Episode 027: Profit Report Intro - Part II

On this episode, I dive deeper into my 2020 income goals, and how I am personally planning to reign in expense to become a more profitable business.

If you’d like to get started digging into the cash flow in your business, check out this freebie.

If you really want to dig into write-offs, I’d also love for you to join the Tax Challenge happening next month to help you get all your docs ready for tax season. It’s totally free! And you’ll get my free small biz tax deduction guide.

Episode Transcript

Braden: (00:00)
Hello and welcome to episode 27 of the unfuck your biz podcast. As always, I am your host Braden and I am very excited to have you here for part two of the introduction to my profit report. Probably could've come up with the juice, your title for this, but you know I'm, I'm really going for uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Clearness I guess and the titles now so you know what you're going to get based on our title here. Before we dive in, I do want to remind you about the free tax challenge that's coming up. We will be starting it at the end of January, January 27 it will be a five day challenge in which I will help you through video lessons each day and Q and A's. Get all of your bank records and tax documents gathered, your all of your transactions separated between business and personal.

Braden: (00:53)
We'll go through all of the common small business deduction deductions you need to be aware of in order to maximize those deductions and to minimize your taxes. We're going to talk about 10 99 and then also I will provide you with some resources to do your own bookkeeping for 2019 so the goal with this one week challenge is at the end of the challenge, you will be fully prepared to either hand off your books to a professional to do your tax return, or you will actually be ready to sit down and do your own tax return online without having to spend an entire day looking all this stuff up. Once all your books are nice and clean and tidy, and those people can do their tax return in about two hours, fingers crossed. Okay, so that is the challenge. You can go to unfuck, your biz.com to get the signup page or you can also go to Braden drake.com forward slash tax challenge.

Braden: (01:49)
Okay, so let's dig in. I have made a very detailed spreadsheet of my goal income projections for 2020 and what I'm going to do is I'm kind of looking at that and I'm going to share with you my revenue goal and my breakdown for how I'm going to get there. And this isn't really so much a guide for how all of you can do the same, but you can, that didn't make any sense. My goodness. Okay, so I'm not going to really be teaching you how to do a revenue breakdown. It's more of I'm showing you how I've done mine and then you can kind of use that as a format to dig into your goal numbers for 2020 as well. Then shoot me a message on Instagram, let me know how it works. Alrighty. So my 2020 goal for my law firm, that's all of my one-on-one services is to gross around $30,000 so that's not a ton.

Braden: (02:45)
Obviously it's not. Especially for a law firm, not a ton of money. It's about three fourths of what I did this year in 2019 so I'm actually planning on making a little bit less in my law firm this year in 2020 rather than I did in 2019 and the reason why is because I'm going to be shifting a lot of the focus onto the education side of my business, which is technically where this podcast lives and exists. So in my education business, I have four primary revenue streams. So if you didn't already know, I sell contract templates. So if you need a contract template, you can go grab one. I also have a membership. So this is my entry level membership. I am going to be inviting all of you to join me over the next few months. I launched this and may of 2019 and currently have 25 members and the membership and it is called the fundamentals with the Capitol.

Braden: (03:38)
Fun, fun, dentals super fun, right? And in the intro membership we go through, I call them the layers of protection for your business with videos and trainings on each of those. And then we do monthly Q and A's. I also have a signature course that will launch twice in 2020 called unfuck your biz, same title as the podcast and then an alumni only membership that's only open to people who complete that course, which is called unfucked. Cool. The contracts are available all year round and fundamentals is always open. So those two things you can get grab, join whenever you want. Uh, the unfuck, your biz signature course is only open twice a year, like I mentioned. And it is a very robust program. So let me give you a little bit of a breakdown of how this all works. The goal of fundamentals. So in my law firm, I offer monthly outside counsel services.

Braden: (04:39)
So we're all familiar with insight in house counsel, probably large companies have their own attorneys that they pay full time salaries to answer any questions they have, draft and review contracts, all that kind of stuff. Smaller businesses, you know, you're not going to pay to have a salary to attorney. That just doesn't make sense. So now some law firms offer services called outside counsel where you pay a monthly fee to have a go to attorney to look at documents, answer questions, that sort of thing. So I provide that service in my law firm. It started at $300 a month. Now it is $500 a month. But I realized a lot of people have simple questions so it can be answered, you know, in a Facebook message and a text message on a phone call in like under two minutes. And they do not want to have to rely on garbage information from third parties on Facebook and on Google and have to do that research.

Braden: (05:33)
So the purpose of the membership is to give you a level of support like you would find in a one-on-one attorney or tax professional relationship, but more in an education setting with another group of business owners. So that is the ideal, uh, the idea of fundamentals. It's great for newbie business owners who really don't know what they don't know. And it's also really good for experienced business owners who've already kind of checked most of the boxes but need a GoTo resource to ask questions when they come up. So fundamentals is $39 a month and that is really kind of like my, my, my primary primary thing I got going on the course is kind of the next step. So unfuck your business, the next step, past fundamentals, you've got the basics set up, you kind of know what you need to do, uh, you've spot checked what you've done haven't done and now you've really decided that you want to go all in and you need a full system, you need to update your contract, you need to implement a cashflow management system, you're ready to file and form your LLC, maybe do your S-corp, get some more help with bookkeeping and taxes and contractors and 10 90 nines we cover all of that and unfuck your business.

