I spent the last couple of weeks asking people, “What is money?” And most people will tell me, “money is a tool.” For most of us, money is used to get things we want. If I want to hire an employee, I need money. If I want to take a vacation with my family, I…
This morning I spent 30 min that I didn’t have wrestling with my phone company who overcharged me by $57 on my last bill. Was that a good use of my time? What if I told you I’d spent almost 5 hours over the last month trying to get my daughter’s phone number off my…
I’ve been working on my money mindset the last few months My fake money experiment made me aware of how uncomfortable I am with money, how anxious and itchy it made me, and created a desire to have more freedom in my relationship with money. It also helped me see how attached I was to…
I’m reviewing budgets with clients right now, and I see one mistake over and over again. It’s a basic math error, but it’s hitting owners right in the wallet! Most of us were taught that Profit = Sales – Expenses. That’s wrong. Or at least it leads to wrong thinking! Let me explain. When new…
There’s nothing that makes me feel more like a failure than when I don’t know if I’m going to have the cash to cover payroll. Vendors can wait, you can negotiate with bankers, even landlords will give you some leeway. But when your payroll is late you are affecting the lives and families of your…
My client called because he was going to have to skip his paycheck this week. Something that hadn’t happened in a long time. “Brad, I used to be able to keep track of my business in one spreadsheet. I had my pipeline on one tab, and my income on another tab and my expenses on…
One of our clients, a high-end personal training studio owner, had a problem that she just couldn’t figure out. She knew how many clients she had and how many sessions each had purchased in their package, but every month her income would come up short. So if she started the month with 160 clients at…
We’ve been talking this week about the value of building a budget for your business — today we will do it. If you didn’t download my magic budget spreadsheet, you should do it now. My budget spreadsheet builds your profit and loss statement for the next year by predicting the sales and expenses for each…
The whiteboard in my kitchen is literally an extension of my brain. I have random notes on there that make sense to me (mostly), but it’s also the checking-in point for the rest of the family. Take Thanksgiving, for example. I write down the name of each dish, when it needs to be made, and…
When I was a corporate drone, I hated budgeting. It seemed like a charade, a game where we all had to guess what answers the big boss wanted. We inevitably failed, and the big boss would send back a budget that had nothing to do with what we had just spent hours slaving over and,…