When you don’t know, what you don’t know, you’re in trouble

Help people who have a money conscience

This work and business story highlights what happens when you haven’t had a proper look at your intentions, and when you don’t know enough about what it is that you want to do. This is the most materially expensive mistake that I made, and getting our heads back above water has taken us 4 years.

I am going to tell you about how making emotionally charged decisions to help people achieve their wants, doesn’t always add up to good business sense, and how when someone doesn’t have skin in the game, in the way of their own money, they rarely have a conscience about your money.

Over the years I helped friends, lovers and families with money. Some I knew would be unable to pay me back, but they had helped me so much when I had nothing, that I was ok with that. Some I helped, not expecting the money back, and I was pleasantly surprised many years later to receive a cheque from them, including interest. Others promised to pay me back and I expected them to, and ultimately they were the ones who let me down. I go into this in more detail in my money story.

Don’t fall for every scheme

Mr Keeping Up Appearances was one for schemes. Everything that came across his horizon was a money making scheme. I really wanted some success for him, to help him build up his self-confidence and self-esteem. He had failed in the promotional gifts business, and I ran most of the day today aspects of “his” flighting and rope access business. “I feel like a kept man”, he would lament. He was, because he was lazy.

First it was a soft drink distributorship. He wanted money for stock $ 5,000 and ran around for a few weeks excited about what he could do. When someone did a dirty deal on him and he lost $ 3,000, he decided that he wasn’t going to do it anymore. I never saw the $ 5000 again.

Then it was suitcases, buying stock at $ 10,000 and selling at markets and at road side stalls. That lasted a month or so and then it was too much like hard work. I never saw that $ 10,000 again either.

It was one scheme after another, but because I didn’t insist on him being accountable for my money, he never learned his lesson. I wasn’t paying attention to the “what you dont know” factor.

Don’t dabble with your hobby

I started Latin American and Ballroom dancing, Mr Keeping Up Appearances came along for my lessons, and it was here that I met Mr Young Man’s Fool. The school that we danced at was dingy and dim, with few facilities but I loved learning to dance.

Mr Keeping Up Appearances was already angling at his next scheme. He was now in to cooking, and to be fair he was pretty good. But, he was seeing himself as a flamboyant restaurant owner, not as a diligent caterer. I liked to dance but wanted a place that was reminiscent of a dance hall and not floor space in an office block. Mr Young Man’s Fool, had worked overseas for a while, was back in South Africa, and he was looking for an opportunity to get into something of his own. Talk about setting myself up with the wrong founding partnership, and I rounded it off by taking on a young female dance instructor too. Each having a share in the business, and none of them putting in a cent. When I think back on it now I wonder what I was thinking. Actually – correction – I wasn’t thinking!

In all fairness, I do believe it was a childlike belief that I had done it, I’d come from nothing to something, and so with determination and persistence they could too. The problem was though, that they all had little of either. We signed for a beautiful premises and built a magnificent dance studio, although by the time we opened Mr Keeping Up Appearances was history. Thank goodness.

I was going through the sale of a portion of my media business, the transfer of the flighting and rope access business from Mr Keeping Up Appearances to the new buyer, and I was trying to all intents and purposes help two very young people run a Dance Studio.

They shoot horses don’t they?

A harsh statement, but when a horse is ill and there is no hope, a vet will end its suffering. When Chris and I realised the extent of what was happening within the dance business and the money leakage, that it was bleeding every month, we knew that we needed to stem the flow. We bought in experts to re-evaluate the space and we turned the space into a Lifestyle Centre accommodating dance, exercise, beauty, health, image consulting, kinesiology, life and business coaching.

Each element was a joint venture with an expert in their field, and we were excited for a venue that had a holistic approach to wellness. But, once again, none of the experts had skin in the game. They weren’t responsible for the lease, utilities, salaries of support staff etc, and each one of them was of the ilk that the business would come to them, none of them was actively going out and getting business.

Chris had left the corporate world and together we were making a desperate attempt to get this business off the ground. Note the word “desperate” I used in the previous line as that was exactly what we were. The premises were beautiful, we were featured in magazines and the local press, and we had a big outdoor advertising campaign in the surrounding areas. We had put a lot of additional resources in to the business and needed to start seeing returns.

The Bob Proctor opportunity

A young couple that we had trained with during our coach and master coach training approached with an amazing opportunity. The wife had been in the US recently at an event with Bob Proctor, and she invited him to South Africa. Bob accepted the invitation, and she and her husband approached us to put together a company to bring him out.

Chris and I loved Bob’s material and we knew how much good we could do for South Africans by bringing him out. We had a feeling that this could be our “Big One” too, and we were right, just not in the way we had envisioned it would be.

Bob’s fees were enormous, the South African currency at the time was around R 8 to $ 1, he only travels 1^st Class and he was bringing his CEO, Sandra Gallagher with him. All told their costs were well over $ 156,000 for the 4 days he would be in South Africa.

We decided that we were going to go big, a gala dinner, a two day seminar and a morning session beamed nationally via a cinema company. We appointed experts in their fields to co-ordinate, market and facilitate the event. We had no idea how to do what we wanted to do, so we pulled in the resources that we thought would make this an enormous success.

