You don’t need to have a passion to make big rich money. All you need are the right tools to make the right decisions, and you can be set for financial success. In this episode, Katja Presnal and Candice Kil patrick Brathwaite give you the tools to take that first step. They share tidbits of financial advice from their book, Big Rich Money. They aim to help women entrepreneurs scale their business to the next level. Don’t let the pressure of pursuing a passion hold you back from creating your own definition of success. Stay tune for more empowering money-making advice to help you author your life!
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Listen to the podcast here
Big Rich Money With Katja Presnal And Candice Kilpatrick Brathwaite
I’m excited to announce that I have two guests on the show. We have Katja Presnal and Candice Kilpatrick Brathwaite. They are the authors of Big Rich Money: How To Turn Your Business Intentions Into A Profitable Company. Before we jump into the first question, I want to give a little bit of background on both Katja and Candice. Katja is an American advertising award winner and an agency owner. Candice brings her skills of being an editor at Yahoo News and being a digital content marketing strategist.
They bring it together as consultants with Fortune 100 companies, working with multinational companies and being an agency serving their clients and what they’re bringing forth nowadays with their new book, Big Rich Money: How To Turn Your Business Intentions Into A Profitable Company is their mentorship. Also their many years in Fortune 100 companies as a consultant to support women in taking their business to the next level. I’m very excited about your new book and to have you both on. It’s great to have you both, Katja and Candice.
Thank you so much for the awesome introduction.
The first question is why did you write a book?
I’ll go first. We both have something to say about this, but one big reason we wrote the book is that we have worked together as consultants with the same clients and what happened was we encountered clients more than once who were not ready to work with us. We were motivated to create a fundamental base layer of number one, “These are some mistakes to avoid that we saw more than once.” We noticed that it didn’t matter the size of your company that they could still make the same mistakes.
The only difference was one mistake for a small company would cost them $10,000 but for a big company, it would cost $10 million. We thought if we could help anyone who’s working with their own business, startup or even solopreneurs if we could them avoid these common mistakes and then after they got the lessons in the book, then maybe they could be ready to be successful and benefit more from our mentorship.
You create your own opportunities.
We have worked with multiple companies, and we’ve had these viral campaigns reaching 100 million consumers. What we actually realized was that it was the bad experiences and the mistakes we saw that our clients were making, even our friend’s companies or even in our own, that it was those moments that taught us more. It’s easy to be successful in a way, but when you are able to do it again, it’s nice to try to find these formulas that you could possibly play to imitate and try to recreate.
When you have that for a long time, you feel like, “I know what I’m doing.” A lot of business owners might get to like, “I know what I’m doing,” then something happens. For example, COVID-19 could be something that is completely out of your control and everything starts from zero. You have to start building. You have to start pivoting.
We wanted to take all of these consulting secrets and knowledge and put into an easy for you to pull and digest bulk package in this book that it’s easy to read for somebody who is just now starting or who has been struggling with some of the foundational things that may be already a couple of years. We wanted to put this in the same package and help as many women entrepreneurs as possible. Obviously, the past several months have been very difficult for many. We figured out, “What can we do to help?” It was the helping and finally putting all of our knowledge in a big way.
That is the biggest learning lesson in life is starting with people’s mistakes, other people’s mistakes, you aren’t mistakes and being able to cover that groundwork to support people. I love what Candice said, “Let’s cover the foundational work so we can do the upscaling, the scalability in a business but it all starts with the basics,” and that’s what your book covers. With that, tell us a little bit about the book-writing journey. How was it to co-author a book? How was it to compile all of these mistakes and put them in a book? I would love to share your thoughts on that.
I love working with Katja so much. Even the projects we worked with together in the past that failed for circumstances beyond our control, I still enjoyed the process of creating with her, and we’re a great team. Writing the book originally, the topics of the book we listed out as a podcast season, episode titles we wanted to do, and then we realized as we flush it out more and more that these are chapters in a book and that maybe even these are multiple books in the future once we delve into all the topics.
We live in two different countries. I’m in New York City, Katja is in Helsinki, Finland, and we would work together on Google Docs and Facebook chat to write. The writing part was easy. Getting it all out was easy. Organizing it so that other people would understand what we were saying was a little more challenging. The co-authoring was a great experience and we’re going to do it again.
