Most product-based business owners think they need something new to grow. A new strategy, a shiny tool, a game-changing idea. But the truth, you don't need more exciting. You need what actually works. Because the businesses that win on profit and cash flow, yeah, they've mastered the fundamentals. And this is exactly what we do inside the Inventory Genius program. We clean up your financials so that you have a clear, accurate picture of your inventory and your real margins. We fix your product mix, making sure every single SKU is actually making you money, not just creating revenue. And we build a profit plan so that you can pay off debt, generate cash, and run your business with confidence. No fluff, no guesswork, no chasing trends, just a proven system that helps product-based businesses win again when it comes to profit and it comes to cash. Because long-term success isn't flashy, it's consistent. Join us in the Inventory Genius program. Let's make your business work for you. Hey friend, welcome to the Inventory Genius podcast, where we work together here to make you an inventory genius. We talk about profit, we talk about cash flow, and we definitely talk about your paycheck. Because at the end of the day, it's all related to your inventory. Let's go. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Inventory Genius Podcast. I'm your host, Sierra, and last week we had part one of a very interesting conversation with a client that recently graduated from the program, Rebecca. And she said something during that podcast episode that sparked the title for the episode and actually the idea for me to create a part two. If you listened to last week's episode, you may have remembered her talking about finding courage, clarity, and confidence through the Inventory Genius program. And that was so interesting when she mentioned that to me. I don't know if you guys know this about the podcast. I've been recording for years now, never missed an episode, and I've never edited an episode either. Um these are raw and real. I record them on Zoom, and whatever we say is whatever we say. So they aren't scripted. I don't edit them. I just want conversation to be real here. So if we're talking about something and something comes up, that's what we chat about. And so I had no idea that she was going to say that phrase clarity or courage, clarity, and confidence. But it really stuck with me so much so that I named that episode part one, courage, clarity, and confidence in your financials. And I decided to elaborate on that idea. I wanted to think about it a little bit more, dig into what she said a little bit more, and then create a part two where we can actually talk about the nuts and bolts of finding courage, courage, clarity, and confidence in your financials. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. This is something that I wish someone had told me a long, long time ago, before I spent way too many years avoiding my numbers, hoping they'd somehow, you know, sort themselves out. And so today we're going to talk about those three C's: courage, clarity, and confidence. And I want to be honest with you, this is not going to be a get your spreadsheets in order episode. This is actually going to be a conversation about what it actually takes emotionally, practically, to transform your relationship with money. All right. Are you ready? Let's go ahead and dig it. So I've broken this episode into three parts. And I actually have a client win that I'm going to share with you, a client story. As we move through each of these parts, I have a client story to attach because as I was thinking about these three C's, I was thinking so much about the different people that have moved through the Inventory Genius program over the years. There's been hundreds now. Thousands, if you count all of the people who have joined challenges and boot camps and workshops, who have listened to the podscasts and downloaded freebies, um, but hundreds that I've had the chance to get to know over the last few years. And so I have some interesting stories that I want to tie back to each of these three C's. But let's dive in and talk first about courage. Here's the thing that nobody talks about enough. And Rebecca brought this up in last week's episode. Courage has to come before anything else. Not clarity and not confidence, not a better budgeting app or a new financial advisor or a better coach. Courage has to come first. And courage can only be found inside yourself. You can't buy it, you can't sign up for it, it's not an app on your phone. It's a decision that you make. And I've been thinking a lot about this. For most of us, looking at our finances honestly is one of the hardest things that we're ever going to do. It is a math problem, but it's an emotional math problem for most of us. There's so much wrapped up in our money, our sense of worth, our fear of judgment, maybe shame about what we've done in the past, our anxiety or stress or worry about the future. And so we tend to avoid it, this conversation about money. We don't open the bank statements. We guess at our numbers instead of knowing them. We tell ourselves we'll deal with it when it things calm down, which here's the truth. They never ever calm down. They just get worse if we don't look at these things. So let me ask you something. What would it take you for what would it take you to just look for you to have that ounce of courage to just take that first step? Not to fix things. You don't need the courage to fix it all. You don't need the understanding to solve everything. You just need to take a little peek, a little sneak peek to get the ball rolling. Courage in your finances doesn't mean having it all figured out. Courage means taking that first step when you cannot see the whole staircase. It means opening the