Season 2 Episode 004
Bonnie Treichel
Episode 066
"It is financial freedom that gives us the freedom of time, to be able to spend time with people, and go beyond the numbers."
Bonnie Treichel: I love continuing to learn. I love continuing to grow. I love continuing to build, and it wasn’t that I didn’t like my situation. It was a great opportunity where I was, but I didn’t see that long-term ability to stay intellectually stimulated and engaged.
Alice Tang: Good morning everyone. I’m Alice Tang, the host of Women’s Million Dollar Conversations, and today I am sitting down with one of my best young, experienced friend Bonnie Treichel. Bonnie is the CEO and founders of Endeavor Law and Endeavor Retirement Consulting. The last round when we interviewed her about two and a half, three years ago, she surpassed the revenue of a million already, and of course she shared a lot of wonderful tips and insight. Today she’s with us, and she’s. expanded. Bonnie, welcome to the show. Do you want to tell the audience a little bit more about [00:01:00] you?
Bonnie Treichel: Alice, thank you for having me back. It’s so nice to be here and I love that you have said, I think you called me young, I’m feeling energized by that comment. Thank you. So it’s like when you go to the grocery store and someone asks for your ID or something like, that’s very exciting.
Thank you Alice, for having me back for a second time. Again, my name is Bonnie Treichel and I have. Two small businesses that, are something I enjoy very much. I work with a lot of financial advisors and their employers that they offer qualified retirement plans to, and over the years we’ve gotten into some other areas doing some work with really a lot of different financial services intermediaries. So it’s great to be here and having the conversation with you.
Alice Tang: Since you are the second time being interviewed, want to know if the value of money has changed for you since the last time.
Bonnie Treichel: The core concepts of how I value money are still there, but over time, I have learned and grown, some ways expected, some ways not expected, which of course changes, what money means to me. So I think the last time I was on, I probably shared some thoughts around, the value of money being about finding safety and financial freedom. That was a few years ago when I was still earlier in the startup journey. Over time, as the business has continued to grow and to stabilize, I’ve shifted from the money aspect and the numbers aspect to how money impacts our behavior, our lifestyle, our relationships, and so the freedom for me that money brings isn’t necessarily about the financial numbers piece, but it’smore about the things like what does that give you to be able to enjoy spending time with people and enjoy relationships because it is financial freedom that gives us the freedom of time, to be able to spend time with people, and go beyond the numbers. So I think that’s one thing for me that has probably shifted since that last conversation.
Alice Tang: common friend Laura Salerno Owens, who co host the event together with us for our first alumni, time together last year, had a, very rare, wonderful message. She said, time wealth is a part of very important wealth, because without time, what is money going to help you to enjoy? And really in case we are called, say I’m called tomorrow, I can’t say ‘no’. I have not recorded a show with Bonnie yet. Can I stay? No, no, no, no. So maximizing the experience with loved ones that’s important. So I’m so glad that it has shifted a little bit, but still we need money to achieve that. You are a partner at a national recognized firm.
Alice Tang: What was the specific financial or internal calculation that gave you the confidence to trade a stable partnership, for uncertainty of founding endeavor retirement?
Bonnie Treichel: You use the word calculation and I’m laughing, Alice, because you know, I think if you go and get an MBA or even an undergrad in business school, you learn about things like having a business plan and really planning it all out. I would not say that my calculus was so precise, but rather it’s really, again, coming back to an encouragement to you know, women who are listening or anyone listening, that if you have a vision or if you have a goal, you don’t have to let perfection of a business plan stand in the way of progress. And that it’s for everything in life that we don’t have to let perfect get in the way of progress. But if you really have a vision and you have a goal, you can always try it out.
If it doesn’t work, you can do something else. And so I think for me it was this idea that, ‘Hey, I don’t see a future. Of where I am right now.’ I love continuing to learn. I love continuing to grow. I love continuing to build and it wasn’t that I didn’t like my situation. It was a great opportunity where I was, but I didn’t see that long-term ability to stay intellectually stimulated and engaged. And so I thought, ‘Hey, I could do this other thing and impact a lot of lives.’ My business models around like, how can I really help create some cost sharing and some flat fee models so that more people have access and more people can save? And so the idea was, ‘Hey, I can try this. If it doesn’t work out, I’m employable.
