We were so lucky to have Brittany Brown, Founder and CEO of LedgerGurus, as a guest to discuss profitability vs revenue for ecommerce businesses. And she really broke it down! The video replay and transcript are below, but read here for the key points before you dig in.
(Incidentally, the title of this webinar comes from a conversation Brittany had an a ecommerce meetup – this becomes VERY relevant in about two seconds)
Revenue ≠ Profit
Your gross profit isn’t, well, your profit. You have the money you brought in, and you subtract your COGS (cost of goods sold), but you don’t get your actual net income. Net income, as Brittany says, is “all the money you have left over after all the money is made and after all the money is spent…” It’s vitally important that you understand ALL the money going out – so that you’re not chasing revenue, but instead running profitably.
Common Mistakes
What you see deposited from Amazon and other channels isn’t your actual profit. Are all your fees and the costs associated with doing business on those channels deducted from your income? Probably not. Is everything taken into account so that you have a true and accurate account of what happened that month? Likely, no. So, you. have to understand your finances better.
Another mistake people make is to purchase inventory right away, in one month. That hits a month rather dramatically. Other months in the quarter should share the burden of COGS so that you have a reasonable view of your profit and loss.
Visit the LedgerGurus YouTube channel for a lot of great information on how to properly assess your costs, and your income.
The Bookkeeper Analogy
Brittany told a story about a bookkeeper she once had that bears a lot of weight in how you should look at your business. A friend of Brittany’s started working part time for LedgerGurus, and hired a nanny to take care of her child while she worked. The bookkeeper was making about $16 per hour, and paying her babysitter $13 per hour. For the hours this person worked, she only made $3 per hour, and she often ran errands or had lunch while the nanny was on the clock, resulting in making NO money for a particular hour, but still paying out for that hour.
Brittany says that she and her team see product-based businesses make the same mistake. Especially businesses with a lot of SKUs, because they may have some that are being sold with little or no margin. So, these businesses are paying fees, shipping, etc without actually making any money. They’re selling product for a loss, and not diving in deep enough to see where they’re bleeding.
Resources
Want to know how to fix these common mistakes, and really understand your financials? Watch the video below and read the transcript below that for tips from a truly brilliant financial mind. But first, resources promised:
10 Steps to Ensure Sales Tax Doesn’t Burn Down Your Ecommerce Business
Ecommerce Sales Tax Compliance Course Early Access
Ecommerce Marketing Budget Calculator
Market Intelligence FREE Competitive Analysis
Watch The Replay
Read The Transcript
Liz Fickenscher:
Hi, everybody. Thanks for attending today’s webinar. This is very special. I’ve got my friend Brittany Brown with me. She is the founder and CEO of LedgerGurus. They’ve created a very, very interesting and innovative way to deal with eCommerce accounting for eCommerce professionals. It’s just phenomenal the way they have their business set up. So, say hi, Brittany.
Brittany Brown:
Hey, guys.
Liz Fickenscher:
So, just a couple of housekeeping items before we get started. This session is being recorded. Yeah, I just looked. It is being recorded, and we will email the recording to all registrants of the webinar. So that doesn’t mean I want you to drop off because we are totally welcoming questions. The way you submit questions is in the questions section of the GoToWebinar panel. We’ll take some as we’re going through the content but I don’t want to break Brittany’s flow. She knows a ton of stuff. She’s going to give you a bunch of information today. So, if we don’t get to your question during the content itself there will be a Q&A section at the end. We’ve got a couple special offers for you. We’ll be pushing those links out. So, without further ado we’re going to talk about Growing a PROFITABLE eCommerce Business – Egos Chase Revenues, Ballers Chase Profits.
Brittany Brown:
Thanks, Liz. So, just a little bit about our speakers today. Liz, do you want introduce yourself?
Liz Fickenscher:
I’m Liz. I’m an eCommerce marketing manager at Teikametrics, and the webinar [inaudible 00:01:32]. Our fearless leader Andrew Waber is not doing webinars right this second. So, I’m doing a lot of them. You guys have been seeing a lot of me. So, I’m bringing people like Brittany on who know a whole bunch of stuff so that we can keep it fresh.
Brittany Brown:
Awesome, and thanks Liz. And I’m Brittany Brown, founder and CEO of a company called LedgerGurus. I’m also a CPA, but don’t hold that against me. I hope to be able to make the topics I want to talk about today really approachable in a way that will really help you guys understand what it is that you need to understand. So, I’d like to thank Teikametrics for hosting us today. I personally really like doing webinars, and so I’m really looking forward to this. I have to apologize in advance if I have notifications pop up. Accounting is my specialization, but notifications and turning them off eludes me every single time. Even though I’m pretty sure I shut all my programs down, pretty sure I swear, they just get through anyways. So, this is some of the brands that Teikametrics helps. They help top rated brands win on Amazon and Walmart, and [crosstalk 00:02:34]-
Liz Fickenscher:
If for some reason you’re not familiar with Teikametrics, we’re a SaaS platform that powers Amazon and Walmart advertising across thousands of brands, but we’re also offering tons of other analytics and insights as well. And also if you’re a larger brand that needs hands on keyboard help we have a team of expert analysts that can act as an extension of your business. So, we’re just helping ensure that your advertising dollar is spent wisely, but we’re also trying to make sure you understand where you stand in the marketplace, where you stand in your business so that you can be as profitable as possible. And we’re always thinking of new ways that our tools and our services can help you do that. Another way that we do that is through education bringing experts like Brittany on to cover really, really hairy interesting and difficult topic like accounting, and they have a whole bunch of businesses that rely on their expertise.
Brittany Brown:
Awesome. Thanks, Liz. These are some of the major brands that we help, Beddy’s, Rags, Wholesome Culture, Fawn Design, Thread Wallets. We have all the accounting needs for eCommerce businesses. So everything from the high level CFO budgeting, cash flow planning, all those things all the way down through the bookkeeping, invoices, pay payroll, and we go very deep on channel activity. All activity that’s coming off of your channels including Shopify, Walmart, Etsy, Amazon all those things. We go very deep on inventory and cost of goods sold and we go very deep on sales tax. So, we’re designed to be an alternative to having internal staff or to doing it yourself. What we don’t do is we don’t do taxes like income tax returns. We don’t do audits, but basically every other aspect of your financial needs we cover.
Brittany Brown:
So, the first thing I want to talk about today is a little bit about the title of this course, Egos Chase Revenues, Ballers Chase Profits. So, most of us when we started businesses and I speak as a most of us because I’m also a founder and I own LedgerGurus. We probably had some altruistic intentions in mind. Like I wanted to be able to employ parents who wanted to stay at home and still have really meaningful careers, and maybe I wanted to change the world and I wanted world peace, but I also really wanted to make money when I started a business.
