[00:00:15] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Hello and welcome to Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneurs, founders and business leaders who talk about the bold decisions, pivotal moments, and innovative ideas that shape their journey. This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation through technology and AI to solve real world industry problems. We do this in two ways.

First, by helping businesses streamline and automate their operations and second, by partnering with startup partners, entrepreneurs and product owners to create innovative software products from SaaS platforms to web and mobile apps. A big part of our focus is health tech, where we work with health tech companies to build secure HIPAA compliant software products.

If you’d like to learn more about us, head over to technology rivers.com and tell us more about your project. So today I am joined by Pam Meissner. Pam, welcome to the show. Why don’t you just introduce, let us know who you are, your background.What do you do currently? anything you would like to share.

[00:01:27] Pam Meissner: 

Okay. Well thank you for having me. This is a pleasure what we are fractional CFOs Currently I’m the COO for Cath Cap. My journey here was a long and windy road. You know, I started off at university, got my CPA, and then I went abroad. I was the first one in my family in a hundred years to go back to the homeland which was Poland. So went over the wall right after it came down and did a lot of privatization work there. They’re one of my largest clients hired me away and I opened the Russian market for Nestle and we were late to the game and we had deep pockets, so we were able, the team was able to grow it to a billion dollars in revenue in just three years.

After that I retired and was able to pursue several personal projects from raising children. I started a nonprofit and I like to bake. So in my spare time, I’m quite creative in the kitchen and that led me to coming out of retirement a decade later to join a local entrepreneur. So I have a lot of background in entrepreneurship in making good decisions with less than perfect data.

I am a huge fan of everything, technology which I think is why you and I connected. I believe that there are opportunities to solve problems regardless of the size of the company. If you embrace technology and automation, I think it can really improve our quality of life. So I along and Windy Road, I spent a decade abroad as I said right now, you know, the firm is virtual but we’re based out of Fort Worth, Texas. I happen to live in the better Fort Wayne, Indiana  which is a rather odd place to land after all my international travels but you do what you need to do.

[00:03:30] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Awesome. No, thanks for sharing. Thanks for sharing the personal as well, the autism, the 501c will probably. Get into that later if you have time about your 501c and your autism group. So but one question like what first drew you into the world of finance and leadership?

[00:03:54] Pam Meissner: 

Absolutely. You know, it’s so much of who we become.Starts off at that dinner table we grew up at and I am a nice blend of my two parents. My father was a CPA turned CFO turned CEO, so I followed a lot in his footsteps and my mother was a marriage and family therapist and the work I do now is very intimate with our clients as we dig into money. It becomes very personal, very quickly and so initially I was father following in my father’s footsteps, but you know, soon my mother’s gifts that she bestowed on me have shown up and have been as or more valuable.

[00:04:39] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Awesome. So currently you are with Cath Cap and Cath Cap works with founder led businesses navigating growth. So what makes your approach to fractional CFO services especially valuable for companies in a high growth or tech driven industries?

[00:04:59] Pam Meissner: 

Yeah, so a couple of things help us be particularly effective. One is we get the entrepreneur, you know, there’s lots of smart people out there. There’s lots of people who are fractional CFOs who’ve spent decades in larger corporations. All of the team at CCAP knows the entrepreneurial spirit and doesn’t even just know it. We actually love it, right? They’re people with passion. They’re people who have an idea and you know, they wanna make a dent in the universe and we love to support that another thing that’s a little unique for us is our aspiration.

Our aspiration is for you to graduate. I don’t want, I can, but the goal is not for you to be with us long term. You know, most of our clients stay two to three years and that’s because we want them to graduate. We want them to grow, to be big enough to need more resources than we provide fractionally to have a financial person that’s on their team, in their office.

We also are a little unique because it’s not just. The CFO that you get paired up with. Every CFO has a dedicated financial analyst and as you well know, oftentimes the devil’s in the details and it’s hard to be in the details and also to be strategic. So having a dedicated financial analyst enables our CFOs to stay strategic and be that thought partner that problem solver with the entrepreneur.

[00:06:42] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Yeah, absolutely and that really resonated with how we do in our business as well. We’re not in the finance, we’re a totally different business in a software, but we use that analogy like if you’re building a house so you don’t need all the workers. Those are all important to build a house but you need one person that is giving the direction what needs to be built.

So financial is the same like that. Key role that you mentioned that’s driving all of that, giving the guidance in terms of how that’s the experience that you are bringing in that. Absolutely, totally get it. Thanks for sharing that. So you talked about two to three years, that’s the average time for your customer.

So for software service based startups thinking about an exit in two to three years. What should they be doing now to make their business more attractive to investors or acquirers?

