If You're Planning for 2026 You Have To Watch This First

So this is not a YouTube video that I'm supposed to make because it's not optimized for views. It's not flashy. It's personal. It's too long. But sometimes these videos are exactly the ones that I want to make because in this video I'm going to be giving you my 2025 annual review. Now, if you want to know the method behind this review, then you need to watch the wrap video that I just published. Because that is going to tell you how I think through my annual review so that I can better preview the year ahead. But this is my personal annual review and it won't apply to all of you. In fact, it may only apply to me. I'm making it because one, I want to do it, and two, because I hope that for some of you, it'll make you pause and reflect and think about what you're doing, how you're living as a person, as an entrepreneur, as a creator, as as a parent, as a spouse, whatever it may be for you, that's a lot of the things that I'm gonna talk about today. And I just wanna thank you for watching. Now, if you've been watching my channel for a while, I've been doing these for a number of years and probably you look forward to these a little bit. I know people that I follow online, I'd like to hear how the year went in their own words. And so if that's you and you're just here to hang out and hear me talk about what happened this year, then I just know that I really appreciate you and please say hi in the comments. Hey, real quick, if you want a really simple, printable, easy-to-follow template for this wrap review, all you have to do is click the link in the description below. You'll go to a site, you just enter your email so then I can send you the PDF. It's really simple, easy to do. I mean, obviously you can just look at like, this is, you know, 4 sections over 2 pages in the Bullet Journal. But if you want this and also like a couple of follow-up emails just to kind of coach you and encourage you through the rap review process, click the link in the description below. Okay, back to the video. Now, just so you know, I'm also releasing this as a podcast. Now, as a YouTuber, I hope that you keep watching it on YouTube, but if you would rather listen to it, I'm going to put the link in the description below. It'll already be out. You can listen to it in any of your favorite podcast players. Might start doing the podcast a little bit more in 2026, but not making a commitment to that just yet. But right now, I just want to sit with you for a bit. I want to talk about what happened this year. Some of the wins, the results, how I feel in alignment for the year, uh, and my life, and what I might be doing differently, how I might pivot or make more progress going into next year. Okay. Just to let you know, the way that I do my annual review is following the WRAP method that I came up with, and this stands for wins, results, alignment, and pivot. And I write all of this down in my bullet journal, and I'm going to be basically going off these notes. With you. I've also used my field notes a little bit to make like short, short and sweet notes. I did this on the plane coming back from Austin last week, but first and foremost, wins. What went well this year? How am I building momentum? What can I appreciate about the year? And for me, the biggest win was making a successful move as a family from Nashville down to Jacksonville, where I grew up. I won't get into all of it why, but we moved to be closer to family. We've got 4 kids, and we landed in a great neighborhood and a great street. It's wonderful to be near my, my parents, and one of my brothers and one of my sisters here in Jacksonville. So that, that has been, that has been really great. The other thing that was a big win is that I hit my revenue goal for this year. When I came into 2025, I was no longer working at the agency that I had, that I was helping run. And my goal was like, I'm going all the way back in to working self-employed and doing this, having to like, every dollar that came in was a dollar that I had to go out and get. I've got some great referrals and people hooked me up a couple of times. Uh, yeah. Through my experience and my network. But every dollar that came in was one that would— I needed to go earn. And my— I told my wife at the beginning of 2025, is like, if I can't make $150,000 this year, then I'm gonna go find a job in 2026. And she was like, okay, here you go. And in 2024, I made about $130,000. So I was already looking at having about an 18 to 20% increase in my revenue. Y'all, I'm over like $210,000 this year, and that's my biggest year ever as an ever, no matter where I've worked. The first place I ever worked, I earned $32,000 my first year. I had a month this year where I did $32,000. And y'all, just if that— this has been a long road for me. And so it feels really good to break the $200K barrier, if you will. And that, that is still even saying it out loud, feel it feels really good. The other thing that was a big win for this year, and there's, there's so many things, but I'd just be talking for so long. But growing closer to God is the other big win for this year. I have read my Bible consistently. I've prayed. I've always gone to church consistently. But for me, like, church was pretty often something that I just did on Sundays. And like, I would try and live a good, godly Christian life, but I wasn't reading my Bible consistently. I wasn't praying consistently. I wasn't in a small group. And this year I've done all three of those things. Now, if you're watching this or you're listening to this and you're thinking, oh, Any correlation there, Matt? You've been like, you know, diving into the word more and you're making more money. Maybe God is blessing thee. And yes, I do think God is blessing me, but I don't, I don't go into a relationship with God or a relationship with, with anyone thinking like, hey, if I do this thing, I'm going to get, I'm going to get a pretty good kickback on, on the other side. Uh, that's not