37. How I turned $65K into $215K in just 12 Months

Have you ever felt stuck in a routine that doesn’t align with the life you truly want—like you’re just getting by instead of thriving?

That was me in 2013. 
At that time, my hubby Ben was grinding away, spending 60+ hours a week away from our family (baby boy #2 had just arrived on the scene!) for a career he didn’t love. It was a “wake up - go to work - go to sleep - repeat” kind of life that we knew wasn’t for us.
But change requires action. 
And for us, that meant figuring out how to turn my “glorified hobby” into a real business—that could replace Ben’s salary, cover health insurance, and give us the freedom to not just survive, but to live a life that excites us. 
We set a huge, slightly terrifying goal: add $150,000 to our revenue in 12 months.
At first, it felt kind of impossible…until we broke it down:
$150K in a year became 30 weddings at $5K each
30 weddings meant booking just 2.5 per month
Suddenly, it wasn’t about how to leave a “stable” job but how to book a few more clients each month
I worked harder than ever that year…but in July of 2014, Ben handed in his notice and we stepped into the life we’d dreamed of.
This journey wasn’t just about money—it was about creating time, freedom, and the ability to be present for our family. It’s about showing up for the moments that matter most.
Here’s the thing: achieving your vision doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It starts with clarity on what you truly want and a step-by-step plan to get there. When you break down big goals into actionable pieces, they stop feeling impossible.
If this story sparks something in you—a vision for your own life or business—know that it’s possible. Whether your goal is to hit a financial milestone, redefine your work-life balance, or simply dream bigger, I’m here to help. 
Tune into this week’s episode of the Successful Creatives podcast to hear the behind the scenes on how I “manifested” an additional $150,000 in 12 months, so that you can make your dreams a reality now.
Let’s make this year the one where everything changes.

Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.

Transcript

Today I am pulling back the curtain on my own personal life and business growth in a way that I never have, and I am so excited to invite you into the journey. This is the continuation from last week's episode where I talked about how to manifest anything that you want in your life. This is a story of how we manifested a vision that we had in our life. In that vision required that we add an additional $150,000 to our business in just 12 months. And that's when I wasn't even making six figures. I am so excited to get into this episode with you. Let's face it, most of us would rather be creating art than running a successful business, but we can 100% do both. My name is Erica Ewing. I'm a wedding photographer in sales and marketing expert for creative entrepreneurs. I'm here to help you define the life of your dreams and create a business that supports just that. Welcome to the Successful Creatives podcast. There have been two truly transformative years in my business since I started back in. When did I start my business? 2010, I guess is officially when I started it. The first was the year that I was able to retire Ben from his engineering career, and the second is the year that I implemented a sales system. My super attractor system into my business. These were the two years that have made the biggest impact on my bottom line, which has made the biggest impact on my life.

And so today we're going to be talking about that first year, which was back in 2013, and that was the year that I added an additional $150,000 in revenue to my businesses, bottom line in just one year. And at the time, the year before, I actually had made a total of $65,000. So the math works out to I went from a $65,000 a year to a $215,000. Year in just 12 months. 12 months. That's a 350% growth in my business in just one year. Want to know how I did it? Well, good. You're in the right place because that's what we're talking about today. So last week I went over the formula on how to manifest absolutely anything that you want. And this is the formula that is tried and true and proven, because I've used it time and time again in my business, and I used it in order to grow my business by 350% in one year so that Ben could leave his day job. So I'm going to walk you through, you know, specifically how we went about making this happen so that you can see how you can install this into your own business and bring your own visions to reality. A lot of times, visions will come from things that you don't like about your life. And this, this goes for everything. Sometimes it's easier to see what you want when you're experiencing something that you don't want, right? Like, this is one of the best ways to get really clear on who your ideal client is too, is by honing in on the clients that you didn't enjoy working with.

And that's the same thing with really thinking about what you want your life to look like. A lot of it starts from what you want your life to not look like, or not be like or feel like. And that's where our vision back in 2012 stemmed from. So at that point I was running a photography business, but it was very part time. And if we're being honest, it was basically a glorified hobby. Pretty much all of the money that I made from my business was cycled back into the business to do things like buy a new website template and, um, lots of lighting courses. I took so many lighting courses I had to buy all the gear. I had to, you know, upgrade my cameras and upgrade my lenses as my craft progressed and as my knowledge progressed on on what was out there. And so I wasn't really making money from my photography business, which is why I'm calling it a glorified hobby. I had a studio space, but it was because at that time we were we just fell into this really beautiful opportunity to have a storefront, and it was insanely affordable. Um, and basically got me out of the house, which, if you are at home with a toddler, you know why this is important.

