I Let Everything Go. Five Months Later, My Passive Income Is Up 573%

This is Week 18 of my rebuild-in-public series. This week I am sharing the most personal experiment I have written so far.

Quick recap if you are new here:

Week 1: I removed 1,300 pages from Google's index and tried not to be sick on the keyboard.

Week 2: I discovered my newsletter open rate had collapsed to 11%.

Week 3: I did the five deeply unsexy SEO jobs everyone ignores until something catches fire.

Week 4: I went through 1,219 pages Google had crawled and rejected.

Week 5: I repaired the email list I had neglected instead of chasing shiny new subscribers.

Week 6: I tackled the inbox that had become another full-time job, during sirens and broken ribs, because apparently I like a challenge.

Week 7: I shared how passive income had saved my business three times.

Week 8: I let Claude loose on my website while I went to get my hair done.

Week 9: I made the newsletter prettier and watched the click rate collapse. Very stylishly.

Week 10: I built a tool that cut WordPress publishing from four hours to thirty seconds.

Week 11: I dug 786 pages back out after deciding some of them deserved another chance.

Week 12: I built an AI inbox system and got a rather large piece of my life back.

Week 13: The website started paying me again.

Week 14: The rebuild crossed half a million search impressions.

Week 15: A complete stranger booked a call because Claude recommended me by name.

Week 16: I built a cold email machine that finally felt worth testing.

Week 17: The machine gave me a beard and renamed me Tom.

Right. Now for the bit I have rewritten about eleven times.

Last month was the best month my website has had since I let the whole thing fall apart.

I have checked the figure more times than any sensible person needs to.

It has not changed.

From its lowest point in February to the end of July, my passive income grew by 573%.

Five hundred and seventy-three per cent.

It is working.

The rebuild I started in public without knowing whether I had left it too late is working.

And I am so, so grateful.

The 573% is the headline. The useful part is everything that happened before it: the change in my mindset, the uncomfortable work, the numbers I watched and the weeks when almost nothing seemed to move.

That is the part you can steal.

The woman I barely recognise

There is a version of me I find hard to look at now.

At my lowest, I was morbidly obese and living with acute chronic pain. My back had given out. I spent roughly two and a half years, nearly three, trying to find something that would make it better.

I had two epidurals.

I went through our savings looking for solutions.

I had meetings with surgeons about back surgery.

And I knew, or thought I knew, what was coming. I would never run. I would never lift weights. I might never have a decent quality of physical life again.

I ended up in a wheelchair. Then on a walking stick. I was diagnosed with diabetes. I was depressed, exhausted and eating rubbish to cope with the pain.

I had already been overweight. The pain, lack of movement and depression took me from overweight to morbidly obese.

I tried almost everything.

Apart from losing the weight.

A minor detail.

Then, because the universe clearly felt the storyline lacked jeopardy, a war started outside my window.

The sirens. The broken sleep. The fear.

My daughter was serving in the army. Every alert, every silence and every piece of news carried a different kind of stress when your child was part of it.

I could not see my parents in the UK for over a year. Or my friends. Or the rest of my family there.

It felt like COVID again, except a hundred times worse. On some days, a thousand.

Part of my brain stayed half awake, even when the rest of me was answering an email as if everything was normal.

It was not normal.

I let things go.

My business. My website. My traffic. The income stream that had quietly supported me for years.

I stopped looking at reports because I knew they would make me feel worse. I stopped giving the site the attention it needed. I told myself I would deal with it when I felt better, when life was calmer, when I had more capacity.

You can probably guess how well that went.

The traffic slipped. The enquiries slowed. The passive income that had kept me afloat through illness, COVID and war dwindled to almost nothing.

Everyone talks about the 56 kilos

People see the physical difference first.

Of course they do. It is right there in the photographs.

I lost 56 kilos. I went from a wheelchair to a walking stick, then walking, hiking, running and lifting weights. You can read the longer version of that story on my About page.

But the weight I lost inside my head was bigger.

The negative chatter.

The self-hatred.

The shame after eating something I had promised myself I would not eat. The guilt. The loathing. The exhausting cycle of wanting to change, failing again and finding fresh evidence that I could not trust myself.

That was the heavy bit.

For 30 or 40 years, I had tried to lose weight. I could usually keep going for three months. Sometimes four. Six at the absolute maximum.

Then it became too hard.

I could not maintain it. I could not sustain it. I gave up.

Again.

That failure was difficult for me to understand because I had been very successful in other parts of my life. I had built businesses, run teams, worked with huge brands and stood on stages around the world. I knew how to achieve things.

