Entrepreneur Rollercoaster: How a Fractional CFO Brings Calm Amidst the Chaos

Free Agent Podcast with Meg Schmitz – Guest: Lynn Corazzi, Fractional CFO and Founder of Data to Profit

Meg Schmitz
Hello, everyone, and welcome to or. Welcome back to the free agent podcast. I am Meg Schmitz and this discussion. This podcast is all about free agency and taking control over your financial future. The mission of my show is to share inspiring conversations with real people who took the leap into self employment, business ownership, franchising and freedom from entrepreneurs, corporate refugees and executives tired of the desk job to investors looking to share camaraderie and inspiration through their own business journey. 

My podcast aims the spotlight on real people who took the leap into the unknown to control over their future and became their own boss. 

And today I have a repeat guest, Lynn Corazzi, who is the data magician. Lynn has a very valuable financial proposition and so I’d love for you listeners to take in what Lynn has to offer while also shedding some light on his own journey into being self employed and some of the challenges there. Lynn, thank you for coming back to the show. I appreciate your time.

Lynn Corazzi
Absolutely. Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate the opportunity because I think when I, when I was on the first time, I was talking about one thing and what I realized, and you know, we find this so many times where, you know, you think you go into business because you have this opportunity, but then as things evolve and then you finally end up saying, okay, I think I’ve got it all figured out now, what I do, what makes me different, and how I can best serve the people that work with me.

Meg
And that’s the big challenge for people who are striking out truly on their own. Hanging your single shingle and setting up a business is sometimes you think you’re on the right track until your business or the demand for your business isn’t where you thought it was, where you’re going to find it. So, yeah, let’s navigate through your, your current value proposition to your clientele and then we can talk a bit about how you, how you refined it so that to where you are now.

Lynn
Well, simply put, you know, now I’m a fractional CFO and you know, for, for everybody knows the CFO stands for, you know, Chief Financial Officer, you know, so I’m that part time guy, but really my job is to have the back of a business owner when they don’t understand what all those numbers mean I’m going to try to show them what those numbers tell them, what they don’t tell them, and how once they become a little more empowered and comfortable with using them, how they can help you better drive your current year profitability, long term business value creation and make sure that you are working on your own personal wealth and in the net in that, you know, and in that role, I am like the quarterback for all the other financial people in your life.

Meg
Oh, interesting. Okay. Something that, that struck a chord with me is what do numbers not tell?

Lynn
Oh, yeah. It’s like, you know, you can look at, you know, there’s some things that are just obvious when you look at them.

Meg
Yeah.

Lynn
But then sometimes you can look at something and, and say, because people love to say, hey, I’m up 20% this month or this year. That’s great. You, you know, mathematically it is 20%, but it doesn’t tell you are you having a really great year this year or did last year just suck? Numbers can tell you that your gross margins are going down. Trying to figure out why is a completely different thing. You know, there are seven different parts in a larger company. There’s seven different organizations or functions that can impact your gross margins. 

If you want to go fix them. Do you look, is it caused by your customer? Is it sales giving away discounts, Is it marketing not pricing? Or on the cost side, is it your buying and cost going up? Is it your labor utilization, Is it your transportation cost? All these things go into it. So you really have to understand where you need to look. And so I, and I like to tell people the numbers, tell you what, my job is a CFO. 

And that’s really where the accounting, that’s what accounting does. It tells you what my job is to help you identify the so what and more importantly, decide what’s next. Because you can have all the numbers you want to, but if you’re not using them to guide your business or make future focused decisions or even really think about what are the implications of decisions you’re going to make and how can I model out. That’s really where the value of a CFO comes from. Because unlike accounting we have, there are two separate functions in a business’s financial management. There’s the accounting, which everybody has to have. Accounting begins with the letter A. It’s an actual, it’s a go. It’s in the past. There’s really not a whole lot you can do about it.

Meg
Yeah.

Lynn
Finance, on the other hand, obviously begins with the letter F. That’s the future. It’s a forecast. It’s your potential fortune, it’s your potential failure, but it’s definitely where today’s fears are. So let’s talk more about your F’s and get them straightened than the A’s. You know, once you understand them, rinse and repeat with those. The F’s you constantly have to start thinking about.

Meg
And so how do. How do you learn the ins and outs of a company so that you can start to assess the problem areas?

