Find out how much money my business made in January 2024, my wins for the month, goals update, and lessons learned along the way!
I’m really excited about this episode this week because I’ve been challenged by one of my business coaches to do a monthly income report.
In today’s episode, we are going to go over my January 2024 income report. And so the purpose of this challenge is to really take time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t work, what I’m proud of, what lessons I learned, and really just look at the month as a whole. So I’m really excited about this challenge. I’m excited to share with with all of you just how everything’s going, a little more behind the scenes in my business. I personally love hearing other business owner income reports because I I love talking numbers. So in this episode, I’m gonna cover my wins in January, how my goals went, how much my business earned, and my goals for next month. So let’s go ahead and dive in. So first off, we rolled into January and I was sick.
Now this was not how I was expecting to spend this the New Year’s, which is also my husband’s birthday. We were going to be in Mexico with the kids and my mother-in-law and my parents. And the day we woke up that morning to leave on December 30th to go to the airport, I was not feeling well. So I sent my family off to Mexico and changed my ticket to 4 days later and spent New Year’s Eve in bed sick, coughing, sleeping, just really taking it easy and eating way too much soup. I am so over soup. That is not the way I want to start the year, so that was the kinda how I rolled into the New Year. I did end up that 1st week in January after I started feeling better. I hopped on a plane and spent the rest of the time down there in on in vacation mode, got to read some books and really just enjoyed time with family relaxing, spending time in the sun, getting in the pool, eating, one of my favorite things too, lots of Mexican food, and it was really great.
It’s always good to go and see my parents. They don’t live near us, and we don’t see them very often, so it’s always fun to spend time with them. We played a lot of UNO. My kids got UNO for Christmas, back in Christmas of 2023, and we’ve spent the last year just really enjoying some family game nights playing a lot of UNO, so that’s been a lot of fun. We got back from Mexico the day before the girls were going back to school, and we just rolled right into it. I had a client, one of my favorite, past clients, had needed a project to get set up pretty quickly, and so I squeezed her in even though it was still the time where I like to take time off in January to get some other things done, and we squeezed in a half VIP day with her. That’s my client Cindy, and she over the years we’ve worked together, we redesigned her website, we created an email nurture sequence, we’ve set up sales funnels for her, calendar funnels, freebie funnels. And this particular VIP day, we were getting her course all dialed in.
She signed up with MemberVault. We kinda talked back and forth about some different options for member for course platforms, and she got everything going with MemberVault, got her stuff loaded, and need me to come in and just get it all integrated with her ActiveCampaign, get her course funnels all set up, make sure the checkout was working, just all the pieces that are involved in that, and that was a lot of fun. It was honestly a really fun way to, kind of, just dive back into working right away that felt really good. So even though that was some planned time off, I still have my out of office on, it was a really fun way to just sort of dive back into the start of the new year, felt like I hit the ground running, which was great, especially after I was just still recovering from being sick for so long. So after that, it was time to really just get back into work mode. I always try to plan off some time right at the beginning of the year to go over a lot of other personal stuff we need to get done. So I know that at the beginning of January, I need to get caught up on all the bookkeeping for my business and my husband’s business. We have a lot of business license renewals for different counties and cities that my husband does work in for his business that we need to get those renewals come in right at the beginning of January.
And it takes some time to pull that information that they’re asking for altogether and go through everything. A lot of times we have other stuff for his business that’s just due in January, so I try to always block off good amount of time at the beginning of the year so that I have the available availability and space to be able to get that stuff done. So this year was no different. I did that. So going into January, I didn’t really get a chance just with everything going on with the kids being home and around the holidays and how busy everything always is and then getting sick. I never was able to really, like, sit down and, like, go through that big review that people are always talking about the end of the year, but I do have some pretty big goals for the year. I knew what I wanted to get done. I knew what I wanted to accomplish, and I’m just gonna let you know it did not go.
