Seed to Exit
Welcome to Seed to Exit, the ultimate podcast all about startups, scaling, and venture capital. Your host is Riece Keck: Startup veteran and recruitment entrepreneur.
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Seed to Exit
Christopher Kim, Founder and CEO at Numeral | Automating Accounting | Sacrifices in Startups
Christopher Kim, founder and CEO of Numeral, shares how his company automates complex accounting processes, particularly revenue recognition and cash reconciliation. He reflects on his personal journey and the lessons learned from his previous entrepreneurial experience.
• Simplifying complex accounting concepts
• The inspiration behind building Numeral
• How Numeral automates revenue recognition and cash reconciliation
• Personal finance's influence on Kim's entrepreneurial vision
• The challenges and breakthroughs in scaling a startup
• Looking ahead: changing the future of accounting
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Numeral aggregates, all revenue and cash impacting data from disparate systems. These are very commonly payment processors, billing platforms and bank accounts. These are the three most common systems that we integrate with. We ingest all the financial data from these systems and then we cleanse, curate, organize all this data, which we call numeralizing the data set, which is the foundation for all that we do. And once we have a numeralized data set within our platform, we apply accounting automation logic. So the example I just gave you of like prorating the revenue recognition schedule for Amazon Prime, for RevRec, we would automate all that. But you can imagine, if you try to do this for millions of transactions and spreadsheets, it's just impossible to do so. That's where we come into play.
Speaker 2:Welcome to today's episode of Seat to Exit. I'm Rhys Keck and I'm excited to speak with Christopher Kim, the founder and CEO of Numeral. Numeral is transforming accounting through automation, with a focus on revenue recognition and transaction level cash reconciliation. Before founding Numeral, chris founded Clean AF Club and gained experience in sales and fintech. We'll dive into his journey from the early days of Numeral. Chris founded Clean AF Club and gained experience in sales and fintech. We'll dive into his journey from the early days of Numeral, including his decision to sleep in his car to make the company's vision a reality. We'll also discuss the problem Numeral is solving for the accounting teams, the importance of servant leadership and the lessons he's learned while building a fintech startup. Thanks for listening and let's go ahead and dive into the conversation listening and let's go ahead and dive into the conversation.
Speaker 3:Welcome to Seed to Exit, the podcast where we uncover the stories, strategies and insights that power the startup ecosystem. I'm your host, rhys Keck, founder of MindHire, a talent acquisition firm specializing in helping startups build exceptional teams. Each week, I sit down with founders, investors and industry leaders to explore the journeys behind iconic companies and game-changing ideas. Whether you're building, investing or just curious about what it takes to succeed in the startup world, I want this podcast to be your go-to resource for actionable insights and inspiring conversations. Now, if you enjoy the show, please don't forget to subscribe, leave a review or share it with your network. Your support means the world and really helps bring more incredible conversations to life.
Speaker 3:Chris, welcome aboard. Thanks for coming on. Absolutely, reece. Thanks for having me. You got it, so I'm super excited to talk to you. I'm a little bit of an accounting nerd myself, even though I'm not formally an accountant. The first thing I really ever did out of college was start recruiting accountants, so I learned a whole lot more about it than I thought I ever would. But for those of the audience who are not accountants, they might need a little bit of explaining what it is that Numeral does. So, before we get into everything else, if you could just explain the concept of revenue recognition, cash reconciliations and what those are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. Reese Numeral is a fully automated revenue subledger that automates revenue recognition and transaction level cash reconciliation. For those who don't have an accounting experience, which I'm sure is the majority of listeners, revenue recognition is very simply an accounting principle that states that revenue must be recognized when it's earned, not when payment is received. To illustrate that in an example, do you use Amazon Prime? I do, okay, same with me. So let's just say you know Amazon Prime. For easy math purposes, let's say it was sold at $120 a year. If you bought Amazon Prime in January of 2022, the revenue recognition principle states that you know Amazon Prime can. January of 2022, the revenue recognition principle states that Amazon Prime can only recognize $10 of revenue in January, $10 in February, $10 in March, so on and so forth, as opposed to $120 in January for when the payment was received. This is a very, very simple, elementary example. It could get much more gnarlier than that, but that's what revenue recognition is at a high level For cash reconciliation, cash reconciliation is very simply the process of comparing accounting records with the bank statement, basically to ensure that everything is properly accounted for.