Lynn
Yeah, it really does start with a review of their accounting. In fact, I met an accountant out in Colorado, and he said, Lynn, you know, I heard you say something that I’ve never heard out of most fractional CFOs that I’ve ever met. You said the accounting has to be right. It absolutely does. Because if the accounting’s not right, that’s the foundational that all the other cool, sexy finance stuff really begins with.

So it is really talking to the owner. Okay, where are they at? What do they understand? Have them explain the business to me. That’s kind of like in the, in the discovery phase, if you will. And then in the early parts of working together, we’re really getting to know their business and then seeing how those numbers line up to industry standards and just against their. Their own expectations, and then helping them dissect them and say, okay, where do we start in terms of an improvement opportunity, what do you really need to know more about?

If sales are just growing a little bit and depending on what type of business it is, is it because, you know, you’re not finding new clients or are you losing clients as quickly as you get them, so you’re just refilling the leaky bucket. Yeah, because people have the opportunity to buy, you know, they’re not taking advantage of buying a wider range of the product you sell because maybe only a handful of items are or services are being focused on, but it’s really getting into all those different behaviors because at the end of the day, numbers. And I learned this in all my years of working with Procter and Gamble. You know, they said all the finance and accounting does is assign a number and a value to the behaviors and decisions of the people working in the company or influence the company.

Meg
Got it.

Lynn
Which. With. When you start now talking about behaviors, that’s a. That opens up all kinds of other doors.

Meg
And just thinking about my own, My own businesses right now and reviewing numbers. Absolutely. To your point, when you first get in, you create a proforma which is projection of what you think your revenue is going to be, what you think your expenses are going to be. And you try to put parameters around all of that.

Then once you’re operational now, you have a profit and loss statement, and that’s actual. So everyone hopes that their actual numbers are going to be a reflection of their beautifully created pro forma expectations. But there are frequently a lot of disconnects there between what someone projects and where they actually are. And that’s why an accurate profit loss statement is so important to creating those expectations. And to your point, changing behaviors that are not effective.

Lynn
Yeah. And really. And the key word there is expectations. And people say, ooh, I don’t like to budget. Ooh, I don’t like to forecast. Okay, what do you expect your business to do?

But then the most important question after that is, why that number? Is that because what you hope you’d like to get, what you think you need to do. But when it comes down to it, what are the activities that are going to drive that?

You know, I once talked to a guy who was expanding his business, and he said, yeah, he had grown about 6% that year, and next year he needed to grow up to like 8%. I said, why 8%? Well, that’s what I. That’s what my accountant says, that I need to grow revenue based on my margins. So I. Because we’re expanding a warehouse and I don’t want to take on a whole lot of extra debt.

I said, okay, so what are you going to do differently? We’re going to sell more. Bob, you and I both know that that’s not the right answer. I said, okay, are you going to hire somebody? He said, yeah, probably.

I said, okay, are you going to buy the Hunter Killer to go get more. More business? Or do you need a relationship person because you have a retention problem? Or would you be better off even having perhaps two inside salespeople instead of somebody traveling all over the country to kind of sell? Because you got this big product variety. And he knew that he wanted to get another 2% of growth, but he hadn’t really thought about the how.

What is he going to do different? What, what kind of incentives is, you know, may he need to change the, you know, his sales commission structure on? Because if you’re trying to launch a new product and you’re not super incenting your sales team to do that, they’re going to default to the easy thing, right? Sell what they know, sell what they are comfortable in presenting. You got to just build, you know, you Got to change the incentives.

So there again, if you’ve made a decision, I’m going to do this without changing the behavior of the people that are working with it. You’re not setting yourself up for success.

Meg
So as a quarterback, then what tools and resources do you have? Because it’s not on you to change. You’re kind of actually like a psychiatrist. You’re diagnosing the problem, but they have to do the work. You’re like a doctor. They. They’ve got to do the work. So what tools and resources do you have available that would change behaviors?

Lynn
Well, a lot of it is starting, first of all, working with the business owner. Because what I hear so much is that I’ve got an accountant, I’ve got a cpa, I’ve got a tax advisor, I’ve got a banker, I’ve got a wealth manager, I’ve got an insurance person who out of all, why do I feel so alone in managing my business when I have all these people touching my business?

And I think the real difference is those people are giving you kind of like more limited perspective. My job is to help you get into your business, make sure that the story that we’re telling to all those people is consistent and that there’s somebody is then making, you know, in the. Answering the questions and asking you the questions that maybe you should be asking them. And that’s, that’s really the quarterback role. So there’s not a unique tool, if you will.

Meg
Okay.

