2015 I gave up the day job - which I enjoyed - and entered the world of entrepreneurship and owning business(es) & investing in property.
 
And it has all been plain sailing since then…
 
I wish!
 
Starting and growing 3 businesses has had its ups and downs over the last 5 years with:

• woohoo months
• what the hell happened months
• didn’t have to work much that month
• there’s not enough hours in the day month
• deals that worked
• deals that didn't
• growth that was great
• growth that nearly killed us
• shiny penny syndromes
• full circle moments
• celebrations
• and hard times

 
Has it all been worth it, hell yes.
 
In my day job I enjoyed the laid back work style I had perfected through automating and systemising most of my tasks, enjoying coffee and pop master at 10:30 and leaving at 16:45 sharp to get the 17:02 train home. Sounds ideal? It was good but… boring, repetitive and didn’t challenge or push me to be better.
  
Starting business with Catherine was the opposite to this, challenging, courses, mentors, learning, grind, effort, every day different, abnormal hours all to make it work.
 
What made the biggest difference for me in our businesses? Systems.
 
I’m not sure why it took me so long to realise I could use my skills from the day job to create and implement processes and systems in our businesses (probably the same reason it never occurred to me in the day job I could create my own business!).
 
in 2015 we hired our first virtual assistant and since then we have employed a number of virtual assistants. physical staff, part timers, full timers, commission based roles and salary based roles and the common theme again is systems. 
 
It is easier to have your team work efficiently with robust systems, output is more easily measured with systems and overall your business is more sellable with systems. 
 
So why were we still not as far along as I planned?
 
Leadership & management! 
 
This started my thirst for knowledge in leadership and through audio books I believe I have improved over the years. But what I enjoy even more, is…
 
Automation! Speed up work flows, remove human error, reduce reliance on management and leadership and your team and let automation take the hard work out of repetitive tasks. 
 
This freed up time, resources and has ultimately lead to a smaller team, focussing on what they are good at with me tweaking automation and processes in the background (leaving the leadership to Catherine).
 
Back in the day job I was building automation into our custom estates and finance management software and now I am doing it for the marketing, sales, finance and admin of our businesses.

Automation was the step I missed when starting out in business, opting instead to hire first and this may have slowed down our progress.
 
And this is why I have launched the Finance Systems and Leverage Day, 12th February in Chelmsford, to save you time, money and effort in the admin of your business.

Whether you are just starting out or been working on your business for a number of years, if you have not automated and leveraged out the finance function of your business so you can just receive, interpret and act upon financial reports and KPIs then on this day you will learn exactly how to do this for your business.

I have 20 spaces, 10 on my interest list and 8 placed already taken.

If you want to come to this one off day event, let me know below and I’ll send you the details! 👇

I would love the chance to help you develop, improve and grow! Come and get involved!

I've always been a fan of Weebly and the ease of creating websites. However, the main shortfall I find is:

IT ISN'T ON ZAPIER - AHHHH

This means my automation goals are hindered sometimes, in particular weebly contact forms (that look much better than embedded mailchimp forms) into a crm like mailchimp. Until now...

The answer
 

1. Install automate.io app on your weebly site 
2. Connect automate.io to your mailchimp account
3. Create a bot
4. Select Weebly as your trigger account, and form submitted as trigger event
5. Select Action app as Mailchimp, and add or update subscriber as the action to be done
6. Here's where it may get tricky: If you are lucky, automate will pick up your form from weebly to select in the Input Fields, if not:
7. Go to your live website and find the form you want to link
8. Right click on the form and go to Inpect elements
9. Find the form ID
10. Go back to automate and enter the form ID into the Custom Value field.
11. Make sure your output fields are listed (usually; name, email, number etc)
12. Next go to the action side and select the mail chimp list you want to add the subscriber to
13. And then fill in the necessary fields from the input fields from your weebly form
14. Save and test!

Simple!

All that because I do not like the embedded MailChimp subscriber forms on the website.

Next problem… mobile friendly tables!!

Do you have any specific automation problems? Let me know in the comments and I will see if I can help (recently I impressed zapier support staff with some of my formula so I usually know a way around things!).

