My business and my book, Fearless Salary Negotiation, both turned 10 this year. This is my 11th annual Year In Review, and my first was My 2015 Year in Review: Using the stair-step approach.

I feel sort of at a loss as to what to say about that. Ten years feels simultaneously like such a long time and like no time at all. I’m really glad I have written these Year in Review posts every year because so much of it seems like a blur. It’s interesting to look back at the goals I set, which ones I hit, which ones I missed (most of them), and how they have changed over time.

My first Year in Review posts did not have forward-looking goals and only talked about goals I had set along the way while writing my book and working on other projects. Starting in 2016, I began to set annual goals and they were all business-focused. Those are pretty enlightening.

Over time I started incorporating a “Personal” section into my reviews and the relative “Personal” versus “Business” proportions have moved around over time.

In 2022, I only set one goal for 2023: “Survive to 2024”. And I did! A 100% success rate on 2023’s goals!

Now I’m writing about 2025 and it’s such a relief to say that this year was my second best revenue year ever. My best-ever year was 2021, and 2025’s revenue came in over 90% of 2021’s, which is pretty amazing because 2021 was off-the-charts good.

Personally, this was also a very good year. That is true in general, but of course having the business up and running again has eliminated a huge source of stress—rather than continuously watching my bank account shrink and wondering if my business would actually rebound, I am just sort of living life while I operate a business. The difference is night and day.

As ever, I focused a lot of time and energy on fitness-type stuff: pickleball, weightlifting, and yoga. Yoga has tapered to once a week, but weightlifting continues to be a three-days-a-week endeavor. I play pickleball as much as I can, but I also practice a lot via drilling or working with my Pickleball Tutor.

Ok, onto the detailed recap…

2025 Goal review

This year was hit-and-miss on the Goal front. I’m ok with that. I see my annual goals as a way to start the year off with something to focus on so I don’t start with a blank slate. My annual goals are less like train tracks and more like starting blocks.

I think last year’s goals were effective in this way. The misses are fine, and pursuing the goals was beneficial.

50% business growth

This was a stretch goal because I increased it by 50% in 2024, and I honestly didn’t think I would get all the way there this year. I actually exceeded this and ended around 70%.

I’m very happy with this and I hope it is a sign that my business is back up and running with my new and improved focus on high earners buoyed by a slow, steady transition to a luxury brand.

Build at least one new revenue stream

Miss. But that is mostly because I could sense that the business was coming back online at full force and that made additional revenue streams less urgent. Focusing on building the core business, which is the way I make my living, seemed prudent and still does in hindsight. Many of the revenue streams I had in mind last year also didn’t necessarily align with the luxury brand I have been building, so it just did not make sense to pursue them.

Improve to at least a 4.5 in pickleball

This was a pretty ambitious goal and I technically missed it: I’m not at 4.5 yet, but I’m around 4.25 or so.

Be more generous

It is interesting that this is so vague because I have found new ways to do this by both continuing things I already do and by adding new things. I’m not going to elaborate because it feels pretty self-serving, but in terms of evaluating this goal, I feel like it went pretty well.

Find one new go-to dish to cook

Miss. Well, technically I made a couple new things this year and they’re really good, but they were baked goods and not “dishes” per se. This goal was meant to be for an entree of some kind and I definitely missed on that.

This is fine. Cooking is time-consuming and I just chose to spend time elsewhere.

2025 Year in Review – Business

Well, that escalated quickly.

I felt like I was being a little optimistic with a 50% YoY growth goal, and I ended up around 70%. I set that goal around Christmas last year (2024) after a busier-than-expected December so I thought I may have been feeling optimistic. Nope—I actually under-shot.

This December was really busy as well. Not sure what’s going on there, but it seems like I might need to update my impression of the seasonality in my business to account for faster-paced Q4s.

I have learned to be cautious about extrapolating short-term results into long-term trends, so I’m withholding maximum optimism for at least one more year. But if 2026 is as good as (or better than) 2025? Safe to say the business is back and better than ever.

Stats

Here are the stats that I typically track:

• Visits to FearlessSalaryNegotiation.com: 87,000 (down from a reported 160,000 in 2024)
• Unique page views: About 140,000 (down from about 250,000)
• Total email subscribers at the end of the year: About 22,000 (down from about 24,000)
• Product sales through the site: About 25 (slightly up from 20)
• Coaching applications: 95 (up from 80)
• Coaching clients: 26 (up from about 17)
• Coaching conversion rate (from prospect to client) was 27% (up from 21%)
• Coaching revenue was up about 77% year over year.
• Overall revenue was up 70% year over year.

