Ep 297: Budgeting For (New) Small Businesses

Thinking about starting a new business or startup? Maybe it's a cafe, wellness, personal services, or items for sale. We'll talk about how to create a budgeting spreadsheet for what you spend as well as estimating how much you'll need to make.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Welcome, low ego action heroes and phoenixes. I'm Debbie Levitt from Delta CX, and today is episode 297, budgeting for new small businesses. Um, it's mid-May 2026, and I'm here to talk to you today about budgeting. Um, as I've been talking with more and more people who are thinking about starting their own business, I'm learning that there's so many things that people who've never done that before just don't know about. And that makes sense. If you have never started your own uh startup or small business, there's a lot you don't know. And sometimes, even if you've read a book or watched a video, there's a lot you don't know. Um, and of course, I can't tell you everything, but I want to focus on budgeting. Sorry about the dog barking in the background. I want to focus right now on budgeting because I think budgeting is something that people sometimes think that they can do later. Like, oh, let me just get my business off the ground and then I'll look at costs or budgets or uh finances. And I am here to say, do not delay. Make sure that you are looking at your finances really early. And in fact, usually when I have a business idea, the first thing I do is I make a budgeting spreadsheet. Because if the numbers don't work, the business might not work, it might not be viable, and it won't make sense for you to put a lot of time, effort, money, and other things into a business that where the math doesn't make sense. So, as an example uh today, I'm going to be sharing with you a spreadsheet that I made to look at the costs of running what here in Europe we call a campground, uh, what America might call an RV park. Um, either way, it doesn't matter because the campground doesn't exist. So, for anybody who thinks I'm trying to pitch you on coming to my campground, I'm not. It doesn't exist. It was a business idea that I had that I'm still excited about, but I have not been able to get off the ground. So I would love to say come to my campground, but once again, it doesn't exist. So it is uh a sales pitch for nothing. So um the main things you want to think about when you are creating a budget are going to be your one-time expenses to start the business. So things you have to pay for up front just to get the business going, and then your ongoing expenses, and these are going to fall into different categories. Some of these, and I don't mean categories as in like the type of expense it is. Oh, I forgot my backlight. I mean, I mean more like um, for example, are they monthly and are or are they annually? So are you paying them once a year or do you pay them frequently? And also are what about usage-based expenses? For example, electricity. If you have a shop or campground and it's very busy and you have a lot of customers, you're gonna use more electricity, but hopefully your spreadsheet and your numbers are set up to pay for that higher usage. So there are going to be some things where you're going to have to look at them from the perspective of what they uh cost based on usage, knowing that if you have fewer customers or fewer utilization of your products and services, you'll have lower expenses for these non-fixed costs, but then you have fixed costs. So, for example, my insurance costs me the same every year, whether or not I've I'm I have a lot of customers or I have no customers. So these are all the things that I want you to think about when you are making your spreadsheet. And in the Life After Tech book, we did have a link to a blank spreadsheet uh with some categories on it to get you thinking. But again, use any spreadsheet from anywhere. Ask your favorite AI or LLM to help you out. Ask your friends, ask your accountant. You don't have to do this alone. You can also join our free Discord community. Um, there we certainly have channels there related to work, and you can certainly uh post there if you feel like you need some help. But I am going to uh share with you uh my spreadsheet for my campground, show you how I put it together and show you where it looks like this business has potential and where it looks like this business doesn't have potential. And right now the campground doesn't exist more because of land zoning and other problems than my spreadsheet. But the spreadsheet brings problems to the surface as well, and that's why I want to share it with you as an example. So let's move over to the spreadsheet, and I will um check it in my window. So, first of all, I have a place in my spreadsheet where I'm looking at all of my expenses that are likely to be one-time expenses, startup expenses, things I might pay for once and never again, or something I might pay for once and maybe again way down the road, like maybe I get more picnic tables down the road, or maybe I need a new fire extinguisher down the road. But in general, um, these are a look at some of the initial costs of setting up a campground or RV park. So, for example, excavation, we would have to make land level and we would have to build out spaces for people to have tents or or campers. Now, again, you might be thinking of a differ different business, but if you are thinking of a business with a physical location, like a cafe or a shop of some sort, there are lots of these things on my list that will end up on your list, whether