In the next few years, we are likely to see a significant increase in small businesses, from home enterprises to startups. Many people have had to create sideline income or recover from losing their jobs in a shrinking job market. Jobs seeing the fastest decline are in production or administration support, primarily due to automation and digitisation of platforms and processes.

With the meteoric growth of social media, personal marketing has become an attractive option for those who don’t have a budget for marketing and advertising. Leveraging digital marketing is an incredible way to build a small business, but one needs to be strategic about it.

When a business is started inside of an urgent need to generate an income, the entrepreneur’s focus is often on earning money as fast as possible. Two common pitfalls of this situation are that they either try to grow too quickly and can’t sustain the growth, or the marketing messages focus more on the product or service and not on the people using it and how they will benefit.

The first pitfall requires better business modeling and less marketing; the second pitfall requires better marketing.

Startups who are struggling with marketing often think that they have a problem with discoverability, but the problem could be more complex and harder to see. It was in the mid-1990s that Bill Gates said, “Content is king!” and it has formed the baseline strategy for most self-marketers, often to their detriment. Too much time is spent trying to create new content (or feeling bad for not creating content), and not enough time is spent on positioning and distributing content.

If you’re not relevant and not “out there”, the right customers and clients won’t find you.

To build relevance, you need to position your message well. When there is pressure to generate income, we focus on the money. Wherever we can, we must focus on the difference we make. Keep reminding people why and how you help them.

To be “out there”, you need to distribute your content. Social media is great, but it’s not the only way to find and engage with your network. Email, direct messaging, and live events are still incredible options. Any way to deliver content to your ideal client is worth exploring and exploiting. Don’t limit yourself to Facebook. 

Begin with the people who know and like you already, starting with your existing customer or client base and creating opportunities for word-of-mouth marketing. This is savvy distribution as you don’t have to manage it all yourself; you simply create the momentum (distribution) and the direction (positioning) and let your network sustain the flow.

They say that getting old happens slowly, and then all at once. Most of the change around us occurs so gradually that we barely notice it; ageing, losing or gaining our fitness, losing or gaining weight, intimacy in relationships, and debt and investing. These are some of the areas of incrementally-unnoticeable change with which we’re most familiar.

Often, our experience begins with gaining or losing “Just one more”. Just one more day before we arrange that video call, one more day of rest before returning to our exercise, one more helping of food before we’re full, one more credit account.

It’s okay to have just one more, in the wrong direction… as long as we can recognise when it’s a habit before it becomes unhealthy for us. Obviously, we’d like to be in the practice of having just one more in the right direction. For example, just one more lap in the pool, one more yoga video, one more glass of water, one more payment on my credit card.

When change happens slowly, it’s easy to think that nothing is really changing yet. This is why it doesn’t seem to happen until it happens all at once. We can carry small changes for a long time, but the longer we carry them, the more noticeable they become.

Debt and unhealthy financial choices can seem small and manageable when they occur, but slowly, over time and with compounding interest (in the wrong direction), we can become overwhelmed. This is because it’s not the weight that matters; it’s how long we’re carrying it for that matters.

Imagine holding a glass of water out in front of you. It’s easy to do because it’s not heavy. But what if you had to hold that glass of water in front of you for an hour or an entire day. What if you tried to keep it in that position for a month?

The glass doesn’t get heavy; our arm gets tired. The same is true for our unhealthy habits. We can think that accounts here and there, a credit card here and there, are manageable, but over time if we keep adding just one more, we will be overwhelmed.

Luckily, the same principle applies in the opposite direction! If we decide to make just one more payment on our credit card, instead of one more payment from our credit card, we will slowly start to pay it off.

If each day, week or month, whatever is workable, we decide to reinforce one more healthy habit and release one more unhealthy habit, we may not see any change until all at once; we’re debt-free, healthier and happier. Not because of what we have, but because of the person we’ve become.

‘Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought,’ Marcus Aurelius.

How we engage with our money reflects what’s going on inside our heads, which is an extension of what’s going on inside our hearts. They’re all connected.

Our feelings affect our thoughts, which in turn direct our actions – but we can also turn that around by changing our actions to create new patterns of thinking, which in turn can change the way we feel about things. Regardless of the direction that change takes place, our mind is at the centre of this process.

This means that the actions we take with our spending, savings and investing (our money habits) will not only be shaped BY our thoughts, but can also shape the way we think and feel. It is why we often experience cognitive dissonance, or buyers remorse, after making money decisions.

The term cognitive dissonance describes the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. When there is an inconsistency between what people believe and how they behave, it motivates people to engage in actions that will help minimise discomfort.

Buyer’s remorse is an example of post-decision dissonance, where we feel stressed by a decision and seek to decrease our discomfort. Purchases that require high amounts of effort but do not bear high rewards are likely to lead to buyer’s remorse. If we focus on them, these thoughts will contribute to a largely negative mindset.

If we always regret purchasing risk products that protect us in emergencies or ill health, we will be more inclined to cancel those policies. It’s hard to spend money on something that will only benefit us in the uncertain future; cognitive dissonance will be fueled by thoughts that are inconsistent with trusting the process. If we are constantly looking for immediate gratification (spending and receiving, investing and seeing growth), our minds will be limited, and our thoughts will affect our feelings and actions.

