[00:00:00] Fiona Johnston
We've made a lot of progress as a society in many of the areas that we needed to in the last few hundred years. But one thing that has not changed enough is money. If we want to be able to tip the scales towards the favor of marginalized people, we need to understand the secrets to making money in small business.
The more we talk about money and the secret. That usually stay at the golf club, the more likely we are to be able to make money. My mission is to get more money into the hands of good people, specifically good business people like you. This is Money Secrets, the place to learn about the money secrets of successful small business owners.
Because I believe small business can change the world, and in order to do that, we need to be making lots of money. Let's go.
This podcast episode was recorded on the lands of the Wie people of the KO nation, and I'd like to acknowledge them as the traditional owners and [00:01:00] custodians of this land and water that I live. Work and play on. I'd like to pay respects to elders both past and present. And note that sovereignty has never been seeded. This always was and always will be. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
On today's episode of Money Secrets, the podcast, I wanna talk about the concept of. Backing yourself. Now, one of the things we need to do as small business owners is make a lot of financial decisions. We are constantly making decisions every single day from our pricing to how much marketing we do, to what sort of clients that we wanna work with.
To deciding whether or not to pitch ourselves for a particular podcast or making decisions about whether or not to chase up that unpaid invoice. We are making financial decisions all the time as business owners, and so what I wanna talk about today is how do we make a great financial decision [00:02:00] and why?
I think it's more important to back yourself than it is to make the right. Decision. So first of all, what is a good financial decision? In my opinion, one of the things that indicates that you've made a great financial decision is speed. So if you are taking hours and hours and hours and days and days and days and months and months and months of time to decide on a particular decision, you have already lost so much money.
So one thing that we want to get really good at doing as business owners is. How do I make a great financial decision, but how do I make it fast? How can I have processes and systems and kind of like checklists or kind of thought bubbles that I go through when I'm trying to make a financial decision?
So you can build frameworks. That are formal. You can have different frameworks that you use in your mind, but the faster that you are able to make a financial decision, the faster you are able to [00:03:00] execute it or take it forward. So for example, you might decide that you are going to put your prices up if that takes you six months to decide.
Okay, now I'm. Finally going to put my prices up. That means that you've missed out on six months worth of, you know, exploration, experimentation, and potentially more money than if you had have just made the decision six months ago. Accepted that it would be imperfect in its execution, but that you were willing to just do it anyway.
Those are the kind of financial decisions that I want to see. Great business owners making decisions that prioritize speed and moving forward towards your goal. The second point about backing yourself is I think that we lose a lot of time in our decision making just by questioning ourselves, doubting ourselves, perhaps not having the appropriate people to be able to ask advice from or for support from.
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Can't wait to meet you in there. I believe that it is more important to back your financial decisions than it is to make the right financial decision. Here's why. We make decisions every single day. As we just discussed. We are constantly making decisions as [00:05:00] business owners, and this is part of why a lot of us, including myself, often find it hard to sleep because we have so many banked up decisions that we may not have even made.
From the previous day that then get added on top of the next day. So because we are making so many financial decisions, sometimes of course we're gonna get it wrong. This is why I think it's more important to back yourself than it is to make the right decision. So first of all, we need to accept that we are not always going to make the best decisions.
This can be about not having had enough. Sleep not being in a great mood, having something unfortunate happen on the way to the office. It could be about reading something that puts you into a bad state of mind. It could be that you heard a song that you love and that made you feel overly optimistic, and so you went about making a decision with an overly optimistic mindset.
So there are so many reasons why we are not gonna always make. Great financial decision, but as soon as we start backtracking [00:06:00] and stepping back on and rethinking and re-strategizing every single decision we make, not only have we now wasted all of the time that it took us to get to the decision in the first.
Place, but now we're expending extra energy, extra time, extra resources To backtrack, go back and forth. Oh, should I have, shouldn't I have, what was that decision I made? Did I make the right decision? Was that the best approach? Oh, now I think maybe I wanna unravel what I've done and I wanna go back and I wanna make a completely different decision.
What happens when we do that is we've now, as I said, invested all this extra. Extra energy and resource and time into this same decision, but we've also taught ourselves not to trust ourselves by choosing not to listen to the previous version of ourselves that said, Hey, the right decision is X, Y, and Z.
We are now saying, Hey, look, fee. I know that past you made this decision of X, Y, and Z two weeks ago, but right now from where I'm. Sitting. I just [00:07:00] don't think it's the right decision anymore. So now I'm gonna backtrack. Next time you are trying to make a decision, you're also going to struggle to trust yourself.
