Columbus marketing playbook: A Transparent Look Into My Business (2026)

Kind: captions Language: en What is going on friends? I hope you are having a fantastic week. This week I am going to be giving you an inside look inside my business as a marketer in 2026. Every month I record a transparent monthly retro talking through finances, things I'm excited about, things I need to be held accountable for, things that are going wrong, etc. And I post that on YouTube. This is an example of January 2026 where I talk about all those things and more. This is a week where we are a little bit behind on content production and I thought, man, we have so much valuable stuff out there. Why not just repurpose one of the most valuable pieces of content that I share every month for our marketers and the audience? In this short video, you'll hear me talk about topline revenue, bottom line revenue, hiring contractors, how I'm getting work, lead generation, things like that, and also the not so sexy things, the things that I'm struggling with, the things that I need to do better, and my goals for the coming month ahead. So, if you are a marketer and you're trying to make more money, clarify your system, this is going to be very valuable for you. So, without further ado, let's jump right on in into a transparent look into my business in 2026. Definitely check out my newsletter in the first link below. Every Monday, get the best job opportunities, freelance, fractional, in-house, all delivered to your inbox every single week, totally free. So, without further ado, let's dive on in. What is going on, my friends and family? It is February 1st, which means it is time to record my monthly retro for January. Uh, all in all, this month up, in case you guys are new here, uh, this is my run through my monthly retro where I go and I talk about all things that's going on uh, in the web design agency talking about profit loss, weeds, activities, how I'm doing, if I'm enjoying the business, if I'm not, opportunities, wins and losses, etc. been doing this for 19 straight months now. So over almost two years is Yeah, I can't even. But without further ado, we're going to jump straight into Notion and then we're jump around uh to some other platforms as well to keep you updated. $28,818 in revenue collected. Business expenses $4,400. Personal income was $319. Personal expenses were $416. LinkedIn followers 6,100, mailing list with size 308. Uh, and two outbound proposals. Uh, so here's screenshots of everything that I just used for accountability. Um, we have wins and losses after this, but I'm going to jump over into our tool stack here to talk about this. This is our cash flow analysis, and I'll bore out this left section. Um, and everything varies in terms of collected revenue versus it varies every month. collected revenue versus net new revenue. Um, so I use Monarch Money to track everything and this is the stat I usually go over every month because I just love like this is right here. This Seni diagram. Highly recommend you guys who are freelancers, contractors, um, or just founders to have some kind of a not just a revenue practice like this. kind of a financial practice but also just some kind of financial visualization that gives you a at a glance view of what's going on. I have two of these. One of these is the seni diagram here within monarch money. Monarch Money is kind of a top level financial aggregator that syncs up all my accounts, both business and personal. And that way I can go in and tag every transaction that comes through and then for tax purposes makes it a lot easier to export all the transaction to CSBs and then invest that uh STPA. So it's a really good adding way. You have all your income here on the left and all your outcome here on here on the right in terms of allocation. So we had 4K in contractor labor. Like I said, 28K revenue collected, 4K contractor labor, 600 recurring in business software and tools, 200 a month uh for business rent co-atch co space, 145 in gas, 125 in taxes, uh which we'll talk about later. That is about to increase. $100 in groceries, uh $450 in maintenance, an auto maintenance. So, it was an oil change and uh $10 in financial fees. So, as you can see, our biggest expenses right now are team contractor labor 4K, business software, 600 a month recurring, and then everything else kind of drops in a bucket per there, but not included in tax. So, I pay tax quarteries. Uh, and that's why savings is big because I'm saving for the ultimate, you know, fist up the bum hole, which is versus United States taxes. Um, so that's kind of all I'll go through here within Monarch Money tracking everything. Um, as you can see, month overmonth steady growth. Um, this month was a little bit down from last month, but last month is an anomaly. Uh, in terms of expenses, we are net around the same. So in terms of the cash flow analysis, this is where I attribute everything. Um, in terms of after revenue was collected, I go and log it in the sheet manually. Like I said, it'll change from this month to last month. So don't account for that discrepancy. We have a 4K collected coming in at next month for a closed project. Uh, here at the here's where I attribute for all of our cost. So you can see the first month here 126 all-time high in terms of contractor labor costs onboarded a new assistant and we started some more internal facing projects that weren't directly client facing which always makes it difficult to play the profitability game when uh you're coming you're pulling