FQ1 Earnings & Learnings Report
A complete income and review on my first full FQ as a full time GTM consultant
Read time: 4 minutes
I had zero expectations going into FQ1. Hell, I didn’t even set any goals…
In fact, the goal was simply to pay the bills and see if I could actually sustain consulting full time.
It was a bit of a rodeo.
My emotions ranged from ‘screw this, I’m going to get a full time job’ to ‘wow, this is it… I’ll fully retire this year’.
Here’s a full breakdown of my first full FQ as an early stage B2B GTM consultant.
💰FQ1 Financials
Consulting Revenue: $69,675.00
Affiliate Revenue: $1,776.39
Course Revenue: $2,680
All Expenses: -$2,634.19
Gross FQ1 Income: $74,131.39
Net Income: $71,497.20
🎉 Highlights
Building for Scale
It’s taken me longer than I thought to learn how to build systems and process that scale for me.
I think the most helpful experience is onboarding a new customer and learning what to do, what to work on and how to do it in the first 45 days.
Now having been able to onboard quite a few customers over the course of 5 months, it’s allowed me to have some pattern recognition of what I need to be doing, how I can onboard faster, etc.
Imagine starting at new company every 30 days where you are expected to move the needle in a meaningful way within those first 45 days or you’re fired.
That’s kinda what it’s like. But I’m doing it with 2 new companies each month.
Regardless, systems of scale are critical. I won’t share my systems here yet because frankly, they are unproven to some extent. I want to get really good at pattern recognition and share better frameworks when I have them.
All that said, I’ve made significant progress. I feel bad for the customers I onboarded in January vs. the ones I’m onboarding in April 😂.
I’m grateful for their support on my journey of figuring out my shit.
Confidence & self worth
One of the constant battles I deal with on a weekly basis is my ability to execute.
Execute for my customers, my family, my own mental sake, etc.
I’ve been working hard on detaching my self worth from my income and net worth. It’s not an easy thing to do.
I’ve made some progress this FQ.
That’s about all I can do to explain it.
I’m continuing to become less focused on the outcome and more focused on my journey and happiness.
It’s really easy to want to chase a larger monthly number. But I’m working hard not to…
I’m slowly getting better.
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Alright, let’s dive in…
📝 Learnings / Thoughts this FQ
Daily operating rhythm
I’d argue, the hardest part of being a soloprenuer is figuring out what is the most impactful thing to do every single day.
Over and over and over. With nobody else to talk to about it.
There were days I wanted to crawl into a hole from overwhelm and I just had to quit at 11am for the day.
Not enough people talk about this as the downside to soloprenuership. It’s hard.
It’s the last week of the FQ and it feels like the first week in 4 months that I’ve I’ve had a plan and executed it to 90%.
And I don’t feel shame about not doing the extra 10%.
Working WeekendsSahil Bloom shared an article last month about how he works on the weekends. I’ve always tried to shut off hard on the weekends, mostly because I’m beyond overwhelmed and exhausted from my week.
He’s not the only one.
Justin Welsch talks about working on the weekends as well.
I’ve never wanted to work weekends.
But if I’m honest with myself, I’m a crazy anxious person. Weekends can be hard for me sometimes. If I’m not outside with my family, camping, boating or doing something active… I can be miserable to be around. Ask my wife.
I’m like a three month old golden doodle that’s been locked in her 3x5’ kennel for 3 days straight.
And then I shame spiral because I feel like I’m wasting time and should be moving the needle on something.
Then by Sunday night I’m depressed because I didn’t get outside all weekend, I didn’t do anything work related because it feels shameful and now I’m just pissed off and feel like I need to start the week all over again.
Why do I say all this?
I’ve JUST started to work on weekends. Not a lot, but some.
The fact is, I enjoy my work. I enjoy progressing a little each day. If there is a day that goes by that I don’t feel like I progressed, I start the anxious shame cycle and will spiral.
I’m trying to let go the shame of working on weekends, it’ll be a journey.
