Permission to Kick Ass

Money mishaps, mistakes, and misappropriation with Katherine Pomerantz

• Angie Colee • Episode 173

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Katherine Pomerantz is an accountant/money wizard turning the financial world on its head. Imagine following all the "steps" - getting your business set up and your employees trained so you can take time off for parental leave... only to return from leave to discover you've lost almost half your business. And during one of the busiest periods, tax season! I think you're going to be seriously inspired by how she turned it all around (especially when lots would take it as a sign to quit). Listen now!

Can't-miss moments:

  • No one likes needy: are you treating your money like a desperate lover chasing after someone? If you're constantly obsessing about how to get more money, Katherine has some tips for how to attract vs chase... 

  • Spoiler alert: MONEY IS MADE UP. It is literally flying over our heads this second, little data bytes we've all agreed equal something of value. Katherine and I reveal why we find this idea inspiring vs intimidating...

  • Out of context quote: "Did I tell you about the time everything was fucked up and I thought we were all going to die?" 

  • Are you treating money as something you earn at the end of the journey, or as a tool to help you on that journey? Here's how to tell the difference...

  • Turning it all around: how Katherine replaced all the lost income within four months (and ensured that losing nearly half her business overnight would never happen again)... 

Katherine's bio:

Katherine, actress turned accountant, has capitalized on her artistic background to create the Money Storyteller MethodTM - a mindset and accounting framework that helps business owners rewrite bad money stories and scale without mess. She firmly believes every creative idea has the ability to change the world if given the right financial support and opportunity. She leads an accounting firm & financial education company, and her expertise has been featured by VICE Media, Discover Card, The Penny Hoarder, and the Stacking Benjamins Podcast. She loves yoga, walking dogs, and throwing rad birthday parties. 

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Angie Colee:

Welcome to Permission to Kick Ass, the show that gives you a virtual seat at the bar for the real conversations that happen between entrepreneurs. I'm interviewing all kinds of business owners, from those just a few years into freelancing to CEOs helming nine-figure companies. If you've ever worried that everyone else just seems to get it and you're missing something or messing things up, this show is for you. I'm your host, angie Coley, and let's get to it. Hey, and welcome back to Permission to Kick Ass. With me today is my friend, katherine Pomerantz. Say hi, hi, we were talking a little bit before we got started recording about. It's a little bit of a breather time.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Now, tell us a little bit about what you do. Oh, absolutely Well, for reference, we are recording on April 17th and I run an accounting firm and financial education company. So in the US tax deadline is April 15th, so we're coming up for air this week.

Angie Colee:

Oh my gosh, what has that been like the last couple months?

Katherine Pomerantz:

Okay, so well. This will be related to what we talk about later on, because there's a happy ending to most stories, hopefully, and there's definitely a happy ending to mine, but it was easy, it was a piece of cake. We were ahead of schedule the whole time. This time, my team's amazing, so it was a lot it was a work. I mean the work was. You know my calendar was very full, but yeah it was well handled.

Katherine Pomerantz:

I was not stressed like at all about making deadlines. Yeah, we literally were like on pace two weeks ahead of schedule almost the entire time. We're just like wrapping up as of three weeks before the tax deadline we had four clients left.

Angie Colee:

of all my clients four. Wow, how on earth did you manage to get so far ahead at a time when most people are scrambling?

Katherine Pomerantz:

So the key thing is that I own a accounting firm and financial education company, so I'm an accountant and I'm a money coach. So I you know, yes, I'm in the business of doing tax returns. That's a big, important part of what we do, but I more often talk about I'm in the business of transforming people's lives and businesses with money. I really want people to stop having bad money stories, so they stop trying to scale messy businesses and instead I'm training CEOs to learn how to like, map and measure and effectively like, easily achieve their goals using money, because money is an incredible language for feedback and metrics and data-driven decision-making, and so that's what I train my clients on. We have three pillars to my methodology, and so they're very well-trained there. They're really well-prepped for doing hard things. They've got really good systems, especially if they're also bookkeeping clients of ours. So, yeah, it's again. I'm going to brag, but I mean it is the week where we just wrapped it all up.

Katherine Pomerantz:

So I'm like, oh, we're on fire y'all, this is a platform.

Angie Colee:

Hell yeah, brag about your stuff. That's quite an accomplishment.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Thank you, yeah, so I've got a really good team. We're really well-trained and my clients are also well-trained. We started doing returns in January and a lot of that was driven by my clients who were like I got all my stuff already. Here's everything I know you need.

Angie Colee:

Oh, I'm one of those kind of super anal retentive people too. That's like I've got all my paperwork by the end of January. Can we get this done by like mid-Feb? Tops, I just want it off my plate.

