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In this episode of ‪What Worked, Mike interviews CJ Gustafson, Founder of Mostly Metrics, a finance-focused media company. CJ talks about his journey from successfully exiting as CFO to starting his own business.

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CJ shares his insights about:

• The human side of selling a company
• The benefit of making sure everyone knows how a company makes money
• Finding product market fit in the content space
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We'd love for you to connect with us:

• Mike Wu
• Tyler Rachal
• CJ Gustafson
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‍You can also find CJ's podcast Run the Numbers, on YouTube and the newsletter at https://www.mostlymetrics.com/.

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Transcript edited for clarity:

Mike Wu

Hey, hey, welcome to another episode of What Worked. Today, we are very lucky to have CJ Gustafson on the podcast. CJ is the writer and founder of Mostly Metrics. and he's building a fantastic media company. I actually discovered him myself, personal discovery via YouTube. So I encourage you guys to check out his stuff. But without further ado, CJ, would you mind introducing yourself to the audience?

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah. Thanks for having me on the pod, Mike. I feel like I made it because the name of the pod is What Worked. So something must be working, which is pretty cool. But sure, I'm a CFO by trade, tech company most recently, exited that about six months ago, which was an exciting process to go through a sale, show that I could drive the car from point A to point B as a CFO. And before that I came up in the FP&A world for tech companies, which for those who haven't heard of that department, they come up with your budget, they help you allocate resources, they help you look at your operating plan and say, where can we be more efficient, where should we invest in the business. And then before that, I was on the other side of the table working at a private equity firm and then also doing some consulting. 

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So my whole career has kind of revolved around business models, optimizing them, looking at the metrics that go in and go out. And it's been really fun, specifically within the tech industry because there's so much that's evolved and I've taken that and I've started to write about it. I've actually been writing for over four years now online. I have a newsletter called Mostly Metrics and it became bigger than I thought it could on Substack. Not at first, I mean like the first two years, nobody listened to me. I was writing into the abyss. But over the last two, two and a half years, it's grown to 65,000 subscribers as of today. So there a lot of nerds out there. And then I also have a podcast called Run the Numbers where I interview CFOs and I also talk to business model experts, and that gets somehow like 50,000 listens a month. So I feel really fortunate to now do this full time. I didn't know it was a real job you could have, but I guess it is.

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Mike Wu

100 % and yeah, I'm one of those nerds that's been following along. I got to ask you, can we go back even further? You have had this  up and to the right finance career that I think a lot of business school graduates or undergraduates pursuing a role, maybe in accounting or finance, investment banking, private equity, would want to have. Did you always know you wanted to take this path? What were you like growing up or maybe like your college years, what were you thinking?

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CJ Gustafson

Well, thanks for saying that because like it certainly didn't feel like I was going up into the right in the moment. In fact, I think I didn't find my product market fit until I went over to what I'll call the operator side. I wasn't that good at private equity. I was okay at the consulting, but I wasn't that interested in it, I felt like more of a financial tourist, like I'd pop in and pop out and didn't really have skin in the game. Thanks for saying that because like, I feel like it did take me a while to get my footing, but the wonder of LinkedIn and everything else is you just get to write your story in reverse. You get to look back and kind of connect the dots. And so it looks great now, but you learn what you're good at, what you're interested in and what you're uniquely qualified to do. And like what I did was I stacked a bunch of those building blocks together or kind of smashed them together, if you will, to create kind of like a skew of one, which is what I'm doing with writing about finance and also trying to do it in a way that that's somewhat entertaining.

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To answer your question though, to go way back, I always loved writing growing up, which makes it kind of funny that I went to Boston College for a finance degree undergrad. I think the people that knew me, they're like, he's always tinkering around with creating blogs on the internet or writing stuff for my school newspaper in high school or in college. So I think that would have been more the path, but it took me a while to find the lane that I would do that in.

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Growing up, I was obsessed with SportsCenter. I was obsessed with anything Bill Simmons wrote. I used to read this blog called Deadspin that I thought was hilarious back in the day. And so I've always been really interested about the creation of media online. It's really cool now that I get to do it myself. But I didn't know this was a career coming out of college.

