Small Business 2023 Year in Review

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I would like to focus on gratitude for what God has created here at Radiantly Dressed as I share this 2023 year in review.

As I head into maternity leave and the holiday season, I wanted to provide a recap of what this last year has brought as a business owner, an image consultant, and a style coach for Christian women. I also want to share with you the amazing journey that God has given me this last year.

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As many of you may know, I am due any day now with baby number seven which means that my maternity leave is starting soon. Some of you may not know this, but I am also recovering from Covid. Last week was the first time since I started the podcast that I skipped an episode and didn’t show up because I didn’t really have a voice and I’m coughing a lot still.

It’s interesting because earlier this year, in mid-summer, I decided to not offer the Radiant Woman Intensive for its last session of the year. I didn’t know why at the time. I just felt a stirring from the Lord that I needed to pull that for the time being, and I figured that he knew something that I didn’t know.

He knew that I was going to get Covid at 37 weeks pregnant and that I would not be functioning at full capacity. Along those lines, I am still recovering and struggling quite a bit with being nine months pregnant and not having enough energy.

Since this is the last episode of 2023, I did want to give a recap of what this year has brought for me as a business owner.

Many of you probably don’t know this, but I have essentially rebuilt my entire business from the ground up this last year. I have worked like a crazy person for pretty much the whole year. I wanted to express my gratitude by giving a recap of what that has meant for me.

Occasionally some of my clients or members will ask me questions about what it’s like to start or run a business. If you’re interested in side hustles or starting your own business or anything like that let this be an encouragement to you.

Table of Contents

2023 Year Review: Background

But before I get into this year, a little background is probably needed, especially if you’re new here and don’t know me very well. I started my business in 2020, um, in the middle of the pandemic with a three-month-old baby. I was struggling to create a capsule wardrobe that felt like me and wasn’t a carbon copy of Pinterest or other people’s style that wasn’t authentic.

Someone said, “Well, you should just do it and start blogging about it.” That is exactly what I did.

Over three years I built up a blog that gets quite a bit of traffic for color analysis. I became known for my color analysis skills as a guru. I kept going and kept learning and got certified as an image consultant, started working with clients helping them create wardrobes that were authentic for them and just duplicating my process.

That’s really what I’ve been up to since 2020, learning and refining and helping other people learn and help them refine as well. It’s just been a process of taking that journey. I’ve always been a Christian business owner focusing on working with Christian women.

We’ve always vetted our free Facebook group carefully to make sure that it’s a safe place for Christian women because nothing that we do is apart from Christ. Even how we look and how we show up. So that’s always been a part of my business.

My tagline from the beginning has been “personal style for Christian women.” because I wanted that to be really obvious. The more I worked with clients, the more I began to realize something was missing in my process. In my business, I wasn’t going deep enough into this part of being a Christian woman and being fashionable, stylish, creating a capsule wardrobe, and whatever your thing is that you’re here trying to learn about.

There was a piece missing and I began to really feel it in my business as I worked with people and I started to feel a stirring to close that gap. That’s what this year has been about, closing that gap. Sometimes it feels like walking off into the wilderness with no clue where I’m going, if it’s going to work, if anyone is going to care, if anybody wants to hear it, or if they just want me to stick to the simple tactical stuff.

Ultimately, at the end of every day, I have to follow God’s leading for my life, including my business, how I show up, and how I work with people because there is this ministry element to what I do. That’s the background of how it started and where we are right now.

Q1 – Podcast Launch, First Large Investment Course and Recording RWI

The first quarter of the year was insane. I launched the podcast on December 28th of last year, so we’re almost a year in. At the beginning of the year, I made my largest investment yet in growth and coaching for the podcast and my business.

At the beginning of all of that was when the Lord convicted me to start head covering which was a huge shift in my own personal journey. Not only was I taking this very intense course that was three months long with 8 to 10 hours of homework every week, but I was also in the process of recording the content for the Radiant Woman intensive.

I had launched it previously before and I had delivered everything in a live format without prerecorded lessons. I knew I was ready to make that into something more substantial and to build a powerful asset to provide a cohesive framework.

The first quarter was crazy busy, and I was also going through some pretty big shifts for myself in how I looked, how I showed up, and having to let go of expectations and deal with what people were going to think of me and being faithful to what God was asking.

When I look back on it, it was great and I do have an episode coming up on maternity leave reviewing a year of head covering and some of the lessons there. The first quarter was build, build, build, learn, learn, learn, and very intense. I worked a lot. I was working 30 hours a week, which as a mom of six who homeschools is an awful lot of work, to be honest.

I would get up at four o’clock in the morning and I would record the lessons for the intensive and I would just keep going about my day. It was insane, but it was also great because it was this heavy push and I created something that I’m still really proud of and still excited to bring back next year in a slightly longer different format for everyone.

