797 Ashley Ford:

We call our client meetings sometimes therapy sessions. It really is working through the mindset that they have around money to really drop the old narratives and drop the old habits to pick up better, more productive habits. And so much of it is about how we were raised, how we subconsciously think about money. I’ll talk to women often. They’re like, “I don’t have a bad mindset around money. I just don’t really want to look at it. I just avoid it.” I’m like, “Well, that is a sign that we’ve got a bad mindset around money.

Let’s face it. Most of us need money therapy. We all have subconscious beliefs about money maybe deep down we don’t believe we deserve it, or we think having it makes us greedy or bad. Ashley Ford is on a mission to help women entrepreneurs get better at all things money, and shares her tips today.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Podopolo, the interactive app revolutionizing podcast discovery and discussion and making podcasting profitable for creators. I’d like to invite you to take a minute, download Podopolo from either app store, listen to the rest of this episode there, and join the conversation with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice … Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an entrepreneur who is all about helping entrepreneurs and business owners get better at managing and maximizing their money.

Ashley Ford is a small business accounting expert and QuickBooks guru who works with clients who want to grow their business bottom line and personal wealth.

Ashley will be here in a moment, and first,

Does money slip out of your hand the minute you get it? Do you avoid being on top of your numbers in business? Do you find yourself in a boom-bust scarcity loop?

What we experience around all things money – in life and in business – says a lot about what’s going on in our subconscious minds. We’re going to dig deep into where women business owners can go wrong when it comes to money – and what to do about it.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Ashley Ford and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Ashley, welcome to Wings.

Ashley Ford:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, I like to geek out about numbers and accountancy. A lot of women entrepreneurs, and men, for that matter, sometimes really struggle to be on top of their numbers. So, what was it that had you fall in love with accountancy so much that you wanted to be an entrepreneur in that space?

Ashley Ford:

Ooh. Well, I think that we all think money is sexy. We all love money. We just don’t always love managing money. And it’s really easy to avoid when we don’t feel like we have enough or we don’t know really what we’re doing when it comes to money. So it’s really easy to avoid. But I think in life, money can give us a lot of really wonderful things. So, we do love money, and teaching people how to manage it has been really fun for me. And I’m getting to do it in a way that really fits who I am as a person in this sort of accounting world, which can be super intimidating.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. There’s something… I don’t know whether it’s correlated to this idea. Somewhere in middle school or even before, girls get this idea that they’re bad at math or something, and it becomes this thing. But then if that gets internalized, when it comes to spreadsheets and numbers and P&Ls and balance sheets and all this sort of stuff, it’s kind of like, “Oh, I can’t do that.” But we all can. It’s not rocket science. Yeah?

Ashley Ford:

Yes, absolutely. And I love so much that you brought this up because I am of the mindset that no one truly is bad with money or bad with numbers or bad at math. They just need to be taught in a way that’s really approachable for them, and that can relate to something that’s important to them. So I find often when I’m working with female-owned businesses, when I can really relate it to “This is how much money you’re going to be able to bring home,” and we get to work the math backwards, they’re like, “Oh, that makes total sense.” It’s just really approaching it from a different perspective.

And I’ve done a lot of research and studying on just this idea of our mindset around money and how it really can impact our lives and impact our businesses. And it’s really interesting because, dating back to World War I and World War II, men were off at war and women were at home taking care of their families. And often, the men sort of left the women with a certain amount of money to feed the family, keep the home up, take care of their children. So, historically, women have been taught to budget, save, look for discounts, not spend frivolously, spend all of their money on taking care of their family.

So it’s not necessarily our fault sometimes that we have these feelings of guilt when it comes to spending or shame when it comes to spending or not fully understanding how to invest our money or do really productive things with our money, because it’s just been taught to us generation after generation. And women couldn’t even have a credit card on their own, or much less take out a business loan up until the 90s. So, there’s just a lot that… It’s taken us longer to really get to where we are with access to money. So I think it makes total sense that we’re still kind of catching up to the learning curve of feeling really confident with it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, a hundred percent, it is that. But I like what you said about tying it to something that they’re interested in. So you take the intimidation kind of factor out of it. Because here’s the thing. Numbers, in my experience as an entrepreneur, they’re the thing that tells the story or the narrative of your business. Like, how are you doing? And I think sometimes there’s just a fear of that. Like, you don’t want to know. What if you’re not doing very well? Like, “I’m afraid to kind of look at how we’re doing.” I think there’s an element of that. Do you find that with your clients that they’re literally afraid to look at their performance as documented by the numbers?

