Monthly review May 2024
Welcome to my monthly review, where I lay out all the dirty details of my business for everyone to see.
I subscribe to a couple of people who do these and read them every single time they land in my inbox. Because I’m nosy, and I like seeing what other people are doing, how they’re doing it, and how they feel about it. So I decided to start doing them myself.
I want to do these for a few reasons:
It keeps me accountable. Writing these up for you guys forces me to actually look at my data and reflect.
I think financial transparency is extremely important and hopefully me doing these helps break down the money taboo.
How many hours I worked in May
I tracked 75.5 hours over the month of May. That works out to about 19 hours a week - but it definitely didn’t feel like I was working part time equivalent! I honestly can’t remember when I decided I was going to track my time properly and do this review so I would say there’s definitely some time missing from that total.
Either way, only 45 of my tracked hours this month were billable, a low 59% of my time. Now that the bulk the work I have to do on my new website is done, that’ll look very different next month.
Ignoring the untracked hours, my effective hourly rate this month was $138.
How was May overall?
This month was quite slow financially, but I’m happy with it overall as I have quite a few invoices that will come through next month. I also made the choice to take on less client work this month so I could spend time working on my own new website. I also had to renew my professional indemnity insurance, which doubled my expenses for the month. My effective hourly rate for this month turned out to be $138, which is a little lower than I’d like but a little higher than I expected. Given this is my first month doing one of these reviews, I’m not mad about anything - just curious to see my time and income in this kind of snapshot.
How did my goals go for May?
I didn’t sit down and do a clear goal setting for this month, but off the top of my head, getting things moving with my new website was definitely top of the list! This past month I…
did my brand photoshoot
mapped out the information architecture for my new website
wrote all the web copy
had a kickoff call with the person designing and building my website
So overall, I’ll give myself a pat on the back.
Goals for next month:
I’d love to launch my new website in June, but it’ll partially depend on the designer. So this one’s a tentative/optimistic goal.
Carve out time to work on my business processes. Specifically, I want to:
Create some Google Doc templates I use for all my projects and create a zap so when I make a new project in Moxie, it makes a new project folder and duplicates all the documents into it.
Create a template/form for my preferred partners to fill in so I can start compiling a nice dossier to refer to and share.
Deliver a fun brand and web client project I’m working on for a financial advisor.
Tech I’m currently using for my business
Productivity
Zapier (paid plan)
Asana (free plan)
Notion
Moxie
Grain - for recording customer interviews and VOC research, getting transcripts and extracting insights
Clockify (free version) for my time tracking. I like the Chrome plugin
Brain.FM to help get me into focus mode. If you’d like to try it, you can use my affiliate code when you sign up for 20% off your membership. Code: tbp
Chat GPT 4.0
Social media
Simplified app - scheduling my own and some clients posts.
Podcasting
Squadcast for recording (free account with Descript subscription)
Descript for recording and editing
Marketing
Mailerlite for email marketing
Damn Write’s content club to keep me regular (it’s been helping a bit, but I anticipate using it much more when my new website’s live)
Website
My previous website was on Wordpress. I currently just have a landing page I threw up on Mailerlite. My new website will be on Webflow
Finance and Money
Thriday for my business banking + bookkeeping, and to implement the Profit First system
Moxie for invoicing
