In this energetic episode, Wendy Barlin, shares how she came to the US in 1997 with nothing but a bag of dirty clothes, took hold of the American dream, and now helps others achieve theirs as well.
You will discover:
– How to take control of your money without being controlled by a budget
– How to make 10x better money decisions starting today
– Why your business doesn’t need to make $1,000,000 for you to be fulfilled
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast and I’m here with yet another high demand coach. In fact, my guest today Wendy Barlin is more than an accountant. She’s a personal business manager, and financial confidant, her specialty is taking all the tedious financial chores off the shoulders of busy professionals, and business owners so they can focus on the areas where they excel. And from what little I know about Wendy already, she does it in probably the most fun way possible. So you guys are in for a treat today, Wendy, so excited to have you here. Thanks for being on this show. Before we jump into what I told you is the book that one my heart from the title, I’d love to just hear a little bit of your background, what were you doing before you got into this world of helping business owners with their finances?
Wendy Barlin
Well, thank you. So I actually am from South Africa originally. And I arrived in the United States in 1997, with nothing but a bag of dirty clothes. I was fortunate in that I had an education, I speak English, but nothing but a bag of dirty clothes. And I spent the last 25 years figuring out how to use the American monetary system to create wealth and success for me and my family. But I never had a plan B, you know, it’s all on the line. For me. Even today, if I lose it all, I have no one, I have no family, and no one is going to come and support me no safety net. So I think that makes me work hard. And it makes me really diligent. But I’m a huge believer in the American dream.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that. I love that. So in 97 you get here, you jump in with both feet to the American dream, you make it your own. You’ve been doing this for a while now, what would you say some of the most important work you’re doing for your clients today?
Wendy Barlin
So based on what I’ve learned, and the pitfalls along the way, I now teach business owners how to manage their money, because there’s a lot of work that we do about be profitable, be profitable, make 50% Pay your taxes. And I think a lot of clients get that down. And I work with a lot of clients to turn their businesses profitable. So they’re taking home 50% of everything they make. But then what happens then that money hits their personal bank account, and all of a sudden, the rich, they buy homes, they can’t afford cars they can’t afford. And it’s devastating. I spent the last three years helping them turn their business profitable. And now the money’s gone. And I was in the same position five, almost six years ago now. I had doubled my revenue. I thought it was pretty good. I have to say my head was this baby, I was pretty proud of myself. I worked hard. And it came to the end of the year and I did my own urine tax and Cash Flow Planning. And you know what was left in my bank accounts got nothing, literally zero. And I sat down and cried. And I said if this happened to me, How does everybody else do this? What what is going on? And that was a real aha moment for me and I said there’s got to be a way that we can learn to manage our cash more effectively without the nastiness and the limitation of the word budget. Just kept my grandfather’s probably rolling over in his grave but I cannot budget I don’t like budgeting just the word kind of hurts my stomach. So that was when I set on the path to say there has to be a better way for all of us business owners to manage our money.
Scott Ritzheimer
So the name of your book is Never Budget Again, which again just won my heart the moment I saw I joke all my close friends know that you know, my worst financial habits always come when I’m on a strict budget right? It just just it just tears me to pieces so soon as I saw that I was like yes, because there’s something to be said right? Don’t get me wrong, there’s something to be said about managing our money wisely. Right? You can’t you got to tell it where to go, you’ve got to tell it what to do. You got to make it work for you, your business can only do so much and supporting your financial dreams and ambitions. But in the same token, you know, most business owners and leaders have that visionary rebellious stop right like definition, they did something that had an 80% chance of failure there they they are used to making a habit of and making a lot of money by doing what people tell them is not possible or not even wise right by but and so when they come you know, into this area of like, okay, how do I manage my money and they get all these strict rules from penny pinchers and process people. It’s just like an automatic hard stop, no.
Wendy Barlin
So I think it’s also the mindset right? So the mindset of a business owner is one of abundance which is more not less, and also because our income often fluctuates. Whereas if you’re an employee with a stable w two and the paycheck hits every two weeks, it’s actually easier to budget because it is what it is Yes, for us as business owners, we have fluctuating income, we’re shooting for the stars, we have this abundance mentality, bring it on more. And then we’re being told no, no, no limitation limitation. And the two just don’t sit well together.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So so how do you tackle that? Right? That’s a million dollar question. So we’ve kind of established budgets are not necessarily the answer. They’re an answer. But they’re not the only answer. Can’t do nothing have to do something. We don’t like the restrictions of our budget. So what do we do to manage our money wisely?
