“There’s no such thing as being bad with money. You just have bad habits.”  -- Helen Ngo 

When I turned 18 and went off to college, I thought I was going to be a dentist. Despite growing up in a family of female entrepreneurs, and later realizing a career in medicine wasn’t for me, I never dreamed of starting my own company. 

The “aha” moment didn’t come until a few years after college, early in my career in the finance industry. When I asked my boss for a raise, he told me I’d be better off marrying rich. 

That was the last time I would ever be shamed for being an ambitious woman. 

My fire was lit. So, I fired that 9-5 corporate life for good. Never will I let someone control how much money I make.

On this episode of Live and Earn, I take a turn as the guest with my friend and client Ashley Williams, host of the Birds Mean Business podcast. Ashley and I discuss how my identity and upbringing influenced the drive I bring to my business every day. I also share the one thing I wish I had done before becoming an entrepreneur, and some of the top tips I share with my clients. 

What we tackle in this episode: 

• Why I decided to become an entrepreneur — and help other women specifically 
• How becoming a business owner myself transformed my relationship with my mother and my respect for her own journey as an entrepreneur before me 
• Why there’s no such thing as ‘being bad with money’
• How people who earn $6,000 and people who earn $60,000 can actually be making the same amount of money 
• The importance of spending with intention 
• Where your personal life should be before you start a business
• The types of people entrepreneurs should surround themselves with
• Why not everyone should be an entrepreneur 

Resources and links mentioned in episode: 

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/MeetHelenNgo

Instagram:  https://instagram.com/meethelenngo

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenmngo/

Email: Hello@helenngo.com

Ready to crush your income goals? 

Grab your FREE 1-Page Business Revenue Planner to help you stay on top of your income goals and track your progress throughout the year.

Get your copy by visiting 

https://helenngo.com/revenueplanner/

“Corporate does a really good job of making you feel like what you’re doing isn’t important.” -- Taylor Epley

For years, Taylor Epley helped friends, family, and pretty much anyone who asked with résumés and cover letters, until a peer challenged her to find her first client, charge for those same services she’d previously done for free, and get serious about starting her own business: The Career Curator. 

Now, as a career coach, Taylor specializes in helping people figure out where they want to be, and how to get there. In her words, she helps people see themselves the way she sees them. In this episode, Taylor explains what career coaching is and gives some insights into the reasons why so many people stay in jobs that don’t satisfy them. Taylor also shares a creative strategy to overcome imposter syndrome around salary negotiations. 

Here’s Taylor.

What we tackle in this episode: 

• What it’s like to work with a career coach and when to hire one for yourself
• How to find the value in the work you do, even if it may not feel important 
• What to expect when you first meet with a career coach 
• How to become confident in your career development
• The variables to assess when identifying a job that will work best for you 
• The mindset shifts needed to confidently negotiate your salary
• What else to negotiate for besides your salary 
• How to quantify your accomplishments 
• Why people who are in an “OK” situation at work tend to be less happy
• Signs you need to pay attention to when it’s time to come up with an exit strategy 
• Why the current economy might present the best opportunity to leave your 9-5 and go after your dream job 

SHOW NOTES: https://helenngo.com/ep-51-why-people-stay-in-jobs-they-hate

---

Ready to crush your income goals? 

Grab your FREE 1-Page Business Revenue Planner to help you stay on top of your income goals and track your progress throughout the year.

Get your copy by visiting 

https://helenngo.com/revenueplanner/

“You don’t always have to wait for the whole dream. You can break it down into parts that can happen now.” -- Johanna White 

Whether you track your goals with a spreadsheet, write your intentions in a journal, or keep your dreams close to the chest, charting out a path to your future achievements shouldn’t be that complicated. And it certainly shouldn’t be scary, but for so many of us, it can be. 

If you don’t set goals or speak your dreams into existence, then you’ll never fall short of them, right? Wrong. 

As entrepreneur and former goal-phobic Johanna White explains on this episode of Live and Earn, striving for a target you set for yourself is the only way you’ll get closer to what you really want and deserve. 

She once believed goals were pointless -- maybe even something that simply set her up for failure -- but over the years, she’s figured out that achieving becomes a lot more manageable when you establish a series of smaller goals that get you that much closer to big success. 

Johanna also shares her “stretch” goal of the moment and why she only opens up about her goals to the people in her life who genuinely support her. 

What we tackle in this episode: 

• Different styles for setting goals and achieving 
• The pressure to choose what you want to be when you grow up 
• How accomplishing goals without passion can lead to boredom and dissatisfaction 
• Goal setting for self-described dreamers 
• Mental exercises for identifying goals
• How achieving financial goals create opportunity for achieving personal goals
• Why you should think big and have big goals 

SHOW NOTES: https://helenngo.com/ep-50-how-to-set-goals-to-achieve-success

---

Ready to crush your income goals? 

