You're listening to Cubicle to CEO, Episode 205. Hey, welcome to our quarter to 2023 income report made possible by our amazing sponsor Theory Planning Partners. Thank you so much to the team at Theory for supporting our mission for financial transparency. My name is Ellen Yin, I am the founder of cubicle to CEO. And 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. All right, let's get into our q2 2023 numbers.
Welcome to cubicle to CEO the podcast. I'm your host Ellen Yin. I quit my job without a backup plan and bootstrapped my first $300 freelance project into $2 million in revenue by age 28. On the show, you'll hear weekly case study interviews with leading entrepreneurs and CEOs who share one specific strategy that successfully grew their business revenue. Skip the expensive and time consuming learning curve of testing everything yourself by borrowing what actually works from the best and brightest mentors. You'll also get a front row seat to my founders journey through transparent income reports and behind the business solo episodes. Subscribe now so we can grow together every Monday.
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This income report covers the months of April, May and June 2023. And in that 90 day window, our revenue totaled $126,000. I'm going to be rounding up or down to the nearest 1000 by the way, for simplicity's sake. So gross revenue 126,000. Our expenses were $86,000. And then our profit totaled $40,000. So that amounts to a 32% pre tax profit margin. If you've been around for a while, then you already know that as a business, we aim for a 30% pre tax profit margin in order to maintain a financially sustainable business. So we're on target with our profit margins, which is great for this quarter.
You'll notice that revenue dipped by quite a bit compared to q1 that can be mostly explained by quarter one from the end of last year from 2022. We had kind of front loaded all of these partnership contracts that were coming due for payment at the beginning of the year. And we had a ton of larger partnerships, some of them extending throughout the entire year that were signed in that first quarter. So we got a bulk of the payout in the first quarter. So hence why in q2, we're not seeing as high of gross revenue, but our percentage profit margin, like I said, is still doing what it should be for the targets that we want. Although it is again are worse than q1. So a lots happened over the last 90 days. And it's interesting because since we started doing bonus episodes this year, I feel like I've gotten to get more intimate with the Behind the Business Insights on a more regular basis with you all. So some of these things you may have already been aware of, or looped in on if you've been listening to every single bonus episode throughout this year. But I did want to still go over the highlights of quarter two, and the big events that happened that you should be aware of to have some context as we're looking at these numbers.
So first off, what I feel like really defines this last quarter was the immense number of speaking engagements and the frequency of travel that was happening. These past three months, we I mean, we've been everywhere, we've been to Austin, twice, actually, we traveled to Washington to California, all over the state of Oregon. And in total, I think I did about seven speaking engagements during these three months. So my schedule was very full, as you can imagine. And I mean, there were so many great events, but I feel like the one that really stands out to me from all of the events that I got to take part of was Kajabi Hero Live in Austin, that was at the very end of May. And I had the immense privilege and honor of emceeing the entire conference, which was such a cool opportunity, I have never emceed an event of that scale before. And it really allowed me to shine in my favorite type of work, which is, I don't know, I just I love being able to essentially kind of act as a guide for an event. And I feel like that's what a host or an emcee is, I love getting to be in the energy of the crowd and, and help keep you know, things moving along throughout the day and make our speakers backstage feel welcome. And it was just such a wonderful opportunity. And I'm so grateful to team Kajabi, for thinking of me for that role and allowing me to just have so much fun with it.
And I always joke actually made a real about this, or people think I'm joking, when I say my dream job is to literally read off a teleprompter, they're like, You're not serious, but I really am. Because growing up as again, if you've been around me for a while, you know, my dream from, you know, middle school on was to be a journalist, and I wanted to be a broadcast journalist, someone who worked in television as a host as a morning news anchor or in entertainment news, and so truly getting to be on stage and, you know, read off the teleprompter and give everybody a warm welcome and just keep the energy high throughout the event was truly a dream come true. So anyways, that was definitely a highlight for me.
And speaking has really picked up this year, more so than any year since the pandemic. And I am not really sure exactly what the cause is like, to be honest, all of the speaking engagements that we had in April, May, June, I don't believe I pitched myself for any of them. There was one where I was a moderator for a panel that I did volunteer my services for. But outside of that, I mean everything was inbound and and I feel like the momentum of all of these speaking engagements coming in, really has to do with visibility, where people think of you as a certain type of role. Here's what I mean by that. I noticed when I switched my bio to include the word speaker, and I can't remember exactly when this was but even that tiny, little change in identity really opened the floodgates in terms of how people saw me and you know, what I might be capable of doing.
