Dan and I enjoyed this Christmas all to ourselves. We threw on the music. He made roasted vegetables and grass-fed beef in the crock pot.
We invented a new drink — champagne + cream soda flavored Zevia!
(Fyi, when you’re buzzed, red wine + Zevia is also yummy… lol.)
Our evening was quite romantic!
Then… New Year’s was spent in Nebraska with his family. His dad bought everyone Nerf guns… and it was war!
Playing with 5- and 7-year-olds, and dogs, was how we spent our holidays… along with getting smacked by neon green Nerf bullets.
While playing Nerf guns, I quickly learned that even when you concentrate and “aim” at your target…sometimes you miss. Actually, a LOT of the time, you will miss… until you get really good at precision.
Precision is the coveted goal for everything.
2019, for me, was about learning how to become more precise with my money…and my profitability!
That meant focusing solely on serving the best clients, firing the bad ones, cutting unnecessary expenses, and using percentage-based allocations for every paycheck.
The book Profit First: Transform Your Business from Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine – by Mike Michalowicz, helped me immensely.
The subtitle says it all!
My biz was indeed a cash-eating monster before I started using the Profit First system.
Now, after using it for 6 months, I’m in a rock solid habit of “putting profit first” always! I almost don’t need to even think about it anymore. (I say *almost* because there are still times when I over-spend!) But overall, my “aim” has gotten more precise.
Even after taking a pay cut in 2018, I was more profitable that year than all previous years… because I learned how to be more precise with my money.
Anything that was an enemy of this “precision” had to go…
The author writes, “95 percent of your company’s probability is contingent on what goes on beneath the surface (after the sales), not what happens in the sky (the sales themselves). And it’s what’s going on ‘underground’ that will help you ‘find’ gobs of money.”
This means increasing your gross revenue isn’t necessarily what makes you more profitable… you have to address many other things, such as:
- Are you focusing on the right clients/customers…or putting all your energy on the bad ones?
- Are your expenses helping your serve your best clients? (If not, cut them.)
- What are you doing AFTER the sale is made, that’s causing (or impeding) additional profits?
- What AREN’T you doing after the sale is made… that’s blocking additional profits?
Like the Nerf gun, you can “aim” for profitability… but if something is going on “underground” that causes you to sabotage it, then this will impede your ability to actually be profitable.
For instance, you could have the best sales funnel in the world… but if you’re catering to the wrong people, and wasting your time on the wrong customers… you’ll never be profitable!
I highly recommend the book Profit First for any biz owner who is great at making money, and even better at spending it (like I was!).
Talk soon,
Michelle
Founder, The Anti-Marketing Manifesto
Michelle Lopez Boggs is a copywriter, copywriting mentor, and author of "The Anti-Marketing Manifesto: How to Sell Without Being a Sellout." She's helped her clients sell millions of dollars' worth of products and services online by using the MEI(S) principle — motivate, educate, and inspire, and sell. 