Fix your Finances (Part 1): The big money mistake + money avoidance

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio

 Welcome to this special miniseries called Fix Your Finances. Over the next three days, I’m gonna be releasing three episodes because at the moment I’m hosting a live challenge. And I thought that I would come and share it here on the podcast as well, because I know the content will be so valuable that I wanted you to be able to experience as well, even if you aren’t signed up for the live challenge.

So over the coming three days, I’m gonna be taking you through how you can work on fixing your finances, because I know this is one of the biggest things that business owners struggle with. Today I’m gonna be diving into the fatal finance mistake that is quietly sabotaging your profit. And it’s something I see way too many smart business owners do.

And we’re also gonna unpack the real reason that you avoid looking at your numbers. And no, it’s not because you’re bad with money, it’s deeper than that. If your current financial strategy is. Hope for the best. This episode will give you the wake up call and the warm hug you didn’t know you needed.

 Welcome to the Three Day Challenge. I am delighted that you are here and that you have chosen to invest this time in learning more about one of the most important things about your business, which is your finances.

Over the next three days, you are gonna get past your fear of finances and you’re gonna learn how to up level your profitability.

Now, I wanna be really upfront because I know that we all hate when we are getting sold to. So I wanna be completely transparent, which is that. You know, I am gonna be talking about my program, which is called the Profit Academy Foundations.

So the Profit Academy is my signature Money training program. It’s a step-by-step framework to help you grow your business profit inside you learn how to manage your numbers. In as little as 15 minutes a week, you’ll learn all about the accounting lingo, all the stuff that your accountant talks about, and you think, what the hell are you talking about?

I’ll teach you all of that. Inside the program, I’ll show you exactly how to understand and analyze the numbers in your business so that you are the CEO again, and you’ll also find out the process to actually hire the right money team. And the last module inside the Profit Academy Foundations is my favorite.

It’s how to actually grow your business profit. So if you learn how to look at your numbers. And things aren’t quite what you want them to be. The last module actually teaches you how to grow it, so I’ll talk to you more about it at the end, but I wanted to just straight away tell you that that’s, that’s what we’re gonna be talking about at the end of the program.

Um, even if that course isn’t right for you, my intention is that over these next three days, you will learn. Enough to still be able to have a transformation when it comes to the space of money. So even if that program’s not the right fit for you right now, I really wanna put a lot into the next couple of days.

I want you to go and take action as well. I’m gonna set you little activities to complete each night because I really want you to change your relationship with money. So where we need to start tonight is I have to tell you why this stuff is so important. If I want you to go and take action, I have to really bring you on the journey and tell you the reason why this is so important.

And you know, like I said, I’ve been doing this for nine and a half years. Something that I’ve learned is that a lot of smart business owners think my accountant can deal with the money stuff. Now let me know in the chat box. I am curious to know who here thinks I’ve got a good accountant. That’s their job.

Okay. That’s, that’s your problem over there. Let me know in the chat box if that is, uh, sounds familiar to you. If you think that this is a problem for your accountant. I hosted this, um, same training this morning and I know that a lot of the people confessed that that rang true for them, that they said, yep, I think I’ve got an accountant.

That’s their job. Let me share with you why this is so dangerous, okay? The truth is, you are legally responsible for your business finances. So let me share an example. Imagine you get to the end of the year, you do tax return and the A TO or your tax office, if you’re joining me from a different country, the tax office says to you, you owe us $50,000.

And you look at your account, you’re like, what? And the account’s like, Hey, sorry. You know, um, yeah, that’s, that’s how much you owe. And you say, please, can you please just let me get out of it? I didn’t know that I owed you that much, who he thinks that a tax office will go. Oh, cool. Oh, sorry. If you accountant didn’t tell you, let’s just, we’ll call it Even Stevens, we’ll worry about it next year.

Do you think that’s what’s gonna happen? No, of course it’s not what’s going to happen. They’re gonna say, tough crap. You owe us money. And you’re like, but my accountant didn’t tell me about it. And they’re gonna say, we don’t care Respectfully. Let’s pick another scenario. Let’s say that you’ve got, um, I know we’ve got a couple of social media people in, the managers in the room.

Let’s say that you hire a digital marketing agency. They’ve been running your Facebook ads, and you go to pay them and you’ve run out of cash and you say, Hey, look, I’m really sorry. I’ve actually, I, I don’t have enough cash to pay you. Is it cool if, um, we just don’t worry about this? Who reckons that?

They’ll just be like, yeah, fine. No, they’re gonna bloody check you. They’re going to potentially even take legal action ’cause they’re like, you owe me money. This is exactly what I’m talking about. If you don’t pay your tax on time, it’s your problem. If you don’t have enough cash to pay your team to pay the bills that you owe, that is your legal responsibility.

