Beginning Balance

YNAB

Diet Coke, Listeners Chime In, and UBI

Beginning Balance

12/06/24 • 52 min

In today's episode Mark explains what makes the perfect diet coke, and Jesse opens his inbox and reads some comments and questions from Beginning Balance listeners, including tips for improving business leadership skills, how to keep track of all your ideas, and why studies can be highly misleading. Mark and Jesse also address a question about UBI, or universal basic income, and bring up Mark's old standby phrase: "incentives are undefeated."

Mark Butler

The Money School: https://moneyschool.works

Jesse Mecham

YNAB

Marriage and Partnerships

Beginning Balance

04/16/22 • 27 min

Thinking about a business partnership? Well, think long and hard about it, because entering into a business partnership is a lot like entering into a marriage. Good partnerships require effort, resources, and a high level of emotional intelligence. Put simply, they add a lot of complexity to the task of running a business. This doesn't mean they aren't worth it, but Mark and Jesse urge extreme caution before getting married to your partner!

Mark Butler, Virtual CFO

You Need a Budget

If Your Business Isn't Growing, Is It Dying?

Beginning Balance

03/04/22 • 28 min

Mark and Jesse tackle the common business saying: "if you're not growing, you're dying!" Is that really true? And what exactly does growing and dying mean exactly?

Mark Butler, Virtual CFO

You Need a Budget

Transparency, Context, Profits, and Begging for Team Members

Beginning Balance

11/05/21 • 31 min

Mark Butler and Jesse Mecham discuss how much business owners should share about the company's financial position, and more importantly, why context for the information is vital to fostering trust and goodwill with employees.

Coming Soon: Budgeting for Your Small Business!

Beginning Balance

05/24/21 • 1 min

Jesse Mecham and Mark Butler are launching a show all about small business finance. They will help you solve your cash flow problems, budget effectively, and increase your profits.

ChatGPT and Learning to Let Go of Control

Beginning Balance

06/21/24 • 38 min

After a conversation about using ChatGPT to organize the weekly recipe calendar for the Mecham household, Mark and Jesse talk about the concept of letting go of control in a business. Mark posits an idea: you can have control or you can have growth, but not both. And Mark hates it! Jesse draws a distinction between control of the business -- that is, controlling the mission of the business and the goals employees are striving for -- and micromanagement, where the business owner retains control over not only what things get done, but how they get done. Micromanagement, they both agree, is bad for both the employee, manager, and the owner.

Mark Butler

The Money School: https://moneyschool.works

YNAB

The Hero's Journey of Customer Service

Beginning Balance

06/07/24 • 52 min

Mark and Jesse discuss the role of customer service in a business, and how the alignment of customer expecations with the business owner's strengths (or working genius, if you like) is crucial to customer satisfaction and avoiding burnout. Mark shares an example from his virtual CFO business, which was highly profitable but making him miserable as his promise of what he would deliver was out of alignment with the type of work he enjoyed and thrived on. Jesse recounts a months-long ordeal getting his new car repaired, which ended on a good note -- a shop manager that took accountability for the mistakes of the business and personally took steps to re-align his customer service with Jesse's expectations.

Mark Butler

The Money School: https://moneyschool.works

YNAB

Firing Clients: It's Not You, Well...

Beginning Balance

12/15/23 • 40 min

Mark shares a trend he has become aware of in his business: his highest revenue clients are also his least time-consuming clients, and thus his most profitable clients. On balance, the clients who pay the least under his sliding scale fee structure end up taking the most time to process. This discussion begs the question -- when do you fire a client?

Jesse hashes out some ideas for a new fee structure so that Mark can retain higher-touch clients while incentivizing them to comply with the best practices that make them easier to process. They discuss the importance of focusing on the client's emotional state and how changing their behaviors to comply with Mark's system (such as opening accounts at banks that are easy to query for data, and minimizing the total number of accounts) can bring them value by reducing stress and increasing insight into the trajectory of the business.

Mark Butler, Virtual CFO

The Money School: https://moneyschool.works

YNAB

Jesse Hires Mark, and the Inevitability of Change

Beginning Balance

02/21/25 • 29 min

Jesse shares his experience working on the YNAB books for the first time in many years, while YNAB's head accountant is out of maternity leave. Working through monthly and quarterly close got him thinking about how software automation could free up the accounting departments time wrangling spreadsheets to do more impactful work for the business. To that end, he engaged Mark to consult on how YNAB can improve their accounting processes. Mark and Jesse continue with a discussion about the inevitability of change, and how employees and companies can position themselves to handle the disruptions that technological innovation create.

Jesse references one his oldest son's college courses, where entrepreneurs visit the class and deliver presentations on their careers and the future of business. On two separate weeks, two very successful entrepreneurs shared their thoughts on AI and how it is disrupting entire industries -- one had a very positive, excited outlook, the other a bleak, pessimistic outlook. The change is inevitable, however, so Jesse asks: which side do you want to be on?

You do have a choice.

Mark Butler

The Money School: https://moneyschool.works

Jesse Mecham

YNAB