Will Boyd (00:00)

Most entrepreneurs, they tend to be more visionary than they are maybe process-oriented.

And we realized, “Hey, I don’t know as much about cash flow as I need to.”

Our theory was more clients equals better life for us.

We realized that you can make a million dollars, but if you spend $999,000 of it, you don’t have anything to play with. You don’t have anything to take home.

We just kind of realized, just doing the math, like this isn’t going to be sustainable. We’ve got to make some changes.

John SmallMtn (00:26)

Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (00:28)

If you’re getting into a business and you want it to be about providing financial stability for you, don’t worry about what you’re passionate about. Just solve the problems with the people you’re talking to.

John SmallMtn (00:39)

Welcome to another episode of Founder’s Growth.

My name is John Hill, aka Small Mountain. I’m the founder of Adapted Growth. Today on the show, we have Will Boyd, who is the co-founder of CEO Finance Academy. We’ve known each other for a while and been digital networking friends. Whenever I was looking for people to come onto here, we had a call and got really deep. I’m excited to have him on here because I think his story is really cool.

Will, can you take over from there just a little bit and give more substance to what CEO Finance Academy is and who you help?

Will Boyd (01:12)

Yeah, absolutely. First off, thanks for having me on the show, John. I really appreciate it.

Co-founded CEO Finance Academy. We do financial coaching and fractional CFO services for small business owners, usually in the half a million a year range up to about 20–25 million a year range. We really help them get dialed in understanding their profit margins, how to make better decisions financially, and where their bookkeeper and accountant tend to stop with things. We take over and help make those forward-facing decisions and train owners to actually think like a CFO, rather than sometimes the visionaries that a lot of them are, and getting into the weeds of their finances. So that’s what we do.

John SmallMtn (01:49)

Okay, I love that. So the idea that the visionary might be—are they normally glossing over financing? Or is it one of those things where it’s like, “When we grow up, we’ll start paying attention to it”? How does that show up for you whenever you’re first engaging with someone about your brand?

Will Boyd (02:08)

Yeah, it’s very common. I think the entrepreneurial brain—again, I’m going to generalize, but most entrepreneurs, they tend to be more visionary than they are maybe process-oriented, in the sense of they’re the ones who are going to take the risk. They’re the ones who are willing to hear the noes.

In this case, we lived this experience. We originally owned a marketing agency. We were physical therapists, and we created a side hustle doing marketing for a couple of physical therapy practices on the side. That took off and grew. We were really great at marketing, we figured out how to sell, and then we had a good service. All that was going great until we tried to expand beyond ourselves and we had to start bringing on team, hire more resources.

All of a sudden, our profit margins were kind of withering away, and we realized, “Hey, I don’t know as much about cash flow as I need to.”

I knew how to manage things when things were just great, overhead was minimal, there was nothing there really, and profit margins were high. But as we’re adding in all this complexity, where’s the cash flow at? Where is the cash? We’re hitting record months of revenue and paying ourselves the least in owner take-home pay we ever had. For a few months, we just said, “Hey, that’s the cost of scaling.” Then we started to say, “Well, we can’t do this forever.”

John SmallMtn (03:15)

Mmm.

Will Boyd (03:20)

Owners, clients that come to us, they’re in this place where they’ve figured out some level of marketing and sales and product-market fit. Now they’re realizing, “Hey, the next level for me to get to where I want to go, I have to understand these financial pieces that I just never sat down and got trained on.” A lot of people just assume their accountant or bookkeeper will do that. Really, most accountants and bookkeepers focus on the compliance work and not sort of the, “Let’s get in there and talk about the strategy of how we’re going to grow the business to hit where you want to hit.”

John SmallMtn (03:45)

Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (03:50)

So that’s where we come in, and that’s just a really common journey that we see a lot of owners go through.

John SmallMtn (03:52)

That’s interesting.

Yeah. Was it like—I’m always very curious about these moments of awareness. Like when the glass is tapped and we see that there’s a problem, we see there’s a gap, we see there’s a challenge. How long were you doing the “well, this is just the cost of growing” kind of thing before you decided to try to get some help or try to figure it out?

Will Boyd (04:24)

Yeah, it was probably a four- to five-month period where we were still continuing to grow. We had built reserves, so we could ride it out a little bit longer than maybe if we hadn’t built up some reserves. But just going through that period and recognizing…

John SmallMtn (04:37)

Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (04:40)

Our theory was more clients equals better life for us, right? More clients, more revenue equals better life for us as the owner. And we realized that you can make a million dollars, but if you spend $999,000 of it, you don’t have anything to play with. You don’t have anything to take home. Looking back, of course it makes sense. But when you have these opportunities in front of you to make the sale, to get these bigger contracts, you just sound like, “Yes, that sounds great.” We were setting revenue targets versus profit targets. So that lasted for four to five months. Then we just kind of realized, just doing the math, this isn’t going to be sustainable. We’ve got to make some changes.

John SmallMtn (05:09)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (05:19)

So we had to make a decision to essentially stop taking new clients, because that theory was going in inverse. More clients was equaling worse life for us. So we said, “Hey, we can keep our existing clients.

John SmallMtn (05:26)

Yeah.

Will Boyd (05:29)

We make sure we take care of them, but this whole idea of just keep scaling for scaling’s sake wasn’t working in the way that we wanted.” So it was a period of time. It wasn’t like a day when we looked at the numbers and it was like, “Today’s the day we got to change.” It was a slow process of seeing those margins wither away and realizing, “Hey, something’s amiss here.” That led us into diving into which of our service lines are actually profitable and how profitable.

John SmallMtn (05:43)

Hmm.

Will Boyd (05:55)

What is it costing us to even acquire a customer for each of these service lines? What’s the difference there between our costs to acquire them versus our LTV, and all this stuff that you hear Alex Hormozi talk about a lot now? It isn’t the sexiest, but once you get into it, you start to realize, “Ooh, yeah, at the end of the day, me being able to pay myself or the team really comes down to what’s available, what’s left over on the table,” assuming you’re not operating off of investor funds or anything like that.

John SmallMtn (06:09)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, in my work, we have to talk about the time it takes to earn trust and to get to the right meetings and stuff like that, because you can spend a lot of time chasing opportunities. It becomes very easy to just go task your team with chasing down opportunities without really understanding the time it takes for the projects to close, you know?

So from that moment, I’m curious: did you just dive into this and you found a lane of greatness, like a lane of excitement? Did you just get so passionate about it that you decided to pivot and go in this direction?

