Thriving in Practice: Financial Strategies for Therapists and Entrepreneurs With Ryan Derousseau

Josh St. Laurent: Welcome to the Wealth in Yourself Podcast, a show dedicated to helping you master the complex subject of money by simplifying it through stories and actionable advice. I'm Josh St. Laurent and this is Wealth in Yourself. Welcome to the Wealth in Yourself Podcast where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. I'm your host, Josh St. Laurent. Today, we're joined by Ryan DeRusso. Ryan is a fellow CFP certified financial planner who specializes in working with therapists, private and group practitioners, as well as people who are self-employed. He focuses on core CFP aspects of financial planning, like cash flow, investment management and retirement planning, as well as unique problems his clients face, like succession planning and tax optimization. He also was a writer in the financial space and he's been published in large publications like Forbes and Psychology Today. Josh St. Laurent: There's so much overlap in what Ryan and I do and I've been looking forward to picking his brain. Ryan, welcome. Glad you're here. Ryan Derousseau: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Josh St. Laurent: So, looking over your background in preparation for this episode, I noticed you started your career as a writer. So, can you walk us through like what the journey has been getting to where you are now? Ryan Derousseau: Absolutely. So, one of my favorite questions to ask people is sort of what were they taught about finances growing up and hopefully their answer is nothing. And my answer is very similar. Learn how to write a check and trade a stock when I was in eighth grade. I hardly ever write any checks and I rarely trade individual stocks unless it's for clients at this point. And so, it's just totally useless. And so, how I came to do what I do today is just a random journey into my life. Ryan Derousseau: I, you know, after school became a writer, a journalist and it just so happened that I started focusing on investing and financial planning. In fact, one of my first gigs was covering financial advisors. So I was like covering the type of people that I am now today. And in that process, I learned what was good in the space, what was bad in the space and what not. But I also learned a lot about just the financial world. You know, in COVID, you know, so many people changed things and what not. I decided I wanted to really start working one-on-one with people. You know, I could practically conduct the interviews myself when I was talking to people and what not. So I started working with the staffs to then get my CFP and start working with the self-employed because I was a long time self-employed writer. Josh St. Laurent: Wow. So I saw kind of that journey play out. And so that helps when you kind of walk us through it. I'm curious. You just touched upon it. Like you now focus on people who are self-employed and therapists. How did that come to be? How did you decide, hey, these are my people that I want to help? Ryan Derousseau: Yeah, absolutely. Because of the experience as a self-employed writer, I always knew that I wanted to work with the self-employed because I went through a lot of experiences that they had. I learned what an S-Corp and the S-Corp often was because I happened to figure it out on my own. And then when I went to my tax person to be like, why don't you tell me about this 40, $50,000 later, like it would have been nice, you know? And so I essentially learned through doing a lot of these things that we kind of manage on a day-to-day from like cash flow, taxes, investing, and whatnot. Ryan Derousseau: And so when I started like reaching out to the self-employed, a group that I found in immediate connection with, but also in need, were private practice therapists. A lot of them operated very similarly to me as a writer, except they had like compliance issues that they had to worry about that I didn't have to worry about. Now, I have to worry about it in the financial space, but then as a writer. And so it became a natural sort of, you know, transition towards there. And then also I wouldn't do what I do today without the help of therapy. I credit my therapist a lot for what I do today. And so both those angles, it just really made sense. Josh St. Laurent: That makes a lot of sense. And I really want to dive into the specifics of like, what problems do these people face? How do you solve these problems? Josh St. Laurent: You know, what are you seeing sort of on a recurring basis? But before we go there, I'm curious from my own perspective, like the journalists that I work with, when they come to me with different questions, I find it really helpful to be like, wow, you're seeing this question over and over again. And I know it's a need out there in the market. Do you think that that was helpful for you as a journalist to be seeing and hearing all these different questions coming in just to get a better sense of like, here's what people are struggling with? Ryan Derousseau: Oh, yeah. I mean, when you're a journalist, you can sometimes get stuck in your whole of like, for a long time, I was talking to just financial planners, right? And so I would talk to them and they would want to talk about investing for, you know, some sort of aspect of financial planning that they want to talk about at that moment. Ryan Derousseau: What I realized was, is I was kind of getting stuck just only listening to those voices. And so I actually went out and I read at one point, I reached out to my brother and some other people who were much younger than me. So I could figure out sort of some of the concerns that they were having at the time. And