Master Your Money with Wealth Coach Natalie Bullen

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Meet Natalie Bullen

Natalie Bullen is a wealth and money mindset coach from Mobile, AL.

As the owner of Unapologetic Wealth, she teaches financial empowerment, money mindset, and sales training for female service based entrepreneurs, especially BIPOC women, so they can step into the wealth they deserve and desire.

An anti-hustle and pro-abundance coach, she shuns traditional personal finance values rooted in shame, guilt and fear and encourages followers to dream bigger, increase their prices and magnify their gifts.

Episode Transcript

I am here today with Natalie Bullen, who is a wealth and money mindset coach from Mobile, Alabama. As the owner of Unapologetic Wealth, she teaches financial empowerment, money mindset, and sales training for female service-based entrepreneurs, especially BIPOC women, so that they can step into the wealth they deserve and desire.

She’s an anti-hustle and pro-abundance coach. She shuns traditional personal finance values that are rooted in shame, guilt, and fear, and encourages her followers to dream bigger, increase their prices, and magnify their gifts. Natalie, thank you for joining us today.

I’m really excited to talk about something that we haven’t really gotten into on the podcast yet, talking about money. That can be a really stressful topic. It can be really intimidating, and I’m really hoping that you can come in here and clear some stuff up for us and get us pointed in the right direction.

I hope so. I am so excited to be here. I love talking about money, and I think it is an intimidating topic for most people.

I love to remove the fear and the shame and the guilt out of how people feel about their finances. I’m excited to be here. Fantastic.

And like you just said, the fear, the shame, the guilt, and all of that can have an impact on our mental health, and especially if we’re business owners, it can be really intimidating if you are just starting a business or you’re not really sure how to manage your finances. In the beginning, all you care about is making enough money to keep the doors open, but at some point, we need to kind of get into a more strategic financial planning and like, what are we doing with our money and what does a successful and profitable business look like in terms of like a balance sheet? So we’re going to dig into that. So I like to do this with all my guests.

I like to start with your backstory. So what brought you to this point of, you know, where you are today and what you offer to your clients? I was a rule follower. I always have been.

I was a straight A student. I never got in trouble. I never been suspended.

I’ve never been in a fistfight. I’ve always been really respectful and I’ve always followed authority. I voted as a good person.

And I went off to college, as all good children do, and I made good grades and I had a scholarship and I worked two jobs, and none of it really shielded me from the fact that I was poor or lower middle class. I worked low wage jobs all through college. I waited tables.

No one ever said, Natalie, as smart as you are, why are you waiting tables? Everyone said, oh, kudos to you. You’re such a hard worker. Congratulations.

And I got ingrained in the spirit of, in order for you to be successful, you have to work really hard. And I became that hard worker and I embodied that. And I wore it as a badge of honor, the exhaustion, the obesity, the malnourishment, the poverty, I felt really good about how hard I was working, despite the fact that I had nothing to show for it.

I lived in a one bedroom apartment and drove an old car. And through a series of unfortunate, successive events, a bad breakup, a job loss, a health scare, I ended up filing bankruptcy with a FICO score over 700. And it crushed me.

I was not prepared. I really thought that my years of on time payments were going to shield me. I thought that it mattered that I had been working for a decade.

And, you know, yeah, I had a little rough patch. My creditors would work with me. Right.

And, you know, yeah, I’ve never made a lot of money, but I’ve always been to work on time. That matters. Right.

None of that mattered. Glory, none of it. And I realized that the rules I’m following are destined to keep me poor.

There’s a rule book we follow in this country called The American Dream. And it keeps poor people poor. It keeps middle class, middle class.

It keeps rich people rich. We’re in a caste system of sorts. And what’s scary, we don’t know we’re in a caste system.

And I decided, you know, I’m going to educate myself on how money really works. I’m going to get in banking. And I did.

And I realized that most banks and most bankers are trained to be product focused. When you go into a bank, they talk to you about their products, their checking, their savings, their mortgage, their credit cards. They don’t really talk to you about earning more money.

That’s not something I’ve ever heard a personal banker that wasn’t me talk about their clients. And when I would talk to my clients about how they can make more money and get better jobs and start businesses, I would get chastised. Natalie, why are you taking so long with customers? Natalie, why are you telling them all that stuff? Natalie, why are you getting so personal with customers? I said, well, maybe he’s right.

Maybe I should move more into the affluent segment. Maybe I should become a licensed banker. So I did.

I got licensed with FINRA. I got my six and my 63 and my 65. And I moved to be a brokerage associate.

And I stopped seeing black people altogether. They moved me to a branch where I was the only black person. I was the only black person for five years.

And I was the only woman that wasn’t a teller. And every meeting was me and white men who were either retired or almost retired. 60, 65, 68, 72, 80 years old.

I had maybe two black clients in five and a half years. And that’s because our minimum at the firm is 250,000. So if you did not have 250,000 in investible assets, not net worth.

I’m talking cash or cash equivalent or money in a brokerage account. Then you couldn’t even get a meeting. You couldn’t even get your foot in the door.

And I’m like, well, how do Gen Xers build wealth? How do Gen Y people build wealth? How do millennials get wealth? How do black people get wealth? How do Hispanic people, how do divorced women get wealth? If it take a quarter million to even get a meeting, like an initial meeting. I said, this is flawed. And I said, well, why is it this way? And somebody said, well, we get paid based on the assets under management.

We get paid 1% roughly. So you’ve got to have a big balance for 1% to make sense. So on that 250,000, they’re only getting 2,500 a year to manage that account.

That’s not a lot of money when you really get to thinking about meeting two, three times a year and keeping the notes and the regulations and the taxes. It’s 2,500 bucks, right? But that’s the system that I found myself in. I found myself in a system of people who didn’t look like me ever.

I never had a client my age, not one ever. And it dawned on me, I’m going to be 70 before I win at this system. Like there’s a reason I don’t have any 30 year old clients because 30 year old clients can’t replicate this system.

So I’m just going to make a new system. And I started unapologetic wealth and I do flat fee based financial planning. Meaning you don’t have to have a quarter million or half million or a million or 10 million.

You don’t even have to have 100,000 or 50,000 or 20,000 or 10,000 or 5,000. If you’ve got a business and an income and a savings, we’re good to go. And if you’re not at the point where you need a planner, I could coach you.

And I’m a money mindset coach, I’m a sales coach, I’m damn good at both. And I help people step into the wealth that they deserve and desire. So that’s me, I built a better mousetrap.

I love this. Let’s talk a little bit about money mindset because a couple of things that you mentioned about your story jumped out at me. One of them was in your scenario where you said you had received the message that be a hard worker, it’ll pay off.

Go in, wear the badge of exhaustion, poor health, poor nutrition, all these things to show how hard you’re working. And that is somehow going to pay off and it didn’t. So where do we get this, you know, making money or being successful needs to be a result of hard work.

Probably Henry Ford in recent history. That’s your, all right. Yeah.

Man, all of that. So, I mean, that is just such garbage, right? So I want to talk about how do they- And it’s not true. The poorest person you know is the most hard working person you know.

Like it’s just flat out not true. Wealthy people aren’t working hard. Only 10% of their income even comes from wages.

They get dividends. It’s all hard. They’re making that money.

Their money is hard working hard. They’re not working hard. They’re not working hard, no.

But they’re in that position where they have, you know, they’ve leveraged some kind of asset to get to the point where they could then, it becomes kind of a self-licking lollipop, right? Where it just starts to work for itself, right? So then it just, it just doesn’t work and they just kind of sit there and manage it or they hire you to manage it or they, you know, they get somebody to kind of keep an eye on it, making sure that ball keeps rolling. But the rest of us, right, we’re over here trucking along, doing our thing, thinking that all we got to do is put in the time, get the degree, work the long hours, give up our free time, give up our family time. And then it’s all going to pay off.

And that is baloney. Yes. Where is the shift right there? Where where can we make a little tweak in that mindset? What can we replace that that thought with instead of making money, you know, needs to be hard or hard work leads to making money? I think people should look at the facts first.

If hard work worked, why hasn’t it worked yet? Why are you still paycheck to paycheck? Why are you still working two jobs? Why do you still have student loan debt? Why is your husband can’t take the vacation that you all want because he can’t get time off work? Why do your children have to take out student loans? Why can’t you pay off your home early? Why are you struggling with credit card debt? If you’re a hard worker and you work hard and you believe that hard work works, then why isn’t it working for you? That was what I came up with. It’s not working. You have to assess.

I think every year, every quarter, you should assess your friends, your neighborhood, your home, your family, your job. You should make an assessment. I made an assessment that following the rules wasn’t working.

Working hard wasn’t working. I was still broke and I didn’t want to be broke anymore. So I was like, you know what? Let me model myself after people who aren’t broke.

Let me watch wealthy people and talk to them. They’re not working 70 hours. They’re not working two jobs.

They’re not doing the snowball method. They’re not clipping coupons. They’re not on restrictive budgets.

They’re not forgoing Starbucks. I knew you were going to say that. Yes, you have a lot to say.

Why do they tell our people get shamed out of drinking coffee? Rich people get to have coffee all the time. But it’s kind of clever if you think about it. You look at like the Hatfields and the McCoys.

They were so busy fighting amongst themselves that other people were able to kind of do whatever they wanted in that town because all the energy. So if you get the poor people in the middle class, people fighting with each other, then no one’s really messing with the rich people. Right.

Which is a good position. If you’re a rich person, right? That’s a good position to be in. But that realization has to kind of be a gut punch, right? Especially if you’ve lived your life up to this point.

I’m going to say is a gut punch. So getting to the point where you’re realizing that everything, all the baloney you’ve been fed is, you know, it’s not it’s not true. So let’s talk a little bit about financial empowerment.

Yeah. What does that term mean? I think financial empowerment is when you realize that money is a tool. It is neutral.

It is not good or bad. It’s an inanimate object that can propel you forward towards your goals if you so choose. I think it’s a space of enlightenment.

Most people fear money and thus they repel it. They don’t want to charge high ticket because frankly, they think they’re bad with money and they’re afraid that someone’s going to pay them $10,000 and they’re going to blow it. They’re not going to pay their taxes right.

They’re not going to file something. Someone’s going to sue them. They’re going to have a charge back.

Like they’ve already built up a whole negative dialogue around. If someone pays me $10,000, then X is going to happen. So see, they’ve already priced themselves into poverty and then they’ve locked themselves into it with their scarcity mindset of “who’s going to pay me that? What bad thing is going to have more money, more problems?” That’s a really common thing that we talk about.

But it’s not necessarily true. Poor people have problems because they don’t have the resources to solve them. Like that, that’s a problem.

If you are sick and you have money, you can get well. If you are sick and you are poor and you don’t have health insurance and you’re homeless, you probably won’t get well. Like so, yes, there are problems when you’re wealthy, but you typically have, like you mentioned earlier, the network, the resources and the income to solve said problem.

Most entrepreneurs are under capitalized. So there are problems in their business. Their systems are a mess.

They don’t have a CRM. They don’t have the right tech equipment in their home. They don’t have a home office.

Their kids are running, screaming, interrupting their calls, making them look real unprofessional. Their prescription on their glasses is out to date. They’re squinting in the screen.

They can barely see. But because they don’t have any money, because they’re afraid of money and they don’t want to actually collect money and they price at that level of fear, they can’t ever level up what they need to do to fix it. So they have these problems for years and years and years and years.

I know people who have the same business problem for a better part of a decade, but they don’t have a capital to fix it. So financial empowerment is saying, you know what? I control money. Money is under my command.

I have dominion over. It’s my money. It’s mine.

I am a steward over this money. I’m allowed to do things with it. And all of my dollars have jobs and they like jobs.

They like to be busy. They like to have purpose. My dollars are so happy right now because they get to like be doled out and in such a fastidious manner.

You know, they know each other. They have a camaraderie. They grow.

They multiply. They are friendly. They’re everything I’m not.

And they never tire. It’s really remarkable what my dollars are out there doing. And that’s because I love them and they love me back.

And there’s just a fear out there around. I’m going to screw up my money. And I’m like, can’t screw up what you don’t have.

If you had more money, you could hire some help. Get an accountant and a bookkeeper. That is probably the turning point for every entrepreneur.

And honestly, a lot of W-2 workers could benefit from having an accountant or a bookkeeper. To be honest, that’s not just an entrepreneurial thing because tax planning is year round. And once you get up over $150,000, $200,000, and the middle class tax breaks start to phase out, with being able to write off, say, your contributions to your traditional IRA, hiring somebody is a blessing.

But how are you going to hire them if you don’t have any money? It always comes back to you got to get over that fear of money. And that’s part of why I work with a lot of therapists as well, because some things are outside the scope of what I can fix. Some stuff is literal childhood trauma, and I think that should be addressed as well.

Maybe not today, but I think people should address this. Some of this is not money mindset or pricing. Some of this is flat out unhealed trauma.

And I think you have some resources, maybe some links to books or content or something that I can put in the show notes. For anybody who wants to read more about this, I will definitely be putting that in the show notes. So check for that.

But let’s talk about what you just said. Sounds like a lot of this is rooted in self-worth, self-esteem, believing what you’re capable of. And again, a lot of that does come from childhood.