Wendy Barlin
So the very first thing I did was create an awareness and put money time in my calendar. And I know that sounds really funny and woowoo from someone who has a CPA license, but I sit with my money once a week, and I started it five years ago, every Friday morning, before anyone in my house is up, I get myself a cup of coffee, I sit at my computer in absolute silence. And I look at my money, I look at what I spent last week, I look at what my plans are for the next week, I look at how much I brought in, I look at how much went out, I look at my credit card balances. I kind of look at my money life. And it’s probably an hour, maybe two, sometimes I pay the bills, and that awareness on a regular basis. I don’t miss that ever. I’m unless I’m traveling. But otherwise, I never miss that. And my family know that. That is that is really sacred time for me. Because that awareness makes such a difference. So rather than just counting things on a credit card and hoping and wondering what the balance is, if I find myself on a Wednesday thinking, oops, I bet I spent a lot of money this week, I wonder what my balance is, rather than ruining my day or stopping what I’m doing. I say to myself, it’s all good. We’ll deal with it Friday. And that allows me to continue to focus on what I’m doing on my business, and my clients. And on Friday, I deal with it good or bad. And I found that just that awareness has changed my spending patterns, because I’m on top of my money. And I see the enemy out much more regularly than this random once a month, maybe I don’t know, people seem to do it at random times. But weekly awareness is what I highly recommend.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yes. And so you mentioned a couple of things that you’re looking at, you’re looking at cash balances, you’re you’re looking at, you know, some of the expenses they had some of the expenses are coming up. What are you doing in terms of Do you ever take a step back from the weekly sequence and look at it in bigger, bigger time slots, are you looking at it in a over a year or, or over months, beyond just the weekly meeting.
Wendy Barlin
So once a month, I do bank reconciliations I know that might sound old fashioned to everybody. But I still don’t trust our banking system. And so I do bank reconciliations once a month, which for those who don’t know what that is, that is matching what the bank says you have with your own records to make sure they tie because believe it or not banks make mistakes. And at that point, I also do my month to month comparisons year to year comparisons and and kind of look at a bigger picture. But that brings up the point that another piece of this puzzle is tracking your money. And this is where software has made our lives so much easier. So I see a lot of people who are still fixated on their multicolored budgets and their envelopes and whatever, great if that works for you. Fantastic. I don’t have the time or energy for that. What I use is a system called mint.com. It’s free. There are a lot of online free systems right now, they are completely safe. I don’t want anybody to worry about it, it is safe to hook up your bank accounts. And then every time you spend $1, these systems are smart. And they know that Verizon is cellphone, and Chevron is gas, and Marriott is a hotel. So you can categorize every single dollar that you spend, not from a punitive point of view, like bad me, but from an from an awareness point of view. And from a tracking point of view so that every week I can look and go, Wow, I spent $500 on restaurants this week. $500. That’s crazy. Next week, I’m not going to do that. Or I’ll look and I’ll say I spent $800 on groceries this week. I didn’t have bought Okay, next week, I’m gonna make different choices. And so tracking those expenses by category that literally takes once a week on a Friday. I think it takes me about 15 minutes because the AI is so good these days. It does it for you. And it’s free.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that I’m big fan of mint.com as well use that even before their Intuit days, but so yes, I’m a big fan of that. Now, one of the things I can just imagine that if someone’s sitting there, you know, they’re driving their car truck. They’re listening to this and they’re still bristling at this idea of monthly reconciliation or Oh, an hour looking at, you know that it’s still tripping a couple of those circuits. So why is that worth it? Right? Like what is the big why behind having a habit.
