In The Thick of It

It is like a marriage.

You just can't walk away from your responsibility.

You got to show up for it

every day and you can't be down.

You've got to be on.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

I'm your host Scott Hollrah.

In this episode, I sit down with

Mike DeRosa, founder of DeRosa Mangold Consulting,

a value added reseller of sage intact.

Based just outside of Waco, Texas, Mike

shares a unique journey from small town

Texas to founding his own business.

After careers in public accounting and

software sales, he offers advice for

entrepreneurs starting their own businesses.

Emphasizes having the finances to withstand the

ups and downs, investing in your dream

and staying relentlessly focused on your vision.

Mike also reflects on lessons learned from

childhood entrepreneurial ventures like hauling hay to

his days auditing for big accounting firms.

From riding his bike everywhere as a kid

to flying planes and riding motorcycles as an

adult, mike has always followed his own path.

Welcome back to In the Thick of It.

Mike, thanks so much for making the

trip up here from Waco today.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

You're in the hot seat.

Appreciate you being here.

I already mentioned you're from Waco.

Tell us a little bit about where you

live and what life's like down there.

So an interesting about Waco is a lot

of us don't actually live in Waco.

We say we live in Waco because

that's easier for everybody to understand.

So I grew up a little bit in Waco

and then China Spring, which is a community, not

even a town, a school district and a post

office to the north of Waco, north northwest.

And I currently live in Hewitt which

is suburb to the south of Waco.

Is that where Chip and Jojo like to do their thing?

I actually don't know anything about those guys.

Seriously, I really don't.

You live in the area and you

don't run into the gains around.

Don't you know?

What do they say about consultants?

You have to cross three rivers to be an expert. Right?

Most of my customers are actually

outside of the Waco area.

So yeah, I don't know much about those guys other

than what I hear other people say, which who knows?

Any of that's true.

I came across Chip at the Fort Worth Rodeo a

couple years ago and it's one of those he just

walked by and I did a double take and I'm

like, I know that guy, he doesn't know me.

Yeah, I've watched some of the episodes but

that whole I was a Bob Vila home

improvement kind of guy and Tim Allen.

But yeah, the newer shows are more like idea

to finished in 30 minutes or an hour.

Not the originals were like we're going to work

on this house for a whole season, right?

And there would be a whole episode.

Just the doors or the windows or the roof or whatever.

I enjoyed that more how to aspect of it.

So are you handy? I guess.

I rarely pay for professional services.

I do most of my own work. Yeah.

When I was twelve, my dad and I built our

house that would become the house that I was in

high school in, on a bluff overlooking the Brazos River.

So it wouldn't be classified as a tiny

house today, but it was a small house.

It was not very many rooms or many formal rooms.

More like a couple of big rooms. Yeah.

I can do plumbing.

We did our electrical.

I'm talking to a truss company right now.

So I remember ordering the trusses and we invited

the whole family over to put the trusses up. Wow.

One weekend.

And then we roofed the following weekend.

We've got a leak in one of our conference rooms.

So after we record, I'm going to go put you to work.

I stink at drywall, so you probably

want to get a professional for that. Fair enough.

That's very artistic. Yeah.

So grew up in the greater Waco area,

still live in the greater Waco area.

Did you leave at all?

I've never lived more than 25

miles from where I was born. Wow.

And they destroyed the place I was born.

So it's a field.

It no longer exists.

And where'd you go to school?

So, through fifth grade I was

in Waco, Cedar Ridge elementary.

If you saw Et, I was part

of one of those bicycle gangs. Right.

We rode our bikes everywhere.

I couldn't afford a stingray, so I

think I had a Sears Spider.

Starting in 6th grade, we moved out to China Spring.

Totally different culture.

I graduated 66 in our class.

So we knew everybody, not only in our class,

but the classes above us and below us.

And yeah, I was thinking about that.

Some of the questions you told

me you were going to ask.

My very first employment, I was 15.

I worked at a gas station,

bait shop, small grocery store.

Because the owner was concerned that I was 15, he left

the money out on the counter every Wednesday afternoon and I

was supposed to pick it up so he would leave the

money and I would pick it up so there wouldn't be

a paper trail that he was paying a 15 year old. Got you.

We won't say the name of that gas station.

Statute of limitations, I'm sure, is long.

It's long gone. Yeah.

Anybody from China Spring who's listening to this

will know exactly what I'm talking about.

It was just kind of a great place to grow up.

Before I actually got a w two job, I started.

I guess my first business was hay hauling

a couple of weeks before my 16th birthday.

So I was driving illegally and so were my friends.

Statute of limitations has passed.

It's been enough time since Mike was 16.

Yeah, but I was only supposed to go to the

field on some farm to market roads from my house.

That's as far as I was supposed to be going.

So I went to school at Texas A and M

and met people that were from big cities, but met

a lot of people that were from small country towns.

The people from the small towns had the best stories.

I gotta believe, like, you and some buddies

in A, like, there has to be some

good growing up in China Springs story.

Oh, yeah, there are.

Care to share one?

Not too incriminating?

I don't know that anything in particular comes to mind.

We used to joke about what it would

be like to go on a date. Right?

So you've probably heard the country and western song.

I don't even know who sang know I'll start walking

your way you start walking so I live that except

we met at Patrick's Crossing on the Braz River.

Shorter walk from her house, longer walk

from mine that's how it should be. Yeah.

Down the river I can identify with those type of songs.

There wasn't a lot to do.

We could only get like, two

TV stations, so I was fortunate.

I had grown up city life been out there, and

I could get off the bus, I could get my

shotgun or my fishing pole, take the dog.

We didn't have a fenced yard.

The dog just knew to stay around the house or go

with us and go up and down the Brazas River.

And if I wanted to shoot at

something, I could shoot at something.

If I wanted to fish, I could fish.

It was tremendously different.

Friends of mine I didn't, but friends of mine

would usually have a rifle in the back window

of their truck when they came to school.

Yeah, and that was totally normal.

Totally normal.

It changed, really, after I graduated.

They would have dogs go through the

parking lot, I guess looking for drugs.

And if you had a spent shotgun shell in

the bed of your pickup, you'd be in trouble.

Interesting.

So there was some transformation that had to happen.

We were kind of in a pocket of time.

It was a great experience.

My first business was hauling hay.

To advertise my business, I wrote on the

back of my dad's business card, hay hauling.

I put my phone number and I said, Call

after seven, because we didn't have answering machines.

