Transcription
Bobbi Rebell:
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Whitney Johnson:
"I tithe, I pay 10% of our gross income to God, to our church," and he was just like, "Okay, you've got a problem here because this isn't going to happen in addition to some of your other financial goals that you have." That was a really important wake-up call for me.
Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner Bobbi Rebell, author of How to Be a Financial Grownup, but you know what? Being a grownup is really hard, especially when it comes to money, but it's okay. We're going to get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a financial grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this.
Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, friends. Well, despite the clip you heard at the top of this episode, today's podcast is not about religion, but it is about values, and leveraging your money and your financial resources to support what you and your family believe in. Whitney Johnson's new book is called Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve. She is also the author of the bestseller Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work, and she hosts, you get the theme here, the Disrupt Yourself Podcast.
Bobbi Rebell:
In this case, the story that she's going to share, Whitney disrupted her entire family life, downsizing everything to get to her financial goals and to have the financial resources to support what she and her family value. She lives what she preaches. Here is Whitney Johnson. Whitney Johnson, you are a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.
Whitney Johnson:
Thank you for having me, Bobbi.
Bobbi Rebell:
First of all, I do want to congratulate you on your new book. It is Build an A-Team and we're going to talk more about that going forward, but just high level, what's it about?
Whitney Johnson:
Build an A-Team is about helping you as a manager build a team that can manage through change, that can be innovative and high performing, and the key is to let your people learn. When you allow them to learn, leap, and repeat, they are engaged and therefore happy, they love coming to work, they're more productive, and they love working for you, so you become a great place to work and a boss people love.
Bobbi Rebell:
That's great. For your money story, though, we're going talk about you and your team, which includes your husband and includes your financial planner, and an incident that happened when you got a call from your financial planner. You weren't achieving a goal that was really important to you. Tell us your money story.
Whitney Johnson:
Yeah. This happened about 15 years ago. I got a call from my financial planner and he said to me, "You are spending way too much money." It was really a wake-up call for me, because I was having the conversation with him of like, "I tithe, I pay 10% of our gross income to God, to our church," and he was just like, "Okay, you've got a problem here because this isn't going to happen in addition to some of your other financial goals that you have." That was a really important wake-up call for me, that I really needed to think about, "Okay, it's really great that you can earn lots of money, but you have to also basically manage your money and not just think about what you're earning. You have to also think about what you're spending and spend less than you're actually earning." That was a really important lesson for me and really started to shift how I was thinking about money, not only what I was earning, but also what I was saving.
Bobbi Rebell:
What was important to you was that 10%. I want to pick up on that, because in your heart one of the things that you really prioritize is giving to causes that you believe in, to religious causes, to God, as you say. That was really your priority and you weren't able to accomplish that, or you would not have been able to continue to accomplish that if you didn't change your ways.
Whitney Johnson:
Absolutely. It's such a great point because when I was thinking about the fact that I wasn't managing my money, a lot of times it was exactly to causes or people or things that I cared about, so it's not like I was being profligate, and yet if I didn't manage my money, those things that were deeply important to me, education for my children, et cetera, were not going to be a possibility, and that was a very important wake-up call for me.
Bobbi Rebell:
Were there things that you could pull out that you were able to change? What did you do to pivot from there?
Whitney Johnson:
I had become an entrepreneur at this point and I was still spending like I wasn't an entrepreneur. I was still working on Wall Street, and so one of the things that we did is we made some really tough decisions. Over the next year, we decided to downsize and to sell our house, and to really pare back on how we were spending our money in that interim so that we could still buy the things that mattered to us, but then also undertake these entrepreneurial ventures that were also important to us.
Bobbi Rebell:
And maintain a culture and a family life and setting an example, for the rest of your family, of giving.
Whitney Johnson:
Absolutely, 100%, because that is a high, high priority for me and for my husband and for our entire family, is to be able to give to others.
Bobbi Rebell:
So what is the lesson for our listeners from that?
