How One Person Can Change Your Biz Landscape

My 2011 By the Numbers (kinda-sorta)/ Why You Dont Need an Advertising Budget to Get Referrals / How One Person Can Change Your Biz Landscape Last year, I gave you this. This year, I give you this: I hesitated putting this out there (hence the January 12th post), but something pulled me towards it. There was so much of it that was eye-opening for me, and when somethings eye-opening for me, then I automatically think of you kids. While I was uncomfortable posting it with the numbers exposed, it feels good to have em blurred but still show you (a) how my revenue streams play out and (b) how much of my money comes from personalized coaching! When I saw that about $10K of my entire salary was from non-coaching streams.I mightve hyperventilated a bit. I already knew I was cutting my client sessions from a 30-40/mo to 10-ish a month (as it stands, Ill be doing 10-20/mo til May at the earliest), and my brain started reeling. How can I cut my coaching by more than half and still meet my financial goals for 2012 (yes, I have a number in mind thats about 35% higher than what I made in 2011)?! Thankfully, the newfound hippy-dippy in me starting breathing regularly again when I placed trus t in raising my rates and prepping for my Clubhouse (opening on Tue the 17th!). I started thinking about the time Id have to write blog posts, workbooks, book proposals, books and do virtual workshops and, well, anything I fancy with the extra whitespace I have by not coaching 30-ish hours a week. The opportunity I have to bump up the money I make from my extras (as I sometimes see em) is pretty infinite, and Im actually really excited to take on that challenge and see what happens (while still taking Care). Last April I signed up for Freckle. Even though I dont bill my clients hourly, I took them up on a free 30-day trial to see where my time was going. Of course, it totally hooked me, and Ive been using Freckle incessantly ever since. When the end of the year hit, I ran a report for the entire year, around both my projects and my tags. As you can see, the projects (above) are broader (although I have em by private client, I placed em all together for these purposes) while the tags themselves are more specific. At least I can see that Im spending more time consistently servicing my biggest moneymaker: my coaching clients! I spent about 611 hours on their work the sessions themselves, set-up and follow-up but then it was interesting to see that social media is my #2 time-taker. Blogging, tweeting, newslettering and Facebooking took 144-ish hours, and I get paid nada con nada for that! Yes, I know its where/how I find a lot of clients, but.it seems excessive/unsmart in some way. Its som ething I dont wanna ramp down this year, but something I wanna do smarter. I made this brand-new last month, going over all my numbers from 2010 and makin a handy-dandy at-a-glance chart to see what I could, um, see. And as you can probably, uh, see August is consistently my killer month! It also made me realize that, even though I can see how much money is coming in each month and I categorize it out, I dont track my purchases month-by-month.so Im not sure what I do in August that I dont do otherwise! I do know that its usually the start of my fall Operations!but other than that, Im not sure what Im selling more of or what magic fairy visits my PayPal account each August. While I take a Business Building Day each month to count my moolah and figure out client averages and demographics and whatnot, I just added a whole slew of stuff to my Magic Formula Google Doc (which is where the Magic lives) to include stuff like how many  Operations! applications came in that month and how many Running Over Resolution Roadblocks sold and how many people switched from Team Coolness to Team Badass (whichll make sense on Tuesday when you get to know aaaaaaaaall about the amazeballsness of my Clubhouse!). While it looks real laborious at first site, I know my main platforms (Batchbook, Outright and PayPal) will make running reports and gettin info easy-breezy. And see those extra lines up there at the top? Im reachin, baby, Im reachin! Aaaaaaaaand heres where my where-my-clients-and-consultation-call-people-come-from stands! I was actually super surprised to see that my PR efforts namely being a guest (on blogs, telesummits, e-courses, etc) and giving interviews has gone the farthest (big fat note for those who think they cant launch a biz without shelling out the big bucks: all those PR opps I got myself and didnt pay a cent for). I love seeing that my personal connections are a close second, namely friends, colleagues, and other people who tell people bout me via word-of-mouth. The Blog category that came in third was for those that said they read about me on someones blog, and that could probably be under the same category as Social Media, but I separated it out (Social Media being Twitter and Facebook for me). Again, free referrals! I wanna disclose that if ya look at my referrals by the specific as in NameOfPersonHere or NameOfWebsiteHere I got the most from general web searches (which floors me), followed by Etsy, and then ready for this? Alexandra Franzen. Seriously, work with one big-time rock-star who people love and respect, and youll be set for life. (THANK YOU ALEXANDRA!) What did ya learn from my numbers/lessons? What are you gonna do differently with your biz now? Let me know what youre taking away and what youre taking action on in the comments below! Hey, Ive spent 4 hours on this post because I had to run lots of the numbers and kept getting more and more ideas for my monthly Business Building Day and I hope its done the same for you!