Episode #088: Our PROVEN 90 Day Profit Cycles Framework
Our PROVEN 90 Day Profit Cycles Framework
Looking for a more sustainable way to generate consistent revenue?
In this episode of the podcast I’m going to reveal our battle-tested 90-day framework that's transformed how we approach business growth and profitability.
You'll discover:
The "Triple Threat" quarterly system that creates predictable revenue without burning out—including why traditional day-to-day profit tracking might be holding you back
The counterintuitive truth about running a "boring" business - and how predictability actually creates more freedom and excitement in your life
Why having a dedicated "build month" could be the missing piece in your business growth (and how we use it to strengthen our systems, team, and customer experience)
The crucial difference between launches and promotions - and how to strategically use both to create a "snowball effect" with your marketing budget
Whether you're struggling with inconsistent income or looking to take your already successful business to the next level, this episode will show you how to create a more predictable, profitable, and enjoyable business model.
Hit play to discover how you can implement this framework in your own business starting today!
Links Mentioned
Full Transcript
[00:00:00]:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 88. And in this episode, we're talking about how we create profitability in our business through ninety day cycles. So if you are trying to create more revenue in your business and create more growth on a quarter to quarter basis, this episode is for you, so stay tuned. Hey. Hey. Hey. Not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast.
[00:00:25]:
Now I'm very excited for this week's episode because, to be honest, I think a lot of people in the online marketing space, like, we see the glamorous numbers, and we hear about the funnels, and we hear about the daily sales. And I think there's kind of this lost element, if you will, of what creates that consistency. And I wanna talk to you today about how in our business, we don't necessarily look at day to day profit. And I know that might sound weird if you're not used to looking at it this way, but we look at our business in quarterly cycles, you know, which is normal. A lot of people do that. Quarter one, quarter two, quarter three, quarter four. But I wanna talk to you about the way that we look at our business in a ninety day period roughly to set us up to have the best results throughout the entire year. Okay? So what I wanna break down in this episode is what we do on a quarterly basis that sets us up to have yearly revenue and profit success.
[00:01:28]:
And for context, if you're new to the show, welcome. We're excited to have you. I've been doing this for about ten years, and, really, I've adapted this mindset. I would say in the last three or four years, I would find myself prior to looking at my business this way being like, oh, this one thing, this launch, this webinar, this challenge, whatever, needs to be a massive success because I need that revenue, and then I hope that revenue carries me into the next time that I have a good revenue activity. And now the way that I look at my business is in monthly kind of ninety day cycles. Right? Monthly and ninety day cycle. And so every ninety days, we look at each month. And one of our months is for launching, one of our months is for promotion, and one of our months is for building.
[00:02:14]:
Okay? So let's kind of get down to the granular what I mean by that. So every quarter, one of our months, we're going to have a launch. And some people don't like to launch that much, and that's okay. I really enjoy having a quarterly boot camp style launch of our membership. And so the launch for me is about two things. Right? One, it's about creating an influx of new students, but it's also about creating kind of, like, momentum and awareness. I find that when I do a launch, it creates what what I like to call launch fallout, which is like this period where people are engaging with you after the launch. They're talking about your brand.
[00:02:55]:
You're getting tagged in Facebook groups potentially. You've got, you know, influx of new potential affiliates who enjoyed your launch that may wanna share it the next time. So that's the first thing. The second thing is we do a promotion. So to me, a promotion isn't quite as intensive as a launch, and it can be fully internal. Sometimes my promotions are, like, just internal to the max. It's, like, only to my warm audience. But generally, for me, a promotion is, like, it's lower lift, but it still generates revenue.
[00:03:27]:
And my goal with that promotion isn't necessarily to have this big massive launch. It's actually to create revenue or influx revenue that I can use in the next quarter to scale the launch bigger. And then the third month in the quarter is, build month. And what a build month is is really just like we're prepping. Right? We're either recording podcasts or video content or reels or Instagram. And I want to candidly say, like, I'm not a great batcher. I don't do, like, a good job batch recording. But I sit down during my build month, and I kinda think, like, what are we doing the next quarter? What are we planning and need to create for the next launch? What is the next promotion need to have in place? So I kind of think it, of of that month as, like, the compression of the spring or the pullback of the slingshot before I let it go into the next quarter.
