Ep #68: 6 Simple Tricks to Clear Expense Clutter and Make More Money as a Coach

Hey coach, I am sure that you've heard the phrase that you have to let go to grow. But did you know that when you apply this to your expenses, you free up cashflow, you increase how much money you're making, and you set the stage for tapping into creative new growth as a coach?

I'm Kendall. Tune in this week to discover six tricks to clearing expense clutter, why it matters for both the profitability of your coaching business and for your self-esteem. Plus my bonus trick for letting go of feeling guilty about the money that you've spent and that you're no longer going to be spending. It's all here for you now in this episode of The Money Coach School Podcast. Let's dive in.

Welcome to The Money Coach School Podcast. To really excel at coaching women, you have to be skilled, confident, and even fearless at money coaching. If you're passionate about women holding genuine money power and love supporting women entrepreneurs, then this is the show for you. Now, here's your host, money feminist Kendall SummerHawk.

Hello, beautiful coaches. Welcome to the new year. If you're listening to this in real time, it is the first full week in January. Now, I took the last two weeks off from working in my business so that I could do planning and visioning and lots and lots of time with my horses. I had pre-recorded a month of podcast episodes early, so those were all done in advance. And I just really slowed down the pace so much these past two weeks, which always feels for me so incredibly delicious. I just love it.

Now, I already have a ton of freedom built into my business, but this time always feels different. No real commitments, no meetings, no due dates, and that leads to massive creativity and spaciousness to re-envision what's next for the impact I'm bringing to you here in the coaching space and the direction that I'm taking my business. More about that soon. I will be sharing more. I'm very, very excited.

Now, the other thing that I did was I got really geeky about clearing clutter and I cleared out masses of stuff. Now I'm not a collector anyway, I'm not a pack rat and it's still easy to collect a lot of things. So I cleared out my garage, I cleared out my tech room. That's what we call the place where we keep our saddles and bridles and all the equipment. I cleaned out bathroom cabinets. I cleaned out the vitamin drawer. Yes, I have an entire drawer, big drawer, delegated to just vitamins. I cleared out past tax returns.

I mean, I think we're taking to the shredding service, it's 100 pounds of paper. Oh my God, right? I didn't make decluttering a chore though. I just did it one cabinet or one room a day. And before I knew it, everything had been done.

I also cleared digital clutter by unsubscribing from more than a dozen different newsletters and clearing out the clutter of my ideas list, which had over the last year had accumulated to over 100 different tasks. Things I thought I would implement, ideas, projects, all those things that felt really necessary or like such a good idea in the moment. But looking at them with fresh eyes during this quiet time, I had a very different perspective about them.

So that list is now cut in half, which is awesome. It's still too many things. But I also created a screening set of self-coaching questions to get super clear on the projects that are going to make the biggest impact for you, my loyal community of coaches, and for my business.

So yes, while I am absolutely a decluttering geek, I love it, I actually think it's fun to get rid of stuff, there's also an energetic and emotional benefit to this. You feel lighter. You're not dragged down by looking at decisions you may still be regretting or looking at items that fall into what I call the wishful thinking category. Trust me, I get you.

And letting go is always the first step to growth. You let go to grow. You let grow to lift your emotional burden. You let go to free up physical space. You let go to free yourself of unmade or partially made decisions. You let go to feel lighter, freer, liberated. You let go to access your creativity and your intuition.

And that brings us to money clutter, or more specifically, expense clutter. Money clutter is a little different. I'll cover that in a different episode. Today, we're focusing on expense clutter.

So what happened was right before the holiday, I led a three hour virtual retreat for my mastermind clients inside of Secret Energy of Money® and Secret Energy of Money is my close proximity money coaching mastermind. Now, as of this recording, Secret Energy of Money is waitlisted, but we are going to be opening enrollment very, very soon. So I encourage you to check it out and get on that waitlist.

You can go to secretenergyofmoney.com and I'll also link to it in the show notes. The retreat was on profit and it was amazing. Everybody totally loved it. And the last section was on expenses.

And when I created the retreat, I did not realize how much everyone was going to absolutely go bananas for that section. I thought, this is important, it contributes to profit. I geek out on it, clearing expense clutter, I don't know if anybody else will, let me put this in there. Oh my God, they went nuts for it.

Now this was not about budgeting or being frugal, that's not my style at all. The focus was on looking at the expenses in your business and you can do your personal life as well, it's really illuminating, and questioning each of them.

It's like, you know how you buy a blouse or for me it's a pair of pants thinking that you're going to love wearing them when you lose that extra 10 pounds. Only that never happens. So the pants sit there in your closet, mocking you every time you see them, right? Well, the same is true with expenses.

Several of my Secret Energy of Money clients happily pulled back the curtain. They were really honest and really vulnerable, it was awesome. They pulled back the curtain on their expenses to reveal software, services, programs, contractors that they were paying for every month and not using.

So for example, one client had $450 being paid out every single month for a particular service. Another had $295. Someone else shared she was spending money every month on software for the past two years that she intended to use, but hadn't yet. And I get it, I've done that too. And yes, it's a little embarrassing to admit to having done that, but the clarity and the release of emotional weight when getting rid of that expense is truly life-changing.

