george grombacher 0:02
Kevin, to get us started, give me two truths and a lie please. Okay,

Kevin White 0:07
you’re mine. First one is I just got married in the UK last week. Second one is I used to teach in prisons, and the third one is I used to live in South Africa.

george grombacher 0:18
Wow. These are really good. Just got married in the UK last week. Used to teach in prisons. And what was the last one?

Kevin White 0:28
I used to live in South Africa.

george grombacher 0:30
Used to live in South Africa. Wow. I have no idea. No idea. I don’t think he got married last week in the UK.

Kevin White 0:42
Actually did get married. That’s a tough one. I was like, how good is George at this? Considering he’s probably paid 1000s of times at this point, that’s fine. It’s tough. It’s tough. Yeah, the lie was I never, I never lived in South Africa. I did. Used to teach in prisons during my MBA program. And, yeah, just got married.

george grombacher 1:02
Okay, great. So let’s start with the prison one. What? What are you teaching?

Kevin White 1:07
Yeah, so when I was at, when I was at Columbia Business School, there’s a program UVA Darden actually started it, and covid kind of franchised it from them, where they’d go into local prisons, and they would run classes and those so we actually had to create the curriculum from scratch. It was financial literacy, entrepreneurship, different things, because there’s just not a lot of job opportunities coming out of these institutions. So it was a way to, you know, connect with the prison population and sort of reduce reincarceration rates. They had taught in Rikers and Taconic, so yeah, kind of been all over with that. It’s interesting, tangentially, is related to how I started my company. I met a guy at the time. His name is Christopher, grew he was running a company called American prison data systems, and he was selling military grade tablets and prisons that they would give to prisoners if there was good behavior. And through meeting him, I met his investors, a venture capital company that I ultimately ended up working for for a while. So yeah, it’s funny, how funny how those things go, but it was definitely a great experience.

george grombacher 2:15
Andy, have you ever been to prison before that? Kevin,

Kevin White 2:21
no, no, that was the first time, first time I have been in prison. It was when I was teaching. It was cool.

george grombacher 2:27
Were you terrified the first time you walked in? Yeah. I

Kevin White 2:31
mean, Rikers is a pretty scary place, pretty intense, I think. But if you’re just confident and you sort of hold your own, most of the people in the program are there because they’ve been on good behavior, and most of the people in that program are there because they actually want to learn something. Prison is really boring. There’s not a whole lot to do. In fact, you know, APDS started that company because most prisons didn’t have Wi Fi. And so, you know, even five years ago. And so if you went to prison and call it 2001 or even 1995 let’s say, and then you came out today in many prisons in the country, you wouldn’t have no concept of what an iPhone is. You would never have heard of it like I mean, you might have heard of it from your friends and family were visiting, but you’ve never had one. You’ve never seen how it worked. And so it’s really tough to then have that deficit and then gain those skills in order to be able to reenter the workforce. And so that that’s what we were trying to address there. And I think it worked pretty

george grombacher 3:23
well, nice. Well, there’s a whole podcast to be done on that, including a whole spin on, maybe that’s better. Maybe nobody should know what an iPhone is and what the internet was. Yeah,

Kevin White 3:33
right, right, protecting them from something. Yeah, right.

george grombacher 3:36
And you got married in the UK, how? Why? Oh, my

Kevin White 3:40
wife’s British, and so, you know, half the family was over there, and half my family was here. And you know, you could rent out really cool British manor houses. There’s, there’s, there’s 1000s of them all around the country, and everyone needs to replace their roof, so they’re renting them out for weddings, and much harder in the US. So, yeah, we flew out there and did it, and had a ton of friends come out, and it was great. It’s beautiful,

george grombacher 4:01
super cool experience. Well, congratulations. And how is married life so far? Oh,

Kevin White 4:06
it’s great. It’s great. I mean, it’s pretty much, you know, everyone says the same thing, right? It’s not, it’s no different going and then we’ll just come help. But yeah, I The wedding was amazing, and I’m sort of, I’m very, also very happy to just be done with planning and be in a place where I can relax a little bit,

george grombacher 4:21
yeah, yeah, until the next stage of life, which we will not get into today. Kevin, so awesome. Well Well done. You got me. Those were, those were exceptional. What is? What is top of mind for you right now? What do you what are you working on?

