“You don’t hate money do you?”

Well, I was beginning to think maybe I did.

From 2016 to 2021, I started and quit over 5 businesses without any significant success, despite 7 years of researching, experimenting, taking courses, building websites, and hustling. Frustrated, I dove even deeper into courses, hoping to find the thing that would finally unlock “all my potential.” 

But all the mindset work in the courses was based on the underlying assumption that you WANT to make money - which would have been great if I did. 

The thing is, entrepreneurial resources are assuming that you, the business owner and visionary, are so driven to be successful that you’ll figure it out (hopefully while you’re in their program so they can claim your success). The assumption is that if your Why is Big enough you’ll keep hustling and iterating until you find the thing that is the most successful.

Like it or not, money is the easiest metric by which to measure success. However, online there seems to be a naive sort of attitude about it: that money will either sort itself out (ie, “success”) or that it’ll never quite click (ie,  “failure”). 

The entire trajectory of every business ever is riding on money, and yet there is next to no information on what business finances actually look like.

There’s lots of reasons for that, but the top ones are secrecy and legal regulations. The government doesn’t want people to brag about their revenue and give people false guarantees, and businesses don’t want to brag about how much they spent and what they spent it on lest rival businesses learn a trade secret.

These are reasonable reasons, but it leaves us with a shocking lack of information on business finance - especially in online entrepreneurship circles. I would hazard a guess that the majority of people starting or buying businesses right now didn’t go to business school. 

And even if you did, I hazard another guess that business school didn’t teach you the nitty gritty of money… what it is and how it works. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a cautious person. 

I want to do things right - and preferably do it right the first time. 

After years of money and success mindset work in all those courses, I realized something about myself that would probably get me laughed out of every Facebook group ever. 

I didn’t really want to make money.

Now, all the money mindset coaches said that was just because my Why wasn’t motivating enough: that I needed to find something more compelling to keep me moving. 

But the truth was, I was scared of money itself. 

The only references I could find to money in online business literature were either vague income claims or horror stories about how they couldn’t make payroll and might have to go to jail for not being able to pay their taxes. Every reference to money was either extremely vague about the positive changes it made, and/or designed to terrify the shenanigans out of you at the thought of not having enough money.

Now, what is the first rule of behavioral change? You’ve got to have a clear vision of where you want to go, and the pain of staying the same has to be worse than your fear of change.

With vague income claims, I didn’t have a clear vision of what to expect or how it would directly impact my life. 

With horror stories about failing spectacularly, I concluded that moving towards money was likely to be more painful than staying where I was. 

Sure I didn’t have a lot of money, but I had all my immediate needs met. I was safe and comfortable. If “success” is an uncontrollably voracious cycle of income unable to keep up with expenses, where the owner has to keep grinding, hustling, and “making it work” in order to stay afloat, I was better off where I was.

But I couldn’t help myself - I wanted to see what I was capable of. I wanted to prove that all my ideas were worth something. I wanted to get a massage once a month and be able to treat my husband to a fancy dinner.

So I did what I do best - I made a spreadsheet.

I started with my personal finances. 

Taking the philosophies of money I had developed, I built a plumbing system that managed my money for me. And as I showed up and built consistency, I realized the key to everything; the big secret that no one ever seemed to tell.

Money is money.

Business money isn’t a different species than personal money. 

Budget reports (to see how much you made vs what you spent) is the personal money twin of a business’s profit and loss. 

Net worth spreadsheets that calculate your assets (home, car, IRA, etc) against your liabilities (credit cards, loans, mortgages) are the personal balance sheet.

If you can understand those numbers in a personal setting (which is super easy to do), you won’t have any trouble reading a business financial statement. 

When I realized how personal money management translated to business finance, I was outraged. 

Why did online entrepreneur gurus make finance sound like the black box of business? Why did they refuse to give even the most basic of financial process advice?

I paid more attention to what these gurus were NOT saying and had an epiphany: they were scared of money too!

