How I earned $35,847.69 Last Month (Income Report)
Today, I'm going to be bringing you inside my QuickBooks account, and sharing with you exactly what is on my Income Report. I want to share:
How much money we made last month
Where that money came from
Which different products we were selling
What different sources of revenue streams of revenue we had and how much each of them were
All of our major expenses
Our profit margin
We're going to get really nitty gritty into the numbers of my Income Report today.
Profit and Loss
My profit and loss statement starts out with our different sources of income in the business, then progresses on to the expenses, and then the profit margin.
First, we have discounts given. That's not very exciting and that just means that we'd knocked a few dollars off a few products throughout the month, so that's a little bit less money we made.
Other Income
Then the next thing we have is the first major source of income, and it is affiliate program income. Last month, I earned $1,488 in affiliate income. This is a source of income that varies a lot from one month to the next; depending on what promotions our affiliates are running and how we're participating in those. I earn a minimum of about $1,000 per month from affiliate marketing and a maximum of about $6,000.
The next major source of income is YouTube. YouTube ad revenue is $6,207.68. That's actually a little bit up, we've been hanging out closer to the $5,000 mark for the past several months. It's cool to see that income number is up! My views were not especially up so I think that as we are approaching Christmas, ads are probably starting to pay a little bit more. You can see those numbers together equal a bit shy of $8,000 and this is our total other income. This is all the income that we earned, not from selling our own products.
Product Sales
So now we get into our own products that we sold. We have a few products that we sold just a small amount of, but the ones that made up the bulk of the revenue we brought in were Creator Fast Track, Startup Society, and the Mastermind.
We sold a bit over $11,000 of Creator Fast Track. I love that this is doing so well because Creator Fast Track is one of the best programs we have ever created and the funnel is also working really well. It's converting really well and it's doing better and better every month, which is rare and awesome.
The other major source of revenue here was Startup Society membership bringing in almost $12,000. This is our most consistent source of revenue by far because it is a membership program, where I get paid consistently each month for the content we create for the startup society members.
Then we've got one other source of income here, which is the Mastermind bringing in $4,000 last month.
Altogether, in September, we earned $35,847.69. That's just a little short of $36,000 and this is quite on par with the baseline. I rarely earn less than $30,000 a month these days so that $35,000 baseline is quite typical.
On the months that we launch, we often earn around $45,000 or $55,000. However, $35,000 is very typical for what I'm earning in a month these days.
Expenses
My expenses vary a fair amount from one month to the next but there are a lot of things that are quite consistent. The first thing we have is payment processing fees for PayPal and for Stripe, totaling just shy of $1,200.
This is directly proportionate to how much product we sell. If we sell more products and our payment processing fees are higher. It's actually better when that number is higher because it means that we have sold more products.
Then the next category is continuing education and training. It fluctuates a lot from one month to the next depending on whether maybe I decided to attend a business conference or purchase a new course or something like that. Last month, I didn't buy anything new, so these were just a few subscriptions that I have.
Next, we have graphic design expenses of $675. This is the retainer I pay to our graphic designer that's on our team.
Then the next category is essentially software that runs the business. It was $867 last month and this is kind of deceptively low because I pay for a lot of the software on annual subscriptions. That means some months, this number is way higher. I might be paying $1,000 or more for one piece of software that we use throughout the year. We're paying for SamCart, Google Storage, Premiere Pro, and things like that. Also, QuickBooks, Easy Webinar, Squarespace, and Toggle.
These are all just normal things that we are paying for every month. I don't think any one of these were annual subscriptions so $867 is pretty much as low as this number gets.
Then we have podcast expenses. The podcast expenses were about $1,500, and this is primarily a payment to the agency, Yellow House Media, that runs my podcast. There are also a few pieces of software here that we use to manage the podcast.
Payroll
Then we come to payroll. Payroll is the money that you're paying your employees. As of now, my company only has one employee, it's me, I have a team, but they're all contractors.
I'm not going to get into in this video why I structured the company that way, but it just makes the most financial sense for my business. I'm the only employee, I get paid a wage or a salary, and that right now is $4,700, and then I have to pay payroll taxes, both federal payroll taxes and state payroll taxes on my wages, which end up totaling around $360. I can tell that there's something a little bit off with these books right now because I know I pay more in state payroll taxes than $1.29 a month, but I'm guessing that payment just hasn't gone through yet, which is why that is so low.
My salary costs me $5,000, I get paid $4,700, and then I also get the profits for my company. Those are owner's draw instead of my actual wages. More on that in just a minute.
The next category is the biggest, and that is subcontractors. Last month, I paid about $13,000 for the subcontractors that work in my business. This was for my business manager, otherwise known as my ops manager, a couple of Virtual Assistant's that run my customer service, a video editor, and a couple of other VA's that do some miscellaneous work for us. Altogether $13,000.
The very last line item is telephone and internet for $245. This was for my business phone, as well as the internet that fuels my business. Altogether, the expenses for last month were $22,600.
That number varies a fair amount from month to month, around $20,000 to $25,000 is pretty typical.
At the bottom is my profit margin. The profit that we earned last month was $13,247. However, you have to keep in mind that I would also consider the wages that I earned to be part of the profit. Technically, they are not, but when I'm thinking about how much money my business made for me, I certainly include those two things together. If you add those two numbers together, then you'd have $13,000 plus about $5,000. Then, $18,000 is how much money my business made me last month.
If we do a little bit of math here, we can figure out what my profit margin was. My technical profit margin would be $13,247 divided by the total revenue of 35,847.
My profit margin was 37% before my wages and 50% after my wages.
It's safe to say that the work that I do brings in a certain amount of money, and then I typically have to spend about half that money to keep growing my business. Full disclosure here, business expenses, even for an online business, can be significant, and they often are. They don't have to be though.
Right now, I'm really focused on growing and scaling my company. It's something that I've been working on from day one. I'm actively investing in my business and working on scaling it. That is why I'm spending about 50% of our revenue.
However, I could sit back and just let my business run as is and not try to aggressively scale it. If I did that, I could easily cut my expenses by at least half, which would mean that our profit margin, my take home would be about 75%.
If I did that, I also would be able to dramatically cut my working hours because a lot of the work that I do is focused on working on growing the business. Right now, I work 20 to 25 hours a week. This means that I would be earning significantly more while working a whole lot less effectively, earning way more per hour, which is cool to think about.
But I am way too excited about growing my company, it is just a passion of mine. I want to be expanding so that we can be sharing the products we've created with more and more customers helping more and more people to start and grow their online businesses is something that lights me up and something that I'm very passionate about.
Even though I can look at the numbers and see that I could earn a lot more and work a lot less if I wasn't focused on growth, I know that I would not be nearly as satisfied with the work that I'm doing.
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