282 - Taking Control of Your Business with My Student, Emily Monus
On today's episode I chat with Emily Monus about how the relationship with her business finances has changed since working through the Unf*ck Your Biz material.
Have you signed up for our free upcoming masterclass "The Most Common Legal and Tax Mistakes at Each Stage of Business and How You Can Avoid Them." I'm going to show you how you can make the ultimate shift from struggling to manage your business gremlins like the finances and legalities to creating ease, automation, and peace of mind. And then I'm going to open the doors to Unf*ck Your Biz and answer questions. Catch it at 9:00am PST or 12:00pm PST. Register at www.bradendrake.com/masterclass to watch it live so you can ask me questions during the Q&A or catch the replay.
Emily is a wedding and event planner primarily serving LGBTQIA+ and vegan wedding clients in the New York City area. She started her business officially in 2016 and credits a big part of where she is today to the last few years and becoming a recovering people pleaser which has led to a mini explosion of growth. She also got in control of her finances (including stopping throwing her books together in a day before taxes).
Currently Emily is projecting to make $75k in her business this year, up from $40k the year before. A surreal number for Emily. About $20k comes from non-profit clients and the rest from wedding planning clients. Her packages range from $4,500 for management only to $9,800 for full service. She also just recently hired her first employee and her next goal is $100k.
Emily is on top of it because when it comes to hiring, I always like to think about when are you going to hit capacity? How many clients can you handle in a year (I call this your ceiling) and what revenue marker do you need to start to hire? You want to solve capacity issues before you get capacity problems. Because you're paying your employees hourly, you won't be paying them unless you have work for them which allows the work to scale. Once this person hits 70-80% capacity, you then hire your next person. I feel like you need enough wiggle room where if you had a 15-20% increase in your leads next month you wouldn't need to turn them away due to capacity.
Emily is a current Profit Rx student, my current membership. I'll be taking the core curriculum from Profit Rx, putting it back into my signature program Unf*ck Your Biz, and make Profit Rx our monthly on-going support after the program.
Emily joined in December 2022 and told herself she needed to get her business under control and this side of the business and finances felt like the last piece of her life she needed to get under control. She had a difficult relationship with money throughout her life and wanted to have a system and get non-judgemental support.
She started by reading the textbook and started the parts and attended the monthly Q&As to build community and get the work done during weekly co-working calls. I set up Emily's books and we got her on her Profit Rx plan and Emily took it from there. She's been keeping up with bookkeeping and noticed in February and March that with not as much going on she switched to an every other week bookkeeping schedule and plans to move back to more frequently as busy season approaches.
Getting control of her finances has made Emily less afraid to invest in things she might not otherwise spend money on because she has a better understanding of how much money she has and can better future forecast. She charges her clients with monthly payments which helps her track future monthly revenue. In her bookkeeping, we also set up tracking by project type so Emily is able to see how much she's making off management, partial planning and full planning.
In the upcoming version of Profit Rx (our post-program support), our core component will be to submit your monthly P&L along with observations, monthly goals and projections to help keep everyone accountable and tracking profit margins.
Get in Touch with Our Guest
Emily Monus of Emily Monus Events
Follow Emily on Instagram @emeventsjc
Check out Emily's website at emilymonusevents.com
