072: My first 10k month wasn’t sustainable

Does hitting a revenue goal matter, if the way you made it happen isn’t sustainable?

$10k months (or 6-figure businesses) are talked about *a lot* in the online business space.

In this episode, I share the cautionary tale of the first $10k month in my photography business. I'll talk about two things that made it unsustainable in terms of replicating it over and over, as well as whether or not I needed to bring in $10k/month in the first place.

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Does hitting a revenue goal matter, if the way you made it happen isn’t sustainable?

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Hello from the Hellberg residence! Before I get into today’s topic, I wanted to let you know that it’s been a couple of days since Nova, our dog, had surgery and she’s walking around just crashing into everything with her cone so if you hear any weird noises, that’s probably her. I think I’m isolated enough in the walk-in closet but we’ll see.

So I was looking for photos for some IG pins the other week, and stumbled across a photo from I think 2017. I’ve got my blonde hair all beach wavy, I’m wearing a beachy hat, and I’m on the beach, smiling at the camera.

And I was laughing because I didn’t have this business when this photo was taken, but it’s probably the closest photo of me that looks “life coachy” – you know, the kind of life coach who sells their coaching by often sharing these super happy photos displaying the lifestyle they’re living.

Although to be honest, I don’t believe I look like one of those types of coaches, because I don’t really care for makeup plus my hair is not even as close to being all luscious and perfect… But I digress – that’s not the point.

Looking at this photo reminded that around this point in my photography business, I was for sure going to the beach often, going on weekly hikes, aaand spending lots of evenings watching TV…. But, I wasn’t mentally off the clock. My head was ALWAYS on work.

What more I could be doing, or should be doing because I hadn’t “made it” yet. And on the drives towards the beach or hikes, I was brainstorming marketing stuff, planning out content, engaging on IG… I had my work notebook with me everywhere I went.

It wasn’t until I started taking real breaks from work, being present with who I was with instead of trying to work every “available” minute… I started having consistent 10k months, and if you start hanging out at the beach like you mean it, money will flow your way too!

Ok, I’m kidding, I’m kidding! I hope that you’ve been around be long enough to have caught that :) and if you’re new here… We’ll, thanks for not hitting stop on the episode and moving on!

No – when I posted about this photo on IG stories, I just got this image of how someone might use this California girl lifestyle to sell some toxic coaching philosophy… Anyway, that’s beyond the point of this episode.

But, finding this photo and making that silly joke on IG got me thinking about the first over 10k month that I DID have in my photography business. Actually, I think it was more like a 12k month, based on what my sessions used to cost and how many sessions I had, but for the ease of this episode I’m going to keep referring to that as a 10k month because that seems to be a thing that the online business world makes us feel like we need to aim for.

BTW I’m not saying it’s wrong to aim for 10k months. But there are different ways to go about our goals.

So, while I at the time was very excited to have booked so much work, actually living through it wasn’t too fun. That 10k month wasn’t something that I could just replicate over and over, and I wanna talk about a couple of reasons why.

The first reason why my first 10k month wasn’t a sustainable thing, was that

1 – It took me way more than that month to actually finish editing and delivering on all those sessions, so if I had had another 10k month waiting for me right after, I would’ve drowned.

For sure, we can argue that if I raised my pricing and then did less sessions per month, it would’ve been more sustainable. But, this wasn’t something I could do in that moment right – I was already in this situation.

The second reason why my 10k month wasn’t sustainable, was that

2 – The amount of marketing that I had been doing to get myself so booked up was not something I could keep on doing longterm in addition to the actual client work

I was so busy working on those sessions and the photos, that I didn’t have time for my marketing anymore.  But, I remember thinking I had made it now, I had finally arrived – and that even if I didn’t have a succession of 10k months, surely I’d have like 5-8k months from now on, which would’ve already been amazing.

So then I got to experience getting super bummed when my next few months were maybe just 3-4k months. Which actually already was really great – if I had been bringing in 4k per month I would’ve brought in more money than I did working as a psychologist in Finland – but I didn’t feel great about it because I was now comparing to that 10k month, but also to my husband’s software engineer salary in Silicon Valley; I was comparing to the “6-fig business owners”. And I spent a good chunk of money on courses and coaches in hopes that I could make that happen more – when less than 10k would’ve been more than awesome. My costs of running the business weren’t that high, since I didn’t need a studio and things like that because I did documentary sessions.

