A quick note before we begin
This episode was recorded in February 2026, while I was still positioned primarily as a money coach. It is a candid account of the business debt and overinvestment decisions I was working through at the time, not a description of my current finances or an instruction to copy the choices I made.
My positioning has changed, but the commercial lesson has become more important. An investment does not create growth because it was expensive, aspirational or made by a serious business owner. It creates growth when it solves a proven constraint, fits the cashflow and leads to a result the business can actually use.
Listen to the episode
In this episode
I had overinvested in my business.
Not because I knew nothing about money. Not because a horrible salesperson forced me to type in the card details. I had years of financial education, could see exactly how the decisions were affecting the cashflow and still made them.
Expertise does not make you immune to your own patterns. It helps you recognise them faster, correct them and, ideally, avoid building a personality around pretending they never happened.
In this episode, we’re talking about:
- how I went from a £500 month to consistent £5k months;
- why I mistook a short growth trend for evidence that revenue would keep rising;
- how business and personal spending became tangled;
- four signs you should not make the investment;
- why revenue, profit and bank balance are the wrong affordability tests;
- the business investments that can be worth making;
- and the rules I created after getting it wrong.
I did not start the new business from zero
I began creating financial education content in 2020. The original business included a low-cost membership, digital products and brand collaborations, and people often called me a financial influencer, a title that has always made part of my soul leave my body.
After maternity leave, I closed that version of the business and moved towards coaching. The new business began at the end of 2023 and into early 2024.
I had an existing audience of around 25,000 people, so this was not a clean start from zero. But only around 10%, roughly 2,500 people, moved to the new account, despite me talking about the move repeatedly.
That is worth remembering whenever somebody’s “brand-new business” grows quickly. She may be selling a new offer through years of trust, experience, relationships and audience history.
The offer can be new while the demand is not.
Booked out did not mean financially healthy
I signed my first coaching client within the first month, another in February, then the business accelerated. By summer 2024, I had 19 live clients across paid, free and testimonial arrangements.
From the outside, that looked like very obvious success. Inside the cashflow, the picture was less impressive.
I was new to delivering a structured coaching programme, my prices were low and some payment plans were stretched over long periods. I had filled the available capacity without creating enough monthly cash or margin.
Booked out is a demand metric. It is not a profitability metric.
If 19 clients occupy every available delivery hour but their monthly payments cannot comfortably cover expenses, tax and your salary, the calendar is full and the business is still financially tight.
This distinction matters because early demand gave me confidence, and that confidence became one of the inputs behind what happened next.
The growth looked like a pattern
The business made around £500 in January. By October, it made its first £5k month.
Ten months from £500 to £5,000 felt like evidence of momentum. After that, I maintained roughly 15 consecutive £5k months.
So I looked at the growth curve and projected it forwards. If this is what happened in the first year, imagine what the next year can do.
That assumption felt rational because it used real numbers. But it used the wrong amount of evidence.
Revenue had grown. I was not consistently tracking what produced the growth, the number of qualified leads, conversion rates, sales activity, audience growth or capacity. I had the outcome without a reliable model of the mechanism.
I turned ten months of progress into a future promise the business had never made.
I invested against expected growth
I used a credit card to fund business investments. The plan was for the business to keep growing, create additional overflow and repay the debt from that growth.
The logic was not entirely chaotic. There was a forecast and a repayment idea. The problem was that both relied on future revenue continuing along a line supported by aspiration rather than sales data.
Then revenue stopped climbing.
Throughout the following year, the business largely returned to the same £5k level. There was one stronger month, and I kept expecting the tipping point to arrive after it.
It did not.
£5k had previously been enough. Now the same revenue needed to cover normal business costs, my pay and the repayments for investments made on the assumption that the business would be earning more.
The revenue had not collapsed. The obligations had outgrown it.
I prioritised personal pay while the business carried debt
At the same time, I was deeply focused on paying myself well.
Part of that came from wanting to provide for my family and prove that the business could create meaningful personal income. I matched my partner’s earnings, then exceeded them. We built household savings.
Meanwhile, business debt remained on the credit card.
Paying yourself is important, obviously. My entire body of work would become slightly awkward if I suggested otherwise. But a salary cannot be separated from the health of the business funding it.