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Mike Wu

That's very cool to hear. I'm not surprised that you've always been a writer or you've always been drawn to writing because your writing is really great. I think it's very hard to write about numbers and metrics and make it both really educational and interesting and entertaining at the same time. I think you accomplish all those things. That's how I got drawn in. From your YouTube channel, I thought you took an interesting approach, a more fun approach to these topics, which are usually pretty dry. And then it funneled me into the newsletter, which I was like, same vibe here. So not sure if that's what you're trying to do, but it worked on me.

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CJ Gustafson

Hell yeah. The network effect is kicking in and I've proved it in real time. I think finance in particular has always had this wall up where people want to act like they're smarter or they want to throw around terms that make it hard to understand. And I think it all goes back to like the scarcity complex. Like if everybody understands it, then I'm not going to be able to make the most money, which I don't think is necessarily true. And so what I try to do is demystify a lot of what's on the other side of the curtain and do it in a way that creates an on-ramp. I think it's too difficult to get up to speed, particularly when you talk about finance within the tech industry, because that's not straightforward gap accounting, if you will. It's not like just what you see on a P&L and you could do with an accounting degree. There is a bit of flair and nuance to it.

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Mike Wu

That resonates. I want to kind of go to, if it's okay with you, like your, your last stint as a CFO, it sounds like you helped shepherd this company to a successful exit, which I think for a lot of CFOs, that's like a really important accomplishment to have and good experience to have overall. And then you took the leap and you're like, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to double down on this, on this content, this media stuff. Could you tell us about the acquisition and what that was like for you as a CFO and then, after that talk about the jump?

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah, I think to become a CFO, there's this funny dance where they want you to have been one before. It's like, well, how do I become one if I haven't been one? It's like this circular reference.

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Mike Wu

That's a common meme in the staffing and recruiting world, which we are in at Hireframe. It's like this is an entry level job that requires eight years of experience.

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah, I have seen that before. Like looking for an entry level accountant with 12 years of experience and a master's degree in SEC accounting. It's like okay, maybe I can't do that one. But yeah, so like I took a chance on this company. They took an even bigger chance on me because I was probably relatively young for the job. I became CFO I think at age 31 and I hadn't done it before. And along that path in two and a half years, we quadrupled revenue, which was cool. We got to profitability. We built a durable company that could stand on its own. We raised a series C and then we sold it. And so, we didn't recreate the wheel, but like we drove the car, like I said, from point A to point B, we got more money back to our investors than they put in, and everyone was high fiving at the end, which I think is a success story. 

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What goes on behind the scenes though, is you just feel like you're digging trenches each day and you don't really know what the end goal is going to be. I think when you take VC money, which we did, you are essentially always up for sale, right? Like eventually you're going to have to have some sort of liquidity event. So you have to figure out what you want to look like when that time comes and how to optimize for it. I think that's where I had both the most fun and then I think it also almost killed me like in the final year there because you're trying to keep this train on the tracks but you also know that you're approaching an event where you're gonna have to have a lot of conversations about like why you're the right asset for someone to acquire and that takes a lot of energy and then there's also the emotions wrapped up in it no matter how you slice it especially for the people who found the company and been doing it for 10 plus years. So I think I learned a ton about the financial process of selling a company, but I learned even more about the human process of running a company and then exiting.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, could you share some of the human component you just mentioned? I think that's really interesting for our audience here.

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CJ Gustafson

People work at a job because they want to provide for their families and a lot of the time you're giving them equity compensation for taking a bet on you and for investing their time. And so I always took it really personally that I wanted everybody to walk away with something at the end of that, because the reality is like 70% of the time you don't get anything back. Like the equity ends up just being something you put in a drawer, forget about and doesn't really turn into anything. So I think at the end, especially for the executives and the founders, there's real, real money on the line. And whenever there's money on the line, emotions do tend to pop up around decision-making and how to optimize this, what it means for me. And as a CFO, you have this dual rule where you have the fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders. And then you also have responsibility to your employees and to your boss, the CEO, and then also in the back of your head, like it's only human, you're like, well, what's going to happen? What's going to happen for me too? And by the way, for those who don't know, after an acquisition goes through, the CFO is like always the first one that gets fired. Like they usually have a CFO, right? 

