Ep. 92 What is Your “Enough” Number?

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Hey everyone, this is Julie. I’m the worst podcaster ever. I’m so inconsistent. But here I am and I got a great question today from a Digital Insider and I thought, you know what, I’m just going to pop on my headset and record this as a podcast.

So the question was, what is your enough number? And this particular person said that they think that they’ve always struggled with building this 8 figure business but then trying to align that with freedom and fulfillment and family goals, it just seems like such a risk to grow with a huge company and employees to the 8 figures, doesn’t even make sense.

So I thought, okay, let me answer this question because it’s an amazing question, and I realized as in enneagram 6, I actually am not the typical personality type of an entrepreneur. So I will regularly see people on Instagram saying, “Oh, I want to go from 3 to 6.” Or “I want to go from 1 to 2.” Or whatever their revenue goals are, and of course at Funnel Gorgeous we set revenue goals, but we set them not because we’re trying to gun for some particular number, it’s more that we want to know that the company is growing. So my enough number personally doesn’t really have to do with my business revenue, it has to do with the number that will help me retire, or stop working should I choose, or if I need to or Iwant to.

So I actually work with Ari, you’ve probably heard me talk about him. He helps us with some financial investing and things, and he talks a lot about this number because most people don’t know what do you actually have in the bank or in investments in order to retire and live comfortably in the lifestyle that you’re at now, for the remainder of your years. And that number is really hard to come up with. I think for me, I would say that that number is about 5 million dollars, as is you know, divested into investments and some cash. But that would be probably the number that I’m looking at. So once I know that I have $5 million invested in various places and accessible to me, I would say, that’s the point at which I could stop working if I wanted to, but I don’t want to.

So in the meantime, I just continue to grow a business that throws off capital that I can use to invest, knowing that I’m thinking, okay, it’s probably going to take me, how many more years is it going to take me to grow that? So here I was answering this question and the reality is that what kind of business would you rather have, a $2 million business that throws off nearly a million in profit, or would you rather have a business that’s making $10 million and throwing off a million in profit? And the bandwidth of a $2 million business is very different than the bandwidth of a $10 million business.

Now if you are motivated by impact, or volume or status, or you want to have a huge reach or you want to grow a big team, you might answer that question and say, “I would like a $10 million business throwing off a million in profit, because probably at $10 million I have a majority of people doing the work, I don’t have to be doing all the things or wearing all the hats, so I’m comfortable with that.” And that’s cool. Or you might say, “I don’t want 50 employees. I want a $2 million business. I want a small team of 5 or 10 people, and I want to be hands on in the business.” So these are the decisions that you’re making. So now if it throws off a million in profit and you have to put whatever, 30 or 40% into taxes, that’s earning, let’s just say for easy math, about $500,000 a year. So if you’re trying to get to $5 million in cash you’ve got to live off that money and then save it. So it’s going to take you 10 years or so to build a business, to build enough cash reserve and investments to retire. And the average person retires at about 65. So you know that’s kind of how the math works. Very macro, not very detail oriented.

So I have this unique vantage point of working with a lot of clients, so I can see on the back ends of a lot of businesses, and understand sort of the lifestyle implications of those businesses. So here’s some things to think about. I’m not going to give you any answers of what is your enough number, but here’s some ideas.

The first thing is that Digital Insiders is my current personal business. And that is a capped business, it will not scale beyond about $2 million a year. I do not want it to scale beyond that. I could grow it and change it and morph it, but I like it. And it has been a steady million dollar a year business, and as I cap out at 100 paying members, it has grown, but that’s going to be about a $2 million dollar a year business, it’s going to have good profit margins, and it’s going to be an amazing way to spend my years working. Now the thing about that business, it’s a full time, 40 hours a week position. Because it’s a small company, I don’t have a big team doing everything, I’m doing a lot of the coaching. So just very, it is taking a lot of my time. So if I wanted to have a business where I didn’t have to talk to a lot of people, where I didn’t have to spend 30 hours a week coaching through Voxer and Audits and Hotseats, then I would need to choose something else.

Now Funnel Gorgeous is a completely different animal. That has a coaching aspect to it, but it’s not a one on one coaching aspect. And then it has course sales, it’s a more scalable business, and we’ve also been rolling into software. That has a much larger team, Funnel Gorgeous in on track to do $4 million this year with about a 40% profit margin. There’s also a second CEO so the capital it throws off has to get divided differently. Plus we have a lot more people on payroll. And the thing with Funnel Gorgeous is that there’s a lot more scaling team, logistic systems management, and less of the heavy duty, intensive coaching.

