It’s been one hell of a year… My 2020 roundup

Dec 31
Luke Carthy 2020 round up

I promised myself that this Christmas, I’d give myself some proper time to rest up, reflect and eat everything in sight before we say goodbye to this right bastard of a year; also known as 2020.

For context, I’ve been a solo ecommerce consultant now for just over a year. I started on my journey in October ’19.

Too soon into the solo game to do a round up in 2019, I didn’t want to pass up on collecting my learnings and musings for 2020 in the hope they’ll resonate with others.

Inspired by the post by Tom Hirst, I want to be utterly raw, transparent and vulnerable in my 2020 round up and share with you my wins and fails this year.

The mission? To help others learn from my mistakes or even better, avoid them altogether. Additionally, I want to encourage and inspire those considering a shift into freelance / consulting or help others level-up their solo game.

Anyway, without further ado, let’s dive in with my TL;DR of 2020

  • I made £100,000 consulting for a multitude of clients this year but it came at a cost to my mental health
  • I bagged my first ~£10K in commissions from partnership agreements for various technology vendors
  • I reinvested business cash in to a new passion project; afrodrops
  • I plan to make key changes to better my mood, work environment, time management and mental health
  • I want to build in redundancy into my earnings and find better ways to scale

Business

Consulting

So, the headline that I’m ferociously proud of is hitting £100,000 in revenue via consulting this year; something I never thought possible so early into my consulting journey. Even now it still feels entirely surreal.

To see it there in black and white in my invoice software properly hit me hard. An incredible achievement considering the world practically stopped turning back in March due to COVID.

In hindsight, I couldn’t have picked a better time to dive in to eCommerce consulting.

eCommerce has exploded and companies putting off digital spend or resisting digital transformation were pushed in to the deep end of digital virtually overnight in order to remain competitive and in extreme cases, survive.

That shockwave was definitely in my favour once businesses began spending again.

As great as an achievement £100K sounds, it wasn’t without costs elsewhere.

I took on a lot of work within a small window. I struck whilst the iron was hot and consequently it taxed my mental health.

As I’m still a rookie to consulting in the grand scheme of things and with COVID threatening income stability locally and globally, I felt unable to turndown opportunities.

Online speaking events, new projects big and small, offering a helping hand; if I was asked in emails/DMs whether I was interested, I felt obliged to say yes or risk exposing myself to financial issues.

On the one hand I felt relieved that finances were quickly becoming a non-issue after two months of zero income. On the other hand, I knew that taking on that amount of work was going to properly test me mentally and it did.

That coupled with working from home with two kids and schools closed? You get the picture… And I know there are many others that were in the same situation as I.

Heading in to 2021, I want to ensure that I don’t get to those overstretched levels again and I find ways to scale up my output without having to overcommit so much of my time and without such a detrimental impact to my mental state.

Ideal should we teeter into another nationwide lockdown.

Passive income and commissions

Making money in your sleep – the dream for many, right!? So, I’m brand new to this as a source of revenue and 2020 gave me my first taste of passive income totalling just shy of £10K in the form of commissions from a number of tech vendors and SaaS companies

Working in ecommerce; helping brands with their digital transformation is part and parcel of the service I provide as a consultant.

Part of the job at hand for me is ensuring that companies are introduced to and sign with the best technology partners for them and their specific requirements.

Becoming a partner with a number of technology vendors doesn’t just come with monetary benefits.

It also provides me with a much greater understanding of the eCommerce tools, vendors and options on the market.

Additionally, I can often cut through the often painful pre-sales processes to get access to pricing (often discounted) almost instantly and I benefit from direct contact persons to liaise with too.

All of the above saves time, cuts down the back and fourth and ensures the best solutions are shortlisted and selected for my clients. Win, win!

Building an email list – Let’s Talk Shop

For those of you that caught wind of my announcement at the birth of the pandemic, Let’s Talk Shop was a project born out lockdown to keep me busy whilst I had no work on. (If only I knew back then just how engrossed I’d be in projects a few months on).

In summary, Let’s Talk Shop is a newsletter where I put out valuable and informative ecommerce tutorials alongside other ecommerce centric news.

It got off to a great start with a small handful of well received editions. However, as a wave of projects and other paid commitments rolled in, Let’s Talk Shop was forced to take a back seat.

Additionally, it was becoming increasingly difficult to put out content without kids stealing the show, meaning it took me 3x longer to get any content recorded, edited and out.

Still in good spirits, I put out a couple of bloopers which helped humanise the content and make it relatable for others working from home with families nearby:

As fun as it was, something had to give and Let’s Talk Shop pulled the short straw.

