Episode 134 Transcript
Heather Porter (00:02.296)
Liz, I cannot believe you're finally on the show! Yay, you're here!
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (00:05.127)
Thank you so much for having me, Heather. It's awesome. We've got that same sort of rebellion vibe about us, haven't we?
Heather Porter (00:15.376)
I know exactly and as soon as you released your book, I'm like, okay, well, it's just a given being that you are all about financial rebellion and we are going to talk about that. And I absolutely love your positioning and what you're up to to help business owners. Yeah. So timing was perfect. Okay. So whenever anyone comes on the show, I get them to start straight away by giving some tangible tactical tips that people can actually use as they're growing their business.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (00:29.767)
Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.
Heather Porter (00:44.676)
And then we'll get into a little bit of your backstory and how we know each other and all that good stuff and what you're up to. So I want to start with tips and the tips I have, and you can think about this from your perspective or your clients, because you work with loads of business owners, is this. What are a few tips that you know of for growing a business better without all that hustle, grind, stress and overwhelm energy?
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (01:10.215)
Really good question. Well, the first one is topical about me, which is don't abdicate the financial stuff. Right? I know it's scary. I know it's uncomfortable, but don't just give it away. You must keep in touch with it. And as I, as I sort of developed the ways of helping business owners understand it a little bit, your business wants to speak to you.
Heather Porter (01:31.12)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (01:40.079)
We do financial statements for you, the business owner, but our whole industry has forgotten about that. They think we just do it for the ATO. We do financial statements or they're getting presented so that your business can have a conversation with you about what the hell's going on. So that's my first one. Don't abdicate that financial stuff. The other thing is get really clear about what your business goal is.
Heather Porter (01:56.614)
Smart. Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (02:07.931)
Like how does it fit with your family? How does it? That's where I start with my clients because quite often we are off on a tangent, you know, spending money hand over fist to build a business and we haven't even got clarity on why we're here and what we want the business to provide for us. So yeah, that's, they're the main two tips. And I guess if I had to give a third one,
It's a bit from my perspective, it's like beware of investing yourself into something that people are not hungry for. So I've been doing that. I wouldn't recommend it, but the universe just keeps pushing me. Like, you know, yeah, they don't want to know about this, but they have to know about this. They just keep pouring your life into it. But often we've got passion businesses that where we really want to pursue.
passion wherever that comes from. Just be careful if it's not something people really want because it's damn hard to sell.
Heather Porter (03:14.106)
You know, it's interesting you say that because that's like one of those fundamental things in business. You always hear business coaches and marketing experts and everyone say you have to find, you know, something that people want, but you're like, no, but they need to know all this stuff. And it's the hardest thing for anyone in business to actually do, I think.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (03:28.711)
you
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (03:31.999)
Yeah, well, I guess technically the business I'm in is accounting education. Does anyone want that? No, no, don't. But financial rebellion, I think we can make that work.
Heather Porter (03:38.16)
Yeah.
Really?
It's a really smart angle. You said something at the beginning as well as like giving away, don't give away, abdicate your power of your business. And I think about this quote and whether or not it's a hundred percent true, I don't know, but you probably know about it. Oprah Winfrey, the Oprah has said that she always kept her finger on the pulse by signing every single paycheck in her company. Did you hear that?
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (04:08.743)
No, I didn't hear that directly, but it wouldn't it makes perfect sense to me and in her in the time that she was making her mark on the world that was something that Was kind of normal right we signed checks literally We had the paper we had control but
Heather Porter (04:13.771)
Mmm.
Heather Porter (04:31.205)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (04:36.197)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (04:37.223)
One of the reasons that I'm so passionate about what I am is that literally this century, everything changed. So we go, especially in Australia, go to the year 2000 GST Canyon. Accountants started to say, you better computerise your books because you won't be able to get your head around it. And then the computerisation took over. And then people started, am I allowed to swear? F and get up, you know?
Heather Porter (04:59.728)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (05:07.257)
And then this garbage and spaghetti of errors started to happen. And then the accountant's job became sorting that garbage. I, signing all her paychecks or even all the checks, that is how business owners kept their finger on the pulse in the past. But the whole thing has been flipped on its head. Yeah, great advice from Oprah.
Heather Porter (05:18.852)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (05:37.105)
So the new advice, guess now, and we can go into this in a bit more detail, but the new advice would be look at your profit and loss statement and your balance sheet a lot, like as often as possible because there's so much power in the accounting systems that they can be powerfully churning out shit for you. And you may not even know, you may have given that work to other people.
