[00:00:00] Fi Johnston
Humans are not linear, and our decisions don't always make sense. Humans make decisions through a lens of emotions, instinct, data, and experience, and we become profitable by navigating our emotions and behaviors. All of the unrecognized mental load that women are carrying outside of their businesses can be made slightly easier when our businesses are profitable.
Intro
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. Let's go.
Acknowledgement of Country
[00:01:00] This podcast episode was recorded on the lands of the Wie people of the KO 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 notes that sovereignty has never been seeded. This always was and always will be. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
My name's Fi, and I'm the host of the Money Secrets podcast. I'm a chartered accountant who has spent 25 years working with small businesses and their money. So much of the advice that I hear being talked about on podcasts, especially male driven podcasts, doesn't freaking work for women. Now I listen to a lot of podcasts.
I have a dog, Flynn dog. We walk twice a day and I spend a lot of time with AirPods in my [00:02:00] ears and podcasts tickling my brain. Um, even though a lot of episodes on the diary of a CEO no, no longer appeal to me or frankly piss me off within the first 10 minutes, I still listen to some of them. And so many of the business experts that come on his show, both men and women, but let's be honest, most of his business experts are men.
They tell these linear stories about how they grew their business and their money. They talk about these linear strategies, how they built from here to there, to there, how they had this win, which led to that win and upwards until they get to where they are now. These conversations make awesome podcast episodes because we humans are storytellers.
We make sense of the world by relating and comparing to other people's stories and experiences. And we love hearing these stories about overcoming obstacles, about how good people eventually win and [00:03:00] how the effort we put in actually goes somewhere. These stories are addictive. We wanna hear about the founder who started here, did this, did that, and then all of a sudden, bang, everything now works so well in their business.
And look, let's talk about the elephant in the room that a lot of these. Successful. I'm putting inver commas. I'm putting inverted commas around the word successful. But a lot of these successful business owners and founders who make it onto podcasts like diarrhea of a CEO, they're male. And they probably have wives who take care of the family and the family home.
There was a client I worked with for a long time, about 10 years. It was five families that owned a business together in the construction industry. It was very successful, and what I noticed was that the five men who were, they were the shareholders, each [00:04:00] of them had an incredible wife who was doing so much on the home front.
That it meant that these men were able to invest huge amounts of time and effort each week into building these businesses. So that's the part that no one's saying out loud, but we all know that that is what is happening. So let's acknowledge that that is a thing, that there are a lot of stories of male success in business, whether it's small business.
Startup or big business world, there's a lot of these stories about these male founders that barely involve their families. They might look back and say, oh, I wish that I had spent more time with my children and not so much time at work. But they're saying that once they're in their sixties or seventies, and we women know that the women in their lives are the ones that are taking care of what is happening at home.
Or they may be in a position. Or they may be choosing to [00:05:00] have paid help in the home and in the family to help make life easier, which I 100% support by the way. So the thing that isn't said out loud is that a lot of these male stories of success have these huge amounts of scaffolding behind the scenes to keep their family life, you know, running and supported and a lot of that labor.
Although not everyone thinks about caring for their family as labor, so you use whatever word feels right for you, but women are doing a lot of that scaffolding. Let's come back to the story of these linear businesses, and I wanna put to the side the differences of the female and the male experience as business owners.
Just for a moment, and I'm gonna come back to it. So this idea of this linear business where we have a strategy and we put the strategy in place and we execute it and we make a few tweaks along the [00:06:00] way, and then the strategy rolls out and everything works, you know, works out in the end and the business ends up being really successful.
I hate to break it to you, but that is not how business works. I've been working with small and medium businesses for 25 years, so I've got some street cred here. I'm also a chartered accountant, which means that I get to see the reality of it, which is I don't just get to talk with founders about their businesses.
I get to see what is happening with their money and their balance sheets. Their profit and loss statements and their cash flow reports tell me a lot of stories about what is happening in their business. So this concept of this linear business strategy doesn't actually work in business. And it's not how money works in business either.
Money isn't black and white because humans aren't Black and white. Humans make decisions through a [00:07:00] lens of emotions, instinct, data, and experience. The rational part of our brain and the decision-making part of our brain aren't even in the same part of the brain. Like that is wild. We make decisions through gut instinct.
