Invest to save?

There’s a lot to shell out, or spend, or invest, however you’d like to label it, when we run a business isn’t there?

Whether we outsource or do all this straight away, it still costs money:

Training to set up

Professional memberships

Website help

Visual brand

Tone of voice / messaging

Marketing

Sales help

Copywriting

Room or equipment hire

Travel expenses

Admin Finance

Business coaching

Tech purchases and updates

That doesn’t even count our time here – with all the experience we bring into the thing we’re passionate about – we hope our salary comes in sooner or later, but it can take a while to get our heads around paying ourselves can’t it? 

What can feel tricky in the ‘spending money on our business’ space is knowing when to do something ourselves and knowing when to outsource and also knowing when to invest for our not yet seen growth – both of which require trust and ability to manage our sense of risk. 

Everyone says you’ll probably need to invest/spend money before you feel ready, but how do you feel ready without help to feel ready?

Plus, we know that to know WHEN these things are right, we might need help to know them so…dilemma!

I’ve seen that there tends to be a tipping point that we reach in making this decision and stopping the circle of indecision, and that point is related to the empowerment around the decision to invest or spend money:

We tend to feel more able to invest in the person or thing we can see will help us if we FEEL empowered by the decision, and the person or thing we’re investing in empowers us equally too.

The tipping point has been reached and starts to decrease when our empowerment about the decision starts to decrease – notably though we might still invest in it, it’s just we feel less empowered, and powerful, about it (perhaps even desperate) although hopefully still empowered BY the thing or person we’re investing in, it’s just our feelings about it that have changed.

We often also say, once we’ve made the leap to spend the money, we’d rather have found and invested in the help sooner than we felt we might have needed it, because it would have set us up just that little bit differently.

That’s if it’s a positive experience of course – and therein lies the risk we must be willing to face.

We need to understand what’s necessary to create the business we want. We need to understand what’s vital to it’s heartbeat and what that means we invest in – on a one off and ongoing basis.

Perhaps even some of the things – the resources or people – that we didn’t know we’d needed to invest in, are exactly where we end up spending our precious money because we realise they’re going to help get us to where we want to go. And they’ll help us get there faster than we would have on our own.

In my book, getting there faster means ‘at the pace that feels really positive’ ie not speedy so we’re burnt out, and not so slow that we’re bored of ourselves and lost motivation years down the line.

So what does this mean for you today?

Well lots of things no doubt.

But I’d love you to think about what happy empowered investments you can make in the coming months that might feel almost scary but also exciting. Sit with them for a bit, and they don’t have to be actions right now, just a nice happy list that makes you feel empowered and not fearful.

Then I’d love you to think about what needs to happen in your business for one or any of those investments to be a reality.

Maybe you realise your business is already in a place where investment is possible in a few of the things that are needed to move your business, and you, forwards.

Maybe you realise your business needs a slightly different way of working to invest in what you need.

Maybe you realise you need to invest before you feel ready at all – and how that feels in your gut too!

There will be so many different answers to this because we’re all unique beings and our businesses are all different.

But I will say this for all of us:

We started our businesses to create change in some way, and to continue to create change – for both ourselves and others – we know we want to sustain our business for longer, and investing in the right things and people will absolutely help us get there.