Let’s jump right in with this February 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!
February 2020 Income Report: An Overview
Honestly, I’m a little embarrassed to be publishing an income report with this low of revenue. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve brought in less than $15,000 in a month.
The main reason we saw such a huge decline in revenue was because I lost one of our biggest clients. Although I loved working with them and they couldn’t say enough good things about me, they wanted to replace me with someone who had more availability on weekends and holidays and a lower hourly rate. To be honest, I’m at a point in my business where I’m just not willing to compromise on stuff like that. So although I was really sad, I understood that we were not the right fit for each other anymore.
But it was a big blindside! I depended on that client for a huge chunk of our revenue each month and now, suddenly, I don’t have that. This happened right at the very end of January, so February was the first month we didn’t have that income coming in…and we took a pretty big hit, as you can see.
It’s really important to me that I be totally upfront and honest about this. Stuff happens in business, and luckily we have enough savings to help us get through tough times if we need it. I highly recommend reading Profit First and implementing that system if you want to build a savings account for your business!
Now that I’ve lost this client, my focus has shifted a bit. Instead of replacing them, I want to fill up my client roster with more package clients (like I’ve been talking about for a while). And I also want to focus more on serving my student audience. I’ve been in the process of relaunching my membership for a few months now, and I’m really excited to see that come to life soon!
I did have to take a step back from my student audience in February, though, as my focus shifted to filling up some more package client slots. I also decided to focus on decreasing our expenses, which we needed to do anyway!
A Few Highlights:
- Lost a big hourly client — Talked about this a lot above. Honestly, it was a blessing in disguise, and although it put us in a tight spot during February, I think this is going to end up being a great thing for my business, because it will allow me to focus more on my package clients and students.
- Consolidated my team — I ended up letting go of one of my team members and having a different team member take on that job. There are certain roles on my team that are benefitted by being filled with uniquely qualified people, so that we can give our clients the best results. But I’ve realized there are other roles/areas that actually suffer when you have too many irons in the fire. I’m really happy with this decision and I think it will also help us be more efficient and reduce team costs.
Business Goal Setting
My Goals For February 2020: Success or Failure?
- Reduce team member expenses a bit. — SUCCESS! I worked a lot on streamlining our processes this month, and we were able to reduce our expenses by a lot this month compared to last month (15%).
- Keep total expenses under $10k. — SUCCESS! We did even better than expected here!
- Do more Instagram stories on a consistent basis. — SUCCESS! I’ve been doing Stories almost every single weekday!
My Goals for March 2020 — Let’s Do This!
- Keep total expenses under $9k.
- Have a great (not too expensive) trip to NYC.
- Increase package client income to $10k+.
February 2020 Expenses
- Ads & Marketing = $65.97
- Team Member Payments = $6,247.10
- Education (Courses + Memberships) = $136.00
- Transaction Fees = $410.01
- Referral Payouts = $70.30
- Gifts = $101.25
- Office Supplies = $7.48
- Postage = $4.54
- GSuite = $12.84
- Rev.com = $67.90
- Active Campaign* = $70.00
- Adobe PS Creative Cloud = $22.46
- Adobe ID Creative Cloud = $22.46
- PennyPipe = $9.95
- ClickFunnels* = $297.00
- Minimalist-Work.com = $10.00
- Quickbooks* = $72.76
- Zapier = $50.00
- DeadlineFunnel* = $67.00
- Later.com = $99.00
- Deposit Photos* = $29.00
- Stock Gallery = $29.00
- Utilities = $156.61
- Website Expenses = $26.10
Total Expenses = $8,114.72
February 2020 Income Report
- Interest Earned = $0.43
- CapitalOne Cash Back Rewards = $80.39
- Affiliate Income = $89.50
- Passive Income Products + Coaching = $442.00
- Done-for-You Social Media Packages = $8,827.00
- Hourly Client Work = $3,415.00
Total Income = $12,724.97
Total Net Profit = $4,610.25
February 2020 Income Report: All the Stats & Analytics!
- Number of blog posts = 3
- Monthly blog page views = 9,778
- Email list subscribers = 7,580
- Facebook page followers = 1,488
- Grow Like Woah group members = 2,592
- Instagram followers = 10.9k
- Twitter followers = 6,332
- Pinterest followers = 26,231
- YouTube subscribers = 184
Final Notes on My February 2020 Income Report:
As you can see from these reports, our profit was substantially higher than I would’ve expected it to be if you told me that we only made $12k.
Our baseline is that we need to hit at least $4,000 profit for us to be able to keep everything running and pay ourselves. Some months, we’ve even done less than that, but that’s okay because it works out as long as we hit an average of $4,000. Like we’ve definitely done less than that, but some months we’ve done way more.
Reducing our expenses really saved the day! Two things that really helped were: (a) no random expensive things needing to happen, like buying a new laptop, and (b) consolidating our team and focusing on processes to make us more efficient.
To be honest, I’m still a little anxious about the coming months. We are taking a trip to New York in March and that will be expensive, and it is going to take a while to completely fill up our client load with more package clients so that I’m able to basically replace that income we lost.
But I’m not worried in an “Oh god, my business is going to go under” kind of way, which is great! I know that, no matter what, my business can survive. It’s more that I have a lot of big goals and dreams for my business, and I’m excited and ready to hit those goals. Losing a big client was a setback that I didn’t see coming and it did push us back a few steps… but we’re still going to get there eventually!
I hope that my transparency here helps you see how a business can overcome struggles like losing a big client! One client should never make or break your business. You have to have systems in place so that, no matter what happens, your business can still prosper!
