Your Cashflow Follows Your Calendar - Plan your PROFIT in advance

Hi, it's Sally here. Let me just take this off. Presenting and stop the screen share. Hi, it's Sally here from Business Mum Solutions. I have a WebJam for you tonight on how your cash flow follows your calendar, so how you can actually create your profit, create and actually plan your profit in advance. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Now, for those that don't know me, you can certainly connect with me on Facebook under Business Mum Solutions. You can also check out my profile if you're wanting to know a little bit more about me on LinkedIn under Sally A. Curtis. So I'm not going to go into a lot about myself. These videos that I do in these jams when I'm interacting with people or whether I'm just recording for use later is really just about providing business owners, business mums, women in business some tips and ideas, strategies that I use to either grow my business or when I'm working with clients or franchises, etc. So these are some of the strategies that I share with the business owners that I work with. So tonight's, as I mentioned before, is called Your Cash Flow Follows Your Calendar, and it's how you go about mapping out your profits in advance. So let me jump straight in. I'm going to share a slide share with you. The plan will then be to watch a quick 3-minute video to just give you some nuts and bolts behind the strategy that I'm going to share with you. And then I'll go through a working model and a case study of how you can actually do this for yourself really, really simply in just 3 easy steps. Easy in that they're quick and easy to follow and they're flexible, but they will require a little bit of setup. And that will require on average about 3 to 4 hours of you sitting down and brainstorming and working it out. But I will certainly give you the process of how that gets about. Keeping in mind that's a particularly good investment, that's 4 hours to plan your next 6 to 12 months of profit in advance. So let me just share the screen with you. In actual fact, we've actually shared the screen because it was just the title page, so we've done that already. So what I would like to do is share the video with you. Now this is a video that you can find on YouTube. I also do have it on my Google+ page. Plus account. I'll let you watch it, it's 3 minutes, and then we'll come back and I'll explain why I've got you to watch that video. Sorry, just got to push the right buttons, don't I? Here we go. Hi, back again. So I hope you enjoyed that video on some simple truths about life and about business. And how priorities are what really make the significant difference in your life. So what I wanted to do was to share that with you to help assist in painting the picture of how in business as well as life— now that was a little bit more skewed towards life— how in business we need to actually set the priorities or put in those big rocks or those golf balls. into our plan in advance. Because I see so many business owners much, very similarly doing the same, what we call a yo-yo diet. So you see lots of people on diets, for example, where they go lose weight, put on weight, lose weight, put on weight, lose weight, etc. And in business, you see business owners doing busy, doing busy, doing busy, lots and lots of small stuff activities. Which makes them appear and feel busy, but they're not proactive and they're not cash flow or profit generating activities. So this is where we're really getting into the nitty-gritty of doing the activities in your business in a regular, pre-planned and mapped out process that you are then able to map out and predict your cash flow. in advance through the activities that you're actually doing. So let me just jump back to the slide share, or the slides, and then we can actually share that and go from there. So just excuse me. Jump into that one. Let's just get the right— oh, that's interesting. Now look at that. Oh, that's interesting. Let's just stop that one. Sorry, hit the wrong button. So let's do this one. Over to here. Share the screen. Technology's fabulous when it does exactly what it is, or more to the point, the operator does the right things for the technology. So here's the slide share that I wanted to share with you. That's obviously the video that we just watched. There's the URL if anyone's wanting to watch it again, and you can find that very easily on YouTube. It is also on my YouTube channel. So here's the question: what are your big rocks in your business? And I always like to bring in the family and the business because obviously most of us get into business to generally spend more time with our family and friends. So part of this process is mapping out both the business activities and the important things as it relates to family as well. So here are some of the big rocks that I have in my family here. So we're very specific in scheduling family time. So we have obviously weekends for that. It can be holidays with family or just regenerating activities for myself. So that goes in there. into my calendar as a big rock because that's something that's very important. Fitness and fun for yourself, and then if you're obviously in relationships, it's important to have and make sure you've created some date nights, and then some of those spontaneous fun things to do with kids. So there's some of the potential big rocks that you can have as far as the family goes. Now, when we're looking at your business side of things, we're looking at what are the big rocks, what are the most important priorities that you should be having and doing within, within your business. Let me just make sure we're presenting to everyone. Sorry. So this is the screen that I was just sharing with everyone here. And we were just going through the list as it related to our family, and now we're just focusing on the business big rocks or big golf balls. What are the priorities? And when I'm sitting down coaching clients or talking to franchisees, etc., whatever the case may be, business owners are business