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Dryrun is a SaaS company in the FinTech industry - focused on Cash Flow Management. They have developed the most robust and versatile software solution for companies that need to better manage their cash flow requirements. From Small Business to Large Enterprise Companies - Dryrun is the only solution you need to consider when developing financial cash flow modeling.
Listen in as groundbreaking leaders discuss what they have learned. Discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research, articles and lessons that shaped their journey. Hosted by: Kevin Horek, Gregg Oldring, & Jon Larson.
Gregg Oldring: Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin Horek and his fellow learner co-founders listen in is groundbreaking leaders discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned. Visit learner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.
Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the show today. We have Blaine Bertsch he's the CEO at dry run. He's also an author and podcast host Greg and John. What are you looking forward to chatting with Blaine about, cause I know the three of us know Blaine and I've known him for a number of years. What are you guys curious to learn from him today?
Jon Larson: I'm interested in, I talked to blade again. I talked to him a number of times over the years. I'm interested to hear where a dry run is. These days he's had, it's an interesting company for financial modeling for everything from small businesses to large ones. I'd like to see where they are in their progress. Cause they seem to be happy every time I've talked to them. They've had great steady growth.
Gregg Oldring: Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Blaine is a fantastic guy, first of all. It's great to just know we're talking to like good dude. So that's exciting. Also, I mean he is, he's a guy who's started one path and kind of moved into others. I always find that really interesting when like financial modeling, I think if you'd told him that, he's, he was doing things around cashflow or somebody who thought maybe 20 years ago, he might've been surprised. I think that's going to be really cool to talk about that whole learning journey as well.
Kevin Horek: No, very cool. I also think too, he was a designer and then obviously founded a minnow, some startups. He also wrote a book. He also does a podcast. I'm curious to hear more about those things as well.
Gregg Oldring: Get a bit creative force. Isn't it?
Kevin Horek: Totally.
Gregg Oldring: And.
Jon Larson: It was book's name was a pandemic cashflow and I always wondered if he got it of a bump from the pen. Typically.
Kevin Horek: You can ask him about that.
Gregg Oldring: Profiting from misery.
Jon Larson: I wrote the book way before that.
Kevin Horek: Alright. On with the show Blaine. Great to chat with you again.
Blaine Bertsch: Oh, thanks so much, Kevin. Yeah. It's it's been a while since we talked and I, I see with John and Greg on the show here, it's been a while since all the stock. I'm really excited to chat with you guys and catch up.
Kevin Horek: Yeah, I think this show's going to be different than how we've kind of done the learner.co show in the past. John and Greg are going to sit in and ask you questions as well. I know, I think you and I have known each other for probably like six, seven years John and Greg. I think you guys have known Blaine for long way longer than that. I think it's going to be exciting for the four of us to have a chat today.
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah, it sounds good. Looking forward to it. Yeah. Good to see a blade. Yeah, you too, John, it's been awhile and hopefully, hopefully over a beer again someday soon. So.
Gregg Oldring: Well, before we get into that, I've been wanting to say that life Rob, before we get into all of that, I think it's, I, I think for all of our listeners, let's get a little background of about you Blaine and where you grew up.
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah. I, I, I grew up in Edmonton, mostly in Edmonton a couple of years down in Ontario as well in my almost teenage years. And, but yeah, I actually had more than and bread the bread and Edmonson and it's, it's definitely home, even though I happened to not be there right now. It's, built up such a long history of friends and colleagues and fellow entrepreneurs and just like you guys is, like I said, it's so great to catch up with you guys. It's it's been a bit too long.
Gregg Oldring: Cool. And, and take us in through your like education journey, like where from, grew up in Edmonton, but yeah. How did you, how did you get to where you are now and in terms of learning?
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah, it's lots of little twists and turns but growing up, I was always loved. I loved building things. I loved, I loved art. I loved, style, all that kind of stuff. And, and what that ended up leading me to what was into starting out life, I guess, and post-secondary training as a graphic designer. I went to university of Alberta, took a graphic design bachelor's degree and minor did industrial design, which I absolutely loved. I still like to build all kinds of things. And, and that was, I guess, that formal training that was really fundamental to where I guess I, I ended up in the future. In fact, I did a master's degree as well at U van design and focus more on again on the graphic design side, but actually did a project or two in the industrial design area as well, just in that they feed into each other, they feed into each other, being able to analyze problems and study the issues that, your potential clients or users would face.
Blaine Bertsch: Design's always been a major foundation for me.
Kevin Horek: You also taught design if I'm not mistaken, is that correct?
Blaine Bertsch: Yes. Yeah. I, I was a, I taught as a sessional instructor for, I guess it was five or six years, and this was while I had an office full of people in the business and not something necessarily recommend later. This is a lot carrying a lot. I did teach at grant MacEwan as well at one time going back quite a number of years now, I ran the center for new media at grant MacEwan on a fractional contract basis as well. The education has always been just a massive part of my life in, in teaching other people and constantly learning that lifelong learner, always wanting to take that next step and learn that next thing. Even while I ran a business, it was very kind of close to my heart and also took up the big chunk of my days.
Gregg Oldring: Cool. I'm really curious actually with the design side, because there's this especially doing a startup now, there's always this juxtaposition of in design and data and, I think it can be framed as oppositional things like you're either a designer or you're like, it's all about the data, but I'm curious what you would have to say about that as a person who's lives on both sides of those fence, I guess.
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah. I don't know if you, if you can separate them anymore. I think I just don't think it's really, you're doing a disservice if on either side, if you separate out design from data, because they're, they're just tied together where, and, like my agency that we built, we did some print design and branding and logos and things like that. The foundation of what we did was very much on the digital side. And, and we, we were pulled into this area where there's, there's more to it you're making, like we did a lot of e-learning and there's, you have to tie all this together. This it's very much that user experience and the user interface and the, and the information and the data that you're actually delivering. It's, there's a lot that goes into that. Right. It's, yeah, there's a lot more to it, I suppose.
Blaine Bertsch: That was my approach is they're all intertwined.
Gregg Oldring: Cool. Well, as I guess, well, we should get into dry run for sure. In that, actually, we immediately ask you a question this way. In creating a startup with this design background, how did design inform your process of creating a business or a cow's that become infused into what you do now? Or, or did you compartmentalize that and leave it far behind?
Blaine Bertsch: No, no, I design it's still affects everything we do. And, and, but the way I view design is very like aesthetic as last. Like that's just the skin on top of it. Design is very much about understanding that customer problem and innovating a solution, not just saying, Hey, what do you guys want? And then you try and build it. It's like, no, what are, what kind of challenges are you facing? What is the struggle? What is the problem you're facing? How are you doing it now? Because we still want some insight from that, but we're not just going to try and mimic it and do it kind of the same way, but a little different it's really, truly understanding the problem and taking that design process very much close to heart and, and building on top of that,
Kevin Horek: It's interesting that you bring that up because you can scroll through Instagram and there's like a bunch of really awesome looking designs, but they're just like art pieces. They're not actual functional things that could even be really translated into code nevermind software. It's interesting to get your perspective because you have that design background you've taught design and you just say that it's kind of that last layer, because yes, it's super important, but it's software is not an art piece. It's like nothing. You could be so beautiful, but if the user can't figure out where to go, it doesn't matter how nice it looks. I, I'm assuming you're going to agree with what I just said.
Blaine Bertsch: Oh yeah, for sure. Like, I, I, I, I, coming back a lot of years, I lectured my students constantly on design is not art. It, it isn't. And if you think it's art, yeah. Go take an art class design is about solving a problem. That's that's what is all about solving a problem and communicating and that, it's, I know it's kind of just really old comment, but it's the form follows function as is simple, simplistic way sometimes to look at it, but it is really important that it's, you have to know what problem you're solving, and I'm talking about, like, if you're doing a logo or a poster or whatever, still to know the problem you're solving, you still have to know who you're communicating with, why you want to communicate with what are you trying? Like, what kind of message are you trying to get across?
Blaine Bertsch: That's all part of it. It's design is never separated from that. If it is, it's someone that can call themselves a designer, but if they're an artist, that's a totally different thing.
Kevin Horek: That makes sense. What exactly is dry run and what made you actually decide to start building it? Because it's come a long way in the years that we've kind of known each other and chatted. Kind of up until what it is today.
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah. So, so dry runs, cash management, financial modeling software, which, so it's finance, it may not sound like super exciting, but as an entrepreneur for, 20 years or whatever, now I know it inside out of why it's so important and how close to the heart, your finances, you own a business. I always tell people, like I learned about finance in 2008, like the rest of the world, we, finance is always a very secondary thing. Cashflow is keep an eye on it, but it was always, it felt like it was always there, right. Sales that as long as we had it, they really care when it rolled in just kind of need to, hit that bottom line. Suddenly when we started getting hit in the recession, 70% of our, our market at that point were government agencies. When they shut the door on their budgets, they shut them for years.
Blaine Bertsch: Like it was, there was nothing squeaking out for a long time. Suddenly I had to look at the business and understand, first of all, how are we going to make payroll? How are we going to, how are we going to keep everybody? Cause we didn't, my goal at that time smarter not was, we don't want to lay anybody off. They all have, mortgages and kids and expenses and everything too. So how do we manage that? It started with point out, kind of some spreadsheets, paper, and pen type thing and saying, okay, step one, where's our cashflow. What's coming in. What has to go out? How do we survive the next week? That's a very short-term view as well. We had to figure out how do we turn this around? How do we get enough sales? Like, I know I need this big figure bottom line every single month to make sure that we can stay alive.
Blaine Bertsch: How, how are we going to get that in and sales? We started to build out, fairly sophisticated sales projections as well. It was more than just getting the sale. Most importantly is we get the sale, but when does that cash come in? When can we actually start using it to pay for all of this stuff? And it starts to build on itself. Once I started to uncover these things, then you start going, well, which channels are most profitable, which clients are most profitable, where are we losing money? Where, and you start to build a bigger and bigger detailed view. And, and, and so, when we got into whatever it was 2011 or 2012 or whatever, the one thing I could do is look back and say, man, did we leave a lot of cash on the table? Because now we had all of this information and realized all of the mistakes we had been doing it.
Blaine Bertsch: Now we had some vision forward, some plan forward in a way to be able to say, let's compare, let's compare our options here. We've got option a option B option C maybe worst, best likely whatever it was and start to figure out, well, how do we make smart decisions? Not just enough to have enough money in the bank, but how do we actually make smart decisions that are going to be profitable and help us grow? This is a very cool picture view of dryer, but leading into that was like, really, I took that kind of experience. After I sold that agency would, I started to figure out, okay, well, what's next? And, I was doing consulting and I didn't think I wanted to do another agency, but I wasn't really sure. It kept coming back to this issue of really understanding where business is headed.
Blaine Bertsch: So, kind of fast forward a bit. I, I, I brought my co-founder on and we built kind of our MVP and rolled it out and kind of waited to see what would happen. And, and, at that point, I think I still was very much a designer. Like I was picturing it as, Hey, we made this really cool product. I don't know, let's see what happens. There's been this massive transition over the last number of years of being, going from being a designer that just really likes product to moving all the way forward to being the CEO and co-founder of a company where we have much, much bigger aspirations and bigger goals. That's, such a major transition, but the starting point was really seeing this problem and figuring out, okay, how can I solve this problem to other people who have the same problem and finding out that yes, but there's of course a lot more to it because I'll, I'll share a little snippet with you when we rolled out dry run, just kind of the two of us, bootstrap, whatever.
Blaine Bertsch: And, and I still remember saying to Tara, like, accountants will laugh at this if they see it, but I know business owners really need it. That was, I remember saying that. Because of that, I talked with all of these business owners and God knows validation in that. Then, fast forward a few years at AI CPA, the world's largest CPA organization basically flies Tarik and I out to New York with two other small businesses into their accelerator and says, yeah, the entire profession has to move to advisory, basically being a CFO for their clients and your tool can help them do that. Also it's like, oh, not only are they not laughing at us, I should have been talking with these guys a long time ago. If you look now today who we sell to it's account of the CFOs, it's kinda like Really bizarre. Right.
Gregg Oldring: I love that story. That's awesome. Well, that's it's not terribly surprising in some ways though. I mean, I was curious, I was super curious about that. About, about the idea of not being an accountant, creating something for accounting, because it seems actually like innovation quite often comes outside of the expertise, right. Because expertise and you need to be, so it was just these outside ideas come and you have some different thoughts of how to communicate, obviously like hearing from talking about design and designing something that an entrepreneur needs, as opposed to what an accountant needs for account other accountants or so on. It sounds like you kind of hit that at a really interesting point. I do want to hear more too about the journey from being a designer to being a CEO,
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah. Yeah, the it's, you're forced into that even in my agency days, I, I, we started a creative agency and it wasn't long, like, I was there for probably over 10 years probably. I was probably designing for the first year. After that, you're now you're a business owner. Now you're an entrepreneur and that's a totally different thing. Right. It's a really big transition, but I, I just wanted to kind of go back to innovating for, from coming from the outside of accounting. How do you do innovation for them? It's like, I knew the problem inside out and upside down with cashflow and sales projections, and all of that isn't necessarily where accountants are comfortable. Accountants are, tend to be very comfortable on, accounting, making sure like the numbers, it's all historical, the numbers make sense at all. Everything lines up and all balances out. What business owners often need is okay, that's the starting point, but now where do I go?
Blaine Bertsch: Where do we go from there? And, the, if you asked an accountant, what they need, what they'll do is they'll show you, this is what I've got giving you the same thing, but I don't know, like make it blue. Like they're, they don't, they're not there to innovate and the, and it's amazing. Cause we do hear every once in a while, it's like, well, yeah, but how do you get accountants to leave their spreadsheet? They love their spreadsheet. Well, yeah, they do. Until we show them what we can do, and then they just abandoned so fast. It's amazing. Like, I like to just share this little story, because this is such a way that you could see a transition happening and why it happens. One of our clients really interesting, the CEO found out about us and he must've been looking for answer to this problem.
Blaine Bertsch: He found out about dry run and he went to his finance team and he said, I need you to use dry run because we can't, as a management team, we can understand what you're showing us in the spreadsheets. What, what exactly where you guys do it well, so these guys, four global locations for different currencies have to do consolidation of the four different locations. This took them til basically Friday morning, the finance team would build models for each location, do currency conversion. That's out of date. The second they do it and build police tabs and then do consolidation. They had what they called their Friday finance in the morning with the finance team. They can talk about here's what we're going to show in the afternoon. In the afternoon, they would get together with the management team. Here's a screen full of just reams of data and tabs.
Blaine Bertsch: They're working their way through and going, this is not like, how do we get through this and trying to make decisions on that. I said, you gotta use dry run. The first time we heard of this was when one of the finance team kind of came to our team and said, yeah, we're supposed to use dry. Right? And she wasn't that happy. She just like kind of forced to use dry run, ? We hooked up their accounts and they had three different accounting platforms, even that they're using. That hooked up their accounts and pull this data in and long story short, they found out that like mid Monday morning, they were ready for a Monday afternoon meeting. We had literally saved them an entire weeks of work. Instead of last thing, Friday, trying to make decisions on a business and where are you going? Last thing Friday, you're doing that Monday afternoon, way more effective.
Blaine Bertsch: And they're modeling things on the fly. Now they can say, oh, this, UK is underperforming. How are we going to do this? How we have over here in the U S we've got to expand the team and we've got to hire more people. What are we going to do? You can do that on the fly. They literally could take some of the staff here that was just grinding to their in spreadsheets and upscale them and say, now you're doing something that's probably way more effective for the business. There, wasn't a whole lot of grumbling when it's like, we've saved you days a week of time. The management team can understand what you're telling them. Well, yeah. Now it's like, okay. Yeah, we get it. We'll, we'll dive in.
Jon Larson: You are a bit of a productivity tool as well as a communication tool.
Blaine Bertsch: Exactly. Productivity for the finance guys, because they want that, and that communication from the management team, because they want that. That's a little super power we have as we join those two things together.
Kevin Horek: How have you figured out how to sell to those totally different personality types? Because that's gotta be challenging to position a product. Like if you're this, you need to use it like this. If you're this, you use it like this, but you're both are in the same tool. Do you know what I mean?
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah. It's, it's a real culture shift for them because they're going from something they're really familiar with through, to something that is quite challenging. And, it's a lot of times some of the struggles that we see with accountants as they move to advisory, it's not even as much a tool. A lot of it is sales and holding those conversations with their clients and actually offering these services where they're talking with our clients and talking about insights and things. That's a challenge for them. To make a long story short, the way we sell it is our director of development was the first business development manager for Intuit and has probably sold more QuickBooks online and QuickBooks desktop, and just put anyone on the planet, maybe not desktop, probably online. He sold a lot of those to accountants. So, that was a, he brought a lot of insight with them and, and worked on building that program of how do you reach out to them and how do you communicate what our value is and how do we get them sometimes to make a really transformative move we're still early.
Blaine Bertsch: Like we're still very early in that move to advisory. So it's coming. It's not like that absolute first in, it's like the late, early adopters thing, but there's a giant wave still coming. And, but you were still in some of those challenges of, we have to find those ones that are saying, yeah, we're ready to jump now rather than a year from now.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. Do you find deer having like younger accountants are adopting it or is it people that have been in the business for a long time, a bit of both, or is it easier sell to maybe a younger generation or not really?
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah. It's the kind of the interesting thing we're seeing is on the especially kind of on the CPA side, it's the younger ones are more like, who are, I guess, the champions a lot of times in software and we're not talking like 20 year olds, like, but just stale, younger. What we're seeing on the management side or the partner side is they know it's like, we know we have to go there. Let's find someone that can actually help champion it and drive it forward. On the fractional CFO side, and this was more like just the last fall when suddenly the CFO started coming to us and went, oh, this was actually a really good group for us. We learned so much from them. We had a lot of CFOs that would come in that are, they're almost like semi retired. Well, I got locked away from being a CFO of giant Corp, whatever, and I'm just going to help some small businesses.
Blaine Bertsch: Oftentimes with them, they're not even looking for new clients. What they love is just like, I got more time to golf or whatever, but they're grabbing hold of new technology because that's this big benefit to them. So, you know, it's summer. We it's like we have these two value props. One is, Hey, we're going to really help you grow, expand your firm, get new clients and grow your practice and all of that. The other one is just like, yeah, you guys just going to love this. We're going to, we're going to make it much easier for you to serve these number of clients that you just want to serve.
Gregg Oldring: Well, tell us about the podcast that you're doing as well, because I haven't heard enough about that yet. This is kind of new to me.
Blaine Bertsch: Oh, okay. Yeah, well, I've actually got, we got two podcasts. The first one is called turning point and stories, strategies in the world of business. I like to just interview entrepreneurs who been very much started from a dry run perspective. We just like to talk as a great opportunity to talk with entrepreneurs and have this conversation, right. And very conversational. We like to, get to the root of things as all other entrepreneurs listening. There's no sales, it's very much about the challenges and the struggles and overcoming them and sharing that. The other podcasts that I'm on, I think we just did our 30 some episode 31st maybe episode is this podcast, this friend of mine, Mike Myla. I started, and we just started through fun basically. It's nobody told me with Mike and Blaine and we just have a topic every week. We, and we just talk about the things that nobody told you before you become an entrepreneur that they're just like, what the heck?
Blaine Bertsch: You just, we just chat about this. We have our featured beer of the week and we just did it the way it'd be, want to do it. Mike actually rolled out Merck where you actually buy t-shirts and stuff. We just, it's just a ton of fun. We just, yeah, we love doing that. I think one of the things that is, it feels like every week is just two entrepreneurs just talking about it and we learn so much from each other and that's such a main, major thing is like, you're learning from other entrepreneurs and the struggles they've had in finding these shortcuts. Basically we just record it and then throw it online. It's most of the time you just kind of forget that it's like, you're actually talking about business and people are listening to it half.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah. Well, I was just thinking about like the two podcasts. They have this nice intersection of the sweating payroll story definitely blended it. Probably most people, if you haven't experienced it, you really don't know what that's like. The, the stress of feeling the responsibility for livelihoods of families and people beyond just yourself. And, and especially that I, I love what you're doing with dry run and that helping people to be able to foresee these things. Cause you certainly feel stupid as an entrepreneur when cashflow catches up on you. Right. That's this just terrible feeling. And nobody wants to ever feel stupid. And, and especially for entrepreneurs, like the other side of it talking like the show or entrepreneurs talking about things that happened to us, like that's, it's a pretty lonely position as an entrepreneur, when you've done something, you feel like you should have been able to foresee.
Gregg Oldring: There's this, the stress of it, but also the shame of you don't want to tell anybody about this because what will it mean for my business and all that stuff? Like, that's a, I think that's really great as a thing that you're doing and talking about that.
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah. It's oftentimes entrepreneurs are just, maybe they talk to the partner about it, but half the time, they're probably not even talking with their accountants about it. When you do want the right accountant, that can be a service that advisor and kind of, because it is like you kind of, you can kind of internalize it, right. And, and, you know, cashflow issues. Some, a lot of times, it's not even the entrepreneur's fault, even though they they'll, they'll take it to heart and don't want to share about, and it can just sometimes ben or clients that just aren't paying, they're paying late, or they're not paying at all. And, and that can always be such a major struggle. The other thing is, it's, it is, it's so hard, like you feel awful on and so much stress from casual. Number one killer of business is also the number one stressor of business and business owners, I think.
Blaine Bertsch: And, and, but this, one of the reasons why, we started thinking were going to help business owners, and then we realized, well, what, it's, it's less equipped the pros and the big benefit is when the, if we can get pros involved to me, it's almost like let's get all these businesses CFOs that really aren't able to afford a CFO yet. Let's give them that kind of level of service by equipping everybody. And, and because you just, there are things that business owners, if they almost, none of them come from finance, like they all come from some domain area that they're experts in. Every once in a while, you'll hear stories and little man, their life would have been different if they had had someone there, they could proceed this barn about and actually talk to them about it. One example I heard a few years ago was a business that was, I don't remember the exact numbers, but they were, I think like a two to $3 million business.
Blaine Bertsch: They were a young business. They grew incredibly fast, had an absolute ton of sales and a ton of revenue on paper. The problem was the timeline to get paid was really long. They ended up and I just, I kind of hate to even say this, but they ended up selling their business on like kind of 30 cents on the dollar thing, because they didn't have the cash. They had to sell it to somebody that had enough cash to float them long enough to survive on paper. This was a wildly successful business cash wise. It was in serious need. The worst part of it is, it's the first question I asked and it was just yeah, I know was what about factoring? And they went, yeah. It was a CFO was talking with that being been connected with these guys later or whatever, and said, they didn't know, they'd never even heard of it.
Blaine Bertsch: They literally sold their business and had to walk away and take a killing on it because they had never heard of factory. That's where, a finance pro I think would immediately start to say, here's some of the options here, some of the options, here's some of the options and how we can do things fast because that's the other thing go to the bank, but it takes time. Everything, can take a lot of time. So, I, I, I, I firmly believe that business owners, you can't push this off with someone else. Like you really have to know what's happening in your business. You have to look at this stuff all the time, understand where you're at, understand where you're going, but you can, you don't have to do it all yourself. You can benefit massively from having a pro kind of do a lot of the heavy lifting and give you some of that insight and keep you up to date on things and let you focus on your business at the same time.
Gregg Oldring: Now you mentioned factoring as a, sorry. Sorry,
Kevin Horek: Go.
Gregg Oldring: Ahead. Yeah. You mentioned factoring and didn't explain explicitly what it is. I think our listeners need to know that.
Blaine Bertsch: That's good. Yeah. That's a good point. Actually. I, yeah, thanks for pointing that out. It's like exactly how the story happened. So, so factoring is you can basically go to a factoring company and they'll essentially give you the amount upfront of the invoice you sent out. If you have a a hundred thousand dollar invoice out there, they have enough cash on hand. Basically, I'm kind of dumbing this down and say, here's your a hundred grand. It's just going to cost you 5% or some percentage of that. They'll chase after the money and they'll have to get that, that money coming into them. What it means is basically they're just up there, they're sending you the cash for all these invoices upfront, and that can make a dramatic difference to businesses in a lot of ways, just ones that need the money to expand rapidly. Are there's a lot of different circumstances where factory can work really well.
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah, you are paying off the top, but boy, it can be just a godsend. That's, did I explain that a lot of for you guys.
Gregg Oldring: That's brilliant. Yep. Perfect.
Kevin Horek: I'm curious to get your thoughts on what about companies or if you have a product that has like a long sales cycle that's could be 6, 8, 12, even like 18 months or longer, like any advice or thoughts around that, or just dry run, help with any of that.
Blaine Bertsch: Well it's yeah, because you have to, that's something you really have to know. Like the companies often use dry run to build out sales projections, because this is a great example. I remember at one point in my agency days before we had started building out sophisticated sales forecast, I remember when they looking at a list of potentials. This is how we did our, our sales forecast or not even just, here's a list of possibilities. We had all these deals and the amounts tied to them. I looked at the bottom and I had added up and it was, I don't know, it was over a million bucks. I'm like, okay, when's that coming in? Because if it's over. Two years, we're screwed. If it's all in one month, we're screwed either way because now you're going okay. If it all came in at once, we're going to have massive capacity issues.
Blaine Bertsch: If it stretches out for a long time, because sometimes sales center four months on a sales cycle, especially on bigger deals. What we found like internally for us, what we found is we have these big, long ones that are going to take a long time to come to fruition, if ever any, you don't, you're not going to nail down every one of them. We kind of knew what percentage we would tend to close. If we close too many, we would likely raise our prices and go, that's an indication there. What building a really detailed sales projection allowed us to do is to say, okay, here's when this one could potentially start and it's going to be paid likely over 5, 6, 10, 20 phases. Here's when the cash would likely come in and then we can start looking back and going, we need some smaller jobs.
Blaine Bertsch: We need some of the thirties and fifties in there. Like we need ones that we can close in maybe 45 days or 90 days. And, and have some of that cash coming in sooner. It was really important from a cashflow perspective, a capacity perspective, a longer-term revenue perspective to not only know what your sales pipeline looked like from a bottom line, but when that money would likely come in, when it would be recognized as revenue, I'm going to be recognized as cash and be able to predict all of that on a timeline gives you so much more information than just a bottom line of yeah. If we get all that, we're what we're great. Like, you're just kind of guessing when it's going to come in. It it's, it makes a fundamental difference because you can see those dips when you look like you're going to be slow and try and backfill them with quicker deals.
Blaine Bertsch: You can see, when are you gonna have those really busy, heavy months? You don't want to overbook your team. Cause as soon as you overbook your team, now you're paying overtime cuts into your, your profit margin. You may have to contract some of it out. You might eat up your profit margin. It's just gold to be able to predict that those sales going forward, especially when you're a project based business like that.
Kevin Horek: No, I think that's actually really good advice. You also wrote a book called pandemic cashflow. What exactly is the book about, I think the title maybe gives it away, but what made you decide to write it? And what's the book.
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah. Well, first of all, it's not about the pandemic. If this came out pre pandemic pre COVID. The title relates to how businesses across the globe are struggling with cashflow and, basically 50% of businesses I think fail within their first five years. And, and a big chunk of those are related to cashflow, sharp falls as things kind of political, the exact stats there's in my book, but talking with business owners, like we, of course at that time, were focused on business owners. We built dry run to help them manage their cashflow, their sales pipeline, all of that. What I realized is a lot of business owners really just struggled mightily with understanding the mechanics, like, just understanding what is going on, how does cash flow work? Like they'll know, it's like, yeah, cash is coming in the door or going out. They, they struggled a lot with figuring out like, how do you get a handle on it?
Blaine Bertsch: How do you build some projections that make sense? And, and, if you look at, cashflow or cashflow forecasting or whatever, on, on the web, you'll find millions of articles. If you start clicking on the articles, what you'll find is generally what I found was a lot of, business owners or finance people that would write an article and they'd say, you really need to do cashflow projections, that's it. Maybe they would add on, go get yourself a spreadsheet and they wouldn't tell you anything else. I finally said, well, I'm just, I wrote this book. It was more for the business owners that are just newer business owners and learning about cashflow and explained, here are some of the key problems here, some of the key things that are going to affect cashflow, here's how it works. Here's how you can build some forecasts, like literally build one that helps you move forward and understand where you're going.
Blaine Bertsch: That was kind of the point of that book. I know now that we moved up market and serving the pros is it's nice to have a disgrace for business owners. It doesn't even help, or as effective, I guess, as much as where we're headed as a business. I still believe the book is a great resource for business owners that are really trying to understand and get ahold of their cashflow.
Gregg Oldring: Part of our audience with learner are people like yourself, who I'm part of the people who use learners, the app side of it. As well as listening to the show or people like yourself though, who are creators of content like this. I'm fascinated with the idea of, being an authoring, a book, writing a book and getting it out into the world. Like, what stories can you tell if things you learned about that whole process having gone through it?
Blaine Bertsch: Oh man, it was so much longer. And, and the hardest than I realized to write like a full book and of you run into business at the same time. So, there were a lot of weekends spent like just get away from the office, get into a coffee shop, open up the laptop and just work and work and writing this thing. And, and it was, it's a challenge to be able to tell the story, how do you make an interesting, how do you make it a story, but also how do you roll out the information in a way that makes sense to people and that set a level that makes that you feel comfortable with so that it's, you're not speaking over people's heads and, skipping things like what this factory did, it's, it's easy to do that. So it's, it's a challenge. It was a real challenge to just kind of figure out, okay, what's the structure and what would be the natural way that someone would learn and go through these steps and where would we go with this?
Blaine Bertsch: I learned a lot from writing the book and it was a, a challenge that was great to finally have it done and out in the wild. And, and of course immediately when it's done and it's out in the wild, then I think, yeah, I would actually probably like rewrite it completely if I had time today, because you just, you become that, you learn so much from it, you become that critic of it. And, and, I think someday I may have another book in me except that it would be a very different book then than a pandemic cashflow would probably be more on the, CFO stories or something like that. Like stories that help people understand some of the challenges businesses go through.
Gregg Oldring: I have up questions just more weirdly practical, but like, w what, when you write a book, how do you get it out into the world? Like how so you've written this and like, what's that experience like of actually publishing it or getting it into people's hands.
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah. It's, it's, there are services out there that now that will help you do that will help you package the book and build it and publish it and get it like, and market it and get into people's hands. And I didn't do any of that. And, part of it was, I, like, I just kind of looked and went, okay, yeah, I get it. I know how to, I, I did my little bit of research and like, yeah, I can upload this, these files to Amazon. I got a book and I can upload these files to apple, and I've got a book. And, and, but the place where I got to cheat a lot was, back in my design days, of course I had designed books, so I knew how to do it. I was like, just really straightforward for me to literally design everything, all of it from the cover.
Blaine Bertsch: I knew all the formats and what they needed and everything else for people that aren't familiar with that there's, it's really straightforward to get that done and there's services that will help you do it. There's, you can even just engage someone on, an Upworker or whatever it is to actually format your book and do the covers and get it all together. It's not very costly. From sort a, a technical perspective, I just understood what I needed to do. That part was really straight forward and relatively freeing because it's like, okay, now I got the broke down. I can actually have some fun and just like, do my formatting to flow it out into a book and make my cover. That was the easy, easy, fun part for me. But there are a lot of resources.
Gregg Oldring: And choosing fonts. Let's talk about that for a moment. Did you choose spots for a long period of time, or did you go right away?
Blaine Bertsch: I would know right away. I don't, I have no idea what it's, but I'm sure at the time I knew exactly what were doing, what I was doing and all that's, cause it, when I was doing back, when I was doing a lot of design, of course, I had all my favorites and I was critical of other ones and he's such a busy design nerd. And, and I, it's funny, I was watching, I don't even know as a show on like Hulu or something the other day. They had like a, a type, like animation came up and I'm like, oh yeah, it's a beautiful type face. And I totally recognize it. I was so disappointed myself because I couldn't picture what the name of the face was. I know that one. And it's beautiful. What was that one? And I'm like, I've lost it. I used to just be able to kind of,
Gregg Oldring: I can tell you right now to comics. I think it was calming.
Blaine Bertsch: I think it's amazing how often, I guess something said to me in comic sense from the team, just because they know it just drives me up the wall. Yeah. That's, that's fun stuff that I don't get to play with as nearly as much anymore, so.
Kevin Horek: Okay, cool. Obviously you were a designer that became a business and CEO, founder. I'm curious, what advice do you give to other designers that would love to do a startup, but feel like they're maybe not technical enough or they're not business savvy enough or a bunch of reasons you've done it. What advice would you give to them?
Blaine Bertsch: Well, I think number one, that I think designers are in a really unique position to offer innovation that is different than a lot of other perspectives. You can, a designer can bring a perspective if they're really disciplined in wanting to understand the problems and overcoming problems. And, and that's, I think a skill that is needed so much more in the technical side, you shouldn't try and do it. You shouldn't do it anyway like yourself. If you, as a designer, if you feel like you can, offer something to change the world and solve some problems, the first thing to do is go find yourself or frankly, go find yourself, probably a technical co-founder that, like ours, my co-founder is so brilliant. It's just unbelievable and amazing person, an amazing developer. And that's, it's just such a gift. On the business side, for me, that was a side that I just, I think in the long run, I ended up being an entrepreneur, not a designer got me into being an entrepreneur, or that was the, the service I could offer.
