330 February Profit Report

On today's episode of the podcast I'm breaking down my February profit report and what's been going on behind the scenes of my business and personal life.

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If you've listened to the podcast, you know I'm all about transparency and while I don't share every detail about my personal life, it felt like I should share what's been going on the last couples months because you'll also see my numbers are down this month and this will inform a lot of that. I took a few weeks out of office when my mom's health began to decline due to the cancer she was diagnosed with in 2020 and it was clear we did not have much time left with her and then a full week completely off from everything including email when she passed. I'm back home and back to work but it's still hard some days knowing I won't have my mom around for more than half my life.

During my time away I've also had a minor business crisis because we had to skip two full launches and I had been planning for March to be our busiest month of the year with people wanting to come and work with us around tax season and everything that comes with that.

Diving into the profit report, let's revisit the 2024 goals I share at the top of every episode.

1. I set good, better, best goals of $300k, $400k and $500k in revenue. I think the $300k is still doable, the $400k that I really wanted to hit, I think might be a stretch.

2. Hit 60% in profit

3. Book 4 state speaking gigs for next year

4. Consistently hit $25k months. This is going to be a struggle in March when I do my projections

5. Hit $15k in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by the end of the year

Let's recap what happened in February:

1. Not a whole lot

2. We had planned a couple of launches and they didn't really end up happening

3. We promoted our tax challenge and at the end of that I was planning to promote our services but I ended up doing the challenge while I was out of town, we didn't have many people sign up and I didn't get around to doing too much in terms of promotional emails.

Projections vs. Actual:

1. Unf*ck Your Biz - $14,000 → $15,000

2. Contract Club - $1,000 → $1,080 (I continue to be surprised how predictably this falls between $900 and $1200 without promotion)

3. Legally Launched - $1,000 → $500

4. Monthly services - $8,700 → ~$4,000

5. Tax - $15,000 → $7,000 This and monthly services are the two biggest places where we missed the mark due to missed launches

6. Trademarks - $2,500 → $2,500

7. Other - $1,000 → $1,850

Total revenue - 4$7,700 (Projected to be our highest revenue month ever but I expected us to at least hit $30,000) → $32,000 I'm pretty happy with this, all things considered.

Profit

Cost of Goods: $48 (Our only COGs are the physical copies of my book)

Expenses: $22,600 (very high for me)

Owner profit: $9,300

My salary: $5,500

Profit: $3,900

Expenses

Employee wages + team contractors (contractors I work with on a regular basis that don't need to legally be employees): ~$13,000 This is double our average. This is because I'm paying our tax preparer for a lot of tax returns and our bookkeeping team put in a lot of hours in February into March because we have a lot of clients who need 2-3 years of bookkeeping backlog

Owner wages/owner tax (what I pay myself, technically expenses for the S Corp): $5,000

Monthly tools: $400

Affiliate payout: $650

Marketing: $300

Travel: $150

Other: $2,600 (included one large refund, a large office expense, a couple Ubers, couple online filing fees and a few meals).

This came to 70% Expenses (need to work on these numbers)

Profit margin: 30%

These expenses are the main reason we're going to be increasing the cost of Unf*ck Your Biz, our signature service, to $5,000 moving forward because after the first time running it I'm realizing the amount of hours my team is putting in for every client is a lot higher than anticipated. I don't think that's a bad thing for our clients, it means they're getting really high value services, I just need to budget for that accordingly. I'm also going to be adding in some more of our higher margin services, for example instead of a trademark filing being a la carte, it'll be included in the services (a $1,250 value). I do the trademarks, not a team member, so this will be a profitable thing for us to do. Adding something with a high margin to a something with a low margin so that it shakes out is something for anyone with packages to consider (and you'll only know this if you're tracking your numbers on a monthly basis).

Since I recorded this on March 26th, I have a good idea of what my March profit report is going to look like so you're not getting the real story with my March projections because now the projections are filtered through the lens of having gone through the month and looking at the numbers as I can see our monthly revenue is down when I log in.

March Projections:

1. Unf*ck Your Biz - $4,000 (lower than February because our December monthly payment plan clients are done with payment)

2. Contract Club - $1,000

3. Legally Launched - $500

4. Monthly services - $5,000

5. Tax - $4,000

6. Trademarks - $1,250

7. Other - $1,000

Total revenue - $17,750

I stretched some of these beyond where they might be to push myself this last week of the month and now really I should do my income bookkeeping now to see where we're at so I know what to adjust this last week. Hopefully I won't need to do this as I've done four client intake calls so far this week and three seem pretty promising so that would go a long way. Will I get to the $25k goal of monthly revenue? Doubtful but I'm going to give myself grace on this one

For context, if we'd done all our promotions this month I'd been anticipating March to be around a $40,000 month so we definitely won't be close to that.

To end the episode, I want to share a bit of a mindset shift we're having over here at Not Your Average Law Firm. For context, I've always been very envious of people who have super streamlined business models and clear messaging of the one thing they sell, take it or leave it. I have a hard time with it because I do feel it's my responsibility to meet people where they're at with their needs because I don't want to turn people away or not help them. But as a business owner sometimes we need to say we're not the best fit so I'm going to start leaning more into that, specifically, encouraging people to more to sign up for Unf*ck Your Biz, our signature service and turning away most other one-on-one service requests because we have trouble providing services in a vacuum. A lot of times people come to us for one-on-one help with contracts, but their business is fucked in many other ways that need help in addition to the contracts. More specifically what we'll be able to do is put all of our effort and energy into helping a new signature client starting every week on a rolling basis. My dream for this is to be booking out eight weeks in advance and then at the end of the service folks join our monthly on-going services because we're already well-equipped to handle their business.

If this isn't a good fit, we have our three do-it-yourself online programs on our website for people who are just starting out or don't need the full investment.

If you've been curious about working with us, take our quiz at notavglaw.com/quiz and sign up for our open house at notavglaw.com/open-house to get a deeper look at our services.