How Finance Leaders Help Mid-Sized Businesses Scale Without Stalling

Megan - 0:55 Welcome back to CFO Weekly. I'm joined by Mike McLain, Chief Accounting Officer at Transwestern, a leading commercial real estate organization with expertise spanning investment, development, brokerage, and property management across a wide range of asset classes. Mike brings more than twenty-five years of finance and accounting experience working with companies ranging from startups and venture-backed businesses to mid-sized public and private enterprises. Throughout his career, Mike has helped organizations navigate growth, transformation, and complex strategic situations across industries, including SaaS, manufacturing, construction, distribution, and commercial real estate. His work has consistently focused on helping business build the financial structure, operational discipline, and strategic clarity needed to scale successfully. In this episode, we'll explore business growth for mid-sized enterprises, what often separates companies that successfully scale from those that stalled, and how finance leaders can help organizations grow with both discipline and agility. Welcome to the show, Mike.

Mike - 2:01: Well, good afternoon, Megan. Hope everything is going well.

Megan - 2:05: Always fun. Thanks for taking the time to be with us today and sharing your knowledge, so looking forward to this conversation. Absolutely. So, Mike, as you think back earlier in your career, was there a moment when you first realized that growing a mid-sized business successfully is often more about managing complexity than simply increasing revenue?

Mike - 2:28: Yeah. So to be honest, it actually started even before my career started. It started growing up with a dad who had his own insurance brokerage and related businesses. My dad could absolutely sell insurance to anybody, but most of the challenges that I saw him dealing with were related to things outside of just being able to sell and create revenue. So personnel, always the most fun thing. Client issues, particularly the people that he sold insurance to, even though the insurance company was responsible for delivering a lot of things, they called him and they brought him into that. And he would do whatever he needed to do to help that even though that wasn't really his job, taxes, where to operate your business, all these different things. So many a family vacation got cut short due to dad's like, I've got to go back to the office and address this issue or address that. We didn't have cell phones, Zoom calls, and things back then. And so literally, he had to pick up where we were, drive back and deal with the issue. So I was exposed to that at a very early age. And then, I started my career in public accounting. I worked with a lot of emerging businesses and startups and, of course, revenue growth, always the most important thing, but there are a lot of other things that founders and leaders of these companies had to deal with again, personnel. And I would say what I saw is, the wrong hire can absolutely derail a growing business. Spend a lot of time trying to raise money to support your business, dealing with cashflow and even administering the business. Where should I put my office? What suppliers I need to use for this and that? So there were a lot of things that were ancillary other than just growing revenue that would make a business successful. And what I would see is that a lot of times, many of the founder led companies would flounder simply because they either weren't effective professional managers and hadn't realized that yet, or they just didn't want to be. They just wanted to be the founder. They wanted to be the guy that would go out and sell the product and interact with the clients and all that administration stuff. I don't really care about a lot of that. So, yes, there's a lot of complexity around running a business, particularly a mid-sized business than other than just, hey, I got to grow revenue.

Megan - 4:46: And taking a step back before we go any further, just walk me through your career and where you've been and where you are.

Mike - 4:53: Absolutely. So graduated accounting degree, both bachelor's and master's from University of Texas. Started my career at Arthur Andersen in Houston. Yes. That Arthur Andersen. My focus and what I was the group that I joined when I worked for Arthur Andersen was something called the Enterprise Group, which was basically the part of the firm that serviced mid-sized businesses, growing businesses. So while everybody thinks, in Houston, you just work on energy. I worked on software companies because a lot of those types of companies were inside that emerging and middle market practice type business. So obviously we all know what happened with Arthur Andersen. And then I spent the second part of my public accounting career with Grant Thornton, which was a firm that actually was wholly focused on that middle market segment. So those were the two firms that worked at. So I had a lot of experience and exposure to how businesses grew, what made them successful, what didn't. And then after leaving public accounting, I jumped over to a mid-sized commercial real estate firm here in Houston that is still to this day founder led. Again, a lot of the same things and applications that I learned looking at other businesses felt like I could bring to this company. And we have been fairly successful, I would say, since I've joined. Probably we're at revenue levels that are 40 to 50% higher than when I started fourteen years ago. So we've been able to successfully grow, but a lot of the challenges that you see with mid-sized businesses, we certainly experienced here.

Megan - 6:29: And you've worked across industries ranging from SaaS to manufacturing and real estate. So what growth challenges tend to be surprisingly universal for mid-sized enterprises?

