Making Accounting NOT Suck

Intro
Welcome to The Future is Borderless podcast with David Nilssen. We feature top entrepreneurs and thought leaders from around the world, those who bring a global mindset and a unique perspective to their life and business. Now, let’s get started with the show.

David Nilssen
Hey David Nilssen here, I’m the host of this podcast. Um On the future is borderless. We connect with business leaders from around the world who have what I refer to as a borderless mindset. And the idea here is to share ideas um shed light on new innovations and then provide best practices, things that can help us uh grow both personally and professionally and ultimately thrive in a rapidly changing world. Now, this episode is brought to you by docs. A talent Docs A helps businesses to source full-time highly skilled workers from all over the world. And as a result, these companies can scale faster, increase margin and improve culture. If you wanna learn how to grow your business with offshore talent, simply visit docs A dot com. All right. Well, I’m excited for today’s show today. Our guest is Spencer Sheehan who has a rare capability, uh the ability to speak in both the language of accounting and the language of entrepreneurship.

He’s been a CPA for over 20 years and has been an entrepreneur uh owning businesses in uh manufacturing, construction, real estate, cold storage, and now financial services and with the goal of making accounting not suck. Uh Spencer is the CEO and founder of shift financial insight insights, providing ridiculously simple accounting and financial insights for businesses that are on the rise and guided by the belief that entrepreneurs can change. The world. Shift is on a mission to help small and medium sized businesses remove their financial blind spots and turn the numbers uh side of the business uh from a pain point into a source of power. Now, I should also know that Spencer is a highly rated international speaker. Um I’ve actually seen him on stage and he is outstanding. He delivers engaging out uh engaging in actionable presentations and workshops to industry and membership associations such as uh TED X uh the Entrepreneurs Organization and tech visage.

His keynote presentation is un bleep your books, uh surprisingly simple path to financial clarity and it complements the lessons that he teaches in his best selling book, uh entrepreneurs, entrepreneur numbers. Excuse me, that’s, that’s kind of a mouthful uh using the same uh drive in sports that he does uh with business. Spencer is completed marathons, ultra marathons and Iron Man, maybe more uh a distance cycling or distance cycling events uh and even distance swims. So uh, a lot. And with that I want to welcome Spencer to the show.

Spencer Sheinin
Hello. How are you doing, Dave, man.

David Nilssen
That is all I, you know, I’ve done a half marathon. Uh, one time in my life was able to check that off my list and no interest anymore. I’ve, it’s pretty crazy to think that you’ve done all of those different things. Is this, is this something that you would just enjoy doing, or is it something that you do to challenge yourself? What’s the sort of motivation there?

Spencer Sheinin
Um, I, I think a few things, um, and I, I should say I don’t do a lot of it anymore, just, you know, it’s pretty abusive on the body and my, my back is, it just reminds me that I’d rather be active than necessarily doing ultras. Um, you know, it starts just as fun, like I’m running with friends or in a club or whatever and then it just sort of, you hear somebody does an ultra and then the little competitive juices start flowing and then it just starts to be like, how far can I take this? You know, ultimately 100 miles. I did 100 mile or one day. So, you know,

David Nilssen
that’s fascinating. It says something about your competitive nature because I’ve, I’ve also had friends who have said they completed an ultra and I never got the itch to try.

Spencer Sheinin
So, yeah, I get that too. I get that. Well,

David Nilssen
let’s talk a little bit about your, your entrepreneurial journey. Um And, and, you know, in your bio, I talked about the fact that you’ve been an entrepreneur and a CPA. But can you clarify? Which came

Spencer Sheinin
first? Sure. Uh Yeah, the CPA came first and I, I think I need to update my bio because it, I, I got, I was a little mortified last year. I got my 25 year CPA P. Um So that came from uh from the institute. Um And really, it was, as I was coming out of university, I didn’t know what to do. Like I was just kind of like, I don’t know. And my dad happens to be a CPA. He’s been a tax specialist his whole life. And he’s like, well, there’s this thing called CPA and I literally didn’t know what it meant. Like I, I thought it was tax because that’s what I knew from my dad.