so then I could go back to the financial advisors and say like, these are the concerns I'm hearing about. What about that? So that's always helpful for financial planners that are listening when you're connecting with the journalist. It's bringing them something different, something new, something that like is a little bit beyond the basic that everyone kind of knows. Like an emergency fund, everyone knows they should have three to six months, you know, saved up. So going to them with that, that sort of is not going to help you like break through or whatnot. Ryan Derousseau: So it's finding kind of that unique, really. Josh St. Laurent: I'm glad you went there. I had in the back of my mind of, you know, there are a lot of business owners and even financial advisors who listen to this show. And I get that question often like, do you have advice around getting quoted or partnering with journalists? And you touch upon that. Did you have partnerships with advisors at that time? Do you have advice for anyone listening, whether they're an advisor, maybe just a small business owner? How did they get out there and get quoted and talk to journalists? Because I know it's a big hurdle for a lot of people. Ryan Derousseau: Yeah, it definitely is. One thing I would say is like, no, your space a bit. So if there's a journalist that you follow, that you really like their stuff and whatnot, reach out not to say, hey, I am selling this thing. Ryan Derousseau: Could you help me sell this thing? If you're a bad, it's, hey, I saw this article and this article, I really liked it. You know, I have an expertise in this. If you ever thinking of doing it, like, please, please reach out. That's going to be a much better way to sort of break through because I have obviously, like I'm LinkedIn, I have a journalist that I'm connected to over the years and whatnot. And there's one editor that I see, he will flat out just put on LinkedIn a blanket statement from PR people, like, because they're so vague and so impersonal and so kind of idiotic, really. So basically call it a mouth. And you know, if you judge whether that's the best use of time on LinkedIn, but it speaks to sort of the heart of someone in that position because they get so much of this stuff. Ryan Derousseau: So if you can show that you are authentically reaching out to them for a clear purpose that's going to help them with the story of some sort doing their job, like everyone else, you're going to have a lot better opportunity. And then the other thing I would say is you got to do a lot of outreach because it's a numbers game as well. Josh St. Laurent: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, you got to keep up the quantity, but to your point, it can't just be this generic comment. You have to have a quality thought as well to add. So it makes a lot of sense. So let's go back to therapists and self-employed and the people that you work with. A lot of those folks listen to this show as well and they're unique, right? They face problems that W2 employees don't face. So can you talk about what makes them unique, what challenges do they face? Josh St. Laurent: What are you seeing in your practice? Ryan Derousseau: Yeah. So over arching issue, particularly in private practice space, but I would say any service, service-focused self-employed person is that they often do not view themselves as entrepreneurs. So they say, hey, I went to school for becoming a therapist or whatever sort of service that they want to provide. That's what I'm going to do. It just so happens in therapy space. Private practice is just a very common way to operate instead of going to get the W2, but they are running a business. They are an entrepreneur and they kind of need to think that way. And part of what I bring to them is the ability to help them sort of view their business in that broader scope as opposed to just trying to create enough income to get by. Because what ends up happening is the rates of burnout in the US are high in general, but in the therapy space, 45% of therapists at any given time, believe they feel burnt out or showing symptoms of being burnt out. Ryan Derousseau: And you can imagine if you are a business owner and the therapist at the same time, you haven't done anything to do that, then I could imagine that maybe even a higher rate there. And so recognizing that, creating systems, so you're one building wealth within that, but then also managing the concerns of the business in the process is going to be really important. And then there's a basic issue with any sort of service based self-employment business is managing the up and down nature of cash flow in that. And so that's the second step is how can we make it where cash flow instead of feels like this and then flatten it out. So it's much more stable and eventually growing ideally. But in the meantime, at least create some stability to that. So that's the second thing. And then the third is creating the tools that we think of when it comes to financial planning and bestying savings plan and all that. Josh St. Laurent: Definitely. And I'm going to oversimplify here, but really like the three big things you touched on were money mindset for one, avoiding burnout. You're a business owner and a therapist. You're wearing a few different hats. You're probably a bookkeeper, right? But then at the same time, you've got to build out a system for yourself. You need to have these retirement plans in place. So where do you begin? There's some things that people can be doing on their own. And maybe it doesn't hurt to touch upon the things too that people really shouldn't be doing on their own, right? Things that they should be working with a professional on. I'm sure we both