From a $1.7b B2B Exit to Pro Sports League - Flint Lane - Major League Table Tennis - Episode #62

I just say you gotta start stacking wins, right? So any business is a combination of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of decisions, millions of small little victories. You just gotta get moving like start stacking.

Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast. I'm your host, David Politis. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders and get the true stories, the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys.

Today's guest has a unique combination of entrepreneurial energy, visionary thinking and operational excellence. Flint Lane is best known as the founder and longtime CEO of Bill Trust, a company he built over two decades into one of the leaders in B2B payments. Bill Trust helped businesses automate their order to cash cycle everything from sending invoices to collecting payments to applying cash, making it faster and easier for companies to get paid. Under his leadership, Build Trust scaled to hundreds of millions in revenue, went public and was later acquired by EQT Private Equity in a $1.7 billion deal. Flint ran the company for more than 20 years, guiding from a scrappy startup into an industry that defining business. After stepping away from Build Trust, he turned his sights to a very different business. In 2023, he launched major League Table Tennis. His goal is to build professional table tennis into a major spectator Sport in the U.S. he also serves as a board member for a number of fast growing technology companies and nonprofits. Please welcome Flint Lane.

David, thanks for having me. This is going to be fun. We've spent some time in the past talking and I know we're going to hit it off wonderfully.

We would. This could probably be like a five, five hour episode, but I'm going to try to keep it to, to an hour. So first question I ask everyone, what is the one thing you've done, big or small, that's had the biggest impact? And you do again if you're CEO of another company in the future.

Yeah, I was thinking about this question and I actually learned this. I had this crazy seventh grade teacher who was, he thought he was a wizard and he used to like explain what all these crazy concepts to us and he would give us these arcane teaching and we'd have to learn these big words. But there was this, a line we learned back then which was a journey of a thousand mile begins with a single step and it's attributed to Sun Tzu. To make it more simple, I just say you gotta start stacking wins, right? So any business is a combination of hundreds of thousands if not millions of decisions, millions of small little victories. You just gotta get Moving, like start stacking. Like, I wouldn't know how to build an office tower. Right. But somebody does, right. They come up with blueprints, they break ground, they do their thing. But when you're building a business, like, yeah, you could like spend a year coming up with the perfect plan, but I think that's a mistake. Like you got to do a little upfront thinking about exactly what you're trying to accomplish. But start stacking wins. Get a URL, pick a name up with a website, come up with the design, come up with a pricing model. Just start stacking. You're likely going to get some of them wrong anyway. You might as well get moving.

I, I love that, I think that I. Especially when you have a first time founder, what I see is sometimes they almost get paralyzed by, I have to make it perf, I have to make my pricing model. So now I'm going to spend the next however many weeks trying to figure out and optimize this. And I need to figure out this. I need to. And, and I, I love when you say, because there's something about pace, when you say stacking wins. Like I think pace and just, there's a, there's something happening and momentum being built. And I, I think it's such a simple but powerful way to, to get across what's needed to be successful, especially starting from nothing.

Yeah. And I think many of your listeners likely have worked at big companies. I know I've worked at big companies where it takes forever to make any decision. And these are not hard decisions. Right. The information is there, but you also need to push that decision making down and let other people make those quick decisions. Like all the decisions are coming to me, that's a huge disaster. So I want a culture of quick, rapid, intelligent decision making because I think if we can do that, we're going to make progress one way or the other.

So very tactically, when you think about this as your company, I mean you scaled, you must have had how many thousands of employees, how many did you have at the peak of Build Trust?

We had about 1250.

1250. So when you get to that scale, how. For not even that scale, we're talking about even hundreds of people. Like, how do you track those wins or share those wins or make the rest of the company feel that momentum?

It's certainly not just one thing. Right. You want a constant stream of communication. Depending on your company size, it's going to be a different cadence. At Major league table tennis, we have weekly all hands meetings. Everybody is on the Call every week. I work with another company. They do it. They're like 12,000 people. They do a daily all hands call. If you can't make it, you can't make it. But they rotate different people in. So at, at Build Trust, we got down to monthly. Cause it was. And in hindsight I think we should have done it more frequently. But we made it a production, right? So we had 60 minutes to spend and I thought of it like a, a TV show. Almost like we have a opportunity to be in front of all 1200 people. What do we want to tell them? So we would solicit input from the management team on like, okay, what are the topics for this month that are important to, to bring home? Who do we want to be on the All Hands? Meeting, presenting to the company? Like, people don't want to hear from me all the time. Yeah, I'm going to kick it off and I'll do different things.

Then we did one of them and it was kind of bad. And I'm like, okay, idiot. Like, of course it was bad. These people aren't used to presenting in front of that many people. Over zoom or in person, whatever. You got to do a dry run. So we then started doing practice dry runs on that, which I'm sure you, you do with, you know, a lot of things that you've done throughout your career. But the All Hands is just one tool at your disposal. You know, we try to over communicate via email or we try to over communicate via Slack. I am a transparent leader. I tell everybody everything. Like if I'm stressed about something, I'm going to share with, hey, I'm really feeling anxious about the following thing that might influence my behavior today. I'm giving you a heads up on that right now.

On the All Hands. So I am such a believer. I used to do all hands kind of. I would show up and I would talk to people and that would kind of be it. But it was not produced. And I always remember the moment, always. I always use this example. I went to a CEO roundtable and I was sitting next to the, at the time, the CEO of the Philadelphia 76ers. And he said, we have this All Hands meeting that we do and we treat it like a full production.

Yeah.

He said, we have two smoke machines. He's like, we're giving awards to the top salespeople every, you know, week or whatever. And when he described, and he said we do dry runs. And when he said that, I was like, oh my God, I, I have to change how I Think about this. All hands to be this production. Literally that's the, the word. And, and it changed everything. And we started to prepare weeks in advance, get the different speakers prepare, make the slides look nice. And, and I had people tell me I loved our. Like someone said like I enjoyed coming to the All Hand because I came out energized.