Katherine Pomerantz:

I want it done. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, oh, fantastic. Well, how'd you get into this line of work?

Katherine Pomerantz:

So I actually am trained as a actress and as a dancer, so I'm a storyteller by profession and famously, that community, the art, the artsy community is not really great with money, stereotypically, and I don't think I was bad with money, but it was true that I had very little of it and I was stressed about money all the time, as much as I was really enjoying the types of things I got to work on and as much as I was really enjoying being in my early twenties. But eventually I decided I must be missing something. There must be something about how this works that nobody told me, because I'm working three to four jobs, I'm working 60, 80 hour weeks and I'm not making any traction and everybody I know is doing the same thing. They're just older and they've added mortgages and kids to the mix and credit cards to the mix. There is something somebody didn't tell me about how money works and I think if I could solve that I could help a lot of people. And so I set out to just like I want to know how money works and about a year later I had started my own accounting firm because what I had figured out I just fell in love with and I could not wait to tell people about it. And I was right that I'm like, oh my gosh, people need to know I'm going to really, really, really help people, and so that's when I started my bookkeeping accounting firm.

Katherine Pomerantz:

The coaching side came a couple of years later, when I realized that it wasn't just about getting organized, it was really about, like, changing how we relate to our money. And because I also paused and was like, how did I do that? Like a couple of years in, I'm like, if you didn't, I mean, I know this is a podcast, you can't see me, but like I'm cute and blonde to this day. I'm like this podcast, you can't see me, but like I'm cute and blonde to this day. I'm like I'm a I'm an artsy theater person. I'm like I'm really really good at this. I mean I was was already bragging, but even at the time I had other accountants or other people who were working with me who were like you're, you're one of the best people we've ever seen at this and I had doing it I'm great at. Yeah, I'm great at this, and that's kind of a weird story.

Katherine Pomerantz:

So when I slowed down to like both think, okay, some of my clients are still having a little bit of chaos in their lives, like they have good, they have all the same tax strategies, all the same organizational systems, but things still feel a little chaotic for them. They still experience this chaotically and my own story is a little bit weird. I wonder if there's something else about money I haven't solved. And that's when I realized like I am so good at this because I'm still a storyteller first and the money storyteller method really came to be at that time and I realized that when we can put all these pieces together and we can really approach money as a storytelling medium, as an artistic, as a creative medium, oh that's where the magic is.

Katherine Pomerantz:

And so that's really. That's really what I do most of the time is I teach that methodology, my team is trained in it, my clients are trained in it. We are doing the you know, the boring, the spreadsheets, the bookkeeping for the greater purpose of. I want that money map, I want to be able to tell a story, I want to be able to change my experience with money and have more stability which allows for more creative freedom and expression and all those good things we're all about.

Angie Colee:

So I really love that approach too, because I think a lot of folks are either they're stuck in one camp or another thinking I'm good with money. I'm not good with money which, by the way, that's a story. It's a story that you're telling yourself, or that you got from society, or that you got from watching your family whether they were good at money or not, or the circumstances that you grew up in. Right, that's a story that I'm not good at money, and that's one that I've struggled with a lot of my life too.

Angie Colee:

I remember, not so long ago, when somebody said you know, I forget how it came up, but I was in some sort of like mastermind or business meeting and somebody said do you chase money? And I was like, well, I mean, don't we all chase money? We're business owners, right? And they said, well, but but like, think about it and think about the energy that you put into it. Do you chase money in the way that, like somebody desperate for a relationship who's super clingy and like controlling chases money. What do you think money, if money were a person, is going to do? In reaction to that kind of pursuit, it tends to stay far away and I was like this is really. I've never thought about it that way, but yeah, it makes a strange amount of sense.

Katherine Pomerantz:

It makes a lot of sense Money. When we talk about money with my clients, I always talk about money as a language which there's lots of jargon, there's lots to know. So, yeah, you can be bad at money, but I mean, no one is born speaking a language. Have you actually sat down and studied it? Have you hired a translator to help you? Right, give yourself some grace there. Every language you learn is hard, and that's that's the first aspect of money, though, is like okay, it's not just learn all these words, right, it's the energy. Money is an energy. Money is actually nothingness.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Even the economic system that we use is a fiat currency system which, if we want to define, means that the dollar has value, not because it's backed by anything. Right, we used to be on a gold standard. It used to be backed by a literal amount of gold. It's not anymore. It literally is backed because we all just agreed it has value, and so we all just kind of said this is now valuable now and we can't.

