Fostering Humanity in Fiscal Matters for a Values-Driven Marketplace - Part 2

Embark on a transformative journey with us, Joel Skeen, as Courtney Shaughnessy of Alchemy Financial joins the Mindful Marketplace for a riveting exploration into the synthesis of financial acumen and unwavering ethical principles. Together, we navigate the complexities of fair compensation and conscientiously managing team growth, all while staying true to the heart of your business's mission. Our illuminating discussion unpacks the essence of budgets as moral compasses, guiding you towards socially responsible prosperity without sacrificing your values on the altar of expansion.

Delving beyond numbers, this episode champions the humanity within the workplace, treating employees as valued individuals with aspirations that transcend a simple paycheck. We challenge traditional corporate hierarchies, advocating for collaborative business models that foster profit-sharing and democratic decision-making. As we engage with the Rad Planners community, we share how Alchemy Financial exemplifies ethical engagement, offering key insights on aligning your financial strategies with both personal and corporate ethics. Tune in for a compelling narrative that promises not just to enlighten but also to inspire actionable change in your fiscal journey.

https://www.alchemyfinancial.co/

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Transcript

Joel: 0:33

What if investing in each other could change the world? I'm Joel Skeen with bizradious and this is the Mindful Marketplace. All right, all right, we are back here with Courtney Shaughnessy, the CEO founder of Alchemy Financial. She lives in Western North Carolina, in my current hometown of Asheville, north Carolina. She has a fantastic, socially responsible financial business and I'm excited to get to dig back in with her.

Joel: 1:07

This is part two of a two-part episode where, in the first part, we got to talk with Courtney about her upbringing, her background, why she's so passionate about what she does and how she helps especially small businesses, businesses that are run by single mothers and businesses really implement strategies around the financial part of their business to be more sustainable, to be more ethically responsible in their businesses so that they can really live out their values. If you're just joining us for the first time, this is the show where we talk to the entrepreneurs, industry leaders, economic experts and advisors who are not only solving a market problem and making a profit, but they're also solving a social problem to make an impact, and it's where we learn how to connect our money and businesses to our values, to our communities and to ourselves. So, courtney, welcome back to the show. Really glad to have you on here today.

Courtney : 2:09

Thank you so much, Joel. I'm excited to be here.

Joel: 2:12

Yeah, so we had a topic that we wanted to dig in with you here to really educate the people that are listening here, either locally on bizradious or actually nationally. You can listen to us from anywhere online on the live stream, but you can also subscribe. If you have not yet, please subscribe and like and do all that stuff please. If you haven't yet do it, it's on YouTube, spotify, itunes, iheartmedia, stitcher, buzzsprout, all of those. But, courtney, I guess let's first kind of zoom out a little bit and I want to ask you about kind of what are some of the main and key points that business owners should take into account when they want to think about doing their finances in a sustainable and ethical way? I guess first, maybe even zoom out a little further Most people don't even think of that when they think about doing sustainable and ethical businesses. A lot of times the CFO part doesn't even register to them. Do you experience that?

Courtney : 3:11

Yeah, agreed wholeheartedly, and I know it seems obvious, but the first step is really defining your values, identifying them, because you can't prioritize everything and you have to be really clear on just like we spend so much time, especially in the beginning, as an entrepreneur. Sometimes we spend too much time on what our brand colors are and what's our logo, what's our company name going to be, and then we put the cart before the horse. We have to be really clear on who we help and how we help them. Well, we also have to be really clear on what we're going to care about, what we want to be known for, how we want to exist in that space, and because you can't align values when you don't know what they are.

Joel: 3:55

Yeah, exactly, and I'm sure there's lots of people out there, or business owners out there especially, who have really good intentions. But I guess what happens if they don't first really take some intentional time to define their values?

Courtney : 4:08

Yeah Well, it's so cliche, but you fail to plan, you plan to fail. And so, just inevitably, when you're not intentional and you don't make a conscious decision, it'll go by the wayside. And because, as business owners, we're pulled in a million different directions and we're spinning lots of plates and there's a lot going on, just like we try to be intentional in our productivity and how we plan our time, how we manage, plan our time how we manage we have to also keep that in the forefront, because it's a thread that's woven into every thing that we do, or if we want it to be, it has to be clear, it has to be top of mind.

