Zero To A Hundred – Episode 43: Scaling Beyond Scarcity: How To Unlock Cash Flow And Growth With Scott Peper

Accelerators! 🚀

What if your biggest financial hurdle wasn’t your balance sheet—but your mindset? This week, we sit down with Scott Peper, co-founder and CEO of Mobilization Funding and author of The Big Book of Cash Flow, to talk about why entrepreneurs fail to scale, how to stop operating in scarcity, and the role of growth lending in business success. Scott unpacks how his firm helps contractors, manufacturers, and small business owners capitalize on golden opportunities—even when banks say no. This one is all about mindset, money, and making better financial decisions.

What’s on the Menu:

💸 Breaking out of the scarcity mindset that keeps entrepreneurs stuck

📊 The difference between cash flow lending vs. traditional bank lending

🔑 Financial red flags, how to avoid lending traps, and clean up messy money mistakes

Why Tune In?

Scott’s real talk on financial missteps, trust, ego, and cash flow clarity hits hard. Whether you’re trying to scale or survive, this episode will give you tools to take back control and run smarter.

💬 🗣️ Gem from Scott:

“You’re not that special. Every entrepreneur’s been there. The power is in asking for help—and acting on the right advice.”

📚 Check out The Big Book of Cash Flow and download his free cash flow tools at mobilizationfunding.com

Subscribe now and let’s take your business from zero to a hundred 💥

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Scaling Beyond Scarcity: How To Unlock Cash Flow And Growth With Scott Peper

I am happy to introduce our guest, Scott Peper, who is the Cofounder and CEO of Mobilization Funding. They provide short-term funding solutions for manufacturers, contractors and small business owners. He is also the author of The Big Book of Cash Flow, which is a resource aimed at helping business owners understand how to put together the right financials for their business and also avoid the pitfalls the business owners make that have a massive impact on their businesses.

The topics that we’re going to cover, and I want you guys to read on because he’s awesome on the show. He has his own podcast and just a brilliant guy. We’re going to talk about the scarcity mindset and what that could mean for your business. Also, growth lending and how to use it to your business’s advantage, financial management and decision making, and making sure that you have all the information that is required. Also, what numbers that you need to know as a business owner at the drop of a hat when operating a successful business.

For those of you who do not know me, my name is Jarrod Guy Randolph, I’m the Founder of BoxFi. We are the nation’s leading payment consultant providing business growth solutions through payment processing. I am ecstatic to share the network that I have built over my years of entrepreneurial journey to help you grow your business and become more profitable. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s accelerate together.

Scott, thank you for joining us on the show.

Jarrod, how you doing? It’s good seeing you.

I’m doing very good. We’re excited to have you on because we’re going to talk about the unique stance that you take in lending. You work with a lot of contractors and we have a lot of our audience or actual contractors. We’re going to learn a lot from you. Before we dive in, are there any disasters within the last month that you’ve had to clean up that you’d like to share some experiences or stories?

Yeah, I can give you one. It actually just happened. It’s a fresh one. Enough details off so we keep the professionalism of the person intact because I’m sure they’ll see this. We had a guy who runs a great business, big trade, second generation. He had some unfortunate circumstances where he took over the business early in his life, probably before he was even ready, but did well. I always go from like in a mindset standpoint. He always operated from that same scarcity place of, “I don’t know if I’m going to be good enough. I’ve got to win on price. I’ll lose.”

At the same time, he also was aggressive enough to know from an abundance perspective that he was good enough to bid the jobs and win them. He would fall back into that little scarcity mindset once he would get into a problem on the job. Unfortunately, that got him stuck in some trouble. He then wasn’t truthful to himself and others, multiple lenders, us being one of them. Unfortunately, it’s put him in a real pickle.

His senior lender really put the screws to him. They were a private credit, almost a bank. They bought the bank debt he had and they just hammered him to submission. Despite numerous folks, us being one of them, strategic advisors of his, just advising him to stop communicating with them, giving them these information, they nailed the man and he’s on the brink of bankruptcy at this point.

It’s really unfortunate because he had a good business, he had a lot going on and it was one of those situations where you’re just not listening to the advice you’re being given by your own strategic advisor. I wasn’t one of them. I had a voice. He asked my opinion and I shared the same opinion as the strategic advisors, but he chose not to. Unfortunately, I’m watching him now really get hurt.

Trust And Transparency With Lenders

You actually said something interesting, the information that he provided for that lender. When is a good time to provide information when you’re in a situation like that? When is not a good time? What do you give? What do you not give? Sometimes, people overshare and I think that’s really critical when you’re looking in underwriting standpoint for a loan. How do you balance that?

