There’s a tale that’s rarely told in the business world. It’s a tale of two companies. Both make seven figures annually. But the business owners behind them receive a vastly different amount of money as actual take-home pay.
What happens once money comes into a business? Where does it go from there? The lack of real disclosure on this in online entrepreneurial circles has led to lots of people focusing solely on revenue goals, not their business’ actual profitability.
So in this episode, I break it all down, talk some numbers, and tell you exactly what it means to have a six-figure take home income, not just a six-figure business.
On this episode of Promote Yourself to CEO:
3:29 – How much time do you have to invest in your business? Here’s how to take a look at your situation to see what works best for you.
7:16 – How much energy do you have available to you? And what do you need to do to maintain it?
9:48 – Instead of pulling a revenue goal out of thin air, ask yourself this question. I reveal the right way to come up with your number and a free resource you can use.
14:28 – I briefly mention why defaulting to your last salary as your revenue goal won’t work.
15:55 – I talk about what goes into running a business, how to use that information to reverse engineer your target, and a super simple way to figure out your revenue goal.
23:46 – Setting aside a little bit of your profits every month really starts to change the game and your perspective. I break down some percentages in detail.
31:08 – I look at the math behind a $100,000 annual revenue goal and how much you really need to earn to make that your take-home pay.
36:27 – How much tax are you going to pay at this point? This is where you’ll want to get yourself a good CPA.
39:10 – Before wrapping up, I go over the biggest piece of misinformation about growing a bigger business. It stops many from setting a higher revenue goal.
Show Links
- Get Paid Calculator
- Profit First by Mike Michalowicz
- Racheal on Instagram
- Leave a review on iTunes
I have a secret for you today. There could be two businesses, both making seven figures a year, a million dollars in gross revenue and the business owners could be taking home radically different amounts of take-home pay. But we rarely talk about that. We rarely talk about what happens once that money comes into the business and where it goes from there. This has led to a lot of people focusing only on revenue goals and not thinking about the actual profitability of their business. Today, I want to break it all down. I want to talk about some numbers and talk about exactly what it means to have a six-figure business versus a six-figure take-home income.
Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook. I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service-based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.
Hey there, CEOs. Welcome back to another episode of Promote Yourself to CEO. Now, if you happen to catch last week's episode on creating a big enough business, then maybe you asked yourself some of the questions that I shared with you to figure out what is the actual size for your big enough business, how much revenue are you wanting for that big enough business. There are a couple questions here to ask yourself to determine this. Remember, the perfect size for you so that you can enjoy your life right now, so that you're not waiting until some mythical someday to finally reach a level of success that allows you to have the freedom, the flexibility, the time with your family, the time for yourself, and time for your health and your well-being, this is what we're aiming for. Finding that number is just a jumping-off point. It doesn't mean that your business can't grow.
In the last episode, I talked a lot about the growth trajectory my business has gone through as an entrepreneur, especially as I've transitioned through different life stages. I started my business in 2008, then got pregnant almost immediately afterwards to have my twins and it put into laser focus what my priorities were, and helped me to come up with these boundaries, these non-negotiables for what I wanted to have in my business so that I could prioritize my life. One of the things that I want you to take away from this series is that this is all within your control. You get to decide and you don't have to model your version of success off of someone else's version of success. If someone else's version of success came at the expense of their life, their health, their well-being, their family, their relationships, then you can choose a different way. Let's dig into some of the things you might want to be asking yourself and let's actually get into some of the numbers to figure out what that big enough business actually needs to look like.
