Ep. 242: How to Map Out Your Revenue Projections

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Revenue Projections and Planning

If you’ve taken my A Year in Preview Workshop, or done any kind of content planning with me, you know that I’m very passionate about ensuring that our business supports our lives, and not the other way around. And the first step I always have people take when mapping out their year is putting their personal calendar into their plans first. Holidays, vacations, birthdays, anniversaries, time off … all of that goes in first so that there aren’t accidental launches during your kid’s spring break.

But before we can even start putting things on the calendar, we need to know what we’re going to put on the calendar. And how do we do that? By starting with our revenue. If you’ve ever wondered how you’re supposed to connect your content with your bottom line, this episode is for you.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Join me on Monday evenings at 4:00 pm Pacific time/7:00 pm Eastern time for my weekly YouTube Lives!
Snag the 2025 Chasing Simple Marketing Planner!
Check out my book for a crash course in content marketing
This week’s action step: Map out your revenue for the year. Do your best to find small tweaks or adjustments to help you hit your goals.
This week’s book recommendation: Skincare: The New Edit by Caroline Hirons
Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

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Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate

If you’ve taken my A Year in Preview workshop or done any kind of content planning with me, you know that I’m very passionate about ensuring that our business supports our lives and not the other way around. And the first step I always have people take when mapping out their year is putting their personal calendar into their plans first.

Holidays, vacations, birthdays, anniversaries, time off. All of that goes in first so there aren’t any accidental launches during your kid’s spring break. But before we can even start putting things on the calendar, we need to know what we’re putting on the calendar. And how do we do that? By starting with our revenue goals.

If you’ve ever wondered how you’re supposed to connect your content with your bottom line, this episode is for you. You’re listening to episode 242 of the Chasing Simple podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, and you can grab your own at amandawarfield.com slash book.

How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways, and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, How do I put it all together to market my business strategically?

Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head. When you think of marketing welcome friend, this is chasing simple or practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content, marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of chasing simple marketing.

I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business, so that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.

When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients, such as The Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell, reading in our hammock, watching Gamecock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me.

If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing isn’t is the thing that they started their business to do.

Which is why I’m here. To help make marketing simple and less time consuming, so that you can spend less time on your marketing, and more time growing your business and doing what you love. Each week, I’ll bring you transparent conversations about Actionable steps and judgment free community to encourage and equip you.

So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choice is and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we?

When it comes to creating your monthly content calendar and sitting down to create your content because you’re batching it, right? The first step is not writing in the monthly calendar. It’s not even writing your categories and important dates on the calendar. If that’s where you’re starting with your content planning, well, all you’re creating is a plan.

But what you need is a strategy. What’s the difference? A strategy is like the inner structure of a building, while the plan is the decor. A strategy is what helps you achieve your goals, and your plan is how you achieve them. Your strategy is where you’re leading your audience, and your plan is what you’re talking about and when.

Without having a strategy first, putting together a plan will simply mean pulling ideas out of thin air. So, how do you start with a strategy? By starting with your goals and working backwards to ensure that you’re moving your audience toward them. What are your yearly goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, and weekly goals?

And how can you translate them into content your audience wants to ingest? You’ve got to consider those questions before you even begin deciding what it is that you’ll post about. And if you want a simple way to create both your strategy and your plan, grab your Chasing Simple content planner. The planner is my number one bestseller, and for good reason too, because this massive, more than 130 page planner was designed with strategy in mind.

It’s not merely a place to write down what you’re going to post and when. Yes, that’s part of it, but first, you’ll walk through intentional pages full of strategic questions to get your brain moving in the right direction before you even start writing down your topic ideas. In addition to the traditional calendar pages, you’ll find yearly planning pages, monthly prep work, monthly reflection questions, repurposing worksheets, and so much more.

If taking your content to the next level is a goal of yours, the Chase and Simple Content Planner was created for you. Grab yours for just 27 at amandawarfield. com slash planner.

Yes, we are talking all about revenue today and in particular, how we can make sure our Content aligns with our goals so that we can increase that bottom line. And if you are feeling the ick or you’re feeling cringy about. Whatever is going through your mind, maybe you’re feeling like it’s greedy, don’t want to bring in more revenue.

I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going through your mind right now, but if you’re having those thoughts, I would really encourage you to sit in that and think about that for a little bit. Why are you feeling those thoughts? Because I know that I’ve been there. I know that I used to feel so shameful around this idea of setting a revenue goal, around wanting to make more money.

And I really had to come to terms with the fact that I’m running a business. Yes. I want to impact people. And that’s what I would hide behind, right? I would hide behind the, well, I just want to impact people and better their lives and help them with their business. And I do, I wouldn’t do all of the work of entrepreneurship, which is not easy in any capacity.

I wouldn’t do all of that if I didn’t want to impact people and help people build their revenue as well. Right. I wouldn’t share all of these quote unquote secrets and all this information I know and help you map out your revenue projections for this year. I didn’t really want to see you increase your bottom line.

