The Small Business Doer

Overview

October was a month of getting things done. Film work, business work, website content work.

I’m actually quite happy with how the month went, despite net income being a bit lower than budget and not doing as much business growth work as I would have liked. The key thing for me this month was that I was focused on the right things.

Goals vs. Reality

Okay, I wanted to get 30 new posts in October. I got down more like 7 new posts. My goal is always quality over quantity, so I’ll have to revise my ambitious goal of a post-a-day. I could do it, but with the quality I’m trying to achieve I wouldn’t want to sacrifice purely for the numbers.

Here are the posts that I did get posted up online.

1. Video Equipment for Around $500
2. Quickbooks Vendor Refund – Credit Card, Bank Account, Vendor Credit
3. What Information Should You Collect for Bookkeeping
4. Entering Meal Receipts with Tips into Quickbooks – CANADA and UK
5. Quickbooks Enter Date not the Format you Want?
6. Issuing Receipt or Proof of Payment for HST/GST Input Tax Credit in Canada
7. Business Plan Update September 2011 – Big Sales – Big Goals

Profit & Loss Budget vs. Actual – October 2011

I achieved 90% of my budget for revenues, pulling in $8,668.45 (budget was $9,700). Decent.

For expenses, I was on budget except for some equipment expense. I keep on finding reasons to invest in equipment. This time it was for a backpack that would fit all my new video camera gear into one bag (instead of three) and a specialized arm for my video monitor.

This month’s net income was a little less than September, but September was a bit more than October, so it evens out a bit.

Profit & Loss Budget vs. Actual - October 2011

Upped My Rates

I am now charging out more than I used to. There were 2 reasons for this.

1. Make more money: That’s a no brainer
2. Focus: If I charge more, the less valuable opportunities are going to go away. If a person is not willing to pay the increased rates, it means they weren’t getting enough value out of what I was doing. I lose those people who are not willing to pay as much and focus on the people that are

I’ve mentioned in the past that eventually I will max out on the rates I can charge to individually provide services to people. When I started Small Biz Doer in 2009 I was charging out at $35 an hour. Now I’m in the $50 an hour range for business services. When I do specialized video productions it is closer to $75 to $125 an hour.

Video rates are higher than my business services as I lot of the video work I do requires specialized equipment that people would need to rent if I didn’t provide it. A lot of my expenditures are also video related, so even though I make more money by the hour, my hourly rate mostly evens out so that I make roughly $50 an hour.

As good as I get, there will come a time, where if I’m still doing the type of productions that I currently do, that I won’t be able to charge more than I am while working on my own. I believe I’m pretty close to maximizing the amount of money I can make for the type of hourly work I can do. That’s why I’m slowly switching to creating informational products that I don’t have to recreate each time to make money. Creating the information takes a lot of time, but once done, I don’t need to put in that same amount of time each time I make a sale and make money.

Capital Expenditures

One thing that is not showing up on my financials is my capital expenditures (in other words, my purchases of assets). For me this is mainly video equipment that I don’t expense in one year but write off over several years. If you are not familiar with accounting terms you can check out wikipedia for their explanation of assets vs. expenses.

I only post my profit and loss statements online, not my balance sheet that would show my assets, so that’s why you don’t see my capital expenditures.

This year I spent a lot on capital expenditures. This is important to note as the net income that you see on my profit and loss report doesn’t include the money I’ve spent. So, if I spent $5,000 on a new camera, and I made $5,000 in net income in that same month, my cash available to me would be $0. Profit and loss reports don’t tell the whole story when you are looking at businesses.

Conclusion

I’m glad that while I didn’t get to do the number of posts that I did, I was still able to produce a decent amount of content for my site. If I had worked at that pace for the past two years I would have had over 150 posts right now (I currently have 50 something).

October is also a busier time of the year for me, so that I was able to produce the content at an above-average time of business is also a good sign.

I recently read (well, listened to an audio book) of “In the Plex”. It’s a book about Google and one of the things that I took to heart was how they created goals. They always aimed for amazing things. They barely ever reached their lofty goals. In fact, if they did, the view was that the goals created were set to low. It’s easy to hit easy goals, hard to hit lofty ones. The point was that if you don’t set the bar high, you’ll never do anything amazing.

The other thing I took away was having a big vision. Perhaps you can’t accomplish your vision in a week, month, year, or even decade. However, like those lofty goals (which what a vision is in a way), if you are always working towards a vision there’s a chance you’ll get there (or partially get there). If you don’t have that vision, you’ll never get there (or even partially there). Roughly, my vision is to make operating a small business easier for the small business owner.

Making small business easier is a fairly general thing to do. What I’m tackling specifically in the short term is one aspect of that, which is bookkeeping using Quickbooks. The goal is to help small business in that specific way and do that well, really well. Once that is accomplished, use my successes and failures in doing that to tackle the next small business subject area. While the short term focus on bookkeeping won’t fulfill my vision, it will bring me one small step closer.

Updates

1. Check out the next update Business Plan Update November 2011
2. Check out the previous update Business Plan Update September 2011 – Big Sales – Big Goals
3. Check out all the updates