Transparency Report #3 – June 2016

Wow, a whole month has passed and it’s flown by. It’s time for another transparency report. I’m writing this now as July will be another challenging month ahead for me.

July will be the last month in my 9-5 role which, given leaving such a role there’s a tendency to jam-pack as much in the last month as possible, I don’t expect to be able to spend countless hours on all the things I have planned for Epic Plugins. Some of the things coming up (which I’ll be blogging about) are:

• The process I’ve been going through to re-design the product pages for the items on epic plugins
• My shiny new business card designs with my current branding (my current cards have my old brand)
• A brand new design for my newsletter page (currently it’s blank and newsletter sign ups are sporadic)
• My strategy and plans / reflection on the ZBS CRM Launch process

As you’ll no doubt have seen from the emails I’ve sent out recently, the launch of Zero BS CRM system (A super simple, customer relationship manager running on WordPress, for free) has taken up a big chunk of my time over June.

Anyway, enough of that, onto the June numbers.

Did you know?

All of the charts in my transparency reports I produce from the Sales Dashboard extension (right out of my very own CRM)

Sales Dashboard Overview

[UPDATE: 1st Feb 2017. The Sales Dashboard in Zero BS CRM has been improved to have transaction tagging. This means I can filter transactions. The featured image shows the position allowing for full splitting]

So, plenty to take in there, but breaking down the information

• June 2016 has historically been a month with sales a bit lower (summer holidays)
• Overall the revenue has been “steady” but down on prior month. This is a tricky one to measure especially given how I recently removed 9+ plugins for sale on CodeCanyon (at the end of May) but more on that below (a -6% fall I call ‘steady’ anything with falls more than 20% triggers actions (to analyse the cause and put in solutions to hopefully dampen the falls)
• There were 35% less new customers added in the month, which is actually 12 less customers, which in absolute terms isn’t too bad
• Net Revenue isn’t down as much as Gross, this is due to less take-up of the end of month firesale and less discounts generally applied at checkout
• Average revenue per customer is increasing, which is great, it gives me that way to track whether upsells and cross-selling is working as well as generally gives me a gauge of what to compare my conversion rate vs advert spend compares to the average value of a new customer

OK, so now the high level is in, I’ve been developing the detailed sales breakdowns which delve a little deeper and show some other useful metrics. I won’t be going into full detail with the below of all the dashboard but picking a couple each month

Gross Revenue

Gross Revenue has been pretty steady over the month as shown in the chart below.  $3,644 is a good amount by anyones book and I need to remind myself that even with those levels forever it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I’m doing what I love to do. But I do have some strong targets. I want to grow epic plugins and epic themes to a point where I can bring on more people and give back to the WordPress community and core.

My first target is to build the business up to a steady $10,000 a month. This will help to cover and improve support team levels as well as be able to expand and invest more in the business while helping me towards financial freedom.

But by when? Well as soon as possible but I’ll certainly need to make some shifts and tweaks to get there (the biggest shift being me leaving my job and going at this 100% from 1 August.  That’ll certainly be a point to start paying even more attention to these reports.

So, what else is useful to look at from the charts,  I quite like looking into my total customer breakdowns / new customer breakdowns this month I’ll focus on the new customers.

New Customers

A pretty good analysis to look into. What this tells me is how many customers I’m adding to the business each month and also which day of the week when I generate new customers on. From the above you can see that Saturdays are the day where I add the least. I wonder why that is.

What are your thoughts? I hope as always you find this monthly report interesting as I chart my progress (literally) into 100% focus on my own Company.