Money Story Project Podcast Audio with Matthew Bellringer
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Matthew Bellringer: [00:00:00] I'm aware that I had this really interesting relationship with money, as a way of solving problems.
Matthew Bellringer: And particularly the problems that come up around neurodivergence.
Matthew Bellringer: your value as a human being and the amount the world will pay you are largely decoupled. look at the people that are paid the most.
Matthew Bellringer: Are they the ones creating the most social value?
Matthew Bellringer: One of the worst things I think you can do as an entrepreneur is build a business that you don't like.
Matthew Bellringer: that's probably worse than being unsuccessful. being successful in a business you do not like is is a gilded cage, but it's absolutely a cage.
Harriet Formby: Like, what am I doing? Am I bartering my Picasso for a loaf of bread? A lot of money content will tell you to budget better, be more disciplined, manifest harder, and just hurry up and fix yourself because apparently you're always the problem [00:01:00] to overcome. The Money Story project is where we go deeper and wider into who we are, where we came from, what we've experienced and discovered along the way.
Harriet Formby: Through honest,deeply human conversations, personal stories and expert voices, helping us make sense of why money feels so complicated. I'm your host, Harriet Formby, chartered accountant, fractional CFO, trauma-informed finance coach, and insatiably curious about the human side of money
Harriet Formby: Today I'm joined by Matthew Bellringer, and Matthew is a neurodiversity and innovation specialist.
Harriet Formby: They work with neurodivergent professionals, execs, and business owners, helping them build a working life fully aligned with their talents, [00:02:00] passions, and values. So a big welcome, Matthew. Thank you for being here.
Matthew Bellringer: Oh, thank you very much for having me on. I'm really excited to have this conversation.
Harriet Formby: Likewise. So to begin with, it would be really brilliant to get into your own money story growing up.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. So it's a, it's an interesting one. I have a,I, I have a kind of, a quite a complicated r- like money relationship growing up.
Matthew Bellringer: So I grew up in, in relative abundance, compared to a lot of people. though with people around me who hadn't, and so there's some interesting tensions there. And when we were young my, my dad started a charity, so he's a kind of, a, a social entrepreneur himself.
Matthew Bellringer: and so we went through the kind of startup phase of all of that. But I was also, I knew I was neurodivergent from a young age. Not as neurodivergent as it turns out I am, but I knew I was neurodivergent and, we happened to have the resources to send me to an independent school, which supported me much more than what was available in the local area, through the, the state system.
Matthew Bellringer: so [00:03:00] I'm aware that I had this really interesting relationship with, money, and I think for me it's often I've seen it as a way of solving problems.
Harriet Formby: Mm.
Matthew Bellringer: And particularly the problems that come up around neurodivergence. You know, you can, you can kind of buy your way out of problems.
Matthew Bellringer: Um, I've never really lived in a situation where it was very scarce as such in, for the basics, but I have lived in situations where we have kind of problems, un- slightly more unexpected problem and not necessarily had enough to solve them, but sometimes have had. So I have, have a kind of mixed relationship with kind of what money was for.
Matthew Bellringer: We never lived in a very, showy, like it's never been about display for me or anyone else in my family really. I think most, most family members, myself included, I grew up with a lot of books, there was always some money for books.
Matthew Bellringer: and as you can see behind me, that, that habit has continued. so yeah. Yeah. so it's different things and different, emphasis. You know, we had [00:04:00] holidays in this country and relatively modest, not big flash cars and all of that stuff. but equally we- Had enough.
Matthew Bellringer: So yeah, it's an interesting kind of space to grow up in, I think.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. It sounds like money was something that was quite practical and p- problem-solving. So it's like-
Matthew Bellringer: Hmm ...
Harriet Formby: if there was something that's come up, you mentioned about being neurodivergent, it was like, well, money could be a problem-solver in that regard.
Harriet Formby: So it's quite interesting, yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. And I think perhaps the idea that we need to keep, we need to have some back in case we have a problem that we haven't anticipated- Hmm ... does definitely come up with that, you know? And that we need to be somewhat careful because there might be something we haven't thought of yet.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah. So it's kind of the, sort of safety net side as well-... in terms of, having something in reserve for, like, unexpected events. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Interesting, yeah. Are there any particular kind of memories you have around money specifically,
Matthew Bellringer: not really from childhood. it was interesting. So, a lot of neurodivergent people struggle to [00:05:00] figure out how to use money well, and I was like that in my- Yeah ... in my, like, early 20s. I ran a business that ended up, running out of money completely. So I had the- Yeah
Matthew Bellringer: experience of basically I had to move back in with my mum and get a job all of a sudden to pay some debts. and I think that was the first time I'd really significantly been in debt, actually. You know, I was, again, had enough privilege that I didn't need to get into debt like, before that. But yeah, so that was an interesting experience.
Matthew Bellringer: That was quite a, an eye-opening thing, I think, in that, that relationship. But also to have tried and failed and then actually worked out of it, it worked out. I think there's, that could have gone... I- It felt at the time, I think, it was really quite a disaster.
Harriet Formby: Mm ...
Matthew Bellringer: but in a way, I mean, I learnt an awful lot.
Matthew Bellringer: I got a next job out of it. It was a good... You know, in some ways it was a, it cost less than university.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: It was a lesson. and I learnt [00:06:00] as much. yeah. So it's, it's funny. So I have this kind of, yeah, again, this kind of relationship with starting things and failure and wanting to...
Matthew Bellringer: I do definitely have always had the frustration of, like, I'm, I've never been particularly concerned with money for its own sake, but I like what it buys.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. I like the thing... I'm not really interested. I- my ideal life would be not to have to think, like, just to be able to not think about it very much and just do what I want to do.
Matthew Bellringer: so yeah, and that's been true all the way through for me.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting that, you've tied in the sort of, business failure as, like, yeah, at the time it feels stressful, but actually it's a lot of lessons. you don't really learn about money always until something sort of goes wrong sometimes.
Harriet Formby: You know, that side of things and it's noticeable that you've kind of turned that into something that, is, like, a lesson and something- Mm ... that you could then, transfer. So, I know that you, had a career in IT. So did that happen sort of after the business? what was the business doing that, that you've started?
Matthew Bellringer: So the business is, and this is, this very much dates the [00:07:00] business because it was... So it was a LAN gaming business. So before- Okay ... everyone had broadband, what people used to do was get, bring their computers to a place- and play games against each other, and we set up a mobile business.
Matthew Bellringer: There were people that were doing quite big, events in certain places, but we, I managed to set up something that was mobile. and so we would go to a leisure center and we would run or like- Any big hall and then get everyone together and a, do a quite a big LAN party, there. So that's, yeah, that was the business.
Matthew Bellringer: So we were kind of traveling around doing... It was kind of IT related and games related- Yeah ... and community related, and all of tho- that's kind of interesting that those themes persist throughout my work actually. but yeah. and moving into kind of bigger IT, it does just, the numbers are just change your relationship with money, I think.
Matthew Bellringer: You know, even w- when I started out, when I first left the business and started working for someone else, I worked for a charity, and that was interesting. I picked up some interesting lessons there, And I think people think of charity as [00:08:00] somewhat softer than businesses financially, but it's usually the opposite.
Matthew Bellringer: You know, businesses can often reach out and finance and put bits of the business in hock because they're gonna make more money in future, and that's, you know, that's, that, that might be a decision. Charities are either solvent or they're not. yeah. So it's a- actually much... In some ways it's harder and, having the discipline of being like every pound we spend is money not spent on service users Is a, is an interesting kind of way to develop your budgeting.
Matthew Bellringer: So I learned to do a lot on very, on relatively little. And then what I did was I moved to a much bigger organization, a university, where budgets were huge. And, where I, I started in an academic department where budgets were much bigger than the previous one, and then I moved to the central IT service where, where budgets were orders of magnitude bigger.
Matthew Bellringer: And being involved in purchases of, in, [00:09:00] in the multi-millions of pounds, where, which is mind-boggling in a way. that, that kind of, just changes your, your perception of what money is and how it's used. And also realizing, we were... Sometimes we weren't spending very much per unit.
Matthew Bellringer: this was like we were thinking about the, say the computer, the default computer we were gonna give to staff. And, like, when you're buying in business and buying in bulk, first of all, you get quite big discounts. and second of all, your per unit cost is, is usually relatively low. you think of how much a computer costs.
Matthew Bellringer: Like, probably people were spending about 1,000 pounds at the time. We were spending, we were talking at, do we spend 623 or do we spend 635 for something slightly different? And weighing that up against, is this gonna make a significant difference to the end user experience and therefore the productivity of people?
Matthew Bellringer: Or isn't it because it adds 100,000 pounds to the budget at the end? you know- ... these, [00:10:00] these, these numbers add up. Even though it's a small differ- it, it adds up. So that was really interesting for me to engage with. But also the countervailing thing of yes, okay, on some level it's a big number and the number goes up a lot if we change it, but equally that if we improve the user experience a little bit across the whole estate, we make a big difference that way as well.
