Podcasts about cfo

Hey everyone, it's your girl Lisa Bilyeu, and welcome back to another heart-shaking, soul-quaking episode of "Women of Impact." Today, I have the absolute pleasure of bringing back one of my all-time favorite guests, a woman who has not only impacted my life but countless others with her raw, unfiltered honesty and boundless wisdom—the incredible Lisa Nichols.In this episode, Lisa Nichols is bringing the heat and the heart as she takes us on a deeply personal journey through her emotional struggles and the path to rediscovering herself. Imagine battling through toxic relationships, facing the depths of clinical depression, and constantly wrestling with societal pressures that try to tell you who you should be—Lisa has been there, and she's lived to tell the tale in the most empowering way.She opens up about the courageous steps she took to reclaim her life, including relocating to escape a toxic situation and creating practices to rebuild her self-worth. We dive into the transformative power of self-reflection and forgiveness, and Lisa shares the incredible methods she used, from affirmations and mentorship to visual reminders that kept her grounded and focused on her true potential.But that's not all—Lisa and I explore the tough, gritty topics like the internal conflict of intuition versus desire, and the necessity of self-acceptance in a world that often tries to dim our light. She even introduces us to her innovative "boldness quiz," designed to help us all push past our fears and embrace our true, fearless selves.And for those of you who crave a little entertainment mixed with empowerment, Lisa gives us a sneak peek into her latest endeavor—a one-woman Broadway show that's set to inspire and transform lives.SHOWNOTES00:00 Aging affects metabolism; hormones necessitate dietary changes.16:06 Realizations about self-reliance in relationships.29:27 Fear of inadequacy and underrepresentation in media.35:04 Struggling with self-esteem and room dynamics.52:51 Exploring pivotal life choices and decision moments.57:49 Desire to help women in challenging times.01:08:55 Journey to body acceptance after shaming experience.CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORSShopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/lisaNetsuite: Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at https://netsuite.com/womenCaraway: Visit https://www.carawayhome.com/WOI or use code WOI at checkout and get 10% off you your next purchaseFOLLOW LISA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisabilyeu/Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisabilyeuYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/womenofimpactTik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lisa_bilyeu?lang=enLISTEN AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS: apple.co/womenofimpactSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the early months of Francisco Partners, Samantha Greenberg sat in a room on folding chairs with the firm's cofounders and one other colleague, planning the business.According to Greenberg, the private equity firm was pursuing an idea that many considered impossible in the late 1990s: executing leveraged buyouts of technology companies. Greenberg tells us she was drawn to the vision because it challenged the belief that technology businesses could not be predictable or capitalized with debt.During the firm's first year, Greenberg says, the team closed its first fund. She helped build operating processes, worked on the first transactions, and participated in fundraising—experiences that she says made her a better operator years later.That builder's instinct eventually pulled Greenberg away from investing. After 18 years as a technology investor, she had come to appreciate the discipline of “separating signal from noise,” surfacing insights, and allocating capital. But Greenberg tells us that running her own hedge fund revealed something more personal: She found operating more engaging than investing because it gave her “a seat at delivering the value creation.”She became a CFO in 2021 and deliberately chose an earlier-stage company instead of a more mature organization. According to Greenberg, the decision allowed her to develop the skills she lacked—leading finance transformation, implementing systems, driving operational maturity, and running an accounting department.The transition also challenged an investing instinct. Investors can wait for the “fat pitches,” Greenberg explains, but rapidly scaling companies cannot wait for every decision to be perfect. Her operating lesson is more immediate: “Velocity matters too.”

Story of the Week (DR):Cracker Barrel CEO is out after MAGA backlash to "Uncle Herschel" logo change MMBefore Julie Masino was brought in, Cracker Barrel was facing a slow-moving existential crisis:Their primary core customer base (older generations and rural highway travelers) was naturally shrinking, and younger diners were simply not replacing them.Kitchen tech, supply chains, and digital ordering lag behind competitors like Texas Roadhouse or Olive Garden.Some great fake populism from Fox: Cracker Barrel to pay for outgoing CEO's security, $4.6M severance after failed rebrandCracker Barrel names David Deno CEOBurger KingYum! Brands and Pizza Hut for 15 years, including serving as CFO and COO.Quiznos CEO.Best Buy: Served as President of Asia and CFO for Best Buy's International DivisionBloomin' Brands for 12 years: CEO, CFO and Chief Administrative OfficerOutback Steakhouse, Carrabba's Italian Grill, and Bonefish GrillBoard MembershipsCracker Barrel Old Country Store (2016-)Panera Brands (2024-): Audit Committee ChairKrispy Kreme (2016-)Bloomin' Brands (2019–2024)Peet's Coffee (2006-2012)Macalester College: Former Chair of the Board of Trustees (1998-2022).From Cracker Barrel to Boeing, Companies Are Turning to Retired CEOsThese retired CEOs are being hired to be "fixers." They are brought in to cut costs, repair supply chains, restore investor confidence, and act as a stabilizing force rather than reinventing the brand.Exxon and Chevron profits surge on rising oil prices due to Iran warChevron posted its highest profit in six years as the Iran war boosted oil pricesBig Oil Is Getting Sued for Heat Deaths. It's Fighting Back With an Army of Immunity LawsMore than a decade after investigations found that Exxon Mobil had known about the dangers of global warming since the 1970s but publicly downplayed the threat, lawsuits against oil companies have proliferated. There are nearly 40 of these cases pending across the countryIn the meantime, the industry has been mobilizing a counterattack against the lawsuits with the help of the Trump administration and Republican politicians.Republicans are trying to pass laws to grant oil majors immunity to these kinds of lawsuits, with success in several states so far.Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Louisiana have recently signed laws shielding fossil fuel companies from lawsuits related to greenhouse gas emissionsOil executives have also gotten help from the federal government, following an executive order from President Donald Trump last year directing the attorney general to prioritize blocking climate lawsuits by states.This May, the Justice Department responded to Minnesota's climate lawsuit against Big Oil with a lawsuit of its own, just as the state's case was moving into the discovery phase. It said Minnesota was undermining “American energy dominance” and attempting to regulate greenhouse gases, which should fall under the purview of federal law—echoing the oil industry's well-known argument.Elon Musk Is Quietly Turning to This Fossil Fuel to Power His AI AmbitionsSam Altman Announces That the Singularity Has Arrived: a hypothetical future point in time when technological growth becomes autonomous, uncontrollable, and irreversible, fundamentally transforming human civilization“We are now, like, in the singularity ... Now we're actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way ...I've been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”Sam Altman says one of his biggest fears is that a small number of companies will control AI: 'That'd be very, very bad'Sam Altman says the Hugging Face hack is a reminder that an AI power monopoly could lead to 'long-term disaster'OpenAI says its rogue AI tried to hack other companiesMark Zuckerberg is urging the U.S. to accelerate AI development, not restrict it'No Way to Stop It': Elon Musk Warns Humans Will Lose Control of AI and Face Extinction by 2036Microsoft CEO Warns That Companies Embracing AI Could Drive Themselves Out of BusinessAI hackers are getting faster. The government may not be readyAnthropic says its Claude models 'gained unauthorized access' to other organizations' systemsAnthropic says its models went rogue and hacked 3 companies during testing'It Will Happen Frequently': Musk Warns of Rogue AI Threat After Anthropic Breached Three FirmsElon Musk Commits Up to $120M to Republican Midterms: Sets Feud With Trump Aside for Major Election PushGoodliest of the Week (MM/DR):DR: Gen Z women are having an entrepreneurship boomOf all women who started businesses in 2025, 47% of Gen Z women did so, compared with 38% the previous year. Gen Xers followed close behind at 46%. Then came millennials at 43% and baby boomers at just 23%.Overall, in 2025, 69% of new Black-owned businesses were started by women. The survey also found that women business owners are less likely than their male counterparts to depend on AIMM: Delaware judge rules public benefit corporations exempt from maximizing value in sale DRFiduciary duty is different - OpenAI, AnthropicAssholiest of the Week (MM):Fake man apologies MM‘I'm sorry ... but': Apologetic Alan Joyce tells his side of the Qantas storyJoyce has expressed some regret“So with the information we had at the time, I still don't think there was any other decision you could make,”“Hindsight is a great thing.”“I'm actually very, very proud of the fact that I'm not sitting here and apologising for Qantas going bankrupt, [something] that many airlines around the world did,”Australian Competition and Consumer Commission fined Qantas $120 million for selling tickets for 8000 already cancelled flights“I apologise for the angst that was generated [for] the customers on it, but the reality was we had 22 million bookings in the system [and] the system wasn't designed to do an automatic refund,”“Stop us!”More than 1,200 AI workers across Anthropic, DeepMind, OpenAI, and Meta are asking for Washington's help building an AI slowdown plan‘No Way to Stop It': Elon Musk Warns Humans Will Lose Control of AI and Face Extinction by 2036Elon Musk's new 5-year warning to Americans: AI will beat human brains by 2032 (then go wild). Get rich or get crushed?Sam Altman says the Hugging Face hack is a reminder that an AI power monopoly could lead to 'long-term disaster'It Will Happen Frequently': Musk Warns of Rogue AI Threat After Anthropic Breached Three FirmsBut also, DON'T stop us, obviously…Palantir CEO warns US against Europe's AI regulation path, urges Trump admin to not ban open modelsElon Musk's xAI sues Minnesota over law to ban 'nudify' appsMark Zuckerberg is urging the U.S. to accelerate AI development, not restrict itElon Musk Commits Up to $120M to Republican Midterms: Sets Feud With Trump Aside for Major Election PushIgnoring boardsHims & Hers mission:“Hims & Hers is the leading health and wellness platform on a mission to help the world feel great through the power of better health. We believe how you feel in your body and mind transforms how you show up in life. That's why we're building a future where nothing stands in the way of harnessing this power. Hims & Hers normalizes health & wellness challenges—and innovates on their solutions—to make feeling happy and healthy easy to achieve. No two people are the same, so the Company provides access to personalized care designed for results.”Hims & Hers board:CEO: Andrew Dudum, tech VC bro investor “serial entrepreneur” with deep health experience from Bungalow (airBnB knockoff in the UK), Homebound (a “homebuilding platform”), TalkIQ (an AI startup, duh), and Terminal (something about scaling engineering?)TWO directors from DoorDash (Kofi Amoo-Gottfried from Marketing, previously of Facebook, and Christopher Payne the COO, previously of eBay, MSFT, and Amazon)TWO pharma execs (one lawyer, Deb Autor, one with an econ degree, Kare Schultz)One guy from Netflix (David Wells) and one lady from Urban Outfitters (marketing/brand, Andrea Perez) and one pure law firm lawyer (Anja Manuel)ONE DOCTOR EXCLUSIVE: US FTC sues Hims & Hers for sending user health info to Meta, SnapUsers' sensitive health information was shared with online advertising companies including Meta ​Platforms and Snap despite the company leading customers to believe their ​data was private, the FTC alleged in the lawsuit filed along with Los ⁠Angeles County and Utah.Hims & Hers also started charging users for prescriptions before ​they have ⁠had a chance to meet with healthcare providers, the FTC alleged. Most customers do not receive a consultation with a provider, and instead are charged for ⁠prescriptions ​soon after filling out an intake form, ​according to the agency.Headliniest of the WeekDR: CEO apologizes for offering interviews to people who got tattoos of his AI company logoSan Francisco tech CEO Jordan Zietz, co-founder of an early stage AI startup called LemonLime. Stanford grad.“LemonLime learns your business and then automates your team's busywork in a single click, no coding or manual setup required.”Former Qantas CEO reflects on tenure, issues apology to passengers over post COVID chaos AND ‘I'm sorry ... but': Apologetic Alan Joyce tells his side of the Qantas storyMM: Amazon received $600 million in tariff refunds and will pass some back to customersMM: Trump Staff Cuts Blamed After Watermarked OpenAI Map Mislabels Africa at AIDS ConferenceIt's the fact that we have less staff that meant we couldn't bother to figure out which country was whichWho Won the Week?DR: Kohls: For getting some much-needed female influence on board: Kohl's Appoints Wendy Arlin as Chair of the BoardCurrently only 2: Robbin Mitchell (7%) and Wendy Arlin (1%)John Schlifske (27%) stepping downMM: The phrase “not due to any disagreement with the Company”Anne Sweeney Resigns From Netflix BoardOn July 26, 2026, Anne Sweeney notified Netflix, Inc. (the “Company”) that she was resigning from the Board of Directors of the Company effective as of that date. Ms. Sweeney's resignation is not due to any disagreement with the Company1,660 8-Ks in the last 5 years have the exact phrase “not due to any disagreement with the Company”So we're saying that 1,660 c-suite and board members resigned in 5 years - more than 300 per year - and NONE were due to a disagreement with the companies? That's only THAT phrase - no other details are given for most of them except occasionally:To pursue another jobPersonal reasonsFor scale, in the last 5 years, the term “was due to a disagreement with the Company” appears… 5 timesPredictionsDR: Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson apologizes that it took former CEO Alan Joyce to apologize for something she already apologized for despite not being CEO when any of it happenedMM: Damion resigns from Free Float due to a disagreement with the zero dollars he gets paid, but Free Float puts out a statement saying it's “not due to any salary reason related to the company”