In the underwriting perspective, when you’re being underwritten, you want to be very forthcoming. I think you should share the information, not your opinion on the information. You should just share the information, something that you know they’re going to find and see. If you know you’ve already gone through a process and something’s going to get picked up that’s negative, maybe it’s your bank balances, a certain debt structure or a lawsuit, you’re much better bringing that up upfront.

Frame it for the lender, what it is, why it happened, and your version of the story than letting them create their own version or paint the facts into a situation that they are familiar with that they’ve seen happen before. You’re always better framing it. Now to the specificity of your question, like what happens in this scenario where something’s bad’s happening, I’m going to give you the advice I gave him.

You always have to pick someone you’re going to trust. In a scenario like that, it may feel like you don’t know who to trust and you got to look out for number one, and you got to look out for yourself. I’m not going to fault anyone for doing that. However, you also need to figure out who has your interest at heart and wants to see you succeed.

You may have to do things you don’t want to do. You may have to concede to things you don’t want to concede, but you do want to avoid the person that’s going to put you in the ground that’s all out for them. You’ve got to pick somebody you can trust and then you tell them everything. You be very forthcoming and you work through with them and you start piece by piece.

First thing you got to do is start small, but whatever you can commit to, commit to it. If it’s a phone call at a certain time, commit to that phone call and make it. If it’s an update every single day at 4:00, make sure you’re giving that update every single day at 4:00. You want to be communicating and you want to be very upfront and honest. If something changes, don’t let any surprises go. You’re in the process of building trust and rapport and you don’t want to lose that when someone who could really hurt you bad doesn’t want to see you come out. You don’t want to give them a reason to not trust you.

Sage wisdom to start off our interview, even though that wasn’t necessarily the direction that I wanted to go in, but I actually wanted to ask that question because I’ve been cleaning up some fires myself. I figured that we would lean in and share some war stories. Let’s talk a little bit about Mobilization Funding, your platform, and really what you focus on and why it’s so important in the industries that you work with.

Mobilization Funding And Growth Lending

The industries we serve and the customers and people we serve, they’re entrepreneurs. Most of them are founders of businesses or cofounders. As the businesses got bigger, we’re working with people who are in senior leadership positions of those companies. We’re helping them do. What we’ve created at Mobilization Funding is a lending tool, a loan program that allows people to grow, to execute work that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do. In a traditional sense in financing, if you can go to a bank and the bank will give you as much money as you want in the perfect exact structure you want, get it, take it. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you have all the discipline in the world to know how to use it properly, plug into the bank, use it. It is the best single best structure, no doubt.

Finding a good bank, and by the way, all banks aren’t the same. All lines of credit are not the same at a bank. Traditional banking with the right partner is an excellent source. It’s like gold. It’s a needed necessity. Absent that in certain industries like construction or a business that’s growing really fast or an industry that has work in progress, progress billing, milestone billing, here’s this great opportunity, that golden moment.

Jarrod, you and I own a company together, we created this cool product and you’re selling them to little shops here and there. We’re financing our credit card. Finally, you get that huge retailer to take a meeting with you and you actually walk out and get a big po and you and I are sitting there like, “High five,” and then all of a sudden, you and I are like, “How are we going to finance this?” They’re awesome opportunities, they’re the reasons you get in business, but that’s not the reason the banks in business. The bank is not there to finance those things.

We fill a gap as a private lender that helps companies do exactly those scenarios. It’s a tool, a loan program that allows you to grow your business by executing work you have in front of you in a structure that allows you to pay it back as you execute the work and utilize the money when you need it, which is upfront, executing on the beginning of the work, paying for suppliers, vendors and labor if it’s in construction. If it’s outside manufacturing or restaurants, it’s all about paying for the food, paying for the other types of materials you have or the labor that you need to deliver your service or product.

What does the underwriting look like for something like that? We’re an audience of entrepreneurs, business owners who are many are in the fields that you mentioned. How do you successfully qualify for a loan like that versus a traditional bank loan?

Let’s start with what a traditional bank looks for. A traditional bank is trying to provide you enough capital that you’re asking for to accomplish what you’re going to use it for in the next year, 2 years, 3 years. They’re not looking in a little segment. They’re looking to see if that your working capital and your cashflow can pay for the debt service on that loan over whatever period of time they want, i.e., the free cash.

If you’re in a business that’s growing real fast, you may have some free cash, but it’s enough free cash that was created off of the business size you’re at right now. It’s not the free cashflow that’s going to be created off of the business size you’re about to be or you’re trying to be. That’s the biggest difference between us and a bank. What we’re looking at, we always want to look at the same things a bank does in terms of figuring out the business, your internal financials, tax return, your bank statements. How does the money flow in and flow out of your business and how are you basically running your business?

