Podcasts about your biz

Photography may seem like a business with low legal risk, but if you don't cover your bases, one unexpected issue—like a contract dispute, a tax audit, or an independent contractor misclassification—can cause major headaches.Today, I'm talking with Braden Drake, a lawyer and tax expert who specializes in helping creative entrepreneurs actually understand business compliance, contracts, and financial protection. And trust me, this conversation is anything but boring. Braden makes legal and tax talk fun, digestible, and completely manageable, so you can finally stop avoiding these must-dos in your business.In this episode, we're breaking down:The five layers of legal protection every photographer should have in placeWhat you really need to know about contracts, taxes, and business complianceThe common legal mistakes photographers make (and how to avoid them)Whether your independent contractors should actually be employeesWhy a good contract is worth every penny—and where to get one without breaking the bankIf legal and tax stuff stresses you out, this episode will make you feel clear, confident, and ready to tackle the things that actually protect your business.Download Braden's Free Legal Guide  Join the Contract Club for Rock-Solid Legal Templates  Get Braden's Book: Unf*ck Your Biz   Follow Braden on Instagram New around here? Grab 3 of my most popular free resources to build a profitable, sustainable photography businessResources: New to the podcast? Go to thiscantbethathard.com/welcome to get access to 3 of Annemie's best free resources. Join our community! We'd love to welcome you into our supportive, business-focused private Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/thiscantbethathard to request access. Long-time listener? Leave a review!

Hey CEO- YAHOO….We're celebrating our 300th episode!!!What a journey it's been over the past few years on the REDEEM Her Time Podcast as God not only planted the seeds in my heart of this message around how He's called us to approach TIME as Christian women business owners, but as I've watched these seeds take root + grow such that CEOs are reaping an abundant ROTI harvest as their new normal.BUT... we DON'T define CEO like the world does.So today I wanna redefine CEO with you, share the benefits of becoming THIS kind of CEO and let you hear straight from a group of my CEOs what it's like to do this TOGETHER.(Just so you know, this part was a spontaneous, candid conversation we had at the end of the year about their CEO experience…and I decided to NOT edit out the silence because that was them doing some CEO thinking…and I have a feeling those pauses will help their words sink in for you too)But the real question is- What could YOUR Biz look like 12 months from now if YOU become THIS kind of CEO? There's only way to find out…grab a CEO TIME AUDIT Access the IT'S TIME CHALLENGE Replays through 2/14I pray this blesses, challenges and moves you to action!Come join the conversation (+ implementation) afterwards inside the REDEEM Her Time Community YOU. HAVE. TIME. LissaP.S. Grab the REDEEM Her Time Planner + Digital Course to shift EVERYTHING about how you approach TIME in both Life + Biz https://redeemhertime.com/planner

Hey CEO- YAHOO….We're celebrating our 300th episode!!!What a journey it's been over the past few years on the REDEEM Her Time Podcast as God not only planted the seeds in my heart of this message around how He's called us to approach TIME as Christian women business owners, but as I've watched these seeds take root + grow such that CEOs are reaping an abundant ROTI harvest as their new normal.BUT... we DON'T define CEO like the world does.So today I wanna redefine CEO with you, share the benefits of becoming THIS kind of CEO and let you hear straight from a group of my CEOs what it's like to do this TOGETHER.(Just so you know, this part was a spontaneous, candid conversation we had at the end of the year about their CEO experience…and I decided to NOT edit out the silence because that was them doing some CEO thinking…and I have a feeling those pauses will help their words sink in for you too)But the real question is- What could YOUR Biz look like 12 months from now if YOU become THIS kind of CEO? There's only way to find out…grab a CEO TIME AUDIT Access the IT'S TIME CHALLENGE Replays through 2/14I pray this blesses, challenges and moves you to action!Come join the conversation (+ implementation) afterwards inside the REDEEM Her Time Community YOU. HAVE. TIME. LissaP.S. Grab the REDEEM Her Time Planner + Digital Course to shift EVERYTHING about how you approach TIME in both Life + Biz https://redeemhertime.com/planner

On today's episode of the podcast, we're talking about big business changes that are coming based on what has and has not worked for us this year. One question I ask myself and continue to ask yourself is, "What can I do less of next year in order to spend more of time on what's working best? What's making the most impact and how can we do more of that?" Between multiple memberships, courses, social media channels, blog posts, podcasts, guest speaking, summits, bundles, stage speaking, I've been pulled in a lot of directions, especially as our business keeps growing which is fantastic, but comes with push pull. When you say yes to one thing, you say no to something else. I've seen areas of growth, I've seen areas of decline, and I'm sharing today how that's impacting what we're doing in 2025. What's working for us: 1. The Contract Club 2. Speaking 3. Affiliates What's Kind of Working1. Threads (Great for business connections, not as much for sales)2. Our quiz funnel (People are going through it, need to look more into conversion data)3. Our blogs (They're a resource, the SEO could be better, I'm not putting more resources into this) What's not working1. Instagram, especially stories 2. Facebook group, engagement is down3.Too many offers, too much we're trying to do What I'm not sure about1. This podcast Our 2025 Core Offer Suite1. Contract Club2. Compliance Club3. Unf*ck Your Biz4.Alumni offers for Unf*ck Your Biz students What we're doubling down on in 20251. Affiliates (if you aren't already an affiliate, you can become one at notavglaw.com/affiliate)2. Strategic partnerships/guest speaking in programs3.Core offer suite4 Stage speaking/podcast guesting 5. Threads and Instagram6. Quiz funnelWhat's getting the cut1. New offers, instead focusing on different launch strategies2. Growing my business TikTok audience3. Reddit4. Our Facebook group - I started this in 2018/2019. I started it as a list builder and as a way to cross promote my offers in the group. The group is now mainly people who are/have been students or bought a program and has mainly turned to a place where they are getting support for the programs they've purchased. Providing this community can be done within our offers in Kajabi. And most of the questions I get on Facebook already are not community-answer questions, they're questions for me and my team. 5. This podcast - I feel uncomfortable talking about this because I really don't know if it's doing much for us from a business perspective in relation to the effort and with the time saved not planning and recording podcasts, I can nurture other areas of our business, like our offers, so that people naturally want to share them and affiliate market. I've found that the podcast is very cyclical, people come for what they need to get answers for where they are in business. Do I talk about the same topics year after year so do I re-record that same episode about LLCs or direct you to a pre-recorded one? I'm not ready to make a decision on the podcast right now and have decided the best thing to do is to take a 3-ish week hiatus to spend time with family for the holidays and think about the future of the podcast. I'll be back in January with an announcement of what will be coming next. Thank you so much for tuning in! I appreciate you all more than you know. I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a DM on Instagram @notavglaw

On today's episode of the podcast I'm sharing Are you ready to unf*ck your biz? The doors are now open to our signature program, Unf*ck Your Biz, where we go through our six-part framework to get your legal and tax shit legit through our video course with group coaching support through weekly calls and a group Slack channel. You get access to our bookkeeping spreadsheet, quarterly tax estimator, contractor classification guides by state, our state-by-state business blueprints and so much more. The doors close on Monday, December 16th. Learn more at unfuckyourbiz.com November was an exciting month, we experimented with new strategies to lead up to the launch so we'll dive into the report but before we do, you can grab your free copy of How to Conduct a Profit Report for Your Business at www.notavglaw.com/355 to follow along with my step-by-step process and run your own profit report. November Projections vs. Actual • Monthly Clients: $8,500 → $8,900• UYB: $0 → $0 (Doors were not open in November)• Compliance Club: $13,000 → $21,000 • Contract Club: $7,500 → $13,850 (We did a promotion before we increased the price and it closed December 2nd and we had over $15k those last two days so more will be reflected in our December report)• Trademarks: $2,500 → $6,750• Other: $2.500 → $1,500 Total revenue: $33,500 → $52,000 (A record revenue month for me) Profit Total revenue: $52,000Cost of Goods: $227 (printing my books)Expenses: $22,678Profit: $29,000Owner's salary: $5,300 Total business profit: $23,708 Notable Expenses • Employee wages: $8,500 (Pretty high, but I had two team members with me at Wedding MBA clocking extra hours at our booth)• Contractors: $4,000 This brings my team expenses to $12,500 • Monthly tools: $1,900 (Higher than usual, but I have an annual payment of $1,500 for Kajabi)• Affiliate payments: $380 • Marketing: $800• Hotels: $1,600• Trademark client fees: $1,900 How am I feeling about the numbers? Prior to November I was not feeling great, we had a pretty bad spring and summer. But November slingshot us over our adjusted goal of $270,000 good goal. We got to $280,000 and with our UYB launch in December, I know we'll be able to hit my adjusted best goal of $300,000 for 2024. This was a big profit month, but we know I love transparency, so a lot of this is actually going to loan repayments. In October I took out a $15,000 Stripe loan to help get out of the hole of the summer and run payroll and make investments into our November launch. We went from our Compliance Club launch to Contract Club launch to Unf*ck Your Biz launch. We did our workshops to launch UYB as a paid workshop because there was more content in it than past years but anyone who had the Compliance Club, Contract Club or came by my booth at Wedding MBA had the opportunity to register for free so we had about 700 registrants between our two workshops. Compliance Club Debrief We offered a few price points - $10/month or $180 for lifetime membership to this monthly compliance newsletter, private podcast and additional compliance resources. I started the lifetime membership at $250 and offered it first to the 19 people on our Compliance Club waitlist but even as warm, interested leads, 8 people opted into monthly instead of the lifetime deal. I lowered the price to $180 as I found that interest in a lifetime deals is best when the price of lifetime is just under the cost of 2 years so people would price anchor that at $240 and psychologically under $200 is more attractive. Once I lowered the price, 70 of the next 92 people who joined were lifetime. I capped lifetime at 100 members and we had 101, one person snuck in as I was toggling it off. I then changed lifetime to annual and made it $90. The Compliance Club is not currently open, but you can get on the waitlist at notavglaw.com/compliance. The Compliance Club is also a temporary upsell on paid offers like the Contract Club. Total revenue: $20,800• Lifetime: 101 sales• Annual: 22 sales• Monthly: ~80 sales Our launch goal was 50 monthly sales and 50 lifetime with a stretch goal of 100 lifetime sales. We surpassed those goals. Wedding MBA Debrief • 40 book sales• 35 Compliance Club lifetime memberships• ~40 Contract Club sales Current Project Plans • Wrap up Unf*ck Your Biz launch• Move into our Quiet Weeks • Run our clubs and programs to a higher level in 2025 • Doing less to do more in our business in 2025 (I'll dive into this on next week's episode) Key Performance Indicators • Bumps across the board on everything as a result of promotions• Instagram: +80 new followers• Facebook group: +50 new members • TikTok: -4 followers • Website: 40,000 unique visitors (about quadruple what we see in a normal month)• Quiz starts: 107 starts, 68 finishes • Email subscribers: Went up a bit despite higher unsubscribes due to promotion• Podcast downloads : down December Projections • Monthly Clients: $8,500• Contract Club: $22,200 (we did $18k in sales at the end of our Contract Club promo that fell on December 1st and 2nd) • UYB: $35,625 (15 full pay, 25 on monthly payments) I think we'll be a bit below this goal of 40 students based on current data, but we will see) • Trademarks: $5,000• Other: $2,000 Total: $70,875YTD Revenue • On track to finish around $330k which would be very exciting considering, especially how the first half of the year went after my mom was put on hospice and passed away. If you're dealing with anything in your personal life that's going to make this holiday season or next year rough, remember that you can always circle back to your business goals and take a break for your mental health or to spend time with family. I've been there and many of us have all been there. Keep that in mind as you do your own goal planning and figure out how you're going to make it through. Business is a roller coaster and we can do our best to make it look like a kiddie roller coaster, but there are always hills and valleys and we are here to support your legal and tax goals. If you enjoyed today's episode, share it with your biz besties and tag us on Instagram and Threads @notAVGlaw

Hey CEO- How well did your biz do in 2024? If you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, for sure this is a question you're asking this time of year in order to calculate + evaluate your ROI in 2024. But what about YOU as the CEO of YOUR Biz?Do you have measurable data to make wise CEO decisions on moving forward… or are you mostly going off how you feel about how many boxes you checked and how full your calendar was? A CEO knows well the condition of her flocks and pays careful attention to her herds….and no I don't mean literal furry four-legged animals!In order to truly evaluate your business growth and success, a CEO MUST HAVE tangible data to look at because this will guide where to invest her time in the coming year…and where NOT to. So whether you're like I was, just glad to have made it to the end of another year without being too much in the red, or whether you're already a diligent tracker of results such that you know your percentage of gain or loss, on this episode we're gonna explore not only WHY it matters to track the numbers as a CEO, but WHAT numbers you should track that will really give you the clearest picture of your business growth and success…And NO, it's not just your bottom line! If you're ready to open the doors, cuz CEO's DON'T put this off till Jan 1st, then let's look at what's really inside…together. Snag a CEO CATALYST SESSION before they fill up + the price goes up! Learn more + grab your spot here https://redeemhertime.com/catalystI pray this blesses, challenges and moves you to action!Come join the conversation (+ implementation) afterwards inside the REDEEM Her Time Community https://redeemhertime.com/communityYOU. HAVE. TIME. LissaP.S. Check out the REDEEM Her Time Planner to shift EVERYTHING about how you approach TIME in both Life + Biz https://redeemhertime.com/planner

Hey CEO- How well did your biz do in 2024? If you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, for sure this is a question you're asking this time of year in order to calculate + evaluate your ROI in 2024. But what about YOU as the CEO of YOUR Biz?Do you have measurable data to make wise CEO decisions on moving forward… or are you mostly going off how you feel about how many boxes you checked and how full your calendar was? A CEO knows well the condition of her flocks and pays careful attention to her herds….and no I don't mean literal furry four-legged animals!In order to truly evaluate your business growth and success, a CEO MUST HAVE tangible data to look at because this will guide where to invest her time in the coming year…and where NOT to. So whether you're like I was, just glad to have made it to the end of another year without being too much in the red, or whether you're already a diligent tracker of results such that you know your percentage of gain or loss, on this episode we're gonna explore not only WHY it matters to track the numbers as a CEO, but WHAT numbers you should track that will really give you the clearest picture of your business growth and success…And NO, it's not just your bottom line! If you're ready to open the doors, cuz CEO's DON'T put this off till Jan 1st, then let's look at what's really inside…together. Snag a CEO CATALYST SESSION before they fill up + the price goes up! Learn more + grab your spot here https://redeemhertime.com/catalystI pray this blesses, challenges and moves you to action!Come join the conversation (+ implementation) afterwards inside the REDEEM Her Time Community https://redeemhertime.com/communityYOU. HAVE. TIME. LissaP.S. Check out the REDEEM Her Time Planner to shift EVERYTHING about how you approach TIME in both Life + Biz https://redeemhertime.com/planner

On this bonus episode of the podcast, I'm inviting you to my open house on December 12th and sharing all the details about how to join Unf*ck Your Biz before the doors close. If you've been wanting to get your legal and tax shit legit to start 2025 off feeling secure in your business protection, now's the time to join! The doors are now open for our signature program, Unf*ck Your Biz. Learn more at notavglaw.com/uyb Doors close on Monday, December 16th. Have legal and tax questions? Considering joining Unf*ck Your Biz but aren't sure if it's a good fit? Stop by our open house on Thursday, December 12th at 10:00am PST/1:00pm EST and we can chat, get your questions answered, and go through a run-through of the program. Sign up at notavglaw.com/openhouse To learn more about the Unf*ck Your Biz program, check out today's episode or visit the website where we cover what's included and the framework of our 10-week, high-touch group program. Get all the details at notavglaw.com/uyb The Unf*ck Your Biz Framework 1. Account - Update your books, learn how to create and analyze a profit and loss statement. 2. Tax -Learn how taxes work, what you need to pay, how to calculate your quarterly tax percentage and how to save. 3. Unf*ck - Complete any back tax strategy, fix any business entity errors, and determine worker classifications.4. Layer - Update contracts and business insurance and obtain trademark searches. 5. Form - Learn how business entities work and form or update your LLC, S Corp or Corp. 6. Flow - Learn how to pay yourself and complete your cash flow policy. We'll go through the framework, with implementation weeks built in so you can get the unf*ckening done with the help of the course, weekly group coaching calls and a group Slack channel.

