If you are in business, you need to listen to today's episode because we are talking about some critical year end planning, both actions and reflections and I can't wait to share it with you. Stay tuned. Welcome to The Hair of the Dog podcast. If you are a pet photographer ready to make more money and start living a life by your design, you've come to the right place.

And now your host pet photographer, travel Addict, chocolate Martini Connoisseur, Nicole Begley. All right everybody. Welcome back to the Hair of the Dog podcast. This is the very last hair of the dog podcast recording of 2023. How did that happen? I don't know how. It's December 16th. This is getting released on December 19th. So you can see the Christmas season has been catching up with me because usually these podcasts are recorded quite a bit earlier.

But actually this works out well for you because I wanted to share some really great conversations we've been having inside of a recent Elevate call that I hosted and also inside our 50 K club call inside the Hair of the Dog Academy. Now I'm Nicole Begley. I am the creator and founder of Hair of the Dog Academy. And if you don't know about Elevate,

that is a high level coaching program that Heather Lahtinen and I run together in which we help photographers get more results faster in their business. And of course we have action items in there, but a lot of the conversations and a lot of the coaching in there focuses on what's going on in our head, in our thoughts and 'cause those thoughts lead to feelings,

lead to actions, lead to results. So we focus a lot on the things that you can't always see and those hidden, those hidden blocks that are holding us back from getting to the goals that we wanna get to that often are hidden to us. But then you need someone from the outside to help you see them so that you can knock them down and get them outta your way.

Actually been really proud of that group. They have been rocking it the past month. The number of posts inside that group of people hitting their highest revenue yearly revenue target for the year ever has been posted. A lot of people having their highest sale ever. A lot of people even just getting something that they've been waiting to do for a long time done.

Maybe it's a new marketing partner or an action that they've known and wanted to take, but they just haven't done it. So the wins in there are just flying off the shelves and it makes me so incredibly happy. Also, spoiler alert, since this gets launched on December 19th, we're actually running a little special promotion for Elevate tomorrow December 20th and December 21st because my birthday is December 20th and I thought,

what better way to celebrate than giving you guys a little special offer in to Elevate? So if you're on our mailing list, make sure you take a look for for an email with details on that because you can save $200 off your first month and you'll also receive lifetime access to all of our Elevate Retreat recordings, which are man, just chockfull of unbelievably life changing,

life changing presentations and thoughts and exercises. So that is going on just for 48 hours on December 20th and 21st, 2023. So jump on over to hair of the dog academy.com/elevate. Okay? And in case you're not on my mailing list, use the code BF two three and you'll get the savings if you wanna join us. But anyway, I digressed. Let's get back to what we're talking about here today and that is that we want to look at some things that we can do for our year end.

Now some of these are action items and some of these things are more kind of reflection, looking back at the year, figuring out what worked, what didn't, what we wanna take into 2024. So we're gonna do a combination of those two things. So let's dive into it, shall we? A couple of these things need to be done before year end.

So let's go over those first. That is, you need to basically get a handle on your books and get a handle on your finances and your profit loss. So is that up to date in your business? If it's not or it's not easily up to date, I'm not talking about like, oh, I haven't done it in a couple weeks. Like that's fine.

Like you have a process, you can easily get it up to date, but if you are looking at your books, you're like, I really have no idea what I've made and I need to like add up all these things or figure out what I'm gonna do for this profit loss for my taxes. All right, we're gonna stop, we're not gonna pass,

go and we are going to create a system for tracking our expenses and our revenue and our business. Yes, you can use a spreadsheet, however, you're definitely missing things if you're using just a spreadsheet and you are manually keeping track of all of these things, that is exhausting and that is no way to be able to grow your business because you're not gonna be able to keep up with that.

And if you are, you likely, like I said, are going to be missing things. So I highly recommend creating some sort of system that happens without you doing it. So some sort of automated system, I use QuickBooks online. I've been using them for, oh my gosh, since I started my business in 2010. I would not use them if I was starting today 'cause it is very robust and quite confusing.