Q2 – RWI Summer Session, First Trimester Fatigue and Waiting on Direction

The second quarter of the year was a period of rest. And I needed it because, at the very end of all of that crazy intense first-quarter work, I found out that I was pregnant with number seven and I was exhausted from the first trimester.

I was feeling really lost in a way because I had always offered color analysis and it had been the big thing in my business. I had offered some other things, but my business jumped from color analysis to a full-on three-month intensive program. I felt like there was a gap in the middle but I didn’t know how to bridge the gap.

No answers were coming. I was praying, looking for solutions, and researching so many different learning modalities and options for finding that bridge. To help people and to get them to this place of completion in their wardrobe with happiness and contentment and feeling like they loved everything in their closet.

There was a big hole in the middle, like a chasm really, of information that I needed to fill in and I didn’t know what to do. This quarter was a period of rest, reflection, praying, and waiting which I needed because nothing much really happened here. We were in the summer session of the intensive, and otherwise, it was just me being really tired and waiting for clarity.

Q3 – Clarity, High-Value Low Ticket Mindset Shift, Radiant by Design, Dialing in on Mindset and Hiring Assistants

As the third quarter rolled around, that clarity started to come to me. I found some direction and inspiration from a business coach who was offering an insane amount of value at a lower ticket price. It transformed my thought process. I still believe in the intensive if you want true one-on-one help.

But I realized that there also needs to be space for everybody else in the process who is in the beginning or middle. I am not ever going to be comfortable charging thousands of dollars for Christian women who are supposed to live their lives in a generally modest way, including our finances.

That was something that other business mentors and coaches had encouraged me to do but it never felt right for me. It always felt really wrong. And so it was such a breath of fresh air to find somebody who showed me that you can show up and give people a ton of value without charging them a ton of money.

It completely changed my framework. All of a sudden that just dam that had been there with no clarity or direction, completely opened up. I spent most of the third quarter creating the Radiant by Design membership, which is a $ 7-a-month program.

I’m going to be honest with you, there’s a ton of information in that course. There are lots of recorded lessons and workbooks that are 30 to 40 pages. It’s truly about transforming how you see yourself. It was that missing piece that I talked about earlier where I felt like there was so much more that God wanted us to discover about ourselves along this process.

I spent all this time creating amazing workbooks and journals, recording lessons, and creating an entirely new program. It’s truly a heart journey and I love it. I kept seeing my clients get stuck on things that they were feeling in their head, that they were thinking about themselves, and I knew they needed something to help them move forward.

That is exactly what I created in that program.

I also expanded my business by hiring my first assistants and started to create a team to help me with some of the workload so that I could focus more on creating and being the image consultant instead of the writer, the blog editor, and the everything person all the time. That’s been amazing and freed up some of my creative space in my head.

Struggling with self image and style? Gain confidence from the inside out in the only image and style membership designed for Christian women in the Radiant by Design Collective

Q4 – Rebrand, RYS Creation, Focusing on one Great Outfit, Capsule Wardrobe Workshop, Maternity Leave, and Slowing Down

In the fourth quarter, which we are currently wrapping up right now, I just kept rolling so hard through everything I was doing. I took on a rebrand of the website and the podcast. Small image things, but also the website got a completely new look. I also created another program.

If you’re counting, right now in 2023, I created three entire learning programs which seems crazy. I’m completely humbled that God gave me the space, the energy, the time, the wisdom, and the brains to do all of this. I created another course, this one’s a self-study program that we just launched right before Thanksgiving.

It is all about color, style essences, and finding one amazingly great outfit to build your wardrobe upon. And we did this cool capsule wardrobe workshop, which had an 85-page workbook. I don’t know how to edit down, which has been a funny journey for me. Here I am a few weeks before the end of the year, and God has slowed me down.

I have officially been stalled and stopped by Covid which threw me for a loop. God knew that this is where my energy would run out and this is where things would be finished. Of course, I have a few still lingering odds and ends I’m wrapping up to keep things smooth on maternity leave.

All in all, it’s just been like a crazy rockstar year. I don’t know that you could build a whole business in a year, but apparently, you can rebuild a business in a year.

I am so grateful for what God has done for me personally this year. My own self-journey, my own discovery of who I am, and becoming so much freer as a person in how I look and how I feel about myself than even I was before. I am so grateful that the prayers were answered for the holes that I felt in my business, and God filled them exponentially more than I could have ever hoped for.

This is a gratitude post about God showing up and being faithful in a very real sense for what I do, who I show up for, and how I am constantly trying to make what I offer you applicable, beneficial, and deeply rooted in biblical truth about who God wants you to be.