Financial and Lifestyle Freedom for UK Business Owners

In today’s episode, I am speaking about simplification, so let’s dive in. It’s a phrase I hear a lot from clients, “I want to simplify now,” and it’s often from people who are feeling burnt out from their business or are feeling a little resentful of their business now, that perhaps they’ve lost that little bit of spark that they had for their business. They’ve spent years, perhaps, adding different programmes and courses, adding layer upon layer of tech or automation and team, and things just feel heavy now. Things feel … well, complex, so I want to share with you what I think is key when you begin to feel that way. First, looking at all of your offerings, which do you actually enjoy and which now feel like a burden to you?

Be really honest with yourself and understand which spark joy in you and which just feel heavy, and next, really be clear on which are making money and which are not. Again, get really honest. Make sure that you layer in all costs, including team time, payment processor fees, as well as your own time. Anything that is losing money needs to go straight away. Anything that you are no longer loving doing, then what is the impact on your take home, if that goes straight away? What is the financial impact in terms of any refunds or repayments that you would need to make? Assess what would happen if these programmes you hated went away. It might be that you can’t do that straight away and you need a phase out plan, but getting the ball rolling and starting moving on that is a good idea. There is no better way to breed resentment for your business and ultimately for your clients if you hate the programmes you are running.

Now, what does your business look like with a more streamlined offering, ones that are profitable and that you love? And what finances would you deliver to your family’s pocket over the next 12 months with a more aligned and simplified offering? Does that work? If not, what needs to happen? What needs to change? Ask yourself these questions to get to a place where your business is not so crazy and it’s feeling a lot more simplified and in alignment with yourself and what you want from your business. And what about the funnels and tech to support those bits that you are no longer planning on having, that you are planning to strip away? What is the phase out process for that? And what about team? Hours or responsibilities need to be changed now. Make sure you get really clear on what can be done away with and what needs to stay in place for each phase of the phase out, of the transition to a more simplified model.

This will help you move towards a much more simplified business, and one that you can start being in love with again. So I hope that this episode has been useful to help you think about simplification, and whilst we are here, I would love to let you know about the next wealth lab that we have happening inside the Uncover Wealth Community. The wealth lab runs from November 11th to 15th, and during it we will be building out your profit plan to release the next six figure take home from your business. Head to annetteandco.co.uk/wealthlabnov19, which I realise is a bit of a mouthful. So it may just be easier to click the link in the show notes and you can register your place. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth, and get more money in your pockets.

In today’s episode, I am speaking about a false metrics. So, let’s dive in. There are so many things to be measured in our business. Literally everything you do can be measured in some way. Posts per day, engagement per posts, leads per day, ads print per day, ads print ROI, conversion rates, churn rates, people in our membership programmes, page likes, Facebook group members, sales a day, outbound messaging or calls a day, inbound calls a day, and the list goes on and on. But are you clear on what metrics you really need to measure for your business? Which ones help you understand if your profit plan will move to reality? What are the leading indicators in your business that if you hit, then you will hit your goals?

Things like your profit and loss statement, this is a lagging report. You can only look at that after it’s happened. You could only assess the numbers after it’s done, and you can’t change anything in the moment when you’re looking at your historic profit and loss statement. What you need to identify are which things you need to be tracking and managing your team to that are not lagging indicators, but are leading indicators? That means that if you achieve those things, your profit target gets hit and you have the take home you want. That might be Facebook group growth or outbound messages sent. It might be people registered for your monthly webinar, but whatever it is, wherever you spot the star of the stats that lead to the end goals, that is the metric that you really need to keep an eye on, measure frequently and often target your team on.

All other metrics, they are nice to haves. Yes, it is lovely to see our Facebook page likes increase, but if these have no links whatsoever to your target that you can identify, then they are just false metrics. Keep tracking them, by all means. See if there are correlations, by all means, but don’t put everything on those types of metrics where you cannot determine the path to the goals. Make the metrics that matter mean something, not the other ones.

