We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ryan Roi. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ryan below.

Ryan, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Artists are generally skeptical of all financial service professionals, and maybe that is justified. But after tattooing for 12 years and seeing how many tattoo artists, and artists in general, struggled with finances, even tho many of them earn good money, I saw a huge need for financial education for artists and creative entrepreneurs. I thought about 30 years from now and how so many people who could have prepared for retirement and buying a home won’t be able to simply because they didn’t know where to go to get the help they needed.

The “starving artist” stereotype is widely accepted as the norm, but I don’t see it like that. I see artists as a group of people who have poured everything they have into their passion and never poured anything into their relationship with money. When they do put some of that magical creative energy into how they deal with money, they are capable of creating extraordinary things.

I had learned to build a healthy relationship with money for myself, and I had worked with many coaches and taken personal and professional development courses all my life, so I thought that one day I should start some sort of financial coaching program of my own to help tattooers and all creative professionals take control of their financial future. In 2020 when I had to close my tattoo studio for covid temporarily, I had a 4-month-old daughter and a wife to provide for, and I couldn’t work. Luckily I had a healthy savings, but I saw so many tattoo shops and small businesses closing their doors because they were not financially prepared to survive the shutdown. Good businesses run by smart, talented people that were closing due to a lack of financial education. That was when I decided I would focus all my energy on becoming a financial coach.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I grew up in Brooklyn, NY. My mother is an artist, my dad is a philosopher and they have had a profound impact on my perspective of the world. My mom inspired me to be an artist, and my dad showed me the power of thoughts, words, and spirit.

I started working in tattoo shops in 2005 when I was 19 and have been a tattoo artist since 2008. I have a deep love and appreciation for the world of tattooing. The stories I have from being in the industry for almost half my life, and the characters I have met along the way have given me a life more exciting and rewarding than I ever imagined possible. Tattooing is the best job on the planet.

But you can’t tattoo forever, and I can’t speak for others, but that idea always hung over me. If I can’t tattoo forever, what is life after tattooing like? What do I want it to be like? How do I make that happen, and are the actions I’m taking today really helping me get there?

I often compare money to pulling lines in a tattoo. If you focus on where your needle is now, it is hard to pull a clean line, but if you focus ahead on where you want your needle to go, your hand guides it there easily and naturally. The work I do as a financial coach for artists and creatives can be summed up by saying that I help people who earn irregular income and are set in a reactive mode for dealing with money, use their creativity to imagine their lives in the future and then be proactive around money to help them get there more easily and with less effort.

I view money as a creative medium. In my Artful Dollar Course, I show people how to properly set up and use their tools (My signature “Waterfall Money System™)so that they can have fun using money to create the life they really want. When you have a properly tuned tattoo machine, the machine disappears, your hand disappears, and you are just having fun creating and discovering what the tattoo is and wants to be. The same goes for money and life. Get the right tools and systems in place, and they start to disappear into the background of your life, and you are left with more freedom to be present and create the life you really want.

A lot of the course is focused on putting this system together, setting up different accounts, linking them, calculating and fine-tuning automated transfers so you are not the one in charge of everything. We also help people with bookkeeping and preparing for taxes and educate them on how to accomplish long-term goals like growing their business, buying a house and planning for retirement.

But my favorite part of the course, and the part of the course that most of our clients rave about in their testimonials is the mindset lessons. We explore the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs around money that dictate our actions. We talk about everything from neuroscience, quantum physics, the nervous system, and at times the conversation delves into the realm of spirit. The area of money can be a painful one for most people. Most people don’t often talk about money openly and honestly and when we do it often triggers emotions and reactions that do not serve us or the people around us. Your accountant or financial advisor can tell you theoretically what to do “spend less, save and invest more, do it in this way” but they aren’t addressing the elephant in the room. Humans are not purely logical, rational creatures, so speaking about money in a purely logical and rational way doesn’t quite solve the problem. By shifting our emotional and spiritual relationship with money, we find a new freedom around it that we never before thought possible. Talking about spirituality and money might seem oxymoronic, but I think that is exactly why there is such a huge breakdown in the world’s relationship with money.