And so I went to, and I became a CPA or I went to school to be a CPA. And I literally, and so we had a lot of article time where we’d have to work at one of the firms. I would drive to work physically nauseous. I hated accounting so much when I back when I was doing it. So that actually came first. Um And kind of as you would get from that little bit, we talked about ultras, I started down the path even though I wasn’t enjoying it.

It was hard and I just, it wasn’t my thing. I stuck it out because what am I gonna do? Not finish my degree when I’m halfway through. Um, so, yeah, the, the accounting came first, um, but didn’t stick around long.

David Nilssen 

Yeah. So how, so how did you make the transition then? I mean, I, I appreciate by the way that you’re going to work, you feel nauseous, uh, going there, clearly, it was not the right fit for you. But like, how did you then make the transition into owning your own business?

Spencer Sheinin
Yeah. And, and really, to some extent when I ended, you know, I ended up owning a few businesses and there was a point in my kind of mid thirties, I’m like, how did this happen? So, um I had bought um my sister and I, after I came back from university, we, we put pooled our resources and bought a small duplex together to live in and it was just the two of us and the realtor on that job came to me and he’s like, hey, there’s this interesting development deal around the corner and through a long story which I won’t bore you with, I ended up participate, borrowing some money from my dad really uh full disclosure and, and doing this development deal where I ended up meeting a general contractor who built the house and him and I just became really good friends. And, you know, I think I was like in my early twenties at the time and he was 15 years older than me. And we just got to be really good friends on it. Really, same integrity, same goals. We, we were always talking about business and he literally said to me, he goes, hey, you want to go find a business to buy. And at that point, you know, I was an accountant. I had been an investment banker as well.

So I worked, uh uh at one of the large Canadian banks as an investment banker and he had no education. He’d never sort of had a traditional job. He’d always just had these businesses. And I’m like, all right. And again, long story, but we found the first business which was a manufacturing business. Uh We made skin care products and I remember this was during the dot like before the dot com bubble crashed.

Um So like I’m talking like this is we, we bought that business in 2000. So like this is way back and we walked into the plant, we saw lip balm going down the line like this and we’re both like we get this, we don’t understand the technology, at least back then, but I understand we just need to do this better than everybody else. Sounds easier than it was. I had the finance background, he had the operations background and, and we, we made a good, you know, that’s how we found our first business. We bought it. I organized all the financing. We were over 90% leveraged when we bought the business.

We, uh, some of that came from one of the vendors who became one of our, uh, minority partners. And there we go, we have this business and then I thought it was easy. I learned running a business is totally different than being an accountant in every respect turns out and, and it’s funny because everyone’s like, oh, you’re a CPA, you’ll be fine. I’m like, no, I had zero understanding of how to run a business. Zero. everything I’ve done up till that point is you go in for two weeks, you do your audit, you leave, you go in for two weeks, you do your audit, you leave as an investment banker, you go in for three weeks, you do a deal, you leave.

I didn’t know what it meant to run a business. Um, and then fast forward, uh maybe six or seven years later, my partner who also owned a construction business building, high end custom homes in Vancouver invited me into that business because, um, he wanted me to come in and, and by this point, I was building processing systems and starting to learn about business. I still have a long, still have a long way to go. Um, but he wanted me to basically extricate him from the day to day of that business. So I was invited into that and then along the way, not too far off that, um I became partners with my dad in a family business, which was a cold storage business. We had uh three, well, ultimately, four facilities in Washington State public Refrigerated Warehousing.

Being in Washington, there’s gonna be a lot of fish, dairy beef. Actually, even um carbon fiber for the Boeing Dreamliner had to be kept at temperature before it was manufactured. So, yeah, so that was sort of how, where the entrepreneur side and, and I, I’ll, I’ll just finish the story with. There was a point in the call it around 2010 where I woke up and I realized I was miserable again. Uh driving to work nauseous wasn’t happy with what I was doing and made a decision that it was more time for me to lean into more purpose of what I wanted to do and, and, and kind of what I’m called to do rather than just having these businesses that kind of randomly showed up in my life in a weird way.

David Nilssen
Yeah. So, so in, in your bio, I, I talked about the, the mission for shift is you guys wanna make accounting not suck. Uh What does that actually mean to you?

