The famous and globally respected Robert Kiyosaki once said money is an idea. This couldn’t be any truer. Indeed, your perception of money largely determines how you make it, retain it, and multiply it.
In door-to-door sales, we are fantastic at selling and closing deals, but financial literacy is not widespread.
It is not rare to come across reps who know so little about filing taxes. It is also not rare to find door-to-door sales reps that blow money away as fast as they make it because of a deficiency of investment insight.
On this podcast, Brady Slack, the senior tax advisor at High Country Finance, thoroughly educates you on the right way to see and manage money in door-to-door sales for accelerated prosperity.
So here are some of the nuggets this podcast entails.
Positive competitiveness in door-to-door sales
One beautiful thing about door-to-door sales is the absence of a ceiling on your earning capacity. It is an open-air playground where your work intensity and skill set directly influence how much you take home at the end of the day.
It goes without saying that some reps make $80k in a year while some are pulling in over a million dollars annually.
Sadly, these financial differentials create negative competitiveness in reps, commonly demonstrated in the sense of insufficiency.
Such door-to-door sales reps (feeling inadequate) are consistently desperate to elevate their earnings just for status sake or just to feed their high ego.
Envy is not a rarity in door-to-door sales, but how about reorienting such poisonous competitiveness and making it healthier inspiration?
Instead of being jealous of a high-performing rep, how about tweaking such jealousy to admiration and respect, using such standards to motivate yourself to higher levels?
Building controls for enhanced organization in sales
In the podcast, Brady Slack rightly points out that money is a means to an end – not an end itself.
In door-to-door sales, some reps are so covetous with money that they ravenously chase it at the expense of other equally critical aspects of their lives.
In some other cases, some reps are terribly risk-averse, refusing to embark on even the slightest calculated risks.
But wealth is about reinventing your mindset, having a healthy perception of money. To have the right mental balance between financial pragmatism and adventurism, you must have controls.
Clearly set targets and stay organized in the pursuit of such ambitions. What is the specific cost of the lifestyle you want to live at the moment?
Also, how much do you need to invest while living that lifestyle?
Next, how much do you need to sell to attain such a lifestyle and yet meet your investment objectives?
With such certainty in need income accrual, work backward to the finer details of how long you need to knock on doors daily.
This way, you have more balance, enhanced control, and are more insulated from negative peer pressure.
Deliberately choosing the right community
Take it or leave it, your upbringing contributes a large chunk of your mentality. This is especially in the early stages of your life.
While we don’t get to choose our parentage or upbringing, we can at least, in door-to-door sales, choose the community we associate with as adults.
It is impossible to completely isolate a rep’s success from the community around him. You tend to take a slice out of the trend or performance metrics around you.
This explains why you must be deliberate with your choice of associates in sales. Specifically, choose to surround yourself with reps that can positively push you up.
We don’t mean reps you would “envy”. We specifically mean high performers who would compel you to better harness your potential and raise your game.
Getting your financial records right
For many, door-to-door sales space is not as “corporate” as the typical 9-5 job. Therefore, they are not meticulous with their financial reporting and documentation.
Brady Slack astonishingly reveals he has met reps who have not filed their tax reports in decades. More than being criminal, this is a recipe for disaster financially when the IRS comes calling.
Brady advocates keeping three unique financial records as a door-to-door sales business or rep.
First are the financial reports you keep for the IRS. In this report, you have to legally shrink your taxable income as much as you can. This way, you get to save enormously on tax rebates.
The second report is the financial data you supply to investors and lenders. This should be a more optimistic (not exaggerated) outlook of your business, where you must portray your finances in as robust health as possible.
The last financial report is that which you prepare for yourself. This has to be as realistic as possible as it needs to reflect how well you are doing in sales accurately.
With your financial reports neatly prepared, you are, at every point, definitively informed of what is in the bank, what is needed to maintain operation, and the chunk available for your lifestyle.
Consequently, you can know which investments you can pivot into and what specific magnitude you can make such investments.
Listen to the podcast above to get the sauce on insights shared in money management.