owners. We need to find out what activities that are you already doing in your business that are proven lead generation? So what activities do you do that you know you're able to generate leads from? So if I use myself as an example here, I know doing live events and live events through Meetup or virtual events like this are a great lead generation tool because it gives people a little bit of an idea, a little bit more of an insight of what I do and how I may be able to help. What events do you attend that return an investment? So that can be networking events. So if you go to an array of networking events, do you know which ones are the better ones to go to? And what activities and how do you connect with your customers to keep that customer loyalty? And bring in referral customers from your existing loyal customers. And then of course it's also a priority to put into this plan that we're going to be doing, what are your customer nurturing activities. So when you're looking at what are your big rocks and determining what are the major things that you need to be doing in your business that generate profit, Keeping in mind we're talking about planning your profit in advance, so you need to determine in your business, and that can be done— determine what creates profit in your business. That can be a case of writing a list down of all of the different activities that you do in a week and then determining what sales you got from that, what leads came in, so you really can fine-tune what are the big rocks or the major priorities of activities that you need to be blocking out in your business. This gives you a really clear indication of then what you can actually say no to. So say for example you attend several networking events but only 1 or 2 of them out of the 5 perhaps have brought in leads or generate leads for you, then you can look at that and discern in a bit more of a discerning manner, is it worthwhile going to that that event if you're not generating leads from it or some form of return? Yes, it's nice to have coffee and it's nice to catch up and perhaps have breakfast, but could your time be utilised more efficiently, either in your business or spending it with your family? So that's what we're going to be going through and I'll show you how to schedule that shortly. So this here is just a visual representation of things, the big rocks that are important. That's that rewarding— rewards and celebrating activities that you do when you achieve goals. Obviously, that needs to be mapped out and put into your calendar. Fun activities with kids. So this was Rory and I quite a number of years ago, and we got back to those date night priorities. And the reason I suggest setting schedules like this How many of you schedule in your calendar, in your phone, meetings, doctor's appointments, and the things that you have to attend? We all do that. We all keep some form of a diary. So what I'm suggesting here is to transpose that same level of urgency, that same level of commitment over into a structure, into a diary. And I'll show you the larger picture here. and we're putting those cash-generating activities and we're blocking out the time to do them within our business on a regular basis. And this is where you move away from hoping you're going to make some money to actually planning how you're making your money and making your profit, as well as having fun and laughter along the way. So let me just give you a big picture overview. Here is the big picture overview. So when I'm sitting down with clients, it's really, really important to be able to map out really quickly a big picture vision. Now there's several ways that you can do it. This here is just an example of an Excel spreadsheet. That can be done on an A3 sheet of paper, and you can sort of colour code it. As you can see an indication there, we've got green for school holidays, yellow would be birthdays, the grey is public holidays, major events that you do, holidays that you, you're going on. So you're mapping out the big picture, the big rocks as it relates to your family and your business. So anything that you need, any conferences that you're attending with your business, etc. So that's one way of doing it. I tend to write a little bit more notes, so I've moved away from this. I used to do it like this from a quick perspective, and I've got a different visual that I'll show you shortly. For myself, I use this version here. This is available online under Win calendars, and it's just a monthly template. And this enables me to be able to share it with my team as well. So this is an example of March. We know that there's an International Women in History Month, so that's significant as it relates to my business. The focus is up— the focus is there's also Clean Up Your Business Day, and we're going to be focusing, or our theme in From a focus and a training point of view is refocusing and tweaking goals. Because lots of people that haven't done this pre-planning like we're going to go through today, come March and then start to hit panic that they're already a quarter of the way through the year and then haven't done or haven't started half the stuff that they were going to do. So for me, from a training and adding value to people, I sort of help get them out of that panic mode and get them back into a structure, effectively the same structure of planning the priorities and planning your cash flow in advance, like I'm going to share with you, or like I'm sharing with you now, and we'll get into. So let me share the process. So I have a 3-step process, and as I mentioned at the beginning of the video, It takes about 3 to 4 hours to actually sit down and map this out. So this is a working example that I did with a business owner. Now this business owner, as an example, is in the franchising industry, so not only does he have his own marketing strategies to work with, he can also pre-plan the marketing activities activities that the company does. So this is another really great way of going, okay, what is the company promotions? What company plans are in