And I was on a party line.

One of the very last people in

China Springs still have a party line.

And somehow I would connect with people and they

would call me and I would go haul their

hay for there was three of us.

So one guy in the back of the truck,

one guy driving, and one guy on the ground.

How long did you do that for?

It was really just a season.

And I just heard that you could do this

and make money so you could get 45 bells.

40 to 45 bells in a standard pickup bed.

You could get up to Bell and

it was like, this just sounds great.

And so got a couple of friends to

join me, and we showed up for our

first job, and there was a thunderstorm coming.

And I know these ranch hands knew we

didn't know what the heck we were doing.

And we're sticking these bells in the back

of the truck, and we're not going to

get a dozen back there, much less 45.

And they come out and they taught us they taught us how

to stack them and how to put them in the barn.

And basically, it'd be like hiring a plumber and saying,

okay, this is how you turn off the water.

They nice enough to show us everything about the job.

And then we just kind of went from there.

And when that season was over, then I

ended up getting my first W two job,

which was at a Piggly Wiggly grocery store.

They didn't leave the cash on the

counter for you to take that?

No, I had to punch in, punch out.

And it's amazing because you're a

business owner, I'm a business owner.

One of the things you have to learn is

sometimes you have to let a customer go.

We call it firing a customer.

I actually fired my first customer hauling hay. Really?

Yeah.

We were out there, and usually when you got a job, the

field was full of hay bells, and you just got after it.

And you would work from dawn to dusk, sometimes after

dark, to get them in before a storm came.

We showed up on this one job,

and the guy was still baling hay.

And we said, okay, well, we'll follow him for a while.

Takes a long time, right?

And then he didn't have regular barns.

We were having to lift it through windows and

store it in bedrooms of this old house.

And finally, I told his wife, I said,

I've got other people calling me for jobs.

They've got hay in the field.

We'll come back, we're going to go clear this

other field, and we'll be back day after tomorrow.

She was like, I'm going to call your competition.

And I was like, okay, how about it?

Here's his number.

But yeah, it was lessons that I ultimately use

today that you just can't make everybody happy.

You have to prioritize.

We've had to fire some customers in our business.

And I tell you what,

it's not something that's pleasant.

It's not something that anybody wants to do. No.

But at the same time, I cannot tell you how

much relief I have felt getting on the other side

of those difficult conversations, because at some point, the business

just isn't worth it, and it drags you way down,

and it's just not worth the revenue that you generate.

And I think it's best for everybody.

It's healthy for everybody.

And in an environment today where

the market for talent is.

So it's difficult to hire.

It's difficult to keep people when

you've got those difficult customers.

It doesn't make people want to stay.

And I think as an employer, it's also important

to tell your people, show your people that you've

got their back and that you're not going to

put up with a difficult customer. Yeah.

And there's probably a reason behind that. Right.

Everybody's different, and everybody works

better with different people.

It's a good indicator if you're getting sick at

your stomach every time a person calls you, they're

going to be just as relieved as you are

when you decide to go different directions.

So I'm not the only one that's

had that sick at the stomach feeling.

Actually, it's one of the best indicators.

Your body is telling you there's something wrong

here and you're not addressing it, and you

need to do something about it. Same thing.

We've parted ways with a few employees over the years.

Sure.

And we've done a really good job of managing.

They're still friends, and some of them

have become customers after they've left, but

it's usually relieving to everybody.

It's like, oh, thank God.

And it happens with customers, too.

I mean, what we do I think you told me

you were going to ask me what DeRosa Mangold does.

My smart answer is, but we answer the know.

My son told his teacher when he was

in grade school, what's your dad doing?

He goes, well, he talks on the phone.

We spend a tremendous amount of time talking to

our customers and coming up with solutions and troubleshooting

and making sure everybody understands what's going on.

You and I were having a conversation about that

earlier, helping a customer understand what's going on.

If you have a sickness in the pit

of your stomach every time you have that

conversation, because communication is not happening.

It's really just better.

It's better for everybody.

There's somebody else out there for that

person that will help them thrive. Sure.

And if you're not helping them thrive, it's better

for them, and they're certainly not helping you thrive.

I think that's a really good point, too.

Just because two people or two organizations aren't a

match to work with one another, that doesn't mean

that one is inherently bad or anything like that.

It's just like in a dating relationship, right?

If you're dating somebody and the chemistry just isn't

there, you're not a good match from one another.

It doesn't make sense to stay in the relationship.

You part ways amicably and find

a relationship that does work. Yeah.

I mean, it's the ultimate expression of love,

is to will the good of the other.

Hey, I'm sorry.

It's probably better for you to find somebody

else who you connect with a lot better,

and we do the same thing. Right.

I mean, when I turned 30, I learned how to

fly, and I went through I kind of interviewed a

couple of guys and gals before I decided.

You interviewed people to help train you? Yeah.

My instructor and I connected with one

gentleman, and we're still friends today.

He got a job with the airlines shortly after I

got my private, and I wanted my instrument rating, and

he had to kind of go through that process again.

So I was with a couple of

instructors, but it just really wasn't clicking.

And then there was a young lady flying for ups

out of McGregor at our airport and just kind of

caught her in the pilot's lounge one day.

And I said, do you still do any instructing?

She goes, yeah.

I said, I'm looking for an instrument instructor.

And I understood what she was

saying kind of from the start.

Both of those people, my private instructor and my

instrument instructor today, if I'm in a situation, they're

both in my head, talking to me.

So, yeah, you want relationships to coach you, mentor you,

move you through business, other parts of your life that

make sense to you, that allow you to thrive.

It's as easy as that, and it's as complicated as that.

Kind of going back to growing up and getting into

college, where'd you go to school, what'd you study.

So I started at MCC, which is the

community college in McClellan county community college.

McClellan community college.

Yeah, the highlanders.

I'd actually grown up just outside the campus, so

knew it like the back of my hand.

Back when I was riding my bicycle, that was my

favorite place to ride, but I was fortunate enough to

again, not real impressive because we only had 66 in

the class, but I graduated in the top 10%. All right.

Just skin of my teeth. I was number six.

I remember my mother was so

angry that I was number six.

She was like, you could have done better.

You could have been valedictorian.

But I was like, hey, I just made it in.

I'm number six.

So I got the coveted scholarship so top

10% in the county would get a scholarship,

so that's where I was going.

It was paid for.

