How Much Money Am I Making? Business Performance Review!

in this video I'm going to talk about how my business is performing and exactly how much money it's making at this point in time I've been making videos on YouTube for four years now generally putting out one video per week but occasionally two and six months ago I reduced hours at my office based day job from five days a week to three days a week so that I could concentrate more time on growing my woodworking and furniture restoration business and the YouTube channel prior to that I was doing woodworking and video editing stuff at the weekends and in the evenings only I'm making this video for three reasons firstly a number of my viewers have asked how things are going secondly making a video about it forces me to actually delve into the detail which is something I probably wouldn't find the time to do otherwise and thirdly I know that some of you watching this video might be considering whether you can turn your hobby into a career like I'm trying to do and hopefully this will help or at least be insightful before we look at the financial detail I thought I'd talk a bit about how it feels like things are going when I first reduced hours at my day job six months ago I found the first couple of months really difficult at that time I had a lot of commissions I needed to get done for my business and my office based day job was really busy at that time too and it felt like it didn't really have enough time to do either of them successfully since then though things have gradually been improving there were some changes made at my day job which meant that some of my responsibilities were taken away from me which made working part time much more comfortable and for my business as I was now working three or four days a week I started to get on top of all of the things that I needed or wanted to get done and also I started to settle into a bit more of a routine typically I'd get up in the morning have something to eat do some computer-based work like video editing admin website updates that kind of stuff then about 11:00 a.m. or 12:00 I go to the workshop and work on projects until around 5 or 6 I then have something to eat chill out for the evening with my girlfriend and my cat and then when my girlfriend goes to bed around 10:30 I do another couple of hours of video editing and then go to bed right now I'm really enjoying the balance of working three days a week at my day job and then three or four days a week for myself it's not always smooth and easy but generally it feels pretty good and I'm keeping on top of things which is great now let's look at the detail on the finances to see how the business is performing and I need to be a bit careful here because YouTube do not allow their content creators to talk about their earnings in specific detail it's written into the terms and conditions so I thought of some clever ways I can share this information with you without giving any specific numbers but there will be some specific numbers later on in the video I started monetizing my videos in July 2015 and since then I've put out usually one video per week by occasionally - the first year the ad revenue didn't really grow at all the second year things started getting better you can see here that there's a peak in December which is when the advertisers pay YouTube more money in the run-up to Christmas for their adverts to be displayed on videos and then there's a drop in January when presumably their advertising budgets are smaller that's pretty normal and you'll see that in year 3 - that happened again but this time there was a much bigger drop my earnings halved in January compared to what they were in December still seeing lots of growth overall though which is great there was a big peak in May and June when two of my video started getting lots of views one of them was the John Heise collaboration plywood armchair build and a random video I made about cutting into an IKEA shelf which for some reason got a crazy amounts of views July 2018 is when I dropped hours at my day job and since then into year 4 you'll see that the revenue increased significantly more than it ever has before and part of that is probably due to it being the run-up to Christmas again but during that time I also started releasing two videos per week more regularly so I think that that had a positive effect on the numbers - having said that the January numbers aren't yet available and I'm expecting to see it plummet again if I were to guess based on what I've seen so far I'd say it'd end up probably somewhere around here and then hopefully I'll start rising again so that's YouTube next is sales and that includes Etsy sales and commissions you know one I basically made nothing yet - pretty much the same as time I was mainly making things for my home or for friends and family yeah three is when I started taking things more seriously in November I did my first commercial commission which was to custom desks for a local radio studio and during that month I also sold a few other things in January 2018 I started to focus much more on paid work rather than non paid build projects and during the summer I did loads of furniture restorations and commissions all for one clients I made two custom desks restored lots of old furniture and repaired some dining chairs during this time I also ramped up sales on Etsy quite significantly because I have more time to make things for sale and I also launched my handmade oil wax finish in July which has sold quite well ever since next is patreon which I was very hesitant to promote in my videos at first because I don't want to ask people for money but on the other hand I want to allow people to show their support to help keep the channel going because the revenue from YouTube is very small when you can see there how much time the videos take to put together but also I can offer things like early access to my videos exclusive content free access to project plans and cut lists and name credits which makes me feel a little less guilty about it all I opened the page in January 2017 and since then the support has continued to grow although they've been a number of recent deleted pledges which I presume is a reaction to the recent censorship scandal which I have to admit at this point I don't really know much about it's not something I've read up on yet the final thing that I'd like to do is probably the most important and tangible way of figuring out how my business is performing right now and that is a simple formula I've come up with and one that I've actually used before in one of my videos part one of my Q&A video which was recorded 11 months ago it's a way to figure out if I'm earning a living wage based on the amount of hours I spent working back when I shot that video I did a graph showing how my income broke down into categories then I worked out my average monthly turnover over the course of a year then I subtracted my outgoings to give me a figure for profit and then I divided that amount by the number of hours I worked on average in a month and there was a bit of guesswork involved there because I don't specifically track exactly how many hours I spend working each day but I could take a pretty good guess at it that gave me a figure for what I was earning per hour before tax and at that time about eleven months ago I figured out that I was earning about half of what the UK living wages which is eight pounds 75 per hour bad times so what I want to do now is compare that with all of the data I have from the last six months since reducing hours at my day job on average I believe I'm currently working about the same amount of hours as I was back then it's just that now those hours are worked during my non day job working days rather than only in the evenings or at the weekend that works out to be about 24 hours per week which is 96 hours per month on average so now for some specific numbers in the last six months my total income from everything like the YouTube ad revenue sales and commissions patreon pledges Amazon affiliates all of that is nine thousand seven hundred and sixty six pounds fourteen pence my outgoings during that time which include things like rent for my storage space the cost of running my fan tools consumables materials all of that stuff were three thousand three hundred and ninety nine pounds twenty-seven pimps which means my total profit is six thousand three hundred and sixty-six pounds 87 pence over six months when I take that number and divide it by six months that works out as 1061 pounds fourteen pence per month and if I then divide that by 96 hours average worked per month I get 11 pounds and five pence earned per hour the UK living wage is eight pounds seventy three per hour so it's official I'm currently earning more than the UK living wage doing my hobby it's been four years of hard graft but I turned my hobby into a job' [Music] so with all of that celebrating out of the way it's important to remember that the earnings I analyzed were just over a six-month period covering the run-up to Christmas when my revenue is typically higher and realistically I expect in the next six months from say February into july 2019 my YouTube earnings will drop significantly and also I'm not sure how much paid work or commissions I will get during that time or how many things I'll sell on Etsy so I don't yet know whether I can continue to earn a living wage during the early part of this year but overall I'm generally feeling really positive about it now for the first time ever it actually feels like things are going in the right direction I am still quite dependent on YouTube earnings though and who knows what might happen to YouTube in the next few months or years so I'm conscious that I need to identify some other sources of revenue from my business to keep it going and make it more stable so that's it for this one I hope you found this video useful in some way please subscribe to my channel for more weekly woodworking videos and thank you for watching Dylan you anything to add Dillons tired [Music]

Channel: Rag 'n' Bone Brown

Views: 38,714

Rating: 4.9640932 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, british, youtuber, rag, 'n', bone, brown, keith, wood, make, making, how, to, ragnbonebrown, business, finance, finances, joinery, carpentry, carpenter, joiner, financial planning, business performance, money, am i making money, am I earning a living wage, earning, earn living wage, earn minimum wage, minimum wage, living wage, patreon, youtube, uk, united kingdom, uk woodworking, earnings, make money, hobby, job, career, work, hobby money, earn money, quitting job, handyman, diy

Id: 1BdB-c4Cv40

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 11 2019