Budgeting is broken. Dynamic non-linear vision-led forecasting is where the smart money is.
Constant Battle Shattered (illustration by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
It’s exponentially more profitable to make informed, contextual, and proactive Value Resource decisions now, ahead of time, that are based on a highly probable financial future rather than an emotionally coloured problematic past that you are powerless to change.
Manifold Study background sculpture by Artist Conrad Shawcross
Value Resources are your time, money, creativity, purpose, intention, inaction, and action. They’re the primary resources you have limited or unlimited access to that will help or hinder your vision realisation depending on whether you manage them reactively or proactively.
“You can’t truly see what’s in store for you while you’re living in the past. Look to the future. It’s where the magic’s waiting.”
Needs Must
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs helps us organise and prioritise the matters that matter to us all as we traverse our Hero’s Journey complete with the baggage of our cultural and inherited Money Maps.
It illustrates the life, work, and business-critical importance of our relationship with money and finance and our skills, experience, and behaviours when it comes to mapping and managing it effectively.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (illustration by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
Money Maps first and foremost are devices that help unleash our imagination on the world. When made conscious they become a critical tool that can be used to proactively realise your vision in the physical realm. Ideally, this process of manifold manifestation starts in the invisible visionary realm, before any Value Resources, especially time and money, are expended unnecessarily. To varying degrees our personal Money Map underlies and effects each foundational level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (Enhanced by Conner)
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (adapted by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be at peace. What a man can be, he must be.
This need is self-actualisation.”
Self-actualisation is; a recurring cyclical staged achievement of one’s infinite potential to live your life to the fullest through independence, creativity, spontaneity, and a ‘clear grasp of the real world’.
Realisations from my real-world experience of working consciously and unconsciously to meet my Hierarchy of Needs led me to devise a complementary version dealing specifically with money and finance.
My Hierarchy of Approaches overlay helps explain the necessary Money Mapping tools and practical skills and benefits that are required to fully realise your vision while maintaining a firm financial footing.
To take care of the matters that matter to us all we must foremost ascend Conner’s Hierarchy of Approaches scale of money matters inherent to self-actualisation and vision realisation with nothing short of a ‘clear grasp of the real-world context you’re operating in.’
Vision Realisation is; seeing one’s full evolving ‘Ideal Outcome’ potential actualised through the timely creation, curation, allocation, and transfer of incoming and outgoing Value Resources.
Conner’s Hierarchy of Approaches Overlay
Conner’s Hierarchy of Approaches (created by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
Allow me to elaborate my own Hero’s Journey story, which, of course, like everybody’s is ongoing forever more until we are inevitably drawn toward the void to meet and merge with our master maker.
For over 25 years I’ve started a handful of businesses, holding many roles, often concurrently. I’ve co-founded an illustration studio, a creative agency, an architectural practice, and more recently founded a software house and Transformerpreneur; a transformation business coaching, consultancy, and creative agency and academy.
All while on Nomad Sabbatical; living, working, and travelling internationally across multiple cities and countries. This digital nomadic lifestyle hasn’t been without its personal and business challenges. Namely surrounding money and financial management.
As a younger man I ‘did my time’ wallowing in what I call the Common Approach. Flying ‘blind’, adopting what I can only describe as financial problem passivity, that reared its ugly head in the form of willful ignorance, detail denial, and perpetual dream delay.
Common vs. Uncommon Approach (created by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
I had succumbed to having your cake and eating it short-termism always believing I had all the time in the world to get this aspect of my personal and business life handled. Except before I knew it I had a litany of money missteps and financial faux pas to my name. Admittedly some were unpredictable and unavoidable, but many were predictable and preventable without much effort on my part.
Uninformed + Risky (created by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
Overly reactive to my financial ups and downs I lived hand-to-mouth literally and figuratively despite my perceived success on the outside.
Possessing the financial tools and skills I have now I enjoy the seer-like ability to see and examine my most likely money future ahead of time.
I can quickly and easily understand the impact that even small seemingly short-term habits and decisions can have over my mid-to-long term financial position, potential, flexibility, freedom, and fun.
I did have personal budgets that I stuck to, but only occasionally.
They were much like this very simple, high-level (i.e. not-so-granular) example. Undeniably, these static budgets do have their uses, albeit limited to simple scenarios and often only single-use. They make you feel better or worse for a while but offer no significant insights that would help change your default approach to money management.
As long as your life and or all aspects of your business are really basic, predictably linear, and you track your time and money Value Resource incomings, outgoings, and transfers consistently you are, on-the-whole, consciously earning, spending, saving, and investing.
Consciously in this sense means being at least a little informed of your current and incoming short, medium, and long-term financial context.
