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Discover Your Brilliance: Are You Working on Your Weaknesses or Strengths?

The-Focus-Factor

In sports the big winners all have one thing in common.  They spend most of their time focusing on their strengths, the things they are naturally good at.  Very little time is wasted on unproductive activities and they practice several hours a day honing their skills.

In my high school years, my twin sister and I represented our school’s track team running the 220, 440,  one-mile and two-mile.  I’m sure you can just about guess the races I enjoyed most.  You guessed it, the 220 and 440.  Now I’ll be the first to admit, I was pretty good running the mid-distance races but, I was not the best.  In practice, our training became more focused on our strength; distance running and very little time on our weakness, mid-distance.

If you spend too much time working on your weaknesses, all you end up with is a lot of strong weaknesses!”
– Dan Sullivan, Business Coach

Coach Elkins, taught us that working on our weaknesses didn’t give us a competitive edge or position us to be the best in our race, doing that would mean we would be average runners, and he didn’t have an average team.  He didn’t believe in time-wasters, he focused solely on our God-given talents as distance runners which ultimately resulted in coming in 1st and 2nd place in the mile and two-mile at just about every track meet locally and regionally.

Fast forward to today.  I’m a wife, mother of 5 children, grandmother of 4 and a #womenpreneur for over 15 years.  Talk about a busy schedule. I had been running my business on a wing and a prayer, constantly asking God, when, God when?  When will the breakthrough come?

After reading tons of books, attending webinar after webinar, trying this trend and that trend, I made a conscious decision to find my brilliance.  Remembering what I had learned from my high school track coach, I decided the only way to do that was to FOCUS on my strength.  Coincidentally enough, I had been reading the book ~ The Power of FOCUS – How to hit your business, personal and financial targets with confidence and certainty by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Hewitt that confirmed my decision.  In the book, they shared “4” questions you should ask yourself to clearly define your area of brilliance and I thought I’d share them with you.

“4” Questions Every Womenpreneur Should Ask Herself to Discover Her Brilliance

  1. What do you do effortlessly–without a lot of study or preparation?
  2. What do you do that other people find difficult?
  3. What opportunities exist in today’s marketplace for your area of brilliance?
  4. What could you create using your unique talents?

 

Natural brilliance combined with the daily discipline to consistently hone your skills is what separates you from everyone else.
– Danette Moss

Are you aligning your strengths and passions with what you are working on daily?

 

A big part of your life is discovering what your God-given talents are, then implementing and applying them to the best of your ability.  You know I’m all about strategic systems, and I honestly think that creating systems in your business can free up time for you to build those relationships around you, but also that your business relationships can be a system, one of support and accountability when established correctly. It’s one of the reasons I’m so pleased to announce Get Your SASS On LIVE!

This 3-day event takes place in May of 2018, but for the next 15 days only there’s a special on the ticket price. Tickets to Get Your SASS On LIVE are $397 – but starting today until December 25th, Christmas day you can save 50% off with Early Bird pricing at $198.50.

Here’s my link to your ticket. [ bit.ly/GYSO2018]

As wifepreneurs, divorced mompreneurs and single mompreneurs, we will all face a defining moment that can transform our lives in positive or negative ways,  but our choices and responses toward every situation will ultimately determine whether you end up living with abundance or living in poverty.

 

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Money Matters: Systematize Your Cashflow

Money-Matters-Systematize-Your-Cashflow-The-SASS-Factor-Academy

Tell me if this sounds familiar: 

Everything seems to be going well in your business. You’re working some long hours, sure, but you’re also pulling in some clients. You’ve finally settled on an hourly rate that you’re comfortable with and people are paying it. But your cash flow is just horrible. You’re spending so much time promoting your business and fulfilling your client obligations and making sure dinner is prepared and the kids’ homework gets done that taking care of your money just falls by the wayside.  

And it’s frustrating because you’ve worked so hard to have clients and bring in that money and you know in the back of your mind that it’s a big deal: you have to grab hold of your money system and reel it in. But with everything else you’ve got going on, you simply can’t seem to find the time.  

So invoices don’t get sent out when they should be. Your taxes either don’t get done or you manage to get them done at the last minute. You’ve got past due balances that you either don’t see or ignore, and you’ve got recurring payments going out of your accounts every month for things you don’t even know if you’re still using or what they even are.  

Unfortunately, this is what a lot of successful online businesses look like, especially in the beginning when you’re just finding your legs. When you’re hustling to bring in clients and have a steady workflow, create and publish content so you stay top of mind, serve those clients and deliver what you promised you would, managing the money you make seems trivial compared to all the work it takes to bring it in. On top of your business work, you’ve get household chores to complete, meals to prepare, kids and family to tend to. Once the money is ‘there’, it simply isn’t as ‘important’ as everything else. It’s not a truth we want to admit to, but it’s true for most of us nevertheless. 

Happily, that also means that if you’re in that situation you’re not alone. Because we as womepreneurs are our own bosses and because most of us work primarily at home, most of the time we have to hold ourselves accountable. Because of that, it’s really easy to let things like managing money fall between the cracks in favor of other more ‘urgent’ tasks that crop up and distract us from being productive and organized.  

And it all has a horrible stagnating effect on our businesses. 

Fortunately, moving forward and setting up systems to handle your money is easy! Let’s split the wide issue of money management into two areas: Money Coming In and Money Going Out. 

Money Coming In 

Let’s start with your customers and those overdue bills. If you don’t already have an online automated billing app, look at something like Wave or Freshbooks or Harvest. You want to find a program that can handle timekeeping and invoicing in very simple steps as well as expense tracking and project management so you can stay on top of your tasks and stay on track with client work. To make sure you take care of billing, set aside a single day for sending out invoices, and keep it free of all other appointments and obligations. As time passes and you become more consistent, you can delegate a few hours on that day, as opposed to the entire day, as needed. 

Whatever app you choose, when you are ready to do your billing, log in and generate your invoices. You will need to enter in the hours you worked for each client job. Once done, sending those invoices will be quick work. 

Money Going Out 

When you’re ready to tackle your expenses, take some time to make a list of your outgoing payments. You want to be sure you know what you are spending money on and that you are not paying for something that you no longer need or use. 

You want to use a single system to limit confusion and oversight, especially if you have payments going out of more than one source or account. You want to make sure whatever you use has a reporting feature, and will allow you to export your statements at the end of the month. If you’re not able to do so yet, make a habit of bundling those exported monthly reports along with your sales reports and any receipts you have to send to your accountant. This will make it easier for you to prepare for tax season! 

Whether you do your own taxes or use a service like HR Block or your own accountant, you want to make sure that whatever tools or apps you choose to use will ‘converse’ or interface with each other easily and also make it easy for you to hand the information over to someone else.  

Honestly, putting these systems in place in your business can save you hours every month trying to make heads or tails of everything on top of everything else you have going on. Perhaps a bigger benefit or reason to implement this type of system is the fact that dealing with your money will finally become something to complete with ease, if not something to look forward to. When you know that your money is taken care of, that you have a system that can handle the volume and the frequency of the income you want to receive, you have more boldness and excitement to go forward and bring that income in, and that’s SASSy. 

Sign up for the FREE SASSy Sales Now: 6 Steps to Make Money on Autopilot with Easy, Streamlined Systems today!