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A Conversation With Rob Ripp, Founder of Fintelligent · The Failure Gap

• Julie Williamson, Ph.D. (00:00) Hello and welcome to the Failure Gap where we talk with leaders about closing the gap between agreement and alignment. We love talking with interesting people and today we're joined by Rob Ripp. Rob is the founder of Fintelligent. He and his team provide financial clarity to entrepreneurs in growth stage companies. They solve the problem of the business owners accounting system not working for them. FinTelegen provides a fractional financial department that handles ongoing accounting, provides great analytics, and offers helpful advice that grows EBITDA, providing founders with more freedom in running their business. He's helped many founders of professional services and technology companies scale and exit their businesses. Rob also loves to travel and he's visited all 50 states and four continents. Rob, welcome to the Failure Gap podcast. Julie, good morning. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, we're glad to have you. Maybe Rob, you can just give our listeners a little bit of background about how you came to be the founder of ThinTelegent. What brought you to this point? Well, the journey of business ownership is always filled with twists and turns. And I'd say my journey was nothing but twists and turns. I had a lawn cutting business when I was a kid. And I liked the freedom of going out and cutting lawns and getting some cash. said, maybe I'll find a path in the future to be a business owner. Life gets in the way. My dad worked in corporate. I took some corporate jobs and I realized that that just wasn't for me. Once my first startup, after about maybe six or seven years in corporate, that was a miserable failure. In fact, my former partner is in prison. So back to corporate. Found a job as a CFO for a startup and that sort of put me on the path that I'm on now. But I will tell you that my track record at corporate and even at that company was not very good. So I wound up leaving that company, went to another startup, kind of helped them get where they needed to be. But then eventually it got to a place where I said, I think I can do this on my own. And about 20 years ago, I became an independent chief financial officer. I knew some people that owned businesses and I was kind of helping them out. And about maybe 10, 12 years into that, I said, I want to be more than just me renting out Rob. I want see if I can build a team of people and actually achieve a vision of giving entrepreneurs the financial empowerment they deserve. to achieve their ambitions. And so if Intelligent was born about seven years ago, and here we are today serving that market. Well, congratulations. Seven years from startup to where you are today is a huge accomplishment. And it's something that a lot of people, I think, aspire to, but it is really hard to do. It's a tough road to hoe, but it sounds like you found something that you really love doing. And so not only did you love the idea of it, but you loved doing it. I do love doing it. I would recommend to any business owner, pursue your passion. Every day, we help business owners with something that's very important to them, but that they struggle with, and it's finances. The entrepreneurs that we serve are typically salespeople or inventors. They're very good at their product, they're very good at convincing people that their solution works for them. But they know that to grow, they need cash, they need capital, they need systems and processes around it. We've seen so many situations where a business owner tried to solve their financial problems by just selling more. And we come in and we say, yeah, but it's not profitable to sales. And so we try to help them with that. And when we actually work with these owners and get them to a place where they're making more money, they're not working as hard. And more importantly, when we help them exit, which we do, and their lives change, it's just incredibly gratifying to hear things like, know, Rob, you and your team, we never would have gotten here without you guys helping us. And it keeps me running to work every day. Yeah. I love that because there's that sense for entrepreneurs. think they always agree that it would be a good idea to have the business be a little tidier. And it's really hard to, as a business leader, align to that and kind of move in that direction. And you're helping them to close that gap right there. Yeah, so more about that in just a minute. Before we get there, I just want to hear a little bit more about you. Is there anything in your life where you've really tackled this space between agreement and alignment, something that you've always thought? I'd love to be able to do that. well, you've you always thought I'd love to be able to run my own business and here you are doing it. So you closed that gap. Any other things where you feel like you feel like you agree that that would be great for you and you're working on getting aligned to it? Yes, there is. It's going to sound a little nerdy. I am a left brain guy. I do love spreadsheets and love computers and things like that. And I'd always wanted to learn how to code. And I had an idea for apps in sort of previous things I did and they didn't work out. but part of in the business that I have now, I had a problem I was trying to solve around measuring my own company's profitability because we're professional services providers and there's labor costs and other things in there. One of the things that's great about doing business today for small companies is the availability of apps and technology that we didn't have even 10 years ago. And so I learned to code