Mike - 6:39: Mid-sized enterprises? Not surprising. It's the how do I grow revenue? One of my weekend warrior things that I like to do is meat smoking. So I'm very amateur. I'm certainly not Aaron Franklin or Franklin's Barbecue in Austin, but it's a fun thing that I do on the weekend. And one of the things that you've learned as you do this is when you smoke a big piece of meat, you inevitably hit something called the stall. And that's the point at which the internal temperature in the meat stops rising for a period of time. Could be an hour, could be longer depending on the size of meat that you have. And so kinda liking that to a lot of companies as they go through their evolution. A lot of times they hit stall points along their path to growth. Some of it's simply capacity. I have one manufacturing facility and I'm running it twenty four seven and I can only produce so much stuff and the demand is greater than that. So that's a limit or in a professional services organization like lawyers, accountants, consultants. I can only do as much work as I have people to do that work. And so by having more work than I have people to support it caps what I can be able to do. There are other market stall points. So sometimes you are geographically limited. You're only offering your services in one metropolitan area, one state. And once you've achieved enough market penetration there, you stall out. So that's a problem to solve sometimes also too, if you're doing something that a lot of other competitors look at and go, Hey, I'd like to get into that too. And all of a sudden, instead of one or two companies doing what you're doing now, you have 10 that also stalls things out for you because now potential customers have 10 different places to go to rather than just one or two. So those are certainly things. And then the other one that I think is certainly relevant and has been relevant in some of the industries I've been in is what you call the obsolescence stall point is, is your product not long for this world? And so particularly in the technology industry, as you could be working on a great thing, you've got a great product and all of a sudden someone releases the new, new thing and your growth basically evaporates. And so you have to be able to anticipate all that. So I think growing revenue is always a challenge. I think the second thing for a lot of these mid-sized enterprises is where do I get capital? So, and there's obviously two primary sources. One's equity, one's debt. Equity is clearly the most expensive capital that you can get, but you can usually get more of it. So a lot of companies when they go out and raise equity, they go out and raise a large amount and they're able to do a lot of things from a growth perspective relatively quickly. In fact, I would say that to use equity, one of the best things if you're looking to do, if you're looking to ramp your business fairly quickly, equity is probably the path that you would want to go. It's also good when you're developing products or services for sale simply because there's no payback. There's no principle that has to be paid back over a period of time with equity necessarily. So you want to ramp quickly, you want to develop you know, developing a product or service. Equity is great. Debt, kind of the less expensive capital, but it certainly is more restrictive. Lenders will obviously cap the amount they're willing to lend to you based on how much cash flow you have or how many assets you have. So for emerging businesses, I've found over the years that debt's best suited to manage working capital. So if you need something to provide working capital at certain times of the year, or if you're to acquire cash flowing assets, debt probably works well, but it's always a decision, a discussion about how much capital I need, where do I get it and what type should I get? And then the third thing that I've seen as well is really just again, how do I administer the business? So if you're a growing company, particularly if you're starting from the very early founder led stage, like, when do I hire a professional management? So I call this putting the right person in the right seat at the right time. That is a huge challenge for a growing business. There are some things that you can outsource, but what I found is that outsourcing sometimes isn't always the cheapest. Isn't always the best. And sometimes you spend more time managing the outsource function than you would if you just had somebody in house doing the same thing. And then of course, the stakeholder management, the external process, a lot of companies that are mid-sized don't have a PR person. They don't have corporate communications. And so how do you handle customers? How do you handle investors, community stakeholders, all of those things, and all of those stakeholders oftentimes have competing priorities and interests. So I've seen over the years that sometimes the founders and leaders as companies have to spend more time dealing with that than growing and scaling the business. And so I would say that that could easily be the biggest time suck that some of these leaders have. Ultimately, all these problems can be solved, but really require thoughtful responses. Do you invest to expand capacity? How do you push into new products? Who do you build relationships with from the debt and equity side that will make it easier to get money when you need it and make sure you have the right people in the right seat at the right time. So I think those things are universal and other industries have very specific things that are specific to the industry, but I found those three things, whether it was a software company, whether it was a pipeline construction company, those were always the things that I saw that were universal.

Megan - 12:25: And as you've watched businesses scale, at what stage do companies typically begin to outgrow the systems and processes that originally helped them to succeed?