First, how much time and energy do you have available for your business? Now, there are some people who have the time and the energy to work 80 hours a week. Honestly, I find that this usually comes from people who have no major obligations. They have no major responsibilities. They often have no health problems. For them, 80 hours a week is no big thing. They have it. They can put that time in. They have the time and the energy. But if you aren't 20 something and you do have kids, you do have responsibilities, you do have aging adults, and you do have chronic health conditions and all these other things that would make 80 hours a week pretty much impossible for you, then we have got to think about this question seriously because if you don't know how much bandwidth you have, if you don't know how much capacity you have, how much time and energy you actually have to dedicate towards this business, it's really easy to overextend yourself. When you overextend yourself, you find yourself on the fast track to burnout, the fast track to major health conditions, the fast track to alienating your family, your friends. It is often a recipe for disaster for a lot of us.
For anyone who's listening to this and you are in that boat, I hear you. I hear you because when I started my business, I honestly didn't have any major obligations. I was in my 20s. I was married but we didn't have any major financial obligations. We didn't have kids yet, so for me at the time, I could jump all in but once I got pregnant with my twins and suddenly had to navigate not only being pregnant with twins but being put on bed rest, and other things that came along with that, then having these tiny humans, the game changed. I had to change along with it. I had to change my expectations of what I realistically had available to invest into this business. Ask yourself how much time do you have to invest in this business. If you aren't 100% sure, pull out a calendar, honestly, pull out a calendar and block out the major things you have going on in your life right now to figure out what that time availability looks like.
I always tell my clients in The CEO Collective, “Start with your life first. How much time do you want to have set aside each day for your own health and well-being, for your morning routine, for your walk or working out every day, for meal prep, for spending time with your spouse or your partners, for spending time with your kids or your family or your friends, for doing any other hobbies? How much downtime or quiet time do you need?” If you were to map out your ideal day or your ideal week or your ideal month, like how much time are we actually looking at? Chances are, if you are plugging in your life first, it's not 80 hours a week. It's just not going to be that much because there's only 168 hours a week. If you are sleeping eight hours a night, then working 80 hours a week, you have very little time for anything else. The math does not work. Think about that. How much time do you actually have available if you were living the ideal?
Then you want to ask yourself how much energy you have available. Could you actually work those hours and stay focused? That is key because you can put in 80 hours but research shows that after about 30 to 35 hours, productivity drops dramatically. We aren't as a species able to hold focus for that long. In general, most of us, our brains work better in short focused bursts versus long periods of time doing focused work. Unless you're doing very repetitive work, which is honestly, where a lot of the 40 hour work week came from, people who were in the industrial age, working on a machine where they did one thing repetitively over and over, and over again, that's different from those of us who are doing higher level intellectual work. How much energy do you actually have? What do you need to maintain that energy? Why do you need to maintain that energy? It probably means you need some of that time off because that's how humans are designed. We need time to rest and recovery. That is honestly more important than the time we're working, is how much time we're putting towards quality rest and recovery.
Once you ask yourself these questions, then we have one big piece of the equation. How much time do you honestly have available? Like I shared last week, when I had my twins and my husband was still working full-time, I only had about 15 hours a week. I would piece that together, waiting for my husband to come home from school—because he was a seventh grade English teacher—and I would wait five days a week for him to walk through the door at three o'clock, and I would hand the babies to him and say, “Okay, I'm on.” I would work from three to six each day, five days a week. That was my 15 hours a week. Over time, that adjusted and that changed. As my kids got older, as we had more resources, and I could hire a babysitter, I could give myself more time and I could still maintain what I personally needed to keep my energy up. That's really, really important. That's something we all have to think about.
The next part of the equation. Once you've figured out your time and your energy, that really becomes your capacity, like how much time, energy you have for this, then you have to ask yourself how much do you need to take home from your business. This is such an important question to ask yourself. This is going to kick off the conversation today about the math, the numbers behind designing your business revenue goal. Most people, when they are coming to me and they're coming up with a revenue goal, they seem to pull a revenue goal out of thin air. They're usually looking outside of themselves, outside into the world to see what people are telling them their revenue goals should be.
This is not the right way to come up with your revenue goal for your business. First things first. We have to start with your life. What does it actually cost to keep you fed, housed, clothed, pay all your bills, take care of your family, etc.?
