January and February Monthly Reviews (We Learned Something MAJOR During These Months)
Episode 198: Show Notes
Today on the show, we are bringing you a two-in-one monthly review session. We know we are always telling you to check your data, but the truth is, we forgot. January slipped away and then February slipped away and before we knew it we had the monthly reviews way off of our minds! Even we made mistakes, the upside is that you guys get to learn from them! Yay! So, even if it is March and you also haven’t done last month’s report yet, that’s okay. You can give yourself some grace and do yours with us here today.
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In this episode, we are diving straight in to our monthly business review sheets which you can find within the Follow Through Method. We’ll be going through our goals and whether we accomplished them or not, as well as our numbers for our various social media pages, our email list and our website. We’ll also be taking a look at increases and decreases in sales and talking about the importance of allowing your goals to pivot and be tweaked. So, grab a pen and paper, dig out the calculator and let’s start collecting some data.
Did Our Goals Happen: Yes or No?
One of our goals for January was to switch to a new email service provider. In short, we switched and we’re probably going to be switching again. So that’s a “yes” check to that goal, but not a very happy check. Tune is next week for an episode on this saga. Our next goal was to evaluate the opt-in for our Trello funnel. A couple of episodes ago we spoke about our $15,000 mistake and how we had wanted to automate more Trello sales. Part of that was running more Facebook ads and one of those Facebook Ads was leading to a specific opt-in. We wanted to evaluate how that opt-in should be performing; should it be a different opt-in altogether or should it be improved upon? The answer to the achievement of that goal is a big fat “no.” Another goal was to do a video ad for Trello, which was also a big fat “no” because we just decided not to go with this anymore. There were a couple other intentional “Did not do’s” such as 1.) The social push to revamp the opt-in and 2.) Go live about Trello. Our overarching monetary goal for that month was to get to $9,130 in Trello sales for the month of January but we only made $7,395. So another “no” on that one. Those were pretty much all of our goals.
The main thing we want to tell you is that there was a snowstorm of things happening in January and although we were working diligently, the things we had spoken about in December just evaporated into thin air. In the words of our wise work husband, Parker, “We were changing the wheel of the bus while we were driving it.” The main thing we remember accomplishing in January is that Andrea came on and she ramped up to nearly full-time in January, plus she’s incredible. That’s really the only the positive thing we have to say about January, other than we did hire a coach to help us with the mistake that we told you about in the “$15,000 Mistake” episode.
A Look At Our Stats for January 2018
At the end of January our iTunes episode average was 3868 and we ended December at 3258. On the 31st of January we had 17,257 members in our Facebook group. That was up from 16,914. Our Facebook page likes were at 11,930 as of the end of January and our last email that went out on January 25th went out to 17,681 people. That was up about 200 from the month before. Taking a look at our website analytics, we had 25,781 page visits and 5196 pageviews. Our audience was at 29,861. Our visits from the end of December were basically 20k and we’re up at almost 26k. Our pageviews at the end of December were 37.5k and by the end of January we were up to 50k. So what we think happened is everyone was lazy in December because we didn’t do anything specifically different. We can’t tell Instagram and Pinterest numbers just yet because they’re on a 30-day rolling number. Our unpaid students were at 7532 and paid were at 2998. So we’ve had about a 450 increase on all of our students since December and a 200 increase on our paid students. Our end of January sales in Teachable were at 25,252 and overall sales were at 29,014. So those are the stats for January!
A Look At Our Stats for February 2018
Did we accomplish anything in February that we deemed worthy? Well, yes, we did a live launch funnel set up for The Strategy Academy. That’s pretty much the only noteworthy thing. Our February downloads are a little less but February also has three days less in a month. So we were at 3670. Visits were at 22,766, page views went down 4% and it’s 43,173 and our visitors are down almost 15% at 25,620. Our Facebook page was at 12,649 and our group was at 17,579, so that went up about 300 and our FB page went up by about 700. If we take a look at our new email service provider (all will be revealed about this in no time), our list was at 19,681, so that was an increase of about 2000. All paid students is 384 and all students at the end of February is 7849. So our unpaid went up by 250 and our paid by about 100. Our Trello sales for February were $2573. Our total teachable sales for February were $29,851 and our total sales were $39,146. $3600 of that income was affiliate income and $3000 of it was sponsorship for the podcast.
