We're labeled constantly in life and all it takes is for one person to say you're not a numbers person, or for you to think that, and then, all of a sudden, you live with that stigma. So today is your opportunity to break free from those shackles. This is Boosting your Financial IQ, where I help business professionals with financial responsibility to elevate their careers and run profitable companies. My hope is that you'll apply these lessons to achieve your greatest ambitions, cheers and enjoy. So you want to learn business finance? Huh, I mean, that's why you're here, right, but maybe it's more than that. It's probably more like you want the outcome of financial literacy, financial freedom, financial security, more confidence with numbers, more profits, less cashflow issues or, like me in the past, not to feel financially ignorant anymore. And for me, I felt like an idiot oftentimes when I was running my first business. More on that here in just a little bit. Now you know the old saying fake it until you make it. Yeah, that doesn't really work well in finance. If you don't believe me, imagine standing in front of your team or working with your CFO or having a one-on-one with your CEO and trying to fake your way through the financial statements. Okay, don't do that it's not going to work well and they're going to see right through it. So you can't fake your way through finance. But that's why you're here and that's why I'm here to help you. So, whatever your reason, I'm just glad you're here.

Maybe you just got promoted and you're thinking, oh no, now I'm responsible for the numbers of my business unit, division, region or department. Maybe you're an up and comer and you want to get a better job out of school. Or maybe you're curious about investment, banking, private equity or consulting. Better. Yet and this is my sweet spot maybe you're running a business and you're tired of busting your butt, pouring money and energy into your company, making all these sacrifices and I know this because I've been there before wondering all for what? Because you know your company is worth so much more and you also know that you're probably leaving a lot of money on the table. I was once there in that position. I'm going to tell you that story here in just a minute.

Now, business finance is my sweet spot. I don't do a whole lot of personal finance, so if that's what you're looking for, this podcast may not be the best place for you, but if you want to learn how finance works in the world of business and how to make a ton of money and to accumulate real wealth. I'm going to show you how to get there. I've spent my entire career turning around and growing businesses. I'm going to explain more of that here in just a minute, but I could tell you what has allowed me to be successful is my financial literacy, and it doesn't have to be that complicated. I keep it very, very simple. So, if you have zero financial knowledge, if you don't even know what revenue means or profit means, hey, totally fine, it doesn't matter. I'm going to meet you exactly where you are and I'm going to take you along with me. So that's my question to you, because I'm inviting you to join me, to take this journey with me to achieve a better financial life. Are you in? What do you think about all this?

Now, if you're listening to this on Spotify, check out that little box below the episode title and the description. This is where you can send me a message. Right now. You can say, hey, what's up? You can share more about yourself and your goals. You could tell me that my bald head is too shiny and distracting, or whatever it is. Just don't make me cry. Okay, I'm actually pretty tender inside. But here's my promise to you.

All kidding aside, I'm here to give you my best stuff, my whole heart. I'll sing you songs, tell you stories from my CFO and turnaround days and share how you can become a financial pro. All for free, no gimmicks, no hooks, just free knowledge. Why? Because I love you, whoa. Okay, I know that's a little fast. This is just the first episode and that was a little creepy, but sometimes it can be a little creepy, I guess. But can't we all? Okay, so here's my plan I'm going to share with you my story and why I do all this, why I provide all this content and all this education for free for Nada, for Nathan, for Zippo. But I'm going to do this quickly because I'm here to help you, not to tell you about my boring life. Number two, I'm going to explain the concept of the value gap. And then, number three, I'm going to tell you exactly how to get started and then maybe, at the end, if I feel like it, I'll share a story about my cat. No, I'm just kidding, okay, but really I'm going to tell you a story about Joe and the surprising thing that changed his life. So if this all sounds interesting to you, let's keep going. All right. So quickly, here's my background.

At the age of 16, I left home, not because I don't love my mom. In fact, I love my mom so much. I was pretty much raised by a single mom my entire life and she is the hardest working, smartest, most beautiful woman that I know out there. I know I'm a little biased, but that's my mom. Hey, I'll always stand by her side. But at the time when I was 16, she married this guy and he was a total punk. He thought he was like God's gift to the world. And he said to me one day Steve, it's my way or the highway. I said, okay, I'll take the highway and I left home.

