Let’s jump right in with this July 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!
July 2020 Income Report: An Overview
As each month passes, I continue to build my confidence in feeling like my business is finally back on the right track. Earlier this year, we suffered quite a few setbacks (check out my previous income reports for details!) and it took us a while to get out of what I not-so-fondly think of as the “danger zone” — where I really wasn’t quite sure if we were going to make it.
It was a rough couple of months with a lot of sleepless nights. But a few months ago, things started to turn a corner and now, every time I put together one of these reports, it fills me with hope and positivity.
2020 definitely hasn’t gone as planned (for me or anyone else!). But it’s given me some perspective and it was probably something that I needed to go through so that I (and the business) could come out the other side stronger.
My business has always been a well-oiled machine, but it’s now buttoned up even more. And it’s allowed me to become even stronger in my skills as a systems expert, which means I have even more knowledge to share with you guys, too!
Our current direction is focused on continuing to operate as leanly as possible while bringing in as much revenue as we can. This will increase the profit we can take home every month, allowing us to build our savings back up to where they were (and more) before this year took a huge hit out of it.
Ideally, we want to have a cushion of savings that, if necessary (god I hope not, though!), would allow us to operate for at least 3 months without any profit.
A Few Highlights:
- We bought a house! 🎉 — Yes, in the middle of all of this chaos and financial upheaval, we decided to buy a house! Because we utilize Profit First for both business and personal, our personal finances were actually fairly unaffected by our recent struggles (it was the business savings that took the biggest hit). We’d been working on saving up for a house for years, and when interest rates dived because of COVID, we decided to take that opportunity! It was a scary decision to purchase while things with our business were still a bit up in the air, but I was confident that we were slowly but surely getting back to normal (and I was right!). So we did it! 😬 We started looking back in May, put in an offer mid-June, and officially purchased the house on July 24th. Follow along on my IG Stories to get some behind-the-scenes of the new place!
Business Goal Setting
My Goals For July 2020: Success or Failure?
- Be consistent with daily IG Stories. — SUCCESS! I have been super good with this! I post on my IG Stories several times a day.
- Make at least $15,000 in revenue. — SUCCESS! This was our first month bringing in over $15k revenue since January! Last month, I talked about my goal for not having any months less than $15k in 2021, and this is one step closer to achieving that! 🙌
- Come up with an evergreen marketing plan for The Systems Society. — SUCCESS! I’m going to call this a success because I technically DID come up with a plan…but I haven’t done anything to put it into action yet 😳 Purchasing the house affected my timeline of this, but I hope to have this whole thing done by the end of September.
My Goals for August 2020 — Let’s Do This!
- Map out the steps of putting together my evergreen marketing plan for The Systems Society and get all tasks assigned in Asana.
- Make at least $15,000 in revenue.
- Finish my homepage + website updates.
July 2020 Expenses
- Team Member Payments = $5,412.64
- Legal & Professional Services = $175.00
- Transaction Fees = $483.36
- Postage = $4.54
- Referral Payouts = $3.60
- GSuite = $12.84
- Rev.com = $38.05
- Active Campaign* = $70.00
- PennyPipe = $9.95
- Adobe Creative Cloud = $44.92
- ClickFunnels* = $297.00
- Quickbooks* = $72.76
- Minimalist-Work.com = $10.00
- Zapier = $50.00
- Later.com = $74.00
- Taxes = $500.00
- Utilities = $129.79
- Website Domains & Hosting = $13.16
Total Expenses = $7,487.61
July 2020 Income Report
- Interest Earned = $1.15
- CapitalOne Cash Back Rewards = $97.73
- Affiliate Income = $33.50
- Passive Income Products + Coaching = $557.00
- Done-for-You Packaged Services = $11,014.50
- Hourly/Custom Client Work = $3,800.00
Total Income = $15,503.88
Total Net Profit = $8,102.27
July 2020 Income Report: All the Stats & Analytics!
- Number of blog posts = 3
- Monthly blog page views = 9,135
- Email list subscribers = 7,699
- Facebook page followers = 1,505
- The Systems Strategy group members = 2,578
- Instagram followers = 10.4k
- Twitter followers = 6,198
- Pinterest followers = 28,068
- YouTube subscribers = 202
Final Notes on My July 2020 Income Report:
I’m probably sounding like a broken record after these last few reports, but I’m so happy with our progress!! We did have some tax-related expenses in July, so our expenses were a bit higher than I would’ve liked. But if you don’t count those, our expenses were pretty much the same as they were last month, which is great!
Our profit was even higher than last month and (because of those tax-related expenses) we hit almost the exact same profit margin of around 52%. Since my industry standard is 30%, I’m still amazed that we are pulling off such a high profit margin! 🙌
I’m also loving the breakdown of where our revenue is coming from, too. In previous reports, I’ve spoken about how we were focused on bringing in more revenue from our packaged services and less revenue from custom/hourly clients. We are doing a really great job at that! This month, our total revenue from clients was $14,814.50, with 25.7% coming from hourly/custom clients and 74.3% coming from packaged services.In the future, I would love to continue to see our revenue from packaged services increasing and also increase my passive income revenue (from programs like The Systems Society) as well.
