Understanding Your Cash Flow With JD Graffam

I’m excited to bring you another great episode with an outstanding guest. His name is JD Graffam. He started a digital agency, a user experience agency in particular, several years ago and grew that successfully and invested in and built a portfolio of software companies. I’m excited to have him share the details of that story. We’re going to do a combination episode.

Sometimes I bring in business owners who have a great story to tell with lessons that we can learn as we’re growing seven-figure businesses. Sometimes I bring in an expert on a particular topic. In this episode, we’ll do a little bit of a combo episode where we’ll learn from JD’s experience growing his companies. We’re going to transition and talk about some cashflow expertise that he has and a software tool that can help business owners who are growing. Welcome to the show, JD.

Thanks for having me, Brett.

I would love to start with a little bit of the backstory. If you could talk to us about starting your digital agency and then how that grew. You became like many entrepreneurs who started and/or invested in several businesses and then you have this portfolio of companies. Please tell us about that story for a few minutes so we can get to know you.

The story that I usually tell about how I got into the agency business is an interesting one that starts with me being in the creative writing program at my college. I’m learning graphic design because I wanted the literary magazine that I was editing to be good and look good. Graphic design led to web design and web design ultimately led to my career. The software was my way of poetry if you want to hear that version of the story. The real story of your audience who built million-dollar businesses will resonate with everybody regardless of where I came from and where my passions were because we’ve all got passions in different places.

I’ve always been that person. Even as a young boy, I was the person who had a million things going and was always looking for a way to stay productive and busy. Quite frankly, I charged for it, whether it was riding around the neighborhood. I grew up in on a three-wheeler stopping off at neighbor’s houses asking them if I could rate their lawns for $20 so that I could save up for a jacket that I wanted to buy from a catalog. Later when I was in college and working as a tutor in the writing center, I was selling Cutco knives. I was repossessing cars and training to sell financial planning services through Transamerica.

I had an internship in the communications office. At that point, I had five jobs while I was going to college. It wasn’t that I was struggling to get through college. That’s just the kind of person I am. I’ve always been like that. I walked off the graduation stage into a job and I’ve never had a job while not freelancing. Here we are many years later. At one point, I had three different digital agencies that I was the owner of. Not only one.

Through some mergers and exits on a couple of those, I’m back down to one agency but also a portfolio of software businesses that I’ve had up to 11 or 12 that I was operating at one time. I’ve always been all over the place. I’ve never been that person that settles into one thing and does that for ten years. That’s my backstory for your audience that would make the most sense. A lot of people either resonate with it or it’ll make them cringe one or the other.

You’ve got that peg right. Some of the people that read this show are like you. You described them. They’ve always had an interest in multiple things at once, always had an eye on a new opportunity and looking for the next thing to get involved with. Some of them have been solely dedicated to their one creation for a long time. That’s the two ends of the spectrum. The ones who are fully dedicated to one purpose, one cause, one business that they’ve been deeply passionate about for their entire work career will still respect the fact that you have such a variety of experiences that the lessons you will share will be critical and germane to what they’re doing, even if they’re “only” trying to do one thing.

I’ve talked with them over the years. I’ll often hear from them like, “How do you do that?” There’s no focus. I responded like, “I got started as a business owner in the agency world where my little company with ten people at the time would have 40 or 50 projects going for 30 different customers.” I was already used to working on a bunch of different things. That’s the nature of the agency business. I’m all over the place, but if you think about it, I only do one thing, and that is manage a portfolio of businesses.

You could think of it as managing one thing, although that’s a semantic argument. I’ve run into people who cannot wrap their heads around it and don’t understand it. Some of them stop there. Some of them respect it, and some of them say, “You need to change that.” They’ve given good friendly advice, but that’s how I’m wired. I know other people are wired differently. Many of them who I know very well are smart guys and gals, but we’re different.

You’ve talked a little bit about some of the differences. Some people might not relate to the multifaceted reality that you live in. However, there are going to be some things that everybody reading can relate to some of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way. One of them that I want to dry out right away because you tossed me a nice little softball has to do with how you were able to delegate responsibility to others. There’s no way you could have your hands in as many things as you have your hands in if you didn’t hire and keep great people and learn how to give ownership with accountability to these people.

If you don’t mind, let’s talk about how you were able to make that transition because early on, you were doing most things by yourself. You were the designer, the web developer, the copywriter, the talent and then you had to build something that included other people. Let’s talk about what enabled you to make that transition that most of our audience have had to make or are still struggling to make that transition to taking pieces of ownership off of your shoulders and gifting them to somebody else so that you can multiply your efforts. What did you learn in that area?

