Transcript of From Corporate CFO to “Mr. Biz”: Ken Wentworth on Scaling Businesses, Cash Flow & Entrepreneur Mindset

A lot of times business owners are really good at the widget they produce or whatever service they're providing, but they're not really good on the business side of things. Increasing sales, increasing your net income, increasing the value of the company. Especially now you get a lot of baby boomers that are considering exiting and wanting to sell their company. How do I improve the value of my company?

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Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always getting right, we're always right now. We're taking the BS out of business. And hey, what better way to take the BS out of business than talk to Mr. Biz himself, Ken Wentworth, author of 3 bestselling books, a known radio master. What's up, Ken?

Good to be here, man.

We're taking the BS out of business. We gotta go straight to Mr. Biz.

That's right, man. I'm here for it.

I do respect the registered trademark on Mr. Biz as a marketing guy. Hey, you got to lean into that brand, baby.

Honestly, I was very hesitant initially. Enough people pushed me, I finally said, I might as well lean into it.

People remember stories, and they also remember catchphrases and things. There's mastery in simplicity, and Mr. Biz is simple, but it's straight to the point. You're Mr. Business, you talk about your own business, the brand is aligned, and it's what people remember. Let's set the table on who is Mr. Biz.

I had a corporate career for a long time, worked JP Morgan, was able to ascend to a pretty high level there. And I was being promoted in the top 1% of the company, which sounds great. Got a mentor, walk through things. He said, you need to be a CFO for 6 or 8 businesses. And I'm thinking, how the heck do you do that? Because being a CFO in my corporate world for one business in JP Morgan is a 60 to 80 an hour a week job. How can you do that for multiple? Like, what are you going to clone yourself?

What the heck?

He's like, no, you do it on fractional basis, part-time basis. Once he explained it to me, it made a lot of sense. I left JP Morgan, I got my first client. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. It's not work for me. What I do for a living is a hobby. Me now. It's a hobby you enjoy to do because I love it so much. Someone asked me, how many hours a week do you work? And I go, I don't know, I don't punch a clock. They said, what do you mean you don't know? You don't work a certain— I'm like, no, I don't. I mean, I have flexibility. My kid's got a game, I take off and I quit work at 2:30 in the afternoon, go to the game. I might work from 9 o'clock at night till 1 in the morning or something too. I do some form of work almost 7 days a week. I don't say that to brag or like, oh man, I'm this big hustle grinder or whatever. It's just because I like it. A lot of times my wife and daughter will go to bed in the evening, I'll pop into my home office because I've got something I'm working on I'm excited about.

I'd rather do that than sit and watch TV. And people more like, man, there's something wrong with you.

I'm the same way. I own multiple companies and I might be gone at 11 AM to do something that no one else has the flexibility to do. I'm doing business and not because you had to, but you enjoyed, you got an idea, you want to flesh it out. Same thing. I think that's the entrepreneur gene. It helps when you do what you love.

I'm very grateful, blessed that I'm in a position I'm in now. I had a client I had been working with for a while and they're getting to the point where they need a full-time CFO. I said, okay, I'll help you transition, I'll help you find someone and then we'll do the transition. She said, well, why don't you just come work for us? And I said, I love working with them. They're a great client, great people. I didn't want to do it. I I can't imagine ever again working with one company, going to one office. I just can't imagine now being kind of locked down to that, to just working with one company or whatever. It's one of the things I love about what I do is different challenges at different companies, different personalities, different industries. And she said, well, there's got to be a price. Give me a price. And I said, $5 million. She said, for what, for a 10-year contract? I said, no, for one year. She said, I can't afford that. I said, right, so that means the conversation's over. So let's move on. I'm very grateful to be in a position I'm in now.

It's pretty rare. I mean, how many times you talk to someone who actually loves what they do living, and they're not just checking the box. They're not on Wednesday going, oh my gosh, is the weekend here yet? I'm not that way. Sunday nights, a lot of times I have trouble sleeping. I start planning my week on Sunday and I get jazzed up about what I got going on during the week. I'm laying in bed on Sunday night going, man, on Tuesday that's going to be awesome. I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. Wednesday I'm going to talk to so— there's not many people in that position. I don't take it for granted, but I'm definitely very grateful for it.

You have a popular radio show. Talk about that, where the Mr. Biz came. Talk a little bit about that journey.

