Name: From CPA to CFO: Ron Wangerin, CFO at Trust & Will
Uploaded: 2026-01-06T22:16:05.188Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: From CPA to CFO: Ron Wangerin, CFO at Trust & Will

Transcript for "From CPA to CFO: Ron Wangerin, CFO at Trust & Will": All right. Well, thank you all for joining us on this Friday. If you're in the West Coast Pacific time and Friday afternoon for those East Coast and anyone around the world. I'm really excited for today's guest. As soon as we actually announced the session with Ron, this is the first in our new series that we're doing virtual fireside chats. And as soon as we announced it, I started getting, like, text messages and emails and LinkedIns of, like, everyone's really excited. Someone said, like, hey, my significant other, heard about this, and I thought they would be a good fit. And and so this is such a good topic. There's been a lot of discussion about, you know, going from accounting to finance. How do you go for how do you learn both sides of you know, you're coming up through accounting. You gotta learn the finance side to be a CFO. Obviously, CFOs can even have broader remits than just finance and accounting. They sometimes take on other areas of the business. And so honored to have Ron with me today. I'm gonna open up a poll for everybody and the poll is really for all of you to make sure this is more informative for you. So please be sure to fill it out. And while I'm launching the poll, I'm going to ask Ron to give a quick bio of himself. Sure. Thanks, John. Appreciate it. I'm Ron Wangerin. I'm currently the CFO at Trust & Will. Trust & Will is an online estate planning platform and I joined just a little over six months ago. And I started my career in public accounting. And I guess the first question is how did you end up in accounting? And it started with a personality test because I played sports most of my life and didn't really have a normal job and was struggling to select a major. And I took a personality test and it revealed that the three things it recommended was an accountant, a dentist and a mortician. And the mortician one everybody usually laughs at, which I do too. And it was really because of things that I got, career stability, the ability to move forward economically. And then the last thing was working with people and the mortician thing and working with people is kind of creepy. I ended up selecting accounting and found that I really enjoyed it. And from there I went into public accounting because back in those days, that was the typical career path. And then you decided, are you gonna stay for senior? Are you gonna become a manager? Like what is your jump up point? When I started public accounting, I really thought staying through partner made a lot of sense. But it was also from a timeframe standpoint, I started in the late 80s, everything was pre SOC. So we did both the accounting, we could help with tax, we did a lot of consulting work as well. And that enabled us to get a very well rounded experience. And also my clients went through a lot of life events. So I think it was the experience that I gained in public accounting that enabled me to be able to learn a lot more about business. When I used to describe my experience in public accounting, was I got to see why companies succeed and why companies fail without spending my own money. And really gave me insights as to what the drivers were for success and the different types of models that were necessary for success and where things didn't work out. So it was a great training ground and I still think it's a great training ground. And then probably I left public accounting after about nine years. I was a senior manager at the time at Deloitte and then made my jump into my different CFO roles. And I've been a CFO for different companies for over twenty five years, CFO and COO in some cases. I was a public company CFO for ten years, had a really good run there. And then since I left that, I've mostly been working with smaller companies, smaller from like 25,000,000 to a couple 100,000,000. And really what I look for is that they're all mission purpose, there's a mission to the company and really good management team and that I think I can add value. So those are like the three things that I look for. And I've had some really great experiences over the last seven, eight years working with what I'll call low to mid thirties founders who developed great products, product market fit, and just being able to join those organisations and add value in the areas that were most needed. So that's kind of my career in a nutshell. I love it. And back to your original point on the quiz you took, it sounds like death and taxes, the only sure things in life you had both covered. And in terms of, there's a ton of questions we have, and I know we're going to run out of time. So I'm just going to dive in because I think uniquely like you've done, you know, the accounting, the in house, the the public, you've done private CFO, public CFO. Not many folks, have, have that breadth and depth. I'd say like when you were in public accounting or even at it like an in house, like on the in house side in a more junior role, did you know you always wanted to be a CFO? Like for those, some people are like, I don't want to be a CFO. Was that how you felt back then? Or do you actually like, Hey, I really want to be a CFO and you knew that? I think once I made the decision to go into private, that was always the goal, was to have the CFO role. So that was always