Episode 50: The Unintended Consequence Of Preparing An Income Report

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life. Hey everyone, this is Julie. Hope you are doing awesome today. I want to talk to you about something super cool. So I am sitting here, I am working on a presentation. I promised everyone in my big program, the Digital Gangsta, that I would do a walkthrough of the first year in business with a new brand that I've been co owning with Kathy Olson. So some of you know that I run a brand called Funnel Gorgeous. And we sell design templates and courses that combine both design and strategy. Marketing strategy both. We started it in August of 2018, so we are officially in our one year anniversary. And I thought, oh, it'd be super cool to show all my marketing students what we did, what we did right, what we did wrong. And so I'm sitting here working on it, realizing the unintended consequence of doing this and how valuable it's been for me. And so I want to share with you why I think all of you, after listening to this podcast, should do exactly what we're doing. So first things first, I am peeling back and looking at gross revenue, expenses and profit. So just looking at the numbers from when we began in August to one year later, what did that look like? And then I'm going a little deeper and I'm saying, okay, but what did I actually sell? Like product sales. Now, if you are a service provider, you can look and you can go back through your clients and say, okay, I sold this type of funnel or this type of ad or content management, and you can kind of get a feel for what your best selling service or product is. So that was the other thing I was doing, looking through our different funnel designs. Which one was our best seller of our courses, which course did better? You know, Funnel Gorgeous or Webinar Gorgeous. And just sort of kind of digging into the numbers of where all that revenue came from. Then after that I went through a process where I started to explain what we did right, and this is a great exercise that everybody should do. Because it forces you to focus in on all of your achievements and accomplishments. And there's nothing that's going to give you faster momentum than to look at what you've done. Well, so I went through and I realized, holy cow, we did a lot of really cool things right, that, you know, now looking back, you know, you're. You're sort of. You're trying to plan ahead, but you're also using some of your gut instinct as you're building your business. And, you know, when Funnel Gorgeous launched In August of 2018, it was not intended to be an entire company. It was just, hey, Kathy has a business, I have a business. Let's do a corporate together. It was definitely what you would just consider a jv, you know, collab. And so it morphed, obviously, as we continued and as it started to sell. But so it's really interesting to see sort of like how the year unfolded when we realized, oh, my gosh, this actually might be something more than just a product line. It might actually be a company. And so that sort of transition. So we looked at the things that we did, right? And then even though it's still scary to do this, the what we could have done better kind of category, so I have about six slides of the things that I'm looking at, and I'm really sort of putting on my black hat and looking at our revenue and our numbers and saying, all right, what. What could we have have done better? And I know for a fact that because of. And this isn't. This isn't like a time to judge yourself, but I know for us, like, both of us were running our own businesses, I was also working full time for Click Funnels. We had maybe 10, 15 hours a month to dedicate to Funnel Gorgeous. And so you could see where we were clearly, you know, didn't have as much momentum. And so the funny part about this activity of creating this presentation, creating this income report, looking at our revenue, our expenses, our profit margins, what we did right, what we could have done better, is all of a sudden the clarity of where to go next. Very obvious. And Kathy and I had a big meeting last week, and we talked about, okay, where do we want to go next? What are the things we want to focus on? And we have, you know, decent amount of clarity about it. But it all of a sudden became so obvious as I was creating this presentation. And so I would encourage you in your business, it's August. Depending on when you're listening to this podcast, maybe it's not August for you. But if you look at and you take stock and you retrace your steps, you might find that the fogginess that you have about what you should be doing now will immediately lift when you retrace. And you know, there is that saying, which I can't remember the full saying now. But you know, there are the people who live in the past, there are the people who live in the future, and then there are the people who live in the present. And you know, there are positives and negatives to all of that, right? The people who get stuck in the past, they tend to not be able to get over mistakes and failures and they imagine things in the past not actually as they were, but they idealize them because hindsight is 20 20. And so that's like the downside of looking in the past. And then the people who are always looking forward, you know, they tend to miss what's happening in the present. They tend to not necessarily learn from their mistakes in the past and they just kind of keep repeating them because they're always so forward thinking. Then there are the people who only look at the present, right? They just look at what's right in front of them, which can be really good because it helps them to enjoy the moment. But it also can be bad because they don't necessarily know where they're going and they don't necessarily, they're not necessarily able to capture what they learned in the past. And as a kid, and I remember, you know, people talking about the whole saying sort of kind of converges on this idea that you should live in the moment, you shouldn't worry about the past and you shouldn't worry about the future. But I think in business it's not so simple. And I think that there is a really good argument for looking back. And I would recommend if you are not doing it or you haven't done it, that you sit down and, you know, maybe drudge up some like fear and anxiety because you're afraid that it's like some report card and you're going to get an F. But if you kind of lean into that feeling and do it anyway, you're going to get insights that you wouldn't get otherwise. And likewise, I would argue that your ability to plan the future is only as good as how well you understand the past. And so today, right now, as you're listening to this, you're in the present. I challenge you to take this present moment, to do the activity of retracing so that you can plan for the future better. And you know, it's work. And I think I never would have done it if I wasn't going to present it. It was so interesting thinking about it from a presentation style, putting it on a slide deck. But I'm almost in that action, presenting it back to myself, and I'm becoming the student of my own actions. And because I'm looking at it and it's like, okay, you can look at a profit and loss statement or a balance sheet or whatever, and you can say, all right, well, those are the numbers. But when you have to then put it into a presentation, you. You have to actually extract meaning from it because nobody's going to sit and listen to you read off a bunch of numbers. They want to understand, like, why does it matter and why is it meaningful to them in their business? And so in the act of actually explaining that on the slides, I am teaching myself. So short podcast today. If you haven't done it, go back, retrace your steps, put it on a slide deck, and teach yourself what you did awesomely well in your business and what you could do better and find that it's going to help you plan forward with more strategic insight than you ever would have had otherwise. I appreciate you all. Talk to you soon. Bye. If you're ready to create, grow, scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today. Sam.