That to do list did not get done. Instead, I ended up diving feet first into this whole new email compliance requirements that Google and Yahoo were pushing out February 1st. I spent some time when we were in Mexico, emailing some clients and letting them know, like, this is happening. I have I created a very messy, very quick offer around helping them and was really diving into researching, finding out everything I could about the new requirements and what needed to be done for the different platforms, and it was a huge undertaking that was way more time consuming than what I had anticipated. I ended up in January selling 15 of those offers. It was, again, a very messy offer. I just had a quick checkout page and Thrivecart. I didn’t even set up a proper sales page or anything, and it just sort of snowballed into, again, this, like, hours of googling, watching trainings, webinars, talking with other friends who are creating the same offer for their clients, and just really taking something that in theory shouldn’t have been.
It didn’t seem like something that was gonna be overly complicated, and man, were we wrong. Some of the things I learned from that project and that offer was that it was really hard. No 2 clients had the same setup. No 2 platforms had the same setup. It was very slow and time consuming to get these done, and they would take multiple steps, multiple days. You had to wait for the changes to go into place called DNS propagation. Little techie, but it takes time for that to goes through, and so sometimes it’s just a waiting game, getting into clients’ different accounts for everything. I mean, two factor authentication is definitely it’s important.
It’s needed. It has its place. I recognize that, but, man, when you’re a good person trying to get into someone’s account and it’s just not letting you in, it was really frustrating. So what I ended up doing is setting up creating appointment time slots, the clients then as the 2nd step after they signed up for the offer, I asked them to then sign up for a time slot where I asked that they’d be available via email. Some of them I hopped on Zoom calls, so that we could just all at one time, I could get logged in to all their places. If I had questions, we could hop on a call. That made it that speeded sped up the process a little bit, but I still found I was just not able to streamline or simplify the process, which is you know, one of my core values is being able to simplify and streamline things in my business, and this was definitely not something not an offer I was able to do that with. There was a lot of roadblocks, a lot of hiccups that I would come across, and sometimes I spent hours and hours on chat support with the different hosting companies.
A lot of people lot of those chat supports were not very helpful, and it was it was really frustrating. It was January was definitely I I was very tired. I was just worn down by the end of the workday because it was just these email compliance. There was definitely a rush to get it done. It was mostly the last couple weeks of January that I was really pushing those out because I was taking time. Of course, at the beginning of the month, we were gone, and I had VIP day when I got back, and then it was time to really start sending out the offer to people. And as I was emailing my list more and as, I had a few clients who referred me out either to people they knew who needed it or sent out my offer to their entire email list. So I had a lot of new people, which was really great.
That seemed to work well as I made some really great new connections and have some new potential people that I can help. I found I saw some opportunities of ways I could help them in other ways outside of just email compliance, so one of my goals this year is to continue that relationship and see if I can help support them in their business in other ways. So some of my wins, my first win would be getting that year end bookkeeping done. As I mentioned, that’s one of my big projects in January that felt like a huge win to get that done fairly quickly. We met with our new CPA in February start of February, and it felt really good to have all our stuff done early. I was really intentional in 2023 about trying to keep up to date on the bookkeeping each month and not get behind as I typically do because it’s one of those things that I put on the back work burner. So it felt good to be able to get that stuff all accomplished and done early on. I was really proud of myself for creating the messy email compliance offer.
Again, something that I was not anticipating offering, but there was a need for it. This is something that it’s not a nice to have. It’s definitely a requirement for anyone who is sending out marketing emails, going forward. So really just creating that offer was felt like a huge win. It was on my goal list of things to get done in January and just make it messy, send it out, and and just get it done. Another big win for me in January was I got new website copy. The fantastic Nicole Kepic rewrote my copy for my website. I’m still waiting to get it up, but it’s coming.