the focus. And I was lucky enough to go into the head finance role at my first company that I went into. So I did have accounting and financial reporting and like all the different things reporting up into me. So yeah, it was definitely always a goal from the beginning if I was gonna make that jump. So definitely. Okay, great. And tell us about the move. Let's talk a little bit more about the move from, and by the way, for the poll, I think everyone saw about half of the audience's VP of finance and and CFO. Yeah. We've got it up here. And then, we've got some controllers and and accounting managers and associates, and then a few, operations folks joining us today. So thank you all that submitted the poll. Thanks for doing that. Would love to talk a bit more about the transition from accounting to finance. You know, I talked to so many accountants and they say, it's just my job to prepare the numbers. I don't analyze them. It's just my job to deliver clean financials. You clearly, as you just stated, had much bigger ambitions while you were in that role. So maybe you thought differently, but what do you advise accountants? How do you advise them to think, especially if they want to move into more of a finance role over time? I think it's understanding the why. I always think from the beginning when I originally started to serve actually with Tush Ross and our audit process was to really understand systems and the flow of transactions. And we spent a lot of time on that and then a lot of time on balance sheet. So it was basically to really be able to map the operations and understand the numbers from an operational standpoint. So that was ingrained in me early on. And I would encourage people to step outside that box of just accounting and really look at where do the numbers come from? Why are the numbers the way they are? I guess when I flipped into the private role or private company role or public company, out of public accounting, what I found was in finance either someone's not paying you or you need to pay someone and if either of those two aren't happening then something's broken. So I always say I spent a lifetime swimming upstream to figure out where the breaks were in the operations and where the bottlenecks were and where the breakdown was of, wow, someone was over budget, how did they get pre approved or our customers not paying us, what are we not doing operationally they're not paying us? So really just swimming upstream, as I always refer to it, is the way I learned the operational aspects and the why behind the numbers and why they are the way they are. I think that it was a comfort zone for me just from what I described on the audit process that we learned on really understanding transaction flow. And the numbers have to make sense in the end. And if you're just in an accounting box, it's really hard to say the numbers make sense, or you can analytically understand them or describe them unless you understand how they got there. That's super helpful. And on that point, I'm like numbers making sense. Obviously beyond the why, what skills do you recommend folks hone, especially if they want to kind of move their way into a larger company CFO role? I think probably several things. One is just analytical skills. I think those are really important And then the operational aspect of it as well to really dig into the operations and meet with your peers or counterparts in management to understand what they're doing, how they're doing it, what their pain points are, how can we do it better? Because ultimately that all stuff flows into the end in finance, it kind of buck stops there. So definitely analytical skills is important and digging into the operations. The other thing that I did early on and I found it served me well, which is this notion of what I call early warning systems. And when things get off or your operations gets off, your numbers get off, it's like, okay, what happened? And then what were the early indicators that we missed that had we identified them, we would have been able to go ahead and execute and correct those so that they didn't happen downstream. So when I go into companies, I always try to understand what are the five to 10 really important things that you need to monitor that are your early warning systems that if those start to get off kilter, then the ripple effect is going to grow and you're going to be farther off downstream. So understanding what those early warning systems are to me is very, very important. And the obvious ones for me have always been like cash, looking at cash more or less daily. On the procurement side, I think the systems nowadays with the various automated procurement systems, whether they're ramp or bill or whomever, there's a lot of front end controls and approvals that are built in that enable you to see the things upfront, are they pre approved? Are they coded right? All those things so that they don't get off kilter. Particularly in consumer products, if you have a Shopify web store, your own web store, seeing what your daily sales were, are any SKUs going better than others? Are you going to have an inventory issue down the line? Those little things that you can look at on a daily basis so that you're not waiting till the end of the month to find out, oh my God, what happened? And that's so you really know what's going on every day. And today's accounting systems really support that. They're a lot more integrated, they're a lot more real time and enable you to keep an eye on things from a much better