5 Must-Do Accounting Processes for Moving Companies

Foreign.

It's Luis Massaro. And welcome to another episode of the Moving Mastery Podcast.

This podcast is all about helping you reach that next level in your moving company. And we do that by sharing with you how processes and strategies and ideas that get you thinking bigger on what's possible. You know, I grew my business from working out of a truck rental yard all the way to $20 million a year. And I want to help share those strategies with you so that you could reach that next level in your business, whatever that is for you. And, you know, it's not all about just making more money. It's about profiting in your business and thriving in your life. And we do that by, you know, being able to set up those systems, set up those processes so we could step away and work on our business and not be every single day stuck in the grind so that we have some time to enjoy with our families and just enjoy life and the fruits of our labor. And today, I am just so excited to talk to you about something that is gonna help you reach that next level in your business. And it's called Smart Moving Software. This is a company that I co founded with an amazing partner and group of programmers that have just built an amazing platform. You know, this is a software that runs your entire moving business. Not only runs it, but truly optimizes it. You know, one of the things that I the most is that you have just ultimate clarity into your numbers. I mean, as soon as you log in, you've got a dashboard right there that just tells you everything that's going on. You know, one of the things that I've realized over the years that helps moving companies really get to that next level of success is being able to know their numbers. And, you know, without a system that pulls everything together, it could be really, really challenging. And Smart Moving just has all the reports and all the information dialed in the way that you need it to be. And I'm just so excited to tell you about it today. Go check it out, get a demo, go to smartmoving.com, sign up for a free demo, check it out and listen, if you don't have a CRM in this modern day of moving, you need a CRM. If you've already got a CRM and you're just looking for an upgrade, something that's more streamlined, something that gives you all the tools that actually matter, go to smartmoving.com, check it out. It's gonna help you do everything from the minute you get leads to your sales process, to customer Service to dispatch, to following up with your crews, to handling your numbers and your books and your reports. Everything you need is there in a streamlined, systematic, automated process. And I'm just so excited to be a part of it. I'm so excited to finally have a solution to offer to moving company owners that for years were asking me, louis, what platforms did you use? What softwares did you use? And the truth is, I used a lot of different stuff that I had to tie together because there wasn't something like Smart Moving that allowed me to just do everything in one place. And now that we have that, I mean, we've got customers at all different levels using this software. You know, companies that, you know, maybe they're just starting out, companies that have been in business for 10 years, they've got 10, 15 trucks. We've got nationwide franchises that are running their entire operation off of smart moving. So I want you to go check it out today because I'm so excited about it. It's called Smart Moving Software. Get your free demo@smartmoving.com and without further ado, let's jump into this episode of the Moving Mastery PO Podcast.

What's up, guys? Welcome back to the Moving CEO Scaling series. What is this? Episode nine? We've been going strong for nine days in a row working on scaling your moving company, taking it to the next level, taking what's working. And stacking. And growing. And stacking and growing. We started off by, you know, stabilizing, right? There's really a few things that need to happen before we could scale. We started off by stabilizing. We went through a few days of just, you know, kind of getting things back in line, stabilizing what's feeling a little chaotic, right? Today we're going to talk about systematizing your accounting. Some of you may have scrolled through and saw accounting and just said, you know what, let me keep scrolling, because it's not the sexiest of topics, right? But I used to feel that way myself. And then it became a whole different ball game for me when I realized the true benefit of what it can do for my business. And so this is actually a really, really, really important episode. You know, a lot of people will dive in, tell me the marketing stuff, tell me the sales stuff, but when it comes to the accounting, people kind of, you know, turn a blind eye to that. And I'm here to kind of plead to you that make this a priority. Make accounting, make your numbers a priority. Because if you're trying to run a business and you don't know what your numbers are. It's like being the captain of a ship without any coordinates of where you're going, you know, and it's a big ocean, and it's a big sea, and you might be out there for a while and be okay, well, I'm sailing. I'm cruising. And might feel like you're really doing good. And you might be doing good, you might be making money, and all of a sudden, you hit the iceberg, right? And now you're the Titanic. You might have had the biggest, best ship, but now you're going down because you hit the iceberg, right? And I'm saying this because this happened to me, you know, when I started my company again, I was 19 years old and almost, you know, right away, after getting through some initial hurdles, it became, you know, started making money, right? And so I based everything off of, how much did we book today? How much did we do today? How much money's in the bank? And that was the extent of it, right? I'd have my CPA saying, Louis, you know, your P. Ls, your P. Ls, Your P. Ls. And I'm like, all right, yeah, what do you need to figure that out? And you figure it out. And to me, it was just something that. Like.