Brittany Brown:
And for most of us when we started businesses we started businesses with those same kinds of objectives. We had the same kind of goal in mind. I wanted some more freedom, but I also really wanted some more money. And we got into business and we started running with the minutiae of it. And we started developing our products. And we started launching our services. And it was all really fun. And maybe we hired some employees. And maybe we formed some relationships with the vendors. And we started outsourcing our product and doing outsourcing or manufacturing, or outsourcing our accounting or forming relationships with marketing firms. We started doing all these things, and as we got into it we realized that maybe we weren’t actually doing the one thing we really wanted to do when you start a business, which was to make money.
Brittany Brown:
The reality is that most of us don’t start businesses because we’re really comfortable with the financial side of things. Most people are not comfortable pulling up open their financials, talking about accounting, talking about cash flow, talking about profitability. And I know this from experience because we work with a lot of business owners, and we work with a lot of very capable business owners that are making a ton of money, and some that are losing a ton of money. And across the board, the one thing that most of them feel the most uncomfortable with is accounting.
Brittany Brown:
So today, what I really want to do is I want to break down for you how to understand the power of your financial information, and how you can utilize that financial information to make decisions that will actually allow you to do what you wanted to do in the first place, which is to make money. So yes, while I realized we may be turning you all into a bunch of nerds like me, I can tell you that if you will stick with me through this presentation, we’re going to talk about some very complex topics.
Brittany Brown:
We’re really going to go deep on some things you need to understand to be able to run a profitable business. But I promise to do my very best to break it down in a way that makes it as understandable as possible. And that if you will stick with me, what I mean by stick with me is I’m sure you’ll still all be here by the end of the presentation. But you may start multitasking, you may have multiple screens going on, you may have allowed yourself to zone out. The topics today are complex enough that zoning out is not going to be in your best interest.
Brittany Brown:
If you will stick with me and not multitask you will come out of this understanding your financial information a lot better, and nothing will empower you more as a business owner than understanding your financial information because it holds the key to everything. Should I be spending more money on marketing? Your financials will tell you. Do I have the money to open a new warehouse? Your financials will tell you. What kind of margins am I getting on my product? What will my cash flow look like in six months? Do I have the money to invest right now in the raw materials I need for Black Friday? Your financials will tell you the answers to all of those things if you know how to read them. It is the most powerful resource you have to actually achieve the objective of which you start a business, which was to make money.
Brittany Brown:
So, let’s dive in. This is kind of the agenda of what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to talk about the code of the profit and loss, understanding your expenses, understanding your overhead. We’re going to introduce some complex but not that complex after I explain them concepts like contribution margins and breakeven points. We’re going to talk about running a business beginning with the profit in mind. And we’re going to talk about some key marketing metrics. And we’re going to talk about spending for sales with a plan. Now, that’s a lot of information to cover. You might have already noticed I talk really fast, which I need to apologize for upfront. But we have a lot to get through, and I want this to be as valuable as possible. So hang in there with me.
Brittany Brown:
So, a couple of years ago, I was at an eCommerce meetup. And I was meeting with somebody just chatting with someone at a happy hour after everything was over. And I asked him what he thought as an accountant to the space for eCommerce, how we could most add value what people most needed to hear. And he said, “You know what I’ve really learned,” he said, “is that have egos will chase revenue, but ballers chased profits.” And what he meant by that is this, what I’m showing you right here on the screen. So this screen is a profit and loss statement. If you’ve never seen one of these before, it’s time for you to learn what it is and how to dive into it. This financial statement I’m showing you right now is a natural generated result of the accounting activities you’re doing whether you’re using Xero, or QuickBooks, or NetSuite, or whatever other program you’re using as long as it’s not shoe boxes or Excel. Financial statements are a natural byproduct of what you’re doing.
Brittany Brown:
At the top of this, you see this is all the money that we brought into the business. And then we have this thing called cost of goods sold. Income minus cost of goods sold equals gross profit, which we’ll talk a lot more about in just a minute. Everything below that is all the other expenses of your business. And at the very bottom here we have net income. So net income is all the money you have left over after all the money is made, and after all the money is spent, what money do you have leftover?
Brittany Brown:
And this is really what he was talking about. He was saying that a lot of business owners will chase sells, basically. They’ll chase income. They’ll chase revenue. So, part of the reason I’m introducing this is because you’re going to hear me use these terms throughout this and I want you to know exactly what I’m talking about when I use these different phrases. So income is this money that is generated through sells. And people love to just try to grow that number as large as possible. I don’t blame you. I do the same thing as a business owner. But a lot of times they do that without noticing or keeping in mind what they’re actually doing here, which is net income, which is the real sign of success of whether you’re succeeding or failing as a business is actually your net income.
Brittany Brown:
If I was a $2 million a year business, and I was doing really great on the revenue side of things, but I was not running profitably, and at the end of the day I had no money leftover I’m no better off. In fact, I’m worse off than if I’m a $200,000 business doing a 10% net income. So I have $20,000 left at the end of the year. That is a much better scenario than $2 million with no profit is $200,000 with $20,000 of profit. So what we want to talk about today is how to manage your business to ensure that while you’re growing your revenue, you’re keeping an eye on profit. That will be the entire objective of today’s discussion.
Brittany Brown:
In passing, I want to talk about this thing called cost of goods sold because it’s an incredibly important expense for eCommerce businesses to manage and to watch. And basically, what it is, is it’s the cost of your product. So whatever it is you’re selling, however much it costs you to buy that from your manufacturer, however much it costs you to generate it or to create it yourself. That is the cost of your cost of goods sold. Now, I’m not going to get into today whether you’re going by landed costs, or by-cost, or all that kind of stuff. Not important at this moment in time, but just know that that’s what your cost of goods sold are, and it’s the most important expense for you to manage as a business owner.
Brittany Brown:
So, I have my income, all of my sales minus my cost of goods sold gives me this very important metric called gross profit, which we’ll get into a little bit more. So remember, income minus cost of goods sold is gross profit. Everything else below that we basically are calling overhead. Everything below here, here to here is basically the overhead of the business down to net income. So one of the most important starting places in order to be able to manage your business successfully is to have good financial information. Financial information that’s not misleading, that’s not filled with error, that doesn’t just fill your mind with rage and horror when you look at it. Because you know the numbers aren’t right, and you have no idea how to fix it, and you have no idea how to go about it.
