Financial and Lifestyle Freedom for UK Business Owners

Productivity is measured in terms of the rate of output per unit. This is incredibly key and a point that too many entrepreneurs miss, whether you’ve been in business for 15 minutes or 15 years. Productivity does not equal how much or how long you work, how busy you are, how stressed you are. Productivity is only measured by what you produce. This is a mental shift when you are trying to be more productive. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve spent on something. It doesn’t matter how much energy you’ve put into something. What matters is how much you’ve actually produced and what your results are. Things like I’ve been at this for a year, I’ve been working 40 hours a week, I don’t have more time to be productive. 

When you’re working on being more productive, it’s very important that you don’t just create a to-do list that has you spending time doing something. That’s not useful. You’re going to have to calendar time to produce something. You need to have a result when you’re done, not just time spent. Here are the ideal emotions you need to generate in order to be productive: efficient, minimum wasted effort, focused, paying particular attention and clear, easy to understand.

There are some action steps that make productivity much, much easier. First of all, this is something I am such a massive, massive fan of because it has such a huge impact, and that is plan, planning before you take action. Starting faster does not get something done faster if you have no plan. The second is honouring your time limit, giving yourself a time limit to produce the result and then honouring it no matter what. The third is stop perfecting ahead. Try not to perfect something on the first round of results. It massively slows you down and doesn’t move you forward. Four, clean up your thinking first. Take five or 10 minutes at the beginning of each day to clean up any negative thinking and move into positivity for the day.

I have a few questions that you can go through to sort of assess yourself on this that might be helpful for you. 

1) What is the difference between productivity and effort or action in your case? 

2) On a scale of one to 10, how productive are you at achieving your current main goal and why? 

3) Are there areas of your life where you’re super productive and why? 

4) What is the hardest part to you of being productive? 

5) How can you change or overcome that challenge? 

6) What do you most want to produce faster and with less energy? 

7) What is your plan to do this? 

8) What is your time limit? 

9) What are your thoughts and feelings that you need to have to get this done? 

I hope this episode has been useful in thinking about your productivity, perhaps slightly differently than you are just now. 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 Facebook or go to annetteandco.co.uk/fbgroup. 

I do a live teaching there every single Tuesday. We go deep for training Tuesday, and I would love to have you in 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.

Most people live in a perpetual state of giving up and mediocrity, or a state of busy-ness and burnout. There is a third option open to you, which is productivity, creativity, and result creation. This is the option that generates a life of contribution and satisfaction, a life that we can be happy about and proud of. When we choose getting up and mediocrity, we choose starts and stops, lots of excuses, great intentions, then life happens and there’s a reason why it can’t work. I was too tired. I was exhausted. I needed a break. It was too stressful or too hard or too complicated. I just need to slow down. I need to take care of myself. When you think like that, when you’re in that state, we are always talking about change, but let’s be honest, it rarely happens.

What’s new? Nothing much. Given up before, during, and never getting to the after, and having a very low tolerance for any discomfort. Then there’s the other type of person who works busily to the point of crazy and doesn’t produce high level work because their thinking is so negative, fear and scarcity based. You can tell this person by how many hours they work and how they can’t pay attention when you’re talking to them at dinner time. They only talk about work. They’re always rushing and stressed and overly concerned about everything that has to do with work. They miss a lot of important things including sleep because of work. And it’s not the actual amount of work that characterises this person, but rather the thoughts and the stress it provokes and ultimately, burnout. This person uses work as a way of not feeling. They have the sense that if they could just get caught up or just make enough money, the stress would be relieved.

But this never happens, because the stress is coming from their brain, not the actual work. Not the business and not the money. There’s also a high rate of these people eating or drinking or taking in some other indulgence when they’re in this state as well. I have been both of these people. I have spent time in both of these states and you know what? They don’t work. So what is the answer? The answer is to be deliberate in the goals that we set and mindful in the way that we think, feel, and act towards them. Having a reason for doing what we’re doing and doing it from a place of abundance. There’s plenty of time and nothing is an emergency. Because remember that our thoughts become our feelings, become our actions, become our results, and repeat. The cycle goes around and around and around. If we are in a place of panic and stress, we are not looking after ourselves.

We have negative thoughts, which lead to not so great decisions, actions, and results. Whereas if we’re coming from a positive place of goal setting and achievement, you can see how that cycle ends ever so differently. So, I have a few questions today for you to ponder on. Firstly, do you identify with one of these three approaches to your goals and dreams? And if you do, which one? Two, think about a time when you quit on a dream and made an excuse. What was the excuse and what is the truth from your perspective now? Three, think about a time when you burnt yourself out. What were you thinking that caused you to do that? Because remember, it’s our thoughts become our actions and results. Thoughts, feelings, actions, results. Number four, when in your life have you been most productive, and why was that? Do you remember what you were thinking and feeling?