on a platform called NoCode, which means I didn't have to know how to code. but I didn't have to know logic and say, you know, do this thing this way. And I had a coach help me with it. And I up building this great app. And so now I have this expertise to write applications to solve problems. And I know this might sound crazy to some folks, but I have some ideas personally to maybe, you know, write a little app for this or that or the other thing. But I did create an app that we are using in our business that we do plan to roll out into other customers. But the process of learning how to do that. was very instructive for me because I hired a coach, but I had to do the work. And writing code is filled with twists and turns. It mirrors my journey of entrepreneurship in certain ways, because I'd run into a roadblock and I'd say, you know, there's, I just can't get around this. Like, what do I do? But if you're persistent, like a business owner is, if you seek out help from the right people, if you listen and you're coachable, you can solve those problems. And it's kind of a metaphor for solving any kind of problem. And so when you talk about things about agreement and alignment and solving for that difference, there's so many examples, I think, in our regular lives where if we thought about it a little bit differently, you could see how you could close that gap. And learning how to code has enabled me to apply that in other areas of my life as well. I love that you're pulling the thread of persistence and also getting help. So often, I think we feel like that would be such a good idea if only we did something that we don't reach out and get the help that we would help us to get there, right? Like, get the nudge along the way. there is just something about persistence when it gets hard and holding the line and being able to stay in that space of growth. Growth is often uncomfortable. Whether it's... much so. Yeah, very much so. And for me personally, mean, know, my growth kind of came through trauma. And I think everybody kind of has that in their lives. And for me, it was my divorce about, you 14 years ago, because I came from a family where that wasn't supposed to happen. And I was the first one that it went through. But I do credit that and having to work through that, you know, getting me better at my business. And because there was a part of me that I was afraid to take some risk and I was afraid to knock down obstacles and I didn't want to disappoint. And there's maybe kind of vulnerability that comes with that that I didn't want to share. But then when I learned to embrace that a little bit more and got more reflective on it, I learned how instructive failure can be, know, big and small. And if I said, well, What can I take away from this? And how can I make a deliberate choice? How do I choose to go forward to use these things that were bad in my life, these failures, to move forward and achieve the things that I want to achieve? And I believe firmly that if I hadn't gone through that, I'm not where I am today with this business. Because it taught me how to overcome obstacles when I thought there's just no way I can move forward here. You know, that is something that so many people, it's an agreement statement that I hear a lot. We need to be more open to failure. We need to be willing to learn from failure. And then these people do everything they can to avoid failure. Or push. Yeah. And you brought up a couple of things there, right? One is fear, right? Fear of letting other people down, fear of not succeeding, fear of being the person who failed, right? And there's a lot of identity that goes into that and getting sort of over that and being able to say, actually failure. is hugely enriching. It opens up all sorts of doors that you cannot open without that failure behind you. I think that's a really, that's such an interesting space, Rob, to be able to say, yeah, it's one thing to say I should learn from failure. It's another thing to actually do that and take advantage of those moments where things have fallen apart a bit and choose to grow and move forward from them. Yeah, it gets back to what we talked before about being coachable. and getting help. And it's really, for anybody that's had a problem, I know there are people who I know who are addicts in my life, and how transformative it was when they had to get off of that journey and go on a new one. And all of them, all of them say the same thing. I would not have gotten there without some kind of help. Now, for business owners who may be suffering from a different type of addiction, it's hard to be vulnerable, especially when you're leading a team. It's hard when you're kind of holding yourself out as this person who's had all the success, to be vulnerable. and to get some help. And I found help with other business owners by joining some mastermind communities that had people just like me in them. And what was amazing to me was when we created some safe spaces where they could be themselves and have confidential conversations, how quickly they opened up. And these people who I thought were the people who they thought they were, were actually just like me. And they had the same issues around, know, challenges with kids, challenges with staff. divorces, addiction, whatever it may be. And so it was comforting to know that I wasn't the only one going through this. But then when you start to have those kinds of conversations, real growth starts to happen. And it doesn't mean so much that you're helping other people and you want to, but you're taking away some learnings from it. That you say, what can I do in my life based on how I've learned these things from other people that might help me deal better with failure