Graham (00:03.716)
If you want your business to become more profitable, stable, predictable, without stressing about the numbers, then today's episode is for you. I think all online business owners deserve that predictability, less stress. And this is why my guest today created the Profit Pillar system, which I'm excited to get into today. Let me ask you, have you felt this? How profitable should my business be? How much should I pay myself?
What expenses do I need to monitor as my business grows? How do I build a system that keeps my finances organized? How do I use my numbers to make better financial decisions? These are the questions I've asked. You're like most business owners, I'm guessing you've asked these questions. If so, you're in the right place. Because my guest today is Parker Stevenson. He's the chief executive officer and co-owner of Evolved Finance, which is a unique bookkeeping and accounting firm that specializes in supporting
the financial needs of online business owners specifically, which is why I like it. He's taught thousands of online business owners like you and me how to build simple and sustainable financial systems that allow you to make more profitable decisions in your business. And guess what? He's actually my bookkeeper. Parker, it is awesome to have you on the show. Welcome to the Graham Cochran Show.
Parker Stevenson (01:22.05)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to talk with you today.
Graham (01:26.48)
Bro, I'm glad we could make this happen because we just connected in person for the first time at the Kajabi Hero Live event, which was awesome. But dude, before we get into like the nuts and bolts of the finances and the business building, we actually met virtually many, years ago because of our shared love for music. I would love your quick take on how we connected there from your side of things.
Parker Stevenson (01:32.652)
Yep.
Parker Stevenson (01:49.909)
Yeah, it's such a small world in the online business space and that's why events like Kajabi Here Alive are so great to just get out and meet people because it really is such a small world. But I was working at a vault, you know, with my business partner at Vault Finance and I was a musician back in the day. I had quit my band, didn't have any aspirations to perform again, but I still had that bug to want to make music at home and I really wanted to learn how to mix and make
music that sounded maybe close to as good as what my band did working with with professional, you know audio engineers and producers and Found you on YouTube Absorbed your content was like this guy's a really good teacher and it was making an impact on my recordings And I was like, alright, I'm and where's your stuff Graham give take my money. I want to go through all your courses I went through a couple of the courses Absolutely loved them. I recorded and mixed a song that
Part of your offer at that time was hey submit a song we'll review it give you some feedback and if it's really good we'll choose it and use it with our community as an opportunity for them to Practice on a song and so my song got picked. I've got to interact with you a little bit and I will say grandma's like
this guy's business would be perfect for Evolve Finance. I'd love to work with him one day, but I was like, you I wasn't gonna push that. But I was just super pumped to have you take a look at the song and get to share it with your community. And then part of why we're talking here today is I got a publishing deal a couple years ago with your publisher, Matt Holt Books, part of Ben Bella Books. And...
Matt Holt who we're friends with and is our publisher was talking about the authors that he's worked with and it's like Graham Cochran and I'm like, wait, Graham Cochran from the recording revolution? He's like, you know him? It's like, yeah, like I took his courses. I love this guy. He's the man. He taught me how to mix music and he's like, I'll put you in touch. Graham and I got in touch. We're now brothers in publishing, working with the same publisher and Graham learned about what we do and was like, that might be a good fit for my business.
Parker Stevenson (04:01.816)
Here we are working together and, you know, known each other for about a year and a half, two years now, which is just a trip.
Graham (04:08.764)
Dude, it's so wild because there's two totally different worlds colliding that brought us together. So that was kind of a mind trip because I totally remember your song because I spent like hours like listening to you sing as I was mixing it for our community and then teaching it. But yeah, it was really cool because just the timing of it when we connected around your book, Prophet Pillars, which we're going to get into, which I think is super exciting. Like I really think this is a book, you know, like you've got the Prophet first and you've got these other types of books that are like, hey,
Parker Stevenson (04:12.427)
Yeah.
Parker Stevenson (04:18.624)
Yeah?
Graham (04:37.007)
business owners need to think about their finances. Maybe you're good at making money, making offers, but how do you manage the money or even know how to read the tea leaves of your business? Like these are important concepts too. So I'm really super grateful that your book's coming out, because it's gonna be one of the staple books that every business owner should read, especially online business owners. But that's what I loved about you was like, was great timing in the market for a new bookkeeper. I just like moved on from my previous accountant slash bookkeeper.
And I literally just needed someone to do the books well that understood the business model. And when I found out what you were up to and you'd been doing Evolve Finance for years, I was like, wait, you do accounting and bookkeeping for online business owners specifically? Like, I love the concept as a niche, but then I thought this is exactly what I need. Seeing some of the clients you've worked with or people that I know. And it's just really cool that, again,
Everyone can have all kinds of different businesses, but it's cool that we get to actually do business together. So I think it's a trip for sure.
Parker Stevenson (05:36.38)
well, yeah, this is all very, very surreal. And we've worked with a number of clients that like we have clients where I'm like.
