100. Ask Me Anything! (Celebrating Our 100th Episode Solo Show Style)

Can you believe it? 100 EPISODES of Consider the Wildflowers 🎊

Recently we asked our email crew to send in questions you’d like for me to weigh in on and boy did you deliver! Our team pulled five audience submitted questions that I will be answering on the show today. From how to pay yourself to saving for retirement, just me, the mic, and your burning questions. 

There’s a first time for everything—today is the day— an “ask me anything” coaching show! Happy 100th episode, here we go! 

WILDFLOWER SHOWNOTES : shannaskidmore.com/100thepisode

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Cash Flow Planning Spreadsheet

Tonic Site Shop (CODE: SHANNASENTME)

Shanna's End of Year Financial checklist

Transcript

Shanna (00:00):

Hey, wild flowers. Shanna, here we are doing something special today to celebrate our hundredth episode of the show. Recently, we asked our email crew to send in questions you'd like for me to weigh in on, and boy did you deliver. Our team pulled together five audience submitted questions that I'll be answering live on the show today from How to Pay Yourself to Saving For Retirement, just Me, the mic, and your burning questions. There's a first time for everything. Today is the day and ask me anything. Coaching show, happy 100th episode. Here we go. Hey, it's Shanna, and this is Consider the Wildflowers, the podcast. For the past 15 plus years, I've had the honor to hear thousands of stories from entrepreneurs around the world. As a former Fortune 100 financial advisor turned business consultant, I have a unique opportunity to see the reel. Behind the highlight reel.

(00:47):

I'm talking profit and loss statements, unpaid taxes, moments of burnout, and those of utter victory. Or as my husband says, the content everyone is wondering but not many are talking about. And now I'm bringing these private conversations to you. Hear the untold stories of how industry leaders, founders, and up and coming entrepreneurs got their start, the experiences that shaped them and the journey to building the brands they have today. Stories that will inspire and reignite encourage to redefine success and build a life in business on your own terms. Welcome Wildflower. I'm so glad you're here. Before we dig into today's show, I want to say thank you 100 episodes. Thank you for being a loyal listener, for taking the time to rate and review the show for your outpouring of encouragement in my inbox and for faithfully showing up week after week to cheer on our incredible guests, two years, three seasons, and 90 plus interviews later.

(01:38):

What started honestly as a passion project to bring you the real behind the highlight reel, the highs, lows, messy middle moments. I have the privilege to see in my work every single day, but I don't think most entrepreneurs see. We just feel like we're on this island alone, wondering if we're the only ones dealing with pennies in our bank account, making a bad hire, struggling to book clients, or landing on Oprah's favorite list and selling out inventory in 10 minutes wherever you find yourself on your entrepreneurial journey. I hope this show has encouraged you. Entrepreneurship is beautiful and hard and messy, but once the bug bites you, you're bit wildflower. Thanks for being here and letting me show up in your earbuds week after week. Let's dive into today's Ask me anything show. Question number one comes from sleepless in Seattle. No, I'm kidding. This one comes in from yikes.

(02:29):

Did I miss the boat? Hey, Shanna, I am 35 and haven't started saving yet for retirement, starting to feel like a big yikes. Would love your take on how to get started. Hey there. Yikes. Did I miss the boat? Thanks so much for your question. What I commonly see is the idea of saving for retirement can be made out to this huge deal, which feels daunting and stops a lot of people from just getting started. How much to save, what type of account, what to invest in, you are absolutely not alone. So I think step number one in actually getting started is redefining or defining your goals with retirement savings. I like to think about saving for retirement as the day you have enough money that you no longer have to work. Work is so different now than from our parents or grandparents generation. I think so many of us see ourselves working later in life or having different revenue streams like rental property.

(03:23):

Maybe that provides income. So having the financial ability to choose to work or not to me is the ultimate goal of retirement savings or just savings in general. That would be true financial freedom. So once you've identified your own goal for saving, step number two is to actually identify why you haven't started saving already. To be honest, as a business owner, cashflow is everything. So Kyle and I spent most of the first 10 years of our marriage into our mid thirties focusing on debt reduction. We wanted to live on less personally to take the pressure off of our business, and that worked for us. It has allowed the business income to ebb and flow without causing us as much financial stress personally. The other thing that I have found intimidating about saving for retirement is the idea of putting money into an account that I cannot access.

