Finance

If you see yourself primarily as a car booking service, your economics naturally revolve around the number of rentals and the commission on each one.

But if you look at the wider urban mobility market, a booking turns out to be just one moment in a much longer process.

A car has to be acquired, financed, insured, operated, maintained, repaired, and eventually sold.

During that time, it may or may not generate cash flow, it has a certain level of utilization, it develops an operating history, and its residual value changes.

The rental transaction happens somewhere inside that lifecycle.

Good morning.

Welcome to Money in the Morning, aka Economic Elevation, aka Financial Consciousness.

My name is Dr. Boyce Watkins, and this is where we get together every morning and we talk about our finances from a B1 perspective.

B1 means Black First.

Over the course of your career, is there one, you know, is there a business lesson that you were taught that really helped your career?

Yes.

Try to be as much of a micromanager as possible, but with people that are amazing at micromanaging in the spaces of the finances, first and foremost.

There's so much money moving in this music shit that you don't even remember to go and collect.

I wish I had that problem.

Number one, a home that no longer fits the next stage of your life.

The first financial burden is not necessarily a large house.

It's a house that no longer fits the life that you're about to live.

And that distinction matters, right? You're going from working every day, perhaps a family to retiring.

Before you retire, calculate what your home truly cost each year and ask whether it still fits the life you expect to live ten years from now.

Number two, having debt attached to things that keep losing value.

The second financial burden is having debt to depreciating assets.

a vehicle loan, an RV payment, the loan you took on that boat, recreational equipment, a line of credit used to purchase things that become less valuable every year.

Because I think otherwise, like you said, Taryn, I've seen a lot of businesses roll it out where it becomes a rock, right? It's a quarterly rock.

We're going to research whatever the new piece of technology is, a new CRM, a new finance platform.

you know, some sort of new funnel building platform, some sort of new, like whatever it is, advertising platform that's going to be able to broadcast all the social media, whatever it is that they're choosing to do.

And they say, I'd like you as a rock this quarter to research it and then roll it out.

Like just, just ask big picture questions like, Hey, if I turn this sideways and plugged it in a little bit differently this way, could I cut out four steps? Like people who are in it in the day to day, it's really hard for them to think like that.

Not that they're not smart enough is that they have the capacity to think like that because of how much demand they're under.

So I think just thinking through like from a finance, this, this particular client with, with the finance system, like they wanted to make this big commitment and it was going to be a big financial commitment and a big heavy lift for the change.

And I like that we're pumping the brakes a little bit and we're looking at their workflows now and we're going to put somebody in a seat next to them to do the workflows with them and to think through, could we reimagine workflows differently so that when we do make this big decision, we have the right thing that we're plugging into the new product if we determine that's what we need.

And I really appreciate just how like clean, educational, informative your content is.

Fisayo as well as another one, Finance Matters, which again is very like educational and informative in quite a clear way.

I wish there were...

I see myself as a bit of a midpoint between like being more... um, personality oriented.

manages all the disputes and chargebacks, interacts with the restaurant, and then the agent that I described, we call them business development agents, also has supporting agents.

It has an agent in finance and operations and integrations, so that order needs to be placed into Toast or Resi, All of that is orchestrated on MyOA.

So that's a real experience.

But the end result of that experience is a blue contract that governs every aspect of that interaction from ideation all the way to the execution and payment and settlement while keeping restaurant owner in control.