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Welcome to day three, can you believe we're here? We're talking about cash, I've got a lot to say on this topic and I wanna start off by posing some questions. So I wanna ask you, do you believe it's possible to do what you love while earning excellent money? Or do you believe that work is either dirge, boring, technical, complex and well paid? or it's lowly paid or free and fun and creative. Do you believe that it's possible to earn more than you're currently earning while working fewer hours than you're currently working? Do you want to be liked or do you want to be paid? Do you want fame and followers and accolades or do you want consistent cash and fabulous clients that you can't believe you get to work with? Do you actually believe that you're capable of making excellent coin right now, today, without hiring a huge team, without getting another qualification or meeting an investor who'll fly in and save you with great swathes of cash? Because all these questions, all these beliefs that I'm poking at right now, they're kind of critical, right? If you don't actually believe it's possible for you right now, then it's going to be impossible. When the opportunity, when the amazing opportunity comes, you'll sabotage it. You'll sabotage yourself, you'll turn up late, you'll not follow up with the lead, you'll undercharge. So part one, I'm gonna talk about money dysfunctions, and then part two, I'm gonna get more into the nitty gritty detail of amplifying our cash. But I wanna start with money dysfunctions, and the first thing I wanna say is that a dysfunction is not a life sentence. Money is still taboo in most households. Money is still something that we don't really talk about. And because it's taboo, we give it way more power than it really deserves. So the three main money dysfunctions, as I see them, is struggling to receive money, struggling to hold onto it, and struggling to spend it. Now, I'm going to talk about how to overcome each of these because as I said, it's not a life sentence, it's not some kind of character flaw, it's just your natural kind of response to your socialization and conditioning. So let's start with overcoming fear of receiving money. The first thing is that we want to, I'm going to go through exposure things first. You want to put your prices up. And what I strongly recommend if this is you, if you hate talking about money, If sales conversations make you really, really anxious, if you find yourself, you know, getting into conversations with clients where they bargain you down, they kind of undermine whatever price you gave them, and that happens regularly, then you want to put your prices on your website. Do me a favor, put your prices on your website. Avoid these conversations entirely. While you work towards changing your attitude, The short term easy fix is to put the price up and put it on the website. So now you don't have to have the conversation. Now of course to do this you're going to have to have packages, you're going to have to define what you're doing. You're going to have to have terms and conditions that stipulate payment in full up front. Exposure therapy includes things like setting yourself a weekly or a monthly revenue goal and looking at these. Put it, write the figure on a piece of paper and display that piece of paper. Look at your profit and loss statements monthly. If you don't know anything about accounts, get yourself some training so that you can actually look at your own accounts. You can look at your own bookkeeping. You can track it. You can do it yourself. And you can buy repeated exposure to money. You can. Lessen the grip. When you're receiving money, focus on how you're feeling and whether it feels uncomfortable. And you're going to transmute these feelings into a celebration of self-sufficiency. Because make no mistake, money is about taking care of yourself. Money is about self-care. It's about looking after yourself. And then another couple of things to do if you have trouble receiving money is to practise receiving compliments without getting awkward, yeah, because we're trying to practise receiving here. How do we look people in the eye when they say something nice about us without obfuscating, without getting awkward or making a big deal out of it, without trying to redirect? All right, how to overcome overspending. So if that's you and you feel like, you know, you're constantly in the red, some practical things to start, and then I'm gonna move on to the psychological. Practical things are pay yourself a regular salary amount. Now, I think this is true of most business owners who've been in business for a while. Every single month on the 14th of the month, I've got the same amount that goes into my. personal account from my business bank account. And of course I need to have enough buffer in that business bank account. But I think this is, I know this is a really great practice especially if you're three, five or more years in business pay yourself a regular amount automatically transferred into the personal account. For the overspenders, you wanna automate your savings with your trading account linked to a savings account to remove the ability to spend. Set it all up automatically so that you don't have to touch it, you don't have to look at it. And then you want to reduce spending limits on credit cards or maybe even do away with it altogether. Psychological for overcoming overspending is you're going to write a joy list. This is something I give to a lot of my clients, writing a joy list of free or low cost accessible things that make you happy. A cup of tea in the sun, handstands, calling a friend, walking the guinea pig, whatever it is, put that on the fridge and commit to doing it once a day, every day, because in this way you're training yourself to, to. You know, not think that I need to spend money in order to get pleasure. If I'm going to have pleasure, it needs to be expensive, and it doesn't. And then finally, we're taking up hard exercise. Can I give this to lots of my clients? Because it helps build up your endurance. It helps build up your tolerance for discomfort. It