And there’s a couple of other things that I wanna add to this. Firstly, accountants make mistakes. I know over the years, I’m an accountant myself. I’ve made some doozies back in my corporate days, trust me. Um, but also as a small business owner, sometimes I’ve been, look, I, I always check over everything my accountant does, and I’ve found things and I’m like, Hey, I think you’ve done this incorrectly.

And they’re like. Oh my gosh. You’re totally right. I honestly think there’s been over $10,000 worth of mistakes that I’ve picked up. Accountants make mistakes and if you don’t know what you’re looking at, if you’re not checking your accountants, this is a big red flag when it comes to knowing your finances.

Another thing, if you follow me on Insta, I’m gonna do a post about this this week. We all like to think the best of other people, particularly. People at work with money. Right. And we think our account, my accountant, would never steal from me. I’ve actually got a, a reel that I’m sharing this week, which is all of the accountants that have been convicted of stealing from their clients.

So don’t know, guy Sebastian, the Australian singer. Yeah. Like smart guy, nice guy. His manager was stealing from him. I actually used to be a bank teller when I was, um, at university doing my accounting degrees. Um, I worked as a bank teller, uh, part-time and at the bank every week our bank would send around this list and it would tell us all of the people who had been caught and convicted, who worked at the bank, who’d been charged with stealing.

And they would also, of course have a paragraph what we are doing to make sure that we’ll catch. You know, it was kind of a big warning, like a big, like giving us all a bit of a. Might take my jacket off, um, giving us a bit of a, a warning not to steal from the bank, but the thing that I took away from that, and the reason I wanna share that is because I used to think that people that worked at banks were perfect.

They would never steal. They were so trustworthy. They’re working in a bank after all. And after having worked there, I’m like, people were stealing literally from the bank every single week. This is important to you because if you are outsourcing all of your power. To your accountant. If you get your BA or your tax return or your numbers from your accountant and you go, oh wow, your accountant’s done it, you, I’m sorry, but you can’t just blindly trust anyone.

You need to crosscheck the numbers. There could be mistakes. You are liable. And literally a lot of um, uh, people who are stealing money, the way they do it isn’t like one day they grab $50,000 out of your account. The patterns that I know from back when I did banking and when I studied abroad at university, usually what they do is they start just taking little bits and they see, if you even notice, I just start taking a couple of dollars here, a couple of dollars there.

And this is why it’s so important that you are across your money so that you are aware of this. It might not even be your accountant, it might be someone in your team. Okay? The next money myth that I wanna bust. Show of hands or type in the chat box if your camera’s not on. Who thinks the problem isn’t my money, Claire.

I don’t need to be looking at my reports. I’ve just gotta earn more. And when I’m making six figures multi, six figures, seven figures, all this money problem stuff will go away. I saw a show of hands there. Yes. Now, let me tell you why. This is a massive problem. You can’t out earn bad money management. Let me say that again.

You can’t out earn bad money management. The truth is this. Sales. If you are in the online world, you will be inundated with this all over bloody Instagram, right? Oh my gosh. 10 KA month, 20 KA month, 30 KA month, a million dollar business. Who’s seen all of this all over social media? Yeah. Let me tell you, in the kind of work that I do, I see.

The back end of people’s businesses. I see what’s going on behind a lot of big names, and trust me when I tell you, I have had clients who are on paper owning three times what I am, and when I see their profit, I’m like, I’m making a hell of a lot more profit than you’re, because a lot of times when we scale our businesses, our expenses are scaling just as rapidly.

You start scaling your business and you’ll find you need more team members, you need more systems. Who’s already experienced that in business? Who’s spending more now than they were when they first got started in business? I know I am. My gosh. When I first got started in business, I was, I literally built my first website myself and I have zero design skills, so it wasn’t pretty.

So look, the thing is sales are vanity, but profit is sanity. And trust me when I tell you, if you aren’t managing your money now, it will not get easier when you are earning more. In fact, I will argue it will actually get harder because the bills get bigger. One of my clients came to me, she was turning over a million dollars a year.

She had a $250,000 tax bill tax debt. Now, even when you’re earning that much, when you’ve got a team, when you’ve got an office which she had, which you’ve got a space, she’s like, I don’t know when I’m gonna be able to pay this off. On paper, it looks like she’s got this sexy million dollar business and she was actually drowning in money, and you might be sitting here thinking of, that wouldn’t happen to me.

I bet you she thought exactly the same thing. This is why this stuff is so freaking important. And it doesn’t matter whether you are brand new in your business or whether you’ve been doing this for 10 years, this stuff won’t go away. So you are probably thinking, Claire, this all makes a lot of sense. I know that I need to look at my numbers, so why the freaking hell aren’t you doing it?

