Now, one thing that I think it's really nice to do before you do anything else is to think about what your goals are and these could be goals in terms of your work-life balance, in terms of the kind of things you want to be doing and, of course, in revenue.

So, I've made you a little workbook, worksheet, I would say, and just think about last year or this year up until now. What were the things that you enjoyed, what you didn't enjoy, and what worked well and what didn't work well? And then, what would you like to do more of in the coming year and what do you want to prioritize in your business?

Something that I find is that I don't always take the time to think about this and things just come along and you kind of get swept up in it and you realize that you would rather be doing something else. You also have to be honest, sometimes you need to just take on certain work to be able to make your monthly income. But it's always good to have an idea of where you would like to be going in an ideal world.

And that's why I also made the ideal week. If you're just running your own business, what would your ideal week look like? I mean, maybe you actually work in university one day a week, and you would like to continue that. That's fine. Add it on there. If you want to work seven days a week, maybe not. So think about what you would like to be doing.

For example, in my ideal week, I have Mondays and Fridays free. Mondays is to really work on the business, on strategy and to plan the rest of the week. And Friday would be to do whatever projects I want to do, to do some work if I need to or to do something nice like go for a hike. Very often my week does not look like what I would like it to, and I do work on Monday afternoons. I mean I see clients on Monday afternoons. Often my Fridays are taken up with catching up on things that I wasn't able to finish during the week. But I do try to keep at least one Friday a month available.

Having this in my mind of what I wanted to do really helped me to be able to set the boundaries to say no, I don't see any students on Fridays.

And then lastly revenue goal setting. I think this is a really important thing to think about because as we often just work without thinking, okay, how much money do I actually want to earn? How much do I need to earn? They may be different. What you need to live on may be different to what you would like live on for your ideal lifestyle.

If you are an auto entrepreneur, of course, you know exactly how much you're going to deduct for your charges to get your net income. If you have a company like me, it's a lot more complicated because you can pay yourself, but in the case of an SAS, you have to pay 70% charges or something crazy. In that case you're looking at not such a regular monthly income, but if you look at it over the year, you can think, okay, if I have enough profit, I can give myself these dividends and how do I get to that point?

If you're an auto-entrepreneur, it's much more easy. You can think about your average monthly goal income and then you can break that down by thinking about, what are my services? How many of them would I need to sell and at what price to reach my monthly goal? And again, let's be realistic because you, at the beginning, you may well have other work, working in university, working for other organismes de formation. And that's totally fine. There's nothing wrong with that until you can manage to do it on your own.

I worked one day a week in university until 2020, and before then I also worked for another organisme de formation, as well as working in the university and working for myself.It was only from 2020 that I was able to really live on my company. I do work for other organismes de formation now, but not organismes de formation en langues, because the price is very different. We will talk about that later in the course.

So go ahead, have a look at this worksheet, work out some goals for yourself, and then think about how you are going to reach those goals. Hopefully this time next year, you will have reached them.

Downloads

• Goal setting worksheet