And so I feel like already just even that tiny tweak started to bring in more speaking requests. And then it's kind of like a snowball that rolls downhill like once you start doing more speaking engagements and getting photographed and storied. And you know, you have all these acids showing you as a speaker, it helps people visualize you and imagine you as a speaker, even more so which only then begets more speaking opportunities, right? So it kind of it's just like a self fulfilling prophecy. The more you do it, the more people see you do it, the more they think of you that way. So then the more you become top of mind for when speaking opportunities arise. And I've been having the time of my life this year, getting to do this. I don't necessarily know how long this this level of momentum will last from the speaking side of things, but I just know I'm really enjoying connecting with new audiences and being able to introduce new people, to our podcasts and to our community here at Cubicle to CEO on the revenue aside.
However, I will note that speaking engagements, thus far, at least, have not necessarily been a huge driver in revenue for us, I think a lot of this has to do with the business model we have now versus then then being like, a year or two ago, because our focus right now is so much on growing our podcast growing our newsletter, both of which are free products to our consumers, there isn't a whole lot of opportunity at times for me to, you know, engage a new person in the audience and bring them in as a paying customer right away in the same way that I might have been able to back when I was still enrolling students in our signature program, or I had a wider variety of digital products that were at the ready and evergreen and available for people to purchase. And so that's kind of been an interesting observation on my part, I do you get paid to speak at these events. So there is some income generated from the actual opportunities.
But I would say that on the back end, that's typically how most people make back their investment of time and energy at these events is, is getting people into their ecosystem, top of funnel and then being able to sell them directly to you know, a product or program or whatnot. And since we've kind of been in this limbo, where we haven't really been offering much on that side of things, the revenue opportunity is really limited to the actual speaking fees that I'm being paid. So while we did generate some income, like I said, from speaking, it wasn't at the level that I think it could be, if you were to give the same opportunities to someone else that had, you know, a lot of evergreen products at the ready for eager new audience members to buy.
So that's actually something that ties into my bigger takeaway from quarter two, which is this, I realized that when we switched from being in the education space, primarily with our online courses and coaching programs for entrepreneurs, and then we retired our signature program, and we switched our business model to a media business model. And that all happened, you know, within months of each other last summer. And ever since then, we've been trying to build the foundation of our media company trying to nail down our workflows for getting this content out to you guys every single week in multiple different formats, in hiring new team members to help with new channels like YouTube, and the blog and things that we previously hadn't invested as many resources in.
So you know, getting the operation side of things down, and then building the foundations of what are the packages and the offers that we want to create. When we collaborate with a brand partner, what types of campaigns do we want to do? What types of campaigns are most effective, learning all of these details and figuring out the pricing playing around with negotiations, and really just starting from the ground up in rebuilding all of these things has taken up a lot of time and energy. And because of that, we haven't really had any space to bring digital products to the forefront in the way that we had in the past.
And so outside of some of the recurring revenue that was coming in from our final cohort of students in our signature program that we closed enrollment to a year ago, which, as of real time of this recording, we're about to have our very last call with our cubicle to CEO students, which is so so bittersweet. I just, I mean, this program has been our baby for four years. And it's so weird to let that go to fully let it go. I mean, we had already closed enrollment, like I said a year ago, but to see our final students kind of graduate, for lack of a better word, and send them off into the world and knowing that we don't have any coaching programs now at all, not only from a sales perspective, but from a delivery perspective is just such a odd feeling to really digest I guess, because on the one hand, it feels like I've had this program forever. And I can't remember a time without it or a time that I wasn't coaching or mentoring students in a very, you know, kind of like direct or intimate capacity. But at the same time, when I think back to who I was when I first created this program in early 2019, I barely recognize that person anymore, not in who I am as a person on the inside, like my character hasn't changed, but just my frame of mind or my perspective on the world was so, so new, I was so green to all of this it was it was just a completely different place, I guess in my life and I've experienced so much since then. And so very strange to let that go.
