Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Excuses. Here I am. So hi guys and welcome to this week's Profit first podcast and newsletter. So I'm Stephen Edwards. I'm the founder of Grow Profit First Accountants.
[00:00:14] If you're listening to this or reading this, I'm actually on holiday at the moment. I'm in Florida. I'm there for three weeks. I actually pre recorded some of the content in this newsletter and the podcast, but I'm excited to be sharing it with you. But you can always reach out to myself and my, my team if you've got any questions in the meantime. Okay, so what I want to talk about today and as always the topics we cover is we give you a sprinkle of Profit First. We also go into some of the fundamentals about Profit first and give you a reminder of why it's so powerful. And the reason why we're so invested in Profit first and we're Profit First Certified Accountants ourselves, is that it makes a difference to business owners lives. It genuinely makes a difference. So we can help people on a far deeper level with Profit first than we've ever done as normal accountants. And normal accountants do a little bit of an injustice to their clients because they don't help them enough and they simply don't know how to. So that's why we're so excited about Profit First. However, in this podcast I talk about anything that's going to create a better business for you as well as Profit First. Anything's going to create a better life essentially for you and your family as the owners in the business.
[00:01:33] So I want to actually talk about some of the content from my book that I released in 2024, my own book, how to build a Business that Runs without you. Obviously my name's Steven Edwards with a pH. You can find it on Amazon and that's not a plug, but I just want you to know where you can find it. And I talk about how I'm literally walking the walk by being on holiday in most of August and coming into September. And I live and breathe a book. And this is why talking about in the podcast is how do you build a business that gives you the profits, gives you the freedom, is systemized to give you, you know, the freedom, the flexibility for your own life. And I want to talk about step one in my book. Step one of what I call the entrepreneurial Freedom system is to create a clear vision. And if you've heard this before, you know it's not a new topic to you. I don't want you to switch off. I want you to Be open minded. And the question I want to ask you is if you've ever created a vision for what does your business look like and what does your life look like? Where is it? Where's it written down? How often do you refer to it? If you've never created your own vision before and you've never asked the question, it all starts with, what do I want? What do I want my, my life to look like?
[00:02:43] What do I want my business to look like? And I literally recommend pausing this podcast if you can right now. And even if you're working, you're doing something else, just take a couple of minutes, just pause and have a think about that for a second.
[00:02:58] Even, even if you can, to write it down. If you can write it down, brilliant. If you've got your iPhone, you've not got pen and paper, do a few bullet points of what does that look like? What are the key things in terms of the hours you work?
[00:03:10] You know, maybe how much do you earn and what do you physically do in your business? So I just want you to reflect on it a little bit now. However, to do it properly, you need to give yourself at least 20 minutes. You need to sit down, pen and paper, where someone's not going to disturb you because this is a serious thing. We're talking about your life and your family and your future.
[00:03:30] So your personal vision, it's all, it's going to be different for everybody. That's the beauty with this, with business, we get stuck in the comparison trap. We all think we want to be bigger, better and do what everyone else is doing. But the truth is, when you really, really think about it, what you want will be completely unique to you. Because we all want different things. We're all different. We've all got different passions, desires and needs.
[00:03:54] And it all really starts with what does an ideal week look like before we even think about the business? If you don't know what an ideal week looks like, how can you possibly design a business around what you really want? So I mentioned that already. What do you do day to day? What time do you get up? What time do you start work physically? Where do you work? Is it at home? Is it an office? Is it out on the tools? Is it in a coffee shop? I want you to think about that and visualize it and write it down. How many hours do you work?
[00:04:21] What days do you work? How many holidays do you have? And I want to kind of literally write out a typical week because if you visualize this and you write it down on paper, it's 10 times more likely to happen. And it's been proven time and time again. Some people might call this law of attraction. I, I just think if we can get our life and our business to work on paper, how do we expect to get it to work in real life? It's just creating a plan. We do it for our career, we do it for projects, but we don't do it for our own life and our own business.
