Let’s jump right in with this September 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!
September 2019 Income Report: An Overview
September was SO busy. Like I can’t even explain to you how busy it was. I knew that this was going to happen, but there really wasn’t anything I could do about it, even though I literally had just had surgery and was still recuperating (I still kind of am!).
Honestly, looking at the numbers for September, I’m surprised they aren’t better. Sometimes busy doesn’t equal cash, and that’s a sad, sad fact of life.
I can’t complain, because we are still profitable. And our financial reports say that we are doing even better than last year! But I struggle with feeling like I’m not doing a good enough job if we’re not having an AMAZING month.
A Few Highlights:
- Ran a really successful launch for a client — Even though I was in the middle of doing my own mini-launch, I had a huge client launch during September that was pretty much the main thing I did all month. I was in charge of the entire launch, including lots of content generation, and even though I was dead tired at the end of it, the whole experience was incredibly rewarding and extremely successful for the client!
Business Goal Setting
My Goals For September 2019: Success or Failure?
- Have a successful Pinterest mini-launch. — FAILURE. Although we did not lose money on this launch, it didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. But it may have been a blessing in disguise, because I did a big launch debrief with my team afterward and we identified some fundamental issues with the Miranda Nahmias & Co. business model and will be making some shifts in the future so that we are moving in a direction where we will see some better launches in the future.
- Help one of my clients have a successful launch of her own. — SUCCESS! This is the launch I was talking about above and it was very successful to the tune of $50k.
- Start taking Saturdays completely off. — SUCCESS! I actually am such a workaholic that I never completely took weekends off before. But now, almost 4 years into my business, I realized that I was getting pretty burnt out and needed to keep my weekends stress-free. Although I was previously only doing a half-day of work on Saturdays, now I’ve made the whole weekend a no-working zone and it’s been amazing for my sanity! I can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner.
My Goals for October 2019 — Let’s Do This!
- Hire a tech intern.
- Hire a content marketing manager.
- Start making strides toward a small shift in the MN&Co. business model.
September 2019 Expenses
- Ads & Marketing = $305.06
- Team Member Payments = $8,616.03
- Books & Courses = $387.20
- Transaction Fees = $15.00
- Referral Payouts = $814.40
- Postage = $9.08
- Teachable* = $39.00
- Active Campaign* = $70.00
- PennyPipe = $9.95
- RecurPost* = $10.70
- Adobe Creative Cloud = $21.39
- ClickFunnels* = $297.00
- Buffer = $10.00
- Later =$84.19
- Quickbooks* = $21.40
- Zapier = $50.00
- ManyChat = $10.00
- DeadlineFunnel* = $67.00
- Deposit Photos* = $29.00
- Stock Gallery = $19.00
- WiseStamp = $72.00
- Google = $12.94
- Web Hosting = $53.08
- Temi = $81.70
- Rev = $60.00
Total Expenses = $12,807.33
September 2019 Income Report
- Interest Earned = $1.31
- Affiliate Income = $247.00
- Passive Income Products + Coaching = $1,672.00
- Done-for-You Social Media Packages = $6,737.50
- Hourly Client Work = $7,849.00
Total Income = $16,504.37
Total Net Profit = $3,697.04
September 2019 Income Report: All the Stats & Analytics!
- Number of blog posts = 4
- Monthly blog page views = 13,578
- Email list subscribers = 7,231
- Facebook page followers = 1,394
- Grow Like Woah group members = 2,582
- Instagram followers = 10.1k
- Twitter followers = 6,420
- Pinterest followers = 23,666
- YouTube subscribers =168
Final Notes on My September 2019 Income Report:
If I’m being honest (and you know I always am), I am feeling kind of stagnant with my business growth lately. It feels like we’re treading water a little bit, because our numbers have been so “blah” and relatively similar month after month after month.
BUT that is actually deceiving…
It does feel like that sometimes, but when I really think about it, it makes a lot of sense why this is happening.
I haven’t talked about this in detail, but towards the end of last year, I made a decision that we were going to stop taking on any new hourly client work and, instead, focus solely on converting prospective new clients into our package offerings, like our Perfect Pinterest Package.
If you look at the numbers from last year around this time and earlier, you’ll see that the VAST majority of our revenue was coming straight from hourly clients, while only a meager portion of it was coming from our packages.
So, no, we aren’t chartering yachts or flying on private jets over here. But that doesn’t mean that nothing substantial is happening. In reality, we’ve done something even cooler (well…maybe not QUITE as cool as a private jet, but whatever).
What we’ve done over the past year is (a) maintained a consistent revenue of between $15-20k each month, which when added up is actually more than last year’s numbers so we are still growing, (b) consistently turned at least somewhat of a profit each month, and (c) almost completely switched our business model on its head in less than a year.
As you can see above, we do still make a tiny bit more from hourly clients than we do from the packages, but every month it gets closer and closer to being around the same amount. With the goal being that, eventually, our package revenue would far exceed the revenue coming from hourly clients.
This switch in our business model has allowed us to capitalize on our extremely systemized workflows so that we can offer our packaged services to potentially hundreds of clients at one time without breaking a sweat. This is such a better situation than when we were bogged down with dozens of hourly clients who all wanted custom work done on an extremely tight timeframe, requiring me to be on Zoom for hours and hours every week and corresponding nonstop with everyone via email.
I decided that that wasn’t what I wanted for myself — or for my team. What we want is to run like a well-oiled machine, producing consistent, high-quality services for our amazing clients in areas that we excel at and actually enjoy doing.
The reason “busy” doesn’t equal cash for us anymore is because if I’m swamped with the handful of hourly clients I still currently work with…the revenue we’re making from that is much less directly related to how much our total revenue for the month is.
So while, yes, it may sometimes feel like I’m grinding my gears, the truth is that we’re making huge strides towards where we want to be as a team, and it feels amazing. I know this, but I wanted you to understand, too.
