Cash Flow Secrets Every CEO Must Know | Karl Maier

Foreign. Hello everyone, from the Big Hitter podcast. I'm Larry Wydell and we're talking to Carl Meyer. Hey, Carl.

Hello. How are you doing, Larry?

You know, Carl, what I was excited about in looking at your bio was I rarely get to meet. Well, two things I rarely get to meet and talk to a financial ninja and somebody who has been behind the scenes and learned the black arts of surviving in the high level financial world. But I'm also excited about the fact that are people listening to this who have maybe companies that are, you know, they're wanting to double, triple, quadruple their size and they don't know what to do next or maybe they're a little distressed and you know, they get some kind of complicated situation, they need a ninja to come in and say, okay, let me help you here. And so it's great to know you exist and I'm impressed with your background and hopefully we'll let a wider audience of people know that you're out there in a case. If they don't need you right now, they know where to get you because you have a very great expertise in running companies. You gotta make decisions in companies and things come at you and opportunities plus problems and surprising situations and you have to adjust, you gotta be able to, you got to make decisions and it affects a whole lot of people. So congratulations on your success. You're fractional CFO and founder of Abundant and you've had all kind of successful impact with your clients in ways you've impacted their business. Seven time turnaround, growth, doubling, tripling, expanding into other markets and even around the world, even with the global scene and some of these multiple working across multiple industries. And so being that kind of turnaround specialist and also in crisis markets, that's, you know, to be able to be a fixer like that is, you know, it's a great skill for companies that are out on a limb and they've got great opportunities, but for some reason, one reason or another, they got themselves in a situation, they don't have time to figure out what to do. They need someone who can come in with the expertise. So congratulations on your career and you know, how'd you wind up doing this? Getting this unique background or track record of experience. How did all this unfold?

Well, I think a lot of it really started when I had my parents kind of twist my arm a little bit to leave, leave corporate, leave the bank I was with and become the CFO for the family's distribution business. And so I learned a lot through that experience. One of the first things that happened a few months, a couple months after I started is somebody threw a rock through the front window of the building, came in and stole all the computers, which included all of our accounting. And this is back before the Internet. And you had backups of everything. And they took all of our accounting, you know, our invoices, what our, you know, who we owed money to, who owed us money. And so we kind of had to recreate the accounting from scratch. So that was a great intro to the real world there.

Baptism by fire for sure. How long had you been working with them?

At this point, about 60 days.

You were kind of bad luck. We hire Carl and then all of a sudden a nightmare happens. Is there somebody that hates Carl or something? At least you got to start with a clean slate, man. You know.

That's right. So we figured it out from there, set up inventory, put in a new accounting system, and started keeping track of everything we, you know, build and every. Everything we owed somebody.

So when you say they had a distribution company, family business, what's that like? What does that mean really?

So my dad had been selling industrial valves and pipes and such for his career, and there was a big downturn in the oil industry and so he lost his job and there weren't any more jobs out there. So he started, you know, entrepreneurial selling, selling the products he knew using the connections he had. And gradually he built the business up. Little by little he had a couple people working with him, and next thing you know, he had 10 people and then second location and starting to grow it. And that's, you know, when I came in and know, helped keep track of inventory, you know, make sure we were invoicing properly, collecting money, getting bank lines so that we could finance the, the inventory in the large orders. And so. And then we, we grew the company from the time I got there, even with losing the accounting system, we, we tripled the revenue. No, in three years, we grew the revenue 5x so very exciting growth. So a lot of, lot of fun there.

What stage was your father at this point where he brought you in? What stage of his career was he, was he trying to get out or did he just. Was he overwhelmed? He needed some help.

So yeah, my, my father, very good salesperson, just, you know, that's what he'd done his whole career, so he really understood sales. But all the rest of this, you know, accounting and banking and, you know, some of the details running the business were just not thing, you know, all the insurance and taxes and he's just Like, I know how to sell, I want to sell. You handle all that, that nonsense. I guess be one way he'd put it.

