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We've made a lot of progress as a society in many of the areas that we needed to in the last few hundred years. But one thing that has not changed enough is money. If we want to be able to tip the scales towards the favor of marginalized people, we need to understand the secrets to making money in small business. The more we talk about money and the secrets that usually stay at the golf club, the more likely we are to be able to make money. My mission is to get more money into the hands of good people, specifically good business people like you. This is Money Secrets, the place to learn about the money secrets of successful small business owners. Because I believe small business can change the world. And in order to do that, we need to be making a lot of money. Let's go.
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This podcast episode was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. And I'd like to acknowledge them as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and water that I live, work, and play on. I'd like to pay respects to elders, both past and present, and note that sovereignty has never been ceded.
This always was. and always will be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
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Money doesn't grow on trees. How many of you heard that statement growing up? Maybe some of you are still hearing that statement now. This was a really common thing that was said by my parents and the parents of my friends as I was growing up, especially in reaction to us asking for the latest pair of shoes or wanting to do. guitar lessons or whatever it was that we were trying to add, uh, to our family's budget. Money doesn't grow on trees was something that was said all the time to me as a child and to many others as well. So I want to unpack it because I think it's really important to understand that when you are a business owner, your mind is so important.
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Of course, as a human, your mind is very important too, but your skills are often less important than what is happening inside your mind and with your behaviours. Now, as we've discussed on previous episodes, your money behaviours will be dictated by the thoughts and feelings that you have about money. So, if you have had this sentence, money doesn't grow on trees.
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Floating around your head for a long time. I'd like to unpack it. The first thing that I want to talk about is the fact that if you heard that somewhere in the last, say, 50 years, in Australia particularly, 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, perhaps even 20 years ago, The economy was nowhere near as strong as it is now.
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I know we're now talking about cost of living crisis, but in fact the Australian economy has changed so much in the last 40, 50, 30, 20 years. So, our families had a lot less disposable income, especially even a hundred years ago. And the way that we work has changed significantly too. When you think back to the jobs of our grandparents generations, or perhaps your great grandparents if you're really young, our grandparents did work that was mainly physical.
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So, nursing, teaching, doctor. Mechanic, baker, butcher, most roles of our grandparents generation were physical. That's not to say that they weren't smart people, but the work that existed in that generation was fairly physical and I suppose for most people quite transactional. When you think about the way that we are able to earn an income now, it is drastically different.
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So we are now in the knowledge economy. So now when you look at the workforce in Australia, there are still many people who are working in jobs that are physical, but there are lots more jobs. And I would say most people listening to this podcast who are small business owners, we tend to work in knowledge economy jobs.
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So what does that mean? It means that we are being employed because of our skills and our opinions. Rather than our physical abilities, right? So, what that means is that it is actually really difficult for us to try to compare how much money a family has now in their discretionary budget, or a business for that matter, compared to what it was like for our grandparents generation.
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It was like that for many of our parents generations too, so our parents, or perhaps if you're really young and listening to this podcast, this might reflect on your grandparents generation. So there has been a really significant change in the sort of demographics of Australia that many people have been moving from what's called working class up to the middle class.
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Most people in Australia are still in the middle class, although I would say that what's happening with our economy and the sort of mega corporations like Amazon and the big mining companies is actually skewing our economy a lot, which really concerns me. I think seeing the divide between the rich and the poor grow is really troubling to me, but maybe that's for another episode.
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What I'm trying to get at is that there actually is a lot more money in our disposable budgets now than there was 50 years ago. There didn't used to be such a thing as like, going out for breakfast. You know, now we have all of this choice of where we're going to be having breakfast, whether we're getting takeout for lunch.
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Uh, what kind of clothing we're buying, people are spending lots more disposable income on, you know, disposable items than our parents, grandparents and great grandparents ever could have. So this mindset that money doesn't grow on trees comes from the generations before us. But when we look at today's society, it might be true to say that money kind of does grow on trees.
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Just to give you a silly example, you think about the fruit called durian, which I've never tried by the way. It's extremely expensive and apparently very stinky. And it grows on trees. So could we actually say That money kind of does grow on trees. Money used to be made out of paper and still is in many countries in the world.
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Apparently Australia's currency is one of the most technologically advanced of the world, which I think is really cool. But if money is made from paper and paper comes from trees, then there's another argument to say that money literally It grows on trees. Why am I playing with all these silly ideas?
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Because this idea that money doesn't grow on trees is really living in the past. Now money literally grows everywhere. There is so much money in the world today. We don't even have to make it. All we need to do is go and ask for it. So if we keep believing this idea that money doesn't grow on trees, we're going to use that every time we get a rejection from our customers telling us that our prices are too high.
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We are going to have that thought come up every time we see something that we want to purchase. It might be a new iPhone. It could be a coaching program or an event that you really want to invest in for your business. It could be that you're wanting to buy a new range of stock for your e commerce business and the prices are just so much more than you expected, you might have this thought in your mind that money doesn't grow on trees.
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And if you use that sentence in your mind as a way of kind of stopping yourself from taking the next step or self sabotaging your efforts, to make money or to invest money in really great things, you are doing yourself a disservice. It's really cool to think about the fact that you can literally make money from your brain.
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I often think about how cool it would be to be able to tell my grandmas, who are both unfortunately no longer alive, I just think it would be so amazing to be able to explain to them the kind of work that I do. I get paid. really well to give advice to small business owners. That often just happens from my computer and with an internet connection.
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I just think that my grandparents would have so much trouble being able to understand how easy I have it compared to, you know, what it was like to have an income and have a career in their generation. So. If you think about all of the different ideas out there that have been, you know, turned into businesses, if you think about all of the ways that you can improve the lives of your clients or improve the businesses of your clients.
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That is how you make money. And you could actually even turn the whole thing around to say, Hey, money does grow on trees. Money grows in the air. It grows in the water. It grows from the soil. Money grows from wherever it is that I am able to put my efforts and energy. And so, when we are able to think about money as something that can grow from anywhere, that can grow from our ideas, that we can turn an idea that we had yesterday into a thriving business within 12 months.
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Small business has the potential to literally turn thoughts into money. So maybe next time you have the thought or you hear yourself say out loud that money doesn't grow on trees. Maybe you could flip that in your mind to say money literally grows from my mind. I really hope that helps you to make different choices and have different behaviors around money next time this thought comes up.
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I'll see you in the next episode.
[00:10:33] Thank you so much for listening right up to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Money Secrets, where we talk about the money secrets of successful small business owners. If you enjoyed the episode, I'd love it if you subscribe to the podcast, but leave us a review or share this episode with one of your friends.
I hope you learned something, I hope you got a new perspective, and I really hope you enjoyed the listening experience.