Spencer Sheinin
Um So I was at an event um uh with the entrepreneurs organization, I was at a speaking engagement. There was a speaker who was a finance guy, excuse me. Amazing, a great speaker, high energy. He was talking fast and quite technical. A lot of formulas. No, I’m ac P, I’m just naturally good at math. No, no surprise there. But I’m watching and I’m like, ok, got it. Ok, got it. Like it was, it was intense and I’m in a room full of entrepreneurs and I’m kind of like, I don’t think everybody else is keeping up. Like I just, that’s my gut and at one point I put up my hand and I remember his name is Alan.

I go, Alan, don’t you mean 2.4 whatever it was because he’d made a mistake on one of his own notes. And he goes, oh yeah, you’re right. And the whole room like almost falls over laughing because they’re like, I have no idea what’s going on out there. And here’s Spencer correcting him. And one of the guys at the table who I knew leaned over and said, hey, I know this stuff’s important. I don’t understand it, but I know I need it. Can you help me with it? And that was a light bulb moment.

Actually, after I, after I made that decision around exiting all of the businesses and following my passion, I was like, oh, I’m actually super passionate about entrepreneurship and I understand this language of accounting. And so maybe there’s a way I can actually help support entrepreneurs, which I believe entrepreneurs can change the world. My role is to help them through their financial blind spot. So that’s kind of where the, the passion piece came in and, um, kind of, it was that one light bulb in the series of several light bulbs which ended up creating shift, which is what I’m doing now. And, yeah, I, I hated being an accountant and no, I don’t do any accounting now. We have bookkeepers, we have controllers. I don’t do. I’m not allowed to touch my own books. I’m not allowed to touch the company’s books.

I have holding companies not even allowed to touch it because if I touch the accounting it don’t let me into quick, I’ll do the account.

David Nilssen
That’s awesome. You know, it’s funny. I’ve had a similar experience. I, um, I, I remember in Seattle, I went to a, an event maybe a decade and a half ago, a financial professional and it was one of the most highly rated events of that year and it was probably the least sexy and the next year they brought the same speaker back, same situation and we realized at that point, so many entrepreneurs are financially illiterate or they really struggle with their books. I’m just curious, I mean, given your experience, like, why is that, why is it that so many entrepreneurs just don’t really, um, have that sort of baseline and understand that they really need to successfully run an

Spencer Sheinin
operation. Yeah. And I mean, I, I’m gonna focus on kind of small medium, you know, when you get like the hundreds of millions, typically can afford some really high priced talent to deal with it. But if you, you know, you’re like 235, 10, even 2030 million, sometimes it’s hard to do that. So I’m gonna say there’s a couple of core reasons for that. And one I already talked about like, I’m a CPA, I went to school for three years to learn how to write trade and interpret financial statement. Most entrepreneurs did the same thing, like when I got into the business and I was like, you’re fine, you’re an accountant. I didn’t know how to run a business. It’s a completely different skill set. And so I think about like, um, this happened years ago, I was, uh I was quite sick. Um, and like, I was actually really quite sick and I know what you’re thinking.

It wasn’t a man cold. Ok. I was actually sick and, and at the time this was a long time ago, I was in, I was dating an emerged doc emergency doctor and she said, if you’re still sick tomorrow, I’m sending you for tests and, and I was still sick. She sent me for some tests and I got an EKG and she looked and goes, oh, you might have myocarditis. Well, if you’ve ever seen an EKG, it’s just a bunch of squiggly lines and myocarditis is a potentially fatal heart condition. And I’m like, how do you know that she goes? Well, this line goes like this and like this and she knows how to interpret an EKG I don’t, financial statements are a technical document. There are rules about how you put them together.

And while even if you’re somewhat financially literate, the thing I got about being a CPA is everything’s a relationship. So when something changes here, I have an intuitive knowledge of what’s happening somewhere else in the business as a result. Double entry, bookkeeping, boring crap. But that’s why it’s complicated. So that’s kind of like the first thing, the language, you know, it’s a different language. And then the other thing and this is particularly relevant for smaller businesses is I, I call it the accounting stack.

