[00:00:00] Fiona Johnston
Hello listener. Today we're gonna do something a little bit different. We've pulled together some of our favorite and most practical money secret shared so far, and hopefully this one little remix is gonna help you focus on where you wanna put your energy. Think of this as a little riff. Fresher to keep your money game strong. Grab a pen, nod along, or just listen and soak it all in.
Intro
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 secrets 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. Let's go.
Acknowledgement of Country
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 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 ceded. This always was and always will be. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
#1 Business Model
Let's get into it now. So first on the money secrets checklist is business model. Have you ever wondered why some businesses just seem so successful and then you see other businesses that are closing their doors? It's no accident businesses that are successful. Are the ones who have unlocked their business model.
Now, essentially, your business model is how your business fits together so you can deliver your [00:02:00] products and services in the most profitable way. Great businesses are the creation of founders who amplify what makes them great, but they do it in a way that's always profitable and customer centric.
Another way of explaining it would be to say that successful companies have the right fit. Business model. This is something that I don't think small business owners are doing well, which is really cool because it means there is a huge opportunity for you to be somebody who takes the time to actually work on building your business model.
Your business model is kind of like a little puzzle that looks at what are the different things that my customers see. For example, my marketing messages, my marketing platforms, who it is that I wanna work with, so who I'm targeting, what are the different things that I'm saying? And. What I do, so what are my unique value statements and the products and services that you sell and the revenue that you are able to bring into your business.
So those are the components of [00:03:00] your business model that your customers or potential customers can see from the outside of your business. Then there's also components of your business model that sit behind the scenes. These are things like, what are the costs to deliver the product or service that you want to deliver?
Who are the key partners, suppliers, or collaborators that you need to have sitting alongside you to be able to be delivering this incredible product or service? Who or what are the key resources that you need in your business? Do you need some operating cash flow in order to be able to get where you wanna go?
Do you need to have great people in your team? And when you think about your key human resources, you are number one baby. You are the most important resource and human in your business. So what are you doing to actually keep yourself well and fresh and rested? We also wanna look at things like. What are the things that I need to do really well as a business in order to [00:04:00] succeed?
We also wanna think about some of those customer touch points. Like what kind of relationships do you want to have with your customers? Do you wanna know their child's name and be invited to their wedding, or are you looking for it just to be quick and transactional? What is the level of professionalism or friendship that you wanna have in your communication with your customers?
How long do you want them to be your customers? So when we start thinking about our business as a kind of jigsaw puzzle or a beautiful little canvas that we can build, then we can start to see these are the ways that I need to work on my business in order to be able to make my business work for me. So your business model is a key part of your business strategy, and your business strategy is essentially.
What is the business that I want to have in the future and what are the steps between here and there? Once you actually understand what is your unique value proposition, who it is valuable to, how you are gonna [00:05:00] deliver products and services to those target audiences, and you understand the things that you need to do in your backend to make your business successful, now you can start working on making that happen through.
Your amazing marketing, automating the right things, becoming more productive at the tasks that are actually valuable for your customers, and using your branding and your reputation to actually build a business that you want.
#2 Pricing
Number two, you probably are under pricing, especially if you are a female or non-binary small business owner.
Almost every female business owner that I've ever met is undercharging. Now there are some mathematics that we need to do in order to understand what our pricing needs to be. How many things will I be selling and what will I be selling them for? But then there's also this psychological part of making sure that you are in a healthy mindset when it comes to money, that you see money [00:06:00] as a tool that you can use in whatever way you choose.
Then there's also building demand and making sure that you have product market fit. So product market fit is a fancy way of saying the people want to buy what you've got and they wanna pay the amount that you wanna charge. So it's all well and good for me to talk about how much we need to be increasing our prices.
And I say that with a lot of experience with with small business owners who are undercharging. But if we wanna be able to charge the premium prices that I think we want to, there needs to be a demand for our services and products. We build demand through our own branding and marketing. Sometimes we enter an industry or we offer a product or service that already has a lot of inbuilt demand.
But one of the best things that we can do if we are wanting to charge a premium price is to really understand what is the value that I'm creating [00:07:00] here? How am I making somebody's life or business better through delivering this product or service? And then we need to get really good at communicating that because it's one thing to be amazing at what you do, and it's a whole nother thing for people to actually know about you.
