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Building Your Dream: Meaghan Likes Shares Her Journey on The Kooler Lifestyle Podcast #59

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00:00:00 Meaghan Likes
And grew up really poor. Like crazy crazy poor. Like, it’s really hard for me to even think about it. And I didn’t know because the funny part about pork, because sometimes they don’t know, like, she didn’t realize, like how impoverished his upbringing was. But it was bad, like one pair of shoes bad, like when his mom died, there was one thing in all of the kitchen covers. Like if you went to my kitchen covers right now, you can eat for six months, like. And you could eat well, like. I mean, I’m a little bougie. Like you can eat really well for that. And so I this book Breaches out of Poverty, really talks about like your money, your money story and how it can impact decisions. And I remember the first time somebody told me they’re like, maybe you’re approaching that like a poor person. And I was like, I am.

00:00:50 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Welcome to the Kooler Lifestyle Podcast. I’m your host, Matt Kuehlhorn, and I’m excited to have you join me as I interview community members and business leaders from the communities in which I live, work and serve through my business, Kooler Garage Doors. We’re going to bring you highlights on characters in our communities. Why? Because community matters, and I want to know more about who is behind our business and leadership in order to understand and support the community fabric that our relationships make up. And collectively, we can build stronger communities that support our lifestyles, our youth and our health. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Kooler Lifestyle Podcast. I’m your host, Matt Kuehlhorn. Today, I’m sitting down with Meaghan Likes. She’s a serial entrepreneur. She has likes accounting. She’s a CPA, Bookkeeping Academy online and a number of others. Meaghan , I’m so excited to chat with you. Thanks for joining.

00:01:48 Meaghan Likes
Thanks for having me. I’m really excited for this Sound Reverse podcast so we could take. There’s a lot of different directions and I can’t wait to see where we end up.

00:01:57 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, that’s true. We do have some diversity and in some different conversations and. For our conversation today, I know we’re going to dive into some business numbers and I want to extract some real value for those listening. And I think this is going to apply really for any business and even if you’re managing a household because numbers play right, you just build out some context. Meaghan, you’re beaming in from the West Coast. Yeah.

00:02:24 Meaghan Likes
Yeah, I’m in Northern California and Davis near Sacramento. And that’s where I called home. I travel quite a bit, but I say there’s no place like home, or an hour and a half from the islands, hour and a half from the ocean. And yeah, I love where I.

00:02:40 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Live. Yeah, beautiful. Where did it all start for you? Where did you grow up?

00:02:45 Meaghan Likes
So I grew up in the Central Valley of California between President and Bakersfield. So very rural ag area, very conservative area and I both my parents were. Well, they did a lot of stuff. My dad, he was a salesman by nature and very entrepreneurial, so they had many businesses. When I was younger, I definitely spent afternoons working in a restaurant that the family owned, or working in a scrapbook store that they family owned, or entering like data and spreadsheets for an insurance agency. My mom was like a pretty constant teacher, but she picked up a couple side hustles like as a writer. And I just, I fell in love with this idea of small business. I was actually on the local downtown Business Association board by the age of 12 because my parents owned two businesses on Main Street in in the town I grew up in. And I I like this idea that you could you could build something on American dream of building something. I always wanted to be an attorney because I was an arguer, had a boyfriend. He was a farmer he’d like, never left our county or a zip code like, ever. And my dad was Rotarian. So Rotary has been like this constant thread through my life. Don’t know what it is. I encourage you to check out your local Rotary Club. I’m the current president of my Rotary Club here in Davis, CA. Very proud of that. Anyway, my dad had an exchange student and this guy was, you know, a sophomore in high school and he spoke 5 languages and I thought he was just the coolest thing since I spread and I wanted to be like Charles. I had a giant crush, like giant 8th grade girl crush on this guy. And I I was. I just rearranged my whole life so that I could be an exchange student, just like Charles. And I wanted to speak a lot of languages. So I left my teeny tiny bubble a year early from high school, went to France, wanted to go to college, deferred a year, ended up at Davis. Never forget, the first time I arrived in the town that I live in now. It was on the train, and my mom had to organize somebody to pick me up from the train. And he went and got me a bicycle. And I to this day still don’t have a car. My husband has a car that we share sometimes. I bike, I skate, I walk and it’s a pretty it’s a pretty idyllic life. I love it here.

