Episode 92: 5 Ways to Improve Your Relationship with Money: Money Mindset Hacks for Creative Entrepreneurs

Minette Riordan: Are you sure you’re ready?

Brad Dobson: Of course I’m ready. I’m always ready. Hi and welcome again to the Path to Profit podcast, this is episode 92. And today we’re talking about five ways to improve your relationship with money. Money Mindset Hacks for Creative Entrepreneurs. I love this title and I love it ’cause she wrote it and she’s really smart.

Minette Riordan: Thank you honey.

Brad Dobson: I’m Brad Dobson. I’m here with my wife, Dr. Minette Riordan.

Minette Riordan: Hello.

Brad Dobson: And once again we’re going to talk more about money and creative entrepreneurship. Today we got a cool quote. I like this quote. You want to do it?

Minette Riordan: Yeah, I get to read it?

Brad Dobson: Yeah. You get to read it.

Minette Riordan: Awesome. The quote is from Jim Rohn who’s an amazing educator, speaker and coacher on leadership. And he says, “You don’t get paid by the hour, you get paid by the value you bring to the hour.” You don’t get paid by the hour, you get paid by the value you bring to the hour.

Brad Dobson: What are you bringing to the table?

Minette Riordan: Yeah. Well, if you think about it, from a job, a traditional job perspective, working for a corporate or even working in the mall. I don’t know about you, I had lots of retail jobs over the years. You weren’t necessarily getting paid by the hour, you were getting paid a salary that was commensurate with your value, that you brought. Your education and your training and how much experience you had, all contributed to how much you were getting paid on an annual basis. And yes, that could be broken down into an hourly rate. But at the end of the day it’s about the value that you bring.
In our last episode we talked all about pricing. So if you didn’t listen to episode 91, we’re not going to talk about pricing today, but we think pricing is a hugely important topic and we highly encourage you to go back and listen to episode 91 if you’re struggling with your pricing.

Brad Dobson: At the same time this episode is going to help you with that pricing, specifically when you’re having problems thinking that you’re worth the numbers that you want to charge.

Minette Riordan: It’s so true and the reason that we’re talking about money mindset today is twofold. First because healing or being on the path to healing, I don’t know if it’s ever completely healed. But really understanding how to look with my relationship with money, the emotional relationship I had with money, heal some of the blocks, practice some forgiveness, really understand how I was raised to think about money, had a huge impact on my ability to confidently stand my value and rates. So it’s partially personal and the second part of that is after five years of working with creative women entrepreneurs and a few amazing men as well.
The number one thing, there’s two things that I see that hold them back. We’re going to tell you about the second one ’cause we have a huge announcement at the end of the show. So stay tuned. So excited for our big reveal today. But the first one is the money mindset and it stops women in their tracks. From building successful, profitable businesses. Whether that’s charging what they’re worth, whether that’s looking for venture capital or investment. Whether it’s just going to the bank and asking for a loan. Mind mindset impacts women.
The statistics of how many women actually reach out and ask for financial support in their business is a tiny fraction relative to the number of men who are asking for and receiving investment, venture capital and traditional bank loans to fund their businesses or Kickstarter campaigns. It’d be cool to see if there’s any stats on how many men versus women who are doing Kickstarter type campaigns these days.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. Definitely. One thing you’re going to hate us for here ’cause this is a little bit of coaching but-

Minette Riordan: How do you know they’re not going to love us for it?

Brad Dobson: Maybe psychiatry but not surprisingly.

Minette Riordan: This is not psychiatry.

Brad Dobson: Not surprisingly, all these stuff comes-

Minette Riordan: The disclaimer is not psychiatry.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. It’s pseudo psychiatry.

Minette Riordan: No it’s not.

Brad Dobson: We’re faking our way through it. Anyways what I was trying to say is that not surprisingly, most of this stuff comes back to your childhood and the way you were brought up and Minette hinted at that. I certainly have gone through my own own issues related to money over the last couple of years. Jumping ship from a job and having being sort of sole provider into what is now … Us trying to make money, provide for the family, run a business. All that type of stuff.
It’s amazing how much of this comes back to your childhood. I know for us, my brothers and sisters we were brought up in a stable household but we didn’t really talk about money. The only sort of money mindset that always shone through was English or Welsh background, waste not, want not type of thing. I’m sure if you listener went back to your childhood, you had your own type of issues related to this. The reason you’re going to hate us is that, yeah you got to go back and dig up your own shit and deal with all of this stuff. Just when you went through life coaching and all the other stuff, you have to go and do this if you want to get past these blocks.

