Columbus marketing playbook: Exactly How Much my Business Made in June | Monthly Retro

Kind: captions Language: en Oh my god, you guys. We are finally here. It is July 3rd, which means I'm two days late on recording my monthly retro. Huge sorry, but oh my god, the logistical errors we have had in getting to where I am right now. Would make you guys thank me. So, I've been in here all day. I'm in a Coach. Shout out Shout out to Coatch Easton. Loving this one now that I'm here in Columbus. There is no AC in this place and I've been sweating my ass off all day. I think it's like 103 degrees here. I've got a fan pointed at me. It's not doing the trick. I'm in front of a window because that's where the best lighting is. And I am just like I had continuity camera set up then it didn't work. Couldn't get this mic to work. I think I have it working. I recorded like 20 minutes of an intro that did not work. So, [laughter] it is 6:30 on a Friday. I'm usually working at this time. Anyway, if you guys were here last month, we'll link to May's monthly retro in the card. But, I was feeling a little bit down bad on myself. We had a low month of revenue. It was like 8K last month, but this month, I am proud to report things are picking up. Uh we've got a lot to get into this month. I've been procrastinating on recording this a little bit, but things are definitely looking up both in business and in life. And I'm excited to share that with you guys this week. So, onto the tool stack. As you guys know, we always start here in Notion. Give us the full at a glance view of the past. Okay, I said 26 months last month, but I'm going to actually go in and count to see how many months that we've actually recorded. So, that's 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 29 months, bro. 29 months. Um, June, April. I don't know why it's not in order. Uh, that's really annoying, but okay. June of 2026, uh, topline wine revenue $21,400 over last month, almost 3x last month. Andy can feel a little bit better about himself. Now going into all the business stats. Okay. Topline revenue 21,400. Business expenses 5,353. Personal income 365. All due to dividends and personal expenses 18K. That is because we put a down payment on a house. So that's going that's literally I think 16k of that is the down payment on the house. So we have some allocated expenses there. But I have screenshots of each for accountability on the revenue side. And I'm going to go into Monarch Money. Talk a little bit about our profit loss. This financial dashboard right here. If you guys are a marketer and you're looking for some more financial visibility, first of all, highly recommend Monarch Money. It's going to give you a great at a glance view into your finances, especially if you know how to use it and create these reports. AI can do this as well. Monarch does have an MCP, which just shut down at the end of last month. silly monarch. But they do have an MCP server so you can do these data visualizations within Quad. But I have so much to cover today. I just want to do the high level financial overview to bring you guys into. So this isn't caught up quite. We have about 3 to 4K in invoices that are still stuck in Stripe uh for the top of the month. So this is a little bit lagging behind. But I want to go to our dashboard or our home base here so you guys can see how I have a lot of this already illustrated. This is where we go in, and I'll blur this out. This is where I go in and track all of our revenue. We had the second 50% of a website build project. We had a half of a website sprint that we did for a client in Web Flow. We had like 3 months of retainer work pent up. We had a quarterly invoice come due for Web Flow maintenance and SEO. So, that was nice to get. And all in all, I'm feeling pretty good. This we're still have about 1.5K even on top of that. So, more like 3K closed this month. One just haven't come through. So, 20 to 23,000 uh top line and I'm feeling a lot better as opposed to last month's cuz you guys go watch last month's I was a little bit down bad, but that's good. So, in terms of actual expenses, again, going back here to Monarch Money, uh this is the it's called a seni diagram. It's the allocation of everything that's coming in and everything that we're putting out. So, uh here is the income on the left. We did get our tax retributions. So, we overpaid on taxes significantly and a fee does come with that. But basically, we were reimbursed for miles and I basically took that and I put it right back into the business. So, we got about 8,000 recouped from our tax payment, which is not bad, but again, it was mine to begin with. I don't like having the mindset that's just like free money. So, we're putting it back in the business. And I actually, as of today, just put it into my Roth IRA. also set up a solo 401k. Shout out to our escorp business owners. Uh that was very helpful. But this is probably the most productive part in terms of business finances. Okay, we spent 5.3K on the business. That's a lot. That's more than usual. Where did all that go? And the good news is that I have it all categorized here in terms of our tax deductions and where everything went. I hope the screen share is able to let this be seen. But 2.5K went to business, advertising, and promotions. We attended a conference which we will talk about. 