That’s what we’re looking at for the basic documentation. We’re not running fancy formulas and trying to come up with credit scenarios that fit into a box. We just want to see how you’re running your business. The best way to do that is look at the financial documents that are available like I went through. Once that’s accomplished, then we’re looking at what do you need the money for? If you have that golden ticket with a big retailer, that customer, then we’re going to look at how that particular revenue cycle cashflows. If it’s a big project, we want to see how that cashflows and because we’re going to help you execute that work. We just start to care a lot about how that money’s going to flow into that job or customer and out and then how we can help you capitalize it.

Do you have a process where you’re actually following up on the cashflow or is it that you give them a $50,000 loan, as long as they’re making the payments, you’re happy?

We can do that but the gross majority of our loans are really built off of a Cash Flow Tool that is free on our website for anyone. What is a Cash Flow Tool? Cash Flow Tool is basically I have this opportunity, it’s a project, it’s a new customer, it’s a new opportunity for growth or revenue that I’m going to execute in my business. I need to know how much money do I actually have to invest in that, i.e., borrow, or use of my own, and when can I pay it back inside that same revenue cycle.

That Cash Flow Tool basically shows and details out for our customers or for anyone that wants to use it, it’s on our site how much of that money they need to invest based on their supplier terms, their terms with their labor, how long it takes them to execute stuff, when they build their customer, and how long it takes their customer to get paid. It shows them where the cashflow gaps are, how much the cashflow gaps are, and how much they need to borrow and when they can pay it back. We can become a source of capital for that if they need it.

Let’s say you’re a manufacturer and you’re making a widget and all of a sudden target calls and says, “We want 500,000 of these,” and you don’t have the cash on hand to do that. Will you be the type of lender that they would come to to say, “We need $200,000 upfront to be able to produce this product, but we have a contract with Target?”

Yes, absolutely. That exact example, it’s perfect for what I was talking about earlier. Target’s a great customer of yours. You’ve finally gotten in. If you invoice them and deliver your product or service, they’re certainly going to pay you, but you’ve got to get to that invoice point. What we’re great at doing, using your example, maybe they have 3 or 4 raw materials and they have some labor they have to put on it.

Maybe those raw materials are two different components for the actual product and packaging, labels, boxes, shipping costs and labor to put it all together. Those raw costs like that, we analyze in that cash flow, be a financing source to get you from that point where you’re putting it together or the PO from Target to the point where you can invoice Target and then we get paid back on our loan when Target pays you.

How would you compare the types of loans and these cashflow loans or, I like what you said earlier, growth lending to an SBA loan, for instance?

It depends on what type of SBA loan you’re working at. Let’s say you can get an SBA loan to acquire a business. That is vastly different than what we talked about here. If you are getting an SBA loan to acquire a business, one of the components of the loan amount from the SBA that a good SBA lender will give to you is they want to make sure you have enough working capital in that loan after it’s closed to not only acquire the business, but to make sure you have enough working capital to execute your growth strategy or your strategy to run the business.

If you are already running a business and it’s growing fast and you’re looking at an SBA loan for working capital, that’s great too. What you’re going to need to do there and need to understand is you’re going to get one lump sum from the SBA lender. A lot of people don’t know this, and I’ll just say this quickly, the SBA isn’t the same. The SBA is not the one making the loan. The sponsor bank is the one making the loan. They’re just getting an SBA guarantee. Even if you’ve gone to a bank and you’ve been turned down for an SBA loan, that doesn’t mean the SBA necessarily turned you down. It means that the bank lender, the SBA lender who’s a bank, turned you down and you try again with somebody else that might be more appropriate or more applicable to your business.

That said, and the reason why I said that is that SBA lender that bank, whoever’s analyzing your need for cash and the amount, they’re going to analyze it based on what information you’re putting forth, what their comfort level is of your industry. They’re comparing your industry and your loan to the rest of their portfolio and balance sheet and you have to be aware of that. That’s the biggest difference with the SBA. It’s typically a bigger loan, and it’s paid back over 5 to 7 years or maybe shorter. You want to make sure that that’s enough working capital for you to execute that plan.

Financial Traps And How To Avoid Them

You’re really focused on education and I want to talk about the components of education that are really important for businesses around their cashflow. Before we go into that, let’s talk about some of the financial traps that are out there in the lending industry for business owners and how to avoid them.

Are you talking about self-induced traps or are you talking about traps that actually sometimes get laid for you? There might be two different cuts.

This is a safe space, so we could talk about anything. I’d actually love to cover both of them. I was thinking about the ones that are laid for you, but we can absolutely talk about induced traps as well.