00:04:54 Matthew Kuehlhorn
That’s amazing. Yeah. So you studied accounting in order to get your CPA, Yes.

00:05:01 Meaghan Likes
Barely. I’m really bad accountant, Matt. Like, don’t tell anybody, but my degrees are in French and in history I had to have 24 units of accounting. So I went back and got an associate’s degree in accounting. But really it was like. Hard Knocks. You know, helping. Yeah, my husband with a window cleaning business. Helping. You know, I paid my way through school as a bookkeeper in college. Yeah, that’s kind of a whole another fun story about how my life pivoted from going to be an attorney to becoming an accountant. But here we are. And now I say it’s probably good that I’m a bad accountant because I’m more of a financial translator. Like I could translate something that’s really, really complex and maybe doesn’t feel like your language or something that you can relate to. And bring it back home to like your daytoday life in your business or in your family. Yeah, it’s a lot about mindset and relationships with money and and fear, like overcoming fear and being brave.

00:05:59 Matthew Kuehlhorn
OK, this has gotten so I had no idea where we’re going to go, Meaghan, but this is really, really.

00:06:04 Meaghan Likes
Cool. I was like, we could talk about stretching routines. We could talk about like hell. I’m not a warning person. We could go any direction. You want to go back? Keep drinking coffee.

00:06:14 Matthew Kuehlhorn
You grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. Did you always know that you were gonna be an?

00:06:19 Meaghan Likes
Entrepreneur Bad at it, by the way. Like, very bad. Yeah, like failed every business, just for the record, like to this day. Never succeeded in any of the businesses. Never made any money.

00:06:30 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Really.

00:06:32 Meaghan Likes
Which I think is important to the story, right? Because 75% of people fail in business, 75% will fail. Like, if you’re listening to this one in, four of you and your friends are going to go out of business after 15 years. And it’s not because you’re bad at what you do, You’re actually quite good at what you do. You’re. I say, and I’m very biased, but I say it’s because you’re bad at the money and the money makes the business go round. And so I’ve made it my personal mission that I want to lower that percentage when I die. I want them to say it’s like 73% of businesses fail or 71% of businesses fail because Meaghanwas on this mission to help, you know, I help like. 10,000 business owners a year. There’s 32 million businesses out there. Like, that’s a lot of people educate about money and like, get over these hurdles around, you know, I’m not good enough. I’m not good at math. People told me that like 10 times a day. Oh, I’m really bad at math. And like, what’s all I That’s what calculators are for. It’s not math. Hey, everybody.

00:07:29 Luke Hylton
This is Luke from Kooler Garage Doors. Just want to take a. Quick second to. Talk about our sponsor, Sommar Garage door openers. In our opinion, Sommars are the highest quality product on the market today. We recommend them for all of our residential garage door installs because of the variety of features they include, such as Wi-Fi connectivity and safety features such as a fixed chain which moves along as secure rail to ensure your garage door opens quietly and safely. Click on the link in the description to learn more about Sommar garage door openers. https://www.sommer-usa.com/

00:08:09 Matthew Kuehlhorn
So you’re kind of leading into into mindset with with your clients and you know the failure of business. I think there’s a huge part of that that is mindset, whether it’s around numbers or not. And I also know part of the entrepreneurial journey is to feel like there’s days where everything’s crumbling and failing and and then there’s days where I feel like I’m on top of the world but.

00:08:35 Meaghan Likes
Like, have you had one of those days, like? I had a meeting the other day and like, I had a meeting with my OPS manager in the morning. And I had a meeting with like one of my lead people in the afternoon. And they were like, I heard you’re having a bad day. And I fixed every and I was like, I am. And I realized like that morning that hour I was stressed out. But this hour I was like cruising along, feeling like happy and sunshiny and I’m like, man, I got it, you know, emotionally, I gotta keep it cool. Like I can’t let them see when I’m freaking out. Yeah, it’s definitely hard hour, minute by minute, day, but.

00:09:03 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah. No, I fully agree with that. But what can you share with regards to mindset and I think this is important for listeners to to pick up on because this happens whether we’re running a household or a business or multiple businesses, but we are specifically talking about money mindset. What are you referring to?

