The Story of a Black Girl and Her Money Part 2

Hey, Courtney Sanders here. Welcome to another episode of the Courtney Sanders show. And today I’m kicking back, relaxing and going back to a series that I kind of fell off from and a few people have asked me like, hey, are you ever going to pick this back up? And that is my story of a black girl in her money series. If you haven’t listened to the first one, which was a few months back in 2018, I’m not quite sure off the top of my head, I’d have to look, but definitely go check that out.

And so “The Story of a Black Girl and Her Money” is actually 10 years in the making. This is something that I started actually back in college just for fun. And when I first got into blogging,  I was in credit card debt and I had all my drama at school. I mean, you know my story and everything that I was going through.

Because I had someone hit me up on Instagram and they saw a lot of the new programs that I’ve been releasing and they’re like, hey, you clearly had made all these changes to your business model, so you gonna let us know like what’s the behind the scenes with that? Why are you making the moves you make it, what’s up?  You know, I have been making different moves and I’m really excited about it. I’m really excited about this direction and so I was going to save this discussion for like a live event. I really want to do a live podcast and I still might do a part two or pick up the discussion at that time. But I also didn’t want to wait. So here we are. I’m like, well, whatever. I’m at the studio, I got a batch record, a bunch of podcasts, so let’s just talk about it.

Notes from the Podcast:

Robert Kiyosaki’s Cash-Flow Quadrant

1. Employee

You’re working in a corporation or a job or something. And essentially your only source of income is, your only source of income is like from your job or your paycheck. Honestly, your only source of income is your labor your time. That’s the thing to keep in mind. It’s not so much so that somebody else is providing your income as much as it is that your income is solely dependent on your ability to show up at the job every day and do whatever it is that you do.

2.Self-employed

it’s still in the same column that the employee is because you’re still technically working a job, but it’s a little better because now you have more freedom because you’re working for yourself.

So your time is less constrained. It still constrained because you’re still trading dollars for hours, you’re still working for clients, you know, your clients become your boss essentially, but you have more flexibility in how you structure your business and different things.

3.Business Owner

So this is different from self-employed because self-employed people still work in their business where business owners don’t necessarily work in their business where they don’t have to. If they do, they do it because they enjoy it, but they are more so outside of their business. And the business is its own system and processes that run on its own essentially to generate the income that the business owner then enjoys because they own it. It’s not because they are working on it or because they have to work in it.

4.Investor

An investor is someone who takes their money and puts it into other systems. So a business owner, you, you own a system, I’m an investor, you invest your money in other systems and you get a return from that. And so basically Robert Kiyosaki’s whole methodology is that, if you want to generate wealth and you want to be financially successful, when you want to get out of the rat race, you need to move through the quadrant from employee to self-employed to becoming a business owner, and then ultimately to becoming an investor. And this is not to say that you can’t work a job. I know some people, they love their job, maybe they’re really passionate and maybe you’re doing something like, I don’t know, you’re a doctor, you’re in politics or you know, you are really passionate about what you’re doing and he loved working for your corporation.

But I’m a big believer that even if you work a nine to five, you should still have these other things going, so you should still be able to have some self-employed skills maybe that you do on the side of that. You can operate in multiple quadrants. You’re going to operate in all four of them, but you need to be kind of moving in that direction. You need to be moving from employee all the way to investor.

Dan Lok’s Wealth Triangle Concept

As I look back at the business model that I had before, I felt like I got started on that, but then I got derailed a little bit. And actually, I didn’t realize that this was the case until I stumbled on another video on Youtube from this entrepreneur, “guru” type where he has this process where I’m like, yep, was like the missing link between a Robert Kiyosaki’s cashflow quadrant. So I have to go disclaimer, I’m going to, you know, I guess shout this guy out. I don’t know him. I don’t think I necessarily agree with all his content. I haven’t really dug into his work like that. I just kind of stumbled on him.

At least this one concept that he teaches, I’m like, yes, this is it. And so I felt like it would be disingenuous for me to talk about on the podcast and not share where I got it from. But just because I share a particular aspect of someone’s work that I’m inspired by, doesn’t necessarily mean that I co-sign everything that they do or that I’m like a fan or even agree with everything.

