Kathryn Main — Award Winning Entrepreneur, Mom, Fitness Fanatic

Once again, it is What's Involved. Pleasure to have you along with us. Man, do I have a special guest at the moment. In fact, I'm not even sure how she managed to find time to talk to me. Her name is Catherine Mayne. She is one of the founders of the Money Savvy Group. She's an author. She's a multi-award winning businesswoman. We're going to say, "Hello, Catherine Mayne. How are you?" Hi, David. I'm great. Thank you. How are you? Fantastic. You've done a lot, and you continue to do a lot. Before we dive into what the "a lot" is, let's start off with a little bit of info about Catherine. I always like to find out where people start and how they get to where they currently are. So give me some history on you, Catherine. So my story is quite an interesting one. I'm a high school dropout. I dropped out in standard seven, which is grade nine, with art finishing, and got my first job at 15 and started my life there. At 18, decided I wanted to study, and luckily was very attractive and managed to model my way through school, and got into advertising later in life. At 30 years old, pregnant with my third child, my husband at the time and I had nothing but 17 rand in the bank. No savings, no investments. We had lost our house in one of our cars, and we were in the biggest financial trouble of our lives at 30. We didn't even know how we were going to get ourselves out of that situation. That's when my own financial literacy education started, and four years later, we managed to completely turn our lives around and started making millions through the multiple businesses that we had set up in the good financial literacy training and implementation we put into our own lives. In 2014, I started to look at how I could help other people not be like me, not to get to 30 years old and have no medical aid and have no money in the bank and no savings. That's where the money savvy brands started. Wow. Okay. So this is going to be good for a whole bunch of reasons, because if you get to my age after multiple things have hit the fan and you've got also no savings and things like that, it sounds like it could learn quite a bit from you. So Catherine, you then started up this money savvy group. Now, what does the money savvy group consist of? So we started with our first flagship product called Money Savvy Kids. So I've been an entrepreneur since I was 22. I've practically worked for myself most of my life.

And when I started to decide how I wanted to educate, I looked for the gaps in the market. And based on the research that I've done, the best place to start is with kids, because if you want to institute a healthy financial mindset, you need to do that when the neural pathways are developing between the ages of four and 12. So we started with Money Savvy Kids and our brand has grown exponentially over the last couple of years. We now have money savvy teens, money savvy adults, and money savvy generation. So we teach financial literacy to kids, teens, and adults. And then we also create financial products for corporates. So we've worked with people directly like Mrs. Mbeki, FNB, the Xaro Mind Group, and we have clients on the African continent as well. Now, off the bat, I would say, I bet you know, money who really needs it, but it is incredibly important. And I have a passion, and this is why I do what I do. I have a passion for business and for small, medium businesses, entrepreneurs. And the amount of times, and I include myself in this, that a business battles and struggles because of this liquidity problem, the cash flow problem, understanding money. Is it that difficult? Not if you know what you're doing. And unfortunately, our schooling system has failed us, specifically our age, but it's failing our children as well.

I've got three sons of my own. My oldest son is almost turning 18. And when he was in grade 10, he came to me and he said, "Mom, what's a checkbook?" I was like, "Why do you want to know what a checkbook is?" He was like, "No, because we're learning about it in class." So I dug through my drawer of forgotten things. I had an old checkbook. And he just laughed. And he's like, "Why would people pay with these kind of things?" And unfortunately, the schooling system is still teaching our children about checkbooks when even the banks went to check cinema. So there's a huge gap. I was actually going to say that it's so strange that you talk about that, because I was in the bank a little while ago. And I asked the person that was helping me about checkbooks. And I got this blank stare because we don't. We've moved away from it. I remember because I'm a lefty, I always used to have to order special checkbooks. Okay. But why are we still teaching our children about it instead of teaching them how to trade online and create passive income for themselves? This is something else. Now, I want to dig a little deeper into what you actually teach people because now you've just mentioned trade online. I've been fascinated by that subject, but I've been too terrified to even look at it because you can lose money. And if you don't have money, then losing it's not a good idea. No. So obviously, the younger you start, the better chance you have of being successful. And you must remember that investing is not a short-term strategy. It's got to be part of your long-term strategy and part of your long-term goal. So setting yourself up for the long-term. Because if you have a look at what markets have done now purely around COVID, how a lot of people have lost a lot of money because of this global pandemic that's happened. But these things do generally normalize over time. But there's some amazing products out there now, David, that make it really easy for the man on the street to do online investing. So I use a platform called Easy Equities. And they have a full online demo site where it's linked directly to the stock exchange where you can actually go and practice buying stocks. So buying things like ETF bundles. I don't know if you know what an ETF bundle is, but buying those managed basket of goods with very low fees. And they're doing incredibly well.

