Columbus marketing playbook: EXACTLY How My Businesses Preformed in July 2026 (Monthly Retro)

Kind: captions Language: en Well, hello there everybody. It is August 9th, which means I am a whole week and a half almost late on my monthly retro. If it's your guys' first time here on the channel, welcome to my monthly retros. This is my series where I go inside deeply into my business, show you the wins and losses. As you can tell from this screenshot, we have been at it a while, 29 almost 30 straight months since February 1st of 2024. I began recording my entire journey. And this is the series, what I call my monthly retros, where I show you guys transparent profit, loss, finances, opportunities, wins, losses, lessons, and I just put it all out there and build in public. Uh, if you guys don't know me personally, howdy. I am Andy. I have long blonde hair, and I own three business, two businesses, two and a half businesses. Main Cash Cow is my studio, MMG Design. We do web and SEO for B2B healthcare. other business that I'm building is the CMO, the Columbus Marketing Organization, which is the premier network mastermind and event for Columbus Marketers here in Columbus, Ohio, where I live. And the third is my podcast, which is kind of an amalgamation of what content is as a whole for me. That's how we get a lot of our leads for the studio. And I've been running this podcast uh this week, if it tells you, is episode 170. So, I've been doing that almost the entire time since I've been recording these retros. These retros live on the Andy the marketer YouTube channel which is not this channel uh because this is more less client-f facing content that I want to use to share to help people that are one and two steps behind me in the journey. So if that describes you, welcome and I look forward to sharing this with you. But yes, so I usually record these the first first day of every month and I've been a little bit behind on it. And I'll be honest with you guys, July was not a great month from a revenue perspective. But then I always feel so much better after I go into the finances and I just look at everything. And I realized there's a lot of reasons that factor into the low objective numbers performance and it helps me feel feel better about it and also empowers me to take control of them because as my father told me growing up here in Midwest Ohio very traditional to this area um is that the power follows the finger of blame. I think Alexi says that as well. So if you take control for the numbers rather than blaming external circumstances, you are now in control to change them. So our normal format we use a much different tools here. I started using Excal because I can annotate something and if I want to illustrate a concept as I share my lessons this month with you guys and I have this board open. But usually run everything here in notion. I also have been keeping track of a few things here in my homebase app that I built all client facing which I will bore out these client names but let's get into the tracking for this month which I do 100% in notion. Um so yeah topline business revenue $8,200 which we look at past months obviously is down last month was 21. Um, not the worst month of the year, but not anything to write home about either. So, 8,000 this month, which brings us year to date at 106,500, which puts us fairly behind our goal on pace for our goal of quarter, million, 250,000 for this year. And there's a lot of factors that go into this, so I'll just go through and explain one at a time. Uh, if you guys are new to this series, Monarch Money is the absolute perfect software that we use to track all of our finances because at the end of the day, business is nothing but a game of finances. And if you aren't good financially, then you're really shooting yourself on the foot. But this is how we categorize everything. So, this is the income here on the left. By the way, for us technical people in the audience, this is called a Seni diagram. On the left represents all of our inputs and on the right represents all of our expenses and we can see where they clearly go. financial. Uh this also adds another layer of like broad categorization before you get into the in-depth categorization. What I love about this is we can click on each one and it shows us exactly where our expenses went. This was a lump sum. So once a year I just take out 7,500 and put that in my Roth IRA and I will be doing the same soon for a solo 401k. But that was a big part of our expenses. I don't technically categorize that as an expense. It's more of an investment which is why it's labeled as such. Uh taxes 125 a month. That's just for our CPA. Business software and tools $3,000. So let's go into that. Shopify, we host a client site on Shopify, which should be no longer paid for. So that needs to change. Web flow hosting, $40. Higsfield, that was an experiment. That was an experiment. I would show you guys that video. I tried to create a logo animation for the podcast, which just ended out turning turning out terribly. like it was not worth it. Not a big fan of Higsfield, but you know, we have to stay up with the trends and playing around with AI tools as part of that. SE ranking $129 bucks. So, we manage all our clients SEO and ClickUp project management $40. Relo for wireframes $26. Canva $30. Web flow hosting for a client again $29. Folk $30. We got to I'll set that as a goal for this month is to trim some fat on these because I'm not a huge fan of these