Speaker 1: 0:00

Andrew Windham is the CEO of the Ideal Client Community, a concierge multifamily office serving founders of businesses generating over $5 million in revenue. With 25 years of experience in client service, andrew excels as a family CFO, guiding faith forward, purpose-driven, legacy-committed founders. By developing and expanding a lifetime comprehensive financial strategy, the ideal client community ensures that business owners maximize the efficiency during their lifetime and sustain their legacy for generations to come. Let's see what makes Andrew so buzzworthy. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show. Just in the green room, I heard myself start sounding like one of those politicians that's like on the road in the deep South and all of a sudden having to start talking like them because they want to get that vote. You know, because if you talk like this the people who talk like this they're going to vote for you, right? So thank you very much for that.

Speaker 2: 1:14

That's right, Because because they think you're one of them.

Speaker 1: 1:17

Right, I had this. I had a horrible. Well, I don't know, it was a mixed blessing, I guess. When, anytime I went to a new country when I was in the military, I always immersed myself in enough to at least get what I needed right Food, water, bathroom stuff like that, right Cervezas, those types of things. But I made sure I always came back with the accent of that country within 10 days. It was amazing. It would disappear within a couple of weeks, but the longer I was there, the longer it stuck around. But and I do it now when I go into different parts of the country, I spend more than a week with a different. Even in like Boston and I never lived in Boston I'll pick up a Boston accent. It's stupid.

Speaker 2: 2:08

For sure. Well, I mean, I ran a lot competitively in high school and college and so I traveled around the country. But I grew up just north of Birmingham, alabama, so the deep South, and, um, there's still some of that accent but. But, like you, when I moved to the Northeast or I went to a running camp called the running school, actually up in the Catskills close to Woodstock, at an Amish camp, and, um, that was funny buzz, because they'd be like, uh, so, uh, y'all have TV down there. It's kind of like, yeah, I think we do, but I'd play into it and get them to play a little sweet home Alabama. And yeah, I had to walk uphill both ways barefoot just to be able to find somewhere that would sell me some shoes. And we talk on cans and a string and I love it, I love it, I played right into it. You know, there you go.

Speaker 1: 2:56

Yeah Well, I've been a being a little farm boy in my grade school years. I never let go. I always told my mama that you can take the country out of you, take the boy out of the country. You can't take country out of the boy. But the days of shoveling horse manure are very, very far removed.

Speaker 2: 3:15

So, anywho, but still memorable, still memorable. I still remember the smell, impression very well impressioned upon you, the motivator to do other things well.

Speaker 1: 3:27

Right, right, exactly. So you are a man who helps successful entrepreneurs not only hold on to their financial independence sometimes sounds like even past being an entrepreneur, like even past being an entrepreneur but continuing to allow them the entrepreneurial freedom and the leverage to drive impact. Tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.

Speaker 2: 3:54

Yeah. So we seek to serve faith-driven or faith-forward, we would say, purpose-driven, legacy-committed founders. They're generally doing $5 million in revenue and up. They're married, they have kids and we jokingly say and maybe this is a little bit of that deep south coming out they tend to have dogs, have dogs. And we believe that that may be because they aspire to be 50% as good as their kids and their dogs think they are and they hope to treat people with as short a memory and with as much gratitude and love as our dogs or our pets do. And we come home from a day's work, even if when we left we were frustrated with them on the way out the door kind of deal, even if when we left we were frustrated with them on the way out the door kind of deal. That is the first time I've ever heard that?

Speaker 1: 4:47

I love it, I love it, I love it. That is fun. So how did you get into? You have a name for it. It's like the family concierge.

Speaker 2: 4:58

Yeah, we call it a concierge multifamily office and so, um, it's actually very common sense and very simple. Um, number one you know, for years I've run some other businesses. Covid hit, uh, a mentor of mine, um, don Blanton, said well, you know that that was the Lord's way of sending everybody their room for time out because things got a little out of hand. I love it. Some folks did a little thinking and learned something and some just drank and continued to get in more trouble and more drama in their life. But coming out of that, I'd owned College Planning Institute and most of our partnerships with that buzz had been with schools, partnerships and education, and schools struggled during that time to just teach kids to manage something as simple as you know a technology me and you were probably using with zoom. They were just struggling to get on there. I mean, I remember being blown away like two weeks to teach educators how to get you know by and large in some places on and use Zoom and stuff. And so I just quickly said self this is not going to turn out well If we continue to rely upon new clients from school partnerships. They can barely teach the kids. We better figure out another way. And so you know. Long story really short.