We work with this person. is insane. Like how did they find out about us? And, it's just the, people I've connected with through the online business space. And as we'll talk about today, kind of like even just falling into the world of finance and accounting. I'm not really a finance and accounting guy. might look like it cause I got the glasses, but obviously I was a musician before I didn't look at myself as a numbers person. so getting to work with the people we work with, which are all just phenomenal people. will say behind the scenes, everyone Graham is
just as nice and just as cool as he is on the podcast and on his YouTube channel. And that's what I love about the work we do is getting to meet like really quality people who are making an impact with their clients and their customers and their audience and getting to be a part of that in any way is just truly an honor.
Graham (06:32.731)
No, I appreciate it, man. And I did pay you to say that, so that's fair. But seriously, I want to get into the book, but if anyone listening, watching, you need a bookkeeper and you do need one at some point, especially when the numbers get a little bit bigger and complicated, talk to the guys, talk to Cory, talk to Parker. These guys do incredible work. It's the best reporting I've ever gotten. Their team is amazing. The people that are on my accounts, like...
Parker Stevenson (06:35.635)
Hahaha!
Graham (06:58.423)
really easy to work with. get a beautiful dashboard every month. It just like says like, dude, here's where you're at for the month, for the year in terms of profit, in terms of what you're spending on team, you're spending on like, they categorize everything. So I just get a beautiful snapshot visually of how we're doing as a company. And it's such a great resource to have. And that's just if I just look at the data, it's not even all the stuff he's covering in the book. So just like plug there, go check out Evolved Finance. let's jump into the book. You say this in your book and
These two lines jump out at me, so we'll tackle one at a time. If you cannot see the truth of your online business's finances, then you're doomed to run your business based on feelings and emotions alone. Man, I feel like conviction when I read that. Can you unpack what your take is on that statement and how you've seen that play out in your clients' businesses, because they're all online business owners like us?
Parker Stevenson (07:44.626)
Yeah.
Parker Stevenson (07:54.696)
I'm not even going to use our clients as an example. I'm going to use myself as an example. We typically look at our numbers. We have an executive meeting with my business partner, Corey Whitaker, our director of operations, Sharice, and we.
Graham (07:56.718)
Okay. There you go.
Parker Stevenson (08:10.698)
We'll review everything, go through our numbers, do essentially what we want our clients to be doing as well. But sometimes, know, just those meetings get pushed back or, you know, we're busy and maybe we kind of are a couple weeks behind. What I find in myself is I will start to let the feeling of what's going on in the business dictate
what I think the reality of the business is, which is if I'm stressed and I'm anxious about stuff because there's things going on in the business, there's a client left or we got a thing going on with the team member or we have to make a big decision, it's easy to let those feelings go, it's all falling apart. What are we doing here? This is a mess. What's happening here? And what I found is every time we look at the numbers, we go, we're fine.
We've been fine for years. We will continue to be fine. It's all good. There's nothing. The sky isn't falling. And so for what I found is the numbers tend to be very grounding, not just for myself, but for our clients. And so many of our clients that have all finance, I think just being in the online business space, a lot of our clients tend to be creatives in some shape or form, or maybe a little lean more on the visionary side to kind of take Gina Wickman's world into play here a little bit. Right.
Graham (09:03.579)
Hmm.
Graham (09:25.371)
Yeah, yeah.
Parker Stevenson (09:27.436)
And so when you are creative, it's easy to live in the abstract. And that's great. Like we have to be able to write copy and we need to create our courses and make social media content and we need to live in that creative world. But there's this whole other backbone of our business or even just like the heartbeat of our business, is money coming in, money coming out. That is the ultimate.
indicator of are we making the right decisions? Is there money left over in the bank account? And sometimes we need
We're not sometimes we always need to see the truth of that to go the business is doing fine. Like we're doing great. Actually, what am I stressed about? Why am I feeling like things aren't going well or sometimes it's yeah Things aren't going as well as I want the numbers are showing me that now. Let's see. What do I need to do about that? Let's light a fire under under myself to go. Okay, let's go I see very clearly what we need to do. We need to bring on three more clients We need an extra X amount of dollars this month in order to hit our number
and to make everything look good. So when we see the truth and the reality of our situation, we can then pinpoint where do we need to take action or sometimes just go, there's no action that needs to be taken. We're good. I just need to like ease my anxiety here because running a business is stressful. But what our clients have seen over the years and I've been doing this for over 10 years now is they go, okay.
Graham (10:45.327)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Parker Stevenson (10:56.135)
I see what I need to do now. And when you have that clarity of action, that can be a huge alleviation of stress and anxiety as well. And your numbers are just literally right there waiting to tell you exactly where to put your intention and focus.
Graham (11:11.023)
Yeah, so, so good. I just got off a call with one of my private clients who literally just had this experience. I was asking him how things have been, because I've worked with him in person at a mastermind event, but we just started working together privately one-on-one. So was like, hey, since it was probably like June, May or June, we had this event here in Tampa. How's business been? Where are we at? Where do you want to go? And he said something almost identical to that. said, bro,
Parker Stevenson (11:18.376)
Mm.
