profit report - September 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
We had two things beyond the norm in September. Well kind of. I ran a birthday promo on August 31st, so those sales hit the bank on the 2nd of September. That’s where the “other” income is from. We did a “Braden Bucks” promotion. It’s essentially like buying a gift card, at a reduced rate, towards future purchased, and we tied it specifically to our October launch for Besties HQ, whih was the second thing.
I sold Besties HQ early to our waitlist, so we had some September income for that as well.
Otherwise, we had a pretty busy month for trademark services booking 7 new clients. Everything else was standard.
Here’s the snapshot of what I projected vs. what we actually did.
A table showing projected revenue by offer.
Step 5 - review profit & expenses
September was fairly profitable.
Cost of goods/services and expenses totaled $13,000 leaving a pre-salary profit of almost $12,000. That’s shy of the 50% target I’ve been shooting for, but I did cut $600 out of my recurring expenses while doing this month’s books, so hopefully we can make some other moves to bring the profit up.
A chart showing revenue, cost of goods, expenses, profit, and salary.
One 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.
Marketing costs were also up. I paid to sponsor two upcoming events.
A chart showing a breakdown of business expenses.
STEP 6 — REVIEW ANNUAL GOALS
My big goal this year was to $500,000 in revenue. That’s almost certainly not going to happen. It’s been a bit of a bumpy year. I’ve discussed the whys for that in prior reports. However, last year’s revenue was $379,000, and we’re only about $5,000 behind last year’s YTD revenue looking at the same time-period (January through September).
Soooo, while the $500,000 mark may be out-of-reach, I do have big, potential plans for Black Friday that may help us it some big goals. I’ll be sharing more about that in next month’s report. Stay tuned.
STEP 7 - REVIEW ROCKS/PROJECT PLANS
We are launching our brand new program, Besties HQ this month.
Our other tasks for October will be wrapping up our blog revamping project and then planning for Black Friday and our December launch.
November and December typically bring in 30-40% of our annual revenue, so it’s big.
STEP 8 - TRACK AND REVIEW KPIS
The KPIs looked pretty good for August. Most notably, I got over 200 new followers on threads and had the bulk of our initial Bestis HQ members join from there.
A chart showing month-to-month instagram and treads followers.
As you can see, I wasn’t tracking for the first 7 months of the year, but I made a focus to track and do much more social engagement through the end of the year. I might make a new goal to add about 250 new threads followers per month. The algorithm there is strong, so I feel it can grow fast as things snowball.
Who knows, maybe it’ll pass my IG follower count by early 2027.
STEP 9 - DO NEXT MONTH’S PROJECTIONS
I’ve consistently been under my Contract Club projections the past few months, so I adjusted it down from $5,000 to $3,000. Everything else I kept to my averages with the one major change/additional of Besties HQ. The goal is to get at least 32 members. We’re capping it at 40. So this goal accounts for some full payment sales and then mostly our monthly payment option.
A chart showing our projected revenue by offer.
