EP 217: Money mindset for founders with Gabbie Kelly

Gabbie Kelly has a background in financial auditing, corporate accounting, and serving clients as a fractional CFO, and has a wealth of experience in the financial industry. However, what she finds missing is the opportunity to help business owners navigate their day-to-day operations and make informed decisions that are critical to their success.Gabbie wants to make a difference, providing the tools and knowledge that business owners need to thrive.

In this podcast episode we talk about personal budgeting of money, how startups and businesses should approach money and the right mindsets.

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EP 217: Money mindset for founders with Gabbie Kelly

Gabbie Kelly has a background in financial auditing, corporate accounting, and serving clients as a fractional CFO, [Name] has a wealth of experience in the financial industry. However, what she finds missing is the opportunity to help business owners navigate their day-to-day operations and make informed decisions that are critical to their success.Gabbie wants to make a difference, providing the tools and knowledge that business owners need to thrive.

In this podcast episode we talk about personal budgeting of money, how startups and businesses should approach money and the right mindsets.

Guest Links: 

Gabbie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriellekelly-cpa/

Business: https://www.wem.co/

Book mentioned: Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey

https://www.ramseysolutions.com/store/books/the-total-money-makeover-by-dave-ramsey

Link to the show:

Please find all resources like video, audio, show notes and as well some shorter clips of the episode at the show page: ⁠https://www.jensheitland.com/podcasthome⁠

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Apple Podcast: ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/human-innovation-the-jens-heitland-show/id1545043872⁠

Spotify Podcast: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/7H0GWMGVALyXnnmstYA1NL?si=7307c301794b483e⁠

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Transcript:

(This Transcript is AI generated)

Gabbie Kelly

Hello and welcome to the Human Innovation Podcast, the podcast for innovative leaders. I'm your hosts Jens Heitland and today my guest is Gabbie Kelly. Gabbie has a background in financial auditing, corporate accounting, and serving clients as the fractional C F O. Gabby has a wealth of experience in the financial industry.

However, what she finds missing is the opportunity to help business owners navigate their day-to-day operations and make informed decisions that are critical to their success. Gabby wants to make a difference providing the tools and knowledge that business owners need to thrive.

In this podcast episode, we talk about personal budgeting, money, how startups and businesses should approach money and the right mindset for it. Please welcome to the show, Gabby Kelly. 

Hello Gabby. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. I'm so excited for today. 

Yeah, me too. And yeah, we have had already so much fun before recording. Let's straight go. Go into 

it. I know we really should have pressed record a half an hour ago and then sounds some way to tie it all 

together. Yeah. Next time. So tell us a little bit about yourself.

Who are you and how did you get to where you are today? 

Sure. Like every entrepreneur I've had a wild ride towards entrepreneurship and maybe 50% of entrepreneurs. I never expected myself to be here. I started my career in financial auditing and corporate accounting, very type a risk averse. I live in the US in New England and so was in and out of Boston in the city and then had my first child and woke up a little bit and did not want to be working on the weekends and did not want to be working 12 to 16 hour days, and I decided I wanted to find something new. Fast forward a few more years.

I had a second child during C O V I D. And decided to take a break and go part-time doing some C F O consulting work. And it was through that process of working with startups and tech clients that my business partner and I realized business owners needed more than just bookkeeping and financials. They needed to understand what to do with their money.

We worked with a lot of fundraised businesses. They needed to know and how some tools, understanding h now that they had money, what to do with it. But not only that, even for our bootstrap clients to be able to use the money that they're generating and investing in their own business in a way that's going to keep moving them forward, that's going to build a business that serves them, that's going to build a profitable and sustainable business.

And we just didn't see that type of support out there and decided that we were going to give that support and through figuring out that piece of how do we give more to clients. We decided to create this business called WEM, and initially stood for, we empower mom entrepreneurs. And that has grown a little bit to not only serving moms and their businesses, but mostly women and their businesses.

And it was one of those things that I never knew what I really wanted to do until it hit me in the face a li a little bit. And I just remember crying the first time that, we decided, yes, this is something we're gonna do. And just felt in my heart that like the world needed this.

