From Accountant to $4.5 Million Dollar Budgeting Software Company with Jesse Mecham

Founder of YouNeedABudget.com – Jesse Mecham

Jesse created a simple spreadsheet to help with his own personal finances. He needed to pay rent, so he decidded to sell it. 10 Years later he has a company with 29 employees. We discuss how he build it, hired the right team, and why they consider themselves an education company not a software company. Also we discuss the KEY things you need to know about your business finances!

Check out YouNeedABudget.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

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Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and I am excited to have Jesse Mecham on the show today. He has an awesome site called YouNeedABudget.com and I remember way back when, when I was first getting out of debt, a budget was hugely important to me and when I had my personal finance blog - Eventual Millionaire used to be that - Jesse was everywhere on the scene, everyone was using his software, so I'm really excited to have him on the show today. Thanks so much for coming on, Jesse.

Jesse: Thanks for having me, appreciate it.

Jaime: So did you sort of fall into creating this software? Were you a software guy beforehand?

Jesse: No, I'm still not really a software guy. I originally created a spreadsheet for just my own personal use with my new wife. We were newlyweds and very broke and still in school and I just created something that worked for us really well and then about a year into it I had the idea that maybe other people could use it so I did definitely fall into it, I would say.

Jaime: That's crazy. I remember I had a spreadsheet too but I wasn't "Hey, I want to make this into a business," so how did you come into that?

Jesse: I wanted to make rent, to be honest. We were going to have a baby and it was about a year into our marriage, the baby was on the way and I was trying to figure out how I could stay out of debt while finishing up my degree in accounting. I couldn't work more hours and I couldn't stop going to school and I just thought I need to do something that can be really on the side and I thought I could probably sell this spreadsheet so I hopped online, I saw that there were other people, like two other people, who were selling spreadsheets to do one thing or another and I thought "Well, if someone's selling them, then it should work." My whole goal was to make rent, $350, and we got it so that worked out.

Jaime: That's insane. So what year was that?

Jesse: That would have been 2004 when we launched it originally.

Jaime: And you were just selling it as a spreadsheet.

Jesse: As a spreadsheet.

Jaime: So how did you find those first customers back in 2004?

Jesse: My first attempt was doing flyers in my apartment complex and that was not successful. My second attempt was to use AdWords, that had just launched fairly recently from Google. Back then, ads were super cheap, there weren't a lot of competitors there and you could easily pay 5 cents per click and get people over to your site. It took me about two weeks to get my first sale but that was basically how it started.

Jaime: So what made you not give up after two weeks? Because usually if you're using AdWords and you're trying and you're trying and it's been eight days and you haven't sold anything yet - what made you continue?

Jesse: I had given myself a budget on AdWords of $100 so I wasn't going to stop until I had run that through. I think I was about $63 in spend when we had our first sale. I was selling it originally for $9.95 and nobody was buying and I knew my numbers, I should convert 1% or so if it was doing okay. I had really bad sales copy but I still wasn't converting very well and I had a friend who told me I should bump the price up because it just didn't look good enough with the price at $9.95 so I doubled it to $19.95 that day and had my first sale that day, so that taught me a lesson on pricing that everyone should learn when they're running their own business.

Jaime: Heck, yeah! So give me the evolution of then until now because I know you've grown a lot since then.

Jesse: In early 2006 I had been selling it for about 18 months or so and it was doing well enough to where it was better than my part time job that I was working at the time and I was working on getting my CPA exam passed and I was just about to finish up school and I had a guy who wrote to me, his name's Taylor, and he said "Hey, I can improve your spreadsheet. I'm a developer," and I said I'd rather have some standalone software that's really nice and forget about the spreadsheet. The value of a spreadsheet was pegged pretty low, and rightly so. So he jumped on board and I was able to pay him as we went along and we just hit milestones with the software and then launched the first version of our standalone software in November of 2006. That went really well. By that time I was working full time as a CPA and just running this very much on the side.

Jaime: So some guy came and said "Hey, I can help you create software," and you were like "Sure, why not?" You didn't check anyone else for doing it for you? And how did you actually pay him? Did he want money upfront?

