Christina: (00:02) You are listening to the scaling to freedom podcast. I’m your host, Christina Bernhard. And this week we are talking about investments as a business owner. Um, I want to talk about how to know if your investments will pay off. Um, this is a hot topic, especially for business owners, because if you are one, there’s absolutely no way around investing in your business. And this can be a really big source of fear as a business owner. And, um, as an ads agency owner, I see investments being a big part of my client’s businesses because with ads spend and ads management, it is a huge investment. So it’s something that I am very familiar with as far as making these, you know, big, scary investments into your business and just believing that they will pay off, which is not the easiest thing to do. So I wanted to break down why you shouldn’t fear investments as a business owner and some other ways to look at it. Christina: (00:59) Um, and how investments always pay off, um, dare I say, and just the different kinds of returns on investment that we get other than money. Um, and also I wanna talk a little bit about why monetary returns aren’t always the best return. Um, so, uh, one of the biggest fears about business investments is, you know, whether they will pay off. So that’s why I wanted to paint this other picture. Um, and you know, I used to think, how do you know if your investment will pay off? And I used to think, well, you don’t, and that’s just part of this game is that you’re going to invest in things you don’t know if it’s gonna pay off. Um, but now, as I’ve been a business owner for a little bit longer, I would just like to offer a different perspective that investments actually always pay off.

Christina: (01:47) Um, and they’re not really something to be feared when you understand the purpose of your investment. And so I wanted to break down some ways that investments pay off other than money. So I’m gonna break down those ways. I have three main ways, um, that investments do pay off. They have nothing to do with money and they pay off in huge, huge ways. So the first way is data. So we need to know what works and what doesn’t and data might not be the most exciting way for an investment to pay off, but it’s something that we actually need. Like we cannot do this without the data. And in my opinion, data is the path and it’s well worth paying for. Um, it’s going to guide you directly to everything you want, everything that you don’t want. Um, and we, it, the what’s important is that you use that data that you actually get to guide you towards that.

Christina: (02:44) Um, if we are paying for data and we’re not using it, um, or we’re, we don’t know how to use it. Um, it’s really important that we learn how to use it. And we actually do apply it into our decision making. So data is a really great way that our, our investments pay off. So if they don’t pay off in a monetary way, um, then we’re definitely going to get some data from it. And this is especially true for, um, ads or really anything marketing related is that you invest in to ads. And if you don’t get a return on your very first campaign, which is like not crazy at all, um, you’re going to get data and we use that data and we get closer and closer to, until we get to the point where you’re just putting money in and getting money out, but you can’t exactly just skip the journey, um, and jump straight in there.

Christina: (03:30) Now I’ve seen it, it happens, but I will tell you that most of the time, the journey is collecting this data, using the data and running more and more tests, testing, all kinds of different things, um, until we know exactly what works, and then we just scale that, um, and really like drive that and amplify it. The second way that investments pay off is, and this one’s really not as fun is lessons. So like it or not lessons often cost money sometimes. Um, so they are well worth the investment and just like data, they show you the way, um, they help you grow as an entrepreneur and a person. Um, I will say that this is something that I have to remind myself all the time is to be a available for the good and the bad, um, all of the, you know, perks of being an entrepreneur and having your own schedule and maybe being able to work from anywhere, depending on your business model, um, and all of these different things that are just so good about being an entrepreneur and having your own successful business.

Christina: (04:33) Like it’s so good, right? There’s so many good things about it, but there’s also a lots of things that are not that fun, like paying taxes or trying to, you know, deal with all these like legal matters or dealing with, you know, clients that maybe want to Sue you or, you know, people not, um, being respectful of contracts or, you know, just all these things that are part of being an entrepreneur. And you have to embrace all of that too, because it’s all gonna come together. Um, and so sometimes whenever we make investments, our lesson is, um, or our return is a lesson and that lesson might be that we need to be a better leader, or we need to provide more for our team, or maybe we need to be better at vetting people whenever we hire them. Um, you know, there’s all kinds of lessons to be learned.

Christina: (05:21) Maybe we jumped into an investment too soon when we weren’t actually ready for it. These are all necessary. Um, they’re necessary things to know. And if you get to know them from learning from someone else’s mistake before you make your own then wonderful, but it’s not always going to be like that. Not every lesson we’re going to be able to learn ahead of time without putting some skin in the game to actually learn that lesson. Um, and again, the lessons are super valuable and they are the path. And so, um, I don’t think that we should undermine how valuable they really are and, you know, honestly, they, they are worth the money because once you learn that lesson, whatever the lesson is, you’re now in such a better place to make so much more money. Um, so it’s definitely worth it while, you know, of course we would all love to go on this crazy journey, this unknown journey without having to learn any lessons is just not realistic.

Christina: (06:18) Um, it’s just going to, it is just part of the game and it’s just going to be a part of it. The third way that investments pay off other than money is growth in self care. And I really wanna talk about the self care part of it. So one of my favorite forms of self care for me personally, is believing in myself. So whenever I make a scary investment or a decision in my business, I’m telling myself that I’m here for myself and that I believe in myself, and I know that I’m gonna be okay because I’ve got me and I won’t let anything happen to myself. And this is my best and most favorite way to love myself. And it might be Rocky. It might not be the journey I necessarily expected it to be, but I know that I’m gonna be okay. And this takes a lot of stress out of decisions.

Christina: (07:11) Um, and those, those decisions, including investments. So whenever I am going to make an investment, of course, I’m not being reckless. I’m not, you know, trying to just be like, well, it’s fine, cuz I’ll be fine, you know, or whatever, and just throw money at anything. There’s still calculated investments. But whenever I feel like this could be something really, really great, um, this is a very scary amount of money to hand over to someone when I might not, you know, get the money back in a monetary way, but this is a way that I’m proving to myself that I believe in myself and that I believe in myself in a way that I’m willing to actually make these big moves and prove to myself, um, in a very like tangible way that I do actually believe in myself in that I have my own bag.