and understand the differences between, know, we may agree, but we're not aligned and what kind of all that means. And so seeking help from the community, they may not always agree with you, but if they're kind of like you and on the same journey in the same path, can be very, very instructive if you're kind of open-minded to it. So I'm hearing this, we started with this idea of persistence, right? Individually, you just have to dig into that persistence. Getting expert help, so whether it's from a coach or from a consultant or whatever that might look like, but also the importance of a peer group. How do you connect with your peers and find the strength in that, in shared experiences and looking for that. And actually we often see that across businesses. I suspect that you do as well, that the leadership team forgets that their colleagues, their peers in the organization are probably going through very similar struggles or have very similar fears, but they're so, they present as such a put together kind of leader that it's hard to get real in that space? Pretty much so. And again, it comes back to recognizing it in yourself and being able to experience some self-reflection, which some people struggle with, some people don't have time for, some people don't want to, you know, hold that out publicly. But at some point, you know, if it builds up and you're losing productivity or you're unhappy, whatever it is, it's going to catch up to you. And the thing about a peer group... is being around people who are going through the same set of circumstances as you just provides really, for me, it was a sense of comfort. I felt like, okay, these people get it. And business ownership and any business owners who watching this podcast know it's a very singular experience. You can talk to people adjacent to it, family members, friends, colleagues, but they don't quite know what it's like when you're the one that has to make payroll, when you're the one that's ultimately responsible for making sure that people who have put their economic dependency upon you, you're paying them, you know, jobs, and the responsibility that entails is now falling on your shoulders. And I think talking to other people, especially people who've maybe been more advanced in their development of their business than you are, is wonderful because they'll talk about the same types of obstacles you faced and they'll show you and they'll explain to you how they overcame it. And that's just a body of knowledge that you can't help but kind of bring into your own situation and say, okay, I can do this better. And I think resiliency, The hallmark of resiliency is being able to pivot and being able to be flexible and to try different things. And with that, being able to advance the things that it is that you want to do. It's kind of like people that go to the personal trainer. Like we want to get in shape, right? But if I go and I just sit and have coffee with them for half an hour, I'm not getting in better shape. But if I follow their instructions to a T, if I want to be coachable and learn that, well, in a few weeks I'm going to be much better shape. And so it's desire, but then also action. you've got to be willing to do the work and you've got to give it enough time to make it happen. I always say with a trainer, if you go and have them do your bicep curls for you, they're going to look great. That's very true. And that's why so many of them actually do look great when you meet with them. So yeah, exactly. Well, you know, I suspect that among your clients, the people that you're working with, there's probably a few business owners who would love for somebody else to do their bicep curls for them in some ways, but they have to lean into that opportunity to say, yes, we do need, if we want to grow this business, if we want to be able to exit this business, we need to go from being the inventor or the salesperson or the person who is able to create the product, whatever that might be, or the solution, to getting some help with how do we make sure that the business is where it needs to be? And I think a lot of the things that we've actually been talking about here probably are reflected in some of your clients' struggles to move from agreement that the business should be buttoned up financially to alignment to that and getting themselves to a space where they're willing and able to mature the business in that way and go from being a little bit of a gunslinger to being actually a button down business. What have you seen in that space in terms of your clients in this struggle? Well, you've nailed it. I mean, for sure we see that. virtually with every entrepreneur that we first start working with. They're very smart people. They're used to solving problems, any kind of problem, and they're to figuring things out on the fly. The challenge with finance is that it is a discipline. There is some expertise required to really kind of understand it and wrestle it. And I would say our more technically minded entrepreneurs, maybe the right code or something like that, will be able to engineer solutions to problems, but finance works a little bit differently because it's cash. It's also very personal to people. And there's trade-offs involved, certainly when you're early stage, about how much risk an owner's willing to take, either through personal funds or just internal cash flow, versus what the payoff's going to be. And they struggle evaluating those kinds of risks because they're so close to it. And they lack the knowledge and the financial expertise to engineer their way out of a solution. And so that's when they come to us, because they've tried some things. They've tried to learn on their own. And it's not really something that's