Here’s what we’ll cover
Ever sat at your desk for hours on end, got to the end of your working day and wondered where the day went? Wondered why you only managed to finish a tiny portion of all the things you had planned? Well, you need to know you’re not alone! We’ve all been there, the problem is that some of us stay there for way too long and it becomes a real brick wall in the way of us achieving our goals. It also becomes a point of constant frustration and source of overwhelm.
Today’s guest shares with us what EXACTLY what she has done to bust down that brick wall and go from ‘getting nowhere’ to ‘getting stuff done’.
She also gets real with us on mapping out her services, not only what numbers are important but where each service fits in your funnel and the one thing that we often forget, ignore or put our blinders on for – what does your audience actually want.
Angela Henderson is a business coach for women, keynote speaker and podcaster who helps women business owners from around the world have consistent 5-figure months and multiple 6-figure years… without burning out in the process. Her skills were honed at the helm of Finlee and Me, where she learned everything from branding, PR, sales funnels, email marketing, website, copy, SEO and more.
She knows what it truly takes to have a strong brand, consistent sales, steady growth and over all dedication. Angela has been featured in the media including Talking Lifestyle with Ed Phillips and David Koch, Inside Small Business and on numerous Australia and International podcasts.
Links and Resources
- Register for the Profit Masterclass HERE
- Checkout the Simply Smarter Numbers website HERE
- Checkout the Podcast HERE
- Checkout the Instagram HERE
- Checkout Angela’s website HERE
- Checkout the Business and Life Conversations Podcast HERE
- Checkout Angela’s Facebook HERE
- Checkout Angela’s Facebook group HERE
- Checkout Angela’s Instagram HERE
- Checkout Angela’s Linkedin HERE
Keep Listening!
Here’s the shownotes
Jen Waterson:
Today, I’m super excited to welcome Angela Henderson of Angela Henderson Consulting to the Simply Smarter Numbers podcast.
As for why I’m excited – because Ange is not only an extraordinary business person, she is also an extraordinary human. I’ve been lucky enough to know Ange for quite a few months now and I can tell you that this girl has one of the strongest strategic minds, one of the best business minds and one of the biggest hearts that you’ll find anywhere.
But not only that, Ange is a talented speaker. No pressure here Ange, but Ange has the special ability to articulate what goes on in that strategic business mind of hers as she speaks on stages all around the world. And it’s Anges ability to articulate what’s going on in her head which means we are in for a great, practical conversation today.
Hello Angela, a big warm welcome to the Simply Smarter Numbers podcast, I’m so happy to have you on the show.
It’s really nice to have you here, I would just love for you to tell everyone a little bit about yourself, what you do, and who you do it for.
Angela Henderson:
Ultimately I started out in the world of business over a decade ago where I had one of my first business jobs with one of Australia’s leading toy stores where we focused on creating childhood memories through play, love and travel, and that was called ‘Finley and Me’.
It was a great successful online business store and through that we had another income stream, I also became one of Australia’s leading parenting vloggers and influencers. I was signed with Netflix, Woolworths, Coles and other big national brands too, both Australia and International brands collectively.
That was fun, people just wanted to start picking my brain and at that stage I was a bit naive to the whole picking the brain scenario because I am quite a giver, I give a lot, that’s probably my fifteen years of being a social worker in me.
One day I was driving home from the last ‘pick my brain’ session and I realised I had done fourteen of them over a two month period and this ‘uh-huh’ moment came whenI thought hold on, if I were to charge people for the ‘pick my brain’ sessions I could have a secondary business.
That is where Angela Henderson consulting came about as there seemed to be a demand there, and people continued to want my time. So I started to put a figure behind it and now I am a Business Consultant and Coach working specifically with women in business to get all the pieces in place to have consistent five figure months and six or seven figure years without burning out in the process.
It’s super fun and I do that through one-to-one consulting, my actions takers mastermind, my group coaching program, and I also run Australia’s leading four-day, three-night women in business retreat.
