If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Business Consultant Anne Marie Graham

What’s the most valuable piece of financial advice you ever received?

The first seminar I ever attended of Brian Tracy’s when he visited Dublin in 2005. I was a year in business. He said, “Pay Yourself First”. That was a challenge for me, as new start-ups tend to pump everything back into the business and pay themselves last! It’s the biggest mistake I see business owners make.

Work-life balance. What are your thoughts?

This remains something I have to keep very focused on. I am a recovering perfectionist and workaholic and I only realised how much I had sacrificed self-care in my first business when I had sold it. I prefer to think of work-life balance as balancing work and life. I think it is like a scales, sometimes it will tip too much in one direction but I think the vital thing is that we notice that and correct it so the scales keeps balancing between one side and the other.

What has been your most proud moment in business so far?

I had always wanted to travel to California and train with Jack Canfield on his Success Principles program. His program inspires personal mastery, resilience, and achievement through transformational growth, and they were the key things I had to develop when I went into business (against the odds!). When he was in Dublin in 2006, I told him I am going to treat myself to that when I sell the business, having no idea how I would make that happen. I went out to do the training in 2016 and he gave me a lovely signed copy of his book. That was a real moment of self-realisation for me which I was so proud of.

Having a five-year plan – yes or no?

Overall, I’m a yes. I think the main thing is that you have a big vision for what it is you want your business/career to be. What is it that you really, really want? It’s the vision that keeps you going. I grew my business through the last recession, so the five-year plan needed to be pivoted and rejigged, but the vision didn’t change.

I think five-year plans can be used a guide to engineer the key steps/milestones you need to achieve, but I have to say that in the last five years no one could have predicted all of the life events that have happened worldwide so I would say, have a guide but detach from the timeframe being an ultimate deadline. It’s the vision that’s important.

What’s your go-to quotation for inspiration?

Jack Canfield always says, “You get what you focus on, so focus on what you want.” I paraphrase this with clients to tell them we find what we focus on so it’s really important we watch where our focus goes.

If you knew then what you know now, would you do anything differently?

I would have worked on my self-value so much sooner when I became an entrepreneur, as our net worth and our self-worth will always go hand in hand. I say it to all of my female clients in particular: your self-value and your business value are a reflection of each other. I have always been interested in self-development and neuroscience and studied it from when I qualified as a nurse and went into neuroscience clinically, but it wasn’t until I was coached in the principles of self-value/beliefs/paradigm shift that I really embodied it and results started to elevate.