trend. Moxy, I can definitely get rid of this tool. Excuse me. I can definitely get rid of this tool. That's what we use for proposals in a past life, but we've kind of scaled out of that. Riverside $29. Workflow $29. That's for website QA. OpenAI 20. This I'm not sure what this is. I think it's a transfer fee. Shadow Realm, that was we paid money we paid for a consultant, which I'm, by the way, I'm going to make a full video. I recently worked with a founder consultant, uh, a very seasoned entrepreneur. Shout out to Yannik who basically did a deep dive on my business, taught me uh what I was missing. Just basically did a deep dive of all of our clients, past clients in the past 2 years, and I learned a ton of lessons from that. Um that I'll be sharing some of them with you guys today, but I'll definitely plan to make a dedicated video all about that. 29 bucks again, Web Flow Hosting, Anthropic, Quad, Quad, Google Workspace 60. Wow. Yeah, this is starting to stack up a little bit. I'm going to set that as a goal for this month at the end to trim the fat and end some of these subscriptions because it's getting obviously agencywise it's not the end of the world. But yeah, I'm not not a big fan of that. Back to the diagram, $1,300 a $1,300 on our contractor waver, $300 a month on business rent. Anything categorized as business in these brackets here at the beginning, by the way, are business expenses. So these are technically write- offs. 1,600 on a mortgage because, by the way, we're homeowners now, guys. 230 bucks a month on groceries, 100 on gas, and 28 on garbage, which is again part of our becoming a part-time contractor for our house now that we're doing a bunch of repairs. So, that's where the money came and went this month. 7,000 from the agency, 5,000 in interest, which is personal allocations for my investment accounts. We go to my full dashboard here. as we can see everything which man you guys really have the keys to the city now credit score this I should not be showing you guys this okay back to excal um but yeah that's how everything was spread apart from my three entities podcast agency and marketing organization uh let's drill down into uh this month where I have my wins losses and lessons so I can share some of these with you guys uh wins from this month I show these wins concerns and then when I set goals and I like to attach a photo of my camera roll because I find it's a good way to do a reflection and see where I spent my time this month and it's a good way to reflect. So plans for this month, we do have a few uh marketing agency leaders lunch is real and working. So for the past several years, I wanted to host some kind of an agency leaders gathering because a lot of our referrals come from agency leaders, other agencies, CMOs, service providers. And while referrals are traditionally viewed upon if you are a marketer or if you are a service provider, traditional referrals are traditionally viewed as things where you can't control them. And while that is true, you can't directly do onetoone outreach to generate referrals. In a lot of cases, it you can control the inputs that generate referrals. So, that's a big motion behind our podcast and I have made and I've been making a very intentional I've been making a very intentional part of my strategy to build that up. So, long story short, I told myself, hey, come hell or high water, I'm going to get this event put together. And on August 27th of 2026, I still have several people left to invite, but right now we have 20 confirmed participants, which is actually higher, 23 now. Um, and I still have a lot more people to invite who are going to come and break bread at North Market in Dublin on the 27th. If you're from Columbus, North Market is basically like a indoor farmers market where there's a bunch of different food vendors and uh like a cafeteria of tables in the middle where anyone can get the food that they want and then meet to uh break bread and connect with each other. So I don't have to I I was looking at this from the perspective, okay, I want to coordinate some kind of gathering, be a connector, introduce complimentary service providers here in Columbus. Picked a central location and just picked a format and shout out to Chris Lefay who is an agency owner in Atlanta, uh, who has really innovated on this topic and he does it every single month. So this is something that based on how this one goes, I want to really make the most of this. So, I've hired a photographer and uh I'll show you guys how I've been organizing everything here in Folk, which is my CRM. Hang on. Okay, so Folk is our CRM where we have different groups set up, and it does a really good job of syncing across LinkedIn, email, and adding contacts. I already have a lot of people here in different groups based on what I'm trying to work on. Um, basically I've added everyone from a list here, people that are in marketing and in Columbus, either agency owners, CMOs, fractionals, things like that. And I have reached out one to one to everybody and it has been remarkable. I've gotten so many people that have said, "Man, what a great idea. Thank you for putting this together." And there's so much great social value that you build when you personally invite someone. A line I've been using is just thought of you. This came to mind right away. language like that has been very helpful and I think when someone reaches out to me like I want to feel that way too, you know, it's not like a cold pitch