2024 was supposed to be my “boring” maternity leave year. Let’s say that it didn’t exactly work out.. My love for life is limitless! It sent me in unprecedented directions again.
What I planned for 2024 the year before and what actually happened
- Make sure that I “have some punk in life” :)) Not just family and work.
- I don’t remember what exactly I meant here 😀 But I think it’s 100% done. I had so much fun and went down some new unprecedented paths..
- Guide baby on her first year of life <3
- 100% done.
- Carve out regular quality time with older kids. Not all attention on baby.
- Yes! I had lots of time with the older ones in my schedule. I even managed to teach them something (piano to Julia and skating to Leo) though it was very challenging with the baby around.
- Sort out my finances. This year I learnt a lot about accounting (both Swiss and Czech) but made some non-ideal steps. Next year, I want to better optimize my taxes.
- Zero progress 👎
- Start investing into real estate with my sister (& revise my current investments in the process). This is huge and any step forward will count. I’ve started taking courses on real estate investing and it seems appealing.
- We made a giant step though it wasn’t exactly an investment but rather a liability 😀 I’ll talk about it in detail in the text.
- Make some impact with business coaching with minimum effort. I know that I won’t have much time for this, given the baby and the next goals:
- Over-delivered on this one!! I had two launches and 2 runs of the Academy, and even created a new workshop.
- Reach $1M in revenue with the pilates business!! What a bold goal – incredible, isn’t it? There’s no way that we can reach it by continuing doing what we are already doing. It will require a big shift. I have some ideas but everything is open right now..
- I don’t think we’ll make it but we will be closer than last year. We didn’t take this goal seriously enough (at all, in fact :D)
- Learn more about running a company. Aspire at turning Pilatesživě into a self-managing company – at least when it comes to operations.
- We made great progress here. I went deep on this topic with my sister and with 2 different coaches, gained a lot of clarity around how to achieve it, and implemented new processes. I’d call it 70% done.
My year in review 2023
From my baby to a NEINhorn
It was literally heart-breaking to watch my babygirl grow this year, knowing that I won’t hold my own baby ever again!! (Never say never but she was supposed to be our last one. I was able to enjoy each baby more and more so potential no. 4 could as well kill me with happiness!! :))
So, at the beginning of the year I still had a baby. Now I have a cute and very opinionated NEINhorn. (NEINhorn is a funny German book about a unicorn – Einhorn in German – who always replies Nein to everything..)
I’ve heard lots of jokes about how chill 3rd-time parents are, but for me it went the exact opposite way. With each child I was more careful and more worried, and the most with this last one. God knows why.
In January I did something for the very first time: I hired a regular babysitter. My baby girl was 4 months old and – before you get mad at me: the babysitter would only come 3 times a week for 3 hours. Looking back at it, I wish I had asked for more.
The cost of babysitting in Zurich is so high that I felt very much compelled to work during those hours, and not just relax 🙂 I immediately felt an urge to get back to business mentoring. But I don’t know what I was thinking…
Business mentoring failures
A bit of context: I put a lot of effort into laying the foundations of my business mentoring business in the first half of 2023 but I barely got anything out of it before my baby girl was born. (My revenue was around $6k in 2023.)
For 2024, I was very cautious with expectations. I wanted to be at home with the baby for most of the year and, more importantly, I didn’t know if I wanted to continue that business.
Well, I very much wanted to.
I only had a few hours a week though so besides the babysitter I also hired a virtual assistant to help me (first time ever). She helped me start another podcast (bad idea) and she helped me through another launch of the Online Fitness Business Academy. I perceived that launch as a failure because it was smaller than the previous one – only $3k. It took my joy away for a while and I “ghosted” business mentoring for several months again during the summer.
I stopped marketing the business but I took time to revisit my strategy. By a complete coincidence I ended up on a call with Valentina Albaek from tackchanges.com – a business optimization coach. She went through my business activities with me and helped me see how I wasn’t focusing on the main goal – sales – and how I was basically wasting my time. My goodness, I learnt so much about business optimization from her and even incorporated new perspectives into my teaching. Most importantly, after working with her, I had clarity and a precise plan on how to get stable revenue from my business with the assets that I already had!!
I waited till my baby girl went to daycare to start implementing the plan. I’ll write later about how it went – and it’s a story I wouldn’t expect!!
Turning Online Pilates into a self-managing company
Ok, the headline is too lofty. We didn’t actually aspire to completely step out of the pilates business. Also because it’s a personal brand for my sister and it’s a playground for my business mentoring. And also – we both like it too much and we are too good at it 🤷🏻♀️
A context for those who don’t know much about me yet: I have two online businesses – business mentoring (younger) and online pilates (young) with my sister.
