Listen to financial expert Kelley Keehn on how to manage your career as if it were a corporation: You, Incorporated.
Are you ready to elevate your career? The job market is evolving faster than ever, and adapting to these changes has become critical.
In this episode of Smart Advice we dive into a conversation with Kelley Keehn, author, entrepreneur and financial educator, on how to manage your career as a business.
Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your journey, learning how to align your career with your financial goals can make all the difference in building a more secure and successful future.
Resources
[07:29] Kelley: “Whatever it is, you use your calendar to hold you accountable.”
[16:52] Kelley: “Now, maybe you're buying rental properties, and you don't tell your advisor that. That's kind of a side hustle would definitely affect your portfolio.”
[18:56] Kelley: “One thing I can definitely say is, don't wait, I've written 11 books because I don't wait. If I have something that's popped into my head, I act on it as quickly as humanly possible.”
Kelley Keehn is an accomplished financial educator, entrepreneur, and passionate consumer advocate. She is dedicated to making financial literacy accessible and empowering individuals to take control of their financial futures. Kelley has authored 11 books on personal finance, including Talk Money to Me, and has become a trusted voice in helping Canadians transform their relationship with money.
Kelley’s work emphasizes the importance of treating your career as a valuable asset and aligning financial goals with professional growth, making her a leading expert in personal finance and career strategy. One of her most effective mantras that helped shape her financial success was treating her career as an asset.
Connect with Kelley Keehn on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or X . Visit her website for more resources.
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Carissa: Welcome to Smart Advice, a podcast connecting you with real financial advice, investment strategies, and economic trends, empowering you with insights you need to make smart decisions about your money. I'm CIBC financial advice expert, Carissa Lucreziano.
Across the country, there are more than 20 million employed Canadians working to earn a living. It's no surprise that money is a big motivator in most people's careers, as the income you earn directly affects the ability to afford day to day expenses and build long term financial security.
Today, half of Canadian professionals have plans to seek a new job in the second half of 2024 with 60% stating the goal of increased income potential as the driving factor for a new endeavor, according to research from the Robert Half business consulting firm. At the same time, many Canadians have been experiencing changing dynamics in the job market, fueling new career plans.
The pandemic transformed the way employers and employees feel about remote work and spurred many people to find new jobs, seeking the opportunity for increased flexibility, with an appetite to retrain for entirely new careers. With the shift and evolution in the workforce culture and the awareness to keep ahead of inflation, many Canadians are refocusing on their career goals and how to continue to grow their earning potential, to maximize their financial well-being.
As a woman who runs her own business, financial educator and best-selling author Kelley Keehn believes in the mantra: think of yourself as a corporation. Mapping out a set of personal standards, habits, and values that act as a blueprint for how you live your life and approach your career. Investing in yourself and treating your career like a valuable asset can help you achieve the financial goals that matter most to you: like having the ability to accelerate savings, invest to build future wealth, provide adequate income to fund retirement, purchase a vacation property or pay for your children's education.
Along with being an entrepreneur, Kelley is an accomplished speaker, consumer advocate, consultant, and media personality. She's the author of 11 books on a range of finance topics and has built her career on advocating for financial literacy and helping Canadians transform their relationship with money. As someone whose career also centers around a passion for helping people improve their financial well being for the future, I'm so pleased to be speaking with Kelley today.
Kelley, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for joining me in this conversation.
Kelley: Carissa, it is my pleasure. I love your podcast. I'm a huge fan, so I'm honored to be one of your guests. I know you've had some incredible ones on your podcast so far.
Carissa: Thank you so much. This is a highlight for me to have you on. And so let's jump right in. I love this concept, I love this topic. The mindset of treating yourself like a corporation is something you began advocating several years ago. In your 2008 book, She Inc., you wrote that adopting this mindset helped you open doors, create opportunities, lucky breaks within your career. And the concept is very intriguing, where you talk about the idea of holding yourself to a certain standard the same way a corporation would set its policies.
