Your business is so busy, so why aren’t you making more money?

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

Does your business feel really busy, but it doesn’t feel like you’re getting further ahead money-wise? Maybe you’re signing clients, you’re marketing, showing up, doing your social media, delivering the work, racing from one thing to the next. But somehow when you finally stop and look at the numbers, it doesn’t feel like you’re getting any further ahead.

In today’s episode, we are going to explore busy versus profitable so that we can get you on the right track moving forward.

Welcome to the Intentional Money Show, where we talk business growth, profitability, mindset, and building a wildly successful creative or digital business without sacrificing your life in the process. I’m Clare Wood, business profit coach, speaker, author, and unapologetic believer that you can build wealth and freedom doing work you genuinely love.

Each week on the podcast, we dive into the strategies and honest conversations that will help you scale sustainably, increase your profit, and build a business that actually feels good to run. Let’s grow your profit.

This is a challenge that I know a lot of business owners face. Like sales are growing, work is coming in, your days are completely full, and objectively you wonder, “For all this extra work, why aren’t I making any more money?” Busyness in business can feel extremely confusing. It feels like progress because you’re doing a lot of things.

There’s lots of emails coming through, clients signing up. You know, the team members are asking you questions. Opportunities are coming along. But just because you’re busy, it doesn’t mean that the business is growing in a meaningful or profitable way. And just to be clear, I wanna say that I absolutely get caught up in this too.

I can get to the end of a day and feel like I have been flat out from the moment I sat down, but when I get to the end of the day, I think, “What did I actually do today that moved the needle forward?” And, you know, a lot of the time what we’re doing is important work. Recording a podcast for example, or following up a potential client.

But sometimes, if I’m being completely honest, I’ve spent the day jumping from thing to thing and doing lots of little fiddly bits and pieces and not working on the big important strategic pieces. So the day’s disappeared, but the business hasn’t necessarily moved forward. So if you can relate, one of the things that I really encourage you to do is find out what is actually filling your days.

You can do a time audit and when you do a time audit, you actually just track what you are doing for every 30-minute increment of the day. And be brutally honest. Don’t just say social media if some of that time was spent scrolling looking for ideas. Really break down your day. “Okay, I spent 20 minutes scrolling.”

Another big distraction that I find is the inbox. I get so many emails in a day and most of them are things that I need to action, and I imagine it’s the same for you. How much of your week is spent doing admin tasks? And next is delivery. Now, delivering for your clients seems like a really smart and useful use of your time.

However, what I see a lot with scaling businesses is that the founder or the leader gets trapped in doing. They’re not actually getting to step back and lead because they’re so caught up in actually delivering client work.

When you step back and look at your week, might be full of client work and you think on paper, “Well, that’s a successful week.” But you had very little space to actually step back and look at the business holistically, work out where the business was going, and spend time working on the business, not just in the business.

Because if all of your time is spent delivering what you’ve already sold, how are you thinking about what’s coming next? And this is definitely a pattern I see with clients of mine. They hustle, hustle, hustle, get really busy, then they’re really busy delivering the work, so they like take their foot off the pedal with marketing or with, you know, working on those strategic things that move the business forward.

And then all of a sudden the clients start to dry up and they’re like, “Oh no, I’ve got to get back out there again.” And so they’re in this constant battle of feast and famine. So as a leader, you need to be really mindful about leading the overall business profitability, improving the office, developing the team, implementing systems, and making those commercial decisions for your future growth.

Because if you’re spending most of your week delivering, something’s gonna have to give. And usually what gets pushed aside is that work on the business.

Because the thing is, there’s busy work, which is always gonna feel urgent. An email, a client deadline, a team member who really needs your help with something to move forward. But stepping back to actually review your pricing or analyze your profitability or do some 12-month planning, it doesn’t feel as urgent.

But that work is actually just as valuable to the future of the business.

The next thing I wanna talk about in this episode is something I know you’ve heard me bang on and on about, which is the difference between revenue growth or sales growth and profit. This particularly seems to affect businesses as they are scaling. Because when sales are increasing, what happens is that extra revenue can be eaten up almost as quickly as it arrives.

Because you’re signing more clients, but now you need another team member to help deliver the work. You are getting more money coming in, and so you think, “I’m gonna invest more in marketing. Let’s keep this growth going.” Suddenly you realise, “Oh my goodness, I’m gonna need a new software subscription,” or, “I need to get an office or a bigger office.”

And as you’re growing, yes, the business is bringing in more sales, but it doesn’t feel like there’s any more money left over. And this can feel deeply frustrating because you think, “Gosh, I’ve worked so hard to grow this business. We are busier than we’ve ever been. Why is this not being reflected in the bank account?”

And this is why knowing the difference between revenue growth and profit growth is so important. ‘Cause revenue is how much money is coming in, but profit is telling you how much is actually left after the business has paid all its costs.

Your revenue can be growing while your profit stays completely flat. In fact, I’ve even seen clients of mine who are making more revenue and actually making less profit than they were before. And I just wanna say, it doesn’t necessarily mean that anything’s gone terribly wrong, because there will be a lag from when you invest to when you see the fruits of that investment.

An example, if you wanna hire a new team member, you’re gonna start paying their salary straight away, and most of the time you’re not gonna see the fruits of that until a couple of months down the track. Similarly with marketing. You don’t pay for meta ads, for example, and then instantaneously see a result off the back of it.

Most of the time there’ll be … It’ll take time for those clients to flow through your funnel or to actually convert and sign a contract and pay you money. So there are seasons where leaning and investing in the business makes complete commercial sense. So just because you have one expensive month or a quarter where you’ve gone backwards, you don’t need to immediately panic that your whole growth strategy has failed.

