Today's episode is sponsored by our Profit Clarity Masterclass.

If you've been avoiding your finances and promising yourself, you'll deal with it

later, you're not broken, you're normal.

Join us for a free live masterclass.

To learn a simpler way to bring clarity and relief, visit less

math more money.com, and we look forward to seeing you there.

Welcome to the six Figure Business Mastery Podcast, where every week

Kirsten and Jeanie dive into the essential topics to fuel your business

growth, from copywriting to course creation mindset, to video marketing.

They've got you covered.

Tune in for expert guest interviews on all things marketing and

business, and learn how to work on your business, not just in it.

So get ready to unlock your business potential and take it to the next level.

If your business is making money, but your bank account says otherwise.

Our guest today, Shannon Simmons, is here to show you how real profit

starts with a simple shift and there are no spreadsheets required.

So I'm excited to introduce you to Shannon Simmons.

Our company is called Fit for Profit, and today we're gonna talk

about profit in your business.

So welcome to the show, Shannon.

It's lovely to have you.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm super excited to be here.

Shannon, I'm always excited to hear people's journeys to how did

you get to where you are today?

And also, we're huge fans of Private First.

So we're so excited about this conversation.

So tell us about you.

This actually goes back quite a ways actually.

But I find that's true for most people when it comes to money and

their stories, because we really do have a relationship with money,

and it usually starts in childhood.

So my childhood, growing up, money was a source of a lot of conflict

in my household, and that really led to an unhealthy relationship

with money that I wasn't aware of.

But I knew that I wanted to change that for other people.

I didn't want other people to have this.

Conflict and especially kids, I didn't want 'em to grow up with it.

And so I had this idea that accounting would somehow solve that.

'cause I'm a very practical person.

Lo and behold, public accounting did not solve that problem for a lot of people.

But that's what led me then to start my own business after

two years of public accounting.

And I just really wanted to help small business owners understand.

Their financial reports.

I thought that would help solve the problem.

And then in 2013, I had a tax bill that I couldn't pay.

I don't know, that kind of felt like when you go to a doctor or a personal trainer

who doesn't look to be in the best shape.

I was the accountant who was helping people but wasn't

following my own methods, and that didn't really feel good at all.

And so I started a tax account at that point.

And then 18 months later, somebody brought me Profit First and I

was like, oh, wait a second.

I actually grew up with this system in my household.

My mom had an envelope box and she divvied up all the money, so

I just had never made the leap.

That same system could be applied to business and kind of

modernized with bank accounts.

So it made a hell of a lot of sense to me and I implemented it and

then started helping people to do that same thing in their business.

And along the way, I did a lot of my own money mindset work

and realizing that childhood's.

Stuff.

I was still carrying it with me and I did a lot of work to change it.

And then I was like, so are our clients.

They are also carrying all of that with them.

And so we were helping them with a practical system profit first,

but sometimes they were still self-sabotaging or they were falling

off the wagon or whatever it was.

And I was like, this isn't about a system anymore.

This is about that head stuff.

And so then we started incorporating that in our business.

So that's the long, windy road of how I got to live off right now with

incorporating money management systems and mindset into how we help our clients.

So you're really helping them with a wealth relationship shift, aren't you?

Yeah, we really are.

We really want people to have a mindset that will help them get

the goals that they know they want.

They just don't even know how they're self-sabotaging most of the time.

Yeah.

That's so interesting because I think it was curse that always says there is

only one word in the English language that can drum up so much emotion.

And that's the word money, whether it's guilt and shame or excitement

or fear or whatever it is.

That mindset shift is so important.

Yeah.

And we see a lot of people out in the world, like I am a bookkeeper

and accountant by training and we do bookkeeping at fit for profit.

And there's a lot of people who are addressing the practical pieces of it.

You can go learn how to do bookkeeping, you can learn how to read financial

reports on YouTube, all the things.

And there's also a lot of people who are helping with mindset, but

I don't see very many people that are doing both in the same program.

And that's what I love to do.

'cause you really do start to see big shifts, not just small ones.

Because if you're afraid of money, 'cause that's what we find a lot of

business owners are afraid of money or they don't wanna acknowledge where

their money's going because that brings the shame or it makes them see my

business isn't bringing in enough money.

Maybe I need to raise my prices.

And that's uncomfortable.

Is that what you're seeing as well?

Yes.

All of those things.

