Navigating Silicon Valley: Practical CFO Advice with Candice Tait

Building Wealth, Careers, and Culture: Insights with Candice Tait

Discover how successful women entrepreneurs and finance leaders build sustainable, growth-oriented businesses while staying true to their values. Candice Tait shares her journey from astrophysics and art to executive finance, her experiences in Silicon Valley, and practical strategies for founders.

In this episode:

• Candice Tait’s unique background in astrophysics, art, and finance 
• The culture and mindset of Silicon Valley companies like Lyft
• The importance of obsessive attention to small details for business success=
• Practical CFO advice for founders: organizing legal and financial documents
• Building long-term financial strategies before seeking investment
• How to develop a narrative that links numbers to your business story
• The rising importance of managing SaaS subscriptions and expenses
• Why some founders can succeed without external funding
• The role of curiosity, continuous learning, and leveraging AI tools
• Tips for young entrepreneurs starting their careers in tech and beyond

Timestamps: 
01:17 - Candice shares her non-traditional background and childhood passions
02:51 - How art and astrophysics influence her approach to finance
03:48 - Finding flow states through painting and studying planetary formation
04:22 - The mental health benefits of creative outlets like art and astrophysics
05:11 - The vibrant, cult-like energy of Silicon Valley companies
06:17 - Candice’s journey to Silicon Valley and Lyft’s autonomous vehicle team
07:55 - The culture and vision driving Lyft’s success
10:25 - Changes in Silicon Valley's ecosystem and employee culture
12:27 - The importance of cult-like motivation in startup environments
13:24 - The significance of building a strong company culture and employee engagement
16:12 - Key financial advice for founders: legal, legal, legal!
17:02 - The need for proper organization of legal and financial documents
18:26 - How disorganized accounts hinder fundraising and growth
20:48 - The critical role of accurate bookkeeping in business scalability
25:58 - Common traits of successful founders: obsession with small details
28:12 - The power of incremental improvements and enjoying the process
30:44 - Why long-term financial planning is essential for sustainable growth
33:03 - Practical steps to develop a financial story and plan for fundraising
35:38 - Building a business that can grow without external investment
37:23 - The importance of a long-term vision and strategic focus
38:46 - The pitfalls of overemphasizing fundraising and venture capital
41:04 - The rapid evolution of technology and advice for young entrepreneurs
43:04 - Leveraging AI tools responsibly and building supportive developer networks
45:10 - Tips for managing subscriptions and financial automation
46:41 - Wrapping up with gratitude and encouragement for women in business

Connect with Candice: https://www.linkedin.com/in/candiceleetait/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Welcome to Fiery Femes, the podcast where high-achieving women build wealth, redesign their careers, and create lives with real freedom. I'm Sheena, an accredited investor, former tech sales professional, and the founder of Fiery Femes. After a decade across global SaaS, startups, and my own reinventions, I realized the most powerful thing a woman can have is optionality. So, in every episode, we explore the future of work, the psychology of wealth, and the practical strategies that help women build careers and lives that evolve as fast as they do. Today I am joined by Candace Tate, a powerhouse CFO with more than 20 years of experience leading finance through high growth, high-stakes moments, including Lyft's IPO in Silicon Valley. Candace has helped drive successful exits and now brings that perspective to supporting female founders with practical, hard-earned financial wisdom. In this conversation, we talk about what it really takes to build, scale, and steward a company through the moments that matter the most. So obviously, I know you, I know you're amazing, I know the work that you've done and how busy you are with new projects, clients as well. So appreciate the time that we have in the podcast. But I'd love to know something that is not listed on your LinkedIn profile.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

I've been thinking about this and what to say, and I suppose, and it's quite a big part of who I am, but it isn't showcased anywhere. When I'll tell you a story um for that. So when I was little, um, I remember a time when my dad took me outside into the garden and it was to look at the moon. And I I think it must have been like a super moon or something because it was enormous. Like I remember this massive, massive moon. And he ran inside to get the binoculars. And to this day, I mean, I must have been four because I I remember the house that we were living in, and I must have been about four around there. And uh I remember the feeling of standing there and feeling like this vastness and just wanting to know more, and that feeling never really left. And so I've got like a whole, I'm looking at it now, I've got this whole bookshelf of astrophysics and cosmology. Um, which I and I love quantum mechanics. And the other thing that people probably don't know about me is that I'm also an artist. So I've been painting in oil since I was 10. And um, before high school, my mother used to drop me off at painting lessons on Saturday mornings, and I was by far the youngest that compared to everyone else. They were all in their 50s, but I really loved it and I learned a lot, which helped me get into art school. So people don't really expect that from a CFO.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Wow. I did not know that one bit, or even like think about how much you love quantum mechanics and also being an art really being one with the arts. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

It's yeah, I love it. It's uh it's very different from finance, but it does add quite a nice layer of personality. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Would you say that does does it relax you? Does it get you into like that flow state?