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Mike Wu

Yeah, redundancy. Yeah, one for one.

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CJ Gustafson

And I knew that going in, like it's all part of the game in a sense, like you do your stint, you

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Mike Wu

Yeah. It's a weird, it's a weird dynamic. Yeah. Let's double click into that because it's you're grinding, working your tail off for a successful outcome, which is a sale, which also equals like a termination. What was, what does that feel like?

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah, it's a total mind warp to think about. Now, I think I was a bit different because like I had been incubating Mostly Metrics in the background. Like I said, I've been writing online for four years and it actually helped me get that first CFO job. But you are thinking like, I'm not only bringing this company to the end of this chapter, I'm bringing my own career to the end of this chapter. So what's next for me? And I was really positive about it too. It does feel a little bit like you're like breaking up with your girlfriend a bit because you love this company that you've put a lot into. But at the same time, you're to move on to something different. And a lot of people said to me like, oh well, you exited a company for this much. Now you can go and do one for that much. Like it's just this ladder you climb. And I think the more I thought about it throughout the experience and it's not like I was thinking about my next step the whole time. I needed to concentrate on what was at hand. I think I said, well, what makes me happiest and what, where, where does my product market fit plug into this. And the conclusion that I came to is like, I want it to be a CEO someday. And the way you become a CEO is either you become a professional CEO for a private equity backed company. Or you go and start your own thing. And that's, that's what I decided to do instead. Yeah. Just like you. And so that was the path I took with, going all in on, on building a media company.

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Mike Wu

Awesome. No, that's a really cool journey that you just took us on. Where it sounds like you've always kind of had this writing toolkit and like momentum behind you. Like maybe you've always wanted to do that, but you were just like waiting for the right moment. Like, you know, both like passively and proactively, but when it came to the time, did you have any reservations?

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CJ Gustafson

I think you always do. It's kind of like you're stepping off a cliff. Now I was lucky enough where I had built some relationships with advertisers to set me up to know I had some runway. And then I had also just exited a company and along with that you can pay down a bit of your debt, which is nice. And my wife was really supportive. Like I got young kids and she was like, you've always wanted to do this. I think what she said to me is like, what's the worst thing that happens? Like you go back to being a CFO and like that's an amazing job too. And so I think like the pain of not knowing what something could be would eat at me more than like any sort of failure. And I've had a number of failures trying to start stuff. This was not the first company per se I've tried to start. I had one company where I lost over $209,000 of my own money trying to build something in the tourism industry. And that didn't work out. I've written about that online if people want to check it out. 

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But it's funny that like the thing that took the least amount of capital investment, it took a lot of time to start and I think of time as a moat of building up your resume online. But like it's funny that the thing that costs like no money to start other than buying a domain was the thing that took off the most, that all the stupid stuff I've tried.

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Mike Wu

It's funny how things work sometimes. Yeah, and I got to take a moment here to shout out to all the supportive partners out there helping us take these leaps.

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CJ Gustafson

Oh yeah, man. Having my wife push me towards something, she saw the energy that I had from doing it and also being like, I'll help you. She helps me with a lot of the event stuff that we do on the side and whatnot. 

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Mike Wu

Oh cool, nice.

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CJ Gustafson

So having somebody who A believes in you and B is like, don't worry, I can step in and help you sometimes and you feel unsure of doing something that's unnatural, that means a lot.

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Mike Wu

That's awesome. Let's talk more about Mostly Metrics. I think this is the newsletter, the Substack that you've been writing for years, even prior to going full time on it. You mentioned earlier, you're just posting into the abyss for two years. Can you take us into that? Because in particular, I think there's a lot of either executives or soon to be founders of companies that listen to our podcast that know that they should be publishing, posting some content, putting some stuff out there, putting themselves out there. Or they're just job seekers, right? They should be putting content out there, but it's hard, especially in the early days when you have no traction. What was that abyss like?