What Did We Learn About Our January and February Sales?
What’s pretty cool is that January last year we made $10,000 and we tripled that in January this year. In February last year we made another $10,000 and we quadrupled that this February! So we’re off to a rather good start even though it still feels slow for us. We’ve been in this new zone of wrapping our head around – it feels different to double from $100,000 to $200,000 than it does to double from $500,000 to one million. It’s hard to double and every single time, you’re at a different phase in business. The things you’re doing to make your first six figures will not be things that you will have to do to be consistent with six figures. Those will not be things you have to do to make half a million. What you do to make half a million will not be the same as what you do to make one million. We have never believed that more than we do today!
Our Q1 Goals: Where Are We At With That?
If you guys remember, we started applying good, better, best goals to our quarterly financial milestones that we wanted to meet and we decided that there was going to be one core thing that we put our focus on in order to reach those financial goals. So we are going to break those down into steps. Based on us reaching those goals, that will affect the rest of the year for us. Our good Q1 goal, in regards to average Trello sales per month for January, February and March is $7150. On average we are at $4959, not including March. We will not reach our good goal, but it’s okay, because it hasn’t really been our focus since January and we never revamped our Q1 goal. So the breakdown of steps of course include Trello stuff: developing a video for Trello, switching over to a new email service provider, a better opt-in, a better funnel, AB testing, better follow-up sequences, Trello lives and social push to opt-in. We are going to have to revamp this in 10 days because our Q2 goal is a funnel for the Follow Through Method, which is no longer a goal! So what this tells us, is that our meeting in March is going to be long. It is going to be updating our good, better, best and what we’re actually focusing on in our business and then re-assigning these breakdowns of how we’re going to get there.
Don’t Get Married To Your Goals And Allow Them To Be Tweaked
We relay this information to you as a reminder not to get married to your goals. You need to have a goal of course, but you need to pivot, tweak and cut it when it’s showing you that it is not working. For us, we could get to where we needed to go faster by focusing on The Strategy Academy first and it took an outside perspective to get us on board with that thought train. But we pivoted quickly and we are editing and trying new things. To be honest, we’re not upset about these changes at all! In the past it might have really bugged us that we totally changed direction but it really goes back to a conversation we had with Jessica Eley about fight, flight, freeze or freedom. What this tells us is that we are transitioning as humans not just as businesses. This means that we are less tied to crossing things off lists just for the sake of crossing them off. Because you can’t say it’s broken if year after year we triple and then quadruple! It’s not broken, we’re just changing. When you look at it from that perspective you can give yourself a lot more credit and that’s what we need to be doing. We need to be kinder to ourselves and prouder of ourselves of what we have done and continue to be able to do. It doesn’t always have to be at this rocket pace because often that’s not sustainable or even possible. We are still set out to double our business overall but we both continue to work less, take more off our plates, delegate more, spend more time with our family and there is no way we could have maintained the craziness that was the last two years. So that being said, give yourself some grace, there is nothing wrong with chilling out a little bit. We feel you.
Quote This
You need to pivot, tweak and cut your goal when it’s showing you that it’s not working.
Highlights
Did Our Goals Happen: Yes or No? [0:03:45.1]
A Look At Our Stats for January 2018. [0:09:35.1]
A Look At Our Stats for February 2018. [0:19:05.1]
What Did We Learn About Our January and February Sales? [0:28:26.1]
Our Q1 Goals: Where Are We At With That? [0:30:32.1]
Don’t Get Married To Your Goals And Allow Them To Be Tweaked. [0:33:44.1]
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
The Follow Through Method, Goals, Setting goals, Q1 goals, Q2 goals, Data, Analytics, Stats, Monthly review