perspective. Right, yeah. I never heard of the early warning system. I'm sure others have, but that's one that I really like. To your point earlier, like I think that's part of that, like accounting mindset of like catching, like everyone was saying about the whole Macy's fiasco where $150,000,000 accounting error that whether it was intentional or not, clearly more warnings, more separation of duties, more controls would have theoretically caught it when it was 1,000,000 instead of 150,000,000. And so the early warning is critical at any size company. We do have a question from the audience and for everyone joining us, please feel free to start asking questions. We'll take them as we go and incorporate it throughout. The first one here, I think I know the answer, but I'd love to hear you extend on it. Do you think having an accounting background helps you be a better CFO? Yeah, accounting is the language of business because ultimately the measurement system is what are your financials at the end of the day? Whether you're trying to go public, have an exit, etcetera. Do you have a clean balance sheet? Is your P and L clean? Is your EBITDA accurate? Whatever those metrics are that you're trying to pay relative to measuring yourself. Ultimately, it's the financial statements prepared in accordance with GAAP. So, I always found like having a good accounting background helps me in meetings mostly to be able to guide the conversation or ask the questions so that are we going to get the right economic outcome that we're expecting in our scorecard whenever it occurs. And whether that's in an M and A situation, where you're like doing real time purchase accounting in your head and modeling the balance sheet in your head in a meeting while you're negotiating a purchase and sale agreement or the same thing with the customer. Customer, particularly with software rev rec rules or SaaS rev rec rules, if you don't have a good understanding of those, you may end up with a bunch of deferred revenue and not get the, you may get the cash upfront, but you may not get the revenue when you expected it. And people be wondering why, but if you can address those in real time and explain to your customer in real time in those meetings and those negotiations, they'll have a better understanding than just letting the lawyers duke it out with red lines going back and forth. So I think having that solid fundamental accounting background helps you in a number of dimensions, bottom line. Yeah, you're able to take more ownership and solve for the right things to solve for. Yeah, I've done a lot of M and A and once you send it to the lawyers, that's always a last resort. If you can solve it on the executive side, you're gonna more likely solve for what each of you actually want out of the deal as opposed to the legal definitions of the right answer. I think maybe one other thing if I could point out, and I think I learned this over the last ten years in some of the smaller organizations, and that is reading your customer contracts, reading your vendor contracts. And whether you have a legal department that does that already, I think it's really useful for the CFO or someone in finance leadership to be reviewing those contracts because one sentence can trip you up and the lawyers may not pick that up. I always say, look, I'd like to review them because I want to understand who I'm doing business with and under what terms so that as I see things come through, they're not a surprise. And then also, we'll tend to pick up things on the finance business side that the lawyers won't pick up and the lawyers pick up on things that we don't pick up. So I think it's a good symbiotic relationship when it comes to both customer and vendor contracts is getting that understanding. And do you have to do it all the time? No, but do it for a long enough period of time that you understand the templates, you understand what to look for, and then you can guide other people on, if this clause changes, I need to see it. If this clause goes through, then it's probably not a big deal. Yeah, for the audience I can confirm Ron personally redlined the Campfire AI contract. I do remember that. So he is good for it. You mentioned buy side M and A, it's one that you've done in the past for CFOs that have never done it or looking to, this is certainly an area where you can add a ton of value strategically, grow the business, launch in new markets. What guidance do you have for folks, whether it's their first or fifth buy side acquisition? Yeah, so I'll say a lot of times it depends on the size of the company, but I always start with the balance sheet. Whomever the business development person, corp dev person is out there, at a perspective, the first thing I want to see before I actually see a P and L is the balance sheet. Because if their balance sheet isn't clean, then I can't rely on the historical numbers and therefore the projections also seem suspect. So if they have a clean balance sheet and that might require looking at like an AP aging and AR aging and inventory aging, something like that, just to get a quality assessment of what you would be acquiring because typically it's assets, you may be acquiring legal entity with a lot of the values in the assets and the liabilities acquired, but most purchase and sale agreements now tend to be assets and liability agreements, not legal entity because you don't want to deal with the potential lingering lawsuits that might have not been filed yet. But with regards to that, I I