Episode 212: Fireside Chat - Top Financial Mistakes (Recast)

We always refer to it as putting your numbers in perspective. Looking at any sort of, really any number means nothing unless you put it in perspective to something like, is that number good? Is that number bad? Is it where I wanted it to be? And that's how you need to look at your business's financials. And so we build our platform for any of our clients to log in and they look at how they're doing over a certain period, a month, a quarter. Right next to it is that previous quarter and then the target that they had for themselves and then year to date.

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Welcome to another episode of Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hammond, your host.

On today's episode, we do a recast with Micah Cannon that we launched in July of 2020. We thought we would bring it back. Micah talks about some of the top financial mistakes that insurance agency owners make that he sees on a regular basis. We felt like it was relevant then, and it's absolutely relevant today, especially as many of you are beginning to prepare for your tax returns, both for your business and personal. Without further ado, here's The Recast with Micah Cannon. This podcast is brought to you by Autopilot Recruiting. Join over 1,200 State Farm agents in putting your recruiting on autopilot. Any successful insurance agent will tell you how important team is. Finding those rockstar team members doesn't happen when left to chance. It happens through consistent recruiting. You never know when you're going to lose a team member, and the key to an incredible team is constantly searching for the best talent. Autopilot Recruiting is a continuous recruiting service where you'll be assigned a recruiter that has been trained to recruit on your behalf every business day. This recruiter will take over and revamp your CareerPlug, send out assessments, do pre-screen phone interviews, and schedule your in-office interviews. All you need to do is to show up and give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. This ongoing service is extremely affordable and a no-brainer for taking your insurance agency to the next level. Listeners of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast, go to autopilotrecruiting.com and use the code CLUBCAPITAL to get started. Again, autopilotrecruiting.com and use the code CLUBCAPITAL to get started.

It's great to have you on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Welcome. Thank you for having me. This is definitely exciting to be one of the first members.

Absolutely, man. Definitely thank you for making the time for this. Before we go into talking about Club Capital specifically, talk to us about your background.

Yeah, so a lot of people don't know where I came from before this, and I think a lot of people that know me as one of the partners of Club Capital, they would imagine that I am either a CPA or an accountant, a background in accounting, and I am neither. So I have a background generally in business. I actually did international business, both in, in college and grad school, and actually got into consulting for about 7 years or so outside of grad school and did that prior to joining Club Capital. So I found myself actually in the healthcare space prior to this. So it seems roundabout, but when you think about general business and people that generally go into the business field, you're all over the place, right? So business is business. I ended up finding myself doing management consulting. For some very large health systems, doing a lot of technology implementation, data analytics, and benchmarking really to national benchmarks for a lot of health systems. So if you know anything about Club Capital and what we do, it was a great way and a great background for me to segue into what we've built here and to build, really be the one that has built our entire analytics and reporting platform for what it is today, benchmarking agents. To others across the country.

So obviously we're going to get into a lot of things you talked about with analytics and how your background has really played into the platform that Club Capital uses. But let's actually go back because we like to do this a lot with not just individuals, but also their companies. How did Club Capital get started and what was the original vision that Club Capital had?