Speaker 2: 6:31

I pivoted, did some rebranding. That's where Educated Freedom came from, the idea of doing a podcast and leveraging online and social or some of that. But during that process the original thought was the podcast was going to. Actually a lot of folks don't know this is going to be called College Cashflow in Cat Food Buzz and cat food Buzz. Okay, so it was going to be around college and cash flow, two things that I've done a lot with, but the cat food was to add a little bit of a humor, because people are making decisions that we call them cat food moments, like where, oh well, the college will help us figure out what we want to be when we grow up. That'll be a cat food moment because you'll be paying for that poor decision you know for years to come.

Speaker 2: 7:25

Right, right, it actually turned into culture, career and cash flow and, frankly, it became a watershed moment where I kind of found my why buzz and so succinctly is how did we get here? It's a function of like a lot of things in our life, a snowball of life's experiences, and then you get crucible moments like COVID that really make you stop and think about what's important and where you feel like you can make an impact. And for me I just realized my best college planning clients um, the, the, the relationships that were the best. And if I was going to continue to run business I had at least gotten to a point financially that I wasn't worried about whether I was going to be able to eat.

Speaker 2: 8:20

Which is a very real battle we go through as an entrepreneur to get over that piece. But it became about hey, the Lord's going to continue to bless me, but how do I steward the capabilities, the talents he's given me in a way that I can create the most impact, if you will? And so culture is basically how do we lead ourselves, lead at home, so that we show up in our business in alignment.

Speaker 2: 8:49

I spent 35 plus years who am I supposed to be? What hat am I supposed to wear? To make everybody else happy, right? And it's just exhausting and it sucked. And then you know, with college we spent so much time helping kids answer the wrong question what do you want to be when you grow up? When they don't have the capability to do that? But you also watch parents who are miserable.

Speaker 2: 9:16

You give a workshop at a school and you'd say, hey, mom, dad, how many of you love where you're at? It'd be literally three, four people out of a group of 400, consistently. And you'd say, well, that's got to suck. And so we'd get in trouble because we'd say, well, how do you help a kid figure out what they want to be when you grow up? Well, start with eliminating all the things that they suck at. Well, you can't really say that, well, why not? That's what they get. Meet them where they're at, right, right.

Speaker 2: 9:47

And then the third piece is cash flow, because college is the largest cash flow event in a family's life, with the shortest time frame and the longest term impact.

Speaker 2: 9:57

And I just love cash flow. And we know as business owners, if cash doesn't flow, our business doesn't go right and so, but over the years, the last three, four cash flow is really more a metaphor, if you will Buzz around stewarding the blessings that we have our time, our talents, our finances, but our ability to leave a legacy and an impact. And so what we love most is working with founders, because they put skin in the game, they know what it's like, they get the payoff and the emotional paycheck or the mystery I'm trying to solve. The big problem is, um, less than 3% of founders who create significant wealth ever transfer that wealth beyond the third generation, and it's because they're not doing great legacy planning. You give somebody a ton of money, you don't give them the skills, the ambition, you don't create experience where they have to transfer that You're basically hanging a millstone around their neck and pushing them off the boat into the deepest you know rest of the ocean, and so I just want to be able to solve that issue.

Speaker 2: 11:13

But to do that, we got to meet an entrepreneur and get them to a point where they have the space, the bandwidth and the capability for their mind to begin to do that, and the sooner we do it, the quicker we give decades of impact back to entrepreneurs, and that's what I freaking love doing.

Speaker 1: 11:31

I love it. I love it. So when we're talking about you know companies, what type of companies are you talking about? When you talk about your your ideal client, right Like cause, you said 5 million and plus. Or are these service-based businesses, professional businesses? Does it matter they?

Speaker 2: 11:52

run the gamut. It doesn't really matter to us. They run the gamut, it doesn't really matter to us. I would tell you that a lot of them tend to run some type of service more than not, but we use EBITDA because that's their secret professional language. So a million plus EBITDA, but there's a huge gaping hole honestly Buzz between about $10 million and $250 million, where these folks have wealth they don't know what to do with it, or they're they're managing multiple lanes and they're just bleeding cash inefficiently because they're trying to basically manage multiple lanes, multiple advisors and and the solution is they eventually just get a little bit apathetic and go.