Grab your FREE 1-Page Business Revenue Planner to help you stay on top of your income goals and track your progress throughout the year.

Get your copy by visiting 

https://helenngo.com/revenueplanner/

“Today might not be the best day, but there's something really, really great on the other end of this, and it just hasn't revealed itself yet. But it's totally there —  it's there for my taking and when I get to it, I'll get to it.” -- Jamie Shank 

If anyone could survive the pandemic job market, you’d think it would be a public health expert. 

And you’d be right — but you might be surprised by the survival guide Jamie Shank created for her own career. Jamie uprooted her life in Kansas to put down new roots in Atlanta, Georgia — without full-time employment or health insurance during the Covid-19 pandemic.

When she moved to Atlanta in 2020, she had several interviews lined up. Then came the Covid-19 hiring freezes. 

Instead of crawling back to what she knew —her old job, Kansas City, public health departments — Jamie chose to embrace the blank canvas in front of her and founded her own company, Organizational Empowerment (OE for short). As the President and CEO of her company, Jamie draws on her years of experience in public health and program management to empower clients working in social services and public health — two fields on the frontlines of Covid-19. On this episode of Live and Earn, Jamie explains why the first thing she did was invest her savings in marketing and branding. She also discusses how she established connections in the local entrepreneur community and shares how challenges in her personal life helped her cultivate the resilience any first-time business owner needs.

What we tackle in this episode: 

• The challenges of establishing a new business and finding clients in a new state 
• Combining households and finances with a partner during a period of financial uncertainty
• Why it’s critical to your first year of success to be intentional about who you connect with
• The greatest challenge entrepreneurs face in the first year of business 
• Balancing personal and professional growth with meeting obligations to clients
• Identifying and establishing boundaries between work and life as a business owner 
• How building resilience enables you to take risks as a business owner 

SHOW NOTES: https://helenngo.com/ep-49-your-backup-plan-might-be-better

---

Ready to crush your income goals? 

Grab your FREE 1-Page Business Revenue Planner to help you stay on top of your income goals and track your progress throughout the year.

Get your copy by visiting 

https://helenngo.com/revenueplanner/

“Once you grow your business, it is a high like no other.” -- Joy Ugi

Joy Ugi always had big dreams for herself. After so many years in marketing, she’d worked her way up the corporate ladder. Someday, she’d be CMO. Starting her own business never even crossed her mind, hesitating to start her own business as a single woman. 

Finally, as so many of us have, Joy reached a point where she simply couldn’t abide the corporate world or the culture that came with it any longer. Because that was the only work environment she’d ever known, she couldn’t help but send some applications out to established companies, but Joy did something else, too. 

She started reconnecting with old contacts, picked up some freelance work, and something just clicked. Her corporate days officially behind her, in 2017 Joy launched her own digital marketing agency: Hella Good Marketing. 

On this episode of Live and Earn, Joy explains the circumstances that led to her leap of faith into the world of startups and freelancers. She also shares the different aspects of running a business that surprised and challenged her most, as well as what makes her company’s marketing services hella good. 

What we tackle in this episode: 

• Transitioning from the employee mindset to the CEO mindset
• Why quitting without a safety net can drive more success than if you had a plan in place
• Fighting through discomfort to develop hidden or unexplored strengths in yourself
• Why it’s hard to return to the corporate world after running an independent business 
• How an entrepreneur’s communication style translates to her business’s bottom line
• Why working your ass off and taking on every client might make money, but won’t make your business successful long-term 
• What marketing is and isn’t, and why every new business needs a marketing expert

SHOW NOTES: https://helenngo.com/ep-48-you-cant-be-ceo-with-an-employee-mindset/

---

Ready to crush your income goals? 

Grab your FREE 1-Page Business Revenue Planner to help you stay on top of your income goals and track your progress throughout the year.

Get your copy by visiting 

https://helenngo.com/revenueplanner/

“It's always better to have data backing up what your intuition is saying, and not just making decisions on intuition.” -- Jordan Gill

What’s your zone of genius and how do you use it to your advantage?

Operations consultant Jordan Gill has a system to help entrepreneurs figure that out. In fact, she has a system for everything, really. As founder of Systems Saved Me, Jordan identified her own zone of genius early on in her career. In just five years, she’s turned her company into a million-dollar business that has the systems in place to survive almost anything, including every small business owner’s nightmare: turnover. 

