Starting a business is exciting. You’ve got a skill, a service, a product, or just an idea you can’t stop thinking about, and you’re ready to work your ass off to make it happen.
Small business owners are a special kind of crazy. We’ll work 90 hours for ourselves to avoid giving 40 hours to somebody else. We’ll run ourselves into the poor house to stop making someone else money.
At first, you don’t even mind. You’re building something that’s yours. You think about it when you wake up, while you’re eating dinner, and when you’re supposed to be sleeping.
Then, somewhere along the way, you realize…
You don’t work from home. You live at work.
That’s usually when owning a business starts feeling different than you imagined. See, being good at what you do is one thing. Building a business around it is another.
You can be booked solid and still wonder where all the money went. You can be so busy doing the work that the boring stuff like billing gets pushed off or forgotten. You quickly learn that your friends and family aren’t as interested in your great ideas as they are in your free services.
You may feel all alone in this exciting thing you started. You’re working harder, sure, but are you getting ahead? Are you actually going anywhere or are spinning your wheels?
Think of your business like a car and the work you do is the engine that makes it go. If you spend all of your time ‘under the hood’ who is steering? Who is watching the road? There is so much more to running a business than pressing the gas and staying in your lane. You have to watch the dashboard. You have to understand the gauges. You shouldn’t ignore that weird clanking. You should probably take it in for service regularly.
The same is true of your business. To keep it in good, working order there are things you need to know.
Are you charging enough to cover your expenses? Not just labor & materials - ALL of your expenses.
Are you attracting and working with the right customers? Are you doing the thing you do so well as efficiently as possible? Or, are you crossing your fingers and wishing for the best?
This is why most small businesses fail. Owners are so busy under their hoods that they have no clue how the car is actually performing on the road. And instead of figuring it out, they try to pawn it off to someone else. Anyone else.
Thing is, if you want your small business to succeed, you cannot expect someone else to drive for you.
YOU have to know your numbers.
And let’s get something straight, paying for QuickBooks or Wave does not mean you have your books in order. Unless you have a firm understanding of accounting basics, all you've really got is a professional-looking source of bad information.
That is why dialing in the financial side of your business matters and why you should get on it sooner than later. Not after the first year. Not at tax time and certainly not once you’re “making enough money to pay for bookkeeping.”
The truth is, you can’t afford not to know your numbers.
And can I just say, on behalf of all wives out there, we beg you not to recruit yours to handle the financials. Unless you want a frustrated, unpaid employee in bed each night, we don’t recommend enlisting your spouse to do your bookkeeping.
Not if you value your marriage, anyway.
You started your business because you’re good at what you do. Maybe you build things, fix things, clean things, sell things or create things. That’s YOUR thing.
Accounting is ours.
You don’t have to hire us, but find someone who does what we do and gets into the car with you. Somebody who doesn’t simply check your mileage at the end of the trip. Someone who won’t let you drive 100 miles in the wrong direction before asking what the hell you’re doing. Someone who says “Yeah, this is your car and you’re the driver. Let me help you plan the trip and come along for the ride.”
We know owning a business is hard. We’ve done it ourselves. There is no magic software, secret formula, or five-step plan that makes it easy. Some days it will absolutely kick your ass.
But when the pieces start coming together and the thing you built begins turning into an actual business instead of just a job you created for yourself?
That, my friend, makes for one hell of a ride. So, what are you waiting for?
Punch it, Margaret!