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Over the past few months, I’ve been trialing these new posts – a behind-the-scenes look at business and life. If you missed any of the previous posts, you can read the August edition here and the September edition here.

This is totally inspired by the wonderful Ruth. I absolutely love reading her behind-the-scenes posts and the transparency she brings through them. More and more recently I’ve been feeling called to share the full business owner life with people – I try to share snippets on Instagram but, let’s face it, I’m rubbish at posting consistently!

These behind-the-scenes/monthly reviews are going to be a mixture of income, regular expenses, who I’ve hired, what investments I’ve made, what’s been happening outside of the biz and, most importantly, how I’ve been feeling about things…because we all know that the numbers don’t actually mean anything in terms of how we feel!

This one is coming to you a little later than usual as we took a family holiday/vaca at the start of November and I wasn’t organised enough to get this done before we went away!

So, let’s get into it…

Income

I’ll start with income as I know that’s probably why you’re here 😉. These are the numbers that hit my bank account (so after PayPal fees, conversion fees etc. but before expenses, taxes etc.)

I’m a big fan of having multiple income streams in my business. As you’ll see from the numbers below, most of my income comes from 1:1 clients at the moment. Over the next few months, I’m going to be focusing more on “passive” income streams and affiliate marketing/income.

1:1 CLIENT WORK: £7,200 (about $9,770)

Each month varies quite a bit depending on a) what is going on for my clients and how much support they need, and b) when the invoices are paid! I send invoices on the last day of the month for most clients and sometimes they pay on the same day, sometimes it’s a few days later but this makes a difference in terms of which month the money hits my bank account!

This is about £300 less than last month. The difference is due to the dates that clients paid me.

October was another really busy month – some of my highlights included:

  • Launching Amanda Jyll’s new website – take a peek at it here.
  • Sarah Lidwell-Durnin’s Resilient CEO quiz – if you haven’t taken it, go do that now!
  • Starting prep for Lizzy’s Christmas Party – there are some AMAZING submissions, it’s so fun looking at them as they come in
  • Celebrating Tonia G’s book launch 🎉🎉🎉

DIGITAL PRODUCTS: £1,940 (about $2,630)

The previous two months were £200 so this is a huge jump! There are a couple of things that contributed to this. Firstly, I actually shared my stuff! I posted on social media and emailed my list about various PLTs and offers happening in October and guess what? People bought things! Who knew 🤷‍♀️

Secondly, I was in two different bundle-type thingies and made quite a few sales of order bumps (more details on these two bundles below)

This is made up of sales of the following:

I’ll be honest, I’m pretty pleased with this!

AFFILIATE INCOME: £40 (about $54)

I did absolutely zero affiliate marketing stuff in October so this isn’t at alllllll surprising!

🎉🎉 BIG MILESTONE 🎉🎉

In October, we passed our $100,000 mark for this calendar year (i.e. income since January).

This actually came with a lot of mixed feelings that I’ve been exploring with my coach, Hannah. I was reluctant to celebrate it because I’ve always been so against this idea that 6 figures = successful and it certainly isn’t my definition of success. I’m also the kind of person who hits a goal or milestone and then immediately moves on to the next thing without taking a moment to celebrate.

BUT, after chatting things through with Hannah, I’ve realised that just because 6 figures isn’t my definition of success, it’s still a big milestone in my business and that should be celebrated! So YAY ME!

What I’ve been working on

1. Updating Fully Booked Without Pitching

I ran Fully Booked Without Pitching as a live workshop back in June. Since then, I’ve chopped it up into smaller lessons and added a few extra resources but at the start of October I decided that it was time for a proper overhaul.

I’ve now added lots of new lessons, tech tutorials and templates PLUS all of the videos now have closed captions and written notes AND you can get them as a podcast so you can listen to the lessons on the go!

You can check out the full details of the course here.

2. Create Your Simple Client Onboarding System

I ran a Paid Live Training on the 14th October on how to create a simple client onboarding system for your service-based business. It was hands down the most fun I’ve had delivering a live training!