If any of you have experience something similar like letting go of a long time offer, I would love to hear you know what you're feeling right now send me a DM shoot me a DM @MissEllenYin, we can chat about it. Yeah, it's been an interesting time. So anyways, that's that's what's happening in real time. But let's return our focus to quarter two, which only extends through the end of June. And I'm recording this at the end of July. So we can get more into the details of the retirement in quarter threes income report.
But back to quarter two, my big takeaway is that I really need for the last part of this year. So in quarter three, the back half of quarter three, and then all of quarter four, I really want to focus on bringing at least one to three core offers back in what I mean by that is one to three evergreen products that are available anytime for people to purchase, I want to bring those back into our offers. That way, I think it's actually going to create more capacity for us to grow on the brand partnership side, because right now, like in quarter two, for example, about 51% of our revenue came directly from brand partnerships, that places a really huge burden on brand partnerships. Because right now, with our limited staff, we are kind of bogged down on both sides, we're bogged down on the sales side, and on the delivery side, I can only sell as much as we can deliver. And that limits how aggressively I can pitch for new partnerships. But at the same time, I can also only deliver as much as we sell, right. So it's like if we're so focused on actually executing the campaigns and creating the deliverables and the content for our brand partners. It takes time away from actively pitching and securing new contracts. So it's kind of a double edged sword. And there's not a whole lot of breathing room right now on either side.
I feel like if we had a foundation of evergreen products that were bringing in recurring revenue through automated sales system, so you know, when we're talking about digital products, this is my background, right understanding how to sell through funnels or through cold traffic from ads, driving straight to a sales page, all of that if we can rebuild the foundation with some of those new offers that I've been meaning to create, some of which I previewed in our 2023 vision cast, which was a bonus episode from the beginning of this year, I'll link that below in the show notes if you want to hear what those different products are, if we can finally get some of those up in the last half of this year, I think that's going to create just a better baseline for us knowing Okay, every month we're gonna be able to more accurately project based on you know, our ad spend, here's how much we can expect to make from these products. And that will then allow us, like I said, a little bit more breathing room to then go, Okay, if we have a baseline of X amount of revenue per month coming in from our digital products, then we know, we don't have to rush as much or kind of be in this like feast famine cycle with brand partnerships.
I will say we have been lucky that we've been consistently assigning new campaigns all throughout quarter two, again, not on the same scale, as we did in quarter one where we front loaded a lot of that work. But we still are constantly attracting and signing new campaigns. So this has been Brand Partnerships has been a very reliable income stream for us this year, I just don't want to place undue burden on it and have it be like the only way to generate new income is to actively pitch a specific partner, and then customize a campaign and then have to you know, manually deliver because everything is manual with brand partnerships, right. There's not really any sort of automation around that right now. But I know we can automate with Evergreen digital products, because we've done it before. So all this to say stay tuned for the quarter three and quarter for income reports, I think you're gonna start to see the balance shift a little bit with the allocation of how we are generating income because like I said, right now about 51% of the income from quarter two came directly from brand partnerships. And I'm hoping to see higher gross revenues in quarter three and quarter four, but also a higher percentage coming in from our digital products.
Now, that all being said, I think another thing to note that was important in q2 was this was probably one of the lowest advertising spend quarters we've had in years. I think our average over the three months was 4.7%. I mean less than 5%. Just to give you a little context around this typically for our type of business, we would be wanting to spend And around 25% of our gross revenue on advertising and marketing. And like I said, in the last quarter, we only spent 4.7%, like less than a fifth of what we would normally spend. And this obviously contributes greatly to the decrease in gross revenue for this quarter, compared to actually, I guess that may not be a fair comparison, I shouldn't necessarily say that this quarter's revenue was lower than last quarters, because we didn't spend as much on ads. That's not true. Because last quarter sales were also mostly driven by organic efforts, just like this quarter sales were because so much of the revenue comes from individual one on one pitching through emails that I send, right. So it's not necessarily fueled by ads, per se.
