Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in personal and business development but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Rachelle Siebke, a money coach and life coach based in Moline, IL, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
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 and 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 the 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 interests in mind.
Tell us about yourself
While participating in a free workshop on how to make an 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 names 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 a 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 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 them 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 they 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 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-on-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.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
Putting myself out there and learning how to show up and be seen. It's been so fun to look back and see all of the things that I've created — from thin air! I love to track my revenue and really appreciate and marvel at the fact that I've doubled my revenue in business 3 out of the last 4 years. I can't say that about my day job! I've quadrupled that salary, but it took me 21 years!
What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?
One of my coaches used the phrase "business as a healing modality." If that's not the truth, I don't know what is. Nothing in my life has grown me and stretched me to my edges and far beyond my limitations in my entire life — other than becoming a mother.
There are challenges that you can Google and skills you can learn, like building a website and hosting a newsletter on an automated email platform, and then there's the soul-crushing but totally worth it work of putting your light out into the world in the way that only you can.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- Make money doing work you love.
- Never make yourself wrong — for anything. Not for your desires, not for your past decisions, and not for the decisions you are currently debating on.
- Live your legacy now — don't wait. You think that at the end of your life you'll get to leave behind some memories for your loved ones, pay it forward to the next generation in your industry, and make a sizeable contribution to a non-profit charity of your choice. Do that now — in your business as you go. How is the world a better place because you are in it and because you run a heart-centered, purpose-driven mission in a way that only you could?
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://www.rachellesiebke.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RachelleSiebke.MoneyCoach
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachellesiebke.moneycoach/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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