Noah Hopton, CEO and Founder of Finvisor, helps startups and growing businesses simplify operations by building integrated back-office teams that combine accounting, finance, payroll, HR, insurance, and technology. By combining experienced financial professionals with modern technology, Noah enables businesses to streamline operations, stay compliant, and focus on sustainable growth.  In this conversation, Noah introduces The Adjacent Extension Framework—Earn the Trust, Build the Relationship, Listen for Other Problems, Connect Other Specialists, and Empower the Team with Tech. He explains why proactive service creates lasting client relationships, how solving adjacent business challenges leads to sustainable growth, and why integrated back-office teams outperform disconnected vendors. Noah also shares how AI is reshaping finance operations by automating repetitive work, empowering finance professionals to focus on strategic decision-making, and helping businesses leverage technology to enhance—not replace—human expertise. — How to Outsource Your Back Office with Noah Hopton  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Noah Hopton, the CEO and Founder of Finvisor, helping seed and Series A companies that have outgrown spreadsheets and part-time bookkeepers but aren’t ready for a full-time finance team yet. Their job is to give you the financial clarity to make good decisions at every stage of growth. Noah, welcome to the show.  Yeah. Pleasure to be here, Steve.  Well, great to have you here, and I’m very curious about your career and your business and what you built here. I’m particularly curious about your personal ‘Why’ and how you manifest it in your business.  Personal ‘Why.’ That’s great. Well, I’ll be honest, I didn’t go in thinking I was going to be an accountant or run an accounting firm. You know, I studied accounting in school. Eventually, I thought I was going to probably be more in a kind of front-of-house sales relationship because I enjoyed the people part—making relationships and meeting people.  But I was very fortunate that I found the consulting, fractional CFO world, where I got to discover a love of problem-solving, creating relationships, and creating value for clients. For me, it was kind of this love of helping clients understand their business, helping clients understand what to think about around the corner, where it's not just being in-house with one set of books that you're closing.Share on X  When you’re at Finvisor, my day-to-day, at least when I started, was probably working with 10 to 12 clients a month and helping them understand, “Okay, how did they perform last month? Can they hire a certain number of people? And what’s the plan going forward?”  Yeah, I mean, that’s super helpful. I started life in accounting as well with KPMG, and what attracted me was to essentially have that language of business so that I would be able to understand how a business works and have this confidence of not flying blind, right? That’s really, really cool. So how did you evolve from a CFO into a founder? What was the trigger point for you?  So I was very fortunate. I actually was at a prior firm at one point when I started my career, and they were a little bit like the cobbler with bad shoes, where eventually they decided they had to close shop, and clients were going to be given notice. I, myself, was given notice saying, “Hey, in a week, you’re not going to have a job, Noah.” And so I was really given this moment in life, saying, “Hey, if I enjoy what I’ve been doing, do I think I could do it better than the firm I’d been at?  And do I want to make this leap into being a founder and starting a business?” And so my co-founder and I both talked to each other and said, “Look, we love our clients. We love what we’ve been trying to build. I think we just need to do a little bit of a refresh and restructuring of how this operates.” And so we started our own company. I was very lucky that I started with about, I had about 30 clients and a team of four on day one, which I think is unusual.  Most people in the accounting space start off as a one-person shop, trying to grow from one to two, and having to double their clients or double their size to get there. We were fortunate to have five team members and 30 clients on day one. Originally, our vision was just, “Hey, let’s help with the fractional CFO and the bookkeeping,” but that really evolved over time as we added additional services and really understood where our clients were having problems in their back office.  What are the areas where maybe the insurance brokers they’d been working with weren’t very hands-on and kind of came in once a year? Our clients were asking us, as their CFO, “Hey, can you help us select our health insurance?” And we’re like, “Well, we’re kind of doing the broker’s job. Why don’t we build out our own team?” So that was one of the first verticals we moved into and added by building an insurance brokerage. From there, we kept building, where now not only do you have your CFO and accountant helping you, but you also have them with the ability to go out to market, help you compare quotes, and help get your insurance in place. So you’re essentially expanding the array of virtual services that you’re providing, or fractional services that you’re providing, to your clients?  Correct. Yeah. We really try to own the full back office end to end because I think a lot of people deal with, “Okay, great, I have a bookkeeper, I have a tax accountant, I have an R&D tax provider,” and they’re dealing with four or five different vendors that don’t really communicate. The client is the person playing telephone between the two, and we’re like, “Wait, stop. Why is this the solution?” We should just build a different business where it’s all under the Finvisor umbrella.  It’s all full-time team members who are actually working together on behalf of the client, even if fractionally. Some of our clients only need five hours of a payroll specialist, but they need someone to own that role, and they need that person to be able to talk to their sales tax team because it’s like, “Oh, we hired someone in a new state. Is sales tax applicable there?” And connect those dots because, when you have these disconnected providers, you have a lot of things that can drop because they’re not in people’s field of view.  Yeah, I mean, it’s a great service. If you can get a competent team that will take care of your back office, then you can focus on figuring out message-market fit and then essentially scaling revenue. You don’t have to worry about it, and you don’t have to babysit inexperienced people that maybe you can afford to hire, but who would not be able to own the job.  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s kind of the, “Do you want to…” You know, I think at least when we started in 2014, there was more of a generalist bookkeeper. That’s kind of the typical solution people went with. Nothing against that, but it’s kind of nice to have dedicated specialists in the different back-office areas that you need. I mean, bookkeepers are great.  They’re usually not your best payroll and HR people. They’re not thinking about California final-paycheck laws, or whether you need to offer a 401(k) if you hire someone in California. Whereas, if you have someone whose entire job is payroll and HR, and you need Finvisor to help run your payroll, they’re going to be thinking about those edge cases and helping you along so that you can just build your business, get to the next milestone, and not worry about tripping yourself up because of compliance, taxes, or a lack of visibility in your reporting. Yeah, that’s great peace of mind. So this podcast is about frameworks, and I wonder, what is your framework? How do you help your clients, or how do you figure things out? What have you developed? We’re about 400 frameworks in, so I’m looking for something unique that helps you and is easy to explain—three to five steps maximum.  Yeah. I mean, one of the ones that comes to mind for us is what we’ve really called the Adjacent Extension Framework. So, first, do really good work and earn your client's trust in one area. Makes it easy for them to approach you.Share on X For us, it’s historically been accounting. People think, “Great, get my books put together.” But for us, it’s really about creating a relationship and earning the client’s trust.  Then, as step two, listen for the other problems they’re having. What are the adjacent problems they’re asking you to solve? And then for us, what we’ve really done is double down in those other areas by building specialists in those verticals. Once you’ve earned the client’s trust, if you’re doing their accounting and all of a sudden they’re struggling with invoicing or collections, you can say, “Hey, we can also help you with accounts receivable and collection efforts because we see your AR balance increasing on your financial statements.” At that point, they’re already thinking, “Great, I like working with this person.  Let’s give their team a try and help us solve another problem.” So, for us, it’s really been about finding those adjacent problems, building a team that specializes in them, and then connecting the client with the right expert. The last piece that’s really coming to market now is using technology to empower the team. Historically, a lot of our value came from having experts who could handle the edge cases or the gray areas between payroll, accounting, taxes, and sales tax. Now, with technology, you can also build the data infrastructure to highlight what’s happening for the client while helping guide the team as they manage those clients.  Love it. So what I’m hearing is, number one—or maybe even number zero—is do a great job, right?  The trust.  Okay. So that’s maybe another way of saying it: earn the trust. But is doing a good job enough to earn that trust, or is there more to it?  I mean, I think in any service business, you want to be proactive. A lot of bookkeepers, accountants, and even legal professionals are usually waiting for the client to ask a question before providing an answer. I think the goal should be to think ahead for the client and proactively provide guidance. That came naturally for us because we sit in the fractional CFO seat.Share on X  But even if you’re just doing bookkeeping, you can still catch these things for clients and help them out. Or if you’re selling P&C insurance and helping clients with their general liability coverage, you can think about what other types of coverage they may need. So I’d say the more proactive you can be, the better. The other thing is meeting clients where they already are.  For us, a lot of our clients are on Slack, so we connect with them on Slack. We chat with them as if we were full-time employees because we don’t want the experience to feel different. We don’t want you to feel like you’re emailing a generic support inbox and not knowing when someone is going to get back to you. If you only need fractional-level support, it shouldn’t feel like you’re getting fractional value or a fractional level of communication.  I love it. So you actually own the function inside the organization, so it feels like you’re part of the team, or your people are part of their team. So that builds the trust. So, do a great job, or earn the trust, number one. Number two, build the relationship. Number three, listen to other problems that they might have. Number four, connect them to other specialists. And number five, empower the team with technology.  Yeah. That’s a lot of it. I mean, as an advisor, we’ve grown… I mean, 60% of our growth comes from client referrals. So I think you know you’re doing something right if clients are recommending you to their friends and network. And so hopefully, if someone’s listening to this and you’re not getting referrals, you should be thinking about, “How do we either create more trust for our clients to be referring us, or how do we become more top of mind when clients are having these conversations?”  That’s great. So 60% of your growth comes from referrals. What’s the other 40%? How do you drive growth? What drives growth for you? What’s the other way to drive growth besides referrals?  Yeah. I mean, I think it’s also being connected with the ecosystem that you’re in. In our space, there are a lot of technology partners. Think about Xero, which is an accounting software, QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, payroll software like Rippling, Bill.com. They all have accounting partnerships, and the more you can build with them and grow your team alongside them, clients will reach out to them and say, “Hey, do you have someone who can help us set up Bill.com or help us set up Rippling?  We don’t have a payroll team to do our state tax registrations.” So we’ve seen a lot of good momentum as our software partners start sending us clients to help us grow. I think the other area is trying to figure out where you can have partnerships that will do introductions. We’ve been very fortunate in partnering with a number of VCs. Obviously, the VCs have worked with us because we’re on the board, or we had a mutual client. A lot of them will start to build partnership channels, and it’s a great opportunity.  They’ll say, “We just invested in this company, and you should go talk to Noah’s team to help with your accounting or your fractional CFO.” So it’s really about finding those tangential operators or entities that complement whatever you’re doing.  So are these primarily personal relationships that need to scale, or do you have a way to scale this across other people in your organization—this ability to develop partners? Or is it mainly you?  It depends on the role. A lot of our fractional CFOs on the team continue to build relationships. I would say probably 40% of our new clients come through a channel that’s not through me. There’ll be other people on our team who have built relationships with another VC or another software company. I think one of the key things we’ve always focused on is hiring people who are very, I would say “doers” might be the wrong word, but people who can self-manage and be project managers.  If you find the right people who can take a step back and look at the bigger picture, I mean, sometimes people come to Finvisor and they don’t realize that we ourselves are a business. Yes, you’re doing accounting like you were in-house and getting the books closed, but if you do good work and you realize clients are having problems, you have to think, “Hey, how can I help clients more and also help Finvisor create a win-win?” A lot of times, when we’re hiring, we’re trying to find people who have that type of drive to continue building and helping us internally, and not just do one part of the puzzle they’re responsible for. That might not be the most direct answer, but I would say a lot of it is hiring—making sure it's not just me leading the growth, but me building a team that can help lead the growth outside of just me.Share on X  Yeah. So how do you share the context so that your team members can connect the dots as well as you can? What’s your approach to that?  There’s a couple of ways we’ve done it. One way is we use a note-taker that then feeds into our CRM. For all client communication, whether they meet with us on Zoom or Google Meet, the transcripts are put into a centralized hub for us. It also connects to our CRM in terms of what we’re doing for the clients. At any point in time, someone can ask, “Hey, what’s going on with this client?” They can understand, “Great, this is what the payroll team talked to them about this week.  This is what the CFO team talked to them about last month. These are the problems they’ve been bringing up.” So we can capture that information without it having to be provided orally every single time, and without having to rely on a chat or an email to the team. There are some moments when it’s useful to give the team a larger update, but in general, it’s good to figure out a way to capture the essence of what you’re doing for your clients so that the team can then, in an AI chat-specific way, talk through, “Hey, great, what’s going on with this client? What are their needs? What has changed in the last six months? Who’s working on the client?”  I’ll have a VC that we’re talking to say, “Oh, we’re looking to invest in the CPG space and this type of vertical. Do you have any clients?” We’re at a point now where I don’t know every client. I usually have an idea about most clients, but there are definitely clients where I don’t know everything that’s happened in the last six months because I don’t talk to all 200 clients.  But I can go to our central hub to gain that information and understand, “Okay, great, which client is looking to fundraise and might want to be connected to this VC?” It’s a nice way to connect the dots. They’re looking to invest. The client is looking to raise. We also do brown-bag sessions. We’re a distributed team, so I think you have to be a little more intentional about how you educate the team. We’ll have weekly meetings where we walk through new technology, new changes in what we’re offering, new positioning, and continue educating the team in a more structured format.  The other thing we’ve done to help the team understand what’s going on is to make information as accessible as possible, similar to how we communicate with clients. So the team doesn’t have to log in to a pretty outdated CRM to pull information on a client. It’s either available directly in the Slack conversation or in a more modern tool like Notion, where you can easily search and find the information you want. So basically, you’re managing and harvesting your data and using that to feed people information about how they can develop partnerships. Is that what I’m hearing?  Yeah. And I think a lot of it is also figuring out which playbooks and processes are repeatable, documenting them better, and then educating the team around them. For example, with our fractional CFOs, we want to be in the board meeting. If we can be in the board meeting, A, we can help clients answer questions about their finances more easily, and B, it’s good to have visibility into what the board is saying about the business and where they want to go.  Then, obviously, the VCs are going to say, “Oh, great, this is Ian at Finvisor.” If he reaches out to me about a partnership, they’re going to have a better understanding of what we do because they’ve been in the room with us—or they’ve been in a virtual or in-person boardroom with us.  So you’re basically sharing the playbook so that they have a better understanding of what they can refer you for. Correct. Yeah.  So, switching gears here, Noah, what’s one thing that you’re trying to actively figure out in your business right now?  I mean, the question everyone is trying to figure out, at least in my space, is how they’re going to use AI in some fashion. That’s the kind of million-dollar question everyone keeps talking about—AI in accounting, AI in finance. Right now, we’re really structured in how we’re trying to use it and apply it. But the question I have is, what’s the next year going to look like? What’s five years going to look like as this technology gets more legs and more trust behind it? We’re pretty intentional about what we’re building and how we’re using some of the newer technology with AI. But I think there’s a lot that, at least for me, you have to continue to iterate. The world today feels different than it did three months ago. I’d say for most of Finvisor’s history—and this has been 12 years—it hasn’t felt like that, where a year later things might feel marginally different because we’re maybe 20% bigger or whatever might have happened.  Now, I think there’s a lot more excitement and unknown around technology and how it can either make people more efficient or help highlight and surface better issues that clients need to talk through. But I also feel like we’re in a moment where everyone’s trying to throw AI into every technology. So we're also trying to stay true to who we are, which is people first, relationships first—technology powering us, not being the solution.Share on X  So as you’re scaling AI to improve the information that your people have, your CFOs have, that presumably is going to lead to people doing less of the mechanical, repeatable tasks and more of the judgment tasks. So how do you scale judgment as you’re scaling the impact with AI?  On our side, I think it’s A, trying to organize and structure the data coming in. B, trying to create tooling that isn’t unique to one client but is built in a way that can be customized for each customer. A lot of the firms I talk to that are in the Finvisor space just take a blanket approach—turn Claude on for every fractional CFO, let them connect it to QuickBooks, and try to figure out their own playbooks.  That’s not how we’ve ever run the business. We don’t just hire accountants and let them run the accounting and see how the output turns out. We’re more focused on figuring out what is actually useful for review. Right now, I think AI has been most helpful around quality. It can definitely check that things are consistent and make sure edge cases are being caught.  I think we’re going to get to a future state where it’s not only making sure quality is at the 95th percentile of confidence, but also giving visibility into metrics like CAC, LTV, and churn—things that would normally take longer to pull together. Your fractional CFO might currently spend hours reviewing Stripe data or Shopify data to come to a conclusion. AI can cut out maybe 40% of that data-cleanup layer, where it’s like, “Okay, now they have the tools to dig in and understand what the underlying problem is,” instead of spending so much time cleaning up the data and getting everything organized.  So currently, at least my thesis is that it’s going to allow us to manage more clients because some of the day-to-day—I don’t want to call it busy work—but the work you have to do before you get to the exciting parts of the job will become more automated and less manual, like pulling data out of Stripe, Shopify, your CRM, or NetSuite.  So does that mean you’ll have a different type of people, maybe higher-level thinkers? Or do you think you can elevate your current team to that level?  Yeah. I think you’re… Sorry, I know I was originally answering this through the fractional CFO lens. Most of our fractional CFOs are already at the top of that organizational pyramid. For them, it’s really about helping them have cleaner data, better visibility into the actions they need to take, and better insight into what they should be reviewing and discussing with the client.  If I think more broadly about the back-office finance team, I do think a lot of the more generalist staff accountant and AP specialist roles won’t be spending as much time on the day-to-day blocking and tackling. If a client has 1,000 transactions a month flowing through their bank and credit cards, historically that accountant would sit in QuickBooks Online clicking “Okay, okay, okay,” reviewing every transaction and coding it. Eighty percent of those transactions will simply be coded automatically in real time as they come in. That leaves them to focus on the 20% that actually requires human judgment.  For me, the question is, can we continue to empower those people to be more impactful with that 20%? Are they the right people for that 20%? We’ve always tried to hire people who are proactive and broader thinkers, so I think we have the right team to step into that. If we’d built a traditional BPO model with an outsourced accounting team made up of people who were really just coding transactions at a basic level, I’d be more worried because getting those people to step up and handle edge cases is difficult.  But that’s not how we’ve historically built Finvisor. We’ve always tried to find people who are a little more… I’d rather hire an A-plus player than a B-player just because there’s some savings in the cost structure. I’d rather have the right people who can perform 80% of the time when they’re at bat than just hire someone because they’re cheaper.  Yeah.  Wrong baseball analogy there, but yeah.  Yeah, I understand. So you have A-plus people. Maybe the people who are doing more bookkeeping-type services—their jobs may become automated—but your A-players are going to have best-in-class information, and they can serve more clients that way.  Yeah. I still think that if you think about the typical accounting structure—if you’re working in-house and you have a bookkeeper and a controller—it’s still helpful. Depending on the size of the company, if you’re a small company, you probably won’t need that bookkeeper.  The controller can handle the edge cases and close the books. But at a certain scale, you’ll still want that junior resource supporting the controller so the controller can focus on the higher-level, more strategic work. I think people will simply be able to do more with less if they’re the right person. There will be people who, if they aren’t good at staying on their toes and figuring out edge cases, won’t be the right fit.  AI will probably replace some of those roles. But I think there’s a great opportunity for people who can think more strategically. They don’t have to be a CFO. They can just be a really smart bookkeeper who’s good at handling edge cases. They’ll simply be able to manage three times as many clients as they could when they had to code every single transaction.  Okay. If you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business over the next 12 months, what would it be?  One area that we probably haven’t prioritized enough because of growth is SEO, AEO, and our overall sales build-out. Our paid advertising hasn’t been the strongest part of our business because it hasn’t been the top priority. If I had a magic wand, I’d have someone clean up our SEO and AEO visibility because I know clients love us and we do great work, but I don’t think we’re showing up the way I’d like from an SEO and AEO perspective. So that would be it. Yeah.  Yeah. Yeah. Love it. So, who are your ideal customers? Who do you want knocking on your door? Is it venture-backed companies primarily, or do you also work with private company founders? Who are your sweet-spot customers?  A lot of our clients are going to be in that 5-to-50-employee range, where they don’t need a full-time back office, a full-time accountant, a full-time CFO, or a full-time payroll specialist, but they need someone to own those roles. That way, we can put together the right Finvisor team to support them. We’ve intentionally made ourselves pretty modular, so while the largest group of our clients is in the tech VC world, we also have a lot of SMBs—law firms, beauty businesses, and other professional services businesses.  I would say that, if you looked at the Finvisor client base as a whole, you’d probably see a lot of startups. But we’re also starting to see more SMBs and more traditional businesses that don’t have VC funding but still need help with their accounting, bookkeeping, and modernizing their back office. So it’s a bit of both. Most of our clients are going to be in that 10-to-50- or 100-employee range, where they’re complex enough that they care about their financials and want to understand what they spent last month, where they’re going, and how they’re going to get there.  Earlier-stage companies are sometimes just a little too early. If you’re a one- or two-person company with just an idea, there’s a reason people think about their financials on more of a cash basis. They can think about the five clients they’re working with. Their bank balance ties pretty closely to their financials. There’s not a huge difference between the two when you’re a sole proprietor.  But as you start to evolve, that’s where Finvisor can provide more value. For all of our clients, we do accrual accounting, so we’re recognizing your revenue and your costs over the life of the service. As you start to grow and build, that’s really helpful. Obviously, if you’re at day one, it’s less impactful because you’re living more day to day, week to week, and month to month.  Steve Preda: Okay. So if we have those kinds of companies—which we do among our listeners—and they hear about this and want to fix their back office and outsource it to a reliable partner who can help them own those functions and give them good advice, what’s the best entry point? Where should they go, and how can they connect with you personally as well?  Yeah. hello@finvisor.com comes to me and the sales team. There’s probably a 95% chance you’ll talk to me if you reach out because I still love connecting with most new businesses that come through the door. The other area I wanted to call out that could be helpful for businesses is PEOs. PEOs are great, but I think at some point clients need to graduate from the PEO, and Finvisor is uniquely positioned to be both your insurance broker—helping you quote large-group plans—and your payroll and HR team to help you leave the PEO.  For a lot of our clients, once they pass that 100-employee mark, it’s like, “Great, we now qualify for a large-group plan,” which might have better rates than what they’re getting through the PEO. They just don’t have the team or bandwidth to get off the PEO. We’ll come alongside those larger companies and say, “Great, let’s quote a large-group plan for you. We’ll also put together a transition plan to register you in the 20 states where your employees are currently located.  We’ll make sure you get your workers’ compensation and employment practices liability insurance in place so there’s really no difference—apples to apples—from being in the PEO to running your own payroll.” We help with that transition because I’m always surprised to see companies with hundreds of employees still on a PEO, where the savings could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars if they left. They just don’t have the internal team because they’ve always been on a PEO. They’ve never had to do state registrations, so they don’t know how to do them. Because of that, they’re usually not looking for an alternative path to get off that structure. We can at least review it with them and help them out if it’s a good fit. And just to remind our listeners what a PEO is, in case they don’t know.  Oh, sorry. Yeah. A PEO is a Professional Employer Organization. If you’ve heard of companies like TriNet or Justworks, they’re PEOs. In the health insurance space, there are four primary ways you can get health insurance. Most companies start with small-group plans in the early days because they’re state-mandated. For example, in California, if you’re under 100 employees, the rates my company gets would be the same rates Steve’s company gets if we’re both under 100 employees and we’re asking Blue Shield for a quote from the same ZIP code. That’s small-group insurance.  Then there’s level-funded, where carriers quote specifically based on your employee group. There’s large-group, which is somewhat similar but designed for larger organizations. Then there’s the PEO. Let’s say you’re a 10-person company. You don’t have enough employees to qualify for large-group health insurance, which is usually discounted because the risk is spread across hundreds of employees. The PEO says, “We’ll employ your team. Instead of you directly employing 10 people and buying health insurance for only those 10 people, we’ll employ your team and give you rates based on the 10,000 employees we already have.” PEOs are really popular in places like California and New York, where health insurance is very expensive.  But once you get above about 100 employees, you can usually qualify for your own large-group rates, which are similar to what the PEO is getting. The difference is that the PEO is generally marking up those rates because they need to make a margin on the plan. You can often get those rates directly yourself.  Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Okay. So if you’re listening to this and you’re building a venture-backed startup, or you’re the founder of a professional services firm, a law firm, or another small business with 10 to 100 employees, and you don’t yet have the budget—or maybe you simply don’t need—a full-time CFO, insurance advisor, HR leader, and other functional specialists, then reach out to Noah and Finvisor.  Check out what they have to offer and see what services might be a good fit for your business. Thanks, Noah, for coming on the show and sharing your expertise. It’s fascinating to see how this field is evolving, how you’re tapping into technology, and how you’re focusing on the highest-quality CFOs to help your clients. If you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned.  Follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure you don’t miss an episode. Every week, we bring you exciting entrepreneurs and their best management frameworks. Thanks for coming, Noah, and thanks for listening.  Thanks, Steve. Appreciate it. Important Links: Noah's LinkedIn Noah's  website Noah's email: hello@finvisor.com

