Latest / Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching] / 23. From Hot Dogs to Wall Street: Building a Finance Business That Actually Scales with Donny Mashiach

Transcript

23. From Hot Dogs to Wall Street: Building a Finance Business That Actually Scales with Donny Mashiach · Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching]

• 0:06
  Jack: What's happening everybody? Welcome to Scrappy But Successful. It's a show where I sit down with your favorite consultants and we find out if they're successful today because they're sophisticated or because they're a little bit scrappy. I'm your host, Jack Tompkins, CEO of Pineapple Consulting Firm, always helping small businesses become more data-driven. Fun fact of the day - cows have best friends. No business association, no joke. Just thought it was hilarious. Today I'm joined by my friend, Donny Mashiach.
• 0:35
  Jack: He's the founder and CEO of Warrior Group. They help founder-led scaling businesses install strong financial infrastructure. Basically getting companies past the scrappy survival period into the sophisticated scaling period of growth. So Donny, do you think you're more on the sophisticated side, or more on the scrappy side?
• 1:04
  Donny: Thank you, Jack, for having me. It's great to see what you've become and we've been friends for a long time. To your question, I think that I'm more on the scrappy side. I've done the sophisticated look - I've been to Wall Street, seen the investment banks. Obviously to our clients we come off as very sophisticated and we are. But the success I've been able to accumulate has been from being scrappy every single day - just grit and grind. I would take scrappy over sophisticated every time.
• 1:45
  Jack: Take me back to the beginning. Where'd you grow up? Do you have entrepreneurs in the family?
• 2:30
  Donny: When I was 19, I got married. Dad said I had to figure out how to make money. So I opened up a concessions company at Wrigley Field. We did the kosher food for the Chicago Cubs, the Green Bay Packers, the Indy 500. That was my first role in entrepreneurship and I loved it. I was balancing family, work, school, and general life. I'd go to a Packers game, take a three-hour drive from Chicago, come back, do a finals exam, come back and try to be with my family too. It was a lot. But I loved that there was so much white space and I was judged by what I could accomplish, not the role I was put in.
• 3:30
  Donny: I did that for a few years - now still a family business, my brother took it over. Then I got obsessed with finance. Even in my own business I was forecasting on spreadsheets. Someone told me about investment banking and I thought it was an incredible challenge - so many applicants try to get into Goldman Sachs and only a fraction of a percent make it. I put my head down for about a year, did a lot of interviewing and networking, and finally broke in. I was an investment banker for four years - first at a smaller bank working with entrepreneurs, then at a larger bank on Wall Street doing billion-dollar deals. Then I started Warrior Group three years ago, back at it helping founders and founder-led businesses through the biggest parts of their entrepreneurship journey.
• 4:48
  Jack: How do you actually get that contract at Wrigley - that's an enormous deal.
• 7:04
  Jack: You scaled from zero to 35 clients in under two years. How did you get your first clients for Warrior Group?
• 8:00
  Donny: The biggest piece of advice I got early was that people spend a lot of time on the perfect business model and business plan. In reality, you need a customer to hand you money for a service. My business was just me with a one-off product they wouldn't come back for - unscalable, no hundred-million-dollar model. But we've evolved so far from there. Now we're 15 CFOs and 15 analysts with a whole infrastructure and so many clients. I didn't even know that back then. A lot of entrepreneurs wait too long because they're worried about scalability. Being scrappy comes in - just do it. Don't worry about if it's sustainable, just do it, and you'll figure it out and systematize it later.
• 10:36
  Jack: The scrappy way to start honestly ends up being the sophisticated way to start because you actually get to do it and grow a business by doing it.
• 12:13
  Jack: The satisfaction of the first payment, even if it's ten dollars, is about the same as if they paid you ten thousand.
• 13:28
  Jack: Have you ever sold something you'd never actually done before?
• 14:50
  Donny: I'm a finance guy and now I'm definitely more in sales and marketing mode, just at the stage of business we're at. I've consumed more Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram content and put out more of it than I have in my whole life in the last six months. After that we'll hire someone into this position and I'll be more on operations and infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised if I had to be the head of AI for the business for a bit. You keep moving to the next spot and keep replacing yourself.
• 16:22
  Jack: Your ICP has changed. Tell us about who you're targeting these days.
• 19:23
  Jack: The forward-looking component is one of the big differences. So many fractional CFOs are just saying here's your net profit from last month, see you next month. Building the strategy is so core to the fractional CFO role and somehow still goes missed more often than not.
• 22:01
  Jack: Where do you start that conversation with a client?
• 25:00
  Donny: One of our first clients was an apparel business and we noticed their inventory turns were going downward - they were being less efficient, buying inventory and not getting rid of it fast enough. They didn't know that. We found a million dollars of obsolete inventory in the business that they didn't even know about - just from financial analytics. They sold it on Black Friday, made eighty percent of it. That's where the real value of the CFO lens comes in - taking data from the past, experience from large industry, and creating the roadmap while tweaking small strategic points from the data that comes in. That's where the magic happens.
• 27:04
  Jack: Let me hit you with some scrappy versus sophisticated questions. What was your version of ramen noodle dinners?
• 27:59
  Jack: Did you collect anything as a kid that you thought would make you rich?
• 28:52
  Jack: If you got a hot commodity as a kid, did you save up for it?
• 30:34
  Jack: Lightning round - are you saying I'm free Thursday afternoon, or sending a calendar link?
• 32:11
  Jack: Docking station or individual wires?
• 33:24
  Jack: If a thirty-minute meeting cancels, what are you doing with that time?
• Jack: We're going to end it on that. I can't say 100% scrappy, but I'd say scrappy beginnings leading to quite the sophisticated business today. What do you want the folks out there to know?