SHEcorporated One Step Empire

Finances feeling out of control? Dump the shame, we've got some simple fixes in this episode. Ep 1 Season 2

December 15, 2021 Kristy Carruthers Season 2 Episode 1
SHEcorporated One Step Empire
Finances feeling out of control? Dump the shame, we've got some simple fixes in this episode. Ep 1 Season 2
Show Notes Transcript


If you hate dealing with spreadsheets, and financial reports give you a headache, or if the fear and uncertainly of what you don't know about your finances keeps you up at night - this is the episode for you.

Many entrepreneurs have trouble focusing on their finances – it’s not uncommon if that sounds like you.

But if we ignore them, the problems don't go away and they multiply and create NEW problems. We end up running out of money, not hiring help when we should, pricing our products incorrectly and SO many other issues that can stem from not understanding our businesses financial picture.

Pam Prior is with us today, she is a former corporate CFO to fortune 50 companies who now spends her time helping entrepreneurs access the same quality finance advice that those multi million dollar companies use, but tailors it specifically  to help entrepreneurs and our unique needs.  and she makes a big promise on this podcast – Pam guarantees you will walk away from this episode with everything you need to help you find extra money in your business you didn't even know you had. 

With plain talk that is easy to understand, and simple steps that anyone can do, Pam is going to walk us through the FOUR things that generally keep entrepreneurs from dealing with the finances in their business. 

Shame, fear, time and overwhelm 

And Pam makes them simple to overcome.

We also have THREE practical tools in this episode to help us deal with finances in our business, that we can do right now, to make it all so much simpler moving forward.

LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE:

Cash Flow Forecast link: https://www.profitconcierge.com/cashflowforecast

Videos:   https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjiJJbC3j75Cnxbj7MnyoObIbB4NwYJ9u

Guide to hiring a bookkeeper:  https://go.profitconcierge.com/optin-rockstar-bookkeeper

Opt in to ask questions on future podcasts: http://www.onestepempire.com

Visit SHEcorporated main site: https://www.shecorporated.com/

Ready to SMASH Your Goals?   We're here to help!

Make this the year that changes EVERYTHING.  

Now offering limited spots in our full day “Done with You” Success Blueprint Days  for personalized marketing and strategy to propel you to your biggest year ever!

CLICK TO:  BOOK MY DAY




Kristy: [00:00:00] If you hate dealing with spreadsheets and financial reports give you a headache, or if the fear and the uncertainty of what you don't know about your finances keeps you up at night. This is the episode for you. Many entrepreneurs have trouble focusing on their finances. It's not uncommon if that sounds like you it's definitely me as well. If we ignore them though, the problems don't go away, they multiply and they create new problems. 

 We end up running out of money, not hiring help when we should, pricing our products incorrectly, and so many other issues that can stem from not understanding our business's financial picture. So Pam prior is with us today. She is a former corporate CFO to fortune 50 companies who now spends her time helping entrepreneurs access the same quality financial advice that those multimillion dollar companies use. 

But she tailors it specifically to help entrepreneurs in our unique needs. And she makes a big promise on this podcast, Pam guarantees that you'll walk away from the episode with everything you need to help you find [00:01:00] extra money in your business you didn't even know you had. Who could use some extra money in their business and be able to sleep better knowing your business finances are taken care of. 

I would guess all of us. So with plain talk, that's easy to understand and simple steps that anyone can do. Even me. Pam is going to walk us through the four things that generally keep entrepreneurs from dealing with the finances in their business. It's shame, fear, time, and overwhelm. And Pam is going to give us some very simple ways to overcome those and move forward. We also have three practical tools in this episode to help us all deal with finances in our business that we can do right now. 

To make it all so much simpler moving forward. 

Hello, Pam. We are so fortunate to have Pam Pryor with us today. Pam is the author of your first CFO, the accounting cure for small business owners. It's a bestselling book that makes finance fun and accessible for entrepreneurs. Is that even possible, Pam? She is also the host of the cash flow podcast.

And [00:02:00] if I may say, so the least accountant, like accountant I've ever met, I realized early on that accounting was not in my personal zone of genius and I'm thankful for my bookkeeper and my account. And everyday I have both. That's how bad I am. So awesome. Perfect forward to this. So, hi, Pam. Welcome.

Pam: Thanks so much for having me. I really look forward to this. Well, it's nice to meet you now. Pam has some fantastic takeaways at the end of this. So stay tuned for that. But before we really get started, Pam, can you just tell us a little bit about your journey here, how you started and more about what you do?

Yeah. So the journey actually started in corporate America. And I was in corporate for, I will say it. 30 years. and I worked for one company for 20, and then that was a fortune 50 company. And then I worked my way kind of down the revenue ladder, becoming as my career progressed to CFO for mid market companies, which basically means between 300 and 500 million.

