In this solo YouTube monologue, Trena Little explains why online coaches, course creators, and service‑based entrepreneurs panic when a month’s revenue drops from a high (e.g., $40K) to a lower figure (e.g., $20K). She argues that the headline revenue number alone hides the underlying causes—traffic, expenses, conversion rates, one‑off costs, and personal activity—that must be understood to repeat success. Trena introduces a "spa day" routine: a monthly spreadsheet dashboard that tracks revenue, expenses, traffic sources, funnel metrics, and a personalized "enough number" (the minimum profit needed for financial freedom). She walks through how the dashboard uses color‑coded alerts (green/yellow/red) to surface leaks, shows example templates for various business models (signature courses, memberships, one‑on‑one services, launches), and demonstrates how to diagnose a slow month by comparing month‑to‑month data. The video also promotes her paid workshop, Data Over Drama, where participants receive the spreadsheets, live walkthroughs, and habit‑building guidance to make the process automatic. The overall message is that systematic, data‑driven monthly tracking replaces panic with confidence and enables focused, high‑impact business decisions.
Chapters
A $40K month tells you you made $40K. It doesn't tell you why and how you made that. And without the why and the how, it's very hard to consistently repeat that. And so when you have a low month, like a $20K or a $30K month, you aren't sure what's the difference between the two, what happened. And that's when a bad month, like a $20K month, turns into a full-on panic spiral. But once you know the why behind the changes and fluctuations in your sales, all that drama you put yourself through kind of disappears. So in this video, I want to have a spa day with spreadsheets. And listen, we can make this fun. I know numbers aren't always fun. I know spreadsheets aren't always fun, but put an eye mask on, light a candle, get a hot tea, and let me show you how to make spreadsheets fun by knowing what numbers to look at to make you more relaxed in every decision you make. In your business. I mentioned this, but I've been in business over 11 years and I know running an online business, whether you're a coach or a course creator, each month can be a roller coaster. And now the goal isn't to stop the roller coaster completely, but my goal is to help make those dips a little bit less. So we're on like a kiddie roller coaster and not like a massive roller coaster. Now I'm talking about this spreadsheet day and maybe you're like, Trena, I hate building spreadsheets. I don't like using spreadsheets. I want to give you the spreadsheets that I use every month in my business, show you how to fill them out, and tell you exactly how to read them in depth, and then answer your questions at my workshop, Data Over Drama. So if you go to trenalittle.com/workshop, you can grab a seat. Like I said, you're going to get all my spreadsheets. We're going to walk through how to fill them out, how to read them, and how you're going to use this to make better ROI decisions in your business. This is what I'm calling your rich girl ritual, because if you aren't looking at the spreadsheet every single month, you're not going to know what you should be focusing on each month to continue to make those consistent sales that you're looking for. The biggest problem that I see in this online business space is that everybody talks to you about their top line number, but nobody is telling you what they're actually spending to make that happen. Sure, they can say they had a 6-figure launch, but what did they actually take home from that 6 figures? Revenue is honestly just a headline and it's not giving me the full story. And so all of 2026, every single month, I've been writing to my email list a complete breakdown of what I made every single month, how I made it, and what spent in all of my expenses so they can see full transparency from me, what it is costing me to make what I am making. Because I've seen it too many times, people are talking about how they are growing their revenue, but they are also increasing their expenses, which is causing what they're actually bringing home to get smaller and smaller. And so then the cycle you fall into is that you need to work harder to sell more but somehow have less. And that's not a sales problem or a business strategy problem. That's a leak somewhere in your system. And you would never know that there is a leak somewhere in your system if you're just reading, oh, I made $40K this month. So for example, a few weeks ago I sent my email list my September recap and I made the least amount of money of the year in September. Now, old Trena, without knowing her numbers, knowing history of her numbers, having the full data in a nice beautiful spreadsheet, would panic. Crap, we made less money. Am I going to make less money in October and November? Is this all falling apart? Do I need a new offer? Do I need a new funnel? Right? Feel that spiral? Give me a yes if you've ever gone through that spiral again down in the comments. When I look below how much I make, I see that I spent a little bit more because I put a down payment on a designer who's going to be helping me in November. I had less sales to my paid workshop because traffic was down. I can see that traffic was down from my Facebook ads and all. Also my organic traffic, I immediately know, oh, makes sense. My organic traffic is down because I didn't send my email list as many emails about this workshop. I also know that I was out the last half of September, so I wasn't showing up as often either, talking about my workshop, talking about my offers. And so that caused sales to go down. Conversion rates didn't change. This didn't mean that I needed to change a sales page. I needed to change a registration page. They all stayed the same. It was that the traffic was the problem and me not showing up to create content that I needed to, to generate the traffic was the problem. It's not something that's going to be recurring because again, I had a one-time expense that it was a little bit higher than a normal month and I've got to focus on traffic. And looking at your business metrics can get overwhelming. It's probably why I sadly avoided them for about 6 to 7 years as a creative mind, as a visionary. I didn't wanna look at the numbers. I didn't wanna look at the math. I didn't want spreadsheets. You just need a dashboard with the most important numbers, not a whole PhD in spreadsheets. That's why I built my own spreadsheet so that I could start to track what I needed to, what was going to help me make the best decisions