My accountant set it up for me and right now I have multiple streams of income in my business from my photography services to the hair of the dog, online education stuff and workshops. So those are all tracked separately in QuickBooks with different classes. So my situation's a little bit different. If I were running just a photography business today, I would go with Wave or Zero or something that was very,

very easy to get started. Wave Accounting is free and I don't know at what point you need to pay, but they do all the basic things for free. I actually have that for my nonprofit, the hair of the dog conservation fund. That's what I use for that business and it works really, really well. Another option that people love is Zero and that's spelled with an X-X-E-R-O and I believe they are also free up to a certain point as well.

And the beauty beautiful, the beautiful things and the beauty of these two platforms as well as QuickBooks is that you can automatically sync your business credit card, your business checking account, your business savings account. You can automatically sync all your business accounts to this software And then as expenses and things come in, it automatically updates. So you're not gonna miss anything.

You can also send invoices from the software and get paid directly into that software, which is really helpful for tracking your sales tax that is due usually quarterly. So highly recommend if you don't have something like that, you really need to get something like that into place. The other piece of the puzzle with prepping for taxes is what are you doing with that pile of receipts?

Do you have them in a shoebox? Because if you do that, ink is likely going to disappear off those invoices before you actually get audited. So you need to hold on to receipts for seven years, hold onto all your tax pay report for seven years and then you can get rid of it. But let's say the IRS decides they wanna audit you and it's like six years down the line and you go to get that,

you know 2020, it's now let's say, let's say it's 2029 and you go to your closet and you get that 2023 receipts off that shelf and you open it up and they're blank. This happens. Have you guys ever seen, 'cause it's not real ink, it's like, I forget what they call it, but a lot of these receipts are like heat activated something or other,

very technical as you can see. But anyway, they, they fade. And so if you're just expecting those to still be there in many years, well you might be very sadly surprised that they are not. So I would definitely have some sort of process for managing your receipts. What I do, it's any printed receipt that I get that's not gonna normal receipt paper.

I will take a photo, I have a QuickBooks app on my phone. The other accounting softwares often have apps too. You can take a an image on your phone with it and it just gets uploaded into your accounting software and matches the transaction. So it's really, really easy. There are lots of different ways to do that. If you get an email receipt,

sometimes you could forward it onto them or you can just mark it into a folder on your, in your email system. It doesn't matter what the system is, it just matters that you have a system. And if you don't have one now and you're looking at tax day coming up for 2024 to file your 2023 taxes and you're just like wanna lay in the corner in the,

in a fetal position, like let's make a change. So this is the last time you have to deal with that. Okay? So that's number one. Make sure you have a process in place that you have a financial review system and that you can update your books. So do that first. Update your books, see where you stand 'cause that's gonna bring us to number two.

What is your financial situation of the year? How much profit do you have or did you not reach a profit this year? It's okay, you're still allowed. Oh gosh, don't quote me on this. I am not a tax preparer professional, but the IRS you need to show a profit I believe three out of five years. Hmm, I could be wrong with that but there is a certain number with that You have to show profit in your business.

But your first year or two of business, sometimes you do have a loss and that's okay, but you do wanna eventually start showing a profit or the IRS's gonna be like, no, you can't continue deducting this because you have a hobby. So you can look at this and figure out do I need to show a profit this year? Do I wanna like take a loss this year to offset other taxable income?

Like what do I want to do? What's my tax strategy here? Which I highly recommend talking to a tax professional. They will save you money, they will certainly save you stress and headache when you have a business you are no longer a basic W2 taxpayer that can just like do a little TurboTax and send it in. There are so many different tax situations that we can think about when we're a business owner that a,

a good accountant will help you realize and help you take advantage of the, the tax savings that are are rightfully yours. It's in the tax code. So you need to know in order to take advantage of them. And that's where a tax professional can really help you with that. So you can look at that and you need to decide are there any expenses that I want to accelerate this year?

