I recently had a chat with Belinda Rosenblum about the relationship between marketing, sales training, and having liquid cash in your business.
How Belinda Started in Personal Finance
Belinda started in personal finance with a TV show and radio show, which launched on the day of the federal bailout back in 2008. She was on the five o’clock news in Boston for the better part of 12 years. “What I found was that I was getting to the point where I was getting really tired of telling people to go make more money. I’m like, okay, if this is what you want to make happen in your life, how do we go make more money?”
She decided to move toward entrepreneurship as this was how to control the amount of money Belinda would be making. She found she could easily talk to other entrepreneurs about their unlimited potential to make money. One of her clients, a video producer, went from $190,000 to $2.2 million in three years under Belinda’s program.
Finding Her Calling to Personal Finance
There are so many business coaches teaching you how to make more money, which is needed. We need help to figure out how to sell better, especially as women. The part clients get stuck on is managing and keeping more of the money that they are making.
“I just felt like there was such a need to help women entrepreneurs, particularly those with an online business. I could easily scale and help raise rates and create more profit to help you take control of the cash flow.”
So many women end up creating this job with much frustration, and they almost feel trapped in this business that they created for freedom. However, they end up not paying themselves and feeling resentful towards their business.
The Messy Middle of Business
Belinda says, “Acknowledging that there’s this messy middle and then saying what is going to help me get out of it? What’s going to help me fill up that business revenue, that business profit bucket?” Although Belinda didn’t make a profit last year, she admits that she was in the awkward, messy middle stage.
Upgrading Your Mindset’s Mental Clarity
Cash confusion where it just feels like you’re overthinking your plan. This stage feels very disorganized and reactionary. To calm the chaos, you can focus on your mental clarity in three key areas: emotional clarity, tactical clarity, and strategic clarity.
Upgrade your beliefs and your money story and start changing your identity to be your business owner. Now you can learn tactics such as a money system tracking revenue expenses. Upleveling requires a strategic side, particularly in thinking about the creation of consistent income each month.
Revolutionize how you look at your business and how you collect money for your business. And this works for everything. You know, coaches are a great example, but I mean, I remember coaching my massage therapy.
Take a step back and look at your business and ask yourself, “How can you work together for three or six months to achieve an outcome?” Now people are buying the outcome and results. You’re not forced into bank balance decision-making and bank-bound stress based on when you happen to have money in your bank or not.
Paying Yourself Shouldn’t be an Afterthought
Belinda is a firm believer in paying yourself first, “I don’t want you paying yourself to be an afterthought. I want you to reverse engineer your paycheck with what I call top down and a bottom up approach. “One hand needs to think about how much we want to pay ourselves and the other hand, how much we need to set aside for taxes.
Make sure you have a tax accountant to put money aside every month to cover your taxes at the end of the year. The key is that you want to have revenue. Money in the door, and fewer expenses, which is money out the door from your business equals accounting, profit. Then we allocate that profit to different places.
Belinda wants to see your business have consistent revenue, so you pay yourself, your business expenses and estimate taxes every month in and out. This is the point to launch promotions with your reserve income. Fund your additional investments, knowing that the baseline income is paying the expenses and yourself.
Remove the Mindset that Money is Bad
“Money isn’t inherently bad. We make it bad. We equate money to negative things. But money actually is a tool which helps us fund the things that we want.” The more money that we’re bringing in, the more people we can help.
They’re paying us for what they value. The more that people are paying you, the more value they’re getting. When you create more value, you’re creating in the world.
If you’re not doing well if there’s a month or two, like look ahead and ask yourself, ‘What am I going to do to make it better? How can I create a vision? How can I create a revenue plan and profit plan to correct the situation?’
Access Credit to Grow Your Business
It’s important to use debt as a business owner, particularly when you’re trying to jump to the next stage, where sometimes the only capital you have access to is credit. Getting into debt isn’t bad as long as you have a game plan to create more wealth with your debt.
Return on investment is the key to going into debt consciously. I think the biggest challenge is when we’re not close enough to our numbers and we’re not intentionally paying off our business credit cards each month. That’s where I think it can get us into trouble where your debt slowly builds. Make sure to have a bookkeeper or accountant who understands your business and can set it up for you. This way, you’ll have a grasp of where your money is going.
Transforming an Employee Mindset to a CEO Mindset
Put less pressure on every purchase and decision because we never know how it will work out. One of the most significant shifts that we need is to go from an employee mindset to that CEO mindset. With less pressure, we will realize that this is all an experiment, and we have to get comfortable with uncertainty and taking risks.
It’s like a big mind-fuck ever better. It throws you for a loop because you no longer get money magically deposited into your account every Friday. Now you need to ask for every dollar, you have a lot more pressure on making money, and no one prepares you for any of that.
We want to normalize money, so we don’t have to add all this meaning and feel terrible about the subject. Think of money as a tool to make more money. This way, you can do more with it.
Everything gets easier because you’ll be able to pay yourself, set aside money for taxes and feel secure with what’s happening in your business and remove yourself from this emotional roller coaster.
Resources that are mentioned or add value to this episode:
- Get Melinda’s free ebook “5 Easy Ways to Get More Bank in Your Online Business”
- Free Facebook Group: High Ticket Sales For Women Coaches and Course Creators
- Persuade To Profit
- Make Money Your Honey Book
- Check out my Live Training Online Here!
- Subscribe to my YouTube Channel to get the latest videos