52: How to Invest in Your Business

You’re listening to the Mastering Money in Midlife podcast with Debbie Sassen Episode 52.

Welcome to Mastering Money in Midlife, a podcast for midlife women in business to overcome financial anxiety and make more money without burning out or sacrificing their families. Join Certified Life and Money Coach Debbie Sassen, as she shares practical business strategies and mindset shifts that help you dissolve the money blocks that keep you stuck in a cycle of under earning and under saving, sabotage the growth of your business and prevent you from building the wealth that you desire.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. Today, on the podcast we’re going to be talking about how to invest in your business. But before we get into our topic on investing, I wanted to let you know that doors are now open to my nine-month coaching program, Wired for Wealth.

You might recall that five months ago, in podcast Episode 31, I shared with you all about this group coaching program that I had been thinking about and sort of conjuring up in my mind, during the last two years. I launched that program at the end of May, beginning of June 2022. I have ten women in that program right now. My coaching program is open to both women and men.

But it just so happens that my current cohort of Wired for Wealth members has ten women in it, and they are doing remarkably well. They are making more money serving clients. One of my clients put today, into our Facebook® group, that she has two new clients that she signed today. And in the last month or two months, she has been signing client, client, client. Her business has exploded in the last couple of months.

And it is just beautiful work that I see my clients doing. In podcast Episode 31, I mentioned that Wired for Wealth was a six-month program. Very soon after I launched the program, it was so clear to me, I was so aligned and congruent with the reality that this program really needed to be a nine-month program.

Everybody in the group, at the moment, is a mom just like me. We have very busy, very full lives. And while I believe that a little bit of pressure, and hustle, and motivation, and just like get-up-and-go, to get your business going is a beautiful thing. I also want to make sure that my clients have some semblance of work-life balance.

I don’t really know if there is such a thing as work-life balance. But we are leading big lives; we have a lot of things going on. I decided to expand the container from six months to nine months, so that we meet three times a month, and we have one week off. That gives you time for integration. Or, if you had to miss a week because you went on holiday.

Of course, I want you to go on holiday with your family. Or, I celebrated nearly a month, in October, of Jewish holidays. And we welcomed in a new grandson. And like me, my clients have full, busy lives. We want to grow businesses, and serve people, and be out there and visible, and show up, and of course, make money, because businesses need to make money.

But we also want to have joy, and family, and life, and experiences. You know the old saying, “All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy.” In this case, it could make Jill a dull woman. So, my Wired for Wealth container is now a nine-month container, so that we can have, just take the edge off a little bit.

I can give my people, my tribe, and my clients, more time to be in the work. I added three extra coaching calls. So, I expanded the container from 24 calls to 27 calls. And this round Wired for Wealth 2.0, I guess you would call it, we will also be beginning with a four-hour intensive.

It’s like a half day workshop, where we are really going to dial in what your signature offer is, that you will be inviting your clients into; into your container. But the thing that you’re going to be selling, during the course of your time in the Wired for Wealth coaching program.

We’re going to be talking about the CEO skills and the mindset that you want to develop and take on for yourself, in order to have the greatest success. One thing that really slows down business owners from growing, is thinking of themselves as the thing they do, rather than the CEO of their business. So, if I took myself as an example, if I would think of myself as a coach, rather than a business owner who does coaching, right?

Coaching is how I call in business and serve my clients. But I’m a CEO. I run under my business, my coaching business, with the planning, and the strategy, and the money principles, and money mechanics, that it requires to have a business.

Last week on the podcast, for example, I talked all about planning for profit in your business. That is a CEO skill. Two weeks ago, in podcast Episode 50, I talked about overcoming the sunk cost fallacy. Again, that is a CEO skill, is to let costs that you’ve already paid out, expenses that are behind you, letting them go.

You want to always show up in your business, as a CEO. And that is one of the skills that we’re going to work on and continue working on in the Wired for Wealth coaching program. If this is calling you, and I do believe that  if you’re having a little nudge from God, or from the Universe, or whoever, however you connect with your higher spirit, I want you to go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/wired-for-wealth, and check out the coaching program.

Because it is really a beautiful opportunity for you to be in a longer term, a nine-month coaching container. We start November 28^th, so don’t hesitate. And, please reach out.

Alright, my friends, let’s jump into our topic, which is how to invest in your business. The first thing that I want to share with you, is that investing is different from spending. When you’re in your business, money inflows, it comes into your business. And money leaves your business when you are spending it on something or investing it in something.

It’s important to understand what the difference is between the two items: spending and investing. Spending is something that will have a short-term effect, and it’s not going to grow over time. For example, I invest in Zoom®, right?

I meet with my clients online, and I use Zoom software. If I want to create graphics, I also have a membership with Canva®. And if I want to host my website or my podcast, I use different services; like SiteGround® for my website, or Libsyn® for my podcast. These are hosting services, and I spend money on those services.

Using those services is never going to be the thing that increases the monetary value of my business. It’s going to be something that is static, or it could be, even, an asset that depreciates with time. For example, a computer; when you buy a computer, and you hold it for a year, there will almost undoubtedly be a new computer that has launched onto the market that is going to be faster.