You know, if you were to go build a house, you have your general contractor. Everybody knows that in charge of the job, you got a bunch of sub trades. Everybody knows that. Plumbers, electricians, et cetera, and maybe some laborers, if it’s a big job hauling lumber, digging ditches, hauling bags of cement, whatever we all know, that’s what happens on a job site. But when it comes to the accounting department, we often don’t realize pretty much the same things exist right at the bottom. It’s the bookkeepers, transactional functions, day to day stuff that most people think of as accountant in the middle.

The sub trades is the controller, reporting and compliance, all the reporting stuff. Sure. But the compliance, the boring stuff, the policies and procedures, the setting up the chart of accounts. So it’s read a certain way. Those are the blueprints, all of that other stuff, the compliance, making sure the bookkeeper’s doing it right. Because otherwise, how do you know?

And then at the top is the strategic function, which is, which is like the CFO the point of that story is if you’re a small business, you probably have a bookkeeper running your entire accounting. It’s the same thing as hiring a laborer to build your house. You’d never do it. Nothing against bookkeepers. There are some wonderful bookkeepers out there. We have wonderful bookkeepers. They just don’t have the skills of the sub trades and the general contract.

You ne like they might know some, you know, the, the labor might know some plumbing, they might know some electrical, they might know how to replan. You’d still never do it. So we’re expecting too much from the wrong people who don’t have the skills. And just like me, I learned how to do financials. I didn’t learn how to run a business. Accountants, know how to run through financials, not how to run a business. So we end up in this vicious cycle where entrepreneurs are like I should know this.

I don’t know what to ask. I’m embarrassed. So they kind of expect the accountants to bring them the, the insights into the business. Whereas the accounts are going well, I delivered the financial statements. So I’m done. So that’s kind of the vicious circle.

David Nilssen
Well, it’s funny. I, I’m thinking back on my early, uh, you know, entrepreneurial journey, I started a business when I was 24. By the time I was 27 we had about 100 employees in Seattle, Washington and I had one, uh, accountant who was running the entire show. Uh, and I may have even overt titled that and some of the pain points were, I mean, there’s some real pain points there, but I’m curious because it is a common sort of pattern that you see. How does it manifest in the business? Like what are some of the early symptoms or signs that you might be ahead of your skis?

Spencer Sheinin
Um I think I heard it summed up once by an entrepreneur who said I’m just not getting the information. I need to run my business and then he leaned in, he lowered his voice. He goes, I don’t really know what information I need. I just know I’m not getting it right. So it’s kind of like that lack of control. If you don’t know what you should be asking for, what you should be looking for and why? That’s kind of a sense of like red flag there will be pain. And I’m not saying that to be like, you know, kind of in your face. I mean, you said yourself like you were 27 like when I bought my, for that manufacturer because I was 26 we had more, like 40 employees. So we were a little bit smaller.

Luckily I was a CPA, so I, I understood that. Right. So, the pains of when I’m not getting the information I need to run my business shows up a couple of ways. Really? The biggest one and the most painful is, 00, hey, Dave, I just let you know, we don’t have enough for payroll on Thursday. It’s like, how do I it’s, it’s Tuesday. I uh what do you mean? Right. Not having the lead time to make those decisions, you know?

Oh man, my vendors keep calling me for payment. Ok. We’re not on top of it. So it’s those things where it’s like I just, I need to want to drive more profitability to my business. I hear that my industry, I should be having 12 15 16% profitability. I have zero. Why? Right. Understanding what’s driving, what’s causing the problems and I get it because it’s painful to read. It’s like, ok, I’m, I’m literally learning Spanish right now and I’m doing a terrible job at it because it, I don’t think that way.

So um the pains are usually the surprises, the surprises are the pain. I wasn’t expecting that and it was, it was a bit of a kick in the junk when it happens.

David Nilssen
Yeah, tell me then like, so, so you guys started shit or you started shift? I should say who’s your core customer? And like Yeah. How are you guys differentiating in the market?