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Oh, definitely. 100%, 100%, yes. Uh just painting for hours. Like sometimes you can I don't know, I felt quite meditative. So you just you don't even think anymore, you're just painting and you don't even know where the creativity is coming from. It's just coming out of you. It's a beautiful state to be in. And similarly, um, I actually because I love astrophysics so much, I did um I studied it at UCL not too long ago, like six, seven years ago, um, because I really loved it. And I did a whole thesis on the formation of planets. I remember like researching and reading and all of that, and it's such a great like for hours, you can get into such a great flow state.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Yeah. That is amazing. Really good to know, because um A most people would obviously think about meditation as like just sitting in a room and meditating, but actually just making sure that you get into that flow state and get lost in painting for hours. That's incredible and it does wonders to our place as well.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Definitely. There was something, some research that I read or heard recently where doing art actually turns off your analytical brain and helps those with anxiety and depression.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Yep. Huge, huge. Um big fan, and I always think you can tell, not that you can tell, but how people operate when they have an outlet, whether it's a creative outlet, that they can really just get lost and like not track time, whether it's um painting, swimming, playing sports, and you don't have to check your phone. There's a correlation to that and their performance as well. Yeah, definitely. Yes. Oh, well, win cute. I'm really excited about that. I'm definitely gonna ask you for photos for paintings that you have created. Yes, yeah. So we have a lot to um cover today. I'm definitely excited for the audience to hear more about your experience. Obviously, you are in the finance field, which we love that. We love um women in finance and we need more as well. I went to a financial advisory conference last week or two weeks ago, and the stats, the data, we definitely need more. There are gonna be more women millionaires uh in the next decade or so. So, yeah, we we need that. We need them more of you, Canvas.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Yeah, well, um absolutely, absolutely. We just need more tools and knowledge that fits the way that women work.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

Absolutely. And now we're getting a lot more research as well and acknowledgement that we are different, we have different cycles, we process things differently. So um, you know, it's a matter of time. Yes. Um yeah. I want to talk about your time at Silicon Valley. When were you there and what made you take the leap uh to explore Silicon Valley?

SPEAKER_00 6:27

It all happened by chance, to be honest. I was in I was living in London and the time I was kind of being parachuted in as CFO for private equity backed businesses. So joining the teams to help them prepare for investments, and even if it was post-investment to help them understand the difference between being owned by private equity and not, it's it's quite a big difference. So I did a lot of that work, and one day I got a phone call from a headhunter and he said to me, Hey, I've got this really interesting business. I'm searching for a CFO, and they need help preparing for an exit. And I was like, Yeah, that's what I do. Uh just yeah, come and meet the team. And so I remember walking through the office and it just smelt of boys. It's like a big boys' room. There were so there was like one other woman in this whole office, and there were like 30 guys. It was a room full of developers, and um, the business was called Blue Vision Labs. It had three founders who all had PhDs from Oxford, and they'd been building this technology in stealth mode, which was all autonomous vehicles, um autonomous vehicle technology. And so I had my interview, like sat down with the team and and kind of understood what they needed to do and realized it was Lyft that was interested in purchasing them. Um, by the way, these three founders were like 26, 27, like really young guys. And so they'd never ever ever owned a business or understood what due diligence was. So I um I came in and supported them through that process. And as I have done with every company I've ever worked with, I had to go in and clean up their accounts. So it took us a little while. And through that process, I also then met the team at Lyft, who so at this point Lyft was not just doing the taxi service side of their business, it was also autonomous vehicles, which they've later sort of sold. But they had a huge team in Palo Alto, a massive office where they were uh just hundreds of developers building AI software for autonomous vehicles. Um and uh through that due diligence process and then the sale, the Lyft team asked me to stay on and support them, and I did. So I ended up being finance director for the European Division of Lyft, all on the autonomous vehicle side of things. And they also had an office in Germany, so um I had a few trips over there. But I worked with that team and kind of went to well, I I was living in London but was in San Francisco very regularly because the the whole head office at Lyft was in San Francisco. And yeah, that that's kind of how I got into that position. It was a very it's a very different ecosystem out there for sure. Absolutely. Um it's quite it's very competitive and Lyft at the time was very uh was sort of on the same par as as Facebook and Google, like a lot of the the talent was being kind of pulled. It was funny, it was whoever was gonna pay the highest salary and give the highest equity, essentially. And so people were kind of moving between between those companies um regularly. And so, yeah, very interesting face, very fast moving.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

I loved like the energy there is incredible. Very lucky to have um experienced some Silicon Valley companies as well uh in my career. Very different to obviously I'm based in Australia and um you're in New Zealand now. Very different energy. And um curious, what year was this?