So Club Capital got started. It was really the idea behind or from one of my best friends and actually the best man in my wedding. Who is a State Farm agent, David Munson. So he is a State Farm agent. In 2019, I believe he just had his 9th anniversary. And so he and I go back to college days, undergrad days. And so we've been friends for a long time. He went right into agency ownership outside of school. And I went to grad school and then moved up to DC from South Carolina and got into consulting and just kind of throughout his initial years, certainly shared a lot with me. On what was going well, what wasn't going well. He comes from a line of agents, State Farm agents in his family. So he's got a really good network, which is kind of why he got into it and why he's done well from the beginning. But he obviously like learned from them and set up a lot of systems the way in which his friends and family had. And that being the case, he kind of set up systems in the way that people much older than him had set up their office. When they were originally his age and getting started. And being someone that was a little bit younger and had just been through business school, he was realizing that some of this stuff is just really inefficient, the way I'm doing this. And there's got to be a better way to manage the back office activities that I have with better technology and better transparency into my numbers. Because he started really kind of asking himself, how am I doing? Right? Not that he wasn't asking himself that from the get-go, but, you know, I think, and now as I've been through this, the first couple of years for any agent are just incredibly overwhelming. And so it was really starting in like year 3 where he was trying to analyze his numbers and make sure he was at a certain percent profitability, revenue growth was happening the way he wanted to. And he realized he really didn't have any access to those numbers. He had set up the management of his financials through a firm that I think his father had recommended and It was a kind of a national firm and worked with a lot of agents, but they kind of did things once a year. And so he would pretty much figure out how well he's doing once a year and then be like, well, I hope next year's better. And so he and I were at some sort of a get-together and just talking through this. And I was telling him a lot of what I was doing in the types of reporting and analytics that we do for some very large Fortune 500 type companies and saying that there has to be a way that we can have this. There are thousands of agents out there generally doing the same thing. Why aren't we all having a better way to manage our financials, one? And two, if we're all doing the same thing, why can't we see how we're doing compared to others? Because he brought in that, you know, there's a lot of that on the sales side of things. but not a lot on just the general business and financial side of how are we doing. And so that's really kind of where this started is, well, why don't we try and design something? Let's look at some technology partners out there that are built for small business that make everything incredibly easy. Why don't we bring in a team of accountants to run this on a regular basis and let's design. So let's get kind of the general accounting, bookkeeping, taxes, payroll all under one place. But then what's really unique is why don't we bring in a more sophisticated analytics and reporting tool that really can give us the type of reporting we want, right? A lot of accounting tools are very, I'm going to call it binary, right? They just kind of give you a P&L, right? Well, let's look at things the way we want to see it. Let's look at metrics like where we could say, well, what percent of revenue is this area of my business? And let's design things that just plain accounting systems don't do. And so that's what we've done at Clove Capital is we pretty much said, let's bring accounting, payroll, and HR and advanced reporting all into one place to actually make it accessible. And so Clove Capital was born. We launched it with him and his study group, and that's where we first tested the benchmarking aspect of things is, well, let's see how you're doing to other people in your study group and, you know, kind of learn from them. Got some feedback on what looks good, what doesn't, let's build it. And then it started to quickly take off after that. And so everything that I just mentioned, uh, I think I was still doing while I was, uh, working at, at my previous company.

Uh, I'm sure they love that.

Yeah.

But truly, like, the nights and weekends, uh, side project that was just incredibly fun and exciting. And we kind of got to a client count that really just— we sat down and said, okay, well This can't be a side project anymore, nor is it financially. So let's get started.

So obviously, I mean, looking at the growth that the company has had just in the last couple of years and continues to have, obviously what you're delivering is really making an impact to small businesses across the country. So let's get down like really nuts and bolts, make it simple. What does Club Capital do? How do you specifically help small business insurance agencies?

So a couple of different ways. The way I like to describe it, because a lot of people will just stack us up against a CPA firm. They'll say, okay, you're Club Capital. You're a CPA firm. We have CPAs, but we're way more than a CPA firm. And we're way more than what most people would think of as a typical CPA firm. So the goal behind Club Capital is to really allow agents to outsource pretty much their entire back office activities. Let them be the front of the house, the sales engine, and they do sales and marketing, everything there. We are the entire back office solution from payroll, benefits, HR, bookkeeping, and then the advanced reporting. And the reporting there is everything on a monthly, annual, quarterly basis and benchmarked to every other agent that we work with. And so we're meant to be that outsourced provider, that one-stop shop for everything that you need on that side of the house so that you're not going to multiple different vendors. You're, working with a payroll provider over here, then you're working with a bookkeeper, the bookkeeper needs something from the payrolls, then you gotta facilitate the conversation over to that party. But then at the end of the year, your CPA needs something from the bookkeeper and you're facilitating that conversation. Don't create more work for yourself, right? Every single business out there needs a finance department. Every single one. Some companies it's 100 people. For small businesses, they need a smaller team. And for businesses that we work with, you can outsource that at an incredibly low rate to where we're gonna be the cheapest employee you're ever going to have.

Yeah.