That brings up an important point that Carl, that the entrepreneurs are usually sales guys and because there's nobody hooks around to sell the product and you know, whatever the idea was that they, they got excited about, they know all the benefits of it and they love talking about it and that kind of makes them good at marketing and sales and all that. But don't like the books, do not like keeping up with the nickels and dimes. And what I used to tell, you know, and that training people for entrepreneurships is like, you're either gonna do the books or you're gonna work for somebody who does. You know, you're either, you know, you're going to either know you're going to know the books or you're going to work for someone who knows the books. And you can, you know, the alternative is to have someone who works for you who can explain the books to you and kind of keep it, keep it up that you could trust that where you don't have to keep such an eagle eye on it. But you got to know the numbers. And I always had the attitude, Carl, that I hated all that stuff too. But we had a great support network and that minimized the kind of things that I had to keep up with. But I had the attitude. I never wanted anybody to know more about my business than me. And I never wanted to be vulnerable to where somebody could come in and say, why are you doing this in 5, 10 minutes asking a few questions or saying, how about this hole over here? How did that happen? I wanted to be aware of all the obvious things. And I think the reason your father, fortunately, he had you as an option to bring in. But not everybody does that. But a lot of times you bring in. How many people do we know that turned keeping up with the books to someone on their salary, on their staff and they got robbed blind. You know, they got embezzled, they got the whole company went down, but their most trusted advisor. That's the extent where I say you got to know the books. Even if you hire somebody, unless it's somebody who's, you know, maybe in your, I guess a son you could trust, a brother. No.

Yeah, I've, I've seen nieces and, you know, siblings and uncles and all sorts of folks who've, you know, walked away from, from companies with money they should never have had their hands on. And it's unfortunate.

Yeah. And so thank goodness for your dad, he was able to bring you in. And when you got in, were you already oriented towards the financial side of things? Had that intrigued you? When did you get intrigued in that? And how did you get the experience where you wound up at the bank?

Well, I guess I started undergraduate, I got a degree in economics and then I went on and got my mba, which beefed up my, you know, accounting, finance, general management type of experience. I went into one of the big accounting firms in their consulting group and then got hired away by a large bank who was a client and worked for them for handful of years. And that's when my, my parents came and twisted my arm. So at that point I already had a CPA designation and worked with, you know, financial management for a number of years. So. Yeah.

And so the way your family looked at it, all of these companies had done them a tremendous favor by getting you this education and experience.

Exactly.

They could bring it back in. And how would you say that experience translated into you being able to impact your family's business in a positive way?

I would say it was pretty substantial, you know, you know, we've already kind of mentioned the systems, computer systems with the, you know, the accounting. So bringing in a, you know, professional level accounting system was one way to keep track of the inventory. We had multiple locations, we were selling internationally, you know, and then managing the cash flow, working with the banks. We had to increase the line of credit substantially in order to keep up with our growth and general financial analysis, just looking for, you know, problems. So, you know, we had, my dad and I had a number of discussions about how much inventory to hold inventory, turning, what's the cost of holding inventory? So that, you know, there's a lot that my, you know, kind of financial analysis experience it had brought me, you know, that I was able to then bring to the business.

So now when you came to the company, you made that change. Did they get you excited about the possibility? I mean, were you excited or it's like, oh Lord, I've got to go bail the family out. You know, they got themselves in a mess or something. I've got to go back and take care of the family business. I'd rather be doing something else. Or did you have a degree of excitement about what could happen here? Did you see potential?

I think it was a, you know, a little of each. You know, there was certainly an element of, you know, I think we've got an opportunity to grow. You know, I knew what a excellent salesperson my, my father was. So I saw the Growth opportunity. But there was also part of me that was not thrilled about, you know, coming to the business. There were definitely family dynamics going on with my sister, mother, father and I all being pretty involved with the business and different roles and so. And it just, it was a, you know, it's a different thing than working kind of in a downtown bank in the high rise corporate environment to working with the family business out in the suburbs and just a different thing, huh?

Well, there the. Also it's easier to be to make decisions about staff and everything when there's not family relationships involved. It's kind of hard to fire your sister, I would imagine.

Right, right. And fortunately that never came up. But, you know, there, there were a lot of discussions where, you know, data may not have been the primary reason the decision was made. It was much more just on emotion, which is things happen that way and there's always emotion indecisions for all human beings. But, you know, the degree, you know, that that happens can really vary.

Yeah, I'm sure you had to bite your tongue, especially getting, getting things going. But how long did it take you to kind of, did you move into a more senior decision making role or was it always a collaborative thing?

Well, you know, when I came in, I certainly, you know, was the chief financial officer. I was financial expert for sure. You know that we had some clerks that were doing billing and payables and the like. So from a financial point of view, I was certainly kind of the expert. But my, you know, my father always retained that, you know, decision making authority. You know, he's going to make any, any call. He, you know, that he wants to override my decision.