Wendy Barlin
The results of an awareness makes such a difference. So rather than a budget, which is confining and saying when do you may only spend $800 on groceries that you got to track every day? And how close am I can I take it? But by simply looking at your money once a week, you’re creating an awareness that thereby will have you make different choices, just because it’s top of mind. And it doesn’t have to be an hour. If you even just started with five minutes, five minutes once a week and just said, wow, look what I spent this week. Oh, rather than let it all just go into a big black hole. Because believe me, we all have one. I know when I went down and started this journey five years ago, I would have told you, I don’t buy clothes. I don’t like malls, I think only stupid people hang out in malls, I can’t stand the parking, I can’t stand standing in line the crowds. The whole thing about the terrible lighting malls are a horrible place. So I don’t shop, I sit here at my desk I work, that’s what I do. And when I started tracking my money, wow, the online shopping that I did and how quickly it added up. But I didn’t count it in my day because I didn’t get in a car and go anywhere, right? I didn’t feel like I was spending money on clothes. But then when I looked at the actual hard numbers, there was no denying it. So rather than say, Oh, we got to limit that to $200. I just said to myself, that that’s not smart, I want to do better, I want to do better. And that awareness of tracking allowed me to make different choices. Every time I’d pick up an app on my phone, you know, goes on sale today. That’s a good deal. I’d say to myself, You know what, let’s see how my numbers look on Friday. And then I’ll see if I still want it. And that awareness makes a big difference. But you don’t have to spend an hour by no means just five minutes, and you know what will happen? You’ll start to enjoy it. And I know most of you are laughing right now. But just give it a couple of weeks. And you’ll see, you’ll start to enjoy a sense of control from an abundance point of view, such like if I want to spend $10,000 on clothing. That’s great. That means I need to make $100,000. So let’s go do that. Let’s go do that. You know what if you have the cash, and you can go and stay in a five star hotel going to that? Great. So the positive reinforcement works just as well, for us abundant thinkers as the negative and and it almost becomes this. I look forward to Friday’s now. Let me tell you, it’s not always good news. But I still look forward to Friday’s because it’s my day of knowing it’s my day of accountability, and then I let it go. It does not ruin my weekends. It does not ruin my week. It’s that one moment in time where we stop and go, what’s going on. Okay, I can do this just as you would with your business, right? If your revenues falling or your people aren’t, you make choices, you make changes, you pivot and you move on, we’re doing the exact same thing with our personal choices.
Scott Ritzheimer
And I think the the genius behind that is where were the visionary, entrepreneurial, abundant thinkers, to use your language, where they’re at their best is when they’re making choices on what they want, when they feel forced into something, it triggers the resistance or resentment, you know, at best. And what you’re talking about here is not necessarily even changing the decisions we make before we make them. But it’s about having a mindset and setting a framework for what we want. Right? What do you want with your money as opposed to letting the advertisers decide that for us, right, as opposed to letting the simplicity of Amazon decide that for us. So what you’re really talking about is putting them in control of their their finances, which I think, at least for me, personally, where I struggle with is I feel like it actually takes control away, right? It puts it in some other pattern or principle or you know, spreadsheet and it just it sucks the life out of it. So just.
Wendy Barlin
Now reminds me Scott, one of the forefront and one of the chapters in the book is your vision board. And I’m a huge fan of vision boards. My kids laugh at me my husband laughs at me. I’m living in a house that was on my vision board three years ago, and I wasn’t even house shopping. We were just out and about and I and I happen to come in with a realtor and I said, Oh my God, this house was on my vision board. Not this location, not the street. But this house and I’m a big fan of vision boards. So I have one in my calendar. I have one on the wall up here behind me that you can’t see. And what that does same thing, awareness, awareness, awareness every day. I look on my desk and I go, making healthy choices. That’s a priority for me. Traveling and luxury is a priority for me. So I have a beautiful cruise ship right here that I look at all day long. So if I’m tempted to buy something silly, like another pair of shoes or order DoorDash for three times today, I might do that. I might. But I also am looking at my vision board going, Okay, now I really want that DoorDash like, I’ve got my eye on that cruise man, do I really want the DoorDash? And so again, I don’t have any constraints that say I’m not gonna order DoorDash for the third time today, I might. But I do it with an awareness that I’m one step further from that cruise that I’m also looking at all day long.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Fantastic. So good. So good. All right. Well, here’s a question I like to ask all my guests. And is this what is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s the one thing that you wish everybody listening today knew?
Wendy Barlin
I wish all business owners and really all people weren’t chasing a revenue number. There’s so much information on the internet driving people to a million dollars, I’m sure you see it, this magic number, only 1% of people only 8% of people already, we got to get to a million dollars. That’s where we got to get to. And I’ve done that. And I’ve been there. And I’ll tell you my health was never worse. My finances were never worse. And I think that we’ve lost our way. And we are told that when you get to a million dollars, everything’s gonna be great. When you get a job that pays you 500,000 Everything’s gonna be great. And that’s not the case. It’s about what you take home. It’s your net income, that is life changing. And I wish someone had told me that because I wouldn’t have worked quite that hard and put my health in jeopardy to get to a million dollars, I need to find that it really made my life worse and not better.