Matthew Bellringer: So s- the tensions between all of that and negotiating and actually bumping up against other people's, views of money and how they saw, their priorities and their roles was very interesting in that as well. it's also just a, it's a slightly, vertigo-inducing thing to write a report In a job and realize that what you write strongly influences when someone's gonna spend a l- very large amount of money.
Matthew Bellringer: Mm. You know, when you're like, "My word here is very significant." And so how do I frame this? how do I say this in a way that captures, the truth? Because [00:11:00] there's, if we got this very wrong, it would be very, it would be a lot of waste for the institution. It would be very bad. we did have experiences where you, there was a very big recall of the brand of computers that we bought.
Matthew Bellringer: that everyone bought. That like, a lot of people were buying at the time, and they had a failure. They had a very high failure rate 'cause they had just one tiny little component in them that just wasn't very well made, and in two or three years it would go pop and fail.
Harriet Formby: Mm.
Matthew Bellringer: And then the whole thing would stop working. And so we had this big process and, and the fact that, we realized that the organization, that the company that were dealing with these must have been spending much more than they'd actually, probably not just their profit margin, but the whole cost just to fix this, which was an interesting experience as well to think, "Okay, why can they spend so much, and how can they spend so much?"
Matthew Bellringer: and that they, so yeah, that was a funny one as well.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, 'cause it comes back to the value. you're really closely looking at margins and thinking, well, they've, you know- Especially when it's like 1,000 pound laptop, [00:12:00] say, and you're getting it for 600 it's al- almost like, well, what is the real value then if, if, the bulk discount is so big?
Harriet Formby: But yeah, then you see an issue. And you mentioned something interesting there about, like dealing with other people and like their views of money and was there anything specific that sort of came out of that kind of surprised you in terms of other people's, perceptions?
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. I think what was always really interesting, I was always interested in value.
Harriet Formby: Mm-hmm.
Matthew Bellringer: And I think actually now I say that out loud in the context of the previous question, I was raised, I think, in terms of value rather than price.
Harriet Formby: Mm.
Matthew Bellringer: I was raised to think "Is this, is it worth spending more? It, where is the most, where is the best price-value ratio?" Not what's the cheapest.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: And I think I actually, in, in a lot of the conversations boiled down to speaking with some people who were clearly like, "What's the cheapest? What's the cheapest we can do this?"
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Whereas for me it was always like, where's that sweet spot in, in, in value? Like, where are we getting the most value for the money we spend?"
Matthew Bellringer: Which kind of comes from clearly some k- slightly different [00:13:00] assumptions about what money is and how we use it. yeah, so for me it was always like being very quite strict on that, and also being like very willing to argue for spending more if it got a significantly better value, which did put me at odds with some people.
Harriet Formby: Mm. Yeah, yeah. Because there's a, a thing here of like the budget line for, say, it's computers or equipment, is smaller because you're, getting the price down, but it's like what's the impact on especially like a institution like a university it's like everyone is, is a knowledge-based thing, isn't it?
Harriet Formby: It's people's brains and typing and- And, and then ju- and also- ... and if they can do their job better, yeah, it's yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: And also for us, even as an IT department and our budget, sometimes it felt like we were moving stuff around between budgets. Because some of the spend was like, "Okay, we can spend this and it will make these computers easier to maintain, so it will reduce our staffing costs in terms of delivering the service."
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: You know? And, w- it's one of those funny things is like by the time that you've [00:14:00] had a technician go out and touch a computer, you've spent a significant chunk of the purchase price of that computer in one instance of them going out and touching a computer. we worked it out, it was like something like just having someone go and look at a computer cost the organization about 150 quid.
Harriet Formby: Mm.
Matthew Bellringer: So if we're talking about a 600 pound computer, that's only four touches before the whole value of the computer is eclipsed by the value of the technician. And so starting to think about, actually is this, is it the right thing to do? And we had a situation where some, like a lot of organizations with constrained budgets, where we ended up with quite an aging estate.
Matthew Bellringer: And, I actually, again, I had to push quite hard with some people, like, If you have to go out and touch this computer again, the only thing you're doing is taking it off the desk and replacing it. we're not fixing these things,
Matthew Bellringer: Because the, it was really interesting that some people were much keener to [00:15:00] value purchases than staff time. staff time was almost like it's already spent, or it's not valued, or it's... And in some ways my responsibilities reflected this. I had a team whose, salary budget was well in, well into the hundreds of thousands, you know, because they were senior IT staff and I had a few people in my team.
Matthew Bellringer: And I, there was very little oversight over how I chose to allocate their time and what I chose to, compared to the fact that, if I wanted to buy anything that wasn't provided in the stationary cupboard. even like, the pile of equipment, like the pile of drop cables.
Matthew Bellringer: Anything more than that I would have to make a case for and make a claim for, and there was a very involved process for. So there was a real tension there in the organization between, the really obvious stuff and staff time, and I spent a lot of time actually and really being like, no, holistically this costs us more even though it doesn't show up on the budget or indirectly in the budget."
Matthew Bellringer: And that was a, that was an [00:16:00] ongoing struggle actually for me, and I was very sensitive to that of how much does the whole thing cost? And that's one of the big shifts I think actually that really changed for me as a thinking in terms of engineering terms. we have this phrase TCO,
Matthew Bellringer: I mean, IT, everyone loves a TLA, right? Everyone loves a three-letter acronym. Um- Yeah, yeah. So, um, TCO is total cost of ownership. Mm-hmm. Like how much does the thing cost you over the whole life cycle, you know? And we're talking about computers, and if you're gonna use one for four years and leave it on for significant amounts of the day, maybe electricity becomes a significant part of the cost of running the thing.
Matthew Bellringer: So if it costs slightly more but it's significantly more efficient, is your TCO, your total cost of ownership, actually lower? And thinking in those, that... so that was quite, and that was, there, there was quite a lot of challenge with that sometimes and argument with that. But also I found it a really useful lens to look at, like how much does the whole thing cost, not just how much is the sticker to put the thing on the desk.
Harriet Formby: [00:17:00] Yeah. was that something that you found that you could then, build an argument for because you could quantify almost some of the other, like the hidden cost side, that actually quantifying it made the difference in terms of- arguing the case for, essentially spending more in this budget area.
Harriet Formby:
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah, I think so. I, I, I quite often had to draw together the whole thing, and, uh, I, I, I did in hi- in hindsight, and again in this conversation, I, I often found it quite frustrating the extent to which I had to do that. Because for, to me it felt very obvious and straightforward. This is not an uncommon experience amongst neurodivergent people who spot patterns in data other people don't.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. Again, in hindsight, oh dear, yeah, this is why it was it. But yeah, so very often I'd have to draw together quite detailed, evaluations of the thing. and people would do very... It was weird 'cause people would do very detailed, front-end evaluations where like these are all the features and these are all the thing, like these are all the different things it can [00:18:00] do.
Matthew Bellringer: But no one would consider the whole, the holistic bit and the, the, the total cost of the thing. So yeah, so and so it, that very much fell to me, in, in a lot of these evaluations. But yeah, it was a, at times it was quite frustrating getting that point across.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah. It's something I think, so like from my perspective, I have always stayed away from working in organizations where everything has to be done like the way it's been done before.
Harriet Formby: And I think it's for that, because you notice silly things like, this is how the budget's set, so that is what we do. And even though we all know it's not really working or we know that it's not really valuing people properly, and that if you just, changed it a bit or looked at the whole picture, like- And I just can't, I don't work in those environments.
Harriet Formby: I've, I'd always, when I was in jobs and stuff, I'd always be in the place where there was chaos and change happening so that you could rewrite the rules as you went, or you'd create the [00:19:00] things as you went. Because, and I think it's for a similar reason, it's because you notice, or just because it says that, like what about all these other things?
Harriet Formby: so it's interesting you mention that about, like the whole thing that your work is about is, is helping like neurodivergent people who are doing things differently. And obviously there's a huge application to organizations and systems and businesses from that, so it'd be useful to get into a bit more around that in terms of like what that actually means when, just like the example of spotting, like there's another pattern here and there's another way, but actually it can be quite difficult to advocate for yourself.
Harriet Formby: It sounds like you were quite strong in terms of arguing for yourself and doing that. But yeah,
Matthew Bellringer: good to- And I'm also lucky that I have the right accent and the right skin color, and I'm quite tall, and I'm man-shaped, you know?
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah. That's a, a feature, isn't it? Yeah. Like these,
Matthew Bellringer: these things help- Yeah ... honestly, to get, like to get you listened to as well. so yeah, no, it is a real challenge. And I, I think for me, that idea of a lot of the evidence [00:20:00] suggests that the real value of diversity is the value of perspectives. all of these different perspectives, and that is actually really important, a really important thing.
Matthew Bellringer: And it's often the, the less conventional our perspective, in some ways it has rarity value, in a, in an organization. and I think the innovation bit, a lot of the reason I call it innovation is almost a lot of neurodivergent people are almost inherently innovative and just coming at it from a different angle.
Matthew Bellringer: and that itself makes it create, you need to be creative and innovative, and you do things in a different way. It's almost like sometimes you, like a whole worldview is just slightly different, and so that means doing things differently and like tooling is different, and the approach you, like the steps you take are somewhat different.
