Ep 88 Transcript: Work Smarter, Earn More: Finding Profit in the Business You Already Have

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors in spelling or inaccuracies in the spoken words.

Shauna Lynn Simon (00:02)

Hey there and welcome back to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and today we're going to talk about something that's going to hit home with a lot of entrepreneurs. Many of you are going to be really feeling this, especially those of you who are maybe working nonstop, serving your amazing clients. And yet somehow that bank account doesn't ever seem to really reflect the amount of effort that you are putting in. So if you've ever thought, how am I this busy and still stressing about cash flow?

This episode is for you because here's the truth. You might be sitting on thousands of dollars just hiding in your business right now, not in some magical new offer that you need to spend weeks or months creating, not in a marketing hack that's just follow this specific formula and you'll instantly get a ton of Instagram followers and all the money that your heart desires. But we're going to be at finding these this money that you're sitting on in the work you're already doing. And I want to help you to find it.

So let me start by telling you a bit of a story about something that happened in my life a couple of years ago. I made a business decision that let's just say I wish I could take back. I think we've all made some of those decisions. This one definitely hurt a little bit. I was in a position where I really needed to bring in some additional revenue and I was feeling maxed out myself and I didn't have someone on my team.

existing that I felt could really help with this. So I found this coaching program that was going to provide the resources for my team to be able to learn how to do the things that I needed them to do in order to generate more sales and bring in some more revenue. And so I went all in on this program. I was going to be a game changer. They promised me the moon and I did the work. I showed up fully. My staff showed up fully. We were following every single step.

putting in a ton of effort, no joke, they told us that we needed to put in 10 to 15 hours every week, which seemed obscene to me, but okay, I'm going to trust the process because that's what they kept telling me to do, is trust the process. And instead they were, I was putting in between myself and my teammates, we were putting in 15 to 20 hours every single week. And in the end, this program cost me close to six figures when all was said and done. And that's not just in the upfront cost, which was

Not at all inexpensive, but I'm talking about what I paid in my team's time, in my own time, in the missed opportunities that we could have been working on where we were spending all the hours on that, not to mention the lack of real results that they promised us. It was supposed to be a 12-month program after five months of hearing, trust the process, trust the process. I just couldn't do it any longer. And the experience completely changed the way that I look at money in my business.

because it made me realize that the danger isn't always in spending money, it's just really in spending it in the wrong places. And sometimes we're looking for that magical fix that promises us everything. And we end up investing so heavily into it that it ends up putting us in a more precarious situation than we had hoped that it would. And so all the while, we're ignoring some of the leaks that are quietly draining your profit behind the scenes.

So since then, I have worked with hundreds of women entrepreneurs and I keep seeing the same thing over and over again. People similarly looking for that magic fix. What's the one magic bullet that if I just do this one thing, everything in my business is going to change. And I would love to say that I have that magic fix. I don't, but I can help you to see things more strategically in a way that's going to help you to protect your profit and allow you to

build on that so you can build something that's truly sustainable, that's not going to completely overwhelm you and build and burn you out in the end. So I see the same thing over and over again with the women that I work with. They're booked out. They're busy. They're amazing at what they do. Their clients absolutely love them, absolutely adore them. But if they have one slow month or one client delay or a single canceled project, suddenly everything feels like it's on shaky ground and they start to panic. And now

They're in a very reactive state. And it's not that they're bad with money. It's not that their business is broken. It's that no one ever taught them how to look for the hidden leaks, the places where time, energy and profit are quietly slipping away. Now, I want to be clear about something there. You've probably heard there's different sayings about this, but essentially you don't want to be chasing like spend $100 to chase 20. Right. We don't want to be spending our precious time, which is a huge commodity.

spending hours of it to recoup pennies. But there are times where investing a little bit of time now in the long run will really pay off in dividends for us. So I can't get into all the different ways that we're leaking money because let's face it, there are a ton of them that come up when I do these as a strategy call with my clients. And I've got a bit of a framework that I use for identifying where the leaks are. But I thought what I would do in this podcast

is identify the three most common places that I see money hiding. So you can see whether or not any of these relate to you and whether there's an opportunity there for you to be able to recoup some of this. So the first one is pricing. And I know I've talked about that on this podcast before. So this is not the first time you're hearing me rant about this. But the reality is that most women under charge, not because they don't know their value. A lot of times they're like they know there was more, but because they're trying to stay competitive or they want to be fair.