Joel: 4:47

What have you learned in that process of helping businesses define those values? I guess what stood out to you the most.

Courtney : 4:54

My specific area of interest is really around how we treat and how we pay our team, and in the beginning it starts with ourselves, so not exploiting ourselves and making sure that the business is sustainable for us and then making sure that before we bring on team members. That's probably the biggest question that I get asked is when can I hire someone? How do I know when I can hire someone? How much can I afford to pay them? And it's such an important transition when you go from one solo person in your business to adding a team member and making sure they understand when that can happen. So there's a practical component to that, but the other piece of it is not just what can I afford to pay them? Am I paying them fairly? Am I compensating them appropriately and when? Is that the point that I can bring someone on?

Courtney : 5:52

And lots of times they'll use contractors in the beginning, which I'm an advocate of, because a contractor is someone who has started their own business. But there's lots of rules and regulations around that. So you have to be mindful and careful not to bring on contractors and skirt any sort of parameters that have been set by your state or the IRS in terms of whether that's legal or not, and that's something that your tax person can certainly help you parse out. But that is first and foremost my biggest piece, because typically your labor, your payroll, is the biggest expense, I would say, for the majority of businesses.

Joel: 6:29

Yeah, absolutely, and I know that I've gone through that process of trying to decide when is it the right time to hire someone. And you know it is a it is a difficult decision to make because in some ways the hiring someone is how you can grow your business because you now have help. It's now not just you all on your own, but at the same time you know it is it is an expense, and you do. I remember having that that debate with some other people where they were telling me that like well, you want to hire someone for as cheap as you can because you want to essentially maximize your profit and move forward. And I just remember feeling having a difficult time with that because I don't know. I'm curious your perspective on this because I know that.

Joel: 7:13

You know I was raised very. My dad's a pastor. I was raised very kind of religiously and always taught to. The golden rule was always a big piece of it is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And part of the reason I got into business for myself was because I didn't like how as an employee I was often I think George Carlin says it this way In a job you are, they're going to pay you as little, just enough to keep you from quitting, and you're going to do just enough work to keep from getting fired, and that's a bad system, that's a bad situation, and so I didn't want to put my people in the same situation that I so desperately just wanted to get out of. Is that why it's important to you? I'm curious your perspective on that.

Courtney : 7:58

Yeah, well, and having been an employee in situations where I was overworked and underpaid, and how harmful it is, it's really harmful to that individual, it's really harmful to their families, to their wellbeing. And as I've gotten older, when I was younger I had a lot more stamina for working around the clock and being available all the time. And I think COVID has really, you know, through the pandemic, brought a lot of these things to the surface, because we realized that our tolerances were way too high. And then we have this major global event happen and we're suddenly realizing, hey, one life is short, and why am I doing all of this? What is the purpose of it? And and really deconstructing what we've always accepted of what this is, just how it is.

Courtney : 8:56

And you know, there's all this conversation between generations, with boomers and Gen X and millennials and Gen Z and the younger folks coming in and they're like absolutely not, I'm not going to tolerate that, I'm not going to put up with that, I don't accept it.

Courtney : 9:10

And so when we do this for ourselves, we give ourselves the permission to say I don't accept that anymore. And when we do that as a collective, that's when things start to change. I mean, if you look at the 40-hour workweek. It's been nearly 100 years since our actual workweek has it's not changed right. So there's a push now to go to the four day work week. There's lots of research and studies around how you're actually more productive, or an employee who goes into the office is actually really truly productive for three to four hours of that eight or whatever hour day it ends up being, and so there's a lot of that and I think sometimes we don't see the correlation between this and our finances. But it very much is right, because a happier, more productive employee is going to yield better results for your company and it's just going to all around make everyone happier and healthier, and why wouldn't we want to work towards that?