Will Boyd (07:00)

Me personally, not at all. If you told me 10 years ago I would be doing anything finance-related, I probably would have laughed and fallen out of my chair. Luckily, no. I have a great business partner, Alex Engar. He’s my co-founder. It really stemmed out of a need. He was married, had two little girls at the time under the age of six, so he needed funding and security, and I needed financial security. I had $150,000 of student loan debt from going to physical therapy school and getting a degree. But his was like day-to-day: “Hey, we’ve got to make this work, otherwise my wife’s going to say, ‘You need to go back and get a job.'” So we were looking at it, and he—

John SmallMtn (07:29)

Mm.

Will Boyd (07:30)

He just took control of it and started to really look at the numbers, start to make projections, understand it. He went down a path as well as personal finances at the same time. It’s kind of interesting how often someone’s business finances are out of whack—it’s not too uncommon their personal finances tend to be a little bit, we’ll just say the house isn’t as clean on that side either. He went down a journey, and over six months really went to town on taking control of things, taking control of understanding our expenses, where we were bloated,

John SmallMtn (08:10)

Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (08:20)

what can we actually afford to spend on marketing efforts and things like that. So really out of a need. Alex will look back and say he was always a finance math person, but really going to the next level came out of a need and a sense of wanting to take control over things.

Finances for so many people is a thing that just makes us feel out of control, like so many other things can be in life, just because it’s the currency we use for opportunity, right? “Can I do this thing? Can I not do this thing? I need this tool.” Even when we started going down that path, there was no intention of “we’re going to start a business out of it.” It was really to solve our own problem because we saw the writing on the wall: there’s no way the business could keep going if we weren’t profitable. It became a puzzle to figure out.

That experience led us to having to get honest with ourselves. We started to be transparent with our clients about why we had to adjust pricing, which led to conversations of like, “Well, why?” We would just break down in the math, “Well, here’s where we’re at.” And they’re like, “Wow, I’ve never really—” You know, we had these physical therapy practices that were doing half a million, a million, four million a year going,

John SmallMtn (09:05)

Yeah.

Will Boyd (09:32)

“I’ve never even thought about my pricing like that. How did you guys do that?”

Talking to them about their finances slowly started into some one-off consulting stuff of, “Hey, let’s walk you through the tools you’ve built and what we’ve been doing on our side to manage it in-house.” That led to these small conversations into bigger asks of, “Hey, could you sit down with us for a couple months and help us get things in order?”

Over time, that led to us having to make a decision. We were getting enough people asking for help with that compared to our agency—which had kind of been winding down a bit as we were making the changes; we had to let a lot of clients go to become more profitable. We had a week period where Alex and I sat down and were just like, “We can’t do both. I guess we could, but neither one’s going to go really well. Which one do we want to do?”

Alex is like, “I just love meeting and talking with people about their finances.” He’s like, “What do you love doing?”

I was like, “I just love sitting and running ad campaigns and not talking to clients every day.”

He’s like, “It makes sense. Well, let’s do this: why don’t we go in on the financial stuff, you run the marketing and sales side, and then I’ll do the delivery.” That’s really where it came from.

John SmallMtn (10:27)

Yeah. Oh man, thank you for the story, right? I love—

Will Boyd (10:51)

Yeah.

John SmallMtn (10:52)

Pivots, I love changes. I don’t think that anybody is really served by trying to be static and fixed, so I appreciate the journey.

I can imagine having that conversation with your co-founder, right? He’s like, “Well, I like this.” And you’re like, “I like the ads, I like the marketing, I like not talking to customers.” And then you end up as the sales and marketing co-founder, right? We talked a little bit about your path of sales training, coaching, improvement, and stuff like that. How do we frame this without leading the witness?

Were you thinking about sales and marketing together as your role when you guys were talking about this, or were you thinking like, “I’m just going to be here on the marketing side and doing the growth,” and then maybe the sales showed up later?

Will Boyd (11:46)

Yeah, great question. It’s kind of blended in the sense that as we were making that shift, I didn’t know enough on the subject matter expertise side to do a true consultative sale on that aspect. This is really interesting where we were figuring out our first version of the sales process—it’s transformed over time. I had to say to Alex, “Hey, I can set these calls, I can get to the pain points, I can do discovery. When we’re going to go into presentation,

John SmallMtn (11:59)

Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (12:14)

I don’t really know what we’re doing.” Obviously, I knew for our company, but Alex was developing the curriculum and the program as we were going, so it made sense that he took the formal sales call.

We would do a two-call process. We still do a two-call process where I would go through discovery, understand what the situation is, and make sure it’s a fit, at least in terms that we actually might be able to help. Then Alex would go through and be able to go a little bit deeper, because of his subject matter expertise, he could actually isolate deeper problems and maybe secondary and tertiary consequences that were going to happen.

That’s how it started. Then I watched enough of those with Alex and started to pick up, “Okay, here’s what Alex is doing.” I knew I couldn’t do it at the level of depth of going into the secondary and third-order consequences of things, but I could do enough. So I started to jump in and take them as Alex was getting busier with delivery and not having as much time to get on sales calls.

Then we started to realize—I always thought of marketing and sales together. I never thought of them as separate. It’s one messaging, right? For us at least, it’s like, “Hey, what’s the message that goes through?”

John SmallMtn (13:08)

Mm-hmm. Hmm, okay. That’s how it’s supposed to be, Will. But there’s a lot of people that would rather just pit sales against marketing because they want attribution. They want to know who’s winning and who’s losing. Sometimes it’s not intentional—some people do it intentionally—but a lot of people end up with a bad fight for land between sales and marketing. So, fascinating.

Will Boyd (13:36)

Yeah, and coming from a marketing agency, we were running a marketing agency and we had to attract clients and we did the sales calls for ourselves. For us, it was always one stream. It wasn’t like, “I do sales and you do marketing.” Before that, it was all just us anyways doing everything. It’s just continued that way where—

John SmallMtn (13:45)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Will Boyd (14:00)

We now have an actual sales team, but I meet with our sales team every day at our huddle. We have a sales huddle every day. On the marketing team, I’m there every day. They give me feedback: “Hey, what are you guys seeing?” Long way of answering that: yes, we view it definitely as one continuous team effort on that front.

John SmallMtn (14:08)

Yep. Interesting.

I’m changing topics just a little bit, because one of the things that I’m always very curious about is this concept that I have of overlap, right? Where things from other parts of our life show up and help us here. I know you’re not in the med field anymore, but I’m curious: do you pull anything from that lane, from that time, that helps you now as a co-founder in the business?