SPEAKER_00 10:08

This was just the so this was two years before COVID. So in the two years coming up to COVID, yeah, yeah. And so that was, I guess, also at Lyft's peak because we went through an IPO um probably six months, maybe more, maybe eight months before I I left and moved to New Zealand. Yeah. So very, very different company at that time and also very different goals and aspirations. The founders of Lyft is really interesting. Like the founders of that business had a clear vision. And um I think the thing that makes it different, and I have experienced this to some degree in London, but but what I felt in Silicon Valley and in Palo Alto, Palo Alto more than San Francisco, was this cult-like feeling. You know, people were like, wow, just full-on like believing in these businesses. Like they believed those values. It was very people-driven, and it was awesome. I mean, like I I always felt like I mean, they had 6,000 people and the head office of Lyft was enormous. It was enormous. There were like four floors, and there was hundreds of people on each floor, but like everyone lived and breathed the values of that business. It was incredible.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

I wonder whether that has changed now, because um, my experience with working for Silicon Valley companies and the distribution scientists in Australia is very much they make you drink that Kool-Aid, and you drink that Kool-Aid and you love it. All your friends are basically from that company, and all your other friends from different walks of life, when they kind of like come join you and you're hanging out with your work friends, they're like, What is this? Yeah, it's very different. They really want to keep you that ecosystem.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Yes, yes. It's very, it's very close and very tight. And I think it has something to do as well with because it's software driven and the talent pool is quite, it's not super small, but it's small enough that everyone's competing, right? With those those talents. So yeah, people kind of, yeah, you're you're either like a a real believer in the business or you're not. And if you're not, you don't stay very long. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

That is such a cool story. Thank you for um sharing that. I'm just getting flashbacks of um my times or whenever I visited Palo Alto and how incre incredible, like incredible energy, incredible technology. Do you think that level of drinking the Kool-Aid it has changed from that time to now?

SPEAKER_00 12:37

I in general, you mean in general? I think that uh I no, I think that it's actually it's a really important part of business. I think that it's the when you're building a business, you know, things are hard. There's only enough resources to pay a certain amount of people. Everyone has to kind of roll up their sleeves and do things that they don't really want to do. And so the only way for you to kind of be driven and to be motivated by working there is to drink the Kool-Aid, to be part of that team who believes in it so much that they would work until midnight and only be paid like half the market rate. You have to. You have to be uh part of the cult, right? I think that's okay at the beginning of any business that you join. I think that every business goes through stages. I was actually thinking exactly this the other day that when I worked for Reward Gateway in London, which was by far the the sort of uh major sort of development of of of my life, um it changed everything for me. And I remember the first ever day that I went for my interview, I walked through the office and I I honestly couldn't find my my way. I was lost, and someone came running up to me with like, Hey, how can I help you? And I was like, Whoa, you are so nice. At the time when he was running towards me, I looked on my left-hand side and there was like a ping pong table, and I was like, What? And people were like smiling and laughing, and the energy was so vibrant, and I thought, my god, I want to work here like immediately. And I was there for four and a half years. I went through an exit with them. I left because I needed a change, and actually to this day I regret leaving. I love that business so much. The culture there was just electric. It was electric. And that business wasn't at the the beginning beginning. It was still considered like I was an SME, but it felt like a startup, and everyone was 100% in the cult-like mode. I remember bringing a bank manager to one of our quarterly meetings where the CEO would stand up and he would present all the learnings of the quarter, and we would commemorate like the best salespeople and like talk about our wins and everything. And it was full of energy, you know, there was music, and the CEO would be like really theatrical, and it was really awesome. And at the end of this quarterly meeting, the bank manager came up to me and he was like, This is a cult. This is 100% a cult. You guys are crazy. And so I do believe that it's necessary to have that. Like, I do believe it. Uh, in fact, like another business I'm working for at the moment in New Zealand, quite different. Like the energy is different, but there is definitely this cult-like feeling of wanting the business to do well and to go where that business is going. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

Uh it's so hard to create a culture that drives people, makes people want to work there. It's expensive, it's hard to create, and it's very delicate. So for the companies who have mastered it, well done. Because yeah, like looking back at the times where I'm just like thinking, I love that company, I wish I stayed longer. The people were amazing, they breed that level of talent as well. Yeah. So well done. And I hope there's more companies as well that really create that Kool-Aid culture. I mean, it is what it is, but people love it. You foster a good culture and people want to stay there.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

Yeah, 100%. Now, with the work that you do now, so you work with a lot of founders, and I know that you must have thought about or you must have now a list of things that founders really need to know. So, would you love would you like to share with us uh the important things that you think founders should know, especially as a CFO?