For a long time, my business literally ran on SEO, but the bottom fell out alongside the Big Tech layoffs in 2022. Simultaneously, there was an influx of other companies creating content that crowded out my own content.

While it’s discouraging to seemingly lose something I worked so hard to build, the important thing to recognize is that the stats I really care about are the ones that are improving. Obviously, the one that matters most is overall revenue, which grew by 70%. And that follows from the increase in coaching clients and an increase in average revenue per client.

Yes, website traffic is down, my email list is smaller, and product sales are down, but those are essentially legacy stats that were much more important when I was running a higher-volume business. Early on in the business, I literally kept an eye on stats like “revenue per unique organic visitor”, “revenue per email subscriber”, and “modal time between email subscription and product purchase”.

As I have shifted to the luxury strategy, the stats have shifted to look more like a luxury business, namely “average revenue per client”. I like this stat because it also tracks directly with “average additional earnings for my clients”, which is the primary value proposition for my business.

Zooming out, my net revenue this year was almost 94% of what it was in 2021, which was my best year ever. But my coaching revenue this year was about 5% higher than it was in 2021 while product revenue and partnership revenue dropped off by quite a bit. That’s pretty much exactly what I would expect to see for a business transitioning from a higher-volume model with a mix of products and services to a luxury model that is laser-focused on high-end services.

I spent many years building up my SEO profile, and that served me well. Now I am building a luxury brand, which I believe will serve me better.

I also still get quite a bit of use from the SEO work I did because it turns out that LLMs like my content and I have booked clients via ChatGPT’s and other LLMs’ recommendations. I also have many more “returning client” and “referral” entries than I ever have before. It used to be that “Google” was almost always the source for new clients, and now there’s a much broader mix of things.

New “best month ever” mark

My previous best month happened in November 2021, breaking the record set in October 2021. September of this year is my new “best month ever”, exceeding October 2021 by about 60% and getting pretty darn close to matching the previous best two months combined. Some of that is just random timing—I happened to have my biggest result fee yet and that client decided to just pay everything in September—but timing is always a factor that affects monthly swings for the business. My worst month this year was August for the same reasons.

Pretty neat to go from “My business is struggling. Here’s my plan to save it.” two years ago to “New best month ever by 60%!” this year.

The fiduciary-ness of it all

Last year, I briefly mentioned that I had a very big negotiation that didn’t close when we were right at the finish line. I was pretty sure that was not because of anything I did, but just because the two parties were not going to find a mutually beneficial agreement.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder: “Did I screw this up?” I was pretty sure there were a couple moments where I could have facilitated an agreement, but I did not think the available agreements aligned with my client’s priorities or were in my client’s best interests.

I am very lucky that I got to talk with that client recently (because he referred someone else to me) and he confirmed that he was extremely happy with the outcome and felt that everything we did was perfect and that the result was totally acceptable and even ideal.

I don’t always get such clear feedback on difficult situations, and I’m grateful that I got that feedback here.

My North Star is to do what’s best for my clients, behaving as ethically as possible. That doesn’t always lead to the best short-term result for my business, but I believe it will drive better long-term results.

The focus on high earners and executives is paying off

A couple years ago, I started to push hard to move my business to a luxury brand focused on helping high earners and executives.

The first big shift was to “high earners”, which I designated as folks making $400,000+. At the time, that felt like a pretty big risk: While I had worked with a number of people in that income range, I had mostly worked with people making less than $400,000.

“Are there really enough people making that kind of money who I can help?” That was my main concern, and it’s always a risk when niching down.

Turns out that yes, there are plenty of high earners and they’re eager to work with a professional salary negotiator. That shift was very slow and intentional, but it is absolutely working and it was the right move.

Slowly moving to luxury

I continue to make incremental changes to the business to shift more and more toward a luxury brand and experience. I’m going to unpack that a little bit for posterity, but also for those who might be curious what I’m up to.

One slow-burning change has been a continual simplification of pretty much everything. For example, the Fearless Salary Negotiation homepage used to be a longer-form page with lots of social proof, links to articles, product offerings, etc. Now it’s an extremely short page that is laser-focused on who I am, who I help, and how I help. There is a singular call to action: “Contact me today”.