Jen Waterson:
We are so lucky to have you here because we are going to pick your brain today.
So Ange, we could speak for hours and hours about business, but what I want to do today is zero-in on what has worked for you and got your business to where it is today from a really practical perspective.
I would love to know what it is that other people can do that you have been doing, that they can start implementing tomorrow. If there’s one thing that I know about you Ange, it’s that you’re really good at keeping things doable, manageable and practical so that’s what we’re here to talk about.
We have got two things marked for you to talk about today. I am really keen to talk about those things because they’re things that I feel really strongly about as well, but this is going to be a great opportunity for the two of us to put our own personal spin on this and those two things are around time, and how it is that you deal with your time and monitor your time, and the other thing is how you offer your services and how you have spent your time working out what it is that’s going to work for you from a numbers perspective.
Angela Henderson:
Tracking time is a concept that I was always familiar about but as we’ve been talking on my podcast, one of the things that I feel is in business there are three different steps, the infancy/start-up stage, the growth stage and the scale stage.
I think the difference between those elements or key stages of business is that you’re focusing on different things even though we all should be tracking our time when we first start in scale, although we all should be tracking our time in the growth stage too.
In my opinion, and from what I have seen from my own clients, including myself, even speaking with friends of mine who are in eight or nine figure businesses, I think time seems to come a little later.
However as I am trying to engrain in my own clients super early on in that start up stage, is if someone were to talk to me about tracking their time earlier on I believe I would have been a lot further along than what I am already at and I equally feel like I would have been able to make more better informed decisions for the growth and viability of the business for both Finley and Me, but equally for Angela Henderson Consulting.
So tracking of time has been key over the last twelve months for me, and it’s a super simple process. I have obviously been doing an enormous amount of stuff because I’m leaving the growth stage and going into the scale stage, and with that it’s made me realise that there’s some things I am doing well and other things I am not.
So what we started to do was track my time.
Jen Waterson:
Before you go onto how you have done it, with monitoring and tracking time, that is nothing new to me whatsoever because i grew up through the ranks in an accountant world, and when you’re an accountant or a legal person, those sort of professionals, what we do as a matter of course and particularly back in those days is to monitor our time in six minute intervals of all things. A ten-block of six gives you an hour and we were monitoring our time constantly.
For me, it’s something that I don’t know how people do without it, but for you as a business owner and bringing it in to your world you need to have a very systemised way of doing it, so I would love to hear about how it is that you bought it in and what it is that you’re using to actually track that time.
Angela Henderson:
We have really kept it as simplistic as possible and i’ve done that not only for myself but also for a lot of those businesses who I’m trying to help get this habit into earlier on, especially if there bootstrapping then money can be an issue, and I would rather them spend their money on other expenses then on time trackers and things like that.
So what I do is I’m really tight on my google calendar so my google calendar is through g-suite. Super inexpensive. I think $10 a month is what I pay. Everything is systemised through there.
I go in at the end of each day to make sure that all of my booking times and all my hours are allocated to whatever I did.
If I didn’t do something, say I took my lunch break, on my calendar it would literally say ‘lunch break’.
From there, I use a tool called toggle, again it’s free, it’s on either your mobile phone or your desktop. I find utilising it on your desktop is easier and it will also prompt you that anytime your mouse is kicked into play or you start typing, it will pop up and ask you if you want to track this task, and it doesn’t let you not know that you should be tracking your task.
Jen Waterson:
Ange, are you tracking everything that you do throughout the day or is this just work that involves client delivery for you, or are you tracking the time that you have to spend sitting here doing this podcast interview for example?
Angela Henderson:
We’re tracking everything. This is under my marketing. If i am a podcast guest on fifteen different podcasts and i don’t see an ROI back on that, why would I keep doing it?
For me, when you go into Toggle, you can start to list everything you do.
Now, I don’t want you to go so specific that you have nine-hundred different categories. I have got to think off the top of my head nine key categories like one-to-one consulting is one, my mastermind clients is another, my group coaching clients is another, recording my podcast is one and being on other guests podcasts and other marketing is another and working on sales funnels is another.
