Ep 29: My Goals for 2026

This episode feels vulnerable… and a little scary to share.

Today I’m walking you through my big, bold 2026 goals — personal, financial, and business — and exactly how I plan to hit them without burning out, overworking, or losing the life I’ve built.

My word for 2026 is expand.

Not hustle harder.
 Not do more.
 Expand what’s already working.

In this episode, I share:

• Why I chose expand as my word of the year
• My personal goals around health, energy, travel, and regulation
• The systems I’m using to protect my time and energy
• My $500K revenue goal (and how I reverse-engineered it)
• Exactly how ads, launches, YouTube, and personal brand fit together
• Why focusing on one marketing channel at a time has changed everything
• How I’m planning growth that supports my life — not competes with it

I also break down the math behind my revenue goals, what I can control versus what I can’t, and how confidence, systems, and consistency have allowed my business to more than double year after year.

This isn’t about bragging.
 It’s about showing what’s possible when you pair:
 ✔ Ads that actually work
 ✔ A clear offer
 ✔ Real leadership
 ✔ And a genuine heart for service

If you’re setting goals for 2026 and thinking, “Is this too much?” — this episode is your sign that it’s not.

Let’s do this together.

If you’re a local business owner who wants to grow faster with ads, now is the time to join Hometown Advantage and build a system that works for you all year long.

🔗 https://www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/hometown

If you’re an online business owner, stick around — I’ve got a new ads offer coming soon that helps you get ads live in as little as 7 days.

And I’d genuinely love to hear this from you:
 📩 Send me a DM with your big, scary 2026 goals.

