I’ve decided the 2023 year is ending minutes after it started. I assume age is what speeds up time but it’s starting to worry me that the years are passing so fast.

I like to do a yearly reflection to try to cement the big things that happened in the year. The one for 2022 was more generic than I wanted because I didn’t know how to talk intimately about what had happened in my life, but I linked it here in case you want to read.

So… 2023. It’s a strange year because it came after a life changing one. And so normally you don’t have two life changing years in a row, but the universe is drunk…so I did. But much of the work was internal. As I went through the calendar, I noticed this year to be slower than others. And that was an interesting insight in and of itself.

This will be a mish-mash of business and personal happenings.

{an audio of this post is available on my podcast here}

January 2023

Business wise, January was a blur. Cathy and I were gearing up for the Marketer’s Heart NOLA event and so there were a million things to design, build, and write.

We also did a mini launch of Easy Launch It!, re-recorded Funnel Rx to give it a facelift, and wrapped up our first year of True North.

On my personal business side (with Digital Insiders), it was a relatively good month. I didn’t realize 2023 was going to turn out to be a hard year financially…and not just for me, for many of my clients as well.

Personally, I was about 5 months past having signed and finished all the divorce proceedings. The majority of 2022 was stuck in divorce negotiations and so it was nice to leave that year behind and start fresh.

Ac and I took our youngest children to Vermont for a weekend, but other than that – he and I were both busy working and preparing for Marketer’s Heart.

February 2023

This was a crazy month! On February 3rd, Ac and I took off (in the car) for an epic road trip down to New Orleans. We stopped in Nashville and then made it to the conference site in anticipation for MHE. We were gone for a total of 11 days.

This was also my birthday month.

Marketer’s Heart was SO MUCH FUN and we sold another round of True North.

Coming back from that event, I was home for about a week before I turned back around and left for Dallas to attend Steve Sim’s Speakeasy.

In the background, I was working on a summit for all the members of Digital Insiders, which was to go live in March.

Personally I remember being very busy and a bit overwhelmed. It was so nice to have Ac attend with me at the MHE event, and it was the first time I was bringing him along for a business venture. I had a lot of past history with pain/arguments around business trips and combining family and work, so I was nervous. But he was amazing, and people took notice.

March 2023

On March 6th, we launched the DI mastermind room summit. That was a ton of work but it was a great success with over 10,000 signups, hundreds of VIP purchasers, and every single member of DI that participated got 100’s of new leads. You can still catch some of the replays here.

A few not so easy things happened this month as well.

It was the last day of the Mastermind room summit. I was hosting a VIP call with people who wanted to ask questions of the interviewees. I was simply facilitating the call and while one of the experts were talking, I noticed a new email had come in. In the subject line was all caps FOR JULIE’S EYES ONLY with a ton of exclamation points. And I saw it was from an old provider I was no longer working with.

I shouldn’t have read it on the call. But I did. Honestly I can’t go back and watch the recording because I can tell the moment I read it you can see it on my face. This provider was threatening to tell my entire client community all my “dirt” through our work together if I didn’t wire this person $50,000 by 5pm.

It was a Friday, March 10th at 2pm in the afternoon. I was at the police station by 4pm. It’s seared in my memory forever. Maybe someday I’ll tell the whole story.

Switching gears here slightly… business wise we knew that if we didn’t strengthen our infrastructure in FGF, we’d have trouble so March was a lot of internal structuring and operations. There wasn’t a lot of promotion happening.

April 2023

This month was pretty quiet. Business wise…more infrastructure. We were installing our own internal live chat for FGF, doing performance reviews, building a cancelation funnel, and more. We also were preparing for our spring round of Launch Gorgeous.

Personally, Ac and I took a trip to Disney with the kids and that was our first “partial-family” vacation. We had so much fun, and it was another example of just how well he and I work together as a team.

At the very end of April, Ac’s brother Willy, and his wife Cata – with their daughter Aby – came to the United States to visit and stayed with us at the farm.

May 2023

May was another crazy month but for different reasons. I hosted the DI Mastermind in New Haven at the Blake. Just days beforehand, I had a emergency family crisis that involved government people and temporary full custody until it could be sorted out. This was the second traumatic event in 2023 after the attempted extortion and I felt very raw. I spent several days crying and just unsure how I was going to cope.

The mastermind was epic (as always). We had over 100 people on a “listen in” ticket and about 50 members present for the week long mastermind.

In Funnel Gorgeous we taught the 3-part workshop series coaching inside of Launch Gorgeous.

June 2023

June was quiet. We were wrapping up Launch Gorgeous, school was ending for the kids, and I had a quick trip back to Dallas to speak at the High Level SaaS mastermind.

July 2023

In this month there were TWO solid weeks blocked for work. The first week was the Course Chemist Live Accelerator. A week long training for all the True North students. Inside of CCA, we helped people build frameworks and ideas for their courses, taught how to hack a sales page, and created all the assets necessary to pre-sell a course. In a week! I hope to do this again.

The very next week, I hosted around 17 people at my house for the week long CEO week. As always, hanging out with DIers is so much fun. We walked, talked, worked, and ate lobster rolls.

Otherwise, July was a lot of camps and kids and summertime stuff. Ac and I started to talk more seriously about finances, marriage, and where our relationship was heading. He let go of his apartment lease on June 30th (right around the 1 year mark of us dating).