And so back then, it our lives looked like been working all week long. Monday through Friday, many days were 730 to 5 plus an hour commute on either end, but a lot of days were more like 730 to 10 because as an engineer, a lot of times you have to go to town hearings. And so he was working 50 to 60, sometimes 70 hours a week at his engineering job. And then on the weekends he was either taking care of Trevor and I was out working, shooting portraits and weddings, or he was second shooting with me. So at this point, he had already started training as a second shooter for me. He was starting to come to my weddings with me. So he was either, you know, we were passing Trevor like a baton on some weekends and other weekends. He just kept right on working so he would work the whole entire week and then the whole entire weekend. And it was rinse and repeat every single week. And so we got to this point in our life where after doing this on repeat for a while, we just decided we'd had enough. That was not how we wanted our life to look. And then the nail in the coffin was. So Trevor was in preschool at this point. And at the end of the year, they had done this event.

That was like a what do you want to be when you grow up kind of event. And Trevor wanted to be a drummer and a rock star band, which is amazing, especially if you know him. Um, and so Ben had asked him, you don't want to be an engineer like I am. And Trevor, like, looked him dead in the eye and said, I would never want to be an engineer because then I'd never see my family. And that was like a stake to the heart. Like that just gutted us to hear our son say he would never want to do what his dad did, because he'd never see his family was the sign that we needed to change something. This wasn't. This wasn't how we wanted to raise our kids. This wasn't how we wanted to live our life. My most favorite person on this planet is Ben, and he was probably the person that I saw the least at this point in my life because he was working so much and he enjoyed his career. But it wasn't his passion, it wasn't his purpose. It wasn't something that he was called to do. It was something that paid our bills. It was something that paid for his vacation time. It paid for our health insurance, great benefits, good company, good employees. It was good enough, but it wasn't what we wanted our life to look like. And so we decided to figure out how to change things.

And the first thing that we realized was that we wanted to spend more of our life together. He's my favorite person. I have a feeling that I'm his favorite person, and we wanted to do our days together, and so we decided that we wanted to have a go at Turning My Business, which was Erica Ewing Photography back then into a husband and wife team, into a wife and husband team. So we wanted to go from Erica Ewing Photography to the Ewing's photography studio. We wanted to do life, business and personal together and share more of our time with each other. We wanted to be able to give our kids more time. We wanted to be present for all of the things that our parents were not present for. We wanted to have more time, freedom so that we could choose what our days looked like. Simple things like being home for them when they get off the bus after school, any, anything. We wanted the choice to be able to choose what our days look like. And photography is my passion. It is the thing that I love. I love owning a business, running a business, serving clients, interacting with Interacting with families and couples and getting to know people. I love this career. I love my job. And ultimately, when we started to talk about what we wanted, for me, career has always been at the forefront of my priorities.

I was never meant to be a stay at home mom. I stayed home with Trevor for the first 15 months of his life, and it just wasn't for me. I loved the mix of my time with my children, but also my time building my business and serving clients and time with friends. Like I just I crave balance, and out of the two of us, Ben is the one who would rather be home, be the caretaker with the boys. And so, as we are talking about our vision, it became really clear that we wanted to create this husband and wife team, which would allow me to, you know, put more time towards the business, obviously towards my family too, but more time towards the business because he wouldn't be always at work and he would have more time to put towards our family and then really enjoy the time that he was putting towards the business too. And so this was the vision that we came up with sharing life together, fully supported by our photography business. We had a clear vision. Now, step two of the formula, if you remember from last week, is to figure out what that vision requires. This does not need to be done in any sort of fancy way. You don't need any like fancy tools in order to be able to figure out what is required. You have to do some research.

So the bigger the vision, the bigger the goal, probably the more research and time you're going to have to put into this piece. Okay. Like if we're going back to last week's cooking analogy, there's not much that really needs to go into figuring out what that goal requires. It's pretty straightforward. But walking away from an established engineering career definitely requires more research. So we started to look into how much the business needed to make in order to replace his salary. His salary went beyond just, you know, his paycheck that he used to get every other week. It also included retirement. It included health insurance, which is a big, scary one for anybody who's not exclusively self-employed. This is the thing I hear a lot of people say, oh, I would love to give up my job, but I get health insurance from my company. It's not that big of a deal. Once you actually start to look into it. There are some pretty affordable options out there. Like, yes, is health insurance insanely expensive? 100%. But can you make it happen? Is it doable? 100%. On top of that, yes. So don't let that be the thing that holds you back. So but those are like these are the things that we had to look into is what will it require for him to be able to leave? It's more than just the salary. It's all of those other expenses. Plus, on top of that, there is the additional tax that you get taxed on when you, you know, make that next level of revenue within your business.

