When you’re a business owner – whether you’re a sole trader, a limited company, or whatever other structure you’ve chosen for your business – there are always going to be months where you make more sales, and times when you make less.
And that income going up and down can be a REALLY stressful place to be!
When you’re sitting looking at your bank account at the end of the month, knowing you’ve got bills and direct debits going out and all the things you need to pay and having no idea how you’re going to do it, it’s incredibly stressful and not much fun at all.
So today, I want to talk about a couple of ways to feel good about money, even when your bank account looks a bit empty.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re just starting out or whether you’ve been in business for a while, cashflow challenges can still happen no matter what level you’re at.
I certainly have business owners come to work with me who regularly make £85k, £100k, £200k a year and still have days where they look at their bank accounts and think “shit, I need some more money. What the hell am I going to do?!”.
Honestly, you are not alone (even if social media sometimes makes you feel like you’re the only one in the world who’s struggling).
So let’s talk strategies!
The first thing is to make sure you are thinking about your business money as separate from your own personal money.
This is a drum I will bang every single day. It doesn’t matter if you are a sole trader or not, you need a separate bank account for your business.
And then in an ideal world, within that business bank account, you want to create separate pots of money – a pot for expenses; a pot for tax; and a pot for your salary (you can have more pots of course, but these are the basics to get in place).
Lots of business bank accounts will now let you set up money pots really easily within your banking app. If your bank doesn’t offer this, you can set up separate accounts instead.
The reason for doing this is to break the link between how many sales you make and how much you get paid.
One of the first things I do with new clients is to set things up so they pay themselves the same amount of money each month, from their business to their personal account.
It’s the same amount of money every single month – even if they make no sales and even if they have an amazing month when the cash comes rolling in – because like I said before, it’s about breaking the link between the sales in your business and how much you take home.
This is such a crucial step to feeling better about your money, because you’re able to detach from the outcome. You can worry a whole lot less about how many sales you make this week and how big your launch is and other day-to-day things within your business, because it doesn’t affect how much you get paid and whether you can afford your mortgage this month.
You might be wondering how this works… and the secret is all about building up a slush fund! I’ve got a training that can help you with that, Profit first Masterclass – it’s just $9…
The other big way to help yourself feel better about money – no matter how much you have in the bank – is to do with your personal account and creating separate money pots there too.
When you pay yourself the same amount every single month and that money hits your account, you can then split it out into different pots (or accounts) for different purposes.
One of those pots should be for fun stuff. We’ve talked about this before – by specifically putting money into a pot for fun stuff every month, you can still have lunch with friends or buy a magazine or get your hair done or whatever fun is for you, even if you feel like you haven’t achieved everything in your business that you wanted to this week.
Honestly, it’s so simple but having a dedicated pot of cash that you can go and spend on shoes or anything else you want is SO liberating. There’s none of the guilt or worry that you ‘should’ be spending it on your bills or whatever, because you’ve already put aside the money for that into a different pot when you paid yourself.
Again, it’s all about detaching from the outcome – and if you want to feel good about your money, it’s SUCH a key thing to do.
If you want to know more about doing this, then you might want to consider sending me a private message here so we can chat about the next steps and working together.
Or check out my ‘everything’ page here where you’ll find all sorts of amazing options, at all sorts of price points (including free resources). There’ll definitely be something there to help, just see what takes your fancy!
Until next time,
Claire