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Oh my gosh, where do I start? So these are just so I'll just give you some some key learnings, I guess, that have happened over and over in my career working with founders, and they're really easy not to let happen. One of them is just keeping all of your legal documents safe and filing them away. Like I know that sounds so simple, but what happens if you don't is when you get in a situation and you would like to raise some capital, and the investors and the legal teams are like, hey, can you share with the I don't know, your your shareholders' agreement, or if you've given anyone else shares, if it's family and friends, can you send us those documents and you know, let's just get things moving? And you're like, that was so long ago, I don't even know where they are. It delays everything. And this is not just on a small scale, it's on a big scale too. I've been part of situations where the founder has put his own money, so he's remortgaged his house, he put his own money into the business, and he cannot tell me where the documents are, he can't confirm anything. So I'm like, well, but you're just gonna have to forfeit that money. Like, how am I supposed if you can't tell me when you put the money in or anything like that, how am I supposed to figure out where where to look? It's a minefield. And that happens as well when founders are not very tidy in their bank accounts or which account they're using to pay for things. I have had situations where founders are paying for business expenses through their personal account all the time. And so it does it like at the at the time you're like, oh my god, I don't have time for this. I'm just gonna pay with my card. Boom, boom, boom, like everything's quick, right? Need to just get this done. It adds up into time later, it doesn't disappear. So you're not just you're not solving a problem just by using your own card or forgetting about a really important legal document or leaving that document in your emails to get hidden and buried between thousands of emails. It just becomes a problem later. And what when I've been through many, many times is trying to help founders get prepared through due diligence, putting all their documents into one place and getting prepared, right? And that process to me is the most frustrating because it's so so so simple. But founders just tend not to be very organized with their business stuff.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

There you go. I wouldn't say guilty as charged. I was looking, I went into um one of my Dropbox files today. I was uh I was doing something, and then I found my registration, like my business classic registration. My goodness. I thought, wow, like I didn't know it's like in this folder. But you know, not that I need it, but I was like, okay, I should really take this filing.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Just just honestly, it's so easy as just creating a legal folder in Google Drive or something, and just it doesn't matter, just put it in there. Do not leave it in your emails, do not like, and also just you know, and I don't know how we fix this problem, but when legal documents are created and they need signatures from various people, like even if you have a safe note, right? And you have like five people on the safe note, the lawyers will tend to send you the safe note, and then they send the signing page to the five people, and then you have five documents of signatures, all of which has one person on each of those, and then you have your original document, your safe doc. You need all of those documents together. Do you know what I mean? It's annoying that it all gets spread out and stuff, but yeah, that sort of thing just watch out for. Um, and then the other thing that happens, which is difficult when you're a founder and you don't know what you don't know, especially when it comes to finance. But when you start working, when you start building your business and you have costs that are coming through and revenues coming through and you have like maybe a zero or you have a QuickBooks or something. What I've noticed that tends to happen is if you are not organized with your allocations of costs and expenses and revenues, then when it becomes important for me to help or any other CFO to help you raise financing, and all that data is mished and muddled and it's messy and it's hard to understand, it's actually really difficult for us to make any useful, defendable forecast from that. So I've I've been in the situation. Um, what month are we in? We're in May, first of May. Three times this year, I've had to deal with that situation where I've had to go back, clean up messy accounts before we can even get into the process of actually forecasting some numbers for the business. My God.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

As they say, shits in, shits out. Wow. Okay. So make sure that we have file, we have different files and folders for legal documents, financial documents. Make sure that the founders are clean with using business accounts instead of personal accounts.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