Katherine Pomerantz:

I mean, this is super fascinating history and I obviously like, love this, so we can go into like why that came about and what that means, but I love pointing that out, that I'm like these zeros and ones that are now on somebody's balance sheet somewhere in the ether, because now everything is digital. They are meaningless until we started telling stories about them, and all it is is an exchange of how we're valuing things. It's always flowing. It cannot sit still, so you do have to think about it in a relational term, because it is energetic, it is by its, I mean it's in the word currency, it is a current, it is going to be flowing, it has to move, and if we're trying to hold onto it too tightly, it's not. That's not you're working against its true nature. It's going to come to you and it's going to come from you. Be in that flow, so anyway, I love that.

Angie Colee:

I think that was one of the first ahas that I had about money and dismantling my own stories, and I'm still in the process of dismantling it right. A lot of us that grew up as poor kids and blue collar families have a lot of work to unpack all that stuff.

Katherine Pomerantz:

I mean, I'm the money coach in me. I can't help it, angie. But as I hear you, I'm like, yeah, you know how many times I've heard that. It's like oh, I'm still working, you don't need to dismantle it, it's along for the fucking ride. Let's go Like, make space for that story, because that's the thing that no one tells you about. Running a business is, every time you up-level your deepest, most innate, natural things you learned way back in that past because they were your survival mechanisms as a kid, they're all gonna come back because that is still your default in stress situations. It will never not be. And so I think that there's so much about coaching or about mindset, about therapy, that people are like someday I'm going to like be cured, I'm going to get past this, and I'm like that would be a really boring story If I was writing that movie, no one would watch it.

Katherine Pomerantz:

I want your conflict. Let's just make sure that there's space for it's going to come up. We know it's going to come up. We know enough about ourselves to know in the specific ways it's going to come up. So then when it happens, you're like hey, old friend, all right, yeah, in this passenger seat I'm still driving this car, but you can be in this passenger seat and here we go, let's go get this next level. That that is, I think, a much, much, much better way to start thinking about money story stuff. It's your character backstory.

Angie Colee:

It is. It is there. I love that. Thank you for that. I really appreciate that extra insight. Right, because it's so. It's so pervasive, it's with us everywhere how we're thinking about money, even when it's unconscious, and I love that you brought that up.

Angie Colee:

Like I call it, the upward spiral. The thing that can short circuit you so fast in this business, being an entrepreneur, is getting to the next level and thinking that you already solved this problem and you're never going to see it again. Nope, you're going to go up to the next level and it's going to come around in a new form. And you're going to go up to the next level and it's like the same three or four core problems that you've struggled with most of your life are going to keep showing up in a different way, like, are you sure you're done with me? Are you sure you're done with me? And like that I've seen so many people stop and be like I should be done with this already. I mean, you're a human, we're we're going to be struggling with things for the rest of our lives. Uh, more or less, um, and.

Angie Colee:

And then I remembered what you talked about earlier that I wanted to circle back to was that was a revelation to me, realizing that money is made up. Yeah, it just. I mean, even when it was backed by the gold standard, we all decided gold was valuable. Yes, this chunk of metal that we pulled out of the dirt, this is more valuable than anything else. The same thing with diamonds we all collectively decided this stuff was valuable and that it should be exchanged for goods and services. So when you think about it that way, I think it's almost freeing to be able to go okay, well, if this is made up and we decided this is valuable, well, I'm going to decide this thing that I do is valuable and I'm going to charge accordingly, because value we're creating and we're exchanging value.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Yeah, yeah, it's so funny, like I mean, there's so many different ways. Allow me to have an unstructured conversation about money and it's dangerous. We're going to go so many places. But it's so funny Cause, like you bring up the gold standard, you brought up diamonds.

Katherine Pomerantz:

People always want to give cryptocurrency or like NFTs a hard time, and I'm like, if you look at the history of gold, gold is an NFT that just never crashed. It's literally just people like this and they pay a lot for it and they just haven't stopped paying a lot for it. So I I mean, I'm not an economist, I don't pretend to be an economist. I like to play the game and teach people how to play the game. I don't try to pass judgment on it at all.

Katherine Pomerantz:

That's not my role, but it is so interesting the way that people's and people's stories are getting into these things where like, oh, that's smart or not smart, and I'm all like we are all taking risks all the time by getting in a car and driving to work, or like eating food that's been sitting out on the counter for like an hour, right, like we take risks every day, so it's okay. Well, I mean, we can talk about financial risks. That's its own thing, but it's like yeah, it's like yeah, as long as you're enjoying the game and you're still like getting things you want at the end of the day for it, I don't. We should not be passing judgment on how people are playing it.

