100TH Episode! (BTS OF RUNNING A SEVEN FIGURE BUSINESS!!)
are you sitting down we'll stand up and cheer because today we are celebrating our 100th episode of free mama tv i'm going to go behind the scenes with you today do something a little bit different and show you what it really takes to run the free mama listen i know from personal experience that it's easy to look up at people who already have the instagram following the youtube channel and the facebook group and feel like it will never happen for you but i want you to know it takes a village there are a lot of people who help make these businesses happen you have to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run and i'm super passionate about helping you take those first few steps if we haven't met already hi i'm lauren golden and i teach moms how to ditch the nine to five to work from home and live a totally awesome guilt-free life i didn't even launch this channel until i had been in business for almost four years the free mama movement was already over a year old as well and that's why in this video you'll see what goes on behind the scenes of a successful seven figure business so you can stop beating yourself up about how much you've achieved so far and you'll understand that everything is possible plus i want you to be sure and watch to the end of this video because i'm going to tell you about a very special opportunity that might be the perfect next step for you now i want you to know that just like you i've experienced the doubts the frustrations the feelings of failure the limiting beliefs but i want you to know that thankfully while i've been building this business i've also figured out some cool stuff along the way the whole reason we have this channel and all of our programs is to teach you how to set yourself up to build a successful business too so since today we are celebrating our 100th episode i want to give you a realistic look behind the scenes i want to show you our profit and loss recurring revenue all the behind the scenes numbers of what it takes to run this business while working the hours that i work but i also want you to see the other side the expenses you'll find out how much i pay my team how much i spend on ads and all the other costs i want you to know exactly what it takes to run a business like this and to truly understand that you can't expect yourself to achieve it on day one your first steps in business aren't about creating an email list a lead magnet and a brand step one is working out if you want to have a service based business and how you'll get results for your clients that's where i started that's where every member on my team started and that's where every entrepreneur you're probably looking up to also started but one day you will learn how to scale and hit these numbers and work three or four hours a day and in this video i'll show you the bridge from where you are now to where you want to be so i think for some context it's really important to start with where this bad boy hole all began um i actually started my own freelance career so acting as a service provider one to one in social media management then evolved to virtual assistants and online business management i was doing some ads i was doing some funnel creation and while i don't recommend this for scaling a one-to-one business i think this was the path that i was really designed to take so that i knew a lot about a lot of different things and i'm now able to teach that to other people which is ultimately what i do now as the founder of the free mama movement but my freelancing career started just me which is how most of you will have to begin like we just discussed i launched my freelancing business in the summer of 2014 and i launched the free mama movement this facebook group that you were looking at in september of 2017. so three full years of experience and failures and pitfalls and feaster famine clients and making mistakes and not charging what i was worth and all the things that i get to teach now i want you to understand that i had to live it i always say you can't walk someone across the bridge you haven't walked across and so you know it's easy to look at people online and think they were an overnight success but there was three years of foundational work and trial and error and just hard work and dedication that went into even being remotely qualified to begin this movement and and now you know years after that i've evolved so much as well but the free mama movement really came about in september of 2017 i hired a business coach i then went on to build out the 12-week program and i hired or i i sold my first course in december of 2017. so um you can see this group we now have almost 30 000 p or 33 000 people in it which is awesome um this took three years like this didn't happen overnight and when i launched the free mama movement this was the only pla presence that i had online i wasn't trying to be on every platform all the time and do all the things i was in one spot serving my ideal clients and telling them what they could purchase from me so there's a really really big lesson in that um but this you know it took three years to build this it didn't happen overnight um and really it took you know six years because there there was all that foundational work that even made me qualified to be able to lead other people inside of this movement now i know what you guys really want though are the numbers and i don't blame you because that's what i would be super curious about as well so we're going to start in stripe and um i've got this pulled up to a custom report so that you guys can see uh from december 2017 which like i told you that's when i made my first course sale so at this time i was still freelancing you'll see some of that revenue when we pop over to paypal um because that's where my clients were paying me from but everything you see in stripe has come from this iteration of the free mama movement so this is a combination the two point almost five 2.44 million since december of 2017 is coming from course sales coaching our free mama squad which is our coaching program um i did one on one in the past we have the quick start freelance success kit so there's lots of different um products and services that we offer that come into this gross volume through our stripe account what i want you to also know about this though is that for the first six months of my business i only had one offer and that was the free mama 12 week program that was it that's where all my focus was was into making that better making sales working on my marketing message and really getting honed in on on who i was serving and what they needed and i see so many entrepreneurs and even new freelancers getting really distracted and trying to do all the things and build all the things and offer all the things and there's just so much wisdom and you know recognizing that having one core offer is is going to make you stand out it's going to make you become known for something and it's going to allow you to become the best because of the time