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Running a business is one thing. Building a business that pays you, funds your lifestyle, and creates real wealth? That’s different.
On ZFO Insider, we take you behind the scenes of how high-performing entrepreneurs turn their everyday operations into generational wealth machines; businesses that create real income, lasting freedom, and a legacy that actually matters.
This is your Masterclass in financial vision and business scaling.
Real Numbers. Real Stories. Real Strategies, that turn your cash flow into power.
See you on the inside.
Most business owners are out here working nonstop, landing projects, selling services, but
somehow still wondering where's the money?
Not because they're doing it wrong, but because no one has ever taught us how to actually
run a business that builds freedom.
In this video, I'm breaking down five pillars to financial freedom in your business.
These are the moves that separate the ones who stay stuck from the ones who build
something real, something that actually funds their life instead of draining it.
I'm Zo, a CFO, advisor and CPA.
My team manages millions in annual revenue for our clients and I help founders master
their cashflow and expense management without losing their minds or their margins.
If you're ready to run your business like an owner and not just like a hustler, this one's
for you.
So let's get into it.
All right, today we're talking about the five pillars, the five pillars of financial
freedom.
And it's really from the perspective of your business.
I can almost guarantee that if you build your business on these five pillars, you will be
well on your way to financial freedom.
All right.
So what's pillar number one?
Pillar number one is what we call money flows.
This is, this is basically saying that your job is to direct the money flow.
Did you know that it's all about the money flow, not just what is stagnant in your bank
account, right?
The money flow.
is all about the cash that comes in your business and the money that goes out of your
business.
The more you control, the more that you direct, the more financial, the more likely you
are to hit that financial freedom number.
All right, so there's two elements, two ways that I believe that you can control the money
flow.
And it's by these two ways.
It's one by control and one by growth.
Understanding those two elements.
Now, what do I mean by that control?
know I said it, it was redundant.
But what I mean by control is really understanding your capacity, understanding your
capacity as it stands today and understanding your capacity as it will be tomorrow.
When you have a right perspective on those two things, then you have a right perception of
where you are and how to actually get to where you're going and what you actually can do
or the speed at which you can get to where you're going.
Because if you start doing the things that you think you will be able to do tomorrow,
today, you're going to be misaligned out of season and perhaps running on E or running too
quickly and you'll just be, you won't get the result that you're looking for.
So understanding your capacity is where am I at today?
How much can I do?
What is available to me now?
Though I know in the future, that's where I want to be.
That's what's going to be available.
How do I, so, so
So based off of where I am today, what was the next step that I can take?
And then that brings us actually to the second component of mastering the money flow.
And this is about investing intentionally is called growth.
But the idea is investing intentionally.
Now that you understand your capacity, now your focus, your priority is now investing
intentionally with the intention of growing up.
How many of you know that it's possible to not only grow up, but also to grow down.
There are people who invest into their businesses or invest into themselves and their
growth is going in the wrong direction.
So it's very important that you get this part right.
It's not about just doing everything.
It's about doing the right things.
It's not about investing in things that would just keep you busy.
It's about investing in things that will make progress.
Right?
A lot of folks,
try to grow way too fast and they actually don't have the control.
They don't understand their capacity and others try to control everything without really
understanding what is the right thing that's going to actually trigger the growth.
And so there's your financial freedom in this pillar is going to come from balancing both
of these elements so that you can actually master the money flow.
Pillar number two is mastering the way that you think.
The way that you think about money
is how your relationship will be about money.
You know, it's funny because we actually don't realize how much of our financial freedom
is going to be dictated based off of the things that we think.
How much our business success will be based off of the things that we think.
Right?
Did you know that if you, the way that you buy affects the way that you sell and affects
the way that you manage your business?
What do I mean by that?
So this is a concept or an idea that I was thinking about
pretty recently and it's like if you buy with the first priority of your purchase being
the cost or being what you are losing it very well may be the you very well may it very
well may bleed into how you actually sell or position yourself in the marketplace and what
you consider and how valuable you consider what you're actually doing.
