Asking if you suck at personal finance can seem insulting, but the question is not meant to be insulting. It’s just that, being a small business owner and having recently taken a deep look at my personal finances, I have to say that I suck at personal finance. A lot of my small business owner buddies do, too. How do I know this? Because we have all been taking the 30-Day Challenge by Ramit Sethi of the Scrooge Strategy, and it has been truly eye-opening.
What is the Scrooge Strategy 30-Day Challenge?
Basically, it’s an ebook written by national bestselling author Ramit Sethi. The challenge is to see if you can save $1,000 in 30 days by doing the steps in his ebook. There is one step per day.
There’s nothing really revelatory in the book but one message comes through loud and clear, especially for small business owners:
Most of us are far too busy maintaining our business finances that we let our personal finances fall by the wayside.
Or, to put it another way, we are too tired, lazy, or burned-out at the end of a business day to do the steps that Ramit suggests in his ebook. Being a small business owner can be difficult, and at the end of the day many of us want to take refuge in comfort rather than engage in the drudgery of personal finance.
An Enlightening Example of Why We Suck at Personal Finance
When it comes to saving money, most of what Ramit talks about is common sense. He calls it the “well, duh!” factor. An educated small business owner might read one of the personal finance tips, find it to be common sense, and say, “Well, duh! I already know that.” And that’s the end of it.
That’s all well and great, but just knowing about something and taking action are two completely different things. One example he gives in the book is pretty relevant as we move into winter and colder weather. One of his tips is to turn your thermostat down by three degrees to save money. He gives specific savings figures for several major cities so that you can estimate the amount of money you will probably save by turning down your thermostat.
Well, duh, right? OK, suppose you actually decide to turn down your thermostat. You bounce out of bed in the morning full of enthusiasm for saving money, and crank the sucker down by three degrees. Fabulous. Good for you.
Off you go to your small business, where you have a lousy day and waste lots of time fighting fires and producing little. You drag your butt home at night, feeling worn out and looking forward to a cozy evening on the couch with dinner and a glass of wine.
What a shocker when you open the front door and are greeted by the arctic temperatures inside your house. Oh yeah, you cranked your thermostat down by three degrees that morning. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Now it seems like a totally lousy idea invented by a complete moron. You are tired, hungry, and not in the mood to suffer. You rush to the thermostat, turn the dial up to 85 degrees, and promise that you’ll do better tomorrow. In actuality, the thermostat stays at 85 degrees and never goes back down.
That’s what Ramit means about the “well, duh” factor. We know better than we act, and thus our personal finances suck the big one. To fix this problem, he suggests that we stack a fuzzy robe, hat, and warm slippers by the front door before we leave for work in the morning. That way, when we drag our butts home at night, we will not only be reminded of why we turned the thermostat down, but we will have some immediate warmth to help us get through the shock of the cold air inside the house.
What’s the Moral of This Story?
The moral of this story is that if you are like most small business owners, you work yourself to the bone to squeeze the maximum profit out of your business, only to squander it with lousy personal finance skills.
Hmmm … sounds like a quandary to me. After all, why am I busting my butt at work only to end up with very little to show at the end of the day, week, month, or year? That seems silly. I might as well quit my small business, flip burgers for a living, and use some savvier personal finance skills to get ahead.
That’s why the Scrooge Strategy ebook has been so valuable to me. It helps me retain more of what I earn through my small business. Sound like a good idea to you? You can download the book for free and read it for 30 days. If you hate it, you don’t get charged. If you love it, there’s a one time charge of around $28. It’s been a heckuva deal for this small biz owner.
Check out the Scrooge Strategy for yourself here.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonas_brothers_luvs_ammy_lou/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: personal finance, Ramit Sethi, Scrooge Strategy, small business, small business owners
Posted by Stephanie Valentine on Nov 17, 2009 in
Small Business Leadership 
With the current business environment, small business owners are definitely struggling and “giving up” may start to look like a better and better option. While only you can decide when enough is enough, I heartily encourage you to consider staying in the game as long as possible.