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CJ Gustafson

I think everybody imagines this really mean person from middle school or high school, just waiting for you to post something so they can be like, you suck. The reality is nobody's waiting for you to post anything. You have to jump up and down, your hair on fire for anyone to pay attention to you. I hate to say it, but people are inherently selfish and they're only going to read something if it helps them in some way. But the writing was for me at first. It was a way to exercise this muscle of how to talk about businesses, business models and metrics cause I was learning so much. And it took on multiple evolutions where the initial product per se did not have product market fit, but I kept honing what I was writing about, I kept getting better at actually writing. And then I kind of figured out what gave me energy and also aligned with what my audience wanted to learn. 

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And I think the biggest mistake I made early on and why it didn't get traction is I was writing for like this fictional smart person that I thought was out there. And the real answer was just to write for like me five years ago or even me today Googling something 10 times and I can't find the satisfactory answer. There are way more people out there who are similar to that than like this imagined smart person that I had in my head.

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Mike Wu

Very, very cool. So if I were to try to distill that is you were one working on your own skill, your own writing muscles, and then really figuring out who you're writing, like the specific audience archetype, and you kind of figured that person out. Today you mentioned Mostly Metrics has 65,000 and more and growing every probably minute subscribers.  I don't know through Substack, I haven't written a newsletter before, but do you have a good sense of who all out there is, reading?

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah, about 25 % are actual CFOs, about 15 % I think are investors, at least 30 % work in finance departments or the office of the CFO, and then we have a lot of people who are interested in how to monetize their own businesses, whether they're a CEO, or they're a pricing expert, or they're responsible for making like the marketplace or SaaS company they work at just more efficient, they tune in. That also impacts how I think about what I write. And so like every time I sit down to write something or really before I hit post, because I want it to be shareable, right? Is this for the CJ 10 years ago who was working in an FP&A department trying to get smarter, who can share this with their boss to say, look how smart I am and signal that? Or is this for CJ, the CFO who would share it with his team to say, hey, we should really look at incorporating this into our monthly cadence? Or is it for the third bucket, the investor who wants to quote unquote, add value and wants to brush up on different terms or, different ways of looking at business who will forward it to the CFO at their portfolio companies saying we should incorporate this in the next board meeting? And by doing that, I'm solving for like the job to be done for all, for one of those audiences. Sometimes it's more than one and it allows for it to spread organically on its own.

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Mike Wu

I want to give people a taste, a sample of the type of stuff you write about. They're getting a feel for who you are, so I want to layer in like some of the topics. Is there a recent topic that you wrote about, a post that you could quickly give the TLDR. I think you have that even at the bottom of your posts usually.

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah.

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Mike Wu

I read the one about.customer success this morning, but there's many.

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah, we can, we can hit on that one. It's fresh in my memory. So I've always grappled with this question of how much you should invest in customer success. And so customer success is different than customer support at most companies. Customer support is like, I forgot my login or like, something's broken and I need help. Where customer success is like, how do I onboard this customer to be useful within the app and then also get value out of it so they want to buy more from us and expand over time and make sure that they don't churn so we get a higher customer lifetime value out of them. 

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And what I was riffing on in today's post is like you can do some simple sanity checks like almost like an acid test of okay, we're a $10 million ARR company. We expect to get a million dollars out of expansion dollars next year, which means our net dollar retention rate, which is a measure of how much a customer would technically grow if you just left them on their own year over year of 110%. So therefore, if I want to get that money back in a year and allow the annuity stream of, you know, future products or licenses that they buy to grow over time, maybe I should spend a million dollars or less on my customer success department. So it's just like squaring things in your head of this makes sense, this is rational of where I'm allocating resources. 

