I was going through my financial statements, looking at the numbers, comparing what came in against what I had initially hoped to achieve this year, and I found myself sitting with a feeling I didn’t quite expect. I had set a target of becoming a millionaire this year. Not necessarily a millionaire in profit or money sitting in my account, but a million shillings in gross business revenue, including rider fees, stock reserves, and the other amounts that pass through the business. I wanted to see whether I could get there. It was one of those targets that felt ambitious when I first wrote it down, something I wanted to work towards even though I wasn’t entirely sure how the year would unfold.
Looking at the statements now, I have achieved about 80% of that target. Eighty percent. I don’t know why I had to actually sit down and look at the figures before allowing myself to appreciate what that means, but I did. I think sometimes when you’re running a business, you become so occupied with what hasn’t happened that you barely acknowledge what has. You make a sale, fulfil an order, pay a supplier, settle a delivery fee, replenish stock, pay for advertising, and then move on to the next thing. The money comes in, moves around, gets allocated, and before you know it, you’re already thinking about the next target.
There is always another number to reach. Another month to improve. Another expense to take care of. Another business problem that needs attention. You can spend so much time looking at the distance between where you are and where you want to be that you forget to look behind you and see how far you’ve actually travelled.
I think that’s what happened to me.
I had been thinking about the things that weren’t going as well as I wanted. The fluctuations in advertising revenue, the quieter periods, the expenses, the products that haven’t performed as expected, the things I still need to improve, and the financial pressure that comes with trying to run and grow a business at the same time. I knew I had made sales, obviously. I knew the business had been moving. But seeing the accumulated numbers in one place was different. It gave me a perspective that individual transactions don’t always give you.
I had actually moved much closer to a target that once seemed quite far away.
And then there was something else that made me pause.
Garo Gift Shop generated over KSh 60,000 in revenue through its website this month alone. Actual customers came to the website, browsed products, made decisions, placed orders, and paid. Not someone messaging me to ask for photographs and then disappearing. Not someone asking for prices through social media. Not an order that had to be manually negotiated through several conversations. People actually used the website to make purchases.
I know KSh 60,000 might not sound like an extraordinary amount to someone running a large e-commerce operation, but I wish I could explain what it means to me personally. I have wanted this for so long. I have spent years thinking about what it would look like to have an online shop where people could independently discover products and purchase them without needing me to personally guide every transaction. I wanted the website to become more than an online catalogue, more than a place where I display products and hope someone will send me a WhatsApp message. I wanted it to function as an actual shop.
And this month, it did.
What makes it even more interesting is that my Artmall website never really reached this point over all those years. Artmall has been around, I’ve invested time into it, thought about its direction, worked on products and content, and imagined what it could eventually become. There were so many times I wanted to see that website generate consistent sales directly, but it never quite happened the way I had hoped. I kept trying to figure out what was missing, what needed to change, and how to make the whole thing work.
Then Garo Gift Shop came along, and somehow, this little business built around gifts, handmade products, cards, and customized items started demonstrating something I had been trying to achieve for years.
I find that interesting.
Sometimes you spend so much time trying to force one idea to work that you don’t realise another idea might teach you something completely different. Garo has shown me that people are willing to buy directly from a website. They are willing to trust the process, make payments, and place orders without necessarily needing a lengthy personal interaction first. The demand exists. Online purchasing is possible. The website can actually convert visitors into customers.
Of course, I am not going to pretend that KSh 60,000 in monthly website revenue means everything is figured out. There are costs, materials, delivery fees, stock considerations, and all the other things that go into fulfilling orders. Revenue is not profit, and I know better than to confuse the two. I still have to work on traffic, conversion rates, customer retention, product selection, and the overall shopping experience. But I don’t want to diminish the significance of what happened simply because there is still work to do.
For me, the important part is that the transactions happened through the website.
That is the evidence I have wanted.
It means there is something worth improving. It means I don’t have to keep wondering whether customers will actually use the website to buy. I now have real interactions and transactions to study. I can look at the products people purchased, the pages they visited, the information they needed, and the things that might have influenced their decisions. I can use actual customer behaviour to make better decisions instead of spending all my time guessing what people might want.
And I think this is one of the reasons I am feeling particularly encouraged about the business right now. For a long time, so much of what I wanted existed in my head. I had ideas about products, websites, traffic, advertising revenue, physical shops, and the kind of business ecosystem I wanted to build. I could picture it, write about it, plan it, and talk about it, but there were moments when I wondered whether I was making meaningful progress or simply moving between ideas.
Now I am beginning to see little pieces of those ideas showing up in actual numbers.
A website generating revenue. Customers making purchases independently. Products finding their market. A financial year reaching 80% of an ambitious target. These are not just things I hoped would happen. They are things I can point to in my statements.
I think I needed that.
Not because I need numbers to validate my worth, but because running a business requires evidence. You need to know whether what you’re doing is working. You need to know whether your ideas have commercial potential, whether customers are responding, whether the systems you’re building are producing results. Sometimes encouragement is not another motivational speech or another promise that things will eventually work out. Sometimes it is sitting with your financial statements and realising that your work has produced something tangible.