And you can go and play around without actually spending a cent. But if you wanted to invest on a small scale, you can start with an amount of 50 rand. Wow. Okay. But let's go back to the beginning with money-savvy kids. How is that structured and how does that work? So I'll give you an example. We're running a program at the moment. And it's for teenagers. And it's a saving and investment six-week boot camp that we run. So we start off with the basics. So first we start off trying to identify what are your values and what are your goals. Because behavior is driven by values and goals. Once we teach them to understand the concept of what they value, so if it's security that they value, how do you create security for yourself? Then what we teach them is, number one, first, you need to make money. So how do we teach you to make money? So we workshop some business ideas with the group. And then from there we teach them how to open bank accounts, how to save, what are the various saving options? What is a long term and a fixed term bank account interest look like? What is interest? What is the benefits of compound interest? What are your investing options? So we teach them the difference between shares, unit trust, ETFs, ETNs. And then we actually teach them to trade online using the easy equities platform. So by the time they've finished our six-week program, they have a fully fledged side hustle or small business that we've helped them set up and establish. And then they're actually making money, putting that money in a safe place like a bank account. They've set up an automatic savings transfer and that they're paying themselves first before they're paying any of their expenses. Now that makes a lot of sense because a lot of times when people do start making money and running a business, you find that everything gets plowed back into the business, whatever it is. And after a while, you start to get quite resentful because you don't earn any money. So this is a way of giving you that endorphin rush and saying, okay, now I've paid myself and I'm making my money work for me. Am I correct? Exactly. So the benefit of compound interest, you know, we have a basic example that we show people. So one kid started at 15, one at 20 and one at 25 and they each saved a hundred rand a month. The kid that started at 15 had almost a million rand by the time he was 60, but the kid that started at 25 only had about 300,000. And that's the benefit of compound interest over 10 years. So we show them practically what their savings could look like if they paid themselves first. Fantastic stuff. We're going to dive deeper into that. My special guest is Catherine Main and she is the founder of the Money Savvy Group.

We'll talk about that. We're talking about kids now, but I want to get onto the teens and the adults in just a little bit. More of that when we come back, this is what's involved. Thanks for being along with us. And we're back with what's involved. My special guest is Catherine Main, one of the founders of the Money Savvy Group amongst other things. And I want to dive into some of those other things too, but let's stick with the Money Savvy. So with the Money Savvy kids, how young are they able to start with this program? Is it something that parents would have to send their children to? Is there an online component? You can start from as young as four, because by the age of four children understand money and financial concepts. So we start our training from a grade north level. We have face-to-face training. We have online training and I've written a book as well called Raising Money Savvy Kids, which I'm happy to give away for free. So if anybody wants some ideas on how to start having money conversations with kids that are under 13 years old, they can either buy the book off my website for 50 rand. It's an ebook. You can print it out. It's got a whole lot of activities, or you could just pop me an email and I'm happily send you a copy. So there's many ways that we can deliver our products. Obviously, now with COVID and the schools being closed, we've had to pivot our business and take an online approach. And I must say it's working pretty well for us. I think that is absolutely fantastic. So if I'm sitting somewhere and I don't really have access, and we'll give out to all your contact details and everything at the end of the show, because I know people are now sitting poised with pen and paper. We'll do that at the end of the show. But if I'm sitting somewhere and I don't really have access to be able to get to any of the face-to-face trainings, you say there is an online component. Yes. So we actually run free webinars every single month for kids, teens and adults, so that you can come and see what it is we're all about, what it is that we're teaching. So we do a free introductory hour and a half workshops, and then there's the six week boot camp that comes after that. So if you're interested in savings or investments or debt and budgeting, you can come and get the free overview. And then if you want to, you can pass 600 rand for the six week program, and then we delve deeper and help you sort out your finances.

