Let’s jump right in with this May 2019 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!
May 2019 Income Report: An Overview
Traditionally, my busy season is September – February, but at this point it’s basically summer and there’s no sign of things slowing down anytime soon. I find that the bigger my business gets, the less predictable things are, because I thought I knew exactly what my busy and slow seasons were, but this year has flipped things on its head for me.
I also think that, as my business starts to serve more and more higher-end clients, the seasonal aspect loses its power because my clients are so busy that they aren’t experiencing much of a busy/slow season either…so, by default, neither am I!
Especially in the online business world, we tend to have less of a seasonal aspect than other businesses. I do expect June to see a big dip, though, as — seasonal or not — June has consistently always been our worst month every year.
As the school year comes to an end and my clients who are moms have less time to work on their businesses, they have less work to give me (or more accurately — less time to delegate). Or they choose to take a break from their businesses and spend more time with their families.
Honestly, I’m excited for there to be a bit of a break, as things have been go-go-go for quite some time now!
A Few Highlights:
- We hired a new general copywriter — I always like to have 3 copywriters on my team, because we deal with a LOT of copy, so I decided to hire another copywriter to join us, since we were down to just two. She’s been helping us a lot lately, so I’m really glad I did!
- We set up a 401(k) — I was reading this article from the Penny Hoarder about financial things that you’re supposed to do in your 20s, and one of them was that you should start contributing to your 401(k). Well…pretty much the only thing I knew about 401(k)s is that I don’t have one because I’m self-employed. But I did my research and figured out that you can set up your own 401(k) if you’re self-employed, so I did! It took me about 15 minutes and voila! Now we have a retirement fund going.
Business Goal Setting
My Goals For May 2019: Success or Failure?
- Have “successful” Facebook ad campaign results for my upcoming launch. — SUCCESS! This one is a bit hard to say definitively one way or another, as I haven’t had my launch yet. But the numbers are looking good in my opinion! I wasn’t able to hit my goal cost per lead exactly, but it was very close and I’m considering that a success.
- Hit $8k+ of hourly client income — SUCCESS! Phew! We just made it by the seat of our pants.
- Get 1 new sales funnel client — FAILURE. I sent out a few proposals but haven’t heard back yet. Honestly, I’m okay with this, as we are very busy.
My Goals for June 2019 — Let’s Do This!
- Launch Systemize + Scale for the second time and have an equal or better result than the previous launch.
May 2019 Expenses
- Ads & Marketing = $4,184.76
- Team Member Payments = $6,467.44
- Books & Courses = $284.00
- Transaction Fees = $613.90
- Referral Payouts = $30.90
- Teachable* = $39.00
- Active Campaign* = $70.00
- PennyPipe = $9.95
- RecurPost* = $10.70
- Adobe Creative Cloud = $22.46
- ClickFunnels* = $297.00
- Buffer = $10.00
- Quickbooks* = $21.40
- Zapier = $50.00
- ManyChat = $10.00
- Planoly* = $99.00
- DeadlineFunnel* = $67.00
- Deposit Photos* = $29.00
- Stock Gallery = $19.00
- Gifts = $18.95
- Web Hosting = $26.32
- Temi = $11.70
- SerpFox = $30.33
- Kapwing Pro = $20.00
- Later = $54.00
Total Expenses = $12,374.76
May 2019 Income Report
- Interest Earned = $1.77
- Affiliate Income = $215.00
- Passive Income Products + Coaching = $952.00
- Done-for-You Social Media Packages = $8,168.00
- Hourly Client Work = $8,235.00
Total Income = $17,994.82
Total Net Profit = $5,620.06
May 2019 Income Report: All the Stats & Analytics!
- Number of blog posts = 6
- Monthly blog page views = 26,597
- Email list subscribers = 7,223
- Facebook page followers = 1,311
- Grow Like Woah group members = 2,454
- Instagram followers = 9,905
- Twitter followers = 6,493
- Pinterest followers = 19,734
- YouTube subscribers =151
Final Notes on My May 2019 Income Report:
Somehow we are keeping up the momentum and managed to do even better than last month! I’m super happy with the revenue and profit that we’re bringing in, so my goals have started to transform and become more aspirational than actual, like, “we need to hit this to survive” type of goals. Which is a pretty nice place to be!
If the business never got any bigger than this, I’d be able to be happy with this! Of course I have dreams for the future that do involve it growing, but we’re making a very consistent nice income with this, and have an amazing team.
We’re doing really well and have been consistently hitting our minimum income goal every single month for about a year now. I finally feel some of the revenue-related pressure starting to abate a bit. It’s become a bit of a foregone conclusion that we’re going to make at least $X every month. And if we can live on that….that gives me a lot of freedom to not feel constant, never-ending pressure to bring in more more more.
Lately I’ve been able to do things like hire an expensive coach and spend money testing on Facebook ads that I never would’ve been able to do previously. (If I hadn’t been launching and spending so much on ads this month, our profit would’ve been almost $10k!!! More than half of our revenue! Craziness!)
These monthly income reports give me a good opportunity to look back and reflect simply on how good of a position I’m in, and how well everything is doing.
Next month, I’m just setting a few goals for myself because most of all I just want to focus on seeing how well I can do with my launch. Unfortunately I’m a lot busier than I had expected to be lately, so I haven’t been able to focus on it as much as I wanted to. But I love this product and truly believe in it, so I’m excited to be able to share the material with more people.