A rude awakening

Expertise comes at a price, the bills were piling up and we weren’t seeing any results. We weren’t getting bums into seats. We saw our dreams of great success being eaten away by fear, worry and doubt. We were such babies in terms of our journey as students of the mind.

Here we were wanting to do something GREAT for South Africa and we couldn’t get any interest what so ever. The economic outlook was filled with doom and gloom, and South Africa seemed to be embracing it.

We were in too deep

The end of October was upon us, we hadn’t even sold enough tickets to cover the airfares and Chris had to make a call to Bob. I will never forget how much it took Chris at that moment to speak to Bob and ask him to come anyway, to pay for his own ticket and then see where we could go from there. If he didn’t come we would lose it all.

It is important to say here that if Bob had said no, if he hadn’t come, we would have lost less materially than we ultimately did. But, we would have lost so much more on an emotional and soul level, and we would more than likely, have lost our marriage too. This being said though on a business level there is always a time when you have to make the choice of when to say enough is enough, when to keep going and when to walk away.

Bob said yes, that we could sort out the details when he arrived and the events went ahead. They were fantastic in terms of content and value, but they bombed on a business level and we were going to be left with a massive loss.

Our young partners didn’t have the resources to carry this kind of loss, they had three young children and there was no way that we could let them lose their home. We were cruel to be kind and we exited them quite ruthlessly from the company in order that we could release them from the financial burden. It was a difficult time for all of us, and we didn’t see them again until 2013, at a personal development seminar. I spent some time speaking to the young mother about what happened and it felt great to help her let go of what had happened. We were older and we had led the charge, so we had to take the hit.

We were looking in to the abyss

This was the tipping point for Chris and me. We had taken too much on without knowing what we didn’t know. In early 2013 when the first massive personal development summit came to South Africa, we met with, and interviewed many of the world’s greatest teachers of the mind, as well as the companies that organise these events.

The lengths they went to, to fill the room were extreme and nearly all the attendees were there on a free ride. The organisers and teachers made their money, and lots of it, through the back end, through the sales generated by each speaker. This model is used by most teacher’s personal development teachers around the world.

This was not a model that we had ever been exposed to and had we been aware of this we would have made our decisions from the position of what we did know. I am still undecided as to whether this is a model that resonates with me, only time will tell.

Letting everything go

We had pre-booked a trip to the bush, to the Northern Tuli Game Reserve in Botswana, and we were to leaver shortly the end of Bob’s project. Originally it was to celebrate our success, and ultimately it was to lick our wounds. We used the time to reflect, to rage, to cry and to deny what had happened. Then we used the time to start the process of regrouping. It was terrifying as we knew we were in, deep, deep water.

Bob had offered us some training valued at $ 25,000 each that would afford us international accreditation. He sat and talked to us about where we were at in our lives and how we were trying to use too many different business to get us to our destination, and how these businesses were a distraction from our Goals. We returned from Botswana and began the process of closing everything down.

You can read more about closing the businesses, continuing our training with Proctor Gallagher and many other international organisations and our personal journey in the Our Story articles, More to Life than This, and Starting Over.

Hindsight is a perfect science. You can’t know everything about any project you get involved in, and experience in life is really, knowing what you shouldn’t do, and not necessarily knowing what to do. Would I have gone in to these projects if a little voice tapped me on the shoulder and said “Listen, this is what you don’t know,” of course not. But it is these experiences that make us grow, and where we find our true gifts and abilities. Looking back there were so many emotional decision made around this project, the Lifestyle Studio, the Dance studio and all the schemes that I bought in to. A lot of them related directly to my money emotion and blue print, and a lot of them related to my belief that other people would want what is best for me, if what I was doing to help them was going to be good for them.

What other people do is to look after themselves and fulfill against their highest values and that’s just how it is – the sooner you learn this, the better.

Because the price you pay for what you don’t know is huge.

Bob Proctor, my mentor, an internationally respected business and life coach, creator of ‘Create Your Own Economy’ and co-creator of ‘Thinking Into Results’ writes “The subject of money [money is what we receive for working, for being of service] has fascinated most people for a long time. When most people are growing up, they were left the impression that if you are going to earn a lot of money, you had to be really bright, well-educated and lucky. The truth is that earning money does not necessarily have anything to do with luck, age, gender, geography, formal education, back-ground or business experience. If you want to earn a lot of money, there is one simple prerequisite – you must make a decision that you are going to earn a lot of money – that is it. It is as simple as it sounds and this is the common denominator that has enabled wealthy people to earn a lot of money. The masses operate under the false assumption that the people who go to work and earn an income know how to earn money. The truth is they are merely grinding out a living. Most people live this way. These people are certainly not stupid, they are intelligent, good people, however habit has taken control and one day leads to the next, soon days run into years and nothing changes for them financially”.

