September 2020 Profit: Five Years in Biz Reflection; Our Thoughts on FB Ad Costs and Botox
Episode 480: Show Notes
We’re excited to talk about business in September and the fact we’ve been in business for five whole years! Honestly, it now feels like we were babies when we started this whole thing because looking back at old blog posts and videos we created in the early days – you can tell that a lot has changed. We have really aged – but we think in the way that fine wine does. Abagail used to have a perfectly smooth forehead when she got botox to alleviate her migraines, but now she embraces her age and is happy to have a few extra lines. It comes with the territory! Emylee, on the other hand, loves her potions and creams and whatever it takes to bring out her youthful side.
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September 2020 Profit: Five Years in Biz Reflection; Our Thoughts on FB Ad Costs and BotoxBut in this episode, we talk about how our business has aged (along with us) and how we have found our groove, shifting from a do-er to a be-er mentality and enjoying much more calm than chaos. We share what we got up to in September, focusing on the live launch we did for Strategy Academy and how we have adjusted our approach to ads for the better. Tuning in, you will also hear us talk about the appropriate amount of planning, the strategy we implemented to make the next few months easy, and all our profit and expense numbers for September.
How Our Business Has Changed Since Five Years Ago
We joke about aging and botox but our business has changed a lot since we started five years ago. The pivots and adjustments and small shifts in-between have been mind-boggling in hindsight. We started with services and one-on-one clients and now we can’t remember the last time we worked this close with anybody. With the opening of the Creative Template Shop, we have just been working more and more in the digital space and are busy focusing on our membership, which happens to be the first one that has worked for us. Our goals and expectations have also radically transformed because what we were thrilled by three years ago is not going to cut it anymore. But that is what growth involves. We have, however, released two other products that have stuck around besides the shop, Trello for Business and Strategy Academy, and they continue to do well. At the end of 2019, we decided to cut a lot of the fluff, dropping the many bundles, courses, and other memberships we had to focus on the core things that were working. Emylee always imagined herself putting out a new product or idea each year and, while we did that for a while, it was time to get laser-focused on the simple, solid streams of income. We’ve had ups and downs and learned a lot in the process but now we finally have our big girl panties on!
Transitioning From A Do-er to A Be-er In Business
When we started, we operated from a do-er mindset for the first few years but we are learning to become be-ers in business. (For more on this topic, listen to Episode 393 with Jessica Eley!) Neither of these is bad but they deliver very different results in life and business. Turns out, most of you listening (our audience) are be-ers, and we didn’t get that for a long time. That’s another great spin-off of being the biz for a while: we are beginning to understand our audience at a much deeper level now. Though sometimes we miss being young and ambitious. Not that we are no longer both of those things but we’ve just matured in them. Life is just different now that we’ve become more confident and settled instead of always chasing after the next thing!
Yay For Live Launches and Refreshing Ads!
The big things we were focused on internally were shop launches and updates to our Strategy Academy funnel. We did a live launch for the first time in a while and even though it wasn’t meant to be a big deal, we did see a bump in SA. Last month, SA was about 22% of our overall revenue and this month it had gone up to 30%. As much as we like live launching, it tends to deliver mini bursts rather than big wows. We know that SA makes money ‘on its own’ – on automation; we know that the ads, copy, and funnel work but we also know we get a boost when we do live launches. We did a webinar for updating it and bringing fresh energy, tweaking some of the slides and changing the messaging slightly, and even though it is evergreen, it is good to engage with our people and get back and forth conversations going in the context of a live launch. So we will always do a live launch whenever we want to update the video of a webinar – we love engaging with y’all and it energizes us! If you want to watch this webinar or be part of our program, go to bossproject.com/dreamjob. The only goal with this was to introduce a fresh, fun webinar and we love the fact that we didn’t have pressure to do super well. Whatever happens, happens. For our Trello course, we refreshed our ads for the first time in how long, because it was slowing down a little and we did see a rise after.