seen that in our practices. You know, hey, I tried to build out my own estate plan with no help. You know, and then there's some unwinding that needs to be done. So can you talk about that? Josh St. Laurent: Like you talked about the unique challenges, but maybe taking the next step around like, where do you come in and what are you doing to kind of remedy some of these things? Ryan Derousseau: Yeah. Well, the number one thing that I see folks who are really growing, building a business and going too fast is they hire too fast. And they're hiring like, I don't know if it's just the personality of a therapist or the aspect of just running a therapy practice, but they there's a belief if we need this service done, we're just going to hire someone to do it. And all the expenses involved with that, but they haven't properly created a balance in terms of how much they're keeping of a fee and how much is going to the therapist, how much the costs on the back end are. And so they tend to grow so fast where it actually becomes detrimental the next time they get a client because they're actually losing money every time they add a client at some point. Ryan Derousseau: I actually see that more often than you would imagine. And so talking about sort of one, when to find help, but also make sure that you find help before you start doing is really when you're starting to grow and finding help for that growth because you have to be so careful in that process, especially when the 100% of the costs are coming to you and your employees are taking a certain percentage of that fee. Where I often start is there's this balance between the personal side and the business side. And we like to keep things separate. We have the LLC, we have the or the S Corp, but whatever. We keep all these things separate. But if you need a new roof, you're going to feel a lot different about your business if you don't have money for that new roof. And if you need to invest in those employees, but you don't have what you need in the personal side, then you're not going to feel like comfortable investing in that. Ryan Derousseau: And so we need to create space for you in that way, both on a personal end and a business end. And so that's often where we're looking first and kind of digging into the cash flows. Maybe that's the emergency fund or maybe that's a system to make sure you're paying yourself correctly. That's sort of thing that tends to be where we start first. Josh St. Laurent: I can hear some of the listeners yelling about the irregular cash flow, right? You brought that up before I see that all the time as well. There's a book I send out to new clients who are business owners, sort of a system for cash flow. Can you talk about how do you approach that? Because it's something so many people, you know, 1099 employees, independent contractors, so many people have to deal with this. And it can really be detrimental, you know, in the slow seasons, especially. Josh St. Laurent: So how do you approach that and work with clients who do have that irregular pay? Ryan Derousseau: Yeah. So I actually start on the personal side of things because we need to figure out sort of what you need out of the business to cover your expenses because you have monthly expenses that come up every month, no matter what happens. Meanwhile, your cash flows are irregular. So we need to at least cover whatever those monthly expenses are. Once we figure that out, that's your pay from the company. You're not taking anything else beyond that, at least until the business is showing some strength. And then once we have that strength built in the business, we now have a salary for you. And so then that is your salary. And then as the business grows, we can start creating distributions and whatnot. But we need to get you over that mark. Ryan Derousseau: And a lot of times it's getting over that mark. So that's where I would say I start generally. Sometimes what I find in the therapy space is because a therapist put themselves last so often that I need to get them paying themselves first before I do anything else. And in that case, it will sometimes be simply how in your business, can you pay yourself a thousand dollars this month? I want you to go back and figure that out because you have all these expenses and you're not paying yourself anything. So I want you to start with, how do you pay yourself a thousand dollars this next month? And then once we get a thousand dollars to you, then we can start getting two thousand dollars, four thousand and more. But we need to first get in that mindset that your money comes first. Josh St. Laurent: Definitely. And so I'll throw this question at you. Josh St. Laurent: It's subjective, right? It can be different person to person. But I think it's important for people to understand like, well, how long is this going to take me? I don't know if you've had this experience, but I've had more than a few clients now say, wow, we got here faster than I thought. I thought this would take five years. It took us three months. So can you talk about that specific to, could be therapist or entrepreneurs, but when you start working with someone, a lot of times there's this attitude of like, I don't know if I'll get there. This sounds really good, Ryan. I would love to have a nice foundation like that to be paying myself for my business, but things are so happy as they're going out. I don't have the systems in place. What is a realistic timeline for someone who's come into work with you, me, a CFP in general who's trying to get things in order? Ryan Derousseau: What do you think, you know, would make sense timeline wise? So people are sort of thinking about this the right way. One, depends on the goal. So