Monthly review November 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 November?
89 hours, 55 billable (52% billable)
How was November overall?
Winding down towards the end of the year? NOPE. This past month has been insane. Full speed ahead every single day. I only had ONE mental breakdown about it (maybe two). That being said, things have been going great with my new VA, Floi. I have been spending quite a lot of time working with her but I expected that for the first month or two– the first time doing things take longer on both our ends. We have been doing quite a lot of work around building out some systems and processes which have already paid themselves off in terms of efficiency and like… less confusion on my part.
Around halfway through this month I felt a bit stressed out looking at my financials, I thought it was going to be quite a slow month. But then I locked in a project. And then I locked in another project. And then I locked in a project for January, and now I’m pretty close to my target monthly revenue!
How did my goals go for November?
One of my goals for last month was to lock in a project for December, and I locked in two! Historically, I haven’t been that great at booking projects in advance so I’m feeling great having one locked in already for January.
I also succeeded in ‘feeling my way’ through the first couple of weeks working with Floi. I’ve already learned a lot about coordinating with another person and translating the chaos from my brain to clear briefs and tasks, but it’s been fantastic. Things that I’ve been neglecting for MONTHS are getting done. I’m so happy (can you tell?)
Goals for next month:
Deliver two client projects that I’m proud of
Work through some bits of a course I’m enrolled in about offer planning
Book in a business strategy session to help get me clear on what I want next year to be and how to get there. I have so many big ideas (hello, building a community of some sort) and need an outside sense check and advice.
Tech I’m currently using for my business
Productivity
Zapier (paid plan)
Upbase (paid 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. Affiliate code: tbp for 20% off
Chat GPT 4.0 (free).
Squarespace for my website
Podcasting
Descript (paid annually) for podcast editing
Squadcast for podcast recording (free account with Descript subscription)
Marketing
Simplified.app for scheduling social media posts
Systeme.io* for emails, courses, products, and funnels!
Thrivecart (lifetime subscription) to host all my products and courses.
Damn Write’s content club to keep me regular
Liz Wilcox’s email marketing membership (I actually just upgraded to her annual pass. Yay!)
Finance
Thriday (annual plan) 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.