Angie Colee:

And take it easy on yourself, because we are all learning and, if you like, bristle at that and go. Some people are financial experts. Yeah, some people have more of an inclination of this, but when you think about the modern financial system, this is so fascinating how timely all this is. I was literally on a call with a group of entrepreneurs this morning where a lady pointed out OK, remember that women didn't get access to like bank accounts and credit until the 70s and 80s. Remember that we added trillions of dollars of value to the economy in the 90s and early aughts tech boom, right before the crash. Yeah, nobody really. This system is less than a couple hundred years old. Nobody really knows what they're doing. They've got their best guesses. Some of them have spotted patterns, but like, yeah, it's all made up and the points don't matter.

Katherine Pomerantz:

And it's not to say and I don't mean to say like I'm downplaying harm that is done like right. When I call it a game, I know, being a money coach, I'm going to bring up somebody's money story about. You know, there is consumerism, there is bad things that happen. They're bad actors, of course, and I don't mean to downplay any of that.

Angie Colee:

Oh yeah, and right now it's a super struggle too, with everything that's happening in the economy.

Katherine Pomerantz:

So like, definitely don't want to make light, yeah, but it is also true. It is equally true and I'm so glad you brought it up that we are in such a special point in history where more people have more access to the financial systems of power than ever before. I mean, if you want to start buying stocks, you used to need thousands of dollars to buy a single stock and now I can buy part of the stock with pennies. Because of the way technology has been developing, I can get started as an investor with my own retirement savings for like a hundred dollars. Now a hundred dollars. I mean, I lived that experience where a hundred dollars was a, was a stretch goal at the time but okay, but like it's a we, you can get to a hundred dollars. Like we, we can do that Right?

Katherine Pomerantz:

We can all do that, and so I. That is this perspective that I always want to bring to my work and to people. Is that? This perspective that I always want to bring to my work and to people is that there is so much more abundance and possibility than ever, ever, ever before. So let's go learn that language, let's go play and flow in this energy and let's make money. Our teammates, that's the three natures of money.

Angie Colee:

So money our teammate I really like that versus an enemy, something that will corrupt you and turn you into something that you're not, versus something elusive that you will never actually have or understand how to have. I love that, making it a teammate yeah.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Well, it comes from the hero's journey and the storyteller thing. Right, we need allies to go, defeat our villains and win our treasures. Money also shouldn't be our treasure, since you were talking about pursuing money, right, treasures come at the end of your story If you're trying to run a business and money is only coming over at the end that's a hard story.

Katherine Pomerantz:

I don't want to live that story right. I don't want to deserve it before I have it. I need it to accomplish big things, and so I always talk about money as teammate for that and that storytelling. But it is also like it acknowledges two things about money that I really love. One is that relationship aspect we again already talked about.

Katherine Pomerantz:

And two a lot of people will call money a resource. A lot of people will call money a tool, and those are true. But money also is independently powerful and active because it can be invested, because it can make more of itself because of the way money systems work. So I love calling it your teammate because it's a reminder that if you give that teammate a job, it will go do it for you and you don't have to do anything for it. It will go and work on your behalf. So it acknowledges that there's an emotional aspect to this relationship. We do need to communicate with it. We do need to set money up to thrive. We do need to put a system in place where it's gonna thrive, thrive just like we would with any teammate, but then we also can trust and rely on that to get jobs done for us, and so I don't have to extol effort. I don't have to keep working that tool. I don't have to keep utilizing the resource. I can just go ask my money to do it for me Money go do this.

Katherine Pomerantz:

For me, my favorite example of this is retirement. I mean retirement's your best tax advantage or your best tax saving strategy at every income level. So, as an accountant, of course I wanna talk retirement, but my favorite example of this is retirement where there's so much trust that is necessary in order to save for retirement, but you're also telling your money I am going to be alive for that. I'm going to need you to pay me for that and I'm going to need you to make more of yourself in order to do that. So you put money away and it sits away in an investment account and, on average, the stock market has had 10% return. So any money you invest is gonna double in size every seven years on average because of compound interest and the magic of compound interest. So if I put $100,000 away when I'm 20, I'm just picking random numbers right In 10 years I'll have $200,000.

Katherine Pomerantz:

In another 10 years I'll have $400,000. In another 10 years I'll have $800,000. So I will be. What was that? 10, 20, 30, 40. I will be 60 with $800,000. I did nothing to get for 40 years. So money is powerful. Money is our teammate. Money can work for you. We want to assign it jobs so I can get that job done on our behalf, and that is yeah.

Angie Colee:

I love that. Okay, so we talked a little bit about going from the creative background to working with money and the money storyteller system, and we talked about it in a way that made it sound like you figured it out. Business is doubling every year, but I know from an experience a great conversation that we had on a rooftop in Houston a couple months ago that it was not all sunshine and roses. So tell me a little bit more about this journey and how you got here.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Yes, yeah. So the first five years I did truly double the size of my company five years in a row. And it's so funny as we talk about like the upward spiral of success which I think is from the big leap um shout out to Gay Hendricks, a great author. Uh, there was a lot of growing pains along the way, but it was also like a really fast pace of growth and I was handling it well and I was really proud of myself and things were going really well.

