Financial and Lifestyle Freedom for UK Business Owners

Let’s face it, organising your business finances can be a bit of a pain. There are so many different ways to choose from including keeping those receipts in a shoe box to be handed over to someone come tax time. But, when you’re on top of the business finances, it means that you can use the information to help you run your business better and make decisions based on the data rather than guesswork. So here are the top three tools that I recommend and use daily myself that will help you organise your business finances as well as help you get a better handle on those finances so that you can use them to help run your business.

Xero describes themselves as beautiful accounting software, but honestly I think that sounds a little daunting for most people. After all this kind of accounting software sounds a bit daunting. Perhaps a great way to describe it would have been something like, “A five easy way to record your businesses numbers.” But hey, I’m not on their branding team. In reality, Xero is written from a business owner’s perspective and is a way for entrepreneurs to keep track of your income and your expenditure in the business but is also robust enough for accountants to love it too and we do.

We are Xero certified gold partners. I was asked recently, why are we are big such big fans of Xero and it came down to two things, ease of use and great reporting. Because Xero is incredibly easy to use. They have a tonne of free videos as well in their library called Xero University. They have really great reports that we can dig into the data and we can get to grips with exactly what’s happening in a business as well. I love Xero and I use it in my business. And we use it for pretty much 99% of our client’s businesses too is cloud based, which of course means you can access from any machine, PC or Mac and it has an app so you can access from your phone as well, which makes it nice and handy for people too.

The second tool that I highly, highly recommend is Receipt Bank. 

Receipt Bank uses optical character recognition to read purchase invoices and receipts. That means that you just need to take a photo of them from your phone and receipt bank does a lot of the hard work. You don’t need to type data in manually or post paper copies to your accountant. It means that you can just take a picture. You can also upload PDFs for example, to their website or email them by forwarding straight to a dedicated email address for processing. Then in the backend you link up Xero and Receipt Bank. They speak to each other, which means that you can upload something to Receipt Bank and it basically ends up in Zero without you having to do very much other do a quick check of the information to make sure that everything makes sense and nothing has been misread. But it makes it significantly easier.

The third tool is Smartsheet. Smartsheet is a little like Excel on steroids. 

We use it for internal reporting and dashboard reporting. Also for a project management tool for non operational projects. I am a massive, massive fan of Smartsheet and I would really be lost without it in my business. We use it for all our planning, creating content, producing this podcast, our Facebook Lives, tracking applications for open roles we have with a team, employee onboarding, tracking leads, tracking revenue. You get it pretty much everything in the business other than the operational side. I would be completely lost without it. 

So those are my three Xero, Receipt Bank and Smartsheet. 

And as a PS I also love and use Evernote. I use it every single day but not for organising business finances. So that might be a topic for another time.

I hope that this episode has been useful for you understanding the three top tools for organising business finances. 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 and Facebook or go to annetteandco.co.uk/facebookgroup. I do live teaches in there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday, and I love to have you in there. Thanks 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.

Let’s start by what a money leak is. I define a money leak as a way that money is going out of your business. Money comes in through sales and it goes out through spending, and some spending in your business is money leaks. Let’s speak about how we identify what those are and how we eliminate them.

The way that I like to do this with clients is I have an exercise that we do. I think the best way for me to explain it to you today is also to talk you through how you would do that exercise as well. Then you can understand how to identify the money leaks and what to do about them.

The first thing to do, in finding those money leaks in your business, is to pull out some records. I want you to gather together the last 12 months business bank and credit card statements that you have, and ideally in paper format, ideally print them out, so you have a big pile of paper is by far the easiest way and the most effective way to do this exercise. 

All the business bank and credit card statements, anywhere where business spending is happening, you want to pull those out. Then you probably want to make a cup of tea as well or something, perhaps, stronger if it is later in the day. But you also want to grab a red pen and a highlighter and sit somewhere comfortable. What you then want to do is you want to go through every single sheet of paper, every single item, expenditure item, and ask yourself, with your red pen in your hand, “Is this expense 100% necessary to keep the lights on in my business? I cannot operate without it. It is not possible to run the business without this expense.”

It’s either not legally allowed or it’s just impossible to do. If the answer is yes, it is 100% necessary, not a nice to have, not 80% necessarily, not yeah it would be a bit of a pain if I didn’t have it. 100% necessary, completely impossible to run your business without. Then I want you to circle that expense with your red pen and I want you to ask that same question every single line page, by page, by page, month, by month, every single time.