Give yourself a pat on the back. Seriously, not many people have even this down pat. This makes ongoing on-the-fly adjustments to how you live your life and conduct your business much easier to manage.
What’s a Cash Flow Forecast?
A personal cash flow forecast is a key part of your financial planning and management. Taking into account your income, assets, outgoings, and other present-day information, the plan predicts your future cash flow in order to estimate how much money you’ll have coming in and going out at any given point in the near or far future.
In the context of business finance, cash flow forecasting is the modelling of a business’s future financial liquidity over a specific timeframe. It’s an estimation of the money you expect your business, or you as a freelancer, to bring in and pay out over time.
What’s an Income Expense Budget?
A budget is a spending plan based on incomes and expenses.
In other words, it's an estimate of how much money you'll earn and spend over a single or multi-month or a full year, normally fixed and pre-defined, time period. Budgeting involves making a comprehensive all-encompassing list of financial movements or just focusing on a few income expense budget and cash flow forecast categories.
As an estimation of incomes and expenses over a specified future period of time budgets are usually compared to actual incomings and outgoings and re-evaluated on a periodic basis. Budgets can be made for an individual, a team, a business, a product, a service, a government, or just about anything that transfers Value Resources.
⚠️ Believe it or not In the real world incomings and outgoings don’t always conform to a regular, consistent monthly or yearly plan.
Having a budget, however simple, or limited it may turn out to be, and working closely to it is an absolute minimum requirement for effective personal money and or business finance management.
Budgets start high level and progressively become more granular.
Revere Seering + Failing Forward (illustration by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
Given my professional training to be an architect the manifesting power of a plan and budget was grasped quite early in my career.
Planning for eventualities, especially the black swan-like events that can hit at any moment, and everything else that is involved in designing, and building a piece of architecture that meets the brief, on time, on budget, and delights the user, is a life-long practice.
Planning gets easier but it is never easy. It takes work and needs ongoing attention, appraisal, and amendment to be of any use.
Nonetheless, it’s an essential level in the Hierarchy of Approaches.
Conner’s Hierarchy of Approaches (created by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
It’s said that ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’. Experientially this statement is undeniably true. That’s why the concept and practice of Revere Seering and Failing Forward, as a form of iterative cyclical planning is an inherently critical aspect of Flowcasting™.
However, despite my self-proclaimed yet questionable budgeting and planning prowess I regularly found it increasingly difficult to predict my own and my business’s likely or potential financial trajectory.
In part, this was because they were so inextricably intertwined and formed the core of my fluid fluctuating financial livelihood.
I needed to quickly cash flow forecast my personal money and business finance situations on a daily basis as well as over greater periods in different longer-term local and macro-economic scenarios and contexts. I wanted to stress-test both simple and complex financial assumptions across time before making strategic and tactical Value Resource decisions and consequent actions.
Value Resources exit, disappear, or flow out of the (un)rolling time window as expenses, cash, or (in)actions.
Financial Decision Window Time Slice (illustration by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
I couldn’t do any of these tasks quickly or easily, if at all, which made it beyond challenging to the point of downright risky to devise, resource, and implement financial plans or budgets to achieve even smaller interim goals, let alone proactively realise my overarching vision.
Everything that was readily available to solve this problem was underkill, disappointing, and frustrating, to say the least.
I struggled for years to manage my Money Map effectively and efficiently so that I could create consistent, reliable, predictable, and desirable results with both that aligned with my vision.
Ever found yourself reluctantly trying desperately to overcome your dreaded ‘spreadsheetitus’ with a gung-ho I’ll give it a go ‘how hard can it be really?’ positive attitude? Only to find you’ve wasted the day, or worse both your evenings and weekends (that you’ll never get back) beavering away at building your own ‘unique to you and your business’ profit and loss, income expense budget or cash flow forecast.
If you haven’t had the pleasure yet I feel obliged to make sure you are aware of and remain wary of what I refer to as the enduring pitfalls of static, linear, traditional ‘vanilla’ budgeting, planning, and forecasting.
Drained
Trying to create or downloading a manual ‘applicable to all but not really suited to any’ budgeting or forecasting template, stubbornly shoehorning your personal money and business finance affairs into it while trying to get something out that’s meaningful to you is an expensive never-ending drain on your time, energy, and sanity.
This outdated, traditional, old-school approach leads to swathes of confusion, frustration, disappointment, and expensive pseudo-solution-abandonment, even for the most spreadsheet savvy.
What follows is a really basic traditional ‘two-liner’ vanilla forecast. It could be used as a budget or a cash flow. It highlights some of the inherent limitations of even the most simple templates.
These shortcomings are amplified the greater the number and variety of line items that are needed to sufficiently budget, plan, model or forecast your or your business’s potential incoming financial future.