That's the key to not only being able to price, uh, your products appropriately, but it's also the key to being able to stay in business businesses that have great products and services that people want and that people that are happy to pay for. They are businesses that have a lot of longevity.
#3 Setting goals
Number three. Let's talk about the idea of setting goals. I know that there's a lot of you out there who are really hesitant to set goals in your business. So in the context of creating a financial goal or a financial roadmap like we call it, the point is not to accurately predict the future. It's not [00:08:00] possible to accurately predict the future.
What we are trying to do is to create the business that we want to have. We are trying to design and map out the future business that you want to have. There's a lot of people who think that they can't actually control the way that projects or clients or money comes into their business, but actually we have a lot more control than we realize.
We actually get to set the terms of how we wanna work with our clients. They get to decide whether they wanna work with us or not. That is absolutely true, but if you have a fantastic reputation, great marketing, and a great ability to deliver for people, you actually get to set the terms of how you wanna work with your clients.
You get to decide your capacity. So you might decide I can take on three clients a month. I charge X dollars per client per month, and that is how I run my [00:09:00] business. You can actually design your business to work the way that you want it to. The setting of the goal is just the first part of the equation.
So once you've gotten out of your own way and you've realized that. If you are not trying to accurately predict the future, you are trying to design the future of your business and you've gotten over the Lisa Simpson part of you who wants to get a green tick against every single thing that she attempts, and instead, you are planning to put your big girl or big boy or big person pants on.
Work towards a target that feels a little bit scary and that you may not reach because that is part of growing as a human and as a business owner. Once you've gotten over those concepts and you are now on board with the idea of setting goals, building roadmaps for the future of your business, the goal is just the starting point.
So what happens after we set the goal is actually [00:10:00] even more important than setting the goal itself. What is the important part? It's monitoring and tracking how you are going towards your goals. The magic is in the monitoring, so you wanna have a process in your business, and you want it to be as simple as possible so that you actually do it.
This is one of the tricks that I've learned through being an online course creator for the last five years, is that simple tools that are easy to use are the ones that are the most valuable to my students, because if we can update something and sort of take it all in quite quickly. We're actually going to use it, and that is gonna benefit us in our business.
We don't wanna wait 12 months to know whether or not we're on track for our targets. So we wanna be checking in. Am I actually achieving something close to my targets? If not, why not? Did I overestimate the amount of [00:11:00] clients I could work with? Did I overestimate the average order size that I would be able to achieve?
Or am I actually not doing enough marketing to achieve the results that I want to? So we wanna use that monitoring process, not as a way of, you know, berating yourself for not achieving a particular goal. But what we want to use that monitoring process for is to see what can I actually do in the future to get back on track with my goals and try to be more interested in what your results look like over time.
So we wanna be tracking, yes, what happened this month compared to what we wanted to happen. More importantly, where are we up to for the year to date? How are we tracking towards our year to date income goal? How are we tracking towards our year to date website traffic goal, or whatever it is that you are working on?
And most importantly, is there anything that I can change in the [00:12:00] future to help me get closer to my goals?
#4 Transitioning to higher prices
Number four, yes, I do want to increase my prices, and you've probably worked out that one of the best ways to increase your prices is by working with a different type of client and that different type of client is now going to be your ideal client.
And the reason they're your ideal client is because they are looking for the kind of value that you have to offer, and they're able to leverage the value that you are able to create. So they have the budget, they have the desire, or they have a problem that you can solve, that they are looking to invest a premium amount of money in.
This is going to mean that your marketing needs to change because marketing is most effective. When it names and calls out the exact client that you want to work with, you are going to increase your prices, which means you need to do a [00:13:00] better job of your marketing and your comms. You need to get really good at explaining and expressing the value, the transformation, the outcome, the benefits of working with you or investing in your product.
So once this all starts to work, you are going to start attracting premium clients willing to pay premium prices into your business. What do you do in the transition time between the old clients and the new? Now, it is possible to increase your prices, and it's probably going to be easier than you expect it will be when you have the right strategy.
When we're in that transition period between the old and the new, we need a strategy for that too, so that we can actually work our way through the messy middle. In my experience, it's really hard to get a client paying a certain price to move to a completely [00:14:00] different bracket. It's possible to move your legacy clients up maybe 10 to 20% per year at the absolute most, unless you have an amazing way of marketing or you have great reputation, or you've really built something special.
