The goal heading into August was primarily to save money and reduce expenses. With the investment opportunities and original strategy, this was the month to make that happen. Savings-wise, the month started off well.

Additionally, I started off August wanting to ramp up the selling of sites. I also wanted to focus on getting another website up and running to generates consistent revenue.

I started looking for additional help, as more of a project manager, to make sure things stay on pace. August was also the month planned for the freelance site to go live that was worked on last month.

Freelance Site Launched

The day before we planned on going live, we were told to hold off. That caused an issue since my partner was headed to the beach for a week, and delaying pushed the real go live date into the beach week. That ended up getting resolved, and we officially launched prior to her trip.

It shortened the amount of time we had to do things, however. The goal was to spend a couple weeks leading up to the launch testing everything. With the indecision, we held off on the final touches, and then when we got the green light the morning of launch day, we had more work to do that day that we wanted, but we got it done.

Upcoming Plans

With that out of the way, it’s time to get serious selling more sites. I plan on taking the 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) approach. Up until now, I have been focusing solely on the lag indicators, the amount of money I made per month, but no lead indicators, what should I be doing throughout the month to his the numbers that I want.

I am aiming to hire a project manager to use along with the lead indicators to help move things forward even without me physically doing to the work. Along with selling sites, I am trying to find the project manager who can help with a product I am working on. That should provide enough work to justify the additional expense of another outsourced worker.

Investments

On the plus side, the money saving strategy seems to be working. I more than doubled the amount of cash I had saved up by transferring money into the high yield savings account weekly. Keeping expenses low and paying into this account first should get me to where I need to be for the investments.

I started off the month still aiming for the two investments I wanted to complete this year. I will not be able to get the money needed for both this month, but keeping the saving plan going was largely due to meeting this goal.

I knew going into August that I had the potential to lose one of the investments. I had several meetings with the bank waiting to get a final approval. I am considering alternate investments, in case this one falls through. I made it to the end of August with the deal still a possibility, but not a finalized approval.

Counting Chickens Before They Hatched

Planning out the investment strategy, I calculated how long it would take for me to come up with the money. Using stocks that I would liquidate, I had a time frame established. The next day, the stocks dropped 9.7% killing the timeline.

A couple days later, I was informed that the best contract I had would be ending at the end of August. I will try and get a new client to replace this one as quickly as possible. The 2 to 3 year potential turned out to be more like 1.5 years.

New Strategy

I am considering redoing the investment plan since a few changes have occurred that basically render the plan useless, but even a new plan would be based so far out into the future that it would likely become useless as well.

I upgraded hosting for the sites I am looking to sell. I wanted to be farther along with selling these with the new hosting and the additional outsource help than where I ended, though. Now, I am split between continuing with this and trying to get a replacement client in place.

I like having the money coming in from the client, but I hate being dependent on the client. Getting something else going allows me to scale it up and down depending on my workload along with revenue I am aiming for.

To end August, I will actually be splitting my time time between trying to get some sites sold and be more independent, while also trying to get additional clients, just not trying super hard. The client part, it will mainly focus on companies already looking to hire and not so much as me convincing them they need to hire someone and then convincing them that I should be that someone.

It will limit my total number of opportunities, but with the holiday season coming up, this is usually when most ecommerce companies are looking to do some type of hiring to get their site stable for the onslaught of traffic.

I finished out August looking for client work, but starting thinking that this is not the path I want to take. Looking for client work will likely decline next month while ramping up my own sites and selling turnkey websites. August is when a lot of my domains expire and need to be renewed. I will, however, end a marketing campaign I started looking for clients. It’s time to readjust expenses and focus more what’s working. Unfortunately, that means less experimentation until I get enough work that I can afford to waste some money on that.

eBay/Amazon Selling

I am also working on redoing the importing and eBay selling, but likely won’t have anything set up in time to capitalize on the holiday season. Mainly, I am working on some brand names to white label products. If this works, I should have about 5 different categories of products.

While looking for new clients, I did get some ideas for my own projects. That’s another avenue I should probably start exploring. Running websites would provide income without the dependency on clients and still give me the freedom to do what I want. However, I don’t really have anything close to being ready at the moment.