Let me tell you a bit more about my personal background and how that has shaped my perspective.
I grew up in a small town in Arkansas. It was the kind of place people moved FROM. It was not the kind of place many people moved TO. My family lived there for 20 years and were still thought of
As in “The REAL Entrepreneurial Years.”
I learned three powerful things during those network marketing years – how to sell, how to extrovert fearlessly, and how to say no to authority by standing up for what I believed to be right.
I knew I didn’t want to be controlled, and corporate life, at least for me, had been about control. Sure, it feels like there’s safety in letting someone else make the call, but it is a false safety. It’s a safe feeling that comes only from not looking at the danger. A change in management, a change in strategy, a change in your boss’s opinion can mean you are out the door, even if you did everything right (or at least believe you did). I was on the right track with being independent, but it needed to be real.
In network
It’s true that nothing happens until someone sells something, but I was fresh out of things to sell. My last corporate job had been in consulting, and my husband was a consultant, so it seemed like a good place to start. The great thing about a services business is that it requires minimal investment to get started. You really just need something to offer to people.
I’d always been fairly good at organizing my space, and so I fell into professional organizing. I joined the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO), which had a very strong Atlanta chapter. From these
At
We tend to feel like what is easy for us is easy for everyone. It’s not. And the danger of this type of thinking is that we fail to appreciate our
Just as I was reaching a point of frustration with my consulting business, my husband was starting a company of his own. He was working as an IT consultant for a firm in Atlanta. The firm was struggling with plans for growth in a post Y2K and post 9-11 world, where cheaper talent was available overseas for big development projects.
Darren thought he could do it better, but he knew there were big gaps between what he had and what he felt he needed. He recruited another consultant from the existing company who had a long-term contract with a large local employer, giving us instant credibility with other clients. A third co-worker was added to cover all the back office mechanics of actually running the business. It’s the kind of role that would be described as “secretary” if a girl did it, but it’s actually a very important component of the operation that allows the consultants to focus on taking care of clients without the distractions of billing, collections, and all the government paperwork that seems to grow as the business grows.
The team came together just as the old company began the process of selling itself, so the exit of the two partners was slowed by their need to assist with that transition. In the meantime, Darren mostly coded the operations guy out of a job, which caused some issues when he was ready to join the team full time. With a small business, you can sell or you can deliver what is sold. There’s not much else to do.
As part of the startup, each partner put in a small amount of money and was given a third of the company. Note to the reader – do not give away for pennies what will cost you thousands to buy back. But that’s another story.
There was one gap in the team Darren had failed to recognize – sales. The technical team at his old company had referred to the salespeople as “overheads” – basically leeches that lived off the hard work the consultants put in and the hours of sweat and tears they invested. Luckily, one of the partners in STS had been part of the core team at the other firm and understood sales is the engine that drives the whole operation. He suggested I be hired to help, since I had a background in IT (albeit as a business consultant), and in sales (although not in IT). Darren agreed, but on the condition that his partner manages and work with me.
Coming in I was confident I could sell whatever they had. It was unclear in talking to them what they had, though. In response to the question, I was given a full page with multiple columns of acronyms of all the technologies they were competent in. I knew from my past sales and marketing efforts and training this would never work. There’s no elevator ride in the world long enough for that elevator pitch.
The process of asking “what do we do? How are we unique?” and the struggles to answer that question led us to a business plan writing class. The class was aimed at minority-owned small businesses and promised to connect us with the large corporations in the area who could hire lots of consultants.
By that time we’d already had our operations guy leave the company to work with a friend who had a construction business in Atlanta’s booming real estate market. Majority ownership was transferred to me and to the wife of the co-owner, making us a women-owned business.
While the business class was invaluable in helping us focus in on our highest bill rate, most unique services, and our target clients, the promised contracts we’d get as a woman-owned business never did materialize. Maybe they were real, and we just didn’t work that angle enough. Or maybe it was always lip service from the big corporations, who believed they should be making an effort to work with diverse suppliers but didn’t really believe it was worth the effort to switch from the companies they were accustomed to working with. Either way, it didn’t matter for us. With our new found focus and plan, we were able to network our way into what has been a long-term stream of clients and projects.
Money is created from within you when you add value in a way the market recognizes. If you don’t earn enough, you need to better understand the market and demand what you are worth, or you need to find a different career where what you do is appreciated by the market. Alternatively, you can be
Money is a tool, a means of exchange, that we use because bartering is difficult. If I raise sheep and you give haircuts, where do you store the sheep after cutting my hair? What if you’re vegan and don’t like wool because it’s itchy? Exactly how many haircuts is one sheep worth?
