Hometown ADvantage - Local Marketing

Ep 4: Let's Talk Money: How much I made my 2nd year in business

• Nicole Eldridge

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 In this transparent episode, I'm sharing my exact revenue, expenses, and profit from 2024 ($75,591 revenue with $55,560 profit!) plus the mindset shifts that helped me double my income from the previous year.

In this episode, I break down:

  • My four biggest expense categories and why I don't regret (almost) any of them
  • How I spent $4,000 on Facebook ads and turned it into multiple $9,000 launches
  • Why being afraid to spend money might actually be a confidence issue
  • My exact profitability goals for 2025 (and how I plan to hit 100K)
  • The two things that had the biggest impact on my income: Facebook ads and mentorship

🎯 Ready to turn your social media scrollers into paying customers? Join my 12-week Local Ads Mentorship Program: https://hello.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/course

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#BusinessGrowth #LocalBusiness #FacebookAds #MarketingStrategy #MoneyTalk #SmallBusinessTips #Entrepreneurship

Welcome back to Hometown Advantage, a podcast for business owners that want to learn how to turn their social media views into actual paying customers with a mix of behind the scenes, running a business, being a mom, all of those fun life things. And I say that because today I'm feeling a little Um, and just ready to go for it. So, we're going to talk money. Including how much money I made last year, how much I spent, what I spent on it, how I feel about all of it. Um, we're just gonna dive right in. So, this time of year is so fun for me because I love planning. I love goal setting. I love being a visionary and really like trying to picture how I want my life to look. And, yeah. My husband and I just sat down to get all of our tax stuff taken care of from last year and I was so interested by, you know, my final numbers, so I thought, why not yap about it on the podcast. So here we go, we're just going to dive right in, I'm not going to make you wait any longer. So how much money did I make last year? Let me pull up my report, 75, 591 was my revenue. Now, here's. Expenses came out to 22, 805, which left me with a profit of 55, 560, and that does not include taxes. So, here's the deal. 75, 000 is great for me in my It's my second full year of business. Um, it's more than I ever made as a teacher. It's double what I made the year before. So, love it, happy. This year was really about building and kind of transitioning from baby business owner to big girl business owner, let's be honest. So, let's talk about expenses because here's the deal. Did I need to spend that much money? Probably not. Do I regret it? Also, no. Like I said, 2024 was seriously a build and lay serious foundations year for me. I built my entire course from the ground up, I raised my done for you prices significantly, I started hiring, like, we are transitioning. No more baby business stage. And if I've learned anything, it's that that costs money. Okay? So, let's talk about these expenses. My four biggest expenses were softwares. education, contractors, and marketing. So I want to talk about how much I spent in each of these and how that all went down. So I'm going to start with softwares because that's just a boring one. I spent 3, 700 on softwares for the year. This is just a given part of the job. This is like, you know, the base expenses for an online business. As far as softwares, 3, 700. That is things like FG Funnels, which I use to house my course and do my email marketing, and like have all my products and checkout in. I have, um, HoneyBook, which does like contracts and onboarding things for when I have a new done for you client. Squarespace for my website. Um, and I've tested. Like I said, with 2024 being such a building year, I've tested so many different things. So at one point I had Flowdesk for email marketing. I've tried different video editing softwares. Zoom, having the paid version of Zoom, that's like a hundred something dollars. So anyways, 3, 700 for the year on softwares. Let's move on from that. Next is education. I spent 2, 800 on education in 2024. And in this 2, 800, I'm not counting like high level mentorship. I do have some business coaches that I categorize personally for myself in the contractor category because I'm hiring these people to help me move faster. That's how I consider it. So these are like self paced courses, resources. I did a lot of investing in. Like, chat GPT, um, pre written AI prompts and courses and things like that, low ticket workshops. Things that are either ads that popped up on my feeds or people I follow that they were selling that I wanted to learn from them. 2, 800 there. Next is contractors. And I spent 6, 200 on contractors. So that is I now have two ad managers that work for me and support me in done for you client work. I have a VA that supports me with my own marketing, like getting my carousels created, editing face to camera videos, scheduling my content out. At the beginning of the year I got a new website, so this counts for that, and then business coaching. I had two pretty big business coaching investments this year that I counted here. And then lastly is my networking and marketing category, which was my highest category at$8,100. So this counts as masterminds, conferences, and Facebook ads. So of the 8,000 ish dollars, 4,000 of it was on Facebook ads, which is so crazy to me because. When I check my