All right, it's if you're cheap if you're a cheap buyer
You likely are going to be very quick to discount what you offer.
Very quick to to um customize and capitulate.
Well, the wrong words capitulate.
But let's say you subvert to whatever the people are requesting.
And that's not always a bad thing.
But when you come into a room, you already are negotiating against yourself simply because
you already are.
You have that mindset of cost cost.
You probably are thinking about
You probably think that the thing that you are offering in service is more taking away
from the client, taking away from your people rather than adding to your people.
And that's a direct result of a cost uh first mentality.
Right.
And it's not saying don't think about the cost.
It's about the order of the priority when you buy.
Buying affects how you sell, how you even position your business.
But what if you flip it on his head and now your mentality is like, all right, I'm going
to, I'm going to buy with value first value first.
The first thing I'm thinking about is does this thing that I'm buying, does it actually
solve the problem that I'm, that I'm facing?
Does it, does it create transformation for me?
Is it, does it make my life easier?
Does it actually get me to where I'm trying to go?
What I'm trying to do?
So taking that value first mindset and now
pivoting over to how you sell and how you position yourself in the marketplace.
Now, when you think about your offer to your people, you understand is actually adding to
them.
It's not subtracting.
In fact, it's going to solve their problems, take them to where they're going, take them
further than they've ever been.
You have the results to back it up and you know you can transform their situation.
So the second priority is the cost.
The first is actually the value given.
The way you talk, the way you present, the way you even give your offer completely changes
simply because your mindset around money has shifted.
You're no longer first cost, cost first, cost conscious first, your value conscious first.
All right, cool, cool.
Let's go to that sec, to that third pillar.
And this pillar I really love because I'm a CFO um and this part is super powerful.
And it's the idea of this pillar is all about
Pillar three is all about budgeting and forecasting.
Now, budgeting, when we first hear that, that's a not a buzzword is actually a curse word
in many of our circles because we see budget so much as guardrails as like, no, not even
just guardrails, we see budgets as restrictive.
We see budgets, when we hear budget, we hear, man, we can't do anything.
man, the...
uh
a department is going to get cut.
man, it's just a restrictive budget is a restrictive word.
But I want to change your mind about what budget actually is because if you understand
what the, what the, the goal of the budget, you wouldn't, you'll be quick to embrace it.
A budget actually is a guard rail, but it's not like you see, it's not just restricting
you.
It's a guard rail that actually protects you.
It protects your profit that you so
desperately actually want.
That's why you're actually working.
You're working in your business to generate a profit.
Well, at least I hope you are.
know, some of us aren't, but maybe some of us, most of us are, but your budget protects
your profit.
It's literally like the lanes on a track.
Have you ever ran track?
I ran track actually when I ran D1 track and field in college.
I ran a high school too, but that's beside the point.
What I'm saying is that in my experience, there are lanes on the track.
for a purpose, not to say is, is literally not to say that you it's to restrict you is to
direct you is to say, Hey, if you keep on this path, you will make it one, whatever
distance 400 meters.
I'm thinking of 400 in my head, 400 meters from start to finish directionally.
Like you will go in the right direction.
And if, it's basically, it's actually guarantees your profits because
If you were to step outside of those lanes and those guardrails, you know what happens
when you do that?
There's risk.
You actually get disqualified from the whole race because you're not even going in the
right direction.
So budgets help your business run in this lane and get to the finish line.
Have a pathway to the finish line.
That's what a budget is.
is helping you.
It's guardrails.
Now, thinking about budgeting, budgeting is only the guardrails, only the pathway to the
finish line.
You know, it's cool when you add budgets and forecasting.
Forecasting is literally it's the vision for the plan.
It's not just the vision.
It's the.
It's your race plan.
So we're back to this to this um this track analogy.
So forecasting is actually like your race plan.
So it tells you it tells you, are you speeding?
Should you speed up?