In the online pilates business, we aspired to outsource all the operations (including running our launches) so that we could focus on business development. Now it’s all clear to me in hindsight but the truth is that I was still hugely confused about the goal (and how to get there) at the beginning of the year.
It wasn’t clear what mine and my sister’s roles and responsibilities in the business were. At that point we had several freelancers working for us on a regular basis but the problem was that it was a lot of work to manage them.
I was considering hiring a project manager or a COO who would manage our operations. I discussed it with everyone who knew anything about running a company but our situation seemed too special. I joined an expensive mentoring program only to get unsatisfying answers.
The huge aha moment only came when I randomly signed up for a free course from https://www.alisoncopywriting.com/, about how to manage a team of freelancers. Oh, dear…. I learnt that we made about ALL the possible mistakes with delegation (and what to do instead). It was pretty mind-blowing.
Then I had a meeting with Valentina Albæk from tackchanges.com (the one who already impacted the business mentoring business) who specializes in intelligent business practices. Another blow for my mind. She made me realize that I was too proud of our intelligent business strategy, that I completely overlooked how dumb our business operations were… It was a very humbling call.
Ladies – Alison and Valentina – I can’t thank you enough!!
As a result, we stopped hiring more people and I carved out extra time for the most satisfying job ever: writing an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for everything repeatable in our business. The goal was to have it written so that other people could execute it the exact same way. I won’t go more in depth here but we also realized that we can rinse & repeat (and therefore delegate) many more things than we thought.
We’re not done. There’s work on this left for 2025 but when it’s finished.. we can go camping or I don’t know :-))
Buying a villa and our biggest launch yet
Ok, this one was unexpected. I love the story and so will you!
I am addicted to the sun. Sunshine is what I miss the most in Zurich which is overcast half of the year. I am also addicted to the sea. I love swimming and I love the salt. The older I get, the stronger these feelings are.
With 3 small kids, I am dependent on other people’s help (my extended family living in a different country) to be able to travel to the seaside, which is a logistical nightmare. It also doesn’t help that I don’t drive and that planning and booking is not my strong point – I tend to quickly get overwhelmed.
Here’s where we met once again with my sister. At the end of 2023, she suggested starting to look for properties in the Mediterranean – “just for fun”. I didn’t take it seriously and the idea was somehow out of my mental map. But she followed through with practical details, narrowed down the area (Sardinia) and came up with a list of options. Her husband was also on board with this which was important – he works in construction and can somewhat judge the state of a property (at least better than us), and also take care of it.
We knew pretty much nothing about buying a property in Italy (my partner is Italian but he was not interested in this project and he hasn’t lived in Italy for the past 15 years or so anyway). We were extremely lucky to come across Tereza Vacovska (https://sardaterrahouses.it/en/) who became our point of contact in Sardinia.
And then it went fast.. Tereza arranged multiple appointments with real estate agents for us for 3 consecutive days in February during the Swiss school winter holidays to view the properties we liked.
I had to take all my kids with me on that trip. My sister’s kids fell sick with chickenpox right before the travel and she had to organize last-minute care for them. You can imagine that it wasn’t exactly all easy 😀
But we somehow made it, and we did the tours of all the houses together with my kids including the 5-month old, with no Italian speaker on our side. The real estate agents didn’t speak any English and they probably never had such clients before 🙂
We were looking for big villas and double-condos 10-minute drive from the sea. Each place that we saw had some flaws. At the end of the day our agent, Marco, showed us one extra place that hadn’t been advertised yet.
It was a sunny day, a sleepy countryside, there was this sexy white old villa with a soul, handsome gardeners were working outside, and it was 300 meters from a nice and underrated beach.. It was love at first sight!!
We made a hasty visit, negotiated the price through Tereza, and signed the reservation contract the day after. It was Friday afternoon, the real estate agent’s hand was shaking (we were literally the first clients to visit the place), and we left the morning after.
Symbolically, during that same week we completed our biggest pilates launch yet: we sold over 1000 spots in the “Queen of the Beach” pilates program and earned $170k in a week..
We bought the villa in cash with the money earned from the pilates business and called it “Villa Regina della Spiaggia”.
The purchase was finalized in May. We then fully renovated and fully furnished it remotely within a few weeks – a herculean task that I wouldn’t even think was possible!! But we did it somehow together with my sister (it included an order of over 500 items from Ikea :)). It was exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. In June my sister arrived there for her first vacation, and I soon joined her.
I travelled to Sardinia 3 more times in 2024, our whole extended family spent vacations there, and we welcomed lots of our friends there. We don’t rent it (yet). It’s our sanctuary, a place for a simple life.
