I was recently re-watching an interview with a client that I did while writing Profit First for Creatives. His story still resonates with me, a lot. You see Kyle had been running his business for five years and struggled with his finances. But he tolerated it. Only when he had to purchase a house and go through the mortgage process did he really start to seek a solution.
Then he and his wife had a child. Now he knew that he had to get his shit together. In his words, “I had other people I was responsible for.” And since his implementation of Profit First, his financial anxiety has gone away. That is a powerful transformation!
But why did he wait? He knew that he had a problem. There were several pain points that he just tolerated. Why? For all of us, we don’t change anything until we’re properly motivated. Status quo is the status quo. Unfortunately, most of us wait for external motivation, which is rarely a positive one.
In Kyle’s case, it was a positive motivation, the birth of his daughter, but it just as easily could have been a failure to be able to obtain a mortgage. Or it could have been running out of cash and couldn’t pay his bills.
So how do you find internal motivation to improve your situation? For most of us, we have a strong aversion to the unknown, to change. The reality is that the pain of the change is just something we’ve built up in our own minds, it’s not real. We think that the change/unknown is going to be too difficult. So we go back to what we know, regardless of how unsatisfied we are with it.
What if you could break the change up into manageable pieces? I’ve already discussed how to begin implementing Profit First by opening a separate savings account and putting just 1% of all of your deposits into it. You can read more about that in this article.
Another baby step Kyle did, while working with his Profit First Professional at Core, was to figure out how much money he needed to make to pay for his personal household. Once he figured out what that number was (in his case 6 days a month), he had a target. And you know what? He easily meets it. Why? Because it is defined, he’s not guessing.
Setting that target took it out of his head, where he was constantly worrying about finances, and it gave him a tangible goal to work towards. How about you? Do you know exactly how much work you need each month to cover your living expenses? Figure that amount out, translate that to days or jobs or customers. You will relieve a massive amount of stress from this simple exercise.
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