Kevin White 4:34
Yeah. So I think biggest thing for me navigating this year has been the pretty intense market shift that I’ve felt in, sort of the venture and lower middle market from January all the way till now. And so, you know, it’s no secret, obviously, the venture market bottomed out really last year, and there was, it was very quiet through the first half of this year. There was definitely work going on, but everyone sort of shifted from growth mode to capital preservation, right? And so we were just trying to help our clients extend their cash runway as much as possible. We were just trying to help them manage cash and look at their board. And it went from Hey, you got to raise money and you need a 24 month cash flow runway to Hey, you got to raise money and show your board that you’ll never have to raise money again. You’ll be able to reach cashflow positive. That’s all started to shift. It’s very recently, really. I mean, it was honestly the beginning of August, when all of a sudden, the MNA and the investment in the both the venture and the lower middle market space started ticking up pretty substantially again. And so, you know, you saw it was very hard to get early stage seed money for funding, and it still is, to some degree, but it’s a market marketable improvement. From call it August all the way to the end of September, we’ve seen a really big shift. So it’s just navigating that process, helping my clients understand it. You know what? When? Who can they expect to raise money from? How much do you think they can get? What’s your pitch now? Is the market shifting? There’s just more interest from investors, and so that’s been a really positive sign.

george grombacher 6:10
I imagine just so many different variables that you’re thinking about all the time I wrote down. Is it? Is it possible to focus on first principles, or is it I need to just do what the market is telling me to do? Or is it both?

Kevin White 6:26
I think you can focus on both, on first principles. I think that the major difference is that you would, you would raise money in order to grow your top line as much as possible, right? And so there wasn’t as much scrutiny on expenses. It was if, you know, you hired 15 more salespeople, and they were all going to generate really good revenue, then you went for it, and now it’s really you’re raising money in order to become profitable. And I think that that’s that makes a lot more sense, right? It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s the ultimate objective of all these companies. So if you focus on first principles, which is getting good sales in and controlling your costs. You should reach that profit goal, right? I mean, I think they’re pretty aligned. It’s just a matter of the kind of conversations that you have to investors. If you, if you went to an investor in 2021 and the first thing you said to them is like, you know, I just, I don’t, I don’t want to. I’m not so focused on growing my revenue. I just want to get to profitability as quickly. To profitability as quickly as possible. They pass right. And now, that’s the worst thing you can say, and so it’s just switched.

george grombacher 7:31
So what percentage of your time is, is, is meeting with new potential clients and then working with your your existing clients.

Kevin White 7:43
Oh, man. So, you know, it fluctuates a lot. I would say a lot of our time at Expo, my time, particularly at EXPO group, is is focused on really spending a lot of good time with existing clients. There is BD that we do, but it’s interesting. There’s a split, right? There’s two sides of expo’s business. There’s the side that does really sell side consulting, which is fractional CFO and accounting work for portfolio companies, private equities, funds. And then the other side is the buy side, where we’re actually, where we’re actually doing financial due diligence and tax due to due diligence on the sell side of the business, there’s, it’s very much pull sales, right? So you’re constantly meeting with people naturally just by doing a very good job for your clients, and then you’ll get a referral. And so it’s kind of like everything’s lined up in your inbox. You’re getting a ton of qualified leads all the time just by doing a good job. On the other side of the business, it’s much different. On the the buy side of the business, we’re competing with, you know, KPMG and RSM and so that really requires more heavy business development. And so I would say, you know, on that side of the business, I definitely have to spend more time doing that. On the sell side of the business, the best thing that you can do from a marketing perspective is get hired to be the CFO of a ten million top line company. Show up to the board as the CFO and just crush the board meeting, do an amazing job. Then you get a call a week later from all the investors that are on the board saying, hey, I need help with two other portfolio companies through portfolio companies. And so that’s a very natural sales cycle. Whereas, if I said this is a little bit more difficult,

george grombacher 9:27
which are you better at?

Kevin White 9:29
Oh, man, I think, look, I mean, like all founders, I think you have to be good at a lot of things. And so I’d say I’m good at both. I probably would say that I like helping my existing clients better. I really do, deep down, really enjoy watching people I work with succeed. And so, you know, we can make a huge impact in those moments, especially for first time entrepreneurs, because we see so much. You know, there’s a big breadth of what we look at across the market. We’ve got 70 clients. We’re working with. We see what works, we see what doesn’t work. And so we’re able to, like any good consulting firm, take those ideas and sort of distill them down into best practices and then offer them people. And it makes a huge difference. And I see what a difference it’s making. And so I feel like I can see that impact a lot more. You know, I like the BD stuff too. I’m not as much as, like, a finger guns. Go play golf, kind of guy, as some of my business partners might be, but, yeah, you know, but both are good. I think as a founder, you just gotta, you gotta do both, and that’s that,

george grombacher 10:30
yeah, yeah. I appreciate that you’ve worked in in over the course of your career, on some of the biggest deals that probably the public is aware of these massive companies coming together. So there’s that experience, which I’m sure was of immense value and of really, of great interest. I was curious, doing what you’re doing now. I perceive, my guess would be that you roll up your sleeves a lot more and are getting your hands a lot dirtier. Am I wrong, or is is? Is that the case? Ah, yeah,