[00:07:40] Pam Meissner: 

Yes. So we wrote a book Exit on Top, sell your firm at the right price to the right person at the right time and there’s a lot of things that you need to consider. If I could boil it down, the most valuable firms are the ones where the owner is least integral. The ones that have developed systems and processes so that leads come in so that the service or the product that the operations is strong and the finance and admin is strong so that you collect what you’ve worked so hard to market and sell and we come in and we do an assessment to identify the areas because we all know when you go to sell, there’s a range you take, you know, EBITDA or tonal owner benefit and you multiply it times a number and those numbers always come in ranges and what we do with firms is we get them from here to here on their multiple and that is a number of things. 

One, we do a lot of teaching and training because most of our clients aren’t finance people, right? They went to school for some other unique ability, their passion is somewhere other and quite honestly the numbers intimidate them. So what we like to do is take the information and instead of having numbers in boxes we like to tell stories and the stories. Tell you where you’re at and we listen. We’re female led, female founded and so those stories also come out of what we’ve heard you say. We’re really good listeners and so we wanna create that vision with you and tell you here’s the roadmap that you need to be on to go from here to here or better yet from here to here.

So usually there’s a number of things that we tackle. Predictability is a key part of that. So oftentimes that comes down to cash predictability. Having good data is also a part of a good exit. Being able to know your numbers and we help you know what’s important and what’s not important and we also support you because there’s.

This is when you exit, most people exit a firm once whereas people that are buying firms are doing, you know, one a week or one a month right and so you’re at a significant disadvantage and so we have special CFO engagements where we work towards your exit.

[00:10:34] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Cool. Thanks. So yeah, that’s interesting.When you said like you tell numbers by story that’s a fascinating way. 

[00:10:45] Pam Meissner: 

Yeah, we bring them to life. 

[00:10:46] Ghazenfer Mansoor:

You help them see beyond spreadsheets.

[00:10:48] Pam Meissner: 

Yeah. We bring them to life and we try to communicate pictorially because you know that we like trends and we like to see what are the issues. We’re always on the search for issues that need to be solved and usually when we do that and we tell the stories and we present it pictorially, the issues just bubble up.

[00:11:10] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

And when you are working with founders, what are those common moments when they get their numbers?

[00:11:18] Pam Meissner: 

Well, one of them is and I think this is the question every founder wants to know is how am I doing? So when we first start off an engagement, we let them know, you know, in these areas, you know, you’re doing great and so we give them a sense of confidence and then we say, okay, these are the areas that we need to work on and honestly, you know, people come to us because they want financial visibility.

They want more time or more money or they’re, they wanna exit and they wanna get their multiple up. So we lean into what keeps you up at night and whatever that is. We focus on that so that one, you can sleep better but two usually in that journey you’re gonna have some ahas about, okay, these are the things I need to do today. So I don’t have that problem on the roadmap in six months or a year.

[00:12:17] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Cool. I’m gonna switch a little bit. So, you said that at Riverside you increase net income by 25%. While removing 10 million in revenue and that’s counterintuitive. What was the strategy behind that? Are you able to share anything?

[00:12:41] Pam Meissner: 

I’m not able to share a lot about how that was done. Sufficent it to say some tough decisions were made and we did some consolidations and we were in a very unique market space that was counter to the normal economic trends and so we took advantage of that.

[00:13:08] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Okay, cool and you held businesses scale to million dollar valuation. What patterns do you see leaders and companies that achieve that kind of growth? I heard one before but I wanna hear more.

[00:13:27] Pam Meissner: 

Well, you know, I’ve had the benefit of having deep pockets and obviously that helps, right, to have do it through acquisition but acquisitions equally have their challenges and so I believe the most important piece to get that far is to have a clear vision and to have a really clear core values. 

So oftentimes people become pragmatic and they lose sight of the forest through the trees and they don’t keep the culture that got them started as they grow hiring well and hiring according to core values is probably the thing that of the successful ones do well all too often we come into companies that are of a certain size but they’re, they haven’t been built on a firm foundation and you really have to go back and reshore the foundation before then you can pour gas on it because the worst thing you could do to any business is pour gas on something that doesn’t have sound policies and procedures.

I was at a conference last week when the guy said 96.4% of the issues in businesses or process issues and way too often. If you were to ask an entrepreneur they would say it’s probably people issues. But I would say it’s the process of selecting good people. That’s probably the underlying issue and you know, you and I talked about this right? That there are different kinds of employees within a company, right? They’re your stars, the ones that align with your core values and are great at their jobs, right? 

