A hearty welcome to “Grandma’s Wealth Wisdom” with your neighborly hosts, Brandon and Amanda Neely. This is the only podcast that helps you take charge of your cash flow and leverage your assets, simply and sustainably, the way Grandma used to.
Amanda: Hi, I'm Amanda and welcome to Grandma's Wealth Wisdom, where we help you break through to a smart, stable financial future with the tried and true wisdom Grandma used.
Brandon: Hey, and I'm Brandon, and this is Episode 55: “Three Ways for Entrepreneurs to Value Yourself More.” Three ways for entrepreneurs to value yourself more. That's a novel topic. This might be the most important episode we've aired to date, and I say that with a lot of, I don’t know, pain from our history and knowing how important this actually is. [01:01.6]
Amanda: We're going to get into that.
Brandon: Yeah, as a business owner, entrepreneurs, self-employed freelancers or independent contractors, if you can learn to truly value yourself, we believe you can master anything in your business, but it has to start with you.
Amanda: Yeah, but first we need to define what valuing yourself is and what it is not. It's not the same as self-esteem in two ways. Self-esteem is kind of an emotion—it’s about how you feel—whereas self-value is about behavior.
It's about how you act toward what you value, how you act toward yourself. When you value yourself, you align your behavior including what you do with your money with what values yourself, and that necessarily includes self-care.
In another way, self-esteem tend towards an entitlement and a hierarchical structure—when I esteem myself, that means that I put others down or below me—whereas self-value includes a value on others. [02:10.8]
Self-value is more about equality. It's the “love your neighbor as yourself” dilemma. To love your neighbor as yourself, you have to love yourself. We value others from the overflow of self-value.
Brandon: And we're going to be really open here. I mean, we learned this the hard way over many years of doing it the other way, we even had a name that was our coffee shop name that was “Overflow,” and yet we had so much focus on others that we've lost sight of valuing ourselves. It eventually got to the point where we were even being not our best selves when interacting with others. We couldn't love them well because we weren't loving ourselves well either, and this was super, super hard for us to actually change this behavior. [03:14.5]
Amanda: Yep, and Brandon and I weren't even treating each other well at one very memorable point in our journey when our marriage almost fell completely apart. And we can't tell you enough how important it is to learn to value yourself, for you and for everyone you care about.
Brandon: I think I remember the point, that low point that she's referring to, where it was just really, really bad and we thought we were awesome. We had a coffee shop called Overflow. I mean, please, we were the stuff. But there was a lot of things that were under the surface that I felt like we needed to take care of.
Amanda: Yeah. And there's a big reason why we're bringing this up right now in particular.
Brandon: The problem with not valuing yourself is being showcased tremendously during this current crisis. Those businesses who are struggling most are the ones who didn't have cash set aside. [04:12.6]
I mean, literally, they didn't have it there in case they needed it. Cash and cash flow are important, but a crisis highlights their importance even more and we never think that crisis is going to happen until it does.
Amanda: Right. So, why are we talking about cash and cash flow, and valuing yourself in kind of the same sentence, right? When you value yourself, you show that by what you do with the money coming into and leaving your business. Too many businesses pay everyone else first and don't leave much for themselves. The entrepreneurs pay or the businesses’ emergency fund. But when we value ourselves, maybe we can change that scenario. So, today we're going to talk about three ways that entrepreneurs can start to or grow in valuing yourself. [05:05.7]
Brandon: Heads up, these ways to value yourself are going to seem too easy, but that's the point. They are easy concepts to understand and to start, but following them consistently and looking for the next steps are where things get challenging in an exciting way. We're keeping them simple and easy, so that you will get started now and, at the end, we'll share how it's a level up, like in a video game, once we've got these started.
Amanda: We do need to say that if you use physical health as an example, what we're going to share isn't like saying cut calories and get exercise, right? The three ways to value yourself that we're sharing today are more like serve your dinner on a smaller plate and stand in front of the TV for 15 minutes a day. [06:00.5]
There are small specific actions that might seem like, Oh, this isn't going to matter, right? But they get you going in the right direction, right? Because it's really simple, really easy to use a smaller plate or to stand in front of the TV for 15 minutes. You still get to watch TV, still get to do what you love, but you're starting in the right direction and that's what's most important. And then, once you get that done, you're ready to level up to go to the next level.
Brandon: I still go back to my old playing Mario brothers and that level was super hard to beat and I could never figure it out. Then all of a sudden it snapped and then I can beat it every time. Anyway, that's when I was in fifth grade or sixth grade, playing Mario Brothers.
Amanda: I feel like let's stick with the good personal trainer example.