Now, this is something different for so many people because most of us, when we enter the workforce, we are given a salary. From that salary, we budget out the salary and that is what we have available to pay for our life and our lifestyle. But when you're an entrepreneur, it's a little bit different. No one is giving you a salary. You have to decide what your salary is going to be. You have to actually sit down, look at what it costs to live your life, and figure out what your paycheck needs to be so that you don't have to pull out a credit card to pay for groceries or you don't have to take out a personal loan or you don't have to deplete your savings while you're trying to get your business up and running or while you're trying to grow your business. Understanding what your personal take-home income needs are is crucial. If you haven't come up with this number yet, then I want you to head down to the show notes to sign up for the Get Paid calculator. This is an absolutely free resource I have created, just for Promote Yourself to CEO listeners to help you to crunch the numbers. We wanted to do this in the simplest, easiest, most straightforward way without making you feel overwhelmed, looking at all the numbers.
When you sign up for this calculator, you will find there are three different parts. I want you to do right now the very first part of that, which is determining what your personal salary needs to be. The way we do this is first, we walk through your current expenses for you as a human to live, to survive, and to pay all of your bills with ease. These aren't your business bills yet. These are just the bills to live your life. In this calculator, you'll find that we have put together your monthly living expenses, your personal expenses, your insurance, your savings, your debt, all of the major categories most of us have and you just fill it in with what your average current needs are. We also want to look at your future needs. It's one thing to cover your baseline, what your needs are currently right now based on your current obligations, but most of us, when we're setting goals for our business, we're doing this because there are personal financial goals that we want, some upgrades in our lifestyle.
Maybe you are looking at getting into a new home this year and it's going to cost a little more, so we need to figure out what that new mortgage payment will be. Maybe you're thinking of buying a new car and that's going to lead to a car payment that you hadn't had before or it's just going to change what your expenses are. Maybe you want to budget in some savings that you hadn't really thought about. This is often something a lot of entrepreneurs forget. We tend to not save as much or set aside money for retirement. Maybe that's something you personally want to put in your goals list for the next year. We want to make sure we're not just looking at our current obligations but we want to add in those future expenses so that when we are coming up with our revenue goals, we have built that into the equation. We know that our new revenue goals need to account for us having a new home or us going after a vacation or us putting more aside for our personal savings. These things are really, really important to consider.
Otherwise, we tend to default to something that seems like an easy way to come up with how much our take-home income should be, which is usually what our last salary was. Often, I hear people say to me, “Okay, my last salary was $40,000 or $50,000 a year, so that's what I want to make in my business. My business needs to make that prior salary.” I've heard this a lot because I happen to know a lot of teachers who left teaching to start businesses but I also know a lot of professionals who maybe left a $60,000 or $80,000 or $100,000 or more salary, so it becomes an easy thing to pull out, “This is what I need to make from my previous salary in order to pay myself,” but that's not actually how it works. One, you need to remember that there were some hidden things in your salary that aren't what you took home. There are usually benefits that you might have had at your previous job. There are things that are going to be more expensive to get on your own as an entrepreneur, things like health insurance or different retirement perks. A lot of corporate jobs will have matching for your 401(k). Things like that are not available to us as entrepreneurs, so we have to be adding all of those hidden expenses in to add up to what our true income was in that previous job.
But the salary you had is not going to be the top line revenue goal. What your business brings in is not what you actually get to take home and pay yourself. If you've been in business for any length of time, you know that it costs money to run a business. There are things that you are going to have to pay out in order to run your business, so your take-home income depends on how expensive it is to run your business, how much it costs to run your business. As your business continues to grow, those expenses will also continue to grow. Let's talk about that. Let's figure out what goes into running a business and how we can use this information to help us reverse engineer our revenue goal, figure out what our revenue goal should be so that we can pay ourselves. Before we dive into this, again, recap. Step one, what do you need to pay yourself? If you haven't sat down, gone through all of the expenses you have, look over all the different areas to pay your current lifestyle, go ahead and do that, and come up with a number for what your goal take-home salary needs to be from your business. Then step two, we're going to start looking at how we take this information and now reverse engineer it to figure out what your revenue goal needs to be in your business.
