2023 Year in Review.
Typo Disclaimer: I had to kind of rush this blog post. There will be typos. I can’t be bothered. We have a couple dozen new clients to work with 🙌 so I had to expedite this to help them.
How does one write a year-in-review? Where does one even begin? 365 days? 525,600 minutes. How do you measure, measure a year?
Well numbers and metrics I guess. But I want to start with a bit of a recap. Here’s graph showing the revenue growth of this lil’ baby of mine.
We had a hiccup in 2021, which I like to call the COVID hangover year. My anecdotal evidence tells me that many folks experienced the same thing. Otherwise, it’s been steady, year-to-year growth.
A QUICK RECAP OF 2022
2022 was a big year in terms of changes to the business and figuring out what worked. We launched the Contract Club in January of 2022. It took off faster and generated an organic marketing buzz that I hadn’t experienced with any other offers.
More than 1,000 folks joined the Club that year.
We also launched Profit Rx (technically in November 2021), and grew it into a six figure membership teaching all the stuff our prior group coaching program Unf*ck Your Biz covered.
I also had my first stage speaking gig at Wedding MBA and hired our first employee, and then a few more. This really set us up for the growth we had in 2023.
I had an interview with my fabulous friend Claire Pelletreau. Check that out here.
What was fun was that I shared my revenue goal for the year was $250,000 with better and best goals of $275,000 and $300,000.
We finished up close to $270,000.
Love that.
A QUICK RECAP OF 2023
The big change was moving from a membership back to the group program Unf*ck Your Biz. I found the membership was a fantastic revenue generator, but not as great at getting client results. In other words, the business was generating money from the monthly payments, but the clients weren’t doing the work in the program. And that just didn’t sit well with me.
Ultimately, what folks needed most was accountability. This influenced the pivot back into a group coaching program/course. That worked well, but we decided to take things a step further and just turn this thing into a done-for-you, signature, one-on-one service because what’s better than keeping you accountable? Answer: doing the work for you.
We also continued to promote the Contract Club and brought in about 700 new club goers. We experimented with some other low-ticket, high-value solutions hoping one would prove as fruitful and popular as the Club. They did like, ok, but not the same. We’re scrapping those moving forward.
We’ve got more posts
Want to learn more about sales tax? Check out this podcast episode: Getting Started with Sales Tax.
HOW I LOOK AT PROFIT
These posts are always a good time to reshare how I look at the numbers. I’ll drop some knowledge lifted from my book now. Generally speaking, a profit and loss will look like this:
We could stop there, but I add a couple extra lines. Take a look:
In an S Corp, owners put themselves on payroll and get a check just like they would if they were an employee of any other company. Those checks, the owner’s salary, are a business deduction. The owner gets a W-2 to report the income, and the business deducts the payments as an expense.
Some folks call the owner profit number their profit, while other folks would refer to the bottom number when they say profit. My extra lines are the P&L are designed to give us uniform language and fix this issue. We don’t include the owner’s salary with the rest of our expenses. And note that when I say “salary,” I always mean salary run through payroll subject to tax withholdings. If you are simply transferring money from one bank to another on your own, that’s not salary. I’ll call that type of payment owner payments or distributions.
The “owner’s profit” is the profit before deducting salary. We then have the owner’s salary expense. Owner’s profit minus owner’s salary is business profit. If you don’t run payroll, your owner profit and business profit would be the same because salary would be $0.
We can also explain this in terms of a pie. For example:
Profit here is business profit, the amount after the salary. Each slice has a different tax treatment. Expenses are taxed at 0% because they get deducted from our income. Salary is subject to both income and self-employment taxes. Profit is subject only to income tax and not self-employment taxes.
I use this profit pie visual in my presentations on S corps because it gives such a clear picture of how S corps are taxed. It’s also a powerful tool for your own business finances, which is why we include a profit pie in our bookkeeping template.