Brandon: Oh yeah, there you go. Personal trainer, video games, and using your thumbs. Just like a good personal fitness trainer, we're giving you the first steps, but you have to keep coming back in order to keep moving up to better and better levels of fitness. You have to keep playing. You have to keep going. And we're going to share how we can become your financial fitness trainer at the end of the episode, or Super Mario trainer, whatever. [07:18.0]
Amanda: With that really long intro, let's get to the first way entrepreneurs can value ourselves more and that is to switch around the order of how we do things. The truth is it's human nature that we give priority to what occurs first and what comes last gets ignored. If you pay your employees on Friday, switch it around. Pay yourself on Thursday, the day before, or maybe pay yourself on the Monday before if you pay your bills for the month. And then, finally, set aside anything leftover.
Maybe instead at the very beginning of the month or the very minute you get paid, start setting aside 1% of every dollar that comes into your business before you pay all your other bills. [08:05.6]
Brandon: It can’t be that simple. Is it for real? So, there's a quick tip for those who hate doing math. It's easy to calculate 1%. All you have to do is just shift the decimal over two places to the left, so 1% of 1,000 is 10. One percent of $2,857.62 is $285.76. All you do is add up how much money you made—that's something you already do—and then move the decimal two places. Then you move that amount to a separate bank account out of sight and out of mind for now.
Amanda: And you do that each and every time that money flows into your business, and this might sound a lot like Grandma's principle of safe first. If you've been listening to this podcast, you've heard us talk about that before, and this is taking Grandma's principle for personal use and applying it to business as well, which is actually a good segue into the second way to value yourself more. [09:14.4]
Brandon: Number two is to apply sound financial principles to your business. Setting aside a portion of every dollar that comes into your business is just the beginning of applying principles that worked for your personal finances to your business. So, here are four other examples.
Amanda: First, sign every dollar to a specific task, otherwise known as zero-based budgeting or give every dollar a job. Take the money you have today and ask, What does this need to do until I get more money? And keep asking that question until every dollar you have today has a specific task to do. This is actually pretty easy for employers because they're used to doing this with your staff. You just need to also do that with your money.
Brandon: You want to remember to account for non-monthly expenses? Do you give your staff a bonus every December? Break that down into a monthly amount and set those amounts aside every month. [10:10.3]
Do you go to a conference every May? Break down your travel expenses and conference fees into a monthly amount? Do you have to pay taxes every March or April? I know I do. Set aside a percent of your revenue every time you get paid to cover your tax bill.
You likely have variable income, so some months you might set aside less than the full amount. Make up for it in the months where income is higher than average, which is tied to number three.
Grandma always said, “Eat your vegetables. Look both ways before crossing the road. And never risk your financial future on elements of the market you can’t control.” That Grandma, always good for some tried-and-true advice. And although some of her wisdom seems to have skipped a generation, you don't have to be left behind.
Download “Grandma's Top Tips for an Independent Financial Future” absolutely free, when you visit Grandma’sWealthWisdom.com. Don't wait. Get Grandma's best tips today.
Amanda: Number three is to stay flexible. This is why we like working with percentages rather than with set dollar amounts for some things, especially like bonuses and taxes. It also applies to expenses. Continue to ask what's necessary. Continue to build up reserves that can be used for whatever purpose is needed.
Brandon: Going to the next thing, it is build a reserve. That's, again, I guess what's needed right now. A lot of people didn't have that, so you can start now.
So, here's a case study. We go to a conference every May, but now that conference is virtual because of COVID, so there's no travel expense for us. Yet we had money set aside for those travel expenses. That was part of our reserve. [12:06.1]
Now we can shift that towards other tasks that will make our business stronger during this crisis. A reserve not only helps you through crisis and lean times, it also helps you take advantage of opportunities that arise.
Amanda: So, we just gave you lots of ideas of how to take personal financial principles and apply them to your business. The most important thing is to ask what's the small action you can take today? Look for something you're doing well on your personal finances and look for a way to do that on the business side, too.
If you can't think of anything, try our first example. Take the money in your bank accounts right now and decide what each of those dollars needs to do for you until you get more money. This, at first, might be hard, but set aside 15 minutes once per week or once every other week, depending on how often you get paid and try it on the regular. [13:03.0]
If you don't get a hundred percent of each dollar assigned to the first time or the second time, that's okay. Do how much you can and then do more the next time. Practice, practice, practice, assigning jobs to every single dollar that you have.
Brandon: Our third and final way to value yourself is a big one for us. Stop comparing yourself to others. Compare to yourself yesterday, and I'm speaking to myself here. I feel like I do this often, but compare yourself to yourself yesterday.