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And then I went on to discuss how there are all different types of customer success teams. Some are involved in onboarding. Some are just order takers. Some are really salespeople. And so they can come in all different shapes and sizes, which I'm sure you probably see even in the seat that you're in today.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, totally. We staff a lot of customer onboarding specialists. So, oftentimes supporting the true customer success managers who are expanding after landing the accounts. Those onboarding specialists are not really revenue generating, but they are part of the overall customer experience team. And I think you mentioned one thing to consider is maybe considering, when you think about the financials, their costs as a cost of goods sold.

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah. Yeah. And that's like another thing that we always discuss on mostly metrics of like you have different sections of your profit and loss statement. One of which is cost of goods sold, which leads you to your gross margin. And gross margin is an indicator of how scalable is this business. Basically how much money do I have left to run everything else after I serve my customer successfully. And the whole rub with customer success teams traditionally has been, well, do you put them in sales and marketing, which goes in OpEx, which makes you look better, or do you put them in cost of goods sold which hurts your gross margin, makes your company look not as scalable, but maybe academically honest because they don't actually sell something. So that's always been like a hotly debated topic.

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Mike Wu

Totally, and I think that's the reason why there's many different accounting methodologies. 

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CJ Gustafson

Oh yeah.

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Mike Wu

That's awesome. No, thanks for sharing that. I have to ask you too, remind me how often you publish in Mostly Metrics.

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CJ Gustafson

I publish Tuesday and Sunday, which are free posts with an advertisement on top. And then I have a paid post on Thursday. And then since I went full time on it, I started another newsletter, which is kind of like a more specialized version of Mostly Metrics, but just for operators at private equity backed portfolio companies and that's called Looking for Leverage.

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Mike Wu

Yeah. Looking for Leverage, I just subscribed to that one too. 

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CJ Gustafson

Thanks, man.

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Mike Wu

And that's interesting to us because we work with a lot of PE backed software companies, who I think look into Hireframe for cost savings, margin improvement and some like operational flexibility with head count. But yeah, tell us about Looking for Leverage. Mostly metrics is firing. you went full time and you're like you're publishing three, four times a week, I gotta publish even more now.

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CJ Gustafson

I know.

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Mike Wu

And for a very specific audience, I think that maybe there's some overlap, but maybe not with Mostly Metrics.

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CJ Gustafson

I'd been searching for another cut of my audience to serve. And at first I was gonna do it like, oh I'm really passionate about marketplace businesses. But then I'm like, nobody wakes up every morning, they're like, I'm a marketplace person. And then I was gonna do it for vertical software companies, and it was kind of the same thing. But what I did discover is that there was this audience of people who identified as being the C-suite at private equity-backed companies who had a very different set of constraints they had to operate under.

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In fact, I was at a conference, I was in a room with 42 other CFOs and COOs who worked at a specific prep for a specific private equity company's portfolio. I was like, they're talking about way different things than like a hyper scale VC growth company who's burning cash would talk about. I can't find anything useful online other than like written by investors. There has to be another voice here of the person who's actually operating the companies. So that's what I worked backwards towards. And it was pretty organic, the way that I think I approach writing about it, because it's kind of taking the same skill set and tone from Mostly Metrics, but like applying it to a somewhat tangential problem set.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, very cool. And by the way, we gotta touch on Run the Numbers. So Run the Numbers is your podcast that you do audio and video. It's on YouTube, please check it out. We'll link to it for sure. But yeah, briefly, you interview CFOs on this podcast, right?

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah. Well, I think like every newsletter, either die a newsletter, or you live long enough to become a podcast. And so I ended up coming up with a podcast too. And it was really just like an expansion of all these convos I was having with CFOs who were reading Mostly Metrics. And I'm like, I should just record some of these. And so I have to admit it was super hard to get like the first 50 yes, but like I'm approaching 200 episodes now, I think. And now, a lot of people actually asked to come on, which is nice because they're like, I find value in these conversations or I saw someone else cool that came on. I think that I'd be a good person to participate and talk about what I've learned. 

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And two out of the three episodes I do a week I'm interviewing like a world-class CFO. The CFOs that I have on are like, they were at companies that were crazy compared to what I did. So sometimes I think I do have a bit of the imposter syndrome, but like I'm like, okay, at least I did it. I got an exit. But like I talked to them about their decision-making frameworks, their favorite metrics, how they look at businesses, the human problems involved in scaling any company. And that's been like a really cool way to explore the world that I came from the angle of the CFO and sometimes I’ll have their investors on too to kind of fill in the gaps.

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Mike Wu

Very cool, yeah, so Run the Numbers, check that out. And so I want to highlight, is there anything else, by the way? Is there anything we're missing? Are those the three pillars to the media company?

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CJ Gustafson

Those are the three. And then in the background, I've started to get into some benchmarking because what's cool about having an audience now is I can survey them and ask some questions on things that they will find inherently useful to give back to them. But it's like the collective knowledge and insights of the group and then synthesizing that and giving it back to them in a report. So I started to put that as like the carrot behind the paid offering. And it's something that I've always been interested in. Because it's a lot of the benchmarking stuff of, like we said, how much should I invest in customer success? Well, I can poll 65,000 people on what they're doing and maybe that'll be a better answer than what I can come up with.

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Mike Wu

Yeah. Super valuable work that you're doing there with the benchmarking. it makes total sense with the audience and the media products you have out today. And so I want to highlight that you have this mix of things, like four things actually now. But probably you probably got a handful of good ideas that you're sleeping on right now. But I wanted to ask you, how do you do it? We have this podcast, What Worked, this is our second year doing it. And it's a lot of work to do just a podcast, but you're writing too. And particularly I want to ask you about the writing. Do you have certain systems or processes that help you publish high quality content, really high quality content, at a high volume too now?

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CJ Gustafson

I wish I had a real system, but I think it's more just like this lens that I see the world through. And I steal this from Ben Thompson, someone I look up to who writes Stratechery, who's kind of the first person to really write online at scale about business strategy. And he's like, at some point, you just kind of see the world and the news you consume and everything that's going on in businesses. And then it synthesized through this filter almost in your head of like, what could I write about here? Honestly though, I'm just following my curiosity. I think I put way too much pressure on myself at first to create something net new or a new formula or a new idea. It's like, just give your perspective and try to distill it down to something that other people can understand. And what people I think overestimate is like how much other people actually already know about something. And even if you do know about it, it's nice to hear a refresher on it or a different opinion. And so, I don't have a system per se for writing. It's more just a view. In terms of the hours, I'm definitely better at writing early in the morning or late at night. Like you can't get an intelligent thought out of me at 3.30 PM. Like there's no newsletter being written.

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Mike Wu

That's awesome. Yeah, I just look forward to continuing following all the content you're putting out. I do want to ask you in the name of the podcast, What Worked, you had a couple of things that you shared prior to us hitting record, compound effort. And also just like making sure that everyone at the company knows how the company makes money. Maybe can we start with that one? That one sounds simple, but could you explain what that means?

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah, it's something I'm really passionate about. Whenever somebody would start at a company or join my team, I would ask them, even in the interview process really, I'd say, hey, would it be helpful if I gave you like a one minute overview on how we make money? Even if they said no, I probably still say it. But I think that how a company monetizes impacts every other part of the org. 

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So to give you an example, the last company I worked at, we were a marketplace for aftermarket car parts. So we did over 80,000 transactions a day. Good chance you bring your car into a garage, you need new brake pads, they procure it through our site. And then we also had a SaaS component on top of it. And so I would walk people through the purchase pattern of how many people would buy something a day. Who would pay us in that transaction? It’s something that people just assume they know, but they might not. There could be all different components paying. It could be the person coming in to get their car fixed. It could be the garage. It could be the supplier. It could be the manufacturer. And so like these are examples of things that every company has something unique about how they deliver their services, who pays them. And then what's important also is how much you make on each transaction. So what's your gross profit on it? If you as a company are profitable at the end of the day, once you pay for all our salaries and how big the overall opportunity is for us to continue to do that. 