I just say that just because I don’t know this person and me, I’m not like in their world, I haven’t followed their work enough. I’m just giving credit where credit is due.

Imagine a triangle on your mind until there are three points on the triangle.

1.High-Income Skill

The bottom part of the triangle is you need to focus on is developing high-income skill.

So if you can develop a high-income skill is essentially like you moving from the employee to self-employed.

Your Corporation determines what your value is. You’re essentially not in, you’re not getting what you might be getting market rate, but you’re not like in the marketplace per se because you’re not freelancing. Your corporation is what sets your hourly rate or your salary and the corporation decides what the work you do is worth to it. And it’s kind of like your only client.

However, when you move to self-employed, your value is essentially determined by the broader market, not just one company, which is the beauty of this.

Dan Lok was saying the first thing you need to focus on when you are trying to build wealth is to develop high income skills and do that from freelancing. Because if you’re going to trade dollars for hours, you might as well one have control over it. So that’s where freelancing and having your own time comes in. You might as well get paid top dollar for it.

If you have a high-income skill, no one can take that away from you. All the other things that I’m about to get into can fall apart. Your whole house could burn down, your business could go bankrupt, all your investments, you could just lose it all. But if you have a high-income skill and that high income skills determined by the market place, not a specific corporation, you’ll always be able to make money and get back to where you started because you could generate income for yourself.

2. Develop a scalable business.

Then the next point of the triangle is developing a business that generates cash flow. We’re moving from self-employed to business owners. Dan Lok calls it a scalable business. So a business that you know is making you money, but it’s scalable, meaning you can grow it without you having to put more and more resources and infrastructure behind it.

Find a business that will scale without even necessarily having to increase the infrastructure, the resources, the time, everything that goes into it. Obviously, when you scale to some degree, those things will increase. But it should increase at a level that is relatively low for the amount of new income or revenue that the business is generating now that it’s scaled.

3. Income generating investments

For Dan Lok, it’s real estate.  He likes to get into cash flow properties or get into rental income properties. But for you, I mean it could be whatever. Different people like to invest in different things. There are all types of different vehicles. Mostly we know about stocks, bonds, real estate. But there are other things that people invest in that aren’t even like that well known. But if it’s like your jam and your industry and you know about and you know what you’re doing, then you can invest in all of them.

And so he’s saying again, kind of similar to Robert Kiyosaki, it’s not so much that you have to move from one to the other and that you can’t still do it. It’s that you need to have all three in your tool belt. So you get the high income skills first and you don’t stop doing the high income skills or you don’t stop necessarily doing the high income freelancing.

You just use the income generated from that to fund a scalable business. And once you have your scalable business going, you use the income from that to fund your investments. And so once you’ve done all of that, then you’re kind of rocking and rolling.

And so when I saw that and I watched that video, I was like,  this is what I’ve subconsciously been shifting back to. This is why my business model has looked different. Because I’ve been trying to get back to what I recognized honestly was the truth in terms of wealth building from an early age at 19, but I got away from it with all the hoopla of growing my business. So when I first started my business, I focus heavily on digital products, which I do now, because I like it. I like that it’s scalable without having to increase infrastructure.

And so I started that because even before I quit my job, I recognize that’s the type of business that I wanted to have. I recognize that I want it to build something that over time the more it grew, the more followers I got, the more customers I got.

The business can get bigger and bigger and could generate more and more revenue, but my time and my resources and everything wouldn’t necessarily increase with it. It would increase a little bit, but it wouldn’t increase proportionately to the amount of income that it was generating. That was my mindset from the beginning. Why? Because I’m a student of Robert Kiyosaki and I recognize that based on my skillset and my comfort level with the Internet and technology and everything, this was the easiest, fastest way that I actually enjoy and that I was good at, that I could build a scalable business.

However, because I took my eyes off the prize,  I went from being long-term focused on being short term focused, specifically quitting my job.

I started to get really impatient because I didn’t like that I was making money but I had to buy and set up all this stuff. And so with getting impatient I shifted into coaching. And once I got into coaching the name of the game is to charge the highest prices as you can.