So how did you come to realize the importance of this strategy, and what success can people achieve by embracing this mindset?
Kelley: Yeah, this is definitely one of my favorite topics. It was my least popular book, but my favorite book to write. I don't know why. It's a hard thing for people to do and to get their heads around. So it's interesting that a lot of my books were written so long ago that it was very anecdotal, Carissa, but now there's empirical evidence supporting a lot of what I was writing about.
So for example, if you just take one thing in thinking of yourself as a corporation, and we can back up of what I mean by that. But one of the tactical strategies is to think about, you know, every corporation has their policies, their standards, their mission, and they communicate that out to the public and their employees. And what if we thought of ourselves like that and wrote those things down. If nothing more, but to help with decision fatigue.
I mean, we've heard so much about that over the years that our bandwidth is stretched. We're making so many decisions by nine o'clock in the morning that it's simply exhausting. Like, what are you going to wear? Are you going to work out? Aren’t you going to workout? Like all of these things, if you actually strategically write them out and make your own agreements. Like Barack Obama with his six suits, you only have so much to choose from. I can't tell you how much it frees up your mind for creativity for other things.
So, yeah, this is not an idea that I originated. This was from an audio program I listened to when I was 18 years old by Les Brown, and it was this idea of his, and I leaned in wholeheartedly. I remember pulling the car over on my way to work, and started to draft my corporate policies, and I update them continuously. And then I was honored to have the opportunity in 2008 to kind of put pen to paper with that mindset in She Inc.
Carissa: Yeah. It's very interesting. And so like, if you want to start thinking of yourself as the CEO of You Inc., where do you start? How do you set these realistic goals? How do you remove some of that noise to really kind of hone in?
Kelley: I should mention that when I came out with this book, there was this conversation about employee versus entrepreneur versus intrapreneur. We don't use that word anymore. I think it's more like side gigs. I'm dating myself here, but it's like, I really think thinking of yourself as a corporation works for everyone, regardless of where you are in your career trajectory.
Now, obviously it's something you maybe think about a little bit more if you're a business owner and entrepreneur, but when I was in the financial industry, I still employed this type of thinking. What's your brand, what's your mission? What is it that you stand for, that you want to stand for? Maybe you can't quite get there yet, because maybe you have some constraints of where you work, or maybe you're unemployed, or you’re career transitioning.
But in a perfect world, what does this You Inc. look like? Write it down your name, incorporate it. I mean, just think of what a business might structure as their corporate policies. You know, we want really positive people, or we want thought leadership. We open at this time, we close at this time. I think also this is so important, Carissa, as a lot of people still are hybrid, are working virtually. I know I personally have to actually have times I shut my work off because I just could work for 36 hours straight.
So it's putting this stuff down and then actually holding yourself accountable by putting it in your calendar. Now you don't want to clutter your calendar so much that you have just rigidity, but you want to make sure that what's important to you, if it's time with your kids, if it's time with your parents, if it's working out, if it's self care, or if it's working on a new project that's going to trump everything in the next quarter.
Whatever it is, you use your calendar to hold you accountable. And I don't know about you, but if it's in my calendar and I'm getting a reminder and I've said I'm going to work out, or I'm going to visit my mom or I'm going to do this thing, it's a lot more likely. It's not 100% foolproof, but it's an accountability buddy that has served me very well over the years.
Carissa:Yeah, it's that planning. And there is a lot that we are in control of, and that's kind of what I'm hearing from what you're describing. And I think we're in control of a good amount of our day and just finding that niche. Of course, there's going to be things that come in or out, but there's a lot that's within our control.
So the job market, as I mentioned, is ever-changing. There's different skills that are now in demand and industries are evolving. Today's young adults are more likely to change jobs or careers over the course of their working lives compared to other generations. You need to be adaptable to advance your career and create new opportunities for yourself.
