The simplicity

I know I’m not alone when I say this, but I wasn’t very good at maths at school. There, I’ve said it out loud. What is unusual is for an accountant to admit that out loud. 

🤷♀ 

But I’ve said it anyway, and we’re all friends, right?! This is a safe space and all, isn’t it? 

It might surprise you to know, in all seriousness, that the majority of the work I do has very little to do with maths. Sure, I work with numbers, but when I say I was no good at school, I’m talking the school-style maths. Pythagora’s Theorum, algebra, pure maths. I don’t deal on any of that now, and I have my trusty calculator, favourite Excel spreadsheets, and a whole host of different software packages that help me to deal with the rest of the extent of the maths involved in my day-to-day work.

So, why then, when someone brings up business finance, accounts or knowing your numbers, is it shyed away from so much? Why does a school-days phobia of a subject we perhaps feel we didn’t excel at still have the ability to bring us out in a cold sweat many years later? 

🧠 The power of the brain, that’s why. 

Our brains are programmed to keep us safe. To avoid scary, uncomfortable or otherwise unpleasant scenarios that we’ve stored away in the archives of our long-term memory.

Maybe you had a bad experience in the classroom way back when and you were laughed at by your peers.

Maybe you got a low test score decades ago and were humiliated by a teacher in front of the whole class.

Maybe your teacher told your parents at parent’s evening over twenty-five years ago that you wouldn’t cope with A-level maths. Or maybe that was just me? 🤔

My brain took away from that comment that I was no good at maths. What my teacher was actually referring to was my ability in relation to pure mathematics, and the complexities of the A-level syllabus, but that’s not what she said, and it’s not what I heard!

But it’s very easy to have a bad experience in one area, and transfer that assumption setting to all future experiences of that subject. Bad experience = avoid the possibility of repetition at all costs!

I see it a lot when talking about money too:

I’m no good with money. 

I make bad decisions with money. 

I don’t deal with the finances, my husband takes care of all that. 

But what we actually need to do is tackle this head on. Ask yourself the following questions: 

‘Whose belief is this?’

And  

‘Is this actually true?’ 

In an ode to my former maths teacher, I developed my own system that I take my clients through, called the MATHS system. 

It covers:

Mindset, Accountability, Timetabling, Housekeeping and Solutions.  

It’s a framework that helps to take the fear and emotion out of working through the key areas when ensuring you have solid business foundations in place. Once mastered, this system can be applied to any area of your life, but I use it to build a sound structure for business finances.

I work with the following rules:

We remove fear with knowledge

We remove emotion with systems 

So we do the work, and we follow a framework, so we have certainty in a process and we can make decisions with the results. Here we go!

Mindset – Money mindset issues and limiting beliefs can impact critical areas of your business, such as pricing decisions, over-delivering and under charging. Understanding where our money story comes from can help us to rewrite what no longer serves us and change the unconscious narrative that works against us without us even realising it.

Accountability – being in business can be a lonely place. Working alongside a professional to support you and provide answers to the questions you didn’t know you had is the biggest element to success with this system. But also learning to keep yourself accountable is what will serve you in the long run; with a CEO mindset, you can quickly identify where your strengths lie, what you no longer want to work on and what you should delegate to others.

Timetabling – the one truly non-renewable resource is time. Identifying where yours goes is key to maximising your earning potential and how best it can be spent to provide the most value to your clients.

Housekeeping – the non-negotiables of running a business. What responsibilities are you kidding yourself are OK to be pushed to the bottom of the pile of priorities? What about what you don’t know you don’t know? How would it feel to know that you plan a year in advance for these so that they never come as a surprise for you? 

Solutions – the unique elements that make your business truly yours. How much time would it give you back to outsource that admin that ‘won’t take long?’. What’s that peace of mind worth to you to know that all the tech side of your business is taken care of? What price would you put on your ability to sleep at night, knowing that you have planned and budgeted for your tax liabilities for the next eighteen months? 

Drop me an email if you’re interested in learning more about how this system works in action, and if it would be suited to you and your business.