PopUP! Series 💰 Part 1/3: Money Habits - The Money Date

In this episode, Ilonka Ras discusses the importance of developing healthy money habits for entrepreneurs. She emphasises the common financial anxieties faced by business owners and introduces three simple money habits that will help you take control of your finances and your life.

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Transcript

Ilonka Ras (00:00.098)
This is the second series that we are dropping in the month of May, and it's all about money habits. This is one of the most requested, most coached topics in my private coaching practice. Also one that I really enjoy coaching on and for good reason, because no matter how good your business looks on the outside, if you don't feel calm and clear about the money side of it, it can feel like a lot of pressure. can cause a lot of stress.

anxiety. Now I work with a lot of smart driven business owners and many of them are still making financial decisions based on guesswork, emotion, or sometimes simply pure avoidance. So in this series, I want to share three very simple money habits that will help you to manage your money better so that you can feel in control over your finances, have more cash in the bank and stop the panic

That typically happens around month end. So let's dive into the first money habit that I teach my clients that will get you back in the driver's seat of your finances so that you can stop feeling like you aren't good with money. It's called the money date. Let's go. to the effortless CEO podcast. The only show that teaches South African business owners how to improve their operations and design a business that can run without them.

If you're interested in leading your team more effectively, creating more operational efficiency, delivering with excellence while getting some of your life back, then you're in the right place. Here's your host, strategic intervention coach and operations specialist, Ilonka Ras.

There is so much tension around money and I haven't made an entrepreneur that hasn't at least once experienced that 2 a.m. panic where they are worried that they are not going to have enough money at the end of the month to pay salaries and expenses. This is part of the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur. And so sometimes it's just easier to avoid the topic altogether. Like if we don't look at the big scary monster, then

Ilonka Ras (02:18.7)
Maybe it's not there, maybe it doesn't exist. I want to share some very simple habits with you because I believe that it doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to be afraid of the numbers. We don't have to have this weird relationship with money and experience the ups and downs of the feast and famine months. We can create more certainty and more solidness around money by implementing a few very simple habits.

many of the business owners that come to me for help often tell me that they don't look at the numbers because they're not sure what they're looking at. And they're not sure what to do with the information that they're seeing. They typically hand over the responsibility of their finances to their accountant. Even if you're not the one sending out the invoices to clients or following up with invoices or paying the bills, maybe you have someone that helps you with that inside of your business.

You still want to take responsibility and accountability for the finances. You still want to know what's going on with the money. And this is the opposite of what I see in my coaching practice is so many business owners don't know how much money came in over the last 12 months. They can't tell me what their expenses are or how much money is being owed to them. They don't know what their profit margin is. And these are important numbers to know.

I do also believe that the topic of money is very heavy. It can be very heavy. And there's a lot of information out there about what you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing. And so often we are confused and we have all of this information coming at us from different angles, but we're not actually sure what we should be doing. I have always taken the stance that simple is your friend, right? Keeping it simple is the best place to start. You can always

get fancy later, but until you actually are in the habit of looking at your money, being okay with the numbers that you're seeing, making decisions based off of the information that you have available to yourself, until you're in that phase, there is no point in getting fancy. If you get financial statements every year from your accountants and you don't understand what is in those statements and you can't look at the information and make decisions,

Ilonka Ras (04:43.618)
from that information, this is your cue. You need to understand the information that you're looking at and you need to be okay with asking the questions and being the person that doesn't have all the answers, right? You need to be willing to ask the quote unquote dumb questions. The purpose of this episode is to get you into the habit of looking at your numbers and being okay with looking at the numbers and having...

conversations around money, be that with yourself, if you're a solo entrepreneur or with your team or with the relevant people that are on the finance team in your business. You want to be able to look at the numbers, talk about the numbers and make decisions based off of the information that you have in front of you. When we empower ourselves to understand these parts of our business, we become better business owners. We become better leaders.

And we can make more confident decisions from that place. So the habit is setting a money date and it's really simple. And it's all about doing this consistently. You don't need to be fancy. You don't need to track a million numbers. You are actually just going to look at three things to start off with. Like I said, you want to start simple. You can always get fancy later.

depending on where your business is and what information you get on a monthly basis, you can adjust this so that it makes sense for your situation. How the money date works is you want to set a date, non-negotiable date at the same time, be that weekly or monthly, where you are going to look at your numbers. I do this once a month at the beginning of every month, every first Wednesday of the month.

I track my revenue. I look at the numbers inside of my business. Depending on what your business is, if you have many transactions happening throughout the week, maybe you want to do this weekly instead of monthly. But if you are a professional service provider and the money is coming in on a recurring basis, mostly at the end of the month, then you can do this monthly as well. But don't stretch it out further than once a month. What you're going to do is you're going to set a date.

Ilonka Ras (07:03.594)
Set a time on your calendar and really commit to doing this. And it doesn't have to be a long, drawn out meeting. It can be a 30 minute quick look at the money and having a discussion if you have a team around your money as well. Including them in these conversations is so helpful. As I said, you don't need to track everything. You can start with a few really simple questions. The first question is what came in? How much money did we make this month, this week?

What went out? What were our expenses? And what are our thoughts about this? In other words, how do I feel about what I see? This is all about building a habit of being in conversation with your money without panic or pressure. And if you notice during these sessions that there is something that you don't understand, that you feel confused about, that you need more information on,

This is your cue. This is your opportunity to enhance and expand your knowledge and learn more about the money inside of your business. So if you see something on your financials that you're not sure about, that you don't understand, talk to your accountant, have the conversation, talk to your team, the person that's responsible for that specific piece and get the answers. Take yourself out of the dark because I promise you, when you take charge of your money,

You will take charge of not only your business, but your entire life. So if this is an area that you have been avoiding or outsourcing completely, I want you to know that you're not alone. Inside of my coaching program, this is one of the first habits we build. If you want to build systems around how you manage money inside of your business, if you want to know that you're tracking the right things and feel in control financially,

I want to invite you to apply to work with me. You can head over to the link in the show notes or visit iloncaraz.com forward slash apply. And you and I can have a conversation about how we can work together and how I can help you to streamline the back end of your business and feel more in control with your money. In the next episode, we're going to talk about having difficult money conversations. I'll see you there.