Will Boyd (14:51)

Yeah, it’s been so interesting to see how it’s showed up in running a financial company. A few things as a founder I find really interesting. I know this is probably based on who we are as personality types, but we’re very conscientious of who we hire. The reason is, as a physical therapist from my time in the medical space, you spend so much time with patients,

John SmallMtn (14:59)

Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (15:20)

and you have to take on so much of their emotions during that time period. It’s like sales. Sales is emotionally—I know for different personality types it can be different, but most people I know, even the people who are really up for sales calls, you’re still drained by the end of the day if you’re doing a really good job. You’re taking on emotion.

One of the ways that showed up for us is I want to find people who can also bear that load of taking on someone’s emotions. We look for that through our coaches, through our salespeople: “Hey, can you sit there and handle someone’s emotions?” I’m not asking you to control their emotions, but can you sit there and be with them and not feel like it’s going to impact the rest of your day?

John SmallMtn (15:41)

Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (16:02)

Obviously, there are things that happen that can, but most of the time, can we just sit with that and be an observer, rather than, “My day is going to be affected by what this person says”? Easier said than done. Obviously, anyone listening will feel that. But yeah, that’s been a big one.

Then how it’s played out in a financial company for us: from my experience, most people that are in the financial field are more analytical, logical, less interested in feelings about things, and more like, “What does the data say?” Don’t get me wrong, we’re very much that way, but money in itself is emotional for most people. Whether they feel like they have the data or not, it’s still—think any of us, you have

John SmallMtn (16:05)

Yeah.

Will Boyd (16:31)

Yeah. Yep.

Will Boyd (16:52)

let’s just say $50,000 and you’ve got to make a decision what you’re going to do with it. You feel something. You’re either like, “Yes, this is exciting,” or “It’s a lot of money and I worked so hard for this,” or all these different things. So being able to think like that and attract people like that—our retention speaks a lot to that, that we’ve got those people who sit and can actually be there. That’s been the biggest overlap.

It’s also played into our sales process. We don’t approach it from the “high-ticket crush objections over and over again,

John SmallMtn (17:33)

Yeah, close them all.

Will Boyd (17:35)

close them all” kind of mentality. If they’re a fit, obviously we’ll challenge them if they need to be challenged, but it’s much more about, “Hey, we’re here to be a sounding board, an advisor, and a trusted guide,” more than, “Hey, let me help you overcome every single limiting belief in your life to make this decision on a one-call process.” There’s nothing wrong with it, and I’ve been on the other side of those and some of them have been great. I just think that’s where the overlap probably comes in for us.

John SmallMtn (17:57)

Mm-hmm. Well, so zeroing in on that a little bit, I would imagine…

My first field sales boss was also a chiropractor, right? I met him in kung fu—we were training together and everything. He gave me the opportunity to go sell pedicle screws to surgeons. We talked a lot about the medical space and everything, and one of the things that he always talked about was the disdain of chiropractors, right? How everyone is up in arms about them and they’re all kind of viewed as grifters and everything. I was kind of like, “Okay, well, that’s odd, because you’ve adjusted me and it’s just been helpful.”

And he was like, “Well, you take action.”

I was like, “Okay, what does that mean?”

I think there’s something to that avoidance and reluctance that you experience as a salesperson, because people will tell you that they’re very interested, but they’re not. I would imagine that in physical therapy and occupational therapy, you have to deal with that a lot. Like, “I’m going to do this rehab, I really want to be better,” but they can’t bring themselves to do it and stuff like that.

Will Boyd (19:08)

Yeah. It depends on how someone comes through, but it’s a really interesting sale in the sense of—let’s just take a normal chiropractor or physical therapist. If they’re insurance-based, a lot of us are familiar with the US system: you use insurance, you go in, and they say, “Hey, your insurance will cover this.”

John SmallMtn (19:23)

Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (19:28)

Technically, there’s not a financial sale being made on that front to help someone see the value of it necessarily. I get that there’s conversation, but in general, it’s not someone going, “That’s going to be $2,000 today.” It’s someone going, “Yeah, here’s my card.”

Where the sale comes in is, for this person to get better, they have to show up and they have to do the work outside of what you do with them.

John SmallMtn (19:49)

Yeah, behavioral change.

Will Boyd (19:50)

So the sale is different. It’s much more of a behavioral change sale over and over and over again. I would argue to me it was probably the most difficult sale. Now, it’s interesting because no one views it as sales. No one’s going to go, “Oh, this is the sales process.” But you’re selling over and over if you want someone to actually get better.

You have to get them excited about it. You have to get them to see that this isn’t a “I’m just going to quick adjust your back and you’re going to be good forever.” This is going to be an 8 to 12 week, maybe even a couple-month process. I’m going to get you committed. You’ve got to drive here, you’ve got to take time out of your day, you might have to ask for work to get out of this, you have to go do something you don’t want to do, which is exercise sometimes.

A lot of people in the healthcare field feel like, “I could never do sales, I’m not a salesperson.” I always just think, “Man, you’re selling every day, just in a different format.”

John SmallMtn (20:24)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I know all those people.

After working in that space and seeing the nurses and the doctors that were all jaded, they’re kind of doing this front, and then as soon as the patient leaves, they’re like, “They’re going to be back. They’re not going to do it.” So they’re not even really bought into the thing, right? They’re all jaded and kind of not happy to be there, just going through the motions. When you’re faced with that stuff, there’s a good reason why lots of salespeople have got skepticism and a little bit of—a little too abrasive, because they’ve had so many people and they just can’t afford to waste that kind of time anymore, right?

Fascinating stuff. Thank you for sharing that, man. I appreciate it. One of the things we were talking about—and I thought this was really interesting—you said this line that I think a lot of people would…

Will Boyd (21:28)

Yeah, yeah.

John SmallMtn (21:39)

On the surface, I really appreciate it, but I think they might struggle with owning that in their days inside of how they’re building their business. You said, “Be willing to hire people that are way smarter than you, right? Don’t let your ego get in the way of hiring people that are better than you.”

I was floored when you said that, because I was like, “That’s great.” Then I was thinking about it, and I was like, “I think most people would hear that line and be like, ‘Yes, that makes sense.’ But they might not actually act with that intention whenever they’re doing their hiring, their growth, and everything.”

I’m curious, how does that show up for you? How have you gotten better in hiring and making sure that you’re bringing on the right people to your team, so that way you are bringing in smarter people in the places that they need to be smarter?

