Zero To A Hundred – Episode 2: Transforming Shame Into Success With Pam Jordan!

Zero to a Hundred - Jarrod Guy Randolph | Pam Jordan | Money Shame

 

Hey there, Accelerators! 🚀Welcome to “Zero to a Hundred,” where we take your business from zero to hero! This week, we’re diving into the nitty-gritty of financial myths and money management with the incredible Pam Jordan.💡

🔹 What’s on the Menu:

  • Boosting your business profitability
  • Overcoming money shame and taking control of your finances
  • Smart strategies for a killer business exit

🔥 Why Tune In?

  • Real-world financial advice you can actually use
  • Practical tips to up your business game
  • Insight into managing and maximizing your business value

💬 Gem from Pam: “Your financials tell a story. Make sure it’s a good one.”

📞 Get in Touch with Pam:

Don’t miss out—hit that subscribe button and let’s take your business from zero to a hundred! 💪

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Transforming Shame Into Success With Pam Jordan!

Hello, Accelerators. On Zero to a Hundred, we are going to have no-nonsense finance expert, speaker, author, and founder of the Pivot Business Group, Pam Jordan, join us. We’re going to discuss everything from overcoming shame around your business finances to putting together a stellar team, why a business attorney is crucial for your success, how much you can justify paying yourself, and the hidden message that the numbers are telling about your business. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s accelerate together. Pam Jordan, we are very happy to have you here on Zero to a Hundred. How are you feeling?

Awesome. How are you?

I am amazing. I want to dive in with you, as you are a finance and business operation expert, and ask you a very important question. What is the number one way in which business owners are lying to themselves about their financial management?

Business Owners’ Financial Blind Spots

The number one thing, most likely, is assuming that it’s being taken care of. Most business owners say, “I have someone for that. I have an accountant. I have a CPA. I have a bookkeeper.” They are not taking ownership of their numbers, and they’re assuming it’s being handled. The thing is, for the business owner, it’s your money. I don’t care if you’re doing $500,000 or $8 million or $20 million a year, it’s your money.

If you’re not taking ownership of those numbers and having reports or dashboards that you’re looking at on a minimum of a monthly basis, you’re completely taking your eye off the ball. It’s your money. You’re assuming it’s handled. I see people make bad decisions every day because they’re not understanding what their true numbers are.

Let’s talk about the psychology around that. In your mind, you work and bring in your outside CFO consulting services to hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses. I’m not sure how many you’ve worked with, but I know it’s a lot. I know many of the people you have worked with successfully. What is the psychology around your financial management being so secondary in the business? Why does that happen? What can business owners do to shift their mindset around financial management?

Shame And Trauma Around Money

Shame. There is an immense amount of shame around money. I am not a mindset guru, but I’ve spent a lot of time with people who are. We learn about money from our parents. If you saw mom and dad struggle and stress about paying bills and argue about money, you have trauma around that. As you become an adult and start to pay bills and have to choose what to pay when you don’t have enough money, there’s a lot of shame and guilt around money and finances. We carry that into our business as entrepreneurs and as visionaries, mavericks, and whatever cool persona you want to wear.

If mom and dad didn’t have it together and didn’t show you how to manage money, and you as a twenty-year-old ran up credit card debt in college because you didn’t know any better, you have shame around money. I talk to company owners who have run multiple million-dollar businesses, and they have shame around their finances. It’s because no one ever taught them. No one ever helped them understand that you are a money person. It’s okay. You don’t have to understand retained earnings, but you need to understand the basics of your financial statements. Your financials tell a story, and they’re telling a story about you and your business. The outside business world understands what that story is. It’s the trauma of our childhood and the trauma of having $7,000 of credit card debt by the time you’re 24, not knowing how you got there.

You need to understand the basics of your financial statements because your financials tell a story about you and your business. Share on X

It’s funny that you say that. I listened to a lot of mindset and did a lot of mindset work. I’ve been doing it for years and started studying with Bob Proctor and Mary Morrissey. I’ve learned so much about myself. In the latter part of my career, I am focused on more financial management, business management, and learning a higher level of skillset to grow my business.