Kevin White 11:01
I mean, so I think back at when I was working at Ernst and Young in their transaction services group were working on huge deals like, as you were saying, like the Dow DuPont merger and these big companies, it’s just that in those situations, you’re there’s hundreds of people in the deal team, and each one is playing a super, super, super specialized role, right? That’s, that’s just how it’s going at those big deal sizes in sort of the middle market space, you’re, you’re really touching every aspect of the deal. And so, yes, I think to answer your question directly, you definitely get your hands dirtier. I think it also makes you a better advisor, though, because there are things that on the big deals as much as they’re very interesting, there’s blind spots, because you’re just not involved in certain work streams, whereas on these smaller deals, you’re involved in everything. And once you’ve seen 100 of them, you can give much better advice to the buyer about what you feel like, the working capital. You know, purchase price adjustments, gonna negotiations gonna go like you can give them better thoughts on like the path to closing the deal, to what might actually be, add backs to EBITDA versus what might not be, because you’ve just got such a good purview from doing it so many

george grombacher 12:12
times. Yeah, I kind of think about that, like theory versus practice, right? You can read all the business books in the world, but until you’ve done 1020, 30, 100 then it’s a totally different deal. That’s

Kevin White 12:21
right, that’s right. And I think in these big, big deals, you get really, you know, you might be the best in the whole industry at a really narrow, specific thing. But with some of these smaller deals, I think you get, you get sort of the breadth of everything, which makes you just a better overall advisor. For sure.

george grombacher 12:37
I’ve heard it said that on when you’re helping companies to grow and take, like, a better term next steps, that the people is more important than the technology. Do you think that that’s true?

Kevin White 12:50
Yes, definitely. I mean, you know, it’s interesting. The thing I’ll say about the technology is working at bigger companies, big, big client at EY was more in Stan that I worked on for many years, I was surprised to find switching into sort of the venture space, that the tech was actually better, and it actually makes sense, if you think about it, because all these big companies, there’s a lot of red tape and hoops they have to jump through to change over a system. There’s a huge cost to them, whereas these smaller companies can be really nimble, and there’s such amazing B to B software that has come on the market in the last couple years that companies that they where they can take advantage of it immediately end up doing very well. That all being said. And look, you know this, who knows? I’d have to talk to a bunch of other CEOs to get their perspective on on their their industry and their business, but certainly in professional services, the most important thing that you can do is find really good talent, and the rest really does sort itself out to a degree. Right you have to that. I think once you have the right people, it’s making then sure you have the right structure, the right org chart. Are people sitting the right places? Are they in roles that they’re actually good at? You know, you might have someone, an employee for five years, who’s unbelievable at these three things, but really bad at this one thing. How do you take them out of that situation? So I would say that people’s more important than technology. You can gain a lot of efficiencies with technology, but without good people, you own the business.

george grombacher 14:21
And is it you are obviously in an outside person to these organizations? Is that the CEO that needs to know that within the org? Is that or just, does it have to be somebody within the org who also appreciates that reality?

Kevin White 14:38
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s, I think it’s a more general cultural concept, which always comes from the top. So if the CEO appreciates that most of the time, the other people are going to sort of follow along and appreciate that as well. So yeah, I would say that it’s, it really does need to come from the top. If people are super tech, tech focused. I also see a ton of companies that are very tech focused. Cost, and they might have Okay people, but the they get bloated in terms of how much operating expense they have just on these subscriptions to softwares, half of which they’re not. They’re not really using a really common example here is, I see a lot of our smaller companies spending tons of money getting data and reports that they don’t use. Right? So if you, if you kill yourself, to get really sophisticated reporting, and you’re spending a ton of money on that, and then, you know, essentially the reports created, and it’s just dumped in the trash can, you’ve wasted a bunch of money, right? So I think it’s you work backwards from, what do I really need, and then you build around that, and I think that the CEO is going to drive

george grombacher 15:39
that, yeah. Think that that makes a lot of sense, especially when we’re maybe a little bit more concerned with, with with cash, than, than, than, than we have at other times, which is kind of a silly thing to think about and say, but it seems to be the case in terms of the biggest challenges and opportunities you talked earlier about walking into a board meeting and really doing a great job that’s not innate, is that something that that you work with your companies on is how to execute and run an effective board meeting? Oh,

