CEO Retreat Recap: 2024 Revenue & My Strategic Plan for 2025

Hey Friend!

Today, it’s just you, me, and my lukewarm coffee as I share with you what happened at my annual CEO Retreat. I have no plan for how this conversation will go because I want to talk to you as my BFF.

Imagine we’re hanging out on the patio at my favorite coffee shop, Meraki. The weather is perfect and you asked me, “How did your CEO Retreat go this year? What are you planning for 2025?”

I want to answer you the way I would one of my closest friends and discuss my dreams, goals, and fears for the next twelve months.

What is a CEO Retreat?

Five years ago, my friend Chelsi Jo and I met for our first CEO Retreat. We just sat and dreamed. We dreamed about what our businesses could become. There were conversations about:

• What God had in store for us
• The problems we faced growing a team
• What a multi-six-figure business looked like
• The growing pains as our revenue increased

Something incredible happened and we said we should have a CEO Retreat every year. Grab a pen and paper and let’s dig deeper into what happened at my CEO Retreat and what you can learn from it for your business. Let’s do this!

The Second CEO Retreat

The next year we met, we had more structure and looked at the revenue from the prior year. There was more of a structured plan for the action items we would tackle over the next twelve months, such as what we would do each month. But we didn’t have words for it yet. There were no buckets for it. We didn’t have a process for the CEO Retreat, but things were coming together.

The framework comes into focus

By the third year, we had a lot of clarity over the framework of our CEO Retreat. We followed that framework and for the first time invited our mutual friend Polly Payne to join us.

For a few years, Polly had been in a mastermind with us. We asked her to join our CEO Retreat. She brought a lot of wisdom to the table about how we could structure things differently. We could use spreadsheets and tools to make some of our calculations more productive and quicker.

The CEO Retreat Grows

The next year we brought our OM’s, or operations managers. And this time, in our fifth year, we had six people in the room, the three CEOs, and our three OM’s. It was amazing! We continued to refine and grow this process. God is so fun because everything is always on His timetable.

All three of us have been asked, “How can we be a part of this? How can we come to your CEO Retreat?”

We feel like there’s something God is doing at a much bigger level with these CEO Retreats but it’s not there yet. He’s taking us through an evolution of iterations to make it what it’s meant to be. We are excited about what the future holds for the CEO Retreat.

So, that’s what it is and how it was born.

CEO Retreat Topics

At this point, the CEO Retreat is a five-day experience. So far, we fly to my friend Chelsi Jo in Arizona each year. I mean, come on! It’s Arizona in December!

Can you dream with me for a minute? One of the things on my ten-year dream board is to have a house in Gilbert, Mesa, or Agrotopia, Arizona. There’s an adorable little pocket of Gilbert, Arizona called Agrotopia. It has my dream house inside of it. I want to snowbird there in the winter. It’s the best!

Back to our time together in Arizona – we get busy in this incredible co-working space. We have amazing food, and we dive into the depths of our businesses:

• Operations
• Marketing
• Student Successes
• Problems
• Pain points
• Team dynamics
• Culture

And everything in between! We uncover any problems that need to be solved, and any opportunities that need to be realized so that we can walk away with a clear action plan for how to grow over the next twelve months.

Growth Does Not Always Mean Rainbows and Sunshine!

Let’s walk through how this experience was for me. I know my listeners are curious about my life and business behind the scenes. So I want to pull back the curtains and walk you through where I’m going next year, what my plans as a company are, and talk about some of the problems we’ve been facing. Here’s the truth.

It’s not all rainbows and sunshine when you hit a certain dollar amount in your company!

Let me be very clear, there are growing pains at every level. It doesn’t necessarily get easier as you grow your revenue. And the more team you grow, the more people you have to moderate, mitigate, and mediate for. Perhaps that’s a belief you have.