Will Boyd (22:26)

Yeah, I think first has been reflecting back on being in teams where you have really brilliant people, and seeing like, “Wow.”

I’ve thought of roles I’ve had in my life, whether it’s physical therapists or working somewhere else, and seeing someone where it’s like, “You are so brilliant,” and then seeing how they’re restricted by the bureaucracy or the hierarchy of the team that they’re in. It’s like, “Where did that fall short?” It’s obviously a leadership issue of not creating space for that person to flourish.

In the beginning, it was really difficult in the sense of bringing on someone who I was like, “Wow, they might be smarter than me.

John SmallMtn (22:50)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (23:04)

They might leave. They might go and take our clients because they’re so much smarter, and our clients will think they’re so much smarter and want to go with them.”

There have been a couple of things that have been really helpful for us. I’m saying all this—I’m by no means perfect at this, and I still struggle with your ego wanting to be the smartest person sometimes. That’s just a natural…

John SmallMtn (23:18)

I mean, hiring’s tough.

It’s so funny, because we were talking about books and everything else like this, and The E-Myth is a very popular book for anyone who’s on an entrepreneurial path. The place that I got to with it is—I would imagine it’s more like The E-Myth and less of, “This person seems too smart.” I would imagine it’s more like, “Well, we have our way of doing it, and this way sounds a little too much like your way of doing it.” Does that show up for you? Does that resonate the right way?

Will Boyd (23:55)

Yeah, it’s definitely not like, “Your IQ is so high, and therefore we can’t.” It brings up a good point and something we could discuss, which is: are we even optimizing for what kind of smart we’re looking for, right? Instead of just general intelligence,

John SmallMtn (24:11)

Oof.

Will Boyd (24:11)

like making a sales manager hire, for example. It’s like, “Hey, can this person do the role, but also can they lead people? Can they sit with people?” That’s a really complex thing.

Recognizing in myself that I was struggling—before I found our head of sales, Kyle Kraft, I was looking at, “Where do I struggle with this, right?” I could close. Okay, it wasn’t my natural strength. It’s not something where I was like, “I’m the salesperson.” I’ve always seen myself as a marketing person, but I was taking on this role of leading the sales team.

We brought on people, and I realized, “Man, I don’t have the next level of skill set to train people on what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing. It works for me.” There’s a little bit of charisma and charm, and I’m the co-founder, so I can get away with things.

John SmallMtn (25:05)

Yeah, that’s a thing.

Will Boyd (25:07)

It’s not a process I can just hand to someone and go, “Repeat all of this.” They’d be like, “Well, that’s not true for me.”

So I realized I need to bring in someone who was way smarter than me in terms of experience running actual sales teams, sales scripting, or at least frameworks that could be done by anybody who wasn’t a founder or co-founder. I realized I struggled there because I would lean on stories that were personal to me in my sales process. I would lean on experience that I’d lived, and I could do that. But when we bring on someone else and I’d be like, “You should just tell your stories,” they’d be like, “I don’t have that story.” It’s obvious, but it’s like, “Oh, well, you have a version of this.”

Long story short, I think one of the things is: what kind of intelligence are you looking for?

John SmallMtn (25:31)

Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (25:55)

In our company, we look for a lot of emotional intelligence. By that, I mean like our sales manager, Kyle, our head of sales—he is so much smarter and experienced. Being smart oftentimes corresponds with experience—it doesn’t have to, but it can be a big role in it. He’s really experienced, he’s been on a lot of sales teams, and he can sit there and relate to the sales team’s issues or problems and be able to sit with those.

He’s also owned his own business before, so he can come and say, “Hey, I can imagine what you guys are seeing on the owner’s side, but I also understand where they’re at with this.” Being able to sort through that—he could easily go start his own thing and take over our sales team because they love Kyle, right? It’s Kyle or our one other closer.

I just want to create a world where he can do what he wants to do, and he’s a central part of the team, but also put some guardrails of, “Here’s as far as we can go in terms of budget or capacity that we have.” But I say, “Hey, within that, I trust you and your framework.”

Now I’m there frequently, which allows me to have safety. Now I’m at a point where he could just do his thing for the next year and I wouldn’t have to worry about it.

That initial part—long-winded way of saying, when we say smart, it’s probably more like what’s needed in that role and how much more advanced or skilled are they, not always in the technical side of the role, but

John SmallMtn (27:25)

Mm-hmm.

Will Boyd (27:26)

everything else around it, the intangible side of that role, too. Can they carry the emotional intelligence that you’re looking for? Can they hold presence with people the way that you want? And do they uphold your values as well? That’s non-negotiable for us.

John SmallMtn (27:37)

This is potentially an odd question. Sometimes I talk with people, and they kind of have this view—we touched on this a second ago, right? Like the doctors and nurses don’t think that they’re selling, but they are trying to get people to change their thoughts and actions.

Were you nervous about bringing in a salesperson because sometimes it feels like it’s going to be salesy and pressurey? Were you concerned about that, or had you had enough experience to see that there’s levels to sales and different ways of doing it? Was there resistance to the idea that we might need a head of sales, a sales trainer, or someone who can train around this stuff and coach?

Will Boyd (28:31)

Yeah, we originally hired our first sales guy, and this is a really interesting experience. For other founders, or if you’re in sales, you might relate to this too.

Our very first sales hire was going to play a hybrid setter-closer role, because that’s how the process had been—a two-call process. I would set and go to Alex, but he was going to do both. What was interesting is we obviously sell digitally. We run Facebook and Instagram ads, people fill out a form, and they book a call.

The guy that we hired was a friend we’d known from a different online community. He had 20 years of sales experience, but it was in door-to-door sales experience. Me being naive assumed it doesn’t matter, like,

John SmallMtn (29:12)

Hmm.

Will Boyd (29:17)

“It’s sales, you’re coming from this process.” I watched that unfold, and it was a really painful journey for both parties. This guy’s amazing, he’s an amazing sales guy, but watching him try to go into this new process—and us knowing the process—coming from the door-to-door world where it’s a lot faster, it’s pattern interrupt, it’s, “Quick, let’s get to this.”

John SmallMtn (29:25)

Yeah.

Will Boyd (29:43)

Really, what he was selling was deal-based—he can get you a deal on this. We’re selling more of a consultative, “Hey, let me project into the future what’s going to happen.” So it was really painful. I just thought, “Well, if he can just do the script, that will work.”

What I realized over time was, “I don’t know how to—” This was the wake-up: “I don’t know how to train this person.”