Something extra in the business that I felt like the accountant needed, right? It wasn't like my mind was focused on, I need to book jobs, I need to hire some movers, I need to get more business, more trucks, get into storage, right? That's where my mind was. And it just felt like to slow down and review these reports.

That the first time. First few times I tried to look at them just felt like they were, you know, like, reading hieroglyphics. I'm like, what am I even looking at here? And I ran my business. I'll admit, I ran my business for, like, probably the first seven years and built a massive company in that time, not really knowing my numbers, not really reviewing my profit and loss, my balance sheet, my cash flow statement. And it wasn't until the recession hit in 2008 where all of a sudden, cash flow got really tight, meaning there wasn't enough money to pay the bills, right? And at that time, I had six locations, and I was scrambling, right? Like, one office was doing okay, another office wasn't doing okay. And it became this, like, where's the money? What is going on? And I had no clarity, right? And so it's. You know, imagine nowadays, you know, driving and just being totally lost. And you don't have your GPS with you. You know, you never learned how to read street signs. You never understood the logic of how they put streets together and what northeast means. And you know, how one side of the street's even numbers, the other side's odd numbers. Imagine like you just never knew any of that and you didn't have your GPS to tell you where to go. And at the same time, it was rush hour. That's what it felt like. It was like, man, there is so much that I need to know and I need to see to navigate myself through this tough time, but I don't have the information to do it. And that's when I got really, really serious. It was like, okay, you know something, you know, listen, it's human nature, right? We know we should do something. We know we need to do something. But until we feel the pain of not doing it right, until we have that heart attack from the food we're eating and not working out, until we, you know, are totally depressed and miserable because we're not taking care of our well being until our business is on the verge of going under, we don't feel enough pain to do the things that aren't the fun things to do. And that was my moment, that was my time where I was like, look, I need to know these numbers. I need to get these on point. And I became a student of it. You know, I went to my CPA and I'm like, let's go. Teach me this, right? Start the clock, whatever you need to charge me, and let's go through this. I need to know what this means, what that means. I need to understand all of it.

And I gotta tell you, it was, you know, the hard, as hard as it was to go through that time, that, that recession period, it forced me to grow as a business person. It forced me to grow as a leader, right? And allowed me to learn the stuff that was totally outside of my comfort zone, right? Totally outside of my comfort zone. Like, I felt like I knew what I was doing, but I avoided that because I wasn't good at it. I didn't know how to do it. And I wasn't feeling enough pain from not doing it to get me motivated to do it, if that makes sense. And so when I finally did it, just listen. I became a whole new person, a whole new business person. My level of clarity that I had to be able to run my business off of numbers.

Was incredible. That's what really allowed me to get to that next level is understanding. Look, the numbers don't lie. You know, we could all mask it with, we're booking a ton of jobs. Look at all these pretty trucks. Look at this, look at that. And what I know now is sometimes that's. That's a facade. It might look like a company's big and doing a lot, and they might be doing a lot of gross revenue, but where are the profits, right? And so, you know, by. By knowing these numbers, man, I just. It's. It's you. It's hard to explain. It's like you finally learn how to play a game. You think you've known how to play a game all this time. You know, maybe you, you know, played. Played poker. You know, as, you know, when family was over, just messing around, and then you finally learned how to go play to solve them or whatever, right? You learn the rules of the game, and accounting is the rule of business, right? And in the moving business, there's only five things that make up everything you do. Lead generation, your marketing, booking moves, your sales, servicing moves, operations, creating raving fans, your customer service and accounting. Knowing your numbers. That's it. You get those five on point. You learn the rules of the game. You go where you want to go. You scale how you want to scale. Weren't looking at their numbers before. There's nothing to be ashamed of, right? I'm not guilting you. I'm not shaming you for not doing it. I'm not saying that you're not a true business person. What I'm saying is the level of success that you've achieved so far without knowing your numbers, if you know your numbers, it's like you just got the juice, you just got the turbocharge, right? You're on a whole different level now. And it's not even what you could accomplish. It's the clarity, it's the peace of mind of truly knowing how you're doing. It's about knowing and understanding where you're truly at. I mean, how many of you have thought that you've had a great month and great summer, great year, and then you're like, where the. Is the money, right? Like, where's the money? Right? Because there's profits and then there's, you know, I use the term profit.