We had a lot of these ideas for podcast season and also an eCourse, and then we looked at you, Alicia, actually with your YouTube playing and another friend, who’s also doing these Author In a Weekend. We were literally working on this planning, we are looking at our Google Doc, we are chatting at the same time and we were like, “Did you hear such and such author on the weekend?” “I have a friend, Alicia, who does the same thing.” We’re like, “How does that work? How do you write a book on a weekend such as ridiculous?”
We have a plan there for the podcast, and then I was like, “We actually do strategy and planning. If you look at this, this could be the title of the contents for a book.” We were then like, “Let’s write a book.” It took us two seconds that we were like, “Let’s do this. What is stopping us from doing it if we plan it well?” Like I said, we had already thought of the content. The writing, flushing it out and organizing it took a little bit, but honestly, once you have the plan done, I do believe you can create that book in a week.
Katja, that’s how we know each other. You took Bestseller In A Weekend several years ago. Is that how we meet?
Yes. I have been following your journey for a long time. We didn’t believe in it that it sounds like, “We can’t do it.” Obviously, it took us longer than two days, but once you create the plan and you know what you’re going to say if you have been a professional for a long time, its SaaS flows out. Once you have that plan, it’s wonderful to have people like you. You are helping people but it wasn’t too bad once we started and had a great plan.
You’ve got it all together. You’ve got an organized organization, which is important when you’re writing your book. Sometimes you think you know what you’re saying, but for other people, you need to create a framework. You need to create an outline that supports people and understanding what message you want to get across. That’s what you created in terms of Big Rich Money. I’m curious, to jump into the content of the book a little bit and share it with the readers here, what are some of your biggest lessons in Big Rich Money?
More money, more options.
It’s hard to choose just a few lessons from the book because they’re all based on our life experiences. One lesson that we repeat and both of us experienced in our lives is that you create your own opportunities. That’s true in life from the time we were children, and that’s true in business. I went through a period when I was starting my career that I felt work is like school.
If you do well, then you’ll be rewarded. If you stay in your seat and do your best, then someone will be like, “You get on the honor roll. You get an A-plus. You get a scholarship.” That’s not what it’s like in work. You have to keep inserting yourself in situations raising your hand, keep showing how and keep asking in order to get opportunities. That’s one huge lesson that I would pick out of the dozens.
It’s interesting, even though we are from other sides of the world that how similar our paths actually are and not, that we have been building our own opportunities worldwide for decades. Another lesson is that you have to define your own success, whether it’s your personal success or your business success, that we get into this all of the social media and we’re following people, and then we think that we should do be doing exactly what they are doing.
There are other people for example, like we had agency jobs that, “You had a great career in New York City in an agency. Why didn’t you stay? It seemed like you fail.” “I didn’t fail. I started my own business, and I traveled around the world in 30 countries. I moved to the countryside in Sweden. I wrote a book and I did a lot of my own personal dreams of reality because I used my professional skills.” It is that you have to define your own dreams and success, what it looks like to you. Create those opportunities for you without anybody else telling you where you should be going and how you should be doing it.
I love how you share that a lot of women, in particular, could take their professional skills and translate them into owning a business and taking the skills they learned to incorporate into the business world. That’s definitely a viable option, which is available now, especially with something like the pandemic, switching, how a lot of people are doing business. I would love for you to share some lessons on how people can have big rich money. What does Big Rich Money mean, first of all?
First, I want to share a story about what it means. When we were still working with a client together and we were creating all of these Big Rich Money strategies, business plans and business models for our client, we looked at our own work, and we were like, “I can’t believe how fast we were able to create this startup from the ground up and get funding.” We were able to help this startup from zero to a first viable product within months, including getting funding for them. We were like, “We did that pretty good.” It wasn’t even that difficult.
During that time, we started a Google folder called Big Rich Money Assets Show because that, “Let’s start putting all of our business ideas in this folder and maybe we will be able to scale our own business one day that we are so focused as consultants to help our clients succeed. We have forgotten ourselves. We had forgotten to scale our own business. We had forgotten to create a good business model or strategy for ourselves.” We thought like, “If we help our clients, we’re going to be successful.” It doesn’t work that way that you have to plan your success. That’s what we go through in the book, how do you go from validating a business idea, creating all of these strategies and decided that, “We are ready for big rich money and treat ourselves as our best clients.”
That was an empowering message for us, and obviously, it’s the words started as hopefully a joke, but when we were telling our friends or family about this, we also realized that there were a lot of money blocks. We have all of these different types of negative feelings about money and we wanted to address that. Candice, if you want to continue and take over from the money mindset.