Hadn't talked to a counselor until I show up

at the school to register for my first semester.

And they were like, what do you want to do?

And I was like, I don't know.

I was something in business.

So I went down as general business,

took classes during the summer, and took

my first accounting class in the fall.

And it just made sense to me.

I'm a debit credit guy.

I can see debits and credits

like other people can see colors.

And I remember thinking people sitting around

me were, like, asking me questions, and

I was like, yeah, it's easy.

All you have to do is

add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Right.

No complex math here.

And I just remember thinking,

people make money doing this. I can do this.

So that's how I decided to

become an accounting accounting major.

This will not be the last time, and it may

not be the first time I've said this on the

podcast, but among the top ten happiest days in my

life are this is like the eight and nine or

nine and ten spot are the days that I completed

managerial and financial accounting in college.

I got C's in both of them.

I was not a C student.

I could not have been happier than

to just gotten out with a C.

And I remember going into, I guess it was financial

accounting, thinking, oh, this is going to be easy.

It's just adding and subtracting.

I distinctly remember telling somebody,

how hard could this be?

It's just adding and subtracting.

And they just kind of rolled their eyes and said,

talk to me at the end of the semester.

And oh boy.

It is not just adding and subtracting.

It's all about classification. Right.

Which is one of the reasons why we've gotten

into Sage intact with such a vengeance, is we

can classify till the cows come home, right?

And we can finally use the general

ledger for what it was intended.

And that's a database.

So I always had that

fascination with money and financials.

My mom was a bookkeeper.

You were clearly a very hard worker.

You grew up, it sounds like, with a very

solid work ethic from a really young age. I guess.

I mean, it was where your friends

were and it was something to do.

I mean, staying inside your house

wasn't exciting or an option, right.

Want to get out there, want to be

around people, want to be doing things?

So, yeah, my junior senior year in high

school, I would go from school straight to

work, and we would close at nine.

I'd have to close up, get out of there about 930,

about 30 minutes drive to the house because I was out

in China Spring, and yeah, I'd get home about ten and

I'd either have to do my homework before or after.

I don't think you do those kind of things.

We really weren't paid a lot at the time.

It was really hard to make enough

money to make a car payment.

But I think you do those things because you enjoy it.

It was like my second family.

I enjoyed being around the people, enjoyed

doing the job, enjoyed helping people.

Ended up doing just about every job that was there.

I worked throughout college there.

People talk about work ethic a lot, and I

think people who maybe don't have a solid work

ethic haven't really discovered the joy or the pleasure

or the social interaction that you can have when

you're doing something well, it's fun.

And when you're around people who

are like minded, it's fun.

And why wouldn't you want to

be there doing those things?

Be part of a group that does it.

So after college, take me through that.

What did the rest of college look like?

It sounds like you discovered accounting very early on.

What was the rest of school like for

you and what did you do afterward?

I had another business in college.

I was a photographer, a wedding photographer.

I didn't invest in that business.

Like equipment was going to be thousands of

dollars and I didn't make that investment.

I wonder sometimes if I had, if I would

have just gone off in that direction or not.

But I didn't make that investment in the

equipment, so it limited what I could do.

I got out of music in college.

I was a trumpet player.

My band director was trying to push me

more towards jazz, and I remember saying out

loud, no, I'm a business major.

I got to focus on my business grades.

And so I got out of that.

So yeah, I was distilling down or fine

tuning down what I wanted to do.

And the last year and a half, against

the advice of my counselors, I did all

my accounting classes and Management Information System and

Accounting Information System classes all at once.

I was drawn by the PC, the Personal Computer

Local Area Network Development, accounting Systems on computers was

really drawn by that, wanted to do that, but

it was an emerging industry at that time and

CPA firms were just not there yet.

Had a little bit of a scare.

I almost failed my first auditing class, which was

a natural for me because everything else was kind

of coming easy on the accounting side.

So I signed up for the second one

because I almost failed the first one.

I signed up for the second one and got an

internship over Christmas break to go work on audits and

it was savings and loans and went out and worked

on my first savings and loan audit.

I spent most of my time in front of

the copy machine, but I did learn some things.

Came back, aced the second auditing class because now

that I had done it, seen it in the

real world yeah, it just made sense. Yeah.

You talk about you spent most of your

time just standing around the cop here.

Sounds like you were probably

doing the grunt work there. Oh, yeah.

And I was fortunate to be able to intern

in the marketing department for a software company.

When I was in college, I was doing

grunt work, I was cleaning up database stuff.

I was literally looking at rows and rows and

rows and looking for duplicates manually and figuring out

which ones to delete and merge and all that.

The work itself is whatever.

I think that there's so much to be gained

just from being in an office environment, being in

a professional environment, and just kind of understanding how

an office works, how a company works, the job.

Yeah, you need to develop and learn new skills, but I

think there's a lot to be gained just by being around

people and the things that you pick up through Osmosis.

Oh, yeah.

As an auditor, it was a requirement.

So once public accounting was my first career, and

I was an auditor and then an audit manager.

On every audit, you are required what

we would call the revenue cycle.

It was basically the internal control cycle of, quote

to cash is what we would call it today.

And then the expense cycle would also be what

we call order to cash, or procure to cash.

And we had to document that for each organization.

And of course, we were measured by the audit

partner, by the quality of our management letters, what

we recommended to the business at the end.

So we're looking for things that could be improved.

And yeah, you would document that cycle and you would

just find nobody really taught us how to do this.

And so to me, I'm finding really basic things like,

we're not making sure the amount of money that we

put in the bank equaled the amount of money that

we're putting on the books, or the amount of money

that we received is making it to the bank.

Basic things like that.

And you would see them

sometimes in really big organizations.

Probably the first time I really got scared, I

was left alone on a project with the sorry,

I can't remember the name of the organization.

But during the savings alone cris, the government

took over the savings alone and service loans.

And we had some contracts.

One of the contracts was to look at the

internal controls of one of these processing units.

And I was down in Houston.

I was left alone for like

a month, which was terrifying.

It was just no supervision.

Write a report.

So I'm wandering the halls for a couple of

weeks, and I'm asking and I'm documenting flowcharting money

as it goes from point A to point B

and entries into the accounting system.

And I wrote my report.

And what scared me even more is

my supervisor just barely looked at it.

It just turned it in.

Next thing I know, I'm being called into

a meeting to the main office in Dallas.

So I'm in a, you know,

very nice looking office setting.

