Financial and Lifestyle Freedom for UK Business Owners

In today’s episode, I am speaking about building the business in life of your dreams, not just being a dream. So let’s dive in. I believe the biggest thing that stops business owners living the life of their dreams is the lack of cash in their business and that that is coming home to them as business owners. There were a few reasons why this happens. Now, first off, if your business’ revenue is 50K a year, that is fine, but don’t be expecting a six figure annual take home if your revenue is not there to support it. That is just pure math, and it doesn’t work. But if your business’ revenue is 200K a year, then you absolutely can expect a six figure take home. How? By making sure that your business operates as profitably as possible. And the easiest way to do that is to make sure your cash is fully under control. And how you do that is by implementing Profit First in your business.

Yes, seriously, because Profit First is a cash management system and it is a massively, massively powerful one. It is a book written by Mike Michealowicz, which explains it all. Now if you have not heard or read this book, then you can head to annetteandco.co.uk/pfbook and get the five core chapters in there as a PDF to your inbox for free. So there is no excuse not to read this book and start understanding the concepts in it. It works in a very similar way to the envelope method of personal finances that perhaps your granny did. You know there’s an envelope for her rent, her food, et cetera, et cetera.

In the Profit First method for your business, we just use bank accounts instead of the envelopes. Like I said, if you have not read it, then that is your first step to living the life of your dreams because it is the step that gets you more money out of your business and that is a step that is essential to making those dreams a reality. So head to annetteandco.co.uk/pfbook to get your copy if you do not already have.

Now you can also listen to episode six of Uncovered Wealth Radio where I speak about money leaks and how to make sure your business’ spending is under control. That will also help with this. So once you’ve listened to this episode, you can head over to episode six as well.

This is what needs to happen first. The business’ finances need to be under control so you can take out the cash that you want from your business. But we also need to get really clear on what our dreams actually are. Can our business actually support those? Not necessarily right now, but does ut have the capability to do that at some point in the future? You need to ask yourself, can that happen with the current type of clients I work with? Can it happen with the current programmes and the services I offer? Can that happen with our current pricing model? Can it happen with the way that we serve clients at the moment? Whether that be one to one, group programmes, memberships, whatever that might be. Can that happen with the structure of the team that you have or the proposed structure you have planned?

You need to understand how all these bits slot together and where you are directing your business in order to make sure that you are building the life of your dreams and not heading in a completely different direction. So step one, read and understand Profit First. It really is massively crucial in understanding cash management in your business and making sure the cash is really under control. And like I said, you can head to annetteandco.co.uk/pfbook to do that. So standing for Profit First book, PF book. Step two, get really clear on your dream. What is that? And is your business capable of supporting that at some point or not?

I hope that this episode has given you some things to think about in relation to building the business of your dreams. I also want to invite you to step into the Uncover Wealth community. This is my private community on Facebook. You can search and Uncover Wealth community or go to annetteandco.co.uk/fbgroup. I do a live teach in there every single Tuesday for training Tuesday, and I would love to have you there. 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.

We are flying towards the new year and it is this time of year that I start to plan the next. I’m a massive fan of having a fully work-type plan in my business to achieve my goals. Because I know without that focus that planning gives, that I am unlikely to hit any goal in the next year. For me, not having goals and a plan to achieve them, is like getting in a car and not knowing where you’re supposed to be going. Driving around with no directions or satnav, and somehow hoping that you end up in the correct place for the party you’ve been invited to. That will never happen. So today I want to share with you my planning process and hopefully that will help you focus on yours too.

First of all, when planning out a full year, I examine how the year, just gone, has been. What went well, what didn’t go well? What did I enjoy, what did I not enjoy? That helps me figure out what I want to do more of, what I want to stop doing and the things I might want to introduce.

I also keep in mind the word “simplify” during this process. It is too easy to think that to achieve our goals we need a tonne of programmes and services or to overcomplicate our offerings. So keeping things simple is usually the way that preserves our sanity.

Having written down everything in those buckets, what went well, what did I enjoy, what didn’t go well and what didn’t I enjoy? I now think about how my services and products align with those buckets. This now gives me a basis for what I should continue with next year and what I should not.

This stuff I want to continue with after this then needs another question asked however. To really make sure it’s the right decision, we need to ask for whether it’s a service, a programme, implementation. Whatever that is, we need to say, “Is this thing profitable for our business?” If the answer is no, then it will usually have to go as well. We can’t keep running a programme or service that is not being run profitably. We are a business and we need to make sure that all our offerings are still profitable to us.

Next, now I have a broad idea of what the year is going to look like, we want to narrow down more. So first off, I want to say, what is it that we want to promote and launch, and when? And we get that pencilled into the diary. We start putting dates around it. What we are going to promote, when we’re going to launch things, what that looks like?

