Three tips for business inner peace
Today I’m continuing with my business brand of Superfreak to share three tips for business inner peace.
These simple reminders will help to support you in gaining a big picture perspective, making aligned decisions, and importantly, gaining inner peace.
I talk about learning to manage and understand time really well and why we must see this as a necessity instead of a luxury.
The best ideas don’t always come when you’re thinking critically!
I dive into understanding cash flow, projecting what will be coming in if you do nothing and how this both did and didn’t save my business. Then I go into the importance of being authentic and making strategic decisions in your business that line up with who you really are.
Also, Bloom Business Incubator is coming soon! This is a 3 month intimate group-coaching deep-dive into the moving parts that make a business bloom. I’m excited to share more about what this experience will look like. It might just be for you!
See below for a full transcript.
Don’t forget to go to the bottom of this page and let me know in the comments any questions or what you think or just share the love on social. Thanks
Podcast transcript.
Welcome back to another episode of this business themed Superfreak. I want to talk to you today about some really simple reminders to help you create inner peace when it comes to business.
Now, the reason why I'm sharing this is because I am so excited to talk about the Bloom Business Incubator. I will talk about it a little bit more at the end, but something that I coach people on all the time is supporting them to have a sense of inner peace when it comes to business.
Sometimes we think that knowing more and working harder at the things that we know, like marketing and sales and being in the actual job and trade of our business by just going a little bit harder in that it actually improves things on the bottom line. But when you can take a larger perspective and look at the overall picture of business and how all of the wheels work together, all the spokes of the wheels work together, so the wheel can spin,…
it makes a really big difference to know that there might be a couple of little tweaks that you can make that actually will impact your business long term.
You've heard me talk about the difference between revenue and profit. And you've also heard me talk about the fact that our education needs to go beyond just understanding marketing and sales, although they are incredibly important pieces of the wheel. I can't stress that enough.
You would have heard me say before that sometimes when we think okay, I'd like to make more money or I'd like to create a little bit more profit. Well, I need to create more sales in order to create more sales. I need to do leads, which means I need to do marketing, which means I need to do sales, and then I can make more profit and how there's so much more that can contribute to your business's bottom line and the profits, than only marketing and sales.
Sometimes it's not the time to double down on our marketing and double down on our sales, but I want to talk today about a few things that will give you business inner peace that are given me business inner peace.
1 - The first one is learning to manage and understand my time really, really well.
So as somebody who occasionally has limited bandwidth for energy understanding how to manage my time hasn't just been a nice luxury, it's actually been a necessity for me. And I wish that everybody had this as a necessity instead of a luxury because I know that so many business owners, especially business owners, who are super busy with like family and other responsibilities, and perhaps even the business is a side hustle.
We can feel like there's not enough time to do all of the things that we need to be doing inside of business and instead of letting business grow with the time that we have and trusting that the amount of time that we have is the perfect amount of time for us in this life stage. And doing the things that are most important.
We buy into this idea that we need to make more sales and do more marketing and get more leads and there's just never enough and that we don't have time to do all of those things and therefore our business suffers because we don't have the time because we've got a family because we've got X Y Z and all of that just doesn't have to be the case.
When you're managing your time correctly. You're able to think critically about exactly what needs to happen in order to support your business to continue to take and continue to run. There might be a few small little tweaks that you make that help you bring in more money at the end of the day that don't take a lot of time but here is the kicker when it comes to time;…
…so many of us because we have often left a nine to five job we work nine to five hours and we're used to just making ourselves look busy for most of the day with unproductive tasks.
The other thing is, instead of making our life flow around our business, what I want you to do as a business owner, to really bring yourself inner peace when it comes to time is make your business flow around your life.
And what that means is
being incredibly disciplined with booking your time on and time off, more importantly.
Before you book in other things, book your downtime, your time that you're taking care of you your time that you're spending with loved ones, your time that you are taking completely off and the time that you are working on your business being separate to the time that you work in your business.
For some of us, we don't have a lot of time to do this. And to those of you who this is true. You don't have the time not to do this.
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And we think that if I just put out these next few fires, if I just get through this next project, if I just if I just, if I just before I take a holiday, before I give myself a day off, before I give myself the time to really work on this overall strategy. If only I could just put out this fire then I will give myself the time to work on my business. And of course it just doesn't work that way.