There are nine of them that I have. Pretty much those are the nine that we have seen used over the last twelve months.
When you go to track your time, it will say choose your category that you want to allocate to this time.
The beautiful thing is that at the end of the week, Toggle gives you a report as to where your time was spent. The first time you get that report, you might as well be sitting down because you will probably have a heart attack because again, numbers don’t lie.
One of those other categories that I didn’t say, is my discovery calls. I still do all my discovery calls and when I got my tracking time for Toggle that very first week, that was the biggest indicator about how I was going to have to move my business forward.
I am very big about human to human marketing and the experience and interaction one faces with a brand, but at what expense is that for me, my family and the business growth?
What we decided to do and what we’re currently working on behind the scenes is I’m bringing in an online business manager to type in things in regards to policies and procedures, and once we have that down, I will now hire a sales person to do that initial point of call for my discovery calls.
When we look at my time spent, I’m spending anywhere between four to five hours a week on discovery calls. Not all those are leading to sales because their really at top of funnel and that’s okay, but what we’re going to do is it’s better that i train someone to have that initial call and if someone is the right fit I will then hop on for a fifteen minute call, versus a thirty or forty-five minute call.
Jen Waterson:
There are numbers in here that you are looking at on a regular basis, and the numbers are the number of hours that you are spending doing a, b, or c and that’s the beauty of numbers in a business, they’re not the scary numbers that we see on our balance sheet, or the numbers you see on a profit and loss, there are numbers absolutely everywhere on our business and if these numbers are telling you that you are spending too many hours delivering particular products or doing certain marketing activities, then you have the ability to change that, to make a decision to do something different to fix that.
Angela Henderson:
Exactly, and I was always so adamant that I had to be the one doing the discovery call.
But when we put pen to paper and looked at that, we said okay, Ange if you’re spending five hours a week, that is twenty hours a month, and your hourly rate is $7.50, that’s fifteen grand a month, times that by twelve months, that is one-hundred and eighty grand that I am potentially losing because i am the one doing the doing.
Jen Waterson:
So you now know given that you’ve done those numbers that you can afford to bring somebody else on to take care of it for you.
Angela Henderson:
One hundred percent, and it still allows me to have that human to human marketing experience and interaction, because I personally don’t want to hire someone that I can’t have a conversation with before I do it.
But do they need me asking all those preliminary questions at the beginning? No.
But if they are then ready for me, the beauty about that is that I am like no worries, let’s hop on for a fifteen or twenty minute call, and I am totally happy to do that because you don’t walk into BMW or Mercedes and say I’m going to take the $80,000 car and just walk out. You ask if you can test drive it and ask questions. What is the mileage going to be? What is the warranty? What are the services?
So I still want clients to be able to have that but at the same time I still want to be able to grow my business because my mission is to be able to help an additional three-thousand women between now and 2025 so they have access to the tools, resources and community they need to have the resources.
Jen Waterson:
But you can’t do that while you’re spending five hours a week on calls for free.
Angela Henderson:
Exactly right, so again it’s not just about being greedy, it’s my bigger vision that I have for my business and being able to help more women to get what they need in order for them to grow too. This isn’t just about Angela Henderson growth, it’s about community growth.
Jen Waterson:
It gives you an opportunity to have a look at the one thing that could potentially hold you back from achieving that goal.
Angela Henderson:
For me, tracking my time, that’s something that might make you go ‘oh that’s a bit pedantic’ but what I did though, I was getting annoyed that the Toggle button kept coming up because I would be starting a phone call with one of my one-to-one clients and I would be in there for the first five minutes and Toggle would come up and say ‘do you need to Toggle this?’ on my screen and I was getting distracted while I just wanted to focus on my clients. So, what I did is I have my VA at the beginning of each day go in and manually enter it for me.
Again, some people will call me lazy, call it what you will, but I look at it as being more productive for the service of my clients.