Intuition experience. We change decisions based on whether we've had a good sleep or we haven't had a good sleep. We might need to make a decision while there's a child crying at us from the backseat that they want an ice cream. And you are on the phone trying to make a decision that is really big. So to think that decisions that are being made in businesses are logical and rational is simply untrue.
We are not linear. And when I say we, I mean humans. Humans are not linear and our decisions don't always make sense. So I could give pretty much any small business owner the perfect plan to make money and profit in their [00:08:00] business. I could funnel my 25 years of experience with small business finances and create a perfect profitable strategy.
To get any business owner where they wanna go, and then I could watch it fail because perfect strategies don't work when humans collide with them. We are incredibly smart beings who think we make decisions using reason, but we're almost always making decisions based on our emotions. We start, grow and maintain our businesses by using our instinct, experience and vibes.
Even when we're 20 years into business, as some of my clients are, we often ignore the balance sheet, the profit and loss, or the cashflow reports, and make decisions based on how we feel that day. We see the forecasts and business plans lovingly created by people like me and make a decision that goes in [00:09:00] the total opposite direction.
Money is emotional and if we pretend that it's not, we are doing ourselves a huge disservice. As business owners, we humans are really just emotions walking around in skin suits. Sorry, gross visual there, but money which touches almost every part of your business is a resource. And we humans do not act rationally around any resources or vices.
Think about what happened during COVID in the supermarket. When we get frightened, we get scared that there's not gonna be enough resources for us, and we go and stock up on tinned food and toilet paper. This is what humans do when they are afraid. Our past experiences of money. Are these invisible voices that are driving our [00:10:00] decisions.
The words we heard as children about money seep into how we behave in board meetings, in sales conversations, and when we're pitching for capital. Smart business owners know this about money. They don't expect that everything, every decision they make will be perfect. They don't expect their five-year plan is going to be exactly what happens.
They know that the way they behave with money will ebb and flow throughout their business career, and it won't always make sense to them or to the people around them. You know who it will make sense to though me. In the last 25 years, I've witnessed so many different money behaviors across the wide range of small business owners.
I've worked with helpful behaviors and unhelpful behaviors. That make millions and behaviors that risk millions [00:11:00] founders avoid money. We restrict and binge on money. We spend money when it doesn't make sense. Some founders sit on their money and others blow it in inverted comm. Some founders price themselves low because they want people to like them.
Others charge big, but pay themselves low because they don't know how to receive the kind of money they're making. We're not linear. Our money behaviors don't always make sense and we shouldn't expect them to. When we listen to these curated, linear upward moving stories of business and financial success, like we hear on the diary of a CEO and Simon Sinek's podcast and others that I can't think of off the top of my head.
We want the same thing for ourselves, but they're not real. We need to stop pretending that money is linear so we can grow and maintain businesses that succeed [00:12:00] because. And sometimes in spite of our money and business behaviors, if you wanna be successful in business, you need to stop expecting it to feel linear.
I think it's really important to first acknowledge how much our emotions drive our decisions in our businesses and the past experiences and thoughts and beliefs that we have about money and business. They infiltrate every single conversation that we have, both in our own mind and out in the world when it comes to money.
So when we expect that we are going to have this strategy and it's gonna have this five point plan of how we're gonna go from here to there to there, we see a strategy like that, or we create a strategy like that and it gives us this really short term comfort. Wow. I know what I need to do. I know what I need to do to get my business from here to there [00:13:00] because in essence, a strategy is a decision about this is the business that I want to have in the future, and these are the steps I believe I need to take between here and there to achieve that result.
That is what a strategy is. Strategy is one of the most overused words. In business and marketing speak, and I really think that we need to look at our strategies, our roadmaps, our plans as more of a kind of a guide. It's not a set of firm instructions. It's not a set of firm directions that says, I'm gonna get from here to there, and then everything is going to feel amazing.
What we need to realize is that. Having the right strategy isn't how you get the result you are looking for. Having the right strategy and having the right mindset, [00:14:00] motivation, and behaviors that actually get you to that result. That is how you build a successful business. Having habits that you develop in your business on a weekly basis, like paying yourself.
