Making your business work for you: Securing your lifestyle

Getting your business to thrive might be what gets you out of bed every morning. But your business should also help you hit those personal goals too.

You need steady profits, dividends, and bonuses to keep up your lifestyle—whether that’s flexibility working around family, taking two vacations a year or paying off a new family home.

In this series, we’ll dive into how you can structure your business to meet your personal, family, philanthropic, and leisure goals.

Fueling Your Lifestyle with Business Income

Starting a business means making some big decisions about your quality of life. Building a start-up might mean months or even years of lower income. But in the end, you want your business to fund the lifestyle you want.

Here are four key ways to make sure your business supports your lifestyle:

Focus on High Margins or High Volume

Go for products or services that offer high margins or high sales volumes. The goal is to create stable, predictable revenue and profits. This will help you draw the income you need for your desired lifestyle.

Review all of your product offerings and go through the process of working out what is most profitable for your business. Don’t forget to factor in the additional unseen costs, like if the product or service doesn’t fit your values or core business and drains the life out of you. Are you selling a lot of a product or service that has a low profit margin (costs you as much to make as it does to sell) or do you have products sitting on shelves gathering dust?

Get Strategic with Your Pricing

Adjust your pricing to stay competitive while making healthy margins. Value-based pricing and bundling can boost the value of each transaction. The more you increase the average sale price, the easier it is to supply the income you need.

Have a look at doing a break-even budget to help break down how much of a product or service you need to sell to break even. This will give you a starting point on where to price, how much to sell and where you need to improve. Business Queensland has some great resources to help get you started https://www.business.qld.gov.au/running-business/finance/essentials/break-even-profit

Hang on to Valued Customers

Improve customer loyalty by offering personalized services and programs. Keeping existing customers is cheaper than getting new ones, so keep them happy and enjoy consistent revenues that power your personal income.

Do a review on your customers. Who brings you joy, spreads the word about how fabulous you are and comes back time and time again? Who doesn’t? Who are the customers that when you see them you are cringing and ducking under the counter? Spend your time finding ways to increase the first kind of customer and making sure that you nurture the ones you do have.

Automate Your Most Costly Processes

What is your real value in your business? Is it bookkeeping and admin? Or is it meeting with people, developing products and bringing your uniqueness to the world?

Work out what your high-value contribution to the business is, and make time for that. Don’t sacrifice your time to save a couple of bucks. Automate basic tasks and outsource non-core functions to free up time for high-value revenue generation (a fancy way of saying “Show me the money”). Reducing overheads can directly boost your potential income as a director.

Creating a profitable, cash-rich business is the dream. If you can stabilise your sales, revenue, and profitability, you’ll increase your chances of a healthy income from the business. We can help you achieve this by working with you to work ON your business and not IN it. Whether it’s the preparation of budgets, reviewing products and pricing or just a chat about the challenges you face, we can help.

Contact us today to find out more

https://www.smallbizhq.com.au/contact-us/

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