2016 has been another great year for me personally and for my business. I feel very blessed for everything I have and I still get excited and motivated about what’s to come. Ever since I started my business back in 2011 the main focus has to become financially independent of any debt. Including a house payment. This summer if everything goes as planned I will have achieved that dream of being 100% debt free!

Personal Life

Aside from being debt free, part of the reason I wanted to start a business was to have more time with my family and enjoy seeing my kids grow up. 2016 I thought would be the year I would quit my day job to have more time but as I approached my goal of becoming debt free I wanted to keep my income stream as high as possible to complete my goal as fast as possible. Other goals I had this year were to read and write more. I signed up for a service called Blinkist which basically breaks down books into 15 – 20 minutes reads. I love this service. I usually read around 3 titles a week. Also in the second half of 2016 I gave up social media for a short time to try to better my writing skills. I would say it worked. Every time I went to go waste time on social media I wrote instead. I was more productive at writing in those 30 days as I was the whole rest of the year. While I back on social media I now only check it a few times a day.

As with most everyone else I had the goal of becoming more fit and making better food choices. I had a big problem with staying consistent with this in 2016. In 2017 I plan to do a 30 day challenge to form a habit in both areas.

Business

My business grew 6% from the previous year and it has grown 132% from 2012. I think I found a way to break through a revenue plateau I have been fighting the last couple of years. If things go as predicted I should see a 15+% increase this year. I still remain a solo entrepreneur and I still have a day job. I don’t plan to change this in the immediate future but will review this every 3 months.

This year I did a major revamp of my flagship plugin, Coming Soon Page Pro, and made my own version of the WordPress customize to make edits in the plugin. I thinks it my best version of the plugin by a long shot and very proud of the work and performance of it. I also released a few other small plugins in an effort to increase my average revenue per user. This seems to be working. More experimenting in 2017.

I also released a platform independent Coming Soon Page builder which you can find at https://comingsoonpage.com This has for the most part has been a failure. With a WordPress product there a clearly defined marketing channels. When you venture outside this ecosystem they channels are more blurred and I’m not interested in doing paid ads at the movement. So for now I have focused that site to be freemium with the hope of organic growth, but it won’t be a focus this year.

2017 Goals

OK, so I’m going to change it up this year. While I am going to set yearly goals they will be generic. And to be honest most people all have the same yearly goals. To gain more wealth, become more fit, eat better, and in general become a better person, right.

This year I’m going to set more defined monthly goals and write about them each month in an effort to better achieve my yearly goals. This will also help me write more and find my voice which is a goal.

Here are my generic 2017 Goals:

• Consistently work out/ jog at least 3 times a week.
• Grow business by at least 15%
• Finish becoming debt free.
• Strategize a investment/retirement plan.
• Contribute more to my kids college funds.
• Never stop learning.
• Focus on learning Marketing better
• Review goals monthly and writing more about my experience on this blog.

January 2017 Goals

• Personal
• Start working doing 7 minute workout app in preparation for a Feb 30 challenge.
• Eat a salad for lunch at least once per week.
• Start monthly blogging on johnturner.blog
• Business
• Switch billing for SeedProd from manual to automated renewing.
• Start crazy heatmap data collecting on SeedProd.com in prep for Feb A/B testing.
• Release Form Add On for Coming Soon Pro
• Implement Unsplash search API in plugin and experiment with feature gating this in pricing plans
• Start weekly blogging on SeedProd.com