Align Your Business Strategy and Finances with Michele Williams
Align Your Business Strategy and Finances with Michele Williams

199: How to Align Your Business Strategy and Finances with Michele Williams

When it comes to your business finances, you might find it uncomfortable (maybe even a bit mystifying) to talk about. But if you really want to think big and level up as a CEO, your business strategy needs (and deserves) a financial plan to match.

Some people love analyzing the financials behind a business and how they affect strategy (and vice versa) and want to help other entrepreneurs get a firm handle on it, too. My new friend Michele Williams is one of them!

Michele is the dynamic owner of Scarlet Thread Consulting and Metrique Solutions, two companies that focus on empowering creative professionals. She’s a financial expert who loves to talk about and teach all things money, strategy, and finance. And she’s crazy about financial success!

In this episode of She Thinks Big, you’ll learn about her dedication to helping business owners bridge the gap between their strategic vision and financial reality. Michele will discuss how she can help you develop a clear financial plan that supports your strategic goals so that you make better decisions, avoid costly mistakes, and achieve your long-term objectives.

What’s Covered in This Episode on Align Your Business Strategy and Finances

1:45 – Why Michele is on a mission to close the financial literacy gap for business owners

5:09 – What entrepreneurs struggle with most when it comes to the financial backbone of their strategy

11:05 – The process and financial modeling tools Michele uses to help clients create the financial backbone they need for their business

15:19 – One thing Michele does to make the money she earns from her business feel more real to her

18:53 – The disconnect that can occur between strategy and financials and why it feels mysterious to us

21:56 – The purpose of Michele’s CFO program, how it’s designed to serve smaller business owners, and how it’s different from bookkeeping and accounting

Connect with Michele Williams

Michele Williams is the dynamic owner of Scarlet Thread Consulting and Metrique Solutions, two companies focused on empowering creative professionals in the design industry, including interior designers, workrooms, and window covering professionals. With an eye for detail and a passion for innovation, Michele has carved a niche in providing strategic business coaching and financial analytics to help designers and workrooms navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship.

At Scarlet Thread Consulting, Michele utilizes her extensive experience in finance and business management to offer tailored coaching and mentoring services. She is dedicated to helping her clients achieve financial clarity and operational efficiency, enabling them to make informed decisions that drive their businesses forward.

Through Metrique Solutions, Michele offers a unique blend of technology and consultancy, providing cutting-edge software solutions designed specifically for the owners of small businesses. Her expertise in financial metrics and data analysis empowers her clients to optimize their pricing strategies and enhance profitability.

Michele’s commitment to excellence and her unwavering support for her clients have established her as a trusted advisor and thought leader in the design community. Her work not only transforms businesses but also inspires creativity and growth, making her an invaluable asset to the industry.

Scarlet Thread Consulting | CFO2Go | Instagram

Metrique Solutions | Instagram

Michele Williams on LinkedIn

Financial Health Check-up Quiz

Mentioned In How to Align Your Business Strategy and Finances with Michele Williams

The Inventory Genius by Ciara Stockeland

Get the She Thinks Big book

Andrea’s Links

Subscribe to Andrea’s newsletter

Andrea on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook

Quotes from the Episode

“When you set your goals and your strategy, there’s a financial component to that success, to making it happen and having the reward on the other side.” – Michele Williams

“We can’t turn it into what we want it to be if we can’t be very clear about what we want it to be.” – Michele Williams

“Sometimes we can reach the big goals that the strategy has for us with less money when we’re looking at it from the bottom up rather than from the top down.” – Michele Williams

“You need to have your strategy and your financial backbone aligned so that they can support each other.” – Andrea Liebross

Links to other episodes

182:  Fall In Love With Your numbers By Starting Small with Ciara Stockeland

159: How to Level Up Your Profit and Keep More Cash with Ciara Stockeland

57: Why It’s Important to Know Your Numbers with Ciara Stockeland

Andrea Liebross: Welcome to the She Thinks Big! Podcast. Get ready to level up your thinking and expand your horizons. I’m your host, Andrea Liebross, your guide on this journey of big ideas and bold moves. I am the best-selling author of She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary.