(04:14):

Again, cashflow, that felt scary for many years and for many years, these two things held us back from saving big chunks of cash or consistently at all. Looking back, I wish I had just gotten started. Even small, $50 a month, a hundred dollars a month, it adds up and it matters. I think a lot of people believe that if they can't do it all, if they can't fully fund their Roth IRA or fully save 10% of their income, then they just don't do anything. So step number two is to simply identify why you haven't started, whether it's not knowing how much you need to save or where to save it, or you're scared to tie up those funds. Name the reasons holding you back and that will help you overcome those. So last but not least, and it's going to sound simple and probably cheesy, but step number three is truly just get started.

(05:04):

When I worked as a financial advisor, I was taught that if you save 10% of your income, that was a great place to start. 15% would maintain your lifestyle into retirement and 20% of your income. If you saved that consistently, you would never run out of money. So 10% of your paycheck if you're a business owner or even sales or revenue, is a great place to start. Take 10% off the top, put it aside for your later years. I'm a big fan of a Roth ira. That's a great account to look into and always, always, always get low fees. You can open a lot of these accounts yourself and avoid a lot of fees. I know that can feel sound daunting, feel scary if you've never done it, but it's actually pretty simple. While I cannot give investment advice, there are index funds out there, target date retirement funds where you don't need to be investment savvy.

(05:57):

You can put your money in one of those types of accounts and let it ride. There's a reason Albert Einstein said, compound interest is the eighth Wonder of the world. Just get started even if it's $50 a month. Question number two comes from WW sd. What would sh do? Hey, Shanna, what is the best slash worst investment you have ever made as a business owner? Alrighty, here we go. Best investment. My team. Hands down, I have worked with some amazing people and I still pinch myself that people love and care for my business and this work and our community as much as I do. I have not always been great at hiring people. I've let being a boss overwhelm me, but after a few years of trial and error, I feel like I've finally found my sweet spot with hiring. Personally, I've realized about myself, I don't want paying paychecks to feel stressful, so I structure pay in a way that makes me feel comfortable.

(06:53):

I also did not worrying about having enough work for someone to do. So again, I structure how I hire people so that I'm not always finding them work. I like to pay hourly depending on the type of job so it can fluctuate during different seasons. I was just really intentional about asking myself what worked, what didn't work with each hire so that now I really feel like I've found my sweet spot. I know how to hire. I can be upfront with people who are interested in the job of what it's going to look like. The last thing was also not being afraid of asking for help and letting the job be the job. If getting coffee is the job, I used to apologize for that. Like, oh, I'm sorry you had to go get me coffee, but that's the job. So just being okay and not apologizing or believing that other people wouldn't want to do it.

(07:38):

Those are few of the things that I have learned with hiring, and now I just feel like we have found our sweet spot. For example, this podcast would not come out week after week without Lauren on my team. She's incredible. I feel like she's thriving in her role. She runs it. She makes it happen. From Asana calendars and assigning tasks to working with our podcast editors to get it out on time. I literally show up for the interviews and Lauren and our editor team do the rest. That to me is a sign of a great hire. That to me is why hiring the right team and the right people so that I can focus on my zone of genius hands down has been the best investment. Also, right now, I do have to kind of plug, I'm digging Tonic Site Shop and their templates for Showit and Canva, and of course we have an affiliate link down in the show notes where you can get 15% off if you want to use that link.

(08:32):

But I'm not plugging them just for an affiliate link. I truly love, we create a lot of graphics on our team for Pinterest, sales pages, freebie PDFs, and we don't have a graphic designer on our team, nor are we in a position to hire a graphic designer full time. That would put stress on me. So buying these templates has really elevated the beauty of our work and sped up our process and our time involved. I have really high aesthetics, but I'm not a graphic designer, nor do I have the time to spend hours trying to be a graphic designer. So I'm just so grateful when I can find tools and templates for things that help us do our work better or faster without having to invest a lot of money that we don't have right now in team members. So tonic has been something recently that we have just used so much.

(09:24):

They're Canva templates we absolutely love. So that would be my best investments, worst investment, Facebook ads, Facebook ads at terrible timing. Maybe I can say that arguably bad investment, but maybe I'm going to go a little different direction here and say the worst investment for me is wasting my time. And that looks like looking back, I would say social media, yes, Instagram brought in a lot of students and clients in my early years and likely produce a lot of income. I also think it has the illusion of ROI return on investment. It's good use of time, can't live without it. It's my main marketing. All my people are here. But when in reality if I had focused on SEO from the beginning or knocking on doors or getting brand advocates that were influencers and protecting my mental energy, I'll just say I'm really glad I quit When I did back in 2017, it was a terrible investment of my time, which indirectly hurt us monetarily.

