78. Podcasting and Business Lessons Learned in 2024 and Changes for 2025!

Are you part of the crowd that's reflecting on the past year and planning for the new one? Me too! In this episode, I share essential reflection questions to help you review 2024 and set goals for 2025. Plus, I'll give you a sneak peek into my podcasting journey, the highs and the not-so-glamorous lows, and my plan moving forward.

This episode was produced by me, The Podcast Teacher! Contact me at Hello@ThePodcastTeacher.com.

Transcript

Hey hey and welcome back! Happy 2025! 

Like a lot of people, I’ve spent some time the past few weeks reflecting on 2024 and deciding where to go in 2025. 

Today, I’m going to share some of the essential reflection questions with you, as well as give you a peek behind the curtain of my podcast and business. As solopreneurs, it’s easy to lack perspective and feel isolated. 

My intention in sharing this information with you is that you will find it helpful when reflecting on your own experiences and setting your own goals. 

Let’s start with reflecting on 2024. I’m going to go over 3 questions that I borrowed from James Clear and his iconic book, Atomic Habits. I know this book has been all the rage for many years and I am quite behind the curve, but I finally read it recently, and wow is it a great book. 

His 3 reflection questions are: What went well? What did not go so well? And What did I learn? I’m just going to give you the highlights for each question otherwise this episode would be 2 hours long!

So, starting with question #1, What went well in 2024? Bear with me while I take just a moment to brag about myself, and then we’ll get to the good stuff! 

On a personal note, I enjoyed several trips with Jeff, including a cruise through the Panama Canal, which was amazing. For my podcast, I released 68 brand new episodes of this show, renamed the show to be more aligned with my target audience, and collected 17,582 downloads. This show is also now ranked in the top 2% of all podcasts worldwide. 

For my business in general, it was the first year that my business revenue surpassed my previous gross teaching salary. I also won an award from Amy Porterfield inside her membership community called Momentum. 

I received the Inspiration and Leadership award, and she said “Julia has helped countless Momentum members find the courage to start and grow their podcast, always embodying what it means to pay it forward. Thank you for being such an inspiring force in this community.” Oh my gosh! If you know who Amy Porterfield is, you know how big of a deal this is! 

That happened in December and it definitely allowed me to finish the year on a high note. I am proud of all the accomplishments listed. But it definitely wasn’t sunshine and roses all year, so let's talk about what did not go so well. 

While my business revenue was good, my profit margin was pretty terrible. While I released 68 new episodes of this podcast, almost every single one of them was slapped together at the very last moment…like literally I was scripting, recording, and editing, a mere hour or two before the episode was scheduled to go live. I also worked an average of 98 hours a week when I wasn’t traveling and I constantly felt stressed, burnt out, and teetered over the edge of a mental breakdown multiple times. 

So, what did I learn from all of these ups and downs? 

Primarily, I learned that my current routine is not sustainable. If I am going to survive 2025, let alone thrive in it, I need to make some big changes in many different areas of my life. More on that coming up in the second half of this episode. 

Along with the lack of sustainability, I learned that I need structure. When I was teaching, literally every minute of my workday was planned for me. I had to plan my water intake because I could only use the bathroom at certain times. It was so cumbersome to take a day off because it was often more work to write sub plans than it was just to suck it up and go in when I had a migraine. 

When I decided to pivot my career and leave teaching, the things that I wanted most as an entrepreneur were freedom and flexibility. I wanted no structured plan whatsoever. 

So, the past few years have been very haphazard. I got up in the morning and went to bed in the evening whenever I felt like it; I had no strategic plan for new offers and programs in my business, nor a plan for attracting new clients and students. My to do lists were more suggestions than mandates. 

I worked a ton of hours, but a lot of them were spent going down rabbit holes, learning new skills that weren’t relevant, or simply overthinking everything, researching options, and experiencing analysis paralysis. I certainly was not being efficient and productive 98 hours a week. As a shining example, I literally still had “review 2023 and set 2024 goals” on my to-do list in September. 

This lack of structure was definitely a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction, because I have learned that I do sooooo much better when I have at least a framework of structure. 

Finally, I learned that I am capable of doing great things and that I do make an impact on others. I struggle with confidence and imposter syndrome, and often doubt my skills and abilities. But my work with clients and students, as well as my contributions to the Momentum membership, have shown me that I am making an impact. I just need to stop getting in my own way! 