With those legacy or existing clients, it is really difficult to increase the price more than 10 or 20% a year. With a new client, you get to charge any price you want to as long as you are able to explain and then deliver the value that equates to this new price that you are looking to charge. So what you might consider doing is looking to increase the prices of your existing clients to the limit that you think you can.
And in the interim, you are starting to bring in premium clients paying higher prices. What will happen is as those premium clients start to come into your business, it will mean that you can let [00:15:00] go of some of those legacy clients. This works really well for service providers, especially when you have retainers in place.
Another strategy can be to really back yourself, go to the existing or legacy clients and put in a really significant price rise. You might give them one or two or three months notice giving you that little time to work through bringing your more premium clients in. What you'll find is some of those legacy clients might actually stay at the new price and a lot of them will drop off.
That is the biggest fear that we have as business owners, is that we will lose our legacy clients. But if we are replacing those legacy clients with higher pain, higher value seeking. More premium clients, we're actually still gonna be in a better position at the end. A third strategy can actually be to wait until you have three months of operating expenses and [00:16:00] wages saved in your business.
Giving you three months to let go of the old clients and spend those three months working on your marketing, your branding, your communication, and your price.
#5 Three Problems of female business owners
Number five, you guys love this one. You ready? The money problems of female small business owners? I see there being three main categories of money problems for female small business owners.
The first is the gender revenue gap. Female businesses are simply not making as much revenue as male owned businesses. The second money problem for female small business owners is that we are lacking in confidence. So many women have not received the right financial or money education, and on top of that, we've been socialized to believe that money is bad.
The third money problem for female small business owners. We have no [00:17:00] strategy. We are not strategic with our money because we're scared of it. We need to take risks if we want to grow our business, our revenue, and our bank account, but we're confused, we're overwhelmed, and we're stuck. I think one of the reasons why we are chronic under chargers as female, small business owners.
Is because first of all, a lot of us don't actually know how much revenue we need to bring into our business to be able to hit our goals. Another reason why we undercharge is because we want our clients to like us, and we have this idea that if we charge a fair price for the work that we are doing, that our clients won't like us, our people pleasing tendencies.
Which a lot of female business owners have leads to over servicing our clients. I see this every day. We are chronically over servicing our clients. Now, how to get around [00:18:00] this, the first thing to think about is, do you actually have a really well-defined scope? So when your clients engage you, are you and are they really clear?
About what you are going to be doing for them, what your deliverables are, what the outcome they can likely experience is, and then when you are working for your clients, you need to be brave enough to go back to that scoping document as you are working for that client and make sure that you are delivering exactly what you said you would and that you were doing it to the best of your ability.
But that it matches the value that you said you were going to give, which matches the price that you charged your client. So the gender revenue gap is about undercharging and it's about over servicing. There's a visibility problem for females in small business, and when we are less visible, it is much harder for us to charge premium [00:19:00] prices, and when we are not charging premium prices, we will not be able to hit the revenue goals that we need to.
We won't be hitting the same revenue goals as our male counterparts. So if you feel that you have a gender revenue gap, a couple of things to consider. How do I work on pricing myself? At the price that my value matches, how do I actually put a price next to my product or service that truly matches the value that I have to offer, but also, how do I perfectly service my clients?
How do I stop over servicing my clients overdelivering, doing so much more work for my clients because I want them to like me. The truth is the goal of wanting your clients to like you is much less important than getting your clients to be satisfied with the work that you are doing for them. We want [00:20:00] happy, retained clients who want to continue to work with us.
What we don't want is clients who really like us, but aren't willing to pay for the value that we are delivering. The second money problem for female business owners that I wanna tap into is lacking confidence. So many women are lacking in financial and business confidence. Because to start with, we haven't had the right education.
Lots of women have ideas in their mind about being bad at maths, and when you think that you are bad at maths, you stop pursuing maths. So I know a lot of women who were told that they were not good at maths. As soon as you start to believe that you are not good at numbers, that you are not good at money.
