profit report - august 2026

If you’re new to our profit reports, start with this introduction. It covers the purpose behind the profit reports, some basic frameworks I use, and an overview of our core offers.

The Profit Report follows a step-by-step process. You can learn how to do your own with this guide.

steps 1-3 — The initial steps

First, I track my income each week in my Finance Friday routine. Second, I track and log all my expenses at the close of the month. Third, I wrap up my bookkeeping. There’s really nothing to discuss here.

Step 4 — Compare actuals to projections

There wasn’t a whole lot happening in August. We did our biggest trademark promotion and push in July, which brought in $21,000 in July trademark revenue. Some of those sales bled over into August.

Here’s the snapshot of what I projected for August vs. what we actually did.

A table showing projected revenue by offer.

I exceeded my project trademark revenue by $3,800. Everything else was slightly below target.

Step 5 - review profit & expenses

August was fairly profitable.

Cost of goods/services and expenses totaled $12,000 leaving a pre-salary profit of $10,100.

A chart showing revenue, cost of goods, expenses, profit, and salary.

The only notable expense was client fees. That’s the fees that we pay to the trademark office on behalf of clients for trademark registration filings. It’s a cost of service, so the expense if directly correlated to trademark revenue.

A chart showing a breakdown of business expenses.

STEP 6 — REVIEW ANNUAL GOALS

It’s been a bumpy year. Am I the only one who seems to experience two years of progress followed by one year of constantly being backhanded across the face?

A bit dramatic maybe because the numbers are telling me the year is going to be fine. Fine in terms of paying for things, not so fine in comparison to the lofty goals I’d planned.

My big goal this year was to $500,000 in revenue. That’s almost certainly not going to happen. Year-to-date revenue is $217,000 with 66% of the year complete.

Last year’s revenue was $379,000 and my YTD revenue at this time last year was $228,000, so I’m not too far off last year’s numbers. My new minimum goal is $350,000 with a stretch goal of $400,000.

Here’s why there’s a big gap between the initial goal and the current reality.

We killed off our agency model and a $750 a month retainer this year, thereby, waving goodbye to about $3,000 in monthly recurring revenue. That was early in February and accounts for about $40,000 in lost revenue.

I also decided I’d only launch Unf*ck Your Biz this year once, in December. Thus, I also waived goodbye to about $4,000 a month in income from that.

And the VIP Days I promoted (quite lightly) as a new thing this year have been a bust as was the new program I launched in April. We're not even gonna talk about that one.

Collectively, it means our eggs have been spread among only a couple remaining baskets. In July, my revenue was $32,000, of which $26,000 came from trademarks services. And that’s scary to me because we did a big trademark push in July, I can’t bank on that each month,and the $6,000 in non-trademark revenue isn’t near enough to keep the business afloat.

And this my friend is why we stay on top of our numbers. I’ve been watching, planning, and brainstorming because I need one more basket to distribute these eggs. Is this analogy working?

STEP 7 - REVIEW ROCKS/PROJECT PLANS

Our big project this quarter will be our new offer launching in October. Stay tuned. This month, I’ll need to finish the sales page, build out the systems, and plan the launch.

We also have smaller rocks each week focused on internal program and business improvements. Over the next few weeks, we are revamping our blogs.

STEP 8 - TRACK AND REVIEW KPIS

The KPIs looked pretty good for August. Most notably, we had 892 email opt-ins.

A chart showing month-to-month email opt-ins.

158 of those came from our Contracts Freebie Opt-In. And 672 came from a bundle we participated in through my friend Lizzy. Those added 315 new subscribers to our email list. Note that new subscribers are always less than opt-ins since many opt-ins come from folks already subscribed.

For example, if you found this blog post and then opted into 3 different things, that’d be 3 opt-ins, but only one new subscriber (assuming you weren’t already on our email list). We love new opt-ins even from existing subscribers as it keeps folks invested in our work.

STEP 9 - DO NEXT MONTH’S PROJECTIONS

I’m being a little lazy this month and copying my projections for last month. I did a little promotion the first week of September that brought in about $3,000 in “other revenue.” Otherwise, most of these just follow our “baseline revenue” numbers.

A chart showing our projected revenue by offer.