Meet Natalie And The Big Why

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Today I have Natalie Ferguson. She is the co-founder of PowerSuit, professional development platform designed to help women and their allies develop the skills, connections, and confidence needed to progress in their careers and leadership. PowerSuit focuses on practical bite-sized learning rather than traditional, theory-heavy professional development. Hello, Natalie. As I was going through various options of how to do this, like I'm just gonna roll with this one and we're gonna unpack for our listeners about how amazing you are. I'm so excited that you joined me today. Thank you so much for saying yes. When I was speaking at the bio, you have a lot of heart in finances and women and lifting others. And this is where I saw our natural connection.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Yeah, I I see that too. I I I agree. And I really I mean you're very good at summarising things. I have always believed, well, finance is a tool, right? And so having financial freedom or financial independence is really, really critical to being able to lead a life that you want to lead. And traditionally, too little of those that money has been in the hands of half the population. So yeah, that has become sort of the motivation for me to get out of bed every day and try and change those stats a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

What happened in her life for her to go, okay, I think I'm passionate about this. I think this is where I see myself, and I'm gonna be doing this. Like a younger, you're very young.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Obviously, I'm still very young. No, I'm in my 40s now, I know what you mean. I may not look at no, I do.

Childhood Lessons And Early Investing

SPEAKER_01 1:52

We so yeah, I'm gonna probably it was I I grew up with so I was a military brat. My dad was in the Air Force, and I traveled around a lot as a child. And what I learned, my mum as a result often couldn't work because she moved so much and you know, visas, etc. etc. And I didn't know the words at the time or probably even realize, but my mum was very entrepreneurial, so everywhere we went, like she always has created craft, she's worked in refugee camps before, she has been English as a second language teacher. She helped us. We I always wanted a dog and couldn't have one because we traveled so much, so helped us set up a dog walking business, and we used to create Easter chocolates and walk around bases and sell them and all sorts of stuff. So I always grew up with an understanding of where money came from and the value of money. And that led me to make quite, I think like not quite different choices, but like I was very much a saver and like a I know how much time, how many hours of dog walking or how many chocolates I need to sell to buy this top from Glassens or whoever it might be. But I think for me, the real, the real switch actually happened quite a lot later, but I knew in my 20s that investing was a good thing. Um my parents had always been property investors, very loosely, like they weren't like big shot, they had like maybe one investment property every now and again. And so I knew the value of investing, and I discovered a platform in New Zealand where I could invest in index funds. And the reason I say the light bulb moment came years later is as you know, investing is a long-term game. And at the start, you you know, you're sort of like, oh gosh, what a mistake. It's gone down or it's gone up, or uh. And then over time, when you start to build that base and you start to go, oh my goodness, even when it goes down, it's not going down nearly like it's still up, and and you start to see the joys of compounding growth. But early on, it was sort of more of a what else am I gonna do with my money? I'm not putting it all on a bank account, and I'm not a spender, really.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

As I interview more and more people, it's funny, it always starts from the childhood. You either were brock and you had parents that had no idea what to do, and so you grew up with a feeling of I don't know anything about the money, so I want to learn, or you grew up with parents that had some sort of idea and maybe pointed you in a way where you've discovered that appetite of, oh, I can make my own money and I can try to put it away. And and then money multiplies. Money has babies, so money grows.

unknown 4:28

Money has babies.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

I totally agree.

Money Emotions And Mindful Spending

SPEAKER_01 4:32

I think one of the things I've learned through our last company, which was an investing platform, is we have so much emotions tied to money. And the thing that I feel incredibly lucky about, other than having a mum who and dad, obviously, who really helped us build a really real understanding of money, is they never tied any emotions to it. Money has in my brain always been a tool. And and things like if I my dad was military, my mum wasn't working. You can kind of put the dots together and go, I didn't grow up in an incredibly wealthy household. I wouldn't have known that though, because my parents never said we don't have enough money, we can't afford it. They never used that language. It was always this is an opportunity cost. It was always we can have this or this, or how are we going to work towards getting it, or is this a priority for us? So I grew up in a world where money was a tool, there was no emotions attached to it. I never felt scarcity, I never felt the sense of there is something that other people have that I don't have. It was always phrased to me as a choice of do we want to spend money on this and is this worth the money? And do you need to jump onto this latest fad because you know that you're gonna get over it in two months' time, and that's $20 of your hard-earned money gone. All of that sort of stuff was the way it was phrased. And now when I have met hundreds of people and learned a lot more about attitudes to money, I was so lucky because I feel like I've very much escaped what basically everyone else has, which is a real emotional, it's tied to your identity, it's tied to your self-worth, it's tied to the scarcity, it's tied to comparison. And that's the first real hard thing to get over or to work through when you talk about money.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

