Possums!

Yay! Welcome back to my monthly tradition where I review my life & business & share behind-the-scenes numbers as well.

I’ll cover:

  • life blessings & challenges
  • what I’ve created in my business
  • how much revenue generated
  • my goals for next month.

You can read previous monthly reviews here:

2021

2022

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How I went with my goals for the month

Life:

Business:

  1. HIGHEST priority: Create a new e-course – DONE
  2. Finish my Goal Getter Biz workbook planning for the year  – DONE
  3. Finish “Deep Work” – DONE
  4. Create 2 free lead magnets – DONE
  5. Finish EG course – DONE
  6. Test 5 videos – Decided not to
  7. Complete a Project 10% on Pinterest – NOPE
  8. Batch create March & April content – NOPE

What I got up to in life!

March was HECTIC.

  • We started with extensive flooding in our region. It meant school was cancelled some days. On other days, our usual route to school was under water, and our detour took us 4+ hours a day to do school runs. It was intense and exhausting. I’m still so grateful our home was safe.
  • My girls celebrated their birthdays – they turned 8 and 12. TWELVE. TWELVE. HOW DO I HAVE A TWELVE YEAR OLD.
  • My big kid also went to the movies with her friends by herself for the first time.
  • I ended the month by having a spa afternoon with my darling friend Mads. It was screamingly funny.
  • Finished off the school term for my kids & started school holidays.

We bought a new house! We’re moving again!

You’re probably laughing right now. I CERTAINLY AM!

If you’ve been around these parts for a long time, you’ll know I’m a serial mover… usually moving across the country when we do. In the last 12 years, we’ve lived in Canberra, Whitsundays, Cairns, Kuranda, Hobart, back to Canberra, to a suburb on the Sunshine Coast and then here on the acreage on the Sunshine Coast.

We’ve been in our current house on acreage for almost 3 years. It’s been a real blessing during the pandemic to have so much space around us, and being back on acreage was definitely a dream we wanted to fill after living in Kuranda. About six months ago, we started considering that as much as it had worked for a season of our lives, we might need something different for the next stage of our lives.

We mused over some options, and decided to move back into town closer to the beach. We’ve bought a house about 30 minutes south of here.

Here’s the reasons why:

  • We currently spend 2 hours a day in the car doing school run. There’s no school bus options where we live. It’s exhausting and not sustainable. By moving, we’ll be able to reduce our school run and also open up the possibility of the kids taking the school bus when they are ready.
  • Our eldest is now 12, and is becoming ever more social. We’re currently out of the way here. I have to say no to a lot of playdates with her friends because it would be a 2 hour round trip for me to drop her off then pick her up again.
  • We live 30 minutes from the beach where we are. By the end of doing school runs each week, we’re exhausted and don’t want to add more driving time. So we rarely go to the beach on weekends now. When we lived 5 minutes from the beach we were there every weekend, and it was the highlight of our week and created some special family moments. We want that back in our lives again.
  • We rented a house with a pool over Christmas and had THE BEST time. Our kids were in it all day, and we’d jump in too. The kids were happier and us middle aged parents had much less pain. We realised a pool would be fantastic for my back and a bonza thing for the kids. We *could* get a pool built on the acreage, but for all the reasons above, thought we’d buy a house with a pool instead.
  • We feel like we’ve completed our acreage dream, and we’re ready for something new.
  • Last of all, but a really important piece of the puzzle: we’re moving my in-laws into our investment property in the same suburb as our new house. They currently live two hours away, and we’d love to be able to pop over more often. Having them around the corner will be useful to nurture family time and also provide support to them as they age.

We’ll likely move in end of May once we have some new flooring installed in the house. I’m feeling really excited about the move and feel like it will be such a good one for our family. I’m also feeling a teensy bit overwhelmed by the enormity of what’s happening.

We finally caught Covid

Added into the excitement of March, my biggest kid caught Covid then gave it to me. We were quarantined for 10 days waiting for it to pass. All in all, we didn’t get off too badly from it. I was triple vaxxed, she was due for her second vaccination on the day she tested positive. My kid napped for hours the first few days which is VERY unusual for her – she’s never been much of a sleeper, and hasn’t slept during the day in probably… 8 years?

It did make me worry, but it passed and she’s back to 100% now. Mine was pretty mild, but I do still feel waves of bone-deep exhaustion even 3 weeks later… I’m not sure if it’s post-viral fatigue or just… you know… life. I’m really grateful it doesn’t seem to have affected us too badly – I had a shithouse experience with Swine Flu years ago, and was really concerned about being ill like that again.

Thank you vaccines. Thank you healthcare workers. I am grateful.

Best Books I Read & Favourite TV/Movies

Favourite TV:

  • Bridgerton Season 2. Now… I fucking LOVED Bridgerton Season 1. I thought it was perfection on a stick. So much so that I get my dentist to play it on the overhead screen when I get dental work done because it’s the best pain relief ever. HOWEVER, I have major issues with Season 2 being more “slow burn sexual tension” than “all out boink fest.” My preference is FIRMLY in the “all out boink fest” category. “Slow burn sexual tension” is for what the REST OF BEIGE BORING TELEVISION IS FOR. Still, regardless of the lack of boinkage, I still love the series anyway and am rooting for it to return to its rooty roots in Season 3.

