I don’t know many business owners who wouldn’t like their business to be doing better. In fact we did a survey at the back end of last year and 94% of people said they wanted to make more profit.
So what’s stopping us?
Firstly, the unexpected can happen. And when we haven’t planned for it, it can seriously take us off track.
During the last couple of years we’d been getting a significant amount of work through Growth Accelerator, which was great but I didn’t want to be reliant on one source of business. So last November we started a marketing plan that would move us away during 2016. Then in December, the government announced they were scrapping Growth Accelerator with immediate effect, one year early. Talk about a game changer!
Luckily we’d already identified the risk and were taking action, and because I’m obsessed with buffer cash, I knew I didn’t need to panic.
Then I think there are 3 other main reasons that stop us achieving what we wanted;
- We’re too busy with the wrong things and we don’t get to spend enough time focussing on the strategic things that will drive our business forward.
- We don’t create a plan to achieve radical financial results in the first place, so we’re not even on the right path.
- We don’t believe we can pull it off, and we don’t want to fail.
And I really get that. I’m not writing this from my yacht. My mortgage isn’t paid off yet. And last week after writing my blog, I revisited my own financial plan and guess what? It wasn’t radical enough. I hadn’t stretched myself to go for what I really wanted. So I had to sit down and have good chat with myself about what on earth I was playing at.
And it boiled down to this.
I was scared. I wasn’t sure I could pull off what I really wanted to, so I didn’t want to make a commitment to excel and put it out there to the Googledrive universe.
I didn’t want to disappoint myself by not achieving what I set out so I’d played it too safe. Rest assured I now have a suitably challenging plan for the new financial year – one that includes decent pension contributions, healthy budget for personal development and training, and strong level of retained profit throughout year – I like to keep building my buffer cash in case of the unexpected, and it gives me more choices along the way.
Is it all in the mind?
I do believe that a lot of what we achieve or not is firmly routed in our belief system. It’s why I’ve set myself a challenge to become an expert on financial mind set. I think it’s the key to unlocking so much potential in business and I’ll be sharing more of that with you over the next few months.