 But again, I want you to do this every single line, every single item, and circle those ones that are 100% necessary to keep the lights on in your business. Once you’ve gone through that stack of paper, what I want you to do is flip it over, back to the beginning, and this time take the highlighter in your hand. And this time I want you to ask yourself again, every single item, line, by line, by line, every single month, asking yourself, perhaps, multiple times for recurring transactions, ask yourself this question, “Is this expense delivering me a positive return on my investment, a positive ROI?”

That either means is it delivering me a return in terms of money or in terms of time. Either I’m getting more money out from this expense that I am putting into it, or I am getting time out in order to free me up so that I can be revenue generating. Again, line, by line, by line, item, by item, month, by month, every single one you want to go through and mark it with your highlighter, if the answer is yes, it is delivering me a positive return.

Now I want you to also be including that question when it comes to your team. Are your team either generating you money or saving you time to free you up to generate money? I want you to also ask this for every single person in your team at the same time, which can be quite a hard piece of this exercise. Once you’ve done this, once you’ve got the pages marked and read, you’ve got them highlighted, you’re going to have some items there that you have not marked with red or highlighted and those items are money leaks. They are not serving any purpose in your business. They are not necessary to keep the lights on. They are not delivering you a positive return. Therefore, they are unnecessary and there are money leaks.

You have two choices with those; either you understand that they are nice indulgent thing to have in your business, and that’s what it is, it’s just an indulgent expense. Or you say, “Hang on a minute, this is a money leak, I’m going to get rid of it because this will free up the cash so that I can take more money home, so that I have more money in my pockets. You have a choice which route you go down on that, but those are fundamentally the options when it comes to money leaks that either they are something that you understand, that there are nice to have, and you like having them. And therefore you know you make that decision that you’d rather have those than have more money in your pocket, or you say, “I cancelled this and I get more money in my pocket.” That is the choice that you make.

I hope that this episode has been useful in understanding the two questions that you need to ask to eliminate money leaks and how you can go about actually eliminating those 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, 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 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.

As business owners, it’s hard to separate ourselves from the business and sometimes we end up serving our ego rather than the mission of the business itself. Here’s the thing, you start your business and there are probably people around you who were sceptical. You, maybe, had to put up with people who said that you couldn’t do it, who whispered behind your back that they knew you were going to fail, and you proved them wrong. Look at what you’ve achieved. Look at how far you’ve come. Now you have a thriving business or are at least on the path to the business that you want to have and someone in your team comes up to you with an idea.

Do you give the idea of the credit that you should or does your ego take over? The ego that helps you in the beginning, the one that told you to ignore everyone else and you were right. Is that now coming up again as your employee gives you a suggestion on how to improve things in your business? Or let’s say that they’re pointing out a flaw in your plan for the business, in your strategy, or your tactics. Do you then just throw the same types of messages that you had from those who didn’t believe in you in the beginning? You can end up overriding the objections or great ideas and plunge ahead with your own plans, which might be half-baked. Ego makes it hard to separate criticism and haters versus real feedback. The reason we need to strip ego out when we get feedback and suggestions is so that we can really hear them, and take it as feedback, and something to think and act upon. Or offer them a discussion which says, “I hear what you’re saying. However, I believe that you are incorrect and these are my thought out reasons why.”

Not Projecting onto someone else the kinds of things that your parents did to you or someone else that you knew. With ego, we can’t take on feedback or adjust as necessary. This can be the case with internal discussions like I’ve just spoken about, but it can also be the client case with, for example, discussions with clients. If they have something that we might perceive as negative that they’re saying to us, we need to pull the ego out so we are not getting emotional and defensive but instead able to receive the feedback and adjust as necessary. It works with our marketing too. If we cannot examine the performance, take that as feedback and adjust, Then things become very, very hard. We have to get the ego out the way. If your ego is in play, you can see from these examples that profit becomes impacted.

The other place we see ego coming up in business is the way we speak about the size of a business and everyone does it. The six figure business, the seven figure business. We even do that ourselves here, but revenue really is ego-based, because people don’t share that profit figure, do they? So stripping out ego allows you to see the way things really are. The point of a business is to make profit, not just to generate revenue. But it’s also to do something you believe in. Ego has no place in our business if you want to uncover the true wealth within it.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking about to niche or not to niche. So let’s dive in. You see, you can’t be all things to all men. I know that you know this, but often it can be very helpful to be reminded, even if we have been running our business for many, many years. You can’t hope to market your products and services to everyone, even if you think everyone needs them. I’m not saying that you can’t be successful doing that, but what I am saying is that we really do limit our potential by not focusing on a select group of people or businesses.