Lynn
But it really is helping that owner understand everybody’s role and why they’re doing it. Because, you know, the. And there’s just examples all the time where people just are not, not consistent in what business owners are not consistent in their understanding what each of those people doing. That makes sense. 

Meg
Yeah. Just again, thinking about myself and my own businesses, the number of people that. Yeah, to your point, wealth manager, tax advisor. That’s a good one. People really need to know the tax advantages that come from owning a business and how to truly leverage those.

Pete and I have a number of businesses. Some of them are very profitable. And then we’ve got one in particular that constantly needs to be fed financially. It’s always below, below profitability. So it’s not cash flowing positive. And we’re always feeding it. Fortunately, we’ve got our other businesses that are profitable so that we can, we can feed that.

But utilizing, yes, it does make sense. Utilizing your advisors. They look at it from their unique point of view. You do need frequently somebody who can draw all those opinions together.

Lynn
Yeah. Because you may, you may have someone say, you know, yes, it’s going to be important for you to maintain the systems that your business is run on, keeping up with technology. And you know, an advisor may say is there’s not going to be a positive payback to that right now.

But say you go, you know, say you don’t update your systems and then you go to sell your business and someone’s going to come in and say, oh, we’re going to need to replace this. All of a sudden, you know, one of, you know, a multiplier goes down a little bit more.

Meg
Yeah, yeah.

Lynn
You don’t have a plan in place that’s going to maybe give some of your top people a little more profit and a little more incentive to stay with you. And if they get to sense that, oh, this business is getting a little old, it’s starting to feel a little stuck, why should I stick around?

And all of a sudden key personnel begin to go. So that’s the long term business value that as you can, as you can probably appreciate, people don’t think about, how am I going to get out of this?

Meg
Exactly.

Lynn
And one of my clients right now, we’ve been working together for two and a half years. She became the CEO of the business after dad passed and there were two separate businesses being run out of one P&L, which nobody in the world should ever even think about doing.

But no CPA had ever been able to convince dad that that change needed to be made. And when he passed, everyone said, okay, where’s the pot of money? He never really created a profit sharing account for himself or his employees. And you know, so after 30 plus years in business, there wasn’t a, you know, a really strong, well managed company to leave to, you know, leave his legacy.

But daughter’s doing a great job in figuring that out.

Meg
Wow. And that’s so true, Lynn, of the, the entrepreneurs that my husband works with, he does a lot of angel investing. So we’re constantly being pitched different entrepreneurial ideas and evalu people with a business idea who are asking for money.

It’s so true that entrepreneurs in a way can’t get out of their own way. They look at the business from their unique vantage point and frequently don’t take into account, don’t, don’t put into effect the advice that they’re getting from other people.

And when exiting the business, the whole point is to do it profitably. And a lot of entrepreneurs just don’t understand how to do that.

Lynn
Yeah. And there was, there was a report that came out last year. It was a 2023 Owner’s Readiness Assessment report from the Exit Planning Institute. And they’ve, they even commented on theirs kind of within the preface that in the next 10 years there’s going to be more businesses for sale than there currently is equity to buy it.

So if you think that your little baby is going to sell for your. For the $10 million you hope, wish and pray is going to, statistically, the chances are tiny that they get that.

Meg
Yeah.

Lynn
And I just did my, just set my newsletter out last week and my blog, this blog for the month was Are you ready to go on Shark Tank? I love watching Shark Tank because you know those people. Because what are they looking for?

You know, they’re looking for somebody that they, that they, they can work with, first of all. Then they’re looking for a business idea that’s, that’s marketable.

Meg
Right.

Lynn
Then the question that they always want to know is how well do you know your numbers? And if you get this, if they get the sense that you don’t know your numbers or your numbers don’t make sense, you’re. There’s no deal for you.

And so, so like I, you know, kind of end the thing by saying, if you met a shark, would they be impressed with how well you know your numbers? And, and again, you take popular culture and it comes down to business. And what is business? The mirror image is in your personal life.

And if you’re not managing your personal life, you’re probably not managing your business. And if you don’t have a fractional CFO or somebody working in your business alongside with you, you are the cfo. How comfortable is that hat that you’re wearing?

Meg
Yeah, we frequently see this just exactly to your point that they’re enamored with the idea of what they’re putting out there and not so much the nuts and bolts, the hard work. Why get into business if you’re not going to do it profitably? The whole reason for doing it.

So you really do need to understand your marketability, your, your clientele, GE geography, demography in your area. Do you have the right offering for the people who are there? And how are you going to reach them?