And then there’s the rats which is stars built backwards which it are the ones that aren’t good at their job and don’t align with your company culture.They gotta go. But it’s the other two categories that really challenge entrepreneurs and one is the puppies. So these are people that align with your core values but they’re not really good at their job, you know and you have to create a conscious plan to get the puppies to grow into stars. But you can’t have a whole litter of puppies because that’s a drain on productivity. 

[00:16:00] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Absolutely 

[00:16:01] Pam Meissner: 

Where I see entrepreneurs make the mistake and slow down their growth is when they tolerate people who don’t align with the culture but are really good at their job and those are the people. They’re just toxic and they hold owners hostage and those people have got to go and it’s scary because usually they are a significant source of revenue for the company. They often show up in sales and you build walls around them. 

But if you don’t deal with them, your stars leave and so it’s things like that that really stall growth because you don’t cut out the toxic bits soon enough. As soon as you do, everybody else rises to the occasion and supports you and quite honestly applauds you. But until then it’s an invisible weight on the business holding them back.

[00:16:56] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

No, that’s a good point. I was listening to Simon Sinek a few days ago. He was talking about Steve Jobs but we talk about like I need a plus player. So you, they’re talking about like it’s not just a player but you need a plus player in your team to get the real growth

[00:17:21] Pam Meissner: 

And to do that you have to have your ego in check. Because A plus leaders, A plus people don’t wanna work for people who wanna be the smartest person in the room. Right? 

And so I often say that on most P and Ls that I look at, there’s a hidden line item called ego and you know, I see a lot of owners who want to be the smartest person in the room and so they don’t hire a plus people because a plus people are gonna challenge you and if you are not confident in your abilities, it’s not gonna end well for anybody. 

[00:18:01] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Yes. You hear all the time, you’re in the wrong room if you’re the smartest person in the room. So, but you also talk, I mean, you know, that’s a good point that there’s people or processes. I think, I believe it’s really multiple things because you need all of those in company growth because you can have one but then you still need the other. So they all have its own importance. 

But yes, in some cases you put people definitely the number one. But without the processes also you’ll have a limitation, without the financials, without all. So these are all the core pillars of the business. So they all need to be aligned and working really well in order to have the real growth, extremely good points. So, one question. 

So how do you and your team health founders use technology like dashboards, AI tools, forecasting platforms to turn their financial data into a confident decision making?

[00:19:10] Pam Meissner: 

Yeah, so we challenge them on what should be on those dashboards. Too often it’s more lagging indicators than leading ones. You know, we have them work through the process of saying, okay, if this is what you want, more cash in the bank, what happens before that and before that and it’s that thing over here, 10 before that’s away. That’s what we really need to be tracking. 

If you know, we also poke and prod around. If everything’s always green then the dashboard’s not working. So you have to work with the owners to figure out what they need to track and usually less is more. You know, we’ve come into ones that, you know, have soup to nuts and the kitchen sink and it’s just, it’s overwhelming. So once you have that then we dig into the next layer which is where’s the data coming from and how do we accumulate that data? Typically, in entrepreneurial organizations, we see disparate data sources.

You know, you go into a large company and they’re gonna have, you know, amazing tools to assimilate and summarize and analyze data that doesn’t exist in small companies. So you’re gonna go with some tools. Oftentimes we help them with getting connected to APIs to bring this disparate sources of information together through tools like Power bi or, you know, in simpler ones some Excel spreadsheets.

It’s important for them to be able to look at a few numbers collectively and not. I find too often with these disparate sources of data that they spend more time trying to reconcile the data than they do about, okay, what is this telling me? So we play the devil’s advocate.

[00:21:13] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

So with AI now, how is that thing changing or is that changing at all in your industry?

[00:21:25] Pam Meissner:

It should change and it really comes back to, you know, what level of an adopter people are. So whether they wanna trust AI, whether they wanna put data out there, you know, some people, particular industries you mentioned hipaa, you know, you have to get certain versions of the AI so that you can retain the HIPAA compliance.

They’re out there. It’s just every software that exists has AI built into it and it probably has been using it for much longer than we all appreciate but I think it’s how much do you trust AI and once you come to an understanding on your trust level, you can lean in and, you know, build things that internally can really speed up your business.

[00:22:22] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Absolutely and on that note, I’m speaking to your, the conference on the data sensitivity and privacy for the regulated industries next week. So I think I’m not sure this podcast will be out by then but just wanted to mention, so maybe the recording, so I can share the link of that as well as part of 

[00:22:47] Pam Meissner: 

Absolutely. Yeah. I think that’s important.

