Episode 75: What Your 2025 Numbers Are Really Telling You (And Why It Matters for 2026)

Welcome to the Creative Minds Smart Money Podcast, where we turn financial confusion into creative confidence. I’m Samantha Eck, Bookkeeper and Fractional CFO for Creative Entrepreneurs. Each week, I’m sharing my financial expertise and actionable strategies to help you build a thriving creative business.

Plus, you’ll hear from industry experts who bring fresh perspectives on growing your business beyond the numbers. Because building a successful creative business starts with strong financial foundations. Your next chapter starts now.

You’re listening to the Creative Minds Smart Money Podcast. And continuing on our year-end wrap-up kind of series on this podcast, we’re talking about our 2025 numbers and what they mean. So after wrapping up your books, reconciling everything, and a giant stack of reports, which I talked about we go deeper into, we want to understand what these reports are really saying about our business.

We don’t just want to look at the reports and say, great, you know, what do we need these for? We’re just going to file them away. We don’t want to be the type of person that panics, does their books at the end of the year, and then just sends it off to their CPA and says, I’m ready to go. You actually want to use the data to understand the story that your business is trying to tell you.

And I know you guys have heard me say that a million and one times. The story your business is trying to tell you. The story your business… I don’t know how many times I can repeat the fact that your business is trying to tell you a story.

There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. There is a story that is unfolding within your business and it wants to tell you that story. And you have to look at the reports to understand it.

So this episode isn’t about just looking at data for the sake of data. We want to look at 2025 financially on a month-by-month, on a year-over-year, as a whole, on a quarter-over-quarter, whatever it is, to really discover all the little secrets that are hidden within our numbers. We’re not looking for perfection, and we’re not just saying, oh, look, I hit, you know, the revenue goal.

That’s not what we’re doing. We’re really looking at the overall deeper story so that we can determine what we need to do in 2026 to make our numbers look even better. Similar to the last episode, we have some steps.

So the first one that we’re going to do is look at our business on a month-over-month basis. So within your accounting software, whether that’s Euro, QuickBooks, whatever it is, you should be able to pull reports on a month-by-month basis. So it’ll be like a profit and loss by month or something like that that you can pull and look and see the differences between the month.

And don’t just pull like January, February, March, April. You want to pull them like the whole year month-by-month. Then look at everything and look at your revenue and expense summaries, but also look at each individual category to like understand what’s going on.

So for example, if you’re looking at the meals category, let’s just say one month you had $200 in meals. The next month you had $4,000 in meals. That’s a good indicator to be like, what the heck happened there? And understanding just what happened.

If you’re like, oh yeah, we had a big corporate party event that we threw, whatever. I know a smaller creative business is usually we’re not doing that, but maybe you did. Maybe it was a one-off.

Maybe you opened up your photography studio to the public and you threw a big party or something like that. Just having that data to understand, okay, what went on throughout the month. You just want to make sure that you’re looking at all of it.

You want to look at the natural highs and lows. Were they predictable or random? You saw a dip in June. Was that also a dip in June of last year? Obviously you’re not looking at this on a month-over-month or on a year-over-year basis, but just asking yourself, was there usually a dip around this time last year? And making sure that if it was predictable, okay, so now I need to plan ahead for that.

Again, maybe every June your sales dip because your clients are taking time off. Maybe their kids are off school, they’re taking a vacation. And then September always spikes because kids are back in school.

Everybody’s kind of coming back looking for website design services or looking for photography, whatever it is. Looking at everything on a month-over-month basis is really going to show you where the heartbeat of your business is because it’s going to show you the timing patterns, where you had some cashflow crunches. So when you see like those negative months and where you kind of really grew because you’re going to see, okay, maybe I hit 20,000 this month.

The next month I had 30,000 and then I hit 40,000, but then I went back down to 30,000 because we had that lull. Whatever it is, it’s just going to show you that rhythm, right? It’s going to really give you that insight into the rhythm of your business. Then we want to look at things on a quarter-over-quarter basis.

This is our momentum check because now we’re moving into a bigger chunk. We want to look at how each quarter performed against the last. So how did Q1 compare to Q2? Again, this is going to give you that pattern data because you’re going to see, okay, Q1 this year was slower than Q1 last year.

And of course, you want to kind of look at those things as well. So yes, we need to look at a big, you know, the month-over-month data, but we also want to compare that month-over-month data to the previous year’s month-over-month data. Same thing with the quarter-over-quarter data.

We want to compare this year’s quarter data with last year’s quarter data and just really look at the trajectory. Like, how did we grow this quarter versus last quarter? How did we grow this year versus last year? You know, and of course, sustained progress is not just hitting a strong quarter. It’s having that consistent quarter.

So if you’re making $30,000 every quarter and you’re consistently seeing that even though, you know, monthly it fluctuates, that’s how you know that you’re having that consistency and you have sustained progress. Even if you’re not seeing it on a monthly basis, you’re seeing it quarterly, right? And that’s still a win. So did your profit trend upwards as your revenue grow or did it flatten because your expenses kind of expanded as your revenue grew? And then we want to look at everything on a year-over-year basis.

So compare 2025 to 2024 and maybe even 2023 if you would like. You know, again, looking and seeing if our revenue grew, how much did our revenue grew from last year to this year? Did our profit grow or did we have a lot of costs that came up with it? So we lost a lot of that what we could have retained or did our costs stay down? And by costs, I mean like your expenses, your cost of goods. And did you pay yourself more this year? So again, when we’re looking at our balance sheet and our profit loss, just analyzing to see if we paid ourselves more this year.