What we like to tell people is to think about us as if we're sitting in your office. Okay? So some people say, how should I communicate or work with you guys? Or how do I tell you about certain things I'm doing? It's the exact same way as if we had a seat in your office, you'd come over and talk to us about it. And so that's all we ask of our clients is to treat us like their finance department, the one that runs their back office. So some people even refer to us as partners because we are truly helping them and giving them insight into really how well their business is doing and giving them some ways to kind of look at and improve how they run their agency from a finance perspective.

So obviously one of the things you just mentioned right there is just the involvement and the engagement on an ongoing basis that you have with your clients, which really differs seemingly to the once a year that they interact with their CPA, their accountants that they've had in the past. And it's really just reflective of how was the year and see you next year type thing. But how else really does Club Capital differ from what people may be experiencing, what you typically see, the experience that small businesses, insurance agents have to what you guys actually deliver? What are some of the other ways that you guys are different?

I would say one on the transparency side and two on the advisory. So transparency into their financials, giving it to them in a way they've never really seen before. So some of the way we do that is just inherent in the way in which our analytics platform is built by not just showing you raw numbers. We always refer to it as putting your numbers in perspective. Looking at any sort of, really any number means nothing unless you put it in perspective to something like, is that number good? Is that number bad? Is it where I wanted it to be? And that's how you need to look at your business's financials. And so we build our platform for any of our clients to log in and they look at how they're doing over a certain period, a month, a quarter. Right next to it is that previous quarter and then the target that they had for themselves and then year to date. Right. So you're putting it all in perspective. And so then the next part of it is advisory. Right. And so the advisory side of it is everything we do on the initial onboarding and training for our own clients. To just ongoing support and being able to meet with our clients on a regular basis to really train them on how to think from the financial aspect. First of all, we train them when they first come on board of like, how should you use a financial reporting system to really stay on top of your agency's financial health and to improve it? So a lot of that is teaching them to be accountable and to kind of remind them that you're the one that controls this. So we're here as a way to give you the tools and the training to do what you need to do. But at the end of the day, it's up to you to execute. And then we're always there on an ongoing basis. So having transparency and insight into your financials in a way that other firms generally don't provide it. And then the advisor side of being able to teach you how to really use the tools that are there.

One of the questions I was probably the most excited about asking you about today is that you've worked with so many different agents. From across the country. I mean, from brand new agents just starting out to agents that have been doing it for 30 years or more. What are some of the common pitfalls and misconceptions that you've seen? And if you want to answer this both for new agents, okay, so we'll say less than 2 years, and then your more tenured agents. So what are some of the common pitfalls, misconceptions you see that the new agents have? And then what are some of those common pitfalls, misconceptions you see from the tenured agents? Regarding their back office?

So I'd say generally across the board there's one and that really sticks out to me and it's actually for both, for kind of all tenure levels, but tends to impact newer agents more because newer agents don't have as much revenue coming in, so it impacts them more. And it's really the not understanding the difference between looking at profit and loss statements. Your financial statements for the business and then understanding cash flow, which are two very big differences. And I truly, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't come from the financial background of things. I wasn't an accountant before. Certainly I was in business school, I took accounting, but this is something I learned too in starting and running a business is there's a huge difference between your profit and loss, your income statement, and then your cash flow. And so when you're looking at things on a monthly basis, as you should be, monthly, quarterly, it doesn't always reflect exactly what happened. A profit and loss statement is very— so just even to give the quick overview of it is understanding the differences between the top 3 financial statements. And those are the income statement or profit and loss, some people refer to it as, the balance sheet, and then a cash flow statement. So those are the 3 primary statements. Generally, most people only think about or have heard of the income statement and the balance balance sheet. And then even when they've heard of the balance sheet, most people say, "I don't need that. I don't need that. It doesn't tell me how I'm doing." And so understanding the difference between those is actually a very, very big deal. And especially when you're a newer agent with normally less revenue, less profit coming in, and you're a little bit more vulnerable on a month-to-month basis regarding cash. The cash flow is really what's happening with the cash, how much is coming in, how much is going out. And the biggest example there is, kind of forgetting that when you pay off loans or lines of credit, the principal value of that is not an expense to the business, which means it's not on your profit and loss statement. If you took out or transferred $2,000 from the business account to your personal account for your own personal bills or spending, that's not an expense and that's not on your profit and loss statement, right? So what ends up happening is you could look at an income statement and show that you profited by $3,000 that month, but then you look at your bank and you wonder, well, how is that possible? Because I don't have anything in there. Right. Right. And so what cash flow statements do is really show you all activity in one statement. So it will show your revenue at the top, your expenses at the bottom, and then payments towards any loans, and then any changes in what's called equity, which is like any draws that you take from the business. Right? And it puts it all into one and it says, hey, you started with X amount of cash and you ended the month with X amount of cash, right? So it shows you the true amount of cash change that happened, which is really important when looking at your financials, is to understand kind of where you are, right? Or if you pay taxes, right? Taxes are not an expense. You can't deduct your taxes to determine your taxes, right? And so sometimes you make those payments and you think, okay, well, I've got X amount in profit profitability, I'm doing fantastic. But sometimes you gotta put it in place there, like, I need to be X percent profitable because I have to pay these loans that I used to start the business or to generate revenue or whatever those were for.