Let’s expand together.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome. Welcome to the Hometown Advantage Podcast, where we talk all things, ads, marketing, business, scaling life. I'm so excited because I am gonna be sharing my big scary 2026 goals. So I love how everyone does a word of the year. I did two words this past year in 2025, rich and regulated, and I feel like they did come true to the point where I am much more rich in my rich life. With how I get to spend my days, the people I get to work with, the clients I get to help my motherhood journey, all of the things. And I am much more regulated working, less focusing on taking care of myself, the way I show up as a parent, as a wife, all of the things. But. I still want more. So I actually decided that for 2026, my word of the year is going to be expand because I already have all of the basic building blocks in place that I want from my life. I have an incredible life, first business. I have amazing clients that are supporting people in their local communities. And who are stepping into entrepreneurship to support their own families and have more freedom financially. With time, all of the things. I have my amazing family. I have my amazing home. I have amazing travel plans. I just wanna expand on all of it and this is how we're gonna do it. Thought I'd go through my personal goals first,'cause they're a little bit more straight to the point. And we just start a little lighter, right? So reading more is always my New Year's resolution. Read more. I love reading, but the thing is, I default to scrolling after a long day of using my brain so much on work and mom life, that it's just this easy escape and I never end up actually reading as much as I want to. There's so many books I wanna read, fiction and nonfiction. So as always, I've got read 24 books and replace reading with scrolling. I always say 24 books'cause I'm like two books a month. How hard can that be? I think I'm ending this year with 13 books read and I count Audible listening to audio books too on here. I just forget about my audible too, and I'll default to listening to podcasts. So literally this should not be hard. I'm doing it. I'm doing it this year, and I'm doing it by ending my nights with reading instead of scrolling. Hold me to it. I'm off to a great start. I am reading. The second book in the A Court of Mist and Fury, is that right? I Court of Mist and Fire. I gotta look it up. Hold on. A court of thorns and roses, but the second book is a Court of Mist and Fury. Okay. That's where I got that. I am trying to finish that book. It's so dang long. I usually love fantasy, romantic, but I'm just not as into this one, but I'm trying to stick through it because I am. Like halfway through it. I took a really long break. I came back to it and I wanna finish it. I'm also listening to I will teach you to be Rich by Ramit. Something Ramit sie. I got really into personal finance at the start of last year. Read. And listened to several books on it fell off a little bit, but we're back on it. It's like something about this time of year, it's, I'm ready to learn more about personal finance and take control over my finances. So if you have any good book recommendations, personal finance, business, or romantic, or thriller, honestly, I love thrillers. I love Colleen Hoover. Please send them to my dms. Second personal goal, obviously, to feel more in shape and stronger than ever. I lost 40 pounds this year. I'm so proud of that. I have been working so hard since the birth of my son and he's two and a half years old. I made no progress until. This year I have 27 pounds to go to my goal weight, but I don't even care about that anymore because of how much better I feel now after losing that 40. I just wanna feel more in shape and stronger than ever. So I do that through Fit Body Bootcamp. I've been going three days a week for the past, probably four months. I'm upping it to four days a week and walking. Keeping track of my steps with my AA ring. Next personal goal, travel and time off every two months minimum. I have always loved to travel since having kids. I love traveling with my kids. Our big thing is finding the time to do it. My husband works in corporate and then I stay very busy, obviously with the business, and then of course it was always not wanting to spend. A luxurious amount on travel, but this year I also got into the points and miles credit card game. That has been huge. It has been so fun. We have done a lot of fun small trips using credit card points. I wanna plan some bigger ones. I wanna do Hawaii. I don't know if that's gonna happen this year, but I at least will have a Hawaii trip planned by the end of the year. I wanna do some luxury stays. I want to fly first class, all things that can be possible through points and miles easily, especially because here's a pro tip for your ads. If you use a business credit card like the Chase or the Amex business card, I can give you a referral code if you reach out to me in the dms. You can earn three times points on every dollar that you spend on advertising. I plan on spending a lot on advertising this year, and so my ads aren't only going to fund my revenue goals and my life and my business. They're actually going to fully fund family vacations. How cool is that? And then last personal goal is just to become more regulated. Remember that rich and regulated goal I had of 2025 and lean into my spiritual growth. So I'm doing this by meditating before work every day, journaling and reading. See goal one. Now onto the juicy business numbers. Okay, are you ready for this? My goal this year was to make a hundred K in revenue. I ended up ending out the year at around 230 K, so over double that every year I've been in business, I've over doubled my revenue and I don't plan to stop. So my goal for this year is 500 K in revenue, which sounds insane to say out loud. But beyond that, I also have a take home goal of 230 KI. I just came up with that number because that's what I made in revenue, but it's not what I took home this year. So let's just make it the take home goal. Okay. That number lines up with obviously funding my life, finishing our basement, some vacation money. Again, not a ton because I use points and then fully funding a good cushy emergency fund and start beefing up some investments so that we can retire when we wanna retire. Now the thing with this type of goal is that you can't actually control an outcome, or as they say, you cannot control the output, but you can, no, you cannot control the outcome, but you can control the output. Of course, anytime I set a number goal, whether it's pounds loss, revenue made. What have you. What I actually focus on is what I want the output to be. So for my health it's four workouts a week. That's the only thing I can actually control along with diet, obviously. And so I can focus on that, which will then take me to the outcome goal, or at least close to it. So when I break down the numbers, there is no route in which we don't easily hit this number. I debated on how in the weeds I should get for this podcast episode. I'm just gonna go for it so I can see our done for you services being able to pretty easily bring in 150 K and then that leaves 350 K for hometown Advantage. And these are modest guesses. Like I said, I think we can actually blow past this with a couple things. I have planned up my sleeve, but I do like to be somewhat reasonable, right? For Hometown Advantage to do 350 K, we need 195 people to join at my current promotion price, which I plan to keep it at that for most of the year. Of course, that's always subject to change and I had 120 people join this year, and with the momentum I have now the big increase in ad spend. And the increase in launches, this should be a no-brainer. If I make around 60 K in revenue per launch and do six launches, that comes out to 360 K in revenue, which when I break down my ad spend, my lead cost, my lead to sale conversion rate, I can spend around what I'm spending now to bring that in. I am also gonna be running low ticket offer funnels between launches and we'll make sales there too. So honestly, we can probably do closer to 500 k just with hometown advantage at this point, which is just so exciting. And honestly, I don't share any of this to brag. I. So badly. Just wanna show what's possible with ads, with a solid offer, with a real heart of service, and just wanting to help your people and with confidence, right? I feel like those are the things that have brought me here. I also have a lot of time being freed up by my team this year, so I plan to use that to add YouTube as a traffic and sales driver on top of ads, which is gonna help with my profitability because it's not going to cost money to acquire customers through YouTube. This will obviously be slower burn, right? But YouTube videos are gonna gimme a longer shelf life than my organic content, and then ads really. My last investment that I made of 2025 was a YouTube coaching program. It's called the YouTube Coaching Experience with Trina Little, and I'm super excited to dive into that and make that a second focus outside of ads this year I have had a lot of luck with focusing on adding one marketing channel at a time each year. So when I first started, I used Facebook and Instagram organic content solely, and I mastered it over a year. Then I added in my ads, then I added in the podcast. Now I'm adding in YouTube, and it's like I keep the other things going because I've mastered them. I've come up with a strategy. I can do things to help outsource the time it takes to make those happen. And then I go all in and focus on the next thing. Notice how I'm not trying something once, saying it didn't work and then falling off. Another way I'm bringing this all together is by making sure I'm capitalizing on my existing audience. So two ways I'm doing that I'm focusing on really fun done for you. Offer that I think people will love, and I'm going hard on leveling up my personal brand. So I had a recent strategy session with my business coach. Her name's Vic. And she is helping me with this because I shared with her how most of my sales come from cold conversions, and I have this growing audience, but I don't feel like my audience is really converting over time. And she shared with me that I need to level up my personal brand, more content that's behind the scenes, more content like this. So it's perfect with my YouTube goal. More stories, more storytelling in my emails, more personality, all of that fun stuff. So basically my business focuses are this year one ads as always two YouTube and three personal brand level up. I actually just did a full post on Instagram with my full on marketing strategy that I plan on implementing, and not just what I'm gonna do, but how I plan to get it all done. I think the hook of it is just my 2026. Let me look. My exact marketing plan for 2026 and how I'm actually going to get it done, so go check that out if you have an yet. I am so excited to take on this year. If you are a local business owner or an online business owner that wants to use ads to grow your business quickly and efficiently. You want to be in my world, you want to do ads with me to. If you own a local business, now is the time to jump into Hometown Advantage and learn it. If you own an online business, please stick around. I have a really good juicy offer for you that we can get ads up and running for you in seven days for a great price. I'm gonna be sharing more about it at the end of the month. I had love if you sent me a DM and talked about your big scary 2026 goals. Let's chat about it and I will see you on the next one.