I’m a little taken aback by how frank you were and how you hit the nail right on the head by using the word shame. One of the guys I listened to, David Bear, was doing a podcast. He said that people have shame and trauma around money. The conversation you should have with yourself is, “When I was growing up, money was, blank. Insert here.” For me, it was shame, struggle, lack, not always having enough money, and being kicked out of homes because we didn’t have enough money.

It’s funny because I have noticed that there was a point in time in my career where I noticed things not coming together. I was never able to pinpoint that till much later on. It was shame. It’s fascinating to me how many business owners suffer through exactly what you have mentioned. There are ways to overcome it. One of the ways to overcome it is by bringing in someone to help you with financial management. We’re talking to existing business owners.

Let’s say those existing business owners are struggling with or don’t have all of the answers to financial management. When should they bring in a team, and who should they bring in to help them manage their business? Let’s use an example of a business that’s doing $3 million in revenue a year, with a couple of employees, and they’re continuing to grow.

When To Bring In A Financial Team

For a company of that size, they should have an outsourced bookkeeper. Depending on the product or service that they sell, they might be on the cusp of needing a full-time in-house bookkeeper. The reason I say that is because it’s north of the $2 million mark if you have heavy inventory like if you’re a product-based business, or if you do a lot of internal invoicing for services, like a construction company or a gutter company, your service provider trades, you need an internal person because you need to start doing job costing.

For example, if you wanted your bathroom remodeled, that company should be tracking every dollar that they spend on your bathroom to you as a customer. At that size, they’re on the cusp of needing almost a full-time internal bookkeeper, depending on their industry. A bookkeeper should have been hired years ago, depending on how quickly they grew. They need a tax strategist because, ideally, they are making money and I 100% guarantee they’re overpaying on taxes.

Most people have a tax preparer who’s not proactively helping them save on taxes. A fractional CFO is imperative at that size because how you run a six-figure business isn’t how you run a $ 1-million business. How you run a $3 million isn’t how you run a $5 million. How you run a $5 million isn’t how you run a $10 million. If they want to exit their business for a number that brings legacy money, they need a fractional CFO to help them get there.

Let’s talk about if we’ve got a full-time bookkeeper, a fractional CFO, and a tax strategist, how much should a business owner be budgeting on a monthly basis to bring those types of people into their business?

Typically, you’re looking at 2% to 3% of gross revenue to have accounting, tax, and CFO support.

If you’re doing $300,000 a month, that’s anywhere from $6,000 to $9,000 a month for all of those services combined.

Correct.

That makes sense. You talked about getting your finances in order, especially when you have a business that’s starting to grow. How do you increase the value of your business so you have that larger multiple when you look to exit or sell in the future?

Increasing Business Value For Exit

The secret there is it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep. You could be a $3 million company and broke, and worth nothing. You can be a million-dollar company with a 25% net profit and be worth more on exit than a $3 million company. It’s all about net profit.

How long does it typically take to start preparing for an exit? Is it a one-year, two-year, or five-year plan where you should say, “We need to have an exit strategy?:

In M&A or mergers and acquisitions, a potential buyer is going to want three years of financials. If you’re wanting to exit within the next 3 to 5 years, now is the time to be playing a different game. When I talk to clients who want to exit in ten years, we play a very different tax game and CFO strategy game than we do with somebody who wants to exit in three.

If you want to exit in one, depending on your financials, you’re going to leave money on the table. We have a number of clients that we’re working with who are preparing for an exit. Depending on each client’s timeline, some of them are going to not get as much because they’re not giving themselves enough runway. Eighteen months, if you’ve been doing well in your company, can be enough. What I find is most companies, when we walk in, their profit is not where it needs to be.

They’re not managing their money clearly. They don’t have the right tax team that’s helping them be proactive. Unfortunately, a lot of tax professionals cost you money on your exit because of the tax game that they’re playing. I would say three years. If you’re less than three years old and your financials aren’t as strong as you want, you’re not going to get the exit that you want.