If we are going through a hard time in our business, it can be really easy to forget this. We can think that we need to widen our net, when in fact almost always the opposite is true. By focusing in on one niche, we of course connect with people on a much higher level, and consequently build that know, like, and trust factor significantly more easily, which in turn leads to more business ultimately.

I’m sure you’ve heard people say things like, “This person really connects with me and they really understand my business.” This is of course what happens when you focus on one niche. You can really get to understand the niche and connect with, and speak to, prospects on a much, much higher level. But, like I say, when things get tough, when we feel under pressure and when we feel stressed, often we can forget that and we can think that we need to start speaking to a wider audience.

Of course, there are certain groups of people or businesses that are likely to want and need your products and services more than others. But, more importantly, we need to remember as well when we are thinking about our niche of people, our niche of businesses, that they need to be able to afford our services. There is no point in targeting groups who want and need your products or services if many of them can’t afford to buy or pay for them.

When you are looking at your niche and narrowing down and focusing more on it, do please remember that caveat that they need to be a niche that can afford your products and services. If you are trying to make a concerted effort to go more all in on your niche, you need to make sure that that piece exists, because if it does not, then you are creating a problem for yourself.

Another pitfall that I sometimes see, even with seasoned business owners, is choosing a niche that they love because they love working there, but they don’t focus on the fact that as they try and escalate people through their programmes, they can’t actually afford those higher level programmes and there perhaps is no way to be able to help them afford them either.

A niche market is of course a specific group or businesses that want and need your services and can’t afford to pay for them. Because you’re targeting a small number, the same amount of money that you were previously using on ad spend to acquire your customer is now spread across a smaller number of people. So if you have a fixed ad budget, then it’s spread across a smaller number of people, which means that you have more to spend on each prospect individually, which in turn can help get more of those people in as well that are your specific niche person.

In a nutshell, your ideal niche market market is the segment that represents your best chance of getting a good return from your marketing offers. A niche is critical, I believe, to really getting your business to where you want it to be. The thing is, we know this, that choosing a niche means that you’re specifically meeting the needs and requirements of a set group of people. You are going to become the go-to person in that industry for the thing that you do. Not enough businesses are trying to scale and go all in enough on their niche. They’re skirting around the edges. They’re kind of hinting at it, but they’re not truly declaring what their niche is.

An example to show you this is let’s say you are a startup business and you need an accountant. You had to Google and you can see two that look interesting in the first two listings. One says ABC Chartered Accountants, tax preparation, audit accounting, payroll, help for startups, management accounts and so on. The second says, XYZ Chartered Accountants, specialising in helping startups get their businesses running quickly, profitably and effectively. Of course, the answer to the one you choose is obvious.

If you can create that stronger bond between you and your niche market, a stronger one than you have now, then I guarantee you’ll see the effect on your bottom line, no matter how long you’ve been in business, provided your niche market has the money to pay you. That is the power of really starting to dive in and go all in on your niche. You become the obvious choice, you own the market. You become known as the only choice. Why would people choose anyone else? Because your service is specifically designed to solve the problem of those specific people. I mean, look at Saga for example who cater for the over 50s. There is no ambiguity there. It is very, very clear if you are in their target, if you are somebody that should be considering them.

Not focusing hard in on a niche is perhaps one of the biggest marketing mistakes I see from business owners. Being wishy washy and not being completely clear on the niche that they want to serve leaves money on the table in terms of the sales, but it also wastes money in terms of the ad spend.

I hope this episode has been useful for understanding why I’m so passionate about people claiming their niche and going all in. I also, whilst you’re here, 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 and that will redirect you. I do live teachings in there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday, and I would love to have you in there.

Annette:           Hi, everyone. Welcome to Uncover Wealth Radio, episode 3. I am Annette Ferguson, the CEO of Annette and Co. I help online service entrepreneurs find the clarity in their numbers, increase their wealth, and have more money in their pockets. In today’s episode, I’m speaking to Karrie Brazaski, and we are speaking about stress.

                        Karrie is the owner of Karrie Brazaski Coaching, and she’s a registered nurse, stress reduction specialist, a certified transformational nutritional coach, and a certified yoga teacher. She is passionate about sharing the gifts of stress reduction and wellness with others. She insists self-care is imperative and not a luxury. Karrie helps busy professionals tame the chaos and stress in their lives so they can avoid burnout, find their energy, and love their life.

