Do you know what is actually making you money in your online coaching, healing, or course business?
This may sound like a question with an obvious answer, but having worked with over a thousand small business owners, we know that sometimes this gets lost in the midst of customer support emails, social media posting, and the ever-growing task list.
As the season shifts and we enter the fourth quarter of the year, it’s the perfect time to assess what is generating revenue and what is just busywork.
Additionally, as the threat of global recession grows, knowing exactly what is working and what is not will help you to pivot if necessary and ensure that your efforts are going towards the products that will have the most impact on your revenue and on serving your clients.
Online businesses are in a powerful position to be responsive in uncertain times, but you can only remain agile if you already know what your customers are actually buying from you.
The best way to start this process is to do a simple audit of your business revenue and activities so you can discover what exactly is making money and how much.
Your audit is not purely quantitative, however: we also want to assess how these activities make you feel. Online coaching programs, courses, memberships, and services that you hate and find draining—even if they make money—are not sustainable in your business, and it’s unlikely that you will be able to maintain them and your wellbeing in a time of global uncertainty.
The goal of the audit is to clarify what is making money, how you feel about it, and from there to decide what if anything needs to change.
You may find that you have offers that take a lot of time but don’t generate revenue. Or offers that you thought were adding a lot to your income, but actually are only a small percentage of the business.
Often our clients realize that they have too many offers, which means that they are putting forward a lot of effort towards different promotions and fulfillment process for ineffective revenue streams. An audit will help you to increase efficiency by directing your energy to the most impactful offers and activities.
Online Business Revenue Audit
You can use these questions as a starting point, but feel free to add your own so that the audit is customized to your online business.
- Look at the past six months of your online business sales. What percentage of your revenue did each thing you sell generate?
- For each of those offers, how did you feel making and/or delivering it? Did you enjoy it? Resent it? Adore it? Fear it?
- What other primary activities do you do in your business, such as social media marketing, content creation, customer support emails, moderating community groups etc?
- List all, and for each one, ask: is this directly tied to a revenue generating activity by either attracting new customers, selling offers, or fulfilling on what has been sold? If you cannot tie it to revenue generation, consider cutting it from your business activities.
- Once you have the revenue-related activities remaining, ask how does it make you feel? If it is does not support how you want to feel in your work, can you automate it, delegate it, or delete it? What would need to happen to allow you to make those changes?
We recommend that our Holistic Business Academy Members audit quarterly to make sure that they are in tune with the needs of their business and the marketplace. Add a quarterly audit to your calendar or project management software now, and develop the skill of discerning what is making you money in your online business.