1.36K went into contractor labor. So paying Roa, Ali, Clark, Eb and John who is our new SEO strategist for this month. And software tools. We have about 900 bucks in recurring subscriptions. And I think we can get that down a little bit. We started paying for SE ranking, which is another SEO tool. Other than that, I'm not seeing a whole lot of a whole lot of fluff there. So that'll probably remain current. 200 bucks a month goes to Cohatch. This facility, which right now is very hot, and I know I've been trash talking a little bit, but we love them still. It's okay. Business supplies and expenses, miscellaneous expenses. Sometimes that's software and business, travel, and meals. So that's the allocation of our finances this month. I have all of the transactions here. Nothing I'll really point out there. again, business biggest expenses where we did do a um we did do a consultancy. That's where about a lot of that $2,000 went as we work we worked with a consultant this month uh named Yannik who is an exited web flow agency founder to help us he basically assessed the business give us a third eye view and it was incredibly helpful and I'll share some of the lessons that I learned here cuz he g us gave us a playbook here to kind of assess where all of our revenues come from and how we can better allocate our assets to be more productive business people etc. So I'll go over that here in a little bit. So, back to notion. Uh, let's do a recap. So, I have a lot of miscellaneous things to cover and this is pretty rewarding and cool because I get to share it all with you guys. But starting here at the top, first full month living in the new house, a grind of repairs on top of heavy travel for the conference. And yeah, that's we would sum it up in one sentence there. But in terms of the wins and losses, closed the biggest month of pipeline in a while. We have I'm not going to bring up my CRM right here, but we have about 50 to 60K in fairly warm pipeline that could close next month. You know, you know how it is in B2B. It's it's a long sales cycle. It's staying in it for the long haul. But we have that much in proposed revenue and it has been verbally agreed to. But I never say I never get excited until that's closed, under contract, and honestly in the bank. So tentatively excited and these are all a direct result of the repositioning. So these are three weeds I can confidently say I would not have gotten if we weren't in our healthcare niche. So super stoked about that. But again, not going to get excited. Uh lead genen efforts. So in terms of feedback from prior episodes, it's very helpful for you guys to learn about what we're doing from a lead generation front in order to grow the business. So a few things that I've been working uh LinkedIn video DMs. I've had this conversation with a few other founders, but LinkedIn video DMs are doing very good and they booked me two sales calls uh last month. So, and I can say that I can confidently say that they're from they are from the the videos themselves. It's being helpful. Usually, I'll send LinkedIn video DMs people that I'm already talking with. And as you can see from the screenshot, I try and send 10 a day. And the bad news about it is that it saves the video to your phone afterwards. But that's a good segue because you always want to be recording these DMs from your phone. The way that I that it appears in your inbox is very click friendly. It's very easy to open, easy to engage with. So I usually just say something to the tune of, "Hey, it's great to meet you." And then continue the conversation in person, articulate my words a little bit, establish a relationship that way. say, "Hey, would love to XYZ get on a call if you uh want to share insights, connect with someone in the industry." Always looking to meet more people. And you can also kind of throw a joke in there based on how the conversation is going. It's very much a warmer view of social selling. And it has been doesn't convert 100% of the time to a call, but it's what I've been doing. And once you get over like the first couple, it's uh you get on a roll. It's actually kind of enjoyable. So, been sending those every day. I'm also uh using the LinkedIn MCP called Voyager which allows you to kind of automate outreach a little bit. So essentially what that does is you go to the GitHub file and you install the GitHub repo onto your local drive and it's it's basically the LinkedIn MCP. So once you calibrate it to your target audience, basically it gets to a sequence where