Jen Waterson:
There’s different ways to do it, Toggle might work for some people, it may not work for others.
Just a plain old piece of paper and writing down what it is that you’re doing throughout the day and handing it to someone else, there is absolutely no reason not to do that.
Even just doing it yourself, if you don’t have someone to hand it too, just writing it down and having a look back at the end of the week, just do it for one week.
I always tell people, just spend one week, it will feel painful, just spend one week writing down what you do from the minute you started working to the minute you knocked off, and you will be surprised at the end of the week, what comes out of that and how it can open your eyes up to what you can possibly do different.
Angela Henderson:
I am always about making sure that you adapt to things that are going to work better for you, your family and your business.
So if pen to paper is how you roll, use pen to paper, if Toggle is how you roll, Toggle, if it’s putting it in an excel spreadsheet, do it.
Just don’t get distracted by the shiny objects, like ‘oh I’m now going to create this magnificent thing’ and it takes you five hours to create some spreadsheet.
Just do it because the reality of it is, that’s where you start to self sabotage, that’s where you start to overthink, that’s when you start to not take action.
That’s when you will typically go ‘screw it, I don’t need to track my time’ and it’s not worth it. Just do it, just track the time and it’ll be worth it.
Jen Waterson:
Time is so important and time for service based businesses is money. More so in service-based businesses than not, but it’s always time is money.
Okay Ange, let’s move onto the second one, that you have been implementing in your business, something that got you to where you are right now, and it’s around your service offering.
Angela Henderson:
Yes, service offerings for me it’s not complex but it is still about understanding what services am I bringing on that not only are going to be a return investment but equally what do my ideal clients need?
I see far too many people creating stuff, just to create stuff. They don’t actually understand how much time it is going to take, what the cost is, and how many people are going to buy it.
So, first thing’s first, understanding when I’m mapping out my services what I’m going to be doing, is do people actually need what I’m doing? If not then I probably need to exit it and save time and money from the beginning.
But if I do deem that yes, this is actually a service that is going to help other people, then I will look at what needs to happen. I look at how many people I want to get into the particular program.
So i Just did a five week mini mastermind because I know it’s mid-funnel forming and I knew that I wanted to bring them in. So eight spots, $1000, five weeks. But I knew that this bigger $8000 piece was going to help also lead me into achieving my other revenue goals. I knew how many spots I needed to fill, what the cost was and how that was connected back to my revenue and profitability.
So that’s how I did it, because once you can understand how many spots you need and the cost that’s affiliated with that, it’s going to help you start building your content marketing strategy, your marketing strategy, potentially your launch strategy, but it’s also going to help you start understanding what is your approach to that, is it going to be an organic approach? Or do you need to put ads behind it to reach those goals?
That’s in a nutshell what I do when I’m starting to map out those services.
Jen Waterson:
So it’s about unpacking, identifying what they are or what the potential revenue streams will be, what you want to bring in, what you want to stop doing and then it’s about unpacking them down to really get to down to the baseline numbers, how much do you want to charge?
And we’ve had this conversation before Ange, it’s around charging, do I want to charge $1000 or do I want to charge $2000? And then you start playing mind games around those things.
If you’re putting numbers down on paper beforehand at least you know going into it that if I only want to charge $1000 then I need to do sixteen of these things. But if I am going to charge $2000 then I can sell eight, still get the same result and potentially my clients will get more of me, or a different quality service.
It’s about putting those numbers down so that you can make an informed decision.
Angela Henderson:
It’s also about understanding your funnel process, for me sometimes it’s the long term revenue goal that is going to help what I’m looking at.
So what I mean is, I’ve been testing a lot out at the moment with these things called tinier offers.
So I know that sometimes people just typically don’t jump from ‘I don’t know who Angela Henderson is as a business consultant, is she actually viable and knows what she’s doing?’, to go ‘yep I’m just going to drop $5000, or $7000 or $10,000’. It normally takes some warming up to do that.
