The financial cross roads

How do you handle the financial crossroads of either reinvesting back into your business or finally taking more chips off the table to pursue your own personal financial goals?

I read this question in a FB group a couple of days ago and I had to write this post down.

Cause I know how annoying it is…

We know our business needs more cash to achieve the level of scale we dream of; the big team who can do all the sales and delivery, the big client base who love the work you do and the ability to step into being a fulltime CEO focusing on growth opportunities instead of playing fire fighter all the time.

But what about all of those personal goals you yearn to achieve?

The nice house with the backyard for your kids to run around in. The investment property portfolio you have seen your colleagues building for years while you feel like you’re falling behind. The surplus cash in the bank that is poised and ready to be deployed when investment opportunities present themselves.

You know like those underpriced tech stocks that plummeted at the beginning of Rona that have now gone up by 1000%+. 

The ones you look back in regret because you weren’t able to find the funds or the mental bandwidth from your business to pursue.

There’s nothing more deflating as an entrepreneur to feel like you are missing out on the freedom and flexibility you got into business to create…

...I wish I just had more profit to grow my business

…I wish I had more cash-flow so I could pay myself what I’m worth

...I wish I had the surplus that allowed me to put more towards my personal wealth

Truth be told, although many entrepreneurs don’t talk about their money and wealth, most business owners have found themselves in this position. I included.

And I know you must have heard from your coach the line…

“You just have to put in more reps”.

More leads, more sales, more team members, more hustle.

So now let me tell you something real.

Most coaches truly don’t understand WHY this vicious cycle happens and why most business owners struggle to break free of the time-for-money trap. And no, doing more sales calls and generating more leads will NEVER solve your issue.

Cause when you don’t have a financial operating system in your business, your business will ALWAYS be a cash-eating monster instead of a profit-making machine and it will CONSUME all of the precious life-blood both you and your business needs to not just survive but thrive.

You’ll start making false assumptions about going back to the good ol’ “I’m not cut out for this game...I’m not working hard enough.” thinking pattern.

Which is gonna make you feel more stuck and even more desperate for chasing vanity metrics that will NEVER get you closer to your goal.

It might seem counterintuitive, but your problems have NOTHING to do with how good you are at business, lead generation, sales or any of that business growth BS you’ve been sold for years.

Let me explain the two potential scenarios you’re facing;

1. You’ve positioned your business as the destination, not a wealth creation vehicle it’s supposed to be
2. You have no systems, structure or safety nets in place for your money so your cash disappears before your eyes

The first means you haven’t taken the time to really consider how you use your business as a vehicle to supercharge your trajectory for financial success. Let’s face it, you’re part of an elite club of the world’s most successful people - you’re a business owner. 

The only difference between you and them is that they know what role their business plays in their wealth journey and have positioned their business as a tool that got them from average Joe and Josephina to wealthy Wally and Wendy. 

Do you think Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg reinvest every last red cent back into their business without fulfilling their own personal goals first? No, they have dismissed the idea of shrinking themselves wealthy and have designed a successful empire that allows them to have their cake and eat it too.

Your small business might be a long way from the level of Tesla or Facebook, however how you choose to manage your money doesn’t have to be.

The second is the reason why the first is an issue. Your money, much like your business needs systems to function properly. Imagine taking on a new team member, throwing them into the abyss with no training, no mentorship and no clear measure of success. 

How well do you think they will perform their role? I think it’s safe to say that their likelihood of failure would be astronomical.

Why is your money any different?

It doesn’t matter if you’re a coach, a financial planner, an accountant, an agency owner or a tradie… Every business needs a financial operating system that gives you structure, financial clarity, allows you to make financial decisions with pin-point accuracy and provides a clear strategy for how you scale your business and fund your ideal lifestyle.

So if you wanna avoid these issues, you’re gonna need a simple system to follow that helps you gain more goal clarity of what you want outside of your business, a clear path to reverse-engineer your goals into your business to define a clear profit target. 

A way to turn your profit target into simple KPIs and metrics that help you measure your success and link your activity to the outcomes you want.

