CYA 2023! My Year In Review

Hey everyone, this is Julie and I am here today with my 2023 recap. Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there. I'm saying, "See ya, 2023!" It was an epic year, and I think I've decided that 2023— this year ending minutes after it started, right? I think age is what speeds up time, but it's starting to worry me. The years are passing so fast. I can't believe I'm writing and podcasting a review for 2023. I like to do a yearly reflection every year to try to cement the big things that happened, and I have a few up on blog. If you go to juliechenell.com, you can see them. The one for 2022, I distinctly remember being pretty generic because that was the year I got divorced, and I just didn't know how to talk intimately about what had happened. And 2023, kind of similar, and I can explain a little bit more about that because if you go back in time and you look at 2020 and 2019's year in review, I was so transparent. And I have And I miss those days. I really do. I don't look back at 2020 and 2019 and think, man, I was too open. I think, gosh, how do I get back there? And what has happened to me that I am now more afraid, you know? And it's funny, people are like, oh, when you're in your 40s, you're not going to give— you know, you're not gonna— not, not going to give a crap. I'm like, yeah, well, uh, maybe the people that said that didn't go through divorce, didn't have a bunch of trauma, didn't have a bunch of teenagers and exes watching their every move, because I don't know I'm more, uh, timid now than I was even just a couple years ago. Anyway, 2023, strange because it comes after this life-changing 2022, and normally you don't have two life-changing years in a row, but the universe is drunk, so I did. But as I go through, I realize a lot of the stuff that was happening was internal because the calendar— because that's what I do, I go through the calendar and then I also go through my photos— I really noticed this this year was slower than others, and so that was an interesting insight in and of itself. This review will be a mishmash of business and personal. Okay, so January 2023. Business-wise, I remember this month being a blur because Kathy and I were preparing for Marketer's Heart, and there were a million things to design and build and write. I think we did a mini launch of Easy Launch It just to try to get some cash injection. I had to re-record a couple courses. We were wrapping up our first year of True North, so it was busy on the business side. On my Digital Insiders business side, it was actually a pretty good month, and I didn't realize that 2023 was going to turn out to be this really hard year, uh, financially, not just for me but also for my clients. I mean, this is the first year that I really— I mean, even 2020 when I was worried that people were losing their, their clients and they were going to bail on DI and I made a scholarship fund, this year was harder. Than that by, by a long stretch. So personally, I was like 6 months out from having signed and finished all my divorce proceedings. My divorce had been finalized in August of 2022, so I was just happy to like have a fresh year and a fresh start. AC and I by January had been together about, about 9 months, 8, 9 months, and we were living together and we took our youngest kids to Vermont for a weekend and he was about to come with me to Marketer Sharp. So that was February, I think it was February 3rd, AC and I got in the car and we road tripped down to New Orleans for the Marketer's Heart event. We stopped in Nashville and had my birthday dinner there, and then we made it to the conference and I think we were gone a total of 11 days. And the Marketer's Heart event was so much fun. We had about, I would say, 180 people there. Then we had another 180 or so people on the virtual. And oh, by the way, doing a virtual and in-person hybrid event is not only expensive, it is like 17 times the stress. We pulled it off, it was amazing, people absolutely loved it, but it was a lot. So coming back from that event, I think I was home for maybe a week, and then I turned around and went to Dallas and I attended the first Speakeasy by Steve Sims, met some really cool people. In the background, I was working on a summit because in March we were going to launch the first DI Summit. So personally, like in life, I don't really remember February all that much. I was busy. I was a little overwhelmed, but I do remember in— at Marketer's Heart, the first time I was bringing AC along for a business venture and I had a lot of past history with pain and arguments around business trips and combining family and work. So I was really like unsure how it was all going to go, and it was amazing. And I just remember that big sigh of relief that I didn't have to like keep constantly separating business and life. All right, so March— March was a— well, March was a significant month, but not for great reasons. So on March 6th, we launched the DI Mastermind Room Summit. So much work if you've ever done a summit. Holy cow. But it was a success. We had like, I think, 10,000 people sign up, hundreds of purchasers, and every single member of DI who participated got hundreds of new leads. So you can actually catch the replay at themastermindroom.com. So I was really excited about that. A few not so easy things happened this month as well. I'm not going to be able to talk about this at length, so I apologize for the open loop. But it was the last day of the summit. I was hosting a VIP call with people who wanted to like ask questions of the interviewees, and I was facilitating the call. And while one of the experts were talking, I noticed that