Let's start reverse engineering the revenue goal. We have to start with understanding what money is going out of the business. There's money coming in from your clients. They're paying you for your products, programs, or services, then there's money going out. What money is going out? You have to pay taxes to run your business, then you also have operating expenses to run your business. Those are the major things aside from your owner's pay. For some of us, if you happen to have a cost of goods, so if you are, let's say, manufacturing something, then there's the cost of creating the product that you have. But if you are a service based business, then you mostly have to think about you have taxes getting paid out, you have your operating expenses to pay out, then you need to pay yourself. Most people, most entrepreneurs, really only pay themselves whatever is left over at the end of the month or at the end of the year. The people who are setting the bar at their former salary, they're automatically not going to get what they need to take home and pay themselves because they have to factor in the taxes. They have to factor in the operating expenses.
For a lot of us, the simplest, easiest way to figure out our revenue goal—and this is super, super simple—we are going to take your salary goal, so the amount of money you want to personally pay yourself to pay for your personal expenses this year, and we are going to double it in order to come up with your business revenue goal. Now, how did I come up with this? This is not arbitrary at all. This is based on the book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. This book is, hands down, one of my top 10 business books. I refer to it all the time. I recommend it all the time. I highly recommend going to get it from your library or downloading it on your Kindle or ordering it. This book is a game changer. The reason it's a game changer is most entrepreneurs, most small business owners, they really only pay themselves whatever is left over. After the business has paid all of the fees and expenses and has paid all the taxes, the business owner just gets the scraps at the end of it.
When they don't have any profit at the end of the day, then their business doesn't have the resources it needs to (1) have some safety net there for the inevitable ebbs and flows of business but (2) it doesn't have anything to reinvest back into the business or to pay the business owner a nice bonus. When we flip the script on this and instead of putting ourselves absolutely last, instead of putting profit last, we put profit first, when the revenue comes in, you take out the profit first, then there's percentages for how much goes to your profits, how much goes to taxes, how much goes to operations—so the cost to run your business—and how much goes to the owner's pay. All of this is based on a sliding scale, depending on the size of your business.
For this particular episode, I am going to use the percentages that he gives for businesses up to $250,000 annual revenue. That brings us to part two of this Get Paid calculator. Part one was your personal salary. We went through all of your personal expenses, your personal financial goals to come up with your monthly personal salary. That information is automatically pulled into the revenue calculator. In fact, the revenue calculator is 100% set up for you. All you need to do is choose the annual revenue range that your business falls under and it's automatically going to adjust those percentages for your Profit First. It's going to adjust what percentage of your revenue now goes to owner's pay, what percentage of your revenue goes to profit, what percentage of your revenue goes to tax, what percentage of your revenue goes to business expenses. Then it even breaks it down more and tells you where you need to allocate all of that money. It's going to give you percentages to help you figure out how much of each thing goes where. It's also going to give you the actual dollar amounts for your owner's pay, your profit, your tax, your business expenses.
This is so much fun to play with because then, you can really start to see the interplay between where your business is revenue wise and how much you personally get to pay yourself, and you also get a guideline here for how much you should be setting aside for your taxes, for profit, and a budget for your overall business expenses, which can get really out of hand if we aren't paying attention. You're going to have a profit percentage. He recommends 5%. For businesses that are under $250,000 in annual revenue, 5% of it goes towards profit, 15% goes towards taxes, 30% of incoming revenue, the money you're getting paid from your clients goes towards operations. Operations is whatever it costs to run your business, then 50% is owner's pay. That's how we came up with the double your owner's pay, double your goal salary, your goal take-home income in order to come up with your business revenue goal.