Companies as the CFO for about the last 10 years and in between a couple of those roles, [00:03:00] I worked with entrepreneurs and I always thought it was kind of in-between work. You know, what I do until I get my next real job. And then I got. Real job. I was perfect job on paper for me.

Perfect. For, you know, my next CFO role, $500 million something I had done before, all the right challenges and 10 minutes in I'm like, wait a minute. I don't want to be doing this anymore I want to be working with entrepreneurs because what had happened was those entrepreneurs kind of fed something in me, totally different from the corporate world.

And I realized that I loved it. And the cool thing was I could adapt. What they hated to work for them in the business as a finance extra. So I got to bring all of that really incredible CFO knowledge from corporate, but take it and reshape it to fit for each individual entrepreneur. And I love doing that.

So they got this. There's no reason entrepreneurs shouldn't have access to awesome financial talent. Right, right. That's what we pretty much did. And that's what got me here. And then soon [00:04:00] after I got into this work, I wrote the book and that's gotten an awful lot of attention. That's really led to just broadening this further and further and developing our own method for really making sure that entrepreneurs have exactly an only all the right stuff they need around them financially.

No matter how big or small. And it's so needed. I think that the mindset is so different from corporate to entrepreneur. I mean, entrepreneurs might just work differently and that's why I think we struggle in a corporate. I would never make it in a corporate sense because I just, I'm not, I may be not patient enough to wait to go through the system.

I want to pivot quickly. I have ideas I want to try. So I think that's, that's a piece that's always really missing for entrepreneurs as well, we're into the ideas all the time. We don't necessarily focus on the finances as much as we should. So this. And that's what actually makes it fun for me because I work with entrepreneurs.

We're all crazy. And I always like to say to my clients y'all are crazy, but that's what I like about it because the minute I've caught up to them and said, okay, we're all set. We've got everything in place. They're like onto [00:05:00] the next thing. And it's like, cool. Now we're going to go do that. And it's, and it's, and it's my job to make sure that that can happen seamlessly for them or when, where the, where the finances are concerned.

So, that's where the excitement is. And in corporate, I loved every minute of it. Except for that very last moment when I realized it was time for something different. just so that everybody knows what we're going to talk through today, what actionable steps are they going to walk away with today that they can put to work in their business after the episode?

So we're going to have three very practical tools and a couple of psychological. hints for people on getting past the fourth things that generally keep entrepreneurs from dealing with the finances in their business. And then those finances end up coming up to bite them either because they don't hire help when they actually can't afford it.

They price things wrong. I mean, it ends up having, taking so many ugly heads on it that we want to. In place early for entrepreneurs. And I want to show people that it's just not hard to do. What I was telling you [00:06:00] is. I mean, my job, we have a lot of times when we get an entrepreneur, who's been through a lot we're on cleanup.

And so once we're on cleanup, I mean, that's great for my business, but I don't want entrepreneurs to have to get to that. Yeah, and it is a sticking point for so many of us. I know when I first started years ago, I thought, you know, because as an entrepreneur, you do all the things, right? And I thought, you know what they say, QuickBooks is easy.

I'm going to do QuickBooks and I'll just do it all myself. And I realized very, very quickly that accounting was not my zone of view. And I struggled for about six months and I would put it off and put it off. And then when I would finally do it, I would have, you know, 10 to 20 hours of, of bookkeeping to do.

And after about six months I gave up, I found myself a bookkeeper. I handed him all of it. I gave him all the old files and I said, can you just check what I've done? And then take it from here. He went through it and he literally had to read. The entire thing. He's so kind though. I said, you know, how bad was it trans?

And he said, well, you didn't train to be a bookkeeper. It's like me trying to use a ClickFunnels. I [00:07:00] don't know how to do it. I'm going to mess it up. Somebody's going to have to clean it up. It's just, it's not. And it's when you let go of that need to be everything that you start to make, get some traction on it.

Yeah. And it was just such a relief to have be able to hand that over to them because it wasn't what I mean, you, of course you still need to be able to understand it. Right. But don't put it off. Don't push it because it's never going away. It's only going to get worse. Don't make the self do the part of the parts of it that you hate so that you can't get the advantage of the stuff that's going to just change everything in your business.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. So let's help everybody tackle this. So let's get started. Where should we. Okay. The place I always like to start in this conversation is it's about showing up, right? And we're entrepreneurs. And we have to show up both to our families, to our friends, to our businesses all the time.

And in a business, there are three meetings. Pillars of the business. And I know you can say four, you can say five, but let's just talk three. And what I like to talk about is the 67% [00:08:00] CEO and the fact you are showing up and you're not a 67% CEO, and I'm going to explain why, but the main thing I want to want to tell you is that by showing up for this training about finances, believe it or not.

