February Summary

The story for February is that I spent a lot of money. Total expenses for the month came in at $2,119 with no income. But boy did I learn a lot.

I wanted to put myself on the payroll not only as a way to pay my taxes but to go through the experience of being an employee. My plan was to do all of the things that you are required to do when you have employees, namely, register with the Texas Workforce Commission, obtain health insurance, create a payroll system, etc. But I have come to realize that all this work is unnecessary and worse, a waste of money!

Here is what I discovered —

• My company is not eligible for health coverage at healthcare.gov because you need 1 employee other than the owners.
• Putting myself on payroll is forcing me to pay double taxes. I already paid taxes on the money in the bank, now that money is going from one of my accounts to another account through the payroll system which is taxing it again.
• By hiring an employee I’m required to get unemployment insurance and worker’s compensation insurance. I can forgo those expenses for the meantime by not hiring myself.

Going forward, I will no longer be an employee of the company, which will save me hundreds of dollars in unnecessary expenses.

I spent exactly $1,000 for advertising including $125 for Facebook and $75 for Instagram. The rest of the advertising costs were in print materials such as business cards and flyers.

Most of those print materials have not even arrived in the mail yet. It will take time to get a real good picture of the return on the investments I’m making in advertising.

Here is the year to date profit & loss:

That revenue is only test runs I did for myself and my brother. This month will be the first month of revenue coming from outside of my family.

I got a lot of work to do and I gotta get to it.

To Do List

1. Document the back-end process from order to delivery including calendar.
2. Create Welcome Packages for new customers.
3. Write a template email for reaching out to influencers to offer free service.
4. Build a habit of sending out emails to influencers.
5. Obtain a virtual office address.
6. Create a loyalty program.
7. Change all promos and discounts into percentages.
8. Create a new Instagram ad set.
9. Create a list of Instagram hashtags.

This story is part of a series documenting the journey of a 2016 Dallas startup called Feather. For your reference here is the Table of Contents for the series.

Previous Story: Customer Lifetime Value

Next Story: Why I’m All-in on Instagram Ads

As always, you can follow the story closer on Snapchat!

Thanks for reading!