Corporate Financial Planning & Analysis with Tom Seegmiller | E075
Taking control of you.
In today’s episode, Jason is going to talk to Tom Seegmiller; he is the VP of Financial Planning Analysis for Vena Solution. Most companies tend to have a centralized finance function which means finance rules up within the finance organization as opposed to sitting within the business with business owners or think of general managers or functional owners.
Episode Highlights:
01.06: Tom acts as a financial business partner or planner for the companies that he has worked for.
01.54: When Jason talks about corporate financial planning, he is basically talking about how the corporation fits into your life and the monetization of it, how the cash flows come out of it, and essentially how it impacts your personal life.
03.31 Jason says the programs that basically came up around the country and around the world that were there to support business very much required a lot of data, information, and calculation.
04.05: Tom explains, what happened in COVID is, many businesses that were likely coasting along or operating just fine pre-pandemic ended up in survival mode.
04.41: Tom has typically focused on creating forecasts or budgets within the organization to try to lay out how and when things are going to happen in this budget or forecast that we ultimately create is really just a financial articulation of a whole series of operational items that we aim to truly understand and then translate into financial results.
06.20: Jason says you start up a business typically to do something not to do accounting and planning strategy. To be successful, you really have to master or at least get the right people to master and listen to their advice.
06.52: COVID 19 gave people an opportunity to actually exit the pandemic in a much, much stronger place as an organization. Tom suggests improving operational mechanisms if people choose to do so, and we have talked a little bit about this in advance, but great opportunity to ultimately drive Businesses forward, should you continue to operate in an enhanced fashion.
07.50 While talking about owner-managed business Tom says, “Through writing down your plans and focusing on understanding the operations, not just yourself, but driving it into your organization you do naturally build a bit of succession plan.”
09.12: Tom focuses on understanding what people do, and he takes a genuine interest in understanding their business. What makes some tech what they are excited about? Risks and opportunities? What sort of challenges they faced in the past where they could use extra help and support?
09.35: Early conversations are usually predicated around truly understanding the operations of the business from them.
10.55 Jason remarks in a job company own you, but owning a business, you own the company, and if you are gone, the company continues on, and that is something that most people have a hard time getting too.
12.30: Tom says you can’t give exactly what somebody is looking for, but you have to make sure there are still some wins in it for them so that they want to come back to the table the next time you look to engage.
13.14: Tom says data is a unique concept because there tend to be many issues with it.
14.52: Nobody would come to me if they needed surgery, go to a surgeon. You have other professionals who deal in data every day and can help you distill it into a consumable fashion, says Tom.
15.01: Talking about the resignation letter Tom inquires - how do you distill back what the impact is on different levels of attrition within the business? Is it going to ultimately cost you more because salaries are higher in the market due to inflation compared to your current headcount? What do you do to try to retain those folks? Could you run a strategy in which you pay more in order to reduce attrition and ultimately not end up going down a path of paying more or higher market-based salaries? It can take different forms depending on the need or the outing you’re undertaking with the business.
18.01: People love excel, live and die by it, and then it is a source software in the market.
19.07: Jason says no matter how many times spreadsheets are engineered and protected all but a couple of single cells that are highlighted, people still find ways to do things with those cells.
19.43: If it is structured and engineered properly, the feedback you should be receiving is that business owners own their own budget.
21.07: When you think about any business that has that kind of structure in place, talk about designing the absolute worst incentive system imaginable, says Jason.
22.41 Tom: Sometimes the world changes, sometimes there is a need to adapt and change, but the whole spirit is we should be running a business that’s firing on all cylinders, not stuck to some plan that happens to be 9,10 twelve months old. That was built at a time before we had the information we have today.
23.01: The intent is to be constantly agile, change and adapt as appropriate, make sure your business is driving in the right direction, and align with your stated strategy.
3 Key Points:
Jason asks Tom to talk about the importance of how COVID-19 basically brought financial planning to life for many people and why it’s just so important not to put this off.
When you think about the operational perspective, the obstacles within the corporation are finite resources, so cash is a finite resource.
In the next couple of years, we’re going to see all kinds of software that plugs into your accounting software and other packages. This gives you this giant data framework that’s user-friendly and hopefully no more difficult to use than social media.