Set yourself apart from 98% of entrepreneurs. Well winning already winning already. And so it's so worth it to focus on this. And what we really want to do is get you to the point where the, some very easy steps to make sure you can stay focused on this. So what does a 67% CEO we have in our businesses?

Like the operations part of our business. That's like our special sauce. It's where we do what we love to do in my case. It's bookkeeping, right? Bookkeeping and accounting and finance help. We can do it with our eyes. Cool. We dream about it. We sleep about it. We've done it for our 10,000 hours at whatever, and we're awesome at it.

So it's easy to pay attention to that. Third of our business. The other third is marketing. And even though we may or may not know a lot about marketing, it's kind of sexy. It's kind of [00:09:00] fun. It's like how we get people into our orbit it's relationship building it's stuff that nurtures our souls. So we tend to spend time in that third of our business as well.

And then there's this other third called our finances. That we tend to kind of back away from. And one of the things that I learned very early on after talking with actually thousands of entrepreneurs in the last eight years doing this work is that there are four main obstacles to entrepreneurs getting into their finances.

So there's four things keeping this 98% of the people away from such an important part of their business and like, We're in these businesses to make money. You got to forgive my staff, they get a little Rammy out there when we're recording. I've just made them part of my brand because it is what it is.

Um, but we, when, when we start to avoid these things, there are four main reasons that, that 98% of the people don't look at [00:10:00] finances and I've interviewed, like I said, at least a thousand entrepreneurs, and I've talked on stages and gotten confirmation and all of that. So what are the. We remember him with the acronym S O F T first of all, two of them are psychological and two of them are very tactical.

So what does S O F T stand for? So the S stands for shame, and I think this is the primary. issue for a lot of us and we all have a money story. We all have something that's happened to us before. What I do with people when I have like a zoom room or an audience build with a hundred or 200 people is I say, all right, take a minute.

And I ask you to do this right now to take a minute and think about your most embarrassing money story, whatever it is. Just take a second and go there. I know painful, blah, blah, blah, but go there for a quick second, because I'm going to make a really important. Okay, you got that? Got it. All right. Now I want you to think about how many people are watching this video.

And I want you to know that every single [00:11:00] person watching this. EV and me talking on this video, everyone answered that question. Everyone filled in the blank that starts with I'm so embarrassed, but I'm so embarrassed, but I had to file bankruptcy. I'm so embarrassed, but I have no idea how much money I'm making.

I'm so embarrassed, but my husband doesn't know how much this business is costing. Or my wife doesn't know how much this business is costing, whatever it is, we've all filled it in. So what's critical for you to understand is that no matter where you are. In business. If you're looking at the wealthiest person in the room or the person who's just getting out of the gate out of college and doesn't have a penny to their name.

every single one of them has answered that question and knows that that has an embarrassing story. It's just one of those things we don't tend to talk about. So what I'm going to ask you for the purposes of this training to do with shame is just take it and put it on the shelf for the rest of this conversation, because I think what we're going to show you is all of the reasons that you don't even [00:12:00] have to think about shame as a block anymore.

Now there are money minded. Things you can learn. They're all, we all have some trigger, not past, that's driven our, our, uh, importance, our, our, how we deal with money. And I'm not minimizing Christy at all that some of that can be very traumatic, but I am saying for purposes of this discussion, let's just put it on the shelf and know if you are sitting next to the person you think is the most successful in the world.

They answer that question with just as much. thinking that theirs is the worst in the world story, as you just did. I don't care who it is. So that's shame. We're going to just put that away for now. Now I want to talk about the other psychological one and that's the F it's the fear. I wish software spelled differently, but it's not, I don't go in order of the letters, but it's how you can remember them.

So, you know, kind of what is fear. If you think about fear, it's really about the unknown. So do you remember the game? And I think in Canada, they called it snakes and ladders were in the states. We [00:13:00] called it shoots and ladders, But snakes and ladders, you kind of had to roll those dice and you had no idea whether you were going to land at the bottom of the ladder. and what I call an opportunity and shoot right to the top, or whether you were going to land at the top of a, of a snake and slide all the way back down to the beginning.

I always hit that square that at the very top right of the board that took you all the way back to the first row. So that was just my luck with shoots and ladders. But fear is that we didn't know if you, if you translate it to entrepreneurship, we don't know every day we're rolling those dice. And we have no idea where we're are.

Because we have no line of sight into it. We can't plan. We can't say, oh, I want to take two steps today. And I want to jump over that and take five steps tomorrow because we can't see what's ahead. And fear really is only a thing when we don't know. What's coming the minute we actually opened the door and stare at the tiger or what may actually be like a [00:14:00] kitten.