They had asked me to be a guest on someone else's show to come on as a business expert. They take callers. There was me, there was an attorney, and there was like a marketing person. So business owners would call and ask a question, and depending which one of us, we would answer their question, try to give them help. I was on the show 2 different times, did a couple different segments. The GM of the station said, hey man, I've been looking for someone to host a business-related show for almost a year now. You're my guy, you got to host the show. I'm like, I don't do that. This was fun, but that's not my wheelhouse. And he said, what I'm finding is I'm finding people who are either super knowledgeable, but they have the personality of a thumbtack, or they don't have any depth of knowledge and they're just super charismatic and sound like a used car salesman. You're a combination of both. I'm like, I'm not sure how to take that. But they finally wore me down. I said, I'll do 8 shows and see if I like it. Probably about 3 or 4 shows in, I was like, this is pretty cool.

I really enjoy it. It's funny, I think a lot of people think, oh, you're a radio show host. I'm like, that's like this much of what I do. That's almost like a little side project thing. I do enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. I get to meet a lot of cool people and talk to a lot of cool people and learn from a bunch of different people as well. I guess I want to show and things like that. It's another avenue creating content and be able to put content out for people and things like that. I definitely enjoy it.

It was a professional CFO, when you step in, what are people looking for you to help with? And maybe what's some of the most practical outcomes that come from your expertise and what you end up helping businesses with?

Typically I come in as very strategic. My undergrad's in accounting, but it bored me to tears. I worked for the first couple years of my career in accounting and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is like way too far in the weeds for me. Typically coming in and helping a business, a lot of times their businesses that probably a lot of people can relate is they've been in business for 8, 10, 15, 20 years and you kind of start to get a little bit of tunnel vision and you start to get the, this is the way we've always done it mentality, and having a fresh set of eyes that come in and say, wait a minute, guys, why are we doing this? It's so often I come into a business and there's so much low-hanging fruit of ways to improve and make massive changes where managing their margins better, in a nutshell, meaning that for every dollar you're bringing in in sales, you're keeping more of it, more of it's ending up in your pocket at the end of the day. And that's not just cutting expenses and things like that, it's a lot of other strategic things to do and making sure you're pricing things.

And a lot of people just come in the air when they're pricing things a lot of times without considering what should your margins be on those different things and managing through some of that ways to increase sales. This stuff's in your wheelhouse as well. There's so many times you get that mentality, we've always done it this way, and picking their head up out of the weeds to like see the forest a little better and a little clearer. When I first started doing this after I left my corporate career, I was like, can I really do this? Can I help people? Can I really make a difference? And then the first client I'm with in 90 days, the change, you could see the transformation in just the first 90 days. And then obviously beyond that. And then the next client I got, and it's like, holy crap, it gave me a lot of confidence to say, yeah, I am pretty good at this. It's easy for me to go in. And I just always thought because everyone has has this knowledge. I was in the corporate world, I was in a financial company, and there's a lot of financial smart people around me.

So I just thought, well, everyone has this knowledge, everyone thinks this way. And a lot of times business owners are really good at the widget they produce or whatever service they're providing, but they're not really good on the business side of things— increasing sales, increasing your net income, increasing the value of the company. Especially now, you get a lot of baby boomers that are considering exiting and wanting to sell their company. How do I improve the value of my company?

In my agency now, my role a lot of times with the client is what you just described, because that's my expertise. In marketing and branding. It's really almost more that business consultant type role. And I was just sitting here thinking, I was like, man, I'm going at this wrong. Some of the challenges we have is we're kind of always on the agency side of the fence. They want to listen to me, but unless you're like on the team, even if fractionally, it's hard to get implementation to happen. Half the time we're working with a client, if they would get this, this, and this out of their way or do this, a lot of times that's more than one ad was going to save the day. This ad could do it and we can write you a great campaign, but that's just going to be lipstick on the pig.