John SmallMtn (29:47)

Yeah, commodity. Yeah.

Will Boyd (30:04)

He’s amazing at what he does. It wasn’t a question of, “Is he talented?” He was reliable and consistent, but he was 20 years in a certain way of selling and then moving to this style, which was different. I was like, “I don’t know that I know how to do this.”

Rather than me saying it’s his fault and, “You’ve got to do it”—which, don’t get me wrong, I had moments in my head where you naturally…

John SmallMtn (30:27)

Yeah, absolutely. If it’s not going according to plan… yeah, absolutely.

Will Boyd (30:29)

Yeah, you look for someone to blame originally, and then you’re like, “Okay, who’s really at fault? It’s me. I need to take ownership of this.”

I said, “Hey, I don’t know how to do this, and we can’t bring on somebody else until I know how to do this.”

In this process, we met our head of sales now, Kyle. I was like, “I don’t think I have the skill set to do this, and I don’t even like playing this role.

John SmallMtn (30:32)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, 100%.

Will Boyd (30:56)

I need to find somebody who…” In that process of finding someone like Kyle, he was helping to train me. I paid originally for him to train me as a consultant, and I started to realize, “I need to find someone like you who’s really great at this, because at the end of the day, I can hire more salespeople or closers, but I don’t know how to train them, nurture them, and guide them like you do. And the amount of time it’s going to take me to get up to that speed…”

I’d never been on a sales team before other than our own company. I found this to be really interesting: I’d never played the role of salesperson. So Kyle came in and showed me what standards look like. I didn’t even know what standards look like.

John SmallMtn (31:16)

Mm-hmm. Mmm…

Will Boyd (31:33)

Right? I didn’t clean up a pipeline every day. I wasn’t taking notes diligently. It was me—there was no oversight, so I could just do whatever I wanted. Then I watched Kyle, and he was like, “Hey, what are you doing?”

I was like, “I don’t know, it’s working.”

And he’s like, “No salesperson would come in here and succeed.”

I was like, “What do you mean?”

He’s like, “You don’t have a standard process.” We had an existing process—it’s not like someone was just winging it—but it wasn’t dialed in. It wasn’t a start-of-day process, end-of-day closeout process. He was like, “Your script process doesn’t make sense. This guy’s trying to repeat what you’re saying, and he’s not you, and it’s different.”

After that, I wasn’t hesitant at all. It opened my eyes like, “Cool, there’s a huge gap here.” What was exciting was it was working okay enough, good enough with me being terrible, that I got excited. If we could find somebody who’s great or a team that’s great at this, then there’s a lot of potential here.

That’s where just getting excited about someone who’s smarter than you and realizing that—there’s the initial feeling of, “I’m not enough.” Then just having talks with my business partner, he’s like, “Hey, this is this guy’s zone of genius. We need to find someone whose zone of genius this is, what they like.”

After that, obviously there’s the financial piece of making it work, but after that it was like, “Okay, we need something like this.” Normally I would say, “I need to figure it out and train them.” Luckily we built enough reserves that we could take the leap to find a sales manager as we were bringing on closers, so we could do that together.

John SmallMtn (33:13)

Mm-hmm. I love that.

Will Boyd (33:13)

It started out as a fractional sales manager. Then—I still think one of the best sales I’ve ever made in the company—I finally convinced, I sold Kyle on our team to join us full-time. So that was the process of how that worked. He got to see our culture, how we operate, and I think he was like, “Cool, there’s a big enough space for me to do what I want to do.”

John SmallMtn (33:32)

Thank you for touching on the main point there, right? Because it’s a thing that I run into all the time.

I started out selling in retail kind of by accident. I just didn’t want to wait tables anymore, so I got a job as a customer service rep. Then three salespeople left, and they were like, “Do you want to be in sales?”

I was like, “No, I do not want to be in sales.”

And they’re like, “Well, we’re short, so we’re going to move you to sales.”

I got pretty good in the retail environment, and then I took a leap to a field sales role, which is categorically different, you know? And I struggled.

From there, I moved into this more entrepreneurial, super small business selling on value, alignment, expectations, and differentiation. Each one of those things was essentially like starting over—choosing to humble yourself, choosing to go figure it out in the new way, as opposed to coming in with a bunch of ego.

What’s so unfortunate is that a lot of people, when they’re looking to hire salespeople, they’re looking for that vibe. They’re looking for that fire in the eyes, and “Are you going to be urgent?” and everything else like that. If you’re broke, you’re going to come across very urgent, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you can fit that level.

If you’re not great at building relationships, a relationship-driven sale that requires a multi-call process is going to be a struggle for you. I talk with people all the time and they’re like, “Well, John, I don’t really know that I want someone new. I want to find someone who’s a killer.”

It’s like, “Are you prepared to poach someone away? Because if someone is out looking, we need to go get as close to this as possible. What do you think you need?”

Then we kind of fall into that whole trap of the transactional salesperson, and everyone thinks that they have to build a business to the place to where they have a transactional sales process—that way it makes sense to bring on salespeople. That’s where, if there’s room, I try to educate them that there’s different levels of this.

But that happens all the time. It’s so funny because people who have never done it—I’m like, “Hey, what happens if they’ve had a great track record of success, but they don’t replicate that here?”

“Doesn’t matter, sales is sales, right?”

Then after anyone has gone through that experience, they just nod sagely like you are right now. It’s such a thing of like, “Why did I think that was going to work?”

One of the things that I think is very interesting is the overlap between sales and marketing, but then also how different it is. I used to do a morning show with a friend of mine, and he comes from marketing and I came from sales. We used to sell together a long time ago back in the same bank and finance together, and we kind of just split on different paths.

There’s a profound difference in the skill set between these two things. I’m curious: with bringing on Kyle, bringing on structure, and really cleaning things up, what are the biggest changes of perspective or thinking about how you view sales, or how you show up on your calls, or where have you changed the most?

Will Boyd (36:42)

Yeah, I think internally it’s been a process. Getting time in with Kyle has really helped me realize, for us to go where we want to go as a company, we need more types of Kyles who are self-sufficient and can have their own vision within what we want to do and be able to do that.

John SmallMtn (37:05)

Mmm, the intrapreneur, if you will.

Will Boyd (37:11)

On our sales team, we have two full-time salespeople, and they’ve both owned businesses before. So they understand who they’re talking to avatar-wise. For our next hire, I’ll try to find someone who’s run a business before. It doesn’t have to be the case, but they can speak to it, right? They know the pain, they know the frustration of sitting there.