And the behavior and how that influences our life. And I love, love, love finding out little things we can do because a lot of people would be listening to this, going, Oh my God, but how can I change my life now? You know, is it all doom and gloom? And this is the exciting bit. I'm excited about that because I feel like the moment you're emotionally aware that yes, I have that issue, this is the starting point of making a change. Would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Yes. And actually, I was talking to my co-founder the other day, and she grew up in a very different environment for lots and lots of different reasons. She's Canadian as well, and we were talking about shopping, and like we've started a new startup. We're bootstrapping. We are on pretty limited incomes at the moment. And she went out and there was a sale on shoes, and she bought this gorgeous pair of boots. But she could have bought another pair of shoes for $100 extra as part of the sale. And we talked through the money psychology because she wrung her husband, they talked it through, decided not to buy the extra pair of shoes, even though she loved the shoes. And I said, I think the question you need to ask is not whether or not I want the shoes, but it is afterwards. Am I gonna feel delighted by this purchase or am I gonna feel shame and stress about this purchase? And I think, and she was like, Oh yeah, the first pair, absolutely delighted. The second pair, I knew that there was a feeling that I experienced. And I really like that as a first step for a lot of us is just to get really mindful about what emotions is this triggering in me when I make the impulse purchase, or when it comes to payday, or when my bank accounts low, or when my friends all want to go out to a fancy dinner and I can't afford it, and start to really understand what those emotions are because there are a lot of them.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

This is cool, what you've done with the platform. I'm not gonna name it, I'm gonna leave it to you to name it. And that became quite big in New Zealand and enabled a lot of people to start investing.

Building Hatch And Demystifying Shares

SPEAKER_01 7:59

Yeah, so we started that back in 2017. I think the team came together, and it was a platform we ended up calling Hatch. And what we initially started out with this was this theory that New Zealanders had far too much money sitting in bank accounts, and we did treat the property market like a casino. Like that is the way New Zealanders, the sole way New Zealanders think about building wealth. And the thing that I had learned along the way is especially with bank accounts, your money is actually going backwards because inflation often is higher. So if inflation's at 3% and you're earning 1% interest, you're effectively losing 2% of your money every year. And we, the other thing that we found early on in our research was people felt that they didn't have control over their financial circumstances, that money ended up controlling them. So I don't know. Like when money comes in, money goes, I have no kind of real control over that or autonomy over that. And we thought, what if we could convince people and change that mindset into I can control my money, I can make decisions with it, I can grow it, I can get it to work for me and really change that mindset around I actually can build. I don't have to wait till retirement age to retire. I don't have to be stuck in the job that I hate. I don't have to be stuck in the relationship that I hate because of money. I can create a situation that allows me to use money as a tool to be able to design the life that I want. That's and we we always used to laugh about private jets because I think in New Zealand we equate wealth with like that really flashy, gaudy sort of displays of it. Whereas actually true wealth, in my opinion, is freedom. That is, you swap those words out. And the freedom to be able to decide and design your life is actually, in my opinion, the biggest form of wealth you can ever have. If you look at a lot of billionaires, they're deeply unhappy. And if you look at a lot of people with a lot less money, they have built a life that they really, really find meaningful and joyous. So we launched the platform, and the idea was to short circuit our thinking was to give people affordable access to the US share market. So before that, it had been like $100 every time you invested, plus extreme foreign exchange fees. So we brought it right down to $3, and you could buy a fraction of a share because like companies like Apple and Tesla and Amazon, you know, those share prices are like $1,000 each or whatever it is. So you could just spend $50 and get a fraction of a share, and you could own a very small slice of those companies. And the reason we started with that is because rather than going, oh my gosh, what is investing? I'm putting in my money in this unknown fund and I don't really understand, and I've handed it over, you could literally say, I love my iPhone, I love my Mac computer, and I am an owner, part owner in Apple. And that is a concept that most of us understand. Like, I know how to buy shoes, I now know how to buy shares, and it's exactly the same thing. So we spend a lot of time talking about financial concepts like that. Like get away from all the jargon and the way that it's like extrapolated away from our lives, bring it back to the stuff we all know. We all know how to shop, we all know how to buy things, we all know the idea of owning something and owning a fraction of something. All of that was really, really, we just brought it back to what it actually is. But what we learned quite quickly, we grew to about 200,000, just under 200,000 investors over the next several years, couple of years.

