31:7 Money saving techniques

Lee Matthew Jackson: So in today’s conversation we’re going to look at money saving techniques and the idea here is to help you to increase your profitability without having to work harder. We so often will see ways of boosting profitability as a business by selling more, by doing more, by increasing our prices, et cetera. All of those are great things. If we can sell more product, we’re obviously going to have more money and if we can increase our prices, we’re going to get more money for what we’re doing. These are all great things, but what can we be doing right now as a business to increase our profitability to take off some of the strain and some of the pressure of running an agency?

So let’s take a look at the purpose of this session. The idea is to help you increase that profitability to help you free up your time without having to make drastic changes. Now there are likely going to be some drastic changes you will need to make over time to increase the profitability of your business. We can’t rule out the fact that you might have to increase your prices at some point. You might have to focus in on a particular product or a particular niche, et cetera to improve your profitability. However you can be taking some actions right now. So through this we’re going to cover analysing your personal and business expenses. We’re going to take a look at some money saving business techniques and some money saving personal techniques. So these are things that I have applied to my business and to my personal life. We’re also going to take a look throughout at a bit of a decision matrix for spending. It’s nothing too complicated, but it’s just certain things you want to be asking yourself or analysing when you are coming to make decisions on purchases.

Essentially the outcome we hope is going to be better control of your spending whilst not becoming Scrooge and I will warn you now that I did become a bit of a Scrooge at one point. So before we carry on, I got to the point where I’d got myself in an awful lot of debt as a teenager. I’d got phone contracts, I’d got all sorts, I was bouncing credit cards and things just went out of control. So what I did was I decided to look at everything that I spent and I went the complete opposite way. Every single purchase that was potentially there to be made, I would talk myself out of it and essentially became a miser. Then as my relationship with Kate developed, unfortunately I kind of passed this onto her, was this attitude of do we really need it? To the extent where we were hardly ever buying anything, just so that we could pay off all of this debt, etc. Then once the debt was paid, that mentality continued for such a long time. And that was actually quite negative. So I would warn you right now that it’s important we find some balance in these sorts of decisions when we’re trying to save money, increase profitability. This is so that we can have a better work life balance. We can enjoy life more, not so that we can simply have money in the bank and never spend it.

So what we want to do is analyse both our personal and our business expenses and our personal expenses do actually have an impact on our business expenses as well. If we need to draw lots of money down, then that is going to put pressure on our agency. So what we would encourage you to do is review all of your current business expenditure. So make a spreadsheet. Perhaps you would open up your account software cause your accountant should have line itemed all of your costs for last year. Get all of those exported, have a spreadsheet of everything that you are spending. So that could be electricity for the office, it’s your rent, maybe you’re paying for support contracts, maybe you’ve got SaaS software, whatever they are. Get a list of all of those. Then on the flip side of this takes a bit more work because you don’t necessarily have this in an accountants software, but have a look at your personal expenses. So download your bank statement for example for the last year or the last six months and take a look at what those monthly costs are. How much on average are you spending on food? How much on average are you spending on entertainment? What is your electricity bill again, that might have to be an average over the what are all of these expenses that you’re paying out on? Are you renting your car? So on and so forth. So you can now see A in your business how much cost your business has. That’s all of the salaries and all of the general expenditure etc and then also how much money you are spending personally, which is obviously impacting on your business as well. Cause you’re having to draw that money down from the business so that you can then spend that in a personal capacity.

You’ll see here that I’ve also highlighted the business partners and this could get awkward if you have a business partner. This is a conversation that potentially needs to happen, especially if your agency is struggling. An open conversation about your business partners expenses as well should be on the cards. I’ll give you an example of a company I knew where they had the equal partnership setup and one of the partners had unfortunately got themselves into a position where their own personal costs were quite high, but it also meant therefore that the other partner, if he was going to abide by the equal partnership share had to also draw the same amount of money down from that business or wave it, which meant that there was undue pressure from one business partner and the other business partner was starting to feel quite resentful of the entire situation. So having that open and honest conversation with business partners, if you have one about what their personal expenditures are. I know it’s a tough conversation, but if you are going to be taking some of the pressure off both personally and also within the business, this might have to be that difficult conversation that you need to have.

