The Profit Pillars Show by Evolved Finance

Before I started working with Corey (my business partner and the founder of Evolved Finance) back in 2014, I was the US footwear manager and merchandiser for adidas Golf. In this role at adidas, I learned the importance of pricing very quickly because a big part of my role was to make sure all our footwear models were priced to: Drive profit for the company Drive the sales volume needed to steal m...

At Evolved Finance, we love making finance easier for our clients. One of the most common ways we see entrepreneurs make things harder for themselves is by not having centralized software to track every sale they make in their businesses.  Newer online businesses tend to accept any form of payment they can because they want to make the process as convenient as possible for their customers. I'm all...

Can you freaking believe it's December already? December and January are when things really pick up for us at Evolved Finance. Between submitting 1099s and sending bookkeeping files over to our clients' accountants, it's definitely the busiest time of year for us. It's also the time of year where a lot of entrepreneurs start to panic about their bookkeeping and taxes. That's why the timing was so...

If you're a big fan of Marie Forleo, who is arguably one of the most successful business coaches and course creators in the world, then you've probably heard that she is not going to be working with affiliate partners next year to sell B-School. If you aren't familiar with Marie, this is a pretty big deal. Mainly because she is the QUEEN of affiliate launches. So much so that she built her entire...

The holidays can be a complicated time for online businesses. While the holiday season can make or break retail, manufacturing, and e-commerce businesses, it seems to have a smaller effect on coaching and info-based online businesses (the types of businesses we serve at Evolved Finance). Over the years, I've heard a lot of takes from different business experts about what online businesses should d...

Entrepreneurship is inherently risky. Period. That being said, it doesn't HAVE TO be any riskier than working for someone else. It's up to you as a business owner to be aware of any vulnerabilities your business might have and get in front of them as soon as possible. As your business grows, new vulnerabilities will come into play, but you will also have more resources available to you to make tho...

One of the most attractive parts of running an online business is the fact you can do so much on your own. In fact, most of the smaller businesses ($100k-$250k a year) we work with barely have any team at all. But what every single entrepreneur we work with quickly realizes is that they can only get so far on their own. Whether you are hiring your first virtual assistant or hiring your first full-...

Nobody can be good at EVERYTHING in their business. At the same time, it's not reasonable to only focus on the aspects of your business that you like and completely ignore everything else. When you start a business, you're accepting that you don't get to ONLY be a specialist anymore. Business owners have to be leaders, problem solvers, sales reps, strategists…the list just gets longer the fewer pe...

One of the biggest reasons people have for starting their own business is that they want to be their own boss. What many new entrepreneurs quickly realize, however, is that the boss doesn't always get paid that much in the beginning. As any business grows, there becomes more cash flow left over each month. But how do you know when the time is right to give yourself a raise? When should you be inve...

With the release of President Trump's tax returns in September of this year, there have been a lot of heated discussions online about what his tax returns have revealed about his businesses' financial health. While I do not want to get into the politics of this, the release of any major politician's tax returns tends to generate a lot of misinformation and confusion around how taxes work as well a...

I went to high school in the late '90s, right when the internet was starting to become popular.  Back then, if you told me to create a website, you might as well have asked me to assemble my own airplane from scratch—I would not have even known where to start. Now, over 20 years later, creating a website is so easy most elementary school kids could figure it out. Companies like WordPress, Wix, and...

If you've been in the online business world for long enough, you know how many trends and fads have come and gone in such a short period of time.  When I left the corporate world to partner up with Corey at Evolved Finance, e-books and 1-on-1 coaching were going out of style and courses were coming in hot. Now, membership sites and group coaching programs are all the rage. The reality is, all thes...

During my time working for adidas America, I quickly learned how important data is to running a successful business. Do we need to order more inventory? Look at the data. Do we need to run a promotion? Look at the data. Do we need to change the pricing of a product? Look at the data. Are we on track to hit our sales targets? Look at the data.  Any major decision I made or was a part of was always...

Hiring a bookkeeper is a lot like hiring a mechanic. You're taking a leap of faith that they're not going to screw you over. After all, unless you know how to fix your own car, how would you even know whether your mechanic is doing a good job or not? The same goes for a bookkeeper. Luckily, you don't have to be a bookkeeper yourself to know if your bookkeeper is doing quality work. That's why for...

I got a surprise text message from my brother-in-law and his long-time girlfriend a few weeks ago. They wanted me to help them put together a personal budget. I was honestly shocked they were asking for help on this. They're both in their early twenties and finishing up their last year of school, so it would be really easy for them to just "wing it." I know when I was their age, it was the last th...

I've probably said this 100 times now, but simply growing your business's revenue is not enough to build your wealth as the owner. Is a steady stream of sales important for any business? Of course! Does generating more sales create the potential for better cash flow? Absolutely! But if a business does not manage its expenses as the revenue increases, then profitability suffers, which means the bus...

In 2019, Corey and I bit the bullet and finally invested in our first coaching program. It was $10k for 8 weeks of support. Outside of our employees, it was the biggest investment we had ever made in our business at one time. Did we get the results we were looking for after the 8 weeks? Kinda. Was it worth it? 100%. Without those very intense eight weeks of analyzing and scrutinizing our business,...

When I jumped into the online business world six years ago, one of the first concepts I had to wrap my head around was affiliate marketing. As someone who had spent the previous 5 years in the sporting goods industry, it just wasn't a strategy I was familiar with. But back in 2014, almost all our clients were either running affiliate promotions for their own products or promoting a product for som...

When there is an aspect of our business that we don't understand, we tell ourselves it's because the subject matter is too confusing or too complicated. While there definitely are areas of expertise like computer programming or law that take a lot of specialized knowledge to understand fully, we can easily outsource this type of work to experts. But when it comes to things like finance, most entre...

Here are the top two things MOST entrepreneurs love to spend time doing: 1. Marketing 2. Creating products and offers Here are the top two things MOST entrepreneurs hate doing: 1. Dealing with their finances 2. Documenting internal processes We know as well as anyone how much entrepreneurs love to avoid their finances, but when our clients start working with us, they realize they can actually feel...

Part of being a successful online business owner is knowing who you need on your team and what they should be responsible for. Hiring people to manage functions like social media, copywriting, customer service, and graphic design is straight forward: you figure out what job needs to be done and pay someone to do it. But who should be involved in your finances? In my experience, there are four key...

Let's face it…we don't really know what the next 6 months are going to look like. Honestly, I'm still trying to wrap my head around what has just happened these last 6 months. Surprisingly, we have actually seen the online businesses we work with thrive this year as more people are spending larger amounts of time on the internet. But can we expect this COVID bump to last? I honestly don't know. Th...

Over the last couple years, the books "Rocket Fuel" and "Traction" have become popular reads for many online entrepreneurs. Both Corey and I loved "Traction" and incorporated several of the principles from the books into our own business. One concept that has become extremely popular is the two roles you need in a successful business: the "visionary" and the "integrator." Naturally, every business...

Successfully selling your products and/or services is how you generate revenue for your business. Understanding and managing the costs associated with selling to your customers is how you make a profit. And when I say cost, I mean from both a financial and time standpoint.  Luckily, online entrepreneurs have a multitude of ways they can generate leads for their businesses, but these options all ha...

There are a lot of great business educators out there helping entrepreneurs to master the different aspects of their businesses. In fact, many of our clients are those educators. And we know exactly how great they are at what they do because we see their numbers. But as important as it is to lock down your Instagram strategy, hone your copywriting skills, or up-level your webinar presentations, th...