Lynn
Yeah, yeah. And it’s, you know, but there’s, there are so many things. Like when I first started my business back then, I was talking about data.

Meg
Yeah.

Lynn
And I was killing people because nobody likes data. You have to be a data geek to really kind of like it. Which, which I do because I’ve seen the power of it. And But I just realized, you know, and I thought that really one opportunity for me was going to be able to support CFOs at smaller companies.

Because every CFO I worked with, a Procter and Gamble or Grande Cheese, there was always more projects, more questions to look into, more answers to be uncovered, more new insights to help the rest of the business. Then there were people to do it.

And it really hit me one day I was talking to a guy who runs a fractional CFO service out of Chicago. And I called him up and got an appointment with him and said, look, you do bookkeeping, you do accountants, you do controllers, you do CFOs. There’s an opportunity here for you I think we might be able to partner on. I want to support the cfo.

And the guy said, why would I need that? And that’s, that’s the, that was the impression there. I learned, you know, the impression of a lot of CFOs. My job is to help make the financial, make sure the financial statements are right, handle banking relationships, manage the 401k plan, if you’re a public company, do audits. And they hadn’t really thought about building out that finance function. That’s helping people look ahead.

Meg
Yeah. So who is an ideal, what, what kind of company is an ideal client for you now in this iteration? And are you working just in the Milwaukee market, or do you have clients?

Lynn
I, I go, I can go just about anywhere.

Meg
Okay.

Lynn
But if it’s outside the area, yes. There’s going to have to be personal visits to make sure that we’re working each other, you know, working well with each other. And again, if it’s like a manufacturing, distribution type, type of business, you got to flow materials. I’m not even going to try to understand cost without seeing the physicality of the layout.

Meg
Okay.

Lynn
And so there is that getting to know each other. But really I’m looking for folks who right now, as I said the beginning, are not comfortable with where they’re at. They’ve been in business five or six years. They’ve been in, you know, their businesses approaching that four or five million dollars in sales range.

And they’re beginning to get that feeling like I should be better. I probably don’t know what I should know. And I’ve never really talked about anybody about what I should know, what I should be doing differently. But then all of a sudden they’re beginning to feel stuck. Businesses plateaued. The reason we do most of what we do is the fact that this is now the way that we’ve always done it.

So those, those are really what I want, that I really do want to work with because they’ve reached that point now where they need to start looking a little further in ahead than the typical solopreneur or really small business owner.

Meg
Yeah. So you want them when they’re already operational for a few years so that they can show you where they started, where they have come from, and that’s where you can diagnose then what some of those roadblocks are to greater, greater monetization, greater profitability.

Lynn
Yes. And really becoming that strategic business partner to them. Because the way that I work with people, it’s not just, you know, an hour and a half call twice a month. You know, I want to be in your business, literally working in your business with you two, three, four days a month.

Meg
Okay.

Lynn
And so it’s. So I’m very hands on. So I, I consider myself part of your leadership team. You know, so if there’s a regular Monday morning meeting that you need to be at, I’d be there at that regular Monday morning meeting.

And so you know that that’s just the way that I like to work with people. But yes, once you’ve been around for a while and you really feel like, okay, I’ve worked on my operations, I’ve worked on my sales, my marketing is down, and now pulling off all the other hats that you wear, I need to get better at wearing the finance hat.

Meg
Yeah. So true.

Lynn
Yeah. And, you know, and at the end of the day, there’s a lot to be said that it, it is all about the numbers, but it’s really not all about the numbers. It’s about you. And when I think about you and what I really offer as a cfo, it’s your confident financial outcomes.

Meg
Your confident financial outcomes. And that again, is an area where entrepreneurs miss the mark.

Lynn
Yeah.

Meg
Oh, they’re either too confident or they’re not confident enough. They’re confident in the things that they do well. Yes. Yeah.

Lynn
Well, okay. Back in October, I became the epitome of my best client. I bought a service that I did not completely understand, SEO. I from a company that I did not properly vet. All I know is after six, seven, eight, nine months, I spent a bunch of money with them. They weren’t doing what seemed to be moving the needle because I googled myself, you know, fractional CFO and like, didn’t show up anywhere.

And all of a sudden I realized I’m frustrated, I’m mad at myself because I didn’t do the diligence and frustrated. I didn’t know where else to turn and fortunately I went back into my network and found somebody who’s a marketing strategist and oh my gosh, talking with her, getting with a good designer.