[00:22:48] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

That’s. It’s a very important topic, very sensitive topic and people are concerned. So I think you need to build that trust and there are different strategies that you can do and at the same time, I also wanna mention other than like as you were talking previously about the dashboard or Power BI and all of those tools now even with AI you have different ways of doing it. Like for example, as I talked to you before like the cps which is a modern context pro protocol. Yeah. Which is, so you can connect your QuickBooks and then just query from your cloud desktop, so Right. We use that all the time per our business. Like rather than going to QuickBooks, I can query from my cloud, I can generate a dashboard and with one click it can go in notion. So a lot of those things are possible now, which used to be requiring a lot of effort to build all of those. So glad to hear you’re on top of it.

[00:23:49] Pam Meissner: 

Yes and we have to obviously respect the adoption level of our clients because we tend to have some conservative clients.

[00:24:02] Ghazenfer Mansoor:

Change is not easy. You’ll always have that resistance. We even see that even within our own company as well. So even though we’re working on those cutting edge but humans are different.

 So everybody wants to do things a little bit different way. Yeah. So you work with founders at that critical leap moment. What are some of the biggest financial blind spots we have seen? How does having a CFO on the team chain that outcome?

[00:24:38] Pam Meissner: 

There are several. I think the CFO changes it by listening to what keeps them up at night and coaching them to understand what truly they need to know and making sure that they have that information to make decisions when they need to make decisions. Some of the things that are really important, some of them are activities we encourage them to start doing and there’s other activities we encourage them to stop doing. Most entrepreneurs check their bank account every morning probably before their feet even hit the ground to see what money’s come in and I think that that is not helpful because really what you wanna be thinking about is what’s the money gonna be in 3, 6, 9 months? 

Because today you can impact that much easier than you can impact what comes into the bank tomorrow and with strong predictability again I mentioned financial visibility. They gain confidence and they can move faster.You know, we all know  Stephen Covey’s book The Speed of Trust, right? Where there’s high trust and it’s not just trust in people, it’s also trust in systems. When there’s high trust the business gets a dividend. 

When there’s low trust again either in systems or in people the business gets taxed and so what we help them do is build that trust in their Information so that they know where the business is going and they can make better informed decisions and also we help them because we transfer knowledge, right? Oftentimes finance people use all these fancy words and we just speak in plain English to help them. I mean, they’re smart people and we respect that and they’ve delved into their own unique genius and we just wanna compliment that.

[00:26:46] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

So you mentioned what to change, what not to change, those kinds of things. So, but when you are working with the established firm helping them driving the growth then how do you decide what to keep, what to change and what to let go of is. I’m sure it’s complicated comparing the only ones

[00:27:09] Pam Meissner: 

Not necessarily, so we go where the pain is, right? Most organizations only think about the things that they can add and things that they can multiply. We come in and we look at everything from a profitability perspective. You know, if you go about it from the 80 20 rule, soon you figure out what is that 20% of what you do that creates 80% of the value of your firm. 80% of your wealth do more of that and less of all these other things and normally there’s head trash involved with they wanna tell you the story. 

Well let me just tell you how we got into that. Okay, that’s fine. Great. You’re not making any money. Well, if we did this. Yes and you said you wanted to build this kind of company. Do you see how that’s different? And we provide them with enough information so that they understand the why behind eliminating things. But the short answer is, it’s what’s causing you the most pain. You know, something that’s keeping you up late at night or you have way too many conversations about it could be about a product line, it could be about a client.You know, oftentimes we come in and say you need to stop working with these six, seven dozen clients. 

You know, those are the kind of things that help people understand where they make their money and why they make their money and although those other things seem attractive they can say no easier

[00:28:57] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Oh, well, one of the questions I have is like so many founders, they make those bold leaps in product and market strategy. Somehow in most of those cases or many of the cases, financial is overlooked. So what are the risks of scaling without any strategic financial leadership and how do you help clients avoid them?

[00:29:30] Pam Meissner: 

Right. The time to get a loan or financing is not when you need it. It’s much like insurance. The time to get insurance is not when the house is burning down, it’s before that and that’s why we like to do very pragmatic forecasting with them to say, okay, you wanna go there, you’re gonna need more funds and now’s the day to find them before you need them.

[00:29:59] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Absolutely. Now this is great, sometime ago I was at one of the conferences and there was a question presented to VC. Like, so the question was, in all the companies that you have seen successful, what is one pattern that you have seen in the founders? And he said obviously there are differences but one thing was became more visible was if one of the founders was the financial person, the CFO.

