September 2021 Profit Report: Growing Our Membership 26% in Revenue in 30 Days
Episode 585: Show Notes
We’re taking it back to September! It feels weird, but we’re going to recap all of the amazing, incredible things that we did in the month of September so that you guys can get a little peek behind the curtains and get to understand what goes on in our brains and why we do the things we do. September was only last month, but it feels like a lifetime ago because we have been moving fast and furiously at team Boss Project.
We’re excited to dig into not just the numbers, but everything that has been going on behind the scenes. It doesn’t make sense to only talk about what happened, and not about how it affected revenue and profit, or to just talk about revenue and profit and not about what actually made it happen. We think it’s really important to talk about both, and there aren’t enough conversations going on about truly how much it costs to run a service-based business, so today we’re going to lift the veil! We’re going to try and answer every nosey question you’ve ever had about costs, and if we don’t cover what you want to hear, you can always DM us, we’re totally transparent about our business!
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Why September is Our Favorite Month
September is pretty much our favorite month of the year. There are 80 000 celebrations; it’s both of our birthdays, many of our loved ones' birthdays, it’s the first day of fall, AND it’s Boss Project’s birthday! We’re the founders of the Creative Shop Co-op, and it celebrated in September with us; for the second time ever we had a sale, and for the first time ever we had a huge birthday extravaganza, which was so much fun! Since September is all about celebrations, we also wanted to celebrate with our audience, and we did so by giving away two iPads (in space grey, if you’re interested) to two lucky listeners!
How We Modeled Our Latest Sale and Promotion Off a SaaS Company
As you all know, we like looking at other industries to see what approaches they are using to serve their clients or their members. Our favorite companies to look at are SaaS companies. We look at what they are doing to not only drive new memberships, but also to surprise and delight their current members. We treat our membership like a SaaS; there’s new stuff added all the time but it’s the same product and the same concept. This means that there are only so many ways we can innovatively encourage people to join by only using our online platform, which is why we decided to treat our members with a sale and prizes. We modeled it after the way Dubsado does their sales (they have a fairly predictable sales cycle). And it was bananas, in the best possible way!
The Highs and Lows of Having a Membership as Your Main Offering
We did some member surveys at the beginning of Spring, and when we implemented the feedback from these surveys into our offerings in August, we saw a major impact in our retention and in the overall happiness and satisfaction of our clients. Also, our membership numbers grew by 17% in a single month (which is by far our biggest growth ever in a single month) and we grew the revenue for that product 26.5% over the previous 30 days! It’s easy to feel like you get stuck in a rut when you keep talking about the same thing, but when you change things up and do something that so clearly benefits your business, it is so exciting, and we felt completely revitalized! Those are the highs you can experience in a membership-based business, but with highs, come lows. We know that the membership numbers are probably not going to stay at the level they are currently at. You’re going to see an influx of numbers when there’s a sale or a promotion, and there are prizes on the line. This influx will be followed by a whole bunch of people leaving, for a whole slew of reasons, and you have to expect that.
The Thought Process Behind Hiring 2 Full-Time People...at the Same Time
We’ve grown our team! We were nervous about onboarding our two new team members during the pandemic because we’re all over the country and going for after-work drinks isn’t possible, but our virtual team mixer was a huge success. If you can’t believe that we hired two people at the same time, don’t worry, we still kind of can’t believe it either, although we are so happy that we did! We interviewed a lot of incredible people, and it was really difficult to decide who to hire. We were only looking for one person, but we knew that we’d have to hire another person in 6 to 8 weeks’ time, so we decided to change the job description to make it a hybrid, proposed it to our two favorite applicants, and ended up hiring them both! After handing over work to them, it’s impossible to imagine how we could have been doing everything we were doing without them.
Getting Into the Numbers
In terms of revenue, we spent the majority of our time on our birthday sale, which our revenue reflected at 75% coming from our membership and once-off templates. Our affiliate income is down a little bit for the month to 11% because we had the big launch in July followed by a large pay out in August, so September was just back to normal. Strategy Academy is also down, but there is a strategy to the 8% that it brought in. Our ad costs have been low for several months, at 19.5%, and we’re choosing to keep things small. We’re still navigating all the changes and putting money where we know it is going to be effective, so we don’t overspend where we don’t need to. Our staff costs have increased because of our two new hires, and we also had to pay a fairly large amount to a lawyer to draft up a contract; these two combined made up 37% of our revenue, which is higher than we’d like it to be, but all things considered, it’s really not bad. Our profit for the month was 19%, and we’re not mad about it because we decided to spend more time and more money on growing our business!
Quote This
If we don’t need to spend more to make more then why would we spend more?
Highlights
Why September is Our Favorite Month. [0:06:20]
How We Modeled Our Latest Sale and Promotion Off a SAAS Company. [0:10:40]
The Highs and Lows of Having a Membership as Your Main Offering. [0:11:55]
The Thought Process Behind Hiring 2 Full-Time People...at the Same Time. [0:19:32]
Getting Into the Numbers. [0:30:59]
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
Sales, Promotions, Celebrations, Costs, SaaS, Hiring, Revenue, Profit, Growth
