Today I’m talking about why I talk about money, and we’re going to lead into a series of episodes that are more around financial literacy and well-being than, say tips, tricks. Maybe I’m not talking a lot about sales or some of the other things I talk about. This is just pure money talk week after week after week. Make sure you tune back in for the next few weeks as these roll out.
Some of the topics might seem a little dry. However, they are things that you want to know because you are asking me and/or I am watching you, let’s be honest, fuck it up. This is me talking about the dryer, maybe slightly boring things about money. However, I promise I’m going to try and make it entertaining.
As a reminder to you, if you are new, my owner’s statement, the reason why I own a business is to build a business that is in service to my health while creating extraordinary wealth for myself and others.
Additionally, my mission is to help 1,000 women small-business owners increase their owners’ pay by 50% by 2026, while reducing their work time. I want to see you all pay yourselves well, give yourself fat paydays, pay increases, and work less.
I have a model that helps us do it and I have a lot of research and proven foundational strategies in there that allow you to focus on high-impact activities that are easy on your energy. We’ll probably be talking through a little bit of that formula in the next couple of episodes as well. But that is my mission to help at least 1,000 women, heck, if I could do more, I’m all for it.
First and foremost that I have tried to avoid talking about money.
I have tried to avoid talking about money for years. You can ask my team, my coaches, my husband, my mentors, my CFO, you can ask them, this is not something that I have wanted to talk about. If you go way back in the Wayback Machine, you will see my struggle with this over time.
I’ll never forget, it’s 2018 when Stacey Harris joins my team on a consistent and regular basis to produce the podcast and she goes into what is at that point probably a year’s worth of podcasts content, and says, “You know, your highest downloads are when you talk about money.” I was like, “Oh, that’s nice. I’m going to still talk about all these other things and not talk about money that much.”
It wasn’t until 2020 that we even rebranded the podcast from The Bold Leadership Revolution Podcast to The Bold Money Revolution Podcast. Listen, I’m just keeping it real here. That is how I talk about money. We are going to keep this shit real. The last thing I have wanted to do is put myself out there on the internet and talk about money. It really doesn’t feel safe for me to do this.
When I say safe, I mean in my body, it doesn’t feel safe, and I ebb and flow between softening the message and just saying it the way I want to say it, which inevitably turns into a bit of a spicier message. It turns up the heat and dysregulates my nervous system. It might disregulate your nervous system too, hearing it in that direct and blunt manner but it disregulates my nervous system.
While nobody has directly called me out, and to be honest, you all really love my spicier episodes, you DM me and you’re like, “That was fire, you were salty, spicy, all the things, ranty,” you like when I bring my New York-ness to these episodes and I appreciate that you appreciate that because that is scary for me to do. When you ping me in my DMs and you’re like, “That was a good episode,” I’m like, “Thank goodness, they’re not going to come after me with pitchforks and fire and burn me alive.” That really feels good when you do that.
While nobody has actually done that or called me out directly, I have certainly heard that “Well, you just make money because you talk about money,” which is something I have feared for a long time and has kept me not talking about money because I don’t want to be one of those people who make money because they talk about money or the coach who wasn’t successful talking about what they want, so all of a sudden, next thing you know, they’re talking about sales with having no background in sales. You know that cliche that we see on the internet, the pseudo experts, the fake-it-till-you-can make-it bunch. I don’t ever want to be that person.
But I’m actually not. I’ve always made money regardless of what I talk about because I excel at the competencies, skills, and abilities it takes to make money no matter how comfortable or uncomfortable I feel in the making of the money.
I am a rainmaker. I’m an opportunity creator. I’m someone who sees value and knows how to position it. I’ve always been that person, even when I was a kid. I talk about money because I’m good at it. I talk about money because I understand that money is energy and it’s a tool. I talk about money because I have neutrality. I have hard-earned neutrality around money.
People tell me that I talk about money in a way that does not jack up their nervous system. I love that. That is what I am here to do. I talk about money because I love it. I find it fun and consider it my hobby. I spend hours a day reviewing numbers, looking at investment charts, playing with my P&L. That sounds naughty.
When I started my business, I was twisted up in knots about money and didn’t understand how it worked in my business.
Whenever I share these stories that go way back to the beginning, I cringe, I could feel the red and the heat rising to my face. But when I started my business, I was charging $10 per hour for coaching.
I had a master’s degree and 15 plus years of experience and I was charging $10 per hour, less than what babysitters charge. I was not recording a single transaction. It was an incredibly rude awakening. Let’s all have a good laugh. This might be a rude awakening for you right now. You might be this many days old when you first heard this, but it was a big rude awakening for me when I realized that $100,000 in revenue does not equal $100,000 in salary.
When you’re eight months pregnant and it dawns on you that the baby has to come out, is it just me, or am I late to the party on these things? Did that dawn on anybody? I was like eight months pregnant. I was like, “Oh my goodness. This thing is kicking and moving and it needs to exit my body how?” It was the same kind of moment. At the end of my first year in business, my husband had to swoop in and rescue me by entering all my transactions into the accounting software and figure out my taxes, and I hated it.
