281 - April Profit Report
On today’s episode of the podcast, I’m breaking down my April profit report and sharing something kind of scary.
Before we dive in, I want to announce that I am bringing back my Unf*ck Your Biz course and launching it during my masterclass next week where I’ll be teaching you the most common tax and legal mistakes business owners make at every stage of business. Sign up at www.bradendrake.com/masterclass
I do these profit reports each month because not only do they help keep me accountable on my own bookkeeping so I can record thes episodes, I find that sharing my numbers shows all of you how I calculate my numbers and when we talk about it together the transparency can help us break down the stigma and baggage around talking about our numbers.
To take it a step further, I’m doing something super scary and sharing my bookkeeping with you. Yes, my actual books and all my numbers, available in my actual spreadsheet that I update weekly. And you can get access to it here: www.bradendrake.com/bradensbooks
I’m nosey and I love to hear about people’s numbers so if you want to follow along with mine while you listen, go grab the spreadsheet.
As always let’s recap my goals for the year before we dive in.
- Consistent $20,000 months by Q3. My mantra is $20k months in 2023 by Q3 and the good news is, we're ahead of schedule!
- January: $13,000
- February: $22,000
- March: $27,000
- April: $23,000
Excited to see how May, June, and July goes as they're typically the slowest months of the year, but I’m doing a launch in May so I do expect that to be higher this year.
- Get MRR to $20,000 by end of the year. I was on track because I did $14k last month but may be making some sacrifices on this one for the long-term best interests of the business, so we shall see where it goes (more on that later this episode).
- Get expenses under 35%. I’ve spent a lot getting the law firm up and running and I’ll be hiring a few more people to join the team. With all this spending, YTD, I'm at 38%, so not too shabby.
Next up, let’s take a look at how April played out in comparison to my projections for it that I shared in last month's profit report (Projected --> Actual)
Profit Rx: $9,000 → $6,500. I dug into this because it’s a bit of a drastic change (this is why we analyze our numbers each month, so we can understand things like this). The reason is that we did a launch at one point that closed at the end of the month so monthly transactions, especially if the end of the month falls on a weekend, don’t typically hit until the start of the next month, so now I can better project by MRR.
Low Ticket offers: $2,000 → $1,100 We averaged a Contract Club sale a day for $930. Get yours at notavglaw.com
Book sales: $1,000 → $80. Most of this will come in May because of what I mentioned earlier with sales hitting the card. I did a big pre-launch at the end of April with my book club where I sold like 35 copies.
Tax Stuff: $5,000 - $8,000 This helped make up for the other deficits.
Legal Stuff: $4,000 → $5,000
Consults: $2,500 → $500
Total: $23,500 → $23,300 I always have some trickle streams like affiliate income and annual membership renewals for Profit Rx which I typically count separately since it’s not MRR. If I included it would bring Profit Rx to $9,000.
If you’re looking at my books, you’ll see on my P&L Snapshot page you’ll see a section of 2022 revenue and then my goals for the month. Instead of taking 2022 and divinding by 12 months, I‘m going month by month to account for slow seasons.
The goal on my projection calculator was $19,000. I need to do 1.8 times what we did last year at this time to hit my 2023 stretch goal of $300,000 this year. This month I expected $19,000 and did 4,000 over that, for $2,000 over YTD.
Where this could get spicy is in Q4, but hopefully things continue on the same path. This isn’t a perfect system, especially when I change launch month schedules year to year.
This is a profit report so let’s talk about expenses as well. I had about $11,200 in expenses for what I call an owner profit of $12,000. Owner profit is the profit in the business before owner salary in an S Corp. I paid myself a salary of $4,300 which I’m going to need to increase pretty soon by about $2k a month to keep my reasonable salary for S Corp purposes.
I spent $3,600 on my team which is 16%, a little above my goal of 15% but I’m probably going to need to up that to 20% as I hire more people.
$1,200 in contractor expenses like my book editor. These are one-off projects, not people who come to my team meeting.
$3,400 all my tools and software
$45 for insurance but I’ll be lumping my malpractice insurance in here soon which will cost me an arm and a leg
$2,600 Marketing. A lot of this went to being Platinum sponsor for Conference Confident at Wedding MBA in November and I’m going to Drag Con to promote Drag Tax and I spent about $1,000 on merch to bring.
$30 Meals
$197 Online programs
$1,300 Client fees. This is a new category because I am baking the trademark filing fee into the price of working with me. SAme if you hire us to file your LLC, etc. We pay the fees.
$365 Affiliate payouts
$1,300 other
Now let’s look at my projections for May.
Profit Rx: $7,000
Low Ticket: $1,200
Book sales: $1,000
Tax Stuff: $4,000
Legal Stuff: $4,000
Consults: $0
Total - $33,200
If you haven’t already, sign up for the Masterclass at www.bradendrake.com/masterclass where I’ll be launching Unf*ck Your Biz. Spoiler alert - this is the lowest price we’ve ever launched it at and it will be going up this winter.
And if you want to look at my books, get access to my doc at www.bradendrake.com/bradensbooks
