KNOW YOUR FLOW TO GROW YOUR FLOW – MARTIAL ARTS BUSINESS GROWTH TIPS

A large number of struggling businesses transform their finances with a few simple ingredients. An equal number are also forced to shut down due to poor flow. The key to getting your business’s finances in order is to know your flow, and ultimately, grow your flow. Sales and systems sensei Jennifer Waters shares her personal method of managing finances and the tips, tools and techniques which helped her grow her flagship school.

The base of the blueprint is to dig into two aspects: First, what are your personal needs inside of your household, and second, what are the business expenses. The end goal is to work together and manage both. Most people are not taught what they should be doing as a business owner, they’re only taught what they should be doing if they work for someone.

First aspect is to calculate your bottom line expenses, that is, how much money that you absolutely need to exist and survive as a family unit. This includes your mortgage, utilities, rent, groceries, and how much you are spending on gas, vehicle payments, insurance and such. After listing down these essential expenses, next is to look at your savings. Work on your savings to try and put together an emergency fund in place, for any unprecedented catastrophic events such as your car needing a repair or you’re in need of buying a new washer. So that in the case of any such happening, you have some cushion there and are not stuck with taking out a loan to take care of those things. You can start it off with one month, then try to take it to three months, then get it to six months. After managing your savings you can further move on to think of other things such as investing or giving funds to friends and family for help. But the most important thing is to take care of yourself first so that you are in a good position to take care of other people. It is very essential that you get your personal finances in order before you start digging into the business finances.

One very helpful tool to have is a budgeting software – one that connects directly to your credit cards and bank accounts, and syncs all the transactions together. Some recommendations are ‘Mint’, ‘Ramsey Solutions’ and Water’s personally preferred one, ‘You Need A Budget’.

Having a budget gives you the advantage of categorizing your expenses and managing your financial goals, and a budgeting software helps you manage financial goals depending on the date of the month or the entirety. For example if you wanted to save money for Christmas, you can set a target goal for December which is a monetary goal. Or if you need to have a certain amount of money in a category for paying a bill that is due by a certain date, you can set the due date to make sure you’re reaching that goal every month.

Next, for managing your business finances, you basically repeat what you did for your personal finances. The easiest way to go about it is to go through your bank account statement and sort it all into different categories with some different colored highlighters or so. Creating different categories such as rent, utilities, payroll, etc. helps you get an idea of the average expenses of the month, and then you calculate it for the past three months, so you can see what on average you are spending on your business. This helps you calculate your break-even, which means how much cash you need to bring in per month to keep yourself from going into debt to cover the business expenses. It has to include all your expenses including any loan payments that you are making, and that is your break-even. Once you hit that break-even line, everything above that is what you make in profit. However, before taking home your profit, you need to make sure you create an emergency fund for your business as well in the unfortunate case of having a bad month in business.

If you are struggling with managing these and could use the help of a mentor to guide you through these steps, Jennifer Waters runs a 7-Figure Dojo program that gives you the required mentorship, guidance and the tools to make the whole process a whole lot easier, and you can check out her program on the website www.7figuredojo.com.

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