I'll start with sort of the idea of like correcting the business because you can speak to this as well. But like part of our job is it start creating momentum. So they can see the impact and it kind of builds on itself. And so when we're looking at sort of creating correct pay, that can actually be a very fast process because they're going to quickly, once they start putting themselves first, once they start seeing areas where they can cut, they're going to find more and more and more. And it's not so I do everything for them as much as I'd love to be able to do that. It's they're going to realize that they know their business better than I do. Ryan Derousseau: Even with my understanding and looking at these many different profit loss statements and balance sheets and stuff like that, they still know their business better than I do. And so they're going to find ways once they've created that momentum. So that can happen very fast. Now, if you're saying coming and saying, I want to retire by the time I'm 45 and you know, I'm 30 now, that may take a little bit more time to build the wealth that you're talking about. But you're still going to create the momentum pretty fast. And I think when clients sort of feel like, wow, that's happened a lot faster than I expected, it's because they're starting to hit benchmarks that they never thought they would get to or that those benchmarks are what they thought were like forever down the road. Josh St. Laurent: Yeah. And that's so encouraging for everybody, right? Josh St. Laurent: And anything you could be trying to lose 100 pounds. I mean, you hit that first 10, 20 pound milestone. It feels so good. It just motivates you to keep going. So I love that about financial planning. I'm just thinking through this from my own perspective as sort of like this start, stop, continue framework. Are there things that you see people doing that they should stop doing and maybe replace with something else? Ryan Derousseau: There's a few things. One, some of my younger clients will like dive into crypto very aggressively. So that would be one. It looks good now. But who knows what the future holds? You mentioned the S-Corp. That's a big one in the therapy space because I think a lot of podcasts and just people who write on it say, just get the S-Corp and until you can effectively use it, you're essentially creating a lot of expenses on your business that you don't risk necessarily need and a lot of complexity that you just aren't ready to handle. Ryan Derousseau: That's a big one. The other one is just the retirement plan that they select. A lot of prospects will have heard that they need a certain retirement plan and so they just get it. They're not really doing anything with it. They might put some cash in there or they might invest in a few like individual stocks or something like that. They don't actually have a purpose for it and it's not serving any business purpose. It's not serving any tax purpose. It's not serving any sort of long-term purpose other than it exists. That's another one that I come across quite a bit where people heard of something and they just kind of jump in. Josh St. Laurent: I'm going to oversimplify this here, but the intentionality that we bring as financial planners, I feel like the longer I do this, the more I realize we help to your point, people know that they should have a retirement account, but they don't know how much they should be saving in it. They don't know how to automate it and make it consistent. They don't know what the target should be, how much risk should I be taking and I think as financial planners, we bring that intentionality to that account or to that plan to be able to say, here's what we're saving for, here's how much we need to save to get there. I think just that path, us kind of showing that path and guiding them along that path gives them a lot of clarity and peace of mind. This may impact a lot of those who are self-employed is sometimes I see situations where the owner has the business and he or she wants to pay his or her spouse, which is a really great saying if the spouse is then doing something with the money like investing in a solo 401K separately or something like that, whereas if they're paying the spouse just to create extra cash flow, what they may actually be doing is paying the spouse funds that wouldn't have funds that wouldn't have had self-employment tax tied to it that now has a self-employment tax tied to it. Ryan Derousseau: I actually do see that quite a bit in therapy, self-employment in general space. Yeah, it's very true. That just goes back to that whole thing of, I have the best of intentions. I want to pay my spouse. We're going to save into a retirement account, all good things, but us as CFPs, I feel like sometimes we have to dive deeper into the fine print, if you will, and say, oh, what about this? What about the self-employment tax? This may not actually be the best thing. Josh St. Laurent: I love that you went there. I wanted to throw it back to you. I know you're releasing an e-book soon. Can you tell us about the e-book and what we can look forward to? I think it's coming out in what six days soon, right? Ryan Derousseau: Yeah, very soon. I'm very excited about it. It's a topic that comes up quite a bit where, like I had mentioned earlier, a lot of therapists look at their business, not as a business, but as an income source. What they've done is create a good job of creating an income, but then a year goes by, two years goes by, and what does that mean? They're sitting in front of clients day in, day out, and it's taxing work. What they haven't done in that process is taken their income and turned it into well. Any financial planner does is