Graham (11:37.495)
I was trying all these new things that we wanted to implement since the mastermind weekend and none of them were working. None of them felt like they were taking off and it's super frustrated. And feel like I'm doing all this stuff and, and he wasn't blaming anybody or me or anything, but he was just like, felt like the business, it felt like the business wasn't doing well. He's like, and then my wife who works with me in the business was like, Hey, let's just, have you looked at the numbers? You know, classic wife like, yeah, yeah, babe. Yeah. And then he's like, wait, I haven't really. And he looked at the numbers.
Parker Stevenson (12:05.805)
Yeah.
Graham (12:07.105)
and the last month, a rolling 12 month period, it's like how has the last 12 months been from the previous 12 months? They're up 33 % in profit. So you see that and you go, I feel like that new launch didn't work out, that funnel's not performing, that cool idea that I heard that guy say at that mastermind that I tried didn't work. But the number that matters, profit, which I love your book, Profit Pillars, it's not even revenue, profit people.
Parker Stevenson (12:16.786)
huge.
Graham (12:36.967)
like look at the numbers and he was like, I think being up 33 % in a world where people are like doom and gloom and the economy, like I feel like I'm pretty good. And he felt better. So the feelings do matter. It's just that the feelings can lie, but then the numbers can give you a better feeling. Or to probably your point, if it doesn't paint a good picture, it gives you clarity on what you need to work on and focus on.
Parker Stevenson (12:58.46)
Well, I've had clients where it's like maybe there's a half truth here. Revenue is down. Like your revenue is down X percent from last year, but you're profit, you're actually making more money. So it's like one thing that I say a lot, we kind of post this on social quite a bit is revenue is a vanity metric.
Graham (13:11.365)
BINGO
Parker Stevenson (13:18.595)
Right? Like obviously if you can say you have a million dollar a year business that that's a huge accomplishment to be able to sell a million dollars of anything. But I've also seen online business owners make a million dollars a year and barely make any profit from that or definitely make not nearly as much profit from a business that size that the owner deserves to be taking home to pay themselves. So sometimes the numbers, you know, we're focusing on the wrong numbers. We think revenue is the end all be all of our businesses. But
If you had to sell less things and make more money personally, that's a win. That's a huge win. It means you're running a more efficient business and you're benefiting more from your business along the way. So these are the types of things that again, we're just not really taught in business school or taught from other business coaches because usually there isn't as much of a financial emphasis and rightfully so. Like we have a ton of clients who are business coaches but finance isn't their thing.
help their clients do with their sales and marketing and all these other components and that's great. We all need help with that stuff. Those really drive our businesses forward to get better at these certain skills. But the one skill that can keep us sane and keep us grounded and what is the reality of my business? What is the truth of my business? So I'm not living in this nebulous what if world is well, we just need a little bit of extra financial literacy, a little better understanding of how
money moves in and out of our business and then we can operate our businesses from a place of like strength and security and confidence which we've had clients who have very successful businesses who never felt that way despite all the growth and all the success they had had because they always felt like something was missing. Like there's something gonna sneak up on me I know it there's something I don't know and the root of that was they just didn't really understand how money was moving in and out of their businesses until they worked with us. All they knew was
Graham (15:02.971)
Hmm.
Graham (15:10.341)
Yeah.
Parker Stevenson (15:18.29)
I got money in the bank account. I guess that's good, but that doesn't, that doesn't tell a big enough story of what's actually going on here. And I know a lot of business owners don't want to have to admit this, but I mean the flow of money in and out of your business, that is your business. I don't care how heart centered you are as a business owner. If you want to help more people make more of an impact, you have to be profitable. And that does mean having to pay a little bit more attention to your numbers.
Graham (15:41.595)
Yep. Yep.
Graham (15:46.72)
yeah, the profit is like the oxygen in your business to be able to continue to serve people for a long, time. Yeah, I think that's so good. One of the things I like about working with you guys is your specialty working with online business owners because I've had three or four accountants and bookkeepers over the years, maybe more. I'm starting to wonder if I'm the problem. It's like Taylor Swift, like it's me. I'm the problem, it's me. But I really do think it was a mismatch all along because when you start out, you know, I was...
Parker Stevenson (16:07.617)
Hahaha
Graham (16:14.876)
starting a business in my spare bedroom, didn't know what I was doing. And then, you know, you're going from broke to I made a couple thousand to, well, we made $60,000 last year. That's like a real income, at least it was, you know, 12, 13 years ago. And, and then you get over six figures and you're like, man, I'm my little Excel spreadsheet is I don't know if I'm tracking things correctly. And, and so then I need an accountant or a bookkeeper. So then I reach out and find a referral or a recommendation in my area. And
I realized I was a mistake. I it was fine, it's all I knew. But you start to talk to these accountants and bookkeepers and I realized two things. One, it's a language I don't understand and I'm an educated person and I really devour personal finance and I love understanding the things. But accounting is like a sub language within the finance language. I don't understand it and I will say that again. Say it slower and dumber for me. I still couldn't get it. So that was hard to navigate. But then two,
Parker Stevenson (17:02.342)
It's a different beast.