Scott Ritzheimer
Well, and you bring up a point to have like your health is in jeopardy. And I cannot tell you how many of my coaching clients have had have had nervous breakdowns or, you know, stress related diseases or relationship problems is like you made a million dollars. Great. But what do you have? So yes, it’s such a such an excellent point. It’s, I mean, it’s a helpful number for Ghana, gauging where we’re at, but there’s nothing magical about any dollar limit. Excellent, excellent advice. Yeah, excellent advice. nother question, I’m going to switch things around a little bit, I’m going to have you take off your you know, financial advisor hat, I’m gonna have you put on your CEO hat. And as a business owner, yourself, you’ve kind of done this throughout our conversation. But I’d really like to have you jump in the ring with the rest of us and talk to us about what the next stage of growth looks like for you, and your business and what challenges you’ll have to overcome to get there?
Wendy Barlin
So right now, a lot of the training and coaching work that I do I actually do on site, which means I come to you. So that is that is great, because I love to travel, I’m earning lots of miles, but it’s limiting and how many clients I can effectively help. And it’s obviously my family don’t really like to wave goodbye every Tuesday. So I’m trying to figure out how through zoom, we can get the same results that I can get in person. And so when I figure that out, I can help a lot more people.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s fantastic. It’s, it’s a challenge a lot of folks are dealing with in professional services world. And again, it’s just an issue of scale, right? You look at even local travel, I was talking with a friend who’s, who leads a group of like a peer group, CEO, peer group, and he’s like, I’ve got 72 meetings, I have to have a month and you know, it’s an hour long meeting, but it’s a half hour, they’re a half hour back, you know, and and then some of them are an hour away. And it’s just so much wasted time that nobody benefits from. But there’s some also something special about being there in person so.
Wendy Barlin
There really is. Yes, there really, really is someone trying to figure out as if I offer people to come here I live near the beach. So is there a way that I can build it into the pricing that I pay to bring people to me, rather than me going to them? That might be the next iteration. Because for the kind of work that we’re talking about here, when it comes to people’s money, Zoom is fine. And I’ve been doing it for years. But to really have the benefit. We all need to step away from our computers and no emails, no phones, just be in a room where we were just talking. And so that’s, that’s the challenge for right now.
Scott Ritzheimer
Sure is. So there’s some folks that are listening and like me, they’re like this, this she gets it right, she gets me Yeah, and they want your help. They want to know how they can get the most out of the success that they’ve created already right and leverage that for themselves. We haven’t even Talk about it. But you’ve got all of these resources available on tax deductions and, again, how to keep as much of the money that you’ve that you’ve made as your own. So how can folks find more out about you and the work that you do?
Wendy Barlin
Thank you for asking Scott. So at wendybarlin.com, super simple Wendy with a Y at wendybarlin.com. There’s a lot of free resources, a lot of downloads on everything from taxes to profitability to money, and then Never Budget Again. Is on Amazon? That’s deductible is on Amazon. And you’re welcome to reach out to me too. There’s a contact form on my website. I’m happy to have a conversation with anybody. If I can’t help you. I’m gonna do my very best to find you someone who can.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Excellent. Well, Wendy, it was just an absolute pleasure having you on when I saw the book on your website, I was like, this is going to be a fun conversation. And so lived up to every bit of the expectations I had. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for the wisdom that you’ve shared and the work that you do for your clients. For those of you who are here with us, you know that your time and attention means the absolute world to us. And so it’s such an honor to have you here. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care. Thank you.
Contact Wendy Barlin
Wendy Barlin is a Personal Business Manager and Financial Confidante. Her specialty is taking all the tedious financial chores off the shoulders of busy professionals and business owners so that they can focus on the areas where they excel. Her professional experience spans more than 10 years in industries as diverse as hospitality, entertainment, manufacturing and the retail industry.
Want to learn more about Wendy Barlins’s work at Wendy Barlin? Check out her website at https://wendybarlin.com/. Get a copy of her book Never Budget Again at https://amazon.com
Podcast Booking Status: Open
We are looking for podcast guests, and we want to share your story.
Are you a coach, consultant, or advisor for entrepreneurial organizations? If so, let’s do a great show together – and we can promote you to our audience on all our social media channels, website, and email list.
Guest requirements:
- As a coach, you should be experiencing some very good momentum AND be grossing $100K or more annually. We’ll be talking about how you help your clients achieve extraordinary results.
- Consider yourself as equally people and results-oriented in your mission.
- High-authority expert management and independent coaches who work with founder-led entrepreneurial organizations of 40 or more employees. We also encourage guests that are operations/strategy and culture consultants, advisors, and leadership coaches to be guests (no specialties in marketing, branding, sales, or IT, please
- Please, no new coaches (under 3 years), published authors, non-independent coaches, or non-business coaches/consultants.