Why Money Mastery, Mindset & Mental Fitness Matter

Welcome to episode 115 of Dawn of a New Era with myself, Dawn McGruer, the business growth coach. And I'm celebrating some pretty audacious milestones in my career because, guess what? In my, well, I'll be 45 this year, but in my years in business, I literally cannot believe that I have been an entrepreneur and business owner for so long. So I started to chart back and have a look at when I started my first business and, you know, I went through a bit of a clear out and I started finding, like, notebooks and workbooks and things.

Now, I started my first business at 21, and it's crazy to think that, you know, over 20-odd years on, I've still got one of those businesses and it's still thriving. And one of my key points on today's podcast is quite a deep one, but one that you'll have heard me talk a lot about before, because when I think back and I reflect, I do bring some mixes of emotions. When I think back to trying to pay the bills and I had a mortgage, I bought my first house at 19. I had offices, I had rent, I had ground rent, I had bills, and literally I felt like sinking.

So one of the things I want to talk about and really have an honest chat about is the three biggest reasons that you absolutely need to prioritize and focus on things like your money mastery, your mindset, and your mental fitness when you're scaling your business, because the entrepreneurial journey is tough. As I reconnected with these emotions, one of the biggest reasons that I went back there was, yes, I was doing a clear out, but in my new book and my next book, it'll be my third, I really wanted to get into the inner emotion of being a business owner and share some of the truths behind things like perfectionism and imposter syndrome. Believe you me, I have been through so many different things. I literally could have a story for all of it because, imagine, every 20 years in business, I have evolved a lot.

I have changed a lot, and my businesses have been dynamic. But in that time, I've also had some really, really low points where I've really had to test my resilience to kind of come back from it, because it takes a toll on your mindset. One of the things that I feel that, you know, third week of Jan coming to the end, or we're in the fourth week now, and we're entering a new month, people will be feeling like a squeeze, even if you are a very successful business who's been around forever. We've got tax bills and things like that.

We have to make sure that we are really looking after the money element in business, and this is something that I was dreadful at. Honestly, the money side in business was not where I flowed. I wanted to spend my time in my genius zone, hanging out with my clients, doing all the work I loved, working on big transformations and results, and that was it. I really wasn't interested in, like, the admin and money side, and that really came to bite me on the backside because when I think back and I feel into kind of like, what were my emotions at 21?

Well, I had unwavering, absolute enthusiasm, motivation. I was so disciplined. I think those are things that have absolutely served me well, but they've also been my detriment in the fact that I would push harder on other things I liked and ignore the others, and I'd kind of bury my head. When I talk about money mastery, I really want to think about things like the financial— Financial stability of your business and how that relates to things around your success and what you deem that as.

Because, you know, unfortunately, money and financial stability and certainty is essential for not only scaling your business, but your sanity too. So I don't know anyone in the world who has not had some form of money issue, cash flow problem, because best will in the world, you set your business up, there's always teething problems, and there's always problems where you have feast and then famine. And by that I mean, you know, you start to get an abundance of clients coming in and you kind of think, well, this is actually working, this is okay. And then, oh my goodness, like, you know, three of those clients are finishing the projects and I haven't got anything else coming in for the next two months.

So having this certainty and having a belief around it, for me, if I think about the emotions in my twenties and having all of those bills to pay, if I had Financial security, I felt really good from a mindset point of view. So mastering your money means really understanding things like your cash flow and really looking at that and not doing what I did in the early days and kind of just focusing on all the things I loved and thinking it will be fine. I mean, I'm all about manifesting and putting good vibes into the world, but we have to have a plan because a goal without a plan is just a wish, and we have to follow action and we have to act as our true self and show up and drive the business forward for things to move, okay? So yes, you may have this unfaltering belief that, you know, things will be great, but we need to make sure that all of that positive vibe, that growth mindset attitude, is backed up with a plan whereby you know what money is coming in, what money is coming out, what you need to pay yourself not just to live on baseline, but to live a life of joy and dreams, the reason behind why you set your business up.

This is the biggest thing I did not do. I took the base money, and it meant I constantly felt under pressure, but also slightly resentful about the amount of work I was putting in. I wasn't paying myself first. I was paying all my bills and taking what was left, okay?

The biggest change, the biggest way that I scaled my business was to get absolute clarity on my numbers. I started to look at optimizing my pricing strategy, maximizing my revenue growth, getting super clear on every expense and every income, looking at sales first every single day. Because without a solid grasp on your finances, it's challenging to sustain and expand your business. It really is.

And those emotions I think of when I was 21, I remember crying and breaking down, talking to people such as, like, you know, my family, because I was under so much pressure. At a very young age, I'd taken on a lot. A lot, which was amazing because it pushed me. But my goodness, did I feel that financial tug.

And every time I think about it, I can literally step into that emotion because it feels like yesterday. It feels so intense and tough. But in other ways, it feels a million miles away because of where I am now. Now, my advice to you is that wherever you are in your journey, whether you're starting out, you're in a corporate job and you're thinking about leaving, whatever it is, you could be scaling six, seven, eight, nine million pound entrepreneur.

