Ep 88- Building Financial Innovations with Mason Brady

Transcript

Transcripts are generated by machine learning, so typos may be present.

BTB (00:00):

Welcome to the Building Texas Business Podcast, interviews with thought leaders and organizational visionaries from across industry. Join us as we talk about the latest trends, challenges, and growth opportunities to take your business to the next level. The Building Texas Business Podcast is brought to you by BoyarMiller, providing counsel beyond expectations. Find out how we can make a meaningful difference to your business at boyarmiller.com and by your podcast team where having your own podcast is as easy as being a guest on ours. Discover more at yourpodcast.team. Now here’s your host, Chris Hanslik.

Chris (00:43):

In this episode, you will meet Mason Brady, founder and president of Brady CFO. Mason describes the entrepreneurial journey as an emotional rollercoaster dealing with fear and risk, but one that is well worth the effort. Mason, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business. Thanks for taking the time to come on the podcast. Really looking forward to hearing what you have to tell us.

Mason (01:08):

Awesome, thank you Chris. Really appreciate this opportunity.

Chris (01:11):

So let’s just start introducing yourself to the listeners. Tell us about yourself and about Brady CFO.

Mason (01:18):

Yeah, so a bit about myself. I’m a husband and father to three little girls, so that’s the biggest priority of my life. I was just telling Chris earlier that we celebrated my three-year-old’s birthday this past weekend and she had a blast that did the trampoline and pizza party thing and she had a wonderful Saturday, so that was awesome. From a more professional perspective, I started Brady CFO about three years ago, roughly right around three years ago, that really in just seeing a need in the marketplace that I was a corporate CFO for agribusinesses, and I had friends that would reach out and ask for help within their construction or ag businesses. They really just needed some fractional CFO support that they had an existing accounting team, but that accounting team wasn’t really leveling up to help them with the decisions that they need to make.

(02:04):

Whether it be, Hey, we want to buy out our partners, how much should we pay? How should we finance it? Hey, we want to go buy this building, how should we do it? We want to buy out our competitor or we need help getting access to capital. All these multitude of requests that they had, but they certainly didn’t need a full-time CFO, and so I helped them, but really it just kind of exploded on me that within about three months of helping friends on the side, I was making more money on the side than I was in my full-time job and said, oh wow, there’s actually a business here to be had. And so eventually decided to go full-time with it and I’ve been growing it since then. So now this past weekend, we’re now a team of five total CFOs. We specialize in the ag and construction segments, and so we serve ag and construction based companies with revenues up to 75 million, and we come in as their part-time CFO, helping them with all the pain points. I mentioned that hey, they need to look at potential investment opportunities. They want to bring in partners or buy out partners and want to figure out what’s the right way to do that, at least finance it. They want to figure out how to optimize their finances, and so we’re the ones that ultimately can help solve those pain points for ’em.

Chris (03:10):

Very good. Yeah, so first I can identify, I have two girls, so I’m a girl dad as well, and no better pleasure in life. And then I love hearing that this just being entrepreneurial and I guess open to opportunities and seeing a gap where you could step in and provide value to clients and small businesses, mid-size businesses and turn that into your own business, which is pretty cool. And I think what all entrepreneurs are looking for is where can they make a difference? Where is there a gap in the market? And so you said three years ago now, tell us a little bit about, I guess you kind of had it going on the side and that’s not uncommon. Some entrepreneurs will say, I kind of had a job and then I was doing this kind of side hustle and then that just kind of exploded. What was it like I guess to go through the process mentally and emotionally to go, I’m going to leave the stable corporate job to kind of branch out on my own? A lot of people are probably stuck scared to make that decision. Let’s talk a little bit about your process and what you might offer some advice to others who may be listening.

