Money Muscle: Multiple Income Streams
Did you know that the top new business and non-profit killers are poor financial management skills and lack of seed money?
Not having enough cash flow to invest in a baby business can kill your new baby. In the first month of Fempreneur Marketing School, I invested about $300 in swag and Instagram ads. Since then I’ve invested an average of $100 per month in giving away swag and my books and buying Instagram ads. (Instagram boosting info is coming in Part Two of the book.) These are the key ways I’ve spread the word about Fempreneur Marketing School and grown the community.
If you want to have $100 per month to invest in attracting new people to become your Instagram followers, email subscribers and event attendees, you must get a grip on your money. You must understand your numbers, the dollar amount you need to live each month, and where you are at income-wise each month. If you’re like me, this number can fluctuate, so it is important you have two cash reserves: one for your business needs and one for your personal needs.
***If personal financial management is a problem for you, or you’re not sure where to start with knowing your numbers, get your hands on my first book, Money & The 39 Forever Mom. That book will direct you to free resources and simple, effective steps to understanding what’s actually going on with your money and how to correct any bad habits.
I’ve shared with you that I believe in faking it til you make it, however, this mentality can get you into trouble financially. I’ve been there.
Back to early 2012 when I was a new Financial Advisor, I was getting the hang of offering good investment and insurance advice to my clients when a few asked for help with budgeting. My finances were a mess. I had never made a budget and had no idea where to start with building a budget. Although I was doing a decent job of looking the part on the outside, with my brand-new vehicle and professional clothing I’d purchased at thrift stores, teaching people how to build and follow a budget was NOT something I was going to try to fake. I called my favourite mentor at the time, a senior advisor at the investment firm. He recommended a book about money management which he said really helped him in his early years working with clients, The Wealthy Barber Returns by David Chilton. That book gave me a healthy dose of reality and improved my money mindset - the basic stuff I’m sure you, too, wish you’d learned in high school.
Not only was this book fundamental in helping me straighten out my personal finances and help clients do the same, I began gifting it to new clients. Technically I couldn’t afford to give my clients gifts, but by then I’d learned the importance of giving personal gifts that would remain in their home or office and remind them of me. This was a good reinvestment of my limited income which I probably paid for with a credit card at the time since my income was barely covering my expenses.
A few years later, I discovered another even better money management book, which I’ll share in a moment, but first let’s continue discussing ways to fuel your baby business.
Multiple Income Streams
One of my first income streams that I still have today is cutting and colouring hair. From when I became a hairdresser at age 18 until now, I have continued to cut and colour hair. Back when I was an employee of the investment firm, I technically wasn’t supposed to be doing hair on the side. I kept it quiet, but I earned a bit of grocery and beer money doing hair. It was tricky because I didn’t want to advertise publicly that I was looking for hair clients but I loved doing hair and needed more money than what I was making from my Financial Advisor job.
Luckily, through word of mouth, my hairdressing business grew as I built my career in finance. I remember the pain of those first few years so well. I was a commission salesperson who was taught to do what’s best for the client while knowing if I didn’t hit my commission target, I’d get fired. A true entrepreneur at my core, being told what to do drove me nuts. I could see that my method of growing a financial practice would be more effective, teaching women so they could make profitable financial decisions, but my way was a slower process and required a side hustle to fund it.
Have you recently started a new side hustle? Do you have income from a job or another business to fund your side hustle so it can eventually become your main income stream? If you answered yes to both questions, this is music to my ears. You need to have savings or income from elsewhere to fund a new business. Thinking you will start a business and right away be profitable is unrealistic. If you know people whose businesses have been profitable from day one, assume it won’t happen to you. It didn’t happen to me. Creating multiple income streams from your talents is always the best way to go.
Have you started a business recently but do not have a side hustle to support it? If not, I suggest you find one. You do not need to share publicly that you are making money doing something other than what others see as your mainstream career. For example, no one needs to know you are driving for Uber or Skip the Dishes a few nights a week so you can buy swag and Instagram Ads. I turned to credit cards for those investments for years and I do not recommend it. The stress of wondering how or when you will pay off debt incurred by fueling your business will come out in your marketing. People will see and feel your financial desperation on social media. You don’t want this. Start a dog walking or lawn care business for your friends. Do something that requires zero to very little upfront investment (say no to multi-level-marketing businesses which require you buy a bunch of product you have to sell) and use 100% of the income to fuel your business before it’s too late.