easily learned. because it is a discipline that's somewhat intricate, but it takes a lot of time and these folks just don't have time. And so what we try to do is go in and help start at the right level and just get them comfortable and get them educated and do the low level stuff like accounting. That trips up more business owners than anything else because accounting is unceasing. There's always bills to pay. There's always invoices to cut. There's always things that have to happen. And there's always problems doing that. And some of the problems takes time. And when the owner is doing lot of that work, it's taking them away from other kinds of things. So it's kind of plugging into those data flows and building from within that. And as you start that process, you're building confidence in the entrepreneur that they can see a solution here that can work for them. But it is a process. It does take some time and has to be understanding a relationship between the work that you're doing and the payoff for them, both in seeing more cash in the company but that emotional feeling that they get of comfort and confidence, hey, somebody who's got my back, I can trust them, they're part of my team, I'm go focus on these other things now with confidence because they've educated me on what the potential economic impact could be of some of the decisions I'm about to make and I haven't had that before, that's what we try to do. You tapped into this idea of building confidence in the entrepreneur and especially in an area that might not be their area of expertise and it- quite frankly, might not be very fun for them. It rarely is. rarely is. Yeah. And I think that that also creates some anxiety for people when it's not a space where they feel energized and confident in having the conversation. So it can be easy to gloss over it a little bit, I'm going to say, right? Or feel like I'll get to that another day because I've got really important business to attend to. Yes. which is the space where I get energized and comfortable. And I suspect that that's part of what you see also as leaders try to get aligned with their business in terms of being buttoned up financially. I'm curious, another thing that you mentioned around especially entrepreneurs is there's that anxiety around cash flow. And so one of the things that we hear small businesses say quite a bit is any revenue is good revenue. And I think you would would probably not agree with that. think any profit is good profit. There's a saying that says, revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. And a lot of business owners, finance is something to get around to. And they solve for finance with sales. And there's stories, I can tell you, people getting to seven figure sales revenue, very sales figures very quickly. They're running out of cash. They're borrowing money. They're in debt. They're hiring people. They're working so hard to fulfill their orders, to fulfill demand that they come to me and they say, you know, Rob, sales are crazy. We're doing really well there. How come I never have any cash? And the first thing we realize is that structurally they are unprofitable. They're fundamentally operating an unprofitable business and their problem is getting worse and worse the more they sell. And so what we try to do is say, listen, how would you like to sell a little bit less, work a little less hard, but make more money? Well, especially with sales persons mindset, that's the opposite of what their training has been and what they thought got them to this point. And so we'll have to spend a little bit of time doing some planning and some analytics and having some conversations around what that would look like and say, look, if we put in some measures and we track them on a regular basis, and I can prove to you that a reduced sales growth rate translate into more profit, which you can then reinvest in the business and then grow sales more profitably, you would that be interesting to you? And the answer is universally yes, but it's skepticism because they haven't seen it yet. In a few months, maybe a couple of quarters, we kind of get them on that path and start to demonstrate how that can be reality. And then the light bulb goes off and their perspective changes. But you do have to work through it and you do have to convince them, here's how we're going to do it. Here's what's in it for you. But most importantly, here's the follow through. So we talked about persistence before and lifting the weights, you have to do the work. You have to follow through. And one of the things that we ask of all of our clients is respecting the cadence of finance. Monthly standing meetings, know, we're gonna have regular workflows set up, we're gonna require some things from you, not a lot of time, but on a regular basis. And when they start getting connected into that rhythm and that cadence, and they get plugged in the workflow, that's where the confidence and the new habits most importantly are developed. And that's where you can start to see some real progress aligning the cash with the growth of the business with the owner's objectives. I love that idea of building habits around this because if you can make that more predictable for a business leader, then I think that it becomes more accessible. It seems like they can build into the rhythm of their day, week, month. Just like sales meetings, or just like product development meetings, or project management meetings. I mean, they have these calendared and it's not a thought. In fact, if people are late to them because they're probably running those meetings, they're upset. The difference to the financial meetings, we're running it. they're actually delegating that to somebody else. But that's