So it seems to me, it just kind of popped in my head about how financials typically get looked at from a past perspective. And what you're saying is we're going to look at the past, but we need to also look at the present and we need to look at the future and use the financials to do that. Is that right?

Yeah, absolutely. You need to be able to forecast the payments that you're going to have to help you project where you need to be today.

Yeah.

So when we go into budgeting calls with our clients and go to set the targets in the reporting system, we really talk about— let's first talk about what you need, right? There are certain payments you're going to have whether you make X amount of profit or not. Yeah. You know, those are your home mortgage, generally payments on any loans. Those could be personal cars or business cars. But any of these loan payments are going to happen regardless, right? And then based upon that, that's your baseline profitability.

Mm-hmm.

And so I look at that with a lot of newer agents. So I think this generally impacts everybody, but it has a bigger impact when you have less profit, less revenue maybe coming in the door. Because when we talk with a lot of initial newer agents, they're under the mindset of, okay, I'm gonna be investing everything back into the business right now. Mm-hmm. Which is understood. And if that's your plan, that's your plan. However, I think what goes lost there is kind of that realization of a lot of things You know, maybe you got a line of credit to help you start at first. That payment to the line of credit that you make is generally coming out of profit, right? It's not an expense. So you need to at least have that amount of cash every month to pay that. Yeah. Which means you need to be profiting by that amount, right? So that needs to be your baseline. Like, let's establish a baseline profitability. It doesn't mean you're going to be 0% profitable. And by 0% profitable means you're investing everything back into the business. We need to find that baseline that's right for you and your situation. That would be your break-even point. All right.

So we started out talking about what are some of the misconceptions and pitfalls. And so just for all the new small business owners, I mean, I think what Micah just talked about there is just so important that, you know, you're so focused on driving sales, driving your auto insurance sales, driving your life insurance sales. And obviously you got to focus there, but you got to spend the time And you would recommend on a monthly basis at a minimum, is that right, looking at these financials?

At a minimum. At Club Capital, I mean, this is also my line of work, but I'm looking at Club Capital's financials weekly to really understand where we are against targets and where we and our partners want to be on a profitability perspective.

I mean, ultimately, if you want to grow your business, you've got to be looking at this, use the financials to actually project forward, not just always look backwards. Before we move on, is there anything that you have seen from, say, really tenured agents that really sticks out that maybe is different? Agents been 10, 15, 20 years. Is there anything that you've seen where that stands out in particular that they really need to pay attention to that maybe is different than what a new agent would?

