Why Sustainable Financial Growth Requires Two Revenue Goals

A lot of online business advice focuses financial goal setting on a single revenue target: pick a number that feels expansive, reverse engineer it, and stick with it ‘til you achieve it. With this approach, you’re often encouraged to aim bigger, move faster, and trust that you’ll “grow into” whatever it takes to get there.

In practice, this often looks like building ahead of your actual financial—and personal/energetic—capacity. You create a “scalable” offer like a membership or group program, only to discover that it requires consistent marketing, ongoing delivery, and months (or years) to mature—and you don’t have that kind of time or energy. You hire support because you’re overwhelmed, even though your revenue isn’t yet repeatable enough to sustain it—and now you’re stuck in the cycle of constantly having to find new ways to make pretty much the same amount of revenue, with momentary spikes being the momentum boost that keeps you going. You layer on more and more demand generation strategies—first launching, then blogging, then podcasting, then ads, then…—without letting any one of them actually mature, because despite doing a lot, you never quite have enough clients or leads to feel stable, financially.

What you end up with isn’t freedom or scalability—as had seemed to be “guaranteed” when you began each new thing—but rather a business that requires more of you than it gives back. One that, instead of delivering your desired results faster, now takes longer for results to catch up. Where maintaining momentum demands a level of energy, consistency, and bandwidth you don’t yet have reliable access to. You could eventually grow into this version of your business, but right now, you don’t have the financial or operational margin to carry it long enough for that to happen.

For many founders—particularly solopreneurs and micro-business owners—this approach doesn’t create sustained momentum or compounding results (the key result in a sustainable business). It creates instability and exhaustion, often causing capable business owners to tap out early, assuming that they must be the problem.

This happens because conventional goal setting collapses two very different needs into one number. It asks a single stretchy-and-sexy revenue goal to both stabilize your present reality and fund future expansion. As we’ll discuss below, this undermines long-term sustainability—and thus, success—at every turn.

The Two Revenue Goals Every Business Owner Needs

There are two revenue goals that every solopreneur or micro-business owner needs to name: their baseline and their expansion revenue goal.

The baseline revenue goal is the amount of revenue you need in order to sustain your life and business exactly as they are right now. If you currently live with roommates, this goal does not include living by yourself. If you currently aren’t working with a coach, this goal does not include hiring one. The baseline revenue goal is the amount of revenue that supports your current life and business without requiring any changes. 

Then there’s the expansion revenue goal. The expansion revenue goal is the amount of revenue you’d like to expand into in order to experience more in your life and business. If you’re setting your expansion revenue goal before reliably achieving your baseline revenue goal, I recommend choosing a number that, in your best guesses, is one you could almost certainly achieve—repeatedly, month after month, year after year—within 2-3 years from now. You can expand this expansion revenue goal later, once you’re reliably settled in at the baseline revenue goal, if you still desire to. (You might not.)

The Core Mistake: Asking One Goal to do Two Jobs

In very simplified terms, most revenue goal-setting practices invite you to look at what you need to cover your expenses and then add an additional amount on top for whatever else you want. In doing so, you are technically identifying two numbers: what you need (your baseline revenue goal) and what you want (your expansion revenue goal).

But as soon as the second number is named, the first fades into the background. All planning, strategy, and effort becomes oriented around achieving the larger, more expansive goal, with the implicit expectation that, once you hit it, the baseline will naturally be taken care of too.

Of course, this expectation isn’t wrong; if you sustainably achieve your expansion revenue goal, you will also achieve your baseline revenue goal.

The problem is what happens before that expansion revenue goal is reliably met.

When your baseline revenue is not yet stable and repeatable, pursuing expansion changes the conditions under which every business decision is made. You are no longer choosing strategies based on fit, sustainability, or long-term payoff—you are choosing them based on urgency.

The baseline revenue goal does more than cover expenses. It changes the decision-making environment you’re operating inside of.

When your baseline revenue is not yet reliably met, every business decision carries implicit pressure. Offers need to work quickly. Strategies need to pay off now. Experiments feel risky because failure doesn’t just mean “this didn’t work”—it means continued instability. Even good ideas become heavy, and often unsustainable, when they’re asked to perform on a survival timeline.

When your baseline revenue is not yet reliably met, every business decision carries implicit pressure. Offers need to work quickly. Strategies need to pay off now. Experiments feel risky because failure doesn’t just mean “this didn’t work”—it means continued instability. Even good ideas become heavy, and often unsustainable, when they’re asked to perform on a survival timeline.

From this place, expansion isn’t actually expansion—it’s an attempt to solve for stability through growth.

Once your baseline revenue goal is reliably met, that pressure eases. You are no longer asking every decision to solve for immediate sustainability. This creates the physiological safety to move with intention rather than urgency. Intention is what allows strategy to mature.

