Executives and entrepreneurs always seem concerned about their companies’ spending, and for good reason. Without sufficient revenue and cash flow to support necessary expenditures, an organization could go into unsustainable debt or be forced to make painful cuts.
Worrying too much about this situation doesn’t accomplish anything positive, however. Constant anxiety about a business’s financial state can produce levels of mental stress that lead to social and emotional dysfunction as well as physical symptoms of poor health. Leaders can’t suffer in this state for long before the effects take a toll on their personal and professional well-being.
Below, 13 members of Forbes Coaches Council suggest some effective ways for entrepreneurs and senior executives to limit anxiety over their business’s finances so that they can spend less time worrying and more time running the company.
Forbes Coaches Council members share ways to worry less about your company's finances.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.1. Focus On What You Can Control
Are there areas where spending can be curtailed? What are all of the expenses? Are they all necessary? How might you generate revenue if you cannot save on the expenses? How much is truly needed to sustain the business? Are you prepared to make tough decisions if the threshold cannot be met? Don’t borrow worries from tomorrow. Focus on what you can do today. - Denise Russo, SAP
2. Try Flipping The Perception
The question is the problem here, as it focuses on what’s not wanted and on doing “less” of something. Try flipping the perception. What can you do “more” of to get what you want? Explore what other perspectives and choices are available to you on your own or with someone you trust. How can you change and reorganize your thinking, acting, feeling and physiology to get you what you want? - Jay Steven Levin, WinThinking
3. Focus On Your Passion
Focus on the passion that brought you into business. Worry will always be there, whether it’s about money, clients, growth or one of a thousand issues business owners are concerned with. When we focus on the work, the problem we’re solving and the heart behind it, that’s when the worry fades. Fix your focus to fix your worry. - Miranda VonFricken, Miranda VonFricken - Masterminds & Personal Growth Coaching!
4. Turn Worry Into Activity
Worry can be a wonderful motivator. Allow your worry to motivate you to act on finding new prospects, new customers and new money. The more you move from worry to action, the less you’ll worry. Once you have completed your first sale, you will know that you can complete future sales. So stop worrying about money and put more action into creating more sales. - Ken Gosnell, CEO Experience
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5. Remove Emotion From Money
You need to remove a lot of emotion from money. How do I know this? I think I could write a book about how emotions and money should not be mixed. When I let the emotions into the mix too much, I know it can hurt how I view others. Over the years, if I attached a contract too closely to a need I had personally, it upset me unnecessarily. Financial planners and other cooler heads must prevail. - John M. O’Connor, Career Pro Inc.
6. Forecast Cash First
This changed my life as a CEO! Once we started forecasting how much cash we wanted in the bank each month, we tied this directly to our income statement, which was built on the things that flowed through our company—“widgets.” It gave me and the team great comfort to have visibility into the cash runway every day to make better and faster decisions that allowed me to sleep at night. - Shannon Byrne-Susko, Metronome United
7. Focus On Sustainable Growth Over Time
Depending on your business model and product, you might be able to attract investors, which will allow you to scale more rapidly. But most new entrepreneurs don’t have this luxury and need to bootstrap their development and growth. Avoid the temptation of locking yourself into unnecessary and expensive overhead costs and focus on the essential. - Jonathan H. Westover, Utah Valley University & Human Capital Innovations, LLC
8. Pay Yourself First
The best advice I ever heard was to make sure you pay yourself first, not last. If you’re not feeling the pinch in your personal bank account, you won’t feel as if you’re starving or failing. You don’t need to pay yourself six figures to start, but compensating your time and energy is important. The second-best advice is to make a plan and stick to it. - Kate Peters, Bright Voyage Leadership
9. Look For Partners In All Areas
Look for valid, qualified partners in all relevant areas to collaborate with. They can bring the necessary expertise and knowledge to help you run your business. Success is a team sport. As entrepreneurs, we cannot possibly have all the necessary skills required to be successful on our own. The required skills are countless, and we all have only 24 hours available each day. Leverage partnerships to avoid overwhelm. - Sharesz T. Wilkinson, The Speech Improvement Company
10. Fire Your Lowest Revenue Producers
Look at your client list. Fire your lowest 20% of revenue producers; they’re almost always the cause of 80% of headaches for you and your team. Use that extra room to get clients that represent your top 20%. This is the first thing we do with every client we help. Make a bigger offer to your best clients. Ask for referrals. When’s the last time you’ve gone hungry? Probably never, right? - Mike Koenigs, The Superpower Accelerator
11. Start By Lowering Expenses
Money can always be a concern, but it is something that you must control in order to have success. To worry less, figure out where in your budget you can cut expenses and spend less money, but also search through these items to see where you can grow revenue. Then, up your prospecting efforts by getting new clients and working to upsell current clients. - Jon Dwoskin, The Jon Dwoskin Experience
12. Use Positive Psychology
I may sound crazy, but use positive psychology. Find a song that talks about being rich, and whenever those thoughts enter your head, turn it up and dance and sing. Feel the power of changing your energy from worry to “more than enough.” It takes the edge off, and over time, you will find yourself removing negative thinking with ease. What we perceive is what we receive; so think positive! - Amera McCoy, McCoy Consulting LLC
13. Look To Your Past
We learned most of what we think about money during our childhood and adolescence. How emotional is money for you? Check out the attitudes toward money of the people who had a significant influence on you in your past: What did they used to say about money? Then, when you have clarity around what the people you grew up with thought, you may ask, “What attitude do I want to choose nowadays?” - Kai H. Simons, Agile Growth Academy GmbH