You know, as. As not. Not as a technical sense, you know, when I say profit and thrive, when I say profit and business thrive in life, that profit is money for you to take home. You know, but technically, when it comes to accounting and truly knowing your numbers, you could show a profit but not have the cash profit on your P and L doesn't always translate into cash in your pocket. But I just want to, you know, take this little extra time up front here and set the tone on how important this is, right? And acknowledge that, as you know, as many millions as I was making in the business, as many locations as I was making had in the business, as many moves as we were doing, I was still in the minor leagues until I learn my numbers. And I know companies that are doing great. They've got great businesses, they've got great staff, they're making money, they're taking money home. They're. They're, you know, they're. They're living a good life, and they're doing it consistently year after year, but don't know their numbers. And so my thing is, like, if you learn that and you knew that, you will unlock more potential in yourself than you could possibly imagine. You now have a tool where you've been trying to use a screwdriver all this time to do all your, you know, your assemblies, and now you've got a drill, a cordless power drill, right? That's what it's about. Nick. Nick says, once I found my true numbers on monthly expenses and cost of goods sold, I have been a new businessman with a whole new perspective. Thanks, Louis. Nick. I love it. I love it. That's why I'm doing this. That's why I'm doing this. I don't want you guys to go through the suffering and the pain and the waste of time. You know, if I had known that early on, if somebody really like my accountant passively told me about it, but somebody that, you know, I, like, really looked up to and respected grabbed me and just said, listen, stop before you go any further. Know your numbers. Get this stuff locked down.

Who knows where I would have been, right? But there's no looking in the past. We're just looking forward. I want to save you guys from making those mistakes. So let's talk about some steps that you could do to automate your accounting, okay? We're talking about. We're talking about systematizing right now, okay? We're talking about getting a system behind it. Because if you don't have a system behind it, there will never be a day where you wake up, go into your office, and say, I'm going to work on accounting today, right? Or, what should I do this week? I'm going to work on accounting this week. It's just not going to happen. Right? It's just not going to happen. So we've got to kind of systematize it and make it easy and make it in a way where it's just part of the process, right? Everything just becomes part of the process. And when it's part of the process, it gets done, right? So first thing you gotta do is a daily closeout, okay? Daily closeout. And so, again, if you guys are like, louis, I know I do this, just hear me out. Every day in your CRM, okay, you want to make sure that who, somebody, okay? Again, when I say you, you, you, you, you, I'm saying you need to make sure this happens in your company. You don't have. You personally don't have to do any of this yourself. You just have to make sure it gets done right. I'm not telling you to go do all these steps that we've been going over. You just oversee it, you delegate it, and make sure it happens, get it executed. But every day, close out. Close out the jobs, right? Meaning all the moves that were done for the day, go into your system and just close them out, right? Make sure that the money's there. Make sure that the money's right. Make sure the payroll for the movers is accounted for on that job. Those of you that don't have a system that does all this, check out my software, smart moving software. Just go to smartmoving.com, right? We need to systematize this because, you know, when we get to the end of the month and we want to run reports and we want to see stuff, and now we've got to, like, backtrack and start filling in numbers. It's. It's chaotic and totally unproductive. The other thing is payroll, right? If you're paying, you know, we paid movers once a week, right? And in order to do that, we've got to make sure we've got accurate payroll records. And if you are in a situation where you are every week, you know, I had this early on for a short period of time, and I was like, this is nuts. We need to. We need to do this daily to where every week you're like, going back through all the contracts, back through all the paperwork, back through your CRM and trying to account for all of the hours that your guys worked, your movers worked. It's totally unproductive, okay? It's a big waste of time. And whoever's doing it dreads it, right? Whoever's doing it is dreading that process. And so if you just close it out daily, making sure, hey, these are the jobs we did. Let's verify the job was $968. Did we collect $968?

The movers, these three movers were on that job. This is how many hours they should get. This is how much, you know, commission they should get.