In the last year, in 2023, I spent I did spend some time partway through the year reviewing how my year was going, what sorts of jobs I was booking, what clients I enjoyed working with, what types of projects I was really liking. And it typically all boils down to I really love offering VIP days more so than the traditional projects, which I still do as well and still find really fun. But the VIP days, they’re they get done fast. My clients get results real quick, and I love helping clients with the tech and setting up evergreen systems in their business so that they’re able to just not be doing so many manual admin tasks and so many things manually. So I still love building websites and being able to offer VIP days in a way that feels in alignment with my expertise has just been something I’m really trying to lean into more last year and now this year, and so it was time to update my copy to reflect this direction a little more instead of really focusing on the website side of things is focusing more on talking about the evergreen systems and funnel setups and tech and all that side that I help clients with so much, and I wasn’t talking about it as much. It wasn’t on it wasn’t the thing you found out about me on my website. So something else that I’ve really enjoyed about having these offers for clients is it’s a great opportunity for us to continue to work together. I don’t really like to just work with client once.
I love creating long term relationships where I get to continue to support their business and be a part of their journey as they continue to grow. That is such a good feeling for me. I love watching my clients get results and being able to help them with their business for years years. That’s just my favorite. So it works again really well. 1st step is we can do the website together, and then when they’re ready, we go back and can work on putting more of the email the emails into evergreen sequences, setting up more of the tech pieces, whether they’re creating a course and it’s supporting them in that piece of it or they just need some more freebie funnels, whatever it is, it’s being able to really support them and, like, as they continue to grow. So in January, I had 2 discovery calls for website projects, And when I do those, those are custom website projects that where I also create custom proposals, which I in reflecting on all this, I just have always take a really long time to do the custom proposals. I put it off, put it off.
I spend a lot of time overthinking it. And, I mean, I’ve been doing custom proposals for websites for over 5 years now, and they still feel so hard. So one of my goals I’m realizing for 2024 is to find a way a better way to do my proposals, a way that doesn’t feel so hard. So stay tuned. That will be getting added to the goal list for 2024. I also right at the end of the month, I had a call with a current maintenance client who was needing some changes to her website and some additional tech support, and so we have a we booked a call to talk about it and scheduled a mini project, which is on the calendar for February. And the mini projects are really great. It’s sort of like a mini VIP day, but a little simpler.
There’s a little less prep from the client side of things. It’s usually we’ve had a call. Sometimes it’s just an email, and we go over the pieces they need. It’s a 2 hour minimum, and then from there, I just bill in 30 minute increments. And it’s just a great way to go in and do some additional updates to webs to the website or sales funnels or whatever it is that my clients need. Another thing I did in January was I had 1 podcast interview for Be Bold Make Waves. Now I just love interviewing people. I’ve really enjoyed creating the podcast and creating new relationships with people, and I really wanted was looking forward to getting back into that in January.
And, my plan was to, at the start of January, be reaching out and scheduling new guests on the podcast. But to be honest, time just was not on my side. The email compliance offers took so much more time than I had anticipated, and I was just wiped out from them. So I was not able to do the outreach that I was anticipating and hoping to do, which is fine. I gave myself grace. Things don’t always go as planned, and that’s okay. So I did get 1 interview scheduled with a gal who we started chatting a bit in the DMs on Instagram, and I just thought she’d be a really good fit for the podcast, so I invited her on and I’m excited to share her story with you in the coming months.
Personal Wins
Next up are some of my personal wins.
So I read 6 books in January, which felt incredible. Now I am a huge reader, not business books. I love me some fiction, some fun suspense, mystery, some beach reads. And, typically, when I’m on vacation, I spend a lot of time reading, which I it really fills my cup. I enjoy it so much. Back when I lived in the Virgin Islands, I spent a lot of my downtime reading, and it was just my favorite thing. So I was really excited to be able to accomplish that. Back when the kids were little, when I first started having babies, I was not.