Here’s the traps that are laid for you. Let’s start there. As you’re growing your business, lenders of all kinds or advisors of all kinds, or brokers of all kinds, they get a lot of reps talking to a lot of businesses. With those reps, meaning reps like the amount of opportunities they see, they become really smart. They know not necessarily who they can take advantage of, but they have a great way of positioning certain businesses into products or services they know they can sell that may or may not be able for you to need now. If you get scared or they play on your fears, then you might make a bad decision or you might take on something that might be a good product, but it might not be perfect for you right now, or it might actually hinder what you’re trying to accomplish down the road.

That’s first. The second thing is when you get yourself in a real pinch, a cash pinch, and you need it or you’re about to miss payroll or your customers haven’t paid you and you’re fallen out of the tree, it’s so easy for the wrong person to take advantage of you in that moment. Missing payroll is a disaster. Any business owner, myself included, has been there and when you get there close, it’s someplace you never want to go. God forbid you do miss payroll once, you certainly never want to do it again.

The self-induced trap there is because you’re so desperate, you’re so scared of that one thing, you’ll make a horrible decision if presented to you by the wrong person and take money that you might not otherwise want. That’ll actually stop the problem today, but create a bigger problem for you to solve over the next month, two months, or sometimes even a year.

The tough decision there in many cases is to maybe miss the payroll. Go have a real tough conversation with everybody on Friday and tell them that by Monday or Tuesday, you’ll have this worked out. Slow down to speed up would be my advice in that scenario. I’m not saying don’t take the quick money or don’t take the quick option. I’m just saying just know what you’re doing eyes wide open, don’t oversell yourself. That’s first.

The next thing I would tell you in these self-induced traps is how did you get in that situation in the first place? It happens to all of us, but it doesn’t happen to us. It happens to all of us for the same reason. We’re not properly prepared, mostly because we’re in unchartered territory we’ve never been in before. Once you start your business, it’s a first.

Once you grow your business to a certain size that you’ve never owned or operated before, every day is a new day. It’s all a new day. You got to give yourself some grace. What you need to do is not worry about, in my opinion, what you don’t know. Worry about what you’ve learned, and seek advice and counsel so that you don’t ever put yourself in this situation where you’re missing payroll.

That means you have proper reporting. You’re going to someone who’s at running the same size business as you, or same kind of business as you, but they’re five times the size. They can tell you, “These are the three reports you need to run your business.” If you have those three reports to run your business, you’ll never miss payroll because you have the information in front of you. As a lender who’s looked at thousands and thousands of companies in that money, in money out scenario, I can tell you the one constant theme that all drives all businesses that I’ve learned really confidently at this point.

It’s not that business owners don’t know what decision to make and they’re dumb or stupid. It’s really not. They always know what decision to make. The problem is, it’s a lack of information. They don’t have the right information in front of them to make the right decision When they have the right information in front of them, I can tell you 99% of the time those business owners make the right decision. The hard decision, they’re making it. They have no problem doing that. It’s the lack of information and them having to make a choice without it. That’s where the bad decisions come in.

Let’s talk about making financial decisions and information. I think that’s really important for our audience of business owners and entrepreneurs. What are the key elements or the key points of information that you must have as a business owner to make very clear decisions financially?

I’m going to generalize here because every business is a little different. Every industry is different.

Every business is different, but we’re all producing a product or service to sell it and be gainfully employed or be able to pay our bills. There are those underlying very simple basics that a lot of times business owners miss.

The Critical Role Of Cash Flow Over Profitability

Here’s a fact, you can run a very unprofitable business for a very long time, as long as it cashflows. You cannot run a very profitable business that doesn’t cashflow. A very profitable business that doesn’t have good cash flow will go out of business 10 times faster, if not immediately, than a business that’s unprofitable but has plenty of cashflow.

Okay, understood. I got you.

I’ll give you an example. Tesla, one of the greatest companies in the world. Everyone buys their stock, it’s probably in every 401(k). We all certainly know the owners of the company and the products. They were unprofitable for a very long time. Uber, extremely unprofitable for a very long time. How did they go public, get valuations or stay in business if they were so profitable but didn’t cashflow or they were unprofitable but didn’t cashflow?

When you have access to cash, you’re a public company, you keep raising cash, you can bring yourself to the point where you eventually break even and you eventually grow. In small businesses, we don’t have all those opportunities. You’re running a construction business, a restaurant business, you’re running a manufacturing business, you don’t have the luxuries of just raising capital.

