A business coach explains why she's cutting down to one 2025 goal, and the revenue-stage framework that decided it for her.
Posted
1 years ago
Duration
Format
Talking Head
educational
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11.4K
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
The fewer goals a business sets, the more resources each one gets, and the right goal isn't copied from someone further along, it's determined by which revenue stage the business is actually in.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A coach, consultant, or course creator with an existing audience and some revenue who wants a simpler way to pick one annual goal instead of five.
Someone roughly between $1M and $10M in revenue trying to decide whether to chase more traffic or build more products next.
Anyone who ends every December having half-finished several different goals and wants a framework for narrowing to one.
SKIP IF…
You haven't made your first sale yet — the video explicitly says that revenue bracket should be reading a different stage of the framework.
You're looking for a tactical walkthrough of ad campaigns or product launches — this is goal-setting philosophy, not a step-by-step build.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Maria Wendt hit all three of her 2024 goals: a $200K month that scaled to $400K, doubling average return on ad spend from 1.5x to 3x, and (after swapping out a planned nose job) a new website, and is entering 2025 with exactly one goal: launch 12 new products, one a month. The number is smaller than it sounds, she argues, pointing to a 60% repeat-customer rate against a 20-30% industry norm as proof her products already work. The goal comes from 'Ready, Fire, Aim,' a book that splits business growth into revenue-based stages: under $1M means selling one product relentlessly, $1M-$10M means the growth lever shifts to building new products. She's at $4M, so the stage decided her goal, not ambition.
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Opens by noting the opportunity to build an online business keeps expanding, and states her rule of setting only one or two goals a year.
01:33 – 02:56
02 · 2024 goal 1: the $200K month
Recaps breaking a four-year $100K/month plateau, hitting a first $200K month in January 2024 and scaling to $400K.
02:57 – 03:33
03 · 2024 goal 2: 2.5x ROAS
Doubled average return on ad spend from 1.5x to 3x across hundreds of ad campaigns spending $70-100K/month.
03:34 – 05:32
04 · 2024 goal 3: nose job swapped for a website
A planned cosmetic goal got delayed for a practical reason (a toddler at home) and was replaced with rebuilding a website last updated in 2019.
05:33 – 06:24
05 · The one 2025 goal: 12 products
After visibly blanking on it mid-sentence, reveals the single 2025 goal: launch 12 new products, one per month.
06:25 – 07:50
06 · Proof: a 60% repeat-customer rate
Justifies the product goal with a repeat-customer rate of 60% against a 20-30% industry norm.
07:51 – 11:04
07 · The Ready Fire Aim growth stages
Explains the book's revenue-based stage model: under $1M means selling one product relentlessly; $1M-$10M shifts the focus to new product development. Her company is around $4M.
11:05 – 12:43
08 · Why copying her stage would backfire
Warns that copying her tactics directly risks copying a losing experiment, since she can absorb test losses a smaller business can't.
12:44 – 14:43
09 · 2025 planning workshop invite
Closes with an invite to a coaching-group workshop to plan out 2025 goals month by month.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Setting only one or two goals a year instead of five is what let one coach hit all three of her 2024 targets.
A business plateaued at $100,000 a month for four straight years can jump to $200K and then $400K a month within a single year once that becomes the stated goal.
Doubling average return on ad spend from 1.5x to 3x across hundreds of live campaigns took a full year of deliberate work, not a single tweak.
A 60% repeat-customer rate is two to three times the 20-30% considered good in the online-coaching industry.
The book 'Ready, Fire, Aim' splits business growth into revenue stages: under $1M is about selling one product relentlessly, $1M-$10M is about building new products.
Once a business crosses roughly $1M in revenue, the growth lever shifts from selling harder to launching more products.
Copying a strategy from someone further along in revenue can mean copying a losing experiment, since a bigger business can absorb a $30,000 test loss that a smaller one can't.
A single publicly stated goal, like launching 12 products in 12 months, creates monthly accountability instead of a vague annual intention.
Reading only the growth-stage section that matches your current revenue, and skipping the rest of a business book, avoids applying advice built for a different size of company.