That company had a much better growth compared to the non CFOs. So I still remember that was a few years ago I attended but that still remembers on the back of my head because that’s the last part most companies would look for when they’re looking for partners, they’re looking for sales, marketing, tech, and finance has somehow always thought that it could be outsourced or it’s a laser thing.

[00:31:01] Pam Meissner: 

Yes and oftentimes people with that skillset don’t wanna take a risk on something that’s not a sure thing.

[00:31:14] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Cool. Hey, so I’m gonna change the topic. We talk a lot on the business side, so let’s go on a little bit. But, so what is one book that has deeply influenced your outlook on leadership or life?I heard you read a lot of books.

[00:31:31] Pam Meissner: 

I do. So this isn’t necessarily the easiest thing. I think it is the coaching habit. It’s here on my desk. I believe that if leaders understand that they are really a coach and a very similar book to this is Who Not How which is by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy.

[00:31:58] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

That’s my favorite.

[00:32:00] Pam Meissner: 

Okay. Well, they align. I like the coaching habit. It’s very simple. It boiled it down to a few questions and we take it and have had clients implement this where they have regular one-on-one connections with their team which is what EOS recommends that you do as well. 

Having that structured in a way that you view yourself as helping them and that you don’t take on their tasks but you keep that monkey on their back  is really powerful. But so many entrepreneurs particularly when they feel insecure they just white knuckle stuff and they don’t let go and you know, in EOS the whole thing about EOS is how you develop a team so that you can let go of the vine and or any and all books that help you do that. I enjoy reading.

[00:32:59] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Oh, cool. Yeah, I see that you often talk about adaptability and curiosity as one of the leadership traits. I think this, no, I think this reference of this book talks about the same thing. Cool and so you’ve clearly built a life around learning and reinvention. 

What’s something new that you have learned recently or are currently curious about?

[00:33:32] Pam Meissner:  

Well, AI is certainly up there. Let’s see, what else am I curious about? Oh my goodness I’d have a hard time putting my finger on it. Construction honestly is like physical construction industry is creating a lot of curiosity for me and exiting, you know, we are talking internally and externally with a whole generation of people who have built amazing businesses, like stellar things that don’t wanna sell to PE right? 

For obvious reasons they don’t necessarily have it air apparent, a child or a key employee or there are big gaps for those people. The next generation doesn’t really have the capital to buy people out and so we’re working with them to figure out exactly what their firm is worth and who might be interested in buying them and then helping them get top dollar and helping them be ready for an exit. 

Anybody who has spent their life, their soul, their everything to build a business when that business is sold, there’s some grieving involved there and so we help them understand and prepare for what does life look like after it. Okay, fine. You have all the money. You can go wherever you want.You can have whatever you want. You obviously have been successful and you. But what do you do when you wake up in the morning? And you know, people talk about that with people who retire, you know and the wives are like, I don’t know what you have to do but you gotta go somewhere for some of the day because you can’t stay here. You’re gonna drive me crazy.

A lot of self-worth comes from the things that we do and when you sell that thing a piece of you. Can evaporate and that’s not good. So we work with owners not only in how do you get the best value but what do you want outta the next season of your life?

[00:36:03] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

So that’s what I’m curious about. Okay. So for people listening today, I want to grow both in person and as a people. What’s one lesson you hope they take away from your story today?

[00:36:21] Pam Meissner: 

I began to learn and grow. Once I realized that I am enough and I have enough and I really wish that people could rather than it being a number in the bank account, it’s really a state of mind that once you can get to grips with that then you can lean in and learn for the sake of learning and help other people realize and develop to that stage as well. So that’s a part of my story.

[00:36:58] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Cool. Thank you Pam. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your incredible journey and insights. So where can people learn more about you, connect with you? Absolutely. Do you wanna share anything? Any personal cell phone number?

[00:37:19] Pam Meissner: 

Not sure we’re gonna go that far. They can reach me at Pam PAM at Cath Cap. It’s a bit of a tongue twister. C-A-T-H-C-A-P.com. You can check us out at cathcap.com online. Happy to connect. You can find a link to book some time with me on the website or you can email me and I’ll send you a link to do it directly. Can’t talk to enough great people, so I hope 

[00:37:48] Ghazenfer Mansoor:

You’re LinkedIn as well? 

[00:37:50] Pam Meissner:

I’m as I am on LinkedIn

[00:37:53] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 

Okay, cool. So for everyone listening, you can find more about Pam in the show notes. We will add the email website, LinkedIn, whatever Pam shares on the show notes. So yeah, check that out. 

Thanks for listening to Lessons from the leap. If you enjoyed the episode, don’t forget to subscribe and share it with someone.We find it valuable. Thanks everyone. Have a good rest of the day.