What are the Top 3 Ways You Make a Difference?
Ian Berry at the Differencemakers Community asked what are the top 3 ways we as individuals make a difference.
Here are 3 ways I make a difference:
1. I take my responsibility in ‘Aiding Evolution of Consciousness of 1 New Human’ (i.e. I am a mother to my 18 month old son) very, very seriously. Sometimes a bit too seriously… for example, last night I responded to a friend’s email about what I wanted my boy to be when… and her response to my response was something like, “good grief it’s like reading a prologue to a book!” – not in scope but perhaps in analysis.
From this need to make this particular difference, I consciously decided to be a “stay at home mom” and reorganize my business ventures around my son. Right now because my son is still very young (not yet 2 years old), I work when he naps and after he goes to bed. I am now forced to innovate in ways I never imagined, and made me an even more effective entrepreneur. I consider this “controlled adversity”, and essential to my own evolution as a human being, entrepreneur, and mentor.
2. I challenge myself to do the right things even when sometimes I’d much rather save myself a whole lot of trouble and do the easy thing. I became an entrepreneur because of wanting to do ONE right thing.
From this need to make this particular difference, I consciously decided to quit a 6-figure career and become an entrepreneur with a very specific mission. I learned how to bootstrap my business and run a lean, mean operation, and at the same time, I never skimped on my own learning and personal development. I had invested over $30,000 within the first few years of becoming an entrepreneur to work with coaches and mentors!
So when I write about the importance of investing in your learning, I’m not doing that so you’ll want to hire me as your coach or mentor (although you’re welcome to apply if reading this fuels a fire), but because I have personally seen the returns on investment from my own experience.
3. I view my role as a case study and sometimes guinea pig, with what writing and speaking talents I may have specifically so that I can share the lessons I have learned in life and through whatever pain or mistakes I have faced.
My very first step in the fulfillment of this role (before I knew this was one of the important roles I have in life) was back in 1998 when I suffered from clinical depression and felt scared and alone. Knowing that if I felt this way, others may feel the same, I began sharing my personal stories of pain and healing online with my mental health website in 1998, which still exists today.
What was born from this need to make this particular difference? You are reading one of them – all the articles and blogs and books I have written, were descendants of this need to make this difference in this way. This is how I came to be sharing all this with you.
You know what’s funny?
Out of our own needs to make a difference in the lives of others, we end up making the biggest difference in our own lives.
Image by Miamiamia (India)
Start Bookkeeping Right with Outright.com
This year I decided to go “business 2.0″ as much as possible. Sure, I’ve been using (and loving) online bill pay and automatic recurring payments for years, but with an active toddler, 5-6 blogs, one consulting business and another one on the way, I seriously needed an online solution that is intuitive to use on a daily basis. The more straightforward and less frills, the better: I’ve tried products like Quicken – several times, actually – but the learning curve was way too steep for me. I have no doubt that if I took the time to learn Quicken, I’d get good mileage out of it, but I don’t have time (you read that list of stuff on my plate already, right?)!
I started using Outright.com (when it used to be called GoBootstrap.com) to track my business P&L since the beginning of this year, and I LOVE IT! …so much that I’m writing this unsolicited testimonial even though I’m not going to need that free domain name promotion they’re running right now. I also want to take this opportunity to share some tips with budding microbusiness / small business entrepreneurs who want to use Outright.com as a business tactical tool, not just an accounting tool. Therefore I’m going to focus on my favorite feature in Outright.com: Reports.
Reports let you see your business performance on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. If you look at the Outright.com screenshot of reports, you’ll see that by default there is 1 category under Income: Sales.
Here’s what I do: I assign my “Income” into different REVENUE TYPES by labeling the “Received from” category as a passive or residual income versus an active income. Passive and residual incomes are revenue that you receive on a continual and enduring basis after investing an initial (often significant) level of time, effort, and resources into a product or service. Active income, on the other hand, is what I’d consider “job-like earnings”: If you don’t do it, you won’t earn it.
This allows me to view not only how much my gross sales are, but also where the sales are coming from. This is extremely useful for measuring the effectiveness of your business tactics. For example, if I looked at my monthly sales trends and I see that a particular revenue channel isn’t performing as expected, I would see this in the reports column. Then I can do something about it – whether I’d refine my tactics or eliminate that revenue channel.
Based on this minor tweak, I was able to create new approaches to increase revenue in one of my channels, and also to detect the extreme poor performance in another one of my channels. If you sell mostly to individuals (for example, if you operate a coaching business), then you can use the names of your clients to see who your top clients are and who are repeat clients. This is a useful way to even look at the “value” of your clientele and see if you’re happy with how you’ve strategized your business.
I had tried the Freshbooks link-up feature but didn’t continue with FB because of the restrictions of client # for free feature, and I’m a small enough outfit where i can still generate my own biz invoices or even use the Google checkout/Paypal invoicing features.
I also love the estimated taxes. not sure how accurate this is given that my biz tax situation can get complicated, but it’s helpful to track what you’ve paid and how much you may still need to pay based on the standard deductions. my accountant will tell me how the tax feature worked out.
The feature I’d wish to see is to have a pie chart graph like Mint.com does with expenses and income. it’s another way to visualize how our business is performing.
I wonder if the future “pro” or fee-based features will allow a user to track multiple businesses under the same account name. I’ll need to know the answer to that since I’m in the process of creating the foundation for another business that I plan to launch later this year.
If you use Outright.com and have good tips to share to make this more of a business performance tracking tool, I’d love to hear from you!
Disclosure: This review is 100% my own opinion. I’m not compensated by Outright.com in anyway and the company has no control over the content I’ve written here.