Heather Porter (05:58.725)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (06:04.559)
And I've worked with some businesses where there's been horrific results of that. So you can't sign every paycheck anymore, but you can keep your finger on the pulse.
Heather Porter (06:16.87)
Definitely. And it's funny, and I love that this is what you stand for because in my space, when I do a lot of marketing for businesses, one of the things I look at is the reports, right, that they're looking at. And it's asking the question, do you know what these figures even mean? And oftentimes they're given these like 10 page reports from their different teams that they outsource to, and it looks fancy, but ultimately...
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (06:42.001)
you
Heather Porter (06:42.822)
You only need a few metrics in the marketing space to actually understand if it's working. I think that that's what I love what you do so much is it's just making it easier to understand what you actually really need to know in your business, right?
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (07:00.571)
Yeah, not only what you need to know, I think my work comes in a step before that and that is
Heather Porter (07:07.407)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (07:10.989)
is what you're getting accurate.
Heather Porter (07:13.338)
There you go.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (07:15.653)
then start narrowing down to what you need to know. the accuracy is lacking. But what I've discovered, and I talk about a little bit in my book, but what I've really discovered is only the business owner knows when it's wrong. And the business owners, even though they think they can't understand financial statements, as soon as you...
I find that they've got this anxiety and they think they can't understand. So as soon as I jump in the zoom with them and open their zero or whatever with them and show them this stuff is actually the story of your business. Yeah. Then it dissolves that anxiety. It's like, this is the story of my business. really? Okay. And then we start talking about what the words mean. And, you know, you can actually shake those words to
Heather Porter (08:01.88)
Yeah, interesting.
Heather Porter (08:11.471)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (08:16.263)
be meaningful to you rather than generic for the accountant. But anyway, we get in there and as we start to look invariably within five minutes or less than five minutes, they find something that's They go, what's that? That can't be right. And that's where the power is. It's almost instantaneous that you go from absolute overwhelm to, holy shit, I get this. I know, my bookkeeper's doing that wrong.
Heather Porter (08:18.361)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (08:46.276)
Yeah, brilliant.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (08:47.631)
And we really have to get there quickly and put, that's why it shaped itself into this financial power. the status quo is you've got no power. The ATO has got it. Your bookkeeper's got it. The accountant's got it. You've got none. either given it away or you felt that it's taken away or you're just being told by your coach to don't worry about it. Let someone who understands it do it. We have to get that power back into the hands of the business owners because when it's not in their hands,
Heather Porter (09:12.239)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (09:17.307)
There is waste, so much waste. Things are not checked, things are not claimed. They might be trying to use Xero and not knowing all the ins and outs, so the whole system's doubling up invoices. There's just so much that can go wrong because this software's so powerful.
Heather Porter (09:37.968)
so much that can go wrong because we're never trained about, we're never trained. And also you're almost made to feel stupid if you don't know about finance, but you never trained.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (09:43.943)
Yeah, and no offense marketing guru, but the content marketing has us convinced that everything is easy and that we can understand. it's just, and even the accounting systems, know, we used to have beautiful succinct manuals that told us about every field in the accounting system and what it was used for and how it connected to everything.
Heather Porter (09:50.217)
Yeah, yeah.
Heather Porter (09:56.248)
Yeah... Not.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (10:12.535)
I loved that because with that you get all sorts of powerful things to happen. And you could get my mantra of enter once, use often to happen. But now you try to get information out of any of these things about how their software works and you get a beautifully made content marketing, you know, pat on the back from them about, this is so easy. Just da da da da.
Heather Porter (10:22.978)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (10:38.182)
Here's the steps. You have no context or no, you're clueless. You're just like, great. Liz, I want to know more about your journey in business because you are creating this incredible movement here in Australia for financial rebellion. And I want to know where you've come from and why this has come to be for you as this new book that you've released. So talk to me about a little bit of your past and why you started your initial business.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (11:00.847)
Yeah, so I'm an accountant, crazy as it might seem. I look back on that now, I'm like, how did I get here? Because weirdly, my best subject in the HSC back in the late 80s, I'm getting, no, early 80s, dear, I'm getting old, was art, abstract, art screen printing got my best marks in this kind of colour, right? And inter -colour, inter -abstraction.
Heather Porter (11:11.738)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (11:23.694)
Wow.