Graham (17:14.34)
I found that all my accountants and bookkeepers previous to working with you guys never really understood my business model. And so because of that, they're like so confused why there's such high profit margins, why they're so low expenses compared to, you know, working with, you know, an attorney or a restaurant or a dry cleaner or whatever. And they would have so many questions and they'd be so confused and we just never could click and they couldn't really give me good
Parker Stevenson (17:20.998)
Yeah.
Graham (17:43.174)
sort of forecasting or advice because they just thought I was an anomaly and they're like, you're great, you have all this profit. Because to me, to them, I was like this magical unicorn and I was like, I'm pretty sure I need some more help than that, like you're good. But what you guys do is really understand the type of business we're in, these digital, very lean compared to traditional brick and mortar businesses. And you understand what we're looking for. And so I've found a lot of comfort working with you guys and your team. And I'm sure that's a big part of
Parker Stevenson (17:52.442)
Yeah.
Graham (18:12.719)
writing this book is helping people like us feel like we've got a language we can use to better understand our businesses. maybe speak to that in terms of like why you guys even started Evolve Finance in the first place, because I'm sure there was that need and that gap in the marketplace you saw.
Parker Stevenson (18:29.231)
Number one, thank you for the kind words about the service and our team. We take a lot of pride in the way we work with our clients because the reality is this is a vulnerable part of running a business. We are literally diving into the most sensitive and vulnerable part of our clients businesses. And so as someone who's
at least on a little bit of coaching with every single client that comes through. I do a strategic call with every single client. So at least talk to them one time during the onboarding process. do group calls every week. So that way our clients can, if they're feeling like they need a little more insight, they can lean on me a little bit there. But what, but what we found is that
Graham (19:12.763)
It's so good, yeah.
Parker Stevenson (19:18.061)
A lot of people don't get into the world of accounting because they want to deliver customer service. Like that's not really what accountants want to do. And account like the problem with most bookkeepers is that they will work with any business that comes their way. But financially. Every business model is going to be different and it takes different tools.
different perspectives, different, sometimes even different accounting practices to manage that. So if you think about a manufacturing business, let's say you're making widgets, well, you have raw goods and now you've got to take those goods and manufacture them into inventory and now you have to sell that inventory, right? Physical products.
We don't really deal with that at Evolve Finance because I come from that world. I work for Adidas. It's a nightmare financially. It's a really hard business to run because there are so many moving parts. But if I were running a business like that, I want a bookkeeper and an accountant that understands that business model. A restaurant.
taking out a loan to get this thing off the ground. You're buying all the food, all the equipment. You have to hire people right off the bat. There's all this stuff that's happening before you even open your doors. That yeah, I want a bookkeeper and an accountant that understands what is going on there because there's some unique components to that. Online businesses are luckily a heck of a lot simpler.
than those types of business models. We're not Silicon Valley startups. We're not getting funding and money from all these different places. We're not having to make massive investments to get our our businesses off the ground and started to buy inventory or manufacturing equipment or whatever it may be. But there are still unique components to our business that you want your bookkeeper and or accountant to understand. And that's where I give my business partner Corey so much credit. He's our founder. He kind of fell into this niche and then saw the opportunity there.
Parker Stevenson (21:15.075)
I think what's really truly unique about the online space is that our clients don't they're not Harvard MBAs, right? They're not a Lot of them don't even have business degrees from undergrad. They're again creative people we work with a lot of
You know just parents who started a business on the side While they were home with the kids or whatever it may be So there is a little more of a gap in that business knowledge and that finance knowledge versus someone's like yeah I got a Silicon Valley startup. I'm gonna get a bunch of money. I can hire a CFO right off the bat I took all these finance classes versus like I'm a person I fell into a business the internet makes it easy to sell stuff. I'm really good at selling stuff How does this work? So I think part of why?
I wrote this book is because I remember when I was like, want to, I want to start a business, but I felt intimidated at the time, even though I had a little bit of finance experience in the corporate world. I was like, what are the rules here? How do you start this? How do you, what, what are we supposed to do to track our money? Like, how does this work? Like I could kind of put a spreadsheet together and map out how I thought the business would work. But even for myself, I didn't know.
Here I am, you know, 10 years later and now I know all this stuff and I wrote a book about it because I remember it limited me. It stopped me from wanting to take a leap of faith. And I was just lucky that I had a Corey Whitaker in my life. I was like, yeah, I'll help you grow your business, man. I think I could be really good at this. He's like, I think you could too. And we joined forces. So I didn't have to start something from scratch. And Corey knows all the accounting and legal stuff. He's really good at that stuff. And so I had the benefit of working with him and learning from him, but I also had the benefit of him like
taking care of that stuff.
Parker Stevenson (23:00.705)
for our business versus Graham, you were everything from the start. You didn't have a core. You didn't have a business partner that knew all this stuff. You had to do this yourself and make some mistakes along the way, right? Make some bad hires. And so that's where this book comes into play is it's literally like, I'm, I want this to be the handbook for years to come for anyone, not just starting a business, but starting an online business to have the resources and the information they need to go,
Graham (23:05.221)
Mm-hmm.