Awesome. Yeah. And very important to say, because you haven't mentioned that too much, is you just didn't wake up and like now I help people with finance. You have worked in companies doing this, started auditing and as well work within accounting and so 

on. Yeah. So I spent the first 10 years of my career doing financial auditing, working with companies, looking at their books, all types of industries, banking other types of startups, healthcare, just seeing the way so many different industries are built, organized, run.

And that's a grind, at least here in the us it's very much a Every year they get new graduates and then, every year people leave because they've been working a hundred hour weeks for two years straight. And I just didn't wanna be a part of that. And so I moved into corporate accounting.

It was still a public company, so bigger business and larger team, but I got to focus on one internal business and you know, Everything changed with Covid. And so again, my priorities shifted and I needed to do what was best for myself and my family. And at that point, I really needed a mental break.

Having the two kids through C O V I D was very hard along with increased responsibility after covid layoffs and everything. And so I am very fortunate that I was able to choose to take that step into more of a part-time role and find a business partner who at the time I worked for that really believed in serving clients, but doing it in a way that is more

human focused, right? Like connecting on a personal level and making sure our team was supported and cared for. And did that for two years and realized, throughout that journey, like I talked about, that business owners really needed a lot more support than, what they required for bookkeeping.

Yeah. Let's talk about the personal perspective of not the bookkeeping, but let's call it budgeting. Speaking about myself, I have never had a proper financial education, and maybe that's as well a generational gap or thing, at least grown up in Germany. I just see, so my parents grew up like middle class.

We have had enough money. But we have never had proper money. Proper money in a way. Yes, we have been on vacation, so no. Nothing to complain at all. Yeah. But it was more about the money was gone at the end of the month. There was nothing left. There was always a for a car, there was some something involved where I today say, I am not going to do that in this way.

I'm going to teach my kids differently. So give us a little bit your perspective on personal budgeting and what works and what doesn't work. 

Yes. This is a huge topic that I have many opinions about because not only are we not set up for success personally because money is such a taboo topic and there's so much shame attached to money, people don't talk about it openly.

A lot of people don't ask for help when they need it, and they suffer in silence because of the shame attached. And I also did not grow up with, a lot of money. I really, we didn't really take vacations. I put myself through college and so I had student debt when I left college. And my husband and I not only paid that off within the first five years of graduating his and mine, which was 90 K total, but we also cash flowed his M B A.

Which was another 90 k so about almost $200,000 in student debt and student tuition that we paid for within five years of graduating college. And we weren't making 250 grand. We were like, almost a hundred, maybe a hundred to 150 K combined in the early days. And so I have a lot of opinions because we're not set up for success because there's not a lot of financial education because people are pushed into college and don't know the financial implications on their future.

And, there's tons of statistics out there about how you make money and how that affects your financial future after college with a college degree and without, but it's almost like.

You graduate and you think you deserve all of these things. You deserve to live in a nice apartment. You deserve to have nice clothes. You deserve to go out with your friends and nobody's really asking you to pause and think about how this all affects your future. So anyways, I went through that with no idea that 10 years later I would be using similar styles to help business owners be more intentional about their money.

And one thing about that is the psychology behind how we spend and what our experiences growing up how they've impacted us, and how that impacts our decision making for spending money not only personally but for our business too. And so for personal budgeting, that's with us all of our lives.

When you add a business on top of that and the money stress that comes with owning a business, maybe being responsible for other employees, doesn't it make sense to like, spend some time to really figure that out and get your ducks in a row so that way you know exactly what you're able to take from your business.

You know exactly how that translates into your own personal financial household budget and it's something that many people just run the other way they avoid. I like to say that time and money are our most limited and most stressful resources. Not only personally, but owning a business.

And so the fact that we avoid both of those typically like the plague is mind blowing and all has to do with our environment, the way we've grown up, the culture that we live in. And, people just not talking about it and not having the support that they need. That was Longwinded answer.

That's good. Let us talk about it. I know already their listeners are saying, ask the question. Ask the question. How did you do that? So let's start with your personal perspective. So you have had this almost 200 K depth. How did you work with that?

What was your plan? 

We decided that we wanted to pay off that debt very quickly, very intensely. And we committed. The first step is, I like to say, is awareness and then commitment. And we sought out tools and we landed on I'm sure for anybody out there who's a big budget nerd, we landed on Dave Ramsey's total Money Makeover.