If maintaining a higher personal transfer prevents the business from building cash, repaying expensive debt or covering future commitments, the salary may be temporarily weakening the source it depends on.
There are periods when reducing pay is the responsible decision. That does not mean returning to “pay yourself whatever is left” forever. It means making a defined trade-off with a date, amount and purpose.
Business and personal spending started to blur
As a sole trader, the cards were held personally, even when they were used for business spending. Over time, occasional personal purchases joined the business investments on the same cards.
The thought was always similar: it will be fine, because the business will make more money.
Then the debt became emotionally harder to hold because I could no longer mentally separate the investment debt from consumer spending. I had previously paid off personal debt, so finding myself there again brought stress, tears and the charming experience of snapping at people who had not personally designed my credit-card statement.
Eventually, my partner and I used household savings to clear a significant part of it. Some business debt remained, and I began changing the way the business handled cash and future investments.
That is the context behind the rules in this episode. They were not assembled from a tasteful finance textbook. I paid for them.
Mistake one: shiny-object investing
I am extremely susceptible to a good sales message.
I like business. I like strategy. I enjoy being sold to when the selling is clever, which means a well-timed email can have me considering a programme I had no idea I needed seventeen minutes earlier.
ADHD adds a particular flavour. The new idea is interesting, the possibility creates energy and buying the solution feels like momentum before any implementation has occurred.
None of that makes the seller responsible for my purchase.
Ethical selling should give a buyer accurate information, a clear promise and space to make a decision. The buyer still has to assess whether the thing solves her problem. I am a grown woman with access to the unsubscribe button.
Before buying, ask:
- Is this addressing a current constraint?
- What evidence shows that constraint exists?
- Do I already own the strategy or information?
- Have I implemented what I already bought?
- Is the new offer useful, or is it more emotionally exciting than the boring work currently required?
Sometimes the correct investment is three months of using the thing already sitting in your course portal.
Delete the email. You will cope.
Mistake two: buying somebody else’s outcome
An aspirational purchase happens when you want the seller’s life, income or business more than you need the specific mechanism she is selling.
You see the revenue, the house, the team, the school-hours diary or the beautifully calm Tuesday afternoon and think, I want that, so perhaps I need whatever she is offering.
But you do not know the full commercial context.
Her audience may be ten times larger. Her business may operate in a market with different demand. Her partner may fund most of the household. Her revenue may be high while her personal pay is low. She may be carrying debt, sacrificing profit or using a delivery model you would hate.
At the time of this recording, most people following me did not know the full story behind my business debt either.
This is not an argument against aspirational marketing. Results matter. Seeing what is possible can help somebody move. But the seller’s outcome does not prove the offer is the missing input in your business.
Buy the mechanism, not the aesthetic evidence that the seller has a life you like.
More revenue does not automatically create more money for you
The phrase “you have to spend money to make money” contains enough truth to become dangerous when used without a limit.
An investment may create revenue. Ads may bring leads. A coach may improve the offer. A team member may increase capacity.
Each decision also raises the amount the business must generate before the owner sees any benefit.
If a new strategy adds £3,000 of monthly revenue and £2,800 of delivery, advertising and support costs, the top line grew beautifully. The owner received £200 more before tax.
The number getting bigger does not tell you whether the business got better.
I have seen multi-six-figure businesses where very little reaches the owner because the infrastructure required to produce the revenue consumes it. I cannot make a universal claim about every large business, and I do not need to. The calculation is specific:
What additional cash, profit, capacity or time should this investment create after its full cost?
If that answer is missing, you are investing in motion.
Mistake three: using the wrong affordability test
My old affordability test was: can I make the payment right now?
Sometimes that meant cash in the account. Sometimes it meant room on a credit card and a plausible future in which the repayments became easier.
Neither tells you whether the business can afford the investment.
Three numbers are commonly used incorrectly:
- Revenue.
- Profit.
- Bank balance.
Revenue is not available cash because it still has expenses and obligations attached. Profit is not automatically available because it may need to fund tax, your salary, debt or future commitments. The bank balance is a snapshot containing money with different jobs.
