2020 Year in Review
For many of us, 2020 did not go as we expected it to.
Never have I ever had such a long, busy, challenging and rewarding year as this last one.
This was my third year of full-time freelancing and the first one that was scheduled with clients and gigs back-to-back. As I recall my modest (pre-covid) goals for 2020, like “maybe having one new business collaboration by Q4”, I can’t keep myself from taking up a little smile. Somehow, with all the confusion, covid and other depressing things going on in the world, I managed my best year revenue-wise to date.
I’m breathing a huge sigh of relief and gratitude with that statement as I vividly remember back in June when my husband, Feri’s projects took an uncertain turn and we had to sit down to figure out our cash flow for the rest of the year. After a little hesitation, I could step in and say “It’s okay, we can make it work, I’ll be able to cover the revenue we’d be missing”.
I had no idea where that boldness came from, but when I look back, it’s a good overall ethos for my past year: Let’s make it happen, and see how it works out, shall we?!
Improvisation and dealing with uncertainty have never been my strongest points but I certainly made some progress in that department.
So what else happened in 2020?
Pre-March plans
Just for the record, my plans for 2020 included:
An in-depth dive into my passion for plant-based gastronomy. I toyed with the idea of going to a cookery school and learn proper kitchen techniques. This seemed to be a bare minimum approach to gastronomy, and it would have had open doors in working next to more experienced chefs. Then, places closed, and the hospitality industry got onto its knees.
The summer months we would have spent in Sweden. Feri would have been working remotely in projects, and I would have to get some kitchen practice in a café or bakery. It has been a while since we left the country and we were really looking forward to seeing new landscapes, another culture and just going through the excitement of relocation together and have a mini fresh start. Then, it wasn’t an option anymore to relocate.
My plans for the rest of the year depended on how the first two would turn out. :D
So, in short, I was doomed by the beginning of March. And as sad as that was, on the other hand, it was ‘only’ the first Q when I knew that things will change immediately and that I need to re-organise how and what I work.
Thankfully, by the beginning of the year, I was already involved in a one-year project that I knew nothing about, except that it would take up speed as we make progress. This proved to be a financial safety-net for us later.
What went well: New business developments
The Adaptable Kitchen - my PDF response to the Spring lockdown
In the second half of March, as soon as the news of a possible lockdown emerged, I started working on a material that thematised my thoughts, principles and best practices around our plant-based lifestyle.
The Adaptable Kitchen is a timely, beautifully photographed and soothing eat-at-home guide for uncertain times. And by uncertain times, I mostly meant the chaos of being at, and working from home at all times, managing family schedule and having a very limited pantry and fresh produce. Those were the weeks that the British call the ‘hungry gap’, the early spring period before the fresh seasonal produce hits the markets.
My downloadable PDF was a huge success and it got a lot-lot more downloads and LOVE through my Instagram community than I anticipated. (I promoted it only through Instagram and Facebook.)
You loved it and I loved that you loved it!
The Adaptable Kitchen is still available through this link, and it’s in Hungarian.
Plant-based business meetups & my new biz coaches
If I want to name one thing that really helped me through the lockdown times by offering community and perspective, I’d say attending Vevolution’s Plant-based Business virtual meetups through April, May and June.
Although they do not organise those meetups anymore, Vevolution has incredible resources on their website, check it out!
I also became their proud Plant-Preneur-level Patreon, too, to thank them for all the great events and lively, in-depth chats over Zoom during the Spring.
I committed to another community last year, a business owner community that I have had my eyeballs on for a while before I could make my decision to buy myself into their membership. It’s Wandering Aimfully by Jason and Caroline Zook, my favourite husband and wife duo on Earth (besides our duo with husband-of-the-business, Feri, of course!).
Since May, I’m a proud WAIM-er, getting the benefit of their unlimited business coaching program that gives a ton of support and most of all: FUN. I still have to pinch myself sometimes to remind myself of such privilege.
With both communities (and probably it’s true to all communities), you’d get out as much value of them as much value you put in.
Wonderful new clients & lots of experimentation
As my meetings with the Vevolution community became regular, I started to see areas where plant-based and eco-conscious businesses fall short because they either don’t have the time to do certain tasks or lack certain professional capacities.
I started to experiment with new business offerings in Plantconfident and pitched myself to conscious small businesses that really align with my personal and professional values.
By July, I acquired three new clients and had two more in the pipeline. I was energised, I felt amazing (no doubt I’m a summer child!) and I was highly committed to delivering small projects and solutions to my clients. I was fortunate in a big way.
Examples of some exciting client works I completed last year:
A full Squarespace website re-design and implementation for a Spanish client, including the copy story and working out the business's value proposition with the founders.