moving forward. And then I have a front page that's basically my dashboard to tell me exactly what's good, what's yellow that needs attention, and what's red that needs fixed now. So some of the most important numbers that you need to be looking at every single month, and this is why I say you need to have a spa day with your spreadsheets every single month, because the data you get each month stacks on itself and it starts to tell you the story and it starts to show you trends. And so maybe I talked about this in the last video, you see a down in sales in September because you sell homeschooling curriculum. And when you look at your sales from last September, you saw the same drop because so many people were buying in the summer and preparing for the fall. Now the homeschool moms are actually doing, so they're not buying. And so that's why you don't spiral not making as many sales because the sales generally happen the months prior to September. But the metrics that you got be looking at every single month is traffic to your lead magnet sales page. However you're getting people into your business, you need to be looking at the conversions on those pages. So if you're sending people there, are they actually converting? You need to be looking at sales pages too, because if you have a sales page, that's how you're making money. So are you getting traffic to that sales page? What is the conversion rate for those sales pages? How much money are you actually making each month? What are you spending each month? And I would encourage you to get granular with your expenses because this is where you could really save a lot of money that you don't realize you're leaking. And then you want to start to see how these all work together, because once you have all these numbers and you have months of this data, you're going to see, okay, on your good months, maybe you have 5 good months and you have 3 bad months. On your 5 good months, what was happening? How much traffic were you getting? What was your sales page conversions? Okay, now on a bad month, what changed? Did traffic drop? Did sales page drop? Did you change something on that sales page that you need to go back to? This is what I like to call your receipts report. This is going to give you the receipts that you need to make the best decisions in your business so you're not doing everything and have this massive list of to-do, and you can really focus on the things that are going to make the biggest difference in your business right now, that are going to save you money, that are going to make you money. And here's what my spreadsheets look like. I actually thought it might be a lot cooler to show you these spreadsheets. Now, when I was building these, I know I just have a group coaching program, but I know so many people have different things like a membership, like a course, like one-on-one services. I actually talked to one of my friends. She's like, hey, do you have this for somebody that has low traffic? Because I can only take so many clients. So my numbers are lower. Yes, I've got that. So let me show you, this is somebody who is selling a signature course or selling a course. And we could drop down here and let's say, let's go to June and all of these numbers pre-populate right here. So the biggest thing we're seeing is what was revenue in June. And we can see it was up 6% in May. But more importantly, what we want to see is sales page visits. And we see sales page visits were actually up in May. So that's the type of information that you want to know right here in one spot. It's also going to calculate your revenue so far. You're going to get these cute little graphs, these profit versus expenses. And here's the best thing. You're not filling any of this stuff out. You're going to go right here to the collect the receipts. And this is where you start to fill out your information. And, um, What's really important is you do this every month. Otherwise, you're not going to have this really cool dashboard to go back and jump from like month to month to see what's going on. So we also have in here the enough numbers. So you can drop in here, how much are you spending each year? What do you want to pay yourself? And it's going to calculate your enough number. And then it's going to start to tell you, is what you're selling right now going to hit your enough number? What's the gap for the year? Let's see what else we got. This is the important part that a lot of people don't track. These are all of your sales page visits, all the different funnels that you have, or maybe you don't have any funnels at all. But this is for a course. I also have one for one-on-one services. So we can jump over here to clients and let's say you booked a client. What is your goal? How many you signed? This is where it gets different for each offer. How many inquiries you get, who joined the waitlist, applications, proposals sent. Now let's say you have a membership, same thing. I've customized this for you to track something different. Revenue and expenses are always pretty same. But when we start to look at the funnel and how people are coming in, that's what you can look at here and start to customize. We can also look at launches. So if you have quarterly launches, yearly launches, there is a spreadsheet here for those launches. It's going to help you also find the leads. And help you decide to make the move. So what are your numbers telling you this month? And again, when we look at the dashboard for the membership, it's going to tell you how many new members you got, how many cancellations you got, where your money is coming from. Is your bottom line, your enough number, good enough? Again, we can jump from month to month right here. Again, go to March, see how things are going. And the other thing, I know some of you do a little bit of all of these. So I also have a spreadsheet that I'm gonna be sharing with you at Data Over Drama. If you have clients and courses and memberships and low ticket, it's all right here. So I thought it was just easier to show you what this looks like, but this is really gonna change how you are taking time to look at your numbers, how your numbers are represented to you. So it's super easy. You can see, yes, does your mix cover it? Oh no, sales are down here. Low ticket sales are down here. And again, when you jump to what's most important, a lot of people aren't looking at is when we get the T, this is where we're gonna start to realize here's where we need to look. This funnel is not doing so hot. Lead signups are low. We can see that the opt-in conversion is good. So we don't wanna make any changes to the sales page, but we need to get more