Facebook ad manager now for just 2025, I think I'm close to two or three grand already. And it's amazing because Facebook ads, I want to talk about this more like in my little reflections at the end, but Facebook ads. Have been incredible for my business, obviously. But the first couple years of my business were just running Facebook ads and doing incredible things for other people's businesses. So now I'm getting to see the fruits of that for my own business and it's been incredible. I have such fun stories about how Facebook ads have made me crazy to me amounts of money. For example, in January when I launched the course for a second time, I spent a little over a thousand dollars on Facebook ads. And I spent this in December. It's funny because this is like an expense for last year, but I saw the revenue for this year. I spent a little over a thousand dollars, and before I even held the workshop that launched off the doors opening to my course for a second time, I had already made a thousand dollars back off of that. And then when I launched the course, I launched it at 1, 000 and nine people watched. So the fact that I made 9, 000 in a weekend from Facebook ads was crazy to me. But also not because I know the power of Facebook ads. The other fun story that I'm still riding, a high from is that I launched Facebook ads for my challenge that I'm hosting next week. If you're listening to this in real time, you don't have a ton of time left because honestly, I launched the ads for the challenge and I had two people buy my program for 1500 from the ads for the challenge, which is only 97. So when I tell you getting visible, if you do something great and you have a great face. You just need to get in front of the right people, and the best way to do that is Facebook ads. That was not the point of this whole podcast, but I just had to share that because that was so fun and exciting for that notification to come through. Anyways, some of my thoughts. I have four little points here that I want to touch on. When it comes to money and spending money and making money and being in business and having to manage money. So my first reflection is that if you're scared to spend money it's normal to be scared, but so scared that you refuse to spend money on things that feel so right to you that you know can help you. that you know can push you farther along in your business. To me, that's a confidence issue. And I say that because I totally was there at the first year of my business. Did not want to spend any money on anything out of so much fear that I would not make it back. But here's the deal. There is not a single investment on my profit loss statement that I regret from 2024, no matter how helpful or unhelpful it was, besides one, which is Metricool, a scheduling tool, auto renewing me, and I didn't know it was going to auto renew, and I haven't used it in months, I was so mad about that, I reached out to them asking if I could please cancel and get it back, and they said no, 150 bucks. That was painful. But anyways, everything other than that, whether it was helpful or not, I have no regrets because every time I make a purchase, it's to teach myself something, it's to grow in my leadership, it's to move me forward, propel me forward and everything I learned and have learned up to this point has gotten me to this point and I feel really good about where I'm at. I'm gonna keep spending that money, honey, where it feels right. And just understand that money is made to be spent and it's made to be made. I have so much confidence in myself and my abilities to have an amazing impact on clients and people that come to me to get them results. And also, understand that I will make more money. If I want to make more money, if I want to grow as a human, I want to grow as an ads manager and a business owner, if I want to keep getting incredible results for myself and my people, it only makes sense to keep spending money on things that will help push me along faster. So anyways, that's number one. If you are so scared I would look at your confidence in Think about what is holding me back. What's making me feel so scared to spend money. And is it that I'm scared I cannot pull through for myself And just think about that work on that and if you want to talk through it with anyone I am so here to talk through all that fun deep shit. I love it number two You got to know your numbers, right? I definitely slacked on this at the beginning of 2024, but like I said, things were still very much in the baby biz phase at the beginning, but not anymore. We're in a big girl business phase and we know our numbers. So my goal every month for 2025 is to keep things super organized, which is not my specialty. I actually just quote unquote hired my dad to be my bookkeeper, so I will keep you updated on how that goes. He's gonna get to see how much money I make and where I'm spending all my money, so that will be interesting. But my goal is to operate at 60 percent profitability, including estimated tax payments. Going into my business savings account every month for 2025. And the big goal is to, make 100K in revenue, which to me is a no brainer at this point. It's definitely going to happen, but the trick there and the caveat there is to make sure that I still operate at 60% of the money going into mine and my family's bank account. 