Building a Resilient Business Through Leadership, Culture, and Growth

Intro  0:06

Welcome to the Growth + Exit Podcast where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms, let’s get started.

Susan Kearney  0:30

Hi, I’m Susan Kearney, host of the Growth + Exit podcast where middle market owners and CEOs talk about founding, scaling and sometimes exiting their businesses. This episode is brought to you by Newport LLC, a cadre of founders, business owners and seasoned C suite executives who help owners of private companies build valuable businesses and exit them on their own terms, as opposed to someone else’s. You can learn more about us at Newportllc.com Today, I’m excited to be talking with Jim Fitzgerald. Jim is a serial entrepreneur who’s founded and led multiple SaaS startups, most notably Taradel, which we’ll hear about in a minute. Amazingly, Taradel was 12 consecutive years on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest growing private companies. So I think Jim’s gonna have some very interesting things to tell us about how to grow a business. Currently, Jim is co founder and CEO of Paycile, which is a new venture for him that we’ll learn about as well later on. So Jim, welcome. We’re really pleased to have you today. I’m pleased to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, excellent. So what I want to do, Jim is start a little bit talking about your professional background. First, tell me a little bit about Teron. What was that business, and how did you get into it?

Jim Fitzgerald  1:46

Okay, that business started, I think, 21 years ago. I exited that in December of 2024 and I got into it. I had been working with a group that was selling advertising flyers to newspapers, and so I’m dating myself immediately here, but what I discovered was there was an opportunity to do that down market and make that type of advertising available to SMBs normally back then, if you, if you saw an insert in a newspaper, it was for national brand, and we, over time, we developed a mechanism to make it very simple for an SMB to target an area or a route within the newspaper distribution system and land flyers just there. So let’s say a local pizzeria would only want to do you know the neighborhoods around his store. So we had some fun with that. But clearly, as circulations started to decline, we realized we needed to pivot, and we took the same concept and brought it over to direct mail and built a platform again that leverage the product USPS had recently launched, called Every Door Direct Mail, where you can reach all of the addresses in your carrier route without having to address the piece. So the postage was discounted. There were no there were no data fees, because you’d have to buy a list. And we created a mechanism where you could target the routes that had the highest concentrations of the demographic you were looking for. And that worked out pretty well, as evidenced by what you mentioned earlier. We we we jumped onto something kind of ahead of the curve and took advantage of it. We’re able to leverage it. And what really made that fun was, over time, we added digital options to that same distribution, so now you could reach a prospect household with not only direct mail, but Facebook ads, cold email, Instagram, yeah, it was, it was a lot of fun, and it took off. And by the time I sold the business, we had 42 full time employees. And it was a blast. I really, I really enjoyed the heck out of it.

Susan Kearney  4:21

Yeah, so one thing that I find interesting about that story, Jim is that you were able to pivot at key moments of change. And so is that something about you and your leadership style or the way you built your company? A lot of entrepreneurs get in market with one thing, and they just aren’t able to sustain the business, because they don’t adapt to change. What’s your secret?

Jim Fitzgerald  4:47

I don’t know. I’ll tell you what I did, and I don’t know if it’s a secret. I think what, what makes business fun to me, is taking so. Chances. Now, I can tell you plenty of times I struck out, trust me, but the way I the way I looked at pivots or changes or trying something new innovations, was if I did it and failed, I created a data point, and I get some great advice from a CEO I worked for years ago, and he gave me a number of things to do, and I remember meeting with him, and he said, You’ve got 10 things to do. You come back here with two of them done perfectly, but I have no idea what’s going on with the other eight. I’d rather have you get those started and so we can learn something. And I really took that to heart, and it became kind of, kind of my modus operandi going forward was, let’s do something, be decisive, make a decision, and if it works great, if it doesn’t, you know, and that cumulative experience from the things that didn’t work out very often play a large role in in your future endeavors, Your future innovations. So I found that by doing something when I thought it was time to change or try something new, was better than thinking about it.

