For 19 straight months now, I have recorded a public monthly retro about my business. Every dollar. Every contractor invoice. Every missed goal. Every honest moment of "I should have done better."
This is not normal for a service business. Most agencies and studios protect their numbers like a recipe. I went the other way on purpose, because the practice itself has made me a sharper marketer and a more honest operator.
January 2026 was my latest retro. I sat down at my desk on a Sunday afternoon, opened Notion, and walked through the whole month in front of a camera. This article is the written cut.
The Numbers I Refuse to Hide
January closed with $28,818 in revenue collected. Business expenses came in at $4,400. Personal income was $319. Personal expenses were $416. Mailing list grew to 308 subscribers. Two outbound proposals went out.
That last number is the one I am least proud of.
Two outbound proposals in 31 days is not the work ethic of a founder who wants to scale. That is the work ethic of someone hiding behind execution. I know that, and I am calling it out in front of an audience so I can do something about it in February.
The biggest line item on the business side was contractor labor at $4,000. A year ago I was making $4K a month. Now I am paying that out every month to other people who help me deliver client work. That is a growth signal and a stress signal at the same time.
Why I Track Finances The Way I Do
If you take one thing from this retro, take this. Build a financial visualization that gives you an at-a-glance view of your business.
I use Monarch Money. It pulls every transaction from every account, both personal and business. I tag everything as it comes in. At tax time, I export the year as a CSV and hand it to my accountant. No scrambling. No missed expenses.
The most useful view inside Monarch is the Sankey diagram. Revenue flows in on the left. Expenses flow out on the right. The picture tells me more in 10 seconds than any spreadsheet ever has.
If you are a freelancer, a founder, or anyone running marketing for yourself, you need a system like this. Not because the math is hard. Because the picture forces honesty.
Where The Money Went in January
Contractor labor at $4,000 was the largest investment, and most of it was internal work. I onboarded a new assistant at 10 hours a week, which is about $400 a month going forward. I also put $3,000 into our internal rebrand and a niching exercise that is going to reshape how MMG goes to market.
Recurring software ran about $600 a month, which I keep an eye on quarterly. Cohatch coworking is $200 a month. Gas, groceries, and an oil change made up most of the rest.
I cut Shutterstock this month. AI is replacing stock photography faster than any agency budget can justify. Shutterstock charged me a $75 cancellation fee on the way out. I also let go of Adobe for the first time since college and moved to Affinity Designer for thumbnails and lightweight design work.
Small cuts add up. So does the quiet permission you give yourself to keep paying for software you no longer use.
The Wins From January
The studio. We started recording the podcast in studio at COhatch, our presenting sponsor. The space looks incredible. The audio sounds better. The guest experience is on another level. Casey Brown came through this month and the energy was different. The photos, the lighting, the conversation. It is a new chapter for the show, and you can feel it in the episodes.
Above the Hold conference. I am headed to Florida for the Above the Hold conference. $400 on Spirit Airlines (yes, I know) and a discounted speaker rate on the ticket. I am crashing with Anthony, which keeps the trip lean. The room will be full of operators I respect. This is the kind of room I need to be in more often.
The MMG rebrand. I started working with a designer to fully rebrand MMG Design. Service pages. Case studies. A comparison section. Pricing. An updated About page. Everything is leveling up. If you take nothing else from this paragraph, hire a designer who can make your work look like the version of itself you have been chasing. The new site launches this quarter and I am genuinely fired up about what it is going to do for the studio.
LinkedIn. Two posts popped off this month. The first came after Casey Brown sat down across from me in the studio and called me out for the way I talk about myself. She told me to stop using language that puts me down, because eventually I start to believe it. I wrote about it, kept it honest, and it landed. The second was a year in review post recapping everything from the last 12 months of retros. Both posts did what I want my LinkedIn to do. They spoke to real people with real stakes.
Four to five website launches. We finished Vibrix Compounding, a Vibrix parent brand site, and AMA Columbus is wrapping today. A few more are in the wild. The compounding site is one I am especially proud of. Multi-step forms, a clinical and credible feel, real interactions, and a navbar I keep going back to look at.