Braden: (06:44)
So those are really kind of the two levels of offers we have. And that's it. So contract templates, membership course, and then they alumni only course, which you don't need to know a whole lot about unless you are an alumni. So right now as I mentioned, I have about 25 rad entrepreneurs and fundamentals and my goal is to grow this membership to around 100 people in the program by the end of the year. So I'm really hoping I'll be able to help about a hundred of you and the membership this year. Uh, unfuck your biz, the course is a $1,500 program that we'll be launching again in the spring. And my plan for that this year is to dabble with some affiliate marketing, maybe do some ads, something like that. And I would love to get, um, about 60 to 70 business owners to sign up for that so that I can help them on their business.

Braden: (07:44)
So that's the game plan. Uh, all of these offerings and the streamlined system and progression is what I have been working on a really hard the past three months in my mastermind. And it's taken a lot of discipline for me because I am an action taker. I like to have an idea and run with it. But I've had to really sit, think process about how all of these things are going to work together. So when you break down the math on these different programs and added to my law firm goal, the total is about $150,000 that's my gross revenue goal for 2020 and that's, that's a pretty big goal. So I want to double my revenue in 2020 without significantly increasing expenses. I shared and part one of this kind of series that my goal is to do this with under 30% expenses and be relatively lean.

Braden: (08:38)
If I could get to 20% that would be even better. So the trick is, and the key is how can we streamline our businesses to make more money and increase our profit margin, which will then in turn make our expenses be a lower percentage of our overall gross revenue. So I'm going to be working towards this. I've already cut some expenses as I start to increase these passive income revenue streams. Although I mean none of them are really passive. The more members and students I have. Obviously the more questions I'm answering, all that kind of stuff, but the more we can kind of streamline the processes then the lower the expenses are going to be. So my game plan is to check in with you all about once per month to let you know how I'm progressing towards these goals and I'm going to break them down in the show notes for you as well.

Braden: (09:30)
So I'm going to summarize, uh, kind of my goals for my business in the show notes so you can go check them all out there. It might be a little bit easier for you to conceptualize the numbers. And also I'd really like to challenge you to go through a somewhat similar exercise. I talked to a lot of business owners who have a hard time projecting income and their business, but you know, if you have an event based business, if you're a wedding photographer, it's not all that complicated to project based on your average packet rate, your average package, excuse me, price for your clients and how many weddings you plan to shoot. You know, if your average is $300 and you're going to shoot 20 weddings, that's Oh boy, $60,000 gross. Right? So you can kind of do a breakdown like that if you work in graphic design, if you're a business coach, that sort of thing, a little bit harder to project, but you can look at last year's revenue and project based on your percentage increase, you anticipate you can get more into the weeds and look at the seasonality of your business.

Braden: (10:33)
So when do you plan on making more money? I know for me it's been pretty surprising because tax season obviously is always really big and my business. But I found that Q4 for whatever reason, like people are ready to spend money and like get shit done and Q4 so October, November, December, maybe it's because it's when a lot of creatives are having their down season so they have more time to work on legal and tax stuff. Or maybe it's just because everyone's already shopping for Christmas, so they're just ready to spend money or they're ready to get their tax deductions before the end of the year. It could be all those reasons, but those tend to be my busiest times. Q one and Q four which happens back to back. So really I have six months of peak and then six months that are a little bit more chill. So think about that, the seasonality of your business.

Braden: (11:22)
Look at last year's income, see if you can make projections and then also break it down by offer. So do you do full website design plus some social media? Is that design plus, you know just like logo design and if so, how many of those types of clients can you take each month? How many leads do you have? What are your conversions on those leads? I should do a whole episode on this and bring it to bring in someone that could actually teach it. But my challenge for you would be after you finished this podcast episode, which will be here shortly cause I'm almost done. Then take a half an hour or an hour with a pen and a sheet of paper and think about this for 2020 and then ask yourself what improvements can be made and what expenses can be cut. My last tip for you, kind of rambling now, but my last tip for you would be to do this outside of where you normally work.

Braden: (12:18)
So anytime I need to do a lot of thinking, I need to brainstorm. I always get out of the house. I work in a home office. So I like to go, I'll go sit on the beach with a notebook, I'll go to a coffee shop, I'll go sit in the park. Anything like that because, and you guys, I'm no scientist should be obvious, but I heard this, I don't even know on a podcast, someone speaking on a stage, I don't remember, but someone talked about how when you are in more wide open spaces and actually widens up your thought patterns and you are able to get better ideas. So go out in the open, sit in a field, that sort of thing. It's going to help you. And then also if you go somewhere that's different than where you work every day, it really helps get your creative juices flowing.

Braden: (13:02)
I wish I could talk about that from a more technical aspect, but I can't. So that's just my tip. You can Google it more if you want, but uh, I hope this episode was informative for you. I know it's a lot of just me talking about my business, but as I do my profit reports, it's going to be helpful for you to understand what it is that I'm doing this year so that we can kind of keep up to speed. Again, before we close out, reminder, go sign up for the tax challenge. I would love for all of you to join me. I promise. Even if you think you have it all covered, you're going to love the lessons on tax deduction so it will be well worth your time. A lot of the content that's going to be in this challenge is content that normally you could only get through being in one of my paid programs.

Braden: (13:47)
So it will be a really great opportunity and you can sign up now through the 24th so to unfuck your biz.com check it out. As always, if you enjoyed the episode, make sure to like subscribe, share, um, hop on Instagram, post the Instagram story, let all your friends know. And also you can join our Facebook group. So if you have listened to all of our Tuesday episodes, you know that I answer questions from the Facebook group every Tuesday. So if you have a question, hop on in there and let me know and I hope that you have a wonderful day and I will see you on the next episode.