out saving essentially for some of the internal design work that we're doing which we're talking about but yeah month over month uh also what accounted for a high month of contractor w for a month of internal expenses. Uh it just was the fact and I'll do a live filter here. So every time I go to the date uh last month and then I go into filters and then I go into business expenses, I have all these categorizations laid out that are good from a tax advantage standpoint. I had a point. By the way, everyone always asks me about my financial habits, but it seems like all the people, everyone says that I'm like so ded from a financial standpoint cuz I post about it a lot on LinkedIn, but then I realize that nobody actually says those things, actually watches this video, and they're always asking me, "What do you use to track finances? What do you um so, first of all, I would encourage you to watch watch these videos." Uh, and all the tools have been linked in the description. Makes it easy. None of them are affiliate codes because I'm not smart enough or spiffy enough to put all any of that stuff into place. Um, so there were some yearly expenses that came out. We cut down the Shuttertock expense and then Shuttertock had a $75 cancellation fee, which I hope they die as a company. AI is going to take over their industry. We don't need stock photos anymore. So, no longer using that $15 runway experiment as a software for video editing. Permit contractor labor. We flow um when clients are recurring uh website optimization clients. We pay for the hosting so that just comes out monthly. Um CRM software with Moxy 240 that's a yearly expense 500 remotely. Open AAI might might cancel OpenAI low key uh and switch over to Quad or either just continue using Gemini. My hesitance with cancelling my Chry GBT subscription has been everything that's already in there. But I've been told that it's pretty easy to migrate elsewhere because I have projects set up for all our clients. I have all the years to a year and a half to this point of data that Chad GPD has on me. So to be determined, we may not see OpenAI in there next month. Riverside came out 30 bucks a month. Veritly contractor waiver. Canva 30 bucks a month. Kit $7 a month for the price increase. GoDaddy I bought a domain which we will talk about. Uh and Reitly contractor waiver. So, why was contractor so high this month? One, uh, onboarded my assistant Roa, who is two hours a day, so 10 hours a week, which is about $400 a month in total. So, that's a big one that's recurring. Um, we had a $3,000 investment into contractor labor for doing internal work. So, we're doing a light rebrand and we're niching down. Some exciting updates to share there. So at SI and the rest of it the whatever 1,500 1,000 was all just for our existing quiet internals. So we're still we're still um meeting our profitability goals. Um but in terms of percentage I don't have the exact calibration but anyway if we're at let's see 20 that's profitability wise they're still you know far and away good but I just I'm always traditional Midwestern background. You know how it is, guys. Um, have to be cash flow positive and not my biggest priority. So, it was a heavy month from the investment standpoint. Also, uh, more recently, $400, um, for a trip to Florida. So, let's jump back over into another business. Jumping back into Ocean here. We're going to the wins and losses now. We're going to talk about some things. Probably make it a little bit more comfortable. Um, the wins from this month. great podcast. Um, started recording in studio. Shout out to Cohatch, our presenting sponsors. The studio just looks awesome, guys. Like this was Bill Beras. Had a fantastic in-person podcast. We had another one with Casey Brown. Um, the boom just amazing photos, amazing podcasting experience. What can I say? You know, just these make me look way better than I actually am. Um, you guys are here from the OG days of the monthly retros. you guys to see just how low production quality they are. Now we got Cohatch, we have microphone. We're just leveling up one month at a time. Above the hold conference, trip to Florida, $400 for flights, $330 for tickets. Yikes. Stick a knife in me and stab it. That was another business expense that attributed to our total, but this is just going to be so dope. Like, uh, first of all, uh, shout out Anthony Master Lasco. Crashing with him. This is literally right in his backyard almost. So we have to pay for lodging. Um just whites just so expensive. The cheapest one we could find was $400 like two weeks in advance too on Spirit Airlines. Has anyone ever booked $400 for a round trip to Florida on Spirit Airlines? Like what the hell are we doing here? Spirit Airlines is supposed to be for traditional Midwestern lean people who don't like spending money like me. Like come on Spirit Richard Brass. What? How we doing? Um, yeah. I don't know. But this is going to be awesome. Like podcast guest Anthony podcast guest T pass T. Um, future podcast guest here hopefully. Sahil, Jess, Rob, Eric, all these people are badasses. Um, the way this is formatted to work is there's going to be a couple I got the cheaper ticket, but there's like dedicated pitch room. So, I think that's what they do for their sponsors. Um, I got a speaker uh pro-rated ticket rate, so I'm going to pay to pay half. Shout out to Tass. She's a legend. Um, but yeah, this is going to be a lot of fun talking about web. We will have the new website launched, which lead to my next win. Um, we