The Small Business Doer

Financials were through the roof this month. I did a lot of subcontractor payments, but still good numbers in the end.

I’m lagging in sales in other parts of business and it seems like video is kind of taking over. I’m slowly freeing up time to work on non-video projects and every month I’m getting rid of some responsibilities that are taking time away from my business growth projects. It’s getting better though.

Ok, another great month in February. It has been surprising to me that both January and February were so strong. If you compare my sales to last year’s numbers, you’ll see there’s quite a big jump.

I feel like I say this often, but I’m taking the work while I can, since my business can be up and down, since a lot of my work is project based. At times it can be very busy, other times, very slow.

I finally finished the Quickbooks Bookkeeping System Course!

Yowza! January was a lot bigger month than expected.

Essentially, my whole focus of the month was to finish my Quickbooks Bookkeeping System Video Course (link). I didn’t.

It’s not that I wasn’t trying. It simply takes time is about all I can say. An exceptional month of sales doesn’t help on the free time front.

I think you have to be somewhat of a biz nerd to be so excited to have your revised biz plan done. Man am I excited!

And no, it’s not only the relief of being finished writing the 7,000+ words.

I posted my business plan online in 2009 so that small business people would have a live case study of a real business in action. It’s what I wished I could have seen while I was in business school.

I’m so glad I did. I didn’t think the plan would be of that much interest for the first year or two, since there would be more talk than action. Where things get interesting is when you can see the results of the plan and compare the plan to reality. I know have some results in and can now feel comfortable telling people that if you’re starting a business and want to get a perspective of the process, you can learn something by seeing what I’ve done.

December was a quasi-frustrating month. I had big ambitions for December, I was supposed to get a lot of business growth work done. I got some done, but nothing close to what I was going for.

November was by far the best month I’ve had for both sales and net income! I’ve never done more video productions in a month before.

So yep, busy. Downside, not too much time to work on business growth, ughh!

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.

There are some good places, which I list, for how to write a business plan. Instead of covering that massive topic, I’ll instead focus on why write a business plan.

September was back-in-action month after a bit of a summer lull. This is my third September with this business, so I was assuming business would pick-up, but it was re-assuring to see that it actually did. What worried me was that something happening twice is not statistically significant, so the fact that I did good business for two September’s in a row was no guarantee that I would do well this September.

In September I was also very excited to finally get started on my info products… which can be more simply summed up as putting content on this site.

Yep, so August was a write-off. Not much to write home – or to the Internet – about.

I was in Japan for the first couple of weeks and then had out-of-town family visit for the last two.

This is a good time to mention that when you are self-employed – and you get paid by the hour – if you don’t work you don’t get money. This applies as much to vacation time as it does to when you simply don’t book work.