I support women like you with the insights and mindset you need to think bigger and the strategies and systems you need to turn that thinking into action and make it all a reality. Are you ready to stop thinking small and start thinking big? Let’s dive in.

Hey listeners, welcome back to the podcast. I am thrilled today to have my new friend, Michele Williams, here today, to chat with us about all things money and strategy and finance and some of the things that we really need to talk about that sometimes it's uncomfortable talking about.

So, Michele, tell me, who are you? Tell the listeners, who are you? What do you do? Where are you?

Michele Williams: Yeah, where am I? And you’re right, we are new friends, fast friends at that, I would say.

Andrea Liebross: Yes. We met at, just for the listeners, we were both guest experts at a LuAnn Power Talk Friday in Dallas earlier this month and then here we are now recording a podcast. So there you go.

Michele Williams: Awesome. So, Andrea, I would describe myself currently as a woman on a mission to try to close the financial literacy gap for business owners. I mean, very simply put. The reason that that is such a driver for me, such a big deal for me, is a couple of things.

I grew up in a small town in South Carolina, in a mill town. In that mill town in that milltown, people certainly went to college but there was a big push to work in textiles and then of course, we know the 90s came and the textile industry changed. Well, I was always math and science brained, that's just always what I loved. I went to college and took a job in software and built financial software for Dun & Bradstreet. We were building accounts payable, financials, general ledger, purchasing inventory, and all of the accounting-type systems. Think of it like an Oracle-type solution today.

Andrea Liebross: But back in the day.

Michele Williams: Back in the day on mainframes.

Andrea Liebross: Yes.

Michele Williams: Then we finally moved to servers and cloud-based and all that, but back in the 80s and the early 90s, around the dot-com time frame. I did that for 10 years, came home to raise my children, started an interior-type business out of my home, and did that for a while.

I started noticing that in my own company, I wasn't making the money that I thought I should make. At the end of the day, the money wasn't there. Fast forward, I ended up with my husband making a comment to me, like, “What are you doing? You ran multiple million-dollar projects. Why are you struggling to run yours?”

I was like, “Well, because I wasn't feeding and treating my business as if it were a business. I was feeding it like a hobby, treating it like a hobby, wrapped up in a business name.”

So I really sat down and thought, “I got to get this pulled together.” I really started defining what did it mean to be in business for me. What did I learn in business school? What did other businesses do that I had not done? It was down to what is your mission? What is your vision? What are your boundaries? Who were you serving? How are you serving? Do you have your pricing on lock down?

All the things, the mechanical tactical things that we really need to do, I can remember seeing companies that did RO, RA, RE and I was like, “I don't want to do the RO, RA, RE.” But it was really getting RO, RA-ed up from my own thing.

Fast forwarding, I'll jump a few decades ahead, I ended up getting it together. I started teaching it in the industry that I was in, teaching other people how to do it, bought a school, put up out a magazine for four years, sold a school, and then I started coaching and consulting back in 2013, still teaching and educating across the country, but with a real big, deep focus on helping people understand that when you set your goals and set your strategy, there's a financial component to that success, to making it happen and then having the result and the reward on the other side.

Then fast forward, I started a podcast in 2018. I became Profit-First certified in 2015, and I started a software company in 2022.

Andrea Liebross: Just, you know, a few things. A couple of things.

Michele Williams: Just a few things.

Andrea Liebross: Just a few things. What do you see entrepreneurs struggle with most when it comes to, I'll call it, the financial backbone to supporting their strategy? Or do they even have a financial backbone to support their strategy?

Michele Williams: Yeah. Gosh, that's such a great question. To be honest, what I see a lot of is a lack of strategy, therefore, lack of financial backbone or a financial backbone that's hinged on nothing concrete. They're building a financial plan based off of a gut feeling.