Spencer Sheinin
Yeah. So um we typically say between about two and 15 million is kind of ideal. Um We have two core segments. One is professional services, a lot of marketing type agencies, managed service providers, consulting anything kind of in that realm. Um And the other is speaking of the the job site uh at the sub trades. So H VAC plumbing, electrical, those types. So those are tend to be the two, I think it’s partly because particularly in the marketing, in particular, in the trades, you’re probably doing the job at a company and you’re like, I can do better than this. Like, I don’t, I’ve heard that story a lot like, oh, I just thought I could do better than the company we were doing and maybe from an execution perspective you can. But, and, and I like the term you said earlier, you know, you get a bit out over your skis when it comes to the accounting and finance. So 2 to 15 professional services and trades. Um And I also think that’s where most of the pain happens.

If it’s like up to a million, a million plus a bit, depending on the business. You can kind of know everything in your brain. You’re kind of on top of it all yourself, you know, who you owe money because you probably put the order in yourself. You’ve probably, you know, sold the deal yourself when you start it to +23, particularly five is where it gets really difficult where you don’t have to rely on other people. Eight, now, all of a sudden it’s all about systems and process and you’re kind of trying to keep up with it going on rather than driving everything that’s going on. So, those are the times where the pain point really happens. If you hit 2025. 

Sure, maybe you can now pay 200 grand for a CEO or a CFO.

David Nilssen
Pardon me? Yeah. Now I, ok, I, I was gonna say, I think I know the answer to this but why wouldn’t someone hire that internally? That function?

Spencer Sheinin
Um, because of the accounting staff, right. So, um, if you’re a $2.5 million business, if a bookkeeper costs 40 to 50 K A controller costs 80 to 100 K A CFO costs 2 50 plus, there’s no way as a $3 million business can afford that. So, um, but the other problem is for a 2.5 3.5 $4 million business, you don’t need a full time bookkeeper. You need part of a bookkeeper, you need part of a controller, you need part of a CFO. And so that’s, you know, that’s essentially what we do. We’re a piece of all of those and especially you don’t need a full time bookkeeper because they’re probably being inefficient because systems and process may not be their, for k, so, while they’re doing their best, there’s just technology changes and, and, and ways to do things in accounting that just make it smoother and easier.

David Nilssen
Yeah. So, on one hand you hire someone that’s a little senior, they’re not gonna want to do the work or you’re not gonna want to pay the rate to do the work and vice versa.

Spencer Sheinin
You know, you know, the opposite issue I’ve always had like a good controller does not want to be a bookkeeper and a good bookkeeper doesn’t necessarily have the skill. They can become a controller. Right. So, you’ve got exactly that. Yeah. And I don’t think when you ask kind of about what we do, I was clear that we are like the bookkeeper controller and slice of CFO for these businesses.

David Nilssen
Yeah. Yeah. So you guys are the outsourced finance arm for these companies. So they don’t have to pay for the full stack but get the proper utilization.

Spencer Sheinin
Yeah, we just, we just think that sounds boring. So we say we make accounting, not suck. Yeah.

David Nilssen
Well, I certainly like the way it sounds. It, it, my ears perked up the moment I read it.

Spencer Sheinin
We, we did a, uh, just real quick, we did a trade show. It was in the H A space and there was another accounting bookkeeping firm there and there’s lots of business out there. There’s gonna be lots of competitive, whatever. Fine. I’d rather be friendly with my competitors. And the second time we saw them at a show like that they would, they, they had changed their branding to something about accounting sucks. I’m like, ok, cool. Whatever plagiarism is a, uh, let’s talk about, um, so delivering financial information is one thing, but actually helping the entrepreneurs to understand it, to make it actionable is another.

David Nilssen
So, how do you guys play a role in that piece?

Spencer Sheinin
Yeah. So I’m gonna, there’s kind of three pieces to that number one. And this is more of like a tool and you know, I’ve, I’ve done a lot, this talk a lot. And I, and I actually for a while, I was like, I, I need to stop sharing this information because I feel like I’m being like, it’s just so obvious, but like when I ask people what their biggest takeaway is, they always come back to the data visualization, you know, is turning financial accounting information into pictures and it sounds so silly, but like the best way I can describe it um is, you know, imagine like a stock chart, just the classic stock chart where you’ve got how the stock is tracking and the volume at the bottom, forget about any of the other technical analysis, right? You can look at that and instantly know is the stock going up, is it going down, what’s going on with the trend? There’s a lot of trading, you can get so much data that if you looked at that chart in one second, you would know. Right. So if you have your financials and let’s just take, I don’t know your, your overall expenses just to make it simple. And you’re charting on a simple line chart this year versus last year versus budget maybe past 12 or whatever it is depending on we all have our preferences. But you can look and then literally a second go. Are we going in the right way?

