We recently connected with Rachelle Siebke and have shared our conversation below.
Rachelle, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?
While participating in a free workshop on how to make online business work we created summaries for who we are and what we do and then we created an offer. It was a grueling process of revisions, but we worked together tirelessly over those two weeks.
A couple of weeks later, a woman created a post asking how she should pay herself. There were several certified financial planners and tax professionals that threw their name in the hat, but this woman remembered me from our workshop interactions and tagged me. She asked me how to figure out how much she and her husband should pay themselves.
While I knew how to make my own dreams become reality on a regular salary, she and her husband had a different scenario.
They both owned their own businesses and invoiced irregularly. They kept their money in their individual business accounts until a bill came due and they needed money to pay it.
They weren’t exactly sure how much they were making.
They knew that they were skilled in their craft. They knew they liked to have a good time and that they worked too damn hard to tell themselves “no” all of the freaking time.
I sat down with my sharpie marker and crafted out a system that would help them know exactly what they needed to take home in order to live the life they desired.
First, we got dreamy. What did they want their day to day life to look and feel like?
- What were the non-negotiables?
- What were the things that they wanted so badly they were afraid to say it out loud?
From there we began to set up easy habits and routines with the money coming in:
- setting up a household plan based on what they were already spending
- creating a plan to pay down debt including student loans, credit cards and home equity loans
- tracking their net worth
- digging into their money stories
- crafting an operating expense budget for each of their businesses
- designing a system to allocate take home pay and tax withholdings
- listing all the cushy benefits they left behind when the left the employee life — simple luxuries like paid vacation, sick days, health care, retirement savings, and insurance policies
They both gave themselves a pay raise that year. In fact, they now give themselves a raise every year. They have all the tools they need to uplevel again and again — for the rest of their lives.
They sold their house, paid off their remaining debt with their home equity and bought a property outside of the city limits.
She now makes twice the money working part time hours from home than she did at her corporate job which had a nightmare boss and a ridiculously demanding schedule.
She even took her young son to London on a solo visit for a couple of weeks — fulfilling her vision of working from her laptop and visiting family with built-in childcare.
I created Profit + Flow, my signature one:one program as a solution to her specific need. It takes into account all the things that a busy, purpose-driven, fun-loving entrepreneur needs to create the life and the business that she wants to live.
This is still the foundation that I use today to help my clients know exactly how much to pay themselves and live the life they want to live with the money they already have. From there, they have the sufficiency to build even more abundance in their daily lives.
Rachelle, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m a money coach and a life coach. I work with coaches and other heart-centered, purpose driven business owners who want to know how to handle their finances and confidently make decisions based on anything other than their bank account balance.
I show them how to get more of what they want while doing more of what they love — from there, they go on to create even more.
They want to spend their time and energy on anything other than managing money, but they also want to know their bases are covered.
They want to take up yoga, meditate for more than a few minutes, learn a new language, indulge in a bougie lunch with their friends or — just lay in their hammocks.
I’m different from the average money coach.
I don’t just provide my clients with templates and send them away with more to-do’s I know they’d never get around to implementing.
I do it for them on our calls while they watch, learn, and then take over. They can even screen record our sessions in case they get stuck later.
They’re able to use these systems to up-level over and over.
I’m certified by the Life Coach School, so we work on mindset, of course but I also work hands-on with them in their spreadsheets, in their spending plan, and I walk them through so they don’t get stuck.
I’m currently participating in a course to help my clients with their emotional baggage and move through their protective mechanisms that keep them stuck in old patterns. This month, I’ll be in a feminist coaching program to learn more about dismantling concepts that were not designed with women’s best interest in mind.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
I had a really solid home education around money. I was fortunate that my parents knew a lot about money and they taught my sisters and I how it worked.
We learned from a young age that work creates money from an allowance chart. It was a system that included points for tasks completed and paid out in quarters. The more work we did, the more money we were paid.
We were also taught to live beneath our means, save for a rainy day, not to spend it all in one place, and how to invest. I’ll never forget the day my dad’s financial planner showed me the “Ben and Arthur” chart on the benefits of investing early and compound interest.