On this episode of Live & Earn, Jordan shares how she scaled up from making $110,000 in her first year to her first million only five years later. She also emphasizes the importance of balancing instinct with data and shares her best advice for fellow entrepreneurs who are new to building systems for their business.

What we tackle in this episode: 

• Launching a business and lining up $12,000 in recurring revenue right out of the gate  
• Becoming a million-dollar business in five years
• How to avoid micromanaging people in your business
• Why systems are essential to scaling a business, maintaining stability amid team turnover, and more 
• The first system to implement as a new business owner
• Knocking down perfectionism to get ahead
• What it means to cultivate a culture of ownership in your business
• Why being a solopreneur is unsustainable 
• Why it’s critical to incorporate both data and intuition into business decisions
• How offering a smaller range of services can yield a larger client base

SHOW NOTES:  https://helenngo.com/ep-47-systematize-your-way-to-success

Ready to crush your income goals? 

Grab your FREE 1-Page Business Revenue Planner to help you stay on top of your income goals and track your progress throughout the year.

Get your copy by visiting 

https://helenngo.com/revenueplanner/

“I think overnight success takes like 10 years for everybody. And we don’t get to see the 10 years; we only see the lead-up … because we just found out about them.” 

 -- Porsha Thomas

In her words, brand strategist Porsha Thomas has been dancing in and out of the corporate world for years. She knew from a young age that she wanted to create and lead but didn’t know how to make that her full-time job — so she went to work for other people and began freelancing on the side. Porsha has since founded her own creative agency, GOWRKGRLS, a dream 10 years in the making. 

On this episode of Live & Earn, Porsha walks us through the pivots she made along the way to becoming an entrepreneur, building her business and brand into something bigger each time. Porsha also tells us the best advice she’s received and shares her own wisdom on everything from branding to meditating. 

What we tackle in this episode: 

• Perfecting the pivot and transforming side hustles into full-time jobs 
• Translating a bright idea into a sound business model 
• The unexpected aspects of rebranding
• What it looks like to be a solopreneur 
• The temptation of trying to be ‘affordable’ to everyone — and why raising your rates shouldn’t be scary
• How to start meditating to ground yourself as a business owner
• How to spend money and not feel guilty about it

SHOW NOTES https://helenngo.com/ep-46-what-it-takes-to-be-an-overnight-success

---

Ready to crush your income goals? 

Grab your FREE 1-Page Business Revenue Planner to help you stay on top of your income goals and track your progress throughout the year.

Get your copy by visiting 

https://helenngo.com/revenueplanner/

“Money gives you the opportunity to be who you really are … so it boils down to: Who am I choosing to be? And whether I'm rich, whether I'm poor … whoever I am is my choice every day. And does the money let me be more of that? Who I wish to be and how I want to operate in the world? Or does it get in the way?” -- Liz O’Brien

Everyone loves a rags-to-riches story. 

Whether we’re watching ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Pretty Woman’ on the big screen or singing along when the radio throws it back to ‘Jenny from the Block,’ cheering on the underdog just feels right. 

Right? 

But when you’re the one who grew up pinching pennies, finally earning your way into a higher income bracket can come with baggage — and I’m not just talking about that Louis Vuitton purse or luxury vacation you can afford at last. 

Our relationship with money doesn’t automatically change simply because we have more of it. 

Like it or not, the money lessons we grow up with become the foundation for the beliefs that guide us as adults. The caution and frugality our parents taught us can protect us, but those same values can hold us back. 

As Liz O’Brien explains on this episode of Live & Earn, it is possible to be responsible and reward yourself. And actually do GOOD with money. 

As a belief architect and mindset mentor, Liz dives into the etiology of the thoughts that limit us. She also shares stories of clients who, through consistent reflection and effort, were able to do one of the most difficult things out there — change their own minds. 

What we tackle in this episode: 

• How to identify subconscious limiting beliefs and discover how they hold you back
• The nuanced relationship between one’s wealth and one’s moral character
• How early in life our attitudes toward money begin to develop
• The constant reflection and effort it takes to change our beliefs
• What it means to be genuinely true to yourself 
• Signs it’s time to make a career change
• The prerequisites for a meaningful life: self care and self love
• Finding the middle ground between following your passion and making sure your basic needs are met
• How to overcome the fear of failing
• The case for being an amateur: why our hobbies and passions don’t need to become our professions

SHOW NOTES https://helenngo.com/ep-45-how-money-amplifies-who-you-really-are

---

Ready to crush your income goals? 

Grab your FREE 1-Page Business Revenue Planner to help you stay on top of your income goals and track your progress throughout the year.

Get your copy by visiting 

https://helenngo.com/revenueplanner/