Unf*ck Your Biz With Braden Braden Drake

On today's episode of the podcast I'm recapping my May profit report.

I'm bringing back VIP days. The point of a VIP Day is to take super quick action to knock out a big task on your to-do list without all the email back-and-forth. I'm booking 5 slots a week in June and you can get an LLC-in-a-Day, S-Corp-in-a-Day, Bookkeeping-in-a-Day, or Trademark-in-a-Day. Interested? Send us an email at bad@notavglaw.com or DM us at @notavglaw

 

Profit reports allow me to assess my goals and revisit projections. I find that nothing ever goes fully according to plan based on the goals I set in the beginning of the year. Usually Q2 is where things start to change. I made a plan this hear that we've mostly stuck to but I think a lot of the time while we may not be hitting our goals in relation to a plan we set in months past, pivoting may actually be detrimental to the longterm success of the business even if it's beneficial to bring in revenue in the short term. For example, if we're not making a lot of money now, that's still okay if we're warming up our audience to buy for a launch in August. Instead, if we do a promo now, it may bring in some clients now, but to the detriment of our launch down the line. But sometimes you need money now.

Adjusted 2024 Goals

• Good, Better, Best Revenue: $300k, $350k, $400k• Ideally 40% profit but that's looking dicey• Over/under - I encourage you to look at your monthly numbers year-over-year to compare. Are you doing over or under for year-to-date and also month to month

 

May Projections vs. Actuals

• UYB - $6,000 → $8,500• Contract Club - $5,000 → $8,750• Legally Launched - $250 → $0• Profit Rx - $0 → $500• Monthly Clients - $7,500 → $8,000• Tax - 0 → 0• Trademark - 1,250 → 1,250• Other - $9,000 → $2,250 We planned to promote a retreat and this number was going to account for ticket sales but the interest didn't work for the date available so since no one was ready to sign up after one email I was going to scrap it for another time.

Total: $29,000 → $27,500

 

Key Performance Indicators

• We have an email funnel set up that you enter in when you buy a low ticket offer to lead you to our quiz that determines your next best business step. The funnel is working because we saw an increase in people taking the quiz in correlation to our huge spike in Contract Club sales• List growth: 300 subscribers added• Web traffic: 22,000, a huge spike from the already high 9k the month before• Social media: Slow and steady, but Threads got the most new followers (60) because I'm putting in the most effort there

 

Profit

While it was a fairly profitable month on paper, I talked last month about how our credit cards were pretty maxed so we used a lot of that profit to pay off debt. We're still playing catchup and still behind on some expenses from our negative profit in March, which means less profit in future months when we have the money to pay those.

Revenue: $27,500Expenses: ~$17,000Owner profit: $10,162Salary: $1500Business profit: $8500

 

Expenses

Employee wages: $7,000Team contractors: $4500Other contractors: $1000Monthly tools: This is a lot higher than I'd like due to some software we've been using that's been more expensive than I anticipated so we will need to cut some monthly expenses next month.

 

June Projections

• UYB - $8,000• Club - $1,750 (35 sales since we increased the price to $50 this year)• LL - $250• PRx - $500• Monthly - $7,500• Tax - 0• TM - 0• VIP Days - $15,000 (this is a big question mark. I think we can definitely get to at least half of this with a few email promotions, I already have had two sign ups this month)

• Other - $2,000

Total: $35,000 (a big, big goal). I'd be pretty happy with $27,500

 

Back to the over/under:

Last year, we did $21,500 in June. To hit the $300k goal, we need to average about $4,300 over prior year revenues in that month. So this month, we need about $25,000 to b

On today's episode of the podcast we're talking about things that should, and shouldn't, go in your contract. 

Starting June 1st, for the first time since launch two years ago, the price of the Contract Club is increasing, from $30 to $50. If you want to save $20, join the club now to get access to all the contracts you need at notavglaw.com/club

 

Looking at contract provisions and terms, I believe they fall into one of two categories:

1. I agree - For example, I agree to provide these services, client agrees to pay this amount of money, client agrees to provide this to company, etc. These are the typical things that are in our contract. 

2. I understand - These are more acknowledgements of factors of circumstance. They can be in the form of I agree statements, but sometimes it can be as simple as "Client understands that generally our communication hours are between X and Y." 

 

This is the delineation of what goes in the contract. "I agree" statements always go in the contract, "I understand" statements sometimes go in the contract.

 

What goes in the contract:

1. Key terms to the agreement - services being provided, how much you're paying, anything that might cause beef/upset your client like a late payment penalty or limit on number of revisions. 

2. Legalese - Choice of law provision, choice of venue, all the boring stuff at the end of the document that the lawyers right that you may not typically think of needs to go in the contract. 