account, even if your stomach completely drops out. It means booking the appointment, starting the conversation, writing down the number, paying for that first month. That's what courage means. Even when every part of you wants to close the laptop, work on something fun in Canva, or go out on the sales floor. The first act, the decision to face it, that's where everything begins. And I want you to think about a moment when you did something that scared you and it turned out okay. Maybe it was a hard conversation you had to have with an employee. Maybe it was a leap in a former career, right? Where you had to say no to one thing or you had to say yes to a promotion. Maybe it was a healthcare scare that you finally got checked out. And remember how terrifying it was before you did the action or took that step, but how different the after felt once you've taken that step. I think about this a lot with hard conversations with people. We think about them and think about them and we go to every worst possible case scenario, right? And then when we finally have the conversation, it is truly hard. But most often it ends up much better than we ever dreamt about. That's what courage looks like. It means saying that you're gonna do what you need to do even before you know the outcome. So here's a client story that I want to attach to the thought of courage. Um, and in these three client stories today, I'm going to change the names of these people so that we can hold them in confidence. But these are real clients that I've worked with. So this gal, we're gonna call her Mary Jane. Mary Jane came to me um after a decade of running what most would feel was a very financially successful business. In fact, she had many years where she felt really financially successful. And she had come to a place where the numbers just weren't mathing anymore. It was negative on the bottom line. Inventory was an absolute disaster. She had over a million dollars in debt. That's right, over a million dollars in debt. She had a massive payroll. And she took the step of courage to set up a consult call with me. So when we got on the call, I asked her about her business. I always start by asking people to tell me about their business. I want to learn about your business. Tell me about how you add into it, tell me about the product, and then tell me what's feeling really financially insecure, what's just not working out. And so she started to dive into all of the things that just weren't adding up anymore. And for her, it took a lot of courage to get on the phone with me because she had had it all together in air quotes for many years, right? There were things that she hadn't done properly, and we had to set those things up, budgets and profit plans, so that we could start to do some cleanup work. But she had been really successful and she loved her business. And so to get on the phone with someone and say, you know what, I'm gonna be honest, this isn't working for me anymore. I'm scared about what could happen if I don't turn the ship around. That took a lot of courage. And because she had the courageous, um, took that courageous action of getting on the phone with me, I was able to lay out for her a plan. We worked together for over a year, we cleaned up a lot of debt, we restructured things, and she's doing really, really well. But that courage had to come first. Your finances are the same. Courage isn't rewarded with instant answers, but it is rewarded with momentum. And what does that mean? That means when you take that courageous step, you're not gonna get an instant relief, you're not gonna get the answer right away, right? You're the problem's not gonna be solved instantaneously, but momentum will start. And momentum, you guys, momentum is everything. So if you're at the very beginning of this journey, I want to say to you, you don't need to be ready, you have to be willing. That's enough. That's a whole first step. And once you take that courageous step, clarity is going to follow. So let's talk about clarity, that second C. Here's where it gets really interesting because clarity doesn't show up before you do the work, it comes through the work. Let me repeat that. Clarity does not show up before you do the work. Clarity comes through the work. So if you sit and try to figure this out on your own, things are not going to become clearer for you. Clarity is going to come when you start doing the right work. And we know what that right work is for you and your business. I see this all the time. Someone finally decides to face their finances, they're completely terrified. They sit down, they start going through the numbers, and at first it's a lot. It might even feel worse than it did before. It feels better. All these things you didn't know, or you half knew, or hoping weren't actually true, it's all right in front of you. And that's not a great feeling. But then, then something shifts. You start to see patterns. You notice where money actually goes every month. You find expenses that you forgot about. You see the gap between what you thought you were spending and what you were actually spending. And with each new understanding, the fog starts to lift just a little bit more. Let's talk about a client's story. This client, I'm actually going to share her real name because I recorded a podcast with her um several months ago. You can go back and listen to it, and you'll have more context to this story. Her name is Sarah. So Sarah came to me with a profitable business. In fact, it was great, like it was successful and it was growing. So from the outside looking in and the inside looking out, we were doing okay. But Sarah wasn't satisfied. She was like, I'm putting so much time and energy, resources, thought, momentum behind this business. And it's just not really giving me what I truly