So once you have all of this down on paper, you’re going to want to look at those business costs and it will take a bit of time. But going through with a fine tooth comb. Are your current business costs reasonable? The first thing you could be looking at is, are you paying generally too much? Are you paying too much for electricity? Are you paying too much for software licencing, etc? So are there any money saving techniques you can apply to that? Can you get those costs reduced? Are there any of those costs as well that you can simply remove from the business entirely? So perhaps you have some random insurance that you’re not even sure what it’s doing. Maybe go get some advice. Do you even need that insurance? What are you spending money on that you’re not really a hundred percent sure why or see the value in? And I wouldn’t say knock everything on the head that you’re not sure of, do your due diligence. Maybe there is some value in that that you don’t realise, but have a look. Are those costs reasonable and are you paying out for things that you even need to be paying out for? The other thing we would look at as well from these business expenses is, is the amount of money that you and all your business partners are having to draw down? Is that having a negative impact as well on your overall business?

Finally, when you’re looking at that data, can your spending decisions be improved? If you look at the history, there’s certain things that you may have spent on that you just can’t change. So you’ve bought stuff and just highlight stuff that you have bought that you have never then used. Perhaps it an AppSumo deal. Perhaps it was stationary, perhaps it was some extra phone for business or a camera or whatever it is. Have a look at some of those spending decisions that you’ve made that were essentially a waste of time. Again, you probably can’t do anything about those, especially not the AppSumo deals if it’s too late to get your refund, etc. But have a look at those and highlight those and say, okay, where could my spending decisions have been improved? So let’s just recap. Have a look at your current business costs. Are they reasonable? What can be removed and what can be decreased with a bit of negotiation? Is your business being impacted by the money that you slash business partners slash salaries that are being drawn down? Is there any improvements that can be made there? That’s where your personal expenses will also come in and help on that impact of the director drawdown. And then could your spending decisions be improved?

Now the important thing we need to remember here, and you know I bang on about this all the time, but it’s remembering your why. We have to remember our why because without having that front and centre in our mind, then we are not going to be making the right decisions. We’re going to tend to react to situations as they are now. So for example, we might accept a job that we’re not sure about accepting because we’re worried about money etc. Remembering our way, remembering our mission. What we’re focusing on is what we need to be front and centre when we are making our spending decisions. So as we look at what we have spent and also as we look at what we are going to continue to spend, so what we’re going to keep and what we’re going to remove from our expenditure, we have to remember does this serve our mission? That’s the business mission and also our personal missions does this cost of this subscription, I don’t know. For example, we’ve got NowTV subscription that we’re about to knock on the head because we actually never watch anything on NowTV. We just do everything on Netflix and that’s like 20 quid a month that we just don’t need to spend. So personal mission just as much as your business mission, do these expenditures distract from your goals as well? I mean, I would argue that NowTV personally definitely distract from my goals because it stops me from doing some of the self help stuff that I would really like to do to improve my general health and wellbeing. So, you know, does this expenditure detract from your goals, both personal and business and business wise could even be software shiny new objects that you want to have. Perhaps it’s the latest and greatest WordPress plugin that everyone’s raving about that you think you must need. Or perhaps it’s some software or perhaps it’s the purchase of just the latest Apple phone because it’s the latest and you’re an Apple fanatic. I don’t know. I’m just thinking of are there certain things that are just distractions that don’t actually help you with your goals and finally other things as well in there that are hindering your progress. Are they distracting you, which is the same as hindering your progress or are you actually spending out on stuff that are just absolute crap? So we actually struggled for years with a system called Stream Time in our old agency and it was costing us I think it was like 300 pounds a month and it wasn’t even that good. It has so many elements that we had to use as work arounds. We had to have stuff in a spreadsheet outside of it so that we could reference things in separate areas of the system to match our workflow processes. It just made things hard and slow and cumbersome and finding content within our drive was complicated. The whole thing was just awful and it just hindered us, I mean I think nowadays they’ve improved their system and it’s all online and it looks pretty cool now. But back then, this is working with an old installed version on our server. But that was certainly hindering our progress and that was something that we absolutely had to knock on the head.