On today's episode of the podcast we're talking about the importance of leaning into the CEO role of your business. The doors are officially open to Unf*ck Your Biz: Your step-by-step framework to get your legal and tax shit legit. The program will help you get your 2024 taxes and bookkeeping wrapped up, make sure your business entity is properly formed going into 2025, getting your legal protections in order including contracts and trademarks and more. It's our signature program that's only available a few times a year and you can join now until December 16th at notavglaw.com/uyb. To announce the launch of Unf*ck Your Biz, I hosted two workshops today to help you at your stage of business. If you missed our workshops, check them out at notavglaw.com/masterclass Legally Launched: The Absolute Legal and Tax Essentials for New Business Owners The 6 Figure Tax Blueprint: The Roadmap to Money in Your Pocket At and Beyond Six Figures When you run a business, it's important to have an understanding of everything that goes on in your business. CEO may stand for Chief Executive Officer, but I often say it also stands for Chief Everything Officer, which is very accurate as a small business owner, especially before we hire anyone. As CEO, we need to know all the core aspects of business. Would a CEO ever get handed a P&L statement from the accounting team and not know how to read it? They have to have basic knowledge because they can't make business decisions if they don't know the numbers. As CEO, it's important to consider that you're building a business as an asset that's ideally going to provide you, family members, team members, etc. a livable income. You may also decide you want to sell your business one day, even if that doesn't seem possible or of interest right now. What legal structures do you need in order for this to happen? You need layers of legal protection to protect your business. These are the foundations we grow our business on. Even if you hire other professionals to manage things bookkeeping or tax strategy, you need to know enough to have savvy conversations with them. When do you go to your lawyer and ask for a new trademark? When do you need to tell your accountant about changes to your business or your personal life that may impact your taxes? No one is keeping track of your business 24/7, you need to proactively be talking to your professionals in order for them to be able to help you. If you want to put on your CEO hat, check out Unf*ck Your Biz at notavglaw.com/uyb

On today's episode of the podcast I'm sharing my finance formula and how to make it work for your personal financial plans. The Finance Formula is a bonus resource included in our Unf*ck Your Biz alumni membership. I am a very big advocate of people fixing their business before they dive too deep into personal finances so even if you're not a Finance Formula member, you can still learn a lot from this episode on how to implement this to improve your personal finances. It's hard to strategize how much money to put away for emergency savings or retirement if you don't know how much you're actually making. We need to know our income, revenue, business expenses, profit, tax rate and how much we should be putting away to pay the IRS quarterly. If your business is not really fucked up and you don't think you need this, I would challenge you on that because there probably are some things we need to fix. To get the most out of the Finance Formula, we need to start with our money mindset- Ask yourself questions like "What are some of your beliefs about money?"- Read a money mindset book or two (I recommend Denise Duffield Thomas)- Get as little or as much woo-woo as you want with itLearn the bare bones basics about retirement and get up-to-date on retirement plans. 1. Take advantage of 401k match if it is available to you or your spouse through an employment role2. Max out a Roth IRA3. Max out 401k if you have one4. Look into self-employed retirement options Tackle debt- I have a lot of feelings on Dave Ramsey, but his most popular teaching is his debt snowball method to help you pay off your debts from smallest to largest by making minimum payments on all your accounts. - What Dave Ramsey is missing is nuance, customization to our own individual needs, and that's where the Finance Formula comes in. The best way to look at this is with a hypothetical. Let's say you have four goals: - Build an emergency fund of $3,000- Pay your quarterly business taxes- Start a retirement account- Pay down, let's say, $3,000 in consumer debt What order do you prioritize them? How would this change if your consumer debt was a lot higher, like $50,000? There's not really a right and a wrong answer, it's personal for everyone based on so many factors like how old you are, how long you have until you want to retire, what your income looks like, etc. It's important to get the wheels turning so we can focus on our own individual goals. For more personalized examples of what your Finance Formula might look like, check out today's episode.

On today's episode of the podcast I'm taking you through my October revenue, expenses, profit and goals. I'm using my downloadable guide, How To Conduct a Profit Report for Your Business, to record this episode. Get your free copy of How to Conduct a Profit Report for Your Business at www.notavglaw.com/355 and listen to episode 355 to hear me break down step-by-step how I structure my own profit reports. September Projections vs. Actual • Monthly Clients: $9,250 → $10,220• UYB: $750 → $1,625 • Contract Club: $1,200 → $3,300• 1:1 Services: $2,500 → $5,050• Other: $4,000 → $2,100 Total revenue: $17,500 → $23,735 Profit Total revenue: $23,735Cost of Goods: $65 (printing my books)Expenses: $25,245Profit: - $1,500Owner's salary: $5,300 Total profit: -$6,800 While this is not great, I was prepared for the expenses to be high. I went to the Kajabi conference in Los Angeles and the hotel alone was $1,600. I booked hotel rooms for Wedding MBA and I had a team member forget to clock out so I paid them double as much (not a big deal, that will get remedied next pay period). Notable Expenses • Employee wages: ~$9,000• Contractors: $4,500 This brings my team expenses to $13,000 • Affiliate payments: $4,000 (This was high because we paid out some lagging affiliate payments)• Marketing: Higher than average due to conference planning Annual Goal Review • Annual revenue: $300k. We're roughly on target but need to have a pretty big November and December• Profit: 20% margins. I used to have a goal of 50% but I'm spending a lot more now on team expenses. Current Project Plans • Alumni membership launch for Unf*ck Your Biz students • Wedding MBA• Contract Club price increase promotion• Contract Club affiliate promotion - Become an affiliate at notavglaw.com/affiliate• Big December Unf*ck Your Biz launch• Launch the Compliance Club (aka the Not AVG Newsletter) - Learn more at notavglaw.com/compliance Key Performance Indicators • On our social platforms we had about double the amount of followers we normally get due to meeting people at events. • Higher completion conversion of our quiz November Projections • Monthly Clients: $8,500• Compliance Club: $13,000 (100 members between monthly and life time) • UYB: $0 (payment plans will be wrapped up) • Contract Club: $7,500 (150 joining before the price increase) - This should shift to December because if Black Friday is the 29th, this won't hit our bank account until December. • 1:1 Services: $2,500• Other: $2,500 Total revenue: $33,500YTD Revenue • Exceeded October revenue goal by almost $7,000• Exceeded October 2023 revenue by almost $4,000• Annual goal of $300k revenue looks possible if we have a strong promo for the Compliance Club, but that we could at least pass last year's revenue of $270k Get your free copy of How to Conduct a Profit Report for Your Business at www.notavglaw.com/355 and listen to episode 355 to hear me break down step-by-step how I structure my own profit reports. If you If you enjoyed today's episode, share it with your biz besties and tag us on Instagram and Threads @notAVGlaw

On today's episode of the podcast I'm talking about how running a business is a lot like putting on our grown-up pants. It's a difficult, but necessary topic to address. If we're going to reach our goals, both business and personal, that require us to do things we don't want to do. Grab the Quarterly Tax chapter for free from my book, Unf*ck Your Biz at bradendrake.com/chapter5 Quarterly taxes are a prime example of things we need to learn and have to pay, even if we don't want to. We find in working with clients that even if you are hiring us to unf*ck your biz, there are parts of your business you still need to be doing and keeping track of, whether or not you hire someone to help. While there's no rules out there on how to be a grown up, there are rules on how to run a business. Businesses require paperwork. No matter how many people you hire, most of the mail is still going to be ending up in your inbox, meaning you need to know how to handle it - what is your responsibility and what needs to get passed on to the professionals you're hiring? If you can't afford to hire professionals yet, you need to know how to handle it. You also need to know what professionals are going to be able to handle for you and what they aren't. For example, we had a student come to us who owed four years of back franchise taxes. They had filed on LegalZoom who isn't the best about keeping people up to date on compliance requirements. Same with filing LLCs in different states if you moved. Even if you hire someone to do this for you, no one will know you've moved unless you've proactively told them. No one is going to care more about your business than you do. How can taking ownership over the thing you don't want to do positively impact your business and mindset? If you take ownership over your business from a legal perspective, it's going to help you know when to file the forms related to your LLC and avoid potential legal pitfalls. If you ever have legal issues, you or your business are going to be the ones to get sued. It sounds like a harsh statement but if you or someone who works for you makes a mistake, you'll be the one to get sued, not your lawyer or whoever you relied on to file for you. Same if you have intellectual property issues. Ignorance of someone's business name or ignorance about a law is never a defense so you need to be proactive. From a financial perspective, similar to the whole if you get sued thing, when it comes to your tax return, the ONLY person for your tax return, tax bill, penalties, fees, etc. is you. You're the only one because you signed the tax return. At a minimum, you need to know what your tax obligations are, how you owe tax, how their business income is calculated and how to read a basic tax return. You need to at least be able to skim it and know if it makes sense or not. When it comes to hiring someone, you're the person responsible for handing over all the financial documents. We have this issues over and over again. We can't do your bookkeeping if you don't give us your bank statements. We can't read your statements if they're co-mingled between personal and business expenses. We also need to put our grown-up pants on when it comes to knowing your numbers. You're the one who is making key decisions, like when to invest, when to save, when to do a new launch, when to hire, get a business loan, etc. These are all numbers-driven decisions. You should be able to look at your financial statements, know how much cash you have in the bank, how much revenue you have coming in, when your next big expenses are, etc. to decipher what you need to be doing in your business. Even if you have someone crunching the numbers for you, it's your responsibility to review those numbers. If you haven't launched your business yet, ask yourself if you want to do these things or if a hobby would be a better alternative. I know these sounds scary, but I would not trade the freedom by business provides me for not having to do these things any day. Put on your grown-up pants and download the Quarterly Tax chapter from my book, Unf*ck Your Biz at bradendrake.com/chapter5

On today's episode of the podcast I'm taking you through my September revenue, expenses, profit and goals. I'm using my downloadable guide, How To Conduct a Profit Report for Your Business, to record this episode. Get your free copy of How to Conduct a Profit Report for Your Business at www.notavglaw.com/355 and listen to episode 355 to hear me break down step-by-step how I structure my own profit reports. September Projections vs. Actual • Monthly Clients: $7,000 → $8,050• UYB: $20,000 → $4,375 (I pivoted our post-summit launch from a signature service to group coaching based on the attendees of the summit) • Contract Club: $1,500 → $1,660• 1:1 Services: $1,250 → $2,250• Other: $1,250 → $4,900 Total revenue: $31,000 → $24,000 Profit Total revenue: $24,000Expenses: $13,500Profit: $10,200Owner's salary: $1,000 (I only paid myself $1,000 last month, $800 of that goes to taxes but the reason for this was because we were quite in the hole from previous summer months) Total profit: $9,000 Annual Goal Review • Annual revenue: $300k. This might be a stretch, because we'd need to exceed October, November and December's projections - Profit: 20% margins. I used to have a goal of 50% but I'm spending a lot more now on team expenses. Expenses • Employee wages: $7,500• Contractors: $4,000 This brings my team expenses to $11,500 (I expect this to be much lower in October)• Monthly tools: $335• Marketing: $781 (I lowered my Facebook ad spend from $20/day to $5/day because they were not converting how I wanted. • Client fees: $500 (a variable expense for trademark clients. We include the filing fee in the price we charge the client)• Other: $290 Total: ~$13,000 Current Project Plans • Deliver Unf*ck Your Biz group coaching • Wedding MBA Prep• Launch of low-ticket offer• Big launch in December for Unf*ck Your Biz Key Performance Indicators Instagram: 30 new followersFacebook group: 70 new membersTikTok: 9 new followersThreads 70 new followersWebsite traffic: 30,000 (a huge spike) October Projections • Monthly Clients: $9,000• UYB: $750 (no new students as doors are closed, but we do have some students on payment plans) • Contract Club: $1,250• 1:1 Services: $2,500• Other: $4,000 Total revenue: $17,500 (need to do closer to $20,000 to match last year's October but ideally we want to do $25,000 as our best goal) If you liked today's episode, be sure to tag us on Instagram and Threads @notAVGlaw

On this episode, I chat with Keila Hill-Trawick, owner of Little Fish Accounting, about Listen to episodes 125, 129, 131 and 132 of the Unf*ck Your Biz with Braden podcast to learn even more from Keila Hill-Trawick. Keila believes that cash flow gets buried behind financial statements. Everyone wants to talk about their P&L and top line revenue, but that doesn't matter if you don't have any money. If the whole point is to earn revenue and keep expenses at a certain point so you have money in the bank account, but you don't, we need to talk about that. Why does it look like you should have profit, and you have it on the P&L, but you don't have it? For example, I met with a client recently operating at a $9k YTD loss, but they were still running payroll and running distributions every month so the question was, how are you paying yourself more than your business is profiting? For them, they had a built-up savings from the past few years of business, but that isn't evident on the P&L. People get caught up on payroll. You don't need to run payroll every week if cash flow is low. But payroll taxes aren't what's going to make or break you. And sometimes you have to take a lower pay if cash flow is low and your team needs to get paid. This leads us into a conversation about Profit First. Keila doesn't think it's a bad method, but she's found that people are often not making enough money in the beginning to meet the percentages you set up and you're robbing Peter to pay Paul. She recommends that when you start you should at least have two - an operating checking account and a tax savings account so you can visually see that money doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the IRS. Once it's in there, it's no longer available to you. I suggest adding a sales tax account as well if you collect that. When it comes to saving for quarterly taxes, these estimated payments are just you paying in advance what you think you're going to owe next year. Every time you get paid from a paycheck, only taxes for that paycheck are taken out, not the taxes for your other business. And if you rely on the voucher system, that's based on you making the same amount in your business that you made last year. If you made more, then you weren't paying enough by just paying the amount on your voucher, you're only paying the minimum. On the flip side, you could make way less than you made last year and not owe all of what's on these vouchers. Going back to talking about understanding how cash moves through your business, if you aren't sure where it's going Keila recommends starting with the basics of accruel vs. cash. Accruel means you are recognizing income when earned, so when you send the invoice you recognize you've done that amount in revenue even though it hasn't been paid yet. Cash method only counts when the money is received. Your baseline revenue needs to cover your fixed expenses, any expense you know you're going to have. You need a sense of what you need to always have in your account to cover your payments. Any time you have a fixed cost expense, it's easier to plan versus when you pay something, like a team member, who works hourly that can change month to month. Sometimes your answers are not in your financial reports. Sometimes they're in a spreadsheet that has a breakdown of how much you're paying each team member to work on each client project or how much you profited on each project. Your numbers are more than what you need to file taxes which is why there's no one correct way to do these things, it's about what systems are best for you. Don't stress about everything being perfect, instead ask yourself what you need to make better financial systems for your business. The whole point is you want to put money in your pocket so you want to be informed enough to know when cash needs to stay in the bank for things like payroll and when you can safely take an owner's draw to support the life you want to live. Keila reminds everyone that when you get debt to pay debt, you still need to pay it off. We see people get loans to pay credit cards, but when you use the cash to pay it off, that cash won't be there for you as the business moves forward. Get in touch with our guest Keila Hill-Trawick, founder of Little Fish Accounting Follow Keila on Threads @littlefishaccounting Follow Little Fish Accounting on Instagram @littlefishaccounting Check out Little Fish Accounting's website Listen to the Fish Food podcast Follow Little Fish Accounting on Instagram Join the Braden's Bestie's Facebook group for answers to your legal and tax questions.

On today's episode of the podcast I'm sharing the process for how I create my monthly profit reports and giving you a checklist so you can create your own. It's launch week here at Not AVG Law! The doors are wide open for us to take on new one-on-one clients in our Unf*ck Your Biz signature service and new students in your Unf*ck Your Biz Group-Study program. We haven't launched the Group Study program in over a year so now is the time to get in on it. The doors close on September 24th so be sure to join now at unfuckyourbiz.com I've been sharing my profit reports on the podcast each month for the last couple years and wanted to formalize the process in a free downloadable workbook so you can follow along. To get a copy of step-by-step process along in an editable guide you can use to create your monthly report at notavglaw.com/355 Conducting a profit report is important for understanding your numbers to make informed, important decision. This may look like getting insight into whether or not you can afford to take on new team members? Can you afford to hire a new contractor? Do you need to let go of a team member or decrease their hours? Do you need to increase your prices or focus more attention on a more profitable offer? When should you take vacations? Monthly profit reports can really show when you have lighter client work months, especially if you are someone who keeps themselves busy all the time, even when you don't have that much client work. If we shift those projects to other months, you may find out you have an entire months to take an extended vacation. A monthly profit report will also show you which offers you should push more or push less and it's also going to help you decide when you can make big investments, how much money to save, how much money to save for taxes. A profit report is not just for tracking numbers, but also for analyzing them and using them to help you make key decisions. Follow along with the steps in the podcast and create your own profit report at notavglaw.com/355

On today's episode of the podcast I'm reviewing my August profit report and September projections. Not Your Average Summit kicks off on Tuesday, September 10, a free online summit focused on the legal and tax side of your business. Sign up for the summit at NotAVGSummit.com. 2024 Adjusted Goals Recap - Annual revenue: $300kis now a reasonable but ambitious marker to hit - Profit: I started the year with a goal of 50% but then I unintentionally built an agency model and now if I can get to 10% for the year, that would be fabulous because YTD this year's profit is barely even positive. We'll head into 2025 with the information we need to set more realistic expectations. Trademark Shout Outs While client shout outs can be tricky due to proprietary information, trademarks are publicly published so I want to share any new trademarks that we've gotten for our clients. Sandra - Dom Sub LivingAnna - Eyes RockCindy - CM PromotionsMichelle - Walk the Path Within Want a trademark for your business? Start with our trademark quickie search and leave the research to us. This $100 search allows us to determine the trademark-ability of your business so you aren't wasting all your money on a trademark attorney only to determine you won't be able to get a trademark. After we determine if there's any glaring issues, if you wish to move forward we can book the next step to strategize, file and prepare your trademark application. https://notavglaw.com/trademarks Projections vs. Actual • UYB - $4,000 → 5,250• Contract Club - $2,000 → $1,350• Legally Launched - $250 → 0• Profit Rx - $500 → 0• Monthly Clients - $9,000 → $6,910 (a little lower than expected due to a cancellation, a delayed payment going through and I'm looking into the rest of the discrepancy)• 1:1 Services/trademarks - $1,250 → $4,250• Other: $2,000 → $350 Total revenue: $19,000 → $18,500 Expenses • Employee wages: $6,000 (does not include my own salary)• Contractors: $6,500 (a combined $12,500 makes this a high percentage when we didn't hit $19,000 in revenue. Ideally I'd like this to be 25% or less)• Monthly tools: $450• Affiliate payout: $200• Marketing: $1,000 (I lowered my Facebook ad spend from $20/day to $5/day because they were not converting how I wanted. • Client fees: $1,750 (a variable expense for trademark clients. We include the filing fee in the price we charge the client)• Other: $1,000 Total: ~$16,500 Profit Profit: $1,900 (before my salary) Owner salary: $4,500 Business profit: -$2,700 Year to Date This is where we look at our annual goal of $300,000. Q4 is always our biggest quarter and we have one month left in Q3 so year-to-date we have $183,000. We need to average about $29,300 in revenue for each month of the rest of the year to hit our $300k mark. That's pretty ambitious but I think it could be possible. I'm not going to do anything outrageous to hit it, I'd rather focus on setting us up for success in 2025 instead of burn us out this year to hit this. Key Performance Indicators Our social metrics were up a noticeable amount in August on Instagram and Threads. For our intake quiz we had a dip in July and then a bit of a bump back in August and this is verified by our website traffic numbers. What's Coming Up in September 1. Opening up Unf*ck Your Biz. Now is the time to get rolling if you really want things tidy for tax season. 2. Working on determining profit margins by client/offer with the goal of doing more dynamic pricing September Projections • UYB - $20,000 (goal - 7 new clients)• Contract Club - $1,500• Courses - $750• Monthly Clients - $7,000• 1:1 Services/trademarks - $1,250• Other: $500 Total revenue: $31,000

On today's episode of the podcast I'm answering the legal and tax questions I get inside my Facebook group. When you join my free Facebook group, Braden's Besties, we ask if you have any legal or tax questions and today I'll be diving into some of those. 1. How much money do you need to make before you file taxes? Learn more about taxes, the process of saving for them and paying them by grabbing a copy of my book, Unf*ck Your Biz, at unfuckyourbizbook.com 2. What can/ can't I deduct on my taxes? For an in-depth guide to business tax deductions, get your copy of the Small Business Tax Deduction Guide at notavglaw.com 3. Should I be an LLC or a sole proprietor? Learn if you should be a sole prop, LLC, or S Corp with this blog post. 4. How do I do taxes as a freelancer? Learn more with our blog post The Ultimate Tax Guide for Small Business Owners. 5. Can you have multiple streams of income under one LLC? 6. What's the best way to track miles for music gigs? 7. How can I file my taxes effectively? 8. What kind of prices to charge? 9. How are education credits taken into account within taxes for a small business? 10. How do I submit sales tax? 11. How do I form an LLC? Our Small Business Blueprint to file your LLC is available in our blog post Should You Be a Sole Prop, LLC or S Corp? 12. What tax structure makes sense for my small business?

