Bootstrappable. Save money to realise your vision.

6 Jul

Baron Munchausen pulls himself and his horse out of a swamp by his pigtail. Bootstrapping, the term appears to have originated in the early 19th-century United States (particularly in the phrase “pull oneself over a fence by one’s bootstraps”) to mean an absurdly impossible action. (Wikipedia)

Bootstrapping means different things for different people, in different contexts. It isn’t just for tech startups. It’s for anyone trying to create something new from next to nothing (we always start with something) without external funding or a bottomless personal savings account.

Bootstrapping is building a company from the ground up with nothing but personal savings and, with luck, the income from the first sales. The term is also used as a noun: A bootstrap is a business launched by an entrepreneur with little or no outside cash or other support. (Investopedia)

If you aren’t full-time in your Transformation Business you may be managing to get by and make ends meet with your existing salary. That could be your job or freelance work, or from ongoing one-to-one or group client sessions and projects that you’re already generating. And, of course, you may be pre-launch with your business or a new product or service and not yet generating any income at all.

Bootstrapping applies to both your life and business. For many Transformerpreneurs these are frequently so interconnected they can often feel and be inseparable. It comes with the territory.

Certainly when it comes to money.

A few scenarios where bootstrapping is essential, if not critical:

You’re starting a business and clients and customers are scarce.
You’re creating a new offering and don’t know if it’ll be successful.
You want to lengthen your research and launch phase runways.
You want to be more profitable so you can be more selective.
You’re spending, and losing money, faster than you can make it.

Bootstrapping is about keeping things simple and straightforward, especially when it comes to personal money and business finance.

Money mindset and day-to-day, month-to-month behavioural changes you can adopt at your own pace to help you bootstrap your way through any or all of the scenarios listed above are must-haves.

Bootstrapping a Transformation Business is not always about spending the least amount possible. Although that’s a big part of it.

It’s being consistently mindful of what you spend money on, when, and why in your life and business to ensure you’re getting the most value over time, not just in the moment. Pause for thought.

Energy Exchange

The most obvious foundation of bootstrapping is to beg and borrow. To quote Richard Branson ‘borrow, rent, or lease, rather than buy.’

The essence, of course, is to minimise or cut your expenses completely by borrowing or exchanging. Doing this is a perfect opportunity for learning and honing your Transformation Craft with free practice.

At the same time, you can also get some of those essential elements of your Transformation Business up and running without paying directly with money or cash. You might give a bodywork, or yoga session in exchange for someone helping you set up your website.

If you can forge connections in your online or offline community you’re uniquely positioned to explore ways to help each other move your businesses forward. If you’ve hit an unexpected or prolonged difficult patch, you can create new collaborative projects that could invigorate your business and also broaden your skills and experience.

Exchanges, especially when business is challenging, are a solid foundation that can help you continue to do what you love doing while developing long term partnerships and relationships with your peers.

They allow you to focus the often limited financial resources you do have to solve your business problems strategically rather than just fire-fighting issues by haphazardly throwing money (away) at them.

Think Longer-term

If you can buy in bulk, or pay annually, you can save money on some of your larger regular expenses. For example, if you know you’re going to be using software on an ongoing basis opt for the annual payment.

I pay for all my subscription-only services including Squarespace, Dropbox, GetResponse this way and regularly save 20% — 30% against paying monthly. On top of that services like Honey can automatically garner you an extra 10% — 30% without you having to go voucher hunting. Remember to turn off auto-renewal so you have the opportunity to scan for deals when payment is due every year.

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There is also software out there that offers an unlimited lifetime access option. This is very likely if they’re a new business in the early product development stages and working to establish their customer base. If you’re certain the software will do what you need it to it’s worth paying the slight premium now so the overall cost is lower in the long run.

Are you interested in self-publishing books or making your marketing lead-magnets available on Amazon, iBooks, iTunes, or other eBook retailers to reach a wider, larger audience? If you are Vellum is an easy-to-use elegant tool that offers an unlimited licence option so you can publish as many eBook titles as you want forevermore.

As an added bonus, Vellum now has some beautiful paperback templates that can easily be exported for uploading to Amazon for sale. Vellum requires minimal effort and no technical know-how to produce professional results. It’s possible to publish a book in a day.

This is amazing value if you’re a prolific writer and harbour an intention to publish your blog series as a growing series of transformation books that you could sell at your sessions, workshops, retreats, and trainings.

You could publish your blog as the proverbial calling or business card to help build your Transformation Business profile and personal brand.

This can save you $100’s of dollars a year. A no-brainer if you’re sure you will use the software regularly and it’s essential to your workflow.