And do that every single day. Again, we're systematizing, right? You might say, louis, I do that. Okay, but are we doing it consistently? Daily? Systematic. Systematic. Not in theory. Is it getting done? That's basic, but that's the start of this whole thing. The next thing we want to do is we want to automate our income and expenses. Automate income and expenses. So when you look at financials, specifically your P and L, okay, you're gonna have income at the top. This is what a profit and loss statement looks like. You've got an income at the top, all the money that came in. And ideally, you have that broken out by the type of income, right? Is it local moving income? Is it long distance moving income? Is it storage income? Is it packing income?

Right. The next section, you have your cost of goods sold. These are expenses that are associated directly with the cost of servicing the move. Okay? Things like your mover's payroll, right? Any packing material that was used, and other things, right? And then after that, you have just general expenses that might not be associated directly. Like, you can't put a. You can't pinpoint and say this is directly associated with the move, but it's other expenses in the business. And then you get down to the bottom of your net income and your profit, right? And so what we want to do is in order to get accurate numbers, in order to get an accurate report, the numbers that go into your accounting software, right? Don't try to do this stuff by hand, okay, into your accounting Software. I recommend QuickBooks Online, all right? Just because it's easy to use and it integrates with smart moving. And, you know, to get it all into QuickBooks, that's half the battle, right? Systematize. You don't want to sit there at the end of the month, whether it's you or a bookkeeper, whoever, and try to, like, input all the income, input all the expenses. So how do you do this? Okay, well, first of all, smart moving, you get that going. I know a lot of you are on there already. If you haven't, go get a demo, you owe it to yourself to at least go look at it, right? I'm not. I don't push it on anybody. You've got another. Another CRM that works for you. Awesome, right? We're still friends. It's all good, right? But.

You go in and you connect it to QuickBooks. QuickBooks is your accounting software. That's what's going to generate your profit and loss, your balance sheet, cash flow, all your every pay, your bills, everything is done from there, okay? You need something like that. If it's not QuickBooks, look up alternatives if you're against QuickBooks. And what happens is when you connect that with smart moving, all of the income from the jobs automatically goes over to QuickBooks and it will separate it out however you want it separated out, right? You do a couple little clicks of where you want things to go in the back end and you tell smart moving, hey, this line, that's a long distance move once in the back end, right? Like all of you know, these are my long distance jobs, these are my locals, this is my storage revenue. And it will put it in QuickBooks already separated out, right? Which to some of you, you're like, okay, yeah, cool. But for me and a lot of you that never had this feature, it's like we would have to take the revenue, the credit card statements that came in, the bookkeeper would have to go and look it up and see what the revenue was, do splits and journal entries, like super time consuming. And so to be able to automate that is huge. And your expenses the same thing. You could hook up all of your credit cards and bank accounts to QuickBooks and so every transaction is automatically there. And now all you have to do is go and tell QuickBooks, oh, that's you know, truck expense. This is marketing, right? And once you do that a few times, it'll start to like, remember what it is, right? This, I mean it's so simple. But you need to set yourself up to make the process easier. Because otherwise the process of like, I gotta do accounting and it just feels like it's gotta be this whole day long project of like, I've gotta get everything input. That's what stops most people. You systematize it. We're not doing this accounting because the act of accounting is what we want. We want the outcome, we want the numbers, we want the reports, right? But we have to set a few things up. We have to systemize a few things in order for that to happen. Okay? So automate income and expenses.

Hey, my friend, it's Louis and I'm just hopping in really quick to remind you to go get your free demo.

Of smart moving software.

Smart moving software is a company that.

I co founded that is quickly becoming.

The leading moving software in the moving industry. And I'M super excited for you to check it out. So go get your free demo today. Just go to smartmoving.com, that's smartmoving.com and sign up for your free demo and check it out today.

Next one is you need an accounts payable process. Accounts payable process. So accounts payable is basically an accounting term of saying pay your bills. Like, what, what bill? What money do you owe? And you know, like in your accounting system, it'll say, here's what's owed. Okay, here's the accounts that we need to pay on. Okay, you have accounts payable and then accounts receivable. Accounts receivable or people that owe you money. So you need a process for this. There's a few ways you could do this. Like back in the day, before technology, automation, all of this, I'd have my bookkeeper bring me.

What'S called a.