One of the things that I can’t take credit for is being lucky. I’m not trying to flatter anybody who worked for me in the past who still works for me. Very early on, I was lucky with a couple of people who joined up with me who were talented, committed, smart, independent thinkers and versatile. I’ve always heard the wisdom from mentors and those who’ve gone before me and anybody I’ve asked for advice on how you do that. What you’ve heard a million times is what you’re going to hear from me is you have to be good at hiring people. The idea of finding somebody who’s fit is an important one to unpack because it’s what’s at the core of good hiring.

Cash Flow Management: You have to be good at hiring people. The idea of finding somebody who’s a fit is a really important one to unpack because it’s at the core of good hiring.

It can also be very dangerous, and you don’t want to get it wrong. You can create a culture where you keep hiring people like you. Beyond the diversity issues and problems that can create, what it can do is perpetuate certain attitudes, habits and behaviors that are fine in a smaller group but don’t scale well. If you have a culture of everybody is the person who likes to control multiple aspects of something and can’t take their hands off, that works well in a tight-knit 4 to 6-person group. With your audience and what I’ve been through and what I’ve seen and you’ve seen, you have to value a different type of thing in hiring.

It’s only subtly different. You want to maintain the value around a versatile type of person who can chip in any way that’s needed as you grow. What you don’t want to do is lean into it so far that you’re hiring a bunch of people who can’t delegate. If you want to get past $1 million in revenue and get to $10 million in revenue, you don’t have to be the only one. You can’t be the only one who knows how to delegate. You got to hire people who can delegate and delegate effectively. That’s the trick and what you have to be careful about because when you hire your first 4 employees and then your next 4, you’re hiring for different qualifications in the soft skills areas.

What we’ve learned in my business is that versatility is the right word to describe what we’re looking for. Micromanager is not, and those can overlap because a micromanager is generally somebody who’s got skills and a bunch of different disciplines. You want to be sure that as you bring people in, they fit with the general vibe and energy that you want to be in your work family because this is a big part of your life and everybody’s life. You want people to get along, but you also want to make sure that you hire people who are different from each other and have different strengths. That’s the root of it. That’s what everybody will tell you. Hiring is important. Hiring well has got to be a hard decision to bring in somebody.

You can’t just bring them in because they check some boxes. They have to click perfectly into place. If they don’t, it’ll be like, “What happened a few years ago when my wife and I were renovating our living room, and we were picking out curtains?” The interior designer and I teamed up and convinced my wife to get the curtains that we liked. My wife was like, “They’re all right, I guess. The colors match, but I like these over here. These are different ones.” We said, “It’ll tie everything together.” We used a bunch of design words, and we sold her on it.

Six months after we paid for these nice curtains that the designer and I wanted and my wife didn’t want, I was at the store picking up the curtains that my wife wanted in the first place because those were the curtains that she knew she wanted. Don’t talk yourself into hiring somebody who’s not quite right. It’s got to be perfect. When you do find somebody that’s perfect and you’ve heard this advice a million times as well, find a way to hire them because they don’t come along often. When you know somebody is right, you do what it takes to get them.

That’s great advice based on what sounds like very personal experience. I love the curtain analogy. When the right curtains come along, you grab them. They’re not going to be on the shelf at the store anymore. I love that. We could spend a whole episode talking about lessons you’ve learned in hiring and we’re not going to do that. I want to get onto some other topics, but I would love for you to share with our audience if there’s one thing that helped you improve your hiring. This is something that they all have to figure out. It’s not just something. It’s a core thing. What is something that’s helped you hire better?

We’ve come up with, as a group, about 5 or 10 words that are meaningful to us that we all understand and can use as shorthand. We use those words as references when talking about candidates. That was an important process. It took a long time to settle on. The other thing, and this can be as brief as it needs to be, is I don’t do the hiring. I’ve got my leadership team who make the ultimate recommendations to me, and they’re the ones who conduct the interviews and put everybody through the paces. They know what I want. We all agree on what we want as a company. It’s their job to bring somebody to me and get a green light, but I don’t do the hiring.

I don’t know if you’ve learned to delegate that, but you figured out that at some point, somebody else needs to do that. Before you figured that out, it sounds like you got good at knowing the type of person you want and putting together some words or ideas that would help us talk about it in a similar way and help us screen for that in whatever paces we put people through. You grew an agency quite fast, and you experienced some cashflow hurt along the way. I don’t know if hurt is accurate. You experienced some of that cashflow hurt that many of us experienced as we’re trying to grow fast, and you came across something helpful to you.