Mason (04:16):

Yeah, I think the path of me becoming a full-time entrepreneur, it has been more of an emotional rollercoaster of learning how to deal with fear and risk and being comfortable with it, of living in a state of being comfortable with knowing that you’re really not in control, which none of us are anyways, even in a W2 job, none of us are really in control, but there’s some false sense of security that exists in a W2 job and just reckoning with that in your own heart as to what that looks like. And it certainly was scary for me to have three young children and my wife doesn’t work. I’m the breadwinner. My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and we generally wanted to maintain that lifestyle just to be able to take care of our girls in that way. So it definitely, yeah, it was on my back, but I say this, my personal faith is important to me, and so inherently I kind of knew that it wasn’t all on my back, but yet at the same time as human nature is, we want to try to control things.

(05:17):

And so it was scary, but I saw that the door was opening for me. It wasn’t on my own doing that. Obviously I worked hard, but the door opened to me that I’d personally prayed and I said, Hey, if this is the path I’m supposed to go, it’s going to be clear when the answer to that was really clear when I started actually making more money on the side and I had more booked revenue than I did in my full-time job and said, okay, there’s obviously something here that it’s not like I have this little launch period where all of a sudden I’m going to do a dipping income and try to figure it out. It’s like, no, I’ve literally fully replaced the income and then some I think we’re good to go here. And so that was easier. Not everybody has that opportunity, but for me personally, it certainly was becoming comfortable with risk. That has been the journey over the past three years, and I think every entrepreneur is a bit on that journey of, as an entrepreneur, you have to be comfortable with taking risk in a bigger way that especially I come from an accounting background as a CFO by trade that

(06:16):

Not known for risk taking. No, we generally are conservative decision makers, and I had to get comfortable with just, it’s okay, get comfortable with fear. That’s when the greatest growth happens. And I heard somebody else like You and I are going to do a podcast swap. I heard somebody else say that wealth is managed and conserved via diversification. Wealth is built when you go all in. And it was like, okay, well if that’s true, then I got to go all in and know that I got to go all in and that I’m burning the ships and just be comfortable with that. And so I began, that wasn’t like a day one decision for me. I had to incrementally overcome some things to move that direction. I guess what I’m saying is, Chris, is that incrementally, I’ve gotten better at that, but it was definitely a huge leap for me of doing that. But I would say to most people that it’s going to end up being okay that all the fears that are in your head, if you truly are a great W2 employee as an example, if you are great at your job one way or another, you’re going to land it, that businesses will fail. But so what if that fails and then all of a sudden you have an idea for something else that’s better because as a result of that failure that if you are good at what you do, generally it’ll work out.

Chris (07:32):

I mean, I guess succinctly have faith in yourself that you can do the job. The other thing I like about what I heard you say there was it’s very rare for someone speaking of entrepreneurs, it’s very rare for an entrepreneur to have it all figured out to not be or be immune to risk, immune to the fear of taking the risk. That’s the unicorn. The reality is almost every entrepreneur shares those fears. They may not want to talk about it until they’ve done it, and then they can talk about it, but you’re going to be scared. You’re going to have some uncertainty and you’re going to grow along with the process. And I see that in so many of the clients that I work with. Some of the guests we’ve had on the pod, they all have a similar story, may be told different ways of I wasn’t sure, but I believed or if I didn’t try it now, I never would. And who I was when I started as a business owner and leader versus who I am today is very different because we all evolve.

Mason (08:36):

Yep, hundred percent.

Chris (08:37):

Yeah. I think what I would tell entrepreneurs is even though you feel like you’re alone, you’re not many that have come before you felt the same

Mason (08:45):

Way. Yeah, I would just encourage, there’s not really a perfect time to start a business that people will think, oh, at this age I’ll do it when the kids are out of school or whatever the case is. I actually advocate that being the breadwinner of my family and having three little kids take care of it was a higher level of risk. I didn’t have a safety net, and that meant the decision making that I was going to make. I was going to focus on the top. If I had to look at my calendar, I was going to focus on the top strategic priorities that were actually going to deliver a result for my time. I wasn’t going to mess around because I didn’t have the safety net. And so the success of the business, I think has been built upon that is to making the right decisions because I didn’t have any spare wiggle room in there for making a wrong one. And some of that’s luck. Some of it is just prioritizing time. I think that mentally we can get in our own way, and so I encourage anybody, any listener, that there’s no, just because you can have a safety net later on in life or it can feel more comfortable. Sometimes entrepreneurship is pretty hard and to make the right decisions is pretty hard sometimes when you’re back is against the wall, that’s the most strategic opportune time to actually do something because your ability to fight your way out of that is actually better.

