Business Review Template: The Monthly Retro a Solo Marketer Actually Uses

Kind: captions Language: en Hello. Hello. It is October 5th and September is over. Welcome everyone to quarter 4. That is just absolutely insane to say out loud. But top of the month marks the time for my monthly retro again. A few days late on getting this in, but I think I have a valid excuse. I was traveling to Atlanta all of last week. This weekend was just last week and this week honestly was just crazy. Um, but I'm staying consistent and that is the metric of success. So, yeah, I'm excited to get into it this month. Um, as a whole, I would say very dynamic and very a lot a lot happened. You know, I was before I do these, I always go through my calendar, just my notes, review last month's retro, and obviously finances are a big part of this. And on paper, everything is good and perceived well-being wise. Daytoday, it's been very up and down. You know, there was a few client churns. There was a lot of travel. And it's crazy that I'm sure a lot of you guys can relate. When you travel, things seem to go super fast and super slow at the same time, which is maybe not the the best way to put it or maybe doesn't make any sense at all. I don't know. But I've got a lot to get into this month and I'm excited to share with you guys. So, um, September 2026, eight paying accounts, topline business revenue 15,600, which if we look at, you know, all of our past months is about average. Um, we're almost at 400K for the business, and we will certainly cross that next month. So, 400K in, you know, two years. It's February 1st of 2024 is when we started, obviously, a little bit more than two years, but I'm proud of that, you know. um something to I mean maybe not towards exactly where my goals are but you know net on net um I'm focused on building a growable sustainable business and enjoying my life you know so yeah topline revenue for September 15,600 business expenses a little under 3500 so 34.96 personal income 366 through dividend reinvestments stock portfolio things like that and personal expenses, uh, 2528. Um, if we look at our Seni diagram, which I've been loving doing, and unfortunately, it's really hard to keep all of this eloquent because we have collected revenue and not everything is completely elegant in terms of the dates that everything transfers over. But this right here, if you guys have any sort of visualization of this is called a Seni diagram and I use a tool called Monarch Money, which will be linked below. Um, if you guys are interested in Monarch Money, been using it in every single video and every single retro that I record, which I've been doing for the last 33 months, 30 months or so. So, yeah. Um, inflow of this month, 28,000 out was 3500 just business-wise. And obviously personal expenses aren't factor factored into this. Pay for a mortgage, utilities, gas, groceries, things like that are all personal. But business related um business expenses were the following. $1,735 to contract labor, contractor labor, $1,129 to software and tools, $250 for networking and outreach. Uh that was the conference ticket only, I believe. So that makes sense. Travel and meals $25. Business rent $125 and utilities and communication $5210. So we did manage to that includes the travel fees. So hotel room, food while I was gone, gas. Um you guys can notice I tend to travel pretty lean. And if you uh want to check out uh the YouTube vlog we just posted, I just edited a full vlog with the travel to Atlanta, super entrepreneurial, 72 hours in the life of a long locked in entrepreneur. That was super fun. So you guys want to see the full recap, uh check out that video. I'll link it either in the description or in the card. So that was fun. Um I edited that myself, so don't don't come at me, guys. Bad editing. But my main metric of success was just posting it. Otherwise, uh go back to notion here. Uh no, go back to Monarch. Sorry. Otherwise, reasonable month of contractor labor. Most of that goes to Ali and Roa. Ali uh worked a bit more this month because he um he was engaged in a in a dev project for one of our support clients. So, his hours were up about about double than usual. So, that's where that comes from. And then Roa is 320 per month, which we cut her hours back slightly, which we get back more into, but I'm I'm okay with those numbers. We did trim a little bit of fat on our subscriptions, uh, which was a goal for last month, but yeah, let's get into the wins and concerns. So, wins, business and revenue, uh, about average. A surprised client project ended up closing at the end of the month. So, super fast sales cycle. Came in from a referral, agreed on a price, one call close, and it's a really, really exciting and cool client. Great fit for us, and uh I'm excited to share more about that because it is it's a really cool client and good budget fit. Sales are moving well with several clients in the pipeline. I've been managing it well. I have made a few mistakes in terms of timeliness just because of travel and getting proposals out, but I'm very optimistic on the pipeline front. And just a reminder that these are lagging lead generating activities are always lagging efforts. So when you experience a full pipeline, it always comes back to your inputs from months earlier. So I need to stay in consistent on it and this is good reinforcement. Finally launched the TSP website and migrated them over to a retainer which is nice and enterprise healthcare client that we're working with. It has gone really well and I will say this client in particular was pro was our biggest project based client and I have managed the projectbased portion of this incredibly well like they are