Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation, JLD here, and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Marketing Made Simple. Today, we are breaking down the income report from October of 2024. We had quite the month, a lot of fun things going on, and we will dive into all of that and more when we get back from thinking our spotters.
DTCPod, hosted by Ramon Barrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. DTCPod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing, and optimizing e-commerce stores in DTC brands. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you. One recent episode on how the best brands are built is a must listen. Listen to DTCPod, wherever you get your podcasts.
Many EO Fire listeners have launched non-food franchises, and Frambridge Consulting has guided them. Frambridge's founder and frequent EO Fire guest, John Austin, has done more placements than any other in the country, and his service is free, sign up for a consultation with John, or get a free copy of his book, Non-Food Franchising, at franbridgeconsulting.com.
All right, Fire Nation, quite a month of travel for us, but we still managed to do a gross income of $140,000 for the month of October. Our total expenses were $10,867 for a total net profit of $129,603 with a 30% increase from last month with a net profit to overall gross revenue of 92%.
We're going to talk about Joshua Tree for anybody that might know what that means. We're also going to talk about a fantastic event that I both spoke at and attended alongside with Serena Williams, David Spade, Ryan Reynolds, got to share the stage with some legends like that at an amazing conference. We'll talk about Bo's first Halloween, of course, and, man, you're going to check out his picture and so much more.
And we're going to start with our monthly tax tip from Ron, Mr. CPA on fire himself. And this tax tip is all about how marathon planning can strengthen your business strategy. So Ron, as always, welcome. Thank you for what you do and take it away. Hello, John. And hello, Fire Nation. This is Ron Parisi.
with CPA on fire for your October 2024 tax and accounting tip. Hey, John, and hello, Fire Nation. We got a really conceptual tip for regarding planning for 2025.
This is planning season. If any of you guys are familiar with CPA on fire, big what we term no review accounting. We do everything future planning through forecasts and budgets. And right now we're just finishing up our planning season with our clients for 2025.
pretty incredible as 2024. I would say a year of uncertainty, obviously we had the elections, but really across our client base, a lot of ups and downs.
a lot of uncertainty as far as certain predictions. So it was an interesting year. And now we kind of roar into 2025 and we start to do our planning. And I was talking to Josh Bauerly, if you guys don't know, Josh way back when played a major role in starting CPA on fire. And nonetheless, he just completed a marathon.
He was his first marathon and he was kind of talking about the frustrations of the training when it came to the plan and how several times throughout the marathon training, over six months, he didn't think the plan was working. He wanted to throw the plan in the garbage. He wanted to make some major changes.
the plan, like he just didn't see how the plan was going to get him to the final outcome. But he stuck to it, and he finished his first marathon a really good time, don't ask me what it was, but he was very happy about his performance. And you know, as he was relaying that story to me,
I said, wow, that's very similar to a founder, an entrepreneur, their journey. Is that as we start planning for 2025, and we go into the year, that your plan is gonna be tested to the reality of the business cycles, the challenges of running a business or a company.
all kinds of uncertainties. And I find that entrepreneurs are more likely to change very rapidly and not stick to the original plan. And there's a lot of reasons for this, right? But if I could say one thing, right, the amount of energy that you put into your plan
is going to carry you throughout the year. And as long as you have, you know, a really well thought out crystal clear plan, the more likely that plan obviously is a good plan and you should stick to that plan throughout, you know, next year.
You know, as entrepreneurs, right, we chase shiny objects sometimes. There's no shortage of mastermind groups, podcasts that are telling you, hey, this is the next greatest thing. This is how you should pivot, et cetera. And I just think that while, you know, course correction each month is important, but sticking to the plan is equally as important.
And I was just going to give you maybe a tip or two on how you do that, right? I think that when you create your plan, and that's, you know, for us, that's a three or five year forecast and then dialing that back to a 12, rolling 12 month budget.
And, you know, what you think the ROI and your marketing is going to be, what team members are you going to need, you know, every aspect of how you're going to, you know, achieve your goals for the year and for, you know, the three or five years that you've forecasted.
I think it's a very important as you create that plan, right? That one, obviously, it is crystal clear, but two is you memorialize the assumptions you're making to create that plan to forecast those numbers or sales. What are you expecting from your team? What are you expecting from your marketing program?