00:09:24 Meaghan Likes
I mean, I don’t have it figured out yet. Like I want I want to have this dialed. I’ve read a lot of books about mindset and money and money mindsets and I haven’t found the answers I’m. So I think I’m still like digging into my client relationships, dipping into my friend relationships meal, what is it? But I feel like you know we are the some of our experiences and we all have had different experiences around money and probably around business in our past and and we don’t realize how that impacts us on a daytoday basis. We don’t realize how we can be feared, driven or feared avoidant right. How we can put our head in the sand and we, I think it entrepreneurs, we’re really good at putting our head in the sand. We’re like, yes, this is on fire. I’m going to go put out that fire and I’m going to ignore everything else that’s on fire around it because this is where I want to focus my energy. I do that like 12 times a day. Yeah. And money is the thing that we tend to avoid. But it’s it’s it can be the most empowering piece of the business. It can be the most freeing piece of the business. And it can’t be used for good. So I feel like lately I’ve been on this mission to like, let’s just talk about money. Like, let’s talk about profitability. Let’s talk about greed, let’s talk about guilt. Let’s talk about generosity, Let’s talk about like, obligation. I feel like I, I work. I have an intense work ethic. Like I work too much. I work a lot. But I am on this like path to solve this problem and I. I’m I’m just so passionate about it, right? And I feel like if we can, if we can start looking at money like this, how much are you making? How much are you spending? Where are you spending it? And how do we keep more of it? If we can just on a daily basis think about that in terms of our finances and business. It could change your story. Like it could change it could change your relationship. With your business, with your family, with your staff, yeah, we we could go down that path for a long time. But money is not equal.

00:11:40 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah. Do you do you run into, do you run into clients And this is getting a little personal, so I’m I’m opening up here because this is something I’ve just really touched on in the last couple of weeks, so. My journey has been super interesting. I’m a late blooming entrepreneur and now I’ve got Kooler Garage Doors and the Kooler brand in general growing and I love it and I’m on a mission. And so I’m really passionate and driven And the thing that I just touched on was a point of guilt around success, guilt around profitability and having a lot of money. And I’ve looked at my my background and I see this historical. Kind of play where flush of money comes in and I do a great job of getting rid of it and it’s in the time like logically I’m thinking about investment and and maybe it’s rolling forward and and yet at the same time I get into also some money crunches and those are relative and you know there’s there’s some reality to it but there’s also the mindset to it. But you mentioned that that guilt and money’s not bad kind of thing and I’m wondering how prevalent is this from your perspective and.

00:12:53 Meaghan Likes
I feel like unless you’re raised privileged, it’s very prevalent. And if you think about the majority of our population is not really raised privileged, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I like to think about this like you think about at home for all the stories that maybe don’t have a business, like think about your relationship with money and your spouse’s relationship with. And then think about, like if you have children, the story that you’re telling around money in your house, that’s a blended experience between you and a partner. So when you have a partner. And what, what kind of impression are you leaving with your children? Like, I I grew up with, you know, like a lot of different things. Like I had a mom that was super fiscally responsible. I mean, this woman, perfect credit her whole life. She was a W2 employee. As a teacher, she paid every bill on time on the 1st of the month, like balanced her checkbook. I mean, she was like a model citizen when it came to money. Never talked to me about money. Never talked to me about credit. Never talked to me about debt. Never talked to me about, like, inflows and outflows. Never. Then I had a dad who was really good at making money, and he was even better at spending it again. To this day, as a grown adult, I used to joke that I think my parents think that I’m an attorney. Like, they don’t actually know what I do for a living. Actually, most people don’t know what I do for a living. But my dad’s to this day will not talk to me about money at all. Like, it’s just there’s a lot of, like, privacy around it, and they’re. And maybe it’s Gill, maybe it’s shame. Maybe it’s like, I don’t know, I don’t know what it is for you, but what I’m going to tell you is your story around money and and talking to you, Matt, but also to any listener listening your story that you’re telling yourself about money. Is we very different than the person next to you? Yes, it’s really different than your clients experience around money, your spouse’s experience around money. And I feel like if you’re a parent, if you’re the honor and luxury being a parent. The responsibility to help shape that story with the next generation, because it’s it’s bad. We need to talk about this more. We really, really do. In business, it’s even worse sometimes because they’ll always bravado around revenue. Like nobody talks about like how much they pay themselves as a salary or nobody talks about like what their EBITDA is or what their net income is like. They talk about gross revenue. Yeah, making money easy. Keeping money is the hard part.