why you're in a relationship with anyone. Much less someone that you call Lord and Savior. So that has been— I call it a win because it's true. That's something that has been a huge blessing to me this year. Another thing is that you're kind of a silly thing, but another fun win this year is that I got to play in this like church softball league with my brother Neil. That was a lot of fun. All the guys were really cool and I enjoyed playing a lot. That was very enjoyable, even though we lost in the championship game and I tweaked my hammy. That was less, less fun. The other part is that, you know, as a father, as a husband, love my family. We're just growing really strong together. You know, people still freak out. We get emotional. I lose my temper sometimes, but I— they're just like kids, wife. They're all so wonderful. And I am just so grateful that we have 4 kids. We had started earlier, we might have more kids. I think we're done with 4 kids. But that's a big win. Is also the other part, and we'll talk about this a little bit in the results, is that I, even though my revenue went way over what, what my goal was for this year, and that's a huge blessing, my work did— my actual working hours was not at a— did not increase at the same rate as the work. So I still most weeks only worked 35, 40 hours. Yeah, a couple, literally just a couple of weeks here and there up to 50 hours. But that was not common. Whereas in the past, like 50 has been a lot more of the standard and now it's more in the 35 to 40 range. So a lot of big wins this year. I will say I miss, miss Nashville a lot. We went back there a few weeks ago and just see old friends, old places, old routines. I will say, like, I don't miss it getting dark at 4:30 in the winter, or the fact that it's like 65 degrees and sunny out here and it's like 25 degrees and cloudy in Nashville. That's just, you know, that's just part of the charm that I don't really miss. But do miss my church, my friends, our family that's there, and, you know, just all my old routines and places. But a lot of wins, a lot of blessings this year, a lot to build on and be motivated about going into next year. Okay, now let's talk about the results. So we start with wins and then we go into results. And what results are in your review is looking and saying, what did I plan for? What was my intention? What were my goals at the beginning of the year? And now what are the results of my work at the end of the year? It's usually— this is pretty straightforward, but I want to give you a warning and a bit of encouragement before you do the results part specifically, is approach your results as a reporter. So somebody who's kind of a third party, just like observing rather than judging. So be a reporter, not a judge. That will save you a lot of heartache and self-loathing because a lot of us, myself included, if you go into this like a judge, which is very common, you'll think to yourself like, ah, for example, one of the results is like this YouTube channel. I wanted to grow to at least 150,000 this year and I'm gonna get to maybe maybe 120,000, which is still decent, but way off what I hoped it would be. So the results, if I just looked at this as a judge, I was like, man, you failed, sucked, did not even get halfway. But if you look at this like a reporter, you can say, okay, well, that's true that Matt did not hit the 150,000 subscriber goal. But I can also see that, you know, he spent a lot more time on client work, which led to increased revenue overall. Can also see that in general, his click-through rate, his retention time, his titles and thumbnails, his average views per month all went up this year. They're higher than— literally higher than they've ever been. And so even though the subscribers weren't quite, quite there, a lot of the metrics and the improvement of the channel is very specific and tangible and data-driven. But total subscribers were not there. And there's also, again, like I'm approaching this like a reporter. I can also say like, oh, well, you spent a lot more time on client work, spent some more time on the Hey Creator community trying to get it up and running. These are just things that a reporter will see that like a judge in this sense would just kind of like check some things off and be like, ah, you didn't make it. And I feel bad. Instead, I can see what's working and then, you know, not to skip ahead, think about how we can pivot, how I can pivot or make more progress going into next year. So that's the YouTube results. The like financial part in terms of revenue, I already talked about that in the wins. My goal was $150,000. My stretch goal was $200,000. I've gone over $200,000 and might hit like $220,000 or $230,000 depending on how the end of the year goes. But that was a really— that was obviously a really great result, which gives me a lot of momentum and a lot of motivation going into next year. The other thing that was a bit of a, a bit of a miss is that I had a, I had a goal this year to diversify more of my revenue streams away from clients and more towards coaching and like courses and other products. And at the beginning of the year, I probably had 80% of my revenues through clients and Now I should have done the numbers right before this, but now it's probably closer to 65, maybe 70%. So it's lower, but I had hoped to get down to like 50/50 at the end of 2025. And still it's well tilted into the, you know, into the client side in terms of revenue. But what that has helped me do, and I'll talk again, I'll talk about this more in the pivot, is that it helps me see like, okay, what are some opportunities that I have to make, make a small pivot, maybe a big pivot and replace more of my client revenue with coaching revenue. And like I said, I'll talk about that more in the pivot section. Um, another thing that was really good is that I took more vacation this year than I have in the last few years. We took a few trips as a family, uh, which were really fun. And the other part is just the