When I'm talking to someone who's a prospective client, and I found this out early on, you got to have someone who's willing to listen and willing to implement. I had one client, that's how I learned it, that given them all these different things to do and change in their business and they're not implementing anything, I really took a step back. I tried some different approaches. I really have to make sure that when I'm talking to someone, the prospective client, that they are going to listen. I'm not saying everything I say is gospel, like I'm sure got every great idea in the world, but when we do agree on something, that they're actually going to make the change. And so for me, having someone that's an ally in the business that's not just a CEO but someone under the CEO, the COO, or something like that that's actually going to be implementing some of these things. It's critically important. One of the things I do that I require for a client, if you have a staff meeting with your leadership team, I'm in it because I want to be part of the team. I want to be perceived as part of the team, and that way it helps me keep my finger on the pulse of the business, and it gives me a voice at that table to push some of the initiatives that I'm trying to get, some of the changes I'm trying to think.

Who's picking up on this? Have we made any progress on this? And that made a huge difference, really making sure that I'm involved in some of those key meetings. When they have quarterly planning offsites, I'm there. And a lot of the clients are like, you'll do that? You're not even an employee of ours. I got to be I want to, and it's going to help me be able to help you better. It's critically important to be involved. It's so frustrating to have someone that doesn't implement. If you just did these two other things, it could be explosive.

The name of our agency is Radical, and that was intentional because I think of myself as a progressive marketing guy and progressive thinker. Also to give license to ideas, because I'll pull the card on the client. You hired a fucking agency named Radical and you're telling me that idea is too crazy?

I do the same thing. I had the last big client I brought on. It was a company that had been in business for almost 40 years, doing pretty well. Doing $20 million a year. They gave me their books. I'm looking them over and everything. And I went back and had a second meeting with them. We get to the end of the meeting. And I said, look, if you want a CFO that's going to help you maintain your $20 million a year, $22 million a year, I'm not your guy. Because this company is a $50 million company. If you hire me, I'm going to push your ass to $50 million. And if you don't like that, and you don't want that, don't hire me, because you're going to frustrate the crap out of me. And I'm going to frustrate the crap out of you. You want someone to push you to $50? Then hire me. Let's go. Let's roll. And the guy stood up, he pounded his hands on the table. And he's like, you're my guy. Let's fucking go.

I was like, okay, I love it.

I knew that company and the potential they have. And I'm like, man, they're going to drive me nuts. Like, if they want to just chum along at $20 or $25 million, that's going to drive me crazy because I can see the potential for it. Just put the cards on the table. If that's not going to work for you, then we probably shouldn't work together.

Exactly. Ken, before we transition into the state of business, what has formulated Mr. Biz? Is this nature or nurture? Are you a student of some form of business technique, or you've read a billion business books and you've just distilled it into your own thing? Or is this just innate?

I think it's a little bit of a combination of almost a little bit everything. A lot of it was just the experience I got in the corporate world at JPMorgan, working in a lot of different types of businesses. At one point in my career, I worked in the private equity group, we would go into businesses and private equity, we would go in and turn businesses around. I love that. The only reason I didn't stay with that is we started a family, and I was traveling a lot. And so I don't want to be on the road and missing out on my kids and all that kind of stuff. So I pulled out of that group, I call my 3 pillars of financial success. And so this is what I start with, with every business, with every client I start with, we start with cash flow, you know, cash flow of business, there's almost always ways you can improve your your cash flow. Usually things are very simple to implement to improve your cash flow pretty quickly. Budget. If you're not going to have a budget, you can't work with me, because a budget is so critically important on making sure you're measuring how you're doing every single month.

That way you see what the heck is working and what the heck is not working, and you could fix it right away, not get 6 months into the year and go, holy shit, we're not going to hit our sales goal for the year, now what do we do? And then the last part is I call it mining your margins, talking about your pricing and your margins and everything I touched on a little bit earlier. But there's almost always subtle ways to improve that, and I don't mean just cutting expenses and things that, but ways to improve those things. Those are the foundation of any financially strong company. You have to have those 3 things. Once you have those right, you got 3 strong pillars to set the business on. And then we can start talking about other things. Really, for me, foundationally, you got to start with those. But yeah, I think it's a combination of my experience, just seeing a bunch of different businesses. And that's what people will see. And again, as a bragger, I'm like, I am pretty good at this because someone will give me their P&L and I'll look at it and I'll be like, your sales have been declining for the last 6 to 9 months or so.