So when it comes to staying relevant, what can Canadians do to give themselves a competitive edge in the job market?
Kelley: So again, bringing it back to my thinking of a corporation analogy, it's a powerful perspective shift, because if you're a business owner, you probably have advisors you're talking to. So again, who are your advisors? Who are your mentors, who are people you can reach out to on LinkedIn to say, “Where is it that I could potentially grow?” Like we have so many blind spots that we sometimes need a sounding board to help us see where to go or what's possible for us, what you think is just fun and inherent as a talent or a trait, maybe something that someone else sees as a totally new career possibility for you.
Now, because I always thought of myself as a corporation, when you have a company, you allocate dollars to support that company. To help it grow, to market it, to build its brand and its reputation. So I always and never considered this a cost — always an investment — was: who can I hire?
I always, again, another analogy I used was thinking of myself as an athlete. Athletes have coaches. Athletes have help. No one goes to the Olympics and does it alone. Yet we're so I don't know. We don't see this investment of either a) hiring a coach, b) maybe it's a therapist that's also a coach that's going to help you mentally, emotionally, get to remember when we're going to a new identity or a new career that's going to take a leap of not just faith, but of that crafting that new identity so we don't have imposter syndrome, especially as women, either pampering us when we're on the job, or even applying for that job.
Or Carissa, I've even gone so far as to hire experts that I know are paid a lot of money to say, what would it cost for 15 minutes of your time? 15 minutes of your time is probably going to save me years trying to figure out something on my own. So there's all of the other things, of course, investing in your education. I believe strongly in doing a time audit, spending one week, and just writing down every single thing that you do. And then ranking, what did you love, what's neutral and what do you absolutely hate?
It just takes everything out of you, and even though it might be an hour, it takes so much out of you. And is it possible and feasible to hire those things out? So I don't have kids, but I have an aging mother, and my husband's mother has passed away. But when she was around, we had a lot of caregiving, mowing of lawns, shoveling of snows, delivering of groceries, taking to doctor's appointments.
I hire all of that, when possible, out so when I have time to see my mom, I'm there and present for her. She doesn't need me doing those tasks. Now, of course, it depends on what you're earning and if you can justify paying that out, but even if all things were equal, where could you then devote that time and energy to doing a better job at your job, upgrading your skills?
I think that there's so much that we need to look inwards to have our career reflect outwards.
Carissa: Yeah, it's very interesting as a reflection point on what resources can you utilize that are within your control and your means to be able to free up that time for you to better yourself, whether that's career, whether that's family. It's a very interesting concept, and I think everyone can benefit from just even reflecting and thinking, how do you make that space and time to better yourself and better just even the person that you can be to those that lean on you most.
There's another piece that you talk about, and it's really around that the characteristics of your career should weigh in to the investment strategy that you choose. And you know an advisor can help guide you here, and I know you're a big advocate of that thinking of your career as an asset class, then that may impact the way you invest over the long term.
So, you were featured in a CIBC article called “Helping Canadians Think Differently About Their Finances.” In this you mentioned like, for example, if you're a professor and you have more security, you know, you may be able to take on a bit more risk in your investing profile or your, you know, your long term goals, etc. And if you're an entrepreneur, on the flip side, you know, just beginning your career, you may want to look at something a bit more conservative for your investment strategies and maybe lean in more towards savings.
Which is interesting, again, going on this whole concept of thinking of yourself as the CEO of your own company. Can you walk us through that consideration in how your career should be a consideration when you're building out your financial plan, or, you know you're building out your long-term wealth plan?
Kelley: Yes. So, Carissa, this is something I'm very passionate about. I call it the fourth asset class. Of course, we know that the primary asset classes are cash, fixed income, and equity. And there's other ones, real estate and all kinds of other ones.
But when I think of the fourth asset class, and I was in the financial industry, I haven't been for 20 years, and I do advocate very much for advisors and financial planners, because they actually take the work that I talk about and make it real for clients. Look, we have these natural tendencies. So the professor you talked about, think about the professor with tenure. This is probably painting with broad brushes here, but probably somebody who's very risk-averse.