They thought they could outrun their fear - that they could make enough to keep throwing moolah at the money monster hot on their heels; but eventually they burned out, gave up, or got eaten spectacularly.

It was shocking how many business owners were scared of money. Scared of not making enough, scared of making too much, scared of people finding out how little they understood about it in general. 

Scared of people who understood it better screwing them over.

I’ve experienced that to some extent with every accounting client I’ve had. Some are more self-aware and therefore gracious about it and some are eager to learn so they can know who to trust. But unfortunately, most are suspicious and quick to assume that their bookkeeper, accountant, CPA, etc is screwing them over since they don’t understand their own money.

I didn’t want that to be me. I started asking the hard questions no one wants to answer:

• Was it possible to not get into those bad situations at all, no matter how much money you made? Is being broke and in over your head really a “rite of passage?”
• Secondly, wasn’t being unable to pay payroll and taxes a failure of the business owner to manage their cash flow, and not an income issue?
• Thirdly, weren’t they actually setting people up to get into those situations by assuming that one could always “sell their way out of a hole” - which is the very strategy that got them in the hole in the first place?

So I started studying business finances specifically. 

I found bookkeeping to be empowering, pulling reports to be fun, and running analyses to be everything I had hoped business coaching would be. The numbers speak for themselves. No more guessing what aspect of the business needed to be streamlined first, or how to know which promotion was the most successful. Now I had cold hard data and the means to understand it.

When I started getting back into the online entrepreneurial world, the lack of basic business financial literacy was mind-boggling. When people don’t know the difference between gross revenue and net revenue, income claims can put someone in a much higher “authority positioning” than they’ve really earned. (Next time you see someone claim they had a “6 figure launch,” ask whether that was gross revenue or profit.)

I started to notice that most of these courses and masterminds were confusing people who were trying to get out of the rat race - employees who were used to the number they saw on their pay stub being the amount of money they had to work with. 

It was easy to claim that “you can make 6 figures in 3 months” and get people excited without bothering to explain that the gross revenue could be 6 figures, but by the time you paid 50% to the ad platform, paid off your subcontractors, and saved 40% for taxes, you the owner are actually left with nothing and you may have to put some of your own money in to cover the subcontractors. 

Am I saying that every business owner also needs to be an accountant? 

Not at all. You certainly don’t have to learn accounting or even do your own bookkeeping. But it is 100% possible - and easy! - to understand your money.

1.  Renounce the idea that money has to be complicated. (Even just calling it “finances” makes it sound more complex.)

Money is really very simple - in fact, it doesn’t exist. It’s an agreement: a standardized way to numerically represent the value changing hands between two people. You don’t even have to have money to exchange value - like with bartering. 

Standardized money (“currency”) makes it easier to create a frame of reference for value, which is why new governments always establish new currency as soon as they take over. You could just as easily use clam shells (or “wampum”), as long as everyone agrees that five fingernail-sized shells are equal to one palm-sized shell. 

The point is that money is a wild card that can be applied to anything at any time in any capacity. It follows the rules of water in a spiritual sense, and the rules of math in every other sense. 

True money management comes down to basic arithmetic. Does it add up or not? 

The only skills you need to manage 80% of your money is addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The further you go into data analysis, the fancier math you have to use, and the more complicated it looks… but that means the math is complicated, not the money. 

2. Develop a mental frame of reference for how you think about money.

I personally use the analogy of water - every money problem I’ve ever had to wrap my mind around was instantly resolved when I pictured money flowing through pools and pipelines. You can also think of money as the “lifeblood,” “vital energy,” “chi,” or “spirit” of a business. 

3. Train yourself to focus on the big picture - the plumbing system of your business - and how money flows through it.

You don’t need an accountant to tell you how healthy your business is if you have a mental picture of your inflow and outflow and the holding pools (or accounts) in between. You probably already have something in your gut that’s telling you already - now you just want to know exactly what the numbers are saying. 

If you’d like my help to lock down your own money system - as well as personalized coaching for setting up or streamlining your business’s financial processes - >>click here<< to get on the waitlist for the next available spot!