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And I found that people always have this sense of relief in knowing how it all works because they don't want to quote unquote ask a stupid question. And it also helps prime the pump for them to ask me questions if it's during the interview or someone who's working on the team and I get to know them better and how they think about things. And a lot of times they'll actually say something that makes me think about our own business model differently. So I always encourage people to explain how they make money to everyone whether they're i n engineering, finance, or product.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, that's a great lesson. And I think, you know, when, when you can get the whole company understanding, like the business model, for example, I think that's a really great insight because it sounds obvious, but when you work in a company and you, if you think about it, if you had to ask everyone, like, how does company make money, it'd be a hard question to answer for probably many people who don't think about that day to day. Cause I think about just their job, but if you can think about your job and then the bigger picture. I think you'll be much better at your job.

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CJ Gustafson

It also makes them feel like they're contributing to something bigger than themselves. Like the number of conversations I've had with the engineering team. And I'm like, that product you're working on, it makes this much money. They're like, what? Like I'm helping do that. Like it helps link their efforts to what everyone is rowing the boat towards.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, I like this one too. I think I'm going to use it because we staff people at different various companies and a lot of times our customers who are maybe the head of customer success or the CFO at the company has accountants from Hireframe. They're always asking us for tips. Hey, how do I work with this person? How do I keep them engaged? What's the best way to manage them? Overall, it's the same way you would manage anyone, no matter where they are, just, you know, regardless of their location. But this is a big one, cause oftentimes we're, we're hiring like a staff accountant or a customer onboarding specialist and they might be supporting a customer success manager who's supporting a senior CSM and then head of CX. And it's just, they're far removed from the executive leadership team who might be talking about the business model all the time. 

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And so we're like, Hey, don't forget during their onboarding, tell them about the business and how they fit into it and how they impact the results. And tell them what the results are that you guys are trying to drive. So that's a cool insight that you share of what worked for you.

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CJ Gustafson

It's even a challenge like the further you get. The further you get from the actual transaction, the more opaque it becomes on what's happening and how you're actually making money off something. And it impacts how you make the product because you want to make it easy to use. And I've even noticed people closest to the transaction sometimes don't understand. So funny story is we had a BDR once at a company and he was like, Hey, I really think I should be being paid more because my accounts brought in two million dollars this month. I'm like, dude, you don't know that we only make 1 % of that. And just not knowing how the system worked gave them a false level of confidence about what was going on. That's more of like a funny thing that happened, but like it's everywhere all over the org.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, totally. And it sounds like he was already good at his job, but he would probably be even better if he understood this piece. 

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah. Come back when you're doing 200 million a month.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, exactly. Very cool. The second piece here is like the compounding effort. Tell me about this, I think we're going to touch on something that's really close to my heart, but I want to hear it from you.

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CJ Gustafson

So yeah, well, I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. I think compound effort is the most glorious thing ever. It's like every day if you can, I think it was James Clear said like, get 1 % better, what that turns into. You just continue to stack small wins and you just got to start earlier and writing online was like the definition of compound effort for me. Like I've posted my timeline before. I think it took me almost two years to get to 400 subscribers. And then after that I broke through and went from 400 to 40,000 in the next two years. Now I'm on 65,000. But people assume everything's an overnight success story. But whenever you dig into someone's background, you see these cookie crumbs of the efforts that they put in and how it led them from one thing to the other. And so, especially in a game like a newsletter or a podcast, you gotta put yourself out there and you gotta continue to hone your craft. I'm a really big boxing fan and I love when they show not just the fight but like the footage of like someone grinding in the gym because you're like, oh, they're thinking through the rounds ahead of time and they're letting that effort from each training camp compound over time. That's very much how I think of any craft that I try to undertake.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, very cool, very insightful. I also do love those behind the scenes, whether it's boxing, leading up to the match or Hard Knocks or something like that. 

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CJ Gustafson

I love that stuff. I'm a sucker for it.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, thank you for sharing. I know we're short on time here, so I want to start wrapping up a little bit. I have a couple more questions, but AI, I have to ask about it. It's something that's top of mind for everyone, especially the CFOs that we work with here at Hireframe. But I saw that you recently posted about AI, of course because it's topical. But for CFOs or the office of the CFO, just what takes on AI do you have? Any advice for finance organizations, companies in general around AI?