 

What should go in onboarding documents that doesn't need to be in the contract 

1. Anything that's nice to know - General business hours, best ways to book, how to upload client files, etc. 

2. Core values statements - Include this in your marketing so people know who will be a good fit. Looking back at an example from 2020, there was a photographer and their couple wanted to cancel the contract because the photographer posted something about Black Lives Matter and the couple didn't agree and didn't want them to do their wedding anymore. Core values aren't really a contract term because even if someone agrees to be inclusive what exactly does that mean? I recommend putting your core values on your website above your intake form so they read and self-filter and can include in the email with the contract to confirm you're aligned. 

3. Nitty gritty details about the project 

 

Provisions you can add to your contract (all available in the Contract Club)

• No Master Resale Rights 

• No firearms (at events) - Clauses like this can get tricky since you aren't having every single guest sign a contract that attends an events. The only thing you really can do is have a client inform their guests 

• DJ approval for wedding planners

• No harassment - What do you do if you are made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe

• Newborn photo clause

• Drone usage 

• Parking reimbursement - Client agrees to provide parking. This was created after a band had to pay parking tickets after an event. 

• No pets

• Ad material

• Spelling mistakes - Client understands that spelling and punctuation is the sole responsibility of the client. 

• No print files

The main thing to think about is "is this something I need to address in my contract?" Keep in mind the contract is part of the client experience. You don't want to look like one of those Airbnb hosts who gives you a massive cleaning to-do list before you check out and still charges a cleaning fee on top of that. If your contract is like 30 pages and you look petty to a client they may not want that but at the same time, you need to have a happy medium. You don't want a two page contract because you want them to like you. 

Every clause in your contract has a purpose. You should be able to walk your client through it, and sometimes a preface is good something in the contract email like "Our contract is a bit long, but it serves to protect us both and outline our working process and expectations. E

On today's episode of the podcast we're talking about the most common bookkeeping mistakes we see and how to avoid them. 

 

1. Going to Quickbooks too early

Unless your hiring a bookkeeper who knows what they're doing, this is not recommended and the reason why is because we see a lot of error. From the outside the bookkeeping looks good, but when we get in there we find that it can be a bit of a mess. A big one we see is accounts never getting reconciled and then we have to go back to the beginning of their Quickbooks to start reconciling. We spend so much time having to reconcile clients' Quickbooks that a lot of time it doesn't end up being worthwhile because that can cost you a few thousand dollars. In the beginning it can sound like DIYing your Quickbooks can save you money, but it can catch up to you in the long run so you should hire a professional from the beginning. 

What I recommend people do is just use a spreadsheet. Log your income, log your expenses. If you need help with this, you can have us set it up for you through our Unf*ck Your Biz service or you can get all our bookkeeping, tax and cash flow systems inside the Profit Rx course https://notavglaw.com/profit-rx

2. Not having separate bank accounts

When you start your business, open a separate bank account. Bring all business income and expenses through this bank account and it will make bookkeeping exponentially easier, especially if you hire someone to do your bookkeeping. If you comingle your expenses, we have no way of knowing what's business and what's personal. The same goes for credit cards, PayPal accounts, etc. 

If you spend something from personal, note it right away so you don't have to comb through your personal statements. Technically you should run a reimbursement through your business account and go through a more formal process if you have an S Corp.

3. Waiting too long to do your bookkeeping

Half the benefit of doing your books is to gain financial insights for your business. We do it because we have to for our taxes, but looking at our bookkeeping helps us better understand our numbers. 

For example, to can learn if you're charging enough for your services or products. By looking at the numbers in my business, I learned that I wasn't even really breaking even on some Unf*ck Your Biz clients because I was paying our bookkeepers so much to reconcile years' worth of Quickbook accounts for clients. This helped me know I needed to raise the price, create custom pricing to add on extra services based on what a client needs, and create podcast episodes like this to help prevent these issues for you in the first place. 

Bookkeeping also allows you to search by client and offer to see what is most profitable for you and when it might be time to raise your pricing. This also helps you determine what offers and programs do best during what time of year so you can better promote. If you aren't keeping your books regularly, you won't be able to make tweaks and changes as needed throughout the year. 

4. Overcomplicating things

One of my mottos is: complicated systems are only as good as our ability to manage those systems. So before you setup some complicated fancy system, ask if you'll take the time to maintain it (speaking from person experience). The same applies to our bookkeeping. Start simple with a spreadsheet, divide your income and expenses into a few broad categories and once you start tracking it you can make it a little bit more complicated after you've proven you can stick with it. 

5. Not using an actual bookkeeping system

A bookkeeping system is going to track everything you need to track. For example, CRMs (Honeybook, Dubsado, etc) are not bookkeeping systems, they have bookkeeping elements to them. I haven't looked at them in a while, but to my knowledge, they only really track your income.  