It sounds to me that it’s a minimum of three years, but when you start a business, and this is one of the things I’ve learned from my mentors over the years, you should have a five-year exit plan. Not because you’re going to exit but because you should have a benchmark of what you’re trying to reach. For somebody who is earlier on in their business, let’s say two years in their business, who should they focus on having to advise them to say, “Advisor, if I’m 3 to 6 years down the road, how should I be looking at my business for a potential exit?” Who should they have in their back pocket?

If you’re two years in, it’s important to have a couple of people who are strategically helping you. A good business attorney is important because you need to make sure that anything you sign or anything that you have your clients sign is structured correctly. Are your contracts assignable? Do your team members, contractors, and employees have non-solicitations? Make sure that your legal house is in order because on an exit if you don’t have your legal side put together, you’re not worth as much. That’s huge. A cheap attorney costs more than an expensive one.

Make sure your legal house is in order because, during an exit, if you don't have your legal side together, you're not worth as much. Share on X

Is it more of the legal structure of the business and the financial structure of the business, or is it a combination of the two?

It’s a combination of the two because you need a strong business foundation. If you don’t have your legal entity structured properly and if you don’t have your contracts, you might not be sellable.

Red Flags In Financial Management

What would you say are your top two warning signs that your finances are not being handled properly by the team that you have in place?

If you get a surprise tax bill. If your CPA says something like, “It looks like you had a great year. Congratulations. You owe the IRS $40,000. I need your bank information so we can go ahead and draft that for you.” Red freaking flag. First off, there should be no surprise tax bill. You should know what’s coming.

If the CPA is like, “It looks like you had a great year,” and in your gut, you’re like, “I have no money in the bank. I hustled my tail off and I’ve got nothing to show for it,” there’s a huge disconnect. The other red flag is if you haven’t seen your business’s financial reports for the last 30 days, you have a problem. If it’s been 60 days, that’s bad. If it’s been 90 days since your bookkeeper or supporting team has shown you a P&L and balance sheet, fire them and go hire someone else immediately. I’m sorry if you’ve been paying them $500 to $1,000 a month and they’re behind. You need a better team.

Tell me one of your war stories. You can exclude names, but what is the worst business situation that you’ve had to go in and fix in your career?

Leveraging Profit First For Business Stability

The first one that comes to mind is a client who brought me in because special assets from the bank told him he needed to bring in a fractional CFO, or they were going to take possession of the building and his business. Special assets are the part of the bank that you never want to talk to. If you have a line of credit with the bank or some loan with a bank, and you are delinquent on payments, at least every year, the banker is going to ask for your financials. They’re going to want your AR report. They’re going to want your P&L and your balance sheet.

Your financials tell a story. If the story that is being told to the bank makes them want to crap their pants, they send you to special assets because special assets then go in and say, “We’ve seen your financials. Things aren’t going so well. Help us understand what your plan is to right the ship so that you don’t go out of business.” If you think about it, banks lend you money because they expect you to pay them back. They expect that you have the assets, the accounts receivable, the equity in the building, the equity of the business, and the equity in the equipment to get their money back. They don’t lend you money out of the kindness of their heart. If special assets ever call, you’re screwed.

What happened in this situation where special assets were called on this particular business?

If the special assets were called in, this particular owner owned a building that was worth $5 million, and his business was doing over $3 million in sales at a loss of $800,000. $3 million top line. It cost him $3.8 million to run the business. He was upside down $800,000. There are multiple reasons why. One is he had a pretty lavish lifestyle and was burning through money. The other main piece was the service that he was providing was at a loss. Every time he sold a service, say for example, he sold it for $5, it cost him $5.10 because he didn’t understand his fulfillment costs.

I went in because the bank told him he had to hire a fractional CFO. I went in and found out the internal accounting team would have been great for a $500,000-a-year company, but was significantly over his head at a $3 million company. I invited them to succeed elsewhere and hired a controller. That’s how I fired them. That’s how I nicely fire people. I did cost analysis for them and helped them understand exactly what was going on.

We hired an operations director because the owner was a visionary, not an implementer, not an operations guy. He was great at ideas, and a baller at sales, but with the logistics of the business, he couldn’t do it. We hired a director of operations and a new controller and did a cost analysis. I helped him understand, “From here on out, you don’t sell anything for less than $6. It’s not worth getting out of bed and being broke.” We then put him on a personal budget so that he could only spend so much money.

