Do you keep seeing dwindling profits in your business, even though you're
growing in revenue every single year?
Maybe it's because you have too much team in your business to handle.
You're tempted to go back to being a solopreneur because a team that
you've hired is both not cutting it and depleting your profit margins.
Or maybe it's because you simply over investing.
You purchased yet another new course or program that you've invested
in that you haven't had the time to even log in or implement.
Another reason is because of a life changing event that happened in your life.
You were forced to change your offers and no longer feel confident, hence less
sales and less profit in your business.
Maintaining a healthy profit seems unattainable in this
season of your business.
It would be great to have more profit, but you don't know.
How you can make this happen.
If this is you stick around in this episode, you'll learn how to
effectively increase your profit margins as a coach or service provider.
This is the Harmonious Wealth Podcast, where we're breaking online business
owners free from chasing every next revenue milestone and instead prioritizing
lifestyle and legacy goals so you can finally have the personal wealth
to show for your business success.
I'm your host, Iyanna Vaughn, fractional CFO and bookkeeper here to guide you.
Now let's start building your financial legacy.
Hello and welcome to episode four of Harmonious Wealth.
I am so excited.
I got my little floral shirt on.
I haven't, I bought this from Express like over a years, a year ago.
If you're watching this on YouTube, you could see it and I wasn't able to wear it.
I still probably can't because I'm, I put a scrunchie on the back
of it so it could look good, but I feel like spring is springing.
It's sprung.
Pam the Palm is making her debut for a second time.
She is my co host today.
I love her.
But anyway, welcome to another episode of Harmonious Wealth.
Uh, first, before we get into the episode, I want you to join us on
our open house, April 26th, which is a Friday at 12 PM Eastern.
I am going over why revenue does not matter if you do not have
the legacy and lifestyle goals to show for it and your business.
Today I want to talk about how to actually increase your profit margin.
We was talking about in previous episodes, we talked about the why
behind it, the energetic reasons, the spiritual reasons, the root causes,
and just things that we know are there and kind of like putting light to it.
Now I want to show you how I help clients effectively increase profit margins.
Once you're able to fix the profit problems in your business, just
about everything else improves.
You're able to pay yourself well and consistently from your business.
You're able to accomplish those immediate lifestyle goals
that you have been working on.
So say for instance, it could be like two vacations a year.
Getting more massages, obliterating your personal debt once and for
all, and saving months of expenses so that you can get out of debt.
And in the future, you're using debt to leverage versus living, right?
And you're able to move forward in your life, raise your credit score, buy a home,
all of those different things with having your business be the number one or top
vehicle for personal wealth in your life.
You're able to accomplish these things in your personal life.
In episode three, I talked a little bit about my profit focus philosophy.
When I think of like profit, right, you're increasing your
profit to do a specific thing.
It is to retain equity in your business, which means what's left over and you're
able to pay yourself more in distributions or keep cash on hand so that you can
reinvest in the business to scale.
However, I like to think of what do you do with that profit by having a profit focus.
So the first focus of your profit should be fixing your cash on hand.
So the elephant in the room is we don't have money in our bank account.
We know it.
It is what it is.
How do we fix it?
The first step is improving your profit.
The next profit focus is tackling your business debt, because your business
debt becomes an expense if you're holding debt in your business over time.
So we don't take into account a lot of times, like, all the cash that we need
in our business, because we're only looking at one viewpoint, one report in
our business, and that is usually the income statement or the income statement.
Did I say the income statement or the income statement?
The income statement or the profit and loss statement.
This, that only shows one viewpoint and that is all the revenue, all the
expenses, profit, which is left over.
It does not take into account if you have credit cards or
loans or stripe advances, right?
That you come across in your business.
And I have a thing, I have a hate, hate relationship with Stripe advances,
any payment processor advances, they're cool until they're not,
which is never, they're never cool.
So.
You get into a trap of paying off your advance and then because they
know your sales cycle and your sales history, they're going to
slide it right on in so that you're tempted to do it all over again.
So when I work with my clients on a profit planning intensive and CFO
clients, we plan to avoid those payment processor payouts like the plague.
The third focus of profit is paying yourself more in business.
