Rachel Rodgers, author of We Should All Be Millionaires: A Woman’s Guide To Earning More, Building Wealth, and Gaining Economic Power and founder of Hello Seven, a coaching company that helps a largely Black clientele make money through entrepreneurship, was the first Black woman who made me feel like I could make a million bucks. She’s teaching us how to leverage our Blackness and create generational wealth through entrepreneurship—and has some advice for those who want to stick with a 9-5 but aren’t happy where they are. This week, she sat down with The Reset to talk about everything from how making money can be easy to why the marketplace needs your Black ideas, creative and brilliance—an excerpt of our conversation is below.

Letisha:  I just want to take a second to thank you because you woke up a giant within me and you’re probably half the reason why I left my job to be an entrepreneur. I just want to bottle that up and give it to everyone. And I think that’s just where your book comes in. Did you have us in mind when you created your book “We Should All Be Millionaires” ?

Rachel: I wrote the book—and this is how I pitched it in the book proposal as well—because I felt like there was this huge market that was just completely untapped and ignored. That’s usually the case for us; Black women are starting businesses faster than any other segment of women and women of color are starting businesses faster than men are. And yet everybody who’s writing a book about business is a white guy and usually an older white man.

Where are the books that can relate to my experience growing up in a neighborhood where there was a lot of struggle? There were all kinds of challenges that I grew up with—and there’s no rich Aunty to call, right? Like, I have to figure out how to do this with my two hands and with $0 in my bank account, maybe a negative balance in my bank account.

And so there’s just not a lot of books that talk about [that] and so I was very annoyed by it. You get annoyed and then you’re like, is no one going to do this? Okay, fine. I guess I’ll do it. I have to do it. So that’s really how I pitched it. I really wanted the guys and the women that I grew up with who would stand on the corner in front of the corner store in New York. I wanted them to be able to pick up this book and be like, ‘Okay, I know what to do next.’  I wanted it to be that practical and that useful.

Letisha: That annoyance really connected with me because the more you shared about who we are, where we came from I got really mad at the fact that I’m settling for this. 

Rachel:  It’s like Beyoncé, I remember when she did Coachella and she’s like, ‘Thank you for having me…but you know, I’m the first black woman headliner for Coachella.’ Ain’t that about a bitch? You know what I mean? And it’s like, of course we’re mad.

First of all, you can’t be Black in America, like James Baldwin says, and be conscious to any level and not be enraged. How can we channel that anger into something productive and into supporting each other and helping each other? The messages that we get all day long tell us that making money is hard; that it’s not possible for us; that we don’t have the resources; that we’re not good enough. All kinds of negative stories that are sort of built into the fabric of our society and culture. It’s like how many movies do I have to watch with the white protagonist winning? 

And so, when you’re getting those messages all the time, it’s like, ‘okay, well I just better be grateful for this paycheck I’m getting,’ or ‘I’ve gotta be grateful for what I have now.’ And yes, we should be grateful for what we have and recognize that part of what we have is our own innate talent and creativity and ideas and skills. Anything we create as Black people and people of color as well, like, because our society is so white we are always elevating whiteness and nothing else. If you’re a Black person and you create anything, it’s unique, right? It’s like capturing a segment of the market that is currently being ignored…I don’t want us to miss that opportunity.

Hear more from our one-on-one with Rachel Rodgers in this week’s episode of The Reset with Coach Tish, available to view in our video above.

Letisha Bereola is a life coach who helps ambitious women overcome burnout and reach their career goals so they feel great at work and happy at home. She’s a former EMMY nominated TV news anchor, Podcast host of AUDACITY and speaker. Learn more: www.coachtish.co

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