So let’s take a look at a few money saving techniques for your business. This is non exhaustive, but these are practical options that we’ve applied to the businesses I’ve been involved in over the last few years. And I guess the purpose of sharing these are to get you thinking outside of the box, get you thinking in these sorts of ways. So the first one is clearly negotiating your bills. This is something that you can do both personal and for the business, but take a look at your bills, especially things like your utilities. Are there any better rates that you can be on? So give your utility providers a call, so that’s telephone, your electric, so on and so forth. What can be done to save some money, even the cost of your internet, even if that’s committing to a longer period of time. So a longer contract, but would therefore reduce your overall bill. So what can be done? And very often if you call your providers as well, they might have a look at your usage and just give you some better rights, et cetera. So we’ve done this on a personal and or business level and we actually do this on a yearly cycle of having a conversation with our providers. Do we need this much? Or is there any special rate we can apply to green rate for electric, et cetera. We also would do this with our supplies as well and negotiating with our suppliers and what we are spending with them. This tends to be something, I’m not a massive fan of trying to get people to reduce their costs for no reason. But what I am happy to do is to have a conversation with our suppliers to say, how can we help reduce the costs? What could we do to help you provide this to us cheaper? Again, that that’s different from asking for a discount. Because if I’m having, if I’ve got a contract, say with the supplier, here’s a print supplier and they need information in a certain way and that’s been part of their cost cause I’m not providing it in the right format. If they can then educate me and say, all right well if you provide it in this format that’s going to save us a couple of hours here and we will therefore be able to charge you less and if it’s no skin off my nose to do that, then I’m obviously going to do that. That’s certainly something we did when we used to do print management and we would find better ways to brief in the printer and cheaper, more effective ways to get that print done that didn’t actually cost the printer. He wasn’t reducing his rates just because we were asking them to. Those rates were being reduced because we were reducing the impact that we were having on them as well.

Next one would be to review staff. Do you have some underperforming staff that are simply costing you money as opposed to generating you money or staff should be generating more than the income that you are paying them. So have a look at that is anyone not pulling their weight. Also have, I look at outsourcing again if you’re going to be reviewing your staff is some of the stuff that they are working on. Stuff that could be outsourced at just a fraction of the price. If you’re getting projects in every few months or every few weeks, then it might be more cost effective to outsource some of the elements of those projects to contract as opposed to having people sitting there and being paid. So that’s something we certainly did. What we also did with that as well is with some of the staff that we let go who were great we actually helped them set up as contractors themselves and also introduce them to other people. So they actually got to set up their own businesses and then we became one of their clients, which was very helpful to them and meant that we weren’t burning bridges and we didn’t feel so bad having to let people go because we were coming to that sort of position where we were going to need to leave, let some people go and outsource some of those elements.