okay because we are hired as the experts. And so they're happy to kind of follow along and participate and take that direction. But what we do is we never tell them, don't do this, don't do that. We give options. And we say, hey, listen, looking at the data and projecting where things are going from here, here's a couple of things you should think about. And these are the trade-offs you should evaluate in doing this. A very popular thing is hiring, by example. And for professional service providers, they struggle with this. When do I hire the next person? How much do I pay them? What's the right kind of fit? And what we'll do is we'll look at how their labor force is actually engaged right now, the utilization rate. And we'll help them project, okay, if demand like this continues, we think in this period, you'll need these people, hire them at this rate, but don't do anything beforehand, because they're just gonna sit on the bench and cost you money. And don't wait too late, because you're gonna have a training issue. We try to optimize that for them. And then we try it. More often than not, it works. but in cases where it doesn't work, we will put in some risk management and say, okay, let's maybe change some things around here so that we're not killing your cash flow. And so the idea is just getting into that rhythm and being able to help the business owner think ahead, but also let them participate in that process in the most meaningful way, which is the decision, do I invest in this now or not? You know, one of the things that came to mind is you were working through that example is it's easy sometimes for business leaders to... stay a little skeptical and to say, okay, Rob, like, give me the data and then we'll make the hiring decision. And then that person didn't work out. And so that's because the data wasn't right. Then it could be that the person wasn't right. It could be a hundred reasons, right? We kind of fuel sometimes that skepticism. And I'll go all the way back. You mentioned the stories that they tell themselves, especially if they're really geared into sales and revenue and they have a belief structure around revenue. Again, that belief that All revenue is good revenue. What did you say the expression was about revenue and profit? So let again. Revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. Revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. I'm going to remember that. That's a great expression. And it reframes the stories that we tell ourselves as business leaders about revenue. It does. But the first time that somebody walks away from revenue, I'm going to bet that that's a pretty difficult moment. that you've had to walk people through a few times? It is, it's learning to say no. And sort of the corollary to the revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. And I didn't come up with it, I wish I did. But the corollary to that is that cash is freedom, right? Cash is freedom. And so when we focus on EBITDA, and we focus on cash flow and those kinds of things, it gives the owner options. The option being, do I invest more in my business? Do I take more of that business and reward myself economically for it? One of the biggest problems we try to solve for is making sure that the business owner feels that they are being adequately compensated for the work they do, because they all work very hard, and the risk that they're taking. They should get a risk premium for that. And so we try to work with them to be able to balance this need to capitalize the company's growth, the cash flow, with what they're taking out of the business. And so it is a journey, because saying no to revenue is hard for people. But they wouldn't come to us unless there was a problem. And even when the problems don't work out, and we do sort of an after action report, we sort of come into agreement, alignment that, look, with what we knew at the time we made that decision, we had better data, we had better financial expertise guiding us. I got some other operating folks involved in it so they could help me with the decision. We did the best we could. This was not a decision like we used to make before, it was kind of gut feel or off the cuff. We did it the right way and it didn't work out. And we know not every decision is gonna work out, but we did differently this time also. was we put in a risk management structure that said, look, if after three months, we're not in these marks, we're going in a different direction. And we did that. So we managed our risk, we managed our losses. And that's a very profound learning for a lot of entrepreneurs, because it's fairly sophisticated financial management that they would never really be able to develop in-house because they just lack that kind of expertise. And more importantly, the track record of having a team really understanding their business at this point to be able to say, hey, a quarter or two from now, we gotta pivot, we gotta make some changes, and here's why. I think you brought up this idea of flexibility and adaptability and that it's not a question of did you make the right decision or the wrong decision. It's a question of did you make a decision and then learn from that and adapt along the way. So often we see leaders get locked up and wanting to make the perfect decision when in fact that's just not a business possibility, right? You can't make perfect decisions. No, there is no such thing. And we see it on both sides. both when it takes too long to make a decision and we see it when they're deciding too rapidly and not quite considering all the factors that are involved. What we want to do is help them make informed decisions. small businesses move fast, so we don't take a lot of time doing that. And