In this episode, ⁠Adam Torres⁠ interviews ⁠Jeffery Raju⁠, Founder of Stonehill Business Services. Jeff discusses how emerging fund managers can strengthen operations, improve financial reporting, and meet institutional investor expectations by implementing scalable finance processes and fractional CFO leadership. Follow Adam on Instagram at ⁠https://www.instagram.com/askadamtorres/⁠ for up to date information on book releases and tour schedule. Apply to be a guest on our podcast: ⁠https://missionmatters.lpages.co/podcastguest/⁠ Visit our website: ⁠https://missionmatters.com/⁠ More FREE content from Mission Matters here: ⁠https://linktr.ee/missionmattersmedia⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Jeffery Raju, Founder of Stonehill Business Services. Jeff discusses how emerging fund managers can strengthen operations, improve financial reporting, and meet institutional investor expectations by implementing scalable finance processes and fractional CFO leadership. Follow Adam on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/askadamtorres/ for up to date information on book releases and tour schedule. Apply to be a guest on our podcast: https://missionmatters.lpages.co/podcastguest/ Visit our website: https://missionmatters.com/ More FREE content from Mission Matters here: https://linktr.ee/missionmattersmedia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Semiconductor firm Analog Devices discloses data breach Copilot for Word POC copies hidden prompts into new documents Microsoft Teams vishing attacks lead to Chaos ransomware attacks Get the show notes here: https://cisoseries.com/cybersecurity-news-analog-devices-breach-copilot-ai-worm-teams-ransomware-vishing/ Huge thanks to our sponsor, Pindrop A finance worker joined a video call with their CFO and wired $25 million to attackers.   This isn't fiction—it happened. Deepfake video. AI voice. Completely convincing.   It could be happening in your meetings right now. Pindrop Pulse for Meetings can detect deepfake impersonation before the damage is done. Go to pindrop.com and start verifying.  

This week's Department of Know is hosted by Rich Stroffolino, with guests Janet Heins, CISO, ChenMed, and Derek Fisher, Director of the Cyber Defense and Information Assurance Program, Temple University. Missed the live show? Check it out on YouTube. The Department of Know is live every Friday at 4:00 p.m. ET. Join us each week by registering for the open discussion at CISOSeries.com. Huge thanks to our sponsor, Pindrop A finance worker joined a video call with their CFO and wired $25 million to attackers. This isn't fiction—it happened. Deepfake video. AI voice. Completely convincing. It could be happening in your meetings right now. Pindrop Pulse for Meetings can detect deepfake impersonation before the damage is done. Go to pindrop.com and start verifying.

David Richter, author of Profit First for Real Estate Investing and founder of Simple CFO, walks through how to onboard a fractional CFO the right way so the relationship pays off from day one. He explains what makes a CFO relationship different from working with a bookkeeper or CPA and what both sides need to bring to the table.This solo episode covers the prep work that gets you clarity faster, why every relevant person on your finance team belongs in the process, and how being honest about your money mindset shapes the whole engagement. If you're about to bring on a CFO or thinking about it, this one shows you exactly what to prepare and what to expect.Timeline Summary[0:26] – David sets up the episode on how to make your CFO relationship the best right off the bat[0:44] – The difference between onboarding well and just showing up unprepared[1:08] – Why total honesty during onboarding matters more with a CFO than any other money person[1:26] – How a CFO relationship differs from a bookkeeper's transactions or a CPA's tax focus[1:47] – The reluctant spouse problem and why all relevant people need to be on the early calls[2:24] – Book recommendation on money mindset from Morgan Housel for anyone struggling with it[2:59] – Accounting for the Numberphobic for owners intimidated by balance sheets and P&Ls[3:16] – Doing the groundwork yourself so less foundation has to be laid during onboarding[3:38] – Bring your existing bookkeeper and CPA into the process to make the handoff seamless[4:16] – You're the orchestra conductor, so connect the right people to the right systems[4:32] – Why owners avoid looking at finances most when money is tightest[4:54] – Telling your CFO how you actually feel about money instead of hiding it[5:10] – What the CFO should be doing: prepping you, starting where you are, asking good questions[5:47] – Why the relationship has to be two sided, a yin and yang, not one person pouring in[6:05] – Facing hard things, building reserves, and putting systems in place for better decisions5 Key TakeawaysLead With Total Honesty — A CFO relationship works only if you share what you actually want and where you're struggling. Hiding your money mindset just slows down the results you came for.A CFO Is Not A Bookkeeper Or CPA — Bookkeepers handle transactions and CPAs handle taxes. A CFO focuses on how money affects you, how much you keep, and the mindsets holding you back.Get Everyone On The Call — If a spouse or partner shares the finances, they belong on the early calls too. A reluctant participant who checks out undermines the whole engagement.Do The Groundwork First — Reading up on Profit First, balance sheets, and money psychology before you start means less foundation to lay. You get to clarity and better decisions faster.Bring Your Whole Finance Team — You're the conductor, so introduce your existing bookkeeper and CPA to your new CFO. Connecting the right people and systems makes the handoff seamless.Links & ResourcesSimple CFO — https://simplecfo.comProfit First for Real Estate Investing by David Richter — https://profitfirstrei.comThe Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel — https://www.morganhousel.comThe Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel — https://www.morganhousel.comAccounting for the Numberphobic by Dawn Fotopulos — https://www.harpercollinsleadership.comEnjoyed This Episode?If this gave you a clear picture of what to prepare before your first CFO call, put it to work before you sit down with anyone. Share this episode with a business owner who's been avoiding their finances, and follow the show and leave a rating and review so more real estate investors can build the kind of money relationship that actually keeps them in control.

Send us Fan MailApparently, caring is cool again, which is unfortunate because some of us just got really good at pretending not to care. On this episode of Mike & Blaine, we're talking about why effort, enthusiasm, and actually giving a damn are making a massive comeback after years of “too cool to try” corporate apathy, detachment, and fake indifference.We take a deep dive into cringe culture, modern workplace apathy, terrible dating advice, and businesses that act like returning a customer's phone call would somehow ruin their mystique. But beyond the banter, there is a powerful business strategy hidden here: radical effort is your ultimate competitive advantage.In today's crowded market, standard "professionalism" without personality is just boredom wearing a collared shirt. Companies that hide behind slow responses, generic corporate speak, and passive customer service are rapidly losing market share to competitors who demonstrate genuine enthusiasm and care.In this episode, we break down key business tactics and strategic takeaways:Customer Experience (CX) as a Differentiator: Why over-delivering and relentless responsiveness beat playing "hard to get" every single time.Building Authentic Brand Loyalty: How injecting real personality into your marketing turns passive buyers into brand advocates.Culture & Employee Engagement: How to combat disengagement and quiet quitting by building a work environment where taking pride in performance is celebrated.Sales & Strategic Execution: Why caring about your client's outcomes creates trust faster than any polished sales pitch.Grab a cold beer and join us as we ask whether trying hard was ever really the embarrassing part—or if caring is actually the secret weapon your business strategy has been missing.Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LouDPrRM9YYLove the show? Head over to mikeandblaine.com to buy us a beer and support the podcast!We want to hear from you! beer@mikeandblaine.comListen to all our episodes at mikeandblaine.comLearn about:Cash Flow Mike who trains CPAs to provide effective advisory to their clients at cashflowmike.comDryrun Cash Flow Forecasting for the office of the CFO where they get finance teams out of spreadsheets at dryrun.comThanks to our Beer Sponsors:Karen Hairston from 3S Smart Consulting CPA Larry Weinstein, the Cash Flow Cowboy from Houston Texas Neighbor Pat Devin Trey MiltonWatch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LouDPrRM9YY#TryingIsCool #CringeCulture #CustomerExperience #Chalant #BusinessStrategy #Entrepreneurship #CustomerService #Leadership #SmallBusiness #BusinessGrowth #SalesStrategy #CorporateCulture #MikeAndBlaine #Podcasting #Apple #Nike #Starbucks #HubSpot #Salesforce #Shopify #HarvardBusinessReview #IncMagazine #ForbesSupport the showCatch more episodes, see our sponsors and get in touch at https://mikeandblaine.com/

You're making more than ever, yet somehow it still feels tight. You're not alone, and there are a few tweaks you can make to get a handle on this. In this episode, we're tracing exactly where money disappears as a business grows: the subscriptions you forgot about, the contractor costs that crept up, the expenses that started feeling "normal" but really aren't. Plus, how to spot your own money leaks without becoming a CFO or living in a spreadsheet. If you've ever looked at your revenue and thought "this should feel better than it does," this episode is for you.

Rafael Lizardi, CFO, Texas Instruments (Nasdaq: TXN) "Data Centers Put TI in the Chips" full 506 Thu, 30 Jul 2026 23:36:51 +0000 h4Z8wxkebM0GJKL6SgVhAuPZMRYdjtN1 business CEO Spotlight business Rafael Lizardi, CFO, Texas Instruments (Nasdaq: TXN) "Data Centers Put TI in the Chips" David Johnson CEO Spotlight 2024 © 2021 Audacy, Inc. Business https:

Meta-beleggers schrikken zich rot. De winst bij de eigenaar van Whatsapp, Insta en Facebook neemt af en toch gaat CEO Mark Zuckerberg méér geld uitgeven. Dit jaar tot wel 145 miljard dollar. De vrije kasstroom holt hard achteruit en staat op het laagste niveau in jaren. Beleggers willen antwoorden. Over de investeringen bijvoorbeeld, wanneer ze uitbetalen. Maar krijgen ze niet. Deze aflevering kijken we hoe lang Zuckerberg nog krijgt van z’n aandeelhouders. Hebben we het ook over Microsoft! Dat doet het wél goed. Geheime wapen: Azure! Verder gaat het natuurlijk over die bizar drukke beursdag. Maar liefst 19 Damrakbedrijven kwamen met de cijfers, waarvan 17 voorbeurs. We proberen er zoveel mogelijk te behandelen. Zo hoor je meer over de cijfers van Shell, BAM, Pharming, DSM Firmenich en AirFrance-KLM. Ook gaat het over de onenigheid binnen de Fed. Voorzitter Kevin Warsh geeft toe dat er een 'gezinsruzie' plaatsvond. Drie van de twaalf leden wilden niet dat de rente gelijk bleef: hij moest juist omhoog! En we hebben het over Arcadis, dat wéér een overnamebod afwijst. Te gast: Jean Paul van Oudheusden, analist bij eToro BNR Beurs is een journalistiek onafhankelijke productie, mede mogelijk gemaakt door Saxo. Over de makers: Jelle Maasbach is presentator van BNR Beurs en freelance financieel journalist. Zijn favoriete aandeel om over te praten is Disney, maar daar lijkt hij de enige in te zijn. Sinds de eerste uitzending van BNR Beurs is 'ie er bij. Maxim van Mil is presentator van BNR Beurs en journalist bij BNR, waar hij zich focust op de financiële markten en ontwikkelingen in de tech-wereld. Je krijgt hem het meest enthousiast als hij kan praten over ASML, of oer-Hollandse bedrijven zoals Ahold of ABN Amro. Jorik Simonides is presentator van BNR Beurs, economieredacteur en verslaggever bij BNR. Hij wordt er vooral blij van als het een keer níet over AI gaat. Je hoort hem ook in de BNR-podcast Moerdijk: dorp van de rekening. Milou Brand is presentator van BNR Beurs, freelance podcastmaker en columnist bij het Financieele Dagblad. Jochem Visser is presentator van BNR Beurs, maakt Beursnerd XL en is redacteur bij de podcast Onder Curatoren. Vraag hem naar obscure zaken op financiële markten en hij vertelt je waarom het eigenlijk nóg leuker is dan je al dacht. Over de podcast: Met BNR Beurs ga je altijd voorbereid de nieuwe beursdag in. We praten je in een kleine 25 minuten bij over alle laatste ontwikkelingen op de handelsvloer. We blijven niet alleen bij de AEX of Wall Street, maar vertellen je ook waar nog meer kansen liggen. En we houden het niet bij de cijfers, maar zoeken ook iedere dag voor je naar duiding van scherpe gasten en experts. Of je nu een ervaren belegger bent of net begint met je eerste stappen op de beurs, de podcast biedt waardevolle inzichten voor je beleggingsstrategie. Door de focus op zowel de korte termijn als de lange termijn, helpt BNR Beurs luisteraars om de ruis van de markt te scheiden van de essentie.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Natalia Zacharin is the Founder and CEO of Zacharin Consulting, an accounting and advisory firm that helps growing businesses strengthen financial clarity, profitability, and decision-making. Natalia leads the firm's strategic direction while advising service-based founders on fractional CFO strategy, forecasting, cash flow, pricing, and scalable financial systems. She draws on her experience building the company from a solo venture into a multimillion-dollar Inc. 5000 firm to help owners create healthier, more valuable businesses. In this episode… Growth can bring more revenue and opportunity while exposing weaknesses in cash flow, pricing, and operations. How can owners tell whether expansion is strengthening the business or stretching it too thin? According to entrepreneur and financial strategist Natalia Zacharin, the answer lies in looking beyond revenue to cash, profitability, forecasting, and the systems supporting expansion. Business owners should monitor where cash is going, avoid relying on high-interest debt to cover deeper problems, and use revenue trends and labor ratios to guide hiring decisions. Natalia also recommends forecasting several months ahead, reviewing variances regularly, and correcting weak pricing or inefficient processes before increasing sales. By treating financials as decision-making tools rather than historical reports, leaders can build companies that are more stable, scalable, and valuable. In this episode of The Same Day Podcast, Yoni Schmidt talks with Natalia Zacharin, Founder and CEO of Zacharin Consulting, about scaling without sacrificing profitability or cash flow. Natalia explains why profit differs from cash, how forecasting supports smarter hiring, and why rapid sales can magnify broken systems. She also touches on value-based pricing, exit readiness, and property-level financial reviews.

A.M. Edition for July 29. Oil prices rise after Iran launches a surprise missile attack on U.S. forces. Plus, Europe's luxury brands try to move past years of sluggish demand. And as Meta spends big on its AI transformation—technology CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the U.S. should help to accelerate—Journal reporter Meghan Bobrowsky says a host of lawsuits could cost it billions. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

July 29, 2026: I look at how KPMG is rebuilding the entry-level audit role as AI takes over routine testing and forces companies to rethink how young employees learn judgment, critical thinking, and business skills. Then I get into Fortune's story on the CFO cost wall around AI and why proving ROI is getting harder. Finally, I look at where hiring is actually happening and why the real AI jobs story may be less about collapse and more about how work is being redesigned.

Freight rates have entered a new phase, and the signals pointing to it have been hiding in plain sight for anyone willing to look past the headlines and into the data. In this episode of Supply Chain Now, Scott W. Luton is joined by Jake Barr, Chris Caplice, Chief Scientist at DAT Freight & Analytics, and Bobby Holland, Vice President/Director of Freight Business Analytics at U.S. Bank, to dig into the newly launched U.S. Bank Freight Payment Index Rates Edition, a joint report combining U.S. Bank's $46 billion in annual freight payment processing with DAT's database of more than a trillion in freight market transactions. Chris breaks down why this tightening cycle isn't the surprise so many transportation executives believe it to be, explaining how capacity, not demand, is the real driver this time around, fueled by driver shortages, tighter regulations, and unprecedented data center build-out. Bobby brings the numbers to life, showing how spot rate movement has historically preceded shifts in contract rates and why shippers should treat that signal as an early warning system rather than an afterthought. The conversation lands on what shippers can actually do about it: stress-testing budgets, segmenting freight into dedicated, contract, and dynamic buckets, and using data to answer the question every CFO eventually asks, is it me, or is it the market? Jake closes with a blunt prediction for the shipper side and a challenge to turn the last few years of smooth sailing into real, productive reinvestment. Jump into the conversation: (00:00) Intro (02:54) What is the U.S. Bank Freight Payment Index Rates Edition (05:18) What DAT Freight Analytics does (06:28) The U.S. Bank Freight Payment Index explained (08:47) Is the truckload market really turning (11:24) Why this cycle is capacity-driven, not demand-driven (17:57) Carriers gain pricing power in a tightening market (20:53) What's changed in the market since January (23:16) Why spot rates lead contract rate shifts (28:01) Elephants vs goldfish: how shippers and carriers remember the market (37:52) Prescribed actions: segmenting your freight network (55:23) Final predictions and one key takeaway for shippers Additional Links & Resources: Connect with Chris Caplice: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-caplice-1839/ Connect with Bobby Holland: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-holland-4a9355/ Connect with Jake Barr: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-barr-3883501/ Learn more about DAT Freight & Analytics: https://www.dat.com/ Learn more about U.S. Bank: https://www.usbank.com/index.html Learn more about BlueWorld Supply Chain Consulting: https://www.blueworldscc.com/ Learn more about our hosts: https://supplychainnow.com/about Learn more about Supply Chain Now: https://supplychainnow.com Watch and listen to more Supply Chain Now episodes here: https://supplychainnow.com/program/supply-chain-now Subscribe to Supply Chain Now on your favorite platform: https://supplychainnow.com/join Work with us! Download Supply Chain Now's NEW Media Kit: https://supplychainnow.com/media-kit/ WEBINAR- Peak Reality Check: What Shippers, Analysts, and AI Models Are Predicting for 2026: https://bit.ly/4aTlsRv WEBINAR- From Volume to Resilience: How Automotive Supply Chains Are Adapting to a New Market Reality: https://bit.ly/4f6SUGA WEBINAR- The Automotive Industry's Next Digital Breakthrough: https://bit.ly/4vhUwT4 WEBINAR- From Disruption to Stability: Building Resilient Logistics Solutions in a Rapidly Changing Global Market: https://bit.ly/3TguZMt This episode was hosted by Scott Luton and Jake Barr, and produced by Trisha Cordes, Joshua Miranda, and Amanda Luton. For additional information, please visit our dedicated show page at: https://supplychainnow.com/review-july-2026-us-bank-freight-payment-index-rates-edition-1615 The content in this episode, including all audio, videos, visuals, and graphics, is the property of Supply Chain Now and is protected by copyright law. Unauthorized use, reproduction, distribution, modification, or re-uploading of this content in any form is strictly prohibited without explicit written permission from Supply Chain Now.For licensing inquiries or permissions, please contact us at production@supplychainnow.com© 2026 Supply Chain Now. All rights reserved. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most home service businesses keep just 5 to 12% net profit, and most owners have no idea that is where they are. The best run HVAC, plumbing, and electrical shops keep 20%, and the gap almost always comes down to a few fixable mistakes. In this episode of Service Business Mastery, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with Matthew Mooney and Raymond Gong of Profitability Partners, a fractional CFO firm that spent years on the private equity side of the table and now helps owners find the profit already hiding in their business. They break down the real gross profit benchmarks for every trade, the labor and pricing mistakes that make your P&L lie to you, why fixing your booking rate beats spending more on ads, and how one plumbing company cut 3 million dollars a year in overhead in six months. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Upfrog, one of our show partners. Upfrog turns paid ad spend into booked, sold system replacements instead of wasted leads. Learn more at upfrog.com. CHAPTERS 0:00 – The 20% Net Margin Most Contractors Never Hit 3:49 – Meet Profitability Partners: Fractional CFOs From Private Equity 7:54 – What Private Equity Looks For in an Undervalued Business 11:00 – Gross Profit Benchmarks by Trade: HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical 15:56 – The Fully Loaded Labor Mistake That Hides Your Real Margin 18:16 – The What Is Everyone Charging Trap and the Discount Price Book 20:24 – Why Discounting Costs You More Than Spending on Ads 23:36 – Fix Your Booking Rate Before You Spend a Dollar on Marketing 27:47 – What Separates a 12% Company From a 20% Company 29:55 – Switching to Commission Pay Without Losing Your Techs 36:41 – Where AI Actually Helps a 5 to 30 Million Dollar Contractor 39:12 – The Overhead Trap: Unused Software and Oversized Leases 41:56 – Case Study: Cutting 3 Million Dollars a Year in Six Months 48:22 – The Exit Math That Turns 200K Saved Into 2 Million 52:15 – The 1% Booking Rate Worth 3 Million, and Why Your CRM Lies 55:33 – Where to Find Matthew and Raymond WHAT YOU'LL LEARN - The real gross profit benchmarks by trade, and why a 50% GP can secretly be sub 40 once labor is fully loaded - Why 20% net profit is realistic, and the mistakes keeping most shops at 5 to 12% - How discounting quietly wrecks your margin, and why 2 to 3% more on ads beats 10% off the price - Why booking rate is the first thing to fix before spending another dollar on marketing - How one plumbing company cut 3 million dollars a year in overhead in six months - The exit math that turns a 200,000 dollar expense cut into 2 million more at the sale THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY UPFROG System replacement leads from paid ads, nurtured and booked into sold jobs before your team arrives: upfrog.comBREEZY About 30 percent of inbound calls in home services go unanswered, and those are customers ready to book with whoever picks up first. Breezy puts AI agents on every call, books the job, and follows up instantly, so you wake up to booked jobs instead of missed calls. See how many jobs you are losing at https://getbreezyapp.com and use code SBM for 500 dollars toward Breezy. MARKET STORM Market Storm uses AI to catch early buyer intent and put your brand in front of homeowners before they ever search. Visit https://marketstorm.ai or text 213-575-5448. CALLRAIL CallRail assigns a unique tracking number to each marketing effort, so you know which channels bring your best leads. Try it free at https://callrail.com/sbmpod. PHONETAP Your calls hold the key to growing your business. PhoneTAP gives you instant AI analysis, real customer lifetime value, and tools to coach your team. Learn more: phonetap.ai/demo COMPANYCAM Capture work, track job progress, and stay connected from the field to the office with photo documentation and AI tools that keep work moving. Start a free trial at https://companycam.com/ CONNECT WITH OUR HOSTS AND GUEST Tersh Blissett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tershblissett/ Josh Crouch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-crouch/ Matthew Mooney (Profitability Partners): https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-mooney-54b09047/ Raymond Gong (Profitability Partners): https://www.linkedin.com/in/gongraymond/ ARTICLES WORTH READING HVAC profit margin benchmarks: https://profitabilitypartners.io/hvac-profit-margins/ Plumbing profit margin benchmarks: https://profitabilitypartners.io/plumbing-profit-margins/ ABOUT SERVICE BUSINESS MASTERY Service Business Mastery helps home service owners run better, more profitable companies. Every week, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch break down the operations, technology, and leadership behind growing an HVAC, plumbing, or electrical business, with the operators actually doing the work. More at https://servicebusinessmastery.com/ Want the frameworks from each episode in your inbox? Join the free Service Business Mastery newsletter: https://servicebusinessmastery.com/ Subscribe on YouTube and follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode. If this one helped, share it with an owner who needs it. #ServiceBusinessMastery #HomeServices #ContractorProfit #HVACBusiness #FractionalCFO

Working harder than ever, but the money still isn't following? Here's the uncomfortable truth: the worst thing you can do to make more money is work more. The money was never in the hours — it's in your packages. This episode breaks down the duo-pricing shift that lets you charge two to four times more, shed the clients who drain you, and finally build a firm you actually like again. Summer's the time to start.…Link to full shownotes: https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/397…Want the skinny on pricing?If you feel trapped by your own accounting firm, it's not because of the work – it's how you've priced the work. Too many accountants are stuck in undercharging, overdelivering, and people-pleasing cycles. Break the pattern with my short PDF guide: 7 Pricing Essentials »It's free, and you can read it in 5 minutes.I want to help you get your prices up without losing loyal clients.  …Want to hear what works, from 57+ clients?Check out the Client Success Stories podcast: LISTEN »

What happens when a company has money—but its CFO cannot reach it?Over one extraordinary weekend, finance leaders found themselves confronting a threat few had anticipated: cash locked inside a failing bank, payroll approaching, and no certainty about what Monday would bring.This episode brings together the experiences of Ben Gammell, Larry Roseman, Dan Murphy, Stacy Tumarkin, and Sarah Spoja. Their stories capture the crisis from different vantage points—from companies scrambling to protect their own liquidity to finance teams helping customers regain access to theirs.The discussion is less about the collapse of a particular bank than about how CFOs respond when ordinary financial controls suddenly prove insufficient. It explores the decisions made under pressure, the communication required to steady employees and leadership teams, and the treasury practices reconsidered afterward.The larger lesson is one CFOs understand well: resilience isn't built during a crisis. It is built long before the crisis begins.

Crain's residential real estate reporter Dennis Rodkin talks with host Amy Guth about local housing news, including what the latest round of data says about the market. Plus: Grant Thornton to acquire CBIZ for $5 billion, Chicago's acting CFO exits ahead of Johnson's next budget showdown, CME plans futures tied to sports to be used as new hedging tool and Northwestern lands $20 million for first publicly accessible AI-powered protein lab in U.S. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Episode DescriptionJeff Berry, CFO at BluWave, joins Sean Mooney, Lloyd Metz, and Doug McCormick to explain how AI is creating practical ROI inside the office of the CFO. He breaks down the foundations that matter most—clean data, mapped processes, clear policies, prompting discipline, and AI-enabled tools that can reduce manual work without sacrificing control. The conversation covers real use cases across AP, AR, FP&A, reporting, forecasting, process documentation, and executive decision-making. This is a tactical look at how private equity-backed companies can turn AI from experimentation into operating leverage—hit play.Episode Highlights1:13 - Moving past AI exhaustion toward practical ROI and real adoption4:38 - Jeff Berry's five-part framework for AI in finance and accounting7:42 - Why structured CRM and ERP data creates better business insight17:17 - Mapping finance processes before using AI to improve them20:32 - Cutting 40–50 monthly hours from AP workflows with AI-enabled tools26:05 - Using Claude Code to build FP&A models and debt schedules faster38:14 - Shifting finance from producing data to acting on better insightsFor more information on the podcast, visit bestbutneverfinal.buzzsprout.com and embark on your journey to private equity excellence today.Visit us on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/best-but-never-final-podcast/Visit us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/bestbutneverfinal/For information on Oridian Capital Partners, go to https://oridiancapital.com/For information on ICV Partners, go to https://www.icvpartners.comFor information on BluWave, go to https://www.bluwave.net

Episode # 157: We walk through how we build an FP&A training plan that develops individual talent while raising the effectiveness of the whole finance organization. That starts with a formal development strategy, not ad hoc learning squeezed in when time allows. We talk about the capabilities that separate high-performing FP&A teams from strong reporting teams: business acumen, critical thinking, stakeholder management, leadership, decision support, and financial storytelling that makes recommendations clear and usable.We also get practical about how to turn analysts into trusted strategic business partners. That means immersing FP&A in the functions they support, teaching curiosity and root-cause thinking, and creating real exposure to strategic planning, capital decisions, pricing, product discussions, and post-implementation reviews. Along the way, we address how to build a culture of continuous improvement through peer learning and safe experimentation with automation and AI in FP&A, plus how to measure training success by impact, not courses completed.Episode outline: Why FP&A needs a formal development plan,Our goal is to develop strategic business partners,Creating a culture of continuous improvement,Measuring training success.Please connect with me on:1. Instagram: stephen.mclain2. Twitter: smclainiii3. Facebook: stephenmclainconsultant4. LinkedIn: stephenjmclainiiiFor more resources, please visit Finance Leader Academy:  financeleaderacademy.com.Send us Fan MailSupport the showStephen is an experienced Finance Professional and Leader who offers fractional CFO services and development opportunities. Please visit his LinkedIn profile or Finance Leader Academy for more information. 