This way, when usually it's February, March, that all of a sudden, things aren't going to plan, maybe sales volumes down, maybe conversions are down, the marketing spend is running hot. That's usually the time people start pivoting off their plan. And I think if you memorialize those assumptions,
and reflect on them as you're going through 2025. I think that's going to really help you stay the course, make those great business decisions throughout the year, and succeed on hitting your goals. So I just thought that this was an interesting
comparison between marathon training plans and what you the founder of the entrepreneur goes through with planning and then executing on that planning in 2025. Fire Nation, always a pleasure being with you. Until next time, I wish you the best and talk to you soon. Thank you very much.
Well, Ron, as always, thank you much appreciated and Fire Nation, please check out CPA on fire.com for all of your tax needs. Ron's a great guy. And again, we have a lot more to talk about from events to hiking to Halloween when we get back from thanking our sponsors.
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at franbridgeconsulting.com. That's franbridgeconsulting.com. All right, Fire Nation, we are back and we're going to talk about our interview of the month, which comes from the event that we went to called Inbound, which was in Boston. It was an amazing event, again, with the likes of
Serena Williams, Ryan Reynolds, David Spade, yours truly, I got to speak and it was really fun and I got to have a conversation with Alex Lieberman and we talked about some great things from stage. One was avoid podfading by consistently producing the right content over time to serve your audience in a meaningful way. We also talked about how podcasting is the most intimate channel to build an audience and then we talked about how choosing the hard way when creating your niche, the higher the barrier, the lower the competition, choose the hard way, choose that hard way fire nation.
so that was a great interview again that i did on stage at inbound there was a lot of fun with alex we had a lot of good back and forth um definitely a good time and just another great event from inbound so thank you hope spot for all that you do there and putting on such a great show and us just being able to go back and enjoy boston every year is always
a pleasure as well. We're going to move into Joshua Tree and then returning to Puerto Rico. And to do this, I'm going to hand it over to the great Kate Lynn Erickson Dumas. So Kate, take it away.
What's up Fire Nation? Always amazing to be on the mic with you and I'm excited to give you a quick rundown of how our October went. We closed out our summer and fall travels with a trip to Joshua Tree before heading home to Puerto Rico. As you know from our last income report,
Our last couple income reports, we spent a good six weeks in Maine visiting John's family. Then we hopped over to San Diego. We spent four weeks visiting my family and we rounded out that time in San Diego with a little jaunt over to Joshua Tree, which is a fantastic park if you've never visited before.
And since this was Bo's first camping trip, we decided to approach it a little bit differently than we would normally if it were just myself and John going, and we rented a camper. And that was actually an awesome experience. We found a website online, just a couple of guys who rent out campers and
you book the camper they drive it out for you park it at your campsite and have it ready for you you kind of walk into it and get to say and then they come and pick it up when you're done so that was a really convenient and awesome way to spend our time in the desert especially with bow again
There were actually temperatures in the 100s while we were there, so it was quite hot and we had a generator and air conditioning in the camper, so that was kind of a must with bow. We could have hacked it out ourselves, but you know, with a little baby you kind of make some exceptions.
But we had such an incredible time. The weather did not stop us from doing some really incredible hikes, enjoying the park to the fullest. If you head over to our income report, eofair.com forward slash income 134, you'll see that we had quite the crew with us. My sister and her family came one of my best friends, Jen and her family.
one of my other best friends Vanessa and her family and my parents were there so we had a big crew and oh man we had such a great time and as was the case with our entire 2.5 months of off-island travel Bo was an absolute champ he seemed to really enjoy his new mode of transportation which was a hiking backpack that our friends gave us
He was sitting high up there. I think he enjoyed it because he could actually see stuff. Usually when we're carrying him, he's in a front-facing carrier. He doesn't really love the carriers too much, but this backpack worked out quite well. John wore him well.
So while main San Diego and Joshua Tree were all very incredible, we were definitely excited to get back home and settled in. Traveling is awesome, but it always feels great to get back into your routine. And especially with Beau, I think we were kind of ready to get back to the nursery and have him on a bit more of a schedule, although we did quite good while we were traveling with his schedule, if I must say so myself.
So we closed out the month diving back into work. Believe it or not, John did not have a single interview day, our entire trip. So that was, of course, all the work that led up to our trip was very jam-packed. And he will attest to that. But we were definitely excited to get back on the mic here in Eelfire Studios.
catch up with some of our other tasks and of course catch up with our friends and neighbors. And at the end of October we also celebrated Bo's very first Halloween, kind of wild to think that a year ago I was very pregnant and very ready to give birth.