Matthew Bellringer: And even if you're looking for the same outcome, you might use a different method. But that can be a difficult thing in, particularly in larger organizations. and we often have this [00:21:00] assumption in the, in society in general, and particularly at work, that if you want a certain outcome, you do a certain thing and you just keep doing that.
Matthew Bellringer: it's kind of what you were talking about actually in the, you know, that assumption of like, this is what works for whatever works means. Yeah ... and we just keep doing that, and we just keep doing that and hope it still works. And it can actually be quite a scary thing to en- encounter the edges of that for people.
Matthew Bellringer: And a lot of us as neurodivergent people, we point to the edges. We're at the edges already. We're thinking about it differently. And that can be a real challenge. it can be a challenge in terms of for neurodivergent people. It can also be a skills challenge in terms of colleagues. th- there's a...
Matthew Bellringer: one of the things with organizations that I'm really interested in is how good are people at being curious about encountering stuff that exists outside of their lived experience, encountering stuff that might be a challenge to the way that they structure their thinking? that because that's a skill set, [00:22:00] and if you've lived a very...
Matthew Bellringer: you've lived within this kind of bubble of everything being for you and everything being how you expect it to be, no shade, that's just life. But if you have, you won't have, probably won't have had the opportunity to develop those skills of being like, "Okay, what do I do when this doesn't quite make sense?"
Matthew Bellringer: You can just push back and be like, "Oh, no, this is how reality is." You can assert your own reality, which is unhelpful in organizations when when someone is pointing to something real and valid from an unconventional perspective
Harriet Formby: Yeah. 'Cause that example of kind of like, you can present something, say, and say, "Look, this is all the reasons why this is a great idea.
Harriet Formby: Look at all the savings here, and here." But if there's no, tick box thingy over here to actually quantify that, it's like, "Okay, great. Glad you've had that idea, but can you just stick to the rules, please?" You know, that's a kind of thing that happens, isn't it, is people are like, "It's really great, but can you actually just be quiet and let us just get on with..."
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah, and that, that could be a really tough thing to [00:23:00] live with when you're- Yeah ... when, particularly if you're, if you're sensitive to, to, to values and you're doing things because you're values led or purpose led or even interest led. I've often struggled with organizations who want really good engineers.
Matthew Bellringer: And I've never met a good engineer who didn't wanna dig into a problem till the end.
Harriet Formby: Mm-hmm.
Matthew Bellringer: it's just a trait that, like, all good engineers have is that, that fascination with, like, why? But why? What sits at the bottom of it? It's if an error comes up and causes a problem, and then goes away mysteriously,
Matthew Bellringer: you don't want to just let that drop. You want to understand why. and I've worked in some organizations where that was supported and encouraged, and others where it was like, "Okay, if it isn't a problem, it isn't something we need to do or spend any resources on." and that can be really frustrating and difficult if you're just interested in the problem as well.
Matthew Bellringer: So there's a kind of, you know, a lot of emotional challenges to that and plus the communication challenges of if you spot patterns and you're really [00:24:00] good at spotting patterns, quite a lot of, I often work with, tends to be more people on the more autistic, with more autistic traits.
Matthew Bellringer: They're so good at spotting patterns in data that their way of communicating the need for change is just to present people with a bunch of data and say, "And so we need to do this." Which makes sense to them, because if you presented them with data and said, "So we need to do this," they go-
Harriet Formby: Yeah ...
Matthew Bellringer: yeah. Yeah, we do.
Matthew Bellringer: but that's not the thing that other people are looking at, or the way that other people are evaluating it. and that can cause a lot of disconnect and a lot of frustration on both sides, I think. And, it isn't entirely on neurodivergent people to change, but there are skills you can add that can make it easier for other people to understand what it is that you're trying to say to them.
Matthew Bellringer: But there are also skills that other people can add that make it easier for them to understand stuff that they're being told.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. It's like not everyone thinks in data. Some people do, and it's like, well, what do you do, I find this especially with numbers stuff, it's like, what do you do when people don't think in [00:25:00] numbers?
Harriet Formby: Okay, well we need some diagrams, we need a story, we need like to relate it to an example. It's it's communicating that, isn't it? It's like you understand it, but how do you like convey that to somebody else? because I think a lot of the time, if people don't understand something, they don't really want to admit they don't understand it necessarily.
Harriet Formby: So you can go, "Look at all the data, it says do this," and they're like, I don't really understand the data," or, "I don't really understand what you're talking about." And people don't wanna admit that they don't understand. They'd like to just say, "No, not time for that today. Sorry." Mm-hmm. You know, "Go away."
Matthew Bellringer: Exactly.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. Exactly. and this is really interesting. So we've talked about the organizational level of like problem-solving and being, in an organization. And I know you talk a lot about like wicked problems, which I think really ties into this nicely. So I just wanna give you a bit of space to explain wicked problems first in your own words.
Harriet Formby: and then we'll- Yeah ... talk
Matthew Bellringer: about how that relates. Yeah. Sure. so wicked problems are these... It, it comes from the kind of complexity work, these complex adaptive systems. Wicked problems- Yeah ... are these tangled, sometimes it's tangled, thorny problems that are resistant to solution. So, [00:26:00] when you've got a, a wicked problem it might be that you don't understand the, where you are, like the full situation you're in right now.
Matthew Bellringer: Or it might be that you don't understand the desired end state that would fix the problem, where the problem would go away. It might be that you have the, in fixing one aspect of the problem, another aspect gets worse. Like that, so there are all of these problems. It might be that you do a thing that helps the problem, it helps the problem, and then suddenly it stops helping the problem and starts making it worse, or vice versa.
Matthew Bellringer: so, they're these very difficult to solve, or difficult to... problems. and to some degree, the whole idea of solution is one of the challenges with wicked problems. Normally, I would say address a wicked problem rather than solve a wicked problem, because they're often, in, at, if they remain a wicked problem, they're not really amenable to full solution in the sense that we can do a thing and the problem goes away.
Matthew Bellringer: It might be that we constantly, th- that it's something we have to just build into how we work with the system or, and sometimes they're- They're problems that are emergent properties of [00:27:00] stuff that we like as well, which is even harder. So the system in general is behaving how we like, but one of the things that emerges through all of that complex behavior is something that we don't like.
Matthew Bellringer: Mm. And it's very hard to have the thing that we like. Then we have to, do we give up the thing that we like? Because that's actually the only way we can fully solve that problem. it's a, so to some, some degree I might, you could as a metaphor you might think of, if you have a, if you have a headache, there is one very certain way of solving that problem, which is to chop your head off.
Matthew Bellringer: It's, but it's not a desirable outcome.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: But it is a solution. And I think, we have to be careful about how we approach wicked problems when we're hold too strongly onto solutions because they can be the organizational equivalent of chopping your head off for a headache.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah. It makes me think actually of like like the rise of AI and how if you were to chuck problems at AI, it would probably be chopping heads off left, right, [00:28:00] and center. And it's like the discernment then of, the sort of nuance of problems, because you've got this very absolute thing of like, well, if we're solutions focused, then that's the solution.
Harriet Formby: Whereas what you're talking about is those things that are, like, much more sort of holistic and complex and you haven't actually got a, a definitive answer. Like, you can't even quantify a definitive answer necessarily. Is that, is that, is that sort of how-
Matthew Bellringer: Exactly that. Yeah. And so the question really matters.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Like the question really matters. And this is where this crosses over with the neurodiversity and innovation stuff again, is if you're coming at it from a different perspective, as I mentioned, this different worldview, you're likely to ask different questions.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: And so you're likely to get different answers that might give you ways of working with a thing that weren't otherwise available to you from the conventional perspective.
Harriet Formby: Mm.
Matthew Bellringer: You know, you can always think of this in the 3D. Think of it like a scene. You've got someone looking from one direction, and there's okay, there's this lever I can pull and this button I can press.
Matthew Bellringer: You look at it from 45 degrees over, you [00:29:00] might see a completely different... might be like, oh, there's a wheel I can turn and a different button I could press. And, but that would be invisible from the other perspective. And so that, that kind of perspective taking and how you actually engage with the space is really important, and the neurodiversity is absolutely vital for this.
Matthew Bellringer: And I wanna say this is where neurodiversity as opposed to neurodivergence is so important. It isn't that there is any one perspective that's better. it is important that you get access to as many perspectives as possible, so the ones you don't have access to right now are even more valuable in some ways.
Matthew Bellringer: But it's about the breadth of perspective really. it's about being able to say, "Okay, yes, the, we can see it from this angle, we can see it from that angle. How can we-" Integrate those two views and come to a better understanding of the whole situation from both perspectives. That's the real capability that we want to be building in order to be able to better address wicked problems.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. [00:30:00] And if we look at, like, an example, so, which ties into money quite nicely in terms of, the polycrisis. So talking about, economic systems, climate change, conflict, and, various world events. if you've got, yeah, a better definition of polycrisis to, to chip in with, and then we can go with that.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. Yeah, so,
Harriet Formby: so
Matthew Bellringer: polycrisis/everything crisis/metacrisis. Mm-hmm. so it is an example of a wicked problem. Or in fact, the, the... It's more of an example of something that's called a super wicked problem. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which is a wicked problem constructed of wicked problems.