Before teaching a tactic publicly, a track record of roughly six experiments across different students and industries is run first, so the 'hack' isn't a one-off result.
Takeaway
Pick one goal sized to your revenue stage, not your ambition.
GOAL SETTING
The right annual goal isn't the biggest one you can imagine, it's the one your current revenue stage says should come next, and one is enough.
01Entering 2025 with optimism
The window to build an online coaching or content business is not closing — more people are entering the space and reaching results faster than a few years ago.
Committing to one or two goals instead of many is a stated discipline, not a lack of ambition — an unwritten goal is treated as 'not a goal, just a game plan.'
022024 goal 1: the $200K month
Four years of plateauing at the same monthly revenue number doesn't mean the ceiling is real — a single focused goal broke a four-year plateau within one year.
Hitting a revenue goal early in the year left room to scale further, turning a $200K target into a $400K month by year's end.
032024 goal 2: 2.5x ROAS
Doubling average return on ad spend (1.5x to 3x) across hundreds of live campaigns is a portfolio-wide optimization goal, not a single campaign tweak.
A return-on-ad-spend goal stated as a company-wide average forces improvement across every campaign, not just the best-performing ones.
042024 goal 3: nose job swapped for a website
Personal goals and business goals can occupy the same annual goal slot — when a personal goal became impractical, it was replaced rather than left unmet.
An outdated website (last touched in 2019) was treated as a real bottleneck worth a dedicated annual goal, not busywork.
05The one 2025 goal: 12 products
A monthly product-launch cadence turns one annual goal into 12 concrete, dated checkpoints instead of a single distant deadline.
Announcing a specific, countable target (12 products) in public creates built-in accountability that a vaguer goal wouldn't.
06Proof: a 60% repeat-customer rate
A repeat-customer rate 2-3x the industry norm (60% vs. 20-30%) is offered as evidence that new products are worth the effort, since existing buyers already trust the quality.
Repeat-purchase rate is used here as the credibility metric for a product-launch goal, not launch volume or revenue alone.
07The Ready Fire Aim growth stages
Business growth splits into revenue-based stages: under $1M means selling one product relentlessly until the first million; $1M-$10M means the primary lever becomes new-product development.
Marketing is named as the single function that should get top priority once a business is trying to cross its first $1M, ahead of product development, customer service, or operations.
Reading only the stage section that matches your current revenue, and skipping the rest of a growth book, avoids applying advice built for a different company size.
08Why copying her stage would backfire
A bigger business can absorb a $30,000 test loss that a smaller one can't, so copying a tactic without the same balance sheet can mean copying a losing experiment.
A publicly-shared 'hack' is typically validated across roughly six experiments and multiple students in different industries before it's taught, not a one-off result.
Comparing your goal to someone at a different revenue stage is treated as a category error, not a motivational benchmark.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Ready, Fire, Aim
A business growth book that maps revenue-based stages, from first sale to $100M+, and argues each stage requires a different primary focus rather than one universal growth tactic.
ROAS (return on ad spend)
A ratio showing how much revenue an ad campaign generates per dollar spent; a 3x ROAS means $3 back for every $1 spent on ads.
Repeat customer rate
The percentage of past buyers who purchase again, used here as a proxy for product quality and a differentiator from industry competitors.
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metaphor
00:00I get asked a lot about my goals every year. You guys wanna know what I'm working on, what I'm planning, and so I thought I would just take a few minutes and share with you what I'm focusing on in 2025, trends I'm noticing in 2025, where our headspace is at, and why.
00:16And then I'm gonna also give you pointers on what maybe you should be working on and thinking about for 2025. I think the first thing is just every year, the opportunity to make money expands and does not decrease.
00:33I'm only seeing more people enter this field. More people thrive right away.
00:39Um, I think the timeline for people starting and seeing results is shrinking rather than taking longer.
00:48I think it's just as an industry or and maybe it's just me. Maybe have become a better teacher, and that could just be me. But whether it's me becoming a better teacher so my students are seeing better results or just the industry in general is getting better, I'm not sure.
01:02But the difference between how fast you guys are all seeing results versus how long it took me to see results is astounding, and I'm really grateful. I don't want it to take you guys as long as it took me. That's the whole reason I do what I do.