The website’s under construction right now. That was supposed to been done before Labor Day. And again, it’s that frustration and that’s what I think I can also offer as an independent fractional cfo as opposed to someone working, working, you know, with a bigger company. That came more out of the CPA world.

I’ve lived, I’ve lived everything that’s going through your head. We don’t, we don’t talk. I don’t talk about the entrepreneurs roller coaster anymore. We’re just, you know, great days, bad days. No, we ride every freaking ride at the carnival.

We’re on the tilt a world on the, the scrambler now and then we get to ride that Ferris wheel and things are just very, very calm. And then other times, man, I’m just got my butt kicked on the, in the bumper cars. That’s the life that we’re all living right now.

Meg
Yeah. And the value proposition here. For anyone who’s listening to this and evaluating what, where they are in business, I have to agree, Lynn, that the disruptor, the real advantage for you and someone working with you is that you know the life of the business owner.

You have. Just to your point, you’ve been at the carnival now for quite a long time. You’ve ridden every ride. And we know on a day to day basis that you’re gonna get all of those carnival rides in a week.

Lynn
Yeah.

Meg
And it’s gonna be crazy. But I’m starting to think about some of the people I work with, who are my advisors, who don’t understand at all what, what I do, what drives me, how a business operates, why it’s so bumpy and up and down.

They’ve, they’ve been in that accounting role, that narrow little silo and that little tunnel vision thing and they’ve never had to take the risks that you have taken and now know intimately the stumbles and falls and as well as the, the climbs to the top and the rises that feel so good.

That to me is really the reason why somebody should work with you, is that you’ve got finger on the pulse. You’ve walked the walk. You’re not just talking the talk.

Lynn
Yeah. And there’s, you know, as much as I’d like to say that, yes, I’m the data magician because I, I can just I do data probably better than a lot of owners just because that is what I do. But, but that, but that’s just it. But there is no magic.

This is, you know, a lot of it is part time. You’re, you know, I think you said earlier, part time counselor. You become the business confident and you know, they want, they want someone to trust and the person who really does have their back. That’s and, and for me success is like, like the last conversation I’ll have with somebody when they say thanks Lim, but we think we got this. That to me is like key moment or when you watch and all those little moments along that path where light bulbs go on, you know.

Last January I started working with a, with the young ladies rans two coffee shops, working a full time job, mother of three. First time you know, we met, second time we got together I said, you know what we’re going to do today, Laura? We are going to take four pictures out of your QuickBooks then we’re going to write a note to your CPA with whom you spent $9,000 in nine months, which was outrageous to begin with, for bookkeeping services and we’re going to ask them for a refund.

So we did that. Two weeks went by, not a text, not an email, not a phone call. But by the end of week three, they had sent a check in for some, a check back for $6,000 without even blinking or the conversation. And. But did she know how bad their books were? No. All she knew that she wasn’t getting responses.

She knew that there were, you know, QuickBooks was telling her all these things needed to be done that they should have been doing. And you can look at her bank accounts that they hadn’t been reconciled. And the reason she went to this company because she had some accounts for two years that had never been reconciled and they were still unreconciled.

But she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what to look for. She didn’t know what questions to ask. And that was the instant value I provided to her that paid for my services for a couple months.

Meg
Yeah, that’s a perfect example too of, of how, how important it is to have someone like you who’s the devil is in the details. And it’s easy for them to, for bookkeeper or accountant to just hand back to you the stuff. But if you, to your point, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, they can.

It is easy to manipulate numbers. It’s easy to not. It’s easy to overlook proper allocation to the type of expense that it is in. In other words, it’s, it’s misrecording.

Lynn
I had a guy, he was so excited, he said, Lynn, look how much my margins have gone up. I said, okay, yes, your margins have gone up, but do you realize your freight has in cost of goods has just gone down, but the delivery expense that your bookkeeper was all of a sudden started moving things to was in. Down below in expenses. Your margin is not going down, it’s actually. Or not. Your margin is not going up, it’s actually going down. The bookkeeping was wrong.

Meg
Frightening.

Lynn
And you were so excited about your top line sales, but they came from your lowest profitability company customer who also has gone from like 60 of your business up to 75% of your business. And oh, by the way, did you know you had all these little companies that are starting to buy from you? Maybe you should call them and find out how they found you, what they’re doing and what else you can do for them.

