Fix your Finances (Part 3): The 15-minute finance formula

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

Welcome back day three of the Fix Your Finances. Miniseries. Thank you so much for tuning in for another day, three podcast episodes, three days in a row.

I’m really delighted that you are here and that you’ve chosen to invest the time and energy into upleveling your relationship with money. Today’s gonna be a good one. I’m teaching you my ridiculously simple 15 minute finance formula.

This is the exact weekly ritual that I use myself, and it’s helped my clients grow their profit, feel confident, tracking their cash flow, and ditch the bill. Panic for Good. No complicated dashboards.

This is an hours of your time, just 15 minutes a week. That will completely feel the way you feel about money.

 If you wanna stop being overwhelmed by your finances and you wanna make more profit in your business, you have to make a decision to change. Let me repeat that again. If you want to stop being overwhelmed by your finances. And you want to make more profit in your business, you have to make a decision to change.

This is like the underlying, I guess, ethos of of business coaching, of me helping people to create incredible change in their lives is that I say you can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. If at the moment you have a crappy relationship with your numbers, you can’t expect it to miraculously change on its own.

You are gonna have to put in the groundwork. You are gonna have to make a decision and say, I’m sick of this. I’m sick of my tax bill showing up and not having the money to pay it. I’m sick of having no idea how much freaking money is in my bank account. I am sick of flailing through business with no clear plan of where I’m going.

I’m ready to change because here’s a big truth bomb. It’s your business and no one is coming to save you. No one is coming to save you. It’s your business. If you wanna fix it, you have to make the decision to fix it. And I wanted to share with you a quote. Um, it’s from one of my favorite money books, which is called You Are a Badass at Making Money by Jen Centro.

And she has this phrase in the book, which says, you can have your excuses or you can have your success. You can’t have both. And I love that it’s, it, I have to admit, the first time I wrote that it was very triggering. But it’s something that I come back to, um, whenever I’m feeling a bit stuck or powerless or I’m caught in victim mode around, oh my gosh, why is this so hard?

I remind myself, Hey, if you wanna fix this, you have to make the decision to fix it. So let’s talk all about the 15 minute finance hack. This is a tool that I have been using in my business, I would say for gosh, at least five years now. Every single week minimum five years might have even been longer. And this.

Tool is something that I’ve taught to my clients, to my students over the years and years later I get messages from my client, students saying, oh my gosh, I still use the, the cash flow formula. It, it’s an absolute game changer. And this is what we do. This is our 15 minute money check-in. It’s called money meetings.

If you are watching along, you’ll be able to see. I’ve got some images here of my hubby and I at our money meetings. This is something that is a non-negotiable in our businesses. We actually have several money meetings that we have. The ones in the pictures here are actually our, we also do a personal money meeting, and again, in foundations I can share a little bit more about how we manage our personal money, but I’ll give you a hint.

It’s using the same frameworks that I teach inside the Profit Academy Foundations. We literally use the same concepts, the same principles, and one of them is money meanings. So what exactly is a money meaning? A money meeting is dedicated time carved out to focus on your money now. When you have your money meetings, this isn’t just a time to sit down and be like, oh yeah, cool.

I’ll have a bit of a look at my bank account, whatever. No. The way to run these effectively is that you wanna have a clear framework or agenda set out for the session. I, like I said, I actually have several, many meetings that I do a month and I have an agenda or a framework that we use for every single one of those meetings because I dunno about you, but my time is really precious.

It’s limited and I don’t just wanna end up in, I still have, um, PTSD from my corporate days where you just spend hours, people talking for the sake of talking, and you get to the end and you’re like. Okay, what did we cover there? So I love to have a really clear agenda or framework. And the next thing that I want you to know about your money meetings is that a focus needs to be on action, not just information.

So whatever kind of money meeting you have, I’m gonna talk to you about a 15 minute. Meeting that I have every Monday, but whatever money meeting that you have, you want to keep the focus on action. So for example, if you get to the end of, if you go and have a look at your financial situation, you’re like, oh my gosh, we’re gonna run out of cash soon.

Don’t just sit there in this doom and gloom negative feeling about it. You say, what are the things that we are gonna do off the back of it? So when I get to the end of my money meeting, there is usually a series of things that need to be done. I, I’ll usually have some actions for myself, so my actions will be written down and added to my to-do list.

