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Happy new year worthy women!
Are you financially ready for 2024?
I am gently reentering the year with lots of resourcefulness, curiosity, and preparing my business for an interesting financial year ahead.
How am I doing that?
Here are 5 ways I am personally & powerfully preparing for 2024 (in no particular order and not the usual "cut your expenses'" song and dance the masculine approach to money takes.)
Create a Cash Flow Forecast. Be the Queen of Your Money Starting with today, stop looking back at your profit and loss statement and start looking forward with confidence and clarity for superior financial decision making. Super simple to calculate in 4 steps ,your Cash Flow Forecast will help you gauge how much money you will expect to have at some time in the future. What you want is ahead of you not behind.
To calculate:
1. In a spreadsheet, take how much money you have in your business bank account right now, this will be noted as your Beginning Bank Balance.
2. Add in what you are expecting to receive in cash receivables in January.
3.Subtract out what outflows you expect to pay out in January.
4. Your remaining number will be your Ending Projected Bank Balance will be left with your ending balance that will kick off February. You can repeat this process for each month in 2024.
Get super clear on your Ideal Client/Customer Profile. This may not sound like it would be a part of a financial preparation plan, but it is. As we enter into 2024, the bigger financial environment continues to beg the question, “Will we see a recession in 2024?” Who knows? There are so many factors at play. But one way to create money powerfully in 2024 is to get super clear on your Ideal Client/Customer Profile. The more closely you know your ICP, the more fine tuned your positioning, your marketing, and your pricing can be towards reaching that market and improving conversion, which in turn makes you money.
Review Your Pricing. My go to, the most powerful way to make money in any year, review your pricing. I know I say this every year, but it is that important to review your pricing at least once a year. Has your product changed? Has your services changed? Have you gotten better results for your clients? Has the cost of services that you have to pay in order to provide your services increased? Included in this point is also reviewing how people play you. Are consumers looking for different ways to pay for things? An example is how services like Affirm, Afterpay, Sezzle, have skyrocketed recently. Can you offer something similar?
Seek Mentorship. Find someone who has been on the path you are on and has found the success you are seeking. They say, success leaves clues. What advice can they impart? How can they save you time, energy, AND money on your path to reaching your business goals? What about them inspires you, energizes you? Doing it alone is so last year. Being in partnership with a mentor, an expert, is a powerful way to prepare for the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur in 2024. Women are wired for connection, community, and collaboration, leverage that.
Learn to Fail Well. This was a game changer for me in 2023 and I believe led me to having my best revenue year while maintaining a 17% profit margin. I grew up thinking failure was bad. That if I failed at something, I was not good enough for the task at hand. WELL, let me tell you, this is not a good quality to have being an entrepreneur. Not wanting to fail keeps you in a place of comfort and not growing (in all the ways, including your revenue growth.) Being an entrepreneur requires risk, and with risk, failure is a part of that risk. What we want to learn is how to fail well, fail intelligently.
So, a powerful way to financially prepare for 2024 is to practice learning to fail well.
3 ways:
*Decide you will be ok with failure when you recognize it in yourself.
*Use failure as a resource: What can you learn from the mistake (call for humility here) that will help you adapt and move quicker towards what you want?
*Make failure OK in your business. Talk about it with your team. Consider that opportunities are always baked into the problem or "failure" that occurred.
Failing well is a sign of progress. This is a key entrepreneurial mindset shift.
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