It doesn't matter. But the facts still come down to the foundations in business. And when we come on to number two, which is mindset, that feeds in. There is no bigger stress.

There is no bigger stress than money. And this is why when I'll talk to clients and I can see on their faces that they're going to be under financial pressure if they work with me too soon. And I would rather a client come back to me once that is nailed because I don't want to be the resentment, but I also don't want to be the person that puts that pressure on. I don't want to be draining that person's resources.

There's a tipping point. Yes, I have invested when it has been tough and it's made me work harder and really get everything in gear. That's fine. That's very different to putting someone into, you know, oh, do I feed myself?

Do I pay myself? And, you know, do I pay the bills or do I pay my coach? I mean, ethically, we have to operate in the correct manner. And it doesn't matter what you do as a job, there is an ethical responsibility of everyone to not feel under pressure as the client, but not put them under pressure as the service provider.

Mindset. Your mindset plays a crucial role in your business's success. So having a growth mindset and embracing challenges and learning from failures can absolutely fuel your entrepreneurial journey. And believe you me, I have had some pretty epic Epic fails.

And these fails have dented my confidence like no other. I literally remember doing a launch, putting my heart and soul into it. I've never launched in the traditional online sense where, you know, it's like big challenges and things like that. I've done the odd Facebook challenge, and we've probably done maybe like 50,000 in a launch.

But other than that, this launch was all around kind of getting people onto, I think it was a masterclass, and getting people to buy. When I look back on that at the time, I was like, Oh my goodness, I have no idea what's gone wrong. Why didn't it work? This is awful.

This is terrible. I need to rewrite everything. It's just the worst thing in the world. But it wasn't.

It was actually the best because I learned so much. And everything that I look at, that time was a big, big one. But there was another one which was in my academy business, Business Consort Academy, which was my digital and marketing academy. We do digital marketing qualifications, courses, and a diploma.

And one of the things is I devised this two-day course, and I just thought it was brilliant, and I'd got so...

my head with it that I was launching it and I had all these grand expectations. I'd gone onto spreadsheets. I pulled targets out of my head, just like, yeah, this is what we're going to do. And then only to be absolutely crushed and disappointed when it didn't happen.

Yeah, we did okay, but it was nowhere near what I had set in my mind. So I was thinking, what has happened here? Like, why are people not loving this? I'm loving it.

Everyone's telling me it's brilliant. What's wrong? And with both of those things, it came down to ideal client and marketing and messaging. Absolutely.

Everyone harps on about it, but why do they harp on about it? Because it's the foundation. It's the essential part of the business that makes it flow and easy. It's the bit that connects the customer to the business and builds that bridge so that you get paying profitable clients.

And I meet so many businesses who do amazing things, but there's a discorrelation and a disconnect, and they're not getting the level of customers they absolutely deserve because their products and services are amazing. And one small tweak. And the great thing is, is I've done these tweaks so many times in my own businesses, I've felt the feeling as well. So, you know, I am talking to a business owner.

I'm not telling them, Oh, you know, it's okay. That's fine, blah, blah, blah. I understand the pain. I understand that sometimes you have to wallow, a little bit in your own self-pity, but eventually you have to get up, dust yourself down, and go again.

It's tough, and no one says that these things are easy. You may be in a position where you're just thinking, Well, why am I not hitting this tipping point? Why are other people out there smashing it and they don't do things that are even half as good as I do? It's half to do with really connecting with the base layer of the fundamentals of why someone wants something, and how do we move them from interest to desire?

Honestly, when it comes to the mindset side of things, it's about cultivating, yes, a positive and resilient mindset, which definitely helps you overcome the obstacles, because there always will be obstacles of some sort, regardless where you are on that. That scale, but you start to take calculated risks, and I think this is a big part. I would still say now in business, I'm quite a big risk taker, and I adapt to changing circumstances really well. I feel that dynamic flow in business is crucial.

And I think when I think back to my mindset then, I did not have the mental resilience in place because I wasn't teaching myself mental fitness. And what I mean by mental fitness is that, this is bringing me on to number three, building mental fitness is essential for a thriving entrepreneur, and it involves sharpening your focus, but also doing things like managing stress and maintaining overall wellbeing. This is something that I am working so hard on at the moment. I have got some big changes, some big audacious goals.

I go through cycles where I feel like every three years I just rip everything apart and just repush again, and now I'm in that phase. So I could be, you know, putting myself under a lot of stress. I might lose focus. I could hit overwhelm.

My wellbeing could dissipate. So this is why I'm really pushing at the beginning of January, and I took a holiday on the 3rd of January to Lanzarote, got some sunshine. Then I went on a military boot camp for a week for fitness. I'd been really ill over Christmas, really bad chest infection the year before I'd had pneumonia, and my immunity just does not feel where it was at.

October I started running. You may have seen on my Instagram, things like that, that I've really been kind of pushing into this, and I start my New Year's goals in the November. But because I got ill again, I felt like I'd lost a lot of the fitness, my lung capacity had gone. So I thought, I'm going to book this week.

