Cash Flow
- Revenue Goal: …didn’t really set one? lol
- Total Revenue: $2,548.75 (18% decrease from last month)
- Total Expenses: $1,322.59 (174% increase from last month LOL)
- Net Profit: $1,226.16 (60% decrease)
- Owner Compensation*: $1,239.10 (48.6% of overall income)
- Profit Distribution***: $295.35
*You may notice that my owner’s compensation is a bit higher than my net profit for the month. I have accumulated money in my operating expenses account which I used to pay off a contractor balance sooner than planned.
**Profit distribution comes out of my profit account, which is separate from my owner compensation account. Profit is my reward for owning the business, while owner compensation is my wage for working in the business. For more information on this, I recommend reading reading the book Profit First.
Time Breakdown
Work Time
- Hours Worked: 42.87 76.31 (44% decrease from April, LOL)
- Weekly Average Work Hours: 10.7
- Billable Hours: 9.75 hours (oops)
- Course Creation: 1.5 hours
- Marketing/Content Writing: 7.5 hours
- Group Program Creation: 0.75
- Non-Billable: 33.12 hours
- Billable Percentage: 29% (miraculously, this is actually a few percentage points HIGHER than lost month lol)
Wowza kachowza, May was…a doozy. After my second COVID vaccination at the beginning of the month, my immune system exploded and I ended up getting shingles, which was extremely uncomfortable and tiring. After that subsided, I was promptly hit by side effects of stopping one of the medications I had been on for shingles, so I continued to feel mostly terrible for another week. By this point, some personal life stress was also catching up with me so my mental health took a bit of a nosedive, from which I am juuuuust now emerging. (Did I mention I launched a course during all this? LOL would not necessarily recommend, but it was something exciting to look forward to that I needed when everything was exploding.)
Hourly Rates
Overall Hourly Rates
- Billable Hourly Rate Before Expenses: $261.41/hour (this is misleading because most of my income this month came from program sales rather than client invoices)
- Overall Hourly Rate Before Expenses: $59.45/hour
- Overall Hourly Rate After Expenses: $28.60/hour
- Target Overall Hourly Rate: $60/hour
I didn’t list my hourly rates by project type because my billing/work has gotten a bit misaligned. Some projects were paid for in April but haven’t been worked on yet, and then I started some work in May but won’t bill for that until June.
This is also a good time to point out how having digital products and programs affects cash flow and time tracking. This month I sold 10 seats to my pricing course, which includes a PDF workbook that I paid to have designed. I’ve now sold enough to pay off the design fee, but I certainly haven’t earned out all the time I spent creating the course materials, building the sales funnel, or the time I’ll spend facilitating the course. It will eventually, but today is not that day. Digital products and programs are great to have! It’s just important to be aware of all the time and resources that go into creating and launching them.
Monthly Achievements
- I successfully ran my Time Tracking Challenge even while being sidelined with shingles that week. (Thank God for prescheduled emails.)
- I launched Hope You Get Rich by the absolute seat of my pants, which – to be clear – I never want to do again, but I’m pleasantly surprised by how well it went considering I was literally writing launch emails five minutes before I sent them.
- I’m fully vaccinated against COVID-19! Took a lot out of me but it was totally worth it.
- I started a paid beta test of my Course Catalyst Lab program which I’m really excited about.
- I turned 34 and took my first solo vacation in…2.5 years?! I went to a cottage in the middle of nowhere with my two business besties. We ate food and swam and played board games about national parks. It was GREAT.
Reviewing the priorities I set for May:
- Launch my revamped pricing course and hit at least $2500 in sales. I didn’t hit my sales goal and will write up a complete postmortem later, but I’m honestly very grateful for how well it did go in spite of an extremely chaotic month leading into it.
- Start building up my authority and mailing list for my course creation program. This…was not a very well-defined goal LOL. I did book another opportunity to speak about courses for the month of June.
How I succeeded/How I could have done better:
Not gotten shingles? Lol, honestly…I did a fucking great job given how very completely my life imploded, so I’m giving myself a cookie.
Priorities for June:
- Plow through a deferred project phase. (The client also had a rough May and I chose to give both of us the space and grace we needed.)
- Hit $4,000 in income again. My strategy for this will likely focus on booking as many standalone business and course creation consultations as I can, rather than signing any more 1:1 client projects.
- Maybe create another lead magnet for Course Catalyst?
- Start on the podcast guesting course I purchased……in March? Yikes heh.