place from a company promotion perspective? So we can actually map those out across the calendar. And then when he's planning his own activities, he can plan them and think about, okay, what theme them around what the company marketing is. So here in this example, you can see lots of busyness and lots of sheets of paper. All we've really got here is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. We've got 8 months of single sheets of paper out using that WIN calendar that I mentioned in the last slide. What we've then started to do is these sheets of paper were just where he was placing print advertising. We've got colour-coded Post-it notes. The reason I start like this and do most of my process with clients in this manner is 70% of people are actually visual. So if you can create a process that's visually easy to understand and quick to grasp what needs to be done, it makes it a lot easier. And it makes planning a little bit fun and also makes it fluid because with Post-it notes you can peel them off and rearrange them very, very easily. So this is our starting point. It's mapping out really quickly what we know is coming up. on a month-by-month basis. So in this scenario, the pre-planning that we knew was in place, we needed to define the activities and the mediums that we were using. So in this case, there was print advertising used, there was radio campaign used, there was normal post, so snail mail— he actually sent letters out— and he also attended events. There was also local area marketing activities. He did a newsletter. And there was products and/or activities to focus on that the company was also cross-promoting. So if I just move to the next slide, I'll be able to talk you through that a little bit further. But this was where we were sort of pre-planning what activities are occurring for him in his marketplace. So we can create the themes. So here it is mapped out a bit clearer for you. And again, we've got each month represented by a sheet of paper. We've mapped out the school holidays because that makes a significant difference to what's going on in his business. And we've also highlighted what just in a quick snapshot what the company focus is for that month. So this month obviously was winter and we were talking about winter-related products. These green ones here was, he knows that in that month he needs to write a newsletter. So we've got, we know that there's a newsletter that needs to be written and generally he put it, he wrote on offers, and those offers generally related to the top 5 products. So that's why it's good to know what each of those are in a quick glance, just on a Post-it note. You can see here he had the particular product ranges that were being promoted by the company. He knew when his print advertising was going in. This is going in in both of these months. And So that just shows those 3 there, and then he's got the newsletters in these months as well. So a newsletter every month through there, and he also has a snail mail to re-engage previously existing customers. So that was all part of the strategy of the activities that he knows generates leads and profitable outcomes for him. From here, once you've mapped out the very, very broad picture of what activities you know you need to do in a month, you then can take it over to a visual board and a working board that you can use on a daily, weekly, and monthly process. So these are just simply corkboards, or you could also use old whiteboards or cardboard or whatever's relevant to you. And these have just been drawn up into a month's worth of squares. They happen to be the perfect size for Post-it notes, so that's extra handy. So if you look at those large-size corkboards, this fits 2 months, so we've put together a 6-month plan In this particular scenario, so it was 3 boards that were up in his office. And as it says there, perfect from there. So this is how we're mapping out our big rock activities. So you're mapping out your family stuff here and the big rock activities, the cash generating activities and the lead generating activities that you know you get results from and we've putting them on the board in a quick layout so you know what you need to do each and every week or month. So here it is taken to the next stage. We started with the broad picture of just having Post-it notes. We then put the Post-it notes onto the paper monthly calendars. And here on the Post-it note, we're actually starting to put the plans into place. The different coloured dots are related to the dates of the— the date, yeah, the date, dates in the month, and the green— the orange ones were school holidays. So what we've done here is specifically said, if we use the green one here, that was The newsletter, for example. We've gone, I know that that day I need to have my newsletter out. So visually, on that day the newsletter needs to go out, so I know beforehand I need to start preparing for it. He's also marked what the top 3 business ones are here, and he's then started to go from the top 5 activities for the month that the company is promoting, he's aligning his own marketing strategies week by week to align with that. And this is how you very easily can build up what activities you need to be doing in a month and can clearly see what needs to be done in that month from a big rock scenario. So, and colour coding it makes it really easy to see what the focus is for for that particular week which runs across this way. The beauty of this also with using Post-it notes is if something changes, which often can happen if you have company marketing or you planned that your website was going to be up and running and something's gone askew and deadlines changed, it's very easy to move Post-it notes forward in time and it not stuff up your thought process or put you in a position where you need to recreate or stop and restart from scratch. It's a— Post-it notes in this form is a really easy way to be fluid and easy with your marketing strategies. Now just to explain a little bit further, the idea around this is to create quick and easy, but