an email had come into my inbox. So in the subject line was all caps and it says, FOR JULIE CHENELL ONLY, and had a ton of exclamation points. And I saw it was from an old provider that I was no longer working with. I shouldn't have read it on the call, but I did. And I can't go back and watch the recording of that summit interview because I can tell the moment that I read it, you could see it on my face, even on my neck. My neck started to get red. Like I was having a full reaction to this email. The provider was threatening to tell my entire private client community all the dirt through our work together if I didn't wire this person $50,000. By 5:00 PM, $50,000. And when I say dirt, what I mean is this provider and I were working together personally in a therapeutic setting. So this wasn't just like, oh, I'm gonna tell you didn't gimme a refund. This was like, hey, I worked with you for several years. I know every single solitary, you know, skeleton and dark shadow. And I walked with you through a hellish year and I'm about to unleash that if you don't wire me $50,000 by 5:00 PM. It was Friday, it was March 6th, it was— or no, it was March 10th. It was 2:00 PM in the afternoon. I remember driving to the police station at 4:00. This memory is seared in, in my memory forever. And maybe someday I will tell the whole story, but that, you know, you have these moments in life where things change, like when children are born or you get married or you meet someone. This was one of those moments, like unfortunately not a great one. Okay. Over in Funnel Gorgeous, we realized that if we did not start strengthening our infrastructure, that we would have trouble if we tried to grow. So infrastructure-wise, we were still kind of around 1,500 users and we were like, we really need to beef this up and we need to grow, but like we have to consider what the impact is going to be on our team, you know? So that was really important. And we decided to prioritize some of those more boring internal operations things. Okay, March was a hard month. April 2023, this month was pretty quiet in the business. We were just doing infrastructure stuff, things like we were moving to our own live chat, we were doing performance reviews, building a cancellation funnel, and preparing for the spring round of Launch Gorgeous. Mid-April, somewhere in the Easter time zone, uh, AC and I took a trip to Disney with the kids, and that was our first like real family vacation with the younger kids. We had so much fun. And that was— I mean, I knew it was going to be amazing, but it was just another example of how well he and I work together as a team. So at the end of April, we came back from Disney. AC's brother Willie and his wife Cata and their daughter Abby came to the United States to visit, and they kind of bunked out at the farm. So they are actually still with us to this day, and that was really fun to meet his family and to have a little one in the house again. And also, Willie and Cata have proven to be quite helpful. Okay, May 2023. This was another crazy month, but for different reasons. The mastermind happened in May. It was at the Blake in New Haven, and it was an awesome, awesome mastermind. Unfortunately, just a few days before that happened, I had another surprise emergency family crisis. Again, one that involved government people and temporary full custody, and it was really probably the second very significant traumatic event in 2023 after the attempted extortion in March. And I was just like raw as hell. I spent several days crying, unsure how I was going to cope. My team was amazing. The mastermind was epic as always. We had 100 people on a listen-in ticket and about 50 person, 50 members present for the week-long mastermind. And my family rallied around me and they were super supportive. In Funnel Gorgeous, we were working and teaching the 3-part free workshop series, that funnel inside of Launch Gorgeous. Okay, June, we are almost to the halfway mark. June was quiet. We wrapped up Launch Gorgeous. School was ending for the kids. I went back to Dallas to speak at the HighLevel SaaS Mastermind, had a great time. Robin and Sean are always super gracious hosts. And then July came around, the heat of summer. And in this month, there were 2 solid weeks that were blocked for work. The first was the Course Chemist Live Accelerator. This was one of those ideas I had that I just wasn't sure how it was going to go, and then it was so awesome. We spent an entire week with the TrueNorth students, and we helped people build frameworks and ideas for their courses. So we went through like USP and sales page hacking and getting your outline done and basically helped people create all the assets necessary to pre-sell a course. It was such a success. People had an amazing time. I really hope to do it again. The next week I hosted 17 people at my house. They stayed somewhere else, but every single day people were at my house for the week-long CEO week. And as always, hanging out with the Ayers is so much fun. We walked, we talked, we worked, we ate lobster rolls. So that was basically half the month. Otherwise, July was a lot of camps and kids and summertime stuff. And AC and I started to talk more seriously about finances, about future marriage, where our relationship was heading. He let go of his apartment lease on June 30th, so even though we had been living together, he still had his apartment. So it was about the 1-year mark of us dating where we, you know, burned the ships and he let go of his lease. Fun, random personal fact that many people don't know: my house actually sits on 15 acres, and the amount of work to do outside in the summer, like a month