Guido Shulz CEO of Bento for Business

Cash flow, Shannon. It's always the key.

Right? Cash is king. Right?

Cash is king. Cash leakage is like the opposite of king though. We're going to learn about that in today's show because that's.

Yeah, it's fascinating. It's amazing to me there's some technology available that I really had no idea even existed. And as a small business owner, man, when I was doing some research for the show in preparation for the guests that we're having on, I was just like, oh. I was just like mind blown how. You know, great this solution would be for small business owners. And see, I wasn't even thinking of it as on a cost saving level, but even more on a person to person level. And it helps avoid so many sticky issues in the office with your accounting department. Hr. I think it's great.

Yeah.

For sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you can. And you'll learn more about the product here. But essentially it helps you control who gets to spend what and when without having to breathe down and where. Without having to breathe down people's necks. Yeah. And, and so it's, it's a solution by technology. You know, I always in, in our Matt Geek Gab show, we always talk about, well, you know, parenting by technology. Maybe that's not like if you need to employ parenting technology to parent your kids, you might be missing something here right there. There's like some. But, but this is one of those scenarios where I feel like, and, and like a lot of those lessons are true with your employees too. Like if you've got a problem with an employee using technology to fix it or to, to isolate it is not necessarily the right thing. But this I feel like is the exception to that rule. I really like this is a, I think this is a great thing. So I'm too.

And I love listening to, you know, we don't often get the, you know, CEOs on the show. Right. Focus on founders and small business owners, that kind of thing. But you know, Guido had such a good story and some really great less lessons about, you know, his life and his background and in his. And one of the things I thought was really great was when he talked about when I asked him that best mistake question that we always do. Yeah, just some really good lessons today.

Really good lessons. Yeah, for sure. No, it's great stuff. Also great stuff is a new sponsor today and that is direct mail for Mac@directmailmac.com SBS we all know even though we don't necessarily practice what we preach, we'll get to that. But we all know that email marketing is a fantastic way to grow our businesses. But most of the tools out there for creating and sending campaigns just aren't that easy to use. So I'm going to use that as my excuse. Well, sort of as to why I'm not all that good at email marketing. But if you're a Mac user like me, then there is this fantastic app called Direct Mail and it's built specifically for the Mac. You get all your email marketing done in half the time because it takes advantage of all the great Apple technology you already know and love. So there's no more waiting for a slow web page to load or fumbling with a browser. We have used direct mail in the past in several of our businesses. And I will be honest, when we've been using it, we've been really good about keeping up with our email marketing. When we stop using it, we're not so good. So there you go, like, do like me, but don't stop using it. Just keep using Direct Mail for Mac and it's cool. They have two plans. You can either do a pay as you go, kind of like buying postage stamps. You buy, you know, X number of thousand emails to send and, and then you can send them whenever you want. Or if you're sending more regularly, and we should all be sending more regularly, you can buy into a monthly subscription which then gives you an unlimited amount. So you're not locked in unless you want to be. And that's beneficial to you that you get to choose. They've got all these really nice templates that are custom, customizable and look great on all your devices. And they their customer service is staffed by real humans, not chatbots. So you can send your first email campaign today with a free download of direct mail. And because you're a small business show listener, you can save 10% off of all full featured plans. So go to direct mail Mac.comsbs and see how they can help your business grow. Our thanks to to Direct Mail for sponsoring this episode. Next up is PDF Pen and PDF Pen Pro from smilesoftware.com podcast. We're always messing with PDFs, especially now that we're all sort of forced to be distributed. But let's face it, we've always been in PDF land. I'm using them constantly for anything. Refinancing my house to everything with business contracts are signed that way. And speaking of contracts, yes, you can sign right in PDF pen, but with PDF pen you also get built in DocuSign support. So if someone's using DocuSign or if you want to use DocuSign, that's built in now too. They've got this cool magnifier window so that you can zoom in on documents and really get to what you want. And now that PDF Pen and PDF Pen Pro 12.1 have arrived, you get a few new features, including page label support in multiple formats for your documents. And Pro users can even go a step further with the ability to add or edit edit page labels. So you get all this flexibility with what you can do with PDFs, how you can change things in them. Yes, you can change text in a PDF with PDF pen. You want to check this out, so go to smilesoftware.com podcast. Check this out. You're going to love it. I love it. I use it every day. I was using it just before we did the show here, so go check it out. Smilesoftware.com podcast and our thanks to Smile and PDF Pen for sponsoring this episode. All right, Shannon, I am very excited to get to this interview here. Learn how I can prevent cash leakage and all that. Anything else that we need to go through, my friend, before we do that?

