If you build financial skills, if you double down, if you take the time and you build the skills right now I know you're busy, we're all busy, right, but if you build the skills, I'm telling you, doors will open up to you in incredible ways. This podcast, boosting your Financial IQ, is about business, financial literacy, strategies for profitability and the principles taught at byfiqcom. My hope is that you'll apply the lessons learned and that we can work together soon in my mastery program. Enjoy the show and don't forget to subscribe If you want to boost your financial IQ and learn business finance. I'm going to walk you through exactly how I increase my financial literacy and how you can, too. My name is Steve Coughran. I'm the founder of Coltivar. I've spent my entire career turning around and growing businesses and in the process, I've been able to generate over a billion dollars in value by combining principles of strategy and finance. And I'm going to walk you through the seven steps that I took, or the seven experiences that I went through, in order to increase my financial literacy. Number seven is probably the funniest of all, and it involves Spanish class and maybe or maybe not stealing a textbook. Okay, so we'll get into number seven here, but let's start from the beginning. Number one okay, this was the first step or experience that happened to me that propelled me towards increasing my financial literacy.

When I was 16 years old, I left home right, I love my mom. She's married to this total punk, so I decided to leave her home and move in with my sister. At $0, no safety net. I was making $4.25 an hour at Dairy Queen right, that wasn't going to cut it. I worked previously a few summers doing landscaping. So I decided to go off on my own and start my own landscape business out of my sister's garage. It's supposed to just pay for college, but then it blew up and I grew it into a multi-million dollar business. But guess what? I had no clue how to read financial statements and I made a ton of mistakes, lost a lot of money and ultimately failed. So you don't want to go down that path, because if you don't know how to read financial statements, you're going to have a hard time leading a company and not blowing it up and running out of cash, all right. So from that experience, I was super depressed. I was in this dark place in life and I vowed to myself oh my gosh, I will never let this happen again. I will never let a bad strategy or my lack of financial intelligence impact my life or the lives of other people. That's when I was like, okay, something's got to change. So that's number one. That's the first thing that created this spark, this insatiable appetite for learning financial concepts, because I realized I had a major gap in this gap hurt other people, including myself and my family. Okay, number two was college.

I went back to school and I got my undergraduate in accounting and finance. At first I was going down the path of finance and marketing. In fact, I was like three classes away from getting my marketing degree. And then, at the very last moment, I was like you know what? Pause, I'm going to go down the path of accounting. Because I had a mentor and he's like if you do finance, that's great, but if you don't know where the numbers are coming from, you're not going to be as successful and powerful as you can be in the world of business. And I was like, okay, good point. So I pivoted and I started learning accounting and I walked away with an undergraduate degree in accounting and finance. Then, after that, I went on to get my master's in accountancy I know, total nerd. And then I took my CPA, passed all four sections, got my CPA and then I went into public accounting.

It was here that I applied what was taught in the classrooms to the real world. I was diving deep into financial statements. I spent thousands and thousands of hours of my life going through financial statements, debits and credits, building financial models, and that's when everything really sunk in. But that wasn't enough, because it's during that moment I realized there's a massive gap between people who teach strategy and try to embed strategies in companies and finance. And that's when I created Coltivar to bridge the gap. So at Coltivar we leverage strategy, in other words, we help companies to put in place a strategy and we apply principles of finance to focus on the right drivers of value to create tremendous profitability and cashflow for organizations. So that's Coltivar.

When I was running Coltivar, I was like I wanna go back and get my MBA. So I went to the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. I studied strategy abroad, internationally, and I deepened my knowledge in accounting and finance. So eight years of school after high school later I deepened my knowledge in the world of accounting and finance and I can tell you college right. College is really important. But I also created a program called the Financial Pro, and I put that on Boosting your Financial IQ because I know that this audience is much bigger than just in the United States. I know a lot of you live in foreign countries and maybe you can't afford a fancy education or a very expensive education, so I created this Financial Pro program. It's super cheap, it's on Boosting your Financial IQ, compared to what exists out there. I even have the Fundamentals of of finance or I have a free app. You could go there and you can get started today and you can start learning finance and if you love it, then you could go deeper and deeper and deeper, like I did. So that's number two was college. Number three okay, this is huge.

I was in this finance club total nerd right and they passed around a flyer once about this financial modeling course. I didn't even know what financial modeling was, but essentially I took the flyer and I was like, ah, it's on the weekend, but I decided to go anyway. So I signed up and then I showed up. This guy flew in from Wall Street and this guy was legit, he was hardcore and he's like look, you use your mouse in Excel. You can't say you're proficient in Excel, like, take that off your resume. You're lying. And I'm like, okay, this guy's intense. But over two days he taught us how to build financial models, just like people on Wall Street and investment banking. That whole experience made me super curious, so I went on to sign up for a financial modeling course. I took that for an entire semester and that's probably one of the most valuable courses that I took in college, because I learned how to build financial models and I still apply financial modeling today, every day, right when I'm working with my team, when we're building financial forecasts or building other models to help customers make better decisions, I apply these skills. So that was huge.

And that's number three. Number four I just took action and I got started. So when I first began, like when I first created Coltivar, my financial modeling skills were definitely not what they are today. My models were kind of ugly, just saying. But the point is is that I just started applying the principles of finance to like real life models and then I'd present them to clients and they'd be like I don't understand what this is saying, and then I'd make tweaks and make it better and better and better. So my point is is that start applying what you're learning. Like build a financial model, build a financial forecast, put in place KPIs. Like apply this stuff and you'll learn it so much faster. There's so much power in application.