Build Money Muscle
If you’re going to read one book to improve your finances, specifically to help you take control of your spending, saving and debt, this book was more impactful than any other book for improving my financial picture: The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. I read this one after starting my own financial consulting business in 2014 and it got me on the right track. If you want a quick example of this book’s power, Google: debt snowball Dave Ramsey.
Dave Ramsey also has a podcast called the Total Money Makeover. I’ve listened to a few episodes and heard him tell people to sell vehicles, houses - all sorts of possessions to reduce their debt and monthly payments. If you want to make a difference in the world through building your community, you may need to take a serious look at ways you can reduce your expenses now. This could mean downsizing your home and mortgage, cutting your cable and other subscription services, telling all your family members and friends you are taking a year off buying birthday and Christmas gifts, limiting yourself to dining out only once per week and selling things in your closet and garage you don’t need.
Grow, Monetize, or Both?
Many Fempreneurs want to start charging for their expertise too soon. Although it is important to know your worth and charge accordingly, you also must have lots of your knowledge available for free, especially in the early stages of growing your community.
Again, if your business is brand new, this is not the time to put financial pressure on it. You need to nurture it. You need to give it fuel and direction. You shouldn’t be looking to your baby business to provide you with income. I’m not saying it is impossible to support your financial needs as a new business owner, but iI haven’t seen many businesses that have existed for less than a year that can support someone who needs a minimum of $3000 per month to survive.
As your baby business grows, you’ll be able to monetize it in new ways, but don’t be in a rush.
How you serve will constantly evolve, yet it will always involve creating something for your people. There are three categories of these “things” you will always be creating or improving and relaunching to your audience, most of which will be free in the beginning:
Group Experiences
An educational and interactive workshop or course
A fun event focused on connecting your community members
One-on-one Experiences
Live face-to-face (in person or virtual) coaching/training with you
Individual Experiences
Written material (person downloads ebook/PDF)
Podcasts
Video training
Products/shopping
***If you need help with packaging your knowledge, Fempreneur Marketing School is designed to help you identify and create the best experiences you can offer your niche audience! Learn more and register at yycfempreneurs.com/fms!
You always want to have a FREE taste of each type of experience on the homepage of your website, or a clear link to each experience you offer. Go to the YYC Fempreneurs homepage (yycfempreneurs.com) to see how I lay it out on my website.
If you currently offer, or are planning to offer, products only or a paid service only, such as house cleaning or bookkeeping, I recommend you offer all three categories as listed above. I’ll show you how to do this, so stick with me!
For example, if my business is cleaning houses, would I be better off marketing myself as strictly a house cleaner?
- OR -
Should I grow a community of women who want to learn cleaning hacks and/or ways to use natural/non-toxic products to clean and sanitize their homes, while sharing before and after photos of these hacks and products being used in my clients’ homes?
Which one will attract more women who want simpler ways to have cleaner homes with less toxic chemicals: Instagram posts focused on offering my paid services or Instagram posts focused on sharing my free knowledge?
Right! Sharing free knowledge attracts ten times more people because you are giving them something for free and wowing them in the process. You will include clear calls-to-action in your free knowledge posts/offers, but there is an art to sprinkling these in which we’ll talk about soon. For now, you must understand the importance of your new audience members getting to know you without you constantly reminding them you have a cleaning business and want to clean their homes. Why?
It’s because the “buy from me” content gets boring quickly. Your new followers might stick around for a month or two, but they’ll eventually get sick of seeing you share before and after photos/videos of the homes you clean. You need to offer your Instagram followers more than what you do if you want them to turn into true community members.
What can you offer your Instagram followers other than “buy from me” posts?
HINTS: What do you know how to do/create/improve that relates to your target audience? What is one common goal they all have that you can help them achieve by sharing your knowledge?
Before you put pen to paper writing your ideas, let’s get clear on why you want to push all the excuses aside and actually build a list of “how to” content ideas.
Build More Money Muscle
You are aware of the importance of having multiple income streams; however, the best kind of income streams to have are ones that all stem from your core talent. Back to our example of a house cleaner, she has many potential income stream options including creating a “how-to guide for cleaning bathrooms in fifteen minutes or less”, a downloadable ebook with links to demo videos on her YouTube channel. She could offer recipes for home cleaning solutions using essential oils in a downloadable ebook and potentially offer the oils and spray bottles in a store on her website. Eventually, once her Instagram and YouTube followers are in the thousands, she may want to patent a cleaning tool and offer it for sale on her website.
