A Breakdown of a Monthly Review with Think Creative Collective
Episode 110: Show Notes
Today we are recording a live version of us going through our monthly review sheet. What we’re really going to talk about is the process and we are going through the entire thing step by step, just as we normally do, so you guys can see it all - how long it takes, what we talk about, what we ask ourselves, what are we looking at, what numbers are we pulling and we’re doing it in real time. We’ve pulled up the websites that we usually gather data from but we haven't crunched the numbers yet. We are doing it on air so you guys can see realistically how all this works.
Listen on your favorite podcast player
It’s August review and we use our worksheets that we’ve created for some awesome students of ours and our community which are available in both The Follow Through Method and Rock Your Biz. We are going through our typical review of what we would do at the end of a month and then planning for the following month. This episode might be a bit different to listen to. We are testing it so do let us know if you love it or hate it at the end of it. So keep listening to hear how all this works!
Goals, Accomplishments and Improvements
We set up these goals at the end of the previous month so we know what we’re working towards. When doing our review we look at whether we were able to achieve the goals or not.
Our goals for the month of August were:
Set up promo for challenge,
Safe travels in Mexico,
Find a video person,
Get ahead and
Wrap Up Strategy Academy on a good note
and we’re happy to say we’ve achieved most of our goals this month. Sometimes we struggle comparing the different between checking off our goals and accomplishments. As far as accomplishments go there was a good balance of work and play. It was a good month of really trusting in the systems that we’ve set up.
Things we’ve definitely had to work on has been improving team communication. This has been a constant learning experience for us in setting our expectations and learning how to communicate clearly with our team. We also tend to work under pressure too much and we need to step back and spread out our stuff more so it’s not so stressful. We’ve also been thinking a lot about whether or not to move to using only US-based employees. We’re also adding getting ahead and fine tuning our before and after launch process to our improvements list.
Quote ThiS
I don’t typically suggest having monetary things be your goals because you can’t control them.
Tracking The Numbers
The review sheet has us tracking blog posts, social media posts, Facebook Live’s, podcast recording and sales. We’re not currently doing anything strategically to make it different and so there’s no reason to be tracking down the numbers. Nonetheless, we put out 10 blog posts. We’ve been asking members of our team to look at posts we’ve done in the past that we can roll out some of the diamonds in the archive. We have a social media post tracker but we’re not going to count posts on Instagram. We used to make it so we actively wanted to post 3x a day but that fell off sometime over the summer, Instagram hasn't been that much of our focus. We have found that we only really go live on Facebook during a launch and slow down in-between. The podcast recordings are doing really well where we’re well ahead of schedule with our recordings. The last thing is sales and the only thing we track on this document is Teachable sales. The reason being that that’s the only thing we have accurate data for right now.We’re just looking at pure, core sales on Teachable and we’ve surpassed our goal of 14k. It’s interesting to see that tick up. We also have end of month audience where we track our blog audience, and all our other social media outlets including our students and traffic overviews on Squarespace and Trello for Business.
Next Month’s Affirmation
Our affirmation for August was belief. We really needed that because we were ending Facebook everything. What do we need to feel for September? We already know that we have five thousand people in this challenge. What we’re saying is that we’ve sold nearly a hundred thousand dollars on that launch. We sold over a hundred thousand dollars on our affiliate launch. If we’re doing two and a half times the people participating in the challenge, can we predict two and a half times that in our sales? Normally we would say hell no but we’re believing for it.
Planning for September
We’re looking at what we want to achieve for September. We don’t typically suggest having monetary things be your goals because you can’t control them but for September we’re throwing down that two and a half times for sales. Our actual goal list for September:
Solidify business manager,
Consider doing an ad for a webinar,
Celebrate all the birthdays.
We now set some goals for our end of month audience, Facebook likes, Facebook group, ConvertKit, students and iTunes. At the end of a quarter we check in to see what we’ve done so far and whether we’re on track for meeting our goals as we had set them in January. It’s a little bit of a hot mess but to recap, of quarter one we checked everything off our goals, outsourcing and hiring. Our quarter 2 goal was to have the podcast bringing in 10k a month in sponsorship, that’s not a thing at all. We had no idea, we just pulled number out of thin air. We did change one of our goals in Q2. Our quarter 3 goal was how many people we need on our email list to make certain amount of money and was based on the products we had at that time. Our average sale per student has gone down. You can do the math all day long but it’s not going to prove to be true at the end of the year.
Highlights
Tackling the goals for the month, our accomplishments and improvements. [0:03:42.0]
Taking a look at the numbers for August, tracking blog posts, social media posts, Facebook Live’s, podcast recording and sales. [0:18:45.0]
Looking at our next month affirmation and what our main focus will be. [0:45:55.0]
Taking a look at September, what we want to achieve and where we’re headed. [0:48:55.0]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Goals, accomplishments and improvements, Tracking the numbers, Next month affirmation, Planning for September