Do that. You’ll need to turn off airplane mode. Oh my gosh. Does anyone else have that? Like this new setting on the iPhone? My phone is on airplane mode and it’s still listening to me. What is that all about? Power off. Thank you. My gosh. The real reason that you avoid looking at your numbers, even though you know that it’s really important is, look, I made this word up, so don’t use it out in common society ’cause people think you’re nuts.

But I’ve made up this word called F anxiety. And basically what I’m saying it is, is a fear of finances. So let’s talk a little bit about what this imaginary f anxiety is. The first part of this, the first part of having a fear of looking at your numbers is that you are afraid of what you might find. You think.

Yeah, I know it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but if I just, if I don’t look at it, I don’t have to deal with it. Who’s a bit guilty of that? I know that I’ll, I’ll tell you an area of my business I, my filing system, when I first got started, I used to have a beautiful filing system. All my files, folders, everything was all beautifully arranged.

And over the years I’ve just been like, oh, I can’t deal with it right now. And when I go into files sometimes I’m like, this is such a disaster, and I know I need to tackle it, but I’m like, if I just don’t look at it, I can just pretend it’s not there because if I have to dive in. There’s gonna be a lot of work behind it.

That’s what some people might experience. The next thing that you might experience is a sense of overwhelm because you run these reports and you’re like, what the fricking hell is this even telling me? I don’t even understand what I’m looking at. Is this good? Is it bad? I’ve had clients of mine that I’ve, I’ve run reports with and they like have a look and they’re like, I don’t even know if this is good or bad.

And I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t understand what it’s saying. And that, that kind of leads me to the next thing, is that if you actually do go in and have a look, you are worried that you don’t know how you’re actually gonna fix it. So if I come in and I’ve got a $250,000 tax bill, or if I come in and you know, I’m spending more than I’m earning, you’re like, I, I literally don’t even know how to fix it.

Like, I’ve got my team. I don’t know. I, I couldn’t fire them. That’s, that’s another thing that I find that comes up quite a bit for people. And what I’ve learned over the years of, of being a business coach is that a lot of people beat themselves up and they think, oh my gosh, maybe this is just, I, I’m just not a numbers person.

And here’s the thing that I’m gonna tell you. It’s not because you aren’t good with numbers, and it’s not because it’s too hard because. I’ve done this with so many of my clients over the years and the most financially illiterate people, a lot of creatives I work with who hate spreadsheets, and they go, oh my gosh, this actually isn’t that hard when you’ve got the system in place.

And yeah, I’m like, sh, don’t tell your accountant because they love to make out. Like it’s really, really hard. So what we are gonna do over the next couple of days?

Let’s kick anxiety in the butt. Alright, so where we’re gonna start, it’s, it’s, it sounds like a really simple place to start, but I think this is a really important, um, place for me to start this journey of helping you to understand where your numbers are at. Let’s talk about profit. So what exactly is profit?

Sales is the money that comes into your bank account. So you say, Hey, go buy my, I don’t know, let me, let me do a website for you, and people pay you. That’s the sales that comes in. The next part of your profit equation is the cost of sales, or if you’ve got a product based business, it’s called cost of goods sold.

Now cost of sales is anything that has a direct relationship to earning that money. So it’s not your overhead cost, it’s not your general expenses. It’s something where you have a direct correlation to the earning of that money. An example of this would be if you run a digital marketing agency and you.

Charge out Facebook ads and you actually have a contractor that does the work for you. So you might be charging out Facebook ads work at a hundred dollars an hour. You actually pay a contractor $50 an hour. There’s a direct correlation between that income earned and between the cost that’s going out.

Then you’ve got all of your other expenses. These are things like your subscriptions. These might be like your admin support. It might be, you know, whatever other cost you’ve got in your business, depending on your business model. So at a top line level, your sales minus your cost of sales, if that’s relevant to you, but a lot of you, it probably won’t be.

So it’d be sales minus expenses equals profit. And then after our profit, you’ll most likely need to pay tax. So there’s actually a nu a a, a a number that’s called net profit after tax. And your net profit after tax, that’s actually what is the money that’s left over after you’ve paid all your bills and your tax.

But there’s something that I find that a lot of people in the accounting world don’t talk about, and I think that it’s important for you to understand, which is how your wages that you draw as a director relate into this equation. So depending on your business model, if you’re a sole trader, you’re likely just.

Pulling money out of your, your sole trader account, but likely what you are doing is paying yourself a wage because your business is a separate entity to you and you need to transfer the money out. So. What I do is have a, a specific account, and again, I talk more about this inside the course, but a, a specific account called Directors Wages.

And what I do is I then add that to the profit or loss to come up with a, a, a number that I call adjusted profit. And let me share an example here. So you might have $40,000 worth of sales, $20,000 worth of expenses, and it looks like you’re making $20,000 profit. Or what probably is more likely what it looks like in your business is that you have $40,000 worth of sales, $20,000 worth of expenses, and you are paying yourself a wage in this example, 15,000.

