629 Jennifer Brazer:

We all have money stories, things we believe deep down, buried in our subconscious, about whether we deserve it, whether its cost is too high to accumulate in hard work, even whether money is the root of evil. These buried beliefs often stand in the way of entrepreneurial success – so what’s your money story? Is there something that’s keeping you from knowing your numbers?

MELINDA

I’m Melinda Wittstock and today on Wings of Inspired Business we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who helps entrepreneurs and business owners get control of their finances, overcome their money blocks, and know their numbers so they can succeed in business.

Jennifer Brazer is the Founder and CEO of Complete Controller, a leading national business services firm. She  believes that businesses and households alike should have access to excellent financial data to fuel their critical decisions.

Jennifer shares today how her company was on the cutting edge back when it was founded in 2007, the first-ever cloud based accounting company. Complete Controller has become the turnkey client accounting services (CAS) department for CPA firms across the country, allowing them to tap into single sign-on access to all of their client’s books and records, standardized managed account practices, and unlimited bookkeeping talent.

Jennifer will be here in just a minute and first…

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Jennifer Brazer has become known as the Queen of CAS – that’s C-A-S which stands for client accounting services. Possibly she’s also the queen of cash, because she helps entrepreneurs and business owners stay on top of their cash – how and when to deploy it, save it, leverage it – and understand their numbers so they can maximize their business success.

Jennifer founded her company, Complete Controller, back in 2007, and the cloud-based accounting business has since become the turnkey client accounting services (CAS) department for CPA firms across the country, allowing them to tap into single sign-on access to all of their client’s books and records, standardized managed account practices, and unlimited bookkeeping talent. She’s also the author of From Cubicle to Cloud, where she shares her own journey with entrepreneurs as well as all her financial methods and virtualized business model that has proven successful and allowed client accounting services to move from a loss leader to become an essential part of the firm, pumping revenue to myriad arteries.

Attributing her success to the support of willing advisers and mentors, Jennifer is always looking for ways to give back, empowering the small business community through financial literacy. An avid supporter of entrepreneurs, Jennifer has built an 83K+ social media following for Complete Controller, and she is a guest speaker to incubators, students, and associations. Her passion for women in business has fueled her membership in the National Association for Women Business Owners. She is one of 12 elite members serving on the ADP accountants’ national advisory board.

Today we talk about how the numbers of your business tell the story of your success, and why you must keep close watch on them to succeed – plus the money mindset issue that keeps many entrepreneurs from being on top of their cash flow, taxes, financial planning, team, or resource allocation and much more.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Jennifer Brazer.

Melinda Wittstock:

Jennifer, welcome to Wings.

Jennifer Brazer:

Thank you so much Melinda.

Melinda Wittstock:

We talk a lot on this podcast about a lot of entrepreneurs and female founders sometimes, not knowing their numbers. They’re creating great products and services but it’s pretty difficult to grow a business without knowing your numbers. What are some of the numbers along the way that you’ve seen, that really hold women back in business?

Jennifer Brazer:

I mean, not just women, all entrepreneurs are challenged by not knowing their numbers, right? That is just … you’re a great chef, you’re a great tradesman, and so you decide to go off on your own and you start this business and then that becomes your stumbling block. So, my business was built on bringing that financial literacy, that empowerment to entrepreneurs and small businesses, but with regard to women in particular, I find that women have a hard time asking those direct questions about what’s going on and sometimes, I’ll see that they want to shy away from … they call it confrontation. What I call it as fact gathering, let me get in there and find out what all the facts are so that you and I can both come to the same conclusion together, that this is either working or it’s not working or something needs to change, rather than this confrontation, where I need to tell you where I think that you’re failing or I think you’re wrong, or where I’m unhappy.

