A month or so ago I was watching a video from one of my favorite business coaching experts, Dave Crenshaw. He was discussing 5 things you should track as a business owner or entrepreneur. Believe me, there are dozens of numbers a business can track. The main 3 are cash on hand, net profit and your salary. Everything else is just a part of those three numbers. He also suggests tracking 2 other metrics relative to your business. I think Pageviews and Subscribers are a good choice for my purposes. He didn’t suggest making these numbers public but I want to do it anyway.
Transparency
Let me preface this with a few things. These are not my personal finances. These are business numbers only. I have a goal to build a business that will one day replace my fulltime job. I have been told it is taboo to share this kind of information but in the age of information we all want to know. I can look up the net worth and salary of pretty much any professional athlete or celebrity. I can also look up the value of any house. What’s the point of keeping the information private anyway? Okay there can be legal reasons or competitive reasons to be private or secretive. Someone may see dollar signs and find a reason to sue me. This is where I hope my vulnerability of showing my weakness and strengths will earn your trust. Let me explain the numbers I am tracking. Cash on hand is pretty self explanatory. Net profits are income minus expenses. At the moment, my only expenses are domain registrations, hosting, cell phone and other random expenses. Salary is any money I take out of the business. This is the number I need to be consistently high enough to pay all our bills. Pageviews are only monetizable pageviews (ads shown). I get these views in various sites, youtube being a big one. Subscribers is a total of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Blog followers. All profits are shown when collected (not earned). So I may do freelance work in August and get paid in September.
September 2012
Net Profits – $2399.28
Salary: $760.57
Pageviews: 62725
Subscribers: 2609
Breakdown
Net Profits
Freelance Work: $2388.38
Ad Revenue: $0
Interest: $0.21
Affiliate Revenue: $10.69
Expsenses: -$123.62
Subscribers/Followers
twitter: 574
facebook: 85
youtube: 1934
blog(s): 16
Trust Me
Last month while reading one of the four books I read I came to some big conclusions. In Delivering Happiness, the author concludes that his purpose is to increase happiness in the world. He shares some results from research shows that happy people have a few things.
- Perceived Control
- Perceived Progress
- Connectedness
- Vision / Meaning
I know I will want to discuss this further. One thing I am still working on is my vision or purpose. What I want to talk about now is connectedness. Odd, I know, when the blog title is related to finances. Somewhere else, I wish I could remember so I could give credit, I learned that in order to connect with someone or build a relationship you have to make yourself vulnerable. Think about the first time asking someone on a date. You might get turned down! I’ve been there before. You run through the possibilities in your head but in the end you have to put your ego on the line. But once you do you open the door to build a relationship with that special someone.
The person you are closest to has the greatest potential to hurt you. Hopefully, you trust that person. Most likely, that person has made themselves vulnerable to you because they also trust you. I realized that in order for me to gain your trust I need to trust you and be vulnerable. This post will be the first of possibly many monthly financial statements. What are your thoughts? Would you like to see this each month? Any tips for improving?
Enjoy a video!
7 Comments
Laurel · October 4, 2012 at 8:06 am
Impressed at your seriousness about tracking your finances. Yeah, our society isn’t used to such honesty. I remember Jimmy Jingle – you’re kids loved him and it was a great family bonding experience.
My only suggestion is to get a white board spell checker. Gratitude, Micah, Gratitude.
Micah · October 4, 2012 at 10:44 pm
I assign you to be my white board spell checker. Keep up the good work.
Laurel · October 5, 2012 at 1:32 am
Well, I’m willing to do that for the white board, but you must promise to use spell check for the blog? (you need to fix expsenses under the Net Profit category).
Jeff Turner · October 4, 2012 at 3:47 pm
This is a great idea though I might track video views over subscribers as I think it’s the more useful number when it comes to YouTube.
Micah · October 4, 2012 at 5:18 pm
I agree. That’s where the pageviews comes in. That is actually the adsense pageviews. So I go a step further and rather than just views I’m tracking only monetizable views. I’ve considered switching subscribers to Klout score or something like that but they seem to change the algorithm for calculating that fairly often. I think, when talking to potential sponsors and people to collaborate with, subscribers is something they tend to look at for both youtube and blogs.
Dustin · October 4, 2012 at 4:16 pm
I think its great. I wish I could be totally transparent with all my money, but I don’t think my employer would appreciate me posting my salary publicly. Posting personal business finances is another story. I may just try this!
Micah · October 4, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Yeah, I didn’t feel comfortable sharing job salary either. Let me know if you do start sharing. I may change my tune if I don’t continue to show progress. It could get embarrassing. I think the idea is that I know people will see so maybe I’ll be more motivated to make things happen.
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