Hei – Jenna from the future here. I’m dropping in because somehow I forgot to talk about how this situation and the next 9 or so months were unsustainable through the lens of the productivity ecosystem. If you don’t know what that is, you can check out an ecosystem summary at here.

So – my design was not where it needed to be to keep this going long-term. To get to those 10k, I had to do an unsustainable amount of sessions as well as work behind the scenes. Even though I had some great systems in place when it came to design (like a client management system with automated workflows around bookings, contracts, email templates etc), I needed to think about things like my pricing and how many sessions I book per month at a maximum.

My wholeness was also out of whack – I was not taking good care of myself AT ALL, and my brain never quite stopped working even if I was physically off the clock.

In terms of sisu, I went into kind of like a shadow side of sisu, where I was hustling and pushing through to keep doing this unsustainable amount of work. So my motivation, determination, and grit may have been there, but it was highly misdirected.

Alright, I’ll let you back in where we left off.

So at the time, it felt like the only legit solution was to then keep up with my marketing even when I was busy with sessions.

It wasn’t until almost a year later that I had to cut down my workload because of the health issues that my hustle resulted in. And because of my interest in minimalism, I knew of the 80/20 rule. I had used it to help me declutter clothes and stuff – so I figured that the rule probably also applies to my to-do list. And that helped me then get curious about all the tasks in my business that were making an impact, and let go of or at least minimize a ton of the things that didn’t make a difference.

I realized that at the time of that really difficult 10k month, I had assumed *everything* I had done to market my business had resulted in those bookings – but that actually there were lots of things I could’ve stopped doing, or lots of one-off marketing efforts I could’ve just not done. And I could’ve maybe doubled down on some of the things that actually brought me clients without using up as much time.

For example, I was spending a lot of time on social media at the time – but I realized that like 95% of my followers were other photographers who were mostly there for inspiration. So I started just scheduling out 1-2 posts per week for months at a time – and I didn’t worry too much about having an “IG strategy”. Most of my clients came either through referrals or they found me on Google, so it made sense to keep doing things that helped my SEO – like blogging.

So – the key takeaway that I’d love to send you off with, is that hitting 10k months (or 5k or 20k or whatever number it is you have in mind) – hitting that number consistently is not going to be valid, if the way you make it happen is unsustainable. We can all do a bit of hustle for a little while, we can do a sprint of some kind – but to have consistent months of a desired revenue means that you also need run your business in a way that you can sustain. Otherwise there’s a risk of disappointing clients, or not getting the services you’ve sold done, or ending up in that cycle of either being super busy with clients, but not having time to market the business, and then having to get super busy marketing to get clients again. Or trying to do both, ignoring our human needs, neglecting our life outside of the business, and burning out. That’s a cycle too – hustling really hard, then having to take a sabbatical because you’re exhausted, and then hustling hard again until the next need for a break.

OK – this wasn’t meant to get quite so gloom and doom, but it’s just true. If we do an unsustainable amount of work, it will catch up with us in some ways.

If you feel like the trajectory of your business right now is sustainable, but you’re not sure how to change it, I’d be happy to team up with you to come up with solutions that work for you. So if you need to book more clients to make more money but don’t have space in your schedule for more, or if marketing is taking up more time and energy than you’d like it to, or if you’re just having trouble managing everything you need to do – that’s the kind of stuff I really love to dig into with my clients. The solutions look different for everyone, but what often happens is we notice a draining marketing activity or two that could me simplified, a service that could be structured a bit differently – and in one case, I even had a client who didn’t necessarily need to make more money. That it was just the culture of the online business world that had sold her on this idea. Not to say she won’t be making more money, but now she’s approaching that goal from a much less rushed place and has been able to enjoy lots of downtime.

So if you wanna know more about working with me, check out the services page on my website – and if you’ve got questions please feel free to reach out in the DMs @thejennahellberg or through email :)

Thank you so much for spending your valuable time with me, I hope you have a beautiful week. Bye