Building Strong Financial Foundations

Two things came from that story that I want to ask you. I think it’s important for the audience because these are two challenges that businesses face. We’ll deal with one and then we’ll deal with two. Before you go for a loan, how do you build or create the best story you possibly can for the bank and build a relationship with the bank so they want to lend you money?

It comes down to your financials. You need to have accurate and current financial records to show the bank, and those records need to be favorable. They need to make you look good. You have to put lipstick on the pig. You need to make sure that your financials are making you look good. Banks lend money to you because they want to be paid back.

It comes down to your financials. If you need accurate and current financial records to show the bank, those records must be favorable. They need to make you look good. Share on X

It is easier to get a loan from the bank when you don’t need it than when you do. If your financials are not strong your net profit is not where it needs to be and sales are down, banks are not going to be eager to provide you with money. If you have money in the bank, sales are strong, and net profit is good, that’s when they’re going to be lining up to give you money. It’s all about timing.

What I’ve done when I’ve had businesses early on in my career, it was a struggle to get funding. I might’ve had to have gotten private funding, but later on in my career, when things were going well in the businesses, I went out and borrowed money when I didn’t need it. The reason I did that was because I established a relationship with the bank when things were good.

The best time to ask for money, especially in capital raising, is when you do not need money. The same thing goes with debt. If you’re a business and you’re successful and everything is going well, you’re profitable, go get that $250,000, go get that million-dollar line of credit lined up so you have that safety net if you need it in the future.

Another thing I wanted to ask you from that story, which is something I’ve never been able to get a really clear answer on, and I feel like you’ll be able to give this to the audience. How much can you justify paying yourself outside of the company, maybe taking care of your expenses like your travel, your car, and food when you’re taking your clients out? How much can you justify paying yourself as a business owner?

The answer is as much profit as is available. When you think about your financial statement, your profit and loss or the P&L, your profit is the bottom number. That number, you need to look at, and hopefully, it’s positive. You need to look at what your monthly debt service is. To your point, it is imperative to get into debt when you don’t need it so that when you need it down the road, it’s there. For example, your profit on a monthly basis is $10,000, but you have $2,000 that you have to pay for SBA loans, lines of credit, vehicles, or whatever.

You are $8,000 less. From that, I recommend that you put a portion of it aside for taxes, and not necessarily taxes to pay the IRS, but tax strategy, because your profit is what you pay debt with. That’s what you have to pay taxes with, From that, it’s your money.

Let’s talk about what you’re paying out of that. I think maybe this is what you were going to lead into, mixing personal and business funds. Do you pay yourself a W-2 salary? Do you take a 1099 as a business owner and have your own personal write-offs? What is the most tax-efficient way to do it and the best way for accounting for the business?

It depends on your business’s legal and tax structure whether you take a W-2. If you’re an LLC single member, you can’t take a salary. If you’re an S-corp, a C-corp, or an LLC taxed as an S, you have to take a salary. It depends on your business’s legal and tax structure how to compensate yourself. There are tax structures where you’re not supposed to be a W-2 employee of your business. There are tax structures where you are required to be a W-2 of your business. Not everyone understands that.

I’ve met people that are S-corps. I’m like, “Great. What’s your salary?” “I don’t take a salary.” “You’re legally obligated to, and whoever is doing your taxes should have told you that.” What we recommend is a combination of salary and distributions. We want you, as the business owner, if your business is profitable, to have a very good living. I have clients who make tens of thousands a month from their businesses to fund their lifestyles through multiple avenues. It’s through tax-advantageous ways.

As a business owner, being a high-salary person isn’t always the best tax-free way for you. Most of our clients’ personal compensation, less than 50% of it, is from their W-2. Most of it is through distributions, accountable plans, the Augusta rule, retirement investments, insurance contributions, all of those, and not necessarily W-2. For most business owners, being a W-2 employee is the best tax advantage because then we can do retirement, then we can do an accountable plan, and then we can put kids on the payroll.

