Let’s jump right in with this October 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!
October 2019 Income Report: An Overview
Wow, October was a whirlwind! September was absolutely nuts and October wasn’t much different. We’ve had a huge influx of new clients over the past two months, and it’s been a little insane trying to keep up with everything. But I’m also super excited that our package revenue is growing so substantially!
October was a big month for me in terms of thinking about the future of my business. Towards the end of the year, I always get a little reflective, and this year was no different. I’ve made such huge strides towards flipping my business model on its head this year — now I have to figure out where I’m going from here.
Because the packages we have are pretty hands-off for me (thanks to my amazing team!), the fewer hourly clients we retain and the more package clients we get (this was the first month we made more revenue from package clients than from hourly clients!), the less work that is on my plate. Not to say that I’m not busy (trust me, I’m still really busy!). But looking towards the future, I see that I’m going to be able to have more time to spend on growing my own business, which is exactly what I want. So what am I going to focus on in that area?
I realized this month that I’ve been neglecting my audience and my students. Although I try to put out quality newsletters, blog posts, and FB Live videos as much as I can, I really want to work on creating some AMAZING content, a really high-quality training hub, and a supportive community where my paying students can come and solve all of their problems.
In 2020, I really want to dedicate myself to building this new student-focused atmosphere of my brand. It feels like the perfect decision and direction for me, and I’ve already started planning out what this is going to look like. I’m so excited to share more with you as soon as I can!
A Few Highlights:
- Brent’s role now includes tech — This is one of the most exciting things from this past month! With the recent influx of new clients, there are a few positions I’m realizing we need to fill on the team, and a tech expert is definitely one of them! We already have someone on the team to deal with the really difficult tech stuff, but I have always done a lot of the more basic tech-related tasks myself, because they’re my favorite! But it’s just got to the point where I can’t do it all myself anymore, so I’ve started training Brent on how to do some of the stuff I do! It’s been great to have his help, so I’m really happy we decided to do this.
- Started running ads to my 5-Day Client Challenge — I’ve been wanting to start increasing my leads more towards the beginning of my funnel. Over the past year, I’ve been focused on building my leads for my Systemize + Scale program, which is a high-level course on how to scale your business by building a team. But I also want to bring in some leads who are more in the “beginner” phase of their business, so I decided to start running ads to my super-popular 5-Day Client Challenge! Surprisingly, the ads are actually going really well (I’ve always struggled with Facebook ads).
- Increased our prices for Facebook and Instagram — In October, we ran what we like to call a “Grandfather Sale” for our Facebook and Instagram packages, where we increase the price and let everyone know that now is their last chance to purchase it at the current low price. It went really well and we got a bunch of new clients, which I’m super excited about! I’m also really glad that we’re raising our prices because I think our packages are awesome and they need to be at a higher price point now that we’ve really perfected the systemized management of these platforms.
Business Goal Setting
My Goals For October 2019: Success or Failure?
- Hire a tech intern. — SUCCESS! I’m going to count this as a success. Even though I didn’t really “hire” someone (I’m using Brent instead!), we still have the position filled.
- Hire a content marketing manager. — SUCCESS! I’ll talk more about this next month, as it ran into November, but we did hire a new content marketing manager, which I’m super excited about.
- Start making strides toward a small shift in the MN&Co. business model. — SUCCESS! I will also talk more about this next month, but I’ve been doing a LOT of thinking about how I want my business to grow in 2020 and have started working on some exciting new projects!
My Goals for November 2019 — Let’s Do This!
- Onboard the new content marketing manager.
- Offload a lot of tech tasks onto Brent’s plate.
- Get a significant amount of work done on my new projects.
October 2019 Expenses
- Ads & Marketing = $1,155.87
- Team Member Payments = $8,206.06
- Books & Courses = $137.00
- Transaction Fees = $669.89
- Web Hosting =$130.70
- Utilities =$112.91
- Postage =$32.38
- Gifts =$70.28
- Referral Payouts = $118.60
- Active Campaign* = $70.00
- PennyPipe = $9.95
- Adobe Creative Cloud = $22.46
- ClickFunnels* = $297.00
- Quickbooks* = $21.40
- Zapier = $50.00
- ManyChat = $10.00
- DeadlineFunnel* = $67.00
- Deposit Photos* = $29.00
- Stock Gallery = $19.00
- Loomly =$432.00
- Canva = $119.40
- Temi =$12.40
- REV =$105.00
- Google =$32.83
- MemberPress =$249.00
- Later =$103.79
Total Expenses = $15,284.99
October 2019 Income Report
- Interest Earned = $1.29
- Affiliate Income = $189.20
- Passive Income Products + Coaching = $1,057.00
- Done-for-You Social Media Packages = $13,728.50
- Hourly Client Work = $9,655.00
Total Income = $22,996.71
Total Net Profit = $12,608.20
October 2019 Income Report: All the Stats & Analytics!
- Number of blog posts = 3
- Monthly blog page views = 8,137
- Email list subscribers = 7,356
- Facebook page followers = 1,437
- Grow Like Woah group members = 2,601
- Instagram followers = 10.1K
- Twitter followers = 6,423
- Pinterest followers = 24.2K
- YouTube subscribers =170
Final Notes on My October 2019 Income Report:
I had a feeling that October was going to be good (and I really needed a win after the past few months, which haven’t been so great in terms of revenue or profit)…and it really, really was! It was actually my BIGGEST month yet! 🎉
Honestly, I’m very, very slightly disappointed that we didn’t do just a TINY bit more in revenue, because I would’ve loved to have hit $25k, which would be a brand-new milestone for me. But we still did absolutely amazing, and I can definitely taste that $25k in the air and hopefully we’ll hit it soon!
I’m also extremely pleased with the amount of profit! We needed a little bit of a cash injection to plump up our savings account. And I’d love to be able to save up to do another round of coaching or be able to increase the salary that we pay ourselves (we don’t keep all of the profit — we take a fixed amount each week and anything extra goes into business savings).
Another thing I loved to see was that our package revenue was substantially higher than our hourly client revenue this month, which is the first time that that’s ever happened! I’m really, really excited to see that this business model switch is working and we’re getting closer to our goals in this area.
You can also see that I increased my email subscribers by a few hundred people, which is a win for me because I’ve been stalled at the 7,000 number for a while. I’d love to be able to hit 10,000 subscribers by the end of 2020.
Overall, October was busy but AWESOME and it has given me a new pep in my step that’s going to help propel me through the rest of this year!