I heard this really funny metaphor the other day I can't remember who said it to me but it was like trying to brush your teeth while eating an Oreo biscuit and I thought that's such a good metaphor for how people do business. I can't remember where I heard it. Because on the one hand, you're not thinking about the big picture. And you're still adding to the stress and the complexity of your business.
So managing your time and I'm not just talking about nine to five I'm talking about from an overall perspective of understanding time and understanding how valuable it is, where we come up with our best ideas. It's not always when we're sitting at our desk thinking critically, it's when we're taking time off when we're taking time down when we're spending time with our families. It's that energizing time away from the business that is just as important and if that is not booked in first, if these are not taken care of before everything else, I guarantee you, it does not take priority when things are really busy.
So what I have all my business clients do is book out the next holiday within the first 90 days of working together so that I know that in the time that we are working, they have something to look forward to to reward themselves for the hard work that they have put in no matter the results and that is so important. So that's the first thing.
2 - The second tool that is going to give you business Inner peace is understanding cash flow.
Now, many of you if you are new to business, you might understand budgeting and thinking about what things cost and how much money you have. But cash flow is a new level of this. And I've got an interesting perspective on cash flow for you as well. Because some of us understand cash flow but like Yeah, but how does it actually help me create inner peace if my cash flow doesn't look the way that I want it to.
Cash flow is when you can project forward on a spreadsheet or with some software, how much money you can expect to be coming into your business whether it's guaranteed money from previous sales that you've made that have not been fully paid off yet because they're part payments or there's invoices pending or whatever it might be.
And it's also if you want to add in this complexity, cash that you can perceive or project that you will make based on either previous evidence so maybe a past launch, or that month in the three previous years. You might take the average amount of money that you've made based on local events or the things that you have launched that month, ..
…and you put it all together in a spreadsheet, so you're not only looking at how much money is in your bank account, but you can see how much you can expect to make in the next however long let's say a year, month to month or week to week or quarter to quarter and it will help you see the larger picture of pretty much if you did nothing for the next little while.
How much money do you have sitting in the bank account to be able to pay your bills. Now that's not the total purpose of cash flow, but it gives you a pretty good picture of when things need to happen.
So cash flow actually saved my business until it didn't.
Because when I was early in business, as you know, I was learning about these kinds of things that I had no idea about when I started my business. And I remember feeling very stressed about the amount of money that was in my bank account and then thinking about all the things I had to pay and what was happening and constantly feeling like I was never making enough sales yet. I always made it by.
Now what was happening was I always had people paying me off in payment plans. I always had people paying me off long term, which I love payment plans, and I didn't really have anyhere that I was tracking how much money you could expect to come in in a month in the sales I had made months before that was sold on payment plans. So I'd be looking at my bank account thinking oh my goodness, I need to make X amount of dollars this month just to cover expenses and not really thinking about, this sounds kind of stupid as I'm saying it, but it's really where I was at, not really thinking about how much money I still could expect to come in from sales I had previously made now.
It's really easy to forget this when you're in business and you have a million plates spinning, or so It feels, so if this is you please don't beat yourself up. It's so normal that cash flow and having a cash flow spreadsheet and understanding cash flow would totally transform your view of cash coming in, cash received in, cash you can expect coming into your business now.
I also said that it didn't save my business and here's why. And if you're sitting there going.. “Yes., well I have a cashflow spreadsheet it doesn't look very exciting to me, Hayley, because I can see that I don't have very much cash coming in.”
Here's the thing. Your Cash Flow only ever shows you how much money is going to come in if you do nothing. So sometimes I speak to business owners who are looking at their cash flow and they start to feel really anxious and they kind of freeze and panic with anxiety over the fact that the cash flow is not looking good. And they've only got a few weeks or a few months before the cash flow is going to run out.
And it is a scary place to be because it can kind of feel like I can't rest. I can't stop because we just have to keep going.
We're going week to week now. I want to remind you that businesses that take startup capital, businesses that have lots of employees, and businesses that really kick off in debt are constantly operating like this. They're not always cashflow positive, sometimes they have to take on more capital more investment in order to keep the business running.
But small business owners. who are service based businesses, this is an important thing for you to learn whether you have a big business or not, because it really helps you see the projection of where your business is going like when it might be a good time to launch things when it might be good time to sell when it might be a good time to start creating something new, when you go in to have some space to actually take a break.
It gives you a fantastic picture. It also helps you see where if you're operating in, what feels like feast and famine, where you can actually implement marketing and sales into your business when you don't need it so that you have the ongoing income when you will down the track when you will need it.
