Amanda Taylor - Building Generational Wealth
Disruption and Innovation Podcast
Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
Guest: Amanda Taylor
Duration: ~40 minutes
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Hi everyone, Kumar Dattatreyan here with the Meridian Point and our podcast on disruption and innovation. Today I'm really excited to welcome a guest, Amanda Taylor, who is a true disruptor going from dentistry to real estate to building a wealth-focused business coaching empire. Starting with a simple five-hour-a-week paperwork job that she knew nothing about, Amanda transformed herself into a business strategist, real estate investor, and wealth mentor who helps entrepreneurs build generational wealth beyond their businesses. Amanda calls herself a disruptor in the financial space, and today we'll explore her journey of accidental entrepreneurship and holistic wealth building. So without further ado, I welcome Amanda on stage. Thank you so much for being here.
AMANDA: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.
KUMAR: Yeah, me too. So you've described your transition from dentistry to real estate to business coaching as happening by accident. Can you walk us through that pivotal moment when you said yes to that five-hour-a-week job, despite knowing nothing about real estate? What drove you to embrace that uncertainty and sort of say, "Okay, I'm going to figure this out"?
AMANDA: Yeah, it was almost necessity, right? I had moved states for my ex-husband's job, and I had been in dentistry for fifteen years. I took the first dental job I found, and he was only working two days a week because he was retired. What do I do with the rest of my time? Someone I had met was like, "Hey, you seem organized, you know what you're doing. My husband and his friend just started this real estate investing business. They need somebody just a few hours a week to do paperwork." Okay. I don't know what I thought I was getting into, but I was like, "Oh, I can manage paperwork. That's fine. I don't think I have to know a whole lot about the real estate industry. Sure, why not?" That was the rest-is-history moment. It was, "I need something to do. This is an opportunity. It's only a little bit of time. Maybe I'll learn something. This seems kind of cool." And so I said yes, and here we are. So total accident, but yeah.
KUMAR: Yeah, I mean, I guess a lot of disruption happens that way, right? Saying yes to something rather than saying, "No, I can't do it." And saying yes to something opens you up and people around you up to the possibility of learning something new. Would you say that's a trait or a skill?
AMANDA: Oh, I think maybe a little bit of both. I think there are people who were just born with that innate curiosity. I call it curiosity and that desire to want to learn something new, to say yes, to have that drive and that grit. But it's a skill to learn how to shut down your own internal voice sometimes that tells you maybe you shouldn't, or maybe you can't, or why would you do this? This doesn't seem logical. So yeah, I think it's a little bit of both in training yourself. And a lot of people, when you read these tremendous stories of transformation of entrepreneurs and people who've started these fantastic things, there's a fine line between delusion and genius. I'm not calling myself a genius by any means, but I think that's that innate drive or sense that is built into you that says, "I'm just going to do it. What other people think, be damned. Here we go."
KUMAR: My wife calls me delusional all the time, so I recognize that. It goes around quite a bit in these circles, doesn't it?
AMANDA: It does, yeah. And I found that sometimes I feel maybe not frustrated, but just I'm curious about why people say no to opportunities that seem so suited to them, right? And I have to remind myself that mindsets are a big part of it, right? So people that don't have the confidence, the self-confidence, or have that imposter syndrome or whatever it might be that are holding them back, that if they could just sort of get past that initial fear and try it and learn something, if nothing else, you learn something that you can apply to something else in the future. And the more times you say yes to something and learn something, the more likely you're going to hit on that jackpot, right? Maybe not every idea is going to be great, but eventually you're going to find something that works for you.
KUMAR: Yeah. And I say all the time, how dare we let an eighteen-year-old decide the rest of our lives? We graduate high school thinking we know exactly who we want to be and what we want to do. And we dedicate most of us or some of us go to college and dedicate this time, energy and money to this one field of study. And then what? We change, we learn different things, but I think that is the skill in of itself is learning how to learn and putting ourselves in situations. I tell people all the time, I want a life. I want to build a life that I can say yes to whenever I want and not have to think about the what-if or the how.
AMANDA: Yeah, yeah. And that's new for me. I had to work my way into that. I was the safe player. I was follow the path, follow the rules, do the things. But when you get into entrepreneurship and you're, you know, no one's coming to save you. You're on your own. This is your thing. You start to operate and think a little bit differently, and it brings you into that alignment in your mindset real fast.
KUMAR: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It does take practice to build that discipline. And even though it may be a trait that you have, it still takes practice, wouldn't you say, to build upon it? And you mentioned the word grit. I don't think that grit is innate. I mean, I think maybe you have some traits that help you build grit, but grit, you get that from scars, wouldn't you say?