I’ve come to understand God’s hand in my problems and growing pains. I’ve been able to recognize what’s self-induced versus what’s an opportunity for growth. Opportunity for growth is never comfortable. I’ll get to that in a moment.

CEO Retreat Topic #1: Revenue Recap & Reflection

On the first day, we went through our revenue recap for 2024. Wow, from a gross revenue perspective, we had our most successful year yet! We hit seven figures in twelve months! We’ve done that before but it’s always been from March to March – from a big event to a big event in the calendar year.

When I became an entrepreneur fifteen years ago, that was the number, one million dollars. It just seemed like a big audacious dream number that I would never hit.

Let me be clear. Making seven figures at the top gross revenue does not make me a millionaire. It does not mean that I make all of that money.

• That money goes to my company and pays my team of nine people
• A lot of the money goes to Uncle Sam
• A lot of the money goes to donations and tithing

When people talk about big, juicy numbers in their companies, it’s typically the top-line number, and that’s not the number that people take home. However, I do make a salary.

I don’t want you to be disillusioned about the success people have when they share that with you. I’ve always been honest with you about the growth of my company, the numbers, and the revenue.

Behind the Business series

Last year, we had a Behind the Business Series where I went through in excruciating detail about my company because I want you to know what’s possible so you’ll have realistic expectations.

Being a CEO is hard sometimes but it’s worth it. And the blessings on the students that we serve and the people we employ are beyond my wildest imagination. I would never dream of another path. This is the path God has for me. I can’t believe I get to walk in it.

But it doesn’t mean that it’s just all roses and sunshine when you hit a big number. As far as revenue is concerned, we did have a hugely successful year.

Simplifying my business

From a business perspective, the other cool win for me in 2024 is that we simplified all of our products and the things we are doing.

For a long time, I was a one-on-one coach. Then I added two courses to my coaching, Clarify Your Calling and Podcast Pro University. That evolved into coaching, two courses, PLUS group coaching with Podcast to Profit. It wasn’t hard but I have never loved selling a bunch of stuff. It’s complicated with so many funnels to maintain.

That is why I teach you guys in Podcast to Profit to create one core offer until get you past six figures with that. Because it’s proven, that the more complicated and the more stuff you put in the world, the less successful you’re going to be.

My business was at a crossroads

For the past twelve months, I still sold Podcast Pro University and Podcast to Profit but I found myself at this crossroads. What do I want to sell? What’s truly the solution? And all arrows pointed to Podcast to Profit. For the first time, I got clear and permitted myself to go all in on Podcast to Profit.

If people want to make money online from a podcast, you can’t stop by just launching the podcast.

We came up with solutions like bundling the courses when people purchase and things like that. But from the front end, this is what I sell. This is what I stinking do. It felt really good to let go of some of those other offers that I needed in order to grow into where I am today.

Dipping My Toe into YouTube

The other really big initiative we did in 2024 was launching a YouTube channel. The reason we did this was not because my podcast wasn’t working. My podcast is generating ninety percent of my revenue! We made more revenue than we’ve ever made before. Let’s be very clear about that.

It’s not that our blog isn’t working. Our blog drives eight to fifteen thousand unique users to my website every month. That’s great!

It’s because I have a team of people who are taking care of all the small things. I’ve had to relinquish control and that’s a whole conversation in and of itself. That alone could be a thirty-day series.

What’s possible with a team?

I now have people to help me create optimized results in my long-form content. The podcast is simple. I record! At this point, I hired Helen who was one of our previous interns. She takes care of all the podcast production:

• Editing
• Uploading
• Show notes, etc.

I have interns who do my blogging by repurposing podcast episodes into blog posts. The Pinterest intern is sharing to Pinterest. All of these things have grown and become an evolution of what’s possible in a company.

For those of you who think, “I can’t afford any help.” Can you trade? Are people interested in coaching with you or taking your program in exchange for part-time work with you? We still do that today. People who want to take Podcast to Profit but aren’t in the position to pay for it can intern for us. It’s a fantastic opportunity!