or a mass invite email, but anyway, I'm really looking forward to this. I am nervous because I've never done something like this before, but I really look forward to overd delivering. I got some customized cards. I wish I had them here to show, but I got some customized uh cards. I'm going to get a um a certificate to co-hatch for a free week of co-working and write a personalized letter to everybody that comes and I'll have photos to share as well from the event. So, really looking forward to that. That's probably the biggest win from this month. Um connections. I had so many coffees this month with people, probably two or three a week. And it's just been amazing to for my mental health to not be lonely and to have something to look forward to during the day that's you know social cuz I can really get like even this weekend it's Sunday afternoon and I will work or work out and eat and that's basically the extent of my normal schedule. So that's been cool to do but um collaboration. So yeah like I said kind of with the events that's basically what I was hitting on there. uh first ever sponsorship motions. So, I have I had two people approaching me for a sponsorship, which really kind of um reminds myself that I should probably be pitching for this more often. Two people, one was a past client who sees what we're doing with the Columbus marketing jobs newsletter and what's for a potential part partnership there. It's a natural fit with his business because he is a head hunter/recruiter. So, working on some kind of maybe a webinar event. Shout out to Will from Acumen Talent or just like a sponsored placement in the newsletter for consulting. Other one was a past podcast guest and I won't share too much about this one because it's still in the works, but a past podcast guest who works for he's a CMO for a company that's in web services and they want to expand some of their content and have like a personal thought leader behind it. And he reached out to me and we're kind of in the works on some kind of a newsletter content format that they can use under their brand talking about websites. So that would fun fall under this bucket right here of the studio and also content. So two really good opportunities there to diversify those. Um so yeah, next up on the wins, losses and lessons. Uh recurring client base is going steady. Uh right now honestly two things that are and hindering our recent revenue levels. One is the conversion of project based work to recurring based work. We had two two projects wrap up this month that did not convert to recurring clients. And I didn't do a good job of positioning the value of the offer, but I'm getting better at that. And yeah, that's the biggest bottleneck. And the other one obviously is top of funnel. So, we have two three really good long-term contracts. And I made a LinkedIn post about it this week about uh it actually kind of popped off, which is ironic. And it seems to be the case with a lot of LinkedIn posts that will do well when they're not directly business related or they're more personal related. But three really big three large largest overall some value contracts that have been pushed off when they had a committed start date. So that's been unfortunate, but we're learning. And this is supposed to be the win section. So I'm kind of rambling on here. uh sellability roadmap I worked uh that's what I worked with the consultant with to operationalize and this is everything that we had four like 2hour long calls with each other I had to come ready to each call with direct revenue stats uh lead sources and ranking like all of our past clients on a satisfaction basis profitability basis and it was remarkably helpful and I highly recommend people to do an activity like this also this is a very leveraged activity as well reviewing your finances and sharing lessons. But basically, one of the biggest things that was revealed through these conversations was that a lot of our leads have come through podcasting activities. 80% of our client base in the last two years on the studio side has come from, and you're starting to see how all of these are overlapping with each other. Um, a lot of our like our best podcast conversations, we record one every single week. What we realized is say these are each hypothetical podcast episodes about 80% either refer us clients f or become clients. I'm not even going to try and write that. But the main gist of this is that we need to operationalize the podcast to an extent to where we're targeted and who we're bringing on so that they can become one of those people. They either become clients or they refer us to clients. So, when you think about perfect referral partner, I shared this playbook in a a lecture a while back. So, definitely check out this video on the channel if you haven't. But basically, the strategy that I'm dialing in on and I need to get more consistent with is recording multiple podcasts a week with people who serve our clients in a different way. So CMOs in healthcare, consultants in healthcare, other web agencies in healthcare that started a higher ticket price. Those are the ideal podcast guests and we're beginning to operationalize that and really hit our stride here. I've created a pipeline here in folk with uh what we call the dream 100. So I deeply researched I took one person who has referred us to most work from the podcast and I created a persona and built an entire list of people that match that. And I'm doing diligent diligent outreach