They do say, however, that the comeback is always stronger than the setback and Let’s Talk Shop is no exception here!

It will be coming back, and it will be bigger and better for 2021. More on this later.

Lockdown highlights

I don’t want to be yet another person adding negative energy to this COVID situation.

Instead, I want to use this space to share what was for me, the real and unexpected highlights throughout lockdown.

Both of which have got to be my totally organic, spontaneous, agenda-free and properly vulnerable Zoom calls with the incredible Arianne Donoghue and the almost hilarious Kirsty Hulse.

My Hangout with Arianne

Honestly, I can’t even remember how we even made a decisions to jump on a call and have a proper chat, but I’m super glad we did.

We laughed, chewed through life, business challenges, silly stuff too and it was a properly refreshing hour or so.

It was great to speak to and open up with someone who I felt was going through the same motions as I. We were both fresh to business and I came away from our chat feeling empowered and recharged. If you’re reading this, Arianne, we definitely need to do it again soon; also thank you!

The feels train with Kirsty Hulse

So for context, the death of George Floyd was raw and ringing in everyone’s ears when Kirsty dropped me a DM and asked how I was doing. I think I wrote and deleted replies about 3 times before answering Kirsty’s question.

I guess I realised at that point that I actually wasn’t OK and that a Twitter DM wasn’t going to cut it…

We eventually jumped on a call and we both just went in and let it all out. Work, lockdown, life, sexism, racism, how all of the aforementioned made us feel, the works. It was an unintentionally powerful and informal conversation that has stuck with me and really helped me to process everything keep me going.

Equally, Kirsty, if you’re reading this, thank you!

Afrodrops

Every time I think about how I turned a dream of proactively making a difference in the world of afro hair care and turn an idea in to a living, breathing business, I get goosebumps!

Launched in October during Black History Month and proudly self-funded; afrodrops is an online afro hair care store born out of two things:

  1. The sheer lack of afro centric hair care available in supermarkets and on the high street. Especially for women.
  2. Seeing my eldest brought to tears after school because he felt lost, unrepresented and tokenised as a result of his mixed afro hair.
https://twitter.com/MrLukeCarthy/status/1300696205257666560?s=20

It’s generating sales, it’s winning the hearts of customers and I believe the afrodrops brand has the potential to be super powerful. I’ve always envisaged afrodrops to do more than just sell afro hair care online.

I want afrodrops to be a brand that helps to educate people on how they can better care for their natural hair or get the confidence boost to transition from relaxed or chemically treated hair to natural and beautiful curls.

I want afrodrops to fight the stigmas around afro hair and to proactively fight afro hair oppression too.

I’ve big things planned for 2021 and I can’t wait to get stuck in!

Looking to the future. Lessons and ambitions for ’21

A new, bright and airy office space to thrive and make carpet angels in

When I started on my consulting journey, naturally I wanted to keep all outgoings and costs to a bare minimum whilst I found my feet.

I tried working from home, but I knew I wasn’t as productive as what I could be when WFH full time and decided I needed office space.

I found a perfect co-working space local to home that was sub £200 per month, had great internet and was vacant 95% of the time, meaning I was the only person there. Perfect! At least it was at the time…

For just over of a year, it’s served as an ideal quiet space where I can zone out and get to work. However, I’ve been here a year now as the darker nights drew nearer, my mental health really took a hit.

After some time working out what it could be (besides lockdown) I realised that it was my office space.

As great as it is, there’s no window here. Just four plain walls and zero natural light. When you spend so much time in a space like this, the lack of natural light quickly becomes apparent and it hit me mentally.

Additionally, although no one else is ever here, co-working means it’s not really a space I can call my own.

I can’t leave anything there and there’s very little free floorspace as it’s mostly used for desks. I was basically hot desking full time and doing so without a window.

Anyway, as a Christmas gift from the business to myself I’ve just signed an agreement on a gorgeous new office space with a WINDOW! A big bastard floor to ceiling unit too. Lots of natural light and it’s a space I can call my own. I already feel better just thinking about it and I can’t wait to move in and do gamboles in it.

Why is this important?

There’s no point being your own boss if you’re going to be a shit one.

Your mental and physical health must be a priority and although this isn’t exactly news to me or likely you, I was one of the many people that had to learn the hard way. You have no business (especially if YOU are your business) if you’re not in the right frame of mind.

This new office ain’t cheap. In fact it’s more than 3x the amount I paid for my co-working spot. But sometimes business is more than just numbers. You’ve got to be happy too or what’s the point?

Equally, it would have cost me more of my health and the business more in lost output if I hadn’t.