it'll send 15 connects a day and it has three different stages of the pipeline where it recognizes in your LinkedIn inbox where you sit in each of those phases. I know it sounds crazy, but you just every morning I just log on and I say, "Let's start our daily process." It will scan back into its cache to look for the past history of outreaches and it did a very good job of finding people who were in our ICP. So, healthcare marketers in a decision level position a lot of times uh recently hired specializing in pharmacy, medtech and private equity backed who some of our best clients are and it recognizes all of this and it continues the conversation. It drafts the message before you sends them and it has been making it a lot easier to keep up with the outreach grind. So, that's how I'm kind of helping to keep the pipeline moving along. It's been helpful and again I would have been doing all that manually. So two things that have been working from a lead genen front. Revenue picked up after a soft stretch. I already talked about that. So sellability diagnostic. So Yannik is a somebody who's been in my network for a long time. He scaled and sold an agency called Shadow Digital. He scaled it to I think a million and a half in revenue and sold it to an agency partner of his. And now he is in a buyout period. He works partly with that agency and also helps around with the business. still tries to grow Shadow, but we did a quick sprint, uh, paid him 5K to basically learn all about my business, prompt me to get really into the uncomfortable conversations and talk about what's working, what's not, what our unique differentiator is, why we chose healthcare, and honestly how we can double down on that niche and and grow in the future. And I got to say it was it was very helpful. I've never, first of all, I was committed to it because it was such a big investment for me. I'm not usually comfortable making purchases like that. And I invested into it. It was the accountability I needed to look back through the finances and really see where the commonalities were in terms of our best fit clients, the clients that we enjoyed the most, the most profitable projects and really do intentionally curate more of those. So basically what we realized is um we have a road map. That was kind of the the gist of everything that we came to. And we have three different uh three different acts and all these are distilled into actions that are going to help us scale to uh 500k by the end of next year. And that seems like a bit of a lofty stretch goal. I think it's a bit, you know, I think I can do it. I think I can scale to a million by the end of next year to be honest with you. I really do. And the healthcare niche is part of that. me getting better and more consistent and feeling like I'm on a direction that is not just on my own senses is going to be is it's it's very helpful and I'm more inspired to continue the business just because I have more insight into what I'm doing and I've had a lot of my preconceived notions to be fact checked by someone who honestly knows more than me and that's the value in working with someone who has already done what you've done and yeah it's I literally have this I can go back to and reference it's distill it into different phases. Uh starting with the most uh the most helpful piece is this part right here. So the strategy map broken down I'm going into my actions into the next 90 days. Um that starts with demand, convert and deliver. So improving our SOPs is what so this kind of segment of deliver refers to convert. So build the offer and path to retainer. Something that we're working on doing a much better job of is making our SEO and our lead genen mandatory after we do a website launch. So really baking that into our core offer, commit to the healthcare positioning. We've done that and turn the podcast into a referral partner engine. That is the big goal and we could do that. Looking back through our podcast, about 80% of our pipeline has come from either podcast guests. This is from the last two years. 80% of our pipeline has come through either podcast guests who were on the podcast at one time, who had heard about it, who was referred to from the podcast. That's where the bulk of our revenue came from. And if I hadn't gone back in and actually traced that stuff, you know, I never would have really realized that. So, working on making the podcast a concier experience for our ICP. Again, it's going to look like a little bit of light rebranding, not totally changing the direction, but really focused on creating an experience to where referrals are natural from that. So, there we go. Uh, this is kind of the diagnostic numbers. So, basically, you put in a lot of your numbers into a spreadsheet [snorts] and it calculates your agency's utility value. And mine was zero because there's a lot of founder dependency on me. So, it's really refreshing and honestly humbling to see