Let's touch on this. Every company that's going to survive has got to have a stellar person in the sales role, in the marketing role, the face of the company out there. That because you got to have clients coming in from the outside. Looking at your father, you know, from the financial side, CPA side of things, looking back, what do you think made him a outstanding salesperson? What did he have going for him?

I think he had a really good ability to create an emotional connection with the, with the buyers in the industrial companies that he was working with. He came from a working class background and understood kind of that mentality of where, where these people were coming from that had worked hard to get their positions in these companies. And then he, he was looking for where they had problems and he could bring a solution. So I think there was the emotional connection and a mindset of finding solutions to problems. And I think that was what worked for him.

Because from the outside, you say industrial, selling pipes. How do you get the emotion up about that? But first of all, he obviously was good at getting people to like him. And he was obviously good at looking at them and listening and figuring out what are their problems and how can I make that, you know, that's what people can get emotional about. Even if something about pipe or plumbing. I got a plumbing situation here in my kitchen. I get very excited about a plumber coming in. And, you know, we've had two or three people. I don't know what to do here, you know, this or the other. I get very excited about somebody coming here and make that problem go away for me. And so even in the, the utility type sides of life, if you get somebody come in and solve problems for you, and on top of that, there's somebody you like and you enjoy doing business with them, hey, you can make sales, right? One thing we could say to people, you want to turn around your business? If you've got a sour puss in charge of your marketing, get rid of them and at least, at least get. It reminds me of somebody we had in one of our offices one time. They said they had this guy named Bill, and he'd always go around like that, you know, always had him. And finally somebody went up to me and said, bill, are you excited? He go, yeah, I'm excited. He said, well, why don't you tell your face, Tell your face about it, you know. And then they got a button, they got a button for Bill that said he had to wear all the time that said smile, you know, but, you know, but that's. That was one of the first things we would do on our sales trainings. Like we'd. Or even speaking, you know, sales or speaking or whatever. When you walk, when you walk in, put a darn smile on your face. You know what I'm saying? And when you gotta answer an objection, smile first. Don't let your forehead wrinkle. Cause then they say, oh, we got problems coming out. I really, you know, I ask the question that they can't answer. Cause look how they're frowning. The first thing you wanna do is take yourself, smile and relax, take a breath, you know, you're going to speak to 50,000 people before you walk on stage. Smile, you know, and whether you had to fake it, get a smile on your face. Because, you know, it's a great starting point and it applies even to utility type. It's easy to get excited about fashion and Art and music and things like that, or food. But if you're in a utility thing, so much of life is just stuff. But you can get yourself excited and people excited about doing business together because you're solving their problems and you enjoy being around them and make them enjoy being around you. And so your dad had that going for it, and he was smart enough to realize he needed to stay in that role. You know, the answer was not for him to get in the financial side. Now, how long did you stay with the family?

I stayed for five years. So we had a good run. We grew for three years. And then one day, one day dad said, that's big enough. I think we've grown enough. So I really don't want to grow anymore. I was like, okay. And I was still a bit of a young buck and was like, I'm not sure I see it the same way. So I went off and did some entrepreneurial things for a few years.

Just because he wanted to stop, didn't mean you wanted to and he didn't want. Obviously he didn't want to just turn the whole thing over to you, so you had to move on. And what was the first. What did you say to yourself at that point? How long was that transition to where you got your own entrepreneurial activities going on? Did you go right into consulting or did you go into starting new things? Do you have an idea or do you have some friends that had some things going on? How'd you make that transition?

So I used some of my systems background and this was back in the dot com era. And so I got with a couple friends and we started a online marketplace, a B2B marketplace, on this new Internet thing. And it was. And we focused on industrial products like the pipes, valves and fittings. So that's what we worked on. So we did that till the dot com blow up and then that ended.

And so you have to adjust. Were you planning on that or is this a big surprise that it. Was it a big setback?

The Internet blowing up was certainly surprise. Didn't see that coming. So, you know, you give it a try. You know, you roll the dice and you know, if it, if it works, great. If not, you move on. That's. Then I went back to consulting. After the dot com blew up and started helping people with their financial challenges.

How hard was it for you to get into consulting or back into consulting? And how do you. How do you. I know a lot of people are thinking about, I, you know, should I start a consulting business? I think I Would like a consulting. But take us behind the scenes with.

Consulting at that time, I'd say it was a little bit of a challenge. I hadn't really built up a large network to get referrals and I hadn't figured out there weren't as many resources for nowadays with all the Internet marketing and email and social media and there weren't as many of those things out there. So it was a little bit of a tough slog to figure out how to make the connections and get the opportunities. So yeah, took a while.