After three months, our clients leave with new tools and systems and an understanding of how to use them. They leave with a new perspective of money that serves them both now and in the future. And they are clear on their future goals and the actions they need to take to get there. Many people have described the course as a life-altering experience.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

That money is evil. It’s a belief that I probably started subscribing to in my early teens, going to punk shows and hating capitalist America. But who benefits from that belief? Certainly not the people who believe it. All beliefs have a cost and a payoff. Believing money was evil meant I could avoid taking responsibility for myself and the world around me by blaming money for everything. Blaming others and avoiding responsibility is a pretty big payoff for an angry teenager. At the time, there didn’t seem to be a huge cost, but as I got older, I recognized that believing money was the root of all evil was costing me a lot. It was costing me everything I really wanted to be up to in my life. The impact I wanted to make on the world and the sense of safety and freedom I wanted to attain were all impossible if I held on to that belief.

So I let it go and replaced it with a new belief about money. I told myself, “Money is just a flow of energy, it flows to me and away from me, and my only job is to not block the flow.” So when I felt myself worrying about, blaming, or resenting money, I saw that as blocking the flow of energy, I gave all that up and trusted the flow would grow naturally if I stopped blocking it. And that’s exactly what happened.

I now have a fun, playful, and creative relationship with money. Money is the paint, my life is the canvas, and I am Bob Ross painting a happy little tree.

My most recent mantra that I started using a couple of years ago is “my money dances to the song of my life” and this has allowed me to see the ebbs and flows, ups and downs, wins and losses around money as all part of the dance. More money will never create more happiness if you believe it is the root of all evil. But when you see money as a flow of energy or as a dance, then the experience of dealing with money becomes a game, and you can be happy no matter where you are on the board.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I think anyone who owns their own business, especially anyone looking to build a really big business that has many employees and makes a big impression on their market, has many opportunities to practice resilience. It’s honestly hard to think of just one, and the one coming up for me while I think about this feels a bit embarrassing, but I’ll share it anyway.

I have had to learn the hard way that growing a business and being good with your finances are two very different skill sets. They support each other, but just because you are good with one doesn’t mean you are good at the other. In this past year, my company passed one million dollars in total sales since it was founded. It sounds exciting, but it was a bit terrifying for me because I thought, “Where the hell is all that money?” Being the financial coach that I am, I have detailed records of exactly where every dollar went. The lion’s share of it went to paying my employees, business consultants, tech platforms, and other things we invested in to help build the business. I have never been responsible for managing this much money, and when growth slowed, as it does, I found myself really stressing about money. After paying out my employees and contractors, money was looking pretty tight for a few months.

I felt embarrassed that I was this financial coach, helping hundreds of people around the world manage and save more money, and here I was, stressing out about how much money we needed to get through the next month. My imposter syndrome was cranked up to 11. I meditated on it and observed my thoughts, feelings, and the reality of my current situation. I recognized that I was dealing with really big (really awesome) problems that I never faced before. Building a big business with 70-80k in monthly overhead was completely unfamiliar territory for me.

Thankfully I had already taken the advice a mentor gave me early on in the business, which was to hire a Chief Officer of Operations as soon as possible. I hired my COO from a LinkedIn job posting, and after interviewing about 6-7 people, my gut told me she was the one I wanted to work with. She wasn’t the most experienced or the one with the best pitch for how they could grow the business. She was calm, genuine, and caring, and that is the culture I want to nurture at The Artful Dollar. Thomai and I sat down and looked at the numbers, and calmly came up with game plan. It felt very touch and go there for about three months, and I can’t say that we won’t see more challenges in the future, but the experience was very humbling, and I learned so much about business and myself in those moments of dread.

Doing extraordinary things always requires you to step outside your comfort zone. If it didn’t, then you would just be doing ordinary things. What lies outside your comfort zone is the unfamiliar zone. A place where what you know “works” from your past experiences probably doesn’t work so well. You run the risk of failing, looking bad, hurting yourself or others. You are inviting breakdowns to occur, and they will. But if you don’t have the breakdown you are trying to avoid, you won’t have the breakthrough you are looking to create. It’s terrifying to willingly go into the danger. “But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” ― Friedrich Hölderlin

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.theartfuldollar.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanroitattoo/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-roi-2143501ba/
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@ryanroi6858?si=gvXf6LCJZOgQAVW5
• Other: Podcast: The Artful Dollar on all platforms Itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-artful-dollar/id1631187307 Spotify: https://spotify.link/j5NC6Mb9YDb