Katherine Pomerantz:

And that last year was fantastic. My husband had just finished a PhD. He was going to get a new dream job. I was pregnant. We were like going to do the thing, and so I hired some new team members to help support me through that maternity leave and I went away. I went away and I took the time and I got to spend baby time and it was really lovely and I came back. My daughter was born in November and I came back in January then.

Katherine Pomerantz:

So it was a little bit of a short leave, but it was so beautiful and magical and I didn't want to. I mean it is tax season, I didn't want to leave. I mean it is tax season, I didn't want to leave my team completely hanging. I still was the primary accountant at that time and I came back to find a company that was basically on fire, but I didn't realize how on fire we were for a little bit longer, because the situation that had happened and that I had been in before was that every year, because I kept doubling the size of my company every tax season, which only comes around once a year, so it's not like we get to practice it, but every tax season was the biggest tax season I had ever handled and I finally got to a point that it was too big for what I had in place, and so I do take ownership of this situation, because it was my company, was my clients, was the systems in my business, and I talk about now how tax season is beautiful and easy.

Katherine Pomerantz:

I did not have the leadership skills or my own internal systems in order to make that possible. I now can maintain that pace of growth again and we're fine. But I had this big pivotal moment where I learned a lot. So I had made a couple significant hires going into this thing. I, about six months before yeah, about six months before I had hired an account manager or like a business manager, so this person would come in to kind of oversee and help lead parts of the team, Cause I'd already had bookkeepers, I had already had, like my marketing assistant, I already had a VA.

Katherine Pomerantz:

I then, like I said, hired accountants. That was the first time I started actually hiring other tax people to take on some of the workload and I had one person who did some part-time contracting year before she came back and eventually was like you know, actually I don't think it's a good fit. I'm going to part ways. But I was left with the last guy that I was like and he was just with us. He was working out fine and I came back to tax season.

Katherine Pomerantz:

It was just really hectic and it was like, okay, it's just tax season, Things are just hectic. But things kept seeming to get missed and we didn't know where things were and we didn't know the status of stuff and my business manager could never answer any questions. And then we got into it almost under tax season and I started getting these weird letters. My clients started getting letters from the IRS where it's like this wasn't, this was rejected or this didn't happen. And what ended up happening is that and I still to this day do not know if he was really overwhelmed or if it was malicious, but the accountant was lying about work- that he was doing.

Katherine Pomerantz:

He said he was doing work that he wasn't doing or he was half completing things that I had said. You know, I had reviewed and been like this isn't right, but he had filed it anyway. And so he either like missed the correction or just didn't care, or, um, some of the biggest mistakes that happened literally were just he. He said, oh yeah, yeah, I got that done, and he just never. He just never submitted it. There's, there's small things on paper Cause, like if you do that in almost any other role where you're not filing someone's taxes, it's not a big deal. But when you're dealing with businesses and you were talking millions of dollars, reporting that we're handling, this is a really big deal. And so it was really hard at the time, because I use the word fraud now, but I didn't realize that that was fraud. I didn't realize no, he's actively lying and like stuff isn't getting handled. And so two things were happening at once is we had somebody who was lying and and that was happening, my business manager was totally overwhelmed because she did not have the systems in place to actually do her job. She was also not a right fit, also didn't know that at the time leadership skill development. And then, uh, there was me with a newborn, trying to figure out how to be a newborn mom and still run a business and could not figure it. No one could give me a straight answer. Because no one wanted to give a straight answer. No one wanted to own what was happening and where all those things and things were. Fortunately, when I did come back, I did figure this out. It did, only, I mean, it was maybe only left for like two-ish months before I was finally like this is someone is actually just lying to me and this is the thing and we started firing people. The accountant disappeared almost immediately and then it was just cleanup time.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Months later, after tens of thousands of dollars in client fees cause I covered everything. Any mistakes were caught, I paid for it out of pocket. All I was on me, I owned it. We did all of the cleanup work for free. I didn't charge a single client. I was very upfront with this has happened and I want you to be on the lookout for certain things. Please let me know. If you get this, we'll add it to the queue.