and energy you're putting on it so that 2.44 million is awesome it is still our core offer is the 12-week program we've served over 4 000 women through our programs and again this is just looking at one dashboard this is our main dashboard uh obviously you can see net volume so this is uh the money that gets taken away for online uh transactions which is something that i i again i see a lot of people wanting to you know try to avoid that and not have credit card fees merchant fees and i just want to let you know that if you're building a virtual business it's just a cost of doing business it is something you write off at tax time and for ease of use for both your clients and for yourself and for accounting purposes i really suggest just dealing with it quite frankly i know that's very professional advice you just got so new customers 4 000 but you'll see we've had over 10 000 successful payments now this is for two reasons number one we have a lot of repeat buyers we have people who enroll in the 12 week program but then they also want to come to a free mama retreat or they come to free mom alive or they enroll in my higher coaching programs like the movement maker accelerator that we launched which now has rolled into inner circle for life we have people who also are on payment plans we try to make our payments accessible now this does two two things number one it it limits the the barrier for purchase for a potential client when there's a payment plan when you when you make it more accessible to them so rather than paying a thousand dollars for a program they can pay 300 a month for a program for a few months so recurring payments it's also a great way to have recurring meaning it happens again and again and you can start to predict this recurring revenue inside of your business we also have a monthly membership which is it started out as private group coaching and just this year evolved into the free mama squad which is 97 a month again that's recurring revenue meaning that payment transaction happens month after month as long as that person stays inside of the free mama squad which is really awesome obviously you can see some other data here all looking pretty good so this is total what i'd like to show you next is year over year so really december of 2017 was pretty much 2018 but let's go ahead and let's look at 2018 yep january 1st 2018 to december 31st so that very first year in business i cleared over half a million dollars you guys i remember the phone call that i made to my cpa in about march of this year when i said hey i think this is really going to be something this is helping a lot of people and people are interested in what i've created here and it's a really beautiful thing so almost a thousand customers that first year 806 and all i did this year was the free mom and movement 12 week program this year at the in the springtime we launched the quick start freelance success kit so we had two products that we were offering i did do some one-on-one coaching we have that continuity that i referred to of the free of uh the free mama it was called private group coaching at this time and so it was really it wasn't a lot there wasn't a lot going on uh during this year i hired my copywriter and assistant and my social media manager they were all brought on actually i think in the fall of this year was when i brought on my final designer as well so i added four team members uh everything through building up to launching i didn't have anybody on my team you guys will see here in a minute i'm gonna show you my actual p l from my cpa and you'll see that this doesn't go in my pocket i wish it did that'd be really great but that's not the way that running a business works once you start to scale when you're a freelancer your responsibility your overhead it's very limited um you know you might buy a computer or a coaching program or some pens or something you know some software programs maybe you pay for quickbooks self-employed you know these things are really amazing but once you start to scale we're always paying with time or money and if you know me if you've been on this channel you know i'm obsessed with time management i'm obsessed with protecting my time and so i look at hiring team as an investment in my own personal time also other people are a lot more talented than i am so uh there's people that i pay here and then that's actually my second business expense i will let you sit and think if you can guess what my first biggest expenses in my business uh and i'll show you here in just a bit so again you can kind of see what happened that first year and then let's jump to year 2019 and we did a little bit better again i want to remind you this is all through uh stripe so this isn't accounting for any of our revenue that came from paypal just trying to show you year over year so we went from about half a million to 830 000 a year and i think it was about 800 customers to almost 1400 customers that second year full year in business and again very few things were added this year um i took time lots of time off i traveled a lot in 2019 so every month i was actually traveling to do fremont meetups uh this wasn't something that was a profitable endeavor this is something that was just very fulfilling and i think it helped the brand and build community but that is something to take into account that i was working even less because i was traveling so much and we launched the inner circle in 2019 i also launched the movement maker accelerator now those two programs have combined like i mentioned in our circle for life and the price points have varied throughout the year so a few more offers came on uh we did add more team in 2019 as well and so just continuing to grow and evolve and then the year is not over at the time i'm recording this so we're not going to be fully up to date but um so today you can see that we have crossed 1.05 million in sales and we got a few days left uh we have jumped from about what was it 13 1400 customers to almost 2 000 customers this year with over 5 000 successful payments so this year we launched the free mama squad and then merged it with the free mama uh private group coaching those become the same thing so a big focus for us is additional revenue streams i think that successful payments number just went up a notch so i think we just made a sale while we're sitting here talking how exciting is that live action um and so it's very exciting just to see that we are having really healthy growth since i've been in business i've had and in this iteration i've only had one month that was in the red what that means is that for one month i believe it was june of 2018 we spent more than we brought in in terms of revenue in the business but this is just so you guys can kind of see this world that you're a part of this is this is the free mama community that you're in again this doesn't go in my pocket i have expenses i had to become a big girl ceo and it's a little scary but it's also very exciting so this is that's kind of the growth financially from stripe okay so