There are lots of advantages to being an employee of your business, but the actual structure that’s best for you depends on what your goals are. It depends on whether you have business partners. It depends on what the assets of the business are because most people need an operating company or a holding company and then have all their other businesses connected to it. You don’t need to be on salary from all of those businesses, maybe 1 or 2 of them do you need to be on salary for.

The answer is it depends on your business structure, your legal structure, and what your goals are. We want you to make money from this business. We want you to have a good lifestyle, but your business is not your piggy bank. I once had a client who had a $100,000-a-month Amex bill, and 20% of it was his shopping habits. I was like, “You don’t need that many shoes.”

Watches or whatever you’re buying. You have a phrase or a statement, “If it’s not in writing, it never happened.”

If it’s not in black and white, it doesn’t exist. This happens all the time when people do handshake deals. “I’m going to bring on this salesperson. He’s been my buddy from high school. He’s going to help me make things happen, blah blah blah.” Your understanding of what the commission was is not the same as his understanding of what the commission was. There’s no signed agreement about non-solicitation or non-compete or anything, then he walks with your entire list. I’ve seen it.

Also, you bring in contractors to work for you, and you don’t have a clear scope of work. You don’t have a clear compensation structure. You don’t have any legal protection. One day, he gets tired of answering you and being part of your team. He thinks he can make more money by himself. Again, out the door with your clients.

It’s protecting your IP. It’s protecting your client list. It’s protecting your business that everything should always be in writing. I’ve always said that I’m all about a handshake deal. That’s the man that I am. We’re going to back up that handshake with a contract. If anybody gets weird about a contract, they’re going to screw you. Period.

100%.

Let’s shift a little bit and talk about profitability and how we add money to the bottom line. Let’s say we’re going to target adding 5% or 10%. What are ways that we add money as our business currently exists to our bottom line?

Increasing Profitability: Sell More, Spend Less

The basic math of it is to sell more and spend less. It sounds so silly, but if you think about your health, like if you want to be healthier, move more and eat less. It’s the same with your business health. If you want to increase your profitability, sell more and spend less. To put legs to that, one thing to do is to look at your expenses and do what we call an expense audit. Go through and figure out where money is being left on the table.

Most businesses, unless someone is stealing from you, don’t have money rushing out the door. Most of the time, it’s a leaky bucket. It’s 2% here, half a percent here, or 1% here. It’s multiple places where you’re overspending because you’re not taking the time to stop and look. Software is a huge one. I have clients spending hundreds to thousands a month on software that they’re not even using. They have five licenses for Adobe when they only need one. That’s $249 a month that adds up.

One thing to do is pull up your credit card statement, your Amex, your Chase, or whatever it is, for the last three months, and go look and see what’s auto-dinging your card. Do you still need those things? When we do an expense audit, we can find 2% to 10% savings. The next thing to do is look at your insurance costs and your payroll costs. A lot of times, those can be renegotiated. Raise your deductible and make your insurance go down.

Payroll, most likely, you have people that are not operating at 80% or above capacity. I had a client who we were doing an expense audit with, and he was in the marketing space and creative space. He went and asked his number one designer, “At what capacity are you running right now?” “About 50%.” The dude was six figures a year salary. That meant 50% of his time, he was sitting around not being productive.

The fact that he admitted that was like, “You didn’t even lie to me?”

Evaluating Team Productivity And Compensation

What’s funny is he probably exaggerated it. He was probably sitting at 40% and said 50% to make it sound better. That meant half of the time, this client was wasting $50,000 a year on salary for this guy. We immediately changed his compensation to be directly related to projects because he was doing project work. We lowered his salary and gave him a commission on completion of projects. His productivity went up significantly, and he was able to do twice the work for the same amount of money. What that did is it increased our profitability because we could do two jobs a month instead of one.

I love that example because if you look at your business, you have to ask, what business am I in? If you’re a marketing business and you have a lot of leads coming in, a lot of marketing opportunities coming in, the question is, are you in the marketing business, or are you in the people management business? If you’re getting a ton of inquiries and you’re not servicing them, so you do a good job, you get good referrals and reviews, and your business continues to grow, then the business fails.