Speaker 1:So if we use the Amazon Prime example once again, let's just say Amazon Prime made $500 million in January of 2025. They sold $500 million worth of subscriptions, right. Well, if in their bank account for that same period of time they received $480 million, there's that $20 million delta, right. So cash reconciliation is identifying the variances, why that delta exists and attributing those variances those that delta exists, and attributing those variances, those differences, to different buckets. Wouldn't that be like taxes, transaction fees from payment processors, currency conversion rates, all of that? So that's hopefully to help sure, non-accounting listeners, but yeah, that's a very simply high level. What RevRec and CashRec is?
Speaker 3:Okay, so now that we have that out of the way and we've got the definitions in place, so what is it that specifically that Numeral does then?
Speaker 1:Yeah, numeral aggregates all revenue and cash impacting data from disparate systems. These are very commonly payment processors, billing platforms and bank accounts. These are the three most common systems that we integrate with. We ingest all the financial data from these systems and then we cleanse, curate, organize all this data, which we call numeralizing the data set, which is the foundation for all that we do. And once we have a numeralized data set within our platform, we apply accounting automation logic. So the example I just gave you of like prorating the, you know the revenue recognition schedule for Amazon prime, for RevRec. Uh, you know we would automate all that, but you know you can imagine if you try to do this for millions of transactions and spreadsheets, it's just impossible to do so. That's where we would come into play.
Speaker 3:So you're not an accountant yourself. So I'm curious where and this is a pretty specific problem that you're solving. So I'm just curious where the inspiration for this came from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I'm not an accountant and I'm not a CPA Never have been but the inspiration for Numeral came about where my biggest personal passion outside of work has always been personal finance. I'm first generation immigrant. My parents were first generation immigrants. I'm first generation born in the US and I don't know if you're you know in a personal finance. But uh, there are tools like uh, there was a tool called mint.
Speaker 3:Uh, before it was discontinued by I was gonna say it's gone now, isn't it yeah?
Speaker 1:yeah, but there's a personal capital, which is now in power. There's rocket money, there's all these tools that are essentially net worth aggregators and they give you. There's the they're supposed to give you a view of your net worth aggregators and they give you. There's the they're supposed to give you a view of your net worth in real time, and that was the inspiration for Numeral. From the very onset, essentially, when Numeral was started, I thought of hey, what's what's at the intersection of what am I most passionate in, which is personal finance, which is, and also like, what am I strongest in, which is, you know, b2b, go-to-market and go-to-market and B2B software teams? So, yeah, that was the intersection where and really all accounting is is just personal finance for businesses. It's obviously much more complex, with a lot more calculations, but it's really not that difficult once you understand the terminology and can speak the lingo.
Speaker 3:And so, you know, typically when you have an accounting system, you can just log in and you can see your balance sheet right, which will show all of your assets and liabilities. So that also, almost in a way, is already like a, a show of net worth. So where, where is the difference between that and numeral? Is it because numeral is real time and then, with with the you know accounting statements, you have to go back and close the month?
Speaker 1:No, no. So the example you just mentioned that's just like simple adding and subtracting bank account balances, and that's simple. What we do is we are ingesting the data directly from these different sources like billing platforms, payment processors, bank accounts, and then we're doing a lot of calculations in between as the middleman. So it's just a lot more calculations, a lot more edge cases versus, as opposed to just, if you think of like a net worth aggregator, it's just addition and subtraction, right, like how much do I have in my bank account versus how much do I have for my credit card bill, right? So it's just the complexity of the calculations.
Speaker 3:Gotcha. Okay, I see what you mean, so I understand where the inspiration for it came from. How did you go about actually getting it off the ground and getting your first customers?
