Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
Why Mastering Your Money Mindset Is So Essential To Building A Sustainable Business with Sophia Sunwoo
Show Notes
Today’s guest is Sophia Sunwoo. Sophie is the founder of Ascent Strategy, where she helps female founders ranging from artisans to health coaches get their companies off the ground. Sophia is a 3x startup founder — she sold her first company when she was 22, helping scale the brand to 250 retailers worldwide and attract celebrity clientele before her exit. Sophia’s second business helped bring clean water to over 76,000 people in India and Cameroon has been recognized by Forbes, African Business Review, and ELLE Magazine.
Sophia is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, a Fred Alger Finance Award winner, named one of the world’s 100 most inspiring women by Salt Magazine and Diageo, and is a Forbes 30U30 All-Star Alumni.
Be Conscientious About Your Cash Flow
Cash flow is so important, and a lot of that is to do with our mindset.
It’s one of those things that we forget to address, as business owners to be obsessed so much over the business model and numbers, and we get into the logical side of our brain, but we forget about the mindset aspect and the fact that, that can actually make or break you as well when it comes to bringing in sales for your business.
We can talk ourselves out sales if our mindset is not in the right place. They wouldn’t want to deal with me. My business is too expensive. They can’t afford it, and all of those negative spirals and all of a sudden you don’t have a business.
When it comes to things like pricing and discounting and just people talking you down on your prices, especially when it’s face-to-face if someone is telling you, “Oh, can you actually go down on this price?” It’s really hard to say no a lot of the times and having that fortitude as an entrepreneur to understand where your boundaries are when it comes to that stuff. That is absolutely a muscle, and it takes a lot of practice, and it’s one of those things where you really have to commit to being that entrepreneur that says no or being that entrepreneur that says, “You know, I’m sorry that I can’t meet you at that negotiation price.” Just letting that sale pass by and understanding that, that customer is not your customer. Because a sale that is earned through discount and bargaining is not a sale you’ll ever see again, it’s usually a one-hit wonder.
Be Careful With Discounting
Discounting is a race to the bottom.
If you want a sustainable business, a race to the bottom is never going to get you there. And also, people just want to ask, it’s always a thing of saving a couple of dollars, a couple of bucks. If you ask if there’s a discount, and you don’t get it, most often people will move on and go. That’s fine, no problems. But if they don’t ask, then they don’t feel like they’ve done their due diligence either. Being strong and standing up to them and say, “No, this is my price.”
It also then builds respect, because if you’ll drop at 5%, maybe I should have asked for 10%. If you drop at 10%, maybe I should have asked the 15%.
It’s just a big race to the bottom.
It’s one of those things where entrepreneurs forget that your ideal customers are actually really, really happy to pay your price. It’s usually the people that don’t quite understand the value of what you’re creating or you’re selling that tend to bargain on price.
For example, you will never see someone who truly values the resort experience, try talk down someone’s resort price or you’ll never see someone who buys a Harley-Davidson try to get a discount on a Harley-Davidson, because they understand the value.
That’s something to always try to keep in mind is, you know what, my actual customers would have never asked me to give them a discount. That really helps to just stay confident and stand your ground with that.
Take An Abundance Mindset
There’s major difference as far as an entrepreneur who really wants to take the business into a serious direction versus someone who’s just doing it as a side hustle. There’s also a huge difference when an entrepreneur has a scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset, where, for example, if an entrepreneur has a scarcity mindset, they’re constantly thinking about this reality where the sale that I get today is the only sale I’ll ever make. They don’t realize that tomorrow and the next week there’s actually more sales coming in through the door, and that there’s plenty of opportunity for you to make money.
The entrepreneurs that have this scarcity mindset are adopting this short-term thinking of, “Oh, I don’t know if I’m going to make another sale, so I have to take this discounted rate or whatever it is, because I need to pay my rent this month.”
Rather than thinking, “Wait a minute, I actually want to build a sustainable business that is going to be around for the long term and that can run by itself to the point where I’m not constantly pushing all the time.”
- What does that entrepreneur do?
- What kind of actions do they take?
Taking this more abundance mindset of thinking long-term and creating the systems and making the decisions for those long-term moves rather than looking for quick sales, trying to give away those discounts, because you truly believe that sales are scarce, that there’s not going to be any more customers down the line.