(10:27):

So giving my time and energy to things that weren't worth it, namely in that season, social media. I am just really protective now of where my time is going and looking at the best use of my time. Question number three from I need a paycheck. Hey Shanna, how do I pay myself? What are the factors to consider? What if the business is not making enough money yet? Such a great question. Taking a steady paycheck from your business, especially in the early days, can feel so daunting. In fact, I just googled this. According to a wave study, 26% of small business owners do not pay themselves at all. 50% of business owners don't pay themselves or take a very modest salary in the resting. When money is tight, what is the first thing that goes your pay? So I believe paying yourself comes down to two things really.

(11:18):

First, you have to make sure your pricing is correct. I see a lot of people, especially early in business, price their work to cover the material costs or a team member but tend not to factor in their own time. So when they need to hire a virtual assistant or rent a studio or a bookkeeper, any of that overhead costs, any money that they're previously paying themselves now goes to pay for these other expenses. So here's an example. Let's say a floral designer gets paid $2,500 to do flowers for an event. She spends a thousand dollars on the actual flowers, $500 for help, the day of a breakdown crew or an assistant to help with flowers, that leaves a thousand dollars to pay herself. So that feels good, right? That's pretty good. But then what if she needs to hire a virtual assistant to help answer emails or to rent a studio space to stop doing flowers in her garage?

(12:16):

That $1,000 she paid herself is no longer paid to her. It goes to pay for those other things, AKA overhead. I see this happen all the time. So what I teach all of my students is we need to make sure our pricing, we're not only covering those material costs like flowers or help like a breakdown crew, but also your time. So if we were to follow the Shanna approach to pricing, using that same example as above that we just talked about. If flowers cost a thousand dollars, the team, the day of costs, 500, a thousand dollars for her time, that's $2,500 of cost to produce this event, I would do a two and a half markup on that and charge the client or the price would be $6,250. Now a lot of you're like, whoa, that's such a big jump, but I teach all my students how to do it.

(13:04):

Why they do it when you know why you price what you price and why and explain that to your client. They understand it's a whole thing, but now you see she can still pay herself and have that money left over for overhead expenses, VA rent without sacrificing her own paycheck. So if you're like, Hey, I need to know more about this pricing strategy of what you speak, go to shannon skier.com/training. It's a free class. It's 45 minutes. You can two exit if you want to because I know that life. Just watch it. I go actually into more detail about my pricing strategy in that free training, but that's number one. We need to make sure we're pricing in a way that gives us profit to cover overhead and still pay for our time. Number two, cashflow is everything. 65% of businesses go out of business because they run out of money, right?

(13:54):

They run out of cash. Well, money is tight. What's the first thing to go is your pay. So to consistently pay yourself, we must have more money coming in each month than is going out or at least break even. But as we all know, sales aren't always consistent, right? They go up, they go down. We have high seasons, we have low seasons. So for me, instead of stressing about fluctuating income, which I get asked a lot, how do we deal with fluctuating income? I just like it's a fact of life. Income's going to fluctuate. What I focus on is what I can control, and that is understanding my month to month expenses in the business. I want to know exactly how much is going out each month and then I can actually set my sales goals, my monthly income goals around that. So for example, if I know that I need $10,000 a month to cover my overhead, that pays my team, that pays my software fees, that pays other expenses that happen every single month in the business, I know that every single month I must have $10,000 on day one just to cover those monthly costs, not to mention my own paycheck.

(15:04):

So say that's another 5,000. I need $15,000 a month I know was going out. So then I look at how much is already coming in. That might be through payment plans or client deposits that I've already booked, and I ask myself, will that cover all of these bills and my paycheck? If not, that's how I set my goals for the month. Do we need to run a sell in the shop? Do I need to book two more clients? What does it look like? So I really keep a pulse on how much is coming in each month and how much is going out AKA cashflow, and that's the only way to ensure that I can always pay my paycheck. A little side note here, just a little tip. This is one reason I actually set up all of my expenses to pay monthly. Even though you can save a lot of money, maybe not a lot, but some money by paying annually on subscriptions, I actually set all my monthly expenses up to pay monthly so that it's consistent every single month.

(16:00):

I know what's coming in and going out particularly, and nothing really sneaks up on me. I feel like those annual fees often have a way of surprising us and they don't feel good. I also want to mention here that I have a really helpful cashflow planning spreadsheet in my shop. You go to shop shannon skier.com/cashflow planning. So flow planning, that's so hard. We will put that link in the show notes. This really does help you track money coming in and track money coming out, and it has a really helpful video tutorial of how to use a spreadsheet. So I really think that you have to know what's coming in and out in order to pay yourself. So all of that aside, if you don't want to worry about pricing or if you're cashflow plan, if that, all of that makes your head spin the easiest way, take 20% of every dollar that comes in the door, every dollar that you sell that comes into your business bank account, take 20% of that, put it into a separate account and label that your salary account and then pay yourself each week or each month a consistent amount from that salary account.

