June was certainly an interesting month for us Brits, but as far as business went, it was normal. I like being in a “normalized” business after the tumultuous months earlier in the year though.
I was actually back in London for most of June. Both my parents turned 70 within a few weeks of each other, so we threw a joint celebration for them.
I'm not going to go into my thoughts on Brexit or England's ‘performance' in the Euros, but it was an interesting time to be back in the UK. I've been thinking about moving back and setting up shop in London sometime during 2017, but right now, it's really hard to know what the country and its currency are going to be like next year.
On The Business Front
I used June as a bit of a test to see how well operations and everything were functioning without me, after building the team up in April and May.
I'm pleased to say that aside from having to keep up with emails, most of the business functioned without me. July has continued this work more too.
Profit-wise, there were a lot of expenses associated with continuing to build the team, and I didn't earn as much as usual. Still, I earned a lot of “time” due to being able to take a few weekends completely off, and the whole ability to travel home whenever I want is worth more than pure profit.
I wouldn't say I'm a digital nomad, but I very much enjoy being able to work anywhere in the world. This isn't something new to me as I've been in this position for roughly a year, but the last few weeks have been a breakthrough in the sense I have a lot more freedom of time as well as location.
I have to give a large tip of the hat to the team for continuing to work on systems with me and for taking on more responsibilities. It hasn't always worked smoothly by any means, but the team have taken on a lot of tasks from me, which gives me time to go back to growing the business again.
I've also been able to complete a lot more training and blog posts recently. The case study series I'm in the middle of publishing has gone down very well with the audience so far, and a big part of that was the team giving me an ability to actually sit down and write it.
When you are first growing a business, you can spend all your time on growth, but once a large amount of customers start coming your way, you suddenly have no time for anything but helping them. Even helping them can prove difficult as well, and it's a struggle to make sure quality doesn't suffer.
I'm looking forward to seeing how the rest of 2016 goes. We are now in a position to serve more people and better than ever, it's just a matter of me going out and getting them to come to us.
I do feel like I've been repeating myself slightly over the last few reports, talking about operations this and service that, but in this kind of business, it really is the bread and butter of our everyday lives.
I promise I'll have something more insightful for you in the next update!
Revenue For June
The following is a breakdown of income and expenditure for June 2016 from the HPD site only. This means our direct services, and affiliate links.
HPD Service Income:
Done For You Sites: $20,764
Articles: $5,030
SEO: $0
Keyword Packs: $667 (view keyword packs here)
Total Service Revenue: $26,461
HPD Affiliate Income
Long Tail Pro: $59 (read my long tail pro review here)
Jaaxy: $24
Wealthy Affiliate: $512 (WA is the place I got started online, and I wrote about it here).
AmaSuite: $0
RankXL: $215
WebHostingHub: $2,040
The Hoth: $373 (My review on their main services).
Thrive: $0
Total Affiliate Income: $3223
Total Revenue Generated: $29,684
Slightly lower than previous months but this doesn't include AuthorityAzon or a JV with Fat Stacks either.
Expenses: $18,462
For this, I'm including payments to staff, writers, and keyword researchers, affiliate payouts, and any other expenses:
Total Net Profit: $11,142
Definitely a month that saw higher than average expenses and slightly lower than average revenues, so the total margin was much lower than usual. This is quite normal considering we were taking on a lot of extra staff, generating a lot of one-time and above-average expenses…but at the same time it is something that needs to be watched carefully.
It's natural that when I take on new staff to free up my own personal time, my profit will go down. This free time should also give me the time to get the total net profit back up again. After all, many of our expenses are now fixed and won't increase with additional sales (especially if those sales are keyword packs), but more sales can bring more logistical problems too, and when the company has so many things happening at once, cost leak is easy to spiral out of control.
Overall though, I'm happy with the direction and $11,000 profit is hardly something to be upset about.