remarkably satisfied overcommunicated in the beginning. We changed our client communication process over to Slack and that's been remarkably that's worked remarkably well. It contains the uh a great place to store links. You can do it on a free Slack channel and it works well especially because some clients are on Microsoft Teams and we don't have to worry about that. So yeah, good lessons there. We'll be moving that moving forwards. Relationships and network. Uh Atlanta trip at the end of the month uh to connect with Chris and Chris Lefay. Both went well. Um travel was very stressful and it does always tend to be uh especially for someone who travels very lean like I am. Again, if you guys want to know more of what I'm referencing, definitely check out the um definitely check out the vlog because it it does tell a lot of these stresses. Uh but that went well. It was great seeing them. If I can pull up a picture of meeting Lefay and Dwis, two legends. Good to connect with them. Conference went well. Reconnected with Nikquille over coffee. It was good to connect with him. He came to our networking lunch, our marketing leaders lunch a few weeks back and we got coffee afterwards to talk collaboration, referrals and things like that. Met Megan Whmers for an Inerson coffee. Really good. Shout out to Peter Guba. Really good long walking founder call and I really enjoyed it. Learn learn a lot from this guy that really stood out this month. Good way to get steps in and walking phone calls are underrated. Really really recommend. recorded five podcasts this month. Uh Ezra Ezra McCarthy's episode was awesome. Big standout. Um I'm actually going down to Kentucky to visit him next month, so more on that later. Posting daily on YouTube felt fulfilling. I do I have really enjoyed the second channel. Like I don't know, I'll be airing this on there, but I'm not sure if you guys are subscribed to the Andy the Marketer channel, but I've been really enjoying doing that. I've dialed in the format using using either Riverside or um TA to record them and I've just remarkably I've I've enjoyed it a lot, you know. So, um I did fall off in consistency towards the end of the month. It's been 5 days since I'm uploaded. Now that I'm home, I'm going to be prioritizing it a lot more. But I need to I need to stay consistent on this because it's inbuilt accountability for me to continue to do outreach and share my journey. and I've reached escape velocity in terms of the format and it's already grown to over 50 subs. So, I'm really proud of that and I need to continue to do that. I kept going to the gym consistently even with low energy. Something about my current workout routine is just not enjoyable for me. Like it I I literally see myself like looking at the time on my watch and trying to just get to 45 minutes. And I do push myself on the intense sets, but it's because I'm gaining weight and I'm bulking and you don't see the results of your inputs um because you just feel fatter. And I do really enjoy running. I've enjoyed runs. Been trying to work on my mobility more as well, but I need to iterate on format because it's just not enjoyable for me right now. Um so yeah, good good transition here to losses and concerns or concerns and lessons. We had two clients turn this month. Both were relatively small retainers, uh, 1,500 a month. So 3K is effectively paused and gone from our pipeline. One of them was a very long-term client who was clear that this is more so of a pause. They're migrating website platforms, so the support work we do for them is isn't needed during this time. So I'm confident that this will continue in the future. Um, but the other one just wasn't a really good client fit. the other 1,500 a month retainer. It was a framer retainer. They didn't really value the work. They didn't communicate well. And I could just tell it was kind of a matter of time before this, you know, ended. And I ended up uh terminating our uh developer who was the lead the lead point person on that project. Um and um it's tough, you know, it's it's you have these hard conversations. And to be honest with you, I didn't take it that bad. You know, I could have stressed out about it a lot. I could have said like hey this is where a you know a good portion of our MR is coming from and I just I didn't stress you know I had we have a full pipeline we can continue with higher retainers for better fit clients who are in healthcare who we serve best um but yeah it caused a lot of internal thought like okay you know what what what retainer should we prioritize moving forwards and um technically on paper that is a loss but I'm confident that we can get it back in So that would be the headline loss. Uh the content sponsorship that I talked about last time. The newsletter churned after just one month. And it wasn't a huge retainer was a thousand a month for three weekly newsletters on Substack. And this one I was not upset about at all. The clients from my in my opinion had very unrealistic expectations in terms of the growth that was going to happen with a newsletter in such a short time. So, we were basically like a full-ervice marketing agency trying to grow that for them. And when we first started, I really enjoyed the content. It was like finding it was uh there was a newsletter that was based off of finding novel websites and writing a short piece about them and redistributing them for a Substack newsletter, posting about it on LinkedIn. But the amount of time and energy it took to grow that just would not have been worth uh 1K a month of my time. And I was creating articles on the weekend. And to be honest with you guys, the second channel is I would rather spend time producing content for