Good hangs. I have a recurring Tuesday call with Brian Andreo where we talk sales, business, and life. That call has become one of the most important hours of my week. Find someone in your stage of business and put a recurring time on the calendar with them. It changes everything.
The Losses I Need To Own
Contractor labor at $4K. I have a great team. The number is just uncomfortable for me right now. I am very Midwestern about cash flow, and watching that line item grow gives me pause. I will be in this range for a few months while we sort internal versus client work.
A bad contractor experience. One developer this month had communication gaps that led to twice-done work. That is on both of us, but it is also on me for not setting the right expectations up front.
Behind on assigning tasks. Some of my contractors logged hours waiting on me. They woke up to a Slack message that there was nothing to work on yet, which means I am the bottleneck in my own business. That is the single most fixable problem on this list, and it is the one I keep putting off.
Quiet churn and long sales cycles. Quiet churn is the silent killer for a service business. You do not always know a client is gone until they are gone. The cost of waiting to get clarity on a relationship is always higher than the cost of the awkward conversation.
Personal. I have not been eating well. The last week of January we were snowed in here and I could not get out of the house. Environment shapes habits more than willpower does, and being stuck in my office for a week made that very clear to me.
What I Said I Would Do in January, And What Actually Happened
I check my goals from the previous month at the start of every retro. Here is what that looked like.
What I hit. I established a visual direction for the new MMG site. I built an hour of dedicated LinkedIn SOP work into the week. I trimmed our subscription list (Shutterstock and Adobe both gone). I went to the gym every day. I coached three times per week. I recorded podcasts consistently.
What I missed. Outreach. Three phone calls per day did not happen. I missed a team meeting. I did not establish official partner hours with my agency network. I did not finish reorganizing our project manager in ClickUp.
That is roughly half. I have high standards on the business side and I want to be doing better on outreach in particular. February has to be different.
My February Marching Orders
Consistent daily outreach. My mom and I joked about using a kitchen timer for accountability. So now I have a 90-minute timer on my desk for prospecting in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, five days a week. Sometimes the dumbest tool is the right one.
Launch 2SP. This site has been backlogged because the client has not filled in the CMS content I need. I set the precedent too early of being nice instead of being effective. Time to close it out.
Launch AMA Columbus. The new site is built in Webflow and looks great. Eight more hours of work and we are done.
Close two pipeline deals. $52,000 in pipeline between two opportunities. Both within our control. Closing both essentially sets up the whole quarter.
Establish a trusted partners list. I have a small group of agencies and operators I trust to refer work to. I want that codified on the new site.
Organize ClickUp. Single source of truth for every client. No more bouncing between tools to figure out where a project stands.
Personal goals. Hit a 15K gym month. Stay disciplined on food. Finish 10x is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. No phone in the bedroom (the worst habit I have right now). Visit three duplexes in Columbus, because I am ready to put my flag down and commit to this city.
What This Practice Has Actually Taught Me
Nineteen months in, here is what I know about doing public monthly retros.
It is not about the numbers. It is about the act of looking. Most founders avoid the mirror because the mirror is uncomfortable. If you build a practice that forces you to look every 30 days, the discomfort becomes a feature instead of a bug.
It also makes you better at your own marketing. The people who read or watch these retros are the same people I want to work with. They see how I think, how I make decisions, how I behave when things are messy. By the time we get on a sales call, they already know if we are a fit.
If you are a marketer or a founder reading this, take 30 minutes this week. Open a doc. Write down your revenue, your expenses, your three biggest wins, your three biggest losses, and what you commit to next month. Do it whether anyone sees it or not.
That is how you build a business you can actually defend.
One More Thing For Columbus Marketers
If you are a marketer in Columbus, or you want to be, I send out a free newsletter every Monday with the best marketing jobs in the city. Freelance, fractional, in-house. All in one place. You can join it at columbusmarketingjobs.com.
TEAM
🎙 Host // Andy Milligan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmgdesign/
🎥 Production // MMG Design: https://www.mmgdesign.net/
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