Because it's not just about saving the money, which is awesome of course, it's also about letting go to grow. It's about taking your power back because overpaying is a form of giving away your power.

On a practical level, when you take your power back by getting rid of those expenses. Number one, you create greater profit in your business. This is very elementary math, right? Number two, you decrease your cash flow requirements.

Oh my gosh, that is such a burden lifter. It really lightens your energy. And number three, you decrease your stress, yes. And number four, you free yourself energetically to make new decisions about your business. Decisions that help you add clients, charge what you're worth, and feel at peace with money, which is what I'm all about.

And just to look at how it adds up, that $450 my client found, it isn't just 450. It's $450 times 12, 12 months in a year, which is $5,400, $5,400. That $295 my other client found, it isn't just 295, it's 3,540. That is significant.

Now I've been going through clearing expense clutter all last year in my business. It's been a priority for us. And as a result, we increased our profit margin by nearly 10%. That's huge. I've also done it for my personal expenses as well. And because I am a money geek, I take it on as a game. I have a lot of fun with it. You know, my money archetypes, my sacred money archetypes are ruler, maverick and accumulator. So of course I'm gonna make a game out of it.

But at the end of the day, just by asking a few simple self-coaching questions, I'm now saving over $5,000 a year off of my horse care expenses. Again, that's huge. And I feel like an expense-saving ninja, which I'm super proud of. It feels pretty badass.

All right, so let's go through six tricks to clearing your expense clutter so that you can free up cash, so that you can feel amazing about your decisions and so that you can simplify your business. Even if you're brand new in business, you wanna keep it simple. Clearing expense clutter matters for both the profitability of your coaching business and for your self-esteem.

So we're going to focus these six tricks on your business, but you can apply this to your personal life as well. What you're going to need is to pull out either a profit and loss detail for the past year. That is a report that lists by category, ideally it's by category, but it lists where you've spent your money, line by line, where you've spent your money.

Now, if you don't have a P&L, profit and loss, that's okay. Just pull up your credit card statements. If you buy things on Venmo or PayPal, anything like that, you're gonna wanna pull that out as well. So let's go through, starting with trick number one.

Trick number one is to look at the past 12 months, not just one month. The problem with only looking at one month is it's easy to justify an expense. You might think, well, it's not that much, but when you look at it for the whole year and you see that expense month after month showing up, you see it's not just $97 or whatever, it's 97 times 12, which is over $1,100. Or that $49 a month for that piece of software you may or may not be using, that's nearly $600. I just think the impact of seeing a year is really eye-opening. So that's trick number one.

Trick number two, notice where you justify, defend, or minimize. Now you do not need to rethink each expense here. That's just going to be draining and time consuming. That's not what's necessary. Instead, you're noticing for each expense, where you start saying to yourself, well, it's not that much. Or you say, well, I've already spent X amount on this, which is really like saying, since I've already spent so much, I might as well spend more. Yeah? No. That is not a reason to keep going with an expense. Better to cut it off now and stop throwing money away.

You might also find yourself justifying or defending by saying, well, I still intend to use this. Really? Intend? I don't think so. This is what I call wishful thinking expenses. And for me personally, I find these the most energetically draining because it's an open loop. And the open loop of an expense represents an open loop of a project or an initiative that I haven't taken action on, which is the very essence of emotional, mental and expense clutter. So no justifying.

And regarding minimizing, minimizing is where you might say, well, I got this on sale at a reduced price and if I cancel it now, I'm gonna have to pay more later. Again, another open loop, cancel it. You may never even want that same software or expense later, and if you do, paying for it will make sense. Paying for something on sale month over month is not saving money, it's wasting money.

Trick number three, every expense needs to pay for itself. This is such an eye-opening way to look at your business expenses and to clear out that clutter. What if every expense in your business was directly tied to you making money? Notice I said directly tied, meaning no circuitous loop of someday, maybe, somehow. This one trick is what I've used to not only eliminate expenses for software, but also I've used it to make big changes in my marketing, in my strategy, and even in my team.

So an example of this is a number of years ago, I had a particular full-time employee on my team that I just could not tie back to helping us make money. And what had happened is I had allowed myself to get pressured into hiring her with the idea that we "needed" someone doing what she did. But there was no monetization plan for her role. And when I asked for that, I was met with vague answers. Now I admit, I bent that pressure for too long, many months, but in auditing my expenses to clear expense clutter, I said, no, I'm done. I cannot pretend any longer that this person is adding value when there's no tangible evidence of adding value.

Now a much smaller example of this was we were using a service that you see on websites sometimes you'll see those little pop-ups in the bottom left corner of a web page and it says you know so-and-so from XYZ location just downloaded this or just bought this. So it's a social proof piece of software, which is great, but it was expensive. I think it was $79 a month. That's nearly $1,000 a year. Only half the time it wasn't working. It was broken. So was it paying for itself? I can't say exactly, but I doubt it. Was it really helping us make more sales? Unlikely. So I canceled it. But if I had not done this clearing expense clutter exercise, I would have kept paying for it for another six to 12 months.