This is something we don’t talk a lot about on this show. I want to spend the rest of our time talking about what you learned on managing cashflow effectively and the visibility that you needed. We’ll get into a tool that you found very helpful for you that belongs in your portfolio of software companies. Let’s talk about the cashflow situation. Set up the story for us. As you were growing the agency quickly, cashflow became an issue. Tell us about some of those details and what you were needing in terms of visibility or tools to help you manage that situation.

In the very early days of the agency, I’ll say the first 4 or 5 years, cashflow wasn’t a concern. I had a very low overhead, a good reputation and plenty of word-of-mouth referrals. Things were humming along nicely. I started looking for ways as a business owner who was new to being my own boss and quite frankly, new to having money because I didn’t grow up in a wealthy family or anything like that. I grew up squarely in a lower middle class, and I didn’t know what money was or how to manage it at all. I had a successful business, and I saw money piling up. To some degree, I was scared to spend it, and to another degree, I wanted to spend it all.

I started trying to figure out how to calculate how much money I was going to have at the end of the year. That’s how this all got started. Here it is. For three months, things are going great. I look at my bank account, and there are however many dollars in it. It would be nice to tell my wife how much money we’re going to have at the end of the year so we can plan around buying a new house or paying off her student loans.

Some of it was nice stuff, but some of it was also like, “If I make this spreadsheet sophisticated enough, I can calculate how much money I will have at the end of the year outside of the business for me. I can also calculate how much I can put back into the business.” I’m looking at how many people I would be able to hire. I started thinking, “What if I bought another business?” I was thinking at the time that I should buy one of those roadside ice machines because I’ve always gone fishing with my dad down on the Coast of the Gulf. These roadside ice machines look like a great business opportunity.

It’s a machine that makes ice, and people come to buy ice from the cooler full. I was like, “I could buy a couple of those or something.” I was thinking about reinvesting in something. This spreadsheet that I built got sophisticated, but I’m not very good at spreadsheets. I got it exactly the way I wanted it and I presented the plan to my wife. She liked it, and it was wonderful. Two months went by, and I pulled open that spreadsheet again to look at it. I was starting over. It was another day and a half of work to get things caught up and manage it because spreadsheets aren’t made for maintaining with 1 month or 2 in between. You either need to maintain it every day, or you need to plan on starting over.

That’s what I did. Often, I would check my spreadsheet, and then some friends of mine from Memphis, where I live, had built an app called Pulse. It is a cashflow app that they built for their web agency as a marketing ploy to show the world that they could build an app in a month. The reason they wanted to show the world they could build an app in the month is because they wanted people to hire them to build apps. They wanted to show off what they could do. They can design, develop and launch a full digital SaaS app in a month. They used this to get attention, and they got a lot of attention for it. This was in 2008 or so when Basecamp was even a new thing.

In our agency world, everybody wanted to get rid of clients and become a product company so that we don’t have to deal with dumb clients who tell us to do things the wrong way when we want to do things the right way. We get recurring revenue, and we don’t have to stress out about cashflow. What I realized is they had built a cashflow app to help small businesses track cashflow, but that app itself could help with cashflow.

Cash Flow Management: In our agency world, everybody wants to get rid of clients and become a product company so that we don’t have to deal with clients who tell us to do things the wrong way when we want to do things the right way, and we get recurring revenue and don’t have to stress out about cash flow.

They built this in 2008 and they got on the front page of Dig. They got a lot of retweets from celebrity web developers and endorsements like that. Everybody was following along on their blog in the industry, watching this little web shop out of Memphis, Tennessee, not even the Valley. They build an app in a month. They came up with a concept, named it, designed the interface, programmed it and everything. They got customers in about 30 days. It was a website called the One Month app. They did it as a marketing thing.

They launched it for free and had several hundred users on it actively. A couple of years later, they put up a paywall, and they had a free account, but they started taking money for extra features. They were doing good. They were running their agency and running this app. They had built a couple of other apps as well by this time. The guys broke up. One guy went in one direction and the other guy went in another direction. One went into the ministry, and one went out to be a development director for a startup and had a big salary.

They were left with this app that they built that was generating revenue, that neither one of them had a ton of motivation to keep running because it was still halfway built. It had some memory leaks. Sometimes, the server would need to be restarted, and customers and prospective customers would email in. The two of them were probably taking $2,000 a month out of the business each so $24,000 a year. It was extra income that we could pay a mortgage or something, but they were both in different places in life, and they decided, “We want to sell this thing. We don’t want to have to deal with this anymore.”