the nice thing about smaller businesses is that we can get our hands around it much more easily. We work with a lot of companies, typically up to about 20 million of annual revenue. And we're also typically the first professionally managed financial department they've ever had. So we're gonna go do some things with a clean slate, you from the ground up to be able to support them. And so where it helps is being able to have that knowledge and help them as we know them better about how they make decisions to plug into the way they operate. And that's just the right people. We're in people, in process and technology to all of our engagements, but we're service providers first and foremost. And so we do try to hire people that are personable and can... connect on an emotional level with business owners because it matters. I'm a business owner, you know, we're business owners so we know what it's like and we have to talk to that to be effective in what we do. cannot ignore it. And I think the knock on financial people sometimes is that they don't consider that they're too linear. They're looking too much at the numbers and in this marketplace that doesn't really fly. And so I'd encourage business owners considering, you know, going into upgrading their financial operations, making sure it's addressing. their emotional needs as much as their financial needs because they're very much intertwined. You know, I think that a lot of people don't appreciate that intersection between the business needs and the emotional needs, especially of business owners. As a business owner myself, and I know my business partner would say the same thing, it is an emotional commitment to growing the business and to your colleagues who are, as you said earlier, depending on you. And also that we are really passionate about the work that we do. We know the impact that it has and the value that it creates. And we want to do that with as many clients as we can, not just because we want lots of clients and revenue, but also because we believe in the impact that we're having. And we want to spread the joy, for lack of a better way to say it, right? And I think that can get in the way sometimes of really understanding or even wanting to understand the financials of the business. in a way that helps you to make those informed decisions. So having a finance partner who can help you in that intersection, stand in that intersection confidently between where is your emotion taking you and where are the numbers taking you is really important. It is. There's a word that's thrown around a lot called the trusted business advisor, which I feel is overplayed. I try not to use it myself, but it does capture very neatly what the role of trust is in this because I have very sort of insightful conversations with a lot of other business owners about their finances. And a lot of times we'll start, if it's an hour long meeting, maybe spend 15 minutes on the financials and 45 minutes on everything else. And we'll call it strategy or other kinds of things. But a lot of time, you know, business owners, again, they're smart people, they know their business well. They're looking for confirmation as to what they think the best path forward is. And up to a certain point, they've been kind of seated the pants. Now they've got some data and some rigor around it. So now they wanna kind of take that and get to that next level of deploying that kind of routine in growing their business. Because we work with companies that are scaling. So we have folks that will go from 2 million to 10 or 20 million very, very quickly. And they wanna know what that looks like and they don't wanna lose hold of it. And so talking to the emotional side of it is very important. For the simple reason of the emotion a business owner will face when they have a payroll and they're short cash or... Something else is happening economically and they're feeling that pain. I mean, it's a very real thing. That's a raw emotion that people, you we worry about our bills, all of us do. So you can't discount it. It has to be part of that equation when you're delivering services like these to the kinds of customers that we service. And I think that helps also when we talk about getting business leaders aligned to run their business in a more financially rigorous way. think... Attending to those elements is really important. think actually, Rob, you've tapped into something that holds a lot of people back from getting the line to all sorts of ambitions, which is you have to be honest about the emotional impact and the emotional management as well as all of the practicalities. It's not just about process and technology. It's also about where is the person in this journey and where are they going to get detoured and how are they going to find their way. as they go forward, how are they going to find that persistence to hold the course and continue to move forward as they run into obstacles? I think it's also easy to blame the obstacles on process and technology and not really recognize that it's often about people and the stories that we tell ourselves as business leaders, as business owners, whatever it might be, the stories that we tell ourselves about what worked in the past. and why something did or didn't work today. I think that can be a real blocker for staying in alignment and staying the course. For sure. mean, we've seen companies go through stages of growth. And if you look at a chart and may have seen this before, the path is never linear. There are these valleys and we call them the valley of death. And the valley of death is where a company is stuck sort of doing things the old way, investing in it the old way, wanting to do things the new way. but they're not generating