What’s With the Money Map?

A few days ago, I posted about my own financial fear and how it has impacted my business and life over the past several years.

As I’ve confronted this issue within myself over the past several months, I’ve built a framework to go around it that I’ve been working through for myself so that I can stop making decisions based on fear and begin to feel really empowered about my relationship with money.

If you receive my emails or follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you’ve heard about it already – it’s called the money map and I’m hosting a free call about it on the last day of this year.

Since you are a loyal reader here, I’m giving you a little more information than I’ve given others about this money map framework, how it came to be and what it means for you.

First, let me say this – I believe this may be the most important work I have ever done up until now.

You see, I’ve been teaching business owners for a few years now and what I’ve come to see is I can give you a complete business system (or even in the case of the guy I sold my business to a complete already set up business!), but if you are operating from financial fear, you will find it very, very difficult (maybe impossible) to do what you need to do to be successful.

Financial fear can be the most insidious disease that keeps us from our dreams, if we allow it to be.   When I am operating from financial fear, I make bad decisions.  Do you resonate with that?

I built my law firm to a million bucks without a money map.   The five years I ran the firm were some of the most painful of my life because of my nearly constant overwhelming financial fear.

I was making plenty of money and had plenty of free time, but I was constantly living on the edge of massive amounts of fear.

Yes, I learned how to feel the fear and do it anyway.  But, I was white knuckling it every step of the way.  As a result, I eventually sabotaged the firm because I simply could not handle the intense fear.

That’s what happens when you don’t deal with the fear – you will eventually sabotage yourself in a myriad of ways.

In my case, I sold my million dollar business to a guy who stopped paying the bills (including the money he owed me) within 6 months of taking over.  I’m now carrying $250,000 of debt as a result.  Yes, my financial fear turned millions of dollars into a massive debt.

Now, the good news about this is that the experience totally broke through my financial fear and I have hardly any of it now.  The worst happened.

You’ve heard the saying “what you resist persists”, right?  Well, I resisted myself right to 6-figures worth of debt.

And sure, that’s one path. But that is not the path I want for you.  For you, I offer the gift of my mistakes so you don’t have to experience the worst to break through your fears.

With hindsight, I can look at the decisions I made that led me to sell my firm to someone who would not (and could not) be successful with it and see that I made those decisions because I was scared to be running a 7-figure business and because I didn’t know how to handle my fear, I sabotaged it.

I sabotaged it by saying yes to the first person who said he’d buy despite the fact that he didn’t have the business knowledge or self awareness himself to step into a 7-figure business.

So, what happened?

The minute he stepped in, he became absolutely paralyzed by his own fear and could not make any decisions.  And the decisions he did make were horrendous.

I watched it happen and while the lessons were amazing, I would have preferred not to have had them.

The reason we don’t have 7 or 8-figure businesses dropped into our laps is because we need to ease into the financial expansion necessary to stay out of financial fear enough to take right action on an ongoing basis.

Let me give you a concrete example so you can see what I mean:

To grow your business, you need to invest in your business.  It’s just the nature of the thing.  So, when I turned the business over to the guy who bought the firm, he was going to have to keep making investments.  Payroll and  marketing were the two biggest investments he’d have to make.

Well, each time he was presented with a marketing plan by the awesome marketing director I had hired for him and he was asked for a check to pay for the marketing campaign that needed to be run he hemmed, he hawed, and ultimately wouldn’t authorize the expenditures.

Within months he was asking me why there were no clients coming in. Well, friend, if you don’t do the marketing, the phone doesn’t ring.

Let’s look at this in my own case.

When I started my second business, I was back at the 1mm-1.5mm mark within one year. Once you expand to a certain level, getting back to that level is fairly easy.   But, now it’s been a couple of years and I’ve spent the past several months looking at what is holding me back from moving beyond.   And now I can see, it’s my unresolved financial fears holding me back.

I have expanded my comfort zone to support a 1m-1.5mm business, but not beyond that.  Going to the next level is scary and too big to white knuckle my way through.

And thus was born the money map.  A framework for making decisions about spending money so I wouldn’t be making them based in fear, but instead based in what I really want from life and business.

Here’s what I know …. when you are worried about money, you cannot be focused on your bigger impact on the world.  You are in survival mode.

What I’ve discovered through the process of creating my money map technology is that the most difficult part can be looking at what you really want because if you see it, acknowledge it and don’t get it, you will die.  At least that’s what it feels like to me.

But, I’ve also become aware that being willing to really look (even when it’s hard) is the key to EVERYTHING.  At least for me.  Maybe it will be for you too.

So I created a way to look that makes it less difficult.  I’m not going to tell you that it’s totally easy.  It’s not.  It’s still a little hard.  But, I’ve found that most things are a little hard.  Having a baby is a lot hard.  In both cases, the outcome is amazingly worth it.

What’s super cool about it is that it dovetails very nicely with LIFT (which was totally not planned but is one of those signs from the Universe that says to me – keep going Alexis, you are on the right path!).

So, no matter whether you are at 5-figures trying to get to 6 or 6-figures trying to get to 7 (or just starting out and are scared to death), the money map clears the fog and unparalyzes you so you can feel great about the decisions you are making and move forward.  I cannot wait to share it with you!!