You block that part of your life, it's really hard to be confident about something that you don't understand. What I wanna offer you is that you [00:21:00] can actually build money, confidence, even if you are bad at numbers. And it's all about seeking out information and education like you're doing right now by listening to this podcast.
It's about choosing to surround yourself with people who can both educate you and help you to feel confident and motivated. But another thing that I really want you to be considering is if you have been socialized to believe that money is bad, we've been socialized to believe that we need to be the good girl and the good girl doesn't arise above her station in life.
So many young women are told. Either explicitly or implicitly that we are supposed to be happy with our lot in life. We are not supposed to be greedy. We are not supposed to be aggressive. We are not even supposed to be assertive in our pursuit of either making [00:22:00] money or being successful in any part of our life.
So when these societal sort of. Expectations and norms, they seep into us. And there is such a belief among so many women in business that money is bad, that money is greed, that money is evil, that people who make money are ruining the planet, that people who are making money are not interested in people.
And I agree that there are a lot of really big businesses. Who are ruining the planet in the pursuit of money, but I really don't see that in small business. What I see in small business is that we take money and we turn it into impact. We do things like employ local people. We build our businesses because we are trying to create societal change.
We see social problems and societal problems, and we think of ways that small business can [00:23:00] overcome those problems, and that's how we are making money. I want you to think about all the ways that money is good, all of the ways that you can use money and turn it into a positive impact for the world.
Think about all of the ways that you make your clients' lives and businesses better, and that is how you are going to start building confidence. Your ability to use money as a force for good. The third money problem for female small business owners that I wanna talk about is that we have no strategy.
And the reason that we're not strategic with our money is because we are scared of it. We are scared of money. We're scared of money because nobody taught us how to make it. Nobody taught us how to manage it, and nobody taught us about how to think about it.
Good Money Club Ad
Making money and managing money as a small business owner is hard. The really cool [00:24:00] thing is it gets so much easier when you have the right mindset, the right strategy, and the right community around you. Good Money Club is that community. It's a place where women in business come together to learn about, talk about, and get support with making money decisions that make their business better, that lead to higher revenue, more take home pay, and a better business. The Doors to Good Money Club are open right now, so if you are a woman in business. Who wants to make more money and impact through her business, you need to come and join the other 40 Good Money Club members who are excellent female business owners just like you making more money because of Good Money Club. Hope to see you in there.
And the fact is, we need to take risks to be able to grow and be successful as small business owners. Taking risks requires strategy in [00:25:00] order for the risk to be worth it. Strategy, in its simplest form is saying, what do I want to achieve and how am I going to achieve it? Strategy is as much about what you choose to do as it is about what you choose not to do.
One of the things that creates overwhelm and confusion in our businesses is that we're trying to do too many things at once when you are trying to do too many things at once, and that might be offering too many services. Offering too many options or products or having a bespoke offer, which means your client has no idea how to work with you until they get on a discovery call and then receive a custom quote from you that's confusing for both you and your potential client.
When we are doing too much, we are overwhelmed, confused, and stuck. And not only [00:26:00] that, we're actually doing more work than we need to because for every level of complication that we have in our business, we need to do more work when we have multiple products or services that we need to market. That's more marketing.
When we are trying to work with lots of different types of clients, that's more marketing when we are trying to create bespoke offers rather than a strategic tailored offer that, you know, matches the goal of your ideal client. When we are working in a bespoke way, it is taking us so much more time to put a quote together.
It's taking so much more time to deliver the product or service because you're doing something different for every single client. Now, I'm not saying that you can't customize and put high quality, highly considered, and incredible work out into the world, but if you were to be strategic about [00:27:00] your money.
You would think about what is the product or service that my perfect or my favorite or my ideal client wants? What is the product or service that will deliver them exactly what they are looking for? And when you are more interested in being strategic than you are about having lots of offers, when we are focused on busy work, when we are focused on metrics that don't matter.
We are not being strategic. The way to be strategic with our money is first of all to try to get over the fear of money, and the only way through fear is with action. So taking actions like. Putting your proposals out into the world, putting your prices on your website, talking with clients about what you have to offer.
Every time you speak about your price, when you say the [00:28:00] price and your process out loud, you become less scared of it, and we wanna get ourselves out of overwhelm, confusion, and feeling stuck. By simplifying what we are doing with our money, taking it back to its absolute foundations. When we move to being strategic and simple and clear, it makes it so much easier to overcome the money problems that come from not being strategic.