Or maybe they're just simply using the wrong perspective and measurement to benchmark for what their pricing should be. They might be looking at what their competitors are doing. They might be looking at what the budget of their clients is, which really shouldn't be a factor. It needs to come back to what is your value? What are you actually worth? I had someone tell me, it wasn't that long ago, a couple of months ago, I suppose, they said, you know, I've managed to streamline a lot of my processes by using AI.

So was thinking I should be really be discounting my rates. Let me be clear. If you found a more efficient way to do things, that is more money in your pocket. Why are you trying to take money out of your pocket? Instead of discounting your rates, you can simply sell more of the thing that you do so well. I will tell you, I had an electrician come to my place the one time I had blown out one of the outlets in my house. The electrician came. He spent maybe five minutes changing it.

I paid him $150 to come out first time, which I thought was really reasonable. In reality, it only took him five minutes to do this. Meanwhile, of course, I've got my friend's husband is telling me like, I could have just done that for you or you could have just done it yourself. There's a bunch of YouTube videos. like, listen, I actually know how to do this. I could have done it myself, but it would have taken me a lot longer to if the electrician came and did it in five minutes and it didn't disrupt my day. And that's what I paid him $150 to do. So the key is ensuring that you are charging

what you're actually worth, not necessarily the actual minutes or hours that you're spending on a project. I have worked to shift majority of the pricing that I offer for any services that I offer to value pricing as opposed to strictly based on an hourly rate because I want to ensure that I'm providing the true value there. So this is a challenge that a lot of women face is they're stuck to hourly pricing. Listen, we only have so many hours in a week. So unless you're charging massive amounts for those hours,

you're constantly going to be finding yourself on that hamster wheel. So you might be setting your prices based on more comfort than cost and profit. Let's get down to the real numbers. You should know what it costs you to offer a particular service. And I see this all the time with entrepreneurs saying like, hey, what should I charge for X, Y or Z? If you crunch the numbers, you can find out exactly what you should be charging for it. I'm not saying that what the market will bear

doesn't have any sort of bearing on how you set your pricing. I am saying that it should not be the primary factor to determining your pricing. And if you are doing things better and more phenomenal than anyone else out there, you're if you found a cool new way to do things, if you're innovative, if you're ahead of the curve, then you should be charging more. Absolutely 110 percent. So one of my clients realized after we ran her numbers and I've spoken about this before, we ran her numbers through the pricing calculator that I have.

And we identified that she was actually losing money every single time she left the house. Every project she was doing, she was literally losing money on it. So once she adjusted her pricing, which she is still working on, to be perfectly honest, and she tightened up her scope and boundaries, that's another big thing is that scope creep, right? She started earning more without having to actually work more. Doesn't that sound like a great idea? So I want you to be really, really scrutinize your pricing and take a really close look at it.

to see ask yourself where did this pricing come from? Is it based on real numbers? Does it truly reflect my value or my worth? Ignore all the little voices in your head that are saying so and so charges so much less than this or this particular client will be so upset if you raise your prices. I don't care about any of that. I want you to take a real hard look at your pricing now. So that's one of the most common places I see money hiding is in our pricing.

Does that mean that it's easy to instantly raise your prices? No, but there are strategies that I teach that can help you to raise your prices if that is the right move for you and it doesn't have to be nearly as uncomfortable as you might think it is. Here's the first hint for someone who is new coming to you, someone who's never hired you before. They have no idea what your prices were previously. So guess what? You just gave yourself a raise for the next client that comes in.

