What Q1 Actually Looked Like in Our Businesses

Q1 is often treated like a proving ground for the year ahead. The plans are fresh, the energy is high, and then reality begins to shape what the quarter actually becomes.

In this episode of Honest Brew, we step back and share what the first quarter looked like inside our own businesses. From aggressive growth goals to finding a sustainable rhythm to navigating unexpected life events, each of us had a very different experience.

This conversation offers a look behind the curtain at how we are navigating growth and the pressure to start the year strong. More importantly, it is a reminder that businesses rarely unfold exactly as planned.

If your Q1 felt messy, slow, surprising, or full of lessons, you are not alone.

A candid conversation between three seasoned business women who've been in the trenches of entrepreneurship. We bridge the gap between the glamorous just market and sell advice and the reality of what it takes to build a sustainable business. While most business content focuses on marketing, branding, OR operations in isolation, we bring all three worlds together. Because your brand culture needs to live in every system you create, your operations need to support your brand promise, and your marketing needs the infrastructure to deliver on what it sells.

We're here for the solopreneurs ready to grow beyond themselves, the partnership survivors rebuilding stronger, and anyone tired of business advice that treats branding, marketing, and operations as separate planets when they're part of one ecosystem.

HOSTS

Cheale Villa, Visual Caffeine, visualcaffeine.com / Monique Johnson, MoJo Design, ...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome back to Honest Brew, Unfiltered Conversations on Business Growth. I am Shaol from Visual Caffeine. I'm Monique from Mojo Design, and I am Sarah from Indigo Elephant. Q1 is always approving ground. The plants are fresh, the energy is high, and then reality shows up. And we have had actually a lot of conversations about Q1, leading up to Q1 and in Q1. Boy, I'm saying this so often, I'm giving myself a headache. But that tension between ambition and execution is exactly the territory season one of the Honest Fruit Podcast was built to explore. And this quarter did not disappoint. So this episode is about where your girls are at in their businesses, as much as we've been gibber jabbering about Q1. Um, today that's what we are bringing to you. So I'm gonna kick off with the T. My T is that I have very aggressive overall this year, I have very aggressive growth goals with my company. And I kicked off uh my year really focusing on relationship and connection because in my 27 years, connection and relationships have always been the core of my growth and um and the consistency in getting business. I'm just gonna give that little tidbit of tea. What do you ladies have coming up first for you?

SPEAKER_02 1:32

Oh yeah. For me, Sarah. I know she's like rolling her eyes.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Y'all man.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

I feel for me, I don't think I've ever felt better in my consistent rhythm of how things are working. So what I mean by that is doing like one-on-ones weekly, improving my back end systems, having consistent marketing, like newsletters and everything going out. And I just so for me, this year so far is just falling into a really strong rhythm of a pattern which is sustainable and effective.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Y'all, Q1 punched me straight in the face. Like I had this subconscious expectation looking back that as soon as Jan 5th came, I'd hit the ground running. Your girl instead got the flu for two weeks. And then I had a lot of personal things happen to where it took me away from my business because I am the type where I don't want to bring emotions into my business. And it was a very frustrating time for me because it felt like I could never get done what I wanted to get done because of the emotions that were coming up. And when I reflect back on that time, what I think is interesting is when I was making my goals for this year, or rather intentions. I like intentions better. This was the year of putting myself first. I have always put my schooling, college business first, then maybe my relationships, and then myself. And I am a very ambitious person. I like doing things. I like getting my hands dirty. And I can see now that I learned a lot of valuable lessons because even though I was not showing up as I wanted, I wasn't marketing how I wanted, I have never gotten so many discovery calls in my life. And it's from people seeing stuff I posted on LinkedIn, people referring people to me. And to me, that shows how powerful the work you put in can be for the future versions of you. So, from that, what I've learned is marketing is a weakness for me. I honestly don't love doing it. And that makes sense as an operations person when I think about it, because like my brain loves the building, the behind the scenes doing that stuff. And it has me thinking about my marketing differently from this experience. I'm like, how can I show up consistently that's authentic to the season I'm in? Because my mission is to make your business run as easily as possible, to be of service. And one LinkedIn post can do that. One YouTube video can do that. This podcast can do that. And so for me, it's how can I take care of myself? What is the bare minimum I need to do to be successful and defining what success means to me? And that I feel like is really setting me up for success for Q2, in which I always feel like I get my shit together in Q2, which makes sense because the clocks have changed. It is spring, it's the astrological new year. Things are growing again, things are like being born again. So for me, now it's January as a month is me setting up the foundation for success for the whole year. Like, girl, stop putting pressure on yourself to hit the ground running as soon as you get back from the holiday because it's not realistic.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Your share prompted exactly what I've made this quarter about, which is, and I and I preface this with saying like the spiritual and health journeys and stuff that we've gone through as a family in the last couple of years have brought me to a place of a lot of grace and gentleness. And even though a lot of things I want to accomplish this year, I made this quarter a lot about fertilizing the soil with connection calls and net relationships and things like that. Also spending a lot of time in vision work, you know, we're looking at different diversifying um where our where the income is coming from and diversifying the types of ways that we're doing that, not just from service-based, but product-based, even creating other businesses and stuff. But I always have to give myself a lot of space because I don't know what's going to happen with my husband's things and and so space and also like, yeah, I I say I want to aggressively grow this year, but if it does, if it doesn't happen, guess what? In the long term, it is going to happen because of all the things, all the action I'm doing, they're going to bear fruit. That is just what's going to happen. And at the end of the day, I am the religious girly in the group here. And so I know any fruit that I bear comes from God. And I know like whatever I'm feeling called to take action on is from him. And that is meant to bear fruit and it will when it's supposed to. I also feel like um my company, we did add a new team member, which was a really great decision. She's started out as an intern and she's amazing. And we're really looking to have her. I was thinking we're diversifying and stuff. Oh gosh, will she have a place? And I'm like, wait a minute. She actually will totally be able to support anything that we're doing. You know, like having those team members that you're bringing or companies that you're bringing on to support you, I just think is another way of giving yourself space, space to actually have fertile ground. I'm going to say that we are watching the show Back to the Frontier, where they're going back to the 1880s and they're like living like 1880s. And it's a very wholesome show and we're really enjoying it. But I only bring this up because I think that when we think of any kind of thing we're trying to grow, I think thinking of farming is a really good visual for that. And like I'm kind of saying fertile ground and things like that. But you know, they had to plow the ground and they had to, you know, sow the seeds and all this stuff. But you think about that, it's like I think a lot of times we try to jump to the final goal and the final thing. Enjoy the process of fertile, like plowing that soil, just creating creating it to be soft and fertile and putting in the seeds and you know, and then planting the seeds is like the connection and then the marketing you're putting in the place and the systems I know, like you know, like Mo Mo is like putting in place with her business and all of these things, they allow a beautiful foundation.