#6 Managing your money
Here's another one. Managing your money is the key to making more of it. Lots of small business owners tell me that they'd love to know how to manage their money, but they need to wait until they're making more of it first, and I get it. A lot of us think that our businesses are either not sophisticated enough or not developed enough or not organized enough.
For us to be able to invest time or money into building our skills to [00:29:00] manage that money, but actually when we learn how to divide up the money that comes into our business and spend it in a way that actually works for us, it actually unlocks the ability to earn more money. Managing your money is about understanding how much of the money that comes into your business is for different parts of your business.
For those of you who have read Profit First, you will know exactly what I'm talking about. Profit First is a book that was written in 2012 by an American called Mike Malowitz. I won't go into the whole process of Profit first, but I do highly recommend that you get the book. And I also really recommend that you consider coming to Join Good Money Club because we learn about Profit First every month and every week.
We actually do our Profit First transfers together as a community. So let me just give you the overview of Profit first. One of the things that Mike [00:30:00] talks about in the book is that accountants. That's me, by the way. Accountants talk about profit in this way. They say income or revenue, less expenses equals profit.
In other words, whatever's left after you've paid all of your expenses is your profit. Now that's a really passive way to be thinking about the profitability of your business. Like there'll be profit if there's any left after I've paid all of my bills, and that's how most business owners think about and manage their money right now.
What he did was flip the script to say, well, what if I thought about how much profit I wanna make first, and then my calculation is income less profit equals expenses. In other words, I will protect my profit before I spend money on expenses. So in practice, what this looks like is having different bank accounts for different aspects of your business.[00:31:00]
You would end up having a bank account for income that your clients pay into, and then you would have four other bank accounts. Most of you would have another four, and those bank accounts would be people costs or owners pay, operating expenses, tax and profit. What we do is we decide in advance what percentage of your income you want to be your profit, and you can only spend the rest.
It's all about deciding what percentage of your income is going to go to the different elements of your business. Now I cannot overstate the amount of calm and clarity that using Profit First will bring to you as a small business if you set it up right from the start. So when you work out what percentage of your income is going to go into your different bank accounts, and you actually listen or you take note of whether or not there's money left in those bank accounts, that will help you [00:32:00] so much to guide your decisions.
What I really love about Profit First as a money management tool is that it really gives you the clarity immediately just by logging into your bank account. So when you log into your internet banking, you can see immediately whether you have any budget for operating expenses. You can see immediately what, uh, money you have there for your tax whenever the tax man sends a bill.
And you can also see what you have in the tank for people costs. So if you are clear about what your weekly people costs are net of tax, you'll be able to see instantly how many weeks of pay you already have in the bank. This clarity and this calm that comes from knowing that the different elements of your business are taken care of helps so much.
I believe that so many small business owners do not trust themselves when it comes to managing money. So many small business [00:33:00] owners tell me that they are so scared that they're going to owe money to the A TO or to the tax board, and that stops them from making money. When we don't trust our ability to manage the money that's coming into our bank account, we are more afraid of money coming in than we realize.
So this is what I really love about learning to manage your money, is it actually gives you so much calm and confidence and clarity. About how to deal with the money that comes into your account. It allows you to trust yourself when it comes to earning money and when you trust yourself and you trust your ability to spend your money and invest your money in ways that work for you and your business, it removes the fear of bringing more money into your business.
#7 Time is your most valuable resource
And here is number seven. Time is the most valuable and misunderstood resource of the small business world. [00:34:00] So I was in a mentoring session with one of my client's team members. So for some of my really long-term CFO level clients, I actually work with their team members as well as the founder of the business.
At the end of one of our recent strategy sessions, Ollie said to me. He finds our time together really valuable, which is awesome. That is of course my goal, but he also said to me that he actually feels like he has less work to do after the end of a session with me than he did before. And thank you, Ollie, for explaining so perfectly the value of investing time in strategy, mentoring and coaching.
So this is a really common story that we are saying out loud and in our minds as business owners, that we are just too busy. When you spend time getting clear about what are the most important things for you [00:35:00] to do from that moment on, you actually end up with less work. You actually end up with less overwhelm.