Susan Kearney  6:11

Yeah, I call that bias for action, right? Yeah, 100% I was talking to an entrepreneur the other day, and he’s had some changes in his business, and we were talking about hiring profile and culture. And you know, for all businesses now, but certainly for his that bias for action has got to be an important part of who he hires and how he hires. And I suspect listening to you that that became a part of your culture with all of your people.

Jim Fitzgerald  6:36

Yeah, thanks for asking about culture. That’s kind of a hot button for me. I you know there’s that old saying, if you’re thinking about building a culture, don’t worry, you’ve already got one. And it took me a while to learn that, and I remember hiring people because of their aptitude and skill set, and having this MiliMatch of personalities which didn’t really come together and made a very significant hire about 16 years ago, woman that would later become my COO and, quite frankly, the president of the division after I sold and she said something that I’ll never forget. She said, you know, very often, you’re going to spend more time with the people you work with than your own family. So you want to make, you want to make that to the extent you can, as homogenous as possible. And you know, you want, you want some diversity. You don’t want to have a bunch of clones, but you want, you want people that kind people that kind of think and feel the same way you do. And we learned over time, you know, that was the way to go. I mean, the phrase we’d use was slow to hire, quick to fire.

Susan Kearney  7:55

Yeah, yeah. I think the other thing that’s important about that is when you are in tough times, you really have to have trust and understanding in each other, and so which goes to your point. And so I’m wondering about some of the challenges you had. I mean, you were obviously very successful with those 12 years on the Inc 5000 but every business has challenges. And so how did your culture and that approach help you through those tough times?

Jim Fitzgerald  8:26

Well, I can give you a couple of examples. Anybody that’s had a business in the last, you know, five or six years had to go through covid. And you know, we I remember, I get Misty. Thinking about it, Misty in a bad way. You know, we had to let a few people go. And I remember having a call like this with with, I think, at the time, you know, 28 people, and tell everyone they were going to take a 25% haircut on their on their income, that’s, that’s always fun, yeah, but I, but I’ll tell you this, yeah, I was almost brought to tears by the time that call was over, by how encouraging everybody was and how thankful they were that we were in this together and that we were going to get through it, and if you don’t have the right culture, that phone call doesn’t go that way.

Susan Kearney  9:26

Yeah, yeah. How did you how did you think about, how did you make that decision to give people a haircut, as opposed to having more people leave the business? Because I think it’s an unusual one and a very difficult one. I’d like to know how you thought it proved.

Jim Fitzgerald  9:43

Yeah, I was kind of a math equation. You know, at the purest sense, I can’t, obviously I can’t put the emotional impact of that away. Please don’t take it that way. But people. Weren’t spending as much when we were all locked in our homes. And I also thought about the impact this would have on how important customer retention would be through this. And my biggest concern was this will be a double whammy. Not only will we lose everything that we all lost as businesses, from, you know, from the shutdown, but to exacerbate it by really not treating the customers you did have the way you’d like. So I said, you know, I’d rather have more people here, and I’m wondering how this will go over, and Wendy my COO at the time, and I talked about it at length, and that’s what we came up with. And I think knock on water was the right decision.

Susan Kearney  10:54

Yeah, yeah. Have you had other near death experiences during the running? Yeah?

Jim Fitzgerald  11:00

Yeah. We had a we had two major servers. We did, we created a platform, by the way, for Canada Post at one point. So that was kind of fun. We had to hire French speaking staff to manage that, but we were essentially the white label version of a direct mail platform for Canada Post, and we obviously did an awful lot of work in the US, but some bad guys got into our Canadian server and encrypted the data, and it was a ransomware thing, so So I had to pick up the phone and call Some sea level people, you know, $6 billion federal agency, and let them know that this happened. That was a blast. So fortunately, the data was encrypted. We had, we had very clean backups. There was no they didn’t pull any of the data out. We were able to tell by the logs and how much time there they were, they were there, that there was no, I forget what the word is, exfiltration of data, I believe is the term. But out of an abundance of caution, our largest partner, you know, had to basically shut us down for six weeks. Yeah, and that’s that’s done. And however they did, they did tell us. They were, they were amazing to deal with, and they were very pleased with the fact that we told them immediately and and we we managed it. And it’s kind of one of my mantras in any business I’ve ever had is, is, please tell me the second something goes wrong, if it’s if it’s something that’s important, you know, I don’t need to know about every single detail or small complaint that happens. But if something like that happens, tell me immediately, because I can’t manage what I don’t know. Yeah, and that’s precisely the attitude they had. So we did everything we needed to do and finally got back, but it was learned a valuable lesson, learned an awful lot about security, and made substantial investments in that regard going forward.

