The Real Way To Have Financial Security In Your Branding Agency
Do you see all those ads online for growing a million dollar business or building passive income products and all sorts of investment opportunities that will make you rich? Yeah, me too!
And yet, when I talk to most of my people, small branding agency owners, what most of them say is that they want financial security.
Sure, they would love to make $30k, $40k, or $50k a month or more.
But most of them count that as icing on the cake. What they say they really want is to just make enough money to live their lives comfortably, take care of their families, and just not have to worry about money.
If that’s you - guess what? You can get there a hell of a lot sooner than you think.
Getting out of debt, but still having the fear
When we first started our business in 2011, all I wanted to do was be able to make enough money to live, take care of ourselves and be our own bosses. That was it.
For years, my only goal was just that - make enough money to enjoy my life without having to work all the time.
I really didn't have visions of grandeur. I didn't have visions of multimillion dollar years, owning three houses or whatever you would do with way too much money.
I don't think I even let myself imagine that because, frankly, I don't think that I believed that I could ever get there.
But I did think that it was reasonable and possible to get to a place where I felt financially secure.
And probably on some level, I felt like that was an okay goal to strive for, and that going for anything above and beyond that would be greedy, would be asking too much.
Thinking that wanting more than you need is greedy, is actually a theme that I see from a lot of people that I work with. And I'm sure that I felt that same way too.
So you can imagine the fear and devastation that I felt in 2014, when we found ourselves in $40,000 of debt. That was the complete opposite of the financial security that I was looking for.
Plus I was working all the time.
I didn't have freedom. I didn't have money. I felt like I was failing in my business and had nothing to show for it.
Fast forward to just eight or nine months later and we were booked solid with BrandUps (our Intensive high-ticket branding service).
I was raising the price, we were doing them almost every day and we were just raking in the cash.
We got out of debt within a couple of months. And we were in the green by a lot.
We had a ton of cash in the bank, because we had let our employees go.
So all of a sudden we went from being in debt and feeling completely financially insecure, to having a surplus of cash.
And that was the moment that I thought that I would feel free, I would feel financially secure.
But guess what? I remember sitting on a beach in Hawaii that following December, on our first real vacation we had taken in years, and we had all this money in the bank, and yet I still was nervous and worried that the BrandUps were going to dry up, and that I wasn't going to be able to find enough clients, and that maybe this was a fluke.
I was so scared of going back to the place where I had been just a few months earlier, terrified because I didn't know which way to turn and I didn't know what to do next. And you would think that having a lot of cash in the bank would have made me feel better. But that cash could go away if the clients dried up.
And we had to use that money to live on for a little while, otherwise, all of a sudden we'd be back in the position we were in before.
And that was my biggest fear.
It was at that moment I realised that I felt just as much fear and anxiety with cash in the bank sitting on the beach as I did nine months earlier in debt.
I didn't feel any more financially secure, even though my financial situation was so different.
It took me a few more years to figure out what would make me financially secure. And I can tell you that where I'm sitting right now, I finally feel that financial security and safety that I didn't feel back in 2015.
So what's the difference?
The difference is today, I have complete confidence in my ability to make money. And I didn't have that back in 2015 - I was starting to build it.
But I didn't know for sure that I would be able to continuously attract clients.
Fast forward to today, or even years ago, like 2016 or 2017, you could have taken everything away from me, dropped me in the middle of New York City, and I would feel confident that I would be able to find new clients, support myself, get myself an apartment and do all the things that you need to do to feel safe in the world.
The difference wasn't having money in the bank. The difference was having the skill set and the confidence in my skill set to be able to support myself. And it made all the difference.
Building the confidence that gives you financial security
Let's talk about how to get that kind of confidence and that skill set.
It really is a skill that anybody can learn.
For me, it started with reliably building a process that I could use to close clients and then fulfil on the projects.
Changing my process from writing proposals to selling this BrandShrink was a game changer.
Going from having lots of conversations and trying to pitch work to just having this product that I had to sell was an instant moneymaker.
