5 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Improve Their Personal Finances Immediately

Being an Entrepreneur comes with many challenges and hurdles to overcome.

Unfortunately, one of those prevalent challenges deals with your financial health.

Most entrepreneurs either fall behind with personal finances or neglect them entirely. This can put you in a position where you are burdened by financial stress.

The last thing any entrepreneur like yourself needs is just that; more stress.  

While it can be unsettling, it’s the reality. This is what you signed up for.

But just because you’re making daily sacrifices, doesn’t mean that you are not able to make important financial decisions.

In fact, quite the opposite is true. Now is the time to practice and refine good financial habits, and look for ways where you can improve your personal finances so that you don’t feel the financial burden any more than necessary.

Financial fatigue is a real thing that impacts many entrepreneurs, but also something you can improve with some discipline. 

Here are 5 ways you can improve your personal finances immediately.

1. Take control of your spending habits

In the early stages of building your company, it’s critical that you exercise complete control over your spending habits. Not just for your business and company related expenses, but for your own personal finances as well.

One of the biggest pitfalls that keeps entrepreneurs and others alike from achieving their financial goals is the lack of a plan in place for their personal spending and savings habits. The absence of structure and discipline in these two areas can end up leaving you in a difficult financial situation.

The root of the problem for most entrepreneurs comes from not tracking where your money outflows. This can be extremely detrimental to your financial plan and can undermine your  goals.

Chances are that you track your spending when it comes to your company expenses. Don’t neglect this when it comes to your own personal finances.

If you’re not sure exactly how to get control of this one, start with taking a look at your previous expenses and spending habits. Take a look back and review the last  three months of bank statements on everything you’ve purchased (personally) and start writing them down. 

Once you have them written down, start categorizing them by expense types  so you can better understand the nature of your spending. 

Doing this will give you a good indicator and baseline for your first month of budgeting.  Again, it’s important to keep in mind that it won’t be perfect. Most likely your budget will require some adjustments along the way.

Just like any exercise, the more you practice this, the easier it becomes. Eventually, you’ll get to a point where this becomes second nature. 

There’s a good chance that almost immediately you will notice areas where you are spending way too much. Start cutbacks on those expenses first.. Ideally, you will want to find ways where you can eliminate most of your variable expenses (or the ‘wants’) so that you can focus on saving more and increasing your savings rate.

2. Create (and stick to) a financial plan

Would you navigate your current business without any sort of plan, assumptions, or direction in place? Probably not.

That would only increase your chance of risk and failure.

Yet, most entrepreneurs are managing their personal finances completely blind. In fact, it’s more than just entrepreneurs. Most people are navigating their personal finances without having a proper financial plan in place to guide them.

Having a financial plan is necessary to ensure a successful financial outcome. Your plan is there to help guide your financial decisions with confidence so that you are continually working towards your  goals. 

There are a lot of reasons why entrepreneurs don’t currently have a financial plan. Traditionally, financial planning has been reserved for wealthy individuals, which excludes many  entrepreneurs just getting started. Additionally, financial planning has been known to be a time-consuming process, taking hours, days, and even weeks. This incentivizes  entrepreneurs to  choose running their business  over taking the time to build their financial plan.

Savology has good news. Now you don’t have to spend hours building a personal finance plan. 

Savology, which also happens to be a RevRoad portfolio company, provides free financial planning in just five minutes.

As an entrepreneur, having access to free, accurate, and personal financial planning tools is priceless. That’s why you need Savology.  

3. Get an accountability partner 

This one can be a real game changer and the additional motivation you need to help keep you focused and stay the course with your financial planning journey.

An accountability partner is exactly what it sounds like. It’s someone who helps you stay accountable to your financial goals.

Typically, this person ends up being a spouse or significant other. However, it can be any individual that you trust. Which means an accountability partner could end up being a close friend, a relative, or even your co-founder. Remember, trust and reliability is the most important thing with an accountability partner. 

Trust and reliability are important because you need to be able to share information (and likely details) of what you are working and be comfortable asking for their help to get you there.

If this is something that you’re considering, which we highly recommend setting up regular “check-ins”. This will allow you to have regular conversations about money, so that you can help one another stay motivated, focused, and working toward your goals.

4. Create and consistently review financial goals

Just as you would with your business, creating and reviewing personal financial goals is critical to your success.

The reason is simple. Setting goals is one of the best ways to create clarity around your personal finances, so that you understand what you are working towards and how you will get there. 

Remember, when you’re setting goals, don’t just focus on long-term goals. It’s equally important to set both short-term and long-term goals that work together. This is  comparable to setting monthly, quarterly and annual goals for your business.

