Special Projects News | April 2025

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How I Transformed My Business in Just 12 Weeks

Sounds odd, but I really did, actually

The Big Picture

Just before Easter, I wrapped up my first 12-week year, following the precepts of a book with that title.

Did I do it perfectly? Of course not, but I stuck with it, and I’m actually quite pleased.

I’ll do better next time (I hope) and better still the time after that.

Q. Why 12 Weeks?

A. To avoid getting overwhelmed by grand yearly plans!

Another answer: because someone warmly recommended a book to me, The 12 Week Year.

I bought the book, liked it, and decided to try what it promised: to pack as much into three months as I might otherwise do in a year.

To begin, I set myself three clear targets:

- one financial goal,
- one practical project for my office
- one creative challenge (my first solo art exhibition – yikes, talk about putting yourself out there)

Now, having said that I didn’t want to be overwhelmed with longer-term planning, I must admit that the process of planning a 12 week year does involve looking further ahead.

To make a 12-week plan, I needed a broader sense of where I want to go, longer term.

So I started, as the book suggests, by writing down a picture of my ideal life three years from now.

This wasn’t a plan, more like a description of what I’d like my daily reality to be.

Sounds easy, but surprisingly hard to do.

It’s so much easier not to have a plan, and just allow life to suggest things from one day to the next week, to the next month…

Having written my vision for three years from now, I put it aside to focus on just the next 12 weeks.

I did a lot of this planning and so on in the Notes app, which saves across the cloud from my desktop computer to my iPhone and iPad, so I can update things anywhere.

But I also used my paper notebook because sometimes I think better with a pen or pencil.

I also stuck things on the wall:

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Daily Practice

EVERY morning(!) for three months, I wrote three goals at the top of my notebook page.

Hardly revolutionary, you might think, but surprisingly effective – because these goals caused me to question whether anything I was about to do would actually help to achieve them.

I’d also made a vague resolution last year – spontaneously, on LinkedIn – about seeing more people in person.

And although this wasn’t part of my 12 Week Year plans, it must have been in the back of my mind because I have seen a lot more people in 2025.

In many cases this involved studying their faces for portraits – a slightly more intense form of socialising than I’d initially planned.

Goals > Tactics > Schedule

Having come up with goals, I broke them down into weekly – and then daily – tactics to achieve the goals.

These tactics included
a) one-offs and
b) things I would expect to do again and again.

I quickly realised I would need to allocate time to specific tasks, and created a repeating calendar.

You may not be able to see the details clearly in this photo. But you probably CAN see that I blocked off the early part of my mornings and later afternoons, leaving the middle of the day flexible.

The timings were there to remind me what I wanted to do each day, not to be rigid.

If I needed to move things around, I did.

Some of the details that you may not be able to read in the photo:

Strategic thinking time and uninterrupted writing were scheduled for mornings every day, plus buffer blocks for eg reading and answering emails.

Afternoons included specific times to get in touch with clients of all kinds. And more buffer blocks.

I scheduled a time on Saturday mornings to review my week and plan ahead.

And on Monday lunchtimes I had a quick call with one other person who is doing the 12 Week Year alongside me, to hold ourselves accountable.

Score my week

The 12 Week Year book that got me started on all this is very clear that, if you’re to hit your goals, you should do a weekly review (yourself) AND check in with at least one other person doing the 12 Week Year (as I did).

In the weekly review, the aim is to tick off 85% of your weekly tactics.

Do that and the goals will “look after themselves.”

I tracked everything as yes/no, and gave myself a weekly score. Some weeks were better than others, but hey:

Every Saturday morning I looked back at what l’d managed, in order to move ahead with more clarity:

Week	Score
———————————	————
1	61%
2 – 25 Jan	77%
3 – 1 Feb	?
4 – 8 Feb	75%
5 – 15 Feb	75%
6 – 22 Feb	71%
7 – 1 Mar	83%
8 – 8 Mar	69%
9 – 15 Mar	75%
10 – 22 Mar	75%
11 – 27 Mar	Did the review but didn’t get round to scoring fully
12 –	?

There was a lot of family stuff going on towards the end. Sorry about that.

Wrong goal?

One of my goals, relating to my office, just never really motivated me like the others.

I never did buy myself (as intended) a plan chest to contain all my art works.

Instead, I bought a number of portfolios, made of stiff board, to hold different art collections and take them with me to show people.

Man (me) on train platform at Gospel Oak, with huge portfolio.

Reading back on this review, I may be making too much of the near misses and slight disappointments.

The fact is that I set myself a goal to do a solo show and I did it.

As it happens, the show related more widely to my financial goal too, because as stated previously I made more than half of my income in the period from art.

And the show also helped with my third goal: tidying my office. Because I sold canvases and frames that have been cluttering up the office for a while.

Best of all, people liked the pictures they bought. Here’s a WhatsApp message I got last week:

Finally I am in London and have seen my Magnolias.
LOVE, thank you so much xx

Unexpected Twists

I promised (above) to show you a screenshot of my iPhone Note, marking the things I managed / didn’t. Here it is:

Not bad.

Looking at some of my early notes now makes me smile – and wince a little.

I set what felt like a very ambitious revenue target for the 12 weeks, and technically, I smashed it.

But “Generate revenue” is not the same as “Earn”.

Not all of the promised revenue is actually in the bank, yet.

And if we are talking about money being banked, I missed the target figure.

I’m confident that the promised revenue will come, but have learned a lesson about being more specific with my goals.

The biggest surprise is that my income this year has flipped.

Art has overtaken writing (including writing for others and teaching writing) as my main source of income.

Looking ahead

I want to boost my writing income, including the ghostwriting and teaching. I’m ready to tackle social media ads for my art. And looking forward to doing some more talks about breakdown and recovery.

But I’m taking forward this big lesson about being precise with my goals. “Generated” revenue and “banked” revenue are two very different things!


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