I can see here, you know, and they're like, how can you tell that from looking at that? I'm like, I don't know. If anyone remembers the baseball player Barry Bonds, right? I remember seeing him interviewed, this when he was still playing, and they were doing a slow-mo of the pitcher and they said, tell me what you're thinking. And they show a picture and he's winding up and they literally, they give him the remote control and the pitcher like starts to rock back in his stance and in his windup and he pauses it. And he said, did you see how he rocked back on his left foot? He took a step back further than he did the last pitch. He said, that probably means that it's going to be a fastball because he's dipping back further to get more. And they're like, you saw that? And then he's like, he gets a little bit further and he's like, you see how he's got his glove held? It's probably a changeup because of this, this, and this. And they're like, how do you know that? He goes, I don't know. I see it. I think, why can't everyone else see it?

It was interesting.

Barry Bonds hit a few home runs and he was a natural for sure. Ken, where can everybody keep up with everything you're doing? Your books, talk about Don't Fake the Funk, your latest book. What can people expect from that and where can they find it and all that stuff?

Yeah, the easiest way to find everything we got going on is MrBiz.com. All the stuff's out there, radio show, the books and all that good stuff. You know, the book, it's different though. My first two books were business-related books. This one was completely completely different. It's not business, it's more goal-oriented. I had, unbeknownst to me, just kind of going along— I used to be a competitive powerlifter and had a lot of success there. And a lot of the goals I tackled in life, I developed this 4-step approach on how to tackle goals and achieve like big goals. I was talking with someone who I mentor and was kind of walking him through. He was trying to do something. I'm like, well, I would do this. And I was kind of walking through, and again, not even knowing. And he's taking notes. He's like, really? Just make sure I got this right. It's basically just like 4 steps. I'm like, yeah, I guess so. A couple weeks later, going through the same process, someone else I mentor, same thing. The woman's like, it really sounds like it's kind of just like 4 steps. And I was like, so I started thinking, I'm driving home from that second meeting.

And I'm like, yeah, it is kind of 4. And they're like, this is great. I do a lot of speaking engagements. It was this guy, the speaker backed out on him. It was early December. And it was like a holiday party kind of thing. And he's like, hey, can you come and talk? I'm not gonna talk about business at a holiday party. Like people don't want to hear that crap. Like people are having some adult frescos. They don't want to listen to someone talk about cash flow or whatever. They got this new topic, talked about it. Everyone loved it. Standing ovation, all this other crap. And people come up afterwards and they're like, please tell me you have a book about this that outlines all this. And I'm like, no, So I'm like, maybe I need to write a book about it. So then that's, that's what it ended up becoming. Don't Fake the Funk. And subtitle you might appreciate is F Being Average. From marketing branding, we were testing out subtitles for the book. I knew Don't Fake the Funk was gonna be a title, but like, what's the subtitle, right? We came up, we came, brought it down to 4 options and we hired a company.

We surveyed 1,000 people that were in the demo for the book. F Being Average had more than the other 3 options combined. It had 54% of the votes and the other 3 combined had 46%. I was like, nope. Okay, let's go with it. Because people were like, you can't put profanity, let alone the F-word, in a subtitle of your book. And I'm like, the people have spoken, let's go. You know?

Yes, does not surprise me.

It's funny, I was surprised by the results. We put the asterisk, it's not spelled out, but still, I mean, I was very surprised. And I caught some heat. People will say, you know, I know what kind of person you put that word in the subtitle of your book. And I'm like, hey man, if that offends you, you probably don't want to read the book, and you probably won't like me either.

So many people get caught up on the cussing thing. I don't think I have a potty mouth, but it's just natural. It's just words, man. It has emphasis, but Man, the amount of people that really get their panties in a wad over that shit, it's mind-blowing. Anyway, I love it. Don't Fake the Funk, Fuck Being Average. With or without the fuck, it's empowering and motivational. That's why people like it. And I'm assuming from the premise— and I did skim through it, but admittedly, from showbooking to getting you on, I haven't read the full book— but yeah, I have to assume you're kind of saying, you know, don't fake it till you make it. You got to live it to get there.

Absolutely. Yeah, I'm not a fake it till you make it guy at all. I think that's trash advice.

If you're faking it till you make it, it's always fake. If what making a copy of isn't great, then what you get out on the other— it's not going to magically have higher resolution if you make a copy of a bad photocopy.

Yeah, right, right, exactly.

It's almost the exact same thing. I really appreciate you coming on.

I was honored to be here, man. I appreciate it. It's good conversation, Ryan.

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