that even after two and a half years of really grinding on the business that it's actually worth zero dollars. So, we've got a lot of work to do, but again, I'm still feeling a lot a lot more confident just now that I have an outside perspective and it's provided a lot of clarity. So, that was a syllable diagnostic. That was a win from this month. Uh, three big call recordings. Big win. Next up, uh, we were featured on the Marketers Exit podcast with Tim and Tass. That was really cool. Sent that to my dad. He was proud of me. And um yeah, these two are awesome. That was it was honestly the easiest podcast I've ever been on. They are very easy to talk to. I met Task for coffee earlier this month. Talked about my story, the journey, growth, the hard parts, um what's working, what's not, and I just I never felt like I had to pretend to be impressive or pretend to be someone I wasn't. That was a lot of fun. I need to reshare that on LinkedIn, by the way. It's a good reminder. Other wins. I guest lectured at CCAD. So, shout out to Shane Richardson who I met at a event at Zoko Design a couple years ago. We've kind of stayed in touch on LinkedIn. And I have two or three meetings set up with some of the students here to just talk career and I need to get back to a few of them. But I super enjoyed this just talking about my career and entrepreneurship. Kind of similar to Marketer's Exit, but answering some of their questions and um I felt I felt helpful. So, that was really cool. I did a workshop with the 10X Solo community. So 10X Solo is a online community that I'm in. It's about a little over 100 members and I did a presentation on let me pull up the slides right here on how to hire and run a remote team and it went super well. Um, so I basically talked about all the members of the team, Ali, Roa, and Clark. Told my story being um how I made $10 an hour just three and a half years ago. Now, how I pay people more than that now. Really cool. Uh, really enjoyed this. And that was a big win because I wasn't even I have a slide right here. So, the cool part, a web SEO guy talking about VAS. I have nothing to sell. So, it was really easy when you're It's really easy when you're giving a presentation to a group and you're not motivated. You're motivated to look like an expert, but you're not really feeling a whole lot of pressure to overd deliver, position yourself as an expert. Kind of just learning and sharing the experiences. So, I really enjoyed this and I kind of took the Alex Formoszy approach of like, hey, I have nothing to sell you guys. You know, my goal with this presentation is that you associate so much value with my name and my brand that you will refer us to clients or just uh associate that value with us, which would be a good thing in the future. That was really cool. I really enjoyed that. It was a high point for this month. Team is doing well. Um Dan is doing well on video. We have a um we're getting ready to release this next week a video. This is the concept I talked about I think two months ago. Creating the boring content that gets you leads. That is what discipline looks like. We made a 15minute video all about HIPPA compliance on your website. So Dan really cooked with these edits here. I'm going to pull up the draft version cuz I'm super stoked about it. Yeah, this is the updated one. In healthcare, few things are more confusing or frustrating than the big bad HIPPA compliance. Your healthcare organization has a website. Maybe Yeah, he cooked on this one. I'm super excited and stoked to share this. Uh that'll be coming out next week and I think that'll convert really well. Sharing it on LinkedIn, clipping it up. But I really am loving the video editing process. We're cooking on the podcast as well. The podcast with Max really love that. turned out super good and it was a lot of fun. Client relationships net on net are healthy. Um, we had one little hiccup with Exact Medicare, which we'll talk about in a little bit, but other than that, good. Personally, I'm feeling pretty dialed in. I'll have a few lapses where I'll slightly binge eat in one sitting and I'll get like tired and exhausted, but I stay within my caloric limits for the most part. And I'm keeping the street going. That's been a big part of what the 75 hard challenge is accommodating for is just keeping the streak going, not missing a day, and staying accountable. And um I realized today I'm going to have to work out in a golf shirt again. But I'm feeling pretty swole these days uh working out in a golf shirt. And that's the biggest I've seen myself in a long time. So uh I need to work on like my hip mobility and my legs still. But yeah, work in progress. a lot of coffee meetings and new people, which is a big benefit of living in on this side of the world for once. Actually, living in Columbus. Um, here's Amy. It was one of my favorite meetings this month. Move into a new house. First month as an owner. Did a