I don't think so. I'm ready to small business.

Oh, you're ready to small business. He is ready to small business. And he is Shannon Jean. I am ready to small business. And I am Dave Hamilton and this is the Small Business Show.

And now, as I have a lot of years under my belt, over time I have learned that simplicity is king. If you don't have a product or platform that can be explained within a couple of minutes and a proverbial elevator speech, you have a difficult time finding an audience. And I think that is going to become true more and more and more because everything that we consume nowadays as humans are sound bites, you know, very, very short form media and so on headlines. My favorite saying is the attention span of a fruit fly. And that's a reality that we're dealing with. And you know, going at product design or going at a building a value proposition from a perspective of it's got to be complicated, otherwise it's not good. Has for me proven to be the completely wrong approach. Keep it simple, keep it digestible and get the key things right.

Hey, Dave, you know, we talk about cash on this show all the time. You know, it's really the lifeblood of every small business, Right? Because you can even over profit sometimes, right? You run out of cash, you're really in trouble.

You need. Yeah, cash has to come first. Because if you don't have it, then profits are. You won't get to profits.

You're done. Yeah. You're not going to make it to the next day. And along with that is also having enough data to manage those cash decisions and how you handle your cash flow and stuff. So it's, you know, capturing the data, managing the cash, critically important. So we're always looking at new tools and techniques to help us understand what's going on with our cash situation. In my business, I know you do the same thing. Tools that help us, you know, plan for our cash needs and make decisions. Today we're going to get joined by Guido Schultz that is going to tell us. You got it. Sorry, that's easy for you to say.

He'll tell us.

That's it. And Guido is the CEO of Bento for Business Business, a service that's built around helping small businesses manage their expenses. And Guido, thank you so much. We're so glad to have you with us today.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, that's just great. I'm really interested in learning. I spent a lot of time on your website looking at your different services and I've got a bunch of questions. So. But before we get to talk about Bento, let's talk about your background a little bit. Looking at your LinkedIn profile, you know, I see quite a bit of experience in the payments and finance fields. And so how did you find yourself in this industry and what led you to Bento for business when you became CEO in 2019?

So when I was about 8 years old, I figured I'm either going to go into payments or I'm going to become an astronaut.

I love that.

No, I don't think any kid will ever have that thought process. I more or less, as I think many people do, I stumbled upon payments. I have about 20 years of experience in payments and I started working for an international business to business currency transfer business in Washington, D.C. in around 2000. And what attracted me to that business originally was since I have an international background, I was born and raised in Germany. I was attracted to the global outlook of that business and having to deal with companies all around the world. So I came in on a completely different track and payments were really an afterthought in there. Although they were the main product of the organization, over time I realized that payments are really a good translation for what business is all about in general. I mean, business is always connected to some sort of revenue generation moving of money and payments are the vehicle that keeps that environment running. And They're a very good barometer when it comes to how does business work, what are the efficiencies or inefficiencies within businesses? And you get a really good understanding, an overview over how the world works and how revenue is generated and what businesses are facing. So as a secondary benefit, I became quite fascinated with payments and have been stuck to that ever since.

Yeah, that's great. It does sum it up nicely. And payments are just everywhere, everyone seeming to want to be in that business. PayPal square, different. I mean on and on and on it, you're right, it does really track what's going on, you know, with, with all these businesses. And as I was on your website, one of the things that I was looking of course at the about page and there was a statement that I really liked and impressed me and that was small businesses build American communities. Our tools are designed for you, not scaled down versions of products for huge corporations. So, and I wanted to ask questions, why is this important to Bento to say that? And why is it important for small business owners that are looking at your services?