Kevin White 16:17
absolutely, it’s huge. It’s a huge part of our job. And I actually think it’s one of the things that is really valued by our clients, especially when they have an institutional board for the first time. Often it’s really seed stage venture companies. You might have angel investors or retail investors, and your board is pretty laid back, and you can get away with a lot the first time a true private equity company comes in, whether that’s traditional PE or whether it’s venture, your board’s gonna change radically in terms of their demands and what they actually wanna see. And so often we come in when the first institutional capital comes in, because they realize how much time needs to get spent making sure that their board is kept happy. And that’s something that we’re really good at, in terms of getting good at that. I think it’s like everything else in life, or it’s a lot of reps. We’ve seen every board you can imagine. We’ve seen boards that are have way too many people on it. They’re stacked. It’s like a 15 person board. We’ve seen boards that are, you know, more apathetic than they probably should be. We’ve seen boards that, you know, have a minority stake, but that treat the CEO like their personal employee. We’ve seen everything, and like all things in life, you need to be able to learn. Have several examples to learn how to navigate each situation. There’s, of course, depending upon whether you’re an ecom company or a software company, a standard set of slides I can give you that you can work off of, and they’re like, generally going to meet the bar. But it’s more about understanding the dynamic of the relationships on the board and making sure that you know the board members are kept happy based on understanding of what they really want. That’s the harder part. It’s the soft skills. And of course, that’s one of those things that’s hard to teach in a classroom. You just have to do it a bunch of do it a bunch of times to get good at

george grombacher 18:08
it. It’s like anything else. How do I know what somebody else is thinking? It’s just just just kind of asking what your expectations are.

Kevin White 18:17
Yeah, exactly, exactly you just want to. You want to it helps to get to know each board member. The first meeting you go into, you get a sense of what they care about, what kind of questions they’re asking. You write that down, and then you make sure that you’re just catering to what it is they care about. The rest of the time, 100%

george grombacher 18:37
which seems like such an obvious thing, but not. It’s not right. I’m sure that you probably told countless CEOs that, and still they maybe don’t. Maybe it takes a little longer, yeah. I

Kevin White 18:50
mean, for instance, like, give me an example. Like, you could have a board member that’s actually truly there to help and wants to solve problems, and then you could have a CEO who falls into the very common trap of, I want to, I want to paint the rosiest picture possible for my board, right? And so they’re going in, and they’re showing them their sales pipeline, that sales pipeline, you know, might be pretty aggressive, but they’re trying to pitch it as something that like, oh, half these are, you know, they’re going to close. No problem. In reality, if, if you, if you’re a very helpful board member, and you take the opposite tact, which is just like, hey, look, I hope these are closing. But here are the things that I’m worried about, and here, here’s what my sales team struggling with, that person who’s probably got a lot of experience, that board member will be able to jump in and support, right? So it’s kind of just aligning the types of relationships that the CEO has the board and shepherding that process along trust is really important. A lot of times I see board meetings unfold where the board members think it’s a good idea to ask a lot of hard hitting questions constantly and with the right CEO, that works fine, but you don’t want. You want to create psychological safety, where management can actually come to you and explain if there’s a problem, so that people

george grombacher 20:08
can be helpful. That also sounds super obvious, but I imagine that’s really hard. I’m sure that there’s board members that come in thinking, I’m going to kind of to your point, ask really hard questions. I’m going to hold so and so’s feet to the fire. Some want to see the company do really well, and like, I’m here to help, and everywhere in between. And then you’re the CEO, and you know, you want to be honest, you want to put your best foot forward, and all of these things, and hopefully in the middle, we meet somewhere.

Kevin White 20:40
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And look like it’s like any other it’s like any other large scale human interaction business. But relationships play a big role and and sort of just getting to the bottom of what people care about. If you can do that, then you can actually make board meetings really productive and make everybody happy from them. If you you know, if you’re just trying to put out the best numbers possible every board meeting, you’re usually going to have a problem. Going to have a problem. Yeah,

george grombacher 21:05
when people ask you, what you do, what do you what do you tell them? I

Kevin White 21:09
usually tell them I run a consulting company, and the conversation stops there. But if they’re in finance, you know, I’ll try to, I try to break it down a little more for them. I mean, we’re really a combination of management consultants and finance experts, sort of on the sales of the business, and we’ve seen everything right. Like, if sometimes you’ve got CEOs former investment banker private equity, they know what they want exactly, and they’ll tell you to a T because we work in sort of the venture all the way up to lower middle market. We get a lot of first time entrepreneurs too, and that’s where I think that we’re extremely helpful, because we can let them know about so many best practices. And if I had someone like me now helping me when I started Expo group, we’d be doing even better, right? So that it’s just making sure that you have someone in the seat that’s seen a lot and can give you good advice. That’s where we sort of really shine. And so when people ask me that question, I try, I usually just say that I’m a, you know, we’re fractional CFOs, but more importantly, we’re strategic advisors to our clients, and that’s really our pitch, too. At the end of the day, sometimes people come to us and ask us for, you know, some basic bookkeeping work, and we’re like, well, we’ve got 100 people. We can refer you to YouTube, but it’s just really not

george grombacher 22:32
us. Yeah, appreciate that. I love it. Well, Kevin, you’ve given us quite a few but we’re ready for your difference making tip. What do you have for us? Sure.