Your long-term financial goals are there to keep you on track holistically, while your short-term financial goals are there to keep you on track day-to-day.. Both should complement one another and play a vital role in the financial decisions you are making.

Lastly, before you move ahead with any type of goals, it’s in your best interest to make sure that you are setting S.M.A.R.T. goals. The acronym stands for:

  • Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
  • Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
  • Achievable (agreed, attainable).
  • Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
  • Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).

5. Diversify your risk by generating new income streams

As an entrepreneur, protecting your income is a financial priority. There’s a good chance that you are not paying yourself market rates, at least not right away, which is why it’s critical that you protect what little income you might be earning.

While it’s important that you are devoting as much of your time and resources to building your company, it’s equally important to make sure that you are not jeopardizing your income and putting yourself in a position where going bankrupt is a possibility.

Because of this, you’ll want to focus on generating new income streams, whether that’s from a side hustle or passive income. This can provide you with earning opportunities that will help you pay your necessary bills, allow you to contribute to your monthly savings, and importantly extend your runway.

By establishing multiple income streams, you’ll be able to diversify and lower your personal financial risk. Ultimately, this gives  you more financial resources to build your business.

The concept of this is similar to creating additional revenue streams within your business. By selling through new channels or introducing new products, you create additional opportunities for sales growth. What you are doing is essentially protecting your business against financial risk. If one sales, or revenue, channel underperforms, your business still has a chance of surviving and thriving because of the established revenue and profitability derived from existing channels. 

Moving beyond financial fatigue 

Financial fatigue is real for the majority of entrepreneurs. But it doesn’t have to be, nor should it be the default option. By using the five tips above, you’ll be well on your way to making steady improvements to your personal finances. 
Importantly, it’s critical to focus on building a personal financial plan, before anything else. In just five minutes you can build a free, personal, and accurate financial plan with Savology. Your plan will show you your current financial trajectory and our strengths and weaknesses. That way you can focus on addressing the areas that need attention right away.  Build your free financial plan today!

6 TikTok Tips for Business

TikTok has quickly become a dominant platform in the world of social media marketing. Gathering user-generated content, cross-pollinating content, and advertising are some of the main reasons why your company may want to utilize TikTok. 

Getting started on a new social platform can be overwhelming, so here are a few tips to help you through the process. 

  1. Be Fun & Vulnerable
    People are on TikTok for a lot of reasons, but the common denominator is to be entertained. If your content is not entertaining or interesting, then it is a waste of time. Be fun, real, and vulnerable.
  1. Keep it Short
    Videos can only be up to 60 seconds on TikTok; however, many gravitate to stay within the 15-second range.
  2. Focus on the Music
    Music is a critical piece of creating shareable, popular content on TikTok. Utilize the trending music and original sounds in your videos.
  3. Maintain Consistency
    When you consistently create content around a specific topic, you generate interest. If users find your content relevant, useful, and interesting, they start following you. Gradually, you start getting more likes, shares, and engagement..
  4. Collaborate
    Every industry has influencers. Find out who they are and make something happen. Reach out to them, duet or react to their videos, and participate in their challenges.
  5. Use Trends & Hashtags
    Check out the “Discover” tab for trends. If you see something relevant that you like, copy it. Make it your own. Expound on the creativity of others. Find trending hashtags that are relevant to your business.

Download your “TikTok Tips” sheet here. Enjoy!

Watch the free TikTok workshop here.

Where Marketers are Spending Their Money in 2020

Written By: A.J. Rounds

2020 Marketing Landscape 

We are now entering the second quarter of 2020. At the time of this writing, you and I are currently under heavy restrictions of quarantines and physical distancing for COVID-19. However, that doesn’t mean that marketing budgets disappear. In many cases, companies are ramping up their marketing spend. The following paragraphs are the top marketing objectives, budgets, and results predicted for 2020. 

Top Marketing Strategies and Objectives 

Marketing channels most implemented in 2019 and carried through 2020 continue to be email, social media advertising, and blogging/content marketing tactics as reported by Sales and Marketing Management. SEO strategies follow as a close fourth place. 

Top marketing objectives for 2020 include converting leads to customers, increasing sales leads, increasing brand awareness, producing thought leadership content, and increasing website traffic. Interestingly enough, SMM also reports that most leads are still found through referrals, trade shows, and events. The percentages are as high as 63% (referrals) and 44% (trade shows) respectively. Print advertising and direct mail are the least utilized at 3% overall. 

Marketing Dollars Spent

In support of these marketing strategies, SMM also reports that 56% of budgets are being allocated to digital marketing, 52% of budgets to website development, 36% to trade shows/events, and 27% to content/email marketing.  

