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Finding YOUR Ideal Number

Lesson 3 from: How to Make a Living Selling What You Make

Megan Auman

Finding YOUR Ideal Number

Lesson 3 from: How to Make a Living Selling What You Make

Megan Auman

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Lesson Info

3. Finding YOUR Ideal Number

Lessons

Class Trailer

Session 1

1

Class Introduction

19:47
2

Define Your Big Goals: What Gets You Out of Bed?

31:09
3

Finding YOUR Ideal Number

37:12
4

How Much Should You Pay Yourself an Hour?

32:03
5

Who is the Ideal Customer for Your Products?

30:33
6

What is Your Customer Willing to Pay?

38:34
7

Pricing Your Products for Profit

31:06
8

Where Does Your Brand Need Work?

51:31
9

What Are The Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Products?

40:07
10

What Makes You a Great Business Owner?

36:19
11

What Should Your Product Be Now?

43:38
12

Bonuses w/ Purchase

01:33
13

Bonus w/ Purchase: Your MAL # (ideal #) in Detail

05:50
14

Bonus with Purchase: Testing Customer Profiles using Facebook ads

16:27

Session 2

15

Live Check In

40:19
16

Shift Your Money Mindset

43:12
17

How To Finance Your Business

33:57
18

Are You Ready to Crowdfund?

52:51
19

Analyze Business Opportunities

35:12
20

Test the Market by Entering with a BANG

50:33
21

Plan Your First Big Sales Event

55:31
22

Market and Promote Your Event: How to Build Buzz

57:00
23

Make Your Event a Success

54:17
24

Analyze and Move Forward

33:18
25

Bonus with Purchase: Calculating ROI

20:10

Session 3

26

Evolve Your Product Line

59:42
27

Create a Production Strategy

52:12
28

Plan for Growth and Future Revenue Streams

35:47
29

Your Big Business Vision

41:23
30

Draft Your Daily and Monthly Action Plan

44:09
31

Keep the Momentum Going

19:48
32

Live Check-in - Finale

28:59
33

Bonus with Purchase: Adjusting your MAL # with employees and contractors

15:16
34

Free Bonus: Student Interviews - Catherine Utschig

00:54
35

Free Bonus: Student Interviews - Christine Herrin

01:35
36

Free Bonus: Student Interviews - Holly Tanner Straus

01:17
37

Free Bonus: Student Interviews - Joy Jenkins

01:03
38

Free Bonus: Student Interviews - Leah Drapkin

01:08
39

Free Bonus: Student Interviews - Lisa Jones

01:12
40

Free Bonus: Student Interviews - Monica Jacquay

01:12
41

Free Bonus: Student Interviews - Richelle

01:13

Lesson Info

Finding YOUR Ideal Number

Everyone so we are at lesson to find your ideal number. Let's, go ahead and get started with our goal for today. So today we want to establish your income goals and find your make a living number. So for those of you watching this who are under twenty that's a number sign, not just a hashtag, so when you see it in this context, this is your make a living number and that's the number that you need to actually hit it in order to make a living selling what you make so let's, take a look at what we did in our last lesson. So in our last lesson, we identified the motivations behind your business and the big goals that you have so that you can keep moving forward, and then what we're gonna do today is we're going to put some concrete numbers to those goals because we can't make a living selling what you make if you don't know what that actually looks like, right? Let's, take a look at where we are in this boot camp. We are in session one set the foundation for your sustainable business, so w...