Tweetable Quotes:
“Personal finances mean anything having to do with the city, corporate reorganizations, tax policy, distributions.” – Jason
“It is an old saying about never letting an opportunity or crisis go away.” – Jason
“An organization really is only valuable, shouldn’t operate as an organization, and part of that means it’s not contingent on just one person.” – Tom
“When you go through budgeting cycle, everybody wants more than it is available.”- Tom
Resources Mentioned
Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook
LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn
Tom Seegmiller: LinkedIn
Woodgate.com – Sponsor
Transcript:
Producer: Welcome to the Financial Planning for Canadian Business Owners Podcast. You will hear about industry insights with award-winning financial planner and entrepreneur, Jason Pereira. Through the interviews with different experts with their stories and advice, you will learn how you can navigate the challenges of being an entrepreneur, plan for success and make the most of your business and life. And now, your host, Jason Pereira.
Jason Pereira: Well, welcome. Today on the show I have Tom Seegmiller, VP of Financial Planning Analysis for Vena Solutions. And I brought him on the show today to specifically talk about the need for corporate financial planning and analysis, and that is different from what I do for a living. I'm going to specify why at the beginning of the interview. But really, this is about planning for the life of the corp, not your life outside the corp. And with that, here's my interview with Tom. Tom, thanks for your time today.
Tom Seegmiller: Great to be here, Jason. Thanks for having me.
Jason Pereira: My pleasure. So, Tom Seegmiller of Vena Solutions, tell us a little bit about what it is you do?
Tom Seegmiller: Sure, so I act as a financial business partner or planner for the companies that I work for. Most companies tend to have, what we call, a centralized finance function, which means finance rolls up within the finance organization, as opposed to sitting within the business with business owners or think of general managers or functional owners. So, what I do fundamentally is partner up with them to provide enhanced insights as to financial performance in the future, so think of things like budgeting and forecasts, business cases, acquisitions, really whatever sort of financial support they require in order to derive enhanced insights and drive the business forward.
Jason Pereira: So, let's just clarify the difference between what it is that you do and what it is I do. We kind of alluded to it in the intro. So, when I talk about corporate financial planning, I'm talking about basically how the corporation fits into your life and the monetization of it, how the cash flows come out of it, and essentially, how it impacts your personal life, so your personal finances, so that means anything having to do with, say, corporate reorganization, tax policy, distributions from other planning strategies and so I'm really planning outside the operation. The operation, quite honestly, I can nudge people or give them some guidance on best practices or certain metrics, but I am not planning their business per se. How does what you do differ from the description of what I just gave?
Tom Seegmiller: Sure. So, what I do is I actually try to help optimize the operations of the business so that business owners have sufficient cash flow and assets to distribute in a more efficient manner, so making sure you generate enough wealth and the ability to execute on tax planning outside of the org is really my mandate. So, if we think of it as a flow of dollars, I'll help the business to optimize within the structure and then you will help them on a day to day basis to make sure they ultimately plan in a tax efficient and effective manner.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, so basically you're helping them plan out the generation of money within the firm or within the company and I am planning and helping them operate the money outside of the company.
Tom Seegmiller: That's exactly right, yes.
Jason Pereira: Within, but let's just say operations, so within operations versus when we get into the actual legal corporate structures, so it's a summary. So, you reached out about coming on the show and talking about the importance of this. This is something we haven't covered in general, and this is also very timely, because COVID-19 and the programs that basically came up around the country and around the world that were there to support businesses, very much required a lot of data and information and calculation, something that a lot of business owners don't necessarily have done, right?
Jason Pereira: I like to say, there's those who see their accounting as a need to do and then there's those who see it as strategic resource and a needs to do, I always quiz people on this all the time, it's like, "Oh, when's the last time you looked at your financials?" And the response is, "Well, my accountant gave it to me when he filed those taxes." You can't run a multi-billion dollar enterprise that way and you shouldn't run a small business that way. So, talk to me about the importance of this, how COVID-19 basically brought this to life for a lot of people and why it's just so important to not put this off?
Tom Seegmiller: Yeah, and I would probably start by distinguishing, within finance, I think there's different realms or areas of focus, so you have your compliance-based accounting or financial statements, which is often what your auditors are going to be prepping for you. It's something that's going to be required if you have lenders, financial covenants, that sort of thing. What I'm typically focused on is creating forecasts or budgets within the organization to try to lay out how and when things are going to happen. And this budget or forecast that we ultimately create, is really just the financial articulation of a whole series of operational items that we aim to truly understand and then translate into financial results.