60K for the year, going into the bank account, 100K. overall revenue. I'm super excited for that. Next point, I think I already went on a ramble about this because it's so cliche, but goodness it is true, you gotta spend money to make money. Money's meant to flow, it's meant to go in and out. Cash injections are super exciting and fun, but I am in this for the long haul. I'm not going to pocket 100k overnight, but over time, more money will come in and some will need to come out, and then more will come in, and then some of that will need to come out. And eventually we're looking at, the big freeing numbers that will take my family around the world. It's my ultimate dream. You gotta spend money to make money. I am also one of those people that believes paying to play is such a good way to grow into your leadership and to get in the right rooms with the right people. Some people think that's, don't know, silly, but have paid. Pretty big money to get in rooms with potential clients, to get in rooms with people who know more than me so that they can teach me how to get closer to where they're at, and it has paid off time and time again. Next, the biggest and direct impact on my money has been Facebook ads and mentorship, for sure. One of my first big investments in mentorship. Was how my course was created. It was an in person mastermind that I signed up for. It was just over three grand for three months. I loved that it was in person, and it's where the idea for my course came, and where the confidence came too. And the accountability to sit down and create it, right? That's a hard part. I have client work, I have to keep marketing. My done for you services, if I want to keep getting new clients and keep, bringing people in, like it's hard to find time to create the course and that, that mastermind definitely I can credit that for the course coming to life. That was huge. And then, some strategy that really helped things take off was from my new business coach, her name is Phoebe. She teaches incredible strategy, but one specific thing I learned from her, and this was just from being in her world, going through her modules, and then getting to mastermind with her, and that is creating these back end custom services that you can deliver through the DMs when someone signs up for one of your free things. Is That changed my launch results. So I don't know if that made sense to you. But basically just a strategy for launching. Once adding one simple thing to a launch. I learned it from her. I implemented it. It made me pretty much get my ad spend back before I even launched the course. Like I was talking about before at the beginning of the episode. And it helped my conversion rate. It helped me land more people in the course because I was Getting to show my expertise custom to them in their DMs. That was huge. I never would have thought of that on my own. So that just speaks the power of, like I said, getting in rooms with people who know different things than you. And then amplifying your message in the most strategic way with Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads. are what I can credit for actually bringing in the money because I built this amazing business, this amazing course, but I needed to get it visible to people to actually sell it. My last point is that spending money is fun. And making money is fun. Talking about money is fun. Celebrating money is fun. I'm tired of it being taboo. If you want to talk money honey with anyone and have it not be weird or taboo or whatever, DM me. I'd love to chat all things money. How much are you making? How much are you spending? What's your plan for making more? What's your dream? What's your vision? I would love to talk about it. My plan, like I said, my goal is a hundred K in revenue operating at 60 percent profitability. So I am just going to stay the course, keep spending where it feels right. Keep advertising the crap out of myself and my offers because whenever I do amazing things come. If you liked this episode or resonated with anything or maybe you didn't like it and you didn't resonate with it I would still love if you shot me a DM on Instagram and let me know what you think What questions does this leave you with or even better yet share a screenshot on your Instagram stories? I would eat that up and if you're ready to Spend some money that's going to make you money, blow up your visibility, convert that visibility into paying clients and customers. I want to invite you to join me inside. One of my offers, if you use the code PODCAST, you can get 100 off either of these two offers I'm about to talk about just for listening here. So I have my 12 week local ads program where I take you step by step through each. ad you should set up based on your specific business. This is specifically for local business owners, and you get 12 weeks of support and feedback every step of the way. That program's called Hometown Advantage. I will leave a link in the show notes. I'm also getting ready to launch my ad sprint offer. This is for any type of business that is just crushing it, where my team and I will create and build all your ads for you. Show you how to manage and optimize them yourself, which will also come with 30 days of messaging support from me. So you're not in the dark there. I'm offering three spots at my lowest price, which is going to be 1, 600. But if you use the code podcast, you can get it for 1, 500. So if that's something you're interested in. Send me a DM or an email. My email is Nicole at NicoleEldridgeMedia. com. Like I said, I'll put all the links and things you need to know in the show notes so you can scope them out on your own too. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll see you again next week.