For instance, we are going to Iceland for the Barca's. The Barca have started a new type of retreat, it's called a Bark Adventure where it's part travel adventure tour and part dog photography workshop. And our first trip is going to be eight days, seven nights in Iceland in June, which by the way we do have one seat open because someone had to drop out.

So if you would like that seat, please go to pet photography retreats.com. Anyway for doing this, we're working with a travel agent. So as you can imagine hosting a trip like this for what, 17 people plus a couple guests. So 20 people traveling along the southern coast of Iceland, staying in hotels, rent cars, doing activities, like there's a lot of expenses.

It's very expensive and iceland's expensive. Anyway, so I have quite a big bill to pay our travel partners and that's not due until later this spring, but the money's already been coming in from some of our students from Iceland and it's sitting in my workshop savings account right now. And if I go to the end of the year without all sitting there, the IRS is gonna make me pay taxes on that money,

but that money is not actually mine. That money is going to be going to pay for the trip because the profit on these types of things is usually not crazy. So it's certainly not how much money's sitting in that account right now. So at the end of the year I'm actually, there's about $40,000 in that account, which I reached out to our travel partners.

I'm like, Hey, can I send you $40,000 before the end of the year? They're like, yeah of course. I'm like great, awesome. So am basically taking that account down to zero so that I can send all that money and prepay it here on this year's accounting so that I do not have to pay taxes on it this year. Especially because that money really isn't mine anyway.

So what can you do? So that's kind of the thing. If you are, you know, have a workshop or something that a payment plan that's going through the next year and you have some extra money now and you're like, oh I wanna pay that now. And that's a good way to, to accelerate that savings. If you're thinking of buying a new lens anyway or a new camera in the next month or two,

maybe you buy that now instead of waiting till January, what I don't want you doing is going out and just spending money just because you're like, oh I need to spend this money. No, no, no, just if there was something you were going to buy anyway, it might make sense to get it before the end of the year. We still like profit.

Okay, so that's number two. And then number three, which is another thing you need to do before the end of the year, which again you guys, you have like 12 days is looking at any sort of retirement savings. Now this does not necessarily have to be done in 12 days, but I believe again, not a tax professional, I believe you need to have the account set up before the end of the year,

but you can fund it through March 15th or April 15th depending on your tax situation. So what that could look like is if you don't already have a retirement account set up, maybe you go and you open a Roth IRA or a regular traditional IRA and you open the account now, but oftentimes you can fund it first quarter for your 2023 contribution so that way you can actually put twice as much in next year.

So that's something that you can think about. And again, check with your tax professional 'cause everyone's situation's unique with when they're eligible for what and all of those different things and how your business is set up. So definitely check that out. Okay, something else that you can do, which doesn't have to be by year end, this is starting to move into January,

is you can go ahead and do an expense analysis, kind of look at where you spent money this year and is there things, are there things that you can cut back on or not spend as much money on? Or are there subscriptions personally or professionally that you're like, what? Why am I paying for this? I'm not using this. So really kind of take a look at that and see where you can save some money.

And likewise maybe where you could invest some money that you could see a return. One of those things that I invest in heavily each year is education. And when we were talking about this and elevate, somebody was asking, you know, what's a reasonable amount to invest in education? And it really depends for each person. And when I look at my budget profit loss for the year,

I don't really have ever a set cap on education. I look at different education opportunities as they come in and I ask myself, what is the return on this investment? For instance, I invested several thousand dollars in a copywriting like accelerator program in which we would sit down and write a whole bunch of launch emails with the help of their copywriter and their structure and then I would write them and send them and the copywriter would like red pen them.

And it was a fairly substantial investment. I was like, ah man. But it did two things. Number one, it kept me accountable because otherwise that to-do list is going to get or that to-do item was going to get keep getting pushed down on my to-do list because I don't love to write emails. And so especially harder ones that are like convergent emails and things like that.