We remember that third anniversary of our coffee shop like it was yesterday. We did a big event with customers, but we also had a little staff dinner with our team. During that dinner, we gave awards to each person, but our biggest takeaway was this—we're moving in the right direction, but we're not where we want to be. Let's all simply focus on one thing, sucking less tomorrow than we do today. That's it. That was exactly what we said. “Let's suck less tomorrow than we do today.” [14:15.1]
Amanda: Now, we were a small coffee shop making an average of less than a thousand dollars per day, some days much less, right? And compared to the Starschmucks and the Duncans of the world, we sucked, but that didn't matter to us. What mattered was consistent improvement.
That might seem like setting the bar super low, but that's exactly what we needed at that time. Even if we added 1% to our top line revenue each week, maybe by upselling one additional pastry per shift, with a compound effect, our revenue would double in a year. If we found a way to reduce costs by 1% per month, maybe just by being less wasteful and measuring milk properly for the lattes that we were making, which I'm sure the staff got tired of me, hearing it all the time … [15:01.7]
Brandon: I got tired of hearing it all the time, too.
Amanda: But if we just measured properly, reduced our costs 1% per month, we would make our net profit over 12% higher. That could be a big difference for us.
Brandon: Most importantly, though, it worked. We were all on a mission to find the little ways to increase revenue or decrease expenses, so that we sucked less today than we did yesterday. And that wasn't just me and Amanda. That was our whole team. It brought our team together and it gave us some really creative ideas to make bigger impacts that were greater than 1%.
Amanda: So, what are you missing? Because you're focusing on trying to be like the big guys in your industry, while 1% improvements are sitting right in front of you, waiting to be seen and implemented. Make it as specific and as easy as selling one extra pastry per shift or measuring milk more carefully, and just let your creativity flow. [16:00.5]
Brandon: Yes, canceling a recurring unnecessary subscription that's at 1% of your monthly revenue counts. Cancel it and then look for the next 1%. So, again, doing that might do that 1% right there.
Amanda: Right, and years later after talking about that with our staff, we came across this idea in a book and we're like, Hey, look, it's right there what we were talking about. Here's what the book says. No matter what you do, in the beginning it's going to suck, because you suck. But you'll get better and you'll suck less, and as you keep doing this, eventually you'll suck so little, you'll actually be good.
Brandon: That's kind of funny that that was in the book, and we thought about that and we never read that book.
Amanda: Right.
Brandon: Anyway, I think that’s … who is that? I don't know.
Amanda: So, suck less today than you did yesterday. Moral of the story.
Brandon: Yep. So, we said at the top of the episode that learning to value yourself more is one of the most important things entrepreneurs can learn. Put that statement to the test. [17:06.2]
Amanda: So, we want to challenge you to try this week to do three small actions that show you value yourself. The first one, shift 1% of all your revenue that you earn this week into a separate account that's off limits for now. Just move that decimal plate point over two places and do the shift.
Secondly, set aside 15 minutes to take the other 99% of your revenue and ask, What do I need this to do for me before I earn more? And get through as much of that 99% as you can and you can try again next week.
Then, third, start one easy specific action that could increase revenue by 1% or decrease your cost by 1%. That’s all we're asking you to do.
Brandon: An important note here is do these in this order. Don't start looking for ways to increase revenue or decrease expenses until you've assigned the money in your account to specific tasks. Don't assign the money in your accounts to specific tasks until you've shifted 1% to a separate account. The order is very important here. [18:17.2]
Amanda: So, we'll say that again. Shift 1% of your revenue to a separate account. Take the other 99% and just set aside 15 minutes to ask, What do I need this money to do for me before I earn more? And then start looking for easy specific actions that increase revenue by 1% or decrease costs by 1%.
And once you've done those three things, we want you to let us know. Go to Grandma'sWealthWisdom.com/55, the number of this episode, 55, and send us a quick message that says, I'm ready for what's next. I'm ready to level up. We're going to tell you how to keep going and continue to value yourself more and more and more. [19:00.0]
Brandon: And I'd love to hear … Put it in your journal and as you're talking to us now, but if you continue this over the next five years, I guarantee you that you are going to see results, I think at least to me.
Amanda: And not just for yourself. You're probably going to see those results for the people you care most about, the people right around you, and the people around the world, right, that you want to pour into and make a difference for.
Brandon: Yep, just speak from our experience.
So, that's it for today. Be sure to subscribe, so you don't miss the next episode about the wealth in your business that's beyond the dollars and cents and your bank accounts, and the inventory on your shelves. We'll share the often unrealized asset and how you can leverage them to transform your business and yourself.
Amanda: I'm really excited for that episode. That sounds enticing. Until next time, keep building your wealth, simply and sustainably, so you can break through to a smart, stable financial future. [20:07.2]
The topics presented in this podcast are for general information only and not for the purposes of providing legal, accounting or investment advice. On such matters, please consult a professional who knows your specific situation.
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