Brittany Brown:
We have so many clients who come to us when they’re originally signing up for accounting services who will say, “I just feel like my financial information is not a source of truth at all.” And therefore, if you feel like your financial information is not a source of truth then creating it as a source of truth is step one. You must feel like your financial information is a source of truth. So whether you need to level up in your own skill sets of knowing how to do this yourself, whether you need to hire better internal help if that’s how you’re going about this or whether you need to find a better accounting firm that actually knows what they’re doing with eCommerce. Whichever one of those options you go with, you basically need to make sure you can get to a point where your financial information is a source of truth.
Brittany Brown:
I’m going to talk about two of the most common mistakes I see business owners make or their accountants make when tracking the financials for eCommerce businesses before we go into some of these deeper topics. Number one is assuming that whatever they see deposit from their Amazon channel or whatever other channels they’re selling on his sales. So if you guys are selling on Amazon, and you already know how egregiously off this is. Amazon basically deposits every two weeks. And that deposit is a summation of a whole bunch of different stuff. It’s your advertising costs on Amazon if you’re using FBA. It’s your warehousing, it’s your fulfillment, it’s your shipping. Plus it’s your sales, plus it’s all of your Amazon charges, plus if they’re giving you money back for inventory that they lost, plus if they are collecting sales tax in some of the states that don’t have marketplace facilitator laws and remitting it to you. It’s all of that in this one deposit.
Brittany Brown:
And so, the first mistake is taking this one deposit that hits your bank account and calling it sells because what that really is, is a whole bunch of other things, a whole bunch of other things. This is just some examples of what it could be. But it actually the list of what Amazon could be. And when we set up our clients’ books to basically map from Amazon activities, there’s literally over 100 different line items that it could be. And all of this stuff you see when you reduce all these activities to one line item. There’s a lot of very key data that’s missed. You have product margins that are very skewed. For example, this is actually $147,000 worth of sales, not 109.
Brittany Brown:
And so, if you’re looking at that thing I just talked about income minus cost of goods sold as gross margin as being the most important metric you as a business owner look at you’ve already skewed your margins by just not stating sells right. So this is your cost of goods sold number. This is what you actually called sales. You already see there’s a huge difference in that. Misstatement of balance sheet activity. So in this particular case, we did have some FBA inventory reimbursements. That is balance sheet activity. We also a lot of times people are running sales tax through here. Sales tax is not an income statement item. Sales tax is also a balance sheet. So sales tax that was collected here. A little bit less of an issue now because of recent laws, but still an issue and at least three states. And if you are borrowing money from Amazon. Also, 30% difference in revenues. As you can see, step one is not calling whatever deposits income.
Brittany Brown:
I’m not going to get into all the solutions we recommend on this right now. But you can visit our YouTube channel where we have a ton of information on how to break up activity from Amazon correctly. Some of the favorite tools that we like we talk about how they work and how they operate. So there’s really easy ways to solve for this problem alone. But if this is the way you’re doing it, then that’s issue number one is you got to dress that.
Brittany Brown:
The other thing we see people, the most common mistake we see people do all the time when they’re running product based businesses is with COGS. So the most common mistake we see people make is that they expensed whatever it is they’re purchasing for inventory right away through COGS. And this is what it looks like when that happens. You basically, let’s say that you have these three months, the first quarter of the year, and you buy all your product upfront, and the expense of that all hits in January. So in January, we show a $30,000 income, we show a $45,000 cost, and you show a $15,000 loss. And then February doesn’t share its burden of COGS like it should and March is home free skipping through the mountains sing in lalala because they don’t have their share of COGS either. And so, March and February both show profit margins that are unrealistic, and January has this huge hit.
Brittany Brown:
Well, the correct way to handle COGS is to basically put on the balance sheet and then expense it as those items are sold. So this is what it looks like when you do it that way. You basically have your COGS and you expense this much this month, this much this month, this much this month. As you can see we have very consistent margins. In this case, we have a 50% gross profit margin, consistently month after month. And the other thing that is an impact of this that I didn’t show is that as well as showing a consistent gross profit margin, your balance sheet also reflects the inventory that is still sitting on your books. So, if you’re going to a bank to get a loan, you have inventory that could be lent against on your balance sheet. If you are trying to sell your business, again, an asset that increases the value of your business. So this is another very common mistake.
Brittany Brown:
Solving the inventory and cost of goods sold problem is not a small easy problem to solve. Again, our YouTube channel has a lot of information about things that we recommend on how to get going correctly on cost of goods sold and inventory. But these are the two most common mistakes we see people make. So that addresses the income and the cost of goods sold and how to handle them correctly. And we’re going to now… Like I said everything below this is overhead costs. So one of the key differences between the income and the cost of goods sold and overhead is that you could argue that there are certain costs that are absolutely necessary for running your business. And there are other costs that are discretionary.
Brittany Brown:
And so, for example, I cannot sell a product that I have not produced to sell. I have to incur cost of goods sold in order to sell a product. Otherwise, I have nothing to sell. But I don’t have to hire a lawyer, I don’t have to hire an accountant. Don’t tell me I just said that. I don’t have to rent equipment in theory. I don’t have to have warehouse staff. I don’t have to… I don’t have to have an automobile that I’m using in my business. These are all things that can be managed and are discretionary. Whereas, I cannot do away with the creation of a product or the buying of a product if I’m selling a product. So, first takeaway I want you guys to take from this is that many companies try to sell their way to profit. This can become a vortex of lost money and opportunity. We suggest you spend or rather don’t spend your way to profit.
Brittany Brown:
Now, this concept of companies trying to sell their way to profit came from a really great book called Profit First. And so some of the things I’m going to talk about today, you could… They’re not necessarily Profit First principles. They’ve always existed. But Profit First does a good job of like explaining a little bit more about it. So basically, the idea being a lot of companies will say, “All right, we have a loss as a business, we just need to sell more.” Well, that may not actually be the solution. In fact, they may actually be increasing their losses by selling more. If they’re not selling their product profitably, they may be going further in the hole by selling their products.
Brittany Brown:
One of the keys to understanding how to run profitable businesses is to really understand the different levels of profitability and whether or not you should be scaling your current situation, whether or not it is a situation that will scale profitably, or whether you will only be putting yourself further in the hole. So, I want to talk about four types of costs that we’re going to go into in a lot more detail. Number one is cost of goods sold, which is just went into a lot of detail on just a minute ago, basically the cost of your product. Now, you could include in that, and you probably should, but I don’t want to confuse your brain now by giving you assignments that make it more complicated. But I want you to think about cost of goods sold as also including the landed costs.