When what you're going to do on the first half of the race, what are you going to do on
the second half of the race?
It actually allows you.
It's for it for imagery sake.
It's as if you're lifting your head and looking forward.
That's what forecasting is.
You look up, you lift your head and you look forward.
And now you can actually see where you're going.
You can actually avoid the the rocks in the road, the dips, the turns in the track so that
you can curve around those turns very expertly.
You actually allows you to not step over the budget.
sees where the other runners are running.
sees how much race you have left, you know, how close you are to the end of the year.
It's literally you looking up and being able to show to, to see ahead and develop your
racing plan.
But it's for your business.
Imagine if you can look up in your business and see six months ahead, not just six months,
but
six month of a clear path that you're if you follow your budget and you're looking
straight ahead, you actually get to the finish line, which is securing your profit.
That's so powerful.
So this pillar thing on pillar three is budgeting plus forecasting.
Man, if you get this part right, if you get this part right, uh there's nothing that
really can stop you.
You are going to be the type of person, the type of business owner.
that can set a plan and actually follow through with it and be the type of person actually
reaps the rewards, gets the results.
Once you, if you lock in on these two elements, you're going to be not guessing about
where you're going, but you're to be leading and actually accomplishing, actually driving
where the business is going.
All right, let's go to the fourth pillar.
So this fourth pillar, I love it.
And it's actually the thing that soup, it builds on top of the budget and forecast.
What is this?
This is called
your cash flow.
Cash flow is the fourth pillar and what you want to and what it does it really and we're
still sticking on this racing on this racing analogy.
Cash flow allows you to set the pace of your business.
It paces your business helps you know the speed that you can take action that the speed at
which you can execute a strategy the speed in which it tells you when you should slow down
and when you should speed up.
In business, it really helps you to stay the course because you have you ever seen in a
track race where where someone is starting the race, right?
It's eight people.
The gun goes off.
They're running.
Everyone gets out hard.
Right.
But then there's lane four breaks away from the from the crowd.
This is a 400 meter race.
Lane four breaks away.
And they're like so far ahead.
It's like they they've left 60, 70 meters on everyone else.
The crowd is watching in anticipation and they're like, Whoa, is that the second coming of
Usain Bolt or Magic Johnson or Michael Johnson?
Sorry.
And then lo and behold, by the third, by the second half of that race, what happens that
person so far out ahead, but for some reason they start coming right back.
They are slowing down dramatically, not even a gradual slowdown, but the slowing down.
is so dramatic that it's as if they're running backwards and the rest of the, the rest of
the pack or the runners that they left, they just overtake them so quickly and it's like,
they overtake them by the time the race is actually over and everyone has crossed the
finish line.
That person lane number four, who was so out ahead with is actually 50 meters in the back
in last place.
I've seen it so many times.
That's the same way in your business cashflow because that guy
That person, that girl laying for didn't pace themselves.
In fact, they sprinted out, use up all of their capacity in the first half of the year and
they didn't have enough strength to actually hold it, hold their pace.
And they ended up being dead last crossing the finish line.
It's the same way in our businesses, right?
It's the same way in our businesses, but we're talking about cashflow.
Cashflow is how you actually pace yourself.
You get, you know, for all of our seasonal businesses, you might have all of the cash come
up front in one quarter and Q4 might be your amazing year because that's the holiday
season, right?
For many of us.
And then by the time Q1 is over, you've spent all of your all of your dollars in Q1 that
you got from Q4 with nothing really to sustain your business in Q2, Q3, Q1, Q2 and three.
And so now your business is even more seasonal than it actually has to be simply because
you didn't pace your activity.
Cashflow allows you to see when you get what you can do and when you should do it.
If you forecast it.
When you forecast your cashflow, what you want to pay attention to is what I call the
peaks and the valleys.
This is really going to tell you when you can actually take action.
The peaks say that's the that's.
Influx of cash that's saying all right.
We got a lot of cash peaks is actually the height of our cash balance The valleys are the
direct opposite.
