Case Study – Adrian, Marketing Manager
Summary: Adrian believed he had a great attitude to money, yet never seemed to have more than enough to survive, until he discovered The Accumulation Principle.
Sometimes coaching allows people to see the big picture rather than get caught up in all the detail. While detail is important, it can obscure the truth. The Accumulation Principle is simple: if you spend money on an item regularly – how much is that item really going to cost you, per month, per year, over five years? For example that cup of coffee at Starbucks every morning on the way to work; is it really costing you only £2.00 per day? Accumulatively, £2 per day is £10 per week, £40 a month and £480 per year.
Adrian was convinced that The Accumulation Principle didn’t apply to him. Adrian believed that he was very careful with money, in fact he prided himself on not having needless cups of coffee and he even brought sandwiches in to work! At work he would always find the best price for anything that needed to be purchased or better still, he would find a way to save by not paying anything at all.
Adrian was totally unaware of the impact of his excellent savings skills; coupled with his excessive need to save was an overpowering negative attitude towards money. The cost of this attitude was that Adrian had long desired to gain a promotion at work and for one reason or another this never seemed to happen. Since Adrian’s attitude to money was also affecting the possibility of him earning more money.
The underlying driver for Adrian was his belief that he never had enough money.
Adrian decided something had to happen to break this cycle – on the one hand being so careful and on the other hand not creating more than the meagre income he needed to survive and to manage his regular overheads.
After only his first coaching session Adrian spotted one of the many small monthly payments coming out of his bank account on a regular basis was for £100 for storage; from a practical point of view, Adrian had placed a large number of boxes in storage after his divorce because his flat was too small and he had wanted to hold onto these items.
Years had gone by and Adrian had never actually used or removed any of these items that he had in storage; and when he applied the Accumulation Principle of £100 per month, over five years, Adrian was shocked to discover that he had spent over £6,000 on what he thought was a low cost method of managing items he owned.
Swiftly, Adrian took a trip to the storage facility where he applied the following rule: if you’re going on a trip and you can only take the most important items with you, which ones would they be? It didn’t take Adrian long to discover that the majority of the items he had stored all those years were of no value to him whatsoever, and that there were barely two small boxes which he really wanted. He took those with him, dumped the remainder, and closed down the storage contract there and then.
Adrian discovered a pattern: his thoughts around money were all negative. His language focused on not spending, as well as seeing and feeling that money was something that you never get enough off, which was exactly Adrian’s experience of money.
Adrian now had a clearer understanding of the Accumulation Principle and an awareness of how his perception of money had been so negative. With new tools to view money as a resource, a positive force, Adrian was able to turn around his relationship with money in his personal life and then apply the same principle in his working environment.
Within a short period of time, Adrian spotted an opportunity within his department where there was a regular unwarranted expenditure, and with a small amount of research and analysis, he was able to save the department thousands of pounds.
Later that year, Adrian was offered a more senior role in the organisation. Clearly his new approach to money had benefited by changing his beliefs and attitudes in both his personal and his business life.
