S4E20: Armed Forces Brewing Co. Double IPA | Job’s Evolving due to A.I | Entrepreneurial Patience

Disclaimer: The information in this video does not constitute Financial Advice. Consult with a Financial Advisor before making any decisions regarding your finances.

Today we're diving into some juicy topics that'll keep you on your toes. First, we taste a brew from Armed Forces Brewing Company. Next, we're getting into the nitty-gritty of AI's impact on finance jobs, breaking down a study on how AI is shaking things up in the finance world. Finally, we talk about why being patient is key to growing or selling your business.

5 Key Lessons:

1. Support & Appreciation: Armed Forces Brewing Company’s commitment to military veterans through their nationwide distributed IPA aligns with values that support our service members.

2. Understanding AI's Role: AI will significantly impact finance jobs by automating routine tasks, thereby allowing finance professionals to focus on more strategic activities.

3. Human Element in AI: While AI can handle data input & research, human oversight is essential for quality control, preventing AI-generated errors or 'hallucinations.'

4. Value through Financial Systems: Accurate, reliable, & timely financial reporting substantially increases the value of a business, which is paramount for potential buyer confidence.

5. Strategic Patience: Entrepreneurs must be patient & thorough in developing financial systems, ensuring they can back up their business valuations with solid data and processes.

This week's What's News: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/finance-jobs-will-be-changed-the-most-by-ai-report-says/ar-BB1oFbxt?ocid=BingNewsVerp

Today's Brew🍺: Armed Forced Brewing Company, Grunt Double I.P.A

🍻 The P.B.K.P.I (Pam's Beer KPI) Scale ⚖️: 
1. Pam's Not Touching It
2. It's Sippable
3. I'd Drink it Again if You Gave it to me
4. I'll Order it if it's on the Menu
5. I'll Seek it out

This week's tasting word: 
Isohumulane - chemical compounds that contribute to the bitter taste of beer and are in the class of compounds known as iso-alpha acids.

About the Brewery: 
Armed Forces Brewing Company is a craft brewery dedicated to honoring the American Military, both active duty and veterans. Their team includes an award-winning brewmaster, restaurant and hospitality veterans, and one of the most famous U.S. Navy SEALs. Their beers are available in select states and online in 36 states, with plans