always start with the balance sheet. And if the balance sheet is clean, I'll say, okay, let me see the P and L, let me see the forecast because then I have a much better understanding and feel I can rely on it better. There's not as much as the integrity issue versus having a dirty balance sheet or an ugly balance sheet. So that's where I start. And then it becomes working cross functionally on like, what are the objectives? Why are we acquiring this enterprise? Is it a strategic acquisition? Are we acquiring customers? Is it an aqua hire? What is it that we want to get out of it? And making sure that the deal is structured to achieve those objectives and work with counsel and the other party on how to make sure that it gets structured that way so we get the desired outcome that we expect once we complete the transaction or kill the transaction because things were just falling apart and you can't rely on the numbers and, so it goes both ways. Not all M and A endeavors are always successful. Yeah, and on that point on killing a transaction or killing even like a new purchase or people want to raise budget, I guess just a follow-up there. CFOs are known for the ones that say no to stuff internally and you go to the CFO and Cody, your CEO sends people to you and you're the bearer of bad news. How do you turn, I don't know, maybe not turn nos into yeses, but how do you get them to think of how you think or any guidance you have there for folks that are just trying to maybe better alignment internally or expectations set? Any guidance on this point? Yeah, I think I'd answer it two ways. The first way is I always approach it with, how can we do this? Not no. I want to hear it out and think about how can we structure it? How can we fund it? That they're always not starting from the position of no. I would say that mature over time. I used to be the no person and then I'm like, well, that really doesn't serve the business well. What you want to do is be able to work with the other team members and figure out ways to do things. And if there are competing priorities, how do you then work with the entire management team on saying, hey, this is probably more important than this and we're continuing to resource this and not resourcing that. Should we look at reallocate resources? So I think ensuring that your work environment and the team that you're working with has a mindset of flexibility and being able to do those things. With regards to working cross functionally, I try to proactively work with the other management team members, CEO, board on educating them on the why behind numbers, decisions, budgets, whatever. And as we make adjustments during the year, that everybody has a clear understanding as to what those adjustments are, what they mean. So to me, it's communication and education. And I think a lot of times, going back to certain things on the accounting side where people have a notion of how they want to do things, but because of how it needs to be structured, they won't get the outcome that they think. So making sure that you have that foundational understanding to be able to then educate them on how do we better structure this or come up with a different way to get the desired outcome that you want. Yeah, that's a great point. When I was finance at in house teams, would always be like, we have the same desired outcome here, right? And so let's try and solve for ways to jointly achieve the outcome. You know, you're working at the same company. You want the company to do well and be successful and you want them to be successful. And so I think just sometimes level setting as you've described there is a a great, great approach. We have another one from the audience and folks, please keep them coming. You know, we love q and a. This time's yours. A lot of early stage startup founders expect the CFO to be strategic. The audience member asks, without proper books in place, strategy is not possible. How do you strike a balance between being strategic and operational? It's a good question. I think it is a challenge. Think the question if it's an early stage, I always start with how well funded are we? How much money do we have? What's our runway? And to me, the runway can dictate what you can and can't do. Obviously, if it's thinly funded, then scarcity drives focus. So you're definitely in a mode of rationalizing every dollar that you're spending, whether it's on people or tooling or whatever it may be. If you're well funded, then I think laying out a plan of where you're trying to be at the end of the six months, a year, eighteen months, just trying to set those goals and then reverse engineering what it looks like to get there, with people, the product development, inventory if it's that, and marketing dollars, etc. So that even though you don't have a set of books yet, for example, you're continually trying to start from the destination and work your way back. I do a lot of reverse engineering and whether it was on trying to swim upstream and figure out where things broke, you're just trying to like constantly figure out what business have broken down. But even when you have an absence of information, like the set of books because you're a startup, I think you have to be able to reverse engineer an outcome and as to how you would get there and use that to help guide strategically what you do and where you place your bets. Now, where do you get that knowledge if you don't have it? I think being part of like mentor groups and different groups in your area because those