01:14So I'm entering 2025 with a sense of great optimism, with a sense of, um, excitement for the future of not just my business, but the businesses of my students. I think it's gonna be a really big year for you guys.
01:27I think it's gonna be for some of you, it's going to be a breakthrough year, which is very exciting. Um, I think that I know that for me, I tend to set very few goals in the New Year's.
01:41So I have I'm a really big believer that if you're going to set a goal, it's not a goal, it's a game plan. And you can't really do many things well.
01:53That's what I have noticed. And so I tend to be more of a, like, one or two goals max kind of person. So I'm gonna tell you what my twenty twenty four goals were.
02:03Spoiler alert, we've hit all of them. I did three, and we hit all of them.
02:08And then I'm only setting one for 2025, just one goal. So twenty twenty four's goals were threefold.
02:16One, hit my first 200 k month. I had been if you remember, I had been making a $100,000 a month for four years in a row, and I just was like, I cannot do another year of not hitting that 200 k mark.
02:30So we hit our first 200 k month in January 2024, and then we scaled up to $400,000 month.
02:38So we definitely hit and succeeded and surpassed that first goal.
02:44And I had three bottles of champagne in my fridge last year that and every time I hit the goal, I pop it. So that was the first goal. The second goal was what was it?
02:55We did it. Oh, hit an overall average of 2.5 return on ad spent.
03:02So meaning across all our campaigns, and we have hundreds of campaigns. Okay? So that's a big goal.
03:08Across we spend around I think it's around 70 to $100,000 a month on ads now. Um, we would get back 2.5.
03:18It's really comfortable at three now. So for every dollar we put in, we get $3 back. That was our overall return on ad spend goal.
03:26We built that up from 1.5 average across all of our campaigns, so to basically double it in a year, um, was crazy.
03:34That was crazy. That was a big champagne bottle. And then the third one actually got modified because I have wanted the third job was the third goal was to get a nose job.
03:44I've and I know everyone says you don't need one, that's fine. Everybody's personal insecurities are their personal insecurities. I have to look at my own damn face every single day for my work.
03:51And so I really want a nose job, and it was my goal for '24 to make that happen. However, Ellie, my daughter, is two and she is usually very good.
04:02So we actually have very little tantrums, but she's at the age where every so often something will just upset her and she'll just and like throw her head back, and I'm with her essentially like 90% of the time, if not more, and so I just didn't want her to like have a tantrum and throw her head back and break my new nose.
04:26So I'm gonna delay that by a couple of years, but you heard it here first, 2024, end of the year, it's the first time I ever mentioned it publicly, but that's something I've wanted since I was, like, 18, 19.
04:38And I've had one other augmentation and I love it, so we'll just put it that way. I like a little fuzzy for my shirt.
04:47It's like a cotton, whatever. I had one other augmentation and I love it.
04:53I have no regrets, and I'm very intentional with everything that I do with my body, and so it's one of those things where I know it's gonna happen, it's just a matter of timing. So I had to make a new goal, and the new goal was to get a brand new website done because my old website hasn't been done since, like, I think 2019.
05:10It's really old. It's really outdated, and so that's gonna be launched by January 1.
05:15So we will pop that one probably it's gonna be tight, like, we will probably pop it right around Christmas time, um, but that one I'm very excited for you guys to see because I just actually had a meeting with the website designer, um, earlier today, and I was reviewing everything that's looking really good.
05:30We're on track, but, like, barely. So those are my goals for 2024. I only have one goal for 2025, and I recommend you only have one or two goals as well.
05:40Um, I had to really push to make three happen, and I have, um, no nine to five job competing with this. This is my only work that I do. Um, I do have a kid full time, so that does make it more tricky, um, but it's just hard to do more than one goal.
05:55I think it's really important to set one goal and then just work towards it. So for me, my twenty twenty five goal is to, I'm like totally blanking on my 20 oh, no.
06:11I think I should redo this, but I'm not going to because I'm six minutes in. But I can't believe I forgot my goal, but whatever. Here we are.
06:16We're human. It's fine. It's to launch 12 products.