That’s it. Very simple and direct. People who see that either think, “This is for me and I want to talk to Josh!” or they don’t. Most people—the vast majority of people—who see my homepage will probably decide that I am not the person they’re looking for. That’s by design and it seems to be working very well.

I have also drastically simplified my overall menu of offerings from my book, several other products, and a few variants on my services down to … well, down to basically one service: Salary Negotiation Coaching for High Earners. In 2025, I slowly pared back my website so that it’s harder and harder to find or buy products of any kind. Soon, I plan to just eliminate those options entirely and totally exit the product (or “info-product”) business.

The one exception is Salary Negotiation Mastery, which I still offer as an alternative to working with me for people who aren’t ready yet. Again, this is an example of simplifying and shortening. That sales page used to be a long-form info-product sales page and now it is not. I will probably tweak this over time, but I like the shorter, more focused page.

Here is how I would describe the higher-level meta strategy for this change: At first, I thought of my business exclusively as a high-volume product business. Then I added coaching. Then I flipped the overall concept to be a coaching business that also sold products. Those products and the coaching itself were essentially a “product ladder”, which would enable people to find a low-cost, high-value entry point (usually a free download) and use that to validate the value of my work. Eventually, those folks would hopefully buy a product, then possibly another product or a more expensive product. And sometimes those folks would hire me to coach them—the top of the product ladder.

Now, I see my business as a very specific, narrow offering of “Salary Negotiation Coaching for High Earners”. That’s it. I am the best at what I do, and I’ve helped hundreds of people significantly increase their earnings for over a decade now. For people who want to work with the best, I’m here to help. Once we talk, I’ll either recommend you work with me or that you don’t. For those who are good candidates for my service, but who aren’t quite ready to work with me, I offer Salary Negotiation Mastery.

Other shifts I’ve made over the past year or two to support this luxury focus are:

• A simplified Negotiation Fee structure that is identical for everyone: $4,000 Strategy Component, 10% Improvement Component
• I don’t collect any fees until after our work is complete
• We start working when you sign my Letter of Engagement
• There is no application or other barrier to talking to me—anyone can book a call with me to explore working together
• You hired me to help you optimize your offer and de-stress the negotiation process, and that’s what I’ll do

I have now had several people say, “I looked at the options out there, and I know you’re more expensive, but I want to work with you because you’re the ‘executive comp’ guy.” That’s a very strong signal that I’m moving in the right direction.

Completing the shift from “Done With You” to “Done For You”

That last bullet point above is another important shift that I’m working on right now, and is worth elaborating on.

Everyone is familiar with “Do It Yourself” (AKA, DIY). There’s also “Done With You” (DWY) and “Done For You” (DFY). Those three are basically service tiers from “you’re on your own” to “everything done on your behalf”. In general, luxury brands are focused on “Done For You”, and they sometimes actively exclude any kind of DIY or DWY. In extreme cases, there is literally no customization or customer input at all—they either buy the product or service as-is, or they do not. That would sound something like, “We make 100 of these per year. They cost $100,000 each. If you would like one, then send us a deposit and we will put you on the list for the next available slot, which is in three years. The deposit is non-refundable. There is no customization, and there are no refunds or returns. Let us know if you would like to proceed.”

At first, my business was almost exclusively DIY (products). I say “almost exclusively” because I was available for email support and am sort of compulsive about helping people and replying to queries in my inbox, so I would still help people if they needed it, but mostly thought of my offering as DIY.

Then I started offering coaching, which I approached with a DWY mindset: I was the coach, which meant that I would try to get the best result, consult with clients along the way, and try to teach them how to do what I did so they would learn a new skill. This followed very nicely from all of my products, which were teaching them a new and valuable skill.

Over the past couple of years, as I have shifted more and more to a luxury offering, I have also shifted to a DFY approach. My clients interact with recruiters, CEOs, Hiring Managers, etc., but those interactions are more or less scripted by me for their benefit. I still collaborate with my clients because I need to know what they know, but I am more focused on de-stressing a difficult situation and getting them the best result than I am on teaching them how to negotiate on their own. I think the clients I was working with years ago wanted that—to learn how to negotiate—but I do not think the clients I work with now really care about that. They’re busy and not looking to learn a new skill; they just want to optimize their comp package before they sign on the dotted line.