Only from this place can you:

• Choose strategies based on legitimate fit rather than speed of result
• Allow systems time to compound, so growth requires the same amount of work for exponentially more reward
• Notice when an expansion revenue goal—or the strategy for achieving it—requires refinement
• Adjust as needed without panic or sunk-cost attachment

Your baseline revenue goal provides the foundation for your expansion revenue goal because it stabilizes the conditions required for effective growth.

The Three Hidden Costs of Skipping Stability for Expansion

When you pursue expansion before your baseline revenue goal is reliably met, the cost isn’t just stress or slower growth. It’s that that stress and slower growth unhelpfully reshape how you think, decide, and build. Over time, this creates three compounding problems, each reinforcing the next, and each making it more difficult to actually achieve—and sustain—the expansion revenue goal

#1 – It Undermines Physiological Safety

As I mentioned above, when you pursue expansion before your baseline revenue goal is reliably met, you don’t just add pressure to your business, you change the conditions under which your brain and body are making decisions. When income isn’t stable, your nervous system interprets uncertainty as threat. Time horizons shrink. Perception narrows. Attention collapses into a single question: What do I need to do next to make this work?

It’d be easy to think you just need more discipline, but the reality is: you’re now experiencing a survival response.

Financial instability is one of the most physiologically activating experiences us humans can have. When your baseline revenue isn’t reliable, every business decision carries higher stakes—not just cognitively, but physiologically. Your entire system is no longer optimized for discernment, patience, or long-term thinking. It’s optimized for immediacy.

Financial instability is one of the most physiologically activating experiences us humans can have. When your baseline revenue isn’t reliable, every business decision carries higher stakes—not just cognitively, but physiologically. Your entire system is no longer optimized for discernment, patience, or long-term thinking. It’s optimized for immediacy.

From this place, several predictable shifts begin to occur.

First, urgency replaces intention. Strategies are chosen not because they are the best fit for your business, but because they promise the fastest possible relief. Experiments feel dangerous. Long-term systems feel indulgent. Anything that doesn’t show quick returns starts to feel like a liability rather than an investment.

Second, your relationship to goals changes. Expansion revenue goals set under these conditions are often either too big to feel reachable in the present moment, or disconnected from personal meaning altogether. They’re often borrowed from externally set benchmarks of what you “should” want rather than rooted in what you actually want to build. When a goal lacks personal alignment and feels threatening, the only available fuel source is survival. You push not because you care deeply, but because you feel you have to. (I talked about this further in our article: You don’t actually want freedom in your business. Here’s why →)

Third, strategy failures begin to contaminate identity. Because survival thinking distorts our relationship with time, results are expected quickly. When they don’t arrive on the expected—albeit unrealistic—timeline, the story often turns inward: Maybe I’m not cut out for this. Maybe this will never work. Maybe no one actually wants what I offer. What is actually a structural problem—attempting to grow without stability—gets misinterpreted as a personal flaw.

At the strategy level, this often produces chaotic behavior: constant switching, adding more and more tactics without letting any of them mature, or overcommitting in an attempt to force results. In some cases, it can even lead to ethical misalignment, such as small overpromises or inflated claims made not out of malice, but out of pressure to make a buck. Survival physiology doesn’t ask: Is this true or aligned? It asks: Will this work right now?

All of this leads to some familiar—yet avoidable—outcomes.

You burn out from oscillating between strategies meant for the business you want and tactics required to survive today—never giving either one what they need to fully succeed.

You break down, as prolonged instability of efforts and results begins translating into self-doubt and an identity-level loss of confidence.

You might even burn it all down, because even if success finally arrives, it ends up feeling hollow or misaligned, and requires either a massive rework or entirely abandoning the very things you depleted yourself and your resources to create.

The experiences of burnout, breakdown, or burning everything down are often labeled as inconsistency, lack of follow-through, or even self-sabotage. They’re diagnosed as a mindset or a motivation issue. Yet what they actually reflect is a business being asked to grow without a floor.

The experiences of burnout, breakdown, or burning everything down are often labeled as inconsistency, lack of follow-through, or even self-sabotage. Yet what they actually reflect is a business being asked to grow without a floor—and no amount of mindset work or motivation can resolve this.

No amount of mindset work or motivational effort can resolve this. What’s needed here isn’t more drive or discipline, it’s physiological safety. In business, that safety is created—in part—by reliably meeting your baseline revenue goal before asking expansion to do the work of stability.

#2 – It Destroys Strategic Clarity

Once physiological safety is compromised, strategic clarity is typically the next to go.

Stability-building strategies and expansion-building strategies are not the same, and they certainly aren’t interchangeable. One is designed to create reliable, repeatable revenue. The other is designed to compound effort, extend reach, or increase leverage over time. When expansion strategies are used to try to create stability, the result is confusion (not growth).