RevRoad Marketing Initiatives for 2020

This data coincides with current RevRoad and portfolio company marketing strategies.  RevRoad is also ramping up our marketing spend online, building home and landing pages to convert that marketing spend, generating more content on LinkedIn, social media, and blogs, while still building person to person relationships (at a socially safe distance). RevRoad continues to invest resources into new videos produced by our amazing video team to promote online. 

As mentioned, we will be revamping our website to be more focused on you and other entrepreneurs who’d like to apply. This includes restructuring and formatting content better. Our goal certainly falls in line with converting leads into sales and increasing brand awareness. As a start, we recently launched a services page complete with videos to ‘show’ not ‘tell’ about the services we offer to scalable companies like yours. 

Summary

Without question, the largest portion of marketing budgets for 2020 will be allocated to digital strategies. Based on what SMM reports and what we’ve seen at RevRoad, the marketing channels mentioned above produce the greatest ROI. 
Good luck with your marketing efforts. Whether it’s a pandemic or other changes to the economy, don’t be afraid to adjust your marketing strategies to accommodate changing business needs. Keep going. You’ve got this!

Responsibility in Families

Written By: A.J. Rounds, Chief Marketing Officer at RevRoad

Responsibility in family. What a fantastic topic. Families come in all shapes, sizes, and varieties. 

Cultures and societal norms can play a big part in what defines responsibility in every family. In other words, it can be defined in many ways. 

Most can agree that parents have a responsibility to care for their children’s well being, while children have the responsibility to learn to be responsible family members, good citizens, and demonstrate responsible behaviors.

Teaching Children Responsibility

One of the ways in which children can learn responsibility is by watching and emulating the examples set by parents.

Being responsible means taking action.

It is beneficial for kids to learn that helping yourself, your family, others, and the community is a choice. But taking that first step towards responsibility is not always easy. 

Responsibility often requires an act of courage.  

Parents have the responsibility to guide and support courageous behaviors. 

Taking the initiative to be responsible requires a push out of our own bubble. It requires us to leave our comfort zone for the sole purpose of helping someone else

Sometimes, the choice to do so is simple. If we see a pregnant woman on the train it’s a good idea to offer our seat. If we see someone struggling with many bags, we should open the door.

These small acts of kindness are essential to creating a responsible society and are often taught within the family unit. But there are other, different types of responsibility that we need to partake in as well — actions that require a little more courage and choice

These behaviors are often less clear and require value judgements, judgements taught and supported at home.

Recognizing Responsible Situations

Think back to being a kid on the playground. Maybe, as we dangled from the monkey bars, we noticed another child bullying a classmate. The easiest thing to do would be to ignore the incident and keep playing. The responsible thing to do, however, would be to stand up to the bully. Doing so would be scary but show bravery, and ultimately a powerful act of responsibility.

Responsible situations happen daily. There are always opportunities to act responsibly. 

 What about stepping in to help out a community after a disaster? Or reporting to the scene of a crime?  These things can be difficult but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what we can to help.

Sometimes responsibility means inserting ourselves into situations in order to do good, and teaching family members why and when it’s important to do so. 

Let’s make a resolution to find the courage within ourselves to take on responsibilities where necessary and teach family members to do the same. By teaching responsibility in families, we are preparing the world’s next generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Savology Secures $750,000 Seed Round to Democratize Financial Planning

Savology, a Utah-based fintech startup providing free financial planning, oversubscribed a $750,000 seed round of funding to make financial planning more accessible and affordable than ever before.

Several strategic investors participated in the funding round, including:

“Savology has the potential to fundamentally change the direction of personal finances in America,” says lead investor Brady Murray. “I look forward to seeing the positive impact that Savology will have on both households and the broader industry as they improve access to financial planning and other financial services.”

After creating a free financial plan, Savology users get access to a financial report card showing them
their financial strengths and areas that need improving most.

Savology boasts a considerable lineup of financial service provider partners that include the likes of MassMutualAcornsLivelyM1 FinanceSelfBlooomThe ZebraCredible and many others. Savology is on track to expand the network of partners to 50 providers this year.

“We are grateful to the early investors and partners who believe in our mission and make it possible for us to elevate Savology to new levels,” says Spencer Barclay, Founder and CEO of Savology. “We know that we have an incredible amount of work ahead of us, but we are up for the challenge to help millions of households achieve financial security.”

Savology’s Founder & CEO, Spencer Barclay, shares how Savology is helping American households improve their
financial well-being to a crowd of thousands.