That means when your business is running on e you have low cash and so What you want to do
when you plot that out and forecast you can directly see all right Maybe in month number
three in quarter number four.
That's when we should hire that next person that next team member All right, what about in
in month number six?
Maybe it's four months later or whatever it is
Right.
And you see a peak.
man, that's when we should be quite conservative in our spending.
Maybe we can cut back on some of that.
uh Some of those extra spending uh areas that are more, you know, wants the needs.
Right.
Maybe is that maybe you see a long term cash crunch that's happening valley and you're
like, OK, we're going to start having to downsize in this time.
And maybe we shouldn't downsize.
Maybe we should actually go out and get additional funding ahead of time.
before we actually need it.
Have you ever heard when someone says, get funding when you actually need it, when you
don't get funding when you need it, get it when you don't need it?
The reason that you can actually do, the way you actually can do that is by being able to
predict when you actually will need it and responding today.
So it's not necessarily like, arbitrarily, let me just go make it a practice to always get
funding, get funding, which is great.
But it can be strategic, like, all right, next year we have a project coming up.
We've already plotted what the cost is going to take to get it off the ground, what the
deposits we're going to collect, and how we're going to start it.
And you've plotted that a year in advance.
You might say, all right, our normal operations are not going to give us enough cash to be
able to start that project.
So we need to go out a year in advance talking to our bankers, building those
relationships, and securing funding.
before the project actually even starts.
That's the power of cashflow.
All right, let's go to our last, our final pillar.
This pillar, honestly, it's the game changer.
It's the hack.
It's the thing that if you get right, you will always put yourself in position to be able
to take the next step, to be able to run faster, run further with less energy.
And that fifth pillar is
Don't run alone.
It's all about your community and your support.
Who is around you?
Do you have you have like minded, like minded business owners?
Are you do you have do you consult with consultants?
Do you have advisors in your firm?
Do you talk with the CFO to help you along with these things?
Right.
Do you have a coach?
Who are you talking to?
Who is your community?
Who is helping you?
This one is so important to me and
We're going to stick on this runner analogy because it is so.
accurate.
So when I was in college, I told you I was a runner, right?
I ran long distance or medium distance.
I did cross country, 800 meters.
And so was a runner.
In college, we would wake up 6 a.m.
and go on these long runs that our coach would have us do.
And it would be, we call it tempo runs.
And we might go for a six, seven, eight, maybe sometimes 10 miles, five miles one
direction, five miles back.
There were some mornings when it was literally just
one or two people who were awake because you know college students 6 a.m.
sometimes the night before was a little hard.
So anyways there's times I remember I'll be going on these runs by myself.
Man when I say the time would take the time the time actually slowed down for me.
Time slowed down.
The distance I was running felt like everywhere I was going it just it would I would never
get there.
It was so difficult to do by myself.
I completed it.
Sometimes I actually didn't.
Sometimes the alert to quit, the temptation to just stop, slow down or not keep focus was
always there.
was heavy.
But on the occasions in the morning at 6 a.m.
when the team was up 545 refreshed and it was like 10 of us.
Man, when 10 people come to a 6 a.m.
session, there's a different type of energy.
Right.
When they come and they're all focused on what they're trying to accomplish, there's a
different type of energy.
That same 10 miles, five miles there, five miles back, uh completely went much faster.
We ran faster and it was so easy.
It was way easier when you have 10 people running.
It's like a momentum.
All of us are just moving, moving as a pack.
In fact, when we're running by bystanders and people who are watching, we feel cool
because we're all together.
We're all together, right?
And we start running faster.
Sometimes when you're running together, you're running so fast that you're like, wait, are
we racing right now or are we supposed to be just, you know, setting our pace?
So when people are actually when the momentum of others come together, you might be
running to the point where you feel like you're even racing.
And that's good because it pushes everyone, helps everyone to to to um
to test their potential and the entire race.
When you come back, you're actually joyous.
