The Fear Behind Handing Over Your Finances (And How to Work Through It)

Welcome to the Creative Mind Smart Money Podcast where we turn financial confusion into creative confidence. I'm Samantha Eck, the keeper and fractional CFO for creative entrepreneurs. Each week I'm sharing my financial expertise and actionable strategies to help you build a thriving creative business. Plus, you'll hear from industry experts who bring fresh perspectives on growing your business beyond the numbers. As building a successful creative business starts with strong financial foundations, your next chapter starts now. Okay, you guys, as we wrap up this very personal series, the last topic that I want to discuss is the anxiety and fear behind working with someone that you don't really know or because you know, you're scared. So you're saying, "I'm scared what makes you able to help me." Like why you, of everyone else, Samantha, why could you help me? And you know, you guys have gotten generally pretty intimately over the past three weeks about why I chose creatives, who I am, everything like that. So I want to just kind of dive deeper into a little bit of my course. So first of all, as I said in the last episode, my faith guides a lot of my business. I'm a Christian, I believe, and Jesus Christ. And God is my Lord and Savior, and He guides me in almost everything that I do. My core principle in saying that is kindness, empathy, and caring, because that's how I feel the Lord would treat others is with kindness, empathy, and caring, and like genuine caring, not just someone who says, "Okay, you know, I'm there for you. I really am there for you." And I really am there for my clients as a whole whole, because it's very important to me that they know I'm there, that I am there, that I help support them, that I can really give them the guidance that they need. So if you're scared and you have any sort of anxiety, today I want to kind of wipe that slate clean. There's a couple things I want to address, including, you know, that anxiety, but let's kind of dive into it and talk about it. When you have anxiety with money, it usually stems from a lot of things that maybe you've been bad with money in the past. Maybe you have just had bad experiences with a bookkeeper. Maybe your bookkeeper has ghosted you. Maybe you've just had a whole bunch of things go wrong, or maybe you just don't, you just have a fear of trusting someone with money because it's so intimate and personal. And trust me, I get that. I get that your business and everything, that is very intimate and personal. And that there's a lot of stuff that is very intimate and personal when it comes to our businesses. But one of the things I always tell my clients is that I am here to help you. I'm not here to try and steal money and stuff at that. And most of the times when we get access to these systems, we get access to your bank accounts, we get access to your credit cards, we get access to your accounting software, whatever it is. It's very limited access. Like, for example, with my clients' bank accounts, I always tell them I need view only access. So that allows me to pull statements. That allows you to see what the activity is in your bank account. I cannot transact. Even in QuickBooks, I can't like pull money out of your account. Unless, of course, you are like invoicing people through QuickBooks, in which case, I have the potential to do that. But I've never done that to anybody because I mean, again, I'm an honest person. I did. That's just not something. And I know there are people out there like that. So that's not something to joke about. But in my books, being 100% honest, being someone who is open about all that is very important. You want people to know that you are taking care of them, taking care of their books, taking care of their system. And that you're also there for them. And I take client security very seriously as well. All my passwords are in a password manager that is locked with a very secure password that I had to take months to memorize because in order to make sure that I could understand my password, I had to make it complicated. And then of course, there's a whole bunch of different softwares and things like that that I had used for my clients. And I make sure they're all very secure. They have that bank level security that I need to keep client data in and make sure that it's not being stolen. I also invested in cybersecurity insurance because I wanted to make sure that if I did get hacked, there was a way to make sure that we were protected. There's just a bunch of stuff that I've done as a business owner to make my clients feel comfortable in that sense, in the security sense. There's also an emotional side where it's like, what if I don't want to handle for this person, my financials because they might shame me or they might say, you're not doing that great or something like that. You know what, there are times where I've gone into clients books and been like, oh my goodness, this is so crazy. What a mess this is. But I've never gone to someone and said to them, why are we doing terrible? Do I say, it's a mess, but we're going to fix it? Yes. Do I be honest with them? Yes. But I do in the kindest way possible and I say, hey, right now things are a little bit crazy, but we're going to get there. We're going to work on it together. We're going to work on it as a team. I just need your help to figure out a few things. And then we can go from there. One of the most important things I was to help my clients as well is that bookkeeping is looking at the past. So when I'm cleaning up your books or when I'm looking at the past, it's the past, right? It's already happened. So it's not something to be ashamed of. It's something that's already gone. We are going to focus on fixing the future. How can we make your numbers look better? Because it not only met bookkeeper, my professional CFO and even though you might not only be working with me for bookkeeping, I use some of those CFO tactics to kind of help even my, like, lowest year