You could. You might be raising money from friends and family nonstop. You might be able to get access to unlimited amounts of debt. Eventually, if you’re running a good business, you’ll eventually catch that cycle and become profitable. It’s critical that you are managing your cashflow. Managing cash is the fastest way to success in a business and longevity. It’s also the fastest way to lose your business and be out of business if you’re not managing it. To me, that’s what you need to pay attention to the most.

The Power Of Delegating Financial Management

Managing cash is actually unique and I’ve found it in my business is I’ve had to have somebody come in and manage it for me. It’s not my strong suit. At the end of the day, I’m a sales guy and I have a glorified title as a sales guy and I can orchestrate, put the pieces of the puzzle together, but I’m not the operator, I’m not the implementer.

I have actually come to grips with that, put my ego aside, and I’m okay with that. Now I have somebody else who manages that. The success of the business and the trajectory of the business is now on this hockey stick because I have someone who has an expertise in that. When you realize that as a business owner, you will see exponential growth if you bring in the right financial manager. I will say this, it really comes down to, I’m just echoing what you were saying, financial management of your business to make sure that it grows and you have a business to come to every day.

Amen. Discipline, delayed gratification. Those are the things that are so hard to do when you’ve gone through those early struggles. As a business owner, and I know you’re an avid reader and I am too, and I think you’ve read the book, The E-Myth. Did we talk about this?

Michael Gerber? Yeah, very familiar.

Yeah. What you just nailed is the basic premise of that book. You can be 2 out of the 3 essential things in a business owner. A lot of people are 2 out of 3. Very few are ever 3 out of 3. If you’re going to miss one, missing the finance side of it isn’t so bad. There’s a whole career full of finance folks counting degrees, Accountants, Finance degrees, who can take the math in any business. It doesn’t matter if they know the product or the service or the customers or can make a single sales call. They know how the math works.

If they just allow them to show you how the math works, then you, as the entrepreneur or the visionary, and you as the operator, can actually run a much better business. I echo what you said and getting those reports and information to you is what also a finance person can do a good one. When you see those numbers in front of you, it’s easier to make decisions.

I want to highlight something that you said earlier, which is find someone that you can trust, that one person you can go to and you can be open and honest with about what is going on. It could be your CPA, it could be a fractional CFO, it could be a friend who runs a business that’s very similar to yours, to your point. That’s because most business owners run into financial issues because they’re embarrassed for people to look at their finances. That is the truth.

You are robbing from Peter to pay Paul, you’re moving money around in various accounts. Not that there’s anything nefarious going on. It’s just the life of an entrepreneur especially, well, I’m not even going to say especially when you’re in the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. You could be 10, 15 years into your entrepreneurial journey and still doing the same thing.

However, until you take control of your financing, the pieces are financials, the pieces of the puzzle don’t come together. That includes your cashflow, that includes making sure you have a great CPA and bookkeeper, potentially somebody to run your finances like a finance director or CFO and the right lenders at your side.

What I’ve realized about the lenders, and I’ve gone through several cycles of lending processes, now I make sure my credit is intact from a business standpoint, from a personal standpoint, I have lines of credit. I can basically go out and get money, like we always talk about, when you don’t need it. The only way to do that is to make sure that your finance is in order. A lender, an investor can look at your books and go, “This is a solid investment. I feel comfortable here.”

I’ve got a great story for you in the middle of stories. Same exact scenario. I go to a mentor of mine and you know what he said to me? I was scared. I was afraid that my books didn’t look right and what was I basing that on? I don’t know, whatever was in vision in my head, someone else must look what their books must look like.

He looked through everything and he goes, “You’re not that special. You are not special. Everybody spend exactly where you are. You don’t know. You don’t think you don’t. You’ve got to open your mouth and just talk like look at all the great things you’ve done. Okay, so you did all this bad. That’s everybody.” Once you realize that, you rip the Band-Aid off, it’s so much easier because then you’re living with the solution.

I love the idea of living with the solution because that is incredibly important when you are an entrepreneur because we’re out there to solve problems. That’s typically why we start our businesses. It could be a landscaping business in your particular area because people don’t do high quality work and you realize that that’s a problem and you want to solve that problem.

For a business owner with that type of mentality, that has to trickle down in every single thing that you do as a business owner and operator. That could include how you manage the business. Realizing that if we look at The E-Myth, Michael Gerber, you’ve got the technician, the manager and the entrepreneur. I’m an entrepreneur. I’m kind of a technician from a sales standpoint, but I’m definitely not a manager. Now that I’ve realized that, again, I’ve seen that shift in my business where I’ve had someone who I brought in to help me build business credit a few years ago.

