Episode 485: Do you invest in yourself?
Running your business can feel like a grind, right? You’re putting in the hours but still feel stuck. What if the issue isn’t the business, but YOU?
In this episode, Fiona Killackey challenges small business owners to ask: Are you investing enough in your own growth? It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget that you need to evolve too. Fiona shares why it’s important to make time for personal development—whether through courses, coaching, or just learning something new. She contrasts her corporate experience, where training was built-in, with the reality for small business owners who often don’t have that support. But she explains why it’s up to you to create those opportunities.
Here’s what Fiona covers in this episode:
Why investing in yourself is essential—not just for the business, but for you.
The difference between corporate vs small business training budgets, and how you can create growth opportunities.
Simple ways to upskill that won’t take up all your time or money.
The importance of finding time to learn, not just spending money.
Actionable takeaways to start investing in yourself and reigniting your passion for your business.
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Do you love your life as a small business owner?
Let's be real.
Sometimes we just don't. It's my hope that this, the My Daily Business Podcast, helps you regain a little of that lost love through practical, actionable tips, tools and tactics, interviews with creative and curious small business owners, and in depth coaching episodes with me, your host, Fiona Killackey With more than 20 years experience in marketing, brand content and systems and having now helped thousands of small business owners, I know what it takes to build.
A business that you can be proud of and that actually aligns with your values, your beliefs, and your hopes for the future. So much of our daily life is spent working on and in the businesses and the brands that we are creating, and so it makes sense to actually love what you do.
So, let's get into this podcast and help you figure out how to love your business and your life on the Daily.
Hello and welcome to episode 485 of the My Daily Business Podcast.
It's a quick tip episode and it's a really important one, especially if you're feeling a little stagnant in your business or feeling like something needs to be shaken up. Before we get stuck into that, I want to remind you that group coaching is open.
So if you would like to work with me for more than a year, I think it's around 14 months in total because we do take a little bit of a break over the new year period, but if you'd like to work together, we are kicking off our new group coaching programme in March this year. We are doing interviews currently as I speak, so if you're interested in joining, please head on over to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching.
Fill in the application form and we'll be in touch to set up an interview with me. So it’s not, you know, at all daunting. It’s just a chance to get to know each other and make sure we curate a really beautiful group of just wonderful, genuine, down-to-earth people who are there to encourage each other, to celebrate, to open up, and to learn.
So if you're interested again, you can just head on over to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching.
Before we dive in, I of course want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of this beautiful land on which I run group coaching and all the other things in my business. And that for me in North Warranart is the Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
Alright, let's get into today's quick tip episode.
Years ago, before I started my business, I was head of marketing for a major accessories brand here in Australia. They also had, at that time, the brand was in South Africa and New Zealand as well. So it was a huge, huge brand that I was head of marketing for. And I had sort of three teams that I managed. There was the PR team, sort of PR and marketing that we had the digital online team, and then we had the creative team. And so they do all the campaigns and photo shoots and everything else.
And so my job when I came in originally was sort of looking after the brand and content and I had the digital team and the kind of content team. And so part of the job when I came in was to really think about how can we unify this team and how can we get everybody using the most skills that they have, but also upskilling?
And one of the things I went to my boss at the time who was MD and said is, what is the training budget like? I can't see on the spreadsheets, I can't see a budget for training. And they sort of said, well, we haven't had one for those kind of people, which sounds so bad. But they had one in the exec team, right? So you had a training budget if you were in the exec team, which I then moved into. But underneath that, which often happens in corporates, there isn't necessarily a training budget for more junior staff, which I think is actually ridiculous because it's the people that are junior that potentially need a bit more training and need to figure out what they want to do and sort of open up their minds to different parts of the business. Anyway, I digress.
And so we talked about training budgets and I then went to the team and said, hey, if any of you want to upskill on anything in your line of work, so like the social media person, she might wanted to have upskilled on Instagram. If you can find something like a class or a workshop or an online programme, please pitch it to me and I will try and get the money for you from above.
And so that happened. And it's something that I've asked in pretty much every place that I've worked in in an employed role, like, what is your training budget? But I think when you run your own business, you don't do that. You don't look at your finances and go, okay, well we need this much for the overheads. We need this much for staff pay, we need this much to change up our uniforms or whatever else. When you're running through your list and your budget of like, where is the money going to go? Often you forget things like training budget.
