What fears or limiting beliefs did you have to overcome in your own career to step into leadership and become trusted advisors founders rely on?

Well, I've had a lot.

I've been very fortunate, to be very honest.

But each stage of my career, I took big steps up.

After I left Merrill Lynch, I went to M&A at Salomon Brothers.

which I was just a CPA from a state university.

I was working with people from Harvard, Princeton, Wharton, and I was getting my MBA on the road.

How do you personally navigate that tension and what advice do you have for founders who feel like they have to sacrifice one for the other?

the one of the biggest reasons that business owners you know create i guess that complexity or uncertainty in their business because they don't have a clear pathway of what their business is actually doing in terms of the financial performance

sometimes you know you know if you're a first-time business owner and you're an entrepreneur a lot of times you don't know what you don't know it's not that they're ignoring it they just don't know that they should be looking at it They're so busy building their business, hiring key staff, going out, selling.

They don't have time in the day to look at their numbers.

A lot of times, their financial infrastructure got them to where they are, and it's not going to get them to where they want to be.

They hired a bookkeeper.

The bookkeeper's been there for five years, and the bookkeeper tracks three metrics.

Accounts payable, accounts receivable and cash, and are they going to make payroll for the next two weeks? That's what they're tracking.

How are you going to help me?

So, Jeffrey, tell us a little bit about your elevator pitch on your background, and then we'll jump into what we got to do to get our finances in order.

I was very fortunate.

I grew up in New York City.

I went to high school in the Bronx.

I went to SUNY Binghamton, became a CPA.

I studied accounting, became a CPA.

I worked for Merrill Lynch Internal Audit in their real estate area.

When is the right time to get out? It sounds like it ought to be sooner rather than later before.