It’s actually helped our marketing to be able to say, “Hey, you’re going to meet with a former or fellow business owner who’s owned a business before and who’s faced these challenges.”

One of our closers actually is a former student of the program. She went through our program and loved it so much. She has an e-commerce business, and it’s seasonal, so when it’s not busy time, she’s working with us. She can literally talk about the program, she can talk about what it’s like to go through it. Kyle has actually gone through it as well.

So it’s really helped marketing on that front to be able to go and speak to, “We get it. Our company gets it. We’ve been business owners, we understand that,” versus, “We’re accountants and bookkeepers, we’re the financial folks.”

I won’t say it was deliberate, but it was somewhat thought through and strategic: “Hey, if we can find people who actually have owned businesses before, that’ll make marketing even more appealing in terms of who people will meet with and who they’ll be guided by.” All of our coaches in the beginning had previously owned businesses.

I might have missed the original point of the question, so I feel bad there, John, but…

John SmallMtn (38:48)

No, I mean, there’s a lot to this, right? There’s a lane of product knowledge and knowing your product inside and out and having trust and confidence in that. But the part that I think is slipping away is just business acumen—business perspectives.

If you had a developmental pipeline program that was showing them the business acumen, then you wouldn’t necessarily need people that had run businesses in the past. But a lot of people are just like, “Well, if we just fill them with product knowledge, features, and benefits, then it’ll be fine.”

Or they go the other way and they’re like, “Well, we’re not going to teach our setters anything about the product, so that way they can’t answer any questions, because your job is just to press for an appointment.”

The perspectives are multivariate. The other part that is so infuriating at times is that nothing never works, right? I mean, if you do enough volume, you can find a way and a path forward, but it’s like: is this the right path? Is there more friction here than there needs to be?

It’s tough, right? I love this thing that I get to do, but it’s also filled with a lot of blind spots, dissonance, and old, hard values and thinking. So you’ve also got to put it down if you’re not open to the ideas, so that way I can go find people that are. So, please.

Will Boyd (40:12)

Yeah, to your point, I was just going to say, it’s been interesting. Just pulling back the curtain, we had hired two appointment setters this year.

John SmallMtn (40:25)

Hmm.

Will Boyd (40:25)

We were going to go from a two-call process—I had been setting for the most part, and then Kyle started doing self-setting. That was going really well. Our other closer was still doing more of a one-call close process. We originally had started on a one-call process, and then we moved to a two-call process. It was always two calls because we always had follow-ups, so it was really a one-call that was a two-call process.

What was interesting is we brought on two appointment setters to your point, who had not run businesses before and had not really been a part of businesses before. We found it really challenging to try to level them up fast enough on business acumen knowledge to be able to get into discovery deeper. They could follow the script, they could ask things, but as soon as things got a little bit off that, it was really hard to go into. It makes sense, it’s a little bit more…

Yeah, so to your point.

John SmallMtn (00:41:08)

Yeah. Yeah. It’s a higher-level thing, right? It’s not just like, sell them the phone, kind of thing.

Will Boyd (00:41:25)

That has shifted our process now to—instead of an appointment setter-closer—that our closer will now do the two-call process. When we were filtering now, it’s not a belief that I think that there’s no appointment setters out there who couldn’t do this, but we’ve just found that if we can go slower, they can control the set and they also have the business acumen. It’s just shifted how we hire.

Rather than doing—because we tried the internal training route to a degree. All of our closers go through the program, so they go through

John SmallMtn (00:41:46)

Yeah.

Will Boyd (00:41:55)

through—

John SmallMtn (00:41:55)

Yeah, that’s important.

Will Boyd (00:41:55)

as a student, so they get to live it, they get to feel it. But we weren’t doing that with the appointment setters side. Part of that was just there was no business acumen at all, where we were like, “Man, it’s going to take a long time to explain some of this.”

Just as you were saying, that really made me think, “Yeah, we’ve really had to be strategic about the type of hire we make there.” Totally, somebody else could be like, “No, you should definitely do it this way.” It’s just been the way that we’ve found to work for us.

John SmallMtn (00:42:06)

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, for sure. Right? I think there are a lot of bad hacks when it comes to hiring and trying to scale sales. The two that I run into the most: one is, “Well, we’re just going to go try to find someone on commission-only,” but you want to make them try to do outbound, and they’re just not going to. They’re going to go find something else to do.

The other one that I run into is, “Well, we want to go find someone who’s already been in the industry and has a Rolodex.” It’s like, that person’s going to run through that Rolodex, and then they’re not going to do anything else, right? Because that’s their asset.

Now, what is cool about this is I think you found a good shortcut, right? Because if you’ve run a business before to any level or extreme, you should have a little bit of business acumen, or at least empathy and some understanding of, “Hey, it’s tough, right?” It’s a much wider lane than people think. That’s why the show…

Will Boyd (00:43:11)

Or if you’ve been a manager or a director-level person, you’re usually responsible for the KPIs and metrics side.

John SmallMtn (00:43:17)

100%. Yeah, absolutely.

Having internal training and internal development is expensive. It’s a lot of build-down, and it’s easy to miss really big. There are reasons why people hire 30 to keep two, right? They don’t have a better way of cracking the nut—which is kind of unfortunate for the other 28 people that are just kind of drowning. But it’s been a play, a thing that worked more often than it didn’t.

Changing topics just a little bit: one of the things we were talking about is you said, “Don’t be afraid to be the least knowledgeable person in the room.” That’s not how you said it, but you were talking about this idea that one of the things you’ve gotten better at is knowing where you don’t know enough, right?

I’m curious: if you’re going to go out as a founder, you have to have a little bit of moxie, a little bit of drive, a little bit of ambition. How do you get better at knowing, “That’s not my lane. I don’t need to be the smartest person in the room. If I am the smartest person in the room, that’s probably problematic”? How do you get better at that?

Will Boyd (00:44:29)

Yeah, I think there are probably a couple layers to that. One is being self-aware enough to know that you’re not the smartest. Sometimes I run into people and they sort of lack self-awareness there. By no means am I some self-awareness expert, but having the honesty to go, “Clearly, I’m not the brightest person at this.”