Unpaid bills report. Okay? Unpaid bills report and put the unpaid bills report on the front of a manila folder. Put all the bills that came, like when all the bills used to get mailed to you, right? Put all the bills in the manila folder in the same order as they are on the sheet. So that if I had any questions or I needed to see what, like, why are we paying this for this? Right? I could go look at the invoice and it's right there for me. And, you know, there was a set day and a set time where I got that information. I was prepared for it. I knew it was a block on my calendar. We talked about that early on. I went in, I reviewed it, I took the sheet. Check, check, check, check, check. What's this? Research this. Why is this? Ask them why this bill is this. Da, da, da, da. Don't pay that right now. Went through and that was the process. Then she went and cut checks, right? And then I signed the checks. And so that's one way of doing it, right? Another way is to just have a day, once a month, twice a month max, where you have it on. You have reminders, you got a list of bills that need to get paid. You know, maybe it's the same bill every month. And you just sit down, you pull up that list and you go manually make the payments. If you're the one that's going to do it, right? What we're trying to avoid is we're trying to avoid, oh, shit, I owe that money. Oh, I got an email. I got to pay this. Oh, oh, oh. And it's so reactive. This stuff doesn't have to be reactive. What needs to be reactive. The phone rings, let's book the job. There's a move, they need extra equipment. Like there's enough reactive stuff in the business. This has to be smooth, right? And another way to do this is just to auto pay bills, right? Auto pay bills, put them right on your credit card and let them just charge you once a month. Get the points, right? You know how many points? You know, many points that I've got over the years from paying for yellow pages and marketing and all this stuff on a credit card.

I'm talking like major trips on points.

Right? So if you could auto pay stuff where you don't even have to worry about it, obviously you need to be in a good cash flow position to where you're not needing to make those decisions. Like, no, we can't pay this, we can pay this, but set up your accounts payable process. The next one is get yourself a bookkeeper.

Get yourself a bookkeeper.

You know this if, unless you're going to learn accounting, which you should, by the way, you should learn, you should understand, you should always know what your bookkeeper is doing and understand their process. But unless you're going to learn it and actually do it, hire somebody, you know, you don't have to get a full time person. You could get somebody part time these days that works virtually that you don't have to send them all your paper, bank statements and all. Like we live in a virtual world now.

You could easily find somebody for a few hundred dollars a month to hand. Like get, make sure your books are on point.

Make sure your books are on point. You know, I had a private client when I first started work with him. This is, I don't know, three years ago, four years ago. I still work with him today. And.

He, you know, at first I'm like, okay, I need to see your, you know, your P. Ls. Let's, let's go through that. And he's like, you know, I don't have it. All right, no problem. We got some other stuff to work on and we don't need it right away. Let's get some of this other stuff going, but get that done. He's like, yeah, I've got an accounting background, going to get it done myself. And after a period of time, you know, we kept hitting roadblocks of, you know.

We kept hitting roadblocks of things that we needed to figure out right answers that he was looking for paths and strategies that we were trying to map out that we needed to know numbers in order to make the Right decision. And finally I'm like, look, you've been saying you're gonna do this for a long time. Just hire a bookkeeper. You've got the money, do it. You know, I don't care that you've got an accounting background. That's great. You're gonna be able to look after and make sure they're doing the right thing. We need this. Let's look at how long we've gone without it. You really want to continue to go. Do you really want to continue to not have that clarity? You are a bookkeeper right away. You know, and so I see a question here. A bookkeeper as compared to an accountant. You know, here's the thing. What you, you need a cpa, okay? You need a cpa, which is someone who's going to be able to handle your tax returns and your accounting from a higher level. From a tax level, okay.

And you want someone that is familiar with business.

Small business tax strategy. Right? So you're not paying extra money. But as far as, like, someone to manage and clean up your books.