But let’s talk about as a business owner and you’re starting at fear-based pricing and really being afraid to charge more. And that can also tie back into fear, self-worth, not so much that I don’t trust myself to manage the money, but am I worth somebody paying this money? And that happens too. I think we should remove ourselves from the outcome of a sales call or the outcome of a pricing discussion.

It’s not your job to come up with the money that your client needs to pay you with. It’s not your job to work out their budget, right? So if Laurie was pitching me something right now and it was $25,000, it’s not Laurie’s job to help me come up with $25,000. Her job is to produce a product with enough value that makes me want to pay her $25,000.

So a lot of why people are uncomfortable with their pricing is because they’re focused on the wrong thing. They’re focused on no one’s gonna pay me that. How can someone pay me that? How can I find someone who’s gonna pay me that? Where is she gonna come up with the money? My client’s a single mom.

My client’s a black woman. My client’s a first generation Latino. Her parents grew up in Mexico and she’s the first person here.

She doesn’t have that kind of money. My client, my client, my client, my client. So instead of bettering their programs, improving their self-worth, crafting irresistible messaging, they’re in their client’s pocketbook, rummaging around for loose change, hoping that there’s a check down in there somewhere that they can pay a small deposit.

It’s no wonder you can’t sell if you’re focused on the wrong thing. When I get on the sales call, I’m focused on showing the value of the service. That’s it.

That is my entire premise. No, I wanna show my personality as well, but that’s gonna come out. But I wanna show the value of the service.

If you hire me, this is what you get and this is why it’s important. And this is how it ties back into what problem you told me you have. So I think if you’re in that scarcity-based pricing model right now where you’re charging just enough hoping that someone will buy it or if you’re afraid of rejection and you’ve priced it low enough to where you think you’ll always get a yes, I wanna give you two pieces of just thought material.

One, would you buy the cheapest option in a grocery store? You go in a grocery store and there’s 20 different boxes of cereal. Do you buy the cheapest one? If you go in a grocery store and you need tire monitor, if you need baby bottles, if you need formula for your baby, do you buy the cheapest formula? When you look for a new hairdresser, do you look for the cheapest hairdresser? For most people, price is not the biggest determinant. It’s certainly not the only one.

Me, I have a big speaking gig in Texas in August. I am not looking for the cheapest hairdresser because I’m gonna be on stage in front of 12,000 people. I need my hair to be laid.

I need people to go, oh my God, her hair is gorgeous. Her makeup is stunning. Did you see her dress in her shoes? She looked like money.

So price is barely even a determinant. I want value and quality. So ask yourself, what makes you different than your client? If you think that the client you’re serving is only interested in price and that they only care about the cheapest, one, why are you serving them? That doesn’t sound ideal.

And two, how do you ever become profitable that way? I think sometimes we forget that the person we serve isn’t who we have to serve. So when I worked at the bank, I worked with the public and anyone who came into the branch, I had to serve them. It didn’t matter if they didn’t like black people and said it openly out loud.

It didn’t matter if they thought I was a junior associate or a secretary or a janitor. Yes, those are real things that happened to me. It doesn’t matter if they use racial slurs.

It doesn’t matter. Nope, I have to serve them when you work with the public. So why would you start a business where you got the same problem as when you work with the public? Why would you do it? One of my mentors likes to say, you need to treat your business like a private club, like a country club instead of a public park and don’t let people come in and pee on your trees.

So stop letting people who aren’t ideal get into your funnel and put the ideal back in ideal client avatar. If the person you sell to can’t pay, they’re not ideal. Think about it.

Ideal means dream, utopia, perfect, best, superlative. It doesn’t mean good enough. If your ideal client can’t pay, they’re not ideal.

It’s as simple as that. You just got to up level who you sell to. What do people need to be before they qualify to pay you? What do people need to do before they qualify to pay you? And what do people need to have before they qualify to pay you and work with you? Stop letting people’s budgets, perceived budget at that.

I actually know how much some of my clients have because some of my clients, I’m their financial planner and I’ll have like tax returns. Like I know beyond a shadow without what they earn. But 99% of people have no clue what their clients actually make, especially when they’re still prospects.

Laura, you don’t know how much I earn? You know I do. You never seen my tax returns. You never seen my bank account.

So it would be silly for you to try to sell me something based on what you think I can’t afford because you don’t know that number. But you know what number you do know? What your mortgage is, what your life insurance is, your health insurance, your business insurance, your errors and omission, the podcasting equipment, the office you’re sitting in, your husband’s health insurance, your kid’s health insurance, your title and fees and taxes, your estimated quarterly tax payment, your bookkeeper, your accountant, your coach, your lawyer, your contracts, your payment processing fees. These are numbers that you probably know.