Transcript

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Weeks to figure it out because you have to go back through five or six corrections and six or seven input points and talk to five people and yell at your bookkeeper automatically. You have given away value to the person buying your business because they're going to say, hmm, there's some real reporting risk here. Therefore, even though I was planning to give you a multiple of five x on hey, I'm Pam Pryor and this is the Cash Flow podcast. We're going to talk about everything related to money in your business. Without further ado, let's hop right in. Hey, and we're so glad to have you on the inside where we're going to cover brews, news and business clues for the brews. We'll be looking at a brew from the armed forces brewing company, which I'm very excited about for a number of reasons. Then we're going to jump into AI and its impact on finance jobs, as in the news. It's in the news this week with a new study that's been done. And where will AI have its biggest impact on employment? Okay, so we're going to cover that. And then finally we're going to jump into entrepreneurial patience and we'll talk about why that's such an important thing when you're really looking to scale or hire or borrow money or any other thing related to growing your business. Section one in brews, news and business clues is always the brews. And we are here with a beer from armed forces Brewing Company. And it's a double India pale ale. So a couple things. It massively supports our military veterans, which I'm a huge proponent of, and the military in general. And it's a double India pale ale, which I'm very excited about. So let's talk about this brewery. It is run and managed and has directors and advisors that primarily came out of the military or have been very supportive of the military for a long, long time. What I love about this is that they are not going to actually be operating as a craft beer store. They are intending to branch out nationally, period. They're only going to do mass distribution right now. You can buy it in a few states, and Pennsylvania is one of them, but you can also buy it online for direct delivery. Coming up now, probably about right now. They are also expanding into the military exchange stores, so that on the military bases, we used to call them the PX. I don't know if they're still called that in this day and age, but we'll call it PX because I can. But also Walmart and some other big players like that. So they're going to be distributed pretty broadly here very soon in some of the big shops and also directly to military bases. So I love everything about that. Now they have a few brews. I, of course, picked the IPA, and even better, the double IPA. I love the can. It's, you know, in army fatigue colors, and it's got a couple of grenades on the front of it, in front of a star, which is interesting. And it's got three stars on it. So I don't know if that's indicating a three star general or what, but they make this, or they say they make it for the grunts. The grunts love it. Also ipas. What's that? The grenades are hops. Oh, the grenades are hops, Francis. Thank you. Well, now I really love that. Then the grenades are actually hops I love. I'm so glad Francis knows what's going on. So perfect. But the thing I really like about this is they say not only do grunts like it, but IPa lovers love it. So I'm very excited to try this. So, let's talk about this beer for a quick second. And we're going to introduce a new term now that into our beer reviews. But this is a double India pale ale with alcohol content of 9.5%. So we'll see how the second two segments go. But it also has an IBU of 75. And what is Ibu? So, Ibu is the international bitterness units. I don't want you to jump to the conclusion that just because there's a high IBU, it means that it's a bitter beer. Because a lot of times, all that the IBU is talking about is in the particular hops that they use. What is the measure of, as they call it, isohumulane. Isohumulane from the hops. And we'll drop that word down in the podcast notes so that you can look up what that is. But it's an indicator of bitterness. Right. And as an IPA drinker, I really like that. But any number of things, like the malts and the citrus or other things, can kind of mute that bitterness a little bit. So it doesn't necessarily mean that if you have a high IBU, by definition, it's gonna be the most bitter beer you ever taste. The range of the scores is from zero to 120, and this has a 95. So if you have, like, a five, it's gonna be sort of a Coors light with no bitterness. If you have a truly hoppy IPA, that's not at all masked or managed by any sort of offsetting flavors, then you might be up towards the 120 level. This one ranks at 95. So I'm actually very interested to see kind of how the bitterness gets masked, if at all. So this is, the malt here is called pale american two row. And the hops are citra, centennial, and Columbus. And the way it's described is with a solid malt backbone, so that may tone some of the bitterness down. And it has a dry finish, an assertive citrus hop flavor and aroma. So let's see what we think. Hang tight here. We'll grab our glass, pop it, I think. Oops. Trying to do too much with one hand here. There we go. All right. Now, I'm guessing it's not hazy, since it's a pale american, but let's see. Actually, that is pretty hazy. Wait, let's let it clear for a minute. That's pretty hazy as hazy goes. All right, let's smell and see what we've got for kind of like a no smell, not very heavy smell, which is good. Cause it sounds like it might not be too citrusy. I think there's a very small, small chunk of, like, orange maybe that I'm picking up, but really, really light, like, not. Not crazy smelly, which I like a lot. So let's see what we got here. That's definitely an IPA. Oh, that's nice. Okay. The 95 it earns, it is bitter, which I love. The citrus is not overpowering, but