On today's episode of the podcast we're talking about the most common bookkeeping mistakes we see and how to avoid them. 1. Going to Quickbooks too early Unless your hiring a bookkeeper who knows what they're doing, this is not recommended and the reason why is because we see a lot of error. From the outside the bookkeeping looks good, but when we get in there we find that it can be a bit of a mess. A big one we see is accounts never getting reconciled and then we have to go back to the beginning of their Quickbooks to start reconciling. We spend so much time having to reconcile clients' Quickbooks that a lot of time it doesn't end up being worthwhile because that can cost you a few thousand dollars. In the beginning it can sound like DIYing your Quickbooks can save you money, but it can catch up to you in the long run so you should hire a professional from the beginning. What I recommend people do is just use a spreadsheet. Log your income, log your expenses. If you need help with this, you can have us set it up for you through our Unf*ck Your Biz service or you can get all our bookkeeping, tax and cash flow systems inside the Profit Rx course https://notavglaw.com/profit-rx 2. Not having separate bank accounts When you start your business, open a separate bank account. Bring all business income and expenses through this bank account and it will make bookkeeping exponentially easier, especially if you hire someone to do your bookkeeping. If you comingle your expenses, we have no way of knowing what's business and what's personal. The same goes for credit cards, PayPal accounts, etc. If you spend something from personal, note it right away so you don't have to comb through your personal statements. Technically you should run a reimbursement through your business account and go through a more formal process if you have an S Corp. 3. Waiting too long to do your bookkeeping Half the benefit of doing your books is to gain financial insights for your business. We do it because we have to for our taxes, but looking at our bookkeeping helps us better understand our numbers. For example, to can learn if you're charging enough for your services or products. By looking at the numbers in my business, I learned that I wasn't even really breaking even on some Unf*ck Your Biz clients because I was paying our bookkeepers so much to reconcile years' worth of Quickbook accounts for clients. This helped me know I needed to raise the price, create custom pricing to add on extra services based on what a client needs, and create podcast episodes like this to help prevent these issues for you in the first place. Bookkeeping also allows you to search by client and offer to see what is most profitable for you and when it might be time to raise your pricing. This also helps you determine what offers and programs do best during what time of year so you can better promote. If you aren't keeping your books regularly, you won't be able to make tweaks and changes as needed throughout the year. 4. Overcomplicating things One of my mottos is: complicated systems are only as good as our ability to manage those systems. So before you setup some complicated fancy system, ask if you'll take the time to maintain it (speaking from person experience). The same applies to our bookkeeping. Start simple with a spreadsheet, divide your income and expenses into a few broad categories and once you start tracking it you can make it a little bit more complicated after you've proven you can stick with it. 5. Not using an actual bookkeeping system A bookkeeping system is going to track everything you need to track. For example, CRMs (Honeybook, Dubsado, etc) are not bookkeeping systems, they have bookkeeping elements to them. I haven't looked at them in a while, but to my knowledge, they only really track your income. 6. Not knowing what you can actually deduct We've been seeing this a lot recently with clients spending money from their business bank accounts to pay for personal expenses. Inside Profit Rx we give a Small Business Tax Deduction Guide (you can also get it for $10 on our website or inside my book, Unf*ck Your Biz). Want to know the best next step for you? Take our quiz at notavglaw.com/quiz

I'm beyond excited to share with you the 3 Game-Changing Strategies you need to know to create illogical, exponential growth in your business. Why tune in? First, we'll talk about the Consistent Flow of New Leads into Your Biz. From innovative marketing techniques to lead generation strategies, we'll explore how to keep that pipeline full and thriving. Next, we'll uncover the secrets to High Conversions of Those Leads into Bookings, Clients, and Sales. It's not just about getting leads; it's about turning them into loyal customers who can't wait to work with you. And finally, we'll tackle the Breakthrough of Limitations That Are Holding You Back. This is where the inner work meets the energetic strategy, empowering you to shatter barriers and achieve unprecedented success. In my world, we don't believe in copy-and-paste strategies. If that worked for everyone, we'd all be wealthy AF from posting a pretty pic to IG. But real success requires depth, strategy, and a willingness to go beyond the surface. Tune in and find out why the right blend of business and energetic strategy can set your soul on fire and create results that leave everyone wondering, "How did they do it?" If you're ready to ignite the flames of your soulful expansion, scale with intuition, and market from the heartbeat of your vision, you won't want to miss this episode. Love and limitless potential, Kailah x TIMESTAMPS: [00:49] Focus on awakening business divinity for expansion and growth. [02:03] Emphasizing lead flow, conversion, and overcoming limitations. [04:38] Balancing energetic and business strategies for holistic growth. [06:35] Managing scalability and client experience while staying aligned. [08:49] Disadvantages of generic strategies, emphasizing innovation and alignment. [10:26] Impact of energetic strategy on motivation and outcomes. [15:17] Stressing discernment, aligning strategy with personal power. [17:09] Leading with magic, intuition, and divine connection for business success. Links:

On today's episode of the podcast I'm sharing my April profit report. If you enjoy the profit report episodes, send us a DM @notavglaw and let us know what you think! As we kick off every episode, let's recap my 2024 goals. • I set good, better, best goals of $300k, $400k and $500k in revenue. I was shooting for $400k, I think the $300k is still doable now despite the setbacks in the first quarter that I've talked about on previous episodes. I've now shifted them to $300k, $350k and $400k. What I'm not doing is any rushed promotions to try to hit these, I'm focusing on slow, steady growth to end the year strong. • Hit 60% in profit • Book 4 stage speaking gigs for next year • Consistently hit $25k months. Did this in January and February, not in March, probably not in April • Hit $15k in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by the end of the year. This was the big goal to help us get to our revenue goals at the end of the year. We're a little bit less than halfway to this so far. My original goal was to get to 10k by the end of March but that hasn't happened yet. Projections vs. Actual: 1. Unf*ck Your Biz- $4,000 → $2,500 (A caveat to this is we had two more $1,000 payments that went through on the 30th but won't hit my account until May meaning we didn't hit the goal). 2. Contract Club - $1,000 → $1,1403. Legally Launched - $500 → 04. Monthly Recurring Revenue - $7,000 → $7,5005. Tax - $4,000 → $2,2506. Trademark clients- $1,250 → $07. Other - $1,000 → $3,200Total revenue: $17,000 → $15,000 Expenses Employee wages (this does not include myself): $4,000 Contractor expenses: $3,000 Owner wages (after my taxes): Monthly tools: $400 Affiliate payouts: $370 Marketing: $400 Client fees: $500 Other: $1800 Total expenses: $16,000 (we were in the negative by $1,000) A lot of this stems still from Unf*ck Your Biz clients because we are going back and doing several years of reconciliation for some clients. Profit (- $1,000) If you're wondering how I'm doing this the answer is I don't have great business savings which we wiped in the month of March (yikes) and the business credit card is maxed. I'm not too stressed about it, I'm expecting expenses to go down and revenue to go up in May and it should start to even out. KPIs I want to start talking more about the KPI we track each month in Enji. We track: Sales (revenue): Tracked in our profit report Audience growth (Facebook group members and Instagram, TikTok and Threads followers): A lot of people call these vanity metrics and I don't get too into these numbers, it's just helpful to see trends in respect to how active and engaging we're being. Are we continuing to see growth even if it's steady. PR touchpoints: We track the number of podcast guest spots, summits, in-person speaking, bundles, etc. we do each month. This impacts our follower count and number of email subscribers and shows how our KPIs are all connected. Contract Club and Contract Bot Sales: I track this separately in Enji so I can have a line graph to see growth. December through April each month we had: 37, 38, 36, 32, 38 and it's interesting to watch it stay so consistent without promotion. For the Bot upsell we had 4 sales in February, 1 in March, and 7 in April (an 18% conversion rate is pretty good for a $70 upsell). May Projections 1. Unf*ck Your Biz- $6,000 We had 5 new clients sign up in April who are all on payment plans. Our goal is to bring in 4 new UYB clients every month to guarantee that revenue and then if half those clients continue to sign up for our monthly services we'll continue to increase our baseline revenue. 2. Contract Club - $5,000 I'm expecting a big increase because of our current affiliate promotion. May is the last chance to get the Contract Club at $30 before it increases to $50. If you aren't already an affiliate, you can sign up here to become one. We are paying out 100% affiliate commissions on Contract Club sales in May. 3. Legally Launched - $2504. Monthly Recurring Revenue - $7,5005. Tax - $06. Trademark clients- $1,250 7. Other - $9,000 (I've been hinting on social media that we might be doing a mastermind retreat in August). Total: $29,000, $20,000 if we don't launch the retreat sign-up this month. What's Coming Up in May No big promotions coming up so I may need to adjust our revenue goals for the summer months. Right now the goal is to get people into the Contract Club and get people into our quiz funnel (notavglaw.com/quiz) to determine how we can best help you and your business.

On today's episode of the podcast I'm sharing my March profit report If you listened to last month's profit report you may have heard me sounding a little bit defeated with my numbers due to some personal stuff going on. If you missed it, go back and listen to episode 330. Diving into the March profit report, let's revisit the 2024 goals I share at the top of every episode. • I set good, better, best goals of $300k, $400k and $500k in revenue. I was shooting for $400k, I think the $300k is still doable now. Last year we hit $270k so I'd really like to get that to $300k this year. • Hit 60% in profit. Probably going to be changing • Book 4 state speaking gigs for next year • Consistently hit $25k months. Did this in January and February, not in March, probably not in April • Hit $15k in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by the end of the year. This was the big goal to help us get to our revenue goals at the end of the year. We're a little bit less than halfway to this so far. My original goal was to get to 10k by the end of March but that hasn't happened yet. Let's recap what happened in March: • I've previously shared that if all things went to plan, March was going to be a $40k month. That's what I was hoping for because of launches we had planned. Those didn't end up happening, • We had planned a couple of launches and they didn't really end up happening • We promoted our tax challenge and at the end of that I was planning to promote our services but I ended up doing the challenge while I was out of town, we didn't have many people sign up and I didn't get around to doing too much in terms of promotional emails. Projections vs. Actual 1. Unf*ck Your Biz - $4,000 → $1,000 2. Contract Club - $1,000 → $1,100 3. Legally Launched - $500 → $250 4. Monthly services - $5,00 → $7,145 5. Tax - $4,000 → $3,000 6. Trademarks - $1,250 → $1,250 7. Other - $1,000 → $1,010 Total revenue - $17,750 → $15,265 Expenses Employee wages: $5,200 (this does not include myself) Contractor expenses: $4,700 Owner wages: $2,900 (after my taxes. I paid $2,500 into taxes) Monthly tools: $500 Affiliate payouts: $650 Total expenses: $17,600 Profit (- $2,400) While I know a revenue of $15,265 sounds great, when expenses are $17,600, it makes it a lot less exciting. I then paid myself my salary of $5,300 so the total business profit was about (-$8,000). This is why it's good to have a little bit of cushion in our bank accounts. In April, I'm hoping to make a little bit more money. We're not really doing any promotions this month to make a lot more, but a lot of the team expenses were for Unf*ck Your Biz clients we were wrapping up and our bookkeepers were working on some clients' books that were several years behind and it's a project to really get them caught up. I'm probably going to need to readjust my profit goals because it's dawned on me that I've essentially built an agency. It's a law firm, but it's an agency and I may need to hire more bookkeepers to keep up with demand. Higher profit means more money in my pocket as the business owner, but I also am not looking to work 40-60 hours a week, for me ~30 is the sweet spot so if I can make less profit in order to bring on more people to do more of the client work, then that's okay with me. Because we weren't able to do our launches in March, my biggest issue right now is MRR (monthly recurring revenue). This is not recurring payments for courses, MRR is something you pay every month for until you cancel, think things like Netflix. My big goal is to hit $15,000 in MRR by the end of the year. If our goal was to get five people at $500/month that's $2,500/month times nine months would be close to $25,000 in revenue that we're now missing out on. If we can bring these clients on in May during our launch, that's two less months compared to if we had gotten in during a March launch. I thought about doing an impromptu emergency launch but I don't want to rush anything. We did do an Open House this week and we have a couple fun things up our sleeve next month, but I'm really thinking about shifting the next couple months to focus on audience growth and continue giving out excellent free resources like we always do. April Projections Unf*ck Your Biz- $4,000 Contract Club - $1,000 Legally Launched - $250 Monthly Recurring Revenue - $7,000 Tax - $4,000 TM clients- $2,500 Other - $1,000 Total: $19,750, would really like to hit $20k What's Coming Up in May No big promotions in April but we are focusing on more people signing up for our referral program. If you have the Contract Club and you like it and want to share it with friends, if you become an affiliate you can earn money from every sale you refer (and the same goes for most of our products and services, not just the Club). Sign up at notavglaw.com/affiliate

This week on All Up in Your Biz, Yvonne looks back at three of her recent episodes with Neuroscience experts, Matt Cooke, James R. Doty and Anne-Sophie Fluri.  Rounding up some of the best moments to show the key role that our brains play when manifesting a better life!  GUEST LINKS: James R. Dotyhttps://www.instagram.com/jamesrdotymd/ Pre-order Jim's upcoming book on manifestation here: https://amzn.eu/d/addnirp    Matt Cooke https://www.mattcooke.me/ https://www.instagram.com/mattcookecoach/ https://www.tiktok.com/@mattcookecoach https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_KN0UbOpheb61gc8iv0sMA   Anne-Sophie Fluri https://www.linkedin.com/anne-sophie-fluri https://www.instagram.com/coochiebygucci   HOST BIO Yvonne started her career as a corporate lawyer for one of Ireland's top law firms. After the loss of a baby during pregnancy, Yvonne founded Pause. Penny - which was created to inspire people to manifest their dream lives. She is also a mom of four. Yvonne is a serial manifester, manifesting everything from her dream jobs (yes, multiple), her soulmate, dream house and even her twins! Podcast Description This podcast is all about manifesting your dream life. Interviews with incredible entrepreneurs who are using manifestation to create successful businesses and solo episodes on how to start manifesting everything you desire. Yvonne teaches you 7 simple steps to manifesting your dream life, shares her own personal manifestation stories and gives practical advice on how to make manifestation a lifestyle. Tune in and I guarantee you will be manifesting your dreams!   VALUABLE RESOURCES website: pausepenny.com Instagram: @yvonnetchrakian_manifest @pause.penny LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yvonne-tchrakian-64257619/          

On today's episode of the podcast I'm sharing our commonly spotted contract red flags. I messaged MJ, our team attorney, to put together some of the red flags they've been spotting in contracts because they are the primary person responsible for updating our Contract Club templates and working one-on-one with our Unf*ck Your Biz clients to give them their full suite of contracts that can typically range from seven to 15 contracts to each client. If you're not familiar with the Contract Club, it's all the contracts you need, all in one place, all for one price, just pay the cover and you're in for life. You can pay your $30 cover and join the club at notavglaw.com/contract We have dozens and dozens of templates already in the club and we're adding more all of the time. We're always putting out new ones in response to contract requests in our Facebook group, Braden's Besties. 1. Repetitive, contradictory terms Repeating yourself in the contract might feel like emphasizing a term's importance, but it can hurt you. When a judge or mediator reads a contract, if you have two different versions of the same term, if there's contradiction in any way between the two, the judge has to decide which controls if they don't just toss them out altogether. If you do need to repeat in the contract, just say "refer to paragraph five for the cancelation provision). I the terms are repetitive but not contradictory, your duplicative terms just made it longer which is unnecessary for you and your client. 2. Inconsistent style of writing We love a patchwork - for quilts only. It does not belong in a contract, and when you're copying and pasting parts of your contract from multiples templates you've found here or there online, lawyers can always tell. What ends up happening, for example, is different contracts from different attorneys will use different terms to refer to the same person, such as "photographer" or "company" and it's confusing to the client. It's a bad look and tells a judge you weren't being very serious about your legal needs and that you might not know the legal footing in your case. 3. Unfair or unenforceable provisions If you put unreasonable shit in your contract, a judge or fact-finder is going to be very suspicious of the other stuff in your contract. There are certain things you cannot put in your contract which is pretty standard and varies a little by state. The way we typically draft our templates is if it's a red flag in some states we just don't include it. For example, non-disparagement clauses. You typically can't have these in client contracts i.e. in California you can't say a client can't write a bad review about your business. There are policy reasons why this is prohibited and suing people for being open and honest is not very good for the general public. 4. Language you don't understand If you can't explain what the contract says to your client, it shouldn't be in the contract. This is not only why it's important to get a professional contract, but that you take the time to read it and understand what's in your contract. Just because you don't understand it at first, doesn't mean that you should immediately cut it out, it just means you should take the time to understand it. It's okay if you don't understand it at first. We do videos with most along with most of our contracts inside the Contract Club to explain what each and every paragraph means. We don't want you to just buy a template and not know how to answer your client's questions, and they will have questions. 5. Formatting issues Like an inconsistent writing style, having an inconsistent format is a bad look. I don't think most people will have a problem with this because, working mainly with creatives, aesthetic is typically on your mind but if you aren't being careful, it shows that you're okay with shotty legal work. Make sure you use consistent spacing and standard fonts. It's not worth the time and energy to make a contract "fun." Don't give a contract that's fun colors or fonts unless you want the title in your brand font or color. If you want to make sure you're avoiding all of these and don't want to break the bank, join the Contract Club (https://notavglaw.com/club). It's only $30 and you get access to all the videos to really learn what's going into your contract templates. And, once you understand what's going into your contracts, if you want to short-cut the process, then what you need is the Contract Bot. It's our not-quite AI tool that developers helped us create that asks about 10 questions in a form and it will give you a generated contract. This is separate from the Contract Club, you can add access to the Contract Bot on to the Club when purchasing it at notavglaw.com/club and you can use the bot whenever you want.