Tom Seegmiller: What happened in COVID is many, many businesses that were likely coasting along or operating just fine pre-pandemic, ended up in survival mode. And so, what folks ended up doing is, even when businesses were typically creating a forecast in the past, they would typically create one forecast, so call it a black and white forecast, no shades of gray within the world. As the pandemic hit, I think it ultimately felt like the rug was pulled out from beneath our world and you didn't know what was going to happen ultimately week to week, so what it did was really drove many, many, many businesses to scenario based planning.
Tom Seegmiller: Focus on what if analysis, how do you adapt if X, Y, or Z activity occurs within the business, in order to ensure you survive. And so, I think about it a little bit as better understanding what tops or levers that can be either pushed or pulled within the business on a regular basis.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, so the coast income, it's interesting, because I mean the number of businesses I know who survive off of mental calculations based off what's sitting in their bank account, right? And they go, "I have this much cash sitting here, I know I've got this much coming in. I know we've got much coming out." That's as far as the thought really goes sometimes, because you start off a business typically to do something, not to do accounting and planning and strategy, right?
Jason Pereira: But to truly be successful, you really have to master those or at least get the right people to master and listen to their advice. So yeah, so I mean, never let a good crisis go to waste, right? If you're wondering how long you can survive of government assistance and still having to pay portions of not all of your rent or to what degree you need to scale down your operations and basically reduce your overhead, then you had no choice and this was, those who survived, no doubt had to do a lot of this and a lot of soul searching at the same time.
Tom Seegmiller: Absolutely, I think they were tough times and caught a lot of folks by surprise. I think it gave people an opportunity to actually exit the pandemic in a much, much stronger place as an organization, so improve your operational mechanisms if people chose to do so. And we've talked a little bit about this in advance, but great opportunity to ultimately drive businesses forward, should you continue to operate in an enhanced fashion.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, and it's something that frankly now, again, if they survived and they learned these skills, hopefully they won't let them go to waste and they see the value of them going forward, because if you move from the entire mental accounting of your account balance to something whereby you're forecasting, and you're seeing, the clients that I've spoken to had to do this, they saw they could survive, they could survive with less, or they can actually find ways to become more profitable with more. So, there's an old thing about never letting an opportunity or crisis go waste. Hopefully they've learned that lesson with this one and not the next one.
Tom Seegmiller: I think there's also another element to it, particularly with owner managed businesses. Through writing down your plans and focusing on understanding the operations, not just yourself, but driving it into your organization, you do naturally build a bit of a succession plan. And if you think about, if you ever want to just take a step back and not be as involved day to day, having a blueprint for how you operate your business and how you optimize things, whether you're walking the halls that day or not, becomes essential.
Tom Seegmiller: And that can just be for retirement or other life planning purposes, or it could be ultimately in the spirit of an exit. An organization really is only valuable should it operate as an organization and part of that means it's not contingent on just one person. And I think that's one of the other sort of hidden values to ultimately writing things down, getting a succinct plan, understanding what your scenarios look like and how you would adapt if different things were to occur. I really think it upscales the organization on the whole.
Jason Pereira: Absolutely. So, talk to me about your role and how you come in there. So, when you first engage with someone, what's the conversation like and what is it that you're trying to accomplish with them?
Tom Seegmiller: Yeah, no, it's a very interesting role coming in from an FP&A mandate. Often folks are hesitant to talk to you, so early outings, I very much focus on understanding what people do and I really do take a genuine interest in understanding their business. I want to understand what makes them tick, what they're excited about, risks and opportunities, what sort of challenges they faced in the past, where they could use extra help and support? So, early conversations are usually predicated around truly understanding the operations of the business. From there, I try to find areas of pain points for them and go deliver wins. So I'm in a very unique position within finance, where we don't really have a lot of compliance based activities within our remit, so it gives you that free time or that bandwidth to focus on challenges and issues within the business. And it's a really great opportunity to go solve some problems for folks, bring it back to them.
Tom Seegmiller: And from there really what we do, is work on developing a long-term relationship in which we can accurately reflect and forecast what the future likely looks like for the business and tackle all sorts of, through doing so, and understanding how the business is going to change, grow and evolve, it's interesting, because you end up spotting a whole lot of opportunities and projects, which can lead to things like optimization of profitability, changes in business models and ultimately de-risking the business, which is something that most folks typically want within their organization.