And your profit actually looks a lot smaller. And this is why I say we need to add the director’s wages. And the profit together, because I’ve run profit and loss reports with clients of mine, they have an absolute fucking freak out because it looks like they’re not making any money and they haven’t made any money all year.

And I’m like, well, you’ve paid yourself 10 grand a month in wages, so even though it looks like there’s no money left, you were actually making money. It’s just that you’ve pulled it all out as a wage. Is this making sense? Do we have any questions? Pop in the chat box if you’re sort of going, I’m already lost, Claire, but I think that it’s important to articulate this when we think about profit because if you go and run your report and you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m not making any profit, and you freak out, I just wanna give you a heads up that if you are drawing a wage, you do need to add that back in there. Alrightyy.

  📍 If so far. This episode has you nodding along, thinking. Oh my gosh, yes. This is me. Then I wanna personally invite you to take the next step with me inside the Profit Academy Foundations. This isn’t another boring finance course that makes you wanna poke your eyes out with a calculator.

It’s a practical step-by-step money mastery system built just for service-based business owners like you. Inside your look how to understand your numbers without needing a finance degree. Create predictable cash flow so that you have no more panic when it comes to paying your bill, and you’ll also learn strategies to grow your profit and actually pay yourself a decent wage.

And if you jump into the course in the first couple of days, you’ll get the early bird offer, which means you get a huge 300 US dollars off, which is 500 Australian dollars off, and you’ll also get six incredible bonuses. You’ll get the Zero and Excel Quick Start Guide so that you can learn the basics of how to use spreadsheets and how to use your accounting program.

You will get the Bookkeeper Success Framework, which teaches you how to work with a bookkeeper. Next, you’ll get the Ultimate Accountant Hiring Guide. This is a framework I put together because a lot of times when people do this course, they realize that they haven’t got the right accountant. So in this guide I teach you how to find the right person to join your Dream Money team.

Bonus number four is an ROI calculator. This is a really cool tool that I created, which teaches you how you can invest in your business with clarity. So it tells you if you will get a positive return on investments you make. Whether you are hiring a new team member, investing in a program, this tool will help you to make your decision with clarity.

Bonus number five, a live tax masterclass. So this is gonna be 10 strategies to save you tax. Now, disclaimer, this is only for Australian clients because I know there are different tax laws in different countries, but this is gonna be an epic bonus, some strategies to actually help you put more money in your bank account and be paying less money to the A TO.

And the final bonus is bonus number six, which again is a live masterclass. This one is called AI and Managing Your Money. In this bonus, you’ll learn what the latest tech developments are and how this relates to how you manage your finance. So if you are thinking about joining the Profit Academy Foundations, you wanna jump in sooner rather than later.

Six epic bonuses and that huge early bird discount. All right, let’s dive back into the training.

 You might be wondering, well, how do I even run this profit and loss thing that you’re talking about? Clare, the first thing you wanna do, I say this inside foundation so many times, I’m like a broken record. Don’t ever run a report until your accounts are reconciled what you wanna make. If you run a profit and loss report and you haven’t reconciled your accounts, it’s gonna be wrong.

Because you haven’t put all of the transactions into your accounting program, so the, the system that I recommend is that you wait till like day, maybe two or three of the month, you reconcile all your transactions, and then you run the profit and loss report. I also don’t recommend that you run at mid month because again, all of your transactions won’t be in there at that point in time.

So you run your profit and loss report in your accounting software. This will then show you your profit or loss. And again, inside the course, I show you how to run it for like a month, for a year for all different periods of time. So you can run it for like the last 12 months, every month.

And if you are someone, is anyone in here not got an accounting program? Hopefully you all do, but I often. Get people inside the program who haven’t even got an accounting program. If you don’t have software, just have a look at your income and take out your expenses to get your profit or loss. Now, here’s something that I find really, really worrying as an accountant, is that most business owners don’t run this report each month.

This is one of. This is the foundation of your business, is your business profitability, and yet, from my experience, the majority of business owners just aren’t doing this one simple process. So we spoke about the reason why people might not be, and why maybe you are not. You’re like, it’s too overwhelming.

I don’t really know what I’m doing. Even if I ran, I wouldn’t know what I’m looking at. What if it’s really crappy and I dunno how to fix it? All those things might be going on for you. And this is again, why I don’t just wanna say, there’s your numbers too bad, so sad. We wanna actually talk about how to use this knowledge to create growth.

So here’s some of the strategies that I teach. If you don’t like where your profit’s at, if you have a look and you’re like, well, that sucks. Here’s some things that you can do. Change your pricing strategy. Now, it’s interesting that I say this because if you follow me, you know I talk a lot about increase your pricing, increase your pricing.

