Going back. I wish I would have got up more. I wish I would have canceled a few more meetings and just walked around on the floor and interacted more with my team. It's not like I didn't do that, I just didn't do it enough. This is BYFIQ. Wealth and success come from understanding how finance works in business, and together we'll explore the most important topics to 10x your financial results. My hope is that we can work together soon. Please share and enjoy. To 10X your financial results. My hope is that we can work together soon. Please share and enjoy.

About seven years ago, I had an incredible opportunity to become a CFO of a billion dollar 50-year-old company, and today I want to share with you the three things that I learned from this experience. So, to set the stage, the company was competing in the construction and renewable energy space, meaning they were building commercial and industrial buildings and also constructing massive utility scale solar projects out in the middle of the desert, and when I say massive, I mean just the scale of these projects was phenomenal. In fact, one of the jobs we were building out in Australia had over 1 million solar panels. They're just huge, right, and you just drive down rows and rows and rows of solar panels, and it's pretty cool to be there on site and see these buildings being constructed, because it's like wow, we're actually making a difference and we're building infrastructure that will support communities, families and just the overall world abroad. So it was a really fulfilling job and also I had the pleasure of working with some very smart and capable individuals and it was such an amazing time to get to know these wonderful people, and my life is definitely blessed from this experience. So let me share with you the three things that I learned from this opportunity.

Number one the my mantra coming into this position, because I realized very early on that we had a lot of complexity, especially in the accounting department. In fact, we had thousands and thousands of chart of accounts and that made our reporting very burdensome and very delayed. In fact, when I started, our financials were so far behind we were lagging about three or four months. It was crazy. So the first thing that we had to do to fix this problem was just to simplify across the department, and that's the first thing that I want to share with you is, when it comes to accounting and finance, it's all about making things simple, and really that's my mission. That's what I do at Boosting your Financial IQ with the free financial pro program that I've provided for all of you. So if you're not in the program, be sure to check that out. It's absolutely free.

But my whole goal is just to make finance simple, right, simple, easy to understand, because if you don't understand the story behind the numbers, then what's the point of all of it? Right? So what I had to do is we had to eliminate a ton of chart of accounts that existed. We were tracking things at such a micro level that we were getting lost in the weeds. So we just simplified things, we rolled it up, we consolidated our reporting and we made it very, very easy for our executive vice presidents, who are running these different profit centers, to understand. I wanted all the reporting to be on one sheet so they could see their numbers and then they could go take action that month, that period, that week, that day, whatever it was, in order to drive change.

So this is a great opportunity for you to take a step back and to look at your own company and ask yourself is there unnecessary complexity in the system when it comes to innovation? Oftentimes we think that in order to innovate, we have to do more. In fact, I think, when it comes to innovation, it's all about doing less. It's all about simplifying. I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who said simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and I think that is so true. So that was lesson number one was just to make everything very simple, and that can be really tough, and it reminds me of something that I read once that made me chuckle, and it said look, I'm sorry I sent you such a long email. If I had more time it would have been shorter. Which means that when it comes to simplicity, it's actually really hard, like when you go into an Apple store it's just so simple, right. All the complexity is removed, and that is true artistic brilliance.

It's really hard to make things simple because when we start making a reporting simple, when we start looking at the numbers and we're trying to make things simple, there's always these caveats or nuances, right, which then introduces more complexity, because we say, okay, let's keep reporting very simple, we're going to just report revenue, cost of goods sold, et cetera, et cetera. And then somebody says, well, is there any way we could break out revenue? And it's like, okay, now we add four more lines to the financial reporting and then it's okay, well, this revenue line item is there any way we could dissect that even further? And then, next thing, you know, the reports become very convoluted and very complicated to understand. So just keep things simple.

And I'm not just talking about finance, I'm talking across the board and even personally in my life. During this time, I had to remove a lot of complexity because I was so busy, I was so slammed and I was tasked with turning around a billion dollar company and therefore I had to stay laser focused, which required me to just simplify and remove any complexity in my personal life as well. Oftentimes we are drowning in tasks, right. We're just so burdened with tasks and with information, especially with AI and all the channels that constantly push information our way. I mean, we have our phones, we have text messages, we have voicemails, we have emails, we have Slack, we have WhatsApp, we have AI, we have meetings. We have all this stuff coming at us in all different ways, and if we don't find ways to simplify the information coming our way or just to simplify processes, we're going to drown, right? So that's the first thing that I did.