When we know our promo periods, then we can do an estimate of our sales and when we’re going to be bringing new people into our services and programmes. Therefore, begin to plan out our revenue and what that will look like in the next year. And with that, we can also start layering in our costs as well. So what are we spending on ads? When do we need to add new team members, all those kinds of things. So getting some numbers around that plan.

Now we have an outline of what the next year will look like, we can then start saying, okay, what activities need to happen on an ongoing basis to support this revenue and this promo, launch, plans, et cetera for the next year? So do we need to be doing certain activities between promos to ensure results, for example. What does that look like? And who in the team is going to be responsible for doing that? Who needs to be held accountable and what all their matrix be? And, what are the businesses overall target and matrix for each month? So mapping that all out.

So now we have our targets and the activities that need to happen. What is everyone’s 40 hours a week look like in terms of activity? What am I and my team doing each and every time block in every day? We need to map that out on the calendar for the next quarter, actually putting that in the diary. Okay, on Monday at this time, I’m doing this. On Tuesdays at this time, I’m doing this, and actually getting it worked out.

Now, of course, no plan ever survives battle. So this document is not something that is done in Q4 and then forgotten about for the entire rest of the next year. It evolves and grows as the business does. As we are examining the data each month, the plan does and can change, but we need to start by planning it out fully so we can understand what our daily activities will be and we can align those to the bigger strategy.

So I hope that this episode has been useful in giving you some things to think about in relation to goals, projects, and plans. I also want to invite you to step into the Uncover World Community. This is my private community on Facebook. You can search Uncover Wealth Community in the Facebook search bar or go to annetteandco.co.uk/fbgroup. I do a live teaching there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday and I would love to have you there. 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 using contractors versus employees. I am a firm believer that for most roles in your business, you want to have an employee and you want them to be full-time. There are a few exceptions which I will dig into shortly. But first, I want to speak about why, whenever possible, it is the most advantageous to have a full-time employee in a position. I also want to offer a short note that if you are in the UK, whether someone is on board as a contractor or an employee is not actually a choice.

I often get asked, “Shall I take this person on as a contractor or as an employee?” But actually, it’s not really up to you or them. It’s up to how you set up the role. And you need to check with the HMRC guidelines to see if your team members are contractors or employees if you are asking that question. The general rule is that if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. For full details, you can find them on the HMRC website. And there is a quiz that you can go through to assess.

So, back to the reasons why I recommend full-time employees over contractors. Well, you have a lot more control over the time of a full-time employee and their working hours than you do over a contractor. If you need for them to be in a meeting at 9:00 AM every single day, what is within their contracted working hours, for an employee, that’s easy to enforce. For a contractor, not so much. They generally can decide what hours they work to get the job completed. With a contractor in the UK, they have the right to send a replacement to do their job. They themselves don’t have to turn up to work every day for you. This could cause you a major issue for your business and you could end up not working with the person that you thought you’d hired for the role.

Generally, full-time employees, you are showing a commitment to hiring them full-time and you’re putting faith in them. We would expect this to be reciprocated in their dedication to their work and supporting your business. You are all-in on commitment to them and they, in turn, are all-in commitment to you. Their loyalties are not split to anyone else. The downside, of course, can be tax. Most countries, including the UK, have employer taxes to pay when you employ someone as well as increased admin of running payroll. If the person is sick or doesn’t come to work, with a contractor, they should be sending a replacement if they’re sick. Although often that actually, in reality, doesn’t happen. Notice periods, if things are not working, most contractors have no notice period at all whereas employees usually do in their contracts to the employment.

I truly believe that the upsides of having a full-time employee however, far, far outweigh the negatives in most situations. Now, the situations where I wouldn’t have a full-time employee but instead use a contractor are if they are highly specialised or technical jobs that only require, say, a few hours a week, then I would look at contracting those. That could be something like website maintenance or, of course, accounting and finance work for most businesses. I hope that this episode has given you some things to think about in relation to contractors versus employees and what might be best for your business.

I also want to invite you to step into the Uncover Wealth community. This is my private community on Facebook. You can search Uncover Wealth Community or go to annetteandco.co.uk/fbgroup. I do a live teaching there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday and I would love to have you there. 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’m speaking about the realities of passive income. Passive income, and the need to create it, has become a buzz phrase for online entrepreneurs. Except that most business owners speaking about passive income are often not speaking about anything that is in fact passive. The definition of passive as an adjective is accepting or allowing what happens, or what others do, without active response or resistance. That therefore means income, or rather revenue coming to you without your active involvement. Except that all revenue requires some kind of active involvement to flow to you. It requires promoting on social media, in marketing, often meeting advertising spend, campaigns needing managed and tweet. These things are active, not passive at all.