Parker Stevenson (23:30.305)
Okay, this is the playbook because not just because I say so but because we've literally done it for hundreds
of online businesses over and over and over again and seeing these systems work and see this approach work as our clients have built six, seven and even eight figure a year businesses. So it's tough. Finance and accounting is a tough industry as being an accountant or being a finance professional because you want to work with anyone that comes your way and help them. But I think it's important for business owners to know not all financial advice is created equal. What makes sense for a startup?
a tech startup is not going to make sense for a manufacturing business or an online business. So that's where I think a lot of business owners have struggled is just getting the wrong advice for their type of business model. But I think we fixed that with my book Profit Pillars.
Graham (24:22.139)
Dude, absolutely. Well, let's get into the book. The book is called Profit Pillars, a Proven System to Maximize the Bottom Line in Your Online Business. So there are four pillars in the book. Maybe walk us through one or two of them that are really going to help us out today.
Parker Stevenson (24:36.128)
Yeah, and I want to actually I want to say this tee this up before we get into profit pillars I think what a lot of business owners go is they say all right, let's just start analyzing the numbers and it's like well the first like are your numbers organized right and It's not sexy Graham. I know it but like part of being a business owner like being a successful business owner is organization like If your business is a mess that's going to be reflected in your results
And so the the we have three parts to the book. The first part is more around the mindset of money because it could be a whole nother conversation if you want to go into it. Graham, the emotion around money I've seen with business owners shocked me.
I felt very impartial to money. was like, yeah, I'm pretty good with it. Like I don't feel triggered by it or anything, but I saw, I've seen so many people really struggle with, with how they approach and think about money. So we start off with that in the book. Then we go into like, how do you get your foundation built? How do you get your house on a strong foundation so you can grow your business on top of something that's strong? And part of that is organization.
and having good bookkeeping, having some reports to look at, working with the right team, understanding how to use your financial accounts. If you have all those things in place, then the fun part comes in, which is what is my business doing? How much money am I making? How much money am I spending? How much money do I have left over as profit? And so what we've done for our clients over the years is actually break down their expenses into four different pillars. these are like big
Expense buckets that have individual categories in them. We're not just like saying all right Here's a profit and loss statement with only four places to put the money, but we kind of help our clients zoom out And go all right. I know your P &L has a bunch of little transactions and categories in it, but let's zoom out first and see Where the main areas of our business that we're we're spending money in?
Parker Stevenson (26:36.309)
The two that tend to make the biggest impact on our clients businesses are lead and conversion expenses. This is the first profit pillar because marketing can be expensive. Our clients have spent millions of dollars on advertising. They've paid out millions of dollars in affiliate payouts. They've paid for ad managers. They've paid out sales commissions to salespeople. Merchant fees are part of lead and conversion expenses. And all these things are...
both huge opportunities and also huge traps if you're not managing them, right? Like, of course, if you knew you could invest $1 into Instagram in ads and get $3 back, we would all be doing it and we'd all be millionaires.
But it's it's not that easy. So the leading conversion expense has definitely been something I've seen change a lot in our clients businesses over the years as we've seen trends and okay affiliate marketing is the way now everyone's running ads now We're going back to affiliate marketing or you know, just we're not doing anything at all. Some of our clients just stopped Spending money on leading conversions and focus more on organic marketing social media SEO things like that So that's one of the pillars I think is so important to understand as a business owner is whether you spent how much
are you spending to generate leads in your business and turn those leads into customers?
But then the second pillar that is almost always going to be the biggest expense in a client's business is team costs. It's labor expenses is what we call it. So labor isn't an issue when it's just you. I'm sure Graham, for many years, you were the primary expense in your business. You were the person. Maybe you eventually got a VA, got a little bit of support, got a bookkeeper, right? And that team starts to grow over time. But...
Parker Stevenson (28:22.654)
Almost all of our clients at Vol Finance are at least making six figures a year or more. so team is, you just can't run this thing by yourself. And so that's where labor expenses become so important, because whether you have employees or contractors, you're going to need people to help you run this business and get stuff done. But also labor expenses tend to be one of the most expensive parts of your business. Again, I'd say 90 % or more of our clients, their biggest expense are going to be team members.
attention to what you're spending money on in terms of your team. What are your team members doing? What kind of work are they focusing on? Are you working with contractors versus employees? Like these are the types of conversations, especially for our six and double, especially for our seven figure clients and above. This is the name of the game. Like how do you scale a business profitably while also making sure you have the team support you need around that? And that's a big part of what we talk about in the book around your labor.
Graham (29:18.587)
Mm-hmm.
Parker Stevenson (29:22.507)
expenses.
Graham (29:24.41)
Yeah, you're, I'm looking at my, my dashboard that you guys sent me for September and it's beautiful because I get the breakdown, but yeah, I see the leading conversion. see the labor for me. Like mine is almost a toss up with labor and general operating expenses, but it just sort of depends. And I haven't had a huge lead in conversion costs. I don't run ads. I do a lot of organic, but like it's really helpful to visually in a snapshot, see, you know,
with you guys running the numbers and like giving the reporting and you could figure this stuff out yourself, but even doing it once a month to be like, okay, snapshot, this month maybe profit was down, but for the year to date, we're doing well as compared to last year, because like some months you're gonna have an influx of cash and the expenses will be low or you'll have all the expenses previously that led to the influx of cash later. So you see a low profit month because you spent a lot, but then the profits coming later.
when you get to cash in on that thing. so just getting the monthly snapshots helpful, but over time these graphs become really, really helpful as I understand, okay, yeah, my labor has gone big or lower. And I know for me personally, last year, going back to something we said earlier about revenue being vanity versus profit, this year will probably be a lower revenue year for me than last year, but it'll be a much higher profit year for me because I...