I'm there with the person who didn't

really look at my report very much. Right?

The guy comes in, has my report in his hand.

The guy being the partner firm?

No, he was a governmental contractor.

He was part of the government

overlooking the RTC Resolution Trust Corporation.

That escaped me there for a minute.

And so he's got my report in his hand, and

he comes in, takes my report, and just slams it

down on the desk and says, I cannot believe this.

I feel this big, like, oh my

gosh, I should have been supervised, right?

And he goes, I cannot believe how

basic, how basic these findings are.

We're not even doing the basics of internal control.

And then I was like, I'm okay.

He wasn't died today. Your report. He wasn't.

He was thankful that I had found these

things and where are some of our experiences? Right?

It taught me something that don't overlook the obvious.

Don't overlook the basics.

The basics are important.

Also taught me accounting.

People's lives are at stake.

People lost their jobs because of those basics.

And it was those basics I described.

Money was coming in and wasn't being

compared to money being applied to loans.

And guess what?

When they tried, it was hard to reconcile.

They had a hard time matching those numbers up.

Which you would think for the banking industry.

Any bank I had audited banks up until that point.

That's basic.

You balance every day.

Banks actually close every day.

Every morning they close.

Which is why I kind of chuckle a little bit when

a business owner tells me, oh, there's just no way we

have to have a month to close the books.

Your bank does it every day and they're

handling way more transactions than you are and

they've got way much more financial responsibility.

They balance every single day.

So yeah, you kind of learn from those experiences.

But anyway, not the country story

you were looking for, right?

More of a professional story going from

audit to what you do today? Actually.

First tell us what do you do today?

What is your business?

Other than answering the phone?

Other than answering the phone.

I want everybody to hear that by the

way, because that's why our customers love us.

They can just call us and talk to us about

their systems and it's so hard to do that today.

So much of that has gone away.

Really what we're doing is we're helping

business get the information they need.

I'm probably going too long if

you want this other story.

I remember an individual, a banker and

we're coming into those days again with

high inflation and interest rates going up.

Interest rates were so high during the early

ninety s that bankers were having this idea

that why don't we do this?

Every time you receive cash it's a loan payment

and every time you write checks, it's a draw.

That way we're paying off the

maximum we can against your loan.

Because literally if you looked at a company

that wasn't making money and if you took

away their interest expense, they were solvent.

Their financing was putting them out of business.

And so bankers came up with this idea.

Well in doing so remember, not very computerized.

We're just now getting the local area networks going.

We're just now getting small

business into the computing age.

You took away the one key metric a business owner

used to manage their business and that was how much

cash they had because cash now became zero.

And they couldn't translate that to

their line of credit balance.

It just basically disappeared on them. And.

When that metric disappeared, I saw three businesses the

banker had great advice for reducing interest rates.

Okay, it was a great plan for reducing interest

rates, but I saw three businesses that, once that

metric of a cash balance was removed, go out

of business in less than a year.

So it's like, yeah, as boring as

accounting sounds, people's lives are at stake.

Giving the decision makers the information that

they need to make good decisions.

Whether you agree or disagree with the metric that

they happen to look at, you need to provide

it to them, because they're the leader.

They know what they need.

And if you change it on them or you

give them a world that they don't understand, they

can make bad decisions, and people's lives are affected.

So I like to think that's what we do is

help that business owner get the information they need.

I might have an opinion as to what would be

good information for you to look at or information I

could provide, but my responsibility is to give you the

information that you need to run your business and give

it to you on a timely basis.

In other words, when it matters,

not after it's already over with.

So talk to me about starting your

business, your business today, because you've had

many businesses over the years.

Tell the audience the name of your firm.

Our company is DeRoza Mangold Consulting.

It started out as DeRosa Consulting, and I discovered there

was things that I didn't know how to do.

And I was either going to need

to hire somebody or bring somebody in.

And I was taught and raised by a mentor here in

the DFW area to have lunch every month with your competitors.

So he had his own CPA firm, but

previously worked for a BDO firm in Austin.

I think it was BDO, and we

were always trying to hire each other.

Well, he wasn't going to work for anybody, and

I wasn't going to go to work for anybody.

So we became partners.

He'd do the installations of the software on the servers

and do some of the things that I couldn't do.

He ended up teaching me to do things like

imports and data manipulation and things like that.

That's where Thomas Mangold, my partner, came from.

And I've always stayed on in

my company in the software side.

And there was a time he asked me to

come into public accounting, but I was like, no.

I was like, I kind of found my home.

This is where I want to stay.

I really don't want to get back into

all the other things that public accountants do.

I'm happy for the accounting profession

to take care of that.

But how I got started was I'd left public accounting.

I'd become a director of finance for a

large nonprofit, and I got kind of bored.

I remember a friend of mine telling me I

was upset at some little inner office political thing,

and I was complaining about it, and I was

complaining on the phone to a friend about it.

And he know your problem, Mike,

is you retired too early.

What did he mean by that?

Well, I was bored.

I had taken them from a month and a half

to do their clothes, which just do the bath.

That's not sustainable. Right?

To three business days.

I treated it like an audit.

It was a mini audit.

And I was just signing off, and I was

just making sure all the boxes were checked.

They were having me do some special projects,

so I did some video conferencing work.

Helped us get the first digital lines in a

Waco so we could do video conferencing over it.

I was always attracted by what my reseller did.

The gentleman who sold us what was then mass, 90,

he had invited me to dinner, met him for dinner,

and he offered me a job as a salesperson.

And I couldn't imagine an

accountant being a salesperson.

I don't know why I couldn't imagine that.

Because when I was in public

accounting, I kind of sold audits.

I would go around and sign up counties and

cities and school districts for us to do their

audits throughout the state, but I couldn't imagine it.

To me, it was a stretch, it was a risk.

And Brian was probably about three

years old at the time.

Brian is your son? Yeah.

And I had another son, Eric, on the way.

So I said no and stuck it

out until after Eric was born. Okay.

And then I called this gentleman back up, and

I said, you still want to hire me?

And he was about to call me anyway

and ended up going to work for him.

Loved it.

Learned a lot about the industry.

It was kind of what I

always wanted to do, going back

to management information, accounting information classes.

I always wanted to help businesses with computing

and data management and providing that information.

Killing the month end close, because I'd done it.

I'd actually done it.

And he sold the business.

I'd been there, like, I don't know, two years.

He sold the business.

How old were you at this point?

That's a good question.