The first problem is a mismatch of function. What works to generate consistent revenue in the near term is often different from what works to scale or expand long-term results. Stability is built through strategies that are direct and quickly responsive—things that give you fast feedback and repeatable outcomes. Expansion, by contrast, relies on strategies that take longer to mature: audience-building, systematization, leverage, and compounding effects.

When you attempt to use long-term expansion strategies to solve short-term stability problems, you create a strategic gap. The strategy itself isn’t “bad,” but it’s being asked to do a job it wasn’t designed to do, and often on a timeline it can’t realistically meet.

When you attempt to use long-term expansion strategies to solve short-term stability problems, you create a strategic gap. The strategy itself isn’t “bad,” but it’s being asked to do a job it wasn’t designed to do, and often on a timeline it can’t realistically meet.

The second problem is that instability removes your ability to evaluate strategy accurately. Without a reliably met baseline revenue goal, it becomes nearly impossible to tell whether something isn’t working because it’s the wrong strategy, the wrong execution, the wrong timing, or simply because it hasn’t had enough time to mature. Everything feels inconclusive, data gets noisy, and your decisions understandably become reactive.

Only when your baseline revenue goal is being consistently met do you gain the clarity required to make informed expansion decisions. From stability, you can actually ask useful strategic questions: What is already working? Where are results coming from? What feels aligned enough to sustain over time? What constraints am I truly working within? Without that stability, strategy selection becomes guesswork under pressure.

The third problem is forgoing any amount of timeline discipline. Achieving your baseline revenue goal once often requires shorter-term strategies—approaches you may not use forever, but that create immediate traction. Sustaining your baseline revenue goal requires a shift toward medium-term strategies: systems that work repeatedly, with fewer novel or moving parts, and less volatility. This phase is where you learn one of the most critical CEO skillsets: designing a strategy, sticking with it, and making measured adjustments rather than constantly starting over.

Expansion requires an even longer time horizon. The path from sustained baseline to first achievement of an expansion revenue goal is often the longest stretch of the journey. But when that path is walked intentionally, something surprising happens: the time between first expansion success and repeatable expansion success is often the shortest phase of all—because the strategic muscles and operational structures required have already been built in previous stages.

When stability is skipped, this entire journey collapses. Strategy gets optimized for short-term relief rather than long-term viability.

• Instead of simplifying, you overcommit—e.g. by adding a podcast, a YouTube channel, a blog, and a new platform because “marketing isn’t working,” rather than identifying which part of your demand generation system actually needs adjustment.
• Instead of letting a strategy mature, you switch models entirely—e.g. turning a group program into a course after one launch, abandoning the momentum and signal you were just beginning to create.
• Instead of designing from your actual constraints, you copy business models that assume existing stability—e.g. making a low-ticket membership your signature offer—without the time, runway, or audience required for them to sustain you.

What results is molasses-like growth—when you want speed—and spaghetti-at-the-wall strategy—when you want coherence and repeatability. Nothing runs long enough to compound. Nothing stays simple long enough to become reliable. And because the strategy keeps changing, it’s never clear what’s actually working or why.

When strategy is selected under pressure, it will almost always prioritize speed, certainty, and (seeming) external proof over fit, coherence, and sustainability. Strategic clarity can’t be fixed by trying harder or doing more, as many unconsciously believe. It comes from having a stable foundation that allows strategy to be chosen, evaluated, and refined over time.

#3 – It Undermines Long-Term Success (Even When You “Succeed”)

Over time, the first two costs—physiological instability and strategic distortion—compound.

Meaning: the real damage of skipping stability for expansion doesn’t always show up immediately. It shows up over time.

Expansion goals typically take a good amount of time to reach once, and even longer to sustain repeatedly. When you pursue them without a reliably met baseline underneath you, success tends to arrive in spikes rather than being repeatable. Revenue jumps happen, but then you start the very next month back at zero, having to figure out how to make the spike happen once again. Wins feel exciting, but fragile—like the other shoe could drop at any moment (because it does). Momentum exists in spurts, but it’s exhausting to maintain when there are no systems designed to carry it forward without constant personal output.

Without the stability provided by reliably achieving your baseline revenue goal, burnout often sets in before your success has a chance to compound. Success becomes something you have to keep proving, recreating, or defending rather than something that your business is designed and prepared to hold.

This is also where the subtler cost emerges: when you’re operating under pressure, you’re rarely paying attention to whether you actually want the thing you’re building toward. You’re focused on achieving the goal, not questioning it. On getting there, not on whether “there” still fits.

By prioritizing expansion before your baseline is reliably met, you often commit to goals based on abstraction rather than experience. You commit to a goal because it sounded good, looked impressive, or was positioned by people outside of you as the next logical step. You didn’t yet know—let alone understand—what it would require of you, or whether you even wanted to live inside the business it would create.