TYPICAL EXPENSES
I won’t go through every expense each month. That’d get redundant and boring. Instead, I want to share here a screenshot from my books. You can see my baselines for the typical expenses we have. Through the months, I’ll note any outliers.
As you can see “team” was by far the biggest expense other than owner wages, which was, if you add the net paid and taxes, $57,458. About half of the marketing budget went to one large event we sponsored. A big chunk of the “other” expenses were flights and hotels for conferences.
One big goal in 2024 is actually to increase the affiliate expense because almost every dollar paid to affiliates means a 2-4 times ROI in revenue. If you’d like to become an affiliate and get monthly payments, join our program here.
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MONTH-BY-MONTH RECAP
This section might be overkill, but it’s helpful for me, so I figure why not hit publish? Each month on the podcast, I share projections for the upcoming month and the actual figures from the prior month. Here, I’ll share those numbers along with what worked and didn’t.
January
This month I didn’t really share my revenue projections, but I did layout my three big goals for the year, which were:
To consistently hit $20,000 in monthly revenue. Specifically, start hitting this toward the end of Q2.
Get to $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue by year-end.
Get expenses under 35%.
The first goal was the only one I really stuck to. We tossed goal two out the window when we moved from our membership back to a group program for our core offer. And, regarding number three, I um, just spent a lot of money.
It was our lowest revenue month of the year, $12,600. It was also fairly low profit month due to law firm reopening plans…
February
February was a big month. After a couple years of limited 1-on-1 services, and closing my prior business, Braden Drake Law, I decided to reopen the doors with a boom. The Not-Your-Average Law Firm was born. We kicked it off with an open house zoom call, and onboarded new clients into Legal Rx, our monthly legal subscription.
We also promoted a bundle this month where folks could get three of our $30 courses for $75. We had 23 sales of the bundle. That along with 63 Contract Club sales is what made up the majority of low ticket sales.
Profit for the month was $11,000. $3,200 went to team, which is a combination of employee and contractor expenses. That’s pretty average as was all other expense totals this month. I had $690 outlier expense under office expenses.
March
This month had great revenue. The law firm launched at the end of February, so much of this was enrolling new clients eager to book legal and tax services. Expenses were routine, $3,400 to team, $700 to affiliates, and $360 to monthly, recurring expenses.
This also was the peak of our Profit Rx monthly recurring revenue. You will notice a steady decline in that moving forward. We stopped promoting it. It took me most the year to figure out how I wanted to restructure that program for better client results. I finally cracked the code in Q4 and hope to see the numbers climb back up to this through 2024.
Not a lot to share here. Owner profit $19,668, 73%, which is a number I may never see again. It was the highest profit month of the year. Revenue spiked for tax season, but expenses stayed low. Love that.
April
My regular podcast listeners ask how I’ve gotten good at revenue projections. I’ve got two answers.
One, it’s a muscle. You gotta exercise it. At a certain point, you intuitively know when slow and busy seasons are. For some businesses it’s quite obvious. Not so much for others. Regardless, you gain a 6th sense about it. As you look at your numbers more and more, you strengthen that sense.
Two, I’m just assuming certain things will remain constant. If you look at Profit Rx, Legal Stuff, and Tax Stuff, you’ll see my projections are simply the “actuals” from the prior month. A lot of these are recurring payments. That makes things simpler.
Despite that, you can see that the numbers were pretty off this month despite me getting the total pretty close. Our membership, Profit Rx, was one of the bigger discrepancies here. That was due to many payments going through at the end of the month, and not hitting the bank account until after a weekend technically then in the following month. This is pretty common.
The biggest discrepancy here percentage-wise was book sales. I intended to launch the new edition of the book, but it wasn’t quite ready yet. Profit Rx also took a dip as we began to transition into Unf*ck Your Biz.
On the flip side, we brought in more last-minute tax clients than expected.
Advertising expenses were higher than normal this month. I paid some expenses for DragCon in LA to network and made a payment to my friends at Conference Confident as a sponsor. That expenses pops up again in the next couple months. We also paid about $1,250 in trademark filing fees on behalf of clients.