Now, these are all things that we have to consider because all of us are going to have expenses. You can run the most lean business, have the least amount of overhead possible, and have a much more profitable business but honestly, a lot of us are going to have some expenses we have to consider. We all have to pay taxes—have yet to figure out how to completely avoid that—and you want to be setting aside a little bit every single month for your profits. Again, that helps you have business savings. That helps you reinvest back into your business. That helps you fund your growth. It also helps give you a bonus every year. If you do this approach, this is so fun when every quarter, you get to write yourself a bonus check. There is your trip to take the kids to Disney. There's the renovation of your kitchen. There's the down payment on a new house, depending on how much your bonus check starts to be.
When you're looking at it from this perspective, it really starts to change the game and helps you see where you can upgrade an area of your life. It helps you see how your business growth can also fund your lifestyle and fund your ideal lifestyle, so you're not just stagnant based on wherever you were previously. This is how you build wealth for yourself. This is how you set your kids up for success. This is how you make sure you can fund your retirement. It's so much fun when you start thinking about this. Let's look at these numbers. I'm going to give you some examples for how this percentage breakdown actually looks. I'm going to walk you through three different examples because I think once you hear the difference between businesses at each level, you will start to see very quickly where your revenue goal should probably sit.
First, let's think about the people who come to me and they're saying, “My last salary was about $50,000, so that's my revenue goal.” I've already shared with you that that revenue goal is not going to be a take-home of $50,000. Let's actually break it down and see what's going on. As we get ready to break this down, I do want to say most women-owned businesses make less than $50,000 a year. In fact, the research from AmEx shares that it’s about 75% of women owned businesses that make less than $50,000 a year, top line revenue, which means the majority of women-owned businesses are not making a great take-home salary. It's not very much. Once you start to dig into this, you'll understand why.
If you are bringing in $50,000 of revenue per year and you're using these percentages to help you figure out what it's going to cost for your business, then how much you get to pay yourself, if you're using the Profit First method, then you've got $2,500 in profit. That's not bad. That's a little bit of a bonus for you and a little bit to keep in the business account for any needs or any reinvestment you have coming up but it's not great either. You have about $7,500 for tax, $15,000 for operations expenses, so a little bit over $1,000 a month to pay for all the things that it costs to run your business, your bookkeeping fee, your website hosting, your email service provider, any other expenses that you might have, your internet, your cell phone, your computer. We've eaten that up pretty quickly, any subscription services you have to pay for, any technology you have to pay for. That thousand dollars a month doesn't go very far, certainly does not pay for you to have any help in your business.
Finally, hopefully, crossing our fingers, we have about $25,000 to pay ourselves. A little bit over $2,000 a month to actually take home and pay our bills. To break it down even more. Let's say look at the time that you're putting into your business in order to make that amount of money. Let's say that you're taking four weeks off a year for holidays, vacation, and sick days, whatever. We're going to base this on 48 weeks a year. If you were working an average of 25 hours a week, which is what a lot of the women I talk to say they actually have available somewhere between 20 to 30 hours a week, split the difference and say 25, then they're really only paying themselves about $20 an hour in order to make that money. For all the work that they're doing, getting paid only $20 an hour, that is a tough pill to swallow. Honestly, it is not sustainable for most of the women that I meet and that I work with. Most of them, even if they are a dual income household, even if they have somebody else, their partner who's bringing in more money to the family, that's usually not enough to actually fund the financial goals they have personally and as a family. That's usually enough to contribute a bit to their family but for the time they'll be away from them, it's not very much.