I actually now talk about change your pricing strategy because I’ve actually worked with a few business owners and their right strategy for them is to reshuffle the way that they’re pricing and actually decrease some of their prices. Believe it or not. The next strategy is to increase the volume of sales, and obviously off the back of this we need to talk about marketing.

How do you get more people to buy the same amount of things? Sorry? Get more people to buy more things, increase the volume of sales. The next strategy is to add extra revenue streams. So one of the bonuses inside foundations, I’m giving you a bit of a, a sneak peek here, is that I have a thing called 50 Revenue Boosters.

And what that bonus is, is it’s 50 ideas for how to add more income streams into your business. Because a lot of times people are like, oh, I just make websites and that’s what I do and I don’t wanna do anything else. There’s a ton more ways that you can earn more money in your business. Again, this is a fine art.

You don’t wanna go and build 50 things because then you’re spreading your energy too thin. But equally, if you’ve got like one thing that you do and you have no other revenue stream, you might always find that you’re constantly fighting for your next sale. And so what we wanna do, we wanna kind of come up with some more ways that you can have money flowing into you in business.

Actually, I’m really curious to know, can you pop in the chat box and let me know? How many income streams do you have at the moment? Do you just have one thing that you do? Do you have like maybe you’ve got your service that you deliver and you’ve got a course, maybe you’ve got some, I don’t know, other things that yourself.

Maybe you can tell me a little bit about it in the chat box. Let me know how many things that you’ve got. Casey’s got two. Cool. Anyone else wanna share? Got four. Woo. And again, there’s no, there’s no judgements around any of this. Like, um, Vanessa’s got three. Kps got three. Cool. Yeah, Olivia’s got two. So again, there’s no judge, there’s no right or wrong around this.

I’m just highlighting that this can be one strategy to make more money, is actually like, let’s open up the funnel. Let’s create more ways that people can actually pay us. And the last way that we grow our profit is that we plug the money leaks. And this is what we’re gonna talk about now. So plugging the ways that our money is dripping out of our business.

So what exactly is a money leak? A money leak is money that you are unintentionally spending in your business. This is not about, yep. Cool. I’ve hired a team member. She’s an essential part of my business. I need her. This is not, I’ve hired a coach or done a course because I really need help in this particular area.

This is money that is like dripping away without you even realizing it. These are the things that don’t add value or grow your profit. So let me share some examples of what money leaks might be for you. The first one is services that you are paying for, that you aren’t using. Oh my gosh. Let me tell you what happened to me.

Okay. I teach this stuff. Let me tell you about a leak that happened to me just a few months ago. So I went along to an AI training. We’re all, you know, everyone’s learning all about AI now, aren’t we? And it was so fabulous. I got so excited. I am like, oh my gosh, I’m going to create these images where I’m, I just create all these cool images of me.

I’m gonna create videos of this Claire Lookalike, and she can do all these really cool things. And so I went and signed up for all of these. I, well, I signed up for two, I signed up for two, I signed up for a video one, and I signed up for like a, an image creation tool. And got off the training. I was so excited.

I went in and created some AI avatars who has done some playing around with AI avatars online. Yeah. And, and creation. Let’s just say that, um, technology’s got a little way to go in this space. I was finding some really weird crap coming up for me. Um, anyway, so I had a bit of a play around and I’m like, yeah, there’s some cool things in here, some not so cool things.

The video creation one, I didn’t even open that once in the month. Now these two programs I’d signed up for. One was. Us $10 and one was us $15. So I’m, you know, on the face of it, you’re like, there’s not a lot of money in the big scheme of, you know, the big scheme of life, but that’s $25, which is, you know, about 40 Australian dollars.

And because I do my, my money reviews every month I picked up and I’m like, whoa, I’m not even using those two tools. I went in for a few seconds. I’m not even gonna use these. So I was able to straight away cancel those subscriptions so that I wasn’t paying it. Because what happens a lot is that people go and set these things up and they’re like, yeah, yeah, I’m totally gonna do ai.

I’m gonna build all my videos on there, and then one month rolls over and then two months rolls over, and then 12 months rolls over. Sound familiar. And then all of a sudden a year’s passed and actually we spent like $500 on these things we haven’t even touched. I don’t know about you, but I would rather, even that $25, that’s a cocktail, I’d rather that money in my own back pocket than sitting there ticking away.

The next example of a money leak is contractors. Or supplier price creep over time. Now, I’m a raving fan of Zero, but my friends at Zero are starting to push the friendship a bit lately with their prices. Who’s with Zero? Who’s who gets another email being like, are you guys kidding me? You’re putting your bloody prices up again.

They are seriously starting to push the friendship with me. Let me tell you. But I know, um, I’ve had some products I’ve worked with that I signed up for, for like, you know, free or really reasonably priced, and then all of a sudden I’m spending 300, then $500 that I need to upgrade. At one stage I was spending on my email, I was spending over $500 a month on just one of my subscriptions because things kept creeping up.