Matthew Bellringer: Yay. Um. The
Harriet Formby: ultimate wicked problem, basically.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. Yeah, in some ways, yeah. and so that fundamental challenge is absolutely the case. And this idea of, we can do one thing over here, but how... But it has these knock-on effects over here, and you're starting to see this at all sorts of different levels.
Matthew Bellringer: And also, this is why we're starting to see institutions failing. We're starting to see, companies go bankrupt so much faster than they used to. You know? Yeah. you look at the turnover in [00:31:00] any of the big markets, any of the big, indexes, for example. You know, companies used to spend 50 years in the FTSE 100.
Matthew Bellringer: Now they spend, 10 on average. And, so we see this rapid turnover, and we see very big companies and very big institutions fail and go bankrupt, and in spectacular and unpredictable ways. And it's that unpredictability, and that causes harm. and these things can feedback loop as well.
Matthew Bellringer: you get people who are more scared, and then they behave in more predictable, more narrow ways, and that means that they put all their money in one sort of company, and then that company fails, and then they get more scared and go- So you get these really difficult behavioral feedback loops with the money system.
Matthew Bellringer: and I came across, a really interesting model of this recently around money as really being options on the future.
Harriet Formby: Mm.
Matthew Bellringer: it's this conception of money as options on the future. If I have money, I have options. I have prom- promises on the future. [00:32:00] But the idea is that during the everything crisis, as, as the systems start to crumble and potentially, as they start, if they start to collapse, or if they do collapse, then that, the options that our money can buy us become significantly reduced.
Matthew Bellringer: it's it's all very well, having a piece of art that's worth however much money, but if there is no art market anymore, or if money is gone and we're using barter-
Harriet Formby: Yeah ...
Matthew Bellringer: like, who's buy- Like, what am I doing? Am I bartering my Picasso for a, for a loaf of bread? Because so our optionality, this idea of optionality collapse is a really interesting one when we think about money and the relationship to money- Mm.
Matthew Bellringer: -and I think ... and the flip side of this is also perspectives create options.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: So, so you can see how those two things relate. Yeah.
Harriet Formby: And it comes into value then, doesn't it? Because we hold a lot, ... Like that example of, a [00:33:00] painting, say. It's like we have this fixed view of value sometimes, and then when that changes, that can be quite, disconcerting almost, the idea that, millions of pounds worth of painting could just be, like, swapped for a loaf of bread.
Harriet Formby: what that does to you psychologically is quite interesting, isn't it? That idea of, well, hang on a minute, the reality I thought... and this is the, the thing with, the economic system is in reality the system we've got of, the stock market and corporations, and, having annual reports and only thinking short-term, that's only been around, the last sort of 50 or so years r- in reality, like the way we see it.
Harriet Formby: But we act like it's everything and that it's always how it's been, which it hasn't. I think that's something interesting is that it's ingrained in us, culturally, sort of white Western capitalist lens that is the way it's always gonna be. And even though, we've got economic collapse, we're still talking about, yes, but we need to make sure that they can still extract fuel and still have annual-
Matthew Bellringer: Still need
Harriet Formby: economic growth
Harriet Formby: reports and-
Matthew Bellringer: It's like-
Harriet Formby: Economic growth. It's like we're hanging onto economic growth like it [00:34:00] actually means something when, it's only just popped up really as a thing in the last, century.
Matthew Bellringer: I think-
Harriet Formby: And yeah ...
Matthew Bellringer: even more problematic is, like, shareholder value.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: You know, and I think that, the 50 years you were talking about is the decision that companies had the primary responsibility of every company was shareholder value partly as part of that whole shift.
Harriet Formby: is what it lifts, yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Uh, and, and so whi- which invites a certain way of doing business. And I think this is a real challenge, when we're starting, when we're thinking about our relationship with money, and particularly if we're thinking about starting our own business, is like it's also in- it's also woven into how we think about business.
Matthew Bellringer: If you start a company, ... You go through the process of registering with Companies House, and they have, these reference articles of, standard articles of association. So articles of association, if you haven't, been involved in this before, are basically the core rules of the company.
Matthew Bellringer: They're like the core principles that you lay out when you're creating an organization. And in the [00:35:00] reference articles of association in this country, the primary goal is creating shareholder value. And so the default path takes you in this direction, and you can challenge it. You can create something different, but it's more effortful and it's difficult, and it, y- if you might find it harder to get a loan, for example, if you don't have standard articles of association.
Matthew Bellringer: so your organization might be considered less trustworthy for credit or, or might end up... Or if you ended up partnering with another organization, they might be leery about that. So there's all sorts of these kind of considerations about how we're really approaching it on quite fundamental levels.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah, and it means there's decisions to make, and, it's interesting when you say, okay, so if you're, like, neurodivergent and it's completely valid to be in the systems and changing things from in the systems. But for example, if you do want to start your own business, say, and that's what you're doing, or you're working through iterations, you've been doing it a while, you're [00:36:00] going to find that your, sense of purpose and morality meets money and the systems and the norms.
Harriet Formby: And that's a really interesting place to be because you're kind of like, I'm empowered to change something, but I'm also having to work with, the reality of the system now and, yeah, I wonder what you think about that in terms of, what you do really. it's tough. What you see,
Matthew Bellringer: yeah. Yeah, no, I think it's, it's one of those things that's an ongoing management effort and an ongoing effort for you in, in deciding where those boundaries lie and what your, what your particular values are,
Matthew Bellringer: And for me it's both where I get money from and where I spend money in the business, and who I will work with and who I won't, for a variety of reasons. like I won't work with... there's a very large, IT cloud provider who I don't work with because their green credentials aren't anywhere near good enough.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. despite the fact that, they have very good product in the sense of, end user [00:37:00] products, and they will be very useful, but th- they're not something, they're not an organization I'm willing to deal with. I don't market on another big social media platform, like company's platforms because I don't agree with what that company does in the world and I don't want to add more content to them.
Matthew Bellringer: So that has effects, and I think there is a balance here for a lot of us to understand, sometimes this will be a compromise. the system we are in rewards you for doing stuff that keeps the system working the way it's working with money. it is designed to do that, not consciously by anyone.
Matthew Bellringer: No conspiracy theories. It's just the nature of most-
Harriet Formby: Powerless, yeah ...
Matthew Bellringer: nature of most systems that continue is that they act for their own continuance just through, because that's why they're still there. Yeah. Yeah. It's like an evolutionary thing. so that, so if you do things that are aligned with the way the system runs, but you're trying to change the way the system runs, it can be a real tension there for the [00:38:00] work and working out what's actually moving in the right direction for you and what is completely untenable.
Matthew Bellringer: And, and this might be challenging for a lot of people who want to get all the way there and want to see something fundamentally different. It can mean doing things bit by bit and going, "Thing was, what's the best option now rather than the really ideal option that I'd like to see in the future?"
Matthew Bellringer: And I think knowing that trajectory can help. Knowing that I'm choosing the m- the most avail- the most of this that's available to me now- And that I know also that I want to move forward, and I want to be able to choose the next one and the next one, and that shifts things over time.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. And there's a thing, though, about in terms of the ethics of it is sometimes I think maybe there's, just generally a desire that you wanna do things, totally right, and any compromise-
Harriet Formby: is too much. And then that can be quite painful because it's either, like, shutting doors to things entirely, or it might be that you have to go, "Okay, well, I am gonna have to work with some things." there's obviously [00:39:00] more extremes of bad companies, but, if you want an online business, for example, it's quite difficult to do it without touching up against some big corporation that you need to-
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah
Harriet Formby: be involved with, for example. So it's almost like knowing what your tolerance is, and it will change at different times. It might be like, "Well, when I'm at this size or th- at this point, I need to engage in this way. But, once I've built up this sort of money," or whatever it might be, "then I can maybe do it differently."
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah.
Harriet Formby: And there's a sort of- Or, or- ... element of that, yeah ...
Matthew Bellringer: accepting that, like, I will choose this for now.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: And I will minimize the amount I'm kind of committed to this because I know I want to change. So I won't buy all the extra stuff, and I won't, be too... I'll try and minimize my commitment to this service that isn't quite working for me or whatever because I know I want to, in future I want to move to something that's more aligned.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. Yeah. And it's the same with business models, right? I, I think, in terms of the money that we get into the business as well, there are ways of making money and for whom that [00:40:00] are more easy to live with and less easy to live with, depending on your set of values.
Matthew Bellringer: I personally try and avoid work that just makes rich people richer.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: If it does other things as well, I don't mind that as a secondary out- It's not that I have a kind of conceptual problem with that as a secondary outcome, but I do have a problem with it as a primary outcome.
Matthew Bellringer: And I think that might also be one of the things for people to play with, is, like, whenever we act in the world it has all of these different outcomes, and it's easy to get a bit fixated, particularly if you're, have neurodivergent, like autistic and ADHD traits particularly, to get a bit fixated about one or one of them and stuck on one of them.