Change your marketing practises. That’s one that was a big one for us. We were investing in awful lot in print, so we were doing print ad campaigns in magazines in the industry, et cetera. So we switched over to social media campaigns and content marketing, which had a much lower cost to the business and we’re still really effective, especially with things like Facebook campaigns, targeted AdWords, et cetera. We also reduced our travel. So that’s virtual meetings using something like zoom is going to cost us $99 a year versus £99 I think it is for me to actually travel to London and back on any one day plus the cost of eating out and everything else that’s involved. So we still do this to this day, but it’s certainly something that we did back then where we were literally going to London maybe three or four times a day each three or four times a day, three or four times a week each and that was insane. Another thing you could be looking at is bulk buy, so bulk buy all of your ink here, paper whatever can be bought. We bulk buy our toilet rolls as well and milk. Whatever you can think of bulk buying is fantastic. If you’ve got the room to be able to store it, you are going to save money across that and things do add up. I know it sounds ridiculous, toilet rolls and milk, et cetera, but all of that does add up, especially in a busy office. Everyone’s making cups of tea, et cetera. If you can bulk buy, save a little bit of money there, that will add up over the course of an entire year, especially when you look at that spreadsheet and you will be very surprised at the sort of impact that that can have.

Now, one thing that we learned really early on is to employ really bright people that want to learn. So that means that you’re employing people who are not necessarily uber experienced. They don’t have years and years of experience and qualifications in whatever it is that you’re bringing them in to do. But what they are are clearly bright people who can learn quickly and will enjoy doing their job. They’ll enjoy the experience of learning on the job, et cetera. Larissa is always a great example of this. The moment I met her, I knew she was a bright person. I knew she was switched on and I knew that she would be able to learn quickly and she’d already demonstrated the ability to self teach through some of the coursework that she’d been doing at college. So I knew even before I met her that this was probably going to be the girl I was going to employ. Then when I met her, she liked Marvel. So that kind of did it for me. But you know, getting bright people in who want to learn means you can create some awesome employees and obviously they’re going to cost less. The benefit to both is it’s going to cost less for you to have that person in. And also that person is going to get all of the wealth of experience to set them up for a good future, a good career, et cetera. So Larissa over time maybe if she ever wants to fly this nest, hopefully not but she’ll be able to go and command a good salary or go and start her own business in the future, et cetera with all of the lessons that she’s learned being a part of this business.

Finally look to partner with others and partnering with others obviously works with regards to providing certain services where it might be cheaper for someone else to provide a service and you take a finder’s fee. But I also mean partner with others where you can partner with agencies and help each other out. This is something we do still, and I know some people frown on this, but we do do some value exchange as sometimes with certain partners. Obviously you all know Tristan, so me and Tristan do a few things where he will cover me for certain calls in our community. Equally I will go and show up and do training at some of his events on things that he’s not a specialist at. He will also provide me with some social media services at times and I’ll also then return that with some web development or with supporting his websites, et cetera. So we just have a nice friendly partnership while we don’t take advantage of each other, we understand what we’re both providing each other. But what it means is that we’re not getting any cost outlay. There is a certain amount of time outlay, but a lot of it is a value exchange between the two of us that we’re being very clear on. So that’s certainly another way that you can look to save some money as opposed to investing in certain things that you might be paying for.

So let’s take a look at personal money saving techniques and I just want to reiterate something. If you have to pull a lot of money down from the business, then that’s putting pressure on the business. That pressure on the business might be causing you to be making decisions that you wouldn’t normally make. The idea of saving costs isn’t necessarily to be Scrooge. It is really to help you run a leaner and a better business if you have to pull in money because you feel you’ve got all of these expenses, you might be attracting the wrong type of projects or you might be making the wrong sort of decisions. So the impact of how much you’re drawing down. If you can reduce that, still have a good quality of life, but reduce that impact on the business. That also might help. It’s a little bit of a reset because you can reduce the impact on your business and then give yourself some breathing space to say, okay, what does the future look like? Revisit your why and then work out what is your future going to look like.

Now as a family together is our favourite place to be is one of our favourite sayings. So we like to approach our own money saving techniques in a way that’s going to promote that togetherness and they’re the ones that I’m going to share with you. Hopefully you’re going to find something in here that you can apply as well to your own personal life. I want to underline this that we’ve got on the, on the slide here ‘Money-saving does not mean a worse quality of life. It can mean the total opposite.’ The actual activities you engage with to save money can be really good fun and actually life affirming. But also when you don’t save money, when you’re not saving cash and you’re having to generate more, than that quality of life might not be great anyway. You might actually be stuck at the office for 12 hours a day or 18 hours a day. I would actually argue that that’s a worse quality of life than finding ways to save money. So if you are about to switch off, I encourage you just to listen to these. These are some really good fun things to do.