of July, is just staggering. And when AC saw the price tag for just what it was costing me to hire mowers and leaf cleanup, He told me to cancel them. He said, I'll take it over. He was already working 50 hours a week at his job, and he basically kept up with the lawn. Now, he did have help. It was nuts. He, um, had his brother and his sister-in-law as well as my dad. This is hilarious that while I'm recording a podcast, my cat has decided to go psycho. Apologies, you guys, but I'm not going to re-record this because I don't have time. So AC had help from his brother and his sister-in-law and my dad, but between them all and all the mowing and all the weeding and all the mulching, I actually was able to save about $25,000 this season by not having to pay contractors. And so it is really hard to explain how much I appreciate AC's commitment to me, to the house, his work ethic along with his family. Like, I just felt super, super supported in that. Okay, August 2023, I started this podcast. So Million Dollar Grit Podcast was born. It was also kind of a relaxing month. We took the kids to Martha's Vineyard. We had an amazing trip in Martha's Vineyard. Then we brought them home, dropped them off with their other parents, and he and I went to Disney World just as a couple. I actually went back to Disney World again 2 weeks later with Ellie since that was her graduation gift. So I took Ellie and her boyfriend down there. There was a lot of vacationing and a lot of Disney month, which August is not really the month I recommend you do Disney, but if you're a diehard like I am, you make it happen. So on the business side, when I wasn't doing boxers and audits with my D.I.R.s, I was working on the launch for the second round of Launch Gorgeous, which was the Challenge Edition. September. September, I really like September just because after the summer, it's nice to get back into a routine. We were doing Launch Gorgeous. I was prepping for my next mastermind in Miami. I did a 2-day workshop with Kathy and Donald Miller on writing a book, and gasp, everyone, I did start my book. I got 64 pages in. I then stopped because life, but I will get back to it. What else happened? I think, you know, personally, AC and I went to a Yankees game. We watched them lose, and I, this was the month where I really started to wonder, like, is AC gonna propose? Like, when's he gonna propose? And I knew that he had gone to my parents to tell them he was gonna propose to me at some point by the end of the year. So I kind of got myself into curiosity mode, like, when's this going to happen? October was busy. The highlight, of course, of the month was the HighLevel Summit in Dallas, and Kathy frickin' rocked the stage, keynoted, best presentation of the entire conference. We got our platinum award. So that was really fun. Like, tucked inside the travel, like, was a surprise launch of the Scalable Coach Method. And this was one of those course ideas that we thought, you know, if we don't do it now, we won't do let's do it. And so we put together a course and a launch in a week. The idea, to be fair, had been marinating a long time, but it kept getting pushed to the back burner. I think we did over $150K in sales in that first launch. I built curriculum in between Launch Gorgeous and travel. It was kind of crazy. Uh, let's see, what else? In my other business, DI, I put out an offer to my list to do some financial training that related to some ideas that I was working on in my book. I got 14 people to sign up, and I started doing some one-on-one coaching, and I really saw a massive shift around income and revenue for the people that I coached in terms of understanding revenue in the business and how much income they want and the relationship between that. Otherwise, personally, October was filled with a lot of colds, strep throat, soccer games, Halloween, and school. All right, November 2023 kicked off with a whirlwind trip to New Orleans to speak at Steve's Speakeasy. Super fun. We were barely there a day, and then AC and I flew to Miami, where I hosted 12th DI Mastermind. We had over 65 members attend. It was one of the best events we've ever had. Tacos, dancing, oceanfront masterminding, pool time, lots of ahas. Like, ah, it's always such a good time. Of course, came back from Miami with a little bit of sickness. It's fine. And AC and I got to work decorating the house for Christmas. He is as much a Christmas, uh, freak as I am. We both love Christmas and love Disney, so like together we're just perpetually like trying to figure out how we can make things more more fun, more magical. We hosted Thanksgiving at our house, and then over at Funnel Gorgeous, we pulled off a pretty epic Black Friday sale that even earned us an award through Teachable that we didn't even know was going on. So that was fun. I finished up my financial coaching and took a nap and also got one picture of me with all my 4 kids, which is kind of like seeing a four-leaf clover. If you go to my blog at Julie Chenell, there's a written version of this podcast. You can see that And lastly, December. December technically is still in session at the time of building this, so it's really not fair to recap, but huge event happened on December 2nd. AC and I were in Disney for the weekend and he proposed right in front of the castle during the fireworks. It was such an amazing moment. The ring was absolutely beautiful. He knew exactly what I would love. He knew that the fireworks were special to me. He knew they were my favorite. And he carried that fricking ring in his backpack all day. And I was like, the first thing that I said to him after he proposed, I was like, you've been carrying