06:19That's what I'm going to do. The only thing that I'm going to do in 2025 is to launch new 12 new products.
06:26So one new product every single month. And, sorry, basically that means a new product every single month.
06:36So if you have ideas for products that you want me to launch, let me know because it's it might not seem like a lot, but I just don't think you understand the amount of work I put into creating each product, and I'll I'll give you a little data point that will tell you how good my products are compared to everyone else's, just as a mathematical frame of reference.
06:57My repeat customer rate is 60, meaning 60% of my customers who buy from me buy again. What's considered good in my industry is 20 to 30%.
07:09So I have either three times or two times better stat, like a data point in that field than anyone else does in my industry. And that is because I put so much work into making good products.
07:23I get compliments on them every single day. And I'm not saying this to like boast about myself. It's more just like when I say my only thing that I'm gonna do in 2025 is launch 12 products, if that sounds like a small goal, you gotta, like, understand the amount of work that goes into it.
07:40I will be so lucky when I hit that goal. That will be because of intentionality and rolling up my sleeves and just like making it happen because that that's a big goal.
07:51Now, for you, and just so you kind of know like where is this strategy coming from, it's from this book that I recommended before. It's called Ready, Fire, Aim, and it helps you build your business eventually up to a 100,000,000 based on the level that you are at now.
08:10So my company is right around 4,000,000. We're gonna end 2024 right around 4,000,000, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but, like, right at that $4,000,000 mark, and which is a big step up from every other year.
08:22So far, we've done, like, 1.5, 1.5, 1.5 pretty consistently for I think three years in a row, maybe four years in a row. And so for us to go from like 1.5 to four was a really big jump this year. Um, we know to go to get to 10,000,000, it's because of two things.
08:37I'm just gonna read it out loud to you, and then I'm also wanting you to read, like, your section. But he says he says it really well, he says it two different ways.
09:06Stage two is from 10 from 1,000,000 to 10,000,000, and he says the primary factor in stage two growth is the development and marketing of new products.
09:15The faster you can develop and sell those new products, the faster your business will grow. This is very different than if you're at zero if you're making less than a million dollars, you need to read section one, which is going from zero to a million.
09:32So he says, you're you're considered in stage one, that's considered infancy. So yeah.
09:41There's so many different different things. Hold on.
09:46Your main thing the number one rule of entrepreneurship is to get sales.
09:52Without sales, it is very hard to sustain an ongoing business. And so the number one thing they need to do of all the major functions, product development, customer service, accounting, operations, marketing, the one thing that should always be given top priority in an entrepreneurial venture is marketing. Your job, if you're getting to 1,000,000, is to figure out how to sell your one product.
10:12He talks about this a ton in here. Your one product over and over and over and over and over again until you hit a million dollars in revenue. Main problem, you don't really know what you're doing.
10:21Main challenge, making the first profitable sale. Main opportunity, achieving a minimum critical mass of customers.
10:27Main skill needed, selling the product. So he says there's a lot of different ways. I highly recommend this book.
10:34He goes on to like all these different like ways to sell, um, and then for me, I only and and the rule is by the way, like only read your section.
10:43So you're only gonna read if you are at one over 1,000,000, you're only gonna read stage two. If you are stage three, if you're making more than $10,000,000 a year, you're only gonna read stage three. If you are haven't made a million dollars yet, you're only supposed to read stage one.
10:57This is why so often we talk about this on my podcast, we talk about this just everywhere, all over my content, it's like stop doing what I'm doing, do what I teach. For two reasons, one, we're at different stages of business, so it doesn't make any sense for you to copy me because you're not at the stage I am, and I'm not saying that to gatekeep, I'm saying that because the because it's just gonna it's the wrong thing for you to do, and then the other reason is that a lot of times, if you just copy what you see me doing, you don't know that I'm running all these experiments in the back end frequently losing money, frequently losing time, frequently doing the wrong thing.
11:28The amount of tests I run for you guys so you don't have to, whether it be ads, whether it be content, whether it be landing pages, sales pages, emails I'm sending out, the amount of tests I run for you guys so you don't have to would honestly blow you away. But I can financially afford to take a $30,000 loss on an experiment that maybe you can't.
