If you find yourself envying other businesses and wondering how they are making their six-figure sums, my advice is to take a deeper look.

 

A lot of what you see, in the online business space particularly, is marketing. Pure and simple. What you see is the final product is a finely polished brand, explicitly designed to target a specific pain point.

Care to guess what the hottest of all the pain points is?

Money.

 

It’s something we all need, we all aspire to have, and it’s so easy to feel comparisonitis, and that dreaded Six-figure FOMO is we see a colleague, peer, or business “personality” getting the big bucks. You begin to fear that you are missing out on some secret wisdom that can really propel your business and expand your wallet.

I am a big fan of asking the right questions to get better answers. So, let’s break it all down and see what the truth is behind the marketing glitz and glamour.

The Big Income Claims and Profit

That big, bold income claim that can so often cause the six-figure FOMO so many of us have been prey to.

There are several questions we should ask when we see a bold income statement.

We need to be clear about how business owners who make big, grandiose income levels are quantifying it. Is the claim based on gross income or net income? Gross income is the big number or your sales before expenses. Net (as in a butterfly net), is the amount that remains after expenses.

What was the time frame? They could be talking about a sales cycle that is longer than a generally accepted accounting cycle. For example, Find out how I made multiple six-figures in my business last month… (what is not said is that this may be the gross income after being in business for five years).

A business can be bringing in multiple six figures in revenue, but whether or not they are profitable is a whole other conversation.

As a bookkeeper, I have seen how the sausage is made. I’ve been behind the scenes of many businesses, and I get to see the reality of operating a business.

Here is the truth;

just because a business is capable of earning $100,000 or more in no way guarantees that business is also six-figure profitable.

What is projected to the outer world is so often not the real picture.

Remember that scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her crew finally get their audience with The Great and Powerful OZ?

Marketing can be a lot like that, and we need to be wary of the man behind the curtain.

Six-figures is just a number

 

Here is another question to ask yourself – why do so many of us focus on six-figures anyway? It’s just an arbitrary amount.

Of course, money buys happiness to a point… but not always. Studies show that once our basic needs are met there comes a point where more money no longer improves overall happiness. It’s somewhat like the economic law of diminishing returns, stated simply “sometimes the gain is not worth the pain.”

So why are we all aspiring to be these six-figure businesses?!

Is it because so and so coach said we need to?

Because someone else did?

Because that’s a definition of “success”?

Or is it because you have consciously created a business plan and you realize this the amount that you require to support your current lifestyle?

And hey, while we’re on the subject of success, whose success are we talking about anyway?

I invite you to consider if you are trying to create success based on someone else’s measuring stick.

Check in with yourself, and take a moment to think about what success is for you personally; there’s no rule book, and what success looks like for you may be very different from anyone else.

Money is not validation.

 

Your business is worth is not tied to your intrinsic worth.

For example, success for me is the ability to control my work hours so I can be present for my family and enjoy a family vacation or two.

My values in this context are family, freedom and flexibility.

On the other hand, I have many clients with excellent businesses. They make multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. BUT their operating costs are really high, so at the end of the day, they may net anywhere between 20 – 50% of their gross income….before taxes. I also have clients with less than 100K with very low operating costs who manage to net up to 80% of their gross income, which makes their profit the same (or greater) than the big gals and guys.

One is not better than the other; this is not a judgement.

The point is that success is not in a number alone.

The measure of success is subjective; stop worrying about someone else’s interpretation and trying to squeeze yourself into their mold.

The bottom line is this: disrupting the preconceived notions of success is the vaccine against FOMO.

What does Six-Figures Really Cost?

 

There’s a lot of secrecy around what it costs to attain $100,000 in revenue.

It’s really not unrealistic to achieve high gross incomes if paying significant fees to marketing consultants, project managers, coaches, etc. Hiring an expert is indeed one way to scale up a business. Yes, you can spend money to make money, but are you also getting to keep some of that money?

Others falsely believe that keeping a gruelling schedule is the secret to getting ahead.

People struggle, but they want to be seen by others as successful, so they say they’re doing much better than they really are not to lose face.

As a society, we’ve been conditioned to value money above all else. What happens when you take money out of the equation?

If it’s not about money for you, then what does success mean for you?

Connecting to the deeper purpose for WHY you want to do WHAT you do you creates the space for money to come into your business.

The most important step is to generate consistent profit before aiming for arbitrary revenues.

You have the opportunity to be SO much more profitable than all those six-figure businesses, and to have a bigger bottom line too.

So, stop the FOMO.

Consider what success looks like for you – specifically you – and you will feel empowered, focussed, and ready to grow your biz in your own way.