Time to test YouTube

Anyway, we got to this point where we asked, what’s next? For me, what’s next is not creating weird reels on Instagram. I’m not going to pour my time, energy, and money into short-form content. So what’s the only other long-form content that’s left? It’s YouTube.

I decided at my last CEO Retreat that I was going to test YouTube. We started the channel in February. We have eight to ten months under our belt. For the first couple of months, I was fiddling around with YouTube. It’s fun and I’m having a great time.

The cool thing about it is you can take a long-form video and run it through software to create a bunch of YouTube Shorts. My team then repurposes the YouTube Shorts onto Instagram and Pinterest.

Has it worked? Absolutely not! I think we had one application come in from YouTube in 2024. The amount of time, energy, and money it takes to do YouTube, blows my mind. If anybody is telling you that YouTube is as easy as podcasting, it’s not! Just ask my video editor who spends six hours on a twelve-minute video.

Not everything turns to gold!

I’m sharing this with you because not everything we touch turns to gold. Testing is testing. The lesson I want you to take away from this is it’s okay for something not to work right away. It’s normal.

I have a very successful company. I’m a well-versed speaker. But it’s been fifteen years of perfecting and refining my craft. I’m great at online business but my YouTube channel stinks!

It’s okay. It’s fine for you to sit in the messy middle, to keep learning and refining. I’ve worked with two YouTube coaches who helped me out. I did all the things they said but we didn’t see any growth.

My point is we’re doing all the right things. So at this point, what it comes down to is patience and trust. And knowing my content is helping people. If it’s helping only ten people, it’s still worth it.

And I love it when God reminds me of the trenches. I’ve been out of the trenches for a hot minute and it was time to get back in. Now I’m over in the YouTube trenches.

Stay with podcasting

What do I recommend for you to do? I do not recommend that you do YouTube! I recommend that you stay with podcasting until your show has over one hundred to five hundred thousand downloads. And is producing five to ten thousand dollars consistently in revenue.

Stay with podcasting before you ever consider stacking another long-form content on top. “But why, Stef? It’s just repurposing.” No, it’s not! There is no such thing as just repurposing. It’s work, time, and money. Please do not dilute your efforts until you have the bandwidth and capacity to do so.

CEO Retreat Topic #2: Wins for 2024

Win #1: My First Keynote Speech

I did my first huge, live keynote speaking engagement. Shout out to my friend Lisa who gave me the opportunity. She encouraged me even though I wanted to cry but I did it and it was amazing. That led to my next speaking engagement, which led to a couple more smaller ones.

All in all, I’m very proud of myself. Public speaking in person was something I was terrified of. I have quite a few episodes about that in my podcast catalog. It’s under Guides. To search the complete catalog, type Control F. It’s an incredible tool.

Win #2: Writing a Book

I also wrote a book and I submitted it to an agent who did nothing with it! I’m proud of myself for that because it was a lot of work. Right now, I don’t know what I’m going to do with the book. Because it’s God’s book. I already told the Lord, “Sweet Jesus, if you would like this book to be in the world, please force my hand because everything inside of me is avoiding that.”

I hope it’s fun for you to know that I also struggle with what to do with something. It’s like a dance to know whether it’s God’s timing yet. Is that why I don’t feel the push and presence to go from God, or is it that I’m afraid of something?

CEO Retreat Topic #3: Cash Flow Audit

We then did a cash flow audit and had dinner together. Amazing! The next day, my friends and I did this photoshoot together. It was a nice, fun way to break up the time.

Over the next two days, we began working on 2025. I want to share with you how to know with clarity what you’re going to do next in your company.

You have to know what worked, and what didn’t work, audit, and drill down on the pieces of your business that light you up and bring in the revenue.

We identified that and I came up with four core strategies I’m going to do in 2025.