And that was based on, you know, a very cursory look at his p. L. He just didn’t know what he was looking for. He just knew that the margin was, was getting bigger. That was good. So, you know, again, these are unfortunately, these are the kind of stories that anybody who does what I do can tell you. And you know, I hear from bankers, from, you know, other CPAs. Yeah, but keep, you know, business owners don’t spend enough time. Exit planning issue. Exit planning institute will tell you people don’t spend enough time.

Meg
Right, right.

Lynn
Business. Obviously you can tell I get a little excited, a little bit passionate about this because my God, I just know how hard you’re working. Silly little numbers, they do can help you be better if you take the time and invest in the time and invest in yourself to learn the stories that they can tell.

Meg
Yeah, you’re bringing sexy back to numbers, which really ought to be the whole reason why people, business owners would want to know what is going on. And it’s frightening to hear you talk about bookkeepers or some of these services that we as entrepreneurs, if you’re afraid of your numbers, you hand your books over to somebody that you trust in order to give back to you proper balances and, and know where your, your money is.

But gosh, Lynn, that’s, it’s, it’s frightening to know that there are stories like that tell people how they can reach you. Because that I think is going to be really resonating with the people who are listening this far into the episode is, oh my God, I don’t have the full story. So how do I get a hold of Lynn?

Lynn
Easiest thing to do is, you know, website data. Datatoprofit.com.net sorry and D A T A the number two the word profit.net and I’m gonna have a brand new website coming up on in mid February and that’s going to be the easiest way you can find me. I am all over LinkedIn and you know, Lynn Corazzi L Y N N C O R A Z Z I on LinkedIn.

You’re going to find me all over there. And my phone number is in my LinkedIn profile. If you’d rather just pick up the.

Meg
Phone and call, this has been really helpful. Typically Lynn, when I’m, I’m interviewing, I not only know the individual but I have a personal connection to it.

I am one of those people that for a long time because in my first iteration of a business owner I had a husband who was very numbers driven. And so it was easier for me to take the employee and operational side of things the day to day feel good, not always feeling good, but day to day operations and work more on the human resources side.

As then a divorce business owner, I had to take over everything. And that was, that was a real bummer when I did that. We were using QuickBooks and our data was off on our payroll. And so the IRS climbed down my throat right away as they do with their letters and phone calls because I was off by something, some ridiculous dollar amount like $10 or it was just such a nominal amount.

But I didn’t know about the level of accuracy and the timing of reporting and just how hard the IRS would come down on timing and mistakes. So that was a real eye opener for me as somebody who really didn’t like and didn’t want to climb into the numbers to suddenly be forced to have to.

And maybe it takes something like that for a business owner to really care. Is either a big mistake that you’re now going to be penalized and pay interest on something that, that was unintentional. But surround yourself with good people like Lynn.

Lynn
Yeah. And you know, and people talk about taxes, everybody hates paying taxes. But, and, but the biggest fun thing is when, as when a new person starts with the IRS and they’re particularly the, the new auditors, you know what, you know what jobs they’re giving first LLCs.

Because LLCs are often run by people who, you know, don’t really set things up. It’s the easiest place, they’re simpler businesses and there’s more likely something’s going to go wrong. So they cut their teeth as the LLC and all this information, the payroll stuff, talks to the IRS computers and they’re looking to see what, you know, what you’re charging on what you’re expensing at payroll. Does that match with what you’ve done and this and the government’s audit systems?

You know, there’s a series of red flags, yellow flags, and green flags. And if you get too many red flags, you are like instant auditor. Auditable.

Meg
Yeah.

Lynn
And so again, having a good CPA who doesn’t just hand you your tax forms because this is good, because this is the time of year we’re getting into that CPA should be walking through your, your tax forms because when you sign that, you are signing that. You are the one who approved it and it is.

Meg
Right.

Lynn
Right. CPA has no, no skin in the game unless they’re a higher level tax preparer.

Meg
This is, this is a good one. This could be a good title for the episode too. Avoid the audit. Hire Lynn for tax relief.

Lynn
That is the one A we want to make sure that you really pay attention to.

Meg
Yeah, yeah. This is so true. Well, thank you so much for making yourself available again to have another data con. Profitability is why people, you get into business, you don’t do it for fun. You don’t do it because your idea is a great one.

You’re doing it to monetize. And not only monetize, that’s revenue, but you have to understand how, like Lynn said, your path to profitability has a lot to do with your behavior. So thank you so much again, Lynn, for joining me today and I look forward to seeing you around town in Milwaukee.

Lynn
Absolutely. I look forward to it as well. Thanks, Meg.

Meg
Thanks.