We go in the wrong way? Are we on budget or are we not on budget? And it actually takes the net, the the need to translate financial statements into just our brains. 90 90% of the information that’s transmitted in our brains is is visual. We don’t think letters and numbers. When was the last time you thought about a paragraph in your brain? We just don’t do it.

So number one is to actually change how the data is presented, data visualization um In, in what we present to not only just our clients, but shift is a client of shift. When I look at our financials, I start only with the data and I go into the financials when I see something that I want. The other thing about the chart is when something is out of line, it sticks out like a sore thumb, you can’t help but to see it. But if you’re not used to financial statements, your eyes may not pick up on like maybe you’re looking at a 12 month financial. It’s like even I get tired, my eyes get tired looking at that. Right.

So data visualization, the second thing which I find, if you, if, if you find financials difficult, this tends to be a big unlock for people. I don’t care what business you’re in, how big it is, how small it is, how many locations you have. I don’t care about any of that. There are five parts of your income state. Sales, assuming you’re not pre revenue, your cost of goods. It’s like the only accounting term I can’t get away from.

But you know, just when I was in manufacturing, we made skincare products or sunscreen the bottle, the cap, the front label, the back label, the box, but all of the materials that we use to make the sunscreen and the labor to put it together. So just your cost of delivering your product or store, right? So sales minus your cost of goods equals gross profit, minus your expenses equals profit, right? But there’s only three things you can do to increase the profitability of your business can increase your sales price, increase your throughput, increase, decrease your cost of goods, ie increase your gross margin or decrease your expenses. That’s it. And so the question starts to become, which lever do I need to rather than worrying about all of these financials and what’s going on here? Which lever do I need to pull? Are we growing? We have a problem with our margin.

We have a problem with our expenses and yes, it gets a little more complex from there, but at the highest level, not having to worry about an 87 line financial statement. Which lever do I need to pull? Which lever? I mean, it’s called lever because you apply pressure to it that gives you leverage to move the business and the balance sheet, which is even more complicated. Um for most businesses, particularly smaller businesses, am I collecting fast enough if I have inventory? Am I moving it fast enough or is it sitting on trucks or in warehouses by my manufacturing? I can’t tell you how many hours of sleep I lost owning a manufacturing business because of inventory, right?

Like I think we at one point, we had almost $3 million of inventory. That’s literally just ash sitting in the warehouse, right? Inventory left the warehouse, we had money in the bed. And are you paying at an appropriate rate? A lot of people potentially pay too fast. Not too, you don’t want to slow down. So you hurt your suppliers or your relationships, but sometimes just that, that’s, that’s an opportunity there as well. Capital equipment and debt are levers as well. They’re a little bit harder to turn, you can’t do them as fast.

So in terms of thinking about the business day to day, there’s only six things you can do tails, uh decrease your cost of goods, decrease your expenses, collect faster, turn your inventory faster and pay appropriately if that’s it. And you figure out which lever is the problem game changing a $15 million survey company. Uh I was doing some coaching work with them and um everything looked good except their cash. Well, it turns out they were having a problem invoicing their customers through their opera. There’s some chunkiness in the operations. So they would do say it’s, you know, April 8th, sometimes they weren’t getting their invoices out till the end of month, the next month. Then there was 30 days payments.

So they ended up not getting, sometimes they didn’t get paid for 60 days. So they ended up not getting paid for for sometimes four or five months after doing the job by recognizing the receivables. Your collections lever was a problem. We saw that the owner had gone from cutting checks for $250,000 to the business. Super frustrated. That’s not fun. I’ve had to do it myself, not fun.