Napoleon Hill in his best-seller book ‘Think and Grow Rich’ writes “When money comes in quantities known as ‘the big money’ it flows to the one who accumulates it as easily as water flows downhill. There exists a great unseen stream of power, which may be compared to a river; except that one side flows in one direction, carrying all who get into that side of the stream, onward and upward to wealth – and on the other side flows in the opposite direction carrying all who are unfortunate enough to get into it downward to misery and poverty. Every man who has accumulated a great fortune has recognised the existence of this stream of life. It consists of one’s thinking process. Poverty is attracted to the one whose mind is favourable to it, as money is attracted to one whose mind has been deliberately prepared to attract it and through the same Natural Laws. Lest we forget, poverty consciousness will voluntarily seize the mind that it not occupied with money consciousness”.

I include these two powerful lessons on money because they’re work related – the biggest mistake I’d made was to get I to business ventures with people who were lazy (they were not prepared to go the extra mile) and who had a deeply entrenched poverty consciousness. Nothing about them was of a wealthy mind-set because people who have a wealth and prosperity consciousness, do not behave as they do – they do not squander opportunities.

Going the extra mile is the action of rendering more and better service than that for which you are presently paid. When you go the extra mile, the Laws of Compensation (listed below) comes into play. Ralph Waldo Emerson says that The Law of Compensation is the law of laws. This Law is also known as The Law of Cause and Effect, or The Great Law or The Law of Karma. The best way to define compensation is what you invest time and effort wise into something is what you’re going to get back. To improve our lives, we must first focus on and improve ourselves. When we do this, we can expect good to be on its way to us. This law will help you when you choose to help yourself. This law (the Law of Compensation) is based on three steps. Know and remember this always – the amount of money or good you receive in life is going to be in direct ratio with these three things:

1. The need for what you do.
2. Your ability to do it.
3. The difficulty there will be in replacing you.

Questions:

1. Are you a freeloader? Do you ruthlessly sponge off others all the time knowing deep down that you’re taking advantage of them? If you are, how does being exposed for being a freeloader make you feel? Can you live with this going forward? If no, what are you going to do to shift from being a lazy free-loader to an engaged, productive contributor?
2. Are you actively enabling a freeloader? Why are you doing this? Do you understand the price you are and will pay for allowing this person to parasitize off you as they are? How does this make you feel? Can you live with this going forward? If no, what are you going to decide to do about it right now?

Exercise:

1. Given the above success teachings, it is clear that “Every act rewards itself”.
2. So, what is the one thing in life that absolutely excites you?
3. How good are you at it?
4. How much time do you spend on it? If you have something that you really love to do, chances are you’re going to put an abundance of time into it. The more time you put into it, the more likely you’re going to be able to give and receive something back from the universe. “As you sow, so shall you reap” is the saying of this law.
5. What you currently have in your life is a result of your past actions. What is this telling you about how you use the opportunities gifted to you by others?
6. Are you clear that you must provide service, because there’s no such thing as something for nothing?
7. If you think differently, you do realise that you have a poverty consciousness as you’re after “the easy money”?
8. Now, in terms of your new money consciousness, do you understand and will you forthwith apply the Laws of Compensation?

My profound lesson:

I hope that my pure honesty in this article has made you understand how when you’re doing things to “be nice” and to “make other peoples’ dreams happen for them, risk-free” you’re on a hiding to nothing. They all knew that they were exploiting me, I knew that they knew that they were exploiting you – in fact, we all knew exactly what was going on yet nobody was prepared to do anything about it – until Chris came along – he was the axeman who helped me and encouraged me to bring down the hatchet on all this absolute nonsense. Heads had to roll and they rolled.

They were all too self-absorbed and lazy to grab the opportunity which “me and my money” was affording them. Deep down they knew this but it was so good – they’d found a cash-cow and they were going to milk her dry. I was too “conveniently blind” to see that they were all just repeating the same old useless behaviours over and over again – I’d seen this, I’d seen the warning signs, but I hadn’t looked after me, because had I done, it would have meant a great deal of conflict and I just didn’t have the appetite for the scrap which was bound to happen. I knew their traits, I’d seen them for myself, they’d bombed in business before and sucked me dry and yet again they were doing exactly the same thing all over again and I was allowing them to do this! Idiotic? Beyond measure…

Yet again, I come back to my self-image and self-esteem and sense of self-worth. Back then I sucked it up, even though I knew better – I hoped against all hopes, even though I knew better – I stuck my head in the sand, even though I knew better – I knew I was being bled dry yet I still did nothing about it. So what’s my huge life lesson here? I did what was easy – I turned a blind eye and hoped it would all miraculously sort itself. Well it didn’t and I got taken to the cleaners; because I did what was easy my life became hard.

Hard I done what was hard (in other words, booted them all and taken back full control) my life would have become much easier. So given the Law of Cause and Effect, it’s not shame on them, it is shame on me because I caused this, I caused this by not dealing the tough issues swiftly and deliberately! Today I have that self-confidence and I love it – there are no 50 shades of grey, there’s only black and there’s white, plus I know exactly what I desire and anything less than that will not be accepted nor tolerated. It’s not that you don’t start things because of what you dont know, it is that you listen to you intuition to.

To your Success, with love

Suzanne Styles

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