'cause there's a lot of of different copywriting techniques that need to go into those. Anyway, so I invested in this for number one, the accountability to get it done. And then number two, well how I asked myself about this was I asked myself, would having these emails earn me the, that was about $5,000 to do this course. I'm like,

would I earn $5,001 back from this? And if I did the work and if I implemented it, yes, I believe easily I will earn that back. So therefore it was a hundred percent worth that investment. Now the return on that investment, because I just did it quarter four is not gonna be in last year's, last year's profit loss. Hopefully it'll be in this coming year's profit loss.

So that's just really how I look at different investment opportunities is I ask myself, what is the expense? What is the outcome? If I do the work, will I have, you know, will I earn that plus a penny? Because what you've learned and what you've implemented becomes cumulative and now that you've just risen your business to a whole new level and you're gonna have more income coming in in the future from that as well.

So that's how I look at education. Just wanted to share that, 'cause that came up quite a bit with our Elevate Conversations. Okay, so that is a general overview of action items. Just a couple other things maybe you wanna look at coming new year is double check your insurance and your contracts and copyrights and your backup system. Do you have your stuff getting backed up,

your files, your data, what does that look like? Do you need to update your website? And then the other stuff I wanna talk to you about is more kind of looking back on the year and seeing what has worked well and what we want to take into the next year and what we maybe wanna leave behind and what our goals are. So we did this on our 50 K club call.

If you're not familiar with 50 K Club, this is a section inside the hair of the dog academy. It's included in our academy membership and it is a space specifically for pet photographers that have sold $50,000 or more in their pet photography cumulative business. And we meet once a month and really just share with each other what's working from a marketing pricing really. It's kind of like a a little mini mastermind and I I am just,

it's really fun to do those groups. So if you're an academy member and you've sold $50,000 worth of pet photography, jump into your portal, go to the getting started section, there's a section there in 50 K club, tells you what the rules are or what's the word I'm looking for? I don't know. Anyway, it tells you what the requirements that's the word are and how to apply.

So we'd love to see in there anyway, what we were talking about on our call in December was really just moving forward in 2024. And there is kind of a little four part process I like to take myself through at the end of each year. You can also do this at the end of each month or quarterly, but certainly at a bare minimum,

I recommend doing this at least once a year. And number one is to list out as many wins that you can think of from 2023, big, small business, personal revenue, non-revenue, all of 'em. List them out. I want at least 55 0, that's less than one a week. You can do this. And if you're having trouble with this,

maybe you need to go listen to episode two 13 of this podcast where Heather and I talk about non-revenue victories and how you should be keeping a list of those as well. Okay, so that's number one. List out your number two, where do you wanna go in 2024? What do you want your year to look like? This includes goals, but also non-negotiables in areas in your life which you wanna create more boundaries.

What do you want your life to actually look like? Okay, number three, make a list of action items that you would do if you had 10 times the more confidence in your life or business. What if you knew you couldn't fail? What would you bring into existence? I want you to answer that question. And then I want you to pick one off that list and do it if you're not sure which one,

if you wanna get really brave, ask a friend, say, all right, what should I do here? What, what's what of these things that I've been avoiding doing should I start to do? Okay. And then number four, this is one of my favorite rituals of all time, and that is writing a letter to your future self from the future.

So you start the letter as it is December 31st, 2024, and then you go on and describe that day. You can describe your day as you're waking up. It's in the present tense, you are, what you're doing when you're writing this is you are literally like transporting to your future self of like, this is what happened, this is who I was to make this happen.

These were the results, this is what I did differently this year. And if you really allow yourself to experience this, you can start to get some really great insights. And here's the crazy thing is I want you to write this for December 31st, 2024. I want you to put it in an envelope and just date it. December 31st, 2024, put it in your drawer and then make a note on your calendar to open it to go find it so you don't forget that you wrote it.

