In this episode of Consulting Spotlight, Michael Bernzweig interviews Jon Morris, founder of Fiscal Advocate and former CEO of Rise Interactive. Jon shares his entrepreneurial journey, discussing how he transformed a $10,000 investment into a successful digital agency and later transitioned into financial consulting. He emphasizes the importance of data-driven decision-making, understanding financial metrics such as gross margin, and the role of innovation in driving business growth. Jon also highlights the challenges service-based companies face and the signs that indicate when it's time to seek financial guidance. The conversation explores the integration of AI in economic consulting and the importance of making tough decisions for business success.
In this episode of Consulting Spotlight, Software Oasis Founder, Michael Bernzweig, interviews Jon Morris, founder of Fiscal Advocate and former CEO of Rise Interactive. Jon shares his entrepreneurial journey, discussing how he transformed a $10,000 investment into a successful digital agency and later transitioned into financial consulting. He emphasizes the importance of data-driven decision-making, understanding financial metrics such as gross margin, and the role of innovation in driving business growth. Jon also highlights the challenges service-based companies face and the signs that indicate when it's time to seek financial guidance. The conversation explores the integration of AI in economic consulting and the importance of making tough decisions for business success.
Takeaways
Sound Bites
Chapters
Michael Bernzweig (00:01.021)
Okay, I'd like to welcome everyone to this week's edition of the Consulting Spotlight. My name is Michael Bernzweig, the founder of Software Oasis, and this week we're joined by Jon Morris. He is the founder of Fiscal Advocate and a serial entrepreneur who turned $10,000 into one of the largest independent digital agencies, Rise Interactive, before achieving an eight-figure exit
and now helps tech and marketing service companies with their strategic planning and financial performance. With that, Jon, welcome to the podcast.
Jon Morris (00:38.744)
Thanks for having me on here. It's great to be here.
Michael Bernzweig (00:41.273)
Yeah, no, fantastic. And I know you just joined us recently at the Software Oasis AI Bootcamp. That was a lot of fun and really just wanted to dive into a little bit of your journey and learn a little bit more about where you're at now with Fiscal Advocate. And from what I hear, little bird birdie told me there's a lot of exciting other things coming in the future.
Jon Morris (01:10.501)
Absolutely, really excited to be here. It should be a lot of fun.
Michael Bernzweig (01:13.703)
So share with the audience, for anyone that may not be familiar with either yourself or your previous journey to this point, a little bit about that journey.
Jon Morris (01:25.934)
Yeah, so, you know, as you mentioned, I founded Rise Interactive. I went to University Chicago for business school. I entered an annual business plan competition, took second place and I won $10,000. And I use that as my seed money to grow Rise Interactive and I grew it to just under $40 million in 16 years before exiting it. And then even after I left, it grew, you know,
you know, pretty substantially after I left over the next five years, I exited in 2020. And, you know, a big part of why we were able to grow was how we took a data driven approach to decision making. And we knew all of the benchmark numbers for agencies or service based companies, and we were able to use that to strategically make better decisions about how we fund growth. And so when I didn't know
what I was gonna do next. had a business coach for the last three years of Rise and I meet with him every three months. And every three months he kept saying, know, the insights that you have and the way you guys make decisions is amazing. Like you could create a business just doing that. And I said that that would be a really fun, cool thing to do. So fiscal advocate was born. We're five years in now. And what we do is we help
really any service-based company, but predominantly marketing agencies and tech service providers with their strategic planning. So how do they do annual planning? How do they come up with the plans for the next quarter? And then we do all the fun strategic aspects of the finance department, such as budgeting and forecasting, cashflow analysis, resource planning, monthly insights. And then lastly, the foundational elements of their finance department, such as
closing the books, invoicing, AR, AP, payroll, et cetera. And so that's what we do today. And I'm having a blast doing it.
Michael Bernzweig (03:24.861)
So how did you make that jump from the agency to what you're doing now? Because that's a pretty big transition, but a lot of overlap as well.
