Financial planning and management as you form your own business can be a daunting task. Fitness instructor turned entrepreneur Nelson Toriano tackles this challenge by giving you his One Big Tip of managing your finances in the process of becoming a CEO and effectively developing your own business.
From Fitness to Finances
Nelson Toriano is here to help equip you with the tools you need to successfully navigate building your business as you become your own CEO. Nelson holds an MBA, but he first found his passion in the fitness industry as a personal trainer. Although it was just a “side hustle” at first, he later decided to build up a full-time career for himself there.
As he continued his path in the fitness industry, he saw many people like himself face difficulties as they tried to move away from being an employee and become CEOs and independent contractors instead. “I started analyzing why might the fitness industry have such a high attrition rate” he says, “it really boils down to the lack of financial and business education.”
This lack of knowledge drove him to get into more of the business side of things and start educating other professionals in the field who also wanted to grow their own business. Nelson now focuses mainly on teaching them everything they need to learn, sometimes from zero. In his words, “I try to fill in the gap by teaching them ‘Hey, this is how businesses operate, these are the structures, here the financial statements, etc.’”
Learning How to Manage Financial Data
Nelson states that to become financially literate, “you need to see the right financial picture for yourself”, which he states all begins with properly accounting for information. His One Big Tip is to use and get familiar with specific data sheets—your balance sheet, P&I payment, and net income—to give you a better understanding of the relationships between different aspects of your finances.
He also recommends that if this is an area where you are not confident in your ability, the best decision you can make is to hire an accountant who can better crunch the numbers for you and keep track of the smaller details. To go along with this, he mentions that “you need to also change the mindset of how you are actually reporting your finances both to yourself and to your accountant” as he highlights the importance of being transparent and careful about where and how your money is being spent.
With all of the data you will be working with, he also highly recommends using Excel documents to keep information together and read it more easily. Once you can set up an Excel document to properly process the data you need, Nelson assures that “as long as you have this one report, this one Excel document, it helps alleviate a lot of the stress.”
You can get financial education and learn what it takes to grow your own business by contacting Nelson Toriano on Facebook and LinkedIn, or by visiting his website.