Jesse: He didn't want money upfront. I did run it by one other software firm that came in with a bid. They were about a third cheaper than he was and the money, obviously, was tempting but I trusted Taylor more and we just seemed to be gelling better so we had lots of phone calls - lots and lots of phone calls - and found an agreement where he would hit a milestone and I would pay him for that milestone so it was just kind of pay as you go and the business was able to fund that. It slowed down our goal of being able to have a down payment for a house but that wasn't a bad thing. We just had to divert that for a while and Julie, my wife, was okay with that, so we just paid him as we went along and then, about two years later, I was able to convince him to come on full time and leave the video game industry.

Jaime: Oh wow, that's a lot, leaving the video game industry for budgeting software!

Jesse: I know. I don't know why he did it still.

Jaime: So what does the company look like now? 2006 was a long time ago - do you have employees now? What does your company look like now?

Jesse: We grew really slowly for a while. I've been really cautious - I feel like every time I'm hiring someone I'm kind of incurring debt because I don't want them to leave and I want to make sure we can have them employed for the long haul. So we were super cautious on the growth side and I've kind of fixed that and got my head around it throughout the years. We've now at, I think, 29, without about a 50/50 mix between part time and full time people doing stuff and we're always looking for more people - it seems like we think we're done hiring and then we start again immediately. But it's a great team and it's been a lot of fun the last couple of years just working with the team.

Jaime: Give us some advice on the growth side. I love that you did this part time for a really long time. Some people are stuck in day jobs right now and they're just like "Oh my gosh, this is taking me a year, I want to quit really, really soon," but you really took a long time to see if this was a viable business before you actually quit. When did you stop doing the CPA work and realize "Okay, I have to go gung-ho and grow this thing?"

Jesse: Yeah, in May of 2007, so I only lasted ten months at this accounting firm I was at. It was really bad hours - 80 hours a week - and I could only work on YNAB between 4 and 5:30am normally so it didn't leave a ton of time for actual growth, it was really just maintenance. I was doing support and things like that and just keeping things going. I wish I had started sooner on doing YNAB full time. I shouldn't say waste because they were good experiences I had that taught me a lot but I do wish I had that year back to really focus on growing it more. I'm extremely risk averse and felt like I really had to have everything laid out perfectly and I think that's not as risky as we like to tell ourselves. If you have to go back and get another job, it's not the end of the world. I wouldn't go into debt to try to start a new business or to try to live on credit cards while I was working on a business - I don't think you're ready to jump ship if you have to do that - but if you have something to fall back on, some savings that you could burn through for six months, the worst case is you go back and get a job again. If I could go back and coach myself again I would say "Go quicker - don't start with this other job, just keep running with it."

Jaime: I love hearing that, because there are people right now in that exact same position. It feels so hard to let go of something that feels so safe, even if it's not safe.

Jesse: Yeah, it's not safe.

Jaime: Exactly!

Jesse: Nothing's safe. Someone could let you go from a job just as easily as a business could go under - well not just as easily, I think businesses go under more easily, but it's not safe. I encourage people, once you have a safety net built of some cash, give it a shot. You do have to burn the candle at both ends for a while, get up early and get things done before your normal job and give up certain things to really get something rolling on the side but if you really want it, usually it's pretty easy to roll out of bed and get stuff going. But yeah, don't hang out too long where it's comfortable. I think you'll regret it later on.

Jaime: So tell me about that growth, because 29 people is a lot but you went from none, just you, to 29 people, so I would love any tips that you have on growth, when the right time to hire is, when it's not, that sort of stuff.

Jesse: The right time to hire is when it's painful and you're really going to want to just be dying to have that person come in. that's when I normally hire. The other right time to hire is when you have money set aside already for that person. Whenever I'm thinking about a new hire, I'm a budget guy and I use my budget software for my business so I've already created a category for that new position, I've funded it for a few months as if they were hired. I want to be able to see that, cash flow-wise, everything is fine. That's my risk aversion popping up but I think it's good practice. You want to make sure you can afford it and you want to make sure that you're not hiring because it feels good and you're seeing staff as a growth marker - it's not - so just hire when it's painful. A lot of times before people will ask me how much revenue - maybe they don't ask because it's not appropriate, I didn't know - but they'll always ask how many people are on the team and it's a way for them to measure growth and I think it's the wrong way to measure growth so I would caution people not to see staff as some notch in your belt.

