I can’t believe 2025 is over. It was a good year, and probably the best year I’ve ever had outside of creating and selling WordPress plugins. It might not be massive to everyone, but R330K is an enormous change after all the years spent chasing this growth for Fosker Media.
In last month's report, I said we were not going to take on too much work as we need focus on Fosker Media a bit, and that was bulk of the month was spent thinking about our goal for 2026, thinking about finances, how to come out swinging this year, and where do I see Fosker Media being at this time next year.
Focus
For the longest time, I’ve been working on side projects like plugins, divisions, and SaaS companies. As I look back on the past, I’ve realised this pulls my attention away from building Fosker Media, so I’ve decided to stop focusing on secondary business ideas for the foreseeable future.
Side projects I’ve invested time in during 2025, such as Affordable Web and WP Hero, are officially retired, and domains will be pointed to Fosker Media in the coming days.
Hopefully, this shift will free me to grow Fosker Media and achieve more in 2026 than I’ve ever achieved before.
Building the business day
For the last 15 years, I’ve had to do all the work myself; now that Ida is on the team, she can handle work when I’m not available.
Starting next Monday, I’m not going to be focusing on client work on Monday; I’m going to use Mondays as a CEO day, which will allow me to focus on what the business needs me to do, to push us forward to our goal, from blogging, social media content, auditing our website and building out our strategy and sales pipeline.
This is something I’ve not really been able to do in the past, as client work filled up my time, so I was working in the business and never had time to work on my business.
Finance
This is an area of the business that has seen the biggest shift in my mind, and how I look at Fosker Media's income. When it was just me for all these years, if I needed money, I would use it, and I would look at the business expenses as my own.
Going into 2026, this is the number one change that needs to happen in the business. I need to be able to cover our baseline expenses, such as staff, software, hardware, rentals, business savings, and start paying myself a salary.
In 2025, the business expenses grow by R9000. These new expenses can be attributed to the fact that in July, I took a desk at Northplace Centre. In October, I hired an employee, and we are taking a second desk this year, which has seen my personal available income drop.
Currently, the business's essential expenses are costing R14,400 a month, and that does not include paying me a salary yet. Based on our 2025 numbers, that leaves me with R12,000-R15,000 a month.
I’ve never looked into my numbers like this, so realising what the business needs and creating my own budget has helped me discover what our baseline monthly income needs to be.
We need to bring in a minimum of R34,000 a month. Our retainers get us most of the way there, with the addition of one to two websites per month, which will get us our baseline. This is alright for now, but in the long term, this needs to be covered by retainers.
This baseline will cover the business's current expenses and a salary of R19,500 for me.
But I want more than just the baseline
Understanding our baseline heading into this year helps me to look at our goals for the year, saving funds for growth and emergencies, hiring employees, and paying myself a R30,000-R35,000 salary.
There are stages we need to hit.
| Stage 1 | Stage 2 | |
| Revenue | R60,000 | R70,000 |
| Business Expense | R18,000 | R30,000 |
| Number of employee | 1 | 3 |
| My Salary | R29,000 | R29,000 |
| Business Tax | R3,510 | R3,000 |
| Saving | R9490 | R8,000 |
I have a lot of work to do to achieve these numbers, but I believe they are achievable by the end of 2026. It won’t be easy, but it has to be done.
New vision
The vision for 2026 is to grow Fosker Media beyond myself and one employee to scale to a team of three, helping small to mid-sized businesses see the value of being online, so that they see returns either by working with us or through resources that will help them market themselves.
To have Fosker Media at the forefront of people's minds when it comes to websites, social media, pay-per-click advertising, seo, content creation, and AI.
I refuse for this momentum we currently have from the last 18 months to die. Last year saw a 90% year-on-year growth from 2024; this year, I want 100% YOY Growth. We are going to lean into building the best Durban-based Digital agency with a reach far greater than just Durban, with our clients in the UK, EU, and Australia.
What we achieved
- Clients:
- Total clients: 64
- Active clients: 36
- Social Clients: 5
- Website Retainers: 0
- Projects
- Websites Projects: 28
- Websites In Progress: 2
- Went Live (Dec): 4
- Web Apps: 4
- Support/Operations
- Care Plans: 4
- AD Accounts: 3
- Hosting Clients: 27
- Team
- Team: 2
- Freelancers: 6
This article is a lesson dedicated to managing my time more efficiently, and a mindset shift when it comes to my business income. There is a ton of work to do over the next 12 months to grow and build this agency.
