Let’s jump right in with this July 2017 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 5-6 figures each month (yet!).

Let’s do this!

July 2017 Income Report: An Overview

Honestly, July went by in kind of a whirlwind. Suddenly it’s the middle of August already and I’m not quite sure what the heck happened. June was an amazing month, but then July started out soooo slowly.

During the beginning of the month, I actually had 9 no-show discovery calls in a row! That was really frustrating, and I even wrote a newsletter about it, so the month definitely did not start off very good.

At the very end of the month, things finally started to pick up again, and August started off with a huge bang. I’m expecting a pretty good month next month! But as a result, July ended up just being kind of average.

A FEW HIGHLIGHTS:

• I FINALLY launched my new homepage — Oh my gosh, I’ve been working on that project since probably March. It wasn’t really at the forefront of my mind, so it was very slow going. Especially since I wanted to do the whole thing myself. But it’s done now and finally live! There will be some other changes going on throughout the rest of the site, like a new media page, new sidebar design, etc. But the main big thing is done! Check it out!
• I reduced my office hours — When I first started my business, I worked like a crazy person from 9am to at least midnight almost every single day. To show that I was super available, I had 50 hours of available space to book calls with me every single week. But after I had those 9 no-shows, I decided that I no longer have the luxury of being quite so available to everyone anymore. I’m a busy lady! So I ended up removing Sundays from the schedule completely, and then narrowing it down to just 4 hours on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. That’s still 16 hours out of the week, so it’s not nothing! But I’m really happy with this new schedule, and it makes sticking to a daily routine a LOT easier now that I can better predict when I’ll have to be on camera.

Business Goal Setting

My Goals For July 2017: Success or Failure?

1. Launch new social media package — FAILURE. Everything is complete except the sales page, which is kind of an important part of it haha. Hopefully this will happen this month!
2. Get my new homepage design live — SUCCESS! I’m in love with my new homepage, which I completely designed myself.
3. Nail down details of upcoming relaunch of my internship program — SUCCESS! My internship program reopened for its sixth time at the beginning of August.

My Goals for August 2017 — Let’s Do This!

1. Launch new social media package.
2. Successfully run ad campaign for The VA Vault and at least break even.
3. Finish mapping out all additional packages (5 left).
4. Finish fixing all opt-in funnels so that they are switched over from LeadPages to Thrive Leads/ActiveCampaign and actually deliver the freebie.

July 2017 Expenses

**Annual expenses not included (such as Tailwind* and hosting costs). 

• Deposit Photos* = $29.00
• ClickFunnels* = $97.00
• Active Campaign* = $70.00
• Teachable* = $39.00
• Adobe Creative Cloud = $21.39
• BoardBooster* = $10.00
• Grum = $2.95
• Buffer = $10.00
• PeopleMap* = $20.00
• Zapier = $20.00
• Zoom* = $14.99
• Smarterqueue* = $45.99
• Namecheap* = $9.88
• E-Courses & Ebooks = $0.00
• Design Elements = $0.00
• Ads & Marketing = $49.63
• Referral Payouts = $232.40 (sign up to be a partner!)
• Transaction Fees = $120.79
• Team Member Payments = $1,711.97

Total Expenses = $2,484.99

July 2017 Income Report

• Affiliate & JV Sales = $122.63
• Google Adsense = $10.59
• Passive Income Products + Coaching = $283.26
• Client Work = $3,996.91
• Pinterest Package = $961.00

Total Income = $5,374.39

Total Net Profit = $2,889.40 

July 2017 Income Report: All the Stats & Analytics!

• Number of blog posts = 2
• Monthly blog page views = 8,895
• Email list subscribers = 6,192
• Facebook page followers = 805
• The VA Collective group members = 1,331
• Instagram followers = 4,159
• Twitter followers = 6,482
• Pinterest followers = 5,061
• Google+ followers = 59
• LinkedIn connections = 670

Final Notes on My July 2017 Income Report:

Check out that cool new chart! I decided to start including these as a reference to my business’ growth over the past year. As you can see, while income was on a steady climb in 2016, I did not maintain that same momentum through the first half of 2017.

But, while overall income has been staying at about the same $5-6k mark since last December (except for two really good months), this is because we have been strategically focusing on increasing our profit margin. And, as you can see in the chart, June and July were awesome months for profit margin! (Profit margin is the percentage of difference between your profit and income). The last time it was this good was almost a year ago, back in October of 2016!

So now our profit margin is finally under control. This is something I have purposefully been putting a lot of effort into this year, specifically by going through the Scale Up mastermind from Create Your Laptop Life, as well as hiring a project manager.

Basically, what we’ve been doing through 2017 is priming the business for growth. Last year in 2016, it was my first year of business and we exploded from making an average of $1,000 a month to an average of $5,000. That was craziness, but pretty typical for a successful new business. Because it got so out of control, our profit margin was shot! I had no idea how to grow the business with such an increase in income. I was working 20-hour days, spending way too much money, and had only 4 people on my team. By the end of 2016, I was burnt out and the business was virtually running off the rails.

Now, almost a year later and with tons of work behind-the-scenes, I have 11 people on my team and have actually lowered subcontracting expenses overall. I’ve also lowered general expenses, reduced my personal work load to a relatively normal scale, and have been able to focus a lot more on my own business than I ever would’ve thought possible back in 2016.

With everything sitting pretty right now, we’re primed for the business to explode again in 2018. I know it’s only August, but I’m extremely excited for what I’ve been building this past year. 2018 is totally going to be my year.

I’m envisioning that the rest of the year will be spent on the last few things we have left in the “priming” stage. Most notable of which is that we’re in the middle of switching over almost completely from hourly to package pricing, with a larger focus on my team’s marketing skills vs. traditional virtual assistant administrative work.

Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy seeing these reports! It’s kind of cool to sit back and get a little bit of retrospect at the end of every month. Here’s hoping that your business is doing as awesome as I think mine is!