Lessons

Lesson Info

Get The 360° View Of Your Business

relax. It doesn't have to be as hard as you expect it to be. Doesn't have to be as hard as a lot of people would like you to believe that it is if we can look at how these things actually work and what it actually means for your business. You can have a much more flexible, relaxed way of approaching a highly profitable service based business so that you get to do work that you love and have a life that you love as well. Alright, now that you've got that bird's eye view on some of the most important components of managing your service based business, let's get a 3 60 degree view and make sure that you're covering all your bases so that your business is sustainable, successful, profitable, taking care of you every single day to do that, we need to measure the health of your business first and foremost. I like to remind every single small business owner that maintenance work is a key part of the work of running a business. It's not always the most glamorous, it's not always the work that ...

you're going to want to post to instagram or talk about on twitter facebook, but it is work that ensures that you feel good about your business, that your clients feel good about your business and that all the moving parts are moving together. And so that just means taking care of your business. It means not always deferring those sort of administrative tasks to the next day or the next week. It means really building maintenance work into your business from day one every single day. You want to keep your eye on how the business is actually working so that you can address any problems as they come up and make sure that that you are maintaining the sustainability that you've built in from the beginning. So to do that, let's go back to that sustainable business framework that we talked about in the very first lesson. And these are some questions that you can ask yourself to sort of take that measure of health on your business and make sure that it's hitting the marks that you wanted to hit. So under personal and social sustainability, are you paying yourself appropriately? Have you considered what salary you need to make from your business? And are you paying yourself that salary doesn't mean you have to run payroll, but at the end of every month, are you paying yourself the amount of money that you should be making from this business? The amount of money that you want to make from this business where you don't want to be, is saving that to some leftover profit calculation at the end of the year. At the end of the quarter. Every single month we want to make sure that you're getting paid that any contractors or staff you have are getting paid and that it is taking care of you, that that payment is taking care of you. Second, as I said, can you pay your team appropriately? You might be a business of one disregard this question, but if you have any contractors or employees working with you, you want to make sure that they're paid appropriately as well. And then finally, in terms of personal and social sustainability, you want to make sure that you're re investing in yourself and your team. That can mean continuing education, it can mean taking a vacation, it can mean a three day or four day weekend or a three day or four day work week. All of those different things go to our re investing in yourself and making sure that you are also working sous Sustainably as your business is working sustainably, then we can think about financial sustainability. We want to take a look there at revenue, right? We want to be tracking revenue on a regular basis. I know that especially if you're just getting started or if business feels a little off, tracking revenue can feel like the last thing you want to do, but you know, nine times out of 10 when I don't want to check my numbers because I'm afraid that they're going to be really low. My numbers are better than where I expect them to be and normally they're right where they should be. So, tracking revenue on a regular basis is just gonna help you feel like, yep, this is everything, financially is going the way that they need to be going second expenses. Is there anything that you're spending money on that you don't need to be spending money on, have your expenses gotten progressively higher as your business has gone on? Some of that is to be expected and some of that is dead weight that you can get rid of. So checking expenses and expenses as a percentage of revenue I think is a really good measure of the health of your business as well. Also in terms of financial sustainability, let's look at your client load, where are you at with your client load? And what I mean by that is, how many clients do you have capacity for? And do you have that capacity filled or is it overflowing or are you way under what your capacity is now, you don't necessarily want to be working at full capacity all the time. You do definitely don't want to be working above capacity all the time, client load is going to vary from month to month, quarter to quarter year to year, but checking in with it on a regular basis and ensuring that, you know, you're filling any empty spots that you have or maybe even having to fire a client or two, if things have gotten out of hand, that's an important piece of making sure that your business is financially sustainable as well, then finally, let's look at pipeline. So if client load is based on your capacity for clients, pipeline is all of the people who have not become clients yet. So that's making sure that you are getting leads on a regular basis or that you're doing the marketing required to bring in those leads on a regular basis. And I put that marketing piece squarely in the financial sustainability piece because it's really what gives