Except this thing.

I felt as though I was living two lives. In one, I had proof that I was capable. In the other, I could not stop doing something that was making me miserable and damaging my health.

So I had to go deeper than a meal plan.

I had to understand why I ate the way I did. Why I reached for sugar. What I was trying not to feel. Why a difficult day could wipe out a decision I had felt certain about that morning.

I quit refined sugar completely.

It was hard. Really hard.

But I had reached rock bottom, and rock bottom made the choice brutally clear. Carry on as I was and accept the future I could see coming, or become comfortable being uncomfortable for as long as change required.

I chose uncomfortable.

Then I kept choosing it.

At birthday parties. While travelling. In front of all my favourite foods. On miserable days and lovely days and days where I would once have told myself one piece of chocolate did not count because it had been a long week.

I did not lose 56 kilos because I found the perfect diet.

I lost it because I stopped giving up.

Most people want the result. Tuesday is the problem.

Almost everyone I know wants something to change.

They want to be thinner. More successful. More financially free. Happier. Calmer. More content. They want a better business, a better relationship or a better life.

The result sounds lovely.

The journey often sounds lovely too, once someone has edited it into a 45-second video and put uplifting music underneath.

Then Tuesday arrives.

Tuesday is when you have to do the difficult thing again, even though you did it yesterday and nothing exciting has happened yet.

The scales have barely moved. The traffic is still flat. Nobody replied. The customer said no. Your body hurts. You are tired. Someone near you is eating something beige and delicious.

That is where change usually dies.

I used to think I needed more motivation.

I did not.

I needed to stop treating discomfort as evidence that something had gone wrong.

Discomfort was the work.

Once I understood that, I stopped negotiating with it every day.

That shift changed my body first. This year, I applied it to my business.

I decided to become obsessed again

In February, I looked at a website with thousands of pages, disappearing traffic and almost no income.

I had 21 years of marketing experience and no idea whether any of it would be enough.

Google had changed. Search had changed. AI was swallowing clicks. The asset I had built over years looked as if it might have reached the end of its useful life.

Then I thought about the woman who had given up sugar.

If I could beat cravings that had controlled me for decades, lose 56 kilos and go from a wheelchair to running and lifting weights, I could do this too.

That was the first part of the decision.

The second part was less inspirational.

The business had reached its own rock bottom.

I could see where it was going if I carried on giving it part-time attention and full-time worry. So I decided to apply the same method.

Go all in.

Become obsessed.

Take massive action every day.

Know it will take time.

Let each action compound with the next one.

And never, ever, ever give up.

I do not mean "massive action" in the online-coach sense where somebody points at a rented car and tells you to wake up at 4am.

I mean a large amount of useful work, aimed at the same outcome, sustained long after the novelty has worn off.

I removed 1,300 pages from Google's index. I cleaned up years of technical SEO problems. I rescued pages worth saving. I published. I rebuilt the newsletter. I created systems. I worked on AI visibility, partnerships, outreach and the routes that bring people back to the site.

I did not pick one tiny promise and congratulate myself for keeping it.

I mounted an aggressive campaign across the business.

It is still running.

The bit about long hours that people like to edit out

I have worked very hard over the last few months.

Long hours.

At the moment, my life is mostly work, fitness, then a much smaller amount of personal and family time than I would ideally like.

I am not telling you to copy that split. It is not a permanent model for a lovely balanced life. It is the season I have chosen because I am rebuilding something I badly want back.

You can choose different hours.

You cannot choose aggressive growth, put in very little and then act surprised when the business declines your invitation.

Starting a business takes work. Growing one takes work. Rebuilding one after years of neglect takes a frankly unreasonable amount of work.

AI helps me do far more with those hours. My AI inbox system gave me part of my working day back. The tool I built to automate WordPress publishing removed hours from a task I repeat constantly. I now run a one-person business with systems that behave more like a team.

But AI does not want the result for me.

It does not get out of bed and decide what matters. It does not push through the uncomfortable call, make the commercial decision or keep believing during a month when the signals look pathetic.

That bit remains inconveniently human.

I put the business rebuild in public before I knew the ending

I did not share my weight-loss journey while I was losing the weight.

I was petrified I would fail again.

I had decades of evidence. Three months. Four months. Six if things were going exceptionally well. Then I would give up and feel worse because I had now added another failed attempt to the pile.

So I stayed quiet until I had done it.

The business rebuild was different.

This time, I published the decision before I had the result.

That frightened me too.