And just filing those important, important paperwork in one beautiful place. And um, that way it's easy to find if when you are ready to raise capital, you can raise capital very easily as well and faster. And yeah, okay, got it. Um what would you say is the is that the most common thing that founders 100%.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Yes. Yeah, yeah, it's the most common. Um, it happens every single time. Every time I'm asked, hey, like I'm running out of cash, can I need your help to raise some capital? I'm like, okay, cool, let's start here. Let's do a little analysis of your accounts. And I'm like, what is this? Why is and honestly, I get it. When you're running a business and you're focused on sales and Your products. Sitting and looking at your accounts is just boring. I get it. But it becomes so important because not just for raising capital, for sitting down and having a look at your cash flow and how much money are you spending. If you've got marketing expenses that are allocated to travel or various things allocated into one place and you can't tell what is what, how are you supposed to make good decisions? Like you need good data. So absolutely. So it's really important to consider that. And I actually, you know, even the best of founders are unfortunately have been caught out by this. Like I've I've actually worked with two founders, um, two female founders recently, who are so organized, the most organized founders I've ever met. However, they hired to so instead of them looking after their books, they made a really practical decision to go and hire a bookkeeper. And so they did that. And the problem was because they didn't know what they didn't know, or they just were not looking at the accounts regularly. They just presumed that the bookkeeper was going to do everything accurately, and they weren't because the bookkeeper unfortunately doesn't have all the context. And so you have to keep an eye on things and don't just trust that an external third-party bookkeeper is going to put things in the right places because they probably won't. They just, you know, you can't have a bookkeeper who's doing the accounts for, I don't know, like a retail company and then the consumer products and then a tech company. They don't have the context across all three of those. They need that from the founder. So as like a little kind of 15-minute thing every month, I would run a transaction report and just have a look at what transactions are being allocated to your your finance system. Okay. But it's like a really good, useful tool. 15 minutes is all it takes is to skim down, have a look at what's being what's been going in there, the descriptions used. If it's bad quality and you're like, I can't even tell what this is, then you know you need to do some work. Yeah. And would you say, like, is that in the cash flow and transactions piece? It's just a transaction listing. So if you go into QuickBooks or you go into Xero and you run an account transaction listing, it gives you every single transaction that's been accounted in your in your um finance system and you can select the period. Like, I don't know, if you want to look at April, for example, you can just run the month of April and it would spit out like everything. And you could go down that list and be like, oh, under the heading marketing, I've got that flight that I booked to Australia the other day. Why is that sitting in marketing? And you can literally go and pull it out and put it in the right place. Or tell your bookkeeper this is wrong. Can you put it here or can you change the description because it's not useful?

SPEAKER_01 24:43

That's super important. Absolutely. And I think there's such a value of if you're gonna use um a specific bookkeeper as well, if they specialize in the kind of business that you operate in, worth the money, worth the specialization, because they just know things that, for example, if you're a media business, a tech business, or a SaaS business, whoever you hire needs to know the different taxation for different countries who's gonna buy your product versus I guess like a service-based business who deal with local services in the local area.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

Yes, yes. Huge difference, massive. And also something else to watch out for. So you have industry-specific knowledge, but and this is this makes a huge difference. If you find a bookkeeper who understands the importance of good data for raising investment or management accounting, that is even better because there are some good bookkeepers out there, but those bookkeepers are only caring about the compliance. So ticking the box or filing your tax return, filing your badge returns, etc., etc. That's what they care about. That stuff to me doesn't add value to strategic decision making. What adds value is good quality data. So if a bookkeeper understands that that's important because the founder needs to make decisions about growing her business, then you will have a totally different level of quality of bookkeeping. Totally different. Okay, I will look into my bookkeeping now.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

Love to know. So we talked a lot about um uh things that founders get um overlooked, important things that founders need to know that they probably take for granted. I would love to know the founders that you have worked with who just excel. What are the things that they do differently versus the others who who don't?

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Oh, that is such a difficult thing to answer because every incredible founder that I have known has been different about why they are incredible. Oh gosh. Okay, but actually there's one commonality that I can I can definitely pinpoint, and that's their obsession to the small details. Obsession, obsession. So I absolutely gosh, brings back memories when I was working with a founder and um he would used to play a game and it would be called What's Wrong With This? And every time he said this, where you knew it was like time for a grilling, and he would play this game and it would be so small, the things that he would pick up. And I was like, Wow, like you are sitting here and you are spending your time focused on such little things, and actually that was his brilliance because the small things mattered, they accumulated, and he knew that he knew the effect of letting small things go meant it was just a bad habit and a bad habit for the business. So I've actually found that in many of the female founders that I've worked with, like that's that attention to the smallest things. You're like, sometimes I've actually responded in a way when I'm like, what? Like, why does that matter? And then afterwards I'm like, no, it does matter. It does. And there's another female founder here um in New Zealand who I work with pretty closely, Jenny Rudd. Um, she is the same. She is she focuses on the smallest things, and it drives me nuts sometimes. But I'm like, it is just her brilliance that it's what's gonna make her super successful.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

That is such an interesting take because obviously there is such a movement of um 80% done is better than like perfect. So, how does that play into yeah, the small details or just getting things done?