Welcome to The SaaS CFO Podcast! In this episode, Ben welcomes back Jim Williams, Managing Director at GLC Advisors, for his fourth appearance to provide an up-to-date look at the software M&A landscape. This conversation dives deep into how the rise of AI is reshaping the market, the evolving benchmarks for software company valuations, and what's currently defining high-quality SaaS businesses. Jim Williams shares insights on the barbell effect in multiples, tougher diligence on revenue quality, new questions investors are asking about AI strategy and margins, and how founders can position themselves for the best possible outcomes—whether they're aiming for a solid exit or shooting for that elusive 10x valuation. Whether you're a SaaS founder, CFO, or investor, this episode is packed with practical guidance and timely market intelligence you won't want to miss. Show Notes: 00:00 AI's impact on market trends 04:06 Impact of AI on business multiples 08:30 AI's impact on SaaS businesses 12:21 Evaluating AI's real impact 15:35 Discussing AI's impact on business fundamentals 17:10 Discussing software company valuations 22:46 Preparing Financials for Buyers 24:27 Focusing on business fundamentals 27:47 Customer segmentation and retention insights 31:19 Discussing growth rates and AI strategy 34:08 Strategizing AI model selection 38:56 Discussing AI adoption challenges 41:17 Discussing market trends and fluctuations 44:57 Contact and Reports Information Links: Jim Williams LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-williams-5754953/ To learn more about Ben check out the links below: Subscribe to Ben's daily metrics newsletter: https://saasmetricsschool.beehiiv.com/subscribe Subscribe to Ben's SaaS newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/df1db6bf8bca/the-saas-cfo-sign-up-landing-page SaaS Metrics courses here: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/ Join Ben's SaaS community here: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/offers/ivNjwYDx/checkout Follow Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benrmurray

On this week's Good Morning Hospitality, A Skift Podcast: Hotels Edition, Sarah Dandashy and Steve Turk dig into four stories about where premium experience is being redefined across the industry.The conversation opens with a one-year check-in on what actually happened after Marriott International bought the citizenM hotels brand. The answer: 50% of CitizenM occupancy now comes from Marriott Bonvoy members and all of it is incremental demand. From there Sarah and Steve get into IHG Hotels & Resorts becoming the third major hotel group to launch AI search after Hilton and Marriott, with a detail every franchisee needs to hear: IHG is now asking hotel owners to upload floor plans, videos, and updated imagery or risk being invisible in AI-driven search. They also dig into why Travel + Leisure Co. paid $343 million for two timeshare companies and why the CFO said they bought the deals for 100,000 owners, not the resorts. And they close with Southwest Airlines signaling that lounges are coming, the latest step in the carrier's full premium pivot.This episode is presented by StayFi & Bilt. StayFi helps short-term rental operators build direct guest relationships through branded wifi portals, email marketing, and guest data tools. Visit https://lnkd.in/giZWR52y to learn more.And for hotels with restaurants and restaurant owners, Bilt Hospitality is finally here. Go to joinbilt.com/gmh to learn more.

SK Hynix had de hoogste winst uit de eigen geschiedenis. Maar beleggers wilden méér. ASM had de hoogste omzet uit de eigen geschiedenis, maar ook dat was niet genoeg. Beide aandelen werden keihard afgestraft. Deze aflevering hebben we het over de chiprally. Ondanks meer dan prima resultaten (en vooruitzichten) is het gedaan met de run op dit soort aandelen. In Nederland zijn ASML, Besi en ASMI sinds de piek vorige maand met tientallen procenten gedaald. We kijken of ( en hoe) die rally nog gereanimeerd kan worden. Hebben we het ook over de prestaties van NXP, nu we het toch over chips hebben. Dat zag de omzet én winst flink stijgen, maar beleggers hebben ook in dit aandeel even geen zin meer. Verder in deze aflevering: De FIFA wil aandelen gaan verkopen SpaceX en Tesla zijn samen 1500 miljard aan beurswaarde kwijt Porsche verkoopt minder auto's, maar maakt méér winst Hermés verkoopt meer, maar wordt gedumpt op de beurs Te gast: Martine Hafkamp van Fintessa Vermogensbeheer BNR Beurs is een journalistiek onafhankelijke productie, mede mogelijk gemaakt door Saxo. Over de makers: Jelle Maasbach is presentator van BNR Beurs en freelance financieel journalist. Zijn favoriete aandeel om over te praten is Disney, maar daar lijkt hij de enige in te zijn. Sinds de eerste uitzending van BNR Beurs is 'ie er bij. Maxim van Mil is presentator van BNR Beurs en journalist bij BNR, waar hij zich focust op de financiële markten en ontwikkelingen in de tech-wereld. Je krijgt hem het meest enthousiast als hij kan praten over ASML, of oer-Hollandse bedrijven zoals Ahold of ABN Amro. Jorik Simonides is presentator van BNR Beurs, economieredacteur en verslaggever bij BNR. Hij wordt er vooral blij van als het een keer níet over AI gaat. Je hoort hem ook in de BNR-podcast Moerdijk: dorp van de rekening. Milou Brand is presentator van BNR Beurs, freelance podcastmaker en columnist bij het Financieele Dagblad. Jochem Visser is presentator van BNR Beurs, maakt Beursnerd XL en is redacteur bij de podcast Onder Curatoren. Vraag hem naar obscure zaken op financiële markten en hij vertelt je waarom het eigenlijk nóg leuker is dan je al dacht. Over de podcast: Met BNR Beurs ga je altijd voorbereid de nieuwe beursdag in. We praten je in een kleine 25 minuten bij over alle laatste ontwikkelingen op de handelsvloer. We blijven niet alleen bij de AEX of Wall Street, maar vertellen je ook waar nog meer kansen liggen. En we houden het niet bij de cijfers, maar zoeken ook iedere dag voor je naar duiding van scherpe gasten en experts. Of je nu een ervaren belegger bent of net begint met je eerste stappen op de beurs, de podcast biedt waardevolle inzichten voor je beleggingsstrategie. Door de focus op zowel de korte termijn als de lange termijn, helpt BNR Beurs luisteraars om de ruis van de markt te scheiden van de essentie.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Elevating your communication and leadership means embracing technology—without losing your humanity. But with the rise of AI in the workplace, how do you strike that balance without sacrificing authenticity and trust?In this episode, Lou Diamond welcomes back Hall of Fame speaker and influence expert Stacey Hanke for an energetic conversation on the evolving intersection of AI and real human connection in business. Together, they tackle the very real risks of shortcutting communication, the dangers to your personal brand, and how to leverage AI tools as a support—not a substitute—for authentic relationships.Key highlights include why "it's never different this time" with new tech, how to blend body language and AI for standout communication, and actionable steps for leaders to maintain trust and credibility in an AI-fueled world.Timestamped Overview[00:00] Welcome & Introduction[02:13] The impact of AI on communication and leadership[03:01] AI efficiency vs. human connection[04:11] Why "it's never different this time"[06:13] Risks of cutting corners with AI-generated messages[08:18] The damage to personal and company brands[11:07] Emotional and economic risks in sales and business relationships[12:27] Solutions: How leaders can blend AI and authentic communication[14:10] Using AI as an assistant, not an identity[16:08] Shaping better prompts & teaching influence through questions[17:33] Branded communication and the danger of laziness[18:30] No shortcuts for presence, messaging, and trust[19:41] Real-life examples (CFO and authentic communication)[20:05] Customizing AI to every voice and show[23:40] Getting the basics right: delivering trust and authenticity[24:00] "Bedside manner" for business communication[25:29] Future of work: Will we double down on humanity?[27:10] The only thing you can really control[28:19] Where to find Stacey & closing thoughts[29:02] Rapid-fire personal questions[31:41] Final thanks and sign-off

Medical aesthetics is one of the few areas of healthcare where practice owners have real control over pricing. Because most services are cash pay, med spas are not waiting on insurance reimbursements or negotiating with carriers. Yet many practices give away that advantage by running constant promotions and training patients to shop for the lowest Botox price.  In this solo episode, I explain how deep discounts create margin erosion, weaken patient loyalty, and push the industry toward commoditization. I also share how stronger consultations, treatment plans, and value-based pricing can improve retention, patient experience, and clinic profitability without turning every appointment into a sales pitch. Discounts Train Patients to Wait for the Next Offer  Discounts can fill the schedule for a weekend, but they also change how patients see the practice. When every holiday comes with a coupon, patients learn that the listed price is temporary and the service is interchangeable. That is how Botox pricing and injectables start to feel like retail products instead of medical treatments.  Patients who choose a practice based only on price are also difficult to retain. They may come in for the promotion and leave as soon as another clinic advertises a better deal. You pay to acquire them, give up margin on the treatment, and still have no lasting customer relationship to show for it. Run the Numbers Before You Run the Promotion  A discount should never be approved simply because the calendar is slow or a competitor launched one. Before lowering the price, look at what the offer does to gross profit, cash flow, future capacity, and patient behavior. Promotional revenue can look impressive while the economics underneath it tell a very different story.  Calculate treatment margin after product cost, provider compensation, payment fees, and promotional spending  Measure how many discounted patients return and rebook at full price  Compare customer acquisition cost with patient lifetime value  Account for prepaid packages as future treatment obligations rather than immediate profit  Review inventory levels before promoting injectables or retail products  Determine whether the offer supports a broader treatment plan or only creates a one-time visit  Give the team clear language to explain value, outcomes, and next steps without relying on aggressive sales techniques  If the numbers only work when patients purchase more later, be honest about how often that actually happens. Upselling cannot carry the strategy when your intake, follow-up, and rebooking systems are not built to support it.  (00:05:43) Building lasting patient relationships (00:09:01) Setting confident pricing for services (00:10:40) Understanding value versus effort (00:15:21) Shifting from retail to patient focus (00:16:31) Improving client intake and planning (00:19:37) Identifying growth barriers for practices  Lead the Consultation With Medical Authority  A patient consultation should feel like clinical guidance, not a review of services and prices. Patients come to you because they want a result and need help understanding which treatments will get them there. When providers lead with patient education, set realistic expectations, and recommend a clear treatment plan, price becomes one part of the decision rather than the entire conversation.  This also creates a better patient experience. People are more likely to follow through, rebook, and trust future recommendations when they understand why the plan was created. Value-based pricing works when the practice can clearly connect its expertise, care, and treatment strategy to the outcome the patient wants. Patient Loyalty Creates More Predictable Growth  Practices that depend on promotions often see the same pattern: a rush of cash, a crowded schedule, and then another dip. That volatility makes financial management harder because staffing, inventory management, and marketing decisions are being made around short-term spikes instead of reliable demand.  A medicine-first approach creates cleaner practice growth. Strong treatment plans, consistent rebooking, and better customer retention increase patient lifetime value and make cash flow easier to forecast. Over time, that stability gives you room to improve margins, invest in your team, and expand without constantly discounting the work that built your reputation. A med spa with medical authority and loyal patients has far more control over its pricing, profitability, and future.  Follow Shannon & Keep What You Earn:   Shannon Weinstein is the founder of a fractional CFO firm specializing in helping 7-figure aesthetics and wellness practices scale with clarity, cash flow, and confidence.  Shannon is committed to helping med spa owners understand, fix, and maximize their business's enterprise value, offering actionable advice and resources, including a popular free video series specifically for aesthetics practice owners.  Connect with Shannon: Fractional CFO Services and Executive Financial Review: https://www.keepwhatyouearn.com/ Connect with Shannon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonweinstein  Watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@KeepWhatYouEarn  Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://pod.link/1580071347  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonkweinstein/  The information shared is for educational purposes only and is not individualized financial advice. Aesthetics practice owners should consult a qualified professional before implementing financial strategies discussed here. 

This week on Catalyst, Tammy is joined by Kevin Thimjon, President of the Arrow McLaren IndyCar Team, who oversees the business side of one of the sport's most storied organizations, from finance and commercial strategy to administration. Kevin traces his path from public accounting through a series of private equity-backed CFO roles and into the CEO seat, describing each stop as a new tool added to his belt for better leadership. He and Tammy dig into what it takes to lead a team through a high-profile driver lineup change while staying focused on finishing the current season strong, the constant tension between running a profitable operation and chasing wins on the track, and the philosophy behind Arrow McLaren's partnership approach, where the goal isn't landing new sponsors but making every partner feel like the standard everyone else should be measured against. By the end of the conversation you'll be searching for McLaren's papaya orange merch!Please note that the views expressed may not necessarily be those of NTT DATALinks:Kevin Thimjon Learn more about Launch by NTT DATASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