Minette Riordan: It’s so funny he has such a completely different perspective than I do to going on this journey. I personally get excited, go in this journey and dig up some of the old shit as Brad said.

Brad Dobson: It’s hard work though.

Minette Riordan: It is hard work but the payoff on the other end is huge in terms of fulfillment, satisfaction and actual money flowing into your business. For me the biggest thing was recognizing like nobody taught me how to take responsibility for my money, how to talk about it, how to have the conversations about it. I just kind of trusted that it was always going to be okay. That only works to a certain extent. I’m actually really, really good at manifesting money. But I’ve never been very good at holding on to it. So a lot of these stories come up.
I was teasing Brad about the psychiatry, this is not therapy, this is not psychology, this is not psychiatry. This is actually a proven, very simple creative process for just getting to know your stories that anybody can do at home. We are not therapists, we don’t claim to be. We’re certainly not trained MD psychiatrists either.

Brad Dobson: I hope that you all read the terms and conditions for visiting this podcast.

Minette Riordan: Yes. So I just want to be really careful to say that you’re doing this work at your own peril and it can challenging work. We are always here to help and support you. There’s some amazing, amazing money coaches out there as well and I’ve worked with several of them and I’m a great money coach and love working with women on this stuff as well.
But the thing this, is that the first step is actually practical, when it comes to your money mindset. And step number one of our five ways to improve your money mindset is just to know your numbers intimately. Brad can really laugh at this, he laughs at this all the time when we have our live events with our clients and I start talking about knowing your numbers, everybody’s eyes roll back in their head, the calculators come out.
We have this myth of believing that we’re not good at math. I certainly was that girl who was raised to think I wasn’t good at math, I didn’t need to know math or science that really … Maybe I was going to be a teacher or a librarian or when I did one of those stupid skills tests in high school, instead I should be an interior designer. What? Really? An interior designer? Not me, it’s actually way to detail oriented for me and I have so much admiration for interior designers the work that they do is such a beautiful blend, the information and creativity right?

Brad Dobson: Yeah. They tend to create really clean spaces.

Minette Riordan: Yes. That’s so true. So we get told these things throughout our life and the truth is I really wasn’t very good at geometry or algebra but we’re al good at arithmetic. So when it comes to doing the numbers in your business, it’s so freaking simple. It’s like first grade math. If you can add and subtract and then maybe what? Third grade math, divide and multiply, you can do the numbers in your business. So you just have to know them. One of the ways to get to know them is to have systems in place for tracking them. That could be just a spreadsheet, it could be … We have one friend that does our budget every month on a yellow legal pad with gel pens, ’cause they’re pretty and she likes glitter.
But it’s like literally just keeping track of what’s going in and what’s coming out. You could be doing QuickBooks or FreshBooks or Quicken. You could be using mint.com for your personal tracking. There’s some great tools.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, we’re fans of QuickBooks online. I understand people worry about giving their information out. There’s reasonable worries about those things but there are some fantastic tools QuickBooks online or FreshBooks and they can help you with this type of stuff.

Minette Riordan: And FreshBooks actually I’ll just give a plug to them. I was lucky enough to meet the founder of FreshBooks this year who was a creative business owner and he finds himself very surprised that now he owns this very successful software company. But he started it out of that need as a creative invoices and do it simply and effectively. So it’s 10 bucks a month and it’s designed for creatives. It’s super, super user friendly. So know your numbers intimately.
As one of my clients recently said, you have to get intimate with your numbers. So number one, know your numbers, know your numbers, know your numbers. Number two …

Brad Dobson: You need to track your income daily. That might sound weird to you-

Minette Riordan: Or scary as all get-out.

Brad Dobson: Right. I love the part that Minette pushes about this, is that it helps you understand that money is a flow. Of course it helps you from a practical standpoint. You understand whether you made money or didn’t make money and that’s an important metric. But just watching money come in and out, actually tracking checks you took to the bank, the penny you picked up on the ground outside the grocery store. PayPal, payments coming in, payments going out. All those things. Knowing them daily gives you a sense of confidence and a sense of flow about money.

