Last week kinda sucked for me. We discovered we had a very high tax bill and I spent the week trying to find all the little allowable deductions to bring that baby down! (My tax bill was more than I made in 2010, if you can believe that!)
The wonderful news, however, is that it meant I made more money in 2016 than ever before. The bad news was I didn’t save enough for taxes.
The really good news is I have a business that makes money, because I’ve set up my systems and plugged a lot of leaks. (So can you, by the way.)
In case you wondered why you didn’t hear from me last week, well, that was why.
Oh, yeah… we also discoverd a very active spambot on the website that we had to deal with. (It’s fixed now.) Even with the precautions we take, even with the firewall we have installed, even with etc., etc., … we still got a spambot.
Darn.
The good news is we figured out where the spambot was active, and we plugged that leak.
This is what business looks like:
you have systems that work,
but then you discover leaks.
In the above examples, I have a great bookkeeping system that works, but my leak was that I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the money I was making and how much I should have been saving in taxes. Regarding our spambot, well we update regularly and protect the website proactively, but we still got this annoying (and time-consuming!) bot.
I see lots of entrepreneurs with challenges with their systems… but especially around getting clients. They know how to connect with their prospective people, but the system falls apart when it comes to inviting them to work together, or obtaining payment, or what to do after they say yes.
Building a business is so often about recognizing and plugging leaks so that your next step is natural and easy.
The truth is the smoother your systems are, (i.e., the more plugged your leaks are),
the smoother your business will run.
And that, Divine One, is one of the oh-so-fun things about building your business: creating your systems and plugging your leaks.
Until tomorrow …
