The Small Business Doer

March was even more unexpectedly busy than February. February had the Olympics and I received some additional work as a result, so I figured March would be a slower month. Nope.

Why was March so busy? Writing this now (in May), I can say that it wasn’t busy for any other reason besides reason steady work from four of my main customers plus some additional non-regular ones. I can only think that in the future I will have months where there won’t be so much work from my main customers. That’s why part of my business plan is to attract more customers on my own as well as residual income.

Rate Change

At the end of March I decided to simply have my rates start at $50 an hour (they previously started from $35 an hour). This goes in line with my business plan where the only way to make more money is to either work more hours, raise rates, or have residual income). Since my work hours are close to being maxed out, and residual income is something I’m slowly working on and definitely can’t count on, raising rates was the only other option. So far the rate change is going well, and is actually not anything too significant, since I was undercharging myself at $35 an hour for work that should be in the $50 an hour plus range.

Delving into the Financial Details

Video production brought in the lion’s share of the revenue at just under $4,000 (if you include the equipment rental income to the video production numbers).

If you look at the profit & loss table below, you’ll see that there is Reimbursed Expenses Income. This is for things such as my input supplies and parking. With that taken into consideration, the cost overruns on both those items is due to the busier than expected month. Communications is also an area where the cost is more than double the budget. This is due partly to the fact that communications is costing closer to $300 a month on average and that a bill for two months worth of services was paid in March.

Equipment rental is noticeably not an expense in March. This is due to the fact that I will not be renting camera gear at the moment. I’m lucky enough to have a brother who runs a video business in Vancouver (www.shawnlam.ca) that is letting me use his second camera when needed. Connections are important, which is something I know I will be talking about again and again.

Overall, there is nothing to out of place on the expenses side, I’m 8% over budget. However, the revenue side is 85% over budget, so that more than makes up for it. In the end, profitability was 123% over budget (2 1/4 times great than expected), so it was another great month.

Conclusion

The month was another better than expected month. This will start to get repetitive, but I will have to work more on the residual income side of the business and promoting myself through my two websites, www.gregalam.com and www.smallbusinessdoer.com. I mainly work as a sub-contractor for other businesses, so my cut of the income is lower than if I were booking the contracts myself. However, this has worked quite well as I don’t spend time finding work, but instead mostly spend time doing the work. Eventually though, I will have to move to booking work myself in order to raise the amount of money I can make given the same amount of time.

Profit & Loss Budget vs. Actual – March 2010

Profit & Loss Budget vs. Actual March 2010

You Post Your Business Plan and Financials online?

I had the idea that for people to really learn what it is like to run a small business, they need to be able to see the financials. The bottom line of business is the bottom line, you can’t operate a business for long without profits. With that in mind, I’ve posted my full business plan as well as updates (including financials).

The Next Update

Check out the April 2010 business plan update.