Blaine Bertsch: I feel like I was born an entrepreneur in a way, if that isn't your thing, then there's also an opportunity to find a co-founder that may help serve that role and find that team. And I know that's a challenging thing. Like I get there's all these things together that make it a challenge, but it's tough to do it on your own. And, and those, one of the things that I learned like is, for me at the start, it was like, I built a thing. It was a project and then Tarik and I built it and suddenly we're down standing on the stage of San Jose and going, oh man, what is going on? And, and it's changes so quickly that then we realized, well, we need people and we need really talented people. We need the right people to be able to move this forward, which means we need money.
Blaine Bertsch: We have to find the investors we need, like, it just feeds on itself. And, and so if you're a designer looking to do some innovation like that, frankly, it probably won't be a designer for long. If you're successful, you'll have to grow and grow this team and become an entrepreneur and a co-founder. You may have your area that you support and you have partners that maybe are co-founders of support other areas, but it's, you need really great people to help you move ideas forward to work with you.
Kevin Horek: No, I think that's actually really good advice. The other thing that I always tell people too, it's like, well, apple built their whole business around design, so there's no reason. They're the most valuable company on the planet. There's no reason you can't, as a designer become a founder or an entrepreneur, like, because there's, they're one of the best success stories of it. Right. I, that always kind of mind boggled me when designers just like, oh, I can't do that. It's like, well, why can't you do that? But, but I'm curious, you mentioned you found a technical co-founder, how did you meet your co-founder?
Blaine Bertsch: Well, yeah, that was, there's no magic way. I just, through networking, you just talking with people and getting introductions and moving along until I found this, I got this great introduction from someone that had used to work for me in a, in a doubt capacity. And, and, and it's, that's a skill and that's a tactic that is just, as a raise money. It's like, how did you do that? Well, from networking and asking for introduction, and it's the same, it's building people, won't come knocking down your door, you have to go out and, and build this community, build this network. I shouldn't say that in a way, because honestly, until it came knocking on our door and so did AI CPA. It's happened a few times where honestly, I was not looking for it. I wish I had been, they did come knock on our door, but for the most part, really what you're doing is you're trying to find the right people.
Blaine Bertsch: You have to meet and talk with a lot of people and see if there are people that really believe in the, in the mission and the vision, and, those things are really important in the culture. Those things are super important, not just the technical chops is it's important. Like that's the prerequisite, but everything past that, it has to be, is this someone that you can work with and work with long-term and really buys into what you're doing and has the same belief as you. It's, we see too many startups fail because you have co-founders that don't jive. And, and I'm just so grateful and lucky that to have found Michael founder, like we're years in. And it's just, it's amazing. And he's just awesome. And, and that's a challenge to find, but it's a necessary ingredient.
Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice, but we're kind of coming to the end of the show. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, dry run, the pot, both podcasts, the book, and any other links you want to mention?
Blaine Bertsch: You got.
Kevin Horek: Lots going on. It's good.
Blaine Bertsch: It's good. Lots going on. You can, you can track it. You can track us down a dry run.com. That's the easiest way. If you want to connect with me, please look for me on LinkedIn. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. If you really want to get through a message to me. Yeah. You just go to drier.com, chat it up and say, Hey, can you get us the blame? It'll it'll get to me and a podcast. You'll actually find information about turning point, right on our website. We're always looking for terrific guests on that show. So please reach out to me. I love talking with entrepreneurs just like this. And, and so love to talk with you guys. The podcast, nobody told me, it's Mike and Blaine is literally Mike and blaine.com. And, and you can, you can go there and you can even buy merchant, like I said, and you can even buy us a beer and we're really waiting for someone to buy us a beer on our website.
Blaine Bertsch: Yeah. And, and pandemic cashflow. You can find it on Amazon and apple and all the usual, all the usual places. If you're looking for a, just a really foundational tactical book on cashflow that can help you understand it. We'd love to hear from you guys and loved love Chapman. You guys. It was great. Great catching up. Yeah, just, this is a fun time.
Kevin Horek: Perfect Blaine. Well, again, really appreciate you taking the time of your day to be on the show and look forward to keeping in touch with you and have good yesterday.
Blaine Bertsch: Absolutely. Take care, guys.
Kevin Horek: Thank you. Okay, go ahead.
Gregg Oldring: Thank you for tuning in to the learner.co show. If you're looking to be a guest, try out our app, or want to get in touch, please visit learner with two L's at www.llearner.co. The music for the show is by electric mantra. Thanks for listening and keep on learning.