Gender Gaps And The Cost To Everyone

SPEAKER_01 11:15

And one of the very early things we started to see a pattern of is that most of those investors were men. And we got really curious about that because we were like, what is it? We know women actually get better outcomes when it comes to investing. A lot of our behaviors are build much stronger long-term investing habits. We are more risk-aware, we set and forget more, we just set up patterns really, really well. So we started talking to a lot of women about why is it that you're not investing? And oh my goodness, it just kind of created this hot, like we just were like like the social conditioning that we have over generations. Firstly, we didn't have access to money for a very long time. And I say that because in the 1980s, we still weren't allowed credit cards on our own. Um we still had to sometimes get our husband to sign off on a mortgage. We weren't in the workforce in a way that was meaningful to being able to live independently. So this is like 50, you know, under a hundred years ago, we finally got access to our own money, but we had by then embedded this really gendered view on who is good at managing money, who is good at growing money. So women became budgeters and men became growers of money. Um, so we started to tackle that. And then, of course, we sold the company in 2021. Lots of reasons why we did that. And by then, Kristen, my co-founder, and I had become obsessed with like how do we help women build that financial freedom and get what we deserve and get the value, get the value out of this economy that we deserve. And careers is just such a simple way, getting paid, getting the positions, getting the pay that we deserve.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

There is a massive issue with the gender pay gap. And if we look at how much women have to deal with physically, emotionally over the lifetime compared to men, and it's not to say anything bad about the man, like I love men just as much as women, but I but I feel like just even physiologically, you know, we're the ones that get the curious, we're the ones that have to give birth, we're the ones that have to go through a lot of issues in life where men don't have those hormonal waves of up and downs. They're not usually the first caregiver choice if it comes to elderly parents or younger children. And I feel like women always walking sort of a step behind, and they're the ones that usually get too overwhelmed with too much jargon and going, I can't deal with that because investments and index and yields and share markets that's way above my head. I'm happy doing I'm happy to play small, I'm happy to be over here doing my role that I know what's best. And I think for someone like you coming along and going, hold on a second, it doesn't have to be complicated, it doesn't have to be that hard. We can show you how you're already doing a lot of it anyway, as just little tweaks and little changes over here could help you significantly long term and help you retire with more money and give you back that freedom, as you mentioned. So I guess now let's talk about the power suit and what that means.

What PowerSuit Offers Busy Women

SPEAKER_00 14:17

And for our listeners, what can they learn about your new initiative?