Kevin White 22:41
So, you know, this is something I think about a lot, like, what’s, what is the most important trait? I’m sure a lot of people were a lot of CEOs consider this question. But over the past six years, I’ve probably worked with, I don’t know, 150 CEOs of different companies, really closely. I mean intimately, having regular calls with them, trying to help them. Trying to help them grow their companies. And it’s a wide, wide range. If I had to pick one difference making tip, in the early stages of a company, when I say early stage, I mean anything below $20 million of top line to me is early stage company. In those companies, the most important thing that you can do is move fast, right? And what I the most common trap I see people fall into that prevents them from succeeding at the rate that they should is that a lot of times, the CEOs, unsurprisingly, are super high achievers, and that means they’re perfectionists, and so as a result, I really common issue I run into is that people get in their own way by trying to get an A plus every time. And so what I tell my team is, you know, if it takes you one hour to get from an F to an A minus and then a whole other hour to get from an A minus to get an A plus, I would rather have two a minuses than one a plus, right? So that’s that just a plus, really not acceptable. B plus, also not acceptable, right? You have to meet the quality bar. But a lot of times, the CEOs for these tasks that they’re working on, they’re meeting the quality bar, and then they’re spending an extra two days trying to get it to perfection. That’s the, I think the biggest mistake you can make when you’re running a really fast, growing company is that you want to balance, you know, fit efficiency with effectiveness, right? So how quickly you can do something versus how perfect it is. And my advice to a lot of CEOs is always look like you got to move, you know, you’ve, you’ve gotten this to where it needs to be, and you got to move on to the next thing. The people that are able to do that well and prioritize the work that matters and not worry about getting perfect A pluses constantly, but millions of a minuses, those, those guys and girls are really the sort of strongest CEOs that I’ve seen over the last six years. Well, I think

george grombacher 24:56
that that is great stuff that definitely gets Come on. I. Can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. Kevin, that’s right. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage and what kind of companies are the right candidates for the work that you’re doing? Yeah,

Kevin White 25:14
so people can find us on our website. So it’s www dot Expo, e XBS and boy o group.com or people can just reach out to me directly, if they if they want to chat or they want advice, I always take a call, is my policy. And I’m Kevin dot white at EXPO group.com and so you can reach over me over email, and I’m happy to respond the types of companies, the types of companies that are good fits for Expo group. So we work with we work with companies from, you know, free revenue, all the way up to $100 million of top line. And so it’s wide range. I’d say, at the most common entry point is you’ve got an institutional board that came in, you just got a big investment, or you’re preparing for an acquisition, and you some somebody has, you know, the founders, been doing the bookkeeping, or a basic bookkeeper that no one speaks to in a regular basis has been doing the bookkeeping, and the financials are just not in the shape that’s needed in order to accomplish your goals. And that might be getting acquired, or it might be reporting to your board, but those are the moments that people usually call us up and we come in, clean everything up, make it look really good, make them look good. Those are the kind of companies that are that that are in that position, where they like I know, I’ve just been doing my own finances with sort of a rag tag team bubble gum and duct tape for too long, and I really need to sort of level up to True Blue Chip financial reporting and management. Those are, those are, that’s our target audience. So if, if that’s you, hit me up,

george grombacher 26:45
excellent. Well, if you enjoy as much as I did, so Kevin, your appreciation. Share today’s show the friend who also appreciates good ideas. Go to Expo group.com Expo group.com check out everything that Kevin is working on we’ve been talking about. Shoot him an email. Kevin dot white at EXPO group.com if you are a company that is growing and you’ve been di wine, the financials, and you’re in the process, or have just gotten an influx of cash and you’re ready to level up, give Kevin a shout, or just reach out with a question, I’m sure that he’ll be happy to to chat. Thanks again. Kevin,

Kevin White 27:23
awesome. Thanks so much. George, appreciate it. Finally,

george grombacher 27:25
friendly reminder, it’s never going to be anybody more interested in your financial success than you are, so act accordingly. You.