6. Not knowing what you can actually deduct

We've been seeing this a lot recently with clients spending money from

On today's episode of the podcast we're taking about the Corporate Transparency Act and why it comes with a Beneficial Ownership Information report. Spoiler alert: you'll need to fill out the BOI form this year if you haven't already.

When Congress makes new laws, they set a day when the law becomes effective. It’s a heads up that they’re changing the rules and that starting on that day-you’ll be expected to obey. 

That delay gives everyone time to

• read the new law, • ask questions about what the new law means, and • organize resources in preparation for the new law. 

In 2021 Congress passed a bundle of laws as part of the annual defense budget which came into effect on January 1st of this year called the Corporate Transparency Act.

The Corporate Transparency Act requires most businesses to disclose certain information to the federal government.

We’ll cover: 

• whether or not your business is exempt from reporting,• whose information gets reported, and • how to report that information if you’re required to do so. 

The Corporate Transparency Act is for helping law enforcement agencies find, prevent, and prosecute financial crimes. Financial crimes can look like a lot of different things. A popular example you see in movies is money laundering, when people get money from illegitimate sources but can't just go deposit it in a bank or use it to buy a car or a new house with it so they disguise it as other assets and run it through their business. People have been doing this for a very long time and proving it can be difficult.

Back in 1970 Congress gave us the Bank Secrecy Act, which said banks have to actually help law enforcement identify and prosecute financial crimes. The reason was because banks didn’t care where the money was coming from, they were getting paid and it wasn’t their job to ask whether money was coming from a legitimate or criminal enterprise. Congress said banks don’t get to turn a blind eye and have to report suspicious activity or really huge transfers. While this helped a lot, there was still plenty they couldn't catch.

In 1990, Congress gave us a sub-department of the United States Treasury called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN. FinCEN lets law enforcement agencies talk to each other about that information that banks have to report, like suspicious activity or huge transactions.

They compare notes, so even if a single blip on the radar didn’t raise any alarms at the FBI, they might talk to state law enforcement and compare notes and find out about criminal activity they couldn’t see before. FinCEN even gives awards every year to different agencies that successfully use FinCEN’s data to prevent or prosecute crimes. 

For example, in 2023-

• The Drug Enforcement Administration used FinCEN data to find and seize 4.5 metric tons of cocaine• The Secret Service and U.S. Postal Inspections Service used FinCEN data to shut down a scheme to compromise emails• And the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division used FinCEN data to protect hundreds of victims of a human trafficking ring. 

But there was a huge absence of information for FinCEN that still made it really hard to crack down on financial crimes. 

FinCEN knew what the banks were telling them about suspicious activity and big transactions and what other agencies noticed about that information but they didn’t know who was behind these semi-legitimate businesses. 

That’s what this new law, the Corporate Transparency Act is for. Businesses affected by the law will have to complete a Beneficial Ownership Information report to FinCEN.

While it's not a ton of information they require from you, it's information from a ton of people, and that tells them more than you might think and helps them discover a lot more criminal activity that they couldn’t know about just from the banks or by talking to each other. 

By collecting a small amount of information ab

On today's episode of the podcast I'm giving you some must-know legal updates about non-compete agreements.

Just a reminder, the Contract Club price is going up beginning June 1st (only to $50) but if you want to save $20, get access now for just $30 at notavglaw.com/club. And, if you want to get paid for sharing the Contract Club with your friends, we're paying out 100% affiliate commissions (regularly 50%) through the end of May. You can become an affiliate at notavglaw.com/affiliate

A couple weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took a vote on Non-Compete Agreements and made a 570 page publication and we're going to take an aerial view on those key takeaways.

The FTC's job is to protect the public from deceptive or unfair business practices and from unfair methods of competition. It's a federal agency that's been around since Woodrow Wilson's presidency. The FTC is put together by Congress, consider Congress the parent and the FTC the babysitter that enforces the rules.

The FTC was asked "can businesses limit a worker's employment option after they leave the company?" 570 pages later, the answer is no, that's unfair competition.

Let's dive into why this is unfair and totally bullshit there are three broad reasons we'll touch on with examples.



The FTC says this is why non-competes restrict the freedoms of American workers and suppress wages. Example: Elle is an attorney for Louis Vuitton. LV has her sign a non-compete agreement saying she won't work for another luxury handbag company for two years after her employment with LV ends. She's not sure where to go from there when she's ready to leave because she can't go work for another luxury handbag company and she can't apply and use that offer to leverage benefits to stay at LV.



Non-competes stifle new businesses and new ideas. Example: Elle can't start her own fashion handbag company or team up with her friend to consult on her luxury handbag company.



They impact too many people. Example: Elle decides to focus on her philanthropy until her non-compete expires. Looking at jobs with other luxury handbag companies, she sees that they all have non-competes as well. They're widespread in the US economy and one in five workers is subject to a non-compete (~30 million people).



