Ep 80 Do You Feel Safe in Your Business? Building Stability Through Clarity and Structure With Lisa-Marie

In this grounded and thought-provoking episode, Lisa-Marie Elkhadraoui explores a feeling that many women in business quietly carry but rarely articulate, the desire to feel safe in their business.

Lisa-Marie invites you to reflect on what safety truly means within your business, and how that feeling is often directly linked to your financial awareness, structures, and sales strategies. Rather than being something abstract, safety is built through clarity, understanding, and intentional decision-making.

She shares practical insights into how you can begin to create stability by understanding your current financial position, building a structured service suite, and developing a clear financial roadmap. Lisa-Marie introduces the concept of the Cashflow Code method, a way of mapping your numbers so that your business feels predictable, supportive, and aligned with your goals.

This episode also explores the importance of setting clear sales targets, understanding your capacity, and creating boundaries that protect both your time and your profitability. When your business is structured properly, it begins to support you rather than overwhelm you.

It is a gentle but powerful reminder that safety in business is not something you wait for. It is something you build.

This episode is an invitation to pause and check in with how your business feels, not just how it looks from the outside.

When you build strong foundations, understand your numbers, and lead your business with clarity and intention, safety becomes something you experience daily, not something you are constantly searching for.

Continue the conversation and connect with Lisa-Marie HERE

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See you in the next episode you lovely lot! Xx