Jaime: I agree with that 1,000%. I chat with a lot of people on gross revenue numbers and stuff like that and if somebody tells me "My gross revs are like $3 million but my team is only four."

Jesse: That's phenomenal.

Jaime: Exactly, that's amazing. Instead of people saying "I have a 50 person company. I'm making $3 million a year," and that is not the same in any way, no offence. Some types of business need more people. Software, luckily, usually has a pretty big profit margin so for you it's probably not as critical to have a huge, huge, huge team, like 100 people. Can I ask you, what are your gross revenues or do you not say it?

Jesse: I'm fine saying it. Last year we were at about $4.5 million.

Jaime: How did you grow to be that? So many people that listen to Eventual Millionaire want to create a SAS product - they're really excited, they're new to the market, maybe they find a pain point like you did, something that they think is a huge need in the market and their grandiose dream is "I want to build a $4.5 million company out of my SAS product." What do you give them for advice?

Jesse: To get money as fast as they can, so ask people for money quickly. People talk about minimum viable product and things like that - my best experience with that was the fact that I launched with a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet didn't allow you to have multiple accounts and there's not a person, well maybe a few people, that doesn't have multiple accounts. I just lumped it all into one big register and, yes, you change the categories but only in this one way and don't touch that because you'll break it. There was a lot of stuff on there that was really bad but it was enough that I could have lived off of it and kept things going. So people's minimum viable product, I think they really lose focus on "minimum". If you've nailed "viable", where it really is going to work, then you really have to make sure that it is minimum. A lot of times engineers especially get sucked into wanting to build, build, build instead of sell. The scary stuff for an engineer is selling, the comfortable stuff is building, so they will naturally build before they sell every single time.

Jaime: But a company only exists when you have revenue.

Jesse: Exactly.

Jaime: So that's the problem - you can have the coolest software product in the world and not make any money off of it and then it's not a business, it's a hobby. So when you started giving it to people, because there's a lot of budgeting software out there.

Jesse: Oh, tons.

Jaime: Did people give you a lot of feedback on it, like "Change this thing and change this," and how has that gone?

Jesse: Yeah, we've had tons and tons of feedback. We have an e-mail inbox for feature requests at YouNeedABudget.com. People send feature requests in there - we rarely respond, we get so many of them we can't respond to all of them. I bet we respond to less than one in a thousand. We read them all, we just can't respond. You take all of that feedback and you appreciate it but you also have to recognize that you're the captain and you get to be the one to sink the ship so that's the stance we take. We have the luxury of seeing all of the feedback and of having really in-depth knowledge of our use case, our core use case. A lot of users, bless their hearts, will send in very specific use case scenarios and you can't run with those, it's not possible.

Jaime: You have to go with the majority.

Jesse: Yeah, you have to decide what you want to do and then you do that really well and you don't worry about the other stuff. They're good ideas, you just can't do them all and so you have to be really picky and say no a lot, which isn't fun but it's just the nature of the beast.

Jaime: Definitely, you've got to make sure your ship stays afloat. Tell me about this - 2006, when the software came out, to now, there has probably been a ridiculous amount of competition that's come in. Thankfully you were sort of towards the beginning but there are iPhone apps and tons of stuff that has really changed things, such as Mint. So tell me, as competition has come along, how have you guys dealt with that?

Jesse: We recognized fairly early on - not as early as I would have liked - where we were competitive was with our teaching and our methods. We have a four rule method and it's not rocket science by any stretch and it's not that we're saying anything fairly new - the fourth rule is kind of new for people and we're known for that, but we teach these four rules for free and we really want people to get these rules. We've run webinars - on an average month probably about 6,000 people go through a webinar where we teach them these rules and then, if they like what they're hearing and it's resonating with them, they can buy the software. On the flipside, most of our competitors are really software-centric and they have some great tech but it's just not where we've decided to place our bet, I really think we're more of an education company that happens to sell software instead of the other way around. It's worked well for us, despite stiff competition, up until now.