now we're over here in my paypal i'm just gonna kind of show your year over year it's only letting me go back to 2019 so we'll just have two years to look at we don't do a lot with paypal and part of that has actually been really frustrating because paypal and stripe and clickfunnels which are three software programs that we use do not all play very nice together it doesn't work out super nicely however i have one of the streams of revenue inside of my business is affiliate partnerships so i work with other entrepreneurs who have something that i believe would be of benefit to my community and i let them borrow access to my community we'll do a training or a workshop or a webinar together and in exchange i get compensated a percentage of the sales that they make and those are typically paid out through paypal we do also have people who will email support and ask if they can you know enroll in the 12-week program and use paypal and of course we try to be as accommodating as possible that is really really central to our mission and to who we are and who we want to be for our community so you know like i mentioned on the strike dashboard we have payment plans if anybody ever asks to be able to pay that off early a lot of people say no because it's automated they just want it to go that's something we've always done for for our clients because again we just we want to be as accommodating as possible so in 2019 we brought in you know an additional you know one thousand one over six figures 113 000 uh through 521 transactions a lot of my coaching students also paid through through paypal that year and i believe at one point we were running all of our book distribution so i wrote a book in december of 2018 that published and for a while we were selling our book directly on my website now you can find it over on amazon you can look up the free mama movement how to work from home control your schedule and make more money and for a while we were selling a hard copy of the book we no longer do that because i realized i am not a book distribution center and that is not a good use of my time to try to do that on my own and but that is where you're seeing that's why you're seeing such a high number of transactions that you will probably see a big change as we jump to 2020. so you can see our revenue is
up slightly again a majority of that is going to come from coaching students who who enrolled in the inner circle as well as our affiliate payouts and you'll see that major dip in number of transactions and i think that that is in very large part due to removing that book option on side of paypal so again you can kind of see some trends year over year down here um and that's super exciting so that is where the majority of our revenue is coming in from is going to be from coaching programs from the 12-week program from all of our e-products our e-learning programs um another revenue stream that we have is that affiliate marketing i was sharing with you i also get passive income which is super exciting it's a word i hear a lot but i think is misused often i do not look at my course as passive income i worked very hard to create it i also work very hard to continue to sell it and bring traffic into it and and upgrade it for my students and all these things there's not a whole lot that's passive about it other than the fact that i made it once and then i can sell it over and over again but what i find to be truly passive income in my business right now is i get paid out from amazon every month when people purchase my my book so i wrote that once and now i literally do nothing and i continue to connect collect uh royalties on that through both audible the ebook and the printed book version i also collect passive income every month from google through the youtube platform so what you're watching right now when you see ads that's something that we've been able to monetize because our viewers and our watch time is is so amazing which is awesome it tells me that you guys love this channel and what's really cool is that youtube will compensate us for that for keeping people on our plat on their platform and and putting out content that really benefits its viewers so that is not seen in either of these those uh come direct deposit into my bank account but you'll see them shown up on my profit and loss here in just a minute okay this is the last document that i want to show to you this is a report that i get every single month from my cpa which is really awesome um so it's a managed report this is as you can see this is going to show you the most recent completed month in my business which is november 30th uh 2020 so but it was prepared as you can see at the bottom in december so it's as recent as we we have completed and you'll actually see that this was this was actually a really low month for us um i moved cross country i was coming off of a 15 day event so you're gonna see a couple things by that number one well we'll get there so so this is broke it out this is the p l that he sends over um he breaks out current assets so that's that's actual balances inside of bank accounts which is really kind of cool just to be able to see like what are what are your personal assets or in your bus not personal assets your business assets and here's where it gets really good though you're able to compare your month to the year when he does a quarterly report i'm actually able to see quarter over quarter and then year over year which is really exciting and you'll see that this actually breaks out different uh revenue streams so like i was mentioning that affiliate income so in november we had about five thousand dollars that came in through affiliates you guys like this is what's possible as you continue to grow but remember before i even launched the free mama movement i put in three years of work to to learn these things and to set a foundation and to have the experience to be able to build a community that would sustain an affiliate revenue um i see a lot of people trying to get into affiliate marketing but they don't have an audience of people who know like and trust them so it's challenging um and then you can see your today it's it's already cleared six figures which is just really exciting um honestly this is my favorite way to make money i it really is because i'm able to bring something i truly believe in and then i'm not fulfilling on the back end so what that means is when someone makes a purchase i'm getting paid basically a commission a percentage but i don't actually have to do any work so it's really a great great thing to consider in the future as you're building out your business and thinking about what streams of revenue could i add to to my business so that you know if i'm not working because i'm moving cross-country for two weeks and i'm taking all this time off and not running ads and you know just kind of sitting back how how can i make that work um we had 71 000 come in through course sales now what i will say is under courses this also includes our free mama squad so our coaching is also bundled under courses