You know, and just keep them up to date and keep them up to speed, you know, you need a. A certified QuickBooks, you know, bookkeeper. That's what you need, right? So good question there. Good, good question. You know, a lot of people will have an accounting office, a CPA office, and like, they do my books, they do my taxes. Cool, great. But be a part of the conversation, right? That's what I had at first, too. And, you know, they would send me these P Ls and balance sheet. And, you know, I didn't say, where'd you get that number from? You know, how'd you do it? Right. It's a big, big deal. And so a bookkeeper is just someone that's going to help keep QuickBooks accurate. Right. Get the numbers accurate. Depending on how you choose to do your accounting, there's two accounting methods. There's cash basis, there's accrual basis. I'm not going to get into that today. We're just talking about systematizing. But depending on how you choose to do that, there could be additional work involved other than just adding the income and adding the expense. Right. There might need to be some journal entries and some. Some rec. You know, you need everything reconciled every month to make sure what's in your books matches the reality of what's in the bank and your credit card charges. So get yourself a bookkeeper. Like I said, I hired somebody full time. When I first did this, this was my first Real hire, by the way. And now you don't need to do that, you know, now you don't need to do that. You can totally find someone, virtual few hundred bucks a month, they can handle it for you. Whoever does your taxes, talk to them and say, do you guys offer bookkeeping services as well? See what that is and go from there. Listen, think about everything that we do. He's saying the daily closeout. He's just been doing it whenever he does the deposit, but we're talking about doing it daily. The more that you can get in a rhythm in your business to where it's like consistent, right? It's a consistent rhythm week after week, day after day. Your team can get on board with that. You can scale, you can delegate. When things are done, like here and there and here and there and here and there, you're the only one that could control that chaos. Nobody else can get really in there with you. And if they do, they're just in the chaos with you, Right? I want to get you guys out of that. So then once we have that, we've got to make sure that we actually review these numbers. So we need a monthly review.

As part of our systematizing with a checklist. Monthly review with a checklist. And what this means is you need to block time on your calendar, set aside some time and review your financials every single month. Every single month.

This is so important.

Because when you, those of you who do this, you're like, yep, yep, yep, I know, Yep. You got. You're right, you're right. And those of you that don't, hopefully I'm painting the picture on why this is so important. Good enough. But you won't truly feel it and understand it until you do it right. You know, for me, like, I remember looking at my financials one month and you know, and at one point I had six locations plus a long distance division, plus my corporate office, right? So you've got eight sets of financials, right? Each one has its own individual set of financials. And I'm looking at this one office.

And I'm like, why are the claims so high? What. What is going on there? Okay. And because I recognize that and I saw that this is one example of so many, I went into the CRM, I drilled down into the claims, I looked at what was going on with the claims. We found out who was causing them and we found out what specifically they were damaging. And we were able to find out that it was because they were damaging flat screen TVs. They were damaging marble tabletops, they were damaging.

Pictures. Basically, stuff that it needs to be packed in a very similar way, right? And it was a specific set of movers with a specific set of items. So what do we do? We went in and we did targeted training.

Right? I wasn't even there. I called the ops manager over there at that office. Here's what we need to do. Get it done. And that was it. We solved that problem. The claims went down, right? You could identify problems so easy by looking at the numbers, right? Maybe the first time you look at your. You may say, louis, I've looked at the P and L and I don't see anything. And that's because you don't. You're not comparing it to anything else. You're gonna need to review these for a few months in a row to start seeing what the trends are, to start establishing what your baseline and what your benchmarks are for certain numbers, what the percentage of income is for a certain category. We're spending X percent on fuel, right? So if you're spending 5% on fuel and then all of a sudden, you know, you're looking, you're like, you know, it should be right around that number, right? And now it's 8%. What's going on there? This is actually another example, right? Found that going on. Drilled down into it. Looked at the fuel cards we were using. Found out guys were stealing fuel at the pump, they were fueling up other people and taking cash. That's happening to a lot of you, by the way.

Just saying, I'm not a cynical person at all. I want to believe the best in people, but I'm a realist when it comes to business. And I know that if you leave the key in the door of the candy shop, people are going to go in and take the candy. You leave opportunities on the table for people to grab a little extra here and a little extra there for themselves.

Not everybody, but people are going to do it, right? But by knowing your numbers, like, you're able to stop all this right away, right? You see it, you identify it, and now you're able to make changes. So not only are you looking at problems, you're looking at opportunities as well. Like, wow, how could we increase that? That's working really, really good, right? So just like anything, the only reason you're confident in tying your shoes is because you've probably done it hundreds of thousands, millions. I don't even know how many times.