SPEAKER_02 8:14

And you know, something that always sticks out to me is again the factor of time, right? But when you make changes in your business, things don't happen instantaneously, right? So it's like like you were talking about the I love your metaphor of you know, growing, planting the seeds. I find that for me, like the consistent rhythm that I'm talking about is that's sort of like creating the the fertile soil. But I feel like something to keep in mind, I always tell myself the things that I'm doing now are gonna affect three to six months out. That's gonna that's gonna affect what's happening in my future. And I just wanted to point that out because I I think it's easy to have this like misconception that I'm making all these changes and you just want it to be instantaneous. Maybe I'm saying it out loud to myself, but I do feel like it's just something to keep in mind. Like right now, this month, okay, what's happening in three to six months from now are the little buds starting to come out of the soil. I think that we just have to keep that in mind, you know, that it's just not instantaneous change.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Be patient. I love how we brought plants into this because I literally made a marketing scorecard with Claude to gamify my marketing. So it's like have goals in it, and every time I click it, the more I add to it, the bigger my tree grows. So it's like I'm not a sapling, and then by the end, it's a tree. Like beautiful guys, I'm really trying to do anything to be consistent. And I feel another big lesson I learned was from this YouTube video I was watching with my fiance, where they're talking about business in the sense of there's a delay, I think, between your input and your output. So it's like, I know Shell is starting a YouTube channel soon. I'm starting one. Gosh darn it, I'm doing it. This is me holding myself accountable by saying it to y'all. And it's like the more videos we put out, yeah, there might be not a lot of people watching. And it's just because there's a delay in that coming back to us. It's building that trust where people are gonna be like, girl, you need help with high level, go talk to Sarah. Shell is magical, she's a magnetic force. People are gonna find her any shape or form. And the same for mom. We all are magnetic people, and it's just about what are the most valuable things we need to do in a season, not only to support our business, but what do we need to do for ourselves so that we show up at our most possible best? Because when we do that, that's when we know whatever we deliver is going to be excellent.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

I think that we mentioned a lot about alignment on the show, you know, just being authentic. And I think that the more that you can make sure that you just check in, make sure that you are aligned, make sure you're being authentic. Because when we are being authentic, that means we're grabbing on to a lot of noise that's in social media or even in our own like direct sphere of just expectations and stuff like that. Make sure you have that quiet time, the quiet time to really listen to what's coming up for you. I spend a lot of contemplative time with God. And I also and I all and I'll do a lot of journaling and those type of things really feed me. Figure out what that is for you. Figure out what that, because I think that when we get all caught up in the hustle, we are going to start losing ourselves and why we were here on the at the end of the day. And we're gonna go into last sips, but I do want to leave us with this quote achievement is not the destination, it's the evidence that kept you going. And with that, last sips.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

Because it's so easy just to see what we're posting on social media and being like, oh my god, they have their shit together. They're doing amazing, blah, blah, blah, blah. Why aren't I like them? Y'all, Q1 was a shit show for me. Monique and Shell were having completely different experiences. And that's just an assumption I have because I don't fully know the whole story. So I hope that us being vulnerable and relatable shows that number one, you can't always trust what you see online to always be mindful of what you are consuming and to also just give yourself grace because life is gonna life. Magical things have happened for all of us, unexpected things have happened to all of us, and that's just part of the process of being a human being. So, with that, I hope you're giving yourself grace. Please make some times to just sit with yourself on how did Q1 feel to you? What changes do you want to make in Q2? Because those are the most impactful things that will always lead you to success.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Yes. And at that point to the long game. Remember, this is a long game. And also remember that your smallest, smallest actions are what actually leads to your success. So don't get wrapped up in the noise. Stay focused and centered and grounded. Have a great day, and thank you for being here.