The training was supposed to be 60 minutes with time for a live Q&A session too but it ran to just over 2 hours 🙈

I started promoting the training the week before the live and sold 12 spots (£484 / $658) which I was really happy with. I’m in the process of chopping up the training and turning it into a self-study course which should be ready to enrol in very soon!

If you’re interested in adding paid live trainings to your business, I highly recommend Lizzy’s course The Quickstart Guide to Profitable Live Trainings – honestly, it’s a TOTAL gamechanger.

3. Back to Business Bundle

In October I was a contributor to Kate Doster’s Back to Business Bundle. Between 4th and 12th of October, the bundle was being promoted and people were able to sign up to over $3,000’s worth of business goodies completely free.

This was an amazing opportunity for me and my biz! During the course of the bundle I added 1,437 new subscribers to my email list (which also means 1,437 new students enrolling in Organise & Grow Your Biz with a Team) and made £589 / $800 in sales from the $27 tripwire offer I had set up.

4. Online Business Playground Summit

October was also the month of Lizzy’s Online Business Playground Summit. I submitted my Fully Booked Without Pitching course to her Ultimate Play Pass and had 107 sign ups/enrollments. I also made $90 in sales from the order bump on my checkout.

Another successful collaboration for the books! 🎉🎉🎉

Note: I know that offering your products up for free might feel counter-intuitive but I really do think opportunities like these are great for your business. For both the Back to Business Bundle and the Online Business Playground Ultimate Play Pass, I submitted products that already existed – I had to do a couple of hours work TOTAL to make sure that the tech was set up so that people could access the courses for free and that they were tagged properly to enable me to check stats. And that’s it. A couple of hours work and I now have 1,544 people in my world who weren’t there before! AND I made almost $900 in sales of the tripwire and order bump.

Fun things…

I love learning new stuff, trying out new tools, and generally exploring what other business owners are offering right now! Most months I sign up for something new!

1. Learn+ from ThriveCart

I’ll be honest…I thought I’d tried lots of new things in October but it turns out, the only thing I bought was the Learn+ addon/upgrade on my ThriveCart account.

I’ve had a quick look at the Learn+ features and I’m excited to fully explore the possibilities!

Expenses

NEW INVESTMENTS: £144 (about $195)

E.g. courses, templates, etc. (one-off payments)

Just the Learn+ upgrade this month!

REGULAR/RECURRING EXPENSES: £680 (about $500)

Includes tech tools, recurring fees, memberships, etc.

TEAM: £305 (about $425)

Includes accountant and 10 hours of VA support.

Tech I used

  • WordPress + Elementor (website, sales pages etc.)
  • ConvertKit (for sending emails, creating sign-up forms, delivering freebies, etc.)
  • ConvertBox (for setting up popups on my website – there’s so much more I can do with this but I’ve not explored it yet!)
  • ThriveCart (for my checkouts and running my affiliate programme)
  • MemberVault (for hosting courses)
  • Voxer (for running Voxer Office Hours and chatting with clients)
  • SmartMockups (for creating mockups of courses, templates, etc.)
  • Asana (for keeping everything organised. If you’re interested in exploring the power of Asana, check out Organise and Grow Your Biz with Asana here.)
  • Otter.ai (for transcribing client voice notes and calls, creating closed captions for videos, etc.)
  • Vimeo (for hosting videos for courses)
  • Dubsado (for invoicing clients, managing client contracts, etc.)
  • Canva (for creating graphics, PDFs, and more!)

Numbers

Instagram: 1,002 followers (+40)
FB Group: 251 members (+54)
Pinterest: 352 followers, 3.5k monthly views (-9, +300)
Email Subscribers: 2,235 (+1,250)
Income: £9,180 / $12,454 (+£1,230 / $1,639)

Other businesses

Absolutely nothing to report on these for October other than having a whole bunch of ideas that I don’t have time work on 🤣🤣🤣

Personal life stuff

I LOVE autumn – even more so now we have Ella.

October was jam-packed full of trips to pumpkin patches, dressing up, and generally having spooky fun! I’m pretty sure I took at least one full day off each week throughout October (which is unheard of!)

I think that just about wraps up October! I’ve had so much fun writing this so keep your eyes peeled for another one next month!