or not you've thought of them. Maybe you don't have excavation, maybe you have uh furniture and decor and things like that, maybe you have appliances, uh, maybe you have desks, maybe you want to make a co-working space, you need desks, you need uh routers. So remember that no matter what type of business you have, you have initial expenses just to get it off the ground. If you're a service business, you're an accountant, you're a lawyer, you're a dog walker, you're a freelancer, you're a yoga instructor, you also have initial expenses as well, but they won't be some of these physical things, but you will still have costs related to starting uh some sort of business. You will probably pay for your first year of insurance, though that will end up being annual. You might need help from professionals, you might need an accountant or a lawyer to help you create that business. That might be a one-time expense for the creation of the business, and those might be people you need again in the future. So, taking a look at uh some of the things that were on my list for startup expenses, which might, you know, give you some ideas for your expenses. Security. So, again, if you have a physical location, how is it going to be secure? Do you need security cameras? Do you need a gate? Do you need a special thing that comes down over your door at night? What uh what else will you need related to safety and security? What about signs? You're going to put up a sign or an awning. Obviously, if you're a service business and you don't have an office, you might not have signs. But again, think about all of these. Uh, some of these are certainly unique to campgrounds, like where will people dump their dirty water? But if you are creating a small hotel, or if you are creating something, maybe you do have to worry about where people dump dirty water. I mean, who knows, right? So uh let's see. We've also got electricity, and for me, that had a startup cost as well as ongoing costs because there are startup costs related to even wiring things and setting stuff up. Sometimes, like let's say you want to start a food truck, but you get a truck that was never built for food. Now you have to rewire things. That's going to cost you some money. That's a first-time expense. Um, do you need plates and dishes? Do you need sinks? Do you need toilets? Do you need tables? Do you need garbage cans? Um do you need um let's see, some of this is fire safety. Do you need internet service? Um, here I've got dog poop bags. You may or may not need dog poop bags. What about permits and and authorizations? If you are building something, you probably need a permit. If you are serving food or alcohol or drinks, you probably need a permit. If you are delivering a certain type of service, you might need a license or permit or accreditation. All of these go into your costs. If you if you have Wi-Fi, you need a router, that goes into your costs. Um, are you putting solar panels on something? So in the end, um I thought it would cost me 32,000 euros roughly to start this up. I had some things that I thought might offset this, but it turned out those those didn't exist. And then even later, as I did more research, I found that that 32,000 probably isn't enough. There are other things that I would have had to add to this based on some things I found out. For example, okay, what happens with that dirty water, with the used water, or when people flush a toilet, where does that water go? If you have a sewer system, great, you hook up to that. If you don't, do you need a septic tank? Do you need some other water storage or water purification? So I want to remind everybody not to go make a campground because it may not even make sense for you, of course, but to start to think about all of the things that people will experience in your business and what you will need to set up for them for them to experience that. So, for example, if you're offering a service where you're going to have video calls, which video call service are you going to use? Why choose one over another? Check their privacy, check their AI terms and conditions. And so no matter what business you create, you're going to be spending money both on these initial startup costs, the costs of creating the business, the costs of making business cards, the costs of buying a domain name, setting up a website. Every single business has one-time startup costs. And then there are those recurring costs. For example, every month you have to pay for or year you pay for website hosting. You pay for your domain name. Every year you might pay a lawyer for something. You might pay your accountant to do your taxes. So don't forget that there are all of these costs, and you can also remember some of them when you think about what your customers will be doing. Oh, my customers will be eating food. Okay, I need plates, spoons, dishwashers. I need, you know, so this is going to be different for every business. I can't give you a list of exactly what your exact business will need because every business is going to be different. And you might have some things that you do differently so that you can differentiate yourself. But I'm trying to remind people to think about every, every, every small thing that you could be paying for in a one-time cost or in an ongoing cost. Here's some of the things that I thought would be ongoing costs here in this section of the spreadsheet. These are some things that I thought would be ongoing costs for my uh potential business. So I thought that I would have an online booking system. And rather than build one, I thought