Jen Waterson:
And this is what these tiny offers do for you, they introduce you at a lower, less frictional sort of level, is that right?
Angela Henderson:
One hundred percent, so if you look at a funnel, you will likely have a mid-funnel, top of funnel, and bottom-funnel.
So again, when I was mapping out my services, and working out my revenue goals, I was like okay, ultimately my goal for this is to bring more people into my ecosystem. Because the more people that are into my ecosystem and paying, the more likely that I am going to reach my revenue goal. Because even if they buy something small from me at the beginning, they’re more likely to buy multiple things from me because they know they can trust me.
For me, that was the end goal, I wasn’t necessarily going to be profitable off this, but what will happen is the knock on effect. I’ll give you an example, I just did a five day power hour, and it was five days and people had to pay $20 to work with me over five days, it was obviously a mini model. We had 33 women in there, 33 women times 20 that was 660, that was USD so it worked out at $1000.
I actually got grief when I got an email sent to me saying but what about your one-to-one clients that pay $7.50 an hour to work with you? This is crap and why would you do this? And I said they’re not getting strategy from me, I am simply delivering one little pointer a day and we broke out into a pomodoro of how to work on the business for 25 minutes. My one-to-one clients get way more strategy, so I was like whatever, there’s always one person ready to complain.
But what the other people don’t realise is I now have 33 new people in my ecosystem and the majority of them I never even knew before. When that power hour finished, on Friday I then opened up my 5 week mini-mastermind, it was 8 seats at $1000. Those individuals from that power hour, three of them, then went from a $20 lifetime value of a customer, to $1020 because they also bought the mini-mastermind.
I also know those same people are also looking at coming to my retreat.
So when I am looking at mapping out my services, is there an ROI and is that a short-term ROI or a long-term ROI for my business? It’s about getting people into the ecosystem, what is the funnel that goes with that and how is that profitable?
Jen Waterson:
It’s about getting people in there, giving them a taste of you to let them decide. It’s less risky.
Angela Henderson:
It’s less risky, exactly right, but at the same time it’s less risky to them and less risky to us too as the people that are offering this.
There was no sales page at all, there were no ads, this is the offer, you take it or leave it. Because they had already been with me for five days, an hour everyday, they knew that I was prompt, they knew what I was talking about, they knew that they were getting results, they knew that there was community, it became a no-brainer.
So again, when mapping out your services, I’m really big about not just looking at the long term revenue growth, but equally again looking at that short-term growth, which may not actually be revenue from a numbers perspective, but revenue from getting people in the ecosystem.
Jen Waterson:
That’s exactly what we want to be hearing, that there are other ways and you don’t have to go full on with the big $5000 product or whatever it might be.
I guess the risk is with some people that you do have that shiny object syndrome, so I guess it’s about being really careful and purposeful with what you’re doing so you don’t get constantly side tracked in trying different things, and going around in circles and getting nowhere.
Angela Henderson:
I totally agree and that’s why last year my word of the year was ‘refine’. I cannot tell you every single day how many people I see that are launching something new. I’m confused, I’m like ‘are you a launch specialist or are you a podcast guru, are you this specialist?’ I am so confused half the time about what people are doing. It’s like again you don’t have to have more offerings as long as you’re doing what your clients want and you’re still profitable.
Last year all I did was refine my services, I refined my one-to-one, I refined my group coaching, I refined my retreat, and it wasn’t until November, a whole year of refining, I then bought in my six-month action taker mastermind.
It’s about giving yourself the space that you don’t necessarily have to do more, just work with less, but there’s all these gurus out there saying you always need to be doing new things, no you don’t. All you need is a scalable product, a product that is going to bring that ROI for you and your family. That’s what’s important.
No matter what at the end of the day, you’re not going to make money if you’re not doing things that bring you joy. It might work for you short-term but ultimately you’re going to start to resent it, hate it and probably more than likely, close up shop. It’s so important that you keep that in mind when you’re growing a business.