Heather Porter (11:30.34)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (11:30.641)
But I thought, hmm, artists, they don't get paid much and the man I'm in love with doesn't earn much. I need to work out what I can do that earns good money. I had it off and got myself a cadetship in accounting and went to my university lectures at night, flogged it out for quite a few years and had to do both, but eventually qualified as a charter accountant. So I was pretty clever.
Heather Porter (11:55.855)
Yes.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (11:58.513)
I didn't have much life though in hindsight. Anyway, so that meant I was an accountant and luckily the cadetship that I had was in Chatswood in Sydney with a firm that was then called Arthur Young. And because it was a suburban practice of a large business, the audits we did were relatively small by standards. Like my city friends were, they might've been all year on the Citibank audit and nothing else.
But that meant that I got to see inside lots of businesses and all sections of the businesses and understood how they all fitted together. So it was a really great grounding in what is meant to happen in financial information systems. yeah, is for the young listeners, this is back when people didn't have PCs. So I was even auditing Texas Instruments.
you know, massive and they were quite modern for the time with it. Already had those slide cards to get in and out of doors and stuff like that. But one thing led to another, interest rates were massive. I was the main breadwinner. We moved to the country so we could afford to buy land and build a house. And so then I worked in what might be described as a suburban practice, doing audit and some tax accounting and stuff like that.
Heather Porter (13:04.229)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (13:16.228)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (13:26.757)
Okay.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (13:27.271)
But then my career took a different tangent because my son got sick and I didn't think I could hold down that job very well. So I took a job with a client who had a number of what would now be called Apple stores. And that's when I came out from behind the desk and realized that the average business owner doesn't really understand all the stuff that we do for them. So he had a trust and a self -managed superfund.
And he was going gangbusters. was in the early days of things. Bloody hell, they didn't even count the till. So, so open for fraud and stealing and so much trust going on and no inventory system to catch out anybody. So I'm really lucky. I'm very unusual in having had those experiences. And then the year 2000 came, GST came in and one of the local accountants,
Heather Porter (14:13.218)
Wow.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (14:25.735)
coaxed me back into public practice. And I spent 11 years there helping businesses transition with the GST. But in those times as well, a lot of the tax laws were coming in, a lot of different tax laws. So I've got the context of the GST and how it's meant to be used and DIB 7A, which is about all those loans that tax practitioners are terrified of, all sorts of stuff. But then I started to see
Heather Porter (14:34.276)
Okay.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (14:55.673)
I don't know what I would consider the wrong behaviors starting to get rewarded in my industry. Like, yeah, you can actually write up on the billing if you don't actually meet with the client. So let's skip the client meeting, shall we?
Heather Porter (15:10.566)
hilarious
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (15:13.391)
where the gold is. That was really where the gold is. And I'm anyway so thought maybe I should try a business coaching or something and the story's in the book. I asked to reduce my hours and my boss decided that that was actually a letter of resignation. So the next thing I know bloody hell I'm self -employed.
Heather Porter (15:15.04)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Heather Porter (15:38.297)
Wow!
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (15:41.507)
Yeah, that took me on another journey. I got some contracting with a huge dairy farm up here and that was really eye opening. The owner of the dairy farm was, I guess some people would call it a pit street farmer, but he was a management consultant. I've been at Arthur Anderson. So really intelligent guy and then a very big dairy farm and he had managers coming through.
Heather Porter (15:47.823)
Okay.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (16:09.489)
So I got to liaise between the phone manager and the pit street guy, if you know what I mean. And boy, did I see some reality there, but also got the opportunity to sort of design my own budget model and stuff for him. So that was where I started to question the chart of accounts, the part that tells the story, because even as an accountant there,
Heather Porter (16:27.044)
Okay.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (16:36.615)
I didn't feel that I had the right to change the chart of accounts that their high level accountants had set up. And yet I went on later to do some training with dairy farmers and stuff like that. And in fact, the standardized chart of accounts for Dairy Australia would have about 30 accounts that cover what is one account in a...
standard accountant's thing of like feed fodder and fertilizer. Well, we wanted to know, know, canola, geez, I can't even remember all the different feeds we used to have, but it was a great learning space for questioning accounting.
Heather Porter (17:09.326)
Okay.
Heather Porter (17:21.466)
Yeah, I can see that, but also learning what businesses have done wrong through the audit experience that you've had and what a learning ground for you on all different aspects. Yeah. Okay. So you started questioning accounting and then did you, from there, what was your business? What did it become at that point?