Brittany Brown:
So, if you’re buying product from overseas, and you have to pay to have that product shipped here, and you have to pay to have it make it through customs, and you have to pay tariffs, and all that kind of stuff. Those are definitely costs of your product. And if you’re not considering those costs of your product, you may be depending on how wide of margins you have, and how much wiggle room you have. You may be finding yourself selling products and profitably adjust that base level.
Brittany Brown:
This is… I want to tell you guys a quick story that I feel like illustrates this point because a lot of people just don’t take the time to think about this. So several years ago when we first started our business, I had a bookkeeper who started working for us. She was a close friend of mine. And we were paying her at the time, I think something like 15 or $16 an hour. And she had hired a nanny to help cover her while she was working, and she was paying her nanny about $13 an hour. And her nanny would come over for four or five hours, and she didn’t… She also loved not having to run errands with their kids. So when her nanny came over for four or five hours, she would usually spend an hour or two of that running errands, maybe taking herself to lunch. And then she would come home and she would work for a few hours.
Brittany Brown:
I hope you’re doing the math in your head already. But just without time spent, if we just said time spent that she made $16 an hour and she was paying her nanny $13 an hour. You can already see she only has $3 per hour that she’s actually making when she works. So hopefully that’s the first thing you got to see. But second of all, as she adds into that time, time that she’s paying the nanny, but she’s not actually being paid because she’s not working. She’s now reversed that. She’s now paying for the privilege of having a nanny instead of making any money at her job at all.
Brittany Brown:
I remember having a conversation with her where she was like, “I thought getting a job was going to help my family financially. Instead, I feel like we’re so much worse off than we were before.” I broke this down with her, and I said, “Well, how much are you paying your nanny?” Blah, blah, blah, we had this discussion, it was mind blowing for her. She didn’t even realize that she was incurring more costs to make that revenue than she was actually making in revenue to begin with. And in such a simple relationship like that she’s forgotten to even do that comparison.
Brittany Brown:
A lot of times, we see product based businesses make the same mistake, especially when they have say like 100 or 200 SKUs. And maybe some of those SKUs are doing really, really well. But some of those SKUs are being sold for a loss. And people have never really dived in and looked at that analysis. And so, they don’t realize that they’re selling those products for loss. Now, incidentally, that’s the key. One of the key differences between a bookkeeper, this individual who is a bookkeeper for us not an accountant is that a bookkeeper coaches transactions and an accountant thinks in terms of a bigger picture.
Brittany Brown:
So part of the case for having an accountant engaged in doing your books, and not just a bookkeeper is a lot of times you’ll get a much better level of insight with someone who knows how to think about it from a bigger perspective. But I would challenge all of you guys to think about it not like a bookkeeper, but think about it like an accountant. Because that’s the first cost is the cost of goods sold. Cost of fulfillment, cost of selling, cost of overhead, I’m going to go into this next slide to show a little bit more about what this is.
Brittany Brown:
Cost of goods sold would include things like product purchases, product packaging, and the assembly. Fulfillment costs would include warehousing, shipping, and packaging. Selling costs would include things like ad spend, commissions, marketing, and channel fees. So these are all examples of product costs. And when you are running a product based business you need to be aware of these products, and you need to be aware of how these products behave. And you need to be aware of how much you’re actually committing in cost in these different areas. So, one of the other things I want to bring up for just a moment is understanding the difference between variable and fixed costs also. So, a fixed cost is a cost that stays the same no matter the level of your business. A variable cost is a cost that goes up or down in direct relationship to how much you’re selling.
Brittany Brown:
Cost of goods sold is a perfect example of a variable cost. If I have a product, and if I’m selling it for $100, and my cost of goods sold associated with this is $50 then that cost of goods sold is $50 for every $100 I’ve sent. If I sell 1,000 of them, it’s still $50 per item. It goes up and goes down, but it stays… It moves in direct relationship with the sales. So, let me give you a better example than me just speaking this out. So let’s take Shopify for example, okay? So Shopify has a monthly fee to just use the platform period, and it’s $29 a month for the basic Shopify. $299 a month if you’re Shopify advanced. These numbers may be a little off. But basically this cost here whether you’re selling $10 million worth of stuff or whether you’re selling $20 worth of stuff, this cost here stays exactly the same.
Brittany Brown:
Now, down here we have our credit card rates. They basically say this is how much it costs. These are the different rates for all the different things that happen. This is an example of a variable cost. So, my payment processing costs are going to be significantly higher if I’m a $10 million business, and they are going to be if I’m a $10 a month business. I will have much, much, much higher credit card rate. If suddenly I were to stop selling completely, my payment processor fees would immediately disappear. This would not. This would stay the same unless I downgraded or upgraded my package. This stays the same every single month no matter what level I’m selling at. This moves in relationship to my sales. As it goes up, it goes up. As it goes down, it goes down.
Brittany Brown:
So why does that matter? It matters because when you are considering budgeting for your business, or how to run a profitable business, it’s important to understand whether you’re talking about variable costs, or whether you’re talking about fixed costs when you’re trying to plan for your business. So let’s take this and just break it into a really quick, easy example, okay? So we have costs of one product. Let’s say that this is an item that we sell for $100, but here are the true costs of my product, okay? It cost me $45 to buy this product, $3 to store this product, $2 to ship this product, and another $10 to market this product. So, these are all things that I would consider like you can’t really run a business, a product based business, unless you’re buying a product, storing it somewhere, whether it’s in your garage, or whether you’re storing it somewhere, you have to then ship it. You have to have it shipped to you, usually, and you have to ship it to the customer. And then usually there’s some sort of cost involved with driving marketing to it as well.
Brittany Brown:
So this would be an example of all of the variable costs on this one product case. So I have a sales price of $100. And my variable cost of $60, which means I have a 40% margin on this one product, okay? This, if I am selling 100 products, basically all of this multiplies out exactly by 100. $4500 to buy all those products, $300 to store all those products, $200 to ship those products, $1,000 to market those products, total variable costs of $6,000. Even though my sales went up by, oh, my gosh, my brain. Was it 100 times? See, I’m a great accountant, but I don’t know math in my head well at all. So my margin stays exactly the same. I still have exactly a 40% margin.