The affordability number I use is overflow.
Affordability begins after the important jobs
Overflow is what remains after the business has covered its expenses, allocated tax, paid the agreed owner’s salary and funded the other financial priorities already decided.
If the investment can be paid from overflow without pulling the business below its safety level, it is affordable in current cashflow.
That does not automatically make it worthwhile. A completely affordable course can still be irrelevant. It means the purchase does not rely on future growth to rescue the decision.
You may decide an essential investment deserves a deliberate trade-off. Perhaps you temporarily reduce another expense, lower personal pay or use a payment plan because the return is well evidenced and the timing matters.
But name the trade-off before buying.
What changes? For how long? What result should the investment produce? When will you review it? What happens if the expected return does not arrive?
“I’ll make it work” is not a cashflow mechanism.
Episode 6 explains business overflow in more detail, and Episode 16 looks at what happens when current income no longer covers the obligations.
Debt is a funding choice, not proof of affordability
Using debt does not automatically make an investment irresponsible. Borrowing can be a deliberate commercial decision when the cost, repayment and downside have been assessed.
But available credit is not the same as affordable cashflow.
If affordability is the only remaining issue, and the investment solves a proven constraint, you can compare options. Ask the seller about payment terms. Model the repayments. Consider what happens if the result takes twice as long as expected. Get appropriately qualified advice where the borrowing is material or personally secured.
The mistake I made was not using a credit card in isolation. It was attaching the repayment to growth I had not proved the business could produce.
Debt amplified the forecasting error.
Mistake four: desperation purchasing
Desperation purchases arrive with a very specific internal sentence:
This has to work.
The business needs money, the pipeline feels thin and somebody sells an offer as the missing catalyst. Buying creates immediate relief because you have done something, even though the commercial result still depends on what happens afterwards.
“I need more money” is not a diagnosis. It is a symptom.
Why is revenue low? Are there too few qualified leads? Are people reaching the sales page and leaving? Are discovery calls happening but not converting? Is the offer unable to hit the target within capacity? Are existing clients leaving faster than they are replaced?
Imagine the data shows plenty of qualified traffic reaches a sales page, but very few people continue to checkout. That is a specific conversion gap. Investing in expert sales-page support may be commercially sensible because you can name the problem, the relevant expertise and the metric that should change.
Compare that with hiring a broad business coach because you want more money and she posted a very shiny revenue screenshot.
One decision follows evidence. The other follows urgency.
Borrow somebody else’s judgement before buying
One of my clients discusses major purchases with her partner. She is not asking for permission. She uses him as a sounding board because she knows she can become excited by marketing and wants another person to test the reasoning.
I decided to use the same idea.
Choose somebody who understands the goal but has no incentive to hype you into the purchase. Give them the numbers and the argument:
- This is the constraint I have identified.
- This is the evidence.
- This is what the investment costs in full.
- This is how it fits current cashflow.
- This is the result it should create.
- This is what I will do if it does not.
If explaining the decision makes the gaps obvious, excellent. That conversation has saved you several thousand pounds and a future password reset for another learning portal.
When investing does make sense
The answer is not to stop investing and attempt to build the entire business alone with free PDFs and raw determination.
Investment makes sense when the business has a real constraint, the purchase addresses it and the financial model can hold the cost.
There are three situations I would look at.
Invest in a specific, evidenced gap
This is the clearest case.
Your sales data shows the conversion problem. Delivery is profitable but capacity has reached its limit. Leads are strong, proposals are accepted and administration is consuming hours that could be used for paid work. The offer is selling, but retention data shows clients need a missing step.
The investment should map directly to the gap.
Do not hire a brand designer to solve a lead-follow-up problem. Do not buy a visibility course when the audience is clicking and the sales page is losing them. Do not hire an operations person to organise five offers that should probably become one.
The clearer the constraint, the easier it becomes to evaluate whether the investment worked.
Invest in capacity when demand already exists
Hiring in anticipation of growth can feel wonderfully grown-up. New team member, new systems, enormous CEO mug, the whole production.
But capacity added before demand becomes a fixed cost the current business has to carry.
I invested to support the growth I expected rather than the demand already present. When growth failed to arrive, the infrastructure remained.