And I think you'll be really pleasantly surprised at what has transpired in what's come true off that letter. So there you have it. That's kind of my year end business planning action items and also questions that I ask myself. There is something else, we're gonna be taking a couple weeks off from the podcast for the holidays, but I did want to leave you with some things to listen to because you know you're gonna be out and about for the holidays,

some downtime, maybe you wanna work on your business mindset, listen to some great podcasts. So instead of just making a list of our best of episodes from 2023, I went ahead and created a secret private podcast for you that has everything already curated. So basically you subscribe to it, it's free, and then you'll see a new little podcast show pop up in your podcast feed that just says,

best of business 2023. And it has our, I tried to make it a top 10, but I couldn't. It's our top 11 podcast episodes from this past year. So that way you don't have to go back and like go through 52 episodes and try to find the one you wanted to listen to. The other one that we did is a best of Craft,

which as you know, this podcast tends to be more business focused, but we did have quite a few great craft recommendations or craft conversations over the past year because we have our top five for that. Let me give you a little insight of what those are. Well first, if you wanna jump in and grab it, just go to www.hairofthedogacademy.com/best of. And we have on our craft playlist,

we have DSS LR versus mirrorless conversation with Charlotte Reeves. We have Kaylee Greer sharing the five biggest mistakes she made in pep photography in her business. We have Shelly Paulson with Overcoming Imposter Syndrome. Oh my gosh, all three of those were awesome conversations. Actually. All five of these, this is why they're on the best of list guys. We're talking about why DSLRs might be dead with Robbie from Ymm camera.

And then a great conversation with Emily Abrams about finding your style. So, oh my gosh, I can't even tell you these conversations were so, so, so good. Highly recommend them. Go take a listen, www.hairofthedogacademy.com/bestof and the business side, man, since we have so many business conversations, this was hard to narrow down, but we have content marketing with Tavia Redburn that was from last January.

It is so good. 10 timeless photography business lessons. So we're talking tax deductions, retirement savings with Tiffany Bastion. Really good to listen to again this January or over the time so you could prepare for taxes. We have Joel Dunn for Hacking Your Mind for Success. I'm gonna have Joel back on the podcast this coming year. So I finally met Joel in person.

We both went to PBD Live in just a week or two ago and he's fantastic and we had lots of fun and we were bending spoons together, the whole group of a thousand of us, which was pretty amazing. So I'm gonna have it back on the podcast to talk about spoon bending. That's right. Bending spoons with your mind. Hmm, here you go.

Here's my spoon. All right, so long story short, this is my first spoon been in half. I did this this summer, my mastermind event, and then afterwards you get in your head of like, oh, maybe I was just in a meditative state and like really strong or like didn't think I was as strong as I was and I just like Ben it.

But look at this, this is flipped into like four little loopy loops. Definitely didn't bend that. It was pretty magical and insane. So anyway, we'll be talking about that in the future. Okay, back to the best of list off on a tangent. We have Heather changing my life in 20 minutes and the power of I actually, it's a,

it's a personal one-on-one coaching call that I had with Heather that changed my entire outlook on time, where I'm talking about not everyone needs a 10 case sale. We have three strategies for smoother sales with Corinda Kinsler authentic social media with Deb Lala, soul Aligned Marketing with Lucy Baum. So good. The secret to building your value for your photography and rock your financial goals with Heather where we're talking about your non-revenue victories.

You guys, even if you've listened to all 11 of these before, it would behoove you to maybe listen to some of them again because there is so much gold in this 11 podcast lineup that you can't help but see better results next year if you listen to those and start to implement them. So go take a look, www.hairofthedogacademy.com/best of just one word, best of and enjoy them.

And everybody have a wonderful holiday season and we will see you back here in 2024 for another year of business greatness. All right, everybody, talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to The Hair of the Dog podcast. This was episode number 222. If you wanna check out the show notes for access to any of the resources that we mentioned, simply go to www.hairofthedogacademy.com/

2 2 2. Thanks for listening to this episode of Hair of the Dog Podcast. If you enjoyed this show, please take a minute to leave a review, and while you're there, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss our upcoming episodes. One last thing, if you are ready to dive into more resources, head over to our website at www do of the Dog Academy.

Thanks. Being a part community.