I can go get a different job.’ And so again, I would just encourage people to think about that. You can trade it in, you could do it as a side hustle first. I started with one client and a vision one became two, two became three. But there’s a lot of ways that you can put that vision together to start to create a business. And if it doesn’t work out, you know, fail, fail fast and fail forward, you’ll try it again the next time. So I think that’s just something that for me, I laugh because I didn’t have a great plan. I just kind of figured it out as I went.
Alice Tang: Progress over perfect.That’s how I receive your energy just now. It’s a great company and good to be a partner, Your soul is not a hundred percent fulfilled, you know what stimulates you. You know what is going to make you happy.So you got to try something and I really appreciate that.
Alice Tang: Failing forward.
Bonnie Treichel: Failing forward. Failing fast. Yeah. And that it is, it’s forward progress.
Alice Tang: Yes. I mean, are transformed regardless whether you made it, or you don’t, but at least we learned, right? Hopefully either we made it, or we learned.
Alice, that’s one thing I love about the community you’ve created. The group of women, I think that you’ve created a community around, It creates such a beautiful opportunity to learn from others and learn that many people,
Bonnie Treichel: might have had failure along the way, but it’s that sharing of the failures, which sometimes [00:07:00] are the best lessons. It’s not the success that’s the best lesson. So, that community you’ve created is such a nice space for sharing those stories of failures and success.
Alice Tang: Well, thank you for, your compliment. I think being vulnerable about things that is, that did not go well, is so important for the connection. Because think about this, we walk into a dominated male industry and when you say, ‘How you doing so and so?’, and they would say, ‘Fine, everything is good, business is good.’ I mean, who’s gonna help you if everything’s good? I don’t, I don’t need to help you. But when we say, you know, I’m just a little bit far away from, my quota or what I promised myself to do, my goal, people will tend to help us. So sharing the failing story of being brave to tell, you know, ‘I’m not, you know, there yet, but I need your help.’ Well, that brings us to,w omen’s million dollar conversations, we talk about the power of intentionality. You have advocated for and to produce, to find the right amount of wealth to prevent burn out.
Alice Tang: How did you personally, we use the word calculating your financial budget and what system keep you at that sweet spot?
Bonnie Treichel: This is another one that’s a work in progress and that, evolves over time as I work on running the businesses. But when we talk about calculating that sweet spot, one of the things for me, it’s knowing what makes you tick. It’s knowing what fills your cup. And so finding that sweet spot for me, both with the financial piece, the time piece, the filling my emotional piece or cup. I think as the business has gone on, it gives me more data points to know. For example, I know that without adding staff, I now know because I’ve got enough data, what my max out point is, so I know what the company’s revenue point is.
How many additional attorneys I need to support that, and I know all of those numbers, which drives decision making for the business. So I think one thing business owners sometimes do is they are really hard on themselves because, you know, early on they don’t know all of that information. As time goes on, then you can track it, and record it. But when I was at Multnomah Group, I learned from Eric Daley something that I’ve tried to carry forward in this organization is, tracking time.
But it’s not to monitor staff. It’s not to monitor what they’re doing. It’s really to monitor where those sweet spots are. And so I would encourage a lot of people to track their time. Again, it’s just a good exercise, even if you only do it for a month or two. But that data is so powerful for helping you figure out.
Where those sweet spots are, where do you wanna spend your time? Because if you’re finding, you’re always spending too much time dealing with multi-state payroll tax issues, well maybe that’s not the best use of your time and you need to outsource that. For example. You know, there’s little things like that that, um, I think you can really learn from those data points.
Alice Tang: What you mentioned is,in my world, we call the highest paid activity. So typically everyone have, you know, a couple hopefully,activity, not only that, I feel I’m so alive, but because I’m so alive and utilizing my skills and my knowledge, I can make the most bang of the buck.
I received recently a gift, this is from Bonnie. It’s her new book, Retirement Sketchbook. So that, hot of the press and quickly become a bestseller. Success is an aesthetic destination.
Alice Tang: Why a million dollar mindset include the flexibility of erase, refined, and resketch, your financial roadmap at any stage of your journey?
