When building your financial plan you need to consider several things:  

• Your personal financial needs
• Your business financial needs
• Your business structure and annual cycle

‍

Personal Financial Need

When is the last time you sat down and looked at your current financial need on a big picture scale? What do you need to maintain your desired standard of living? Considering things like your rent, utilities, lifestyles expenses and others will help you get a complete understanding of the financial number you need to achieve to make this happen. In business, whatever you track get’s better so let’s apply this idea to your personal financial situation.  

‍

Business Financial Need

Once you have a firm understanding of what you need personally, the next step is to identify what your business needs to do to make it happen. During this step it will be important to clarify:  

Is this your primary source of income?

If this is the only way you make money then everything you do needs to count. If this is a side project with no intentions of becoming the main or you have outside funding that provides you with cushion then you can afford to consider alternatives.

• What's your business structure? Privates, classes, in person, online, etc.

• What is your overhead?

• Bricks and mortar costs, online fees, software or systems management? Employees or sub-contractors?  

• What are the prices and margins on your products and services?

• What are your rates, how much of that do you keep, how much to you spend to operate the business, what’s left over at the end?  

‍

Business Structure and your Annual Cycle

If there is one thing every business should work to achieve it’s a firm understanding of their structure and their annual business cycle.  

• What products or services will you deliver?
• What’s your price point?
• How many products or sessions are required to achieve these goals?
• What time of the year do you make the most money?  
• When does business slow down the most?  

‍

Many of the answers to these questions require thought and planning. Things to consider include:  

• Your business model
• Your clients
• The time of year

‍

There is a major danger involved with having a few good months in your business and “feeling” like it’s time to upgrade, but if you can’t define them or recreate them then you might want to pull back and focus on understanding them first.

‍

Here is a basic concept to consider if you are just starting out or if you’ve been in business for a few years:  

• In the first year of business, you should be really focused on trying as many things as you can that are authentic to you and your business to help generate revenue.  
• In subsequent years you should develop a system to analyze the results of previous years and develop a strategy to improve. Don’t try to improve too many things at once, but understanding what worked and why it worked (at least why you think it worked) can help you improve at lightning speed.
• Although this last section is important, we will be focusing on the first two during this course. It’s important to note the value and insights gained by reflecting on this information and having systems and software in place to help you track, manage and monitor this data to help optimize your performance.

‍

If this is something that would be of interest to you, please let us know and we’ll create a course to help you get a base level of knowledge on these topics. If we did create a course what information would be most important to you? Let us know by sending us an email at – courses@simpler-x.com

‍

Before moving into lesson three there are a few things you’ll want to have to make sure this process moves efficiently. Here’s what you need and here’s how we’re going to use it:

• Sales numbers for previous year and breakdowns if available- Who are you working with? What are they buying? How often are they buying?
• Service numbers for previous year and breakdowns if available- How often are you servicing sessions? What does that look like from a numbers point of view over a given month? How does that change from month to month?
• Previous years CC statements for your personal and business expenses – This will help you identify trends in your spending habits and will allow for greater clarification on creating budgets.

‍

If you don't have any of these items it's ok. Even if you used a rough estimate in your head would be better than nothing. From here on out, keep track of what your business is doing.

‍

‍

‍