Having a solid budget is a big key in growing your business. You know how much money your business has, where you’re investing and the best track to get your business to the next level.
But even with a budget in place, you’re likely still making some of these big mistakes.
Forgetting Yearly (or Undesirable) Expenses
You have a budget with each of your monthly expenses itemized out. Great! You’re on the right track. But business owners often forget to include expenses they incur yearly, such as renewing your domain name, email services that you pay for annually, web hosting and anything else you purchased on an annual renewal out of convenience.
And what about those undesirable expenses? You know the ones…The expenses that you hate to think about or that were previously taken care of by your employer. Yep, I’m talking about taxes and health insurance. These are monthly, quarterly or yearly fees that are not only necessary, but also typically costly. Figure out how much you need to account for each month for each of these expenses and make sure they’re prominently in your budget.
You’re Not Paying Yourself
I know some business owners who run their business as a side gig or a hobby. It’s something they do because they love it, and not necessarily something they need to make a profit from.
Most of us aren’t in that unicorn situation. Our business needs to be profitable so we can pay our mortgage payments. Or eat. Eating’s nice.
For most of us, it isn’t realistic to reinvest every dollar we make back into our business. We need to pay ourselves. If you have your business and personal finances mingled together in the same account, you have no way to track how you’re spending money in your business. Or if you’re paying yourself correctly.
You Have Shiny Object Syndrome (and FOMO)
Oh, aaaaalll the things. You want them all. The latest e-course (that you need). Tickets to that big conference. The new sign for your storefront. New systems or system upgrades when the free version would suffice.
The shiny objects aren’t going away any time soon, with new products, services and conferences popping up daily. So you need to get a handle on what you actually need in your business and turn blinders on the rest. It’s impossible to attend all the conferences and to use all the systems. If you tried, you’d run out of time to work with clients (and you’d go broke).
Stop worrying about missing out on something and start worrying about minimizing your expenses to just what’s necessary.
