Overcoming Fear Through Financial Collaboration: A Real Business Case Study
We don’t often want to admit this, but this great client, she admitted this often. She was really quite frightened of the numbers. And in fact, I find that with most clients, especially when they’re starting out. They often have quite a successful business, but they are not looking at the numbers. And when they are not looking at the numbers, they start to fall behind in their business practices. They get other people to help them not knowing what they’re really asking for.
So, my client didn’t understand GST or entities or Capital Gains Tax. And we started out exploring some of these things to see whether her business was set up correctly. She was also not sure what buckets of cash to take and what was hers really? What was the business’s? She had everything in together and thought it was too hard to separate it. But what I helped her to understand was that doing it that way, left it up to the Bookkeeper to make those decisions for her. She kept fantastic records, but the Bookkeeper she was using didn’t necessarily follow her instructions on those records, because sometimes Bookkeepers think they know better than the Business Owner. And this is a scary thing to discover.
When coming to us and starting to really look at her numbers, we just did what I always do with clients – went through the story of her business, in numbers. What’s your income? What are your expenses? How does this fit with this? Which part of the business does this income come from? Which part of the business does that income come from?
So we did a lot of things, together, and she had all of the pain points that I witnessed with clients. That shyness about what they know and don’t know. The fear of making a mistake of changing something, of facing up to the Bookkeeper, who’s actually maybe not being very helpful. Having a disinterested Tax Agent. Layers and layers and layers of things that should have been straightforward for this client had been made difficult, sometimes through her own behavior, sometimes through the behavior of others.
But any Business Owner can understand, when things are presented correctly in their financial statements. And it’s not that hard to get it right. It just takes a little bit of sucking up the energy, to actually collaborate with someone like myself, and really buy into the numbers.
The lovely thing about this case study is we came up with some tactics about which money was hers and when it was, because she had a business where often things were paid for in advance. So we’ve got this method that she loves that allows her to split out what belongs to her – what’s wages, couple of other things. And her phone literally goes ’Ker-ching’. when it’s her money going into her account.
Money is set aside for BAS, possible refunds, all that sort of thing. That’s part of what we do here at Better Business Decisions. It’s in the collaboration with you about what you don’t understand, what you’re fearful about, and what’s not working in your business. From that, we unpack better ways for you, so that the information is there, the conversations can be had, and you make better decisions.
Thanks for being with us today.
The best thing about working one-to-one with my clients is finding ways to help them break down the unique barriers they have about understanding their numbers. In this video business owners can see that self-doubt is a common problem when it comes to business numbers. Who can you collaborate with to gain a better understanding of your numbers? The more you view your numbers with an expert the better your understanding will become.