Past clients, little bit different, depends on your services. Again, that's a whole other podcast episode, but just know this, if you are undercharging, you will constantly find yourself on that hamster wheel. Okay, so next we're gonna take a look at number two. The second most common place that I see money hiding is in our process. Profit doesn't only leak through money, it leaks through time. So when you are over delivering, remember those boundaries I talked about, that scope of work.

When you're over delivering or redoing work or constantly reinventing the wheel, you're burning billable hours that never make it into your bank account. So I want you to ask yourself, if I had to hand off my work to someone else tomorrow, would they know exactly what to do? If the answer is no, that's a profit leak. This is where your processes come in. I'm not saying you have to spend hours sitting down creating your SOP documents and making sure they're all polished and pretty and have all the best screenshots in them.

I am saying to start documenting your processes and not only that, but evaluating how efficient those processes actually are. So back when I had a home staging company, I remember going to the warehouse one day and my team had made some rearrangements to the warehouse, let's just say. And my warehouse was divided into three distinct sections. There were essentially three warehouses we combine into one, we open up the walls in between. So we had three distinct sections to them.

And in the third section was where we kept all of our small stuff like our decor, accessories, all the small little items that we use to accentuate the house. And then what we do is we would pack all these items into a bin and like wrap them up in like bubble wrap or tissue paper and pack them into a bin. And so when they were selecting the items that they needed, let's say it's for a coffee table centerpiece, they would select them from the third unit. They would walk it to a table in the second unit.

to make sure it all looks proper, like sets it up on the table, does this look right? Take a photo of it so they have a photo on site of what they're planning on doing. And then they would walk it to the first unit where the bins were, or they would go to the first unit to grab a bin and bring it to the second unit and pack things there. Does this sound efficient to you? What if the table that is mainly used for this particular purpose and all the bins and all the packaging material was all in the same unit as all the decor and accessories?

This might seem like an obvious change, but I got to say it was not obvious to the different team members that I had at that particular time. And that's not because I think that they were lazy or ⁓ inefficient on purpose, but they weren't looking at the big picture of things. So this is something I need you to take yourself outside of the process sometimes and really scrutinize it. If someone from the outside looking and was looking at what you were doing, does this actually make sense the way that you're doing it? And then can they follow the steps that you've laid out for that?

And then the third place where I see this is a big one. This is where I see a lot of money hiding and you might be guilty of this and probably never even consider that this is where your money is hiding and that is in priorities. This is a really sneaky one. It's that $25 an hour work that keeps you busy but not profitable. Answering every email, chasing invoices, managing small fires, all while avoiding the higher level strategy and visibility work.

that actually drives your growth, that actually drives your clients into that lead generation, the visibility that you need for your clients, the servicing your clients maybe or the high level business development, whatever that looks like. This is the busy but broke cycle that you are in when you are spending your time doing low level tasks yourself instead of someone else. Now, I understand not everyone has the ability to outsource immediately and I get that, but imagine what you could do at that time if you were incredibly intentional with your time and you outsource.

Even let's say four or five hours a week of these 20, $25 an hour tasks. OK, so let's spend $100 a week to gain yourself four hours. What would you do with those four hours? Could you move the needle in your business? So I know you're probably thinking, but I don't. can't offload anything. I can't pay someone else. I don't have the cash flow to support that. I want you to reconsider that and identify are there specific tasks that someone can spend a few hours each week working on taking off your plate for you to spend it on?

higher level items. So why don't we see all of these leaks sooner? I mean, I'm identifying the top three areas that I see money leaking. And I'll admit that when I do a bit of an evaluation on my own business and I do this frequently and I'm often shocked to say, how did I miss that previously? And it's because we weren't we weren't we weren't taught about profit. We were taught to chase growth, not profit.