We Focused on the Shop and Came Up With A Great Planning Strategy
We also just continued to focus on the Shop, dropping new templates every second Tuesday of the month. We are preparing to test things going into Q4, so we have been busy with planning. Historically speaking, we have been picking templates only two to five weeks in advance but this time, we sat down and mapped out Q4 and early Q1 of 2021 to help our team get their ducks in a row. So, if they wanted to get ahead, they could do that and take some more time off during the holidays. Picking the templates so close to the time was necessary because we wanted to incorporate our audience’s feedback and create things they needed at that moment. Now we are at a place where we can create them long in advance, even though we can still add new ideas here and there as they come up. We decided to pick themes for each month of the year and thought about the templates that would make sense for each theme, and this strategy really helped us to give some structure to our planning. You too can incorporate this tactic by breaking down the months into themes and developing content around it.
Striking the Balance Between Planning Versus Going With the Flow
At the beginning of the year, Abagail and Emylee just had this strong intuition about not planning much in advance. Before the pandemic hit the US, they knew that this was not going to be a year of mapping everything out in January. What we did do, however, was designate what percentage each product was going to bring in. Because we were cutting so many products, we had to have a plan around how much each of the remaining three products would bring into the business. And this kind of planning felt empowering rather than restricting – which is what regimented plans make you feel! But just because we had a plan does not mean that it happened exactly the way we had anticipated. While you can have all your expenses figured out, it is not possible to always determine where the income is going to come from. We had no idea, for example, that the Shop was going to blow up as it did. Consequently, we let slide some of the other items that were on the docket. However, in the first week of September, we hit our 2020 revenue goals! So, this form of planning worked really well for us so we hope to stick to it. Unfortunately, you cannot ever guarantee that expenses will turn into profit, so be mindful of that. Our biggest expenses have consistently been contractors and advertising. For September, the Shop made up 55%, Strategy Academy made up 30%, and Trello made up 9%.
Why Conservative Is the Best Way with Ads
Advertising has never been as volatile as it is right now, yet our business has never been more stable! We think it has to do with our ads team, for sure. In the past, we have had people who simply poured more money into advertising when it was unstable but now our team has backed off on several things and adopted a more conservative approach. They endeavor to keep things going without breaking the bank and taking massive risks. Because we know we need advertising (we’ve tried stopping them altogether which turned out to be a big mistake), so we want to keep kindling the fire but with a much smaller budget. Therefore, ads for September made up only 22% even though we budget up to 30% of revenue for advertising. So, we have been constantly low on using our revenue for advertising, which is due to one of two things: we are seeing a better return or we have built our base enough that we don’t necessarily need as much. At the end of 2019, we were in a weird conundrum where we were spending so much on ads and sometimes they were working and other times not. We didn’t know whether what we were doing was really working. Neither of us wanted a business that relied so heavily on ads to make money anyway. We have reached a happy medium where we use them but don’t rely solely on them for business.
The Profit We Made While Mostly Planning for the Future
As much as September was great, a lot of it involved thinking about the future and planning. We are still thrilled about our profit, though. We landed at 22% profit and we are still, on average, over 30% month-to-month for the year. We are so happy with the shifts we’ve made and, looking back, we’ve grown a ton since last year this time and really settled into a great flow. The downside to all of this is what we learned about retained earnings where you should not only make the money but spend it as a business. Whether you are paying yourself or investing back into the company with ads, team members, software, or whatever, the money should also go somewhere at some point, otherwise, you are paying taxes on a lot of money! So for us, it’s about having the proper amount in our savings. With the way we run our business, we do not pay corporate taxes so whenever we earn money above covering the expenses, it is considered our personal income. So for us, if the business does well and we keep it in the business instead of paying ourselves, we still owe taxes on the money sitting in the business. Whatever we gather in our savings has to be split and we each pay taxes on that. When you are paying more taxes, it is because you are making more money – and that’s a good problem to have!
Quote This
Our goals and expectations have also radically transformed because what we were thrilled by three years ago is not going to cut it anymore. But that is what growth involves.
Highlights
How Our Business Has Changed Since Five Years Ago. [0:06:26.1]
Transitioning From A Do-er to A Be-er In Business. [0:11:36.1]
Yay For Live Launches and Refreshing Ads! [0:13:27.1]
We Focused on the Shop and Came Up With A Great Planning Strategy. [0:18:32.1]
Striking the Balance Between Planning Versus Going With the Flow. [0:26:14.1]
Why Conservative Is the Best Way with Ads. [0:30:16.1]
The Profit We Made While Mostly Planning for the Future. [0:39:52.1]
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
Aging, Change, Do-er versus be-er, Ads, Content, Planning, Monthly themes, Profit