00:15:18 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, so OK, there’s a couple of questions in all of this. And you know, I’ve got a a background riddled with a few different Llc’s that are in the dumpster. One of them, the very first one was life schools. And that point I was on a mission to teach young people around money, sex and life and big taboos. Money is a big taboo. Sex is a big taboo. And. To get over that is just getting into the uncomfortable. And so I’ve been learning how to communicate these topics with my kids. But it’s still difficult because that’s one skill set that isn’t.

00:15:55 Meaghan Likes
Taught.

00:15:56 Matthew Kuehlhorn
And so to drive the conversation around money is our conversations going is a bit of a skill set and we’re I am sensing you would agree that this skill sets lacking we just don’t know what we don’t know and to then. Bring it up. It brings uncomfortable and we all like to stay comfortable most of the time.

00:16:18 Meaghan Likes
It’s vulnerable. Like, I even read through school as a bookkeeper, but not for businesses, for for really wealthy families. And I would help them like, bounce a checkbook And, you know, I would help their kids set their first budget and, you know, get ready for college and like, set up their first check and get like I did that for dozens and dozens of times through college. And what I realized was like, you can learn. Almost everything you need to know about a person based on what’s happening in their checking account, right. Yes. Where are they spending? What’s their balances? Yes. What’s right? Like, what are their habits around? Like, you know, all the vices. Like, my gosh, if you knew the stories that checkbooks could tell you. And so we don’t want to talk about it because we have shame around our spending habits. And I’m like, that’s right. Why would you give it that power? Why not take the power back? Why not? Like, you get to set the story. You get to choose like I see money as a vehicle. I see money as as like this. I don’t know it’s it’s this way of getting to where you want to go and the more clear you are about where you want to go, the more powerful that money store can become. And taking back that power is so wonderful and it’s so like transformational and it I have the privilege of getting to do that in my daily life and I’ve now. Tried to shift into doing that in Group settings. And the cool thing about group settings is it breaks down these barriers because now it’s not this intimate one-on-one relationship that feels a lot more like therapy, like financial therapy. But now it’s more like group therapy, like, hey, I have this driving lie, I have this passion and this is what I’m trying to do and let’s go, let’s go build a path to get there.

00:18:08 Matthew Kuehlhorn
I love that you were worth. Yeah, I was thinking we were talking about business financials, now we’re talking about transformation.

00:18:14 Meaghan Likes
Your.

00:18:14 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Hardest question to answer in some of this, and this might be some of the The problem, if you will, is just answering that question. What do I want?

00:18:24 Meaghan Likes
What do you want? I feel like I’ve hired many, many people in my life to help me figure out what I want. Because it’s constantly evolving, right? Like, totally. Why? You know, what am I working towards? And yeah, I remember my husband, so my. There’s a book, and it’s like, here on the ground, but I’m going to get it, I guess. I grew up really poor. Like crazy, crazy poor. Like, it’s really hard for me to even think about it. And I didn’t know. Because the funny part about poor people, sometimes they don’t know, like, she didn’t realize, like how impoverished his upbringing was. But it was bad, like one pair of shoes. Bad. Like when his mom died, there was one thing in all of the kitchen cupboards. Like if you went to my kitchen covers right now, you can eat for six months, like, and you could eat well, like we. I mean, I’m a little bougie, like you can eat really well for that. And so I this book breaches out of Poverty, really talks about like your money, your money story and how it can impact decisions. And I remember the first time somebody told me they’re like, maybe you’re approaching that like a poor person. And I was like, I am. And for a long time, you know, Jeff and I, we were poor when we started. Like, we bootstrapped this. There was no, yeah, there’s no family money that came in. Like, we, I remember being so upset. We started with a lot of school debt from my French degrees that I use every day, you know, And like, Jeff was making a ton of money and he barely graduated high school. He dropped out to be a professional skateboarder. Like, yeah, we could go on and on. Everybody’s got a story.

00:19:58 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Everybody’s got a story.

