166: Why I’m Back—and What I Hope It Means for You

Master business finance for free with 100+ video lessons—no gimmicks, no hooks, just valuable knowledge: https://www.byfiq.com/

Steve is back! After taking a break to focus on his business, Coltivar, he's returning to the Boosting Your Financial IQ podcast with fresh insights and a new tool to help you level up your financial game.

In this episode, Steve shares why financial literacy is key for business owners and how understanding your numbers can make a huge impact. He also introduces a free tool to help you find the best profit levers for your business and explains how small changes can lead to big results.

Whether you're new to finance or looking to sharpen your skills, this episode will give you the real-world tips and tools you need to boost your financial IQ and grow your business.

Get ready for more episodes to help you dominate your financial future!

Disclaimer:
BYFIQ, LLC is a wholly owned entity of Coltivar Group, LLC. The views expressed here are those of the individual Coltivar Group, LLC (“Coltivar”) personnel quoted and are not the views of Coltivar or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, Coltivar has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.

This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. The Company is not registered or licensed by any governing body in any jurisdiction to give investing advice or provide investment recommendations. The Company is not affiliated with, nor does it receive compensation from, any specific security. Please see https://www.byfiq.com/terms-and-privacy-policy for additional important information.

Transcript

Guess who's back? Back again. Steve is back. Tell your friends, guess what's whack, guess what's whack, guess what's whack, guess what's whack, guess what's whack.

Okay, I'm back. Hey, so back in April, I told you that I was gonna take a break from boosting your financial IQ because I needed to focus on my main business, which is Coltivar. And that's where I provide CFO level support and strategic guidance to companies.

And that's what I did. So I doubled down on my business over at Coltivar. I rolled out some new software updates, including some KPI features, et cetera.

And it's been really cool. But during that time of focusing on Coltivar, I continued to get people reaching out to me through LinkedIn, which is great. If you ever wanna reach out to me, connect on LinkedIn, you can send me a DM and I'm happy to respond and to connect with you.

And so during this time, I'm reading the comments, I'm looking at your messages, and I'm thinking to myself, what am I doing? Here I am, I created this podcast. I thought it was gonna be like my mom and my sister from the beginning downloading the podcast, but what it's turned out to be is a show with over a million downloads. And every day, even since the sunsetting of the podcast back in April, I was still getting thousands of downloads.

And so here I am, I'm like, okay, I have this podcast and even one person said to me, Steve, I just found your podcast and now you're leaving, what the heck? Okay, I'll follow you on your other podcast. And I'm like, okay, there's a lot of people out there who can benefit from this podcast. And it's not just about teaching finance, it's about sharing my journey along the way and helping out and mentoring where I can, right? So I'm back in that intro that I gave you.

You should shoot me an email at hello at byfiq.com or you could put it in the comments of this episode. Who's the artist that sang that song? It's not the same exact words, but it's inspired by somebody. So tell me who that is and what is the song name? And then also when I say, what is WACC? What is WACC? What is WACC? So tell me what WACC is, it stands for W-A-C-C, it stands for something else, but I want to see where you're at with your financial literacy.

You could cheat if you want, you could Google it, but let's have fun together. All right, so I'm back. I'm gonna keep doing episodes on boosting your financial IQ.

The website byfiq.com is still totally free. I created this program, over a hundred video lessons, you can sign up, totally free. And it's all about helping you to increase your financial literacy so you can dominate in business.

I can tell you one of the biggest obstacles in business is not knowing your numbers. I run into this all the time. Seriously, I'm talking to CEOs who can't read financial statements and therefore they're just guessing at business.

And I don't want that to be you. And the earlier you start, the better. Okay, funny story for you.

When I was in seventh grade, I was like the worst kid. Seriously, I was like this troubled kid because my home life was like an absolute disaster. No fault to my mom, just some guys that she married, you know, this one guy is a total punk at the time and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna act out at school.

So here I was in seventh grade and I was terrible in Spanish class. My poor teacher, she had to deal with me and I was just naughty, right? I'd just interrupt. I would not pay attention.

I'd be drawing things in my book. Or sometimes when she wasn't paying attention, I'd throw a textbook across the classroom and it hit the other side of the wall and it'd be like, bam, and it'd scare her. And she's like, what the heck? You know, she's like, okay, pasa, right? And freak out.

So the point is that at the end of the school year, she said to me, she's like, you have an F, Steve, and if you don't get a good grade on this final, you are failing this class. So I went home and I studied really diligently and then I ended up passing the class with like a C minus or a D plus, whatever it was. Then to thank her on the very last day, I stole her textbook, which I'm not proud of, okay? I don't think stealing is good.

That was back in seventh grade. Hopefully the statute of limitations has passed and I don't get arrested for this, but I stole her textbook. And the crazy thing is I went home and I don't know why I did this, okay? But I went home over the summer while all my friends are out playing basketball or hanging out at the pool, I studied that textbook from page one all the way to the end.

It is a thick textbook. I created flashcards. I put sticky notes around my room with all the things labeled out in Spanish.

And I gave myself quizzes. And I mean, it's crazy. Like I said, I don't know what the heck I was doing.

I like totally blacked out or something. Then I learned how to speak Spanish. And I learned all these words over the summer.

So then when I went back to school the following year, my eighth grade year, the teachers were like, what the heck? Why are you in this class? You are so much more advanced. So they put me in an advanced level. I skipped the eighth grade, eighth grade Spanish.