Okay, so 600 rand is the investment, which is really not a lot of money in today's terms. Obviously, there are people that would battle with that, but I think that's brilliant. So the kids can start from four. What is the difference then between money savvy kids and money savvy teens? The kids and the teens are skin slightly differently. So our kids, there's more book work, there's more activity work with the older kids, we've kind of gamified all of the financial literacy concepts. So there's not so much book work. So the terminology is slightly different. But the concepts are the same. It's just the way that we serve the concept up so that they understand it at their age. Okay, alrighty. And then obviously, we're moving on now to the stuff you do for adults, because so many of us don't want to turn around and admit that we actually don't know enough about money and money management, etc., etc. Where do the adults fall in then? So we also we run online webinars, we do face to face, and we do quite a lot of corporate training as well. So I have a separate brand called Wellness Assets. So we actually work with corporates. So depending on the kind of stuff that you have, we can come in and customize a specific product for adults. Our adult content is mostly through the corporates. Like you said, we don't get a lot of one on ones, because people are actually embarrassed to admit that they have a problem. Which is silly, because I mean, and particularly now, if you consider what's happened over this last period, and this year, which we all started out with, at least I started out going, this is going to be my year 2020. Well, we got plenty, just not plenty of the stuff we were planning on getting. But a lot of people are now in a place where they are in serious financial trouble. Is this something that we could work our way out of? I mean, listening to your story of dropping out of school and starting work when you're 15, etc, etc. 30 years old, you said that you had 17 rand in the bank. Is there hope for us?

Absolutely. So David, I'm very lucky that I have more than one source of income. But literally in March, my money savvy business stopped trading completely. And I had six licensees who were dependent on my product working because we have school programs, we all stopped making money effective immediately. We've had to do a couple of things. One, we had to relook all of our budgets. So we've actually created like a little five step program, how to relook your budgets, how to cut back on expenses, what are some of the mindset shifts that you need to have to cut back? Personally, I had to cut my own food budget from 5000 to 2000 random in, you know, and I have three sons. So it's been quite a difficult thing. But I managed to change my mindset. And that's the thing is what you should be doing now is scaling back as much as you can. Don't stop saving. Make sure that you're looking to create more than one income source, and really just buttoning down and tightening the hatches so that you can buy this difficult time. Which is it's very, very sound advice. And I think one of the things certainly one of the things that I've learned over this time is how much less we can actually get by with, you know, before before COVID, it was like, Oh, we're living right on the edge, we can't afford to do without this, that or the next thing. COVID comes and we were also we do a lot of our businesses training oriented, it's sales training, it's digital stuff. We also ended up with that abrupt halt. And we managed to make it through, which is one of the silver linings that I'm trying to look at at the moment, we're still here. We might not be sort of thriving, but we certainly have battened down the hatches and we've managed to survive this. Where does somebody start? If they're listening now, and they're going, I actually don't know. I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do.

You know, money is almost non-existent. Where would a good place be for somebody to start? So firstly, sit down and figure out where exactly you're at. Be honest with yourself and see what situation you're in. Start cutting back immediately. So what I suggest is you start off putting a budget together of all the expenses that you think you have. Then go and revisit your bank statements and actually go and look at the expenses that you really have. Because a lot of the times we're forgetting that 20 grand that we're spending on that cup of coffee on the way to work every morning and the packet of cigarettes we're buying every weekend and the alcohol that we're spending on, you know, people are not factoring these things into their budgets. So put a real budget together, see how much money you need and see where you can cut back. So I had to cut back at least another 10,000 rand a month because I didn't have enough savings to pull me through when I stopped earning income. And it was everything from my insurance company to my Wi-Fi provider to every single place that I could juggle around money. I did. And get the whole family involved. You know, my children, we have such a tight food budget. So what I do is I say to them, "Okay guys, we've got a thousand rand. This is what we're spending. So we'll allocate potatoes 50 rand and tomatoes 20 rand. And their job then with me is to come shopping with me and try and save on as many items as they can." And whatever they manage to save off that budget, they can have whatever they want. So they've really started to like cut back and scrub and my kids are now making their own money so that they can have all of the things that they need.