I started selling my Lead Product, which was the BrandShrink, which is also what I teach my students. I was selling that for $650, as opposed to writing a free proposal and hoping and waiting to close the client.
This was a huge gamechanger, because it meant that I could make money on the spot, it was relatively easy to sell.
Once I learned the skill, understood what it was, how to position it and how to talk to somebody so that they wanted to buy it, all of a sudden, I could generate $650 in a conversation.
That's power, right?
Then I learned how to use this process, and built this BrandShrink process up so that I knew with pretty high certainty that I could close that client into a 4-figure or 5-figure project at the end.
Because of the way I run the interview, and the way that I write the brief, I knew that clients would come on the journey with me and want to hire me after.
It wouldn’t be 100% of them, but pretty close to it. So I knew that from one conversation, I could generate a few $100. And then using that experience, I could turn that into a few $1,000. That's powerful.
Drop me in the middle of New York City with no cash, and I bet you I could sell one of these to somebody, because everybody needs help with this.
In 2015, I had this process. Granted, it wasn't nearly as fully formed as it is now, but it was there.
That’s why I was able to sell so many of them.
Your Authority Machine will make you money
That was all good, but it wasn't until 2016-17, when I also had the Authority Machine, that I could have that peace of mind around my finances.
Having this in place meant that I knew I would always attract new clients. And that's where that financial security really kicked in.
Building an Authority Machine is like building the foundation of a house. You can't just build a house on a patch of grass, you have to put down some concrete or some foundation so that the house will be level and steady and it will have something solid to stand on.
Most people do their marketing without having a foundation - they build a house on grass, so it just sinks into the ground.
Building an Authority Machine consists of core, foundational content and core, foundational ideas that your whole brand is all about.
Then, you set up a way to take people that come into your world and nurture them for the long term.
Having those different components means that anything you do in marketing is going to translate to some clients coming out of it.
When a lot of people start marketing, they think, ‘I should go be on a podcast,’ or ‘I should post on social media.’
And then maybe someone sees what you said or listens to your interview, which is great, and then they think, ‘I like that person’ and that's it, right?
We're all busy, we're all distracted and so they don't think about you again.
When you have an Authority Machine, that person then goes into your world and is basically indoctrinated into your way of thinking.
If they like you, they'll continue to follow you and there'll be a whole other host of content and a whole world of content for them to engage with.
Once you have the Authority Machine, you will be generating prospects all the time, without you having to do much work at all.
The combination of having a really clear and reliable process, a way to turn a conversation into cash on the spot, then turn that cash into more cash, and a machine that is bringing people to you - that is the ability to make money.
That is a level of trust in your ability to make money that dwarfs any cash you have in the bank. It's like owning a golden goose.
If you don’t know that story, I’ll give you a quick summary.
A poor miller has a goose that starts laying golden eggs every day. He’s so excited and becomes very rich, but he also gets really impatient. He can't wait for these golden eggs anymore, so he thinks there must be more gold inside the goose. He cuts the goose open and sees, to his disappointment, that it’s just like a regular goose with no gold inside, so the goose dies, and he is out of his golden eggs, and is back to where he was before.
Building the ability to make money, and building your trust in that ability, is like creating a golden goose for yourself, and you’ll never ‘kill’ that goose, as long as you’re always building that Authority Machine. There's always more golden eggs coming out.
I finally felt financially secure. And a couple of things happened when I felt that difference.
First, it gave me complete relief, because I no longer had that fear and anxiety that I would be stuck in debt sometime with no way out.
Irrespective of how much cash was in the bank, the money in the bank didn't dictate how I felt, because I knew I could always make more.
And what that allowed me to do was invest in myself at a much higher clip.
I started investing at higher and higher rates, because I didn't need to hold on to the money. The money wasn't where the security was coming from.
The security was coming from my ability and my skill set.
Every time I saw an opportunity to build my skills, learn something new about marketing, get better at writing or branding - whatever it was - I always said yes.
I knew that that would pay me dividends on the back end way more than whatever cash I was trying to hold on to.
In the past, I would hold on to that cash because it felt like that's where the safety was coming from.