I have been working. I have been trying things, changing things, learning, making mistakes, spending money on equipment, developing products, dealing with suppliers, responding to customers, and figuring out how to keep everything moving. Some months have been uncomfortable. Some decisions have been difficult. There have been times when sales were disappointing, when expenses felt too high, and when I questioned whether I was moving quickly enough.
But apparently, all those months have been adding up to something.
And perhaps that is what I want to take away from looking at these numbers. Progress is not always going to feel like progress while you’re in the middle of it. Sometimes it looks like a series of ordinary days where you are simply doing what needs to be done. You make a few sales. You improve a page. You create a product. You respond to an inquiry. You learn something about a customer. You fix a problem. You try again. Nothing particularly extraordinary happens on any one of those days, but eventually you look at the bigger picture and realise that the accumulation is significant.
I also find myself thinking about how I initially defined success for this year. I wanted to become a millionaire in revenue, and I treated that number as a marker of what I wanted to prove to myself. I wanted to see whether I could build a business that could generate that kind of turnover. I wanted to move beyond simply having a business that occasionally made sales and start seeing something more substantial.
I am at approximately 80% of that target, and even if I don’t reach the full million within the timeframe I originally imagined, I don’t want to treat the remaining 20% as though it cancels out the 80% I have achieved. I would rather understand what contributed to the progress, what held me back, and what I can do differently next time.
There is a difference between being ambitious and being so fixated on the destination that you become incapable of appreciating the journey.
I want to remain ambitious. I still want the million. I still want much bigger numbers. I want Garo to grow into a business that can generate substantial monthly profits, not just seasonal revenue. I want Artmall to find its footing and become the larger platform I have envisioned. I want my websites to attract significant organic traffic and generate advertising revenue that gives me another reliable income stream. I want to build products that people actively look for, improve my systems, and eventually have a physical space that reflects the quality of what I have been creating.
But I also want to become someone who can look at a milestone and actually acknowledge it.
I don’t want to keep moving the goalpost every time I achieve something. I don’t want to make a million shillings, immediately start thinking about the next five million, and then behave as though the first milestone was nothing. I know there will always be bigger things to pursue. That is part of being an entrepreneur. There will always be another product, another market, another opportunity, another level of growth.
But I am learning that I can want more without being dismissive of what I already have.
And perhaps the biggest surprise this season has been that Garo is showing me possibilities I hadn’t fully appreciated before. I had spent so much time thinking about the website as something that needed more traffic, more products, more reviews, and more improvements. Those things are still important, but now I have another perspective. I have seen customers actually use it as intended. That changes the conversation. Instead of wondering whether the model can work, I can start asking how to make it work better and how to increase the number of people who experience it.
I want to pay attention to that. I want to study this season properly. I want to know which products contributed to the revenue, what brought customers to the website, what made them comfortable enough to order, and what I can replicate without compromising the quality of the experience. I want to understand the numbers behind the excitement because I don’t want this to remain a one-month achievement. I want to build on it.
And I want to remember that Artmall not having achieved the same thing over the years doesn’t mean the effort was wasted. Perhaps some of those years taught me what I needed to know about running an online business. Perhaps Garo benefited from lessons I had already learned, mistakes I had already made, and things I had spent years trying to understand. Not every project will grow at the same pace, and not every idea will produce results on the timeline I initially imagined.
I am learning to let the evidence guide me without allowing old disappointments to define what is possible.
Tonight, I am genuinely in awe when I look at the numbers. Not because I have reached the final destination, but because I can see that the work is translating into something. I can see that I am not just dreaming about running an online business where customers purchase directly from my website. It is happening. I can see that an ambitious revenue target I once wrote down is no longer some distant figure that exists only in my plans. I have covered most of the distance.
I wish I could go back to the version of me who was worrying about whether the business would make enough sales, whether the reviews were enough, whether the website was positioned correctly, and whether all the effort would amount to anything. I would probably tell her to keep working, keep paying attention, and stop assuming that a difficult month or a disappointing metric is the final verdict on the business.
There is still a lot to do. I know that. I am not confusing a good season with having arrived. But I am also not going to pretend that nothing significant has happened.
I wanted to become a millionaire in business revenue this year. I am sitting at approximately 80% of that target. Garo Gift Shop has generated over KSh 60,000 in website orders this month. Customers are finding products, trusting the website, and completing purchases. Something I had struggled to achieve with Artmall for years is now happening through another business I built.
And I think I deserve to sit with that for a moment.
Not rush to the next target. Not immediately find something wrong with the numbers. Not dismiss the achievement because it isn’t profit or because it isn’t yet the kind of monthly revenue I ultimately want.
Just acknowledge it.
I am building something. It might not yet look like the big business I see in my mind, but it is no longer just an idea, a website, a collection of products, or a list of things I hope to do someday. There are customers, transactions, financial statements, lessons, and actual evidence of growth.
Perhaps the best part is that I now have something more useful than another idea about what might work. I have something that has worked, even if only at this stage and at this scale.
And I want to see how far I can take it.
I am not where I ultimately want to be, but I am no longer where I started. This time, I have the numbers to remind me.