Christina: (08:00) So tho that’s probably one of my favorite ways that an investment pays off because once you hand over that money, a lot of times your identity kind of changes depending on what investment we’re talking about and the size of the investment, which is really gonna be relative to what feels big and scary to you. Um, you just change your energy’s gonna change, um, how you act is going to change and your decisions after that point are definitely going to change and how you view yourself. And that’s just something that you just can’t get any other way. Like you kind of just have to do that scary thing to get that kind of result, um, with when it comes to growth in self care as a business owner. So that’s definitely one of my, um, favorite ways, but those are the three main ways that I see an investment paying off other than money.

Christina: (08:54) And you know, also another thing too, is that whenever I think about wanting an investment to pay off in a monetary way, I think about the problems that we actually have with that. There are actually, in my opinion, problems with returns, always being monetary, whenever investments are paying us back in a monetary way, we don’t have to actually think outside of the box. Um, I used to feel like if my investments came back with a high, a high ROI and um, I had got these great returns from every decision that I made, I used to feel like that made me a better entrepreneur. And one thing that I’ve learned very quickly is that I actually become a way better entrepreneur when I don’t get that monetary return. And that’s because I have to think outside of the box. Um, another thing is that your threshold for discomfort, it doesn’t grow when you are just getting these great monetary returns for every investment that you put out.

Christina: (09:56) Um, so you, you want that threshold for discomfort to grow because that just means that you’re able to, you have the ability and the capacity to think that much bigger to, you know, live that much bigger and make these bigger decisions. Um, and that’s gonna grow your business. That’s going to grow your personal life, whatever those goals are and things like that. Another thing is that the belief in yourself doesn’t get tested when you get a return on every single investment that you make. Like whenever you put that money out there and you don’t get a monetary return and you put that money out there, cuz you were like, I believe in myself, like I’m gonna make this happen and this is gonna work. And then it doesn’t work well now the belief in yourself really gets tested cuz it’s like, well, what now?

Christina: (10:41) Because you just dropped all this money and you didn’t actually make a return. It didn’t actually work out. Um, so now you have to, you know, be tested in a whole nother way where you have to still have that belief in yourself despite this new evidence that you didn’t have before. And that’s a really powerful thing as a business owner to be able to continue on and still brush it off and know that you still believe in yourself that, you know, you’re getting the return in some other way that has nothing to do with monetary. Maybe it’s that lesson, maybe it’s the data, you know, whatever it is. Um, but you, uh, you know, you’re able to still believe in yourself beyond that. And then another thing is that, um, if you always get, you know, a monetary return back for everything that you do, um, you don’t get to experience negative emotions.

Christina: (11:34) And I know that this seems like maybe a good thing. Like we don’t really want to be, you know, afraid and like have shame and all that stuff. But I feel like as a business owner, I continuously become a better entrepreneur. The better I am at feeling negative emotions and realizing that they’re actually not that terrible. I mean, they are terrible. Um, but they’re not as bad as you anticipate them to be. Once you get good and you at feeling them and just embracing them, if you are not afraid of feeling shame and doubt and being afraid, you will have whatever you want in life. It’s the best gift that you could give yourself is to not be afraid of having these negative emotions. Um, because that’s oftentimes whenever we’re making these decisions where we’re kind of shying away from something that could really turn out to be something very big and amazing in our life.

Christina: (12:35) It’s because we’re trying to avoid feeling these negative emotions. Like we don’t want to feel shameful. We don’t want to feel that feeling of regret and doubting ourselves. And we don’t wanna be afraid of what’s gonna happen after we do this. But whenever we are familiar with those feelings and we embrace them and we just embrace the suck of them, then it’s not as we’re just not afraid of them. And so we can still, you know, go all in on things and really believe in ourselves, continue to prove to ourselves that we believe in ourselves. Um, and that is just something that I think is the best gift that you could give yourself. And I think that if, you know, again, every investment that we made in our business had a monetary return and we didn’t have these other ways of return. Then we just would miss out on all of this stuff of being a better entrepreneur, thinking outside the box, learning how to pivot, um, you know, having that threshold of discomfort increase so that we can live a bigger life.

Christina: (13:33) We have that capacity for it. Um, testing the belief in ourselves and also just having more experience sitting in these negative emotions of shame and doubt and learning how to navigate that. Um, I think that those are the best ways of a return on an investment or anything that, um, whether it’s a time investment or a monetary investment, but especially a monetary investment, because whether it makes sense or not, we often prioritize or we hold our money a little bit higher than our time. For some reason, we’re more willing to sacrifice our time often than our money, even though most of us agree that our time is actually more valuable, but it just kind of how we’re wired. Um, but that is what I have for you today. I wanted to just offer another perspective and, um, just how I view investments as an entrepreneur.

Christina: (14:24) Um, I think that they pay off in way bigger ways other than money. And I actually think that it’s a beautiful thing when they don’t pay off in a monetary way. So, um, if you have any opinions on this, um, or any insights I would love to hear, I would love to have this conversation. You can find me on Instagram ads, Christina D Bernhard. Um, I will put a link in the show notes to my Instagram. I would love to have this conversation with you, but I hope that you found this episode helpful and you enjoyed this other perspective and I will see you guys next week. Thank you for listening to the scaling to freedom podcast. If you are a seven figure coach looking for ads management with an agency that partners with you to get your work out into the world and amplify your impact. See if we are a good fit by applying for a spot in our agency@christinabernhard.com slash apply. Find the link in our show notes.