about using one. Hashtag not sponsored. I didn't do business with them. I don't know if they're any good or not. It was just one that I'd looked up, and that's what it would have cost me per year to have an online campground booking service. Uh, what would I pay for in water? Now remember, both water and electricity are not fixed costs. Those are going to be variable costs based on uh how much business I'm doing. If I don't have a lot of campers, then I'm not using a lot of water or electricity. My bills will be lower, but then I don't have people who will help me pay for them, my customers. If I do, if I got very busy and I had a lot of customers, I am going to be using a lot more water and electricity. And hopefully my pricing is set up so that that's paid for. So that's what we're going to talk about a little bit later today is how to take all of this information and work it into your pricing so you can make sure that your pricing pays for your expenses and more so that you can make money. Uh, what about your internet? I thought about getting Starlink, even though I personally don't totally love Starlink for various reasons, but uh in a campground in the middle of nowhere, it could be a good choice. Uh, garbage pickup is probably going to be a fixed expense no matter how many campers come to my site. Um, other electricity per year was just an estimate that I had because I didn't know what it would cost to run uh showers and water heaters and pumps of different sorts, and I was gonna have to look into that more, so I just put a block number there uh as a placeholder. I'm gonna have property taxes. If you have property, you have property taxes. Um, and if you don't have property, you don't have property taxes. But if you're in a food truck, you have maintenance of the food truck. You have to pay to have a license plate. You have to, there's still going to be ongoing expenses for uh every type of business. And of course, if you're watching this live and you're thinking about starting different types of businesses, I would love to hear more about what you are thinking of starting and if you have any questions so that I can help you live as we are talking here. Um, some of you will be listening uh to this later, uh, both on YouTube, Delta CX Hive, and on our podcast. We now issue these on the podcast multiverse. So uh you might be listening to those there. I'm just gonna open up Twitch and just double check. Okay, got it. Oh, we have 200 followers now on Twitch. Super. Don't forget to join us on Twitch. So uh what else? Um, professional services, accountants, lawyers. Um, what about insurance? Yes, you whatever you're doing, you need insurance. I can't think of a single business out there that shouldn't have insurance. Uh, I have a service-based business now, not this campground, and I have insurance, and it has certainly saved my butt last year. So good to have insurance. Remember that if you run a business where you receive payments, in many cases you lose money when you receive payments. There are bank fees, there are credit card fees, there are other fees that you might uh lose in the course of just getting paid. Not everybody's going to hand you cash. And so you want to make sure that you uh have done some research and you know what it will cost you between bank fees or payment service systems, also called point of sale systems, POS, between those and the commissions and other fees that they take. Some take monthly fees whether or not you sell anything. Some only get paid when you get paid. So you want to take a look at that and make sure that you are um uh taking those numbers into account, but those are going to be some of those variable expenses where the amount of credit card fees you pay is going to be related to the amount of credit cards you're charging, which is related to how many customers you have and how much business you're doing. So um you can see how right now I'm using a number times 3% in my calculation, but I might find that oh, my credit card company actually charges me 4% or 2.7 or whatever it is. So I just used 3% there as a fairly standard number. But if you're making a spreadsheet, you will want to change that number. And I'll show you later what H17 says and why this is kind of why this spreadsheet is a living document that is calculating lots of things. Um, I thought about make doing a little bit of advertising, 250 euros a year, probably not enough for a new business. A new business might have to do a lot more marketing and advertising that costs money because you don't have that visibility and awareness yet. And when we talk about funnels and we talk about uh finding new leads or finding new customers, very often we're talking about visibility and awareness being that first step. How do people even know that you exist? And very often we've got to invest money in that from people who run ads to people who create partnerships to people who pay influencers. Whatever you're doing, it costs money and it goes in your budget. Um, I thought I might need a septic pump company to come and pump the septic tank, and I thought about hiring uh a cleaning person, and then I would also have to pay for a security system, and I hadn't priced that out yet, so that was zero. But obviously, a security system does cost something. You have the one-time fees of buying um, at the very least, cameras and maybe um door and window sensors and other things, and then you might have a monthly fee for running that system or or the recording uh to the cloud and things like that. So just a reminder that people with physical spaces