11:47And so when I come and teach you a strategy, when I say, here's a hack that three x my sales, or here's how I increase my conversion pages, or here's a way to get to daily sales, it's not me pulling stuff out of my ass, it's not me hypothetically talking about it, it's I ran six experiments and I did it with a couple other students as well in several different industries, and I feel very confident that this will work for anyone who watches it.
12:10And if you just do what I am doing, you might copy in a losing experiment. You might run an ad to something or make a piece of content that's actively losing me $3,000 a day.
12:20That's happened before. I'll see students in my coaching group, know, they'll be like, um, hey, I'm doing this thing and I'm like, oh my gosh, that's something that like I'm running an experiment on and we're about ready to pull a plug on it because it's it's god awful.
12:33So this is by the way, if this is an invitation, if you want to, in my coaching group this month, we're gonna be hosting a goal setting, like a 2025 planning business coaching game plan.
12:46And what we're gonna do on this coaching call is we're gonna sit down all together, and we're gonna plan out 2025. So we're gonna figure out what's your goal, what's the number one thing you're working towards, and then what do you need to do in order to make that happen so that you're gonna be very clear what you're doing in January, you're be very clear what you're doing in February, March, all the months.
13:03You're gonna break it down into, like, first the annual goal, then we're gonna break it down into monthly goals, then we're gonna break it down into weekly goals, and then you're gonna literally walk away with a daily checklist of what you should be doing to hit your goals based on your goals, based on your schedule, based on your challenges in your life.
13:19Everyone's got different reasons why they can't get work done or different challenges we all have work around. So if you wanna come, I'm hosting it this month in the coaching group. So I'm gonna put a link down in the description to join.
13:31Make sure you're in it. You'll get more info once you're in the group and kinda like where to go and where to be and, um, what any homework you need to do beforehand and whatnot. So highly recommend you come.
13:41I think it's gonna be really, really fun. I would love to have you guys there. Please don't miss it.
13:46I do these, like, they're workshops, for lack of a better word. I do these workshops every single year, and nothing makes me happier than when I see a student who workshop with me in January or or, like, at the beginning of the year and completes their goal, frankly, usually complete them by like August and September, but even if you complete it by December, you're right on track.
14:08You hit your goals, and it just it's what I was meant to do. This is the work I was meant to do. So gonna be a really fun coaching call.
14:14I'd love to have you guys join. I'll put the link in the description to give you guys info on where you need to go and what you need to do. That's what I'm working on in 2025, launching 12 different products.
14:23If have any ideas, anything you want me to teach on, I gotta come up with 12 amazing products that, like, top each other. That's my thing is, like, every product has to be better than the one I made before. It's my minimum standard.
14:33Has to be better. So I have to come up with ways to top each product. So if you have any ideas, let me know, and I'll see you on that coaching call.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
She opens by admitting she gets asked this every year, then spends two minutes recapping three goals she already hit in 2024 before revealing, mid-sentence, that she briefly blanked on the single number she's betting all of 2025 on.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
08:00model
Ready, Fire, Aim revenue stages
Stage 1 (under $1M, 'infancy'): sell one product over and over until you cross $1M
Stage 2 ($1M-$10M): growth comes from developing and marketing new products
Stage 3 ($10M+): read the stage-three section only once you're actually there
A revenue-based growth model where the right business focus changes depending on which stage a company is currently in, not how ambitious the owner wants to be.
Steal fordeciding what to build or focus on next based on current revenue, not copying a further-along peer
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
12:44product
“I'm hosting it this month in the coaching group... I'll put a link down in the description to join.”
Soft invite woven into the value content rather than a hard sales break; link goes in the description, not a spoken URL.
A student case-study interview: how a full-time stepmom with three chronic illnesses built a six-figure low-ticket business on 30 minutes of ads a day and a lot of repurposed content.
A ManyChat coupon-recovery flow, a retargeting ad script, and a 45-email upsell sequence — the three automations one course creator credits with tripling her monthly revenue.
A business coach walks through pricing a first digital product at $5, building a PDF bundle, and choosing between paid ads and organic reels to scale it.
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