That's actually a good segue into, and I don't think I quite answered your initial question as to how did I end up at Bento and what attracted me to Bento. So that actually is one of the deciding factors or was one of the deciding factors for me joining Bento was that clear mission statement to say we're a platform, we're not for enterprise business, we're for small to medium sized businesses. We're going to concentrate exactly on what's important to them and build a platform that will be tailor made for them to consume. And really what that means is Bento as a platform is incredibly flexible in how you use it, but it's also very easy and intuitive to use. You don't need any ancillary systems. It's. It doesn't have to hook into any accounting systems, it can stand on its own legs and it doesn't require any software to be installed, it doesn't require any technical knowledge. It's just a tool that you can use out of the box to improve your cash flow as a small business. And that focus was very dear to my heart because I've seen time over time again, everybody in payments and in many other industries always flocks towards acquiring these giant accounts, helping giant businesses that can help themselves, quite frankly. And oftentimes smaller businesses are left to the wayside or are left to consume some sort of discontented or not quite so well thought through version of A product that's in general, always designed for the largest use case. And. And Bento isn't that. And that was very attractive to me.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I do often feel, you know, I've always had this kind of outsider mentality, and I think that has actually served me well as a small business owner because you kind of makes you scrappy and you kind of have to feel like you have to fight, you know, to get to get heard and that kind of thing. So having your company present themselves like that, I think it's just a winning message to, you know, small business owners like me, at least. That's great. So let's talk about the services. Why do small business owners need your help?

They do need our help. And let me put this into context with the larger environment of cash management. One statistical fact that really struck me when I joined Bento, it was buried somewhere in Bento's materials, marketing materials, actually. But it really drove a point home for me was that in 80% of small business bankruptcies, the leading cause for it getting there is actually cash mismanagement rather than a business model that's not viable, wouldn't generate enough revenue, and so on. It's really in how small businesses handle or don't handle their cash. And that's where we come in. So our platform is, you could call it an expense management platform, but it's really a spend management platform because we manage spend before it actually happens. And the way that works has three main building blocks. So you have, on one hand, you have an administrator that can be the owner, or if it's a little bit larger organization and you have a delineated finance management function, it could be the CFO or accounts payable manager, whoever. I mean, it's. The administration function is very easy to use. That person sets up a DDA account with Bento. They fund that account, and connected to that account are debit cards. They can be virtual or they can be physical. And those debit cards are customizable on the fly. It's a very easy interface. You can set up, up and have three dimensions in terms of how you can set up controls on these cards. So you can control by spend levels, the amounts that can be spent at a given time period by when you can spend. So you can choose, this card is active from Monday through Friday or 247 or any other scenario, only one day per week, whichever way you want to set it up. And then, and this is the most distinguishing part of the platform, you can choose which merchant types the card can actually spend.

That's powerful.

Wow.

And that's quite powerful. So you can build a, call it a kind of a purchasing card ad hoc that's completely customized to a specific use case. And why is that important? Because many small businesses, let's say you have an air conditioning business and you have five trucks out in the field and there is a foreman in each truck and two technicians. And that truck needs to be kept running, it needs to be gassed up. You might have a lunch allowance for those guys and they might have to go and buy filters at Home Depot when they run out. Let's say that's the use case scenario. You can specifically limit that card to become a fuel card, plus meals, plus home improvement stores. And then you have a very specific use case scenario in place. They won't be able to get a beer on your bill, they won't be able to spend it anywhere else. But it empowers them, it allows them to work and work efficiently and it puts a very stringent level of controls on where that money is going to be spent, when, where and how. And that's really the part where the platform saves a small to medium sized business the most money because a lot of small business owners don't want to face that fact. But a lot of cash leakage happens due to an ill defined expense policy or somebody taking advantage of, of a company account. And this is really where the magic of the platform is. And any declined transaction due to the categorization that's outside of the parameters that you determine to be on that given card, we count as savings. So on the interface on the platform, you can see over time how your savings are actually accumulating based on what would have been spent that hasn't been spent due to the card controls.

Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, knowing exactly where these folks are going to be able to use the funds and how they're going to be able to do that, seems like it could really add up to some big savings.

I like the term and I'm sure it's common in businesses where this is a scenario. Is that term cash leakage? That's a powerful term. You mentioned that to any small business owner and you've got their attention. You certainly got mine. I was like, oh, that's a, that's an interesting thing to think about. Right? So yeah, cash leakage, I like it.

But I will comment one technology, once again, ruining everything where you can't get a beer.

Oh, you can get a beer, just not on the company side.

You got to pay for it. Right? That's. Yeah, yeah.

I actually, actually have a funny anecdote there. So a new client of ours, it's a good mid sized company, so they have a lot of these cars. Experts in the field now with us and the CFO let us know how much they like the platform. And their story was they said, well, you know, we had about $150,000 in expenses before using the platform. That has gone down to about half that. So we had massive cash leakage to stick with that word every month. And the funny anecdote is our CEO, which the, the CFO set up the card for, the CEO as well, tried to buy donuts and wasn't authorized to buy donuts. So he got declined from buying donuts because his controls were stringent.

