1842 – A Dual Approach to Debt and Wealth with Becca Heissel

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now it's becca heisel becca you are a success strategist with smashing numbers you're found on the web at smashing numbers.com becca thank you so much for joining us yes thanks josh i'm happy to be here yes yes yes great to have you and so again smashing numbers website smashingnumbers.com. But Becca, tell me about who Smashing Numbers is. In fact, I'll go find while we're chatting. I'm going to go and see if I can't find when I interviewed your founder, Maddie. But that was a while ago. But give us a quick overview of what Smashing Numbers is. Absolutely. Smashing Numbers is a new generation accounting firm.

1:40We do bookkeeping, tax planning, and tax returns, but we use those as tools to help business owners get business strategies to save more time and money. We help them figure out exactly how much money they need to make to live the life that they want. More time freedom, more money freedom, and just overall understanding their finances. Yeah. So very practically, that's done if someone has worked with bookkeeping services before? I don't know if you want to kind of start with kind of the, well, very tactile, you know, from a tactical standpoint, we provide these services, kind of take us in that door and then kind of where do folks kind of ultimately engage with you?

2:28Yeah, absolutely. So bookkeeping is actually important for two main reasons. For every$100 of expenses is roughly$30 that they save of their own money. and we use those reports to tell, we call them books because they tell a story about their business. And so we learn from the past and we forecast the future and we manage the present. And financial literacy is not taught in schools. Entrepreneurs, business owners, they get these big ideas, they go into business, got a problem that they can solve and they're doing amazing at it. There's just business and money was not taught in school. And so that's why we're passionate advocates for them and want to teach them financial literacy and how to, you know, money's not the most important thing, but it touches everything.

3:17So business owners end up doing, wearing all the hats. They're doing their marketing. They're doing this. They need a virtual assistant. They think they can't afford a virtual assistant. And so we help them plan for what they want and help them delegate those tasks and so that they have more time and freedom. So money doesn't touch everything, but if they want to go on a date night with their spouse or they want to hire a virtual assistant, they need to know how much those things cost and plan for it. We are totally against budgeting, totally against budgeting. I'll have you tell me more about that.

3:55Remember that. Let's I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. No, you're great. So I'm actually going to tell you right now because that's where I was going, but we're totally against budgeting and all in favor of financial freedom. So if you want a$5 cup of coffee every day, that's great. You can have a$5 cup of coffee every day. We just need to bring awareness to it and figure out how much it costs. And so that's what we do is we help them figure out exactly how much the life they want to live costs. And the first thing we do, the first three meetings is actually all about them. What do they want to do, be, or have?

4:29Why did they go into business? There's nothing more important than what they want. And so if they want to go on a vacation, if they want that$5 cup of coffee every day, we figure out how much their personal life costs and how much their business needs to generate to support itself and their personal life and set aside money for taxes and pay themselves. There's so many business owners not paying themselves. and we want you to take the first 10 % and set it in a wealth accumulation account and have that money working for you. Don't touch it, it just grows and it works for you. And so once we figure out their life, how much their life costs, then we come up with a strategy plan of how many people do they need to work with at what price?

5:18There's so many business owners that have so many offers and a confused mind says no. So what we do is help them craft those offers and to get specific so they know exactly what they need to do to live the life they want to live. Okay, well, let's dig into that. By the way, it was episode 608 with Maddie Brown. Here we are knocking on the door of episode 2000. But just someone who wants just a little bit more, if you want to go back to episode 608, you're welcome to listen to my interview with Smashing Numbers, Maddie Brown. So my question, Becca, is someone might be hearing this from a high level and say, cool.

6:00I mean, that sounds fine. But the reality is I owe this money. And then we've got this debt that we're paying off. And we've got these expenses. And this is my payroll. And great. That sounds like a great idea to just bring more money in to be able to pay this stuff. But I can't even wrap my brain around, you know, putting money into an investment or something like that when right now I'm paying 18 percent interest on, you know, this business loan that we have or a credit card, business credit card or something like that that's accumulating interest. Absolutely. I go into that for you. So we believe in yes and yes, you can pay off your debt and you can have a wealth accumulation account.

6:42We actually want you to allocate money overall. Pretend your money is a pitcher of water and you have four cups and one is your personal life. One is your business. One is and we consider debt in your personal. And then we got wealth accumulation and taxes. You don't want to dump that pitcher all in one glass because if you dump it all in your business glass, now you have no money set aside for taxes. And it's going to be a lot harder to chase that money that you already spent that we need to pay taxes with. So we want to allocate your money over four areas of your life. And that's wealth accumulation, taxes, business and personal.

7:29And so the first thing is to figure out how much your life costs, whether you're just starting or whether you've been in business for 20 years. You need to face your finances head on. You need to have a coffee date with your finances once a week. We have so many business owners that does not even look at their finances. Husbands and wives do not even talk in depth about their finances as they do with us. What I love is when we're going through bank statements or profit and loss with our clients and they say, hey, can my husband come on the next call? Can I show my husband the screen? they're actually doing a lot better than what they think they are.