I was maybe reading 1 book a year, and so it’s been an intention of mine the last couple years to just get back into reading more. So really proud of myself that I was able to get 6 books read in January. I’m always looking for more recommendations of great books to read. I have some more on my list from some friends that I’ve been asking for recommendations. I got on Goodreads with some friends also that it again, it’s just been really fun to just get back into books more. Another really fun personal win is that at the end of December, my husband had mentioned that he wanted us to start hiking together on Fridays after we got the kids on the bus. And so January was the plan was as soon as we got back from Mexico, we were gonna start hiking. So we had 3 Fridays in January where we had available to go do hikes.
We did them every Friday of those 3 available in January, and that just felt so good and fun. I love hiking. I love being outside with the dog. We had one of my neighbor’s dogs. We even took one of the times spending that quality time with my husband. It’s just it’s been really nice for us to do that. So that was felt like a really huge win. Again, getting outside is always something I enjoy doing.
And then another thing we had going on on the personal level is planning my daughter’s 8th birthday party. So I have been trying to just let it be of us doing our normal. Typically, we go to the zoo in Santa Barbara for my daughter’s birthday every year, and it’s a fun family time. A lot of times, my mom will come down for the birthday, and it’s just pretty low key. But this year, my daughter wanted a friend birthday party, and it was our 1st year doing it. And, oh, man, it was a lot. We had to figure out where she wanted to do it at. She ended up doing it at, like, one of the jumpy places.
And trying to get the details sorted for that was an interesting experience. I found there that the company’s website wasn’t really helpful with explaining to someone who had not booked a party there before what was available. I called a number of times and talked with someone who again, the information wasn’t super clear. It was very confusing to me, and it would have been nice, if it’d been a little clearer. Again, I just it was an interesting experience for sure. And, like, their website had all these broken links, and I was like, man, you’re making this really hard. Like, the user experience just wasn’t that great, which bummed me out. But we got it all sorted.
I got invitations made. I got we got the place booked. I ordered a bunch of party favor favors. We ordered cake. My daughter was just so excited about this upcoming party that she had in February, and so a lot of planning was going into it in January, especially at the end of January. So those are my wins that I had in January. Now we’re gonna kinda talk a little bit about how my goals went. So my big picture goals for 2024 is to book 3 VIP days per month and 1 half day.
As I mentioned earlier, VIP days are something a way to work with clients that I really enjoy, and so getting those booked ahead of time on the calendar is, again, a huge goal for 2024 and working towards getting booked out more. Another goal is to continue to work on my email nurture sequence. I currently have a 3 month setup, and I’m still in the process of month 3, but just consistently emailing my list. I love setting up nurture sequences for clients, and I also want to practice what I preach. And I have I have ideas. I make lots of emails that get written in my head, and they just don’t always make it down on paper and into ActiveCampaign. So it’s on my list to just continue to work on that nurture sequence and continue to consistently show up and provide value for my email list. Another goal for 2024 is to schedule out 6 months of content in my social media, and that’s on Instagram and Facebook and also LinkedIn.
I use SocialBee to schedule out my social media, and I have back in at the end of last year, I think it’s actually in November of last year, I scheduled with Lizzie Matson of Wild Feather Co. To do one of her VIP days, VIP insta days, where she will create a it’s basically comes out to about 6 months of content, evergreen content that’s able to be repurposed and really excited to have that coming up this year. Another goal is to get some case studies put up on my website. I have just worked with some amazing clients. I have some just incredible testimonials and really being able to highlight their projects would is been on my to do list for a while. So my goal for 2024 is to get at least 4 of those up, and another goal is to sign some more maintenance clients. So I offer a WordPress protection package where I go in on WordPress sites weekly and do updates on plug ins, core updates, and just make sure everything is backed up, and I’m available to clients. There’s a lot of questions that come up from clients where they’ll email me questions and ask about, you know, weird emails they get or their host might send them something.
