Money & Life Archives | What Works with Tara McMullin

EP 375: Is this really a new economy? (Time & Money 4)

Mar 1, 2022 | Culture, Money & Life, Operations, Podcast

I’ve been talking about the “new economy” since about 2010. But more and more, I recognize that the economic possibilities created through the internet aren’t nearly as new or innovative as I’d first thought (and hoped). It seems that the old economy is just making itself over as the not-so-new economy. In this episode, I explore 3 processes of the old economy—speculation, financialization, and liquidation—to pinpoint how they’re showing up in our digital world of independent work.

I weave together the housing market, creator economy, Great Recession, and crypto promises to help you situate yourself in this strange, not-so-new world. At times, it’s a bleak story—but ultimately, understanding where we’re at gives us a better opportunity to make different, more humane choices.

EP 373: Should we lower our expectations? (Time & Money 2)

Feb 15, 2022 | Money & Life, Podcast, Time Management

We spend money on lots of tools designed to save us time and work. But all too often, those tools just end up raising our expectations. Why do work in less time when you could do more work in the same amount of time?! In this episode, I examine “the egg beater effect” and why we should, just maybe, lower our expectations a bit.

Money Is A Shared Delusion: Why How We Think About Money Matters

Feb 10, 2022 | Mindset & Identity, Money & Life, Productivity

“Time is money.” It’s a phrase you’ve heard before. And probably a phrase you’ve accepted as truth. And it’s certainly true that there are plenty of ways that time and money relate to each other. But a few months ago, I started to wonder: Is time really money? And if...

EP 372: What Is Money? with Paco de Leon (Time & Money 1)

Feb 8, 2022 | Money & Life, Podcast

“Time is money.” Ben Franklin gave us that chestnut in 1748—and ever since, we’ve been trained to think of our lives as opportunities for making a buck. This week, we start a series exploring the “time is money” construction. But before we think through how we spend our time, we’re going to think through money: what it really is, how we relate to it, and some of the factors that make it “weird.” I talk with Paco de Leon from the Hell Yeah Group and author of the brand-new book, Finance For The People.

EP 355: Cash Flow Is A Feminist Issue

Sep 21, 2021 | Business Models, Growth, Money & Life, Podcast

It’s easy to think 2-dimensionally about the money in your business: revenue and expenses. But 2-dimensional thinking makes it much harder to find the money to grow. If you can start to think 3-dimensionally (revenue + expenses + time), then you can expand your opportunities.

Managing for cash flow gives you a way to see the interconnected components of money in your business. Plus, it’s a way to powerful financial systems and live out feminist & anti-colonialist values.

Cash Flow Is A Feminist Issue

Sep 8, 2021 | Business Models, Growth, Money & Life

It takes money to start a business. Money can come in the form of a loan, a credit card, a savings account, or even pre-orders. Or, time and sweat equity become a proxy for money until there’s enough cold hard cash to invest in growth. It also takes money to grow a...

EP 341: Taking Better Care Of Each Other with Wanderwell Founder Kate Strathmann

Jun 15, 2021 | Money & Life, Operations, Podcast, Top Episodes

What can you do with your business if you look beyond your individual needs and your individual success?

That’s a really exciting question to me.

What kind of impact on the collective could this business have? How I can I use this business to meet others’ needs, too?

These questions don’t have many easy answers. But they’re fertile ground for imagining different ways of doing business.

It’s with this in mind that I want to share my conversation with Kate Strathmann. Kate and I share many similar concerns about the state of online business and the even the broader small business, freelance, and gig economies.

As always with my conversations with Kate, this might be confronting at times. You might be nodding along, digging on what we’re saying, and then all of a sudden feel a twinge of recognition that isn’t as nice.

But none of this is aimed at your personal responsibility for where we’ve gotten as a market or even the things you’ve done in your business.

Our goal is to explore some big, hard questions about how we do business and how we can better take care of each other.

Stay tuned to hear us talk about the messages we consume that make it hard to imagine things a different way, why focusing on individual success causes us to devalue the care work that goes into making our businesses work, and why small business owners feel trapped between the worker class and the owner class.

Plus, Kate offers some powerful questions for reframing the potential of your business and gets super pragmatic about the choices we can make without becoming a martyr for the sake of positive change.

EP 334: Creating Mental Space With Simple Changes

Apr 29, 2021 | Money & Life, Operations, Podcast

What’s the ROI on mental space?
What would it be worth to you to get some peace of mind?
What would you be willing to do to alleviate a bit of uncertainty from your life or business?
All this month, we’ve been talking about simplifying and the immense benefits you can experience by building a simple business.
We’re going to close things out here by taking a look at how operational improvements can create a profound sense of relief—and open up mental space that you didn’t even know was cluttered!

EP 330: Letting Go Of Complication With Brigitte Lyons & Sophy Dale

Apr 6, 2021 | Money & Life, Podcast

Today, we’re kicking off both a series on simplifying and a set of two episodes with businesses owners who have direct experience with dramatically simplifying their businesses—and in turn, creating immense growth.

Brigitte Lyons is the founder of Podcast Ally, a PR agency specializing in getting experts and idea people booked on podcasts.

Sophy Dale is a copywriting mentor, messaging coach, and brand storyteller who helps coaches, designers, and course-creators write compelling copy.

Both Brigitte and Sophy know what it’s like to run complicated, bloated businesses.

And both of them figured out what the real problem was they wanted to solve. For Brigitte, it was scope creep that caused her to always be reinventing systems and getting involved in projects she shouldn’t have. For Sophy, it was a lack of traction due to the fact that she was actually running three businesses so no one quite knew what she was offering when!

In this episode, we’re going to get into how they ended up with complex businesses in the first place, how they identified the need to simplify, and what the process of actually letting go of that complication looked like.

In next week’s episode, we’ll dive into how they actually restructured things, how doing business is different today, and what the results have been—hint: they’re both making more money.

What I Wish Every Small Business Owner Knew About Making More Money

Mar 31, 2021 | Business Models, Growth, Money & Life

More work doesn’t equal more money. More offers don’t equal more money. More marketing doesn’t equal more money. More lead magnets, more email subscribers, or more followers don’t equal more money. And, the flip side is also true. Making more money probably doesn’t...

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