Matthew Bellringer: and instead to be able to say, "Okay, there's this constellation of effects that it has in the world, and in general that's okay, or in general that's not okay for me." and you're allowed to make your own judgments about this. I think this is the other thing about b- it's like just 'cause everyone else is doing
Matthew Bellringer: There, [00:41:00] there's a lot of pressure, particularly on social media, to do things in very specific ways, you know? Yeah. And so it's like you don't have a successful business if this doesn't happen or that doesn't happen or that doesn't happen and it doesn't happen that way. It's like the business is successful if you think it's doing what you want it to do for you and in the world.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. and having a good sense of, knowing what good looks like to you, not the external factors that are people on, Instagram are saying or whatever. It's like, no, what does good look like to me? 'Cause I don't need to benchmark myself against somebody else's thing because,
Harriet Formby: what you think's happening isn't always what's happening. people can be really successful on paper but, not feel it in their heart because they've got a different measure of success still. And it's like that is really important when you are trying to sort of, like, do the right thing and, knowing what the right thing is for you at different times.
Harriet Formby: And I mean, a big part of this then is kinda like, okay, so you've started the thing, and you wanna keep going 'cause it's, your passion. this is, I guess generalizing my, you know ... Like, neurodivergent people [00:42:00] often have, a, a mission that they're, like, "I'm passionate about this thing."
Harriet Formby: And it might change at different times, but, like, you want this to go for, like, 20, you know, 20 years, 30 years, whatever it is. It's like it's not just a overnight thing. So, like, how do you- Big question. How do you keep going without, like, burning yourself out or running out of money, basically?
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. I mean, I, and I think it, it, th- this itself, this question itself is somewhat challenging to the prevailing way we think about money and finance in st- particularly in startups.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. You know, most people, the way we talk, it's like people start things up with an eye to the exit.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Which for me is very strange. Like, personally, I've always found that really difficult. I don't, can see why people want to. I can see why some people want to do it, but for me personally it's not the slightest bit why I started a business.
Matthew Bellringer: But a lot of the support and the direction that you'll kind of get nudged and pushed is, will take you in that direction. It's like big hyper-scale funding and, and grow and grow in an IPO and exit. so [00:43:00] when I say I'm u- don't know whether your audience is comfortable with the jargon of, like, IPO, so IPO is floating on the stock exchange, where- Yeah, it's like
Harriet Formby: that
Matthew Bellringer: whereby you're basically selling the company to the public at large, is the best way- Yeah ... I can describe. It's like
Harriet Formby: a conventional- Or a summary we can chunk ... way of looking at it. the tr- conventional startup is you're supposed to, like, raise investment, bring in investors, get more and more money, and then, like, sell out, to the stock exchange, and that's like unicorn.
Harriet Formby: You've made it. You've done a software company and, now you're- Yeah ... a founder that's ac- you know, so this kind of glamorized view, isn't it, of, like, that's the route. And then all of the routes, if you, if you look at like, I don't know, like a startup incubator, that's what they're kind of pushing you towards almost in general, a general startup sort of incubator, and that's the sort of prevailing mindset, I guess, isn't it?
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. And their business model will be dependent on you doing that.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Like, their survival as a business will be dependent on your business doing that.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, the sort of the invested money is, there'll be, like, a load that just [00:44:00] collapse and we don't really care because there'll be, like, one or two that do amazingly and we'll get all our returns on them.
Harriet Formby: So there's, a real high f- expectation of failure, I guess, in the startup world or in, in the business world of, it's okay if all these great ideas actually fail because, we'll win over here 'cause it's about return. Again, it's like shareholder return, isn't it? So-
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah ...
Harriet Formby: yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah, exactly. So if you're starting up a business for other reasons and you're kind of starting up for the long term 'cause you actually want
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah, 'cause as you say, it's born out of passion and meaning for you, then the whole kind of tooling and approach of the business is gonna probably be quite different to that. and you'll, you might want ... You're gonna probably want to avoid very rapid growth, like that, that hyper-scale kind of hockey stick-type growth.
Matthew Bellringer: you're probably going to want to grow more slowly and sustainably and make sure that you're not growing beyond your personal limits and the limits of, of what- You and, and, and, um, I think bringing other people in is a [00:45:00] really helpful thing for many of us, you know, in some way or another.
Matthew Bellringer: Trying to do it alone is exhausting. If you do try and do it alone, in some ways I think it's very... Even if you run, you know, one way to keep this going is you might have your own thing, but you find allies. would very much recommend finding allies as a way to keep this sustainable. Now, I think the conventional concept of networking to a lot of neurodivergent people is utterly repellent.
Matthew Bellringer: but thinking about, okay, where can I find the people who are sharing in what I'm trying to do? They're doing a different, slightly different aspect, and again, this comes back to the wicked problems thing. There's lots of work to do to solve these things. We're not competing with people who are doing, who are solving the same problem as us when that problem is so big that we're never gonna solve it.
Matthew Bellringer: which again is a shift in- We
Harriet Formby: can work together, yeah ...
Matthew Bellringer: in terms of how we think about money and business and, this competitive nature of business. Instead, we're thinking about allies, and we're thinking about, who is working alongside us in a similar direction. That can make it much [00:46:00] easier.
Matthew Bellringer: I think the other things to do are to think about building a business that's a system for doing a certain thing, and working out, when you do things yourself, you kind of almost do them automatically very often and without really knowing what you're doing on some conscious level.
Matthew Bellringer: And so if you can figure that out and systematize it, you can start to build what that business is, and then you can bring other people in to help you with that. But it is always a negotiation and an ongoing thing. I think it's not something that's immediately solved, and maybe that is the challenge of the work sometimes.
Matthew Bellringer: just to how do we make this work for us and for the outside world? Instead of how do we out-compete, if we can let go of that. Because again, the, the default, like, you know, you look at if your model of business is Dragons' Den or Shark Tank if you're American-
Matthew Bellringer: You're gonna have a very narrow view of what businesses are like that may not work for you as a neurodivergent person. [00:47:00]
Harriet Formby: Yeah, and that's actually, the, I guess the other side to that is there is, there are a lot of people doing things differently as well. just because the dominant narrative, like literally those TV programs, those TV shows are all about, the dominant way of, like, raising money, like pitching against other people, competition, cattiness, all of that stuff.
Harriet Formby: It's, like, actually there are loads of people that are doing things, you know, they're it's understated. So, like, they're not going around saying, "We've raised, like, a million dollars," or whatever. They're going like, "We're bootstrapping it," and quietly getting on with it. Like, most people are just, yeah, just getting on with it and talking in their own sort of spaces with people that are a bit like them or that are, got a similar ethos, and it's understated, and that's perhaps attractive if you are not down for the sort of flashy entrepreneur brand thing that, that's going around as well.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Def- definitely, and I, I think there's a risk that money in an organization can become a vanity metric.
Harriet Formby: Mm.
Matthew Bellringer: You know, this is, and this is an idea for, that comes from lean agile, this [00:48:00] idea of vanity metrics, is that they're... we have to adopt, if we want to measure something, we need to conceptualize and we need to, we need to find a concrete thing we can measure so that we can see how we're doing and manage that thing.
Matthew Bellringer: But again, the questions that you ask, the way you think about it is actually really important because it can distort, how you view the world. If, for example, like particularly turnover, big companies that just turn over a lot of money without making any profit are, from my perspective as a, it's are you actually doing good in the world?
Matthew Bellringer: are you measuring also, may- there's also, triple bottom line reporting. A lot of companies now do, like financial, social, and environmental reporting. So are all those things working together? Are the metrics working together, or are you trading one for another in a way that's having a detrimental effect to what you're trying to do?
Matthew Bellringer: So I think it's really important when when you look at, people and, like particularly on social media, [00:49:00] when people are like, "You're not successful. You're not a successful coach if you're not turning over six figures," and It's like you're a successful coach if you're doing what you want and it gives you the, you're having the life you want and you're helping the people that you want, full stop.
Matthew Bellringer: there's no, you're successful if it's working for you and doing what you want it for you, to do for you. yeah. But that takes a lot of resistance, right? because the messages are like, from outside are really strong to make more. But very often they're not necessarily in your interest.
Matthew Bellringer: Like, it- again, it's like it helps another person if you adopt this model and make money this way because they can make money from what you're doing as well, and that may or may not be an outcome that you want.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah. Or that you need. You kind of ... ... It, it's interesting because it comes down to sustainability as well, because it's if you are, for example, generating huge turnovers, it might be that there's a huge, amount of ad spend that was reliant on doing that, and then, some algorithm changes and your ad spend doesn't deliver what you were getting.
Harriet Formby: And there's [00:50:00] lots of very kind of precarious models. They don't seem precarious, but, like, when you look at how dependent they are on other things, you think, well, actually being smaller and leaner and, able to kind of keep going year on year might be much more success, whatever success means to you, than something that, looks brilliant but then could just collapse because it's so propped up by all these plates spinning.