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Oh, thanks for asking. I really appreciate the support, by the way. I was just thinking about what you said then, and I think one of the things we all need to realize is that these systems, this world we operate in, was designed by people who are no longer alive. Like all of us are operating in it now. And I don't know if you've seen, I like like Instagram a lot. A couple of days ago, there was a guy in Australia who launched Dad's Dad Walks, and he got a whole bunch of his friends and like random people turned up, about 80 men turned up with their prams and started walking with their kids. And the the big amount of interest that has got sort of really highlights that the world has been designed pretty poorly, and it was designed with very gendered roles, and that has led men, like when we talk about like the whole dis discrimination at work and the lack of diversity and leadership and the pay gap, that's reflected equally as poorly for men on the other side, where they are not entitled to the same will. They don't get the same leave benefits when they have children, they don't get to build the same relationships. There aren't spaces and organizations for men to come together and be parents. So I do think when we have this conversation, it always feels like what about the women? And men are bad. It's nothing to do with that. We're all losing in the system. But when we started PowerSoup, we had come out of finance, and finance, as you know, is heavily regulated. It's an incredibly expensive business to be in. It makes it very hard to grow internationally. It also makes it very expensive to get a company off the ground. We loved doing it, but the model behind that meant you had to get a lot of funding. And that by default means that you lose control, a lot of control in your purpose and what you're trying to achieve. And so we wanted to come up with a slightly different way to be able to create the world that we want to live in. And so we wanted to bootstrap, which means we're funding it ourselves. So what we came to with PowerSo, we actually ended up doing we're researches. We did a bunch of research again and found yes, the gender pay gap is a big thing and the gender leadership gap is a big thing. And there are a lot of things in life that are really unfair. But there is also, like with finance, a lot of opportunities for us to take control and control where we can. And so we wanted to teach women and help women connect and learn the skills and build the relationships to be able to navigate the system of work that was designed before we fully participated in it or properly participated in it and be able to succeed on our terms. And I don't care what success looks like to you. You might want to be a CEO, you might want to be a really good technical expert. It's not about that. What it is about is trying to tackle some of those unfair barriers, which by the way, no one else is really motivated to tackle because they're all kind of benefiting from them and take that control back and get what we need to get where we want to go. Um, also, we have a lot of allies on the platform as well. So again, everyone's welcome. Everyone has a place in power suit. So we launched in 2024 and we effectively have a professional development platform for busy women. We talk about busy women because none of us have time to be able to like take a day out and do stuff. But what we're about is really tangible, actionable tools, templates, bite-sized insights, behavior change, mindset shifts that allow us to de-stress, to avoid burnout, to operate at our best and to be visibly valued. So we do mini masterclasses where we teach different skills from AI to commercial now to communication to relationship building, everything you can need in your career. We also have interviews like this with really incredible role models. I would love to interview Michelle Obama, but we interview women who you can look to and go, oh, I see how she succeeded in my industry. I may be able to actually do that because currently I'm looking up and seeing all men in those positions and they're all golfing together and going to the pub. So I don't think I can do that role. But now I've seen this other person who's done it in their own way. I may be able to do that. Um, and then we do peer coaching because we don't talk about our careers enough. Like, when was the last time? Out of interest, when was the last time you sat on the channel? I don't talk about it being dedicated in a space in your career. I interview everyone else. You are not alone. Yeah, yeah, you are not alone. We all, I mean, like other than the platform you've given people like me, most of us, we try and battle through on our own. So we've created this peer coaching and option where you can actually talk about the things that you are struggling with, get a sounding board of perspectives, really low stress, again, like it's a cone of silence, all of that stuff. And then we've plonked it all onto an all-access platform. So you get one membership monthly or annually, you get access to everything. You've got live events, you've got you can watch and listen on demand on your iPhone or your Android while you're walking. Someone said the other day, ah, you've turned my walk into work. It means that I don't have to count it as a break, um, which is great because you can learn on the go. And then we have in-person coffees regularly, so you can get that in-person connection. Uh, and we see amazing results. We see people making progress in our career in their careers. We see businesses increasing their attention, increase uh decreasing time wasted, and then therefore increasing performance. And we're having a blast. I loved it. I absolutely love it.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

Because I fully agree with that. If you put the energy in the right place, that's what will grow, right? You've got to water the right plant, you've got to feed the right wolf. Which wolf do you choose to feed? And I feel like with what you're creating, if people know about it, and the more people know about it, the more they invest in themselves. That's where the returns come. And as you were saying, you know, it's all about the compounding returns as well. Whether you're investing into a proper share fund or whether you're investing in yourself, by learning something new every day, you're expanding your brain cells, and therefore you're creating a new pathway, new futures. And as you said, you know, you suddenly people can see, oh, you know, even if I had kids and I had time of work, I could have that job because that person did it. So that means I could do that as well. And I think if we can showcase that to women, that will really lift. And I think statistically as well, if women do well, everyone else around them do well as well, whether it's their communities, their neighborhoods, their families, their relatives, everyone around them will also be lifting up the game. So I absolutely adore and love what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

I love that you and compared it to investing as well, because you're right. Like when I first started investing, I'd invest like maybe $50 a month. And that doesn't feel like a lot, but it compounds over time. And in a comparative example in PowerSear, and I love this example because it's a real one of a young woman who came along to one of our mini masterclasses on how to introduce yourself. So, you know, we never get taught like when you're going around those meetings and say a bit about you. And most of us, like, oh, I'm just gonna say my name. And we have a really structured pick and mix approach to go, here is a 15-second introduction that you can craft for yourself. So she went and tested it and she was very skeptical. She's like, What is this gonna do? How is this gonna transform my career? It's her $50 investment, right? It was uh 15 minutes of her time crafting it, and then she had to go and say it at the next meeting. And what she didn't realize is the compounding benefit of that because she introduced herself differently. So people came to her with questions during the meeting that they wouldn't usually have come to her with. Someone followed up after the meeting, and over several months she completely repositioned how her value was perceived in the company, and then six months later got a promotion. That is like the exact same thing with investing, that those little first things you're like, it doesn't even move the needle. Why am I doing it? But they compound, and over time, and sometimes you get a real return investment that's listening to this and a little bit lost in life.