He uses these baby steps and it's really conditioning, giving you a plan and steps to say, okay, step one is this. Now I can check it off. Step two is this. Now I can check it off. And it's not for everyone. It's really intense. And for you to make Worth your while. You have to drink the juice a little bit, I like to say.

But the outcomes are worth it. In my sense, having gone through it and being able to do those things. Now, some of our friends looked at us like we were, crazy. They're like, yeah, hey, no, Gabby don't you? Don't you wanna go do these things? One of the stories I like to tell is we still like to go out with our friends.

We just didn't like to spend money doing it. So we would eat at home before going to dinner, work an app, get a drink, and still hang out with our friends. So it's really right like that, that scarcity creates innovation. You change your habits. You change your environment and it creates an environment for you to think of new, innovative ways to do the things you wanna do, prioritize the things you wanna do, like hanging out with your friends, but in a different way to make it fit the goals that you're working towards.

Yeah. So I love that method now, being 10 years out of it, tw eight years out of it. I, when we start to talk about how you manage money in your business and that mindset, it can battle a little bit because I, the scarcity mindset and this abundance mindset, navigating both of those, we can use scarcity as a tool, but I think it can be hard to escape.

Once you're in there and to operate a business successfully, I think we need to, put a lot of effort to move into an abundance mindset on a daily basis. Yeah. 

If we still keep on the personal perspective before we go into the business, which I guess a couple of listeners are interested as well, if we look into the personal perspective, you said, okay, you're restricting what you're spending.

I guess you have a detailed plan and analyzes of what are our variable costs, what are fixed costs? What are the things we can squeeze? What are the things we don't want to squeeze? And then you have a commitment with your partner to say, that's what we are going for. And then you allocate the income you have towards that.

Did you work then as well on how do you create more income at that time? Or was it more about let's not spend the income we have and use that to pay off the debt? Oh, 

it's a little bit of both, right? So the two ways you can create more money in your pocket is decrease your expenses, increase your income, or I guess get donations, right?

Go out and solicit donations. And increasing your income is really interesting because often, especially as women, we're not reaching and asking for promotions. We're waiting until they're given to us, right? So when you're looking at it from that perspective and looking at your financials personally, in a holistic way.

It is a good idea to say how can I increase my income if you're on a salary or if you're working for somebody else? Do you have a passion? All those things that you're making maybe on the side, can you sell them? Or, are you at a place where you really just need to demonstrate your value and ask for a promotion?

The other thing about that is there's research to show that when people move companies, they increase their salary faster. Right there. You leave one company to get promoted at another company. So it's really terrible, right? That loyalty to a company isn't rewarded and that outside hiring, you're usually promoting somebody.

But those are three of the biggest ways, right? Most common to increase your income. Now squeezing costs you can do at the same time. And the way, and I know this may differ, so I can only speak from my own perspective in the US and growing up here but there's so much you need credit cards to build credit and all of this stuff.

And it, when we spend money with a credit card, it doesn't quote unquote hurt, right? It's something that we deal with later. To pay off the credit card. And so by not having financial education to lo to know how to use credit cards, people coming out of school with crazy amount of student debt or not and being told by our culture that credit cards and having credit is important.

Which it is, but at that age, it, it can be really easy to spend money is basically what I'm saying. We want a thing instant gratification, easy to swipe a card. We get the thing, especially with Amazon, right? Two days, like it's year in one day, especially when I lived in Boston.

But so squeezing expenses. Looking at everything that you're buying. Still to this day, my husband and I do a monthly budget it's like personal bookkeeping, every transaction. Yeah. We like allocate to this bucket for this month. And it is with awareness and intention that we are saving for our kids education.

We are saving for our retirement savings. We are putting money aside for our vacation funds. We have an emergency fund when we need to use it. We are replenishing our emergency fund. We are saving up for house renovations and repairs and things that we wanna do. And that awareness and intentionality allows for those things to happen.

And I do think that's really important. Yeah, so both sides of the equation, right? Increasing income, decreasing costs are what's going to really get you to a place. If paying off debt really aggressively is your goal which a lot of people are in that boat. Otherwise, all of that stuff is just really good to think about and to know and to have awareness and intentionality on a, month to month basis with what you do, personally even if you don't have debt to be paying off.

