Hello and welcome to voice notes from your CFO. Bestie, I'm Harriet Formby, your fractional CFO and holistic business mentor, bringing you money chats, pep talks and financial know how that's practical, relatable, and actually feels good. Whether you're a business owner, a founder or an entrepreneur looking to get a handle on your finances, I'm here to help you make sense of it all.
Today I'd like to talk about something that many of us struggle with it's that feeling like we're just terrible with the numbers, the money side of running a business, and all things financial, it comes up a lot. And guess what? I'm going to tell you now that actually you're not.
In fact, I've got a little secret to share with you, one that might surprise you about my own journey with finances. So first of all, I'd like to take you back to probably your earlier experiences with money and finances and numbers in particular, in the kind of educational setting where perhaps you wer the students that were kind of sat there, kind of thinking in the math class. It's not making a lot of sense. I'd really prefer to be in another class, doing something different, doing the language stuff, being more creative, learning about history, and I'm sat here confused by algebra, confused by shapes and measuring angles and all of that stuff they got us doing.
And maybe there you were kind of like, well, look, I'm one of those creative people. I'm not one of those numbers of maths people, actually, this is quite, yeah, unintuitive, and it's not really my, my vibe. So actually I was, I was one of those people myself. So I would say, actually, my worst subject at GCSE was maths. I was excelling languages and the arts and, you know, history and all the good stuff like that. That's, you know, very much, not maths. And somehow, there's a couple of steps to talk to where this happened, but I became a chartered accountant, which is very much about, you know, finances, but it's also about business and lots of other things as well. And still to this day, I don't, I don't particularly love maths. I mean, there isn't a lot of complex maths in reality, in the day to day, real world life of you know, business finances, obviously there can be, if we're getting into, yeah, really technical bits and pieces. But for the majority of the time, I actually don't use much maths.
So the point of explaining this all is not just to sort of say, Isn't that strange? Wow, whatever. It's actually to say, I would have been, you know, that person that thought I was bad with numbers and, you know, disengaged from it. Luckily, I've engaged with it. I've become an accountant. I now help other people manage their money and all of the good stuff. And I've got, you know, a bit more comfort with the whole financial thing along the way. But the point is, actually that can be very off putting, because if you are running a business, and actually in between that, you know, you left the education system, maybe worked in a job or something else, and then you're coming to set up a, you know, your own company. You may have managed to avoid, you know, a lot of the financial stuff until now. And suddenly, now it's like, well, I'm now responsible for a cash flow, a P and L, you know, my company stuff, my bank accounts, money, taxes, all of these things. And you're like, the last time I did this stuff, I was told it was a bit rubbish back in school, and suddenly someone's, you know, expecting me to just pick it all up. And know, because I'm a business owner, so often, there is this fear element that it's a bit like being back in school and not knowing what on earth is going on, which is, yeah, totally valid, because it is kind of the other side to it is actually sometimes, if you are, like, very detached from the situation, you can kind of look at money and go, we should do this, that the other we should invest it here and do this, and do that, and spend here. And you can make a lot of sense of it.
But actually, when it's your own money, it's a different story, because there's emotions attached to that, there's feelings, there's fears, there's shame, there's all this other stuff going on that kind of clouds your ability to think logically and have judgment and do the right thing, and it also puts a lot of strain on you. So it's actually like an emotional strain of I'm sitting down looking at the money stuff, and it's scaring me, so I'd prefer not to. So that'll be why we think we're bad with it. Because one we were told we were bad in the past, which we shouldn't have been, it was obviously, you know, it's fine to have preferences and not, you know, not really love the maths. Things. That's absolutely fine, but a lot of people are kind of scarred by maybe how they were taught maths in school and that sort of thing. And it just puts that brick wall up, and then you're holding a mirror to, kind of how you feel about business and yourself and money situations as well, when you go and look at your business finances, so that, yeah, that's just kind of like to acknowledge first of all, yes, there's valid reasons why you're feeling a bit freaked out about this stuff.
Yes, that's totally true, but there's also some real positives in there. So the one thing we do know is now we get to do this on our terms, so we don't have to follow somebody else's formula for what it looks like. We can set our own routine with how we manage our finances, how we get support, what systems we use, and we can find a way that works for us as people, as individuals, we don't have to conform to this is the one way of doing it, and that's the only way. So that's the first thing. And if something doesn't work, you can tweak it till it fits you, rather than having to fit yourself into like a method. So for example, if it's how you record your you know transactions. So some people like to do that on a daily basis. Some people like to do it once a month and just sit down and blitz through it. Some people like to outsource it. Some people like to do it themselves. And those are Yeah, just something, some sort of simple examples of just Yeah, where one way is not always the only way. So far, we've kind of zoned in on, you know, very much, ourself, our own perspective, the emotional side, the history with finance and money, in terms of educational side. Now the there is also this bigger picture piece.
So actually, you know, it can feel like everything's very black and white. It's like you made a mistake. You did this wrong, you did this right. But the reality is, we're all operating in a much bigger system than ourselves. We're all operating within an economy. We're operating in new learning spaces where we're trying new stuff. And you know, sometimes things work, sometimes things don't. We've got lots of pressures on our time. We're juggling lots of different hats in our business.
So actually, you know, it can feel like the pressure is really there to get things right all the time, but just because in the past, perhaps you've made a mistake in inverted commas, or, you know, can be, yeah, I'm not, I'm not trying to detract that. You know, when things go wrong with money, it is stressful. I accept that totally. But also, we often have little room for error before we punish ourselves for making a mistake. And what I'd really love to kind of take away from that is, what if we could be a little bit kinder on ourself for what we did with the best of our knowledge and ability at one point in time was probably all we could do, for example, in that situation.
So actually, we could move forward with a bit more grace around that. And, you know, move forward with the learning experience that could be a way of reshaping kind of how we feel about that side of things. I've got a nice exercise that you might want to try out. So this kind of brings all those aspects together. It's the idea of writing a letter to money. So it's very much about pen to paper. Get it all out. You can, you know, explore your emotions and your feelings around finances and money in letter form, and it's a really nice, kind of cathartic way to release those negative feelings and fears. And it's also a way of, kind of reframing money as it's a bit like, well, we normally write letters to people, I suppose, don't we, you know, people we know, etc.
So actually, we're giving money the sort of a personal form, like it's got a persona. So just in the same way that you might want to kind of reconcile a relationship with a person or make sense of it, you might want to do the same with money and yeah, write it down. Write down what's happened in the past there, if you want to see where your pen takes you. So you can do this, as I said, in like, the form of a letter, if you if it's not accessible to you right now, maybe it's something you can come back to another time.
And yeah, it's also worth just like, reflecting on what comes up. You know, once you read it back, see what comes up, anything surprising, what's going on there, actually. And yeah, there's an opportunity there to, you know, ultimately, if you want to, you can kind of tear that up into little pieces and throw it away. All of those things that we do to kind of, yeah, draw a line under things, maybe set new intentions, make peace with the past of the situation. That can all be lovely things to do with that. Once you've kind of finished and reflected and all of those things. So I hope that's been useful for you. I'd love to know your thoughts on any of the aspects of the topic. Feel free to DM me, and if you are enjoying these podcasts so far, I would love it if you would make sure you are subscribed so you don't miss any future episodes, and if you feel called to do so, leave a review, and then more wonderful business owners will hopefully find the podcast and benefit from it as well. Thank you.
