NOTE: Feminist Founders is a listener-funded podcast. Your contributions enable me to continue bringing you these important conversations. To support the mission, sign up for a paid Substack subscription at https://feministfounders.substack.com/ 

Discussed in this episode:

• Natalie’s relationship with feminism (and why she prefers “high achieving breadwinner”)
• How the “American Dream” failed Natalie, and how that fuels her work today
• Natalie’s experience with bankruptcy and the stigma society attaches to it
• Why wealth isn’t rigged, and the real reasons so many never achieve it
• Gatekeeping and wealth
• Overcoming negative money stories
• The reasons Natalie will die on the “sell high-ticket offers” hill
• Why a service-based business needs to be making money from Year 1
• A hobby vs. an abusive business
• Sales vs. abuse
• How Natalie teaches sales differently than others
• The difference between being a producer and a visionary
• Working for free does everyone a disservice
• The money mindset blocks that keep people from making big sales
• Why selling without first testing the marketing is dangerous
• What goes wrong in how most business owners attack growth and hiring
• Doing it all is a quick path to burnout
• Why Natalie is closing down her most profitable program (and what’s next)

Resources mentioned:

• “To Sell Is Human” by Daniel Pink
• Downtown Rescue Mission

Becky Mollenkamp:

Hi Natalie, thanks for joining me today.

 

Natalie Bullen:

Hey, thanks for having me.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I’m so excited to chat. Your smile lights up a room. I know that you like to have fun and laugh. So hopefully we’ll have a good time, although we will be talking about some serious stuff. I know that you said you don’t consider yourself a feminist in the traditional sense, and that will be fun to explore. And I’m excited about that because it doesn’t matter if you call yourself a feminist or not. It’s about the values and the way you show up. So I’m curious, because you said you resonate more with terms like ‘high achiever’ or ‘breadwinner.’ Tell me a little bit about your relationship with feminism and why it doesn’t quite feel right for you.

 

Natalie Bullen:

You know, this is something I’m learning. There’s like a cultural split in feminism. I have found that at least in my side of the Black community, that’s not a word that we typically use. You know, and in between when you asked me that and this podcast, I’ve been thinking about like what it is. I think the definition of feminism, meaning us being able to have the same opportunity as men or other genders is fair. I think in practice though, when I meet women who say ‘I’m a feminist,’ what they really mean is I want to be equal to men or I want to do everything that men do or I want to be better than men. And I’m like, yeah, that’s hard for me. I don’t feel equal with men. I’m not trying to be equal with men. I feel like we’re different. So it would be impossible to be equal. That’s like asking me, is an apple equal to an orange? Right? Like they’re both fruits and they both have merit, but I don’t know that they are equal. And that, that’s the part that makes me go, well, and do I even want to be equal? I want to be kept, frankly. If I had somebody with millions and millions and millions of dollars, and I didn’t have to work anymore, I wouldn’t. So I just, when people are like, yeah, lead the charge. We should, we should get drafted into the military like men do. And I’m like, hold fuck up. We should not be trapped into the military like can I just raise my hand and say I’m good with not being involved in the selective service. I come from a military family and I’m really glad that I didn’t get like foisted into the Vietnam War like my dad did. Like, I’m good. I actually don’t want that level of equality. So for me, I want to be able to do the best that I can do. I’m not in a competition with another gender. I just, my brain can’t understand that.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

And what is it about the terms ‘high achiever’ and ‘breadwinner’ that feel better for you?

 

Natalie Bullen:

Well, because they’re about me. It’s about my achievement. I feel like feminism is tethered to  men. It’s like, I am trying to be equal to men and have what men have, instead of just trying to be the best version of myself. Like, I feel high-achiever is all about me. I am achieving in relation to humans, not just men. I’m doing great for myself. I bring home the bread, I make money, I’m happy about it. So that’s why those terms work for me because they feel something that I can control. They seem like they have an internal locus of control. And I feel like being a feminist has an external locus of control because it’s tethering to what the government and what society and what other people think that I should have in relation to men.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

So interesting, isn’t it, how we all have different perspectives on the same thing. Because my perspective is quite different, but that’s okay. We’re allowed to have different perspectives. And I’m excited to hear how other people relate to it. Because ultimately, like I said, I don’t care if that word feels right to you or not. If the work you’re doing and the way you’re showing up is about how do we create more equity in the world so that more people can have more instead of it being only select people they get to have more, then that’s what really matters. And your business is called Unapologetic Wealth, which I love ‘unapologetic’ anything because I just think we should all just be unapologetic. And you say that making money is a radical and necessary act. So why are you so passionate about creating and supporting seven-figure, women-led businesses?

 

Natalie Bullen:

Because I’ve done it the American dream way. I did it the right way. I was a straight-A, gifted student. I went to college at 18 on full scholarship. I worked two jobs until I ended up losing my scholarship. I took on student loans so that I could stay in school. I graduated. I got an MBA. I waited tables at Cracker Barrel for almost six years. I made $2.13 cents an hour in Alabama. That is still the tipped wage in Alabama in 2023. Just so you know, when you start talking about how you’re not going to tip servers, you’re going to piss me off because they’re making $2.13 an hour. And some of them are like me with an MBA still waiting tables. And I bought a home that was very modest. My house was $149,900. I don’t know anybody who would say that is an expensive home. And, you know, I still ran into hardship. You know, I had a bad relationship. I had a health issue with my uterine fibroids that made it hard for me to go to work. I lost my job and I ended up filing bankruptcy and sleeping on a friend’s couch and it sucked. And it sucked for a long time. I filed Chapter 13, which I’ve now found out it’s disproportionate Black and Brown people that get pushed into 13s instead of Chapter 7s, which could be practically immediately dismissed. And it was traumatic. And all I could think to myself was I’ve never been on a vacation. I have a finance background. I read economics books in my spare time. I’ve done everything right. I was on a budget and had savings. I followed Dave Ramsey. I depleted my savings down to $1,000 per his baby-step recommendation. And then you lose your job and you have no cushion to go anywhere. I was literally harmed by Dave Ramsey’s advice. I was harmed by the personal finance community, the student loan community, the college education scam community, the hard-working community. I’ve done it all. And that is why I’m so passionate about women having money because you’re not going to, you can’t budget your way out of poverty. So if you are working a low-wage job, that’s what you’re going to get. And it’s not right. And I feel like if more people that have been through it would speak up and help, if I could avoid even one person having to go through the hell that I went through in my 20s financially, it’s worth it. And I know everyone doesn’t want a six-figure business, I mean, a seven-figure business, but if you want to pay yourself six figures, you probably need one. You need to be doing at least half a million to be able to pay yourself $100K. I want women to have retirement accounts. You know, we are much more likely to go into business disadvantaged with no money, little money, bad credit, no credit, especially women of color, much more likely than a white man. When white men go into business, they choose to go into business more often, they have funds to go into business more often, they have a support team like an attorney and an accountant upfront more often than women and women of color. And that’s why their businesses thrive and our businesses struggle. And you didn’t leave a six-figure job, which a lot of us have. I’ve never had a six-figure job, but a lot of the people that I know in the internet space had six-figure jobs with five-figure bonuses and they leave them to go be broke in businesses. And I don’t get it and I don’t accept it. And, and I’m going to fight for the people who want more money because it’s possible for them.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I love it all. I love that you’re so willing to be open and like you said, if more people would share, it makes such a difference because I wanted to talk a little bit about the bankruptcy and the stigma that is attached because I think it’s why people don’t talk. And then when we don’t talk about something, it creates more shame because we think we’re the only ones. Talk to me a little bit about that experience of having to file bankruptcy and what followed and some of the stigma that you faced and what that created, if that created anything for you around shame or internal feelings.

