The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

220 | I worked 45 hours in August; and it’s not on what you think

• Serena Shoup, CPA • Episode 220

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No one talks enough about the amount of time that goes into an online course business. So I’m talking about it today.

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • My profit margins for both my firm & my online course business
  • the time I spend during launches & fulfillment
  • how much time I spent in August 2025 on both businesses

Resources mentioned in this episode:

  • Clockify → timetracking

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Something I've been asked more and more lately is what portion of my revenue and my time are spent on my online course business versus my accounting firm. We are about five years in. To running a course business, which mentors and coaches, other bookkeepers and accountants, while also running my accounting firm for the past eight years. And there's a lot of people that come to me with a question of, how much are you making in your course business versus your accounting firm? How much time are you spending on this? And actually, they're more interested in the revenue than the time I'm actually putting into this. So this video is all about being transparent on the amount of time that I'm actually spending inside of and promoting my courses for my course business. So let's dive in as you can see here on screen, I have my clock. I reports, and this is something that I use, my team uses to keep track of time. While we don't charge our clients at the firm hourly, I still have everybody track their time because I wanna make sure we're profitable on every single client and every single project. And so I also track my time. This dashboard that you're seeing right now is last month, and as I'm recording this, we're in September of 2025, which means last month I had a course launch, and so on screen you're going to see the number of hours that I personally worked. I'm not including my team's time in this, but just to give you some perspective on. When you launch a course and you're the one delivering it, and you're the one creating and launching it, this is what it might look like. And this is after years of doing the same process over and over and over again. So we have it down pretty tight, and I'm not the one that does all the admin on the backend. This is purely just creating the content, launching the content, and fulfilling on the content in the course. Everything else is done by my team. So as you can see on screen, we're here in last month. This is August of 2025. This is a summary and so I've blurred out the, the one, client work that I do that way you can't see my client's names, but everything else is. There for you to see. As you can see, I have launch tasks that took almost 21 hours of my time, just last month, and this was during the launch month and not including prior months of preparation for this launch. I have administrative work and this consists of maybe doing some admin work, like writing emails or. Reaching out to students or putting together anything for the launch. I might not have categorized it as a specific launch task if it's something that can be used in the future. And running my team meetings. I do those weekly and I usually categorize that as ambitious bookkeeper, even though my team goes across both companies. And so the team meeting really focuses on both companies. So technically, should I be splitting that in half probably. Then we have fulfillment. So this is me fulfilling on after the course has has launched. I have a VIP group where we do weekly calls twice a week, and so this is my fulfillment of that time plus checking Facebook group. Although I will admit I'm not really good at tracking my time in the Facebook group because I usually do that on the fly on my phone, so. There's more time in there than I'm actually showing here on screen. Then I have two and a quarter hours basically, of actual client work. And this is the one client that I do client work for, , myself. And then we have sales and marketing related to my firm, my, administrative work related to the firm, like checking emails, scheduling stuff, things like that. And then I have my volunteer work that I do. I'm part of our young professionals. I'm the treasurer, so I record that time as well, just so I can see where I'm spending my time. Then we have more, that's purple. So if you haven't caught on by now, all the purple is my course business. The blue is my firm and the green is my volunteer work. So as you can see. More than 50% of my time. I would say that's probably more like 75 to 80% of my time is dedicated to my course business, and this is pretty indicative of most months, even if we're not in a launch. This is kind of how the breakdown works out. Because if we're not in a launch, I am creating content for the future, and that could look like YouTube videos or writing newsletters or recording podcasts and planning for all of that in the future, planning future launches, creating other programs or revamping the programs we already have. This is very, very typical of each month, how much time I spend on that business versus my firm. As you can see, it's just about. Um, Three plus five, so like eight and a half percent of my time, is dedicated to the firm. Now, when we talk about actual breakdown of revenue inside the firm versus. The course business. Yes. My course business is, it is about the same breakdown in revenue when it comes to time. So I said about 80% of my time is spent on the course business. I would say it's more like 60 40 when it comes to revenue. So 60% of my revenue is from the course business, and about 40% of our revenue is from the firm, however. I don't really like to talk about revenue because that's not indicative of what's actually being brought home. At the end of the day, our profit margins in the course business are not as strong as inside of the firm. And some of that has to do with the fact that I didn't launch twice last year normally I would launch in January and in the summertime this year, I only did that once, and so I was actually operating at a loss. Until July or August, and so there's zero profit now. I'm right about break even. So that launch basically just caught me up for the entire year and now anything going forward will be a profit. Hopefully, and in the firm we have consistent profits of about 50% per month, and that's because I am not on payroll. And so that whole 50% could be partially, owners pay. Or profit that's retained in the business. But on years when we are launching a couple times a year, our profitability still does not match what's in the firm, and we're usually between 30 to 35% of a profit margin in the course business. So why am I sharing all of this? Because I have a lot of bookkeepers and accountants, and honestly, anyone who's watching might be curious about what it actually takes to run a course business. Now, I don't have a large team. I have an assistant that spends about 15. Hours per week helping me on the course business and the rest of her time. She is also a part-time bookkeeper for me. And then I have a part-time designer who is also a part-time bookkeeper for me. She spends maybe a couple hours a month on the course business unless we're in a launch and I need graphics created for ads or things like that. and then my other team member is solely dedicated to the firm. He's my account manager and he is my client facing employee. my team is small, and so I like to be transparent about how much time I'm spending on everything. And even with that small of a team in our firm, I'm still able to achieve a good profit margin because of how I price. That's probably a video for another day, but if you've been curious about what actually goes into a course business. And if it is gonna be worth your time, I hope you look at this, , little breakdown of the hours that I spend and really consider before you spend all the time creating something, learn how to launch it and validate it before you create it. Because I would hate for you to spend all of your time creating something and then never be able to sell it because you just weren't aware of what actually goes into launching that course and having people buy it. So if you have questions, you wanna see more detail or anything like that, please comment below this video and I will share some more in the future.

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