I see it across industries so there's not like one industry that I think is more than another. But I think that many people who've started their own companies, and I'm talking sometimes smaller, even some, I've got some that are $5 million, $7 million, $8 million, $10 million, they don't have strategies in front of them.

Not what we, you and I would call a strategy that could be executed that was clear and with some level of precision in the short term. What happens is they come in and they're telling me, “This is the amount that I need to make in my company,” or, “Here's a revenue dollar amount that we want to target.”

I ask, “Why?” And they can't even tell me why. That's just the next number I'm supposed to hit. You know how if you build a really deep, clear strategy, then when you make your decisions, it's almost like having a hook, it's like the bar in the closet. The strategy is like a bar in the closet, everything you do is you're putting hangers and hooks.

Andrea Liebross: Oh, I love that analogy.

Michele Williams: Over that bar, but the bar is solid, and it's like welded in. It's hanging there. We're just putting things on it that it's meant to support. They don't have that. Then they've got a hanger and they're opening the closet and they're dropping the marketing hanger on the floor and they're dropping the financial hanger on the floor.

Then what happens is marketing's going out this way, financials are going this way, operations are going this way, and they're not working in a cohort or in sync together because the strategy is missing.

Andrea Liebross: I think, when you said strategy, this is a different kind of number but it totally plays into your numbers. I've noticed that okay, let's say you have concepts for the strategy but you don't have KPIs, you don't have Key Performance Indicator, you don't know how many leads you really need, or what's your goal for that, or you don't know how many podcasts you want to be on and why did you even pick that number?

I think that's a piece too because then what do you need to support that number of leads? How much average, if we're talking about like Facebook ads, for example, how many ad dollars do we need to get there?

Michele Williams: It's the tactics.

Andrea Liebross: It's the tactics.

Michele Williams: But again, the tactics are a hook over the strategies.

Andrea Liebross: Right, you still need it.

Michele Williams: You may have actually put it in your book, if not, it was another one I read too but have you ever seen the movie on Netflix, the girl that plays chess? The Queen's Game.

Andrea Liebross: Yes.

Michele Williams: Well, if you've ever seen it like she's laying in the bed and in her mind, the chessboard is on the ceiling. Well, she has a strategy. I read something the other day, it says that I think it's a master chess player sees 13 steps ahead of their opponents. They can strategize 13 steps ahead. Incredible.

So what they're doing was exactly what she was picturing, “I'm going to go here,” she was strategizing. But what happens is when you sit down at that table to play the opponent, if they pull out something that's different than the 13 things you thought about, tactically, you've got to figure out what the move is going to be.

So to your point, the tactics of how you're going to get there and how you're going to know that you're there when you arrive are the KPIs. Often we might, “I want to be ABC in my industry. I want to reach this.” But we then don't break it down into the goals and the items and the checklist items and how do we know that we're there?

Andrea Liebross: I always ask it. How are we going to define that? What's the success going to look like? How do we know we're there? That's a question I ask a lot.

Michele Williams: Yeah. I always say, “What is done mean?” How do we know that we’re really done?

Andrea Liebross: Yes. When are we done? That gets into having SMARTER or SMART goals that are measurable. Measurable, specific.

Michele Williams: Right. Not nebulous. We shouldn't be able to look at it and go, “Did I make it or did I not?” The other thing about it too is we're not living in a world of perfection. Again, I've read your book. I'm going to tell everybody if they haven't read it, they've got to go read your book.

Andrea Liebross: She is a good reader.

Michele Williams: I am. You gave me one.

Andrea Liebross: I know.

Michele Williams: A beautiful signed copy. I'm going to tell you, I normally mark my books up like nobody's business. I've got flags hanging out and Sharpies. Yours is so pristine. I got a journal and started writing everything in it because I didn't want to mess up the book that was so pretty.

Andrea Liebross: Thank you.

Michele Williams: But it's got such good information in it. But what I was going to say is you talk in the book a lot about having the strategy, but then putting in the support systems and setting the KPIs and tracking it.

Look, we can't turn it into what we want it to be if we can't be very clear about what we want it to be. You're so good at helping us get there. There just happens to be money and business that comes along with it. Money is really just a tool.