move itself. I wouldn't call that a vacation. But there was a solid 4 weeks where I was definitely working closer to 30 hours a week than 40 hours a week, some, some weeks only like 20 hours. That kind of played into the YouTube side as well. Because, you know, when a client is paying you to do things, you have to do those things and be like, oh, well, you know, I'm moving and I have this YouTube video to do. That's a good way to lose a client. And I did not want to lose any clients, especially through something like that. And so those 20 hours would just go to clients and I wouldn't make YouTube videos. But what has— what made me really encouraged is that even during that time, that those 4 weeks where I basically only worked part-time, I still had, I still had good revenue. And I was able to realize that, okay, I can take a little bit more time off, I can go a little slower. And more specifically, and this kind of goes back to when in terms of like family dynamics and growth is that I was able to, like, be present and be a leader for my family, even during a year with, with a lot of change and a lot of things that could have thrown us off. Certainly we had, we had our ups and downs during this year, but overall, we're really happy with where we are, where God has placed us and what, what we're doing in our day to day, week to week, month to month. The last thing I'll say about results is that I probably still have too many things going on. I had dinner with some friends in Austin last week and they're like, so are you doing the Hey Creator community or the YouTube channel? Are you working with clients? Are you doing newsletter coaching? Which of these things are you like doing? And I'm like, yes, yes, all of them. Each of them. And they kind of looked at me, cuz like in my mind all these things kind of feed each other. But I've also come to the realization that if I really want to like go past this kind of $200,000, $250,000, uh, earning and get up closer to like $300,000, $400,000, $500,000, $1 million and beyond, it's most likely that I have to start to focus on just one like, and like 1.5 things to be able to really focus and scale and give those things, that specific thing, all the energy that it needs in order to grow. I know that I'm kind of like, I'm putting a limit on myself when I, when I stretch myself and kind of give my attention to too many things. Again, that's the reporter in me just kind of observing that. I don't know what I'll do with it yet, because it's hard to let go of things. But let's go ahead and talk about the alignment. So that is the third, the third of the four: wins, results, alignment. Let's talk about alignment. What you're doing is asking yourself, is the work that I'm doing, is the life that I'm living, is the things that I'm— are the things that I'm doing every single day, are they in alignment with the person that I want to become, with the life that I want to live, with the work that I want to be doing? So you have to ask yourself kind of this hard, almost unanswerable question. And I would recommend like wins and results. These are things that I do just like sitting at the desk or sitting at the dinner table or a coffee shop. And it's things that you can write down. They're a little bit more tangible and something that you can point to. It's a little bit more analytical, like, hey, where are the wins? Well, I can think about these things. Well, what are the results? Well, if I look back at what my goals were at the beginning of the year, I can say this is what the results were. Alignment is really asking yourself the hard question of, man, is this really what I want to be doing? And even if it is like something that you want to be doing, and hopefully it is something that you want to be doing, and you are pursuing a life that is meaningful to you, but you still need to ask yourself the question, am I doing things that matter to me? And the thing that I believe a lot of people get wrong is that this is a type of question that can often lead to a lot of dissatisfaction and something that makes you think like, ah, I'm not, I'm not fully aligned. And yeah, I need to just completely change my life. And for some of you, you may be watching this and you know, you kind of, you got to change your life. You got to do some different things. Others, you may like feel a little bad or be like, oh, well, I'd really love to be doing this type of work, but I'm stuck. I'm stuck in this other kind of work. But let's just talk about work specifically, because I'm not a relationship coach. But when I am considering what different type of work that I might need to be doing, like say pivoting away from as much client work or to take an even, an even wider pivot, a more extreme one, like I can't stop thinking about wanting to like make content for dads and like connect with other men and dads more. And I've been able to do some of that. But like that would be a pretty extreme pivot. But I'm asking myself quite often, am I in alignment with the kind of person that I want to become, the type of father, the type of husband that I want to be, and the kind of life that I want to be living? And when you're doing this, and this is the alignment piece especially, this, this RAP method that I'm giving you, this is something that I recommend doing, if not every week, at least every month. Because the alignment piece, especially if you just try and think about the whole year in one, like in one big blur, it's a little hard. It's a little hard to tell, uh, if you're consistently in alignment, but if you're consistently asking yourself this question every week or at least every month, now you have, say monthly, 11, you know, going into December, you have 11 different monthly reviews to look at. If you've been doing this weekly, maybe you have, you know, over 20 or 30 weekly reviews you can look at as well. We are asking yourself the same question. What are my— am I in alignment? And then you can look at, you can read back all over all those. It