On today's episode of the podcast, I chat with Jodi Brandon about preparing for unexpected time off in your business. I'm hosting an open house! If you've considered working with me or aren't sure which service is best suited for you, register for the Open House on Tuesday, April 16th at 9am PST. I'd love to answer your questions and share more about the resources I have available to help get your legal and tax shit legit. Register at notavglaw.com/open-house Jodi and I go way back to a mastermind event in 2019 and have been in a mastermind group together ever since brainstorming ideas and solutions in our business alongside for other business owners. She is also my book coach for Unf*ck Your Biz. Jodi has one of the most streamlined businesses I've ever seen which lends well to taking unexpected time off, something Jodi has had to do. The streamlined organization is the product of the time off Jodi had to take when he husband had to have a valve replaced in his heart and what was supposed to be an easy procedure became unplanned open heart surgery that was much more complicated and required time off. At this time, Jodi was doing all one-on-one copy editing work with no subcontractors or SOPs in place. This wasn't something scalable and Jodi was out of work. This time off is what led her to diversify her offerings, including the book coaching she now offers. Subcontractors now on her team work on the copy editing. After her husband's surgery, they knew that in the future he would need to have this same valve replacement again. Jodi wanted to be prepared for the next time she would need to care for her husband so she got to work learning about systems and preparing for what happens if you can't run your business. She has a network of colleagues that she wanted do be able to line up work with in the event of an emergency so her clients wouldn't be out of luck. During this time Jodi had some clients who were okay with being moved off her plate to someone else she lined up, some who were good to paise the project until Jodi could work on it again, and some who were unhappy and wanted to stay on schedule because they'd had a contract. Jodi still discloses to all her clients that she is not always the main one to be doing the work because sharing your book can be a vulnerable project. Their contract is with Jodi Brandon Editorial, not just Jodi Brandon. If you aren't in a place to financially hire someone just yet, that doesn't mean you can't plan for the unexpected. You don't necessarily need to have someone on stand by or do doomsday preparation, but you would be surprised how often these conversations are happening to prepare for all sorts of scenarios like maternity leave or chronic illness or caring for a relative. To prep for this, you can charge the client more than you need to pay who you'll contract to. You may be making low overhead to keep your business afloat, but if you have long-term goals for your business, this is better than referring everything out and losing out on weeks or even months of client testimonials. Systems are also an incredibly important part of preparing your business. The clearer your standard operating procedures are and the systems you have in place, the less someone will need to ping you to constantly be asking for info they can't find. These are all things we should have in place anyway, especially if you have team members who take time off, planned or unplanned. Loom videos can be incredibly helpful to create your SOPs. If you need to give yourself unexpected time off, give yourself grace. Even when the business is still operating, it's easy to get caught up in negativity and frustration. It won't be forever, even if it feels like it when your life is in disarray. It's important to give yourself the mental space you need to not go down the negative rabbit hole. You likely won't look back and regret that time you spent during that unexpected time. Going back to preparing your audience, like in the case of Jodi preparing her clients that it's not just her working on their projects, it's important that clients know that I own the business but that I'm not the only one at Not Your Average Law Firm. Get in Touch with Our Guest Jodi Brandon, owner of Jodi Brandon EditorialConnect with Jodi on Instagram @jodibrandoneditorial

Darrell "Coach D" Andrews is known worldwide as "America's Passion Coach." For close to two decades, he has been a nationally acclaimed life coach, motivational speaker and author and our conversation touched on discipline, accountability, and success in personal and business life.He stresses the importance of consistent habits and systems for achieving freedom and success. Coach D discusses journaling for self-reflection and tracking progress, the role of accountability partners, and introduces "Boss for Your Biz" to support entrepreneurs.This episode emphasizes the transformative power of discipline and structured support in pursuing long-term success and fulfillment. So many great points so be sure to listen.HIGHLIGHTS:4:53 The Importance of Healthy Relationships in Organizations7:07 Building Healthy Workplace Cultures10:49 Leading by Example with Integrity13:22 Aligning Actions with Primary Aims15:16 Seeking Feedback and Making Personal Improvements22:24 Importance of Measuring Progress and Accountability24:19 Overcoming Excuses and Prioritizing Self-Care27:44 Discipline and Structure for Success29:14 The Power of Journaling and Accountability36:35 Creating New Patterns Through Consistency38:06 Utilizing Accountability for Business SuccessSPONSOR:Cellev8Discount code: THEALISONK2024CONNECT WITH COACH D:Coach D SpeaksBoss for your BizFacebookInstagramLinkedinCONNECT WITH ALISON:Check out the ULTIMATE PODCASTSGet your copy of Alison's Retreat ChecklistEMAIL MEVISIT MY WebsiteFIND ME on FacebookFOLLOW ME on TwitterFOLLOW ME on InstagramEXPLORE OUR RETREATS HERE!JOIN OUR GROUP HERE If you are a health/fitness/wellness entrepreneur, or a coachINNOVATION AVENUE: Fitness & Self-Care...

On today's episode of the podcast I'm breaking down my February profit report and what's been going on behind the scenes of my business and personal life. I'm hosting an open house! If you've considered working with me or aren't sure which service is best suited for you, register for the Open House on Tuesday, April 16th at 9am PST. I'd love to answer your questions and share more about the resources I have available to help get your legal and tax shit legit. Register at notavglaw.com/open-house If you've listened to the podcast, you know I'm all about transparency and while I don't share every detail about my personal life, it felt like I should share what's been going on the last couples months because you'll also see my numbers are down this month and this will inform a lot of that. I took a few weeks out of office when my mom's health began to decline due to the cancer she was diagnosed with in 2020 and it was clear we did not have much time left with her and then a full week completely off from everything including email when she passed. I'm back home and back to work but it's still hard some days knowing I won't have my mom around for more than half my life. During my time away I've also had a minor business crisis because we had to skip two full launches and I had been planning for March to be our busiest month of the year with people wanting to come and work with us around tax season and everything that comes with that. Diving into the profit report, let's revisit the 2024 goals I share at the top of every episode. I set good, better, best goals of $300k, $400k and $500k in revenue. I think the $300k is still doable, the $400k that I really wanted to hit, I think might be a stretch. Hit 60% in profit Book 4 state speaking gigs for next year Consistently hit $25k months. This is going to be a struggle in March when I do my projections Hit $15k in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by the end of the year Let's recap what happened in February: Not a whole lot We had planned a couple of launches and they didn't really end up happening We promoted our tax challenge and at the end of that I was planning to promote our services but I ended up doing the challenge while I was out of town, we didn't have many people sign up and I didn't get around to doing too much in terms of promotional emails. Projections vs. Actual: 1. Unf*ck Your Biz - $14,000 → $15,000 2. Contract Club - $1,000 → $1,080 (I continue to be surprised how predictably this falls between $900 and $1200 without promotion) 3. Legally Launched - $1,000 → $500 4. Monthly services - $8,700 → ~$4,000 5. Tax - $15,000 → $7,000 This and monthly services are the two biggest places where we missed the mark due to missed launches 6. Trademarks - $2,500 → $2,500 7. Other - $1,000 → $1,850 Total revenue - 4$7,700 (Projected to be our highest revenue month ever but I expected us to at least hit $30,000) → $32,000 I'm pretty happy with this, all things considered. Profit Cost of Goods: $48 (Our only COGs are the physical copies of my book) Expenses: $22,600 (very high for me) Owner profit: $9,300 My salary: $5,500 Profit: $3,900 Expenses Employee wages + team contractors (contractors I work with on a regular basis that don't need to legally be employees): ~$13,000 This is double our average. This is because I'm paying our tax preparer for a lot of tax returns and our bookkeeping team put in a lot of hours in February into March because we have a lot of clients who need 2-3 years of bookkeeping backlog Owner wages/owner tax (what I pay myself, technically expenses for the S Corp): $5,000 Monthly tools: $400 Affiliate payout: $650 Marketing: $300 Travel: $150 Other: $2,600 (included one large refund, a large office expense, a couple Ubers, couple online filing fees and a few meals). This came to 70% Expenses (need to work on these numbers) Profit margin: 30% These expenses are the main reason we're going to be increasing the cost of Unf*ck Your Biz, our signature service, to $5,000 moving forward because after the first time running it I'm realizing the amount of hours my team is putting in for every client is a lot higher than anticipated. I don't think that's a bad thing for our clients, it means they're getting really high value services, I just need to budget for that accordingly. I'm also going to be adding in some more of our higher margin services, for example instead of a trademark filing being a la carte, it'll be included in the services (a $1,250 value). I do the trademarks, not a team member, so this will be a profitable thing for us to do. Adding something with a high margin to a something with a low margin so that it shakes out is something for anyone with packages to consider (and you'll only know this if you're tracking your numbers on a monthly basis). Since I recorded this on March 26th, I have a good idea of what my March profit report is going to look like so you're not getting the real story with my March projections because now the projections are filtered through the lens of having gone through the month and looking at the numbers as I can see our monthly revenue is down when I log in. March Projections: 1. Unf*ck Your Biz - $4,000 (lower than February because our December monthly payment plan clients are done with payment) 2. Contract Club - $1,000 3. Legally Launched - $500 4. Monthly services - $5,000 5. Tax - $4,000 6. Trademarks - $1,250 7. Other - $1,000 Total revenue - $17,750 I stretched some of these beyond where they might be to push myself this last week of the month and now really I should do my income bookkeeping now to see where we're at so I know what to adjust this last week. Hopefully I won't need to do this as I've done four client intake calls so far this week and three seem pretty promising so that would go a long way. Will I get to the $25k goal of monthly revenue? Doubtful but I'm going to give myself grace on this one For context, if we'd done all our promotions this month I'd been anticipating March to be around a $40,000 month so we definitely won't be close to that. To end the episode, I want to share a bit of a mindset shift we're having over here at Not Your Average Law Firm. For context, I've always been very envious of people who have super streamlined business models and clear messaging of the one thing they sell, take it or leave it. I have a hard time with it because I do feel it's my responsibility to meet people where they're at with their needs because I don't want to turn people away or not help them. But as a business owner sometimes we need to say we're not the best fit so I'm going to start leaning more into that, specifically, encouraging people to more to sign up for Unf*ck Your Biz, our signature service and turning away most other one-on-one service requests because we have trouble providing services in a vacuum. A lot of times people come to us for one-on-one help with contracts, but their business is fucked in many other ways that need help in addition to the contracts. More specifically what we'll be able to do is put all of our effort and energy into helping a new signature client starting every week on a rolling basis. My dream for this is to be booking out eight weeks in advance and then at the end of the service folks join our monthly on-going services because we're already well-equipped to handle their business. If this isn't a good fit, we have our three do-it-yourself online programs on our website for people who are just starting out or don't need the full investment. If you've been curious about working with us, take our quiz at notavglaw.com/quiz and sign up for our open house at notavglaw.com/open-house to get a deeper look at our services.

On today's episode of the podcast I'm sharing how to build a profit plan designed for your business. If you haven't already, take our quiz to help determine your best starting point on your legal and tax journey. Head to notavglaw.com/quiz to get your results. When I started my business I was operating with a sub-500 credit score and I didn't have the greatest habits with money (still don't always, but I have the knowledge and know-how).I was in a cycle of churn and burn that was further exacerbated when I started making more money in the business. I'm not going to tell you that making more money doesn't help, but if you're not managing it well, what happens is you start spending more money on more expenses. That's why it's really important to stay off the "WTF happened to my money?" hamster wheel and get your profit sorted out sooner rather than later. When I was going through this journey I read Profit First and lots of other finance books to piece everything together. During this process I created my Unf*ck Your Biz course and wrote the first edition of my Unf*ck Your Biz book. Fast forward a few years and now we're running Unf*ck Your Biz as a signature 1-on-1 service and I'm seeing more than ever how much of a sticky issue cash flow is for people because no one teaches us these things. How do you pay yourself? Do I need a business bank account? Can I pay a business expense from my personal bank account? What if I'm an LLC instead of a sole proprietor? The list of questions goes on and on. I get asked a lot about Profit First and while I may be jealous of the brand recognition, I can't hate on the book too much because it has done a fabulous job of getting people to understand the importance of profit and to pay themselves first. It also gives a simple to follow system. The big thing Profit First has you do is open five bank accounts. I did this at one point in time and despite setting it up properly, it wasn't set up right with the bank on the back end and I was getting fined zero balance fees for zero-ing out the accounts as you're supposed to do with the Profit First method. I also found many people going through Profit First only end up implementing about half the system anyway. My biggest issue with Profit First is that while it helps with cash flow issues, it doesn't teach what you're required to do in terms of paying yourself or tax nuances based on tax and business structure. I understand why it doesn't from a legal perspective. As a tax attorney, I'm able to dive into cash flow in my book, which is a big piece of unf*cking your biz, but also dig into the nitty gritty that comes with it. If you're curious about how you should be doing all this, that's what I dive into in Profit Rx. The Profit Rx course dives into parts one, two and six of our Unf*ck Your Biz framework which is covered in the book. You can also work with us to implement the full framework 1-on-1, you can DIY it and use the book, if you just want the legal bits of the framework you can buy our Legally Launched course and if you want the tax, bookkeeping and money aspects you can buy our Profit Rx course. To give you a highlight of what's included in the book and what you can get in Profit Rx, let's look at an excerpt from the book in Chapter 18. I hate the word "budget." Ick. But creating a bucket system is like budgeting for non-budgeters. By separating your money into different buckets, you're creating a budget for each category without sitting down and saying, “I'll spend X on groceries this month, Y on eating out, etc.” Instead, your balance in any given account is your cap for spending on that category to make it easy. The basic system looks like: 1. Set up a business bank account - If you have a sole proprietorship, you're not legally required to have a separate bank account. If you have an LLC, or any other formal legal entity, maintaining a separate bank account is one of your corporate formalities and is required. 2. Dial in the profit 3. Automate your taxes - Inside Profit Rx I teach you how to calculate your quarterly tax percentage and therefore how much you should save for taxes. 4. Pay yourself - Once your tax savings are automatically taken out. I recommend that twice per month you transfer a set amount of funds from your business account to your personal account. This prioritizes your profit. After you transfer your profit, the balance remaining in your account is your allotment for expenses. If you want to take on a new business expense, you must have the funds in the biz account. In the book I dive more into detail like how to add in sales tax savings, how to adjust cash flow in a partnership, how to adjust cash flow with an S Corp, and more. To learn more about this whole process you can: Buy the Unf*ck Your Biz Book: notavglaw.com/book Join Profit Rx: Get all the lesson videos, guides and templates: notavglaw.com/profit-rx Take the quiz if you're curious where to start: notavglaw.com/quiz The main takeaways I want you to have from today's podcast is to separate your business and personal finances, start saving for taxes and start focusing on profitability and start paying yourself.