talk about the ways that we create wealth. Essentially, there's three ways in America. You invest in the markets, you invest in business, and you invest in real estate. The e-book is an outline of how to turn that income into wealth so we can reduce that potential for burnout because no matter what's happening in the business, we have created structures on the back end that we are protected and can you to grow. It honestly came out because one of conversations that I've had with therapists through the years, but through my own experience, as an individual writer, like COVID, was one of my best years I've ever experienced as a writer between my career change and just the way the world worked. I lost about 90% of my income, but my net worth rose in the process. I had protections in place between my spouse and I. Without that, it would have felt a lot worse. That's what we want to create. We want to create that availability for you. To do that, you do need to go through these processes to turn that income into something. Go to thinkingcapfinancial.com slash income to wealth. It's a free e-book. Josh St. Laurent: I want to ask, who is this e-book for? I'm hearing you talk about it. I'm like, man, I think just about everybody could benefit from learning how to turn income into wealth. So, this specific to a therapist and people who are self-employed, or is it really something that just about anybody with an income could use some of the lessons in there to build wealth with? Ryan Derousseau: Yeah, I actually came to that conclusion too, Josh. I actually wrote two different versions of it. Again, former writer. This is something I can do. I have one fourth therapist. That's the one that I had already cited. I adapted that for the self-employed. One, they can hear some stories more geared towards them and not so focused on what that therapist might be focused on and whatnot. To find that one, you can actually go to thinkingcapfinancial.com slash self-employment income to wealth. Josh St. Laurent: Awesome. We'll link that in the show now. It's easy on everybody listening to go track that down. I want to throw it back to you and just say, what else should we be thinking about? I have gotten a lot of calls, especially recently, of all the doom and gloom we see on the news and the world, all the things that are going on. People don't know what to focus on. I just wanted to throw that back to you on, what else should we be thinking about? What should we be focusing on as business owners? What's most important right now? We have limited time and energy. Ryan Derousseau: I'll give two things I would focus on right now. Just in terms of doom and gloom and stuff like that, you've got to only focus on what you can do and what you can achieve. Your space better than anyone. No matter what's going on externally, as long as it's not directly impacting your day today, like a flood or something like that, figure out that's three steps that you're going to accomplish that day and just continue moving forward. The other thing I would say focus on, and this is not an original idea for me. There's a coach, a thinker out there named Dan Sullivan, he came up with this idea, the gap versus the game. Your ideal situation is like the horizon and you're just never going to, yes, you are pulling out one of his books, in fact. Josh St. Laurent: I've read that one, I love that one, but I just love this concept for financial planning clients because they're so focused on what they're missing out on. But the perfect financial situation is essentially like the horizon. You are never going to reach that. No one ever reaches that. It's just something that you sort of strive for. What we focus on too much is where we are now versus the horizon and that's called the gap, but where a lot of your energy should be focused on is all that you've gained in order to reach the point where you are that close to the horizon that you're at. By doing so, it's going to give you so much more energy and so much more belief in the future. Josh St. Laurent: I love this concept. I love the concept for financial planning. I love the concept for life and I use it for my own self as well. Man, I love that you went there. I have not heard the horizon analogy. I love that. I think it makes perfect, perfect sense. In grad school, it was introduced to me as goals versus aspirations, whereas a goal has to be time bound. You can achieve a goal. Hey, I want to lose 10 pounds by September. Well, you can do that and then you're done. You've achieved your goal and now you need to set a new goal. Whereas an aspiration might be something more like a 2B statement. I want to be an athlete or I want to be someone who's healthy. You can never really say, well, I've done that. I'm now an athlete and I never have to exercise again. It's something you're always striving towards. I think the horizon analogy just fits perfectly into that and it might even be a better analogy. Thank you. Josh St. Laurent: I do want to transition into, there's these three big questions. I like to ask towards the end of the show more personal to you, but I think we'll give a lot of insight, especially coming from a financial planner. First question is really, what is living a wealthy life look like for you? Ryan Derousseau: So I have two kids, two young kids. And so as much as I would love to say my wealthy life is just traveling and exploring the world right now. Honestly, a wealthy life for me is having the time to want to spend with them. So be able to take some time off and sleep and relax and whatnot because it is something that's missing too often when I get really caught up in the day to day. It's a big reason why I'm self-employed myself and why I've always