Yeah. People didn't want to miss it. Right. It's not, oh my God, it's going to be an hour meeting. I can't believe I have to sit through this. Like something exciting is going to be said. And you know, the people who present, they get to, you know, be in front of their peers and they feel awesome about it. Yeah. And I like, I think for, you know, if you're a five person company, probably don't stress that much about it. But as you continue to scale, there's this great book we've talked about what Got yout Here Won't get you There by Marshall Goldsmith. And you know, the things that you do as a five person company are not the same as 50, which are not the same at 250 or not. Like you're always rethinking your ideas and the all hands is a perfect one for that.

And when you said, then you said about the transparency, which kind of a separate topic, but it is an important one. Have you always been a transparent leader like that where you would say, hey, this is what's stressing me out. This is why I'm acting this like, have you, has that always been just your M.O. or did you develop that?

I think it is a function of being under a management team. That was the opposite, honestly. So I worked at a software company in the early 90s. Oh my God. Now I'm really aging myself. And the two founders of the business would not share with the team what was going on. Like we fired our head of sales, we put in our top sales leader as the head of sales, which most people know is often a mistake. Right. What makes a great salesperson is not a great sales leader. And I'm at the time, I don't know, 24 year old, 25 year old software developer. And I knew that. Right. And nobody said anything about it. I'm like, this can't be the right way to run a business. So I think I developed that over time reading hundreds of business books and learning, you know, the different options available to you. Because I remember, I don't remember who told me this, but I was trying to pretend to be somebody I wasn't. Right. I was like oh, let's go be like Jamie Dimon. He's amazing, right? Like, no, I can only be the best Flint Lane I can be. And for me, transparency just works. And I think it's probably been that way for 20 plus years. A function of, you know, being on a team where it was the opposite.

And do you feel like it takes what I have seen when I transitioned from being kind of closed off to being transparent. And I came for me because I was so stressed by holding everything on my own shoulders. And an advisor said, why are you. If you tell the team, they probably have the answers in some cases. But when I made that shift, I remember people.

It was like jarring a little bit because I would maybe say too much, you know, and I would share kind of too much and it'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, is something wrong? Are we all, are we going out of business? When in reality, you know, that was just. And so I, I've had to kind of evolve that over time, I guess. My question is, do you do something to prepare people for that? Do you give them some disclaimer? Do you, you know, or, or they just get used to that working with you?

I think when we do our new employee onboarding at BuildTrust, it was a very formal process at MLTT, we're like 20 people, so they should sort of show up at the all hands. And what we do is say, okay, we have a new person starting today. We're going to go around the horn. Everybody's going to say what their name is, what they do here, how long they've been at MLTT. And it's sort of like our introduction at BuildTrust, we had a formal one week program where, you know, we would educate them on the benefits and the different departments and then they would have meet the executives and the executives would come in. I mean, we'd explain a little bit about our culture, but that was baked into the values. Like, we haven't talked about that yet. Like mission and values. Oh my God. I thought those were the stupidest things. Those are the things you write down, you put in your drawer and you never think about. And I think we hit probably 25, 30 people. And one of my board members, I went to it and I'm like, listen, we're struggling getting people to make decisions the way we want them to make decisions. They're like, yeah, idiot. Like, that's cold. Values. Like, if you don't write down your values and codify them, how can you expect them to know how to make decisions? Like, are you going to talk to everybody all the time. So that was kind of a light bulb moment for me around mission and values and now we take those very seriously. We talk about them all the time and transparency is one of those.

So you, so you mentioned, I mean you've been through building this multi hundred hundreds of millions revenue over a thousand employees. Now you're back at the beginning 20 people. Did you write down mission values day one?

I think within a couple months, yes. Until we had employees it kind of didn't matter.

Do you think those values, are they very different? Build trust to the new company. Like is that or are they in your, you know, I don't know if that makes sense.

It does make sense. So I am surprised how much is similar between running a software company and running professional sports organization. Me, the CEO. Like so 80% of the job is about the same. Hiring great people, setting clear direction, keeping KPIs. I would say there's a fair amount of overlap between the values of what they're trying to explain to people. Like are they different words? Of course they're different words. There's some differences. But the culture that I wanted to build for us, we were one of the best places to work. I want people to feel like this is the best job they ever had and the values support that.

I love it. And when, when in terms of the. I'm going to back to the all hands for a second because again I'm so, I am very obsessed with it now.

When did you start that? At 5 people? 10, 15? Just now at 20. Like when did you start your. Your now? Like when did you start them?

Well, I, I was a, I was a failed entrepreneur when I started build trust so I didn't know anything. I had, I had a dot com that over. We raised way too much money, made all sorts of first time entrepreneur. We literally raised like $100 million and spent it on radio ads throughout America and we knew everything until we didn't. Right. So I couldn't get a job after that and I actually tried to get a job and ultimately nobody wanted to hire me. So I had to start build trust. I did that as a sort of backup plan. So I was a failed entrepreneur and I think over first 10, 15 years developed a playbook on how to become a better CEO. All of those lessons I get to plug in instantly. So the, the pace of all the important culture benefits of culture attributes is way different here.

That's why I wanted to ask you because now you, you know, you have all that experience.

Yeah, we had we had an all hands right away. You know, stock options for everybody right away. Like, all the things that you learn are important to the kind of company you want to run. You get to just bang those out.

Right. And then on the people front, like you said, I think the common theme. I've done 60 of these episodes, like, people is always the number one thing. And even in the days of AI and it doesn't matter. Like, at the end of the day, you're building a company, the people that's going to be the differentiator.