Jason Pereira: No doubt. I mean, the reality is, even if you love working at your business, I think at the end of the day, we all want the option of not having to show up to work. There's a difference between owning a job and owning a business, and I said before this podcast, owning a job, basically the company owns you. Owning business, you own the company. And if you're gone, the company continues on and that's something that most people have a hard time, almost every business has a hard time, getting to.
Jason Pereira: So, you get in there and you start doing those projects. Tell me where the biggest hurdles are? Where are people, besides the confidentiality, I mean, there's no doubt that people typically are told to keep their financial affairs private, of course, and then there's also the occasional, you get people who are a little bit embarrassed maybe, they think they should be better organized. Where are the obstacles and how do you get around them?
Tom Seegmiller: Yeah, so typically the obstacles within the corporation and when you think about the operational perspective is, you have finite resources. So, cash is a finite resource, there's only so much investment that can go around. And typically what happens, particularly when you go through a budgeting cycle is, everybody wants more than there is available. And so, it's trying to find that happy medium ground in which you optimize for the organization, you help all of your constituents and stakeholders within the business and you have a functioning and productive working relationship as you exit.
Tom Seegmiller: So, it's easy to operate in finance and act as the know person, but I think the glue that helps things to bind is if you can navigate a situation and ensure folks ultimately get the outcome they require, even if it's not exactly in the fashion that they requested in the first place. And I find that's often the way these relationships work out. You can't give exactly what somebody's looking for, but you have to make sure there's still some wins in it for them, so that they want to come back to the table the next time you look to engage.
Jason Pereira: So, okay, we talked about some of the onboarding. Talk to me about where the deficiencies typically are in data. I mean, I'm sure that a lot of times businesses just haven't collected everything you're going to need, so even my process in particular, I always kind say semi unapologetically that I'm going to have you go on a treasure hunt for stuff you may not even know where it is, because frankly you need this information, it is vital to you and consider this an operation in organizing yourself. I'm sure you have a very similar experience, so what kind of data is it typically that's missing from the picture?
Tom Seegmiller: Yeah, so data's a very, very unique concept, because there tends to be a whole bunch of issues with it. One, you probably haven't collected it in the past. And so, the real trick is start collecting that data and often as you do start collecting the data from an operational perspective, you find it's still raw, which means you have to head back upstream and often do process improvement. So, data is very much about a journey. It doesn't happen overnight. It's not going to be right or likely as useful as you'd like it to be, even off the [inaudible 00:13:48], so that's one issue with data. The other issue is, lots of organizations that have started collecting data, find there's too much. And that's where my role can come into play or folks that end up in the operations type roles, other business partnering type roles. It's our job and mandate to take that plethora of data, distill it down, make it into a consumable fashion and ultimately deliver it back to the business so that they can make improved decisions based on that distilled data.
Tom Seegmiller: So, data challenges, I think, come in multiple different forms. Step one though is always just start doing it. As you say, go on that treasure hunt. My experience is it really isn't perfect ever the first time over, so start refining it so that it starts to end up in the format and in the manner you'd ultimately like to be using it. And then, as data becomes overwhelming, bring in folks that are capable of handling that for you. There are professionals that spend their entire careers doing this, so leverage people. And I like to say, "Nobody would come to me if they needed a surgery, you'd go to a surgeon, so you have other professionals that deal in data every day and can help you distill it down into consumable fashion."
Jason Pereira: Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, this is a topic that's been covered a million times over in my other podcast on FinTech where essentially one of the biggest obstacles to anything is clean data, because no one really gave a damn about collecting it until less than 10 years ago. And now it is the most vital resource of any business, but the problem still becomes, the biggest one, becomes curation. Am I collecting the right things? Where am I putting it? How do I link all those stuff? And more than one guest, when I've asked them what their biggest wish for something they could change in the industry was, more data scientists.
Jason Pereira: And it's interesting to think about how that's good for large scale businesses or businesses at a certain level, but how really the need for tools that make that easy on a single practitioner level are missing from the marketplace. So, I have no doubt in the next couple years, we're going to see all kinds of software that plugs into your accounting software and other packages that just gives you this giant data framework that's user friendly and hopefully no more difficult to use than social media, but we'll see about that. Okay, so you basically collect all this, you have these challenges, what does the output look like? What are you trying to get them to in the end and that they can actually look at understand their business?