Yeah. And so what did you do for that? I mean, how did you get established, get your toe hole on the mountain there?

Eventually I found some groups to start doing some networking and was able to use the connections I did have to slowly build my network. And that's kind of how I did it. How long is eventually I'd say it took couple years. So it took a while.

Walk through that. Because I have often wondered because I've been in sales and marketing all my life, it's like I was in construction, then I had to transition and learn sales and marketing. But I've been here a long time and so I've often wondered my friends that are CPAs, attorneys, doctors, you don't think of them as the big happy, go lucky marketing kind of guys. And you know, I wondered to myself, but all of their practices are built, you know, you get out of school, you get a degree and you get out there. And if you go to work, like work in a hospital or work for another company, I get started type thing. But pretty soon you want to get your own business. I wonder how they get their business. How do they get their clients? So I asked my attorney one time who was the classic, most boring ever dry personality human being on the planet. And I said, kevin, how do you get clients? Basically, how does someone as dull as you get clients? Was the subtext of the question. And he said, he says it very simple. He said, when I get some, you know, my business gets a little slow. He said, I start taking all the party invitations that come that ordinarily I would just decline. And I start going and mixing and mingling and talking with people. And then sooner or later in the conversation they'll say, well, what do you do for a living? And I'll say, attorney. He said, well, it's funny, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I said, well, here's my card. And he says, if I go to a few of those, pretty soon I've got some business again, you know, how did you go about, you know, if you're a consultant, you're a freelance consultant, you're unattached. How do you go out there and stir up some excitement? Because you know, to make those connections and get people excited about you, bringing you into their world and you know, how do you get known?

Right. You know, one, a great way to do it is if you're an attorney or an accountant and you know, you kind of work your way up the ladder in an organization, so you build up little reputation and you also meet people in the course of doing your work. So that's a great way to kind of build that core network. And then there's also a lot of business networking groups, you know, roundtables and networking groups out there that you can find that are good ways to kind of repeatedly meet with people, build that connection. And so when they think, oh, somebody needs an attorney or needs an accountant, they say, oh, well, I know somebody. And hopefully they send the opportunity your way. And of course, like you say, going to parties is always good too.

Yeah. And so the thing is, you've got to be proactive. You can't sit and say, you know, what am I going to do? Run ad in the paper? No, it's a friend to friend to friend business. So you got to get out there and make friends. And that, you know, one thing for people listening, that maybe you don't need it right now, but you should focus on while you have the opportunity. If you're in a corporation, if you're in a town, you're in a. Or you got your own business, focus on meeting people, focus on being likable. You cannot be a negative, sour puss SOB Unless you're, you're gonna stay self employed the rest of your life or keep your job. Cause sooner or later you're gonna need people. I think that's a good piece of advice for people to get is like make friends and meet their friends. And just be like the Bible says, if you want friends, be friendly, but make yourself useful. Make people glad that they know you. Make it possible for them to remember what you do and be intrigued by it a little bit. But that network of friends and there's all kind of ways that you can, you know, that's something that you can start at any time of your life. You know, I used to say in sales you'd have people that he said was, you know, best thing in sales is go friend to friend to friend, you know, and. Cause you know a little bit about them or if it's a Friend of a friend, you know. You know, you screen out all of the drug addicts and, you know, criminals and this, that and the other, because he's, you know, so and so nosy. But the thing is that you gotta start somewhere. And so we used to tell people, like, well, I just don't know. You know, I've been to all of my friends. You know, none of my friends are interested in what we're doing. I said, well, you need more friends. So forget about going out. Forget. Forget about going out and making prospects. Going out and make friends. In fact, I. I'd say if this was in a meeting room, I used to say, okay, everybody who's made a friend in the last, you know, month, raise your hand. You know, and about half the room raised their hand. And I said, you see, if you don't know how to make a friend, go to one of these people and ask them how they made a friend. You know, first thing you got, develop the skill of how you meet people. Be interesting, you know, have. Have an opinion or something, you know, you know, get a new shirt, a new suit or something. Look like something, and get. Get interested in a sports team or something. You know, get something interesting about you where you can have a conversation with somebody and get out in the world. But that network of friends is very powerful. But we don't really think about it. But the bigger that network of friends, the more people you can go to and even ask their opinion. You know, here's where I am. What would you do? You know, you can go to your friends for advice, much less contacts, but that. And then you get into these professional associations that maybe you never had a need for before, but they're still out there. Right, right.