Ashley Ford:

Oh, yes, we see that all of the time. And what I always try to encourage people is that that’s just information and we get to do something with that information. So it’s not good or bad if your financial situation isn’t where you want it to be or your numbers are lower than you want it to be. Maybe that’s the revenue dollars in your business or your profit, it’s lower than you want. Expenses are higher than you want, whatever that looks like. That’s just information that we get to work with. It’s financial data and we can use that to make decisions. So, what we really work with our clients is to set goals. And I know that that’s very broad and everyone’s always talking about goal setting, but really our idea of setting goals is so that you can make the money work for you to get you closer to your goals. So we’re running sort of spending decisions through those goals. And it gives people a little bit more excitement around finances because when you have a goal and you see where your finances are starting… get a starting point of where they are, we make progress towards that goal, that feels exciting. And then we can really get them excited about looking at the numbers more and wanting to understand them more when they can see how it’s really working in their favor.

Melinda Wittstock:

And we started the conversation by saying, “Okay, everybody loves money.” You know what I mean? And we do on the surface, consciously. And yet, a lot of people subconsciously don’t. Maybe as a kid, they heard their parents [inaudible 00:05:36] about it, so thought money means conflict, or from some religious quarters, it’s like, “Oh, if you have money, you must be a bad person,” these sorts of things, which really set people up for all sorts of patterns in their life. Like, even if they’re earning a lot of money, they’re getting rid of it as fast as they can, all these sorts of things. So, how much is what you do in the end about accounting and how much of it with your clients is actually really about the money mindset?

Ashley Ford:

Oh, it’s so much about the money mindset. We call our client meetings sometimes therapy sessions. Because I am in no way a licensed therapist, I just want to put that out for the record. But a lot of times, it really is working through the mindset that they have around money to really drop the old narratives and drop the old habits to pick up better, more productive habits. And so much of it is about how we were raised, how we subconsciously think about money. And I think identifying that is a huge starting point. I’ll talk to women often. They’re like, “I don’t have a bad mindset around money. I just don’t really want to look at it. I just avoid it.” I’m like, “Well, that is a sign that we’ve got a bad mindset around money. So let’s dig into that a little bit deeper.” So, any thoughts of just “I can’t afford that,” or “I never have enough money,” or “I could never make that work. I could never reach those revenue goals,” those are all signs that we have opportunity to really flip that mindset and have a better relationship with our business finances.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so, so true.

So, what are some of the ways in which the different money-mindset issues manifest? We’ve talked about avoidance, not wanting to look at your numbers. One of the things that I’ve seen in a lot of female founders that I’ve mentored over the years or just even stuff that I’ve had to recover from or unearth and release around this is the difference between expenditure and investment. And where I’m going with this is, a lot of women hire too late because they’re thinking, “Oh my God, this is an expense,” when in actual fact, if you’re bringing team members in early enough who are creating value in your business, you’re growing the valuation of your business, you’re going to achieve your numbers faster. So what’s the investment as opposed to expense and what’s the return. So, how often are your clients aware or not about the difference from a business owner, entrepreneurial standpoint in terms of spending money as an investment as opposed to an expense?

Ashley Ford:

Yeah, I think this is such a great topic. When we’re talking about a negative mindset around money or an unhealthy mindset around money, we call that the scarcity loop. And I usually see two different types of people that are sort of sitting in that scarcity loop. The one we talked about is avoidance. And those are generally the people that I see not wanting to look at their bank account ever, completely avoiding finances as a whole, but they usually are also the people that I see what I call sloppy spending. They’re not really spending intentionally, they’re just spending on whatever they want, whenever they want, hoping that the amount clears the bank, sort of thing. So they’re living in that avoidance and maybe overspending category.