Traditional ‘Vanilla’ Budget or Cash Flow Forecast (by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
Firstly, they quickly transition from too simple to overly complex, high-maintenance, inflexible, static, and limited to a single-use purpose.
Maintenance
To maintain a consistent up-to-date ‘always now ready’ forecast time window time periods need to be removed at one end and added at the other. This is repetitive, time-consuming, and difficult work that only caters for single ‘locked-in-time’ fixed date periods (daily, monthly, or yearly). Updates require extensive sense-checking that can lead to template patching or worse, a complete agonising overhaul.
Limited
Traditional templates often require manual monthly schedule creation and frequent updates, review, and analysis without instant much-needed contextual feedback. As such they are one-dimensional, linear, static, rigid, inflexible, quickly obsolete, and incredibly error-prone.
Complex
More complex forecasts become more confusing and difficult to change and update. Anything other than very simple money movement patterns over time increase scheduling complexity.
Alternative
What’s the alternative? Research, design, build, and test or buy your own expensive bespoke tailored template and get frequently bogged down with relentless manual budget forecast updates.
Overkill
I searched endlessly for the Money Mapping holy grail; simple, easy-to-use, flexible, dynamic, multi-purpose, multi-use, automated, low-maintenance, contextual budgeting, Value Resource scheduling, cash flow mapping, and wealth planning solutions, forecasting software and templates that could form the basis of my personal and Transformerpreneurial financial management needs.
I spent years developing ad hoc systems in Excel, Google Sheets, and Salesforce CRM. In short, I went all-in and overkill. The bolt-on solutions I discovered or self-developed quickly became the proverbial ‘sledgehammer to crack a nut’. Excessive and overly complex, hard-to-manage, time-consuming, these ‘too little, too late’ so-called solutions hindered my progress instead of helping it.
My entrepreneurial right-of-passage quickly became my proverbial baptism of fire, especially when it came to effective money management, planning, budgeting, forecasting, and mapping.
Crucible
Throughout the latter half of my career, I thankfully faced down and survived, a cascading crucible of unwanted financial problems and challenges that could have easily been mitigated or avoided altogether, if I could have seen my money future clearly.
Growing too fast with too little money, i.e. victim of own success.
Company insolvency and liquidation, twice in one year.
A 10-year personal Debt Management Plan process (DMP).
Forced to accept a ‘weak cash position’ investment valuation which led to the giving of too much for too little.
Not one, but two, low share valuation business founder exits.
A 3-year creditor Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA).
Underfunded under-planned startup business failure complete with business partner relationship breakdown.
Personal bankruptcy with all the bells and whistles.
Relentless ‘Keep the wheels on at all cost’ spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical worry, anxiety, and stress.
Constant Battle Shattered (illustration by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
Retreat
When the dust had settled on what I hoped was to be my last crucible moment I finally decided on my Significant Life Change :
Burned out I made my long overdue ‘ten-year decision’ left my businesses, and entered the forest jungle of ‘Not Knowing’.
Putting my house in order I embarked on an open-ended career break sabbatical to Thailand. I found myself sculpting a dinosaur on a beach, modelling consciousness, and living in a cave, literally.
Spending years indexing, recapitulating, organising, analysing, and conceptualising I codified life. My ‘Work Life Wide Open’ and ‘Life’s Work’ magnum opus drafted I re-emerged from my cave.
Despite these grand projects and my naive post-business-exit pre-sabbatical ‘I’ll be back up and running and earning again in no time’ budget, my savings were all too quickly dwindling away.
It was clear my financial fear of well and truly bottoming out was calling me in, again. This time it meant business. We were overdue for a reckoning. A ‘feel the fear to let it go’ showdown.
Yes, that’s me having a caveman meltdown, Wolverine style (copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
Insight
Through the experiential insights I’d gained about myself and my default approach while dealing with the seemingly never-ending crucible problems that I’d overcome, I finally realised something.
It quickly becomes a living nightmare trying to budget, plan, resource, forecast, implement, and actualise the realisation of your vision using only traditional static linear methods, tools, and approaches.
After countless light-bulb moments, I could now see, recognise, and appreciate the limitations inherent in the half-baked inflexible pseudo-solutions that many of us attempt to find, invent, re-invent, and cobble together ourselves, often out of sheer financial desperation.
Waste
To address this expanding sinkhole of wasted Value Resources and help ease the pain I put my architectural training to wider use and designed a holistic solution to meet my own recurring needs and the needs of those of you that are struggling with similar issues.
An all-in-one multi-purpose super-tool to suit not just one but many different, interconnected, life and business contexts and scenarios was born out of the ashes and still glowing embers of my now burned through financial fear. With it, where I was blind I can now see clearly.