Sometimes it’s just, “I haven’t spent as much time as other people on this.” It’s letting go of having natural talent for something versus respecting the work and time someone’s put into something and going, “Hey…”

So much of it is interesting. As competitors, we get into a fixed mindset of either “I’m naturally good at something” or “I’m not good at something.” It’s like, John kicked my butt in sales, but he’s also spent 10, 15, 20 years more practicing his craft than I have. Then the question becomes: do I want to spend 10, 15, 20 years to try to get

John SmallMtn (00:45:09)

Hmm, that’s fair. Mm.

Will Boyd (00:45:33)

there? Even if I train with John, as an owner, it’s like, maybe that gets me there in a year or two. Do I want to wait that long based on the runway we have? Should I look for someone who is smarter than me at this already?

Part of it comes down to being curious. I don’t know about you, but I just like to learn, and I tend to learn from people who are smarter or have more experience or knowledge in something than I do. I really enjoy learning. I enjoy being curious about things.

It’s kind of—I won’t say frustrating—it’s frustrating and kind of boring, honestly, if everyone just looks at you and you have all the answers. There’s an ego fill at times where you’re like, “Yeah, I’m needed,” right? But there are other ways to be needed besides just being the “answer guy,” right? “How can I support you? What can I do? I have connections—can I connect you with someone?”

I know what we’re talking about is nothing new—it’s the “you are the five people you surround yourself with” kind of thinking. But

John SmallMtn (00:46:20)

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Will Boyd (00:46:39)

it’s trying to reframe it, like you talk about reframing things in sales. Rather than, “My gosh, I don’t know enough,” it’s, “How cool that I get to sit with somebody who knows so much more than me? What can I learn from you? What do you think?”

It’s been so fun with our team, hiring people who in my mind are so much more knowledgeable at whatever their skill set is, and being like, “Well, what do you think? What would you do if we had a blank slate? What would you want to do?”

“I want to do this.”

“Okay, let’s do it.” Or, “Hey, I would love to do that. That thing might cost 10 times our budget. What can we do at a micro-scale of that? Let me put some guardrails on what we could do budget-wise. What would you do with this?”

“I’d want to do that.”

It’s like, “Wow, I never would have thought of that.” Maybe ChatGPT would have gotten lucky and told me the same thing, but I doubt it. But I have you and I trust you. ChatGPT might give me 10 ideas, but you’re like, “I’ve

John SmallMtn (00:47:06)

Epic. Hahaha.

Will Boyd (00:47:31)

literally lived all 10 ideas, and I can tell you the one or two that actually seemed to work well in practice.” It’s like, “Thank you, let’s go that route.”

John SmallMtn (00:47:36)

Yeah, lived experience.

Shifting gears a little bit, Will, because I want to respect your time and we both have other things to go do today: we’re going to go into the rapid-fire questions. I planted these seeds whenever we talked before. On this first one, I’m going to open it up just a little bit. Being on the marketing side, but also being in a finance company—when you think about founders and people going out on their own, what do they need to know about finance and/or marketing so that way they can avoid some of those pitfalls and false paths?

Will Boyd (00:48:16)

Number one is you’ve got to invest in learning at least the minimum of each. In my experience as an owner or founder, getting into understanding the marketing and getting into understanding the financing is key. I have no desire to be a bookkeeper or accountant ever, but I need to understand bookkeeping and accounting. It’s the scorecard of my company. If someone were to say, “Hey, I want to buy your business,” that’s what they’re going to ask for: my books. If I don’t understand them, I don’t understand what it means, and I’m at the mercy of someone else telling me what it means.

Same with marketing. Rather than going and hiring an agency right away—there’s nothing wrong with it, but can you at least dabble in it so you understand what expectations to set? “Hey, I want to spend money on this. What are realistic expectations?”

I was talking with a lady, one of our clients, who’s like, “I’m on my seventh marketer in two years.”

You’re like, “Man, it makes you kind of wonder: where is it going wrong here? Is it all seven marketers wrong?”

She was honest about it. She goes, “I just don’t think I’ve understood what expectations I should set.”

I was like, “Hey, before we hire number eight, let’s learn, right?”

She’s like, “Yeah, I think that’s probably a good idea.”

Long-winded answer: it’s easy to blame others when you don’t know what expectations should be set on your own side, right? Just like in sales where it’s like, “I expect you to close at 40%.”

It’s like, “Well, have you been in there for a year closing at 40%?”

“No.”

“Do you think I’m a wizard?”

“I hope you are.”

Dude, live it. Live it a little bit. Obviously, there are certain things that other people are going to be better at, but live it a bit so you can set realistic expectations for yourself and for a team.

John SmallMtn (00:49:40)

Yeah. The other side of that that I hope people hear is: you won’t get sold nearly as off-base if you have a little bit of working knowledge, right? If you don’t have any working knowledge, you get that cold email or cold DM that says, “We’re going to 10x your business through finance and accounting.” Because you don’t know enough, you don’t know what’s within the realm of reason versus what’s BS just for marketing attempts and trying to set meetings.

What happens is those people—because they don’t want to lean in and appreciate that there’s craft, thinking, and strategy to this thing—put themselves into the position of being the biggest marks on the planet, unfortunately. When it doesn’t go according to plan, because most things don’t, there’s frustration and everyone is just mad at each other.

It’s fascinating to me just how wild it can get in the realm of promises made via outreach and the stuff that people fall for. Honestly, I’ve got to put myself in there, because I’ve made some bad hires, I’ve paid for some courses, and I brought on a consultant that was supposed to help me and didn’t. It was a money-back guarantee, but that didn’t pan out either. I don’t know a single person that hasn’t happened to, if I’m being really honest about it. But when you don’t know enough, there’s hope, right? I hope that this can come out the right way.

Will Boyd (00:51:24)

Or an opposite of fear. I just think about—and I’m sure they’ve all had great intentions—I’m sure I’ve spent way more money on fixing car parts that I didn’t even know existed because someone sat down and goes, “Hey, your Kadaverna was broken.”

I’m like, “That sounds bad. Yeah, we should fix that.”

They could have made up a term; I know nothing about the inside of my car. I’m just like, “Cool, you know more and it sounds important, let’s do it.”

And they turn a knob this far and they’re like, “Yep, nice.”

John SmallMtn (00:51:56)

Yep, there it is.

Thank you for that. That’s a great answer. I think that alone will help some people stop dabbling and invest a little bit, so that way you can make smarter decisions and at least express your own expectations, right? On the growth side, sales and marketing side—if you don’t know what you’re asking for, you’re probably not going to get it.

Next question: when you’re thinking about all the advice and all the mantras—we’re friends on Facebook, that’s how we originally connected—it’s filled with everyone regurgitating advice, mantras, and dogma. Is there a piece of advice that you now appreciate because you’ve learned the lesson, that you didn’t really think was real or valid before you had to learn it the hard way?

