Hetty Verney describes discovering and adapting the Profit First cash-management system (started September 2019) for her UK limited company, how she tweaked allocation timing (weekly instead of the book’s suggested 10th/25th), the emotional and practical benefits it brought (personal rewards, travel paid from profit allocations), and how she now certifies and coaches clients—combining Profit First implementation with mindset/belief work—to improve cash flow, tax readiness, and owner pay.
Chapters
I came across prophet first in 2019, and somebody introduced me to the book and I thought, oh, this sounds exciting. Let me have a look at it and just see what's going on here. So I read the book, then I read the book again, then I read the book again, and then I thought, okay, fine, so I can do this. This is absolutely fine. So I did it exactly as the book said, and it was okay, but it just didn't quite work for me, being a UK limited company, and it just didn't work quite right. I tweaked it, changed it, moved it around. Specifically, the allocation is on the 10th and the 25th that Mike suggests, which I gather is absolutely perfect if you're in America, but if you're in the uk. It didn't work for me and my business. My clients pay me throughout the month. And so I decided to. Initially, I set it up on a monthly basis. That didn't quite work. So then I set it up on a weekly basis and that really worked. And it gave me such an enormous peace of mind from day one that I was already putting this money aside into separate accounts and it was working for me. I started doing it in September 2019, so. So at the end of September, when I took my first profit distribution, 50% of whatever was in my profit account wasn't a huge amount in there at that particular point. I went and bought a bottle of piece of carrot cake and a magazine that I'd been wanting to buy for a while, which was, to me. At that point, very expensive. I went into the, ate all the carrot cake, read my Magaz, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I was in tears. It was the first time I had ever, ever in that time, rewarded myself for running my business. I'd paid myself minimum salary, but I paid myself, but I'd never actually rewarded myself. And suddenly being able to do this was like, wow, this is what it's all about. And so I tweaked things and changed things a little bit, so it worked for me. And then I decided to sign up certification because I thought, this is going to be unbelievably good for my clients. And I immediately thought of about six clients straight off that they would love it, absolutely love it. I can teach them how to use profit first now, because I'm certified. And so that's what I started doing. And I started doing online courses on it and webinars on it and all sorts of things, because I realized at that point that if I hadn't had profit first set up and running in my business. I may not have survived lockdown or I might have survived it, but literally just survived. And I certainly wouldn't have thrived if I hadn't already put it in place. So it stood me in incredibly good stead and it started helping so many of my new clients that I was taking on being able to show my clients because I had done the certification because I was running it in my business. It meant such a lot to them to see how successful it was for me and how easy it was for them to set it up and get it up and running for them once they realized that it was a behavioral system and actually it was going to help them so much in their business, but also in their personal lives as well because they were starting to set up profit first in their personal lives as well. That it was, it was, it was a no brainer and it was a complete no brainer to me. Any, any new client that comes on to on with me now, they will be setting up profit first. End of story. Even if they don't set it up immediately when they start working with me, they will be setting it up because I talk about it. So they look at me and say, what's that book in the background? I've heard of Profit first but I never really understood it. Isn't it just a fad? No, it's not a fad. It's an amazing cash management system that helps manage your cash completely. And once they start realizing quite how easy it is and how quick it is for them to do this, and I mean my, my weekly allocations, I have a, I call it my Finance Friday. I don't work with clients on Fridays. Usually at 10 o' clock on a Friday I will go through all my Xero and my Go card list and everything else, make sure everything is up to date, sorted and I will organize my profit first allocations and it literally, It'll take me 10 minutes. 10 minutes to give you the peace of mind is just like, why wouldn't you do it? It's a complete, utter game changer. It really is. Last Christmas, well, last, I suppose it was last June when I took my profit allocation out, I put enough aside to pay for my son, my younger son and myself to go to New Zealand to see my eldest son who we hadn't seen since before COVID at that point. And I paid for everything, all the accommodation, the flight, the food, the excursions, the whole lot. Not only that, we actually upgraded to business class for the whole flight, which was unbelievable. Purely. Purely because of Profit First. If I hadn't set up Profit first, yes, I might have had that money in my account, but it would have been there and I probably would have spent it on things that I really didn't need. Mostly on Amazon, I expect, but I certainly wouldn't have thought putting it into a separate account. I have a lot of clients who start with me and they say, oh, yeah, well, we already put aside however much as a fixed fee into an account for our tax. And I'm like, what happens if you have a really bad month? And they're like, well, it doesn't happen. And I said, so then when you have to pay your tax, you haven't got enough. This is why Profit plus works me for. Because it's a percentage and whether your income is down or up or whatever it's doing, it is a percentage of that income. And that's why it works so good. Once I got it up and running with my clients, I then became a belief coder. So I work on people's mindset because so many people have issues about, oh, I can't do numbers, I hate spreadsheets, or that. So I help them work through those blocks in order to be able to be clear enough to run Profit First. And it makes. It's a game changer. Every single client that I have, every single one that's on Profit first says that they are so grateful that they've got it up and running and sorted for them. And it makes such a difference. And it means they can sleep at night. They know that their tax already put aside. They know that they're paying themselves not just the basics, but they're actually paying themselves what I call their wants, not their needs. And that's the difference with Profit first and becoming a certified professional and being able to help those people is just. It's so unbelievably rewarding. It really is. People who've had issues with HMRC because they've owed tax for God knows how long, and they're like, well, I've got this huge tax bill to pay and I've got last year's tax, which I still haven't paid. And I'm like, it's okay, it's fine. We'll get Profit first set up so that we're set up for next year's tax, but we'll also get that debt kid as quickly as we possibly can as well. And they're like, oh, okay, that's fantastic.