Harriet Formby: And it's also, like, where you put ... You know, in te- terms of your own energy, it's like where do you wanna spend your energy? 'Cause the one I always come back to with people is, like, when you say, "I'm gonna scale because success means building a team," it's like, do you realize then you're gonna have to manage a team?
Harriet Formby: Like, at the moment you do what you want, and now if you want to grow to, a million turnover, you're gonna have ... 30% of your week is gonna be just dealing with people and problems, and is that something that you want to do? And that's a conversation I have all the time is like, do you like managing people?
Harriet Formby: Do you want to manage people?
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah, absolutely. And it's like, is that part of ... Yeah, completely. And it's a really important [00:51:00] conversation to be having. It's like, is this pathway right? and I think the other thing that's worth saying is if you do want to grow, there are lots of different ways to grow a business as well.
Matthew Bellringer: You know- Yeah ... there are, you can grow a surprisingly large business as an individual, um, by doing different things, by working with different people in different relationships. So it isn't impossible either, But again, and this is that con- that relationship between the conventional way and the unconventional way, but completely.
Matthew Bellringer: One of the worst things I think you can do as an entrepreneur is build a business that you don't like.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: that's probably worse than being unsuccessful. being successful in a business you do not like is is a gilded cage, but it's absolutely a cage.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. 'Cause you kinda get trapped in the success, 'cause it's like people are celebrating what you've done, but you don't like it, so you're stuck.
Harriet Formby: You're like, "Well, I should like it, but I don't," and-
Matthew Bellringer: And potentially are dependent- Yeah ... on what you've done. Yeah. you've got, you know, you've got, [00:52:00] you've, you've hired a bunch of people, um, uh, their livelihoods, and you, you know, we, we, we're human. We don't want the people that we spend time with and close to to suffer.
Matthew Bellringer: And we're like, "Well, if I stop doing this, then they can't pay their mortgage, or they can't pay their rent," or
Harriet Formby: Yeah ...
Matthew Bellringer: that's a, that puts us in a really difficult position. So I think there is a, you know, there is a, an element of this that's, that for me that's about judging, being really careful with control And I'm not saying hold on to control at all costs because that, that way is burnout.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: But also just knowing when we're giving up control, intentionally doing it and saying, "Okay, this is worth it for me." You know, and it's true when you're so, you know, that example where you're like a business that's entirely reliant on ad spend and then the platform changes its algorithm and then you- your ad spend suddenly doesn't return anything, doesn't get you any customers.
Matthew Bellringer: It's like that relationship that platform is out of your control. [00:53:00] So if you're using that, you're making that decision, you need to do it in the knowledge that you're putting something beyond your ability to influence it, beyond your ability to control, just to make that intentional decision.
Matthew Bellringer: And when you do, to either make very sure that it's not someone whose business model might suddenly change, or to make sure that it's a partial bet, that it's a sum of the flow of the business, and that if it goes away you can tolerate it, you still have a viable business without it.
Harriet Formby: Mm-hmm,
Matthew Bellringer: yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Otherwise, other- otherwise you're betting all of your business on someone else's business model that you have no influence over, which is a very precarious place to be.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. I had a conversation this morning around, you know, the minimum wage goes up and people go, "Oh, this is terrible for this sort of hospitality or whatever industry.
Harriet Formby: How are they gonna cope?" and that sort of thing. And you think, well, if your business is being sort of propped [00:54:00] up because you're essentially underpaying people, and, maybe they're claiming universal credit off the government to sort of cope with living costs, you need to look at yourself and say, "Okay, my business is actually causing harm.
Harriet Formby: If I can't make it work where I pay people, like, not just the legal minimum, but, something that I know that they can go home and, you know, get food without worrying, my business hasn't actually really got a place." And I know that's hard. It's not an absolute thing, and I've got a lot of sympathy for people that are in, like, you know, situations where they're on short margins and they don't feel they've got autonomy around that.
Harriet Formby: But at the same time, it's like the holistic view of that is, okay, you need to be able to make decisions that cannot be derailed by, like, government policy or by doing the legal minimum but actually is not good for other people's wellbeing. You need a business that you can go, "Okay, I'm really happy.
Harriet Formby: I'm paying my staff in a way that, They can live on quite happily, and my customers actually also want me to do the same thing. And it's a bit idealistic sometimes, but [00:55:00] is it really? Like, is it really ethically? Like, ultimately, no, it needs to be something you can sleep at night that you're treating people well.
Matthew Bellringer: I, I completely agree and treating everyone, all stakeholders in the business. If you can't do that, then yeah, you don't really have a viable business model. And if you discover that you don't have a viable business model, there's two options. You either close down or you try and reinvent that business.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: But those are really your only two options. and if you are running a business right at the margins, for me it's also if your wage bill is a s- really significant part of your overheads, we know the minimum wage goes up regularly.
Matthew Bellringer: You can, you can't predict exactly when it's gonna go up, but you can predict roughly when it's gonna go up, and it's gonna go up roughly in line with inflation. So if you're not kind of constantly a little bit ahead- [00:56:00] There's been a bit of a failure of planning.
Harriet Formby: Mm. Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: You know, I, honestly. So, I, I think that's...
Matthew Bellringer: And it, it is really important, and there is something slightly brutal but slightly liberating in business is that no one owes you a business that exists. I'd really like to live in a world where our basic needs were met because, from a, fundamentally, at a societal level, we've basically solved scarcity- Yeah
Matthew Bellringer: and we've failed to solve distribution. we have enough now for everyone in the world to have their very basic needs met, and we should do that. but all the extra stuff is down to you, and I think that's one of the things, that was one of the decisions you have to accept if you want to do that and follow that path.
Matthew Bellringer: So that the government does not owe you a viable business if you can't make it viable and treat people fairly. so I completely agree, and I think the concerns in that [00:57:00] direction are all great. Well, then, you know, if, if you are in that direction and you want to innovate, great.
Matthew Bellringer: This is when you start listening to the unconventional voices. This is when you start doing things differently. Or-
Harriet Formby: Yeah ...
Matthew Bellringer: shut down elegantly. You know, I also think there's no shame in shutting something down which is past its lifespan. You know, some things are just... I imagine there were, far more top hat makers in the, you know, in the 1890s than there were in the 1990s, you know?
Matthew Bellringer: and so if you had in between that you had a business that was making top hats, and that was what you, that was the whole thing it was set up to do. And it's there is no shame in realizing no one's buying these things anymore. We're gonna shut down, and we're gonna do so everyone can go away and do something else.
Matthew Bellringer: But we're gonna do so in a way where everyone, where we pay our bills till the end, and we pay our wages till the end. Instead of driving it off the cliff and then looking down like Wile E. Coyote and then being like, "There's no ground beneath me," and then falling. [00:58:00] But-
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah ...
Matthew Bellringer: I, I think it's taking that intent, you know, that intentionality I think is really important in this.
Harriet Formby: And it is recognizing that some things have a lifespan, and that's okay. they don't... We pretend things go on forever when they obviously don't. Whereas actually, yeah, things have a lifespan. And then there is the sort of neurodivergent angle there of like, well, okay, things that are traditionally, um, exploitative in the model, well, that's a really great problem, isn't it?
Harriet Formby: To say, "Well, we've got this thing that's can be exploitative. We sort of need it, but, like, how can we do it in a different way?" And then there's an opportunity there to say, "Well, the, the people that can do it in a different way can thrive," and that's a opportunity then to kind of grab hold of. So, yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Exactly.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. The other thing that happens when you're running a business, and particularly when you're neurodivergent, I mean, it happens to everyone, but it's like we touch up with sort of how to value ourself is a huge thing. Like, when you are in a job, you get a salary, and there's still a lot of things to worry about with money [00:59:00] and to think about with money, but when you are running a business, you're having to sort of price things and have negotiations and work out what the value is and what you're selling and how much things should cost and, like, what you should pay yourself and making money decisions about spending and saving and taxes and all the different things.
Harriet Formby: And so I wonder what your thoughts are around that in terms of being, like, neurodivergent and having to sort of put a value on yourself in a business context.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. I th- think it can be really hard, and It can feel like a very direct relationship between my personal value and the amount that I can charge.
Matthew Bellringer: and that can be a really difficult thing in both directions because if we struggle to value ourselves, which is true for a lot of neurodivergent people, or if we don't get paid, or we can't find clients for whatever reason, then it can feel like a value judgment on ourselves. So I think it can be really, really tricky, and take [01:00:00] quite a lot of work to do this.
Matthew Bellringer: What I would say is that, your value as a human being and the amount the world will pay you are largely decoupled. At best, they're very loosely coupled. Look at the amount of, a- assuming that you have a s- relatively similar neurodivergence set of values to me, look at the people that are paid the most.
Matthew Bellringer: Are they the ones creating the most social value? If they are, great, and you'll probably be in that group too if you think that. You can go and do that. You can go and work for an, go and work in finance or in, AI tech or whatever, in, in big tech. and you'll get paid a very large amount of money.
