Every time I forget to check my bank accounts for a while, I find all sorts of nasty surprises. Surprises that are silently eroding away the money in my bank accounts. It may only be a dollar here and a dollar there, but it’s dollars for nothing, and if you are dead set of being rid of those dollars, it is far better to give them to a charity than to a bank.

Key offenders

• Insurance. They bung repayment insurance on credit cards by default and let you pay for it. If, however, you are the kind of person to pay off your credit card/you only have a small limit, it’s simply not worth paying. I recently got life insurance as part of getting a bank loan… Paid off loan and wouldn’t you know it, still have life insurance. I just stopped a $9 monthly charge to my account, that was being taken for nothing (I have no kids, if I die, no one will suffer!)
• Interest. The ‘Goal Saver Account’ is called that for a reason. You have to have some fairly strong goals if you ever want to make any money off it. Today I changed to an online account and instantly raised my interest rate from 5.6% to 8.2%. Crazy.
• Credit cards. If you owe money, get a low interest card. Thank goodness, I don’t but I have one anyway, just incase I ever do. Seriously, why pay 20% when you can pay 12%?

I’m going to go to the bank twice a year now purely to check up on what’s new and get things re-fiddled. Just budget about an hours worth of time and get a good consultant person. It’s worth it!

While Decisive Flow was elbow deep in our business plan on Friday afternoon (and also in chocolate cake and custard), we learned why you write a business plan.

I know, I know, I used to work in a business planning company.

As a result of sitting down and debating who we are, what we’re about and why we exist, we figured out a lot of things about who we are, what we like and why we exist. We probably set aside about 2 hours, and I don’t care how many times people tell you to work on the business as well as working in it, it is only in that 2 hours that you ever remember why it is important.

We are now going to hire a coder guy. This is heavily controversial, as we have run into the problem that ALL coders seem to be male, well, all coders who want to work here seem to be male. And a large part of our identity (as we are starting to realise) is that we are female. However, our coder guy will be welcomed with many girlie hugs, because we also realised we want someone to do that stuff for us so we can focus on the pretty girly things that we like better.

This is going to lead to a little restructuring. Which I am very happy with. The restructuring basically goes that I will be slowly working my way out of my job, so when I go to Vietnam in October, no one will even notice. Actually it is more going that I will have more time to convince you that we are the best people to trust your website with. So that kind of works for everyone.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say, is no matter how small you are, and how straight forward you think your business is, it is soooo good to write it down, and discuss it together. And then take it to an outsider to critique. And then hire a mentor (another outcome of planning) who will keep you honest.

There seems to be quite a flurry of good business ideas being directed towards me in the past few days. One thing they ALL have in common is exponential growth. This is not exponential growth in customers, but in the size of the idea.

One sentence that I find myself regularly repeating is “There are 6 billion people on this planet. You do not need to appeal to ALL of them”

Yes, if you have a great idea, people WILL get excited about it, they will tell you how it applies in many situations and how much an extra feature would help them.

But while your idea is growing ever bigger, your prospects of success are shrinking just as quickly. Rowan’s diagram explains this phenomenon nicely:

There are MANY downsides to having 6 Billion people on this planet. One of the few upsides is that you can have a super focused, simple and targeted product that 99.9999% of people have absolutely no use for, and your target market will still be multi-thousands or millions of people.

I know it’s scary and adding new target audiences feels intuitively like a safe way to play it, but the reality of the situation is that the more you DILUTE your idea and spread the appeal, the less that your main and most profitable market will like it.

When you have that target market eating out of the palm of your hand, that is the time to start looking at how to attract a different group of people. If you are unsure of whether your idea is enough to get your initial group knocking down your door, then maybe it is the idea and not the size of the market that needs analysis…?

I LOVE mine. And now Nik LOVES mine too.

I joined up with Kendons earlier this year, they came highly recommended by one of my best friends who is also the daughter of one of the partners (who I have also known for years and would trust my business with any day.) But I reckon Nik (who doesn’t know Murray from a bar of soap) nailed it on the head when he explained why he chose them:

• They don’t bore you with the details. All they want you to care about is making money.
• They don’t care if you are dumb. Ask away, they’ll explain anything to you.
• They are EXCITED about Xero. And so should you be
• A senior partner talks to you. Even if you are little and insignificant, they treat you like you will be the next big thing.
• They are PROACTIVE I hear other accountants claim to be, but I have NEVER received this many emails from my accountant reminding me of things, asking things, letting me know things and generally making me feel confident they are on top of it all
• They are uber smart. In my first hour with them I got more accounting tips than I’d received the entire previous year

So if you don’t feel like you are getting this much from your accountant, I HIGHLY recommend you make the switch. I think I have delayed premature aging by about 5 years :)

I have been playing indoor netball for a couple of months now and my team is plagued with loser syndrome.

We, quite literally, cannot win a single game.

Sometimes, we win the first quarter or half a game and freak ourselves out to the point we start making stupid mistakes to ensure we lose the full game.

We’re not any worse than any other team, we’re actually a LOT better than we used to be, but you’d never guess it from our scores.

I find it fascinating how much psychology has to do with sports. Because the ONLY thing that lets us down is our heads. Because we BELIEVE we are losers, we behave like losers, so we lose.

Which makes you realise that if you believe you are going to win you’re halfway there already, which makes being successful that much easier.

We just took a mid-afternoon food dash and while doing so, discussed how we will stop doing so.