the second channel and sharing that with you guys. So that was another loss. But um it's a lesson to communicate better in the beginning and just align on expectations because you know growing a newsletter to a thousand subscribers in one month um from zero is very uh is very high expectations. So just make sure your expectations match. So the same thing with any client relationship. We lost a RFP for to a local pharmacy system that I thought we were great fits for. Um they were local. They had three locations and I thought we could have done an incredible job for them. Three, it was a three call sales process. Ended up becoming the final of two and just unfortunate because we could have done a amazing job for them and I know we could have and I also built a decent rapport with the staff members there. So I did have hopes that that would go through and it was a bit of a surprise to see that but um I did reach out to them asking for feedback on how we managed the process. So um a good lesson to learn there in terms of managing the sales process and you know lessons to be learned from it. Operations and execution uh we cut down two of our team members hours just because of retainers and those being lost don't need as much support uh hourly support from our developers. So, you know, it's technically a loss, but you know, it just makes sense. And that's honestly a positive given the nature of my business model. We can control costs. You we're not stuck with long-term salaries, and that's why I love working with remote team members, uh, who are still very talented. So, um, the right call, but still technically a loss. a stressful scenario. As I was driving down to Atlanta, the I created a dedicated landing page for the CTA on our um the columbusmarketing.org site for the VA workshop and my bonehead put in the wrong link to the CTA page that was going to advertise my slides and get leads to the newsletter. realized I put the totally wrong link into the CTA both for the podcast and for YouTube. So once that happened, I was literally driving and I was like, "Well, [ __ ] you know, nothing we can do here." Pardon my language. But that was unfortunate and um I fixed it afterwards, but you know, 10 hours later in the car ride, it's like what's the real point, you know? So unfortunate there. Um daily YouTube posting fell off towards the end of the month. I was really good about scheduling these out, recording quick wins, but all in all, we grew, you know, the channel to 50 subscribers in one month, which doesn't sound like a lot, and I know that, but this consistency is going to be really helpful moving forwards. And um I'm really looking to build that muscle and get better at content in general. Get better at speaking to the camera, building authority, dialing in the format and moving the moving the business forward and using that as a funnel for the newsletter readers to be helpful for answering their job search questions and also to beginners who are freelancers as well. Community offer still isn't finalized and the next event isn't even on the calendar. Every day invites goes out is costing me. So, I want to get together the next marketing leaders lunch and I have not done that yet. So, I am confident that I could get at least 30 new people to the next launch and I just need to send out invites because I we need to it's that time of year we need to get one out before, you know, next month is November and then much after that is December. So, it's getting to the holiday season and I want to do it while fall is still here and we have to plan out weeks in advance. So, I'm deciding on October 22nd and before the end of this week, I need to have a full guest list and invites. I have a full pipeline set up here in folk. Um, and I created tags for all of the past attendees and moving them through. So, uh, being consistent on that is a very high priority and I'll probably spend a lot of time tomorrow making that happen. Life and property. Um, ordered 12 cubic yards of dirt. Not mold. Whisper flow. Understand me. Dirt. And I unloaded it all by myself. Yes, I did. And I talked about this briefly in the last retro. But guys, 12 cubic yards of dirt is an astronomical amount. Like, it is quite unbelievable how much dirt that is. Like, you can't even imagine how much. And just to provide some tactical proof here, I have actual photos. So if we go here to when was this exactly month dirt? Yes. Behold your eyes on the dirt masterpiece here. So this much dirt. So this was taken from my um from my deck and I basically filled in everything around the house with this amount of dirt. And I know it doesn't look crazy, but the bad was literally this right here. This is an entire garbage truck. Like, watch this. This is like unbelievable how much this is full. This is an entire garbage truck full of dirt. And I'm still not probably doing it justice, but like this is just a ton. And I filled it in all around the house because there was negative grade leading to the foundation of the house. Water was getting into the basement every time it rained. And the best part about this is that it actually rained right after rained right after super hard right after he unloaded it. So it was mud and I got a tarp on it as fast as I could. I ran to Harbor Freight to get this done. And oh my lord, guys, it was two full days over Memorial Day weekend or Labor Day weekend. Just pro it was about 18 hours in total. Just two to three full days in there. Absolutely kicked my ass. But as you can see, there's some progress there. And I did a full walk through when it was at like, you know, dark at night just with everything here. Fully walked around the house. Literally so much dirt. You can