The minute we opened the door, we move out of fear and we move into adrenaline and action. So fear is really insidious because it's not really protecting us. We think it is. And it's worse. Then the actual thing we're going to attack once we realize what's there. Yes. And we go on and on and on don't we, rather than facing it, it just carries on.

I can still come in and bite you because it doesn't, it can still actually bite you. So how do we overcome fear? We overcome fear by actually. And this can be a little bit scary, but what we need to do, that, that the, the term for this, in a business, there's a forecast. We want to look at what we think is going to happen with our money over the next, however long.

And I'll just talk weeks for now. When we use the term forecast, it can sound awfully intimidating, but one of the things I'm going to give you at the end of this is a free. To an actual cashflow forecast. That's 12 weeks with a video of me that takes eight minutes tops. And if you do this for 12 weeks, it takes 15 [00:15:00] minutes a week.

Period. If you do it for 12 weeks, a couple of things are going to happen. Number one, you are going to learn about your business more than you ever knew about. And I really, really challenge you to go grab this thing and do it because you're going to learn a lot. The second is your ability to see the future.

Like this is going to get better and better and better with every week. And the third thing is Christie. What I'll tell you is that anybody that has faithfully done this for 12 weeks and has proven it to me that they've done it for 12 weeks. Always found more money in their business either by realizing they needed to fix their pricing or how they're selling or by finding costs in there.

In fact so much so that when I give this away, if you prove to me after 12 weeks that you did this faithfully and you have an at least. Money in your business one way or the other significant to you call me, I'm sending you a a hundred dollar Amazon gift card because it's impossible. Yeah. I've been doing this for [00:16:00] five years now.

Nobody has called because either they kind of gave up halfway through just because it took a little bit of time or they didn't have the data to do it all you need to do. This is your bank state. Your checking account bank statement. You don't need your credit card statement. You need your banking checking account statement and this model.

And I'm going to give you guys the link to that when we're done here. So that's, that's how we overcome fear is get a line of sight out 12 weeks, because then you can start to say, Hey, instead of finding out, I ran out of money yesterday. Now I can look down what I think I'm going to do for the next 12 weeks.

And if I do it, I'm going to run out of money in six. So, let me change what I'm doing and all of a sudden you can go to sleep because you're not worried about what's going to happen tomorrow because you've already made an adjustment to be able to deal with it. And I think one of the things with entrepreneurs too, is common mindset is just make more sales.

Right? I know I've had that before, too. It's the cost are fine. I'm not spending more than [00:17:00] I should. I just, if I just make more sales and everything's fine. And then. A not always easy to do, certainly in the short term and, and B it's not always the best way to manage your cashflow. So by doing this exercise, you're gonna be able to see, you know, the other side of it, where you can save happening where you're.

Yeah, absolutely love it because I will tell you people growing sales, there's such a thing. And we talk about it in CFO circles and I've had a couple clients who've come to me after they've done it. Yeah. Increase your sales right into bankruptcy. And there are ways to avoid that in this package is a way to do it.

This, this one spreadsheet 15 minutes a week is all it takes. And if you're not spending 15 minutes a week on your finances, I would venture to say, you're not an honorable. You're a hobbyist. Yeah. And that's kinda where I draw a hard line with my clients. If you can't talk to me for 15 minutes a week, you're really not a business person.

You just have a hobby and that's fine. Totally cool. We all have hobbies, but recognize that that's what this is. Unless you're willing to really [00:18:00] jump in there. It's not an hour a week. It's 15 minutes a week. So forecast gets rid of. Right. So we're taking care of shame. We're going to put her on the shelf for five minutes and we're going to take care of fear by getting ourselves a forecast so we can see the road and start adjusting our steps to miss the shoots and LA.

Those are the hard ones to make. Cause those are the psychological ones. Right. But now let's talk about the tactical ones. And the first one of the tactical ones is time. Like we are busy. and time is as valuable to us as.

Quite frankly, because we've got so much else on our plate. That's so important. And so how does this manifest itself, this time block to dealing with our finances? A lot of times you might find yourself saying, you know, my God, I'm looking at these numbers, but they make no sense. I'm getting some stuff from my bookkeeper, but I know it's wrong.

I really just want to know where my money went. So you get these reports. Out of something, be it QuickBooks, be it Excel, be at your bank statement and you'll look at it [00:19:00] really quickly and you go, uh, crap, I'm putting that in a drawer. I'll deal with it next month. We talked a little bit about this, right.

You know, the next month I'll deal with it next month. And when I do a slide presentation, I often show this drawer that we put this in. And then all of a sudden we opened a closet door and that's what's happened all this paper. So what I would challenge you with is that if anybody's just giving you a piece of paper with numbers on it, you should throw it away.