It made a huge impact and I did actually start my first ROTH IRA account when I was just 19 years old.
I’m so grateful for the financial education my parents gave me, but there was another side of the equation that was given much less attention — the desire and the income side of the balance sheet.
The idea that if I wanted something, if I desired something, that there was a way for me to get it by creating more money.
I was definitely taught that more work would bring more money. I was working 3 jobs at one point in high school.
I was certainly taught that living beneath my means was the smart thing to do.
I did live far below my means for many years. I’m grateful for the basic habits and the foundation that was put in place but it left long stretches of time in which I was sacrificing or “waiting for it”.
It wasn’t until I became a money coach, at the midpoint of my career in my day job, that I realized how unbalanced the scale was.
YES, I was good with managing the money that I already had. But the clients that I was helping were good at making more and more money. The skills they were lacking take just a small tweak to manage the money already coming in. The skillset I was lacking — and am still working on — was the belief in myself. The idea that I could make more money, not based on more time at work or more education or more responsibility but based on the fact that I wanted to and I was willing to create value in the form of a service in exchange for more dollars. That I could put myself out there, stretch and grow.
That growth is continual because the more I lean into my unique desires, the more things I want to do with my money, the more I look to create money. This serves everyone — myself, my clients, my community, the non-profit organizations that I support and the tax dollars that are filtered through government agencies.
Cutting back on spending can ensure that I have more money at the end of my month, but it can expand my vision and my goals and my purpose in the world.
There is a limit to how much money you can cut back on. There’s not a limit on how much money you can create.
If you don’t believe that, it’s not your fault. It’s been conditioned into you to believe that you have to look towards external sources to provide money.
Thankfully, I am unlearning that and you can, too.
Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.
There’s a lot of shame offered to business owners who haven’t taken the leap to go full-time in their business. As a money coach, I can be especially hard on myself about it. There’s the stigma that if you believed in yourself enough or if you had an “abundant mindset” you would have already left your day job.
But, we’re not all the same. We don’t all start from the same starting line. We don’t all respond to risk, fear and pressure the same way.
I’m literally building my life right now, exactly the way that I want it to be.
I work with the coolest women I’ve met from all over the world, who do deep, meaningful change work. It’s incredible.
I get to take all my unique interests and skill sets and offer them up to other women, women just like me who are heart-centered and purpose-driven and have a unique set of skills that they use to do good in the world. When they are able to combine their talents + set up routines in their homes and businesses, their work becomes more sustainable.
It’s my mission to create well-resourced women.
Women who have the time, money, energy, information and decision-making muscles to live, love, or leave without restriction.
It’s important to know your resources and leverage them according to your needs, values, and priorities. Having a stack of cash doesn’t solve everything. There’s a limit to what cash can do.
When I started my business, I had plenty of cash. What I didn’t have was a good working knowledge of how to run a business, how to coach exquisitely well, how to market. I decided that for me, it was more important that I have a consistent way to meet and onboard clients.
I’ve stayed in my day job while I built my signature program, a beautiful brand, a reputable presence, confidence, a network of connections, a solid website and tech that helps me.
I want a repeatable process to gain new clientele consistently before I make my leap. In the meantime, I think of my day job as an investor in my business. I expand my soft skills and my hard skills on the job. I purposely create habits and routines that help me to love the job that I’m in.
I’ve set up my finances to make a smooth transition by maxing out my health savings account and I invest at least 20% of my salary into my ROTH 401K.
I heavily invest my take-home pay on my coaching skills. business masterminds, retreats and advanced certifications.
I’d like to see more business owners supporting their personal values, nervous systems, and risk tolerance on their way to full time business. I’d also like to see more “side hustlers” identifying with and introducing themselves as a business owner first with the “day job” on the side — it’s much more interesting and representative of who they really are!
Contact Info:
- Website: rachellesiebke.com
- Instagram: rachellesiebke.moneycoach
- Facebook: RachelleSiebke.MoneyCoach
- Other: https://vimeo.com/rachellesiebkemoneycoach
Image Credits
Jessica Sheridan Photography