Profitable Podcast Bootcamp

A fun new thing I’m doing is a five-day evergreen bootcamp. I’ve taken the best thing I do in my company, the Profitable Podcast Boot Camp, and packaged the bootcamp as an experience people can do at any time. You can do it right now at an affordable price and see what I’m talking about. Click here.

The reason I’m charging for it is not because I want a tiny offer. Absolutely not! This filters out people who won’t hang out for five days.

It’s not just a free class. It’s five days of intentional learning.

I’m not interested in people signing up for something I have and then never open it. That doesn’t feel good to me. It’s been my experience that people don’t show up for free stuff. So we’re testing this. Everything is about testing. I’m completely unattached to the outcome.

Podcast to Profit

That was all about external planning and coming up with the strategies involved. If you’re struggling with how to take the things you want to do in your business and plan them out, that’s what I teach in Podcast to Profit.

If you want to know how to:

• Do a live launch
• Position your freebie in a way that people will opt-in
• Plan an offer that makes you six or seven figures

That is all included in my group coaching program. The New Year is a fantastic time to start a program like this. You can check out all of the details here.

If you would rather get a sneak peek into all of my methods and get a bite-sized chunk of what Podcast to Profit entails, check out the bootcamp.

CEO Retreat Topic #4: Culture and Growing Pains

Now that we’re done looking at the external, what’s happening inside? One of the coolest things I hear about the company from the team and interns is, “This company is amazing! I love working here! It’s so great! It’s the culture we’ve created.

I’m super proud of what my management team and I have created. But as we’ve grown from the three-quarter of a million to the seven-figure point, we have experienced some growing pains and efficiency lapses in how we’re running everything.

Marketing Manager

Sometimes you get a little too big for your britches and you need new britches. So we came to the point where we realized we needed help in marketing and we ended up hiring a marketing assistant. Which in five minutes turned into our marketing manager, Erin.

Bar none, she’s the absolute best. She came in and brought marketing strategy, email marketing, and messaging. She helps me with the positioning of our offers and all the things we do.

This was needed because I was filling that hat along with the CFO and CEO responsibilities. Subsequently, it left holes to be filled.

Operations Manager

My operations manager is Lydia. She’s been with me for over four years now. She grew with me from the ground up. That’s great, except that when you grow from the bottom, you tend to stay in the details a lot of the time instead of relinquishing control to the people beneath you and rising into a pure management position.

We’ve been working through this with me on this side and her on that side, and trying to get our company into this place of scale and possibility.

The goal for all my students coming into Podcast to Profit is to get you to consistent revenue months. If you come into Podcast to Profit with a 5 to 10K business, I feel really good because we can scale you.

But when you start talking about multi-six-figure to seven-figure businesses, different things need to happen. Now you’re going from an entrepreneur or solopreneur with one or two people to help you. Then you need to think from an organizational perspective about how to grow and scale a highly systemized, effective, and efficient team that’s going to produce revenue.

That’s been great, but it’s also had its pain points for me. I spent a lot of the time discussing with my colleagues how to fix some of the things that we’ve been facing.

What we’re working on as a company

One of the things we’re working on is having more boundaries within our organization around communication. We’ve had this on-demand culture using Voxer and voice messaging and forgetting about the incredible operating system and tools that we have to slow down and do things well.

Not that we haven’t done them well, but when things fly all around an organization, things get missed and lost. There’s no discernment in thinking through directives.

Organization analogy

Let’s say that you want to explain to your twelve-year-old son that he’s going to be in charge of cleaning his room and taking out the trash when he’s never been in charge of that before.

You need to come up with a plan to clearly articulate and teach your son what day of the week he is to take out the trash, when he is going to clean his room, and what your expectations are. This ensures that he understands without resentment. Versus, “I’m annoyed that you’re not cleaning your room. Why are your pants still on the floor?”

There’s a clear difference between slowing down and articulating with effectiveness the changes you wish to make, versus a verbal dump of an emotional response. It seems small but it’s not.