Katherine Pomerantz:

So, months later, still working with a manager who was completely overwhelmed all the time, still working with a newborn who was not sleeping, still working with a team that was now under supported. We finally started getting everything cleaned up and clients started leaving. In total, we lost 43% of my clients within that six month period. So it was about halfway through that process that I finally was like I had a really difficult client conversation with somebody who had been working with us for years, who basically threw it back in my face and was like, well, the first time mistakes have been made and I say this with love and I, as just somebody who was a money coach, I recognized how some of her own stories were being triggered. I don't know if she ever gained that insight into herself because we don't work together anymore, but that was basically it was.

Katherine Pomerantz:

She had thrown a lot of it back out in my face about it and that was when I finally paused and was like this isn't, this can't. This isn't my fault, this can't be my fault. And I looked up the definition of fraud and was like, yeah, it, it. I mean again, I took ownership and I I'm very upfront with where I had failings, but I'm like this isn't my fault, somebody lied, somebody lied and this is fraud and I had a good case to go and, like you know, sue this person and only decided I'm too busy, I'm not going to put myself through that, I don't need to we're going to float this.

Katherine Pomerantz:

We're going to get this figured out, yeah. And so, after all the cleanup was done, after we lost 43% of my clients, we had good conversations, me and my business manager. We parted ways because it wasn't working out and I was left with a company that was half the size it used to be, no team and still no, no way to like okay, what's my path forward? Right, with a baby who doesn't sleep, with me still trying to recover from my birth, right, so that was probably the lowest, lowest of the low moments, oh man, where it's because it was just like such a slog, because it was just so much work you had to get through. You had to finish tax season and then I had to finish the cleanups.

Katherine Pomerantz:

And the IRS does not move fast. We had a client just this year who still got a letter about it. It's like, you know, two, three years later they finally are like, oh, sorry, this form doesn't look right and we're going to like send you a letter about it. And it's like, oh, yeah, cause that's the pace the IRS works out, we still get letters. Okay, okay, well, let's get it handled. Right, I was at this point again. I got a great team, we can get it handled. But it really was like, okay, what do we do now? Right, how do I, how do I move forward? What? What is the right decision?

Katherine Pomerantz:

And so we ran the company. I kept the whole rest of the team and I invested heavily in my own leadership development, into putting systems in place, and we kept the team really small. I went from having you know again. My company was cut in half basically overnight. So at the same time that was happening, I was increasing team expenses and trying to pay for a new life with a new baby and I mean this is I'm an evangelist, of course I am about like my own work, but I'm like you know, the only reason we got through that is because I'm really good at my job and I'm one of the best cash flow managers in the world and I know how to make money maps. I knew how to strategically make decisions and measure returns on investments, so I could very, very quickly see this isn't working out. We're going to pivot, we're going to put things in place and so, very slowly, I'd say probably by the end of that, actually, no, within four months I had replaced almost all the income, yeah, yeah, and then within that next year we continue to put an experiment with new offers and new ways of doing things to improve the client experience and to make sure that we all supported each other in ways that it never happened again.

Katherine Pomerantz:

So there's I mean I could go into so many details, I don't know. I don't know if we want to talk operations and systems and scaling, but it's like. It's like there's so many things that we do now where, again, like, I mean, listen to my one, my second version of tax season that I just shared, versus my first one. At the beginning of the thing I'm not even kidding you we were weeks ahead of schedule. It was so easy and it started. It started easy, it was easy from January onwards, and that's with my full bookkeeping team, with my full payroll team, with all the stuff. And so it's like, yeah, that, like these things, not that we don't have growing pains. I have growing pains in other areas of my company right now. Tax side, oh no, no, the core, the core thing of what we do, yeah, that's been handled, we've got that down.

Angie Colee:

So that's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing that story, and there are a couple of things that I really loved that I wanted to unpack for folks. I find that a lot of folks like to really or maybe we're just we've got that hardwiring, that binary thinking right there's a hero and a villain, there's black and there's white and stuff like that. You talked about accepting responsibility for things, and then you also talked about there was fraud, and this wasn't my fault, and I just really wanted to highlight how balanced, how mature, how thoughtful that approach is versus going this is all my fault. I hired like beating yourself up, sinking into that.

Angie Colee:

I made a mistake, let me you know, for lack of a better word, wallow, but when I use that, I use that with all the compassion, right Of understanding. When you make a mistake like that in front of people who have trusted you, it is gut wrenching, it is devastating, it is a big blow to the ego, to your sense of self, like that is. That is traumatic, um, and, by the same token, going okay. Well, I can give myself grace for knowing that I did my absolute best, that I cared that I had a plan in place and this plan didn't work, and not only that, the plan didn't work, not through any fault of my own, but because this person was doing things that I was unaware of. I was unaware of, and as soon as I became aware of it I did something about it.