You're like, wow, we just did that all together.
And it's the same way in your business.
When you're running with people who, who have the mind to get up at that 6 a.m.
and like, let's do this thing together.
You're everyone is of the same mind.
You have an inertia, a momentum that just pushes you closer and closer to your goals.
So don't.
Pillar number five, don't run alone.
Because if you run, you can go wherever you want to go and it's like by yourself.
But if you want to go far and even faster, go together.
So if you're serious about building your business, a business that actually funds your
life and not just your lifestyle, then these pillars are not optional.
All right.
They're essential.
Your mindset, that's the foundation.
You're budgeting your forecast.
said, that's, that's a superpower.
That's your GPS and your cashflow.
That's your fuel gauge and your community.
That's your pit crew.
Those are the people who want to help you get up and build that momentum.
Right.
If you build your business on these the right way, your business will stop feeling like a
treadmill and more like a machine that you're actually driving.
So if that's what you're building towards, then I want you to like this video.
hit that subscribe button and stick around because we're not just talking about numbers.
We're building businesses that actually pay us back.
I'll catch you on the next episode.
We're going to be here same time next week.
I'll catch you next week.
I know that was weird.
I was just doing that for the recording because we're going to put a recording on this.
All right.
So we're going to just pivot into some of our real world questions.
And I wanted to spend some time just answering some of those questions.
You know, we do these office hours on a weekly basis, Fridays at 3 p.m.
And we invite business owners from our communities and also from all our various
communities to submit questions and online.
So if you want to submit your questions online, make sure you click the links.
They're going to be somewhere.
I mean, we're going to answer them pretty live.
Or if you want to register and actually join in and talk to me directly, hit the
registration button.
I would love to have you.
All right.
So let's go through a couple of these questions.
We won't be long.
One of these questions says,
All right, I'm I'm making money.
So why does it feel like there's never enough?
Well, this is an excellent question.
I love this question because this is just a this is a common feeling that many of us as
business owners may feel, not necessarily because we're not successful, but I believe it's
because we don't have great visibility, like financial visibility.
And that's really going to set set you apart.
from the average Joe that is just running their business, right?
How do I get financial visibility?
Honestly, it's really the components of two different things, cashflow and profits.
We spoke about this.
If you follow me, you may have heard me speak about this, but cashflow and profits answer
two different questions in your business.
Cashflow really answers, what can I do?
And then profits answer.
What is it?
What should I do?
Like, is it even worth it?
So what can I do versus what should I do?
The confusion that we feel sometimes when we like, OK, I'm making money, but it doesn't
feel like there's never enough is because we don't actually understand the difference
between cash flow and profits.
We think that those two things are the same.
We actually think cash, money, and profits are all the same.
Like, they are synonymous.
But
from a business finance standpoint, they're actually very different.
They move differently.
I've seen businesses that have a million in profits.
By the end of the year, they owe 100K in taxes, but their bank account says 10,000.
How's that even compute?
That's because they don't understand the relationship between their profits and their cash
flow.
When you understand that relationship and how they differ,
then you start behaving a bit different.
might, you might respond differently.
Let me give you an example.
All right.
So let's, let's say a business has a project that they just completed.
Right.
And now they sent an invoice for, I don't know, $120,000.
They sent that invoice, right.
And on their profit and loss statement, it shows, you have revenue of 120, 20,000.
And you also have expenses that, you know, your net profit might be 50,000 on that 120.
Yes, they own their profit and loss statement says 120, but their bank account, they
haven't actually received the cash.
That right there is one of the timing differences between profits and cashflow.
They recognize the profit, but their bank account says zero.
Right.
That doesn't actually reflect it.
And you can, you know, depending on your project, especially with your government, with
governments and, and late payers, you might not get that cash until a month later or two
months later, sometimes in the government case, six months later.
Right.
But your profit and loss is something different than your bank account.
That's one way.
Another way is another difference between cash and profit is to understand that there are
certain spends that you
spend that actually don't hit affect your expenses.