Speaker 1:Yeah, getting our first customers, that was a fun time. I don't think we created the wheel. I think we just did what was tried and true. I come from a go-to-market background. I started my career as a sales rep so I've made a ton of cold calls in my time, so it was all founder-led sales at the very beginning. You reach out to early prospects. You reach out and look for advisors to give you feedback on these wireframes, this vision you have for them. But yeah, honestly, all of our early customers, first customers, literally just cold calling me, cold calling them saying, hey, this is the founder and CEO of Numeral. I wanted to receive your feedback on X, Y, Z. Yeah, nothing out of the norm, I would think.
Speaker 3:And who exactly are you selling into? Is it higher level, like e-commerce businesses? Is there a specific vertical that Numeral is the best fit for?
Speaker 1:Yeah, at the highest level. We sell to companies that have high transaction volume, which means they have, like self-serve revenue streams. So this is in juxtaposition to think about. Like sales-led companies, right, like Oracle. Like you can't buy Oracle by swiping your credit card. You have to talk to a sales rep, right? So we work with companies that have high transaction volume and the majority of their revenue stream comes from self-serve uh business models. Um, yeah, e-commerce brands is one of them, right. Like is one uh area in which we've seen a lot of success, but it really varies. Like we have. We work with direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands, like birchbox. We work with subscription consumer subscriptions, like Scribd. We work with app store apps like Captions, consumer electronics like Gap Wireless. Even companies that provide a financial instrument, like Payzen. So it's really as broad as do you allow your customers to buy your product or service without talking to a sales rep and you just let them use a credit card and swipe? If so, then obviously you have high transaction volume and we can potentially be a benefit to them.
Speaker 3:Gotcha Okay. So before I get too far down the rabbit hole of the progress that you've gotten so far with Numeral, this is not your first entrepreneurial venture, so before that you did uh, clean af, which is obviously completely different. Um and I and I've seen the youtube video you sent. I'm 100 putting that in the podcast description link. You can't get out of this one, unfortunately. Um sounds good. So what? What was that experience like? What did you? What did you take from that?
Speaker 1:that helped you build numeral yeah, um, you know for the in regards to the naming, you know these are things that you know, you think about when you're in your mid-20s and you have a lot of youthful exuberance. I'd say the biggest takeaways from Clean AF Club. So, just for some context, clean AF Club was I got inspiration from Dollar Shave Club. I got inspiration from Dollar Shave Club. Essentially, clean AF Club was providing eco-friendly, organic bamboo toothbrushes as well as fluoride-free toothpaste and a subscription, direct-to-consumer membership where every three months that's the frequency in which you should be replacing your toothbrush we would ship this to our customers. My biggest takeaway from that experience was I learned a lot about how e-commerce companies and what e-commerce brands face from an accounting pain point problem, because when you have high volume like that, when you have these different subscription models and you allow customers to upgrade, downgrade, cancel, when you allow them to buy gift cards, it introduces a ton of revenue complexity. So that was my first introduction into what is revenue recognition, what is cash reconciliation. So a lot of the lessons I took from Clean AF Club. Obviously we apply to numeral and a lot of the customers we serve today are direct to consumer subscription e-commerce companies like Birchbox, battleboxbox, elysium all true, they're basically the same type of business funnels that I had at clean af club. So, um, learned a ton about accounting and uh kind of processes there.
Speaker 1:Uh, the second thing I learned, I would say, is that stick to areas in which you're more you know are naturally more proficient in. So like b2c, for example, I've never had any experience there, it was just you know. When you're more proficient in so like B2C, for example, I've never had any experience there, it was just you know, when you're in your mid twenties, you have unlimited energy and you just have an entrepreneurial itch, you just you just got to scratch it Right. So I just saw an opportunity there and took advantage of that. But yeah, the biggest takeaway for me from my clean AF experience was sick to B2B. B2b is what I know. B2b is what I'm the strongest in, what I do with the least amount of effort, and obviously that's why I'm here, that's why we're doing this at Numero.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, and I imagine that also really helps when you're talking to I imagine you're selling into controllers or CFOs at these different companies where you're like, I've literally been in your seat and I know how hard it is to keep all of this revenue recognition together Of course, of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's certainly is helpful, especially when you are first starting the company and you have no social proof or no pedigree.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so what, if you don't mind me asking, what did you ultimately end up doing with with cleaning AFCO? Did you, did you wind it down? Did you, did you sell?