Week 1 did not say, "Here is how I saved my website."

It said, in effect, "I am about to de-index 1,300 pages and I do not know whether this will work."

Putting it in public made it harder to quietly disappear when I had a bad week. It forced me to return with the next experiment, the next number, the next honest account of what had happened.

Sometimes that meant sharing a win.

Sometimes it meant admitting that my beautiful newsletter redesign had crushed the clicks.

Once it meant publishing a photograph of myself as a man called Tom.

You are welcome.

Accountability was one reason I shared it. The other was that I wanted the work to help someone while I was still doing it, not years later when success had made me accidentally tidy the story.

How consistency and compounding rebuilt my passive income

Compounding gets sold as a lovely smooth curve.

Mine looked more like a drunk person trying to draw a staircase.

For weeks, I worked and the income barely moved.

I fixed pages. Published. Cleaned up another problem. Watched a promising number go up, then down, then sideways for no reason I could see.

There was no choir. No beam of light through the clouds. Mostly there was me at 5am, staring at another spreadsheet while my brain was still willing to cooperate.

Then the small signals started arriving.

More pages appeared in search.

Search impressions rose.

Enquiries started coming back.

Old buyers returned. New buyers placed a first order, then another.

The systems made the work easier to handle, so I could act on more of the demand without giving every remaining hour to admin.

A complete stranger booked a call because Claude had recommended me by name.

No one signal created July.

Together, they produced my best month since the collapse.

The income rose 573% from the February low point. July included 37 completed paid jobs, so this was not one enormous order wandering in and making the graph look pretty.

It came from repeated demand.

It looked sudden on the monthly report.

It did not feel sudden while I was living it.

The dangerous stretch before the signals arrive

The easiest time to keep going is now.

I can see the income. I can see the enquiries. I can see search recovering. The signals are giving me more optimism, more faith and more hope.

They are making me hungrier.

The difficult part was the stretch before them.

For a while, the signals were tiny. Some weeks they were invisible. I had to keep doing the work without the emotional reward of knowing it would pay off.

This is where most useful change gets abandoned.

You do not need much faith once the graph is pointing up. You need it while the graph looks bored.

If you are in that stretch now, track three kinds of evidence:

Evidence that the work is happening

Did you publish, pitch, improve, contact, build or repair what you committed to doing?

This is the evidence you control. Do not dismiss it because it is not revenue yet.

Evidence that the market is noticing

Are impressions rising? Are more people visiting? Are replies changing? Are previous customers returning? Are you appearing in places where nobody found you before?

These are leading signals. My half-million search impressions mattered before all of them turned into money.

Evidence that the result is arriving

Revenue. Profit. Paid jobs. Conversion rate. Average order value. Repeat purchases.

These are lagging signals. They arrive last, which is deeply inconsiderate of them.

You need all three views. If you only watch revenue, you may quit while the work is starting to take hold. If you only watch activity, you can remain very busy while producing absolutely nothing anyone wants.

Become obsessed with your numbers

This may be the controversial bit.

I checked my numbers daily.

And weekly.

And monthly.

I did not protect myself from them. I became obsessed with understanding them.

When I used to do more coaching and consulting, I would ask business owners for their numbers. Far too many could not tell me.

It always reminded me of Dragon's Den. Someone walks in asking for a large amount of money, then appears surprised when the dragons want to know the sales, margin or cost of acquiring a customer.

You do not need to be pitching in a television studio to know your numbers.

Whatever the size of your business, you should know:

1. What came in, what went out and what was left.
2. How many genuine leads or enquiries you received.
3. Where those leads came from.
4. How many became customers.
5. The average value of a sale or client.
6. How many customers returned.
7. What is sitting in the pipeline and what needs following up.
8. Which work consumes the most time to deliver.

If your business relies on a website, add traffic, search visibility, conversion rate and the pages that create enquiries.

If you do not like the numbers, know them anyway.

An ugly number you understand can be improved. A number you avoid gets to cause damage without supervision.

AI has removed most of the excuses for not doing this. You can connect your data to a dashboard, have AI monitor changes and turn the weekly figures into a plain-English summary. I have written about why performance reporting is one of the first marketing jobs worth automating.

The dashboard does not make the decision.

It stops you making the decision blind.

The seven rules I would use to create any serious change

This applies to building passive income, growing a business, changing your body or doing another hard thing you have postponed for years.

1. Tell the truth about where you are

Use numbers. Use photographs. Use bank statements. Use the clothes that no longer fit or the report you have been avoiding.

You cannot change the softened, polite version of the problem.