So you just wanna keep an eye on that. You also wanna keep an eye just because you’ve worked with a business for a long time, like sometimes people can get a little bit, a little bit cocky with their pricing, which is what I think that Zero is doing. I’m hoping they start to slow things down, or I will really start to think about looking at another preferred supplier in that space.

But it’s something that I really want you to watch. Um, same with companies that you work with regularly. You know, just keep an eye on what’s the market doing. Is this still where I wanna be paying for these things? Subscriptions. Now subscriptions are a funny one because we need a lot of tools to run an online business these days.

It’s pretty hard to not be using things like a Canva or an email marketing platform. I know for me, I’ve, um, paid to verify myself on Instagram and Facebook because I just had so many copycats trying to steal money off people. Yeah. So we sort of do these like incremental little things and then all of a sudden we’re like, how the freaking hell am I paying all this money?

Adding subscriptions? So when you do your homework activity today, which is about plugging your money leaks, I really want you to spend a lot of time on your subscriptions. Go through them all. Am I actually actively using this? Because even if it’s not big dollars, little amount add up to big amounts over time.

The next example of money leaks. This is one of my pet peeves. Paying interest on accounts for not paying your bills on time or not getting discounts by paying early. Has anyone here got a business credit card? I know that I do. And I have, on the odd occasion, not paid my Amex on time. I’ve now got a system in place.

I now have reminders that reminds me, but one month I paid hundreds of dollars in interest on my Amex. I feel sick thinking about that. I’m so, um, frugal when it comes to like buying clothes and things like that, and I’m like, that’s just stupid. I had the money sitting there and I just didn’t pay it on time.

It’s such a waste of money. Um, and also getting discounts if you’ve got your rates. Bill, I just paid mine today and I got a discount because I paid it on time. Again, the reason why this is a money leak, especially if you’ve got the money, is that if you are not paying it on time just because you didn’t know that it was coming up, that is an absolute waste of money.

My money meeting process that I’m gonna talk to you about over the coming days, I am looking forward and I know I’ve got a big bill coming up in three weeks time. Have I got enough cash there for that? No. Okay. What am I gonna do about it? This is about being proactive so that you don’t get your Amex bill and go, oh my gosh, I didn’t know I had an Amex bill.

You know that’s coming. You are planning for it. The next example of money leaks. Oh, this one might ring true for you. Bank fees. When I first got starting business, I was so proud. I was like, I’ve got my own business. I set off. I registered my business name, took off to the bank, and I set up my business bank account, and it was $10 a month to have my business bank account.

I’m like 10 bucks, whatever. I’m a big professional business owner now, and it was only when I was like five years into business, I changed accountants and my accountant’s like, why are you paying an account keeping fee on your bank? I was like, ’cause that’s just what you gotta do. And she’s like, no, go move to this bank and you get a free transaction account.

You don’t have to pay that. Now $10 a month might not seem like a lot, but let’s do some maths on this. $10 times, 12 months times five years can I know I’m pop in the chat box 10 times, 12 times five. Anyone? Anyone at all. I know what you’re all thinking and you are thinking she’s the bloody accountant and she’s asking us, this is a fun fact that you don’t know about accountants.

If we don’t have a spreadsheet or a calculator in front of us, we are useless. We have the worst maths in my corporate job, I’d be sitting there with me, my finance manager, my CFO, I’d be like, what’s 10 mil minus five mil plus three mil? And we’d all look at each other and I’m like, I’ll go grab my calculator.

Um, but in all seriousness, it’s a lot of money. I dunno, roughly. I seriously, I’m, I’m terrible at basic math. $600. Thank you. 600 bucks. $600 is a fricking lot of money, isn’t it? Can we all agree? $600? What’s $600? It buys you a nice night in a nice hotel at buys you flights somewhere buys, you were a whole bunch of new clothes and yet I just hemorrhage that for five years.

’cause I’m just like. It’s just bank fees. It is what it is. Shop around. I also get a little bit, um, tight with my, um, like my stripe fees and things like that. Um, if someone works with me in a, a high, like one-on-one capacity, I actually manually still invoice them rather than use a payment link. Because I was looking and I, I was just hemorrhaging thousands of dollars in strike fees because I sell a lot of high ticket services.

I would say that if you sell lower ticket things, um, like for example, if you go to buy, um, foundations, there’s a, a payment link because I don’t wanna be sending manually sending invoices to everyone, but you can actually end up losing a lot of money in fees as well. So it’s something to keep an eye on there.

And the last one as well is other overhead costs. Look, I don’t wanna go into this in too much detail, but I will say that one area that I see people really get stuck here is when they have an office space. Because look, and I don’t wanna PPO office spaces, for some people it’s exactly the right move.

