If you don't know finance and you're gonna just fake it till you make it, one day you're gonna be a CEO, you think, but you don't need to know finance. Then you're just tricking yourself. 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. Here's straight up financial advice from 30 years of experience.

When I was 16 years old, I left home. I loved my mom a lot. She's just married to this total punk. I moved in with my sister. I was making $4.25 an hour at Dairy Queen. That was not cutting it. I had $0, no safety net and after working a couple of summers in landscaping, I decided to go off on my own and I started my own landscaping company from my sister's garage. I had no clue how to read financial statements. I just relied on sheer heroics, hard work, grit, sweat, blood, sweat, tears all that stuff in order to grow my business. And guess what? I made a ton of mistakes and ultimately failed in the end. So I don't want you to go down the same path.

Since then, I went back and I got my undergraduate degree in accounting and finance. I got my master's in accountancy, got my CPA, I worked in public accounting and, to top it all off, I got my MBA at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, studying international strategy and diving deeper into finance. So I'm a complete nerd when it comes to finance, but I could tell you that's been the game changer for me. With my business, Coltivar, I go into companies and I turn them around. So I go in, I turn around a business, and the way that I do that is I combine strategy this framework that I came up with and finance principles, of finance to drive value. Because I can think strategically, I can identify the value drivers in a business and know exactly where to focus attention. But I could tell you I would not have created over a billion dollars in value for companies if I didn't know financials right how to read financial statements, the financial levers, how everything worked, how to build financial models. That has been the difference between me and everybody else. All right, so let me just share with you how you can apply some of these lessons in your life and shortcut your path to success. And I wish somebody would have been talking to me just straight up like this, like I'm talking to you when I was younger, but nobody did so. I just had to learn the hard way. So let's just skip all the mistakes that are possible. Let me just help you to be successful in your life. So hashtag, real talk.

The longer you wait to build a skill, the harder it is to do it. So when I was younger, I studied Spanish. I studied Spanish in junior high and high school and then, with my landscape business, I had the unique opportunity to work with a Hispanic workforce. So I learned Spanish and I am so grateful for this opportunity to learn a foreign language because I used it quite a bit. I use it all the time. I wish I had the opportunity to speak more in Spanish, because I'd be more proficient, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to build more in Spanish because I'd be more proficient, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to build the skill.

The same thing is true with finance. Finance may be scary. You may be listening to this podcast or wondering okay, how do I learn more? A lot of people reach out what books should I be reading, what courses should I be taking? And that's all great, and you should learn as much as you possibly can about numbers and if you can interpret the story behind the numbers and then take action, you're going to be so valuable out there in the workplace. And remember money follows value. If you can solve problems with your financial literacy skills, you're going to make a lot of money. All right, so that's been.

A huge game changer for me is learning finance. When I was 30 years old, I had the unique opportunity to go into a billion dollar company and turn them around, and when I asked the CEO why did you hire me? He said because you knew strategy and finance. And I was like, wow, okay, and I've heard that over and over again. So that's what I'd encourage you is to build financial skills. So if you're wondering, okay, Steve, how do I start? You can go to byfiqcom. You can take the assessment and just establish a baseline. You can also download the Boosting your Financial IQ app and in there there's a starter course that you can take for absolutely free.

There's all this content that I put out there. I have my podcast, boosting your Financial IQ and Business Strategy, or you can search the web. There are other YouTubes. There are other courses you could take. I have a premium course called the Financial Pro, whatever it is. It's just immerse yourself in content that is clear, easy to understand and applies to the real world.

But I'm just like so emphatic about this. That's why I'm so passionate about this topic, because financial literacy was a skill that I learned early on, thank goodness. It was hard, it was arduous. Some of my friends were taking some easier classes and I'm like what the heck? I'm struggling here with these complicated financial academic courses, but I'm so glad that I built these skills because it's made all the difference in the world. And let me just say this when somebody's trying to fake finance, I can see it from a mile away. So if you and I are talking and I know you don't really know finance then I can catch you in the act of trying to pull a fast one on me.

I've done a lot of interviews with controllers and this surprises me. So I'll try to source a controller for a company that I'm working with, and just a few months ago I was having these interviews with these controllers and I would ask them where do you find capital expenditures on the financial statements? And I can't tell you how many controllers would say oh, the balance sheet. It's like. You can find property plan equipment on the balance sheet, but you have to make all these adjustments to get to CapEx. Really, capital expenditures are found on the statement of cash flows under the investing section. So it's just little things like that, not that I was trying to catch them in the act of like pulling a fast one on me.

My point is is that if you don't know finance and you're going to just fake it till you make it, one day you're going to be a CEO, you think, but you don't need to know finance then you're just tricking yourself. It's like me. Years ago I went with my wife to the U S open and I didn't know anything at tennis at first. And so we go to the U S open and I'm like oh, yeah, you know that was a great set. And she's like no, that's not a set, that's a game. Or I'd be like, yeah, that's a great match. She's like that's there, that's a volley. She's like, no, she correct me on my baseline. I'm using all the words incorrectly, but thankfully, after three days of watching tennis I was able to pick up on more. I'm still not there yet completely, but nonetheless I think I'm proficient enough to have a conversation with my wife and she loves tennis.

But the point is is that in the world of business, the number one skill you could develop is learning how to read financial statements. I'm not talking about being a nerd wearing a green shade, doing debits and credits and being like yay the trial, balance sticks and ties. I'm not talking about that at all. I'm just saying learn the fundamentals of finance. Learn how to read an income statement, a balance sheet, a statement of cash flows. Understand the financial metrics and the levers that drive value in an organization. Understand how to compute working capital. Learn how to build financial models like a financial forecast, and these skills will take you so far in life.

Like I said, there are a ton of resources out there. I built the entire Boosting your Financial IQ platform to provide goodwill to the world and to help business leaders educate themselves so they can step up and they can create a tremendous amount of value, and I want the very best for you. So please check out the resources and if it's not mine, go check out somebody else's resources. But the point is is that the faster you learn skills, the earlier on you build these skills, the more successful you'll be in life. So maybe you need to put away TikTok, maybe you need to stop playing video games and you need to get focused on what really matters in your life, and this, like learning finance, will be a game changer for you and it'll allow you to be very successful and to live a better financial life. All right, those are my words of wisdom. I hope you have a great rest of your week and until next episode, cheers.