AMANDA: Yeah, that's experience. That is being told no, failing forward, learning from mistakes. And I got to a point where if I'm told no, my response is "watch me." And that wasn't always - that's that delusion again. But it pays off most of the time. And that's what it is, is you have to believe in yourself enough to even - yeah, that delusional thing - even if it doesn't work out like you said, I'm learning something and it's gonna help me do something else better or do better the next time or whatever the case is. It is giving me a skill one way or another.
KUMAR: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'm gonna come back to this topic because I think there's more here, but I want to move on to you as a disruptor in the financial space, right? So what exactly are you trying to disrupt, and why do you think traditional financial education is failing people, entrepreneurs, particularly when it comes to building wealth outside of their businesses?
AMANDA: Oh yeah. Okay. So I could talk about this for days, but yeah, you want to talk disruptor. I just got off of another - I'm doing an investor series for a venture capital group, trying to get more investors in their space to learn about investing. And somebody was asking me a question and they were like, "Well, I talked to my financial advisor," and here's my first disruptive thing. I'm like, "Well, your financial advisor gets paid commission to give you this product and this advice. So be careful who you're taking advice from and what they get paid if you listen." And I think that's a huge thing that I'm putting out there. I'm not an advisor. I don't have any licenses. I don't sell any financial products. What I'm doing is learning for myself how to grow and protect my wealth. And I am shouting it. I say I'm running my mouth telling other people how to do this because they're not teaching it.
And the financial education system as it's set up, even what we were taught - I'm Gen X, right? My parents were like, "Go get a job. You're going to work there for thirty, forty years. Your employer will contribute to your retirement plan. And there you go." And that's not working. Gen X, I think the average retirement savings account is less than one hundred and forty thousand dollars.
KUMAR: Wow.
AMANDA: Yeah, it's crazy and we don't have that far to go. I'm the youngest of Gen X, but they say we need one point two six million to retire comfortably. I think that's low. We were not active because we were given advice that worked for someone else. So I'm coming in now and trying to wake people up and say we can't be passive in this any longer. Again, that no one's coming to save us. We have to take control of what's happening with our money. And when you have it only with a financial advisor, they are only giving you what they get paid to give you. Is that in your best interest? Maybe. Maybe not, because there are a number of other asset classes and ways that you could be investing your money that could be growing faster, that you could be doing different things with that could align more with your values. So I just advise people to really think hard about who's giving you the advice and what they get paid if you listen.
KUMAR: Yeah, that's really good advice. I don't personally have a financial advisor, but I wonder... I wonder always, should I get one? And the reason I don't is for that very reason that I don't want to pay him money to sell me some products that I don't necessarily want or don't understand or whatever it might be. And you're absolutely right about financial education in general. Like people, kids don't learn about finances in school or even in college, unless they sort of go into that field of study or learn more about economics and finance and things like that, but really truly, sort of the investment or investing mindset isn't something that is taught in school. I think a lot of people come out of school financially illiterate, including my sons, who I think they have to learn on their own and I try to help them, but I'm not the most educated in these things. I just sort of happened to get lucky with certain investments that I've made over time. And that luck has sort of carried me through to where now, I think it's more than luck. It's a little bit of experience, a little bit of that grit that you mentioned, right? But that's not true for everyone, right? And I think it's like the yes mentality that you have towards business. It seems like it may carry through to other parts of your life, maybe even investing, because those are things that people are afraid of. People are afraid of money, afraid of building it and then losing it, afraid of not having enough. And so they'd just rather not think about it and give it to a financial advisor.
AMANDA: Right. They stick their head in the sand. There's so much that goes into that emotionally, mentally, spiritually around money that has nothing to do with like the physical currency of money that we have to get past. And I mean, investing is such an important tool and you can't save your way to wealth. You know, inflation is eating your money. If you're just keeping it in a savings account, that is not the way to go here. And, you know, a big thing with that financial confidence that we don't have. I mean, I'll admit I dropped my finance class in college. I didn't understand it. I've never dropped a class. I was a straight A, maybe a B occasionally student. I didn't get it. And I'm like, "Well, I'm dropping it because I can't get a bad grade." Right? I didn't make any sense to me. It was like a foreign language. And that is what gets people afraid of it or hands off. "Not for me. I'm going to pass that off to someone else," especially women. We are extremely underconfident and undereducated. And we just say, "That's not my sandbox to play in. I'm going to let somebody else handle that for me." And we give away our power when it comes to that and let somebody else take control of our future. So I do stand up a lot in that space and tell women, "Hey, we need to learn about what's happening with our money. Even if we have the most astute partner in the financial space ever, you be part of that conversation. Know what's happening with your money, with your future, with your children's future." It's just part of a conversation we need to be aware of. And with the financial system changing every day, you don't have to be an expert. You just have to be aware.