Um to actually having $2.5 million of cash in the bank by understanding the key lever in like that was in about 100 and 20 days. But from cutting checks down and 2.5 million in the bank by focusing on the lever that had the most impact in them. So those are kind of the two core fundamentals. And then it’s about selecting the data to analyze once you know which lever is a problem. And this is where we probably can’t get into it right now. But what are the analysis underneath if cost of goods is off?

What do I need to analyze labor materials? Ok. If expenses are off which expenses are the problem, how do we need to analyze it? That gets a little more technical. That’s where you need somebody a little further up the accounting stack to know what the analysis you need are. But if I can understand it and it’s quick, simple and intuitive because I’m looking at a picture, I’m focusing on the key lever and I have somebody delivering me the right analysis under to support the lever that’s gonna have the most impact on my business all of a sudden, it’s not quite as painful.

David Nilssen
Yeah. Yeah, it’s so interesting. Like even as you’re talking, my energy is rising because it does feel so simple. And I think about like when I drive a car, if I have to worry about how the engine is put together, terrible, but I can read a dashboard and I can, I can actually drive the car reading a dashboard, right?

Spencer Sheinin
So the whole idea of data visual, you talk about the concept of KPIS and so that can layer over and I’m sure you’ve had those, those thoughts before. And it’s kind of like Jerry Seinfeld said, years ago. You know, if my car breaks down, I pull it off the side of the road, lift up the hood and I look for the giant on off switch. Oh, here’s the problem. Right. Like, I don’t understand cars either, so I get it awesome.

David Nilssen
Well, um, let’s switch for a second. I want to talk a little bit more about entrepreneurship in general. And I, and I, you know, I love talking to people who have been in peer to peer organizations like the E OS and YP OS because they’re, they’re better at the 5%. I’m curious, what is your darkest day as an entrepreneur?

Spencer Sheinin
Um So speaking of eo um obviously, you know, I’ve, I’ve been a member of EO for a long time and we were going on the Vancouver chapter retreat and I was, it was on a, a um cruise ship, which is my private health. Like I, I’m not a cruise ship guy. I just, my and I’d never been on a cruise ship before and I’m like, this is, and I literally stepped on board and I’m like, yeah, this is exactly what I was expecting. So my skin was crawling. Um I had just broken up with somebody that it it was quite an impactful breakup and I had just discovered she had gotten back together with her ex from before me, like literally that same day. And I’m up on the top deck of the boat and I’m on the phone with my bank because we, this was the manufacturing business and inventory was our biggest lever problem. And it was a really hard one to solve because we had, I think six or 7000 skews.

Right. And if you go to make a bottle of shampoo and you don’t have one ingredient, you can’t make the bottle. So like anyway, and so I was, and we were growing but, you know, particularly manufacturing businesses, you grow it, it’s cash. So I knew we were coming up against a really difficult cash problem. It was kind of one of those perfect storms where we had like we were hit with a bunch of several bad months. Then we were growing again. So cash was already constricted, then we started growing.

So it was even more constricted, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m on the phone with the bank as we’re pulling off uh of the shore and like for sure, like up until that point, you’re getting the loan, you’re getting the loan and as the like the ship’s horn, you know that as that goes off, the guys like I’m sorry to tell you, but um I thought we were gonna get the loan but we can’t and like I was so sure that was gonna happen. I had no plan B, I had no backup. I had nothing else and here I am taking off on this ship where I’ve like where where I’m on my private hell by dealing with this relationship situation. And it was just, it was just one of those where everything happened on the same day to the point where I literally hung up and I’m like, sitting on that boat and I’m like, I don’t, I literally don’t think this business is gonna survive. We don’t have the cash to do it. Um So, I mean, I have a lot of other difficult moment stories, but that was probably the only time where I was like, there’s no way for it, there’s no way through it.

Spencer Sheinin
And that’s an awful feeling because at the time we had 50 or 60 employees and, and I, I imagine you can relate to, like, I felt responsible for 50 or 60 families, 100% you know, putting food on the table and having a career and, you know, we all think being an entrepreneur is all, you know, yachts and expensive cars. And, you know, for me, it was the really a strong feeling of obligation to the those that were relying on me. Um And so it was really the darkness of like I’m gonna have to now we found a way through. Um But I’m gonna have to, I’m not gonna be able to live up to my commitments to these people who have been showing up every day to work in my company. Um That was probably the biggest thing even more so than the personal failure type of fear.