Then, we have to tackle it from this angle of now you’re trying to dig your way out of a hole with me. So both of those things. They’re not necessarily looking and gathering the facts and that happens with the numbers, it happens with monitoring the KPIs of their employees. We’ve got these beautiful guts as women, I think it’s an evolutionary thing. It must serve us in motherhood, it must serve us in the tribe and we do fly by gut, a lot and I think that it is to our advantage that we listen to that. At the same time, when we’re dealing with employees, when we’re dealing with customers, data is so important and I want to remind the women out there that if you know your data, there is power in that.

You can take those numbers, you can take those KPIs, that information and you can use it to leverage your business the way that you want it to be. You can turn it into what it should be, rather than what it is now. You can’t do that if you don’t know what it is now.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, so it’s intuition backed by data, I find the numbers tell the story and perhaps there’s just a fear there, like it’s sort of a thing that, when people don’t open the bill because they sort of think some deep, subconscious level, it’ll go away if they don’t open it but it just gets bigger.

Jennifer Brazer:

When you talk about fear, it’s so true. If I don’t know, it’s not going to hurt me, right? If I’m failing, I don’t want to know because then what am I ever going to do? The truth is, you do want to know. You want to know, if you’re failing. You want to know if a certain area of your business is sucking up all of your capital. You want to know if somebody is not performing … somebody that you’re quite frankly, probably paying for and even if not in dollars, in time or training or mentorship. So you really … as an entrepreneur, you have to be a little bit selfish about your resources. The way to do that is to know what those resources are, to measure that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, this gets into a whole area where people hire people to do things as opposed to hire them to deliver results and having clarity about what those results are going to be and having a way to measure performance against that. It seems so logical when it’s just said out like that, but I know with so many women that I’ve mentored over the years and just frankly from my own experience too, some of the things that I’ve had to learn along the way in terms of hiring and really being very careful about your resource allocation, hiring the right people at the right time, all of that. I mean, it’s a big topic but so vital, so vital because it’s not enough just to have a great product or service.

Jennifer Brazer:

It truly is. You’re leveraging human resources and the way that you leverage them, and it’s really neat, actually, in this current market because we’ve come out of this depression but that resulted in some very quick innovations and very nimble change in the areas of technology and workspace and the way that companies are handling their employees and the way that companies are handling their gig workforce and their 1099 workforce. I think that it’s opened up some great opportunities for workers as well as for entrepreneurs, and an entrepreneur, to be able to recognize that and understand the power of being able to hire someone to accomplish something, to meet a particular goal, and then to learn how to measure against that goal is so critical because quite frankly, human resources … I mean, I know for me, it eats up a lot of the budget, right?

I think that most can say that. So, if it’s going to be a major portion of my budget, I want to make sure that it’s as efficient as possible. I want to make sure that the quality is where I want it to be for my price point and then, I want to make sure that I’m getting out of them, everything I possibly can and at the very least my expectation level. You can’t know that unless you set the bar and I talk about it in my new book, From Cubicle To Cloud. There is a whole section called killer KPIs where I break down the different departments in my company and I’ve broken it down by the KPIs that I measure, as a CEO. Even if your company is small, getting in the habit of saying, “What do I really want to get out of this person? What are my goals for them?”

It is so powerful, because when you communicate those goals, either one, they’re going to … just their eyes will glaze over and they’re like, “No way I can’t do it. I’m out of here,” or they’re allergic to hard work or they say, “Thank you. Now, I have something to work toward.” By dangling the carrot of, “Wow, if you exceed these goals, maybe there’s a bonus, maybe there’s some other type of recognition,” then you are causing them to take personal responsibility for not only meeting the goal, but for exceeding and for growing your company and making things better for you because that advances their career.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. So, so true. So Jennifer, tell me what was the spark that led you to launch the Complete Controller?

Jennifer Brazer:

Well, it’s interesting because when I launched the company, my kids were all teenagers. So here, I am, an outsourced controller. Getting in my car every day and driving to various different clients. I had a handful of them at the time. I’m driving out there and I’m working in their office, and then I’m getting back in my car and I’m driving home. I often, and I think a lot of you are going to relate to this, found myself in that guilt juggernaut between the client and the kids, between the household and the career. Every time I was investing all of my time and energy into making sure those clients were satisfied, making sure that everything was just tip top that I had to … if I had to stay late, I would. I would get the job done. I was sacrificing the other side, which was the kids in the household.

