I have had moments in my gym when my books were upside down due to uncontrolled spending habits. I’m not much of a shopper for clothes, but something about office supplies and organizational supplies excites me. We used to have an Office Depot in town and I could have spent hours perusing the aisles deciding what I needed at the gym that would help me to be more effective. What I didn’t realize was that Office Depot was a vice for me in our early years.
Spending can often make us feel like we have control of something. Picking out an item at a store (or online) and checking out gives us a sense of satisfaction. When that card goes through and you see the words “Approved”, there is a temporary sense of satisfaction and feeling of success. The problem is – the card may have been approved, but the sense of success was temporary. If you have poor spending habits, then you know what’s going to happen next.
You’ll get a mile down the road before the guilt sets in. If you’re like me, you didn’t return the stuff, but you spent the next hour justifying your purchases in your head. We didn’t have a lot of disposable income in those early days. In fact, I have always been a snob about the pens I like best and I had a hard time reverting to anything else.
I had to learn the hard way that some expenses were meant to make me money and others would do nothing but cost me money.
Fancy pens? Cost me money. They don’t have a true return on investment.
For those who have been to my gym, you may have been hard-pressed to find a post-it note within the entire building. If you did, it probably said H&R Block on it. That’s not because I can’t afford post-it notes in my gym these days. It’s because in those really challenging years, I taught myself how to be more efficient with free things and spend less on anything that wouldn’t give me a return on my investment. (In return, I had a fairly organized and clean front desk I suppose.)
So what did we spend money on? Even in the hard years (and during COVID closures), I didn’t cancel my Audible account. Just one business book could change my entire situation, and I believed that. So, it was a return on my investment.
I paid for a business coach and to attend conferences. I didn’t always stay at the host hotel or attend the expensive after-parties, but I always invested in learning.
I paid for marketing even when I didn’t want to. There wasn’t a single ad I placed that I ever regretted, because every one of them got me to where I am today.
We always invested in our staff and their training. With our own education growing, it was important to make sure the team was growing as well.
There were years I bought rhinestone transfers for $1 and pressed them onto a $1 t-shirt, and that’s what my staff was required to wear to work every day. I couldn’t afford anything nicer in those days. Staff shirts were necessary, but they didn’t give me a return on investment. Their training did though.
So let me ask you – is your spending out of control? Go line by line. Are you seeing a return on your purchases? If not, then they’re “expenses” and you need to get rid of them. On the other hand, if they’re giving you a return, you need to keep them and use them. The average Academy member sees a minimum of 2.5x return on his or her monthly investment. We teach them to minimize expenses and maximize investments. If you were seeing a 2.5x return on your marketing (meaning you pay $100 and you make $250), wouldn’t you do it all day long? I’d turn that budget into $1000 to make $2,500.