And it's so interesting to me too.

I told you my story with all the conflict that I grew up with.

I also have two sisters, and so the way that an experience gets integrated into

your mind is so interesting to me because.

We all grew up with that same experience, but some of us have come out with

this like need to almost hoard money because we didn't have enough quote

unquote growing up and other people, I don't wanna name my sisters, but

others of us, I feel like because we couldn't spend it as a child, we are

like spendaholic and freak out about it.

And so it's really interesting to me how it doesn't matter what the.

Experience is, it can manifest itself in different things.

But yeah, Kirsten, you're right.

Like the fear, some of our clients, we've been doing this for 17 years

now, and I have clients who will hire us and then we don't hear from 'em.

Mostly bookkeeping clients, right?

Because they just want their books done.

They don't wanna think about it, they don't wanna deal with it, just get it

done so that I can get my taxes done.

So I don't have to deal with it.

And really it comes down to either fear or guilt and shame around it or all of it.

And so once we started to address that, we actually got better reactions

and interactions with our clients as well, because now they're not so

afraid of members on a piece of paper, is really what it comes down to.

So how do you help them with their relationship with that money or that

wealth and getting them excited about it and thinking about it in a positive way?

Yeah, first step with most of anything is awareness around

what is the relationship already.

Like I said, a lot of people don't even realize what it is.

So what I love is we don't have to go back to those childhood stories.

We don't have to go back to those memories 'cause that's really

not fun for a lot of people.

I've done it and that I can understand where it's coming from now, but

we really focus on the present and really being aware of what's

going on in your physical body.

When you are dealing with a money transaction, so whether it's

sending an invoice so that you can get paid, receiving money.

Is your heart rate picking up?

Just even thinking about that, like Kirsten mentioned earlier, raising prices,

is your heart rate picking up and when you're thinking about, oh my gosh, I have

to ask for more money, or even on the spending end, do you get really nervous?

Is your, like I said, your heart rate picking up, your breathing, picking

up, do you notice tension in your body?

That's really what we have people do.

Just spend a week like writing down every time you have.

A, an interaction with money and what does it feel like in your body?

Because once you notice that and you're aware of it, we can begin to shift it.

We don't even have to know what the story is behind it.

We just know that our body is reacting and we're having that response.

And then we can start to say, okay, what's another action we can do to

get our body into our nervous system right into a calm state before we

proceed with that money interaction so that we teach our body money is safe.

It's not that story from years ago that we're still carrying in our bodies.

So I think that's the first thing that we do with most of our clients.

Just awareness and then small shifts.

So after you help them get into their bodies and understand that

they can be safe with money.

And I love that Safe with money because again, I think that we don't

realize that it is the safety or not.

How do you help them strategically move in using an Understanding Profit

first, because we love that book, but I'm really excited to find out how do

you integrate that with your clients?

I like to talk about three different steps when it comes to

money, and they're not linear.

They're just three areas that we have to deal with First, we have to make

money because if we're not making anything, there's nothing to manage.

Marketing people are really good at helping you make money and

bring people into your business.

So we don't talk about that too much at the beginning.

Then we learn to value money.

So that's getting your mind, that's getting your values aligned with

how you're spending, that's getting your actions aligned with how your

goals are and what your goals are in business, making sure that the actions

are getting you there when it comes to money, and then we need to keep it.

Or manage it, right?

So we've got money coming in, we value it, we know what we wanna do with it.

How do we actually do that?

So, like I said earlier, profit First.

I really talk about it being the modernization of the envelope system

because we're now using bank accounts.

But it's really about giving every dollar that comes into our business a purpose

before we spend it, and making sure that your taxes are gonna be covered

so that you don't end up like me.

10 years ago now, making sure that you have money left at the end of the day.

'cause Jean said in the intro, like people come to us all the time and the bottom

of my profit and loss says I have money.

I made money.

But it's not in my bank account, like where is it?

And people don't realize that there are other places for your money to go on

your balance sheet if you have debt.

That's not on your income statement.

If you're paying yourself too much money, which we actually do see this

sometimes with, especially with online business owners, if this is actually

how I got in trouble back 2013, my husband lost his job and so my business

was the sole supporter of our family.

And I was taking so much out of the business.

I didn't have enough to pay taxes and I didn't have enough to

hire help and things like that.

It can be taking too much money out.

It can be not spending money in the right places.

