I’ve known for about a week that this post was coming. I decided to sit back and let the contents percolate in my brain and figured I’d sit down at the keyboard and just see what came out when it was time to write it. Tamara and I have made a point to be pretty transparent with our business and the steps we’ve taken, and we’re carrying on that theme today as we talk about our end-of-year review and our plans for the upcoming couple of months.

Remember how we mentioned that we’re doing bi-weekly business meetings? It’s been such a great way to keep ourselves enthused and on the same page. We knew this most recent meeting was going to be a big one, so we had the company buy us lunch and included an extra large tip for our server since we monopolized one of his best tables for about four hours last Wednesday.

The plan was to look back on where we’ve been, evaluate where we are now, and determine where it is we’d like to go with this business of ours. It was really enlightening, and the Thai pizza wasn’t bad, either!

Because I imagine this might get pretty long, I’m going to go ahead and put the nit-picky details behind a “read more” cut. For those of you who don’t want to read about our ups and downs, our goals and objectives, and our epiphanies, here’s a summary of how we’ve decided to approach 2008:

WORK HARD.

On the other hand, I absolutely love blog posts that really give you a glimpse into what people are actually doing.  I have a lot of respect for bloggers like Kristina King at InkThinker who not only talks about making $70,000 from freelancing last year, but also tells us how she did it and Dana Prince of The Writer’s Blog who also shared the details of her freelance business in 2007.  For those of you who want a voyeuristic look into a couple of freelancers’ minds . . .

The Highs and Lows of 2007

I’ve gone back through my Google Reader, and I just can’t figure out which of the wonderful blogs I read supplied the inspiration for our review of 2007. Basically, we asked ourselves a few questions:

What Have We Achieved?

• we are officially “probloggers”
• Freelance Parent was named to the Top Ten Blogs for Writers
• we’ve developed a professional network of colleagues
• we’ve gained an incredible amount of knowledge
• a few of our clients have converted into pretty good money
• we have all of the documents that make us an official business
• a realistic percentage of our revenue has been safely tucked away for taxes
• we have a rudimentary web site, although it will be facing changes after this meeting
• our clientele hails from all over the world
• we have been very productive and are excellent at meeting deadlines
• our clients have given us great feedback and give us repeat business

Perhaps most importantly:

• we’re still in business!
• we’re still friends!!

What Has Worked . . .

. . . from a marketing perspective:

• the Freelance Parent blog
• Guru.com
• networking

. . . from a work/life balance perspective:

• convenience
• time with our families
• personal satisfaction

. . . from our clients’ perspective:

• our work quality
• reasonable (from their point of view) prices
• reliability

. . . from our partnership’s perspective:

• encouraging each other
• division of labor
• differing skill sets that complement each other

What Hasn’t Worked . . .

. . . from a marketing perspective:

• web site
• relying on others
• brochure

. . . from a work/life perspective:

• setting a regular schedule
• procrastination
• separating home and work life

. . . from our clients’ perspective:

• not enough of them know how to find us yet
• we undervalued ourselves in the beginning

. . . from our partnership’s perspective:

• self doubts
• uncertainty about each other’s feelings
• parenthood sometimes gets in the way

What Do We Hope to Be Doing This Time Next Year?

• laughing at how hard it seems to make big bucks!

If We Continue on Exactly the Way We’ve Been Going, Will We Get There?

• nope

Looking Ahead to 2008

Setting goals can be a little scary, especially after you just sat down and determined why you haven’t gotten further than you have already. Now, don’t get me wrong. Tamara and I are quite proud of how far we’ve come. Our business is definitely something that can legitimately be considered a “business” rather than a hobby. We have learned so much in the past few months, and we truly feel poised to build on that momentum.

The first step, of course, was to determine what it is that we want. We’d done that previously when we set out goals in our business plan. The truth, though, is that we’ve discovered that some of those goals aren’t all that relevant to us now. When we apply all that we’ve learned, we see that some of the goals aren’t as important as we thought, and that others can be accomplished in different ways than we expected. After all, we wrote that plan when we had very little actual knowledge about freelancing, and a lot of it was simply theorizing about how we thought things worked.

So, what have we determined is important to us for 2008? Here’s a peek:

1. make enough money that neither of us needs a part-time job
2. create a work schedule that works for our style
3. be a Guide on About.com (one or both of us)
4. develop our nonprofit client roster through our new blog
5. do more subcontracted work during the first couple of months while Lorna adjusts to motherhood
6. get at least two articles published in the print media

These are all lovely objectives, of course; and each will bring us closer to our financial goals for 2008. While it would be easy to sit back and fret and worry about how to get where we want to be, it became quite clear to us that we know exactly what needs to be done to get each and every one of the things on this list.

WORK HARD.

There’s not one single goal on here that can’t be reached if we work as hard as we possibly can. It’s a bit daunting. It’s also quite liberating to realize that we have most of the knowledge we need to get what we want. It’s now simply a matter of applying it and moving forward voraciously.

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