Jaime: I love that. I want to ask about those four rules in just a second but before we get into that, how did you decide to go with the webinar strategy? Considering teaching is going to be important for you, but right now webinars are hot and everybody is talking about how you can do amazing things with webinars because you teach, you give value, you sell at the end, we have good conversion rates and you're teaching 6,000 people every single month. Tell us how you got into that and how well it's working for you.

Jesse: It's working very well. We're always tinkering with it. It has to be live, you can't fake it. I know there are a lot of people who will think "I'll do a faux-live class" - I don't think that works very well. We wanted it to be personable, we also needed to scale ' all of those reasons, the scaling, the remoteness of it, we don't have to rent a room, we don't have to have people physically there, that was all attractive, the price was fairly attractive, as far as running it, from an infrastructure standpoint. The medium is great for being able to get questions. we always have an admin or an assistant that's running and is able to interact with the class through the chat and then we have the live teacher who is fed specific questions from the assistant so we can keep things really dialed in, but you've got to just practice it and make sure it's perfect and deliver a lot of value and respect people's time in that way and then you see that it pays off in a big way. Besides development, where we have the most staff is in our teaching and it's working really well.

Jaime: Can you give us the logistics - what webinar platform you use, how you get the 6,000 people on the webinar, that sort of stuff?

Jesse: If you were to go to YNAB.com/support you will see a link you can click and you'll see how we have all of the classes laid out. We use GoToWebinar. We don't like them at all.

Jaime: That's what everybody says.

Jesse: I hate to say that because I don't like talking bad but they've migrating us to a different server right during a class and things like that and their support has been really, really horrid. We've been with them for years and, frankly, we're shopping around to try to find something else but we use them for now. We run the classes, we have them all posted online and it tabs into GoToWebinar's API. Teachers have specific classes assigned and know what they're teaching, the assistant knows what's happening. It's a well-oiled machine - Erin is our lead teacher and she runs the whole thing and she does a phenomenal job.

Jaime: Nice.

Jesse: It takes a lot of planning and you've got to have fallbacks and make sure everything technically is going to work but it's a great medium, we absolutely love it.

Jaime: How do you get those new people on the webinars? You're not just sending out to a list that you already have, you're getting brand new leads, so how do you get those brand new leads?

Jesse: Most of the people on the webinar, or about half, have already downloaded the software and are kind of familiar with it, they just want to get some education. What we teach is a little bit of a money paradigm shift so people recognize the value there. We don't use them as lead generators except we did one experiment last week where we literally sent them first to a webinar. For the most part we are pushing it all in the back so we'll use e-mail courses, we'll use the blog to a degree, we get a lot of word of mouth so we don't have to worry about buying ads in a lot of places. People land on the site, it resonates with them, they see we offer a class and they go ahead and sign up, so it's a little bit later in our funnel and we're trying to experiment, like I said, with moving the webinar medium up the funnel to see if it works really well there too.

Jaime: That's really interesting. So most people come to your site first, download the software, there's a trial and stuff like that beforehand. How do you get so much traffic to your site, then?

Jesse: It's a mix. Organically we do really well. We don't focus on SEO or anything like that but we do well there, that's probably why we do well. We try to put out good content. We've been around for a long time so a lot of bloggers write about us. We have a referral program with our customers where they can get a friend 10% off and get a little 10% payment to their PayPal so we enjoy good chatter socially. It's a pretty good mix of different sources. The biggest one we had, if I look back to say what worked well really on, would be our e-mail course that we launched. That was in 2006 as well ' it doubled my sales really early on, to be able to suddenly take people's e-mail address and feed them a course teaching them a new way of thinking about their money. It just worked really well. So for anyone just starting, the e-mail thing was the slam dunk for us early on and I would encourage everyone to give that a good stab. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just have to get something out there and put some good content there.