I begged them for two years, “Let me buy Pulse.” I had started using Pulse at this time. Pulse was awesome. I loved it. There are two reasons I’m still in business. One is because I read Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst and I have a good system for managing emails and to-dos. That’s number one. Number two is because of Pulse. I love this thing, and I was begging these guys, “Let me buy it from you.” They kept saying, “No. It’s making real money. You got a little bitty agency. You probably can’t afford it.” They wouldn’t even tell me a price. They kept shopping it out, trying to get somebody to buy it for big bucks.

They eventually realized that the app was so small that it wasn’t interesting to anybody who had real money. It was big enough that it wasn’t interesting to anybody who didn’t have money. It’s right for me because I have a little bit of money. I had a successful agency. After a couple of years, they realized they weren’t going to sell it for big bucks and that I was probably their best bet.

They called me up one day and said, “JD, we’ll sell it to you.” We worked out the terms of the deal pretty quickly and then it was over. I bought it. It’s a story that I found this app that I loved so much that I bought it. That’s how I got into the software business because I have since bought over a dozen apps in addition to Pulse since then. Pulse has grown an insane amount over the years, so it’s much bigger. The customer base makes a lot more money. We’ve got a team behind it.

Getting into a program like Pulse got me out of that spreadsheet problem where if I don’t maintain it for a couple of weeks, I come back, and it’s a mess. I feel like I got to start over. If a formula gets off, I don’t trust the math or if I want to collaborate because even with Google Sheets, where you can invite people, everybody’s able to go in there and mess up the spreadsheet. I know people who’ve got multimillion-dollar businesses. I know a bakery that runs its bakery operations off of a spreadsheet. If somebody comes in at 2:00 AM a little tired, they can hit the wrong button on the shared Google Sheet and mess up their operations for the next couple of days.

It avoids all that by charting out, giving you reports and letting you play with everything without messing up anything. That’s the magical thing about it. That’s what I love about it, and it’s transactional levels. If I’m feeling meticulous one day, I can go in and put Comcast for $328.76 in there. I could create a line item for communications in general for $1,500 a month and roll a bunch of things besides Comcast into and ballpark it with the numbers that I know because it’s my business.

Without getting in the habit of staying on top of my cashflow, I wouldn’t be in business. Going back to why I needed to do this in the first place, the spreadsheet is good for helping you figure out where you can reinvest or track your cashflow. It’s good for helping you figure out where you can reinvest what you might call thriving. Also, a few years later, when I felt the pinch at my business, Pulse is what kept us from imploding.

Cash Flow Management: The spreadsheet is really good for helping you figure out where you can reinvest or track your cash flow.

We had lost a big contract. We weren’t in a position to be ready for that because we had hired up and renovated a very expensive office and blew too much money on that. That ate into our buffer, and we weren’t planning on losing this customer. If we hadn’t lost the customer, everything would’ve been fine but we lost the customer. We had blown all our cash on this office renovation. When things got tight, I was giving the team, at least the leadership team in my business, daily updates on cashflow forecasts from Pulse.

We were looking at every potential source of income or whether somebody was going to pay their bill on Tuesday or Thursday to see how we were going to get by and have something that was there. When things are good, it helps you not miss out on opportunities, but when things are tough, it helps you figure out what you need to do to survive.

If there’s a lesson I could share with anybody in business that’s going to get you through, it’s to get in the habit of looking at your cashflow, not your accounting. Don’t look backward but look forward. Look at what’s going to happen on that, and then talk about delegating and managing your emails so you don’t miss things from a day-to-day perspective. Those are two important pieces of business.

Thank you for that, JD. The old saying cash is king, a lot of us ignore cash until the moment happens. For you, you describe losing that big customer or that key account. All of a sudden, it’s a new game altogether because the expense structure exists to support that big client. All of a sudden, that big client goes away, and the expense structure must adapt or new revenue sources have to come in. You described having a cushion, but then you did some office upgrades or invested in some office space then that security blanket was not there, and the change happened to you.

At that moment, business owners know what that feels like. Most business owners have been through something that put their cash position in a risky spot. They have to go immediately into knowing where every penny is going from an expense standpoint and knowing where every penny is coming in from a cash generation standpoint.

It sounds like that became a lot more manageable for you because you were already using Pulse. It gave you the visibility that you needed. It helped you understand from a timing perspective. If you knew something was coming in earlier or later than you had anticipated, you could see all those adjustments being made in real-time in Pulse, and that allowed you to navigate. Am I catching all that correctly?

