ZERO pay for the first 3 years?

by Belinda Rosenblum

Imagine going to a job interview and having this conversation…

The person interviewing you says:

You’ll have more responsibilities than anyone else in the company, including having the weight of the entire success of the business on your shoulders. 

Oh and you’ll be expected to be reachable at all times. You’ll be doing the job of 6 people. And… you won’t be paid for the first 3 years. 

Are you taking that job? 

Because I sure wouldn’t! 

Not intentionally at least…

But as business owners we totally accept *not* getting paid much and working A LOT. 

And we justify it because we know that one day we will be successful and have more than enough money from our business. 

How long can you wait? 

Seriously… Do you have a mortgage or rent? A cell phone, cable, or insurance to keep up? Mouths to feed, including your own? Investments you want to be making?

YES — we have bills to pay, kids’ school to save for, and lives to enjoy. 

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Just this week, I put the finishing touches on my new presentation for FinCon 2022, THE annual event for finance content creators and brands happening next week. 

(If you’re going, let me know so we can meet up. I’m especially excited one of my past clients is a co-host MC’ing the event!)

I’ll be sharing my 5 step blueprint to better pricing the value of your services — and great for you, I am realizing one of my super powers is around pricing and offers.

So 2 pricing tips for you today:

FIRST…

One of the biggest things biz owners often don’t realize is that you can deliver a lot of value *but* if you don’t price your offers in alignment with the value you are delivering, people won’t want to buy it. Like this:

If someone tried to sell you a Louis Vuitton purse for $100 (or even $500), you would likely assume it is a fake and the value isn’t there — so you wouldn’t want to buy it. (I checked — most original LV purses run $2k – $3k+… without the dog lol)

So it is key that you figure out how to understand and be able to articulate the value of your services/ products AND have the value be in alignment with the price. If you don’t believe in it or can’t communicate the value, your potential clients won’t believe in the value either. You need to sell yourself on the results first.

SECOND…

How you price *position* your offers in relation to something else affects how your potential client views the value of your offer.

If there is only one option, they will always want to compare it to zero. “I can buy it or not buy it.” 

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Come behind-the-scenes with me

by Belinda Rosenblum

Come behind-the-scenes with me today…

Recently, I set aside a day to do a mid-year internal planning meeting with myself and my business partner (and husband), Marc.

We got out of our home offices and came to our local library, which essentially serves as a co-working space with its beautiful study rooms (pic after Marc left to get the kids from camp):

I wanted to share a few things we did that day that were very helpful to support the rest our success for the rest of the year:

1 – Overall planning and goals – to make sure we were both on the same page with the day and the business 

2 – 1st Half 2022 Reflection – so often we are so quick to move to the next “to do” that we don’t take the time to reflect on how what we are doing is really performing. So in this step we listed out what worked (the positives), what wasn’t as great (the negatives), and what would we like to intentionally do differently moving forward. 

This was so eye opening — and to hear each other’s perspectives especially. So even if you don’t have a business partner, you can do this with your key team member or even a close colleague.

3 – Goals and Vision – Lately, I’ve been listening to Dr. Joe Dispenza and just this morning, in two different videos, I heard this and it so resonated with me:

This is why I like to take a few minutes to get more clear on that vision, so we can intentionally (and even subconsciously) create it — both for the remaining 5 months of 2022 and beyond. 

So often, when our Cash Flow CEO Accelerator students come to us, they have been afraid to really establish goals, usually either because they don’t want to be disappointed if they don’t achieve them or because they don’t have a plan to make them a reality, so they don’t want to bother setting them at all. Do you not set goals for either of these reason?

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I was all set to write you an email about how positive I’ve been feeling and the huge lessons I’ve already been learning…

(If you’re just tuning in, I shared my early breast cancer diagnosis and my surgery update on my profile here, and have been due for an update from the last 2 weeks but as you’ll read below, it’s been quite a handful at home.)

… until I got a call at 2:04pm yesterday. More on that in a minute after I share the chaos that led up to the phone call. (I remember the time because I was being interviewed for a podcast at 2:30pm and almost didn’t answer.)

Immediately after my surgery on July 13th, my days were mainly about recovering from the brain fog post-surgery sedation and then lots of icing and Advil. (Oh and supporting my mom who had come to help but then tested positive for C’vid so was quarantined.) We tried to keep some normalcy with the kids’ routine and took off from work to give me lots of time to rest.

About a week later, we got back the pathology results that they didn’t quite get enough “margin” (that is the extra tissue between where the small cancer was and normal tissue) and that they wanted to go back in again.

Ugh. This hit me hard for a few days. I was so looking forward to a positive report and we could move onto the next steps.

(PSA: Turns out after some quick research that 25-80% of all lumpectomies need a follow-on surgery. No one had mentioned that to me so I was quite surprised with the news. Just as my students tell me they “don’t know what they don’t know” about the money in their business, I felt I was living that exact thing here. And the surprise sucked.)

I scheduled the next surgery for this Tuesday August 2nd (the earliest date available so they could “go back in” before the incision was fully healed) and concluded I must have more to learn in accepting this healing journey.

Then all hell broke loose at home. 

First our son Seth tested positive for C’vid. (We all took home tests before Marc’s mom came to visit and help out. Denied!) Let the quarantine begin — again.

Thankfully Seth didn’t have many symptoms and ended up enjoying the time in his room without a mask where he did Lego, watched some movies, did some reading, and listened to 2 audiobooks.

Then a few days later, Marc tested positive for C’vid too. Yup more quarantining. He had it pretty bad but has been such a trooper and is coming out of it all now.

And along the way, I got an eye infection, Becca lost a tooth, and we’re needing to stay healthy and support the two patients in the house. (So many reasons why I could have thrown in the towel and gotten lost in self-pity, but I didn’t.)

I leaned into the gift cards we received (thank you!), enlisted Becca as my “assistant” and expert helper (she’s even making her own lunch now and super proud of it!), and let go of any “perfect parenting”. Don’t get me wrong — it’s still been tiring. Shout out to all the single moms — holy cow I don’t know how I’d do this all the time.

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