And when we have spent on ads last quarter, it was mostly towards podcast growth, not necessarily ads, attracting new customers into our ecosystem. So a little bit of a different objective. But that all being said, the good news about this, and this is why it's important to track your data in this way is, I understand that ads is a huge growth lever for us that I've basically just hit pause on like, if it were a handle, it's just been like sitting there waiting for someone to pull the handle and crank it back to full gear. And we've kind of just left it alone, like we've put it in lock position and, and we're waiting for the right moment to reengage and pull that lever and let things go again. So once we have our new digital offers at the ready, we're going to definitely be cranking that lever up again, and making sure that we're pouring a considerable amount of money into paid traffic as a growth lever for us. So that was just interesting to know. Because again, if you don't know what you should be spending to achieve certain levels of growth, and it's hard to know, like, Am I under spending overspending because I've been tracking my numbers for so long, I know that we are, you know, hindering our revenue growth, because we aren't spending the ads. But there's been a specific reason for why we've been doing that. And like I said, it's to build up the foundations of our brand partnerships revenue stream, which is unique and new to our new business model as a media company.
Okay, what else do I want to share here, labor has been pretty much on par with what we've seen for the last six to 12 months, it's hovering right about 41% for the quarter. So definitely our biggest expense bucket has been for years now. And overheads increased to 15%. That's higher than it was in 2022. And that's because of a couple of key hires on the finance side of things.
And actually, this is great timing. Because Wednesday, you'll get to hear from Kaitlyn Carlson, who is the CEO of Theory Planning Partners, you've already maybe heard her full length interview on our podcast before she came on, as a guest to share a case study for our retirement for entrepreneurs series. And she was talking about how she is uniquely saving for retirement as an entrepreneur. It's really, really insightful. But on top of that, Kaitlyn is also my wealth manager. So I'm a client of hers of Theory Planning Partners, and Theory's also a sponsor of our podcast, and more specifically, our income reports. So Kaitlyn, I share, you know, the same heart for wanting to help more women feel comfortable with money and wanting to help educate, and increase financial literacy so we can all make better informed decisions. And so I'm so so grateful to theory for helping make this work that we do this advocacy work of creating this free content for you possible by helping to, you know, support us financially through sponsorships in creating this content.
And you'll get to hear from her in our bonus episode on Wednesday, where we're going to talk about why entrepreneurs tend to fall into this trap of infinite scale where they always want more and more and more like they want more revenue more profits every single year, year over year, quarter over quarter, sometimes even month over month, which quite frankly, is not sustainable for most. And she's going to be talking about how we actually need quite a bit less than we may think we need in order to achieve the actual financial goals that we want like for the lifestyle we want to live. Understanding how to actually generate personal wealth from your business is an equation a lot of entrepreneurs miss, right? Like we understand how to make money in our business. We understand how to produce profits in our business, but utilizing those profits to then feel your own personal Well, so that you can build a sustainable financial future for yourself and your loved ones, and not just be essentially trapped within your business. That's a dilemma I think a lot of people haven't quite solved for themselves yet. But that area is something that I've really heavily invested in this year, like the consulting and understanding how to manage that for our business, and for my personal life. And so that's a key area that we've, you know, made some investments in, in this year from an advising standpoint. So hence why our overheads are a little bit higher than they were the previous year.
And then biz dev has been right around 6.6% For this last quarter. So pretty much what you would expect, not a whole lot has changed there. The biggest dip or drastic change on the expensive side really was the advertising marketing, which we are, like I said, going to ramp up in the last half of this year. Now, I think that pretty much covers the big takeaways and the context around the numbers for quarter two other just quick things that happened this quarter that I want to share with you, so I can remember them to you know, years later, when I'm reflecting back on this since these income reports basically serve as an audio diary of my journey as an entrepreneur.
One of the big things that happened in quarter two of this year was we closed the clubhouse, which was my women's co working space in Oregon. And I actually recorded an entirely separate episode on that decision, what led to it and ultimately how that serves the greater picture of what we're doing. I'll link that below in the show notes. If you haven't heard it yet. I think it's a good one. And actually, before you even listen to that one, I would listen to the original episode where I talk about how I opened my co working space, back in 2021. Then listen to the one where I decided to let it go. Because I think you can't really get the full story without you know, the first half. So anyways, both parts of the coworking saga, if we will, will be in the show notes for you. But that was a big thing that happened in quarter two. So I just wanted to kind of say it out loud. And, you know, what is the word, memorialize it in a way.
And then also, you know, got to do some really cool things like go to Laguna Beach for a wellness retreat for myself, I recorded a bonus episode on that as well. My big takeaways from that, like I said, because of the bonus episodes this year, I feel like I've gotten to stay in much closer contact with all of you and get to share kind of more real time what's going on, both in the business and in my personal life as the leader of this business. And so I'll link that below. If you're curious why I went on a wellness retreat and what I learned from it.
