Why knowing the health of your business is a powerful force in business

Why knowing the health of your business is a powerful force in business

Have you ever felt as though you know your destination, you know exactly where you want to end up but you’re not sure of the best way to get there? 

Your options are to wing it. Or you can pop the destination in the GPS to know what bumps, traffic jams and obstacles lay ahead. 

A business health check can be the equivalent of a GPS for your business!

Knowing what areas in business to look out for and what obstacles may lay ahead allows you to be strategic in the growth of your business and your wealth. 

I wonder if you relate to the feeling of your business running you instead of you running your business?

A business health check can give you the green light for the areas to keep going. And red lights to alert you to upcoming dangers. 

We know there’s a direct link between business success and a thriving culture, high performance and effective leadership. 

So having transparency in these areas alongwith support and clear direction will help shine a light on the blind spots you can’t see for yourself. 

Introducing Business Together’s COMPASS

We’ve created a 7 point system leading businesses to sustainable and long term success. 

COMPASS lays the foundation of ensuring your business continues to move in the right direction. It’s a compass for your business success. 

COMPASS considers:

  1. Culture
  2. Operating rhythms
  3. Mindset and attitudes
  4. Profitability 
  5. Action with purpose
  6. Sales 
  7. Skills of the team

If you’d like two experienced business coaches to bring their decades of knowledge into your business, book a chat and find out how COMPASS can help you get back in the driver’s seat of your business. 

With an instinctive curiosity for human behaviour, over 20 years of experience in sales and leadership, Nicky and Ness are obsessed with helping women in business break the cycles that hold them back from creating profitable businesses they love, without sacrificing time or life. 

Each having run their own successful coaching businesses for 7 years, they came together to start Business Together working with female led, service-based businesses with teams.

Their clients have often experienced rapid growth not being able to keep up with the systems, structures, and team growth. As a result the business owner gets stuck in the busy trap, they’re juggling all the balls in business and find themselves in a place of business chaos. 

If this sounds like you, book a complimentary chat with Nicky and Ness to see if they can help you find time freedom again, get peak performance within the team and have a focus on smart growth in the business.

Supercharge Your Business!

Join us to receive expert podcast episodes and tips on how to achieve the work-life balance you've been craving while still watching your business grow.

Do you have the financial foundations to set your business up for success?

Do you have the financial foundations to set your business up for success?

This week in our True North in Business Mastermind I ran a Masterclass all about the financial foundations that are essential to have in place to run a successful (and profitable) business. It was one of the most popular Masterclasses so far with many valuable take-aways and lightbulb moments for our clients.

If you’re anything like the women we speak to and work with, you might be able to relate to some (or all!) of these challenges:

  • Lack of cash flow
  • No clear planning
  • Unreliable financial data
  • Poor understanding of the numbers
  • Lack of time

If you said nodded along to any of those, then read on…

 

The 7 key financial checkpoints in business you need to nail:

  • Whether your business structure is best for now and will see you into the future
  • Making sure you have the correct amount of tax put aside so you don’t end up with any surprise tax bills
  • Starting out strong when it comes to setting up your cloud-based accounting software
  • Knowing the three most important financial statements you need to be across in business and how to interpret them
  • There are 7 key numbers to monitor in your business – how many are you currently looking at and where’s the gap?
  • What profit-building habits you need to implement in your business
  • Keeping your expenses in check with a simple plan to ensure they’re a part of a monthly system

Whether you’re in the early stages of business and setting up your foundations, or you’ve been in business for ten years and realise that perhaps those foundations are rocky, being able to feel confident across these areas is essential.

Because as the old saying goes:

Revenue is Vanity

Profit is Sanity

Cash is Reality

Need more help with this? You might like to consider joining our True North in Business Mastermind. Or perhaps you’re looking for a more hands-on approach to support? Reach out and let’s start a conversation. Book a chat with me by clicking the button below.

 

Ness is a Coach and Mentor for women in business. With extensive experience in executive leadership, she started her own professional coaching business 7 years ago and since has worked with women to help them create business and financial success on their terms. 

Ness is obsessed with helping women break the cycles in business that hold them back from creating profitable businesses they love, without having to sacrifice time or life.  

5 money myths that are holding you back

5 money myths that are holding you back

Our beliefs are sneaky little tricksters

You would be surprised by how influenced we’ve been as kids when it comes to our money story. You see, when we were growing up we were learning to hold beliefs about how the world works. And when it comes to money it could be still holding us back.

How ingrained are some of these sayings for you?

  • Money doesn’t grow on trees (said that to my kids more than once!)
  • The rich get richer, the poor get poorer (thanks Robin Hood)
  • Another day another dollar (always said in a depressing tone on a Monday morning)
  • Money isn’t everything (how we justify not having money)

And these don’t even scratch the surface of the thousands of times we’ve heard people give meaning to money over our lifetime from friends and family to TV and movies.

Why does this matter? 

All these stories we hold about money we believe as the truth and they influence our actions, especially in business. What I want to challenge is why you should believe them in the first place.

Let’s tackle some big myths I see holding women in business back from reaching an income level they deserve and that allows a sense of financial freedom for them.

#1 You will pay yourself when you hit a certain income level

How this holds you back: When we first go into business often it takes some lag time to start earning more money than what is needed to cover expenses. However, if we don’t draw the line and start paying ourselves even a small amount that can be built upon, then the magical income level number gets shifted further and further back. We grow our expenses to match the income and there is nothing left over. So include your own wage as part of your expenses and watch yourself bring in enough to cover it.