On today's episode of the podcast I'm sharing the lessons I've learned since re-opening my law firm last year. Head to notavglaw.com/quiz to find out which business bestie you are. The quiz will tell you what direction you need to go and what you need to be doing in your business when it comes to the tax and legal stuff. Last year I relaunched my law firm and rebranded it "Not Your Average Law Firm" in February 2023. After I did some soul searching and decided what direction I wanted to take the business, we launched the firm with an open house and kicked off the firm with our monthly legal subscription and had about 10 clients join in our first couple months. We then started doing tax return services and trademarks. In just the last year with our legal members, we had one client who we helped navigate the $50,000 copyright lawsuit they were served. We had a client who purchased a business ten years ago and they got hit with a copyright claim for a photo on the website from before they bought the company, we've also filed about a dozen trademarks for our clients and the first are on their way to being officially approved soon after going through the process. We've drafted dozens and dozens of contracts and terms of services for clients and sent emails on their behalf to their own clients who weren't paying on time. In December, we launched Unf*ck Your Biz as a done-for-you service and onboarded 19 clients. One big thing we learned from the legal subscription is a lot of folks get themselves into trouble because they don't take time to set themselves up properly. For example, I spoke with someone getting refund requests from two multi-thousand dollar projects but we had a hard time helping them because they had weak contracts. Same with the clients that come to us looking to file a trademark before they have an LLC. There's an order that things need to be done in order to avoid patchworking things in an unideal order that isn't systematic.. From our perspective, there is a step by step process we recommend going through to avoid these scenarios. Here's what I've learned: 1. It's hard to launch an offer without great systems, but it's really hard to invent great systems before you launch an offer. We've set up work flows and within a week of launching we're changing them because now we're getting a better understanding of what our client needs and what works better. For this launch we did 1-on-1 calls with each Unf*ck Your Biz client to see what they needed and then we took them through a custom roadmap. My lesson was that beta programs are great, but you need to do them with fewer people depending on the capacity of your business. 2. I decided we are going to raise the price after our first beta launch so a) I want to get more people and b) I wanted to give people an opportunity to join the cohort at that initial price point. This is where I learn a lot of my business decisions are clouded by the conversations in the online course space about beta programs, founding members and scarcity. But, when you have to deliver on a service, maybe not the best option. If I could do this over again I would do a quiet launch for about five clients as an initial beta to develop systems and then I would do a big beta launch. Clients have found it to be valuable, but we want a more organized system in place that's clearer to those in the cohort. Next time, we'll do it the opposite and do a five client beta program in March to test out our 58 step system to really test the process we've created. We still have three spots left for the March cohort. One of them can be yours. Send me a DM on Instagram @notavglaw and we can chat about if it's a good fit for you. This round will still be at the $4,000 price point from last year, and this will be the last time it is offered at this rate. For everyone who signs up for Unf*ck Your Biz, we: - Set up your bookkeeping and complete up to one-year of bookkeeping catch-up. - Provide tax strategy plans - Do ne past tax return if you're behind on your taxes- A full suite of contracts (at least seven to eight covering your routine business stuff)- File one trademark for you- Do a legal compliance audit- Set up a business formation (LLC, S Corp, etc.) - Create a custom cash flow strategy After we go through Unf*ck Your Biz (UYB), we help everyone maintain their systems for those who choose to continue working with us through one of our monthly services. For 2024 this looks like a two tier system. In our first tier, we track all your income and expenses for $150/month and do monthly Q&As where you can bring your tax and legal questions. In our higher tier, the Monthly Everything tier, we offer full bookkeeping in Quickbooks, we do the reconciliation, and this also prepays for your tax return next year. We also include tax strategy, twice annual tax consultations, all of the monthly legal services mentioned earlier in the episode AND up to one trademark a year for just $500/month. If this sounds interesting to you or are curious if this is best place for you to get started, be sure to take our quiz notavglaw.com/quiz

On today's episode of the podcast I'm diving into my January 2024 profit report. If you're new to the podcast, I do these profit reports for a few reasons. 1) It's good accountability for me to keep up with my bookkeeping every month. 2) It helps me do my projections for the next month. 3) It provides a good example of what is possible when you regularly do your bookkeeping, do projections and really look at the numbers. 4) It's one of my core beliefs that money is more taboo of a topic than it should be and if we talked about it more we'd have more realistic expectations of what it costs to run a business. Our Tax Season Workshop is back. During the workshop we will get you ready to file your taxes by wrapping up your 2023 bookkeeping, making sure the proper documents are collected and organized and getting prepped with video lessons from me and live Q&A sessions. At the end of the workshop you're ready to file on your own, hand your neatly buttoned-up package off to your tax preparer, or have us file. If you are looking for us to file, we are only filing this year for our students, members or anyone who goes through the workshop. Sign up at www.notavglaw.com/taxworkshop Diving into 2024, let's take a look at the goals we have for the year. We set good, better, best goals of $300k, $400k and $500k for the year. It's a big range but we've seen big jumps in the past. We're aiming for 60% profit margin not including my owner salary. Other goals are to book four stage speaking gigs in 2025, have consistent $25,000 revenue months, and end the year with monthly recurring revenue at at least $15,000. There wasn't a lot happening in January as we were heads down working with the 19 Unf*ck Your Biz clients we signed in December. We also resurrected Legally Launched from what it was a few years ago and brought it back as a $200 program that launched in January. If you purchased the $10 offer, this is different that that, we just really liked the name stole the name to use for this new offer. We didn't promote the launch much due to some family health issues and time I'll be taking off so I'll be doing 1:1 calls with the two people who joined instead of a group cohort as planned. That program is now evergreen that you buy at any time. We also launched our Contract Bot which will auto-generate your contracts and is an upsell to the Contract Club which you can get at notavglaw.com/club. Let's review our projected vs. actual revenue amounts. Projections vs Actuals 1. UYB - 14,000 → $14,4002. Club - 1,000 → $1,1403. Legally Launched - 3,000 → $500 (off-the mark but that's okay because didn't promote it as planned)4. Monthly - 5,700 → $8,500 (includes monthly legal clients, monthly bookkeeping clients and monthly membership clients because we're restructuring our monthly offers for a clearer marketing message)5. Tax - 5,000 → 0 (mostly because the clients we signed for this will role into February when I sent contracts and they're ready)6. TM - 1,250 → 0 (Had someone sign up but that revenue won't hit the bank until February) 7. Other - 1,000 → $1,1788. Low Ticket - 0 → $190 ($10 offers and my book, I projected $0 because honestly I forgot to make a projection)Total - 31,000 - $26,000 Expenses Team: $5,200 (about $1,500 more than I typically average which is because we're working with all our Unf*ck Your Biz Clients. This will be about double in February because our bookkeeping team is logging like 5x as many hours because we are doing full 2023 bookkeeping clean-ups for all our UYB clients and our attorney is logging a lot more hours working on contracts for clients). Non-team contractors: $1,200 (folks I hire for one-off projects)My wages: $5,600Affiliates: $500Worker's Comp Insurance: $45Marketing: $905 (more than normal, included annual Squarespace renewal)Client fees: $250 (the fee way pay to file a trademark on behalf of the client)Other: $1,500 (I bought a new rug for my office and a few other things) Definitely did not hit 60% profit this month because our expenses were more than 50% Profit Revenue: $26,000Expenses: ~$16,000 (pretty high, will be higher next month)Owner Profit (profit before Braden's salary): ~$10,000Braden's Salary: $5,600 (about half goes to taxes)Total business profit: ~$4,000 February Projections1. Unf*ck Your Biz - 14,0002. Club - 1,0003. Legally Launched - 1,0004. Monthly services - 8,7005. Tax - 15,000 (this number will make or break the revenue for the month)6. TM - 2,5007. Other - 1,000Total - 47,700 (That's wild to type and say. It'd be a record month for sure. Even if we only hit $35,000.) What's coming up in February: - The Tax Challenge- Profit Rx onboarding- Wrapping up UYB client work and rolling these students into Profit Rx- Starting new UYB cohort in March (I won't be promoting this, we'll hopefully be filling all our spots from the waitlist so if you're interested, head to notavglaw.com/uyb to get on the list. The price will be increasing and we will be taking a smaller cohort.) Enjoy the episode? Give us a review on your podcast platform and tag us on Instagram @notavglaw

In dieser Episode treffe ich Dr. Finn Breuer in den Studios 301 in Frankfurt. Nach einem gemeinsamen Rundgang durch die Limelight Gallery sprechen wir über Metality, Leadership, Heavy Metal und sein neues Buch "Metal Up! Your Biz". Alle Infos zu diesem außergewöhnlichen Gespräch gibt es hier: https://www.finn-breuer.com/THE BLOG OF ROCK ist Dein Hardrock & Heavy Metal Podcast Musik Magazin. Ich bin Uwe Lerch und nehme Dich Backstage mit zu dem RockStars!Natürlich quatschen wir über die Musik, die uns alle verbindet. Über neue Platten, über Live-Pläne und was früher so war. Aber wir sprechen auch über die Menschen dahinter. Was hat sie inspiriert und motiviert und welche RockStar-Tips haben sie für Dich da draussen.Noch viel mehr zu diesen Themen findest Du ab sofort auch in unserem neuen Magazin: Es heißt SOLVEJG – Das Mindful Metal & Rock Magazin, welches es hier digital & kostenlos für Dich gibt. Oder für alle Jäger & Sammler auch in einer limitierten Print-Auflage zum Selbstkostenpreis.Hier findest Du alle weiteren Podcast-Portale, wo Du THE BLOG OF ROCK auch abonnieren kannst – sowie weitere Informationen über mich und einen Link, der Dich auch in meine offizielle Facebook-Gruppe führt. Ich würde mich freuen, wenn wir uns hier kennenlernen.Höre Dir gerne auch die bereits veröffentlichen Stories an, denn jede Woche gibt es hier neues Futter. Und vor allem - erzähle es Deinen Freunden und teile die frohe Kunde auf Social Media.SUBSCRIBE oben rechts und wähle Deinen Anbieter wie Spotify, Apple Podcasts oder deezer aus, damit Du keine Folge mehr verpasst.Über den Host des Podcasts:Uwe Lerch ist ein passionierter Musik-Experte, Co-Gründer des ROCK HARD-Magazines und seit fast vier Jahrzehnten im Musikbusiness in verschiedenen Funktionen erfolgreich tätig. In diesem Podcast plaudert er aus dem Nähkästchen über seine Begegnungen mit den RockStars und den Machern dahinter. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On today's episode of the podcast I'm sharing what's considered a "reasonable salary" when filing for a S Corp. If you missed last week's episode, go back and listen to part one of this two-part S Corp series. In episode 319 we talked about how S Corps save you money, and the trick is you have to pay yourself a salary. The lower the salary is that you pay yourself, the more you save in taxes, but that salary has to be reasonable. So what is considered "reasonable" for tax purposes? Coming soon we're launching a small cohort of my program Legally Launched to help you form an LLC or an S Corp or even if you want to make sure your sole proprietorship is legally legit, this program is for you. You'll keep your access to the program, so it can grow with your business and you can revisit it when you're ready to become an LLC or an S Corp. We also have a S Corp Savings Calculator, available at notavglaw.com/scorpcalculator for $10. This will help you determine how much an S Corp can save you in taxes. The calculator is included in Legally Launched so if you know you're going to join the program you don't need to get it but if you're not sure if the program is for you yet, the calculator is a great stepping stone. In my book, Unf*ck Your Biz, I have a chapter on S Corps, including a section on determining reasonable salary. To do so, you can look at the market rate of pay for someone offering your services in your geographic area with your level of expertise. Alternatively, consider how much you would pay someone to do what you do. What would be a reasonable amount of pay to find someone qualified to fill your role? The importance of this is that S Corps are subject to fraud abuse so the IRS may look at this through a critical lens. The way we can start to determine this is with a simple Google search to give us a good ballpark. This is where it can get tricky. Often this can skew to the high side, and that's because we don't spend all our time necessarily doing that one thing. That's where the alternative Many Hats approach, a more popular salary calculation method for entrepreneurs. As a solopreneur you wear all the hats. You may start the day in your administrative work hat, then you put on your social media manager hat before another hat change into your core role. Consider the Many Hats approach a pie chart where each slice is sized by the time spent wearing each hat. This approach allows us to consider time spent on these tasks. We then calculate our salary by taking that percentage of the reasonable salary for reach job, for example 10% of your time on social media is 10% of the social media manager reasonable salary, etc. I learned this the hard way. I looked up the (high) salary of a San Diego tax attorney. But only about 5% of my time is spent doing tax attorney work. The rest of my time is spent podcasting, speaking, doing social media, etc. When you do the Many Hats approach it can help pull your salary down which will help save you taxes. It just needs to be reasonable. For example, if you have $100,000 in revenue and $50,000 in expenses you'll have $50k in profit. Let's say you wear four hats - web design (their primary), admin, social media and managing their team. If they spend 40% of their time doing web design with a reasonable salary of $70k, their percentage is $28k, social media, we'll say 20% of $50,000 for $10,000, for admin work we've got 20% of $60k at $12k, and management at 20% of $70k is $14k for a total salary of $64,000 which is $6k less than the $70k reasonable salary. This would save $918 in taxes. This is not fool-proof, the IRS will be doing the same types of calculations on their end if you were to get audited. The most important thing to do is document everything when you calculate. Hyperlink screenshots of the reasonable salary numbers you find, don't just include the source link as average salaries change and if you get audited in a few years it may be higher than it was when you calculated so be sure to screenshot and date those. Note the tasks you do under each hat. Worst case scenario if you miscalculate your reasonable salary, your penalty is going to be owing the difference in taxes on that salary difference plus some interest and penalties they decide to charge those to you. Not the end of the world unless you drastically underpay your salary. If you're not about doing this math, you can use RCReports. You pay them a few hundred dollars and they ask you some questions about what you do in your business that they run through their algorithm to tell you what your reasonable salary would be and they give you a report you can give to the IRS if you're audited. I don't think this is necessary for everyone, I think it's more for businesses making six or seven figures in profit and wanting to pay themselves like $100k.

On today's episode of the podcast we're talking about the way you can save possibly thousands in taxes through an S Corporation. This will be a two-part series. Part one today will focus on S Corps and how they really work. Coming soon I'll be re-launching my program "Legally Launched" which is a full course that covers LLC and S Corp formation and serves as an alternative to things like Legal Zoom or IncFile because I don't think they do a great job of helping people (hear more about that on episode 312). I also know Unf*ck Your Biz isn't for everyone and if right now you just want help with filing your LLC or S Corp, you can buy it on our site now or when we do a mini launch with live support in the coming weeks. During this episode I'm also releasing a new offer called the S Corp Savings Calculator. It's a Google Sheet along with a tutorial video where you can punch in some numbers using our directions and it'll help you do a rough estimation of how much you could save by having an S Corporation, letting you know if it would be a good fit for you. Get access to the calculator at https://notavglaw.com/scorpcalculator When we are self-employed, we pay income tax and self-employment tax. if we have an employer, we only pay income tax which is an employee benefit. An S Corp helps save us Some of that self employment tax is saved when you become an S Corp. As in escorp you are required to pay yourself a Reasonable salary regularly as opposed to paying yourself a distribution whenever you feel like Which I find is common with many people who are single member LLCs and not an S Corp. When you have a salary, it means you pay yourself through a payroll system instead of just transferring money from your business to personal bank account. Being on payroll means that money for taxes is taken out before you are paid at that money is sent to the IRS and your state tax authority. Fun fact: you cannot be on payroll if you do not have an S Corp. When you have an s Corp, you can also give yourself distributions on top of your salary. Non-S Corps (sole props and single member LLCs) pay income tax and self-employment tax on all profit. When you have an S Corp, only your salary is subject to both taxes and the remaining profit is only subject to income tax. You would calculate your tax savings by finding 15.3% of your net income after salary. That 15.3% is Self employment tax that you are not paying on that net income After salary, since we only pay a self-employment tax on our salary and income tax on everything when we have an S Corp. It really comes down to how much you pay yourself in salary because the lower the salary But let's tax as we pay, but remember that you have to pay yourself a reasonable salary. You also want to make sure you are distributing the money to yourself. That's left after salary that you don't need for business savings. Because that money left in your account is still considered business profit if it is not distributed to yourself. You don't want to leave it sitting in your account unless you are trying to build business savings. Another way to save money with an S corp is to run your health insurance through the business and not pay it out of your personal money. Learn more about the money you can save with an S Corp at notavglaw.com/scorpcalculator

On today's episode of the podcast I'm breaking down what my business looked like in 2023 and what that means for 2024. Over the last few weeks I've been chatting on the podcast about my business as we round down the year including KPIs, my November profit report and annual planning for 2024. I'm planning to release a year in review blog post soon and work on a month-by-month recap blog for 2024 so in this podcast, I'll be giving a highlight overview and saving the detailed break down for the blog. My first full time year in business was 2018 and I did about $30,000 in revenue. 2019, about $70,000, 2020 we doubled the revenue and did $140k, 2021 took a step back and did about $90k, 2022 was a leap forward and we did $170k, and in 2023 we are YTD $268k (I recorded this with 11 days left to the year during which some recurring payments will come in) so I expect to hit about $270-$275k. To recap what led up to 2023, let's take a look at 2022. We launched the Contract Club (formerly the Contract Vault) which took off faster than I imagined with the help of organic word-of-mouth-buzz and more than 1,000 people joined in the first year. We also launched Profit Rx the end of 2021 and turned it into a 6-figure membership in 2022 by taking Unf*ck Your Biz from a coaching program into a monthly membership. We found that people weren't getting the results that they could get if it was a coaching model with accountability which is why we brought that back in May 2023 and then made it a done-for-you service in winter 2023. Profit Rx didn't go away though, it's now a monthly membership accountability program to help you get your bookkeeping and your cash flow ran. We'll be opening the doors to that in February again with a lot of fun updates with a new level of value we've never had before. The energy I'm trying to bring into 2024 is a lot fewer offers, each with their own very clear deliverable. In 2022 I also brought on my first employees instead of just a team of contractors and this allowed me to help more people because I had a larger capacity with a wider range of skillsets. It wasn't that I was always too busy, it was that I used to feel like I needed to have all the answers for every single client. But my friend Kira at Paradigm pointed out that's not how all businesses work. Look at other law firms, they have a variety of lawyers specializing in a variety of types of law. To recap 2023, we moved our membership back to our program Unf*ck Your Biz, we also brought in 700 new club goers to the Contract Club and added some order bumps which I recommend to other business owners. January was our lowest revenue month which was unsurprising to me, in February, we jumped when I launched the law firm which continued to grow until we dipped in July and then again at the end of Q4 we jumped which is typical because it's when we launch and when people want to get their shit together ahead of the new year. This year we made close to $23k from our eight low-ticket offers (under $50). Out of that, $17,000 was from the Contract Club. In 2024 we're going to scrap most of these low-ticket offers, add a few $10 offers to answer some big questions we have, for example an S Corp savings calculator because people always have questions about that. If people determine they won't save money starting an S Corp, we save them money from hiring someone they don't need yet. I've also decided no freebies this year, with the exception of talks and presentations, but we will be having a quiz on our website. The Contract Club averaged $1,400 a month in sales, Profit Rx averaged $6,000/month. We averaged ~$4k in tax services, $4k in legal services. Expense-wise, our average team expenses was $3,300 per month. When I tell people I have employees I think they think I have multiple full time employees which is not the case. I have five employees on payroll working about five hours a week give or take given launches or projects being worked on. Our monthly tools averaged $430/month and $950 in marketing/month. $300/month average in memberships and online courses that I took. $400/month in client fees which is essentially cost of goods even if we don't call it that, it's the fees we pay for things like trademark filings. $380/month to affiliates. Throughout the year I kept telling myself I needed to spend less, but as I look at these averages, none of them seem wild to me. I could cut things here and there but for the most part, it's pretty A-ok. Coming next week we're launching Legally Launched, a mini group coaching program starting January 15th to help you file your LLC at a price point comparable to services like LegalZoom. Stay tuned. If you would like to talk about money in your own business and share your own Profit Report, I'd love to have you on the podcast. Send me a DM @notavglaw