Late 20s, early thirty, s at this point, when he sold

the business, I would have probably been about 34, 35.

The new owners, great guy.

But he was like, who's this guy in Waco?

Driving to Austin, where we only have one employee,

other employee, and everybody else is in Dallas.

What's that all about?

They kind of didn't understand me and my position.

Wanted everybody in Dallas.

And kind of while that was going on, I was like,

you know, I've always wanted to have my own business.

Maybe now is the time to give it a try.

And so, yeah, it was just after my 36th birthday.

I think it was July of 1999, probably the

worst time at all to get into accounting.

Bust is looming, and 911 is right around 911 was

around the corner, but everybody was saying, everybody has already

bought the software that they're going to buy.

My last day, I closed a deal for my employer.

At my exit interview, I handed my boss a $70,000

check from a customer that I signed on for them.

Next day, I showed up at an

executive suite with a folding table, $100

Office Depot secretary chair, and a phone.

You were in business.

Zero customers, zero leads, dialing for dollars.

I closed my first deal in, like, 90 days.

I told my wife I was going to do it.

It's probably not going to work out.

I'll probably be looking for a job in a year.

But I was pretty confident I could find something

in public accounting or wait a second, wife.

Well, what was the conversation like?

I remember the conversation with my wife when I

told her what I was wanting to do.

How did that go with your wife?

It was identical to the conversation we had when

I said I wanted to learn how to fly,

which I did on my 30th birthday.

Her question was, I just have one question.

I said, okay, what's your question?

Will I be able to buy groceries?

And I said, yes, you'll be able to buy groceries.

So with the flying, I got a life insurance policy.

And with the business, we had saved up enough money.

I financed the equipment aspect and

the marketing cost, not my salary.

And I drew from savings every two weeks.

So I had a year of net pay saved up.

Not gross pay, but net pay.

And I said, yeah, I'll draw from savings for a year.

I told my banker, who's a friend of mine, and by

the way, everybody should have a local banker and a friend

in the banking industry, but he and I were in an

investment club together when I was at the CPA firm.

And I said, his name is Joe.

And I said, Joe, I want to borrow enough money to

buy like, a nice Suburban, but there's not going to be

a Suburban, and I'll pay, you know, over five years.

There's just not going to be a car.

And he said, I can sell that.

And I said, okay, I need a business plan.

So I came up with a business plan.

I need a projection.

My goal was to build $10,000 a month.

That was on my original projection, and that was it.

And I kind of didn't expect to succeed,

but I was going to do it.

I was going to do it so I could walk

in later and say, okay, guys, I've been an auditor,

I've been a tax preparer, I've been a director of

finance, and I've been a business owner.

I now have a 360 degree view, and then somewhere around

70 to 90 to 120 days, something just kicked in and

said, you need to get some dollars coming in the door.

By the end of the first year, I was able

to withdraw my salary, which was greater than the previous

year as a W two employee working somebody else.

Which is what you should do. Right.

Don't be a sole proprietor.

Be a corporation.

You can be an S corporation. Yeah.

Deduct those payroll taxes.

You start a business that

you're not expecting to succeed.

You convince a bank to give you a

loan equivalent to the value of a car.

But there was no car. Right.

It was my third bank try, by the way.

It took three tries. Okay.

Some guy wanted me to plant radishes.

I don't know what he was talking about.

I don't know why I didn't go to

Joe first, because he's a friend of mine. But I didn't.

Within a year's time, though, you were at or

above what you were making working for somebody else.

What did that feel?

Know, adele Carnegie kind of thing. Right?

I can tell you where I was standing.

I can tell you the smell in the air.

I can tell you the building I was in because I

took the money and I put in my brokerage account.

So one of the advantages of getting paid like

a farmer, which goes back to my roots, right.

It was harvest time.

I was able to save.

I put, like, $10,000 away because I had been on a

meager salary all year that was coming out of my savings.

And I harvested my salary almost all at once.

So, yeah, I was able to put

money away and replenish my savings.

And then probably first I don't know how

many years of business, at least five.

I would start off the year not taking a salary

out of the business, just drawing off savings, let the

money and the business build up and then either take

a big lump sum or something along that line.

Even once I got out of that, I was taking what

many would consider a very reduced salary during the year.

And I still do that today.

I operate on a reduced salary and I have these harvest

bunches where when I know we're okay and we don't need

the money and we're making money, I'll take that.

And it's actually kind of become my savings plan.

So it was like, wow, I did it.

And I thought I'd be looking for a job.

I remember having those thoughts.

I thought I'd be looking for a job right now. I did it.

I actually made my salary, and I made a little

bit more and I made it on my own.

Really good feeling to be able to do

that and not really be encumbered by debt.

We paid off our loan probably about three years in

and we kind of stayed debt free after that.

I did take advantage of the idle loan this last year.

First time I had borrowed in over 15 years.

It was almost stupid not to take it. It kind of was.

And we didn't know what we were up against,

and maybe still don't, but I feel like we're

coming out of it at this point.

Although the supply chain was, I thought the

supply chain was much more elastic than it

actually is proving to be, that's for sure.

So today, how long have you been in business?

I think we're completing our

23rd year, starting our 24th.

And when you first started, it sounds like it was just

you, you didn't hire employees right out of the gate.

Correct.

At what point did you make your first hire

and what was that process like for you?

I failed miserably.

So what I would do is I would sell during the

day and do service during the day because I was also

the person doing the implementations and doing the support.

And of course, Sage was on the West Coast, so

I was placing all my orders starting 05:00 Central time.

I had from five to seven

Central time to place my orders.

And so my first hire was for an office

person, bookkeeper account manager, somebody to answer the phone

when I'm out in the field working with customers,

somebody to place the orders for me, somebody to

pay the bills, do the accounting, because I was

doing all of that as well, and hired somebody.

It was a great person.

Wasn't their fault.

I just learned that I didn't ask enough information.

I assumed they knew how to do spreadsheets.

I assumed they could work in an accounting package.

I didn't do any testing of capabilities.

The first month, I was just like, what am I going to do?

I knew it wasn't going to work.

I was out of the office, not able

to spend enough time training this person.

And the basic skill sets weren't there.

I assumed too much.

I assumed everybody knew Word, everybody knew

Excel, and I figured I could just

teach putting into the accounting system.

So, yeah, she ended up taking a position with the

bank, which I was in their building, and also there.

So it was good for her, parting on good terms. It was.