https://youtu.be/KUPg9BuYSaM David B. Jones, CEO and Partner of Mercer Assessments, is helping organizations attract the right A-Players by making labor markets more efficient through defensible human capital insights. By combining psychometric science, workforce analytics, and AI-enabled technology, David helps employers identify, develop, and retain the right talent while empowering people to discover careers where they can thrive and make meaningful contributions.  In this conversation, David introduces The R.E.A.P.E.R. Framework—Review the Situation, Explore Alternatives, Agree a Course of Action, Execute the Plan, and Refine the Approach. He explains why organizations should begin every challenge with a thorough situation review, how collaborative decision-making creates alignment before execution, and why continuous refinement drives long-term organizational success. David also discusses how AI is reshaping talent management, why organizations need real-time workforce insights instead of static reports, and how Mercer Assessments leverages technology while preserving the integrity and defensibility of human capital assessments. — Attract the Right A-Players with David B. Jones  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. Today, my guest is David Jones, the CEO and partner of Mercer Assessments, focused on providing defensible human capital insights and foresight in the fields of talent acquisition, leadership development, and organizational productivity. David, welcome to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Great to be here.  Well, I’m excited to have you here, especially because you are the first guest—maybe not completely from the Middle East because we had a couple of guests from Israel—but definitely from Dubai, where you are. Maybe that is also impacting the answer that you’re going to give to my question. So here is my first question. What’s your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business, Mercer Assessments?  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think obviously a lot of skills around resilience and being able to think about how you maintain your own personal well-being, but also the well-being of the workforce, is something which has come to the fore in the last couple of weeks, for sure, living in Dubai. But I think very much of my North Star—by educational background, I’m a labor market economist. Although I’ve worked in HR and talent management for pretty much all of my career, I think I’m always thinking about how to make markets more efficient.  I think the labor market, in some ways, and what it takes to become efficient, is very similar to a fish market, a stock market, or any other market that you can think of. What you need to be able to make the best decisions is really good data, really good up-to-date information, both on the supply side and on the demand side.Share on X I think a lot of what we do at Mercer Assessments, and a lot of what we do in talent management more generally, is really about trying to do that. Trying to help individuals understand what their strengths are.  Trying to match them to specific careers that will be more fulfilling for them in the long term and also help them be more productive for their employers. As well as helping employers understand what the important skills are for today and tomorrow, and how they can predict how people will perform in certain environments. So really trying to bring the supply side and demand side together. I think, notoriously, labor markets have very bad information.  Typically, most people get their career guidance from their parents or their grandparents, which can be great for aspiration but doesn’t always necessarily keep them up-to-date in terms of what’s happening in today’s workplace. So I think this is really my anchor, if you like, where a lot of what we do in our innovation, our technology, or our engagements with clients typically comes back to this point. Fundamentally, how do we make labor markets more efficient and more functional for all of the stakeholders?  Yeah, that’s fascinating. So would you say that if you are doing this well, then more people will feel fulfilled in the roles that they work in?  I mean, I think that’s definitely the aspiration, right? That’s definitely what you would hope to do. I think, as individuals, I’m sure we can all think of those really, really great days where you think that you nailed it at work, and you think that this is something where you can make a really specific contribution. It just feels good, and all those people around you have the benefit of that. It becomes something which is infectious for those around you.  I think it’s important for the economy on a macro level, right? I think if we are able to provide opportunities, provide career paths, and help people understand what their unique strengths are, then this is something which helps to promote productivity and positivity more generally, right? At the individual, team, family, and societal level, it affects all sorts of dimensions.  So maybe this is kind of a side question, but I’m really wondering, is this AI revolution, as we’re going through it, influencing your work, and is it changing the requirements of employers?  Yeah. I think we’re in a very interesting time. I mean, I’m not a futurologist. I’m not a prophet. I’m not somebody who makes these sorts of big predictions about the future. But I think the case for AI, to some extent, is still unproven in terms of what it’s actually delivered to date. I mean, I think there’s obviously a lot of investment. There’s a big impact on the environment. But I don’t think we’ve had something really groundbreaking discovered by AI at this point that’s new.  It seems to be quite backward-looking in many ways, based on ingesting data from all the novels that you have on your shelf and that I have on my shelf. Maybe they’re going to ingest this podcast in the future. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem that there’s been a unique breakthrough that humanity has not been able to, or would not be able to, achieve by itself. And yet, I think the promise and the anticipation of what AI can do is quite compelling, right?  I think the way that it is impacting the labor market especially… Ironically, it’s impacting probably software developers the most today. It’s interesting that a lot of people in white-collar fields, professionals maybe, are also feeling like it’s changing the way they’re working. So there’s a big debate, I think, about whether it’s going to be an augmentation or whether it’s going to be a replacement of some sorts of tasks. I think one thing you can say with certainty is that the concept of a job is definitely going to change. If you look at the roots of the word—the etymological roots of the word “job” in the English language—it literally means “a task” rather than a role as such. Yeah. So I think we’re going to get this greater atomization of people’s roles. What used to be bundled together as one job is now going to be much more atomized into specific skills, specific tasks.  The opportunity there is that we all get to do more of the things that we find more fulfilling and less of the repetitive, dangerous, or dull types of things that we have to do in our jobs sometimes.Share on X But I think it has some second-order impacts in terms of how people develop their careers and the competence and confidence that people, particularly when they’re junior in their jobs, need time to build—the ability to operate at a higher level. So I think we’re all going to have to be leaders in lots of ways, even leaders in our own work.  Yeah, I agree with you. That’s fascinating. So, David, let’s talk about the framework. What would be a framework? Think of something that allows you to be more effective in your job—something maybe that you personally discovered or that you and your colleagues developed. Something that helps you be more effective in creating those labor market matches, finding the right candidates, and assessing them. Something that you can describe in three, four, or five steps, or maybe three or four ways of looking at things. Anything that comes to mind?  So there are a few things. I did miss a few things because I think—I don’t know if you’ve heard the news. We’re recording this, and I think the British prime minister has just resigned today. This is, I think, our seventh prime minister in 10 years. I’m sure each one of those prime ministers had their own framework in terms of what they wanted from their political leadership and how they were going to operate in government.  So I think we’re definitely operating in a much more VUCA world, right? This mnemonic is about being volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. I think, to some extent, that means that having a framework has to be something that is constantly being amended, reviewed, and updated in many ways. A lot of what we do in assessment—we have very clear statistical frameworks where we look at particular behaviors or particular characteristics, and we try to make sure we measure them. But I thought maybe that was too detailed and too comprehensive.  So one of the things we do when engaging with our clients is that we have a sort of consulting approach. It’s like a cycle. We start by reviewing the situation, so it’s like a situation appraisal, if you like. We use this internally as well in Mercer Assessments. So we try to understand what’s happening, what’s going well, and what we’re concerned about—just trying to get any data or information that we can.  Then it's important, particularly with a team or with a client, to explore what the priorities are, what's important, and what is causing them the most thought or requiring the most energy to address.Share on X So reviewing, exploring, and then agreeing on a course of action. Making sure that there’s consensus or, if you’re in an organization, making sure you’ve got the budget and the endorsement from headquarters or senior management. Then I think you can go into a planning stage. Making sure you’ve got a focus on execution and that you know what has to happen and when.  Then I think you can go into the ability to have that as a cycle and review or evaluate the plan itself. Is it on track? Is it on time? Is it on budget? Is it achieving its objectives? You can continue on this sort of reflexive cycle. So if you were to do that, it becomes quite sinister. The mnemonic becomes R.E.A.P.E.R., like the Grim Reaper or like “reap what you sow,” because you review, explore, agree, plan, execute, and then review again.Share on X So it can become, hopefully, a virtuous cycle, but it can also become an ongoing process.  I love it. So Yeah. So if you refine, maybe the last one is refined, and then you avoid repeat— Yes. Yeah.  Yeah. Oh, great.  That’s good. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, love it. So basically, what you’re looking for is helping your customers with an initial problem and then helping them generally improve their organization by continuing to refine and add to it, making it better over time.  Yes, correct. Yeah.  So it turns into a recurring engagement.  Yes, that’s the hope. Well, yeah. I mean, hopefully, if you have that relationship with the client and also with your team, you have this ability to recognize what you’ve achieved together, but you can also plan what you want to do differently next time.  So you’re the CEO of Mercer Assessments, which is the Dubai operation. Is this just a geographic branch of the Mercer Group, or is it a separate business that operates in multiple geographies?  Yeah. So actually, it’s a new venture for Mercer globally. My background is that I was one of the founders of a company called The Talent Enterprise, which was acquired by Mercer just over two years ago. It had also made an acquisition of another company before that called Mettl. So we were more of a talent assessment type of company.  We would do talent acquisition, talent development, leadership development, things like high-potential identification, succession planning, and these types of applications. Employee engagement as well, things like employee well-being assessments and stuff like this. The psychometric assessment field. So if you or your listeners are good at Greek, you would know that “psychometric” means “measurement of the mind.”  Yeah, right. So this is really what we’re trying to do. We’re accredited by the British Psychological Society to say that the tools we have, use, or develop have validity, reliability, and are statistically stable within the sorts of bounds that you would expect when measuring human beings.  It can never be perfect, but it’s considered to be predictive. Mettl was more focused on skills assessment. That was one of their big areas of focus, along with educational assessment. So coming together as Mercer Assessments, we’re now part of this big global organization. Although we’re based in the Middle East, we’re now working in Asia, Europe, North America—we’re just starting to do more work in North America—and Australasia. So this is the sort of big, hairy, audacious plan that we have.  That must be pretty intense if you’re working around the clock, essentially working around the globe. Then Mercer is… It can be.  Yeah, it can be. Even working in the Middle East, you have different working weeks. Some of our clients work on Sundays. But we have a good team. We have a big team. We have great technology. So we have scalable ways of doing it.  So what drives growth in this business?  I think it is changing. If you were to ask me that question even two years ago, I would say it’s to do with the change, the transformation, or the aspiration of the client, of the organization. If they’ve got a new operation, or they’re expanding, or they need to develop new skills, or they need to make sure their productivity and positivity are enabling them to keep up with their competitors, then these things would often trigger the sorts of interventions that we help our clients with.  That’s still true to a large extent, but what's changing a lot is what you were talking about earlier—to do with AI and expectations from technology. So I think what we're doing a lot more of now is real-time decision support.Share on X It used to be that our deliverables would look like a PDF report. They would say, “Okay, this is Steve. We’ve assessed Steve. These are Steve’s strengths. These are his areas for development. This is the sort of team or the certain type of colleague that he would thrive working with.  These are the people or the situations that he might struggle with.” That type of static report. Then either we or the client—sometimes if you’re looking at large numbers of people—you’d have to do a lot of spreadsheet work or a lot of PowerPoint work and say, “Okay, now we need to match that with your strategic objectives.” So I think what’s happening now is we’re focusing a lot more on the data.  Our technology is providing much more of a dashboard report, so Steve can access his results straight away because that’s actually when Steve is most interested in them and they’re most relevant—not two weeks later when you schedule a coach or someone to give him feedback. You’re interested as soon as you finish the last question. You want to know, “Okay, what does this say about me?” We can add lots of AI layers to that to help you implement it or understand it. Then for the organization, we now provide much more of a dynamic dashboard-type report.  So if, I don’t know, the CFO leaves this afternoon and the CEO calls the CHRO and says, “Okay, who are the internal candidates for this role?” You can come up with an answer. It doesn’t have to be something where you say, “Let me check my filing cabinet,” or, “Let me put a PowerPoint together for you and get back to you later this week or next week.” You can actually do that type of matching within the platform that we have. We have our own platform called Lighthouse, and it really helps you match individuals or teams to certain tasks or to certain ventures or aspirations that the organization might have.Share on X  Yeah. So instead of providing individual reports for individuals, you now operate this platform for your clients, and then they can look up the people involved in changes. So how is it different to scale the business with this type of approach? What makes it more complex?  Yeah. So on the one hand, it can help us a lot as our own organization because we can be much more pervasive 24 hours a day across the different time zones that we operate in. If you’re our client, you don’t always have to rely on having a meeting or a call with us in person. You can go and find that answer yourself. It’s quite an intuitive process and platform. You can access it and get value from your own data. I think that’s the key thing that I’m trying to emphasize that’s changed.  Clients are now impatient with SaaS platforms in particular when they’re not able to access their own data directly. So there’s a little bit of disintermediation going on in the enterprise software business as a whole. That’s the key trend that I’m trying to highlight here. But it also helps us to be more scalable. Just to take a step back to the previous discussion about AI, I think when it comes to using AI in your business, the key strategic choice is what you’re not going to use AI for.  For us, we made the choice actually three or four years ago that we’re not going to use AI in the assessments themselves. Not today. Maybe in five years’ time or ten years’ time we might change our mind, and we’re constantly reviewing that. But we need these defensible assessments. We need to be able to say, “This is fair and objective, and we’re coming with an external point of view that is transparent and defensible in every sense of that word.”  Yeah. You don’t want to hallucinate assessments for clients or even run the risk of that happening, right?  Yeah, absolutely. And there are some companies that have done that, right? I mean, there are lots of cases you can find where companies have said, “Hey, we just need a five-minute video, and I can tell you everything you need to know about this person, and you can make decisions about their career and all sorts of stuff,” right? I’m not saying we won’t get there in the future, but I just don’t think that’s good enough at the moment.  And I think with a lot of things that you do with chatbots now, if you’re judicious about it, you might be able to say, “Well, actually, that’s interesting, but it’s not good enough,” right? It’s not a finished product. It’s not something that I can execute on. What we can do is add a lot of value around the assessment. So we can do things like AI-based development planning, right?  When someone wants to see their results—and people normally want to see their results almost immediately after they’ve finished their assessments—you can start to say, in the flow of work, in the client’s environment, whatever their learning partners or learning architecture may be, “Okay, here’s a development plan for you,” customized and curated within that environment for your strengths, how to emphasize them, and also for any development areas or new learnings that you want to address.  We can also do things like AI-based proctoring, right? We can give the client a risk report on an application and say, you know, how genuine is this? What other software does Steve have open on his laptop? Is there a shadow in the room? Where are his eyes going? Is he looking at someone else? Is he getting help from someone else? Is this really Steve? All these sorts of things, right? We can do that. We can also develop customized case studies for the organization around its specific tasks and challenges that the organization has.  So you can come up with very specific, job-related assessments. AI can add a lot of value to all of these things. It can provide greater scale and a greater ability to sustain our growth. But with the core of what we do today, we’re saying, “Look, you need to be able to trust us.” And we want to be able to show you the answer. If you have a question about any of our assessments, we can check. There’s an audit trail, and we can show you the answer. It’s not just, “The computer came up with this idea. We don’t know.” But that’s intellectual property, and you know that it works, and you’re sticking with it. You don’t allow AI to bastardize it, basically, yeah, which makes sort of sense. So, David, what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? That’s a great question. I mean, there’s lots of things. I think a lot of them come around, you know, what is this threshold between what we do as humans and what we use AI or other technology to help us do? And I think that threshold is constantly being reviewed. A lot of it is to do with how do you make growth sustainable. We have had massive growth in the last five or six years, and that’s a great thing.  But I think it means you have to make sure the foundations of your organization are strong so that you can move from one to another. I mentioned earlier that we’re just starting to focus on North America as one of our new markets, and I was very keen that we didn’t do that until this point or even next year because we’re not the organizational equivalent of The Beatles, right? Like, we can’t just expect to turn up in a big, sophisticated, very strong, highly cultured market and be able to expect that we’re going to do things like we’ve done them everywhere else, or that we don’t need to think about how we communicate with those prospects and those clients.  So that’s a really big step for us. And how we manage data, I think, is probably the key thing. Fundamentally, if I was to come back to answer your question, I think it’s how we manage data because I think clients are becoming much more sophisticated, much more impatient with people who curate their data. They say, “Look, you know, we know we’re generating lots of data inside the organization,” right? Which is typically what we do, right? It’s people data.  Normally in most work environments, you can tell when somebody opens their laptop, or you can tell when they walk in the office door, or you can tell sometimes even what they’re doing inside the working space, right? Their ID has got an RFID in it or something like that. So there’s lots of data that’s constantly being generated inside the organization, and clients want to get value from that data. And having a sort of third-party proxy come in and say, “Hey, we can do your payroll for you,” or “We can send a questionnaire to people once a year, and that can let you know whether they understand health and safety or they’re engaged in their workplace,” it’s not really satisfactory anymore, right?  The clients are saying, “Okay. I want to be able to get value from my data, and I want to be able to see that. I want the analytics. I want to ask questions that are not able to be prescribed at the beginning.” “And I want to be able to do these queries in real time.”  So essentially, would that require you to get integrated with your clients to some degree so that you can process the data in real time as it emerges? It’s really interesting because I think what I’m hearing from my clients is they’re actually frustrated with that. In the sort of classic SaaS world, which we’ve had in organizations now for 20, 30, maybe even 40 years, you integrate the big internal ERP systems or CRM systems, and you integrate them, and then you have to sort of work within their framework, right? And you might see a report that’s already pre-programmed, but you don’t necessarily see the data, right? If you wanted to say, “Okay, what’s the trend today over the 24-hour clock?” or “How is it changing in June compared to May?” or “How does it relate to the temperature?” or whatever, right?  You can come up with all these questions that you might not be able to predict and then plan and have a sort of pull-down standard report. So to do that, you need access to the data. And I think clients are saying, “This is our data.” This data belongs to us. We want to be able to see that directly, and we want to be able to use that as a decision-support tool, and not necessarily just have a report.”  Yeah. So they’d rather own the data and apply your tools to their data without you necessarily having access to the data or something like that?  Yeah. It’s also a source of differentiation for them, right? Because they know that if… I’m not going to mention these companies. I’m sure you and all your viewers know the big brands. It’s interesting what’s happening with their share prices recently, right? They’re all maybe suffering a little bit from a decline in their share prices, on average. It’s basically a standardized way of doing things, right?  There’s pretty much the same way that any corporation in any part of the world is going to do it because that’s the way you get efficiency through that software. But if an organization says, “Actually, we’ve got an insight into something that we think is unique and differentiated, and we want to make decisions in a slightly different way, or make them faster,” that’s a point of competitive advantage.  Does that mean they wouldn’t want you to apply their idea to other customers because it’s their unique property? They’d just want your tools to help them process their data. They don’t want to share it with you.  Yeah. There are clients like that. We do deal with very sensitive industries, and sometimes government departments, where we have to be able to certify that type of approach. I think that’s likely to become more common in the future as people become more sensitive and more aware of the value, the opportunity, and the threat of what can happen with their data.  Yeah. I mean, some people say that information is now ubiquitous. It’s the questions that are really important because that’s how you communicate with AI. Maybe the question itself can be proprietary know-how—knowing how to ask the right kind of question. They don’t want…  No. I mean… Yeah, I agree. Completely. Yeah. You’re absolutely right. Again, to go back to assessments, we’ve recently released a whole bunch of assessments that measure skills in AI as a domain. We’ve got all sorts of technical and non-technical AI assessments. Obviously, one of the skills that we look at is prompt engineering. If you’ve used some of the generative AI platforms, you’ll always get an answer.  They’re pre-programmed to give you an answer, and most of them are also pretty polite. They fluff up your ego a little bit and say, “Hey, great question.” “That was really interesting.” Then they’ll give you an answer. You need to be aware of that. You need to probe and make sure you’ve not just got an answer—you’ve got the answer. Or at least the best answer that makes sense for you. Then you’ve quality-checked it.  You’ve taken it from one platform, put it into another platform, and then into a third platform. Whatever you’ve done, you need to have that awareness and those specific skills to get the most value out of it. It’s very dangerous, and I think we can all see it. I’m sure your inbox is like my inbox. You get emails from people and think, “Okay, well, that’s not an email from a person.” It’s a bulleted email. It’s not personal. It’s not directed at you. Sometimes it’s hard to understand what it even means.  Yeah. You’re right. So David, who is the ideal customer for you that can most benefit from your solution?  That’s a good question. Personally and professionally, I like clients who challenge us. I like clients who ask questions that make us think in a different way, so we can hopefully give them value and really answer those questions. I think that’s important for us to develop. Clients who are looking for new insights or different foresights that help them in their business—those are the kinds of clients we’re looking for. Definitely the ones who are pushing the envelope and helping take us forward in terms of quality.  So if those types of people are listening to this show and would like to learn more about what you do and how you might be able to help them, where should they go? Where can they find out more?  Yeah, absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m David B. Jones on LinkedIn. There are a lot of David Joneses. I think David Jones is the most common name for a British man—even more common than John Smith—so there are a lot of us around. But you’ll be able to find me as David B. Jones. You can also find Mercer Assessments. You can find out more about us through those channels. I’ll be happy to answer any questions or provide more information.  Is there a website people should check out? Do you have a separate website for Mercer Assessments?  We do. Mercer Assessments is part of the mercer.com website. That’s where you’ll find more information. There are also a number of books we’ve published on particular subjects to do with assessment, talent, and leadership development more generally. Those are all available on Amazon as well.  Okay. So if you’re out there and you’re looking to have a more sophisticated view of your people and their aspirations and how they fit the type of work that you want them to do, and you’d like to understand more deeply, then check out Mercer Assessments, David B. Jones. Actually, it’s easy to just put in “David Jones Mercer,” and David will pop up that way.  Check out the books that David and his colleagues have published. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts. And David, thanks for coming to the show and sharing your experience and insights. I mean, it seems to me that you have a much more nuanced approach than most talent assessment or performance assessment organizations, and you have a lot more tools at your disposal. It’s a combination of technology and professional expertise. So that’s fascinating. Thanks for coming on the show. And if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you follow us because we come out every week with exciting entrepreneurs like David. I will. I will. Thank you, Steve. Important Links: Davidi's LinkedIn David's  website