So, I hope that this episode has been useful to help you think about the metrics that really matter in your business. And whilst we are here, I would love to let you know about the next Wealth Lab that is happening inside the Uncover Wealth community. The Wealth Lab runs from November 11th to 15th and during it, we will be building your profit plan to release your next six-figure take home from your business. Head to annetteandco.co.uk/wealthlabnov19, which I realise is a bit of a mouthful, so you can head to the link in the show notes to register your place. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth and get more money in your pockets.

In today’s episode, I am speaking about loving delegation more than control. So let’s dive in. There are three types of business owner. One, everything is delegated, they abdicate responsibility for everything in their business to somebody else. Then they get peeved off when they don’t know what’s happening, they feel out of control and they end of any complete mess.

Two, nothing is delegated at all, the business owner keeps as much for themselves as they possibly can, feeling like they may as well do it themselves anyway. They’ve tried in the past to hand off stuff and it’s come back to them anyway. Or three, managing a team, leading a team and coaching a team. You have a team of awesome people doing great work together, knowing what is expected of them, and they are managed to matrix and targets. By far the least stressful and most successful is version three. When you manage, lead and coach your team, that means you can also delegate work to your team, you are clear on the outcomes you expect from them, and they understand that.

Every other version leads to high stress and a toxic relationship with your business. So how do we make sure that we can delegate well, empower our teams, and ensure that they are performing awesomely for our business? Well, that’s about you, not them. It’s about how you lead them, not how they work. It’s not about trying to control your team, it’s about empowering your team. And these things can only be done if you are ensuring you are their trainer, their coach, their mentor, and their leader. Any one of these things missing, and the likelihood is those things you delegate, will end up back on your plate and you’ll have the feeling of wanting to fire everyone, and take everything back to do it yourself anyway.

I know I’ve had that feeling before. We need to ensure that our team are really clear on our expectations, they cannot read minds. We need to have regular check-ins to keep everything on track. That does not mean that you post to do’s and slack, and then just expect everything to be done. That means proper all team daily checking calls. It means individual ones to ones each week and the like. And it means really managing and leading. It means communicating the matrix and targets that you expect every person to be hitting, and probably having some hard conversations if they don’t. But, in order to move your business to that next level, this is the stuff you need to practise and become good at. This is this stuff you need to get comfortable with.

You need to love delegating to your team, and seeing them thrive with what you’ve given them. Yes, they may not have done things the way that you would exactly do them but, that is a training and mentoring opportunity, not something to get annoyed about. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode on Uncover Wealth Radio, and it might encourage you to loosen the reins of control just ta tad and start delegating more in your business to really step into leadership. And whilst we’re here, I would love to let you know about the next Wealth Lab that is happening inside of the Uncover Wealth community.

The Wealth Lab runs from November 11 to 15, and during it we will be building out your profit plan to release your next six figure take home from your business. Head to annetteandco.co.uk/wealthlabnov19, which of course is a bit of a mouthful so the link is also in the show notes, and you can register your place. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth and get more money in your pockets.

When you start your business, you don’t know what you don’t know. There is pure excitement and joy and a newness of everything that keeps that fire inside you burning. You have this vision of what you’re driving towards. Then you get into the business and you get into the grind and you start accomplishing your goals. That excitement can start to wane and you’re achieving many of those initial dreams and you’re running a well established company and it can feel heavy.

You are now feeling like you just need to stay the course or long enough to get to your all ultimate goals and that can be challenging because that excitement can now fade away. You are in the reality of doing it. You’re feeling the pain and heaviness and the responsibility of the day-to-day and yes, you see progress each and every day with you and your team. But you no longer have that pure excitement you once had when closing a client or doing a launch. You almost become accustomed to these things happening in your business, being a victim almost of your own success. And a lot of the time we can lose that energetic spark in our own business. When this happens, you develop the skillset to be successful in business, but sometimes you lose the excitement, your results start to suffer.