through for our accounting purposes uh we had products that were physical products so you can see sales from youtube those are split out and that is income that is coming in completely passively as well so that's always really exciting to know that that we've built this channel and that it provides an additional stream of revenue and and what that really means is that this channel basically pays for itself because this money just gets turned around to the team that i hire to help support free mama tv which you guys are watching so it's very very exciting to see that type of growth you know which happened about a year into our business so then we get into expenses and all that stuff which gets very exciting you can see that my number one expense in business is actually advertising so this year while we have already let's see where was the to date so to date through november of 2020 we had already made 1 million 134 000 plus right but you can see that almost 400 000 of that goes to ads marketing and promotional expenses so that's a lot that's a lot of money right for the year and then again you're seeing this monthly breakdown from november that's a lot now i know a lot of other companies have that number in a lot wider gap but what i'll tell you is i practice what i preach when i say i'm only working four hours a day i'm only working four hours a day when i say i'm only working five hours a day or two hours a day or i took two weeks off or i went on an eight week rv trip those things are really happening and like i said we always pay with time or money and what's so beautiful about having a virtual business is that when you set up automated systems and you get the right team in place and you're working with software that is functional and and exciting and you have a sales process that works and you understand marketing and you know how to leverage these things that's the important word then you can pay for it with money that's clearly the revenues there in the business rather than with your time so that's to me what that exchange looks like and while it is a ton of money that we're spending and we're always looking to increase our bottom line so our net our net profit that we keep um it's also money that is always well spent in my opinion because i know that i'm able to create these memories with my family and practice what i preach so it's very exciting um obviously you'll see some other line items in here which you're welcome to view which is exciting you will see contractor fees so contractor fees um would be some of the members on my team others are you see down here under legal and professional services so legal in accounting um so this is just literally my cpa but then also you'll see other professional fees so again that's you know we're getting into the definitely tens of thousands hundreds of thousands so we're looking at about you know almost 400 000 for ads marketing and promo but my second line item biggest line item is definitely all these contractor and professional services and i'm trying to do some quick math but it looks like we're at about almost not quite two hundred thousand so about 180 000 coming from that alone which is again a really big expense now you'll also see over here education training expenses so these might be coaches courses um mentors you know programs that i'm being a part of so that i can continue to grow because something i do know is while we've been able to make over two and a half almost two and a half million over the last few years i've invested over a hundred thousand in my own personal development and i know that those two are not mutually exclusive from each other because of taking the time to find people who i knew could help me grow and could help me have this level of understanding and success not just through through coaches but also through the right team members and professional service providers i'm able to continue to do better and and earn more which is just really exciting um because then i'm able to give back to other people as well which is really really cool so again you'll see some other expenses here that are relatively minor compared to the other things that we talked about um something else that i want to point out just full transparency is payroll so i am my only employee so you'll see that i pay myself a salary i think we're missing a month but i pay myself a six figure salary which is really really cool i mean that's not something i ever was even close to in the corporate world and i could pay myself more you see that in november we're already posting almost a 300 000 profit for the year which is amazing um that obviously does that this number right here this bad boy in case you're curious or new to business that's what i will have to pay taxes on so it's not again it's not all going in my pocket i'm very intentional and smart about reinvesting back in my business however you know i i am a big fan of the the concept of profit first and making sure you know i don't want to be that broke entrepreneur who's you know claiming they made a million dollars but they you know can't feed their family or have a bunch of debt i am very intentional about making sure that my family is provided for that's why i created this business i'm very in alignment with how i tell you that i spend my time and i do have to make investments that then pay for that but you can see we also have a very healthy business which is beautiful and something i'm incredibly incredibly proud of so there is a look at our p l most recently which is just kind of a behind the scenes for you now if you're where i was in that 2014 the 16 17 era and you're already earning about two to five thousand dollars a month consistently and this looked appealing to you you're ready to scale you understand what it's going to take in terms of an investment of your time and your energy as well as learning how to outsource and grow a team and diversify your streams of revenue inside of your business then i want to invite you to take a close look at the inner circle for life program where you'll get access to our signature four pillar method to build and scale your online business successfully now this comes with a mastermind of driven women who are committed to personal growth business development and creating a global impact just like we try to do here at the free mama you can find a link to the inner circle for life application in the comments just below this video or you can head to lauren's innercircle.com also if you want to join a community of mamas just like you i have a facebook group where thousands of mamas come together for support and action taking tips and motivation now we did things quite differently today but i need to know if you liked it dude you like this behind the scenes unscripted version of free mama tv let me know if you want more episodes just like this down in the comments below and as always hashtag i am a free mama if you're ready to take your business to the next level okay i also want to use this okay weird um whoa um let's go with that
2021-01-09 07:02