KUMAR: Yeah. So what would you say to listeners who are interested? "Okay. What do I do? What are my next steps, if you will, to become more aware?"
AMANDA: Yeah, join my community. I have a community that educates people on all the asset classes, what the level of risk is, what the returns are, what the liquidity is, the basics of investing that we don't know. And I think it's just helpful because it's not intimidating. It's not a class. It's not crypto bros. It's not an MBA in finance. It's just, "Hey, let's just talk about what this stuff is so that we feel comfortable doing it." And at the end of the day, if you're doing nothing, here's the top three things I would recommend. Number one, get your money out of a bank savings account and put it at least in a high interest savings account. I think they're at like four and a quarter right now. Four and a half, four and a quarter, depending on the bank. Is it as much return as you're going to get somewhere else? No. But compared to a bank savings account, that's like one, two percent, maybe. If you're lucky, it's usually less than one percent.
KUMAR: Less than one percent.
AMANDA: And that's what started my whole journey. I get a year-end Chase Bank savings account statement and I had been ignorant to it in the past, and I look at this thing and it's just like an infomercial. I'm like, "There has got to be a better way." And speaking of financial advisor, I go to her and I'm like, "Okay, what can I do with all this money I have sitting here that isn't as volatile as the stock market? I really like real estate. What else do I have?" And she's like, "Oh, I wouldn't do anything but put it in my product." And I was like, "Of course." And that's when I went in search of my own education because I was like, "This isn't right." And I just started to learn about all these other tools. So we're not educated and we don't know where to go to find it. It's not all in one place because if you go to one person who sells this product, they're going to tell you that's the best one. If you go to this person who sells this product - I'm a big advocate of cash value, life insurance and banking and insurance. You can find somebody that tells you it's the greatest thing ever. You can find somebody that tells you it's a scam. It works for me. I use it. I'm growing my wealth inside of these policies and life insurance and using it while I'm alive. That's what I can tell you from my experience now.
KUMAR: And you can use that money to invest in other things. It's just - it's a tool. It's a strategy. It's a game. And if you don't know how to play the game, you're not going to come out ahead. And it's not a secret, even though it's the tools of the wealthiest.
AMANDA: Mm hmm. We all have access, we just don't know it yet. And that is my mission is to not keep this stuff a secret. We can all do it. We can start small. They have the acorn app. I mean, if nothing else, your spare change can go into the stock market. It's something to start getting into the habit of putting that money in this place that it's going to grow. When we learn the power of compounding interest, when we learn the power of appreciation and cashflow, when we learn all of these things and we see it in action, then we build that confidence to try another level and try another level and learn something else. And that's just how it grows.
KUMAR: No, I love it. I love it. I think that we could definitely do another episode on this topic alone just this one asset class because I think it would be very interesting. But going back to sort of the mindset, if you will, of an entrepreneur, right? In our last conversation I think we talked about how you believe some people are born with it, right? This spirit to start businesses. And then some people just do it because they don't want to work for someone else. What do you look for when you work with people and they claim they want to - I know you do some coaching and stuff, right? So mentoring of business people. How do you identify which type of entrepreneur you're working with? And how does that change your approach to coaching them?
AMANDA: I'll answer that with kind of an example or a case study. I was sitting down with a woman and I was talking to her about our business and I ask a lot of questions. I don't talk. I ask questions and kept asking questions and asking questions and asking questions, and she couldn't answer them. And it got her really upset. And, you know, I didn't mean to, but she started to cry. And if I want someone - and no disrespect to her or her business or where she was, but even if you don't quite know, but you have that, whatever that is, that grit, that drive, that curiosity to me is the number one attribute that I'm looking for. Because if I don't know, I'm gonna find out. I'm gonna bring in the help. I'm not ashamed to ask for help. I'm not ashamed to ask questions. I'm going to seek out the tools and strategies from the people that I know already have them. It is curiosity and probably humility to go out and find it from the people in your circle who know. Put yourself in the rooms with people who are a level higher than you. I'm a business coach. I have a business coach. It is that curiosity to always be wanting to learn more.