Brittany Brown:
This introduces a concept that I want you guys to understand called the contribution margin. So contribution margin equals my sales price minus all the variable costs of selling that product. So this is what it looks like. In this example I just used here is my sales price. So sales price was $100. Total variable costs was $60, giving me a contribution margin of $40. Why does this matter? It matters because this contribution margin is now the amount that I have to go towards all of the overhead costs of my business before I will actually generate a profit. So people will say, “Oh, this is my profit.” Well, it’s not your profit because if you have any costs over these, which most people do your salary, legal expenses, utilities, travel, whatever it is you’re doing. You still have to cover those costs before you actually have a profit. But this contribution margin, and understanding the contribution margin on your product is a very important place to start with understanding whether or not you’re operating profitably or not.
Brittany Brown:
If you are not operating profitably at the contribution margin level, and you scale this, you are basically scaling yourself out of business. So, first step is that first relationship I showed you guys, which was income minus cost of goods sold is gross profit needs to be positive. That’s barrier number one, right? Second barrier is we add into that now all the other costs that I talked through, so I’m going to bring it back here for just a second. Cost of goods sold, fulfillment costs, selling costs, these are all the things that factor into your contribution margin. This also needs to be a net positive relationship. So, sales price minus all the variable costs of selling my product gives me contribution margin. Is this positive? If this is positive, great, you are ready to move on to the next step. If this is not positive you need to rework this right away. What were you going to say, Liz?
Liz Fickenscher:
We have a question from the audience. How contribution margin differ from gross profit margin?
Brittany Brown:
Great question. Contribution margin, gross margin is typically just this. It’s just like the buy cost and maybe the shipping cost to get it there. That’s typically what people consider with cost of goods sold whereas contribution margin then factors in fulfillment storing and cost of advertising. So, it’s basically what we call the true sell cost which is like the cost of the product and the cost to sell that product would be our contribution margin.
Liz Fickenscher:
And then everything else is the gross profit margin. At the end of the day after you spent all the money on payroll, and everything else-
Brittany Brown:
Net income [crosstalk 00:30:42] margin, yep. So, gross profit margin is right under here. So, income minus cost of goods sold is gross profit. But a lot of times advertising fulfillment costs are below this line, but even though they’re the below this line they’re still what we call the variable costs of selling your product. And it is something worth looking at because it is the true cost of selling your product, and I’m going to show you guys in just a second one of the best, one of the most useful things for this which is contribution margin. So good question. Gross profit margin is only cost of goods sold. Contribution margin is all variable costs associated with selling that product. So, this is [inaudible 00:31:27] margin.
Brittany Brown:
Okay. I’m going to show you guys what I mean when I talk about the financial impact of one product and how the variable costs affect the net income and how fixed costs work. So let’s carry on with the scenario we just used. We have $100 to sell our product. We have one product, we sell it one time, we made $100. We just went through all the variable costs of selling that which is the cost of goods sold, shipping, fulfillment, advertising were all $60 giving us. Now, I used gross profit here, but I should have said contribution margin instead. Giving us a contribution margin of $40. Now, let’s say that the business had an additional fixed costs of $2,000, which means that if I only sold one product you can see I actually had a loss of basically $1800.
Brittany Brown:
Now, if I take that same scenario and now I bumped myself up to $10,000 I had $6,000 of product cost… I mean, variable costs on product giving me $4,000 after I basically sold my product, and I still only have $2,000 of fixed costs because now I’m scaling based on fixed overhead. I now have a net income of $2,000. So, this is why it’s important to understand differently variable costs versus fixed costs because all of these variable costs went up at the same rate as my sales whereas fixed costs stayed exactly the same.
Brittany Brown:
One of the questions people will ask is okay so somewhere between one product and 100 products we became profitable. Where did that happen? This is what you call a break even point. So clients will ask how much do I need to sell to at least break even? How much do I need to sell to just not be going in the hole every month? And that question comes back to this contribution margin which is another reason why I break this out separately over and above just gross margin is because this helps you understand what your breakeven point is so this is the way you calculate it. You take all of your fixed costs and you divide it by your contribution margin and that tells you what your breakeven point is so let’s look at how this works.
Brittany Brown:
In this scenario we just talked through we have $2,000 in fixed costs, $100 sell price and $60 in total variable cost. These variable costs include cost of goods sold, cost of fulfillment, cost of selling, costs of storing. So this was the scenario we’re looking at. So this is our calculation. Fixed costs was $2,000 minus total revenue minus variable cost. This is incidentally same thing as contribution margin. It means that I have to sell 50 units to break even. If I sell less than 50 units I will be in a loss. If I sell more than 50 units I will be profitable. So this is where contribution margin really comes in handy is helping you really understand how much sells you need to at least run a profitable business. Anything over and above this as long as my breakeven point stays the same. I mean, as long as my fixed costs stay the same as this grows and grows and grows and grows my profitable grow and grow and grow and grow. Anything less than that and I’m basically coughing up money to run a business.
Brittany Brown:
So, let’s bring all this together. There’s two different approaches I want you guys to think about. Now that I’ve introduced different ways for you to think about costs and different ways for you to understand what’s going on in your business this is what we call the revenue chasing approach. So basically businesses will say, “Whatever I sold, it’s still not enough to actually be profitable. I have to spend, spend, spend more. Spend for sells. And typically when people are thinking spend for sells, this looks like things like hiring more marketing agencies, pouring more money into ad spend. It often looks like investing in inventory, pre-investing in inventory, all that kind of stuff.
Brittany Brown:
And then as they spend for sells. They build up overhead to support those sells. They’ll say, “Oh, my gosh, I’m super overwhelmed. I really need somebody to manage this for me.” And then they start hiring people. Or we’ve totally grown out of our warehouse, we need a bigger warehouse. They’ll go invest in another warehouse without really considering whether or not they can afford it, how it affects all of this. They start by spending for sells, building up overhead. And then at the end of the day, they hope they made a profit. This is the revenue chasing approach, and a lot of businesses find themselves in a real pickle doing it this way. Now, there’s always the business, by the way, that has such good margins on their product, and they just got lucky. And they figured out pretty early on how to get a good return on marketing spend, and they literally are so profitable, and they’re basically printing money that they can basically ignore all of this. And yay for them.
Brittany Brown:
We have clients like that. It makes me wish I owned an eCommerce business instead of an accounting firm. But we all know somebody like that. If we’re in this, and it’s the thing that dreams are made up is the business is so profitable they can basically ignore all of this other stuff we’re talking about because at the end of the day no matter how thoughtfully they manage it, or unthoughtfully they manage it, they still make money. Yay for them. Most of the rest of us though, do much better when we manage the profit in mind.