to these people every single day and just moving people down this funnel with an outreach commenting on their LinkedIn post, building relationships and making it an easy yes for them to say to come on podcast share a conversation. So I've also put on a lot of automations on the back end to to streamline onboarding production things like that. So that's a big effort that I am working on currently. Uh so yeah uh finally got over myself and did the thing. I didn't want to record this this once but it's actually felt really good to do so. So that's a win. uh biggest win on paper. We did finally just sign a long-term contract. And on paper, this is our biggest financial value ever. So, this is a 12-month contract with a 6 week website build and then 12 months of recurring revenue after this. And I won't share the exact you guys will see the the monetary value of the contract, but it's a perfect fit. They're in healthcare and I'm really excited to to work on this one. So, things are starting to look up. Um, and like I said, I especially after last month's revenue, I wasn't stoked on this. So, that just came in today, Sunday recording, that just came in last Saturday. So, that was or that just came in this Friday. So, that was a really big breath of fresh air. Final wins. I was invited to speak at Otterbine, which is a college here locally, uh, for their marketing students. Uh, I'm not sure how many students will be in the class, but it was a it was a form of outreach um from the head of marketing, the marketing professor over at Otterbine, who's a past podcast guest, and I'm really excited to do that. So, it's cool that we're starting to get booked on. I know it's not South by Southwest or anything crazy like that, but it's still an opportunity. Uh, concerns said lowest revenue month in a while. Two long-term warm projects fell through. Uh, repeating pattern with a website launch. Like I said, terrible conversion of project based work to partnership based recurring work. And a lot of that is my fault and how I'm positioning the offer. And I talked with Yik about this, who's a consultant that I work with. He gave me a lot of good tips for how to do that, like baking it in from the beginning, writing it in the initial proposal, things like that. And just doing a better job. And we ex to concur with that we do have one client who has been one has one has been unresponsive and two has just been pushing back deadlines asking for more QA time and I haven't enforced schedules and leniency the way that I should have and now I'm paying for it with my time and it's been a huge drain on my mental energy and it's been unfortunate. So that's been a big loss this month is just the drain of energy of what was initially a great project and has just continue to to falter. Lack of confidence and a failure to pitch myself. I need to have dedicated outreach time every day. I have an account list in folk where I need to just send onetoone direct pitches and obviously there's a right and a wrong way to pitch yourself but I've been loving recording like womb breakdowns. So, like if I look at my TA account, I just took 10 healthcare websites and I just straight up recorded a like 45 minute breakdown just going into all of them. And that was actually a lot of fun. Uh it was just 10 different websites and what I can do is kind of chop this up and append a quick email with it and send it to each of those ICPS. It was like 35 minutes. But yeah, um that's what I need to do. I started kind of whipping up one of them right there. But it's just trying to be value added helpful first and then positioning it to them and then if they convert on it then start a conversation look for a call things like that. But that is the like that if I view like highest leverage activity obviously it's stuff like this and content but that direct onetoone outreach with you know potentially people that are in the people that are in the sales funnel that could potentially convert like two conversions from doing that outreach is just it it just changes the business you know. So, it's something that you have to be consistent with and you have to reinforce the value of it because while you're doing it, it's not reinforcing. So, I just have to remind myself of that and have times like this where I just drill that in my freaking head apparently. All right, moving right along. Uh, bad stresses with food and lack of focus. I've had a couple episodes where I've binge eat. I've binge eaten and I don't love the word binge eaten, but I realize right in the moment it's because of stress. Like it's I like the Sunday scaries, moments like that, I've been fine today. But whenever I get a potentially stressful email or I have to dive back into like messy client work or something like that, I just want to lash out and self-sabotage. And now that I know where it arrives from, I just need to be consistent on recognizing it and curbing, you know, the out the lashing out. I also notice concurrently on days when I have coffee meetings where I meet people, I'm just happier and I don't indulge in self-destructive tendencies like that. So, mornings, I just need to rethink my morning routine. I'm going to charge up my Whoop and use that as an alarm because I need to get my phone out of my room. It's just it's so bad and it's embarrassing and it's sometimes it's 30 45 minutes of my morning is just gone and it's incredibly frustrating and it's nobody's fault but my own. So that's what I need to fix on that's