see the difference between the the the dirt with water and then the dirt that was dry all the way around the house and to the back to probably 2 feet high all the way around the house. So unbelievable. That was completely stressful, but I'm glad it's done. It was good hard work. The house still has no tenants because I am in this constant process of I need to fix this first before this happens. I've already paid for the bathroom repair downstairs that was 1,200 bucks. I've already ordered the dirt, unloaded it. It's by all means ready to go. And the leads that I'm getting from Zillow are just terrible. Like people don't even read the description. They request a application and they think the whole house is for sale for rent for 800 bucks a month which is just people just don't use their brains and it's been a huge migrating waste of time and I need to reach out to my network and get referrals that way which I'm good at but I haven't been able to do that. Travel. Uh last one. Travel was incredibly stressful. I feel like sometimes I get peer pressured into saying yes to events and I don't really identify whether they're a good f fit for my business and I just get sucked into the whim of wanting to meet one person and I don't consider the consequences and this was an incredibly stressful travel trip. It was 11 hours to Atlanta each way. I got home at like 2 am. Again, watch that vlog for the full details, but it was remarkably stressful and it's basically a full week of productivity loss, which I can make a lot of money in a week. I can spend that time doing a lot of things and I have to rigorously evaluate a traveling arrangement like that due to the productivity costs and uh we'll weigh that more more in the future and that's a good lesson. All right, action items and goals, business and life. uh last month. Going over last month, 25K revenue, we did not reach that. Plan next event logistics, we did not do that. Begin community outline. We kind of did. So, I built a sales page for early applicants on the website. It's not really a sales page. It's more so just a it's just a just establishing offers and pricing and inclusions. I need to get this rolled out soon. I did meet Melissa Fischer at the content adventure conference this weekend and she and Michelle Garrett and a few others that were at our first event expressed interest in doing some kind of a mastermind. So I want to build out a circle community or a school community maybe and just get that into fruition. Delir Casey I met this weekend also expressed interest in collaborating on some kind of a 90-day course that we can use for entry level uh people or people who are looking for a marketing job. that would be a very valuable resource and I just need to solidify the exact offer stack. But the good news is that we made it public. Um, so I think I think I'll give myself a check mark there because I did begin the community outline. 12 YouTube videos, we definitely did that. Onboard editor, I did that last night. So that's a win. Triump add-on subscriptions, we did do that. I still have one more to trim. We cut the Moxy subscription and we cut the Reloom subscription. And so that's 70 bucks a month back right there. Subscriptions are still too high though. I'm not a fan of that. Begin new challenge with Ezra. We did not do that. We finished dirt. We finished We did finish dirt and leveling, but we did not acquire three tenants visits. And we did not have our finance sessions. I need to text my finance guy, Eli, and just have a session with him uh talking about, you know, setting up a 401k, solo 401k for the business, all this other stuff. And I just needed to do that. So, we did not acquire any of our life goals, which is unfortunate. And we really didn't acquire any of our business goals either, which, you know, a lot a lot of surface area for improvement. This month, though, we have really doubting goals. Um, build a repeatable SEO process. I still feel like we've got our web process down. I still feel like we're just winging it when it comes to SEO, which is really unfortunate because I'm good at it. I enjoy it. I've got a team member, John, who's very skilled at it. and very responsive, does good work, and I just haven't built out the functions in ClickUp when it comes to project management, Slack, you know, to really operationalize it and have default repeatable weekly tasks. And I just need to do that. I need to either talk to Sam or one of the community members and just create a repeatable SEO process. And obviously things change really fast in terms of AI search, but just some kind of a weekly cadence for each of our clients that are on retainer and establish that moving forwards and just have a framework to work from that people that our team members can clock into that have clear SOPs and deliverables and really build out that side of the business. So that's a big one. Close at least two more website deals. Our pipeline is full. So I'm confident that we can already we already have multiple 3K MRR retainers that are in pipeline and being proposed to right now. So confident we can close at least one to replace some of the last the lost revenue from this month. Finalize the community offer. Host the event for October 22nd. Get the invites out this week, ideally tomorrow. Keep the second YouTube channel daily by batching instead of scheduling post ahead of time. By batching and scheduling ahead of time. I want to upload every day this month. Well, starting now, upload every day this month. Do newsletter outreach every day. That channel is working. I'm having Roa work from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and sending um sending LinkedIn outreach and it is working