We attended a Halloween party and I remember a bunch of people asking me if my Halloween costume was a joke. Like if I was jokingly a pregnant person, but no, I was really a pregnant person, very pregnant.
And now that we are officially in Q4, we're also excited to start some holiday celebrations and close out 2024 strong with the business. Fire Nation, we are wishing you and your families a very happy holiday season. And we will continue on here with the income report. John's going to give us a little income breakdown.
Okay, thanks for that share. I will just echo everything, especially the fact that Bo was a champion. We have so many great photos. So as always, head over to eafire.com slash income 134 to check out some great photos and just Bo being a champ in a backpack and in a Halloween costume in a pumpkin costume, whatever costume season. Life is good. Definitely check it out.
Now, we're moving into the income breakdown for the month. For freedom journals, we did a total of 35 journal sales, $1,350 in sales. For our affiliate income, we did $5,192. And for our podcast sponsorships, we came in at a cool $130,570.
Our total gross income for the month was 140, 470 as a result with expenses being just under $11,000 to $10,867. So a very good month there, especially when I gave you that 92 percentile net profit gross revenue percentage at the beginning of the episode.
So a lot of good things going on. We are definitely heading into the end of the year with a lot of excitement for how Bo is going to have so much fun with all these holidays. And Kay's going to bring us home with her biggest lesson learned.
This month's biggest lesson learned was inspired by the biggest lesson learned exactly one year ago, October 2023, and it's all about choosing a word of the year. So last year on October, I shared my annual routine of choosing a word of the year. And since we're approaching a new year once again, which is crazy and very hard to believe.
I wanted to bring this back to the top so that we all have time to brainstorm. I have not chosen my word of the year for 2025 yet, but I am also giving myself this little reminder. So let's do it together. So first, let's review what I shared last year so you know a bit more about the exercise and how powerful it can be.
Okay, so first, great question. How can choosing a single word help you stay focused throughout the entire year? Kind of seems like a tall order, right, with just one word. However, choosing a word of the year and consistently reminding yourself of what that word is and why it matters to you can not only help you stay focused, but also motivate you in tough times.
That's because we all know that distractions are around every corner and it's so easy to fall off track. We get frustrated by lack of progress or something doesn't go the way that we had hoped it would and, you know, you kind of think like, man, all right, maybe I should throw in the towel. But when you have your word of the year to constantly go back to, you can easily refocus and remind yourself of what's really most important to you.
My word for 2024 has been surrender and I chose that word because I knew that becoming a new mom was going to flip my world upside down and that I would need a strong reminder that not everything is within my control. I really wanted to enjoy my first year with bow to the fullest, not let frustrations or tough times override all the incredible joy and excitement that is becoming apparent and experiencing the first year of your child's life.
I also knew that my work life was going to look a lot different and I had no idea how I was going to feel about that. Was I going to miss working every day? Would I crave being challenged by the same types of things I've been facing for the past 10 plus years working as an entrepreneur?
So I knew that 2024 was going to bring a lot of unknowns and being a person who loves control and typically having everything kind of buttoned up and planned out, uh, surrender was a word that I knew could help me stay focused and on track with whatever my new normal was going to look like. And this word has served me so very well this year. I'm so grateful for it.
So just to give you a little example there, I would love if you would join me in taking some time out in the coming weeks to really think about some of the big goals you have for 2025. What do you want to focus on? And what do you want to give your time and energy to? What reminder would serve you well in tough times? And what word can help you stay focused and remind you of what's most important to you?
Once you've chosen the word, write it down, look at it daily and share it with as many people as possible. It's really powerful to have this repetition and to have it someplace where you're going to see it every single day. I will be doing the same Fire Nation, so stay tuned. I will love to share my word and I'd love to hear yours too. So hit us up on social media, send us an email, let us know what your word for 2025 is going to be.
Until next month, keep your fire burning.
DTCPod, hosted by Ramon Barrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. DTCPod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing, and optimizing e-commerce stores in DTC brands. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you. One recent episode on how the best brands are built is a must listen. Listen to DTCPod, wherever you get your podcasts.
Many EO Fire listeners have launched non-food franchises, and Frambridge Consulting has guided them. Frambridge's founder and frequent EO Fire guest, John Austin, has done more placements than any other in the country, and his service is free, sign up for a consultation with John, or get a free copy of his book, Non-Food Franchising, at franbridgeconsulting.com.