Other than it is a legal requirement, here are our main reasons for getting your team members to take longer holiday breaks rather than odd days off:

Better for them
Longer breaks give a range of benefits to your team, including more time to:

1. Fully switch off and relax
2. Rest and recuperate, coming back to work more energised
3. Catch up with friends and family, ensuring a happy work/life balance and a longer working relationship with you

Better for you
With team members off for 7-14 days, this gives you (or their line manager) a chance to:

1. Test their workload - could they be taking on more, do they need to take on less, what are they doing on a day to day basis, do they have the capacity to take on more if your company grows
2. Test their processes - could you systemise more, could time or resources be saved by doing things differently, do processes need improving, do they need more support
3. Test holdups - are there reasons that tasks take longer than you expect, is there downtime, what else could be done to improve

Better for all
We have had first hand experience of scaling too quickly and if we had put the above tests in place, maybe we could have seen the flaws in some of our systems, found improvements to processes, systemised more and freed up more time for staff before overwhelming them with more to do.

Now we are over this and looking back, we want to ensure we can share as many tips as possible to save others doing the same. 

To your success in business,

Stephen Turner
Turner Invest 

We are in the final month where tax returns are due and, as I recently helped someone submit their self assessment for their self-employed business, I thought I would leverage my time by sharing my top 3 tips to help all those who have been putting it off:
​

1. Keep a record:
   • It doesn't take long but often forgotten, keep a track record of income and expenditure throughout the year as you go and it will save you time come January. 
   • If you do not want to spend out on software such as xero or quickbooks (£10-£30 per month - and essential if reporting on VAT), then keep a simple spreadsheet tracking income and expenses for your self-employed business (and employment if you are employed)
   • Also keep track of charitable gift-aid donations, interest statements, pension contributions etc and keep any property income/expenditure separate
2. Just do it:
   • For a simple tax return it doesn't take long (it took me 30 minutes to tally up and help submit their self assessment return)
   • You do not have to pay your tax liability as soon as you submit giving you plenty of time to plan to pay
   • Feel less pressure! Around half of tax returns are submitted in the last month, not knowing their tax liability until then – don’t let this be you
3. Make it simpler, use:
   • A different bank account for only business transactions (paying yourself monthly)
   • The HMRC app to help estimate your tax liability
   • Evernote, a free app to keep notes and records of invoices and bills you collect (if you do not opt for bookkeeping software)

I hope that helps.
 
Have you submitted yours yet?
 
Additionally, for Life Leverage Online Masterclass members, you will see a new training video showing you the step by step process of submitting a self assessment return. So if you have a simple tax return to submit, take the stress out of it and follow the video.
 

One of the goals we have set here at Turner Invest is to help more people in 2020. 

Whether that is through:

• Providing more content that helps people with their businesses
• Providing investment opportunities so people can get more for their money
• Providing education materials to help people get more from their life and business

We are committed to empowering people to live the life of their dreams.

So, to help us help you, what are your goals this year?

Feel free to reach out to us here or on social. 

To your success,

​Catherine & Steve

After a long break (and a push from the other Directors in the business) I’m getting back to writing regular blogs, so if you’re reading this I hope you enjoy it.

This year there have been huge changes and growth across our existing and new businesses, too much to detail out in one blog, which I’ll cover in the coming months. To begin with, I just wanted to let you know what my last week has looked like.

For the past 2 days I have been at a sales and closing training event in Birmingham (while testing out staying in our own SA), Wednesday I was in Northampton running our Business and Property Mastermind, helping business owners with their next steps and their overall Business Plans, Tuesday I spent the day with Mylo as Ella was with her nanny, Monday I caught up with the team in the office working on priorities for the week, the weekend was the weekend   and last Friday I was head down in spreadsheets (earphones in, hacker mode!).

If I could, I’d spend every one of my working days in hacker mode, automating reports and KPIs and improving business data using spreadsheets (SUMIFS, Conditional Formatting, Graphs… lovely).

82% of small businesses fail due to cash flow problems with most business owners rating cashflow as their number 1 risk.

So how do you manage cashflow? Data! - live, accurate, automated data in easy to read formats so you can make business decisions quickly to the benefit of your business.