Do you need marketing or do you need team?

Those two things, like it really depends on what your goal is in business, but that

is one of the things that we will look at and help people decide what do they

need, and then creating bank accounts, those buckets, like Profit First talks

about every business needs five, making sure that you are profitable, that

you're paying your taxes, that you're getting paid as the owner, whether you're

getting paid too much or not enough.

We wanna fix that.

We wanna get you paid.

So that you're not burning out.

That's what we see when people who can't pay themselves enough, they

start burning out and then whatever's left is for operating expenses.

And that's the big shift for a lot of people.

'cause they pay their operating expenses first and then they think

they're gonna live off what's left.

And that's really hard to do because there won't be much left.

'cause our mind says, spend everything that we have.

So that's profit first in a nutshell.

And I think for a lot of people having this conversation.

You can have a business that's doing a million dollars a year and the business

owner's making 50,000, you can have a business that's doing 150 and the business

owner's making a hundred thousand.

So it's understanding like managing the operation expenses is hard because

I think people think if I spend more money, I'm gonna make more money,

and that's not always the case.

Yeah, exactly.

And again, a lot of it goes back to mindset.

It also goes back to how we are naturally wired as human beings.

So one of the things that the author of First talks about is Parkinson's

Law, which says the more of a resource we have, the more we will spend.

And I always like to tell people, use this analogy when you know people are coming

over to your house for, you're having company over, you might know that for, I

don't know, three hours or three months.

Does it matter?

When do you clean?

Usually the day before, right?

The hour before.

So when we have three months of time, it doesn't matter if, you know you have,

if you only have three hours, you're still gonna get the cleaning done.

It usually happens in the last hour.

The same is true with our money.

Like Kristen said, if we have a million dollars, we will spend a million

dollars and we'll pay ourselves 50,000.

If we have $150,000, usually we will spend 125 and pay ourselves 20.

Whereas if we just take a little bit off the top, if we take 1%, let's

say off the top, all of a sudden that million dollar business is paying

the owner a hundred thousand dollars just by taking 1% off the top and not

allowing yourself to spend the $950,000.

Yeah, I know there's so many little things that can add up software

subscriptions or things that you signed up with that may be very small monthly

expenses where you add up all those small monthly expenses and they get big.

Yeah, and a lot of people don't realize, maybe your CRM has

something else included, a calendar scheduling system included with it.

And so they're paying for a CRM over here and they're paying

for a calendar link over here.

See these things all the time, and it's maybe there is a reason, but

have you identified that reason as necessary and worth the extra cost?

Because a lot of times people haven't, it's just they pile

on expense after expense.

And one of the things we do with our client is a quarterly expense audit and

just making sure that they're looking at their bank accounts every single quarter

at least, and analyzing is this expense driving profitability in my business?

I love that.

Is it driving profitability?

It's a great way of putting it.

How do you help them boost that productivity but without frustrating

and burning out and feeling like they're stretching themselves so far?

Yeah, I mean, it is a balance, right?

It's always a balance between efficiency and profitability, and so I'm not

gonna tell somebody like, you have to cut your team out completely,

like there's a healthy amount of team and let's get your business to that

healthy amount, or there's a healthy amount of marketing or whatever it is.

Wherever we see that they're overspending, right?

We try to figure out like, how can we get that really working efficiently for you?

So, are there systems that you need to implement?

Is there a software that will save you money and or time with

your team or time with yourself?

There's a lot of different options for how we can attack, but first we have

to, just like with mindset, first we have to figure out where are you over

spending, and then what are your goals?

Is it your goal to only work 20 hours a week in your business?

Okay, then you are either gonna need really great systems or really

great team, or maybe some of both.

It just depends on your business, right, what you're doing.

And that may mean that you are not paying yourself top of the line dollar

because you're only working 20 hours.

A week in your business, if you're willing to work 40 hours a week in your business

and you want to have that full-time job, then that looks like maybe we can pay you

more because you don't have to pay so much team 'cause you're doing so much work.

So it really is personalized to the business owner's

goals, is what I would say.

I would say it's a strong focus of ours to make sure that we're not burning

people out, putting those systems in place because there's only so far that money

can go before time is more important.

Can you share without, obviously, without names, can you share some

success stories or some challenges that people came in with of the aha moments

that they had in working with you?

Yeah, I would say this one especially goes to that boosting profitability

without burning out piece.