are the easiest ones to be able to meet with. Like we have a big startup ecosystem here in San Diego where I live And there's two different groups and there must be three to four things every week that are going on that you could go to and ask questions and speak with people who've gone through it before along with other people who are going through it right now. And you can talk about your struggles and at least, A, you're not alone, but B, how can you work through it and collectively everybody wins. So I think, and as I said, depending upon where you live, there's typically a lot of those types of groups that are available. And if not, I'm sure there's a lot of online forums that exist as well that you can participate in that can help give you those insights. Yeah, and that's a great plug. At Campfire, we actually run an online community Slack channel. We'll send a follow-up for everyone attending. There's hundreds of finance and accounting folks at tech companies like Trust & Will, like Katie on your team is in there. So she's asking the group questions about, you know, are auditors pushing us on this or something? And so it's most folks on this session are the only finance, the only controller, you don't have a large team like sales engineering and to your point, having some semblance of community to go to. One area I can't not ask about AI. There's a lot of AI fatigue, but it is where the world's heading. Meet with so many CFOs and you are certainly pushing the boundary on AI in a good way. You're certainly on more of like the pioneering end of AI. And team are always pushing me on, Hey, there's a new AI tool that just came out. We want to integrate it to Campfire AI. You love our AI and we're working with your team to make big investments there. How have you gone, you've seen so many tools in your career. You've got, you probably got your, your set tech stack, but you've had to like evolve your tech stack too. How do you think about just more broadly new tooling? And then if you want to talk to like AI and where you are in your journey, anything you want to share? Yeah, so I guess when you think about finance or accounting systems or ERP systems, I started back in the on prem Oracle days. I did three different Oracle implementations in roles that I had and those were painful. And then it was great once I got out of that public company thing and went into some smaller companies like, oh, QuickBooks, this is easy. Oh, NetSuite, this is easy. And now Campfire AI, this is easy. So I would say the tech stack has evolved really nicely to make any AI implementation a lot easier. Yeah, at Trust & Will and Mo, we are a very AI forward company. We use a lot in our product and we have big initiatives across the company. It's a very conscious investment goal for us this year. So every individual, every department is being challenged on how can you increase your adoption to provide either A) better insights for decision making or B) more efficient and effective so that we can scale better. So I think the first thing is don't be afraid. I would encourage people to create budgets so that people can test and learn because not every AI solution is going to be the right solution. There's five to 10 popping up every day. So how do you stay on top of that? And I think at some point you just got to put a stake in the ground and say, okay, I'm going to try this and then see what the experience is. We use it in different ways across our data lake. We have different data aggregation tools that we can have it come through. We're running some, I'll say really aggressive type pilots with regards to like one of them is a personal AI, so they want to create an AI run. So I gotta meet with people and figure out what do I do? What tools do I use? I'm an AI crawler, crawl through all that stuff to help, not that they wanna replace me, I think, but at the same time, it's how can we take some of these lesser tasks off of Ron, have an AI tool do it so that I can continue to focus on the more strategic things working cross functionally to meet our overall goals and objectives. On the finance accounting side, I think AI is great for year over year analytics, budget versus actual analytics, stuff that took real time can now be done in a very, very short period of time, complete with text and writing up reports and things that was very, very time consuming. So I think FP and A people kind of don't like that aspect of it rather than maybe look at it and say, how can I leverage AI to spend time on the things that are low leverage low leverage for the individual and then I can spend my time being more strategic because we're not there yet with AI being the strategic thinker in room? So I would say, A, don't be afraid, B, budget for at least some testing of some tools that work well. In most cases, I think most of the accounting systems are coming up with their own embedded AI. So I think that makes it a lot easier. But a lot of times, like in our case, not all of our transactions will hit within the accounting structure. So things like rate and volume analysis become harder because they're more offline than necessarily embedded in the accounting system. So being able to correlate the two with an AI tool, think would be helpful as well. Did that answer the question? That worked? Yeah, it was perfect. Thank you. And we have another question in the chat and by the way, Cody, the CEO of Tristan Wilson confirmed. Yeah. They're turning Ron into an AI. Like, what would Ron say? It seems like as you pointed