Bonnie Treichel: I wrote the book with a co-author and maybe a couple of notes that you probably figured out that are very different about this book is that, there’s 125 retirement plan concepts, but it comes with 125 sketches. So one of the concepts is that we want people to visualize concepts because they’re easier to explain some things around money movement like RMDs and all these other acronyms we have through visualization. It makes it a lot easier to understand, but more so the theme of the book is how can you Alice, be the artist, be empowered to sketch out your retirement? How can we get the 25-year-old or 30-year-old when they’re going to, you know, prepare to be married, sit down with their partner and say, let’s sketch out what we want in our future. How do we get the 65-year-old who just experienced a concept called silver divorce or divorce in retirement, that was unexpected to resketch that journey? The book does not, get away from traditional notions of basics around the financial piece. We still embrace those basic concepts.
We talk about things like stocks, bonds, annuities, social security, that’s all included. But we are challenging people to go beyond those basic concepts and think about becoming their own artist, and at all these stages of life, recognizing if you’re gonna have bumps along the road, you need this flexible framework to be empowered.
Don’t just go to Alice and say, ‘Hey, Alice, give me a financial plan.’ No, no. Alice is your, your guide. Or you know, a financial advisor is your guide, but you get to be the person who actually sketches it out, and when those bumps happen, you erase a little, you bold a little. You have to be able to make those adjustments over time, and you have to be empowered to do that for yourself, not just rely on someone to give you, well, here’s your plan. Go stick to it, because that’s only one part of it. And that also doesn’t get to all of the behavioral or emotional things like the purpose and community and recreation that you’ll also have in the retirement years.
Alice Tang: Sketch is not a firm plan. I also love the fact that you mentioned the ownership. The ownership is really the person who’s walking the journey to financial independence or retirement. And after all, everybody else who’s supporting you is the guide. So the guide can make it there, but will you make it there? That’s your decision.
Bonnie Treichel: I love this idea of empowering people. The financial advisor is the guide. The estate planning attorney is the guide. All these people can be the guide, but we ultimately have to take ownership. And if we take ownership of our own journeys, we have plenty of guides to help us, but we will feel more empowered, and we can recognize that it’s not gonna be perfect. There’s gonna be these bumps along the road and that’s totally okay, but it’ll help us to think about how to deal with the bumps as they arise. And so that, that’s a lot of the style of the book is really just helping people to think about the bumps that will happen.
So that’s one of the goals of the book, is really just to make it an approachable conversation around the dinner table that you can do with a partner, with a parent, with a child, and make it more fun to talk about these things.
Alice Tang: Yeah. Yeah. ’cause ultimately it’s your plan. So you take action or not is your choice. The journey of scaling your business, we often choose between what’s profitable and what is right for our brand.
Alice Tang: Why does a million dollar mindset include the flexibility of erase, refined, and resketch, your financial roadmap at any stage of your journey?
Bonnie Treichel: I wrote the book with a co-author and maybe a couple of notes that you probably figured out that are very different about this book is that, there’s 125 retirement plan concepts, but it comes with 125 sketches. So one of the concepts is that we want people to visualize concepts because they’re easier to explain some things around money movement like RMDs and all these other acronyms we have through visualization.
It makes it a lot easier to understand, but more so the theme of the book is how can you Alice, be the artist, be empowered to sketch out your retirement? How can we get the 25-year-old or 30-year-old when they’re going to, you know, prepare to be married, sit down with their partner and say, let’s sketch out what we want in our future. How do we get the 65-year-old who just experienced a concept called silver divorce or divorce in retirement, that was unexpected to resketch that journey? The book does not, get away from traditional notions of basics around the financial piece. We still embrace those basic concepts.
We talk about things like stocks, bonds, annuities, social security, that’s all included. But we are challenging people to go beyond those basic concepts and think about becoming their own artist, and at all these stages of life, recognizing if you’re gonna have bumps along the road, you need this flexible framework to be empowered. Don’t just go to Alice and say, ‘Hey, Alice, give me a financial plan.’ No, no. Alice is your, your guide. Or you know, a financial advisor is your guide, but you get to be the person who actually sketches it out, and when those bumps happen, you erase a little, you bold a little. You have to be able to make those adjustments over time, and you have to be empowered to do that for yourself, not just rely on someone to give you, well, here’s your plan. Go stick to it, because that’s only one part of it. And that also doesn’t get to all of the behavioral or emotional things like the purpose and community and recreation that you’ll also have in the retirement years.
Alice Tang: Sketch is not a firm plan. I also love the fact that you mentioned the ownership. The ownership is really the person who’s walking the journey to financial independence or retirement. And after all, everybody else who’s supporting you is the guide. So the guide can make it there, but will you make it there? That’s your decision.