To be clear, we’re only talking a few hours. Usually when the kids are asleep or busy doing something else.
Biggest learnings from FQ1: Take the time to move the needle each day on the things that matter: physical, mental, financial.
This tweet from Justin Welsh resonates…
Sources of income
I’m blown away at the potential of opportunity out there. Truly, there’s a million ways to make money.
I was telling my wife the other day, “the hardest part is literally thinking through which way I WANT to make money and which path is the fastest with the lowest barrier of entry”
This is no small task.
I’ll go into detail more below on how I’m thinking about this but I’ve spent a lot of FQ1 just learning and watching.
I’m not in a huge hurry to make $1M in a year, but I want to invest time in the appropriate vehicle that will get me there fastest on the straightest road.
Some initial thoughts:
→ Courses. Triple down here. An evergreen asset.
→ Microsaas. So hot right now. I’m obsessed. I’m tempted to buy some microsaas and scale it a bit. Sounds fun and potentially lucrative and could be additive to what I’m doing every day.
→ Recruiting. Holy hell, so much I can do here but I’m trying to figure this one out. Starting with a personalized job board of my referrals. If you want top talent, let me know.
→ Events. This one would be fun and let me explore / expand in a community I want to go deeper on. Utah.
→ Community. Big topic right now and I think there’s a lot of fun opportunity here. I’ve considered turning this exact audience reading this into a community, early saas leaders, etc. I get SO many questions about how to do this, I want to figure out how to collaborate / communicate more efficiency with everyone.
→ Venture Fund. I get to see SO many saas deals raising capital, I’ve considered building a unique fund that gives access to angel investing for everyone out there that is interested
→ Incubator. There’s not a good incubator in Utah. YC dominates the space, I think it’s ripe for disruption.
I could go on here…
Biggest learning from FQ1: Decide on 2 for FQ2. Go deep.
Lead flow
I don’t know what to think about lead flow. I believe this is the hardest thing for anyone out there that is considering consulting full time.
Hell, I’m a sales guy and it was my biggest concern before starting this.
A few key learnings I’ve had that I’ll elaborate on though:
→ Consistency & Discipline is key
→ You HAVE to be good at networking and do it often
LinkedIn:
- It’s been a bit of a rodeo in FQ1. As you can see below, LinkedIn is a HUGE source of my deal flow, over 70% of my revenue.
I hit a dry spell for a few weeks between Feb / March that made me question everything…
My post impressions were down 50% or more across the board and had a hard time getting a post >5,000 impressions when my average was ~8-9k.
Not all posts are hits, but I’m learning that you only need 3-4 posts a month to gain traction and it’ll make up the difference for all the other posts.
I’ll get ~3 posts a month that will do >40,000 impressions.
Biggest learning from FQ1: eyeballs matter. As many eyeballs as possible.
Above is my weekly lead flow. I consider a ‘lead’ someone who reaches out and schedules a first call.
Lot’s of thought going into how to get more eyeballs (and ears) next FQ.
→ Substack - They are launching a twitter like feed in the coming weeks I’m going to bet that will drive the same twitter audience
→ Video - for Linkedin and Youtube
→ Podcast - I’m not exactly sure what for but I’ll likely do it as an audio version on these posts & interview other people consulting to learn from
→ In person events - I attended a VC event last night in SLC. They are game changers. I could pick up 2 deals from it if I wanted (I’m pretty booked right now so I don’t need more)
I’ll commit to a full FQ and see how it increases the eyeballs I can get.
Here’s a screenshot of my contracted revenue for this FY so far by source:
Running the business
It’s easy to underestimate the work required to run the day to day of a consulting business.
→ Banking - setting up accounts, moving money around, invoicing, collections, etc.
→ Taxes - working with my advisor on write offs, unique strategies to avoid taxes, where to invest, when and how
→ Website - there’s so much here. I’m not one to care about the most beautiful website, etc. With that said, there’s SOOOO much I can do to update the current website, build assets and marketing flows
→ Marketing - in addition to my social media content, there’s 10 different ways to repurpose, re-organize and re-write my content. This stuff takes a lot of time and figuring out where to spend my time is extremely hard.
