Live from Cleveland, Ohio, it's C-level game plans with host Norman Hood. Tony, welcome to the show. This morning I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and I noticed that you spent 7 years at JPMorgan. I've seen it before, but. And that you formed the private equity group with Chase's global private bank. So can you tell us what you learned from that experience that you still use today? Sure, the biggest part of that endeavor was working directly with business owners in the private bank. We generally Worked with individuals, not with corporations, but interestingly, we work with the individuals that own the corporations or companies. So you would be talking directly to business owners. And what I found out then and I find out every day now is business owners are often in a quandary. About where to go next, how to build value, what they're doing right, what they're doing wrong, and a lot of times it's, what are other people doing? That's, and you would think that somebody who's running a multi-million, 1020 $50 million dollar company would have that sorted out, but it's not always the case. OK, so the that information that you picked up from your experience and is that what actually caused you to create the maximum value program that helps business owners grow their business, or was it something else? No, that's exactly right, because what I would find is we would sit down with a business owner and sometimes even. Some family members who were involved in the business, and we would talk about things like, OK, what's bothering you? I always had a question, what's keeping you up at night? A lot of times what would happen is I would get answers that weren't quite the answer that to the core of what was bothering them. In other words, oh, I need to, I need to get my sales people to sell better, to generate more revenue. And what I often do is, I, I, the way I think about it is, ask questions like a 4 year old. A 4-year-old will ask you why, until they get to the heart of the problem. So you ask, why do you want to generate revenue so that our profits are bigger. Yeah, but why would, why do you want to do that? And what you end up with is I want my business to be more valuable. Let's, let's start there and let's focus on what makes a business more valuable and what makes your business more valuable, even more importantly. OK, can you give us a quick example of someone you've worked with either at Chase or more recently that struggle with a particular obstacle that MVP could help them overcome? Sure, in one case, what I was working with a manufacturing company and one of the things That they were dead set on was having the best and newest and most advanced machinery possible, and that for them was really overkill and a waste of capital. So what we would find is Gee, the machinery you've got works perfectly well for what you need, and the new machines that are coming in require not just the lease payments to have the machines there, new software, and retraining workers, and everything was working fine. So sometimes, it's leaving well enough alone, and just doing what you've already been doing better, sometimes it's, Revamping things, so you really have to look at where the value drivers are, and that is really on a case by case basis, there's no one size fits all. OK, so you're obviously creative. I've known you've created the MVP program from experience you had in the past and also I'm sure it's ongoing. But you also have another tool that you created called the star analysis. Can you explain what star is, how you use it in MVP, and how you actually came up with the idea for it? Yeah, being a former banker, we love acronyms. So STAR, STAR is really strategic advisory Review. And really what that comes down to is, I'm gonna use a word that I don't really love. But holistic overview of everything that's going on in a business and business owner's life. So, if there are, for example, if you think about it as a business org chart, OK, and which may include family members, sometimes there are sons and daughters and nieces and nephews working in the company, and overlay that with A a personal family tree, how does that affect things? And then it's asking the questions, what do you want? What do you want out of this? What are your passions? I was working with a company once that the owner and his son were co-owners, I guess, of the company. And all they cared about was race cars. They had a race car team, and really, the reason for the business was to fund their passion for race cars. And the owner said, I'd never sell the business. I don't want to sell it, because it's the, Pun intended, engine that lets me have this race car team with my son, and he said, I love that, I'm with my son all day doing this, and what I want is a more valuable business that gives me more ability to have a newer and better and faster and bigger race car team. Perfect. So I'm gonna switch gears a little bit, but instead of talking about creativity, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the lack of creativity. We're in the AI world, and sometimes AI and human experience can look pretty similar at first glance, but AI actually is really good at capacity for repetitive tasks, something that might take us all day. It could do 1000 times in a day, but when it comes to creativity. Humans are much better at creativity because they've done it from lived experience. In your world, when you're working with a client, when is your creativity more important than capacity when it comes to building value? So creativity over speed. Yeah, I will start this by saying speed in the wrong direction is pretty counterproductive. But I, I can think of an example where I was working with a company that manufactures footwear, for example, and they have their, the soles of their shoes literally made in China and looking at, at their cost structure and their supply chain. It wasn't evident from the financial statements what was going on there, but what happened was, the company at, and I can't remember the exact numbers, but if they made 100,000 soles, 50,000 pairs, then the, uh, the manufacturing facility in China would use one set of machinery, one set of molds, and, Churn out 50,000 or 100,000 of these things and ship them all at once, and what that was doing was making working capital pretty choppy, I guess is the right word. Once, once we got to a certain threshold of volume, now what was happening was the manufacturing facility in China agreed to, we're going to have. One set of machinery, fully devoted to you, 365 days a year, we don't have to change the molds to make somebody else's shoes next week, and we can ship. In a more steady stream, and what that did was it flattened out working capital, because don't forget, you have to pay your people every week. You don't just pay them when the money comes in or when. So it really enhanced cash flow, but even more, it enhanced or it reduced the risk associated with that cash flow because it made it less volatile. And that's something that only came out through numerous questions. Again, why is that? Why is that? Why is that? And I don't. I think AI is really capable of that. If they are, I'm not aware of it. Yeah, I haven't seen it. So we're gonna move forward here. We're gonna talk a little bit about metrics. So metrics obviously are just numbers and your system measures those metrics throughout the process. How do metrics actually enter into MVP? They have to be the right metrics and sometimes business owners will get bogged down in. KPIs, quite frankly, that I've never even heard of, and I've been doing this for 30-something years, and trying to measure, as my grandmother would have said, how many angels dance on the head of a pin. And it's really not, not to their benefit to get bogged down in this. Let's start with The basics, OK. Value is a function of cash flow and risk, and in your business, how do we monitor and increase cash flow while monitoring and reducing risk? So there are things involved there that different, I guess you'd call it KPIs are important in different. Businesses and again you have to understand what drives value in a particular business so that you can figure out what to measure. It's, it doesn't help you to measure something that's not, uh, not affecting one of those two things, cash flow and risk. OK, so I'm gonna try to put you in a box. Let's just assume that you. Got 5 seconds to just glance at the KPIs. OK. If you could only glance at 1 in 5 seconds, which one would you focus on? MB converting income into how it converts income into cash. In other words, how, how quickly do you collect cash from the revenue that you're reporting? OK, something like that. OK, so that's a good answer. So let's just take that. And let's Consider that you have a track record of what that's done in the past with a particular client like month 1, month 2, month 3. So you can plan for risks that might come up, but you still have to expect to manage them in real-time. So how do you do that? How do you plan for a risk based on past results, but stay in a position to manage it in real-time if something changes. Yeah, really, what you're talking about is flexibility and the ability to, it often revolves around having the right team members involved in. Addressing a certain risk and what I'm thinking of is a contract, OK, that you've been working under a contract for 2 years, let's say, and it's, it's coming due to be either renegotiated or whatever in 3 months. There's a big risky date right there. OK. Let's work on the terms of that contract, what that means for us going forward. What are the likely negotiated terms that we will face? In other words, and that can have a lot of things. I, I once was working with a company that it's an electric cogeneration facility, and they live and die by the price of natural gas because that's what spins their turbines and creates, in this case, electricity and steam that they then sell to customers. Makes sense. So that's it. Did a great job. Very insightful answers. Appreciate your participation. Hopefully we can get you to come back sometime. I'd love that anytime. You just let me know. All right, take care. All right, have a great day.