So it's a very, very powerful tool to support you in gaining big picture making decisions and helping you feel a sense of inner peace at the work that you've previously done, that you can enjoy and relax into and rely upon as your business grows and develops and scales. So over time you'll start to see that you have a certain amount of money that is guaranteed to already come in even if you did nothing at a minimum because it's money that you've already made through previous sales and people still paying off things that they've bought from you.
And over time you can layer in more sales, more marketing more selling more things that people can do with you that they can pay you for that will build up this recurring, I will call it leveraged income, not passive income over time where you've done the work once and it's been paid off for you, and it's another way that you can bring more revenue into your business to whereby you might only be selling one thing but you're still being paid for things that you have sold and done and are still doing sometimes in the past.
So cash flow is a really beautiful thing to get into in your business and remember if it doesn't look the way that you want to, it is only indicative of what will happen if you did nothing. So if your cash flows not looking really good, it will help you see where you can go and what you can do.
3 - Authenticity
Now the final thing I want to talk to you about when it comes to business inner peace is actually something a little bit more mindset related. And less concrete and practical, although this is concrete and practical when applied and that is to be authentic. Now it might not seem like it brings inner peace to be authentic. But here's the thing,
When we don't show up as ourselves,
….when we don't strategically make decisions in our business that line up with who we really are, and what we really think, and how we really feel, and how much energy we really have, and how much time we really want to work, and how much money we really do want to make, and how much we really want to charge….
….It becomes effort.
When you're acting and behaving and showing up in a way that is authentic to you. It becomes effortless, and ….
so by being authentic, which I believe it takes a little bit of work to narrow down what is actually authentic to you because we can be so easily inspired and influenced by our influencer culture. When you are clear on what's authentic to you and you stick to that. And you make decisions from that place and you operate from that place and you share from that place, you market from that place, and you sell from that place, and you run your business and your team and your life from that place, it becomes so much easier and so much more effortless than trying to be a second rate version of someone else.
So authenticity is incredibly important in business.
And here's another reason why, from a practical perspective. It's really easy when you, when you kick off a business and you start to look around and we get really inspired by those around us. That's oftentimes why we start a business because we think oh my gosh, that person is amazing. I feel a kinship and connection to that person. I think I would love to learn from them. I think I could do that too. That's awesome. It's also really easy to then model what we see around us, which is of course natural. It's what we do as humans. It's how we create success. It's a beautiful thing. It's how we learn to walk and talk and speak different languages, we model off other people. But, ….
there comes a certain phase, where life is asking us to think for ourselves, life invites us to challenge ourselves with doing what we know from our own perspective, and it's in those moments when we are truly living and operating from our own highest values, and ….
what is important to us and what we think is beautiful and what we think is powerful, what we think is true, and what we want to show the world. That becomes what we are known for that becomes what people want to listen to us or watch us or work with us for. It's not because we are a secondary version of someone else's because we're 100% ourselves.
And coupled with that if you're doing it from a place of- this is genuinely me it's like the easiest, most effortless way I can do this for myself because it's the most fun and exciting and inspiring for me, then you can see with it has this beautiful exponential clash - where it's super easy for you and the easier it is for you, the more fun it is for people to experience the more people want to experience and then it's even easier for you to continue to grow your business and grow every part of your business not just you know, a following.
So being authentic is a wonderful business strategy. In fact, it is incredibly underrated in today's world and something that if you spend a little bit of time thinking with and muddling with and being with, will pay off in dividends.
So I hope that this has been helpful for you. It is three simple strategies for business in a pace These are three things that I will be delving into in depth with the folks who joined me for the Bloom Business Incubator, which is starting very soon.
This is a 90 day coaching experience with the education that many business owners do not receive until they get it from the school of hard knocks, in other words, real life experience learning from mistakes and we're going to spend 90 days going through it together where I'm coaching you in exactly how to think critically about your business, big picture and make decisions for you based on your goals, your values, your life stage, the season of your business, that are going to be the most impactful for you and I'm going to teach you how to do that for the rest of your business.
So if you want to know a little bit more about that, you can click the link underneath the podcast here. You can also reach out and message me if you want to find out if this is right for you and have a little conversation about it. That's fine.
So I hope you've enjoyed this episode today. Thank you for being here. I hope this has been really helpful and I'll see you in our next episode of Superfeak.
Stay Curious, Stay open. The life you crave is so much closer than you think.
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