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (17:41.905)
So then, so I had that client and gradually was trying to get other clients. I could already see, so I had a business name back then, CSI, consistent strategic improvement. I had a really cool banner with all this head explosion stuff going on. But I'll tell you what, it's bloody hard sell. Like how do you find clients? And then I tripped over the entourage, which is how I met you.
Heather Porter (17:50.373)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (18:10.436)
Yeah, how we met, yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (18:12.345)
Yeah, so I'd always wanted to do an MBA, like go back to uni and do an MBA, but really MBA was going to help me meet more corporate people and that's no use to me at all. Like, you know, I really wanted to help smaller businesses. I'm going to say small, you know, small to medium. But yeah, I tripped over the entourage and I joined them as like, I saw it as a, like an MBA in small business.
Heather Porter (18:30.981)
Yeah, totally.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (18:41.585)
But what I discovered there, in amongst the other students, just shocked the socks off me. So I was aware that business owners weren't really aware, but when I, you in that safe container, they call it now, safe container of, well, there was a hundred or so of us meeting regularly under the way, entourage, doing things then. And I had lots of people coming to me once they'd heard me in question and answers, like saying,
Well, I don't really know anything about how I'm going because dad's accountant just does it and effectively pats me on the head and says, there, there, girl. Especially the girls, they were being really neglected, I guess, terms of accountants just didn't pay attention really to what was going on.
Heather Porter (19:36.366)
No, it's like, Hey, file this report. Hey, it's time to do your payroll or whatever. Yeah. There's no sort of.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (19:40.775)
Yeah, you're just an add -on to some of these. Like, dad's the big thing and you're just an add -on. And then other different things that people were telling me. yeah, I just saw this sample of 100 or so people even more disconnected from their financials than I expected. Then I was challenged by one of the coaches to do a
Heather Porter (19:49.382)
Yeah
Heather Porter (20:05.421)
Interesting.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (20:10.724)
to do a free session for businesses. I've got a bunch of businesses that came in for a free session and then again I was able to show them other things and see that they were interested in some of the more holistic things that I was interested in.
Heather Porter (20:12.973)
Right.
Heather Porter (20:25.262)
Is that how you started is through the finding the need in the market. So people that didn't know what they needed to know. That's, that's how you got your start. That's amazing. And that's through, like a shared interest of the entourage and their training and their members. And, I did not know that's actually when you, how you started here your company. So that's really cool. Okay. Got it.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (20:34.033)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (20:46.407)
Yeah. they chat. The most exciting thing, suppose, out of all of that was I did a crowdfunding. So I used Possible. I called it Suck the Scare Out of Accounting. It's still up there actually. It's pretty cool. But as you know, it was a really good business process because I got around 10 people to come into this pilot program.
Heather Porter (20:56.954)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (21:02.34)
Ha ha ha!
Heather Porter (21:09.734)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (21:14.479)
Nice.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (21:14.789)
And the pilot program was really successful in that the outcomes they got were good, but my accounting, that nerdy brain of mine, isn't really great at converting that stuff into marketing.
Heather Porter (21:27.823)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (21:32.567)
There was just so many good things that happened when you brought people together to learn. So I tried to sell that and just wasn't successful. So the next six years to where we are now has been iteration after iteration of how can I get this to be something that people do want? I sell plenty of packages and I've got a lot of entourage clients to be honest, which continues to show me.
Heather Porter (21:38.982)
Amazing.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (22:02.892)
what can go wrong when their eyes are off the ball. Generally they come to me if there's something not quite right.
Heather Porter (22:08.976)
Can we talk about that for a moment? Cause I'd like to actually do a little bit of a case study to understand how you work with people. And of course we'll go into your book shortly too, but how, so with more of the service side of what you do, do you have a case study or somebody you can think of whether or not you want to say their name is up to you, but how, when they came to you, what were they like and how did you specifically help them?