I might have some actions for my bookkeeper. Hey, can you please move this from this account to this account? Can you please follow up that outstanding invoice for me? Uh, there might be actions for my accountant as well. Hey, can you please confirm that this amount for the bass looks is correct? It, it looks a bit funny to me, so there’s gonna be actions off the back of the meeting.

We don’t wanna get to the end and we are like, okay, well there it is nothing to do here. The whole point of these is to stimulate actions either by yourself. Or by others. So let me talk about the 15 minute. Monday money meeting that I have every week, first and foremost, and again, everyone is going to be different.

So you need to work out what’s the right cadence, who are the right attendees for you. But if you dunno my story, I run obviously my business. Claire Wood, my husband also is an entrepreneur. He runs a recruitment firm. And so what we do, we actually do our. Our 15 minute meetings together on a Monday morning, along with our bookkeeper, we are at the stage where we are very blessed that we have a bookkeeper that helps us with, um, you know, she’ll pull together a lot of the, the backend work in preparation for this meeting.

So we have, um, my husband’s meeting, my meeting, and we also do our personal finance cashflow forecast. So our meeting is a 30 minute meeting where we cover all three. Um, I think that 15 minutes is plenty of time, and maybe you don’t have a bookkeeper. Maybe you don’t have a partner who also runs their own business, or maybe you do and you’re like, we wanna keep as far away from each other as possible, regardless.

Every Monday, sit down on your own and have a look at these key numbers. So the first thing that I love to do a check-in on is what are the monthly sales numbers at? So where are my sales at? I call it month to date, or what are the sales at for the month? So you might be sitting at the, you know, the 14th of January.

You have a look at what the sales have been from the 1st of January to the 14th of January. I also like to have a look at a yearly sales number. Now the way that I do this, I actually look at both the financial year and the calendar year. So here in Australia, our financial year runs from the 1st of July to the 30th of June.

And obviously the calendar year runs from the 1st of January to the 31st of December. But I like to actually keep a handle on both of them. Um. For me, I like to know what’s happening on a financial year to date basis, because that is what our tax year falls to. And so I like to sort of have a, you know, have an understanding of where that sales number is at.

It can gimme a high level view on where my, my tax might land for the year. And I just also think that it’s a helpful measuring stick. But I also love to check in, um, on. Where I’m checking on the calendar year. So for example, we are in July now. When I did my meeting, um, on Monday this week, we had a look at the the month to date number, which was obviously from the start of July till the date of Monday, and then the, the year to date, the financial year to date was also the same number, but I wanted to have a check in on the calendar year today, how I’m tracking from January through to July.

So that’s the first number that you want to check in on. The next number that you wanna look at is your cashflow forecast for the coming eight to 12 weeks. Now in yesterday’s call, in yesterday’s session, we spoke about cashflow forecast. So just a quick refresher, if you can’t remember your cashflow forecast.

We pick up our opening cash balance. We have a look at the inflows of cash and the timing of the inflows of cash. We look at the outflows of cash and we look at a forecasted closing cash balance. So this is our little crystal ball into the future that tells us, oh my gosh, if we keep going the way that we are going in four weeks time, we are gonna be in a bit of trouble.

Or alternatively, you look and you say. Wow, we, we have plenty of cash even after I’ve paid all of my, my tax, my team, my credit card, my expenses. I’ve still got a huge buffer of cash in there. And this might give you the confidence to make the decision to say, you know what? We are ready to go ahead and upgrade the website.

We are ready to go ahead and invest in a photo shoot. I’m ready to invest in a course in the coach, in whatever it might be. And again, this knowledge, having this visibility over what is coming and going and when empowers you with the confidence to make that decision. So the next thing we wanna look at is the cashflow forecast.

And again, when we are being action oriented, we are not just looking at it, we are deciding, we are creating actions for ourself. We are saying, okay, with this information, what am I gonna do? Okay. Excellent. I’ve got the cash buffer there. I’m ready to push go and go ahead on hiring that mentor that I’ve been eyeing off.

So having a look at your cashflow forecast is the next thing that you wanna do. The next thing you wanna check in on is the wages. So obviously in your cashflow forecast, you’re gonna have wages that you are paying to contractors or your team. You also wanna have a look at the wages you are gonna pay yourself.