Yeah. It's quite interesting because I, I do that in a similar fashion. We German style excle table and my wife hates me for that, but I do this since years and there was a period Where we lived together. I think we, we were already married at that time, but where there was a little slack in the book, internal house bookkeeping.

And we spent more on stupid things. And now, there's a couple of years back, but now I'm really looking at details, looking, did we spend this? Did we not spend this? Can we allocate that to something else? Can we save it? And I do the same with the company just to get track of everything.

But I think that's, and that sounds maybe so obvious for you and me, but I'm always chatting with my buddies around this they don't, One very small thing. I would love to get your opinion on that. So what we have is we have like things you pay yearly whatever, an insurance for the house or whatever that comes once a year, maybe in February.

So what we do, we every, I divide that by 12th, the total sum and put every month something on the side. So my buddy's always saying, yeah every February is don't have money anymore because I need to pay this ridiculous house insurance. Yeah, that's so easy, just save it every month.

But that's just not in their normal way of doing. So I think this small tips will enable people to do things very easy. It's not complicated at all. 

It's 

simple, but can be hard. Just because it's simple doesn't mean that it's e if you have the habit, it's quote unquote easy, but in any event it's simple.

You take a amount of money, you divide it by 12, and then you put that in a savings account or just keep it in your ch whatever it is, right? Get it, get outta sight, outta mind. But the actual execution, building the habit, going and finding the information, right? Who logs into their online insurance platform, you just get billed and you're like, oh shit.

So that is where we're fighting against our, human like habits and being aware. And intentional. You can create an environment that makes better habits easier, which this intersection of money and habits and mindset and psychology is just so you know, I, obviously, I'm here, right?

I could talk about it all day. I could go read about it all day, and one of my favorite books is Atomic Habits by James Clear. And somebody just recommended another habit book and it just is so fascinating to me just today, right? Case in point about habits, I, we have to pack our kids' lunches.

I always pack them at night. I used to pack them in the morning and it's the worst thing ever. Somebody said, why don't you pack them at night? And I was like, it's too freaking hard to pack them at night. And I started packing them at night and it's wow, this made my morning easier, right? Today, this morning I saw some lunch cartons.

I put them on the counter right to make it so obvious and easier. And I was like, let's just see if I make the time or do it when I eat lunch, I pack them already. Now I don't have to worry about it at night. Like creating the environment, being aware and intent, like intentional makes it easier to have better habits.

And that's across the board money, exercise, doing things like procrastination, things you don't wanna do, right? It's creating that environment to enjoy the process and know like the joy you'll have with the outcome. That is all worth it. Yeah. 

I already see one day we need to do. An episode where we talk about how do we teach that our kids, because we both have young kids.

And I think the struggle, at least for me, the struggle is I learned it and we now have my daughter is five and we have we have the cash counter where she's working with her playing money. Yeah. But in the end, you pay through the card, you pay through the phone you don't see the money anymore.

Like when I grew up, it was like, okay, I get 10 bucks per week. And if the 10 bucks are gone from my pocket, then they're gone. There's nothing left. But now you have a card. Yep. And you go and buy something. 

Yeah. That's really interesting. I'd love to, some research, do some experimenting because my right, my oldest daughter is right around that age where she, we got them play wallets for Christmas and she puts money in there.

She has real money, which I'm like, where did that go? But she is starting to get really interested in it. And so I'm really excited to get to that stage where we start talking more about it and we start, doing the, like mini si different savings banks, right?

Like this one's for that, this one's for that. Every time you get money you have to like allocate it in these things and then you get to use it for the goals that you assigned to those things, right? So yeah. Let's keep that for nugget for another day. 

I was just thinking, imagine we would have learned that early on how much money we would have saved and then you get starting.

Let me tell you, my husband grew up with a similar system. His parents did talk about that. He, whenever he got paid, he had to allocate it. And guess what? He was a better saver and less of a spender than I was. Yeah. Not having that financial education, just like somebody talking about spending and saving growing up.

Yeah. I can't imagine. Let's talk about that offline. We need to do another episode on that. Let's go into business and talk about, so you started off with wem? Yes. Helping women. Yes. On finance. Why did you start with women? Let's start that way.

Yeah. 