out One here is like the title of this session is CPA to CFO. This question directly asks about how important is it to have your CPA license on the path to becoming a CFO? I ask as a former colleague, an ex big four is having challenges transitioning to VP director roles. The recruiter feedback has been to encourage them to get their CPA license. No, I actually have a really strong feeling about this. And I've used it a number of times just to coach people. Well, I would say back in the day and I think still to this day, when you see a lot of more advanced, it's MBA or CPA preferred is kind of at bottom. And I would say, if a CPA always came to me, like worked in the department or wherever I was working and say, Hey, I'm thinking about getting my MBA. The first question I ask is why? What are you not getting out of your experience, whether it was in public accounting? And they might've been two years in out in which case, sure they had enough to get there enough hours, enough pass the exam to be able to get their CPA license, but they may not have had a lot of the experiences that staying in public accounting can provide your exposure to both from whether it's becoming a senior or a manager, senior manager, etcetera. As you move up the chain, you get exposure to different people and organisations, like how to talk to the C suite a lot more and your exposure to boards and board meetings and what that's like. I always thought it was really interesting. I'm sitting in a board meeting, 24, 25 years old, I'm sitting in a board meeting of a multi billion dollar company. I'm like, what am I doing here? But at the same time, it was scary on the one hand, but on the other hand, I'm like, what other way could you be in that seat at that place in time? And to me, was always interesting how the CPA route or a big four, a big six, seven, however many there are now, could provide that opportunity that you don't get if you're starting out of college into an accounting or finance function at a company. Actually, I shouldn't say it that way necessarily. Nowadays you can have a lot of startups that might get you back, but it's not the same because it's a different type of a board environment. There's different things at stake, there's different decision making, etc. But I always just thought the CPA experience can provide those valuable, not only tool sets for understanding companies, how they work, why they're successful, why they're not, but then also exposing you to the C suite and the type of information that you don't usually get at that age. So I've always been a strong advocate on the CPA side. I had a couple of nephews work for me when I was at my public company as interns over the summer and they were both finance majors. And then after spending the summer as an intern, they're like, I got to go get my accounting degree as well. Finance wasn't teaching them enough on the language of business and the flow of information that they thought they needed to have in order to do the things they wanted to do down the line. Nothing against an MBA, although everything I read nowadays is that people who get an MBA, they're having trouble getting jobs, they spend a lot of money, the payback isn't there. I can't really comment on MBA, CPA, I can only do the CPA side of things, but the job descriptions were always CPA or MBA preferred. It was really the CPA part of it is the set of experiences that you're gathering along the way that prepare you for the environment you're going to step into. I love it. I'm going take a slightly different approach to your answer. I came up through investment banking. Similarly, was sitting in public company and private company board meetings at twenty five and climb the ranks up into finance executive without a CPA. But I do meet with a lot of CFOs that don't have a CPA or an MBA to the audience over that asked. I just think this person is getting into the wrong interviews that they have a Maybe they have some scar tissue on incorrect accounting. I think a CFO that I've The CFOs that I've seen that don't have the CPA background that are doing really well have a great controller, someone that can really help them. But to Ron's point, it's gonna add a ton of value, but go find roles that they're looking for that strategic thinker. And and yeah, I would just keep applying. That's my hot take for the audience. Can I ask you one question since you came up with the investment banking route? Because I always, when I had think ten, eleven analysts covering me in the public company CFO job. And they were all really EBITDA focused and I would always comment to them. For one company, I actually took a lot of time and I actually walked them through how I could legally manipulate the P and L within the accounting rules to show better EBITDA versus what we were showing because we were taking more conservative positions versus aggressive positions. And they found it fascinating because they never really focused as much on the balance sheet versus the EBITDA models. And I think that's just one thing that I always found interesting. It's like, okay, a lot of these decisions are being made on EBITDA and you can legally end up with two different sets of books within the accounting rules that are completely auditable, that give you two different answers just based on conservatism, aggressiveness, etcetera. And I was just curious what your perspective is on that. So we're fully, it sounds like we've got a bone to pick with bankers and that's probably fair. No, no, it wasn't. I