[00:04:28]:
Right? So each of these months of the quarter, like, I'm focused on one thing, either a launch, a promotion, or a content creation / build month. Okay? What I'm essentially doing, my big goal with this is, number one, I wanna create profitability on the ninety days. K? Now we've done this over enough years, and we have our membership and our our services and agency and consulting that really we have a very healthy baseline revenue in our business, which I love. And so our ninety day profitability is really pretty much set in stone at this point, but we'll talk about our launches in a minute. Those are not massive, revenue or I should say profit. Those are not massive profit generators for us, on the whole. I'll talk about that. The second goal of this is that every ninety days, I wanna make sure I'm building my list 24/7.
[00:05:23]:
And so during this ninety day cycle, if I'm launching, I'm typically focused on launch ads. But during my promote and build month and after my launch, even part of my launch month, I am just running ads 24/7 that grow the list. Okay? Like, that is non negotiable for me. If I look at the ads that we've been running from, you know, January first to to just right today, like, the the day that this is dropping, let's say January or February 19 because I'm recording it a little early. But if I look at the the ads that we're running, the thing is we are generating, like, a very healthy amount of leads. Right? We've generated over in this year so far alone over 2,000 leads from ads plus any other organic activities that I'm doing. And to be really honest, that's lower than I want. I'd like that to be a little bit higher, but, you know, it's doing well.
[00:06:28]:
When I look at, our CEO dashboard, which is something that we do in the last thirty days, we've done about 1,800 leads. We track that metric really closely in our business, but that is, like, the core fundamental of what I'm doing. And the reason that that's so fundamental is that everything I do, the promotion, the launch, and even the content creation is contingent on the fact that my audience is expanding. Right? If my audience isn't growing all the time, then all of this stuff that I'm doing, eventually, it it tapers downward. Right? If I'm not always growing the audience, then when I launch, I don't have new people to speak to. When I promote, I don't have a bigger internal audience. When I drop a podcast like this or a blog post, I don't have new people that are gonna be reading it. Right? So it's really important that over this whole ninety days, the audience is growing.
[00:07:21]:
And then the last piece in terms of goals is that I wanna engage my audience on a weekly plus basis. So this quarter, our goal is actually to email our list twice a week, working on it, trying to be really good about it. But, typically, I do a story and a piece of content, and my story may relate to something. It may relate to nothing, but I tell a story because I wanna build a connection and and and, you know, relationship with my audience. And then I also do a piece of content. So, like, if you're listening to this the day it released to you, you got an email that was like, come listen to the podcast. Go figure. Right? And we're trying to do that twice a week.
[00:07:59]:
I'm also doing other things now, like running Facebook ads to specific pieces of content. So I think there's value in not just running ads to grow your list. Yeah. That's huge. We do that. But we also wrote a really great blog post in January. I'll link it up. It's it's on how we had our first $100k cash month, and it was really good.
[00:08:25]:
I mean, it's a really juicy blog. I'm biased, but it's pretty good. And I'll link it up in the show notes. But what we did with that is we ran traffic from all of the people in our warm audience to that blog. Right? And what's been really cool and really interesting is this is, like, probably one of I like to think, I'm biased, one of the best blogs we've written in a long time. But what's cool is that blog is actually generating people on our wait list for our upcoming program. It's generating sales of our products. So generally, when we run ads to content, we don't generate revenue, but we are this time, which is really, really cool.
[00:09:02]:
But, again, the the goal, this this quarterly goal is that we engage that audience weekly plus with a email, but also that once you're in our audience from that list building, from those launches, from the promotional phases, but you're also getting content from us. Right? And this is a whole rabbit hole I will go go down today, but the other thing to keep in mind is that content is intentional. So we wanna make sure that our content is intentional and is moving people in the right direction towards wanting our products. Okay? So where I'd like to go from here, if your game, is to kinda go into each of these months a little bit deeper. So one of our months is a launch month, and for us, I'm a huge fan of the five day challenge model. I mean, I've been using it for years. I love it. I've been teaching it for years.
[00:09:54]:
And one of the things I love about the five day challenge model, we do the Facebook and Instagram Ads for Listbuilding Bootcamp. What I love about it is that it's really engaging. Whether you do a free or a paid challenge, the people who show up, they freaking engage and they love engaging with your content, especially if it's good content. Right? And you're an expert. So, of course, it's good content. But for us, our membership is the back end of our boot camp. And so just for context, super quick rundown, our boot camp is the five day Facebook and Instagram Ads for Listbuilding Bootcamp. It's $25 to join.