And number five, what can you do to stay out of the drama and quit the burnout? So I hope that this episode has been useful today in giving you some things to ponder over. 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 within Facebook, 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 for the next one. 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.

In today’s episode, I am speaking about revenue streams and when to create a new one in your business. So let’s dive in. I want to start by clarifying the difference between a revenue stream and an income stream, as I see it. 

An income stream is a source of revenue in your business. 

It might be different products or services that you offer. 

An income stream is a way that income reaches you personally, so one income stream for you would be your business, another might be dividends from shareholdings or investments, another might be rental property, and so on. 

In terms of revenue streams in business, there is a lot of chat online about having multiple streams of revenue in your business. And on one level that is a good thing. However, I see far too many people with multiple revenue streams, where those streams are not actually generating proper revenue, let alone profit.

What I mean by that is that people are offering a large number of different options to their prospects. A course, a membership, VIP days, group programme, one-to-one services and so on. And their business is not at the right place to be offering all those options. You need to really understand and nail one offering before introducing another. I believe that you have to be generating an absolute minimum of 100K a year in one revenue stream, before you even think about introducing a second. Then the second needs to be at an absolute minimum of 100K before you introduce a third, and so on.

Introducing another revenue stream before the 100K level means that you end up losing way too much focus on each revenue stream. If you are doing it before it gets to that minimum 100K, then it is likely that you are not completely crystal clear on your messaging yet, on your target market yet, and on the results you can achieve for your clients yet. All of those things make it much, much harder to scale a revenue stream, so you end up with that one stuck, and not being focused on.

Then you make the decision that that one is not working for you, when in actual fact, had you concentrated on it until it reached at an absolute minimum of 100K, it might very well be the greatest revenue stream in your business. Now I say 100K, but actually in reality I’d like it to be much closer to 250K that you have for one stream before you introduce another, but I know that a lot of people won’t want to stick it out that much. 100K is the absolute minimum though. Please don’t go below that. 

Because the thing is that focus and consistency are two things that are massively important when scaling a business, and with having multiple underperforming revenue streams you have neither of those things. I know that you know that, but it often helps to be reminded.

So look at your business. Pick out those revenue streams that are not at the 100K level yet. Choose the next one that you’re going to work on to get to that 100K and drop the others for now. Focus on the revenue stream until you get that to an absolute minimum of 100K a year revenue stream, at which point you can clean up the systems around it, clean up the marketing and the message and the sales process, and then you can start focusing on building that next revenue stream. You can go back to that list and pick out one of those ones that you paused and parked earlier.

So I hope that this episode has been useful in understanding revenue streams, and what you need to think about when you have multiple revenue streams in 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 within Facebook, 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 pocket.

Why is it that when new things are released on social media, big brands don’t jump in with two feet and adopt them straight away but many, many small business owners do? 

For example, when Facebook Stories came out, lots of small business owners are jumping on it, and trying it out, and just going for it. Whereas, we’ve seen a lot of big brands be much slower on the uptake. That is not because of their hierarchy and internal structure and getting approval. It’s because of analytics.

When big brand companies decide to put time and money behind something, they test it first. They actually make sure it’s going to work for them. They make sure it’s in alignment with their strategy and the plan they have for their business. They’ll try out something, they’ll evaluate, they’ll tweak it, and they’ll try again if it is in alignment with their strategy. But if it’s not strategically aligned, they won’t do it at all. If it is strategically aligned, they evaluate, they tweaked, and they go through the cycle again and again until they get the perfect formula for them, the way that works for them. But these are things that small business owners really don’t do.

Most small business owners don’t do this at all because they have no feedback loops to evaluate if a strategy is working at all and that is even if there is a clear strategy in the first place, which helps them make the decision whether they should try the new thing or not. Often, there isn’t even a strategy in place. The thing is that most small business owners are terrible at tracking, and monitoring, and tweaking, and changing, and making sure that the platform works in a way that is working for our business. That is not a criticism, it is just the way that things are.

This isn’t even the case for startups, or five-figure entrepreneurs, or even low six-figure entrepreneurs. I see this in seven and mid-seven figure businesses too. There’s not enough tracking and monitoring, and it’s causing a huge amount of wasted time and money, and in all honesty, energy as well. We need to really understand that our actions generate results. We need to understand what actions are going to generate us the most leads and then most clients. We need to know what those actions are and without tracking and monitoring of results really closely without being clear on the data on what that is telling us, we can’t understand that and make decisions off the back of it. 