May
This month we resurrected and launched Unf*ck Your Biz. This was my signature course and group-coaching program. I converted it into the Profit Rx monthly member in late 2021. Ultimately, folks weren’t getting as far through the curriculum in a membership model, so we moved it back into a more cohort-based model.
8 folks from Profit Rx rolled into UYB. They paid the difference between the cost of UYB and how much they'd already paid for UYB so they could get access to the live coaching. We had 14 additional new students join most on a payment plan. The cost was $1,000 total.
Now, for a look at the expenses. My big expenses of the month were:
$3,300 to team
$2,000 to marketing (Facebook ads and DragCon. I spent about $1,000 to make $3,000 on Facebook ads so not too shabby.)
$2,500 to mostly travel (to Austin for Kajabi and LA for DragCon).
Total expenses (not including my salary): $9,900 (some of the big expenses, like the hotel for DragCon, were paid in April.
June
In June, attended the Kajabi summit in Austin, Texas. This was a last-minute networking/inspiration conference. There, I mapped out a new evergreen/nurture sequence for our signature program and got a chance to network with and meet some awesome new business friends.
Meanwhile, my team worked on some extra projects, which led to higher than average payroll expenses.
Team expenses were $7,017, about double the average. We also had $1,183 in affiliate payouts. Those two combined with travel expenses increased our typical expense spend.
I WROTE A WHOLE-ASS BOOK, AND
I never thought people would be jazzed about reading a book on law in tax, but the reviews are in! And most read something like "I read this whole book, and I didn't hate it, and now I know stuff.
But for real, it walks you through my full "Unf*ck Your Biz Framework" - something I created for my first course, which was $2,000 and saw over 70 graduates - and is like the A to Z guide to get you started.
UNF*CK YOUR BIZ, THE BOOK -
UNF*CK YOUR BIZ, THE BOOK -
“I never thought I would say I enjoyed reading a book on taxes, but I definitely did. Braden’s wit and spunk made this, often times, traumatic topic of taxes, actually really fun and enjoyable. He put into perspective the proper ways of filing your taxes, as well as covering if you should become an LLC, S Corp or sole proprietor, for small business owners. It was jam packed with knowledge and key tips that I have already put into effect in my own business! I’m so thankful that Braden has decided to share his knowledge and help us small business owners. Highly, highly recommend reading this book and getting your legal stuff figured out!”
- Kelsey, Owner of Kelsey Rae Designs
July
Myself and my team observed our summer company quiet weeks the first two weeks of July. I came back feeling refreshed and recharged.
In July, we wrapped up our Spring/Summer cohort of Unf*ck Your Biz, and I moved our blog posts over to notavglaw.com from bradendrake.com and spent time to set up a few dozen redirects from the old site.
Shortly after launching the law firm, I’d decided to combine the education business into the firm to making things clearer for our audience.
This was the first month since January we didn’t hit our $20,000 goal, but we were out of the office for about half the month, so not too mad about that. Expenses were all fairly routine.
August
August was a fun month. I got a new idea that I called Trademark Quickies. I offered quick, simple trademark searches for $10. We have since raised the price to $50. Folks would send us a name they were interested in registering. I’d run a report, send it over, and give a green, yellow, orange, or red flag to help them decide if they should proceed.
It proved a great way to get folks into our funnel to file the marks with a low cost, low risk way for them to learn more. A win/win!
We also ran an affiliate contest, which didn’t go great. The lesson learned was that affiliates needed more notice and time to plan and prepare.
I also projected $8,000 in revenue from a small launch of Unf*ck Your Biz, and we only did $1,350. That one kind of stumped me, but I feel there was probably just too much going on.
Other than UYB, the big discrepancy was the “legal stuff” projection. The bump in revenue came from trademark quickie clients who moved forward hiring us to file for them.
This month I made a permanent increase to my salary. It was looking too low based on the projected annual revenue in the S Corp. Team expenses were up a bit. We had many new trademark clients and paid $2,500 in trademark filing fees to the USPTO. The other big chunk of expenses came from flights and hotels booked for upcoming business trips.
