A Business and Financial Whole
On your business, your money, and your emotions.
I am back in Vermont for the next few months, which means morning walks with Josie the dog in the mossy forest. I write in my head a lot while I walk, and wanted to share a quick snapshot of some ideas I've been working through the past few days about different aspects of a business and financial "whole", which are always in dialogue with each other:
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Three pieces:
How money moves through your business, or your business model: the internal system. This is about profitability, expense load and labor: all those internal levers that create a financial model.
Pricing & Market: the larger ecosystem. We can think of pricing as part of the business model, sure, but pricing is also about external perception, positioning, and the ecosystem that your business.
Your emotions & "mindset": this is where your social & cultural context, upbringing, and your stories about money come in. (I put mindset here in quotes because there's so much baggage around this word now; to be clear I'm not talking about manifesting yourself to abundance! That's a dirty word around here.)
What I've found is that we can address our emotions/mindset/whatever...but if we don't also actually understand how money is flowing through our business and how to engage the feedback loop, then we can sooth our feelings all we want and we still may have challenges.
Our stories about ourselves and money — informed by our family and ancestral context, our traumas, our experiences of oppression and/or privilege — absolutely inform how we experience and lead our businesses. And at the same time, there's a really rich fertile territory in the intersection between our own stories and the stories that our business tells through the financials.
A noticing about myself: Wanderwell's numbers have radically changed the past six months as we've intentionally created a smaller business overall. I have found myself frequently internally freaking out when I look at the numbers; like, oh god, there's no money, DOOM. My brain hasn't quite caught up and recalibrated to the new business model. So I've started pulling different reports for myself comparing margins, and Wanderwell's story is that not only are we totally fine, the business as a whole is healthier, more profitable, than the same period last year. If I didn't understand the business's story, I might let my fears drive decisions: maybe I take a client that isn't a great fit, or lower the price on a proposal because I'm worried a client won't say yes. The truth is, what I wanted to make happen is happening. The financials confirm this.
Another example: I met with one of our clients recently as we were working out some reporting nuances and we noticed that she wanted to introduce increasingly complexity into her reporting and systems, the kind that makes a bookkeeper say "hmmm...". As I asked her questions to better understand what she was trying to see/do/change, what because clear to both of us was that her own anxieties and feelings about the business and it's stage of growth were driving her requests: if she could just get the *right data*, then the business's story might change. Figuring this out together created space for her to care for parts of herself that are getting activated by a pre-break-even growing business.
We're in relationship: with our business, with our customers, with ourselves and our own stories. Each part informs the other.
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