Now, from there I moved in with my sister. My sister had two little kids at the time and she was kind enough to let me live in her basement. Now, this room I don't even know if it's up to code, it's a little sketchy, there are no windows and in fact it was the laundry room. But hey, I was grateful to have a place to live and to be in a loving home where I felt supported. But that was minimum wage at the time. I later on got a job with my friend doing sprinklers and landscaping, and after a couple of summers, the business that I was working with they went bust and I was left with the decision find another job making minimum wage or some terrible wage, or go out on my own. So that's what I did. I started handing out business cards and flyers, talking to people, getting referrals, and the next thing I knew I launched my first business from my sister's garage. Little did I know that I was going to grow it into a multi-million dollar business.

Here's the pathetic thing, though I was running this company and I had no clue how to read financial statements. My accountant would give me the income statement and the balance sheet. I was like I don't even know what the balance sheet is. I'd brush that aside. I would look at the income statement and sure, I knew what revenue was at the top line the sales right. I understood that. I understood profit on the bottom line, but everything in between it was like a foreign language. I was like I don't know what the heck it's saying. Nor did I understand what the levers of profit were, or concepts like invested capital, working capital or free cashflow. So guess what? I made a ton of mistakes and left a lot of money on the table.

After experiencing a lot of failure and struggling, I decided that I wanted to change my life. I went back to school. I got my undergraduate in accounting and, experiencing a lot of failure and struggling, I decided that I wanted to change my life. I went back to school. I got my undergraduate in accounting and finance. I went on to go get my master's in accountancy, earned my CPA and worked in public accounting.

I was working at Ernst Young on a large financial services client and I realized that there was a massive gap between strategy and finance. The executive team. They would set these strategies based on mission, vision and values, and they would talk about all the great things they're going to do and how the business was going to double in size in the future and make all this money. And then, on the other side of the table, you had the financial nerds and I say nerd because I'm a nerd, but you had financial nerds building these models and these budgets and whatever the CEO said they would just model out. So if the CEO is like next year we're going to grow by 20% and we're going to make profit this year unlike last year. Then the finance team would go and model that out and say hey look, we built a spreadsheet that says exactly what you're talking about. But I could tell you, just because you put it into a spreadsheet doesn't mean it's going to come to pass, because you have to have a strategy for your business to focus on the most important value drivers so you can actually make that a reality.

So I realized during this time there's a major gap between strategy and finance, so I opened my own firm called Coltivar. This time there's a major gap between strategy and finance, so I opened my own firm called Coltivar. The name comes from the Italian word cultivare, which means to grow something through labor and attention. But since I'm not Italian I'm just a pale, white, bald headed guy I dropped the E and I just stuck with Coltivar, all right. So I started Coltivar, and Coltivar was all about taking strategy and finance, combining them together to drive value in companies. And that's what I've been doing going into organizations, turning them around or growing them to unlock incredible value. And over this timeframe I've helped a ton of people make a lot of money, creating over a billion dollars in value in the process.

Also during this time. I've been a CFO of some big companies. For example, I was a CFO of a large construction and renewable energy company, as a CFO of a tech company where we raised nearly a hundred million dollars and grew the firm to unicorn status, et cetera, right. So I have experience as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, as a CFO, as an investor in companies, a member of boards and an advisor to many more. So here on this podcast, I'm going to combine all this experience together and share with you real knowledge, like real world experience, of how you can fast track your way to financial literacy. Because, let's face it, I spent eight years of my life in academia learning about accounting and finance and I could tell you a lot of it was just misguided or it was just too much, it was focused on the wrong things. So I'm going to get you focused on what really matters in business so you can unlock incredible value.

Now, enough about me. Let me explain the concept of a value gap when it comes to our personal lives. If you just look at your current state and you compare that to your potential state where you could be, there's a gap. So let me just illustrate this with numbers. Let's just say, you make $100,000 a year right now. Okay, not too bad, but you could be making a million dollars a year. Well, the difference between where you could be a million bucks a year in income and $100,000 is $900,000, right, that's your ignorance gap, right?

I hate to say that because I don't want you to feel bad or to shame you or to infer that you're dumb, because you're not. Obviously, you're smart, you're here, you're willing to learn and, like I said, it doesn't matter how much financial knowledge you have. That does not correlate to your overall intelligence, but what does relate to your intelligence is what you're going to do with your ignorance gap. See, the people that are most ignorant aren't the ones that lack knowledge. They're the ones that just stay stuck. They just keep doing the same things over and over and over again. And I was there once. I was ignorant, right, I felt like an idiot because I didn't know how to read financial statements, I couldn't speak from a place of wisdom regarding my numbers and my business, and it's terrible. So I don't want you to feel the same way.