When you pay yourself well and consistently, you're able to accomplish
those lifestyle goals that you have, as well as create legacy goals
and implement those in your life.
The fourth profit focus is getting serious about retirement.
When you don't plan for retirement, you're avoiding planning for your future.
It's different from worrying because worrying about the future
is different than like, planning or having provision for your future.
Right?
So, and entrepreneurship.
It's pretty rare, unfortunately, to see someone like, having a
retirement account and contributing it maxing out every single year.
Even if we're focusing on like this aspect of your profit or like increasing
your profit so that you can invest in your retirement, even if it's
just getting started, at least we're starting somewhere so that you can
start investing in growing your money.
Or having your money grow so that you can have a nest egg in the future.
The fifth profit focus is becoming an investor.
And now that you've hit all these different areas, now you can use excess
cash to do things like buying a real estate, commercial real estate, investing
in a new company, being an angel investor in companies, acquiring different
companies, things of that nature.
So these five profit focuses happen either together, one at a time, but it is an art.
Cashflow management is an art.
Increasing your profit and knowing what to do with your profit,
with your cash on hand is an art.
So when you work with me as a client, you're able to say, okay, what's the
first thing that comes to mind for me immediately having at least a month's
worth of cash on hand in your business.
Then we'll work on getting your debt taken care of.
And then when we look at your, your personal finances, what do
you absolutely need so that you can start thriving versus just surviving?
We'll kind of work on those three things.
And then as we obliterate one of your debt is like, okay, what's the next thing?
What's the next thing that we need?
Right?
One of my clients, she had a payment processor loan.
And with our weekly cashflow forecast, I was able to accurately predict
the exact week that we paid it off.
We had a celebration.
It was like, wait, Let's go and check.
And it was zero.
I was down to the day that, that I predicted when it
was going to be paid off.
We celebrated because it was like, now we can move on.
First up are coaches and service providers with retainer services.
Usually when it comes to increasing profit, we're only talking about revenue,
raising your rates, making more sales, but there's no guidelines on what you
should be spending so that you can have optimal profit in your business.
My approach is first, as usual, we're uncovering what you must pay yourself.
Then we are going to look at what do you have going on currently.
Before we get into planning to increase your profit.
So, 1st is what is your current monthly recurring revenue?
If you have a coaching program, what are your open payment plans for the
next few months so that you can see exactly what you should be expecting
in your business coming in and cash.
If you're a service provider, same deal.
If you have projects that are six months for recurring revenue or three months,
nine months, 12 months, figure that out so that you know exactly what to
expect these next three months or more.
Then I want you to review all of your expenses as they are right
now before you pay yourself.
Then you get to see exactly what your profit margins are before
you've even paid yourself.
Ask yourself these questions.
Is, Your current profit optimal for you right now.
Are you able to pay yourself your desired salary?
Are you able to have cash left over after you pay yourself to
pay any debt to save for taxes?
If you don't, let's highlight those gaps exactly.
What do you need additional so that you can pay yourself, your expenses,
and your debt and your taxes.
So, when we look at the gap in your recurring revenue, right?
Let's say you're currently at 20, 000 and now you need an additional
10K so that you can pay yourself.
Be able to pay yourself your salary as well as paying off your debt.,
You know, the gap is 10, 000.
Now you can go out and make 10, 000 additional and recurring
revenue so that you're not starting from scratch all over again.
Maybe it's getting a new retainer client, maybe a new coaching client and that 10,
000, maybe it's 3 of those clients, maybe 1, 1 off service, whatever your rates are.
What can you do to close that gap of monthly recurring revenue
so that you're not starting from zero to 10 every single month?
Now, I want you to be on the journey to make 50 percent profit
margin before paying yourself.
So that means if you're making 30, 000 or your goal is 30, 000,
that means your profit should be no less than 15, 000 a month.
And that leaves you the ability to pay yourself what you desire.
Maybe that's eight to 10, 000 having money left over for maybe the minimal
debt and putting cash on hand or saving for cash in your business.
You want to rinse and repeat this so that you can incrementally increase
your, your profit or go straight to see like, here's where I am now.
Here is where I will be if I were to make 50 percent profit margin in my business.
We do this with our clients during our profit plan.