They need space, they need to be working from the kids. They just need an energetic level up. But a lot of times when clients of mine have set up offices, and I didn’t get into their numbers, I’m like, you need a cleaner. They’re like, I’ll clean it. I’m like, you’re not, you’re not gonna clean your office and scrub the toilet of all of your staff members.

You know? Um, there’s things like electricity I hadn’t accounted for. There’s a lot of hidden costs that can come up in, in many different areas of your business. Even if you don’t have an office space, your overhead costs can really add up. So this is why we wanna really be going through every single month our reports in detail.

Questioning. Even the little things go in and do a deep dive. I do. I still go and I, I, it blows my mind as someone who does this as a job, the number of times I still find things that I’m like, oh my gosh, I hadn’t realized that was there. Oh, oh wow. That’s crept up. Make this a regular practice. So this is gonna be your activity for today.

You will be getting an email. Which explains a little bit about the actions that you need to take, and I want you to come back to day two and tell me how much money you’ve saved. I have had people who’ve come in and they’re like, from day one they’ve saved a couple of thousand dollars because they’ve canceled things.

So please come and share should only take 10 to 15 minutes, um, depending how many expenses you’ve got, but please make sure that you go and take action because I want you to have wins. I want you to be making more profit. That’s what I’m all about. So if you are already seeing, like we’ve just done a tiny, tiny taster in day one, if you’re already seeing that there is an incredible opportunity to make more profit, increase your confidences and grow your business dollars, then you will love the Profit Academy Foundations.

This is just a little teaser of what’s inside the program. The foundations is actually a step-by-step framework to understand your business finances. It helps you feel confident and clear about how much profit your business is making, and most importantly, you’ll actually learn how to make more money.

So inside in module one, this is where I teach you all of the basics of the accounting concepts. If you’ve ever sat in a meeting with your accountant and they’re like, you’re best, you’re POIG, and you’re like, I have no freaking idea what you are talking about, but I’m just gonna smile and nod along this module is for you.

I teach you all about the foundations of business finances so that when you are accountant is talking, you are like, oh my gosh, I actually know what you’re talking about and I can ask intelligent questions back. This is all of the stuff I’ve learned in my accounting juries. I’ve got rid of all of the boring crap and stuff that’s not relevant to you as a small business owner, and I’m just teaching you the basics that you need to know.

Then we’re gonna go and have a look at your current financial state. So we’re gonna really dive in, start to really understand the key numbers that you need to to know in your business. And we’re gonna start to set a future focused plan for what you wanna create in your business. Which then leads us into module three, which is where we actually go through, we do goal setting.

We’re like, how much money do you actually wanna be making? Not just like, I wanna make a million dollars. How much do you actually want profit in your back pocket? And then we create your month by month plan to get there. Because what a lot of business owners don’t do, they’ve got the sales goal or the profit goal, and they don’t actually think, oh, how many people would I need to hire for that next, next level, what other expenses would my business have?

We are mapping out the entire, you know, down it’s, it’s really your game plan of how you’re gonna achieve those goals. And then what you do each month is you actually track your performance against your plan. How am I going against my plan?

What I do in the next module is then teach you how to actually understand these reports. So we go through and I say, okay, you run this report. You look at these numbers. This is how you know what the difference is. Here’s what it’s telling you, and here’s the actions that you need to take off the back. I also in this module teach you about cashflow forecasting.

It’s something we’re gonna cover over the next couple of days as well. This is the 15 minute, um, meeting that you do each week that really keeps you empowered. You know what bills are coming up, you know when your taxes due. You know what’s coming in and going out. And if you don’t like what it’s telling you, we also talk about how you can fix that, how you can actually bring more money in.

The next module is all about the Money Dream team. If your accountant sucks or maybe your accountant doesn’t suck, maybe you actually just how to work with them very well, and regardless. In this module, you’ll learn how to work well with your accountant, or you’ll actually learn, like if they’re not the right fit, you’ll learn.

How to know if they’re not the right fit in this module. And we’ll also talk about who you need to hire. So sometimes people are like, do I need a bookkeeper? Do I need a CFO? Do I need an accountant? What’s a tax agent? How do I know who the right person to hire is? I break it all down inside this module for you.

Module six is money meetings. This is where I take you through the exact frameworks I use to manage my own money, so I feel confident and empowered, and the clients of mine are using, gosh, five, six years later, and tell me I still use the exact framework and system that you taught me. Then last but not least, we’ll have a whole module, which is all about profit growth.

This is where you learn systems, structures. You’ll learn about marketing so that if you don’t like where your business currently is, you can create a game plan to actually scale your business profit. So. If this is sounding amazing, you will also get, so the, the course is prerecorded, you’ll get your modules released each week, and then I’m also doing this as a live round, so you’ll get seven 60 minute calls with me where I can answer any questions that you’ve got.