Joel: 10:06

Yeah, invest's. Investing in your people is investing in your business, at least from my perspective. Because not only is it, is it like you said, people can be just as productive a lot of times with fewer hours or whatever the case might be, but to me it's also just about not reducing things like turnover, and you know retention and you know the amount of time wasted. I think it's I remember who said it but someone's like, well, what if I treat my people well? And then they quit. And it's like, well, what if you don't? And then they stay right. Like like what, what are you setting yourself up for? And that kind of leads me into point two that you wanted to bring up of how you help people and what's most important for people who do want to have ethical and sustainable practices in their finances is forecasting. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Courtney : 10:55

Yeah, and so it leads into capacity. So when you model it out and that's part of the process when someone says, can I afford to hire someone, can I afford to do X, y, z, okay, well, let's model it out, let's see what this looks like on the P&L and on the cash flow statement, and especially as you get bigger and you have a team in terms of capacity. So I can speak specifically to the accounting work. When you have a firm that's doing accounting work and you've got a team working fractually within lots of different businesses, if you don't charge your client appropriately, it's going to require you to pack and stack a roster for your usually work in pods not every company, but lots of companies.

Courtney : 11:43

You have a lot of people who service a certain roster of clients and so when you pack and stack someone's roster, the amount of work it takes to get it done, what needs to be done, is going to require usually way above and beyond a traditional full-time job, and that's like the thing that we have come to accept within the accounting industry specifically, but it happens also in other businesses. So it's the capacity planning when you have more work right. The whole joke is when someone gets laid off and they don't replace them and they just divvy the work out to everyone else. That all is interlinked into your finances and your modeling and what you can afford, and making sure that you're mindful that you should not put the responsibility on your employees if you cannot afford to bring on appropriate number of staff or team members to execute the work that needs to get done. And so part of that is caring enough about your staff and your team members to go through that process of being really thoughtful and intentional in your capacity planning and putting it into your forecast.

Joel: 12:52

What does that intention look like? What are some of the things that go into that?

Courtney : 12:57

Well, it's one being really honest and candid with your staff and being able to take a temperature.

Courtney : 13:03

There's a lot of management that goes into this and being a good manager, being a good employer and really having your finger on the pulse of how people are doing, how they feel, and not only looking at what's profitable but what's good for the whole everyone who's working towards a common goal within a business.

Courtney : 13:27

And I think it really just boils down to okay, I care enough about my people and my employees that I'm going to ensure that I can actually afford to do right by everyone. And it goes and, of course, like wage is a big part of that and we can talk about that in a little bit. But, um, when you I don't know if you've ever been in a work situation where you were stretched to the max, where the expectations of you were more than what you could reasonably give over time and we can all do hard things for short periods of time, but we all reach our breaking points and that's what I think the pandemic at least in my experience and with a lot of the people that I know working traditional corporate jobs it's like a rubber band. It will only stretch so far before it breaks.

Joel: 14:18

Yeah, it sounds like on the whole, if I can paint broad strokes is you're just talking about treating your people like people instead of numbers, and treating them, having a real relationship with them.

Joel: 14:25

I remember one of my favorite books that I read in business when I was kind of coming up in business and reading a lot of books about business and about specifically about leadership was a book called Leadership and Self-Deception and it talks about how, if you treat people like objects, something that's either someone that's either just there to help you get what you want or that's just there and in the way of something that you want, you're going to never develop a real relationship and you actually put yourself in a box and you can't actually that you carry that box with you into the rest of your life.

Joel: 15:00

But when you actually see the other person on the other side of you as their own person, as a person who has their own needs, has their own desires, has their own wants and their own dreams, and that you acknowledge that and recognize that and treat them as such, that box goes away and it allows you to actually have real connection and actually have real influence with them from a leadership perspective. But I think a lot of times people forget that money is a part of that. It's not the whole thing, it's not all of it, it's not the entire thing. But if you're treating people like people when you talk to them but you're treating them like a number when it comes to the balance sheet, it reminds me of Jim Wallace said budgets are moral documents, and so I guess how does that start to then play out when we actually get into the numbers and into the compensation of it? I know you have a process and a few points of kind of some practical ways that people can make sure that they're doing this ethically and that they're treating their people like people.