Knowing your data is vital within a business as it helps; identify problems, find bottlenecks, highlight poor performance, see unnecessary costs and more. Ultimately to come to the answer of ‘We need to do X to improve Y’.

I love spreadsheets. Solving businesses perceived problems of managing business finance and getting real time reports and data (I’ve been doing it from day 1 as an accounting apprentice all those years ago). So many people get stressed by this, ignore it until it becomes a mountain, have no idea where to start and fly their business blind as they don’t know their results. So make sure you spend some time now, setting this up right, setting up your accounting system to give you the right data, automating reports from this data, linking in data from your other systems, and make it easy to analyse so you can focus on making decisions and the high value tasks that you need to be focussing on for your business.

What are the biggest challenges you are facing in managing your businesses finance? 

This week’s tips are ideal for small to medium sized businesses looking to grow their business and step out from the day to day running of the business, and become the Business Owner they set out to be.

“Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week” – Lori Greiner

Tip 1:                Systemise
Within your business you have processes that are normally documented as process documents, these describe how to begin and complete a task within your business. So, a process describes what needs to be done in your business. Business systemisation is the systems that form around these processes, these can either be manual or automated systems in order to complete each process. 

Systemisation definition from Personal MBA is: A system is a process made explicit and repeatable. Systemization is the act of creating a new system. The primary benefit of creating a System is that you can examine the process and make improvements. Developing Systems helps everyone do what they have to do with minimum misunderstanding.

For example; the process document for a business task that aims to get more website subscribers, would be to give value, create blogs/reports, advertise them on social media and then link to the website where people can subscribe. The system around this process would be to manually create and schedule posts on social media, and then automate the subscriber sequence by embedding a form into your website (from Mailchimp for example) and setting up an automated email series. You can then monitor results and KPIs based on this system to make improvements. 

This is just one example of how to systemise your business and one example of business systemisation software. There are many systems to your business and just as many (if not more) different software out there that could help automate some of these.

Tip 2:                Outsource        
After reading the Systemise section, you may feel you need this section the most with the amount of process documents and systems to build in your business. However, outsourcing should only be done when you have a correct and detailed specification – and this usually means processes and systems complete, but could mean just a detailed specification of one task.
Some Business process outsourcing examples; 

• Project based – to do one certain task (or repetitive task) in your business, this could be from logo design to website design, research, videos and many more. We have used various outsourcers for project work ranging from:
  • Logo and intro videos for Business SOS using Fiverr.com, 
  • Transport services for guests for our Serviced Accommodation business
  • Business post collected and scanned into Dropbox using UK Postbox
  • And many more
• Part Time or Full Time – to do various jobs/tasks for you and your business for a certain amount of hours per week. This could range from admin, to bookkeeping, sales & marketing to delivering products, and everything in between for your business. We have one team member based in the UK for our property business and 4 Virtual Assistants from the Philippines covering all of our businesses, all full time. We started by hiring part time, and then as roles grew and more processes in the business were defined and could be outsourced, roles became full time and the range of roles increased. 

Outsourcing the systemisation of your business can be done, however you should expect to pay a higher price for this as the person or business that can do this for you needs to be very highly skilled and experienced to know how you want to run your business and what systems you need. You will also need to be heavily involved with this task in order to convey your business vision and what you expect from your business so that the right processes and systems are formed.  

Tip 3:                Scale    
Once you have systemised and outsourced some or all of your business, you should have freed up some of your time as the business owner to work on higher value tasks such as growth. 
With more time to be working ON the business rather than IN, you have more time to work on the business vision, direction, process improvements, new sales, bigger picture growth in order to scale your business.
And then, the great thing about these 3 tips, is that as you scale, the increased sales you make should fall into the systems you have created, be fulfilled by automation or your outsourcers and then create more growth through customer recommendations and reviews from the great service you have provided. 
 
Systemise, Outsource & Scale is a cycle within your business that never ends. Improvements to systems will need to be made as new technology or competition emerges and as you scale you will need a bigger team of outsourcers and new processes in place. 

Business SOS has been created to help small to medium sized business owners, systemise, outsource and scale their business. Through a monthly membership that delivers new training videos each week covering the Business SOS model and how to implement SOS into your business, AND a monthly Live Q&A to have all your business questions answered so there are no blocks in the way of your growth, Business SOS is becoming the go to platform to help your business become sustainable, scalable and profitable (especially due to the low monthly fee of just £9+VAT).
 