And the other one that I see is actually the people who are obsessed with seeing a lot of money in their account. So they’re over-savers. They’re, like, saving every dollar, they’re stockpiling money in their savings accounts, which also isn’t great. We want our money to work for us. So, that’s really where I see people missing opportunities for investments into their business that can really help them grow and avoid burnout, see better… just better returns on their business and better satisfaction from their business. So when I see people that are stockpiling that money or over-saving, those are the ones that I see that aren’t investing in their future. They’re seeing it as an expense and they’re thinking, “Well, if that’s just money that’s going to go out, I can just take that on and do it myself,” or “If that’s just money that’s going to go out, I’m going to wait until I have doubled my savings in order to be able to invest in that.” And what they’re not seeing is that they could actually grow a lot faster and the amount in their bank account could grow a lot faster if they were to invest in their business in the right ways.

So, really helping people overcome either side of that, whether it’s the avoidance and overspending or the obsessiveness with wanting to have a lot of money in there, maybe out of fear that they’re going to run out, so they’re keeping as much as they can, but not investing in their business in a way that’s really healthy.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, this is the thing that actually keeps women in overwhelm and burnout because if you think you’re trying to save money by doing it all yourself, not only are you jeopardizing your own health and well-being but you’re actually holding yourself back. And I mean, when you look at the stats, something like only 3% of women business owners get above a million dollars. So that seems to be the big block right there.

Ashley Ford:

Yep. Yeah. And I think a lot of times people are like, “Well, I just literally don’t know how I can afford it.” They see what’s in their bank account right now, and they’re either worried about how they’re going to make it work or it failing or they’re not sure how they’re going to be able to afford to invest. And my biggest piece of advice is, first of all, planning, making sure that you’ve got a good plan set in place. But if you can really sacrifice maybe some money that you’re going to be able to take home in your business for one, maybe two months, I see it happen so much faster than people think it’s going to do, but when you invest in your business and bring on support, it is going to allow you to spend so much more of your time in a revenue-generating area or something that brings you so much joy, which then helps you grow your business. And they’re seeing the return on their investment so much faster than I think they think they’re going to. They’re thinking, “I’m going to hire this person and I’m going to be losing money for months,” and that’s just really not the case.

So, if we can do it in a smart way, it’s really what helps people scale without getting so burnt out, because that burnout, I truly think is what keeps women from reaching a million dollars. I talk to women who have businesses that are making maybe a few hundred thousand dollars and they’re like, “I don’t know how I could take on any more. I don’t know how I would even get from here where I am right now to that million-dollar mark.” But it’s because they’re not investing, they’re trying to do everything themselves. And that’s what’s really holding them back.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, as you work with your clients, tell me a little bit about your clients, who your ideal client is and perhaps what are some of the transformations you see when you work with them? Because, I mean, you’re helping them with their accountancy, obviously, but, as we’ve said, there’s a lot more to it.

Ashley Ford:

Yeah. We work with female-owned brands and service providers. And a lot of the women that we work with are in the online space. So they’re either selling their services online, their marketing online, or they have maybe an e-commerce store, they’re selling their products online. They also have some retail stores, too, but most of them have some sort of online presence. And we love helping women when they’re growing their businesses. They’re excited about growth, they’re in a growth phase, which lasts a long time. But we love helping women in that phase because our specialty is that we really offer two things. We like to say, “We don’t just do the work, we like to teach, as well.” Our goal is really to make sure that the women that we work with truly understand the numbers in their business and know how to use that data to make better decisions and get them closer to where they want to go. So, we work with them to really define what success looks like for them, set financial goals, and then advise them as they go to make sure that they’re getting closer to those goals.

So, the offering that we have is, our main offering that we do is monthly bookkeeping, and it includes what we call advisory. Bookkeeping is the accuracy of your financial data. It’s keeping everything in QuickBooks, making sure that all the information is up to date and accurate, and providing you with reports on a monthly basis. And then all of our packages include what we call advisory, which is really where we’re here to help you make decisions in your business based off that financial data. So we’re helping them set money aside for taxes, we’re helping them budget how much they can pay for new hires, we’re helping them pay off debt or save for something that’s coming up. Whatever it is that they’re working towards in their business, we want to make sure that they know how to get there using that financial data.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s not just knowing your numbers and whatnot, just from a P&L standpoint, but there’s also other things for business owners, like understanding things like valuation growth. What are the things that are going to have the most maximum impact in your business, where you can look at it from a lens, for instance, of “Okay, so what’s my top-line revenue,” which I think a lot of folks do, but then there’s this other level of “Okay, how is my revenue profitable? How am I going to get more of a margin on that? What are the decisions that I can make that do that better?” And then on the other side of it, it’s like, you’re trying to minimize your tax exposure. Sometimes there can be a conflict between those two things. Yeah, right? Right?