most importantly, a very easy, changeable, and flexible scenario. So I absolutely totally hate rework. So this system doesn't have the need for a lot of rework. You're just moving Post-it notes of those activities. The next stage from here is to really write in your diary, in a normal diary, what your to-do list is for that day. So going back a couple of steps, you've mapped out your big picture, you've then put your big picture into your month scenario, which is what this visual here is, and then for each week, you know, on a Monday, this week I need to do do my newsletter, for example. So you go create newsletter in readiness to post it on Thursday, and you just get into highlighting. And because you've planned your whole month in advance, you can actually then very, very easily plan your to-do list on a daily basis. And a to-do list in my eyes is 1 to 3 things. Done each day, done well, because you know exactly what you're needing to do. You know that it generates income for you. And this is how you plan your cash flow in advance, is just putting those priority items into your big picture and then nailing the to-do lists to support that big picture that you created and that cash flow in advance scenario. So here's a visual example Of what can be done with a plan. Now I know you probably can't read it because it's very, very blurry. That's fine. That's not the point of why I'm showing you this section. This was a normal example for normal marketing activities with somebody that hasn't put a plan, a big picture plan together and then brought it back down. down to the monthly activities, big picture monthly activities, and the big— start again— and then the big to-do list activities on a daily basis. When you've actually got a plan in place, you get a whole lot more done with your time. You get activities, you create activities that generate income, and you know exactly what you're doing where. When, where, and how. So that's how you generate your cash flow in advance. Now, the key is planning weekly and daily activities into your calendar. The key to success is activities that produce profit. Define and take the time to work out what activities you do in your business already, and then also the ones that you could be doing more of. Because the more of those activities you do, the more income you know you're going to generate because you know those activities are already doing that. The other key is to look at what you do effortlessly. So in this example of this particular business owner I was referring to, he was brilliant in front of people at events and he would generate a lot of activity and income for his business by being the frontman. If that's you and that works for you, do more of it. If you're better at putting the nitty-gritty plans together and delegating to your team, do more of that. That is also how you will increase and generate more profit in your business. It's all about the activities that produce results in your business, what's effortless for you and what's effortless for those that you delegate to, and also working on the activities activities that make you happy within your business as well and the activities that you do at home, because if you're happy at home, you're happy at work. If you're happy at work, you're happy at home. If that all occurs, you have a happy family. And that's really why we're in this game of being business owners, is to have a good time, make a good income, and have time with our family. That's just an example there of a marketing and PR companion that I use to map it out. And then I just run a weekly planner as well, as you can see there, that's got to-do lists and what, what's priorities. And if you need a guiding hand, then I am only ever a phone call, Skype call, or an email away. I do have an offer that if people want some assistance in how to follow on from this training material tonight, you are more than welcome to connect with me for a couple of hours, and there's a special offer there that you can join. I also do do 20-minute free quick consults, and you can also find those on this URL as well, or send me an email and I can flip that out to you. So that gives you a little bit more information. This is obviously my contact details if you're wanting to connect with me. It's sally@businessmumsolutions.com. And let me just shrink this down so I can come back to you and take it from there. Just bear with me a minute. Excellent. So that was just to share with you a little bit of how you can really truly generate your cash flow and plan for your cash flow in advance. It's no different to setting your doctor's appointment and your meeting appointments in your calendar. You attend those because they're in your calendar and that you need and want to go for whatever the appointment reason is. If you plan in the same way through those 3 steps that I just shared with you, the activities that you recognize and know that generate cash flow and profitability for you and leads, and you do more of those simply by having them blocked in your calendar. The goal and the secret behind this is, is getting prepared, locking it in your calendar, actioning it— that's the key, actioning it— and committing to the actionable activities on a month-by-month basis and then a week-by-week basis and and then a daily activity. That is how you very simply create a to-do list that's strategic, that generates your cash flow and plans your cash flow in advance. So please don't hesitate to connect with me, to contact me if you're needing any more help. I also do run once a month virtual connecting circles. That's where I open up this platform and just simply allow business owners, women in business and mompreneurs to come on the line, ask a question, and then we'll brainstorm it and sort out some ideas and put some strategies into place. I run that on a Friday afternoon from 4 o'clock, once a month. The next one will be in 4 weeks' time. Keep an eye out on Facebook and LinkedIn for that. And thank you very much, and welcome to my world anytime you're ready to connect. Thank you. Bye.