helps demonstrate to yourself that you can do hard things. All right, last one, how to overcome fear of spending money. So if you are scared to spend money, it tends to be related to control and safety. And to help overcome this, we need to address both control and safety. So firstly, control. You wanna stop looking at your financials so closely. You don't need to be checking your financials every single day, yeah? You can perhaps bring in a bookkeeper, You can have an accountant do more of the work or a bookkeeper do more of the work, remove the banking app from your phone and then commit to spending a percentage of your profit each quarter on your business. This is really normal stuff, right? If you're gonna grow a business, if you're gonna be in business, you gotta spend, you gotta spend some money at least. So it could be business coaching, it could be hiring a digital marketer. It could be hiring a systems expert. Certainly that's not something I'm great at. So I hire systems people to set up my processes and systems for me. You could be updating, upgrading equipment, your website, or any other kind of professional learning and development. And then back to our sense of safety for those that fear spending, is we're gonna focus on strengthening our community, strengthening particularly our local business community, having more, making more business friends, initiating regular events and catch-ups, and then also getting into a regular routine with reaching out to old and current clients. And you can do that in a multitude of ways. You're going to put more effort into your personal relationships with friends and family because this really helps to increase your sense of safety. Not all friends and family, of course, you might find in the process. Wow, I don't have anything in common with you. You might need to make some new friends. Yeah. And then we really need to implement holidays and weekends that are free of work. If you feel any sense of embarrassment or shame around money, you're not going to make more. When you are feeling shame or embarrassment, when it feels like this weird love-hate relationship, I have clients tell me all the time that they're not interested in money. They use, you know, words that are laden with shame like greedy or, you know, pushy or needy. You're not going to make more. You're blocking the money from coming in because you're actively telling yourself that this is some, you know, this is some distasteful thing. So if this resonates with you and you do find yourself in a vexed relationship, saying and feeling contradictory things in relation to money, I want you to just look at it, look at it. Cause we take the taboo out of things, right? We take the power away from things. when we stop and actually look at it with clear headedness. In the same way that, you know, when we wake up from a nightmare, we can make ourselves feel better by kind of looking at the nightmare, reassuring ourselves that was a nightmare. This is what happened in the nightmare. Now I'm awake. The nightmare is not real and we take the power away. Just by looking at money more, it will grow. So we are talking about how to increase money, how to amplify money. Because of course, money is at the centre of any and all businesses. And money is the thing that makes it sustainable. It's the thing that makes your impact a lot deeper, your influence a lot wider. It enables you to do the work you feel born to do in a much bigger, more sustainable, more impactful way. So of course it's tricky to give coaching to people that aren't in front of me and a group at that. So I wanna put in a few different scenarios here and you wanna identify yourself or count yourself out of the scenario. You can't be all the scenarios, right? So the first scenario is you booked out, you are working too many hours and you're not earning enough. So you are doing paid client work. for the vast majority of each working day. And maybe even you're working into the evening and possibly even into the weekend, but you are not earning a viable living. You are not earning the equivalent of what you would be earning. And I would hope it would be much, much more than 10K a month. Yeah, because you've got all the additional things that you don't have in a job. You've got to look after your own superannuation. You've got to think about saving for the future. You've got to... You know, there's no such thing as holiday pay or sick pay. What are we doing this for? Right. What, why are we taking on all this extra stress and extra worry and uncertainty as a business owner, if we're not actually earning, you know, 10 K a month at a minimum. So if this is you, booked out, working too many hours, not earning enough, it's time to rethink everything. Don't be dramatic, don't burn it to the ground, but stop doing what you're doing. Because it's not working and that's not your fault. It's not a reflection on your technical ability. You may be the best in town, I don't know. You might be the best, insert your profession here, but the business model is broken, it's not working. So you can change your business model. And I think you should like this is life, right? Change is life, change is good. Progress happens. Like we want this to happen. We don't want to be sitting in the exact same spot 10 years later, looking exactly, you know, how we looked 10 years ago. We don't want that. That's a sign of stagnation. So I want to share a quick client story here. One of my clients was feeling like that. She was overstretched, overbooked, overscheduled. She had a inbox full of people who wanted to do business with her and they were waiting, waiting for her to get back to them and it was killing me. As a business coach it was killing me. I'm like, oh my god, you're in such an enviable position, but she literally did not have time to scratch herself and it was driving both of is charging for fee proposals because things, her business was complicated, her client's business was complicated. It wasn't a simple kind of thing and especially writing a fee proposal, writing an accurate quote for a job was complicated. There wasn't a way of simplifying that step. So what she implemented