthly total is going to auto feed right into this big spreadsheet so you don't have to do a thing. All you have to do is just keep track of your sales, which you're likely already doing. Next year, when you start planning for 2027, you can have these numbers to go by, and you can actually see how you're doing and if you're actually achieving your goals. In the next son, we're going to talk about some basic tips, some reality checks, and some common pitfalls that you could run into as you're setting your goals and as you're working with a spreadsheet in order to try to give you the best chance possible to reach your goals and to have a successful year. 12. Tips, Pitfalls, & Adjustments: Lesson, let's talk about some common mistakes that crop up as we're setting goals for ourselves. I know as a small business owner, I set lofty goals. I get real excited, and I tend to think that I can take on more than I can actually chew. I don't think I'm alone. I don't think I'm the only one that does this. So I'm here to encourage you to be realistic. Be realistic with your goal setting and really think about and consider what you have the capacity to take on. If you try to bite off too much or set goals that are just unrealistic, it can lead to a couple of things. First of all, burnout, which no one likes. We want our business to be sustainable. We don't want to be putting all this hard work and effort in burn ourselves out, and then we're gonna be stagnant for the next two months because we're just trying to recover from what we just did. You want sustainable, you want balance. Super important. And I know this is one that I'm still learning. I have a cup of tea with me here just because I know I need to take care of myself as we're doing these big projects and we're doing these big undertakings. And that's okay. It's okay to be human. You don't have to be a superhero to be successful. Common pitfalls, overestimating your capacity. Do you actually have the bandwidth to output the figures that you're putting into your spreadsheet? Do you have enough supplies? Do you have enough production capacity? Do you have enough equipment? Do you have enough marketing capacity to be able to do everything that you need to be doing? Be realistic with what those numbers are. And if you truly want to do those numbers, you might have to upgrade your business. You might have to start hiring. You might have to work on new production methods. This can give you a pretty clear picture of how you might need to grow and change and adapt in order to scale as the years go on. I also want you to be really mindful of seasonality in my real business in my garden girl studio business, not my made up business. I have a number of revenue streams, but they're often seasonal. So I'm a long arm quilter. My long arm quilting business usually increases in the winter when people are inside and sewing in the cold wintry months here in New York. My product based business usually booms in the fall and winter around the holidays. Usually, I have a boost in product sales then. So keep in mind that you might have seasonality in your business. There might be times of the year where certain revenue streams are busier and some parts of the year where they're quieter, and that's okay. Use that calendar in your annual planning view to really get a good picture of how your different revenue streams have and flow. Study it. Seriously. Spend a day or two really looking at your calendar and what realistically it's going to look like for you throughout the year. The next pitfall is setting numbers without a plan. I can't tell you the number of times I've been to either art markets, craft markets, or I just hear small business owners talking about how they have these huge plans, and I'm so excited for them. Like, I am here. I'm sitting here cheering you on, cheering them on because I want them to hit all of their biggest goals. But I sit back and I ask myself, but do you have a plan? Do you know what it's gonna take to hit that number? And this spreadsheet will help you see the figure that you're gonna need to hit the numbers that you're trying to hit with your year. Don't just set a ballpark. I'm gonna make $10,000 this month. Truly break it down, get your calendar out. How are you going to hit that $10,000, go into your monthly view, break down how many items, services, workshop seats you're going to need to sell in order to get it done, and then come up with a marketing strategy, come up with a launch strategy for your production. This is how you're going to get closer to those goals and get closer to those dreams. And then don't give up if it doesn't go according to plan. Sometimes the sales just don't occur, and that's okay. Take some notes, come up with a new game plan, and then attack it again in the next month, because the next month is a brand new month for you to start all over again to set some goals for how you're going to hit all of these estimated numbers. Be ready to adapt, be ready to change. This is going to give us benchmarks to go off of. We can adapt our plan and make changes that might lead us to even more success in the following month. While I can't guarantee success, this system has helped my business grow year after year. And there are some revenue streams that taper off. It's okay to try a few and realize that maybe they're just not working. Something's just off, but these other revenue streams are doing really great, and it's okay to adapt and to adjust and to change your business as you go and be sure to give yourself some grace. It's okay if things don't always go according to plan, that's life. There's always next month, and we can try again. In the next lesson, join me for a few final thoughts as we wrap up this class. 13. Final Thoughts: Ya, you totally did it. So now you have a clearly defined plan for going month by month into your year so that you can hit all of your revenue goals. I am so totally excited for you. Be sure to have a sit down each month or weekly to keep checking in with your goals. Write down those actual numbers. This is going to help you see whether or not your plan is effective or not and if you need to make any changes. Grab a cup of coffee or tea, sit down and cheer yourself on. See What's working? See What's not working and what you might need to adapt for the next month. Want to encourage you to please share your class project in the project gallery. You do not need to share your numbers. Please don't share your numbers. It's truly I just want to see that you have come up with a marketing plan or a business strategy to help you hit your goals. Share some of the things that you're going to do this month. Maybe your goals are going to be I'm going to send three emails to my list. Just jot it down. I want to see the little notes. I want to see the excitement of what your plan is going to be. And as we wrap up this class, I just want to encourage you to keep going. You're doing great friends. I am seriously cheering you on. I hope this spreadsheet helps you find a little bit of a plan and success for the years to come, and don't forget that you can use a spreadsheet, make a copy of it, and use it again the next years. I know I personally use this spreadsheet year after year to try to give me a direction for my business and to keep myself accountable and on track. And remember, it's not a competition. We're growing at our own pace here, and I am so, totally cheering you on. Thanks again, friends. Until next time, Happy Creating.