May Income Report

Another income report? Oh my gosh how lucky are we? Honestly, I am just so happy to finally get “up to speed” and all caught up on these for you babes!

When I started the monthly income reports (you can see a collection of all of them on the blog in our "income reports" category. I was doing it to show the world that you can actually be a lucrative online coach: that success is possible! I wanted to remove the stigma of the “broke coach” and actually show people that you could be wildly successful online. There are so many misconceptions out there in the online coaching world – one of them being “it’s hard to make money.” The truth is, if you put your mind to it and work hard you can shift into an abundant prosperous life.

Let’s give credit where credit is due – my amazing friend Kathrin Zenkina at Manifestation Babe came up with the idea (she’s so awesome.) We need more successful online entrepreneurs showing up to share their income.

I wanted to lift the veil and show all of you the truth behind the business. After all, Lauren of Love is a brand focused on teaching biz babes how to make money online – so why should I keep my income a secret? I Want to show you that what I teach is exactly what we are doing here. And it’s working.

May was a really interesting month. Quite honestly, I think May was the heaviest most challenging month I’ve seen in a while. It was without a shadow of a doubt the most emotionally challenging month of my year thus far. Our income was still strong, but so many crazy things happened that knocked me off my feet emotionally and physically. Have you ever had a month where you want to just hide under your covers and avoid your business? That was May for me.

May total income: $40,854.26

Breakdown:

• Courses and Coaching: $39,482
• Book: $933.76
• Affiliate income: $438.50
• Note: this does not include DoTerra which is not included in any of this month’s breakdown, since I’m traveling and can’t pull up the numbers.)

What I did Differently in May: I didn’t set an income goal. 

Every month I sit down and set a financial intention. “What’s the income goal?” Is something I often ask myself. But for the month of May I decided I didn’t want an income goal. I wanted to take a break from setting high intentions around individual months of income and learn to just be happy and fulfilled with where we are right now. One thing that’s great about Lauren of Love is that we created enough payment plans for our structured programs that we always have residual income coming through, so I have the ability to relax, take breaks and just chill (even if that feels hard because I’m obsessed with my business.)

We didn’t do anything different with our strategy this month: Instead, I did a TON Of inner work. (Which I didn’t exactly plan or prepare for.)

Even though I took a break from trying to achieve a big financial goal, and we knew we had enough reooccurring payment plans out to keep us consistent with our income, May still felt hard. Really hard. If you guys don’t know, I struggle with depression and PTSD so I have random times of the year where things feel really difficult for me. Feelings of anxiety and sadness come out of nowhere sometimes and the only way for me to cope is just to step away and let myself heal. So when my body was telling me to slow down in May, I listened.

Feeling Uninspired. 

The first three weeks of May I did not want to create anything at all. Coaching calls felt a little bit harder than usual. I was feeling overwhelmed, stressed, anxious, and not too sure why. Matt and I fought a bit more than usual and I couldn’t understand why I was feeling so heavy around my work. After all, things were going great on paper.

In the beginning of the month, I felt kind of like a failure for not showing up often enough and for not feeling inspired every single day. “What is wrong with you that you don’t want to create right now, Lauren?” I had to take a minute to grow through that and let myself know that it was okay to not be driving towards a goal. It was okay to feel uninspired sometimes. Once I allowed myself that break to just be content with being present, that’s when I started to notice what was really going on. I wasn’t actually having a breakdown – I was breaking through to something bigger and better in my business.

I had to learn to trust that whatever was going on with me emotionally was actually happening for a greater purpose. When I took the time to really feel into my emotions, I realized that  I was becoming exhausted and burnt out trying to manage our team and all the technical pieces of our business. This was totally the reason that I was feeling disconnected and uninspired to create for my audience.

This was a huge breakthrough for me. I was spending way too much time trying to strategize and manage our team when I should have just been focused on having fun and feeling good!