Now the reality is that for the past couple of years, Digital Insiders and Funnel Gorgeous have kind of thrown off, at least in 2020, I would say they threw off about the same amount of capital. Um, yeah. Sort of. About that. So I can kind of feel from a lifestyle position what it feels like to have a Digital Insiders type high touch coaching business versus at Funnel Gorgeous where I’m more managerial, and I do have a little bit of coaching. But still, what am I going for? Am I trying to hit some magic number with Funnel Gorgeous? No. We are trying to grow. We’re actually trying not to grow too fast. It scares me to death to grow too fast. So that is not something I’m interested in.

So when you’re looking at your enough number, it is really tempting to just gun for some big number without the context. And it is incredibly dangerous, because when you get to that number you’re probably going to be pretty disillusioned as to what it means, because you attached a meaning to it that wasn’t really true or accurate. So when you’re sitting down and sort of building out your value ladder or if you’re a company and figuring out where you want to go, you want to start with that end number in mind of when do you want to retire? What age do you want to be when you retire? How much money do you want to have invested or in the bank in order to retire? And then back into it from there.

And then as you’re building that business, thinking about the different containers that business can go in, you know, do you want to have a huge impact? Do you want to have big volume? Do you want to manage a big team? Do you want to have a smaller business? Do you want to have more intimate and deeper connections?
So those are the things that I would encourage you to think about, as you’re trying to plan out your enough number.

Anyway, thanks guys for listening. Sorry to be so MIA, but life. We moved, we got a puppy, and there’s been a lot going on in the land of Funnel Gorgeous, but I’m glad to be back.

Ep. 87 2020 Recap + Takeaway

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Hey everyone, oh my gosh. I meant to record this podcast at the end of 2020, but here we are in 2021. This was going to be sort of my 2020 recap report and takeaway, and it’s now January 11th. But I’m recording it on January 11, who knows when you’ll see it. But nonetheless, I’m here to talk about the year of all years.

I have to say, I did write this on my blog and I’ve been procrastinating a little bit on recapping 2020, and I think I feel so much conflict because this year brought so much stress and trauma, and crisis to all of us. But in the midst of it, there are so many gifts and lessons that I’ve learned about myself, my relationships, my business, that I don’t really know what to think about 2020.

And 2020 is also the year that I finally stopped keeping everything about my life and business in silos. You know, I was given the advice that you never, ever, ever want to talk politics or religion in business, and I think I held onto that for a long time, and 2020 was really the year where I finally broke free from that. And I have a few reasons why. I think one of the big reasons why I struggled to find my voice was because I was working in an organization and company that has values that are very different from my own. And it has taken me a long time to come to grips with how much of the real me I was suppressing in order to fit in a role that I was in.

You know, I have nothing but warm feelings and respect for the people over at Clickfunnels because they have been critical to a lot of my knowledge and expertise and visibility. So I just want to honor them in that, but there is a real thing that happened to me when I became a part of that company, representing that company, that my voice kind of went dormant. And that’s because my voice is in direct contradiction to a lot the things that their voice is in. So I left in 2019, but I think it took me 7 – 8 months to really feel my way back into the world.

So for 2020 I started talking about politics, the election, Black Lives Matter, the Coronavirus, and then I also started talking about fun things like plant based living and eating and gardening and birds, and all that kind of stuff.

So this year was interesting because I lost thousands of followers, in fact, I’ve culled my email list in half, and yet, my business is still growing. So I know there’s a really important lesson in there. It obviously sounds really cliché, but it is the stay true to yourself mantra and to continue to deliver value. And your business will be fine, no matter how dorky or unpopular your opinions may be.

So that’s sort of a big overview of some of the significant changes that have happened in 2020 personally and what you’ve seen publically through all my channels and my email list.

Now financially 2020 was a great year. For my revenue in 2020 it was 2.24 million dollars. And my net profit was 1.4 million. Now that is an enormous success, and also a really important lesson there, which is that my revenue in 2019 was 2 million, my revenue in 2018 was 2 million. So I know that 2018, 2019 I was working with Clickfunnels, so it was very hard to be a VP and run a business, so you can see sort of that stagnation of revenue growth there, because I’m not superwoman.

So this year was the first year, 2020, which was a crazy year, where I didn’t have any other obligations. I wasn’t working at Clickfunnels. So you can see that I went from 2 million into 2.2 million. Now that may not sound like a lot of growth, that may not sound exciting, but I have trained all of my clients and students to celebrate all wins. And the reality is that 15% growth year after year is actually excellent in the real world. 30% growth is amazing. And it only seems to be in the internet marketing world that people think that 100% growth is the only kind of growth that you can have.