It’s brought us so much joy!!
Leaning into business mentoring
My energy to market me as a business mentor was coming and going in waves. I definitely felt guilty about the lack of consistency but I’m in a much better place now. I’ve enjoyed working with clients consistently though and I don’t seem to get tired of that.
After the “failed” launch earlier that year I didn’t expect to earn any more money from business mentoring in 2024. But I was wrong!
Another “marketing” wave came in October 2024. Luckily I had the plan that I produced with the help of Valentina and I just executed it without overthinking. I launched the Online Fitness Business Academy again. This launch felt lighter than the previous one and I had lots of conversations with people who were interested in working with me. I sold 9 spots in the Academy (some of them for 2025) and made over $10k!!
Everything felt really good this time. Why? First, I had a long-term plan which put me at ease. Second, I hosted a new launch workshop which I really believed in. And third and most importantly, I just started working with a new coach, Kiki, who helped me feel more confident about my offer. I realized that confidence in an own offer is the absolutely most important ingredient when it comes to selling.
I ended up with revenue over $13k from business mentoring in 2024 which was more than double of the previous year despite the fact that I was on maternity leave most of the time. It’s nowhere close to where I’d like it to be but it’s growing.
I will aim at $30k from business mentoring in 2025.
Inner work, education & politics
My energy and willingness to do deep inner work also comes and goes in waves. The last massive one came in 2020, and a new one came suddenly in 2024. I can tell by the number of coaches and mentors that I impulsively hire.. 🙂
It’s somewhat understandable: a new child, new transformation.
In the first half of the year I had huge aha moments thanks to a wonderful coach Ilona Navarova who helped me see my blind spots in communication. I identified my triggers and unhelpful repeating patterns. Also, Ilona is such a Lady with capital L – a role model in some sense. The work I did left me a bit tired though and I was longing to learn something simpler and more straightforward for a change.
So, after the summer holidays I hired an Italian language coach, Klara Opravilova, and was overjoyed to start learning some language once again in my life. Our lessons were very effective and I made progress but I couldn’t discipline myself into studying regularly on my own. There was no immediate urgency. Going forward, I need to start using the language on a regular basis – not just during travels.
Towards the end of the year I decided to step up my business mentoring to be able to better help my clients with not only strategy but also mindset. I joined an online program from Alissa Stevens and I’m currently immersed in learning the craft of coaching. I have wanted to do it for ages and it feels soo good to be working on this!! I have a huge respect for coaches and I can’t wait to hopefully become a real one too. I know that the coaching skills will expand my whole life.
Also towards the end of the year I started working with a subconscious healing coach (or, in my language: a witch :)) Kiki Neag and it was a ride.. What she does is very close to magic. We solved some of my ancient mindset issues and blocks literally in minutes. This is why I prefer coaches to licensed therapists – they are “allowed” to do crazy shit and it sometimes works! I feel like it catapulted me to yet another level (just like in 2020 when I worked with a different somatic healing coach using similar techniques) and it already materialized in my latest business mentoring launch.
My last area of expansion was, surprisingly, world politics. When Elon Musk publicly supported Trump, it was a wake up call. I started to dig deeper and became fascinated with topics that I never paid much attention to – freedom of speech, liberal vs. conservative values, geo-politics, the bias in traditional media etc. Before the US election, I listened to probably a hundred hours of political podcasts (if you are wondering when: while putting baby to sleep 😀). What stood out:
- I couldn’t believe that I wasn’t able to find a single strong and reasonable liberal voice (liberal in the US sense). I made it a point to stay curious and listen to both sides but the left was just desperately bad compared to the right (in the US in 2024). I used to superficially identify myself with the left without giving it any deeper thought – that certainly changed.
- Evidently almost nobody out there was willing to listen to both sides. Majority of people live in their eco-chambers and it’s terrifying that I also used to (even if I consider myself well educated)!! I lost some hope in humanity 😀 And became very interested in the art of debating.
- I started paying attention to the forces in the background and seeing how the world is ruled by various groups with agendas. Some good chunk of conspiracy theories turned out to be very true..
This experience left me more open-minded and also more critical, which I am very excited about.
My health leaps
Healthwise, I spent 2024 recovering from giving birth in September 2023.
In the first half of the year I was still physically weak. I loved visiting weekly postpartum yoga classes with my baby, but either it was not enough, or my body was simply not ready yet. Only when I stopped the postpartum classes in summer and started exercising pilates (following my sister’s classes, of course 😀), I started to regain my strength. By the end of 2024, I reached my full power again.