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Design Boss Dialogue podcast. And today I am going to be talking all about feeling safe in your businesses. Now, I would really like to invite you to think about the word safe. When someone poses a question to you, do you feel safe in your business? Where does that land for you? What feeling is created in your body when I use words do you feel safe in your business? And what I mean by do you feel safe in your business is a couple of things. Do you feel safe with your structures? Do you feel safe with your processing? Do you feel safe with your pricing? Do you feel safe with your financial awareness? Now, for a lot of businesses, we're going to be going into a new financial year. So if your financial years run from April through to March, we're going to be starting a new financial year. Mine runs from January to December, but some businesses start them at certain points of the year. A lot of businesses run their financial tax years from April through to the following March. So for a lot of you listening to this that have generated or started businesses, we're going into a new financial tax year. And with that, I always ask women the question: what are you forecasting from a sales revenue perspective into your business for the next financial year? What figures do you want to make? And earlier on in the week, I held a financial mastery masterclass, which was my cash flow code method that I teach when I work with women on a one-to-one or I work with them on a VIP day or an accelerator package. And it is my step-by-step method that shows you how to create a predictable monthly income by understanding your numbers, structuring your offerings, and building a sales model that actually works. And I wanted to talk you through some of the financial awareness around that today so that you can take some of this information and implement it into your business moving forward for the next financial year. Now, the cash in the cash flow method for me and what I teach stands for clarity audit structure and how many sales in a target. And it's really important that when I talk about safety in business, these are some of the things that come up for women. So they say to me, I don't understand my forecasting. I don't understand how to generate profit in my business. I go one month where I have a couple of clients, to the next month, everything drops off the edge of a cliff. My business has a roller coaster effect. It's feast and famine, like there is no stability, no consistency in the business model. And when I start to work with a woman, we really want to create stability on all levels across her foundations, her processes, her structures, and the way she prices so that she can then start to implement growth. A lot of women will come to me when they are in survival mode in their business as well as in consistency. And that is a stage where we really do dismantle parts of the business down and we build parts of the business back up again. I have women that also come to me that maybe are a couple of years in, they've got some really good grounding and foundations in place, others they still need work on, but we still need to dismantle sections down and build them back up again for complete financial clarity. Now, when we're running businesses, we need to create financial awareness across the whole of the business. That is really knowing your numbers, setting your baselines, and defining all of your goals. It's so important that we have clarity in a financial roadmap as well as a vision roadmap for our business so that the two go hand in hand together. When we have clarity in our financial awareness, we can make some really great decisions. We can decide: do we have the funds in the business to hire in support? Can we get a VA? Can we get a CAD technician for argument's sake? Can we outsource our social media? Do we have the funds in order to do that? If we don't have financial awareness in the business, then we cannot make those levels of decisions because we don't know our numbers. We have got no idea. So what I would invite you here and now today is can you create an audit and awareness around your business? An A in the cash flow method is for audit and awareness. Understanding where you are right now, your revenue, your clients, your conversions, you know, your baselines. Have you actually stopped and looked at all of your business outgoings recently? Have you optimized them? Have you refined them? Have you tweaked them? Do you know how much your business needs to be operating on a daily or monthly or weekly basis in order to meet those baselines? So A is for audit and awareness. This is for structure. Now, this is something that I love, love, love to teach, and I cannot get enough of it because when we are creating structure in our businesses, we understand how our revenue model is going to work. And what I mean by structure, you can have elements of structure in your foundations, you can have elements of structure in your processes, you can have elements of structure in your financials and your roadmaps, but we also want structure in our service suite as well. And the reason why is when we are building a solid service suite, we have a clean model of maybe two to three services, or you have one key service and maybe two or three sideline services. But when we understand structure in our service suite, we are building a suite that goes into our forecast model, which is easier to predict how we want our business to run, how many numbers of clients need to run through our business at any point given time, as well as how is the forecast going to affect our sales visibility and marketing strategy, which is so important. So all of a sudden, there becomes a circular pattern of how everything has to flow. Our forecast will dictate the number of clients in our business that we want to aim for. So therefore, we know our call to actions when we're looking at our sales strategy, our marketing strategy, our visibility strategy, and it keeps going round and round again and again. These are the things I want you to consider when you're building a service suite. When you look at a service suite across the board, we naturally should be looking at what is our zone of genius? What do we do really, really well, and the type of problems that we want to solve. Is there a market out there for solving those problems? What stages are our ideal buyers at currently that need those structured services in place in order to buy them in order to come into our business to meet our forecast goals? Your capacity within that structure of service as well. So, for argument's sake, you have a one-hour power hour Zoom call in your structured service suite, and you know that at best you can service two calls a week over the course of a month. So that's eight calls a month. In your forecast model, you might then implement eight clients running through your business in January or say April, eight clients running through your business in say February, if you're starting it from Q1 or May, and eight clients running through your business in June. So if it's into Q2, then you know that you have got eight clients in one month, eight clients in the next, and eight clients in the next that you need to service and you need to feed that into a sales strategy in order to meet your targets for your capacity to deliver that product. You also need to know when you're building a structured service suite, your boundaries are non-negotiables in place to make sure the client knows where you stand with everything, where they understand where the boundary starts and stops, so that scope creep doesn't happen. And this simply is a terminology used in the design world where clients start throwing the kitchen sink at things and think, okay, I'll add that on, add that on, add that on. And if you don't have the confidence or clarity in your business model, or you're not aware of the structures of the safety of your