this in your backpack all day. And he, it was funny because there was one point during the day when I was like, I need to grab something out of the bag. He's like, what do you need? I got it. And now looking back, I'm like, ah, that's why he was acting that way. So on the business front, both personal and Final Gorgeous, there's just a lot of coaching and planning going on. We're getting ready to launch a micro subscription called Metrix Muse here at the beginning of the year. So I am excited for 2024, and there were a few things I noticed as I was writing this review up. And I said it at the beginning, but it bears mentioning again: this year was not a crazy year in terms of events and speaking. I have slowed way, way down. And some of you might be like, "Really? That was still a lot." And it was, but not compared to 2018 or 2019. During those years, I was gone at least once a month, sometimes twice, and I had virtually no personal life. And honestly, this was due to a fair amount of escaping on my part because my relationship at home was so tenuous. So this year I was like, "Wow, it's different. I'm different, and a good different." So this year was busy, but there was actually more going on personally than professionally, which is a definite switch, and I'm gonna call it a happy one. So I sort of breezed over a significant life event crisis in March. So I know I opened that loop, and as I was reflecting, I'm like, like, this is really a fundamental change for me. At some point, I think I will have to tell the story. It was pretty traumatic, and I want to do it in a way that doesn't, um, you know, inflame or, um, reveal who the person was. But I do feel like I need to tell the story because I, I think for anyone who has experienced that kind of betrayal, like It changes you, you know? So another thing I noticed is that we've kind of hit a stride in Funnel Gorgeous. You know, we're really working on deepening and optimizing what we already have. And so it doesn't quite have the same energy of like everything's new and different. We did launch new things, always, that's fun, but the company doesn't feel new anymore, which I'm really proud of, you know? So, and same with Digital Insiders. So it just finished its 6th year. It's also in a very like healthy but uncomfortable phase of stabilization. And I think this is something that's not really celebrated in the internet marketing community because it can be boring. But if you want to build things that last a long time, you really do need to kind of stick through it. And in the internet marketing world, when, you know, they've got new companies and new things like at a, just a frenetic pace, the fact that Digital Insiders is going into its 7th year is really a testament to like the team I've built, the members that are inside of it, and also my commitment to the program. So I don't have the final P&Ls yet for the year, but based on estimation, it looks like Funnel Gorgeous is going to do $4 million again. And it has taken a lot of work and sweat to hold that revenue line 3 years in a row. We did it in 2021 and it felt like 2021 was kind of this hypermania buying year. So I wasn't surprised. But in 2022, I think we did like $3.7, $3.8. And so I thought, are we going to be able to do it in 2023? And we did. And you know, is it doubling growth? No. But the fact that it's stable there is, I'm just really proud of that. And it is not easy to do. And we've had to work on, you know, our operations and our team and all of this kind of stuff. And I really have a lot of people to thank for that. Emily is someone who was the CFO at Funnel Gorgeous, CFO at Pipeline, was really very helpful in us stabilizing our income, our finances, and also our team. So this year, another thing I noticed is that this year was really hard financially for so many businesses. I spent a lot of time coaching and helping people through hard times. In DI, I had a bunch of business owners leave as they grappled with the economy taking a dive, pivoting, leaving their business. It was like a hard year. It was really a hard year to kind of keep people's spirits up. A couple other things I noticed. I went to Disney World 4 times in 2023. That was actually less than I, I mean, that was less than I thought. Felt like I was there a lot, but each time was super significant. Cities I traveled to: Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Virginia, Vermont, New York, and Massachusetts. So one last thing that I can't even remember the timeline, but I launched a beautiful new website! And juliechenell.com is coded by Jeanie Sumner, designed by Kathy Olson, written by Ashlyn Carter, and photos by Erin Blackwell. And I am just so happy with how it turned out, so I hope you go give it a visit. So that is 2023 for me. Yes, there are a lot of things that I cannot say that I would like to, and as I said at the beginning, I really want to get back there. I am toying with some more like, you know, paid newsletters, broadcast channels, things where I can— I'm fine to be transparent, and I know that those things, you know, information still gets out. But at least if I force somebody to, uh, you know, have some sort of paywall, then I feel a little bit more comfortable. Because when I just blog and podcast and anyone and their mother can read or listen, and that has— it's been heard. And maybe I'll do a whole podcast episode on transparency and privacy as, uh, an internet marketing influencer at some point. Okay guys, I hope you have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening. And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until Till next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.