Every time I stayed home because I had a sick kiddo or I didn’t finish a project because I wanted to go to a school play or participate in a group event with my kids, then my career was suffering. By the way, I wasn’t making money because I was stuck with this hours for dollars type of model. So when one of my clients came to me and said, “Listen, I am managing self-storage units all across the nation. I am paying through the nose to have a CPA, do the bookkeeping after the fact, the reports I’m getting are old. I have nothing to show my client at meetings. I’m really dropping the ball here and the bill is huge because I get one lump sum when they finally get to doing the work, and it’s not manageable for my budget.”

I said, “If I could find a way to do bookkeeping for all of your facilities, even though I fully recognize summer in Florida, summer in Michigan and you can’t afford to fly me out there, will you bring them to me?” He promised that at the right price point, he would do that. That was all I needed. That was my spark and I told you the first part because I think that you have to be fueled by something. You have to have some unrest, some discomfort, right? Then when opportunity knocks, you’re just ready to open the door. For me, that was my opportunity knocking. I recognize it immediately. I’m thinking, “Oh, my goodness, this guy has at least 20 clients in his portfolio. If he’s promising to bring them over and bake my costs into his contract and I’m able to serve them, I literally do not have to ever get in my car again.”

So I went about finding that solution and this was 15 years ago, way before the cloud. We put together, invested in an old legacy, terminal services environment. I hired and trained a couple of bookkeepers and we made it happen. He was thrilled and I was thrilled, and I slowly started to bring other clients to that solution and that was our start right there in my home.

Melinda Wittstock:

What a wonderful story, because I love this whole idea of this single sign on access to all the books and records. I imagine that that is becoming much more standardized now than it was in 2007, when you launched. I mean, this is just really the way it works? I know, for my company, the way I work with our accounting firm, it’s exactly like that. Everything is in the cloud and whatnot but back then, talk to me about the innovation of that. Were you the only one doing it or were there other people doing it?

Jennifer Brazer:

It was very cutting edge. There were a few people in my competitive research that were starting to do it. There’s this thing in your head where you’re like, “Am I doing the right thing or am I crazy, because if no one else is doing it,” but I guess that’s when the gut comes in and you just have to really listen to it. I knew that it worked for me, right? So I kept moving forward and no, there were not a lot of people doing it. I’m actually one of the leaders in this virtual accounting genre. Now, here we are 15 years later and you’re right, everyone is in the cloud and everyone whose anyone is starting their virtual accounting department within their CPA firm or going virtual with their accounting services.

I think it’s great. They’re all at different levels. Of course, we still provide that, but the whole idea back then, we have like people doing QuickBooks on their desktop computer and then QuickBooks had some options where you could remote in, but then you couldn’t see their source documents, so how are they supposed to get those over to you?

Melinda Wittstock:

God, I remember that. I remember, like business way back. Yeah, it was before QuickBooks Online. Yeah.

Jennifer Brazer:

Yes, before QuickBooks Online, before document sharing. So we didn’t have Box back then. We didn’t have a way to get documents back and forth securely, before MS 365. So you’re dealing with just regular email, so you have to be so careful about what gets sent via email and what is received via email and basically teaching the client and it’s so fun to kind of throwback to those days, because we really were answering a critical complaint in the market, which was that my accountant can’t get access to my books and even if I can allow them access to the books, I can’t work alongside of them because while they’re in the books, changing the books, I can’t be in there as well.

Then, they also can’t get access to my records. You have to have a source document for every transaction on those books. That’s just how it is, in our industry and for us not to be able to look at those records, it was really crippling. So, figuring that out and then figuring out how to manage payables and this is long before bill.com was launched, and figuring out how to interface with their online banking and deal with their sensitive financial information. So it was a huge curve, but it was something that needed to happen and somebody had to start somewhere and I definitely wasn’t afraid to be on that cutting edge. If it meant that I could start deciding for my own life, what it was going to look like?