lot of house work. We repainted the ceilings. We repainted the walls, jackhammered the front porch, getting ready to jackhammer the back horse this month. And after that, I think we're all set to add in tenants and then go through the whole process of listing rooms. So that'll be up on the agenda for this month. All of our June meetings and podcasts. So this month, um, recorded a podcast for the first episode of Allison Dipmer's show. Really excited for that. Tim and Tass's podcast, Marketers Exit. I was a guest on a show called the Healthcare Go to Market Show, which is really fun. Cool. Looking forward to seeing that come out. Has not come out yet, but I'll share when it does. I was on my friend Alex Ferguson's podcast. It was more of a video jam session, but uh shout out to his business, Terap. They're a trusted partner of ours, and it was a great conversation. That'll be coming out next Tuesday on the pod. Coffees and one-on ones. All my meetings uh used Codeex to connect to uh my Google calendar and just look at all the meetings that I had so I can do follow-ups. Chelsea Castle, Amy, Nate, Logan, Catherine, Wayne Klein made a LinkedIn post about that. Brian at St and Grandary. That was a good one again. Met Tass. Uh Peter, who is a marketer here in Columbus that I met. Super cool guy. Uh Peter Gooba, uh my man. Reconnected with him. He lives up in Michigan, but it was a great chat. And I have a weekly recurring session with Chris Le. Shout out to Chris. He's the man. Uh concerns. So diagnostic results. Although the process was a win, the result is concerning to have an agency worth zero dollars after several years of grinding. It wasn't insightful. It was the hard work, but you know, that's, you know, it's it's it is defeating nonetheless. But the good news that we know the information that we need to do conference. So I, like I said, traveled to a conference at Putin Bay, which if you guys are not near Ohio, honestly, I didn't know where it was before I did this either. So, it's a it's on the very north tip of the Ohio border. So, Columbus is about in central Ohio. Putin Bay is north uh on the border of Lake Michigan. It's right in the northern tip closer to Cleveland near the Toledo area. And that was a it was called the the wick wic we inspire innovate and connect. I had been pitched to be a sponsor of the event and I'm glad I didn't because that would have been not a great allocation of funds. But I went there and I it wasn't terrible. Stress is always going to be travel is always going to be stressful. But I could have done a much better job of engaging, following up with people, being more outgoing. And I get into my head that I feel it and experience it a little bit firsthand. But when you are a smaller business at a conference like this and you're not one of the private equity guys or you're not one of the agencies, you're not one of the big budgets, you're not the an employee at a company who's there with a big budget, people really don't want to talk to you. You know, it's it's one of those things too where try not to read too much into it, but if you're the solo, if you're the independent, people don't want to talk to you, you know. So, you kind of have to take that with a grain of salt and not let it get you down. And to be honest, I did a little bit. So, I could have made that a much better time. But all in all, was good to get out of the house. It was good to cut my teeth and, you know, learn what that side of the business is like a little bit more. And I've been to conferences before. This is the first healthcare industry specific podcast conference that I've been to. But it was a great learning experience. Something that I will do better in the future. Another concern, pipeline deal being stalled again. This is the third month in a row. We've had a 3K a month retainer client. that is this close to being across finish line. We'll meet, we'll get the scope aligned and agreed upon and we'll kick it down the road. So, we met February of this year, starting quarter 2, pushed back to quarter 3, and now pushing back towards September. So, you know, it's one of those things. Could I have been more proactive and following up and getting out across the finish line? Sure, probably. Is that the main reason? Maybe. Who's to say? Uh it's just one of those frustrating things that you know you learn as a business owner. Loneliness a little. Um I mean right now it's 7 o'clock in the evening. I've been staying here at Cohatch pretty much every night either here or at Upper Arlington until 8 or 9 and then just coming home and then going to the gym and going to bed getting home around 11:00. You know I I love I love this life. You know it is. But there are times where it's like this weekend going to be staying down here not going to be going home for the weekend. So, it's it's growing and I could I I've thought about how intentionally I want to pursue a relationship, a partner, and