→ Side Hustles - I’m having to re-write my brain a bit and this one is hard for me. Building an online course feels like a ‘side hustle’ to me… which is fine. But it gets reduced on the totem pole easily.
→ Partnerships / Networking - I’m averaging 3-4 hours a week on these types of calls. They are amazing but I sometimes feel pressure to be working on other things. I know there’s a lot of value on these but I’m working to figure out how to use these more. Being a 1-man show, these become expensive calls.
→ Content Creation - A huge portion of my business thrives on good content. Writing, diagrams, posts and more. When >70% of my revenue comes inbound on LinkedIn, it’s made me realize how much MORE time I should be spending here. This is a revenue driving activity but it’s hard for me to wrap my head around that concept sometimes and feels like a useless activity
The more I learn what takes my time each week, the better I can build scalable systems or outsource tasks.
I’ve only just started to outsource some of these efforts and will be dabbling more in FQ2. Honestly, it takes time to know what to outsource effectively.
For example: I’m re-doing my website a bit for a better flow and to be able to give more assets away for lead gen on my website. So, moving traffic from Linkedin → Website → Form fill → Marketing cadence.
I’m not an expert in Kajabi, so I found someone on Upwork who re-did it all for $60 and within 24 hours.
It got me to 90% of what I wanted, now I can finish the remaining 10% myself.
Best $60 I spent in FQ1.Biggest Learning from FQ1: Schedule time weekly for admin tasks
Not all customers will be successful
One of the hardest parts about working withe pre-product-market-fit companies is the assumption that I’ll easily help them find PMF.
It’s also been very challenging personally to not see every single customer I have ‘go to the moon’.
There’s so many factors that go into this stage of company for it to be successful and so many of them are out of my control.
I wish I could easily say, “Yes, I’ll help you find PMF and we’ll scale”… but I’ve been clear in my engagements that we just don’t know. We’ll do our best and use the frameworks I’ve used previously to find it, but it’s not an easy or sure journey.
So I have to focus on the wins as they come.
Give, give, give, get.
I’ve always been a fan of this principle. The more I can give, the more I’ll receive. This rang true more and more in FQ1 for me.
I spent a lot of time and energy giving away free information, advice, candidates and more.
I’ve helped source and place a VP of Sales for a startup, zero fees. Probably saved the founder >$85k in placement fees.
I’ve placed >10 sales reps at early stage companies, all for free.
I’ve spent >25 hours on calls that were setup by friends, VCs, etc with founders looking for feedback or advice.
It’s taken a lot of time and energy, but it helps me build relationships with people who have much deeper networks.
Each of these have almost always turned into referrals.
And I’m blown away at the spiderweb of networks of people I get to meet.
I’ve had 2 founders that I met 4 months ago email me back asking for feedback again and potentially a consulting engagement in the last few weeks.
Play the long game.
Building Automation / scale
FQ2 is going to be a lot more focused on scale. How do I build more systems to scale.
I’ve touched on this a bit already but after 4 full months I’m starting to feel like there are things I can automate better to scale.
I tried to do these things sooner in FQ1 but frankly, I was trying to automate & do them too soon. I didn’t know enough.
For example: Customer onboarding
I thought there would be the same 2-3 things we’d work on in the first few weeks. I built in some automation around these documents that honestly just didn’t work with every customer. I realized there were 2-3 other things that were very ‘similar’ across each customer I would onboard. Instead, I automated those.
🎯 FQ2 Goals:
Nail down my content system
Double down on Substack
Weekly long form publishing
Start and launch the $0-$1M Soloprenuer podcast
interviewing other soloprenuers on their journey of quitting their W2
All my learnings on this journey in a podcast
>$30k a month from Consulting
execute content strategy weekly as planned
Try more, faster.
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