When you think about that, how do you go looking for those people? You've hired so many people. You have the pattern recognition of who's been successful, who hasn't been successful. What is it that you look for when you're hiring today?

Well, first I'd start with, don't be so hard on yourself. There's anybody who says they have a perfect track record of hiring is just a liar. So if you can get to 70 or 80%, you're doing pretty well.

So past success is the best indicator of future success in the specific function that you're trying to hire. Right. You know, you want to. You know, if you're hiring a programmer, you're asking them to be a product marketing person. That may not equate. Right. It's a different set of skills required there. I would say can do attitude is probably the most important thing for me. My mom used to drill into to me and my two brothers, you can do everything you set your mind to. And I used to torture my kids on that as well. Which was anytime they said, oh, I can't do that, I would make them say, my name is Amanda Lane and I can do anything I set my mind to. And I wouldn't let them off the hook until they said that. But I want employees that have that can do attitude, that feel like, yeah, of course we can build a professional table tennis league, launch them within six months. Why can't we? In fact, we had some advisors that said, wait until the following September. We launched in March. We were live with matches in September. They're like, you should wait a year. I'm like, we're not waiting. Are you kidding me? Like, let's get moving here. Like, we'll figure this out. I'm, um. And I want that can do attitude. So how do you figure out, do they have the can do attitude? Like, I want to ask them questions about, like, what's the hardest thing you've ever tried to pull off? Give me some examples of some hard things you tried to pull off where you didn't succeed. In retrospect, what happened? Like, did you overestimate your capabilities? Was it impossible to achieve? Like, I, I want to hear how they think about things. Even with, you know, interviewing hundreds of or thousands of people still at 70 or 80%.

Do you have. First of all, I want to say this. So growing up my father had that same thing where he just said to me, you can do anything that you put your mind to. And that's, that's how I grew up. And if you say it enough, actually if it's being told you enough, you, you do believe it and you start to, to think that way. And it's, I've done the same thing. I think my kids are, you know, very already at this age, sick of me saying that to them all the time.

You know, let me interrupt you right there because my daughter just ran a triathlon, my son ran a half marathon, and my middle kid just graduated from law school. And all of them have success in different ways. And they define success in different ways. But I was at my daughter's triathlon and she's this little five foot nothing kid. I'm like, man, I could never run a triathlon. She made me say it.

I said it. I still don't think I can run a draft.

So in terms of the interviews, are there other specific questions? Do you ask the same set of questions? Do you have different interviews for different kind of functions? How do you think about that?

Yeah, I think it depends on the function. Let's take a at build trust. We would onboard big enterprise customers and we would have these two to three month projects that we'd have to run to get, let's say it was Home Depot or Under Armour or some big company onto our platform. And it required some very disciplined organizational skills. So I would ask them about how do you stay organized? I want to hear how do they keep track of things? Well, you know, I have seven to do lists. Like, okay, that's a yellow flag. Like you could only have one to do this. Well, I write things down on a blackboard that I don't have access to all the time. I want to hear like, so I'm like a hyper organized for. I want to hear about their inbox. Like I'm a zero inbox guy. Like, I want enough. Like, and today I'm at like 12 and it's really annoying me. I have a friend that has like 600,000 unread emails and it gives me anxiety just thinking about his phone. Now, salespeople, like, okay, like they're going to be like that a little bit. As long as they're writing down their activities in Salesforce, I'm okay with that. But a project manager, forget it. I used to ask this question which I was told I wasn't allowed to ask anymore was, do you fold your underwear, David, do you fold your underwear?

Yes, I do.

I don't fold my underwear. But that was a, that was a dead ringer for. Aren't they hyper organized? Because if you're willing to fold your underwear, you're going to be pretty organized.

Do you. You've seen, again, it's amazing because you've seen this every stage of companies and including a company that failed, like, you've seen all of that. Do you think it's different people who are successful early stage versus later stage? And how do you balance that?

Oh, 100%. I mean, the data is crystal clear on that. And you know, we'll get back, getting back to this book. So we made the Inc. 500 list back in 2006 and I got to see Marshall Goldsmith speak and he was like, congratulations, everybody. You've done some amazing things. And those same things are going to cause you to be a failure. Let me show you the data behind this. Here's how companies scale. You know, it's this step function. And if you bring the same set of skills as a CEO of a startup, as the CEO of a public company, that ain't going to work right. So you have to bring a different set of skills.

And I imagine that's true in sports and lots of other things. But you know, as a startup CEO, like I'm hands on. I'm like the official scorer at matches. I'm doing lots of different things. But if I'm doing that as a CEO of a public company, like, okay, oh my God, like I got to focus on, you know, talking to shareholders and things like that. So I think the recognition, it's not per. It's not like you're saying, okay, I will never do these things again. It's a recognition that those things required to get from zero to a million revenue, really freaking hard. You know what's harder? Getting from 1 to 5. You know what's even harder?

Getting 5 to 10.

And it just keeps getting harder and okay, suck it up and get moving.

Do you, when you think about it, the people that you hire, like executive team members, when you think about that, I mean, build trust. 20 years. How many executive teams cycles did you.

Go through yeah, that was hard. That was hard. When I used to say, you know, there's only one thing harder than letting somebody go who's been with you for a long time, has done amazing things, is not letting them go. Right. Because you owe it to the team, you owe it to the shareholders, you owe it to the company to make sure you have the best people in the seats at the right time.

So we had.

Probably five CROs, I would say one was bad and the other four were great for the scale that they were at. Chief Revenue officers. We had three CFOs, all who did fantastic work for us. But the company got too big at some point and we needed somebody with a different set of skills. We had one.