I have someone who manages our finances, so I make sure bills are paid on time, things aren’t missing. My personal credit score has gone up substantially where I can go out and basically get any type of loan that I’m looking for. It’s these little nuances that, as a business owner, we have to make sure that we have intact. I can come to Scott Peper and say, “I need Mobilization Funding to fund one of my new projects that I’m working on.” You can do it easily.

Jarrod, you made a great point there. Your ego is what will keep you from hiring this contract CFO, finance operator, manager. Don’t be upset about that because your egos what also gave you the E part of E-myth. It got you into this when everyone told you it wouldn’t work, your egos would push you through. Just embrace it. Now that you know the difference between where to use it and where not to, now you have the awareness of that which gives you all the power. Now you can make a good choice.

It’s okay to check your ego when it comes to whether you or not you’re running your finances right and have what a better professional expert. Look at those. Keep your ego when you’ll need it. When everyone’s telling you you can’t do it, it won’t work and quit now, that’s when you need your ego and you’ll be all alone. Use it then. Don’t use it when you’re trying to sell your financials.

It’s probably only over the last 5 years of my career, maybe 4, where I’ve started to shift and be able to put that ego aside. I actually just read the Bezos letters, which was the letters that Bezos had originally written to his board members about the ethos of the company. He always goes back to the ethos of the company and says, “We’re at day one.”

How he articulates the meaning of failure in business was encouraging to me. The more I read and the more exposure that I have to what other entrepreneurs have done to build successful businesses, it helps me temper my ego even more to be like, “I’m not the only one out there. People who are a million times more successful than me have gone through the same thing. It’s about that mindset.”

That mindset only improves by having that go-to person, that mentor focusing on education. Education is a huge part of your business. I want to talk about The Big Book of Cash Flow and how that is the basis of your suggested way of operating a business and how you use that to benefit the clients that you work with.

I appreciate you asking me that. The Big Book of Cash Flow is the book I wrote. That’s what it’s called. I wrote that book because I felt so bad for everyone that feels like they’re supposed to know all this stuff. In the finance world, you have all these acronyms. You have these reports, and what do they mean and what do they look like? You feel stupid, like we’ve talked about, if you don’t know what it all means.

I learned a long time ago from making these mistakes that if I hear an acronym or I hear a word someone uses that I don’t know what it means, I just ask them. What I quickly found out, especially when I’m in a room full of other people that I’m not even close to the only person that didn’t know. When everyone comes up to you on the side afterwards and says, “I’m so glad you asked that question,” you’re actually making better bondable like friends with people because you got the courage to ask. I think it’s like a little superpower now.

The reason I wrote that book is I am a person with a Food, Hotel, Hospitality Management degree in college. Not finance, not accounting. I had a twenty-year sales career that was pretty much where I spent time. I did sit in a lot of boardrooms. I did sit and see a lot of Excel files. I’m not an Excel wizard. How did I learn about financials and cashflow? From the school of hard knocks, like all of us. I took that book, the idea, and I said, “I just want to give something they can read in 90 pages that gives them 95% of what they need to know.”

All the silly stupid questions, what each one of the reports means, why you have a report, why you don’t, net income is versus gross income. All those questions that you want to ask and you don’t know the answer to. Why does the balance sheet have to balance? How do you make a balance sheet balance? Just all of it and then cash flows and work in progress and what is overhead, overhead allocation, all those little buzzwords and what percentages are you supposed to use? All that so that people can figure out and determine what’s best for them in a simple way.

That’s exactly what that book was. As well as all the tools associated to it. What is a thirteen-week cashflow? All these little reports that you and I talked about that you need to run your business, that provide you that information. I wanted to create 90 pages. I write like I talk. It’s super straightforward and makes it easy for people to read.

Are there 3, 5, 10 key financial points or numbers that you should know right now if you were to pick up the phone and somebody were to have a conversation with you? What are they and why should you know them?

Key Financial Metrics Every Business Owner Should Know

You want to always know how much cash you have on hand. That’s critical. You want to be able to know in a minimum what does it cost to run your business on a monthly basis, a weekly basis. What’s that break even cash amount to pay all your bills. I think you need to know what your overhead allocation is. Some of that could be like what’s that monthly number?

There are variable costs, but you should have a good idea what that is. If you want to break it down one step further, you should know what your fixed costs are no matter what. Those are going to be the amount of cash minimum you need. Your variable costs are then going to be different percentages of labor. If everybody’s not on salary in your company, like if it’s a construction company, for example, you may have different vendors and labor. You want to know what the cost it’s going to take to run your business on a monthly basis.