was a charge for fee proposals. Now, If you've never heard of this before, you might be thinking I've just grown two heads. This is not uncommon at all. I've paid people, I've paid multiple people for feed proposals. I had a consultation with an American woman yesterday who I'd paid and she, you know, presented her information, presented her findings, but it was just a way of getting the next piece of work and this is exactly what my client does as well. So she charges $1,500. I've had other clients charge 3,000. In order to actually scope out the work and write a accurate quote. If your current business model isn't working and you are working way too hard, you need to stop doing what you're doing. I'm going to be sharing a bit more information a little further on about how we actually do that. But the next scenario that might be you or might not be you is you're not busy enough. You're not, you simply don't have enough paying clients. Yeah. If this is you. You don't have enough paying clients. You've got to spend all of your time on pitching. And a lot of people in this scenario also, can you hear that? It's so loud those cockatoos, so joyful. A lot of people in this scenario spend a lot of time networking, but they're networking without pitching. So they're out all the time, they're meeting people all the time, they're telling themselves that it's for their business, but they're not actually gaining any work out of it, right? And they're spending time and energy and money with people that they've got nothing in common with, that they wouldn't really choose to spend time with if they weren't in business, and yet they're getting no business out of it. This makes no sense. So if you're not busy enough, you need to put multiple irons in the fire. You need to make this a priority. It's not a matter of should I do this or should I do that? You've got time. Do all of them. All of the things. Put all of the irons in the fire and stop overthinking things. Stop thinking, oh my God, I can't do that because everything's gonna come in at once. It's not, yeah, it's not. Trust yourself that you can handle things. Should all of your wishes come true and all of those irons, you know, those irons, so to speak, come in, and you do have a lot of opportunities that come in at the same time, trust yourself that you can handle it. You can handle it. And I don't mean working yourself into the ground. I mean taking deposits, telling people that you'll start with them in two months time or one month time, humming a few bars and faking it, letting people feel that the work is commencing when it's not quite yet commencing. So the next situation is number three is lead gen. You are perhaps a little obsessed and telling everybody who listen that you don't have enough leads and you're trying to get leads, trying to get leads, trying to get leads. And I should clarify, a lead is an email address or a phone number. A lead is not a random conversation with a random person. It's an email address or a phone number, not an Instagram follower, not a LinkedIn follower. Now, what I've noticed over and over again is the people that are obsessed with lead generation and they're like more, I don't have enough, I need more leads, almost always do a pretty shit job at sales. So what you want to notice is your actual sales process and your conversion rate. If, for example, you have 10 leads coming in one month, how many of those leads are converting into new paying clients within what time period. And this gives you a percentage which becomes your conversion rate. Because what I've noticed is most people obsessed with leads are really great at burning them. You wanna focus on improving your conversion rate. Focus on what you've got in front of you, the people you've got in front of you who are inquiring about working with you. You know, are you showing them a good time? Do you have a sales process? Is the process clear? Are there points of tension in the process? What is the conversion rate? And then beyond that, are you actually holding onto that client beyond that first sale? Can you increase the amount that they spend with you? And can you hold onto that client longer? so that they are with you for longer and you're not having to worry so much about leads, leads all the time. All right, the final scenario is that you're growing. Congratulations, congratulations. It's a really exciting place to be. And, you know, it can be very discombobulating. There can be some weird and wacky behaviour that happens when we're growing. Self-sabotage and fear of success is a thing. It's a big thing. I see it all the time. I think fear of failure is easier to understand, right? But fear of success is something that I think a lot of people really... um, you know, struggle to recognize it's strange and weird and complicated. And, you know, we don't really get it, but it happens all the time. So if this is you, you're growing your, you know, your revenue, your profit margins are growing month on month, or, you know, fairly rapidly, you want to seek support, you want to ask for help, you want to receive it and don't give you power away in these scenarios. You are the boss. Don't get wobbly because you've brought some expert in to help you. and they're kind of subtly undermining your confidence. This is not what, this is not productive. This is not what you want, right? They are there to serve you, to support you. You are the boss. You know stuff, trust yourself, but focus on asking for help, receiving help, spending money in order to keep that momentum up. So those are four different scenarios. You won't be, you know, all of them. but hopefully you can see yourself in at least one of them. So people are still buying right now. I've had some fantastic months in this 2024, but they're buying differently. They're taking much longer. The things that were ho-hum, nice to have, pretty ordinary marketing, not that differentiated, used to sell really well because in an economic... upturn when the economy is buoyant, people don't worry about spending, they just spend, they see something they want and they buy it. Whereas in an economic downturn, people are going to take their