clients to be able to better their numbers so that we could get them to where they need to be. Because that's important, right? And the exciting in the fear is there and it's very real. And I want to acknowledge that it's not something fake. It's not something that is not valid. It's a very real fear because people coming into your business from outside of it is scary. There are so many different people out there and I'm just going to be honest. There's so many different people out there who have gone through, I don't even know, maybe they've just done quick books once and they're like, I'm a bookkeeper, but they don't know enough about the background. And I'm not trying to bash anybody or say anybody's business is bad, but there are a lot of people out there who just start a business because they think it's easy and not necessarily because they have it in mind to help people or they do it just for the money or whatever that is. Again, that's not me saying trying to bash anybody or anything at that, but there is an honest factor out there that there are people out there who are not as concerned about the clients and are more concerned about getting the money or just concerned about getting as many people as possible and getting reviews or whatever it is. For me, the most important thing is making sure one that you feel supported, two that you feel like heard and seen based on what I'm seeing in your books and three that we can get you to where you need to be. My clients, there's open lines of communication. I was talking to them with every package, unlimited email communication. We can even voice note in Google chat. One of my clients, we check Google chat almost every single day. So we talk about her finances a lot and we help her feel comfortable in her finances. That's so important is being able to feel comfortable, fully acknowledged that someone is there and looking out for you. There's power in that, right? Because there's a lot of people who, again, don't care enough about their clients or don't get in touch enough of their clients. I've had many people come to me and say they've never heard from the bookkeeper at all or they hear from them once a month or whatever it is. Now, one of the things that I'm also, if you're saying why you Samantha, why you, is that I'm very passionate about education. I think this podcast is an example of that for sure. I'm very passionate about providing financial education. I feel that financial education, especially in business, especially for women in business, especially just in business in general, is very limited. There's not a lot of information on cash. There's not a lot of information on a lot of things. And there was a statistic that recently came out. I can't remember who posted it. Someone sent me an information about people were saying like the factor of their success out of, I think it was 100%. Only 14% of people said that they actually factor a profit as the success of their business, which profit, as I've told you many times over these past episodes, is the number you should be looking at, not your revenue. But people don't know that. And education on finances is so limited. And it needs to be talked about more. This is why I'm so passionate about what I do. Why I'm so passionate about helping people see me as you know, why me? Another reason is because I'm so passionate. Like I'm never going to leave you in the lurch. If something you're curious about, I'm more than happy to show you now. Am I going to give you a step by step on how to do my job? Probably not because what I do, yes, I can help you learn how to categorize. But I can't really teach you like the theory behind everything, right? Because it's taken years of practice. And there's a lot of people. people who don't understand that there is a lot more than just goes into going into QuickBooks and categorizing your transactions. You know, as a bookkeeper, yes, that is the there's a core of going in and categorizing transactions and reconciling, but there's also analyzing reports and being able to actually give you factual information and data on those reports and being able to say here's what we could be doing better next month or you know, you're a person saying hey, you spent 30% of your revenue last month on coffee and I've talked about that before and hey, again, if you're a solo business owner or you have like a couple employees and 30% of coffee last month it's something that brings you joy. Then good for you. Like that's what I want for you. I want you to have a business that brings you joy, you know, thinking of Marie Kondo. I want it to spark joy for you. So the most important thing for me and like why you should work with me, you know, is I'm going to try and ease that anxiety by being as friendly as possible, by being your biggest cheerleader, by being someone who is there to educate you to help you understand your numbers, to help you grow your business in the most meaningful ways possible. Because for me, I want to see your success and I want to see your success not just as a client, but as someone who wants you to succeed. And even if that success is not with me, even if it's with someone else, I want that for you. Because what's most important to me as a business owner is seeing you thrive. So again, if that person is not me, that's totally fine. But I am someone who wants what's best for you. I hope you guys have enjoyed, you know, getting to know me over these past few weeks and really getting to be involved with me. I appreciate so much if you did choose to listen to these four weeks. I know it's been a lot of really personal and up close stuff. And I just thank you so much for spending time with me and listening to my voice and really getting to know me. If you guys enjoy this episode, please like it, share it, subscribe. And if you want to suggest a topic, please feel free to. I'm always a little bit topics. I appreciate you guys so so much. I wish you the best week ever. We'll see you next week for our first episode in case studies. Farewell fellow travelers.