It's, that's quite a funny story. We were working with a business coach and, we had been talking about what our niche is gonna be, how do we help, for our CFO F consulting, we were working with social entrepreneurs. We wanted to help people who were doing good, do better, right?

And do more good. And off the cuff, she was like, why don't we are going on and on and, talking for months about what our niche would be for this new service. And off the cuff, she was like, why don't you work with moms? And I will admit being a busy. Mom, I was multitasking and did not hear it the first time she said it.

And then fast forward a few days later we were talking strategy and it came up again and we talked about it. And that's when I just felt this emotional connection to everything in my life has changed. Every time I've had a child, I've refocused, I've reprioritized, I've gone through so much growth.

And to me, being able to support other women with children owning a business was just something that felt so obvious. That's what I was talking about. I didn't, I never knew what I wanted to do until. It was right there in front of me and seemed so, so obvious. And so that propelled us into working with moms, working with women.

And I think being in that space as a mom entrepreneur, the connection is instant. Even you and I having kids, right?

 Undoubtedly it changes you. And I found that working with other parent business owners, the first five minutes is like, how are you doing? How are your kids? Blah, blah, blah. And it's just human. It's just being human together.

And I think human connection and that togetherness and that seeing another person for more than just getting on a call, getting things done, making money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is something that, that is very much missing in the finance and accounting world. And with finance and accounting professionals.

Yeah. So 

How do you link that? You mentioned as well the how kids, and maybe even as well females get raised when it comes to money. Is there a perspective on that as well? 

There's a lot there for women in history and Howard, at least money even children. And first. talked about how you're raised affects the decisions you make around money either perpetuating bad generational habits, generational poverty or in your case like trying to do the exact opposite of what you were raised with for women.

And like I said, I can only speak from my perspective growing up in the US there's been, hundreds of years where women had no rights. Where they, when they were married their husband had ownership of all of their assets, right? They couldn't own property unless they were married to a man and the man owned the property, right?

It was so much ingrained in our history and culture that males took care of finances, males worked and supported the household. And so even our structure systems in America you can see it in looking at the Forbes 500 or the top percentage of women in executive roles, right?

It's just so much less than males in executive roles or male led fortune 500 companies. I think I said Forbes, I meant Fortune 500 company. Even in. Creating policies and laws. I think in the US we have 400 plus in people in Congress and there's still only less than 50, that are women. Mm-hmm. And so representation um, the ability to own and na navigate, make decisions about property and wealth and that has been not allowed for women for so long that truly only in our recent history. 50 years even. And, we could even go into reproductive rights.

That's a whole nother thing, but there's just so much about. Navigating the professional world as a woman. P policies, politics, regulations as a woman that has been against us, right? Building wealth and our individual individuality that is so impactful on the way we view ourselves and the way we interact with money.

And one of those other things, imposter syndrome, right? Think thinking that you're not good enough or that you don't belong here or you don't deserve this, that occurs so much more often for women than men. And it's that environment that. Women, especially in business, are navigating every day and have to, was just talking to a client yesterday and she was like, I've been in my business for three years.

I've paid myself six figures, and still somebody yesterday told me something. A and I was thinking, why am I not there? Am I doing something wrong? And it's this voice in our head that we constantly have to wrangle and expend energy to overcome. 

If we take this to the business finance perspective and budgeting like you mentioned, what are things that a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with when it comes to allocation of.

The finance you earn and so on. 

Most businesses don't pay the owner. There's the statistics around businesses not making it past a year. And then businesses not making a past two years, businesses not making past five years in the pandemic. Cash flow problems was the number one reason businesses fail.

Honestly when your business fails, it's not it's because you don't have money to keep going. It's literally all about money. Life is much more than money, but owning, operating and creating a successful business is ensuring that you have cash flow to continue. Your business to continue serving your clients, to continue producing the thing that you're selling to do the thing that you're doing.

And if we want to beat those statistics, then we need to be aware and more intentional about how we manage money in our business. For most business owners, money comes in and it's already been spent. But there can be another way. And that happens when I'm like a broken record.