And so I guess today's question is really in this tip tool or tactic, to really look at it as a tactic of where am I investing in upskilling myself? And it not necessarily even is about upskilling. It could, yes, be upskilling. So you might be doing, I don't know, a camera course or a course on a video editing software and you're like, cool, I'm going to pay to train myself to, you know, get better at that. Or it could be investing in a community, in a connection, say like a group coaching programme. We have one open right now. You can go to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching, but it could be investing in that.
It could be investing in community, it could be going to like, I don't know, business dinners. It could be investing in knowledge. And so you may decide, you know what, this conference that's in San Francisco is like the best in the world for my industry. And so I want to try and put aside a certain amount of money to be able to pay for that.
And so really the question today is amongst your plans for 2025 or 2026 or whenever you're listening to this, and it doesn't have to be at the start of the year, but just any time thinking about, where is my investment in myself, where is that? Because if you were in an employed role and potentially if you're moving up the ranks, the latter, then you would have somebody in that company, the HR team, putting a training budget against your name and being like, okay, we're going to upskill. Also within a business, a bigger corporate, you will always have opportunities for upskilling, often.
Because I remember even before I left my head of marketing role, I knew I wanted to leave, right? And I knew that my knowledge of Microsoft Excel was good, but that it could be better. So I actually asked the finance person, I was like, you're incredible at this. I was like, would you be able to over lunch show me how to do some formulations and do some other things? And she was like, yeah, absolutely.
And so she was absolutely, so lovely, shout out to her. But I was able to ask her and she was able to show me things. And so that exists within a large company and, you often within corporates, there are people at different levels that you can go and have a one on one or sit down or you often with within companies they'll have like an incubator or they'll have a sort of buddy system.
When you're run your own business, you don't have that. You really don't. And so it's like okay, am I going to invest in upskilling in a group coaching programme? Am I going to invest in a business coach? Am I going to invest in a video tutorial software programme? Am I going to invest in dinners out? Am I going to invest in a trip, you know, like a retreat? Where is your investment in yourself happening?
And even if you're listening to these thinking fa I don't have like a spare dollar at the moment so how am I going to do that? It could be investing your time. So you might decide. Every Wednesday between 8 and 10 o'clock I'm going to invest in my learning and I'm going to choose a topic and for a month those four Wednesdays I'm going to upskill by using YouTube or using podcasts or reading books.
I mean I have two books, Passion, Purpose, Profit and Business To Brand. If you sat down and actually I had to read Business to Brand recently for the audio version and it took about two days, of let's say four hours a day or maybe five hours. So you know, let's say that's like I don't know and we stopped and started a few times with the producer and the microphone. But let's say you really diligently committed to that book business to Brand, which you can buy on our website or from lots of other retailers.
You might be like, okay, I'm going to do that every Wednesday for the next two months and I'm going to work through that entire book. We have a workbook PDF kind of attachment to it as well. Or I'm going to listen to the audio version which also comes with a workbook. And so I'm going to work through that.
And so that can be something that you, you can borrow the book from the library. You can, you know, if you have a Spotify account, I think you can just listen to it for free on Spotify. So. Or Audible if you have an Audible account. So you can invest in yourself without it always being financial.
So what is it? How are you investing in yourself? That is the question for you today that is thinking about is it a training budget? What does that look like? If you have staff, is there a training budget in mind for them as well? And what does that look like?
Because so often these are the things that are missed and those are the things that really you are supported often in a corporate to upskill and somehow that kind of gets missed when you move to small business.
So that is it for today's Quick tip episode. Do you invest in yourself? How are you going to invest in yourself? And if you are interested in investing in a larger kind of programme, we have our group coaching programme that is kicking off in March. You can go on over to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching and apply there and we are doing interviews shortly.
If you are also interested in courses, maybe you want to start a podcast like this. Then we have a how to start a podcast course. We have, you know, how to map out your money, we have how to get your book published. We have lots of different courses and you can find them at mydailybusiness.com/courses.
Thank you so much for listening. You'll be able to find the text format for this over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast485. 485 episodes. Wow. We are nearing 500 episodes.
Alright, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Podcast for a range of tools to help you grow and start your business, including coaching programmes, courses and templates. Cheque out our shop at mydailybusiness.com and if you want to get in touch, you can do that by email at hello@mydailybusiness.com or you can hit us up on Instagram at mydailybusiness_. You can find us on TikTok at mydailybusiness or find me Fiona Killackey on LinkedIn. I look forward to connecting.