I’m sure he was fairly unfazed, but I perceived him to be super annoyed and mansplainy. I’m telling you, I swear it. I’m like, “I am never doing this again with you. If we want to stay married, this is not a good use of our time together. There will not be enough therapy in the world to save us if we have to do this again.” Honestly I was at that point where I was like, “Fuck these dudes and their money. It’s my time. I’m going to be a woman of means, a wealthy woman. I’m going to figure this out.”
I went to hire a bookkeeper. When I went to hire a bookkeeper, he told me I couldn’t hire someone until I learned how to do it on my own. I had to learn how to do my own data entry first. He was right but, good lord, I was pissed.
We cannot abdicate these things in our business.
I see this all the time; women wanting to hire people to do sales for them, to be call centers, social sellers, or whatever the thing without even understanding their own sales process, without even understanding sales, without understanding how to manage somebody doing sales, without being able to sell anything themselves. Don’t do it. We can’t abdicate. That’s not the way we get to abundance.
Abdicate your way to abundance, you abdicate abundance. When I started my business at 39, I hadn’t even really paid any bills. Each week my check got directly deposited, and John handled everything. This goes back to before we were even married because we were together for a long time and then we lived together for about a year and even when we were living together, it’s just like, “Yeah, here’s the money. Let’s just combine accounts. I can’t be fucked off about this. You handle it.” Completely abdicated.
I didn’t have a good practice around my money. In 2016, I vowed to make $100,000 in revenue and gain a shred of financial literacy. Now, in my 20s, I read all the finance books. My 401(k) was on autopilot. I could hear Suze Orman in my head, but reading and taking action to apply the knowledge are two different things. Very different things. I came from a corporate background where I was no stranger to budgets and P&L, but it’s wildly different. When it’s your own business, factor in generational narratives, society’s bullshittery, and the fuckery of the internet, and taking control of your business finances can be quite the ride.
From that moment, in 2016 to now, I really buckled up. I raised the bar for myself. I now raise the bar for all of you. I went from a goal of making $100,000 in revenue per year to a goal of investing $100,000 in my business and personal development and being the woman who invests in herself at that level. Then I set a goal of having a team that I pay $100,000 to so I can make money easier, have more time back, give people jobs that they find interesting and enjoyable and not be alone in my business.
Flash forward to most recently, we’re setting a goal of investing $100,000 a year so my profit continues to grow without me having to work for it. We are going to get there. We’re going to talk about that in this series quite a few episodes down because we are a long way from where you are right now to there. Being able to do this and seeing these goals gives me a hell a lot of peace of mind as a business owner.
My next goal is to be able to pull that ripcord whenever I want. Currently, I still have to work to maintain my lifestyle. But now I think about the day when I don’t have to do that. Of course, I’m most likely going to still choose to work because thankfully, when I retired from corporate America, I created something that fuels me on most days and allows me to step back when it doesn’t. But having that option of pulling that ripcord sounds dreamy, especially if that becomes an option in the next 5 to 10 years while I’m 50 or 55.
This whole concept of retiring at 65, is for the muggles, no, not for us small-business owners.
We have way more control over our money than that. Even now, my business revenue goals are based on what I want my life to look like and not some weird, ego-driven garbage that someone else deems as valid. My goals are based on the things that I just shared with you. My next goal, my revenue goal, is based on what I need to do to provide for my family to hit $100,000 invested and be on track to be able to pull that ripcord whenever I want. That’s the number I hit. Not seven-figure this, not eight-figure whatever.
That is why we have the Revenue Goal Calculator. That’s why we created that for you so you can be on track in that way as well. I talk about money not because I’m exceptional at managing money and using it as a tool, I am, but because like the Stoic philosophy and Ryan Holiday suggests, the obstacle is the way, this has been an obstacle for me that I have hunkered down, dug into, figured out, rumbled with, gnash my teeth on, leaned into, gotten uncomfortable with. I may not understand all the intersections that come with every single person’s lived experience, but I know enough to be open to that and open to it.
I know that your journey with money isn’t as simple as it seems.
Selfishly I talk about money because I’m ready for women to rise to a level of unprecedented economic power. I’m ready for it. I’m here. I’m waiting. I want more wealthy women friends who realize that relying on someone else to meet your financial goals is riskier than any investment you can ever make.
Bet on you, ladies, bet on you. I want women to have more time with their families, to be compensated exceptionally well for the work they do, to have the financial resources required to support their health, experience more fun, and do whatever else they want to do.
I want you to have the choice and options you want, the freedom you deserve, and the power you crave so deep in your soul that you are afraid to give it a voice. These are the things that women tell me on calls that they’re not talking about on social media, that they’re not talking about on Instagram, that they want power, freedom, choice, and options.
Here I am, me and microphone, desperately wanting to share everything I’ve learned in the last 20-plus years with you to combat some of the misinformation you might find on the internet, to raise the bar for you, and say listen—higher expectations is a dirty word—I do have higher expectations for you because I know what’s possible. I know you can do it. I believe in you. I believe that everything you want is here for you right now. I have to believe that. That is my worldview. I will not ever not believe that because then I will have lost hope. That’s not a good place to be.
I’m here to talk about the stuff that nobody talks about. This brings me to how I am closing out this episode. I am challenging each and every one of you to get right with your money stuff because if you can’t get right with the money stuff, you have no business running a business. I am here to implore you to give your relationship with money serious consideration because I very much do want to see more women leverage their small businesses to create wealth in this world.