A stronger trigger is demonstrated demand. You are turning work away, delivery is full, response times are affecting sales or administrative tasks are genuinely restricting profitable activity.
There is a fair objection: once you are that busy, when do you find time to hire and onboard?
Prepare before you hire. Document the repeated processes now. Record yourself completing a task, dictate the steps into your phone or keep a basic operating document. Then, when demand makes the hire necessary, the knowledge is not stored entirely inside your head during the busiest week of your life.
Build the instructions early. Add the payroll later.
Invest when the operational fixes are exhausted
Sometimes the business has plateaued, the obvious gaps have been checked and the strategy is being implemented. Leads exist. Conversion is healthy. Capacity is available. The offer economics work.
And still, the owner repeatedly pulls back from the next level of action.
That may be the point for identity or behavioural work, not because every revenue plateau is a subconscious ceiling, but because the observable behaviour suggests an internal constraint.
In my case, another coach helped me notice the fear underneath earning more. Would I become unrelatable? Would out-earning my partner change something? Was I avoiding rocking a boat that felt familiar?
The reflection landed because it explained behaviour I could see. I had the strategy and understood the numbers, but some of my decisions kept protecting the existing level.
That is a legitimate use of coaching. It is very different from buying mindset support because the business made less money this month and you have not checked the pipeline.
Diagnose the business before diagnosing your identity.
The questions to ask before investing
Use this decision sequence before buying a course, coach, team member, tool, rebrand or expensive new tactic.
1. What specific problem am I solving?
Name the observable constraint, not the desired outcome. “More revenue” is an outcome. “Only 8% of qualified sales calls convert” is a constraint.
2. What evidence proves it is the problem?
Use sales data, capacity, client feedback, time tracking, profit margins or repeated behaviour. Do not promote one uncomfortable week into a business diagnosis.
3. Do I already own the solution?
Check previous programmes, advice, systems and unfinished implementation. Information you have not used does not become more effective when repurchased with new branding.
4. Does this investment address that exact gap?
Understand the mechanism. What will change because of the purchase, and what must you still implement yourself?
5. Can current cashflow afford the full cost?
Look at overflow after expenses, tax, owner’s pay and existing priorities, not revenue or the bank balance.
6. What is the expected return?
It may be profit, capacity, time, conversion, retained clients or reduced risk. Specify the measurement and realistic timeframe.
7. What does the downside look like?
If the return is delayed or never arrives, can the business still meet its obligations? Which cost, salary or goal carries the consequence?
8. Who can challenge the decision?
Talk it through with somebody capable of questioning the assumption, rather than somebody who believes supporting you means saying yes enthusiastically.
My rules after overinvesting
The decisions I made going forward were deliberately less exciting than the investments that created the problem.
I stopped using debt for personal spending. I reduced what I paid myself temporarily so the business could rebuild cash. The plan was to use those reserves to make lump-sum repayments against the remaining business debt.
For new investments, the rules became:
- it must solve a clearly evidenced gap;
- it must fit current cashflow, or involve a deliberate and fully modelled funding decision;
- and it must survive a conversation with somebody who will challenge me.
I also stopped assuming I needed to invest in more capacity simply because growth was the goal. The forecast did not show that demand required it.
These rules did not come from deciding debt is bad or investment is dangerous. They came from separating useful leverage from spending that relied on a future version of the business to make it sensible.
Awareness is more useful than perfection
One of the frightening parts of sharing this story was the possibility that people would decide a financial expert should never make a financial mistake.
Therapists still need therapists. Doctors still need doctors. A person who understands business finance can still struggle to see her own decision clearly while she is inside it.
The credibility is not in never getting anything wrong. It is in understanding the mechanism, changing the system and not selling perfection as the qualification.
I had a system that worked. My decisions stopped following it.
That is fixable.
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Want an investment decision based on the business you actually have?
Inside Momentum, we do not fix every revenue problem by adding another programme, hire or marketing tactic. We look at the numbers, identify the real constraint and decide which change can improve sales, capacity, cashflow and take-home pay without creating another expensive layer the business has to carry.
Apply for Momentum, and we’ll make the next investment answer to the evidence.
