It's All About the Numbers, So Make Sure You Know Yours

Tip #2 REMEMBER, IT’S ALL ABOUT THE NUMBERS SO MAKE SURE YOU KNOW YOURS.

The reason I like to quantify things is because all businesses come back to something that has to do with numbers. And numbers don’t lie. To deliver profitable growth, you need to be ambidextrous to sustain excellence in both growth and cost control.

If you are a business owner who has her books done by an outsider, then you better not be putting the reports you should be getting on a very regular basis in a drawer. Or worse, not getting the reports at all. You need to understand how money is flowing in and out of your business, how fast it is flowing, and who is giving it to you or getting it from you. You need to know how long you really spent doing a job, every minute of it, to know if the price you charged paid you fairly. How many times have you undercharged and overdelivered?

Now, let me tell you about a client who came to me already making a six figure income. Her business is mature, she is over 50, and she is, of all things, another coach. Her specialty is coaching celebrities and CEOs who have to present compelling messages to important people. When she came to see me, she had her act together. Her image was dialed in. She could explain her business quickly and effectively and she brought her financials, which she understood. She was interested in one main deliverable from our time together, making more income but spending less time earning it. She was thinking of early retirement and wanted to fund the kitty in preparation for that chapter of her life.

So, we did two important things together. She went back through her numbers and took a closer look at the projects she worked on and how long they really took her. I had her keep a time log for 30 days of every phone call to and from her clients, every piece of correspondence she wrote, every bit of research she did, and every meeting she sat through. She was amazed out the amount of time she had lost track of on each of her projects. When it was time to renegotiate her next year of projects, she went to each client with the ammunition of the time spent on their behalf and more importantly, what the client had accomplished because of her work. She was able defend her pricing integrity and to increase her income by 25% from this all important attention to detail.

Our next piece of her goal was to work less hours, so we needed to create a “make money when you sleep” scenario. This concept is more difficult for a service business, such as a consultant or a coach, than it would be for a provider of products who can post them on the internet, add a shopping cart, and ship things you can see and touch. We needed to extract items from her brain, package them up and post them on the internet.

When you go back to work tomorrow, think about capturing a record of the time you spend on each of your clients projects, take your financials out of the drawer if you put them there, and keep accurate notes of how your work and/or your products have benefitted your clients. If you provide a service to others, go back and read your reports to clients and notes from your meetings and figure out how you can reuse them in articles, seminars, or speaking engagements.

Next week, I will share with you Tip #3,

JUSTIFY YOUR DECISIONS FROM A POSITION OF BUSINESS SAVVY, NOT FROM A POSITION OF EMOTION, OR EVEN WORSE, A POSITION OF LAZINESS.