And so our brains are naturally hardwired this way. And it takes a little bit of rewiring, which is something that's an ongoing process, especially when you keep hearing things out in the world that remind you that you should be playing fair, playing nice, taking other people's budgets into consideration for your pricing, for example, or ⁓ just being a good person and helping to expand your scope. And, but this will give you lots of exposure and all these things that you're being taught.

make you into this likable person, right? Because we all want to be liked, we all want to people please. And the reality is that especially in a male dominated society, which we still live in, and this is not me to be clear, male bashing or anything like that, it's just stating the facts and the reality that we still are being led by a lot of what we see out there in the world is often being led by the strategies that

that men practice and they don't always work for women because for women, women often have two jobs, don't they? They have their job at home as well as their job at work, right? And it's not to say that men don't do a great job of taking care of their families. And I know so many women who are so incredibly fortunate to have such a solid partner by their sides who really takes on, does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to the family dynamics, but.

In most cases, the women are doing a lot of that heavy lifting. So after you've worked a busy day at the office, whether you're working for yourself or working for someone else, you come home and you're starting all over again, essentially. And we have a tendency to almost glorify being busy. Like busy is this badge of honor that we need to carry. And what we end up doing is we actually end up glorifying burnout that way. And this is something I would like to put an end to.

Another reason why we sometimes miss these leaks is that we like to avoid numbers because they're uncomfortable or they're confusing. I know that especially when you feel like your sales are low, you do not want to look at your bank account. It is incredibly uncomfortable and disheartening. If you've been doing a lot of mindset work to think positive and think abundance and think wealth, then the last thing you want to do is see that you've got nothing in your bank account because that kind of throws your whole mindset out the window. But

If you are facing it head on, it's not that you're seeing, I have a negative balance or a very low balance in my bank account. It's that you're seeing that you need to make changes. And that's what you're wiring your brain to say that we need to fix this. And it wires your brain to start compensating less for what other people need and taking care of your value and your worth first. And then the other reason why I think that we often end up missing some of these leaks is

that we're trying to do it all ourselves because we think no one else can do it right. Am I right? Does this sound familiar? If you've ever said, I'll fix that when I have time or I just need one more client, that's often a big red flag that your business is leaking money right now because you are finding yourself being pulled in too many different directions. Again, talk about those priorities that we had, right? But here's the good news. So once you know where to look, fixing those leaks actually becomes incredibly simple.

So you don't need to overhaul your entire business to find hidden money. You just need to look with more of a profit focused lens. So I'm going to give you some examples of a few places to start looking to start finding some of that hidden money. So the first thing is to revisit your offers. Let me be clear of what an offer is because I actually just had this conversation recently.

on one of the networking calls that I attended because one of the women that I met there, specializes in helping people to craft their offers and people when they tell them what's your offer, they're like, I don't really have any sales going on right now or I don't have any discounts or promos. That's not your offer. Your offer is your offering. What is it that you are offering to others, whether it's a product or a service? Most of my clients have services. So I want you to revisit what it is that you offer. And that's that package of whatever it is that you have, everything that comes with it. You might say, it was just a consultation.

cool, but what happens at that consultation? What are the transformations? What are the results? What are the things that they're going to get? Is there a follow up to it? Like, what does that look like? Whatever it is that you're offering, and it might be bigger service than a consultation, of course. I'm just using that as a bit of an example. So what's your main offering, your core offering? And are people still buying what you're selling or wanting to buy what you're selling the way that you are currently selling it, the way that you currently have it packaged?

If your best clients are asking for something slightly different, it might be time to actually refine what you're offering instead of just adding more offerings. How can we refine this so that it really meets the client's while also ensuring that if we're adding more to it, we're increasing its value, we're increasing its price, but can we increase its value without increasing our expenses by any sort of significant amount? That's always the key thing to is balancing that, right?

So what is that we're offering? How do we make it incredibly irresistible? How do we make it like nothing else that anyone else is offering? Really make it stand out and then be able to price it at a way that's so valuable that feels absolutely irresistible, but is profitable for us. So that's one way that I want you to start trying to find some of this hidden money is revisiting what your offers look like.