SPEAKER_00 28:22

So, well, there's I suppose another argument which is focusing on that 1% and making small changes every single day. And I know there's some research on this where when you just focus on this, the sort of the small incremental changes, they start to create this feeling that we're going somewhere. And that feeling that we're going somewhere creates momentum, creates belief, creates good work ethos, creates the culture, takes everyone along with them. And I think that's really important because this whole idea that we need to focus on like just achieving, achieving, achieving is it's not, it's not going to give you that sense of purpose and meaning that's really important to building your business. And I think back to like painting as well, one of the biggest lessons I ever learned when painting was don't rush the process. Enjoy the process, because the process is what matters. And it's the same when you're sitting there and looking at the small minor details. Like, I think even in my own business, one of the things I do pretty regularly, not every week, but very regularly, is to say to myself, what is the one thing that I can change just a little bit that makes it better than it was before? Just that one thing. And so I think that feeling that I can do something, I can absolutely make a change, a positive change, and a quick and easy one, makes me feel like I'm always gearing up. If I gave myself this task of having to achieve something major, it feels really far away. Like I I love big dreams and I like very difficult, complex things to solve. But the way that I tackle them without being getting lost is or just demotivated as well, is to create these little steps. You know, what can I do tomorrow that gets me closer to that? And I just continue with it. And so I preferred living in that world rather than the whole, like, let me just do 80% of it, you know, like rather and forgetting the 20. Like, I I don't really live in that world. I prefer small change regularly.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Yeah. And I think that plays in very well into what we wanted to talk about, the thinking long term and making sure that you have the minute details, important details in order and building that foundation. So tell us a little bit more about um the concept of thinking long term that you would want to share with our audience.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

Yeah, so something that obviously I have witnessed and it's been a pattern now. Being in finance for more than 22 years, I've seen time and time again where founders are coming to me with this idea that they don't feel like they're in control of their numbers. They don't know how long their cash will last, or they don't know the starting point of going out and raising investment, or how to feel prepared, or how like what is the first step? And before founders even go to investors asking for money, the thing that is so important for your business and for you as a founder is to build a long-term financial strategy that sits alongside your business strategy. There is there's no world anymore that you can just go off and you know, build a business without considering finance and money. It doesn't exist, right? Maybe in the olden days when we still lived with our parents until we were 40 and didn't have to pay rent, fine. But in today's world, I think it's so important and critical that you have some, you don't have to be amazing, you don't have to know everything about finance, but there is some basics that you absolutely need. And one of them really is just understanding what's sitting in your accounting system. It's so basic, right? Like what we talked about before, getting to grips with what's in your finance system, understanding what kind of expenses have you got? Like, what are you spending on? How many subscriptions do you have? Do you know why you need those subscriptions? How much of your money are you spending on marketing and how effective is it? What is that as a percentage of your revenue? Like, you know, asking yourself really important questions and getting to grips with what's in your in your accounts and knowing your story as well. Like I think sometimes I get on a call with a founder and I'm like, well, just tell me, like, how did you get to where you are today? And they find it really hard to build a narrative of joining the numbers and how much they've invested and how much it's cost them into their business strategy. Like they really struggle with that. I have actually, because of all of this, I've started to develop my own program, which takes you through seven, seven steps. And those seven steps are in order of um getting you through each of those very important stages to feeling in control of your business finances. And at the very beginning, it's very much let's go through and do an analysis of where you've what you've done so far and like how you got here. And let's create like a little one page to make make it really clear what your situation is today. And then the next thing we do is we kind of talk about like, okay, well, you know, you want to grow this business. Like, what does that strategy look like? Are you going to be operating in the country that you're trying to sell in now or are you going to expand? Are you considering hiring more people? Do you have more products you want to sell or more services you want to sell? Like we go through quite a lot of that together and we explore it, we explore as well the key drivers that would be essential for you to monitor if you do go down the road of that forecast. Like, we'll decide, I don't know, like your CAC has to be $50, right? Or your lifetime has to be a certain number. Like we decide what those metrics are that you can then start monitoring too. And then once we've done that, there is this relief from the founder of being like, oh my God. Okay, so today I can tell you that I feel confident about what's in my accounts. I know things are clean, they're not messy, I know where I'm going. I can literally tell you the story of where I'm headed and associate that story with numbers. Okay, awesome. When you're there in that moment, you can then start to develop what it looks like to raise investment, right? Because you've done the numbers. You're like, I need half a million, or I need 250,000, or I need a million, or whatever it is. And then we can go, okay, you have a narrative, you have a forecast, you have a story. Now all we need to do is pull together a pitch deck, and then you can go out and you can talk to banks, you can talk to investors, you can talk to your family, you can talk to angel investors, right? You have all of your ducks in a row to get you into that position. That's that's the key. That is literally the key in a founder's success to finding the money to grow your business, but then also knowing how the numbers affect your business, like it's so important.

SPEAKER_01 35:26

Yeah, I agree. I agree. And amazing to hear about this program. I feel like it's gonna help a lot of founders not feel as overwhelmed with the numbers that they see, especially if they have self-given that themselves the title of I'm not good with numbers, then it's almost like a self-manifesting prophecy. So this is amazing.

SPEAKER_00 35:47

Um how long is this? So it's seven weeks. Seven weeks to get you from feeling completely out of control to feeling in control. And then there's an addition, additional week after that. If you are in that process of requiring external funding or investment, you can then take the eighth week, which helps you prepare for investor questions, helps you create the finance slides of your pitch deck, and really prepares you to tell that that story, that narrative to an investor. So seven weeks plus the the eight-week add-on.

SPEAKER_01 36:19

And would you say what stage should the business be in? Is it like startup, um, actual revenue coming in? Who usually would would want to go in this program?

SPEAKER_00 36:29

Yeah. So I've actually been running this program with individual founders, and the type of founder doing this is someone who is just about to enter in the market or has been in the market for, like has tested their products, generated a little bit of money, but knows that potentially they might have to do, like think about financial strategy and might have to do a bank financing or friends and family or just something because they know they'll need money to cover inventory or product investments or development. So, right at the early days, I'd say, like in that that sort of sweet spot of they have a product already. So definitely not someone who's like considering building a product and hasn't got something out there. Okay, very good, very good.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

I like that a lot. I know a few people um in that space. And um with with the uh long-term success for this, I love how you've talked about like thinking long-term and building that vision. How important is it for founders to have that vision in place?

SPEAKER_00 37:34

It just like the first thing that popped in my head was sustainable, you know, like you you have to think long term because you want to build a sustainable business. I also I very much believe that there are situations where founders don't need to go and give away equity to grow their business, right? I do believe that. I believe that if you if you could build a robust and effective financial strategy, you don't need investment. I am working with some founders here in New Zealand who've been growing their business and they have never ever raised capital. They are EBITDA positive. It's amazing, right? So it is possible. I think that this we live in this world today where we're like, you know, you look at the news headlines and it's always, you know, less than 3% goes to female founders from VCs, and I'm like, and it just it kind of when you see all of this stuff about raising investment and female led businesses succeeding or not, you always feel like I need to raise investment, I need to go and do an accelerator, and I need to get this much from textiles, and I need this much from start made. And you're like, no, maybe not. Maybe you don't need that. Like, has anyone challenged those businesses that maybe they don't need investment? You know, maybe they have a sustainable business that can run itself. The difference is it might take longer, it might be slower, but it's more sustainable that way. And going and raising funds and investment is actually like it takes a lot of time and a lot of energy to go and do that, right? It takes time for your business. So I just, yeah, I feel like if you sit down and you you make time to build a robust financial strategy and you know your cash flow, maybe in that process you can find a way to build the business sustainably. Just maybe.

SPEAKER_01 39:29

Yeah, yeah. Uh I actually spoke to a VC the other week and they said they're like, this is gonna be a cash, this is a cash flow revenue generating business. I don't think it needs VC. Exciting. And I guess it's it's it's the headlines, right? You read all the headlines of like 26-year-old raised um, I don't know, 16 million with X valuation. Versus there's literally a guy, um, it's called Cal AI. He somewhere in the US, he actually got rejected for um for Stanford University and all like the top universities, but he sold his business for 50 mil.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

No investment. No investment, just him and his buddies, and they were in high school. They were in high school. They were in high school. Uh it's such an incredible story, and then they created this app that you can take photos of the food, and it sh it tells you how much the calories are for those who are calorie counting. And obviously, fitness is huge. So I think I'm pretty sure it was um fitness, uh, my fitness pal who bought them out. But I would love um like that kind of deal versus praising from VC. Yeah. But maybe I'll just in case um please listen to my podcast. You know, yeah, we'll see. But uh if they do go through their due diligence process and listen to this part, I'll be very impressed. But look, um Candace, such golden nuggets over here, especially for founders, especially for female founders. Um, I'd love obviously we're going towards the um end of the show. Um, but you've been in tech for a while, you've seen a lot of people in tech, a lot of founders in tech, and you've seen the changes. What advice would you give to 20-year-olds today who are starting their careers?