Chief human resource officer, chief people officer, you know, her name is Jeannie o'. Connor. She came in as a HR admin and she just kept scaling and scaling. She was with us for 17 years and she was amazing. Like, you know, she did all of the recruiting on LinkedIn and then she's running, you know, she had a team of 25 people managing a team of 1250 globe. But to look back at, you know, the CEOs as well, I was waiting for that tap on my shoulder from the board members as well, like, hey, Flynn, it's time for somebody else, because your skills no longer work for this company size. And as a large shareholder, I was open for that. Like, at some point, if I'm not the right guy to be running this business, then please tell me. And I've been part of some boards where we've had to have those uncomfortable conversations with founder CEOs, and it's not good. Like, it sucks, but it's kind of on them to constantly reinvent themselves or that happen on the shoulder is going to happen.

That Chief people officer.

That is. That is rare that someone can actually do what you just said and scale that whole way. Like you just mentioned, there's multiple of this role, multiple of this, but this person scaled. What do you think she had.

That allowed her to do that?

I imagine most people know what imposter syndrome is at this point, but, like, you have this deep nagging feeling that you're faking people in your role, but it's not have it or don't have it. It is, how bad is your case of imposter syndrome? And she had a wicked case of imposter syndrome and always felt like, oh, my God, somebody's going to figure me out. And that drove a lot of her other behaviors, which were getting a mentor outside of the business, reading books, asking good questions and being in a constant state of reinvention. I have the wicked case of imposter syndrome. I was middle of three boys at a relatively under resourced family growing up on Long island. And I'm still trying to prove to those high school kids that I'm worried. And I think that. Is that. That chip on your shoulder that you talk about, right? Do they have the chip on their shoulder? It's tough to get a chip on your shoulder, but it's pretty easy to test for that.

Getting the, you know, in the people I've seen who have done that scaling, almost everyone has that. I mean, for. I'm the same way with the imposter syndrome. I have it very badly, but the people have been successful. I think it's the outside person who's done it before, who's not, at least in my experience, not just like an executive coach, but someone who's actually been through the journey that you're going through as a chief people officer, chief revenue, and can really help you along that way. Because you can't, you don't know what's around the corner. It's a, it's impossible until you get there. And someone who's seen that, at least I, I think that that's a big. Now that you're saying it, I, I'm thinking to myself, all the people I've seen scale and they all have had that really good kind of mentor, I.

Think, I think it's spot on. But they also need to want it. Right. So I'm a big believer in like being a lifetime learner. You know, I'm always reading books, I'm still reading books. I have a board that I attracted like within three months of people who knew things about sports that I didn't know. Right. So I need to surround myself with people who are smarter than me in certain areas. You need to be willing to be vulnerable and say you don't know. Right. If you're coming off like all, you know, brazen, that you know everything, like that's not a good recipe. And what she did was she took coaching well, but I couldn't coach her to be a great GP people officer. I don't know what that is. Right. I could give her, you know, different advice and different sort of things. I'm like, you need to go find people who have done this job before and that's the job like for the next three years, but after that it's probably going to be somebody else. Much like when CEOs are creating their directors. Like you got to like think of that board as a weapon and find people who seeing that journey so you can ask them good questions.

Do you last question on this is do you how much succession planning did you do at Build Trust for the executive team since you knew that there was going to be these different stages, how much did you do if you did it and then when did you start that succession planning?

I would say not much honestly. Like, I would like to say that I had a know a piece of paper I could pull out and say, okay, well this person goes down like this next person is in. I probably thought about it.

I think early days, you know, you've got such a light team that you know, loss of anybody is going to be, it's.

Going to be hard.

But we were also not, you know, Ford Motor Company with you know, hundreds of thousands of people having to think about it. So.

Right, right.

I probably could have thought about that some more.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's something that I didn't think about actually until Vista bought the company and then they kind of, they made it a part of the board decks, you know, in the part of the board meetings. And when you do start thinking about it, it does highlight usually a lot of gaps.

You know, that's also Vista, you know them and they're. Yeah, yeah, they've got a plate for everything.

That's true. So how much. Let's talk about, I want to talk about board and fundraising and all that how Build Trust. Can you give me a little bit of the history of kind of the funding of the company and, and, and how did that work?

So started in September of 2001. We actually 24 years ago on September 1st was the founding of Build Trust in my basement. And one of the first moves I did was I hired an advisory board and it was equity only. If people want to make cash from your startup, that's probably not the right kind of person you want on your board. We didn't have the formality of a board of directors. I called it an advisory board but for all intents and purposes it was a board of directors. I met quarterly with them. I would reach out for them, you know, on different issues on a regular basis. But after my debacle at PayTrust, my first company where we over capitalized, I was, I sort of swore off venture capital. Like in my mind venture capital was bad. It wasn't only wasn't until later that I realized, well, there's good and bad venture capital, just like there's good and bad private equity, good and bad leaders. So we bootstrapped for the first five years and didn't raise. We raised $4 million in our first 11 years. And there's no prizes for bootstrapping. There's no prizes for raising $4 million in your first 11 years. There's no prizes for raising $100 million in your first six months. There's prizes for building a great business. So my journey and our journey was very different than a lot of people. You know, that is a very conservative path. Raising $4 million in 11 years. The next 10 years were a bit crazier. We raised, I think $100 million privately and then $200 million in our. In our public offering. But we then embarked on an M and a strategy where we were acquiring. We acquired 10 companies to build up scale in a variety of different areas.

But I am very open minded about that. I hear people say, yeah, we did this all without raising any money. Good for you. We did this all. We have this great investor. Good for you. But like, the act of raising or not raising capital is not an indicator that you're going to be successful. Right. So figure out what the right path is for. You know, what you're getting it to find the right partners for that board. Like raising money for people who are going to drive you crazy at your board. Oh, my God, you're better off writing a large conference.