Jon Morris (03:36.043)
You know, it's funny because a lot of people are like, you know, it's a very weird path to going from running a marketing agency and being a digital marketer to taking over people's finance departments. But what made Rise Interactive unique, and it might not sound that unique today, but it was very unique in the early 2000s, was this data-driven approach to marketing. In fact, we couldn't get
marketers who are good at math, when we are recruiting in the early days of Rise Interactive, we ended up recruiting from the financial industry. And so I have an MBA with a concentration in finance. Numbers have always been like my core specialty. The way we did digital marketing and the way we analyzed everything was math driven.
In order to get a job at Rise, you had to take an analytics exam and had a 22 % pass rate. And so it really was a natural transition. And we're doing the same thing. You know, at Rise, we took media data to identify waste and figure out scalable areas to redeploy it. And at Fiscal Advocate, we're identifying waste in your financial data and helping you figure out more impactful high ROI areas to scale your business.
It sounds like it's very different, but I'm actually doing almost the exact same job just in a different medium.
Michael Bernzweig (05:07.813)
And, know, it's so interesting. mean, in the early days of internet advertising and all of that, there was very little, little data. And as things transitioned, there was no overwhelming amount of data, waste never went away. And, you know, obviously being able to drill down into the details of each individual visit and a piece of ad spend and all of that, you know, obviously in the
early days was super important and even more so today. I mean, I think that's really amazing.
Jon Morris (05:45.473)
It's, I would say that my specialty is what I'll call it's just granularity. When it came to, you know, leveraging data and digital marketing, we would be able to get down to the ROI to the individual placement that you spent the most amount of money on. And, you know, we were very able, very, we were able to very quickly assess, you know, you're spending money on foolish things. And it was,
Michael Bernzweig (05:50.781)
Mm-hmm.
Jon Morris (06:14.814)
oftentimes, like so obvious to the prospective client, how poorly their money was being allocated, because we are just looking at reports differently. And with fiscal advocate, it's the same thing. What I find is that a lot of financial data when you look at your income statement is bundled. So for example, your payroll is oftentimes one line item. And if you really want to get
to understanding how are you spending your money, you have to unbundle your payroll so that the people who are doing sales and the people are doing marketing show up in your sales and marketing budget. The people who are actually delivering for your customers show up in your cost of service. And I'd say at least 90 % of the time when we talk to people, if not 95 plus, all these expenses are bundled where you can't do analysis and we help them unbundle.
Michael Bernzweig (07:10.823)
Makes sense. So with the clients you're working with today, are you seeing a lot of overlap in terms of the types of challenges that organizations are having and drilling down to that bottom line number or, you know, in terms of turning things around to get that bottom line number where it needs to be or what are you seeing?
Jon Morris (07:32.207)
Absolutely. So one of the most important metrics is your gross margin. So if you own a consulting business, and I'm just going to give a little bit of definitions here. If you take all of your payroll that relates to doing client work, all of your freelancers, all the technology license, any travel, entertainment, any client gifts, anything that relates to client work, I call that your cost of service.
And if you take your revenue minus your cost of service, you get your gross profit. And what we want is gross profit divided by revenue, or your gross margin, to be between 50 and 60%. The vast majority of people who come to me have no idea what gross margin is, what their gross margin is, why it's important, and how to optimize it.
And what I can tell you is if you're below a 40 % gross margin, you are most likely losing money. And if you want to figure out how you can invest more into your business, you want to figure out how to improve your gross margin. When I left Rise, we had a 57 % gross margin. That gave me a huge edge. Because if you think about it, someone's in
got a 38 % gross margin and I have a 57 % gross margin. It gives me 19 percentage points to either go to the bottom line and be profit or invest back in the business. And so this allowed me to spend more on sales and marketing as a percent of revenue. It allowed me to spend more money on R &D and innovation to differentiate ourselves. And so there's just one metric is just a key metric that I see time and time again, people don't know about that I need to educate.
and then help them figure out how to make it better.
Michael Bernzweig (09:21.649)
Makes a lot of sense. I know a lot of, obviously a lot of the metrics are different across different industries and different areas of commerce, whether it's B2C, B2B. Are you focusing on a very specific niche within the ecosystem or are you working with a wide range of organizations?