00:19:59 Meaghan Likes
Stories in there, right? Yeah.

00:20:01 Matthew Kuehlhorn
That’s what I love about these kind of conversations because you build that context and it just, it adds a depth, it adds a connection, it adds the the relativity, like the relationships. Let’s get into some practical pieces, Meaghan. And I’m curious through your journey through your conversation with folks, what are some of the daily habits that you’ve embodied either yourself or teach that make? Styles move right. Like on a basic level, maybe there’s somebody like myself running a company that could probably be more profitable, be more cash flow positive. What are we doing to kind of steer the ship the other way? Or if we’re, you know, in quote UN quote poverty and we want to start getting our family out of this, what would you, what would bubble up as as daily habits that we can start today?

00:20:58 Meaghan Likes
A great question. So I always struggle about like, where do you start? What comes first, The chicken or the egg? Right. Look at that. I don’t know if I’ve answered this in a while, so I’m gonna say something that I might contradict myself, so bear with me. I feel like I’ve been on a big passion, a big kicker on budgets lately, and I know they’re not sexy, and I know they’re not. But I really feel like, so Jeff and I, we did, we did a challenge in February called Frugal February. But it seems crazy because I talk about money and talk about guilt around money. But I felt like our spending had gotten way out of control because we stopped paying attention as a couple and because we had quite a bit of income. Like, you know, it just it’s different when you’re not stressed about bank account balances, like you make different decisions. So we did this Frugal February challenge and it was so funny because Jeff growing up poor, didn’t want to participate. He was so opposed to this. He was like, we have worked way too hard to do this. I’m not playing. And so we set some ground rules around like we were allowed to spend. But, you know, we tried to do that to one trip to the grocery store. We we tried to limit, like, if we needed things, we listed them before February came. We weren’t doing things like compulsively, like ordering on Amazon 10 times a day or something, right? Yeah. So we did this challenge around frugal February, and it was amazing to me how much our spending changed. Like it changed dramatically just because we’re paying attention to it. So then I started thinking about business and I was like how would we bring a fruitful February into our business without starving it at the cash that it needs? Because a lot of starting growth mode and growth takes money and money takes runway. You know, like it’s a whole thing. And so I started revisiting the budget and and I feel like that is the secret sauce is taking back control of your money is when you start telling it where to go. When you start signing a job for every dollar and you say like I am going to spend this and then you hold yourself accountable to only spending that. When you think ahead, like I think of budgets a lot, like other people would think about a forecast or a trend, but I like to think about budgets as forward thinking like that. So I know that I want to go to this conference this month. I know I want to buy plane tickets this month. I’m going to put that in the budget and I’m going to work everything around now. It takes a lot of discipline and it takes getting over that nastiness. Like every I’ve had a lot of jobs. This is another fun fact about me. I have actually had 60 different jobs for 75 different employers, and my last job I got in 2008. So it’s been a minute since my last job. But every, almost every job I’ve been at, I’ve talked about money or about budget, because I knew as an employee my path to a raise was there. Understanding about financial literacy like they’re like, I wanted to know how could I make more in that position and I need them to be clear about their money. So I would go to these bosses and if they’re ever listening, they know I’ve done this. I’d like we’re going to have a budget party and we would like change the theme around a budget like this is going to be fun if you drink, We’re going to drink, We’re going to like have food and we’re going to knock out a budget really quickly and then we’re going to have that same party every month and we’re going to hold ourselves accountable. That budget, I feel like. That is the easiest, lowest hanging group to taking back control of your finances. You want to hack profit first, Basically puts you on a budget, like because you starve the business of unnecessary spending in cash. Yeah, yeah. Jeff, when he was still involved in the business, would say, like, I feel broke 89 days the quarter and he’s like, I’m the 90th day. You pull out like 6 figures. I don’t even know where you found it. I’m like, yeah, it means it’s working. Like I’ve starved us of overspending. I’ve kept it feeling really tight and uncomfortable. And yeah, so budgeting I that would be my answer today. I asked me a couple weeks ago, I might have said pricing, but I think I’m back to budgeting like I got a couple.