 

Natalie Bullen:

You know, the whole thing was just ridiculous. I was angry more than anything because I’m so financially responsible. I had a 705 FICO score when I filed, but I had lost my job. So I knew I wasn’t gonna have an income. And when I called my creditors to say, I have no income, I’m not gonna be able to keep paying you because I only have $1,000 in my savings account because I’ve been paying my debt down aggressively using the Dave Ramsey method. So I’d had like $8,000 in savings, but I did what he told you to do. You spend it down to a thousand, you send it off to your creditors. So I had a creditor who I had just made like a $5,000 payment maybe two months prior. And now I’m saying I’m not gonna be able to keep making my minimums and they’re saying good luck. And I’m like, can you help me. And they’re like, not until you start missing payments. But why would I wait until I start missing payments and tank my credit? To me, filing bankruptcy was just a lesser of two evils. At least I could get it all done at one time instead of slowly watching my credit get bad and then start getting bill collecting calls. Like I knew emotionally, I just wasn’t gonna be able to pull that off. So yeah, the only really bad thing about bankruptcy is that people make character judgments from it, just like being overweight. People decide when you’re overweight that you’re lazy and trifling and you don’t have discipline, et cetera. So when you file bankruptcy, people make judgments about you. Um, that’s why employers want to run credit checks. They want to make the correlation that because you are struggling financially that you would steal from them. That’s the correlation that they are trying to reach. Is this person likely to steal from my coffers because they are having trouble paying their creditors? They’re flat-out calling you a thief when they are running your credit score for employment. And I’m licensed with FINRA, so I had to acknowledge that. It’s on Broker Check, which is public. That’s why I tell people, because it would be very easy for you to find out on your own. You can go to Broker Check and look up Natalie Bullen and you can see my businesses and that I am still a registered agent with securities licenses and that I have filed bankruptcy. In fact, if I filed it again, I will be permanently banned from the financial services industry for life.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Did you internalize it? But what I heard instead is, no, you knew it wasn’t you. And that really created this fire within you to say this whole system sucks. 

 

Natalie Bullen:

The American Dream is not real. It’s fake, right. It’s a myth. It’s a hologram. It looks real. It’s not real. You can’t touch it. You try to touch it, it’s elusive. It does not exist. So the best thing is for you to not participate.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

In your experience, I know you talked a little bit about, you hinted at some of the pieces of it or mentioned some of the pieces of it around medical debt or medical issues that come up, losing a job, listening to Dave Ramsey, which I talked about in another episode around all the flaws within so much of the traditional money advice that’s out there from white men and white women. How is wealth rigged in this country? What is your experience with that with yourself and then what you’ve noticed with people who are coming to you now for help with building businesses.

 

Natalie Bullen:

I don’t know that wealth is rigged. I think there’s a formula, there’s a game, and we aren’t taught the rules. I think that what most people are attempting will never create wealth. I think that what most people are trying to do is not create wealth. I think very few people have wealth on their radar. Most people just want financial solvency. They just wanna be steady. You hear it all the time. ‘I just want enough money.’ Think about it. How many women have actually told you on this podcast, I aspire to be wealthy and I am doing the things it takes to get there? That’s not what I get. I get people tell me they just want enough to be comfortable. They just want enough to feed their family. They just want enough to take one or two vacations a year. In my experience, women are not even pursuing wealth because they have disqualified themselves. So I’m not so sure that it’s rigged. I think it’s out in plain sight. If you put $200 a month in the stock market starting at age 20, you’ll be a millionaire when you die. That’s just facts. It’s not hard. People just aren’t attempting it because they have been told they can’t have it. They don’t deserve it. Money is dirty. Money is evil. Money is the root of all evil. Money will change you. It will corrupt you. People will hate you. People will trip and fall in your yard and say that and file lawsuits. People will steal your belongings. People will break into your house. You’ll be famous. You’ll be inundated with requests. You’ll be unhappy. Your husband will feel emasculated. Your kids will be spoiled. Your whole life will be ruined. You’ll fall into drugs. You’ll overdo plastic surgery. You are going to ruin your life. Your life is going to go to shit if you become wealthy. That is what people believe. So no, I don’t think that wealth is rigged. I think it’s out in the open. I think it has been cloaked maybe by certain persons who don’t want you to see it, but it’s as visible as the Statue of Liberty. It’s out there. You just got to go and do the thing. And a lot of people are very uncomfortable with doing the things that create wealth, like investing in real estate, investing in the stock market, starting a business, relentlessly pursuing a higher salary, even if that means jumping from company to company every two years, aggressively saving your money, buying assets instead of liabilities. The formula for wealth is not hard. It is out there, it is published, it is in the public library. I think people don’t want it for those reasons we talked about. They think they don’t want it. They’ve convinced themselves they don’t want it, or that they can’t have it, or that they don’t qualify for it. So I don’t know that it’s rigged. I think it’s purposely been made to look undesirable by certain people. And I think the church encourages that because when Creflo Dollar had a helicopter, when Joel Osteen wears $10,000 suits and cufflinks and stuff, we complain and we go, well, a man of God shouldn’t have material possessions like that. Jesus got frankincense and myrrh. I know people don’t know what those things are, but those were really expensive spices. It’s like saffron and truffle. Those weren’t cheap things that a baby got. So I think we have a misconception, especially as Christians, like Jesus wasn’t poor. I can’t tell you how many Christians I meet that truly believe that Jesus, the son of God, was poor. Why would you wanna be rich if you think that the God that you serve is poor?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I remember when we talked previously before our interview to get to know each other a little, one of the things you mentioned was a story about financial literacy with a female coach, and some of the gatekeeping around financial literacy. So I agree that there are really clear ways to do this. And I think that certain groups of people, typically non-men and non-white folks, there is some gatekeeping that does happen around sharing that knowledge and empowering people with the knowledge or making them feel empowered that they can act on that knowledge. So tell me a little bit about that because it was a story you were gonna share about that experience and what that sort of showed you about gatekeeping.