Jaime: I love that. Let's focus our attention now on money, because that's what you talk about all the time. Tell us about the four rules and I really want to dive into, especially for business owners, how we can really pay attention too, because budget is usually a four letter word for people.

Jesse: Absolutely.

Jaime: So tell us a little bit about those rules first.

Jesse: Well, first to tackle the idea that a budget is a bad thing. If I could just get everyone who's listening to this, who's watching it too, if they're a little stressed with their money, to retrace where those feelings come from and why they're stressed. So when a bill comes and you have to check your account balance to see if you can pay it or not and then another bill comes and you've got to check it again, that's a stressful cycle. I then want to have them imagine that a bill comes and they just pay it and they don't have to think about if there's money there - that's not a stressful cycle. If they start to think about a budget as a forward looking plan instead of a diet or a restriction - it's just a planning tool; it's just goal setting with money - then we can start to get something. So, that being said, the four rules are, number one, that you prioritize what you want your money to do. We say give every dollar a job. That's just forward looking. You start with money that you have in your account - you don't forecast, you don't look at your receivables, you just say "This is my cash on hand. What should I do?" The second rule is to look ahead for larger, less frequent expenses. Personally, the things that catch us are vacations, Christmas, even though it comes every single year, annual premiums for life insurance, things like that. For business owners, taxes are the biggest by far. So you look ahead and you say "Okay, my life insurance premium is $1,200 a year, I should set aside $100 a month every month and be ready for it." Normally, when you have a life insurance premium you stress out, or when Christmas comes you put it on the cards to push off the stress until January, but either way you're really stressing because you have a big bill hit and your stress levels go up, you don't have the money, you don't know what to do and you scramble, you maybe put something on the card. What I want to do is, instead of it being this big up and down thing, just have it be more steady. So once you have a grasp of what your larger, less frequent expenses look like, like car repairs and things like that, and you've broken them out into monthly amounts, you have this monthly expense line that's higher than what you originally thought - and we call that your true expenses - once you have that, you can start to make really good decisions, going back to rule one, with your priorities, because then when an opportunity comes as a business owner to buy this new piece of equipment that you might need, you look at it and you don't say "I've got $5,000 in my checking account, I can buy it," you say "Oh, I have $5,000 in my checking account but $4,000 of that is for things that I know are coming down the pipeline so I really can't buy that piece of machinery yet." It's just giving you good information so that you can make really good decisions. Most will make fantastic decisions once they have that good information. The third rule is much shorter - you can change the plan whenever you want - we call it rolling with the punches, so if you get better information tomorrow that has you change your budget that you set the day before, just change it. Nothing is set in stone for it, it's encouraged to roll and adapt as you get better information. You do that as a business owner all the time anyway - just do it with your numbers too. And the final one is to live on last month's income. As a business owner, you build up a buffer, you have a little bit of a reserve and it's just a way to raise the waterline for your stress, where you aren't dipping so close where it's like "How are we going to make payroll?", you're able to just stay a month, a month and a half, depending on your business volatility it would depend, but wherever you're comfortable. With YNAB we're moving to a big shift later on and so we're saving aggressively to try to weather that and it's totally subjective but you want to have a month, maybe two months, of revenue just sitting in reserve and that's the fourth rule, to back away from the financial edge. It's a super long answer but I've tried to condense it down to a minute or two.

Jaime: I think that's awesome. That's the funny thing - most business owners in general are really good at ignoring that piece. They don't even know what their profit and loss is when I come in. I'm like "Okay, what's your profit and loss?" and some of them are like "What's that?" which is tough because that's a huge piece of your business and probably one of the reasons why a lot of businesses fail is because they don't realize why they're at and, like you said, getting the information in helps you make decisions and that's what I want to highlight for everyone - it's not about being super restrictive and having to do this stuff, it's going to help you make better decisions in your business so that you can live and be happy instead of killing yourself. It gets crazy.

