The Part of Business We Don’t Like to Talk About
There are a lot of exciting conversations that happen when someone decides to start a business. We talk about the idea, the name, the logo, the products, the clients we want to serve, and what the website could look like. We imagine what it will feel like when people finally begin buying something that started as an idea in our heads. What we do not always talk about quite as enthusiastically is what all of that is going to cost, and I do not mean just the price of a website or how much it costs to register an LLC. I mean the sacrifice.
Starting almost anything requires something from you. Sometimes it is money. Sometimes it is time. Sometimes it means saying no to something you would normally buy because the business needs that money instead. There may come a point when you have to decide whether you are willing to put another $500, $1,000, or $5,000 into an idea when you cannot guarantee when, or if, you are going to see that money again. That is where entrepreneurship becomes a lot less romantic.
There are grants, loans, investors, crowdfunding, business credit, and any number of ways people will tell you to fund a business, but none of those options automatically remove the uncertainty. You may find a grant and realize you have no idea how to write the application. You may apply and not receive it. You may qualify for financing and still have to decide whether taking on debt is actually the right decision for your business. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, your personal relationship with money walks into the room too.
You do not suddenly become a completely different person because you opened a business. If managing money has always made you anxious personally, some of that anxiety may follow you into entrepreneurship. If you avoid looking at your personal accounts when you know things are tight, you may do the same with your business. If you have a hard time saying no to yourself financially, you may eventually have to ask whether you can make better financial choices for your business than you sometimes make for yourself. That may be an uncomfortable question, but it is worth answering.
The financial side of entrepreneurship has also become one of the primary ways we decide whether someone has succeeded. If you are losing money, something must be wrong. If you are breaking even, you start questioning whether all of the work is worth it. If you are turning a profit, finally, something must be working. But I keep coming back to another question: Can everything be working, and you still not make a dime?
A lot of people would probably tell you no. I am not so sure.
A business can be building awareness, developing an audience, helping you understand what people actually want, creating relationships, refining an offering, building systems, establishing credibility, and showing you what needs to change next. None of those things automatically appear as profit on a spreadsheet. That does not mean the spreadsheet doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. It just means the spreadsheet cannot tell the entire story.
Once we decide that money is the only measure of whether the business is working, every month that does not meet our financial expectations begins to feel like a personal failure. It is not. It is information, and information is something you can work with.
A Quick OMAS Pause: Start With What You Know
If the financial side of your business is something you have been avoiding, you do not have to begin with a complicated financial system. The OMAS Free Financial Worksheet was created as a starting point. It gives you space to look at your relationship with money first, then move into your current revenue, expenses, profit, financial goals, and what you would eventually like the business to pay you.
You do not have to solve everything today. You just need to be willing to look.
Download the Free Financial Worksheet and give yourself an honest starting point.
Then comes the part that may be harder than filling in the worksheet: you have to keep looking.
You cannot look away from your business finances simply because they make you uncomfortable. In fact, if they scare you, that may be an even bigger reason to become familiar with them. Repeatedly looking at what we fear begins to take some of its power away. The first time you really sit down and look at what the business earned, what it spent, and what is left, you may feel anxious. The next time, maybe a little less. Eventually, those numbers stop feeling like something waiting to judge you and start becoming what they were supposed to be all along: information.
Where are we? What changed? What are we spending? What are we earning? What can we afford? What needs to wait? What needs to change? What does the business need from me right now? Those are business questions, not character assessments.
You may look at your numbers and discover that you need to spend less, charge more, or stop putting money into things that are not actually moving the business forward. You may discover that the business is healthier than you thought. You may even realize that the business is doing exactly what it needs to do right now, even if the profit has not caught up yet. But you cannot know any of that if you refuse to look.
That is what I want us to sit with as we begin talking about money this month. Financial clarity does not mean every number is where you want it to be. It means you are willing to know what the numbers are. Money no longer gets to sit in the corner of your business like this mysterious thing you only deal with when something goes wrong. You look at it, learn from it, make decisions, and keep moving.
Because money does not make or break anyone unless we give it the power to.
Until next time,
Crystal
OMAS Reflection Questions
What part of your business finances makes you most uncomfortable to look at, and why?
When you think about the money you have already invested in your business, what expectations have you attached to getting that money back?
How do you personally define financial success in your business?
Are there financial habits from your personal life that you see showing up in your business decisions?
What is one number you have been avoiding that you could look at this week without immediately trying to fix it?