                        She is blessed to be a mom to her twelve-year-old son, and a wife of 21 years to the love of her life. When she’s not helping clients, she loves hanging out with her guys and playing in the kitchen, creating new recipes. So let’s dive into today’s episode.

                        Today I have the massive pleasure of speaking to Karrie. Karrie helps organisations realise that stress and burnout can erode their bottom line, and it’s so important to her CEOs to take care of ourselves and our team. It’s not just a luxury. It’s a massive, massive necessity in our businesses. Not only does it impact the individuals, it actually impacts the bottom line at the same time.

                        Karrie, thank you so much for joining me today.

Karrie:              Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Annette:           Awesome. So, why don’t we start by speaking about what is causing this stress to the CEOs, and the stress to the team as well?

Karrie:              Well, there’s lots of different things that are kind of going into stress. Overall, people are feeling more stressed out now than what they have in the past. There’s a bunch of different polls and research out there that are showing that. What’s happening is… what I’m finding, even with the individual business owners, it’s the stress of being ultimately responsible for everything, the inability to delegate well, as well as not taking care of ourselves.

                        We have for so long, and I think, I’m from the U.S., the U.K., we have this similar philosophy that being busy is this badge of courage. I do all of these things, this is great. Look it, I’m doing this, I’m doing that, I’m running this business, I’m successful, I’ve got my kids in this, we’re doing that. It’s like this go, go, go mentality, and so we never take time to slow down and really take care of ourselves.

                        So, some of those things that we used to incorporate into our lives, because you had to walk to a bus stop, you had to walk to the market to get things… kind of automatically had de-stressing activities built into our days, and now we’re attached to our phones, we’ve got laptops, we go on vacation, everything goes with us, and so, we don’t know how to disconnect, and we don’t know how to create … I won’t say we don’t know how… We don’t put it into a priority of making space in our day for quiet, or just stillness, and just taking care of ourselves.

                        We think that stress reduction, taking care of yourself, is this elaborate, “I have to go out and spend a day at the spa or take this amazing beach vacation where I fly off somewhere”, which those are great. The more you can do that, fabulous. I think they’re extremely important, but it’s really learning to incorporate those things into your daily life for you and your team. I hear it a lot with sleep; that’s one of the big keys that people are starting to get stressed is that their sleep diminishes. The quality of sleep, the amount of sleep, or that they’ll make comments of, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Well, it may be sooner than you think if you don’t-

Annette:           Yes.

Karrie:              … take care of stress. It’s compounding and not being able to make yourself a priority.

Annette:           Absolutely. I can completely relate to that. The whole feeling of feeling like you have to do everything, feeling like you’re almost on this hamster wheel that’s just happening. You’re running a business, you’ve got a family, you’ve got all these things, you’ve got to be all these people as well. You’ve got to be the CEO, you’ve got to be the manager, you’ve got to be the leader, you’ve got to be the mom, you’ve got to be the wife, and just feeling like you’re constantly… not to mention the daughter, the sister, the friend, all these other roles.

Karrie:              Yeah.

Annette:           You just feel like it’s this constant pressure, this constant situation. Like you said, being completely tied to your phone 24/7, even to the point where people with smart watches… their watch is ringing. It’s not just their phone, it’s something that’s actually attached to their body is ringing at the same time, which just makes it, as you say, incredibly stressful.

                        So what impact is this having on both ourselves as individuals, our team as individuals, and also, our businesses and our lives as a whole?

Karrie:              Well, people don’t realise the impact that stress is actually having.

Annette:           Yeah.

Karrie:              Accumulated stress, a little bit of stress is very beneficial. We can hit a deadline. We get kind of in the zone, get going. You can get a lot of activity done, but our body can’t tell the difference between that chronic stress that we feel every day, and that “Oh my gosh, there’s a fire. I’ve got to get out of the building.” That chronic stress, over time, just like any other disease, takes its toll. If you have an unhealthy diet over time, and you don’t do things eventually, you’ll have some cardiac conditions. This is the same thing, and it’s the accumulative effect, and never being able to give your body a break so that it can rest and rejuvenate.

                        In the U.S., which I’m sure the U.K. it’s not much different, the top six causes of death are all… stress is an attributer.

Annette:           Wow.

Karrie:              Stress makes those conditions worse. Chances are, if you look at everything that people are dying from, stress impacts it. Stress causes our blood pressure to go up. We are… cantankerous. We snipe and bite at people when we get very reactive, we don’t sleep well, we have weight gain, there’s an increased rate of depression with stress, and the really sad one that most people don’t even want to talk about, and there’s actually a study that just came out, actually in Scotland, where 17% of people who are stressed are actually having suicidal thoughts because they’re so stressed.