On today's episode of the podcast I'm walking you through my annual planning process as I prep for 2024. I love goal setting and business project planning so I'm excited for January planning. If you're familiar with the Strengths Finder assessment, Futuristic is my #1 and Strategic is always in my Top 5. When planning for the New Year rolls around, I always have to dial myself back a little and ask if I'm planning for the sake of planning, or am I mapping out something executable? I brainstorm all year long, but I created my 2024 planning Google Doc in October, did a lot of it last month, and then we do our company quiet weeks, end of December/early January, is when I generally wrap up my planning process. To start my planning I use the Vision Traction Organizer which comes from the book Traction by Gino Wickman. I've been using this since 2019 and I found it really useful for breaking down project management as an entrepreneur. You start with your core values, focus and goal setting. I also recently read Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz which has you come up with your Queen Bee role in your business which is what you hang your hat on, and also come up with your company promise. Our company promise is making things fun. I hear people tell me a lot that we make tax and legal stuff, a not very fun topic, as fun as possible and non-judgemental. Our core values are: 1) We make stuff fun. 2) We keep it simple. 3) We stay transparent. 4) We educate and empower. 5) We reserve judgement. Our purpose is making business fun again. What I mean by this one is that when we start our business it's an exciting idea and it's fun to work on our branding and website and getting our first clients but then we get weighed down with taxes and bureaucracy and the stuff you don't want to do. If we take the weight of that off your back, can we make business fun again? Our company promise is legal and tax solutions that don't suck. Clockwork also has you figure out your 10 year target, three year picture, one year goals so you're essentially reverse engineering your goals. This is something I share a lot about in my programs. In three years, my goal is to have $600k in revenue with roughly $330k in profit with about $25k in monthly recurring revenue. I think it's fairly doable based on the growth we've had over the last year. And this is what I need to hit to fund all my personal life goals. We also need to map out what this looks like. For example, if you're in the wedding industry how many weddings do you need to do to hit your goal? In Traction you also map out your marketing strategy. You create your three unique selling propositions, for us it's 1) Accessible for newbies because we have offers at all different price points, 2) Judgement free, 3) Fun for everyone. Most folks come to us through our lower ticket items or the podcast and eventually we want them to go on to join Unf*ck Your Biz and then they join Profit Rx or Legal Rx for monthly maintenance as we help them scale up a profitable business. Once we have our three year plan, we can move into our 2024 goal. For revenue, my Good goal is $300k, our Better Goal is $400k, Best $500k which may be a little extreme. Profit, my Profit goal is 60% and I have two specific measurables - 1) Get to $15k in MRR and 2) Book six stage speaking gigs for 2025. Then we ask ourselves what we need to do this year to hit our one year goals and set ourselves up for the three year goals and these tasks are called Rocks, which is modeled after this example. Our rocks are the core things that are important to your business that are big picture. I like to map out one or two big ones per quarter for myself and then one for each of my team members. In my opinion it should take someone 2-3 full work weeks based on how many hours they work a week. Here are a few rocks for me and my team: - Migrate our email to @notavglaw.com - Relaunch our Pinterest - Finish a state-by-state sales tax blog - Build out a formal testimonial process - Create speaking calendar and pitching timeline - Create industry-specific keyword rich blog posts Then we take theses and map them out my quarter. We also map out our launch calendar. In 2024 we want to stick with the programs that are working for us and just launch those instead of adding new stuff. I mapped out the months we're going to launch things, and I'm allowing myself to get creative with the way that we launch things. We've also mapped out our core offer structure and our company KPIs (more on that in next week's episode). If you're a regular listener, this offer structure is going to set up the structure of our Profit Report episodes for next year. Our core offers are: - Unf*ck Your Biz, our signature 1-on-1 service - Contract Club - Legally Launched (launching in a different format in the new year) - Profit Rx (revamping and opening the doors in February) - Legal Rx We'll keep some $10 offers on our site and we're getting rid of freebies because I find people don't really download them or care about them and we usually send more low ticket offers than get downloads of freebies anyway. With all this in mind, we created some big goals based on our brand promise of "making legal and tax solutions that don't suck." Our goals (you'll hear these at the start of every Profit Report) 1. $1500/month in low ticket sales 2. $5,000/month in monthly revenue (I want to this 1 & 2 each month) 3. $15,000/month in monthly recurring revenue (I want to hit this by the end of the year) In order to reach these goals we have lots of data points we need to track. One is focusing on getting 500 new follower contacts/month whether it's 100 people on TikTok, 100 people on Threads, 200 on Instagram, etc. We're tracking this now on Enji. Each person on our team has a KPI they'll be tracking around this. If you listened to today's episode, I would LOVE for you to hop into the Braden's Besties Facebook group (bradensbesties.com) and share what your 2024 goal is. What to do you hope to accomplish? Feel free to share some rocks as well. I'd love for you to leave a review of the podcast on the platform where you listen.

On today's episode of the podcast we're doing the last profit report of 2023. While the year isn't over, my December profit report/year in review won't come out until January so while it seems like I'm wrapping up the year, there's still a month and the end of my current Unf*ck Your Biz launch left to go. Like I start every profit report, we're recapping our 2023 goals which we've moved further away from as the year goes on. I think it's pretty common for us to drift from our goals as the year goes on and I'm pretty proud of myself that I've stuck to the goal to hit consistent $20k months by Q3. Big goals for 2023 1. Consistent $20,000 months by Q3. → I'm pretty confident that we will end the year hitting it 9/12 months. 75%, I'm pretty stoked about that 2. Get MRR to $20,000 by end of year. → Not even close. As I've talked about in previous episode, we scrapped this one early into the year due to changing business models. 3. Get expenses under 35%, bringing up to 65% profit. → We updated this to a more reasonable 40%. Year-to-date we're at 43%. Probably going to finish there so not close but we've invested in a lot of good stuff but I don't think I spent money this year on anything big that I regret. Been noodling on 2024 goals. Right now I'm thinking... 1. $25k months 2. $15k MRR - a stretch goal I hope to reach by end of 2024 3. 60% Profit - Get down to 40% from 43% I've been going back and forth on if we do profit reports in 2024. If you enjoy these episodes, let us know or tag us on Instagram. If we do them, I'm going to share our business promise on each episode. What Happened in November This was an expensive travel/promotion month. Puerto Rico - I ended October/started November speaking at the Association of Bridal Consultant Conference in San Juan. I loved the vibe of this event and recommend wedding pros check out ABC. It was a really intimate event and I really enjoyed it. Wedding MBA - A much larger scale than ABC. It's now become our annual event to see almost everyone we know in the industry. I'm hoping to go to more events each year and not just wedding industry, I'd love to meet all of you. November Projections vs. Actual Low Ticket Items: $6,000 → $8,000 (We did a Wedding MBA bundle of the Contract Club, Tax Toolbox and my book, regularly $90, for $75. We did about 70 bundles) UYB: $3,800 (3 pre-registrations) → $1,000 (I anticipated more pre-registrations than we got) PRx: $4,000 → $4,750 Legal: $4,000 (3ish trademarks and a couple LLCs) → $3,000 Tax: $4000 →. $3,000 Consults: $0 →. $0 Total: $21,800 → $21,600 (some projections were higher, some were lower and it all balanced out. I consider anything within $1,500 I consider to be spot-on.) Let's go through the expenses and talk profit... Expenses Team contractors - $320 Employee wages (not including mine) - $5,100 (almost double some months because I had a couple employees with me working our booth at Wedding MBA) Wages (mine) - $2,900 Taxes - $2,000 Monthly tools - $500 (I'm really hoping to cut this down in 2024) Insurance - $45 Marketing - $260 (pretty low) Meals - $500 (a lot higher than normal since we were traveling and picking up the tab for some meals with team members) Online programs - $256 Other expenses - $3,000 (mostly hotels from travel) I also have some other things coming up I paid for, like a quiz we hired Ava and the Bee to create for us. Total: $11,000 Owner profit: $10,300 Profit: $5,300 after salaries I primarily look at owner profit when I look at my own profit so we were at about 50% so not great but on big travel months I aim to break even, which we did at Wedding MBA. At big conferences like that KPIs are not always trackable because you never know if someone will join our Unf*ck Your Biz launch, hire us for a tax return down the line, or become a trademark client two years from now. What's happening in December... We're wrapping up our Unf*ck Your Biz launch so I won't talk about it too much on this episode, I'll debrief it more in the December profit report. But we have some other exciting stuff coming up in January and February. December Projections: Giving you a sneak peek at our 2024 offers and our new mantra, "No new offers in 2024." I've created a game plan for 2024 and what we'll launch and when and I plan to not deviate off of that. The way I've structured our December projections is a bit different, it's how it will be set up in 2024. UYB - $17,000 (usually our biggest launch of the year. This is a huge question mark since it's launched as a done-for-you service for the first time. This includes some paid in full payments and the first $1,000 payment of the other payment plan purchases, Contract Club - $1,000 (My average month-to-month) Low Ticket - $200 Legally Launched - $400 (I wasn't planning on announcing this but here's a sneak peek for my listeners. We're changing this from a $10 course to a new course with a new course promise and objective for $250. It essentially will be our alternative to Legal Zoom. We'll roll in out in January with a launch but I plan to offer it as a downsell to folks who don't buy Unf*ck Your Biz). Profit Rx - $3,800 Legal Rx - $2,000 Tax services - $2,200 (locked in for monthly bookkeeping clients, I'm not expecting to get new clients for this in December) Trademark - $0 Other - $1,000 Total - $27,600 If we hit this projects, that would put us at $262,600 YTD which I would be ecstatic about because our original good, better, best goals for the year were $200k, $250k, and $300k so we have a pretty good cushion to hit our better goal. I'm really proud of the consistency in revenue this year. Our lowest month was January with $12,600 and then we had a big spike February - May when the law firm started offering 1:1 services. It took off a lot faster than I thought it would and then things started to level off in the summer. September was our second lowest month of the year at $16,600. October went back up to $20k and November was $21k. If we hit $27k in December it will tie with March and May for highest revenue months. Two years ago when I was primarily doing course launches I would see like two $20k months and then every other months would be at like $4k and we were struggling to meet expenses. It was my goal to level out that bar graph so super happy about that. What's happening in January and February... January - We're doing either a little or big launch of Legally Launched. How big will depend on how things are going in the business but this will give you a chance to file your LLC or S Corp at a more accessible price point compared to Unf*ck Your Biz. In early February we tend to open up Profit Rx again. Not ready to announce all of the big things coming with that that yet, but know that if you didn't join Unf*ck Your Biz you'll have an opportunity to work with us at a much more accessible price point to help you wrap up your 2023 bookkeeping so stay tuned. Don't go elsewhere, we'll be there to help you and get it wrapped up with us in plenty of time for tax season. Enjoy today's episode? Send us a DM on Instagram and let us know @notavglaw

On today's episode of the podcast I'm introducing you to Unf*ck Your Biz, a step-by-step, done-for-you service to get your legal + tax shit in order once and for all. This is a new version of Unf*ck Your Biz, now offered as a signature service for the first time. To learn more visit unfuckyourbiz.com, First, let me share the back story on Unf*ck Your Biz (UYB). In 2018 I came up with the concept at a live mastermind event in Austin, TX. The people at my table were asking me questions and I said business owners would often come to me once their biz was already fucked and I helped them unfuck it and the idea clicked from there. My friend Meghan asked me if I had a signature framework and at the time I didn't know what that was. So I thought about what the ideal process would look like for every single person who came to me wanting to unfuck their biz and I mapped it out. At the time it was five steps (it's now six) and I launched my first course in the fall of 2019. That first round I made $18,000 in my beta program and people really liked it. After that I had a videographer come to my house and we recorded the full course. I made it a $2,000 program and had 20 people join. And then we launched again and had 20 people join. I ended up having 75 people go through that iteration of the program. In 2021 I ended up pivoting after a step back in revenue. We ended up taking away UYB as a group program and we introduced Profit Rx, our group membership. It worked really well and brought in over $100,000 in revenue in the year and half we ran with that. Ultimately I decided people needed the accountability of a group program again. People liked that they could join whenever they wanted, but they weren't getting through it at the pace we wanted them to. Earlier this year, we went back to putting all the core tax and legal content into Unf*ck Your Biz and launched it as a group program again and made Profit Rx an ongoing accountability membership to help with bookkeeping and taxes and we're currently doing some experimenting with our existing members that's going to add to it and make it an off-the-wall bananas good value. More to come on that in the new year. In 2024 I'm also I'm locking down our offer structure, launch calendar and processes. Listening back on the book Clockwork, one of the concepts is having a core business promise. I decided our core brand promise is "Tax and legal solutions that don't suck." Solutions can be done-for-you solutions, courses, memberships, my book, our Contract Club, whatever it is you need. Not sucking can look different for different people. For some people it could be something you read if that's how they learn best. For others, it could be the cost that doesn't suck (hello $30 Contract Club). Our core values have always been fun, transparency and knowledge/education because we want business owners to be empowered. Unf*ck Your Biz is rich with education and at one point our Profit Rx textbook was 800 pages, but that's not fun for everyone. In 2024 I want to prioritize the not sucking part. For most people, learning all of that would be helpful but not fun and doesn't make them excited to join the program. With all that said, we decided to turn Unf*ck Your Biz into a signature high-level, high-value, done-for-you, 1-on-1 service meaning you don't need to go through 800 pages of course materials if you don't want to, though you'll still get my book and our 6 module course with 50+ educational videos, but that all becomes optional now, we'll only recommend the videos that you'll need to go through to be helpful before our 1:1 calls. To learn all the ins and outs of what you get with Unf*ck Your Biz, visit unfuckyourbiz.com. Inside the program you'll get: The Full Course Bookkeeping Setup + Catchup Tax Strategy Tax Return Unf*ck It Strategy Call Contract Audit + Redraft - Trademark Quickie Search Legal Compliance Audit Business Formation Custom Cash Flow Strategy Beyond a full-on book, audiobook, professionally-edited 40+ lesson course, guides, bonus courses, and templates, where UYB truly delivers is with the next level support through… A full series of 1-on-1 support calls when needed, messaging access, and truly done-for-you services. This is valued at $7,500 but for the first round we're charging only $3,000. You can opt for a 3-month payment plan of $1000/month or buy it outright at $3,000, we do not charge extra for the payment plan. I'm actually encouraging payment plans because it's giving us a head start on our 2024 revenue goal since we already hit our 2023 revenue goal and two of the three payments will hit after the new year. We are only taking 20 clients at this initial rate at this time. We won't be opening the doors for another few months, likely at a higher price point. If you want to join, you'll want to do it now at unfuckyourbiz.com. The doors close December 14th and we're getting started with our intro calls right away and UYB officially kicks off on the 18th. Have questions about the program? The best way to ask is to DM me on Instagram @notavglaw.