The issue though and where I say things kind of got arrived for me and my business model is that I started focusing on coaching cause it seemed like a quick win. Everybody wanted to learn how to grow their business. But at my core,  I’m not really a coach and I did an Instagram live about this like maybe a month or two ago when I got clear on my business model even recently.

I just let everything go. The shift that people have been seeing now and the person who hit me up on Instagram was asking about as essentially I’m going back to building that scalable business that doesn’t require a lot of overhead or doesn’t require a lot of infrastructures as it grows. I’m going back to developing my inventory of digital products because when I first set out to do this, you know, back in 2011 when I incorporated, and then in particular in 2015 when I made my first product, it was always about digital products.

I always saw myself as a product based business, just a digital product based business. And so I allowed myself to kind of get swept away from that. And so what you see, what I’m doing now is that I’m really going back to building that infrastructure that I should have stayed the course with back in 2015 even if it meant me staying in my job a little longer.

I see why this guy, Dan Lok says you should focus on having a high-income skill first before you try to build a scalable business. Because when you’re creating a scalable business, it requires a lot of your time.

I’ve been speaking like crazy. Why is that? Well, that’s part of my high-income skill. That is a part of my high-income skill portfolio in terms of the types of hours that I’m willing to trade for dollars. I am no longer willing to trade hours for dollars in the coaching industry.

And to be honest, I get paid thousands of dollars to speak, to go to corporations and host training for millennial women, millennial development, millennial retention, that’s really hot and corporate America. Getting the different generations to work together. How do you get millennials to play nice with, you know, the baby boomers or whatever? And I just did as a speaking training on this, you can check it out. It’s called “Free to Fee, How to Get Paid Speaking Engagements.”

My scalable business is a product base, a digital product based business because it’s the best of both worlds. I don’t have a lot of overhead. I don’t have a lot of inventory or anything like that. And my business can grow, my expenses don’t really increase if 10 people buy my product or if a hundred people buy my product or if a thousand people buy my product, I mean my hosting costs stay the same. I might have questions for my developer because I had an issue where part of my site crashed when I announced a new product.

That’s really where I am right now, where my mindset is. And I’m really focusing on getting these two bases of my triangle nailed down. So getting a system really consistent with my high-income skills, my influence or marketing, my podcast sponsorships and my paid speaking, getting good like system rolling with that. So that’s kind of rolling on autopilot. I know how many engagements or how many sponsors or whatever I’m doing per month. So I could have just really focus on basically creating all these digital products that I need to do in order to round out my inventory so that I can then automate and systematize that.

So all the extra income that’ll be thrown off from, whether it’s my high-income skill or my scalable business, I’m focusing on putting that into investments so I can create wealth, not just for my family, but for my community.

I’m really fascinated by that process of how people get into development. I feel like it’s not something that I see a lot of women in. Definitely not a lot of minorities. When I’m 40 or 50 or whatever, I would like to do those kinds of investments, but I know none of these things is possible unless I get my foundation in order. And so that’s why I was so excited when I saw this video from Dan Lok when he explained that even when he explained it as a triangle,  I feel like my high-income skills and my scalable business is literally the base for the rest of my financial life.

This is why I said in my previous podcast a few podcasts ago if I’m not wealthy,  it’s my fault. I have everything, I have all the components. I just need to do what they do. I just need to make it doable to do. That’s why things have looked different in terms of my business model. I’ve just been really focused on, again, crawling that scalable business, getting my high-income skills in order. This is why you’re seeing me speak all the time.

And also I would love for you to join my more than one club, which is my community where we can chop it up and um, you know, hash these things more in depth. Um, I feel like the more than one club is kind of like my secret place where I can like really go ham. I talk about, I mean I’m open, I’m transparent.

You know, I could be a little freer, not only myself but just to chop it up. I’m with you all and just really like hash these things out. You know, I want us all to win. So if that’s of interest to you, go to more than one club.com. That’s m o, r, e t, h, a, n one o n e club Club, [inaudible] dot com to sign up. You get a free two-week trial. So with that, that’s the story of a black girl of her and her money. And I’ll see you in the next episode. Bye.