Minette Riordan: It does. I want to just dive into so how do you track your money everyday? We’re talking about just tracking your income. Yes you could also track expenses but to begin with, I would challenge you for the next 30 days to track every penny that flows into your life. Like Brad said whether it’s a penny you pick up on the side walk, whether it’s your IRS refund check which you’re maybe going to be getting this month. Whether it’s some other windfall money maybe you get a rebate or a surprise check in the mail from a relative. There’s income flowing in your life in ways that are not just in your business. Maybe you have a combined household income where one partner still gets paycheck. That counts as income flowing into you personally. This isn’t just your business, it’s about tracking every penny that flows.
Some people do choose to do this where they’re just looking at money flowing into your business. The beauty of this is that you get to see all those zeroes stacking up which, men when I first started tracking income that way was so scary. Men and seeing those zeroes, I could tie those zeroes back to my lack of marketing. So it helped me see exactly why I wasn’t making money. I wasn’t asking anybody for money, I wasn’t creating opportunities to make money.

Brad Dobson: You learn really quickly that you’re failing to promote.

Minette Riordan: Yes and failing to ask or you’re asking and not getting yeses, which is sales conversation challenge.

Brad Dobson: Exactly.

Minette Riordan: But you also start to see the beautiful rhythms in your business. Maybe you have a great cycle where most of your money comes in once a month or twice a month or once a quarter. When we were doing more live events, we had money, big chunks of money coming in twice a year that then we had to manage that money to pay for this year long program. So tracking is a powerful emotional energetic tool just honoring and staying open to receiving abundance as well as a business planning and projection tool is super powerful.

Brad Dobson: Number three is rewrite your money stories. And this is the coaching part that you were talking about.

Minette Riordan: The we will part as you would fondly say.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. And we’ve seen a lot from different clients. They really feel achy about charging money at all because they think they’re put on the planet to just serve. I hear you going, “Well, what’s the matter with just serving?” There’s nothing the matter with just serving. It’s a fantastic calling. Go out and do it. And if you’re called to be a monk in the world or a nun, be a monk or a nun. That’s fine. But if you’re in business, you do need to charge for what you’re providing. It’s not achy and in fact I think the mindset you need to have about that is that the more money that you can make from this business, the more you can help and the more you can serve.

Minette Riordan: ‘Cause you cannot serve people from an empty well. That eventually you will feel burnt out, exhausted, desperate. People don’t want to work with you if you’re desperate for money. They can really feel that energetic about. But I want to share a couple other very specific money mindsets. Some of these might resonate with you that we hear over and over again. And some of these may not even be conscious, they maybe things that you heard throughout your lifetime from your family that you just kind of absorbed that need to be brought into your consciousness so that you can release them.
Things like money is evil, it’s the root of all evil is a common one, rich people are snobs, there’s not enough money to go around, I will never have enough money, you shouldn’t talk about money, it’s private. The one I see over and over again is the just enough money mindset. Where people always make just enough to cover their costs but never extra. So no matter how much they’re making whether they’re making a thousand dollars a month or a hundred thousand dollars a month, they spend it so that they always have just enough in their bank account. And they’re not even doing this consciously. It’s one of the biggest challenges we see where people go along just sort of pottering along and never actually getting ahead.
So none of these are good or bad or right or wrong. This isn’t about judging the mindset or anybody that came before you that shared these stories. This is about consciousness of the stories that are making it difficult for you to charge what you’re worth in your business.

Brad Dobson: Whatever techniques you can use to identify when you’re telling yourself those stories, use them.

Minette Riordan: It’s so true and if you’ve listened to the podcast at all or you ever have worked with me or read us on the blog you know I’m a huge fan of using creative processes and practices to heal our relationship with ourselves and to work on these mindset issues. So I would journaling, I would be doing collage, I might be painting it out but I would be really creating some imagery to recognize and honor these many stories because some part of these many stories served you in some particular way. So we have to honor these stories in order to release the stories.
I wanted to just pause for a moment to talk about the myth. Brad talked a little bit about the impoverished healer mentality where we feel like we have these gifts and we just have to give them away. But I also want to talk about the starving artist mentality. So here’s my opinion on the starving artist mentality. So it is a myth, it is not a reality. There are many, many uber wealthy, successful, profitable artists working in the world today. When we think about the starving artist myth, we often go back to stories like Van Gogh.
Well, Van Gogh wasn’t focused on making money. Van Gogh had all kinds of crazy issues if you know his story. I personally believe that the reason that artists starve is because they’re so focused on making art, they’re not focused on building a business. In the old days, like even in the times of Jackson Pollock who’s a modern American abstract expressionist that I love, he had sponsors. He had people that supported him that took care of his for him. So if your dream is just to make art or write books or be a speaker, you don’t have to do it alone. You might in the beginning have to pay attention to the aspects of building your business.
First and get the foundations in place and then you can bring people in to support you. There is absolutely no reason if I could burst any myth in our country right now, it would be the myth of the starving artist.