Managing your money using something like Profit First, which I'm a huge fan of. Getting around people and talking about money in an environment that is safe. Clearing out the money bullshit that is living in your mind that you don't even know is there when you have an opportunity to clear out the money bullshit that's there with people who are safe.
Rather than that money bullshit sliding out into your conversations with your clients, your team, your suppliers, your leads, we don't want that kind of money mindset, garbage coming out in those environments. What we want is for the money mindset, [00:15:00] garbage to be unloaded. In a space that's not going to do damage to your business.
Good Money Club Ad
Making money and managing money as a small business owner is hard. The really cool thing is it gets so much easier when you have the right mindset, the right strategy, and the right community around you. Good Money Club is that community. It's a place where women in business come together to learn about, talk about, and get support with making money decisions that make their business better, that lead to higher revenue, more take home pay, and a better business.
The Doors to Good Money Club are open right now, so if you are a woman in business. Who wants to make more money and impact through her business, you need to come and join the other 40 Good Money Club members who are excellent female business owners just like you making more money because of Good Money Club. Hope to see you in there.[00:16:00]
When we stop expecting that business is going to be linear, and we accept that humans are driven by our emotions. Our businesses are more likely to be successful because instead of pretending that everything is going to go exactly to plan, and that every decision you make is gonna be the perfect decision, instead of pretending that you are always gonna show up when you said you would.
Instead of pretending that every piece of marketing you put out is gonna be amazing, instead of pretending that you are not going to accidentally fuck up a sales negotiation at some point when we acknowledge that our businesses are not linear, because we are not linear, it means that we can actually build sustainable businesses that navigate around the messiness.
That small business really is. One of the things that I [00:17:00] feel is so powerful about Good Money Club is that we are working on mindset, strategy, and community. Working on your money, thoughts and feelings is going to help you to be more likely to do the kind of behavior that you want to. Building habits into your business around your money means that your behaviors are going to lead to the results that you want to.
We also have strategy. So in Good Money Club, I am teaching my members how to understand their money, how to manage it themselves, and how to plan for the future. In Good Money Club, you'll create your own business plan, your own financial roadmap. You'll have tools and new skills at your fingertips that make decision making around money in your business easier.
And we also have community. The thing that I love about the community we have built [00:18:00] in Good Money Club is that we hold space for each other. We have these incredible conversations every single week on Zoom where we talk about what's happening in our money, what wins have we had, what things are feeling hard, and we hold each other to the same standards that we hold ourselves to.
Yes, we commiserate and. Talk about the things that were hard, but we also look to how can I improve this situation? What are the things that I could do to move through this situation and get to a result on the other side, I also love how much my members collaborate with each other. So next week, three of my members are driving interstate to film a documentary together.
One of them is a theater producer. One of them is a videographer, and one of them is a marketing and branding expert, and it just fills my cup so much because when you [00:19:00] get to know people on that level that we are getting to know each other each week, it's inevitable that you are going to find new clients, new suppliers, new friends.
We get to hang out in real life sometimes too. We're on Zoom together twice a week every week. We also have opportunities to meet up in different parts of Australia. We are gonna be going on retreat together soon. So there are experiences that we get to have that we really miss from that employed world where we had the kind of work friends.
So whether you decide to come and join Good Money Club or not. And by the way, the doors are open right now and I'd love to talk to you about joining the other 40 women who are in Good Money Club right now. Whether you decide to come and join Good Money Club or not, I want this to be your moment to think about, am I expecting my business to be linear?
Am I expecting the way that I [00:20:00] make decisions to be linear? Because if you are, you are setting yourselves up for failure. Women in business have other things to contend with beyond just our businesses, so therefore we need our businesses to be as. Profitable and successful as they can be, so that it can impact positively on all of the other things that we are managing in our lives.
All of that unpaid labor, all of the unrecognized mental load that women are carrying outside of their businesses. Can be made slightly easier when our businesses are profitable and we become profitable by navigating our emotions and behaviors in ways that are helpful rather than unhelpful. I hope this conversation has been interesting and helpful for you.
I'll see you in next week's episode, and until then, I hope that there's something that you can change with your money in the [00:21:00] next week.
Outro
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.