And the difference between those two is, is all to be understood.
Like, let's say you took out uh a, you know, a loan of 50,000, right?
And your profits are 30,000.
And during the, during the year, you actually paid back 20,000 of that loan.
Many people, business owners who come to me are like, I paid 20 K on a loan.
It doesn't affect my 30K profit.
And this is because we have this conversation around tax season.
And the issue is that paying down your loan actually does not affect your expenses.
So cash payment towards a loan is not an expense.
not an expense.
it won't even affect your net profit.
It won't affect the end result in taxes.
And so if you have a lot of loans on your books, you can have a missed, a misconception.
or a misconception about, you the amount of expenses that you're experiencing.
Like what your, the amount of times you swipe your card is not the amount, it's not
exactly what's going to affect your expenses.
And that reality sometimes bites people in the back because they weren't in the butt,
because they weren't expecting it.
Right.
They weren't expecting it.
So that's another way.
Another thing that affects cash, mean, profits in cash is like the timing on which you
actually pay your bills.
You know, everyone doesn't pay their bills immediately that they swipe the card.
Some of us actually collect invoices and bills from vendors.
Right.
And we see it is, I mean, a lot of us do even on a personal basis.
You see your bills come in the mail.
It comes in uh your email because everything is not auto paid yet.
Right.
And you wait 30 days for you actually to pay those bills.
Your cash is more is higher, but your profit and loss statement.
that we mentioned, your expenses still reflects those expenses.
So that's another difference that that can affect cash and profit.
So imagine you combine all three of those examples and all of that is happening in your
business.
You can imagine how different profits can look versus versus your cash.
So why do you feel like you're making money?
But
it still feels like there's never enough, the first answer is because you don't actually
have good visibility in your numbers.
You don't understand it really.
When you understand it, maybe your feelings would change a little bit.
All right, let's go to one more another question.
All right, this question is cool because I like it.
It says, I'm nervous to hire.
How do I know if we can actually afford it?
So this question is really related.
It is a capacity question.
Can we afford it?
Is it going to be worth it for this person?
And I told you there are two questions that we answer primarily at CFO, the cash flow
question, what can we do, and the profit question, what should we do?
So this question is like, how do I know we can actually afford it, is a cashflow question
yet again.
So you can know if you can afford it, if you were to know if you want to afford it, if you
can afford it, you should first do a cashflow forecast.
A cashflow forecast is going to plot your cash peaks and your cash valleys.
That's the inflow and outflows of your cash over time.
So once we plot it over time, we might even see what our historical cash flow has been.
We're going to say, okay, what is the average amount of cash we actually need to meet in
the bank account today in order to survive the next three months or something, three or
four months.
So you can break it down into these questions.
So you can say, yeah, what is the amount of cash we need if we were to just have a
stagnant amount of cash?
What amount of cash do we need to make it to?
know, three months, right?
All right.
You say, all right, that's our target cash is that cash.
Let's say we wanted to hire someone.
Let's say how much of that, how, how much of that cat, how much is it going to affect our
peaks?
So I guess there's a lot of ways you can answer this question.
How you know you can afford it is if your cash capacity can actually afford it.
So you can actually make that decision to hire that person once you see the peaks in the
future.
I say, for cash or cash, let's say three months later, you will actually see your balance
increase.
And you can say, all right, on month three, because we're profitable, I'm going to hire
the person then.
You can afford it if, your cash flow can capacity can handle the dip or the payment of
that salary and the return on investment from that, that employee, like further adds more
cash to the business.
So it's a combination of those two.
How efficient is the, is the employee, is the employee employee tied to the revenue of the
business or are they simply a management role?
What is the out?
What is the return on the investment in the employee?
Hopefully the return is going to further.
You know, hopefully the return is going to further, you know, make it more worth it or
even pay for themselves.
Right.
So if you bring in on an employee that essentially is revenue generating and they will pay
for themselves, all you really need is enough cash to be able to fund them until they can
pay for themselves.