If you haven't changed your pricing in like a decade, it's probably time. If you haven't changed your services and how you offer things in like a decade, it's probably time. If you want to keep the classic offering, that's fine. But I can tell you, I am on some legacy plans for software. I'm not going to lie. I've got a few different platforms that I am on where they've changed their plans, but I'm still on a legacy plan because that's what fits my needs. And I just haven't bothered to figure out which of the new plans.

best suits me. But the reality is that most companies, most successful companies as they are growing, they are going to change their offerings. And it might mean that it no longer suits some of your clients. And that's OK as well, because you're going to be serving a greater market and being able to charge a better price for that. Now, I want you to take a look at the last three projects or clients that you've had. Would you say that you were paid fairly for the amount of time and energy that you gave?

And if not, that's your signal that perhaps you're underpriced or underscoped or under structured. So let's look at each of these individually. So underpriced, you know, what ends up happening when you're underpriced and you're offering all this time and energy to someone is you start resenting the work, you start resenting the clients, you start feeling like the clients are being demanding because you've already given so much. But if they don't know that what you're giving is above and beyond what they've paid you for, as in like you didn't price it properly and they really should have paid you that much more.

That is on you, not on them. But what happens when you are priced appropriately is you feel great offering those services. You are happy to accommodate them and give them exactly what they need because you have ⁓ accounted for that behind the scenes in your pricing. Now, underscoped means that you offered them a certain scope, but it's crept a little bit without you saying, well, that's going to be outside of the original scope and it's going to cost you more. We need to ensure that we are always capitalizing

on any of those additional charges. Now, that's not to say you need to nickel and dime them. If you want to throw in a couple of things here and there by all means, but you want to do that intentionally and I cannot stress this enough. If you are offering something beyond the original scope at no additional charge, they need to know that that that was an exception, that that wasn't just a general inclusion. You can it can be a gentle, you know, that's beyond the original scope of the project. But you know what? Relatively simple fix. I'm going to throw that in there for you, because I think it's really important that we have that.

And I know you've already invested a lot of time and money into this, and it's just one small thing. However you want to say it. Maybe it's your birthday and you've decided that you're going to celebrate them, or maybe it's you've just landed another new client. say, listen, I landed another new client today. I'm feeling like I'm in a really generous mood. This is what I'm going to do for you. Whatever it looks like. Now, the understructured, this is sometimes a bit harder to actually see. But what this ends up looking like is essentially you don't have a solid process that you're following. So as an example,

You might know what you need to do every time you have a client come in, but if it's not structured in a way that's easy to find all the things like like I was mentioned about my warehouse, if you're running from one room to the next, trying to gather up all the stuff rather than having it all in one place that is under structured. And so what this might look like if you've got say something, maybe you're doing a website design or something and you've gathered the clients brand colors and you've got, ⁓ you know.

maybe some descriptions about their business and their website copy, and you've got all this stuff compiled in various emails as opposed to one place on your hard drive, that's going to send you searching for all the different things that you need when you need it. If you had one spot that had all of this information in it, as well as a direct link to the website that you're updating,

and any specific behind the scenes notes, as well as maybe the client's email address in case you need to fire off an email to them. You don't want to be going searching like, now I've to go into my CRM and find their email address and then compose the email. If you are sending the same type of email every time a website is designed or when you're first kicking off, like let's say you've got, okay, we're to do a website design. We're going to kick off this by, I'm going to ask you these certain questions. This is the access you need to provide. That should be templated.

It should either be in an actual form or just in a form email, but some way for you to be able to capture that in a consistent way every single time. But if you're typing from scratch every single time and then trying to customize it on top of that, this is under structured. So take a look at your last three projects or your last three clients. And would you say that you were paid fairly for the amount of time and energy that you gave looking through this profit lens now? Were you underpriced? Were you underscoped or were you under structured?

or all of the above. OK, so then the next thing I want you to do is I want you to start protecting your CEO time. Listen, news flash for you. You are the CEO of your business. If you are a business owner, I don't care if you are a solopreneur with not a single employee or outsourced person on your payroll. Or if you have a massive team, you are the CEO. Unless you've given yourself another title like CFO when you actually hired a CEO to run your business. If you don't have someone else sitting in that seat.

