Let’s jump right in with this August 2020 income report! I’m super excited to share with you guys what’s been going on with me lately.
What’s Up With These Income Reports, Anyway?
Ever since my very first month in business (I made a whopping $87), I’ve been sharing my income and expenses for each month, in order to give other online entrepreneurs a good baseline of what a real business looks like during its start-up phase.
My goal with these posts is to give you guys a super realistic look into what type of income and expenses you can expect from being a “girl next door” type of online entrepreneur who isn’t making 6-7 figures each month (yet!).
Let’s do this!
August 2020 Income Report: An Overview
I don’t want to get too ahead of myself, but I’m super excited because in August we had our highest profit month EVER! It wasn’t our highest revenue month (not even close — our highest ever revenue was $22,998.71), so that means our profit margin is crazy good right now.
For reference, when we had that highest-revenue month, only 33% of that was profit. But this month, our profit margin was 54%!! 😱
This is amazing, because our goal has always been to have it be at least 30%, but we’re just blowing that out of the water! I think our goal needs to change. 😂 I had that as our goal because someone once told me that 30% is the industry standard for digital marketing agencies (although this post from Agency Analytics suggests that it’s actually way lower than that, with the average only around 11-20%).
While we are still a fairly small agency with only 20 team members and a few dozen clients, I’m extremely proud of us for being able to do that! A huge part of how we’ve improved our profit margin over the last year has definitely been because of our switch to focusing on packaged services.
I talk a lot about this in The Systems Society and how powerful this strategy can be. You basically take your most popular offerings and turn them into repeatable systems that are very similar for each client. This cuts down on the day-to-day management and communication that is needed for typical client work, and allows you to deliver your services in a much more streamlined and efficient way. It’s also WAY easier to delegate to your team when your process is super cut-and-dry.
I’ve been packaging my services for a few years now, but it’s only been over the past year that I have switched my focus to bringing in revenue primarily from those clients instead of from custom or hourly clients. Before I did that, my profit margin stayed around 20-30%. But now, for the past 4 months, we’ve been consistently around 50%.
A Few Highlights:
- Hired a new copywriter — One of our copywriters had to leave the team for personal reasons, so I ended up hiring a new copywriter to replace her! I followed my Team Member Onboarding System (which you can find in The Systems Society!), so the process was super easy and only took about a week to get her hired and onboarded.
- Completed a huge launch for a VIP client — While my goal is to bring in lots of revenue from my packaged services, I do still have a few custom or hourly clients that I’ve worked with for a long time. One of those clients had a huge launch this month and, as her integrator, I was managing it all and it was a HUGE success! It’s something that we were working towards all year, so it felt amazing to complete that project and have it go off without a hitch.
- Revamped my monthly content system — In order to free up some time, starting next month, I’m cutting down on the amount of free content I’m producing. I’ve been doing one piece of content every week (so 4-5 pieces per month) for YEARS. As an experiment, I’m now cutting it down to just two (but they’ll be super good ones!). My goal is to still put out amazing, high-quality, helpful, free content…but also not have that be the only thing I’m able to do. I have so many other exciting projects I’d love to have time for!
Business Goal Setting
My Goals For August 2020: Success or Failure?
- Map out the steps of putting together my evergreen marketing plan for The Systems Society and get all tasks assigned in Asana. — FAILURE. I had to put this on the back burner due to a surprise large project that I need to work on for a VIP client. This is something that I will definitely still be doing, but have to put on hold for a while.
- Make at least $15,000 in revenue. — SUCCESS! You can see more details on this below, but we crushed it!!
- Finish my homepage + website updates. — SUCCESS! Although I still want to fully redesign and update my Work With Us page, the other changes have all been completed, including an updated homepage and blog page!
My Goals for September 2020 — Let’s Do This!
- Make at least $15,000 in revenue.
- Create a more concrete plan for the rest of 2020 and start thinking about 2021.
August 2020 Expenses
- Team Member Payments = $6,091.71
- Transaction Fees = $449.91
- Postage = $9.08
- Office Supplies = $27.81
- GSuite = $12.84
- Rev.com = $34.00
- Movavi.com = $85.55
- Active Campaign* = $70.00
- Acuity* = $117.70
- PennyPipe = $9.95
- Adobe Creative Cloud = $44.92
- ClickFunnels* = $297.00
- Quickbooks* = $72.76
- Minimalist-Work.com = $10.00
- HelloSign = $156.00
- Google = $9.99
- Zapier = $50.00
- Later* = $74.00
- Deposit Photos* = $0.00
- Utilities = $297.80
- Website Domains & Hosting = $74.86
Total Expenses = $7,995.88
August 2020 Income Report
- Interest Earned = $0.74
- CapitalOne Cash Back Rewards = $153.38
- Affiliate Income = $38.67
- Passive Income Products + Coaching = $826.80
- Packaged Services = $7,572.00
- Hourly/Custom Client Work = $7,255.00
Total Income = $17,396.59
Total Net Profit = $9,400.71
August 2020 Income Report: All the Stats & Analytics!
- Number of blog posts = 4
- Monthly blog page views = 7,662
- Email list subscribers = 7,744
- Facebook page followers = 1,505
- Instagram followers = 10.5k
- Twitter followers = 6,815
- Pinterest followers = 28k
- YouTube subscribers = 207
Final Notes on My August 2020 Income Report:
Honestly, I’ve kind of been living this year by the seat of my pants. I haven’t really felt like I could fully relax or make concrete plans, because so much is up in the air. But I think I finally had a realization this month that my business is back on track (big time) and I can’t just keep sitting around, letting things happen to me. I need to be proactive about it and figure out what’s next for Miranda Nahmias & Co. once 2020 and the havoc it’s wreaked has come and gone.
So many of you are still in the midst of your own personal struggles when it comes to finances, COVID, etc. And I don’t want to gloss over that. Not everybody is privileged enough to be in the position that I’m in right now, where things are growing instead of falling apart.
But I’ve also worked really hard to be where I am. I put systems and processes in place in my business so that, if the worst happened (which, it kinda did!), that we would be okay and be able to quickly turn things around. And that’s exactly what happened…because I made it happen.
Being able to recover from everything that happened this year wasn’t a fluke or “lucky” — it’s because I built my business in a way so that it could not fail me. No matter what (even if I sometimes doubted this out of fear), we were always going to be okay…and we WILL always be okay. Because I’ve built a sturdy AF foundation through systems and my team, so that it will support me through anything.
But now, as the smoke clears, I’m left thinking: “What next?”
There are lots of choices to be made and plans to create as I start looking towards the future. It’s time to emerge from “reactive mode” and start working towards some new goals. These goals are probably going to look quite a bit different from the ones I had at the start of this year. But I need to figure out where I want to go next and the steps I need to take in order to get there.
There’s going to be some restructuring and some reorganization as I figure out what this all looks like. But I’m super excited about it! For the first time this year, I feel like I’m exactly where I need to be and that there are so many awesome things coming my way.
I hope you feel the same!