Ditch Your Subscriptions

If you haven’t noticed the world is shifting to a subscription-based business model and mostly for good commercial reasons. Adobe, who create Photoshop, InDesign, and Creative Cloud, have massively increased their profitability after moving to a cloud subscription vs a traditional buy-once and upgrade later product lifecycle approach.

They’ve lowered costs, grown revenue, and increased profits significantly by not having to waste resources supporting their legacy software. And, because customers rarely leave the Adobe ecosystem, and they now have a more predictable revenue stream, they can channel marketing and advertising spend more effectively to maintain and grow their core business. Using their own software no less!

Yes, Adobe is a huge enterprise, but there’s something to be learned from bigger business. By paying attention you can distil strategies that might enhance your Transformation Business in a small or big way.

However, being tied into a $10, $25, or $60 a month subscription just to produce some simple marketing material for your website, blog, or Facebook page is not a great return on your investment (ROI).

Unless you’re creating artwork as your Transformation Craft and selling it, or you create and manage marketing and advertising material for multiple clients you’ll rarely, if ever, get enough value back from this recurring expense. I was a long-term Adobe Photoshop and InDesign user until a few years ago. I, reluctantly made the change to Affinity Photo.

Affinity also creates Affinity Designer (similar to Adobe Illustrator), and now Affinity Publisher (similar to Adobe InDesign). The buy-it-once (I haven’t had to upgrade yet) price was $49. So far that works out at only $2 a month and will only get less as time passes by.

That’s over 80%+ saving versus Adobe subscription services.

On top of that, if you use services like Canva, which is easy-to-use but limited, you can change to using more versatile Affinity software with very little learning and effort and you’ll save yourself another $13 a month in the process. Which can be put to better use in some other mission-critical area of your Transformation Business.

Over a year that’s another $150 saved. You get the picture.

Money Mindset

With smaller Transformation Businesses it tends to be easier, simpler, and more likely that you’ll keep track of business expenses.

That’s because they can be less frequent and are normally more substantial ‘noticeable’ amounts. Think of buying a laptop, or replacing your phone, or booking a shala for a yoga retreat you’re running.

However, with personal expenditure, we can be, and usually are less than mindful of our spending and money management habits.

Admittedly, in an ideal world, you’d rather not flow through life looking at the right-hand side of the menu when while dining at your favourite restaurant, especially after a long, hard, exhausting day.

If you’re bootstrapping this is the money mindset you must live by.

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Question Your Priorities

Bootstrapping is also a question of priorities.

What’s more important to you in the medium to long rather than the short-term instant gratification pleasure response? The creative freedoms that running a successful, profitable, sustainable, Transformation Business can offer may be more valuable to you than always doing and having what you want when you want it. Your call.

After all, what is this doing, getting, and having all about anyway?

Check in with yourself to make sure your spending habits aren’t just a mechanism to satisfy some elusive deeper-seated insatiable urge. Are you just distracting yourself from an uncomfortable feeling or thought pattern that needs to be inner-worked out of your system?

Think about this marketing scenario for a moment.

Is it worth spending one hour to think of ways to reduce your spending by just $50 a month or to spend 10+ hours a month trying to get your Patreon support channel up and running, that after a year or two may eventually reward you with only $50 a month in revenue?

An Integral Part

You are or will be an integral part of your Transformation Business. You’re the most important employee, team member, manager, and leader. You fulfil many roles, working ‘in’ and ‘on’ your business.

It’s easy to forget, with all this hard, relentless work you’re putting in, day after day, week after week, that you’re the biggest cost to your business as well as its most valuable income-generating asset.

When you’re bootstrapping a Transformation Business or a new product or service you are the cost base and income generator you’ve got to manage the most closely to get where you want to go.

When you master your self (the inner you) and yourself (the outer you) in relation to your Transformation Business you can start to realise your vision and live life more fully on your terms, more consistently.

In the first instance, this means tracking what you’re spending and minimising your costs where you can so you can maximise them, where and when appropriate, within your life and business.

When you do you can squeeze the most juice possible out of your money and edge ever closer to living the dream.

Realise Your Vision

These are just a few examples of how to make your Transformation Business and you bootstrappable.

Time, money, space, and weight. Whatever these words mean to you they are, in all their contextual forms, important considerations for every Transformerpreneur, especially the nomadic variety.

Mastering them makes the process of building and growing a business less overwhelming, less stressful, and much more enjoyable. They give you much more time and space to get things right more often.

You no longer have to rush around chasing your tail in an attempt to beat the system or cheat the game. You can finally stop playing catch-up and start directing and leading your business from a grounded, confident, and bootstrappable unbreakable position.

Building a successful Transformation Business is about putting the time in, working hard, patience, persistence, maintaining a sense of humour, and making your money last as long as humanly possible.

Oh, and it’s having the right Money Mindset and the simplest Money Kit to get you started and keep you on track to realise your vision.