Last updated on September 22nd, 2022

Meet Growth📈 & Finance🤓, your soft-spoken bespectacled duo, double-dog daring you to bravely pull out your calculator, nudging you to face the music and open the spreadsheet. Cheering you on into the black and running interference when you dip into the red.

But the truth is… 

This duo, unlike Batman+Robin or Woody+Buzz, doesn’t always get the spotlight. 

Quite honestly, for most businesses, Growth & Finance remain the perpetual underdog, always playing second fiddle to more exciting elements in your business development … like poor Neville Longbottom, forever stumbling in the shadows of Harry + Ron.

Which is why one of the key components of our “entrepreneurship growth” conversations in Intentionally Profitable, is focusing on growth and finance goals for 2021 using our 4P approach to create sustainable scale with intention.

So, on that note… here’s a question for you: Who’s on your growth + finance team?

See, most entrepreneurs have a biz support team, a cheerleading squad, maybe even a mastermind community but finance…

… finance finds few takers.

Now the thing is…

…having a finance team is what actually gets the numbers to add up. Pun intended.

Because finance is what fuels growth, and together, they’re a duo to reckon with. Like Batman and Robin or Buzz and Woody!

However, I get that not everyone has a numbers nerd in their friend circle. Perhaps not even someone who understands how to crunch business numbers to lead to sustainable scale and growth.

Which is why I wanted to share how I run growth and finance for Content Bistro while ensuring we don’t do debt and continue to grow.

In an upcoming post, I’ll also share how we create a “revenue roadmap” for our financial goals and integrate it with how we want the year to look like for our business and life. 

Start sowing the seeds of your growth strategies with 3 “buckets”

(Because intentional growth doesn’t happen without intentional strategy)

So, the THREE ‘buckets’ that I look at when considering growth strategies for us are:

1. Skills,
2. Support, and
3. Visibility

Our entrepreneurship growth plan (in a nutshell) 

(And, surprise, we have a framework for that too)

Even before the start of the year, we review and outline what goals we have for each bucket and how do we see this dovetailing neatly with our overarching goal for the year.

When you know what your Skills, Support, and Visibility goals are for the year, it becomes easy to say “no” to shiny objects sliding across your screen and also make strategic decisions with confidence.

This is what our “growth” plan looks like in a very tiny nutshell. There’s more to it, though, but this should give you a good idea of what to think about when considering your Growth plan.

THIS is also how we help our Intentionally Profitable clients make investing decisions that guide their growth instead of adding to digital clutter.

Now, how do you find the finances to fund this growth?

Good question.

Answer: Our C.A.S.H Framework.

Now I’ve shared this before but it bears repeating.

Because we’ve used this framework both for business and our home for the last 7-odd years.

So, for the sake of this post, let’s look at just your business.

Here’s how this plays out:

C – Clear All Expenses: Expenses include your team, tools, and processes for your business.

A – Allocate Taxes: This is pretty self-explanatory.​

S – Strategic Development: These are all the courses you want to take, events you may want to attend, website redesign, photoshoot…

H – Healthy Profits: This is what you have once you’ve taken care of all the above.

 

Avoid the entrepreneurial feast-or-famine cycle and nurture a plan for predictable profits

How we use this framework to have a 60% profit margin while investing in our business, hiring a team, and planning for taxes is…

Allocate the first 6 months of the year to put money aside from the revenue that comes in: for your expenses FOR the year, your taxes for the year, and whatever strategic development you want to invest in for your business. This could be – taking a course, joining a mastermind, or rebranding your business, etc.

Month 7 onwards whatever you make goes into the Profit pool. Ka-ching!

The logic behind this is that when you focus on investing in yourself, working with a team for business and marketing development, AND don’t have to stress about taxes, your revenue DOES increase.

This, again, has a twofold advantage:

1. You have a full 6 months of revenue that goes straight to the profit pool
2. You don’t endure the notorious “feast-or-famine” cycle because you’ve got everything covered including your marketing and strategic development which means you’ll never be short of clients.

The reason you have MORE profitability with this framework is that you’ve used the first half of the year to fuel your business’s growth fueling the growth of your business without getting caught off guard when tax season rolls around.

When you factor in and prepare for expenses like these, you don’t have to dip into your savings or scramble around at the last minute.

Now, I know… the next question you probably have is…

How much should you allocate for your expenses?

Well, how long is a piece of string? 😂

Honestly, though, in the early years of our business, we allocated 6-8% of our gross revenue for expenses.

We could manage only that much because we’d quite literally eaten up our savings and we needed to replenish that. #lifewithchronicillness

Today we allocate 15% on expenses because we have a team, bigger goals, and have a significant amount of savings.

Our goals may have taken years of careful planning, but it does pay off

We’re 100% debt-free.

We’ve realized key life goals such as – buying two houses, traveling, and covering Manini’s education, so she doesn’t take on student debt.

We have a robust corpus for retirement and much more.

We also set aside another 15% for our strategic development which includes investing in programs, coaching, and masterminds.

And then 10% goes towards taxes.

Disclaimer: The reason we’ve been able to keep this at a low 10% is because right when we started, our first full-time hire was a Chartered Accountant. By working with him, we realized that if we set up a private limited company in India, we’d end up paying at least 30% as taxes.

Since Content Bistro has two founders, we’ve operated as individual consultants and that helps us save on taxes.

Tax structures differ from country to country.

However, it would be exceedingly helpful if you hire an accountant to help guide the financial structuring of your business entity.

PHEW!

It’s a lot of info and I’m not done yet. 😂

But we’ll save more for another post.

All of this to say, please remember…

Your growth + your finances go hand in hand. When you build your business, finances build up too. It’s somewhat of a symbiotic relationship. This is why when you’re creating sustainable scale for your business, you want to have this dynamic duo on your side.

Entrepreneurship Growth: Do this next to create more profitability for your business

You can self-appoint yourself and use our framework.

OR

You can choose to hire someone to help you unravel all of this and create finance-friendly systems to support your growth.

At the end of the day, as an entrepreneur, you need to remember… 

Growth + Finance are your unsung heroes for realizing your growth goals as an entrepreneur. 

Yes, it takes a little direction, because, unfortunately, your goals aren’t going to materialize out of thin air. 

Enjoying the fruits of your labor takes a dedicated strategy that’s specific to you, so you can have the peace of mind that you’re in the driver’s seat of your business – not at the mercy of random happenstance.

In Intentionally Profitable we work 2:1 with business owners – devoted to helping seasoned entrepreneurs with their personalized growth plan while building intentional and sustainable businesses that work so they can build the life they want to create.
Tap here to find out more.