It did. I want to add something because it didn’t make anything less ugly.

This isn’t a glorious moment.

It didn’t save me from having to lay off anybody. What it did is it helped me keep the business alive more accurately but it was still ugly. You have to make tough choices, but what it did that you can’t recreate is it gave you some assurance that what you were doing is the closest thing to correct that you could come up with because if you’re having to make all those ugly choices and you don’t know your numbers, you’re letting people go for example and you don’t know if it’s enough.

You don’t know if you’re going to have to do it again. One of the things that was ugly was we had to let people go. I hated it and all comes with that. I knew in my heart and the leadership team we got together, and we said, “If we do this, we have to do it to a degree that that’s all we need to do to save the business.” We do not want to have to come in and do a second round.

In those situations, time is of the essence too, because if it’s a leaky bucket and you don’t get that thing plugged, you’re going to have to take more action.

If you wait another two weeks and you run another payroll, then it’s that much more money you don’t have. You dug deeper in the hole. Being able to move fast is important. Having a way to track your cashflows helped, especially having been in the habit of it already. I was able to reference it without having to create any new paradigms for people to understand. When we decided that we had to bring the axe down and we were going to do this, the only thing that helped me sleep was knowing that I felt confident that the size of the adjustment we made was the right size.

It’s hard when you get in that pinch. It’s not just about surviving the hard times either because one of the things that I’ve built my career on is acquisitions, and knowing my cashflow is what’s enabled me to feel confident that this is the right time and I can afford to drop some cash on a new app purchase. It tells me how much money I need to operate the core business. Do we have extra? We do. If we have extra and we add this revenue and expense to bring on a new team, when am I going to get my money back? That helps you forecast whether what you’re doing is a good deal or not without having to do all these ad hoc spreadsheets. Every time something pops up, you can look at it in one place. It’s handy.

I want to draw out something important in what you shared. You were already in the habit of watching your cash. For a time, you had been using Pulse to do it. It wasn’t in the moment of crisis that you went out there and found something that was going to be helpful to you because, at that point, I imagine as an app, Pulse isn’t overly complicated. If somebody got into crisis mode, they could go out, purchase it and start using it but that’s not the ideal situation to start using something like that.

You need to know your numbers and manage your cashflow effectively all the time before you get into crisis mode. When crisis mode comes, and it will at some point, something will happen in all of our businesses. That tests our foundation. It will test our financial health and our ability to make tough decisions in a timely manner. If you hadn’t had that discipline and a tool that facilitated your discipline before that point, it probably would’ve been much uglier, wouldn’t it?

I thought about this when I was preparing to talk to you. I was like, “If I were to try and quantify the value of being in the habit of knowing my numbers, I didn’t have to learn my numbers when this all went down. I knew them.” Even though I own Pulse, I still pay to use Pulse. I’m one of my customers because they’re separate business entities.

The simple focus of my agency is a Pulse customer. We’ve been Pulse customers for a couple of years, and that’s at $59 a month. That’s not even $5,000 over a few years. When the poo-poo hit the fan in business to have already been fully vested in a solution like that, that saved my multimillion-dollar-a-year agency, and I know it saved me from having to make deeper cuts than I made. $5,000 over a couple of years, that’s effectively $0.

You described a great insurance policy. A lot of us pay $59 a month for some life insurance, health insurance or death. We pay something for insurance, and when that moment comes, we hope that we’re saving ourselves a bunch of money from having a catastrophic event. It’s $59 a month to get better visibility.

We don’t do infomercials, but the point here on this episode is to make whatever nominal investment you need to make to have the visibility and the discipline of knowing your numbers. When the time comes, either for a good situation, opportunity comes around, or you’re in crisis mode, you aren’t missing a great opportunity and collapsing to the pressure that you’re feeling financially because you know your numbers, you have the tools, and you can make the decision you need to make.

To use a non-business metaphor, if you think about all the training that some of the elite military people go through, they hike insane amounts carrying heavy backpacks. They run. It’s because one day, they’re going to need it. It’s not that they need it every morning at 5:00 AM. It makes them feel good every morning at 5:00 AM, and it helps them a few times a year when they want to go compete or when it makes things easier. The reason they’re so prepared is because one day, they’re going to need it. I remember when I was going through my cashflow crisis and having to make these tough choices, I sat down with many different mentors and advisors.