time a little bit more, they're going to consider the purchase a little bit more, you know, perhaps they're going to be a little bit more cautious, but they are still spending and especially in the premium sector. So most business owners are positioning themselves. as low end when they're delivering in fact premium services. They're under charging when in fact they have a boutique specialist specialty premium business where the prices don't reflect this. So if you are charging by the hour you want to move into charging by the day. If you are charging by the day, you want to start charging by the project. You want to scope out the project. If it's complicated, complex, like I said, you can charge clients for that scoping. You can call it a diagnostic or an audit and you can charge them for that. If you are charging project fees regularly, that's how you charge. Then it's time to create assets to leverage. And ideally a low risk. high-profit business has multiple income streams, multiple revenue streams from multiple different places. And from the outside looking in, you know, a person might not see all those income streams. They might just see one or two. But in the back end of the business, there's multiple opportunities happening to earn money. So the basic process of any and all business, regardless of the industry, the sector, the size, same thing, we have leads, we have inquiries. And then we have conversions that gives us our sales conversion rate. Part of this has to do with pricing of course, because oftentimes it turns out, if the business model is broken, it's that... you cannot, it is impossible to earn consistent 10k plus months or 20k or 50k months charging the prices that you're charging in the business model that you're like it is an impossibility. The maths doesn't math. Yeah. So we have leads, we have conversions, we have pricing, which has a direct influence on profit and on whether or not the business model actually makes sense. Then we have delivery of the services or goods. So how do we deliver? How do clients receive the value that we sell? How do they actually, you know, how much time does it take you, for example? What is the process for you servicing your clients? And then the final piece, which I think a lot of people overlook is retention. Yeah. So these are the basic building blocks of any and all businesses. And you can play around with all of those. All of those are open for you to interpret and to change. And if you're listening to this thinking, well, I don't like, I'm getting up and down, up and down all the time income. Like, you know, there's nothing reliable about what I'm doing. Well, firstly, I would ask, are you actually doing consistent marketing and consistent pitching and promotions? Yeah. In 2024, it's not enough just to do our minimum viable marketing. Ideally, we need to layer on another layer of offers and pitches. And that is when you do some kind of promotion for a period of time where you are shining a spotlight on the thing that you're selling. And you don't have to do a drastic discount or anything wild like that to do a promotion that works. But you do have to shine a spotlight. You can't just go, hey, this is what I do. Hey, this is what I do. You have to break it up a little by giving people an immediate reason, urgency and scarcity that they act now and not later. So consistent income needs consistent marketing. It needs a commitment to building relationships. And further to that, there's four different ways to create consistent income. From the top of what I prefer is we have that retainer relationships. And particularly for a lot of different industries, but if you're like counting yourself out immediately. I want you to think about, keep an open mind here, how do I get some kind of retainer where the client comes back month in month out and pays the same amount? And ideally this is set up on a direct debit where I don't have to issue invoices, it just comes in, the money comes in and I service the client and off we go. I saw a One of my clients showed me a facials business. They did skin and they had retainers. They had a membership. So the next part down is the payment plans. Payment plans is recurring amounts of money that are coming into your bank account again. Ideally, they're automatically set up. You're not sending invoices. You're not having to worry about any of that. The money's being deducted and it's a set fee. but you are extending the courtesy of a payment plan to your clients. So it's not a month in month out where they can drop out because it's Christmas. Yeah, it's a set amount and you have extended the courtesy of a payment plan to your clients. And those payment plans can go on, you know, for 12 months, they can be long payment plans. And that can be quite appealing to people because... It tends to be a smaller amount, right? If you've got a set fee and you're spreading it over three payments, it's going to be a lot higher monthly payments than if you spread it out over 12 payments. The next one down is memberships. I don't love memberships because I think they're harder to sell with a smaller audience. They're definitely harder to sell with a smaller audience. And I think a lot of business owners get themselves into trouble because they think, easy and that looks low cost and surely it's a no-brainer because it's so low cost and surely people will buy it and they end up in these kind of situations where they've got a membership that's like a dysfunctional relationship where they give, give and no take. They're making $2.50 a month and they're completely over-servicing their members because they simply don't have enough volume. Memberships really require volume to work properly. And of course there's things that you can do such as getting people to, your month to month membership might be a minimum commitment of three months, a quarterly kind of membership rather than a monthly membership. But I don't wanna discourage you away from it. I'm just saying it's not all it's cracked up to be. It's harder in practice than it might appear from the outside looking in. And then the fourth way of getting that regular recurring income, and this is