So your cash might, you might be looking for when am I going to hit a certain level of
cash in my balance, in my bank balance?
And that's when I'm going to execute on um hiring an employee.
So there's a lot of elements to that question, right?
And having a discussion with your finance people, your accounting people, mean the owners,
your operations people will help you get to the right answer.
So this other question, it says, where can I cut expenses without hurting the business?
Well, this question is interesting because you can cut everything.
You can even stop the business and have zero expenses.
Right.
But you said without hurting your business, of course.
So one of these things, this is important because as you are running your business and as
you are, you know, evaluate your numbers, you need to also be doing analyses around those
numbers.
And this is really an expense analysis question.
Right.
You want to balance the cost in which you're spending
on expenses with the benefit that they're actually driving to the business.
can't tell you how many times I've seen, you know, oh businesses that have expenses all
over their books that kind of just keep on that they don't really understand what they're
actually for.
Sometimes they do, but a lot of times, especially when it's like softwares and things that
are on subscription, it's the same, you know, businesses have the same habits as personal
people, right?
You, you, you subscribe to a software because you needed it.
in one month, by next month you forgot that you actually subscribed to it and you maybe
you took out the free trial for 15 days and they ended up charging and now you subscribe
to this thing over time.
Businesses do the same exact thing and probably at a higher rate just because we spend a
lot more.
um But you need to be doing an expense audit, you know, on a fairly regular basis, maybe
quarterly.
semi-annually or even annually, where you just review all of your vendors.
I like to start at the top 10 vendors and you're going to ah discuss what is the benefit
that they're providing?
What is the cost?
Do we need it?
Are there any overlapping, um overlapping vendors that do the same thing?
Like, is there any any scope overlap?
When you evaluate each vendor, especially your top 10, then it's going to give you a clear
a better view as to what is leaking, right?
And when you plug up leaks by cutting those expenses, that means you're you know, you're
spending money without hurting the core operations of the business.
There are other things that you can do, not just comparing the vendors, but actually
looking at um those vendors that are fixed, those costs that are fixed versus those costs
that are variable.
That's going to give you a uh good, great insight into like what is actually
What costs are growing with the growth of the business and which one are affecting my,
what we call uh our break even points.
So you have your fixed costs.
can be rents.
They can be, you know, equipment rent, building rent.
They can be uh utilities, payroll, salaries.
Those are your fixed costs.
You actually have to pay those.
But let's say you have software applications that are billed per month by user.
And a lot of software companies are doing that these days.
So you have five, six, seven different softwares per month by user with, you know, varying
amount of people in each of those things.
So doing an audit around those softwares will tell you, will let you know, OK, on a per
person basis, how much are we paying for software?
Do we need all 12, all 13 pieces of software?
Maybe there are a few that overlap in capabilities.
And we only really need one as long as we're just.
you know, willing to make that change, that adjustment, right?
So you could do that.
And so that's actually what we do because we run a lot of different softwares and with
each new team member, they may need access to a lot of different softwares.
Right.
So you control that cause by honing in on what is actually necessary.
You know, one thing that I just realized, and this is a pro tip on it, on just expense
monitoring.
um We, I'm not going to call out the, well, it doesn't matter.
Microsoft.
One thing I noticed is that one of the, when I removed team members on the list, a month,
two months later, I realized that I was still paying for the licenses.
The licenses just weren't matched to a team member.
So be careful of that for those software companies, right?
You're paying for licenses, but you don't have team members using those licenses.
If you do a simple audit, you just look into your billing statement.
you might find that out that you can find some additional savings simply by doing that.
So that's a pro tip by experience.
Hopefully that's helpful.
All right.
So I think that that is all we're going to do for today.
If you like this episode, if you like this, these office hours, please registered for next
week.
We're to talk a bit more about, you know, other things, growing your business, scaling
your business from the lens of a CFO.
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ah And yeah, we're out.
Take care.