Speaker 2: 12:51

You know what? I'm gonna bleed money. My solution will be just to go make more and I just hate seeing that. Because when we stop up those inefficiencies and we help them stop losing the money unknowingly and unnecessarily big one tax which, while it's a full net problem, right, it's the largest expense business owners have when we empower them with tax strategy, I just think entrepreneurs are better stewards with the dollars than our government and all of our politicians. 100%, and I don't agree with all entrepreneurs on many things, but I think that one we can all see.

Speaker 1: 13:34

Americans and anybody who pays taxes will agree that we are paying on the same dollar. One wanted to impose a 2% tax and now we're all okay with the 48 or 49% taxes we have now. Yes, I think that tax strategies and helping people hold onto those as much as possible. I think there's also a statistic out there to talk about the amount of businesses that go under because of tax problems, because they don't keep enough back for their taxes, because at some point you have to pay taxes. There's two things since you were born, they're guaranteed, and that's taxes and death, and it's just a matter of how much of those taxes you're going to pay versus how much you're going to have control of, like you're saying, in your community, because there's ways to funnel it back to your community and not give it to Uncle Sam and do the same stuff that Uncle Sam can't do or they promise to do and never do. But when we're talking about legacy, what are the main pillar of legacy, as you see it, for the majority of entrepreneurs that you work with?

Speaker 2: 14:59

Well, I think most folks think legacy is leaving money, but, like I said earlier, there's so much more to that and one of the things that is actually one of the largest pieces of interest to high net worth, ultra high net worth founders and family enterprises, which could be said, you know, for a bunch of different things generation two, whatever is, is actually 90 plus percent of all legacy and estate plans fail when they go through a stress test.

Speaker 1: 15:36

And what's a stress test, so people know what that means.

Speaker 2: 15:39

Yeah. So let's say somebody goes and they hire an estate planner and they get a trust in place and some life insurance and all of these things. Well, one of the things that you stress test is when those dollars move to the next generation. How are those dollars divided up? Are they divided evenly right, or are they divided in a way like especially if there's a business enterprise involved?

Speaker 2: 16:08

if you had three kids, you may have one that has the capability, skills and interest to run the family enterprise and if the way you leave the legacy to those three kids is they're all three business partners, you're basically asking for demise of the family enterprise through lawsuits and taking all that wealth and giving it to attorneys because you've got two people that you know don't want to be set an easier way. So many people are like wanting to pay their house off so they can leave it to their kids, and we talked about in the podcast like mom, dad, no offense. Maybe we should have a conversation about do your kids really want your house? Because we spend years you know Buzz like wanting to build and cultivate successful kids and family, but we unknowingly, unnecessarily do things that we believe to be smart but we're not thinking through or using great who's that have seen these things play out and so, unfortunately, we leave something that's a house that really just represents money to the kids in a lot of cases.

Speaker 2: 17:19

Or you got one kid that deeply emotionally wants to buy the house, but they don't have the means to do so and the other two are like oh, I just want my money. So the third is upset with the other two and may never talk to them or may never sell that deal over a thing, right? So there, there's that aspect. Or there could be things like where a business owner has a buy sell.

Speaker 2: 17:44

Well, a buy sell legal agreement's awesome If there's no funding mechanism for it, meaning there's no life insurance or business overhead or whatever then, what you really end up with is you end up with a major, major problem because there's no funding mechanism, and then you end up with a spouse who doesn't know anything about the business, who's now in the business with you. Oh, I've seen.

Speaker 1: 18:08

I've heard about that, like in the partnerships and stuff like that. I'm going through a little bit of that right now as far as bringing on my first partner ever out of, and I've been in business for 19 years and for me it's a little bit of a legacy play, but it's also a leverage play for me, like it's like I could. I've run my own, I've been the sole owner for my businesses for almost two decades now and I'm just at that point where I'm like I don't need to be the only. I could leverage this into something much greater than the two of us just having two. There's just so much more you can do. But one of the things I've heard about is making sure.

Speaker 1: 18:47

I mean, we're both married and it's like one of us goes the spouse. Does the spouse even want to deal with it? Right? And you, when you have to partner two partners or more each of them are putting a lot into what is it like? 70% of their value is in their business, right? So if they die, me absolutely. Yeah. 70% of your value is locked up in your business and now your spouse doesn't know how to get it back out and the people who are left are trying to figure out how they're just going to survive without their partners, because a lot of times that's a huge hole.