Number five I learned the cornerstones of finance, in other words, the value drivers of business. Really, there are four value drivers. Number one you can increase price. Number two you can improve cost and capital efficiencies. Number one you can increase price. Number two you can improve cost and capital efficiencies. Number three you can reduce your operating expense. Or number four you can increase volume. Those are the four ways to maximize value in a business and then if you just follow the micro strategies under each of those, then you'll know how to turn around and grow a company.

But the biggest thing is, if I didn't know how to read an income statement, a balance sheet, a statement of cash flows and, more importantly, the story behind the numbers, then I wouldn't be able to take action in the right ways. I mean, I'd be able to take action. It's easy to take action, but if you don't know the value drivers, you won't understand where is the greatest upside for the work that you're putting in. That's called leverage. If you can leverage your effort and get 10 times the result of doing something else, you're going to be really effective in business. So understanding the cornerstones of finance and how those applied to strategy was really helpful to me.

Number six is I attended a lot of financial meetings, so I have the unique opportunity to meet with CEOs and their teams and in these meetings we go over the financials every single month. If you're a business owner, you can hold the same exact meetings in your business every single month. Review your financial statements, look at your forecast, tie that back to your strategy and you'll learn the numbers so much faster by following this cadence. Maybe you're not a business owner, but you can find a way to be involved with these financial meetings that will make all the difference in the world. So, just like the other steps that I took, being in these financial meetings deepened my financial skills because I was talking the talk, I was hearing things, I was applying things, I was seeing what was working and then I would follow these KPIs and see the trends and everything else, and it just brought everything together by being in these financial meetings. Now here's a bonus, because I didn't write this one down, but mentorship was a really important part of my journey. I was mentored by other CFOs and other financial experts or Wall Street people or investment bankers, but you can do the same thing. So work with your CFO or partner with a controller, or find somebody in finance or investment banking that can teach you these skills, and just they take you under their wing and help you to apply the principles that you're learning. That could be super valuable. All right, moving on to number seven without further ado.

This is such a funny story. Oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm saying this. I'm totally going to get arrested. No, I'm just kidding. So when I was in seventh grade, I was like this little punk. I was this troubled kid. Right, things weren't going super well back at home. No excuse, I can own my actions, my behavior, but I was just this troubled kid.

I remember being in Spanish class and I was so bored. Like I was so bored, I was so naughty, like I'd throw things across the classroom. When my teacher is writing on the board, she'd be like what, what was that? What was that noise? And we'd all laugh, ha, ha, ha. And I, just I was a punk and my grades were terrible. Yeah, I was failing Spanish. So my teacher came to me and she said look, steve, you're getting an F unless you turn things around and you really start taking this class seriously. And I was like, dang, okay, I don't want an F. So I pulled myself together, I started studying, I did enough to get by and I passed the class with a C minus.

On the last day of school I decided to repay her her generosity, her kindness, by taking her Spanish book this is the teacher's edition and sitting on her desk, and I was like, oh, there it is, I took it. All right, I know total naughty kid, right. So I took her Spanish book, but I just take it and like throw it in the trash or like punk her by any means. I took it because I wanted, for some weird reason, to like prove her wrong or to study over the summer. I don't know what I was thinking. Okay, this is like me being super crazy. So I go home and the first day of summer I opened up the book and I have all the answers right To all. Like the little exercises in the book. I had the student version and the teacher version, so I was almost playing like teacher and student at the same time. I created all these little quizzes for me. I had flashcards. I wrote things on sticky notes in Spanish and I'd like attach it to like the lamp and the carpet and the wall and my cat's tail like El Gato. No, I'm just kidding, but I created all these sticky notes and these quizzes and stuff and then I would take these quizzes and I'd grade myself. I know total nerd right and I did this all summer.

Then I go back to school the next year and I'm sitting in Spanish class. I take the test and I like ace it, you know 100%, and the rest of the class struggled. And then I take a few more tests and my teacher's like, huh, you're doing really well. Anyways, I ended up skipping the whole next level because I educated myself over the summer. So I skipped a whole year of Spanish and then I went on to take a few more years of Spanish. I didn't take it really seriously. Then in college I was a total goofball. So I took beginner Spanish as a five credit class, totally aced it Like I was totally overqualified to be in the class, but whatever.

And then I started a landscape business and I had the unique opportunity to work with the Hispanic workforce and all that came together. So it's kind of like Steve Jobs said you know you can't connect the dots looking forward, you could only connect the dots looking back. And the whole point of the story is not about being naughty and taking my teacher's book, it's about distrusting in, you know, the future. I believe in a higher power, so for me I'm like not that the higher power is pleased with me stealing this book, but I believe that all things work for the greater good of us if we have faith and if we take action. And this experience taught me that having this curiosity, building these skills, allowed me to run this landscape business.

I had no clue I was going to start a landscape business. I had no clue that I was going to need to speak Spanish in order to be successful in my business, but I did it. I learned the skills and opportunities opened up, and then I learned how to run a landscape business, how to interact with CEOs and how to avoid pitfalls in the future. And all of this has led me down this path because I decided to build the skills. So that's what I want to just leave you with.

I know kind of a rando story here that if you build financial skills. If you double down, if you take the time, if you put away the Netflix, the TikTok, the video games and you build the skills. Right now, I know you're busy, we're all busy, right, but if you build the skills, I'm telling you, doors will open up to you in incredible ways. And I'm so glad that I learned Spanish, because it allowed me to be successful in business, to learn construction, which later on led me to consult construction companies. It also taught me how to learn, and then that translated to building financial skills and everything changed for me. The same exact thing can happen to you. Your path will probably look different from mine, but I just wanted to share with you what worked for me and maybe you can apply some of these things in your life. I just want you to be successful and I could tell you, like the Beastie Boys said, it's the skills to pay the bills that makes all the difference in the world. All right, I wish you all the best and until