Brittany Brown:
So, what does that look like? This is the profit chasing approach instead. You decide on what you want your profit to be. For example, 15%. I want to do 15% as a business and net income. Then you spend for sells in a educated way understanding what your return on marketing is, which we’re going to get into in just a minute. And understanding what your contribution margin is. You make a deliberate plan to spend for sells. Then you build up overhead based on what the current sells level is, and what your profit goals are instead of reversing that. So this is what this would look like. If you’re using the revenue chasing approach. You basically say, “All right, jump in, we’re just spending for sells.” You basically… I mean, hopefully, you’ve done some sort of analysis on this to at least make sure that you’re spending at the sells spend level, you’re at least spending profitably. They just start spending for sells.
Brittany Brown:
Then as they build up, they build up, they build up, they end up with a high overhead for the level of sells that they have, and they end up with no profit at all. Better luck next time. This is what it looks like to approach it with a profit chasing approach. Decide on what your profit will be, say 15%, then say, “Okay, look, we have $100,000 worth of sells, that’s great. It cost us $40,000 to make those sells giving us $60,000 left. I have already budgeted for $50,000 of that to be profit, therefore, I only have $45,000 left to spend on overhead to support these sells. And they don’t incur overhead until the sells actually support the overhead level based on their budgeted profit. I hope that just made sense to you guys because this is so key. It’s such a reverse way of thinking about it, and it’s so important.
Liz Fickenscher:
[inaudible 00:38:36], and it made sense to me. So if you have a question, pop it in the question section because Brittany will answer it. She obviously knows, but I thought that that was clear.
Brittany Brown:
Okay, cool. Thanks, Liz. Okay, so then, so how do we go about spending for sales? So we recommend what I call a data driven strategy. So one of the things we really like about Teikametrics, and one of the reasons why we like them as a partner is because we’re a big fan of anything that gives clients additional information to be data driven. Because when you are operating a business without data, you’re flying blind. You might get lucky, good on you. But most of us don’t just get lucky. Most of us have to be deliberate. And how do you be deliberate, you are deliberate by using data to inform your decisions. The more sources you have data, and the more places you can get that data, and the more refined that data can be, the more you can make good smart decisions that will actually support you.
Brittany Brown:
The first marketing thing I want to introduce is this idea of customer acquisition cost. So basically, this is a pretty straightforward thing. If you’re in the product space, you’ve probably heard this quite a bit. Customer acquisition cost is basically all the marketing expense divided by the new customer. So it looks like this. I spent $57 on ads to make four sells. So basically $57 ad spend divided by $4 equals $14.25 to acquire each new customer. Now, this is grossly simplified because in the eCommerce space, especially if you’re selling to multiple channels and all that kind of stuff there’s like, “Yes, you’ve got this customer, but then they were a repeat customer. And then they told their friend and blah, blah, blah, blah.” It’s not quite this straightforward, but you can make it this simple when you’re making certain decisions.
Brittany Brown:
So customer acquisition costs $14.25. So then what do you do with this? Then you take this, and you evaluate something called ROAS, which stands for return on ad spend. So, ROAS equals the average sell divided by the customer acquisition cost. So if my average sell is $87, and my customer acquisition cost is $14.25, then my ROAS is 87 divided by 14.25, which is $6.10. So what does that mean? What does that number mean? This number means that for every dollar I spend on ads I get $6.10 back in sells. As this number gets higher and higher, you become more and more and more profitable. As this number becomes lower and lower, if this number drops below one, for example, you are in a situation where you are literally paying for the privilege of giving your product away. You are not making any money on the sell, and you are in trouble.
Brittany Brown:
Now this by the way, this is a straight up cost of ads in comparison to cost of… I mean, sells. Oh, my gosh, I’ll say it again. Words, Brittany. This is straight up just looking at money brought in the door in comparison to money spent to get those customers in the door. This does not factor in, for example, the cost of the product, the cost of shipping it, the cost of fulfilling. This is just looking at when we talk about like the very… Let me go back to it for just a second so you guys can see what I’m talking about here, here. Okay. Actual cost of sell. This is where we’re talking about ROAS here.
Brittany Brown:
So, on top of that, what we just looked at you also need to factor in how much did that cost? Oh, my gosh, how much did that product cost me to buy, to store, to ship, and to sell. And if all of those things are positive and you have a positive gross profit margin then it is time to scale meaning if you have access to capital and you have a positive… You are positive in all of these areas. It is basically time to start to pour money into scaling. Take out loan, borrow money from friends and family. Whatever you need to do, you are in a profitable situation where you can profitably scale this.
Brittany Brown:
If you are not positive on this, as you scale your business you will basically be running your business more and more into the hole with every passing day. Okay, so how much should I spend for sales? That really depends on, first of all, whether or not you’re spending profitably at the sales level, but then also how much your basic overhead is. So if you’re trying to basically scale your business and make sure you breakeven, at least, and then moving towards profitability. That’s the process we recommend you use. So, harnessing the power of your financial information. So this is a spreadsheet that we built out. It’s on our website, you can download it for free that basically talks about how all of these pieces come together.
Brittany Brown:
Here’s the financial variables at the top of the spreadsheet. So let me just talk real quick about where you download it. So you go to our website, we have a downloads page. One of the downloads is this thing called the eCommerce marketing budget calculator and it will actually try to simplify this and make it all very attainable by taking out a lot of the thought going through this. So this is how this works. You’re going to start by determining your financial variables. You’re going to say my cost of goods sold are 45% meaning that I have a gross profit margin of 55%. Here’s my total monthly overhead. Here’s how much I’m paying in agency fees for marketing. Here’s how many days are on each month. Here’s what I’m getting right now on my ROAS. Therefore, here is what I’m budgeting for daily ad budget. Here’s what my monthly agency fees are..
Brittany Brown:
There’s different variables you can pop in. These are just some basic ones we set up but hopefully you know spreadsheets well enough that you can play with this yourself. But if not if you just plug in these variables it’ll then give you this. So this is basically what I’m calling the daily profit and loss. So, I put in my sells for the day. I put in this number. Let me show you this. Okay, I put in this number. It will calculate my COGS based on the rest of this. So this I put in. This calculates, this calculates, this comes in from above, this comes in from above, giving me my total variable marketing, giving me my total contribution margin. Then this comes in from above broken out by day. This comes in from above broken out by day giving me my total advertising, my return on marketing, my total overhead, net income.
Brittany Brown:
So, all you have to do in order to make this work is to plug in your sells number… Actually no, you don’t even have to plug in your sells number. You just fill out this and you play with… Actually, you don’t fill out your sales number. It calculates based on your ROAS. So, all of this calculates if you just adjust these financial variables up here, and then it will help you understand what your monthly budgets should be. So what you’re looking for is you’re looking for a positive daily net income. So these are all of your fixed costs of marketing and these are all your variable costs of marketing. You have to do enough in sells to be able to make enough to cover this, cover this plus if this is your overhead broken out by date. So if I have a $50,000 monthly overhead then this divided by how many days there are means that each day I need to cover at least this much in overhead to make this $4,000.