No matter what knowledge to decide to package and share, you must market it using video. You also want to share knowledge for FREE constantly because it’s the best way to grow your community. By sharing tons of knowledge for free on your social media channels, you will convert 2-3% of your viewers into paying clients (products or services) if you include a clear call to action in every video. Again, we’ll get to what a clear and effective call to action looks like soon.
How Experts Think
In order to build more money muscle, you need to really own your expertise, or as I like to say, OWN YOUR PURPOSE. I created a training series for my FEMTEAM all about this and it is coming in the second half of the book to help you package and offer your smart brain.
Now let’s build on the importance of Speaking and Writing with Conviction and Authority. We agree that everyone is looking for strong leaders. These “leaders” are also known as “experts”. Did you know you don’t have to be the expert to be an expert?
Never forget that on the highway of life, you have come further than many others, and the lessons you have learned are both helpful and valuable to others.
~Brendon Burchard, The Millionaire Messenger
You don’t have to be THE expert to be AN expert. It’s true. Here’s how I explain it: Imagine your Instagram followers are looking up at a twenty floor building. They all want to get to the top floor. You know how to get them to the 14th or 15th floor. Sure, there is someone who knows how to take them to the top, and it’s not you, but do they need that right now? No. They need you. They simply want someone they like and can relate to to help them get moving, to start taking the necessary steps to get closer to achieving their goal. That’s you. In their eyes, you are an expert, even if you don’t fully believe it yet. You know more than they do about a certain topic, and that makes you an expert.
In the second half of this book, you’re going to learn the steps to sharing your expertise with them by consistently (over and over) inviting them to participate in the experiences you have to offer. Here they are again:
Group Experiences
An educational and interactive workshop or course
A fun event focused on connecting your community members
One-on-one Experiences
Live face-to-face (in person or virtual) coaching/training with you
Individual Experiences
Written material (person downloads ebook/PDF)
Podcasts
Video training
Products/shopping
How will you best position yourself as an expert? No matter what your focus, whether it be product sales, seminars, writing books or offering one-on-one coaching, one thing is guaranteed: you must develop your video making skills.
Video is NOT Optional!
Here’s a story from The Millionaire Messenger book by Brendon Burchard. He’s talking about how entrepreneurs must gain the skills necessary to their long-term success. This story is from back in 2007 when he “realized that online video was going to be the dominant communication mode for experts in the future.”
“...a small cadre of online marketing experts, including Frank Kern, Andy Jenkins, and Mike Koenigs, started waving the flag and telling our community to pay attention to using video in our marketing. But as of this writing (2011), most experts are still not using video, even though it has proved to be more effective and lucrative for the industry. Why?It’s because few experts look at the horizon of our industry and ask, ‘What new skills will I need to develop to stay relevant, connected, and effective?’ People ask that all the time in the corporate space, but not often in the entrepreneurial space.
In the case of online video, many leading experts thought, ‘Yes, video will be important someday. I’ll just outsource it.’ It turns out that in the entrepreneurial world, ‘outsource’ often equates to ‘I’ll get around to it someday.’
But I approached video very differently. I thought, ‘Video is becoming very important in our industry; therefore, it will be important to my long-term success in the industry. I had better learn it and develop skills, right now.’ With this in mind, I went to some free classes on shooting video offered by a local art school. I researched shooting, editing and posting videos. I e-mailed people who were using video in their online marketing, and asked how they did it.
Most importantly, I took action and bought a cheap Flip video camera and started shooting video in my apartment. My first videos were just me looking at the camera and teaching some basic personal development concepts. They were horrible. Really horrible. But the first time I rode a bike, it wasn’t so pretty, either, and I approached video just like bike riding or any other skill - you get better with practice.”
~Brendon Burchard, The Millionaire Messenger
Like I said at the beginning of the book, our three greatest challenges will continually pop up on our entrepreneurial journey - they will never go away:
We don’t know exactly who we serve
We don’t know what our community needs from us right now
We don’t know how to communicate with them effectively on social media
If you can master the following five essential skills, you will drastically minimize the time you waste being held up by our three greatest challenges:
The 5 essential skills every Fempreneur must learn asap and not outsource/put off
Shoot you own videos and post/share them online
Create marketing images (I use Canva.com or in Instagram stories, I add text over images)
Write a two week launch plan
Update/make changes to your own website
Build landing pages/opt-in forms in your preferred CRM (client relationship manager - mine is Mailchimp.com)
In the second half of this book, you’re going to complete the steps necessary to gain these skills.
Thanks for reading this excerpt from my new book! Click here to order a copy on Amazon!