We can go through and you can help be, help be. I can help you be really empowered and understand what you are actually learning inside the program. And I’ve also got six epic bonuses for you if you jump in early. The first one is a live masterclass. I am not a qualified tax agent, but I’m bringing along my friend Jacob from Latitude Accountants, and he’s gonna take you through 10 strategies to save money on tax.

This bonus alone. He’s probably worth the cost of the program because you’ll learn strategies to actually add like more money back into your business by paying less tax. The next masterclass taught by me is ai. We are gonna talk about how AI is changing the way that we look at numbers, manage numbers.

We’ll be working with your accounting program over time. A lot of people don’t even know that this tech is developing. And so in this masterclass, I’ll take you through what this looks like and how it will affect you. This other bonus is if you are completely new to numbers and you dunno how to use Excel, you don’t even really know your way around zero.

I have these two guides where I actually do videos and I take you through how to do formulas in, um, Excel, how to run reports in Xero. I get such great feedback about this bonus here. The next one is the Ultimate Accountant Hiring Guide. I take you through how to hire a new accountant, how to fire your old one if you need to find a new one.

I also have a way that you can work with a bookkeeper. So whether you have a bookkeeper or not, you’ll learn, do I need a bookkeeper? How do I work with them, and what are the stages? As my business grows, how do I actually start to hand more things to my bookkeeper as my business is scaling? And the next bonus is a cool one.

It’s called the Return on Investment Calculator. This is a tool that you can use whenever you’ve gotta make a tough decision in your business. If you are not sure whether to buy a course, whether to hire a new team member. If you are trying to make a decision. What you do is you input your numbers into this really cool tool and it says to you, yes, there’ll be a positive return on that.

Or do you know what? Based on what you’ve told me, this isn’t the right decision to make right now. So that’s another really, really cool bonus. All of those bonuses are designed to help you make more money in your business, and that’s just the bonuses, not even the course content. So here’s the cool thing.

If you buy. This course now I have a massive early bird discount available, which is 500 Australian dollars off. It’s actually 300 US dollars, but it’s approximately 500 Australian dollars. I just wanna be completely transparent because I know people often say, why do you charge in US dollars if you’re an Australian business?

It’s because I work with clients from right across across the world, and the US dollar is a globally recognized currency. However, I don’t wanna be one of those misleading people who you’re like, I don’t even know what I’m paying. I always try and put a current conversion back to the Australian dollar, and you’ll notice that I’ve also included here that that includes GST because I’ve had the experience myself where I’ve got to the checkout and suddenly I’m like, what the freaking hell?

There’s an extra 10% in here. I dunno if you’ve had that experience. I’ve just popped a link in the chat here if you do wanna go and check it out. Um, and also you’ll be getting emails about this, um, today and over the coming days. Here’s the kicker. Here’s the kicker. I am so sure that this program will help you to make more profit.

That if you do the seven modules, if you complete all seven modules and you attend the seven live q and a calls, you come along right to the end of foundations and you say, do you know what? I’ve done it all. And I really, I’m, I’m implementing the, the processes and I still can’t see how I’m gonna make back, at least the cost of the program.

I can’t see how I’m gonna make back the amount of the program. I will refund your money in full. I am that confident that this program, you will get to the end and be like, I am so empowered and excited about how much more money I make that if you do the work. And you can’t still see that at the end, I will refund the money in full.

I’ve been offering this before and I can tell you to date, I have not had to refund one single person. That’s how confident I am that this program will transform your relationship with money. So day one. I told you I bring the goods, don’t I, in, in these free trainings. Um, you can imagine inside the program how much you will learn in there.

But look, we’re only just getting started. This is day one of three. Tomorrow we are gonna learn the two number cash flow formula that will stop you from having sleepless nights and will help you feel really confident and empowered that you have the capacity to pay your bills on time. And you are also gonna learn about the power of a budget.

You’re gonna learn how a budget actually makes you more money as a business owner. Thank you everyone for being here, and I can’t wait to see you tomorrow. Let’s go deep tomorrow. Have a good one. Take care. Bye.

If you have loved day one of the challenge and you are already thinking. Claire, I am ready to actually get my finances finally sorted. Then make sure you jump on into the Profit Academy Foundations. The link is in the show notes for today’s episode, and as I shared in the midway break, there are a ton of bonuses if you jump in early.

You get the early bird discount and you get six epic bonuses, which are all designed to help you make more money in your business. This offer is strictly for the early birds and it will expire very soon. This course has helped business owners increase their profits by 20%, a hundred percent, and yes, even 350%.

If you are finally ready to feel calm, clear, and in control of your business finances, click on the link in the show notes for today’s episode. I can’t wait to see you inside because money is so much easier when you know what you’re doing.

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio