What's up, guys. It's Brown Ambition Episode five.
So Mandy said, I can't say hey, hey hey anymore.
I just suggested nicely that perhaps she'd like to explore a different way of introducing herself to the podcast we're on.
But I like, hey hey.
So if you don't want me to say hey hey anymore, then, or if you do want me to say it, then tweet us at the BA podcast on Twitter at the BA podcast, and we're gonna take a vote.
Yay, hey, hey, hey, nay, hey hey.
Hey, Okay, fine, it's the democracy Twitter democracy. Well, let's start to show you guys today. We have an amazingly special show for you. This is not the Brown Ambition you would come to.
Know so far.
We have a special guest you're not just gonna keep hearing from us today. And her name what we call her our fairy money godmother. Yes, she truly is Lynette Califani Cox, aka the Money Coach. She is an amazing personal finance expert. She's all over the television, she's all over radio. She's authored more than a dozen books, including a New York Times bestseller called Zero Debt, The Ultimate
Guide to Financial Freedom. Lynette has come back from having one hundred thousand dollars in credit card debt to paying it all up in three years. She now owns her own company. She's owned it for well over a decade now. She was a former correspondent at Wall Street Journal and for CNBC.
She's been on opwah, The Big Oh of course, Yes, uh, Steve Harvey, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Doctor Phil, Doctor Oz. I mean, honestly, this is a woman who has hit all of the benchmarks.
She is our hero, she's our Shiro, and we are sharing her with you today and we just want this, We want this podcast to be all about Lynette, because she has so much wisdom and so much guidance, and she literally gave us life, yes for these forty five minutes that she was generous enough to speak with us. So, without further ado, here's our interview with Lynette called Fani.
Cox Brown Ambition Family. We have an extra special guest on today's.
Show, our fairy money godmother.
Yes, my mentor in my head, the awesome, the amazing, the extraordinary, Lynette Califani Cox.
I'll pay you guys one hundred dollars, I promised later. Okay, so you.
Know, it's so super fun what I do as a money coach because I get to kind of geek.
Out about my favorite topic. I'm talking about money.
All day long and doing it through a variety of different platforms. A huge part of what I do to teach people about personal finances is to make it understandable and fun and engaging and.
Just like the kind of stuff you talk to your sister or your friend or your mom about.
And the media in all its you know, various formats is one way that I can do just that.
So, Lenna, I know that you wound up at the Wall Street Journal, and you were there for several years. You were you had a recurring spot on CNBC as their personal finance correspondent for a long time, and then what happened you? Somehow, at some point you segued into being this money mogul and owning your own business, building your own brand, writing a dozen books. But can you walk us back to how you transition from a nine to five into the empire that you're building today?
Sure, what happened was that I got fired?
I mean, is there a delicate I mean, so I was with dal Jones for about ten years.
I was I went through a whole bunch of jobs. I was a bureau chief, I was a special writer and reporter. I was a.
Deputy managing editor and Wall Street Journal reporter for CNBC. So my last couple of years I was on air at CNBC and my official title was Wall Street Journal Report or for CNBC. But long story short, you know, it was one of the first waves of downsizing in the media business. And one day my boss came to me and to you know, two hundred other people and said, all you, you know, kind of six figure way journers, we can't afford you anymore.
You gotta go buy figures.
Oh my god, this was a different era.
Yeah, it totally was so but you know, the long and short of it is, I was like, oh.
It's not right, it's not fair. Hey wait, why me? You know, I went through that whole thing.
And then one of my friends who's still at the Journal today, Melanie Trumpman, and she was like, she was like ever so gingerly trying to tell me, well, Lynette, did you kind of always want to do your own thing and maybe this is you know, a cue for you to be an entrepreneur. And I was like, but I didn't want it this way, you know, I wanted to leave on my own terms, you know. So now I tell people that, you know, when you leave corporate America, it's typically with a feather or a baseball bat.
You know.
The feather is the nice party, the going away thing, and like, oh, she's going on to greener pastures or to retire, or to spend time with family or bigger project whatever. But the baseball bat is kind of like bam, they just hit you upside the head. You know, it's like goodbye. So but long story short, I really loved my time at Dawd Jones. And now I don't have any complaints. I mean, you see me, I go on CNBC all the time. Now, I did it probably about
five times this year. I'm still great friends over there, no problems. But I transitioned because I was forced to, and it turned out.
To be a blessing in disguise.
And I had my last day on air as a full time correspondent. I was a daily television reporter at CNBC. My last day on air was March first, two thousand and three, and that very same month I started my company, and so I made it work, you know, where's the wood for me to knock on?
You know?
And I just really never looked back. It's been a great ride ever since. And the twelve years now that I've owned my business have been so much fun, so amazingly surprising to me in terms of the opportunities that I've had, the fun that I've had, and the freedom that I've had, which is what I enjoyed most of all.
Now that sounds very nice, but I feel like starting a business must be difficult. Was there anything that can you take us, like to some real talk and what were some of the challenges that you found. I know Tiffany, obviously she's an entrepreneur, and you know she makes it look easy, as you both do, but I know there must be something. It can't be that easy.
A lot of ram and noodle nights.
And I'm not suggesting that there weren't hardships and that it wasn't difficult at times, because frankly, it very much was. In my case, I rated my four O one K, which I would obviously not recommend that anybody do in order to start a business and kind of get things going. I was in an unhappy marriage at the time, and I was you know, anticipating divorce, and I did obviously in fact divorced later and I.
Subsequently remarried in two thousand and seven.
But for me, it was sort of financial pressures, you know, loss of salary, going through a ton of money in terms of my retirement savings, going through a crumbling marriage.
And trying to hold it all together. And I was the only breadwinner in.
My family at the time because my ex husband, he was still in school. What was frankly supposed to be you know, kind of a five year program turned into six years and seven and eight and nine and ten and then eleven long years before he got his PhD. So I was the only one working during that time period. So yes, you know, the hardest part for me initially was the transition from having a big brand name behind you.
Because let me tell you, when you say I'm coming from the Wall Street Journal, people are gonna take your call. When you you know, pick up the phone and say you want to be interviewed on CNBC, it's like, how quickly can I get there? And so after that, because I knew I wanted to do the very same exact things that I had been doing. I wanted to talk about money. I wanted to write. I wanted to write books. I wanted to teach people about money. I wanted to
be on TV and leverage my journalism background. It's easier to do that when you have a big name behind you and a brand and that kind of platform than it is to establish the platform on your own. So for me, that was probably the biggest challenge of it all. And even through that, you know, there were trial and many trials and errors. I feel like the first couple books that I published, well, certainly the first one when I did investing success, oh my god, I spent so
much money. I wasted, frankly, so much money. And I'm glad that I learned the lessons though, because it really made me appreciate having both sides of the equation, knowing the traditional public world and knowing the self publishing world.
And again I looked out and that my husband happens to be a book agent, and so he taught me a lot of the ropes and showed me the things that I was doing incorrectly and that could be modified and improved upon, and the things that I could really do well that would leverage my own skill set and the things that I was, you know, just already kind of passionate about where I had connections and how I could sort of make one plus one equal three or four.
So you mentioned Earl. You know that he's your manager as well as your husband. Mandy and I were just both talking. We're both in long term relationships, and we were both just fantasizing on how how that would look with our booze and I just don't see it. I'm like, how because when I first met this is a whole.
New This is how much ty we have. This is a segment unto itself.
Ladies, Okay, what struck me when I first first met you a few years ago is that when you mentioned Earl then and even now, your faith lights up, you know, And I just love that. And I'm like, wow, not to say my face doesn't light up with boo but it's been two years, so you know, we're still new.
So how do you maintain that?
How do you work together and still maintain this amazing relationship.
Earl is truly my best friend, I mean, and we started off in a business capacity and I trusted him with a lot of things to kind of manage some things on the brand. Side for me to consult with me, to teach me what I didn't know, and I was always sort of attracted to the intellectual and creative side of him, and I always felt like, Gosh, this is somebody who I can and I like to learn a lot, and so I'm sort of more naturally attracted to people who.
Teach me stuff.
But even beyond that, I would say, we really do actively work at what is no question about it. The number one thing to strengthen any relationship, and certainly any
romantic relationship, which is communication. So I've had so many friends tell us because we have a home office and we literally sit side by side, we have our two macs set up, and some people have told me, in no uncertain terms, I would jump off the roof, Okay, I would slit my wrists if I had to work with my husband or my boyfriend in business all day long.
And they were like, you guys are like in the house, like all like twenty four to seven, you see each other in your work, And I'm like, yeah, pretty much, you know, so you really do.
Have to like the person.
But I will say this that since we were both previously married, Earl was married like in the I don't know, late eighties or nineties or something. You know, well before I met him in two thousand and three, two thousand and four time period. But he was in a bad marriage. I frankly was in an unhappy marriage. And we have so much gratitude now for having had a previous sort of negative experience that we can appreciate each other. And we were you know, we were older when we got married.
We you know, second time around.
Teaches you a lot.
You learn about yourself, You're a lot more mature. You understand what you can tolerate and what you can't. You know what your needs are, and you.
Learn a lot of lessons.
So I certainly don't put you know, everything for a failed marriage in the past on my ex because I know so much of what I did that contributed to the deterioration of the marriage, et cetera. But I also know now that I know what it takes to keep a marriage together and to keep it healthy and strong, And for us, a lot, a lot, a lot of
it is about communication. So many times, like when I talk to my mother on the phone if I'm tired, I'm like, oh, you know, Earl and I were up it was like two o'clock in the morning, but we were talking.
We were just talking in the bed and.
She's like, mmmm, y'all are talking and I'm like, no, we were seriously like talking, you know. But we're like always like bouncing off the you know, off the walls with ideas, and you know, the passion is there because we have the love interests, we have the partnership and the sort of affinity factor for one another. There's a tremendous amount of respect and we try to stay in
our own lanes. So you know, I had a photographer once who met us, and you know, after he kind of dealt with us for a couple of hours and he asked.
Us a lot about our business.
He said, ah, I get it. He said, Lynnette you're the Wow, and Earl you're the haw. And we were like, yeah, that's pretty much it.
Well, I feel like as a writer and I run into this too, I so very little want to acknowledge that people may be underestimating, underestimating my abilities as a woman of color, because I just you know, it's like you said, when people tell you not to do something, you just want to strive forward improve them wrong. And I never really think, well, are they not believing in me because of my color or is it just because of my gender? Have you ever you know, when you were going.
My god, totally, you know, Mandy, I experienced what you feel, probably threefold because of the area of financial writing that
I was doing. Can you imagine me being, you know, twenty seven years old writing for a Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and going to interview some investment bankers on Wall Street from Merrill Lynch, JP, Morgan, Chase, Solomon Brothers, talking to traders, investors, money managers, stockbrokers, investment analysts, and nine times out of ten I walked in the room, I was the only person of color, certainly frequently the
only woman. And I could just see, Okay, are they thinking, Hey, who is this woman?
Who is this black woman? Who is this young black woman? You know?
So in my head as a professional, I kind of always wanted to be older than I was, just to like eliminate that part of it, that part of the trifecta that was like a negative, you know. And so it was so funny because when I started, you know, when I dated Earle and I, you know, we got married and everything, and I was like, oh, you know. I was telling him things like oh, I can't wait to turn forty, and he was like, Lynette, slow your role, trust me, he said, I'm five years ahead of you.
I know you're saying this right now, but it gets different and you're gonna And it didn't happen until I was about maybe forty three forty four that I was like, oh, okay, I see what he's talking about. I was like, gosh, my eyes. I was like, I've never worn glasses. Do I like need glasses now? And I was like, what's going on with my body?
Come?
My body is changing so much?
And you know, I so identify though with that feeling like you just want you wish you were older, Like when I was just starting on as a reporter and I was you know, you know, I so identified talking to the stockburgers and traders and even now wealth managers.
YEP.
I wish my voice was deeper. I wish that I were older. I wish I sounded more professional, and eventually I just you know, I'm still working on it, but I just try and tell myself to just stop thinking about it, fake it.
Time, make it, and honestly, that's what you have to do.
You just have to kind of get over yourself and understand that if somebody is going to have those kind of preconceived notions and prejudices and sort of misconceptions about your capabilities, all you need to do is shine.
All you need to do is be excellent. All you need to.
Do is write copy that is so flawless that they're like, oh my god, this was a good story.
I can't I want her to interview me again.
I have never, ever once in my entire career had somebody come to me and say, oh, oh my god, this was so awful, this was bad, this was this was you know, this was totally wrong.
This was you know, have I had.
A correction ever or something that was a typo or something, Well, yes, I'm not gonna, you know, say, I'm like, you know, Christine perfect that kind of thing. But I'm saying substantively, nobody's ever been able to pick holes in my work ever, and so and it's because I hold myself to an extremely high standard of excellence and my sister Debbie and among the other people you know, taught me that. And
after a while, it's like, what can they do? They can't mess with you when you just you know when you're when you're when you're just doing you, and just so you just have to kind of put that stuff in the back of your mind, just go about your work and just do you. And honestly, Mandy, before you know it, you're gonna be like thirty two and you'll be thirty seven.
Then you'd be like, ooh, I remember Lene told me I'm thirty five and nine. I'm like, whoa, what did this happen?
Well.
One of the things that you said at FENCN that was so striking was at this conference we were all at last week was that you should never use someone else's success as your own bar of excellence. But I feel like I want to break that rule because I don't think I'll be doing myself a disservice if I make you my bar. Oh really down. I think I think I'll just keep reaching and maybe if I hit that level, I'll be even if I don't have If I get one level below that, I'll bet.
That's so so flattering. I'm so humble to hear you say that.