And as far as being born an entrepreneur, I mean, I say that lightly but I hear it from people that they knew from the time they were five years old when they had their first lemonade stand or, you know, my partner, he tells me he was selling baseball cards on the school bus. So yeah, there were those people. I wasn't that person. I didn't know. I wanted to be on the Broadway stage. Now I'm a speaker and I talk about it, but I do have it in me. Once I got a taste of it, it's like it woke up and there it was. And I was like, "Oh, this is what I'm supposed to be doing." I had that moment where it became so clear. I had been in this fog of "I'm in dentistry because it just happened and oh, well, it's a job." And then when I got into real estate and that started to grow, boom, game over. This is who I'm meant to be, what I'm supposed to do. And it just keeps evolving. And that's what - I've never met an entrepreneur that didn't have three or four different companies or groups or revenue streams that they were building because it's just that's how we operate.
KUMAR: Yeah. I recognize a lot of those things in me. It's like, "What can I start today?"
AMANDA: Yeah. It drives people around me crazy, but it's just the way. I know people are like, "You work too much." And I'm like, "Yeah, it doesn't feel like work."
KUMAR: Yeah, no, that's great. You talked about one asset class, but in our prior conversation you're sort of agnostic about the different types of investments, right? So from whiskey barrels we talked about that, we talked about digital assets, life insurance you just mentioned. How do you sort of advise your clients, your customers - how do you educate them to evaluate which of these are most appropriate for them?
AMANDA: You know, I put down financial advisors but I kind of do it the same way like let's work backwards. What is your end game? And, you know, you talk about business owners - less than thirteen percent of entrepreneurs and small business owners have any kind of exit strategy, legacy plan, succession plan, retirement, anything. So start there. What is your plan for this business, for your life? How much time do we have in between now and then? What is your level of liquidity that you need? How long can your money be out? What kind of returns are you looking for? It's a very individualized process. How comfortable are you with risk? And that can change depending on how much time you have to ride the waves, so to speak. So it's a series of questions based on the individual and what their goals are. Because with, you know, even in real estate, let's say you can have very quick turnover if you're flipping houses or lending on fix and flip projects, you can get your money back in and out, in and out very quickly. So that's good liquidity. If you're putting it in, let's say, private equity or venture capital, you can get a much bigger return. There's also much higher risk and your money's out for way longer and you don't have access to it. So that's just it. It depends - it's not the best answer when you say "it depends," but it's completely individual for your goals and what it does.
KUMAR: And it shows that the flexibility you offer people that you work with, the people that you coach is, it really depends on what you want, what your time horizon is, how comfortable you are with risk and how comfortable you are with sort of parking money for some period of time, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, whatever it might be, maybe shorter, right? For venture capital. And values is coming more and more into investing we're seeing. Values-based investing is becoming important to people. What am I putting my money into? So people now are really looking into purpose and profit, income and impact. And so, you know, just throwing money into an ETF or a mutual fund or whatever, they don't know. It's like, "I want to do something good with my money and make a return." So that's what I'm seeing a lot more of. So when you're investing with your values, you're investing in communities, you're investing in sustainability, you're investing in good medical technology. Things that are going to make the world a better place. And I love that. I think that's great.
AMANDA: Yeah, I think it's fantastic as well. One of the other things we talked about, and this is something I really feel strongly about is, as a coach, you're coaching on investments and sort of financial matters. But you're more holistic. You're thinking about the whole person, right? So it's not just about what they do at work, but it's also their health and their mental fitness and how much rest they're getting and things like that, which I find very resonant. There are not many coaches that sort of combine this more holistic approach. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how you combine all those different pieces to provide the service to your clients?
KUMAR: Yeah, I even call myself a business coach/consultant, but at the end of the day, it's more about the business owner because yes, we come in and we help you systematize your business and get the funding you need to make your business more profitable and take you out of the business. Great. And then what are you doing with that? That is what I am concerned about. What happens then? You've got this money. What are you doing with it? Are you investing it? Are you making it grow? Then how are you going to enjoy that life? What are you going to do with that? If you're not caring for your mental and emotional and spiritual health, what's the point of having that money? If you're not caring for your physical health, what are you creating all of this wealth for - long-term care insurance, hospital bills? Like what is the point? So really identify your why and your future. To me, that's really important because wealth is not money. Wealth is a number of things that create a life that is worth living. Wealth is being able to sleep through the night and know that your family is taken care of. Wealth is being able to enjoy, have joy. It's so much more than just the currency of money. It's more than the income that you make in your business. And that is what I want people to see. It's not a game to see who dies with the most wins. What are we doing while we're here? How are we impacting other people? And we can't do that if we are not in alignment within ourselves, fully in alignment.