I do remember a time in my business, and I think that people will relate here too, where I had started the business and sure enough, my client was true to his word, he brought over a bunch of clients and was doing pretty well, but I still had a few clients that I was driving to go serve because I had that relationship with them, and I was doing that and quite frankly, it was bread and butter, right? It’s money in my pocket. There was a time when I was driving out to visit one of these clients and a fire drill hit on the Complete Controller’s side. It was a tech thing that I could have fixed very easily if I was sitting in front of my computer, but where was I? I was in the car, on the way to an appointment, where I had promised someone my dedicated time for the next couple of hours.

They were paying me for it, I couldn’t very well just say, “Oh, hold on, while I go fix this.” I realized at that moment that I needed to decide, is Complete Controller going to be my full time, bread and butter? Is that going to be where I focus my energy or am I going to continue to try to straddle these two horses and where are my priorities? I call it taking the leap where you finally decide that you’re just going to go for it, whether it’s in the form of investing your savings in your company, going out and finding those investors, quitting the day job or quitting the part time night job. Whatever it is that you’ve been doing to get you afloat and really making that my core focus. When I did that everything started to take off.

Melinda Wittstock:

How did it feel being a pioneer? I mean, you mentioned a little bit that you look around, you see no one else is doing it, and that’s the most amazing time for an entrepreneur, but it’s also tricky on the timing because you can be bleeding edge, as opposed to cutting edge. How are you feeling around that time that you were going off, trusting your gut, but like, “Oh my God, I’m the only one doing this?”

Jennifer Brazer:

Well, it was a little scary, needless to say. It’s also difficult to explain it to other people when no one else is doing it because nobody has spent the dollars and the time to educate the market. So you find yourself in the situation where you’re not just presenting this great new idea, but you’re having to educate and break down barriers that you wouldn’t have otherwise had to do with, let’s say IBM was already doing it or Xerox was already doing it back then, right? The big names were saying, “Hey, this is something that’s safe. This is something that’s great. You should be doing it.” Now, here I am on this little island and it’s working for me, but I really have to develop great marketing.

I have to develop a way to communicate the value and communicate that I understand the risks, and that I understand the barriers and overcome them in my marketing materials. So, I mean, as it is, with most entrepreneurs, you have to be so much more than just good at what you do. So I had to be better than just an accountant. I had to be better than an accountant that had processes. I had to be better than someone who had the guts to virtualize it. I needed to also know how to market it. Then, eventually to sell it and I think that that’s the scary part is when you go to get out there and talk about it and people just they’re not getting it, right? For me, I realized at that point that I needed other talent to actually sell it because I could talk about my business all day long with somebody, but actually going through that sales process that was not my forte.

I think it’s really important as an entrepreneur, that you find your weaknesses and you recognize them, and you fill the gaps, right, because at first, you have to wear all the hats but the first one to take off is that one, that is hindering you from moving forward. So I could do the marketing but I couldn’t necessarily do the sales. I just wasn’t that person that could do the cold calling. I wasn’t that person that could do the follow up. I always felt like I was annoying someone. It’s the introvert side of me that came out and just kind of put out its horns. So, hired to fill that gap and best thing I ever did. It really started to roll forward at that point in time and take an upwards trajectory.

Until you start to see that trajectory, until you see that traction, it’s a scary place to be. You really are going on your gut, but let me say the thing that saved me was my mentorship. The women out there that I was able to tap into and float ideas by, and I knew that they would tell me the truth. I think that that’s ever so important and I don’t think you have to pay for them. I don’t think you have to pay for business coaching necessarily. I mean, as you develop, certainly that can be a tool in your toolbox but my mentors were … I had a woman that had worked in the telecom industry forever. She was just the sage executive, and I would throw my marketing ideas at her. I would throw the idea … whatever was popping up and she really would let me have it.