But you know what, I read the ten X rule by Grant Cardone and he was talking about competition and just different things. And he's like, crush the competition, you just dominate, you know. But his philosophy is in large part outwork everybody be willing to do ten times as much. And I'm like, I totally identify with that because I'm a hustler and I believe in hard work, and I
have a tremendous work ethic. But he also said something that was I think very relevant when he said if you must, he was like, if you must benchmark yourself against somebody, make make it somebody that's so epically beyond your plane. And and and Mandy, I am not epically beyond your plane. Don't don't say oh I want to be you know still and that I'm I want you to like go to like Oprah level. Okay, here, something
that's the that's ten x thinking. It's the it's the idea that you go well, well way beyond your kind of wildest imagination. So for the person who said, you know what, yeah, I'm making one hundred thousand dollars and my goal is to make five hundred thousand dollars a year, why not say my goal is to make five million a year, Because then it's sort of like that expression you've heard, you know, kind of you know, reach.
For the moon or or the sun or the stars or whatever, and at least you'll fall among the stars or whatever the expression is.
It's to get you to go way, way, way out of your comfort zone and to just go for enormous stretch goals and then you'll surprise yourself. You'll see like, holy cow, this actually you know, this actually worked.
And what's the worst that could happen if it doesn't work?
You know, for the person who says, for example, or I want to make five hundred thousand, if they could have said, oh, I want to make one hundred and fifty thousand, But if their creativity, efforts, hard work pushes them to say five hundred thousand is the goal, even if they fall short and they come up with three hundred thousand dollars, that's better than them having benchmark themselves to say, oh, I want to make one fifty because now they actually got a result that was twice as
much as they thought they could achieve.
So I believe in just like going for it for the max.
And like I said, I never if somebody tells me I can't do something, Oh, that's that's like.
You know, it's on.
You know, people told me, oh, you know, you need reviews for your books, and you know, especially if you want to get on New York Times Bestsellers. Listen, they would tell me this one and that one, and they were saying, you know, get in USA today, and I said, okay, well USA today it is. And then people started saying to me, well, you know, USA today they don't review self published books. And I was like, watch, and don't you know zero Debt was reviewed in USA today as well.
So so just they're all these artificial barriers. Don't let other people's limited thinking or other people's success be your benchmark, because nobody knows what you're capable of, and frankly, even you don't even know until you try, until you go for it.
I wondered if you could offer some just general advice to anyone who's listening out there, who is at a point of transition in their life and they're maybe thinking of branching out and tapping into that entrepreneurial spirit. What would you, you know, what kind of advice would you give them?
For anybody who's thinking about making the transition from employee to business owner, I really would encourage them to go for it, but to do so in a strategic fashion. I'm not one of those entrepreneurs who kind of poo poos people who work in corporate America or the person who has a nine to five. On the contrary, I think that a lot of people should stay put and should kind of make it work and should learn from
the positions that they currently occupy. But if you have that kind of passionate fire in your belly and you just know that you're meant to run your own show, I think that you have to be strategic about planning your escape.
And so you need to do things like thinking through your.
Finances and you know how long it'll be before you're profitable. You need to make sure that you have a good potential client base some body out there who wants to pay for the products and services that you might offer.
And I don't.
Feel that entrepreneurs should just kind of, you know, willing nelly roll the dice and gamble and kind of say, you know, bet the farm, so to speak, and say I'm just going to hope and pray that it happens. That to me is an imprudent way to go about entrepreneurship. You know, we hear all the stats about you know, six out of ten or seven out of ten, depending on who's numbers. You believe six out of ten businesses
failing within the first five years. And frankly, you don't want to be a statistic so try to do everything upfront to stack the deck in your favor and to reduce the odds that if you don't want to go back to a nine to five or to corporate America, that you won't have to do so because you're forced into it for financial reasons.
Lynette, you are our money fairy, our fairy money godmother. I really feel that way. Thank you so much. Yeah for taking the time and joining our little podcast and spreading that beautiful entrepreneurial gospel sounds good.
Thank you ladies, and continue success to you both.
Thank you, Thanks Lynette.
Byebye bye bye.
No, didn't we tell you how amazing Lynette was. Honestly, me and Manny don't even have anything to add.
Except please let us know what you think about this week's podcast. You can hit us up on Twitter at the BA Podcast, email us at Brown Ambition Podcast at gmail dot com, and please leave us a review It helps people find us on iTunes. It makes sure that we can keep on doing this. Just go to iTunes find the Brown Ambition Podcast leave a review. It takes literally just a few seconds of your time. And we're
also doing a really fun giveaway. We're gonna pick one lucky winner this month who leaves the iTunes review, and the prize is an amazing tote bag courtesy of the Finance Bar Miss Marsha Barnes. Thank you so much. It's super cute. You can see a picture of it on our website right now, Brown Ambition podcast dot com. And also Tiffany a copy of Tiffany's best selling book, The Live Richer Challenge.
Yes, so we will see you on the flip side.
Bye, guys, see you guys next week. Buye