All right, so our first one is meal planning and book cooking. This is a family activity. Every single week we are making a full meal plan for all of our meals. That’s lunch and our dinner and breakfast and we all have say the girls really love my chicken lasagna as an example. So that usually appears in the menu at least once a week. But we’ll have a conversation together as a family. We will plan that meal or that range of meals. We might even plan a month’s worth of meals if we’re going to do some bulk cooking for other elements as well. So for example, casseroles or soups and that we’ll actually bulk cook and then some of those will then become lunches as well or will become future meals later on in the week when we know we’re going to be busy. So certainly something that’s more effective. Let me just highlight our food bill used to be say 150 pounds a week or something ridiculous a nowadays it’s 60 pounds a week if that because we meal plan and we both cook and it’s just so much cheaper. So we’re saving, well I don’t know, I can’t do the math now. Let’s just say that’s 400 pounds a month. We can save as a family by just meal planning. So it’s ridiculous how much money we are saving by doing this and we got the bug and we do it all together and it’s really, really good fun. We eat really well. We have some wonderfully healthy meals and we also have loads of good fun with it and my daughter’s learning how to cook. It’s just a really great immersive, lovely family experience. So I highly recommend it and it saves you money. Bulk buying is not exactly an immersive family experience, but it’s very helpful when you’re bulk buying. Same as the business, you know buying your toilet rolls, all that sort of stuff. Certain veggies will last ages so you can bulk buy veggies if you’ve got a freezer, you can bulk buy all your meats and stuff so you can get them cheaper, et cetera direct through the butcher. So, that sort of ability, I think you US people have got Costco haven’t you, which allows you to bulk buy certain elements. So definitely another great way of saving money.

Now for us, what we did was reviewed our bank account and took on a special bank account where a whole lot of insurances were all built in. So I would recommend take a look at that. So for example, our bank account actually covers us for all of our phones. It gives us all of our worldwide travel insurance as well. It also gives us car breakdown cover and all sorts, and that’s all built into the 10 pound a month fee. So that in itself saved us about 50 pounds worth of extra insurances per month that we didn’t need. So if you think about the money we’ve saved on cooking 400 pounds average plus the money, we’ve saved of 50 quid, that’s 450 quid we’ve already saved, which is a heck of a lot of money per month that we don’t need to be drawing out of the business anymore if we don’t want to. Another thing that we’ve started doing, we still do this is inviting people over for dinner and being invited over to there’s as well, is great fun. Eating out is nice. It’s a nice thing that we actually budget for. We make sure we go out at least two or three times a month and eat out together as a family. Yes but equally, to actually have a nice time with friends, et cetera. We don’t need to go and meet them out somewhere. We actually have them over and they’ll bring the kids, uh, the kids will all play together as adults. We’ll have fun times, it usually means that a few of the adults can even have a drink, et cetera. The cost of the meal is cheaper and the fun that is had is much more relaxed. So we love having people over or going over to other people’s houses. It’s definitely a great way.