Susan Kearney  13:15

Yeah, sounds like you learned a little bit about customer relationships prior to that. That helped you on that one too,

Jim Fitzgerald  13:20

sure, yeah, yeah, but we weren’t. But the only comforting thing about this was we discovered that we were not alone. And it’s almost, it’s almost like it’s not a question of if somebody’s going to hack into your system. It’s a question of when. And you know, we thought we had really good systems in place, but it’s, it’s a full time job, and it

Susan Kearney  13:46

moves fast. So let’s turn the coin a little bit and tell me about some of your proudest moments there.

Jim Fitzgerald  13:54

I think the maybe the the most, there are a couple that stand out. One was, I was asked to speak at the national postal forum, and that was fun, but but the product of that was, there was somebody in the audience from FedEx, and started a conversation, which led to us becoming a part of the FedEx and we became their direct mail solution provider for their customers. So I remember, you know, going their headquartered, the FedEx Office Division is headquartered down in the Dallas area, and going, you know, walking into a room with some very experienced season executives and walking them through how we could put this partnership together and making that happen. It was a similar story. We did the same thing for staples Office Depot. So every time we we acquire a partnership like that, I. On. It was, it was fun. I remember walking out of those meetings in the Canada Post when I mentioned earlier, those were for a company our size, you know, when you’re dealing with, you know, a multi billion dollar entities, and the compliance and all the things you need to go through to you know, go through their filters, which found was was an accomplishment that we were all proud of.

Susan Kearney  15:30

Yeah, that’s terrific. Those partnerships sometimes don’t work out as well for small businesses. So I can,

Jim Fitzgerald  15:36

yeah, you got to be careful in the first when we were so excited about getting that first big logo that we probably negotiated away a bit more than we should have. But again, data point learning and doing it versus not doing it was clearly the right thing to do.

Susan Kearney  15:55

Yeah, yeah. He opened a whole window of opportunity with just a little give, yeah, and so was Terra Dell. Was that your first entrepreneurial venture

Jim Fitzgerald  16:07

when I was when I was much younger, I have always been up until very recently. A lot of what I’ve done has been involved in graphic arts and print and direct marketing, that sort of thing. The very first thing I did was I launched a business. It’s called Venture graphics, and it was essentially print brokering. So I would, I would call on folks that bought a lot of printing and would audit what they were doing, and then come back to them and and help them partner with the right providers. And in doing so, I would, you know, take a commission on that project. So I was basically an independent broker, and learned a lot about business. Made a living, but it was, it was tough. It was just made. And second business I had was called church systems, and again, leveraging my experience in the print space, we created revenue enhancement opportunities for churches through collections and envelope programs so they could reach out to their congregants, parishioners, whatever, and have them commit to regularly paid tithes or or funding for the church. And that was fun, because that was when I first leaned into technology to help us so we would we separated ourselves by helping our church clients leverage the software they already had to facilitate that. So that was kind of fun, and actually sold that to a private equity group that was doing a roll up in that space. And I was excited enough about that where they actually hired me to be their VP of Sales and Marketing post sale. So that was the first real venture where, you know, things came together, and then there was a payday.

Susan Kearney  18:17

Yeah, what’s it what’s it like to decide to take that leap away from working for somebody and having health care and salary money coming in every month or every two weeks?

Jim Fitzgerald  18:32

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think fortunately for me, my entire career had been in sales, and I felt I had a high level of confidence that, you know, if I believed in what I was doing, I’d be able to, you know, get somebody to nod their head and agree with me. Now, it’s one thing. It’s one thing, having your conviction. It’s something else that executing on it, but, and, but, you know, you learn, and it also helps, in fairness, to have a wife who understands that, you know, her husband will spontaneously combust if he doesn’t do something like this. So she’s been incredibly supportive, and that makes a huge difference, because it’s not all fun and games, particularly in the beginning phases when you’re cash flowing in Bootstrap, when you’re trying to bootstrap a business and give it to cash flow. And you know, it doesn’t happen overnight. Yeah, it does.