have so many more expenses than people who work from home or do service-based businesses. But again, even a business that is a service-based, uh, a service like say you do yoga classes, well, you've got to hold those somewhere. You might be renting space somewhere or sharing space somewhere. If you're a massage therapist, you need a table, you need a license, you need oils or creams, you need music. You know, so there's so many things that are so easy to forget when we're trying to create a budget and we don't think about all of the one-time expenses to start the business or these ongoing monthly or annual expenses. Now, once you can get a sense of what your monthly and annual expenses are, so here I've kind of looked at them uh annually. So I've taken anything that's monthly and I've just turned it into annual so that I could say, okay, this is what it costs per year to run my business. I have all of these expenses, I have the one-time startup costs and I have the ongoing costs. And in order for me to make money, I've got to eventually pay back all of the one-time startup costs, and I've got to keep my head above water when it comes to bringing in money versus the money that's going to keep flowing out, both the fixed expenses that go out, whether you have business or not, and the variable expenses that adjust as you as you see how much business you have. So, so then what? The rest of my spreadsheet takes a look at okay, if this is a campground, a campground has seasons. Depending upon what you're doing, you might also have seasons. Bookkeepers and accountants are so busy at the beginning of the year for America because that's when people file taxes. And then there things are quieter for them after that. And so you might, depending upon what you're doing, you might be able to charge seasonally or you might have the same price year round. That's up to you. But that's something you can play with in your spreadsheet. Another example, I used to work many, many years ago when I was just out of college in a recording studio. And the recording studio charged more for weekends than it did for weekdays because the studio was more likely to be booked on weekends by people who worked during the week and then wanted to make music on the weekend, and so that was more expensive. Because that was more prime time than the weekday booking. So again, think about whether you have seasons or you have prime time where you want to charge differently for your time or your services or a product or whatever it might be. So here I imagined that I could split the year into three different seasons: a low season, which is really the winter where I am, where we don't get a lot of campers. You're not really gonna see people in tents. We don't get a lot of the motorcycle and bicycle tourism that we get in nicer weather. And so I have to imagine that I might have very little business this time of year. And when I make these spreadsheets, I tend to like to imagine I call them bad case scenarios. It's not going to be the worst case scenario because the worst case scenario is you have no business, nobody comes, you never get a client. That's really the worst case scenario. But a bad case scenario is we get one client, we get a couple. So here I'm imagining that I have four different types of campground spaces that I can offer people. They're priced differently because they have different sizes and features. And so I'm imagining, for example, that they have these different prices. The there's a nine euros a night, 11 euros a night, 13 euros a night, and 35 euros a night. And this low season says, what if I only sold one medium spot per night? That's it. One. What would my income look like if I only add one? And then what I added to this, and I know it's not labeled, so it's a little hard to tell, but then what I added was what would it cost if that one person used a certain amount of water uh per night? And what would it cost if that person used a certain amount of electricity per night? Because remember, my bills are gonna change based on usage, and I have to make sure that I'm charging people enough to not lose money on uh on these things. And the same is gonna go for you. If you run a cafe and somebody wants extra milk or an extra flavor shot, you can't just give that away for free. You're gonna have to charge something for it, but you have to figure out what the bottle of flavored syrup costs you, how many shots is it, how much money you do wanna make on that. It's all a math game. And when you put it into a spreadsheet like this, you really can turn it into a math game because you can start to make small changes here and there, and you can see how does this affect my numbers. What we'll do is I'm gonna walk through the spreadsheet and then I'm gonna start changing the numbers, and I'm gonna show you how the spreadsheet changes so that you can think about building something similar, either yourself or with the help of AI or an LLM, like Claude for Excel or something like that, or Gemini in a Google Sheet. So I'm imagining super bad case scenario for 150 nights of the year, I have one customer per night. Pretty bad case scenario, but hey, can I still make money if that happens? Then I imagine we have kind of a mid-season for 94 nights a year. What if I had five customers per night? One on a small spot, two on a middle, and two on a large. And because it's the mid-season, I can charge a little bit more per night because now there's more demand, the weather is better, people are coming to where I live, and of course they're going to be using water and electricity. So