Chris (09:58):

That’s really good. Let’s go a little deeper on that because I think you touched on something I think so important, especially for someone that’s starting out in a new business. And the one thing you hear almost universally is you’re wearing many hats in those early days, and to your point where you spend your time can make or break you, right? So can you go a little deeper on maybe some of the techniques or strategies or things that you did or still doing to make sure you are prioritizing your time in the right ways versus being distracted on the wrong things?

Mason (10:31):

Yep. I would say in any business starting out, I mean making sure that you have traction in your sales is critically important, and you have to try to drive repetitive repeat sales that, and in order to do, that’s not just going to fall in your lap. You actually have to take action in doing that and to the conclusion that I was going to have a weekly set of sales activities that I was going to do, and that meant that, whether it was activities on LinkedIn, whether it was people I was going to meet, who I was going to meet and making sure I was meeting with the right people and saying no to the wrong people, but I was going to commit to a consistent set of actions every week that I was going to prioritize because even if I had book client work that could sustain me revenue wise, that can dry up.

(11:15):

And so I never wanted to be in a position where, okay, that’s going to dry up at some point and we don’t have a solution to it or we’re going to have this big gap period. It literally is when you’re starting a business, always be selling literally and make it a part of a routine. And I think for many people that are somewhat the artisan, like they’re going and providing a service. So whether it could be accounting or CFO work, it can be plumbers, it can be roofers. They may love doing the operational work themselves or that’s what they’re good at, and it’s really easily mentally to go do what you’re good at because that’s what you’re comfortable with.

Chris (11:51):

It’s human nature, right?

Mason (11:52):

It’s human nature, but sales is hard regardless of whether you have a sales background or not. Sales is hard because you’re putting yourself in uncomfortable situations where you’re going to get told no, you’re going to get rejected, and that is hard, but it becomes easier through repetition and through repetition, you’re going to be able to define things better. You’re not going to start perfect and just understand that you’re going to define your niche better. You’re going to define who should I talk to better? Where am I going to get the greatest ROI for my time? But create a set of weekly activities. I’d say especially for somebody just starting out that really needs to represent close to 40 to 50% of your time, honestly, it needs, you need to be making at least 40% of your calendar focused on new business development activities and just create that pipeline that’s always flowing. And if you do that, at least for me, that was a great success factor, is just trying to implement that finally. And I think most people would agree that is the way that you keep things rolling.

Chris (12:47):

Yeah, thank you for that. So let’s talk a little bit about innovation. You started out on your own, you said you’ve now got five CFOs. How are you using technology or what are you doing to be innovative to drive your business and grow it?

Mason (13:03):

Yeah, I would say, I mean we’re not heavy technology users in the sense of, yeah, we do use technology, but we’re not necessarily taking technology to drive where we want to go and how we provide our services. I mean, I do think that there’s opportunities in the space of AI to improve what we do 100%. I think what we’re a bit unique in is you’ll find out there, and I think innovation can just come from seeing one way that everybody does something and trying to do it a different way. And I always worked for agribusiness firms that were always low margin. And so from an overhead standpoint, you couldn’t really staff up in a big way because you didn’t know when your next crop was going to, when you’re going to have a hailstorm that was going to knock out your next crop. And so you had to maintain a really lean overhead at all times.