I know there'll never be a perfect time, but I want to bring our clients bags of cash and extract the value from that to be financially successful heading into my 30s. And that is a sacrifice that I'm willing to make. Will I regret it? Maybe. I don't know. But we can't roll this dice twice. and we'll see where it takes us. All righty. Action items and goals. So, recapping on last month, 20K revenue. We reached that. That's a check mark. Close new project deal almost grow newsletter to 150 subs. I think we did that. I have to Yeah, we did. We're at We're Columbus marketing job is over 150 subs. Invest in team. So, new high month of contractor waiver weekly YouTube videos. We did that. Life continue 75 hard. We did. House repairs, walls, floors. So, not quite done on the drainage. We did not do the one group exercise session. So, pretty good month of goals. Uh, that's three out of five on business and three out of six on life. Better than usual. Better than usual. On to this month. Business and life. Do five CMO outreaches. U, I should have talked about this a little bit earlier, but I finally I had a I had so much fun building this. This is the columbusmarketing.org website. So much fun to build. built the entire sales page for this. Recorded the intro video, got the testimonials from LinkedIn, and built a really nice sales page. I want to start doing outreach for Inerson events. I just want to hold like a small a small event because I said, I'm lonely. I want to meet more marketers. I want to be around other high performing marketers. I just I have to get over the imposttor syndrome of reaching out and setting this event up. I listened to a podcast, James Clear on the Diary of a CEO podcast. Crazy James Clear, local legend. It's on Diary of a CEO. Unreal. He He's probably 10 minutes from my geographical location right now. I'm right here in eastern Columbus. It's a little bit northeast of Columbus. He lives in Beexley. 10 minutes away. What if he James is going to come on the marketing design podcast at some point. You know when that day is to be determined, but it'll be someday in the future and I'm excited for that day. But yeah, sales page. I'm loving this. A lot of work still to be done here, but directionally correct. That's all we can ask for right now. Five outreaches to set up an event. Launched a 2SP website. We had a meeting with the team today. Their CRM is finally integrated into the website that'll launch and will hopefully return into a web growth and SEO retainer. Super excited for that. Close our lead that we've been working with. Very warm big project. Excited for that. Extend more sales opportunities. So something I've been struggling with again even with the people that I met at the conference. Why can't I extend the invitation to tell people about what I do or offer my expertise in web to them? Why do I view that as salesy talking about what I do and helping them through it? I don't know. It's me holding myself back. Great question. Why why aren't I being more proactive in presenting collaboration opportunities to people who truly need our services and what we do? So, got to [sighs and gasps] escape that mindset a little bit. And we're doing better. Like I said, it's a constant it's a constant growth experience across the process. So, getting better there. Life goals. Don't break on 75 hard. Ezra, I'm going to beat you. Ezra's in our mastermind community. He's in on the 75 hard challenge. Shout out. I'm going to win. Go to run club. There is a Hillyard run club that I have not been to yet. Need to go. CrossFit that is tomorrow morning in Clintonville. They have a free workout at 10:00 a.m. and I need to go. Finished book. So, I've currently been reading the Daily Stoic, which is 365 meditations on wisdom, life, and the pursuit of happiness. I don't think that's the exact subtitle, but it's a Ryan Holiday book. I used to read that I read that book every day for two years. Both of my years of college, I read it's this book where you read one page a day. Uh, and it's a stoic quote along with a brief word of articulation and self how you can apply that stoic principle to your life. Um, I'm almost done with that book. I've been really enjoying rereading it and one meditation session. So, I saw a video this week about a guy who used to took 20 take 20 minutes every day to just stare at a wall. I thought that was like good for resetting your dopamine systems, helps with scrolling, not get addicted to that stuff. So, I thought that could be a good idea to do. So, that's it for July, June's retro. Um, thank you guys for watching and sticking around to the end. Highly encourage you guys to subscribe. I appreciate you following along on the journey. Share your wins with me. Email me, DM me on LinkedIn. I want to hear them. And I appreciate you guys. And we'll see you next month for August. Jul for July is retro, but it'll be in August. Oh my god. I'll see you guys next