Tom Seegmiller: Yeah, so it really depends on the venue and the outing that you are undertaking. Sometimes what it looks like is a budget or a forecast in the form of your financial statement, so think of an income statement, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement. Sometimes it's a recommendation, a yes, no, on should you proceed with this acquisition? What would it look like for the business? Sometimes it's an analysis around head count, so if I think about things like the great resignation that's occurring at this point in time, how do you distill back what the impact is on different levels of attrition within the business?
Tom Seegmiller: Is it going to ultimately cost you more, because salaries are higher in market due to inflation compared to your current head count? What do you to try to retain those folks? Could you run a strategy in which you pay more in order to reduce attrition and ultimately not end up going down a path of paying more or higher market based salaries? It can take all sorts of different forms depending on the need or the outing that you're undertaking with the business.
Jason Pereira: Absolutely. So, in particular, in your software development, I mean, you guys try to keep this easy, you got everything built into Excel, is it not?
Tom Seegmiller: It is yeah, we have an Excel add-in, so what we typically do is leverage your preexisting models and work that you've completed, suck it into a centralized database, help with things like visualization as you alluded to, you add a great deal of control to your structure, so built-in workflows, visibility as to status, even things like distribution of templates. So, if anyone's ever gone through it before, the exercise of distributing an Excel template to people, asking them to populate it, and then assuming that even after you've asked them not to change the format, that they're going to do so, it just doesn't occur. So, it very much takes all of the benefits of Excel. People love Excel, they live and die by it, and then it adds-
Jason Pereira: Oh, the best worst software out there in the market. Man, I tell you.
Tom Seegmiller: The best worst software, I will agree
Jason Pereira: It's utilized for so many purposes and the number of errors that people just fail to detect, but the approachability of it, is what it comes down to. But it never ceases to amaze me how many people develop, they develop a clear spreadsheet, but it's clear for them, never for anyone else. Anyway, that's my Excel gripe. I get very particularly worked up when we start talking about it on my other podcast, because anyway, long story, Excel runs way too much of this world and it's a little too brittle for my liking.
Tom Seegmiller: And what we try to do is take all the good of Excel and distill it down and try to mitigate some of those risks that you alluded to, so if you think about errors in spreadsheets, if you can maintain the same template once and make sure people aren't fundamentally altering it, they're able to enter in the information that you've requested and that's required to run through a process, but not ultimately break that work that can be vetted thoroughly in advance, that's really at the heart of what we do.
Jason Pereira: Yeah, that is a hard challenge, because no matter how many times I've engineered spreadsheets and protected all by that couple of single cells that are highlighted, people still find ways to do things with those cells that I just did not plan on them being able to do. And it's just, "You must have tried hard to screw this up." I don't understand. Anyway, such as life. So the output gets done, basically, the entire idea is that, what you're really trying to do is give people a 360 view of where their business is today and where it's going, which is basically what I try to do with people's lives, but you're specifically addressing it to the entity. Tell me about the feedback you get from this process? What are the common pieces of praise or major takeaways people feel they experience when going through a process like this?
Tom Seegmiller: Yeah, so if it's structured and engineered properly, the feedback you should be receiving is that business owners own their own budget. So, one of the things you ultimately want to avoid is that this is a finance based activity. I really love to say that the budget, the forecast, it's just the output at the end of this process. What really counts is truly understanding the operational plans of the business, getting the buy ins to ensure that over the next 12, 18, 24 months, the operational plans align to the strategy of the organization, that business functional owners truly understand what activities they're going to undertake to be successful. And then, it's our job in finance just to translate it into a financial output, so if this is all done properly, the praise you should get it is, "I understand my budget. I understand my operational plans for the next short to midterm and I'm ready to execute on them, I'm entirely bought in and we're going to go win together."
Jason Pereira: Absolutely. So, question for you, you talked about budgeting a couple times and that is something that, they never quite pan out the way you think they're going to. So, is there a specific approach you use, because this is one of the most broken processes in most businesses, especially large enterprise, where the number of times I've heard utter nonsense. "Well, if I don't spend the budget, they're not going to give it to me next year." And then next thing you know, company money just gets wasted. I mean, when you think about any business that has that kind of structure in place, talk about designing the absolute worst incentive system imaginable, that if you're responsible and you're able to deliver things under budget, we are going to penalize you the following year by taking away resources from you. Just utter nonsense, right?