She was the one that pointed out, “Hey, listen, I don’t care if you have the glossiest flyer on the face of the earth. If you’re not wanting to get out there and sell it, girl, it’s not going to happen. So how are you going to fix it?” Another one of my mentors was from Coca Cola and she said, “You know, Jennifer, you know what makes Coca Cola what it is, is that every single time someone opens one of our products, they get the exact same result. They get what they were expecting to get. It is standardized.” She was the one who really helped me with, if you don’t standardize this thing, you’re never going to grow, right, because you can’t grow something that is completely unique and customized for every single client.

So you have to make sure the clients feel that boutique feel, that unique customization, you need to standardize all of your internal processes. These mentors got me … they bridged that gap, that slight lack of confidence those times and I was like, “What am I doing, right?” They were the voice of reason.

Melinda Wittstock:

Mentorship is everything. I see so many entrepreneurs trying to do it all on their own, and why reinvent the wheel when the wheel is already there and can be leveraged. I found in my own businesses, I mean, the same thing that when I really invested in coaching, the right coach at the right time, or mastermind groups, or retreats or whatever, that’s where I had my most growth because women especially, we’re really good at helping each other. We’re all stronger when we do it and also from a place of abundance, not really a competition. We can all lift each other, which is actually why I launched this podcast. It’s such an important point that you raise and also about the systems.

Once you perfect something yourself, it can be SOP’d and you can have someone else do it for a fraction of … the value of your own time.

Jennifer Brazer:

That’s right. That’s right.

Melinda Wittstock:

Really, critically at the scale.

Jennifer Brazer:

That delegation is so critical.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, exactly. Well, it’s the other thing that I find that we fall into this trap as women, thinking that we have to do it all or not being good at delegating.

Jennifer Brazer:

Right.

Melinda Wittstock:

Do you find some of your clients, especially with the finances? Is it like a little bit of a tussle to let them … like to get them into the mode where they kind of let go a little bit and enable you to really step in and work your magic?

Jennifer Brazer:

It’s interesting, because it’s all across the board with the finances. Some them are literally throwing it at us, right, saying, “Please take this.”

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s like, “I don’t want to deal with this, you deal with it.” Yeah.

Jennifer Brazer:

Yes, I have no idea what I’m doing or it’s wasting all of my time and I get it, right? You don’t want to work all day in your business and then come home and do your bookkeeping. That’s no fun. So we definitely solve a pain point in the market, but I think as regard to delegating, man … and I see this with women as well. I think it comes back to, one of the original things that I said at the beginning of the podcast, where we’re talking about fact gathering and KPIs. So women will tend, in my experience, to focus on the relationship. I like working with this person. This person is fulfilling my needs. This person is my muse, this person makes me feel good or right or I don’t want to hurt their feelings or they have a lot of stuff going on in their life.

I don’t need to be another problem for them. We just take on this kind of emotional relationship and I’m not saying don’t care. I’m saying care and look at the facts, because the facts will tell you the truth. So no matter how nice they are or how much you connect, or how much the chemistry is there, or in some cases, and I sit a lot with my clients, they held you hostage, where they have certain information and because there isn’t an SOP, and there isn’t a standardized mode of practice, there’s this one person who knows how to do it. If you tried to get rid of them, everything is going to fall apart, right? So, with the delegating, I think it’s so important for you to say, “Hey, here’s your role, here’s your scope of work, okay? This is what I’m hiring you for. This is what I imagine it’s going to look like.” It might evolve. We need to be nimble.

Sometimes we pick up multiple hats, sometimes we cross train. We’re going to have fun. We’re going to see what your assets are. We’re going to play around. Hopefully it works out, but this is the role that I’m hiring you for. Okay? Then here are my set goals for you. This is how you’re going to show me that you’re succeeding in this role. So let’s say it’s marketing, so okay I’m going to hire you in for … let’s say, you are my social media manager. So what am I looking for from social media? You just really have to set the bar. You have to say, “Okay, I want to see, a 10% increase in my traffic over this period of time, period over period. I want to see greater interaction. I want to see posts that feed back to other information that I’m disseminating, from my company based on a topic calendar.