That's brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant. Now you talk about multiple streams of income and you talk about side hustles and things like that. When we come back, do you think about to give me some examples of where we should be looking to start up our little side hustle or our little business or something like that? Okay, sure. Fantastic. My special guest is Catherine Mayne, one of the founders of the money savvy group. She's also an author and a multi-award winning businesswoman. When we come back, we're going to find out about side hustles. There's just something about that that I love. We'll be back with more in just a bit. It is what's involved. And we're back with what's involved. My special guest is Catherine Mayne of the money savvy group. So Catherine, side hustles. Talk to me about side hustles. So it would obviously be age dependent and interest dependent and passion dependent. My middle son is a little mathematical genius. So when lockdown happened, he started doing math tutoring in the state that we lived in. So that was something natural for him. And I said to him, "You need to make money now." And he's like, "What am I going to do?" I was like, "I don't know. What are you really good at?" And he was like, "Well, I'm really good at maths." I was like, "Absolutely. Ah, let's work on that." My younger son who's 10, he walks dogs. And my older son, he's running a clubhouse. So it all just depends what it is that you have time and capacity and interest for. So for me, I love marketing and I love marketing strategy. So I'm spending a lot of my side hustle doing marketing work, which has been a booming business for me during lockdown.

So my suggestion would be find a problem and solve it because we all have problems and we live on a continent where there are hundreds and hundreds of problems that need solving. I don't know if you know about Tato, that girl who designed the backpack with the solar panel on the back. No, tell me about that. So Tato was a girl who was living in a rural area and she used to walk home from school. And by the time she got home, she had no electricity to do her homework. So she built a backpack and on the backpack, she put a solar panel. So while she walked home from school, the solar panel actually charged. So when she got home, she stuck that into a jar and she had electricity to do her schoolwork. And Tato was on the cover of Forbes Africa magazine at the age of 21 because she found a problem and she solved it. So that would be my first advice. Look for problems that you have every day or that your family has every day and try and find a solution to that problem. If you don't, if you can't find a problem to solve, think about how do you enjoy spending your free time? So I was doing quite a lot of cooking during lockdown. It was cold. I'm a vegetarian. I was doing a lot of soups. My neighbors loved my soup and called me the soup queen. And they were like, cool, I'll pay you 120 rand for a bucket of soup. I was like, okay, cool, this could work. You know, I love cooking anyway. I was cooking anyway. So to make some extra money was a good idea. So find something that you're good at or something that you enjoy spending time doing and push some energy into that. Okay. As I'm sitting here, I'm thinking, you know, that people that would be listening now, what would people do? Let's say that they've they've now been retrenched. I mean, I've got my sister, for example, worked for a company for 20, almost 21 years. And during this period, they had to shut the company down. So she's now sitting and she's sort of going, what is next? So somebody like that, what would they do? And I'm trying to think, you know, because there's a lot of, as I understand, a lot of people that are professionals that are now sitting without jobs. So we've talked about something that you like, but is there a possibility of taking your existing skills or maybe taking some of the money you've got and investing it in new skills? What would you suggest there?

So there's a couple of things that you can do. So online work, working remotely has become massive, and it's a global thing. So there's a website called rework remotely.com where you can actually go and apply to do customer service jobs on international dating sites and all sorts of products. And it's really good money because you get paid in international currency. And the working hours are pretty weird hours. So sometimes you work from 10 o'clock at nine to three in the morning because you're working in American time. So there's often online stuff that you can do that you can work from anywhere. And then yes, if you have some money and you have some business ideas, absolutely invest in those. So I see that there's quite a lot of recruitment companies that have changed their formula, and I've spoken to two in the last two weeks, that they're now creating like an executive suite where you can rent an executive for a contract period of three to six months. So I would suggest get in touch with some of the recruitment agencies, see if there's any contract we're going because the companies have also lost money. So they can't afford to take on an employee at a million rand a year now because they just can't afford it. But for a three-month contract to train somebody else or to fill a position, those jobs are many at the moment.

But you know, I'm an entrepreneur. So for me, I would always figure out how could I work for myself? Yeah, I must admit that is one of those things that and I've spoken to a bunch of people about this over the last little while. I think it's both a blessing and a curse because, you know, I discovered also from a very young age, I didn't play well in the sandpit with other children. So that's been a challenge for me. And I always if I sort of get my way, I would always choose to work for myself because that way I don't resent the hours I put in. Exactly. Well, that's the thing is I have such an amazing work ethic. I work Sunday to Friday. My days normally start at four o'clock in the morning. But I wake up and I'm excited to work because I'm doing what I love every day. Like it doesn't feel like work. I feel like I'm just living my dream every day. Yeah, absolutely. My special guest is Catherine Maine, founder of the Money Savvy Group. She's also an author and a multi award winning businesswoman. When we come back, we're going to be wrapping it up with Catherine. And I'll give you those that email address or contact details as well. This is what's involved. And we're back with my special guest, Catherine Maine.