want. And so I want to decide: should I sell it or should I keep it? And I have no clarity around that decision because I don't understand what the numbers say. And so we dug in and we cleaned things up. Again, Sarah was very courageous, right? Because she could have said, I can't go and ask for help. It looks like, and in fact, I do have a lot of my stuff together. Like this is a successful business. This is going to be scary. What if I'm going to find out that the business actually isn't worth what I thought it was worth? All the what-ifs, right? That could have deterred her. But she had the courage to say, I want better for myself and my business. So I'm going to take this first step. And with that first step, brought momentum, which started to produce clarity. And we heard I talk about this in the podcast that I recorded with her. So much clarity, in fact, that she was able to clean even more up, become even more profitable, has more money in the bank than she ever did before, and decided, you know what? I'm not going to sell the business. Now that I know what's going on, this business is actually worth something to me. I'm going to restructure it and I'm going to really make it make sense for my lifestyle and what I want. Clarity is cumulative. It doesn't arrive all at once. So you're not going to open up your inventory genius operating system, dashboard, and wow, clear, clear as day. Here are all the things I should have done differently. Here's my next steps. No, it doesn't arrive all at once, but it builds layer by layer. Every time you show up and do the work, more clarity. Every time you show up and do the work, even more clarity. The next time you show up and do the work, even more clarity. Think of it like a hiking, um, think of it like hiking a trail in the morning. When you start, there might be mist everywhere, right? You can only see a few feet ahead, but you keep walking. And slowly as you go, the sun comes out and the mist starts to burn off. The landscape reveals itself and you realize it was there the whole time. You just couldn't see it yet. You couldn't see it until you had the courage to take the first step and continue to move forward. And that's what financial clarity feels like. You're not creating the picture, you're uncovering the picture. You all have your own puzzle. You all have your puzzle box and you all have the exact right amount of pieces inside that box. You just need to be able to prop up that cover to see what you're actually building and creating, to sort those pieces out so that you can have clarity with building the structure around the business that you want to build. And here's what I love about this phase every small act of clarity compounds. This is the best phase. Encourage clarity and confidence. I love the clarity phase because it all compounds. Once you know your monthly expenses, you can start to see where your income is and how it covers them. Once you see that, you can identify a gap. You can see what margin can do for you. Once you know the gap and once you see where margin plays a part in your business, you can make a plan. And each piece of understanding unlocks the next piece. But it requires you to keep showing up. Clarity is not a one-time event, it's a practice. And that's why the Inventory Genius operating system is so successful for product-based businesses because it creates in a business a practice and a rhythm. It requires you to continue to show up and reveal more and more clarity about your numbers. Some practical ways that clarity might start to come. Tracking your spending, even for 30 days without judging it, you're just watching it. Now you have clarity. What am I doing? Getting your accounts all in one place so you can see the full picture. What do I really have going on? Knowing which numbers to focus on, what comes in, what goes out, what you owe, what you own provides clarity. Every single one of these actions and steps creates clarity. And the more clarity you have, the more power you have because you can't make good decisions off of what you cannot see. Which brings us to confidence. The outcome starts to accelerate. And this is where it gets super exciting because once clarity builds, something remarkable happens, and I see it in every client. It's a transformation that happens. Sometimes it's a month in, sometimes it's six months in, sometimes it's after a year, sometimes it's after a week. Clarity happens, and then I see confidence. It starts to follow. Not the fake it till you make it kind of confidence. The real kind, the kind that comes from you actually knowing your numbers, from understanding your situation, from having made decisions that started to work in your favor, even when other times they did not, and you just survived. Now you're able to make decisions that, oh my goodness, this actually worked. I have a little more money in my bank account than I used to. I was able to have that hard conversation. I paid off that amount of debt. Confidence isn't something that you can just sum it, it's something that you earn through the evidence of your actions. And every act of clarity gives you more evidence that you can do this. And the more evidence you have, the more confident you become. That's the way that it works. That you can handle this, that you're someone who can face their finances, and instead of you're not someone that runs from them. And here's a thing that I found most powerful about the whole kind of arc of confidence, clarity, excuse me, courage, um, clarity, and confidence. The outcomes start to accelerate as you move through this arc. So then you have courage to do the next hard thing, which brings more clarity, which gives you another confidence boost, which then encourages you to do the next hard thing and gives you the courage to do it. And then you have