00:24:53 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Of things I love about this and I want to I want to clarify too for listeners. So one of the things I heard in there was change the mindset around it. Like it can be this very strict. Like I’ve I’ve hated budgets in the past. I’m getting more and more warm to them. You just tweaked a little piece in my mind because. The mindset around it, make it a party, make it fun and make it a game, right? Like gamify it and then there’s something to celebrate towards the end. And I guess one of my questions in that, so you know, I’ve done annual budgets, Are you suggesting do them monthly?

00:25:28 Meaghan Likes
Oh hell yeah. I don’t even like annual ones. I had been doing quite a bit of work with a company called Breakthrough Academy and I was really proud cuz I like automated the. So I figured out how to get QuickBooks Online into Google Sheets last December and it like broke my brain because a lot of our companies run on spreadsheets, right? Like we have these forecasts and we have these like pricing tools. And so then I started to automate like the actual versus what we were expecting and breakthrough Academy like every there’s like 500 members or something and every member I’ve touched does their budget differently. And I finally just said guys, I give up. I quit like I will only do monthly budgets because. Otherwise it’s just too ethereal. Like it we don’t even.

00:26:13 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, like it. Just it’s.

00:26:15 Meaghan Likes
Too hard to track and then at Jeff likes clean windows. Last year we did something huge which is we switched to weekly and I don’t necessarily mean for spending because it’s very hard to track, but we are tracking revenue produced sales and gross profit on a weekly basis. And I have to tell you like. These goals are so much easier to crush when you can like make a little pivot every Tuesday, like, all right, this week we’re going to like focus on commercial rate. This week we’re going to focus on average ticket rate. This week we’re going to focus on labor efficiency like it is been, you know, we’re 17 years in the business and and I was just telling Jeff like last week because he’s asking how it was going and I was like, Oh my God, it’s great like we’ve hit every target for six consecutive weeks, which after a shitty winner. Like I needed the win. I was gone a little beat up.

00:27:08 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, yeah, that’s amazing, all right? Monthly budgets make it fun. Gamify it.

00:27:15 Meaghan Likes
And it’s a shopping cart. That’s how I like to think of a budget. What do you want to buy? Where do you want to spend your money? This should be fun. It should not be a chore. It should not be nasty.

00:27:27 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, yeah, I love it. What’s the point of savings?

00:27:37 Meaghan Likes
So that’s something I’ve struggled with. So we’re going to go deep for just a second because I feel like I’m going to do it. Not justice if we don’t, but I was a very sick person for a lot of my life, so I personally had six brain surgeries over the past 15 years. Wow. And I could not see in the future because for a long time, I didn’t think there was a future like I thought I was just. We’re living surgery to surgery year to year. We we went through like five years of our life where there’s always a hospital back in the in the car here and goal setting for me into the future like five years in advance was impossible. I just couldn’t see that far. So I think in some ways I’m, you know, we all have our own trauma. We all have our own experiences. I feel like in some ways I still live in that mindset like a one year goal is super easy for me, a three-year goal. I can’t see it quite so. The irony to me is about savings. So saving for a rainy day is, is to me, Peace of Mind. Like when COVID hit, or when a hurricane hits. Or like this month, randomly we had a serial pillar in my teeny tiny idyllic town. You know what happened to my call volume and my lead volume? It stopped. That one of the murders was at my shop. So for the second time in four months, I had no access to my trucks, my vans, my equipment. My employees could not report to work twice in four months. Those disaster plans savings can really help. Like it can really give you breathing room to know, OK, that sucked. OK, that was unexpected, but I’m not going to have to change the course of my of my plan. Yet, or I have this much runway. Like when I think about savings in a business, that’s what I think about as runway. Alternatively, when I think about personal savings, I’m not really good about saving for a goal, like saving for a house or saving for a car like that. Stuff doesn’t really get me excited. But after saying all that about the future, retirement savings has always been really fun for me, and I’ve realized recently that this is actually a bad mindset. And the bad mindset thing is if you were listening to this and you’re a business owner, you are probably sitting on the best retirement asset that you could ever finance and that’s your company. But we don’t treat it that way. We don’t treat it like an asset. We treat it like an ATM machine, right. Like if you started to think about your business as your retirement plan, you would rebuild to sell and you would go optimize or app out of your business because you know that someday that’s going to be your plan, whether you sell internally or externally. You’re sitting on a really big asset. I, I I was never that forward thinking. So just recently like when I meet with my financial plan, I like you know we’re very fiscally responsible and should like you’re green. You know Jeff, my husband, he retired at 39, he’s fully retired now and and that’s great. I would like to retire by 39 as well. So I’m on this like mission to get there but I never factored in a sale to any of those. I never factored in the passive income to any of this. So I’m going to challenge you. If you’re struggling with savings like and you’ve not, if you have like guilt or shame run, you’ve not been doing an IRA or 401K or any of that, then I just look internally like what are you sitting on? Yeah, what’s happening with your company and what are some small tweaks you could do in less than two years that could absolutely change your financial history?