Alright, so that concludes the 2024 recap - if you haven’t done a 2024 reflection yet, I encourage you to identify what went well, what did not go well, and what you learned. 

This brings us to changes for 2025. 

My word of the year is intentional. Because the past few years have largely been anything but, and it’s not serving me.

I won’t bore you with the details of my new sleep routine and some health changes that I’m incorporating, but I do have some new intentional things in place to help with my overall physical and mental wellbeing. Even though we’re only a few days into 2025 and new years resolutions and goals are notorious for not lasting, I’m cautiously optimistic that these changes will stick. 

In terms of my podcast, I have two big goals this year. 

First, is to be intentional about a recording schedule and sticking to it. I’m not off to a great start for this one as I’m getting this episode done the day before it airs - although 24 hours in advance is a significant improvement over 1 hour in advance, haha! 

But my plan is to be at least one episode ahead - if not two or three - at all times. I’ve incorporated a dedicated 4-hour podcast block into my workweek schedule, and then I also have some flex time blocked off and I can use that to get ahead if I want to. You might not need a 4 hour block.

It works best for me to script, then record, then edit, all in one chunk of time for a single episode. I know some people who love to work on their scripts or outlines in pieces throughout the week and then have one chunk of time where they record multiple episodes, and then they edit at a separate time. That may work well for you. If it does, great! Do that.  

It does not work well for me - I handle it better when I have one big chunk to knock out all the tasks, so that’s what I’m going to do. 

Find what works for you and do that.  

My other big podcasting goal is to do more promotion and content repurposing. I designed a tracker for my students that I’m going to use to hold me accountable to these tasks. I’m also leaning into the use of AI. Now, I promise you that I will never ever get AI to write a script for me and then just read that to you as an episode. That’s not cool. 

But, AI can help me repurpose my own content. Because I wrote the original script, it’s relatively easy to create new content that maintains my teaching style and personality. 

I’ve also just hired a part time VA to help me with this and few other tasks. She’s only with me for a few hours a week, so I still very much consider myself a solopreneur, but this move was necessary in order to intentionally free up some time in my schedule. 

I don’t have any specific goals for podcast metrics at this point in time, but I’d love for them to continue to climb at the pace that they have been in 2024. 

Now onto my business in general. As I alluded to earlier, I have created a weekly schedule for myself and my goal is to adhere to it. My goal is to be intentional with my time, being as efficient and productive as I can be.

The schedule is very similar to what I had as a teacher, except that I can switch things around if I need to. I’ve built in “flex” blocks that don’t have a specific task assigned to them. 

And, I feel like it’s pretty realistic. I know I’m not going to go from working 98 hours a week to 40 hours a week anytime soon. But I’d be pretty happy with 60 or 70. 

I’ve put personal tasks onto this schedule as well so that I have intentional and dedicated time for my physical and mental health. 

Now, I know that this schedule has the potential to make my life overly structured again, and I’m definitely conscious of that. This schedule is not carved in stone and I’ve already tweaked it a few times to better fit my needs. 

I am hopeful that this approach will strike the right balance of structure and flexibility. 

Ok, and finally, I have a goal of only purchasing courses and trainings that are directly related to my specific projects - I have a whole bunch of smaller goals for the business that I’m not sharing here for the sake of time! 

And this one is for sure going to be my most challenging goal. I love to learn new things and I love to support fellow solopreneurs. Therefore, I spend a LOT on continuing education every year. I spent less in 2024 than I did in 2023, which is progress, but it was still my biggest expense category. 

Being intentional and selective about the courses and trainings that I purchase will help to increase my profit margin, and it will help me take back a lot of hours that were spent consuming content passively but not doing anything actionable…therefore it will indirectly support my goal of being intentional with my time. 

So, I know this is right goal to have, but I also know that it’s going to be very challenging for me!

What about you? I hope that you take some time to reflect on 2024 and set your goals for 2025. 

Also, I think this is the first episode where I’ve really deviated from podcasting-exclusive content here on the show. I debated whether or not this was an episode worth doing, but I decided that I’d try it….since we’re Podcasting for Solopreneurs, the business content is still relevant. But let me know what you think by clicking the “send me your podcasting question” link in the description below.  Yay or nay for a sprinkle of business content from time to time? 

Until next time, happy podcasting!