Jon Morris (09:45.071)
So we only work with service-based companies and mainly B2B service-based companies. So if you are selling time as the way you make money, that's the group we help. Now that being said, 95 % of our clients are either in the tech service category or in the marketing service category. And now a lot of times people think like, well, that means that they're all the same type of business. They're widely different.
within both categories. So I'll just use marketing service as an example, you PR firms, traditional agencies, digital agencies, web development companies, video production companies, CRM, know, implementers, know, it's a market research is it's a wide gamut of different types of businesses. Some are project based, some are MRR, monthly reoccurring revenue base, some are hybrids. And what I found
is if you're selling time, the metrics hold regardless of the industry. And that if you can follow those metrics, you'll do really well.
Michael Bernzweig (10:56.765)
Interesting. And I'll be honest with you, over the years I've owned two companies, Software Oasis and another company in the B2C space. And I would agree with you. mean, I think the, you know, the metrics are super important. Having tight control of your numbers is super important no matter what type of company you're running. And one of my favorite celebrities, I don't know if you've listened to
Marcus Lamonis, he's actually done quite well for himself and he's gone into all different kinds of organizations and done turnarounds, but mostly in the retail space. That's his world and one of the things that I see about yourself on this end of it, you understand the service-based industry.
inside and out. You've been there, you've lived it, you've done it. So I can't think of anyone better to take that journey with. Now, you also mentioned, I think when we were chatting before the podcast, that you had some other exciting things coming. And I didn't know if you were ready to share any of that with the audience or...
Jon Morris (12:14.647)
Yeah, so, you know, I'm a big believer in investing in innovation. And, you know, by doing so, you can reduce your churn, you can help increase your win rate, you can help win new customers, you can increase your gross margin, you know, etc. There's all sorts of benefits to investing innovation. And where I find, you know, when I think of our monthly insights service,
And I think of the world today with AI, there is the need to be able to answer questions 24 seven with instant gratification. So we're going to launch in the next month or so an AI CFO co-pilot. So think of it as just chat like chat GPT with better organizational capabilities, easier to upload knowledge that relates to your finances.
and eventually will connect to your accounting software, your banking software, or say your accounting platforms, your banks, your payroll provider, your CRM, you know, whatever information that helps you with your finances, you'll be able to connect to or upload. And so if you have a question of, you know, how am I doing relative to my peers? What is my gross margin? What should my gross margin be? Which clients are the most profitable?
you know, whatever question you have, Luca is the name of the of the program. You know, you'll be able to answer, know, at your fingertips instantaneously.
Michael Bernzweig (13:53.061)
And you know that that is amazing because it's not just the tech, it's more importantly the process in getting to the solution. And I think having the right knowledge and understanding of what that process is, is really an important part of the solution you're putting out. So really excited to see that come together. I mean, at the end of the day, the magic of AI is the ability to sift through and
draw our insight from massive amounts of data. So that is something that no human could or should want to undertake, you know?
Jon Morris (14:30.927)
Yeah. I mean, look, before AI came out, you would you would have to require humans to do this. And now you're able to get information faster and more insightful. You know, by having an AI solution. And what we're able to do is help people get to that transactional level of detail.
Michael Bernzweig (14:54.993)
Yeah. And I think, you know, let's face it, anyone that's listening to the podcast gets it. The world is changing and changing very quickly. And the reality of it is integration, you know, and automation has been important, you know, for a long time, but the ability to find efficiencies through using the most advanced technology. I truly believe over the years to come is going to be the
differentiator between the companies that are here and the companies that aren't because at the end of the day, everybody has access to the same types of tools. But I think it's going to be the organizations that not only reach out to those tools, but wrap their arms around them and really dive in deep and learn what they're all about. Because if you're not doing it, your competition is.
Jon Morris (15:51.468)
Exactly.