Those are critical items. Once you know that, you can really start to move forward, there’s so many key metrics you get on the front end of your business in terms of sales. If you’re talking about when’s your next sales strategy, what are the credit card receipts, what’s your daily outstanding for receivables, what’s your AP balances? There’s a lot. At the end of the day, if you know what your cash is on hand, if you know how much it costs to run your business on a daily basis and you know on a weekly, daily, or monthly basis and you know what kind of money you have coming in, you can really run your business if you had to off of those three things.

In terms of cash on hand and cashflow, a lot of businesses run with razor thin margins. Are there techniques that you would suggest for business owners to alleviate that and actually have more cash on hand?

Mindset Shift From Defense To Offense

Yeah, we touched on this a little bit. This may not be a technique, but in my mind, that mindset shift from a growth mindset to a scarcity mindset at some point, if you’re going to be successful, you’ve got to switch to offense. If you’re playing defense in the entrepreneurial game, you’re going to get hurt. It’s already hard. You’ve got to get on offense and you got to not grow unnecessarily. Offense means you got to focus on the windshield.

Looking in the rearview mirror is a reason why that thing’s 1/10th or 1/100th of the size of the windshield. You need to be looking forward. Where are you going to go? What are you going to get to? How are you going to get there? Be aggressive at driving growth. Sales drives a business, so if you have to have a great sales strategy, then you want to make sure that every dollar you bring in, how can you keep as much of it as possible?

You don’t want to be stingy on not providing the resources, but that’s why you want to have a forward-looking plan that might be 12, 24, 36 months out. You may know you’re going to run your business at a loss while you’re investing cash back into the business in terms of capital expenditures or one-time expenses that you need. Maybe it’s a new employee, maybe it’s another part of human capital or talent.

Maybe it’s a software system that you have to invest in that’s going to help you that you know at month 24, I’m going to be profitable when I get to $3 million or $4 million of revenue or $10 million or $20 million, whatever the number is. You want to be on offense. That’s first. If you’re trying to save your way to a successful business, you’re going to run into issues because you’re going to have to spend money.

If you’re running a very low margin business, then you must know how well you manage cash and the finances of it is going to be way more critical than if you’re running a high margin business because the higher the margin, the more room you have to operate the business. I would tell you that one of the worst things you can do is be in an industry that has a very thin margin and you think you have a big margin or if you have a big margin and you end up with a thin.

You have to know where you are. All kinds of businesses are okay. It’s a matter of what type of business you want to run, but a lower margin business, you have to make up for that in volume. Volume means you have to be really efficient with your systems and processes because you don’t have enough room in your margin to cover up mistakes.

Those are the things I’d be paying attention to the most. Where you can save money and lower margin businesses is efficiency and processes. You can look at start to look at technology. Any technology you can add to enhance your current workforce’s ability to do their job in my opinion is a good investment. Any technology you invest in that might hinder your customer’s experience to you is probably an investment I wouldn’t make. Especially while you’re trying to grow or especially if you’re in a low margin business and you’re not at substantial scale.

Let’s talk a little bit. This is going to be my last question before we go into the rapid fire section, which will be fun, I’m assuming, with you. Let’s talk about some trends and shifts that you’re seeing in the lending industry right now into the next few years that you think are going to impact our audience or your clientele that would be borrowing from you.

Trends And Shifts In Lending Industry

We just went through a big rate hike environment change. Banks, in general, are pretty heavily weighted in commercial real estate. We’re going to see some shifts around commercial real estate that’s certainly going to have impacts on banks. When you’re choosing your bank, try to get an understanding of what type of appetite they have for the type of loans you’re looking for. There might be more banks that are looking for more C&I type of lending, which is what we’re talking about here, more cashflow type lending, more SBA lending because they’ve lent so much money into the commercial real estate market.

I think other trends you got to look for in the lending market is it’s moving a lot to private credit. A lot of these banks are risk off right now. They do not want to take risk. The private credit world, the private world like Mobilization Funding and other lenders are actually filling huge gaps in places where there was no opportunity for cash before.

Not only are they taking spots where banks are moving away from, but they’re actually creating spots that were never existed before. That’s a great trend to see. I think looking at those different lenders is really important. On the other end, you want to look at these private lenders and, believe it or not, where are the banks shifting their attention? The banks are lending to these private lenders. They just know that private lenders can do it better. They’d rather lend to them than the banks invest the resources to try to figure out on their own. That’s another thing to look for.

Depending on your business or where you’re at, I think you’ve got to be guarded and careful with the lending environment and how they’re looking at ratios to the way you handle tax and the percentages of payroll you have and how fast you’re growing. There’s a lot of things there that you just need to be careful of and being paying attention to.

You mentioned C&I. What is C&I?

Commercial and Industrial. That’s the banking term for non-real estate. That’s business lending.