SPEAKER_00 41:21

So I do believe that there's never been a time in history where you can literally think up an idea in the morning while you're having breakfast. And after dinner, it's built. You can build, you can build stuff in a day. We have Claude, we have Repplet, we have Lovable, we have all these incredible tools that have quite literally changed the game. So if you're 20, I think that you should absolutely be you should be seizing the day and using these tools regularly. Over the last 22 years, I'd say like tech goes through so many different cycles. I was there when we got access to the internet. Like I literally was. I have been exposed to the day where we got mobile phones, right? I remember the Brooks, the Motorola, if you remember those. And I also was I was there when crypto launched, and now I'm living through the AI, the season of the AI, right? So tech will continue to change, but we forget that tech is just a tool. And the things that don't change are the things like the qualities of judgment, empathy, and just like old-fashioned good communication. And so I feel like those are the things that we should be focused on whilst we're building these products, like connecting, back to connecting to the humans and building a tool that resonates with people to help them. I think also what's important to say is that like there's been, you know, I've seen a lot in the news about how AI is taking people's jobs. And I think that I don't believe that AI is going to replace you. I think the risk is that you don't join the movement and take advantage of such an excitement, exciting time. Um, so I think it's about just going and building the thing that you had a thought about because if there's no bit of time to do it, I don't know when you're gonna do it. Like do it now. So good.

SPEAKER_01 43:15

Okay, so for our audience, make sure that you start building, start playing around with things. And I do say I do um want to talk about the piece of AI replacing workers. I saw a um one of my developer friends, he runs a very successful web dev um agency, and he gets so much business from people who have created like vibe coding tools. And towards that, because towards the end, if it's not a proper tool that has proper foundations, proper database, it's actually quite difficult. So there's more work for web devs at the moment, from from what I've gathered from him. But also another one is the CFO. I saw I got this reel last night. Where he sent me this reel and he said, like, this the the face of the CFO who laid off stuff and thought that it would be cheaper to just like go with AI because the AI bills are now piling up. And it's actually more expensive to have just AI run everything than human workers. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 44:19

Yeah. Yeah. I I to your first point, I do believe that there's more working around. Like I I had to, with my tool, AI CFR, I built I built in myself using Claude Code. And then I realized as well that there was like I I don't have the fundamentals of understanding proper frameworks for software development tools. I reached out to uh a company in London who helped me build all the security and make sure that my site was secured for founders. And um they told me that they had never seen so much work coming to them from people building their own tools and they're actually exploring, building their own vibe coders support helpline, which I think is genius. Like that's what we need. So many people are doing, going off and building tools and then realizing they hit hit a roadblock and they can't fix it, and they just need something, they need access to like a software developer who understands the language and understands the frameworks and can just go, hey, I can fix that for you in an hour while that rather than you spending like three days trying to fix it. So yeah. Three days, multiple token upgrades just to fix it. More subscriptions, like people's subscriptions must be going through the roof. I think at one point I had manners clawed. I didn't ever pay for chat GPT. I always didn't, I didn't really fancy that one, but just so many tools. So, so many. So people need to try.

SPEAKER_01 45:40

I I am a big believer of like trying them out, see what works for you, but also every month do have a look at your transactions list and look at those subs because they're gonna be very sneaky.

SPEAKER_00 45:51

Yes. One thing I've actually done, which I don't know why I never did before, but anytime I sign up to a subscription that has a free trial, I cancel it immediately. Yeah. So like literally I've signed up, I know it's 14 days or it's a month, but I cancel it immediately. And then it takes away that pressure of having to remember that I have a subscription that I might want to cancel. And if if it cancels and I just start paying for it, then that's fine because I've got some free trial. I've I've had a use of it and I like it. So I just start paying for it. But if you don't cancel it straight away, you have to put a little reminder in your calendar. So you still get the free trial, even if you cancel straight away.

SPEAKER_01 46:28

That's a great tip. That's an incredible tip. I hope the listeners take advantage of this tip. But yeah, I actually didn't know that. I do have those calendars like three for three consecutive days. There's like, have you canceled this? Have you canceled this? Are we keeping this?

SPEAKER_00 46:43

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, get rid of it, just cancel it straight away.

SPEAKER_01 46:46

But you still get the free, free time. All the SAS founders and marketers are like, What is this? Yeah, what did she just say? Well, um, Candace, this has been amazing, super helpful, super funny.

SPEAKER_00 46:58

I had such a great time, thank you. Yeah, awesome. Thank you. It's been nice, been nice chatting. See you later. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

Thank you for listening to another episode of Fiery Femes. If this resonated, share it with a woman in your life because we rise higher when we rise together. Don't forget to follow and review. It helps more women access the tools and conversations that build wealth and confidence. For more career and financial empowerment, come hang out on Instagram and YouTube at FieryFems. I'll see you in the next episode.