Michael Bernzweig (15:53.521)
So, you know, really, really important. now, do you, with the different organizations that you're working with, you mentioned a bit of a range. You mentioned tech, you mentioned agencies and the like. Are there certain types of organizations that you see that, or that see the most benefit from the guidance and the structure, whereas other organizations may already have?
a lot of that in place or is it really just having that outside individual that can come in and take a look at everything that's going on without that personal, I don't even know how to say it, that someone that can take a holistic view of everything that's going on without really feeling personally involved in the minutiae of some of the decisions that have to be made.
Jon Morris (16:53.027)
You know, we generally see two types of companies. The first are financially distressed. you know, they're not profitable. They might be in a poor cash situation and we can help them get out of that situation. The second one is, and the more common one, is our clients just have hit a plateau.
You know, they were growing for years and all of a sudden they got stuck at 20 million. They don't know how to get bigger. And the generally, if I look at someone's income statement, I can tell them in five minutes what their problem is. You know, it's the numbers of your income statement tell you a story. You know, if you have a now, sometimes I might have to manipulate the data to get
Michael Bernzweig (17:43.581)
Sure.
Jon Morris (17:49.315)
the data organized to answer the questions that I need to answer. Like I need to know what your gross margin is. I need to know what percentage of revenue you spend on sales and marketing. You know, I need to know a series of different pieces of information, but once I have it organized the right way, then we can start getting to the fun work and figuring out, how are we going to put you on a path to growth?
Michael Bernzweig (18:09.873)
Makes a lot of sense. And across the different kinds of organizations, do you see the same types of challenges or is every situation that you jump into very different?
Jon Morris (18:23.289)
I would say that the business is not that complicated. So, you know, it's generally five to six problems. You know, if I'm just talking about revenue growth, there is really only four things that you can do to grow revenue. You can win more business. You can reduce churn. You can upsell more, or you can increase the average order value. Those are like the four things that you can do to improve revenue.
So if a company is not growing, which one of it is of the four? it their sales is lackluster? Is it that they're churning too many customers? Is it that they're not upselling anybody? Or is it that their average order value is too low? And sometimes it's a hybrid, you know, where they might have churn and be bad at winning business. But once we get to the root of the problem, then we can figure out, what are we going to focus on to solve in that scenario?
Michael Bernzweig (19:15.591)
Sure.
Jon Morris (19:23.439)
If you have a profit margin, your gross margin is too low or you're spending too much on SG &A. You know, so it's very easy to dissect where your issue is.
Michael Bernzweig (19:37.234)
Now, one of the important things I think in running any kind of business is, you know, obviously knowing what your talents are that you're better at than anybody else and focusing on those and surrounding yourself with others that are better, smarter, brighter, or more capable than you in terms of certain areas. And I think this area comes down to that as well.
For organizations that need to bring in support in this area, what are some of the signs that they're going to see that are kind of like, wow, you know, if I had looked in the mirror and I had been honest with myself, I would have understood that that was a warning signal that I really needed to reach out to somebody like Jon and his team, or what should they be looking at?
Jon Morris (20:31.887)
mean, the first thing I do is I just look at your income statement on a year over year basis. If you're not profitable, you know, if you're in the service sector, there's no reason to not be profitable. So if you're not profitable, or if you're not happy with your growth rate, you know, at the end of the day, I always tell people your number one real boss. If you're a CEO of a company is the income statement.
It is completely objective. It is grading your performance. And if you're not pleased with that performance, it's time to get someone who can help you strategically understand the finances to understand where to invest.
Michael Bernzweig (21:16.241)
Makes good sense. And do you see a lot of organizations starting to become more streamlined than they were in years past? Or are you seeing still very, very bloated organizations?
Jon Morris (21:32.719)
I see a mixture. It's a bell curve. You know, if you, I hate the fact that this is the answer they're about to give you, but it's kind of how I feel right now is I'm not convinced people want to be sophisticated in terms of how they run their business. I think that they want to be slightly more conservative than they are, sorry, slightly more sophisticated than they are without having to do a lot of work. The reality is,
Michael Bernzweig (21:36.242)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (22:00.575)
Sure.