Andrea Liebross: Most valuable resources, money.

Michele Williams: Just a resource. That's right.

Andrea Liebross: Right. Okay. How do you help someone create that financial backbone? What does a typical client look like?

Michele Williams: Yeah. A typical client is they can be in their just beginning and want to set up things correctly to start or they could be in business for 30, 40 years, have a 10, 15 million dollar company and they're just trying to figure out at a very high number, “How do I make this work?”

One of the first things that we do is ask them to give us their strategic plan, which shows up empty in those cases. But we asked them, “Give us your strategic plan. What are we building the financials to support? Where are you trying to go?”

It would be like going on a trip and not knowing where you were going, and not knowing how to pack, how much money to take, and where to get a hotel room. You got to give me all the deets.

So we say, “Give us your strategic plan.” We ask for a SWOT analysis. What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and trends that you have or that you're working with in this particular case? What is it we're trying to accomplish quickly?”

Andrea Liebross: Yeah, I would say the next 90 days and this year, we go.

Michele Williams: That's right. The same thing. Just tell me what you're trying to do quickly. We ask them to review the prior year. Let's look at it together. Some of the big questions are, “If you had it to do over again, how would you spend your money for that year? Is there anything that we're looking at and expenses that if you had known what you know now if you had it to do over, you would spend that money differently? Because the profit and loss statement is showing me the decisions that you've made for where your money went. Just tell me, would you do the same? Is there anything you would add to it that you didn't have?”

Like maybe I need to photograph something or I need to spend more on Facebook ads or I need to pay commissions or I need a new delivery truck or whatever it is. What do we need to add and what do we need to take away? What do we need to reallocate? Do we need to hire?

Every single thing that we have in the strategic plan should have a dollar amount assigned to it. It's going to cost us this. But it may also have a revenue side. It's going to bring us this.

We're then going to go into the software program that I've created that is for all industries. We're going to put their numbers in, and we're going to move into the modeling tools.

In the first modeling tool, we have one called Financial Goals. We can do it from the top down, meaning “I want to sell for $3 million. Here's my cost of goods or cost of service, and here's my gross profit, and we're going to work our way down.”

Or we can start on the other side. “I want to bring home $150,000. I want to be able to cover my taxes outside of that $150,000. I want to leave this much money in the company as profit in the company. I want to give bonuses to my team.”

We start adding up, as I call it, the job of the net profit. That job description that we talk about. What is it that we need it to do? Then we go forward to roll up. If this is what we need at the bottom, what does it cost us to run the business? This tells me how much I need to be able to have gross profit. What percentage is that of revenue? Boom, I've got a revenue number.

Because the truth of the matter is sometimes we can reach the big goals that the strategy has for us with less money when we're looking at it from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

Andrea Liebross: Yes. Do you know Ciara Stockeland?

Michele Williams: I don't.

Andrea Liebross: Okay. She has a book called The Inventory Genius. She deals with businesses that have inventory. But she's been a guest on the podcast a couple of times. She's always talking about the bottom-up. That's what made me think about this. But I think that you could go from either way. Top down or bottom up.

Michele Williams: We usually do both. I mean I usually have a company do both because what we usually settle on is probably somewhere in the middle because you're making strategy and/or strategic and tactical decisions as you're going back and forth in this exercise.

Andrea Liebross: Yes. I love it too that you said well, I always call it like what do we want to put in the personal bank of Michele or what do we want to put in the personal bank of Andrea? Because that's something I think, especially new entrepreneurs, you just blow by it.

But then you're frustrated when something isn't happening. Like you said, it's something you don't really want to think about. But then when you think about it, it creates a lot of angst.

Michele Williams: Did you know that I have been in business for myself since 2000? So what? We're in the 25th year of 2024. I still, every month, write myself a physical check “To Michele Williams, from Michele Williams. Here's the amount you're bringing home.” I turn the check over. I endorse it to Michele Williams. I mean, you understand, I understand that I could log into my Wells Fargo and slide the money.