You know, like the, the card doesn't know. The card just knows what it's told. That's it.

The card knows what it's told. Yeah. So that was, it was. I mean, of course that goes a little bit far, but it put a kind of a smile on our faces. But again, as you can see, I mean, there are real world scenarios where these companies are actually cutting their spend down in half. And many companies don't want to face that. Sometimes it seems to be a little bit of an uncomfortable topic. Even they don't want to really confront their employees. And the beauty of the platform is the platform handles that for you. You don't have to have that difficulty conversation. You don't have to reconcile expenses after the fact. The card will make that decision for you and it'll protect you right from the get go.

Like, yeah, like you said, if somebody has a valid expense, like the CEO wanted to buy donuts for the staff, I'm presuming for the staff, of course, then you know, then that can be addressed. Right, but, but instead of it being addressed after the fact, it's being addressed before the fact.

And that's true.

Yeah, yeah. And I imagine that it's a huge, I mean, relieves a lot of pressure from HR or your accounting department that's always having to kind of go after the fact and pick up the pieces and solve these problems. Like, hey, what is this? And hey, what is that? You know, they must love it.

Absolutely. And then that's, that's where the whole part of reconciliation comes into play. So the platform also have a, has a mobile app. In fact, we just released a brand new version of the mobile app this week. So it's brand new, gives you full access to all the platform functionality. And if you're out in the field, you can just take a picture of your receipt right there and that gets attached to the transaction. So there are no expense reports to be done, nobody has to use their personal cards, there's no credit exposure in any way, shape or form. And on top of that, the platform nicely integrates with most of the small to medium sized business accounting platforms out there. So you can just upload your reconciliation right into the accounting platform. And it takes that entire headache of, you know, hunting people down for their receipts and taking three months to close out your books and so on. It takes all of that away.

Yeah, that, that's, that's great. One of the things I was thinking about when I was looking on your site, I mean, is there a typical time in the lifespan of a small to medium business that you know, where they would kind of gravitate towards you? Is it like when they're growing fast, when their finances start to have problems, or are you just getting people at all different points on the lifespan?

We are getting them all across. So there are some tech savvy startup businesses that are using us from day one and we grow with them, which is actually a great scenario to see. You can see how businesses spend behavior changes over time as they grow and the entire environment grows with them. And then we have also companies that are getting to that point where they say, well, wait a second, we have tens of thousands of dollars in expenses, we're still a small business, but we have to do something about managing those and we have to put controls in place and we give them that out of the box all in one solution. So it really spans the gamut. What we tend to see is where the solution becomes immediately apparent is if there is, and I mentioned that beforehand, if there's a delineated financial management, sometimes owner operators sniff out that solution themselves and they get it. If you're talking to somebody who's an accounts payable manager or an accountant or a CFO of a small company, they immediately get it. I mean, for them that's, that's a no brainer. There's not much explanation needed. They can get on the platform, they can use the platform pretty much intuitively and they will immediately see the potential in it. So it's, it's more a question of who's your audience and how do you present the value of the, the platform. And then really the easiest audience is that profile.

Yeah, that's great. And I was looking at the pricing too. I mean it seems very reasonable. I mean, you have a free level with a couple of cards that somebody could use this thing, and that's really cool.

It's just nominal. Yeah, we just cover our development expenses partially with the nominal fee. So that's not really a big revenue generator for us. Yeah.

So are there obstacles that you found to, you know, I mean, when a customer, when a business owner looks at the service and what reasons are they giving? I don't think I'm, you know, why I wouldn't use it. I mean, is there obstacles that you've come up with that you've had to overcome?

Generally, no. I mean, once we are able to demonstrate the platform, we don't run into any obstacles. The only objection, and I actually just had a conversation with some of our salespeople about that. The only objection that we run into, and I mentioned that beforehand, is that sometimes it seems to be an uncomfortable conversation for business owners to actually put controls in place because that implies that there might be a problem, there might be a challenge.

Lack of trust.

Lack of trust. And they don't, they don't really want to face that. There can be that scenario where people say, oh, you know, we're five people and they're all family. I don't have, I don't, I don't need spend controls. I trust everyone implicitly. But, you know, that company three years from now might be 25 people and they're not all family. And, you know, sometimes even family does things. Of course.