This is one of the more challenging parts of this transition just because I like teaching people so much. I still do teach them things, but that is not my focus. This is a logical place to end up, though: Even thinking back on my first-ever coaching client—who had a copy of my book and whose spouse I had coached while I wrote my book—when I asked her why she hired me instead of just doing it herself, she said, “I just wanted you to tell me exactly what to do for my situation.” She did not say, “I wanted you to tell me what to do and teach me how to do it.” I did that on my own as a value-add while I grew the business. I think that feature just isn’t needed anymore, and might even be a detractor for people considering hiring me.

2025 Year in Review – Personal

What a great year! Obviously, the success of the business makes this easier, but that’s never a guarantee. In many ways, this year was more of the same, which is great.

Lille, France – My first vacation in a couple years

Thanks to the previously-reported business slump, I had not been on vacation in more than two years. This summer, I finally felt like I had enough margin (both time-wise and financial) to finally take a trip.

It helped that I had a bazillion unused Amex points, giving me lots of free flight options.

I have some friends who lead a study abroad program In Lille, France every summer, and they invite me to go hang out there every year. I finally took them up on it and joined them for about 10 days.

It was exactly the kind of vacation I like and just what I needed. I got an Airbnb right across from the Lille equivalent of Central Park, and spent a lot of time walking around the city and writing in the park. I wrote treatments for three book ideas I had been batting around and used ChatGPT to decide which project might be best to pursue. I narrowed it down to two projects, which are both promising in different ways.

I also ate some pretty good food and really enjoyed just hanging out in France where the sun set every night around 10:00 PM. I say “pretty good” food because the food was not what most people probably think of when they think “France” (because they’re probably thinking, “Paris”). Lille is way up in the north of France, very close to the Belgian border, so the food is very Flemish and heavy. That’s probably great in the winter, but really heavy Flemish stew with cheese-and-cream-forward dishes don’t hit the same when it’s 85 degrees outside and there’s no air conditioning to be found.

Still, the town was amazing and I got to go see a World War 1 cemetery and memorial in Belgium, which was awesome. I also spent a couple days in Brussels, where I enjoyed one of the best Italian meals I’ve ever had (sounds weird, but there just happened to be some Italian ex-pats who opened a restaurant there, and it was amazing).

Hopefully I’ll get at least a manuscript for one of those writing projects done this year, though I’m not sure this rises to the level of a goal for 2026. We’ll see.

While I’m here, a little easter egg for the few people who actually read these Year in Review posts. The two main book ideas I’m batting around are:

• A book about building a luxury business for people who may not be at all familiar with luxury brands or how they work. There are a few good textbooks about luxury brands, but there aren’t really any modern how-to books. I think I could write a decent book on how to build a luxury business.
• A book about how to be hospitable, specifically for introverts. That’s intentionally ambiguous as it would be about how an introvert can be hospitable, but also how to be hospitable to introverted people.

If either of those sounds particularly interesting to you, let me know. If neither sounds particularly interesting to you, let me know.

Pickleball progress

My current goal is to get to 4.5 and my stretch goal is 5.0. Pickleball ratings are basically on a bell curve, meaning that marginal increases get harder and harder to achieve the higher you are on the scale. Getting from 4.0 to 4.5 is not easy but is significantly easier than 4.5 to 5.0. So any progress is meaningful.

I have been really grinding to improve my game. That means a lot of practice on my Pickleball Tutor, focusing on specific shots to improve weaknesses and gaps in my game. That work is paying off, but it’s slow progress.

Bottom line is that it’s just difficult for me to improve because I had no racket sport background before I started, and because of all the depth perception and light-contrast issues I’ve written about before. There is virtually no part of improving at pickleball that is natural or easy for me, so I just have to grind away to make small improvements.

Which is fine. As long as I’m improving, I’m good. At least twice this year, I played in a game with someone who hadn’t seen me play in a long time and they later said something like, “Whoa. He’s way better than he used to be.” That slowly opens doors for me to occasionally get into better games (as a backup to a backup or something), which will help me improve a little faster.

Third shots

One thing that was holding me back in 2024 was my third shot. I was just doing it wrong. Sometimes, it would be pretty good, and other times it would be really bad. So I had to break it down completely and rebuild it. That took … a while. I estimate that I hit 10,000+ third shot drops on the Tutor to get it grooved in.

Now it’s one of my best shots. It’s very reliable and I can use it as a way to manipulate point structure.

Other shots

My dinking has also gotten very good, especially on the left side. I can pretty much move the ball around wherever I want, often hitting a series of shots to set up a winner for me or my partner. That’s pretty cool.