I have to put that. This is my estimated uh income based on what I might charge them. And then I've got the high season for 121 nights a year. It's extremely popular to come here in campers, in RVs, in vans, in uh with motorcycles with tents and bicycles with tents. Uh I but hey, I'm trying to do bad case scenario. What if I still only had five customers per night? And you might say, Deb, I think that's even too high. What if you only got three customers per night? That's fine. We can mess with the spreadsheet in a moment. I'm just going to show you a few more things that I've put into the spreadsheet so that you can think about this for your own business. So, for say, for example, you are a consultant or a freelancer or a coach and you bill by the hour or by the appointment or by the project. You know what your expenses are. You know what it costs to run your website, pay for your domain name, pay for your electricity. Your computer needs electricity. Did you have to buy a new computer? Did you have to license any software? These are all expenses of the business. And now you want to make sure you're making enough money to pay for that and more. Um, and that's, and again, we also talk in the Life After Tech book about the idea of also making a personal budget. Because especially if you are a small business or a startup or an entrepreneur, you've got to cover not just the expenses of your business, but you're gonna have to cover the expenses of your personal life. Things like rent or mortgage, putting gas in the car, paying for health care or things like that. You know, just paying for life. And you have to make sure that money is coming in. So you might be comparing a business spreadsheet to also a personal spreadsheet to see what kind of money you need to bring in to cover your personal expenses. Notice on this spreadsheet, I haven't even put anything personal on here. I haven't put haircuts, I haven't put groceries. I'm just talking about what it would take to run this business, not even to pay myself or pay for personal expenses. So that's why you might end up making two spreadsheets or one very complicated spreadsheet, and you're gonna have to take a look at both of them to try to make more sense of your financial world. So, a couple of other things that I put on the side here are just a high estimate of how many kilowatts per day do I think a customer could use? This is probably on the high end. I think when we go out in our camper, we use four to six. So I put eight just to imagine there's a high utilization. What would it cost me for the from the electric company to pay for electricity? What would it cost me to pay my water company for water? So these this is what I pay, and then I would have to decide on a markup for the customers. So uh I might say how much water I think people are going to use. Um, do I want to charge a per person fee? So another thing to know as you are doing this, definitely do some competitive analysis. Do some research, take a look at other similar businesses and how they charge. We we have a camper and we stay in campgrounds, so we know how they charge us. We know that they generally charge us a per person per night fee. They charge a fee for the space that we take, different sizes or different features. They bill us for electricity. Some we they usually don't bill us for water, but that's got to be in the price somewhere. They're not gonna lose money on water. They're gonna make sure they're taking my water usage into consideration and what they pay for water, and they're gonna make sure they don't lose money on it, even if they're not charging me extra for it. So you also have to think about what is built into your price and what do you charge extra for? Do you have add-on services or add-on products or add-on features? These are all things that you have to decide, but your spreadsheet should help you. So now let's take a look at some of my numbers. Based on these bad case scenario numbers, I would bring in 27,600 euros per year. And that may sound like, gee, that's not too bad, Deb. Maybe you could live on that in a low cost of living place like where you live. Yes, except that has to then pay all of these expenses. Plus, I would hope to be paying back the initial startup costs, and I would love to pay myself, but that's not here. So we're just taking a look at this number, $27,600. And if we compare that to this, these numbers where I've got the uh annual expenses that I expect to have to pay, I'm losing money. I'm not gonna make money. If I have only one customer per night in the slow season and five customers per night in these other two seasons, I'm losing money. Now, what are my options? Sure, you could imagine that you have more business than that, but that might be setting you up for disappointment because it always takes, well, it almost always takes time for a new business to get off the ground. I'm not gonna open my doors and put up a sign and immediately be sold out every night. It could happen, but it's very unlikely. So I could say, oh, imagine if I had five medium pitches per night. Oh wow, look at this. Now I'm really making some money. Yes, but also, are you just fooling yourself? Because I know that where I live, people come here during the winter, all the campgrounds are closed. They don't even have choices. So hypothetically, I could be a great choice. I could be the only choice. But what am I up against? I'm up against parking for free in a parking lot somewhere. So I recognize that I might not get a huge amount of off-season business unless people say, ah, you know what? Maybe