(13:50):

And just through a personal aspect, my wife is from Chile, I’ve worked in South America, I can speak Spanish and all that. So I would actually contract financial analyst and accountants out of South America. And I did that in corporate where when I needed project support that I would go secure people from South America and I’d have them help me build financial models when I needed time to focus on other strategic objectives. And I would have them do that on my behalf rather than me getting stuck in Excel analysis. And so within our business, you’ll find a lot of fractional CFO firms where you’re buying the person of the fractional CFO themselves, you’re buying the person, and we have a unique team approach to where every CFO is paired with an analyst. And that way in our pricing, we can deliver it at a more cost effective rate to our clients that ag and construction aren’t historically high margin industries.

(14:44):

And so that way we can be most cost effective and be value adding for the client. But we have a unique model in which the analyst does a lot of the Excel analysis, financial analysis work on behalf of the CFO, so the CFO can go actually work on strategic objectives with the client versus being stuck in financial analysis all day. And at least for us, that’s what innovation looks like and that’s driving that further in regards to setting up systematic ways that we deliver our services. And rather than it just being that, hey, you’re buying a person for an hourly rate, which I feel like a lot of our competitors do, we’re trying to set up a systematic way that we deliver the services along with a team approach, and that way it creates the greatest value add for the client. And so there’s not a lot of technology in there, but we’re just doing it different that we feel like is, it’s all meant to be valuable to better fit our clients ultimately.

Chris (15:34):

Hello friends, this is Chris Hanzlik, your building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations, and business leaders. Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm@boyermiller.com and thanks for listening to the show. So like I said, I agree. I don’t think innovation has to be wow always, but just maybe slightly different. Sounds like what you’re talking about more is a value proposition, right? And that you’re really getting a little team here or not just one person. I can see where that would be different important to your clients. So you’re in Houston. Let’s talk a little bit about the advantages you see of being a business, maybe not just in Houston, but in Texas, the advantages that you think that’s brought to you and how you’re trying to capitalize on those.

Mason (16:38):

So I think I should start a little bit backwards. Originally from California, so I’m one of those statistics that I moved the business to Texas. I literally picked up my LLC and I converted it to a Texas-based LLC. So I’m all in on this

Chris (16:53):

Welcome man. We have done so many conversions of California LLCs to Texas LLCs since 2020. It’s crazy.

Mason (17:02):

Yeah, it’s real. Still have family in California. We still have many clients in California. There’s a lot of ag in California and construction as well that we will continue to serve that still believe that while the state is difficult to operate a business in, that also creates opportunities because there will be people that leave and yet there’s still demand for those services and those products and goods. And so yeah, for me being in Houston, it’s really actually great because this is a booming state in terms of its economic activity, especially on the construction side of things. But from an ag standpoint too, it can be a little bit tough not to be in the ag segments that we serve, where we’re being able to go out to the ranches and the citrus groves and all that and the farms themselves on, in Houston, the fact we can serve clients in California, go hop on a plane, get out to Fresno, California really quickly, but at the same point in time, there’s a ton of ag in Florida, Georgia, and we can go hop to those areas.

(17:59):

We happen to work with a lot of fresh produce clients and fresh produce distributors, and so those are all over. But the fact that Texas is a central point and has a lot of economic activity where a lot of those goods and services are coming in and so well may not necessarily be that all the products and goods are grown here, the distribution of them is happening in a very significant way here. And so the fact that this state is so central to everything, it’s just, it’s been actually a blessing because if I was all the way in California and I wanted to go to a trade show all the way in Georgia, that whole lag of time in between travel time and just killing a day worth of travel, et cetera, et cetera, when right now I can get to most places within two and a half hours the United States.

(18:43):

And that’s a beautiful thing in terms of building relationships and being on site and the fact that the Texas economy is booming nonetheless, that it’s real here. We actually had one of our CFOs that moved from California to Oklahoma, and he just said, yeah, it’s amazing. Just the lack of, I shouldn’t say lack, but the more minimized regulation by comparison to other states and how it just creates additional business opportunities. It’s a wonderful blessing. So it’s great for us and allows us to be centralized, but at the same point, it allows us to work with Texas and the clients all over too.