Matthew Bellringer: If you don't think that, then that's also true for you. the value that you create in the world is more than the money that you get paid for What you need to think about is what you need. And that is also a really difficult thing [01:01:00] when we're neurodivergent, like, meeting our own needs, particularly meeting our own needs first.
Matthew Bellringer: Most neurodivergent people, we... I think we learn that our needs come after everyone else's very often. we can have our needs met, but only if we've met everyone else's first.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, and if you've been told, like, "No, you need to conform. It doesn't matter that you need something different, but, like, you need to get on with it and be quiet," it's hard to then, value yourself, I guess, later in life, isn't it?
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. Yeah, and practically I think it's really worth, it's almost certainly worth char- you know, like, you, you can charge probably more than you think. one thing I would say is you can also charge, some... Depending on what you want to do, it might be that you can genuinely, you know that if you charge a certain amount, that will exclude certain people from being able to engage with what you do, and that might not be something that you want.
Matthew Bellringer: So there's two different ways to engage with that as well. So one of them is to vary your pricing, which some people are comfortable with and some people find [01:02:00] morally uncomfortable. but some people are just happy. there's, there's a weird thing. P- pricing is such a weird s- thing psychologically, particularly if you work with businesses.
Matthew Bellringer: You can price too low for people to buy things from you if you're listening to this and you haven't done, like, worked much with businesses and purchasing, you'll be like, "What? How does that work?" But, businesses have budgets, and the way that budgets are allocated is that they're kind of often like they have a, a window wh- where you c- basically you have to do one thing and it has to use most of this budget or all of this budget.
Matthew Bellringer: So if you price too low, they might actually have a harder time buying from you even if they want to buy from you than if you price within their budget. So different or different people have different spend, so You might find that you feel that you can, ethically charge different prices to different people.
Matthew Bellringer: I do this, and I do it transparently because for me it's the obfuscation, it's the I don't know who's [01:03:00] paying more and who's paying less and why that is the un- unethical bit for me. So for me, I charge, for nonprofits and people that work in the nonprofit world, I charge two-thirds the rate I do for profit making, for the profit-making world.
Harriet Formby: Hmm. Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: That's, that's just, and it's just flat across the board. That's just the way my pricing is. There's no hiding, no negotiating, no... That works for my level of ethics. The other thing you can do is think in terms of product and think in terms of what you can reach in a way that's gonna be available to more people.
Matthew Bellringer: So for example, if you, if you are in that kind of coaching-y space and you work one-to-one with people, that's always gonna be an expensive thing. Your time is always gonna be expensive and you probably want to charge quite a lot for that. probably if you're starting this out or you've only been doing this for a bit more than you're thinking right now or more than you're doing right now, charge a bit more for that now.
Matthew Bellringer: You know? Um-
Harriet Formby: Yeah, you rarely need to tell people to charge less. I think generally it's [01:04:00] always a case of- Charge more.
Matthew Bellringer: Um-
Harriet Formby: Yeah, you could probably get a bit more, yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: But think about other products, other ways of helping people that they can afford. So that might be like, Does it make sense for me to m- make a group program?"
Matthew Bellringer: that's where people are still spending a significant chunk of money, but, it's much less than the, than the same thing would work one-to-one. "Can I do a, an interactive course?" Again, a bit lower down. "Can I do something simple like a book or a, you know, a, a download or a set of video courses that people can take away and do relatively cheaply?"
Matthew Bellringer: And you can sell much more of those. And it's not, again, and this is like it's not necessarily... And you might find that you fi- have a much bigger market there. You know, some, some people can actually make a very, make, might work one-to-one with people, but they make most of their money through selling books or selling courses.
Matthew Bellringer: and that, that is also a viable business model, and they might find it might be, "Okay, I know my, the people I want to reach, they can definitely afford a 20 [01:05:00] quid download. That, that's, that doesn't exclude anyone. So I'm comfortable doing that, and I'm comfortable charging 2, 3, 400 pounds an hour for the one-to-one work because I know that people can also get access to a lot of the good stuff in slightly different terms with the download."
Matthew Bellringer: So, I think there's a, there, there's different ways you can engage with that. But it's really about using pricing intentionally as well and to aligned with your purpose and aligned with your values. Mm-hmm. You don't have to price In any specific way you can choose, you can use it to actually bring about the outcomes that you're trying to.
Matthew Bellringer: It's just another tool really to think of as a way that you can bring about the outcomes that you're trying to bring about in your business.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. The other one with that is especially if you've come from maybe like a more of a corporate background or you've worked in a employment sort of first, which a lot of people will have, is you can sort of have a mentality that your [01:06:00] diary needs to be like full all day because in, in a world where you didn't have a choice, there was like back-to-back meetings all day long, for example.
Harriet Formby: And if you go into sort of like a coaching practice and say, "Oh well apparently what I know from the other world was that I was supposed to be busy all day and have meetings all day," it's like well is that actually sustainable? Like can manage your energy around that? Um, it's perfectly reasonable to say, "Actually I can only do like two calls a day," or, "I need to have only like a day or two a week when I'm doing like certain types of work," for example.
Harriet Formby: And actually then the value part is built in as well to kind of how do you structure your week in a way that you know is gonna mean you can keep showing up, and that's gonna affect your pricing, your value because you can only do so much like face-to-face time for example.
Matthew Bellringer: And it might be that y- you're actually better to give yourself the support and the space around the work and to do less actual work but you deliver more value for people in a small amount of space.
Matthew Bellringer: I mean you think about this as maybe the, [01:07:00] the prime example of this is like, i- is say like a musician, touring musician. Like maybe three gigs a week, like big tour, maybe four but but that's a total of like in terms of actual work and output maybe what, like six hours, seven and a half hours a week?
Matthew Bellringer: but the value delivered in those is huge, and you have to do a whole load of stuff around that. You have to travel You can't deliver that value without doing all the other stuff with the practice and the preparation and the soundcheck and the ... so separating out that idea of like I am paid by the hour for like the work that I'm paid for versus how can I create more value?
Matthew Bellringer: what can I do to create the most value for people? What, what patterns around that? And that only some of that value creation process will actually be the thing that you're probably directly paid for. Yeah. You know, no one's, no one's paying a musician to soundcheck. [01:08:00] They're paying to go to the gig.
Matthew Bellringer: You know, like, it's the same thing for you. what's your equivalent of the soundcheck versus- Yeah ... what's your equivalent of the gig?
Harriet Formby: And that's actually quite a fun thing to work through as well and to kinda go, "Well, how do I look at value in a different way, and what does it mean for me? And what are all the components that make me do something really well, and how can I, deliver really good stuff but not all the time?"
Harriet Formby: You know, like, not have to be doing stuff all the time as in like- Mm. Yeah, yeah. It's really important, isn't it? And just if somebody, well, hopefully lots of people listening to this, like, recognizing what we're talking about, they're there themself. Like, yeah, I'm trying to build something meaningful.
Harriet Formby: A lot of this stuff is, resonating. Like, what's the sort of main thing you want them to take away?
Matthew Bellringer: I think if you're at that early stage and you're like, you know, maybe you've, you're running a business that you don't much like, or you've got a job that you're like, "This isn't actually like what I want to be doing with my life."
Matthew Bellringer: Um-[01:09:00]
Matthew Bellringer: Think about this as a transition. Think about how you can move in the direction that you want to move in small steps. There's a lot of people will talk about, business and startups, again, as these huge bets, and this thing of, okay, you kind of build this huge thing, and then maybe it works and maybe it doesn't.
Matthew Bellringer: Don't do that.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Please, please don't do that. Um, instead, look around at what you have already, what you've done already. It is worth something. It is worth a lot. You know, probably more than you're giving it credit for. And see what you can combine out of all of that, out of the people you've already met, the relationships you already have, and the stuff you've already done, and see if you can combine that in a way that helps you move in the direction you want to move.
Matthew Bellringer: You won't get all the way there, but moves you a bit more in that direction, and that might just mean, like, [01:10:00] looking at the courses available from your current employer so you can learn something about the kind of thing that you actually want to be doing, and seeing if someone will let you do those courses, 'cause no one's really looking, and there's always more space in the system to, like, move than the kind of expected way.
Matthew Bellringer: So allowing yourself a bit more of that, allowing yourself a bit more of the, like, taking your intent, what you want, where you want to go is important and is valuable, but you don't have to convince anyone else of that just yet, and you don't have to get permission to do that. You can just start, but start in little small ways that don't feel overwhelming
Harriet Formby: Yeah, I really like that.
Harriet Formby: Really like that it's not just like this thing where you have to go, "Right, I'm all in on this one thing now. I need to announce it to the world, and ... It has to work," or, you know, it's, it's gonna be awful. It's like how can you do it in a way that feels good? and yeah, I love that, that you can actually be building your skills while you're in [01:11:00] a job.