I've had this discussion a couple times recently, and it's something that I presented on recently, so it's kind of top of mind right now. And I see, I do see this across everybody, but it's amazing how much I see it across some larger, some very tenured agents, is the notion that you can, and it's okay to mix your financials together. So meaning your personal and your business. I think there might have been an early on years ago, kind of this notion of, hey, I'm a sole proprietor, everything's one, right? I am one with the business. My expense is business expense, which really isn't the case. A sole proprietorship is still separate from your financials. And that being said, it should be its own. A sole proprietorship is an entity type, right? So it is an entity in and of itself. And so every entity should have separate financials. So separate bank account, a separate credit card. And really what's interesting too, working with insurance agents, I mean, one of the number one things that they do and that they press is reducing risk. And so one of the biggest things that we hear about is having enough insurance to kind of reduce risk should anything happen. Do you have general liability insurance, all this other stuff, right? And a lot of people, why they will end up incorporating, say an LLC or an S corporation, is to limit the liability to themselves. That being the case, if you are mixing financials consistently, those legal entity types are in essence a wash because a lawyer could come and say, Yes, you have a separate entity type, but you treat everything exactly the same. You're operating not separately. And so therefore, when we come after you, we're coming after all of you.

Right.

We're not just coming after the business because really you didn't have a business. You didn't treat it separately. And so it's just interesting to me to see that that's far more rampant than I would have expected. And I understand it. We run a, you know, a partnership on our side. You know, I certainly wouldn't be running any my personal expenses through the business. It would, it just affects cash flow. It's, you know, it's not mine, it's the entity's. And then we would disburse of it as we need to. When you run it yourself, it's a little bit, you know, I understand seeing it more as, well, I control both, so it really doesn't matter, but it really does. They need to be treated separately. One, it's much easier on the financial side to really get a handle on how are you doing and how much money are you truly taking from the business? Like it's much easier for you to understand your business if it's not muddled. And then second, which is one of the biggest things people want to do anyway, is limit their legal liability. You are kind of tarnishing that if you do that.

I was thinking about it from the perspective of you are not getting clear financials on the business of how it's doing. So therefore you can't make better decisions using the financials. But you brought in the part about wiping away that veil of liability protection by doing that. So that's something I had obviously not considered. All right, look, so you've mentioned benchmarks, you've mentioned analytics. I mean, let's be real, for some people that are listening to this podcast, this stuff can be a little overwhelming. It can be a little intimidating. I mean, you mentioned about cash flow statement and balance sheet and income statement, and there's a lot of terms thrown around that people just are not familiar with. So can you just speak to that and speak to not just what Club Capital does to be able to take that burden off of you and the educational aspect of it, but just even though some of those things can be a little overwhelming at first, why it's so important and how Club Capital makes that simple for people to understand.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I do think the term analytics might even be too strong. Really what we're trying to do is make better sense of an accounting system, right? Like I'm not an accountant. And when I look at the accounting system that we use, although it's great, I look at it And I looked at it when we were starting the business and said, we got to be able to show this in a much clearer fashion. And so that's what our analytics platform does. So it's directly integrated to the accounting platform from what we call the source data of everything that you're spending and bringing in and just makes better sense of it in a dashboard fashion. So what do you want to see? You want to see revenue, you want to see revenue growth, you want to see kind of how you're making that revenue across the different lines of your business. Right? So if you brought in $30,000 in revenue, how'd you make that? Auto, FireLife, right? And then what would be nice is to have things kind of like you can double-click into anything. You want things to be intuitive, right? If I'm looking at a revenue number and I want to say, hmm, I wonder how that's been trending over the year, well, just click on it, right? Just the way in which you would think you'd want to look at something to dive in and get a little bit more information. You should be able to do that. And then you want to look at your expenses really at kind of like a higher level, like, okay, I don't want to dive into the 30 different expense accounts and see how many dollars and cents I spent here. Let's roll that up to just say, okay, there's 8 main categories of expenses across your business. What percent of your revenue are you spending in each of those categories? And what's your total operating expense? So that you know how much you're profiting. So it's the whole idea of making your financials easier to understand so that it's easier to get a handle on them and it's easier to budget and it's easier to really forecast and track and get to where you wanna be. So it's about making it easier, not about diluting and making it harder to understand.

And it like almost gives you the opportunity to interact with the numbers more so than just seeing the numbers on a profit and loss statement and you can't make sense of it. It's just numbers and it's kind of boring. But I mean, the analytics and the dashboard gives you the opportunity to actually really dive in and to be able to make better decisions off of it.

Right? Right, exactly. So people see and interact and understand information in different ways like we all do.

Yeah.

And so what our reporting and analytics platform does is it allows you to interact with your financials in the way that you like.