Let’s talk about the money mindset, money blocks. That’s a huge thing for many business owners and people in general. Candice, what are your thoughts on money blocks?
The money mindset is something I’ve been into reading and studying about for several years but before that, it wasn’t on my radar at all. I knew about affirmations, but I didn’t understand the idea of money block, which is a form of self-sabotage. One of the many things that I had tried to incorporate into my life routine is having anchors such as setting your password that you type in multiple times a day to be one of your money goals like $500,000 in sales or however you make it work as a password because you type your passwords like a million times a day.
For some people, use their birthday or something, and that’s not helping you stay anchored, little things like that. That was the Big Rich Money joke because I was doing stuff like that for myself. Katja was the first person that I voice of what I’ve been learning. We also realized pretty quickly that talking about money in a positive way, it’s triggering for people, even business owners.
Even say the title of the book has caused some controversy.
You don’t have to follow a passion to make money.
Even our group of female entrepreneurs, our Facebook group, people said some of the very common triggered reactions that you hear like, “Money is not important to me because my family is important, my art is important or anything else that we don’t.” We’re raised around people saying these things. We say these things ourselves, but we never stopped to think like, “My family is important. Why would that stop me from making good money on my work?” It’s not like those two things are mutually exclusive. There’s not like some judge at the bank, holding back the money go like, “Is your family important? Okay, you can have the money.” I don’t know why we make it such a binary, like a win-lose when these things exist.
I love saying, “Big Rich Money.” I love the way it does lands on my lips when I say it. That’s fantastic that you’re challenging women, especially to get their own money story and be able to see the blocks to that we all are deserving of wealth. I’m all about mantras around wealth. Share some of the tips perhaps in the book around overcoming money blocks.
One thing we did was challenge some of the basic assumptions and how you can turn them into positive statements. One thing you hear a lot is, “Money’s not important to me because I love my family,” for example, and change it to be like, “Money is important to me because I love my family.” I’ve been saying for years the opposite of, “More money, more problems.” For me, it’s more money, more options. For anyone, it doesn’t even matter if you’re a business owner or not.
Having money, especially for women it’s close to my heart because we’ve all seen women stay in a bad situation for too long, whether it be work or a relationship. They don’t have the power to have enough money to get them out of it. They have to compromise even their safety sometimes because of money. In that way, money is super important and empowering. I want every woman to have as much money as they need.
It opens opportunities, and you can use money as a vehicle for good, that the more good we can do in the world, the more money you have. We do go in, obviously these mantras, mindset and even understanding, it sounds silly when we say that, “If you want your company to be profitable, you have to want to make money.” It sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud. We, especially women, do many things that aren’t in our business that we are not planning to be financially successful.
One of the examples that I do share in the book is that sometimes we hope like, “I want to be successful and I’m going to sell a lot.” Actually, that happened with my first business. My store went viral. A couple of products went viral, and I got so many sales that I was not able to keep up sending them. I didn’t have enough finances to buy inventory as fast as my store was getting.
The big success was the reason that I failed because I hadn’t planned the success. I didn’t even think I could possibly physically and financially do in a moment if my store and my products went viral. That was a shock for me like, “All of these good things are happening. I’m so done being a business owner.” That was a very big lesson, but I was able to use that to pivot into a consulting career and then helping other people to deal with their inventories and a lot of that.
It was still a fortunate event, and you can turn anything into a positive. I have an engineering background. One of the things we do go through in the book is financial planning. Even like production management and looking where your time is going and doing it, we call it the Big Rich Money Math. It is important to learn the love the numbers a little bit. We are trying to make it fun because ultimately, it’s very important for your business.
I love the Big Rich Money Math, and that’s important. You’re taking people, particularly within these foundational elements to build a business. You start with the mistakes. You give them tips. What are some other tips you want to share with the readers?
One of our more disruptive pieces of advice is that when I’ve read entrepreneurial books authored by females, a lot of them talk about finding your passion, finding what you’re going to focus on to make your money. Katja and I don’t believe that you have to follow a passion to make money. I almost feel like that advice is a bit sexist because I don’t see as Jeff Bezos, did he have a passion for shipping? Probably not, and he just became a trillionaire. It’s a little unfair to tell a woman that, “You can be a wonderful yoga teacher, but you can’t be like a well-known investor.” Those are very few and far between.
