The best investment I ever made

4min read; read on for work++; productivity+; inspiration++

I’m a cabinetmaker. I’m not a graduate of anything, except high school. (I haven’t finished my cabinetmaking apprenticeship yet.) And yet I have made a lot of investments in my time. Not all of them good. [But I am still secure, and have reasonably good prospects for happiness, if not quite outrageous fortune! ] But you came here to see the best investment I ever made. It’s tangible, it’s practical, and costs less than the price of a night on the town...

I've spent tens - approaching hundreds - of thousands of my money [$AUD] on training, software, tools, and machinery. I’ve spent hundreds of thousands more of my parent’s money, on the same. But two years ago, I spent $30 of my money on a simple software application, quite a unique product in the market: Money Calendar, formerly called Rylstim Budget. Here’s the link - http://sketchman-studio.com/money-calendar/

Now I am ABSOLUTELY NOT an affiliate of Sketchman Studio. Just a fan of this product. You see, I have made and saved more money because of this little beauty, than I have from any of the big-ticket items I have bought.

I am a big proponent of what I now know is lean manufacturing and lean management. The most important change Money Calendar gave me, was my team started chasing bills. My accounts department became responsible for income and not just accounts. We now run two accounting methodologies: accrual accounting for Government to take their taxes by, and cashflow accounting for us to run the business by.

Here is the simple summary. Before Money Calendar, we had no control over our incomes and expenditures. Monthly profits swung anywhere between +45% and -35% of monthly turnover! Seasonality and late-payers dictated our profits. I was tearing my hair out - how I could be making money on the page, but unable to afford new tires for my work vehicles?

I couldn’t take it any more. I sat down for one day over the Christmas break, and spent 6 hours discovering for myself, that my seasonal, project-based business could in fact budget its revenue over the full 12 months of the year. I grouped my expenses into strata, into tranches by volatility and frequency. I used my statistical analysis course from my flopped business degree, and found standard deviations of volatility from the mean. It took me another two days to create and stress-test my new budget...

Guess what! I could in fact make 15% of turnover, every month! This was mind-blowing. And I could ‘cash-out’ that profit each month, and re-invest it elsewhere every month. Within a year I was looking for better investments than the bank’s saver accounts, and I found crypto! Now I’m laughing!

Do you know, it wasn’t entirely easy. Training my SME, full of numerically savvy, but financially undercooked tradespeople, took a bit of work. But I never had to bring any consultants in! We taught ourselves. Breaking our dependence on batch-buying and inventory was a big team effort. Reporting on the two accounting systems took incredible patience for the first 6 months. But now, two years on, a good 70% of our office processes have been streamlined, made sensible, and visible. Transparency and oversight is everywhere, where it wasn’t before.

If you’d like to learn more, I’d like to write more on this topic. You’ll need to ask me in the comments. This is because the most important lesson I learned from this period, is that you can over-invest in an idea, a process, a machine, inventory, an employee, a customer, and yourself.

Yes, you heard right.
Forget about the inspirational speakers, and the educators selling their conferences, their self-help books, their training camps;
You can definitely over-invest on yourself.
Be clever, be patient, plan and act, and create a team around you.

Hit me up for more; @thought.rush