The Small Business Doer

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.

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.

Ooohhh, got myself into some expenses this July. All justified… of course.

I also thought that July would be worse than sales than it actually was, since I was to leave in the last week of the month.

After going through my first 6 months, and as mentioned in my half-year review, I am really itching to get on with my plan to make information products.

June, my biggest month in the past two years. The only reason, two self-produced contracts. That accounted for near half the revenues brought in.

Feel like a broken record, but again no work on growing the business.

May, another solid month!

Once again, so solid that no work was done on growing the business, only work on making sure the business was still running.

April was a smoking month for sales. 24% more sales than expected in fact!

The reason? I produced more of my own contracts. Three to be exact. I was busy, but not terribly more than March.

February, man, this short month always throw me off! Those 2-3 days “lost” due to the 28 day month really is felt when you finish something on the 1st or 2nd of March that was something you wanted to do in February.

So, February was a more regular month than January. Busy with paid work, busy with unpaid work growing the business.

Sales were lower than budgeted. If you look at my budget vs. actual section, you’ll see that I believe I overshot my income for the entire year.

I’ll be intensifying my efforts to gain traction on this smallbusinessdoer.com site and have set new visitor and subscriber goals for the end of April 2011.

This is my big update for the entire 2010 year.

I take a look back at how things went in 2010 and talk about what I have cooking for 2011.

My diversified business helped me out this month. Without it, I would have been up the river without a paddle.

December is a time for celebration in many cultures. I tried to use it for a bit of rejuvenation.

Wow, I thought October was busy. Well, November was even busier.

Dead car, but it’s all good.