Oh My Gosh - I Made A Profit!
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Well it’s been a long time coming but this tax year (ending in June for Aussies), my business BetterEdit is going to turn over a proper profit. It’s not much more than the average straight out of university salary (and I don’t actually pay myself a salary from that) but it’s a really big deal for me. The growth, while not skyrocketing, has been consistently trending upwards as more and more clients come back after previous good experiences and spread the word to friends and family as customer evangelists.
Just as I said over at Small Business Branding - it can take 5 years before you finally taste success.
It certainly hasn’t been smooth sailing all the way and each bump in the road makes me rethink what I am doing, but I’m still here and the experience for 99% of the people involved, including customers, editors and me, seems to be a good one, so I can’t really ask for more, just for things to continue as they are trending upwards.
How was your business this tax year?
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[...] As I reported my business has managed to turnover a profit and despite the occasional murmurings in my head that I want to leave it, I’m still here, still steering the ship and heading into the 6th year of operations, and my third full time tax year. Overall I’m excited about where the business is going, so I suspect I’ll be here next tax year saying the same things, at least I hope I will be! [...]
Hello Yaro and congratulations!
Based on your suggestion for our new selection criteria business, we set up a small Google AdWords campaign and took out some advice from some of the SEO forums out there as well as your good self.
It launched in the middle of May 2006 and it has been a fantastic and very profitable experience for us so far.
We haven’t even followed up with the many more ideas up our sleave such as an online purchasable eBook, Blog (with exerpts from the book), newsletter and text linking.
I fear that we will have to expand if these take off in the same way and we will have to kiss goodbye to a good nights sleep for quite some time!
Congratulations Yaro!! It takes a lot of perserverance to see a startup through to profitability, you should be incredibly proud! Congratulations and thanks again for all the great content.
Hey Yaro,
Quick Question is to your meaning of profit… i know you are a “learned” type of guy… I would have figured you be profiting all along the way… Just a little confused about this.
Congrats none the less Yaro!
Lucas
Congrats!
That’s fantastic, Yaro!
I’ve been following your site for the last month or so.
You - and other bloggers like Steve Pavlina and Darren Rowse - have truly been an inspiration in my work and my writing at Mindful Entrepreneur.
Keep up the great work!
Hey I wouldn’t have re-started Myweblog.com had it not been for Yaro’s constant “blogs are big” bashing in the first place.
I would have also not started the other websites of mine had I not restarted Myweblog.com, this month alone I have made so far $241 USD from AdSense. This has been by far, the easiest money I have made, sure I do a lot of blogging but I love doing it and the more the traffic increases the better it gets
Hey, don’t sound so surprised Yaro. Patience and persistence will always prevail in the end. And you my friend, have followed through with you projects.
Good luck, and be prepared for better things to come.
Aitch
Thanks for all the “congrats” everyone, I appreciate it. Makes me wonder what the next five years will hold?
Lucas - I’ve been cash flow positive all the way, but I’ve also been reinvesting in marketing and two years ago I was renting an office for an English school I was running which turned out to be a money drain.
This year I tightened up the positioning and focused the marketing on what works best (so far anyway) in an 80/20 style. The revenues for this year are not much higher than last year but the expenses are down.
This doesn’t count the money made from things like blogging though, I keep those records separate so I can see how BetterEdit is doing by itself.
Hey, congratulations. Glad to hear you are doing well.
congratulations mate - well done.
Hi Yaro,
Thanks for clearing that up a little bit for me. I figured that any profits you’ve been making have been going back into the business.
Business is all about long term efforts… i am trying to figure the best way to market my business (CommerceCubes)… its turning out profits two months out of the gate but i need to figure out a good plan to reinvest over the coming months and years. Sounds as though the things you are doing are working for you.
Just Curious… how are you paying rent and food costs these days? Or are you giving yourself a salary now?
Also i think a good article would be about transititioning from full-time work to a full-time entrepreneur… i know you did an article about this recently but i was thinking you could showcase other entrepreneurs and get them to tell their secrets as well. Just a thought. Talk soon Yaro!
Lucas
Some good ideas there Lucus, you are right, people are really interested how others manage to make the transition to full time entrepreneur.