Speaker 1:it. We sold it, but it was not for any meaningful amount. Let's just say that much. Yeah, I sold that. And keep in mind, while Clean AF Club was operating, I was still working full-time. I was still working tech sales, go-to-market leadership at startups the entire time in parallel. So it was a great experience, but certainly not any life-changing amount of money.
Speaker 3:Sure, sure, yeah. What did it feel like actually winding that down? Was there a little bit of an element of sadness? How did you feel?
Speaker 1:After that many years of running it, I felt a little bit of relief mainly because it was in the area in which I was not super knowledgeable about and proficient in which direct to consumer subscriptions. It was simply a matter of hey, I know I need to start businesses and I know I need to. I'm going to be starting other businesses. Uh, let me, let me get this first at bat. Let me, let me just let me learn how to grind. Let me learn how to, you know, literally lie to China to negotiate with manufacturers for a weekend and be back in office by Monday, like it just teaches you a lot how to grind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah, that that was my and be back in office by Monday, like it just teaches you a lot how to grind, yeah. So yeah, that was my main takeaways Okay and so.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I actually I had seen that, that you were at Balto and then you went straight from that to Numeral. What was the decision that made you decide to go all in on Numeral as opposed to, you know, maybe starting to scale it up as a side project, like how you did with the other company?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm 11 years into my career almost 12 years and as you progress in your career I mean if you make the smart financial decision, like I told you, personal finance is my biggest passion outside of work. You build yourself a little safety net there so you can take more risks and those risks can become more ambitious as your career grows. So it was just at a point where everything was going well at my former company, Balto, but an opportunity presented itself where there was a technical co-founder and there was opportunity to start this business and you just jump at it and take the chance. And, of course, if perhaps I was in a different position financially, maybe you don't want to take that type of risk. But, like I said, personal finance has always been my biggest passion. When you're the first generation born here and your parents immigrated from a different country, you tend to do well with money.
Speaker 3:Where are your parents from? If you don't mind me asking South Korea, South Korea. What did they think about you both starting this and your other entrepreneurial journey?
Speaker 1:You know my, my parents since high school, I think they've learned to just kind of let Chris do what he wants to do, because he has just that type of mentality where it's probably best just let him do what he wants to do instead of arguing over it. So it wasn't always like that, I'll tell you that much. But, um no, they were very supportive, of course, as any parents would be, and um yeah, uh, they've been uh definitely uh supportive, uh shoulder, during tough times as well.
Speaker 3:Nice, so okay. So I, when I was prepping for this, I watched another podcast interview and you mentioned you slept out of your car at the start of numeral. Now, you clearly weren't homeless because you had the bad guy, so overall that just sounds terrible. So why were you sleeping in your car? What filled me in on that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was quite observant of you, by the way, noticing that other podcast.
Speaker 1:But you know, all roads lead to Rome, right, there are multiple roads to get to the same destination and I have always been a very strong proponent of burning the boats.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure if you're familiar with that metaphor, but, yeah, so in every major life decision I've made, when I have quote unquote burned the boats, where I have no backup plan, where I'm just all in on something, and when you're all in on something, by definition you're cutting a lot out, right. And when you sleep out of your car, you're cutting out social life, you're cutting out, obviously, anything dating, you're cutting out All you're optimizing for is the survivability of the business and making sure the business grows and is successful. So it's almost like I look at it, it's like a hack, right, like if you sleep out of your car and you know there's a hundred, you know 68 hours in a week, right. And I don't know about you, but me personally, I sleep eight hours a week or a day, so you know that's 56 hours there. So you know I work out, you know two hours a day. So, um, you know that's 56 hours there.
Speaker 3:So you know, I, I work out, you know, two hours a day as well, so that's 14 hours.
Speaker 1:So, basically, like you work out two hours a day, I work out twice a day. Yeah, okay, yeah, it's, it's uh, nothing is more therapeutic than working out every single day. But, um, that leaves, you know, if you do that, that leaves uh, like 100 hours, roughly 98 hours left in the week. So I mean, if you live it, if you're sleeping out of your car like you don't want to do anything, you just want to work, right, you don't want to, there's nothing. You don't want to go home, right, you don't want to, right, you're just sleeping out of your car, and all that 98 hours a week is that you have left over is just is put towards work. And I mean, reese, like, think about it, if you're anybody, anybody who's conscientious, who's any high caliber individual that you know, if you are putting close to 100 hours a week on anything, it's impossible for you to fail, like you're just not going to fail, like if you actually put that amount of time, it's just it's very difficult to, of course, you know.
Speaker 3:To sustain that, but sometimes that's what you got to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, to sustain that, but sometimes that's what you gotta do, yeah, and also just make that like deliberate, intentional decision to do that. But, um, yeah, I did that because you know that's. That's that's what it. Uh, I've learned personally that's always what's worked well for me. Like I said, there's multiple paths to get to the same destination. For me it's maybe it's more extreme than other folks, but, uh, I've always approached things and major life decisions that way and, uh, it's always worked for me.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, that's the, that's the, the founder mindset, right and it's. It's. Oftentimes it's not as glamorous as uh as others make it out to seem from the outside. Sometimes you're just sleeping in your car, working a hundred hour weeks Um, um, also for, for anyone who's not familiar so the phrase burn the boats now was that? Was that the greeks or the romans? I think it was the romans, wasn't it? You know?
Speaker 1:maybe we can ask chat gbt, but uh, but uh. For my recollection it's from uh, like a, I think, a spanish conquistador. Who was it the con? I think it's. The context is no, they land on a new land. Yeah, they land on newfoundland.
Speaker 3:You know wherever they're going and they burn the boat so they can't go back. The only way forward is to succeed. But you know what? You're right. It was Cortez, okay, never mind, I thought it was the Romans. Sounded good, okay.
Speaker 1:So I credit the Romans for everything I know right. So credit the.
Speaker 3:Romans for everything I know right. So how long did you pull off those 90, 100-hour weeks?
Speaker 1:I did it until we raised our seed round. It was over a year. Oh wow yeah, and, like I said, it's not for everyone. It's unhealthy in a lot of regards, but I'm not optimizing for work-life balance when I'm starting a company and I'm optimizing for Don't you live in Boston too?
Speaker 3:Isn't it freezing?
Speaker 1:No, when we started the company it was in San Francisco. Okay, all right, that's a little bit more doable. Yeah, it would have been a little tougher in Boston, but it still would have been done. Yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 3:Okay, so you raised your seed round and you mentioned that it took about a year.
Speaker 1:How has the company changed since raising that initial round? Since raising that round? So we raised that. We had a 1 million pre-seed before, which got us started, but that seed round helped a ton right. It helps us with scaling our teams. It helps us with actually being able to work on the architecture of our product, versus just trying to cobble things together for the customer who needs things by this deadline as soon as possible. It helped us grow our go-to-market team right. Instead of me doing everything, me selling, me doing customer success, we have somebody who handles that now right, both individual those areas. So, no, it's definitely helped us scale and helped us grow.
Speaker 3:Was there a pivotal moment, and maybe it was the fundraise, maybe it was closing a certain customer where you really felt like it was a breakthrough for the company.
Speaker 1:I would say there's been two major breakthroughs since the inception of Numero, the first being, within five months of starting the company, we signed our first significant six-figure deal and prior to that, like you know, we were, you know we sold like a smaller 10K, 20k, 30k, those type of deals. It was incredibly validating when one of our earliest customers said hey, we've been trying to build something like this internally for two and a half years. It didn't work out. We're going to write you this check and I know you don't have a solution fully baked out, but your problem that you're solving is exactly what we try to solve. Solve it for me and I'm going to pay you to help you build it, even though the software is not fully live yet. So that was incredibly invigorating and was a monumental moment for us.