Andrea Liebross: Of course, you totally could.

Michele Williams: I get it. You get it. I know that I could do that. But I am telling you about the endorphins that are released, here's the kicker, when I write all that on that check and I endorse all that check, I hand it to my husband. He puts it in the bank account.

Now, everybody knows what Michele's doing. It's not because I'm trying to brag. It's because I need to know that all of this work that I'm putting in to build this business, that I'm being rewarded, and that I'm the one rewarding myself or paying myself for the work that I'm doing not only as an employee, if you will, in my company, but also as an owner.

When I was running things to everything through payroll, I would certainly get a payroll check, but I would then write myself the distribution check so that I could touch it and feel it.

It hits you differently when you touch and feel the money than when it feels like a nebulous slide from account to account. It doesn't feel as real about where the money is going. I've built in a couple of little things like that so that I can feel it deeply.

Andrea Liebross: I love that. It also reminds me too of when I talk about time as being a resource with my people and you can look at your Google calendar, I mean, I'm a big digital calendar person, but when you transfer that onto an actual paper-type calendar and you can see the time you're spending on things or the time that's left over that you have to spend on whatever you want, there's a bigger impact there than using that digital calendar. It's like the same sort of thing.

Michele Williams: It really is, which is why I even made the decision, going through your book and a couple of others that I'm going through right now, at handwriting my thoughts, like hand journaling them, where a lot of times what I do is I'll open up a Word document or a Google document and I just like, chat, chat, chat, type, type, type. I was like, “This one feels like something I need to feel.”

I need to go through the journey and the experience of actually connecting with it in a written form. I think that's the same thing. Even when I teach financials, I have people do it on paper by hand with the calculator.

Then I give them a tool because the tool makes no sense, you don't understand what it's doing for you if you haven't had to go through the journey of discovery with pen and paper and calculator.

Andrea Liebross: So true. Even figuring out profit, like net profit.

Michele Williams: Exactly.

Andrea Liebross: All of that stuff. Doing it on paper is very valuable.

Michele Williams: Yeah. You were asking about the connection. One thing that I think is important is it's how do we pull it one out from the other? I don't know how to pull a financial plan away from the strategy but I also don't know really how to pull a strategy away from a good financial plan. I don't know how to do that.

Because they're meant to support each other and to go forward. One is telling us what we're going to do, why we're going to do it, and how we're going to get there. The other is going, “But this is the resource that we need to monitor to get there.”

Andrea Liebross: I was going to say they have to support each other. It can be empowering to say, “Okay, if this is my strategy, if this is what I want to happen, then, all right, here's my current financial situation.”

Really, all I need to say is it's not enough to support it. But then you can recognize, “Okay, I don't need to go build another monster company. If I just made these few tweaks or if I just brought in this many more clients or purchases, it's not that hard to figure out how to support that strategy.” It's not very mysterious. People think sometimes it's like a mystery, how would I ever do that? It's not very mysterious if we look at the two together.

Michele Williams: I think we've made it mysterious because it's something we don't know. There's a mystery to whatever we don't know. What's so cool within Metrique is we have a couple of, and certainly, people can build this, they can build 5,000 spreadsheets, that's what I did, and then Metrique is just a compilation of all my spreadsheets put together because I'm a spreadsheet queen. I would build a spreadsheet that would say, “Okay, what is the capacity for my team for billable time or for sales? What is that capacity?”

I would look at “This is what they could do in any given week.” Well, then I would look at the financial plan, “How much do we need to do a week to make the numbers that we need to match the goal?”

I would look at it. What I needed in work wasn't what the team could do. It could be high. It could be low. But now I know. I either can adjust the goal to fit the team that I have. I can look at “Is there a way that I can educate my team so that they can work at a higher rate? Do I just need to add another person and then increase the opportunity over here?”

But at least now the questions show up in front of us. We have billable capacity modeling tools. We have break-even modeling tools. Even if I have a new idea, what would it take to break even just on that piece, then we can put it into the whole plan, like merge it into the plan, as a new revenue stream.