That's the type of career they've chosen. They're probably going to look at their investments very risk-averse as well. If they look at their career as an asset class within that pie of diversification, can they maybe take more risk? They have a pension, they don't have to worry about those things.
I think that's where an interesting conversation can be had. And to your point about the entrepreneur, even if they're not just starting out, even if they're very successful in their 20th year, they probably have that hustle, high-risk mentality. But when it comes to their investments, they probably don't have a pension, they don't have all of these things.
They probably need more of that balanced approach, and also because they're used to having ultimate control over their largest investment, which is building their company when they go to sell or when they're investing with their advisor, I think it's really prudent to get them in the mindset of understanding that, look, you know, to balance you out overall, you probably need a lot less risk in your investment.
So I think that's a consideration that I don't see enough in the financial industry. I know you and I have had lengthy conversations about this. But I do think that I love having this conversation and having more people wrap their heads around it.
Carissa: Even from a fundamental perspective, even to think about it that way, is within the career or profession that you're in, what's available, what will help fund, for example, you mentioned, like your retirement, and do you have a pension? And those types of things should weigh in on to the way you invest and the way you need to, you know, have a discussion with your financial advisor about how this can weigh in on your decisions.
Kelley: Well, yeah, and then also, what if that changes? Carissa, you know, we're hearing the stories of this person was a lawyer, and they actually were doing really well, and they made partner. All of a sudden, now they're opening up a pastry cafe.
Okay, great. Well, now you got to talk to your advisor, because they were like, okay, you know, you had this income and this is how we structured your portfolio based on this very solid career trajectory. Now all of a sudden you're like, throwing caution to the wind. You're now going into a very high-risk proposition.
Your advisor is going to be like, hold on, let's now flip it over, and we've got to take those investments and make it very safe. So, I think it's so key that you're talking with your advisor, not just when life events happen, like a divorce or a marriage or things of that sort. But with your career in mind and how that may change all of a sudden now, maybe you're buying rental properties, and you don't tell your advisor that.
Like, that's kind of a side hustle that would definitely, I think, affect your portfolio. So your career, side hustles, all of that type of criteria definitely should be factored in into your asset allocation.
Carissa: Yeah, and even into retirement. I mean, retirement is a much different thing than it was years and years ago, and many individuals will maybe retire out of the career they've been in for 30 years, but then they want to start their own business. You mentioned before, and you know, what does that mean? What do they plan on doing?
So there's a long list of individuals, even in Canada, that have started up some pretty successful businesses at 55 plus. It's like starting a whole new endeavor. So, it is a really good thought to have that discussion with your advisor and the plans of either changing careers or starting your own business, or what that looks like.
So you stated that you know, you started your career as a financial professional in the industry and then really built your business into what it is today. A financial expert, author, consumer advocate, speaker, consultant, just to name a few, you've had a huge impact.
How do you navigate becoming a successful entrepreneur, doing what you're so passionate about? Like, what advice do you have for us?
Kelley: Oh my gosh, it's just realizing. I mean, first of all, the only thing that's inevitable is change. So it is looking at trends like, where, where do you see the world going, as opposed to, this is what I am. This is what my expertise is. This is what I went to school for.
Unfortunately, the world is changing so rapidly. You know, I can't — I thank you for your kind compliments and introduction, Carissa, but I think my failures are much more interesting than my successes. And I've had many, many, many of them. You know, as an entrepreneur, you see these trends, you think you did your due diligence, and then you come out with the product, and the market's changed already. It's done.
And I think one thing I can definitely say is, don't wait. Like I've written 11 books because I don't wait. If I have something that's popped into my head, I act on it as quickly as humanly possible. I can't tell you how many friends, PhDs, Masters, Professors that have told me they want to write a book, and I mean, they've been working on it for 20 years. That ship has sailed. The market's not even the same anymore.