Whitney Johnson:
Most of us have a pretty ... not most, many, probably including myself, have a fairly froth relationship with money. We're like, "Is it good? Is it bad?" And it's not either, and so a couple of lessons that I've learned is that money is meant to be a servant, not a master, and that I, and this is a gradual lesson that I've been learning throughout my life, is to remember that that's the case. And that also the more money we're able to not only earn, but the more we extend our ability to do good beyond our physical presence, and so those are becoming mantras for me, but really guiding principles in terms of how I think about money saving tactically day-to-day, and spending, I should say, as well.
Bobbi Rebell:
And the importance of not only thinking about growing your business and buying things, but also the values that money can help you support.
Whitney Johnson:
Absolutely. I mean, one of the things, there was a quote that I remember reading probably about seven or eight years ago now, which is really, again, a bit of a watchword for me. It was Anna Lappé and she said that every time you spend money, you're voting on the kind of world that you want. That has been a really powerful thing for me. One, a dollar, $10, what kind of world am I saying I want with this money that I've just spent or allocated to whatever I allocated it to? That's just a really important thing to me and something that we're trying to instill in our children as well.
Bobbi Rebell:
You also have a wonderful money tip, and this is great especially when you talk about children. It's always hard to teach children to invest because sometimes stocks are really expensive and you can't always buy. I can think of Berkshire Hathaway, obviously as the most extreme example perhaps, but a lot of stocks, they don't split and they're very expensive to buy individual stocks. They just start buying 100 shares of a stock, so talk to me about your money tip, because it has to do with investing. It's something that is often applicable when children want to start learning about investing.
Whitney Johnson:
Yeah. One of the really wonderful boons of the last couple of years is you can buy fractional shares. You don't have to buy 100 shares. You don't even have to buy 10 shares. You can buy a half a share. There's something called Stockpile, stockpile.com, that you can go on there and say, "Okay, I want to spend $300," and so you can spend $300 on Apple or $300 on Tesla. Or just to other day for my son, for his birthday, he wanted to buy Spotify, and so I was like, "Okay, $300. We'll buy some Spotify stock." I don't actually know how much it costs, but you can buy a half a share, a quarter of a share, a tenth of a share, but it's just based on how much money you want to spend.
Whitney Johnson:
So it's a great way to start investing in the stock market and really building on an idea that Peter Lynch pioneered 20, 30 years ago now, which is to buy what it is you know and use and value, and couple your investing behavior with your consumer behavior, and fractional shares, and Stockpile specifically, allows you to do that.
Bobbi Rebell:
Wonderful. All right. Let's talk about your new book because it is coming out pretty much now. It's called Build an A-Team. It's a follow up to Disrupt Yourself, which was a huge, huge hit and relatable to so many people, especially myself, having disrupted myself in the last few years professionally. Tell me more about Build an A-Team.
Whitney Johnson:
Well, Build an A-Team came about because people had read Disrupt Yourself and said, "Okay. I get it. I got it. I'm willing to disrupt myself, but what about the people around me? How do I create an ecosystem that makes that possible?" So in Build an A-Team I make it possible for you to think about, "Okay, how do I create a workplace or an environment, a team where personal disruption is possible?" Then I flip it on its head and say, "Okay, so to you, the manager, you don't want just your people to be disputing themselves willy-nilly. What's in it for you?"
Whitney Johnson:
So I make the case that every single person is on a learning curve, including you, the manager, and you build that team that can innovate, that can manage through change by managing your team as a collection of S curves or learning curves, and optimize by having about 70% of your people in the middle at any given time, 15% at the low end, and 15% of your people at the high end. And when they get to the high of their learning curve, you allow them to disrupt themselves because by doing that, they start over that cycle of learn, leap, and repeat, and whenever people are learning, they're able to be innovative. When they're learning, they're innovative, and so you as a company can stay competitive, and because they're so happy at work, they love working for you as a boss, and so you become a talent magnet.
Bobbi Rebell:
Let me just ask you, if you are the employee, because a lot of our listeners are younger and starting out in their careers, if you are on the curve and you recognize that you're at the top of your curve, do you approach your manager and say, "I basically want a different job within the organization"? I mean, what do you do?