parking in a parking lot isn't that safe. Or maybe parking in a parking lot sucks. We don't have a place to take a shower. So I don't know. But for now, I'm gonna use that bad case scenario just uh to do my math. I could raise my prices, but then I also know, um, as someone who goes out in a camper and stays at campgrounds, how much can I charge if I don't have a hotel, a restaurant, a grocery store, a swimming pool, uh, bicycle rentals, you know, like other things that make people feel like, oh, this is this is a larger experience. There's more here. There are places we've stayed that were basically a parking lot, no bathrooms, no showers, no electricity, nothing. And then there are places we stayed that were parts of very fancy hotels and offered a lot. So could I charge more than 11 euros a night in an off-season when people are used to paying nothing and just parking in a parking lot somewhere? Maybe not. I don't know. You know, I it's something I would have to experiment with if this business ever got going. But I think at least I would want to start with pretty low prices to see how many people even come, and then say, oh, could I raise these prices? Now that I'm getting 10 people a night, could I get 13 euros? Could I get 15 euros? I don't know. So I'm starting with conservative numbers, conservative amounts of people who might be my customer, and conservative prices per night, knowing that I could raise them later if I'm successful enough. Same is true if you have a service-based business. If you are going to be a freelancer or a coach or a consultant of some sort, you might be wondering, what can I charge per hour? And people will say, Oh, charge what you're worth. And I say, you know, sometimes that's hard. What are you worth? You're worth endless amounts of money, right? You're awesome, you're unique. What should you charge? Oh, hundreds of dollars an hour. Okay, but in reality, what's the market likely to pay? What do other competitors charge per hour? Do you want to charge around what they charge? Do you want to charge more? Do you want to charge less? These are choices you can make and you can play with, and there is no one right answer where I can say, oh, everyone who's a freelance designer should charge this per hour. No, it's going to be based on regions and places and so many other things. So it's just something you have to keep experimenting with. But especially if it's a new business, start out with more of an average market rate. Find out what other freelancers in your region are charging for that type of work. Do they charge 10 euros an hour, 20, 30, 40, 50, 200? I don't know. But start out with average pricing before you decide do you want to come in under the average price and see if you could win people by being a little less expensive? Do you want to come in over the average price because you believe you're offering more or you're offering something better or you're just worth it? It's totally up to you. So right now, my spreadsheet shows this business loses money with my bad case scenario. And I don't want to over-manipulate things, but I could say, gee, if I spent more money on money on marketing and advertising, could I have more people come to the campground? Could it sell out more? I might say, gee, you know what? After doing more research, or maybe I've done a little test run in some way. You know, it's hard to prototype a campground, but maybe there's some way that I was able to test something. I might say, gee, you know what? I think I can book more medium-sized spots in our high season. I think I can get four of these a night. Well, now all the numbers on my spreadsheet change. The 19 euros a night didn't, but the amount of money I make changes. The amount of money I'm the now because I'm marking up my water bill and I'm marking up my electricity bill, I'm making more money because more people are, yes, they're using water and electricity, but then I get to mark that up and make a little profit on that. That helps too. So now I've got a profit of 3,000 euros. Not enough to really pay myself. Not enough to really uh pay back those startup expenses. So if this campground didn't get off the ground, no pun intended, this could really be a money loser. Now we could take a look at what if this really got off the ground. And let's say every night I had five of these taken and ten of these taken and ten of these taken. Well, now we're making some real money. Now my annual profit is $42,000. In my first year, I might pay back all of my initial startup costs. And starting in year two, I can pay myself. But year one, I might not be able to pay myself, but hey, that's okay. Looks like I have a viable business that is turning a profit. And at that point, you can start to ask yourself, uh, okay, next year, if I have a similar profit and I don't have the startup expenses anymore, how much do I pay myself? How much do I reinvest in the business? Hey, should we get a few more picnic tables? Um, hey, should we start serving coffee? You know, uh-oh, now I need a permit to serve coffee. Okay, that changes things. So again, you can then decide once you have something that is viable and profitable, how much of it will you take out of the business for yourself? Because you need to pay yourself something. You've got expenses to cover, and how much do you want to build back into the business? And also, let's not forget, how much you're going to have to pay in taxes. My profit is 42,000 euros, but I don't keep 42,000 euros. I'm going to have to work with my accountant to do my taxes and to see how much of that gets