Best Books I Read:

After reading only 3 books in February, I got back into the swing of things by reading 17 books.

My 5 star favourites were:

What I got up to in business!

March ended up being a combination month of lots of different things happening:

The biggest project I pulled of was:

My small group coaching program, The Uplevel Incubator.

I haven’t offered this level of intensive coaching in 10 years. It’s not something that’s part of my usual business model.

I just had an intuitive inkling that I’d like to offer it again and mentor another small cohort again. I felt like it would be most powerful if it was existing business owners who are already turning a decent level of profit, so we could accelerate their growth even faster. To make sure that I was supported as a mentor, and to provide as much client support as possible, I asked my business manager Zita and my best mate Tam to be assistant coaches.

I made it a higher priced offering to compensate me and my team’s time and energy. Even though it’s a higher priced offering, I definitely could make more money from e-courses & with much less time & work… but I felt called to doing it. I regard it a wee bit as a community service to offer it – just one that I get paid for. It’s a joy to connect more deeply with my incubators, and support them to help them make their next dreams come true.

Stats:

  • Price: USD $5,000 (or 3 payments of USD $1,888)
  • People had to apply via an application form so I could determine if they were the right fit
  • I had 17 applications.
  • I didn’t accept 4 applications for various reasons – some weren’t at the right stage of business yet, I referred another to work 1:1 directly with Tam (my accountability coach) & one was a dude who didn’t feel like the right fit for the energy of the group.
  • I accepted 13 applications.
  • All 13 enrolled.
  • Total earnings: AUD $93,000 (once all payment plans are completed).

How much money I made overall in April

$90,617

Where that income came from:

  • Uplevel Incubator: $38,317 (enrolments were also paid in April, plus more in payment plans to come through over the next 2 months)
  • E-courses: $31,455
  • Passive income business: $11,121 (I set this up 6 years ago & now do nothing with it except get paid)
  • Goal Getter planners: $8,239
  • Affiliate for Kajabi: $1,462
  • Calm Christmas Planner on Etsy: $23
  • Shares & Ethical Managed Funds: Market has recovered quite a bit, but hasn’t made more profit just yet.
  • Investment property: Currently not rented while we prepare for my parents-in-law to move into it instead.

E-course income breakdown:

  1. Marketing Without Social Media: $22,222
  2. 40 Days To Create & Sell Your E-Course: $3,160
  3. Work Less, Earn More: $1,172
  4. Sales Star: $2,417
  5. Money, Manifesting & Multiple Streams of Income: $1,898
  6. 40 Days To A Finished Book: $937
  7. Mini workshop: Behind The Scenes of A Multi-Millionaire’s Finances: $135

Expenses

Due to popular request, I’m going to include expenses for the business for the last month as well to give you an even more transparent look at profitability.

  • Contractors: $5,925
    This is for 1 part time Customer Service Virtual Assistant and 1 part time Online Business Manager. This is probably on the higher side for pricing, but I don’t mind paying more for people who I trust and have a long term working relationship with. I want them to feel appreciated, and I want them to be able to live good lives.
  • Accountants: $19,320 (covers most of the financial year plus a large one-off cost to create our holding company)
  • Affiliates: $12,595
  • Paypal & account fees: $1,168
  • Software subscriptions for everything we use to run our business online (see full list further below): $3,502 (twice more than we usually pay – we paid for some subscriptions annually that month)
  • Website hosting: $98
  • Courses & books (for me & my staff to learn from, we are continuously learning): $3,052
  • Minimum purchase order to qualify for my passive income business income: $123

Total expenses this month: $45,783

Total profit: $44,834

This is a super high expense month for me because I paid for my accounting for most of the year, plus paid for some of our software in full for the year because it was most effective. Overall, it’s still a rad monthly profit to have, and I’m grateful!

From that profit, my husband and I then take salaries (that we then pay personal tax on) and pay compulsory superannuation (contributions to retirement funds). The rest of the profit stays in the holding company, and regularly gets invested in ethical managed funds.

If you want more details on how we manage and grow our income streams, Money, Manifesting & Multiple Streams of Income is the course for you!

Blog posts I published

Interviews

Current list of software I use to run my business:

  • Kajabi for most things in my business:
    • selling through their shopping cart
    • teaching my courses through their learning management system
    • running my affiliate program
  • ActiveCampaign to send all our marketing emails.
  • Optin Monster to create all the pop-ups, reminder windows & lead magnet forms on my website.
  • Calendly to screen interviewers and book in interviews.
  • Xero is my accounting & financial management system.
  • I host my WordPress websites on WPEngine.

More tools of the trade here if you find that kind of thing useful!

Goals for April

Life:

  • Stay sane
  • Supreme self care
  • Pack
  • Organise renovations & moving

Business:

  • Launch Get Organised!
  • Get everyone settled into the Uplevel Incubator & it working beautifully
  • Create & share delicious content
  • Get into good management habits of assigning priorities etc!

Yahoo!

Let’s do this thing!

Love,

FREE GOODIES:

BOOKS:

COURSES: