#167 - 5 Financial Factors That Make or Break E-commerce Brands with Paul Bianco

In this episode of the Startup CPG Podcast, Daniel Scharff interviews Paul Bianco, founder and CEO of Graphite Financial. They highlights the essential role finance plays in startup success, particularly within the e-commerce and CPG sectors. Paul emphasizes that finance should go beyond mere number-crunching, offering actionable insights that empower founders to make informed decisions. They discuss critical financial metrics such as margins, customer acquisition costs (CAC), and product costs, shedding light on how understanding these can guide strategic planning and promote sustainable growth.

They also address the challenges of early-stage financial planning, underscoring the importance of having a good finance partner who assists in navigating risks while encouraging innovative ideas. Paul shares insights on effectively calculating CAC, considering direct and indirect expenses, and highlights the importance of analyzing customer behavior for evaluating profitability.

With a focus on cash flow management, unit economics, and the experiences of entrepreneurship, this episode offers valuable strategies for startups looking to scale responsibly. Tune in now and discover how to elevate your financial strategy for long-term success!

Listen in as they share about:

• Basics of Finance for Startups
• Finance Tools and Templates for Founders
• Stages of Growth and Financial Focus
• Finance as a Strategic Co-pilot
• Finance Strategy as Startups Grow
• Profitability and Margins
• Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
• Using Agencies vs. In-House Staff
• Optimizing Payroll and Resources
• Lifetime Value (LTV)
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) Limitations
• Graphite’s Services
• Handling Underperforming Employees
• Business Strategy and Exits
• Diversification
  
  

Episode Links:

Website: https://graphitefinancial.com/https://graphitefinancial.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paullbianco/ 

Don't forget to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you enjoyed this episode. For potential sponsorship opportunities or to join the Startup CPG community, visit http://www.startupcpg.com.

Show Links:

• Transcripts of each episode are available on the Transistor platform that hosts our podcast here (click on the episode and toggle to “Transcript” at the top)
• Join the Startup CPG Slack community (20K+ members and growing!)
• Follow @startupcpg
• Visit host Daniel's Linkedin 
• Questions or comments about the episode? Email Daniel at [e-mail]
• Episode music by Super Fantastics
  
  

Creators & Guests

Host

Daniel Scharff

Founder/CEO, Startup CPG

What is The Startup CPG Podcast?

The top CPG podcast in the world, highlighting stories from founders, buyer spotlights, highly practical industry insights - all to give you a better chance at success.

Paul Bianco
The accounting and the finance really should just be a culmination of everything that's happening in the business. You're having meetings, you're striking deals, you're spending money in marketing, you're launching new products. What's that actually mean in terms of what is it costing me, what's working, what isn't? And we should look at those things, understand what's going well, what's nothing, double down, back away, start making some real decisions. Or just keep going, doing what we're doing, if it's all working right. But it should tell you something and not just be numbers on a piece of paper.

00:35
Daniel Scharff
I'm looking for a guy in finance, specifically one who can explain it to me. And that's what's going to happen today, because we've got Paul Bianco. Paul is the founder and CEO of Graphite Financial and he's a former vc. We're all going to learn about finance from him today, specifically walking through five financial factors that can make or break your company's e comm strategy, which I think new founders can use when they're planning out their business, or people with products already in the market who just want to figure out how to get better and improve their chance of success. This is a topic that's generally very hard for me to wrap my head around. So if I can do it, you can do it. We're going to learn together today. Let's go.

01:13
Daniel Scharff
And if you want to reach out to Paul or the team, you can go to their website. It's graphitefinancial.com. All right, enjoy. Quick shout out for people who left us a review this week. So Ashley Waldman, the founder of Better for you flavored milk brand Jubilees, said this company, their podcast, their webinars, the Slack community, it almost feels like cheating. She's saving 50% to 200% on shipping after signing up with our partner EPG. She says her margins have never looked so good, and she nearly cried when she saw the numbers. She's no longer feeling like she's living on an island, just winging it. Deepd from Kaylon, which makes cool, chewable toothpaste tablets, said she feels blessed to be part of the community. She's met amazing people and learned a lot.

01:55
Daniel Scharff
And instead of going into Googling on a deep hole, she can now just go to our community and ask questions. Thanks so much, both of you. And if you can leave a review, we really appreciate it. Feel free to call out your brand, what you're working on, and I will try to shout you out here. Thanks, everybody. All right, everybody. Welcome. I've got a quick bio on today's guest. So, Paul Bianco is the founder and CEO of Graphite Financial. He did a stint as a tech investor, but then he had an epiphany, which is, founders don't just need funds to flourish. They need some kind of a partner who gets both the finance and the innovation side of ecommerce. So he created graphite. It's a finance department as a service for startup brands.

02:37
Daniel Scharff
Paul thinks that finance should be the win beneath your wings, not the chain around your ankle. So it's about finding what works and then doing more of that, not panicking every time your company hits a bump in the road and pulling back all the spend. So he grew his company from one to 100 employees without any outside capital, which I really respect, and has helped hundreds of startups hit tens of millions in revenue themselves. So, Paul, I am super pumped to have you here. Really excited to dig into this, especially as it all applies to e.com strategy. So, first, can you just actually start with the basics of how do you explain even what finance is to a total newbie? It's a scary word.

03:20
Paul Bianco
Yes. So I think it's better to say. Cause it gets a bad rap for a lot of reasons sometimes, right? Accounting, finance. What's it actually mean? Why should I be spending money on this? What it should not be, and this is the worst thing it could be, is, hey, I categorize a bunch of stuff for you in Quickbooks, and I'm lobbing it over. And here's some financial statements. Well, what are you gonna do as a founder with that, right? Especially if you're not a finance founder that happens to also be a CPG founder. What are the odds of that? You need someone who could actually sit down with you and tell you what it all means. So the accounting and the finance really should just be a culmination of everything that's happening in the business.

03:56
Paul Bianco
You're having meetings, you're striking deals, you're spending money in marketing, you're launching new products. What's that actually mean in terms of, what is it costing me, what's working, what isn't? And we should look at those things, understand what's going well, what's not. Double down, back away, start making some real decisions, or just keep going, doing what we're doing, if it's all working right. But it should tell you something and not just be numbers on a piece of paper.

04:18
Daniel Scharff
Okay. I like that a lot. And I also have to make a stunning admission to you, which is, I actually went to the Wharton School of Business, which is a renowned finance school. But guess what? I suck at finance. It's very. It is very scary to me. It was the worst grade I ever got was in that class. And so when I got hired as the CEO for a beverage company, I think everyone just assumed I really was a whiz talking through, like, a p and l and a balance sheet. I mean, I'm still not. But fortunately, I did actually have a CFO there who could explain that stuff to me. And I think exactly what you're saying. He wasn't just throwing me back some books, like, great, here you go. Like, do what you want with this.

04:59
Daniel Scharff
But, you know, fortunately, I would ask him for the help, and we would sit down and go through everything together, and I would ask just millions of questions. And I don't think it made me an expert on it, but it made me really understand what he was showing me and the numbers. And then I had more of a frame of reference, and then I could just see where the problem areas, where the opportunity areas, what looks better than we actually might have imagined, and then just starting to understand the linkages and how our strategy could actually impact the finances on a, I'd just say, more meaningful level. Does that sound typical?

05:32
Paul Bianco
Look, that's exactly what you're supposed to be doing, right? Like, the numbers themselves are the output. It's the culmination of all those decisions you've made. But there are all those inputs that are actually driving those things related to your product, related to the way you're going about doing your business, related to your strategy. You get good enough at it, and it takes a long time. You have to have a good finance person at your side. But you start understanding revenue growth. How do I get there? There are a lot of different ways you can grow revenue. Expansion. It could be doubling down what's working. It could be other things. Expanding your margins. You want your margins to be high. There are ways to do that.

06:06
Paul Bianco
And obviously, just running the whole thing profitably, we'll get into that a little bit, but that's a whole other set of things to do. And you start seeing the, like, ten or 15 total things that actually, you could actually affect and make those numbers better. Clay.

06:19
Daniel Scharff
So if you're a new founder, I mean, yeah, these are really important things to understand. What are some things that you could do to just try to bone up on some of these finance topics, like day one. Okay. Launching this brand I need to get going on this. What should I be doing at a bare minimum, so that I'm not just totally exposed in this area?

06:39
Paul Bianco
Yeah, we definitely work with companies pre launch, sometimes ones that have raised some ventures, sometimes not. But at a minimum, what I want to do with you is you already know what you're going to launch. You're heading in that direction. You're trying to figure out the supply side of it. You're not sure on pricing yet, you're not sure quite on design yet. But let's just, what do we think it's going to look like? What do you think you're going to be able to sell this thing for? What's your, you know, what's your gut telling you based on market, based on how you're going to position it? So what's, let's try to figure out our average order value, right. Let's envision what a checkout process is going to look like on the website. How much are people going to spend then? What's your product cost?

07:16
Paul Bianco
You're negotiating. There could be a range, but figure that out, right? And then figure out what the, you know, is this a one time purchase sort of thing? Is this an ongoing thing? And I, we're going to talk a lot about that in a bit, but just understand what it's going to be. And then your benchmarks on customer acquisition costs, especially if you start with an e commerce strategy. There are benchmarks, right? There's ranges. It's not going to be dollar five and it's probably not going to be dollar 500. And that's a big range, but there's a range and you could optimize for that. So figure those things out and see if the whole thing's going to make sense. Maybe you don't want to start with e commerce. Maybe you want to start a different way.

07:52
Paul Bianco
See if it even makes sense for an e commerce launch before you go and start burning money for no reason.

07:58
Daniel Scharff
Well, here's some great news. Paul and his team are actually going to make a very basic tool available to anybody who's interested to access it. And it really is for those early founders who maybe aren't big enough yet to get to work with a team like graphite, but they really want you to understand these basics. Paul, can you tell me a little bit about what that tool is? And, yeah, if you want to get access to it, check our show notes.

08:18
Paul Bianco
Sure. Yeah. So it's just a basic tool where you could plug in your assumptions on how high and low ranges on what you expect your customer acquisition cost to look like and play with that relative to the product cost, what you're selling the product for, product costs, shipping costs, infrastructure costs, three pl course, everything like that. All the basics that an e commerce company has to get in place, merchant costs, credit card fees. So everything that culminates into that, boiling it down into a template where you could visualize and see if this is going to work or not at a high level.

08:47
Daniel Scharff
All right, so this is a mini Paul bot that you can have in your pocket before you get a full Paul. And, I mean, I think it's worth it for anybody to do this kind of an exercise because, like you were saying, like, at least just know this and be realistic about it. Whatever assumptions you have, put them in there and, like, go into this thing eyes wide open. And, you know, I think hopefully your cogs are going to get way better and your acquisition cost is going to come way down. But just know what it is to start. And then, hey, if you do actually find yourself in that elevator with a big investor at some point, like, you'll at least sound knowledgeable. Like, yeah, no, I understand this and here's what it is.

09:24
Daniel Scharff
Today, it's gonna get better, but this is where we are.

09:26
Paul Bianco
It's just a benchmark. Right? Do the work. I don't want to discourage founders, right. But I also don't want anyone to go into something not really understanding what's going to happen, because it's easy to do that. Do the math. Have your vision, do the math, then kind of go into it.

09:39
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. And if anyone needs benchmarks, you can always ask in our slack channel, like, hey, what are brands like mine paying for this right now? And people love to help you, so you'll definitely get some help there. So, okay, let's say that as you then do start to grow, maybe you do have somebody helping you with finance in the early days. Like, you know, I'm thinking of the unreasonable finance people that I've worked with before who I feel like don't. Some of them don't add a lot of value. I feel like they think that their job is just to say no to stuff. And, like, even without getting into the details, they're just like, no, that's a bad margin.

10:15
Daniel Scharff
You know, where's your holistic understanding and knowing where we're going and the stage that we're at, the ones who I think really do a good job. I think it's that co pilot mentality. I know you've kind of described it but that's what I've heard. Like, they're going to get into it with me. They want to really get deep in the numbers of it. They want to understand the trade offs. They want to like help me figure out how to get a better return on it as well. Like, oh, did you think about this? Did you think about negotiating that? So I don't know, is that like what you would hope that at least if somebody's working with like a consultant or something, what they would be seeing?

10:50
Paul Bianco
I would hope. Again, finance gets, I think sometimes I was saying before a bedrock because of that, like mister, no saying no to everything. Right. I think incentives maybe are part of it, right? It's very, you're not going to get fired if you say no to everything and have the founder take zero risks. Right. But then the founder is also then not growing the company. So you do need someone that's willing to help you take some calculated risk, maybe talk you off the ledge of something really doesn't make sense, but certainly not say no to everything that maybe something hits. Maybe something does make sense. So you don't want to do that. So there's a balance. I think finance people tend to be a little more conservative than a founder. I'm both, so I'm somewhere in between.

11:33
Paul Bianco
But you want to find the right person. I think a personality fit, background, all that's important.

11:37
Daniel Scharff
I feel like, yeah, my CFO, I think, had a good strategy at times where he, a lot of times would say no the first time. And then if I went back and asked him, hes like, yeah, basically my rule is if you come back and ask a second time, I know you actually really think we need it, so then ill be much more likely to approve it.

11:54
Paul Bianco
I get that. Right. Maybe thats one filter for sure. But again, finance person should protect the founder too, right? Theyre the ones really digging into the numbers, really understanding everything inside and out, and really just trying to be a good steward to the company. But if you go too heavy, it really will hurt the company long term.

12:10
Daniel Scharff
Okay. So I know I have just probably way more experience on the retail side than on the ecommerce side. But I can say at least in retail, all the VC's now, they say you've got to focus on profitability. Like they were the first ones who ever thought of that. Then they'll throw out like some impossible margin. Like if you don't have this, like, you know, which I think if you're an early brand, can often be really misinterpreted like, oh, I need to have that crazy 70% margin the day that I launch, which is just, you know, it's not going to happen. Like you've got to do early production runs and sample runs and figure out how to even like, you know, get the water running through all the pipes in your supply chain and all that stuff.

12:50
Daniel Scharff
So what kind of guidance do you give around margin, especially on that ecom side?

12:56
Paul Bianco
Yeah, well look, with the VC thing and the profitability, I think your counter to that as a founder should be like, well if I'm running a profitable company that I 100% own and control, why am I even talking to you? I don't need you then. Right. So I think there's that too. Right. But yeah, certainly funding has been tougher. I've seen a lot change over time and yeah, margins, it does take time to improve and go up and margins, it depends on the channels too. Right. So I think I've seen a bunch of changes in the market and how VC's are approaching it. I've been doing this for almost ten years, first as a VC, then as starting this company. And ten years ago saw a lot of e comm. There's a bit of a gold rush. I mean we all saw that.

13:34
Paul Bianco
A lot of shopify companies, that's why we graphite doubled down into it. We saw a big opportunity, complicated business. It's really a lot of moving pieces. Even for a company that just has a few employees. There's a lot going on, there's a lot money flowing into it. I think the VC playbook, there were a lot of funds that invested in tech and CPG and this and that same tech playbook was generalized and I think that hurt companies, long term consumer companies. That's sort of stopped, right? I think in the whole iOS, sure. Everyone, the now infamous iOS privacy change made a big difference. A lot of brands on the Shopify side were panicking a lot, saw a big move into Shopify, Amazon over the years. And then now I think a lot of brands are like, we've got to be omnichannel now and again.

14:19
Paul Bianco
Margin profiles are different on the Shopify side. Yeah, you're spending money a lot on customer acquisition costs on the Amazon side. Well, Amazon's not Amazon for no reason. They're getting their lion share. And then on the wholesale side, distribution, it's like a whole other business. So it's a whole other way to invest and it takes time too. So it's a different thing. We're seeing companies looking into all three, you need to understand all your profitability at all levels.

14:44
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I feel on the Amazon side, I mean, the benefit is they bring the customers to the store like as if you were in retail. They're there, but you got to fight for their attention against a lot of people who want it as well. They can handle logistics at least. D, two, c. I mean, yeah, you got to now bring everyone to the store, but at least you kind of control your own destiny a little bit more.

15:03
Paul Bianco
A little. Yeah, a little bit more. Exactly. But I think you kind of almost have to do all three, right. I'm seeing most brands at this point that work with us are doing all three in some way, shape or form, some way heavier in one or the other.

15:15
Daniel Scharff
Okay. So one thing that you've done and have mentioned recently that I think is just the most amazing thing is growing your company without raising money. Speaking of VC's. So I just want to talk to you a little about that. That's my goal as well. And I think just VC's have so much power in this industry. Honestly, it kind of scares me. And I think that everybody worships that power. And their immediate goal, thinking about launching a company is how much they can raise from a VC where I will celebrate a brand or a company like yours that does not raise VC money.

15:49
Daniel Scharff
Because, I mean, just personally, I've gone back to a grad school reunion and met a bunch of my friends, and I can tell you the ones who were the happiest are the ones who have companies that they did not raise money for. They never had all the pressure for it. They don't have to chase some ridiculous exit because their ownership percentage of a company is so small. What are you seeing from people right now and how do you talk to them about that? About just opportunities that are out there and considering raising vc money?

16:22
Paul Bianco
Yeah. So look, taking ten steps back, what are the real reasons you want to raise venture money? I speak to founders. It's now a debate. Three, four years ago, it was like, yeah, that's just what you do. Like, no matter what it is, even service company like us, it often doesn't really make sense. Consumer company, whether it's e.com or something, food and beverage, whatever it is, all tech companies. But I'm seeing more of like a, hey, should I do this? Once you start, you can't really stop. So, like, the first thing I say to companies is like, you do understand that the minute you have even an investor that has put even a dollar in, right? Let's say the company's profitable now. You cant just like, lets say youre very profitable. You cant just pay yourself whatever you have, stakeholders, its not your show.

17:06
Paul Bianco
Even if its a dollar, it really makes it. And then if its sophisticated investors, theres a lot of governance and stuff. So know that its a different thing. Right. Youre working for yourself, but youre going to have technically a boss as a board of directors and you report to the board and the board represents the shareholders. So its a much different thing. The other side of it is im like, well, but why? I have young kids. They're like, well, why? Why? Why? And eventually you get to the core and I think a lot of it is just risk. So I speak to founders, and if you haven't had a windfall before, right, if you're a first time founder, you've had a job, you're leaving your job to start a company. Maybe you can't go years with a terrible salary or no money at all.

17:48
Paul Bianco
I get that. So one allure I think to raising money is you could just pay yourself a salary with that and take some risk off the table and not like crush your household. I think a lot of it boils down to that. And I get that, right. I didn't come from money myself or anything like that. So like I get like my backup plan was like, what, a ten? You know what I mean? Like, what am I going to do if I can't afford rent? So I get that it's really hard to take that risk and bear all of the risk. And so that's a very personal choice.

18:17
Daniel Scharff
That accompanied, okay, so for you, for example, you did it starting off savings or you did a side hustle.

18:23
Paul Bianco
Yeah, no, so I was working in venture capital before, and actually graphite is a unique circumstance we actually spun out of when were very small. We had a few people we spun out of the venture fund with a small subset of companies. So I actually got a little bit of a head start. We did not take capital to use. We ran profitably the whole time. So that gave me a little bit of a different thing. We had some capital by which to pay a livable wage, maybe a little bit lucky, but also stakeholders too. Getting off the ground with nothing is very hard, and I don't think there's an easy way around it. And it takes longer to grow that way. If you can't, like, you have to start very slow. Right.

19:05
Paul Bianco
If you don't have a lot of capital to start, limited production runs, limited marketing spend, it takes a really long time to compound. But if it's working and it does compound, you own the whole thing. You don't need a giant exit to make life changing money. So I have met a lot of founders that have, you know, these are no Wall Street Journal level. Like, you're not reading about this in the press, right? Small exit, not bad. But a small exit is millions of dollars. That's like a lottery ticket, you know, that's. That's completely life changing. No one's going to read about it, no one will know about it. And it's. It's attainable, right? You don't need to grow a company to hundreds of millions or billions in revenue to actually have a windfall for yourself when you own the whole thing.

19:45
Paul Bianco
So that's the allure of it. But everything is risk, reward.

19:48
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. I actually, I've been listening to this podcast called my first million, and that is actually one of my biggest takeaways from listening to people who have been on that journey and they've kind of made it is. I mean, yeah, that, like, if you, if somebody can exit at like, you know, 1020 million, something like that it seems like that's the point where they're actually the happiest rather than they're like just gunning it, trying to get up to that next tier, which ultimately doesn't seem like it actually means that much to them. It's where they just start buying things that they don't need that then occupy their life.

20:19
Daniel Scharff
Like, I remember them talking about like, my life just, I just started buying all this property and then my life became a series of decisions I had to make all the time about all these things.

20:26
Paul Bianco
But, like, I don't know that one, actually. I think I know. I know the episode you're talking about. I get that, right? You could. And that's a lifestyle thing too, right? Like, I think. I think even 20 million, if I told my dad that, like, oh, with 20 million, how am I going to make that last? He's like, with 2500 grand, you could make that last a lifetime. It depends on your lifestyle decisions and choices, right? And I think there's some number, I think, out there for everyone. And it's not like I don't think it's 20 million high, to be honest with you. It's not because you're probably still gonna want to work and do something anyway. Keep yourself busy, start something else, whatever it is.

21:04
Daniel Scharff
Very few people who would work hard enough to make that much money would just stop working if they did make that much.

21:10
Paul Bianco
I think a lot of people think they're going to, and then they realize this is what I, because I talk to founders all day, every day, and I'm like, just do me a favor. Sit on a hammock. Go, like, to a beach. Just like, sit on a hammock and tell me how long it takes till you're bored out of your mind. And it's like 45 minutes. It's like, it's that dream. It's like, maybe just take a long vacation. Certainly post exit chill a little bit, but I think most of them are going to want to. I don't think I've seen one of our founders that have exited and had a windfall. Like then, like, stop in their thirties or something.

21:41
Daniel Scharff
Like, it's with athletes, right? Like, most of them are not retiring at the top of the game. Maybe once they start to slow down, they're like, all right, I should hang this up. Retire gracefully, but not when they're just like, I am killing it right now. I'm only getting better because, like, you know, as a founder, you're only going to get better. So it's unlikely. But yeah, I mean, I just, I'm like, 2025 for me, year of the side hustle. I'm telling everybody this, just how tight the funding market is right now. I went on a walk with a female founder the other day, and she's like, not working now, and she's trying to start this brand and she's going to try to raise, you know, a couple hundred k. And she was like, what would you do if you were me?

22:15
Daniel Scharff
I was like, well, what did you do before? She's like, well, I had a job and I was making two hundred k. I was like, well, go maybe keep that job. And then you have money to pay for all this stuff, and then you don't have to, you know, for me at least, kind of ruin your life by raising all this money that then you, like, you're accountable to people and you're on that hamster wheel of growth and, oh, man. So that is what I would just tell anybody. And that is what I did. You know, startup, CPG, I ran for five years before, you know, just as a side hustle. And that's how were able to get it to a point where I could even do it full time.

22:49
Daniel Scharff
So if you have the time and energy, I know it's a little bit different if you have, like, a family and your time is very precious and, you know, like, even more accounted for than mine has been but anyways, now let's get.

22:59
Paul Bianco
I think we have to double down on this because, like, I also meet founders, right. That glorify the, taking that massive family risk. Right. I don't think you have to. I just don't, you know, I think just the way you did it makes a lot of sense. See if things are working and then lean into it.

23:14
Daniel Scharff
I think that is how people can be the happiest. But that's just based off what I've seen personally. People like you, Paul, honestly, you guys are the people that I idolize as founders. The people who just like, yeah, they just took it slowly and made this thing really happen. And now you can make so many choices that other people can't make with your business, with lifestyle, all of that kind of stuff, because you don't owe anybody that thing. And I get it when you're early on, that big check from a VC is going to be a huge point of validation and take a lot of the worry away, but it's going to give you a whole different kind of worry and get you on the.

23:48
Paul Bianco
It doesn't go to you. Right. It goes to the company. It's not your money. Right. It's like, well, now what do I do with this money, right. You got to do something and you got to report on how you're doing, and it's a different thing.

23:59
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. All right. Okay. So after enough of this life philosophizing with us, but what I really want to get into now. So you have prepared for our audience here a little bit that I'm really anxious to get to, which is five financial metrics that can make or break your ecommerce strategy. Let's just dive into it. Do you want to lead us off?

24:23
Paul Bianco
Yeah. The first one, this is really not a metric. Let's say it's a list of things, but the first one I call the four quadrants. I've met a lot of companies that, again, most clients that come to us are starting in an e commerce strategy and moving from there. Some don't, depending on the industry. But if I could boil it all down, what works and what doesn't, it comes down to two things. You're spending some amount of money on customer acquisition, and you got to make that back in some way, shape or form. So if you picture quadrants the way it prepared, it is average order value and sort of subscription or recurring in nature. One axis is how high is the average order value, and the other is how frequently do people repurchase.

25:06
Paul Bianco
Basically, either one could be good if you got a high average order value, but it's a one time purchase that'll work. Let's say a thing that costs $1,000 and you got 60% margins on it, that's going to work. Someone orders one thing one time, and that's okay. There have been cases where that doesn't work. Also, when the markets get really crowded, like we saw in the mattress market, any of these things could not work. But that's one. Now, if you've got a low average order value and it's a one time purchase, you're pretty much dead in the water, right? So I think the very first thing, know that if you're selling a thing and you're at your average order value, someone checks out, it's gonna be like 30 or $40 or something like that. Maybe a 50% margin. Your customer acquisition costs like $50.

25:48
Paul Bianco
You're not paying it back in that first order like you're dead. There's no way. The quadrant where, you know, the impossibly good quadrant is high average order value and lot of subscription or reorder behind it. That's like the Scrooge McDuck literally skiing down a slope of gold. That is an infrequent thing, but a possible thing. That's the best of both worlds. And then, of course, if you got a low ish average order value, but a thing that really lends itself to subscriptions, something that people are making part of their life over and over, maybe it's consumable, maybe it's just some kind of habit forming sort of thing that I'm now doing. And it's decent margin that works, too. But. So it just depends know where you are, and I think base the company around that. That's why we built that thing.

26:32
Paul Bianco
Do the math, like, understand what your business is going to do, what you expect your customers to do, and then go from there.

26:38
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so that makes a lot of sense. And you're talking, like, high order value. Yeah. It could honestly be a product. Like, let's say we all want to create a product that changes the world and, you know, completely gets into people's lives. But, like, yeah, if you actually sell them something that's expensive, like, it could cost, I don't know, 100, $200. Like, maybe you're selling the, I don't know, eight sleep mattress of whatever, but, like, they're just going to buy at the one time and never come back to you for anything else ever again. Just, you know, hypothetically, or they're going to buy it and like, I don't know, maybe they don't even like it as much as they thought they would or they just don't use it. You know, they're buying that, like, Peloton and then they're never using it again.

27:11
Daniel Scharff
But if you sold it to them for enough money where you're going to be profitable and then you can go out and sell it to a bunch of other people. Okay, like, yeah, you don't need that repeat. And then on the other. And is like, yeah, it may, this isn't going to be super high order value. Like it might be, you know, a couple cases of product, like food, beverage, whatever. But like, actually people ordered a lot because either it's a very high usage product, like, you know, Celsius, they drink it like maybe one a day, maybe two a day, I don't know. And like, or it's just, you know, just they love the product so much, they are really likely to become super fans. Right? So that's, you have like your two axes there and it could fall somewhere in between.

27:51
Daniel Scharff
But the basics of what you're saying is like, look, over the long term, you need to be getting enough orders or money from that customer, whether it's the order size or how frequently they're going to order it, so that it makes sense for how much you have to pay to find that person.

28:07
Paul Bianco
Yeah, I mean, look, reorder subscription is insane, right? If you could crack that code with consumer business, it's amazing. There's a reason SaaS companies are valued high, right? It's not because, oh, SaaS, it's so cool. It's worth more than consumer brands. It's just the recurring predictable nature of the revenue is appealing to ultimate buyers. It just compounds. If you have these, we'll talk about cohorts, but you have these cohorts of customers that just keep stacking on top and you get new ones, but the old ones are still buying too. You're in a good spot.

28:40
Daniel Scharff
I'm just trying to think of the stuff that has gotten me lately and whether it was high value or high order recurrence. I will all admit, man, I'm all over poppy now and it's in retail, but I'm ordering it online actually through delivery. But for a soda, it's more expensive. But man, I'm just all over the frequency of it now and then. Just some one off clothing Instagram purchases where it's like, I know the margins for this $200 jacket that I bought are pretty high for them. Maybe I will never need it again. But I just moved to a different climate, so I need some of that stuff.

29:18
Paul Bianco
Yeah, but at least with apparel, okay, I bought the jacket. Maybe they have a shirt. You're thinking maybe it's not like I'm buying a jacket. You're not going to buy 100 jackets, but over time maybe you're buying different things within the brand. And I think VC is asking about this a lot, too. Is this a product or a true brand that we're going to develop around when a company first launches? I'm like, well, yeah, they literally just started, so they're not going to have 50 and it doesn't make sense to start with 50 different things. Start with one. You got to keep it simple and focus, but you got to give it time. So long as I think the strategy is like, you could roll this out, you can get the values up higher over time. I think it's fine.

29:57
Daniel Scharff
Okay. I like that a lot. And I hear that on shark tank a lot. I think especially from Mark Cuban, they would show them some magic beard shaving collector and hes like, okay, this is a product. This is not a company. You did this once. Okay, great. You got some low hanging fruit on a Kickstarter. I dont know if it was that company or another one, but how are you going to come up with the next thing to get that order value back or up or the next thing you need to sell them without having to reacquire all the consumers? For that reason im out.

30:28
Paul Bianco
Thats exactly how he says it, too. For that reason im out.

30:31
Daniel Scharff
So dramatic.

30:32
Paul Bianco
But yeah, that tends to be a very, it's like a nice go to, like, you know, way to say no, I guess.

30:37
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, he's, I mean, he's pretty good. I actually, I respect him a lot, especially in comparison to some of the other sharks, one of whom I feel like is just the worst. And I've heard also from people who work with him that he's the way you think he is. He's not good.

30:50
Paul Bianco
Everyone probably knows who I'm talking about.

30:52
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. I also wonder who I'm talking about. Okay, so let's get to point number two here, Paul.

31:01
Paul Bianco
Okay. Now, were going to talk about customer acquisition costs. I know we spoke about it before. Were going to talk about it later. So much of it has to do with its key to everything and it makes or breaks the business. Right. But what actually goes into that, right. So I want to make sure that every company, when theyre thinking about customer acquisition costs, is not just thinking about the money that theyre spending directly. Right. Its all the pr work that theyre doing. Its the people that they have employed at the company that are doing the work. It's the agency costs. It's not just the direct costs. You need to put everything together to really understand. Because sometimes I see that without, it's like, well, this is our direct Facebook spend only, but you're getting some organic whatever.

31:42
Paul Bianco
It really skews things and I don't think it serves you well to do it that way. Forget about attribution and everything. I just like seeing everything you spent, including the people compared to how many new customers you got in the door. And I think that's a good start and that is a good basis for understanding your payback periods, which we'll talk about next.

31:59
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so that's a pretty interesting way to think about it. It makes a lot of sense to me. And it also just made me think like, the most important thing for a brand could be like basically your ability to acquire customers. And that's all about if you know how to do it well and if you execute that well or if you hire the right agency and they're doing it well. So, I mean, maybe for a lot of brands that do end up hiring an agency, that could end up being the most important decision for them. Do you see most of the brands you work with actually paying an agency? Do you see any of them that have made some smart decisions on how to do that and hopefully try to get a good cost of customer acquisition?

32:38
Paul Bianco
I definitely see some agency hopping. I do. We see companies, they go from one agency, sometimes two, and sometimes they stick with one, but sometimes they're like, I don't really love, but it's pretty painful to kind of switch around, right? And then eventually I do see companies that sometimes they just bring it in house and they say, hey, I'd rather pay this salary. I'm starting to pay the agency so much money. But then just like anything similar to us, right, how we're an outsourced company, I don't really use the word agency for us. But let's say you hire like one person that's managing all of your finance and accounting, and let's say they leave, right? You're a little bit in trouble. The same thing.

33:14
Paul Bianco
If you have one person, you can only afford one person hiring that one person, doing all of your marketing stuff and advertising stuff and managing all the campaigns and some of the creative stuff, and they leave, you're in trouble too. Right? So it just depends on where you are and how comfortable you are as a company, taking that risk to optimize, save a couple bucks.

33:32
Daniel Scharff
So if you are starting Paul's new Ecom company and selling, obviously creating a company, not just a product, but are you going to be going, what do you think you would do right off the bat? Would you just, okay, I need to go out and get an agency, and hopefully their retainer is not too crazy. Or would you be thinking about already, like, yeah, how could I get somebody and start building that in house?

33:52
Paul Bianco
I'd keep, if I'm starting an e commerce company, which I've never done right, but I've worked with a bunch, I'd keep my payroll as low as possible. I'd keep my actual employees as low as possible. It's the hardest thing to change. If you accidentally grow a little too fast, it's really a lot of, no one gets upset in your company if you say, hey, I reduced our spend with this agency by five grand a month. But they do. If you're like, hey, I had to let this person go, and that was a layoff. And like, now everyone starts getting nervous. That makes a, that's not good, right? So it's easier to scale up and down when you have outside providers, and it really helps you just focus on what you're good at internally.

34:30
Paul Bianco
You're not worrying about the HR side of starting to build this organization, at least to the very beginning.

34:36
Daniel Scharff
That's a great point. And, I mean, when we've cut agencies that weren't cutting it, we all celebrate it, you know, unlike just the horror of having to let somebody go who you probably care about a lot as a person, even if it just wasn't the right move for your brand. So thank you. I think that's a really helpful way to think about it.

34:54
Paul Bianco
Starting to see more brands come in. When companies come into us, sometimes they're getting a bit of traction and not household names by any means, but you're like, okay, I see what you're doing. There's some growth here. How many employees you have. Sometimes it's the founder. It was just me, and I got two contractors and a bunch of agencies cobbled together. I'm starting to see more of that small numbers on payroll, gusto, rippling, whatever you're using. Some subset of contractors. If it's like an outer ring, then the more agencies, I don't really count that as a contractor. That's companies that are doing different things. Give your three pl, but less actual employees that work for you're just focusing on what you're good at, only I'm seeing more and more of that.

35:35
Paul Bianco
Whereas five years ago, seeing companies with dozens, hundreds of employees on consumer, it's hard to sustain. You need a lot of top line revenue, good unit economics to be able to sustain that type of company.

35:46
Daniel Scharff
Clay. Yeah. All right, next point, let's go.

35:50
Paul Bianco
Okay, so next point is looking at cohorts, which is a proxy for understanding your lifetime value and not just trying to distill things down to basic financial metrics, things I don't like to see that don't really help me when I help companies. And I know probably people are going to think I don't know what I'm talking about now. But like Roas, for example, I don't really, that doesn't help that much. It's not giving me an indication of margins, for example. I understand it's a context, but I have to do additional work beyond that to tell me what the economics are actually doing underneath the hood of the company, factoring in all expenses.

36:26
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so Roas, which is return on ad spend, is basically like, hey, when I'm spending a dollar on an ad, how many dollars do I get back.

36:34
Paul Bianco
On that top line? Right? Unless you have 100% profit margin, which literally no company does. Its a number and its a way to track things, but it doesnt really tell me the health of the company and how much you can grow the company and how much you need to invest to grow the company. Thats the counterpoint. Another is, if I say, hey, do you look at your cohorts? And they say, I hear, well, our reorder rates like 50%. Well, still I dont understand customer behavior right from that 50%, meaning someone buys something once, then three years later, half of them buy it again. Or what does that distribution look like? Are they buying things more around the holidays? Is it seasonal? Is it a monthly? Is it some amount of customers? A lot drop off, but then a lot stay forever.

37:20
Paul Bianco
What does that actually mean and look like? I like seeing that. I think all I'm saying here is I think you have to look at it visually. I'm a visual person. I think it's just easier when you look and you chart things out visually and you basically take picture a horizontal line, that's your customer acquisition cost. And then you take a subset of customers, which is your cohort. And this is not the easiest math in the world. You do need to figure it all out. But you could get pretty close to the right answer with basic assumptions, knowing your economics. But you take your cumulative gross profit from that cohort of customers that you acquired for some amount of money. Sounding abstract, I hate buzzwords, but I'll get to a point.

38:01
Paul Bianco
Once you understand how much actual profit you're making from that subset of customers, you know how many weeks, months, whatever it takes to cross the level to the point where once those numbers cross, you've now broken even on that group of customers that you've acquired. And everything they're after is pure profit. And so the reason it's important is you have to factor in all of the expenses related to getting your product into customers hands, and that's why you can't do this on top line revenue basis. Okay?

38:31
Daniel Scharff
So a cohort would be like, hey, this using this ad set that I did, or everyone that I went to around Black Friday or something like that. And then you know how much it generally cost you to acquire all those consumers? And then you're tracking like, okay, in month two, I made $4 off one of those customers. Month three, I made $4 again, because they reordered. And you're just tracking that actual cumulative profit that you made off each of those consumers until the month or week or whatever, where that cumulative profit equals the amount you spent to acquire them. And then, you know when you're in the money after that.

39:06
Paul Bianco
Yeah, yeah. And that tells you how much, basically, capital you have at risk and how long it takes you to break even, recover your money, forgetting about ordering inventory and that float you have to worry about there. This is just when you start getting your cash on, cash back within the company. And, yeah, I think that's exactly right. Like, when I look at a cohort, typically you look at them on a monthly basis. You could also do quarterly. You could segment it in different ways, but you're basically saying, hey, if I spent 50 grand this month acquiring customers, and I got so many customers in the first month in cumulative gross profit, I made only $25,000. Right? So I spent 50. I made 25 total in gross profit. Well, how long until I get to 50 grand? Right?

39:45
Paul Bianco
And you could also do that on the person basis. It was a $50 customer acquisition cost. I made $25. Like, how long does it take to get there? Right? That's an important way to look at it. And you have to shave off everything. It's your revenue, it's minus returns, it's minus discount, it's minus your product costs, it's minus getting the product to your three pl or your warehouse, whatever you do. It's shipping it to the customer, it's your credit card fees. It's all those things together. That's a lot of different things. That's a lot of stuff that really knocks it down. But you have to think about it fully baked like that fully loaded cost or you're just cheating yourself basically. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot.

40:29
Paul Bianco
But once you start seeing that, you really understand, it starts clicking, starts making sense what the trajectory of the company could look like.

40:35
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like the bigger companies have done a lot of analysis on that, which is when you sign up for a credit card and after you spend a certain amount of money, then they give you the sign on bonus because maybe theyre in the money at that point and they know how much theyve made off you. And ive seen some other companies do it interesting in that way where the third month they give you some big thing because they know thats maybe where the drop off point was or thats where you really start becoming pretty valuable to them. Thats pretty cool to hear about. Lets go on to our fourth point.

41:08
Paul Bianco
Margins by channel. I think this really lends itself well to what were talking about before. We were talking about setting up fundamentals as a company. When you're really early, even if you don't have a lot of money to invest in sales and marketing, you're not hiring a CFO pre launch. You're just not, you may even not work with a company like us pre launch until you're just getting off the ground. So one thing we sometimes see that's hard to back away from is companies they start, they create a quickbooks instance, maybe they have a bookkeeper, they have a friend, uncle, whatever. That could do accounting, that could do it for cheap for them. And they structure their chart of accounts and that basically just means the accounts by which youre booking things, categorizing things to understand your revenue and expenses.

41:52
Paul Bianco
Basically, we sometimes see it on a SKU basis because its okay, Im selling one thing to start. So yeah, whats my widget one, how much revenue did I make from that widget? Two, widget three, whatever it is. But then when you start moving into, let's say you start Shopify, then you go Amazon, then what we see is revenues coming into widget one through both Amazon or through both Shopify and Amazon. Then let's say you do wholesale too. One account you're looking at on your financial statement says is how much you made from this one sKu. But across multiple channels right now because you've kind of backed yourself into a corner having to account for things that way. So my strong preference is starting the other way. And your SKu level economics, you could account for that. Track that some other way.

42:44
Paul Bianco
Quickbooks doesn't have to be the source of truth, but Quickbooks should be the source of truth or whatever other accounting system you use. Usually it's Quickbooks, sometimes zero. There's other ones out there, too. Start by saying, okay, website revenue, or call it something and book all the revenue to that. Then when you go into Amazon, book all the revenue to that and so on and. And the associated costs and your costs of goods sold have everything booked to those channels, too. So then you could see what your margins are looking like and you could do all this math that we've just been talking about this whole time. Way easier than trying to break all these pieces together and break it all apart and put it back together again. It's super complicated. So that's my strong preference, is viewing it that way.

43:26
Paul Bianco
I think it tells you more about the company because companies come to us. They have 500 lines on their p and L. I'm like, I'm looking at that, my head is melting. And this is what I do for a living. It's like I can't look at this in any way, decipherably figure out how healthy the company is, what's going on, what's going right, what's going wrong. It's too complicated. So I'd say start that way. And you're going to be happy later on that you did.

43:49
Daniel Scharff
I like how you say that. Also because one of my pet peeves about working with a finance person can be when they try to get you to, like, break everything down to the most minute part of it. And then they're like, I can't close the books until you code every single one of these, like, sales samples that you sent out to exactly the person and what state they like. You know, I need all of that because you're going to want it for decisions later. And you're like, it's a small amount of money. It's not a good use of my time. I need to go sell. And, like, there's. I'm sure there's a balance there, but at the end of the day, just like, just use a percentage. I don't know. I'm not going to look at that for a while. But.

44:25
Daniel Scharff
But that stuff in general, when it's totaled up, does give you good insights. I remember learning a lot of things because the numbers do total to 100. When you look at the cost, it is important to understand what am I spending more on than I really planned to or thought that I would. What am I spending less on? But I think, yeah, it's finding a balance so that actually you have time to look at the numbers and really understand stuff without spending too much time just on coding things that you're not actually going to use.

44:54
Paul Bianco
Exactly. Actually, I like what you just said about what I think was going to happen and what happened. So one thing that I wasn't thinking about coming into here talking about is, but I recommend all companies doing this is having a budget. Especially you own the company. No one's making you do a budget. If you go to raise money, you have to create one. But you should as a founder, even if it's a simple budget, my projected revenue by channel my projected costs and see what you thought was going to happen and compare that to what actually did happen. And you'll learn a lot. Like very quickly, you'll learn a lot. It's like, okay, why are margins in Amazon so much lower? I thought it was going to be. And you will see, okay, some underlying thing or assumption.

45:37
Paul Bianco
Either the accounting is wrong, that's possible, or something I thought about the business is not right and I should do something about that.

45:46
Daniel Scharff
One funny thing around budgeting in almost every company that I've ever been at, when you actually do the budget process, when you're working for somebody else, I think most companies, you end up hitting about a third of the revenue that was like kind of forced into your budget. I've seen this with so many companies so many times where if you have like some crazy target, like, okay, yeah, like, we'll put that together and then that's like what it ends up being. Whereas I find when you work for yourself, you actually are very good at appropriately forecasting revenue and costs. Right. Because, you know, you don't have that pressure. You just kind of like, do the thing that makes sense and you end up pretty close to it.

46:27
Daniel Scharff
But I do really like the process of it because when you do, you sit down, you look at the historicals, you think about the growth, and you put something out there. For me, I get pretty close to it, which is actually incredibly helpful so that I can make decisions around resources and investments that we want to make. And so as much as I do kind of hate finance and like, if someone says finance, I just want to boo. It is really helpful just to put a stick in the ground. What do I think is going to happen? Revenue and cost. And obviously those are both going to be built off a bunch of things underneath them. So the cost buckets and what you think youre going to spend on and then, okay, what did it end up being?

47:06
Paul Bianco
Steven? Yeah, exactly. We see a lot of founders. If theres one thing that we do, because we build the financial models, its a lot of work and theres a skill set around it. Its difficult and its complicated and you have to refresh them and true it up. But we actually do see founders more so than the accounting side or tax side of the business, leaning into that and wanting to spend time with our team and understand it, just like you do, because that's telling you, like, exactly what's going right, what's going wrong, what did I think was wrong and ended up being right? Like all that sort of stuff, it helps you understand the levers of the business and it's really important to spend time on that. And you could build a simple one.

47:39
Paul Bianco
Even on our website, we have a free template, separate thing, separate from what were talking about before. You could see that, too. But it's worth spending some time sketching out what you think the company is going to look like.

47:50
Daniel Scharff
All right, so, Paul, we are now at our fifth and final point of financial factors and metrics that make or break companies. Hit us with it.

47:59
Paul Bianco
Okay, so this one should be obvious, but I call it just the 10,000 foot view we've been spending this whole time. And a lot of companies and a lot of investors and a lot of people talk about unit economics a lot because it is important. But Ive had our fair share of clients that have had really good unit economics and still went through rounds of layoffs, still did down rounds. And why is that? Because its relative to the overall size of the company. You could have incredible payback periods. Everything could be working. But maybe its not a giant scale company. And you just hired too many people doing all sorts of different things, and you just kind of got ahead of yourself and the company just got too heavy for the trajectory it's on and the type of company that it is.

48:43
Paul Bianco
So you have to look at all this stuff. And that's why I said, if you ask me candidly, what would I do if I was starting a CPG company now? Start lean, because you could always go heavier. If you just go too heavy, too fast, things put the cart ahead of the horse. It really gets hard to backtrack from that. And you could really mess yourself up if you're lucky enough to raise money. Well, now you've diluted yourself. You're going to end up making nothing after the exit or very little. So you don't want to put yourself in that situation. So taking a step back and looking at the unit economics, but then the overall financial statements, looking at cash flows, understanding how that's all flowing, how much cash you need in the bank, do you need a loan line of credit?

49:22
Paul Bianco
Is this working or not? And could I grow organically like this or not? That's what you want to get out of that analysis.

49:29
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so cash is king and really paying a lot of attention to your overhead and whether that's appropriate for the kind of company you have. I feel like people do those things really differently depending on, oh, is this some like, food tech company and we're chasing a billion dollar valuation and just add people and then, you know, it's okay, we don't have any revenue anyways. So, you know, multiples should not be.

49:51
Paul Bianco
Based off of pure play, right?

49:53
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, gosh, it's the, just some of the decisions that were made at those kinds of companies are so crazy in retrospect. Like, all of them, if you look at it like your revenue was what? And you had how many people? What did those people do? You know, like, and I mean, they were all selling very unprofitable stuff, but even if they had figured out how to make it profitable, there was still no way to justify how many people they had. And what the, you know, with this is like high tech salaries too, that everybody there was making. So it just, there was no way any of that was ever going to make sense.

50:23
Paul Bianco
Yeah, that's like all industries, right? Sometimes when things get a little bit of frothy and a little bit bubbly and you see other companies doing things similarly. Like, even though if you're common sense, right? Like, if I had, like, my grandma look at like, a company like that, she'd be like, okay, so it's just losing a lot and it's not making any. That doesn't really. Right. Sometimes you have to think of that outsider mentality that's not in the bubble. What would they say? And sometimes that's probably the right reaction.

50:50
Daniel Scharff
And then the strategy becomes, dig the hole faster that we're in. Like, okay, now just raise more and more at this, at like, increasingly high valuations based off increasingly worse revenue.

51:01
Paul Bianco
So for better or worse, I think we're out of that, at least in most of the economy do see some.

51:08
Daniel Scharff
Crazy stuff out there. But I hope all the brands out there get an amazing valuation. Me too. Okay, cool. Well, Paul, I think this was a super interesting discussion to have. We talked a lot about how to balance the acquisition cost and recurring orders to find yourself in that sweet spot of basically just how to actually make money right when you're acquiring people. We dug into the actual layers of customer acquisition cost and how to think about it. We talked about cohort margins. So cohorts of people ordering from you and how to track how much money you actually make from them over time. So that in general, you are actually making money when you're acquiring customers and can think about when you're in the money off that.

51:54
Daniel Scharff
And then we talked about channel margins and setting up your chart of accounts in a way that is going to help you make decisions, but not ruin your life just tagging and coding everything. And then we just talked about the overall just how to look at your business and how to think. Remind yourself, yes, this business is here to make money. How do It in a way that makes sense and I don't overextend us, which can get us into a bad position, but still help us figure out how to grow. What do you think? We got some of the most important ones.

52:23
Paul Bianco
I think that's it. There's a lot. There's so much that goes into starting a company. It's hard. Everyone knows that. It's cliche to even say it's hard, but it just is. But hopefully this is at least a little bit that we put together that can make things a little bit easier, put things some more abstract concepts to make them a little bit easier to understand.

52:40
Daniel Scharff
All right, well, it sounds like a perfect game plan that anybody should have. I feel like even if you take the most successful companies that you know of, that I know of, and like, did they all do this? Like, probably in a lot of instances the answer was no, but maybe they got a couple of them right. But then they, you know, figured it out along the way. But, I mean, it makes perfect sense that like, yes, please, everyone, keep this in mind. And, you know, I think in general, this will put you on a much better path than most people have gotten on. Okay, Paul, so we've come to the end of the list here. So you guys do outsourced finance accounting services.

53:15
Daniel Scharff
Just from my own experience, the most wasteful use of an accounting department of a company I worked in is they had just tons of people manually doing all these deductions all the time. But somehow that stuff was never even useful. It didn't work and there were three or four employees on the overhead doing it. So hit us with the graphite ad. Why should companies think about maybe using an outsourced model with you guys? What are going to be the benefits for them?

53:41
Paul Bianco
Well, I think theres a few benefits. One is on the cost side. We could start very small. We tailor every single solution to the company. Every company is a little bit different. So if youre really small pre launch, thats going to cost a lot less than a company thats quite a bit larger and its going to cost way less than hiring one person. So you can scale up into us without really decimating your overhead. Thats number one. Number two, I think is just the concentration risk of having a team if you can only afford one person on your team in finance and accounting if they quit on you. And this has happened. We have had a lot of companies come to us that have a controller and then they come to us that controller quits. They're managing everything without them.

54:26
Paul Bianco
People aren't getting paid, vendors aren't getting paid, revenue is not getting booked the right way. Cash is messed up. We have to jump in right away. We take away that concentration risk. And third, you dont have to worry about hiring the right person because we have a team that knows your industry inside and out already and we manage all that. And its our job to make sure we have the right people in the right seat. Thats basically an ad for us or honestly anyone, any outsourced firm. And really what sets us apart is really want graphite to be a company. Our team works for long term. Im trying to build a long term culture and thats what weve done, try to make it a great place to work.

55:02
Paul Bianco
I think that leads to great client outcomes and it builds a really strong team that is there and they actually care about the company and the clients. It sounds simple and not everyone does that. That's a bit of a differentiator. Of course, we're tech first. We spend a lot of time understanding all the best tech and both efficiency side and metrics and getting you on the best platform as possible. So we spend a lot of time there. But I think service is at its core. We really try to help our customers and nothing lobby over a set of financial statements at the end of the month.

55:30
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, even like, man, I've seen accounting people just doing the most inefficient stuff you can imagine, like manually going through every PDF and not even really getting the right data out of it and just spending all day doing that. And then I'm like, my old CFO just actually wrote a script to pull out of that stuff automatically. So just like, knowing a little bit how to be tech enabled in those areas can helpful. But I can see you're kind of following your own advice of like, yeah, I mean, maybe keep your overhead, like, internal a little bit lower and, you know, use some agencies more as you scale. It gives you some flexibility. So I definitely can understand that point. And I will say, I have always been an ambitious person professionally.

56:08
Daniel Scharff
I wanted to, you know, manage a big team, get all this responsibility. The only thing I ever said no to when I was offered more responsibility is when somebody was like, yeah, do you want to manage the accountants who do the trade promotion stuff? Nope. That's definitely. That's not fun. It's horrible. I don't want to be in the meetings talking about it because it's all just terrible data and like, no one wants to do that. So it's nice you can outsource it.

56:31
Paul Bianco
Yeah. It's not your interest or skill set. With many founders. It is not. There's people like us that are willing to do it, happy to do it and are good at doing it.

56:39
Daniel Scharff
All right, great. So, Paul, what's a good way for people to follow up with you guys or just learn more about graphite in general?

56:46
Paul Bianco
Yeah, look, you could go to our website, graphitefinancial.com dot. You could follow me on LinkedIn. That's where I post mainly and try to post interesting things I see in the market. And that's it. Nothing salesy.

56:59
Daniel Scharff
All right, thanks, everybody. I hope that all of you are set up for extreme financial and e commerce success after this and definitely get back to us and let us know what lessons you learn along the way. So, Paul, thank you so much.

57:12
Paul Bianco
Thank you.

57:12
Daniel Scharff
We really appreciate all the knowledge here. So thanks again and I hope everyone enjoyed it.

57:17
Paul Bianco
Appreciate it.

57:20
Daniel Scharff
All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening to our podcast. If you loved it, I would so appreciate it if you could leave us a review, you could do it right now. If you're an Apple podcast, you can scroll to the bottom of our startup CPG podcast page and click on write a review. Leave your company name in there. I will try to read it out. If you're in Spotify, you can click on about and then the star rating icon. If you are a service provider that would like to appear on the startup CPG podcast, you can email us at [e-mail] dot lastly, if you found yourself grooving along to the music. It is my band. You can visit our website and listen to more. It is superfantastics.com. Thank you, everybody. See you next time.