Bonnie Treichel: I love this idea of empowering people. The financial advisor is the guide. The estate planning attorney is the guide. All these people can be the guide, but we ultimately have to take ownership. And if we take ownership of our own journeys, we have plenty of guides to help us, but we will feel more empowered, and we can recognize that it’s not gonna be perfect.
There’s gonna be these bumps along the road and that’s totally okay, but it’ll help us to think about how to deal with the bumps as they arise. And so that, that’s a lot of the style of the book is really just helping people to think about the bumps that will happen.
So that’s one of the goals of the book, is really just to make it an approachable conversation around the dinner table that you can do with a partner, with a parent, with a child, and make it more fun to talk about these things.
Alice Tang: Yeah. Yeah. ’cause ultimately it’s your plan. So you take action or not is your choice.
Alice Tang: The journey of scaling your business, we often choose between what’s profitable and what is right for our brand. What is one hard decision you have made where you had to choose between integrity or vision over easier financial win?
Bonnie Treichel: That’s a really great question and I think. The more you go on in business, the more you have to decide that. I think I am now Alice, I’m gonna say a shocking statement here, but I am probably what’s called a people pleaser sometimes. I want everyone to like me, you know? And so that has been one thing in business I’ve had to learn is everyone’s not going to like you. And that doesn’t mean you’re a mean person. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. But sometimes saying the right, ‘No’, leads to better yes’s. I’ll just give a brief example. There were a few clients that we had from very early on that just didn’t fit the model anymore.
When you’re new to a business, you take anything. You have a checkbook and you’re breathing, great. We can work with you. You know, it’s like you take anything because you need revenue. That’s what you do. But as the business wants to grow and scale, you can’t take everything.And if you have clients on these legacy models, eventually you have to figure out, there’s some clients you continue to do that for because, they’re a good referral source, they’re a great partner. You know, it brings joy to you. So if you keep that client, but there’s others, it does not make sense to have that client continue to be a, a partner to the firm. And so, we did an adjustment a few years ago where we said, okay, we are going to put people more into these scaled models, and then we had to go back to a couple of clients and say, we have this new program, would you like to add the new program, or would you like us to refer you somewhere else? Ultimately that made it feel like we’re firing them as a client. And again, that is not an easy thing to do because you feel bad about doing that, but that’s the right thing to do for the business because if you don’t do something like that, you’ll never be able to scale and grow, and that doesn’t help you.
That doesn’t help your people. You can’t really give employees the benefits they need if you’re not profitable enough to be able to do that.
Alice Tang: I’m also a people pleaser. It’s hard for me to tell people no. I think as I get older, which I’m probably 20 years older than Bonnie, that’s why she’s my young friend, but very smart, very knowledgeable. I feel that over the years, one area I feel strong about is I’m more and more confident about my value regardless of how people think of me. I still worry about how people think of me, But am I truthful to me?
So thank you for sharing that wisdom.
Alice Tang: Bonnie, in your experience, what are the biggest legislative blind spot that catch high earners and financial planners off guard, and make reaching that million dollar milestone harder it needs to be.
Bonnie Treichel: Great question, and I think it might be reaching the milestone, but it might also be dealing with the milestone once achieved. But I think it’s the constant evolution of the tax changes. So I think that that can be really difficult keeping up with the changes to the tax code and how those continually evolve. So when I think about, we had the one big, beautiful bill last summer.
There’s changes in there that people have to be aware of. You can accumulate a lot of wealth, but if you’re not thoughtful about the tax strategy for today, and many tomorrows from now, right, you might not be making or maximizing that wealth if you don’t have the tax strategy to go with it. So I think, Alice, I’m pretty sure I learned this from you, at a, the first session I met you at, you had us use a note card and we were writing down partners like COIs, and I’ve evolved that in some of my conversations when I am talking to financial advisors and I talk about your partnership wheel, and it’s a concept that really evolved, Alice, from learning from you, but it’s this idea of who’s in your partnership wheel.
And one of the top people I put on that partnership wheel is good CPA. You know, good audit partners, because that CPA in conjunction with a financial advisor, if you don’t have them, and then that sometimes trust in estate attorney too, that partnership to me, it really requires good collaboration. They don’t all have to be at the same firm by any means, but the lack of collaboration between those experts can really put a dent in your wealth. I think that’s just so important for people to think about who are those strong partners in that partnership wheel of the financial services realm, because the tax piece is so critically important.