Then when I got to high school, I was sitting in this class with juniors and seniors as a freshman. And they're like, how did you get into Spanish four? And I'm like, I skipped Spanish two and three. All right, so fast forward from that experience.

And when I was 16 years old, I started a landscape business. I had no clue that it's gonna grow into a multimillion dollar business. And guess what? My workforce was predominantly Hispanic.

I just think it's interesting how God works. To me, I'm a faith-based man. And like Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement speech, look it up on YouTube, where he spoke at Stanford.

He says, you can never connect the dots by looking forward. You can only connect the dots looking back. And the same thing is true in my life.

I don't know why I stole that Spanish book other than just being a punk. I don't know why I studied Spanish over the summer and I was so ambitious about learning Spanish. I don't know why I continued to study Spanish throughout high school and I became fluent until I got my landscape business and everything clicked.

And I was like, wow, what a blessing. Now I'm sure God's not happy with me stealing. Okay, I broke a commandment there.

I had to repent for that. But the point is, is that I doubled down on a skill and little did I know that that would pay off when I had my landscape business. Things would be radically different if I didn't know how to communicate with my workforce when I was running my landscape business.

Radically different. Not just from like an operational efficiency standpoint, but also from a friendship standpoint. Some of my greatest friends in life come from my Hispanic workforce.

I love, love people from South America, Central America, just Hispanic people, I love them. I love their values, I love their work ethic, I love their kindness, I love their family orientation, so many other things, I love that culture. My point is with you, and with all this, and the reason why I'm coming back is because I wanna continue to help you and support you and mentor you along your path.

And if you're a business owner, I want you to understand the fundamentals of finance so you can avoid costly mistakes. But as an individual, if you could double down on this skill right now, especially if you're younger, because a lot of you are younger and you reach out to me through LinkedIn and you're like, hey, I want career advice or I wanna talk to you about entrepreneurship, and that's great, I love that. But when you're that age and you don't have huge responsibilities like a mortgage or like kids or a spouse or a partner, whatever it is, now's the time to double down on your skill set.

Like build skills, build skills. And learning how to read finance is not gonna go out of style. And even with AI, sure, you could like prompt AI and get financial answers.

But if you don't know the context, the story behind the numbers, you're not gonna know how to translate that information into wisdom and action that really creates value. So I don't know what else to give you other than this like free course that I spent over $100,000 developing and all this time for free. I've had people from Indonesia, I've had people from the Philippines, from Mexico, from South America reach out and say, hey, thank you so much for this course, it's been a blessing.

And you know what, you've been a blessing. You've been a blessing to my life. So it's the least I can do.

All right, so I just wanna tell you that I'm back and I'm excited to roll out some new episodes because obviously I'm like super passionate about this. And also I wanna leave you with a really cool tool that you could apply to your life, to your business, just your understanding of financial literacy. If you go to Coltivar.com, that's my main website, okay? Coltivar.com. I'll provide a link in the show notes too.

On this page in the navigation, if you look under resources, you'll find tools. Go to tools and there's this calculator which I just created. There's a bunch of calculators on the page, but it's called levers of profit.

So you click on it, it's totally free, right? You don't have to enter your email or anything else, just go here. It's called levers of profit and there's two things you need to enter. Cost of goods sold as a percentage of revenue and operating expense as a percentage of revenue.

So let's just say for a business, you're running at a 60% cost of goods sold, which leaves you with a 40% gross profit margin, right? Because you have 100% of revenue minus 60% cost of goods sold leaves you with 40% gross profit. Then let's imagine your operating expense is 35% of revenue. So you type that in.

And then the calculator is gonna spit out four levers and what the impact will be on profit based on a 1% improvement on each. So I'm just looking at the screen right now, but you should check this out for yourself and for your company because like this would be hugely valuable. All right.

I said that kind of weird, hugely valuable, okay? So go to the calculator. I'm looking at it, like I said, 60% cost of goods sold, 35% operating expense. And it shows four levers, price, cost of goods sold, operating expense and volume.

And guess what? The number one lever to pull. In other words, if you improve price by 1%, we'll have a 20% impact on your profit. The next lever is cost of goods sold is 12%.

The next lever operating expense is 7%. And the last one is volume. And I'm not gonna tell you what that percentage is.

You need to figure that out for yourself. So check out the tool. Here's the point of all this.

And this is why I wanna leave you with this tool. So many people in business, they don't understand what the levers are. So they could look at the financials and they're like, oh no, profit's down.

We need to go do more sales. And the reason why I created this tool is because maybe you don't need to go do more sales. Maybe you just need to fix your price or maybe you need to improve your cost of goods sold by having more efficient labor or investing in better equipment so your labor could be more efficient, right? More productive.

So that's what I'm gonna be leaving you with in these episodes. I'm gonna give you tools. I'm gonna provide you guidance.

I'm gonna give you real-world stories. And hopefully I come back stronger than ever. Here's what I ask.

Hit me up, like DM me. It's so lonely creating a podcast because it's a one-way conversation. So DM me on LinkedIn.

So check me out on LinkedIn and connect with me there. I just love connecting with you. In the comments of the show, like I know a lot of you will leave comments, but in Spotify, like if you're listening to this down below, you can leave a comment, right? There's also a spot to send a text message.

You can email us, hello@byfiq.com. I would just love to connect with you. It's so great to be back sending you my love. Can't wait to do the next episode and I'll see you then.

Cheers.