Scott, incredibly informative, a ton of wisdom there. We talked about lending, we talked about mindset, we talked about organizing your finances and managing them in a way that can help you grow your business. This was awesome. We’re going to do the rapid-fire section. Are you ready for me, my friend?

I love it man. Any rules to this rapid fire?

No rules. Whatever comes to the top of your head. Coffee or tea?

Coffee.

It is a zombie apocalypse and you have to leave your home and protect your family. What is your weapon of choice?

I am taking my Benelli M4 shotgun.

Is there a book that you would recommend the business owners and entrepreneurs who read our show pickup and read?

If you haven’t read The E-Myth, I highly recommend that book. Outside of just straight business, I would read Think and Grow Rich.

Always a classic. How are you incorporating AI into your business now?

We talked about that. Any place that we can put AI that enhances our employees and team members’ ability to do their job, our staff, we are investing in it. To replace them or make our customer engage with AI, we are avoiding that.

Money-Saving Tactics For 2025

Give me three money saving tactics for 2025.

One, if you can enhance your team’s ability to do what they’re doing faster using AI, that’s a great investment. Money saving, I’d say add discipline. If you don’t have enough discipline yet to figure out where you can save money, there’s always places you can save money, build cash, spend better. I would find that discipline either in a book or I would start talking to a mentor. Maybe it’s a mastermind group. I would start asking those kinds of questions. The third way to save money, let’s think. Halt the discretionary spending. See what it’s like. If you haven’t done it in a while, take 10% of your revenue and park it in savings. See if you could run your business on 90% of the cash that comes in.

Audience, please do that. I have, for the first time, like a 790 credit score and I was thinking about going and buying a ridiculous car, no money down, like 3% interest. I’m like, “Don’t do it.” By the way, I’ve convinced myself not to do it, but it felt really good and I was like, “Yeah, I’ve made it. I’m almost 800 credit score. I can get whatever I want.”

I was about to go blow money. Stop that guy. It’s ridiculous because it’s not helping you get to your goal and all guilty of it. Thank you for that one. Here is my last question, but not least. Give me two people in your life who have had massive influence and have helped you get to where you’re now and how they did it.

There’s a lot of few people, but the two that come to my mind are a gentleman named Rob Reynolds. He’s helped me tremendously figure out and provide me to the spots I needed to be to figure out who I am, how I am, how to forgive yourself for some of the stupid stuff you did earlier in your life and where to find the right path to walk on.

Another friend of mine, Todd Schweitzer, who has been that business advisor. He showed me the way, gave me great advice, stuck by my side, and basically let me look through a set of binoculars to see what’s coming. I’m like, “I don’t see anything.” He’s like, “You missed this, this and this. That’s what you need to see.” I look back in there, I’m like, “Okay, cool. Yeah, implement that now.”

Fast forward a year or two later and I’m like, “I can’t believe I didn’t see that, but thank God I asked because there it is.” Those are two, folks. The most important person in my entire life is my wife, Jessica. She’s provided so much guidance, security and safety to me. Honestly, without her and meeting her and all of the grace that she’s given me through every piece of the support and function, everything I’ve ever done that’s unwavering, I wouldn’t be a thing.

Scott, tell everybody where they can connect with you if they would like to do so.

All right. Best places to find me are on LinkedIn at Scott Peper. You can find me MobilizationFunding.com and our YouTube channel, which is also on YouTube, Mobilization Funding. Those are the best places to find me. I put out a lot of content there. A lot of great resources and information. Of course, we have a whole team and staff at Mobilization Funding. You reach out to us. One of them can either help you directly or they will get you to me.

Scott, thank you for joining us.

Thanks, Jarrod. I appreciate the opportunity.

Thanks.

Important Links

• Mobilization Funding
• The Big Book of Cash Flow
• Cash Flow Tool
• The E-Myth
• Think and Grow Rich
• Scott Peper on LinkedIn
• Mobilization Funding on YouTube

About Scott Peper

Scott Peper is a proud husband, father and Christian. He founded and is now the CEO of Mobilization Funding, a direct lender that provides essential capital to business owners who excel in their work but face financial hurdles.

Today, he is known across the construction industry for the content and education he offers to the community and his expertise in helping businesses successfully cash flow their projects and customers.

Scott earned his bachelor’s degree in business, but he attributes his knowledge and success to the books he has read and his mentors, particularly the Arete Syndicate led by Andy Frisella and Ed Mylett.

With over a decade of experience teaching courses and training on cash flow management, business startup and operation, and leadership, Scott is deeply passionate about helping others succeed. His dedication to supporting the growth and development of others in their professional journeys is a cornerstone of his work at Mobilization Funding.