And anybody who knows me, it's really hard

for me to part with an employee.

I take a lot of responsibility when I hire

somebody because I know they're making a big decision.

Always operated on.

Employees get paid. Always.

And they get paid first. Absolutely.

I get paid second.

Yes, without a doubt, the basis of the

employee employer relationship is timely and accurate pay.

If you violate that, then there's nothing left. Yeah.

And we probably again, feel like that's a staple.

Everybody does that, right?

Well, my tenure in public accounting taught me that there

were people all over the place that were borrowing against

their employee, and I was not going to do that.

And if they didn't borrow against their employee,

they borrowed against the government, which you really

don't want to do that right.

If they weren't borrowing against their employees,

they were borrowing against their payroll taxes.

That's just bad business.

We had an employee several years ago, and I

don't even remember what the hiccup was, but something

didn't get set up in payroll, and payday came

around, and he's like, hey, where's my check?

What do you mean, where's your check?

He's like, I didn't get a deposit.

And at that point, it wasn't okay.

We got to figure out why this didn't happen.

It was, I got to figure out how quickly

I can get money into your bank account.

And so I'm going straight to the bank, and

I'm like, okay, give me your banking information.

I'm going to get a wire to you today.

We'll figure out how to deal with all

the withholdings and all that after the fact.

But it is critical to me, it is important

to me that I get you money today so

that I fulfilled my end of this bargain.

And anyway, yeah, you operate the same way.

It's exactly how we handled the support calls.

When the customers would call in and say, hey,

my direct deposit didn't go, it would be okay.

The entries happened.

The money hasn't moved.

Let's just move the money.

In the realization of what you have to offer

as a business owner, and everybody has something to

offer, and everybody has something different to offer.

One of the things we realized is a lot

of these solutions don't have to be technical, right?

They're business solutions just like that one.

If I go to my system and I record a payroll

and the money just doesn't move, just move the money.

Don't worry about undoing and redoing to try

to make the money move, but you'll be

surprised about how many people who will undo

and redo transactions to make money move.

It's like, no, we'll figure out why the money

didn't move, and so it won't continue to happen.

But all that hasn't happened

here is money hasn't moved.

Let's just move it.

Yeah, exactly.

So you've always run the business very lean. It sounds.

You're very diligent in how you paid yourself.

And going into that first hire, I recognize that it

didn't work out the way that you wanted it to.

Was there fear and trepidation about

bringing on that first employee?

Or were you at a point in the business that

you were just like, no, this is so easy.

This is a no brainer?

No, I mean, it was at the point where I needed help.

I need somebody to do this, and

I can't do it all myself.

I need somebody else.

And I've tried with all my hires to

hire people that can do different things.

I frequently tell people, I don't need a

bunch of people who are just alike.

I need a bunch of different people who are good

at different things, specifically things I'm not good at.

I'm always looking for somebody to do what I can't do.

And then, of course, as the business has grown and

I've had to relinquish responsibility and recognize I'm no longer

good at this anymore, I need to let somebody else

do it because I'm too distracted with other things.

Is it hard for you to

relinquish responsibility as the business owner?

Not for the last ten years.

It's hard to find people willing to take

the initiatives that you want them to and

equally as hard to get them to understand

that you want them to take that initiative.

So you've got two challenges ahead of you.

First challenge is you want somebody who's going to

take initiative, ask for forgiveness, not for permission.

Right.

And even if you've found somebody who totally gets

that and is willing to do it now, you

got to make sure they understand that you're okay

with that, because they've been trained by all their

previous performance that all their previous employers.

Yeah, I know I said that, but I didn't really mean it.

It's okay to go out there

and make mistakes and do things.

So it is.

And I'm a big believer that when things don't work out,

you look yourself in the mirror and say, okay, it's your

fault, and how are you going to correct this and how

are you going to do it better next time?

So you said that in the last ten years,

it's been really easy to delegate and shed responsibilities

in the first part of your career.

Was it harder?

I think it was just like a lot of people,

I think I fell into that trap of, I know

how to do this, I can do it better myself.

It'll just be faster if I do it myself.

It has literally taken me the last probably half

of this business venture to get into more of

the mindset that I wished I had in the

first, and that is how people had treated me.

They left me with stuff with infinite patience.

I remember being out at a small county

in Texas and calling my audit partner and

saying, I don't know how to do this.

And his answer was, Neither do I, but you

can't come home until you'd figure it out.

And we probably charged two weeks worth of labor

for that audit, and I was there for months.

But I came out having a deep understanding

of how county governments work and how the

county and government finance system works.

And I just used it over and over and over.

So I'm very thankful that I had that kind of

leadership when I was younger, just out of school.

My fault.

Took me way too long to get to that.

And as each year goes by, I get better at it.

Do you remember the first thing that you handed

off to somebody and said, I'm going to let

you run with this the first thing?

Well, I probably did it back

when I was director of finance.

It was a bank wreck.

It was like, I'm not going to

help anymore with this bank wreck.

A bank wreck is nothing but differences.

You got two books.

Just tell me what the differences are.

And they would come in, they'd

start telling me a story.

And I said, well, how much are you off?

And we're off $5,700.

And I said, you don't know

what all the differences are.

I really don't need a story.

I just need to know what all the differences are.

Then I can tell you what to do with the differences.

I was playing goalie.

I just kicking the puck back into play again.

I almost lost an employee over

that because they couldn't do it.

And that not taking it away from

them was just driving them bananas.

I don't know that there's a perfect way

to do it, but I started back then.

Probably when I have it all figured out is when

I'm no longer doing the solution sales in my business,

but I've got other people doing it for me.

That's the alamo.

That's the last stronghold.

So let's actually kind of drill into that for a second.

When you started the company,

you were selling the work.

You were doing the work before

you hired your first person.

You were sending the orders off to the partner.

Obviously, you're not doing all of those things now.

What does the day to day look like for you today?

Oh, I'm almost embarrassed to tell you.

A lot of it is self motivation.

What do I need to be looking at today?

It's easy for me to get distracted

and sidetracked, there's probably two tracks.

Going right now is developing opportunities

and introducing people to Sage intact.

That's a full time job.

And if I can find the right

person, I probably need help there.

The second side is marketing.

Just like you hated accounting,

I hated the marketing classes. I don't get it.

I don't understand.

It doesn't make sense to me.

Two plus two doesn't equal four.

So I've struggled with contractors, struggled with

making sense out of our spend.