Chris (19:16):

Right. You mentioned, I guess, one of the CFOs that you brought on. How are you going about evaluating whether these additional CFOs align with your vision of the company and can not just from performance but from your ethical standards, which you obviously led with in the very beginning of our conversation. So what are you doing to vet these people out to make sure you’re making the best decision you can in bringing them on board?

Mason (19:49):

We definitely, through our hiring process, we do a very significant case study approach. And even in the person’s background, we want to see that for me, it’s a personal choice to each person building their own practice or firm in this way. If the background is heavy public accounting that they work for a CP firm for most of their life, it’s probably not a fit for us because we actually want to make sure that we get people that have been operators inside a business that have experience helping to deal with the issues of whether it be a family transition, growing a business and wearing many hats because it’s rare that if you have a full-time job and a 20 million revenue business that you’re going to be doing multiple things I should say. And so we want to see that they have operator experience in that regards, but we put them through some significant case studies to really evaluate because it’s unique that many of the business owners that we’re working with, we say that we work with businesses up to 75 million in total aggregate revenues. We find that’s a perfect segment where they can really use a part-time CFO. They don’t quite need a full-timer yet. They can use a part-time on a reoccurring basis. But what’s interesting is we’re watching the evolution of the entrepreneur themselves as well, or the founder. I got to tell a little bit of my story, but even though that they have the CEO title, they’re not quite fulfilling that CEO role fully, right? And

(21:13):

We’re helping them navigate that. And there’s a lot of emotional rollercoaster that goes with that. And so we actually evaluate, we just did interviews with two construction focused CFOs, and that’s another part of it too, is we want to see deep industry and experience within the industries we serve, but we ask them that, Hey, if you were faced with this similar issue we just worked through with the previous client where it’s a husband wife team, and we literally just saw the husband wife get in a fight with each other over something they’re talking about in the business, we say, how would you handle this? And we want to hear how they would handle the emotional aspects of it from an empathetic standpoint. Can you actually navigate that as a leader and still come out on the right way that you’re not going to be overly technical about it, you’re going to help them relationally work through it and help them move in the right direction, see the bigger picture.

(22:00):

So that’s a lot of how we’re doing it, that we are working with clients where again, there’s just emotional dynamics where we’re seeing that the entrepreneur themselves is having to evolve in a very significant way. They are not some major corporate CEO, they wouldn’t tell you that they are. They’re evolving as a person. And so being there with them through that evolution and kind of helping to almost be somewhat of a guiding coach too is what we see in our role and that’s what we’re looking for in our people that they can help do that too and help navigate sticky situations.

Chris (22:30):

Well, very similar kind of parallel seats that we sit in. I find myself in the very similar times with a lot of our clients where, you’re right, they’re evolving through the process as I mentioned, and they were really good probably at sales or something with an idea, but they all of a sudden have a CEO title and helping them along that journey, and whether that’s eventually getting a good operator underneath them to really run the business so they can focus on what they enjoy doing the most that made the business successful. Those are fun places to be kind of be an extension of that team. Right?

Mason (23:08):

Yep.

Chris (23:09):

Let’s talk a little bit about your clients. I mean, what are some of the things you’re helping them through, some of the challenges you’re seeing, any kind of trends of where people are, maybe what are they excited about, what are they concerned about? How are you helping them navigate through both of those emotions?

Mason (23:29):

Yeah. I like to tell this story because literally you can insert the name, and this more specifically applies to our construction clients, but you can insert any one of our client names in here. And it literally is the same situation. This is the trend that we see that Joe started a construction business that he started a general contracting business. He was a project manager for another big general contractor in town, felt like, Hey, I can do this on my own. I want to go do this on my own. He got the licenses and started bidding on some work and started winning the work and started actually managing the projects, working with the subcontractors, et cetera, fulfilling all the work requirements for the job and kept growing. Eventually hired some PMs underneath him to handle some additional jobs, but knew that he needed to take care of accounting.