And so I do love to support clients in that way and just give them peace of mind that their website’s being taken care of. So I have 2 different plans that I offer clients, my basic and my premium. The premium does include an additional 30 minutes of support. So I would love to get some more clients on my maintenance plan because those are, a lot of times, just, again, the clients that I get to work with year after year, my long term clients, and they’re just my favorite. Some of my goals that are kinda happening in the background is just to continue to produce the weekly podcast. I took a much longer break from it over the holiday season than I had anticipated. Again, email compliance just took a lot more time than I had anticipated it taking. So getting back to just producing the weekly podcast and continue to do that throughout the year, create more blog post training content.
There’s a lot of ideas that I’ve gotten from doing market research, and I have a lot of knowledge that I can help share and so creating those posts, I know will be really helpful. And then continuing to connect with my network and grow my network. I am such a connector. I love reaching out and connecting with new people and really just continuing to support my other friends in my network. It’s been great for me and something I really enjoy doing. Then, also, this year, I joined a program AI to a 100 k with Britney Long. She was on the podcast back in episode 24, which I will make sure to link up in the show notes, but Britney is so smart and so incredibly helpful at all this new technology coming out with AI, chat GPT, all the different programs. I was first in her AI copy club, and then at the end of last year, she launched a new program, AI to a 100 k, which is a 1 year program, and I joined that, and so I’m working towards going through that program and utilizing AI in ways to help automate and simplify the back end of my business.
Okay. So those are some of my bigger goals for 2024. Now we’re just gonna talk specifically about my goals for January. So my goals were to book 3 VIP days. I booked none, which is okay because, again, give myself grace and know that I didn’t I didn’t do the outreach that needs to happen to book those days, and I know that. So that was the goal was to book the 3 VIP days. It did not happen, but I did accomplish goal number 2, which was launch and deliver the compliance email offer, which, again, was a very messy offer. I booked, I think it was around 15 different compliance offers that I created, in addition to also helping some friends out and other people trying to speak up in groups when people were needing help and just really be helpful around this whole email compliance update.
And so I did get that offer launched. Another goal for January was to do 2 outreach emails. I did a lot more than that because I was doing a lot of outreach to to people in my network and to current clients and past clients about the email compliance offer. So even though initially that goal was meant for reach do some outreach and just see if I can help support, it ended up being more geared towards the email compliance offer. Another goal for January was to just check-in with my past clients. I did that in the form of email compliance, and then my 5th goal was to complete my next email, my nurture sequence, which is a training email. That did not get done, but it’ll get pushed over to the February goal. So, now my goals for February is to create some more blog posts and training videos on email compliance.
As I was going through all these different setups, there was a lot I was learning and there was a lot of small pieces. I was seeing in a lot of groups the same questions coming up again and again, and it I wrote down ideas of I could make a quick training on this. I can make a quick training. Of course, a quick training doesn’t take you know, a 3 minute training video takes a lot longer to record and produce, and also making sure, you know, I’m blurring out sensitive information on my accounts and things like that. So that’s on the goal for February to work on getting those created. Another goal for February is to book 3 VIP days and then to go back to producing the podcast. So I have some episodes that I did record back in December and just, again, getting those produced. I was releasing rereleasing some of the most popular episodes during the holiday break, and so just getting back into producing new episodes and launching those out into the world.
January 2024 Numbers
Total revenue: $4,935
- Affiliate Income: $585
- Services: $4,349
Total Investments: $360
Net profit: $4,574
January Numbers in Review
Okay. Let’s get into the juicy bits. How much money my business made in January of 2024. My total revenue was $4,935. Now of that revenue, $585 was affiliate income. So these are different products, programs that I use, love, and recommend out to my audience and to friends, and then the remaining $4,349 was in services, so that would be the VIP day that I did at the beginning of the month. That would be paying the balance of it because when someone books with me, they have the option to either just pay a 50% deposit or pay the full amount. I did a mini project for a current client who was needing some updates to her site.