You end up with less things on your to-do list. So when you put time into talking to someone like me who is a strategist at heart, we actually help to take things off your list. What I also find is that just the mere act of talking about whatever is going on for you in your business, whether you are talking to a strategist, a friend, or even just talking out loud to yourself.
It actually helps you to clear your thoughts so that you can then get on with the next bit if you are just working all the time, but you feel like you are not able to pay yourself well, or there just doesn't seem to be enough money in your business. The first piece of advice I'd give you is go and get yourself on the Good Money Club wait list.
So Good Money Club is where I meet with my Good Money [00:36:00] Club members every single week on Zoom to talk about money. We talk about pricing ideal clients. We talk about how to manage and spend your money. We also talk about how to think and behave with money so that it actually works for you. Go and jump on the Good Money Club wait list, which you can find@peachbm.com au.
I hear from a lot of founders that they don't understand how other people are able to do so much marketing, so let me tell you how you do it. Every time you choose doing work for a client over doing work for yourself, you are making a financial decision. The decision that you are making is to earn that short term fee from that client or earning that short term revenue from a product that you sell.
Over investing time in building assets such as great [00:37:00] marketing, great branding, great copy, great communications, even just stopping and thinking about what you are doing with your business is investing into your future revenue. So let me say that again. Every time you prioritize working for a client over investing time in your business.
You are taking a short-term revenue hit in exchange for a long-term cost because it's impossible to be able to increase your value as a business owner if you spend all of your time delivering revenue for your clients, right? So investing time into your marketing, your branding, your comms, your business development.
Your sales process, investing money into your business strategy. These are the kind of investments of time that are going to have a long term return for you.
#8 Making 30k money decisions in your business
Number eight. So [00:38:00] if you want to pay yourself more, or if you want to make a bigger profit from your business, there's two ways you can go about it.
You can either work on bringing in more revenue. Or you can work on spending less. So I do think there is a place for trying to reduce your expenses and making sure that what you are spending money on in your business is giving you a really good bang for your buck. So we need to make sure that all of the subscriptions we have are actually delivering something for our business.
We need to make sure that the kind of coaching we invest in is designed for the stage of business that we are at, which means that we can actually leverage it. We need to make sure that when we're spending money on things like marketing, that it matches what we are trying to do in our business at that time.
So when you are setting your business up, you wanna be [00:39:00] focusing on things that are assets in your business. Things like a great website, SEO, great copywriting, amazing imagery, uh, social media strategy or a marketing strategy in general training. Training in how to actually market and communicate what it is that you are doing in the world.
These are things that are great marketing investments at any stage of your business, but things like outsourcing your social media and outsourcing or investing in paid ads. Is something that I recommend for businesses where you've already established your brand, you've already established that you are working with the right customer, that those customers convert when they get to your website, and then when you turn on the meta ads, it's like adding water to a pot plant, right?
So I definitely believe that small business owners need to be really careful about how they [00:40:00] spend their money. We also need to be really careful with how we spend our time. Time is our most precious resource as a business owner, and we need to make sure that we are thinking as much about the return on effort as we spend thinking about the return on investment when we spend money.
So saying all of that, yes, it's important to get our expenses right, and anybody who has worked with me and implemented Profit First into their business would know that I recommend that every single small business out there should spend no more than 25% of their income on their operating expenses. That does not include people, wages or product.
Now because your expenses only make up about 25% of your income, reducing them doesn't have anywhere near as much impact as trying to increase [00:41:00] your revenue. And that's why this is the major focus in Good Money Club and in all of the work that I do with small business owners. We are always looking at, are we actually optimizing the revenue streams that we have available?
Are we tapping into the best clients that we could be working with? Is our marketing actually representing the value that we are putting out into the world for our clients and customers? So what I want you to consider is that all of that time that we spend trying to decrease our expenses. Is basically focusing our, our energy on $30 decisions.
I want you to be spending more time thinking about $30,000 decisions than $30 decisions. I want you spending most of your energy thinking about how to bring more revenue into your business. So let's say if we were thinking [00:42:00] about how this might work across the year, you might spend one month of the year working on reviewing and being really discerning about your expenses, and we wanna spend the other 10 months of the year.