So Catherine wrapping it up now you've got, I suppose one could almost call you a serial entrepreneur because you've got the Money Savvy brand. What else are you involved in? Wellness assets you mentioned? Yeah, so wellness assets is a corporate wellness product that I have some partners in one of them being Paula Quincy, the relationship expert, I think you know her. And I also run an advertising agency called Maine Multimedia. And our focus there is online regeneration, marketing strategy, and rolling out marketing campaigns for our clients. Wonderful. So you really have got a lot on your plate. You also mentioned earlier on raising Money Savvy Kids eBook. So that's available. You've been very kind to say if somebody drops you a mail that you'll give them a free copy and thank you for that. In terms of Money Savvy Kids, you mentioned that you had people franchisees. Is this a franchise opportunity? Yes, it is. So we actually decided to launch this model on a smaller scale. So they're licensees. So they buy in for a very small amount. We basically help some primary focus for this business as women and empowering women. So I'm finding that a lot of women over 50 are really struggling to find jobs. So if they have some entrepreneurial spirit and they're interested in what we're doing, I'm happy to sell them a license at a very low cost. And then we train them and give them everything that they need to start and run their business. We were actually about to scale into Kenya and Namibia just before lockdown happened and unfortunately I didn't get to make those trips to those countries. But we will be scaling out into Africa as well, firstly into Burundi actually. Wow, okay. That's interesting. So your model then, the model of financial literacy is translatable. Absolutely translatable. We've already created products in Portuguese for Mozambique.

We've created a product in Canada for a client of ours. So financial concepts are the same all over the world. We change the currencies, we change the name of the characters, we change some of the terminology, but pretty much it's very easy to replicate anywhere in the world what we do. Fantastic stuff. Before we let you go, some advice, Catherine, you've been there, you've experienced this. If somebody's sitting listening to us right now and they're thinking, all is lost, do you have advice for somebody like that? Yes, I do. All is not lost. For me, I very much believe in energy and vibrations. When you're vibrating at a negative or low energy, you're going to track negative, low vibrations into your world. So keep upbeat, keep reading, keep learning, keep trying. So I think one of the things that really saved me was changing my mindset about money and setting goals. Setting goals changed the way that I showed up every single day because I had something to work towards. So understanding your values and understanding your goals because that's going to drive your behavior and just don't give up because it's only money at the end of the day and it doesn't define who you are as a human being. Fantastic stuff. One of the things that we've been chatting quite a lot about over the last couple of months is this concept of becoming more human and being a human being as opposed to human doing. So some very sound advice there. Catherine, for yourself and your brand, what is your next? Where are you heading to from here? So I've actually spent most of lockdown automating my business and getting it online. So we'll have a full online component with six products up and running by the end of the year and then our plan is to scale into Africa. We've just signed on a new licensee now in the South. So we now have seven licensees under our belt. So making sure that their businesses are successful next year and scaling into Africa with our online component. And I have a new book coming out in January called Raising Many Savvy Teams. Wonderful. Well, that looks like we never chat to you about that as well because I'd love to find out more about that book.

Talking about books, if somebody wants to get hold of you and they want to maybe find out more, get some advice or maybe just get the book, where is the best place for them to go? Go to www.manysavvykids.co.za. All of our contact details are on the website. You can just drop me or one of the licensees an email and we'll happily share any information that you need about our workshops or if you want a copy of the book. Catherine, thank you so much for taking the time out and having a chat to us today. I know it's been a bit rough for you because you have the dreaded Lergie. I hope you get well soon. And by Lergie, I have to always say this. It's not COVID, okay? She's all right. You are all right, eh? Yeah, my ex-husband's got COVID and we were all together on Thursday for my son's birthday and we all have some snivels, but we're not sick sick. We're very lucky. Wonderful stuff. So you are doing the right thing and self-isolating. Thank you so much for taking the time out, Catherine. It's been wonderful. We wish you all the best. I look forward to chatting with you again in the not too distant future. Thanks and have a rad day to you and the listeners. Wonderful stuff. That was my special guest, Catherine Main, the Money Savvy group. Check it out, moneysavvykids.co.za. Drop them a line and if you are a parent, get one of those books for your kids. It's an absolute must, something I wish I had. Until next time, thank you for listening.