Yeah.

You know, whatever method it is, if you just want to look at a financial statement, that's there. If you want to look at graphs and understand how things are trending, that's there. You know, pie chart, that's there, right? It's how you want to see it. Do you want to see the numbers or do you want to see the percentages? Yeah. It's all there for you to really have access to and see across whatever month at whatever time period. A lot of typical services will just give you a snapshot at that point in time, and that's all you get. And you got to wait till the next month to get that snapshot, and then you got to find that other piece of paper or PDF and then try and compare. The whole idea is to just make it much easier and accessible, access it from wherever you want so that you always know where you are. All right.

So overall, I mean, we've talked a lot about the topic of finance today, how some people are running it and what FlubCapital is doing for insurance agents to help them make better decisions and become more profitable. But for an agent who's just either starting out or has had a business for a while, what's one piece of tangible advice, like one nugget that you could give them today that would allow them to improve their business?

I would say to realize that the buck stops with you and to hold yourself accountable to it. You're in charge of getting yourself and holding yourself at 25% profitability. And you're also in charge of righting the ship if you were negative 25% profitability. Sometimes those take some very hard decisions to make because if that's happening, certainly revenue is not as high as it needs to be and expenses are way higher than the revenue can support, which means you gotta make some cuts across either expenses or, you know, key personnel. And so I would say the biggest thing is to understand that you're in the driver's seat and, you know, a lot of people are in positions of ownership for the first time. Which is incredibly exciting, can be incredibly scary, can be incredibly hard at times. But to realize that, you know, you got to start off by setting, you know, a benchmark that you need to hit. And a lot of people do that primarily on the sales side, and they hold them and their team incredibly accountable to sales targets. And that doesn't happen as much on the expense side of things. And the expense side of things is the fun side, right? I mean, we want to be profitable. We want those high sales targets. To get to the profitability that we want. But if we're bringing in $1 million and it took $1 million for us to get there, there's nothing in the bank at the end of the day. So we gotta be able to set the targets, track them as close as you track the sales metrics.

You know, early on in the podcast you mentioned about the fact that you wanna be accessible and it's not a once-a-year thing. You're engaged with your clients on an ongoing basis. In some cases, monthly. I want to give you the opportunity just to talk about your team that you have at Club Capital. I mean, you've got an amazing team that obviously is talking and working with the clients on a day-to-day basis. And so I just want to give you an opportunity to talk about the team that you've got at Club Capital, brag on them just a little bit.

Yeah, honestly, it's humbling to see how good of a team we've been able to put together. Being a business owner and talking to a lot of business owners, everyone knows that's the hardest part is finding, retaining, and motivating your team, the right team. And so we've been able to just find some incredible people that just love to help other people. I think that's the biggest part of it is they enjoy helping others. And so we've got a lot of motivated people that want to just jump after it every day. We come in here excited about the targets that we set for ourselves to get out there. And those targets are sales targets. Those targets are success targets for our clients and for us to reach out to them and you know, we're in an industry of huge deadlines, right? And so there's always something to reach for there. And I'm just incredibly excited about the team that we put together. They're from an incredibly diverse background, which I think makes it even more fun from where they're from to what they were doing before this, but to kind of find a common thread of, you know, we want to help people and let's find a way in this industry to do that.

You know, spending the day with the team, I asked that question about what they enjoy the most and they've all shared the fact that they actually, number one, believe in what it is that they're selling. Right. They really believe in the product. Number 2, they really love the fact that they can see that they're making an impact on small business owners' lives. And I think that's just really cool. And I think it's awesome what you guys have been able to build.

Awesome. Thank you.

All right. You ready for some E9?

E9? I've heard about this.

Rapid fire questions.

Okay.

First thing that comes to mind. You ready?

Yeah.

Last book you read?

Profit First, actually.

Oh man. Solid book. What book would you recommend the most?

Ooh, another recent book on the sales side, The Sales Acceleration Formula from the guys that created HubSpot.

I think I know the answer to this next one, but I'm curious what you're going to say. What's the one thing you can't live without?

I'm going to say my wife, Catherine.

Great answer. I knew you were going to say that, actually.