That could be a new way for people to think about being an entrepreneur because so many people get stuck there because they’re like, “I don’t have a passion. I’m not that great at baking or flower arranging.” The two things that are always on the Visa, small business credit card commercials, like a woman arranging flowers or making cupcakes. Those were the two small businesses women were allowed to have.
That’s so important. There are other businesses. I firmly believe that you can make money to pursue your passions outside of business and that whole topic because I know it’s like, “Follow your passion, turn your passion into profit.” That was lots of themes that are directed towards women. You’re turning it on the head a bit and sharing that this is how you create a profitable business. When you create a profitable business, you create jobs, you create opportunities, and then you can use the money for your passion projects on the side.
You can reverse engineer any big goal.
We’re not averse to following your passion, but if you haven’t discovered your passion but you’re pretty good at accounting, we don’t want that to be a roadblock. We want you to be a scalable, hugely successful accountant.
There are lots that you’re sharing here. I’d love to hear from you. In what ways can our audience find out more about Big Rich Money and both of you?
We also have our own podcast. Follow our podcasts as well. We have Insider Society that you can find from InsiderSociety.com, and that is our success accelerator for women entrepreneurs. We love to connect to them. We own every single social media channel that you can find but actually, I do want to tell one more tip from the book. Regards to that social media channels because we do a lot of automation, and we do share our basic marketing strategy like, “This is how you create the basics of good marketing that we have been using for years.”
We do share a lot of more getting secrets in the book and also some client case studies that we have been able to do. On that, I do want to raise that a little bit related to the passion that you don’t have to be on every single social media channel and you don’t have to do everything. It says, “Pick one, be yourself and pick what your goals are. Define your own success.” Carve your own path, whether it comes to your business or marketing channels, you’re choosing how you want to show up on social media. First and foremost is be you and discover yourself. That’s something important we want to share.
Remember, you can buy the book, Big Rich Money on Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com. Go there, purchase the book, leave a review and learn how you can take your business to the next level. Ladies, I’d love to ask one final question. What is one piece of advice you want to leave the readers in terms of Big Rich Money and how it applies to life? I’d love to hear your thoughts there.
One thing I want to leave the readers with, if you have this desire, you feel like you’re destined to make big money but you haven’t made any moves yet. My advice is to take one step. Make a Google Document, call it Big Rich Money. That’s how it started for us. Just the one proactive thing. You don’t have to have a plan. Take a step and now is the day for your Big Rich Money journey.
It’s all because of Google Docs. I can tell you that I have a lot of Google Docs for my ideas. Thank you. That’s awesome, Candice.
We’ve done many big goals of reality in professional and personal lives. Let me tell you, moving to the other side of the world with three kids and a dog, for example, can be a very big test, exactly like starting your own business. When you start that, it seems impossible. It seems that, “There’s so much to do. My business can’t compete with all of these other people.” It can feel daunting, but you can reverse engineer any big goal.
You can start thinking about all of the steps that lead to that big goal. You can start taking one small step at a time. Please buy the book because we go deeper into it, and it helps you. Start that Google Doc, start collecting all of your ideas, and start the journey. The worst thing in life is regret. Ask yourself, “If I don’t do this now, will I regret it later?” If the answer is yes, please get started.
I want to thank both of you, Katja and Candice, for coming here and sharing your lessons learned in Big Rich Money. It’s great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much.
Be well, everyone. We will see you next time.
Important links
- Big Rich Money: How To Turn Your Business Intentions Into A Profitable Company
- Bestseller In A Weekend
- InsiderSociety.com
- YouTube – Alicia Dunams
- Big Rich Money – Amazon
- Amazon.com
- BarnesAndNoble.com
About Katja Presnal
With over 13 years of consulting experience, working in an agency, in-house CMO, and as an independent consultant. Clients have included Fortune 100s to startups. I focus on fixing the business foundation and strategy first, and then marketing strategy in a way that the team can get results fast but also build long lasting results. I’m at my best in helping companies to do something for the first time; pivot, rebrand, new international markets, product launches etc.
About Candice Brathwaite
A New York City-based master of media with many years of experience in digital marketing, digital strategy, influencer marketing, social media strategy, content creation, editing, and video production.
I have worked with Fortune 100’s and gotten small startups off the ground.
I do whatever it takes to get the job done (recruit 100 writers, plan and execute an experiential event, or start a podcast). I never run out of ideas, and I have a unique global view, having lived overseas and worked with global clients and teams.