Let’s jump right in with this September 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!
September 2020 Income Report: An Overview
Before I dive into this, the numbers are a little wonky this month for a few different reasons.
At first, I was really annoyed when I realized how weird our numbers are for September, but then I reminded myself that the whole entire point of sharing these income reports (besides for my own accountability) is to be transparent. So it’s okay that the numbers don’t look like they normally do this month because…sometimes that happens! There are occasionally times when I look at these reports for the month and go “huh that doesn’t look right” — and then I have to think about what is off and it starts to make sense.
Even if you don’t share income reports like this in your own business, looking at your numbers every month is super important. The goal should be to get to such a consistent place with your income that if something seems “off,” you notice it right away. And then there’s either an obvious reason why it’s a little weird, or you need to do some digging!
There were a couple of reasons why our numbers were off this month, and just in case you’re curious — here’s why!
- One of our VIP clients had a huge launch — I still work with a select few hourly/custom clients on top of the clients who have my packaged services like Pinterest. Typically, my goal is to have the majority of our revenue coming in from packaged services, but because one of my VIP clients had a big launch, we saw more of our revenue coming in from that source.
- We paid for work on a project that we previously received income for — This is just one of the reasons why I LOVE having packaged services and highly recommend it. A VIP client decided that they wanted to do a pretty big project, so we quoted them on it (using my Proposal System in The Systems Society!) and billed them for it back at the end of August. But because it was a large project and our team didn’t finish completing the work until the end of September, this meant that we saw a disproportionately high amount of team member expenses this month compared to our revenue. I don’t normally do projects like this, so this is a cash flow issue that we don’t typically have. This is something that you’ve probably experienced before if you ever occasionally do one-off custom projects. Personally, I’m not a fan of it — I plan to keep sticking to our packaged services, which is a much more consistent source of income!
- We had a billing issue — There was a glitch in our payment processor that caused one of our larger packaged service clients to not get billed correctly. They were supposed to be billed at the end of September, but the charge didn’t go through until the beginning of October, meaning that we’ll see a double payment from them in next month’s income report. So, in this income report, we’re missing about $1,500 of revenue that should have been accounted for in September but wasn’t because of that billing issue. I typically never have payment issues like this (that’s the beauty of using Stripe to automatically charge your clients each month instead of sending manual invoices!) — it was actually just a weird technical error that shouldn’t happen again.
A Few Highlights:
- New daily schedule system — If you’ve been following me on my Instagram Stories, you may have seen me posting about this new daily schedule system that I’m using! I’m still experimenting with it, but I’m basically using a daily planner to map out my day ahead of time each morning. I plan to do a full training on this once I play around with it a bit more, but so far I’m loving it and it’s helping me get even better with time management!
- Hired a virtual assistant — This is something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. We actually had originally planned to hire an in-person executive assistant for this role, but with COVID being an issue, it could be a while before we feel comfortable having someone work in our home with us. So for now, we ended up hiring a virtual assistant to help out our OBM with some of our more basic administrative tasks.
Business Goal Setting
My Goals For September 2020: Success or Failure?
- Make at least $15,000 in revenue — FAILURE. I kind of already talked about this above, but because of a payment glitch, our revenue was significantly lower than expected. Even taking that into consideration, though, we still would’ve been a bit short of our $15,000 goal.
- Create a more concrete plan for the rest of 2020 and start thinking about 2021 — SUCCESS! I still don’t feel like I have it totally figured out, but I at least know the plan for the next 3 months of 2020. The role that I have with one of my VIP clients is shifting right now as I take on more work for her, so I’m still trying to figure out what that looks like and how it’s going to affect our revenue and goals moving forward. Our revenue split between hourly/custom clients and packaged services may look a little different over the next few months as we navigate this.
My Goals for October 2020 — Let’s Do This!
- Make at least $15,000 in revenue.
- Relax after this most recent launch.
September 2020 Expenses
- Team Member Payments = $7,821.92
- Transaction Fees = $442.73
- Client Gifts = $4.54
- Active Campaign* = $70.00
- PennyPipe = $9.95
- Adobe Creative Cloud = $44.92
- ClickFunnels* = $297.00
- Quickbooks* = $72.76
- Zapier = $50.00
- Later* = $74.00
- Deposit Photos* = $29.00
- Rev.com = $37.50
- GSuite = $22.83
- Wisestamp = $72.00
- Minimalist-Work = $10.00
- Utilities = $268.10
- Website Expenses = $39.14
Total Expenses = $9,337.39
September 2020 Income Report
- Interest Earned = $0.92
- CapitalOne Cash Back Rewards = $124.77
- Affiliate Income = $120.67
- Passive Income Products + Coaching = $910.00
- Done-for-You Packaged Services = $5,033.00
- Hourly/Custom Client Work = $6,775.00
Total Income = $12,659.16
Total Net Profit = $3,321.77
September 2020 Income Report: All the Stats & Analytics!
- Number of blog posts = 2
- Monthly blog page views = 7,063
- Email list subscribers = 7,772
- Facebook page followers = 1,505
- The Systems Strategy group members = 2.5k
- Instagram followers = 10.4k
- Twitter followers = 6,159
- Pinterest followers = 28k
- YouTube subscribers = 207
Final Notes on My September 2020 Income Report:
I’m not going to lie, I’m a little disappointed in these numbers. But honestly? That’s just a vanity thing. I want to be able to see good numbers every single month. This month wasn’t as good on paper, but at the end of the day…it doesn’t really mean anything. Our business is still just as successful this month as it was last month, even if the black-and-white numbers don’t tell that same story.
If I don’t look at these numbers, I actually feel really excited about what’s happening with my business right now. There’s a lot of interesting shifts and changes going on below the surface that I can’t go into a lot of detail about quite yet because they’re still up in the air.
These changes are a little scary, but I’ve been thinking a lot about what I truly want out of my business. Like…
- What type of schedule do I want to have?
- What types of projects do I want to work on?
- What types of services do I love offering the most?
- Which revenue streams are the most profitable and sustainable?
- How do I want to structure my team long-term?
I’m thinking about all of these things and am really trying to be strategic about making decisions so that my business goes in the direction that I want it to go in. For a while after COVID first happened, I really felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants. I was letting the circumstances of the world dictate the choices I made out of fear and anxiety. And it’s okay to do that in the short-term — it’s a global pandemic, of course I was in “emergency” reactive mode! We all were.
But now I feel like it’s time for me to be less short-sighted. Where is my business going to be in 5, 10, 15 years? I’m not 100% sure what I want it to look like, but what I do know is that I get to choose what happens. So I’m getting back in the driver’s seat.
Right now, I’m really trying to step into the CEO visionary role and have been doing a lot of thinking about what I truly want out of my business (and life), and then making decisions based on that.
It’s going to take a while for this to fully form, but I see a lot of shifts and changes happening over the next few months and into 2021 as I figure out what the next phase of my business looks like for me.