And yes, you're allowed to have one month off a year. You absolutely need to be taking at least a month off from your business, even though it feels really hard. So we wanna spend 10 months of the year working on our revenue. How can I increase my revenue without working more? Because there's no point in trying to grow your revenue by just working more.
Unless you are right at the start of your business and you are still building out your client load, or you are a product based business who hasn't launched yet, of course you need to be thinking about how do I work more, get more activity happening and bringing more money into my business? Once you have established a client base, a set of products or services, and you are [00:43:00] out there in the world doing it now, we want to be thinking about optimizing the amount of money that you earn for each hour that you work, so that you are able to increase your revenue without working more.
The kind of things that we wanna be thinking about is what is my price and is it attracting a premium client? Am I putting myself, my marketing, my positioning, my branding, my communication? Is it speaking to the needs, the desires, and the problems of premium clients? If not, that's where we wanna start. We want to think about what kind of clients you are attracting.
#9 Manifesting in small business
Number nine, how to get what you want through Manifesting or Your thoughts. So I wanna talk about how manifesting works in a small business lens. This idea that you can think [00:44:00] about something you want and then all of a sudden the universe drops it into your lap, is not my experience or my observation.
There is actually some neuroscience out there, and if you haven't heard of her before then I highly recommend you go and check out Dr. Tara Swart. She is absolutely amazing. She's a neuroscientist and a content creator. She's written a few books and she's just so knowledgeable about really tricky topics like manifesting and gut instinct and things that seem so ethereal.
And her take on manifesting absolutely aligns with my observation and my experience as a business owner. And that is that manifesting does work. And the reason it works is because every time you say the things, so let's say you, you want to manifest a hundred thousand dollars in revenue this [00:45:00] year, so you want this a hundred thousand dollars year.
So the first part of what makes this powerful in my opinion, is that you now have a clarity about what you want. You cannot manifest or bring something to life without knowing what it is. And in my opinion, this is the most powerful part of manifesting is clarity. Once you make that statement, the more often you make that statement, either in your mind or by writing it down or typing it or saying it, whatever your um, medium or method is, you actually are looking for opportunities to make that happen.
So in the example that you say out loud that you wanna make a hundred thousand dollars in revenue. If you keep saying that to yourself every day, you will start to see and notice different things in the world that are going to get you closer to that a hundred thousand dollars goal. You start to see opportunities to [00:46:00] make a hundred thousand dollars a year.
Everywhere you start to think about yourself differently, you start to present yourself differently. If you start to show up differently, you, you might start doing things like marketing yourself more. You might start networking more. You might start doing more business development, and you are actively doing things that you can see are going to get you closer to this goal of a hundred thousand dollars in revenue.
When you are focused on getting towards a goal, you will start taking action towards that goal. Manifesting doesn't work just by thinking we need to act. When you pair really intentional thoughts or thought work, or mantras, or meditations, or however you wanna say it, when you pair that with action taking.
The world is your oyster. It's actions like thinking about, okay, well if I wanna get to a [00:47:00] hundred thousand dollars this year, how am I going to do that? That's something that we love doing in Good Money Club is working out how do I actually reach my goal? So I've done the thinking part. I've worked out that I wanna get to a hundred thousand dollars.
Now I need to work out how I'm going to do that and what steps I'm going to actually take in the world or on my computer that are going to actually get me closer to this a hundred thousand dollars revenue point. So thoughts plus action creates results.
#10 Are you making enough money in your business?
And number 10, the three reasons why businesses don't make enough money is usually comes down to one of these three things your pricing.
Your business model or your money mindset. And the really cool thing is all three of these things are fixable. So let's talk about the first of these options, your pricing. So pricing is the lever inside your business that makes more [00:48:00] difference to your finances than anything else. A lot of us who are in business.
Have been sold. This idea that we need to be affordable or accessible. This is garbage by the way, and anybody who is trying to be affordable or accessible as a small business owner, it is just not possible to be both a small business owner and affordable. The point of being a small business owner is not about being affordable, it's about being valuable.
I think one of the other reasons why we have a lot of trouble with our pricing is because it can be a little bit difficult to calculate. If you haven't looked at your pricing for a while, this is your sign. If you have not increased it for more than a year, then you absolutely need to increase it, and not because of inflation, although that is one reason why we do need to keep increasing our prices each year, but also because you get better at what you do every year, and the better you get at product and service delivery, the higher quality client is gonna [00:49:00] be more attracted towards you.