There are so many ways to do it. I think a lot of times, we can think about it. but we don't know the math or we don't have the tool to model it so that we can stand back and look at it and go, “Oh, that's how that would play out.

Andrea Liebross: I love that. I love that. Tell me about your CFO, your part-time CFO program.

Michele Williams: Yes. We have a program called CFO to Go. What it's meant to do is to work with the business owner or the business owner and their accountant or their bookkeeper or their COO, whoever's on their team with them.

But the goal is to help them sit down and look strategically at that plan, that strategic plan, look at their financials and what they need to do, help them set up some of the KPIs that they need to monitor to, how they want to look at their data, and then create a set of financial goals that match the strategy, take the financial goals, and turn it into two budgets.

We turn it into a conservative budget. This is what we really have to do and an aggressive budget: what if we did a couple of extra things? Now we've got a financial plan that is in alignment with the strategy.

We have a conservative budget. We have an aggressive budget. Then we set KPIs. Then we go into monitoring. We've run all the financial numbers and we've strategized it. We've done the break-even analysis. We know how many projects we need to do. We know how we're going to make the money. We've got the whole plan in front of us.

Then we create the budgets. We create the KPIs. Again, you just start monitoring. Then we let them go. Then they can certainly continue to coach with us in some capacity.

But it's really short, it's usually about six to eight weeks based on the complexity of what we're working on. Sometimes it could be four weeks, three to four calls and so based on how fast we can get information.

But it's a “Come in. Let us help you set up your financials. Let us teach you how to look at the strategy, look at the financials, make some decisions. Let us empower you to do that, and then we're going to let you go do it. Then you can work with your other teammates. We're just trying to help you get that quick view into ‘These can match. They currently don't. Let us show you how to make them match.’”

Andrea Liebross: I love that. A lot of times they're not matching. That's the real problem. That's where all of the angst is coming from.

Michele Williams: That's right. We've worked with people, like I said, in their first six figures because they're like, “Look, it's going to behoove me to know how my financials and my strategy like what is the Apex, where do they run into each other, that intersection point, where is that? What does it look like?”

My big thing is I want you to know your numbers so well that you're not making just gut decisions. Sometimes gut decisions are good but I want you to have empirical data that you know how to analyze to use to make decisions. That's the goal.

If I can teach you how to look at the numbers, what they need to be, and how you should interact with those numbers, now, when you go back to thinking big and thinking bigger and thinking the biggest, you know how to do a financial model that matches where you're going.

You don't feel like, “I've got this big plan, but I don't have an idea of what it's even going to take to get there financially.” I can show you what it's going to take to get there.

Andrea Liebross: I want to add something in here. This is not a bookkeeper job. This is not what your bookkeeper is supposed to be doing. Just throwing that out there. This is really not a CPA either. This is why you need this cash flow financial modeling component for your business in order for it to do what you want it to do.

Michele Williams: Yeah. I'm not going to say that bookkeepers, accountants can't do it, it's very consultative and it's more looking at your business like a CFO. Some do that but it would be as an added service to your point. It's not the basics of the everyday what they're doing, it's just not.

What I found too was large companies do this. The big companies, $10 million and up, they've got a CFO on staff. They're doing some of the heavy lifting. They're doing these things. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't and couldn't have access at the smaller business, $5 million and under. It doesn't mean that we don't need it. It just means nobody's giving it to us in the marketplace.

That should be a big question. Why? Because the majority of the businesses are $5 million and under around here. But we don't have it. I'll tell you, Andrea, I was just at a conference. It was a conference where there were a lot of family businesses.

There were a lot of young people coming up to me. When I say young, they're probably 30 or 40 years old. They're coming up and they're saying, “We bought this business from Mom and Dad. But Mom and Dad didn't run this business with financial astuteness. We can't run this business where we are today moving forward without understanding the numbers, and where they were coming from. They just looked at the bank account, they had enough money to live. It was a different world. We can't do that. But we don't know how to look at the numbers and Mom and Dad can't tell us.”