After we set the goals, uncover what you need to pay yourself,
we'll go into planning for profit along with a tax strategy.
Usually with coaches, they don't have as much of a problem with, with
profit as a service provider, because they're typically the main talent and
they're able to serve one to many, or one to few versus one on one services.
So the biggest thing is your tax strategy, because when you have high
profit, chances are you, you're might potentially have high tax liability.
So what we do is when we look at our clients plan for profit, we're then
creating a tax strategy by looking at your past tax return, putting that data
in for your personal and then implementing what we mapped out for your profit for
that current year and then having an estimate and suggesting strategies.
So that you can reduce your tax liability.
Those tax strategies can be anywhere from changing your tax structure to an
S corp, hiring your children buying a vehicle, buying a fixed asset so that you
can 179 deducted, which means that you expense it throughout the year and putting
money into retirement different things, depending on where your life is right now.
If you're a coach or you have high profit margins already, you might be
thinking why would you need someone else to help you with your money?
And chances are they're not helping you with a profit plan to have
guidelines for how you're managing your money or a cashflow strategy.
Chances are they're not helping you understand your tax strategy.
Because, as we know, more profit can potentially mean more, more taxes if you
don't have the strategy to rectify that.
When I created a three year profit plan for one of my clients
in 2021, we mapped out what her 2022 through 2024 looked like.
We were able to accurately predict what her 2023 looked like with multi 7 figures
and revenue as well as very healthy profit margins by the end of 2023.
We were able to say, okay, you're, you're right on target with your revenue.
You might even surpass it and you have really, really healthy profit margins.
Every single month.
We were giving her.
Tax estimates so that she can put money over to save for taxes as well
as pay some some quarterly taxes So that it's not an overwhelming
amount that's being taken out.
So by the end of the year, I was like, okay, how could we save you as much?
Towards the end of the year.
How can we save you as much?
taxes and then also Help you Accomplish some of those immediate lifestyle goals.
So we were able to save for about a $100K in taxes because
we implemented tax strategies.
Next up is for service providers or influencers who work on projects.
So they have projects, so say for instance, that is like an event planner,
video production agency, or you're an influencer who works with brands.
You are a project based business.
You have project based services.
Usually when it comes to creating revenue or more profit in your business,
you're thinking again, let me raise my rates so that I can have more profit.
Let me do it myself so that I don't have to pay a team and I can keep
profit because I don't know when the money's going to actually come in.
Another thing that I've seen is not keeping up with your invoices when you
have a project based business or not having automated payments or not having
any deposits, and you're waiting on your money to come in net 30, 60, 90,
depending on if you work with small businesses or bigger corporations.
My approach when helping clients such as this with projects or influencers who work
with brands is we need to keep a pulse, a heavy pulse on your current invoices.
Is.
Tighten up your invoicing system is going to be the most important thing
and automate as much as possible.
And then what you could do as well is have an incentive or just have
a process where you're getting deposits from these companies.
Another thing is when you are working with brands, especially, because they
pay whenever they want, unfortunately, it's having another source of revenue.
So that working with brands is not your only source of revenue.
You're able to mix things up.
Maybe you have a digital product.
Maybe you have a service that you offer on top of working with brands.
Those things can help you maintain healthy cash flow throughout the year versus
struggling with that cash flow, because you're waiting on a company to pay you.
We want to look at tactively, what do you have going on right now
before we increase your profit?
So look at your expected revenue for the next 6 months.
That's supposed to come in based on your projects.
Look at all of your expenses.
And then get your before paying yourself and then you can get a
review of what your profit should look like before paying yourself.
Then we want to highlight our gaps.
Are you able to pay yourself what you want based on your current profit margin?
Are you able to even afford paying your current expenses?
Are you able to pay off debt?
Are you able to save for taxes?
If not, We need to figure out how to increase your revenue
and manage your expenses.
So first thing when it comes to like project base is we want to
plan for profit from the very beginning with your with your rates.
So I like to look at your pricing.
And see what is it costing you for your team, your software,
with every single project.
What is the profitability of each and every project that you have?
So that as you work with more clients on projects, you're able to scale
at the same level of profit versus Depleting your profits entirely
because one, one service is one price.
Another is another price.