AMANDA: Okay. I got to admit, I've got chills. Literally I've got chills from what you just said. "Wealth is not currency. It's about making a good life." I don't know exactly what you said, but it's recorded, it's on this recording. And so it's going to go viral. I guarantee it. It's going to go viral. It's amazing. Love it. All right. So I lost my train of thought because I was so inspired by what you said. We're running a little short on time here. So I'm going to ask a few sort of lightning round questions. So simple, one or two sentence answers, maybe just one word answer. So what's your favorite morning beverage, coffee, tea or something else?
KUMAR: Coffee.
AMANDA: Coffee, okay, me too. Are you a morning person or a night owl?
KUMAR: Morning.
AMANDA: Okay. Your favorite mountain in Colorado?
KUMAR: Ooh, that I've climbed? Yeah. Okay, Quandary.
AMANDA: Which one?
KUMAR: Mount Quandary.
AMANDA: Okay. I haven't heard of that, but it's -
KUMAR: There's a lot of them here.
AMANDA: Yeah, I'm sure. Best business book you've read this year.
KUMAR: I can't remember. I'm going to butcher the name of it. I think it's called "The Witch's Way to Wealth." And that sounds funny, but it encompasses a lot of spiritual health into wealth. So there you go.
AMANDA: Okay. "The Witch's Way to Wealth." I love it. I love all the W's. I like alliteration.
KUMAR: Yeah.
AMANDA: One word to describe your investment philosophy.
KUMAR: Agnostic.
AMANDA: Agnostic. I like that. All right. So if you could invest in any company from history, which would it be?
KUMAR: I mean, I'd go back and invest in Apple, I'm sure.
AMANDA: Yeah, they're pretty...I'd put that one at the top of the list. Apple, Google.
KUMAR: Okay.
AMANDA: All right. And what would you say is the industry that's most ripe for disruption right now?
KUMAR: I mean, I think this industry of financial education, not just because I'm in it, because it's messed up.
AMANDA: You're going to un-mess it up.
KUMAR: I'm going to un-mess it up. I'm not the savior. I'm not the end all be all. I'm just trying to make a ripple that will hopefully catch and make a wave because I want to create a nonprofit. I want to do things that are doing family education, not just for business owners and entrepreneurs and people who are making money every day. I'm talking about people who are living paycheck to paycheck and need the skills and strategies to make a better life for themselves. So that's what - we're not teaching these skills. And there's a lot of mindset that goes into it. So it needs to be both, you know, mental wellbeing and financial wellbeing.
AMANDA: Yeah. I love it. There's a lady I spoke to - I think I might've mentioned her, I don't know - about a year ago who was doing something similar in India for women and trying to raise literacy, financial literacy levels for women that are, you know, it's more traditional culture. You know, women who work, they hand their paychecks to their husbands who manage it or mismanage it, depending on how you look at it. And so trying to sort of raise the bar there. I think she would enjoy this episode. So I'm definitely gonna mention it to her. It's a global issue and I don't think I realized it. I just got back from Ireland two days ago. I was speaking at a retreat there and I had women from Australia, Ireland, all over the country at this retreat. And they were so impacted by my message. I'm like, "This isn't a United States thing. This is a global thing that women are impacted by money in a number of ways every day." And we're just trying to create change.
KUMAR: Yeah, I think it's fantastic, the work that you're doing. I would say that men could be a little bit more humble because we don't know - I'm not going to say the word here, but we don't know. Starts with an S, right? We may claim we do, but we don't.
AMANDA: I got it.
KUMAR: All right. Fill in the blank, please. "The future of entrepreneurship is..."
AMANDA: Taking over. I think it's growing at a pace that we're going to take - people are moving into it more and more and more, especially women, especially in midlife. We're coming into our own. We're finding our passion and we're doing that to help other people. And I think that's going to keep growing.
KUMAR: Fantastic. Amanda, what have I not asked you that you'd like to share?
AMANDA: I don't know, I think I've said it all. I actually caught your tongue. I mean, I could go on.
KUMAR: Yeah, I'm sure you could. So I really appreciate you being on the show. I think this is fantastic. There's so many moments, I think, that can make an impact, the things that we talked about. And so if you're looking to improve your financial situation and your business, and I think more importantly, just your life as a whole. And I love what you said about wealth not being about the currency, about the money. It's about the whole being. Then contact Amanda. I think she can help you. So thanks again for being on the show and we'll see you in a week. Bye everyone.
AMANDA: Bye.