e are laying the ground work, making sure that everything is in good shape so we can move forward and we're on lesson to finding your ideal number. So what does it really mean to make a living selling what you make that's the whole theme of this boot camp right? But what does it actually mean so it's more than just bringing in the exact amount of money that you need to live off of right if you need thirty thousand dollars you may need more you many less it all depends where you live but you need thirty thousand dollars to live off of your business needs to make more than that the reality is in the industry that we're all in your business probably needs to make a lot more than that right? So you need to bring in enough income to cover your business expenses that's first and foremost to pay yourself a living wage bottom bottom of your bottom line living wage ideally I want you guys to make way more money than that right? I want you to make tons and tons of money would be awesome right guess what happens when you make tons of money you've to pay taxes turns out you have to pay taxes even if you don't make tons and tons of money right? So we have to factor that in did you put money into savings? One of the things that we're talking about over and over again in this boot camp is the idea that your business ebbs and flows and chances are you're never gonna be ableto level that out and actually, personally, I don't want teo I used to always think, you know, all those months I really slow I had to get those up to the high months. Now I want to make more money in the high months so that when it's slow, I can take a vacation, right? But the only way that you can do that is if you're putting money into savings, so we need to make sure we're doing that, and then finally I want you to make a profit that is my business is actually exist. One of my favorite books was called the one percent windfall, and the author of that book says businesses exist to make a profit and are entitled to do so it's really important to say to get businesses exists to make a profit and are entitled to do so. So your job is not just to cover your business expenses, not just to pay yourself a living wage, not just to pay taxes, but you definitely gotta pay those now just to put money into saving, but to make a profit with your business and again, ideally, I want you guys to make enough money to live your dream lifestyle, not just to get by. For a lot of us, I know that that dream life style means getting to make a living, selling what you make, right? But I don't want you to be having that fear every month like I have a bad month that's it things are over, right? I want you to really kind of have that lifestyle that you want now, here's the sort of bad news it's hard to make a living, selling what you make when you see going abbreviate this because there's a long phrases you're in hear me say it a lot, right? So mouth wim, your mouth was right. They're going to make a living selling what you make you can't do it if you don't know your numbers, even if you don't like mad, I'm sorry, you got to run him a little bit. So what we're going to do in this lesson is we're going to dio back of the napkin calculations here's the good news is you're not a spreadsheet person. If you're not into those details, you can get by for now, you're probably gonna want to hire an accountant because at some point someone's gonna have to look at those details, but for what we're doing here, it's okay to just do those back of the napkin calculations because I'm guessing. That a lot of you maybe haven't done them any of you guys do you know right now off the top of your head, how much money your business actually has to bring in e a couple nods, a couple of monica looks real scared, so we're going to talk about those numbers I want you to at least have a ballpark. Now, for those of you who do really like the details, we also have a bonus lesson where we're going diving really deep into these numbers with the special spreadsheet so that's a bonus lesson that we're doing for those of you who want the numbers or want to dive in a little bit deeper or who's accountant told you, you have to dive in a low deeper. We've got that lesson, but for now, we're just gonna look at those really big picture ballpark numbers, but we're going to be honest about them, right? It doesn't do us any good to not be honest about how much we need to make were just sell ourselves short, so we're really going to find two numbers here in this lesson. The first one is what I call your monthly break even, or your m b number, and the monthly break even is important because even though your business ebbs and flows pretty much all the bills you have her do everything every month, right? So we want to make sure that we know every month what's our bottom line number and when I talk about monthly business monthly break even I'm not just talking about the business that monthly break in even number is also going to include what the business needs to pay you that you could make a living because it doesn't matter if the business paid the business bills if you can't pay your mortgage or your rent or your cell phone bill or whatever it is right, so our monthly break even is going to cover both of those things, then we're going to set your annual income goal and that's your make a living number and we're doing this is the big picture annual goal because we know we have those absent flows every month changes so this gives us something to shoot for each month. But then we've got that big picture that tells us what the whole year needs to look like. You might realize that the best fit for your business is to take all of your annual income in the fourth quarter right now like I just want to bring it all in for the holiday season and relax the rest of the year and you could do that if you know what your number needs to be and then you know how to budget so that you have enough in the bank to hit your nb every month right so there's a lot of options here it's also really important to remember that everyone's going to be different so there is zero judgment here as faras what your number is you might be a super frugal person who lives in a really an expensive place to live you remember might be lower you might be like me not a frugal person who lives in an expensive place so I've kind of probably hit somewhere in the middle some of you probably some of you sitting in the studio audience living very expensive places till it right so you're number might be higher no judgment doesn't matter we want the number that's right for you and as I mentioned I don't expect to make that same amount of money every month I'm going hard on that because I know that everyone wants that consistency right so nice if it was just even it's not don't expect it plan for it and then plan for the vacation when you can relax right really really important so let's dive into our first exercise we're going to define your m b e number which is your monthly break even number and that number is your monthly business break even and your monthly cost of living break in so we want to make sure that we're hitting both of those numbers so your monthly business break even number. Something that you might also