Did those advisory board members become actual board members at any point or were they always in this unofficial kind of capacity?

Two of the three did, but eventually rolled off the board once the company size was beyond their understanding or capabilities. And that was also a hard conversation.

You know, I'm sure that was.

Yeah, we would routinely. I remember talking to this guy, Chris Sudin from Edison Partners. They were our investors in 2006 and I think they invested 4 million bucks, something like that. At the time, it was a lot of money and like, okay, we're going to want two seats. And I was like, oh my God, no way am I giving you two board seats. It's like, Flynn, calm down. Let me explain. One is for me. Great. Okay. And one is for an Edison Director network member. Nope, not doing it. Like, you're not getting another seat. Flynn, calm down. Let me explain what this Edison Director Network is. Is people who have been CEOs of companies who've scaled. And if like can give you good advice, I'm like, all right, I'll talk to somebody. Anyway, so I got this lady, Diane Smith, who had built this great payroll company, sold it to ADP and had been on this great journey where she saw a lot of the things that I was about to see. And thank God I ultimately agreed with Chris to do this because it opened my eyes to how much value board members could have.

I've been working with a Bootstrap founder who actually just did what you just said, which is they got a group of three people together and said, I want to create a board, but non governing board, but I want to be accountable and I want to have quarterly meetings and I want to have, you know, the, the, I want to put the deck together and report. And I, I said to them, I said, that's like one of the most mature things I've, I've seen. Like when you don't. He's taking $0, doesn't need to do that. But he said, I need this accountability, this cadence, this reporting structure. And I love that. I was actually, I haven't seen many people do it, but then you just said, it's kind of what you did day one.

I've also seen the flip side where people raised money and had a board, but it was simply a thing on a website. And you go to these quarterly meetings, they wouldn't listen. And you know, they had all the answers. And I'm like, what am I doing on this board? Like.

You know, I had a board member once told me, like, I'm gonna tell you lots of things. If you listen to everything, that's a mistake. If you listen to nothing, that's also a mistake. Right. You've got to figure out which of those things you want to listen to.

Yeah. Do you, do you.

When you say that, I really, I think that you don't get a prize for bootstrapping, you don't get a prize for raising $500 million. Like that is.

At least in today's world on LinkedIn and everything, people are like literally celebrate themselves and pat themselves on the back for those, for those things. If I'm a new founder coming to you and I'm thinking about starting a business, I know you talk to a lot of founders. Like someone comes to you and is asking for your advice. How do you help them through that.

Thought process, you know, of which is right for them?

I asked them to explain why they want to do what they're suggesting. Like often it's the question, like, we're trying to raise an angel round of $2 million. Like, okay, why? Because we need to do some hiring. Okay, why? Well, because, you know, that's what other companies have done. Okay, bad reason. Right. You know, if the reason is because we need to build out the tech in a certain way so that accomplish this big thing that's key to our mission, or we've just started to get product market fit and we desperately need to hire some salespeople. Okay, that's a good reason too. But like, if you just keep asking why, ultimately, if they can't get to the final answer of like, this is so important to building a success, then it's a yellow.

You went public before you were acquired. When you were a public company, was that always your goal? Did you want to be a public company CEO? Did you want to build a public company?

I would say, deep down, being the insecure guy I was, I would say yes. I thought it was a good thing to have in my belt. Right. You know, I, you know, I was the CEO of a company that went public. That felt good.

But it was also, that was, I'd say, a small piece of the decision making. You know, we were in this cycle where we were doing acquisitions. We were rolling up smaller businesses, putting them on our platform that we could get this arbitrage opportunity where we would pay one to three times revenue. And we were seven to 10 times revenue because of our scale. And we would have to raise money privately all the time to do that. Right. Because these private companies, they're not going to take private shares from build trust. But as a public entity, yeah, we could certainly issue shares to do that. So there was a thesis behind being a public company was a better strategy for what we were trying to do to build and scale. But it most certainly wasn't an exit. People talk about an IPO being an exit. Yeah, my God, not at all. Like, you think if you're the CEO, you're going to start selling shares when you're public and not like crush your stock price. Forget it. Right. But it was a strategic decision to help the company grow even faster because now we had currency for M and A in the public stock. But it did feel pretty good as a CEO.

And how long were you public for?

For maybe about a year and a half. So we went public. At the time it was 2021. And Spax for the rage and SPS are now back in the. But for like a couple years, it was like, oh my God, that's the worst thing ever. And going public was not the goal. Being public was the goal. And there's lots of ways to go public. You can go public through the traditional banker route. You could do a Dutch auction. You could do a spac. And the SPAC economics were ridiculously favorable for companies. They gave you certainty, they gave you a price. It was a quick earn out. It was a great way for us to quickly turn into a, from a private company to a public company without a lot of risk. So no regrets about that. Stock went out at 10 bucks, quickly went up to like 16, 17 bucks. And then all the fintech companies, regardless of how they went public, got crushed. So we were trading in like five bucks a share and we're public for maybe a year and a half. And I started to get these inbounds from these private equity firms, like, hey, have you considered going private? I'm like, can you give me a minute? We just went public and we've done everything we told Wall street we were going to do. And the company was doing really well, yet the price was at five bucks a share. So after we got a couple of those, they were offering 10 bucks a share, we were at 5 bucks a share and we had issued more shares that was actually higher than we had gone public. The board concluded we need to hire a banker. Really explore this because 100% premium is too much to say, no sir.

And so you ended up with eqt?

Yes.

And that was through a banker process. You actually ran a process.

So I think we publicly disclosed that we got two or three of these inbound letters that was, they were formal letters that once they send you a formal letter as a public company, you have to disclose that to your board. You're under no obligation to take those offers. Like they could offer 10 times your stock price. You're not obligated to do that.