When you're more aware of what you're spending your money on. How many times do you do a quarterly, an whatever, and look at all of the expenses of your business and then decide, do I really need that? We were talking about seo. Offline, right? Many people when they first start out, they're spending a ton of money on branding and SEO and whatnot. But have they done market research? Have they talked to their ideal customers and decided what their pain points are and if they're selling the right thing. And so by adding more awareness, by being more intentional about the goals, right? By looking at your business in a way that means it is supporting you as the business owner that's where everybody goes wrong, right?

They wanna just do good for other people. They wanna help other people, and you can't help people if you go out of business. Yeah. You can't help people if you are going bankrupt personally because you never paid yourself, right? It's as a parent you can't pour from an empty cup. So how do we redesign the way that you think and feel and approach money in your business so that way it money comes in and you are not stressing because you know it's going here, it's going here, it's going here, it's going here.

You're saving for your tax bill, you're putting aside actual cash for profit. You are putting aside your own salary so you know exactly what it is, right? And then the rest for your business expenses, right? Yeah. And see that bucket approach. You know exactly what you have to spend. If your monthly expenses are more than that, it's a red flag.

You need to take a look at, if income isn't coming in to cover my basic business expenses, then I need to reconsider how I'm running the business. Right? 

Big one, I, I just speak out of personal experience. So I was leaving the corporate world. I was responsible for a couple of millions budget, and then you jump into your own company and it's like you are used to different numbers.

That was the biggest struggle for me. And of course you can't delegate it to everyone. I was always working that I have had someone who is good in numbers next to me. I was not paying that much attention to it. And then being in your own business oh, maybe I should do the bookkeeping. I do.

At home in there as well. But if you just jump in from a large corporate and start your business, you spend easily 20, 30 K already and then he is oh, maybe I shouldn't have done that because I haven't validated, like you said, that's specific to people who work in innovation. They all know validate before you do anything and don't scale it.

So I was just throwing money at it 

and yeah, I'm in lab boat too. learned that the hard way. Like we paid for branding, we paid, and then, I was like, wait, I need to, this is, I need to take a dose of my own medicine here. Yeah. So totally agree. 

It's so important and yeah we could talk about this a couple of hours more because I think it's why it is so important if you talk about startups, If you talk about people, young people, or it doesn't matter almost which age.

When you start a business and you run a business on your own, let's say very small scale still, you don't have a CFO O who takes care of that, who has the financial education to bucket, like you said, to put things in a way, a big mistake. I did as well because I have saved a lot of money before I started.

So I have a safety net, which gave me a couple of years freedom. I didn't pay myself. So then I've had even a client told me that one thing he learned, I think it was during a dinner with, had a couple of wines and he wasn't one thing I have learned and he was saying always taking a little bit.

He was showing this with a couple of noodles, always taking something away for myself. I was sitting there holy moly, I have never done that. Maybe I should start doing that because I was just using my cash reserves. 

It's almost like you need permission, right? As a business owner small scale or large scale, there's a lot of it can be really scary, right?

You don't wanna do things wrong, so you just don't do them right? You're fine spending money, but Ooh, I don't wanna pay myself wrong, or I don't wanna ca like, bankrupt the company by paying myself. And it's almost give, giving people permission to pay yourself. One another point there is if anybody is looking to sell their company, right? Who wants to buy a business that can't pay the owner? 

Yeah. No chance, 

right? So if you pay yourself from the beginning, No matter if it's, if you made a thousand dollars in one month and you paid yourself a hundred dollars, right?

And then you make 10,000, the next month you pay yourself a thousand dollars. Right? Whatever that percentage of your revenue is, and the way I work with my clients is figuring out the percent that works for them in their business and what their goals should be for that. But creating that habit gets you a hundred steps above most people running their business.

No matter how much you take, you are thinking about it and you are setting up a system in order for you to do it again and more in the future. Yeah.

So important. Why, Why couldn't have you? You told me that earlier. 

You know, I'm trying, I'm like, I'm here. I'm ready. Go shout it from the rooftops. This is for anybody owning a business, anybody running a business, whether you're a cfo, F you're not you're not big enough for a C f O. You are.

It's really important to think about cashflow management. Yeah. And too often we just are so overwhelmed and we just don't, we like avoid it Like the click, right? Like taxes, you're like, ugh, big time. Right? But if you plan ahead, if you're saving, you know, you and I are ta were talking about that um, putting a little bit aside each month, right?