But the difference is, are you being intentional about the investments? Are you keeping right across your finances and really making sure that the additional revenue isn’t disappearing as quickly as it’s coming in? If it’s only been happening for a couple of weeks, it might just be a timing thing. But if it is happening month after month and you’re looking at your P&L and thinking, “Oh my gosh, what is going on here?”

It does need your attention. You need a circuit breaker. Because if you keep doing business exactly the same way, it’s unlikely that another six months or 12 months of working harder will suddenly produce a different result. At some point, you actually have to stop, step out of the day-to-day activity, and look at the business as a whole.

Where’s the business actually coming from? Which of our clients or offers are producing the highest return? Which ones are a lot of work and not really delivering much of a commercial return? Has the team grown faster than the revenue? Are you still doing work that’s easy work but that could be outsourced to someone else?

And when I sit down and do strategy sessions with my clients, this is the first question that I always ask. What are you actually trying to build here? Because a lot of times what I see is that people are just putting out fires, and all of a sudden they’ve built this beast that they didn’t actually want at all.

So we– one of the first things that I really love to do with new clients is say, “W-what is the intention here? What are your goals? Do you wanna be able to pull more money out? Do you want more flexibility? Are you trying to build a business to sell?” Just saying, “I wanna make more money,” or, “I want the business to grow,” this isn’t a strategy.

You need to know what you want the growth to produce. Otherwise, you are creating more revenue, more employees, more costs, and more stress without actually achieving what it is that you set out to achieve.

A big mistake that a lot of business owners make is that they sit down in January, write a list of big ambitious goals, put it aside, and then forget all about it and don’t even actually map out a plan of how they intend to achieve it. I’m a, a huge fan of goal-setting, but if you’re really wanting those goals to materialize, you actually need to convert that into a plan of how to make it happen.

And effective business planning means looking objectively where’s the business now, where do you want to take it, and what needs to change to close that gap?

A 12-month financial plan and looking really strategically. What’s your role gonna be? What’s your team gonna be delivering? Do we actually have the capacity for this? How much are we investing? When are those investments gonna pay back? And this is why a lot of people bring me into their business, because when you’re in the business every day, it’s really hard to see the full picture, ’cause you’re too close to the moving pieces.

You know why that team member was hired. You understand why you set up that offer in the first place. Like, all the decisions individually make sense, but sometimes when someone comes in with fresh eyes, they can say, “Hey, why don’t you do it like this?” And it can change everything.

Over the years, I’ve worked with clients who’ve been trapped in the same cycle for years. They’re smart and capable and business is going well, but they just haven’t ever had the capacity to step back and challenge, you know, how the business is operating. And that’s what I do inside my strategy sessions.

We sit down together and look at the business holistically, help you get clear about your goals, and I help you look at all your offers, look at what the numbers are telling you, and help you create a plan that’s gonna deliver you a business that you love.

If your business is really busy, but you’re not making any more money or you’re not making the amount of money that you wanna make, here’s what I suggest that you do. Firstly, do a time audit. Pay close attention to where your working hours are actually going. Not where you think they go, where they actually go when you are tracking it.

How much of your time is spent on admin, delivery, managing the team, marketing, social media? How much time are you spending on each of these different activities? And next, look at the numbers. Compare your revenue with your profit. Have a look at what the relationship between your sales and your profit is doing.

Where is your money going? What costs have increased? And were these intentional investments or have they just kind of crept up? Next, let’s have a look at the bottleneck. What is the thing that’s preventing the business moving to that next level? Is it you? Is it the structure of your offers, your pricing?

Do you perhaps not quite have the right team in place? And then you need to ask yourself, “What do I need to stop, modify or do differently?”

And then ask yourself, “Do I want to keep doing things the way that I’ve been doing them? What do I need to stop doing? What do I need to start doing? What do I need to change that I’m currently doing?”

The intention of planning isn’t to give you another big list of jobs to do because, you’re already an overwhelmed business owner. But it should help you to make clearer decisions about your time and your money and how you can be creating the greatest return.

If you want someone to come in, sit down with you one-on-one, look at your business overall, being numbers-led, and help you to create a tailored game plan for the 12 months ahead, there is a link in the show notes for today’s episode to book in a session with me. This is completely tailored to your business, and we’re gonna be looking at what is happening commercially, where your business is getting stuck, and we’re gonna work out a game plan, and you’ll get a clear action plan for moving forward.

These sessions are for established and scaling businesses who really want a really customised solution and someone to really dive in and help make sense of all of the different moving parts.

I appreciate that not every business owner or business leader is in a position to invest in, you know, a private session. So I did wanna share something exciting that is coming up. Soon I’m gonna be announcing a business planning workshop that I’m gonna be running. I’ve run one of these before. It was a huge success, and I’m excited to do this again.

So inside, I’m gonna take a group of business owners through this process together. It’s an opportunity to actually step out of the business, get together in a room, and actually complete a full review and create a game plan for the year ahead. I’ll be sharing more about this soon. But one of the cool things about this isn’t just that you get to have your planning done for the year ahead, you also get to be in a room full of amazing humans where you get to connect with other business leaders.

Another cool thing about these workshops, it’s not just about getting your planning done. You actually get to hang out and network and connect with other business owners. Because let’s face it, being at the top can be lonely. So this is a great place to get some networking in, maybe meet some new biz friends as well.

So keep your eyes on my socials. Make sure that you keep listening to the podcast, because I’ll be sharing more about what these workshops look like very soon. But in the meantime, I just want you to start to really ask yourself, is your business genuinely progressing, or are you just busy being busy?

Remember, a full calendar doesn’t mean a profitable business. Sometimes you have to stop, step back, and work out the best game plan to move your business forward.

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