It’s going to have more tools, it’s going to have better resolution, more pixels, more memory, the memory is also going to process more quickly. But the moment you buy a laptop computer, it’s losing value day by day.

Also, there’s just general deterioration that happens over time. In accounting terms, we call it depreciation. So, if you buy a laptop today, let’s say you pay $2,000 for your laptop. It’s going to be worth maybe $1,000 in a year, or two, or three. I don’t know how quickly laptops depreciate in value, and go, you know, from the purchase price to whatever, you know, half the price in the market.

But we do know that every six months, every year, there’s always something new with the state-of-the-art that has been launched, and is available on the market. That is how you spend money in your business.

When you invest, investing is always in something that is going to grow. It’s going to compound with time. It’s going to give you what we call, “a return”, a positive return on your investment. Let me just sidetrack and talk about investing in financial assets, which could be, for example, stocks.

You know, if you have a stock portfolio, or real estate if you buy real estate as an investment, when you take money and you invest it in real estate or invested in the stock market, your expectation is that money is going to grow over time.

If we look at the US stock market as an example, over long periods of time, the average return on investment, in the US stock market, is 10%; 9%, 10%, 11%. But the average is about 10% per year. We’re in November 2022, this has not been a good year for the stock markets. The US stock market and global stock markets are down.

But again, if we stretch, if we expand our timeframe, not just for one year, for 12 months, but really look at it for 10, and 20, and 30, and 40 and 50-year periods, the average return is 10%, even a little bit more.

Similarly, in your business, if you want your business to grow and increase in value over time, you have to take the money that you have, that you receive from your clients, and take that money and invest it in your business. If you think about the different opportunities that you have for your money and what you could do with it, you really have to ask yourself; how can I make the value of my business grow for the long term?

We don’t want to be impatient for a quick return on investment. We’re always going to take our money and put something that’s going to give us a longer-term return. If it turns around quickly, that’s great. You could put money in the stock market. And you could just show up in a year when you got very lucky, and the market rose by 20% or 30%. And you just got a bumper year.

Sometimes that happens when you’re investing in your business, that you can double your money pretty quickly. But you always want to keep a long-term investment horizon in your mind, when you’re investing in your own personal business. And never be impatient for quick returns.

So, the main thing that I have invested in for the long-term growth in my business, is me. Because I am the most important asset in my business. It’s not my computer, it’s not my podcast, it’s not my website, it’s not my Zoom membership, or my Canva membership. The most important asset is me. I show up in my business, and I serve my clients.

So, I am always investing in my mind, and developing my mind, and my thinking skills. Sharpening my capacity to think better, on behalf of my clients so that I can serve them better. I invest both in a business coaching program, because I work with a business coach who has more experience, and has made more money in her business than I have made in mine.

She has things that she teaches me. I learn from her experience, and I take her experience and I apply it to my business. I also invest in coaching certification programs. I just now invested in a new program called, Deep Dive Coaching. That’s a four-month program.

I am learning new skills to go deeper into nervous system work and embodied money work, because that will improve my coaching skills. So that I can show up better, stronger for my clients, and help them to get quicker results.

So, in your business, you have to look at how you are making money. And whatever you can do to make your results better for your clients, you can speed up the results from your clients, they can get more powerful insights, more powerful results. That investing for you is always going to be something that is going to have a return on investment over time.

I would look, for example, at my program, Wired for Wealth, as something that you could invest in for your business. Because it will teach you CEO skills, how to manage your money, how to work on marketing, how to work on sales. There is my sacred sales conversation process that my clients say is gold.

When they follow the process, and they connect with the process, and they show up and they’re serving their clients with clean unattached energy, and really helping and serving their clients, they close their sales faster. So, that is one way that you can invest in your business and in your future. Because any money that you would invest in a program, like Wired for Wealth, will grow and compound over time.

The other thing that I would like to bring to your attention with investing, and this is a little bit more with personal finance rather than business finance. But I do think it’s important that I bring it up as part of the discussion, is that there is a difference between saving money and investing money.

When we save money, it’s money that we want in a safe place. Because maybe we’re gonna need it for an unexpected expense. That could be a joyous occasion. Like maybe, a friend of mine, across the Atlantic Ocean, is getting married and I want to take a flight, and I want to go in and celebrate with him.

In fact, in January, my cousin’s son is getting married, and I would like to go to that wedding. So, if I have money in my savings account, then I will be able to pay for the air flights, and enjoy and celebrate with my cousins at their wedding.

And sometimes unfortunately, it’s a sad event. It could be an unexpected medical event that happened, or all of a sudden, your car needs repair. But it’s always a good idea to have money in savings for unexpected events that always happen in life.

Or, for example, now I’m recording the podcast in November 2022, and next summer I want to take a vacation with my family. So, having money in savings is going to give me that pot of cash, that I’ll be able to spend on something that I actually know when it’s going to happen. I don’t know the date; I don’t know the month. But I want to make sure that I have that safe savings set aside for the future.