Yeah, it can be worse, like you said. Yeah. Because they know that you don't want to have the, the, the awkward conversation.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So sometimes people are standoffish because they don't want to even breach that subject. But once they do and they realize that they're, they're precluding a potentially uncomfortable conversation, then they open up. But that's. If there's any, any kind of rejection for us, it's usually around that.

Yeah. I like the way you created the framework around it too, which you could say, hey, we're going to implement this now for future growth. It's really going to help us. I know I trust everybody here in the room, but we're going to. It'll be great going forward. I think that's a great way to pitch it.

Good habits are easy to grow, but they're hard to implement once the company has adopted a number of bad habits. That's a real truth. And I've seen that not only in cash management, but in many other areas of business management, for sure.

So when you came on board as CEO last year for Bento. Was there anything that surprised you about the business or how it worked or coming in from the outside?

I was. I wouldn't say surprised me because I had a pretty ample exposure to the key individuals in the organization before I joined. What pleasantly surprised me was the culture of the organization. I think this whole aspect of serving small businesses, trying to bring real value, add to our clients, it permeates throughout the organization. It's a great company to work for and work with and to serve. The individuals are very caring. The company culture is very inclusive. We're a very diverse group of people. And I think the way we handle our clients and the way we present ourselves to the world definitely is fueled by that diverse and inclusive environment. And I can only say I'm blessed to be there. I love every minute of it. I think we have a ton of opportunity. And I also have to mention at this point, Farhan Ahmad. He's the founder of the organization, so this platform is really his brainchild, and he has definitely built something amazing here. He's still with us. He's fully engaged in the business. He still works on furthering and improving our product every day and works on strategy hand in hand with me. And it was great to see that he had that aha moment where he realized, he said, you know, I've taken this company, I've built this vision, and now I need somebody with expansive GTM and scaling experience to bring this to the next level. And he's just embraced me with open arms, and it just has been a great experience for me.

That's wonderful. And that's a hard thing as a founder to come to that realization that, oh, you know, you kind of have to fire yourself. Right. And go maybe into another role, but bring someone else in that has that additional experience.

Absolutely. It can't be easy. And he has done that with the utmost level of graciousness. I mean, just amazing.

That's great.

Speaks to his character.

It speaks to your value, too. I mean, he wouldn't be comfortable with this if he didn't trust you. So there you go.

Well, you know, and we've had a lot of people in the payments business on this show over the years. And one thing that stuck out as I was thinking about this interview, it's similar to some of the messaging you're talking about as, like, when we had Bill ready. He's the, you know, was the COO of PayPal at the time on the show. And you guys have taken what some people could consider, oh, it's kind of a boring, you know, payments. Nobody gets excited about it, but you've created something exciting around it in a culture that makes, you know, a great team and all that stuff. So I think that's terrific. I love that.

The payment really is just the vehicle, right? The payment in its own right is a well defined protocol and that's utterly boring. I mean, there are some people out there and to me, they're freaks that get really involved in, in the finer aspects of that and bless them because they're very much needed. Right. There's a whole host that a normal consumer doesn't see of compliance and regulatory complexity and so on. That's all around there. And there are people that are deeply, deeply immersed in that. But ultimately, to me, as a brand builder and a more commercial person, that's the boring aspect. To me, the interesting part is, and I think this is where you see a differentiation between service providers and true solution providers and innovators in this space. There are a lot of pain points around payments and delivering the platform around solving these pain points and connecting these disparaging odds and ends within payments. That's where the creativity is and that's where the excitement minutes for me at least.

Yeah. Oh, that's great. So one question we ask every guest that comes on the show is all about mistakes. And I'm going to couch this a little different for you because your experience is a little, little different. So we like talking about mistakes because they teach us so much. I know I'm sure I've made the most out of the three of us that are on this show right now. What would you say is your best mistake? You know, something that's stuck with you over the years and taught you a lesson as you, as you've built your.

Career.

Somebody put you on the spot.