SHOW NOTES:In this episode, Matt Zaun sits down with Jody Grunden to unpack the financial habits, mindset shifts, and forecasting principles that help entrepreneurs build healthier, more scalable businesses. Jody shares his journey from reluctant entrepreneur to building and selling a highly successful virtual CFO firm, along with the lessons he learned the hard way about cash flow, pricing, risk, and growth.They discuss why so many business owners misunderstand cash, when debt is helpful versus harmful, how AI can support financial decision-making without replacing human oversight, and why every entrepreneur needs a real forecast instead of just a budget. Jody also opens up about the gritty early years of entrepreneurship, bootstrapping with credit cards, learning to price properly, and discovering the kind of business he actually wanted to build.

Nvidia opens the AI security tent Microsoft puts a cyber sprinter in MDASH Fairlife ransomware spills data Get the show notes here: https://cisoseries.com/cybersecurity-news-nvidia-opens-ai-security-tent-microsoft-adds-cyber-sprinter-to-mdash-fairlife-ransomware-spills-data/ Huge thanks to our sponsor, Pindrop A finance worker joined a video call with their CFO and wired $25 million to attackers.   This isn't fiction—it happened. Deepfake video. AI voice. Completely convincing.   It could be happening in your meetings right now. Pindrop Pulse for Meetings can detect deepfake impersonation before the damage is done. Go to pindrop.com and start verifying.  

How do India's wealthiest families actually manage their money, and why does the man who looks after roughly ₹50,000 crore of it own zero stocks himself?Rohit Sarin is the co-founder of Client Associates, which he started in 2002 as India's first multi-family office and has grown into the largest in the country, managing around ₹50,000 crore for more than 1,100 wealthy families. The firm acts as a personal CFO for a family's entire wealth, doing for a household what a finance chief does for a company.He built it the hard way. He left a senior banking career at Deutsche Bank and Kotak, walked away from a full salary into a negative net worth, and took no salary in the first year so every rupee could go into building revenue. The firm's first working machine was an old computer he won at a Deutsche Bank auction.His most contrarian view is about how ordinary Indians treat the markets. He believes trading is a zero-sum game, and the data backs him. A SEBI study found that 93 per cent of individual F&O traders lost money over three years, worth more than ₹1.8 lakh crore, with only about one per cent earning a meaningful profit. Rohit made money on seven of ten trades and still ended underwater because the three losses wiped out all seven gains, so he closed his demat account entirely. He reads the AI boom the same way, as a bubble much like the dot-com era where a rare Amazon survives, and points to Byju's as a reminder of what happens when growth runs ahead of discipline.What the rich do differently is stay patient. They spend on their needs and rarely on their wants, and their real goal is to stay rich across generations rather than to get rich quickly. His own line for it is that wealth is a gift given by the impatient to the patient. He is equally clear that this is India's century, that the country has just crossed the income level where consumption compounds, and that the next ten years may be its best for anyone who starts investing early. He lays it all out in his book, Unlocking Wealth: Secrets to Getting Rich at Any Age.If you are excited about how India's richest families think about money and where India's next decade is headed, this episode is for you.00:00 - Trailer01:50 - The personal CFO for India's richest families03:50 - Quitting a full salary for a negative net worth05:20 - The old computer he won at a Deutsche Bank auction06:50 - The first clients and the two crore bar he borrowed from Merrill09:20 - How many dollar-millionaires India really has11:50 - The income level where a country's wealth suddenly compounds14:20 - What is really driving India's wealth creation16:50 - How old-money families decide who controls the wealth19:50 - The tech gap that changed who leads a family office22:50 - Is the AI boom just the dotcom bubble again26:50 - Why he is telling family offices to sit out AI for now30:50 - The asset classes the ultra-rich actually hold33:50 - Why the rich are moving money beyond India37:50 - The one thing the ultra-rich do that the 99% do not41:50 - His relationship with wealth, and needs versus wants44:50 - Advice to first-generation founders who just got rich48:50 - Why this is India's century and its best decade52:50 - 93% lose money trading, and the demat account he closed55:50 - The book he wrote for every young Indian57:50 - Rapid fire: the best investment he has ever made-------------India's talent has built the world's tech—now it's time to lead it.This mission goes beyond startups. It's about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.What is Neon Fund?We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that's done it before.Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we're doing it all at Neon.-------------Check us out on:Website: https://neon.fund/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect with Siddhartha on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7-------------This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Steve speaks with Alex Bovee, co-founder and CEO of C1, a technology company focused on identity security online. Steve and Alex discuss why identity still often is an afterthought when businesses look at their risk profiles and how governance is changing as employees get access to more and more systems. Alex also shares his thoughts on how to translate identity management to board members and how to adapt technology so that it fits your team, not the other way around. Key Takeaways: 1 Identity must be treated as a strategic risk.  2 When it comes to protecting your business against deepfakes, tried and true verification methods like MFA and multi-step approval processes remain best practice.  3 Choosing robust but user-friendly technology is important for attracting and retaining new talent. Tune in to hear more about: 1 The deepfake challenge (6:14) 2 Automated identity governance (8:33) 3 Empowering a culture of trust through identity strategy (12:20)Standout Quotes: 1 “I would say that most forward-thinking CISOs 100% view identity as one of the most important pillars in their company that they need to protect and secure.” - Alex Bovee  2 “There's different, I would say, classes of deepfake-type attacks. There's more of your broad-based social engineering type attacks, and I think one of the impacts of AI on that is that AI is able to do that at scale and in a very targeted way. I think we're gonna see a lot of asymmetry happening in those types of attacks. And then the second category is much more of your targeted attack, where you're trying to deepfake the CEO calling the CFO, asking for an immediate wire transfer to pay for something.” - Alex Bovee 3 “The best kind of security controls are the ones that are just in place that work, that are silent, and you don't know they're there, but they let you do your job.” - Alex BoveeRead the transcript of this episode
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Connect with us on LinkedIn and TwitterFrom the Information Security Forum, the leading authority on cyber, information security, and risk management.

Claims are down across the country, but Shey Knight, CFO of Autosport Bodyworks in Opelika, Alabama and FenderBender columnist, has some strategies to share on how he approaches the collision repair business. He is not only a 40-year veteran of the industry; as an insurance producer, he has a different perspective than most. Check out his recent column on the subject here.

In this episode of the CFO 4.0 Podcast, host Hannah Munro is joined by returning guest Sara Daw, CEO of The CFO Centre Group, to explore how CFOs can build the right team around them from smart delegation to bringing in a fractional "CFO's CFO" for M&A, systems work, or steady-ship support.In this episode:Why delegation should focus on outcomes, not tasksHow to build a team that plays to individual strengthsWhat to do when a delegated task goes wrongThe emerging "CFO's CFO" model and when to use itGround rules for successful peer-level fractional partnershipsWhy the future of executive work is a team sport, not a solo actLinks mentioned in this episode:Sara's Linkedin Learn more about the CFO centreExplore other CFO 4.0 Podcast episodes here.Subscribe to our Podcast!

In this episode of The Truth In This Art, the guest is Dina AZ. Salem!About Dina AZ. Salem: Washington, DC–based abstract artist born in Alexandria, Egypt, working across painting and sculpture to create materially driven works that explore healing, transformation, memory, and resilience. Through layered surfaces, texture, and unconventional materials, her practice investigates how personal experiences can be translated into visual language. She signs her work with the initials of her late father, honoring the person who first encouraged her artistic journey.In our conversation, Salem talks through growing up as a hyperactive child in Alexandria, Egypt, and how her mother discovered that painting calmed her down—leading to a lifelong artistic practice that began at four or five years old. She shares how her father, Ahmed Zaki, a CFO who never used a calculator in his life, would sit next to her and watch her paint, eventually buying her early works for small amounts to encourage her. Salem recalls visiting her father's office at nine years old and finding all her blue paintings hanging on his walls, and how his passing when she was twelve stopped her artistic journey for years.She connects her path from applying to shoe design school in Italy to eventually attending Virginia Tech and landing in DC about four years ago, reflecting on how the journey "chose her." We get into her philosophy that materials carry memory—sourcing everything from sand to plaster to abandoned items found walking around DC and at Home Depot, her "happy place." As she puts it, she's interested in "how we become someone new without losing who we were." Salem discusses how living in two places has made her understand that "identity is never fixed, it's always evolving," and how she wouldn't create the same style of work if she had stayed in Egypt.Be sure to follow Dina AZ. Salem on Instagram at @dinaazsalem to keep up with her work and future projects.Photo courtesy of subject. The Truth In This Art is supported by William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, the Maryland State Arts Council's Creativity Grant and Mayor's Individual Artist Award - Creative Baltimore Fund (Baltimore). Host: Rob LeeMusic: Original music by Daniel Alexis Music with additional music from Chipzard and TeTresSeis.Production:Produced by Rob Lee & Daniel AlexisEdited by Daniel AlexisShow Notes courtesy of Rob Lee and TransistorPhotos:Rob Lee photos by Vicente Martin for The Truth In This Art and Contrarian Aquarian Media.Guest photos courtesy of the guest, unless otherwise noted.Support the podcastThe Truth In This Art Podcast Fractured Atlas (Fundraising): https://www.fracturedatlas.orgThe Truth In This Art Podcast Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thetruthinthisart.bsky.socialThe Truth In This Art Podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truthinthisart/?hl=enThe Truth In This Art Podcast Website: https://www.thetruthinthisart.com/The Truth In This Art Podcast Shop: Merch from Redbubble ★ Support this podcast ★

In this episode, Wes Cobb reflects on his career at JLJ, a leading critical infrastructure construction company, and his journey from field operations to project management, finance, and ultimately CEO in 2022. He discusses JLJ's specialized work renovating and upgrading mission-critical facilities, including data centers, hospitals, and telecommunications sites where uninterrupted power and cooling are essential. Cobb shares how the company's rapid growth exposed gaps in its leadership structure, prompting the creation of an executive leadership team, clearer organizational roles, regular leadership meetings, and a structured superintendent training program. He also offers candid insights into his own leadership evolution, emphasizing the importance of having difficult conversations, empowering others instead of micromanaging, and focusing on strategic direction. Looking ahead, Cobb outlines JLJ's commitment to strengthening its systems, expanding its capacity, and achieving sustainable growth while maintaining the quality and consistency that define the company. Episode Highlights & Time Stamps 2:09 Hypergrowth Reality Check 4:29 From Field to CFO 5:43 Critical Infrastructure Focus 9:19 The Wake-Up Call 13:43 No Leadership System 15:36 Growth Pressure Mounts 19:33 From Micromanager to Leader 21:36 Meetings Build Alignment 23:00 Training the Next Tier 27:30 Hard Conversations 29:49 Alignment Drives Results 31:22 Ready to Scale Again  In This Episode, We'll Discuss ✔️ Wes Cobb's journey from carpenter to CEO of JLJ. ✔️ How JLJ specializes in critical infrastructure renovations for data centers, hospitals, and telecommunications facilities. ✔️ Why rapid growth exposed weaknesses in the company's leadership structure. ✔️ Building an executive leadership team with clearly defined roles and accountability. ✔️ The importance of leadership operating systems during periods of hypergrowth. ✔️ Creating a superintendent training program to develop future leaders. ✔️ The shift from micromanaging to empowering leaders throughout the organization. ✔️ Why difficult conversations are essential for healthy leadership. ✔️ How alignment across the executive team improved consistency, culture, and execution. ✔️ JLJ's vision for continued growth while protecting quality and reputation. Key Takeaways ✔️ Leadership systems matter more than headcount. Sustainable growth requires clear roles, accountability, and structured leadership not simply hiring more people. ✔️ Growth exposes organizational weaknesses. Scaling from $70 million to $150 million forced JLJ to address issues that had previously gone unnoticed. ✔️ Alignment starts at the top. Regular executive leadership meetings created shared direction and improved decision-making across the company. ✔️ Leadership requires personal growth. Cobb learned to stop micromanaging, delegate effectively, and focus on setting strategic direction. ✔️ Training creates long-term capacity. Investing in superintendent development ensures the company can scale without sacrificing quality. ✔️ Difficult conversations build stronger teams. Honest, direct communication became a cornerstone of JLJ's leadership culture. ✔️ Reputation is the ultimate competitive advantage. Maintaining excellence while growing remains JLJ's highest priority. ✔️ Sometimes you have to get better before you get bigger. Building strong systems and capable leaders creates the foundation for sustainable expansion. ✔️ Wes Cobb, CEO of JLJ, shares how he led the company through a pivotal period of rapid growth by transforming both his leadership style and the organization's leadership structure. ✔️ After decades of working in field operations, project management, finance, and executive leadership, Cobb recognized that JLJ's success had outgrown its systems.  ✔️ He discusses the challenges of scaling a critical infrastructure construction company, building an executive leadership team, creating accountability through structured meetings, and investing in superintendent training.  ✔️ Cobb also reflects on his personal growth as a leader, learning to have difficult conversations, delegate instead of micromanage, and focus on strategic leadership while preparing the company for its next phase of sustainable growth.

Send us Fan MailLEARN THE CAPITAL RAISING STRATEGIES AND FRAMEWORKS used by alternative asset professionals: https://go.fundraisecapital.co/applyThis episode is brought to you by Reef Pass | Serial Acquisition Investors: Reef Pass Investors has spent the last 10 years focused on partnering with founders to launch and build long-term holding companies, and has a proven track record doing exactly that.To reach out to Reef Pass Investors, email holdcofounders@reefpassinvestors.comIs the US debt about to collapse? No, but debasement already is. In this episode of Making Billions, I address this question and more about the US debt, gold, and the dollar.What is the debasement trade, and how is it different from a default?This week, I, Ryan Miller, break down the interest spiral behind the 39 trillion dollar US debt, now costing over 1 trillion dollars a year in interest, more than the entire defense budget. For anyone building an investment mindset, working as a capital strategist, or stepping into private equity leadership, this is the framework for reading fiscal policy as a signal instead of noise.To measure portfolio risk and protect purchasing power, DOWNLOAD my U.S. Debt Debasement Exposure & Positioning Scorecard. [THE HOST]: Ryan Miller is a fund manager, capital strategist, and former CFO turned angel investor in technology and energy. He is the founder of Fund Raise Capital and Aequor Capital Partners, and has mentored over 1,000 fund managers across private equity, private credit, venture capital, real estate, and alternative assets globally.Subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOe79EXLDsROQ0z3YLnu1QQConnect with Ryan Miller:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rcmiller1/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanmilleroffical/X: https://x.com/_MakingBillionsWebsite: https://making-billions.com/Support the showDISCLAIMER: This podcast is for entertainment and general informational purposes only — not legal, financial, tax, or investment advice. Nothing herein constitutes a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any security or investment product. Past performance does not indicate future results. Always consult qualified legal, financial, and tax professionals before making any investment decision. NAME NOTICE: "Making Billions with Ryan Miller" reflects the profile and aspirations of guests featured — it is not a promise, projection, guarantee, or representation of any financial result, income, or outcome for any listener, viewer, or reader. Most individuals who consume this content do not raise any particular amount of capital, and many achieve no financial result whatsoever. "Fund Raise Capital" is a brand identifier only — it is not a promise, guarantee, or representation that any member, subscriber, or listener will raise capital, attract investors, or achieve any financial or professional outcome. This show does not constitute a business opportunity, franchise, investment program, or offer of any product or service of any kind. No part of this show should be construed as a solicitation for investment in any way. Guest views are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the show or host. Host and/or guests may hold positions in assets discussed. This episode may contain paid sponsorships, advertisements, or endorsements. Sponsored content is identified where...