Peak
With what I’ve learned through countless ‘frying pan around the head’ repetition and ‘the penny has finally dropped’ realisation I’m now making it my enduring mission to empower people, just like you, to take back control of their short, medium, and long term personal money and business finance ‘presence’ and most importantly their future.
That’s the vehicle I’ve chosen to uncover, design, refine, and realise my soul-purpose while helping you to efficiently self-actualise yours.
With foresight and informed, considered action you too can make consistent incremental progress with increasing clarity, certainty, confidence, comfort, and control toward realising your vision and experiencing life at its creative peak without being held back by worry, anxiety, and fear surrounding your money and finance.
You can see your money future clearly today and you can change it now for a better tomorrow, with Flowcasting™. The must-have money management, budgeting, planning, mapping tool and practical skill needed to succeed financially in life, work, and business.
Solution
Money management, for some, is a necessary evil that we struggle to solve ourselves, outsource, ignore, or deny the need for entirely, at our financial peril. For many others obtaining the money skills needed to succeed financially is fast becoming a no-brainer.
I’ve discovered that with a powerful easy-to-use self-managed flexible automated forward-planning tool you are liberated to work more efficiently, productively, creatively, and freely, while moving safely, securely, steadily, and surely toward living your unabridged dream life, taking problems in your stride, with financial peace of mind.
I created the Flowcast™ SUPER-TOOL to form the beating Heartmind Money Map of your Informed Uncommon Approach to personal money, business finance, and realising your soul-vision.
Common vs. Uncommon Approach (created by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
Informed + Safer (created by Richard Conner • copyright 2021 Transformerpreneur)
Flowcasting™ The Quick and Easy Way
SUPER-TOOL provides a vision-led, goal-centred, flexible multi-purpose, automated set-and-forget, always now ready, rolling time-travel reality code Money Map window. It can be used as a daily, monthly, and yearly income expense budget, a cash flow forecast, and a wealth planner. Or a unique-to-you hybrid combination, for all your overarching needs, big picture wants, and detailed desires.
How easy is it to use, really? Click below to watch a short demo.
Click for Flowcasting™ SUPER-TOOL PERSONAL / NOMAD SABBATICAL Demonstration Video
Click for Flowcasting™ SUPER-TOOL Multi-This Multi-That BUSINESS Demonstration Video
Flowcasting™ with Flowcast™ SUPER-TOOL lets you see(r) your money future clearly today so you can change it now for a better tomorrow. Navigate financial decisions with ease, grace, and flow.
Always NOW Ready; Up to date from today onwards.
The worst thing about traditional forecasting tools is they rely on your transaction history being up to date or you having to manually update a schedule. Flowcast™ SUPER-TOOL is purposefully forward-looking. You only have to update your balance to be Always NOW Ready To Go.
Automated Set Forget; Just add balance for the big picture.
To be useful forecasts should be realistic and error-free. The best way to achieve this is to minimise data entry. Flowcast™ SUPER-TOOL does the hard work of automatic forecast scheduling. Set and forget it safe in the knowledge you’ll always see the forest and the trees.
Value Resource Combos; Recurring amounts, time, tasks.
It’s useful to schedule important financial administration responsibilities so nasty surprises, last-minute submissions, and costly late filing fees are avoided. Flowcast™ SUPER-TOOL tracks one-off and recurring tasks or time-based resources as easily as scheduling income expense amounts. Add them like you would a standing order.
Mission Guided Goals; Predictive achievement dates.
Take a sabbatical. Build a house. Buy an electric car. Hit a sales target. Value your aspirations. Flowcast™ SUPER-TOOL forecasts when you’ll hit your goals and how many months it’ll take to get there. Adjust your financial model to realise your vision sooner or later. It’s up to you.
Custom Contingency; Prepare for the unthinkable.
Oh to know all costs associated with achieving goals and realising visions. Financially planning for all that may go wrong and right in life isn’t always as easy as pie, but we’ve made it so that it is.
Flowcast™ SUPER-TOOL ensures you’re automatically prepared for the unthinkable, unexpected, and unforgettable.
Time Traveller; Now, then, whenever.
Imagine if you could predict the mid-to-long-term financial impact of your detailed day-to-day and bigger picture choices well in advance of making important financial decisions and taking proactive action? Flowcast™ SUPER-TOOL uses your forecast line item data to predict your financial position at any point in the near or far future.
Skip Months; Budget overlaps and dovetailing.
Nomadic lifestyles. Travel sabbaticals. Seasonal businesses. Create realistic multi-location or intermittent product service cash flow forecasts for you or your business. Excluded months sequence overlays let you model irregular but predictable monthly on-off cycles.
Because you and your clients just won’t sit still.