 

Natalie Bullen:

It was so strange. I worked at Wells Fargo down the street from an elementary school. I did financial literacy, mostly for free. Wells Fargo paid for 16 hours a year of community service or volunteerism, but I did way more than 16 hours. I did maybe 100 hours a year, so most of it was unpaid. And I got a call from a guidance counselor who also taught PE at an elementary school. And she asked, well, I come in and speak to the boys about financial literacy. And I said, well, why the boys? These were fifth graders and they were split because of puberty. So I said, well, sure, I’ll come and do the boys on this day, but what day do you want me to come and teach the girls? And she said, well, no, I don’t need you to do that because the girls have Girls Inc. come in. And I said, well, what’s Girls Inc.? And she said, oh, it’s a self-esteem, women’s empowerment kind of program to help them with self-esteem and inner worth and confidence. And I said, well, I could just come a different day. Like I don’t understand. I mean, that’s fine. You can send them to Girls Inc, but why don’t the girls get the same financial information that the boys do when women make less than men? It seems like if anything, the girls need it and the boys don’t need it. And she went, well, you know, I really just need you for the one class. Can you come? Like she really just shut the whole thing down. And I said, well, it’s discriminatory what you’re doing. Did the parents of the children know that you’re making a decision for them to have an outside practitioner that’s not even in the curriculum, come and teach the boys something that the girls do not have access to? What if you have kids at this school that are siblings and the boy goes home and says, I learned about money today. I learned about credit and finance and financial literacy. And you asked the daughter and the daughter says, nobody came and taught us that. And that was, it was only when I mentioned it was discriminatory that she backed down and let me come and teach the boys and the girls. Otherwise, if I would have just said yes, that’s what would have happened. But again, this is her own money story. A lot of women are afraid of wealth. So in her mind, what are girls going to do with this information? How are they going to use it? They don’t need it. 

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I just wanna praise you for pushing back because I think too often people don’t push back on those things. If someone’s offered some money to come in and talk or even if it’s volunteer, they’re offered some opportunity, they don’t always think beyond just that moment. They might just say yes, right? And I love that you push back because not everyone does. And in that moment, I hope, it made a little difference, right? And that’s a big, it’s small, but it’s mighty. That’s important. So now fast forward to like what you’re doing as a sales coach and messaging coach and all of the things you’re doing now, how are you still trying to bring that energy into your work? Like, what are you doing to combat all of the stuff we’ve talked about around trauma, around money miseducation or lack of education, money stories. What is your work now and how are you trying to combat that narrative that we’ve all got?

 

Natalie Bullen:

Money mindset is in all of my programs. I mean, if you’re a coach, there should be a mindset component to all of your programs, in my opinion. In the sales work that I do, my goal is to encourage women to sell high-ticket. That’s the hill I’m going to die on, especially in the beginning. I think that the way most people teach business is flawed. They tell women with no audience, very little confidence, with a ton of skills and intellect, to sell a teeny little $7 thing, then a $17 thing, then a $87 thing, then a $697 thing, and then like 18 steps down the funnel later, they can finally give you 8,000 bucks, which is foolishness. And I would rather people start with the high-ticket. So that is, the only clients that I take on privately, some of my group programs will allow people who don’t yet have their high-ticket offer, but my one-on-one is what are you selling that’s between $10,000 and $100,000? And how can we get that out in the world in front of people? Because then you don’t need the volume, and then you can actually make an impact and pay yourself well. I also encourage my clients to meet with their accountants, get as much profit as they can early enough to convert to an S-corp, so they can put themselves on payroll, get a 401k going, and start building up their retirement for funds. I also make my clients have life insurance. I know that’s really weird as a sales coach, but yes, I ask my clients if they have life insurance and if they don’t, I find someone to sell it to them. I’m still licensed, but I don’t want to be in a conflict of interest, you know?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

The flip side of this, and I think you may be answering it, but what are the mistakes that you see business owners making?

 

Natalie Bullen:

Charging too little, 100%. That is the number one mistake, charging too little. And it’s because of our lived experience and it’s very unfair. But the truth is, most of us have never been exposed to people who buy $10,000 discretionary purchases in a healthy, safe way. Maybe we know people who max out credit cards about Louis Vuitton purses, maybe. But in terms of meeting people with enough discretionary income to where they are buying things that are expensive in a safe, normalized, responsible way? No, I was never exposed to that. Other than cars and houses, those are the only types of large expenses. Never saw other types. So I think a lot of times we just sell what we know. So if we don’t know of anybody buying $10,000 things and we’ve never purchased a $10,000 thing, we don’t sell a $10,000 thing. It’s just straight-line logic. And I’m, that’s why I’m against the, if you want to sell high-ticket, you need to buy high ticket rhetoric first. I think it’s BS. If you have skill as a legal consultant, if you went to law school, you have a JD, a jurist doctor degree, you have an LLM degree. You have passed the bar and you are a practicing attorney, and you also have legal and risk compliance training and you want to be able to sell a $5,000 a month retainer. That doesn’t mean you need to go buy a $5,000 a month coaching program. And even if you buy it, it’s not going to make you a better consultant. It’s damn sure not going to teach you the law. You already have the skill. But I find that women, especially women of color, get fed a very strong rhetoric that until you have purchased high-ticket, you do not qualify to sell it. You are out of integrity to sell it. You’re a hypocrite if you sell it. And so I meet women who are afraid to charge more than they have personally spent, not considering that they took out six-figure student loans. Why doesn’t that count? That’s, that’s spending. Or courses or continuing education or licenses. They don’t let you count that, it’s only coaching. You have to spend $10,000 on online coaching to qualify to be a high-ticket sales person. It’s BS. It’s one of the worst, most damaging rhetorics. And when you charge too little, you can’t take good care of your clients. You resent your clients. You don’t have the profit that you need to be able to give yourself a raise. You can’t pay yourself. You can’t hire help or a team. You have to cut corners with the help that you get. And then they stall out and get stuck because they can’t hire me to train them on sales. They can’t hire someone to do SEO, to get leads. They can’t hire someone to run Facebook ads. Then they run out of leads. And then they run out of money. And then they go out of business. That’s what happens. That’s the trajectory. And in this particular case, with running a business, prudence can be your pitfall. Sometimes people are so reluctant to get out there. They procrastinate so long, they run out of steam, they run out of money. If you are starting a startup on limited funds, which in my opinion is less than 100K cash, you’re in a sprint. You are literally sprinting, trying to make enough money to get enough clients to not have to go out of business. It’s not the time to pace yourself and go really slow and think about it a long time. Like if you’re gonna hit it, hit it hard. And it’s a lot easier to sell to people with money, which also brings up mindset stuff for people. Cause again, they want to sell to past versions of themselves. I was poor. I grew up in the projects. I have people tell me this. My home was burgled. I was a single parent. I know what it’s like to struggle. That’s why I want to help these women who are struggling now, not understanding your business needs money to stay in business. So if you sell to people who cannot pay you, you will go out of business. That doesn’t mean turn your back on the community. Create a free resource, a free Facebook group. There’s so much you can do. I actually closed down my free Facebook group, but instead I donate to financial literacy campaigns and programs that are already doing that work and just refer people to those programs. You don’t, just because people need help doesn’t mean you have to be the one to help them. And a lot of us have really built up our whole livelihood around. No, no, no. I have to be the one to break this particular curse. And I’m like, you’re going to curse yourself selling to people who don’t have money. Period. There’s no way around it.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Louder for people in the back. That’s amazing. I mean, that’s a beautiful sermon on exactly it. Because I hear the same thing all the time from my clients as well. All of these ideas of this servant’s heart, which is beautiful, and you can’t keep pouring from an empty cup. And I mean that both in the energetic drain and in the financial drain, you can’t keep doing it. But what is it, Natalie, that got you to that place? How did you break some of these cycles for yourself to now be able to say, I get to charge more money and I’m gonna tell other people to do the same thing?