This episode of CFO at Home is part 1 of Vince·s conversation with Heidi Heron, a Neuro-Linguistic Programming practitioner with 25+ years of experience, about how the ·language of the mind· creates patterns of emotions, beliefs, and behaviors·and how those patterns can be changed through root-cause work. Heidi connects NLP to money issues that commonly come up in her work, like worthiness, lack and limitation, and relationship dynamics around finances. She shares examples of a successful day trader who couldn·t keep money due to an unconscious childhood message, and a woman who shifted a belief that money is hard to get after tracing it back to an overheard conversation. Heidi also explains what she means by ·money as energy,· describing how gratitude for both paying and receiving money helped transform her own relationship with it. Learn more at heidiherron.com, including 1:1 work, NLP training, and her book, The Wizard of Cause. 01:39  Neuro-Linguistic Programming Explained  03:25 Mind Chatter and Feelings 05:14 Money Meets Mindset 05:51 Top Money Blocks 08:01 Root Causes and Memory 09:05 Money Pattern Stories 12:35 Beliefs Create Reality 14:15 Common Meanings and Limits 16:58 Money as Energy 17:28 Heidi Money Turnaround 21:30 Digital Money and Vapor Key Links: https://www.heidiheron.com/ https://www.instagram.com/dr.heidiheron/ https://www.facebook.com/DrHeidiHeron https://www.youtube.com/c/nlpwithdrheidi https://www.linkedin.com/in/drheidiheron/ Contact the Host - vince@thecfoathome.com Want to be a guest on CFO at Home? Send Vince a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1628643039567x840793309030672500  

An idea to reimagine marketplaces for equity and debt markets turned into a 16-year ongoing saga against the securities industry, government regulators, high-level infiltration, paid informants, and even the Canadian version of the CIA, Canadian Security Intelligence Service.Chris Horlacher is the CFO of The Dollar Vigilante & Anarchapulco. He is the co-founder of Equibit and is currently in a legal standoff with the Canadian government after catching them participating in a Man in the Middle attack against him. The fight continues on both sides with no settlement in sight.---Guest: Chris Horlacherhttps://equibitlawsuit.com/dns-man-in-the-middle-attack-exposed/---Macroaggressionswww.Macroaggressions.ioMerch StoreLink Tree Video ChannelsRumble | YouTube | BrighteonActivist PostNewsletter Sign UpAudiobooksHypocrazyThe Octopus of Global ControlSupport Our SponsorsReplace Your Mortgage: www.WipeOutYourMortgageNow.comGround Luxe Grounding MatsC60 Power | Promo Code: MACROChemical Free Body | Promo Code: MACROWise Wolf Gold & SilverLegalShield: www.DontGetPushedAround.comChristian Yordanov's Health ProgramThe Dollar VigilanteNesa's Hemp | Promo Code: MACROAugason Farms

Send us Fan MailMcBee Dynasty: Prison Farewell, Business Betrayals & A Shocking SuccessorSummary – McBee Dynasty Season 3, Episode 6: "First Impressions and Final Farewells"As Steve McBee Sr.'s prison sentence looms just days away, the McBee family scrambles to prepare for life without their patriarch. Tensions explode during a leadership meeting when Steven Jr., Jesse, and Cole question Galyna's role in the business, leaving her furious and hinting that the brothers want her out once their father is gone. Meanwhile, Steven Jr. prioritizes a trip to Texas to meet Allie's family, frustrating Jesse and Cole, who feel he's abandoning the family during the company's most critical moment. At the same time, Steven and Kacie clash over her growing tallow skincare business. Steven pushes for Allie to receive a 20% ownership stake because of her finance background and social media influence, while Kacie insists she wants to build the business first before giving away equity. The heated disagreement ends with Kacie in tears and Steven throwing a temper tantrum, creating even more family tension. The biggest shock comes during Steve Sr.'s company-wide succession meeting. Instead of naming one of his sons to oversee the businesses, he places ex-wife Kristi at the top of the organizational chart as Interim President, with Steve Jr. serving as CEO and Galyna remaining CFO. Everyone—including Kristi—is stunned by the decision, leaving the family questioning how the businesses will function after Steve Sr. reports to prison. In an emotional finale, the family shares one last meal, removes the McBee Farms headquarters sign, and accompanies Steve Sr. to the minimum-security prison in South Dakota. Carrying only his Bible, he walks into prison alone while his family watches through tears, determined to keep the McBee legacy alive despite an uncertain future. ✳️Follow us on Social Media✳️ ============================================

Anthony Faso and Cameron Christensen are the founders of Infinite Wealth Consultants and hosts of the Infinite Wealth Podcast. Anthony, a U.S. Army veteran, former CFO, and recovering CPA, and Cameron, a longtime entrepreneur, have spent nearly two decades helping investors and business owners build wealth outside of traditional Wall Street strategies. In this episode, they break down the Infinite Banking Concept, explain how entrepreneurs can use leverage more effectively, and share the lessons they learned from betting on themselves to build their own business. On this episode we talk about: How Anthony and Cameron transitioned from traditional finance to building their own firm Why passive income changed Anthony's perspective on wealth creation The risks and rewards of leaving a secure job to become an entrepreneur How the Infinite Banking Concept works using specially designed whole life insurance policies When leveraging your own capital can accelerate investing and passive income generation Top 3 Takeaways Passive income creates freedom because your money can continue working even when you're not trading time for dollars. Entrepreneurship often requires taking calculated risks, but betting on your own skills can provide greater long-term security than relying on an employer. Infinite banking isn't about buying life insurance for the death benefit—it's about strategically using policy cash value as leverage while allowing your capital to continue compounding. Notable Quotes "The first time I got passive income... my money was making its own money." "If you want to go fast, go by yourself. If you want to go far, take somebody with you." "The biggest form of security is your own ability to go generate something from nothing." Connect with Anthony Faso & Cameron Christensen: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/InfiniteWealthConsultants Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infinitewealthconsultants/ Other (Free Resource): https://infinitewealthconsultants.com/travismakesmoney Podcast: https://infinitewealthpodcast.com/ A Word from Our Sponsors: - Visit DrinkAG1.com/TMM to get a free AG1 Travel Case with 7 free AG1Travel Packs in your Welcome Kit with your first AG1 subscription order while supplies last.  - Go to Leesa.com for 25% OFF select mattresses (through July 26, 2026) PLUS get an extra $50 off with promo code TMM, exclusive for my listeners  - To learn more about Mode Mobile and its investor community, go to https://invest.modemobile.com/travismakesmoney Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A successful Shopify store can generate sales. A strong DTC brand gives customers a reason to choose you, remember you and buy again.Nadine Killoran joins Nick Trueman to explain how ecommerce businesses can move beyond building a good store and create a brand with long-term customer loyalty. Drawing on her experience with brands including Absolute Collagen, Aion Bank and MYJAR, Nadine shares practical advice on brand investment, customer retention, subscriptions, pricing and securing CFO buy-in.Learn what customers actually care about, why the second purchase is more important than the first and how to build a DTC brand that customers choose over cheaper alternatives.In this episode:00:00 - Store vs brand: the real difference01:57 - What customers actually care about03:11 - Nadine's journey to becoming a CMO05:57 - Getting CFO buy-in for brand investment09:16 - Measuring awareness and brand stickiness11:29 - Retention, churn and the second purchase18:25 - Turning customers into subscribers24:45 - Pricing a growing DTC brand29:15 - Difficult brand and pricing conversations33:02 - Final thoughtsExclusive listener offers:Seguno - Shopify email marketingGet a free customer analysis and strategy session with an email expert.Claim your free Seguno sessionYoast - Shopify SEOGet 15% off Yoast for Shopify and WordPress with code WWS15.Visit YoastInventory Planner - Shopify inventory managementJoin the free seven-day inventory planning bootcamp.Join the free inventory bootcampTaxCloud - Shopify sales tax managementGet free migration onboarding as a Winning With Shopify listener.Claim free TaxCloud onboarding

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Tim Mercer. Author of Bootstrap Millionaire and CFO of Cadence Ventures, Inc.:

Play audio-only episode | Play on YouTube | Play on Spotify Episode Summary Sara Gallagher, President of The Persimmon Group and author of the LinkedIn newsletter Big Dumb Questions, joins Cornelius Fichtner to answer the uncomfortable questions most PMO leaders avoid. The conversation follows four threads: PMO identity, design, accountability, and the future. It opens with the biggest question of all: are PMOs dying? Sara takes an optimistic view, with caveats. She explains that traditional PMOs are built on standardization, which raises weaker projects to a certain ceiling but also flattens excellent, tailored work down to the law of averages. She then paints a concrete picture of what comes next: project managers with robust knowledge bases and AI agents that draft synthesized status reports, simulate steering committee members such as a CFO, and hand results to a PMO agent that standardizes everything for portfolio roll-up. The result combines hyper-customized stakeholder communication with standardization only where it is truly needed, and it frees the PMO to coach project managers in sophisticated stakeholder management and risk practices.

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Katrina Fitten. Purpose of the Interview The interview aims to educate entrepreneurs—especially women business owners—on how to secure funding responsibly, avoid scams, and develop a strategic financial plan. It also highlights Katrina Fitten’s expertise as CEO/CFO of New Day for You Financial and her mission to help startups and small businesses access capital. Key Takeaways Funding Opportunities & Qualifications Katrina helps women business owners secure up to $100,000 in 100 days or less, with same-day approval and next-day funding. Basic qualifications include: Credit score of 680+ Existing credit lines (at least $10,000) A clear business mission and low-risk profile. Avoiding Scams Beware of unsolicited emails/texts promising easy money. Do your homework: Check companies on Better Business Bureau (BBB). Look for testimonials and partnerships with reputable banks (e.g., Chase, American Express). Never share sensitive information without verifying legitimacy. Importance of a Business Plan Funding is not free money—you need a strategic plan. Katrina calls it a “money mission”: know exactly how funds will be deployed. Without a plan, money disappears quickly, leading to debt and bad credit. Family & Friends Lending Treat personal loans like business loans: Have written agreements with terms, repayment schedule, and penalties. Decide upfront if it’s a gift or a loan. Services Offered by New Day for You Financial SBA loans, equipment loans, purchase order financing. Lines of credit and 0% interest credit cards (18–21 months). Credit card stacking for higher funding amounts. Credit restoration referrals for those with poor credit. Success Story Example: A tax accountant secured $160,000 in less than a week due to strong credit, revenue history, and a solid business plan. Notable Quotes “If you don’t have a plan for your money, your money will have a plan—and you’ll look up and it’s gone.” “We don’t want to be out here racking up good debt and then you’re not going to be responsible.” “You have to vet companies. Go to BBB, Google them, and check their credibility.” “If I give you money, I decide—is it a gift or a loan? There are rules to borrowing money.” “We say if you don’t get anything, we don’t get paid.” #SHMS #STRAW #BESTSupport the show: https://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Katrina Fitten. Purpose of the Interview The interview aims to educate entrepreneurs—especially women business owners—on how to secure funding responsibly, avoid scams, and develop a strategic financial plan. It also highlights Katrina Fitten’s expertise as CEO/CFO of New Day for You Financial and her mission to help startups and small businesses access capital. Key Takeaways Funding Opportunities & Qualifications Katrina helps women business owners secure up to $100,000 in 100 days or less, with same-day approval and next-day funding. Basic qualifications include: Credit score of 680+ Existing credit lines (at least $10,000) A clear business mission and low-risk profile. Avoiding Scams Beware of unsolicited emails/texts promising easy money. Do your homework: Check companies on Better Business Bureau (BBB). Look for testimonials and partnerships with reputable banks (e.g., Chase, American Express). Never share sensitive information without verifying legitimacy. Importance of a Business Plan Funding is not free money—you need a strategic plan. Katrina calls it a “money mission”: know exactly how funds will be deployed. Without a plan, money disappears quickly, leading to debt and bad credit. Family & Friends Lending Treat personal loans like business loans: Have written agreements with terms, repayment schedule, and penalties. Decide upfront if it’s a gift or a loan. Services Offered by New Day for You Financial SBA loans, equipment loans, purchase order financing. Lines of credit and 0% interest credit cards (18–21 months). Credit card stacking for higher funding amounts. Credit restoration referrals for those with poor credit. Success Story Example: A tax accountant secured $160,000 in less than a week due to strong credit, revenue history, and a solid business plan. Notable Quotes “If you don’t have a plan for your money, your money will have a plan—and you’ll look up and it’s gone.” “We don’t want to be out here racking up good debt and then you’re not going to be responsible.” “You have to vet companies. Go to BBB, Google them, and check their credibility.” “If I give you money, I decide—is it a gift or a loan? There are rules to borrowing money.” “We say if you don’t get anything, we don’t get paid.” #SHMS #STRAW #BESTSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Send us Fan MailThe world came to North America for soccer—and left talking about free refills, ranch dressing, poutine, barbecue, and a whiskey-drinking raccoon. This week on the Mike and Blaine show, we unpack the funniest and most unexpectedly wholesome stories of international fans discovering life in the United States, Mexico, and Canada during the 2026 World Cup.But this isn't just a recap of tournament tourism; it's a deep dive into core business strategy, tactical marketing, and customer experience (CX). Why do visitors see pure magic in the everyday things locals completely take for granted? More importantly, how can your business leverage its own "ordinary" features to build an unforgettable, viral brand?Mike and Blaine break down how culture serves as the ultimate marketing strategy. In business, your standard operations, unique regional quirks, or basic hospitality touches might actually be your greatest competitive advantage. We share actionable insights on how to avoid becoming a generic, sanitized corporation and instead double down on the unique differentiators that make your brand memorable. Whether it's the psychological impact of a "free refill" or the comfort of hyper-local hospitality, successful companies win by embracing who they are. If you want to learn how to turn your daily routine into a powerful customer acquisition tool, grab a cold beer and join the conversation!Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZAs79X_0Iz4We want to hear from you! beer@mikeandblaine.comLove the show and want to support us? Visit mikeandblaine.com to buy us a beer!Listen to all our episodes at mikeandblaine.comLearn about:Cash Flow Mike who trains CPAs to provide effective advisory to their clients at cashflowmike.comDryrun Cash Flow Forecasting for the office of the CFO where they get finance teams out of spreadsheets at dryrun.comThanks to our Beer Sponsors: Karen Hairston from 3S Smart Consulting CPA Larry Weinstein, the Cash Flow Cowboy from Houston Texas Neighbor Pat Devin Trey MiltonWatch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZAs79X_0Iz4#WorldCup2026 #BusinessBeerAndBS #NorthAmericanCulture #CustomerExperience #Hospitality #BusinessPodcast #FIFA #BusinessStrategy #MarketingStrategy #BrandStrategy #Entrepreneurship #CustomerRetention #McDonalds #HiddenValleyRanch #FIFAWorldCup #SmallBusinessTipsSupport the showCatch more episodes, see our sponsors and get in touch at https://mikeandblaine.com/

Method Man and his wife celebrate 25 years of marriage; Andrew Gillum denies drug use; 90s fine footballer Maduka Okoye is (allegedly) a fuccboi; UPDATE on Sister Fawn/ Uncle Nearest and her friend-of-the-family CFO who went rogue Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.