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (22:11.11)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (22:30.149)
Yeah, this one I really do, I still find hard to articulate the other, is, you know, why I needed your help to put my websites together and everything. Because for me, the magic is often very early and it's really more about empowerment. So it's often the, don't understand anything, which is, which quickly converts to, shit, I actually do understand quite a bit. And then,
Heather Porter (22:33.734)
You
Heather Porter (22:55.689)
Yeah, right.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (22:58.611)
then with those training wheels on, you like, we start to explore what's going on in their data. And that's where I would find with them. it's done. I've iterated it quite a bit. These days it's all done with you. So if you come into my better business decisions practice, then I do done with you. Sometimes just a one -off power hour, sometimes more. And
Heather Porter (23:21.807)
Nice.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (23:28.377)
It's actually the realization that they can understand a bit of the financial stuff, which often leads to them putting their prices up. So we'll talk about why is it that, you know, your business is so successful and yet not very profitable, that they're always difficult conversations to have. And often people believe they can't charge a higher price, but usually I can quickly show them what, why they need to and B,
Heather Porter (23:43.547)
Mm
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (23:56.731)
that the customers don't run away if you're really that good at what you do. But, you know, a more extreme case would be where someone's being really let down. Everything's behind, they're getting penalized by the ATO. They had delegated in good faith that things were being done and we're talking, you know, multi -million dollars here.
And then as you explore something, as I bring them to understand the importance of the balance sheet and that again, they're the only ones that can know whether it's right or not. As we start to explore things in there, which is often, there's often either owner drawings or directors loans, and they've all been named very generically. But when I take them into there,
which is as simple as a drill down, know, get your balance sheet, here's the owner's drawings, click on that number, change the date range, let's have a look what's in here. That's when they'll often see things that bookkeepers have decided was in the two, I would say decided in the two hard baskets, so we'll just put it to owner's drawings, right? So there'll be a bunch of deductions that they've missed out on because of that.
Heather Porter (25:19.524)
Right.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (25:20.387)
Or in a worst case scenario, I found fraud. So there were so many transactions, so many that someone started taking money out of an ATM and noticed that no one asked any questions and then took some more and some more and some more. Yeah, devastating.
Heather Porter (25:46.64)
God. Yeah, right.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (25:48.945)
devastating for the business owner.
Heather Porter (25:50.832)
that they would have never realized had they not just looked deeper into some of the data that you taught them how to Wow. Yeah, I'm sure you've seen quite a few interesting things over your years. God.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (25:57.158)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (26:04.431)
Yeah, I mean, then sometimes there's another story in my book of a really awesome business owner who their financial statements being done by the accountants showed good profits. But when she wanted to finance another ute for one of her employees, she needed to just use zero file to get current financials out of.
Heather Porter (26:17.754)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (26:30.757)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (26:31.217)
But the zero file showed that she was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars and she just couldn't get a head around it. she did, actually it was when I realized that people, I named the phrase financial anxiety, it was during an entourage session actually while we were talking about marketing. I was asked, we were asked to look at things that our service provided that
other services provide that are not like our headline. So that's when I realized I improved people's mental health. But this lady heard me having this epiphany and reached out to me the next day and told me this story. And so we jumped into her zero very quickly, but discovered that she'd been just, she did her own bookkeeping and just simply been putting the wages to the wages expense instead of.
the balance sheet there's something called wages payable or some other label. She'd just been doing that the wrong way for four years right but the accountants didn't tell her they just fixed it for tax and left her doing the wrong thing.
Heather Porter (27:41.272)
without and so yeah, so she had no idea. So she like you were saying like lack of power, loss of power from the years of just sort of how it's been run.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (27:46.98)
Yeah.
Yeah, the consequences are huge really because she's trying to step into her power to get alone in a hurry. Or she's doing her own bookkeeping. there's not many errors, but this one, it happens to a lot of people. Sometimes just once off here and there, other times all the time. And that means effectively the wages are doubled in the P &L, which is going to show you a loss, right?
Heather Porter (27:53.188)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (28:12.964)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (28:20.13)
Yeah, totally. wow. These little tweaks that you do are phenomenal. I mean, I'm making them sound like they're little. They're massive. They're like they change somebody's business.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (28:21.486)
yes.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (28:29.681)
Well, I feel like they're little because it's just like, yeah, there's that. Yeah, there's that. Just unravel that and Bob's your uncle. Look at that profit.
Heather Porter (28:32.112)
Cause you know them.