[00:10:31]:
It leads to a $67 a month membership. We have some upsells and upgrades, and, of course, we have an annual option. But in essence, it's not high ticket. Right? And so the last time that we did our boot camp in January, we did about $52,000 in revenue, but only around $21,000 in profit. Now before you come at me, I know you're like, only. That's a lot. And and it is. It is.
[00:10:55]:
It's all subjective. But when you look at the percentages, you know, only 40% of the launch revenue was profitable roughly. Right? But we created $4,000 in new baseline monthly recurring revenue. So I mentioned earlier that one of the reasons our business has been able to grow is that we create this baseline revenue both with our membership, but also with our our agency services. And so one of the really cool things with a five day challenge is that we also create this big influx of awareness. And so for I mean, even now, the the challenge has been over for about four weeks, and it's not uncommon for me to get tagged in a Facebook group even on the back of that to be like, you need to check out @zachspuckler's boot camp. You know? We sell the recordings of it, and so it just creates this big influx of awareness and support that I love because when I'm doing these other things, the podcast, the blogs, not just are the people who have gone through the boot camp hearing about it, but, like, the word-of-mouth expands beyond that. And I like to call this launch fallout.
[00:11:59]:
It's like this post launch after effect that is people wanna talk about it. Right? Now we do some cool things with our challenge, and we really get people geeked up and excited to be there. Last time that we did a challenge, we had a theme, and we do themes a lot. But our last one was, like, you're in your advertiser era or in your list building era. And we had, like, friendship bracelet decor in my office on the Zoom, and I bought, a Taylor Swift cardboard cutout, and I bought Taylor Swift clip art, and we did Taylor Swift theme prizes. And look, you don't have to like Taylor Swift. It's fine. I do.
[00:12:35]:
There's there's people who like Taylor Swift, and then there's people who are wrong, and that's okay. But, what was really cool about it is people talked about it. Right? We did some other, like, unhinged stuff with the Taylor Swift theme, but it gets people talking. And so after the boot camp, there's this fallout, and I still have people talking to me about not even this one we did in January, but when we did in October, don't laugh at me. Our theme was cats, and people still talk about the cat theme, you know, almost six months later. Because when you do a boot camp right, when you do a five day challenge right, this fallout effect, this, integration of, and communication of your brand to your audience really creates this kind of, like, outward ripple into a lot of different places. It's not uncommon for me to get a message for someone to be like, oh, someone mentioned you in my mastermind. Someone mentioned you in this course.
[00:13:29]:
Someone mentioned you in this program that I'm in. That is my goal. That is I wouldn't say it's intentional to the point of, like, I wanna be mentioned in this room at this time, but it is intentional in the sense that I'm creating a system and a process that gets people talking. And so typically, not always, but typically, we do our launch towards the beginning of the quarter because it really sets the tone for the quarter. Right? If I create a front end influx of revenue and profit and I have people talking about me, it kind of sets the tone for how that quarter is gonna perform, not just financially, but in terms of engagement of my audience and engagement of new audiences. Right? And so from there, what I'm basically doing is moving into engagement and promotion to the audience that's growing through this fallout awareness ripple effect. Right? Now if you're listening to this and you're like, a five day challenge sounds really cool. I need to use for my business.
[00:14:25]:
We do have a training where we walk through our five day challenge process. It's not open right this second if you're listening to this in real time. But if you go to thechallengelaunchengine.com, again, that's thechallengelaunchengine.com, you can actually get on the wait list for the program. It's gonna be opening in March, and and we'd love to have you. You know, I won't say a whole lot about it today. There's some details over on that page. But, basically, if you were like, I love the idea of a challenge, but I don't wanna have to write a million emails, a million pieces of content, all of this stuff, and not really know what I'm doing. You'll love this program.
[00:14:59]:
It's, like, literally everything from templates to road maps to trainings to help you run a successful five day challenge. So thechallengelaunchengine.com, if you wanna learn more about that. Now once we get through the challenge, sometimes we go into a promo month, sometimes we go into a build month, and it really just depends on my schedule. Like, this this year, this first quarter, we were going to New York City in the middle of February, and so I didn't want it to be a promotion month. I don't like to promote when I'm traveling too much. I also have some plans coming up at the beginning of April, but I like my launches to be the first month of the quarter. So I'll be doing a launch at the end of April. So I create space in my ninety days for me to kind of, like, not just do this stuff, but also exist and enjoy life.