And this client wanted more things and this involved your team having
to get paid more and just having your gross profit margins depleted.
So gross profit is when you have your revenue.
Minus your direct costs, so direct costs directly relate to your sales.
So that can be like a subcontractor, or if you're a video production
agency, that can be like your editor working on client projects.
If you are an event planner, that is like your, your event planning team
who helps you retain that revenue.
If it's someone like me say I'm doing a project or either
retainer, it's my accountants.
That's on my team.
That is a direct cost to my business.
So as we're going to use the same deal right now, the recurring revenue
for projects can be very sporadic.
Maybe it's 20, 000 one month, 10, 000 another.
If you map out for the next six months, what is stopping you from hitting that
30, 000 and monthly recurring revenue, you know what your project should look like.
Once you know the gap, you will know what your goal should be.
So that means getting another Project and mapping out your monthly payment plans
so that you can close that gap entirely.
You can also do some cash injection where you offer paying full bonuses for projects
so that you can get some cash in advance.
But then also your.
You have visibility for the next few months.
If you feel that your cash on hand is too sporadic because you have projects
again, consider having another stream of income so that you can increase
your monthly recurring revenue that can be having a digital product that
can be having a membership community specific to like, what you're offering
to the community to your audience now.
So say, for example, you're an influencer and you've built a, an
audience that really trusts you, right?
And they, you can have an, a membership community where you talk to them more
intimately, or you have a, an offering that you can have like some camaraderie
in a community for them, or you can launch a service or a coaching program.
So you might have a business where you're a project based business
owner, or you work with brands and you don't feel like you're ready for
a fractional CFO or that you even are ready for a profit planning intensive.
So when you're making about at least 500, 000 in your business and scaling
path to about 1 million in your business within the next year, it is time for a
discussion about fractional CFO services.
Or if you're a business owner and you're making 100, 000 or you're trying to make
multi six figures in your business, this is a great option for the profit planning
intensive as it will give you about three months Having a CFO on your team, no
matter where you are in your business.
So you don't have to be at that level of 500 K to get cFO level services for
your business because it can be in an intensive style for the next 12 weeks.
Next up is beauty businesses.
So of course this is a service provider, but the business model is different.
When it comes to making more profit in beauty businesses usually there, I
haven't seen a lot of specific tactics on how to grow profit besides increasing
rates, of course, making sure that you have the right team in place making sure
that your team does well with services so that they have returning customers.
My approach is working backwards.
I like to review all of the expenses again, right?
Highlight the gaps of average weekly revenue that comes into the business
is going to be the pulse of how to maintain the company financials.
When it comes to increasing profits for a beauty business owner, it is going to
be essential Essential to track weekly, track your finances weekly, because
you're going off of weekly sales.
So getting your average weekly sales is going to be where
you're going to start, right?
Then you're going to map out all of your expenses and then you're
going to get to the profit.
Is the profit going to be able to help you pay yourself?
Well, is the profit that you have so far going to help you pay debt?
And is it going to help you pay taxes?
If not, we're going to have to fill in that gap.
So once we map this out, we'll see, okay, what is the gap?
What must you make every month so that you can pay your expenses yourself,
paying off debt, having healthy cashflow.
You want to divide that by the week and then you have your weekly sale.
weekly sales goal.
So say, for instance, you must make 40, 000 a month so that you can support having
cash on hand, paying yourself, paying debt, of course, having your expenses.
So that means every single week you need 10, 000 and In sales, and this means
that you're able to see what your weekly sales goals is for your entire team.
They're able to see the average, so you're able to say, okay, the average ticket is
125 and then you're able to say, okay, this is how many clients need to be seen.
For every single stylist that you have on your team or every single technician that
you have on your team, and you're able to then give them goals so that they're
able to reach their revenue goal too.
So if they're making commission of 40%, then you know 60% is gonna
be left for you to pay yourself.
Now it's gonna be hard to get to 50% profit margin.
Promising that, but we do want it to be healthier than it is right now so that
you can be able to support yourself.
And what that means is you might have to start implementing different
strategies outside of your services and offering product so that you can
have higher profit margin, or if you are an established beauty business
owner, you can also start offering maybe courses or different classes, or
maybe even classes for consumers, right?