So you have to factor in salary, health insurance, retirement, all of these other benefits that you get from your job. Plus then taxes on top of your business when you are looking at increasing your revenue by a significant amount. All of these things we had to roll into our goal. And so that's how we came up with the $150,000 figure. Remember when I said last week that you want to turn the vision into you know what you need. You want to figure out what you need to achieve in order to hit, to get that vision, to make that vision a reality. And then you want to set a very specific goal. And so the number that we came to is Thousand dollars. This is the number that we had to bring in in order to match Ben's salary, plus the additional benefits plus the increase in taxes. It was $150,000 at this point in my business. Like I said, if you remember, I mentioned it was basically a glorified hobby. I was making $65,000 a year. That was, well, I'm going to say making that was what I had made the year before, and that was my best year yet. So this was this business was still quite at his infancy stage, and adding $150,000 was a huge number.

So again, at this point, it would have been really easy to take a look at where the business was and where we wanted to head and say, we can't do this or we can't do this in 12 months, maybe, Maybe down the road we'll do this. It would have been so easy to walk away, but I think because our vision was like built on the back of some pain that we were feeling, the fact that, you know, Trevor was noticing that Ben wasn't around, the fact that we never got to spend time together. We were in a place of feeling enough pain that our vision became really pressing. The next part of the goal creation is to set a time frame, and we decided that we were ready to make this happen. We were ready to step into the next version of our life. And so the time frame that we came up with was one year when we set the goal. It was July 2013. So we had just welcomed our youngest. Cooper was born in February 2013, and we decided with a new baby at home, that we wanted to change our life and bring in life changing money within the next 12 months so that by the By the time July 2014 rolled around, Ben would be able to resign and we would be, you know, fully living the vision of the life, our life that we had created. So now we know.

We know that we needed to make an extra $150,000 within 12 months. Very specific goal financially. Very specific goal. Time wise, in order to bring a vision to life. So from there, the next step is to create a plan that gets you to your goal. In this process does not have to be hard. In fact, this process can be really, really easy when people think about creating a business plan or a profit plan, it's immediately overwhelming because you think of spreadsheets and you think of you think of endless numbers and budgets and all of these things that feel overwhelming and hard. But it doesn't actually have to be like that. In fact, the way that we created our very first plan was the two of us sitting on the floor in my studio with a Sharpie marker on an 11 by 14, 11 by 17 sheet of paper. And that is where we created our very first business plan of exactly what we were going to do to bring in an additional $150,000 into the business over the next year. If you've ever heard me talk about pricing, I talk about how clarity and confidence comes from actually knowing what your real numbers are. And this is what creating a financial business plan for your life or for your business can do for you is it gives you that clarity and that confidence. So up to that point, I'm going to guess I was probably just making my pricing up based on whatever I saw competitors charging people in the area, charging what I felt like I was worth.

Once we had this big vision and this big number that we had to hit, all of a sudden Insecurity around pricing went away because we now had the clarity that if we do not charge the pricing that we set in this business plan, then we will not be able to hit our goal and then we will not be able to live the vision of our life. This is how you get just unshakable confidence in your pricing, because then you build a business that supports that pricing. I wish I had saved that sheet of paper. I wonder if it might be in my basement somewhere, but it was very simple. If I could remember roughly what it was, it was broken down between weddings and portraits, which were the two essential business lines that I was photographing back then. And, um, and I remember that a big the bulk of it was going to come from weddings. So we the goal became 30 weddings at an average booking price of 5000. So that is Is 150,000 right there. And then the additional revenue was going to come from portraits. And I'm going to guess probably my average back then was maybe around 1500 or 1000 to 1500 per portrait order. So I don't know, whatever that math ends up breaking down to is how we were going to net to the $215,000 that we needed to bring in by the next July.