paid in taxes. It could be none if I have a loss for that year because I had all of those expenses. I might show a profit in year two. Now I gotta pay some taxes. So remember, you this doesn't even take into account taxes. That could be something else that I could add in here. So for example, here H17 is the amount of revenue I'm bringing in in a year. And I could take a uh I could make another thing here and say estimated taxes. Oop, I could also spell it right. And what's it going to be? It's going to be a percentage of the profit. Usually it's not a percentage of all of the income if you have the type of business where you can write off your expenses and just pay taxes on the profit. But again, you want to check with an accountant so that you're doing this right. They might even set up a spreadsheet for you. So I might say my estimated taxes are going to be equals my profit times, and then what is your business tax rate? Um, I'm just gonna put 25%. I've got oh okay. I made a mistake because I have a circular thing because I have this feeds into itself. So let's put this in a different place so that it's not part of my uh circular thing. Let's see. Uh oh, I see, because I added that. So let's take that out right now of the okay. So let's put this back equals this times 0.25. Okay, so this profit is before this number, but again, it's hard to uh I'm not gonna go too deep into the spreadsheet right now. I'd probably end up having a new annual uh not an annual profit number, but I would end up trying to say this is the number that I'm likely to keep after taxes. Um, I always forget if that's the gross or the net. I think it's the net. Um, so uh that this is some of the calculations that you would have to do. And this was just based on what's the maximum number of people I could put based on different layouts I was trying with the land that I was going to build this on. And same would be true for you if you have a store of some sort. How many seats will you have? How many tables will you have? If you have a different type of store, how many people can fit in the store? How many people can you serve at the same time? Maybe if you are a service business, you can only work with one person at a time. So that's that. But maybe if you have additional people working with you, they can help multiple people at the same time. So this is kind of a number of how many people could we serve at the same time? Um, and uh so for example, the most I could do would be three small, eighteen medium, seventeen large. That means this five can't happen. Okay, that significantly changed my profit, lost about five thousand for the year. But that was that was how I was working on things. Now, what about a best case scenario? What if in the high season we are sold out every night, as some places are where I live? What would that look like? Well, now we're making some serious money here. We can certainly cover our expenses, we can certainly reinvest in the business, and I can certainly pay myself. But notice what is also not here, and I have a little placeholder for it. I have no workers. Right now, this business assumes that I do everything, I scrub every toilet, I trim every tree, I mow the grass. So if you're going to start hiring people, of course, now you have additional expenses. Uh, you have the expenses of whatever is their salary and whatever taxes you have to pay or health care contributions you're making. So this number looks pretty exciting until you remember that this is currently a one-person show. I'm not even paying a cleaning person to help me keep this place clean. That might be my first hire so that I don't have to scrub things all day, or I might be happy to scrub things all day to put that money in my pocket. Again, choices that you make as you go, as you're thinking about this, or as your business changes and grows. So, uh again, I want to make sure that people are thinking about this type of spreadsheet and budget early. On, especially because a lot of these costs can be so deceptive. You're not even thinking about these, but yet the costs exist and you would have to pay for them no matter what. Remember, you have your fixed costs that you pay, whether or not you have real business, whether or not you have customers, you're gonna have to pay for insurance, right? You're gonna have some electricity to keep the lights on, you know, even if you don't have lots of business. And so it's really important to make sure you're aware of those startup costs as well as the ongoing costs that are both the fixed costs and the variable costs based on uh uh, for example, for me right now, Claude is a variable cost because if I am doing um courses where I'm teaching people how to use my Claude skill, which you can find at dcx.to, if I'm running courses where I'm teaching that, I usually upgrade my package and pay for the higher package so I don't run out of Claude in the middle of trying to teach people how to use it. Um and then when I'm not running courses, I go back down to a lower paid Claude package. So that ends up being a variable cost for me. If I weren't doing those courses, then Claude might be a fixed cost for me. Um, I would just stay on the lower tier plan. Um, so really, really important to think about your business and work on a spreadsheet like this so that you can start to see does this business make sense? Is it viable? Is it a money winner? Um, or would I have to have a lot, a lot, a lot of clients to feel like I broke even. Another example could be even my coaching work. Um, uh a year and a half or so ago, I went to coaching school. That