I'm Bad at Numbers

"I'm just not a numbers person."

If you've said that — or thought it — this episode is for you.

In Episode 3, Melissa Armstrong gets personal. As a CPA who has spent her career helping creative founders understand their finances, she still found herself believing she wasn't on top of her own business money. It took validation from her commercial banker and her business advisors before she could let that story go.

Sound familiar?

This episode unpacks where the "I'm bad at numbers" belief comes from, what it's actually costing your business, and why financial confidence has nothing to do with being good at math.

In this episode:
— Why creative founders carry the "I'm not a numbers person" story
— The difference between financial language and financial intelligence
— What avoidance really costs you (and it's not what you think)
— What financial confidence actually looks like — and how close you already are

Amigas Coffee Talk | Denver Metro Thursday, May 28 | 9:00AM

I'm speaking at an intimate morning event in the Denver area. We're talking identity, life transitions, and what it looks like to build a business that actually fits your life. If you're a woman building something with intention, I'd love to see you there. Spots are limited.

👉 Reserve your seat here https://www.sarineplanning.com/amigas-events-page/coffeetalkmelissaarmstrong

Not sure if your business is healthy or just busy? No Se Habla Confusion is a $500 financial assessment for creative agencies on QBO doing $300K–$3M. I dig into your numbers, find the gaps, and tell you exactly where you stand. Email info@steadyhandaccounting.com — subject line: No Se Habla Confusion. 

Let's connect!

LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/armstrongmelissacpa/

Website: https://steadyhandaccounting.com/

Transcript

0:59

Hey, welcome back to No Se Habla Taxes. I'm Melissa Armstrong, CPA, and fractional Controller, and this is a show where we talk about the money stuff creative agency owners actually need to know without, drowning you in spreadsheets or making you feel like you should already know this. Today I wanna talk to you about something I hear constantly, and I mean constantly."Oh, I'm just bad at numbers." Maybe you've said it yourself. Maybe it's your explanation for why the books feel overwhelming, why you avoid looking at your profit and loss statement, why financial conversations make you want to reschedule indefinitely, and here's what I want you to know before we even get started. That belief is not protecting you. It's not doing you any favors. It's costing you. Let's talk about it before I tell you about a client. I'm gonna tell you about me. I'm a CPA, and I have spent my career helping business owners understand their finances, clean up their books, and make smarter decisions with their money. That is literally what I do for a living and have been doing this for over 20 years. For a long time, I still believed I was bad with my own business money. Not my client's money. Mm-hmm. My money. I could walk into someone else's business and see exactly what was happening, but when it came to my own numbers, I second guessed everything. I questioned whether I was reading my own situation correctly. I even wondered if what felt true was actually true, or if it was just wishful thinking. It took my commercial banker looking up my financials and saying,"Melissa, this is solid." It took my business advisors reflecting back what I couldn't see for myself, and even then I had to sit with it for a minute because the story I'd been telling myself that I somehow didn't have it together the way I helped everybody else get it together. That story had some roots, and I'm sharing that because if A CPA with decades of experience can carry that story, I promise you, you are not alone in yours. Now, let me tell you about this founder. I'm gonna call her Margarita. Margarita runs a branding agency, beautiful work, loyal clients, a small but solid team by any outside measure. She had built something real. When we first connected, one of the first things she said to me was," I should warn you, Melissa. I am not a numbers person." She said it almost as an apology like she was preparing for me to be disappointed. What I found out when I actually looked at her books was not what she expected me to find. Her pricing had some gaps. Her cashflow had some patterns worth paying attention to. All normal stuff for business at her stage. But here's what was also true. Margarita understood her business. She knew which clients were draining her team. She knew which projects felt underpriced, even if she couldn't put a number to it. She knew when something felt off. She had financial intelligence, what she didn't have with the language to trust it. The"I'm bad at numbers" story, had convinced her that her instincts weren't valid, that she needed to wait for someone with credentials to tell her, which she was already sensing. We spent about an hour going through our numbers together, not lecturing, just translating. And by the end, she said something that stuck with me."Oh my gosh. I knew something was wrong. I just didn't think I was allowed to say so." That is the myth. Not a lack of intelligence, but a lack of permission. So here's what I always say, finance is a language. It's not a talent. Nobody is born understanding a profit and loss statement. Nobody comes out of the womb knowing what gross margin is and why cash, flow and profit are two different things. Those are things we learn along the way. They are concepts, just vocabulary. And you as somebody who built a business from scratch and kept it running, have already been doing financial thinking every single day. You just haven't been calling it that because you didn't have the words for it. When you decide whether to take on a project, you're assessing risk and return. When you feel that tight little knot in your stomach about payroll, your body is running a cash flow analysis. When you know a client relationship is unprofitable, even though you can't explain why that is financial intelligence, the problem isn't that you're bad at numbers. The problem is that the financial world has done an exceptional job of making ordinary people feel like outsiders. So let's look at this closely. What is this avoidance actually costing you? When founders believe that they're bad with money, they do predictable things. They avoid looking at their numbers until they have to. They hand everything to a bookkeeper and hope for the best. They price based on what feels okay instead of what the math actually supports. They make big decisions, hiring new services, buying new equipment based on vibes, because the alternative feels too technical. And I want to be clear, none of that is stupidity. All of it is a completely logical response to believing that you are not capable. But avoidance creates risk, not because the numbers are complicated, but because you are making decisions without. Looking at them, and at some point something in the business starts talking louder than this story you've been telling yourself. Usually it talks in the form of a cashflow problem or a team member you can afford to keep. Or a quarter where the revenue looked fine, but you somehow ended up with nothing left over that. It's not a numbers problem. That is an avoidance problem. And avoidance is something we can fix. So now what does financial confidence actually look like? Okay, I want to reset what you think financial confidence means. It does not mean that you can build a financial model from scratch. It does not mean, you know, tax code. Ew, we don't talk about that here. It does not mean that you run your own books or understand every line in a balance sheet. Financial confidence means you know your key numbers. You can look at your profit and loss statement and tell me roughly what's happening. You ask questions when something doesn't look right, you have a sense of whether your business is healthy or whether it's burning through cash faster than it's making it. That's it. That's the bar. And you can clear it. It's not as far away as you think. I have watched founders go from completely checked out of their finances to genuinely engaged in a matter of weeks, not because they became different people, because someone translated the language for them. So here is what I want you to leave with. If you have been walking around with, I am bad at numbers as part of your identity, I want you to put that down right now. I'm giving you permission to it, not because it is a moral failing, but because it was never true. It was a story that made sense given how finance has been taught and who it's been taught to, but it's not who you are. Do not let it define you. You have built something, you run something, you make a hundred small financial decisions every week without even recognizing them as financial decisions. You are already a numbers person. You just haven't had the right translation yet, and that's what I'm here for. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a founder friend who needs to hear it. And if you're ready to stop avoiding your numbers and start actually understanding your business, reach out. I'd love to be your translator. Thanks for spending time with me. Until next time.