Mike - 12:35: I would say it obviously is different for every company and every industry, but I have noticed there are certain warning signs that will tell you, Hey, you've got to address this. So one thing is internal functions begin to slow down. So it takes more time to close your monthly books, and takes more time to process an AP invoice. It takes more time to onboard employees. This tells you that you're growing or you have grown to a point where to address, or whether you're just hiring somebody for systems to address the fact that I can't even do basic internal things like I used to be able to do. So that's one thing. The second warning sign that I see is if your customer facing apparatus becomes less responsive. So it takes you longer to respond to a proposal, takes you longer to close a deal. It takes you longer to deal with customer issues. Again, that sign of a system that's beginning to strain a little bit and then you have to address it. And then employee dissatisfaction. If your employees are used to being in one environment and they find that now there's a lot more pressure on them, because again, those systems and processes are creaking, They're breaking a little bit. Employees start becoming dissatisfied. They start to leave. Morale's bad. All those things. Those are the warning signs that should tell you that, Hey, we've got to make some system changes. We've got to make some process changes. And that the trick is to try to catch those as early as you can. I find that's what it tells you. And so if you see some of those things, if you see, oh, wow, what's taking us, instead of being able to send out an invoice in a week, it's now taking ten days. That may not seem like a lot of time, but it is an indication that there are potential problems down the road.

Megan - 14:32: And finance leaders, how do they go about balancing growth ambitions while still maintaining operational discipline and healthy cash flow? I know sometimes that can probably be a very fine line.

Mike - 14:46: It probably is the hardest thing to do. I would say that I've seen it as much art as it is science. But some of the things that I think are important for finance leaders to think about is the first thing is to grow the front of the house before the back of the house. So the front of the house is your client facing, your revenue generators, people that are actually driving the revenue. If you're going to invest in things, at the business, invest in the front of the house and then grow the back of the house once there is revenue and cash flow to support. There's obviously a base layer that you have to have no matter what, but kind of have to resist the temptation to hire a huge infrastructure. And where I see a lot of companies do anticipate the growth and say, oh, well, I'm going to need this many support people to do that. So they go and hire all the support people for the growth that never actually materializes. So you have to make sure that you're addressing the front of the house to get that up and running and generating the revenue and cash flow from that before you hire the back end support. Yes. It may mean that some folks have to do a lot more work up front, but it avoids you running into the problem where you hire too much back end revenue, never materializes. And guess what you have to do. You have to start cutting heads. That's not good for anybody. So that's one thing. I think the other thing too, is need to be very disciplined about parameters for whatever investments you're making in people, assets, businesses, understand those metrics that make the business work and then stick to them when you're evaluating those investments. So one of the temptations that we see in the business I'm currently in is, we go hire broker teams and, and hiring broker teams. I kind of liken it to acquiring a free agent in sports. They're expensive and usually cost a lot of upfront money. And so and a lot of our regional market leaders will be like, oh, yeah. Well, we need to have this team for this reason or that reason. And they'll always say things like, oh, this is going to be transformational. That's why we have to do this deal, but the economics don't really pencil out. So you have to be very careful and cautious to make sure you stick to your guns, Hey, these are the investment parameters. If we're within these, it's a good deal. We can make money. Leave yourself a little room for the inevitable macroeconomic hiccups that always happen on these things. But stick to your guns and those parameters because the worst thing that you can do is do a bunch of bad deals and all of a sudden you're stuck in debt hell or got cashflow issues or something because you spend all this money investing in those investments and they're not really panning out. And then the other thing that is really, really critical is cash is king. Cash flow is king. So one of the things that we did at a Transwestern coming out of COVID was we built out a thirteen week cash forecast where we could see what cash was going to come in over the next thirteen weeks and then expanded that to more of an annual look. And it's been very essential to how we've been able to manage our business since that point. Obviously, if you know that you're going to be in a downturn, you can quickly identify levers that you can pull to mitigate the impact of that. But also too, it's really helped us try and schedule out the investments that we do need to grow our business. We actually just closed couple of acquisitions over the last forty five days of companies, one in Philadelphia, one in Minneapolis, which was this week. And part of timing those out was making sure that, okay, we had the capital to do that without the cash forecast. We couldn't have done that. And then for future investments that we make down the road, I've got something of a rolling twelve month forecast where I can see, okay, when are we spending cash? When can we make investments? All those types of things. If you're not monitoring your cash flow, if you're not tracking that as a disciplined part of the business, you're doing yourself a disservice. And I would say that it is a little bit of a pain to constantly update the cash forecast schedule, but it is an essential part of the business. And particularly if you're a growing business and early in your stage and cash flow burn is something that you're concerned about, you have to have that. And doing it on a week by week basis is really critical.