I want you to create a topic calendar that is intuitive and that aligns with other topics that are being discussed in the industry. These types of things, and then you want to measure back. Is it increasing by 10%? Is there higher engagement? What is that engagement look like? Then, you want to hone down into the details. When you’re looking at the numbers, with somebody, sitting right there beside you, it doesn’t matter how nice they are or how much they know that you don’t know. If they can’t reach those numbers, it’s undeniable. The two of you look at it together and they did not reach their numbers. Of course, you ask them why. Is there a training that I can provide for you? Is there better support? Is there something that we’re missing. If they don’t know them, perhaps they’re not right for the job or if they’re constantly just not meeting their KPIs, let them go.

Let them go find that place in the world where they’re bringing value, and find that person for yourself. Don’t get so hooked on the relationship or wearing the cape and being the hero. Don’t get hooked on that. Let them move on and find that person that is going to fit into your team so perfectly. Man, when you’ve got them, you’ve got them. I mean, for those of us that have found those team members and were like, “Oh, my goodness, what would I ever do without this person because they’re just so amazing. They constantly surprised me. They always have great input,” whatever it might be, right? Loyal, trustworthy. So find that, don’t settle for less than that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, that’s such, such good advice. So, what were some of the challenges you faced in building your company? I mean, things now that you look back and say, “Oh, God, how could I have not have known that,” but that you had to work through yourself?

Jennifer Brazer:

Well, one of them is delegation, because of course, I can do everything better than everybody else, right? That’s what your brain tells you or mine does anyway. Then I learned that actually, if I let other people do it … and I just measure that they’re doing it well, they come up with new ideas, they come up with better ways to do it and now, next thing I know, they’re surpassing me. So really, that delegation was a very big deal for me. Then the other side of it for me was the bootstrapping. So I chose the bootstrapping path, some people will choose to have investors in their company. I chose not to have investors and to try to stay away from debt in as much as possible.

So I built my company by reinvesting the equity and holding on to it for myself. It was difficult at times, and there were times when I could have leveraged funding and made life easier. In the end though, even though I had those thoughts of, “Man, I should just bring somebody in. I should just go get the loan.” In the end, I’m so glad that I bootstrapped even though, there were times when I’m like crying in my living room, thinking it’s never going to get better than this. What am I doing? I’m maxed out in terms of my time and I’m not going to be able to make any more money, like it’s not growing. What’s happening? I think it’s when you get to those desperate moments that you then grow, you go through this expanse of growth after that. That’s what I’ve always found.

So in the bootstrapping, that’s always what happens is you invest, invest, invest and then you invest time, invest your own money and then, you get to a point and things are good, and you experience growth and then, you kind of plateau and you’ll hit these times when it’s like, “Man, I just bought this huge system and now, here we are six months later and it’s overwhelmed, and I need a whole nother system.” Remember, Legacy Systems that weren’t expandable, like the Cloud. You have to like, drop $20,000 on a brand new system, just completely unexpected. I’ve had to do that and then, there goes the money that’s in the coffers or investing in staffing, and trying to find staffing, and trying to train them and trying to make sure that they’re doing a good job.

So, just knowing like now, today, looking back, I’m like, “I wish I had known that in all those moments where I felt like I had plateaued, like there was nowhere to go from here that I didn’t know what I didn’t know and I was stuck, that the answers were going to come. That as long as I stayed open, and I persevered and I was willing to innovate, those answers would come and the growth would begin again. That there’s a cycle in every business and businesses can’t just constantly grow,” because if they constantly grow, then you have a loss of quality that you have to deal with and eventually, you may internally decide to start tamping down your own growth. So let your business cycle. Let yourself go through those moments, where you’re a little bit slimmer or things aren’t playing out the way that you think that they should, because that’s when you’re going to learn your biggest lessons.