So what we really wanna do is back our decisions. What does that look like? It looks like backing yourself in. It looks like saying, you know what? On the day that I made this decision with the information that I had available, the gut instinct that I listened to, the intuition that I know I can call on, I listened to all of that, and this was the decision I made.
I think that I made the right decision with the information that I had. Has it turned out to be the right decision? Perhaps not, but backing myself says that. I will say, look, the past version of me invested time and energy in making this decision, so I'm gonna back it. I'm gonna take it all the way through.
I'm actually, rather than going to flip Floop around about whether this was or wasn't the right decision. Instead I'm going to take this as an opportunity to look at it and say, cool. What was the information that I [00:08:00] had when I made the decision, and what was I hoping would happen? So has something changed between now and then?
Is more information available? Was my expectation of the result of this decision out of order? Did I need to do a little bit more research? Is there information that I've learned through making this decision this time that I can actually apply next time? I'm trying to make a similar decision now. What we wanna do, particularly as females, is we need to learn to trust ourselves with money.
We need to learn to be able to listen to our gut instinct, our intuition, and the logical part of our brain when we are trying to make decisions and back ourselves. When we trust that we make great decisions, instead of getting tied up in guilt or shame or embarrassment or annoyance, or just delay through every single decision we make, we are able to speed the process up by putting a layer over the top of the decision that says, Hey, I trust myself.
[00:09:00] I trust that I'm going to make the best decision that I can in this moment, and I'm not going to look at this in the future and feel any embarrassment, shame, or annoyance. What I'm going to do is look at this as a learning moment that says, this is the information that I had. This is the assumptions that I made.
This is the outcome I was hoping for. This is the outcome that I had, and we're going to apply that new learning next time we make a financial decision, rather than what I cease. So many women doing, including myself, is we make a decision. Then the next day, the next week, the next year, whatever, we look at that decision and say, no, that was wrong.
I'm actually going to untangle that. I'm gonna go back to doing things the way that I did them before. And so next time I need to make a decision. I can't trust myself because I can't even trust the decisions that I've already made. So when we learn to trust ourselves and trust that I'm not trying to always get it right.
I am trying to make [00:10:00] the best decision that I can in this moment. Do I have all of the information that I could have about this particular topic? Is there other information that I need to access? Are there people that I need to talk to about this? How big is this decision? Is this something that's going to cost me less than a thousand dollars?
If so, why am I. Spending all of this time on it, are there calculations I need to make about the possible return or the possible outcome? Who are the people that I spoke to last time I made a decision like this? And do I have any prior knowledge of this? So rather than looking at, Hey, am I wrong, is the decision that I made wrong, we actually wanna come at it from the angle of was the approach that I took to making this.
Financial decision, the right approach for me, whether or not you made the right in inverted commas, the right decision or not. It's so important that we are able to objectively, calmly, and with love, look at the decisions that we have made in the past, [00:11:00] assess them for what they are. Do a deep dive into the approach that you took, the information that you had at the time.
What intuition or gut instinct moments you had, whether or not you listened to those. Did you actually ask. The right or enough other people for help or support. And if you don't have the right people around you for making decisions, they are a lot harder. There are so many fantastic people that I have called on in my career and during my time as a business owner that have made a huge difference.
To how I make decisions recapping this short episode. I believe that it is way more important to back yourself when you make financial decisions than to be trying to get it right all the time. We make so many financial and business decisions every single day as. Business owners, it's exhausting and it takes up a huge amount of our time and effort.
So the faster that we can make those decisions, the better, the more that we can learn [00:12:00] to trust that we made the best decision we could in the moment, and the more that we can do to assess. The approach that we took to making the decision and assessing whether or not that approach is the right one to take next time, those questions are much more valuable, much more likely to lead to a learning moment than you looking at yourself and blaming yourself, feeling guilty, feeling embarrassed, or feeling ashamed about having made the wrong decision.
The more that you can learn to trust. Your financial decisions to listen to your gut instinct and your intuition when it is talking with you, to having great people around you who you can actually go to for support. The more successful you will be as a business owner, the faster that you'll be able to make decisions and the less time you're gonna spend beating yourself up about some made up mistake that you made back yourself and your business will benefit.
Thank you so much for listening right up to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Money Secrets, where we talk about the money secrets of successful small business owners. If you enjoyed the episode, I'd love it if you subscribe to the podcast, but leave us a review or share this episode with one of your friends.
I hope you learned something. I hope you got a new perspective and I really hope you enjoyed the listening experience.
