🙊 Here's how much money we made in July

In July our business made $5,955.56 and spent $723.53 on expenses.

Woah! No one ever shares real numbers … this week I thought it’d be a fun exercise to break down our July business finances and talk about what we learned in our monthly money date (to use a term we learned from the wonderful Meg of @borntoroambookkeeping)

To set the stage before jumping into numbers. Originally we had planned to run a round of Capturing Luxury our group program for branding photographers in July (MSRP $950/per person), and then a few days into the launch in June we pulled the plug and pushed back the round by a month because Jo’s therapist pointed out that she was burning out and needed to slow down - totally the right decision, no regrets.

We basically went silent on socials for the last two weeks of June as Jo took a much-needed break. During this time, we started talking about what we wanted work to look like when she came back. To briefly summarize, Jo's job would be to create content she loved, I would handle the business, and we both wanted to educate & coach.

Up until this point, our businesses functioned with the majority of income coming from branding photography each month. Suspiciously absent from what we wanted to prioritize as Jo came back 🤔.

Changing our focus and coming back from time away we knew income would be down in July. But what was amazing to us, was that by taking a step back and shifting focus - by a percentage of income we were “almost” even split between Coaching and Photography in July.

Here’s a fun somewhat basic pie chart of our income for July by category, dollars deposited in our bank (post $183.54 or average out to 3.175% transaction fees), and percentage of total income. (Don’t hate me, I have a 2016 version of Excel that doesn’t have pretty charts, but I still think it’s superior to Google Sheets)

As we’re interested in doing more coaching, we dug deeper into these numbers, where did our coaching dollars in July come from? (aka how can we repeat this and get even more coaching clients next month)

Of the three coaching clients that made up the coaching income (1 VIP Day and 2 90 min calls), one has followed us for years, one was a branding photography client that wanted to go deeper after a session, and the last was a word of mouth referral from a previous client.

Nothing we changed in our marketing in July brought in more coaching inquiries, but our sales process for coaching inquiries converted 100% of inquiries and upsold $700 in packages. Which means our post inquiry sales process of a Chemistry Call, clearly diagnosing the problem(s) and specifically proposing how we can help, along with a quick turn around are working great for us.

This leads us to, generating more leads is where we can improve. We’re already thinking about more content that is focused on generating our authority as coaches and showing our expertise. I personally batched 2 reels this week on our food pyramid for content framework & hand-raiser content that I’m excited to go up this month.

For those of you reading with a fine tooth comb you’ll notice we had no “courses” or Capturing Luxury income in July even though we had a launch the last week of July. We didn’t end up signing up anyone for an August round - Jo has thoughts about our launch and a breakdown coming soon so I won’t get into that.

The other thing we noted is that collectively Passive & Referrals only generated 4% of our income in July, with us (read Jo) focusing on more influencer-type content this is an area where we want to place more focus on growing (if you operate a brand looking for partners/ambassadors or a PR list, hit reply we’d love to chat). If you keep up with our stories on Instagram, you will have seen us teasing a mini-course we’ve started working on to launch this month about creating content on your iPhone (by our loose definition a mini-course is “passive” income).

What about expenses?

In July we somewhat shockingly didn’t travel to work with a client. Historically this is consistently our largest expense category between flights, accommodations, car rentals, and food while traveling. This meant that our expenses were also lower than usual.

In July our expenses accounted for $723.53 or 12.54% of our income (post transaction fees).

While we didn’t travel in July we paid for flights to Orlando in August (if you’re looking for a last min session in Orlando or Tampa we have next Wednesday/Thursday open for in-person coaching or a mini branding session). Since we use cash-based accounting, those expenses still hit in July when we spent the money. But we also counted income for the branding session in Orlando in August in our July books since they’ve been paying a monthly payment plan for a few months.

We canceled the content templates subscription since we weren’t using it enough to justify the $97/month we had been paying.

Even though the second largest category is Professional Development, we should be spending even more on that based on our goals of being coaches and educators who are staying up to date. That’s an aligned expense that is justified to be even higher given the right investment. In July most of that was towards books we’re currently learning from.

Every time I look at our software expenses I’m reminded of the value to us cultivating relationships with and becoming brand ambassadors for some of our most expensive software companies. Whether being an ambassador comes with a free software license or a referral code that can pay out towards free months of software, we save hundreds of dollars each year on fees on top of earning referral income.

Our big takeaways from July Income & Expenses:

• Sustainable coaching & educating income is more attainable than we’ve been telling ourselves for months - just maybe not how we thought

• We can see a path toward more passive income, we just now need to lean into those things without losing track

• Our coaching sales process for inbound inquiries is solid, maybe we need to put more thought into our coaching marketing & outbound sales

• Follow-ups and maintaining a relationship works, $900 or 15% of our July income (and another $900 in August) came from a custom branding quote we sent out in December, re-quoted in March, and followed up monthly since then

• We need to figure out a healthy monthly/annual spend on Professional Development that will get us to the place we want to be - July’s spending was only 0.2% of income (in June we were in the high single-digit percent of income)

Did you find this interesting, curious about some specific number I quoted, have a very different takeaway, or have a recommended Professional Development investment amount? Hit reply, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

See you next week, assuming I have time to write an email while we’re traveling in Florida,
Lyndon