So I think it's just, you know, you want to do everything you can to keep upgrading your skills and working your network, but just realizing that things are changing so fast that I think that's where that entrepreneurial mindset needs to come in, even if you are an executive at a major company. And by the way, that's no guarantee that you've got job security. I've had so many friends that have been packaged out or they've had incredible careers, and now they're only 50, 55 and they're having to re-invent themselves, which is very exciting and terrifying at the same time.
So I think it's being nimble. It's having a really great network that you don't be afraid to reach out to people. I think people are really awesome to share and help, and if they don't reply, just keep going. Everyone's very, very busy asking for help, but being gracious when you don't get the replies, and just being tenacious in that follow-up is very important, regardless if you're just starting out in your career, or you're a seasoned executive starting your next career.
Carissa: Yeah, and it's great advice. It's, you know, a lot of it is confidence, but also it's almost like this concept of being like, always on, learning and taking on new endeavors, or being open to you mentioned kind of LinkedIn and a few other things like, get connected, stay connected. That's how the networks build. That's how you know you'll find that mentor, etc. And then the resilience, and that's what I'm hearing a lot of the resilience and taking control of your own journey.
It's interesting, you say, you know your failures are more interesting than your successes because we learn so much from when we fall. It makes us stronger, but it's that continuation. So that's really great advice. I think it's admirable that you have dedicated your professional life to helping people achieve financial well-being, which we know is such an important goal for Canadians.
You've experienced many highlights of your career. Your book “Talk Money to Me,” resonated deeply with the public. As you know it appeared many times in the Globe and Mail Toronto Star bestseller list, and I noticed it's even quoted in the New York Times.
Like with all this work, what's next for you and continuing your reach? What are you excited about?
Kelley: Oh, that's a great question. I mean, we've got a couple of things that we're working on that's very exciting. I mean, number one, I'm very clear on my role as a consumer advocate and educator, but how limiting that is, Carissa. Because I was in the industry, I understand and have learned over the last 20 years how we need to speak clearly and even make financial wellness really fun.
So one of our projects has been Money-Wise Workplaces, where we have an online, self-directed program for employers, and they sign on so the learning is free for their employees. We think that financial literacy and moving that dial can really be shaped, because if someone has a job, you know, they've got income to really change their life.
Then I also work very closely with the financial industry as well equipping advisors on speaking that language to the public and connecting deeper. Because I really believe that, as I was talking about earlier, about my coaches and about the experts and the people that have taken my career to a level that I could have never done on my own. That's the same of what a great financial professional does is takes your ability to earn and retain wealth and grow it and pass it along to generations and change the script. Because we all have inherited a money script, I think it is so important.
So I thank you for the incredible work that you've done, because you've actually changed people. You get to see the change in people's lives. I just get to spark them. So that's what's next for us.
Carissa: That's wonderful to hear. I think it's all important. I think to your point, educating and helping Canadians really think about having a trusted financial professional that can help guide you, be your trusted partner can really make the world of difference. I'm just as much of an advocate for financial well-being and financial advice as you are.
And a big thank you for being on the podcast today. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this conversation. And really something different for you know, our listeners to think about as they really continue to think about their trajectory, their career, how they really think about their income as an asset class, as you mentioned.
So it's been such a pleasure. Kelley, thank you so so much for being here.
Kelley: My pleasure as well. Thank you for having me, Carissa.
Carissa: The future of work culture is always evolving, and like any long-term investment, you'll likely experience some highs and lows throughout your career. But as Canada's economy changes, new technologies develop and industry transformations take hold. Being proactive and deliberate about your professional development can help make a big difference in your overall financial health.
You can find more information on Kelley's books, presentations, and media appearances on her website, kelleykeehn.com. Or you can connect with Kelley on LinkedIn. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of smart advice. I'm Carissa Lucreziano.
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