Fitness business owners should save at least 10% of income automatically by setting up recurring transfers to a separate account, starting with even $10 weekly. The speaker, drawing from The Richest Man in Babylon, argues that controlling spending matters as much as increasing revenue, and that a savings habit enables future investing in stocks, bonds, real estate, or the business itself.
So as part of sound business structures, I thought now would be an apt time to talk to you about something that is very, very important as a business owner. That's saving money. And this is often overlooked and downplayed. And the truth is, it is absolutely crucial to your growth that you have some sort of savings system in place. To future-proof what you're doing. Now I'm going to say it emphatically that the goal of business is to give you profits, to give you life, right? To give you a means of income. Now in doing that, what you see a lot of the time is people, you know, they spend a lot of money growing their business or they just simply don't, you know, even as employees, they don't track what they're spending money on and they spend without thought. Now, much like eating well and health and fitness and, you know, having disciplines around your food, gives you a result, having disciplines around your finances is the same thing. So here's what I'm going to recommend, and it's been said for millennia, right? The ancient— what is it? The Richest Man in Babylon. That book spoke about this quite in depth, and that's save 10% of everything that you earn, right? And this is a discipline, as a practice. That's exactly what you want to do. And 10% is the absolute minimum. So if easy way to look at it is if you're earning $1,000 a week, you want to be at least saving $100 a week. Now this needs to be two things. It needs to be automatic and it needs to be non-emotional. So basically what that means is you need to set up a plan where there is money coming out of your account every week and just being deposited into a saving account. Now the thing is with that is you can do this on any, any, you know, online banking service, I'd recommend having at least 2 different bank accounts. One is your everyday kind of spending money and where the money from your business goes. And the other one is an account that is, you know, online and that money that you earn, it gets deducted and you can set these up. And the way I like to advise trainers and clients to do it is start off with just one transaction a week and it's not even about the amount to begin with, right? If you're scared of savings, just remember the worst thing that can happen is you have the money, right? So there's no risk in the advice that I'm giving you. So set it up at least one day a week at a very minimal amount. Set up $10, you know, $10 to come out Monday. What I like to do and the way I like to push myself is to have daily amounts come out and those amounts can be small. But when you have daily amounts coming out, what it's done for me, what it does for the psychology is it puts an onus on you as a business owner. I'm going to be earning money today, right? Because there's a bill that's coming out of my account. Yeah, the bill's for me, but I better get busy and make sure I pay that bill even though it's a bill to myself. That's how you got to treat it, right? So there's a bit more onus on you to make sure you do the marketing, do the work, get on the sales program and study that and improve your conversions. And then that way you can pay the bill a lot easier. And then you want to push yourself, you want to grow, right? You're doing this program because you want to grow professionally and personally. So that $10 becomes $20. And then when you have daily amounts, you can also play with it, right? Like, so Mondays can be $10, Tuesdays can be $20, Thursdays can be, you know, $30, for example. You can have different amounts and then, you know, scheduling the productivity of each day so you can have some fun with it. But coming back to the point is you need to have a savings plan. You need to manage your money. If you are going to be in business, you're going to be a sole trader. You don't— you're not going to have an employee withholding tax for you. You need to make sure that you've got money in the bank for both your tax and also your personal wealth. So it's on you to understand money. Once you get to a point where you have, you know, money and some wealth behind you, then you open up a different game. And this course, I'm not going to be talking about that, but this different game is investing. That's where you decide whether you're going to put it in stocks, bonds, or real estate, or put it back inside your business. These are the options that open up to you once you've got a considerable amount of money coming through. You've got the cash machine. But to get to that cash machine, to get to the investment point of view, to get to that level, you learn the discipline. Now you learn the discipline when you start, you learn the discipline when you're only earning small amounts of money. And then when you earn more amounts of money, you apply apply the same discipline. But ultimately, it's that discipline that you learn now that's going to get you to being at that point where you're able to handle X and multiple amounts. So don't overlook this step. Be disciplined with your money. People with cash flow as well, when talking about money, often there's really only velocity and speed of in and out, if this makes sense. So if you want to look at money, you want to look at it as a river. And that river is either coming to you or going out. So sometimes people think, I just need to earn more money and it's not always the case that you earn more money. They need to sometimes slow down the money that's going out and speed up the money that's coming in and they're really the only two factors. So implement this, make sure you put a savings account. The action steps from this video is I want you to write down on a piece of paper what you commit to today to doing and I want you to do it. Go on your net bank now, go on your online banking and set up a savings account that's going to be taken out at at least one day of every week. You can push yourself for more. It can be as small as $10, but you gotta do it.