8:10It's just how they manage the money. And so that's why we do a complete audit from the very beginning. We set up a foundation so you know exactly how much your whole life costs, how much money you need to set aside for taxes. We create a plan for the debt. We absolutely pay down the debt. And we've actually helped business owners pay down six figures in debt. It is doable. It is doable to pay down debt and set aside money that's working for you. It's a yes. And I know it sounds like a promised land, but it really is possible. Right. And I'm just, again, just kind of advocating for the person might be listening and says, okay, but again, I'm just thinking very logically.

8:59No, absolutely. Money in, money out, right? it. Absolutely. And it's how you manage it. And it's to have a strategic plan. You need to have a strategic plan on how to pay down debt. You need to have a strategic plan on how you offer your services. You need to have a strategic plan that supports your time freedom. And so that's what we do is set a foundation and a strategic plan that helps you cover all those things. It's building muscles. You're not just going to start setting aside 10 % for wealth accumulation today. but you're going to start setting aside$10 a week. So what we do is we build those muscles.

9:39It's not going to happen overnight. But a year from now, it will look completely different from where you are today. And the first thing is looking at your finances and having somebody that you can talk to about your finances. Yeah, no, it really is. Because I think also too, And listen, you know, no matter the stage in business, like we can experience cash flow issues. Like if you're growing, sometimes that means that you've made some investments in growth and or maybe you made a recent hire. So long term, ideally, that's going to pay off. Short term, you know, you're accumulating that ROI from that investment.

10:21So growth can impact cash flow. Certainly, you know, if you get unfortunately, like let's say you lose some customers or something like that. So that negatively impacts your cash flow. It's tough. It's quite a balancing act at times. And I think the important message back, and it sounds like what you're saying too, like from an emotional perspective is, first off, don't feel bad about this. This is just normal. But it is really easy to apply or to have that really hit us in the emotional gut, right? When we have challenges, just like a really good outcome, we would probably feel pretty proud and excited.

11:05Help us kind of understand this duality behind kind of the logical number side of business and the emotional side that is often interwoven. Absolutely. There's absolutely no denying that there's so much shame and fear around money. And it is so hard. It is so personal. And it's so hard to just open your checkbook up to anybody. There's so much emotion that goes behind it. And the biggest thing is mindset, money mindset. And what it is, is so when we sit down and look at your goals and how much things cost, we create a vision of where you want to go and you hold that vision. So it's just like getting in a car and typing in an address and a GPS to go to New York City.

11:50You know you're going to New York City. This is how you get there. Detours and roadblocks come up, but you still know that there's other routes to get to New York City. And it's really that it's holding this vision of what you want and what you want to achieve. and then it's creating the strategic plans to get there. Now detours and roadblocks could come up, but you're gonna hold that vision on what you want. And there's lots of yucky money emotions. You know, one of them is like, another analogy I use is, you know, if you've ever done something wrong and you have to go talk to your boss and tell your boss you did something wrong and the longer you wait, the more stories you tell in your head and you get all these yucky money, all these yucky feelings and then you go tell your boss what you did and your boss is like, that's all you did.

12:39You learned from your mistake. Like we can fix that. And it's the same thing. The longer you take to address your money, the more worry, the more fear you have. We have somebody that we helped. And once she eliminated this worry, and she was looking at her finances an hour every single day, looking at her paying statements, what could she do? She had debt. But once she went through the 60 day program and we got her bookkeeping up today and she knew her numbers, she made eight sales calls the next month. Actually, she closed eight sales calls the next month. And it's because she had more time, more time to do what she's good at and help the people that she helps.

13:26And so that's one thing is once you get rid of that worry and fear about money and you get rid of those yucky money emotions, you have more good energy to do the things that you're good at. Does that make sense, Josh? Yeah, yeah. All right. So someone that's been listening to our conversation, where do they go from here? What would you recommend they do? I know you provide a lot of great education. You provide a lot of great resources. Certainly, I'd say as well, like I want to thank you, Becca, for the work that you do and kind of the empower her world. But yeah, to our friend that's listening, where do they go from here?

14:04Absolutely. I recommend they go to smashingnumbers.com. And for resources, there's a tab called free profit strategies. There is four excellent tools on there that are things that we talked about today. Or they could schedule a free strategy session on smashingnumbers.com. And I will tell you that I love watching the transformations. I love empowering women and there's no greater joy. You know, my paycheck's nothing. Honestly, what gives me joy and accomplishment is watching the transformations of the women and loving their getting more time, more freedom. And that's what I love to do. Yeah. Smashingnumbers.com.

14:47Again, Becca, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate you. Yes. Thank you, Josh.

15:20Apple Podcasts, or join our listener Facebook group. Just search for The Thoughtful Entrepreneur in Facebook. I'd love, even if you just stopped by to say hi, I'd love to meet you. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful entrepreneurs. Hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes each day.

16:02Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.