We just keep increasing the spend.

But I still struggle with that.

And I've decided I've learned how to fly an airplane.

I've learned how to ride a motorcycle.

I've learned how to scuba dive.

Surely I can figure out marketing.

Surely I can learn this somehow.

So I am spending part of my time there because

just delegating and just spending in house out house, it

seems to always come back to me anyway.

It's like, well, Mike, this is your company.

You need to invest more time in it.

That's what the marketing people usually end

up telling me in the end.

My marketing people have never told me that.

You've got the right people.

You're doing a great job at it.

I'm a fan at what you do.

It's a mystery to me, and I

don't know what to do with it.

And I'm spending large amounts of money, and

I don't know what I'm doing with it.

How are you going about learning?

You talked about you learned to fly an airplane, you

learned to scuba dive, you learned to ride a motorcycle.

How are you going about learning how to be a marketer?

I don't know that I could quantify

that, because it's changed, and it continues

to change as well as our business.

I've redesigned the business three times now,

and this last time was almost like

a start over from the very beginning.

Meaning you've changed your brand or you've

changed your business model or both.

I don't know that I've changed my brand.

I've changed our business model.

We're now fully a subscription business.

Our solutions now focus around software as a service.

And we will talk to you longer than you

and I have been talking today about why we

think small business needs to get off of solutions

that are installed on any premise specifically for you.

I don't care if you're installing it on

your server, a server at your It company's

co, location hardened facility in, you know, Amazon

or Microsoft, if you're managing an installation specific

to you, I think you're wasting your business's

attention and resources, and that's become the mission.

Has anything major changed in

your business with the Pandemic?

Not external, but internally, yes.

Do you want me to say it out loud?

So you and I went different directions.

You bought a place, I got rid of my place.

So we are totally, 100% virtual.

We have no physical offices now.

We do have a relationship with my old landlord.

I can get a conference room on demand.

Probably get a cubicle on demand if I wanted to.

There's a number of WeWork type places in

Waco that I can engage as well.

We initially made those relationships really concerned that

we weren't going to have an office.

To be honest, in the last, what's now

been two years going on two and a

half, we've only used those facilities maybe twice.

People have really gotten accustomed to meeting virtually,

and I think even before the Pandemic, there

was a strong comfort level with that.

But with the Pandemic, that

wall has been completely shattered. It did.

It shoved us over the edge, and

by doing so, we're way more efficient.

So if you just look at drive time, I used to have

probably an hour drive time to get to work and back.

Lunch probably ate up an extra 30 minutes or

so, going to lunch someplace and coming back.

The act of getting to your office and getting going and

getting set up, I don't have any of that now.

I mean, the distance from my coffee maker

to my office is less than 30 seconds.

I'm more effective at cutting off the day now at

five because I've worked a hard eight that's interesting.

That's really interesting.

So working from home, for me, it's actually

significantly harder for me to cut it off.

It's so much easier to work right up until

my wife says, hey, dinner is on the table.

Come on in and eat.

And then it's easy for me to

walk back in there after I'm done.

So you've been really effective

at drawing those boundaries.

So what you need to do is you

need to adopt a small furry critter.

My beagle, who I adopted during the pandemic

I rescued, he's like a small child.

He comes and gets me at five every day.

He's your alarm clock. Yeah.

And there's been a few days when

I've had meetings go on to six. Right? It happens.

But yeah, he comes in and I know

puppy doll guys, and he's telling you.

But more than that, I know I've put in a

pretty hard day, and in fact, I have to make

myself like, take breaks for lunch and things like that.

But if I do need to do something or go run

an errand or do whatever I need to do, I don't

feel bad about that one or 2 hours, because I'm saving

one to 2 hours every day over previous activities.

It's kind of interesting now for me to go to my car,

and my car has got a diary on it and to see

that my car hasn't moved for a couple of days.

It usually moves once at least every three days, but

a lot of times I'll take the bicycle or I'll

take the motorcycle and the car doesn't move.

And then, of course, our travel expenses.

We used to travel to every meeting.

So being in Waco, I could be in

Dallas in an hour and a half.

I could be in Austin an hour and a half.

I could be in San Antonio or Corpus a couple hours longer

in the plane, I can be in Corpus in 2 hours.

So my carbon footprint for our company was pretty

big pre pandemic, and now it's almost nothing.

You think about that methodology.

If I go to a city and meet

with customers, I can really only effectively meet

with two customers tops in a day. Okay.

If I'm chained to my desk meeting

virtually now I'm talking to four, five,

sometimes six customers in a single day.

So my ability to leverage my expertise across

individuals is greatly increased by me not moving.

Do you miss the face to face, though?

I turn on my camera and I find if I

turn on my camera, other people turn on the cameras.

So I don't miss it as much.

Guilty pleasure. Okay.

I miss the drive time.

What do you do on your drive time?

Well, I would listen to a book, or I would listen

to talk radio, or I used to have satellite radio.

I don't anymore, but I did for the drive time.

I would listen kind of like. People.

Now I watch YouTube instead, right?

If I want to take a break, I'll watch YouTube.

Something I want to gain expertise in.

Usually not work right, like how to tune my

bicycle or or to perform better when I'm cycling.

But, yeah, I miss that drive time, which would

be usually an hour to an hour and a

half of just mind numbing listening to the radio.

I have a very short commute, but I do

enjoy getting ten minutes of a podcast in or

ten minutes of an audiobook in wherever I can.

So looking back at over 20 years in business, what

is one thing that you point to that you would

say, man, this is why we've made it this long.

This is what has made us successful.

I won't quit.

That's really it.

And to anybody listening in their 20s, just don't quit.

If I stayed at the CPA firm, I would have been partner.

It was one of the reasons I left.

I didn't want to be partner.

I felt like the other side

of the fence was greener pastures.

If I had stayed at that company, I

would have eventually been on executive staff.

And now that I'm in my business,

I just keep working the problem. I don't give up.

I don't quit.

And also, being in business this long, and it

doesn't really take that long to figure it out.

When you're in business, your circumstances are

going to change on you frequently, yearly.

I always tell people running a business is like a

jigsaw puddle on the kitchen table, except somebody sneaks in

in the middle of the night and they take a

part of the puzzle that you had already done, and

they cut the pieces into different shapes.

And you've got to figure out you thought you had

that taken care of, and now you got to figure

out how to put it all back together again, because

the rules of business and your partners change regularly.

