Our October Monthly Breakdown
Episode 140: Show Notes
Today on the show we are back for another monthly review session! This is something we do on the regular here at TCC so today we thought we’d share it will all of you. We break down all the stats, all the data, everything we did, crunch the numbers and check in on our goals every 30 days. So this is us doing it for October 2017. As you all know by now, we love sharing the behind-the-scenes with y’all and giving you the step-by-step breakdown of what we have been up to in our business, what worked and what didn’t.
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We start by going over all of our goals, reviewing what went down and how we could have done things differently. Next, we go over what we actually accomplished and what the outcomes were. We also check in on all of our stats including social media audiences, website pages views, and all of our other end of month audience numbers. As part of our breakdown, we also do an in-depth quarterly check-in from September and set new goals for November. We end it all off with new goals of our end of month audience numbers as well as setting an affirmation for the month of November. So if you want a little behind-the-scenes look at how we get it done, listen in and get writing!
Reviewing Our Monthly Goals
Our first goal for the month was to send emails for value. We definitely did that and stayed on schedule with providing value of all of our peeps! Next, we prepared for our launch which is pretty much ALL we did the entire time! Then we did a successful onboard of our new director of operations and our graphic designer. They are both gems and we are so thrilled to have them on board! Another goal was to try and stay on schedule for our podcast. So far we have pretty much done that. We recorded everything in October for the entire rest of the year, with only a few missing episodes here and there. Finally, our last goal was to get a footing on 2018 with Funnel Guy and Val. This is a half-check; we met with both of them. They are both starting but there are still some loose ends to tie up! We believe they will be completed within the next week.
What Did We Accomplish in October?
This part is always a little tricky for us because we are preparing for the craziness but nothing is really happening quite yet. However, we did what we said we were going to do! We are surprised with how much money we made considering the depressing side of our accomplishments. Our business and our team yet again showed us how well it can stay sustained and not fall apart when one of us has to leave very unexpectedly, due to a death in the family. It was very sudden and required us to move some things around, reschedule and make sure everything ran smoothly despite it all. This ability to be sustainable is certainly more of an on-going accomplishment but it definitely showed itself in the month of October. Another thing we were able to accomplish was to continue delegating, which really saved our ass this month! Defining our roles again is another improvement we are working on. We asked for some feedback from our community about what our roles should be and what it really looks like.
End of Month Audience Stats
For the blog, we had 28,289 visits, 27,245 unique visitors and 42,253 pageviews. We went down from last month on these numbers after a rise from August to September. For the Facebook page, 8,946 likes, surpassing our goal by 500. In our Facebook group, we have 14,641 passing our goal by 1,000. What?! There are 6,177 students, 2,489 of which are paid. This is up 150 on paid students and 500 on all. On iTunes, we had 2,840, which is down from September. These results may have been due to some of our episodes going out late and not getting all of the downloads as usual. For email, we have 15,385 subscribers, which is up from last month but not quite to our goal. Pinterest had 8,804 clicks and 6,820 re-pins. On Instagram, we are at 27,082 followers, which is only up by 2,000 from July. This is what happens when you stop paying attention, clearly!
Quarterly Goal Check-In From September
First, we said our email conversion in September was 15.7%, which is amazing! Then we asked ourselves how many people enrolled in Your Biz On Autopilot first and then bought Trello versus how many just bought Trello? We don’t really know the answer to that yet. However, our Your Biz On Autopilot course is by far our biggest opt-in. We have almost 4,000 people who have signed up for that compared to a general opt-in where we would be lucky to even get 100 people to sign up in its lifetime. Trello for Business has also done great with over 2,300 people in it now. Our monthly revenue for September was $68,123 and in October it was $14,662. We were anticipating it to go down to $10,000 just because we weren’t doing anything. In regards to students, our initial value per student was $139 at the beginning of this year. That has drastically changed since we threw in a higher-priced program and we sold Trello for Business. It decreased the value of our student but our launch values increased overall. With the launch of The Strategy Academy coming up, we anticipate reaching our financial goal despite not having met the numbers we were hoping for.
Setting Goals for November
The first goal to set is the enrolment goal for the challenge. Based on the number of people that are still on our list from the last challenge, it was a little over 1,700. With Four Days to Sexy Systems, we had over 4,000, but our sales did not match that at all. So based on that, our goal would be 5,000 for the challenge and if we convert 2% industry standard, that would mean we have 100 people enroll. Assuming they all do the full payment, that would put us just shy of $200,000. Looking at the numbers, we are unsure about what will happen. Last time, we were converting at 3% and our pricing structure was different. However, we will be ecstatic if we converted at the 2%, especially if we are able to reach the 5,000 goal for the challenge. Next, we want to get the Trello funnel going and we want November to be our largest month ever.
Our Number Goals for End of Month Audience
Our Facebook page increased from September to October by about 400. We are planning on running some ads and doing the launch, so our prediction is that it will increase by 1,000. For students, we are definitely hoping to increase our paid students by 100 since that is our goal. We know there is going to be some trickle in from other sales that just happened. The increase from September to October was about 150 without a launch so our goal would be 200. For email, we know we are going to increase by at least 2,000 so let’s shoot for a little over 17,500. The Facebook group will probably increase by a couple thousand so our goal would be 16,000. On iTunes, our goal is to get back up into 3,000 per episode with consistency and then we will just track the real numbers for Instagram, Pinterest and the blog since we are not actively growing them right now.
Affirmation For the Month of November and Final Goals
When it comes to affirmations, we love to pick an inspirational word for a very specific goal that we have. For the month of November, our main focus will be launching both the challenge and the The Strategy Academy for a second time. Since this is round two, our goal is to improve numbers, get feedback on our new pricing scheme and reach the numbers we have set out for ourselves. The active word for this strategy is “launch”. Some synonyms for launch include monumental, ambitious, brand, embark and epic. For this month, we are going to choose “monumental”. Our final goal for the month is to finally start our vlog. We have been putting off growing our YouTube channel and creating a vlog because we wanted to come at it strategically and we wanted to be able to batch it and do it the right way without wasting our time. This meant that we needed to find someone to help us with the SEO, the naming and the formatting. Now that we've set that up, we decided to optimize the videos that we already had and finally plan out the vlog plan and get recording!
Quote This
We don’t have the time to strategize and try new fancy things right now because we’re doing the things!
Highlights
A review process of our October goals, what worked and what didn’t. [0:02:37.1]
What did we accomplish in October and how our business has become sustainable. [0:04:56.1]
An overview of our end of month audience stats for the blog, podcast, email, and social media. [0:10:29.1]
Crunching the numbers and setting new goals for the month of November. [0:25:04.1]
Setting end of month audience number goals and our strategy for non-growth platforms. [0:30:39.1]
Find out how we set our affirmations for November and our final goals. [0:30:31.1]
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
Goal review session, Sustainable business, Audience statistics, Setting business goals, Audience growth goals, Setting monthly affirmations