remarkably well. So, we're going to continue doing this and check in on our subscribers here just to show you guys what we are up to and refresh quickly here. Up to 238 subscribers. So, it is growing. Uh, we got a few from the content adventure conference this week. I built a landing page for it, which I am pretty proud of that kind of just matches the existing site. I did a little bit of work on for the SEO on the main website as well, but this is a nice little optin. Get a confetti animation. Boom. And then you get the welcome email, which is kind of cool. Love building in Ship Studio. Love this website. Love the branding. Shout out to Jason Turner for the great branding on this one. Um, so yeah, we're still have a high open rate. Uh, 63% that is falling as we grow a little bit. So, I want to make sure that we're doing re-engagement and making sure that our warm visitors are subscribing. So, that's important. But, yeah, onwards with our goals. Uh, pre-launch QA um for every piece of content. I'm not overly stressed about that, but that's a good thing to add. Life front, get new tenants for the house. Start doing direct outreach. I have several people that are based here locally that would be very good to reach out to just hey you know looking for it's a good hormosy sales approach hey uh this is what I'm looking for and they could be direct fits of the offer but if they know anyone then it's it feels less salesy so I want to reach out to a lot of people here in Columbus and if you're in Columbus and you know someone who would be good fit for a house uh hit me up would love to have you got a great room for sale you know I am very laidback coolest guy you'll ever meet you know if you just don't get on my bad side. But yeah, need to get some housing tenants in here. Getting a tenant for the house before winter makes it harder. Some reason that added it twice. Health targets, six gym sessions a week, 12,000 steps a day, and tracking macros, and one mindfulness session every day because why not add that on there? It can only help. I want to use a Kentucky trip to help Ezra and actually unwind. This weekend I am headed to uh Somerset or Somerset, Kentucky to help my friend Ezra McCarthy, who's a guest I mentioned on the podcast earlier. Um help him move into his killer new house, which I'm super stoked for for him and help him do that stuff, meet his family, probably go on a run, crash on his basement, and do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of stuff. So, by the way, uh Ezra, I have to share this, but um in the scaling studio mastermind been sharing these AI generated videos. I don't know if you guys have seen these, but this is just um these are just inexcusably fun to make. And I won't share with you guys how much I spent on the tokens for these, but all you do is give it photos and Higsfield will create videos like this. I don't um I'm having way too much fun with these. So, shout out to Higsfield. Um not cheap, but I mean, all I did was give it uh these photos right here. Um, boom. I gave it this photo of Sam. Um, and I gave it this photo. You go see the the photo of Ezra that it used as well. Hang on. Anyway, I just gave it a photo of Sam and Ezra and did a remarkably good job right here. Gave it that photo of Ezra and made that video. This photo of Sam. Uh, this is the Migos rap video that it made with those characters. I know it's not a challenger. I messy. I made one with me and my mom too, which again just an ungodly amount. I sent it to dad here, but me and my mom. Bro, I'm sorry. So, if you guys are interested in that, check out Higsfield and give it a quick uh quick spin because that's been Haven't laughed a whole lot this month due to all the stress. But um those were the sources of a lot of my laughs. Last thing I want to show you guys before we sign out is this that I put together this um for a presentation that I gave to Otterbine um the Otterbine entrepreneurship students and it is a demographic chart of all of my revenue all my months of revenue that I've been tracking since I started in February 1st of 2024 and this correlates very very sharply with my mental health and it's unfortunate that as solos that we I think we equate a lot of our own selfworth with the performance of the business. And I'm by no means free of that. And we still have a couple more months to add on to here, but they've been both of these have been good months that have been up a little bit. Um, this month was actually a little bit down. But yeah, it's it's I mean, looking at this, it's not been easy. It never is. And I am still convinced that the only way you lose is if you quit. you know, I'm going to make this work either way. Um, and I just need to create that objectivity and that detachment from business performance, business well-being, and personal well-being. Um, I've started to pursue uh dating a little bit. Uh, I've downloaded a dating app called Hinge, which I imagine you guys have heard of, and I'm getting way too personal with you guys. My god. But stuff like this I've put on put off for a long time just because I've been focused on building this business and obviously like I said this is very transparent and none of you guys are interested in it. But um yeah I am starting to diversify on the life front a little bit. I want to start playing pickle ball and just kind of finding myself finding out who Andy is beyond all this stuff because I put way too much into this sometimes and um yeah continual growth experience moving forward. So, um, way too way too transparent, but uh, hope you guys enjoyed this retro. Subscribe for more daily updates like this, and I'll see you guys next month for October's retro. Have a great Q4, guys.