won't take you very long and you can start to feel again, like, this is what I was feeling in the middle of summer. This is what I was feeling, you know, January, third week of January when like I just wasn't hitting my New Year's resolutions anymore. More? Am I really in alignment? So for me, I do feel very much in alignment with what I want to be doing as a— from a work perspective, you know, with the exception of wanting to like focus even more on YouTube. And I feel really good about where my family's at as well. When I am— the other thing that I wrote is that I have a good ratio of work that interests me for good money in a very family-friendly amount of time each week.. And I kind of keep coming back to that because even if I'd rather be doing some more YouTube videos or like personal writing right now, there's a book project I've been toying around with. I'd like to have some more time to do that. But if it's at the expense of say like cutting 50% of my revenue out, no way, no sir, no thank you. Because that would be out of alignment for the type of father and provide— father, husband, and provider that I want to be. And so when you're consistently asking yourself this alignment question specifically, it's not something that you get to the end of the year and you have to like guess at, or you have to be a prisoner of the moment, or just like recency bias, like, hey, how have I been feeling, you know, since Thanksgiving? You're able to just look at it over the course of a year and say like, okay, I can read back through these 12, 20, 30 entries and see how I've been aligned with kind of work that I want to do, the type of person that I want to be, and the life that I want to live. Okay, the fourth and final step of my annual wrap review is pivot. And in this step, I'm like building on everything. So I'm thinking about like, what were the wins? What were the results? Am I in alignment? And then finally, when I have all of that information, I can really think to myself, okay, what kind of pivots or how— what kind of progression do I need to make in the new year in order to have more success or to do more of the things that matter to me. And what I wrote down is coming back to that part of the results that I mentioned at the end, that until I start to focus more on a, a specific thing, or at least fewer things than I am right now, and my earning potential and some of my growth online, as an entrepreneur, as a personality and a YouTuber even will be limited. So I, like, I can still earn, I can still earn more, like I'm going to talk more about other pivots that I can make in the business that should like make some positive impact. But there's only so far that I'll be able to get until I start to focus on one thing. Now, the pivot for me that I'm aiming towards, let's just call this a very slow pivot, perhaps it's like YouTube, YouTube's everything for me in terms of my goals, my long-term ambition. I am very bullish on YouTube. I love making videos. I love connecting with you. I love, I love everything about YouTube and also where it's going. I believe if you could build your platform on just one service, then I would make it YouTube. I mean, as much as I love newsletters, and I do, I think they're 1 and 1A. And if I could only do one, then it would be YouTube because I just, I love making videos more than I love writing newsletters. But I'm not going to get into all that right now. And so the pivot for me is just to continue to make more progress and get better and better at YouTube. And yes, I continue to want to add subscribers to the channel, but just as much as of that, I want to make meaningful videos that are really well done. That's good titles, thumbnails. This year in 2025, I've done better than I ever have. I've been more intentional than I ever have about title, thumbnail, hook, first 60-second, first 60-second intro. With the exception of this video, not— this is the outlier, but I already told you this. I already told you all that at the beginning, but this is something that I'm going to continue to put a lot of time, resources, and energy into because I believe in it so much. The other thing that I'm going to be pivoting on a little bit in, in the next year is setting up a paid ads funnel. This is something that I've always kind of avoided, but like for better or for worse, probably for worse, advertising, especially for even products, channels, newsletters, subscribers. That's just something that if you want to grow a little bit more, then you gotta, you gotta play the game. Now the good news for me, and if you're watching this and you're like thinking about being an entrepreneur in your own right, then the, the advantage that I have besides having an audience that I've built, you know, over 10+ years is that I do have products and I do have things to sell. So the idea for this is that, just to put it very simply, and I don't understand this as well as I should, that's why it's a pivot and it's something to progress and learn more about in the new year, is that basically if you can get an email subscriber for $3, $4, like that's kind of on the high side, but let's just even say $5 to make it high. Now let's say that I spend, $1,000 a month on advertising. That's probably pretty low, but just go with me on the math. And I hope— like Sam Parr always says, don't do math live. Here I go. I'm just very okay at math. But if I'm spending $5 per subscriber and I spend $1,000, that means I have 200 subscribers. Now I also have Analog Action, which retail normal price, $250. Let's just say that for new subscribers, I discounted $50. So it's $200 $200. Well, all I need is for 5 of those 200 new subscribers to buy the course within 30 or 60 days to start to make up the amount of money I spent that month to bring everyone in. You see how that kind of works? So I spend $1,000, but I have a $200 product. So out of those 200 new people that came in, I need to nurture them and get them to buy my product, you know, within a relatively short