that right there is should be the highest that's what I should shove all of my mental energy in on fixing because that'll have a lot of downstream positive effects. So yeah, we can tell by this photo our camera roll right here. Recording a lot of content for some thumbnail shots right here. Going to a lot of great meetings. Andrew, Michelle, Amy, John. John is a freaking goat. Shout out John if you're watching this. Um, met Katie this weekend, my sister. Uh, ran 10 miles yesterday, which is the longest that I've run in a while, and I actually felt really good. Also ran into JL Klaus at a random coffee shop, so that was pretty cool. Um, but yeah, a lot of things. Super fun. Okay, action items and goals. Rounding this out here. Uh, business. This is my goals from last month. Do five CMO outreaches. I definitely did that. Uh, launch 2SP website project. We did not do that. Close folio health. We did not do that. Extend more sales opportunities. We did not do that. Life, we did not. Don't break on 75 hard. 75 hard is a mastermind is something I did with my mastermind group where we are accountable towards doing hard things every day. That actually wrapped up this month and I'm glad that we did that. That was a lot of fun. We did not go to CrossFit. We did not go to Run Club. We did not finish a book. Actually, we did. We finished uh I've been reading daily meditations. Um The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holidayiday. It's like one meditation per day. I've been really enjoying that. I did meditate once. So, taking care of ourselves a little bit, I guess. Goals for this month, uh 25K revenue. We might already from the new contract and recurring revenue. We'll probably already have that. So, that's very much within reach. organize team structure. Clark and Ali have kind of been falling off in communication and I need to operationalize and get work ready for get work ready for all of our team members before the day starts. Kind of a a a groundhog day problem that keeps arising. So I need to have a task like slot the last 30 minutes of my workday to ask the question, okay, what is everyone doing? What is the team doing first thing tomorrow morning? Uh and to increase content pieces per week. So, I've been traditionally on weekends I just record a ton of content like this. I've recorded two YouTube videos this weekend and it's actually been a lot of fun and I need to have I did it a little bit last week. I have structured calendar blocks throughout my week where I reserve them for uh content recording exclusively. I started to time block a little bit as you can see here and that has been helpful but I need to make it a week activity too so I'm not rushing to get content out on the weekends or like Saturday night, Sunday night. Nail onboarding uh new contract starting nail that onboarding. Uh what I want to do is I have all project ops set up in ClickUp and I something that I should have done a lot earlier was email send calendar invites for every meeting point before the engagement starts. really good way to set you up for set us up for success and um that's what I'll be doing first thing tomorrow and crush the event agency leaders lunch get all those personalized tidbits in place personalized cards one week free trial at co-hatch and just make it a great experience for everyone that goes and I hired a photographer so I'll be sharing with you guys photos come next next retro on the life front finished plumbing repairs and begin house listings so I got two quotes from plumbers and neither of them was lower than $1,500 for a small plumbing job. So, what I thought about doing is creating some kind of AI workflow where I hook up an SMS delivery system like Twilio or something like that to Quad and get quotes at a massive scale and kind of continue that conversation because I have everything existing related to the house repairs and its existing real estate project here in Claude. Uh so, I go to real estate. Uh everything is in here. Here I have the entire, you know, inspection report and these past chats with all my dialogue of what needs to be fixed. I want to get that done cuz that'll be a one-day job for a plumber. We have to order in dirt to just fill in the cracks of the front yard. I have to mow when I get home. But other than that, it is largely ready for tenants. So, if you are an entrepreneur or if you're anyone in Columbus who wants a, you know, less than $1,000 a month living arrangement for a one bed, one bath and you want to rent, hit me up 331. I won't say my address, sorry. Um, yeah, that'll be really exciting. I'm not really keen on the cash flow income. I don't care about that as much, but it'll be cool to have some company to just learn the process and yeah, that'll be a lot of fun. Final goals wrapping up here. um begin house listings, begin your challenge with Ezra. Um Ezra is one of the members of our mastermind, the scaling studio, and we're going to start some kind of a focus mastermind together. He's getting ready to move soon. So, TBD on the intensity of a challenge like this, but it really was a good really had positive roller effects on my life while we were doing this, pushing each other, and I look forward to that helping me out and growing both of our businesses in the coming month. So, that is July 2026. Apologies again on the delay in getting this out. You'll see this live on the Andy the Marketer YouTube channel. And until next month, until August, the end of August, I will see you guys