Susan Kearney  19:37

It takes that we talk about trust and culture and values in the business. It takes trust and culture and culture and values at home as well. Whenever I’ve set off on one of these journeys, I’ve I’ve had some tough questions at home, but after those discussions, you feel like you have that wind at your back, and it makes all the difference. Agreed, that’s tremendous. So thinking. About those, those three experiences, first, is there a common thread that runs through them?

Jim Fitzgerald  20:08

I think the first three for certain, they were, they were all all about leveraging my experiences and knowledge in the print space, and knowing a little bit about how print is manufactured, how it’s done, how paper I work for international paper in between these things for a number of years. So yeah, so I was leveraging what I learned with my experiences there this latest thing I’m doing is a complete departure.

Susan Kearney  20:43

We’re going to talk about that in a minute. I’m very excited to learn about it. My last question, kind of in this vein, is, how would you say founding, leading, exiting, growing, scaling businesses. How has your leadership been affected by those experiences?

Jim Fitzgerald  21:09

I’d say I’m a much more patient guy than I was when I first started. I, you know, we talked about kind of the sense of urgency, you know, you want to you want to move, you want to be decisive. You want to get something done. And earlier in my leadership path, my my expectations were incredibly high from everybody around me, and what I learned over time is not everybody’s wired the way I am, and that does, that’s not bad. It’s very good, actually. So, so it’s finding, it’s finding what is, what it is about the individual. And you know, using that to your in their behalf, on their behalf, you know, finding out what makes them tick, what you know, what is it about, what they do in this environment, in this application, that we can lever and that when that happened, it also tied in very nicely with, I think, the development of a much better culture.

Susan Kearney  22:19

Yeah, funny. How that that patience thing doesn’t come naturally to some of us.

Jim Fitzgerald  22:25

No, really, and I still have my moments, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a The other thing is, just in general, just from a life perspective, is you realize, unfortunately, it takes a long time, but you realize that, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s being present, it’s, it’s the journey, it’s not the destination. And you got to learn to appreciate and have fun with what you’re doing at that moment in time that took a long time, but, but now that I’m there, I’m a different guy. Yeah, I’m very thankful. That’s awesome.

Susan Kearney  23:05

Let’s turn now and talk a little bit about you personally and how that maybe informs your career and the way you approach words or your entrepreneurship. Tell me where were you raised and what was it like?

Jim Fitzgerald  23:18

Yeah, I grew up in a housing project in Boston, and it was at the time, didn’t know any better than if I had grown up in, you know, a mansion. It was I had a blast as a kid. I enjoyed every minute of it. But it’s a different when you when you take those experiences, when you get older, you learn to appreciate things. I think I had a couple lot more than maybe the average person does so but those experiences coming out of that environment, I think, toughened me up a bit, where you know when I when I take a chance or run it to something unexpected, it just doesn’t have, I think, the same impact on me than it would on somebody else. But lived there half my life, and when the opportunity came to sell that second business, they wanted me to relocate down here to Richmond and move the family down and never look back. I love visiting Boston, but I’m much happier here in sunny Virginia. Yeah, mostly sunny Virginia, right, except for the last couple of weeks. But, yeah,

Susan Kearney  24:44

yeah, that’s right. And were your parents entrepreneurs? What did they do? You know, did you have that model? Or did you find your entrepreneurs model somewhere?