Jon Morris (22:02.701)
that in order to take a data-driven approach to running your business, it requires a lot of work. Like you have to have people constantly maintaining the data. You have to manipulate the data. You have to clean the data. And so I would say like when you look at the bell curve, there's probably about 15 to 20 % that fit in that category of really willing to do the work and want to be data-driven.
The second thing is when you get the data driven results, that's when the hard part begins, because oftentimes you have to make decisions that you just don't like. We have to accept reality that you don't want to accept. I'll just use the service based industry real quickly. 80 % of the cost are people. And they're not just people, they're people you love.
They're people you've been in the trenches with. know, they're people that have been with you for years and side by side. Sometimes they're family members. Sometimes they're best friends. And so when the data says that you have to take cost out of the business and all of sudden you have to let go of these people that you love, it's hard. And you know, have found everybody believes that they're special.
And that for whatever reason, they don't have to follow the laws of these numbers like everyone else does. And then I have these people who are amazingly brave and they make the tough decisions. You know, I have a client last year, they were losing a crazy amount of money. They were running up their debt. By working with me, they now have double digit growth this year. They are, they,
Michael Bernzweig (23:37.278)
Sure.
Jon Morris (23:58.927)
are incredibly profitable. They're now paying down that debt. And they're sleeping well at night, they're having a lot of fun, because they did the work. But they had to do a reduction in force. And they had to do a bunch of things that weren't fun to do. And so it, you know, from my standpoint, you know, one of the first things I tell people in a sales pitch is, I just want to let you know that this is a partnership. And I'm going to give you the data to make decisions, and you're going to hate those decisions.
And do you have the strength to do it or you do not have the strength to do it? And if the answer is you don't have the strength to do it, don't hire me. Because I don't want people to waste their money. You know, like if it's kind of like if you found out that you have a health issue, but you don't want to go to the doctor because you're scared of what's going to happen. You know, I find that similar to some of the people with their finances.
Michael Bernzweig (24:54.866)
Makes, makes good sense. And I think at the end of the day, you know, let's face it, business is challenging. It's not for everybody. Entrepreneurship is not for everybody. And there are, you know, quite a few people running organizations that, you know, maybe in a space where times were good at one time and things have transitioned or changed very quickly and tough decisions need to be made. And, you know, obviously it's not.
Jon Morris (25:03.652)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (25:25.286)
not where you want to be at certain points in your career, at any point in your career, not certain points in your career, but like you said, it's the difference between survival and not. So, you know, I think if you look at all of the individuals in your organization and you look around the room, you know, clearly if you can't make the tough cuts, not only are some of the people not going to be there, but most are not going to be there.
Yeah, so it makes a lot of sense. So on a different note, with some of the organizations you're working with, have you had, and this is one question I always like to ask, have you had, and I don't know if you can share any of this or not, but any specific success stories as of late, whether you want to mention a specific company or not that you're particularly proud of that has turned the corner?
Jon Morris (26:22.159)
Absolutely. I the one I just gave you is a really good example. they're at last year, they were $10 million company, it like they're going to do 12 million this year, they were losing probably a million dollars last year, they're probably gonna make $2 million this year in profit. So it's a $3 million swing in financial performance that they believe next year is going to be another growth year. So that's a really good example. I have lots of companies
Michael Bernzweig (26:40.147)
Wow.
Jon Morris (26:52.515)
who honestly have taught to me about how the biggest part of their success has been the numbers that they've, by getting the benchmark numbers, using engine BI, our budgeting and forecasting software, and really has made a huge difference for them in terms of how they run their business.
Michael Bernzweig (27:12.808)
Amazing. you know, overall, when you're working with organizations, I'm sure you must have a structure that seems to work in terms of like a process. Do you have some keys to your process that require more or less involvement from the clients as you're getting up and running versus later on? And what does the process look like?
