Most advice about planning business income starts with a revenue target. Pick a number — $100k, $200k, $500k — build toward it, arrive, and repeat with a higher number.
The problem with that approach is that a number, on its own, is the wrong unit of measurement. What you’re actually after isn’t a figure in a bank account.
It’s enough time with the people you care about, enough energy at the end of the day to be genuinely present, enough financial stability that a difficult month doesn’t spiral into a crisis. Money is the tool you use to assemble those things. The target should be the life, not the number.
Here’s a practical framework for getting that sequence right.
Step 1: Understand What “Enough” Actually Means for You
Before you set any income target, it’s worth understanding what you’re optimising for.
Decades of research into life satisfaction consistently finds that a good life is built from roughly ten components:
- romantic relationships
- leisure
- meaningful work
- friendship
- parenthood (or close relationships with children)
- physical health
- contribution to something beyond yourself
- family
- a sense of larger purpose
- and personal growth.
Only one of those ten is primarily about money.
Most of what constitutes a genuinely satisfying life is driven by how you invest your time and energy — not by the size of your income.
This matters for income planning because it reframes the question. The right question isn’t how much can I earn? It’s how much do I actually need to live well across all ten of these areas?
For most business owners, when they answer that question honestly, the number is lower than they assumed — because a lot of discretionary spending turns out to be compensation for a poor work-life balance rather than genuine necessity. As quality of life improves, the need to spend on that kind of compensation tends to fall away.
Step 2: Run a Lifestyle Audit
Before planning where you want to go, you need an honest picture of where you are. This is a one-week exercise.
Track your actual hours. Not the hours you planned to work — actual hours, including emails checked at dinner and Sunday afternoons spent thinking about Monday. This number is information, not a judgment. You can use clockify for an easy app solution.
Track your daily energy. At the end of each day, note your energy level simply: depleted, flat but functional, or genuinely alive. A working week that earns well but consistently leaves you in the depleted category is costing more than it’s paying.
Score yourself across the ten dimensions. At the end of the week, give each of the ten life satisfaction areas a brief, honest gut-check score. Where are you doing well? Where are whole areas of a satisfying life being quietly eroded by the demands of the business?
What most people find is that the areas scoring lowest are the ones requiring the most uninterrupted time — friendship, presence with family, genuine leisure. These are precisely what an unaligned business depletes first.
The audit doesn’t fix anything by itself. But it makes the invisible visible, and you can’t redesign what you haven’t honestly assessed.
Step 3: Design Your Ideal Week
Once you have a clear baseline, design the week you’d actually choose — not the week you currently have.
The key here is to start with life, not with work.
Allocate time to the ten dimensions first. When do you exercise? When do you spend time with the people who matter most? When do you have genuine leisure — not passive scrolling, but activities that restore you? When do you protect the commitments that are non-negotiable regardless of business pressure?
Once those are blocked in, you’ll see clearly what’s available for work. That’s your working week — shaped by your life, not the reverse. Then ask: when does the working day start and end, and does it actually end, or does it just migrate to a different device?
This exercise often reveals that your working week can be shorter or more focused than you’ve assumed. It also reveals exactly which business demands are encroaching on the dimensions of life that matter most — which gives you a very specific list of things to address.
Step 4: Calculate Your Real Income Number
Now, and only now, work out the income figure.
Go through your current expenses and separate them into three categories:
- Essential: Housing, food, health, education, transport, utilities
- Meaningful: Experiences, hobbies, relationships, and spending that genuinely improves your quality of life
- Compensatory: Spending that exists primarily to offset the stress or dissatisfaction of a working life that isn’t quite right — the slightly too expensive holiday, the extra rounds, the retail therapy that provides a short-term lift
Add up the first two categories. That’s a much more accurate income target than any aspirational figure you might have inherited from industry benchmarks or comparisons with peers.
Most people are surprised by how reasonable the number is.
When I have tonnes of freedom and energy, my ‘enough’ is ONLY slightly above the median Australian wage!
They’re also surprised to realise how much of their current income goes toward the third category — and how much of that spending would disappear if the business were better aligned with their life.
Step 5: Test Your Business Against the Numbers
With a real income target in hand, you can now ask a precise question: does your current business model support that number, at the hours and energy levels described in your ideal week?
Not hypothetically. In practice. Run the numbers:
- What is your current average hourly effective rate (total annual revenue ÷ total hours worked)?
- What rate would you need to hit your income target within your ideal working hours?
- What’s the gap between those two numbers — and is it a pricing problem, a volume problem, a scope problem, or a mix of all three?
This is where income planning gets genuinely useful, because it connects your financial targets directly to the structure of your working life. A business generating $180k across 60-hour weeks is a very different proposition from a business generating $130k across 35-hour weeks — and for many people, the second option is the better life even at the lower income figure.
One Important Caveat: Enough Changes Over Time
Whatever number you arrive at now, treat it as a living figure rather than a fixed one.
What you need to live well at 35 is different from what you need at 50. A season of life with young children has different demands than one with a different family structure. Health, relationships, ambitions, and values all shift — and your income planning should shift with them.
The practical implication: revisit this exercise annually. Each year, check whether your enough figure has changed, whether your ideal week still reflects what you actually want, and whether your business is still designed to support both. A lighter quarterly check-in — fifteen minutes, a brief honest review of whether you’re spending your time as intended — helps catch small drifts before they accumulate into something larger.
The goal isn’t to arrive at a perfect number once and never think about it again. The goal is to stay close enough to your own values and priorities that the business keeps serving your life, rather than quietly taking it over.
The Practical Summary
- Define what “enough” means across all areas of your life — not just financially
- Run a one-week lifestyle audit to establish an honest baseline
- Design your ideal week starting with life commitments, not work commitments
- Calculate a real income target based on what you actually need, not an aspirational benchmark
- Test your current business model against that target and your ideal working hours
- Revisit annually — your enough will change, and your business should change with it
Planned this way, your income target becomes a useful tool rather than an arbitrary finish line. And the business you build to hit it is far more likely to be one you actually want to run.
Are you feeling burnt out in your business? Check out my post on the 7-year burnout wall.