A version of this article was first published on DesignGood.
In my last post, I talked about the importance of business financial alignment and asked you to consider where you’re at. Today, I’d like to address how you can start financially aligning yourself and business through three pivotal steps.
Step 1 to Financially Aligning Yourself
First step: get clear on what it is that you want from your business!
When I ask business owners what their dream business looks like, the responses vary greatly. Some people think in terms of bringing in a certain amount of money or becoming a (multi) millionaire. Others share with more lifestyle things like “I want to travel all the time and be location independent,” or “I want to only work 3 hours a day and be at all my kids’ activities.” Whichever way you tend to response, I’d like you to take that vision to a more holistic and bigger-picture level.
For instance, if you want your business to provide you a certain lifestyle, figure out the monetary amount of what that you’d need to create or maintain that.
For instance:
- How much money do you need to be able to travel constantly?
- How much money would it take to live in your dream house?
Assign a dollar value to each dream you have for your business. (This may take some research!) But, once you have a total, you can further break it down to figure out how much money you need each month to sustain these life choices.
Or, if you responded you want you business to provide you a set dollar amount, let me ask: What will that dollar amount provide you? Think specific! So, for instance:
- How will you use that money?
- How do you want to be able to live your life?
- What changes do you expect that big dollar amount to bring?
- What does this mean to you?
Then start researching the dollar amounts for what you actually need based on your specific responses. This may or may not match with the money goal you originally had in mind, so feel free to adjust.
As you go through this exercise, remember to think in terms of what you want to take home–so your business revenue has to be higher. If you’re great with numbers or have some financial assistance, you can factor in your business’ profit margin and taxes to get an exact total revenue of what your business needs to bring in.
I love this exercise because it brings home that even though we’re talking about money, we’re really talking about something much bigger than money–like lifestyle, freedom, security… Essentially, we’re talking about what you want and are able to do in life. And this exercise gives you the full picture. Because whether you think in terms of numbers or lifestyle first, you need to consider the other side. This exercise ties the financial side of business back to your life and what matters to you. Which helps you start financially aligning yourself and making holistic financial choices as you move forward with your business.
Step 2 to Financially Aligning Yourself
Second step: invest in your financial literacy!
I’ll call the elephant in the room: financial literacy isn’t most people’s favorite thing. I get it. But guess what? Even when you have the best financial help in the world, only you, the business owner, are in the driver’s seat of your business. You are the one who knows where you going. You are the one at the wheel. So ultimately, it’s on you to make the final financial choices and decisions in alignment with that. If you don’t fully understand some key accounting and tax concepts (like profit and loss statements, balance sheets, profit margin, cash flow, tax rates) business finances and money will always be a challenge.
From a purely energetic standpoint, when you nurture your understanding of business finances, your actions say things like “I see you. This is important. I’m taking care of my business. I’m taking care of myself. I’m taking care of my life. I’m in control. Money is easy. Knowledge is powerful. I’ve got this.” Like attracts like. So when you nurture your finances, they start nurturing you back–and that’s a great way to start financially aligning yourself!
Step 3 to Financially Aligning Yourself
Third step: Fully trust that your business has your back.
Trust. Ahhh. Trust, by far, is the most challenging step of all. So often as business owners we spend a lot of time crafting the perfect offer, updating our bio, going to networking events, hiring staff — and the list goes on. We may even spend a lot of time with client acquisition or crunching the numbers. But at the end of the day, if you do not truly believe that your business can and will sustain you, it will be difficult to create business financial alignment. And, likely, business will always feel hard.
There’s a surrender that comes in trusting something will work. It frees your energy from worry and bumps it to a higher vibration. It gives you bandwidth to address challenges and perseverance to do what you need to do. And, even if things aren’t where you’d ultimately like them to be, you know that each day brings a new beginning, new support and new opportunities.
Learning to develop a “trust” mindset also allows you to enter an equal partnership: one where you invest in and take care of the business and you have a business that invests in and takes care of you. Now, to be clear, trust isn’t void of action. It’s simply another tool that further propels you to financially aligning yourself–and is one that’s crucial to take your business to the next level.
In the upcoming final post of this 3 part series about business financial alignment, we’ll talk about pay–and why that’s so crucial to financial alignment.
PS. Did you catch the first part of this 3-part series on business financial alignment? If not, you can catch-up here.