Speaker 1:The second thing, I would say, the second moment which I recall, which was a big breakthrough for us, was when we got our first customer live and using the numbers that Numeral is producing. So to have a business rely on your software and the numbers that we produce that Numeral produces. They use it to close their books, they use it to report to investors, they use it to forecast, they use it to make strategic company decisions. That was a huge life of aha moment for us, like wow, okay, now it's real, now a company is actually reliant on us and trust us fully with this. And, yeah, those are the two, I think, pivotal breakthrough moments for us.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I can imagine that must have been a great feeling. I'm curious with that first company, since they had been trying and failing to solve it for two and a half years. Why were they confident that you could do it when they couldn't?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, when you are doing founder led sales, it's all about conviction, it's all about, I mean, it's a typical sales process, right? And I think the reason why they bet on us is we had a very strong team. But also, you know, they they believe in what I'm asking, right, they believe in what I'm saying. They believe that, hey, you know, chris will ensure that we get, he gets this built and he will serve us and, uh, and that's what I promised and that's what we've gone on to do. So, um, yeah, when you're selling so early stage like that, when it's literally just you and maybe a couple engineers, it's really just all relational, right, it's do I believe that this person is going to deliver what they say they will. And fortunately, you know, I was able to convince some folks of that.
Speaker 3:And here we are, nice, and obviously you still are continuing to take a primary, you know leadership on the sales component, but also being a founder you still have to think about you know the engineering, the products, components of the business. What was that adjustment like for you as you shifted your mindset a little bit?
Speaker 1:Yeah, engineering and product are different worlds when it comes to sales.
Speaker 1:So it wasn't a crazy adjustment because if you are leading any go-to-market team organization at any high-growth startup, you are rowing in the same direction as product engineering.
Speaker 1:Everyone's rowing in the same direction and you're in lockstep. At least that's been my experience with strong and well-run organizations like that. I think the biggest adjustment is a shift in mindset no-transcript, like a customer wants it yes, you know this, you want this feature, yes, and then it's balancing that which with product engineering, which, to simplify it, for me it's just understanding and saying a lot of no, and balancing, like you're juggling engineering, bandwidth, customer deadlines and product roadmap versus additional revenue and scope creep, and preventing scope creep is a huge part of of that process of juggling all those different functions, um, as the founder and ceo. So, yeah, I think, like I said, I think the biggest adjustment is just a mentality shift, though in sales it's, like I said, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. In product engineering it's hey, how can we, how can we build a, you know, scalable, long-term solution while factoring account existing and current customer needs and demands? So it's balancing all that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's almost like using just two different parts of your brain, more or less, and also the other part where you may have to do a little bit of balancing is at one time. Or one time or, on one hand, you're the, you are the founder, you're the CEO and you know, you're, of course, responsible to investors and you have to have a vision for where the company goes over the course of the next few years, but then, at the same time, you're still small enough where you have to be pretty tactical in your, your day-to-day operation. So how do you balance the two of those?
Speaker 1:It's not easy, but I would say the key to balancing those, at least for myself, is a delegation and trust. So essentially I am finding and vetting folks that can be strong functional owners in their respective areas and execute on the tactical details which obviously frees me up for more of the high-level stuff and making sure that we're on course. So at the same time, you don't want to lose sight of the nitty gritty details and you don't want to be so far away from the weeds. So I think one thing, some things I like to do, is literally we'll have daily engineering standups and I will still join, I will still liberally ask questions on double-clicking into the weeds on certain implementations, and then, on the go-to-market side, like I'll literally still listen to cold calls, like every meeting that's booked, I'll listen to it.
Speaker 1:When we have a new business meeting and it's recorded, I'll listen to that game film and then I'll provide feedback to the rep immediately after. So I think a way to like balancing that is kind of just roll up your sleeves, right. I mean, common sense is not always common practice, but it's just being able to being open to, you know, still being in the weeds with your, with your teammates. Um, you know, we're a startup here. Right like there's no one. No one lives in the ivory tower here. Right like you don't want any of that type of mindset going on.
Speaker 3:Yeah and on that and on that note of just hiring the right people and vetting them, how have you done that successfully thus far, or have you made any mistakes on that side?
Speaker 1:we've certainly made some mistakes, right. I think every everyone makes mistakes along the way. When you're a startup, especially when you're trying to balance immediate need, like oh my goodness, we have a burning need for this person, I'm kind of overlooking some other potential red flags because to solve that burning need, yeah, we've made those mistakes before, but all mistakes are good, all mistakes are lessons, right? So, yeah, I mean, in terms of finding the right folks for the roles I learned this very early on it's just finding the folks that are high caliber, self-starter, take the initiative and are ambitious and that you can trust and they work well with others and then get the hell out the way. That's it. So you know, like for the folks, like for the first sales um rep we hired on our team, you know I trusted him because he used to work, you know, on a previous team of mine and you know all those qualities you know were already previously vetted for um. But yeah, you try to just vet for those uh qualities as much as possible.
