Step 8: See How Your Spending Stacks Up Against Your Earnings
And lastly, you want to conduct an audit of your business’s finances. This is true for any business, but as an entrepreneur, you may be one of those people who gets caught up in the buying process.
You may suffer from shiny new object syndrome, where you are constantly forking over money for courses, tools, and coaching without actually implementing these to the point where they pay off for you.
You want to conduct an audit to see where all of your money is going regarding how you are reinvesting it into this business. How many courses are you purchasing each month?
How many tools are you signed up for with recurring fees? Even if you love to use the tool and don’t want to give it up, there may be a purchasing option where you pay a little bit more for lifetime use rather than paying a monthly fee, which will save you money in the long run.
You may find during your audit that you are spending too much on paid advertising fees. If you are not seeing a healthy return on your investment, you may need to reduce your spending on paid ads and instead try to master organic traffic generation.
You may also be able to determine from your financial audit that you are spending a lot of time on tasks that would be better delegated or outsourced to someone else so that you could free yourself up to earn more profits.
This is not just a matter of being able to hand off work that you’re not good at or don’t have time for. Sometimes, it’s a financial benefit to hiring someone rather than waste your talents on a task that will not pay off for you.
It’s good to see what you pay out every month and what’s coming in. Many online entrepreneurs are blind to this fact. They end up signing up for things little by little, and they don’t realize what a considerable expense it is.
The only time they get an idea of what shape their finances is in when it comes to their business is at tax time, when they can see the profit of the company as well as the losses and expenses.
If you discover that you have more money going out than coming in, you’ll want to make some changes. This might mean you start using free tools rather than paid ones.
Or, you might look up information on how to do something on YouTube or even ask some of your industry colleagues how to do something rather than spending money on a course.
A financial audit can be done every quarter. You don’t want to wait until the end of the year when too much time has passed and you have wasted too much money without earning enough profits.
An audit allows you to use complex data to guide how to change your business. Unless it is running to perfection, you’ll likely have to tweak certain aspects of your operations to earn as much as possible.
When you’re ready to discuss or develop your marketing strategy, we can help. Contact us and schedule a free marketing consultation.