2. Make the decision before you feel ready

I did not feel ready to give up sugar forever.

I did not feel ready to de-index 1,300 pages.

I reached the point where continuing as I was frightened me more than changing.

3. Accept the price

Change costs time, comfort, energy, convenience and sometimes money.

Decide what you are willing to pay before the bill arrives on a difficult Tuesday.

You do not have to work my hours. You do have to make room for the work your goal requires.

4. Take enough action to give the result a chance

One useful action is better than none.

But a large goal usually needs more than a tiny habit.

Choose actions that can move the result, then repeat them aggressively. If you want to grow a business, "I posted once this week" may be consistent. It may also be nowhere near enough.

5. Measure before your emotions write the report

Track activity, leading signals and final results.

Your mood is not a dashboard.

A good day can make weak progress feel brilliant. A bad day can make real progress feel pointless. Look at the evidence.

6. Learn to live in the quiet stretch

You will work before you see the reward.

Expect that gap. Stop treating it as a surprise.

Look for small signals, adjust when the evidence tells you to, and keep moving while the result catches up.

7. Do not use one win as permission to relax

July did not make me want to take my foot off the pedal.

It made me hungrier.

The first result proves the work can move. It does not prove the work is finished.

I have been praying for this

I have not talked much about this part.

Over the last few months, I have been praying to God.

Properly praying. Not firing off a quick request and returning to my to-do list before He has had a chance to open it.

I have been journalling too. Writing down what I am frightened of. Writing down what I want. Writing down what I am grateful for, even on days when gratitude required more effort than opening another SEO report.

I have even turned it into a verb: gratefuling.

English will cope.

I did not pray instead of doing the work. I prayed, then did the work. I journalled, then did the work. I practised gratitude, then got up the next morning and tried again.

I cannot put prayer into an attribution dashboard. Some things can stay holy and untracked.

The work mattered. Consistency mattered. Patience mattered. Taking the risk mattered. Trying another way after something failed mattered.

Faith helped me continue before the evidence was kind enough to arrive.

Now the signals are giving me more optimism, more hope and more energy to keep pushing.

That is why I am grateful.

Not polite grateful. Not the grateful you type beneath a photograph because the caption needs a tidy ending.

The sort that catches in your throat.

Business is not weight loss, and I know that

There is one point where the comparison ends.

My weight is largely within my control.

I have been tested. Birthday parties. Travel. Tables full of my favourite food. Difficult days. Celebrations. I have stayed consistent, and I no longer feel the temptation I once did.

Business has more moving parts and some of them do not care how disciplined I am.

Google could penalise the site.

Demand could change.

A platform could disappear.

There could be another war, although "another" is doing quite a lot of work when the current one never seems to end.

The growth could halt. It could plateau. I have no idea what will happen over the next few months.

Right now it is still moving.

I am not mistaking that for a guarantee.

That is why an aggressive growth campaign needs more than one route. Search, newsletter, referrals, AI recommendations, returning customers, partnerships and direct outreach can support each other. One can slow without silencing the entire business.

It is also why I keep watching the numbers. Optimism is lovely. Early warning is useful.

Why passive income still matters so much

Passive income has acquired a faint smell of rented Lamborghinis and men shouting from swimming pools.

Mine has never looked like that.

Mine looked like income arriving when I could barely get out of bed.

It looked like breathing room when COVID stopped other work. It looked like one less frightening thing during the war. It looked like not having to find a new client on a day when getting dressed had already used most of my available energy.

Passive income does not mean money for doing nothing.

It means you build an asset that can earn without every payment depending on your next available hour. Then you keep tending it, because passive is not the same as immortal. I learned that distinction rather expensively.

I believe everyone should try to build one income-producing asset.

Not because you want to retire to a beach and develop strong opinions about coconuts.

Because life can remove your ability to work without checking what is already in your diary.

Illness. Trauma. Caring for someone you love. Redundancy. War. A market that changes while you are busy surviving something else.

An asset gives you another line of defence.

Build it before you need rescuing.

How to build passive income that can survive real life

Your version might be a website. It could be a paid newsletter, a useful digital product, intellectual property you license, a membership, a book, investments or something that belongs to your life rather than mine.

The format matters less than the protection it creates.

Start with something you already know, make or own. Find a problem people already pay to solve. Give the asset a clear way to earn, then build more than one route for people to discover it.

Do not create seventeen half-built projects and a folder called FINAL FINAL 4.

Choose one asset, then take enough action to make it real.