But once I started to realise and experience that financial security and safety actually comes from my ability to make money and not cash in the bank, all of a sudden the cash was freed up.
It was such a huge revelation and mindset shift for me.
What this kind of financial security can really do
If you think about financial security, you probably think about having money in the bank or owning property or owning something that's going to make you feel like you are safe.
But do you know what’s better than having $100,000 in the bank?
Having an email list of people that love to hear from you so much that you can sell them something and make $100,000 whenever you want.
That's security. That's financial safety.
It's a lot more fun and you can make a lot more money in the process!
And you can still go for however much you need.
I used to joke with Steve that I would keep increasing our lifestyle, because I needed to increase the amount of money that we needed, so I had something to go for.
Because I would never go for more than we needed.
So every year I would set up how much money we wanted to make based on what kind of life we wanted to lead.
What kinds of things do I want to invest in for my business, and how much does that cost?
What kinds of things do we want to do in our life, how much does that cost?
And then add it all up, and make a plan.
By the way, this is what I do in my No BS Agency Mastery Program.
I have my students create the life that they want and then figure out how much it costs, rather than just say ‘I want to make $100,000’.
What does the life you want cost? And then let's make that amount of money.
Tally the whole thing up and then I'd say, ‘OK, this is how much we need to make.’ And then we would always make it.
We would rarely make more, because once we made that amount, I had no push to make more than what we said we wanted. Basically, I would just stop working. Or I would reinvest the time that I would spend in a different place doing things that I wanted to do.
So if we weren't getting towards our goal yet, then we would probably put more energy into sales.
And if we were hitting our goal, (and there have been many times where we've hit our goal months before the year is done), then we just spent the rest of the year doing other things.
Steve is painting, I'm writing content, I'm writing my book, I'm working on my speaking, I did my TED Talk etc. There's so many things that I want to invest in that don't create sales immediately.
So I would increase our lifestyle and just add things to the list so that I had a higher goal, because I knew that I would never go beyond that.
And that was a mindset shift that I had to work through, which I’ll share in another blog post. It’s probably connected to that idea of ‘You'll make as much as you need, and nothing more, because wanting more or going after more is greedy.’
I'm not sure exactly what it was, but I definitely had that. I had to unhook that, and get to a place where there was a greater ‘why’ to make even more.
It’s not because I want to hoard cash.
It’s because the more money I make, the more things I can do. I have big visions for the kinds of change and impact that I want to have. And the more cash I have available, the faster and more easily I can do those things, and the more people I can affect.
I used to be in the nonprofit world, and I just hated how it felt asking people for money and trying to get them to donate to our causes.
I'm so over that - I want to make the money and just donate it myself. I want to see causes that I love and be like ‘Great, here it is.’
And that's what I've been able to do in the last couple of years. I've been able to see people that I want to help and just give it to them, see organisations that I want to support and just give them money.
It feels so good.
So there are so many reasons to get good at this skill of making money.
You can stay where you might be right now, which is where I was feeling like I just need enough to live, I just want to feel financially secure.
But I'm telling you - financial security comes from your ability and confidence in your ability to make money, not from cash in the bank.
So keep investing in that skill. As you build it, your imagination will continue to grow and you’ll think of ways that growing your business will be able to affect things on a much greater level. You'll be able to see way beyond yourself, way beyond what felt like all that you needed.
Because you'll want more and you'll want to do more, once you see that you have the capacity to do it.
Invest in your ability to make money - it's a skill anybody can learn.
I know you can do it. It’s going to help you, your family, your community and it's going to make you feel that safety and security that I know you’re chasing.
Here’s what you need to get…
It’s easy to think that financial security happens when you have a certain dollar amount in the bank, or buy a house, or something else that is ‘safe’.
Real financial security comes from mastering the ability to make money any time, and it’s a skill anyone can do.
As a branding agency owner, who’s in it for the long haul, it’s critical you build this skill. It will last you a lifetime, and let you make the biggest impact you want to make with your business.
P.S. You can always jump on a call with my team if you want to fast-track your financial security, and learn all my other tools and strategies to scale up your agency - just go here to get started!