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- 🎉 1 Year of Toil+Profit
🎉 1 Year of Toil+Profit
Retrospective & The Road Ahead
Zak Graves
September 21, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Where We’ve Come From
Technically, Toil+Profit started the first Sunday of August… so 1 Year & 1 Month anniversary! Originally, T+P was my solution for addressing 4 overlapping aspects:
1️⃣ I was regularly helping others with various insight, tools, and resources… there was a desire to extend that radius of influence to help more people.
2️⃣ There were several concepts that I was constantly covering in detail… I needed a way to display the information more clearly and have it ready on the internet to send to others.
3️⃣ Continuous Improvement has been such a powerful concept in my own life… Once you get it, there is no turning back and there is no ceiling on your growth. And I want that for YOU.
4️⃣ I want to see Christendom grow, and that entails equipping all disciplines of life… we need Christian entrepreneurs, business owners, managers, teachers, and households to be excellent. And to grow in excellence, you need resources!
Milestones
📧 Entries: 39
🌟 Top Entries (Open Rate % and Click-through)
The Focus Funnel 🔽
Anatomy of a Budget 💰
Anatomy of a To-Do List ✅
Conflict Conversations 💥
🗓️ Originally a Bi-Monthly Publication: Became Weekly in APR
👥 Subscriber Growth: +600% (Let’s be real though, this is because the “Law of Large Numbers” is on my side, while we’re still tiny 😄)
Earned this prestigious award!
But I realize that it really helps that Toil+Profit is small… so I made fun of myself on my socials…
Where We’re Going
Oh man, there is much that I aspire to, let’s just pick a few! I don’t know how or when I’ll be able to hit each phase, but I do know HOW you can help.
🔊 Audio - Short audios with each entry would be an opportunity to explain a concept in further detail or in a better format for you auditory learners.
👨🏼🏫 Learning Module - A “Help me get my life together!” course that covers the essentials of organization, top tools, and the power of continuous improvement.
🗣️ Interviews - Part of continuous improvement is learning from top performers in their field. It would be sweet doing exposés on those individuals and what it looks like to sharpen ourselves with their insights.
🎟️ Referrals / T+P Points - At the next tier of newsletter service I can include an integration that tracks how many people you’ve shared T+P with, and qualify you for rewards!
Help Me Help You
These improvements take $$ to unlock those features, this comes from two avenues 1) Subscribers 2) Referrals & Links. The best way to help is sharing the newsletter with others (simply forwarding it to them and letting them know they can subscribe themselves at the bottom).
You can even head to the webpage to snag the link to some of your favorites to send.
The more people on this journey with us, the more opportunity for #2 to happen as people find value in the various links, and then I get more opportunity to create content to help you!
Of course the content needs to be WORTH sharing! I still keep about a half a year lead on subjects to cover, but it’s always helpful to know what’s top of mind from subscribers so I can rearrange that content accordingly or address different things all together. Reply back with questions you have or subjects you wish were covered.
So to summarize
1️⃣ Share the newsletter
2️⃣ Reply back with content you’re looking for
In so doing you’ll help T+P get to more advanced phases 🏆
🌟 TOP PICKS
Resources that Inspired T+P
Maybe this is why I picked orange as a brand color…
Tools of Titans - Collection of actionable insights from over 200 interviews with world-class performers.
Atomic Habits - How to build small habits that lead to big impact, analyzing the 4 part recipe to habit building or changing.
Ploductivity - A theology of productivity and being committed to regular “plodding” along in faithfulness, wherever you are.
