Kirsten Barrie Is a Finance Passionista

Kirsten Barrie, the founder, and owner of Verte Consulting, has over 16 years of experience as a CFO, working with large corporate brands, small businesses, marketing agencies, tech startups, retail, E-tail and professional service businesses. She's passionate about affecting change of financial equality by supporting women and founders and helping them achieve their dreams.

Here’s an excerpt from our interview with Kirsten.

Passionistas: What's the one thing you're most passionate about?

Kirsten: Specifically, women founders having their own freedom, with money and their business. And that freedom comes from control and being organized. I want women to have a wonderful team, ideally, a very diverse team and create opportunities for lots of people. And feel really great about themselves and the team feeling really great about whatever their business is that they're doing. The result of a really well functioning business in the profit would be that, the women founder is giving herself a paycheck that is comfortable for her, and she is never in a situation that she can't get out of.

Passionistas: What did you learn during that period where you were acting and in the entertainment business that you carried forward into your more entrepreneurial career?

Kirsten: I think one of the biggest, and it's not really related to giving any financial advice, but just entrepreneurial advice is when I used to audition. We were trained that the audition was the performance and to not think past that, not to think like, oh, the action. If I get this role, what will that be? But to really just focus on the audition as a moment in time. And that's your like three minute amazing performance and you walk out of that room, usually the casting room and move on with your life. As if, you just did the thing and then you do that over and over and over and over again.

And that can wear on someone, if they're constantly thinking that the outcome is the role. But if you change the outcome to be even just that, three minute experience you have with those people. Like, that's the product, it doesn't wear you out and I think it's very uplifting. So I think in business, sometimes we get exhausted because we have the outcome, and if we're not hitting that outcome, like I talked about the beginning. It feels horrible. So to fall in love with the process is really the most important part of it. And the outcomes will happen, but it's really the process, the habits that you develop as you're trying to get to that, that I think, keep you going.

Passionistas: Talk about 2005, when you started Verte Consulting. What was the process? Why did you start it and what was the inspiration behind it?

Kirsten: Oh, I wish it was so much more romantic and sexy than the actual story, I got divorced. I was teaching yoga. I was not paying the bills. My ex-husband was hiding money. He left me with all the bills and I, was young. I was in my twenties. See, these are things that I don't want, anyone to have to go through. I thought, oh, okay. I'll pay my own bills. Even though I had completely spent five years rearranging my life around a narcissist, which is what they do.

So yeah, not good. I didn't know. I was so young, and I was so naive. So, because I had a website design company and a design company that did photography and all this stuff. Some colleagues of mine from that industry knew that I actually had done a bunch of business courses and a bunch of business training and accounting. Because as an artist, and the goal was to have acting career and everything else was just like paying its bills. I wanted to be a successful business person, to run my artistic career. And I thought everyone else knew this business had business acumen. Turns out no one had business acumen and I was this, like, rare golden person that actually gone and, and taken myself to get educated in this way. So, these colleagues hired me.

Hear Kirsten’s full interview here.

Learn more about Kirsten here.