Fired everybody. And the biggest one, I'm slowly rehiring some people, but like I cleaned the house. It just wasn't working, but I had a very expensive CMO, CPO type multi-person, multi-role person, fractional CMO. And she was very expensive, really awesome person. But like we, we made decisions to part ways and her costs coming down, even though we generate a lot of revenue, I didn't make as much profit because she, she got a bunch of that.
And this year, it's like, if I look at revenue, could be like, sad. It's not as cool as it was last year. But I look at profit. My wife's like, keep going, babe. Like, we can we can do more stuff now because we're actually making more money. So these snapshots are huge.
Parker Stevenson (31:28.671)
Well, and this is what, if you don't mind me saying, Graham, I just want everyone to understand about your business. You're an efficient operator. have, you've been able to leverage marketing activities that are very time consuming, but don't cost a lot of money. And you reap the rewards of that, right? Like that's been part of your strategy. And that was one of the first things when we looked at your numbers is it was very obvious to me.
Cool. I understand what your business model is. Here's your advantages. This is why you're so profitable. And so this is the kind of stuff like as business owners, we just can't kind of need to understand if you're playing the ads game, then you're going to have different expectations around your profit pillars. What percentage of your revenue is going to ads? Where can your profitability be?
When you have to spend so much money on ads to generate new leads or if you're giving half of your every dollar of revenue you make to an affiliate or whatever that may look like so I think for you whether you realized it or not as you've developed the the coaching business separate from what you're doing with the recording revolution, although I know that There was probably some similar components there You're you've been very intentional at least from what I understand talking to you about like how do we keep this simple?
we keep this clean? How do I make sure I stay focused on the things that are making an impact for my audience and is attractive to the marketplace without having to add a lot of bells and whistles that create complexity, which usually reduces profit. So, so anyone that, you know, listens to Graham every week and follows his content, that's something, I guess that's the insider information I can give you. The benefit of Graham's perspective is he keeps things as simple as possible. He's not out there to overcomplicate.
He doesn't let his ego get in the way of like, well, everyone else is doing this, so I better do it too. So I feel super businessy and successful. And it's like, no, my numbers tell me if I'm doing something right or wrong. And your numbers are definitely telling you you're doing something right. And I think that's just a good thing for people to understand. Like that is,
Parker Stevenson (33:39.993)
Not a complete unicorn. We've worked with a lot of businesses like yours, Graham, but not every online business is able to run as efficiently and simply as you're able to run your business. And that's huge.
Graham (33:51.215)
Well, I appreciate that. Hey, you have this line in the book that I love because I like to just like poke the bear a little bit at people. You say most online business owners do not have a firm grasp of how much money they need each month to pay their personal bills. Subsequently, they use their businesses like ATMs. So this is real. This is like the, crap, I need to pay for my kids private school tuition. crap, the car broke down. crap.
Parker Stevenson (33:58.513)
Mm-hmm.
Graham (34:20.614)
I want to take a vacation. So what do we do? We pull the slot machine of our business, which is run a flash sale, hit up my people. I've got a new course or whatever it is to infuse some cash or pull cash out of the business. This is a real thing. Why is this a problem? What's a better approach?
Parker Stevenson (34:38.212)
Yeah, so let me start off by saying there's no judgment around this. This is part like this is part of the learning process of running a business, right? And it's hard to separate sometimes our personal identities and personal finances from the business's identity and businesses finances. But ultimately, if we're trying to be in business for a long time, we need the business to be its own thing.
Graham (34:45.252)
yeah, I've done this. Yeah.
Parker Stevenson (35:07.813)
have its own financial fence around it. And we have to accept that as business owners, we have extra financial responsibility. This is just what we sign up for. If we want to keep things simpler, go get a job, be an employee for someone else. Then all you have to do is worry about your personal finances. but we talk a little bit about it in the book with some stats. mean, most Americans, struggle with their personal budgets and now you throw a businesses finances on top of that.
Graham (35:24.111)
Yep. Yep.
Parker Stevenson (35:37.498)
And it's like, okay, I not only have to manage my household budget, now I gotta make sure my business is financially solvent as well. But when we put pressure on our businesses to pay us more than really what the business can afford, what we're doing is putting our business at risk from a cash flow standpoint and putting at risk our incomes. Because if we put too much pressure on that business,
then all sudden your business might not be able to pay you anything because it's going out of business because we're not really taking our responsibilities of the full financial picture we have to manage seriously. And so the best way we can do that is number one, we have to separate our personal finances from our businesses finances as soon as we possibly can. If you're just dabbling and getting started, cool, that's fine. You don't have to start off with business bank accounts. I think you should, but I get it if you're not.