hear referred to as monthly burn. So this is something that you'll hear a lot of companies say, like art, our monthly burn is ten thousand dollars, right? That's how much money the business burns through every month? S o that's, another way to think about it, the business has to burn through that money, and then after that that's, we make our profit so let's talk about how much money does it cost to actually run your business? And what I want you guys to do is you haven't already grabbed at work book, and you can start to kind of chart some of these numbers out as we're going along. If you haven't thought about this yet, now is the time to start right? And one of the first things that I want to encourage everybody to dio if you haven't already done this, get a separate bank account for your business and a system for tracking senses everybody here already doing that? Uh, not yet, all right, that's your homework and that anyone watching online that's your homework too. So if you haven't done that it's really simple, you don't have to set up a separate business account. This is one of those little tricks that I learned when I went to the bank is he's happy business account they're going to make you have a pretty high minimum maybe five grand maybe ten grand is a lot of money to have to keep in the bank and not have liquid right so just set up a second personal checking account easy most places now that you give it a name nickname it like my biz whatever it is have that make it really really easy to keep track of your business so then all you have to do is go back to those numbers so I want to go through these questions and and then once we kind of talked about all these areas were going toe hot seat some people and to make our in studio audience really dive in here. So how much money have you spent on your business in the last twelve months? This is another case where I think it's better to total it up for the year and then divide by twelve because your your expenses fluctuate some months I send a lot of money to my trade shows, right? I'm like there's another giant check right out the door some months I don't have that so this way at least it lets us average them out see now here's where we get into the real questions because I know this is a case for a lot of people especially when you're first starting your business is what should your business technically be paying for that it isn't it doesn't serve us to do these calculations and take out these big pieces just because you're working from a home studio, for instance, so you're working on your kitchen table and you're like, I don't have rent out of mortgage utilities, somebody has to pay those bills, right? Yes, it's coming from your house and your personal, but the idea that your business needs to pay for that. So think about all the things that your business isn't currently paying for that technically, it should be do you think you're not in your head? No, I'm not calculating any of that. Yeah, awesome. Okay, then the other thing that I want you guys to think about when we're calculating this numbers were taking into account what your business spent in the last twelve months, but I also want you to think about what you're going to need to spend in the next twelve months, because if you're trying to grow your business, you're going to need to spend more money, so if we don't put that into our number right away, we're going to start off on our back heel, right? We're not going to be prepared for where we want to go, so think about some of those things, maybe you do want to move off your kitchen table. Into your own studio, our office space maybe you have a new tool or equipment or something that you need to buy maybe you just have to invest in more production maybe you want to do a trade show hey, you need a new laptop because you're just really slow and it's holding your business down. These are all really important legitimate things maybe you have some business related travel that you want to dio maybe it's time to start thinking about an employee and we're going to talk about some of the stuff way more detailed down the line in this bootcamp but just start to think about what some of those numbers are, and even if you don't know the exact number, you can start to ballpark it, right? You know you can look up what studio space is running for in your area, you can call a trade show and asked them how much a booth it costs or how much they think of booth is going to cost next year because guess what, they like to raise those numbers every year to esso, sit down and think about that so that, you know, in the next twelve months what your business is really going to need to spend, so to calculate your monthly business break even we're going to take your annual business expenses so that everything you spent in the last twelve months plus your annual missing missing expenses. So that's things like my business isn't paying for the rent. And the utilities are my phone that I actually used more for my business than anything else, right? We want the business to pay for all those and then your projected expenses for the next twelve months. So anything that you think you're gonna have to spend money on I know this number's gonna start to get really high really fast and it's probably gonna be a little scary and that's okay, we'll make a little less scary by dividing by twelve to start so that we know where we have to hit each month. Okay, so, it's the first half of that, and in a few minutes, I'm gonna call up one of our lovely ladies here and make them work through it. But I also want to talk about the second piece first and that's your monthly living break even because if your business isn't paying for youto live, then you're not making a living selling what you make, right? So we want to make sure that every month your businesses hitting both of those things for us in the audience is your business paying you right now? Anyone know all right we're gonna we're gonna fix that right that's our that's really our big goal here right? It sounds like from talking to a lot of you that some of you at least are getting to that point where your businesses sustaining itself but it's not sustaining you yet and we want to fix that and so we have to make sure that we put those in there now there are two ways that you can think about this one is if you haven't existing salary that maybe your number if you have a day job that you're trying to quit you may decide you want meghan I don't really like math that much I make one hundred k a year in my current job that's what my business needs to pay done perfect easy but if you're not sure what you're business really needs to pay you then you should actually sit down and figure that out, right? So how much money do you need each month for your rent or your mortgage for utilities for transportation whether it's your car, your metro passed whatever it is food close be honest if you like to go out to eat, don't budget that you're eating peanut butter sandwiches everyday should be really unhappy right? If you like nice shoes put that in there don't skimp on yourself really be honest here health care, whatever it is, you'll be realistic and then think about those other things that you need or