Another thing would be mend and repair. We actually looked at the amount of money we were spending on clothes versus what we could have repaired. Now a couple of days ago on Facebook, I posted that my button had popped off my trousers. It was actually during an event where I was presenting, I was kind of hoping that my trousers wouldn’t fall down for the entire event, which they didn’t. They held up so clearly I need to eat less pie. When I got home I got a needle out and I stitched the button back on job done. In most cases we might have thrown that out, thrown that pair of jeans out and then actually gone and bought some new ones because you know, it felt like it was cheaper to buy them, but actually doing the old mend and repair instead of wasting stuff I think is highly recommended. It’s also something I’ve been able to teach Ella, so I’ve been able to teach her how to, so it’s better for the environment as well. It’s just modelling good practise to our children. So mending and repairing and making the most, another good example would be that. So we’ve got a blanket that we’ve had in the family for an awful long time. It’s got a lot of memories. It’s also got a tear down the side. But it does have a lot of memories. It is actually a perfectly good cosy, warm blanket. So we just dropping that off with my mum later on today and she’s just going to stitch with her sewing machine and resolve that. So instead of buying another replacement blanket for, I think it costs us 50 quid, that blanket did, you know, we’re just making use of the perfectly fine but ripped old one, which also has lots of lovely memories and smells attached to it. So yeah, mend and repair.

Purchase secondhand is something that we do a lot, not because we’re cheapskates, but remember the value of things depreciates really quickly. So if you’re going to purchase a game for example, for your PlayStation, it’s actually way more cost effective to buy it at a thrift store or buy it at one of those secondhand resellers where you can get at a smidgen of the price. So just the other day, Ella got a new PlayStation and we took her out down to the local second hand game reseller and for 30 pounds, she’s been able to buy tonnes of games as opposed to barely even one brand new game off the PlayStation store if we would have done it direct. But you can do that with all sorts of things, secondhand furniture that you can repurpose, et cetera. We’ve done that in our own house. We’ve had second hand furniture and then together we’ve made it a project to spruce it up, maybe to sand it down, repaint it, or do whatever, and you can actually create a really nice style as well in your home. So there’s all sorts of things that you can do together as a family where you don’t have to keep buying new stuff, you don’t have to invest loads of money. You can actually have a really good fun quality of life with some secondhand stuff, repaired, restored, whatever. Just changing your lifestyle where family is first and being together is paramount. All of these things become really good fun. The last thing on our list is selling old stuff. We have got so much tat in our house, it’s ridiculous, but we have loads of fun selling them on the stalls. Every year there is a stall that we have outside our house and we sell our stuff and people travel around the village using a map to visit all of the stalls, et cetera. Then I have to try not to buy other people’s tat to replace the tat that I’ve sold. But also we enjoy selling stuff through eBay as well as selling stuff on Facebook as well. So it’s just, again, stuff that we get to do together.

So remember, saving money does not mean a worst quality of life. It can mean the complete opposite. It can mean having fun. It can mean spending time as a family. It can also mean freeing up a whole load of cash that you could do other stuff with. I want to wrap this section up with all of that money that we’ve been saving over the last few years. By doing this doesn’t necessarily mean that we don’t have to draw it down from the business. What it’s meant is we’ve, for a lot of that money, it’s meant that we’ve been able to put that into savings and then make mega holidays one of our priorities. So you’ll know that we’ve spent two months once in Florida. This was because we were able to save so much money and we were able to go to Disney world and we’ve had holidays and all sorts of different countries, not because we’ve had to grow our business, for the business to become a multi millionaire business, but instead because we’ve gone the opposite direction and we found ways to have a good quality of life and save money and use that money on stuff that we would like to do. I’ll wrap up with one last story for this. My wife wants said that the rendering needed sorting on the back of the house and my point to her was the rendering was safe. It doesn’t look terrible and we could either spend the money that we had on a trip to Disney and get a picture outside of the Disney castle or we could have a picture outside the brand new rendering that we’d paid for with the very same money. Obviously Disney world won.