We hope you have found these tips useful and are able to use them to improve your business and investments. Don’t miss out on future tips - subscribe to the Turner Invest newsletter at turnerinvest.co.uk and follow us on social media. 

Having run a Serviced Accommodation business for over 3 years now, I know first-hand how hard it can get at Winter time when bookings slow down, cash flow is tight and you’re doing everything you can think of to profit.
 
So, apart from the obvious of making more sales (which a lot of people are posting about), as part of the Business Health Check I do for clients, we look into expenses and aim to trim them where possible ensuring no effect on business performance (as money saved is straight into your profits, whereas increased sales come with more costs).
 
As I have recently done this for a SA business I thought I would share some of my top tips to reduce spend over the Winter (& longer term):
 
Below are tips on how to reduce the Cost of Sales expenses for running a SA business:
 

1. Rent – may not be the easiest to make savings on, but have you considered renegotiating rents or speaking to the landlord about managing their property as a SA rather than renting it (letting them know all the benefits that could get from that)?
2. Repairs & Maintenance – Winter can bring on a lot of larger property repair costs, which if you are a R2R SA business, largely fall to the landlord. However, this can have a massive impact on your business if you are waiting around for a landlord to fix it and your SA is closed. A top tip we employ is having 4-6 weekly maintenance checks to be pro-active and stop larger repairs being needed.
3. Furnishings & Consumables – you may already be tied in to some furniture finance so it would be hard to reduce this cost. However, shopping around can help reduce the cost of the other furnishings and consumables, along with bulk buying.
4. Utilities – again you may be tied in to a contract but that should not stop you looking to change. For example we used a company that will pay any exit fees you have and quoted us cheaper rates then we were previously on (let me know if you want their details). Additionally, monitor SA utility usage and compare units against each other to see if there are any problems or improvements that can be made to reduce usage and cost. A 10% saving here could be a £500 per month saving across 20 SAs.
5. Cleaning – changing cleaners is not something you want to do often, especially if you are happy with their service as a good housekeeping team is vital to a SA business. However, there are savings that can be made, and this should not be ignored. The difference between a VAT registered cleaning company and non VAT registered is a 20% cost to your business, which for a SA business of 20+ properties is over a £1K per month saving. 
6. Laundry – linen hire seems to be the cheapest way to go. Even when comparing a linen hire company who is VAT registered against a non-VAT registered launderette. Re-negotiating laundry rates have saved us thousands and moving to a linen hire supplier could save you even more. Just make sure you factor in the additional time and cost that may come about from your cleaners to manage the laundry from the usual one location/one drop-off service that linen hire companies provide. 

 
Those are just some of the tips for savings in a SA business and all the above relate to the Direct Costs of SA income.
 
If people are interested, I can share further tips on the savings to be made from the operating expenses of a SA business? Just let me know.


Stephen Turner,
Turner Invest
Empowering People to Live the Life of Their Dreams

On the back of our recent Serviced Accommodation (SA) business milestones, we had a lot of interest for our set of automated guest messages.

In summary, the timing of our messages are as follows:

• 28 Days before check-in or Immediately if within 28 Days (to all)
• 27 Days before check-in or immediately if within 27 days (to all excluding agency emails) – With Availability of Booking Extension
• 27 Days before check-in or immediately if within 27 days (to all excluding agency emails) – Without Availability of Booking Extension
• 2 Days Prior to Check-in (Only if Contract is not Signed)
• 1 Day Prior to Check-in (Only if Contract is not Signed)
• On Confirmation of Booking (Payment confirmed and Contract Signed)
• 1 Day after check-in (automatically sent)
• 2 Days after check-in (automatically sent)
• 2 Days before check-out (automatically sent)
• 1 Day after check-out (automatically sent)​

To download all of these templates, click here  (no email address required - instant download)

I hope you find this useful for your business.

If you need SA management services in Essex and the surrounding areas, get in touch.

And if you would like to receive our free report series, subscribe to our mailing list below.

All the best in your business success,

​Stephen