want to spend money on, right? We want to put all of that stuff in gifts, you know, right now you're like, it's, great my business makes all the money in the holidays it's so easy to buy gifts, but put that number in. So, you know, vacation? Do you like to travel? Is that really important? Put it in there you're really smart. You can actually put his many of your vacations as possible into the business expense category. That's what? Ideo a lot of things to be written off weekend at the beach with your kids might be a little trickier, so think about what you're what you want to do makes you put that in there, if you have hobbies, whatever they are, put that in there, make sure that your business is really supporting the lifestyle that you actually want to live, and chances are again, the number might be kind of scary, and you can also decide later that you want parrot back a little you're like. All right, I realized that for the next three years because this might not pay for that extravagant vacation to the south pacific that I really want to take it's cool, we'll put that in the future. That's okay, you do that too, but at least be honest with yourself that weaken the beach with the kids is really important and you want your business to contribute to that go ahead and do that that's fine. The other thing is when you're thinking about these expenses obviously you think about your own personal situation some people are single, some people have partners you it's okay to say my business has to contribute half the rent half the mortgage whatever it is figure out what makes sense for you there's no even though there's a lot of math the good news is there's no right answer here there's not going to be you know, a quiz I'm like nope that's the wrong number you got it wrong whatever makes sense for you is what you need so we're going to add up those personal expenses miscellaneous expenses and getting divided by twelve makes the number a little less scary and that's going to get us to our monthly break even number by adding those two things together our business break even and our monthly living break even so I want to run some numbers now who wants to be brave and run a couple numbers they could be super ballpark I promised lisa all right, how about up here? Yeah, bring your numbers but your nose because we're gonna we're gonna also flip chart this use that okay, I'm gonna stand so I can write on our fancy flip chart okay and actually while we do that gonna back up a little so we can get right to the right question there we are look at that all right how perfect all right? They don't have to do math off the top of my head they're helpful all right? So first of all tell us who you are and where we can find you and what you do so my name is lisa jones. I do personal leather good stuff bags and belt um hearing's pretty much everything that further and you can find me at throckmorton jones dot com all right, so what's start with how much money have you spent your business in the last twelve months? So we're gonna really ballpark it it's fine, but they're just totally fine with it. So about eight grand about eight grand okay? So business twelve months about a k okay, so what's your business pain not paying for that it should be about how much is that annually? Yeah so are you do you work from home? I do yeah, I have a shop. Why have the whole garage really nice it's really nice so why would I think that it needs to pay for a shop? Did you have an idea of how much well in my area shops about three thousand dollars a month well so that is thirty six k for the year that's a big number but we know that write anything else retirement oh that's a good one. So how much do you want to be contributing annually towards your retirement? I think the basic which is twenty five hundred I mean the the max it can that's a good one yeah don't even put that on the list good cow all right and like utilities if I'm gonna have a shop space so how much do you think those will be? I say you know one hundred fifty month okay what's that I hear uh, twelve hundred and then what expenditures you see for the next of course there's supplies okay, so you so you see buying more supplies above and beyond the a k that you spent the last twelve months yeah, I guess I want to grow you want a graph? So what do you think that will probably run you so the a k kind of includes everything right? You know that I spent so in supplies alone I would say at least four thousand. So another four as you know what else um stretches trade shows do you think that's in your twelve year plan two least do one twelve months? Yeah, yeah, definitely yeah, I'd like to do three three yeah that's how I started it's a good way to start so have you run the numbers? You have an idea of what three trench is going to cost you? Well, I think it's going to be depending on the trenches I picked but about six hundred bucks a show for trade jos that's awfully love is it too though? Yeah, you're probably depending on do you have an idea of what shows you're looking at? Well, some tree okay, so let me qualify some trade shows and some like papa papa okay, so you're looking at him up so combination. Yeah, so but my last trade show I did you know, a collaboration it was like five hundred bucks with because you you should have rung ahead and so if you write perfect so if you're thinking about doing other shows where they all give me that same scenario and do you have to travel to any of them because that's money that you have to factor in a swell trade shows are never just called show okay, so travelling I did not factor so that's I'm thinking local like west coast so it may be another couple hundred bucks, so yeah, so what you thinking? Maybe let's say like at least two k over your shows, okay, if you want a little higher yeah let's go higher let's make sure that it's taking care of perfect so what do you think? Um let's look for although way so just in case all right and anything else I kind of need an assistant okay? And I need why have some help but I need to pay them oh yeah ugo ugo maybe yes, I trade them but I need to pay them I want to pay them. Okay, so how much do you think you need to pay them at least at least fifteen dollars an hour and how many hours today work for you a week? Well, let's start a ten and at my handy calculator yeah, so one hundred fifty bucks a week. Okay, one hundred bucks a week but they any time you have an employee they cost you more than that's, right? Because you have to pay taxes workman's comp all of that stuff so let's, just say two hundred bucks a week, ok for the year so so right now you're looking at will round up a little eleven k okay that's an eleven that's all right. So anything else? Well, I had traveling, but I think we incorporated it in the trades you have any other travel that you want to do outside of the trade show I kind of really need to go to bali to see some other manufacturers I love that I really have to go to polly really dio I love it's important so how much is that trip gonna run you this is this is how you right off your trip to the south pacific that you find those new suppliers in bali and that's going to cost me at least uh three thousand dollars because it may take a week and