You'Re gonna need to do this month after month. And at first, you may Suck at it. You probably will suck at it the way I sucked at it. You probably will get a little frustrated with it, but stick with it, okay? Month after month, and it'll start making more sense. It'll start becoming more clear. You'll start to be able to, like, know what's going on by the numbers, right? When the numbers change and the ratios change and the percentages change, that's what you. That's the language of your business, right? That's what you'll be able to see. That's what you'll be able to make improvements on, and that's what will really change everything for you. And so the reason I say with a checklist is because for me, I still use a checklist when I do my. My monthly review, okay? I still use a checklist. Why? Because I don't want to waste time. You know, when you do something once a month, especially.

You know, I don't want to waste time like, okay, well, I do this first, then I do this first, then I do. No, I have my little checklist up just as a little guide, and I'm like, that's the first thing I do. Boom. That's the second thing I do. Boom. That's the third thing I do. Boom. Because there's a little bit of work that you need to do in order to get the information you need and make sure it's accurate. There's a few steps involved in the process. There might be a little back and forth with whoever's handling your books. And I don't want to waste time thinking about that. Right. I don't want to waste time thinking about it, and I don't want to skip a step because my mind might be somewhere else at the moment, or I might be overly confident that I've done this so many times. I don't need a. I don't need a list, right? Monthly review. Just start getting your income and your expenses put into QuickBooks, okay? Just start getting that put in there and make it. Set a date. Like, set a date with a goal of when you're going to have completed financials to review on a monthly basis. I'm throwing a lot at you here, okay? Anytime you absorb information, never feel overwhelmed with the fact that you've gotta go and implement it right away. And I understand that that's what can happen. It's a matter of take. You know, it's better to know, right. What you need to be doing and realize, oh, wow, okay, Just maybe in this scaling series, okay? All this. That might take me 18 months. Okay, cool. But at least you've got a path. At least you know where you're headed. At least 18 months from now, you're gonna be on top. You'll stop dealing with all the stuff that you've, you know, been dealing with. So I'm, I'm, I'm kind of pre. Framing it for you to not look at this and go, I'm gonna get this done this month. I'm not. That's not me. Like, go, get it done today. Go get it done today. Like, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is understand the importance and the challenge I will give you is do not let this go past.

The first of the year. Got three months. You get other. Whatever your other priorities are of things you need to do. You know, you've got objectives for the fourth quarter, okay.

No later than January 1st. Starting fresh in the new year. I'm giving you a lot of leniency here. You make that commitment and you start reviewing those numbers every single month. I know most of you are like, no, I'm on it now. Right? I'm getting on this now. But don't get overwhelmed. Always take all. Like, one of the things that I had to learn, it's really, really helpful, by the way, and I think you'll, you'll appreciate this, is that as someone who's always looking for a better way, like, that's how I have done everything in my life, was just, there's got to be a better way. There's got to be a better way. And when you do that and you go seek information, when you come and you watch videos like this, when you come to the seminars, when you get in courses, when you read books, right? It's. These are, these are the books that I choose to keep when I'm done, because I'm like, I'm gonna read them again. If they're not good, they go, right? I donate them. And so when you are on that path, you're always getting ideas.

So having a little system. We talked about this a little bit earlier in the, in the series. Having a little system, being able to bring new stuff in and then decide when you're going to put it into action is huge. Because otherwise you're like, shiny object, squirrel. New idea, new business, this, that, and you're. And you're gonna drive yourself insane. You won't get that far. You're gonna be stressed out. Except the fact that you will have a massively growing to do list or project list or idea list or. Right. It's okay. It's okay. I've got. I've got probably more ideas written down than I could.

Accomplish in a lifetime. Are they all great ideas? I don't know. We'll see. I go through them periodically and I pull out whatever I think should be, you know, as I'm doing planning strategy session for the year, for the quarters, for the months, weekly plans.

Don't worry about ever having too much information. Don't let it feel overwhelmed. Because here's the thing. Wouldn't you rather know there's a better way? Wouldn't you rather know that maybe you're doing something wrong or you could be doing something better or a problem that you're facing consistently day in and day out that there's an answer for it than to not know?

Right?

Absorb, absorb, absorb. Have a place to keep it all. Notebooks, you know.

Notes in your phone, whatever, spreadsheets. And then you plan. Go back and watch planning and productivity in this series if this kind of stuff interests you at all.

But I say that because I know what it's like to go to, you know, to watch something, to take a course, to read a book, to go to an event and be like, oh my God, right? There's so much. So, you know, the one or two or three things that are really going to make the biggest impact right through this scaling series.

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