Angie Colee:

So I just wanted to unpack that thinking for anybody that has ever made you know like a big mistake in business or had something go sideways in a huge way, that you can take extreme accountability, just like Catherine did, and give people that faith that you're after it, you're going to fix it, you know what went wrong. We're going to, we're going to get to the bottom of this right. We're in this together. And also, I don't take accountability or responsibility for things that are not mine to own. I did not tell this person go commit fraud. I did not tell this person to lie to me, like those were not part of my explicit instructions, and so I did my best. I brought my a hundred percent, and so I did my best. I brought my hundred percent. They clearly did not bring their hundred percent. I can only own what I can own.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Thank you so much, angie. And I will say, for anyone who might be going through it while you're listening to this, it's been several years and I did. I did do my fair share of wallowing and while I did, was able to replace the income. That next year, where we were trying to then figure out how to get it fixed, was my toughest year in business and we still had moments where we were losing lots of money because we were trying things that were expensive, were hard to put in place and that weren't working. And we stuck it out until we got to the next hump.

Katherine Pomerantz:

You know it wasn't immediately that I was able to realize oh, I could have better systems so that I actually have clearer account Because my team is virtual. I've always wanted a virtual business. We move a lot for my husband's job. I also wanted to be a really present mom. I knew that going into starting my own business. So there are pros and cons to having a virtual team and one of them is, well, it's a lot easier to commit fraud, you know. But I didn't go into it thinking, oh, somebody, somebody is going to cheat me. I better, like, make sure I have like software that allows for a certain level of oversight, right, I need to make sure that there are certain things and procedures and permissions that need to happen, right. And so there's software upgrades, and we had to experiment, and anybody who's tried to put new software into a company, especially one that, like, runs your whole core service delivery, oh, that's not an easy process and it's not a cheap process. And so that was one thing. But then it was also like, well, how does the team communicate? And then that's this whole other thing. And so it wasn't that I woke up one day and said, oh well, clearly, here's where the failing was. Right, it was you talk about your revelation of, like realizing how money works, which I had as well.

Katherine Pomerantz:

I had a revelation that leadership, which I have natural skills in, and because people are like, oh, you're such a natural leader, right, I'd always been put in positions of authority in like clubs and things growing up, right. So it was just like, well, you either are a leader or you're not. And again, that's when you go and rant on that. I'm like no, leadership is a skill, did you? Did you get? Do you guys know that leadership's a skill? You can actually like study that Like, there are whole people. That's all they do is teach you that thing. And so it's just like I had no idea.

Katherine Pomerantz:

And now that I invest in a lot in the last three years is like, yeah, what does it look like to actually lead and to be an effective leader and to have an environment where people are going to come to you before problems get big? I mean, nowadays, my team is literally like, yeah, here's this problem I'm experiencing, but here's all the things I'm doing to fix it. I'll give you an update. Great, I can't wait to hear it. Like, loop me in as you need me, right, like that is not. Like, oh, it's not magic.

Katherine Pomerantz:

It's like no, there are very intentional things we do as a team to make that type of interaction our normal interaction, and that was, I mean, that was it's night and day to what I had. Um, but it is, yeah, it is. It's not like I woke up with all the answers. I did have to really do a lot of reflection and it was very traumatic. There's a lot of things. Well, actually, I'm pregnant again and I can feel my body stress response of like, well, the last time we went through this, you know that was not a safe period for us. Are we going?

Katherine Pomerantz:

to be okay, and it is like, hey, upward spiral of success, things are going great, things can continue to be great. I mean, a newborn is going to be a newborn, but I'm going to now have two of my toddler and my newborn, but we're all going to, we're going to be there, right, and so, yeah, having to make space for those emotional reactions is 90% of the work.

Angie Colee:

Oh, yes, when I love the broader theme about this.

Angie Colee:

Like we talked about binary, we talked about black and white, we talked about money stories, and and the thing that I thought was interesting, like the thought that just popped into my head was how that applies to a whole bunch of different things like natural leadership, natural business skills, natural presentation skills, like all the stories that we tell ourselves about why somebody else can succeed but we can't. And that's the reason why I love this podcast, and I deliberately designed it this way so that we could come here, we could create a space to talk about mistakes, about hard lessons one hard knowledge one so that we could show everybody who's out there in the thick of it, feeling super alone, that uh, hey, all the people that you admire and you go oh my God, that's brilliant. How did you ever come up with that? Did I tell you about the time everything was fucked up and I thought we were all going to die? I figured what I figured out was that I can survive all kinds of shit, and here is what I learned from that survival. Thank you very much.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Yeah, god, I love that so much, angie. I remember so clearly because I have a money ritual that I teach my clients and that I use for getting that data-driven cadence to your business right and going through it where it's like, okay, we were no longer in crisis. It's so funny because in crisis I don't really remember that first immediate year, that first six months of when all of my clients were leaving and then just scrambling just to get enough sales again to keep the business running. That was probably actually the hardest, but it was so hard. I like don't remember it very well. Like the sequence of events is like not clear, like I have to sit down and like like literally before we talked, I was like, okay, I'm going to make sure I like remember what order things happen in, because it's all mixed up in my head and I wasn't sleeping because I had a newborn, so it's literally.