And then the next one is coffee. That's what I was about to say. I thought you were going to say cold brew.

I think those two are neck and neck, to be honest with you. What app do you love the most?

This is going to sound nerdy, but Asana. That's my go-to right there.

I'm right there with you.

I'm right there with you.

If you'd not gone into Club Capital and being CEO here, what do you think you'd be doing?

I think I'd like to say I'd be doing it at another company, but given where I was before at my previous firm, I would probably still be on the consulting side. I always enjoyed. I mean, that's what I think is such a good background for this is probably on the consulting side of things or working with one of my previous partners, uh, probably at their new endeavor. Nice.

Now, not talking about work, what's your favorite non-work hobby?

Surfing. Surfing.

Oh wow, I didn't know that.

What about your favorite sports team?

Philadelphia Eagles. I married into that one.

You did.

All right, last question: best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Any piece of growth requires being uncomfortable. So if you're comfortable, you're probably stagnant.

I like it.

That hit deep.

Mike, it's been great having you on the podcast today. If someone is currently not a client of Club Capital, they want to learn more about Club Capital and how you guys could help them, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you and learn more about you guys?

Best way, I would say, reach out to us at info@club.capital if you've got some general questions. We've tried to build out our website for those that want to just at least check us out, see a lot of our different resources on our blog, see what we're all about and what we're doing. And there's a great way to easily book a demo directly onto the calendar of any of our team members here. But if you have any questions directly, definitely don't hesitate to reach out. info@club.capital goes to the whole team, including me. So please send any questions our way.

We just scratched the surface of financials and analytics and benchmarking, so I hope to have you back on the podcast in the future.

I look forward to it. And this, you know, our new business coaching and podcast endeavor going after right now is just incredibly exciting. And all the guests that we have lined up is— I just can't wait to kind of hear everybody else's stories too.

I could easily see you coming back to talk about taxes. I feel like that's a huge topic that we didn't mention today, but definitely looking forward to having you back here to talk about that. You and John.

Yeah, absolutely. I would definitely lean towards our main accounting manager here on the tax side. I know enough to be dangerous, but definitely don't do anything I told you there. I will always make sure we got a fact-checker with me.

All right, thanks, Michael.

Thank you, sir.

Have a good one.

All right, hope you enjoyed that Recast episode. We've got some great guests going into Q2 of 2023. We're really excited about— big shout out to our podcast sponsors: Club Capital, DirectClicks, Autopilot Recruiting, and Coach P Consulting. If you wanted to— you're thinking about your financials as we get into March and April and you don't like that, you have a really good understanding of kind of where you are, your tax situation, how much you're going to owe or not owe, how much you're going to get back. Go to Club Capital, go to club.capital and book a no-obligation demo with someone on the team. And if you're wanting to make some decisions to bring on your own team, either to widen your bench or to be able to bring on some A-players, reach out to Autopilot Recruiting. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com. And, you know, they can really help you. I call them A-players. But many of you think about like building a championship-level team. And look, in any labor market, whether it's good, it's challenging, Autopilot Recruiting is there to be able to help you. And they can help fit within any budget. So you don't have to be a mega— you don't have to have 20 different people working for you. They can help work within any budget that you may have. And help you to hire a championship-level team with those A players. Autopilotrecruiting.com. You know, once you get those A players, you can't just let them sit there and, you know, hope that they do well. You've got to be able to train them and develop them. We want to create a world-class training program. But for many of you, man, you're wearing a lot of hats. And so, you know, couldn't I just be able to borrow and use the same best practices that somebody else is getting it done at a high level? Well, you can go to coachpconsulting.com and reach out to and let him know you heard about him on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. CoachPConsulting.com. You know, being a digital business owner and digitally minded doesn't mean that you have to be an expert in all things digital marketing. I'm in a group with a guy named Ryan Dice with a company called Digital Marketer that he exited from, and he's an expert, right? And he's been doing this for a really long time. Well, same thing with Matt and Maddie Jones at the team over there at DirectClick been doing this for a long time. They get— be able to help you to be able to understand the world of SEO, social media, and pay-per-clicks. Go to directclicksinc.com. Directclicksinc.com. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well.