To date, Savology has helped nearly 10,000 households improve their personal finances with its free financial planning platform. With the current economic uncertainty and recent stock market declines, there has never been a better time to help Americans with their personal finances. Savology plans to use this funding to help 100,000 users build free financial plans this year.

For more information about Savology visit savology.com.

For media inquiries, please contact Bri Ray, Communications Specialist, at (801) 472-2124 or press@savology.com


Your financial future starts today

Savology is a free planning platform where you can build a free, unbiased, personalized financial plan in about 5 minutes. Your Savology plan will give you action items to start working on as well as an overview of your current financial situation. After you have made some progress, Savology can connect you with some of the world’s top providers to help you accomplish your financial goals.

Build your free plan today

It’s Time to Champion Underrepresented Talent

Diversity, or the lack thereof, has been the topic of conversation as the highly anticipated Silicon Slopes Tech Summit came to a close. Though tech companies in the Silicon Slopes area have provided an influx of new jobs in Utah, the amount of underrepresented talent employed by these companies is low. We could blame it on Utah’s general “lack of diverse population”, on the homogenous religious communities, or on the difficulty of finding qualified underrepresented talent. We could  blame it on numerous factors, but it doesn’t change the fact that underrepresented talent in Utah is just that—underrepresented.

While Utah’s startup community is on the road to becoming the next Silicon Valley, companies face significant recruiting challenges in the most competitive talent market since 1969. “Leaders can no longer afford to ignore any opportunity that could present qualified candidates. This includes creating an inclusive environment where everyone feels like they have a place”(Mentorli, 2020). The truth is, Utah is 78% white and predominantly Mormon. While many of the cultural responsibilities that come with Utah’s dominant religion prove beneficial for entrepreneurs, “the very thing that is transforming Utah into the next tech mecca could be the very thing that ends up holding it back” (Bluestein, 2020). 

It’s no question that the companies on the Slopes are in need of cultural pivots to better recruit, hire, and retain more underrepresented talent. The call for diversity has been issued, and a new company, called Mentorli, appears to have the solution. Through their mentorship platform, Mentorli increases a candidate’s chances of landing a job by 15x. “We’re leaning into that power to close the opportunity gap underrepresented candidates face,” says CEO Luke Mocke.

Creating equal opportunity for job seekers is simply the right thing to do, but it turns out there’s a significant business case too. For one, there’s a linear relationship between earnings and racial diversity on the senior leadership team—to the tune of .8% in earnings for every 10% lift. However, the most compelling reason for fast growing companies in the US, and Utah specifically, to hire diverse talent is to open their talent pool for future hires. Homogenous organizations unknowingly marginalize talent that looks different to them. To ensure they’re creating an inclusive environment for all qualified talent, they need to create a representative workforce. Failing to do so is already creating monumental challenges as minorities in the US become the majority. 

Mentorli supports this philosophy by empowering underrepresented employees to recruit candidates from similar backgrounds—showing candidates how to set themselves up for success in the interview process and thrive in a new environment—building diverse networks from the grassroots level. Read Mentorli’s full press release here. As a participant in the recent Silicon Slopes Tech Summit, Mentorli is offering a FREE first hire to companies that schedule a demo before February 7, 2020. Check it out today!

RevRoad hosts Women Tech Council Cofounder Sara Jones

We continued RevRoad University series in July with a focus on marketing video and the value of lean growth strategies. The free series is focused on business leaders and startup employees, and was open to the public.

Each RevRoad University event includes a workshop about an important element of business growth. Then, over lunch, I get the opportunity to interview local serial entrepreneurs about their experiences.

This month started with a presentation on the importance of storytelling in video from RevRoad Video Director Tigran Mirzoyan. He talked about the history of visual storytelling, the importance of asking the right questions and having humility, and how to create a story arc.

After lunch, sponsored by Squire & Company, PC, Sara joined me on the RevRoad stage to tell her story. She talked about how she transitioned to entrepreneurship after working as a patent attorney, and how much the landscape has changed for women in tech since 2007.

In fact, much of that change may be due to her efforts. Sara cofounded Women Tech Council in 2007, and has helped lead the nonprofit organization ever since. The group is laser focused on providing only what the community needs, and was careful to listen to feedback at every stage of growth. Today, the organization has 10,000 men and women members around the country, has helped thousands of college women in STEM careers and has inspired 12,000 high school girls through the SheTech program.

The complete transcripts and video recordings of the event will be available soon. To watch previous #RevU workshops and interviews, visit us on Youtube and be sure to follow our channel and let us know what you think in the comments.

Then, mark your calendar for our next edition of RevRoad University. We’ll host San Diablo Churros Founder Scott Porter, and focus on branding and raising capital.

 
RevU July – Gallery
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