Having a 1 year plan

With my latest venture, it took about two months to launch, but we made money with it immediately once we did -- albeit not very much at the beginning! Our income grew, slowly at first and then faster and faster -- pretty much what you'd expect given the standard model of business growth, the S-curve.

As for you, personally, I think a one-year plan is way too long. My first two ventures suffered from overplanning and under-implementation and consequently both failed. Planning is important, but so is implementation. But equally important -- and often ignored -- is evaluation: it's imperative that you understand what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong.

The money is important -- but especially in the beginning, it's a really bad indicator of how well you're doing. Making money takes sustained success over a long period of time. Important actions you take today might not pay off financially for months. Moreover, making money is dependent on doing the complete package correctly: product, traffic, sales, branding, etc. Even if you do everything else perfectly, if you do any one of these things wrong -- if, for instance, you have beautiful sales copy, and a fantastic product, but no traffic -- you won't see any money. But in the previous example, you don't want to give up or throw out your beautiful sales copy just because you aren't making money. You want to get more traffic!

So at least in the beginning, don't focus so much on the money -- it's just not a reliable indicator of early progress. Think of the money more as a side effect of achieving all your other business goals. Then focus on each of those goals individually until your business is a smoothly running machine. At that point, the money will roll in by iteself.