All right, so we’re coming into land and this is just the final element I want to help you with regards to your spending decisions. This is a decision matrix which we’ve had from another resource years ago and we’ve repurposed it and then watched other videos for a little bit of help. So this isn’t really an exact science, but it’s certainly something that just helps us logically think through our purchases, especially those bigger purchases. You’ll see with regards to this, first of all, let’s have a look over here at these kind of core elements here. We’ve got profitable, we’ve got mission, resource and cost impact. So these are the measurements that we want to track and we have a legend down here. So we have profitable. Is this going to help us be profitable slash generate profit? Mission is, is this going to help us achieve our mission resource? Is this gonna require a lot of resource or is it going to help us reduce that resource? Then also finally there is the cost impact. What we’ve done here as well is done a little bit of a, um, a chart. So we’re basing this on a kind of five star system. We actually use Airtable for this so we can do stars. So here we would say is it profitable? If it’s low profit, it’s a low number. It’s one if it’s high, it’s a high number of five. If it’s on mission, then if it’s low, again, kind of the five star rating idea, if it’s on mission. So he’s not on mission, it’s low and it’s a high number if it’s on the mission. Now this kind of seems backwards, but we need to be doing the lower number.

Is this going to be a high resource? That’s not a good thing. So we want that as a low number and if it’s a low resource, we want it as a high number. So I know that kind of feels opposite, but if we’re going to score using this score section here, we need to do it that way. And then it’s the same with cost. If this is going to be a high cost to our businesses, a lot of money coming out, then that’s not worth five stars. That’s only one star. But if it’s a low cost, it’s definitely five stars. So that’s the way that we’ve worked that out. And then you can see here we’ve got a new laptop. Is it going to be profitable? Well, we think it’s going to generate right? A little bit of profit. Is it on mission? I guess he kind of is.

Is that going to require any extra resource? Yes, there’s a bit of setup. It’s stuff like that. There’s going to be a other it people involved, yada, yada, yada. Cost impact wise, it’s fairly expensive to us. That’s got a score of nine. If we look at the new office location, you can see there, it’s not looking good for it. You know, it’s, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be super profitable. It’s not necessarily on our mission. We have a perfectly good location here right now. Resource wise it’s going to be quite resource intensive. Cost-wise it’s gonna be quite costly as well. So that’s giving us a low four score so we can already see that perhaps I’d want to weight my decision more towards the purchase of a laptop as opposed to the new office location investment, which might mainly be for vanity metrics as opposed to anything else.

Then finally, another example would be a SaaS subscription. So this was a SaaS subscription to I don’t know Airtable. So is it going to be profitable? It’s going to manage our, help us manage our data and deliver projects or yeah, we’re going to put this in the high profitability. Is it our mission? Yeah. We want to document all of our processes and make sure that data is accessible to all of our clients, et cetera. So yep, that’s definitely also on mission. With regards to the resource. It will be quite high resource to get this implemented. So that score is a two therefore is that’s not the best school cause we are expecting, you know, quite a lot of time investment in getting it already. But then the cost impact is very minimal. It’s a very low cost to us with the amount of data that we are going to be able to process, the amount of time it’s going to save as et cetera. So we’re going to give that a high score of five. So we can now see in our decision spending matrix that it might be worth looking at our laptop or seeing what we can do to improve the existing laptop that we have. It’s definitely not worth us moving. I think we’ve ruled that one out and that Airtable subscription is looking pretty damn hot. Um, on this decision matrix. Now obviously there are other elements that will go towards making a decision, but I really do like to use spreadsheets or tables like this just to help me compartmentalise my decisions. You’ll see here that we’re using these as our measurements. You can do the same, just come up with the our own measurements, like profitable, is it on mission and all that sort of stuff. It kinda leads back to what we talked about here. Remembering your why and any purchasing decisions you make. It needs to serve your mission as well as your personal ambitions. It shouldn’t be distracting you from your goals or hindering your progress. So if we go back over here, you can see on here, is it gonna hold you back? Is it resource intensive, is it going to hold you back with regards to costs or is it actually on mission? Is it going to feed your, why is it going to generate you income? Is it going to meet those requirements that you or your company have?

All right folks. So I’ve definitely gone over time so I won’t do the Lee Matthew Jackson recap. We can always do that during our conversation if we need to. So that my friends as a wrap, let’s all jump off mute and let’s have a conversation about money saving or anything else that you would like to discuss.