Tonya ran a seven figure laboratory business. She was good at what she did, her team performed the testing her clients relied on, and from the outside, everything looked like it was working.

But like so many of the women I work with, Tonya was financially phobic. It wasn't that she never glanced at a report, it was that even when she did, she had no real sense of what those numbers were supposed to look like for a business like hers, and on top of that, she wasn't even sure the numbers in front of her were accurate, so what was the point. Without knowing what healthy even looked like, and without trust that the numbers were even right in the first place, a number is just a number.

When we finally sat down and looked at her financials together, one thing stood out to me. Her supply costs, the materials her team needed to actually perform the testing her clients paid for, had grown much faster than her revenue had. Supply costs had more than doubled in a single year, while her business had grown at a much slower pace in that same stretch.

Tonya hadn't caught it, and honestly, there was no reason she would have. A rising number doesn't look alarming on its own when the business around it is also growing. You have to compare it against revenue to see the real story, and that's a comparison she'd simply never had a reason to make before. Nobody had ever shown her that supply costs are supposed to grow roughly in line with revenue, not faster than it.

Once we saw it clearly, we started watching that relationship closely, supply costs against revenue, month over month. Tonya didn't need a complicated system, she needed to know what she was looking for and why it mattered. Within a year, her supply costs came back in line with her growth, saving her close to $350,000.

That's the thing about financial phobia that people don't talk about enough. It's not always about fear of what you'll find. Sometimes it's simply never having been shown what you're supposed to be looking for in the first place. Tonya wasn't careless, and she wasn't avoiding her numbers on purpose. She just didn't know what she didn't know, and once she did, she used it immediately.

This is exactly why I hold a free event every single month called Where Is All My Money Going. Not because looking at your numbers should feel intimidating, but because knowing what to look for changes everything.

Because here's what I know for certain. The answers are always there, waiting in the financial information, whenever you're ready to look. If you're afraid you're missing something in your business, or you know it's finally time to start understanding your financial information, come join me at my next Where Is All My Money Going. https://www.audreyfaustconsulting.com/money.