Brittany Brown:
So, with this video. I mean, with this download there’s also a video where I explain it a little bit better than I just explained it. But basically what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to give people a tool that will help them understand how much they need to be spending in sells in order to make sure that they are operating profitably assuming that all of these factors are holding true. So if your ROAS goes down change this number and see what happens. Or if your overhead goes up change this number and see what happens. Or if your COGS changes, change this number and see what happens. You’ll start to see all the things that are affecting your daily net income. And if you have daily net income, you will have monthly net income. And when I say net income I mean positive. So if you have a daily positive net income you will have a monthly net income.
Brittany Brown:
Based on this scenario over here if we have an ad budget of $30,000 it gives us a monthly net income of this. Based on daily net income times the number of days shows me how much I can expect in net income. I will take questions on this right now, but I think I did a really poor job explaining it and I think if you download it instead with the video that accompanies it I’m pretty sure I did a better job there, because [crosstalk 00:47:07]-
Liz Fickenscher:
You did a great job, actually, but I also popped a link to that into the chat. So, I encourage everybody to go look at the chat. I put the… Actually, the landing page where all of the LedgerGurus downloads are because man is that some awesome content? But I also put the marketing budget calculator directly to that download page. But we do have a question from an attendee [crosstalk 00:47:30]-
Brittany Brown:
Yeah, go ahead.
Liz Fickenscher:
Where would seller fees from Amazon sit in the P&L, and what is the agency fee is it to a third party?
Brittany Brown:
So, those are great questions and it’s a question we get a lot which is where on my profit and loss should these different fees sit. So if I come back up here to the P&L right here the answer is there’s not an exact right way to approach this. It is more about what informs you and helps you the most as a business owner. So for our clients we typically set up as much of those variable costs that we just talked about inside cost of goods sold as possible so that in a glance they can see their gross profit is including all of the costs of the sale. So even the cost of goods sold is typically just straight up cost of that goods sold.
Brittany Brown:
We typically set all of these above. Well, not like the cost of fulfillment because a lot of times that’s just to have your product just sitting somewhere is really an overhead of the business. It’s not like a cost of selling that product but it’s a cost of holding the product so. We typically have direct fees of the channel. So that would be like Amazon seller commission fees would be part of cost of goods sold, but the fee that Amazon charges you to just hold your product in FBA would typically be down here and overhead. The cost of having the product shipped to you would typically be part of this cost of goods sold, but the cost of shipping your product to your customer may be cost of goods sold you may consider it overhead of the business.
Brittany Brown:
There’s a best practice that we do, but there are accountants all over who would argue with me about the way we set it up. The real answer to that question is set your financials up whether it’s above the line, below the line. Whether it’s cost of goods sold or a general expense. In order to basically affect that, all you’re doing is you’re indicating when you set up your chart of accounts.
Brittany Brown:
If you set it up as a cost of goods sold type of expense you can name it whatever you want to name it and you can put in it whatever you want to put in it, but if you set it up as a cost of goods sold expense type it will be above this gross profit line. And if it’s a general expense type it will be below this line. Set it up in the way that makes you as crystal clear as possible in trying to make these decisions. In general, I would say fixed costs should be down here, variable costs would be up here. If I was just shooting off my hip and just giving someone a general rule of thumb, I would do variable costs up here, fixed out here. What were you going to say, Liz?
Liz Fickenscher:
The second part of that question is, what is an agency fee? Is that a third party? And I’m assuming it is?
Brittany Brown:
Yeah. So this scenario here we assumed. We tried to build in as if you were having this managed by somebody else. So, a lot of agency fees will [crosstalk 00:50:36]. What was that, Liz?
Liz Fickenscher:
Like us, or if you’re working with an agency to help you optimize your listings, or if you’re working with an agency to help you with your A plus content or something like that. That’s the third parties that you work with to make your business successful.
Brittany Brown:
Right, and I built in both of these here. So, some monthly agency fees are just a fixed flat fee where they’ll just say, “Hey, it’s $2,000 to work with us per month.” Other agencies will have some sort of like, “Hey, our fee is 7% of total sales.” Sometimes they’re a combination of both. So I built this calculator to accommodate either scenario. So if you don’t have a monthly fixed fee, just put a zero here. And if you don’t have a month of agency fee, just put a zero here. If it’s part of this, it will drop down here where it’s talking about fixed costs of marketing. And if it’s here, it will drop in here to a variable cost of marketing. So this is designed to allow you to utilize lots of different scenarios successfully, but that’s the [crosstalk 00:51:34].
Liz Fickenscher:
Super. We have a question from Kathy who also said, “Thank you, this is great content. What would be your advice when you’re launching new products? Do you advise to start at breakeven costs or to have a different kind of plan with product launch?”
Brittany Brown:
With product launch, I would start with experimenting. What you really need to do like what we guide our clients on doing. First of all, try to figure out how to get as good of a margin as you possibly could on the COGS. So like if that means investigating overseas manufacturers, then investigate that. I’m not saying necessarily… You want to make sure the product will sell before you buy 1,000 units from China, basically. But you first of all need to get your cost of goods sold as good as possible. So get the costs on your product as good as you possibly can.
Brittany Brown:
After that, you need to be able to get it to market as cheaply as possible. So with this ROAS there’s usually a little bit of experimental that happens. Like if you’re working with an agency, or if you’re doing it internally, you want to watch this and see what’s happening. Like, where’s my ROAS. Usually, when we help our clients do this we’re usually looking at this over a long period of time. So, this is designed to be a planner, but it’s not a tracker. So, you can adjust this at any time for different variables, but it’s not designed to track it. I should… This is a great thing that I am just realizing that I could have included in this.
Brittany Brown:
So, when we have clients that we’re working with [inaudible 00:53:08], we basically will have across the top. We’ll say like each day. So, it’ll be like there’ll be a tab for each day. It’ll be like January, February, March, April. And across the top, it’ll have the day. The first, the second, the third, the fourth, and we’ll basically put in the actual data. So it’ll say, sells today, marketing spend today, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then it’ll give us, it’ll actually calculate a ROAS so we can see what our actual ROAS is and how it’s trending. Is it going up? Is it going down. So then when we’re coming in here, we’re basically plugging in these amounts.