Jon Morris (27:37.337)
Yeah, so the in the world of finance, there's something called your chart of accounts. Think of it as how you organize all your financial data. You know, so whether you use QuickBooks or NetSuite or Intact, you're going to organize your chart of accounts in a certain way. As a default, your payroll comes in bundled as one line item, you know, so generally connects to your
your payroll provider, and if you don't do anything, it's just going to show up as one line item as payroll. So what we do is we help people on the revenue side, organize their revenue and unbundle it. So you have a real good understanding of your revenue by line of business. We then help people understand their cost of service. And then we found that as all your non-client related expenses, they really only fit into four areas, sales and marketing.
your back office, so operations and finance, is HR, legal, corporate IT, general administrative expenses and finance, your executive team and R &D. And we have benchmark numbers for each one of those. So for example, the average company in the service sector spends 8 % of their revenue on sales and marketing. And so by just starting off by organizing all of their financial data into these buckets, I can instantaneously tell them
you know, you're under spending on sales and marketing. So you say you want to grow. But if you're spending 4 % of your revenue, and all your competitors are spending 8 % on average or more, it's gonna be hard to grow. You know, you're not going to win market share unless you have some like amazingly efficient method to acquiring customers that no one else has. But I got news for you. That's pretty rare. And so
Once you get this all organized and you understand these numbers, you you can do really cool things to really streamline your business, make better decisions. Now, once again, it's up to the leaders to actually make the decisions, but now they know what decisions to be made.
Michael Bernzweig (29:46.238)
And I think that that's half the battle. think just getting, having the data, being able to make database decisions and try to take some of that emotion out of it, which is not always easy. And I think that that's an important, important, important aspect. And that was actually, I think that the word I was trying to get out earlier, you know, when you come in to an organization, is it traditionally an ongoing type of relationship?
Or is it the type of thing where you're there, you fix things and move on? Or what does it look like?
Jon Morris (30:21.879)
It's generally an ongoing relationship, you know, where there's this department called FP &A, which is financial planning analysis. So we're doing your budgeting, your forecasting, you know, your monthly insights, your resource planning. And that never changes. Like every month where there is work to be done to, you know, put these insights together and make sure that you're making decisions. We also, you know, take over what I said, those those foundational elements of your finance department. So
We're doing your invoicing every month. We're closing your books. We're doing your AR, your AP. So we are really an extension of the team and are involved on a daily basis.
Michael Bernzweig (31:03.495)
Now, were there certain size organizations where these services make sense and other sizes where they just don't make sense either at all or any more? what size organization should be considering these kinds of services?
Jon Morris (31:19.695)
You know, we typically work with companies from 10 million to 100 million in revenue size. So I find that you absolutely if you've hit 10 million should be investing in your financial planning analysis. In general, though, I got I started doing this, you know, as a one person shop, both at rise and fiscal advocate. You know, if you think about putting a budget together and keeping it up to date,
especially over the next 30 to 90 days, you'll have a really good idea of what your revenue is, and you can determine if you need to make any adjustments on your cost based on.
Michael Bernzweig (32:01.235)
Makes sense. And really, I think at the end of the day, it's really just, you know, just starting that journey and getting your hands around things. And, you know, there's a lot of organizations in the tech space and more and more launching every day that, that, need to have the right fiscal guidance. And I think this is obviously a very important, but growing space, but is there something that you're seeing more so with some of these
AI based tech startups that allows you to add more value than a more entrenched older brand that's been around for years in the digital marketing space or something like that. Is there a big sharp contrast or not so much?
Jon Morris (32:53.071)
I haven't, think most of my clients I would say are, I don't know if they're behind, but I think that they do not have a clear innovation roadmap yet. So, you know, I recommend that you spend 5 % of your revenue on innovation. But when I talk to them, I'm not impressed yet that they're like, okay, these guys are really on top of it and have a really good solution. And
You know, so what I talk about is like, I'll just use, Luca, my AI CFO co-pilot. I can tell you very specifically what we're working on. You know, we are launching a new architecture. we're to be curating all sorts of new collaboration and sharing features. You know, I have a very specific roadmap of things that we want to work on. And when I talk to a lot of my clients, I still feel they're in what I call the AI committee stage, you know, where like,
Michael Bernzweig (33:49.768)
Yeah.