[00:15:45]:
But this quarter, this Q1 of 2025, our second month was a build month. And what we do in our build month is really we work on systems, we work on process, we work on retention, we improve our funnels. And if we if I was to distill it down to, like, one thing, it's like, where do we need to create and improve? And that's what I do in my kind of in between months. Right? So for example, this February, we had a big influx into our membership. Great. We have almost, 400 and I think 460 as of the time of recording this, like, almost 500 people in our membership. And that means that my team needs additional support. And so right now, what we're doing in February, our big, like, build month is to build the team.
[00:16:37]:
And so I'm doing interviews with people this week. I am you know, we put out a job posting. We built a job posting. I met with my team and the people who need extra support and said, where do you need support? What jobs do we need to get you help with? And we kinda found out that customer success and community management are two areas for improvement. And so we're focused on customer success, customer service first. We have a great community management process. We just see down the horizon in the next couple of months, maybe after this, maybe after our next launch. We're also probably gonna need someone to help us with the community on the whole in our membership.
[00:17:11]:
Not that anything's falling through the cracks right now, but it's always better to be proactive than wait for things to to be problematic. So that's kinda where we're focused here. But we've also, this month, planned out our March launch. We also mapped out our podcast for the next six weeks. Admittedly, I did not record them all, but we mapped them out. We're working on spending more on advertising, so we're scaling up our ads, and I'm also working on developing content. I wrote that really good, blog post about January. So the thing that I wanna communicate is that your build month, it doesn't have to necessarily be one thing.
[00:17:50]:
I prefer when it's, like, one major project. For us, that was hiring this month. But the big thing that I want you to understand is that it's just this month to kinda be thinking, like, what do I need to do? What needs to happen? Where do I need to focus? What do I need to expand on and add more to and do less of and do more of? And it's really about kind of, like, fine tuning the machine that is your business. And so the other thing that we did was we looked at, some of our onboarding for our membership. I was like, you know what? I think it would be good if for all the new people who joined in January, we actually had a check-in process. And so we rolled out a check-in email process. Right? So I just wanna encourage you that, yes, launching is great. Yes. Webinars are great.
[00:18:33]:
Yes. All this stuff is wonderful. And if you don't create the space in your quarters and your your calendar to actually, like, work on the stuff, marketing is great. It is. I'm a marketing nerd. It's the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast. But if you market a product that you're not always iterating and improving and, like, making better, what will happen is the quality of your product declines and people won't stick around and talk about it. Right? So it's just really important to me that I build time into my quarter to, like, build, iterate, you know, and and refine.
[00:19:12]:
The last piece of the quarter is the promotion. And so people always ask me, what's the difference between a promotion and a launch? And so, I mean, to be really candid, for me, a launch takes, like, one and a half to two months of prep. You know, it just takes a lot. Right? Like, our five day challenge, like I said, we did, like, the Taylor Swift theme. I have to find the cardboard cutout. I have to set up the emails. We have to create calendars. We have to do live calls.
[00:19:36]:
We have to set up Zoom links. We have to do new tags. We have to build pages. We have to build check. We do a lot. Right? And I love it. I love it. It's it's it's a good return on our investment because we put that work in.
[00:19:48]:
To me, a promotion is like it's it's lower lift, but it still generates revenue. So, typically, I do my promotions webinar style. I think they're a little easier for me personally, and they're a little lower lift because I typically refine or iterate a webinar that I already have or I take content that I've already used. And typically, a promotion takes me, you know, roughly, rough estimate here, peeps, but ten to twenty hours, whereas, like, a launch is like a eighty to a hundred and twenty hour commitment. But it still is a good product. Right? And this is to clarify after the the end product is already built. But because I have done this big launch, because I'm, like, building awareness and engaging that list all throughout the quarter, there's kind of, like, good awareness around the brand. And so it's the perfect time to insert or share additional offers or ways to work with me.