I'm going to just throw myself in. So when everyone else was going crazy on the socials and emails and offers, I had already prepared everything I was doing in the November, December, so it gave me that headspace to go and follow my not only mental fitness, but my personal fitness. And oh my goodness, was that game changing. It was the hardest— Hardest, most torturous thing I've ever done in the world, but it was amazing because I've come back and I'm nailing my food and my nutrition, my sleep, my whole fitness.

All of my CEO wellbeing feels like it's in flow. I don't have to do anything. And the biggest game changer has been meal prep because I really struggled with, like, the cooking and the portions and just eating the complete sort of variety that, as a vegetarian as I am, that I need. And, you know, I'm not saying I'll do it forever, but I've been doing Lion's Prep and it's been a game changer.

I've loved it. And, you know, at the moment, and for the foreseeable future, I'm staying on that plan. You know, I may switch to something later, but this has given me almost like in business, the foundation. So now I can start building bricks and start thinking about running 5K runs, do my park run and my 10K.

I'm already running like 5 to 7K, so, you know, it's totally feasible. So it's a good goal to make, but it means that it feels like I'm already progressing. So my point here is, is that regardless whether your mental fitness is about your work or your life or getting some sort of work-life balance, it's about taking care of your mental health, which everything flows from. And, you know, this allows you to make confident decisions, not decisions that are under pressure and sometimes are just too emotionally led.

You know, it can lead us to be quite rash, but maintaining productivity and handling the demands of scaling business and life effectively. So when I think about prioritizing things in business, someone said to me, What's your key focus for 2024? It absolutely is money mastery, it is mindset, and it is mental fitness, because once I have that, and once you have that, you have a solid foundation for scaling your business and achieving long-term success in a way that feels good. I can't express this enough.

I've already spoken to people who are burnt out. They've gone too hard at the beginning of January. They've set things up because they thought they were going to be easy sell. I've spoken to someone the other day who set up a membership, someone who did— a low ticket.

They've ended up with something that they already resent, and it feels like a burden to them. I've spoken to people who are giving up their free groups and doing free things. You know, I'm not suggesting any of these things are what you have to do, but you have to think about why these people are making these decisions. They're making them because they're right for that person.

If something is weighing you down, you need to think about what it is you need to let go of to step into 2024. Now, one of the other things that I've been doing is I have been doing a lot of breathing workshops. I've been doing gong and sound baths. I've been doing meditation.

All of these things really have kind of aided sleep, aided healing in my body, doing a lot of exercise, been doing massages, and I can't express to you how good I feel at the moment. I may come across in the podcast, but if you've listened to my podcast before, you know that I come from the heart, I'm all about success from your soul and honesty. And I want to share this to you because we have all been through things like perfectionism and just trying to make things amazing before they go out. You know, think back to my epic fails.

If I just pushed it out, I could have evolved it and probably not hit that epic fail. If I had retested and kind of gone to a smaller audience, beta tested my marketing messaging, I wouldn't have gone through all of that pain and hardship. I would have nailed it quicker. And the parting word here is it's things that can really wear you down now can change fast.

You know, within 30 days, you can have a whole new world, an absolute game changer. And this is why I want to give away something that's so dear to my heart. I created the Growth Coach app last year. I put my absolute heart and soul and effort into this app.

I recorded over 42 bite-sized videos, and what it is, is it's a 30-day program that is all about money mastery, mindset and mental fitness. And in this episode, if you're listening, the great news is, is I'm giving it away for free. Please look at the show notes and have a look for the free program, because this is a paid program. This is a 30-day challenge that I've done with hundreds and thousands of clients who've joined the app.

And one of the things I just felt really passionate about doing, I always go with my gut, is I just thought people need this boost now at the end of January. So why not let's just give 30 days free to the audience and clients so that people can really start to see a shift? Because when we tested this, 80% of people were seeing huge shifts in as little as five days. And then we had people that were completing the challenge, and they were over 80% in improvement across the 10 areas we're testing you on.

And these things are all things that we want, like happiness and relationships and money. It's a whole challenge and program around everything in our life, not just as entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, you don't even have to be a business owner to do the 30-day challenge, but I urge you to sign up. You know, you can do it at your own pace.

There's emails that go along with them to kind of keep you positive and focused. But it's a 30-day challenge with, like, mini bite-sized videos that are game changers. These are all the things that I did in my 20s, coming into my 30s, to start scaling my business, but to get my money mastery, to get my mindset, to get my mental fitness. And every single technique in there, every tip, every tool, there's things from vision boards and, you know, mapping out your goals.

There's a game board that I use. These are things I still use today with myself and clients, and I want you to go and join and see what you think, because this has helped so many people, and it is my gift to you. So enjoy, and don't forget to let me know how you get on. You can reach me on all the normal channels at Dawn McGruer.

So take care and have an amazing day. Thank you for listening to Dawn of a New Era podcast, and for your free checklist to find out how to boost your business for growth, profit and success, and join our community, go to dawnmcgruer.com.

I'm not the one who's been waiting for you.