Yes, there are assets we can create in our business where we create them once and then they are delivered multiple times, meaning we don’t do not need our own personal involvement or the involvement of our team to deliver, but they are still not truly passive. They are not set and forget. They need tracked and monitored. Digital products which you create once and can deliver through tech are great, but let’s be honest, they are semi-passive. They need promoted and monitored. Books which you write once can be bought by anyone at any time, but again they are semi-passive. They usually need promoted. Prerecorded webinars, again, semi-passive. They need promoted in some way.

You get where I’m going with this. So don’t fall into the trap of thinking that a thing that’s going to save your sanity is to make your business income into passive income. Yes, these things I have mentioned, they are great as part of an ecosystem of products and services and should 100% be added to the mix, once you’ve got your one-to-one and group programmes before me for you, that is. They are additional revenue streams on top, but they are not set and forget at all. No revenue stream in your business is.

While I’m covering off the ecosystem of your products and services, I am a firm believer that you need to get one area performing incredibly well before you introduce a second. My philosophy is that each revenue stream in your business needs to be hitting at very least a 100K a year in revenue before you even think about introducing a second revenue stream, then that one again needs to be reaching at the very, very least a 100K before a third is introduced, and so on. I believe that most businesses need to stack up their services where they offer one-to-one services first as their initial a 100K revenue stream, then you can add group and then you can add digital products. The reason is that you learn so much about your ideal clients when doing one-to-one work. You learn so much about your own signature system that you want to teach and develop, and only then can you understand truly how to support groups.

Once you have one-to-one working, the next natural progression is to move onto group programmes, since you can start leveraging your time better that way and you are now much clearer on the support your clients need in order to get the results you promise. Only then, once you have your group programme working well and you’re making at least a 100K year on that should you be thinking about the digital products. These are low priced things, and in the early stages they don’t give you much bang for your buck in your business, so leaving them until this stage makes a lot more sense than trying to promote in the early stages when your audience is smaller and you would need to be seen by hundreds, if not thousands, to reach your revenue goal.

I hope that this episode has been useful in giving you some things to think about in relation to passive income. I also want to invite you to step into the Uncover Wealth Community. This is my private community on Facebook. You can search Uncover Wealth Community in the Facebook search bar or go to annetteandco.co.uk/fbgroup. I do a live teaching there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday, and I would love to have you there. 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’m speaking about what to do when you are running a business, and you have one of those off days. This episode is the audio from a Facebook live that I previously did, but the content is incredibly useful, so I wanted to share it with you here on the podcast. So let’s dive in.

Running a business can be a lot of things. It can be incredibly exciting. It can be incredibly rewarding. It can be incredibly uplifting, but there can also be days where it’s really hard. There can be days where you can feel quite low. There can be days where you don’t feel like getting on camera. You don’t feel like being on Zoom calls with clients. You don’t feel like doing all those things that you’ve time blocked into your calendar. You just don’t want to do it.

And there can be times where you actually feel even lower than just not wanting to do it. You can get to that point. There can be times where you actually get to the point where you’re like, doesn’t matter anyway. Why am I bothering? I can’t be bothered with this. You know, you can feel that sort of three out of 10 rather, than… hopefully you’re above a give usually, but you can get to that point where you’re feeling that kind of two, that three out of 10. I get where I just almost can’t be bothered to just put makeup on and be a functioning member of society, and be a human and have conversations, even, let’s face it, with my husband and my kids because I’m just like, “Oh, Oh.” Sometimes it’s just too hard.

We can have those days in our business, but the thing is that it would be lovely to be able to just switch the world off, and not take the 10 calls that you might have scheduled in your diary or whatever that is for you. Whatever that looks like. For me, that’s kind of what my days look, my busy days look like. It would be lovely just to shut that all down and not pay attention to any of it. But actually often we can’t do that when we’re running our business, particularly if most of the stuff still falls on us to drive the business forward.

We often cannot just go, “Okay, game over, don’t want to play anymore. I’m just going to take my toys and curl up in my bed.” We often can’t do that. So what can we do in order to raise up that kind of two or three out of 10 to a little bit higher so that we feel like we can function in our day? I think also it’s worth saying here too, that remember that life is 50/50 okay? 50% is great and 50% is a bit crappy.

Okay. And it’s okay, that life is 50/50, because that is just how the world works. So it’s not a problem that you have those two and three out of 10 days. As long as you’re having some eight and seven and eight days, then is okay because it’s about 50/50. But like I say, those two and three out of 10 days, we often can’t just switch everything off when we’re running a business, we need a way to cope with those and a way to deal with those so that we can actually move our day forward, and have a productive day. And at least get something out of the day. It might not be what we originally planned when we planned out our calendar or did time blocking, or whatever it is that you do to organise your day, it might not be that. You might have to adjust the plan a bit, but so that you can still feel like you are moving forward even if that is just the tiniest, tiniest shuffle forward, rather than perhaps the big leap that you had planned for the day.