Jon Morris (33:51.203)
We bought Chat GPT, we're AI proficient now. And what I recommend is that people need to get really focused on what they want to achieve and how they're going to achieve it. We're going to use AI to improve onboarding. And once we improve onboarding, we're going to use AI to do this, or we're going to use AI to do that. I think of it as a tool, just like HTML is a tool for building websites. And you have to figure out how you're going to leverage that tool. And I think people are...
a little stuck in terms of how to leverage that tool at the moment.
Michael Bernzweig (34:24.947)
Yeah, I think that's a very fair statement. think a lot of, you know, what I'm seeing from this end of it is a lot of organizations understand that AI is here. They understand they need to be involved. But I think the biggest thing is a lot of organizations are just not sure where to start.
Jon Morris (34:45.081)
Yep.
Michael Bernzweig (34:47.007)
probably seeing the same type of thing. And I think the larger organizations were slow to start because of the compliance and the complexity and all of that. But I think they're getting up to speed. And I think some of the very smallest organizations are just taking massive, massive action with AI. But I think there's a big subset in between that are
really trying to wrap their hands around it. And I think it's critical to get that done sooner rather than later. The other thing that I think we're gonna see, and I've mentioned this on some of the boot camps and summits over the last few months, I think we're gonna see our first AI unicorn in the not too distant future. think there's some in the making right now. I think there's some organizations that are very lean and mean.
Absolutely using every last ounce of AI muscle out there to build some amazing, amazing solutions. So I think that'll be interesting to see. But I think the other flip side of it is I think AI is just that, just like you mentioned at the top of the podcast, it's a tool, but it doesn't replace good business fundamentals and strategy and value that you're adding to customers.
Jon Morris (36:12.879)
Yeah, you need to figure out why you're using this tool, you know? And if you can't figure that out, then you're gonna struggle on your AI. You need to be very clear. We are looking to improve this, and this is how we're using AI to solve that problem, as opposed to, wanna figure out an AI strategy. So start with the problem you're trying to solve, then incorporate AI.
Michael Bernzweig (36:40.199)
And just to take a step back, because I really didn't dive in too deep at the beginning, but I can see from some of the questions that came in before the podcast, your journey in terms of where you got to with Rise Interactive and that spectacular exit, what were some of the learning lessons that you had from all of that? You obviously started off with a very modest.
modest goal, modest sums and all of that and ended with a spectacular ending. What were you learning lessons?
Jon Morris (37:15.087)
You know, I mean, I mean, there's a couple of things. The first is my business really took off when I hired a phenomenal salesperson. You know, I'm still at at Fiscal Advocate, the primary salesperson, but I'm doing this podcast interview with you right now. Right before this, I had a client meeting. Before that, at another client meeting, you know, so I'm only a fraction of a salesperson. So.
Michael Bernzweig (37:43.615)
Sure.
Jon Morris (37:44.793)
getting a really solid senior salesperson is really critical. The second thing is, you know, really work on whatever you're selling is better than the experience that the salesperson told the person. So I call it the pursuit of world class. And the idea is that I wanna make sure that I'm not just selling somebody because I wanna sell. Like I really wanna solve a problem and I wanna get
Michael Bernzweig (38:13.375)
Sure.
Jon Morris (38:14.029)
better at solving that problem. And so your service offering should be better at the end of the year than it is at the beginning of the year. And if you can keep on doing that, and your competition stays flat and stays idle, you know, you're going to be building something really special that allows you to differentiate yourself and build a great company.
Michael Bernzweig (38:35.461)
Under promise and over deliver. think, I think that is the message. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, really interesting because, you know, no matter how amazing the solution is, it still needs to be sold and communicated and the marketing and the messaging and the strategy and branding and all of that is important, but having that individual that, that is actually able to deliver to the end consumer.
the result they're looking for is key. And I think that to my way of thinking, maybe one thing that may never be replaced by AI, I know there's a lot of organizations that would disagree with me. I think there are components of the sales process that can be replaced by AI. But I'm not so sure that the human touch, the human interaction, the human to human...
interaction there can be replaced, but we'll see. I may eat my own words.
