July’s review was popular so I thought I’d go ahead and share my August review today. It’s a bit different to normal months because I take a break from client work and I’m at home with my daughter for 5 weeks.
What did I get up to??
I actually did a lot more work than previous summers because I’m busy building some stuff in the business. I’ll share that in a minute.
In total, I worked almost 60 hours throughout the month. This is 30 hours fewer than July and June (90 hours each).
Here’s my time-tracking pie chart:
Where my August hours went
As I said, I don’t do client work in August. Instead, I was working on building out my sales funnels and testing a promo for my email marketing membership - The Spark.
Marketing and Funnels are the green and orange segments of the pie and make up 48 hours total.
Funnels includes time I’ve spent on Meta ads. Tasks like designing new ad creatives, reporting stats and building the ad campaigns. It also includes the email funnels and landing pages that are part of the journey.
Running a live masterclass over the summer holidays
Marketing tasks for August included something I’ve never done over the summer before: running a live masterclass (twice!) to sell my membership.
Masterclass promo and delivery clocked up about 10 hours. It did convert to membership sales - which I knew it would because I did the same masterclass in July!
You can’t market the same thing to the same people one month apart, so I used ads to grow my list over summer whilst I didn’t have capacity to grow my list organically like usual.
The membership itself took about 5 hours of my time as I batched the weekly email templates into early September so I wasn’t scrambling to create them the first week back at my desk.
Learning how to increase my average order value
The pink segment of the pie is Personal Development which in August looked like learning how to increase my average order value from my funnels. This has given me a pretty meaty ‘to do’ list for September but I’m a funnels nerd and can’t wait to get stuck in!
Admin, finances and everything else
I did 2 hours of admin over summer to sort out some stuff behind the scenes in my business. In a normal month I spend around 1 hour on admin because it’s not a revenue generating task and my VA handles everything she can do for me!
The grey segment is everything else lumped together. Things like looking at my finances, sorting out tax stuff and tying up loose ends with 1-1 clients.
I wrote a lot of emails (and batched them early)
Once again, I wrote A LOT of emails in August. Plenty went out to promote the masterclass and membership offer and I batched all my marketing and sales emails for the first half of September. I’m not usually this organised because I don’t have the time or headspace to batch so far in advance.
Why this summer was different
However, this summer was different to the ones that have gone before in that my daughter is now 9 and she’s more independent. She went to play with friends and had her friends over at ours which meant I didn’t see her for hours at a time!
We took two family holidays this summer and the first (Isle of Man) was the final week of July so I was around to do some work for the first 3 weeks of August.
We then went to Wales for the final week of school holidays and that’s when I did the personal development learning. I had a couple of hours to myself in the cottage so I cracked on with learning about upsells and order bumps. Call me sad but I really enjoyed myself! I’m lucky because marketing is my passion as well as my business. I just have to be careful it doesn't take over all my spare time.
The highs and lows of August
OK onto the highs and lows from August…
Wins for August:
Enrolled 27 new members into The Spark
Spark renewals continue to hit 55% (awesome for annual membership)
Had a lot of fun with friends and family - highlight was riding the Fforest Coaster in Wales
Got 9 x 5-star Google reviews
Had a date night with Adam
What didn’t go so well:
I couldn’t go to the gym because P is too old for kids club and too young for gym floor
I couldn’t go running in the week as I had P with me
I had a mindset wobble about my business (might share more on this later)
P got upset at the dentist and now I’m concerned she has a phobia which is stressing me out
So, how was August overall?
All in all, August was a great month! I feel happy that I took time out from working to have fun and although my fitness routine slipped, I’m back on it now it’s September so it’ll be fine.
If you’d like me to review September, comment to let me know!