Thinking about that long and hard. I don't think it's one singular mistake. I think it's a mistaken outlook. Earlier in my career, I always thought that value add was. This is hard to express, but I'll give it my best shot here. Value add is analogous to complication, meaning that more is better that adding more functionality, taking account of every possible use case, making it as broad as possible, making the solution seem as intelligent as possible, was the secret to success. And now, as I have a lot of years under my belt, over time I have learned that simplicity is king. If you don't have a product or a platform that can be explained within a couple of minutes and, and a proverbial elevator Speech. You have a difficult time finding an audience. And I think that is going to become true more and more and more because everything that we consume nowadays as humans are sound bites. Very short form media and headlines. Headlines. My favorite saying is the attention span of a fruit fly. And that's a reality that we're dealing with. And going at product design or going at a. Building a value proposition from a perspective of it's got to be complicated, otherwise it's not good, has for me proven to be the completely wrong approach. Keep it simple, keep it digestible, and get the key things right in the client experience or in the offering that you put on somebody's table and that'll be the road to success. It's about the key value proposition at the center of your solution. If that's not right, all the window dressing is not going to fix it.

I think that's great advice and I think you guys have done that with the bento. When I was looking at your site and I'm like, well, this seems so simple, but it's like you have this aha moment. Like, wow, this is crazy how it could save you money and make things better.

Yeah, it is deceptively simple. So there's a lot of technology behind it and it was very difficult to build, but to the client, it's a no brainer. It's simple. It's a few clicks here and there and all of a sudden I've saved. On average, our clients save about 15% on their spend every month. And you just go, well, that wasn't much. How did this just happen? But that's the ideal scenario.

Right?

Right, Right.

Makes sense. So your comment, it's great and I think there's some real valuable lessons in there. And it leads me into my next question. We are this sound bite culture and I blame the iPhone and Apple for it because they've destroyed our attention spans, at least mine and my kids. So. So messaging and story, they do seem to be getting more important to connect with customers. And I wanted to ask you, is that one of the reasons why you're here today? Have you found that podcasts are an effective way to connect with customers on a more personal level or on just a different level?

Absolutely. I think telling a story and there are two parts to that. I think you have to provide value add no matter if it's for your own gain or if it's for your audience's gain or whoever benefits from it. I think storytelling and this freeform format of being conversational is almost becoming a Lost art. And the podcast format has given that slightly longer form communication protocol a new lease of light on life. And it's just not possible to tell your entire story in sound bites or three paragraphs. And I think therefore it's interesting and it's interesting to me and it's probably interesting to your audience to get a little bit deeper and hear some of the stories behind somebody's success or failure and hear it from the horse's mouth, so to say. And yeah, I mean that's a great reason to be on a podcast if there ever was one.

Yeah, we love it. And you know, I started this because I just wanted to meet people and learn as much as I could. And every week I always say I always learn the most. And now we have thousands of small business owners that get to listen along. So it's great. I love it. So. So I have one final question for you and you seem like a person that's taken action in your life over your career and we're big fans of action over planning and falling in love with ideas. Is there one action item that you could tell recommend to our small business owner listeners that they could do to help their business related to your, maybe related to your expertise in the payment industry, Something that you could leave them with with.

Absolutely. Be aware of where you're at in time and space. And what that means is as a business owner you need to know who your audience is. You need to know how well your service, value proposition, product, whatever it is that you sell matches that audience audience's use profile. And then you need to know what the operating metrics of your own business are. And I can't overstress that. I see a lot of small businesses, they, they fly a little bit by the seat of their pants. So they, they say, well, I'm bringing clients on board, I'm making phone calls, I have phone calls coming in. I put this app advertisement out there and people are calling me now. So I must be doing well. And it is extremely important to know. And it comes back to the beginning intro of this conversation. What is my cash flow? How much do I make, how much do I spend, where do I spend it and where does my money go? Because an expense is not necessarily a bad thing, but an expense is only a good thing if it goes towards either growing your business or satisfying one of your clients so that they come back and spend more with you. Ultimately, I mean, that's the lifeblood of any organization, is to become a positive revenue generating entity. And too many small businesses are not aware of where they're at and where they're going. So they can't really make a plan. They can model out different scenarios as to where they say, what happens if I lose my largest client? What is the impact and how well will I be doing if that happens again? Those are sometimes uncomfortable questions to answer, but it's much better to be able to answer them and have a plan and know where you stand if the sometimes inevitable happens rather than just saying, oh, you know, I'm, I'm adding clients on some, I must be doing great and I'll worry about my finances later. That's one of the biggest items.

Yeah. When you started this and said be aware of where you're at in time and space, I'm like, now we need something like to hang our hats on. And you hit it. What are your own businesses operating metrics? That is the key because it, like you said, it's so easy to focus on the things that you are choosing to do every day. That doesn't necessarily mean those are the things that matter the most for your business. And zooming out and figuring out what the metrics are that you need to look at either day to day, week to week, month to month to make sure your business is growing and going forward, that's key. That's the, to me, that's the takeaway there. So thank you for that.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And take it, you know, from someone who's spent, spent a large part of their life flying by the seat of your pants, to use your term. It is really good advice.