Megan - 19:24: Yeah. I'm sure cash flow is not something where ignorance really is bliss.

Mike - 19:31: Absolutely not.

Megan - 19:34: And you've supported companies through challenging strategic situations. So what is it that usually separates businesses that successfully navigate those moments from those that struggle?

Mike - 19:45: I'll give a great example of something experienced at Transwestern. The ownership and or the senior leadership of the company have to provide clear direction and rationale for what's going on and what we are doing to address it. And one of the important things that you need to do is, you need to let your clients and employees know that you ownership, you've seen leadership ride along with them in the struggle. I would say that really defines a kind of servant leadership. Everybody had struggles during COVID, and one of the things that we had to basically do was how we got to handle this uncertainty? Because we were concerned that we'd stop getting paid, deal flow would slow down. And so what did we do? And so one of the things that Transwestern did, and this is something that is an example of exceptional servant leadership was we decided, yes, we have to probably do some sort of a salary reduction. But guess who got the biggest cuts in salary? It was the senior leadership team. And they said, look, we're got to take a bigger cut of this. So those of you that are farther down are experiencing less of this. And because we're doing this, we don't anticipate that we're got to have to do any reduction in force, which we ended up not having to do. And to me, I think everybody appreciated that. And I think our clients appreciated that because we could tell them with a straight face, Hey, we still got to support your buildings. We're still going to be able to work on your deals, whatever deals are able to happen during this crazy time. But we have built a program that will allow us to continue to service you and service your assets little to no disruption. A lot of other companies when COVID happened and it was all of a sudden things are going away, people got cut, probably services were degraded as a result of that. We were able to do that. Servant leadership. I mean, that's probably the most important thing when you're dealing with challenges. You want to make sure you're doing that. The companies I see that don't do as well as that. And I've seen that, certainly over my public accounting career, the ones that provide very opaque direction, no clear strategic rationale, and certainly not leading by example. And a lot of times employees are just kind of left to fend for themselves. And those companies are either they come out of those situations, they're a lesser entity, or sometimes they don't even survive. So I do think that providing that servant leadership, being very clear with direction, with rationale, making sure that you're being very communicative with your employees and clients is extremely important. And you don't have to be a big company to do that. You can be a small company, but, again, it's that direction. It's the clear rationale, and it's the we're all in this together.

Megan - 22:39: And as organizations grow, obviously, complexity is going to increase across areas like reporting, operations, and decision making. So how should finance teams evolve to support that next phase of growth? Is it all about hiring or is there other things that can be done?

Mike - 22:57: There's other things that be done. I would say first thing is, evaluating the systems and processes that you do have. We have amazing technology tools in this day and age that when I started my career thirty odd years ago, I could not have imagined what we have today. So you can utilize a lot of that, but make sure that my system's built to support what's coming next. Are my processes built to support what's coming next? I think very routine processes you can easily automate. We're about to launch, and then we're probably a little behind the curve on this, but we're about to launch something where, now we can have our vendors send invoices to an email box and the system will pick it up and populate in the system. So now, also we have to quickly review it and it goes through the approval chain, saves time and effort and allows folks to focus on more essential parts of the business, more an analytical role on less kind of a transactional role. So technology enables that. So you have to look at your systems and your processes and say, Hey, am I built for what's coming back? And if I'm not, then I need to figure out how to do that. We made a great evolution in our ERP system by moving to Workday back in 2017 that has allowed us to really elevate our data, our reporting, and a lot of stuff just by acknowledging that we had an old ERP system that really didn't work anymore and we needed to move to what was next. And this made a tremendous difference in our business. But also I think need to really understand business as it exists today and what could become and, making sure that you're building the right metrics, building the right reports around what matters most to the decision makers because information is moving at probably two times the speed of light these days. And so the ability to make decisions quicker is becoming paramount. And so as a finance leader, finance team, you need to make sure that you have things set up to be able to provide that information to the decision makers at the right time. So financial statements will always be important, but if you have those coupled with metrics that blend different financial data or even a combination of financial and external data can add real value. That's really where it's important. Again, good systems, good processes, and then be able to understand what matters to the people that are making the decision. And the last thing I'll say on this is that the finance function in general needs to kind of move to becoming more of a storyteller more than anything else. Data is important, is what it is, but the story around it is what people want to hear. This is what we found in our organization. We've built great data visualization tools using Power BI, but you could use Tableau or something like that. A lot of times it can produce visuals and real time data that explain things fairly simply. They say a picture's worth a thousand words. So if you can produce a picture, if you will, a financial data, sometimes that makes a bigger impression than just showing them a big chart with all these things. Again, visually pleasing financial information actually resonates. I was surprised, but it actually does resonate with leadership because they can comprehend a picture better than a table of numbers.