Because the two reports, again, you’re going to want to look at this detailed level is your balance sheet and your profit loss. Those are your two most important parts, okay? And I want to just remind you that you can see if the profitability is good or if it’s just noise. You know what I mean? Like if you’re seeing that you did make more profit, but maybe you were looking at that and you’re saying, wow, I really hated a lot of the projects that I did last year or this project didn’t really make sense to my business, you can kind of analyze that and say, okay, well, I made more money, but I didn’t like the way I made more money.

It gives you that strategy, right? And we’re going to talk more about the strategy behind some of these numbers in a coming episode. But again, this is how we’re looking at things and we want to really analyze it, okay? Once we’ve kind of gotten through the year over year, we’ve looked at things month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year, we now want to remove the comparison. Remove the comparison of last year of 2024 and 2023 and look at the whole year as a big picture.

So look at everything. Don’t just pull a year to date numbers for 2025 and just look at it as a single body of work. So your total revenue, your total expenses, your total profit, your total owner’s pay, and just look at what you were expecting.

So let’s say you set a goal at the beginning of the year. Okay. I’m a business owner.

I want to make $250,000 by the end of the year. Look at that. Did you make it? Did you hit it? I only want to spend 50, you know, 60, $70,000 on expenses.

Did you hit that? I want to retain the rest of it as profit. Did you hit that? I want to pay myself $60,000. Did you hit that? Looking at all of those numbers and understanding to see if you actually did hit it.

Looking at what the relationship was between each of these numbers, you know, how much of what you actually earned, the revenue that you brought in, turned into profit. What was that ratio? And understanding that. How much of the profit that you had was owner’s pay versus stayed in the business for reinvestment.

Maybe you were saving up for a bigger project. And then of course analyzing and saying if you’re spending aligned with your priorities or did that money drift towards what we like to call, you know, shiny penny projects. So did you buy any software? Did you upgrade your website just because you wanted to even though you did it last year? Like what did you do? Did it align with what you wanted? Okay.

If every dollar you earned this year was a hundred percent, how did you divide it up by percentages? So how much of that percent went to your cost of goods? If you have sort of products or even maybe you’re doing a business or a service-based business where you have cost of goods, how much of it went towards your operating expenses, towards taxes, towards savings, towards yourself? It’s a very important question. Again, this is kind of getting a little bit into the strategy, which we’re going to dive deeper into later. Because the whole year is going to help us to see the theme, right? Obviously looking at a month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year, we’re looking for those fluctuations.

We’re looking for those patterns. Looking at everything on a whole year basis, this is where we’re kind of getting to that reflection. We want to just analyze if it was a year of investing.

Was it a year of consolidating? Was it a year of expanding? Was it a year kind of paying ourselves more? Did our business feel financially healthy or do we just constantly react to whatever was going on? So we want to really look at that to understand that. Now that we’ve looked at everything on those different basis, we want to combine the data and ask ourselves, what were the best and worst months? What caused them? Was it a new client? Was it a new launch? Maybe you had burnout. Maybe there was something in your life that happened.

Maybe someone passed away. Maybe the industry shifted. What caused your best and worst months? Because this is going to help you.

This is an intentional reflection. We want to reflect. We want to look for the repeating patterns versus the one-offs.

So if you see a really high expense just in August but nowhere else, maybe let’s say, again, using the meal as an example. Maybe you opened up your studio to have people come in. Things happened and you saw that it was a one-time fluke.

That is not a pattern. So don’t acknowledge it as a pattern. It was a one-time thing.

You know what’s going on. Use it. If you know when you have a dip, you can plan your cash flow and your marketing around that dip to hopefully mitigate it, right? Understanding that will just give you information.

Once you’ve seen all of these different views, it’s going to help you connect to certain decisions you need to make. For pricing, did your numbers support the rates that you want to see? For spending, did your investments pay off? And if you haven’t already, there is an episode I did early this year where it was a reflection on your investments, looking at your investments and ensuring that they paid off, you know, and doing a proper investment reflection. And then growth, did you see your profit margins hold steady or did they shrink? You can’t fix what’s in your business if you can’t see it and you can’t repeat what you don’t see or recognize.

You know what I mean? So if you’re not looking at the patterns, if you’re not seeing them, you can’t make any changes. You can’t understand it, which is why I tell you that there’s a story, right? This is where your numbers move from being sort of that reactiveness to just being at the end of the year and tossing it at your CPA to being more strategic, okay? Of course, we’re going to go more over this when I do the strategy episode that I’m going to give you at the end of the year, but I want you to pick one area to focus on. So whether that’s increasing your profit margins, stabilizing your cash flow, raising your owner’s pay, or reducing that spend creep, just track that next year.

Keep that in mind as your goal. That is the area that you want to focus on, so we’re going to make that our goal. Again, your numbers aren’t a judgment call, okay? They’re there to guide you.

So we want to make sure that we learn from the data that our numbers are showing us. They don’t lie, but they also don’t speak unless you listen to them, unless you actually look at them. As always, if you found this episode helpful, make sure to leave a review, like it, subscribe, comment, share it on social media so that other people can find it.

And if you want to hear more topics like this, shoot me a message. Let me know what you want to hear on the podcast. I want to know what you guys are looking forward to in 2026.

Otherwise, as always, I wish you the best week ever, and we’ll see you next week. Farewell, fellow travelers.