My favorite “me time” activity was a really hot sauna + cold bath.
I continued breastfeeding Jana for the whole year (and I still do as of March 2025).
The 3rd kiddo got me though – I developed a chronic pain in the right shoulder. It took me a year to visit a physiotherapist (sigh).. It was a quick and easy job for her: she showed me how my bad posture affects the shoulder, and a few simple exercises to fix it. I’m fixing..
Alright, I’m extremely proud to say that my biggest health leap happened in nutrition 🏆 I got fed up with not being able to efficiently and healthily feed myself. Here’s what my starting point was:
- My mother’s cuisine on which I grew up didn’t have much to do with either efficiency or health (it was extremely tasty though)..
- I hate searching for and following recipes.
- I hate looking for ingredients in a shop.
- I hate cooking complicated meals when there’s always some kid behind my back.
Very annoying. But I found a fantastic simple solution. Some call it a power bowl or a buddha bowl but my kids gave it a new name: “a Swedish plate” 🙂 (“a Swedish table” means buffet in Czech for some reason).
Basically, it’s a plate containing at least 1 ingredient from each of the following categories: protein, legumes, fresh veggies, boiled veggies, carbs, greens, seeds, herbs. I have a note in my phone with options for each category and when I’m in the shop, I make sure to buy something from each. THAT’S IT. It’s healthy, it’s efficient, it’s parallelizable and it solves all my problems.
My plans for 2025
2025 will be my last year before I turn 40 and, believe it or not, I am EXCITED to be entering my 5th decade soon. My forties will be uncompromising and I already feel a shift in the air. 2025 will be a step in that direction. Here are my plans:
- I want to make health my priority (from now on, forever :)). The formula is: more sleep, more sun, more joy, less sugar, good food. “Less stress” also belongs to the list but I don’t aim to minimize it much because I love adventures..
- I want to become a better parent. As my kids grow, they present me with new challenges and sometimes I have no clue how to support them best. I realized that I invest time & money into all kinds of coaching – why not focus specifically on this issue.
- I want to become a stricter parent. The strictest on earth 😀 Being permissive with my kids hasn’t served us well. I can now see how one can be strict and loving at the same time.
- I want to finally get on track with investing. This is delayed from the previous years and it needs to be solved before I turn 40. This year I am 100% confident that it will work out because I’ve solved some issues that were holding me back 😁
- I want to make Online Fitness Business Academy bigger in 2025. With my current plan, I can take around 20 women through it in 2025. I won’t pressure myself with a lofty goal and will see how I feel about a more radical scale-up. Business goals never worked for me – I prefer to focus on personal goals, and the business grows as a consequence.
- I’m not 100% sure about the goal for the pilates business. Further growing it while spending even less time on it. Maybe taking first steps towards creating a lifestyle brand.
- Some other things: I will start the naturalization process to become Swiss, do a professional brand photoshoot, spend a few days without my kids, do at least one spontaneous travel, and read more books!
Books I read
2024 was probably my weakest reading year ever!! I can’t believe that I only read 3 books. A huge red flag. Partially it’s because of the new child coming into my life and stealing a lot of my focus. Partially because it’s becoming harder for me to focus on reading. And maybe partially because I spent too much time participating in online programs instead of reading.
- Vladica Djordjevic: You are the power
- Andreas Kihlberg: From functional to fucking fantastic
- Stefanie Stahl: The child in you
Other things that happened in 2024
- We spent a wonderful extended weekend in Laax, Switzerland, and I skied with the older kids when Jana was only 6 months old. We learnt there that our wonderful friends from 2023 Ivana and Kruno are separating and that she’s moving out of Switzerland. We then fell apart..
- I took a trip to Brno with Jana to visit my high school besties and it was awesome as always.
- My son Leonardo watched the final match of the world ice hockey championship with me and witnessed the Czech republic win over Switzerland. This experience made him decide to sign up for ice hockey and he played his first season in EHCT Thalwil!
- My daughter Julia chose to start judo.
- We did a trip to Venice to visit nonna and finally show her the new grandchild but I fell ill and spent it all in bed.
- I missed my youngest sister’s amazing wedding in Czechia – although I had the trip booked – because of floods (and a sick child) :((
- Jana was a wonderful smiley happy baby. I enjoyed her immensely. I continued weekly physiotherapy with her until she fully recovered some damaged nerves in hand that she had from birth. I slightly panicked when the doctor told us that she’s not growing enough. Of course it was just a fluke and she was “back on track” at the next checkup.
- Jana started to go to daycare in September and although I feared that moment, she soon started absolutely loving it and especially her teacher Flo.
- I also met my high school besties in Sardinia in October 2024.