When you look at it outside of the monthly retainer, it’s a no-brainer and actually a bit of a bargain in all honesty.

Plus, now is the best time ever to lease office space! You can haggle much harder than ever and get an insane deal. It’s very much a buyer’s market in the world of office space right now.

Let’s Talk Shop is BACK, baby!

https://lukecarthy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/LetsTalkShop-logo-400px.png

I enjoy being in front of the camera and it’s a great way to fill that gap that’s been left by speaking at conferences and events. Additionally, I want to build an engaged mailing list too and Let’s Talk Shop was always my way of working towards that goal.

In 2021, I plan to get this goal back on track and turn it in to a welcome habit.

I’ll be putting out irregular newsletters and tutorials again real soon! If you’ve not already, be sure to subscribe here.

I’m going to outsource more

Afrodrops has taught me that you can’t do everything and just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should.

To give myself more time, to allow me to scale up and to proactively avoid rising to stress levels to those of 2020, I’m going to outsource more tasks and I’ve a cool way at quickly identifying whether you should outsource something or not.

1) First, identify your key strengths and desirable skills and keep those close.

You can’t outsource these as this is what people and companies are paying you to do. You can’t outsource painting a canvas if someone has commissioned you to paint it!

These things could also be skills you want to learn albeit time intensive.

2) If you’re not good at something and have no ambition to be so, outsource it.

One such example here for many consultants and freelancers is accounting.

Additionally for me, web development sits in that outsource bucket too. Sure I can do it, but I’m not the best and I don’t have any ambition to be better. Additionally, it would take me way longer than a seasoned pro in that space to build my websites.

3) If it’s time intensive and it’s not one of your key strengths, outsource it.

For me, this will be everything from video editing to proofreading and graphic design. Basically, any time intensive task that is important but not a key strength or a desirable skill.

This rule remains the case even if you can do said task well. Assuming it’s not a small and urgent 15 min task that needs attention now and no one else is available; it gets outsourced.

You can’t create more time but you can control how your time is spent. On the other hand, you can create revenue and as long as you’re bringing in the cash, you can swap said cash and free up time by releasing yourself from laborious tasks.

I want to be empowered to say, ‘No’.

Last year, I bit off more than I could chew because I was scared to say no when I needed to. Sure, I said no to projects, but not as many as I should have.

As shared above, Let’s Talk Shop had to take a time out, but I feel my personal brand suffered too.

I starved myself of time to write posts, read, learn work on the business; instead becoming buried deep into client work.

I basically kept my head down and became a hermit for a good few months. I barely spoke with friends and family. It really wasn’t a healthy place to be.

I felt the need to say yes because I wanted to ensure I was financially secure. In 2021, I want to work towards further improving financial security so that the fear of saying no is ultimately removed altogether and I can better avoid being overworked and overwhelmed.

Just because I’ve capacity doesn’t mean that I should say yes to the next project that comes my way.

One other benefit of saying no means I can focus on selecting and working on projects that I feel in my gut are right, are exciting and are a bit of me!

There’s nothing worse than saying yes to a lacklustre project only to have to then miss out on an incredible opportunity shortly after.

Through a undefined mix of passive income streams and increasing/changing my pricing models, I aim to improve financial security in 2021.

When I say give more, I want to give more back. I already donate a bunch to local food banks, I mentor University students and help those that ask where I feel I can.

Lastly, what did I get right this year?

  • Although not perfect and I definitely struggled at times to stick to it, but I pretty much nailed the work life balance and always had time for my kids.This was and always will be my core goal and I’m super glad that I never lost sight of it. I’m convinced my mental health would have been worse if I had. I’m also committed to being able to make the same claim at the end of 2021 too.
  • I gave myself some time to learn new things.Ok, so not as much time as I’d like, but I know much more about Google Analytics 4 and RegEx than I did this time last year. Progress! Next year, SQL and BigQuery is in my sights.
  • Considering everything, I put out some incredible work for clients. I’m not just saying it either. Clients have said how awesome my work has been and that’s a really wholesome and rewarding feeling.
  • I started to give back. I’ve begun to donate to food banks, I mentor University undergraduates and my DMs are always open to those that ask.

I’m hype AF for 2021. I’m gonna go stare out my new great big fuck-off window for a while..

Happy New Year!

Subscribe to the lukecarthy.com blog

* indicates required

About The Author

Luke Carthy is an international speaker, eCommerce SEO & CRO Consultant. Luke specialises eCommerce growth, analytics, strategy and increasing conversion rate and can typically found writing about proven and effective eCommerce SEO advice and case studies. Learn more about Luke Carthy.