Then you're, you don't have that like terrible gut wrenching feeling about taxes coming up. You're not having to put 10 or 20 grand on a credit card for your tax bill. Right. And then you had this incredible year. I had a client who I've worked with, she had this incredible year, got hit with a tax bill, had to put on her credit card.

Now she's starting off her year from a great one behind. 

Yeah.

It's, again, it's the financial education that is missing. And it's like you said as well with the personal finance and budgeting perspective. If you, If you do this in a very simple way, it don't need to be sophisticated. You don't need to have financial models and just, Nope. Take your yearly spending, take the monthly spending and put a little bit aside.

And then it will work out. 

It is more likely to work out, right? 

Yeah, true. Like you still need to generate the income. 

You still ha you still have to get paid and generate income, but it is more likely to work out more in your favor to become more profitable, to be able to save more, to be able to pay yourself more when you are more intentional about managing cash and expenses and, setting those type of goals and then doing it on a regular basis.

Yeah. 

Let's get into the last part of the podcast where I'm asking a couple of questions that are related or not related to what we discussed until now, because we are reaching already almost the hour mark when we finished. I know, 

but can we do monthly? We should just have a monthly finance, 

I have happy to discuss that. That's definitely an interesting one. So if you could work with a project that is impacting every human being on earth, what project would you work with and why would you work with that project? Wow.

I love that question.

What first just came to me was

a program. You know how we like all go to elementary school or, primary school, whatever it's called. What if part of that is financial education? You and I were just talking about experimenting with our kids and how do we teach them? And there there's got to be research and experts on

teaching children about money. I, I work with adults about money. I'm not an expert in children's psychology. But what, if every person in the world had some introduction through high school, secondary, whatever it is How much better off would the world be? Yeah. 

Hugely.

So if anyone is interesting doing that, reach out to Gabby and me. I'm happy to join that club as well. 

Let me know. I am there in a, part of my background that I didn't touch on was I taught at university when I was doing my own master's and then postgraduate, and I really thought that was gonna be my future.

And who knows, maybe it still will be, on the side. But I absolutely love teaching. So putting together something like that would be amazing. The other thing that I will be working on soon is like a startup business kit. What do you need? Do, how, why do you, are you gonna have an L L C or in the US Or you like, why do you need a S corp?

How do you pay yourself? How do you create a budget? How do you look at your finances? How do you get business insurance? Why do you need business insurance? So huge one that will, that might be coming in the future. 

Yeah. I can connect you to a couple of people on that, but let's take that offline. Next question.

What advice would you give to a young innovator that's just getting started? 

Don't wait. I um, you know, I'm very active on LinkedIn and I really love all the advice being shared, and I think that, and I wish that I was paying more attention. And was more open to entrepreneurship in my younger adult days and in my, early career.

And one of the things that I think people struggle with is perfectionism. But like you and I said earlier don't skip validation, but don't wait for perfectionism. Try, if you're passionate about something, go try to sell it. What do they call the M V P? Yeah. Most viable. Get it to a place where you think somebody would pay for it, and then go try to get people to pay for it and then make it better, and then keep getting people to pay for it.

And I think we miss so many opportunities because we are scared and that vulnerability is normal and hard to overcome. But I, I. I really think that, when we get to the end of our days, we wouldn't regret trying, definitely. So don't 

wait. Good one. Where can people find you and how can people reach out to you?

You can use my name right, Gabbie Kelly. Profit first or money. But by email is, I love meeting and connecting just like this. Every conversation is very personal to me. Every relationship and connection. So that is Gabby, g a b i e.

At wem.co, that's w e m.co. Uh, I'm on LinkedIn, Gabby Kelly, cpa. Instagram at WEM Financial. And our website, wem.co, which we have free trainings there as well. So one of my favorite things about running a business is getting to connect with people all over the world and having conversations not only like this, but sometimes even more, right?

Vulnerable people share so much that I'm grateful for their trust and openness. So I'm here to help and to connect, and I'm looking forward to it. 

Gabbie, thank you very much for spending the time with me on the podcast. Was a pleasure to have you. And looking forward to the episode about Kids and Money. 

Yes. We'll schedule that soon. Thank you so much. I have so much fun chatting with you and I hope this was helpful for your listeners.

Definitely. Thank you very much.