amount of time to then replace the money that I spent on the ads. So if I can do that consistently, that basically means that even if I just break even, I'm at least increasing my overall newsletter subscriber number and I'm giving myself infinite time to be able to sell them on something down the road. And even if I don't sell to that person specifically, even if they never buy anything, if they're consistently opening emails, then eventually, like right now my email list is about 20,000. It's going to get to 30,000. It's going to get to 40,000. It's going to get to 50,000. It's going to get to 100,000 people. And then people will start to advertise with me to reach those 50,000, 100,000 people. And so these days, um, you can try and grow organically and it is still very possible. But it's also like you're kind of just pulling gas on the fire if you can get paid ads figured out. And that's something that I'm working on. That's one of my big pivots. The other thing that is kind of a pivot for me, and I mentioned this earlier, but one of the things that I'm, that I started doing this year was more specific, like in-depth newsletter coaching. And what I'm doing with that is that there's a group of people, 10-week program. Every single week you write a newsletter and every single week I give you inline edits and feedback on how to improve your newsletter so that more people open it and read it. And more importantly, that more people buy from you. And so I've been working in newsletters for over 10 years. I worked with a bunch of great people, including Ryan Holiday and Dan Go and Justin Welsh and many, many, many others. Michael Hyatt, Amanda Goetz, Susan Cain. Michael Easter, a lot of great people that I've been fortunate to work with. So I've helped them and I've seen what works for them, and I've applied a lot of my learnings directly to the people who are in this program. So if that sort of thing, if you just like, not really promoting it here on the channel because it's not productivity, but if you're interested in having me help you directly on your newsletter, just click the link in the description below and you'll actually get a free training that you can check out and kind of get a feel for how I teach newsletters. But Enough about that. That's the other big pivot because to me, if I get, if I am able to do like 3 groups, 3 cohort groups next year, then that will actually replace the majority of my client work. And so if I can stay consistent on doing newsletter coaching and YouTube videos along with the Hey Creator community as something that I'm just like, helping people with, then that feels like something that's really exciting for me going into next year. What I love about an annual review is that it gives me the opportunity to look back on the year that was so that I can look forward to the year that is to come with more information than I would've normally had. Too many people, myself included for a number of years, just look forward to the year ahead and be like, oh, you know what? What do I want to do next year? How do I want to improve? What could make it better? And those are good questions to be asking. But, but if you don't have the information from last year to like help inform you about what is possible next year, then you're going to make inaccurate estimations of your goals. And when you do that, you're more likely not to achieve them, which is depressing. And why people like, you know, quit with their goals too early. Like I can say specifically, one of the things that I'm going to be more, I'm going to be more careful about going into the new year is that I probably won't set a 50,000 subscriber new subscriber goal. I'm going to hit about 18 to 20,000 subscribers this year. So and publishing, I didn't count, should have counted, 30 to 35 videos. Okay, so if I increase my videos by like 10 or 15, which is basically like, you know, 20 to 30%, could I increase my number of subscribers 20 or 30%? So if I make 40 to 50 videos, like a weekly video, could I then like get closer to 30,000 subscribers? That's a much better guess instead of just like, ah, I kind of did that last year, like, ah, 50,000. I had no reason for that other than I was just going for it. But now this year I've gone through and I'm like, okay, I will need to still be intentional with my time. I've built a lot of momentum. Let's shoot for 30,000 subscribers. Same thing with my, with my revenue. Like, okay, let's make the goal next year $250,000 as the baseline and $300,000 as the stretch goal. And I can know that now because like, obviously, I track how much money I make. But now I can look at and say, okay, if I get these paid ads going, then that's going to be an increase because I'm going to have a more consistent like product, product revenue. And if I get all my newsletter coaching going, well, okay, if I get 50 people at the price that it is, that's going to take care of about half of it as well. Great, great. I can do that. So I love doing annual reviews simply because if you're all about making, uh, goals that are realistic, uh, realistic and achievable and still like stretching yourself a little bit, nothing will help you set a better goal than knowing how the last year's goals were performed and giving you the information that you need. So those 4 steps— wins, results, alignment, and pivot— those are the only 4 questions that you need to ask yourself when you do an annual review. I'd love to know, uh, what you think about this system and how it applies to you. And if it's something that you will do in the new year or at the end of this year, I'd love to hear from you about it. If you want a really simple template to follow, all you have to do is click on the link in the description below. You'll be able to print it out, or just at least just like look at it and be able to copy it into your bullet journal. I mean, seriously, this is, this is all I have right here. It's just a 2-page spread. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next video.