So why would you price on data you don’t have? I.e. how much money my client has and how badly they value a transformation. Cause I’ll tell you, I hired a $10,000 coach as my first coach and I ain’t had $10,000. I’m gonna go tell you the truth.

I put it on a credit card. So you pricing based on perceived client income, perceived client tenacity and resourcefulness and how badly they want a transformation which are three variables you don’t know. When you could price on all your known valuables.

So why would you not do the latter? I feel like people should price from the top. The lifestyle I want, not priced from the bottom, what people can afford. Can we talk for a minute just to tap into what the numbers that you do know and also the value of what you provide? Yes, that as well.

I like to tell people a three year value. When I have clients, I go, what is the three year value of working with you? Cause lifetime is nebulous. You don’t know how long people are going to live and you don’t know the season with which people will actually invest.

And, but three years, most people will agree that their client will live another three years and will value from their offer another three years. So if the value of your service is $30,000 over three years, well then it probably shouldn’t be $199. And by selling it at $199, you’re incongruent.

And I don’t know that anyone ever talks about what happens when you price yourself out of alignment with your transformation. So I met a health and wellness coach. So I met with her and she talked about health and wellness and nutrition and diet and exercise and wholeness and healing and herbal supplements.

It was a lot. And I was like, man, why did I get on the phone with this one? This is going to be like $15,000. You know what I’m saying? Like she’s listing out the value.

And I’m like tallying it up in my mind. And I’m like, wow, one-on-one group, exercise, emails, boxer. I’m like, damn, this is, I’m running up quite a tab.

Like the whole time she goes, and so it’s $699. I was like, I’m sorry, what? And I was like a month for like a year. And she was like, well, you know, if you want to keep going and then you can work this out, like you could hear her like, I’m saying it sounds cheap.

You mean it’s more. But just me mentioning the price, like a question, she started to downsell herself from the 6.99. Like she read it as an objection. I wasn’t making an objection.

I was making an incredulous statement of how could it be so cheap? But like at the very first hint of, oh my God, I might lose this sale. She started to talk herself down even more. It was easy 15K in value.

I didn’t invest with her because she might be the best at what she does, but she’s not in a viable business model. And I worry about hiring somebody who’s going to have to go out of business in two or three months because they realized that they’re broke. And two, are you as good as you claim if you can’t put a price out there that honors your talent and value? You went to school to be a nutritionist.

You’re excellent as a physical trainer. You’re going to give me all this one-on-one time and you’re going to charge me peanuts. That makes me nervous.

I want an expert because my life is on the line. I can’t hire a novice. And if you price yourself like a novice, I’m going to believe you’re a novice, even if you’re an expert.

So unfortunately, some people are losing out on money, not because they’re too expensive, but because they’re too cheap. What they’re charging is out of alignment with the value that they are offering and they are creating mistrust with their clients. And I think that the reason that a lot of them do that is they’re so used to hearing objections because of the prevalence we’re seeing a lot of like fitness apps and the information out there that maybe they’re used to hearing objections.

So at the first hint of it, they’re backpedaling. But I like objections. I love objections.

Objections mean you’re considering it. The worst thing that can happen on a sales call is for a person to go, I have no questions. Because they’ve already made up their mind.

Right, and they’ve already made up their mind and their mind is a no. Like if people go, no, I have no questions, no, no, no, come on, y’all aren’t. Unless you’re the best salesperson in the world and you have a comprehensive sales process that leaves no stone unturned, or unless you have a very compelling client attraction system that pre-sales people before they get on the phone with you, wink, wink.

If they have no questions, that’s a bad sign. So I like when people start to ask questions because that means they’re actually considering giving me their money. They’re thinking about it.

Like I said, before we had Spuck has had two sales calls in one. And one of them, she had an objection. She didn’t wanna start right away and she wanted to know if we could start in March or April.

I said, sure, if you paid a deposit and signed the contract, I’ll hold a space for you. There’s no problem at all. That wasn’t an objection.

That was a fact finding because I let her know I work with people in this timeframe and we could start as soon as this date. So she just wanted to make sure if she paid me the money that she wasn’t gonna lose it because she couldn’t start on that date. That’s not an abject, oh my God, I’m never gonna pay you.

And even if somebody gave me an outright price objection, be thinking about how you can overcome those, right? Like flat out, like what’s a common objection that people give when they don’t wanna buy something? It’s too expensive. Laurie, you’re right. My service is expensive.

I appreciate you acknowledging that. I wanna take a moment here to coach you a little, if I may, is that okay? Absolutely.