So saying you're a hairstylist, maybe you can have a course on how to maintain
your hair after they leave or something like that, or having a membership, you
know, something that would be like a given you have some membership sales
that come in every single month, maybe half of them take up on the services
that They are invested in for their membership that can help you increase
your revenue without decreasing your profit and that'll help the business grow.
So again, when it comes to beauty businesses, your cash on hand, managing
that, and as well as your profit is going to be an art because you're going
to have to, because most of the time with beauty businesses, especially if
you have a storefront, you're going to have some debt because you're
Getting the business started and you're probably, and you're getting the
business started so that you're not using your own money to fund the business.
So it's going to be imperative to have enough profit so that you're able to
pay yourself and pay the debt off.
Having a weekly cashflow forecast will help you tremendously.
So one of the things that might come up for you is How do I
actually track my finances?
It will be essential for you to have a bookkeeping system.
So usually with our clients, if you're coming in and you need to be
caught up with your bookkeeping, we will get your bookkeeping caught up
so that we can look at your trends, which is the second part of our
framework called assessing your trends.
When it comes to having bookkeeping cleanup in your business, we go up to
one year so that you can know exactly what you're inspired up to a year.
And you can assess those trends and make assumptions for the new year when
it comes to creating a profit plan.
Let me recap on how to actively increase your profit in your business.
First, you're going to see exactly what you must pay yourself.
from your business.
Then you want to map out where you are currently in revenue.
Ideally, if you have a service business or a coaching business
with payment plans, look at your monthly recurring revenue currently.
Then look at all of your expenses before you pay yourself, assess where that profit
is before you pay yourself, ask yourself, is this enough to pay me, pay off debt,
and retain cash on hand in the business.
If not, increase that number so that you can get your profit margin
before you pay yourself at 50%.
Highlight that gap.
Is the gap 10,000 Is it $15,000 Figure that out.
If it is $10,000 and your service is 50, 000, 2000 per person for four or six
months, then you know you need five sales.
What is how you, how would you get five sales?
Would you have to show up on five sales calls?
Seven sales calls because of your conversion rates.
Then you look back and say, okay, how do you get people on these sales calls?
Is it, is it by adding people to your email list and inviting them on a call
with you while they're on your email list?
That way you can actively increase your sales.
Then look at.
Your expenses, what are some of the guidelines if you're if your team
is over 30 percent that is too much.
How can you effectively either increase your rate or figure out how to pay
your team in a way that is affordable.
So after the 30% of what you pay your team, you then should
have guidelines for the rest of your expenses in your business.
So typically I like software to be no more than 5 percent of
your revenue for investing in your professional development.
I like that to be no more than 10 to 15 percent of your revenue in your business.
For marketing, maybe you have a digital product based business and.
Instead of having a team be at 30%, your advertising should be no more than 30%.
And if your advertising is higher than 30%, there might be an issue
with not having repeated customers.
How can you decrease your ad spend by looking for ways
to have repeated customers.
Once you figure out what your profit margin is and those guidelines, you're
able to then increase your profit margins.
Based on what I shared today, which one of these tools will you use to
create more profit in your business based on your business model?
Let me know in the comments, what type of business that you have, and I'll talk
more about increasing your profit margins there in the comment section of YouTube.
So today we talked about how to effectively increase your profit
margin as a coach or service provider.
If you're ready to expedite, increasing your profit and take control of
your cash, Flow, book a call with me and my profit planning intensive.
I'll help you create predictable and healthy cashflow in 30 days.
Understanding and growing profits in your business will help you create
a legacy for three generations.
You as a first generation entrepreneur, like me, will, you'll be able to also
honor your parents in the previous generation, as well as create a legacy
for your children in the third, in the future for your children's children.
Head over to lovelyfinancials.
com slash intensive to book a call with me.
I'm on a mission to help 100 women reach at least 1 million in net
revenue to create generational wealth and break generational curses.
If this aligns with you, I'd love to have you as part of the community and tune
into more episodes on Harmony as well.
Hey there girlfriend, if you're ready to finally have the lifestyle
and legacy to show for your business success, I would love for you to
click that subscribe button on your favorite podcast app or YouTube.