Leads are not your issue. You’re in the people management business, and there’s ebbs and flows. It will be different at different points in time. It’s like in the real estate business with a brokerage, you’re not the main brokerage in the marketing and sales business. You’re in the agent procurement business because your agents are the ones doing the marketing, sales, and branding of the company. That is a very good point. Know where you are in your business. Know what you need to be functioning well to increase that productivity, and in essence, make more money. I want to shift to one of the next topics, which is super hot out there. How are you using AI in your business right now?

Utilizing AI For Business Management

Lots of ways. First is content. I speak a lot on stages, and so depending on the audience that I’m speaking to and what the topic is, I’ll put in the main point of my talk, what I want the key points to be, and then I’ll have AI help fill it in. I take that and incorporate it into my speech. We use it for content, social media, and publishing. I’ll write a five-point article about tax strategies for businesses, I’ll put that into AI, and have it fill in and make it a 600-word newsletter that then goes out to our audience.

On the actual accounting side of things, we use it in two ways. One, with our coding. We use third-party software that attaches to QuickBooks. The AI suggests where to code things much better than QuickBooks does because QuickBooks is supposed to learn how you code, but it doesn’t very well. The third-party software looks at historical data of how things have been coded, plus uses web searches of what the vendor is to make a much better recommendation of what it believes that $12.99 was for. It’ll know it was an Exxon gas station, whereas QuickBooks doesn’t always know that Highway 84 South is a gas station. The AI software will do that.

With the CFOs, we’re looking at the historical data of the clients, and then forecast their 14-week, 12-month, or yearly forecast, and also a five-year look ahead. We do a lot of forecasting with our clients, and we use AI for that. On the tax side of things, because we do tax strategy and tax filing, we use software where you can upload their last two years’ tax returns and their current year’s financials, and it will forecast what their tax liability is going to be, and then select which strategies it feels are going to be the best for that client. We use it a lot.

If you’re advising a client to do one thing in AI to help with their financial management, what one app or program would you suggest that they go out and get and implement?

I don’t know an app at the consumer level to use because all of the ones that we use are at the agency or firm level. I don’t know as a business owner what app you would use. We use Keeper, Corvi, and Fathom. We use a lot of agency-level, where it’s a couple hundred bucks a month per client to use.

I’m no financial or AI expert, but one of the things that I’ve been doing, if we go back to what you said about pulling your bank statements or credit card statements for the last three months, going over them and seeing what’s there, what you need, and what you don’t need, I’ve taken the PDF, put it in ChatGPT, and asked it to analyze it, break out my expenses, and give me suggestions on potential expenses that I can look at getting rid of or reducing. It has given me some good information. It wasn’t enough where I felt safe that I could go do this myself. It’s something where I still needed the advice of my fractional CFO and my COO.

It at least gave me, as the business owner, who’s way more of a strategist, a salesman, and a visionary, talking points so I can go in and say, “Let’s look at these things.” That has been an incredible help. What I want to do is go into our rapid-fire question session. Are you ready?

Let’s go.

Mentor or coach?

Mentor.

Coffee or tea?

Tea.

Rabbit or turtle?

Turtle.

If you could only grab one weapon during a zombie apocalypse, what would it be?

A bat.

Who would win in a fight? Barbie or My Little Pony?

My Little Pony.

Why My Little Pony?

Have you seen their tail?

It’s a glittering tail a lot of times. That makes sense. Your favorite movie or streaming series?

Top Gun.

Got you. Dead or alive, who would you have dinner with tonight if you could pick?

Sarah Blakely.

Why Sarah Blakely?

She’s the founder of Spanx.

If you were sitting down with her, what would be your top two questions you’d want to ask her?

I love how she is family and owns a multi-billion-dollar business. I would want to ask about that integration, how that works, and what her support team looks like to operate at that level. As far as she’s done a partial exit, I would want to learn how she prepared at that level for her exit. She got $3.5 billion, and she’s still a minority owner and operating it on a daily basis. That’s pretty baller.

Not bad. What is one book that you recommend every business owner read?

Profit First.

I’m putting that on my read list.

I got it right here.

What are we getting out of that book? I have to segue into that, and then we’ll go back to the last couple of questions.