So that's the concept of the value gap from a personal perspective. Now, if you're running a business, let's just say your current value is a million dollars. But if you were able to grow your business, improve your margins, increase your cashflow right, if you're able to do just these three things, what if your business was worth $10 million? So the difference between where you are today and where you could be is called the value gap, and that's what I focus on when I turn around and grow businesses is closing that value gap. Now, there are a lot of ways to close the value gap, but the difference between how I approach it and others is that I act with precision, because I focus on the exact value drivers that improve financial and operational performance and ultimately increase firm value. If you can act with precision, you're going to increase the rate at which something increases in value. I mean, you don't wanna go to a doctor who's not experienced and say, huh, so your stomach hurts and they start like cutting off your toes right or messing with your hand. Instead, you want them to act with precision and get right to the point and know exactly where to focus. Now, how do you feel? Is that what you want? I'm sure you have some type of motivation. That's why you're here. That's why you're still listening to me. That's what I want to help you to get to. Okay, so let's talk about how you can get started.

When I first created this podcast, I really just put out a few episodes to teach people about certain concepts like the income statement, the balance sheet, the statement of cash flows, and I was just doing this to help people to overcome the number one obstacle in business, which is a lack of financial literacy. I put these episodes out. I didn't promote it. I had no intention of growing this podcast, but it grew and it grew and it grew and it grew. So you'll notice as you get into the podcast that the episodes just get better and better over time. As you get into the podcast, that the episodes just get better and better over time. I'm actually re-recording this episode because we have now surpassed over a million downloads and I have some really cool updates to share with you, which starts now.

Over holiday break between 2024 and 2025, I was at home, right, I was spending time with the family. I had time to unwind and actually think about life and what I wanted to do in the future. It's during this time that I was going through the messages that I received from people like you in the community. Okay, so when you send me a message on LinkedIn, or when you leave a comment on the podcast, or when you send me an email, or you connect through my company, Coltivar, et cetera, or you're in the program at Boosting your Financial IQ, whatever, I get all this feedback from people. So I'm going through and I'm reading this feedback, which I'm so grateful for, and I'm like, oh my gosh, you know the story of this kid in the Middle East who loves the podcast and he said it changed his life for the single mom in Florida who listens to the podcast and decided to go out on her own and start her own bookkeeping business because she was inspired through financial literacy. So I'm reading all these comments and I say all this not because I'm anything great. It's not like I think I'm this super smart guy as it relates to finance. I'm just the guy putting this content together for you. So I'm reading this and I'm thinking I am so grateful right now for the opportunity and the resources to put together a platform like boosting your financial IQ for the entire world Now.

At the time, I had paid programs so people would join these programs, people would take these courses, they'd boost their financial IQ and I'd make some money. And I'm reading these comments and I'm thinking why am I here? Like, why do I exist? My whole purpose of Coltivar is to elevate lives through better business. So I'm thinking what's the whole point of this passion project called boosting your financial IQ? What am I doing with it? That's when the thought came to me what if I just make all this free? It totally, it's crazy, right? So I have several mentors.

I was talking to one of my mentors right before break and I was like you know what I've been thinking about? Maybe making this free. And he's like yeah, I want to do that. Don't make it free. What you could do is just give away like a one hour or two hour portion of your course and then upsell people into your premium program. But he's like I definitely want to give it away for free. The content is way too good. You've spent so much money and time like perfecting your craft and so you should capitalize on that. And I was like okay, yeah, yeah.

But then during break, that thought came again. It's like just make it free, because I've already been blessed in so many different ways with Coltivar

and therefore I don't need to add more zeros to my bank account. In fact, I would get more satisfaction by more people taking my courses and becoming a financial pro than I would just making more money. So, after much prayer and consideration because I'm a very spiritual guy I thought God has blessed me with gifts, just like he's blessed you. I thought God has blessed me with gifts just like he's blessed you. I'm a very religious person. God has definitely saved my life in so many different ways. You'll hear more of that later, perhaps in other episodes, as I share little bits and pieces of my personal life. But I thought God has been so merciful to me. He has forgiven me when I've made mistakes. He has given me tremendous opportunities, including these gifts, and he wants me to share them with the world. And that's when I decided to have faith, to take courage and to be brave and just announce to the world that all this is free.