Heather Porter (28:37.2)
And that's how your brain works. there was this really great metaphor that I heard from an old friend of mine. he said, there's this mall, like a shopping mall in California. And they had a problem with their plumbing and they couldn't work out what was going on. It was just leaking everywhere inside. So they called this plumber to come in and he came in and he's like, yeah, okay, that's it. And he like literally quote unquote, banged on a pipe, right? So he just found the spot, he quickly fixed it.
and said, okay, here's my bill for $10 ,000. And they said to him, wait, you just spent five minutes doing that. And he goes, yeah, but it's the 50 years of experience that got me to know exactly what pipe to bang on. And I feel like that's who you are in a nutshell is like, have this incredible background that you see things that's such a different way because you are almost like a business coach or mentor, but also you have the flip side of the accountancy and financial brain. I want to know about your
where you're headed and what you're really excited to work on right now. I think it's probably the book, but correct me if I'm wrong. What are you excited about you're working on right now? Yes.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (29:41.799)
So my book, Financial Rebelant, excuse all my stickers, I just have to remember where things are. There's a few up there too. It's available on Amazon, it's like the beginning of me getting together a lot of people to fight against the status quo and claim back that financial power that we've been talking about. And so I wanted to do
Heather Porter (29:50.619)
He
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (30:11.781)
get courses in an online community happening. I've been working on that in the background. But you know, the universe wanted to push me in a different direction. I'm actually an app developer now, technically. Using a platform called PassionIO to make that happen. So it's not as, you know, I'm not really in the weeds of development, but yes, my financial rebellion app.
Heather Porter (30:23.75)
Go figure!
Heather Porter (30:35.152)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (30:38.823)
is going to be available to everyone very soon. So it's where we're going to hold the community and in that community we'll have Tuesdays at 2 which is like our little mini financial power hour where I'll be available for anyone to ask questions. I'm hoping it turns into like a bit of a homework club where everybody does Tuesdays at 2 gets into their numbers, comes into the Zoom room and asks questions if they've got any.
Heather Porter (31:04.294)
Smart.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (31:08.337)
And then out of that, we'll get even more ideas around what people want to better understand and I'll develop more and more course material. I don't think of it as courses though, because from the stories I've just been telling, I actually think there's a knowing in every business owner that got their own knowing. It's just about pulling that knowing out and helping them to recognize that the business speaks to them through the profit and loss and the balance sheet.
Heather Porter (31:18.947)
Excellent.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (31:38.299)
And if they listen to that, that grows their knowing and then they can know more. So it's not about accounting education. It's about leaning in and developing an understanding of your own stuff. Because everyone's stuff is unique. So yeah, that app is nearly out there.
Heather Porter (32:03.308)
exciting. That's and your book is amazing. And it has great branding. And so it's brilliant. So is the idea that you'll lead with your book into the market get because it's so many people can easily consume that and then they kind of jump into the community as part of that. And then that's where they can get more sort of actually one on one help from you essentially over time.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (32:09.063)
you
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (32:27.163)
Yeah, in the community they can get one to many help from me and then if they want some one to one, they can jump out into my better business decisions side of things and get some one to one mentoring, like I said, once off or more sessions depending on the size of their business. And the other thing is I often, I find that I'm not only working with the business owner, I might be working with some of their team. So if their team in
Heather Porter (32:31.024)
Great.
Heather Porter (32:45.03)
Perfect.
Heather Porter (32:52.101)
Okay.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (32:56.711)
particularly the internal team isn't fully across what they could be in accounting. We've lost a lot of the wisdom that we had last century. It's just that people were trained differently. We had a lot of women that were trained in admin with a lot of attention to detail. And now we're in this century, 25 years into this century, everyone uses computers in an intuitive manner.
We need a bit more preciseness with accounting in particular, because it's very powerful, the software that we've got. that Spider -Man line, with great power comes great responsibility. If you make errors, the way they can ricochet through your system is scary.
But from the business owners point of view, that means that the information you're making decisions with might be wrong. So we need to get real clarity that your information is being collected in a way that's meaningful to you so that when you come to make decisions, the numbers are correct, which circles us back to that question you asked earlier, like around what do we measure? What are our metrics? Where do we want to, you know, what do we keep an eye on?
Heather Porter (34:16.517)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (34:20.747)
First of all, we keep an eye on is everything falling where it should? Is it accurate? And then we take that level of understanding of accuracy in our financial stuff. Then the business owner actually really levels up. And I see it like eagles. You know when the eagles get in the updraft and they just gently go higher and higher? If you think of it from, if you're in a hot air balloon, you're down in the fog.
Heather Porter (34:24.634)
Nice.