That's me. Absolutely.

That's why. Yeah, that's difficult. I mean, it is very difficult. Especially I'm a, I realized a long time ago I'm a top line, you know, revenue generating person and I, if I don't have a bottom line person helping me, I'm in big trouble. Someone that can do the, that, that planning and look at those metrics because I often think, oh, as long as I keep growing sales, I'm going to be fine. And that's not always the case.

Yeah, it's true, it's true.

That is, that is very true. Because I mean, you have all these variables like customer acquisition cost, how much does it cost you to onboard somebody and how much do you spend on keeping a customer happy. And oftentimes if you have these metrics, it also equips you with valuable information. If you, you have to renegotiate terms with a customer that you may have onboarded to say, oh, I just want this Name, I want this client. And then all of a sudden you realize you're actually losing money on that relationship. And if you know your metrics, you can go to that client and say, hey, this is how it looks like I'm losing money on you. So in order to create a win win scenario for both of us, this has to change. And, and you would be surprised. Most people are actually quite amenable to that. Yeah.

Plus you can show them the data. I think that's great. Guido, thank you again for coming on the show. I think that Bento for Business, you have a really unique and solution that could be really helpful for every business. What's the best way for our listeners to connect with you and to learn more about Bento for Business?

So they should definitely visit us on the web. We're actually in the process of rolling out a new website. It's about a month away, so come back often. It's bentoforbusiness.com and if any of your listeners have any direct questions, my email address is Guido. G u I d oentoforbusiness.com.

Awesome.

That's awesome. Thanks again. We've learned a lot and you've taken, like you said, a subject that can be not as exciting, but built a real great message around it and a great product. So thank you again.

Thank you. It was a pleasure being on. Thank you.

What a fascinating business, man. I, I, it is. You know, that whole cash leakage thing like that resonated with me so much.

You know, that's, that's the story. Right. I mean, what a great way to, you know, metaphor to use.

Yeah.

On why you need our, why you use our service. And, you know, it's going to pay for itself because you're going to be able to tighten up all these things. And the minute I was at their website, like I said during the interview, and I saw the process and I was just like, oh, wow, I can use this. You know, 20 years ago, of course, technology probably wasn't there, but just seems so helpful.

It's so helpful. Yeah, you know, I, I think it's great. I think it's great. I do, I do have one piece of advice and I hate to, I probably should have done this in the middle of the show so that he could at least defend himself while he was here. Because Guido said, you know, we have a new, we're in the process of launching a new website. I feel like that's 100% true, 100% of the time, of 100% of all small Businesses or all businesses.

True.

And. And I don't know that it's all that worthwhile to tell people that. That like just launch it.

Yeah. You're interested into. Well, yeah. Cuz I mean you might think like, I mean, I thought their website was awesome.

Yeah, I did too.

See what happens as. When we're on if. As your. It's your site. Right. It's Guido's site now right under his thing. So he's on it probably all the time. And so he's thinking, oh, I can't wait for. We have this new stuff on here where it was just new to me yesterday. So. Yeah, but a great guy.

No, great guy. Yeah. But you. You're right. That's the thing is you, you know, it's just like telling customers we have a new products coming out. It's like, well. Or a new version of that coming up. Well, then I'll wait. Should I not get. Yeah, that's don't wait. Like don't wait. We got you covered. This website's fine. The next one's also going to be fine. Like just. It'll be there when you see it. There you go.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. I love having them on the show. Yeah. Good stuff. Because we don't connect with a lot of of, you know, CEOs. We tend to talk to founders and that kind and marketing folks. So it's great to get that different take on things. And he had some great advice for. For all of us.

Yeah.

Some advice I'd like to give our listeners is please go leave us a five star review on the podcast choice of or podcast directory of your choice and you can link to any of those at BusinessShow Co reviews and we would love your help. It only takes a few minutes and it really makes a big impact on how many people get to get this advice from people like Guido.

Yeah, exactly. All right, folks, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Thanks for listening. Let us know what you think. Feedbackusshow. Co. Of course. Check out our sponsors, directmailmac.com SBS and smilesoftware.com SBS thanks so much for listening. Keep living that charmed life. We'll see you next time.