Brad Dobson: In fact that’s what Patreon is doing.

Minette Riordan: Yes it is. Absolutely it’s a great example. I think they even say that in their copy. In the last episode we mentioned a website that we actually have two clients right now. One just launched a page and one is about to launch a page on Patreon. P-A-T-R-E-O-N it is like a crowdsourcing project for artists specifically to share their gifts.

Brad Dobson: I’m subscribed to someone who is in the doctor and health field that’s-

Minette Riordan: And they’re using Patreon?

Brad Dobson: Yeah to get support from people.

Minette Riordan: It was created for artists. I’m seeing other peoples but their raison d’etre did I say that correctly?

Brad Dobson: Raison d’etre.

Minette Riordan: Your French is better than mine. But the reason they got started was to help artists get the support they need to be creative. As brilliant ideas do it’s going to take and fight. But the idea is that you share your art, whatever that looks like, your service, your products, your music. We have a guys that’s making horror movies in our creative business accelerator community, that’s sharing out his process and his journey and creating horror movies and people contribute money. A dollar a month, $3 a month, $5 a month and then they receive different gifts in exchange of different access to your community, in exchange for supporting you. And it’s a way to fund your arts so that we can eradicate that starving artist mentality.
Step four once you’ve become conscious of those stories is forgiveness of self and others. Because we could also spend a lot of time, waste a lot of time beating ourselves up about holding on to these stories or worrying about how these are impacting us. And what I recommend instead is get a piece of paper and a pen and physically write a letter of forgiveness. It might be to yourself, to your dad, to your mom, to your grandparent, to a teacher. And that starving artist mentality often flows from someone saying to you, “You can’t make money from your art.” And when I say artist I don’t mean just a painter, these are painters, musicians, writers, speakers, coaches, authors. People doing creative work in the world are all artists in my book.

Brad Dobson: Yeah you might be making LEGO models, whatever it is-

Minette Riordan: That’s the coolest job, LEGO engineer.

Brad Dobson: Our son, he’s-

Minette Riordan: Metal working

Brad Dobson: He’s targeting metal working and goldsmithing. I can hear these stories come up in my own head about how his future is going to be.

Minette Riordan: And my thing is, we can help him build a business around that. But what most parents are saying is that you can’t make a living in that. Our parents had beautiful intentions. They wanted to keep us safe and secure and they wanted us to enjoy a certain level of living. But if you’re being called to be a creative in the world, you got to let go of some of these beliefs and myths and stories that you can’t make money from your art or you can’t make money from your passion. We’re a living proof that you can of it. And we have so many clients right now who are proving it over and over and over again that is absolutely possible to do this and it starts simply with forgiveness.

Brad Dobson: Number five. Remember that money is simply an even exchange of your products and services for someone’s cash. Right? That’s it.

Minette Riordan: That’s it.

Brad Dobson: That’s all you have to remember.

Minette Riordan: It’s an even exchange of goods and services for cash. Just like the old traditional barter system where I traded my eggs for maybe your carrots. It’s an even exchange. We get so caught up in the mindset about money that we forget to remember that this is a common business practice. You would not exchange to walk into the doctor’s office and not pay them instantly for their services. Whether that’s you personally paying or your insurance paying. You don’t expect to go in to Target and buy a new t-shirt and not have to pay for it. There’s an even exchange of services for cash. When you are bringing your gifts, your talents and your products to the marketplace, money is just an even exchange. It’s how our world works right now. No matter what your political beliefs or thinking, even if it’s Bitcoin, it’s still an even exchange.
Learning to monetize your business has to do with you remembering that people want to pay you. They don’t want to get something for free. They don’t want to get something. They want something that’s of value and they want to believe that when they give you money, they’re getting what they’re paying. So this goes back to that piece about standing in your value. We talked more about that last time on the pricing but it’s pretty practical. So remembering this isn’t about emotion, this isn’t about magic. This is about business. And like Brad said before, we’re talking to you today about hobbies and we’re not talking to you about building non-profits or the non-profits also need to learn the lesson that you have to have money in order to serve.
But if you’re someone who’s a creative who’s called to make an impact, who’s called to serve the world in a bigger way and you know you have a message and a vision to share that’s going to help people, you have to have money. You can’t do this when you’re broke and poor and desperate, you have to have money.

Brad Dobson: Definitely.

Minette Riordan: We got a bonus tip. You want to share the bonus tip?

Brad Dobson: A bonus tip. Six out of the five ways to improve your relationship with money?

Minette Riordan: Yeah, it’s a bonus tip.