It's not worth. The only time numbers become worth your time is if they're in context, because the whole point of this, the whole reason I want you to grab onto this and really understand your numbers is because they tell the story of what's happening in your business. Yeah. So if we put them in context, if we all the sudden, instead of just looking at our October profit and loss statement, which is the standard report that every bookkeeper will hand you, instead of just looking at that, tell your bookkeeper and say, Hey, I don't want to get that anymore.

I want to get a report that shows me my October profit and loss statement, but show me in [00:20:00] columns September, August, July. All the 12 months that came before. This is, well, now all of a sudden you're putting the numbers in context, you can look at trends. When did my sales increase? When did they decrease?

If I increase my marketing does something happened when I go on vacation, what happens to my business? When my clients all go to Disneyworld in February, what happens? And you can start to see the story of how your business runs. So thing one, that's a takeaway from. Ask your bookkeeper to always give you.

And there's a technical term for it called 12 month. Rolling profit and loss state. Because then you'll be able to see what is happening over time in my business. The second really cool context is to look at it versus what you expected to have happen. So in this particular case, instead of just getting our October numbers and saying, we made this much, we spent this much, we had this much left.

We often say, Hey, create yourself a little for. [00:21:00] What do you think? I think I'm going to sell three things at board dollars each this month. So I'll make $12. And I think I'm going to have $5 in expenses and I'll have seven leftover take the time to just kind of go through that on your head. What do you think it'll look like then when you get those October numbers say instead of $12 in sales, you have.

$10 in sales, you can say, oh right, here's the story there. I increased my price from $4 to $5. And look, I didn't quite make up enough sales for that price increase. So maybe I'll change that to four 50 next month and see how that goes. So you can start to, if you look at what happened. Just if you're just looking at it, it doesn't tell you anything.

But if you look at it versus what you expected for price per quantity, for how much you're paying for help for your credit card bill, then you can really start to say, oh, now I understand the story on this. I raised my price by too much. And by the way, when [00:22:00] I'm looking at it in the context of time, not only did I raise it too much, but I raised it in the wrong month.

Whenever. Not paying attention to this. Okay. So that's how we deal with the time. Get your information in context. So it's worth the time you're spending. Absolutely. Even to me, that makes sense. Yeah. All right. Okay. So the one, I can understand it. Everyone listening can understand it.

That makes me happy. All right. So now we're moving on to the big one, which is overwhelmed and, you know, kind of what are the symptoms of overwhelm, right? Like with anything it's like me with my marketing, I've let it go too long. I don't know where to start. I don't know who to trust. This is your money, right?

I don't know who to trust to talk to about this. A lot of times this comes through, luckily not for you, but when we get clients sometime it's like, I want to kill my bookkeeper. They're just sending me stuff. That makes no sense. and again, that drawer just turns into a box and you might just have receipts sitting all over the place and she might just ignore it.

Okay. Just don't [00:23:00] know where to start. And then what this can lead to sometimes a typical symptom of overwhelm is your taxes don't get filed. And then I'm sure there are other things that you can look at that overwhelm you as well. Well, here's takeaway number two, I'm going to give you a three step cure for overwhelm.

All right. So we've had. We've handled shame. Just, we're going to ignore it for five minutes with, fear. We're going to go ahead and take a look at that 12 week forecast model and commit to spending 15 minutes a week on that model. And, for time, we're going to start asking for stuff in context and now for overwhelmed, are you ready?

Ready to do the three-step sob cure for overwhelm? Okay. Okay. Fortunately it doesn't stand for what you think for separately. Organized and business model. And I'm going to tell you what those three steps are. So the first thing is, and here's a little tough love again, separate this. Isn't a hobby for you.

If you're here and you're listening, it's a business separate your personal finances [00:24:00] from your business finances. Okay. Best practice shore set up a company, set up a sole proprietorship or an LLC or whatever with the, with the state. But you don't have to go through all that. All you have to do, you can have two personal bank accounts and have one of them for your personal stuff.

And one of them for your business stuff, even have two credit cards, one for your business, one for your personal. The reason I say this is there's a lot of psychological to this, but you know, the big thing was why, why should I do that? Well, number one, You can start to psychologically think about this business is something that's going to ultimately serve you in the beginning.

We're all feeding our business, right? If it's all mushed together, we don't know what that's doing, how much we're putting in what we're investing, but once you separate them, you can start to see, this is what I'm putting into my business now. And, and, and I expect it to give back to me. In the future and when it does, I'm going to take money out of that account and put it in my personal account [00:25:00] because that's a win paying me is like the first win as an entrepreneur.