Exactly. Exactly. Cool. Yeah. Good advice. I think it's all good advice, Larry.

You eventually made your way around. You had done this along the way, you had a network of friends. Took a while. But, you know, the thing is, I would say that look where you are today. So what if it took you a couple years to get started in consulting? You know, look where you are today. You know, prices, experience. And because of those things, one thing led to another. You've been able to develop this kind of expertise. This would be priceless for companies going through some of these same experiences. But, you know, I do need to bring up that even BlackRock, the guys who started BlackRock, the biggest hedge fund in the world, they, the two of them, when they started, they were big stars at a hedge fund and knew everybody in the industry, and they thought well, we're going to go start our own hedge fund. Everybody will come running to us, just throwing money at us because, you know, we're such a proven success. They went for two years, they sent out like 50,000 emails. You know, great news, we got a new hedge fund, Crickets. And they did have network and everybody did know them, but they weren't proven, you know, they weren't proven to them and they had to go all the way around. I think they found their first investment money from somebody in Dubai. You know, because that's the other thing, the further you are away from home. You know, their home was New York. You know, they're in Dubai. So you know, the guys in Dubai said these guys have got to be experts. But that's how they got their nest egg. But now they're the biggest hedge fund in the world. So the thing is, you cannot begrudged the fact that it might take a little time to get going. It took you a little time to get going, but what happened to you during those, the two, there had to be some kind of transformation that you went through during that time.

Yeah, eventually I found some people that were kind of like minded. I was able to partner on some turnaround work with one gentleman who was very good, was able to, you know, give me some, some good advice and guidance and help. We've marketed together, found a couple clients and did some good work for, for them and that, you know, carried on to some other work. So, you know, it just, you know, one thing builds on the other. It's can be a slow, slow path, you know, getting those first couple of successes under your belt. But don't quit. I think that's kind of the Michael Jordan lesson, right. You have a setback, you don't quit.

Yeah. Now with you, did you ever think about quitting and going back and getting a job with a big corporation or big CPA firm or something like that? Did you ever reach the point where you started to lose faith that this was actually going to work out for you?

Well, there were times when, you know, I did, did work with some larger organizations or found an opportunity that, that made sense to do for a while to help a company get from, from here to there. So, you know, I, I did take a full time CFO role for a while and that's where we had the 7x growth. You know, I got to know the, the entrepreneur, the owner and I just saw, you know, that he had the characteristics and the opportunity and it was like, man, this is going to be a good ride. And so I jumped on. But you know, for CFOs, most of the time, you know, it's not a question of if it's a project, it's, it's always a project. It's just how long the project lasts.

Yeah. And what is the, you know, we're hearing? I hear this more and more fractional cfo. What does that, what does that mean? And how long has that been a thing?

Right. I think about 10 years ago I was, is when I first started hearing it and it's been more and more over, over the time. And the idea, you know, I guess the old school way of thinking is, you know, I'm going to hire a cfo. They're a full time person. I can either afford them or I can't. And nowadays for smaller companies, you know, especially with the Internet, you don't have to drive from place to place to do the work, you know, with all the computers. So you know, you can be, you know, I'm going to work whatever it is. I'll work one day a week for you and I'll work one day a week for Bob and I'll one day a week for, for, you know, Joey. And so it's a fraction for each and so that's what it is. And so you can work with smaller companies on an affordable basis and have a big impact on them.

So a smaller company can bring in a really expert brain on the financial side but not have to have it full time. You know, where they do it might be years before they could afford that but. And that seems like that would really. Has it been your experience if this really helps them collapse timeframes on getting bigger? Cause I see the scalable word comes up quite a bit when you come in and you see things. Because I'm sure there's similarities in companies at different stages and things they can do to kind of compress timeframes and move up faster. Have you seen those kind of turnarounds?

Absolutely. I've had a number of companies. I had a, and it was staffing company so they would place people in the oil field and they'd grown nicely for several years, but then they plateaued. They were, their sales had basically been stuck for three years in a row. They're scratching their head trying to figure out what's going on, why, why can't we grow anymore? And so it came in and I told them after I met with them and, and kind of explained what, what I, what I see the steps going forward is that I'd like, to make one change a month, you know, for the next 12 months. That's our goal. And I said, well, even if we don't make it, you know, if we don't do one change every month, if we still make six or eight changes over the course of the year, that's going to have a really big impact. And that's what we did. And what happened is the sales for the first six months, we were putting important things in place, but you had. It didn't hit the sales yet. But after six months, the sales started creeping up, and by the end of two years, the sales had doubled.