Jesse: I wrote a book called "PACE", it's on Amazon - people could e-mail me and I'll send it to them for free. It was a way for me to tell me story as a business owner. I was super stressed, it was 2011, revenues were growing and I was more and more stressed by the day, even though there was more and more money coming in and profits were climbing. I couldn't pin it down to where I was stressed except people would come to me and say "We need to hire", "We need to do this", "What about that?" and it would stress me out and I wasn't running my business with the same principles that I was running personally and it was dumb of me not to do that. I thought "I have to use QuickBooks, I have to do it this way because that's what I learned as an accountant," and that just wasn't the case. Once I moved my business to using my same principles that I've been teaching families and individuals, suddenly my stress was gone. I mean there are still stressful moments but I was able to say "Yeah, we can hire," and it actually helped me be more aggressive in my growth, not less. Some of you that are like swashbucklers, who are super aggressive and just throw caution to the wind, it might reign you in some, or someone like me who's super cautious, too cautious, it helped me open up a little bit. It really is like you say, Jaime - it's a decision making tool and the bookkeeping that we all kind of wince at because we only associate it with tax compliance, we can start to think of bookkeeping as a value added decision making tool that the CEO should be primarily in charge of and with that information you can make great strategic decisions.

Jaime: That's huge. I love what you said about having the reserves there too. I remember last year, I thought taxes were fine, we apparently had a really horrible tax person the year before so the estimates weren't right and I owed $25-30,000 on top in April. Thankfully I had the cash put away but it's one of those things where life sort of ends. If I hadn't had that I would have had to go into debt or I would have owed the government. I'm not a fan of debt. So these things, like you said, putting things away just in case, they don't sound sexy or anything like that but it will even out. what I've seen with business owners is it's feast or famine - we don't know exactly where all of our marketing comes from so sometimes I sell, sell, sell and then I have to deliver, deliver, deliver and your revenues go down, so it's feast or famine and that's what everybody talks about. That is preventable and fixable by selling all the time and saving money so that there's no famine. I'm trying to teach people that so if you can give us some quick tips or advice on being a business owner and dealing with the ups and downs. What's the first thing? Because sometimes it can be a little overwhelming. Setting up a budget - what are a couple of quick tips you can give us?

Jesse: First, you do not forecast. You do not pretend that more money will come in. even if you tell me the check is in the mail, I say wait for the check to come - I don't believe you until the cash lands. The reason you don't forecast is because we want you to make good decisions and good decisions come about when there is scarcity and we create scarcity by following rule one, where we are prioritizing and giving every dollar a job. So when you look at your bank account, it's scarce. Then you have to be creative and start thinking "It's only $1,000, I need to sell, sell, sell", or you think "It's only $1,000. Normally this will come in or that will come in so it's really $3,000." That didn't push you to sell - that let you fall back to some comfortable forecast, looking through rosy glasses, to try to become really comfortable with it but it's under false pretenses. So embrace that scarcity. We often say scarcity is clarity, where if it's really scarce you'll be really clear on what that $1,000 needs to do and there won't be any question and then it will be really clear that you need to close some more deals, or whatever it may be, but you've got to make sure that you stop the forecasting and you just embrace cash in hand and the job that that cash has to do. You will find all sorts of motivation that's hidden inside there if you really embrace that. That's the one tip, that's all I would say - and, for heaven's sake, track what you spend - if I was just to say one thing, it would be that, because we have all of these business owners who are so creative and so energetic and so driven and we don't want to have that handicapped by this false reality that they're more successful than they actually are when it comes to money. So that would be it.

Jaime: That's huge. I remember my mentor, at the very beginning, I would get a client and I would be like "I got a client! They said yes!" and he would be like "Is the money in the bank yet?" and I'd be like "No? they're giving me the check in two days," and he's like "Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it." You want to feel such a high when somebody says yes to you but it's true, a lot of times deals fall through and then you feel worse. I was hoping, predicting, that I would get that money and then I would do this, this and this with it and I didn't even have it yet. Like you said, it makes a huge difference to know what that is and what I find with business owners is that when pain is great they'll take more action - they're willing to get outside of their comfort zone because they're like "Shoot, I got to do this," but the reason why we predict the future is so we can think "The pain is not that great. I don't have to do that much."