A fun (random) fact that people don’t know. My house sits on 15 acres. The amount of work to do outside is staggering. Ac saw the price tag for just the mowing and leaf cleanup, and told me to cancel them because he would take it over. He was working 50 hours a week and trying to keep up with the lawn. It was crazy. He definitely had help from his brother and sister in law, as well as my dad. Between them all, I was able to save over $25,000 this season by not having to pay contractors.

It’s hard to explain how much I appreciate Ac’s work ethic, along with his family. I felt very supported.

August 2023

In August, I started the Million Dollar Grit podcast.

We took the kids to Martha’s Vineyard and then did a lazy trip to Disney World as a couple. I went back AGAIN two weeks later with Ellie as a graduation gift. There was a lot of vacation and Disney this month.

On the business side, when I wasn’t doing Voxers and audits with clients, I was working on the launch for Launch Gorgeous Challenge Edition.

September 2023

September was an interesting month. Cathy and I were deep into Launch Gorgeous. I also was prepping for my next mastermind in Miami. I did a 2 day workshop with Donald Miller on writing a book. And gasp… I started my book. Got 64 pages in.

Ac and I went to a Yankees game. Watched them lose. I also started to wonder if Ac was going to propose. 🫣 He went to my parents to tell them he was going to propose to me at some point by the end of the year.

Otherwise, September was the last quiet month of the year as the next three months were filled with travel and launching!

October 2023

October’s highlight was the High Level Summit in Dallas Tx. Cathy keynoted (and rocked) the stage. We also got our platinum award!

Tucked inside this month was a surprise launch of Scalable Coach Method. This was one of those “if we don’t do it now, we won’t do it” moments, and we put together a course and launch in a week. The idea had been marinating a long time, but it got pushed to the back burner. We did over $150k in sales in that first launch and I built curriculum in between Launch Gorgeous stuff and travel.

In my other business (Digital Insiders), I put an offer out to my list to do some financial training that related to ideas I wanted to include in my book. I got 14 people to sign up and started doing 1:1 coaching and saw people have a massive shift around income and revenue.

Personally…October was filled with a bunch of colds and strep, soccer games, Halloween, and school.

November 2023

November kicked off with a whirlwind trip to New Orleans to speak at Steve’s Speakeasy.

Ac and I were there barely a day and then we flew to Miami where I was hosting the 12th DI mastermind. We had over 65 members attend, and it was one of the best events we’ve had. We had tacos and dancing, oceanfront masterminding, pool time, and lots of aha’s!

We came back from Miami with a lovely cold, and Ac and I got to work decorating the house for Christmas. We hosted Thanksgiving, and then over at Funnel Gorgeous, we had an epic Black Friday sale that even earned us an award through Teachable.

I finished up my financial coaching, and took a nap. lol

December 2023

December is still in session so it’s not fair to recap it yet. But… a big event happened on December 2nd. Ac and I went to Disney and he proposed right in front of the castle during the fireworks.

On the business front, both in my personal business and in Funnel Gorgeous, there’s a lot of coaching and planning going on. Even though there’s no big launch, we’re gearing up for a very epic 2024!

A few things I noticed while I was writing this up…

I said it at the beginning but it bears mentioning… this year was not a crazy year in terms of events and speaking. I have slowed WAY WAY down. Some of you might be like, “Um… that was still a lot!” and yes, but not compared to 2018-2019. I was gone at least once a month (sometimes twice) and I had virtually no personal life. This was due to a fair amount of “escaping” because my relationship at home was so rocky.

This year was busy, but there was actually more going on personally than professionally, which is a definite switch from past years. A happy one.

I sort of breezed over a significant life event crisis in March that — if I’m being honest — has fundamentally changed me as a person. At some point, I think I need to tell the story. It was traumatic.

We’ve hit a stride in Funnel Gorgeous where we’re working on deepening and optimizing what we offer vs that “new startup” energy where everything is new and different.

Digital Insiders just finished its sixth year and is also in that very healthy but uncomfortable phase of stabilizing. For entrepreneurs, these periods can be boring, but they are necessary to go the distance. And in the Internet Marketing world, it’s very normal to switch things up constantly and at a frenetic pace, and the fact that Digital Insiders is going into its 7th year is a testament to the team I’ve built, the members, and my commitment to the program.

I don’t have the final P&L for the year, but it looks like Funnel Gorgeous has stabilized at $4m and it’s taken a lot of work and sweat to hold that revenue line three years in a row. I’m really freaking proud of that. We also hit 2000 users finally – three years into our SaaS.

The year was hard financially for so many businesses. I spent a lot of time coaching and helping people through hard times. In DI, a bunch of business owners left as they grappled with the economy taking a dive. It’s been a hard year in trying to keep spirits up.

I went to Disney World 4 times in 2023.

Cities I traveled to: Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Virginia, Vermont, New York, and Massachusetts.

There are so many things I cannot say that I want to. I used to be so open – crazily so – and as life has handed me crisis after crisis, I’ve gotten more private. I would like to share financial numbers, more personal insight into being a CEO in the Internet Marketing scene, my hot takes on the industry, etc. but gosh — I’m fragile. 🤣 I’ve toyed with a private password protected blog but maybe I’m being a sissy.

One idea I had was a paid newsletter or broadcast channel. I don’t mind being transparent, but I also don’t like to hand information out publicly anymore that could easily be thrown back in my face.

Side note: I cannot remember the month that I launched this BEAUTIFUL new website! But it was a near year long project. So grateful to Cathy, Jeane, Ashlyn, and Erin for their contributions. I’m so happy with it!

I hope you have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

xx Julie

Past Year in Review Posts –> 2022, 2021, A Decade of Lessons, 2020, 2019