Cash Flow Management With Profit First Methodology

Profit First is a cashflow methodology created for entrepreneurs to better understand their numbers. I’m a Profit First professional. My team are certified Profit First professionals. We help people implement this methodology. It’s multiple bank accounts. Each bank account has a purpose. To some of your questions earlier, you were asking, “How do I know what to pay myself? How do I know what my profit should be? How do I exit?”

Profit First answers a lot of those questions because when you pull up your bank account and you see five bank accounts and each one has its own purpose and reason for being, you can make better financial decisions. While you might have $100,000 in all of them cumulatively, you only have $40,000 in your operating account, and that’s the only money you have access to make decisions on because everything else is earmarked for something else.

That makes sense. A few more questions. If you are a business that is doing $10 million a year in gross revenue, and I hand you a check for $300,000, what do you advise the business owner to do with that $300,000?

If their goal is to exit, I would spend that money on systems and people. Your business is going to be worth more if you have repeatable systems and processes. If you have people that can run the business without you, but if you have a business that’s doing $10 million and no proposal can go out without your approval, no bills can be paid without your approval, and you’re in every meeting that exists in the business, your business is not worth very much. I would spend the money on systems and people.

If your goal is to exit, spend that money on systems and people. Your business is going to be worth more if you have repeatable systems and processes and if you have people that can run the business without you. Share on X

The biggest obstacle you’ve had to overcome in your business?

Myself.

How did you master yourself?

Coaching and mentors. As you said, it’s the mindset. It’s our own trauma and shame that we have. I was raised in an environment where you shouldn’t want money. You shouldn’t have money. You shouldn’t have nice things. It was a very evangelical conservative world that church-wise that I was raised in. You shouldn’t want to have nice things. You shouldn’t want a nice house and lots of money. I had to do the work of I work hard. It’s okay for me to have nice things. It’s okay for me to still serve in the church and still help people, but also go on vacation to nice places and spend money because that’s money that I’ve earned. The biggest block was myself and that it’s okay to have nice things and it’s okay to have money and it’s okay to make a huge impact with the money that I make.

Last question. What are your top three money-saving strategies for 2025?

Number one, pay off your credit card every month. Don’t carry a balance on your credit card. That’s 26%, at least. Some of them are higher. That credit card balance is costing you a lot more money than you realize. Two is to review how you’re compensating your team and pay them for success, not for showing up.

I love that. Number three?

Make sure you are putting money aside for tax strategy.

You’ve done this before. Pam Jordan, before we bid you adieu, why don’t you tell the audience how they can contact you if they have questions, comments, or complaints?

Go to PamJordan.com.

Pam, I appreciate this. It’s incredibly insightful. We look forward to having you back in the future. I know the audience is going to garner a lot and take a lot away from this. Thank you.

Thank you.

 

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About Pam Jordan

Zero to a Hundred - Jarrod Guy Randolph | Pam Jordan | Money ShamePam Jordan is a no-nonsense financial expert and speaker. Pam specializes in analyzing and streamlining the backend of fast-growing companies as well as efficiently creating more profit and strategic growth.

Pam has an MBA from Elon University and has been honored with numerous awards and accolades including: Outstanding Business and Financial Executive of the Year, Financial Executive of the Year, and 40 under 40 in the Triad Business Journal. She has been featured on Entrepreneur.com, as well as podcasts such as The Digital Marketer and Business Lunch with Roland Frasier. She is also a certified Profit First Professional and Empire Operating System Coach.

Over seven years ago Pam started Pivot Business Group. Carrying the title Founder and CEO, she works day in and day out to identify and eliminate errors, create financials businesses can trust, and work with her clients long term to maximize growth (and profit). Pam recognized that most entrepreneurs begin their business based on an idea or passion. This being the case, many of them are not interested in the financial side of running a company. That’s where the Pivot team steps in. They focus on untangling businesses’ finances while you continue to grow your company, create ideas, and take over the industry.

Pam and her team manage over half a billion dollars for entrepreneurs.

Pam and her husband, Nick, met while Pam was in her junior year of college and have been together ever since. Together they have three children.

In her personal time Pam likes to brainstorm new business endeavors, blog on her food account ImaCeliac.com, and end the night with her favorite drink – Bourbon.