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CJ Gustafson

Well, this kind of links to what we were talking about about compound effort. Everybody thinks they're behind when it comes to AI, but I did this survey on Mostly Metrics and it showed that nearly nobody has concrete use cases that they're using org wide. So if you can just start with one use case, like, oh, we're going to automate this part of our billing process, or we're going to do something around travel booking, those wins add up over time.

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I think that the two ways that AI is helpful if you look at the larger org are A, does this reduce headcount? So there's some pretty clear examples of that. You need less customer support people because a chat bot can answer here's your login. And then the other way is will this make the existing people more useful? And I think people overemphasize the will this cut down on headcount and what they under emphasize are the compounding wins you can get from like pulling someone who's maybe like a 4 out of 10 engineer up to like a 6 out of 10. It may sound small, but like that's a huge leap if you let their efforts compound over time when they come into work every day. So I've been really interested in ways to make existing employees more efficient. And it's kinda like this marriage of the people and the technology. A lot of people look at AI like, oh, it's gonna replace the people. It's like, no, how can the people harness it to be better at their jobs?

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Mike Wu

Love that. That's a great, great answer. That's how we're thinking about it here at Hireframe too. How can we couple AI and talent and just really shepherd into this new, I always think about it as an org chart. What does like the modern SaaS org chart look like? 

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CJ Gustafson

That's cool.

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Mike Wu

Yeah. No, thank you for sharing that. And last question for you CJ, when you look hard enough, there are some CFOs who have made the leap and become CEOs and started their own companies. You're one of them. I recently interviewed Julian Rowlands who did the same thing. He was a CFO and he started a company called Cashboard. Any advice, as I think there's a lot of CFOs who are thinking about this, sometimes probably there are many CFOs who think about it their entire career, but never make the leap. I’m not saying they made the right or wrong decision, but that happens probably too. Any advice for CFOs who might be thinking about starting their own company.

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CJ Gustafson

I think having domain expertise in anything makes you incredibly useful, especially with AI now. Like how do I stack things that I'm good at, that I'm interested in and uniquely qualified to opine on, to create like a one of one. And that's what I've tried to do with the media company I'm building. There aren't that many great resources out there for finance people, specifically in the tech world or finance people and C-suite leaders than private equity companies.

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And I think for anyone who's looking to start a company, start extremely small. And that was a mistake that I made at my first company that I tried to start in the tourism industry. I tried to launch it in every state at once, that was stupid. I should have went and niche down to the South of the US, then to Florida, and then to Tampa within Florida launching it. And I think the same goes for anything that you start, whether it's like an application for fintech companies to use or any really software you want to niche down to figure out that core use case and you gotta wake up every morning loving it. 

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This is something that I talked to James Currier, founding partner of NFX, a venture firm on my podcast. He's like, you gotta wake up every day loving the skateboard. You have to wake up every day wanting to solve that problem with the skateboard and being the best at that before you can become the convertible.  And I think a lot of people wanna start a company out there and they wanna be the Ferrari at first. But it's like you have to start solving something at like an extremely specific level to understand your customer need and then you can go from there.

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Mike Wu

Love that. That's very great sage advice from someone who's done it. CJ, thank you so much. This has been awesome. Could we just go through again where people can find you on the internet?

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CJ Gustafson

Yeah, you're a gracious host. Great questions. So just go to MostlyMetrics.com. That's the newsletter. Run the Numbers, It kind of sounds like Run DMC, Run the Numbers is on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and then Looking for Leverage, lookingforleverage.com is also on the interweb. But if you go to MostlyMetrics.com, I point to all of it.

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Mike Wu

Cool, and we'll link to it in the show notes. And yeah, I strongly encourage you guys to check out the content. It's super interesting. If you are an experienced finance professional operator, I think this will definitely resonate. And if you're new and you're just starting your career, I think this is a great place to get smart quickly on a bunch of business topics. Thank you, CJ. Thanks for coming on the pod.

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CJ Gustafson

Thanks man, appreciate it.

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