Do you think it’s time to invest in yourself?
Now you know me, I don’t like wasting money, but I also don’t mind spending it when I know that something is a good investment. And over the years, I’ve learned what a good investment looks like!
Investments come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some will improve productivity, while others might reduce costs, some might improve customer satisfaction and others might increase loyalty.
Now some investments can be easily measured, but others are more about gut feeling instinct but as entrepreneurs, we can be shockingly poor at spotting one of the most important investment opportunities we have – the opportunity to invest in ourselves.
Before I get started, I don’t want to confuse investment with salary. I’m not saying that we should all pay ourselves more money, quite the opposite in fact! For years, I paid myself way less than I would have paid somebody else to do my job because instead I wanted to keep all of the money in the business to have the capital to help it grow.
So I always deliberately put myself at the end of the salary queue so that I could keep the wage bill down and the cash flow positive. And I know lots of others, especially startup entrepreneurs, that do the same thing. Just as you would invest time, money and training in a member of staff that you really believe in, you need to take that same approach to investing in yourself and looking at development opportunities for you.
In my case, one of the best investments that I’ve ever made in myself over the years is presenter training. Now, when I say over the years, I’ve probably spent tens of thousands on presenter training for me over that time. I said yes to every bit of training that was on offer from the shopping channels that I worked with, especially over in the States, but I’ve also invested personally in coaches and mentors who’ve helped me with my skills in that area.
Presenting live on shopping telly is not something that is easy to practice at home. After all, a big part of it is getting used to all of the different screens, the cameras and the instructions that you’ve got in your ears from the gallery. Making sure that I consciously invested into improving my presenting skills was the best method I had of staying at the very top of my game. Yes, it cost me a lot of money, but has it been worth it? Ten times over.
Now, as well as the money I’ve spent, I’ve also made a big investment of my time. If you think over the years, I’ve spent hours and hours reviewing so much footage of myself presenting, trying to understand what I do well, looking at areas that I need to improve. I also spend loads of hours looking for inspiration from other presenters, I watch them on screen and I have talked to lot of them to try to discover the tips that they’ve got and see how they do it.
Investing in yourself isn’t just about acquiring new skills or enhancing your existing ones. It could also be about putting yourself in a position where you will be able to perform at your very best.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. Imagine that you’ve got a really important meeting coming up with a potential new client. The only problem is that it’s 150 miles away, and the meeting is at nine o’clock in the morning. The drive’s is going to take four hours, the train’s three hours, then you’d need to get a taxi from the station to their offices, yada, yada, yada.
The bottom line is that you’re going to be getting up at four o’clock and out the door by no later than five and that is a big ask, right? And, you’ve got the worry of a delayed train or an unexpected traffic jam, all of which is going to add to anxiety before that big meeting.
Now, if you think about it, if the meeting goes well, the business could be significant so you need to give yourself every chance to be on it. So what do you do? Under these circumstances, doing something as simple as staying at a hotel close by the night before should be considered an investment, not a treat. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just somewhere to lay your head down the night before, check through your presentation and make sure you’re confident that you’re going to get the meeting with time to spare.
And, most importantly, it’s going to take away all that stress that you might have so that you’re just worrying about the meeting. Turning up fresh and focused could be the difference between winning the business or not so the stakes are pretty high and the return on this type of investment could be huge.
Now, to help you think about this, I’ve put together four really simple questions that should help you decide whether or not you’re going to make an investment in yourself. So let me walk you through them…
Question one, will I get a return on this investment?
It doesn’t have to be cold hard cash, but there does have to be some kind of future return. Now, the return doesn’t have to be guaranteed. You might stay in the hotel and then never get the deal but, there still has to be some potential for some gain in there somewhere.
So that’s the first question. Then secondly, I want you to think about whether making this investment gives me the very best chance of performing at my very best.
Now I gave the example of a hotel the night before the meeting, but it could be a piece of equipment that you need, a new printer, a specific laptop, even like a new suit or an outfit. Anything that you honestly think could make a difference and will contribute to you being at your absolute best qualifies as an investment.
Number three, would I justify this money if the same investment was on the cards for a member of staff that I believed in?
It might seem like a really strange question to ask, but you’d be amazed at how many people, entrepreneurs, will happily justify spending money on a member of staff, but wouldn’t spend it on themselves. Remember that you are an important member of your team as well, not just the boss so you’ve got to give yourself some respect.
And then finally, ask yourself the last question, can I afford this investment?
Of course, there comes a point where we all have to say no to an investment if it’s really going to stretch the budget beyond what we think we can afford. But we also need to consider the potential impact on the business if we don’t make the investment.
Being late for that meeting, the laptop crashing, the printer not working when you need to print off a big presentation – these are all things that can destroy months of hard work if you don’t get it right. So, if the answer to all those four questions are yes, yes, yes and yes, then it’s more likely than not that the investment stacks up.