Trick number four, you need to feel good about the expense.

So when I'm clearing my expense clutter, I pay particular attention to the emotions that come up for me when I look at each expense. And if I feel resentful or negative or doubting or anything like that, I just circle it, and I keep going through the list of expenses, but then I come back to the ones I circled, and I do the self-coaching to discover what is that emotion? And I can tell you that it always comes down to either I no longer value what that expense is for, or it represents where I'm giving away my financial power. Either way, it's going to go. The energetic lift that happens when you let go of expenses that you don't feel good about is immense.

Another way I handle expenses I don't feel good about is I ask, what would it take for me to feel the value of this expense? So for example, the CRM, the customer relationship management software that we use, it's very expensive, it's very complex. We've been on it a long time, which is not a reason to stay, but we've been on a long time. We have a lot of history built into that. Do I feel good about that expense? No, I wasn't. I had not been feeling good about it. But changing to another system is time consuming, is a costly project, that's just not part of my plan for this next year.

So what I decided to do instead is because I wanna feel good about the expense, is to find ways to utilize the software better so that it's helping us enroll more clients into our coaching trainings and our coach certifications. And that feels great. So that's how I'm handling that.

All right, trick number five. Is there a less expensive alternative option? Just because you've been using a software or service or a program, it does not mean you can't switch to something else. Don't stay with something just because you've been with it a long time.

And that leads me to trick number six. Is the expense relevant to your business today? Not from the past and not in the future. The beauty of doing this clearing expense clutter exercise is you're making fresh decisions that are relevant to your business now, not carrying along baggage from months or years ago.

So for example, let's go back to my client inside of Secret Energy and Money who was paying that $450 for a service that seemed relevant at the time when she engaged in that service. It wasn't necessarily a bad decision. It was a decision that made sense at the time. Problem was it was a set and forget. She never rethought the decision. She hadn't done this kind of an audit, this clearing expense clutter, so it just kept dinging her 450 month after month after month.

The service was supposed to help her attract clients, but she actually had no way of knowing if it was working or not. There wasn't any real tracking. There weren't any systems that she put in place to tell if clients were coming from it. And she had not canceled it because she wasn't sure if it was helping or not. And she wanted it to work. Again, this had become a wishful thinking expense.

So I coached her and actually with just one coaching question, she knew she'd cancel it, which she did immediately. She was just beaming, she was so proud. And I was so proud of her because she took action instead of avoiding handling it. And as a result, she's now saving herself $5,400 a year. That is significant. And maybe even more importantly, she's no longer relying on a passive, hard-to-measure way of attracting new clients and is instead getting creative about how to proactively attract clients in ways that she can actually measure.

All right, so there's one more bonus trick I want to give you here, which is to give yourself one moment to mourn the loss. Okay, so what I mean by that is it can be painful to realize you've been spending money on expenses that you haven't used or that you have such a positive intention for initially, but they never panned out or that maybe it just slipped through the cracks and you didn't realize for months that you weren't using it, but yet you were still paying for it.

Trust me, I understand completely. My business is large enough and has a fair degree of complexity to it. So these things happen, I get it. What I do is I give myself one moment, not even a minute, just one moment to mourn that loss. And then I immediately look at how much I'm going to save or look at how good it feels to step back into my power with money. I focus on that good feeling and I say, phew, thank goodness I made this new decision.

All right, so to wrap up, for every expense in your business, you want to:

1. Notice where you may feel resentful or not good enough or shame or something less than positive, anything less than positive, and clean that up because you deserve to feel good about the money you spend in your business.
2. Notice where you may be defaulting to wishful thinking expenses and absolutely clean those up as well. Those are the ones I regret the most actually. It is okay to let go of a service or software now if you're not using it right now. You can re-sign up for it at another time if that time ever comes.
3. Ask yourself, does this expense support me in making more money right now?
4. Does this expense up level me in my business? You deserve the very best in what you spend money on. And that does not mean spending the most money, but what it does mean is getting the very best service and results from what you do spend your money on.

Now we're going to be talking a lot more about money because this is my zone of genius. I've known this for most of my life and there just are not that many people talking about money in both the practical and also in the energetic way in ways that are specifically focused for women like you. Small business owners with a big desire to make money and make a big impact.

I am a money feminist and my mission is to create genuine money power for women. I am your money coach. So keep tuning in each week to this podcast and stay tuned for new money trainings I'm creating coming up soon.

Remember, coaching changes lives, starting with yours. And if you could take two minutes or less to leave a five-star review for this podcast, I would so greatly appreciate it. Your review tells the algorithm to put this podcast in front of more women like you, big-hearted women who want to make money and impact.

Alright, thank you so much for listening and always thank you for your loyalty and I'll see you next week in our next episode.

Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of The Money Coach School Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you follow so you never miss an episode. Also, I would so love and appreciate if you would leave a 5-star review. Your review supports women just like you in discovering all of the juicy tips and insights I’m sharing here on how to coach women on money.

And if you want to learn how to excel at coaching women on money, definitely go to KendallSummerHawk.com and check out the wealth of money coach trainings that we have for you. Thanks so much for being part of this money coaching movement and for tuning into the show every week.