sufficient capital to get to that next level of growth. For professional service providers, classically, it's the over hire situation. I have too many staff, thought I was gonna grow, not enough demand, I'm stuck, and I don't wanna fire my staff, so I just hire them, but I'm having trouble getting the sales that I want. And so it's working through a situation like that and being able to share with them how we've seen other people do it. But more importantly, say, look, I can't tell you that you're going to get out of this situation. without making some hard decisions. But I can give you a choice and the choice is this, if you choose not to reduce your staff and increase your cash flows so you can fund growth and take cash out of the business you wanna do, then just be prepared to keep living the way that you're living. And if you're borrowing more money or racking it more debt, like that's gonna continue. And at some point that will become unsustainable for you. You will run out of cash, but you could choose to do that. I'm telling you, you can't, I'm just telling you in the circumstances, what we know right now in the data we see, this is what we see happening. And so we have to deliver that kind of news sometimes. It's kind of like a doctor delivering brand news to a patient that's very sick, but can get healthy. And so we do try to color it with a sense of, listen, we have solved this problem before. It is a hard decision. We'll help you work through it. Talk to your staff, talk to other people to get right with it. But we don't want to tell you to make this decision in a vacuum. And our recommendations are one of several different recommendations that you can choose. Our job is to show you what the likelihood of an outcome is given the decisions that you're making and what are those trade-offs that you're considering. And now that we've gotten to know you a little bit better, connected to that emotional side, we're trying to bind our data and our analytics and our left brain stuff with that kind of more emotive connection on the right brain stuff to say, listen, we know that this is important to you, especially in businesses where there are family members, or this is very classic for a lot of entrepreneurs, the people that got them to where they are can't get them to where they're going because they're moving from a small community that was very close like a family to a more structured, you know, processed, somewhat bureaucratic thing because they went from, five people to 35 or 40. It just works differently. And we help them understand and respect that and then make a decision. Do you want to go forward or do you want to stay where you are? Rob, I see you and your team bringing some love and logic to business owners. Love and right? Very much so, very much so. Love and logic. This has been really great to hear about how you're helping these business owners move from agreeing that it would be a great idea to have their businesses buttoned up financially to getting aligned and doing the work that it takes to get them there. If there were two or three things that you would suggest to people that they really lean into if they're trying to close that gap, if they're trying to get to that space, what would be the two or three things? We've talked about a few things like persistence and getting some help and what would you put on that list? Number one, seek out a community of like-minded members. The membership, the mastermind communities I've joined were transformative to me. And the growth that we've experienced would not be here without them. And part of it's the emotional journey and part of it is just tools. Like, how did I solve this problem? And so we learned about tech and processes and service providers and all these other kinds of things. So number one, would say certainly the community. Number two is for the business owner to be honest with themselves. and say, what do really want out of this? Do you really wanna grow? Because growth requires risk. And so you may have to sacrifice income in order to get some growth. But the payoff is you may get more income and wealth and maybe even generational wealth, like life-changing wealth later down the journey. Are you willing to pay that price? Or would you really just rather be in a lifestyle business? Which is again, perfectly fine, but requires some different decisions and some other kinds of things. to make sure that that lifestyle business can be maintained. And at some point you will exit. Every business owner will exit. So the mastermind community, you know, being honest with yourself. And I think the final thing would be, it's okay to be vulnerable. And, know, I, you know, as a guy, it's kind of something we weren't brought up with. I've been around for a long time and I see this more so with my male colleagues and that we kind of, you know, even around each other, kind of tense up a little bit. But when you're vulnerable and you invite in, people can connect with you in a way that's meaningful. As business owners, it really matters because we're the ones empowered to make the decisions that have an immediate impact on the trajectory of our business. And that requires a lot of flexibility and persistence and kind of renewing and nourishing that persistence and that energy that we have to have to move forward. And to me, that only comes from other business owners because they know the journey, especially the ones that are bigger than I am. And even the ones that are in my space, and I talk to competitors all the time, know, Fractional Financial Services is a huge, fragmented market. So there's lots of people we can talk to and not really step on each other's toes. But it's fascinating, the things that I've learned