As CEO, you are the CEO, whether you like it or not. so listen, if you don't want to be the CEO, you can certainly hire for that role. And hopefully you're making buckets of money that that CEO role can absolutely pay for itself. That makes sense. If they come in there and they're able to take on those CEO responsibilities and run with it and you just want to be the one doing the work every day, have at it. But most of the time when I'm meeting clients like you, you're wanting to actually be the CEO. You know you want to lean into that role a little bit more.

but you're feeling a little bit of imposter syndrome with it. When you start protecting your CEO time, you start feeling more like a CEO. So even one hour a week spent reviewing your numbers or planning for future growth is going to pay off exponentially. That's where the magic happens. Not by doing more, but by focusing on what actually moves the needle in your business. Again, this goes back to the priorities. What is your highest value? Where is your time best spent? What are the things that no one else can do but you?

You're the visionary. You are the dreamer. You are the one who is driving this bus. We want to make sure you're going to get to your destination in the most efficient way possible and while you still have money in your pocket. Now, I to be really clear here. Finding hidden money in your business isn't about guilting you. It's not about reflecting on all the mistakes you've made. Trust me. We've all done it. We spent some time with our regrets. Like I mentioned, you know, the

group, the coaching program that I ended up spending a fortune on that cost me a lot of money and put me in a pretty precarious position if I'm being honest. It's not about reviewing all those mistakes, although we want to take the lessons from them. It's not about regretting things and just wishing that you've done things differently. It's just about recognizing where the opportunities are here and going forward. Because if you're this busy and this dedicated, imagine what happens when you stop some of these leaks and finally start keeping more of what you earn.

That's where your freedom comes from. That's where your sustainability comes from. And okay, if you're listening this and you're like, okay, Shauna Lynn listen, I've got I know I've got some leaks here, but I'm not really sure exactly where they are. That's exactly what I help my clients uncover in my money momentum session. This is a 45 minute super hyper focused working call where we're going to identify the top leaks in your business. We're help you to find your quickest wins to some cash and map out a simple plan to start putting money back into your business and into your pocket.

It's not overwhelming, no spreadsheets required, just a whole lot of clarity and action on this call. If this is something that you feel that you need right now, you can go ahead and book your session at Aboutshaunalynn.com/moneycall. And remember, sometimes the money that you're chasing isn't out there in your next client. It's right there in your business. Don't get me wrong. I do want you to get your next client. Sometimes the money, the profit leak is coming from a lack of

generation, lead generation coming in, a lack of clients coming in, a lack of closing deals. Like we want to figure out where in the funnel, and this is what we do in our money momentum session, is we figure out where on the path to profit, there's seven steps on there, whereabouts are you at on that path to profit where you're finding the most leaks, and that's where we're going to concentrate the most. But the money is in your business and it is just waiting for you. So.

I hope that you have enjoyed today's episode. I hope that you have taken some notes and that you are going to re listen to this if you are driving right now and you need to write down some of your next steps. I hope that you will take the time to do that, but I just want you to remember that you are a success. You are doing incredible things in your business. I'm simply here to help you to make more money doing it. So if this episode has resonated with you today, I want you to do me a favor. First of all, be sure to stop by our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.

Give us a thumbs up, a five star review. Let us know that you're enjoying it. It means a lot to us and it really does help with the algorithm. So feel free to subscribe, of course, and leave us review on your favorite podcast platform. And I hope that you'll continue to join us each week for new episodes where we share stories from special guests, as well as my own insights and help you on this path to entrepreneurship. And of course, if this really is hitting home and you're like, listen, I got six people in my inner circle who I know can really benefit from this.

forward this on to them. That is the best way that we can continue to support each other as we grow our businesses together is by sharing this episode with someone that you know can really use it. It helps me, it helps the podcast, and it helps them of course. So I'd love it you could do that. Until next time, I want you to keep building stronger, keep working smarter, and keep dreaming bigger. And at the end of the day, just keep thriving. You got this girl.