Jim Fitzgerald  24:54

Yeah, my dad retired from the post office, but, but he. Had an entrepreneurial bug. He, he had this thing on the side where he’d see make jewelry, and it was kind of a hobby. But he, you know, he made a couple of bucks here and there, but that’s clearly what got him excited. It wasn’t throwing mail sacks around. But, yeah, so, I mean, I got a little flavor for that. The a big influence for me was when I was in high school. I took a part time job at a medical medical supply warehouse, and I got to spend a lot of time with the entrepreneur that that started that business. And he was he wasn’t the most pleasant person, but he was brilliant, and I learned an awful lot about entrepreneurship and a lot about business in general. By the time I graduated from high school, I had 23 direct reports working for this guy. Yeah, it was, it was fascinating. I mean, when I was in school, I had to have detailed instructions for every one of them because I was in high school, and I’d get there about 230 in the afternoon and see what was going on. So it was learned a lot about delegating and managing and somewhat motivating folks that were from all over the place, and that was probably the most significant entrepreneurial experience I had, which left a mark in a good way. I realized there weren’t a lot of kids growing up the way I did that had that kind of exposure. And my big takeaway was, you know, this guy’s smart, but this isn’t that hard. And when, when you really are able to peel back the inning and see how business comes together, it’s hard work and and time consuming, but once you understand the fundamentals, if you get something people want to buy, you can make it happen. So that that was a that had a huge impact on me.

Susan Kearney  27:15

Yeah, it sounds like that, plus the resilience that you learned from the way you grew up and having to multitask and so on, have served you well as an entrepreneur in your businesses.

Jim Fitzgerald  27:28

Yeah. And to follow up on that, I think if you get 100 entrepreneurs in a room and ask, ask them, how many of them have ADD to hold their hand up, I don’t know if there’ll be any hands down, right? So it’s, it’s almost, it’s like the coolest place in the world, because, especially when you start, there’s 100 things to do. So you can spend 20 minutes on something and then move up, move over to something else. It’s, it’s, it’s coming back to center. That’s the challenge, and that that’s something you constantly have to work at. Yeah, yeah.

Susan Kearney  28:05

I’m curious. You know, folks like you are busy because you’ve got all the plates spinning right at in the community, at home, at work, in whatever. I’m wondering if you’ve created any kind of daily rituals or life hacks that have contributed to your ability to live on the edge of chaos and be successful?

Jim Fitzgerald  28:27

Yeah, I am pretty good about getting up early and and and giving myself a little bit of time before I jump into the rat race and that, I think that’s very helpful the but once, once I sit down, I definitely have a routine I kind of go through. Probably the first thing to do is go through emails, prioritize what I need to get down and throw out immediately what doesn’t and pass along to somebody else on the team, you know. So I get kind of my ducks in a row and in leverage the hell out of technology. So I’m, I’m an early adopter whenever anything comes out that’s going to make my life easier. And I find, now, for what it’s worth, that I spend an awful lot of time building gpts And and leveraging AI to help me. And it’s, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s incredible. It’s incredible.

Susan Kearney  29:31

It’s absolutely incredible. And we’ll have a story, a conversation offline, about a conversation I had yesterday. But it’s just absolutely amazing, absolutely amazing, if you spend any time at all. Yeah, power that it can have any life in your business and so on. How do you stay current and relevant? Are you? Do you listen to podcasts? Are there books? You read newspapers, website?

Jim Fitzgerald  29:55

I’m a reader. Just finished a book, for instance, the other day, called the sign. Science of Scaling fascinating. It’s, I’ll give you the premise of it real quick. It’s like, let’s say you have a goal to increase sales 10% a year for the next three years. The author would challenge you and say, What? Why? Why 10% Well, why not? Why not 100% Well, I mean, that’s crazy. Why is crazy? What would you have to do if you wanted to grow 100% Well, I had and then, then it’s like, okay, I get it. It’s not impossible, but you’d have to change a lot of things and, and it’s the old Christmas somewhat to something I think Jack well, to GE used to talk about where they have, what they call them stretch goals. And you know, if your goal was to do a 5% increase and you hit your goal, they used to celebrate, but he’d say, Okay, your goal next year is 10% and you and you miss your goal, but you come in at eight, you You still did better, didn’t you? So I think this is kind of what he’s what he’s trying to do, but it’s the way you think about it, which I found very interesting, is if you push yourself to say, what would I have to do? Suddenly some of these answers appear versus we all have this kind of built in number in our head that is reasonable. And even after the whole Inc 5000 thing we talked about, you know, we averaged, I think, 23% a year for 12 years, but it wasn’t 100% a year. And, you know, you even, even if you’ve done something successfully with with growth percentage, you start to limit yourself when that’s that. That was my takeaway, was, I have to stop thinking that 20% is good