 

Natalie Bullen:

I’m really blessed in that, A, I didn’t actually grow up poor. Lower middle class, yes. Poverty, no. And there’s a difference. And so that’s why I don’t diminish the lived experience of people who actually lived through poverty. Two, I wasn’t raised with that lack mindset. My mom really blessed me in that way. So like, that wasn’t a trauma I had. Like I never wanted to sell low-ticket. It always seemed hard. Like logically, it doesn’t make sense to me to try to get a hundred yeses. Maybe because I come from sales. If you’ve ever come from sales and you’ve ever had to do sales calls and make dials, if you’ve ever made a living on commission, you know, it’s much easier to try to sell the big thing and get a big commission than to get 20 people to say yes to the small thing. Who wants to do 20 dials, 100 dials, 200 dials a day? So for me, it was just common sense. Sell something expensive so you don’t have to sell that many of them. And my mom believed in the prosperity gospel. So she believed that God wants us to have more life and have it more abundantly. She always told me that we were supposed to have lots of money and that we were out of alignment because we didn’t. So I never bought into the idea that I was supposed to be poor, like many, many of us have. We bought into this belief. And I was just raised by somebody who didn’t have that belief system. So she just didn’t pass it to me.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

What you were talking about earlier on high-ticket sales and that the only thing some people see for high-ticket is maxing out a credit card to buy a handbag or to, you know, other purchases like a car or a house. Another place where I see it, and I think you were talking a little about this with coaching, is in these sort of get rich quick MLM kind of things where people will spend $10,000 as a buy-in or just like you said, coaches who are like, you have to buy my $10,000, $20,000 system, package, whatever, and you specifically say on your website, ‘we don’t teach get rich quick schemes, we teach timeless sales strategies that last a lifetime. Getting rich quick is just a byproduct of the work we do together.’ Tell me more about that.

 

Natalie Bullen:

I love that. That was a stroke of genius. Well, here’s the thing. Making money takes a long time if you believe it takes a long time. I spent a lot of my youth in my 20s working at Cracker Barrel, like I told you. Why? Because I believed that everybody in college worked a low-paying, crappy job in a restaurant. I didn’t try to get a six-figure job. I didn’t apply for six-figure jobs. I applied for retail jobs that paid minimum wage because I was a college student. I thought that’s all I deserved to have because that’s what college students do, right? They’re broke. That’s what college students are. That’s what happens. You go to college, it builds character. You work, you don’t get paid very much. It’s like a residency for a MD, right? You do the thing, it sucks. You don’t get paid very much, but eventually you’ll graduate and you’ll do better. I think that’s where the whole get-rich-quick thing, people go, ‘oh, it’s a scheme and it’s a scam if you make a lot of money really fast.’ Maybe, but maybe not. I made six figures my first year in business because I was too naive to know that wasn’t normal. I didn’t know that wasn’t what everybody’s business did. I really did not know. I didn’t have a goal. I didn’t wake up and go, okay, Nat, you got this. You going to make six figures your first year. I just didn’t cap my potential. I didn’t tell myself I couldn’t make six figures in the first year. And a lot of people tell themselves that. Hell, even the IRS anchors people to that, that it’s normal in the first couple of years for your business to lose money. Go to TurboTax’s website, go to H&R Block, look at the IRS. It’s common. And I know people who literally switch businesses every two to three years, cause that’s how long the IRS will normally let you carry a loss before they start going, why isn’t this business making a profit? So hell, if even the IRS isn’t going to penalize you for losing money for a couple of years, must be normal, right? But I did not know this information. To me, it’s only normal to have profit. Why in the hell would I go through all the struggle and strife of running a business and not make profit? That is baffling to me. I am confused. And clearly I’m not as resilient as a lot of these entrepreneurs. ‘Cause when I meet people that’s been struggling in their business 10 years, I don’t get that. I don’t resonate with that. I don’t understand it. I don’t get behind it. I can’t do it. I’m sorry. The mental health, the physical health toll, it’s a lot of work building a startup. If it’s not going to be lucrative and help you live a better life, which is the lie that people tell you when you ask them why they went into business, they wanted freedom, they wanted more money, they wanted to spend time with their kids, they wanted all these things. Then it takes money to do them. So why would you settle for a business that can’t pay you well? And if you are a coach or a consultant or a service provider and your business can’t pay you, you are settling. Period, full stop. I don’t coach product-based businesses. It’s a whole different aisle and the cost and the expenditure is totally different. But if you’re an accountant and your business can’t pay you well, you’re being taken advantage of. Your business is harming you. You’re being abused. And I wouldn’t stand for it.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Or you have a hobby and not really a business at that point.

 

Natalie Bullen:

But see, I used to say that, but they’re working a hundred hours a week. That ain’t no damn hobby. Hobbies are enjoyable. You do them when you choose, like an Etsy store, maybe, that doesn’t make money, I might say, is a hobby. You like crafts, you like to do them in batches, and you like to sell them once a month. You don’t care if it makes a lot of money or not. That’s a hobby. But if you got payroll, and staff, and responsibilities, that ain’t no damn hobby. That is an abusive business. If most of these women had a husband like their business, everyone would tell them to get divorced.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Yeah, such a good way of thinking of it. And when you talk about selling, because then, you know, if you’re gonna start a business, you have to get people to buy what it is you’re selling, you know, what you’re offering, right? And that’s the key to making the money. If you can’t sell the thing, you can’t make any money. And yet I know that a lot of people hide when it comes to selling. They’re afraid of selling. And I know they have a lot of internal stories about selling. And I think one of the ones I hear a lot is selling is sleazy or it’s scary or it’s rude or it’s pushy, aggressive, all of these things, or you can’t do it, it’s tricky. You’re trying to trick people or something, right? Because a lot of what I think we see out there in the typical sort of white male sales approaches feels like that. I know that you said on your website again that you stand for ethical sales processes for business owners charging premium prices and all of that. So where do you come down around sales being manipulative vs. sales being ethical. How do you teach an ethical sales process? And does that change how people feel about selling?