Will Boyd (00:52:47)

Man, there are so many. The one that comes to mind is “hire slow, fire fast.”

It’s one that is so painful, because if you’re someone who is invested in people and you care about people, even if all the data is there and it’s like, “Hey, this isn’t a fit,” you’re still—at least for me—clinging on to, “But maybe it could work. Where can we find the ways that this would work?”

Your gut is telling you, “This just isn’t it. This isn’t the one,” and you know it. Even if you don’t have the data, your gut knows. I’ve heard that one so many times, and I was like, “Yeah, maybe there’s a different way.” I’m sure there are, but I’ve just spent so many agonizing nights sweating, worrying, and knowing I have to have a tough conversation that I let go for way too long.

For their sake, to put them—I look at one of our first hires. I think he’s in a role right now where he’s super happy, and it fits exactly what he needed. I’m like, “Man, I dragged you on for a year longer trying to make this work than I should have. I could have set you free to find that opportunity.” That one for sure has stuck out beyond all others.

John SmallMtn (00:53:37)

Oof. Yeah, good for him.

I love that, because one of the things—I have to talk about this differently sometimes with salespeople, but if there’s a crack in the facade and you’re more focused on the crack than you are on the facade, it’s time to go, right?

I’ll talk with founders or leaders and I’m like, “Tell me about your sales team.”

They’ll literally tell me, “Oh, they’re all garbage.”

“Okay, why are you still paying them, right? You don’t trust them, you’re not bought into their efforts and actions—why are they still

Will Boyd (00:54:16)

Thank you.

John SmallMtn (00:54:33)

here?” Hearing that from your perspective, it’s the same thing, right? If you have put someone into a bucket of “they’re just not it,” you’re going to be looking over your shoulder and over their shoulder more than you would be focused on the work you need to be doing, because trust has been fractured in a very meaningful way. So, great one.

Now, you’ve been in the space for a while, you’ve run a couple of businesses, and obviously we’re in the age of AI and things are crazy, different, and new. Everyone wants to reinvent the entire business scene every six months to a year, it feels like. If you were talking to someone who’s starting today with everything you know and seeing how things have changed, what is your most important piece of advice or word of warning?

Will Boyd (00:55:23)

I love this one from—I can’t remember who originally said something like this, but: if you’re getting into a business and you want it to be about providing financial stability for you, don’t worry about what you’re passionate about. Just solve the problems with the people you’re talking to.

I find so often—we’ve just organically, not coming from a business background, always launched based off getting feedback first. “Can we sit down? What do you need? Okay. Do a lot of people need that same thing? They do? Okay. What are you trying so far? We’re trying this.” Sort of like a sales conversation, but then creating a product or service based off of that has been so much more helpful for us than saying, “We’re just going to start a bookkeeping company and try to compete on bookkeeping.”

What’s different? What are people willing to pay for? I’m not saying that’s a bad idea, but if you’re starting over with so many things changing fast: who do you want to help? What type of person do you want to help? Then go ask and do surveys.

One of my favorite marketer guys, Jeff Miller, used to run survey ads. It blew my mind. He would spend money to just say, “Hey, if you fill this out, we’ll give you a free eBook or something,” and people would just answer a survey on their pain points. That was it. He would spend money just to collect data on their pain points.

I was like, “Whoa, you’re not doing this to get clients?”

He’s like, “No, I’m just learning about my potential clients and what they need.”

He would do a survey, take all that data, and then go make an offer to all of those people based on the problems they were facing—create a solution for what they were saying their problems were. I was like, “Man, that’s so smart.” Because he was like, “I never run an offer until I know I have surveyed at least 50 to 100 people about what their exact needs are, and then I go and test the new offer.”

I was like, “Duh, that makes so much sense.”

That’s what I would say starting out: if it’s just about passion, then plan to go slower, usually. Save some money.

John SmallMtn (00:57:27)

I love—man, there’s so much in that. I get to do a thing I’m very passionate about, and for me, I need the passion, right? If I don’t really feel like I’m helping, I don’t think I would put in the amount of effort that I have into my business. But that’s for me.

For some people, I take that very discovery-driven process, because otherwise we’re just alone in a tower thinking that we’re smarter than everybody else that we’re trying to help. No one likes feeling that energy in a sales process, on a sales call, or on a checkout page.

That’s something I tell everybody now: go find the people that you want to help. One of the things that I ask people to do is, “Okay, if you’re going to spend eight hours in front of people talking to them, hearing their concerns, and trying to help them, what do those people look like?”

Everybody’s like, “John, what do you think is ripe for disruption, or where do you think it’ll be an easy win?”

It’s like, if you don’t have an ounce of care, this is going to be so much harder, right? I’ll send people off right there. They’re like, “John, I want to start a business.”

I’m like, “Great. Here’s the protocol: 15 by 50.” We’ve actually written about it and talked about it. Look, if you don’t want to have to become a sales machine, go build something that people are actually asking for, right? Get out of the way, put down your ego, and go learn from the people that you want to help.

The cool thing about the protocol is I talk with a lot of people who have desire and grit, but they’ve not really channeled that into action, so it’s still very much in the “nice-to-have” versus “I need to go figure this thing out” phase. If you can’t make 50 asks to try to get 15 meetings within a group of people that you’re excited to help, you’re not that excited to help them. Let’s just be honest about it. This ain’t it.

I love that. Thank you, man. That’s very cool, and I appreciate that insight.

If people want to come learn more about you and your company, hang out with you, and check out what you’re working on, where should they look you up?

Will Boyd (00:59:42)

You can check us out on our website at ceofinanceacademy.com, or you can tag me on Facebook or LinkedIn—just Will Boyd, or it might be William Boyd. Mine will say “Fractional CFO” or something like that. Feel free to reach out. I try to make content somewhat frequently. Feel free to check out our website if you want to learn more, or otherwise, feel free to just shoot me a DM on LinkedIn or Facebook.

John SmallMtn (01:00:22)

Awesome. Will, thank you so much for coming on here and being so open and transparent about your path and what you’ve learned on the way. I do think that this is going to help a lot of people, and it’s just very cool that you’re willing to do it. I really appreciate it.

Will Boyd (01:00:33)

Thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor and a pleasure. I really respect what you’re doing and feel humbled to be a part of it. Have a great day.

John SmallMtn (01:00:40)

Thank you. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Have a great day.