We had a client who came in, they might've been profitable, but they weren't great.

They were really looking to sell their business.

They wanted to get profitable enough that they could sell their

business 'cause they were done.

They were at that burnout spot and I was like, okay, let's implement

profit first so that we can see where you're spending too much money.

We got a lot of things fixed and in line for him and he was all of

a sudden profitable saving money and this, it took a couple years.

Profit First is not an overnight fix, I will say that too, but it took a

couple years and he had implemented Profit First and was really actually

falling in love with his business again.

It was like, maybe I don't need to sell this.

This is working pretty well.

And here's where my favorite part came in.

He had a team member actually, whose dad passed away suddenly, and he had

been doing profit sharing with his team and his team came to him and

said, we wanna forego our profit share this quarter so that you can pay this.

Team member for two weeks of bereavement time.

'cause she didn't think she was gonna be able to take time off to be

with her family because she needed to work and all of those things.

And he said, that's great.

I'm gonna do one better.

You guys get your profit share and I'm gonna pay her two weeks bereavement time.

Because he had that money set aside in his business, in his profit account.

He had that cushion that he could fall back on and do the things

that were important to him.

Take care of his team and when you take care of your team.

They take care of you and your business.

Like his business was just running at a point where he didn't wanna sell it.

And if he had wanted to sell it, it would've been way more profitable,

able to pay team for bereavement time than it was when he had this turn

revolving door of team in and out because he wasn't taking care of them.

So I just love that profit first, really does start to compound and take care

of way more than the one goal that you came in to take care of it with.

Yeah.

That's fantastic.

I love hearing that you, when you make more, you can be more generous.

Yeah, exactly.

Part of the mindset work that we do is having clients identify their

values, and sometimes we have to rename that profit account so that

it is like the generosity account.

Or the charitable donation account because profit doesn't really motivate people

at first, but being able to be generous with money does or whatever it is.

So that's another tip that we use in both mindset and the strategy work that we do.

In yesterday's interview, I learned.

Friday's interview, I can't remember what day it was.

Instead of having a to-do list, have a success list.

I love that.

So I changed my to-do list to success list, and I love the idea that you're

helping people understand that.

You can think about where do you want that profit to go?

How do you want this to benefit you and your family or your community?

I think that that's so smart.

Yeah.

And it really does motivate business owners in a different way.

So if you could give all the small business owners out there, just

one piece of advice when it comes to money, what would that be like?

I know that's a big topic, but with all of your experience, what do

you think the small business owner needs to hear most from someone?

That's always a tough one for me because I wanna say open an

account and go the practical way.

But honestly, like just start to notice where your body is reacting to money,

because it does not matter how many practical things you put in place.

If your body is running against those things, you will run against

those things every single time.

So just take a little bit of extra time.

It does not have to be much like five seconds.

When you're doing something regarding money and really notice

what's your body doing first.

I love that.

Yeah.

Awareness is so important.

So important.

So Shannon, if people are listening to this saying, oh

my gosh, I need to talk to her.

I need to pick her brain.

So I'm interested in what she's doing, what is the best way

for them to reach out to you?

Yeah, so we've actually put together a special page just for your listeners.

So if you go to fit for profit.com/six all spelled out, you'll have

access to our success kit.

So we talked about three tips today.

We actually also have two more tips on systems and strategy

execution in your business.

So goal setting, you'll get that, and then in that you'll have my email

and you can contact me there too.

Awesome.

Thank you.

That's an amazing gift.

Yeah, thanks.

So thanks so much again for joining us, Shannon.

This has been such a great conversation, and I just love the renaming things

and how that can make you feel.

I think that's so important and can help so many people, and

it's something really simple.

So thanks again for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

It was great to be here.

So listeners, thanks for being here and if this conversation

helped you think differently about your numbers, don't stop there.

Make sure to collect Shannon's free resource.

We'll put a link in the comments and we'd love to also hear your biggest takeaway.

Maybe it was the wealth relationship shift, the mindset, or something else.

So just leave us a comment and let us know what you're gonna implement first.

And thanks everyone for being here.

Thanks for listening to the six Figure Business Mastery Podcast.

If you enjoyed listening to this episode and you are ready to leverage video

marketing on all online platforms, or maybe even start your own video

podcast, then you need to check out the Done for You and Done with You program

at the marketing va advantage.com and take your business to the next level.