Alice Tang: I cannot agree with you more because one piece when I, uh, started, WIFS, women’s in Insurance and Financial Services and, uh, we want the chapter to be different. We don’t want only insurance and financial advisor, but partners to serve the client in the middle.
For example, if we have a financial, year end meeting, tax planning meeting, why does the financial advisor need to be because there are things we needed to know in order to help the client better. And you can’t expect the client to bring all what they learned from this session to another expert. So that collaboration is very important. I agree with you. Now since you have the law background, we are gonna drill you a little bit. When we look at the current retirement law, where is the system failing women the most, and how can we strategically pivot to protect our path to a million dollar legacy?
Bonnie Treichel: Great question,From a retirement law perspective, I think where I see there’s some gaps or rather opportunities if you look at just the basics of how a retirement plan works with the eligibility requirements and the way people enter and exit plans to be able to get the matching contribution and that sort of thing. If you think of then for females, when females take time off to have children or to come back to work, there’s a gap and that puts us behind for retirement. So from a workplace retirement savings plan opportunity, I think there are ways to help with filling that gap when people take time off and return to the workplace again, so that we can better be able to serve the female population. The other space where this is starting to change, but it’s not uniform.
If you look at the percentages of small businesses that have a workplace savings plan, it’s just, it’s abysmal, right? Because it’s so complicated to do that. Places like California and Oregon have started these workplace IRA requirements where you’re required to have a plan through Oregon saves, for example. But nationally that is not a requirement. There’s not a legal requirement to offer a plan. It’s optional .Until we can really have more workplace savings. When you think about the number of small business owners, females in those positions, again, that’s really disadvantaging females who don’t have access to workplace plan. If they take time off, then they’ve gotta meet eligibility requirements to come back into a plan. So they’re missing out on all those savings years.
Alice Tang: I agree with you wholeheartedly. I care about women as you know. That’s why we created the podcast, women’s Million Dollar Conversations and, at the get go, we know that nine out of 10 household is under a million dollars. A million dollars is a lot to take to Las Vegas and play some games, but it’s not a lot for retirement as we know there is inflation.
Alice Tang: How much does it cost for us to live a month or a year? I mean, 80,000 seems like a lot of money, but it’s not. Think about and how expensive is mortgage and rent and all these little things. So, yes. Help women who take time off to get back into the run of saving better is the message.
Alice Tang: If you were to Resketch using your books, uh, title, definition of a Wealthy Life. What does your personal legacy look like?
Bonnie Treichel: It’s funny ’cause that kind of goes back to where we started with how I place value on money. And I think it shows too, um, where I’ve shifted from where I was a few years ago when we talked because, at that point I was so much more focused on numbers that led to financial freedom.
As I’ve become more comfortable with where the business is set and been able to financially be in a place where I value time, I value community. I value purpose. I myself have resketched, what does that vision look like? That vision is not about numbers. That vision is about having a cup of coffee and sitting outside, petting Sunny and Sadie.
Bonnie Treichel: And so, I was actually thinking through a lot of the numbers aspect recently of what is the year in which I hope to retire. For me, my retirement is, a phased retirement, which I think is becoming more and more common where because I practice law, and I have a small law firm, I could do that forever. I don’t have to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to be finished at 65 and never work again.’ But I could say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna work a lot until 55 and at 55 I’m really gonna scale back. But I’m gonna really work on those projects that I want, but in a much more scaled back way.’
So that’s the vision for me is continue to work on the projects I love, but at a certain age, it’s only those projects I love. I’ll work really hard until then, but then it is much more about who do I wanna spend my time with? Where do I wanna be spending that time? And it’s about the people and the purpose.
Alice Tang: That’s awesome. The most important thing is know what you want to today and have the courage to honor it. Um, because if you don’t do it, no one is gonna do it for you. I mean, your spouse will not know it. Your business partner may not know about it. Of course, they have their, love, care, and agenda, so don’t be hijacked. We are very happy, Bonnie, for you to show up at Women’s Million Dollar Conversations. We love you and we are so grateful for you. Thank you so very much.
Bonnie Treichel: Well, thank you for having me. It’s an honor to get to be a part of your community and conversation, and it’s great to be able to be back.
Alice Tang: If you are ready to turn your what if’s to a million dollar reality, make sure to hit the subscribe button. Join the community of powerhouse women who are redefining wealth on their own terms.