a bit more clarity, which allows you to take the next right step. Confidence changes how you act and how you think about yourself. I want you to think about this client. We're gonna call her Susie. When Susie came to me, she had a subscription box, everything was running from her home, and it was feeling really constricting, really suffocating. It just wasn't bringing her joy anymore. And so her courage was again to take the right step and to look at the numbers, which brought her clarity. And because she had clarity, she was able to take a confident step of moving her products outside of her home into a 3PL. Now you might say, like, okay, where's the confidence in that? This was a big decision. She was going to be outsourcing her inventory subscription boxes and putting that whole part of the business into the hands of a stranger. So where in the past, yes, she hated having her guest room full of inventory, but she controlled it. She knew everybody got their boxes on time. She knew that they were packed with love, right? She was now going to outsource that to someone else, but she knew she had to take that next next step. And she had the clarity around that financial decision because she had been doing the work, which then gave her the confidence that this was the next right step, and indeed a needed step in order for her to grow. She ended up moving all of her product to a 3PL, which allowed her to focus on visioneering what she really wanted for her brand. It has since exploded. She's more than doubled her subscribers, she's streamlined her product, and she's very profitable. When you're confident in your finances, you negotiate differently. You price her services differently, you make investment decisions differently, you stop leaving money on the table because you know exactly why you need the money and where you're going to put it and why. You stop saying yes to things that don't serve you because you start to understand the real cost. You start building the future you actually want instead of just managing the one in front of you. Competent people take better financial action, and better financial action creates better financial outcomes. And better outcomes builds even more confidence, and it goes round and round and round. I've watched this happen with people over and over. Someone who is terrified to look at their numbers because someone becomes someone who reviews them weekly without fear and in fact cannot wait till money Mondays. Someone who didn't know their profit margin becomes someone who makes a strategic decision based on profitability alone. Someone who felt out of control becomes someone who feels genuinely empowered about their financial future. It's real. That transformation is real. So let's bring this all together because I want to leave you with a clear picture of this journey. Courage is the ignition. It doesn't require certainty, it doesn't require a perfect moment. It requires you to decide today that you're willing to look and you're willing to work. That's all it requires. That you're willing to take one step, even if it's a small one. Clarity is the reward of doing the work. It doesn't arrive fully formed, it starts to accumulate. And every time you open the statement, read the report, ask the question, sit down with your numbers, you get just a little more of that clarity nugget. It builds on itself like compounding interest. Confidence is what clarity creates. It's not something that you have to manufacture. And when you truly know your numbers, when you understand your financial picture, confidence is the natural result. It changes how you show up, how you decide, how you act. And ultimately, it will completely change you as a person. The outcomes you want, the stability, the growth, the financial freedom, they don't come before confidence. They come because of it. And confidence doesn't come before clarity. And clarity does not come before courage. So wherever you're at on this journey, whether you've opened your account statements lately, whether you've been thinking about joining the program, whether you're in the middle of just paying off a bunch of debt or wondering if this is even all worth it, I want you to know this. Wherever you're at, you're capable. The path from where you are to where you want to be is one step at a time. And the first step is always, always the hardest. But you can take it. You're a business owner, you're strong, you're resilient. That's why you have a business. I believe in you. And if you don't have belief in yourself, I want you to borrow my belief for a little while because I've seen this happen over and over again. So I can believe it for you. Take that courageous step. I'm so excited that you tuned in today. Thank you for joining me. I hope this was helpful. Pass it on if it was, and I'll see you all next week. Bye for now. Hey there, friend. It's time for you to start winning at business again. I want you creating more profit and keeping more cash every single week in your business. Head on over to Sierrastockland.com, click on the programs tab, and you're going to see multiple ways that we can work together. Whether you're doing $50,000 a year or $50 million a year in top line revenue, there is a place for you. The Inventory Genius Framework has helped hundreds and thousands of product-based business owners just like you create more profit and keep more cash in their business. I want you to win. I want you to start taking a consistent paycheck, paying off that debt, and just feeling confident and comfortable when it comes to your numbers. You can do this. I believe in you and I'm here to help. Head on over to CRStockland.com or click on the link in the bio. Figure out where you might best fit. We are here to help you. Let's create more profit and keep more cash starting today.