From now on, it’s all about budgeting, saving and living a much more frugal life (eek) so as to fulfill dreams such as buying a house.

So, we dashed back to the office and I signed into Mint, which was meant to solve all my budgeting issues while showing me how awful I am at spending currently, so I would have the kick up the butt I needed to get serious about this whole saving thing again… For those of you who didn’t know me when I was 12 and like the MASTER saver, I used to be great, supurb even. This is because I am from a long line of savers and it came naturally to me. But then I left the family nest and it no longer came naturally to me and now I am useless.

But Mint didn’t help me. I don’t even understand how to use it and every time I go to do something it doesn’t even let me do it in the page, it pops up another page on top. I am gutted because I was super inspired about saving and now the inspiration has died.

So, now I am going to make Verity make me a budget (hi Verity can you please make me a budget?) because although she too suffers with the practical side of things, I think theoretically she has it sussed, and she has more time than me, or is better at procrastinating.

And then I WILL stick to it. Because isn’t the first rule of getting something done writing it down and measuring it? I think also that saving needs to be a competitive sport, much like eating has turned into over the past few weekends.

Does anyone else have a successful savings strategy they can pass on?

I started reading the Alchemist. I didn’t think I got it until I started discussing it and realised the book is all about following your dreams and not getting stuck in the comfort of every day. I haven’t finished but suspect that the other point is to spend less time reading about life, and more time living it (a funny point for a book, but to be fair, it’s a short book).

In my life, I’ve had many (unfulfilled) dreams, from being a vet, to being a dancer for Michael Jackson, to being like a big shot business person, to now, just being happy.

But then i thought maybe I should change my dream again back to something that I can measure.

All my life up until November last year I had big plans and dreams. Now I deliberately avoid them. I felt like I needed to take a break from finding my one calling to figure out what it is that makes me happy. Now I know what that is again (and what it’s not), and I’ve started on the Alchemist, I feel a pressure to find my life dream again.

But I just don’t want to.

It’s quite the dilemma.

Man I am a blabber mouth. I got a twitter email the other day and went to reply with my usual waffle, only to find Twitter cut me off after 160 characters. I deleted half my rant then sent it on through. Same message, same outcome, in like a quarter as many words.

When humans are given any space to write, we LOVE to fill it. Email enables us to pretend we are famous novelists with prose that the world can’t wait to read. Twitter reminds us that we are every bit as boring as the guy sitting next to us and to keep it to a minimum thanks.

I wonder if someone could invent a thunderbird plugin that counts words and gives you a massive warning when you start to ramble? Is there one?

When you are young and in business, it is VERY easy to fall into the trap of people finding it so impressive that you are even scraping together a living for yourself they engulf you in praise and congratulations.

This isn’t actually that helpful and while I accept that owning a business in your 20′s SOUNDS super fantastic, the reality is that normally it’s just another job… But a job where unless you seek help, you don’t get it. There is no senior management staff out there to guide you through, so you really rely on outside people to offer criticism and identify weaknesses and teach you how to improve.

Yesterday , Emma and I met with our favorite branding person Simone Lennane from Maxim. The intent was to go through the beginning of a fairly grueling process of discovering WHO WE ARE.

And man oh man is it difficult!

Even with plenty of warning and stories about how she will go straight to the jugular (and to be fair I think she was pretty soft on us…), It was pretty hard to sit down and HONESTLY point out flaws and weaknesses and even the good bits.

It is something we have needed to do for a while, we have managed to get by with a lot of hard work, but it really is time to do as she says and stop thinking comfortable and start thinking world domination – even if only to make the business so well managed that we can work less.

But it struck me yesterday after the meeting, that I have come to expect surface slaps on the back and even though I know everything we pointed out yesterday has been sitting there in the back of my mind, I’ve never actually had to acknowledge it. That’s a pretty weak and dangerous position.

So. Simone (if you are reading this), I am sorry in advance for the tantrums I will probably pull at some point when the process gets hard, but Emma and I are VERY excited and pumped about the next month, we love your work and we are stoked to have met someone who really seems to care enough about our future that you are willing to tell us the stuff that’s hard to hear :)

Can’t wait to see where we get!

For some reason, in the last 2 weeks, I started to panic about the recession.

Claire informed me that I should be panicking because the world is a changing and since we are soon to run out of petrol and we should all start biking.

Lance took over my whiteboard for 2 minutes to show me graphs of how it would/wouldn’t affect me.

Jack and I listened to how hard it is for restaurants and found out how many are closing down.

Someone else said to get more government work.

I jumped up and down and told everyone I was worried because I have no strategy if things slow down and become sad that I would never own my little cottage which I now NEED because I have the perfect rug to put in it.

So I came up with a strategy:

1. DON’T Panic!!!!! Currently I see no signs of this business slowing down, and the only thing that will slow it down is if I start to cut down on everything (like new Macs which we seem to buy like all the time) and we go into hibernation mode
2. Get variety Things hit worse if you have only one source of income. If you have nicely spread out international customers and a nice mix of governemnt and business customers, you have not put your eggs in one basket.
3. Be necessary If your job is to help people get more business, they will probably still need you if they hit hard times. Maybe they will need you even more.

Not the most complicated of strategies, but I am sleeping at night again.

I also just wanted to say to all the mothers out there: Thanks you do a great job.
And to those whose mums aren’t here anymore: I thought about you too yesterday.
And for those whose mums are: Don’t take your mum for granted. She is your greatest ally in life.