Now, I remember when I started my business, I had three small children. I started my business, then had kids pretty quickly afterwards and there was a point in 2013, I remember this so clearly because I had my twins in 2010, then my youngest in 2013 and there was a point where I had all three in a daycare preschool type of thing in our neighborhood, and it was nearly $2,000 a month, just to pay for preschool. To me, the idea of earning only $50,000 a year, just for all of it to go to preschool, then have nothing left over, working that much every single week, no. That doesn't work for me and my family. This is one of the biggest reasons why so many women leave the workforce when they have small children because they're looking at that expense and they're thinking, “This is crazy. All the work I'm putting into my career, it's just going to child care.” That's why I say we have to start really getting clear about the numbers and not be scared of looking at the numbers but get realistic about looking at the numbers so that we can understand how to set the appropriate goals.
I will say that for some of us, we have to get to this first level. The $50,000 mark is one of the first big benchmarks in getting your business off the ground. We all get through it but we can't stay there very long. Long term, it's not going to be a super sustainable business. In the short term, we all have to go through it. I went through that. I went through that period as well where it was a short-term reduction in my take-home income while I was getting my business growing. It was honestly the break-even point for what I needed to make in order to pay my bills as a business owner. From there, I knew I had to grow in order to achieve our personal financial goals. So $50,000 a year, clearly, it's just enough to get going. For most of it, it's a break even in our business, the minimum we need to make in order to make it work. We start to realize pretty quickly that we need to grow the business in order to make it more sustainable, in order to make sure that our actual personal financial needs are met and to make sure that we are not just over working, and burning out in order to keep this business going.
The next benchmark here becomes this six-figure mark, $100,000 of annual revenue a year. This is a number that is thrown around so many times. People start to have a lot of feelings about this but I'm going to look over all the feelings that people might have. I want to just look at the math. I just want to talk about the math behind a $100,000 a year annual revenue business. I think this is so important because when we don't look at the math, then we let our feelings dictate our decisions. I want data to help me dictate decisions, not just feelings. They need to work together but the data is important too. At $100,000 a year, you are in the top 12% of women-owned businesses according to the AmEx report on women in business about 2018, 2019 I believe. A very small percentage of women actually grow their businesses to $100,000 or more. When we use this Profit First perspective, we're using these percentages to figure out how this money is now distributed in our business, our 5% profit becomes $5,000, which is awesome because at the end of the year, now you reinvest half back into your business, into your business slush fund so that you can get some more support or you can upgrade something in your business, then you get a bonus check of $2,500 for yourself.
Again this is fun. This is a vacation. This is getting a whole new wardrobe. This is fun money for you. Then you're going to pay tax, so 15% is $15,000 in tax and operations is about $30,000. Now, you might be thinking, “I don't need to spend $30,000 a year to run my business.” It might not be required to run your business but you know what is amazing that happens at this level? Now you can afford to get a little extra help in your business. That is a game changer. That's where you really unlock the potential in what your business can do. With $30,000 available in your budget to invest not only into the right technology or the right tools or the right computers or whatever gear you need, the right equipment, you can start hiring a few people to help you out on a part-time basis. At this level, you could have one or two people in the team who are helping you to do the administrative work, the bookkeeping, the basic customer service, to do some of the techie stuff that you don't know how to do. This could cost anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a month and still have money left over to handle other things, other expenses in your business.
That starts to be a game changer when you pull yourself out of the day-to-day, out of the lower value activities in your business and now you're able to focus on the higher level activities, working with your clients, focusing on marketing and sales, and actual growth related activities, creating your next level product, program, or service. That only happens when you can free up your time and energy. That only happens when you can hire other people to support you. This is where things really start to change. You actually get more of your time back. It's amazing. Then of course, you get your 50% take home. This gets you closer. If you had a goal of taking home $50,000 a year, because that was your former salary as a teacher or I don't know, whatever other career you might have had, then that's a $50,000 salary. That's a lot closer than the only $25,000 salary in our previous example.