Right. What that does like that just totally lifts you up when your business writes you a check. I can't tell you how I felt the first day my business paid me. Yes, it worked. So that's kind of one major reason to do it. the second major reason is, is that it sets you up kind of for the next step. it, it eliminates the year end.

Dread of the, of the box and the drawer, because all of a sudden, if you've got a separate account and you know, it's all business expenses, you don't have to worry about receipts. You've got them. If you need them and you're audited, then you'll pull them out. But you know, if you're looking at that bank statement, it's all business stuff, you hand it to your tax accountant.

Now they'll tell you the next thing, which is organized, but you're still in much better shape. Then, if you had it all mingled together and you got to sit there at the end of the year or on April 13th, as most people do and pull out every single receipt and try to remember what the heck you did 14 months.

[00:26:00] Yeah, right. So it removes all of that. So go ahead and do that. If you really want to step it up a notch, go ahead and set yourself up as a company with whatever state you're in, but it's not necessary. It's just a good next step. All right. So that's the separate, separate your personal, separate your, your business.

Second thing organized. So here we go. This is the heart. But there's a lot of benefits to it. Get an online bookkeeping tool, go ahead and do it. Quick books, zero, et cetera. There are a couple of very low cost ones. Um, but here's the point. Once you get that? Yes, it costs you a couple bucks a month, but you can get very cost efficient versions of all of these products hook up your bank account.

'cause all of a sudden what happens is all of those transactions, you can stop worrying. They're automatically coming into a system, just like you did with QuickBooks. Now you may or may not choose to spend the time to classify them. In which case you just get a [00:27:00] bookkeeper, but the minute you hook up your, your now separate personal card and your now separate bank account, all of a sudden that data is all there and you can have somebody catch it up for you, or you can tell.

day and just spend it classifying transaction is as we start out now, that's not a high volume of stuff. So if you're a beginning entrepreneur, it's the time to do it, but here's the thing I would say the best practice. Get a bookkeeper to do the grunt work. Don't go down the road. He did with quick.

Don't go down the road. I did with ClickFunnels, get the bookkeeper, pay them a few bucks to do what they know how to do really, really well, and save yourself a lot of time. Your time is money too. You know, I was spending 10 hours a week. The weeks I made myself finally do it it would take him an hour to, you know, max, why am I saying you weren't doing it?

What was it doing to your psychologic? Oh, well, it is losing confusion in your head. I [00:28:00] absolutely. And the fear I would, that's why I would put it off because I could see the stack on my desk. I'm like, I have to do that. I know. I don't know. I'm not doing it right. I don't understand what's happening. And then finally it would become overwhelming and I deal with it and I do it all wrong.

So, you know, whatever, whatever your zone of genius is, if, if bookkeeping's not it right, and you're not good at it, then pay somebody to do it. Honestly, I think that's the, that was the. Person. I hired in my entrepreneurial journey. He's still with me today and it was probably the best money I ever spent in my business.

So you're setting, even if you're not using all that information, now you're set for when you're ready to, when you're ready to try something new, he can, he or she can adapt that bookkeeping for you so that it's all set. And what's been great is because he's grown. He's, he's been with me this whole time.

He understands some of my businesses. I have a couple now and they're, and they're quite complicated and they don't run necessarily the way a business normally would. One of them's a franchise and he understands it all, all the backend [00:29:00] of it. So I, if I don't know how to do something, I can call them and say, Hey, you know, how do I do this?

And he'll be like, well, in your business, this is probably how you want to do it. And that is another giveaway. I'm going to get you guys, which is a, how do you find the right bookkeeper, document, which is a whole bunch of tips on there and exactly how to do it the right way. because that's so important, you know, there are people that.

Take a little quiz and say I'm a bookkeeper. They don't know their stuff. You do want to make sure you have a good, solid bookkeeper who can adapt to you. Not the other way around. You're not getting your books kept so that they can make a tax accountant happy. You're getting your books kept so they can give you information and keep the tax accountant happy.

So that's just an aside, but anyway, so where we kind of left off there. Getting a bookkeeper to do the drunk work, getting yourselves a quick book tool. This is the organized piece because you're not going to have to deal with receipts anymore. They can all, you can take a snapshot on them and they go right into the system and match up with the transaction.

So you're the box that's been piling up with. [00:30:00] Receipts goes away. That drawer that's been piling up with reports goes away. You don't have to worry about manually inputting data and taxes actually become a button. You'll literally just give your tax accountant access. They got everything they need and your taxes are done like that.

It's awesome. And it minimizes your tax bill too. Right? And that it also sets the groundwork for the third piece of this, which is knowing your business. So here's the thing that every business owners should know, you have a business model and I think of it as a house, right? You have stuff coming in the door, which is like talent and supplies and materials and whatever you need in order to do what you do.