An eCommerce store setup on Shoprenter with 400+ products for a Hungarian client, moving content from the previous site, implementing custom CSS, including a 3x 2-hour training for the staff to learn the new platform.
A Shopify Lite configuration for an organic veggie garden for their Instagram and Facebook shop. You can read my case study here.
A Google Sheet tool to calculate Bill-of-materials (BOM) expenses and material orders for a knitwear company producing sustainable, ethical, natural knitwear in Hungary.
Market and customer research for a new plant-based beauty product targeting South-East Asian and United Arab Emirates markets, including written papers and a Facebook campaign setup.
Reviewing evaluation and policy papers in agriculture, environmental sustainability, short food supply chains and climate change.
Wowza, right?!
It feels like a LOT to even write all this down, no wonder that it took me this long to complete my yearly review. I put myself in a pressure cooker (stylish metaphor), and in the time of two business quarters, I delivered a handful of exciting projects from scratch.
*Pinching myself again*
As bold of me as it looked in April to jump into client projects for the rest of the year, as good of a decision it was. I had a diverse mix of clients, located literally worldwide from Budapest through Barcelona to Singapore, offering me an enormous opportunity to experiment and grow.
“Thank you for all the invaluable support over the past five months. Alles Gute would not be the same without you.”
Shout out to you, passionate and kind vegan and plant-based business owners!
From everyone I worked with, I asked for detailed feedback on our collaboration, my performance, how satisfied they were with the outcome and if they could suggest areas to improve in my service.
Looking at the clients’ positive feedback, I’m getting more certain that this is the path I’ll keep following through in years to come.
Tuning down my obsession with plant-forward gastronomy
When I launched The Adaptable Kitchen mini guide back in April, I planned to extend it to a series of guides that I’d promote through a regular newsletter I named ‘The Weekly Menu’.
As soon my days got filled up with meeting slots with and eventually, productive working hours, my priority shifted from being creative in the kitchen to be creative in the consultancy work I was doing.
I quickly realised that if I have long cooking sessions every day (or even every other day), plus the time I need to photograph, edit and post that content, I slice away a valuable chunk of my time from projects that make me excited. So this is how I started prioritising creative desk work over creative kitchen time. I still cooked for us sometimes, kept our family well-fed and healthy, but became more conscious about the use of my time.
On the other side, we developed a solid meal planning practice with Feri. We spend our Sunday mornings together and cook 3-4 meals that keep us going until the next Thursday. That’s our time to chat, share reading experiences and discuss things we heard in podcasts, and so on. Sometimes we try new recipes, and sometimes we opt for family favourites. We love it.
However, letting the Plantconfident Instagram rest and neglecting my ambitions to learn more about plant-forward cuisine left a space. To ease this feeling up a bit, I decided to wrap up that period of my life, from the end of 2018 (when Plantconfindent was born!) until early 2020.
I made a beautiful, minimalist photo album with 50 of my most-loved images I made of plant-based dishes, including those still available on my Instagram feed and Story Highlights. I titled it Plantconfident - Discovery through food 2019-2020.
Feels so good every time I flip through the album: I have come such a long way from my early photos in 2012 regarding my cooking style and image composition.
What didn’t go well
Most freelancers I know, are highly ambitious people. We keep pushing and pushing even when we burn out.
I’m no exception to that. By early December, I felt burnt out, and I knew that I need to slow down, balance back sleep deprivation and my high level of stress hormones. I spent October and November working form 7-8 am until 8-9 pm in most evenings so it was kind of what I could expect.
As experimentation has been the big ethos of 2020, I didn’t mind getting sucked into ‘busy-ness’.
Next year, I will stay accountable to myself and keep rest and mental health a priority over being productive.
I won’t continue working like a madwoman for the first half of 2021. Instead, I got back to a regular yoga practice, and won’t beat myself up if I’d like to take some time to read a book during the day or go on a walk in the neighbourhood park.
Looking to the future: 2021 Goals
I’m hoping that 2021 will be a year to settle in a more specific area of expertise and connect deeply with my business intentions. I want to expand my topic knowledge on the plant-based movement, eco-conscious business models, and my skills in some of my favourite productivity tools, Miro and Notion.
My biggest goal is to create a more streamlined business offer for Plantconfident that easily translates to the values plant-based business owners are looking for.
What’s for sure is that in Q1 I’ll write up and publish a couple more articles here on the website, I have so many ideas and already drafted case studies in the pipeline and can’t wait to process and share them with you.
I’ve also got one big project lined up for Q1-Q3 2021 that’ll allow me to shape a positive change in how our farming and land cultivation policies perform in Hungary. It’s amazing to wear many hats when working on plant-based solutions: to really move things forward, it’s nice if you are knowledgeable of the big picture, but then, the immediate impact is that you make at a personal level by pushing the demand for such solutions.