My serve is my best shot and has been for a while, but other shots are starting to catch up.

I’m to the point where I’m just selecting one weakness at a time and working on it until it’s no longer a weakness. For example, I realized that my volley dinks weren’t great because I had never really worked on them. I got good at dinking because I drilled with a partner who is very good at pickleball and dinking. That’s good because I can handle aggressive dinks, and dink patterns that move me around a lot. But because he’s so good at dinking, he rarely gave me volley-able dinks to work with. I’m just used to having to let his dinks bounce because I would normally be reaching too far to volley them.

Well, the games I play often have many volley-able dinks. But since I hadn’t worked on that skill, I would just have to let them bounce anyway, which is a sort of double-whammy: I missed opportunities to volley and take control of the point and I was often back-footed because the ball traveled so far.

After five or so sessions on the Tutor, my volley dinks improved dramatically and are no longer a weakness. It’s a very subtle thing, but meaningful.

Now I’m working on resetting from the transition zone. That’s just a gap that I have never spent time on. Now that I’ve worked out some other weaknesses in my game, this is a glaring weakness that needs to be addressed.

Slow and steady.

Joining an advisory board for a startup

I wasn’t sure whether this would be considered “Personal” or “Business”, so I’m just putting it here.

A friend of mine has a seed-stage startup called Rovex and he asked me to join his advisory board, specifically to advise on business and negotiation strategy. This is cool because it’s a nice example of doing something for fun that turns into something more.

Since my friend had the idea to start the company, we’ve talked about the concept, execution, roadmap, all that stuff. And as he began hiring for key roles, he would loop me in to talk about which roles to focus on and how to think about compensation.

Obviously, my day job is helping candidates negotiate job offers that are extended by businesses. But this is a chance to flip that on its head and consult with a company on how to think about compensation for early-stage hires.

On its face, this might seem like a sort of conflict of interest, but my philosophy has always been that compensation done right is good for everyone—the candidates accepting the jobs, and the companies employing them. Candidates get paid what they’re worth, and companies get good candidates and have lower attrition rates in the long run.

For an early-stage company, incentive alignment is extremely important. That means sometimes coming up with creative compensation packages that align everyone’s incentives in a productive way.

This is just a natural extension of what I’ve been doing for a decade. Advising on the business side is really fun as well. It’s cool to have an indirect impact on what could eventually be a big tech company.

The Gator Basketball team is good again!

Almost exactly a decade after Billy Donovan moved to the NBA, Gator Basketball is finally good again! What Todd Golden has done in just three years is really remarkable. He had never even won a Tournament game before, and then he ripped off six straight to win the Natty.

His approach to coaching is extremely analytical, which I love, and he is excellent at developing players. It’s been a long, long time since I had anything good to say about Gator sports, so it’s nice to have another Title to celebrate.

2026 Goals

Ok, it’s time to look ahead to 2026. I’ll keep it pretty brief this year, I think.

Maintain or grow the business

I was pretty darn busy this year, and my business isn’t really designed to “scale” per se, so shooting for another 50% year-over-year growth year might be a little ambitious.

There is a path to growth, but that would be via two potential mechanisms:

1. More clients. I was consistently busy and close to capacity for a good amount of the year, but not at capacity.
2. Larger average deal size. This is sort of happening naturally, but working on bigger deals could bump revenue. I might be able to induce this to happen quicker, but I think it’s naturally happening on its own and I’m inclined to just let it happen organically.

Improve to 4.5 at pickleball

This is doable this year. I pretty much know what I need to improve to get there, and going from 4.25 to 4.5 is not a huge leap. I’ll be disappointed if I don’t hit this, and I think there’s a chance I exceed it by a little bit.

I suspect that somewhere around 5.0 is my ultimate ceiling, but we’ll see.

Write a manuscript

I have two book ideas that I’ve been knocking around. Both of them would be fun to write, but they are very, very different. So I just need to pick one and work on it. I think I’ve made that pick and started one manuscript a few months ago, but I’m not so deep into it that pivoting is off the table.

Find one new go-to dish to cook

Re-upping this from last year because I just didn’t get it done. I have actually set up a little learning plan with ChatGPT to teach myself the basics of cooking, so I just need to follow that plan.

I can make pretty good dishes, but they’re all just me executing a good recipe as opposed to me knowing how to cook. My plan with ChatGPT will make me a more competent cook.