Ashley Ford:

Yep, exactly right.

Melinda Wittstock:

Okay. So maybe let’s just start there, what you want to show… And I guess this is sort of increasingly in the, I don’t know, the political discourse when you watch someone like, say, Donald Trump, who’s [inaudible 00:15:53] in trouble for maximizing his valuation for different reasons to get loans, but then minimizing it for the taxman, right? So it can kind of skirt the bounds of legality, but-

Ashley Ford:

There’s a line there.

Melinda Wittstock:

There is a line, right? But it bears talking about because it’s actually an interesting dynamic, and it’s a level of sophistication. So, how do you advise your clients around that particular issue?

Ashley Ford:

Well, it is a really interesting dynamic. And oftentimes, we’ll have businesses come to us and say, “Okay, we want to show as much profit as we can, and we want to pay the least amount in taxes as we can.” And it’s so funny because I understand both of those goals. Those are very valid goals. The issue is that they don’t work hand in hand. So we have to figure out how to really understand where it is that they’re going and what it is that they’re looking to achieve to make sure that we’re setting them up on a plan for success.

For example, if someone comes to me and says… We actually just had a client that’s going through this process now. She’s buying a new home. So whenever you’re going through any sort of loan process, you’re buying a home, you’re getting business funding, whatever that looks like, we want to show as much healthy profit as we can, we want to show a business that’s really profitable. This means that maybe we’re not trying to maximize every single deduction. We’re still working within, obviously, all of the rules, and we’re writing off things that are business related, but we’re trying to maximize profit. And she knows that that means that she’s going to owe more in taxes because we’re maximizing that profit.

On the other hand, when I talk to business owners that they’re like, “I’m not going to need any sort of funding for a few years. We just bought a home,” or “We don’t need one,” or whatever that looks like, “I just want to pay the least in taxes. I want to make as much money as I can. I want to pay the least in taxes.” So in that case, we figure out how they can pay themselves in their business in a way that is going to allow them to pay the least in taxes. But they’re going to show a lot less profit. So their business is just going to look less profitable, but it’s actually really strategically done.

So, it’s just always funny when people come with those two goals. And we really have an opportunity to show them that those are great, but we kind of have to lean towards one or the other. And there’s different seasons of your business where it’s going to make more sense to lean one way or the other. And as long as we’re staying in compliance with the IRS rules, all of that is totally legit. We just want to make sure… Like we joked about a minute ago, there is a line and we just don’t want to cross that line. We want to make sure that we’re keeping the IRS happy, but also your pocket happy.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. And then there is a gap, potentially a personal conflict, too, between you as a business owner and your own thing versus the health of the company. And I see a lot of women not pay themselves, especially in the early stages of the business. Especially if it’s a type of business that’s going to get investment funding, like angel or venture or such, there’s a lot of pressure to do that. The way I’ve resolved it is to, in the early stages of my current company, is accrue compensation. So it’s there, it’s on the balance sheet, right? And technically, I guess it’s a liability for the company, but I still need to be paid my worth. So, how do you walk around things like that?

Ashley Ford:

Yeah. Well, I think this is such an interesting topic because, to your point, sometimes there are just different goals of the business owner where it makes sense to sort of delay their compensation. But I feel like what I see more often than not is business owners coming to me, and I think they’re living in that scarcity loop we talked about, where they’re obsessed with the saving and wanting to have as much money in their account as they can. So they’re not paying themselves at all. They’re just not paying. They’re just like, “Well, I’ll be able to pay myself someday,” but right now they’re not paying themselves. And I always try to put it in perspective. Like, if someone were to ask you to work for them for no pay for years on end, you just wouldn’t do it because it would be completely unfulfilling, and you would not feel like you were being valued for the work that you did. So I think when we do it to ourselves, we almost don’t realize that we’re doing that same thing.