So here is what I do when I am having those two out of 10, those three out of 10, crappy feeling days. The very first thing that I do is acknowledge how I’m feeling and accept that that’s where I am. I try not to. I say I don’t, I try not to judge myself for it. I try not to beat myself up about it, and make myself feel even worse, putting myself into that downward spiral, which I’m really good at doing, by the way. So I try and I try and be gentle and kind with myself and understand that, okay, I’m not feeling so hot today. You know, things are not feeling the way I want them to feel this morning. That’s okay. That’s okay. But what I then try and do, and I actually try and do this most days anyway, but particularly on those days when I feel lower, because I know on those days where I feel lower, this is the thing that I will avoid.

I will avoid lots and lots of things, but one thing I will avoid doing is going outside. And actually going outside and being active in nature, going for a run or a walk or a cycle or whatever, or gardening or whatever that is for you. Being active outside for me massively, massively helps. It massively helps to reframe where I am, give me some perspective and just give me that time out. It avoids me kind of piling on that self-loathing, because otherwise if I don’t do that, what I will do is I will basically open the fridge and start eating, or something like that. So it gets me away from basically that negative reinforcing pattern that I can easily fall into, and it gets me out breathing fresh air. Doing something that is good for me, fundamentally, and taking me away from that kind of funk that I get stuck in.

I used to think that it wasn’t a big thing for me. I used to think that I could be holed up in my office seven days a week, 24 hours a day almost, and I would be fine, but I’ve learned as I’ve grown older that actually that drives me insane and I need to get outside. I need fresh air every day. I love to run. I don’t get my trainers on as often as I want to, but that’s all choice. That is complete choice. I’m not saying that as if it’s anything else. And I think getting outside in nature makes a massive, massive difference for me and it makes me… you know, it elevates that day a bit. It may not elevate it to an eight or a nine, but it might elevate it from a two or three to a five or six, which I can deal with a lot better.

I can deal with a lot, a lot easier to do that. The other thing that works really well for me is just changing my environment, with changing where I’m planning to work that day. So if I’m planning to work from home, work from my home office, which I do the vast, vast majority of the time, then actually just going out to a local coffee shop, or if the weather’s nice, working in the garden, if your wifi reaches. That kind of thing can also help lift me up a little bit if I’ve got one of those days, if I’m feeling like, “Oh I just don’t want to do this, I don’t want to have today, can we start from the beginning?” If I’m having one of those days, sometimes just getting out off my desk going and working somewhere very close by, a local cafe or whatever, that can really, really help me as well.

It just changes your perspective, changes your environment and actually, it can help you refocus as well. So there are some big things that I try and do. So being kind to myself, not judging myself about it, being active in nature and changing my environment. I also heard an awesome one recently from somebody, I forget who it was, who told me that what they do when they are stuck in a kind of little bit of a funk, is they actually start their day over. So if they realise that they are not in a good place, what they actually do is they go, “Okay, I’m going to pretend that I’ve just got up.” And they get into the shower, they redo their hair, they redo their makeup, they put on a new change your clothes. They actually start their day again. And they kind of use the water in the shower as a sort of, almost like a cleansing ritual, washing away the negative energy that they have and actually doing it that way, which I think is pretty cool too.

Those are some ways that I use to turn round the day where I am feeling unmotivated, where I’m feeling like I don’t want to do anything, where I’m feeling like I just really can’t be bothered, into ones that are more positive. Of course, if you have these days much more often than you have good days, then you need to assess where you are with that, and where your kind of mental health is with that. I am of, course, not a therapist, not a counsellor, not a mental health practitioner. Therefore it would be somebody like that that you might need to see if you are having twos and threes way more often than you’re having any other number, because it could be an indication of a much, much bigger problem rather than just a short term kind of funk.

Of course with these it’s trial and error of what works for you. You know, I found that the big, big one for me is being active outside and getting that fresh air. And that’s the biggest hit for me in terms of pulling me up, but every person is different. For you, it might not be that. It might be something else. It might be the shower idea that I was speaking to with a friend. Find ways, basically, that you can help get to that place yourself, and that you can move yourself forward on those days to, at least turn them into, as I say, tiny shuffles forward, tiny wins, tiny movements. Because as long as we’re progressing forward, no matter how small those movements are, they are always going to be positive. We always want to be moving forward and pushing are pushing ourselves forward.

I hope that this episode has given you some things to think about when you have one of those off days. I also want to invite you to step into the Uncover Wealth Community. This is my private community on Facebook. You can search Uncover Wealth Community or go to annetteandco.co.uk/fbgroup. I do a live teaching there every single Tuesday for training Tuesday, and I would love to see you there. 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 pocket.