I do feel the malt kind of backbone, as they describe it. Sort of calming it down a little bit after the first sip. But it hits your tongue and it's just like, you know what it makes me think of, Francis, what are those pop rocks that you used to put pop rocks in your mouth? It's got a pop rock bite to it when you take the first sip and the second sip. I like this a lot of. And I do definitely pick up the malt they describe. And a little bit of citrus. But honestly, it's sort of a nondescript citrus. It's not orange or lemon or anything like that. That's overpowering. But I can see why IPA lovers love this beer. This is a IPA drinkers IPA. I love it. I'm going to do something I haven't done yet. I don't think Francis, this is going to get a PBKI, which stands for Pam's beer, KPI, or key performance. Uh, indicator. Geez. Um, we're going to go with a five, which is our top notch, which means I will hunt this spear down. Not just, you know, wait for it to come to me. I will hunt it down. So cheers to you, armed forces brewery for a fantastic IPA. You hit the nail on the head with this one. I need to find you and visit. Cheers. All right, folks, so what's in the news these days? Most probably if we did a search on it, we would find that it was the most prominent thing in the news is AI, artificial intelligence, and what it's doing in the world. We're all now, I would say a lot of Americans are aware of even chat. GPT is sort of the intro drug, or the, what do they call it? The gateway drug to AI, just like sort of coinbase and bitcoin or the gateway drug to crypto. And it's affecting all of our lives, whether we know it or not. I can promise you that the vendors that you use or the online systems that you use are all starting to integrate AI in a very sometimes very complex way. We've had a couple discussions here with Francis, who is our AI expert, and continues to stay very up to date on a lot of these things. But one of the things that kind of makes people a little nervous about it, and I get it, is that AI, you know, is this going to replace jobs? And I think the easy answer to that is yes. And that can feel a little discomforting, but I kind of don't want it to. And here's why. We've all been through those periods of time when technology has disrupted old jobs. I mean, this goes back to the steam engine, goes back to Ford figuring out the line that he did, the production line. There we go, setting up the production line for the first Fords that were built and really establishing a new way of industry in the US and then globally. This happened with computers when they first came around and took up a whole room in order to process a relatively simple math calculation. And it certainly hit us all back when the Internet came along. I mean, everything about how we did business change, everything about what we needed to do changed. And then this little guy here that all of us now walk around with really changed things. Like, I look back at how business was done in the seventies when my dad was in corporate, and you were handwriting letters and somebody was typing them on duplicate paper or running them through a mimeograph machine, or you were using transparencies on an overhead machine, and then all of a sudden, this little doohickey comes along, along with the Internet, along with other computing things, and we can whip up a power presentation, PowerPoint presentation in five minutes. Aihdenhe, is that sort of disruptive? Okay. What we used to need people to do, we will no longer need people to do. But, and here's the comforting piece of this, it's not going to eliminate jobs. It's going to change the nature of jobs, and not so insurmountably that the people who are in the current jobs that might be eliminated aren't the same people who can do that next step of work that's going to be required. There's a really good article that we're going to link you to here in the show notes that was done by, I believe, Citibank Francis will fix that. Am I wrong? But yeah, no, it's Citibank. And it talks about the fact that historically, technology adoption has not so much led to reduction in the workforce as it has changed the nature of the workforce. And interestingly, for finance professionals, in the study that Citigroup has done, they have determined that the finance profession is going to be the hardest hit with these job changes. I don't even want to call them job eliminations. I'm going to call them job changes. And I can certainly see how knowing all the things that are done in finance and knowing all the things that could be automated with AI in finance, it's rife for this sort of technology. But the thing that I want you to think about, if you're a bookkeeper, if you're a CFO, if you're a controller, whether you're a in a small company or a large company, just think about how it changes the nature of the jobs. It gives you the chance to really develop people, because tasks that used to be things like data input or research or whatever it might be, can be automated by properly used AI. However, AI makes mistakes. Right? AI, as this article puts it, which I really love, is that AI models are known to hallucinate and create information that does not exist. I'm going to read that again because that's important. AI models are known to hallucinate and create information that does not exist. If you've played with AI at all, you've seen this. So here's the thing. It is always still going to need human intervention. What's going to happen is the nature of the work is just going to change. So whereas an employee might have at one point been responsible for input, or let's just call it researching something like a tax regulation in finance, or gap, for God's sake, which is just horrible to have to pour through to find out how to do things. I used to work for publicly traded companies, and one of the hardest things we had to do was put together our annual report, or even our quarterly ten K, ten QSD. The