Now, this is a little bit controversial, but I’m just gonna share because this is what I do. But we will play around with our internal wages. So for example, if there’s a big cash buffer, we might choose, we are gonna pay ourselves. Higher wages moving forward to, you know, be able to draw a little bit more of that money out and enjoy ourselves.

I know that some people really like to have a religious fixed amount that they pay in a wage, but you know, again, you need to get your own financial advice. Talk to your own accountant about. But across my husband’s and my business, we will sometimes play around with what the wages we draw looks like. So, um, for example, like I said, if there’s a bigger cash buffer, we might say, do you know what, let’s draw down a little bit more wages at the moment.

Um, obviously, well not obviously, but like in my. When I think about their priorities, if you have people who are on a full-time, part-time basis, you have to pay them first. So legally you must be paying your team. So that should be where the focus is. Um, but obviously I also wanna empower people. You know, if you are looking at your numbers on an ongoing basis and you’re like.

I can’t afford this team. Then there might be some decisions that you need to make about either driving more sales in so that you can comfortably afford them, or you might need to make decisions about whether you do have the capacity to continue to afford to pay the team. The last thing that you look at at this a Monday morning, 15 minute check-in is how much tax you need to pay and how much superannuation you need to pay.

And particularly when. So I go and have a look at, uh, you know, what, what dates the BA due, what’s the current forecast for the ba if you’re in Australia, that’s, um, sales tax if you are joining from outside of Australia. Um, I also have a look at how’s our personal income tax tracking. So again, just put that money into, put the money aside, um, making sure that there’s like, what dates my superannuation due?

Do I have enough put asides for that? So it’s just a, this is just a little check-in. I do the big check-ins at the monthly meeting, but each month I like to just do a quick little, quick little high level, um, check-in on that as well. Now you might be listening to this and thinking. Holy smokes. That’s a lot of, a lot of information to cover in 15 minutes.

And you know, the first time you do this meeting, look, it might take you half an hour, it might even take you an hour. But you know, when you get into the cadence and you’re doing this all the time, you’ll find it’s actually. Really quite a quick process to go and run a lot of these numbers. It’s literally just a click of a button inside your um, accounting program.

And with the cashflow forecast, once you’ve done the initial setup each week, you are actually just shuffling numbers across, so it really isn’t. That much of a convoluted or complicated process, you’re just looking, did I pay that? Yes. Excellent. I need to move that forward, or no, I didn’t. Um, again, I do the full training inside the program, but I just wanna assure you that if you are thinking, gosh, this is a lot of information.

Like I said, I actually do three meetings in 30 minutes on a Monday morning, admittedly, with the help of a, of a bookkeeper, but I’m, I, I’m really sure that you’ll be able to do the same for your business as well.

If you are getting value from these episodes, imagine what do together

inside the Profit Academy Foundations in the program, you will learn the exact frameworks that we’ve spoken about here. You’ll be given the templates. The systems to actually get across your business profitability, your cash flow, and your balance sheet for once and for all.

You’ll learn the foundations of understanding business finances so that when you’re in those meetings with your accountant. You truly understand what is going on, but most importantly, you’ll have these tools. You’ll have this knowledge up your sleeve so that you can actually implement the changes and make more profit in your business.

Knowing your numbers isn’t just a nice to have thing. It’s an imperative part of being a business owner, and these tools actually empower you to make more money.

But remember, the early bird offer is expiring soon. So if you are feeling inspired, now is the time to jump on in, buy the link in the show notes for today’s episode. All right, let’s get back and finish the training. 

So we’re gonna do now is dive on in to the profit success.

Framework. So over the last three days, we’ve spoken about a lot of different things. We’ve spoken about profit, how to understand what your profit is. We’ve spoken about cash flow, we’ve spoken about budgets and we’ve spoken about the power of money meetings. What I wanna do is bring this all to into a cohesive, what I call profit success framework.

And this will take you through what I believe you need to be doing. To be confidently right across your money and to be in a state where you are setting yourself up for understanding and scaling your profitable business. So the first step in your profit success framework is learning the basics of business finance.

I’ve been doing, working as a a business profit coach for nine and a half years now, and overwhelmingly what I found with small business owners is that they don’t really understand the basics of business finance. They have like a general grasp of it. Like, they’re like, yeah, I know that I’ve gotta pay.

You know, bass every quarter, or I know that I’m supposed to run these reports, um, and get an idea of how my business is going, but they actually don’t really understand what they are looking at. You know, when I talk about concepts like cash versus accrual accounting, um, a lot of times people are like, well, what’s that again?