It's also wild how many people don't even know they've signed a non-compete until they get sued later on because a lot of times a non-compete can be a single term deep within a contract. It's often overlooked and commonly lumped together with a non-disclosure agreement.

On the flip side, if you are the issuer of a non-compete, you're going to need to take it out now and check any contract templates you use or previously drafted attorney contracts to make sure it is removed.

A large portion of effected non-compete workers are in healthcare, not great for public health when we had a global pandemic and they were prevented from working where the need was greatest.

Any time a federal agency has an idea for a new rule, they have to open it up to the public for comment and then they have to respond to those comments otherwise a court will smack down the rule for not being well thought out. This rule had 26,000 comments, of which 25,000 supported a total ban on non-competes.

There are some exceptions for senior executives, mainly that if you're a senior executive under a non-compete you still have to follow it, but there can't be any new non-competes.

To draw some attention to the legalese, it says "worker." It goes on to say "worker, including but not limited to an employee, independent contractor, extern, intern, volunteer, apprentice or sole proprietor who provides a service to a person." The only exception is the senior executive.

They include a part in this rule that allows it to stack with state laws so if your state has a rule against non-competes, you're in trouble with both the FTC and the state.

Are you fucked if you've had people sign non-competes for your business? No.

On today's episode of the podcast I'm sharing my April profit report.

If you enjoy the profit report episodes, send us a DM @notavglaw and let us know what you think!

As we kick off every episode, let's recap my 2024 goals.

• I set good, better, best goals of $300k, $400k and $500k in revenue. I was shooting for $400k, I think the $300k is still doable now despite the setbacks in the first quarter that I've talked about on previous episodes. I've now shifted them to $300k, $350k and $400k. What I'm not doing is any rushed promotions to try to hit these, I'm focusing on slow, steady growth to end the year strong.

• Hit 60% in profit

• Book 4 stage speaking gigs for next year

• Consistently hit $25k months. Did this in January and February, not in March, probably not in April

• Hit $15k in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by the end of the year. This was the big goal to help us get to our revenue goals at the end of the year. We're a little bit less than halfway to this so far. My original goal was to get to 10k by the end of March but that hasn't happened yet.

 

Projections vs. Actual:

1. Unf*ck Your Biz- $4,000 → $2,500 (A caveat to this is we had two more $1,000 payments that went through on the 30th but won't hit my account until May meaning we didn't hit the goal). 2. Contract Club - $1,000 → $1,1403. Legally Launched - $500 → 04. Monthly Recurring Revenue - $7,000 → $7,5005. Tax - $4,000 → $2,2506. Trademark clients- $1,250 → $07. Other - $1,000 → $3,200Total revenue: $17,000 → $15,000

 

Expenses

Employee wages (this does not include myself): $4,000

Contractor expenses: $3,000

Owner wages (after my taxes):

Monthly tools: $400

Affiliate payouts: $370

Marketing: $400

Client fees: $500

Other: $1800

Total expenses: $16,000 (we were in the negative by $1,000)

A lot of this stems still from Unf*ck Your Biz clients because we are going back and doing several years of reconciliation for some clients.

 

Profit

(- $1,000)

If you’re wondering how I'm doing this the answer is I don't have great business savings which we wiped in the month of March (yikes) and the business credit card is maxed. I'm not too stressed about it, I'm expecting expenses to go down and revenue to go up in May and it should start to even out.

 

KPIs

I want to start talking more about the KPI we track each month in Enji. We track:

Sales (revenue): Tracked in our profit report

Audience growth (Facebook group members and Instagram, TikTok and Threads followers): A lot of people call these vanity metrics and I don't get too into these numbers, it's just helpful to see trends in respect to how active and engaging we're being. Are we continuing to see growth even if it's steady.

PR touchpoints: We track the number of podcast guest spots, summits, in-person speaking, bundles, etc. we do each month. This impacts our follower count and number of email subscribers and shows how our KPIs are all connected.

Contract Club and Contract Bot Sales: I track this separately in Enji so I can have a line graph to see growth. December through April each month we had: 37, 38, 36, 32, 38 and it's interesting to watch it stay so consistent without promotion. For the Bot upsell we had 4 sales in February, 1 in March, and 7 in April (an 18% conversion rate is pretty good for a $70 upsell). 

 

May Projections

1. Unf*ck Your Biz- $6,000 We had 5 new clients sign up in April who are all on payment plans. Our goal is to bring in 4 new UYB clients every month to guarantee that revenue and then if half those clients continue to sign up for our monthly services we'll continue to increase our baseline revenue. 2. Contract Club - $5,000  I'm expecting a big increase because of our current affiliate promotion. May is the last chance to get the Contract Club at $30 before it increases to $50. If you aren't already an affiliate, you can sign up here to become one. We are paying out 100% affiliate commissions on Contract Club