ten qs and the ten ks are monstrous to create and they're monstrous to audit. And I used to have to count on my auditors to research things for me. Now I'm going to be able to do my own research with this thing, but I'm not just going to have it research and create a ten Q and spit that out to my owners and shareholders. I'm still going to have to have a group that really understands the concept of what's going on with these publicly required reports, that reads it, that edits it, that adds the color and the narrative to it. So whereas somebody's job might have been to spend three days researching one small issue related to corporate filing, now they're going to be able to do that research in five minutes, but then they need to just spend 15, 2030 minutes refining it, and then they can spend all the rest of time making the report even better and better. Well, that's corporate. What does it mean for small businesses? Right? So if you're a bookkeeper or you're a fractional CFO, you need to be looking not at preserving your job with your clients, because that's not the point. You want to add value to your clients. And the more and more you can utilize AI in your business to do the research that might be needed to classify the transactions that might need classification to do any of the other myriad of things that are just really what we'll call in honor of the beer that we're doing today, grunt work. AI becomes the grunt and we get to take some employees that have been spending their time doing that grunt work and really elevate them to do other things. And if you're an entrepreneur, I want you to challenge your CFO's, I want you to challenge your bookkeepers to say, hey, how can you make this easier and better and possibly more cost effective for me as an entrepreneur? And they should be aware enough of AI and it's creeping into the world of finance here to be able to answer that question. And in a lot of cases, it's not going to be, hey, you can eliminate my cost because frankly, there are a lot of places this could lead you that could be a very bad place for an entrepreneur. But it's, I can change the nature of what I'm doing for you from making sure that everything's in the right place in case we ever need it to providing you more analytical, strategic information without having to hire a staff of analysts. So right now I offer strategic advice to my clients and we go ahead and we implement and we execute on some very complex strategic plans. I have to have people actually pulling the data together to be able to do that. Whereas now I may not need all those people to do that. I can actually have that done by AI. Those people can spend their time doing some work that actually gets that strategic information packaged more nicely ready to display to potential investors or bankers, more nicely able to go into it in a little more depth because they never had time to before. And I end up with a much better product for my clients. So I would challenge you if you're a CFO, if you're a bookkeeper, yes, it's going to affect the finance industry more than any other. But I also challenge you this, no matter what you're doing as an entrepreneur, what can AI do for you to eliminate not so much cost as to elevate your ability to deliver value? Okay? And that's the thing I really want to point out. And like any sort of, sort of technology improvement, you don't want your staff or the world thinking, hey, I'm going to cut as many jobs as I can, right? You don't want to do that. It's not why you're in this business. You're in this business to create a micro economy and generate wealth for a lot of people. So given that, that's why you're in this, the question becomes, what can I do to reframe the work, to take advantage of this thing and add even more value than I can add today? Then your prices can go up, then the number of people you serve can go up. So that's the way I challenge you to think about AI, and it's really how this article is pointing it out. The simple way that they put it, I ran on a little bit and rambled because I'm really excited about this particular topic. But the way they quote it, to quote the article here, says the tech will perform those chores faster and cheaper than people, but also generate other needs likely to offset radical headcount reductions. So don't be scared of AI. I've said this before, embrace it and figure out how it can increase your ability wherever you are in the world. Employee, large business owner, small business owner, student, how can you employ it to increase your value and the value to the customers you serve? Tying into this is the story of entrepreneurial patience, right? This is about looking at things strategically and making sure that you're taking advantage of the technology that's out there to both serve your employees, serve your clients, and serve yourself. One of the things that's required to do that is entrepreneurial patients. And I want to talk to you about how entrepreneurial patients can increase your welcome back. In this particular segment, what I want to talk to is entrepreneurial patients. And as I'm speaking specifically to you, if you're an entrepreneur who's getting ready to scale or sell your business, and it's the topic of my book, founder to exit. One of the things that happens when you're a founder is that you're able to kind of run rapidly and do things quickly and without a lot of constraints. And I'm not saying that if you're ready to scale or exit, you have to put on shackles and do things the way that a hundred million dollar company would do it, or a billion dollar company would do it. But there are some things that will return to you in value and wealth, to yourself that are really worth investing in. And one of those things is patience. So I'm bringing this up because I've had a couple clients in my time here who have been very much focused on, hey, I want to sell my business, give me the reports to make it happen. And in truth, to