Whitney Johnson:
Obviously there are going to be risks in doing that. You've got to really suss out your boss. I think one of the ways that you can do that is, "Does it make sense for me to have this conversation with my boss?" What's that boss' track record? Do they have a history of people who have worked for them in the past, it's been possible for them to move on to other opportunities for which the boss advocated, that they've sponsored them into those opportunities? Then you can be pretty comfortable that having that conversation with them is a safe thing to do. You also, before you have that conversation, want to make sure that in fact you are ready to ... sometimes we overestimate our abilities. We all do it. We think we really want it, and so therefore it's time for us to have it.
Whitney Johnson:
So in having that conversation, what I would encourage you to do is go to your boss and say, "I've been in this role for about three years. It feels like I'm starting to peak and I've really hit my stride, and it's time for me to try something new, so here's what I would propose and here's the business case for why it makes sense for me to do it, because it's not just about me. It's going to help our organization be more innovative, and in the process I've identified this person over here that I think can really step into this role nicely, so you will not be left in the lurch. I will help train that successor so that they're able to continue to grow and develop. And at the same time I'm able to grow and develop as well as help our organization and our team be more innovative, and so that would be my suggestion to you."
Bobbi Rebell:
Anticipate what's going to go wrong and make sure you have a solution for every possible iteration. All right. Whitney Johnson, where can people find you?
Whitney Johnson:
You can find me at whitneyjohnson.com. If you want to email me, it's wj@whitneyjohnson.com. I would love to hear from you.
Bobbi Rebell:
And you have, by the way, a million, I heard a million LinkedIn followers.
Whitney Johnson:
I do, 1.2 million, actually, but I'm not counting.
Bobbi Rebell:
Oh my gosh. You are our hero, Whitney Johnson. I will leave all of your social media links in the show notes, but just so we have them here, Twitter, Instagram, all that stuff?
Whitney Johnson:
Yeah. Johnson Whitney, actually. It's Johnson Whitney.
Bobbi Rebell:
Okay. Good to know. Exactly. That's why we ask. All right. You're wonderful. Thank you so much, and congratulations on the new book.
Whitney Johnson:
Thank you, Bobbi, for having me.
Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, friends. Don't you feel so motivated by Whitney, like anything is possible if you know think it through and get really intentional?
Bobbi Rebell:
Financial grownup tip number one, let your values be a guide to how you want to not just spend your money, but spend your life. Whitney literally disrupted her entire life, her family downsized, and I don't have Whitney's personal financial info, but I'm guessing she does pretty well, so this is not really about income level. It's about allocation of your resources, whatever they are, to support the way you want to live your life and the role model you want to be for your family. In Whitney's case, it was about tithing to her church and other things that her family valued, like education and financial security and financial freedom.
Bobbi Rebell:
Financial grownup tip number two, get intentional about your career goals. You probably think you are, but be honest. Are you proactively doing something to remove barriers? Put yourself in your bosses' position and think about what they need to get you what you want. If you own a business, your clients are basically your bosses. Yeah, sorry, but kind of. Right? So come with solutions.
Bobbi Rebell:
When I wanted to work, for example, four days a week after having my son, I presented my bosses with the solution. My colleague, who was, fun fact, Manoush Zomorodi that many of you may know as the host of the Note to Self podcast, was also having her son. We gave birth, in fact, two days apart in the same hospital. Manoush agreed to be my Friday fill in. We presented a complete solution, and it was tough for the bosses to turn down something that was already good to go, especially with someone as wonderful as Manoush.
Bobbi Rebell:
Now Whitney is giving us the first chapter of her new book Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve for free to download. Just go to whitneyjohnson.com/ateam and you can get that download, so start there for free and then go pick up a copy of the whole book ASAP. Build an A-Team has tons of specific examples in it that will give you a lot of aha moments of how bosses think and need to think, and it is well worth the time you will invest in reading it.
Bobbi Rebell:
Just a reminder, we are excited to start our once a month listener episode, so if you want to be a guest on Financial Grownup, email us with your money story and your money tip to info@financialgrownup.com. Make sure you are on our mailing list. Go to our website, bobbirebell.com/financialgrownuppodcast. You'll get a pop up and you can sign up. Be in touch on Twitter, @bobbirebell, and on Instagram, at bobbirebell1. Whitney Johnson gave us so much to think about. Here is to us all getting one step closer to being financial grownups.
Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve Stewart and is a BRK Media production.