actually appreciated the perspective because I wasn't thinking that way. And I love to think that way. Totally. My like WeWork is famous for creating their own EBITDA metric, right? Like EBITDA is very adjustable. As you pointed out, accrual accounting has some art and science in it, to your point, the balance sheet, you know, the statement of cash flow, at least under the direct method, like it's immutable data, like cash in cash out. There's no, you know, there's no moving the numbers around. So I think you and I are fully aligned there. Bankers certainly fight over EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA and quality of earnings all day. I think there's probably some work to be done to probably move to more of your mindset. I think you have the right mindset there. My comment was more of, you know, you don't need a CPA or an MBA to be a CFO. Cause I see a lot of successful folks without either, but it's certainly, they certainly both add a ton of value and will help you punch through if you're having trouble punching through. I think for If I could add, in my thirty five years of business, there's no better time with all of the startup activity to be able to go out and be that 25 year old who could be the lead finance person or 30 year old who could be the lead finance person just because business is moving so fast now and startup opportunities are so great and the exposure happens so fast that it's definitely something that can definitely occur versus necessarily like when I went through it. Yeah, like you definitely need to know accounting as a CFO to be fair. Go take a class. If you're in interviews and you're struggling on accounting questions, go take a class or two or something. You got to have that it's table stakes. But we got a few more minutes for the audience if there's more questions. I think one that I want to ask while we're waiting for another question, like there's this like adage that you need a company that's gone public before to go public and every CFO that's never gone public is like, well, there's like a chicken and egg. Like, do I get, how do I become a public CFO? If you need to have gone public before? What guidance do you have for private CFOs that like you see someone wants to go public and it's always like, oh, they brought in this CFO that's been at five public companies. Like they're, this is the obvious move here. Like whether it was you for your first public CFO role or just for folks today, like how do you get, whether it's the board comfortable or how do you convince yourself and maybe you're never ready, right? Maybe you need to take the leap, but like, what's your advice? I think when it comes to going public or moving into a public company role that might come me that's already public, I think some of the most important things are a strong understanding of governance, corporate governance around role, the role and responsibility of the CFO as a gatekeeper and demonstrating that to the CEO and the board to basically provide that confidence that you're a fiduciary, you're serving the shareholders, you have the shareholders best interests in mind. So I think that's really important. I think the second thing is, which is, I would say less important as it was fifteen years ago, is necessarily the roadshow. Because when you're going on the roadshow, it's a CEO and a lot of times the CFO that's really leading a lot of the financial discussion And you have to be able to demonstrate and provide the confidence that you have a firm grasp of the numbers, you understand the ups and the downs, you understand how you pivot all those certain things. And with the amount of venture funding, PE funding that exists nowadays, I think the roadshow interview in essence when you're pitching to different prospective investors or even existing investors to invest more, I think that process is very rigorous and can provide a solid foundation. So even if you don't have the roadshow experience, I think you're actually getting the roadshow experience the more and more financings that you go through as a private company. Then I think the other is just all the requirements of being a public company, it's back to reverse engineering. What is my S1 going to look like? And how many years back do I need to have to make sure that everything is in order so that the auditors are comfortable, the SEC is going to be comfortable and knowing that and understanding that and demonstrating that more importantly, it's like that firm grasp of these are the requirements of a public company, this is how I'm gonna approach it. And so I have both the technical and the raw understanding of what I need to do. I've got the roadshow experience, if you will, through the amount of fundings that we've raised. And then you've built the right rapport with the board to show that you're a gatekeeper and that you can handle this. So I guess those are kind of the three things that I would center in on. I'm probably missing some, but those are the things that come to mind the most. Then a lot of cases, private company board isn't, some of them may not have public company experience either. So then the question that you've got to work on with the CEO is do we have the right board for becoming a public company CFO? That to me is like another step of looking at and understanding I understand this, I can handle this and I'm going to here to help and work with you on this because I think that can be overlooked sometimes as to what that looks like. I think it's a great point. And I