been self-employed is because the only way I've been able to manage that is to actually be self-employed. Josh St. Laurent: Yeah, I'm glad you took it there. I'm going to digress a little bit here before getting into the second question, something that just popped into my mind when you were talking. It's always incredible to me as a financial planner when we're talking to people about goals, how manageable these goals are. I've yet to have anybody say, well, really what I want to be doing is sailing around the Mediterranean and a mega yacht. Typically, it's like, I want to make sure I can walk my son to the bus stop. These are the things that are important to people from a financial standpoint. It typically doesn't take this massive financial commitment. So I just wanted to ask you, do you find the same thing? Ryan Derousseau: Yeah, I actually think one of the biggest benefits of financial play in general is a process to understand your goals in life. Because so many people come thinking, hey, this financial planner is going to tell me how I cannot spend my money or he's going to talk about investment when so much of the conversation is actually about what do you want to do with this? Because it's money. Money is just a tool. You're going to use to live the rest of your life. So how do you want the rest of your life to look? Some of my older clients, they've spent years and years not thinking about that. And so it can become very difficult for them to suddenly start thinking about it. But it's going to benefit them in the long run because otherwise, what are you doing? You're just if that hamster will analogy again, you're just trying to go and go and go get as much as possible, what's it for? And so in those conversations, that's what we're doing a lot is figuring out what you actually want to do in life. Josh St. Laurent: Where do you actually want to spend your money? So we know how much you actually want to get and gain. So while I said, I'm just going to leave it there. The next question, if you could give one message to someone working to gain financial freedom, who isn't there yet, what would it be? Ryan Derousseau: So I bet you here, it just takes time a lot to that question. And I'm wondering if I should come up with something more original than that or if that truly is just the best advice. And that's why you may hear that one a lot. But when you are saying I want to create financial freedom, come up with the end. What does financial freedom look for you? And then come up with very both short term and long term benchmarks within that journey, one to help motivate you in the process because if you're celebrating the little stuff along the way, it's going to become so much more motivating and encouraging as well. Ryan Derousseau: In just a small example, I would, it's not financial freedom, but like my wife had like $100,000 in student loans. And years ago, we just decided to take it on ourselves to like get rid of this because it was really dragging us down financially. And so at the first year, maybe we paid off like $10,000 and then the next year, we paid off like maybe $20,000, $30,000. It became like this huge thing where we just paid off so much so quickly. And it became something that we just like celebrated throughout and still financial accomplishments is just getting rid of those. And so yeah, I think about that a lot when I think about just reaching those short term benchmarks. Josh St. Laurent: I'm glad you mentioned that. What's the saying? It's easy to get lost in the forest for the trees. It's like when you have this big, gigantic, long-term goal can be very easy to get discouraged. Josh St. Laurent: It seems like everybody wants to have that million dollars, but it's important to celebrate along the way. Well, yes, you're on track to get to that million dollars, but guess what? You paid off the debt. Let's celebrate that. You hit your first 10k. Let's celebrate that. And I think that's part of the message that you're talking about. Josh St. Laurent: To add to that, I used to cover people in the fire community when I was a writer. And it almost became like a competition within that community to retire the earliest as possible with the least amount of money as possible or the most money as possible and whatnot. And like, that's not the purpose. That's not the goal here. So by creating those small benchmarks, you're at least keeping the focus on what your actual needs are. Josh St. Laurent: It's such a good point. I have had to find that balancing point for a lot of clients because some of the people, especially in the fire community, you know, the goal seems to me to be as absolutely frugal as possible. Josh St. Laurent: And I don't know about you, but I'm not going to opt out of haircuts and start shaving my head and live in a tent to retire as soon as humanly possible. Right? There's a certain standard of life that you also want to maintain. So it's that balance of how do I love a great life now and save for the future, right? So third question, probably the hardest one of the day. If you only had a thousand dollars and we're starting over, what would be the first thing you would do with that money? Ryan Derousseau: Honestly, a thousand dollars starting over, I would probably, I would first, I would get a part-time job that can help give me time and finances to get more money as I build my business. And then with a thousand dollars, focus on the first thing that I need, which is probably the website. Ryan Derousseau: If I could do the website and stuff and use a thousand dollars to get a like a business coach or something like that, I might do that because that way I'm creating income, but I'm also getting someone on my side who can