The same goes when you have twenty to twenty-five people in an organization. If I’m the head of the organization, the go-getter, CEO, and leader, I have to remember that I now don’t just lead a team of one or two. I have an entire organization looking to me.

When I blink my eyes, it affects the rest of the team. That’s something I’ve been working through on my end and will continue to do.

The importance of boundaries

We also got clear about the boundaries of everyone on the team. Not just boundaries, but work boundaries like time. How long does it take to do a task, and is that task even needed anymore?

The bigger your company grows, the more unclear you get on what everyone is doing.

I’m far removed from some of the things that happen in my company now. That means people will do what they’ve always done. However, when people do what they’ve always done, you’re going to waste money. And worse, you’ll waste people’s time.

We’re taking a deep-dive look at all of the people in the company. Their roles, tasks, and expectations. And we’re going to realign:

• What are the things you’re currently doing that you don’t need to do?
• How can we be more efficient in your position?
• How can we be more effective in your position?

Dipping our toe into AI

One of the things we’re looking at in 2025 is AI. It’s something I’ve been leery of. For the past few years, we’ve had disclaimers in all of my contracts for interns coming in saying they can’t use AI here. Why? Because when AI first came out, it stunk!

As it’s been optimized, I do think that there’s a time and place for AI. For example, why are we paying an intern an hour to pull notes from a call when AI can do it in five seconds? Things like that.

We’re looking for different optimization opportunities with AI. And as I’m learning, those things are becoming bonuses I’m putting into my programs and courses.

I recorded one this morning on how you can create podcast content. Brainstorm your podcast content from your market research using AI. Now have two to three topics to record for your podcast in under five minutes. I teach this in Podcast to Profit.

No more getting stuck wondering what you should talk about. This tool can help you brainstorm. It can help you develop drafts for your emails. That’s something cool that we’re exploring, as well.

To Summarize the CEO Retreat

At the end of the event, I walked away with:

• Permission to know that it’s okay to be in the middle even when you’ve made it
• There are growing pains at every level
• We are going to optimize
• We’re going to flow with it
• We’re going to trust in God because He knows what we need

This is uncharted waters for me. I’ve never been at this level in any kind of business. This is truly God’s business. I couldn’t have gotten here without God. I’ve had business meetings with the Lord and gotten discernment and help from Him.

He guided my mind and heart and gave me inspiration and courage when I got speaking opportunities. I’m trusting that God has a way for me and this company, a way for my team, and a way for my students and the incredible callings they have.

Prayers for myself and you

I pray that He’s equipping me to train, coach, and teach my students to create the kingdom businesses that are possible for them. I attribute everything to the Lord and I couldn’t be more grateful.

I’m going to continue to do that and remind myself in gratitude, praise, and petition over my business and partnership with Him. I encourage you to do the same.

Another piece for me is to pull up a chair to the table. I have to take action when I’m afraid. I have to lay down pride, ego, or limiting beliefs about myself to grow into the next phase for me as a leader. I’m willing and available.

One of the phrases I’ve committed to saying this year is:

“It’s okay to make mistakes, Stef. You’re doing great! You’ve got this! I do not partner with pressure but I lead a peaceful kingdom business and I trust myself and God. I am equipped to make powerful choices through the Holy Spirit.”

In a nutshell, that’s what went down, where we’re going and growing. I’m excited to see what 2025 brings. I believe that God has a fresh wind for our company.

I’m also curious about the positioning He will have me take. I’m going to show up and be available. I can’t wait to see the incredible outcome that all of you have when you have the right mentorship and leadership in your life. I hope you’ll stop and take a moment to think about what has God done last year and what He will do in the new year.

Ask yourself, “How can I partner with Him and what is my next right step to make it a reality?”

I love you. I’m excited for you, and I hope you enjoyed that. I’ll see you soon.

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