Jason Pereira: Contrast that to the zero cost budgeting where it's like, "Here's the goal I have for how much I want to make and how do I work that backwards and spend what I need to spend in order to get there." So, is there an approach you take, are you just taking the client's existing processes, how do you coach them around that? I'd say everyone hates the word budget, around that five letter word, not four letter word, that five letter word, that everybody can't stand, tell me how you're handling that?
Tom Seegmiller: Yeah, so we tend to deploy a driver based budgeting process. So again, I keep alluding to go back to understanding the operations of the business. It should start with a series of activities. It's not a financial activity saying I want to earn X number of dollars and ultimately you do, but you have to start with, what activities drive up to that? Are those attainable targets from a driver based perspective within the business? And then what we do is we run an agile process, which means we acknowledge fully and wholeheartedly that we're going to be wrong on a regular basis, which means going back to the drawing board every time.
Tom Seegmiller: So, at Vena, we run a five quarter rolling forecast, updated once a quarter on at all times. If we ultimately find there are material differences in what we believe will be occurring in the business and should be occurring, as compared to our budget or our plan, we'll go back to our board of directors. Sometimes the world changes. Sometimes there's a need to adapt and change, but the whole spirit is, we should be running a business that's firing on all cylinders, not stuck to some plan that happens to be 9, 10, 12 months old, that was built at a time before we have the information we have today. So, the intent is, constantly be agile, change and adapt as appropriate and make sure your business is driving in the right direction and in alignment with your stated strategy.
Jason Pereira: Excellent. So end of the day, I mean, it's kind of like you're my inter-corporate doppelganger. You take care of an aspect of the business in a similar way that I do, so great. No, this has been fantastic. So, who do you typically engage with, what kind of size business are you typically speaking with in this regard?
Tom Seegmiller: Sure, so I'm full time at Vena, so I am their dedicated internal partner. FP&A professionals, I would say, probably start to enter into organizations when they end up in the 30 to 50 person range. It really depends on the needs and the wants of the business and bluntly put, I think how forward thinking the owners can be. As organizations scale and grow the FP&A departments end up being typically quite large. At one point in my career, I was at OpenTech, which is a large Canadian tech company, and there was upwards of 100 people within the FP&A organization out there doing business partnering and driving things forward.
Tom Seegmiller: Contrast that with smaller tech companies, you might have one or two people. I think what ultimately happens is, when you get an FP&A team in there and focused on the operations, people tend to see the value and instead of you trying to push more headcount on them, you find it's very much a draw. You go and do good things for people and they say, "Can we have more?" And it ultimately leads to a want for more investment in headcount within the function versus FP&A saying, "Can I please have this?"
Jason Pereira: Absolutely. Well, I mean, it's just, similar to my job, when you go from just a paradigm of, "Okay, I'm going to make a bunch of business decisions and hope they work out," to, "I need to make a bunch of business decisions, so let's get the model in place to see what the actual impact is." And I refer to it as, you're almost, even by focusing on money, you're taking money off the table as a variable in the equation. And by doing that, it allows people to make decisions far more confidently and based around other variables that aren't necessarily monetary anymore, because if you've answered the monetary questions, well, what else is keeping you from doing this or what else is the concern of the business? So, it makes a lot of sense. So, Tom, thank you very much for your time on this, appreciate you walking us through this all. Where can people find you?
Tom Seegmiller: You can reach us any time at www.venasolutions.com.
Jason Pereira: Perfect, thank you, Tom. And thank you for joining us yet again, that was today's episode of Financial Planning for Canadian Business Owners. If you are a business owner in that ballpark of number of headcount or size, then basically, if you haven't started, really, you should get started in making sure that you have this kind of control in your business. And even if you're not, and you are just a sole practitioner or someone with a couple of staff members, do not look at accounting and the numbers and all the information that you're creating around your business as just a byproduct or exhaust.
Jason Pereira: It is information that can help you make better strategic decisions, finding the right advisors, including accountants and other people to help you maximize the value of that business. Hey, that is, if you're successful, your largest asset and one that is a greater reward than any other investment you're going to have an opportunity to own, so that's my gentle nudge to make sure everybody gets their act together. As always, if you enjoyed this podcast, please review on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Until next time, take care.
Producer: This podcast was brought to you by Woodgate Financial, an award-winning financial planning firm, catering to high net worth individuals, business owners and their families. To learn more, go to woodgate.com. You could subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Google Play and Spotify, or find more episodes at jasonpereira.ca. You can even ask Siri, Alexa or Google Home to subscribe for you.