But after our second or third, we decided, okay, we're going to hire JP Morgan as our banker. They had done some other work for us. They're exceptional and run a official process to figure out what the real price is. Because what will happen is, and people who've raised money know this, like people, we'll talk about a great price, but you know, once you see a term sheet, well, that's not what we talked about. So how real was these, were these prices that they were throwing around? So we ran a process for three months. There were two contenders. At the end, EQT wanted to bring in their own CEO. And the other said, we're not doing this unless you stay. And they were 20% less than EQT. I'm like, all right, I guess we're going with EQT.

That was an immediate transition that you, that you made after the EQT deal.

We announced in September of.

22 that we were getting acquired. It took three months to close. And then we announced that when we were private, we were under no public disclosure responsibilities. And we let the company know a new CEO was going to be brought in. And at the beginning, I was a little saddened by that process. Like, what do you mean? You don't think I could be a good private equity company CEO? Right. We were going to be a quiver. And in hindsight, I served on the board for about a year and a half. I would have been a really bad private equity CEO because the private equity firms like to be very involved. That's their M.O. you talked about Vista. They have a playbook. And that was not my thing. I love having a board. I love having an idea, ideas from them on how to run the business. But it's the management team's responsibility to run the business, not the board's. The private equity model is just a little different, wouldn't it, for me?

And when you, I mean, that's 20.

Years, two decades, probably not probably enough time to be running an accounts receivable software company. Like, I think we're all thinking, oh, I could just run a B2B payments company. My life will be full.

Now, in terms of.

At Build Trust, what was the biggest challenge in you faced in two decades? I'm sure many, but, you know, what was the biggest challenge you faced?

So many challenges that we had, but the ones that come in mind are the life or death challenges. So we had two life or death challenges. I'm talking like, the business could be going under right now. We had a, a malware attack from a group out of Russia. I got a call at 6 in the morning from our CIO saying, hey, we're under a malware attack. I'm like, okay, well, we got backups. He's like, no, it's spreading now through our entire network. I'm like, all right, what are we going to do? I'm a technical guy, but I don't know all the advanced things. I thought we were well protected. We had firewalls, we were PCI compliant. We did all the things we were working with. I think we sent out a trillion dollars worth of invoices. We probably processed hundred billion dollars worth of payments, something like that. So, like, we were vetted by banks and like big companies.

But, you know, the bad guys don't care. And if you, you, you can read in the news, like, the bad guys get into lots of bigger companies than us, right? The banks get attacked all the time. Anyway.

They, we, we were worried about recovering from this, but we were mostly worried about are they going to get into the money flow, start stealing the company, the customers money.

Right.

We've got so much money flowing through our system. So we will take money from our customers and then send it to customers customer. And that's lots of money flowing. And we quickly determined that the bad guys really didn't know what they were doing. I can't believe I'm saying that. Jinx. And they were just unleashing some kind of vector attack that they bought from somebody else. They probably had 10 companies going on. They weren't communicating effectively with us. By the time they got back to us, which was like five o' clock that night, we recognized that they hadn't gotten to the crown jewels, which were the payment accounts were the money. And we were able to recover. Now recover was a one month until we were sort of fully back. But we were down hard for two days and fully down, fully down. And these are the online billing sites for Coca Cola online billing sites or.

CDW computers. So hundreds of thousands of small businesses couldn't go to the businesses they transacted with. Those were our sites. Like we boosted branded experiences for all those big companies. We had about a thousand customers. And it was brutal. Like, and then I would, when I went to bed thinking, okay, now they're going to get into my checking account. They're on my computer. Like it was a life or death experience. And it caused us to rethink our whole strategy around cybersecurity. And we had invested, but we had not invested anywhere near enough. And the, the metaphor I talk about is a castle. Like if you have a castle in the Middle Ages, you don't just have archers, right? You have a drawbridge, you have boiling oil. You have all sorts of defenses on your castle. Because if they breach one line of defense, you want to be able to get the bad guys again. And your cybersecurity is no different. So one of the first things I do when I join a board is I talk about cybersecurity with them because they're like, oh no, we're well protected. I'm like, let me tell you a little story.

In that period, a couple of other CEOs have mentioned similar types of situations. Hard down, massive customers, mission critical product. How did you handle the customer communication during that period of time?

Same way we did with employees. Over, communicate over, communicate over, communicate like day one, day like day one, day one. We were doing hourly emails to Customers we then went to twice a day emails. Same with the board, same with the employees. Because the employees were anxious. Right. You know, you have all these employees, they don't really know what's going on. Here's what we know, here's what we don't know, here's what we're working on. Here is a prognosis. People would always want to know when you're going to be back up. We don't know at this time. Like we were transparent and there's some risk to transparency. We had my president, Steve Fanato and myself really couldn't be hands on with the recovery. Even though I tried. They said go, go away. But my job was to talk to customers. I had 100 calls that first week with customers. Steve had 100 calls with customers that first week. I would say rough Numbers of those 200 calls, 199 of them were supportive. Please help us understand what happened so it doesn't happen to us. And they were awesome about it. And you know, because we live in a, in a tough world where the bad guys are always trying to get in. And I think the CIOs, the CFOs recognize that. And most companies. There was one company that just wanted to just land based us and wanted us to pay them a lot of money.

But I want to talk about that.

Yeah.

Okay. Now let's transition to major league table tennis. So what is, what does that look like? What does this look like in three years? I mean, you, you pretty much just started. He's done a lot in a short period of time, but you've pretty much just started. Where is this three years from today?