And I had to come to terms with the fact that while that’s true, A business needs revenue is also true. A business is not a business without revenue. And the more revenue I make, the more I support my family. The more I support my community at large, the more I can support people and outsource to other business owners for their zone of geniuses, which they will then in turn Support their families and their communities and be able to outsource to other business owners.

And it’s a ripple effect, right? So if you’re feeling that shame, that ick, that cringe, I just want to encourage you that we’ve probably all been there and felt those things. But your business needs revenue in order to be a business. Okay. And when it comes to your content, well, your content’s purpose is to amplify your business, to get your business out there in front of more eyes so that you can bring in that revenue.

And if you want to ensure that your content is aligned with your goals, you’ve got to start by digging into the revenue numbers. So, like I said in the introduction, I’m going to run you through some of the questions that are inside of the JSON Symbol Content Planner that are in the yearly planning section to help you do your revenue planning and your revenue mapping.

So, there’s a two part series that we’re going to do right here. You probably are going to want to have pen, paper, whatever. So, first thing, revenue planning. You’re going to ask yourself, What was your revenue last year? Write that number down. Then you’re going to write down how much each stream of revenue that you have brought in.

So if you brought in 40, 000 and you have one to one clients and you have a course, how much did each of those bring in? Then, And if you have the data, you’re going to really want to dive into how that came to be. So for example, your one to one clients, let’s say of that 40, 000, you brought in 30, 000 with one to one clients.

And on average, the clients brought in X amount. Maybe you have different packages, maybe, you know, you raise prices, but on average, what did they bring in last year individually? So let’s say you had 10 clients. 30, 000, 3, 000. Is that right? Yes. Okay. So each client brought in roughly 3, clients over the year.

You brought in 3, 000. Okay. So you had 10 clients. Well, how did you get those 10 clients? What number of inquiries did you have throughout the year? If you had a 50 percent close rate and you had 20 inquiries, okay, well, 20, 50 percent gives you 10, you know, your close rate, you know how many you needed. You can take that number and go, okay, so next year, if I want to make 50, 000 on my clients and, No, that math’s not gonna be good.

Let’s say 60, 000. I’m trying to do this in my head. 60, 000 on clients, and they’re gonna bring in roughly 3, 000 each. Okay, so I need to bring in 20 clients next year. If I know I have a 50 percent average close rate, that means I need to focus on getting 40 inquiries throughout the year. Do you see how I worked myself backwards with those numbers?

You’re going to want to figure that out for this year so you know exactly how many clients you need to hit your revenue goal so that you know exactly how many inquiries you need and so that you can focus on bringing in the inquiries and not just sit there and go, why aren’t the clients coming in? So if you can dive into the numbers.

Great. If you’re listening to this and you were feeling overwhelmed because maybe your business didn’t bring in much this year, and you just, you don’t have that data at all, or maybe you did bring in money, but you just didn’t think to mark down that information. Well, now, you know, moving forward, what kind of information you need to be looking for and what kind of KPIs to be tracking for yourself, right?

But if you just didn’t bring in the money, and that’s why you’re feeling overwhelmed. I want you to ask yourself a few different questions, similar questions. What did bring in money this year? Even if it was only 100, what brought in money this year? How much did it bring in? And how did you get those sales?

Did they come from word of mouth? Did they come from Google Analytics, did they, or like people finding your website from Google search, I guess I should say, did they come from Instagram? Where did they come from? And what you’re going to do is you’re going to plan for more of the same next year. And you’re going to build from there.

It’s not a neat formula like the other example, and it is messy, but messy is completely normal in these early years. Okay. So don’t feel overwhelmed. Don’t feel lost. Just what worked this year. Keep doing that. Get rid of the other stuff that didn’t work and keep doing what did work. Even if you only made a hundred dollars, you still made a hundred dollars.

You still made some sales. So then next part of revenue planning, you’re going to write down what your yearly goals are. Go ahead and write down all of your yearly goals, but in particular, what is that revenue goal? And if you have any goals that you’ve set surrounding how many clients you want, or anything like that, write those down too, for sure.

The next question you’re going to ask yourself is, what new offers, services, products do I plan to create? Is there anything new that you’re planning to bring to the table this year? Then the final question is, for the revenue planning, is what projects do I plan to undertake? So, are there any Back in things that you plan to do.

Are you planning to update anything you already have? What projects do you have on your plate for the new year? Now all of these are not going to necessarily tie directly into your revenue mapping But having them in mind as you’re doing your revenue mapping is going to be really important Which is why I want you to go ahead and write them down So now we’re going to move into revenue mapping.

We’ve done the planning. You know where your numbers came from. You know where you’re going in the new year. Now we’re going to map it out. So create a list, maybe on a new piece of paper, create a list of all of your offers that you have all of your different revenue streams down the page. And I want you to leave some room to the left and to the right.

Then you’re going to start projecting your revenue for the new year. So to the right, I would write out, How many I plan to sell of something or how much I plan to sell per month. So, for example, I might write down five at 500 per month beside my one to one client space because I only take on five clients a year, but for my shop.