In your house to create your product, whatever your product is. And then inside your house, you're working all the magic, using all those things to create something that you're then pushing out the other day. To your clients in some high value form that didn't exist before you did your [00:31:00] magic on it. So understanding your business model means, know what all the things are that are coming in the one door, know what they are and how much they cost.

You know what you're doing in here in the house to create the thing you create and how much time you spend doing. And use that information to understand how to price it for the people you're pushing it out the door to. And I have a couple of videos on this, on YouTube that I'll also end up giving you the links for.

but talks about that business model because then, you know, anything you look at financially, you should understand. In the context of that picture, you've just drawn of your house, then it makes sense to you.

Then it's worth your time. Then it's really, really something that's very valuable to you. So. What are your next steps? The takeaways for me are this, know your business model, or at least draw it out, get an understanding of what it is for your business. What comes in, what do you do with it? [00:32:00] What do you sell when you're working with bookkeepers or anybody giving you information, even if it's, you know, the context, ask for your numbers in context over time with that 12.

Rolling report. And also versus what you think was going to happen this month. Go ahead and map out your numbers in a forecast. Do it it's worth it. I'll get you the kit that will give you the link to where that kid is. I want you to open a bank account for your business, get a bookkeeper, unless you are a bookkeeper, and then only review your monthly numbers.

In context, like we talked about, all of this is going to let you identify obstacles and opportunities before they happen and give you as the entrepreneur time to plan, pivot and adjust so that you're doing. Proactively, instead of just reacting to the fact that you just stepped in a landmine or on a landmine, and that's kinda what, what these numbers can do for you.

And it, and it just as an example, if you're one of those people right now is just worn out, you're [00:33:00] exhausted from working in your business. You know, you need to hire somebody. You've got some money in the bank, but you're scared to use it because. I don't know if I'm going to need it for something else.

Am I going to be able to keep paying this person, that forecast model alone that I'm pushing you to do, we'll solve that problem for you right away. And to your point, Kristy time is as valuable as money. So if you can save yourself some time, have more time with your kids or with your spouse or with your friends or God forbid with yourself, then it's absolutely worth that 15 minute investment in that 4k.

It's so critical and it really does affect everything. You know, if again, like you said, if you can afford you, you find out by doing that, that cash flow, that forecast that you can afford a virtual assistant to take some of the tasks, you know, the busy work tasks off your hands. Suddenly you have time to work on your business development.

That's exactly what your business, which is really what you should be doing is working on your business. Not, you know, in your. and that's what your time, your time is actually worth [00:34:00] money that way too. I mean, real money, not just, you know, fake money. Right. And you know, something that I talk about quite a lot is, and I found with a, with a lot of the women that we work with is business development falls by the wayside because.

It's not a fire to put out right now. Right? You push it off. It's like, okay. I know, I need to think about that marketing, or I need to think about those emails, but right now I need to cover the shift or right now I need to do this thing. So I always tell them to block time. Right? You put some time in your schedule where it's non-negotiable, you know, Tuesday from 9:00 AM until noon is your business development time.

And every time you have an idea or you have, you know, something. Pops into your head. You write it on your schedule for Tuesday, between nine and noon. And that's non-negotiable, there's no phone calls. There's no emails. There's nothing in that time. And I think what you're talking about here with this forecasting, with this 15 minutes, a week of forecasting, that exactly the same principle applies.

You take, maybe give yourself half an hour for like music and a little longer block it. And it's non-negotiable you pretend it's like a [00:35:00] meeting with a client and this is the thing that I need to do every single. I love that's exactly right. That is 1000% correct? Yeah. When you, you nailed it. All right. So everybody that's listening, everybody that's watching, uh, we're going to put the link in the show notes for the forecasting tool and the video that Pam's talking about.

And I expect every single one. No excuses, at least 15 minutes. Again, if you're like me, give yourself half an hour and, uh, and, and do it, it's such a relief, when you, and I know I do it all the time, I think I push it off and I push it off and I'll get to it. I'll get to it. And it sits in the back of your head and it affects everything until you finally look at it and then, oh, look, it's actually all good.

It's not anywhere near as bad as I thought it was. That's exactly right. Yeah. Okay, lovely. So we'll put that in the show notes. That's excellent. Awesome. Well, thanks for that Panama. Oh my God. You bet. Perfect.

And you know, I love how you, you make everything right. Plain English there's no, [00:36:00] bookkeeper, accountant speak. It's easy to understand. And it's honestly, for my bookkeeper is infinitely patient with me. He has to explain things sometimes multiple times. So the fact that I got all of that.