For one thing, small businesses are the engines that really drive our economy, so just by keeping your doors open you are helping the economy to recover. Second, if you have been in business for more than 5 years, you have already beaten the odds, since 95% of small businesses fail by their fifth year. If you have come this far, maybe it’s worth trying to keep your small business afloat a while longer.
Inspiration from Winston Churchill and Abe Lincoln
Whenever I feel like having a pity party because one or more of my small businesses is floundering, I always turn to the examples of two inspiring leaders: Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln.
Consider Winston Churchill, who survived two world wars, much criticism (as well as praise), and the turmoil of British politics for many decades. He was definitely a maverick, and suffered the indignities that are often heaped upon such characters. When invited to give a commencement speech at Eton, a well known private school in England, Churchill endured the 20-minute introduction, and then stood up and said:
“Never give up. Never give up. Never, never, never.”
Then he sat down. In just nine words, Churchill captured the very essence of his indomitable will to succeed. Do those words ring a bell for you?
And then there is Abraham Lincoln, who demonstrated a similar sort of stubborn persistence that eventually led to success. Although many of us are familiar with parts of Lincoln’s political career, many are unaware of how many failures he suffered before he became President. Here’s a short chronology of Lincoln’s career:
1831 Failure in business
1832 Defeated for Legislature
1833 Failure in business again
1834 Elected to Legislature
1835 Sweetheart died
1836 Nervous breakdown
1838 Defeated for Speaker
1840 Defeated for Elector
1843 Defeated for Congressional Nomination
1846 Elected to Congress
1848 Defeated for Congress
1855 Defeated for Senate
1856 Defeated for Vice President
1859 Defeated for Senate
1860 Elected President
While Lincoln wasn’t recorded as saying, “Never give up on what you want,” it’s clear that he never did. Twelve defeats and major life losses marked his life, yet Lincoln never faltered in going after what he wanted.
Feel Inspired About Your Small Business Yet?
So if your small business has hit a bump in the road, be it a minor pothole or a major road hazard, think of Lincoln and Churchill. Perhaps by comparing the scale of your problems to the scale of the problems these two men faced, your business problems will shrink into perspective. In this time of economic correction, we need more small business owners with Churchill’s spirit and Lincoln’s will to step up and lead the way to recovery. So perhaps Churchill’s commencement comments can become a battle cry for your small business (as it has become for mine):
Never give up. Never give up. Never, never, never!
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/the-o/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, small business owners, small businesses, Winston Churchill
Posted by Stephanie Valentine on Nov 10, 2009 in
Small Business Management 
Adrian Monk is one of my favorite characters on television, probably because my husband resembles him so much … everything has to be “just so”! I catch reruns of “Monk” on the tube at least once a week, and I love how he uses his OCD mind, which is truly detail-oriented, to solve crimes. It has occurred to me more than once that small business owners could benefit from a little Monkishness to create a more efficient and productive business.
Small Business Owners and Adrian Monk
It’s true that Monk’s OCD tends to hinder rather than help him on a daily basis, since he spends so much time staying sanitary and clean. However, his “devil is in the details” approach is pretty useful for the small business owner.
Why? Well, think about this. How time do you spend looking for stuff (files, documents, phone numbers, etc.) that you’ve misplaced somewhere? How often do you dig around trying to find a business card? How many times have you tried to find that important email in the masses of them stacked in your inbox?
If you are like the typical small business owner, the answer is clear: a lot! The typical small business owner is a business-savvy risk taker who is adventurous but not necessarily organized. Lack of organization results in a lot of wasted time.
A Monkish Example
Let me give you a simple example. At the moment we are in Cancun, vacationing for 5 weeks. We have digital room keys. The first few days, I just carelessly laid my room key anywhere that was handy, often dropping it, along with sunglasses, sunscreen, and lip balm, on the counter or night stand. Sometimes I left it on the kitchen counter or dining room table of our condo. Wherever.