As a creator, my number one objective, purpose, passion and mission is just to show up and create content every single day that feels good and inspires my audience. That’s it. “Just create, Lauren.” My job is to be a creator. Not a manager. The minute I let go of trying to be everything for every part of my business was the minute I had HUGE breakthroughs around my creation and felt totally inspired again.

Ever since then, the content I am creating feels so aligned, exciting and fierce. My viewership is up and our following is booming. We nearly doubled our podcast listeners in May (I recorded a ton of new episodes I can’t wait to share with you this month) and we hit record breaking instagram numbers (come follow me on @laurenoflove.)  All of this beautiful creativity stated to flow because I let go of what wasn’t serving me in the business and instead, I focused on just creating the best content I possibly could create for my audience.

Let this be a lesson to you ladies: If you love creating – live in that bliss. Give yourself permission to be the creator of your empire and hire people to do the rest as you go. I think we often think we have to do it all in our businesses. If you aren’t a strategy girl, don’t spend hours trying to strategize. Surrender that shit to the universe or hire an assistant. If you have a team and find yourself micromanaging people and getting burnt out trying to make sure everyone is doing their work – STOP. Find someone to manage your team for you. Having one or two part time biz babes can be super helpful, but if it is causing you more stress it isn’t serving you. (see the next section under managing a team with Matt to see how we handled this.)

Another piece of advice, let go of the obsession of fast growth. I think we get in our heads sometimes and think that we have to grow every part of our business really really fast all at the same time. The truth is, slowing down can give you a chance to emotionally process how things are going in your business. It gives you the opportunity to reflect and figure out how to better align with the big vision you have. You can be more intentional with your time and energy when you aren’t rushing fast towards one big crazy income goal every single month. Without slowing down I wouldn’t have seen the disconnect in how I was showing up. I would have kept plowing through and running myself to the ground feeling exhausted.

Managing a Team with Matt:

Like I mentioned, managing a staff has been the biggest challenge for me. And working with Matt has also been a huge learning curve this month. As we grow Lauren of Love I realize I am not in any way shape or form a good manager. I have a hard time holding people accountable. I get worried people won’t like me, or that I will hurt their feelings. I get stressed out and feel like I have to micromanage people. I am also really bad at giving up control and trusting people when they work on projects for the biz. And I’m constantly asking if our team is happy – which I think is out of fear, right?

When I was spending all my time trying to manage a team and make everyone else happy, I was sooo drained in my business. I spent way too much time thinking about how to grow my audience and how to strategize our next launch, or what so and so was working on, that I was spending zero time in my bliss. Inspiration, creativity and fulfillment are hard to come by when you are running on empty.

Losing Team Members. (almost.) 

Another upset in our business was almost losing one of our team players. Let me say this:Lauren of Love has an amazing team. I absolutely LOVE the girls who work with us. But in May one of our girls sent a note that she was resigning. And I nearly broke down. Truly I was devastated. I cried, I felt sad. I felt abandoned. I thought I did something wrong to have someone want to walk away from our company. It made me so sad and drained a lot of my energy.

Matt is an amazing Manager, and after working through it, we found an amazing way for all of us to continue to work together. It was great. But I think I learned a lot about trust and building a culture within a business. – Something I never had to really think about when I was a soloprenuer.

Lessons Learned: 

1. Take a full month to stop obsessing about hitting a new financial milestone and watch what happens (it’s magic.)
2. If you aren’t good at something in your business, hire someone else to do it.
3. If your bliss is creation, live in your creation and delegate the rest.
4. Your audience needs you to show up and focus on creating for them – so don’t feel like you need to spend all of your time in strategy.

Business Goals for June: 

1. Double our monthly listeners for the Badass Business Podcast. (We almost hit 5K downloads for the month of April.
2. Try a new courses strategy (We only did under 1K in evergreen courses this month so we are going to try something new for June – Announcements coming later this month.)
3. Hit 50K revenue

Personal Goals for June: 

1. Meditate every day for 30 days.
2. Adapt a solid healthy sustainable gym routine.
3. Spend more time on Dates with Matt (we’ve been working so hard, we want to have fun now!)