started, first of all, I started working with the designer to redo our current branding. Um, and it's just going so well. We're currently working on the service pages. Um, but this is how everything is coming together. And every time I look at I just get so [ __ ] happy. Um, pardon my French, but this is the direction we're going to go. We're going to be another expense, another investment into the company. I should stop calling the expenses. These are investments. Um, we are going to have a VSSL kind of above the fold here with some editing of our previous, you know, really good work. Um, just look at the way that this site looks, guys. Uh, I don't know if we got testimonials here. This is a really nice above the fold impression. Really nice. Like, look at these drop shadows, y'all. Like, are you kidding me? These are going to be case studies when I go live with four really good case studies. They have a comparison section. Oh my lord. Come on. Uh, who we serve best, logos, um, pricing and rates. This is what we do right here. We're bringing some geo to hero. Really good mockups. Just the design quality of these. Also, the case studies template page. Like, get out of here, guys. Like, look at these mockups. If you're an agency, always work with a designer who makes your work look even better. Like, look at these, dude. Like, this is insane. Um, work with a designer who can make mock-ups that make your work look really good. So, yeah, amazing quality here. Uh this about page design equals trust web flow expert partners trusted by weeding health companies healthcare probably based in Columbus Ohio bio team section yes look at this design eyes marketing brain relationship art like that's us guys um we're going to swap out some of these photos cuz a little bit uh too personal um if that's possible but this is going to be big for us like if I've if I've made if I've reached a quarter million in revenue with, you know, the site that I currently have up. Like, this is really going to let us charge some awesome rates. We've got a trusted partners section, trusted partners template page, migrating those over two-step opt-in page, native web flow. We're going to get our stuff dialed in a CRM side with that. And yeah, I'm just absolutely stoked with the direction we're headed for the company and what this is going to do, uh, how this is going to grow for the future. So, that's probably the biggest win from this month. A few posts popped off. So, if we head over to LinkedIn, we had two posts that did really well this month. Um, we're up at 66K followers, which isn't terrible. Um, couple posts that popped off. One, let me go a post here. One, uh, 67 reactions and one repost. Um, a shock from the studio with Casey. She recently after we recorded we had a really good chat. Um she kind of well you guys can read the post but we she said like you need to really stop you without going into too much detail. You need to really stop putting yourself down with your language. You know you need to talk in a way that doesn't is so detrimental to yourself but give yourself credit. Um and when you hear the way that you talk about yourself it reinforces things that you may or may not believe, you know. And it was it was a really good call out and the post did really well. Just honest, candid. Uh I still have a lot of comments to respond to on this. But when a post gets a lot of comments, like 20 comments, you know, like that's that's a lot. I also posted a year in review um kind of essentially just going over everything we talked about in the last monthly retro. But that post there, if I can find it here quickly, uh 50 comments, 192 reactions, 3K impressions, no boosting. That's pretty impressive for me. Um and you know, we had some really good photos to post. you know, it was heartfelt led with a lot of emotion, which is what all good posts do. Um, but yeah, that two two post really popped off this month. Also, Andy Crestadena, just put this guy's face on any piece of content and you're looking at 2K plus impressions, 65 reactions. My lord, the exact matter posted pretty well. Um, yeah. Uh, but also like some of the dumbest stuff too, honestly. Like this just a screenshot 2K impressions 70. Like what the hell? It was literally just a screenshot and a mockup and two words before after. Maybe that's working it way into the content strategy, but I would like to see some more dense content. Um, if I'm a viewer on LinkedIn, I don't know. It's just me. Whatever. We were very consistent with podcast this month also. So, another dub on that front. Um, oh, I know I'm taking a long time on the wins here. That's what I like to talk about. We changed the video section above the fold here. Added our self-p proven testimonials. We got a lot of them. Um, published podcasts this month. Uh, eight in total. So, two per week. So, uh, one, two, we still have to upload shout outs page, but Mark's, Ben's, Brandon's, Meredith, Stacy's, Andy's, and Micah's. So, seven episodes. We'd been doing two a week, but um we're continuing to grind, dude. Um good episodes, too. Like, we're not compromising our quality just to upload two times per week. So, I'm proud of that. Continue that going. Consistent podcast postings. Good hangs with Brian O. So, um Brian Andreo and I the past podcast guest. We have a recurring call every Tuesday to talk through sales stuff and everything we're both doing in our businesses. really good hangs, you know, no other way to put it. We completed four almost five websites this month. This is why