Now let me just provide you a little bit of context. Here is free. Now let me just provide you a little bit of context here. Like I said before, this isn't some marketing ploy to get you into a program to later upsell you. Okay, it's not. In fact, it's my best stuff. I have over 100 video lessons that I recorded, that I had edited, that I applied some post-production to, so it's not so boring, right? So it's a little exciting. I spent all this time, all this money, all this energy, putting this program together, creating quizzes, and the thought of just making it free is somewhat terrifying. But also it's exciting because it feeds into my simple mission to educate more than 10 million business leaders with financial literacy.

Because here's the deal to be totally frank with you if you don't know how to read financial statements, if you don't know what the levers of profit or the levers of cashflow are and you're just like out there grinding in business, you're gonna make so many more mistakes than if you could just understand the fundamentals. I'm not here to turn you into a nerd doing debits and credits, celebrating every time your trial balance ticks and ties. We're in a green shade in the back office. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about just teaching you the fundamentals so you can become a financial pro, and you don't have to have any knowledge. All you have to do is put in the time and the effort.

But guess what? Check this out too. If you waste one hour a day, just one hour, how easy is that to waste one hour. I mean you're watching a show on Netflix or you're scrolling through your feed or you're watching some YouTubes. You can easily waste one hour a day. Well, guess what, if you take that one hour and you translate that into a working week, it equates to 12 working weeks a year. That's three months. That's crazy Just through one hour a day. So you can't use the excuse with me Like I don't have time, I don't have the money, like it's all free. This is all free.

If you become a financial pro, I promise you you will live a better financial life. That's it. There's nothing in it for me other than I just want to help you because I seriously care about you as a person and your success, because I know all the pain that I went through through a lack of financial literacy and I don't want you to feel the same pain, because it's terrible and also our lack of financial literacy impacts other people's lives. Think about it If you're running a business like I was running my business back in the day and you don't understand the numbers in your business, guess what You're making mistakes. And if you're making mistakes, that's impacting your employees and your employees' lives and their family's lives. So I'll tell you a real quick story.

When I was a CFO of this billion-dollar company, I was in the process of turning them around and I remember I was so stressed. I was working so many hours because I wanted to restore confidence in the company and I wanted to provide the safety and security the employees needed because the company was in a really bad financial situation. So everybody had left and our company was on four floors of this building and I walked from the fourth floor that's where my office was down to the third floor. And I was just walking the hallways and every office that I passed I noticed there were pictures of people's families right their kids, their wives, their husbands, their grandparents, et cetera, right On these pictures. And so I'm walking by and I'm looking at these family pictures that people have displayed on their desks and I thought, wow, wow, it hit me.

The responsibility that I had as a CFO, the fiduciary responsibility of my role, was so impactful, like hit me to the core and I realized that my financial literacy, or lack thereof, or my lack of strategic knowledge of how to take financial literacy and apply strategies to impact the performance of a company, was super consequential, because if I made bad decisions at the top. It was trickling down and it was literally impacting their families. And that's when I was like I need to get my stuff together, I need to elevate my game, I need to learn more. And this was after I had my undergraduate in accounting and finance, my master's in accounting, my MBA from Duke, my CPA all these things, all this experience, and I was like I need to elevate my game. So you can always elevate your game.

So here's exactly how to get started. Okay, exactly, you can go right now or after this podcast episode. You could go to boosting your financial IQ. Okay, b Y, f, I, qcom, and on that platform you can get the link. There's a button that says start learning for free, and it's really. It's not start for free, I'm going to charge you later. It's just like get started for free. It's always free, and you could download the app for your phone, for your tablet, or you can access it through your computer, any device, anytime, anywhere in the world, for free, forever. So simple, right? I mean, literally, you have to fill in a few fields, like your name and your email address, to get going, like I can't make it easier for you. So you go to the website byfiqcom and you sign up for free.

Then there are six levels. Six levels to become a financial pro and I'm going to teach you everything. I'm just going to fast track your way to becoming a financial pro. So imagine paying a hundred thousand dollars to get a degree at a university. That's what you're getting for like free, but you're getting it in like a fraction of the time because I cut through all the garbage, all the exercises, all that coursework, all the junk, all the noise that is irrelevant in the real world.