And I see that that leads to a lot of burnout and resentment because they’re not really seeing… they’re not reaping the benefits of all the hard work that they’re putting in. They might be seeing benefits in the sense of they’re seeing their business grow and that’s incredibly rewarding, but we also do need to be able to pay ourselves for the work that we’re doing. Sometimes I’ll talk to women that say, “Well, I don’t really need that money.” And I’m like, “That’s great. Let’s still pay yourself and invest it in another way because your business should be able to support it paying the owner.”

I like to lead into this other perspective, too, which I think helps sometimes people understand, but if someone were to buy your business, and you were to tell them that the hardest worker in the business was working for $0, they would say, “Well, this is not sustainable. We can’t buy your business because we’re going to have to pay somebody to do that work. And it’s not happening now. So now we have to find the budget for it.” So, your business should absolutely be able to support paying yourself, depending on what your growth goals are. And then what you choose to do with that money is, you can do whatever you want, right? So if you need it to pay your bills, that’s wonderful. But if you don’t, then we can invest it in different ways that are going to help your money work for you rather than having it just sit in a business checking account.

Melinda Wittstock:

Ashley, I always like to ask people their origin stories of how they come to found the businesses they do. So, as a kid, were you entrepreneurial, or did you like numbers, or was there some indication that this was going to be your path early on? And if not, what was it that made you go in this direction?

Ashley Ford:

I come from a family of entrepreneurs and just a family of business owners. Even my sister used to sell cheesecakes in our neighborhood when she was eight years old and made some pretty good money, actually, selling cheesecakes as a kid in our neighborhood. I think she was selling her cheesecakes for $40 a cake, and this was a long time ago. And my parents owned businesses and other people in my family did. So I think I always had this entrepreneurial spirit about me. And I always preferred math over history. So I always leaned on that math and science side.

But when I was going into college and trying to decide what I wanted to major in, my parents were like, “You really should do finance and accounting.” And all I could think was, “That sounds so boring. I don’t want to do that.” So, I started off in architectural engineering, actually. I thought, “Well, I’m going to design houses or do something like that.” But I had to take an accounting course, and I took my first accounting course and just completely excelled in it and realized I was really good at accounting. So I was like, “Okay, this really needs to be the path that I go.” But I wasn’t sure how I was going to fit in this accounting and finance industry because all I really knew about it was that it was sort of like someone sitting in a back cubicle in the back of an office somewhere, or it was like the principal’s office. When I thought about a business going to see their accountant, I could just picture them sweating in their car before they go in. Like, “I’m about to get in trouble. They’re going to yell at me about how much money I’ve spent,” or something along those lines. And I just didn’t want that to be my job. I didn’t want that experience.

So I just decided, when I was going through school, I was going to find a way to be myself in this accounting industry. I’m someone whose super cheesy and friendly and likes to keep things really lighthearted and casual. But I also really like to make an impact and do it in a way that feels good and not icky in any way. So, I went out of college, I went to go work for a CPA firm, and then I went to go work for a startup. And it was in those that really just the entrepreneur in me was like, “What would it look like to do our own thing? What would it look like to hire my own team and choose my own clients and build my own business, and how fun and exciting and challenging that would be?” So, I was sitting in my car on my lunch break one day and decided I needed to just take the first step towards entrepreneurship, and I filed for my LLC and just started serving clients and really have found so much joy in being able to teach people about money in a way that’s really approachable and that makes it fun for them. It makes it really fun for us, as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing. What’s the best way for people to find you and work with you?

Ashley Ford:

You can find us on all social media pretty much @prettypennyaccounting. We’re on Instagram the most, so you can reach out to us anytime, or you can go to our website heyprettypenny.com, and you’ll be able to see we have services, like I talked about, kind of our main offering. We also offer a lot of educational resources, courses, downloads, templates, things like that for people who are in that DIY stage wanting to really take things on their own. We’ve got resources for them, as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing. Ashley, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Ashley Ford:

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.