                        You want to get on it in the front end so that you don’t ever get to that point, because if you are having suicidal thoughts or anything, please reach out to your healthcare provider because there’s help, and you don’t have to feel like you’re alone.

Annette:           That’s something [crosstalk 00:07:58]

Karrie:              Oh, I’m sorry.

Annette:           I’m just saying that’s incredibly high statistic as well.

Karrie:              Yeah.

Annette:           This is huge.

Karrie:              Yeah. It was a decent size, I think it was 500 business owners… no, that was a different state. I don’t remember how many were in that actually study. But it was a fairly decent amount of people that they were actually looking at. It’s a recent statistic. It’s within the last year.

Annette:           Gosh.

Karrie:              We’ve got to do a better job. When we don’t, depending on the size or your organisation, and that… almost 50% of people calling in sick, they don’t show up for work, is because of stress. If you just look at that, and there is another study from Scotland that actually said that business owners are spending 17 days a year worrying about the business when they’re not working.

Annette:           Wow.

Karrie:              That’s a lot of weekends where you are not fully present with your family because you’re worried about what has to go on in your business, and you’re having a very difficult time disconnecting from it. So you don’t ever get a break. Very productive people in businesses are having that. If you’ve got your right-hand man, your left-hand girl, whatever it is… and you’re constantly calling them, are you creating the culture to be able to have downtime from your business? If you’re doing that, and then you’re connecting with your team, you’re doing the same thing to them. So, you’re perpetuating the problem.

                        Chances are, if you can learn how to disconnect and get away, it’s still going to be there in the morning. It’s still going to be there Monday morning. There are things that you can do to set yourself up to be more successful so it doesn’t feel like it all hits you in the head, but you’ve got to be able to break away. So, you’ve got the absenteeism rate.

                        The other is healthcare cost. Some people may think, “Well, I’m not specifically paying for my healthcare.” I’m here to tell you, you are. In the U.S., it might be part of your insurance plan, or it might be part of… there’s someone who funds that, and typically it’s tax payers, or the people who are paying into that specific insurance plan. So you’ve got higher rates of that. But even if you’re not paying out, let’s say because you’re going to the doctor, it’s time away from work. It’s time away from your business. It’s time away your family. People who are really stressed, they get sick more, and so it’s this whole chicken and the egg. Which is it? It’s the circular problem that really does impact our bottom line when we start looking at missed time, missed productivity. There’s days where you’re like, “I can’t even do anything,” where you try to focus on something that should take you a half an hour and two hours later, you’re like, “I still haven’t gotten that accomplished.” That’s money. Your time is probably your most valuable asset, and your business most valuable asset is you.

Annette:           Yeah, 100%.

Karrie:              You’ve got to start taking care of you.

Annette:           Completely. Actually, you sort of said there as well, it’s not just affecting you as a person. It’s not just affecting your team as a person. It’s not just affecting your bottom line, it’s affecting your family; your kids and your friends and everyone you’re hanging out with, because you’re being distracted and all that stuff as well. It’s not great family life in the long run, and may very well end up escalating to a position there that you don’t want to have either. So, it’s just so incredibly, incredibly important to be very, very mindful of our own stress, and our team stress as well, and not be the people who are actually impacting our team in a negative when it comes to stress at the same time.

                        So tell me, what can we do? What can we do to change this, because I suspect a lot of entrepreneurs listening are thinking, “Well, that’s all very well, but I can’t turn my phone off. Things might happen. That would be more stressful if I turned my phone off, I would be worrying about what was happening behind the blank screen on phone. What can I do to alleviate some of this stress, some of this pressure I feel?” They might be thinking, “I’m the breadwinner of my family. I need to be pushing, I need to be working all the time, I need to be doing this, because otherwise things will fall apart… balls will get dropped…” What do we say to people who are feeling that right now, and who just don’t know how on earth they can get out of this stress cycle?

Karrie:              I think there’s two big things, and they’re actually small. It is taking 20 minutes. That’s what I start my clients with. 20 minutes a day where you create quite, white space. You stop moving, because I’m shocked at the amount of people that you start working with them, and it’s like, well, let’s just kind of calm you down. “Oh, okay. Well, I can listen to that while I’m washing the dishes.” Or, “I can do this while I’m…”