David Nilssen
Yeah. No, I, I actually, I appreciate that you brought that up. I’ve talked about this before on, on other podcasts when I think about my darkest day definitely related to 2008. I was in the, you know, the self directed retirement space. At that point, the markets had collapsed. Real estate was in a disarray. I was going through a divorce. I mean, there’s lots of stuff happening at that time and I remember letting go of one of my team members and I was so upset because I knew that this person and everybody else that we were letting go that day was not gonna be able to find another job and I couldn’t hold it together and she ended up consoling me. Right? Like that, like it, you know, you said it sometimes entrepreneurship looks glamorous but there’s a lot of like, if you care about people, there’s a lot of responsibility that goes with it. So,

Spencer Sheinin
um it’s,

David Nilssen
yeah, I, I want to talk just briefly. I know we’re getting close to the end of our time. But I, I wanna talk about your, I, I, you said earlier that you’re not doing quite as much in sort of the endurance athlete space. But I’m just curious about some of the discipline that you’ve used interchangeably between those two that might sort of help people that are, you know, uh sort of in early in their career. Like what are some of the things that, that correlate between the two that have sort of helped you succeed in life.

Spencer Sheinin
It’s funny. I was kind of thinking about this the other day. Um, and I don’t know that it’s necessarily skills per se but something I’ve appreciated with the grossness of going out and training. You know, I live in Vancouver so, you know, it might be like 36 degrees and raining, which is colder than 20 degrees. Like, if you’re out for five or six hour training, right. It’s just cold and it’s miserable. And when you’re in Vancouver, that’s 4 to 5 months of the year. Um, or like, you know, learning to run on tired legs. Like we would go out for like a five or six hour run and the next day go out for a two or three hour run just to like, train ourselves to run when our legs didn’t want to run. Um, because that’s going to happen.

Spencer Sheinin
And so it’s as much about the process of being comfortable, being uncomfortable and welcoming discomfort in because life is not comfortable. Our lives in today’s day and age are ridiculously comfortable compared to the, the history of humanity. Like it’s insane. Um, but even in our lives, we have discomfort, we’re gonna encounter discomfort, whether it’s physical, emotional, financial things aren’t always gonna go our way. We’re going to have bad times. And so, and, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of kind of self development theory around this.

Spencer Sheinin
Um But just being ok knowing that what I’m doing sucks. But it’s actually going to help me in the long term. I believe in longevity of life. I believe in eating healthy, being healthy because I, I enjoy life and I want to experience it for the most. So if I can’t be OK with the hard times, it’s gonna make it really hard to just be a human because we have hard times, especially as an entrepreneur. I mean, I’m might if, if I may, I’m not the second book I’m writing right now.

Spencer Sheinin
And you know, because I’ve interviewed you for it. Um If I can say that is, is called Entrepreneur Cases and it’s stories kind of like the one you asked me about the vote of, when was that moment where you just thought it was all gonna evaporate? Um And then how do we create impact, positive, impact in the world out of those experiences? So for me, it’s about being comfortable being uncomfortable because it’s going to be an uncomfortable journey. Yes, we hear about the 20 year old entrepreneur that does XY and Z and becomes a billionaire. Those exist, but they’re not very many of those are like such freaks. The almost every entrepreneur I know has almost lost everything more than once.

Spencer Sheinin
Well,

David Nilssen
finding discomfort or finding comfort, I should say in the discomfort, I think we’ll leave it there. All right, we’ve been uh listening to Spencer Sheehan, the CEO and founder of Shift Financial Insight. Spencer. Where can people go to learn more about the work you’re doing?

Spencer Sheinin
Yeah, I mean, probably the easiest thing is uh shift financial dot co not dot com dot co. Shift financial dot co, somebody registered it and is piloting the, the the site. So I’ll leave that story. Um And you can also find me Spencer Shanon at on linkedin and it’s the last name is spelled Sheinin.

David Nilssen
Well, and we’ll get all those resources put in the show notes. Uh Thanks again for being on the call today. Thank you,

Spencer Sheinin
Thank you Dave.