Money is a way in which what you demonstrate what is truly important to you, not just what you think you should believe is important. If you get a new car every few years but have nothing saved for retirement, you are saying that being a person with a new car now is more important than being a person who is financially secure then. That’s actually totally understandable, as humans have a hard time delaying gratification. But the future is coming, ready or not, and in the US retirement is a DIY project, so you’d best get on it.
Money is taboo in our culture, and I think it’s time for that to change. Many of us are more comfortable talking about sex than about money. Financial education is a way to break that taboo and lose your fear. There are tons of people in the world looking to separate you from your money, and many will think that by doing so they’ve done you a favor. Understanding how they are paid will help you understand their motivations.
Money is everything and nothing. The balance on the statement for my retirement accounts changes nothing for me today and feels a bit abstract and meaningless. But your net worth is, in my opinion, the truest reflection of whether or not you are “winning” with money. So many advertisers will tell you that owning their goods or using their services will allow you to buy happiness. But happiness comes from within and isn’t for sale. With that being said, with money, I can buy chocolate and that brings me happiness, so your mileage may vary.
My dad used to say money doesn’t grow on trees, which I thought was a weird thing for someone in the timber industry to say. Yeah, it doesn’t grow on trees, but you cut them down and turn them into timber or paper that you sell for money, so isn’t that the same thing? It’s good to teach your children the importance of stewardship. Promoting a scarcity mindset is damaging and comes from a place of fear.
They say money doesn’t
Fix your money, fix your life, because money is a metaphor for your life. Are you in line with your values?
I remember in my corporate days, one of the companies I worked for had a complimentary meeting with a financial advisor as a benefit. I was very excited to have someone give me advice on how to get rich! My husband and I sat through an hour-long meeting and then were told we needed to buy life insurance. What???
I understand not all financial advisors are the same. And honestly, it may have been excellent advice for our overall financial health. But financial advisors need to understand that their titles are inherently misleading to those who don’t understand who they are and what they do. It’s like the dude at CarMax calling himself a Transportation Advisor. Dude is never going to advise you to take the bus.
A Financial Advisor typically is compensated by selling products, either insurance or mutual funds or a mix of both. And there is nothing wrong with that. If you don’t have the right insurance, a bit of bad luck can undo all your hard financial work. Mutual funds are a great way to build wealth, and if you need someone to walk you through how to start investing in them, a financial advisor can be a great resource. But understand that a commissioned salesperson is going to have a vested interest in selling you something that works for you and for them, and therefore cannot be the cheapest alternative. Since the major obstacle most people have in building wealth is feeling safe enough to get started, financial advisors can be a huge help for a client. But it has to be win-win, and the way they win is to get paid for you taking their advice.
My husband says if you get something for free, you are the product. Think about those free newspapers that places give out (like Creative Loafing or the real estate books). Think about Facebook. It costs money to create those resources, and those people have bills to pay just like you. If you are getting it for free, then your attention is what they are selling to advertisers. If you are ok with that transaction, there’s no problem. But understand how the money flows. If you think your financial advisor is helping you for free, you need to ask how you provide the money the firm uses to pay them. Because it is not charity work.
I think the real problem is the stigma around sales. I’ve worked in sales most of my career, and I believe I’ve been able to help STS’s clients find the solutions they need at a good price. For that, I receive a cut of the deal. Without me, they would have bought the wrong thing or overpaid. Without me, IBM would not have that client or would have had to hire someone to work with them and pay that person a salary. I’m cheap for IBM because I’m commission only. I’m cheap for the client, because they had that purchase in this year’s budget anyway, and working with me helps them understand what they are doing and get the right stuff. You shouldn’t have to be an expert in IBM software to buy the right thing, but you often do, and I help provide that expertise so they don’t have to take the time to develop it.
I believe selling is sharing. If you saw a great movie and told a friend about it, and then that friend saw the movie, you sold them on the idea of seeing the movie. Selling is only wrong if your motivation is manipulation – to hurt them in order to benefit you.
People hate to feel sold to, but they love to buy. If you help them make the right choice, you’ve provided a service and deserve to be compensated for that.
If we could remove the stigma around sales, a financial advisor could label himself as a “Mutual Fund and Insurance Sales Person”, and then I wouldn’t expect them to tell me how to get rich. I’d understand they sell products that may or may not add to my overall financial plan, and that I may or may not whan to try to buy them cheaper elsewhere.
But by hiding how they are paid, financial advisors are setting their clients up to feel misled down the line. And that hurts both clients and sellers. You’ve taken some of the people with the most financial education and turned them into the enemy of the self-taught investor. No wonder there’s so much distrust of the financial industry. We need to free up the people with the financial education to partner with clients in an honest and clear way so we can all learn together.
Recent Comments