Courtney : 16:02

Yeah, and you're right, it sounds so simple, like it should be simple. It should be easy, but it ends up not being. A lot of times, at least in my experience. I've worked for very large international businesses and small businesses that really struggle in this area, and so I think, ultimately, it begins with deconstructing how we value work, and there's this lens that we we look through with entrepreneurship, of risk and reward, and the person who takes the risk should reap the reward at a greater percentage of those who help make those gains. And I think the overlooked part the middle if risk is on one side and reward is on the other In the middle is leveraging labor to get there and so expanding our ideas of how we look at our businesses and how we look at this model and how we're traditionally taught to look at it, and opening ourselves up to the possibility of more collaborative models and having the way that we even view compensation for employees. So typically we place a higher value on strategy than we do on execution, and I'm not sure if you are familiar with the book Work Won't Love you Back, but the author talks about the types of work that has to happen in order for all other work to happen, and that's education, childcare service, retail, and how historically they're the least paid and most exploited of all types of work. And so, even though your business may not be within those specific industries, we still carry those ideas into our businesses, I think subconsciously.

Courtney : 18:01

So that's been part of my journey is my own deconstruction of what I've been taught to accept and what a business is supposed to look like. And, for example, you brought up international contractors. That's a big problem, in my opinion, within accounting is hiring international contractors, paying them less than what would be legal to pay them in the United States as a way of bolstering profits in a business, and that, for me, is a boundary. I'm not going to work with a business who is hiring folks internationally and paying them pennies on the dollar, essentially from what it would cost to hire someone locally or domestically. It's exploitive.

Courtney : 18:39

And we could get into all the things arguments that people make, and to that I say just get to know some people who are in those situations and really interrogate whether what you've been told is true. And that's been my experience. Once I actually did the work to interrogate these ideas, these thoughts, these beliefs, I realized this is not okay, and so these are things that I won't engage in and I'm not going to support. I don't want to help a business grow and become more profitable. Who is using the decisions about what to do with?

Joel: 19:16

the profits are made by just one person or just a board, but when those decisions on what to do with the profits that are made because, yes, the business owner has a huge, huge, huge part in creating those profits they have the idea they make a lot, they take the bigger risk in a lot of ways. They put themselves out there, but they couldn't do it without their workers. If they could do it all by themselves, they probably would have. So they couldn't, so they have to use, so they have to have someone else to help them and to think that and we do have a bit of a bias where it's well, the person that started the business has more right to decide what to do with the profits that was created by everybody, when there could be some models that are more democratic. It doesn't mean that your brand new worker is going to have the same say as the guy who founded the company or the gal that founded the company, but it could mean that there's at least some sort of process where we get to collectively decide how those profits are used together. And the businesses that do that don't fail a lot of times. New Belgium they're in Colorado, but they're also here in Asheville are a worker-owned co-op. I mentioned a couple on my balance sheet last episode that are actually outperforming many of the other companies in their space, so it can be a profitable model there.

Joel: 20:57

I know that there's more that we could dig in on here on the details of this. We are starting to run out of time. Where can people find you to really if they want to learn how they can match up their finances with their values, whatever their values are? Because it sounds like sometimes there are values that you may have a little bit different than theirs, and that's okay. There are some boundaries that you don't cross. But if someone wants to be able to really sit down with someone to define their values, to do that forecasting and to really implement that fair compensation and make sure that their finances match their values, where can they find you and how can they get connected with you?

Courtney : 21:35

Yeah, my website is alchemyfinancialco. You can find me on Instagram at alchemycfo Awesome.

Joel: 21:44

And I'm excited to get to continue the dialogue with you here in the local area and also on the Rad Planners group that we're both a part of. Go, rad Planners. Until next time, make sure to subscribe on all the platforms I mentioned earlier. Make sure to listen to the other hosts on bizradious. And until next time, remember we are each other.