Um, when I talk about the difference between a balance sheet and a profit loss report, when I talk about reconciling your accounts, a lot of people get really. Overwhelmed or a little bit like, yeah, I think I know what that is, but they truly don’t understand, and this is why I really believe every single business owner, like I teach a whole module on this inside the Profit Academy foundations, whether this program is right for you or not.

I do urge you to go and invest the time to learn this skillset because as a business owner, you can’t afford not to understand what’s going on with your hard earned money. So the first step is absolutely to learn the basics of business finance. You need to know what all these terms mean because you, as we spoke about in module one, are legally responsible for your business.

The next thing is that you wanna be able to read your numbers, so it’s all well and good to say, okay, yep. I know how to run a profit loss report, but do you actually know what the reports are telling you? Can you actually look in and say, oh my goodness, okay, I know that this is a red flag. Or I know how to fix this issue, whether it’s, you know, on your profit and loss report, whether it’s with your cash flow statement, whether it’s with your balance sheet.

I actually know how to understand what’s going on here. You know, when you look at your balance sheet, do you understand what depreciation and accumulated depreciation is? Do you understand what an asset register is? If not, then perhaps you, you don’t really know what you’re looking at. The next thing that I believe is essential to be growing a long-term sustainable, successful business is actually having your pathway to success.

Having your game plan of where you wanna go and how you intend to get there. On day two, I spoke about the power of budgeting, and I truly believe that you need to be across your budget. You need to have a game plan of where you wanna go and how you are gonna get there. If you don’t wanna be spinning your wheels and be in the same place in three months, six months, 12 months time.

The next thing that we wanna do is actually track your money. So over the last three days, I’ve shared with you some tools for how do I actually understand what’s going on. How am I looking forward and understanding what the future might look like, what the future will look like if everything plays out?

And equally, how am I actually looking back and understanding what my financial reports are telling me? Am I actually tracking my money? Am I actually looking at what the numbers are telling me? Because your numbers are trying to tell you a story, and if you aren’t looking at them, if you aren’t understanding them, you could be leaving money on the table either through those money leaks that are hemorrhaging out or by missed opportunities from not investing in your business.

So tracking your money is a really fantastic way to create scalability in your business. The next part of your profit success framework is building your dream money team. A lot of times people have said to me, if I join foundations, can I fire my accountant? I’m sorry. No. No, you can’t. I’m an accountant and I still pay an accountant because I am not currently a practicing accountant.

And I’m not up to date. I’m not a qualified tax agent. I am not up to date on the latest tax legislation, and even if I was, I would probably still pay someone else because a lot of times we can’t see our own stuff, so. You do need to have an accountant. You do need to potentially have a bookkeeper depending what stage of business you are at.

And a lot of people, um, don’t know how to work well with their accountant or bookkeeper. A lot of people don’t even know what the hell the difference between an accountant or a bookkeeper is, or a tax agent. Um, again, inside foundations, this is why I spent a whole module talking about what the different roles are that you might need in your organization.

And how to actually find these roles and how to work with them effectively because it’s all well and good to have a fantastic accountant, but if you are not asking the right questions, if you are not meeting with them regularly, you, you’re not gonna get the outcomes that you desire. So building your dream finance team is a really important part of your long-term success as a business owner.

The next part of your Profit success framework is money meetings. I believe that every single business owner should have money meetings, I believe every single week, every single month. Check a check in once a quarter, a check in at the half year, and obviously I do a big analysis at the end of financial year.

Money meetings is your secret hack. To knowing what the hell is going on with your business. Most business owners are flying blind. They don’t even know what is actually going on in their business. And I wanna tell you, I don’t want that for you. I want you to be empowered and confident, and when you have to make decisions in your business, you are not doing it on a whim and a prayer.

You are doing it based on data. Your money meetings will change your life, so please make sure that you go and set up regular money meetings. And the last secret to creating profit success is having a profit growth strategy. Not just, you know, uh, thinking I really wanna make it and so I’m, I’m gonna hope that I can make more money.

You actually need to have a strategic plan. You need to have tools. You need to have levers to pull. And this is one of the big things that I find with clients of mine is if they’re like, oh my gosh, I’m freaking out. I’m running outta money. I’m like, dude, what’s your leavers? What are the things that you can say, okay, I’m gonna turn this switch on.