[00:04:52] My book chapter step one, which is chapter 10 in the book, does go into super detail about this. So I won't cover all of the topics, but it starts with your personal life and the next thing it's all about the business.
[00:05:05] Can the business then give me the life I want? And for some of you, you might actually have a tough question. It might be that your business cannot give you the life you want. It might be impossible.
[00:05:19] Or it might be impossible with the business you've got right now because it might be just you and it might be just you doing everything.
[00:05:25] So this helps you start to think about what needs to be true, what needs to happen for me to get to that point where I can live that life. For some people, it might be hiring their first team member. For others, it might be ditching some of their customers. For other people, it might be creating better processes in for their business, whatever it means for you. And for a lot of people it might be changing our mindset and just having a different intention and a different focus. So I want you to think about what does your business look like, what does the team members look like, what does the structure look like, what your customers look like? Get a bit of a visualization. But in an ideal world you need to create a business plan. And this is one of the first things we do with the people, our clients, that want to really grow their business.
[00:06:10] We help them create a business plan and we help get all of this stuff out of your head. What does your ideal week look like? What are you good at, what you great at? What does your ideal customers look like? What, what are your values? How much do you want to earn from your business? We put all of this into a business plan and for the people, we don't do that with one on one. It's also going to be part of the Grow Academy which we're launching in the next couple of months where people can do this themselves. And I've actually got a previous newsletter where I dive a little bit deeper. If you search the library, the Profit First Club on Beehi, you will find if you scroll down there might, there's quite a few on there. But you will find something about creating a business plan. And I will try and drop the link, my team member, try and drop the link in the newsletter for you. But essentially you need to create a business plan. A lot of people think that a business plan is something you give to a bank. They think it's something you do just to get investment or finance.
[00:07:06] No, it's not. A business plan is you committing to the direction and the success of your business.
[00:07:13] So you should be creating this every single year. When I started my business properly about 15 years ago, I literally wrote all of this pen and paper in a book. There is a better way of doing that, but something's better than nothing. Just writing it down is great if you haven't got one. And it was, what does my revenue look like? What does my profit look like? What does my team size look like? Who do we serve? What makes us unique? What makes us attractive to our team members? Before I even hired anyone, what sort of processes do we have in place? I had all of this written down.
[00:07:43] And when I look back a few years later, a lot of it come true. And I can promise you, if I did not write it down, it was far less likely to actually come true.
[00:07:54] So that's what I would urge you to do. If you haven't done this. First create your personal vision, then create some kind of business plan. If you want more one to one support or you want to use our DIY roadmap to create your own business plan, just reach out and we can share some resources with you. But it's super important because the numbers link into this as well. So step one of the entrepreneurial freedom system in my book, how to build a business that runs without you is creating a vision is understanding what you aiming for long term, what does your ideal week look like?
[00:08:27] What does the business look like? Step two is all about the numbers and I'm going to talk about that in next week's podcast.
[00:08:35] And in many ways I've been talking about that for the last few weeks, but I'm going to do it in order. You then need to get crystal clear on the numbers you get. Because when we want to create this vision of our business, we don't want to get too stuck in the weeds. We don't want to say I can't do this because it's not going to work. We want to give ourselves permission to dream a little bit. And step two is all about making the numbers work. So if somebody wants to earn £50,000 a year or £100,000 a year, we need a model that can deliver that for you, and that's having a numbers plan. You know, what is the turnover? What are my team costs, what are my overheads, what are my direct costs? If I'm buying goods or selling goods, or, you know, to deliver that service, what is my profit, what is my tax? And then that can link into your personal income in terms of you and your family, in terms of what do you want personally to take out of the business to give you that dream life.
[00:09:30] So this is the order we need to do things. Hopefully, that's useful, guys, and next week, I will go a little bit deeper into building your own numbers plan and see you all soon.
[00:09:41] Excuses here I am sorry.