Jen Waterson:
So to circle back to what you just said about refining, if somebody was out there thinking ‘that is me, I have got lots of things going on right now, and I need to stop that’, where do you start when you’re refining? Is it going back to customer, client, what is it?
Angela Henderson:
It goes back to your numbers. Typically it’s going to be looking at your financial numbers and numbers of how many people have gone through and actually bought, how many people have landed on your sales page and converted.
Your numbers and your time. If you put 100 hours into something and you’re getting minimal out, then that’s easy, okay what do I need to do to change here? But if you’re not tracking your time and not trying to understand that you’re putting 50 hours in a week to your one-to-one clients but you’re only making $10 an hour, how can you make that informed decision?
So for me it comes down to when I look at things, for example we were talking about my podcast looking at the retreat, my retreat is still profitable but when we looked at the profitability for each of my core services, my retreat is the one that sits at the lowest profit margin. It’s still profitable but not by much.
However, it’s still profitable and it’s top of funnel for me, people come into my ecosystem, they get to know me over four days. However, if the retreat, because based on my numbers and looking at my time, became in the red for example, I would probably question whether or not that was a viable product that I would continue to have. But, I wasn’t able to make an assessment on that until I started looking at my financial numbers and looking at my time in order to make a better informed decision.
Jen Waterson:
That just goes straight back to what we started talking about, which is recording time.
You’ve got to know before you can grow. You’ve got to know what it is that you can and can’t afford to do, from a time perspective as well as from a financial perspective.
I think on that note, I’m going to end it there because that is just so much gold out there for people to take away and look at implementing.
In summary, we’ve got recording your time, whether it be on Toggle, whether it be on spreadsheet, whether it be by hand, that’s number one. When it comes to looking at your service offering, pull them apart, have a look at them. What is making you the money and what isn’t? Use the time that you’ve just recorded over a couple of weeks to get a feel for whether or not you’re actually making a dollar through those services.
Angela Henderson:
One hundred percent, again, this isn’t rocket science, but there seems to be sometimes a business owner’s resistance, and I think resistance goes back to numbers don’t lie.
You actually have to sit in it and go ‘I’m not as profitable as I thought I was, or actually, the service that I have, I probably need to cut it, but I’m scared to cut it because what does that mean?’ When you actually give yourself the space to sit there and look at those numbers and the time and everything that I know you do a really great job with the own services that you offer your own clients Jen, this is where the growth happens, this is where the magic happens.
If you think about 7, 8 or 9 figure businesses, they know their numbers like the back of their hand. That’s what they’re basing the next steps in their business on. The sooner you guys can do it, the much better off you’re going to be.
Jen Waterson:
Those businesses that know their numbers, the ones that know what’s happening in the books, behind the scenes, they know what they’re doing from day to day, there the ones who have at some point had that stab in the chest moment where they have worked really, really hard for a year, or whatever length of time, only to then find out all too late, that they didn’t make any money. That’s the thing that kicks them into place and gets them a little bit more interested in their numbers.
Angela Henderson:
The sooner you sit down, pour yourself a glass of wine, beer, coffee, tea, I don’t care what it is, just start implementing this. You don’t need a huge team to do this, you can do it yourself, but it’s just a matter of taking action and doing it.
Jen Waterson:
Perfect Ange, where can people find you?
Angela Henderson:
The best place i would say for people to find me is to head to my website angelahenderson.com.au and from there, depending on how you consume information, you can listen to my podcast ‘The Business and Life Conversations Podcast’, you can join my free facebook community, or if you are interested in growing your business and want to work with me from a business consulting point, you can book in for a discovery call. So just head to the website.
Jen Waterson:
Perfect, and I will have all of those links in the show notes below so make sure you go and check Ange out, she’s definitely worth following and I can guarantee that you will learn all sorts of wonderful things from Ange.
So thanks Ange for coming onto the show, I’m really excited to have you here, and for everybody else that’s out there whatever you’re doing in the world today, do it well and enjoy it.
Angela Henderson:
Thanks Jen have a fab night.