I'm stressed out and overworked. So, we finished uh I'll give you guys quick looks at all of them. Um, one of them, Vibrix Compounding here, Vibrix Master and AMA Columbus, which I'm going to finish after this today because I have a presentation next week. But, um, Vibric Compounding just a gorgeous site. I'm going to look at it on the actual staging or actual live site, but it's really nice interactions. Uh, work with a really good developer for this, although it wasn't a great relationship there. Um just it's a really nice page. Like I did all the design for this one. Developer did a nice job too. Um really nice and branded. Really nice about page this company too. Uh yeah, I'll do a higher standard built clinical precision. Boom. Really nice. Really great team section here. Um yeah, really nice. Love this design. I love the way this one came to life. I think I think we knocked this one out of the park. Really do. Uh really good contact page. So, multi-step forms, three different forms, patient provider, and just a global contact form, which is already integrated with their CRM. So, yeah, really nice design here. Um specialties pages for each of their hormone specialties. Uh I have to connect some of the links here probably, but uh patients and providers dedicated messaging pages here. Boom. Providers. Boom. Yeah. All the stuff to do with this one is launch it. So, we'll do that sometime this week. Have a call with them on Wednesday. It's a really nice mockup. I played around with some AI tools to make a really cool mockup just for this section. Um, it turned out really nice. Um, got a nice little icon with the branding right there. Yeah, super stoked and proud. Love the way this one turned out. Really nice navbar interaction here. um the home run. Other launch was Vibris Master. So, this is kind of a a VC um more buttoned up website. We just have to add interactions to this, but um it's really more of a corporate look and feel to this site. Um want to make sure that we're appealing to the right audience. Uh and it alludes to all of our um subsidiary brands that come out. really nice interactive scroll section uh of all the properties of their company and um proper linkage here in the bottom. Really nice navigation. So, I'm a big fan of this one and uh how it presents itself. Really nice gradient on these icons here. So, simple kind of a simple landing page, but you know, a really good approach to, you know, what they're representing each individual variant of their company. um and it really unifies the brand uh together. So, super proud of that one, too. AMA Columbus, I'll share that in a later video. But again, we're also developing the MMG new website currently and um development is coming along awesome. It's a really tough site to develop and Clark is absolutely doing a great job. Um yeah, this is going to be a big pro company. Really stoked to see it come together, guys. um next monthly retro. This one will be launching in the wild and um we'll see you know it's going to be a big next chapter for the company. Um so yeah uh I'll bro I don't have the the juice already been going on 20 minutes here losses 4K and contractor labor. Um, that's a lot. You know, I if you would have told me to sign last year um back when I was making 4K a month that I would be paying other people 4K a month, that would just be insane to me. But um that's a lot and it's it's more than I'm comfortable with to be honest. So, we may have to downgrade some of our hours and do some more internally. We had a bad contractor experience with the developer just not communicating well, letting some place leading to some twice done work. um behind on assigning tasks to the team. So, one of the reasons our contract labor is so high is because uh they have to do tasks that I assign to them. And a lot of times I don't have stuff ready for them. They spend their hourly contracts a couple times or their hourly sessions just waiting on me. And it's really stressful because sometimes they'll wake up late in the morning with just another loss and realize cause a lot causes a lot of anxiety. So, uh, working with contractors is a good thing cuz it's flexible, but it's also very anxietyprovoking sometimes. So, that's another loss. Um, lack of communication about the quiet churn. Long sales cycles suck. Um, which is kind of a funny one, but it does. You know, you're always you're always waiting. You're always kind of checking in. You don't want to be overly proactive. You do want to be over proactive, but you don't want to be annoying. You want to be helpful, resourceful, valuable people about in your network and always present and you can't you can't leave. Um, just sucks. I think my next life will be in a product business to where it's a lot more turnkey, but you know, to get with the bad stressed [ __ ] lol. Um, that's kind of a joke, but it's true. You know, I'm um I'm gaining weight. I'm getting stronger. I've gone to the gym every single day this month. But, you know, it's it's it's stressful. I spent a lot of time alone. Like, it's Sunday right now at 3:00 in the afternoon getting this retro win because that's who I be. Um, but yeah, it's this isn't a glamorous life, but probably you got to focus on the wins, you know. Uh, okay. Action items and goals. Going over our business and life. Action items and goals from last month. Establish website visual direction. We did one hour dedicated to LinkedIn SOP. I was not accountable to doing as much outreach as I should have this month. Sylvest L. Never miss a