(17:08):

That to me, is the most simple way without having to worry about cashflow. Even though cashflow planning is obviously very important, pricing is obviously very important. If you just want to make it as simple as possible to take 20%, set it aside, and of course taxes will come out of that. Make sure you're saving for taxes. Question number four, curious minds want to know, knowing what you know now, Shanna, what are three things you would still have done the same and three things you would have done differently? Okay, so I'm going to quick fry this one a little bit. Not going to go into great detail because that would probably be its own podcast episode, but here we go. Three things. I would do the same. Number one, I would absolutely hands down, take the first year as kind of an unofficial year of business.

(17:51):

I would throw spaghetti on the wall, try all the things, see what sticks. I spent most of 2012 helping people with their taxes, pricing, branding, doing flowers, pursuing an MBA, shadowing, a private equity firm. I was kind of doing anything I was curious about or slightly good at. I knew I needed to make $60,000, so I was just like I was getting paid with gift cards, anything to pay the bills, but I just wanted to try all the things, and I found my sweet spot. I found my bread and butter. I was able to build out packages and price them well before I even officially started. So when I opened my doors officially in November, 2013, I hit the ground running and I had 106,000 in profit that year. So that's after expenses, just because I knew what I did, what I didn't do, who it was for, and I had my pricing and my packages together.

(18:43):

I know that propel my business so much faster, and I tell a lot of my students, take six months, take a year, get paid, of course, but try it all and figure it out. I think it'll really help instead of setting it all in stone and building out your entire website and getting a custom brand and then realizing, oh, I don't actually like that thing. Second, I'm so glad I started with one-on-one client work. I learned a lot. I got better at my craft and I truly could see the impact of my work. Not to mention that those first clients are still some of my biggest brand advocates. While I'm so very grateful that I eventually in 2016 started the blueprint model and get to impact more lives now through a digital product than I could one-on-one being in the trenches with people makes me a better educator.

(19:33):

I believe one-on-one work is necessary and makes me better always. Number three, I would still quit social media even though some days it can feel tough. I know my audience is there. I know there are opportunities I miss out on. I would still quit for my mental health, my brain space and energy and more smarter marketing. That's what I wrote down to do marketing more smartly. Wow, that sounds smart to do marketing better. You get what I'm saying? Number four, I would also track my time with toggle bonus there three things I would do differently. Number one, I would've focused on and learned about SEO from the beginning. Big mistake, huge. Number two, I wish I would stop and celebrate more. I still need to work on that. Only two things come to mind that I would do differently. Question number five, from ready to scale, how did you transition from one-on-one to group work, and at what point do you recommend scaling?

(20:31):

I have bright shiny object disease and worry about hopping from one thing to another. Great question to end on. I did one-on-one client work for three years, officially four years unofficially before creating a scalable product. I once heard a quote that said like, never scale until your main source of income is secure, and I think that's really valid. I see people jump from offer to offer or try to scale too early and it can really slow growth. I created a course because I could not keep up with demand of my one-on-one offers. So I think that's a great time to scale. You have a proven track record, a proven system that people are saying they want create a way to give more people that solution and you've scaled. While I think it's totally fine to do one-on-one client work forever, I have recently been thinking a lot about how we can all build in two things, two types of revenue into our offers.

(21:28):

One, scalable revenue. To me, that means creating something once and selling it as many times as possible with not a lot more work to you. So for example, creating an art print, you create the art once, but you can sell that print one time or 10,000 times without much more work on your part. That's a scalable offer. The second I've been thinking about is recurring revenue. So money coming in every single month, pretty consistently, pretty reliable. So that'd be subscription payments, memberships, contract works like bookkeepers who have contract clients they're working with every single month. I love this recurring revenue idea because it gives consistency and reliability to your income, which helps you take on more business expenses and paying yourself as we talked about with cashflow more confidently. So while yes, you can do one-on-one client work forever, you can sell a product forever.

(22:25):

I do think at some point, thinking strategically about how you can add in a scalable offer, scalable revenue offer, and a recurring revenue offer. These are things that I'm thinking about 11 years in that I think, wow, maybe that's the third thing I would do differently. Add in that recurring. It just gives you kind of peace of mind. Alright, wildflower, you just finished another episode, episode 100 of Consider the Wildflowers, the podcast. Thanks so much for letting me do a fun q and a show. That was awesome. Head over to consider the wildflowers podcast.com for show notes and resource links that I mentioned in today's show. One final thought for today from Winston Churchill. Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts. As always, thank you for listening. I'll see you next time.