EP 231 - Q4 2023 Income Report

Ellen Yin41min

Ellen Yin

00:00

You're listening to Cubicle to CEO, Episode 231. Hey, friends, it's your host, Ellen Yin, just like that another 90 days has sped past in our business. So we're back for another quarterly income reports, I have been publicly sharing my income reports for my business since 2019. So this is our fifth year now of reporting exactly what our business makes spends and profits every 90 days. And if you're new here, you can catch up on all of our past income reports at Ellenyin.com/incomereport. But if you're not new here, then you know, we've been doing this practice for so many years because we really believe that financial transparency is the future and that we all benefit when we collectively share our insights and our data. And we don't gate keep this really important information. So this is part of our advocacy work as a media platform that creates content through a financially transparent lens. And I hope it inspires you to be more transparent in whatever way makes sense for you, in terms of money conversations. So here are our q4 2023 numbers.

Ellen Yin

01:16

Welcome to Cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful founders and CEOs the business questions you can't google. I'm your host, Ellen Yin, every Monday go behind the business and a case study style interview with the leading entrepreneur who shares one specific growth strategy they've tested in their own business, exactly how they implemented it, and what the results and revenue were. You'll also hear financially transparent insights from my own journey bootstrapping our media company from a $300 freelance project into millions in revenue.

Ellen Yin

01:58

All right, so this income report covers the months of October, November and December 2023. Our income for these 90 days totaled just over $149,000. And of the three months, the highest revenue month was December, our expenses over these 90 days totaled $98,000. And our profit was just over $51,000. So that leaves us with a profit margin of 34%. Now, if you've been following our income reports for a long time, then you know, as a company, based on our unique business model, we aim for a 30% pre tax profit margin throughout the year, and some months that may fluctuate up and down. But in general, that's kind of our success metric that we're shooting for.

Ellen Yin

02:45

I do also want to clarify that when I say pre tax profit margin, that is our net income as a business that we keep after all expenses are paid. So that includes payroll, our W-2 wages, that we pay our employees as well as myself as an owner of the business, and then also anything we pay to our contractors. So I know when some people share income reports, if they're a solopreneur, especially, they may treat profit or take home pay as the same as owners pay. But within our business payroll is, you know, labor I should say as a whole is counted as part of our expenses. So profit is actually accounting for what our business keeps after we have paid our payroll costs and any other wages that we're paying for labor on our team.

Ellen Yin

03:35

Speaking of, labor and variable overheads were our two largest expense categories in November and December. And advertising and marketing and labor were the two largest expense categories for October. The reason advertising and marketing was a larger expense category in October and then was not in November in December is because in October, we had our pay to create challenge, which is a live challenge that we typically invest in running ads for. So we did have a launch also in December, which I'll talk about in just a moment. But that was a purely organic launch, we only sold to our existing audience. Whereas with Paid to create, we usually, I would say close to 50% of our enrollments usually come from cold audiences.

Ellen Yin

04:22

So people who previous to the challenge, were not part of our community, we're not on our email list or following us on social media. So we really rely on cold traffic, and particularly running ads on meta, aka, Instagram and Facebook to drive sales for that particular challenge. And we'll talk a little bit more about the 10th cohort of paid to create in just a moment because it was unique in the way that we structured the pricing model for this challenge compared to the nine previous cohorts of running this challenge.

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