September
Not a whole lot happened in September. We focused on working with our clients and students along with some program improvements on the back end. November and December tend to be big months for us, so we are typically chilling in September in October. That may change in 2024 based on the current launch calendar we have mapped out. Stay tuned.
The biggest expense here was the cost of goods. I ordered about 150 copies of my book to take to Wedding MBA in November. Otherwise, all expenses were pretty standard.
October
We ran another affiliate contest in October. This one also did not go well. We found a lot of affiliates dropped off when we switched over our website and links. We probably didn’t do a great job getting everyone back on track and switched over.
In 2024, we plan to tell affiliates in January the two months we will be running contests. The goal is that they will then work them into their promo calendars is it’s a fit.
Most of October was spent prepping for the Association of Bridal Consultants conference in Puerto Rico and Wedding MBA, our big Contract Club project, and planning for our December launch of Unf*ck Your Biz.
I really missed the mark on the legal stuff projection this month. We didn’t book as many trademarks as anticipated. We made up for that with a couple of tax clients and a consultation.
This month included a bump in marketing expenses and team expenses.
November
November was busy, busy, busy. I was in Puerto Rico the first month for the ABC conference. Flew home to San Diego. Packed my car to the brim, and drove to Las Vegas for Wedding MBA where sold about $6,000 in low ticket programs at our expo booth.
I got to speak on two stages, made fab new friends, and reconnected with many others. This brings a lot of new energy into the business each year. We actually saw a spike in web traffic, about 3-4 times our average, during the month.
The past couple years, we’ve done our biggest launch after these events to capitalize on this new traffic and leads. You will see that reflected in the December revenue.
December
This was our highest revenue month of the year. Yay. We rolled out Unf*ck Your Biz again and rebranded it as a one-on-one signature service enrolling 19 total new clients. The price point was $3,000. About 15 folks joined at that new rate. The others rolled into the program from previous cohorts of different programs at credited rates.
December also tends to be big because we always have a handful of folks who want help structuring LLCs and S Corps for the new year.
Everything was pretty on point here with exception of Profit Rx - we have several annual subscriptions renew, which I had considered in the projections - and UYB which had an even better launch than anticipated.
Expenses were also up in large part to the affiliate payouts for UYB. We had one big affiliate for the launch who got a $5,000 payout. Love that. Any time we can help our referral payments make some money, help their people with what they need by introducing them to us, it’s a win all the way around.
I also went ahead and booked some travel for 2024 in order to hit a new Delta reward status by year end. Those were the non-routine expenses for the month.
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Fun Charts
One chart can often sum up several paragraphs of text, so I want to visually demonstrate some big takeaways.
The chart below shows monthly revenue by program for each of our low-ticket offers ($50 and less but mostly $10 and $30). You can see why we’re sticking with and doubling down on the Contract Club. Some of the others will stick around as $10 offers, but the other $30 programs are getting cut in 2024 to clear up some confusion on our website.
2024 Goals
Based on all the info above and the trajectory of the business, we’ve four key money goals for 2024.
$300,000/$400,000/$500,000 in revenue. That’s a good, better, best goal. We’re really shooting for the “better” of $400k.
60% profit. This is profit before owner salary is considered. In other words, we just want to keep expenses under 40%.
Consistent $25,000. Peaks and valleys are expected to a certain degree, but I prefer peaks with no valleys by maintaining a baseline of revenue with targeted, higher months.
$15,000 MRR by the end of the year. One of the biggest focuses of the year will be growing our membership and monthly payment programs to increase monthly recurring revenue (MRR). That makes goal number three much easier.
In addition to the revenue goals, we made a goal to book 4 stage speaking gigs for 2025 and 5 “PR touchpoints” per month. A PR touchpoint could be a podcast interview, guest blog, a talk to someone’s course or membership community, or generally anything that gets our business in front of a new audience.