a half yeah, yeah kind of ali take a week to all right? Anything else here? I think that's it that's all they have now so let's go ahead and total that up and that's very scary. Yeah, and we haven't even done your personally well and I think for you the one that's the really big one is right here. It's the shock that's, right? So that one is one that when you run these numbers, you know it's okay to kind of think about some different scenarios. So can you if you run this number, it seems really scary. Can you split a shop space with someone for a while? You know, you can start to run these other scenario. I love your eyes for a little while, right? And you decide that you want to, but it's good to run these the way that they are now yeah, that was definitely there, all right, so we are at worst gonna round up to seventy, okay, that's pretty good and they were gonna divide that by twelves that we had that number would be really nice for you to you all smack on top of my head but I can't. So your monthly business break even is about fifty, eight hundred a month. Okay, okay so that's how much the business needs to make every month just to break even. Okay that's, how much profit? That's how much sales sales? Yeah, we're talking about this number this is sales so this is how much you have to sell a month just for the business to break even. Alright, alright. So now let's do the second pizza that I guesstimating myself it at, um seventy five thous a month a year? Yeah, yeah so you just want to have a salary that you want to be at so that's perfect then twenty five k what's that what's your monthly, then six okay it's a little over six very handsy. So yes sixty to sixty fifty. So you're and the number did I just say on that last year was your business fifty eight fifty eight, post sixty two so you're basically you're a twelve so that is the sales number that you need to hit every month for your business to break even and pay you your bottom line that's a few products that isthe I definitely need to hire somebody right? Right. And here's something else. We're going to talk about this a little later down the line because what I think is gonna happen for a lot of people is you're going to run these numbers and the new york if you like, I can't make that much product, I'm gonna need to hire some help. I'm gonna need to bring somebody else in, so that will kind of work on calculating a little bit later. But for now, this is the least just going to give us that really good ballpark. Okay, awesome. All right, so you go ahead, and today we're gonna thank you. Jump forward. Yeah, that was perfect. So we're gonna come forward and we'll leave this up because we're gonna come back to in a minute. But now I want to talk about the second piece, which is that bigger number, right? So this is your make a living number. This is the whole big picture and that's the annual target that you have to get and to get there. What we're going to dio is we're actually just gonna add on these extra things that most people starting their business do you not think about right, and this is where then, if you're not thinking about these, it really starts to get you into trouble. Especially so I'm just gonna pull you back up here we're just jumping right back into your happy I don't know I make it down all right so we know that your business needs to bring in tough camp twelve came on so annually you birth business needs to bring in one hundred forty four which by the way not insurmountable totally reasonable number for the record but it doesn't actually he's bringing that needs to bring in a little bit more weight but now we're gonna make a lot more money now okay, so what I think it's really important to add in these three numbers so the first one is savings now with things like savings you can really judge this but I would recommend it least adding in five percent buffer for savings really good idea just to get in the habit of putting that in the bank right away you may want more what do you mean idea of how much you're gonna pick up a savings percentage that you'd like to add in is your buffer on fifteen and go higher if you want I think ten ten about good okay, perfect so then we're going to add in for that you think I could do this math in my head so I'm gonna add that to our number and this is really exciting watching media map on stage okay? So with our savings we're now this then I want to add in a little bit extra for profit now, here's, the thing that I know is going to trip everybody up, so I'm just gonna highlight it now and then I'll come back to it later in this calculation were adding in a number for profit because I wanted to be there when we price your products individually, I never advocate adding a straight percentage for profit. It always leaves money on the table, and we're gonna talk about that very specifically and lesson six howto actually add the profit to your pieces. So this is not your not going to say okay, well, I want twenty five percent profit and then every piece I design, I'm gonna add twenty five percent profit, not what we're doing here. We're just adding a number that makes this a little bit more realistic of where your business probably wants to be. So where do you think you want to be at ad on in terms of profit? Um, I typically do thirty five percent profit picked so let's go in and we're just gonna think that's hi. I don't think so. Here's the thing wholesale to retail. Yeah, it depends on what your model is, chances are until it's all said and done if you calculate at thirty five percent profit you're not actually gonna be a thirty five percent profit it's just the reality of this business so if that's what you're calculating at that's perfect let's go so we're going to add on so it's actually gonna get us out fifty hey profit and what you may find too is that when you were running with really small margins thirty five percent seemed really high but now you're like okay that really jump that number up that's exactly what I'm like right now so you may decide that you want to shift that number a little bit because remember too that when we're doing this we've built in what you need the business to pay you every month so you may decide in the beginning I don't need to talk about how much profit because I'm getting I'm getting paid my employees are in the business of getting paid and now for the record I love profit I'm all for profit I think it's awesome and amazing but this also is a reality that we are not a super high profit margin business you're not this is not going to know those things where you hear about the people who like I had a seven figure launch and I took home almost all seven figures right? We're not it's not that kind of business and I'm not saying that to scare anybody away I just want everyone to be really aware of what's going on this is something that I grew up with my dad actually owns a machine shop so he's in manufacturing and I remember once looking at his profit report it was like eight percent you do all this work for eight percent profit but depending on the business here and that's the reality so if one you're doing you know we're doing these numbers now we're gonna leave this like this but if you get home and you're like ok