Now to go from 2 million to 2.2 million is not quite even 15%. So I only grew, whatever, 8-10%. So I’m like, “Okay, what do those numbers actually mean? What do they actually say about what happened in 2020?” because you can’t just look at the numbers, you gotta look below them. And again, another reason why people spouting revenue numbers is not helpful. So a couple of things changed. Number one, I stopped promoting Clickfunnels as an affiliate in 2020, which means I’ve lost a lot of revenue, by no longer doing that.

Now, I still am getting some recurring revenue, but my Clickfunnels affiliate was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So this was a big sort of change for me. I stopped selling my create your laptop life membership. I had you know, about 700 or 1000 people in a $50 a month membership. I sunsetted that so that I could work on this new project, FG Society with Cathy. I also stopped selling TDG, that was my $2000 program.

So basically, I stopped selling everything except for Digital Insiders. So when I look at my revenue and I say, “Okay, I stopped selling most of what I’ve been doing, and I still grew by 8-10%.” That’s a sign that it was an excellent year. Right, because I mean that’s awesome. It means doing less but making more, which is what everybody wants. Now if you look at my net profit in my business, which was 1.4, the thing is that that is my most profit year to date. So even though I only grew by whatever it is, 8%, 9%, in 2018, 2019 my profit was less. So all in all 2020 has been my best year yet.

And that is despite the pandemic. I had a bunch of lost income due to people who couldn’t afford to pay because they were losing clients, you know there’s that ripple effect. So I did set up a scholarship fund for those people, so I absorbed a lot of that cost. So there’s just a lot of things that happened. And so I’m really, really proud of these numbers because of the story that they tell.

And a bunch of people asked, they said, “So does this include Funnel Gorgeous?” because a lot of you know that my personal business is Digital Insiders, but I co-own Funnel Gorgeous with my partner Cathy Olson, so people are like, “What? How does that work?” So I just wanted to kind of share that, because I didn’t really share it in my blog post.

So the 2.2 million that I earned in 2020 includes my post-net after tax FG distributions. So basically whatever Funnel Gorgeous makes, after the expenses, after we figure out the profit, then we cut 30% off for taxes, and you pull that out, and whatever distribution I get, and the distribution Cathy gets, that is included in that number. It turned out to be somewhere around 6 or 700 thousand dollars, right. So maybe a little bit less, I’d have to go back and check. But my point in telling you that is just to sort of create an accurate picture. And then my point also is to say that if I were an internet marketer who is trying to wow you with my pizzazz-razzi numbers, what I could have done is take my profit and my revenue from my business, and then taken out the distributions, and then just instead talked about my gross revenue at Funnel Gorgeous. And I could be like, “Well look, it was like 1.7 million in my business and 2.2 million, or whatever it is in Funnel Gorgeous.” And I could 2.2 and I could add 1.7, and I could be like, “I did 3 ½ – 4 million dollars this year.”

Now that would technically be a true statement and what would that number show? It’d be like, “Oh my god, she doubled her business. She went from 2 million to 4 million.” And that would perpetuate the lie that it’s easy to just double your business when you’re up at these high numbers. And I think a lot of people, it’s not sexy to say, “I went from 2 million to 2.2 million.” But that’s $250,000, how many of you listening would love to have a $250,000 a year business. How many of you have a $250,000 a year business and work so very hard? But that number doesn’t feel big at that level.

So this is what I’ve been trying to do, and you’ll see in my upcoming podcasts, that I’m really trying to kind of beat this drum to change the conversation around all of the stripe screenshots, and revenue numbers and all that kind of stuff.

So I have a state of the union address on my site, I recommend you read it. I’m kind of giving you the highlight, I went through and tried to figure out how many podcasts did I do, which I was probably super inconsistent with, as you guys know, how many blog posts, where I got to speak, how many emails I wrote, what kind of presentations I built, where I donated, what I was able to do with raises and bonuses for my team, and most importantly how much I was able to change my lifestyle so that I wasn’t burning out.

So that is the story of 2020 and I am incredibly grateful for everybody who has purchased from me, spoken about my business, followed, sent an encouraging word, I really value all of you. And I just thank you for being on this journey with me and if you have enjoyed my very inconsistent podcast, and you would leave a review, or share it, or tag me on Instagram, that would be amazing. Guys, let’s make 2021 a different year than 2020. I appreciate you all.