What posts get engagements? 

What posts get conversations going? 

What posts get conversion events happening? 

What posts move people forward in the sales cycle with us? 

If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

All these things are things that big, successful companies and small, successful companies are tracking and monitoring really, really closely. They’re making sure that they are completely on top of the stats, and that is something as small business owners, we really do neglect. So what stats do we need to be on top of? Well, there can be different kinds of analytics in our business, and we need to make sure that we’re looking at those that align to our goals for the quarter. That is a real key one, which statistics, which pieces of data are aligning to our goals and which do we need to look at and track to ensure we are moving closer to those goals? So they can be financial analytics, things like website analytics, social media analytics. We can actually look at them broken down into each areas of the business. 

So sales, marketing, delivery, finance, and so on.

But we need to be clear in our business that the ones that we are starting to look at are in alignment with our goals. That way, we can make sure that we spend time doing the right things, we are doing things in a way that are helping us grow, and scale our business, and actually drive our business forward. For example, you know in terms of the web analytics, you’ve got things like visits, unique visits, exit pages, pages per visit, average duration time. These are all stats around our website analytics that we can monitor and we can be on top of if those align to our goals if those are lined up with where we want to be. We’d understand the trends so that we know if we drive traffic to someone on our site, what effect that will have on our sales? What does that mean for our bottom line?

In terms of things like social media analytics, we can understand how we’re performing on the platform so we know if we should keep doing what we’re doing or if we should stop doing what we’re doing. What activity is driving our business? And ultimately, this makes us more efficient if we understand this data. Once we know, for example, the best types of posts to post for our audience or the best times of day, then we’re not wasting time and energy creating content that doesn’t work for our business. We know that we need to put out things that actually convert to our clients, so let’s understand what that actually means.

Understanding these stats gives us a real grasp, a much better and stronger grasp on our business and actually then can help us grow, and scale, and understand which way we need to go, understand what our likers and commenters want, and how to get them to convert into clients. When we think about our financial analytics, we’re not just speaking about understanding the profit and loss statement. We’re speaking about understanding things like the cost of acquisition of a client, the lifetime value of a client, and those types of metrics. Again, incredibly important to understand and track so that you can make business adjustments based on the trend in data.

I hope that this episode has been useful in understanding a bit more about why big businesses make sure they really understand the data and what we can learn from that as small business owners. 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 within Facebook or go to annetteandco.co.uk/fbgroup and come and join us. I do a live teaching there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday day, and I would love to have you there for the next one. 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 putting yourself first before it’s too late, so let’s dive in.
Now, many of you listening to this podcast will, I’m sure, be familiar with Profit First, the book by Mike Michalowicz, and the cashflow management system that I run my business on as well as my clients’ businesses. It is incredibly powerful. If you have not read it yet and would like a copy of the five core chapters, do head over to annetteandco.co.uk/pfbook , and I’ll send you over a copy in PDF. I will also put this link in the show notes for you. 

Well, the premise of Profit First is that you pay yourself first from your business, and of course I share a lot of tips on this podcast and in my Facebook community, the Uncover Wealth Community, on how to make that a reality for you. Paying ourselves first in our business is so important so that we can ensure its survival. Because if we don’t ensure that we are taking out what we want from the business, then we end up not only resentful, but ultimately it means that our business will need to shut its doors because we cannot feed our family on Facebook likes and financial losses.

Running profit first in your business is a way of putting yourself first in your business from a financial perspective, but there are other perspectives that I want to speak about today. I have recently started exercising every day, and it has been a game changer for me. I am eating better. I am sleeping better. I have greater mental clarity. I am putting myself first in my day, every single day. I get up early before the kids are up and the house is moving, and I get my exercise in. I put myself first.

For me, this has become incredibly important, both for my physical health and also for my mental health, as well as my business’s health. Because when I am the healthiest version of myself I can be, it can only have a positive effect on my business because there is so much of me in my business. Putting myself first every day is paying off.

I think it is so important to make sure that we are doing something every single day that is putting ourselves first. I would love for you to let me know what that is that you are doing to put yourself first or what you have decided that you are going to change in order to do that. Do you send me a DM on social media and let me know what you are doing to put yourself first or what you are going to change so that you are putting yourself first.

You are the most important person in your business, and you need to make sure you are taking care of yourself, and you are looking after yourself. You don’t only benefit yourself, you benefit the business, and you benefit those around you, too, whether that be your family or your team.
I hope that this episode has been an incredibly useful reminder to put yourself first in all areas so that you can run a strong business and ultimately have a fulfilling life in all areas. 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 Facebook 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 for the next one.

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.