I also joined a nonprofit board. This is the first board that I've served on since my college days, actually. So it's a local leadership, nonprofit, that's an extension of the Chamber of Commerce in my city. So that's really exciting. I got to go to my first meeting this quarter. And it was amazing just getting to meet local business leaders and kind of just learn more about the work that this nonprofit is doing. And I highly, highly recommend getting involved in local business, even if your business isn't local, I think it's really hard to separate the impact of where you live. And the work that you do, even if the work you do doesn't necessarily directly touch the citizens of your community. I think that because you live in that community, your work as an entrepreneur still has an impact, if anything, just by you know, the dollars generated by your business that you then spend in the local economy. So I think there's so many amazing ways to get involved. And I think I actually recorded an episode on why I think online businesses should also have some element of in person or local networking as well. So I'll link that as well, in the show notes.
I know I'm referencing so many bonus episodes. But these really are like I poured my heart into sharing what I've learned in all these different areas in depth in each of these episodes. Because I know that if I waited until the income report, it would just be I mean, it'd be a mammoth episode if we try to cover all of these different subjects. But I want to bring them to your attention in case you missed out on some of them. So everything I mentioned, all those bonus episodes will be linked below.
And then finally, the last big thing that happened in this quarter was our ninth pay to create cohort in May. So that was really exciting. I can't believe we've done this nine times now. We had an amazing group of people it was, I would say, not necessarily like a tiny group, like our smallest ever paid to create group was in 2022 it was I think June of 2022. So this one is like an average sized group, I would say. But I, I am very excited for our upcoming 10th cohort in October because we are testing a few new things for this cohort that we've never done before. I don't want to give it away yet, because I know we're going to cover it in the fall. So keep your eyes open and your ears tuned for updates on that. But also, if you're following us on social @CubicletoCEO + @MissEllenYin, and if you're on our newsletter, if you're not on our newsletter, by the way, make sure you sign up for that ASAP, just go to the link in our bio on Instagram or go to Ellenyin.com, or cubicletoceo.co and that form will be right there you can get on our list, but pay attention to what we're doing around October leading up to the promotion. And during the promotion of our October Paid to Create cohort, I think you'll find it interesting to observe and then I'm excited to come back and dissect things with you from like a behind the scenes standpoint once we've wrapped up that launch.
So that's all I have for you guys today. I hope you enjoyed this income report. And like I said, make sure you come back on Wednesday, Kaitlyn will be joining us for a bonus segment. And the topic is really juicy. I already previewed it, but it's really important, I think, for us to really understand what is enough, like how do we answer that question as entrepreneurs when we're always striving for progress, right? We always want to be challenging ourselves. And I think that's a beautiful thing. But also really understanding like, how do you know when it's enough and how not to push yourself into that zone of overkill or or burnout.
And I say this to on the precipice of I'm about to go on a month long sabbatical, I'm actually getting married in two weeks, as of the real time recording of this, I think when you hear it, I'll maybe only be a week and a half away. So that's pretty wild. But August I'll be taking off for the most part, at least from external projects and communications so that I can really enjoy this season of my personal life. And I actually have a really cool bonus episode planned for the future all about some ways that I'm preparing for marriage as an entrepreneur that I think might be helpful to anybody who finds themselves in a similar season. Maybe you're newly engaged or you know, you expect that to happen for you sometime in the near future. I think there's a couple things I'm learning both from a legal perspective as well as just like personal life that I want to share with you guys when we get there. So I'll be in touch on that topic. Again, it'll be after August, but I hope you all are doing so, so well. And I will catch you all in the next episode. Thanks for listening and watching.
Hey, Ellen here, thank you again for tuning in to cubicle to CEO. If you enjoyed today's episode, follow our show on Instagram at cubicle to CEO for more bonus content and hop on the last Tuesday of each month to watch our live after show with recent guests. If you want to support our podcast, text this episode linked to a friend, leave a positive review on Apple podcasts or rate our show wherever you're listening right now. Please make sure you also hit the Follow button on Apple it looks like a plus sign. Or click Subscribe on your favorite podcast player so you don't miss out on our new episodes every Monday and friends until next time, keep dreaming big!