That's got to be exciting for you to be involved and see those things. Except it takes a long time for it to evolve. It's not that happened by Thursday, but it's got to be exciting for you to see these changes take hold and companies transform. Because there is an excitement and growth, isn't there?

There is. And the impact that that has on people's lives, on the employees, they have a more stable work environment, more stable paycheck, on the owners, the entrepreneurs, you know, that they get to see their business grow. It relieves stress, it improves their, you know, their personal cash flow, which can, you know, impact their personal life pretty dramatically as well. So, yes, there's a lot of very important impacts.

So an important idea that's coming out of this thing is if you are a smaller company and maybe you're stalled out and you're ready for some fresh ideas, think about a fractional bringing in a fractional cfo. It sounds like. Sounds like an emergency room doc. You know, like when the doctors work at this hospital, you know, on Monday, and they go here, they move around. But that's in all medicine now. You know, you go to the dentist, they have the endodontist or whatever comes in on Fridays, and, you know, the specialist comes in once a week or once a month or something like, you know, like traveling out to a rural area or something if they don't have a lot of people. But it's interesting that it's happening in the financial world. And so that's an option for people. But in terms of scaling, one way you create excitement in any business is growth. And the danger is when you stall out, what goes up eventually is going to go down. And I'm curious about your dad. That's one thing that I'm not sure he was really thinking about when he said, okay, I've grown enough. That's enough. How has that business done since you left?

Well, unfortunately, about five years after I left, the company closed up. And he. There's a stall in the market in sales, and he had a lot of inventory and the bank came in, took it over. So that was the bad news for my dad to grow or die. That's right.

Grow or die. Grow or die. Good Lord. I mean, the danger, you know, red alarm should go off in your head anytime you hear somebody that's as big. You know, I finally got as big as I want to get. Yeah, well, then quit, get out and turn it over to somebody else who now wants to. Who wants to take it further. Because if you're tired, it's going to go down and you're not going to want to be around for it. And so it was good that it lasted for five years. So they couldn't blame the demise on anything to do with you. But in your turnaround thing, I mean, this is a big thing, folks, and it's a great option. Be able to bring in a person who has the experience of Carl and to make those suggestions. You know, the whole idea. I'm sure a CEO or an entrepreneur running a business, if they had known what to do, they would have already have done it in three years. But all of a sudden you come in and see something, and that's the other thing that I see that is very smart about your approach. If you got something that's working, even if it's stalled out, it is working. So you don't want to come in and reorganize everything. I despise these people who said everything you've done, everything you've learned is wrong. You know, it's like their big expert. Everything you're doing is wrong. You know, all the wrong. You're idiot. Shut up. You know, go back to bed. You know, we're going to be disruptive. Disruptive. You're going to plow up all the ground. Yeah, yeah, you idiot. And so, yeah, that should set off alarms in your. You know, you build off foundations, you improve foundations. You don't throw things. You know, you might throw out a piece here and a piece there, but you don't go in and just throw everything out unless you want to start all over from the beginning. But you had to be doing, no matter how bad your company is, you had to be doing something right or a lot of things right, that combination to be able to last up to this point. And you're stalled out now. So what? There's some more changes that need to be made. If you're out of ideas, bring in somebody who's got some fresh ideas. And that might be Carl, but the first thing you can do is read Carl's book. When did you write this book, Surfing Economic Chaos?

That was about three years ago. And so yeah, I had a lot of fun with the book. Talk about how the world's changing and the challenges that presents, but also the opportunities that that brings for companies to make adjustments and take advantage of all the craziness we're seeing in the world.

Yeah. When you get, and you've worked with these companies over the years, what are things, when you get in, what are the first things you say you look? Are there, are there certain things that you've done it so much now, Are there certain patterns that you look for and you recognize and then you have sequence of changes that you go through and that's probably in your book. But anyway, can you give us an idea of how you think when you go into a company? What are you looking for? What kind of information?

Yeah, there's some basics that I'm always looking for. And you're right, there's a list. But how, you know, what's the priority is always a little bit different, of course, because every, every company's different. But you know, do you have solid financials, do you have, you know, the, the banking or financing relationships you need? Do you have management communication systems internally? And do you have the right people in the right place in your, in your organization working for you? And I think, you know, those are some of the key things that I'm looking at in almost every organization. And just like you say, everybody's doing something right, but maybe there's a way we can do it a little bit better.