Katherine Pomerantz:

I'm sure that was harder, but like I don't even remember it was so hard my body just like disassociated it. So the next year where I'm trying to actually solve it and fix it and I want to feel safe again, that was the year I remember being the hardest because it's like no, never again, I'm not doing this, we're going to get it fixed. And I remember doing one of my reflection rituals where I'm just like nothing is still working. Nothing is still working, which isn't true, of course. A lot of things were working, but we weren't enough out of the weeds to see it yet and I just had a moment of like what have I learned? And I'm like nothing, nothing is going well.

Katherine Pomerantz:

It was a really bad day and I'm like and I wrote down I am strong, like. My only takeaway at the time is I am so strong, I am so strong. And it was really powerful Cause it was still like. My body was still like, like I mean I never. There's still stuff from that birth because I could not attend to myself the way I needed because of everything else that was happening. There's still physical things, especially now that I'm pregnant again that like, yeah, I am going to need to make a lot more space for that this time around. I'm going to need to really emphasize my recovery a lot more.

Katherine Pomerantz:

That that's been neglected as I've been dealing with these other fires and so I was weaker than ever, I was overweight more than ever. I, you know, like we were still kind of being like I was trying so hard to like put new things in place in my business and just to feel I am strong because of this and I can do hard things and I like that takeaway is well, if that's true, then literally anything can happen to me, like this is fine, this, this is fine, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to get this. Like it was just such a moment. So, um, yeah, I'm thank you for for that reflection, because I'm like, yeah, I know I that literally happened to me. Yeah, yeah, that is an entire story that would break a lot of.

Angie Colee:

It has broken a lot of people to go through something like that and a lot of us will get started and I include myself in this because I've burned things down many times before, feeling like I encounter a setback. All of this hard work was for nothing. I am a failure, I am a screw up and I am trying with this, with the show and all the work I do, to dismantle that, not only for myself, but for a lot of other folks that just that's, that's the way that they think. There's another way to think, there's another perspective, there's another route, there's always another way. We there's always another way, always another way. We'll go find it together. And it's much easier to see these other things when you surround yourself with kick-ass people who show you what's possible. If you just figure like I am strong, we're going to figure this out.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, oh, so cool.

Angie Colee:

Oh, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for sharing all of this. I have so much appreciation for you. You so much for sharing all of this. I have so much appreciation for you. Tell us more about this money storyteller method. Where can we learn more? How can we work with you? I want it all.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Thank you so much for asking, angie, if you want to learn more about the money storyteller method. There are three core pillars to it your money story, your money systems and your money map and the best place to start is I have a financial foundations assessment. It's totally free.

Katherine Pomerantz:

You can go and get a score and kind of see okay, here's where I'm landing on each of these three pillars, and this is the one I should focus on next, so that I can have that unstoppable foundation in place to do hard things, cause like, yeah, sometimes stuff is still hard and I still got it, but then when stuff is good, oh yeah, I capitalize it even faster and it's really good. So I know we were talking a lot about fires, but this is fun, it makes things more sustainable, it makes things more doable, and I'd love to just take that resource, get some good insight, get some like a clear target of like if I like that way of. I like, if I like Catherine's way of thinking, if way of thinking by like Catherine's way of doing business, that's a great place to start.

Katherine Pomerantz:

It'll give you some quick little action items of like yep, start here. This is where you're at in this journey. Fantastic, where's that site? Oh yes, it's Catherine Pomerantzcom slash assessments. That's Catherine with a K, pomerantz with a Zcom slash assessment.

Angie Colee:

Awesome. I'm going to make sure there's a clickable link in the show notes. Along. I'm going to stalk you a little bit and make sure that we can find any other places that we can find you. All of that will be in the show notes. Thank you again for being such a fantastic guest. I really loved this and I'll talk to you soon. Congrats on baby number two.

Katherine Pomerantz:

Oh, thank you so much. This was very fun. And hey, everybody, go make some money for me.

Angie Colee:

Yes, that's all for now. If you want to keep that kick-ass energy high, please take a minute to share this episode with someone that might need a high-octane dose of you can do it. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Permission to Kick-Ass podcast on Apple Podcasts, spotify and wherever you stream your podcasts. I'm your host, angie Coley, and I'm here rooting for you. Thanks for listening and let's go kick some ass.