So do you see how a big goal starts to feel so much more attainable when you break it down like this? So we went from leave the corporate world, leave your engineering job, walk away from stability and health insurance and retirement savings and your salary to okay. In order to do that, you have to make $150,000 in one year to okay, in order to make $150,000 in one year, you have to book 30 weddings at $5,000 per wedding. Do you see how much more attainable that is? So that rather than saying, how are we going to free Ben from his engineering job, it becomes, how are we going to book more weddings? How are we going to charge $5,000 per wedding? And then that starts to get so much easier, because once you have those smaller goals in mind, you can create a plan on how you're going to attract more clients, how you're going to book more weddings, what are the marketing strategies that you need to leverage in order to be able to do that? These are the things where it starts to get so much easier when you break down your goals, and then if you break them down even further, you might say, okay, let's break 12 months up into quarters, so 12 months into four quarters, and we need to now book seven and a half weddings per quarter.

So when you start to think about that, I need to book seven weddings over the next three months. How much more attainable does that feel? How much pressure does that take off of your shoulders when you break down the vision into very specific, into a very specific goal, and then into a plan on how you're going to hit that goal? This is how big life change becomes. Easy. This is how you can manifest anything that you want. And so once we had that Sharpie written business plan, I was really clear on exactly what I had to do and I got to work. When you have a vision that you are 100% soul aligned with, and then basically a blueprint that tells you, hey, if you do this, you're going to achieve that vision there. It just lights a fire under you that that lets you know that I can get this. I'm going to go get this. I'm going to put in the work and do the work. 2013 into 2014 was the hardest year career wise for me. I worked the hardest, I worked the most hours. I busted my ass in order to hit that goal. But July 2014, when Ben handed in his notice and resigned and never looked back. It's been ten years together that we've been able to sustain and grow this business year over year, because we made that choice to go all in and to go for it.

And now when I look back, I am forever grateful that we took that chance, that we took that leap, that we didn't let logistics like health insurance or leaving stability change our goals. Because it's interesting seeing seeing the economy over the last, you know, decade, seeing a global pandemic come through and seeing the actual instability that lives within the corporate world. In a lot of ways, our job feels more stable than than then a lot of the other options out there, and we have kept our business alive for a decade. I don't see it going anywhere. I see the next decade looking back again and reflecting on everything that we've built together. And in the meantime, the both of us have been able to spend way more time with our family. We are able to serve our clients on a deeper level. We are able to structure our business in a way that lets us pour into everybody that we love, from our family to our friends that we get to see regularly, to our clients who are basically an extended extension of our family now at this point to we, so many of our clients are repeat and they stay with us. And I think it's because they feel the love in the the time commitment that we pour into them as well. And we're able to do that because of the way that we've built our business and the way that we can structure our time.

We're home when our kids get off the school bus. And yes, are we gone a lot of weekends for weddings, 100%. But Ben and I are doing it together, and we get to be at the boys baseball games during the week instead. And this works for us. This works for our family. And seeing the bond that Ben shares with the boys and seeing them play catch in the yard and, you know, reflecting back on all of the traveling that we've done from just like road trips every April down the East Coast to Hawaii, spending a month in Maui to spending two weeks in the Azores, and recently exploring London and Paris with them and giving them so many opportunities and really giving them time, giving each other time. At the end of the day, that is our greatest asset. That is the thing that people look back on and have regrets about is how they spent their time. And so our vision serves us by in our business, serves us Letting us spend our life, letting us spend our time in the way that brings us the most joy and the most fulfillment. So, you know, drop any questions that you have in the comments. Dm me on Instagram. I am here to help support you in building out your vision, building out your goal for your most beautiful life.

I hope that sharing this story of how we hit this goal in just 12 months was inspiring to you. If you want me to elaborate on any bit of it, if you want another podcast episode that breaks anything in it down even further, just yummy, let me know. Email me. I am here. I'm happy to supply more help and I would love to hear from you. If you are ready for your best year yet, and you want to get really clear on what your vision is and how to achieve that vision, then I invite you to dream bigger, achieve more, and plan with me with the Refresh and Refine Success plan. In this success plan, I'm teaching you the exact method that I've gone to hit all of my goals over the last 14 years of running a photography studio. This includes leaving my corporate job, earning $150,000 in just 12 months so that I could retire Ben from his civil engineering job. Building our dream home. Traveling the world with our children. Spending a month in Hawaii. Your most, biggest, most beautiful version of your life is totally possible, and it just requires the vision and the plan to get there. Let me help you achieve your most beautiful life. Go to the Ewings success plan. Right now you can grab it for the lowest price that it will ever be. It is a complete steal for the transformation that is possible for your life. You.