You start to plateau your revenue or worse, it starts dipping. And now your results might not be as good as they once were or they may even be lower than the level of some newer people in your industry and that hurts. It happens because the spark has dimmed a little and you’re not as energetically high as you were when you started. When you started your business there’s often a really strong emotional reason as to why you started. Leaving corporate, getting divorced, having a baby, wanting to stay at home. All of these things, whatever they were, have now passed and that emotion around that doesn’t exist any more. What happens is that the things that were driving you in an urgent manner when you started, no longer apply as time goes by and you mark things off your list.

If you don’t set new emotionally compelling goals and a new compelling why, a lot of your motivation is going to disappear. It’s really important that you pause and reset your goals and where you are going with your business and you give yourself permission to no longer want the same things than you wanted when you started up. To no longer desire the things that you’ve outgrown and choose a new direction, which fits better the person you’ve become in the process of building a business. Allow yourself to truly grow as a person by embracing a direction with your business that is so unique to you, that it is right in every single way. At the beginning, business growth is the most important thing, since your business needs to get to a certain level just to survive and we are driven by that.

Bigger is better when you’re starting out, it gives you a safety net. But as you become established, bigger is not necessarily better. Then it’s about the business model and what you want from the business. Do you want a massive business or a boutique brand? These things need to be reflected upon because the vast majority of things that you will see and content you’ll be exposed to will all be around the bigger is better, grow, grow, grow. But you need to decide for yourself now that your business has reached a certain level, do you still feel that’s the case? Is that the kind of business that lets you achieve the vision you have for your life?

So I hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode of Uncover Wealth Radio. Whilst we are here, I would love to let you know about the next Wealth Lab we have happening inside the Uncover Wealth community. The Wealth Lab runs from November 11th to 15th and during it, we will be building out your profit plan to release the next six figure take home from your business. Head to annetteandco.co.uk/wealthlabnov19 or you can click the link in the show notes, since that is a bit of a handful and that will register you your place. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth and get more money in your pockets.

In today’s episode, I am speaking about trading time for money and why you need to stop, so let’s dive in.

Your income is limited by time. When you’re trading time for money, your income will always be limited. There are only 24 hours in a day to devote to the pursuit of money, and since most of us need eight hours’ sleep, time to cook, eat, go to the toilet, shower, exercise, relax, and spend time with family and friends. That leaves us around 10 to 12 hours max to trade in for money. That’s it. But the reality is that no matter how much each of your hours is worth, when you are trading time for money, there is always a cap imposed, and that cap is time.

The other thing is that not many people can just ask for a higher hourly rate because they want it. Clients might just say no and take their money elsewhere. But the other big thing is your impact is limited. When you are continually trading time for money throughout your life, time is limited for pursuing the things we’re passionate about. This could be a hobby we love, giving back to the community, or building something that we could have a real impact in the world. Simply put, with limited time comes limited impact.

So, how do we stop trading time for money? Well, in all honesty, it’s about changing your mindset. The main thing we must do is change our beliefs. When we drop the mindset that says in order to make money, we have to trade our time for it, our minds open up to the other possibilities. There is no rule that says that to make X pounds, we have to work X hours, so think about trading value for money and not time. Think about what value you can create for other people and how you can deliver that value. What assets, skills, knowledge, connections, or ideas do you have that people value? And recognise your strengths and competencies, and go all in.

What are you really selling in your business? Because you’re not selling time. You’re selling your years of experience, expertise, and ability to make an impact, a transformation for your client. That is what you are selling, not an hour or two of your time. Packaging that into something exciting for your clients and putting a price point that works for both of you on it, and then move out of the time for money trap. Don’t let yourself be pulled into the “It won’t work in my industry” level of thinking. Look for inspiration outside of your industry to see if you can find a model that works that does not trade time for money.

So, I hope that this episode has helped you to understand why trading time for money really is a bad idea, and gave you some things to think about around how to price instead. And whilst we are here, I would love to let you know about the next Wealth Lab that we have happening inside the Uncover Wealth community. The Wealth Lab runs from November 11th to 15th, and during it, we will be building out your profit plan to release the next six-figure take-home from your business. Head over to annetteandco.co.uk/wealthlabnov19, or just click the link that is available in the show notes to register your place. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth, and get more money in your pockets.