What are the things that you need to do in terms of marketing, in terms of messaging, in terms of offers to be empowered to bring money in? And if you are listening or watching this and you don’t know what those lever are, this is your sign that you need to get on top of this if you wanna be building a long-term profitable, successful business.

So this profit success framework is, funnily enough, when I built my course, the Profit Academy Foundations around. I created it because I want you to have a successful business and not just a successful business, the most successful business that you can possibly have. I want you to have clarity around your finances.

I want you to be empowered. I want you to be, uh, you know, acting as the CEO of your business. And when you join the Profit Academy Foundations, this is exactly what I teach you, the foundations of money. And of creating more profit in your business. But don’t just take my word from it. I wanna share with you a couple of the previous Profit Academy Foundation students and hear what they have to say.

I think good at budgeting and everything, so I was. In the beginning a bit unsure if we were just gonna be covering doing a budget. But once I did it, I realized it was so much more than that. It was just, um, everything you need to know before you go talk to your accountant. Basically. It’s like, and it really, it’s exactly did that gave me this strong foundation, um, that now has caused me to like revisit the whole business plan and everything.

And then. As of this month, starting to experience all the benefits of doing that hard work. I’ve always been good at budget. And another one of my students, verity. Trust me when I say if I can do it, you can. Like I am the most ignorant, cis bliss kind of person when it comes to this. And honestly, you just make it so easy.

You know? And it’s like, it’s something that you put off for so long and you have that conversation with you, and then it’s like, um, why didn’t I do this earlier? Like, I could have just saved myself 10 years of anxiety, you know, just having this conversation. But. You can’t not know your numbers to grow. If you wanna grow and scale your business, you have to know your numbers.

You need to understand what’s going on to make better business decisions. And one last, trust me, when I testimonial from, um, one of my, actually she’s shares, there’s two clips in of Emma. That was a too overwhelming, I don’t think any of us really needed a full accounting degree. We just need to know how to run our business better.

And to be in charge of, you know, that CEO energy Yeah. That, that it was enough without being too, too open all I really liked that it was a too. And one more thing I can say, the cashflow forecasting is, is probably the thing I use the most, just watching things like, what have I got coming in? What, what’s going out?

What do I need to do to make that all balance and, and work nicely? I think one of the really valuable things that we did in that course was create a budget. Like, so you know that forward planning, like what are your revenue goals for the year and how are you gonna make that happen? And let’s break it down.

That was hugely valuable. Yeah. Budgeting, cash flow were great. They’re probably the two, you know, they had the biggest impact in the business, apart from, you know, changing account, having a bookkeeper, a board, the cash. So if you have heard what they have to say and you are feeling called to, to jump in and for once and for all, master your finances.

Just a reminder, if you want to different, create different outcomes in your life, you need to do things differently. So doors to the Profit Academy Foundation are. A live round open. Now there is 300 US dollars off the course at the moment, which is about 500 Australian dollars, but it disappears at 6:00 PM tomorrow, which is Thursday, the 31st of June, 2025.

If you are catching this in the future, sorry you’ve missed out. Um, but if you do wanna jump on in and get that early bird discount. Jump on in before that early bird discount disappears the link To jump in, you can grab on my website, my socials, or alternatively it’s online. Dot clare wood.com/foundations.

From the bottom of my heart, I wanna say a huge thank you for joining me for the Fix Your Finances challenge.

I trust the skills that you learn over our three days together will help you grow your business profit. And if you feel called, I would love to continue this journey and take this work even deeper inside the Profit Academy Foundations.

All right. That’s a wrap. You have made it through the three days of the Fix Your Finances miniseries. I’m so delighted that you’ve taken the time to invest, to learn in your finances, to learn more about your money. I know that this means that money is important to you.

So just a reminder that the early bird offer is expiring today.

If you are being called to jump on into the Profit Academy Foundations, that huge early bird discount, 500 Australian dollars, 300 US dollars is disappearing.

The six early bird bonuses are disappearing today. So if you are on the fence, consider this your loving nudge, because I don’t want you to miss out on those bonuses. I don’t want you to miss out on that discount.

Join us via the link in the show notes for today’s episode, and let’s fix your finances for real.

Thanks again for joining me for this miniseries and I hope we can continue your money journey together inside the Profit Academy Foundations.

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