So the plan wasn't like exit, build trust and start a Lee. Like my plan was to retire. I was 56 at the time and I retired for three weeks. It was brutal. I remember the day on a golf course where I was golfing, hanging out with three guys after we talked about bitcoin for like two hours. And I was like, yeah, I can't spend the rest of my life doing this. And I know people of my age who retired successfully, God bless them. Like they play pickleball, they play golf and they have a wonderful time in retirement. They're reading more, they're exercising. I'm just not wired for that. Like, why are the Rolling Stones still touring? Because that's what they do. So I went to my wife and I said, I think I'm going to start a pro table tennis league. And she was like, I'm surprised it took you so Long. And I've always been passionate about table tennis. I'm a competitive player, I own a club. And I've always been surprised that nobody has tried to build a pro table tennis league in America. And there are pro leagues all throughout Europe and Asia. And sports is an incredible. You think software is lucrative? Sports is off the chart. Just look at the price the teams are getting right. And I spent two months talking to a bunch of people in sports trying to understand what are the right ingredients. And I'm like, all right, I think table tennis has enough. Let's go. So I would say it is a passion play. But when I hear passion play, there's like a stigmatism to that. Like, oh, I'm doing this because I'm passionate about it. Like, oh, no, this is a real business with a real chance to make, you know, another billion dollar plus market cap and we're going after it.

And so what does it look like? Can you talk a little bit of what does it look like today and how do you think that that's going to. What is it going to look like in three years from today?

Yeah, sure. So we are a single entity league, unlike the big four, baseball, football, hockey, basketball, where there's franchises. Most other sports are single entity leagues where the league controls most of the things. So we hire players, we get the menus, we sell tickets, we sell sponsorships. So we have 10 teams, we have eight athletes per team. So 80 athletes from 40 countries, half of which have played in the Olympics. Teams sell to wealthy owners. They own the team. They're actually investors in the league. Think of it as like an angel investment. They own a piece of the league, plus they have an operating agreement for a team. Over time we'll have 20 to 25 teams. My guess is we are launching a dedicated streaming channel. Most sports have their own streaming channel. We are launching a streaming channel for table tennis that will be global. We're launching a rating system. Most sports have a rating system. Golf has gin G H I N Golf Handicap Index. Pickleball has duper tampon. Tennis doesn't have a global rating system. We're doing that and, oh, it doesn't.

Have it anywhere in the world.

There are lots of countries have different rating systems, but you know, none of them are really scaled like some of the, you know, like the golf, the golf, like 3 million people. The U.S. rating system has like 12,000. Right. And it's not because more people play golf than table tennis. It's just, it's not run like a business. So 10 years from now, you know, this is going to be, you know, the best league on the planet. We, we use the NBA as our sort of guidepost. We're not going to be the NB in 10 years. Like that would be way too arrogant. But we could be tennis in 10 years. We could be as big as tennis.

I, I, I, I watched this whole real sports that was like one of my favorite shows, Real Sports with Brian Gumbel. And they had the one on like the darts.

League, which you know, got pretty, is pretty big. And when you watch those videos, I was, I was telling my kids, I'm like, we're going to see darts. I've never played darts even, you know, it's like, but you can see how those, you know, even that kind of, that's less of a sport, I would say than table tennis.

You know, it's, it's less about being a sport. It's more about what is the fan experience. Right. Do people enjoy themselves?

Right.

Arts is this raucous drinking environment. People are having a blast. And are people really focused on where every dart is going? Probably not.

But you take the Savannah Bananas. Yeah, there's some degree of sport there. They're playing baseball, but it's mostly there is fan and fan entertainment. We probably skew more to sport than fan entertainment. But like it's really important. The fans are having a blast. Like those, right?

Pickleball.

We don't compete against pickleball. We're competing for fans wherever they are. Pickleball has a bit of a watchability issue. Right. People really enjoy playing pickleball, but watching pros dink at the net, back and forth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's my number.

I love table. I mean I watch, I wait for the Olympics. It's funny, my kids like are like, can we watch ping pong, you know, like for the Olympics? And I'll sit there and watch. It's, it is a lot of fun to, to watch like and the speed and the like.

So you remember how I said 80% of the job is the same, 20% is wildly different. How do I convince you to watch our league or come out to one of our matches? I've never sold tickets to live sports before. Right. So that's not him. So we wound up hiring a guy from minor league baseball who was really good at it. Dumb mistake. We're not minor league baseball. We don't have 60 matches in the same venue every year. We were like the circus. We're a traveling show. We have home games all over the place. So we have to build an audience in each of those areas. So we hired a guy from Feld Entertainment. They did like Disney on Ice and Monster Truck Jam. So we're more like that than mine. So anyway, I'm still making those hiring mistakes.

They're just new, so I want to transition to you a little bit. So you mentioned from Long island, middle of three kids have this chip on your shoulder. Like, did you always know growing up that you wanted to be an entrepreneur? Was that in your blood at an early age or did you just happen onto that?

I would say looking back, I could see signs that I probably had it in me. But no way was I thinking that, like I was going to be a software developer. I went, got a computer science degree. I was a programmer. I was good at it. I enjoyed it. Like the computer didn't talk back like my brothers. It just did what I told it to do, as long as I gave it good instructions. And I love that.

And then I recognized my compensation was going to be capped. As a software developer now I need to get into management. So I could, you know, I could program, but then I could like form sentences. And they wanted me to be a development manager. And then ultimately I became like a cio, CTO of a public software company. And I was like, man, this is a great job. I think I'm going to do this. And that company got acquired. Then I wound up co founding this company called Pay Trust. And looking back at some of the things I did as a kid, like I sold greeting cards door to door. I had a painting business, Sunbright Painting, Wally painting at affordable prices, only to find some Benjamin Moore paints. So there was these entrepreneurial things I did that looking back, I'm like, oh, of course I was probably going to be an entrepreneur, but I certainly didn't have that in my head.

Well, did you do that, those things.

With your brothers or did you Door to door greeting card sales and shoveling. I probably had a friend with.