What does this look like if you want more than that? Maybe you're like many of my clients who are coming from corporate America, who are coming from professional careers and they already had a high five-figure or even six-figure salary, and they want to replace that. To be quite honest, if you want to have a six-figure salary, if you want to pay yourself $100,000 a year, you really need to be bringing in the business $250,000 a year. That is what I see makes the most sense for most people based on the businesses that I work with. If you are offering people coaching, consulting, training, courses, a creative business or anything along those lines, this is how the math usually works out. At $250,000 annual revenue, now, you have $12,500 in your profit each year, $12,500. That means you get to have $6,250 for your bonus at the end of the year and you have $6,250 to put towards your business next year to fund that growth or to be in your slush fund or to have business savings. That's pretty awesome because on both of those sides, now we're talking about money that can massively up level your personal financial goals and help you reinvest into
the continued growth of your business for the upcoming year.
We look at how much tax you're going to be paying. Yup, you're going to still be paying quite a bit in taxes. Get yourself a good CPA at this point. There are ways to reduce how much tax you are going to owe, but if we're still using the percentage that we have from Profit First, then we are still going to be paying that 15% tax. That's $37,500. Get yourself a CPA because that number might come down if you have a good one. Then we're looking at our operating expenses. For a $250,000 a year revenue business, that's about $75,000 to put towards your operating expenses. That means you can spend a little over $5,500 a month to run your business. That could be divided up into so many ways. Most of us don't have a ton of equipment we need. It doesn't cost us a ton to deliver what we're delivering. The biggest expense in this line now becomes hiring a team and getting some support. If you have $5,500 a month to hire a team, you can get a lot further, a lot faster.
Finally, at this level, it's still the 50% owner's pay, so out of a $250,000 business, that becomes a $125,000 salary for you, the business owner. Now, this is where the numbers get so exciting because for a lot of us, this is our actual take-home income, not just for our baseline needs but to upgrade our lifestyle, this is where it starts to happen. There are many parts of the world and of the country where you can live incredibly well on this type of take-home salary. There's also a lot where that take-home salary is just barely scratching the surface but for most of the people that I'm talking to, this is where we now are paying ourselves an amount that makes sense for the expertise, the time, and energy we are bringing to the table. This is where we can really start to make our business work for us because it's more sustainable. We're not having to rob Peter to pay Paul where one month, you are having to put groceries on a credit card and the next month, you're having to go into debt in the business with some really high interest loan in order to keep the cash flow working. This is where things start to shift. This is where things start to change in your business, starts to work a little easier and more smoothly for you.
Now, the final thing I want to say here before I wrap up this episode is that the biggest misinformation out there, the biggest belief that we have to bust is that when you are growing a bigger business, the more revenue you're bringing in your business, you have to work harder to do that. I think this is the reason why a lot of people, when they're setting their revenue goals, they're scared or hesitant to set a higher revenue goal for their business. It's because they believe, “Well, I just don't have time in order to do that. I can't work 80 hours a week. I don't have that capacity.” I'm here to tell you that you will not work more to make $100,000 than you will to make $50,000. You will not work more to bring in $250,000 as you will to bring in $100,000. The reason is, at this level, you now have some funds available to get some support, so it's not just your hours. You're bringing in a team and hiring them. You're getting their hours to work in your business. You have to get that thought out of your mind that going after higher levels of revenue and higher levels of take-home pay equals more hours. That is a very employee-driven mindset. That's not how owning a business works.
In the next episode, we're going to flip this again. I've got a second calculator for you. Today, at the end of this episode, I'm going to leave a link in the show notes for you to go and get a calculator to help you figure out, based on your take-home pay goal, how much your revenue should be. Then in the next episode, there's a second part to this calculator where once you have your revenue goal, it will help you reverse engineer what you need to sell and how many of them you need to sell, at what price point in order to make that happen. We're actually going to reverse engineer it to help you figure out how many clients you need and what the price point needs to be. This information is going to help you to really dial in and make sure that what you're putting out into the world lines up with what you want to have happen in your business. I'm really excited to share that with you in the next upcoming episode. If you like this episode, please make sure you're coming over and talking to me over on Instagram @racheal.cook. I would love to continue the conversation there. Until next time.