Jon Morris (39:37.423)
Um, I'm not sure I'm in disagreement with you. You know, there, I agree. Once again, it's a tool and that tool could help you gather research faster than your competition. That tool might help you keep your CRM more up to date. Uh, that tool might help you do a proposal faster, but in terms of closing, you know, especially on the enterprise side, I, I don't picture like an AI agent coming to the pitch and being like, let me tell you why I should hire this company today.
Michael Bernzweig (40:07.519)
Exactly, I would agree with you. People still buy from people at the end of the day, so I think that's okay. Well, really exciting. mean, I'm very thrilled to hear that journey. Very exciting to hear where you're at now and what's on the horizon, because I think at the end of the day, you've been in the right space and it still feels like you are heading in the right direction with all of the different areas of projects and things like that.
Jon Morris (40:12.876)
Yep.
Michael Bernzweig (40:36.499)
The last thing I want to wrap up with is people. So you mentioned, you know, obviously Rise was an organization you sold. At the end of the day, did all of the people go with the sale or did some of the people stay with you or how did things transition on that end of it? Because you build up relationships over many years and it's always challenging.
Jon Morris (41:00.259)
Yeah. You know, look, when you sell a surface based company, that's one of the big risks of the buyer is the revenue is attached to people. And, you know, for the last, I would say for the first four years, I'd say 80 to 90 % of the leadership team has stayed at rise. This year, there's been some transition out where some of the people have moved to different areas. But that's pretty impressive that
Michael Bernzweig (41:21.854)
Neat.
Jon Morris (41:30.499)
five years later is how long they stayed. that's, know, Quad was the company who bought us. You know, that's a big, you know, sign of how well they did with the integration to have the company, you know, the people stay there that long. One of the, I'm sorry.
Michael Bernzweig (41:46.119)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, absolutely.
Jon Morris (41:50.455)
One of the things I learned from Quad was their whole philosophy was do no wrong. You know, so they bought this company and the last thing they wanted to do was integrate too quickly and screw it up.
Michael Bernzweig (42:04.255)
And it sounds like they already had a strategy and a vision for where they wanted to grow things and it sounds like they did grow things.
Jon Morris (42:12.909)
Yep, they did amazing.
Michael Bernzweig (42:14.655)
Yeah, now that's crazy. All right, well, anyways, any other little pieces that we left out of the story that you wanted to make sure we fill in, because we have a lot of people listening with open ears.
Jon Morris (42:25.357)
No, I mean, what else?
You know, the main thing I'll just leave it at this. There are only three KPIs that matter. How much cash you have relative to your monthly overhead. If you have lots of cash, you have lots of optionality, your profit margin and your year over year revenue growth. And if you revolve all of your decision making around those three KPIs and you can constantly make improvements to those three KPIs, you're going to build a really special business.
Michael Bernzweig (42:55.187)
Fantastic. Well, today on the consulting spotlight, we've had Jon Morris, the founder of Fiscal Advocate. recently, well, I don't know if we say recently, but he exited Rise Interactive several years ago and is continuing on with that entrepreneurial journey. So Jon, if anyone wanted to reach out to you or the team, what would be the best way for them to get in touch?
Jon Morris (43:24.915)
They can always go to our website. We have a great resource section at fiscaladvocate.com. You can go to LinkedIn and follow me. I post three times a week at a minimum every week. And you can also email me at jown at fiscaladvocate.com.
Michael Bernzweig (43:41.684)
Fantastic. Well, thanks for taking the time out to join us today on the consulting spotlight. For anybody that is tuning in for the first time, if you want to keep up with everything that's going on here at SoftwareOasis, just go to softwareoasis.com. You can sign up for our weekly newsletter, which goes out every Tuesday and join any of our live events, which happen every month. They're free as...
as all of the information we believe should be free to help you grow and thrive in the year ahead as it's a very interesting and transitional time in business. And I feel from my end of it, anything that I can do to lend a helping hand to everybody that's out there and whether it's the consulting, the SaaS or the creator space is the least I could do. So thank you for joining us again this week.
Jon Morris (44:38.489)
Thanks so much for having me here.