from them, and hopefully the things they've learned from me, in helping them grow their businesses and channeling that passion into really positive and really productive means so that they can achieve their greatest ambitions. It's why we started a business in the first place. You know, it's so well said, this idea about finding that community and being willing to lean into the community and share as well as take out from the community. And how do you, how do you have that space as a business leader? It's also something that I think we can all challenge ourselves to do more of as business leaders, that if you can tap into some of those communities, you will find yourself rejuvenated, re-energized, and also that you will have grown your expertise in what it takes to successfully run on your business, a line of business, a team, whatever it might be. So I really appreciate that encouragement to people to find that community. I'm curious, Rob, this is the last question we always ask people. If there was something in your life, in your world that you could get people aligned to doing together, what would it be? This is an interesting question to ask at this interesting time, which you're now three weeks after the US presidential election and the divisiveness and the things going on in our country. I guess I would say, so many of us want more harmony, want more unity, and to find ways to seek first to understand and then to be understood. think that was a William Covey saying or something like that. Covey. We can't claim to want less division without doing the work to be less divisive ourselves. We can't just continue to convince, know, try to convince the other person, see things our way. If we know 20 people, we know 10 of them voted away that we didn't like. And it's impacting relationships, which kind of blows my mind. Because growing up, the things that impacted relationship were things that were very personal to us. Somebody wronged us in some way. Somebody abused us or something. That's worthy of severing a relationship. And I never heard of voting being so worthy enough of causing that. And so I would say, you know, in light of the emotion around the political scene, to just find ways to, you know... to connect and say, how is this really impacting me? What's the payoff for this? And how do I personally find a way to maybe take down the temperature a little bit? And through that, we all kind of take the temperature down a little bit and maybe start working towards healing and towards unity. I think it starts with us individually. We like to say at Kerikun's group, nothing changes until someone changes and that someone is probably you. That's it. I love it. put it very succinct. Da-da to B.B. Covey also. Seek first to understand and then to be understood. Both of those are really important. And I think, Rob, as you've shared through your bio, you've traveled to all 50 states and four continents. And I think travel is such a wonderful way to start that process of understanding, seeking to understand what other people's lives are like, what their worlds are like, and what we all share in common and how we find those communities where we can create that sense of connection and unity. So I appreciate that. I think your desire to see people align to how do we find ways to be more in harmony probably ties into a little bit of your travel while you're underlust in that space. nothing broadens you like travel. And I was fortunate early in my career to travel internationally. And when people ask me, even when I tell them I visit all 50 states, they say, what did you learn? I said, I've learned how similar we all are. We want the same things. You know, we want to good jobs. We want to live in safe communities. We want to be healthy. We want to spend time pursuing our passions, our hobbies, friends, family, whatever it may be. and that's kind of it. I mean, we to experience all that humanity has to offer. And a lot of times, you know, we let other things get in the way and we can't kind of see each other for who we are and the commonality of it. And this is not just in our country, but I've been to four other continents and it's the same over there too. I mean, you know, they send their kids to school every day. They get together for dinner every night. I mean, it doesn't matter, you know, where you are. There's just certain things that we all do that we have in common. And that was kind of fascinating to me. We may do it a little bit differently. But we all do it. And there's a commonality that I think kind of gets lost sometimes through a lot of the other noise. So definitely travel has informed me and a lot of my perceptions around these kinds of topics that we discussed today. it shines a light on the power of community in my experience. yeah. Rob, thank you so much. You have given our listeners some really great things to be thinking about as they cross the space from agreement to alignment. think being persistent, getting some outside help, finding communities, working towards that idea of what you would like to see happen, being willing to take risks, being willing to make decisions and adapt along the way as you go. We've covered a lot of ground. So thank you so much for sharing your expertise and for being a guest on the podcast. I really appreciate it. And to all of our listeners out there, just a reminder. to please like and subscribe, comment if you have any thoughts based on this conversation. We'd love to hear from you. And Rob, thank you so much for being our guest today. I appreciate it. it's my pleasure, Julie. I really enjoyed our session today. And thank you again for the invitation. It was a great session. Thank you. Yeah. Great podcast. You got it. Bye, everybody.