think for folks that want to be a first time public CFO is like, if it like, when we were being acquired in Invoice2Go for 600,000,000, we opted to not hire a banker because the board and the exec team, you know, and I ran the deal, like I had, we all had like a lot of M and A experience. And so whether it's like a fundraise, and A, or going public, if there is strong experience on whatever transaction you're embarking on, then, you know, if it was me, I would point to like, Hey, you know, CEO, you've gone public, you know, Hey, we've got a board that's gone public. Like, I know I've never gone public, but like, we we've gone, I've done a lot of transactions. This is the largest transaction I've ever done, but I've done a lot of, you know, capital raising. And you can lean on the board a little bit and it's going to be, there's going to be some learning, but I mean, transaction has its own learnings anyways. Right. So maybe that's part of the pitch, for folks thinking about that. We have time for one more question. If there's anything from Q and A, hopefully folks have found this super helpful, but would love love one more question from the audience. Otherwise, I'm going to ask one about to end it off here on capital raising. We had like 21 was frothy as they get, we went into a winter, anything you want to share of whether it's like the cyclicality of funding and how you think about, do you optimize for the right time in the company and the right time in the market versus just any advice for folks going out for a growth stage round or anything you want to share? Yeah, I think more so nowadays than ever the markets are dictating who can do what and when and with whom. There's a lot of companies that are really, really, really good companies that in a normal environment they would like be going public. And they're holding back because the market's a little skittish right now. There's a lot of uncertainty around the Fed and other things that are in move the markets. So I guess in terms of capital raising, timing is one of the most important things and it's not only timing for the market, it's also timing for the company. Have you plateaued? Do you still have a steady growth path? Do you have other things that are, if you're on a steady growth path, do you have other things that you're gonna be adding into it that will keep that growth path going? So I think the story behind the numbers and why people should invest is really important with regards to how they're going to position themselves in front of a prospective investor. I think raising money today is very difficult if you're able to do it, kudos to you. And I'll say outside of the outlandish AI things that are going on right now, I think that call it the normal blocking and tackling companies that are growing nicely, need that next round, etc. That it is a difficult time, but at the same time, are still getting done. But why are they getting done? They're getting done because there's a solid story, good management team, they're placing bets with either A) people they've already bet on or B) what the story is, what the trajectory looks like. In the public markets, when I was my public company CFO role, announced a major capital project which we had never done before and it was going to change the entirety of our business and our balance sheet and everything. Then like a month later, the market crashed and it's like we committed to this 400 and plus million dollar capital campaign and then the market tanks and we did it because we knew we could self fund it if we needed to, but the goal was always to go out into the public markets. So we had to wait till September 2009 to really go do that first one. And we were one of the first ones to go out when the markets opened up after the 'eight crash. And that was a really interesting time. It was very, I'll call it tenuous a tenseful. We were going out as a first time debt issuer, public company debt issuer. So we were trying to attract like anybody and everybody and then get enough to where it was oversubscribed so we can bid down the price. And I would say sometimes it feels like that in this environment today to where you're having to bring in a broader audience of prospective investors to create the, whether it's oversubscribed or create the investor or investee tension that you want to get the right terms. Awesome. Yeah, I mean public, I found the public markets to be certainly more intense because like shareholders are voting every day. We had a situation just real quick story. One of our partners had like a material event and our share price was falling from it. And we actually investors, some of our largest kind of investors were pinging us and we didn't even know because our share price was moving on it and we didn't even know what had happened yet. And so we were digging in on the finance team. And so, yeah, certainly that level of intensity you're describing of markets moving on you is more acute public. Well, thank you all for joining. Thank you, John. You found this valuable. If you have follow-up questions, you know, you can send them over to me, johnmeetCampfire dot com. I can forward them to Ron. I don't know if you want to share your info here, but I can forward them along to Ron. And just want to thank you all. Have a wonderful weekend and a great Friday. And we're also going to send out some summary topics for folks that attended as a follow-up. Thank you, Ron, and thank you all for attending. Thanks, John. Thanks for everyone attending. I appreciate it.