Jesse: If you want a nice endorphin shot, just open up a blank spreadsheet and start putting in fake numbers of all of the money you're going to make. You will feel really good and you'll have done nothing.

Jaime: Exactly - "Whoo hoo! Great, I'm going to the beach today!" That's the thing - I interviewed John Dumas, who was a client of mine who made a couple of million in a few short years and he goes "The thing that's really amazing is that everybody I know who started having success got in the slow lane and kept going on. I kept as Ferrari as possible, as fast as I possibly can. No matter how much money I made in the past, I just kept going, making more and more and more," and of course he's got $2 million cash in the bank so it's really changed him, saving and saving and saving, and I don't think a lot of people do that. Even when he said that to me I was like "I've been enjoying myself a little bit too much, maybe I should get back on track," because when people aren't just feast and famine, they start having some success, it's easy to relax a lot more. So I love your idea of pulling out the money and feeling that pain a little bit more so that way we can actually take some more action and drive our company to be better and better and better and it sounds like that's what you do.

Jesse: It's not fake - you're not pretending there's pain there, you're unmasking real stuff there. I'm trying to get people to not pretend and it's amazing the creativity and the drive that comes from that.

Jaime: And the safety that you feel when you do have the money.

Jesse: Yeah, you make better decisions, things are clicking when you've got a fallback. You don't have to pick that one client that you know probably won't be the best - and we all know there are bad clients, right? - and you can say "I don't need that" and that's so liberating, to be able to do that, so to have something to fall back on, you just can't overestimate that.

Jaime: And you have five children, I'm sure that always played a piece in your mind as you've been growing and dealing with that too. I have two kids and anybody who has a family that they have to deal with and support, it's a lot of pressure.

Jesse: Oh yeah, I am still very risk averse, trying to always build a bigger net underneath us, it's just the way I'm wired.

Jaime: That's awesome - accountant, it makes sense. We have to start wrapping up so what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Jesse: The goal of $1 million is fantastic. I want to run with the same line of thinking - I want everyone to log into their bank account and write down on a piece of paper - do not do it with a computer, on a piece of paper - what their balance is and then, continuing on that piece of paper, I want everyone to just think through what this money needs to do - whether it's $50,000 or $500 - what does this money need to do before more money will land in my account? Write that down by hand - do not do it on a computer because you'll make it too fancy - and then make sure it's all totaled up and examine how you feel once you've done that little exercise. Just see if you don't feel a little bit of that clarity that we talked about.

Jaime: I love that. I highly recommend doing that. I'm probably going to go and do that again because we just did a launch and I'm like "Oh shoot, there's a whole bunch of cash in the bank and now I have to figure out what I'm going to do with it."

Jesse: Give it all a job.

Jaime: Thank you so much, Jesse. Where can we find out more about you and your website and how we can get that free trial for your software?

Jesse: You can go to YouNeedABudget.com or, if you're in a hurry, just YNAB.com and that will get you there. The trial is free for 34 days, give it a shot. Take a webinar - there are two things you can get from it. One, you can learn more about what I'm talking about but, two, you can see how well run our webinar is. I'm bragging about it because the people that we have, Erin and the team, they do a flawless job so you can do a little bit of reconnaissance too and pick up some tips, which would be a good thing. The other thing is if you want to grab the book, the "PACE" book, that's kind of YNAB thinking geared towards business owners, people can just tweet at me - @jessemecham - and I'll put out a link on Twitter so that they can grab it. It's a short read and I think it will help people start to think about their money a little differently so that will be a great way to do it.

Jaime: I love it. We'll definitely put that in the show notes so everyone can take a look and add you on Twitter too. Thank you so much for coming on today, Jesse, I really appreciate it.

Jesse: Absolutely. Thanks, Jaime.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: Budgeting, Finance, hiring, Human Resources, Jesse Mecham, millionaire interview, Profit/Loss, software company, team management, Wealth Building

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Debt Freedom, Entrepreneurship, Finances, Goals, Hiring/HR, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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