In contrast, building toward and then stabilizing your baseline goal gives you something incredibly valuable, perhaps even more valuable than money: time. Time to experiment. Time to notice what feels sustainable as opposed to what drains you. The time to learn what kinds of work, rhythms, and responsibilities actually support your life rather than consume it.

This matters because direction chosen under urgency is rarely values-aligned. When goals are set from “escape” energy or survival pressure, they tend to reflect external definitions of success rather than internal ones. And when you build from that place, even “success” can lead to disengagement, resentment, or a desire to burn everything down and start over.

This is how capable, thoughtful business owners end up with businesses that technically work, but don’t work for them.

Once again: what looks like inconsistency, lack of follow-through, or self-sabotage is often a business being asked to grow without a floor. The issue isn’t that you didn’t want it badly enough or that you had too many limiting beliefs. It’s that the conditions required for long-term success were never built, let alone stabilized.

The issue isn’t that you didn’t want it badly enough or that you had too many limiting beliefs. It’s that the conditions required for long-term success were never built, let alone stabilized.

Sustainable growth isn’t created by pushing harder or chasing faster results. It’s created by building in the right order. That way, when success arrives, it’s something your business, your body, and your life can actually hold.

The Reframe: Stability First, Then Expansion

The “cool” thing to do in the online business world has long been to chase big, expansive revenue numbers, and to broadcast them loudly as a way of signaling authority. To be fair, this culture does seem to be shifting as more business owners burn out, scale back, or disappear. But the pressure to expand fast, and to prove success through ever-growing numbers, still seems to run deep—at least as an unconscious driver for many a micro-business owner.

My invitation to you, therefore, as you think about revenue goals, is simple: consider what you actually want, as well as what kind of business you want to live inside of while you build it.

This framing is, of course, a simplification. You can pursue expansion first. And for some people, in some seasons, it even appears to work. But something “working” in the short term doesn’t necessarily mean it works in the long term. Instead, those things that seem to work quickly often come at a cost to you as well as your business and the life you’re trying to build alongside it.

If what you want is a genuinely sustainable business—one that compounds rather than consumes—you have to allow yourself to start where you are, with what you have. That means stabilizing your business at your baseline revenue goal first, and then pursuing expansion from a place of safety and stability rather than urgency and, dare I say it, chaos.

When baseline stability comes first, everything downstream changes for the better.

Strategy selection becomes deliberate instead of reactive, because long-term thinking becomes physiologically accessible. You can actually perceive the tradeoffs of your decisions, which means you’re actively choosing them rather than being unconsciously cornered into them. Expansion becomes something you opt into because it’s meaningful, not something you chase because you need relief. And when you reach your version of “enough,” you arrive somewhere that actually fits with the vision you have for yourself, your work, and your life.

Throughout the time this step-by-step journey takes, you’re also building the capacity to hold the success you’re working toward. Increased revenue, clients, visibility, and responsibility stop being activating—not because they’re small, but because they weren’t rushed into. Your business grows more complex, perhaps, but paradoxically easier to maintain. This is what regenerative success looks like.

And this is where it’s important to name something explicitly: your goals don’t exist in a vacuum. They inform everything else.

Your goals shape your business model. Your business model determines your offers, pricing, and delivery. Those, in turn, dictate how your demand generation and sales systems actually need to function.

When goals are structurally sound, the rest of the business can align around them. When they aren’t, everything else becomes fragile, convoluted, or performative, often without you realizing why. (Which is when the “maybe I’m just not cut out for entrepreneurship” voice often starts showing up.)

If you take anything from this essay, may it be this: 

Expansion without stability is almost always survival-driven (not visionary). Sustainable ambition builds the capacity required so that you can scale—doing so in a way that’s aligned with your true values, desires, and priorities for yourself, your life, and your business.

Pushing harder toward your goals might be how you were taught to operate. That was definitely my M.O. for quite a while in both my life and my business. It can work, but it makes everything much harder than it actually needs to be—and more exhausting—while typically leading to short term positive results at best.

Building with intention, and going step-by-step, however? That’s the method of sustainable—and, eventually, regenerative—success. Understanding your goals and working toward them in order is the first step. As to what this looks like practically? Well, for many business owners, this starts by clearly naming their baseline revenue goal and then designing the simplest possible strategy to meet it consistently, if they aren’t already.

For our clients who join our signature program, EXPAND, we spend our very first retreat determining both their baseline and expansion revenue goals, and designing the right strategy for where they are currently at. Then we use the rest of the program to get every single part of their business—from their offer suite and messaging to their entire demand generation system—set up to not just achieve, but sustain their business at those revenue levels. In short, we support our clients to shift from chasing short-term revenue wins to building for long-term, regenerative success.