How do I pay for rent and food? Well I’m in the mafia, sooo…no, not really…I don’t know. As Dick Smith said - I just look at my bank account at the end of the year and if there’s more in it then at the start of the year I’m doing well
I live a fairly in-excessive life so my yearly bills can’t amount to much more than 10-15K. I do drawings to pay for daily life things, I use money I make from other projects like blogging and web hosting and of course the grandma’s chip in when it is my birthday, but to be honest I really don’t know when it comes to the specifics, I don’t budget. I seem to get by and add more to my savings each year on an income which is probably about half of what my peers earn working full time, yet I seem to manage to save more than they do, so I guess I’m doing something right.
Congrats Yaro…all the hard work is paying off.
Hi Yaro….
Im very happy things are starting to pick up for you. It does take time and of course patience. Many give up to quickly and never return to try again. I wish you much success and congratulations.
Congrats man, congrats. Apart from being a good entrepreneur, what I found (read) you do a lot for yourself too, taking out time for ownself
And living a good life.
Hey Yaro,
Well i thought that the mafia may be involved but i didn’t know they were in Brisbane… you learn something new everyday i guess.
Its not about how much you make but simply how much you keep and grow over time. Well i think about how much i live off of fulltime these days as a worker and how much my business spits off after expenses and i am seeing a bigger gap and a lot of potential.
I’ve just been questioning myself lately as to how much i need to make to survive if i have a business that is growing… something that has me a little confused… i see my friends buying homes and getting fancy cars they cannot afford and i realize that while those things are tempting they are such a waste. I wonder where that conditioning comes from? maybe its your parents? maybe not?
Talk soon Yaro,
Lucas
Lucas, the way most people see it, is that they want something, and they want it now. It doesn’t matter if they can’t afford it, they just want it, and hence they’ll go out and get a loan for it if they need it.
Furthermore, things like cars, houses, etc, well, buying a house is a good idea, its hard to buy a house without going in debt, but property is not a waste, never has been, most probably won’t be for some time yet.
Cars are a waste to some and not to others, for example, I am very conservative with my money, I do a lot of saving as well, but I am saving it all for a car, not.. just.. any.. car.. but the car that I want. Yes, its a want thing, I don’t think its a conditioning factor, moreso I think its a desire to drive something that I want to drive. Its hard to explain if you are not into cars. If you love cars the way I (and perhaps some of your friends do) you will realize that somethings in life, even though they might appear as a waste, are worth having even now, I guess I am writing this to justify it also to my self, but I really do believe in what I say, you can be frugal with your money but it has be for a reason, and I would have never saved the amount of money that I have, had I not had this goal for a car.
Hu Alborz,
Yeah i agree we are in a “want-it-now” type of society and its beneficial on certain levels… example. The ease most have getting a mortgage now.
For me personally buying a house doesn’t seem to fit with my plans now but if i look at my friends they are going for the stable jobs, homes in quiet neighbourhoods, having kids and minivans and then trying to compete in some age-old pissing contest. Now i’d like a house somewhere down the road and a car is a need to a certain point because unless you live in a big city, like Toronto you are probably going to need it to get around.
The reason why they’d be to some extent a waste right now for me is that i am solely focused on my business so that somewhere down the road i can have those things, i just don’t want to do it the way that other people are. Perhaps that explains it a little better.
The conditioning point was that i notice most people go to school, get a good job, build a family, build debt (that they think is good), wonder how they are going to pay for all the debt, kids get older and need money for college and the cycle repeats. This is the way most people have seen there lives or their parents lives and i am not knocking it. The trappings of this are buying things you cannot afford to keep up with your neighbours or friends… etc.
Lucas
Congrats… I hope to someday have the same results
Congratulations on your business success. I think 5 years to wait until it finally succeeds will really test the metal of someone who is in business. That just seems too long to me. If, however, one can meet their base financial needs during that time period, well, that’s a horse of another color. I just think that one needs some positive feedback before that happens, though.
To perserve that long is really phenomenal.
My 2 cents worth.
GR
Home Loan Lending Info
Lucas,
I cannot argue on the “want-it-now” type of society we have right now and there’s no way for us to stop it, either. I think it is just Yaro’s luck (and preference) that he exercise frugality.
We cannot judge the people who engage in what you call a “pissing contest” because that’s what they want, that’s how they think. And so they resort to loans and mortgages that sometimes they cannot afford. But, again, who are we to judge them.
That would explain why online entrepreneurs such as home mortgage lenders are doing well. Because of these people. In a way, both benefit from the other. The lender, from the profit he gets, and the debtor, from the kind of home, or car for that matter, that he gets out of the debt.
I know this is an old thread, but some time has passed and I was wondering if you are still making a profit.
This business was sold last year. Have a read through some more of the posts and you will find the whole story.