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Welcome to my December Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way!
IMPORTANT THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN DECEMBER.
- I began tracking my time and limiting my work hours.
- I was accepted to Bryan Harris of Growth Tools’ Partnership Accelerator Program.
- I got my laptop repaired.
- I scheduled my last work day as December 16.
- We met with a builder to see if he’s a good fit to build on the property we bought back in June.
- I updating my branding.
Notes I found to myself in my planner:
REVIEW OF MY GOALS
When in quit my day job in January of 2018, I set a goal to generate $10,000 in revenue so that I could pay myself $5,000 a month and set aside the other $5000 for taxes and expenses:
- $5000 – Income to cover my old paycheck.
- $2500 – Expenses
- $2500 – Taxes
WHAT I FOCUSED ON IN DECEMBER
I had a couple of big goals in December. I really wanted to take time off during the holidays, so I blocked my calendar from December 16 through the first week of January.
I told myself I would let my clients know that I was unavailable and to plan accordingly.
Part of the reason I wanted to take time off is to simply have some white space between all of holiday get-togethers and travel – but another reason is so that I would have time to do one of my favorite things to do – which is to work on my own business, unencumbered by meetings and appointments.
My other big focus was to stay true to my health goals. Continue going to hot yoga three times a week. To avoid overindulging in sweets and comfort food and alcohol that is fun in the moment, but zaps me of my energy and makes me feel terrible, physically and mentally.
With those goals in mind, here’s what I made in December of 2018:
TOTAL REVENUE: $7627.52
Affiliate Income: $1334.80
Courses: $2661.00
Done For You & Consulting: $3631.72
TOTAL EXPENSES: $3246.84
Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here.
NET PROFIT: $4380.68
BIGGEST LESSONS LEARNED
I learned a lot of lessons in December. While I was very successful at not overindulging and still enjoying myself around the holidays, I was not very successful at holding my boundaries when it came to client work.
December has always been a slower month revenue-wise, and this year was no exception.
December and July are always slow for me.
I didn’t promote anything for sale this December because I didn’t want to be available to support it! And it’s just not my style to jump in to all the holiday sales.
It’s my goal to take the entire month of December off in the future…
I mean, it seems like that last week before Christmas is when everyone is trying to finish everything they never got to throughout the year so that they can actually take time off from work and come back in January with a clean slate.
It’s like, the height of the holiday frenzy.
So next year, I need to do a much better job of letting my clients know my schedule. I didn’t really tell them this year… I just kinda blocked it on my calendar and put an out-of-office up. And then I still responded to the emergencies. I can’t help myself sometimes…
I also still do some consulting for my old day job and they have a big year-end project every year that despite my best efforts always goes to the 11th hour… So if I’m still consulting for them at the end of 2019, there’s no use in fighting that. It happens the exact same way every year.
I’m really glad that I not only scheduled the week between Christmas and New Years but also the first week of January off so that I could work on my own stuff.
I didn’t hold my boundaries the week of the 16th, but I did for the 2 other weeks I had planned vacation! And it’s not like it was hard because the rest of the country was checked out of work anyway…
But you guys, I LOVE working on my own stuff. I get so much joy out of getting to be creative without having a deadline.
So I gave my brand a facelift in December, and that’s just saved me so much time in these first few weeks of January already.
I had worked with a branding firm back in September of 2017 to help me transition my branding away from WP+BFF and to Shannon Mattern. And I absolutely loved the experience and the end result and I’d recommend my branding company, Braid Creative, all day every day. We did much, much more together than just create a logo, color scheme and fonts to solidify my brand.
But what I discovered after awhile was that my branding was very difficult to implement consistently across platforms. Specifically it was a challenge to make it look good vertically for Pinterest and horizontally for my website, and hard to outsources the nuances of making it look good anyone who is not a graphic designer, and the colors were too muted to really stand out online.
I had been gathering inspiration and had an idea of the changes I wanted to make, and then one morning, I was just sitting on my couch drinking my morning coffee with no plans, nowhere to be and no one needing anything from me, and the inspiration struck, and as they say, the floodgates opened, and I rebranded.
Then I started working on my systems. I’ve overcomplicated my marketing funnels and I don’t need all the bells and whistles I have. They don’t work right half the time anyway.
And as I mentioned in my last income report, I’ve decided to move away from Infusionsoft to ConvertKit. Not just to save a few hundred dollars a month, but also because I am committed to simplifying my business in 2019.
I waffled on whether I had time to do it myself or if I wanted to oursource it, and at the end of the day I decided to just go for it. I like to make decisions in real time, as I’m solving the problem and setting things up. And then I know what’s available to my clients because I’ve explored all the possibilities.
So one day I was inspired to just do it – and I just got lost in time rebuilding all of my email sequences and working on the migration. Which is still in process in the 3rd week of January. I hit a snag with the built-in Infusionsoft importer and I’m working with ConvertKit engineers on it, but getting help has been a slow process. I’m hopeful I’ll get a good result because I want to be able to recommend ConvertKit to you guys – but customer service is so, so important so I hope they step it up. Maybe I’m too nice and patient… Anyway.
Another thing I did was make some decisions on whether I’d continue offering some services I’d offered in the past.
And I’d been watching Marie Kondo’s show on Netflix and it actually helped me make some decisions.
Tracking my time helped me make the decisions.
And obviously looking at these income reports also helped me to make some decisions.
Does offering this service bring me joy?
How much time am I spending on this service?
How much do I make on this service?
And some services didn’t even come close to making the cut.
The WordPress Protection Package didn’t make it. I lose a lot of money on it. Of course I’ll still serve my existing clients and my Done For You Clients, but I won’t be accepting new clients for that service and I removed it from my site.
Accepting small projects of under 8 hours didn’t make the cut. Why? Because when tracking my time I discovered that a 2 hour time block actually took 4 hours when I included communication and prep. And a 4 hour time block actually took 6.
And while I could build that into the price, those projects are difficult to schedule and take my time away from marketing more lucrative offers and working on partnerships.
I know there’s a need out there to help people with smaller projects, so I need to analyze whether it’s worth it for me to build a team to take those on, or just say no. I’m still undecided. And honestly I feel guilt turning away work when I know there are so many web designers out there who are struggling to market themselves and get the work.
It’s something I need to work on.
As I look back on December and 2018 as a whole, I’m proud of what I accomplished. It’s important to me personally to not have debt other than a mortgage, and I maintained that boundary in my business.
It was important to me to pay myself twice a month, and although I was late a few times on my paycheck I still paid myself everything I planned to pay myself.
And I think I paid enough in quarterly taxes, but I really have no idea since it’s my first year without a W2. I’m eager to do my taxes so that I can settle up with the IRS if I need to and get a clear baseline for 2019 (and see what I’m able to do to get a construction loan to build a house as a self-employed person).
And I’ve taken steps to grow a legit team – but I still have work to do. I keep accepting work and then doing it myself instead of taking the time to delegate and train a team. So I definitely need to work on that.
In 2018 I for sure overworked myself, spent my time on non-income producing activities and barely grew my email list or my social media followers.
And I still hit my revenue goals.
So I’m really excited to see what happens in 2019 when I focus my time on my physical and mental health, list growth, partnerships, income producing activities, simplifying my business, building a team and practicing constraint.
Watch out 2019, ready or not, here I come!