It’s not as precise because there are multiple products and I’m more worried about the shop’s overall bottom line than I am each individual offer. So beside that, I might just write average 500 a month. And if I make more some months, great, if I make less, that’s okay, cause I’m gonna make more other months and that’s fine.

And I base these numbers on the previous year. And then what I’m thinking that my launches and my projects will be, which is where that comes back into play. If I know that I’m going to do less promotion of one stream of revenue, I might project less for it than it made the year before. Or, if I plan to put more effort into an office, I’ll raise it from last year.

And make no mistake that this is a guessing game. You want to consider what you did before, and keep it realistic, But it’s also okay to dream here, too. I know for a fact that I’m only taking on five ongoing one to one clients. But I also have launch VIP days where I help map out an entire launch strategy and marketing plan for clients.

And those, I don’t know how many are going to come in throughout the year. And that’s one where I’m dreaming a little bit, because I don’t have a set number that I’m taking on, and that I know I’m taking on. So that’s one where I might say, okay, well, I want. 10 next year, or I want five, whatever that may look like, there are some that are a guessing game.

So just know that it’s okay to dream as long as we’re also being realistic and using the numbers and the data that we have from last year to do that dreaming so that we’re not just pulling it out of thin air. So then once I’ve written out my projections to the right of each revenue stream, I’m going to put the total projection.

Number for each one to the left of the offer. So the five clients at 500 a month, that’s 30, 000. So I’m going to write 30, 000 to the left. And it really doesn’t matter which direction you do. This is just how I’m doing it. And you’re just kind of showcasing that for you, but I’m going to write that number down to the left.

And then after I’ve done that for each revenue stream, I’m going to add them all up and see what that total number is. You’re going to compare that number to the revenue goal that you wrote down earlier. Is it on the nose? Is it lower? Is it higher? This is where you start playing around with these numbers.

So you’ve done the initial projections, the initial mapping of how much you want to make per each revenue stream per month, how many clients you want to have, yada, yada, yada. You’ve done the initial projection, the initial mapping. You’ve got to compare it to that number. Is it right on the nose of that number?

Is it higher? Is it lower? If it’s really like a lot lower? Well, that might be an indicator that your goal isn’t realistic for next year. If it’s only slightly lower, you may just need to change where you plan to focus your energy next year. Can you tweak some numbers like trying to fit in more high ticket offer clients?

Or in order to, to raise yourself up to the goal number, or on the other hand, if it’s higher than your goal number, you might want to consider raising your goal number. Personally, I like to have my revenue mapping end up higher than the goal. I’m trying to hit that way. I’m still likely to hit my actual goal, even if I don’t end up with the projected sales and clients that I mapped out.

But that’s really a personal preference. You may want it to be right on the nose. You may want. That’s kind of up to you, but I like to have it so that when I’ve mapped out my year, if I hit all those numbers, I end up way beyond my projected goal. If I don’t hit it, I will probably still hit my goal. So, once you’ve gotten your numbers tweaked to where you like, you’ll know exactly how many clients you need for the year, how many sales you need to make within each revenue stream, and how you expect to hit that big revenue goal.

Now you have to decide when you’re focusing on each revenue stream throughout the year. And that is going to inform your content plan, making it so that your content is aligned with your goals and actually moving the needle in your business. Like I mentioned in the introduction of this episode, these questions are laid out inside of the chasing simple content planner, along with many others that are going to help you keep on track with aligning your content to your goals.

All year long. You can grab your own copy over at Amanda Warfield dot com slash planer. And your action step for this week is that it’s never too late to map out your revenue for the year. So even if you feel like you’ve got a plan in place, give it a try and see where you might need to make some adjustments in order to hit that revenue goal for this year.

This week’s book recommendation might be totally out of left field for you, but it’s Skin Care, the New Edit by Caroline Herons, and I did not know how to girl. I say that all the time, like I don’t know how to girl. I never learned how to do my makeup. I never learned how to do my hair. I never learned how to take care of my skin.

These are all things that I just like never learned and I really wanted to start taking better care of my skin. I’m in my late 20s. Like, I should have been doing it a long time ago. I live in the South where the sun is just like beating on my face and my skin all the time. And I was determined to figure out what it is that I needed to do.

But then the more I researched, the more overwhelmed I got, because there’s so much information out there and there’s so many different products. And I was so confused. And then I got recommended this book and it was life changing for me. You know, things about skincare. You may not like it. I don’t know.

But if you’re, if you’re where I was and you’re just overwhelmed completely by skincare, I cannot recommend this book enough. Like five stars. I will gift it to everyone. It explains all the different things and what they mean, but it also tells you how to create a routine and how to create routines.

Based on your skin type and based on, you know, are you in your teens? Are you in your early twenties? Are you in your late twenties, your mid thirties, forties, fifties, whatever. It’s got different routines in there, no matter what your skin type or your age and all of that is. So highly recommend skincare, the new edit by Caroline Herons.

So much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes as well as all the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.

Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast. And ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.