my least favourite, but I want to add it is to be rebookable. So if you are convinced, if you have told yourself and you've convinced yourself, no, I don't want to get people locked into contracts. No, I don't believe in locking people down. I want them to just use me when as and when they want. Great. You need to get good at becoming rebookable. You've got to understand how to make it a how to assume the sale. so that every single time a client leaves you, you've got the next one booked in the diary. And ideally that you've taken money upfront as well. Because this is, you know, when we make it all so convenient for people, we make it very inconvenient for ourselves. And a lot of business owners are in this position where they're way too easygoing, they're way too accessible, they're way too flexible. and they find themselves in all kinds of trouble because their clients are treating them inadvertently like a doormat. So... I have had some fantastic experiences this year and even in the last six months. And I wanna share these experiences because I think it's really important. It's really important to go seeking evidence that good things can happen. It's really important to go seeking evidence that people are still buying, that people are still paying, that people are still paying good money to work with you. So I've had multiple clients this year who were paid upfront in full, four and a half thousand, six thousand six hundred, ten thousand dollars, it is it has happened over and over again. Yeah. And this is something that I want to encourage you to do. The challenge today is to start talking about money and please for the love of chocolate. Never ask people how much would you pay for this? This is a dumb thing to ask. Don't do this. It makes you look unprofessional. It makes you look like a bit of a ninny and you are not gonna get the truth. People are gonna low ball you because they know what's coming, right? You're the business owner, they're the client. You're saying how much would you pay for this thing? Of course they're gonna low ball you because they don't wanna be paying more, right? So instead of that question, I want you to start getting in the habit of asking how much did you charge and how much did you pay? So you ask your clients and assorted others who might be friends or they might be prospective clients. Oh, how much did you pay for that? Oh, you had a money mindset coach. How much was that? Oh, you went to Bali. Oh, how much did you pay there? Do you mind if I ask how much the resort was? Start getting in the habit because you're always going to get a more honest answer on people, on what people have spent and what they have spent. indicates what they will spend, whereas otherwise, you know, people can, you know, be grossly inaccurate in, oh, I would never spend that. What they have spent is actually the reality. And then you want to get in the habit of asking people how much they charge. So go looking for evidence of people in your industry doing something similar to you who are charging great amounts of money. I made a friend recently, a business friend. She's 24. She's charging $2,500 a month for two coaching sessions on a topic that is not business coaching. And that I found hugely encouraging because that's evidence that if she can do it, I can do it. So, look, ask, people may well deny and obfuscate as they did. to me over the weekend, I asked a woman how much she charged for something, and she obfuscated and I pushed back and she obfuscated again. I thought, fair enough, I'm gonna ask you twice, but I'm not gonna haggle, I'm not gonna hassle you further. That's fine. But if you don't ask you, you'll never find out, right? And when I first started training, I had a conversation with somebody and I said, how much do trainers charge? And she said 2,400 a day. Now, I don't know if that's accurate. I don't know if that's stacked up next to what other people, other trainers would say, but it was a really useful conversation for me to have because I would have come in charging a hell of a lot less than that. And because she told me that amount, I then came in at a much higher rate than I initially would. I've done this with clients, with corporate clients, don't do it with individuals. But with corporate clients, I've definitely done it. Australia Post, for example, when I had them as a client, the person I was dealing, I had a figure in my head as to what I was gonna charge. And the guy I was dealing with, I said, look, do you mind telling me what the last person charged for this kind of work? And he said, oh yeah, let me just talk to some colleagues and get back to you. So he spoke to the colleagues and he got back to me and he gave me an amount that was double what I was thinking of charging. And now... several years later, I look back on that job and I think I could have charged Australia Post three times what I charged them easily and they still would have got a bargain. So have these conversations, start talking about money. If you're listening to me and I've identified anything, you know, I've kind of named your circumstance, please put your price up. I've had this situation over and over again, not only in my own business but in my clients businesses as well. where something hasn't been selling, and then we put the price up, in some instances we've doubled the price, and all of a sudden it starts to sell. Because one thing that happens that doesn't get talked about nearly enough, is that when you raise your price, you will rise to meet that price. You will pay more attention, you will take more care, you will think more deeply, you will be more conscientious, you will revise your process, you will... redesign your methodology, yeah, you will rise to meet that price. So this is the challenge today, talk about money, ask questions, ask people what they've spent, what they've already spent on certain things, ask your colleagues how much they charge, go looking for evidence of people that are charging three times what you're charging and they're probably less experienced than you are. clearly the writing on the wall that you need to raise your prices, go ahead and raise your prices.