So we're seeing a lot of the generational shifts in some of these businesses and if the younger generation doesn't come in and try to create a structure and understand it, what worked for Mom and Dad 50 years ago is not going to work for them going forward.

Andrea Liebross: 100%. I have a client exactly what you just said. They right now are interviewing CFOs.

Michele Williams: Yeah, because they've got new big ideas. But they've got to have an understanding of the finances to go with it.

Andrea Liebross: It's exactly what's happening. They're contemplating, building an additional building, but they need more help to understand.

Michele Williams: I will say this too, we work with a lot of bookkeepers and accountants who come in to learn what we're doing and how we do it and then they use it to support their clients to make their business even richer with their offerings.

Andrea Liebross: The reason I brought that up is I hear a lot of newer entrepreneurs say, “Well, I just need to hire a bookkeeper to get these books cleaned up, which, yes, 100% you do. But the standard bookkeeper will say, “It's not going to help you with decision-making.”

Michele Williams: They’re not analyzing the data. Right. In general, at the basics, bookkeeping is more a transactional, you're putting things in the right bucket.

Andrea Liebross: I say it's like after the fact too. It's all the things that have happened after the fact.

Michele Williams: That's exactly right. Where accounting historically has been more tax prep and getting you everything ready to keep you legal and the requirements and we need that too. CFO has been more of an overall financial look at the company, how all the pieces work together, more of the analysis, and more of the forward thinking.

But most companies don't even start looking at fractional CFOs until they've hit the five million. But there's a lot of us under five million that could you use a hand up in that area.

Andrea Liebross: Yes, 100%. Well, this has been a super fun conversation, not just fun, informative, and necessary. Thank you for being here. Where can my listeners find you and all of the great things that you do?

Michele Williams: Yeah, so I'm hanging out on Instagram as @scarletthreadatl and also as @metriquesolutions. Same two names, Scarlet Thread and Metrique on Facebook and then Michele Williams on LinkedIn.

The two websites are scarletthreadconsulting.com and metriquesolutions.com. Andrea, I'd love to invite your listeners. I have a financial health quiz if they want to see how much they know about their numbers. There's a financial health quiz. I'll send it to you to put in the show links.

Andrea Liebross: Okay.

Michele Williams: They can get that at the Scarlet Thread website. Then I also send you a code for them for one free month in Metrique Solutions if they want to get in the model and give it a try.

Andrea Liebross: I love that. Thank you so much.

Michele Williams: You’re welcome.

Andrea Liebross: All right, my friends, until next time, we've got a lot to think about. But this is a way in which you think bigger. If you want to think bigger, this is an essential component. It really is the key to leveling up. You need to have your strategy and your financial backbone aligned so that they can support each other. See you next week.

Thanks for tuning into the She Thinks Big! Podcast. If you're ready to learn the secret to unleashing your full potential, don't forget to grab a copy of my book, She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary. It's available on Amazon and at your favorite bookstore.

And while you're there, grab a copy for a friend. Inside, you'll both find actionable strategies and empowering insights to help you navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship and life, and step confidently into your extraordinary future.

If you found value in today's episode, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast platform. And if you're ready to take this learning a step further and apply it to your own business and life, head to andreaslinks.com and click the button to schedule a discovery call. Until next time, keep thinking big.

Take The quiz

Are you overwhelmed with business and life and think there is never enough time in the day? Are you tired of being reactive vs proactive in your business?

Learn how to show up as your best self in business.

Who else could use this? Share this post.

Who_s the Best Business and Life Coach in Indiana - AndreaLiebross.com

I'm Andrea Liebross.

I am the big thinking expert for high-achieving women entrepreneurs. I help these bold, ambitious women make the shift from thinking small and feeling overwhelmed in business and life to getting the clarity, confidence and freedom they crave. I believe that the secret sauce to thinking big and creating big results (that you’re worthy and capable of) has just two ingredients – solid systems and the right (big) mindset. I am the author of best seller She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary and host of the Time to Level Up podcast.