I have a terrible story about selling cigarettes. Where all the people in my town, in my neighborhood, smelled cigarettes and I did not. So I would buy a carton of cigarettes and resell it. By the way, 100%.

Sure I violated a few laws on that one.

Though. Some were with, some were without.

Yeah, co.

The co founder discussion is an interesting discussion. I don't know if we have time for that, but like a lot of people say, oh yeah, I was a solo founder or I have three co founders again, it's like the journey really depends on you. Like which one do you want? And I've done both. And for me, I kind of like the solo founder mode. Like, air all the pressures on me, but I recognize that's just me. Like, and if somebody. That's cool too.

You, you mentioned this kind of anything is possible kind of mindset. Did you. Was that embodied by your parents or by, like, did you see that or was it just being told to you?

I think it was being told to me. But if I didn't have a good appreciation for what my mom was going through, she. My parents got divorced when I was in first grade and my dad did not support us financially. And my mom somehow figured out a way to find childcare for us so she could go back and get her master's degree in library science and get a higher paying job so she can raise us. And my mom used to drive us crazy and she had all these other problems, but, like, you know, she raised three boys on her own. Like that. That story will never change. Like, she went back and got an advanced degree while she was raising three young boys so that she could support us even more. Like, that will never change. So I'm sure that rubbed off on me.

It had to. I mean, so many people that I talk to, it's like, where the work ethic and the. Because this is a shitty. I mean, to start a company and to build something, it's. It's not easy. It's generally shitty. Usually you fail. Like, and you have to have some kind of a grit and some kind of work ethic, and it has to come from somewhere deep down, you know. And so I always find, like, when I ask these questions, it always comes back to some. Usually something someone saw, experienced, usually with their parents, you know, or someone very close.

Did you. Did you have, you know, you through this whole career? I'm sure you had many mentors. Is there like one mentor, one person, a role model, like someone that. That really changed the curve for you?

So many. I'll talk about my. There's this high school teacher. His name was Dr. Dorfman. He was actually the special needs teacher. He helped people who had learning difficulties figure things out. But he's also a complete computer nerd. And they ran out of computer classes in high school. He stopped me one day in the hallway and said, hey, you should come see me. I'm like, all right. Like, why do I want to go see the special needs teacher? Please try the helmet cutter break. It's like, oh, no. I was super into computers and at this time, this is like, 1980, there were no PCs. Things were still very, very early. And I remember he taught me assembly language for the Atari back then. And he made me. He allowed me to dream about having computers as a career, because at the time, like, nobody was going into computers or software as a career like people.

But he was also, like, a mentor. And, like, I had lots of difficulties throughout high school, and I would lean on him, and he. He definitely changed the trajectory of my life.

Did he know? Did he. Did you stay in touch with him?

I did, yeah.

Yeah. We would write letters back and forth.

Wow.

Actually got a job in college programming, and I would talk about that. I put myself through college a little bit on that, so. All because he's starving one day in the hallway.

It's amazing.

You mentioned a little bit before, but, like, what. At your core, what is it that drives you? Is it this chip on your shoulder? The imposter syndrome? The. Like, what. What is. What is it that drives you?

I. I think that provides certain fuel to the fire. But I, I, I like creating, like, and that sounds so trite, like, like, it sounds, like, so over the top. But, like, why don't painters paint? I don't know. Because, like, they like to paint. Like, I like the act of building businesses. I like the constant state of challenges. Like, it's freaking hard. Like, but I'm good at that. Like, this is. I don't know if you've seen this, but there's this college video of some women's college basketball coach where they're talking about, why do we practice? It's not so that the hard stuff becomes easy. It's so that you become good at hard. Right. Like, there's so much hard that is thrown at CEOs all the time. All right, let's go. Let's figure it out. Right? So I've sent that video to my kids, and she sends it a whole lot more eloquently than I just said it. But I like what I do. I like. I like being in business. I like challenges.

I'm sure there's a chip on my shoulder that's still driving some of it, but it's more because maybe this is what I was just supposed to do.

Do you think you'll ever retire?

I hope so, but maybe not. Like, I don't know. Like, I do board work. I find that not as rewarding. But there are many board members that were instrumental in my life growing up, and I feel like sort of a duty to go back and do it. And I enjoy the CEOs who like talking with me. And, you know, we, we get value out of each other. So I'll always do board work for sure. But I don't think I'll be running major league data times till the day I die. But who knows?

Yeah.

Okay, so last question. Knowing everything that you know today and all of your experiences, what is the one piece of advice you would go back and give yourself before you started your first job ever?

That everybody running all those other businesses isn't smarter or better or, you know, better suited to do that job. You had what's inside of you to figure this out. And you can, you can have the confidence to do that. Like, I was lacking a lot of confidence and that's why it took us 11 years. We only raised 4 million in 11 years through built trust. Because I was lacking confidence, I felt like I was a pretender. And it's okay to have that imposter syndrome recognize that. So when I have it now, I'm like, oh, that's just the imposter syndrome talking to me. But if I had known more about imposter syndrome and being able to recognize when it was rearing its ugly head, I think I would have been better off and we probably could have moved faster in hindsight. We had a great business that was at a great exit. No regrets, but understanding how that imposter syndrome can play tricks on you, I think is an important tip.

Flint, thank you very much. I'm really happy that we met and that you're willing to do this with me. I really, I could talk to you for many, many hours. I. There's a bunch of stuff in here that for those listening, I'm sure, like there's gold in this and probably can listen to this a couple times over and pull out things from it. And anyway, so thank you very much for doing this with me.

Been a lot of fun Dame.

Thank you awesome for everyone listening. Hope you enjoyed if you did. Please share this out with your networks and we'll see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please Visit not another CEOPodcast.com we'll see you next week.