team meeting. I did. I missed one earlier this month. Established agency partner with hours. I did not do that. Organize our project manager. I did not do that. Trimmed down subscription list. That I did do. Um with Shuttertock. Uh stopped using Adobe for the first time since college. Uh started using Affinity Designer more, which I'm really enjoying for thumbnails and stuff like that. I still do all our thumbnails, which is not the most leverage use in my time, but um I enjoy it. So, yeah, a lot of stuff we need to catch up on. Gym every day that I did do. Co-hatch three times per week that I did do. Three phone calls a day that I did not do. Um I did not do three cold calls. Be present podcast that I did do. So, yeah, looks like I'm short on the business. I have high standard when it comes to the business side of Andy. When it comes to the wife side, I um am usually a lot more conservative with my goals because I realize there's not a m much of Andy left outside of the business. Um so yeah, this month goals, business, and life. What are we doing, consistent daily outreach? So I toyed with my mom on this idea. Uh we have a kitchen timer like one of those crank kitchen timers and I thought just for like for purposes of accountability. Uh what if I just use that every morning say this is my 90 minutes of prospecting and outreach on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Um and just use that as my accountability mechanism. Um that I that is something I wouldn't be doing every day now uh during the week, five days a week. Launch 2sp. It's a website. This one's been backlogged. and I haven't been proactive enough on charging them because they are not filling in their CMS information and we need to populate the content on the site. Um, and I've set the precedent too early of being nice and not effective. So, we're going to watch this month. We're going to launch AMA Columbus stuff going to be big for our company. Uh, the current AMA Columbus website is [ __ ] Um, we built a new one in web flow and it looks amazing and it's almost done. Want to get that done before the end of day today. Um I've got about eight more hours of work today. Started here at about 11. So I've got four hours in a day. Got eight more hours I can knock that out of him. Two big pipeline deals are coming to a head this week. Uh we have about 52,000 in pipeline if both of those close. Uh, and both of those close, we'll be pretty much set for quarter one, which is amazing. So, if we can close both of those, those are roughly within our control, but we still have to be accountable towards putting them across finish line. Establish agency outreach list. So, I'm going live with a new with our set of trusted partners. I need a couple I need a little bit more information for them to put on the live site. Um, so getting that up and established, organize our project manager. So I started using ClickUp, I need to go in and create more detailed spaces for each of our clients so that the recurring task that we do is more organized. And also when it comes to uh reflections and billing, it's a lot easier to just have a single source of truth and bouncing between Moxy and Quick Up and I just needed aside life 15k gym and 3k calories. So, I have been an absolute uh slob when it comes to eating uh this month, which is just really frustrating because it gets me behind. It revokes my focus and I honestly just like getting out of the house has been huge. Like, um I can't even this the uh towards the last weekend of this month, we were snowed in. There's still two piece of snow on the ground in some places. And we literally could not leave because of the weather a weather emergency. And I was absolutely in the dumps because it was just depressed. You know, you not depressed, but just you can't control your environment. So many distractions. It's just it's awful for me. And I still have to just get out of the office in the morning, go to work. That kind of feeling I just haven't been able to replace. So that's big. Go ahead and doing that. I want to read one book. One book. Come on, Andy. It's not that hard. Uh, there's a book I want to read at home. Um, um, it's called 10x is easier than 2x. Dan sold and Benjamin Hardy. I want to finish that book up. I have a couple audio books that I'm currently listening to. Um, buy back your time by Dan Martell. Really great one. And Time is a Tool by Benjamin Hardy. Also reading that one. Need to read the physical book. That'll help me with the next one, which is No Phone in My Bedroom. I so often first thing I do in the morning throw out of bed and either scroll or check email. Very bad habits. So we're going to end that immediately. Visit three duplexes. This is the other other job that I have is searching for property looking for my investment into a property so I can move to Columbus, set my flag up and do this thing right. I've been putting the soft for too long. I have a call scheduled at 4 on Tuesday with a realtor. Uh, and we're going to make this happen. So, goal to visit three duplexes this month and open that and get back on track. That is January's monthly retro. I know it went over long about 30 minutes or so, 28 minutes. Appreciate you guys hanging around to the end. Uh, if you've been around since the beginning of the series, you're a G. Let's keep it going. Um, and if you're listening too and you're in a low point like me, just um, you're not in alone, know that. Um, feel free to share your monthly retro with me. Tag me on LinkedIn, follow me over there.