On today's episode of the podcast we're auditing if your business is as fucked as you think it is. Since the title of the podcast is Unf*ck Your Biz it only makes sense that we'd take a look at if our businesses are more fucked than we think. We're talking about why people make the mistake (and if it really is a mistake) to think of legal and tax things in a vacuum. We're not talking like deep imprisonment for tax offenses, we're more along the line of asking if things are slipping through the cracks because you're not thinking through things holistically enough. For example, business entities, so like whether you should have an LLC or an S Corp, that is both a tax and a legal question. LLCs serve as legal protection, S Corps help save you tax dollars. Recently an attorney I know sent an email saying to hire them for x,y and z before the end of the tax year to get your tax deductions in. If you've followed me for a hot minute you know that drives me bananas because buying things just to get the tax deduction is not great unless you truly need the thing. For example, if you're in a business growth mode, it may not make sense to buy something you need in December if you can buy it in January when you're in a higher tax bracket. It's a nuanced thing and it pisses me off when people make this blanket statement, especially to make a sale. Similarly, we also need to think about contracts holistically because they impact our cash flow, tax payments and savings. This comes together with our payment plans. It impacts how you're going to be able to pay for things for example, are you taking all the money up front and you spend the money up front and don't have any left when you finish this project eight months later, that will impact you. Same with refunds. You need iron clad refund policies or you may find yourself issuing a refund that hits your bank account when you don't have the money to cover it. Same with bookkeeping. We can't give you solid tax strategy if you don't have your books done. I equate this to if you hired someone to do branding but you don't know who you're marketing to. You need to determine that based on several factors and is something you should know before you spend money on a designer. Same with knowing your messaging before hiring a copywriter. Neglecting one thing in our business can impact another thing we're doing really well. For example, it's great to outsource tax services but if you don't do your bookkeeping, you also need to outsource the bookkeeping service so you can have your taxes done and aren't scrambling to do bookkeeping at the end of the year, especially because it doesn't help you keep track of profit and how your business is doing throughout the year. With seasonal and launch-based businesses especially we want to avoid a feast or famine situation in business where you're left struggling for money in the slow seasons of your business. Same with contracts, if you don't have a solid contract and multiple clients come asking for refunds to big projects at the same time you may be left scrambling, and it may not be a client problem. It's also time to rewrite your contracts. These situations can impact the oh-shit cycle and leave you with not as much money as you forecasted. It's important we take a holistic approach because everything impacts each other - your business entity, your business insurance, your bookkeeping, taxes, etc. Enjoy the episode? I'd love to hear about it. Tag me on Instagram or send me a DM @notavglaw

On today's episode of the podcast I talk about the importance of having a brand from the start as well as trademarks and copyrights. When you have a business, you need to think about the value of your brand and then help that drive your business decisions. To learn more about the technical aspects of this, I write about it in my book, Unf*ck Your Biz (unfuckyourbizbook.com). Don't have the book? I'm giving away a free chapter to go with today's episode at notavglaw.com/chapter13 This topic has been top of mind since I helped a few clients over the past several months with both buying and selling businesses. What gets people interested in buying a business is essentially the brand, maybe the systems too, but most of the time what I find is that people have their own systems. Most of the time it's the brand value of the business that they're interested in. When we think about the business, we often think of ourselves and our own thoughts and ideas but it's really our brand awareness for others, and it can be hard to pull ourselves out of that if we are the face of the business. Having a strong brand is a shortcut to word-of-mouth marketing. This is the short-cut folks get when they buy a business, the brand is already in place if people already know what you do and it's even better when we have ownership over that. Branding stays top of mind for me because I'm always thinking how do I uniquely position myself in the market because I'm going to want to protect that down the road. You might not be coming to it from that same lens, but you should start to to help determine how you position yourself and what makes you stand out in the market. For example, I've been talking about changing my Instagram handle from @bradenadamdrake to @notavglaw because while I love having a personal brand and having people recognize me, growing my business and growing my team means I can't do it all on my own and we offer a large suite of services in the business. This also means we'll be better served in the long run being known as a law firm rather than just myself which is why we've been making this subtle pivot. As I'm shifting this branding message about what makes us not average, I've changed the name of our Instagram to @notavglaw to reflect the business name. In talking with a friend about this, they said they always think of me as Unf*ck Your Biz which at first made me think that maybe I was choosing the wrong name because I already have brand awareness but then I thought it's not a problem, it's actually really powerful that when someone thinks of the term Unf*ck Your Biz they think of me and I think it's cool that I own the trademark (and hopefully I'll soon own more of the trademarks I've applied for). I'm assembling these pieces to create a larger brand with a lot of smaller assets with these other trademarks. Even if you aren't thinking about a potential business sale right now, you need to consider how you can position your business to stand out and create a brand presence. It's valuable. You want to be different, you want to be known for something. This will help you come up with better program names if you're in the program space, maybe you're going to chance your business name if you haven't come up with one yet and once you have better names, better frameworks, better things you want to own, you're going to want to prevent others from using them. That's where trademarks come in. Intellectual property also helps us protect the names we have grown from having other people use them to have a solid foundation on which to grow our businesses. To learn more about trademarks, copyrights and protecting your assets, grab the free chapter at notavglaw.com/chapter13 Get on the waitlist for our Trademark Quickie Searches at notavglaw.com/tmquickie

On today's episode of the podcast I'm getting real personal and sharing why even a tax attorney ended up owing money to the IRS. We're oversharing today. If you're just getting started in your business or are looking for help with the tax basics, we have a $30 mini course called The Tax Toolbox (notavglaw.com/toolbox). You can get it by end-of-day Friday for 50% off, making it just $15, using code 50OFFTOOLBOX at checkout or clicking here. We have a lot of folks come into my programs and book one-on-one services who have tax issues with the IRS. Sometimes they're serious, like I've neglected taxes for years and owe $100,000 (this is more of a common scenario than you may think), and sometimes they're I forgot to report one 1099 and now I owe a few hundred dollars, and some are in the middle, like mine. I always hear business owners put themselves on the back burner because they're too focused on client projects. Like the web designer who needs to update their own website. I'm guilty of this myself when it comes to tax things for my business. Last year, I did not make any quarterly tax payments

On today's episode Ashley & Josh chat about the power of focusing on yourself instead of getting caught up in distractions & comparisonitus. Topics include: Their Shared 90's ObsessionPutting Yourself & Your Biz in the SpotlightAshley's Upcoming WeddingKicking Distractions to the CurbKissing Comparisonitis GoodbyeHow Human Design Amps Up Your Biz StrategyMaking Self-Care Your Favorite IndulgenceEmbracing You Without Seeking ApprovalBook Private 1:1 Virtual Mentorship with Ashley Join us for our Free Golden Hour GOLDEN EXPERIENCE GUIDE The Evolve Shop

On today's episode of the podcast I'm sharing my August 2023 profit report. I do these every month to show an example of how you can go about budgeting and understanding your numbers while also giving a real life example of how much it costs to run a business. It is important to note that my business is not indicative of every kind of business. Whether you do or don't have a team and depending on how much you do or do not work, how many ads you run, if you have a product or service based business, those are all factors that impact how much it costs to run your business. Let's start by recapping my 2023 goals: 1. Consistent $20,000 months by Q3. We're ahead of schedule! We hit it this month so we are at 6 out of 8 months so far this year. Yay! 2. Get MRR to $20,000 by end of year. It wasn't necessarily a realistic goal to begin with, more to strive towards that. Definitely not going to happen this year, especially based on ways we've restructured programs and payment plans. It's probably going to replace goal #1 in 2024. 3. Get expenses under 35%. YTD, I'm at like 41%. Got some work to do. It's crept up a bit more with some big expenses. Probably going to have to pivot to a 40% goal Here's what happened in August Delivered first batch of Trademark Quickies and onboarded new clients Started Fall cohort of Unf*ck Your Biz Ran an affiliate contest August projected vs. actual revenue Low Ticket - $3,000 → $2,200 $1,000 more than last month But far less affiliate sales than expected. Need to give more notice and we had some link issues. $1,600 from Contract Club UYB - $8,000 → $1,350 (way off) Some lessons learned here. Was hopeful I could maybe do 4 launches a year, but I'm probably going to need to scale it back to 2. The program works best for everyone with at least 15 students. Ideally 20-30. PRx - $5,000 → $4,600 Our alumni program for Unf*ck Your Biz, we already have about 50 members. Tax Stuff - $1,000 → $4,000 Apparently, I haven't really paid attention to how much MRR we have here because we have at least $3,000 from monthly bookkeeping clients and we have pretty good retention. Legal Stuff - $7,000 → $11,600 $9,000 of this was Trademarks. About spot on, but we did 5 marks for one client Consults - $0 → $0 Total: $24,150 → $25,129 Expenses Total → $13.000 (my highest month of the year so far) Team contractors - $865 Employee wages - $2,600 (Pretty standard. This does not include my wages) Outside contractor expenses - $1,500 This was the first of two $1,500 installments for a project I hired a contractor to do. Not ready yet to disclose this project. Owner wages - $2,900 (what I pay myself) Owner tax - $2,500 (goes to the IRS) Monthly tools - $850 (I paid a $300 annual expense which arguably shouldn't go in monthly tools) Insurance: $45 for now (will be going up soon) Marketing - $500 Meals - $48 Online programs - $453 Client fees - $2,500 (These are the trademark filing fees. I bake this into the price of my trademark services flat fee the client pays and then I pay the fee) Other expenses: $3,200 (These were travel expenses. I am flying to Puerto Rico at the end of October through beginning of November to speak at the Association of Bridal Consultants conference and then the week after that I'm going to Wedding MBA and am covering the flights for two of my team members who are also coming). Affiliate payouts - $368 Expenses were 52% of revenue went to expenses this month so a profit of 48% so 8% higher than where I'd like it to be but really I'd like it to be at 35%, not 40%. Upcoming Expenses Another $1500 to contractor $1500 to Vegas hotels and flights $1000ish in swag orders for Wedding MBA Upcoming Projects Doing a big affiliate push in October (meaning a higher projection of low ticket sales in October over September) A potential exciting update with the Contract Club to make it even better, which also means a big expense Working on Profit Rx My projected revenue for September Low Ticket: $1,500 UYB: $1,400 PRx: $4,000 Legal: $8,600 (6 trademarks) Tax: $3,000 Consults: $0 Total: $18,500 Want to see my actual books (and maybe even watch me update it live) for free? Head to www.bradendrake.com/bradensbooks to see all of my numbers.

On today's episode of the podcast we're breaking down the ins and outs of trademarks. We're covering how I got into trademarks, a new idea I've recently had and how it's been going, and then a short section from my book all about trademarks and finally, a few quick tips. As of March of this year I've been doing trademarks in batches for clients. I take about five every other month schedule but I foresee this ramping up with my new offer. I've started doing Trademark Quickie Searches (Learn more here: www.bradendrake.com/offers/szLipL33/) Filing for a trademark can be fairly complex if done right. When I started offering the Trademark Quickie Searches I had someone say, "don't you just go to the trademark website and search for free?" and the answer is yes, but that's equivalent to doing a Google search and expecting to synthesize the answer from a scan of the first page of results. When you do trademark searches, there are particular circumstances where you can find a registered trademark somewhat similar to your business name and if you're not a trademark expert you may not know how similar your trademark is to know if it will be approved. For example, it's not just spelling, it can be pronunciation, similar services, etc. so we use complex search formulas and there are expensive trademark attorney softwares. For $30 you can get a Trademark Quickie search. Get on the waitlist (waitlist members get first dibs) at www.bradendrake.com/offers/szLipL33/ Now to dive into the trademark section of my book. Generally speaking the first person to use a trademark in the marketplace owns that mark and has general protection against those who use it. This is a default protection. We don't have to do anything, but registering for a trademark provides a whole list of benefits. Typically when we're talking about trademarks, we're talking about registered trademark. To qualify to be registered, the name or logo must be unique enough to earn recognition on its own or have earned recognition over time. Likelihood of confusion is also important. If another mark is too similair to yours, you may be able to go to court over it if there's confusion. Identical marks can exist in the market. It's important to note that an LLC name does not give you the same protection as a trademark. An LLC is a trade name, one we use for banking, billing, taxes, and other official services. For example, I am Braden Drake LLC but I have a trademark for Unf*ck Your Biz. You can read more about trademarks in the book. Get your copy at unfuckyourbizbook.com I recently had a client call and while I'll never give percentage odds to the likelihood of if you'll get a trademark, I do comment whether or not it may get approved. I told the client it may or may not and while they didn't want to risk that, I told them it's a huge asset to have a trademark if you ever want to go sell your company. I currently have a few clients who are currently buying, selling or planning to sell down the road. While you can sell without IP, it makes it way more appealing. It's best to trademark early so that you don't find yourself five years down the road with an established brand struggling to get a trademark. I also recommend it if you plan to expand outside of your geographic area. If you're a course creator, summit host, have a membership, etc. you want to get your names now. When I started doing searches for event-based business owner trademarks I really thought a lot more names were going to be saturated which means if you're in the event space there might be a lot more opportunity to own your name than you thought so it might be worthwhile to do a search after all. Get on the waitlist and get your Quickie Search done for $30 at www.bradendrake.com/offers/szLipL33/

On today's episode, I share my Profit Report, breaking down how much I earned, what my expenses were, and if I reached my monthly profit projects. The doors will be opening next week to join a mini cohort of the next round of Unf*ck Your Biz (by mini we mean an intimate group of 10 - 20). Be the first to learn when it opens by visiting unfuckyourbiz.com. The program includes access to the six part framework that covers bookkeeping, saving and paying quarterly taxes, saving and paying for back taxes, sales tax, LLC and S Corp formation and cash flow. It includes group coaching and 1-to-1 elements like bookkeeping office hours. Let's start by recapping my 2023 goals: 1. Consistent $20,000 months by Q3. We're ahead of schedule! 5 consecutive months now. I shared last month that I was fully expecting a dip in June and July goes as they're typically the slowest months of the year, but I still wanted to shoot for 20k. I ran an end-of-the-month promotion. Didn't quite get there this month but hopefully will be get back to it in August and beyond. 2. Get MRR to $20,000 by end of year. We're pivoting that to a 2024 goal. Maybe. 3. Get expenses under 35%. YTD, I'm at 42%. Got some work to do. It's crept up a bit more with some big expenses. Here's what happened in July My team and I had quiet weeks All blogs have been moved over from bradendrake.com to notavglaw.com and redirects have been set up We wrapped up another round of Unf*ck You Biz Opened up access to Profit Rx which is now the alumni program for Unf*ck Your Biz July projected vs. actual revenue Low Ticket - $1,500 → $1,420 Book sales - $150 → $120 UYB - $6,000 → $2,700 PRx - $5,000 → $5,200 Tax Stuff - $2,000 → $2,700 Legal Stuff - $6,000 → $4,400 Consults - $0 → $0 Affiliate - $500 Total → $20,650 → $17,100 Expenses Total → $7,000 (41% of revenue) Team contractors - $206 Employee wages - $1,600 (We had quiet weeks in July and also worked on a big project in June that accounted for significantly more employee expenses in June) Contractor expenses - $2500 went to a one-off project with a contractor to create a bookkeeping tracking system for Profit Rx members on AirTable to help us track streaks of weekly bookkeeping Owner wages - $4,300 (what I paid myself) Owner tax - $2,600 (goes to the IRS) Monthly tools - $650 Marketing - $1,000 (a lot went to my Conference Confident sponsorship for Wedding MBA) Online programs - $364 Affiliate payouts - $338 What we're currently working on Revamping our affiliate program A potential exciting update with the Contract Club to make it even better Re-opening UYB Welcoming new Profit Rx members My projected revenue for August Low Ticket - $3,000 (we're doing a big affiliate push this month) Book sales - $150 UYB - $8,000 (My goal this launch is three pay in full students and seven payment plan students) PRx - $5,000 (This estimate is going up because I think we will get some new members from the most recent round of Unf*ck Your Biz) Tax Stuff - $1,000 Legal Stuff - $7,000 (I have several trademark clients coming up) Consults - $0 → $0 Total: $24,150. My goal is $27,000 This is when I typically I ask myself, "Is there anything I can do to make up the difference between my projection and my goal?" I can push my current promotions a bit harder. Because UYB is a mini launch, I'm not going above and beyond on promotion because I don't want to fatigue my audience going all in another launch. Year to Date (YTD) Last year we made $168,000 and this year I made my stretch goal to be $300,000 which is 1.7x more so the way I did my goals per month this year was I took my revenue from each month last year and I multiplied it by 1.7. Last year we made roughly $15,000. Multiple that by 1.7 and you get roughly $27,000. I have an over/under on where we are for the year. YTD we are $4,000 over on those projected goals. What's coming up We're launching the next round of Unf*ck Your Biz (learn more at unfuckyourbiz.com) -‐‐‐------------------ Want to see my actual books (and maybe even watch me update it live) for free? Head to www.bradendrake.com/bradensbooks to see all of my numbers.

On today's episode of the podcast I chat with my legal intern, Madeline Cintron, about the State by State Business Blueprint. Madeline has been working to create a resource I started called the "State by State Business Blueprint." This is a resource that is currently only available inside my signature course, Unf*ck Your Biz. In the program I share my business blueprint which is made up of 14 steps, starting with 1) Check for name availability for your LLC, 2) Get your registered agent, 3) Form your LLC but these 14 steps can vary by state. The terminology also varies by state, for example California calls your annual payment an annual franchise tax, but some states refer to it as an annual report fee or annual fee. The point of the blueprint is to give my students the right language to look for in their state and give the direct links on where to go online to file your LLC in your state so you don't find yourself going to Legal Zoom and instead know how to do it yourself. It also makes our internal process easier if you choose to hire us at the Not Your Average Law Firm to file your LLC for you. To give you an example, let's dive into New York. When filing an LLC in that state, you'll want to 1) Get a registered agent, 2) Choose your business name and check availability/apply to reserve your name, 3) Determine entity type and file articles, 4) Get your EIN, 5) Get your seller's permit aka certificate of authority, 6) Get your business license or tax certificate, 7) Get your DBA, called a "certificate of assumed name" in New York and then we move into the post-formation steps. *Please note that they steps are for New York and not for Florida has briefly referenced after they were listed. The same goes for fees. There's the filing fee and the annual fee. In some states there's a business license fee, in some states there's the fictitious business name license fee, it varies state to state. What I've typically found is that states with high filing fees have low annual fees and vice versa. For example, in California our minimum annual fee is $800 but our filing fee is only $70. To get access to the State by State Business Blueprint, sign up for our next round of Unf*ck Your Biz at unfuckyourbiz.com

On today's episode, it's time for my June Profit Report where I break down how much I earned, what my expenses were, and if I reached my monthly profit projects. This episode is coming to you a bit after our typical report time as my team and I just wrapped up quiet weeks where we take 2 weeks of no internal or client meetings. Doing it midway through the month means my projects should be pretty spot on, but we will see on next month's episode. I share my numbers because I think it's important to share our numbers. I'm not saying plaster them all over the internet, but share them with your close friends. Let people know when you're having a down month. It's helpful to get advice and also know we're not alone. Knowing our numbers helps us really know our business, understand highs and lows, understand when we might be struggling during the year, and more. Let's start by recapping my 2023 goals: 1. Consistent $20,000 months by Q3. We're ahead of schedule! 5 consecutive months now I shared last month that I was fully expecting a dip in June and July goes as they're typically the slowest months of the year, but I still wanted to shoot for 20k in June (and in this month (July)). 2. Get MRR to $20,000 by end of year. I may be making some sacrifices on this one for the long-term best interests of the business, so we shall see where it goes.4 3. Get expenses under 35%. YTD, I'm at 40%. Got some work to do. Not sure I'll get there so we'll see. Here's what happened in June I attended the Kajabi summit in Austin, Texas. This was a last-minute networking/inspiration conference. I walked away with a strategy idea that I've implemented in my business. We've had extra projects going on around here so a lot of extra payroll expenses. June projected vs. actual revenue Low Ticket - $3,000 → $1,700 ($1K was Contract Club. We also launched our Quarterly Quickie last month) Book sales - $500 → $180 UYB - $3,500 → $3,850 PRx - $6,000 → $5,000 Tax Stuff - $2,000 → $5,375 Legal Stuff - $5,000 → $4,200 Consults - $0 → $0 → $500 Total - $20,000 → $21,500 What we're currently working on After quiet weeks I'm feeling refreshed, recharged, and excited about what's coming up. Here's what we're working on: Wrapping up our Spring/Summer cohort of Unf*ck Your Biz (our next big launch is coming in November but if you're ready to do it now, we're doing a mini launch in August so if you're interested, send me a DM on Instagram or an email and we'll get you on the list) I'm moving our blog posts over to notavglaw.com and wind down bradendrake.com but I'm continuing to analyze that decision. My projected revenue for July Low Ticket - $1,500 Book sales - $150 UYB - $6,000 PRx - $5,000 (we might have a spike since our Unf*ck Your Biz members are graduating and will be getting an offer to join) Tax Stuff - $2,000 Legal Stuff - $6,000 (We're also pre-booking for August now so send me a message if you want trademark formation soon) Consults - $0 → $0 Total → $20,650 What's coming up: - Revamping our affiliate program - Chat bot stuff - A potential exciting update with the Contract Club to make it even better - Fine tuning some low ticket offers and big projects. More on that next week. Want to see my actual books (and maybe even watch me update it live) for free? Head to www.bradendrake.com/bradensbooks to see all of my numbers.