traffic. So let me know if you have any questions on this, because I'm gonna be walking you through this and how to set this up at Data Over Drama. You're gonna be able to customize what green, yellow, and red for you looks like, because once you start getting a baseline, you may actually need to start changing what good, warning and fix looks like. Because let's say you realize traffic is a problem, and so you really start to focus on getting more traffic to your business. And so now your traffic baseline, how much traffic you generally get on average every month, starts to go up. And so you don't want that ever to dip below your new baseline because then your sales are going to drop off. Or let's say you make a few tweaks to your sales page, so your sales page conversion rate goes from a 2% to now a 4%. That's your baseline. You want to make sure your conversion rates never drop below that. And so this spreadsheet really allows you change the metrics as you fix things and get them better. You don't really have to spend a lot of time analyzing and thinking this through. I've made it super easy for the colors to literally tell you. Green means good, yellow means pay attention, red means look here, fix this. And that's where the tea is. This is where you're going to find the good tea in your business to make changes that are going to make the biggest difference. Because this is something, once you see a red, this is something you could change and by next month see the changes already happening and see sales increase and get back to the level they were before. And usually for me, the biggest red that always creeps up is traffic. And I know because I've been doing this for so long, I know when my red is going to show up. It's because I've taken time off, I've not shown up. Maybe we put a pause on ads. Maybe I know YouTube did something a little funky earlier this year that was happening with me. My channel kind of got reclassified and so the wrong audience was going to my channel, and so I didn't get the traffic that I needed to. And so I spent the whole summer revamping the YouTube channel to fix the traffic to the pages to get that red back up. And if you're like, Trena, I don't want to look at my numbers because I'm afraid of what I'm going to see, you've got to see this because if you want to become a rich girl in your business, you have to create this ritual of tracking your numbers, filling out your spreadsheet every single month. And this is why I call it spreadsheet spa day. I want you to make it fun. I don't want it to be a drag. I want you to get excited every time you sit down to fill out your numbers because it is literally going to tell you what to do the following month. It's going to take so much work off your plate. It's going to tell you what projects are going to make the biggest difference in your business. It's going to eliminate stress on you trying to figure out what strategy to do. It's going to put blinders on you so you're not chasing and strategy hopping every other month because you know what is and isn't working and that's what focus is going to be. And it's not based on how you're feeling or how the vibe is or what's trending right now on Instagram. It's based on historical data when you start tracking this every single month. The other thing that building this spreadsheet does for you is it helps you figure out what your enough number is. And this was a complete game changer for me and my business. So what do I mean by enough number? Enough number means what is the amount of money you need to make to have that financial freedom? Because we hear so much messaging on 7-figure business, 7-figure business. Maybe you don't need a 7-figure business. I don't. I don't need a 7-figure business. I don't have to hustle and chase a 7-figure revenue number for me and what my lifestyle needs. And so when you can sit down and you can start mapping out how much money do you really need to make each month, how much money do you really want to save each month, how much money do you need for taxes, you get a realistic number and then you can start plugging in and playing with numbers. Okay, if I need to make— let's say you need to make $37,000 a month and you are spending about $17,000 a month on expenses, you're able to start to figure out how many more sales you need to make to hit your enough number. What could you cut in expenses to help you make your enough number if you don't increase sales? If you know you need to increase sales, how can you do that? Are you going to increase your conversion rate on your sales page? Are you going to increase your leads, increase your traffic to your pages? That's That's what allows you to have freedom in your business again, to stop chasing and doing everything under the sun, because now you know you have a literal roadmap on what's going to make the biggest difference to get you to the number that you need to be happy in your business. And then you can start taking things off of your list. So now you have free time. That's one of the biggest things I've been working on this year is taking things off my plate so I can spend more time with my YouTube content. This is a huge goal for me in 2027, so I've really been digging into my numbers, figuring What can I really optimize to get off my plate so I can create more creative videos, more fun videos, get more innovative with my videos, maybe start a new YouTube channel in 2027 because that's what I really love. And so having these spreadsheets will tell me exactly what I need to do to get to that. And that's what relaxing— this whole idea of a spa day with your spreadsheets really means. You stop ignoring it and you start knowing it so well that the numbers don't don't scare you anymore. Do you think a spa day with your spreadsheets would be fun or not? Give me a spa day down in the comments if you're really starting to romanticize this idea of sitting down every month and doing this to take the stress, the overwhelm, the uncertainty out of what to do next in your business. Now, in my workshop Data Over Drama, I'm going to walk you through exactly how to find your enough number, how to plug it into the spreadsheet, how to fill out your numbers in that spreadsheet and create a habit so that you're doing this every single month. If you want to be that workshop with me, go to trenalittle.com/workshop to get your seat today. Now, you heard me mention a habit. I'm going to walk you through the entire habit that I go through every month to really love this system of filling out my spreadsheets and pulling decisions from the spreadsheets. So watch that video next.
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