Those few days I spent at least 15 minutes per day looking for that darned key! Not that it makes a big difference on vacation, but it illustrated an important point: not knowing where stuff is wastes a lot of time!
My husband and I decided after a few days to always put our room keys on top of the television so we wouldn’t waste time looking for them. After all, looking for our keys one day made us late for a taco party!
Tools for the Monkish Small Business Owner
Misplacing a room key is a small matter, but throw a few of these “time wasters” into your business day and you’ll easily lose an hour or more hunting down stuff that should be at your fingertips. Luckily, there are a number of useful tools for the small business owner who wants to be more like Adrian Monk. Here are a few of my favorites.
Password Agent
This encrypted software safely stores your login and password information, as well as notes about anything important. If you are like the average small business owner, then your online accounts abound. With this software, when you need to login to a website, all you have to do is open it and access your login information. Because this software is encrypted and lives on your computer rather than in your browser, it gives you an added layer of protection. This software comes in a free “Lite” version, which allows you to store a limited number of records, or a full version which gives you unlimited records. Free downloads are available at Tucows and other software download sites.
Chaos Intellect
I recently purchased this software for contact management and email list management. The software is quite inexpensive and allows you to easily store contact information about customers, vendors, and business partners. Best of all, it allows you to easily group contacts and send emails to entire groups at a time. The email-sending function on this software throttles the sending speed, so you don’t overwhelm your email server. Finally, contact records are linked to documents, emails, and any other form of correspondence, so that each contact record automatically stores a full record of every email or piece of correspondence sent. Compared to better-known but costlier contact management software programs, this program is a good buy.
Memo to Me
I love this online software because through it I can program email reminders to myself, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or on a specific date. I don’t like to have “reminder software” running in the background because it often eats up RAM, but having reminders come through email is convenient, since I check email at least twice a day. The software is available for an inexpensive subscription fee or you can get the free lite version.
I adore all three of these software programs because they keep all my necessary information at my fingertips. If you’ve got some nifty tools that help you be a more Monkish small business owner, I’d love to hear about it. As always, the pursuit of a more productive business life that allows more time for fun is ongoing!
P.S. If you’d like to know why I’m down in Cancun, Mexico for five weeks (and how I afford it), drop me a line. I love to connect with people about this!
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kinghuang/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: Adrian Monk, small business, small business owners, software for small business owners
Posted by Stephanie Valentine on Nov 3, 2009 in
Small Business Management,
Small Business Marketing 
Here is something to think about:
One of the most successful businessmen I have ever had the pleasure to talk to, Bob Block, credits his success in great part to his practice of developing five ideas per day to improve his businesses.
This is a practice he developed when he was just starting out as a salesperson in a mid-western state. He would think of five ideas, every single day, for improving his business.
While he admits that most of the ideas were worthless (about 95% of them), the few that were valuable were fairly priceless.
With small business owners struggling to keep their heads above water, don’t you think this practice might help generate innovative new ways to do small business?
The Value of Five Small Business Ideas per Day
I’ve recently started this practice and I can already see the benefits to my small businesses, and to me as a small business owner. Here are the benefits I have discovered so far:
- I’m forced to think outside the box (all the “in the box” ideas were used up in the first few days)
- I practice making mistakes every day, since most of the ideas are useless and can be considered “mistakes” … thus mistakes become an accepted part of learning to improve my businesses
- I think of things only crazy people would think of, and historically crazy ideas are often the ones that result in quantum leaps in the business world
- Many good small ideas pop up, and these ideas are useful for helping me patch up the “leaks” in my businesses, whether they relate to excess spending or lack of linkage between my online media outposts
- This process prevents me from being lazy and conducting “business as usual,” which I tend to do when I think I’m too tapped-out to do more.
I really like this process and it has produced some excellent ideas for my small business. What about you? Care to give it a whirl?
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Photo credit: Free Digital Photos
Tags: five ideas for small business owners, small business ideas