Susan Kearney  31:54

big ideas, because it knocks you off your seat a little bit, right? Yeah. So, so

Jim Fitzgerald  31:59

different, yeah. So that’s, that’s, that’s how I, occasionally, I’ll listen to a podcast I love Guy Raz, you know How I Built This. That’s just, I think it’s, it’s candy for entrepreneurs. You know, it’s just, it’s just fun listening to those stories. But, yeah, I I read almost all day, and not necessarily books, but whether I’m reading an article in the journal, which leads me down a rabbit hole, because I get interested in it, and then I start pumping it into chat, GPT or quad and have it do a deep dive. Yeah, I do a lot of reading, but not to the point that it stops me from making decisions and actually getting stuff done.

Susan Kearney  32:53

We talked about challenges you had and near death experiences. Tell me one of the funniest things that ever happened to you while running one of your businesses, something that just really gave you a belly laugh. We don’t talk about that as much as the challenges, but I think that’s insightful.

Jim Fitzgerald  33:10

I know there’s something, but it’s like, normally, I don’t have to think too long when somebody asks me a question about my business, but something funny, yeah, I Gee, I don’t know you might maybe, if I had been prepared for that, I think I’d do a much better job. Yeah, I you know, I know there’s something out there. I can think of some experiences. I don’t know if I’d call this funny. But we, we helped a pizzeria do a grand opening. So we, so we did a direct mail campaign, and I remember the sales rep following up on that, and on this particular campaign, we published a unique phone number on the postcard so we knew exactly what kind of response they would get for that particular campaign. And I remember the sales rep following up about 90 days later, talking to the guy, and she said, Hey, I just wanted to follow up and see how the campaign went. He said, all that, thanks, but no thanks. And she said, really. He said, Yeah, really. She said, Well, you got 2223 phone calls that lasted a minute and 45 seconds on average. I did. I mean, I that’s not hysterical, but that’s also, it’s also not unusual when, when, when you’re dealing with SMBs. I mean, there. Are, they’re a blast. You never know what’s going to happen next. But yeah, we’d have experiences like that. And then, of course, the guy’s like, well, you get Tell Me More what. Like, how do you know? Well, remember, we told you we were going to put a unique phone. Oh, yeah, wow. I thought it was from, you know, these radio ads, whatever I mean, right? But it was a valuable lesson for him, but it was just, what killed me was he just had no idea. Yeah, yeah. And if you, if you give me a little heads up next time, Susan, I’ll come up with something that’s that I’ll get a chuckle out of the audience.

Susan Kearney  35:39

I promise. I’ll do that. I’ll do that. So you’re in a new seat now. You’re a co founder and the CEO at Paycile, Paycile, yes, good. Why that venture? And tell us a little bit about it.

Jim Fitzgerald  35:53

Sure. So, so after the exit of my marketing technology platform, part of part of the deal, very often in an exit, is that, you know, we don’t want you going out and doing anything competitive, which I totally understand and appreciate. So not long after the exit, a friend of mine approached me and he said, What are you going to do? I said, I’m really I don’t know what I said, I might do some consulting. I’m not sure. He said, Well, I’ve got this opportunity if you want to listen to me. I’m all ears. And he had, has a lot of experience in the insurance space, and in fact, was the consulting with Thurston young specifically in what they called the Digital Transformation unit in insurance. And what he told me was the reconciliation of payments in that space is a real nightmare. It’s a massive bottleneck. And a lot of these legacy carriers and managing general agents in the space are still running things you know, not too dissimilar to what they were doing 40 years ago. So it’s, it’s a needed solving that is needed and and it’s a, it’s a significant opportunity. So I said, Okay, I know very little about what you’re talking about, but I know a little bit about building technology, so let’s keep talking talking. And we did, and decided to put an application together that would not only provide payment processing, credit cards, ACH and so forth, but also, at the same time, take the the invoices associated through for those payments, through an API, process the payment and then automatically reconcile it and push it back to the general ledger. So, yeah, so we know, just from the some of the interviews we’ve done and some of the due diligence that it is in fact a necessary, not necessary, but is in fact a black hole that needs fixing. So we are. We have our MVP belts. We’re going to be onboarding our first quiet here a couple of weeks in the time we went from concept to development of the platform, we learned that there are other verticals, other industries, that have very similar challenges, and property management is one of those. So we were kind of dueling our energies in both insurance and property management right now, and that’s what we have. That’s where we see the most potential. So when this thing is fully developed, we will have payment processing, automatic reconciliation, cash flow forecasting, and finally, a module that will provide insights beyond what a typical dashboard would see. And all of these things will be leveraging machine learning and AI so they’ll get iteratively better every time. The more transactions we run through it, the cleaner the results will be. So I’m excited about it, because I think it’s, it’s, I wouldn’t call it blue ocean, but it’s certainly not red ocean. Payment Processing is red ocean, but adding value in the way that I think we we see it specifically with what we’re solving for, I think is much less competitive. So I’m very optimistic about where this is going.