this just took a number that I already felt was scary to number that feels really really scary you may fudge that percentage a little bit I definitely feel like I might especially because I add so much profit into my product prices right so it's built in yeah right because and here's the other thing we have to then on top of this ad in for taxes and so depending on what tax bracket you fall into and internationally I cannot speak to that you guys are gonna want to talk to an accountant everyone should really talk to an accountant to find out exactly where you are but figure out where you're at for taxes and we have to add that number in as well and the taxes number we have to add to this big number because they're definitely taxing your profits rice on that it's going to be at least thirty five percent right exactly based on the number you're at least in that thirty five per cent tax bracket exactly forty two right right so yes you're getting pretty high so you're looking at you know another like seventy to eighty k for taxes so now right a number that's like two hundred million dollars right now for a quarter of million dollars every year how about that? You do it oh yeah I feel like I can do it but it is overwhelming, right? I mean it's definitely I can't wait to look at the other prices and breakdown right first engineer it it makes me feel you know, like I have so much to dio yeah but but you and I think all of this is totally totally doable and the other thing that I wanna kind of impress upon you guys you're doing these numbers is you don't have to hit them right away so it's okay to be realistic it's okay to take your time so you can say you know what? This is the goal for my business I want to be a quarter million dollars in sales I'm not anywhere near that right now so this is my three year plan and then you can work backwards and say okay, this is my three year plan is there where I want the numbers to be you know? So for your uly said that real big expense was the serious save you say ok I'm going to take that out for my numbers for my next year school and that's gonna shift all this down a little bit so you can kind of then set your margins as you go okay all right thank you down ok thank you all right so I won't make anyone else do that for the group I know it's actually pretty scary so thank you lisa that's a big deal to talk about your numbers and that something else that I think it's really really important is that we're not doing this enough right? We don't sit down we don't we personal look at our numbers we don't talk to our numbers to other people and that's really really key so I want to make sure that you guys are doing this so I know that the rest of us in the audience haven't run these numbers but then you started to think about this number how does that make you feel anyone how you feeling about your numbers nervous nervous they're a bit overwhelmed scared here yeah so I know this is a big one and the reason we're doing it now so that we know where we need to go and then we can plan for it and the rest of the boot camp we can figure out what we need to do to get there so how does this number compare to your current revenue so, lisa, how what's what's the difference between what you're currently bringing in and so I think, currently it's about ten, cate there in sales? Yeah, ok, so you've got a pretty far ways to go. Oh, yeah. And how long have you been in business? This is my fourth, third year on, you know? Yeah. Business license, everything. Everything perfect? Yeah. So now you know, this is where I am. This is where I need to go, okay? And again, if they're really far apart, think about how long you want it to take you to reach that number, right? Is it a year from now? Is it two years from now? Is it five years from now and go back and play with those numbers? You know, again, maybe that vacation doesn't happen, but maybe that trip to bali has to happen because it's part of your business so, you know, figure out what's really important what's going to kind of get you towards those numbers. So in the next lesson, what we're going to do is we're gonna take those numbers that you figured out. We're gonna figure out how much you need to pay yourself an hour when calculating your price is right. That's something I know a lot of people struggle with. You guys still kind of iffy on that. Are you paying yourselves enough? Yeah, that we're going to take a look at in. The next lesson is how much you need to pay yourself based on that making make a living number that you set today. But before we go let's look at your lesson to homework. So if you haven't already done this, I want you to set up a separate business bank account and an expense tracking system. The expense tracking system might literally be I go into my business bank account and look at it on a regular basis. That's okay? If you really like numbers, you can create a spreadsheet. You know, you can use something like quickbooks. Whatever is comfortable with you and your accountant. Quite frankly, I had my accountant stacks of paper and let him do it. Drop right it's up to you. But I can do that because I have the separate business bank accounts, every business, credit card, all that good stuff that then the count doesn't have to sort out the paper. That's your first homework. If you have already done that second, I want you to calculate your make a living number I want you to post it in your studio or workspace. I want you to get comfortable with that number and the on ly way you're going to get comfortable with that number if you see it and you think about it and you live with it right? And I also want you to share it with another business friend you say you're number they say there's now it's all out in the open and now you can push each other right? How is it going? Are you working towards that number some days you're gonna wake up and be like this is impossible and then I'm gonna call that his friend and they're going to be like it's okay, we have a plan it's time to get to mind of some of this year's, so find that person that you can share that with and if you're feeling really brave, your extra credit is to share that number in our private facebook group when you guys are up for this class, you'll get a link where you can join a private facebook group, go ahead and post your number and there feel free to share this really helps everyone I know it's scary can big kudos for lisa for standing up here and talking about those numbers because it's really scary to do that but jump into that facebook group and share those numbers because going to really help everyone if we're all talking about it and it's a no judgment zone your numbers, your number doesn't matter. But get out there, run that number, live with it and share it with everyone else. And I'll see you guys in the next lesson.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Class Workbook
Private Facebook Group Invite
MAL in Detail - Numbers Template
Editable Bootcamp Workbook in Pages Format
Editable Bootcamp Workbook in Doc Format
Cost Plus Pricing Elements Bonus Video
How to Talk About Your Products Bonus Video
Trade Show Traffic Flow Bonus Video
Visual Branding Basics Bonus Video
MAL in Detail - Excel Template