The reason I mentioned bootstrapping is because some of my biggest lessons came from the value of each dollar that I spent, I find that people who bring in investment capital or bring in loans, they tend to spend that money a little bit more loosely than people who are bootstrapping it. People who bootstrap have this mentality of I am going to spend this dollar, and when I spend this dollar, how many dollars am I going to get back? It is a true cost value analysis and they are very strict about it, because it’s their own money and because there’s a limited supply of it. So just something to consider when you decide how you want to fund your business. I know that there are a lot of businesses that are out there. Now, they go out for investment funding.

They hire a CEO at whatever rate that CEO is, away from the last company that that CEO maybe did well or did not do well with. Now, they’re running your company and who knows how it plays, but usually that comes with a high price tag, and that person is experienced with a large budget. So, bootstrapping works for me. It might not work for everybody, but regardless of your funding, I want you to really take the time as you spend a dollar and ask yourself, how many dollars is this going to make me back? It’s hard to do when you’re dealing with things like administrative costs? I don’t know how many dollars is it going to make you back, right? Well, is it going to give you some peace of mind? Is it going to mitigate some risk?

What are we looking at here for this dollar and negotiate heavily. Don’t make any purchases without doing your research and negotiating heavily. Never buy the first thing that you see online. Always dig in and always ask for a price cut, even if it seems like it’s a service like mine, that’s a SaaS where, “Hey, there’s a menu and you get to pick and that’s all you got,” right? There’s no room for negotiation. You should always ask because your dollar is your power.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so interesting. I’m in the tech space, so a lot of my companies necessarily needed to bring in investment, through my podcasting app and whatnot. I see women tending to get either not funded and having to bootstrap or getting funded at lower valuations, lower sums of money, and necessarily having to be much more on top of the spend. I see a lot of other companies in Silicon Valley get huge sums of money and they get the whole like location with the atrium, blow it all on parties, all that kind of stuff.

Jennifer Brazer:

Right.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s a really interesting mindset, where women almost just by virtue of the fact that we get only still 20 years on 2% of the available venture capital, allocated to companies that are qualified, like could become billion dollar companies, right? They qualify for venture funding in that sense, still only 2% of that money. So it forces female founders in the tech space. These highly scalable technology companies, to be very frugal. We get more out of each dollar, which is great but then we also just don’t get the kind of money to seize market super-fast either.

Jennifer Brazer:

Right, right, and I think that there’s this great balance and you can strike it, where you prove the concept and you may have the definitely less investor funding or have to bootstrap it and find yourself in this position, but when you prove the concept, you are going to have a higher level of profitability. So then when you go in for growth funding, and you blow the socks off of the market, you already have developed a process that is profitable.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes, yeah.

Jennifer Brazer:

So now … yeah, so now your bottom line, your capre exceeds everyone else. That’s where I want women to go with it is, “Hey, you got to deal with the cards you were dealt,” right? I mean, it’s just embarrassing that women are not getting the same venture capital as men in the industry today. Are you kidding me? I mean-

Melinda Wittstock:

I know it’s crazy, 20 years on, it’s the same percentage.

Jennifer Brazer:

Yeah, it’s ridiculous and really, we have so much more to offer, not necessarily male versus female but just that we have these new ideas in the market, we’re such innovators. I find that women more quickly will see an opportunity to go in a different direction, and follow that and play with it and sandbox it and make it happen so much more quickly. I don’t know if the guys are just busy playing golf or if they’re just kind of stuck in that kind of rigid, this is what the business plan is, I don’t know. We are so nimble and so capable of really spreading into any market. That’s why women need to invest in women, because we see it, we know it. Although, I do think that there are areas where we can improve and I keep bringing it back to fact gathering.