#2 You’re not good with finances

How this holds you back: It might have been a throw-away line from your maths teacher at a stage where numbers felt hard that left you with this belief. The problem here is that we take this belief with us throughout adulthood and never challenge our thinking. You don’t need to have an accounting degree to go into business, but abdicating your finances to your accountant or bookkeeper without learning about what the numbers mean will not help you build your wealth. All it does is keep your head buried in the sand which is a recipe for disaster.

#3 One solid source of income is all you need to build wealth

How this holds you back: There are a couple of issues with this line of thinking. Firstly, this means you put all your eggs into one basket and if something out of your control happens (hello global pandemic, I’m looking at you!) then everything falls over. Secondly, it can set you up to pour all your waking hours into growing your business which can leave you feeling burnt out and resentful. It holds you back from looking at the bigger picture of your life and finding multiple streams of income that all work towards building your personal wealth.

#4 You can “set and forget” your revenue streams

How this holds you back: This kind of thinking for me sits alongside the ‘overnight success’ thinking where we see someone on social media making millions in their first year of business. But when you dig deeper, it’s actually taken them years (often with failed businesses behind them) to get those results. Setting and forgetting can leave the impression you don’t need to think about your product or service once you’ve created version 1.0. The truth is, to stay relevant in your market you need to continually improve your products or services. 

#5 You need a lot of money to start investing

How this holds you back: When we fall into the trap of believing what the media feeds us about rich investors, we can think it’s out of our reach because we don’t have the tens of thousands of dollars (and beyond) to get started. Nowadays the barrier to entry into the share market has reduced with share apps that have no minimum investment, so you decide how much you want to invest. You can buy part of any share with just 1¢! And if you own your home, you might have enough equity to purchase an investment property without having to outlay any of your own money. 

If you are a woman in business who wants to set and achieve your financial goals but feels like there’s something holding you back, then you might like to consider working with a money coach. Book a free discovery call with me to see if working with a coach is right for you.

Ness is a Coach and Mentor for women in business. With extensive experience in executive leadership, she started her own professional coaching business 7 years ago and since has worked with women to help them create business and financial success on their terms. 

Ness is obsessed with helping women break the cycles in business that hold them back from creating profitable businesses they love, without having to sacrifice time or life.  

Is your ego dictating your financial goal setting?

Is your ego dictating your financial goal setting?

If you’ve ever set a big financial goal and deep down know you won’t be able to achieve it then this video is for you.

If we listen to others, we can get sucked into joining the bandwagon of 6 or 7 figure business based on our ego rather than setting goals that work for us.

What this means is that although we have a big goal written down that we’re aiming for, deep down we know we’re not likely to hit it. So we link a negative feeling to that number and get frustrated when we don’t reach it, wondering what’s wrong with us.

At this stage, we start chasing this elusive number by trying to be like everyone else and get further and further into a rut.

Watch as Ness shares her insights into how to solve this problem so that you can set goals aligned so closely to what you believe that you will smash them!

Can you separate your personal and business finances for better success?

Can you separate your personal and business finances for better success?

When we start out in business there are some big decisions to make when it comes to how we set up – sole trader, company, partnership, trust? It can be overwhelming when all we want to do is just get out there and do our thing.

So for many women in business I connect with, they are carrying over their financial set-up from the start of their business. This means juggling their personal finances and business finances in one account.

I’m a strong advocate for separating these out. Here are 3 reasons why:

1. It gives your money a purpose

For all income received in your business, it’s important that you’re purposeful about where it’s going. It’s about separating it into different groups, such as:

  • Paying yourself a salary – which includes Superannuation
  • Setting aside your tax obligation – Pay As You Go (PAYG) tax for yourself and your income tax for your business, plus GST if you’re registered
  • Expenses – separating the variable and the regular expenses allows you to have a closer eye on what you’re paying out
  • Emergency fund – 3 months of expenses covered for downtimes
  • Profits – making sure you can see the rewards of your work

 

2. Easier management of your finances

If all your money is sitting in one bank account when tax time rolls around it can be a nightmare trying to sort everything out. Understanding what a work-related expense is compared to a private one is usually something best left to the experts – your accountant. Having to pay them to sort it all out is a drain on your expenses you don’t need. Consider setting up a cloud-based accounting system for your business such as Xero, it will save even more time for you in the long run.

 

3. You can get an eye on your cashflow

As the saying goes, in business 

Revenue is vanity

Profit is sanity

Cashflow is King (we prefer to say Queen!)

Once you’ve set up your accounts so that your money has a purpose and you are aware of where your money is going, you can develop an easy to track cash flow system. This is important to help you overcome the ‘feast and famine’ way of working and helps you make savvy financial decisions in your business. Don’t have a system yet for cash flow management? I’ve created a Cashflow Planner for you, which you can get access to here.

the 3 essential numbers every woman in business must now

the 3 essential numbers every woman in business must now

When it comes to your business plan, if you don’t have clear targets in place or know your numbers then you don’t know how you’re tracking. Can you hire that new team member or outsource that piece of work? Or what about paying yourself?

This means you end up going blindly and your business becomes hit and miss. Or you’re not quite sure about the recipe for success… highly successful businesses are built on replicable results. Meaning you know the formula for success and you can do it again, and again.

Understanding the formula for success – for your unique business is key. And a big part of this is knowing your numbers.

What are the numbers to know? At a minimum, have

  1. A revenue target,
  2. A profit % target,
  3. An income goal that you want to pay yourself.

It’s not about putting pressure on yourself, it’s about making smart decisions in business. And the right process around this helps make it easy. These systems take into account your particular skills and natural abilities.

Need more support with this? We are going deep into this topic at our next Strategy Day in the True North in Business Mastermind. You can find out more here.

WE'RE READY WHEN YOU ARE!

A NEW WAY OF WORKING IS AROUND THE CORNER