Brittany Brown:
We know if we’re way off base, if our daily ROAS has averaged $2.37 we’re not going to plug in here a $10.47 because we know we’re not getting a ROAS like that. And therefore, we’re not going to plug in that amount. But we track daily data in order to help us understand what the average is, in order to help us understand what the more reasonable rates are for us to be plugging in here. But if I was launching a new product, that’s how I would go about it. I would make sure I got as good a cost as I possibly could, and that I would investigate. I would have an experimental period showing me what my ROAS was. And I wouldn’t start scaling that until I felt like the metrics were dialed in. And then I would pour money into it. As soon as soon as it was dialed in I would just go.
Liz Fickenscher:
That’s great. And I think actually with that question you answered the next question, which is do you offer all of this analysis as part of your services or is this just good advice for business owners to calculate? And I think you just said we factor all of this in. So, these actual spreadsheets that people can download are an example of part of the tools that your team learns in order to do the really, really deep dive accounting for eCommerce businesses.
Brittany Brown:
So this would definitely be on the CFO side. As far as the services we offer, we go really deep on getting the financial information all correct. Some of our clients then take that information and run with it themselves. Some of our clients have us guide them on this journey from a CFO. We do offer across the board on that, yes.
Liz Fickenscher:
Okay, great. And then finally, oh, yeah, sorry. So, Robin, yes, we will be emailing the recording to everybody who registered.
Brittany Brown:
Okay, cool. One last thing I want to talk about real quick is the sales tax issue. I don’t feel like any good accountant can discuss financial anything with eCommerce businesses without bringing up sales tax because it is such a growing and pervasive issue that is the kind of thing that you just can’t stick your head in the sand about. So, on this same download page you see we have this, 10 steps to ensure sales tax doesn’t burn down your eCommerce business. They’ll kind of walk you through the steps of the things you need to consider as part of how do I know whether or not I do have sales tax issues? How do I know… Like, if you’re selling primarily on Amazon, most of you probably know for the most part that means you don’t have sales tax issues. But if you also have a Shopify channel, now you do have sales tax issues. So this guide will kind of walk you through that.
Brittany Brown:
And then also, most importantly, I wanted to talk about we’re launching a course in the next couple months that basically really shows you how to manage your own sales tax. So we do have a full sales tax department that will do a Nexus analysis, help you make all the decisions, help you understand where you have sales tax, help you understand what your risk is, which states you really need to register on because you have a lot of risk, which ones you can ignore because even though you have Nexus there, if they found you and audited you, you’d only have to cough up a couple hundred dollars.
Brittany Brown:
Help you walk through understanding those choices and those decisions. And then we register and then we file and we do all of that. But we’re also getting ready to launch a course that basically will let people DIY this entire process from determining whether they have sales tax to getting licensed, filing returns, managing inside their QuickBooks file, setting up the sales tax tools, and all other things through that. So, if you’re interested in course, updates, um, here’s the URL, ledgergurus.com, resources. I’ll actually copy and paste this in the [crosstalk 00:57:19].
Liz Fickenscher:
I put it in the chat.
Brittany Brown:
Okay, thank you, perfect.
Liz Fickenscher:
No problem.
Brittany Brown:
If you just sign up here, then you’ll just get notifications on the progress of that course. And so that’s something if sales tax is weighing on your mind you can either talk to our sales tax consultant who could just help you understand a direction on how to go or you can sign up for this course or you can just hire us to manage it all for you. Either way, it’s fine. We just want to help you guys in whatever way we can. We want you to feel supported.
Liz Fickenscher:
That’s awesome.
Brittany Brown:
So, last, I think this is your slide, Liz.
Liz Fickenscher:
Yeah.
Brittany Brown:
So, why don’t you [inaudible 00:57:52].
Liz Fickenscher:
Brittany, that was tremendous. I learned so much, and I don’t understand math, but I understood that. But obviously, you are a wealth of information. Your team is a wealth of information. But you’ve also got a lot of great content on your website. So I did put several links in the chat here. Y’all go to the chat before you log out of GoToWebinar and grab those up. But also grab up this guy right here. This is a link to our market intelligence analysis because we don’t want you to spend more on advertising than you’re supposed to. And that’s a big piece of your success. It’s a big piece of your sales, your visibility. So, we’re offering this marketplace intelligence analysis.
Liz Fickenscher:
I don’t know if you guys have been paying attention to all of our advertising and all that kind of stuff. But we are in the midst of launching Flywheel 2.0, which is going to offer deeper, deeper insights. Eventually, some accounting controls, but you still need an accountant. Access to capital financing, which you might need as you scale, some inventory insights so that you know where you stand, and that’s really, really helpful. But right now, people who are using Flywheel 2.0 have access to market intelligence, which is a ton of data that’s awesome. But we’re for anybody going to do a free marketplace intelligence analysis that’s going to give you some insight into your competitors, insight into organic and paid product ranking by search term, brand share, voice, and all that kind of stuff to help you make good decisions about your advertising so that your ROAS is not completely screwing up that wonderful spreadsheet that LedgerGurus is generating for you.
Liz Fickenscher:
So I encourage you. I just popped that into the chat. I’m going to pop it one more time. It is totally free, and it’s totally worth doing. And as you’re thinking about this, I mean, it’s almost tax season. So, obviously, you’re going to want to take Britney’s course. Her team is going to provide some content that we’re going to be pushing out to you guys, too, to get you ready for that. I think that the federal deadline is extended a month, but that’s not very much time and it’s almost April. So, I encourage you, if ever was a time to get your ducks in a row, now is the time to wrangle your ducks.
Brittany Brown:
Right. True, truth, yes. So, you can contact us through our website ledgergurus.com. There’s a call button. There’s also if you email I get… If you fill out the form, if you go on and say contact us, and you fill out the form, I get all the notifications when people fill out those forms. And so, you can just put in there like, “Hey, saw your presentation.” You can ask what your questions are. If I can answer them quickly, I will. If not we can jump on a call, we can give you pricing on any of our packages from just basic accounting support all the way up through all that other stuff we talked about. So, this was really fun, Liz. Thanks for letting me be [crosstalk 01:00:45]-
Liz Fickenscher:
You are awesome. And also yo’ why do math yourself? I hate math. It’ll do the math for you, win-win.
Brittany Brown:
Win-win, win.
Liz Fickenscher:
Thank you so much. We’ll see you again soon. If you have questions for Brittany contact her team, go to their website ledgergurus.com, download some of that awesome content. Look out for some content on the Teikametrics blog soon, and we’ll see you next time. Bye, everybody.
Brittany Brown:
Bye.