That takes us to the second reason why most small business owners aren't making enough money, and that is your business model. Your business model is the foundation of your business strategy. And your business strategy is essentially what do I wanna achieve and how do I think I'm going to get there? So when you skip.
Working on your business model, you are kind of blind to all of the different ways that you could be making your business better and more profitable, and ideally also making a bigger impact on the world. So one of the things that we would look at in your business model if we were working together is what makes you uniquely different from your competitors?
You'll note that. Because there's no such thing as better in business, and there's no such thing as being the best in business because it is subjective. What is possible is to be [00:50:00] different, and that is the, what I am always striving for, for myself and my clients, is how can we position ourselves as being different from our competitors?
Then we wanna start really thinking about who are your customers? What customer segments are you targeting through your business? Going back to that first topic of pricing, your price is really dictated by who your customer is, and I see so many small business owners making the mistake of keeping their prices low and being really frustrated that they are not getting the kind of clients that they want to work with.
Price is one of the indicators of value, and if you are looking to work with a higher quality client who values what you do. How you do it. Sometimes your price needs to guide them towards you, and you may find that you have been trying to price yourself as affordable or accessible. And [00:51:00] unfortunately what that's doing is actually keeping the really awesome clients away because a savvy buyer knows when something is underpriced and they will assume.
That price indicates that either it's poor quality, perhaps you're inexperienced, or that there is gonna be some kind of disadvantage to working with you as opposed to one of your competitors because you are indicating with your price that it is lower quality. So the most important part of your business model to get started with is who are the customers that I wanna work with and what makes me uniquely valuable for them?
We have some amazing on demand training within our product suite. There is a program called the Business Model Design Mini Program. You can purchase at anytime, and we'll put the links in the show notes, so there's nothing stopping you from working on your business model anytime. But if you just wanna sort of touch [00:52:00] the, the surface of it, start with who are my clients and what makes me uniquely valuable to them.
I wanna get to the third reason why you may not be making enough money in your business, and that is your money mindset. I think of it as more than just what's happening in your mind, and I think even the word mindset is a little bit confusing. Because your money mindset or how you think and behave with money is something that ebbs and flows through your life.
It's not set. And that is the really cool thing, is that when you actually have time to go underneath the way that you are thinking about and behaving with money, you can change. It's not as simple as just saying, Hey, I wanna change the way I think about money, and then automatically you just change it.
But it's absolutely possible to improve and interrogate the way that you think and behave with money. Money mindset is [00:53:00] essentially the beliefs that you have about money, and those beliefs come from things that other people have told us, either explicitly or implicitly. And unfortunately, a lot of the sentences that we pick up around money are just things that peoples say, but we have thought them over and over so many times that instead of thinking of those things as thoughts, we have now turned them into beliefs.
Generally it's sitting at an unconscious level. In your kind of thinking, not everybody is able to access their money mindset really simply. Some of us need to actually look to our behaviors with money in order to understand what our money beliefs are. So if you are somebody sitting there thinking fee, I have no idea what my money beliefs are, think about how you behave with money.
What do you do in situations like when it's time to pitch yourself and tell somebody about your business? What do [00:54:00] you do when it's time to send through a proposal to a potential client? What do you do when somebody asks you for a discount on your product? What do you do when you have a lot of money in your bank account?
What do you do when you have very little money in your bank account? When you can access how you behave with money, that might start to help you work backwards to understand, well, if this is the way that I'm behaving, then that must be that this is what I believe about money. And sometimes we can even work out where that thought came from because the sentence will pop clearly into our mind and then we can think back to that time when Auntie Joan said, blah, blah, blah, and it's somehow stuck in our mind.
Okay, so I call it money psychology, which is. Encompassing your money, thoughts, your feelings about money, the way that you behave with money, the actions that you take and the results that you therefore get. It might [00:55:00] sound complicated, but once you understand that the thoughts you have about money impact the results you get with your money, everything in your business can change.
Thank you for listening to our little remix, our 10 Money Secrets. I hope you love it. I hope it gives you quite a few different perspectives to help you make more money and impact through your small business, and I'll see you next week.
Outro
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 [00:56:00] experience.