(24:11):

And so he’s got QuickBooks and he’s heard stories, but he needs somebody that he can trust to handle the day-to-day transactional entry and that he’s got to keep things lean. So he asked his wife, his mom, his sister, his aunt, somebody that generally has some knowledge of QuickBooks and coding transactions, he asks them to take care of his books, and he can do that for couple of a few years. And then all of a sudden say, Joe, he gets this opportunity at the university or this big hospital that this big remodel project where he can put his banner up. Everybody can know it’s his brand that’s doing this work, and it can be a real showcase project. And he goes to bonding. He goes to this bonding agent to make sure they can be bonded for the job, wants to put a bid and proposal forward on it, and the bond company says, no way.

(24:57):

Absolutely not one. The financial reports that you give us, show that you are an absolute financial mess whenever we ask for those financial reports, you send them two to three months later, so we never get anything on time. And when you actually do send them the quality of them, not just from a financial performance standpoint, but your accounting standards and your record keeping is absolute junk, we can’t really tell what’s going on underneath the hood here, but of the little that we can tell you’re not doing that great. Insert Brady CFO. We help to make sure that you are never denied by bonding again, that when you want to go pursue that high profile job, we make sure that you get the yes. And that’s done through various ways that we make sure that you do have liquidity. So whether that’s working with banks or other capital providers to make sure that, hey, we get you liquidity so that the bonding companies will like that.

(25:46):

You have a little bit of backup, but then yeah, we’re navigating that. How do we get your accounting in good order to actually, that it’s in a useful state, and then how do we optimize your financial performance to where whoever’s provided that capital, we can make sure that there’s a good ROI on that too, whether you’re having to pay down debt, can you actually pay down the debt, et cetera, et cetera. But through that process, we’re seeing a significant trend that a lot of construction companies ride around 15, 20 million mark. They’re going through an ERP implementation as an example, just to get their accounting records in a good state. And we’re helping to navigate that. We don’t like to be deep within the accounting itself, but we certainly serve it because we understand it’s a means to an end that once we have good financial records and we make sure that there’s some liquidity in place, then we’re talking about, okay, where do we want this business to strategically go that this is a $15 million business now, but how do we make this a 50 million business? And then how do we make it a hundred million business? And we’re creating these long-term plans with the ownership to do that. And so that story I told about Joe though, literally that you can insert several of our client different names in that, and that is the consistent theme across the board. And we find that when we bring that up in a sales call too, that is usually what’s being seen for most of our clients that we work with,

Chris (26:58):

Keeping ’em up at night. And again, and when you solve that problem, right, then now you have a client for life.

Mason (27:04):

Yep. Yep.

Chris (27:05):

That’s great. That’s the goal. Let’s talk just a little bit about leadership. How would you describe your leadership style and how do you think it’s kind of evolved over time,

Mason (27:15):

Especially as an entrepreneur? I would say that I have a visionary side to me, and that is important that I think every entrepreneur has to have that visionary kind of fulfillment and believing in what’s possible and what can be created. But at the same point in time, you still have to put in the operator mode at times. You just have to get stuff done. And that aspect of learning to delegate, I mean, I was a corporate CFO, so I had teams of people, but again, in an agribusiness environment, you’re running lean. And so usually what you see in an agri environment is that you have these C-suite leaders or these VPs that they’re excellent, but then generally there’s not a good layer of middle management below that. It’s basically you have a variety of accounting assistance, and they’re all rolling up and with the intention that you’re keeping your labor and your overhead costs low.