One of them was my CPA at that time. He told me two things. He says, “Everybody goes through what you’re going through at least once. This is how you get your PhD in business. Everybody has been through it, or everybody will go through it without exception.” The other thing he said was, “I bet you’ve learned how to hold a quarter in your butt cheeks.” The point is that everybody has been through this so you can count on it.

Even if it’s already happening and you’ve learned your lessons, or maybe you’re lucky, and it doesn’t ever happen to you, having discipline helps you in the good times as much as the bad. It helps you every day to feel better about the business. You’re keeping an eye on this. That’s all it is. It’s discipline. Check in on your numbers and forecast. Look at your KPIs. It’s not just cashflow. It’s how your business produces and how you are performing. How does everything tie together? This is one aspect that is important that gets overlooked because it’s so fuzzy.

Cash Flow Management: Checking in on your numbers and your forecast every day helps you feel better about the business.

To underscore the point that’s important is when you said everybody goes through this or will if they haven’t something like this. I don’t have the stats off the top of my head, but it’s general knowledge that of all the businesses that start this year, there’s a big percentage of them that won’t be in business next year and an even larger percentage that won’t be in business five years from now.

Those aren’t because people lost some fire about their business. It wasn’t about a passion thing usually. Most of the time, it’s because of some crisis around cash or some product market fit or other things. Cash is a big deal, and we all face it. I’m grateful that you are willing to come to talk about some of your experiences at a tight time.

Nobody wants to let people go. Nobody wants to call on accounts that are due and say, “Can I get a little more time to pay that? What terms can we come to?” There are things we do to make it work but it goes a lot more smoothly and better when we have that discipline set up that we’ve got that running in our business. We’ve looked at the right numbers, and we do it at the right cadence. Having some tool that enables you the visibility and the flexibility to make the adjustments that you need to make and have that all show up in real-time in different views that you’ve set up is a key thing to be able to do.

For my audience, whether or not they ever touch or look at Pulse cashflow software, I’m strongly encouraging them to develop the muscle. Go on the 5:00 AM runs with the heavy backpacks and get this discipline in place because the storm will come at some point, or the adversity will come, and you want to be prepared when it does.

If I could add one more thing for everybody, a lot of your audience are $1 million-plus businesses and not everybody is going to be bootstrapped. The thing about cashflow is if you don’t watch it, you can be set up to have the most profitable year you’ve ever had, and a cashflow crunch in the summer can bring you to your knees because when you run out of money, you’re out of money.

Not everybody knows that but most businesses have experienced some pressure with COVID. You’re right.

I was going to tie it out to what we’re dealing with in the economy. If you could be set up to be having a great year, and then all of a sudden, things dry up and you run out of sources of cash, you have to make choices with personnel and lose people because you can’t pay them. It’s hard to dig out of that hole. If you try and keep enough money in the bank and know how much money you should have in the bank, you’ll know that if you know your numbers. Knowing your numbers is what can help you survive.

JD, this has been a great interview. I appreciate all of the nuggets that you shared along the way from your experience. I would love for you to share with people the best way to learn more about you, Pulse cashflow software, your portfolio of companies and whatever would be a good way to connect with you and learn more. Please, feel free to share with us how to best do that.

Anybody that wants to talk to me can reach out on Twitter @JDGaffam. Send me a text at (901) 605-9192. I’m happy to talk. Tell me who you are so I don’t think you’re a creep. Don’t just call me. Please text. I’d be fine with that. My team has set up a page on the Pulse website for your audience at PulseApp.com/ElitePodcast.

Very generous. I appreciate your time, JD. You’re a seasoned entrepreneur. I love finding people who can’t get enough action. They want to be in all sorts of things because they’re experiencing lessons at a rate that most of us aren’t. I appreciate you slowing down enough, even amidst homeschooling and bathroom renovations, to give us some of those words of wisdom from your well-earned experience. Thank you again, JD.

Thank you so much for having me, Brett.

—

That wraps up this week’s episode. Make sure that you’re sharing it. We have lots of seven-figure business owners out there going through similar challenges. In this episode, we talked about hiring, cashflow, knowing your numbers and developing that discipline. There are so many things that all of us have to go through as seven-figure business owners. Why not share the love a little bit? Share with other business owners you know. Review our show and rate it. Please keep reading. We’re going to keep bringing you great guests like JD and others who can help you along the way. Thanks again. We’ll see you next time.

Important Links

• JD Graffam
• Pulse
• One Month
• Bit Literacy
• @JDGaffam – Twitter
• PulseApp.com/ElitePodcast