 

Natalie Bullen:

I think that what most people, when people say sales is manipulative, no, manipulation is manipulative. That’s not sales. Tricking people into paying you is not sales. Look at the definition of sales. The definition of sales is a willing seller and a willing buyer. It’s consent-based. So if there was no consent, what you watched was abuse and manipulation, not sales. So sales has just been given a bad rap. Like it’s just, most of what people go, how can you teach sales? Sales is manipulative. And I go, send me an example of this manipulation. What they send me is abuse. It’s not even sales. So I’m like, yeah, that’s not what anybody ethical would teach as a sales training or product. I think the big things that make the way that I teach sales different is that one, I lean on people’s why and their mission. When people tell me they hate sales, but they love their clients, I’m very confused because how did you get your clients without selling them something? Unless you’re doing volunteer work. They paid you. So if you’re an accountant and you love to help people save money on their taxes, how could you hate to sell people into packages that help them save money on their taxes? Like that’s incongruent. You actually can’t love your clients and hate sales. It’s impossible because the sale is what created the client that you claim you love to help. The sale is what created the client that you say you want to help. So if you’re pretending to help people, you have to like the sale. It just is what it is. And what people are really saying is, I don’t like talking to strangers or I don’t like getting on sales calls because I don’t know what to say, or I’m so bogged down in client work. And I have no sales process or marketing system. And it feels hard and heavy because I’m guessing at how to sell. That’s what people really mean. I think when people say sales is hard, I don’t think they actually mean, I actually don’t want any clients in this business. Cause when I hear people say, I hate sales, I wanna close my business because I don’t wanna have any clients.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

And when you talk about mindset, there is such a great reframe for people to think about because I do hear that a lot. I hate sales. I love the work I do. I hate sales.

 

Natalie Bullen:

To be fair, some people are technicians. They actually don’t want to run a business. They, they’re, they’re accountants. They got in business to do accounting. They’re lawyers. They got in business to practice law. They are operations strategists. They got in business to do operations. They suck at the business part. They actually never wanted to run a business. They lost their job, their kid’s schedule, whatever, whatever. And those are people that, if they have enough leads, should probably just outsource their sales to a commission-only salesperson, frankly, but someone has to love sales. And if you refuse for it to be you, then you should extricate yourself from that. However, you’re still going to have to have a sales process for those people. You’re still going to have to know what works to be able to close people. You’re still going to have to be able to train that salesperson in the way that you do business in your company so that they don’t do the sleazy, slimy stuff that you claim that all salespeople do, and you have to have leads for them to work. And a lot of the people who claim they hate sales actually don’t have anybody to sell to. They actually have a lead-gen problem. And they struggle with marketing and visibility because they want to be behind the scenes as a technician, not out in the forefront as a visionary or a leader. Like their self-worth is attached to the thing that they do, not the title that they hold. So they might be the CEO of the company, but they actually don’t want to be the CEO. They want to be the main producer. They want to be the manager of the team and they want to be the doer of the work. They don’t actually want to be the leader of the ship. At least a third of people in business shouldn’t be in business at all because they don’t want to do the thing that keeps you in business. They only want to do the thing they want to do the part after they get paid. But somebody’s got to do the part that makes people pay you. And if it’s not going to be you and it’s not going to be a salesperson, you won’t be in business long. Like you’ve got to accept that either, hey, I own Unapologetic Wealth and it serves this kind of person. And I’m going to put myself out there and attract those people into my business, or I own Unapologetic Wealth and I’m too busy to do my own sales, so I’m going to hire a salesperson, or I used to own Unapologetic Wealth, and it shuttered because I wouldn’t sell things. I don’t understand an option other than those three.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I have lots of thoughts about people owning businesses that shouldn’t or being CEOs that shouldn’t and all of that because there’s a lot of things around the way we view leadership in this country and promote and management and what we’ve put a value on and then accordingly what we pay and the doers aren’t seen as valuable and that’s a whole problem too. And I know that you what I heard you talking about too is paying people thriving wages, if you can’t be, if you’re not able to do that, then you shouldn’t be in business either, right? And that’s part of that high-ticket offer.

 

Natalie Bullen:

So that you can have enough profit. My VIP day is $6,000, which means that if I need to pull in an expert, if I need to pay for an hour of my marketing person’s time to come in to the VIP day and talk about SEO, if I need to bring in a brand strategist, so I can send them a physical document in the mail so that I can send them a beautiful custom money tree as a welcome gift, so that I can give them 14 days of support via Voxer so that I can give them lifetime access to my course. Yeah, it’s $6,000. And that gives me the profit margin in case I need to take exceptional care or even that my standard level of care is incredible. If I only charge $1,500, I’d have to do 20 of them a quarter. I’d be burnt out and stressed out. My calendar would be packed full of meetings. I would be exhausted. I’d forget who signed up and when. I wouldn’t have systems. I wouldn’t be able to pay my admin, Terika. I’d be screwed and people would show up differently. The way that people show up when they have invested a large sum of money and paid in full for it is very different. Very different. When I was selling VIP days for $3,500, letting people put 50% down and 50% three days before it’s an incredibly different experience than now that they are 6K pay-in-full only. Just that shift has brought a different level of clientele, people who have leads, people who have their offer suite nailed down, people who have the confidence, people who want to make money. My last VIP day was with a client who sells a $50,000 package. So her paying me $6,000 is nothing because if I can get her even one more sale next year, hell, it don’t even have to be soon. If I can show her a path to even one additional sale, she got all of her money back. That’s what I love about teaching high-ticket. It gives clients the best chance of recouping their Natalie investment.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Going back to that pain people, because you said on your website, we don’t discount or ask for discounts over here. And that’s, so you’re not discounting your offer because when you start doing that, when you start charging too little or discounting what you’re doing, the ripple effect of that is then you have to start asking the people who you’re asking for help, your brand strategist, your designer, your marketing person, your whoever, you start having to ask them for discounts. And now you’re not honoring the money they need to be making to make a living wage. So it’s not just about discounting yourself either. For those do-gooders who sometimes are better about people-pleasing…

 

Natalie Bullen:

Oh, they’re worse. They barter everything. They don’t pay anything. So they get into relationships where no money is being exchanged. And they’re both just working for free. And I’m not saying there’s never a scenario to barter, but even on a barter, Becky, if me and you decide to do business together, I’m going to pay your invoice and you’re going to pay mine. Even if they are the exact same amount of money, because we need to train our brains that our service is worth compensation. Working for free does everyone a disservice. So even on a barter, I’m still gonna make, you’re gonna sign my contract, you’re gonna go through my onboarding, even if it’s, I’m gonna write $5,000 worth of copy for you and you’re gonna do, like, we are still going to transfer money. That is so important. And women are very prone to work for free. They do it in their beta programs. Y’all done wore beta out. Beta is tired. Beta don’t know how the hell she got attached to all this free shit. Beta is over it. She’s like, man, why does this keep happening? Why do people keep working for free and blaming it on me? Beta has to be turning in her grave, her Greek grave.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

It’s not surprising to me that women tend to be the ones that are discounting their own labor. But I like this reframe and the idea of remembering…

 

Natalie Bullen:

They think that they’re selling to people who are broke. It’s all, it’s all a big scheme. It’s all a story. It’s this money story that they truly believe. And a lot of people believe that it’s harmful to ask people for lots of money. Like you have to ask yourself, how do people feel about money? So I might ask somebody, how does money make you feel? If they say safety, I know that they’re going to struggle with sales because if you believe that money makes you safe, then you would believe that you are making people unsafe by taking their money from them. You have diminished their safety. You have diminished their financial safety net by taking money from them for this thing. They would have been safer keeping their money. And so if you believe that about money, then this is why I tell people money is neutral. It’s a tool to get what you want. Money actually means nothing. If you lock me in my house with money, I’m gonna die because I will starve to death, right? Like money is only worth what you exchange it for. That’s it. It’s currency exchange. That is its purpose. We used to use maize, kind of messy, went bad, spoiled, hard to count. So we got paper bills to be able to exchange for goods and services. That’s why money exists. So hoarding money doesn’t really make sense. People don’t actually want more money. They want the things that money can do for them. Cause no one’s swimming in their money. No one’s wearing their money. No one’s eating their money. No one’s drinking their money. Like your basic physiological needs, no one’s house is made out of money. Be for real. Like money only serves the purpose of buying what we want. That’s it. It’s a tool to be able to grow your investments. It’s a tool to be able to pay off debt. You want what money can do for you. But if you believe that your clients are better off with their problems and their money, than giving their money to you, that is why sales feels hard. It’s not about the sale at all. Almost every sales problem is actually a money-mindset problem veiled. Almost all of them, very few. It’s why I’m moving my offer suite to, um, more around building your authority and getting qualified leads who are so bought into your mission and your ethos and your work and your offer that they sell themselves on working with you.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

That’s good. I want to talk a little bit more about that in a second. And for anyone who wants to know more about developing that sort of sales mindset or getting over some of these mindset issues, you’re going to share three tips, which I will be sharing with the newsletter subscribers. So make sure you go subscribe, the link is in the show notes. Thank you. I want to talk really quickly too, because you also have said that you can’t outsell bad branding, which I think gets a little bit into some of this messaging and stuff. So if you have no leads, no traffic source, what good is sales? So are you working with people around branding? Is that a common mistake you’re seeing, that people think they have a sales problem when really what they have is more of a branding problem?

 

Natalie Bullen:

Really, really common. I don’t do branding at all. I do help people develop their messaging, which probably is a sliver of branding, but in terms of positioning, strategy, visuals, I refer that out. I actually have a few people that I trust to be able to refer people out to for that. Almost all people, I would say 80% of the people who think they have a sales problem have something else. Like it’s a huge number. It’s almost always a marketing problem, a traffic problem, a visibility problem, a confidence problem. That’s really big. People are just afraid to ask for the sale. But if, here’s how to know if you have a sales problem, if you get 10 people on a sales call and you can get six of them to say yes and pay you full price, you don’t have a sales problem. So if you get people on sales calls and it works and they pay you, in general, if that’s your lived experience, you probably don’t have a sales problem. You probably just aren’t booking enough sales calls, which means you don’t have enough leads. And that could be that your offer is not great. Because if your offer is great, people will sell themselves into it. I’ve had offers that I barely promoted. Look at ChatGPT, it’s a great example. ChatGPT did no marketing. They didn’t run ads at all. People, it spread like wildfire. Why? Because the product was so good and it was what people desperately wanted because they don’t see themselves as good writers, and they are looking for a way to crank out content in this new content-frenzy marketing. I post seven to 10 times a day and I do it from my brain. Very few people can do that. So they need an AI solution that can crank out eBooks and posts and blogs and web copy until they can either hire a copywriter or get more proficient or faster at it themselves or more prolific. I’m very prolific. Most people aren’t. ChatGPT sold itself. So now they’re putting people on monthly paid subscriptions and nobody’s blinking an eye because they really want the product. So I see a lot of people think they have a sales problem, they have an offer problem. Some people have an operations or a reputation problem. So people have bought from them before and weren’t happy with their experience and didn’t buy again. So they’ve got to go out and replace those leads all the time. I do think a lot of people try to outsell their bad branding. They want to sell really lux, expensive things, but does your site look really lux inexpensive? You know, my rebrand is definitely going to be more on the lux side because I’m going to be unveiling an ultra-high-ticket offer. Right now, my website says, you can trust me. I used to be in banking. I’m in finance. We make money. It’s safe over here. Look at me, I’m Natalie. I’m intelligent and trustworthy and safe. I want something that says we’re elite over here. We are high-performing here. We are luxury here. We are well-rested here. We are in a class of our own. We’re a category of one and that is why you should pay me $75,000. So when people wonder, you know, why is Jimmy Choo able to sell $995 for a shoe that Steve Madden can only get $129 for? It’s in the branding. So you can price too high for your perceived branding, and make it difficult to be able to close the sale. Unless your offer is just irresistible. But I don’t think very many people build out irresistible offers because they build out what they want to sell, not what their audience wants to buy. I can’t tell you how many people I meet that have whole built out offer suites, no leads. They don’t have one lead for this mastermind. Why did you build a mastermind and you have no leads for it? Me and Sarah didn’t build out a mastermind until people started asking us to build a mastermind. And then we got a wait list, and then we did some market research, and then we met and we talked about it. And then we got a framework and then we put out a minimally viable product to see if we could sell it. The idea of spending tens of thousands of dollars on photos and website and copy to launch it to crickets is baffling to me. And I just feel like nobody is telling folks you find demand and then you fill it. Stop trying to create demand for things that you’re in love with. that no one has indicated that they actually want to buy from you. But I think this is just the part of business education that we just don’t give women. They just don’t know any better. We tell people to do stupid stuff, like follow their passion and purpose. I mean, that’s cool. That’s not business advice. That might be life advice. That’s not business advice. Business advice is build something people want, and sell it every day. That is sound business advice. It is not sound business advice to tell people, whatever you build, people will show up for it and just do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. Like those platitudes might sell books, but they don’t sell high-ticket coaching and consulting packages.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Yeah, so good. And some of the other advice, I think, is around working your ass off nonstop. And you have mentioned before, you know, ChatGPT being an example of people looking for a way to not have to spend all of their time because running a business takes a lot of time. There’s a lot of pieces. And if you’re not getting help. And you had mentioned to me once that money doesn’t solve your time problem because time is an asset. You also just talked about being well rested around here as part of your rebrand. So I hear you saying, even though you’re posting eight times a day, which seems like a lot, that you are well rested and that you know money doesn’t solve the time problems. So talk to me about time and rest.