Susan Kearney  39:52

Yeah, well, congratulations. I wish you all the best in that it’s an exciting time getting ready.

Jim Fitzgerald  39:57

It is. It’s a lot of fun. I’m learning. You know. Drinking from a firehouse, but it’s a lot of fun. I’ll drink it from a

Susan Kearney  40:02

firehouse as a way to stay young, right, right? All right. Here’s my last question, Jim. It’s not, you know, a rocket science, but what’s, what advice would you give to other you know, founders and entrepreneurs? You know, a tough lesson you learned, maybe, or something you’d like to help them avoid in their journey?

Jim Fitzgerald  40:21

Great question. Great question. I say nearly all, not always, but nearly all of the entrepreneurs, maybe in the audience, at some point are going to sell and and I think in exit, and I think the second you realize that is the same second you should start thinking about that. And what do I mean? It’s you can be running your business and making a good living, but if you don’t have processes in place, and if the business can’t run without you, it’s going to have very low value when the time comes. So that’s, that’s something I was fortunate enough to get really good counsel on years ago. And it was, it was a happy accident. One of the partners we’ve already talked about approached us about buying us. So it came in out of the blue, so I had to learn what that meant. And how do you create a an environment where, you know, there’s not just one offer, right? So we hired a an investment banker, and they took us through the paces, and we formally went to market. Now that was 10 years ago, did not sell, but boy, oh boy, did I learn an awful lot about how to prepare to sell, and I also learned that we did get some offers. They just weren’t, let’s just say we disagree with valuation, but I learned an awful lot about why. You know, my idea what the business was worth and what the market thought it was worth were two different things. So over the next 10 years, we leveraged a lot of those learnings, and we’re able to put together something that did have the right value when the time came. So that’s that’s an experience I share often, is start thinking about how you would sell the business, and get ahead of that, because it may take you can’t just flip a switch and have systems and people in place that can run your business without you. That’s a

Susan Kearney  42:40

great one. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. All right. Well, this is a Growth + Exit podcast, and I’ve been talking to Jim Fitzgerald, a serial entrepreneur and resilient and very smart man. I wish you all the best with your new venture. Any last thoughts you want to share before we say goodbye?

Jim Fitzgerald  43:00

Yeah, that when we talked, we asked earlier about podcasts. These are I can’t get enough of experiential content, so stuff like this. I love being this is great, and I’m honored that you asked me to join you today, but these are the things that I think are real hacks, real lovers. Listen to other people that are they’re going through, that have already gone through what you know you’re going to go through at some point. And it makes a massive difference. It really does. And every chance you get, if you can try to get around other people on a regular basis, who who share your, your your your desire to grow and and exit eventually. Because I also think just rubbing elbows with people like that is huge help.

Susan Kearney  44:04

Perfect way to end this. Really appreciate it. You bet thanks for talking to me, and we’ll talk again soon.

Jim Fitzgerald 44:09

Sounds great. Thanks again. Bye.

Outro 44:17

Thank you for listening to the Growth + Exit podcast, sponsored by Newport, a unique national business advisory firm. If you enjoy this show, be sure to share, like and subscribe for future episodes.