For a website, that may mean publishing useful content, repairing old pages, improving conversion routes, building relationships, distributing the work and measuring what creates an enquiry.

For a product, it may mean talking to customers, improving it, publishing proof, creating a sales route and following up far more than feels comfortable.

For a newsletter, it means sending consistently, improving the offer and earning trust. It does not mean writing three emails, hearing crickets and deciding newsletters are dead.

Then maintain the asset.

This was my expensive mistake. I treated the income as passive and forgot the asset still needed attention.

A garden can feed you for years. It will still object if you stop watering it.

I want more now

I thought getting back to this point would make me feel relieved.

It does.

It has also made me ravenous.

I do not want to crawl back to the old peak and sit down for a well-earned cup of tea.

I want to supersede it.

I want to see what happens when the woman I am now gives this asset the attention the woman I was then could not.

I am healthier than I have ever been. I lost 56 kilos. I run. I lift weights. I feel more content in myself than I did for decades.

I am stronger, clearer and more determined than at any other point in my life.

And I am grateful.

Grateful to God. Grateful that my body lets me work. Grateful that the roots of the business survived my absence. Grateful to every person who has read this series, replied, bought something, recommended me or quietly kept turning up while I found my way back.

At the beginning of this rebuild, I wanted the old income back because I was frightened.

Now I want to beat it because I feel alive again.

I am not taking my foot off the pedal.

This is the start.

I still do not know the ending.

One uncomfortable question for you

What change do you keep saying you want while resisting the journey required to get it?

Maybe it is your health. Your business. Your income. Your relationship with yourself.

Tell the truth about where you are.

Decide what the result is worth.

Take enough action to give it a chance.

Know your numbers.

Stay when it gets uncomfortable.

And when the early signals look embarrassingly small, keep going long enough to find out what they become.

That is what saved me.

I am going all in.

This time, I am paying attention.

Every week I share the experiment as it is happening, including the wins, the mistakes and the weeks where I have no clue which one I am looking at. Join the newsletter here.

If you want to read more about the mindset behind rebuilding after life knocks everything sideways, read my honest guide to doing hard things as an entrepreneur.

Frequently asked questions about passive income and business mindset

What mindset do you need to build passive income?

You need to accept delayed results. Most passive income assets require significant work before they produce meaningful returns. Choose a valuable asset, take sustained action, measure the leading signals and keep improving it while the income catches up. Motivation will fluctuate, so your decision must survive days when the work feels unrewarding.

How can I start building passive income?

Start with something you already know, make or own. Choose one problem people pay to solve, one asset that solves it and one clear route to income. Then build distribution and measurement around it. Focus matters, but focus does not mean timid action. Give the asset enough work and time to prove whether it has demand.

How long does passive income take to build?

There is no honest universal timeline. It depends on the asset, existing audience, demand, distribution and the amount of useful work applied to it. My recovery took five months before the combined result became obvious, but the underlying website had taken years to build. Treat passive income as compounding, not a quick win.

Should business owners check their numbers every day?

Check the numbers at the frequency that helps you act without confusing normal daily movement with a trend. I checked mine daily, weekly and monthly. Daily tracking helped me spot activity and changes. Weekly tracking showed leading signals. Monthly tracking showed the commercial result. The important thing is knowing what each number can and cannot tell you.

How do you stay motivated when you cannot see results?

Track evidence at three levels: the useful work you completed, signs that the market is noticing and the final commercial result. The last one often arrives slowly. Use the first two to check that you are moving, but change course if the market keeps giving you no response. Persistence needs evidence and judgement, not blind repetition.

Can a website generate passive income?

Yes, if it attracts the right visitors and has a clear way to earn. A website can generate income through advertising, sponsorships, paid products, memberships, licensing or leads. It still needs useful content, distribution, maintenance and trust. My website income recovered after I repaired the asset and rebuilt several routes to demand.

Is passive income really passive?

Usually not at the beginning. You create or buy the asset first, then maintain it. The benefit is leverage: one piece of work can create value more than once. Problems begin when someone hears "passive" and assumes "neglect-proof". I did that. The asset sent me a bill for the misunderstanding.

How do you protect passive income from things outside your control?

Avoid depending on one platform, customer or traffic source. Build several discovery routes, maintain a direct relationship with your audience, watch the leading numbers and keep the asset healthy. You cannot remove every external risk. You can stop one algorithm change or lost customer from taking the whole income stream with it.

Related reading: 5 Ways To Earn Passive Income Online and Earning A Passive Income From Crypto.

For the bigger picture, see my full guide to side hustles.