When you invest money, like I said before, it’s always with a long-term view. Let’s say for example, that I was going to take $10,000, and I wanted that $10,000 for my summer vacation with my family, in the summer of 2023. I thought to myself, “You know what? maybe I could make that $10,000 double to $20,000, if I put it into the stock market.” And rather than keeping it in a safe savings account, I took it; I put it into the stock market.

Here we are in 2022, I have no idea what is going to happen by next summer; the money could increase in value, it could decrease in value. I could end up, rather than going on vacation, I could end up having a staycation because I don’t have any money, because the stock market continues the trend, you know, downward, like it’s had in 2022.

Any money that you know that you’re going to need, or for an unexpected expense where you know you’re going to need money, you would never want to put that money into an investment. Because investments need time. The expectation is always that there’s going to be a positive and very juicy return on investment.

As I said, the stock market returns like 10% per annum, over long periods of time. When you invest in your business, what I have seen, is my first year when I really started investing in my business, I tripled my business. And, after that I’ve increased it by about 33%. And now, it’s gone down to about 25%.

You know, every year for the last three years, I started really investing in 2019, I went from $40,000 to $100,000 in my business, in 2019. And then, I grew it to $155,000, and then $200,000. And this year, I’m actually on track to make $300,000 in my business. So, it’s actually going to be a 50% increase in my business, in 2022.

That is because I continue to invest in my brain. And I continue to invest in my business acumen and my business skills. So, when you’re thinking about how you want to grow your business, I want to also caution you about being in a place of scarcity and lack.

When you’re investing, you don’t want to have to hustle to see the return on your investment very, very quickly. I’ve been fortunate that I have been in a place where I have seen the return on investment in the last four years. But I would also like to bring to your attention, that I started my business in 2008. And for the first ten years of my business, I wasn’t investing my time like it was my full-time job, because I do have a large family and I had some kids who need my attention. I had to take a couple of years, you know, almost off of my business completely, because I needed to be more at home.

But I had business coaches, and I had a marketing coach. I wrote a book; I launched a book. Like, I was doing all the “right” things in my business during those years. But my business didn’t grow, or it didn’t grow very quickly. In the first ten years of my business, I was able to move the needle on my business from $0 to $40,000.

Again, I wasn’t working full-time, and I had taken some time off and whatever. But I wasn’t impatient for the money to return quickly. So, I allowed my investments to be in there, and to, you know, collect the compound return on investments. That would happen, let’s say if it was in the stock markets, they would have just a little bit, little bit, little bit, little bit of return on my investments.

And then, all of a sudden, in 2019, when I went all in, I like, turned the corner. And then, I was able to really skyrocket my business from $40,000 to $100,000 that year. I have just continued to keep growing, because I’ve taken everything that I’ve learned by being in business for the last 14 years.

It is just this continual growth and compound, and I see this beautiful, like, return on investment curve. If I could show it to you with a graph… You could probably google it, you know, what is your long-term return on investment look like. I definitely have it in my book, The $1K Investor: Simple, Smart Steps to Start Investing with $1K or Less.

But that’s exactly the pattern that I have seen in my business. My early investments just took a little bit more time, or a lot more time, to show me the return. So, wherever you are in your business, really think about; is the thing that’s holding you back, that you are just being a little bit in scarcity and lack? And unwilling to invest money in your business for long term growth?

Or, if you already have a history of investing money in your business, and you’re getting impatient, do you need to give it a little bit more time? Or, do you need to make that next investment, that’s really going to step you up and catapult you into just a higher level of your business?

It’s your responsibility and job, as the CEO of your business, to be introspective, and ask yourself; what stage of my business am I in? Have I been investing in my business? Or, have I just been making like little tweaks, and just like buying little courses?

I don’t want to be dismissive or poopoo, the little courses, I also did the little courses, and I bought them. But I have to tell you, that when I invested at higher levels, when I put more money into my business, I got way better return on my investments.

Because I showed up better. What you pay for you pay attention to. When you pay more money for something, you pay more attention to it. So, I really believe like, down to my tippy toes, that when you invest in a higher level, you will take yourself more seriously. You’ll be more committed, and you will actually see higher level returns.

So, really think about yourself in your business. Where could you be holding yourself back from bigger, powerful growth, the ability to show up more boldly and more visibly and serve more clients? And where do you need to invest, to create more money and to create greater success and impact, in your business?

All right, my friends, that is what I have for you today. I am really calling out for you to ask yourself how you want to invest in your business for your long-term success. And if you would like to reach out and speak with me, and we can have a discussion and conversation, to see if Wired for Wealth is the business investment that is right for you, at this stage of your business.

Reach out to me, send me an email Debbie@debbiesassen.com You can also go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/wired-for-wealth. Check out the sales page and all the details are there. The nine modules that we’re going to be covering, your CEO skills, creating your signature offer, healing your relationship with money, marketing, sales skills, business foundations.

It’s all there. Go and check it out. I look forward to seeing you in Wired for Wealth. And I look forward to seeing you next week on the podcast. Bye-bye for now.

Thanks for listening to Mastering Money in Midlife. If you want more information on Debbie Sassen or the resources from the podcast visit MasteringMoneyinMidlife.com.