00:31:10 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, yeah, I love that. Is there a rule of thumb for an amount of savings, aka runway? For business or family it.

00:31:19 Meaghan Likes
Depends on the environment. So like, you know, historically would say three to six months. Yeah, right now in inflationary times, I say one to three months, right off, right on. And there’s probably a better like economic answer. But for me, I’m like hate sitting on cash when it’s like not, you know, I when it’s inflationary times, I like to spend money on marketing, like that’s my favorite time to spend money on marketing because I say it’s on sale. Yeah, I’m gonna spend today’s dollars to earn future dollars. They’re gonna be worth more, right? But one to three months so that, you know, if there’s a serial killer or if there’s a hurricane, or if there’s a terrible snowstorm. Yeah, you don’t have to make any reactionary decisions.

00:32:00 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Yeah, yeah, that’s great .0 man. I love it. A lot of value in this conversation. I want to give listeners an opportunity to reach out to you. I know you have. Some classes, some opportunities. You’re on an admin, bootcam, Profit first class. How do people reach out for to you? Connect with you, learn from you, and grab some of these resources?

00:32:29 Meaghan Likes
Yeah, so I made it a goal this year to become Internet famous. Yes, I don’t know how I feel about saying that out loud, but that is a mission of mine. And so I have a new brand and it’s called https://www.meglikesmoney.com/ . Very easy to find. You can find me on any social media network that you’re on. I’m doing you know like 3 videos a day of little tidbits of this like changing your minds that are on money and on that website https://www.meglikesmoney.com/ . You can see all all my offerings, all my courses and all my businesses. Well, maybe not all my businesses are a couple of secret ones that aren’t totally public yet, but most of my businesses and learn a little bit more about me otherwise. Yeah, you can find me on social media. @meaghanlikes and. Yeah, this has been really fun. Thanks. Awesome.

00:33:14 Matthew Kuehlhorn
I really appreciate your willingness to open up and share Nuggets. I think there was some good value in here for the listeners. We will have Meaghan’s links in our show notes, so be sure to reach out, connect, follow and let’s help Meaghan become Internet famous.

00:33:33 Meaghan Likes
Sounds so silly, but it’s an important mission, right? If you know profit first, the mission is to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. And I love that.

00:33:43 Matthew Kuehlhorn
That’s good.

00:33:44 Meaghan Likes
I love that.

00:33:44 Matthew Kuehlhorn
That’s good, but you’re absolutely right. I mean, when we get into a mission that locks in a win, win, win, win, win, win, right, the winning goes on forever. It’s not a take. And I can certainly support and get behind a mission like that, so.

00:34:01 Meaghan Likes
Well, and what people can do to give back for me is implant. Like don’t just consume the information. Go take this hour. You’re inspired by one thing, go do it. And then. You’ve ever seen me in 3D. Tell me about it. Like, that’s what keeps me going. Tell me like, I heard you on Matt’s podcast and you said this, and I did this, and I will celebrate with you. But it’s so easy to just be passive and like, let life go by, let business go by. And I’m here to remind you, like, this is your story and you get to tell it how you want. And you’ve got to, you’ve got to start being intentional about that.

00:34:37 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Well said. Thank you so much for joining us today, Meaghan.

00:34:40 Meaghan Likes
Thanks Matt, this is fun.

00:34:41 Matthew Kuehlhorn
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening to the Kooler Lifestyle Podcast. We count on your subscriptions, your likes, your shares and I encourage you to do that. Now, if you’re watching on YouTube, go ahead and subscribe lower right hand button. If you’re on audio, download this, share it and we look forward to having you on the next one.