I don't know if you figured this

out, Scott, but you are the consistency.

I'm the consistency.

My customers have known me longer than anybody

at Sage, and that's because the folks at

Sage have rotated through and the people that

they've had experience with are gone.

But we've been the consistency.

We've been the glue that gets them from one

season into another or one thing into another.

So just not giving up.

I don't know how to describe that very well.

I've got a prospective customer right

now who's worried about my age.

I'm worried that you're not going to be around.

And I'm like, what else am I going to do?

If my business goes out of business, I'm

still going to be here, and I'm still

going to be interested in accounting information flow

and solving problems with software as a service.

Just really kind of doesn't matter.

Just like the other things I love to

do, I'm going to continue to do this.

So just not quitting, not giving up.

I think that's why I made it the

first year and kind of kept going.

It was like something kicked in.

It was like, okay, I can do better than that.

I can make this work.

You talked about how had you stayed in public

accounting, you could see a clear path to being

on the executive team and being a partner.

I think for a lot of people, the

ambition is to get to the top.

But I think it's so important that you had the self awareness

back then to say, I know I can get to the top.

That's not where I want to be.

That's not the ladder that I want to climb.

Do you ever think back how different

your life would be if you had?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I think everybody does.

That's why those shows like Ordinary Joe

are fascinating or what would have been

like had I made a different again.

You know, when people ask you,

what would you do differently?

I don't know that I would do anything

differently, because it created who I am today.

And if I did something differently,

I would be a different person.

From a financial standpoint, I'd probably have more

money, and I'd probably be deeper in debt.

I've been financially free for 15 years now.

I'm not going back.

Why do you say you would have more

money, but you would be deeper in debt? Yeah.

Oh, because I would have tried to

keep up with my peer group.

I would have elevated my housing.

I would have elevated my circumstance.

I would have financed more.

It was one of the few places

that took a break every day.

Like, all the partners and all the staff would break

together once a day or twice a day, actually, and

people would talk about what they were doing.

And I didn't still know some of these guys.

I'd probably have a couple of VRBOs and some other things

going on, and I kind of went the other way.

I kind of just simplified everything.

I didn't do other more complex financial investments.

And of course, I think every American, if they

have the idea they should start their own business

because there's just so many benefits to being a

business owner that you just don't get when you're

an employee and just somebody's paying you a w.

Two, it's not for everybody. It's not.

And there are times when I was like, some days where I

wish I was an employee today because I would just quit.

I would just quit and go find a

job somewhere else, but never thought that. Really?

No, that was a lie. Yeah.

I mean, it's like a marriage.

You just can't walk away from your responsibility.

You got to show up for it

every day, and you can't be down.

You've got to be on some days you're

like, okay, where do I find it?

I got to find it here's all the pieces of the puzzle.

Where do I find it and where's my blue sky?

Oh, here it is.

And focus on the blue sky and forget about the

storm and just focus on that and get through it.

And then you look up and you're like,

yeah, got through two stock market crashes, 911

COVID I think it's just determination.

So you've already said that everybody should figure out

what the idea is and go start their business.

For the people that have the idea and

have made the decision, what advice would you

give to somebody that's starting a business today?

So the best advice that Friends gave me

before I started the business was, number one,

learn how to live without money.

I didn't understand it when I heard it either.

I was like, what?

You have to have money.

You've got to pay the rent, got to pay.

But like I said, I figured out a way to draw

my net pay from savings, right, for a period of time.

What that really means is you need to be

in a position where you're not having to make

business decisions because you personally need money.

That's where small business owners get into trouble.

That's when they start borrowing against their employees

or borrowing against the IRS, or they just

overspend and run out of money.

And the example that this friend used was he had

some business property that he leased and one of the

places was a restaurant, and he said, you know, it

was a great restaurant, it was a great concept.

But he closed the doors after four months

because he ran out of money and it

was like four months in the restaurant.

But people don't even know you're there yet.

So, number one, how are you going to stay?

You need staying power.

How can you measure that?

Staying power, that's what learn how

to live without money means.

Or you've got to be able to

master that part of your life, right?

You don't have to have a lot of money.

Like I said, I started my business with what it

would take to buy probably a very nice used Suburban.

Doesn't have to be a lot.

It might based on your business.

Restaurants take a lot of money.

If you're an equipment rental business,

it takes millions to get going.

So whatever it is, how are you going to have the

staying power to not have to make decisions because your cash

balance is not what you think it would be?

That's number one.

Number two is you have to invest in it.

The reason I'm not a professional photographer today is I

wouldn't go out, I wouldn't buck up the money to

get lights like you have here, the medium format cameras

that were required in the day, the facility to hang

the paper, all these things that you have here.

I was in college and I wasn't willing

to spend thousands of dollars of initial investment

to do it, so you have to invest.

And the third is, I'll take

the bankers, don't plant radishes.

So when I asked him what he meant

by that, what are you talking about?

I need to know how to plant radishes.

He goes, well, I might be planting this really nice crop,

but I know I can have radishes in so many weeks.

I looked at him and I said, you know what

if I don't focus on my dream and my vision?

What he wanted me to say was that I would do

public accounting on the side, that I would do tax returns.

That was all that was standing between me and

that loan was me saying that I was willing

to do public accounting, tax returns, bookkeeping, whatever.

I said, if I don't pursue this dream to

help small businesses with software, I'll never get there.

I will become what I do, and therefore I

need to do what I want to become.

And, yeah, just go for it and do it.

If you think it through financially, it might

turn into a spend of money, right.

But it was an experience.

And if you fail, you fail and you're employable the biggest

lie in the world is that if I give up this

job, I won't be able to find another one.

That's just the biggest lie there is.

If you don't believe me, go

into any business right now.

They need people.

A lot of the people working in the

business don't care if they're there or not.

So don't ever think you're not of value,

that you're not going to be able to

recapture that or get it someplace else.

It's just a lie.

In the next lifetime, maybe I can tell you how to

get out of a business once you get into one.

I don't know how to do that right now.

That's the cost of success is now.

I have people dependent on me and

customers dependent on me, and I just

can't get mad and quit tomorrow morning.

Awesome.

Well, Mike, thanks for making the drive up

and being a part of this today.

My pleasure.

That was Mike DeRosa, founder

of DeRosa Mangled Consulting.

To learn more, visit derosamangold.com.

If you or a founder you know would like

to be a guest on In the Thick of

it, email us at intro@founderstory.us.