[00:20:44]:
Now if you don't have other courses or programs, that's okay. Maybe this is a time to open the doors to work with you one on one or for your services, and that's fine too. What I'm kind of doing with my promotion for me is I'm trying to create an influx of revenue, and then I'm not gonna go spend that money. That would be fun. I'm gonna take a percentage of that money, and I'm gonna put it into the next launch. And so what I'm really trying to do with my promotions is I'm trying to snowball. Right? I'm trying to snowball the available cash so that I can spend more on advertising when I do the next five day Facebook ads bootcamp. And so all of this becomes this beautiful system that just, like, hums along on a quarter to quarter basis.
[00:21:31]:
It's like, do your launch. Great. Optimize your process, people, systems, content. Great. Generate some revenue so that you can do another launch and then repeat. And I wanna say one thing. Something that I've learned that has taken me years and years and years to learn is that it doesn't have to be exciting to be successful. And I think a lot of times when I talk to people about this concept, they're like, so you're just doing the same boot camp over and over again? Yep.
[00:22:07]:
So you're just doing the same webinar? Yep. So you're just making content every quarter? Yep. Predictability comes from predictable and and and repetitious action. And so one of the best pieces of advice I was given was by a mentor a while ago. They said because I had this tendency where every eighteen months, I'd be like, burn it all down, start all over. Like, let's let's do something different. And they said to me, Zach, your business is not built to entertain you. It's built to create the flexibility, lifestyle, freedom, and financial support to do what you want to do that actually stimulates, excites, and enthralls you.
[00:22:46]:
And so what I found is that, yeah, my business is a little predictable in the sense of, like, we know what's coming. We know what we're doing. But number one, because I've created predictability in my process and my quarters, I can go travel. So, like, for the rest of this year, I'm gonna be in LA in April. I'm gonna be in, Orlando, the new new Orlando Studios, Universal Hollywood or oh my goodness. Universal Studios Orlando, is opening, like, a new theme park at the May, and we're gonna go in late October and see it, in late October? I'm not good with dates. At the October or August, it's one of the two. And then whichever one is not Universal, October or August, I am going on a small cruise down to the Caribbean.
[00:23:32]:
Subjective. Right? It's a big cruise because it's a big ship. But, you know, all of that is possible because I've created the predictability in the business. I used to crave the stimulation and excitement from the business side of things. Now I say the predictability and manageability of the business creates the excitement and stimulation outside of the business. And I just think that's something really important to communicate because, again, I think, especially in the online world, we you know, it's fast. It's quick. It's exciting.
[00:23:58]:
It's flashy sometimes, and and we want that excitement. But here's what I will offer you. When you create the predictability in your business, your system, and your cycles, and for us, it's a ninety day cycle, you're going to find that you create more space for freedom. Right? So let's do a quick recap. Basically, every quarter, we're looking at profitability on the whole. Our goal is ninety day profits, building our list 24/7, and engaging the audience that we're growing along the way. Then within that quarter, one month we focus on a launch, one month we focus on a promotion, and one month we focus on building, which we just say is, like, optimization, content creation, etcetera. The point of all of this is that we're always growing the baseline of the business.
[00:24:43]:
The business is always growing because we're always snowballing our efforts into the next quarter. Does it become predictable? Yes. Is that sometimes boring for someone who likes the excitement of things? Yes. But last thing I'll say, you can build excitement into what you do. And so, yeah, it's fun to build new products. It's fun to sell new products. It's fun to launch new courses. It is.
[00:25:08]:
It is all fun. And build the excitement into what you're doing. Like, so for me, my challenge every quarter, my my five day boot camp, I always do a really fun theme, and we have the most fun theme planned for Q4 this year. I'm so stinking excited. I want Q4 to be here now, but we we just have fun. And so you can have fun with predictability. So I hope you got massive value from this episode. If you are enjoying and you wanna get the show notes, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap088.
[00:25:40]:
Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap088 for the full show notes, the transcript, all that good stuff. We'll link up to those links that I mentioned earlier, including the Challenge Launch Engine wait list, the $100k month blog, and I'll also link up to my Instagram. If you enjoyed this episode, please DM me over on Insta, @zachspuckler. I love hearing from you guys and knowing what you think about these episodes. And if I could give you one takeaway from this, it's create predictability. Like, business is unpredictable on the whole, so anything you can do to create predictability is going to improve your experience, your clients' experience, and your business experience. So I hope you got massive value from this. Like I said, shoot me a DM.
[00:26:30]:
I love to hear from you. I'm gonna wrap it up here. Until next time, stay not so average.