help guide me through this process. Josh St. Laurent: I will say for my own self, like I've worked for myself for many years and the past couple of years I've had a business coach in the process and it's definitely a very helpful thing to not be donated alone and doing it alone. So I mean, I can only speak for myself, but when I was in corporate America, this concept of business coaching and mentorship, it was important, but not necessary. I'll say I had some good mentors along the way in corporate America, but now as an entrepreneur, it's like the biggest cheat code out there. Josh St. Laurent: It's the biggest hack that I know of to get ahead and save yourself some time as find a great mentor, find a great business coach. Everybody, myself included, has blind spots, right? And you think that you're thinking about something the right way and then come to find out, well, if you had just done it this way over here, you would have saved yourself three months of frustration and time and energy, right? It's not unlike us financial planners, like we see financial plans all day every day. So when someone comes to us and says something, we can say, well, that's maybe not the best use of your time or maybe a better use of time is this. It's the same with a business coach. They have seen, if you find a good one, they've seen a lot of businesses come their way. And so if you're thinking of investing here, Facebook ads versus a regular ad versus, I don't know, we can't or something else. Josh St. Laurent: They're going to have ideas for you in terms of how to think about that and whether that's the best use of your time based on where you are right now. And so I don't know. I've found it really nice because I'll be honest with you because I work for myself. I have not had many mentors in my life. It's one of the now I do between like where I operate as a financial planner and the business coach and some others. But as someone who spent a lot of his career in an industry that did not, he did not, like I did not look at other people in my industry being like, I want to be like them. I didn't have a lot of mentors because of that. And so now that I want to be like folks, I have more, but the business coach is a great way to kind of fast forward some of that. Ryan Derousseau: So true. What if I not asked that I should be asking, was there any questions that you're like, wow, we really ought to be touching upon this for the audience who's listening? Ryan Derousseau: You've asked some great questions. One question I would definitely start thinking about when is the point where I can start growing? What is a moment where I can start either hiring that VA or hiring that admin or hiring someone who executes some of the work and whatnot? Because that's a real tricky balance that people just kind of want to jump to as like the way to say, hey, I've done it. I've hired someone. I've reached one of my goals. This is fantastic. But like I had mentioned earlier, it can be really dangerous to do so. And so one thing I will say is when you're evaluating your finances, make sure that your own salary is taken care of. Ryan Derousseau: All right. Because we don't want this issue to impact like your ability to pay your personal bills and stuff like that. And then on top of that, you need to have money available that would have been a distribution. So because essentially what you're doing is you're taking away your own draw, investing that in the business to hire someone who's going to increase that draw. And that's the purpose of it. If you're in that place where you have that salary, you have draw that you could be taking. But you think there might be a better use for it to invest in growth. Josh St. Laurent: I love that point. Do you touch upon that in the ebook? Ryan Derousseau: I don't get into the debt level of detail in the ebook. That's for podcasts and that's for clients. You know, that's for those situations for anyone listening who's like, man, where do I go to track down Ryan? Josh St. Laurent: Where's the best place for them to connect with you online? Ryan Derousseau: You can always find me on LinkedIn if you can spell my name correctly. But if not, then it's thinking capfinancial.com. That's where I do a lot of my marketing. Josh St. Laurent: Perfect. We will put the LinkedIn in the show notes too so people can just click on it and go connect with you there. Appreciate you being here. This has been really fun. I know I learned a lot. So thank you. Thanks again. Josh St. Laurent: This has been the Wealth and Yourself Podcast where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. Our guest today was Ryan DeRusso. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. The Wealth and Yourself Podcast is hosted by me, Josh St. Lorenz, an edited and produced by Ray Heycraft. To learn more about how to make your money work for you, visit us at www.WealthInYourself.com and connect with us on all social media at Wealth in Yourself. Josh St. Laurent: This podcast is educational in nature and is not meant to be investment advice. Please do not construe anything said to be advice and the opinions of the guests may or may not represent the opinions of Wealth in Yourself. This podcast and the information presented are separate from my employment at Golden Gate University. Still, they are part of my mission to make no cost financial knowledge more accessible. If you like the show, please take a moment to leave us a review. We read all of your feedback and we want to make sure we cover the topics that matter most. If you have a specific subject you'd like us to explore or a guest you'd love to hear interviewed, don't hesitate to shoot us a direct message. And as always, thanks for listening.