Speaker 2: 19:22

Right the partnerships rely on each other to basically in capability and things right. You got somebody who's the major rainmaker and they go down, right yeah, who's making it rain and you can run the best shop, but if nobody shows up at Chick-fil-A to give a chicken sandwich to, I mean you kind of got a problem, right, yeah you do.

Speaker 1: 19:44

So what's the first thing for the people that may probably not going to be? You know there's going to be a lot of listeners who are not quite to that 5 million plus mark right there. Sure, there's a ramp up to that, obviously. What do you tell these people in preparing for that inevitable time where they're going to need somebody like you? What can they do now to be well prepared to accept the guidance that you're going to give them once they do get to that echelon of success?

Speaker 2: 20:16

So number one I really appreciate that question because one of the things that we have discovered is we put in a process that we call simple automated cash flow and it is a methodology to manage personal finances. It's kind of a creation of a combination of Hardy's willpower doesn't work plus Mike Michalowicz's profit first on the business side, plus a little bit of the old Dave Ramsey envelope system that people would look at you like you've got COVID or some bubonic plague if you gave them cash in this day and age right.

Speaker 2: 20:57

And so you know what we basically did is we designed it, because what I find more times than not not just business owners, but absolutely business owners we have more to do every day than we'll ever get done. And so what happens is we get so busy running the business that in many cases, we abdicate the personal finances or we poorly delegate it to our spouse, or we don't delegate it at all and things get out of hand, which is how the tax issue comes into play. But the number of business owners that I run into Buzz at any level, including $20 million companies, that would tell you that they're honest people, they have integrity, they have character. And then you ask them a simple question what do you pay yourself every month? And they don't have an answer.

Speaker 2: 22:01

Okay, and so in your world, the marketing world, if you don't know your numbers, how can you know whether you know whatever the marketing endeavor or whatever is working? Okay? So recently we had a client that we couldn't get them to slow down long enough to get the system in place, and I just asked the healthcare provider. I said, hey, so how many blind surgeons do you know that are world renowned? And they looked at me kind of funny and said well, none, they can't see. And I'm like interesting, so do you know how many people in the financial realm can be successful for you if they don't know your numbers? He's like no, I go nobody and guess what? You can't be successful on your own without knowing your numbers, and so I'll tell you.

Speaker 2: 22:58

One of the things, buzz, that I think is really underappreciated is the thing that will help a business owner get through or break through. The next level is being honest with themselves. The reality is, as a business owner, we wear two hats we wear an employee hat or we work in the business and we wear the owner hat and we work on it and eventually, hopefully, have a self-managing company. True, but ask yourself how often or how long could you get an employee to continue to come to work? And they never know whether they're going to get paid or what they're going to get paid. But we do that to ourselves over and over and over again, which is actually why Michalowicz wrote Profit First, because business owners get focused on revenue, so they grow the gel cell or the monster that consumes them, not only personally, but also all the time. The focus, so they can't be present with their family and all of these other things.

Speaker 2: 24:05

They're not putting taxes aside, so that implodes the business. There's all of these things and those are important, but honestly it really it comes down to a very basic, non-sexy, non-product sale that a financial advisor doesn't make a nickel off of. Buzz makes them stop and figure out what their current lifestyle is personally, so that they know every single month that there's going to be enough there to honor themselves and the people they care about most. First, now we can begin, believe it or not, to have more peace of mind and not have personal financial drama and uncertainty that feeds over, because then we're never focused or present anywhere we are. So I would tell you bar none. Right now I'm on a soapbox a revival, if you will, in starting to roll out this simple, automated cash flow.

Speaker 2: 25:13

I did a mastermind just last week and the number of people out of that 20 people that sent me looms or messages out of the request to tell me what emotions did they experience? What were the things that they're hit? I mean, honestly, I felt horrible because you know they were like, oh yeah, like I don't know and I need to cut expenses, but I don't know where and I need to have revenue. I mean, it's just chaos. So it's not sexy.

Speaker 2: 25:45

Just like you know, losing weight is as simple as be more active and eat less and eat healthier stuff. You don't have to overcomplicate it. So we just set up that system three bank accounts one that captures all the money coming in, one that we live out of as an outflow account and one we call a private reserve, where you stack all the good stuff and then that begins to allow us to see, to visually validate we have enough and we're winning. And when that happens, that is a game changer in all areas of life and confidence. You quit worrying about do you spend $25 here or do you try to save, you know, five bucks by driving across town? Do you try to save 10 bucks on a tank full of gas or you just get it so you can get on and be present to the next thing. I mean, it's not sexy, but it's what matters. We'll be right back.