you that sort of leading indicator on the financial health of your business. Speaking of financial health, we want to make sure that we are tracking income and expenses, revenue, expenses. As I just mentioned, fiber workspace makes that super easy. Let's take a look at how that looks inside the software earlier. I showed you one way to see how that money is being tracked via the shoebox function and you can remember that we went to the transactions tab there at the end and I could see my income and my expenses all on one screen. So you've seen that, maybe you've played around with that a little bit already. But another piece that I really like to look at as a business owner is my income statement. That's sort of that bird's eye view on the money in my business and I can run that report at different lengths of time as well. So I might compare this year to last year or this quarter to last quarter. So from fiber workspace, you're gonna click in the left hand nav where it says statements and as you can see we've got some options here for running this income statement report. I can choose the last seven days. I can choose the last 30 days. I can choose this month, last month, last year, you get the idea. Um and those different date ranges or those different kinds of reports are going to be um important to different kinds of businesses in different kinds of ways. But even if you just only look at your income for the last 30 days once a month, you are going to be in much better shape and have a much better 360° view of your business than the average business owner. So I've got this populated with just a couple of example things here, but this is showing me my total revenue for the last 30 days and it's showing me those expenses that I've created. So there's a travel and transportation expense, there's a supplies expense and then there's my profit before taxes. So this is essentially the net profit from the business. The amount of money that I can pay myself from keeping an eye on your revenue and your expenses and how they're changing and evolving over time is going to help you make sure that your business is financially sustainable. Finally, let's revisit the health of our business around operational sustainability. First, are you automating and streamlining things as you go. What new process have you created? A standard operating procedure for what new set of tasks have you created a template for in your project management software, what new communication templates have you created and loaded into fiber workspace. Anything you can do around that kind of operational sustainability and operational predictability is going to help you run more sustainable business manage a more sustainable business For me, I like to make sure that I'm banging out one or two of those projects per month and little by little by little, it will take you less time to manage your business. 2nd. Are you delivering on time? I think that it can be really easy to lose track of the timeline, especially if it's not something that you're involved in daily. So we want to make sure that we're hitting those due dates and if we're not hitting due dates, why what obstacles are we running into that? That's preventing us from delivering on time. They might be client problems, right? You might not be getting what you need from your clients. Well, that's a cue that that piece of your business operations needs some attention. Maybe you need to change up your communication policy a little bit. Maybe you need to make deadlines firmer anything like that. That's going to help you make sure that you're delivering on time. That's a good indicator of health for your business. And then finally, under operational sustainability, I want to make sure that my predictions about projects. So my projected timelines are our spot on the closer I can get a project to go to plan the healthier. I know my business operations are, so again, if things are getting off track, I want to use that as a cue to make some adjustments, but I can't do that if I'm not paying attention to those project plans and how they're unfolding in time. So that's what it takes to really manage a service based business in a sustainable way. We need to think about personal and social sustainability. We need to think about financial sustainability and we need to think about operational sustainability. We've gone through a bunch of the different tools that you can use to make your business more sustainable and think about how each piece works together in a strategic way. Bottom line doing this work will help you get back to the work that you love and guess what? It can also help you love the work of managing your business. And truly, if I have a sort of big picture goal for you, it's that I want you to love managing your business as much as you love the work that you're passionate about, the work that you do with your clients. And I believe that following this kind of strategic framework, thinking about that bird's eye view of your business and making sure all the pieces work together is the way to do it, The more haphazard your business management is, the less you think about making things predictable and repeatable, the harder it is to enjoy those tasks. They're going to be tasks that you don't look forward to. So instead, when we take this more strategic view, when we think about predictability and sustainability and repeatability, we put ourselves in the position of being able to love the work of managing our businesses as much as we love the work that we do with our clients. Because managing our businesses is not busy work, it is the work of running a business. I hope this class has given you that bird's eye view on how your business works and how you can love your business as much as you love the work that you do.