Right. And again, I'm sure a lot of this is, is like the medical world where the first thing is stop the bleeding. Right.

We don't want you to bleed out. That's right, that's cash flow.

We don't want you to bleed out. And you know, there's a lot of, you know, you look at the low hanging fruit, but maybe if you're in the company you don't see those things. You know, you didn't understand it, but fresh eyes coming in. It's like you're, you know, what are the first kind of things that you find are almost always wrong or off. The CEOs got to sell his jet, something like that. He can't afford his jet.

One of the most common things is just not having a handle on what your cash flow's going to be. You know, 3412 weeks out into the future, you know, that is, it's actually pretty easy for almost every company to know what their cash flow is going to be week by week for the next four, four to eight 12 weeks. And if we have them get a hold of that, man, they can steer the ship so much better and just reduce their stress.

Yeah, when you hear the investors in the stock market, the Warren Buffetts and everything, they talk about the fundamentals. That's what you're talking about, the fundamentals of the business, the cash flow, the sales, the revenue. You know, what, you know, stay in front. You know, how, how solid is this thing likely to be? Where are, and you find the weak areas and you, and you make changes to make them strong. But, well, first of all, if you're bleeding, you gotta stop that hemorrhaging cash. And, you know, if you're cbs, you say, okay, we're gonna pull the plug on Stephen Colbert. And, you know, if we're, you know, if we, if we're going to make that sale to Paramount, you know, they're not going to want to come in and they have to pull the plug. They're going to be the bad guys. So we'll go ahead and pull the plug on. Okay, that's 40 million out. Okay, 40 million loss. But it wasn't just $40 million loss. It was a huge 100, $200 million budget item that they could have off the balance sheet. And so, you know, you want to do things like that, stop the bleeding, get rid of the obvious expenses, but then you want to get your fundamentals in place where you just look for your weakest link. What are some of the areas that are usually weak links in companies?

Understanding your financials is certainly something that most business owners will look at. Top line sales and your bottom line profit. And that's about all they typically see. If I can bring in tools to help them, you know, look at things over time, you know, look at things compared to, you know, other, the way other companies might be performing, kind of give them a broader perspective on their numbers without making them accountants or anything like that. So that's something I think is really powerful.

And a lot of that can be done. A lot of improvements can be done just by adjusting, in other words, percent, you know, like if you got a big building, you know, what percent is going to electricity, you know, it's way out of range. Why is that? You know, or, you know, the support things here that, you know, the cleaning crews or the supplies or this, that the others like Are all of these cost items in line with where they should be? And a lot of times if you don't look at them, you don't realize where they're out of balance. And so there are controls now with AI and all that, you can go in and say what is reasonable for this budget, this line item and for this size business, this size company, what should we be paying? And then you can kind of, or have someone do that. You don't have to do it yourself and have them bring it to you. So check this, get AI working for us on that. But as you move forward, at what point did you start Abundant?

I did that about almost eight years ago.

And why did you need Abundant? Is it just to formalize your consulting business?

It's just a legal entity to operate through and just makes it easier to separate my personal and, and it's handy for taxes. I can deduct things that expenses as business expenses. So yeah.

How strong are the similarities when you work multinational and when you work multi into multi industry because you've worked across multiple countries, you worked across multiple industries. What are the similarities there? And are there similarities or is it all just really crazy different?

Well, the basic economics running a business are the same anywhere in the world and across any industry. You know, you've got, you got to have enough sales to cover your overhead and make money and you've always got people problems. So those things are always true. Now the details as you move from country to country, very pretty dramatically, you know, legal institutions, payroll, the, you know, a lot of, a lot of different details there. You know, how you finance, do you need partners in the country, all sorts of fun things. I'd say depending on the industry you're talking about, there can be a wide variance. I mean if you're in medical, you've got some very particular regulatory things going on. Financing, things are done very differently. You know, construction worked with a lot of construction companies and you know, seen how they work, that's different than manufacturing versus services distribution. So a lot of different business models. Software, done a number of things with software companies and nowadays so many of those blend together. You know, well, we're manufacturing and doing construction or we're blending chemicals for the construction industry or for the oil and gas. So having some experience in an industry really can be very helpful.