Harriet Formby: And you might well be working in a job and starting something and doing a bit of a, you know, a few things at once. It's very normal to be doing multiple things- Mm-hmm ... so that you can experiment with the security of having a job backing you up, and that's perfectly, a good way to, to do it as well.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Yeah. And if you can do ... and these things aren't oppo- Like you're, you're creating value, and you can potentially create value for your employer even if your value doesn't, e- even if your employer doesn't expect that.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: You know, I, I, and so like it is worth if you've got an idea pitching, you know, if you, if, if it's appropriate enough, is pitching what you do to your current company either as a job or as a, you know
Matthew Bellringer: Like, you know, I've known some people who were, who were thinking of leaving, and instead of actually leaving they just changed their role because they pitched a different role 'cause they figured out what they wanted to do and were like, "I could still do this in this company, and actually I don't really want all the stuff with the business, but I want to be doing this thing instead, and I could do this with them."
Matthew Bellringer: So pitched that and got that job. You know, I worked with someone [01:12:00] a few years ago who was doing that, and built a whole load of digital stuff, and was just like, "Well, I want to be doing this role, and I'm looking for these jobs." And we were like, "Okay, great. What can you do in the current employer?" And built a little bit for demonstrate that.
Matthew Bellringer: Um, by the time that they'd even started getting their CV out, the current employer had spotted it and gone, "Ooh, we really like this. This is really good. Can you do this role instead?" And they doubled their salary. So-
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: You know, like, It is perfectly possible, and I think, being able to...
Matthew Bellringer: You don't have to have the complete answer. That's a really important thing. you don't have to have the complete solution, and people will kind of ask you for it. say, "What are you gonna do with this? What, what's this? What's, what's g-..." So sometimes the answer is, "I don't know. I'll find out." Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: "That's what I'm doing. I'm finding out." That's a, that, that is a good answer. For me, that's a much better answer than like, "I know all of these definite bits, and it's gonna look exactly like this." And when I hear that from someone, it isn't. I mean, all the... I mean, I suppose it- maybe there's a chance. It feels like, you know, like quantum probability.
Matthew Bellringer: Like, once or twice [01:13:00] in the lifetime of a universe it works out that way.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, like when you have a business plan. It's like, the business plan is gonna change a lot. If you've done, the sort of academic exercise of creating a business plan, it's like, well, that, you look at that in six months, gonna be very different.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: I, I, I think Rework, the book comes up with the suggestion of everywhere you see plan in that context, replace it with the word guess.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah. '
Matthew Bellringer: Cause it's more accurate.
Harriet Formby: Mm.
Matthew Bellringer: So this is, this is my business guess. This is my best guess. And then, and work towards it. You know, it's important to have that, and have something animating that.
Matthew Bellringer: You know, animating the action. It is important. I'm not saying just be completely passive in this. So be intentional.
Harriet Formby: Yeah,
Matthew Bellringer: yeah. but also, like, allow yourself, allow the idea to unfold. Allow yourself to unfold. You know, allow yourself to f- allow you... You'll find new things out about you and what you want and how you like in this, and that's another big reason to go bit by bit in that.
Matthew Bellringer: You know- Yeah ... I've had people who were, like, convinced that they wanted to go in a certain direction, and we've done a few, we've done a little experiment. They've been, [01:14:00] "Actually, no, I really didn't like that. I want to do something slightly different." So that's important too because, when we have, particularly as a neurodivergent person, when we have unmet needs, you know, we, we've had our needs, never really had our needs fully met by the system.
Matthew Bellringer: It might be really hard for us to answer the question, how do we meet those needs better? And it's gonna take some trial and error. It's gonna take some experimentation. So, so even on a personal level, But being able to navigate by that, this is actually, this feels better. I'm moving, you know...
Matthew Bellringer: That's, that's a really helpful thing to be able to do as well, to help, help you navigate that journey.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. It just reminds me actually that we had a couple of guests on a few months ago from the theater world, Paul McCauley and Laura Mugridge, and Paul was talking about
Harriet Formby: how essentially Like, he had a day job, but he was, secretly in comedy and theater, but like didn't tell. Did had this, like, professional job where he's like, "I'm not gonna mention it." And then one day he kind of told people, [01:15:00] and they were like, "Oh, amazing. You can do, like, some...
Harriet Formby: We wanna do a production with, the leadership and management." And, then they brought in all his theater and comedy skills, and they were like, "Wow, this is amazing." And then he brought that into his day job, and then he had so much, like, much more satisfaction because he was doing the sort of the day job was, like, in- integrated, and then he transitioned into doing, like, comedy.
Harriet Formby: But, um, it's that idea that, you know, your skills are actually... You know, they won't always be welcome. There'll be times when, you know, you're gonna be, disappoint- I'm not saying it's always gonna be like that. But there's a, the propensity for people to actually be interested in all the other skills and all the other things about you is probably quite high.
Harriet Formby:
Matthew Bellringer: Um, we are, we are often, as neurodivergent people, a slightly weird value proposition.
Harriet Formby: Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: You know, we just have a, an odd combination of skills and knowledge the, that, very often just because of the nature of the way we are. and the thing about being an odd value proposition is that sometimes it can be hard that's not a mass market thing, right?
Matthew Bellringer: that's not necessarily what people are out there, lots of people are out there looking for. But if you can find your niche, you can find where [01:16:00] that is exactly what people need, and they need someone who's this and also that, and, like... But that's where you can deliver value almost no one else can.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a really interesting point as well, isn't it? That it can, feel like a negative thing, but actually that can be something really important, especially where all the sort of manual thinking tasks or maybe all, logical stuff is being outsourced to AI. It's like, well, actually, they can't outsource you if you've got all of this combination of things that, don't appe- appear naturally that often.
Harriet Formby: Yeah.
Matthew Bellringer: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. Really good stuff. Okay. Well, thank you, so much. I wanted to just ask you if you could explain a little bit about, so people that are listening, like, how they can find you and work with you and, like, what the next steps might be if they're interested in, yeah, different ways to engage with you.
Matthew Bellringer: Super. Thank you. So yeah, so you can find me... I mean, I primarily share stuff on my website and on LinkedIn, and a little bit on Blue Sky. so if you want any of my kind of regular content, um, [01:17:00] You'll find at least signposts from those places. yeah, if people are actually interested in working with me, I work one-to-one with people, and very happy to have a conversation about that.
Matthew Bellringer: I'm happy to... Any- anyone listening, watching, I can, please do just reach out. Happy to have a half-hour conversation with you completely free just to see whether we're, you know, whether, whether it's a good match and I can help. and if I can't, I'll also probably point you to some useful stuff and maybe people that can.
Matthew Bellringer: So, Yeah, and then I tend to work with people to a fixed goal actually. It's funny, this exploratory work can be quite difficult. and, I like to actually, work with a fixed number of sessions and a fixed goal and then we repeat and we may repeat that cycle if you need something else.
Matthew Bellringer: so I prefer to work that way. If you're a business and you're a business owner, please do, approach me for a chat, if, particularly if you're a neurodivergent business owner, and you're thinking about scale and struggles with that, um, tensions around burnout versus impact versus all of those things.
Matthew Bellringer: Again, straightforward half-hour conversation and I'll [01:18:00] take you through all the different ways that we can work together.
Harriet Formby: Amazing. That sounds really great, and we'll put all the links to, your website and different profiles in the show notes so people can click through and find you. So yeah, thank you very much, Matthew.
Matthew Bellringer: thank you very much for sharing this. I really like the approach that you're taking in this podcast.
Matthew Bellringer: I think we don't talk about money nearly enough. It's often quite a taboo subject. I really like podcasts where I get to talk about slightly taboo subjects, so I- Yeah. Yeah ... I think it's really important. they, for neurodivergent people, we can pick up shame so easily around stuff like this.
Matthew Bellringer: Um, so it's really good to just be able to get that stuff out. the best cure for that is hearing these stories, I think, and talking about this stuff openly. so yeah, so thank you for doing what you're doing and for sharing this 'cause I think it's a really important part of the picture to help people do more of what they really want to do, and I think that's a really important, valuable thing, so thanks.
Harriet Formby: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I think it's something I've really, really been intentional about, is I want people to hear. [01:19:00] You know, sometimes it'll be things that they resonate with, and sometimes it'll be different perspectives. But so often people say to me, "Yeah, I heard that conversation, and actually it made me think of this."
Harriet Formby: And we need to hear stories, different stories about money from different people, and also stuff that's the, the tricky stuff and not the glossy stuff always, not the things with clear answers and just do this, and this and it will all be fabulous, but actually just the things that really make us think sometimes.
Harriet Formby: But also that we know we're not alone with stuff, and we know that there's other people that think like this as well. Like, "Oh, there's other people that got thoughts about the startup journey and want to do it differently. Oh, it's great to know there's other people like me.
Harriet Formby: and I'm glad that I'm in good company." I think a lot of, people have talked about neurodivergence as well, and so having somebody on like yourself that's, able to talk more about that experience from your professional perspective has been really wonderful.
Harriet Formby: So yeah, thank you. You've been listening to The Money Story Project podcast with me, Harriet Formby. If you've enjoyed the episode, please follow the show, share it with someone [01:20:00] who might want to have a listen, and if you can, leave a review. In the show notes, you'll find links to connect with our guest and to learn more about the project itself.
Harriet Formby: And if you feel called to share your own money story, you'll find details there on how to be part of a future episode. Until next time, take care and have a great day