She had a book that when we had built her site last year, the book was in preorder mode, and now it was available and I was and she was needing me to go in, update the website, update some of the sales funnels, update some language in different places, and, get some graphics updated, and so just really going in and dialing that in for the full on book launch. And then then the other portion of that income comes from my WordPress protection plan. So, again, these are my monthly maintenance people, it’s my monthly reoccurring revenue, and then my total investments, I don’t like to call them expenses. This also comes from one of the coaches I work with is really just changing the way that we think about the money we spend on our business is not an expense. It’s an investment because it’s money putting in that helps my business grow. And my total investments were $360, which was felt really low for me, which is great. And that’s mostly made up of bank charges and fees, so that’s the PayPal, Stripe, and QuickBook fees, and then I had some office supplies, which is my monthly HP Insta Inc subscription, and then a software and subscription, and then my the Internet for the business. Of the software and subscriptions, I did have the annual renewal.
I personally like to pay for things annually instead of monthly because I like to see I like to get the discount and pay less for the monthly or I’m sorry, pay less for the annual instead of paying a little bit more to have it broken out monthly. That’s just how I do things. So it was annual renewal time for YNAB, and that’s You Need A Budget. And this was a program I started using back in, gosh, November of 2022 when I was at one of the retreats. We had done a little training in the group on it, and I got it set up and then, oh, man, I struggled with it. Like, I spent all last year struggling with it. I got on different calls with other friends who use it and was trying to get help and support and was just really struggling to wrap my brain around it. And then I think it was around August, I had reached out to one of my very close friends, Laura Sklar, Get Productive with G Suite.
I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about that a whole bunch. She also was on the podcast back at one of the very first episodes. I think she was back in episode 3, Getting Productive with Dara Sklar, creator of Get Productive with G Suite. Absolutely brilliant. Great friend of mine. Anyway, she is a YNAB user as well, and so we talked a little bit about it, and she told me gave me a game plan of just scrapping where where I was at and starting fresh, and for whatever reason doing that and with her support when I had some questions that came up, I was able to figure it out and really consistently get it going where I want it to, and I’ve really enjoyed using it now. I’ll put my affiliate link in the show notes if you it’s something you wanna check out. So I had the annual renewal for that came through and then also the annual payment for GoodSync, and this is a software that I signed up for last year in January when I was working on a on a photo management project with Maria Mezeck.
We talked in episode 26 of the podcast, and Maria is just such a delight. Back in January of 2023, we were working on a project together, and, I mean, I hit the ground running, getting things going, and then all of a sudden life started happening and that project got pushed to the side. So it’s definitely something that is also going back high on the 2024 priority list and goal list to get that finished up, and then hopefully I’ll be able to, remove that piece of software from my tech stack. I don’t believe that once the project is complete, I will still need to use it. With that, my total income for January of 2023 was $4,574. So in reflecting on this amount, I it’s not where I would like to be. I would obviously like to have it a lot higher than that, but for January, that’s pretty good for me, especially considering I do take a good amount of time off at the beginning of the year because the kids are off school, and, especially, I’m also taking time off at the end of in December, and so I’m not able to do as much outreach, get on as many calls, all the things that I know helps create more clients. I was really happy that my investments didn’t feel like it was too crazy amount.
I’m always trying to find ways to simplify the back end of my business, see if I can you know, I I do a lot of auditing of my tech tools and seeing is there something I can remove from my tech stack, am I still using it, and really just take I take a lot of time to evaluate that throughout the year. So I am hoping that I can continue to grow my revenue, and reach some of the goals that I have for 2024. Last year, I was around 5,000 on average in revenue for the month, and then after expenses, it was more closer to 32100 a month. So and, again, that’s just getting the average from all of last year. So I am happy looking at the numbers again that my investments didn’t seem too crazy. There wasn’t anything that I spent a lot on. I’ve really, again, been trying to get intentional in the last couple years of questioning before I buy something, you know, all those shiny objects that come through and really taking some time to sit and think on it of is this something that’s is this a shiny object, is this something that’s going to help move the needle forward, or is this something that’s going to distract me from the things I know I need to be doing? So that concludes this income report. I am excited about seeing what this year will bring and looking forward to my February goals and how that all comes through.
