Monthly review July 2024
Welcome to my monthly review, where I lay out all the dirty details of my business for everyone to see.
I subscribe to a couple of people who do these and read them every single time they land in my inbox. Because I’m nosy, and I like seeing what other people are doing, how they’re doing it, and how they feel about it. So I decided to start doing them myself.
I want to do these for a few reasons:
It keeps me accountable. Writing these up for you guys forces me to actually look at my data and reflect.
I think financial transparency is extremely important and hopefully me doing these helps break down the money taboo.
How many hours I worked in July?
73.5 hours, of which just over 48 were billable (66% billable). When I look at the weekly break down of those hours, most of the time was spent in the last 2 weeks of the month. The first two weeks, I worked 10-12 hours each.
It’s bizarre to me that I worked similar hours to last month, though I guess 9 hours difference is reasonably significant. This month, was a tough one and I felt like my capacity was nowhere near what I’m used to. Some days, I couldn’t do anything. Most days, I had to leave my desk by 2pm. Shoutout to that tuesday, where I tracked 43 minutes of work.
How was July overall?
Months like this are not my favourite, but sometimes the benefit of running your own business is that you can give yourself what you need. I expect my August income to be lower because of the time I took off this month, and that’s okay. Sometimes we pay ourselves in time rather than money. If Simone Biles can walk away from the Olympics, I can walk away from my desk.
Interestingly, when I looked at the weekly breakdown of my time tracking, the first two weeks of the month I worked around 9-10 hours, and more over the last two weeks, which makes sense when I reflect on my energy levels.
I’ve also observed how much time I spend doing non billable ‘busy work’. I’ve been wanting to hire a VA for a while but it’s daunting trying to figure it all out in advance and I don’t want to make an expensive mistake.
How did my goals go for July?
Officially launch and promote my new website
Done!
Create the google doc templates and zaps I wanted to do last month.
Did this too!
Update some free content so I can put the new versions onto my new website.
Partly done… I’ve updated the content for one of the free workbooks but haven’t updated the design yet.
Fly up to Sydney for quality time with my family and my niece’s first birthday party.
Done, and it was incredible. I’m actually in Sydney again now as I write this for the Bx Business Awards event, which I’m a finalist in!
Goals for next month:
Take some time off
VA preparation
start working through Lizzy’s Hiring a VA Course
continue listing out my admin/busy work that I could potentially hand over
I’ve been feeling a little burnt out, so having a long list of goals for the next month doesn’t feel good to me. Instead, I want to focus on doing what’s necessary and spending as much time as possible filling my cup in other ways so that I can come back feeling more enthusiastic about things!
Tech I’m currently using for my business
Productivity
Zapier (paid plan)
Asana (free plan)
Notion (free)
Moxie (lifetime subscription from Appsumo)
Grain for recording customer interviews and VOC research, getting transcripts and extracting insights
Clockify (free version) for my time tracking. I like the Chrome plugin.
Brain.FM to help get me into focus mode. If you’d like to try it, you can use my affiliate code when you sign up for 20% off your membership. Code: tbp
Chat GPT 4.0 (free). I used to have a subscription so I could use the more advanced data analysis features, but I downgraded to free once they made more features free to use.
Squarespace for my website
Social media
Simplified.app for scheduling my own and some clients posts.
Podcasting
Descript (paid annually) for recording and editing
Squadcast for recording (free account with Descript subscription)
Marketing
Mailerlite (paid plan) to send out these emails that you all know and love!
Thrivecart (lifetime subscription) to host all my products and courses.
Damn Write’s content club to keep me regular (it’s been helping a bit, but I anticipate using it much more when my new website’s live)
Liz’s email marketing membership. I dip in and out of this membership. It is very low cost and excellent value. She sent out an offer for 6 months for the price of three (USD$27) so I snapped it up. Why not.
Finance and Money
Thriday (paid plan, paid annually for discount) for my business banking + bookkeeping, and to implement the Profit First system. I mostly use Moxie for my invoicing because I sometimes need different currencies.
Wise for any international payments I need to send or receive.
Scribe - screen recording for creating SOPs.