Ratings and Reviews

user a03f28
 

Love the shorter and longer format to this class. It keeps me interested and I don't have to schedule a whole day at once, during the free play. Well worth the money if you pay for the class too. Megan is amazing! She really knows business, marketing and has strategies which apply to all kinds of businesses. The work book is 150 pages long and breaks everything down into small bits and teaches you to really think about all aspects of your business. Where you were, are now and best of all where you want to be and how to get there. Highly recommend any of her classes. Thank you so much Megan and Creative Live for bringing us such wonderful content!

user-e2bf69
 

This course was totally awesome!!! I cannot express enough how fantastic Megan Auman is, what a great teacher she is, and am so thankful she offered it for FREE!!! Wow!!! It was exactly where I was at, stuck and frustrated. Exactly what I needed to begin to get my business off the ground. I am currently implementing all I have learned from her. Rebranding my self, rebuilding my website, new product shots, model shots, list building, etc., etc. I am still connected with the Facebook group, and that is awesome we have that connection to continue helping each other out and using each other as a sounding board. I plan on purchasing the course as soon as I can. I HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend this course to anyone who is struggling to get their business off the ground and going!!!

user-3f5a23
 

Thank you Megan for this opportunity. I really liked the first classes. You indicated interesting directions to think about. Even though life verifies the rest it is still worth to become smarter. Great Work! Best regards from Poland. Ewa

Student Work

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