But eventually like if we're making a full-time income from our businesses or even making a substantial part-time income that that your family and your household is reliant on then we got to separate the businesses and personal your businesses finances from your personal finances so you can see What's going on with my household income? What are my monthly expenses?
How much money do I actually need to make from my business in order to cover those expenses? It's some basic budgeting that just goes, hey, I know what my monthly net is on the personal side. So now let's go to the business and go, is my business set up to do that for me? Am I clear enough around what is my business averaging and profit every month? How much of that profit do I have to pay to pay myself versus how much?
Can I leave in the business to build a cushion have cash available to invest back in the business and where business owners get in trouble is when all that just gets murky and gets really cloudy and unclear and we're just kind of looking at the business's pool of money as Just like a cash grab and so we're left in this very
Graham (37:29.903)
Hmm.
Graham (37:40.325)
Yeah.
Parker Stevenson (37:45.592)
for me, nerve wracking place. But this, this very kind of risky place of like.
All right, I need to pay my business's bills, I need to pay my personal bills, and we don't have the visibility into like, what can I actually cover on the business versus what can I cover personally? And if we don't have that clarity and we don't have that division between our two financial lives, that's when I see clients get into debt. They're taking out credit card debt, they're taking out business loans they could have avoided, they're taking on personal debt to cover stuff and...
Graham (38:02.224)
Yep.
Parker Stevenson (38:17.947)
And the reality is sometimes businesses just don't do as well as we want and we have to get into these places. But most of the time these things could be avoided if we just create more separation and get the clarity we need to number one have good bookkeeping and financial visibility into our business and then also make sure our household.
What are we spending money on? we clear on what our monthly nut is and not just like winging it? If you're making so much money that you don't have to pay attention to that, then congratulations, you're crushing it. But for everyone else, like we have to have a little more intention around getting clear on what are those numbers on both sides so we can make sure that we're not putting more pressure on our business to support our personal lives than the business can really handle.
Graham (39:04.124)
Yeah, so good. And I think here a little intentionality goes a long way. It doesn't have to be this most complex system. But yes, yes to all of that. Dude, I want to honor your time. Two last questions. one sort of I ask everybody, but last question for you specifically. And I think this is unique. And I've asked you this before, I think maybe on our strategy call, or maybe we talked about it a bit at Kajabi, but you look at people's numbers all the time. Like your company looks under the hood at
Parker Stevenson (39:09.69)
No.
Parker Stevenson (39:17.061)
Please.
Graham (39:33.271)
my business, tons of other businesses. So you have like the real data on what's going on in online businesses right now. You have a unique angle. And so my question is simple, like from what you can tell, what trends are you seeing if any in our industry, people that are selling information products, coaching, online businesses, what trends are you seeing if any that we can glean some wisdom from going into 2025? What's working, what's not?
Anything that you can glean is probably useful for the audience.
Parker Stevenson (40:05.202)
If it's okay with you I'm just gonna paint a little bit of a picture of what the last couple years have looked like because I think that will help us to understand where we're kind of at as an industry right now. So during the pandemic from 2020 to 2022 it was a very nerve-racking period of time I think for everybody at the very start of it a lot of business owners were gonna be like is my business gonna fall apart or people gonna stop buying things and what we saw was we saw a lot of our
clients businesses absolutely boom 2020 2021 especially a number of our clients had the biggest years they've ever had the reason for that is people were stuck at home more they had more time to spend on the internet people were investing more in hobbies and developing new skills and and even starting businesses themselves and so we saw
tremendous growth that then by 2022 and 2023, especially our seven figure clients, they, and I don't know if it would have been possible to fully understand this and predict this, started to scale up their operations, invested more in their operations because they're like, my business is just gonna triple or quadruple every year and I'm gonna be a billionaire. And it's like,
Graham (41:22.523)
Yep.
Parker Stevenson (41:24.761)
No, I don't think we are paying attention to market conditions, which as soon as people were the world opened up again and people were getting out, all of a sudden we saw people less engaged online, people having less time now to invest in skills and hobbies because
Kids are back in school, going on vacations, have to get back into the office. On top of that, we also saw right around 2020, I think that was when the iOS update changed. Facebook ads got more expensive and then tracking what was going on with people who are clicking your ads. Now we're kind of, we're lacking visibility on that. So what we've seen, I think a lot of business owners struggling with right now,
Graham (41:56.133)
Hmm. Yep.
Graham (42:02.042)
Yeah.
Parker Stevenson (42:11.019)
is lead generation because again, I know that we're not in a lockdown, but we're still dealing psychologically with the side effects of the pandemic.
people still want to get out of their houses. are still like, people are like so nervous about the economy and about a post pandemic world. And especially this year, you throw an election year, you throw in some crazy inflation since 2020, like some of the highest inflation we'll probably ever see in our lifetimes or our children may even see. And it's a, it turns into a situation where our smaller
Clients are either faltering and literally just going I can't get anyone's attention or they're booming they're seeing opportunity in this economy because they go People are still doing the old tactics from like three four five years ago and those tactics don't work anymore And they're figuring out what is grabbing people's attention online and they are growing
Graham (43:06.65)
Yep.