Megan - 26:35: I love that finance and accounting is evolving towards being, like, a storyteller. That's interesting work.

Mike - 26:43: Yes. It absolutely is interesting work and so I certainly am trying to get my finance team to think about that and evolve in that way.

Megan - 26:53: Yeah. And it requires people to understand operations and marketing and say like you have to finance these days, you really have to know a little bit of everything.

Mike - 27:01: You do.

Megan - 27:03: And this kind of brings us back to the cash flow topic, but what role does data and financial visibility play in helping leadership teams make smarter growth decisions?

Mike - 27:16: Well, I would say today, it's everything. The one thing that I've seen evolve and I've helped evolve, certainly at Transwestern is trying to provide financial visibility during the month, as opposed to waiting until you close the books at the end of the month and just kind of see how you did. We talked about cashflow and the cashflow schedule, but today I have visualizations that will show how we're doing on revenue closings during the month. The president of our services business uses that report daily and he calls me, quite frequently and going, Hey, so how do you think the month's going to close? And because I can see the trends and how deals are closing and what's in the pipeline that potentially happened, I can make a pretty good guess a week before the month closes as where we're going to come out in revenue. And that's essential because if you see trends where not having a great month and pipeline looks a little weak out the next few months, that allows you to think about, okay, what's the response to that? Whereas if you just waited until the end of the month and saw, Oh, we had a bad month, that's a surprise. You're not thinking about that early enough. So that's one of the things that is really key. I've got a pipeline, I've got a report that shows AP spend trends as invoices are being input in the system. It's going into a Power BI report that kinda shows what's being spent and where it's being spent. So having very organized data is essential to making that happen. And so I think one of the first things that you have to make sure you do is you have a good data governance process to make sure, okay, am I capturing the right data that I need? And once you feel good about that, then it allows you to have these reports so you can see financial visibility during the month, as opposed to set times when you close the books. So, the quicker you can identify trends, the quicker you can pivot and change is constant in business. It's always happening. And I think the companies in the future that will be really successful will be those that can pivot quickly when there's a macroeconomic change that's happening or there's something in the industry that's happening. If you have the data and you can see it happening in real time, instead of waiting until it gets reported to do that, you're better off.

Megan - 29:38: And I'm sure many mid-sized companies struggle to move from entrepreneurial decision making to a more structured form of leadership. So how do finance leaders help guide that transition without slowing innovation?

Mike - 29:51: That's another good one. Something we certainly have dealt with here at Transwestern and we still consider ourselves a very entrepreneurial real estate company, even though we're reasonably large now. But what I found is you kind of have to decide what has to have structure versus what doesn't need as much structure. So I'd say to me, the non negotiables, at least from where I sit, I got to have controls around, hash, got to have controls around financial information, and really have to have controls around data. The data governance part of those things have to have centralized standard controls because that benefits the entirety of the organization. But there may be other parts of the business that don't need as much structure, so you have to decide what those are. And then your senior leadership teams at these companies should ensure that there's clear lines to how decisions get made. So you don't want to over engineer the process. I think about what it takes to pass a bill in Congress these days, forgetting, setting aside the whole political thing. It's like first the bill starts the subcommittee and it gets debated there for a while. Then it goes to the full committee. It's been there for a while and then it goes to the floor. It gets debated there for a little while. While we probably want slowness in the government side of things for businesses, if you do that, you'll miss whatever it is you're trying to deal with. And so you don't want to over engineer the process. You want to just make sure that there's an easy path to making a decision. And so, the finance leader probably needs to ensure that they are not overburdening their part of the process in reaching that decision. But other things that I do see mistakes that are often made is really finance getting left out of the room. A lot of companies, oh, assignments, they're just numbers of people. They're not as essential as this. And if key decisions are being made, finance needs to be a part of it because they can provide a perspective that maybe everybody else isn't thinking about. So if you're a finance leader in an organization and you're not being invited to the table, you need to push for it. You need to make sure that you are part of that decision process because the one thing that can happen as you're moving to kind of a more structured deal of finances isn't in the room, you're got to run into problems because the worst thing that can happen is somebody just walks into CFO's office and says, Hey, here, we've decided we're got to buy this company, come with $10,000,000 and you're sitting there going, well, I didn't know this was happening. We don't have $10,000,000 so I've seen that happen to companies before where deals get kiboshed because somebody in the finance wasn't part of the discussion. So I would say to folks, Hey, if you're in a company where finance is not involved and you can't get at the table, you probably ought to look for somewhere else to be. If you're running a company that doesn't involve finance, you need to look in the mirror because it is just an essential part of being able to make good decisions that will benefit the growth of the company.