That's the advantage. I'm not saying academia is like totally terrible, but I could tell you a lot of the stuff I learned in undergrad and graduate school. I don't even apply to the real world because that's not how the real world works. I'm going to show you exactly how to become financially literate with the least amount of effort, in the fastest amount of time. That's how you get started. Once you go through the six levels, it's a huge accomplishment. So you're going to get certificates of completion along the way as you pass the quizzes and then at the very end, when you become a financial pro, you're going to get acknowledged right, because you put in the work and I want you to be recognized for that. Some more on that. You can learn all about that at BYFIQcom. So that's how you get started and you can listen to these videos like when you're working out.

So I have people reach out and they're like I love, you know this course or this exercise, and I was listening to it when I was working out. I'm like, okay, that's, that's cool. Like I thought I was the only one who was nerdy on the beach in Mexico with a highlighter, reading a finance book. But other people I guess around the world are nerdy just like me. So now I feel less alone and that's great. Okay, here's my story, real quick, and then we're going to end.

I'm going to tell you a story about Joe. Okay, now I met Joe years ago and he was a general manager at one of my clients and he was responsible for the profit and loss of a certain location. And so when I first met Joe and I talked to him about his business I mean, he's very smart, very capable and he came up through the ranks but when I asked him questions like what's your average transaction value? How many transactions do you do a year? What's your throughput? How much working capital does it require to run your location, et cetera? Right At asking these financial questions, he had no clue. He'd look at me like a deer in the headlights, which is totally fine, right. I mean, he was way better off than I was when I was starting out in business. I was like, hey, at least you're like in a better position than I was back in the day, but nonetheless, he lacked the financial literacy he needed to really understand the unit economics of his business and to drive value with precision. Right, that's what I've been talking about Now.

Fast forward, after working together in their business, helping them to turn around, put in place data, insights and tools like KPIs, a strategy blueprint all these things that I do for companies to help them to understand their financial position and how to close the value gap that I was referring to earlier, and all this mentorship and all this coaching. Now this is how Joe sounds, I kid you not, like I was talking to him a while back and he's like hey, steve, great to see you. My business has been grown by 15.6% and the reason why is because I was able to get my throughput up. We're now doing upselling, cross-selling and downselling of our products, which has increased my revenue as well. You know, our free cashflow is improving because I'm making better decisions with my working capital and with managing my AR. And I'm like who the heck is this guy? This is not the Joe that I used to know, and his success has followed his financial literacy. He's made more money, he's been more successful and his business unit has experienced tremendous growth. That's the power of financial literacy.

If you want to change your life, it starts by learning finance. I literally cannot make it easier for you, so there's no excuses, right? You cannot use the excuse of I don't have time, I don't have money, I don't have time, I don't have money, I'm not smart enough, I'm not a numbers person, I'm bad with math, like all that stuff is a bunch of garbage, okay, and I don't like that. I talk to my kids about that all the time. I don't like labels. People will say, oh, I'm a DD, or I am not a numbers person, or I'm bad at reading, or whatever it is. All the crap that we tell ourselves or that other people tell us is just noise and it's false. They're lies. You can become whatever you want.

I'm a creative. That's why I loved building my landscape company because it had a huge design element. And, if you know me, I create these graffiti cards for people's birthdays. I'll write their name and graffiti letters and I'll color them and whatnot. So I'm like, very creative.

So when I told my family I was going back to school to get my degree in accounting and finance, they're like what, who are you, steve? You are not a numbers person. A label right, and they did it out of love and kindness. It's not like they're trying to be malicious, but that's the whole thing that I'm talking about. Like we're labeled constantly in life and all it takes is for one person to say you're not a numbers person or for you to think that, and then all of a sudden you live with that stigma.

So today is your opportunity to break free from those shackles, because that's where I was. I thought I wasn't a numbers person. I would have never imagined that I would be turning around and growing million and billion dollar businesses today through financial literacy. I mean, it's crazy, it's bonkers. And I'm here to be your guide. You're the hero. Let me guide you. That's my invitation to you. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode. If you haven't commented below like send me a message. I'd love to hear from you, and please be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn. All right, until next time, take care of yourself. Cheers.