 

Natalie Bullen:

I wake up 30 minutes before my first call every day. I am not an early morning, work all morning. Listen, you will burn out if you’re the only person doing the work in your business. The best tip that I can give you is to outsource some of the production. That’s the best advice I can give you. If you don’t get anything else from this podcast, and what I mean by that is if you are getting paid to file trademarks, hire somebody who can help with the filing. If you get paid to file taxes, find someone to help file the taxes. If you get paid to write copy, find a junior copywriter that you can train to help you write the copy. The way that we teach people to outsource is flawed. We either tell them to start at the bottom with a poorly trained VA, find them in the Philippines, pay them $4 an hour. Or we tell them to start at the top, build out your C-suites. You’re the CEO, hire a CFO, hire a CMO, hire a COO. So now you got a whole team of strategists and no doer. So now you have to be the doer or hire a whole team of low-level doers who can’t think on their own, and now you have to do the thinking for them. What I vote is you hire out the production. So if you’re a coach with a group coaching program, hire a co-coach. If you’re a consultant, get a junior consultant under you that can, or a data statistician, somebody who can work on the client work, the researching and the proposal so you can deliver the work, but you aren’t the one who had to do it from A to Z. That is how you don’t burn out. You will burn out on either strategy, top down or bottom up. Trust me, I would know. You are gonna burn out. If you have to do all of the work. If every sale that comes in, you have to do the delivery, you’re screwed. Because you’ll always be capped at how much you can sell. And nobody talks about that. We talk about the selling part. There’s very little talk around the delivery and how hard it is to deliver all of this work by yourself. So people build out these wild financial forecasts and projections. And I’m like, great, who’s going to do all the work after you sell these things? Like after you sell this hundred thousand dollar thing, then what happens? And that’s another reason why I’m always going to go hard for high-ticket. Cause if you sell a $50,000 offer, you can afford to hire $10 or $15,000 worth of help and still have a great profit margin. And you can get a ton of help for 15,000.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

And still pay them well.

 

Natalie Bullen:

And still pay them well, pay yourself well, treat the client well, send them a nice gift. But if you give away a year of coaching for $5,000, you can’t hire help. You can’t hire good help because you’re only getting what? 400 bucks a month from them? So how do you ever, what, $410? How do you grow and scale that? It’s really hard. Sleep more than you need to. Give yourself rest. And if you can’t rest, like I hate the toxic rest culture, sleep more, take naps, eat better. No, no, no. Get your operations and systems and your team to the point where there’s not so much work. If your business generates a hundred hours of work every week, someone’s got to do a hundred hours of work every week. It would be better to streamline to where your business doesn’t generate so much work instead of trying to just hire people to do a hundred hours a week worth of work. I got to think we solved the wrong problem when we try to hire.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

You said if you take away only one thing, I think they’re gonna take away a lot more than just that one thing from this episode. That is great though.

 

Natalie Bullen:

That’s one thing that’s important. It’s something I’ve learned that nobody really taught me. And I was like, because I’ve done it all right. I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on systems and ops and tech. And I had a CMO and a COO and all kinds of consultants and strategists. I had a business coach and a mentor and I never felt better. I was working from 30 minutes before my first call till midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock at night, because I coach all day. I do sales first. I prospect first thing in the morning before I get on calls. I don’t take client calls. I don’t check email until I’ve prospected. If nobody has heard about what I’m selling today, then I don’t have any business doing client work. You put your, you put your own oxygen mask on first and sales is the oxygen of your business. So if you have not sold your own stuff, you shouldn’t be touching anybody else’s stuff. I’m sorry. I don’t care how much client work I have because if I go out of business, the work ain’t going to get done anyway, right? If I go out of business, how much of the client work is going to get done? Zero. So my main goal as the CEO is to make sure the business is solvent. That’s sales. So I prospect first. I’m marketing on Facebook, check a couple of data points, my quiz, my leads, et cetera, my Airtable, sales CRM. Then I do my client work. And then you start the second shift, right? You worked on the clients. Now you got to work on your business. How do you get new copy up on the site? And how do you build out your new course? And when do you meet with your coach? Meet with your CFO, meet with your CPA, go over your books and your tech? And now it’s eight o’clock. Well, now you got to do the production. The thing that people actually paid you for. You had the meetings, but now you got to do the work. And I was like, yeah, this isn’t going to work for me. I can’t really work three shifts a day. I can’t really do the client-facing shift and the sales and marketing shift, and the production shift. I’m gonna have to get some of that off, but it took me a long time to realize that I needed more help and the kind of help that I needed. It’s not intuitive. At least it wasn’t for me.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I appreciate you for sharing that. And we’re running out of time, so I wanna just go to the last thing I wanted to ask you about before we get to our resource and the organization you wanna support, which is that you mentioned you’re making some big changes in your business. And we talked before, what I heard was that you’re putting more space into your business because you have realized you’re not obligated to coach everyone on everything. So some, you know, even more boundaries there because you don’t have to be that savior who does everything. So you’re closing your group program, I believe. So tell me a little bit about what changes are coming for you.

