Since 1 April this year, I’ve been stealing spare moments of time to compile a wrap-up of my last financial year. The second financial year as a Sole Trader for me. I took on a whopping 16 clients 🤯 (while they were all lovely people, it turned out to be a real burnout situation by the end of the year).

These clients came from diverse industries, ranging from: photographers and web designers a brand strategist, a women's business group, a biodynamic gardening educator, urban planning consultant, an antenatal teacher, a candlemaker, a microbiologists, a healthy homes developer, and a business coach.

The best part? Those clients are women-led businesses or self-employed women or queer folk with plenty of 🌶️ neurodivergent brains thrown in the mix for good measure.

I saved these clients over two thousand hours of time that they (collectively) could have spent pretending everything was fine when it was in fact on fire, instead of on the front lines delivering their services/products to their clients. That’s pretty f*cking epic.

Another really exciting thing that happened last year is that I started outsourcing! I hired a few contractors to help me with things like bookkeeping. I waited until I knew I could pay people fairly, and I’m proud to say I’ve never paid a contractor less than a Living Wage. This year I’ve even started hiring sub-contractors (but that’s a story for another blog post).

So, on that note… I think there’s a big need for transparency in business. I f*cking hate it when people say things like “I made six figures this year!” but then don’t tell you if that was profit/revenue/income and how much of it went on expenses etc. without further adieu…

Here are my figures for the last FY in a nutshell:

Revenue/taxable income: $51,099
Income after taxes: $39,031 (I was not GST registered last FY)
Claimable amount of expenses: $20,310*
Income after expenses: $18,721

If you divide that net pay by the hours I actually logged it’s about $9/hour. You did read that right.

Just to be crystal clear here, there are perks to being self-employed and working mostly from home. The claimable expenses cover things like professional development training (business coaching, sales coaching etc.) but they also include a small percentage (my home office size, about 8%) of my mortgage interest payments, phone/internet, petrol, tea/coffee/milk, cleaning products and various other things that I’d otherwise need to pay for if I was renting an office space.

Theoretically, I work “part-time” which is less than 30 hours per week, but as any business owner knows… running a business is full-time and then some.

If you’re thinking “Excuse me, WHAT?! I can claim tea & coffee?!” then let’s have a chat.

So, in my second year of flying solo, I took on a whopping 16 clients from all walks of life. It was a rollercoaster, to say the least. I didn’t make much “profit” but in the early years of business, the main thing is to cover the expenses and keep on keeping on.

Do you do any EOFY wrap up? Or is yours more calendar year focussed? Or is it based around your business birthday?