Speaker 1:But when you, when you find folks that are that want to be founders themselves, right, well, when they want to, when they, when they show that initiative, when they're just immediately responsive on slack. There's all these like little signals that you see, which which give off the impression of like, ah yeah, this this individual is is on, it has it, and uh, and if you can trust them and if they're a good team player, right, which is not always the case, right, you can, you can have those qualities, but not get along with everyone else. But if they have those qualities, it's it's fitting for that and get along with everyone else. But if they have those qualities, it's it's fending for that.
Speaker 3:And, like I said just, empowering them as much as possible and getting out their way Love that. So I'm curious, now that you've you know again to go back to the crazy hours you were pulling. You know, hopefully you're and obviously you're not doing that anymore. What do you do now outside of the office that enables you to perform better at work?
Speaker 1:I mean, I, I, what I do now is the same thing I've done for like a decade plus. Uh, I mean, I don't know about you, reese, but for me I just like to go to the gym every morning. Um, you know, my gym opens weekdays at 5.00 AM. So I'm there 5.00 AM, you know, work out for two hours. Nothing is, uh, it's like a vacation every morning. You almost don't need to go on vacation. You go get a really good workout. You go to the steam room, you take an ice cold shower. You feel better than you can handle anything. No, it doesn't matter what. So that's, yeah, I'm not nothing special there, just go to the gym every single day. It's incredibly therapeutic.
Speaker 3:Yep, yep. Well, I'm getting better. I'm about five days a week, but baby steps. And then I guess, one of the last questions I'd have for you just single best piece of advice you've gotten in your career thus far? That's really helped you. What would that be?
Speaker 1:The single best piece of business advice you're asking, not personal advice, yep or either, whatever you think is more impactful.
Speaker 1:The single best piece of career advice I've ever gotten is to seek input to maximize output. What I mean by that is I mean I'm sure you've heard of, you know, the number one rule of leadership is people are much more likely to want to do something if it's their idea or if they've had their, if they've contributed to the idea. So, before any major decisions are made, I've always learned to seek the stakeholders' input. It doesn't matter if you're the founder and CEO, it doesn't matter if you set the course for the company and this is what we're going to do you can have conversations and wordsmith things in a manner which allow others to chip in and be a part of that. And, yeah, when they contribute to that decision-making process, you know they're much more willing to support the resulting plan and you know that's going to lead to just greater commitment and motivation. So, yeah, I would say seek input to maximize output. That's the best piece of career advice I've gotten, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I guess then, final question just how do you see Numeral evolving over the course of the next few years? What is your ultimate goal in terms of building this company?
Speaker 1:Yeah, our ultimate goal here at Numeral is to advance the profession of accounting by standardizing and normalizing a daily closed process as opposed to monthly closed processes. So, if you know any accountants, if you know any folks in the profession, month end close is terrible. It's just that it's every company, every accounting team that is the norm. That's what's done and we are empowering and enabling accounting leaders and finance leaders to do a daily close, as close to a real time close as possible, starting with revenue and cash, and when you convey hey, this is what we're working towards. You know it's a foreign concept, right, like the concept of a daily close to most accounting leaders accounts right now. It's just they don't think it's possible. There's like that sounds kind of farfetched but, as with all you know, major industry changes, it's it's a gradual. You know gradual, gradual and then all of a sudden thing. So that's what we're working on and that's what we. That's how numeral will impact the accounting profession in the future.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Well, I'm rooting for you guys. I'm excited to follow along in the journey and just to wrap things out today. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Likewise. Thanks so much for your time. We appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Seed to Exit. I hope you found today's conversation insightful and valuable. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to subscribe, leave a review and share it with your network. Your support means the world helps us continue to grow and bring more incredible guests onto the show. Now for more content and updates, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter, or you can check out MindHire, where we help startups build exceptional teams. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode of Seed to Exit.