Brad Dobson: We need to talk about how important it is to pay yourself. And this is crucial on a lot of different levels. It’s about you taking value from the business that you run. It’s about you taking that profit out first before everybody else gets paid. The traditional way of looking at things is to pay everybody else and then take whatever is left.

Minette Riordan: I made that mistake when I had my publishing company. Everybody else always got paid first and we didn’t pay ourselves.

Brad Dobson: We’ve bragged about this and we talked about it on the podcast. Before we were big fans of the book called Profit First Michael Michalowicz. Yeah. Profit First. There’s some difficult paths to it especially if you’ve been in business for a while, because it really forces you to curve away expenses that you can’t afford. But the key is that you are pulling money out of the business and paying yourself first. ‘Cause otherwise what are you in business for? It’s just a toil and a weight around your shoulders.

Minette Riordan: It’s just another job and we’re not saying you’re necessarily going to pay yourself a fabulous salary right out the gate when you’re getting started. This again is a mindset thing even if you actively pay yourself $10 a week. And then you do that for a month and then the next month is $20 a week or a hundred dollars a month. So it’s just that noticing how you feel about the fact that you’re paying yourself. And remember if you’re in creative business, you’ve got two different bank accounts.
If not you need to do that first. One for your business, one for your personal life and literally move the money. Whether you write yourself a check or you go online and you move the cash, basically take cash from your business account and put it in your personal account. It’s incredibly satisfying to do this and it gets you into the habit of treating your business like a business because part of that money mindset is really standing in that place of I’m building a business. This is not a hobby, but this is a business. And the more that you put some of these simple systems in place for tracking income, for working on your money mindset and paying yourself, the faster you’re going to grow.

Brad Dobson: Definitely. Cool stuff. Now it’s time for us to talk a little bit not a lot but just a little bit about our big announcement.

Minette Riordan: Can we share our fan free gift before we tell each other’s topics.

Brad Dobson: Okay it’s not time for us to comment. I got to shut up.

Minette Riordan: ‘Cause it will make sense once if we do it way at the end.

Brad Dobson: Okay definitely.

Minette Riordan: You want me to do that?

Brad Dobson: Yes please.

Minette Riordan: So one of the things that I have created in the last couple of years is a 21-day guided journaling, meditation process called, Money, Meditation and Mandalas. It’s super playful and super fan. And if you go to pathtoprofitacademy.com/money-meditation-mandalas. We’ll out a link in the show notes, you can go look it up or just Google money, meditation and mandalas, you’ll find a link to download our coloring book and our affirmations and some other great resources including some guided meditations. This process has been proven at this point to really shift your mindset around money.
By simply coloring and focusing in every day and how you feel about money so you can really get to the core of what it that you’re doing. So pathtoprofitacademy.com/money-meditation-mandalas.

Brad Dobson: Like she said, you don’t have to worry about that. We’ll put it in the show notes.

Minette Riordan: I know that was a really, really long URL, we need a link shortener for that one maybe.

Brad Dobson: We have one. Anyways.

Minette Riordan: The big really you … We need our horns.

Brad Dobson: Our plans coming up is to refocus and have a more specific focus for this podcast. And you don’t have to worry your subscription will still be the same but what you’re going to find is that we’re going to rebrand it. So we’ll have a new logo badge and a new name and that name is going to be …

Minette Riordan: Structure and Flow the Productivity Podcast for Creative Entrepreneurs.

Brad Dobson: And she’s flow, I’m structure.

Minette Riordan: In case you haven’t figured that out in the last year and a half of listening to us.

Brad Dobson: And so much the same content but much more focused on productivity and we think that when we’ve talked to our clients and our peeps, that productivity is going to really serve people even further than what we’ve talking about in the first 92 episodes. So next week we’ll have a small announcement episode and we’ll talk more about this-

Minette Riordan: About what you can expect, what some of the upcoming episodes are who’s some of our awesome productivity guests are going to be.

Brad Dobson: And then we’re going to roll out right away a whole bunch of episodes just for you to get underway with structure and flow.

Minette Riordan: And our goal is that there’s going to be more teaching and practical takeaways so just like we did today where we have five ways to X, we want to make this really simple and actionable because we can talk a lot but if we aren’t sharing information that’s relevant, useful and actionable then we’re probably not doing our jobs as the owners of the Path to Profit Academy.

Brad Dobson: So next week you’ll get that episode and you’ll hear all about it.

Minette Riordan: It’s going to be exciting. See you there.

Brad Dobson: Thanks guys.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.