Yeah. And I would guess as someone's contemplating going expanding international is the first thing to look at is the regulatory. What regulatory issues are you going to run into? Because I know when we were, we've expanded or thought about expanding and gone through that process. First thing. Well, first thing is like, who's going to run it there? Is it going to. Or are we going to send people over there? Are we going to hire locals? And the other thing is the regulatory thing. The other stuff you can kind of put in place. But sometimes the regulatory issues are just so bad that it's just like, why bother? You know, we might wait five years, let somebody else figure that out, and we'll just copy, we'll copy their roadmap, you know, but we don't want to be the guinea pig to figure out how you navigate that, that maze of regulations in that particular, you know, in our industry, you know, but people problems. Do you, do you get involved? I mean, how often do you get involved? And all of a sudden you realize, you know, you see this on these restaurant shows or, you know, Gordon Ramsay goes in to fix this mom and pop restaurant and everything, and you got the mother in law, she doesn't like anybody, and what are we going to say to her? And, you know, she started thinking it's all her recipes and she very stubborn about it. You know, I don't want to hear y', all, you know, and so you have these intractable personal situations, but how often do you run into these businesses and it immediately becomes obvious, you know, systems are great, but I mean, we got some people that have got to be moved around.

I don't think I've seen a business yet that doesn't need people to do things to make the business work. You know, there can be a lot of software, there can be a lot of systems. But even if we need to make a change to the system, we've got to train people, we've got to get their buy in. It's all behavior, you know, so. And even if, if I'm trying to get a bank loan, well, you know, I've got to work with a banker, and we've got to develop that relationship, and they've got to have confidence in the business. So every single part of a business is about people. So we need to understand the finance and, you know, spend a lot of time on that. But how we bring the team together, both the employees and the contractors and the service providers and the finance people, that's all people.

Well, and the phrase, she said, we've got to bring the people together, but basically bring them together to where they can be functional and, you know, and much less, much less optimal. And probably getting them functional is one step and getting them optimal is another. But do you Ever. Do you often run into situations where you have to go to the CEO or the owner and say, I hate to be the guy to tell you, but, you know, Mary Lou's got to go, or, you know, yeah, I've had.

A number of times where I've said, you know, maybe we can move these people around. And then a few times that I've definitely said, yeah, we need to change these, you know, people out. But I've also had a situation or two, well, number of them there where. There's one in particular manufacturing, light manufacturing company, where the supervisors say, you know, the manager was saying, man, I've got this group, they're doing terrible. We really need to replace them all. You know, the supervisors are arguing with me. And I was able to bring some tools to help them manage those people more effectively. And we did turn that group around. And the supervisors, you know, several months later were bringing suggestions to the manager and the.

How'd you turn them around?

It was really a communication thing with bringing a structured way for them to have regular weekly meetings with the supervisors. It's like, here's a format, it's not complicated. It's a one page kind of guideline. And you do that every week. And one of the biggest keys is you got two ears and you got one mouth. Listen more than you talk.

So many of the problems in organizations is communication, isn't it, and setting up that it's not necessarily. You have to bring in all these technical systems or redo their computers or bring in AI if you could just get people talking together efficiently and where they really clearly understand what they're accountable for, what their job is, and they get some clear training on it. A lot of those simple things go a long way, it would seem like to me, not being a consultant. But would that be an accurate statement?

That would be a very accurate statement, absolutely.

Well, thanks so much, Carl. This has been a lot of fun, very revealing. And could you. I always like to give my guests a chance to give a final thought, a final word to people that are out in business, running business, trying to make things happen, which are the, you know, to me, the most valuable people out there in the world because they're creating the jobs, they're creating the new inventions, new solutions. And they need encouragement, you know, they need to stay on track. And a lot of that is when they hear from people like you some kind of insight that, you know, makes a difference for them. So what would you say to those people out there running businesses? And maybe it's not going as fast as they want, maybe they're a little bit frustrated. What would you say to them?

Well, I guess the first thing that comes to mind is a piece of wisdom that I picked up from a very, very, very successful entrepreneur that I know who said every time you double your sales, everything breaks. Your systems don't fit anymore and you've got to adapt and change things just to keep that growth going. And then the kind of corollary to that is something that another mentor that I respect a lot, that he said, cash flow is more important than your mother.

Well said. The thing about when sales double, everything breaks. But that's what we call, you know, there's problems and then there are happy problems. Those are the happy problems. So you got a problem to fix, but it's a happy problem because you gotta double the business. And so it proved to you that you got a valid concept out there. And so cash flow is more important than your mother. Thanks so much. It's been great, Carl.

Absolutely.

Larry.

Enjoyed it a bunch, Sam.