(28:06):

And so you have one kind of rainmaker up at top, but then you have a lot of people that need a lot of additional skill and development reporting into you. And so naturally, you’re kind of having to manage and keep the reins pretty tight that you’re having to be a little bit more controlling to make sure that things are going well. And within this business, on the other hand, we’re managing other CFOs, right? We’re managing highly qualified people and coming to the conclusion that I don’t need to be involved in as much, right? It’s important to trust but verify, but you have to be really good at delegating. But delegating doesn’t mean you show them once and then you hand it off and expect, why did that not get done a month later? Why did it not get done the way I wanted it to me getting really good at delegation, and I’ve had to evolve at this is spend some time with them, show them, make sure that it’s being done over the course of a couple weeks or a couple months correctly, and then you’re good to go and you can leave it and you can touch base and say, you’re accountable to this now.

(29:08):

I’ve given you all the training. You know what to do. Be careful about just giving somebody something and expecting that it’s going to be done the way that you want it to be done. That’s hardly ever the way it works, but you got to be really good at delegating and getting things off your plate as quickly as possible,

Chris (29:22):

Right?

Mason (29:23):

Yep.

Chris (29:23):

Very true. Very true. Let’s turn a little bit, since you’re new to Texas, going to ask you a few questions about our state. Fair

Mason (29:29):

Enough. Yeah,

Chris (29:30):

So anything stand out that you have, places you’ve gone, experiences you’ve had since coming to Texas that stand out in your mind?

Mason (29:38):

Yeah, I mean, just the generally friendly nature of people. I mean, it’s a part of the reason that we love living here and that we wanted to move here is you walk down the streets and people just say hi, and that doesn’t necessarily exist in other states where people are friendly and just say hi, and we got to witness or experience our first hurricane last summer, and I couldn’t believe the resiliency of people where, I mean, yeah, the day after the hurricane, people stayed to work. Oh, you go into Barnes and Noble and people are literally plugging their laptop into the corner, little electrical outlet and making sure that they could still get work done and sent emails that day. You’re just back at it, and the nature of that type of stuff happens here so often that from California, yeah, you get wildfires. That’s a whole nother story of how it can be managed or not, but you get wildfires, but you don’t really get natural disasters that just kind of come and uproot your life for a bit. But they happen so often, and Texas has such crazy up and down weather. People’s resiliency is pretty amazing in Texas of just, yep, we had that terrible storm yesterday. Well, we’re back at it tomorrow, and it’s just, this is life and we got to get back to it. And yeah, I think the friendliness and people’s resiliency here is a pretty big thing that we’ve noticed.

Chris (30:53):

Yeah, that’s great. I love that perspective. I think those of us that have been here our whole life maybe lose sight of that sometimes, but yeah, it’s good to get that perspective from you. So again, new to the area, but I ask everyone this, so it’ll be good because you’re kind of a Guinea pig or fresh in this do since getting here. Is your preference Tex-Mex or barbecue?

Mason (31:16):

Yeah, I do love good barbecue, but we have all kinds of Mexican food in California. I mean, I think the population in California is a good 60 to 70% Hispanic, but Tex-Mex has a different unique flavor to it that I grew up in Mexican food because of that growing up where I did. Yeah, it’s kind of natural to make that migration that I love it. So yeah, I love a good queso. Oh,

Chris (31:38):

Man, I have for my own heart. Yes. Well, good. Well, really appreciate the time, Mason. Love hearing your story and where you’re taking this business. I definitely agree. There’s a lot of opportunity for the type of services that you’re providing because a ton of companies that fit within that space, and again, I know that because part of the market we serve in that kind of the middle market there, so congratulations on taking the risk how it’s going so far.

Mason (32:05):

Yeah, no, I just appreciate being able to come on here, Chris, and talk with you that it’s fun to come and share the story. But yeah, just appreciate the opportunity to share with your audience as well.

Chris (32:13):

Well, that’s great. Well, we enjoyed having you on and I look forward to seeing you soon. Take care.

Mason (32:17): Sounds good. Awesome. Thanks Chris. Have a good one

Chris (32:21):

And there we have it. Another great episode. Don’t forget to check out the show notes at boyarmiller.com/podcast and you can find out more about all the ways our firm can help you at boyarmiller.com. That’s it for this episode. Have a great week and we’ll talk to you next time.