Marketers know this well, so in most product booklets, they begin with a congratulatory message for choosing their product. If we want to shape our minds, we can set up systems of support that help us remember why we’ve made certain decisions that will be healthy for our future self. This is how we ‘hold in thought’ the choices to keep a healthy mind when it comes to our money (and all other things in life!). 

Support systems include working with a financial adviser that we trust and keeping a written record of our financial plan and policy portfolio (a one-page overview is a great start). We can also set milestones for moments of celebration and acknowledgement, like clearing our debt, saving a specific amount of money, or improving the way our family communicates about money. The bottom line is this: the more we think about something, the more likely it is to manifest in our lives. So if we keep thinking that we will never have enough money, we will most likely never have enough. But, if we learn to work with all we already have and hold thoughts of gratitude and awareness of our abundance, we will continue to have more than we need. It will directly affect how we feel about our money and the habits we form.

We all know that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. Even after we’ve gone, taxes are still levied against our estate. The more money we make, the more money the taxman looks to take.

Tax can be a serious stumbling block in our financial mindset, especially when we think about all the ways in which we are taxed, where that money goes and how it is ultimately invested into our community, whether it’s local or across the entire country. As we also know, most of our success in life happens in our head; how we think and what we think about are crucial to making healthy decisions and choices. So, if there’s a mental stumbling block, we need to flatten it or learn how to jump it.

First, we can change our perception of tax and accept that there are elements that we will never fully agree with. This is because tax is not just for us, but for everyone else too and whilst you can keep some of the people happy some of the time, you can’t keep all of the people happy all of the time.

We can think about our country like a country club. Every country club offers benefits to its members, and in order to enjoy these benefits, membership fees need to be paid on time. This keeps things equal, and it keeps the country club in a position to keep providing benefits to its members. The committee that runs a country club needs to account for ensuring that the ideals of their community are upheld and maintaining the facilities with the membership fees paid.

It’s a simple illustration, but it’s a helpful way to understand that when we choose to live in a country, we too need to pay the fees to maintain the resources, infrastructure and ideological leadership. The complexity with tax is that we move from a couple of hundred people in a very similar demographic to millions and millions of people across multiple demographics. But at its core, if we understand that tax is designed to help us contribute to shared resources, we can start to flatten or jump this mental hurdle.

Second, we can change our behaviour when it comes to earning money and paying taxes. Life is already so busy and complex, if we don’t pay regular attention to our money and our taxes, we will always find ourselves rushed and stressed over the tax season. Here are a few things to do differently this year:

1. If you’re not money savvy (most of us aren’t), find a financial adviser, planner or coach who you trust and make sure you have regular meetings with them.
2. Keep track of your income and your spending. This is the fundamental basic law of good money management; your financial adviser will help you with this.
3. If you don’t pay tax every month, keep a small savings account active where you can pay your estimated tax. Smaller monthly amounts are far easier to stomach than bi-annual or annual payments. You’ll also accrue interest on the saved money, which will help you when payments are due.
4. When you check in with your financial adviser, stay up to date with tax exemptions or tax-free savings initiatives to maximise your financial potential, both in the short and long term. These options and rulings are often updated in annual budget speeches and will affect how you move towards financial independence.

Being tax savvy is not about working hard at the end of the tax year; it’s about understanding that tax is part of our daily financial planning. If you need to chat – let’s set up a time and ensure your financial situation is at its healthiest.

“Remember the past, plan for the future, but live for today, because yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come.”

The best time to live is in the present. It’s easy to get lost in a daydream of how life could have been different or how good life used to be. It’s equally easy to succumb to the speculative dreaming of what might happen in the future.

Believing in a better future is hope, and being confident of what we hope for; that is faith. Faith is grounded in the reality of the past; hope is looking to the anticipated reality of the future. In this way, to truly live with purpose today, we need to remember our past and plan for our future.

But there is a difference between thinking about the past or future and living in it. Sometimes we live in the past because it’s familiar; we know what happened; there are no surprises. So too we might live in the future because we are deeply dissatisfied with where we are.

When we dwell on thoughts to the point that they consume most of our energy and attention, this is when we move from thinking to dwelling. As the old proverb goes, “home is where the heart dwells”.

When the past was really good, we can be tempted to live in our memories because just thinking back on it gives you a feeling of comfort and happiness. And, if the past was really bad, we can live in the future seeking the same comfort and happiness.

We need to identify this in our lives because we can’t change the past and we cannot predict the future. The only place we can make changes is in the present moment. No matter how certain our plans might be, if some major event happens, that can all dissipate into the ether with the snap of a finger.

Being present to our present is where we regain and maintain control of our power to choose. When you speak to people with children or people on their deathbed, a common regret is missing their kids growing up or wishing they’d spent more time with their loved ones.

If you feel like you’re not quite focussed enough on the present, grab a journal and a pen and jot down one of these questions on each page. When your mind wanders and you find yourself dwelling on something that is taking you away from the present moment, jot it down on that page. This will help you release it from your focus, but still, be able to recall it to help you in your planning.

1. Is there one particular period from the past that you find yourself clinging to?
2. Are you frustrated with where you currently are in life?
3. What causes you to be anxious for the future?
4. What are you most grateful for in life?

Whilst these are helpful life questions, they’re also rooted in the core motivations for how we work with our money. When we can slowly break these questions apart and work through them, we can start to understand our money better and embrace what it means to remember the past, plan for the future and live for today.