Parker Stevenson (43:15.636)
But we have to understand that social media engagement is down if you're using the old tactics to get grab people's attention Facebook ads aren't working as well as they used to if you're still using those old tactics So I think we have more competition in the online space There's more online businesses than there have ever been and there will continue to be there's plenty of room for everyone in this space but I think for Anyone who's been in this game for a while? We've had a lot of conversations with clients going
You have to shift the way you think about your business. have to whatever you felt comfortable with before you have to start to examine that and figure out what are the market conditions now and how do you show up and serve people in these market conditions? Newer business owners, they don't know what it was like seven years ago. They only know what's going on now. And so they have an advantage from a mindset standpoint to be like, well, I'm not attached to what the past was because I didn't have a business in the past. I've only been doing this a couple of years and I think they have
Graham (44:09.648)
Yeah.
Parker Stevenson (44:15.226)
an advantage to come in and establish themselves and sort of replace some of the maybe old guard that's been in this industry and whatever niche you're in. And so that's where I think the opportunity is, is yes, it's harder to generate leads than I think it's ever been in the history of the online space. But also the people who are paying attention to what it takes to drive leads and aren't attached to the way things were in the past. Those are the businesses we're going to grow and scale.
and have the right mindset to go into this sort of new economy in the online space.
Graham (44:51.247)
Yeah, super good. Thanks for sharing those insights, man. It's always good to reflect on and I agree 100%. Okay, last question. I ask everybody, I called it the golden rule segment. This can go any direction you want, has nothing to do with the book necessarily. But if your kids forgot everything you and your wife have taught them because you've been trying to raise them up, train them up, these awesome kids that you care about, what is the one piece of advice though?
Parker Stevenson (45:17.272)
Hmm.
Graham (45:19.664)
that you would want them to remember. If they remember just one thing, they would actually carry it with them their whole lives like a golden rule. What would you want that to be for them?
Parker Stevenson (45:29.196)
The first thing that pops into my head is just the power of connect, like connecting with other human beings and learning to enjoy people. I've found that, one of my biggest advantages is like we went to the Kajabi event, Graham, I could talk to everybody because I have a true interest and enjoyment of hearing other people's
connecting with other people, even if it's just for a brief moment of time to feel like we're on the same page here, this is cool. We're engaged, interacting with each other and enjoying a moment. And so I think especially in an internet world where it's easy to detach from other people and I think overall build a mentality of people are challenging and exhausting and
A problem interacting with other people is a problem socializing is a problem. I get it I get that there's introverts in the world I get that not everyone likes small talk and all that stuff, but I think in an internet world if my son
Someone who enjoys people is not afraid to interact and talk and speak with people in person I think he will have a massive advantage Both in the economy and with a rich social life and in a life that has love and connection in it And so I just don't see how he could go wrong with at least having that be his one golden rule to live by if you forgot everything else I taught him which I'm sure he will anyways
Graham (47:04.377)
Yeah, that's good. think that's the first time on the show. That's a great one and I love that. You can't go wrong. This has been amazing. Okay, bro, the book is Profit Pillars, a proven system to maximize the bottom line in your online business. It drops next week, November 19th. Where can people get the book and are there any pre-order bonuses if they grab it before or on book launch day?
Parker Stevenson (47:26.176)
So we, yeah, we, the book will be anywhere. You can find a book essentially on the internet. if you go to evolvefinance.com forward slash book, it'll send you to all the different places that you can go to. we will be launching a toolkit around the book. think of all the spreadsheets you wish someone would have shown you how to make in your business and, with tutorials on how to use these things, whether you're trying to do your own bookkeeping, whether you're trying to build out your first business budget.
your first personal budget. Also a ProfitPillars cheat sheet to help you kind of keep track of the ProfitPillars in your own business. This is gonna be launching on the 19th with the book and anyone who's subscribed to our email list, we will be doing a special promotion for that. So if you go to volfinance.com, you'll find the book there and also we have a free audio course right now to opt in to get on our email list and that way when we have some of these awesome tools that are gonna be coming out with the book.
We'll have a great launch deal for everybody because if you're me and a finance nerds we want to reward all of those that are Taking that leap of faith with me and getting into the nerdy parts of running an online business
Graham (48:38.32)
guys.
Graham (48:41.765)
Hey, nerds make money, man. That's it's important. It's important, bro. This is good stuff. Yeah, man. That's your, that's your merch right there. Chopper, you know, our shop nerds make money. So anyway, dude, this is great. Get the book guys. Profit pillars, go to evolved finance.com slash book to pick it up. Parker love what you're doing. Thanks for being a partner in my business and helping me with my profit and my profit pillars.
Parker Stevenson (48:43.957)
You need to put that on a shirt that that's a shirt right there
Graham (49:08.055)
And I'm excited for you and where the book's gonna go, bro, and continued success in the business and with your family as well.
Parker Stevenson (49:14.207)
Feeling is likewise, Graham. Thank you so much, buddy.