Heather Porter (34:39.045)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (34:49.947)
But as you get up, gently get lifted, you can see so much more. It's the same in the leveling up of a business owners understanding or what I was saying before, like knowing, I'm getting emotional here. Yeah, it's a gentle ride up to understand more and more. So then as you understand how the information gets into provide the data that you're using,
Heather Porter (35:04.549)
love it.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (35:18.809)
you can directly or indirectly, like either through your team or whatever, you can say, actually, I want a bit more detail here or a bit less detail here. And then keep massaging your information flow to give you more more meaningful information, which you then make better decisions with.
Heather Porter (35:41.594)
Who's the best person to join your community and read your book? You said it can be team members, can be business owners. Is it a specific size business, specific industry? Is it just in Australia? Like, who are we focusing on here?
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (35:52.935)
You
well, you know, I break all the rules right Heather, I'm supposed to have a nice niche, okay? Nice niche, but it's kind of for everyone. Any business owner, and I'm really hoping that accountants would read it too because accountants are in the dark about the reality of their business owners experience.
Heather Porter (36:00.601)
I know.
Heather Porter (36:07.288)
Any business owner. Yep.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (36:23.671)
And even an accounting student could get some benefit from it because we get all of this theory and all the theory that we get taught assumes that everything's right in the first place. And I think that's what I really want to really want to call out is that it's often not right. the probably the smaller the business owner, the more important it is because the smaller the business owner, the less the
Heather Porter (36:36.047)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (36:52.281)
accountant kind of cares. And the worst thing is if the business owner is not making money as in profit, the accountants really care even less because it's actually the compliance that they are so focused on doesn't matter so much if the people are losing money because it's not going to be an error in tax, right? The tax on no profit is nothing.
Heather Porter (37:16.154)
Yeah. Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (37:18.759)
tax off, whether it's minus $100 ,000 or minus $50, you know, that's no one's paying attention in that space. So I think every business owner could get benefit from the book and understand not everybody likes to read. And in fact, it's the literacy thing, like my family has literacy, my children have literacy issues, my husband. And that's, I think that's part of why
Heather Porter (37:25.723)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (37:32.347)
Okay.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (37:49.409)
I can see the importance of it. It's like that original pilot program, I ended up calling it a float. I thought that was very clever. Achieving functional literacy of accounting and tax. Nobody wants to do that everybody. I think everyone would rebel against the financial system where they're not being looked after. That's what we're doing. Yeah, that's what we're doing.
Heather Porter (38:01.274)
Yeah
Heather Porter (38:11.367)
hands down, how you position that's brilliant. yeah. I love it. Where, and just so you guys know, as we start to wrap up, I do like to bring in people that I work with from time to time. And so not only have I met Liz through the entourage, which I've talked about on previous episodes, but, and just followed you and seen what you've been up to, but I've also done some work with Liz as well. And I always like to have a quick little chat about that as we wrap things up.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (38:30.565)
You
Heather Porter (38:39.268)
because yeah, it's fun. I love to highlight my clients on the show and bring you guys in because you're just doing such cool things. So what have we done together and how have you felt that I've helped you over, I guess, the last short amount of time that you've known me?
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (38:43.335)
Thank
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (38:51.947)
Well, we met quite a long time ago and you were a wonderful vision partner with Entourage. So I got quite a few free calls with you and you always gave me amazing insight into what I was missing. I'm coming from that literal accountant, you know, black and white numbers shift. But getting me to understand the customer, the journey the customer's on, you know, finding something they want to buy.
Heather Porter (38:58.224)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (39:19.769)
But that's all and that all of that has helped me lead me through my journey. But once I got my position clear and this financial rebellion revealed itself to me, the ideas in it, I approached Heather and said, can you build my website for this? So we've got a beautiful website which focuses on, excuse me, which is
One of the things I haven't mentioned is there's five arrows in our, we've got our, our horse, we've got arrows, we've got our bows, which are about stretching your thinking and reframing accounting into something you believe. And then we've got our horse, which is our accounting system that works really hard for us. But in our five arrows, my intention long -term is that they're the five colors of Australian money. So, and then.
Heather Porter (40:05.71)
Mmm.
Heather Porter (40:15.589)
Yeah.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (40:18.375)
Yeah, we've reflected that beautifully in the website. So we start with the color of the $5 note and then we move all the way through to the $100 green. But it's also, there's so much depth, I guess, if I could say so myself about what the financial rebellion is about. And it's reflected beautifully in the website that Heather's team came up with. Thank you.