On today's episode of the podcast, I sit down with Haley Johnson to create her contract for one-on-one marketing services and explain how you can use the Contract Club to do the same for your business. Get your copy of the Contract Club and pay just $30 for lifetime access to all the contract templates you need. Check it out at notavglaw.com/club Check out Haley on Episode 250 of the podcast where we dig into her profit & loss statement and talk about her income breakdown. Haley offers one-on-one marketing strategy and marketing copy for other service providers. She recently had an issue where a client did not like her contract and wanted Haley to use their contract instead. Ultimately Haley said no and they didn't do the project, but she felt like it was time for her to feel more confident in her contracts so she didn't have to do so much back and forth with clients. For this contract, Haley is looking to create a project-based contract (as opposed to a retainer-based contract or hourly contract). To follow along visually with this contract creation, check out the video at bit.ly/ContractClubTutorial Haley currently owns the Contract Club and used it to create her contract. She feels confident in it, but when a client asks her a question she starts to feel like maybe she fucked it up. For the purpose of the podcast, we are going to recreate Haley's contract from scratch. To get started, we log into the Contract Club and start with Module 1A, service-based client contracts. Part one of the contract is the intro where you'll watch my quick nine minute tutorial and get the intro terms to copy/paste into your contract. For Haley, we're using Option #2 because it is not an event-based contract. This contract is for marketing strategy services between the company (Haley E Johnson LLC) and the client. For Part 2, we grab our scope of services. For Haley, she sometimes gives both a proposal in an email and then the scope of services in the contract. We select Option 2 where we enter in the scope of services. In the Contract Club, you'll go ahead and delete all the blue text from my template. For payment, Haley typically sends a Thrivecart link where they can pay in full, 50/50 or set up a payment plan. This can make the contract tough because you want your contract to be specific to how the client is paying. Personally, for my Thrivecart checkouts I have a different contract at the checkout for each payment method and I clone the contract and edit the relevant text. In the Contract Club you'll find 11 pages of payment terms so you can choose what best aligns with how you charge. You want to specify the methods in which the client can pay. In Haley's case, since they're paying on Thrivecart, you'd say credit or debit card (this way Haley doesn't have to fuck around with cash or checks). Moving on to a cancellation agreement, if Haley's client cancels, they don't get the first 50% down payment back for any reason. Haley wants to add a project restart fee because often what happens is she has a client start date and then the client ghosts in the middle so she isn't able to keep to the tight turnaround and it throws off Haley's schedule to work with other client. What I recommend is outlining the project timeline, which needs to be tweaked client to client, and say that if the client is non-responsive for X days, then we have a restart fee of $X. Looking at the Additionals section of the Contract Club, Haley should add the additional services section which states that should the client ask for any additional services not included, she will provide them a quote. If you send a quote and they want to add to their project, you can either send them a new contract for a new scope of service, or you can send them a new contract that cancels the previous contract. Now we're in Module 1, Part 6 of the Contract Club, Industry Specials. This is where you'll find contract terms that are specific to you such as photo editing for photographers or age requirements for boudouir photographers. In Part 7 are the legalese maybes that maybe you do need or maybe you don't and they go at the end of the contract before the legalese must-haves that I cover in Part 8. It's important to watch all of the Contract Club videos that go along with these so you get all the details and understand what you need to add to your contract. For Haley, the legalese maybes about copyright ownership and permitted use are terms that she always gets questions on from clients before they sign the contract. In Haley's instance, I (and several others) would object to Haley owning the copyright to what is created and it's reasonable for clients to question that. That legalese maybe would be mainly added into contracts for photographers, they want to own the copyright to the photos and give the client the license to use them. When I hire a copywriter to write my sales page content, I want to own the copyright, I don't want them to be able to go use that copy other places. Haley had been setting the copyright ownership as hers because she wanted to be able to use the content as portfolio work, and I have a different provision for that. Haley also doesn't want the coaches she works with to be able to use the marketing materials she creates for them as a resource in their program and selling them. We're talking about multiple things here - the copyright of the stuff that you write for the client versus the copyright of resources and materials you provide to them that supplement the project. For example, if you join Unf*ck Your Biz and we draft your contract, I'm not going to say I own the copyright of that contract because you need to be able to go send it out but I would have a separate paragraph saying that I do own the copyright to any of the videos, guides, and everything inside Unf*ck Your Biz. For Haley, she should pull the copyright language from the course creator section of the Contract Club. When Haley creates a quiz for real estate agents, she wants to make sure they use it as a lead generator and don't turn around and sell it as a quiz template for other real estate agents. To avoid this, Haley should grant the client a license right to use that quiz in the purpose it is intended to be used and include the language that they don't have the right to create derivative works off of that quiz and resell it. I don't typically encourage anyone to get too creative with copyright language via the Contract Club because there's a lot of loaded legal jargon. If you have a lot of copyright concerns, I recommend you work with us one-on-one in my $200/month in our legal subscription. Get in Touch with Our Guest Haley Johnson, Customer Journey Strategist Connect with Haley on LinkedInListen to Haley's podcast, Messy in the Middle Follow Haley on Instagram @haleyejohnsonWork with Haley at haleyejohnson.com

Hey Friend! Running an online business is not a piece of cake, especially when you have a busy life with so many tasks to juggle. As a busy mom, I know how hectic life can get with school runs, extracurricular activities, managing the house and running a business. The good news is that there are things you can do as an entrepreneur to make the most out of your free time, even when you have only 10-15 minutes. In this episode, I am excited to share with you 6 easy business tasks that you can tackle while in carpool line, at soccer practice, or during any other free moments in between your busy schedule. I pray this blesses you! Xo, Stef   Next Steps: Watch the Free Workshop: www.podcastforgrowth.com Join the Stefanie Gass School: www.stefaniegass.com/school Grab Your Freebies: www.stefaniegass.com Join the FB Community: www.stefgasscommunity.com   >   Read the Blog: Easy Business Tasks to Tackle When You Only Have 10-15 Minutes at a Time to Work   Listen to Related Episodes: 593 - Work Full Time? 4 Tips to Find The Time & Energy to Work Your Side Business 494 - The 4 Best Things to Automate NOW to save time and grow your online business 373 - What to Do When You Feel Like Your To-Do List is Taking Over Your LIfe! Outsourcing 101. How to Get Help in Your Biz, ASAP. 352 - Plan a Podcast in 10 Minutes or Less! Stop Wasting Time Prepping! 307 - Profitable Podcast SERIES: 3 Successful Strategies for Efficient Podcast Time Management  

On today's episode of the podcast I'm breaking down why you need to pay quarterly taxes and how to calculate what you owe. Trying a new format for the podcast today, I'm sharing Chapter 5 from my Unf*ck Your Biz audio book to help you understand quarterly taxes and also, being totally transparent with you, to sell more copies of my book, with you can get at unfuckyourbizbook.com If you're looking for help on how to pay your quarterly estimated taxes, I created the Quarterly Quickie, a $10 guide on how to pay which you can get at www.notavglaw.com/quickie. When we become self-employed, we become responsible for our own taxes by paying them as quarterly estimated taxes. It uses the time value concept of money. A dollar today is worth more than it is in the future and we want our money now (and so does the IRS). Much like how you run your business, you wouldn't accept your client payments at the end of the year, and the IRS wants their money when you owe it, not at the end of the year because they have expenses too. Much like you don't have to drive the speed limit, you don't have to pay quarterly taxes, but it will come with a penalty. If you expect to owe $1,000+ in tax for the year and you expect your withholding and refundable credits to be less than the smaller of either 90% of the tax to be shown on your return or 100% of the tax shown on your prior return when the prior return covers the whole year, then you must pay quarterly taxes. For example, Greg in his second year of business makes $20,000 in his part-time garage business. He also gets a salary from his full-time job. He owes tax of $10,000 on his total income. Greg has $7,000 withheld from his paycheck for his full-time job. In his first year of business he owed $8,000 in taxes. Apply the first part of the rule, Does Greg owe at least $1,000 in tax? Yes. He owes $10,000. Now apply the second rule, which has two parts. Part one: What would 90% of the tax due be? Here, Greg's tax due is $10,000. 90% of that would be $9,000. Part two: What was the total tax due for the prior year? Here, Greg's tax due in the prior year was $8,000. The lessor of those two parts is $8,000. Now, ask whether the amount withheld was less than $8,000. Greg had $7,000 withheld, which is less than $8,000. He must make quarterly tax payments. If Greg had $8,000 withheld, he would not be required to pay quarterly tax (but it would still be advisable for him to set aside the appropriate percentage of his income to eventually pay the tax). The IRS has a few tax penalties that range in amount with the primary penalties being 1) Late payment and 2) Late filing. You may initially think the late-payment penalty serves to charge penalties when you fail to pay taxes before April 15th (or October 15th if you file an extension) but that's only partially true. If you're required to pay quarterly taxes, then the penalties start to accrue after the deadline if you fail to pay. The penalty for failure to pay quarterly taxes is far less than almost all forms of consumer debt which is why I always share that it's never worth going into personal debt in order to pay your quarterly taxes though I encourage you to not play games with your quarterlies unless absolutely necessary. Business owners tell themselves, “I'll take care of that when I'm making more.” But every time we get more money, we get normalized to it. We increase our spending and nothing really changes. This cycle is a big part of why I created the Unf*ck Your Biz Framework. How to Estimate Your Quarterly Taxes: Estimate income and divide into three buckets - net self-employment income, employment income, and other income. If you're married, include the total of both your and your spouse's income in each category. Find total and taxable income. To find taxable income we subtract adjustments, the qualified business income deduction, and the standard or itemized deductions. If you're not sure if you have any adjustments or itemized deductions, deduct your standard deduction to start Calculate income tax. Make sure to do a search for the tax brackets applicable to the year in which you're calculating. Calculate self-employment tax on each of your three buckets. Add up your total from steps 3 and 4. Subtract credits. If you have children, don't overlook the child tax credit. Find Federal tax percentage. Find the effective tax rate for federal taxes. To do that, take a step back and find gross income (income before any expenses). Take the total income and add back in any expenses that had been deducted. From there, divide the total federal tax due by the gross income. Calculate state tax percentage. Since we already calculated the federal percentage, you can figure the state percentage as one-fourth or one-fifth of that. If you're in a flat tax state, the process is a bit different. You have to calculate the tax first and then figure the effective tax rate. If you're in a state with no income tax, write 0. Find your total tax percentage by adding your state percentage to your federal percentage. This total percentage is how much of your gross business income you should be setting aside for taxes. Also, mentally note that your percentage may change as your total income increases or decreases. For example, if you were to cash out a trust or IRA, or you were to win some money or otherwise acquire more income (other than by gift), your income would increase. Not only do you need to pay tax on that income, but you need to consider that it will also increase your tax bracket, so you need to set aside more of your business income for quarterlies. The more sources of income you have the more complex quarterly taxes are to estimate, especially when we bring spousal income into that. U.S. tax law allows married couples who were married for any part of the year to file as married filed jointly for the whole year. You should now be able to answer the million dollar question: How much must I save for quarterly taxes? Not sure? Pick up your copy of the Unf*ck Your Biz book or get the audio book at unfuckyourbizbook.com

On today's episode of the podcast I share my May profit report and goals for June. You can get access to my books (yes, the actual Google Doc I use to keep books for my entire business) at www.bradendrake.com/bradensbooks We are back with our monthly profit report but first, let's quickly recap my 2023 goals. 1. Consistent $20,000 months by Q3. We're ahead of schedule for 4 consecutive months now. I am fully expecting a dip in June and July goes as they're typically the slowest months of the year, but we're still going to shoot for $20k in June. 2. Get MRR to $20,000 by end of year. I may be making some sacrifices on this one for the long-term best interests of the business, so we shall see where it goes. To be honest, I think we're still a year/year and a half away from that goal but we're working on it. 3. Get expenses under 35%. YTD, I'm at 37%, so not too shabby. 1% better than last month Now let's take a look at what happened in May. I finished the 3rd edition of the Unf*ck Your Biz book. I'm still waiting for the proof of it and if they look good I'll be able to fill all the preorders. Unf*ck Your Biz launch. The first one in two years, we had 22 students join and we've been having our student calls each week. DragCon. I went to RuPaul's DragCon with my mom to promote DragTax. Kajabi summit. I went to Austin, TX for their summit to learn and make connections since it's the platform I use for all my programs. Diving into my May projections, here's how they compared to my actual revenue. ProfitRx - $7,000 → $6,400 Low Ticket Offers - $1,200 → $1,400 Book sales - $1,000 → $460 Tax Stuff - $4,000 → $4,500 Legal Stuff - $4,000 → $4,000 Consults - $0 → $0 I've gotten pretty good at these projections because if you look at them as a net, I was only off by about $300. The area where I really wasn't sure was the Unf*ck Your Biz launch. UYB Launch - $16,000 (provided we hit our goal of 30 students, and about 1/3 opt for a pay-in-full plan) Ended at 22 students but eight were rollovers from Profit Rx and they paid the difference between the cost of UYB and how much they'd already paid for UYB so they could get access to the live coaching. Total earned in May was about $10,000 from UYB alone. Total - $33,200, which was a pretty big goal (I think we did $25,000 in our highest month last year). Ended up doing close to $28,000. Not too mad about that, pretty happy with that. Now, for a look at the expenses. My big expenses of the month were: $3,300 to team $2,000 to marketing (Facebook ads and DragCon. I spent about $1,000 to make $3,000 on Facebook ads so not too shabby.) $2,500 to mostly travel (to Austin for Kajabi and LA for DragCon). Total expenses (not including my salary): $9,900 (some of the ig expenses, like hotel for DragCon, were paid in April. Owner profit: This is the revenue minus expenses (not including my personal salary as owner of the business) $17,500 for a 62.5% profit margin (goal is 65%). Whenever I look at my recurring expenses I think that 35% expenses should be good. I could probably keep them under 30% but there's always an extra 5-10% for one-off business trips like my time in Austin. June profit will be down most likely. Payrolls are up, but we're working on some big projects including updating my offers and promoting UYB in an evergreen funnel. One of my lawyers is working on a blog post on sales tax and my law school intern is working on a resource about state-by-state employee classification that will be available inside Unf*ck Your Biz. Here are my upcomig June projects projections: Creating new funnel Contract Club promotion Affiliate stuff State-by-state sales tax blog State-by-state contractor resource PRx - $6,000 Low Ticket - $3,000 Book sales - $500 UYB - $3,500 Tax Stuff - $2,000 Legal Stuff - $5,000 Consults - $0 → $0 Total - $20,000 (I didn't plan it to be this way but if I hit this projection I'll continue my $20,000 MRR.

Hi Friend! Is it time to hire a Virtual Assistant and get some help in your online biz? As a business owner, it can be difficult to admit when we need help. We want to be able to do everything ourselves and manage every aspect of our business. However, as our businesses grow, it becomes harder and harder to keep up with everything. That's where a virtual assistant can come in. A virtual assistant can help you streamline your workload, allowing you to focus on what you're good at and what you enjoy. But, how do you know when it's time to hire a VA? In this podcast, we'll explore 3 ways to know if it's time for you to hire a virtual assistant. I pray this blesses you! XO, Stef   Next Steps: Watch the Free Workshop: www.podcastforgrowth.com Join the Stefanie Gass School: www.stefaniegass.com/school Grab Your Freebies: www.stefaniegass.com Join the FB Community: www.stefgasscommunity.com   Read the Blog: 3 Ways to Know if It's Time to Hire a Virtual Assistant   Listen to Related Episodes: 530 - Behind the Business – OPERATIONS & TEAM – How I Went from a Solopreneur to 5 Team Members and 13 Interns 520 - Ready to Outsource? The First Tasks I Outsourced in My Business 373 - What to Do When You Feel Like Your To-Do List is Taking Over Your LIfe! Outsourcing 101. How to Get Help in Your Biz, ASAP 340 - QUICK TIP: How Much Time Should I Spend Training a New Hire or Virtual Assistant? 175 - OUTSOURCING 101! When to Outsource, How to Delegate, and Can You Actually Afford HELP?