Megan - 32:51: And last question, but looking ahead, let's say three to five years, how do you see the role of finance evolving and what new skills or mindsets are going to be critical?

Mike - 33:00: This is a great thing and I'm sure you've seen these but I've seen a lot of articles, LinkedIn posts and stuff that say, what is the role of the CFO or the finance organization or the company kind of moving to? And I would summarize and I believe this as well is really we need to move from just being a reporter of what's happening to a problem solver. So I think finance historically has always been looked at as kind of a reporter. I can tell you what happened. I might be able to even tell you why it happened, but the next evolution is going from telling you what happened, explaining why it happened to becoming a problem solver. I mentioned this earlier, but I've kind of been pressing this upon my finance organization that it's I don't have to report it nor is it enough to say why something's happening. We need to add the how to solve, how to address the problem because that's really what the business decision makers are looking for. They're looking for, Hey, we've identified a problem. Here's what we need to do to address it. And there's a lot of talk about AI out there and I think, AI probably can do heavy lifting on obviously the reporting and maybe, pulling out the whys from the data, but it is not going to be able to execute solutions. It's not going to be able to think in the mind of, okay, for our organization, we have this problem. This is how we need to solve it and go out and do that. So that still requires people that's still going to acquire folks with skills to understand, analyze, and be able to develop an executable plan. So I would say the finance function really has to move away from reporting really to that solutioning. And I would say we're even evolving to a point where we're going to be expected to get better at anticipating the problem happening, seeing trends that may indicate, it's kinda going this way and try to preemptively fix a problem rather than, identify it because it's already happened and trying to fix it on the back end. So how do you get there? What are the skills that you're got to need to do? And I think you touched on a few things. You got to understand how the business works. So, again, it's not just understanding the finance side of things, but what does marketing do? How does the sales process work? What does a deal look like from cradle to grave from the time it starts until the time it's closed? How does data flow in our organization? What is essential data? What's not? What metrics are important? And then where are there bottlenecks in the system? Where do things tend to get hung up? And then the secondary part of that is what are the impediments to removing this bottleneck? Sometimes the impediments are actually people, people that don't want things to change because it could negatively impact them or their job or things like that. So all of these things are important for finance to help uncover in an organization so you can get to a better place on your business. I mean, this is, in my opinion, this is kind of where it's heading. And I do think that the path to get into some of these senior exec roles, CIO, CFO, all that stuff. If I think ten years from now, it's going to look different. It used to be go work for a big accounting firm, big consulting firm, investment bank, all those things. I think they're still going to be important, but I think it's also going to take some other skills that you maybe we haven't thought about yet, but should think more about it's analytics, it's understanding data. It's being able to then effectively communicate. People always say, accountants are boring and can't communicate. Man, I have to tell you, if a finance person can't communicate, a lot of organizations probably won't have a use for them. That's got to become a very essential skill. So all of those things that when I was going through school thirty years ago, they taught us, oh, this is what is important to be an accounting and finance person. Now I'm sitting there going, Yeah, I needed those, but I needed other things as well. And I think that's where this is heading and nobody should be afraid of technology. Nobody should be afraid of AI. You need to embrace whatever's coming down the pipe because it's going to change things. Maybe not in the grand way that everybody thinks it's going to, but there is going to be change and there's just constant evolution. So our skills clearly have to move with what's happening.

Megan - 37:34: 100% agree. Mike, thank you very much for being my guest today.

Mike - 37:38: Oh, you bet. It was great. I hope some folks get some valuable insights out of this.

Megan - 37:43: Yeah. This has been such an insightful conversation, and I appreciate you taking the time to be here today to share your knowledge. And to all of our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care.