business model, you're going to happily accept them because I've heard this so many times. Well, they paid for their first quotation, so I felt it was bad if I re-issued another quotation out. And this is what we don't want to happen. We don't we don't want patterns like this happening in our business. So it's really, really important to put boundaries and non-negotiables in place. And then the last one is the process of how it flows. How do clients move through your service suite from A to Z, understanding the processes, the onboarding, and the movement to get out the other end. When we do not have a clear service suite, we have no clear revenue model to work with. And it's so important to have a clear revenue model because then we can build our forecasts off the back of it. Like I said, having that forecast model in place is like having a financial roadmap. We start to understand at each of our 90-day sprints how many clients are we going to need to facilitate over the next 90 days in order to feed into our call to actions, in order to feed into our sales, our visibility, and our marketing strategy. So I wanted to share the S for structure because I believe it is so important to make sure that women understand how they should be building their service suites out. And then H is for how many sales targets. Now it's so important to know exactly how many clients or sales you need in any given month. And this obviously aligns very much with the S for structure. And simply, if you were working off the basis that you need a £3,000 sales revenue month in your business, and you had a product at £500, you would need six clients in your business that month to meet your goal of £3,000. So we genuinely take our total revenue that we want to create divided by the price of our service, and that would equal the sales needed. So it's very important to understand the clarity around your financial awareness, your auditing and awareness around where you are now, the structure of the business that you create, as well as understanding your sales targets and how many clients you need to move through your books to create financial safety in your business. Now, something I love doing with my clients on our accelerator days is sitting down with them for a whole day in London and looking at absolutely everything. So we look at their service suite, we look at their pricing and alignment to build it for profit and to build it for healthy sales revenue coming into the business. And we look at a 90-day forecast model so my clients can walk away knowing what they need to be doing in their sales, marketing, and visibility strategies. They also get 60 days of support within that. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, do you know what? I really need to understand clarity, auditing, awareness, structure, and sales targeting. I want that financial roadmap. I want to approach my next 90 days with complete clarity, knowing that I understand my figures, I understand how I need to sell, I understand the profit in my business, I understand my call to actions, and that in turn is going to have a really positive sales visibility and marketing strategy because I'm setting up the right foundations in this area. And I absolutely love doing this, like I say. And I think it's so important that more so now than ever, we have to create those healthy structures in our business where we are understanding financial awareness. So many women come to me and they have their head buried in the sand, not because they are ignorant to it, it's because they simply don't understand or they've never been taught this part of business where you understand how to create financial safety. There is no point building a business saying I want 7 or 10k cash months and finding out that actually with your current service suite and the prices that you've aligned to them, you're going to become burnt out after 5k. That's not running a healthy business. A healthy business is understanding where your ceilings are, how to optimize and lever certain things in your business through your forecasting and refinement to create a business that feels as good on the outside as it looks on the inside as well. So it's so important that we are constantly creating the right environments in our business. So I really would invite you to think about currently do I have a clear structured service suite with an aligned pricing that can contribute to a revenue model? And if you're sitting there thinking, do you know what I don't have any of that in place? Then I'd really invite you to come and find me on Instagram, drop me a message, and let's start the conversation to see how we can create safety in your business for the next 90 days. Because if you're not addressing these habits now, I can bet you that they're going to be there in 90 days' time, they're going to be there in six months' time, and they're most probably going to be there by the time we finish 2026 and we're going into 2027. So it's really important that we set a healthy business culture so that you can have those dreamy days off with your family. You can open your business bank account and see that there's consistent money flowing into your business, that you can open your financial trackers and see a pipeline of clients two, three, four, five months in advance, that you are understanding how to hold levels of money in your business. You're understanding how to stretch to new levels in your business, and you're really optimizing the whole business model. I know when I first started out in this industry, no one showed me these types of things. I had to go looking for them, learning them, and through working with my coach and mentors and my peers around me, I found ways and developed ways that would work for me and my business. And that is why I have developed the cash flow code method so that women can understand this step-by-step method to create predictable monthly sales revenue in their business to have complete clarity around their numbers. So I want you to look at this podcast as a little bit of an awareness and audit process to think about where are you in your business and do you understand what's currently going on and how can we create awareness with that? We are going into the last week of Make Money Moves in March, and there are four incredible opportunities where you can get access to a replay of a financial forecast. You can also work with me on Fully Booked and Highly Paid, which is my three-course pricing module. You can watch it and get instant transformations in your business. You can access me with a VIP day in London for a pricing accelerator and get 60 days support for implementation where I'm supporting you build that financial roadmap for clarity. Or if you feel like you need hand holding in your business, we need to dismantle certain parts down and rebuild for long-term transformation where we could three and a half times, four and a half times your sales revenue, then I offer a one-to-one close mentorship for nine months. So with that, I hope you've enjoyed today's super short and sweet podcast. But I really felt compelled to come on and talk about the clarity auditing structure and sales targets in my cash flow method and ask you about feeling safe in your business and giving you a couple of questions to think about so you can digest them over the next week and you can reach out to me and start talking to me about how you need support and help and how I can be there to support you because it is my mission this year to support so many women in their businesses, create sustainable, thriving, profitable businesses that work for them. There is no point having a business model that does not work for you. It's so important to have that business model that does work for you. So, with that, my gorgeous souls, have a great weekend, have a lovely week ahead, and I cannot wait to get back in touch with you for another podcast next Friday. But have a great weekend and speak to you all soon.