Number two this may sound a little weird, but it's have a clean balance sheet. So let me explain here what I mean. When it comes to the demons right, the monsters of a company you know where they live. They live on the balance sheet because the income statement is so much more straightforward. You have revenue, your costs, and you have your profit and loss, and a lot of times businesses will look at their income statement. In fact, they'll build a budget or a forecast around the income statement. So the income statement gets a lot of attention, but guess what? The balance sheet gets ignored. And don't even get me started on the statement of cash flows, because that is the child that is neglected in most companies, right? People don't even pay attention to the statement of cash flows, but we'll get into that later. But the balance sheet is really where these demons hide, because there are things that exist in working capital right, the difference between your current assets and current liabilities that if you don't pay attention to, they can definitely harm the business in terrible ways.

So when I came into the company, I focused in on the balance sheet and I got it cleaned up, and there were massive reversals and things that we had to do in order to clean up the balances. So everything ticked and tied, and this was painful because there were things that were sitting on the balance sheet for so long for example, in prepaids and in cruels and in other parts of the business and when they got cleaned up, they created reversals on the financial statements which made the losses look even worse. Okay, so the balance sheet is very important and it's important to keep it clean, because when you take the income statement and the balance sheet and you combine them together, guess what? They make the statement of cash flows. So that was lesson. Number two is make sure you have a very clean balance sheet, because if your income statement and your balance sheet ticks and ties, guess what you could then create a statement of cash flows off of those. And the statement of cash flows is really important because it'll tell you how much free cash flow your business has, and you know me, I love free cash flow because it's all about cash flow, baby. All right. Number three the third thing that I learned in you know what part of this. To be honest, I didn't even learn this until after the fact and I wish I could go back and change a few things here. But principle number three is get up and talk to people. Right, I'm talking to myself here. I should be holding up a mirror right now when I say this third point here.

I was so busy as a CFO. I mean, my meetings were stacked, one after the next. I'd go into the office and I'd go in there early. And then people found out that I'd go in there early. They'd see my car in the parking lot or my light on in the corner office and they would come up and say, hey, steve, do you have a few minutes? And of course I didn't want to turn them away, but then that started interrupting my early morning time and therefore I just found myself in meetings all day long, which is good, it's important, right. But here's the thing Getting up and just walking around and talking to people would have made a bigger difference in my leadership style.

Our chairman his name is Jay. I love Jay, he's such a great man and he taught me so much about being an incredible leader. What he would do is he would walk through the halls and I'd hear him come in. He'd be whistling, he'd be all happy, walking up and down the halls. He'd be saying, hey, good morning, how are you doing, stacy, how are you, bill? Right, he'd be calling out the names of the people across the company, asking about them, asking about their weekend, asking about their kids following up on their dog right, asking them about their vacations, and he just really cared about people and this uplifted the people Just, even if it was a one second interaction or just a tap on the shoulder or hey, let's pound some knuckles, right. Whatever it was, he just did a great job of booing up people and lifting their spirits and I just really love that about Jay and his whole style of leading.

Also, I had these informal lunches with the president of the office in which I was working. His name was Jack and we would walk over and have some Mexican food quite frequently throughout the week because I just love Mexican food. And these informal impromptu meetings were excellent because we were able to talk about the most pressing things happening in the business and get aligned from a strategy and finance perspective, and also we were able to build trust with each other and that really strengthened our relationship. And the reason why these meetings were so important is because at the top of the organization you have to be aligned right. Ceos and CFOs have to be aligned with each other, because strategy plus finance, plus operations, equals value creation.

So, going back, I wish I would have got up more. I wish I would have canceled a few more meetings and just walked around on the floor and interacted more with my team. It's not like I didn't do that, I just didn't do it enough. So those were the three things that I learned from my experience as a CFO and, like I said, it was such an incredible opportunity. It was a heavy burden, right, because I had this fiduciary responsibility to drive value in the organization, because so many lives depended on it. But I wouldn't trade it for anything. All right, that's all I have for you. I hope you have an incredible week and, until next episode, take care of yourself. Cheers.