costs thousands of dollars. Um, okay, but I'm keeping track of how much money I make doing coaching, and I've played around a little bit with my hourly rates. Some rates I lowered, some rates I raised, and I would be able to go into my records and see how much do I tend to bill in a month? And how am I doing with paying back my startup costs, which had to do with going to school, getting accredited, um, signing up for some services. So I bought a domain name, I set up a website, I've got a Google Workspace account at that domain name, so that's a monthly fee. So again, every single thing you do is going to have costs associated with it, and you want to make sure you are keeping track of um uh whether or not you're breaking even. And if not, how are you losing money? Why are you losing money? How much money are you losing? And then if you are making a profit, can you pay back those startup costs? Can you pay yourself a salary? And are you ready to grow by reinvesting in the business or possibly hiring people or opening additional cafes or campgrounds or whatever growth might mean to you? So uh again, I can't stress enough that the best time to make a spreadsheet like this is yesterday, uh, because you might find that you have a business idea that just doesn't look like it's going to sustain itself. Service businesses are easier if you're a freelancer, uh a coach, a consultant of some sort. Um, this is the these are easier because your costs are minimal. There are other service businesses where there are more costs, but they're still minimal. Massage therapist, as I mentioned before, yoga instructor. These uh will vary, but it's easier to uh make money with services because you're not spending money on an office or a shop or a physical location for business, which is going to come with a lot of maybe construction, decor, electricity, lighting, insurance, safety and security. There's so many things you have to do once you have those spaces. And then also challenge yourself to think about, you know, we talk sometimes about the minimum viable product, which should start out as the minimum viable prototype so you can test your ideas before you spend or overspend on them. But when you think about that minimum viable product, what is the least that you could roll out? Um, and and be an attractive offer that because it's got to be, it's not just viable, it's got to be valuable. So minimum valuable product or service. For us, we realized the campground probably has to be a lot more than a parking lot. It's not going to be a hotel with a pool, but it can't have nothing. Otherwise, people are already parking in parking lots for free. So we would have to offer something they can't get now. And we thought the minimum viable product was probably to offer people Wi-Fi, electricity, water, toilets, and showers. So no restaurant, no bar, no cafe, no pool, um some picnic tables, and really just the basics, plus safety. There would be a gate and a fence. And we decided that was a minimum viable product. You might decide differently. Um, some of you know my husband and I started a karaoke DJ business. There's lots of ways to go very minimally on that. We went less than minimally on that. We decided to spend more on that so that we could have a really different, interesting offering for people and not just show up with a Bluetooth speaker and an iPad, but to do something that was really, really professional. Um, and so those startup costs are going to be different based on the equipment we buy. And then the ongoing costs will be uh will vary. Um, for example, we like to give people trophies. These are ongoing costs for us, but they are variable because we only buy these when we've got karaoke shows to do, which means we're only buying them when we need them. We don't have they're not a fixed cost, they are a variable cost. So hopefully I'm gonna wrap up the show right now. I'm not sure we had any questions. Either we had no questions or my question system isn't working right now. Um, but I'm gonna wrap up this show because I am actually going to be um turning our Tuesdays into double stream Tuesdays. So I'm going to be doing a take action Tuesday for the Delta CX Hive channel. And then a little bit after this stream ends, I'm going to be doing a stream on my new Vocal Coach Debbie channel. And that is going to be a channel devoted to music and singing and learning lots of stuff about music and singing and songs and uh um and that and so I hope you'll follow us not just on Delta CX Hive, uh all over YouTube and Twitch, but now the Vocal Coach Debbie channel. So I'm going to be doing the first new stream there tonight. So I'm gonna go get set up for that, and we're gonna be talking about um what's autotune and do you still want to learn to sing, even if you're using auto-tune or something like it. So thanks for watching my show uh or listening later about budgeting. Um, again, any budget spreadsheet is fine. You don't have to use mine, it doesn't have to look like mine, it doesn't have to work like mine. Just make something. And if you need help from a professional, get help from a bookkeeper, get help from an accountant, try help from AI or LLMs. But of course that might be hit and miss, but just try anything. Start doing this, start getting these numbers in and start understanding how much money you'll need to make to not just sustain the business, but to sustain yourself, or possibly you and a partner, or possibly you and your family. So it's a math puzzle, get to work on it. Um, thanks, and I will see you next Tuesday with a fresh topic. Goodbye.