get to those reports to make it happen. Take really understanding how the money flows in a particular business. How do transactions work in a business, and in a lot of businesses, when they get to the point where they're ready to sell, they have been kind of winging it for a while, and there's not any very clear process in place. So entrepreneurs will sometimes very quickly say, oh, I need to buy a thing. I need to buy software and slap it on, and then boom, we'll be ready to go. And as your CFo here on the cash flow, I'm going to tell you that is not how it works. Like anything else in the business world, what you need to do is get somebody who can look at your business and understand it as a cash flow generator. Okay? You're doing things, you're putting money in the bank, you're taking money out of the bank. There is a way to capture that information that really good finance professionals understand. And it also starts with capturing data at the very beginning of when a transaction occurs. And the whole idea is that we eliminate having to input the same thing multiple times over and over again or correcting something over and over again as it works its way down the belly of a snake. Now, what do I mean by that? So, if you are in business and you invoice customers for something, whether it's a product or a service, let's think about this. You do something or send them something, you invoice them, they pay you, you put that money in your bank, and then you spend that money. Okay? Now, all of those individual pieces of information are transactions. And what a good finance person does is they say to you, I understand this process now, and I know the best technology or human or AI or whatever it might be, is to capture that information at the right point in time so that when we create those reports that let you sell your business, it's accurate, it's reliable, it's timely, and it's cost effective. And most notably, it transparently represents the story, the narrative, the thing that you are trying to create or sell or grow, and that's not a snap your finger thing. So I just really, really encourage you, if your goal in selling your business or growing your business is to create wealth, create more wealth, what you do with that wealth is totally your business. Some people want to buy more businesses. Some people want to start charities. Some people want to put money away for their families. Some people are a combination of all those things. But be aware that whether you love money or hate money, that is the goal of selling your business or even investing more money into your business. So take the time to let a good finance professional come in, listen to you describe your business, and literally map the transactions that happen along that flow of cash into and out of your business so that they can create the reports that will most, most accurately and reliably and in a timely fashion reflect what's happening in your business. Let me give you an example of what happens if you don't do this. There's an expression for it that I won't use because I don't think it's politically correct anymore. But if you literally just slap some reports on a table and say, there's my p and l, and somebody who's looking to buy your company goes, okay, explain that number to me. And you have to go back and take two weeks to figure it out, because you have to go back through five or six corrections and six or seven inputs and talk to five people and yell at your bookkeeper automatically. You have given away value to the person buying your business because they're going to say, hmm, there's some real reporting risk here. Therefore, even though I was planning to give you a multiple of five x on EBITDA for this business, I've just reduced that to one x because I can't rely on your numbers. And so your impatience in that particular case has led you to lose four times the value of your net income. So, for example, if your business would have sold for $500,000 or $5 million, now it might sell for 100,000 or a million, because you can't demonstrate that you have effectively captured the financial information related to the cash flows in your business. So I'm a little emotional about this because I have seen entrepreneurs throw away money simply because they didn't want to give the right investment or time to make sure that when they sit in front of somebody and put numbers in front of them, they know that when this guy pokes, it holds up. And if this guy pokes, and it holds up and he pokes again and it holds up, then all of a sudden you've increased your value in his eyes and he's going to know, or she's going to know, that you have plenty of other places that will be willing to to buy this company, because what they're looking at accurately represents what happens. It removes suspicion, it removes worries about the quality of your financial systems. And anytime anybody's buying something, anytime anybody's selling something, it is about the money. So as an entrepreneur, whether you love or hate the money, it's so important to be patient and let the people who really know how to build out the financial systems properly for you do their job. That's it folks, for today. Thank you so much for joining us. I do want to remind you we have a new membership for this podcast, so please click on that link and join us. For the cost of a beer a little less than the cost of a beer in some places, you can join us be on the insiders club for the cash Flow podcast. All sorts of surprises will come your way as a result of that. And in the meantime, like subscribe, download all the things so that we can keep this coming to you. And if there's topics you like us to cover, definitely pop it in the comments. Have a great week. We'll see you next time. Thanks so much for watching the cash Flow podcast with us. We want to bring more and more of this to you. So please like share subscribe comment so that we can keep bringing more of this content to.