Heather Porter (40:44.728)
I that. You know what that means Liz, now everyone has to go look at it.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (40:49.063)
Everyone must think I'm look at it. my god, I don't know about other people watching this. you're in, think lead magnets are such an important part of life, but my god, I'm so bad at building them. So we're trying to build, what is it? A better balance sheet. I'm going to get my sheet together and get that finished so that if they go there, they can get one.
Heather Porter (41:08.624)
Lead magnet.
Heather Porter (41:12.986)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (41:17.352)
Yes, you need to get that on there. Exactly. Well, no, by the time this airs, let's get that going. And what, where do people go to learn more about you and the book? Cause you actually have two websites. So where do they go to get the book?
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (41:18.542)
That is all she's got.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (41:24.529)
you
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (41:32.487)
the financial rebellion .com. and if you go to .au it should redirect of course. And then about my mentoring services, which you've also helped me and we're about to, reskin that a little bit. That is betterbusinessdecisions .com .au. So they're the places we're in socials for both those brands. on LinkedIn for me.
Heather Porter (41:35.852)
Excellent.
Heather Porter (41:40.688)
Yes.
Heather Porter (41:48.644)
Yeah.
Heather Porter (41:52.526)
Yes. See you guys.
Heather Porter (41:59.814)
Perfect. You guys.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (42:03.029)
And of course the book's on Amazon too, if you want to get it there.
Heather Porter (42:08.184)
Yeah, absolutely guys. but go, you need to go check Liz out on what she's up to. If you've ever had overwhelm around your numbers in business, if you've ever felt like you don't want to ask a question cause it's too stupid. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, my God, I have already made some of those mistakes at least said in my zero. But literally these little tweaks, as we said earlier, can mean everything for your business. And I absolutely love Liz how you said your
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (42:26.075)
Ha ha!
Heather Porter (42:38.13)
your numbers of the story of your business. And that is such a powerful reframe on what it means. So as we start to wrap up, are there any last comments or questions that you would like? I should say comments, not questions. You're not asking the viewers questions. Are there any last comments that you'd like to leave our listeners with?
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (42:56.583)
I really could talk all night underwater with marbles in my mouth about all of this, I'm so, cause it's so important to me. But yeah, look, we also have a 15 minute free chat on the Better Business Decisions website. So honestly, there's nothing I haven't seen before. And I know that it's a, it's a matter of trust to let somebody else see your stuff. But honestly, I see so many people's stuff all the time. I don't remember it.
Heather Porter (43:10.629)
Yes.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (43:25.711)
And there is no stupid questions. I had the beautiful Dave Thompson, is behind Inspirational Book Writers, who helped me do the book. I gave him a little sample session. He's like, my God, that's like 10x result because you told me this and this and this and this and my stuff's pretty neat. So there's just so much to offer you that's difficult to explain other than right there in the moment. But yeah, if you've got a quick question.
grab a 15 minute recall. I'm very friendly. it's just, know, I can.
Heather Porter (43:58.278)
Liz can help you guys go have a chat if you have any questions. Obviously we have links to everything you've offered in the show notes as well. So you can come on over to hustlerebellion .com and you'll find this episode with Liz and you can click on all the links there. It's been such fun chat. Thank you so much for sharing some really great actual tangible takeaways, but also just empowerment around numbers and that we're not alone, that it's okay that we've not learned numbers and
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (44:08.677)
Awesome.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (44:14.8)
you
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (44:25.223)
Really.
Heather Porter (44:27.896)
Now's the time to do it.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (44:29.851)
Yeah, it's not about the numbers, it's about the story. And all of you can understand your own story. So don't worry about the numbers. I can sort that little bit out. And they make so much sense once you just ignore that part and focus on the words that are in your story. But there's all sorts of other things, know, the...
Heather Porter (44:33.114)
Yeah, I love it.
Heather Porter (44:51.11)
perfect
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (44:56.783)
Unfortunately, tax agents are really stuck on compliance. The ATO is making it, making their life very, very, very difficult. So we try to provide a bridge so that you can get the answers that you want that are not forthcoming from your accountants. But also if you're worried that you've made these mistakes or anything, we can look at that. We can cover a hell of a lot in just a few minutes.
Heather Porter (45:19.93)
Sold, sign up everyone. No, just, if it works for you, definitely do it. Okay, thank you so much for being on the show. Much appreciated everyone. Thank you for listening as always as well.
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (45:22.3)
Hahaha
Liz Jarvis - Financial Mentor (45:30.033)
Thank you everyone. Thank you Heather.
Heather Porter (45:31.398)
Thanks