 

Natalie Bullen:

My group program is closing, which is scary because it’s my flagship. I get 40% of my annual revenue from it, but I’ve discovered that the women in it aren’t getting the result that I want them to get because they don’t actually have a sales problem. They have a leads, marketing, visibility problem. So I’m closing it down. I’m also going to stop quote unquote sales coaching. So there will still be some coaching, but it will only be around money mindset and wealth identity, especially for people who are already making the money. You’ve had the six-figure, seven-figure launch. You’re paying yourself more than ever. How do you avoid lottery winner syndrome? And how do you get the best financial dream team set up to where you don’t squander your money and you actually grow wealth? So I won’t go back to being a financial advisor, but I’ll be kind of a wealth liaison. That’ll be the coaching. The consulting is great. I actually have a couple of clients in it. We start with my, what I call my gold mine audit because I feel like most people are sitting on a gold mine. You already have lead magnets and copy and email funnels, but it’s piecemeal. It was made by different people at different times for different purposes. When’s the last time somebody actually reviewed your entire funnel, from lead gen to awareness to the sales call to the onboarding—I mean, every single piece. Your text, how you’re creating anticipation, your application, all of it from, oh, this is a cool brand to, yeah, I paid her $10,000 a month and everything in between. I have people in a 30-day audit, we meet, and then I present them with a report that gives them, here’s what I suspect is going on with your business. Here’s the priority of tasks that I would tackle. Here’s what’s working well. Here are the assets you’re missing. Here’s what you should change. And here’s what you should stop doing because it’s costing you money. And then if they wanna continue working with me on a retainer basis to fix the things that we found in the audit, they can do so. So I actually have a few people in that. It feels super aligned. I’ve got a new operations person, which is great. We’ve moved everything to Notion, created like a company Wiki, some really great, intuitive tools for my clients to use. So they basically have the beginnings of a sales department and they’ll be able to walk away with a sales dossier or a sales playbook, if you will, and know exactly how they do business at their company. So when they are ready to outsource sales, they already have everything. Here’s how we do business, here’s how we price, here’s how we message, here’s how we market, here’s how we get leads, it’s all together. So I feel really, really good about the coaching being after the sales instead of before. So you can come in and we do the sales consulting, assess what you have, fix it. You go out here and start crushing it, making tons of money. Then you can come into the coaching where we can actually talk through your wealth identity, build your wealth dream team, and then I can off-board you. And that way I don’t feel like I’m leaving people in the lurch with all this money and success, knowing like we’ve talked about that there’s very little financial literacy out here that’s geared towards entrepreneurs that’s geared towards non-men or non, just anybody who’s a person of color, they’re just excluded from these conversations. So I’m excited about that. And my done-for-you services are gonna be changing, too. In order to get done-for-you copy with me, you’ll need to come in for messaging strategy or VIP day. Basically we need to have it mapped out exactly what you intend to do. People think I’m a magician. They think I just type words on Facebook and it’s gonna make money rain out the sky. I don’t think people realize how much work I’ve done for six and a half, seven months. I sent 42 outbound DMs a day, seven days a week. And so when people are like, oh, you never run out of leads. Well, hell no, I don’t ever run out of leads. It’s thousands of people. You wouldn’t either if you, right? Like if you did 42 pull-ups every day, you’d be really buff in seven and a half months. Like it happens. So I’m excited about where things are going. It’s scary. It’s scary to let go of some of your clients. I’ve let go of a lot of my one-on-one clients. It’s eerily quiet. My calendar has a lot of space on it. It’s hard for me to not fill that space up with things but I know that next year the unveiling when everything is settled, the audit is live now. People can buy it now. I have people in it now, it’s perfect. But as new things unveil, I think it’ll be a much more cohesive brand and it will actually solve the problem people have. How do you become an authority so you can charge more and sell better? You do these things. That’s step one. You have leads, great. I do your sales audit and teach you how to sell, great. You go out and make all the money and now I help you form your wealth identity and then you’re good to go. So I feel really good about the progression, the ascension model, instead of putting the coaching on the bottom, putting the coaching at the top after you’ve already achieved some success and you already have an objective. In the beginning of business, you don’t really know what you want. It’s really hard to coach people at the bottom of a business because they’re still figuring stuff out. And frankly, they’d probably be better off investing their money in systems or tools or tech or, you know, books or trainings. And so, yeah, I’m elated. I know it’s going to be the right thing when it’s finished.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I mean, everything you’re talking about is stuff we talked about here today and that you are clearly passionate about and know, have knowledge around. And you also talk on your website about how, you know, working with you means lots of laughs. And I could see where people would work with you and have a great time.

 

Natalie Bullen:

Why do you think I stopped being a financial advisor? I was too funny. It was really hard for me to talk about balancing portfolios for an hour. Like I would do like 10 minutes of the work thing and then joke for like an hour. Like people’s work got done, but like, I can’t sit in a boring meeting for an hour. That would be difficult.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

What’s the point if work’s not at least fun? You should be able to enjoy yourself. Thank you for everything you’ve shared. It’s been amazing. And again, we’re gonna talk right after this, three tips for developing a sales mindset. So if you wanna listen to that part, make sure you subscribe to the Feminist Founders Newsletter. Before we go, what’s a resource that you can share? A book, a podcast, something else that’s been helpful for you.

 

Natalie Bullen:

I think everyone should read Daniel Pink’s book. It’s called “To Sell is Human.” He does a really good job of explaining how you’re already selling. You are selling your husband on going to a Mexican restaurant instead of an Italian restaurant. You are selling your kids on eating green vegetables with dinner instead of just ice cream. You are selling the PTA on letting your kid be the bunny in the play instead of the toad. You are selling the florist on bringing back roses because they don’t do that. You sold the waiter on bringing you your food faster because you’re really hungry. You’re selling all the time. So when people go, I hate sales. You just don’t know the definition of sales is just using your persuasion to get people to do what is in their best interest to do. That’s it. So if you’re on the same side of the table with your client. If you want your clients to succeed and they want to succeed, you taking their money and selling them into something that’s going to create that result is actually the ethical thing to do. It’s actually unethical to not sell it to them. And Daniel Pink does an excellent job of outlining that in that book.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I haven’t read it. I’m definitely going to check it out because that’s quite the endorsement. And then what is an organization that’s doing great work in the world that you’d like to highlight?

 

Natalie Bullen:

I would love to highlight the Downtown Rescue Mission. You can find out about them at downtownrescuemission.org. They feed the homeless. I am there at least once a month, feeding the homeless as well. You can give monthly. They have thrift stores as well where they sell donations. So if you have clothing that you wanna share, they have a recently opened all-women’s center, which is great. They do allow people to stay overnight there. My father has spent quite a bit of his life homeless, which is deplorable as a Vietnam veteran of the United States Navy. We do a really bad job of caring about people who are on the streets. So if you have excess, if you give a damn, it’s a good place for you to invest. And I have personally invested over $10,000 in the Downtown Rescue Mission. I also championed for Wells Fargo to give them $5,000 while I was still employed there. And we did the big check and the photo, but I think they’re doing amazing work. The CEO is present on campus. He’s there every day. He’s very involved. And you don’t see that from every nonprofit where people actually care about the work that they do. So if you have any interest at all in helping get our homeless off the street, downtownrescuemission.org.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

And what city is that?

 

Natalie Bullen:

Huntsville, Alabama.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I will make a donation as a way of saying thank you for your time and I hope people who listen to this who, there’s no way they didn’t get so many incredible insights and ideas and mindset shifts, I hope you will also donate as a way to thank Natalie for her time. And you’re gonna join me right after this to share three tips for developing a thrilled mindset. So go subscribe to the newsletter so you can hear those. Thank you Natalie for your time.

 

Natalie Bullen:

Thanks.