And lastly, a way of course correcting quickly when your finances start to veer off track.

Otherwise, without all this you’re gonna keep feeling as though you’re treading water, working harder than ever while stuck in a cash-flow trap that has you going around in perpetual circles.

(Which will literally drain all your energies, and weaken your confidence and motivation.)

This all sounds well and good but you’ve got other things to worry about, right? 

You’ll just come back to this later, like you’ve been saying for years once you’re done getting all of your other business growth projects done because all of this money stuff will be far more effective when you have a BIGGER business.

You see, this is the biggest problem for most small businesses. Your money is tomorrow’s problem because you aren’t clear on the COST of NOT doing this NOW.

For example, I was working with a coach recently who had a great business. Loyal clients, steady flow of leads, high conversion rates and amazing client retention. From all accounts, he had a FANTASTIC business.

Except, there was a chink in his business armour. 

There was no mechanism for turning business profit into personal wealth and everything kept getting reinvested back into the business. 

Yeah he had a nice family home but the remainder of his cash-flow was either eaten up by the business or consumed by lifestyle spending.

His baseline plan had him on track for $4,036,000 in net worth over 20 years. It’s not the worst outcome in the world right?

But there were HUGE opportunities to maintain his lifestyle, remove cash-flow bottlenecks and help him turn business profit into personal wealth.

With a few small adjustments, we were able to restructure his cash-flow, design a wealth strategy to recycle his debt, use smart leverage strategies to compound his wealth and allow him to supercharge his net wealth to $8,852,000 over 20 years (more than doubled compared to the base line).

But most of you will read this post and think: “mmm… It looks like something I might need, but not right now”.

And that’s the exact problem that then shows up in your bank balance at the end of the month.

Tomorrow’s problem is showing up with a vengeance today and costing you not hundreds, not thousands, but MILLIONS in lost wealth due to inaction.

If you want financial freedom in the future, you need to start taking action TODAY. 

Unlike chasing more leads, more sales, a bigger team, wealth doesn’t necessarily provide you instant gratification, however the small shifts you take today will compound into HUGE shifts in your future.

You can see how the true problem isn’t that you don’t have a good business, but ultimately a lack of financial clarity around why you’re working so hard, a system to ensure you hold on to your hard earned and a structure that holds you accountable to turning business profit into personal wealth.

If you want to start making your money work harder for you, if you want to see your bank balance growing all while you grow your business profitably, pay yourself more and see your wealth grow without sexy or sophisticated wealth creation strategies that require all of your spare time to manage, this is exactly what I’ll help you do within my Accelerate program.

In this program, I’m not just gonna help you identify and remove your money roadblocks, but I’m also gonna help you design a financial road map that spans 20 years into the future so you know exactly what you’re working towards and what your business needs to produce for you to manufacture financial freedom.

Then I’ll help you analyse your financials in your business, reviewing your 7 levers of cash-flow and profit, helping you unlock quick cash all without more leads, more sales or a bigger team. We’ll review your pricing and how you position your value so you can quantify your value based on financial facts your clients understand.

We’ll help you implement our financial operating system that we’ve tested with over a thousand clients who on average improve their cash flow by $2,000-$3,000 a month almost instantly. 

We’ll get you paying yourself a regular income that you deserve to earn and get you out of treating your business like an ATM all while getting you complete clarity around your money and how it flows through your business and personal bank accounts. 

Then finally, we’re gonna help you define the right KPIs that will give you the ability to link your business activity to personal outcomes and show you simple methods that have been proven to help you turn business profit into personal wealth, even if you’ve read wealth and finance books until you’re blue in the face, studied finance at uni or even if you’re a financial services professional (some of my best clients are financial advisers, accountants and mortgage brokers).

If you’re making at least $20,000 a month in your business, have been able to deliver great results to your clients and take pride in being the best in what you do, want a plan to double your profits and personal income over the next 12 months and have 2-3 hours a week to take action.

Then this program is for you.

Shoot me a DM with the word ACCELERATE if you want to know more about it.

Jackson