It was amazing. So you awesome. And they should be patient they're explaining an expertise that they've studied for however long, right. And it's a whole different language and culture of its own that needs to be translated into entrepreneur. So, and folks can find the book on online as well. It's on Amazon.

It's in bookstores. very easy read told basically as a story of a client by. Wonderful. And we'll put some links for that as well in the show notes. And if you're listening on, any of the platforms really anywhere you can get podcasts, you can, you can find the podcast. If you're listening there and you don't see show notes, just head over to our website.

If you go to one step empire.com, it will have all of the episodes there, all of the show notes, all of the links. So if you're listening somewhere else and you don't see links, just go to one-step empire.com and we'll have all of that good stuff there. And, you know, Pam, you're an entrepreneur yourself.

Obviously you serve [00:37:00] entrepreneurs, but you're also an entrepreneur. So before we kind of head out the door here, couple of questions for you, you know, what is your, uh, what's your biggest struggle that you've found over the years as, as a woman entrepreneur. I tell you for me, very specifically, it has been lead generation because this topic is such a, uh, it's, it's such a trigger for people.

That's been my biggest struggle now. I'm very lucky. I've gotten a little almost well, not almost all of my business by referral, and it's a thriving business based on referral. But the thing I have struggled with wrapping my head around is how to get somebody who needs this and knows they need it.

In the door so that we can get them the information they need to just relax on this subject and make it not that gray cloud over their head. Yeah. Well, you know, and that's, I think lead generation for everybody is no matter what industry they're in, that's always, that's always the number one question is how do I find my people?

I'm going to actually get that two answers. Cause that's a very tactical answer. [00:38:00] Right? I would say the second thing is always wondering if I'm really gonna be. Like am I really an entrepreneur? Or am I just playing it, being an entrepreneur, you know, it's one of those hosters syndrome, comparison syndrome, all of those things.

Very much something I've done a lot of work, with, you know, meditation and self-awareness and all of that. That's been equally as fun for me as an entrepreneur, because I feel like I've just grown in so many ways, unrelated to the business. So that's the other thing. Yeah. I wonder if that ever goes away, because I know women that kind of the top levels of success that still have that, you know, every now and then, I mean, they've learned how to squash it and they've learned how to move past it, but here's its ugly head for some, they define themselves in motherhood for some I've defined my, I defined myself in corporate and as a result, it's very hard to shift that paradigm to say, yeah, I can do anything.

I set my mind to.[00:39:00] And the other one I wanted to ask you too, is what's your best piece of advice for new women founders? Cause we've got a lot of women listening who are in kind of the first, three to five years of their business and some who haven't even launched yet.

They're still just in the preparation stage. So what have you done for. Yeah, don't get dogs. If you're going to do human calls and podcasts or cats, every time I start talking my cat, you don't see him all day and suddenly he needs to be in front of my computer. They're not, mine would be very much. What I did at the very beginning is structured.

Structure your time and stick to it because I find it very, I found it very easy to procrastinate, especially when there were unknown things. So the best advice I can vis somebody is when you decide to do something, figure out what your best productivity tool is and put it to work. Because if you don't do the things you're never going to.

And it's when we stop doing that, we lose that momentum. So that would be my biggest advice structure, your time, or pick [00:40:00] whatever productivity tool you love and put it to work seriously as a, as a job. That's great advice. Excellent. Now, just in case somebody misses the show notes, let's give them a way to get in touch with you.

What's the best way for people to find you? Yep. A couple different ways. The best ways the website, which is profit concierge dot. Okay. And that's just P R O F I T C O N C I E R G e.com. Prophet concierge.com. That's the best place you can reach me from there.

You can see what you can get a lot of free tools there, including this forecast. That's one of the links I'm sending you, not everyone is going to be doing, but to beat a dead horse, go do that. It'll change your life as a business person. Well, and then everyone is listening today. I invite all of you with questions for Pam, because I'm sure you have questions after all of this great information.

You can actually sign up@onestepempire.com. There's a link on there. It'll give you a, we'll give you the list of future recordings. So we'll notify you when we're going to be [00:41:00] doing a recording. So you can actually be on live for a Q and a and ask your question. So go to one-step empire.com and look for the link there.

And you can also submit questions from today's episode and we'll, we'll compile a little followup episode once we've, we've got all those questions and we'll get that information back to you. and we give you an opportunity to have a bit of back and forth with Pam and, and get those questions answered.

So all of that will be in the show notes. Again, it's one step empire.com. And if you've already forgotten Pam's website, that'll be there too. And we'll link we'll link you through. So thank you so much for joining me today, Pam. I really appreciated your time and honestly, the plain speak. It was amazing.

Thank you so much. This was so much fun. Thanks for having me Christie