Two Small Habits That Compound

SPEAKER_00 22:10

What would it be?

SPEAKER_01 22:11

Firstly, I'd say subscribe to our newsletter. It's free and it's fortnightly and it gives you like really actionable tips. I would say it's a really good question. If they're feeling a bit lost, I'm all about small actions rather than like big shifts because I don't know if you've ever seen news resolutions, but like they get forgotten about. I think the average is like three weeks later. They're done for. So I would say rather than trying to blow up your whole life, there's two tips that I would say. I would do a Friday, I call it a Friday retrospective. So you literally sit back and you do two minutes on each question. What went well this week, what didn't go well, and what am I going to change next week? Three questions, two minutes each, six minutes of your life, and just start building that habit. And it's not about like, oh gosh, my whole life I feel completely lost and I'm not sure what's happening. It's actually just like this week, and what can I change next week? And it's something small. So you're starting to pull back that control. And the second thing that Kristen, my co-founder, and I do every week is we celebrate a Friday win. And you've talked a lot about the pathways in our brains. One of the things that our brains are really, really beautifully designed for is focusing on the negative because they are trying to protect us all the time. And I used this example yesterday. You know, if you get a text in the middle of the night saying we need to talk, your brain's not like, yay, they're probably going to tell me I've won Lotto. You immediately go to the negative, right? And so we celebrate Friday wins because we are retraining our brains to focus on and identify the upside. And that makes you far more likely to say yes to opportunities. It makes your brain health much better because you are looking at the world and retros like looking back at your last week and seeing the positive rather than the negative. And it makes you feel more confident, less stressed, all of that great stuff. So six minute reflection and identify one win, big or small. And some weeks that's harder than others, and celebrate that win. And that celebration could just be admitting it out loud, it could be sharing it with someone in PowerSuit. We have a whole channel where people can share their wins and get other people to celebrate with them. Those two things I think can over time have that compounding effect and help you start to see that you can make change in your life. I love that. Get out of whatever's making you know.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

I think it just reiterates again that big things don't happen overnight. You've got to build up to it. You cannot build a six pack by no. Hey, I don't know if I can't do it. I think you know small, small changes. But I think it just really shows that if if you're willing to put the hard work in, if you're willing to really take that time, and it doesn't have to be long, 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day, you know, start small, build it up to it. And and this is powerful whether it comes to you know finances, investing, people wanting to buy their own home. Like I often work with people that think they can never buy a house. And by showing them how close they are, you know, it blows their mind. And this is why I love doing what I do, because every day I can change someone's life, going, ooh, I went from point A to point B really fast. And and I think this is one thing that I'm taking away from this interview is that regardless of people's backgrounds, regardless of how you grow up, there is a way to change the future. There is a way to set the goals, achievable goals, and work towards them. And there are platforms like yours that exist now that can help people get there, especially women that often time poor. And having something that's bite-sized, get onto it. I saw your Instagram channel as well, you're doing a great job there. I'm loving all your reels as well. Look, I'm the same I had to embrace the social media as I'm developing this channel as well, because what I've realized, as much as I cringe at my own voice, I've realized there are people that need to hear the messages that you and I have. There are people that, you know, by listening to us, they may get a bit brave in their own world and work through their career progression, ask for that pay increase, learn how to deal with the no's in this life. So I'm absolutely grateful to you and your work. And I would love to have you for part two where we can maybe dive a little bit deeper into the whole women and society and what else we could be doing together as a collective.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

I love that because we'll leave them, we'll leave everyone on cliffhanger because I think what you just said about like thinking you can't buy a house and the work you do. I had a conversation about this the other day about the difference with the emotions we have around money, that feeling, that light bulb moment of you have to own it. You have to own it. You have to own the change, otherwise, you end up staying in the same position. So I would like to dig into that a little bit more because it can feel really hard because sometimes we accidentally think someone's gonna come and save us, or that you know, there's a magic trick and there isn't a but it doesn't mean that sometimes we can say we will drop all your links in the episode for those that are listening.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

If you're driving, please don't click on anything while you're driving. But when you do stop, have a look at the notes and connect with that. Absolute gorgeous soul. Thank you so much for your time today.