Women are not necessarily data driven. In the tech industry, it’s different but even at that smaller level as entrepreneurs, really know your data. You need to understand the finances of your company. You need to understand what makes it tick, where every single dollar is going, where you are making your money, where you’re bleeding money. Do not be afraid to make the tough decisions early and fast. To change direction. It’s okay. The great thing about not having all those investors is there’s no one you have to be accountable to except for yourself. Now, you have the freedom to do whatever it is that you want. That was one of my questions when I started my company is okay, I am starting my own company. I am going to do this thing.

So what do I want it to look like if it fulfills all of my dreams? One of my dreams was that I get paid in advance for the services because I was so sick and tired of accountants having to chase clients for collections. It’s just ridiculous. How many at that kind of client accounting services, that bookkeeping level were just treated horribly and those are really the people who could least afford to have to chase their money but they would be made to do so by their clients and so long before SaaS was really a thing, I decided to put it into a fixed subscription model and serve it up on the technology and make it more of that type of focus so that they would be used to and okay with paying it up front and I would make sure that I paid my staff in the next period so that I was always paying them with the money that I had been paid for those very services.

That’s what I wanted to do so I did it. So model the company anyway you want to and model it so that you have a greatest chance of profitability and watch those dollars.

Melinda Wittstock:

Absolutely. So, you revealed all your secrets in From Cubicle to Cloud and sometimes that can be a scary thing, right, because these are your sort of trade secrets but there you are out with them, and you’ve got this massive social media following and what not. How did that impact your business?

Jennifer Brazer:

Well, I mean, obviously, when you’re starting, don’t tell anybody what you’re doing and then you have to start getting the word out there but they only get to know, how you market it. They do not get to know the internal workings and for so long, I held those secrets really tight. Then, in writing From Cubicle to Cloud, I had really reached a point in my career, at least with Complete Controller where I was ready to give back to the community. I’m ready to tell other accountants and entrepreneurs how I did it, to empower them, because nothing that they do or that they learn from what I’m doing is going to … the pie is big enough for everyone, right? It’s not going to stop my growth trajectory. In fact, I found that after writing From Cubicle to Cloud, although all of the concepts are still very valid, some of the tools have changed, right, because you’re constantly innovating.

There is a part of me that was like, “Okay, I’m doing it. I’m just going to put it all out there.” I don’t know if this is a woman thing or an author thing but there’s also that thing where, how are people going to judge me based on the way that I did it or the decisions that I’ve made or the strategies I’ve employed and you just got to let go of it. You just have to throw it out there and say, “Hey, this is how I did it.” Maybe it’s right, maybe it’s wrong. Yeah, different strokes for different folks but this is how I did it, and in an effort to help the accounting industry and in an effort to help entrepreneurs that maybe aren’t so tech savvy and are a bit afraid of that virtualization that is happening in the market today, that going to the cloud, that not being able to set eyes on their staff on a daily, how do you measure staff that you can’t see, how do you train them and mentor them, right?

How do you serve clients that you’ve never met. Those types of things are what I talk about in the book and it was a really good process for me to put it all down on paper and then, share some of my ugly moments too and bootstrap boogie where I talk about those plateaus and I talk about what caused them and how I got through them and how they made me stronger. Yeah, now, it’s out there and I’m always willing to share, I mean, I’ve always been in the mentorship because that’s what saved me. So, I want others to see what I did and I want them to ask me for advice and feel empowered with that, just like what you’re doing Melinda.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s wonderful. So, I could talk to you a lot longer, of course but thank you so much for sharing all these insights. It’s so important for women to hear, I want to make sure that people know where to find you and work with you.

Jennifer Brazer:

Yes, absolutely. Well, From Cubicle to Cloud is available anywhere books are sold so you can go Amazon or Barnes & Noble, whatever you want and you can find me at jenniferbrazer.com and if you need bookkeeping and you want to stay on top of those numbers, you can find Complete Controller at completecontroller.com so please feel free to reach out.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wonderful. Well, thank you so very much for putting your Wings on today and flying with us.

Jennifer Brazer:

Thank you, Melinda.