IAM1060- Founder Provides Simple Accounting and Financial Insights

Spencer Sheinin (pron: Shay-nin) has the rare and unique combination of speaking both the language of accounting and the language of entrepreneurship. As an accountant, he's a 20 year CPA, CA and as an entrepreneur, he's owned businesses in manufacturing, construction, cold storage, real estate and now, financial services. Spencer is the best-selling author of Entreprenumbers: The Surprisingly Simple Path to Financial Clarity.

He is also a highly-rated international speaker, delivering engaging and actionable keynote presentations and workshops to industry and membership associations such as the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and TEC Vistage. With the goal of making accounting not suck, Spencer is now the CEO and founder of Shift Financial Insights, providing ridiculously simple accounting and financial insights for businesses on the rise.

• CEO Hack: The creative aspect of my morning routine
• CEO Nugget: (i) Data visualization (ii) Focus on the key letters (iii) Follow your passion
• CEO Defined: Opportunity to change the world

Website: https://www.shiftfinancial.co/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencersheinin/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/shiftfinancial.co/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spencerrsheinin/
https://www.facebook.com/accountingdoesnthavetosuck/

Medium: https://medium.com/@spencersheinin
https://entreprenumbers.com/

geni.us/entreprenumbers

Full Interview:

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Transcription

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00:16 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I Am CEO podcast.

00:43 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Spencer Shannon of Shift Financial Insight. Spencer, it's great to have you on the show.

00:53 – Spencer Sheinin

Great to be here. Thanks, Gresh. Nice to see you again.

00:55 – Gresham Harkless

Super excited to see you and have you on the show. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Spencer so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Spencer has the rare and unique combination of speaking both the language of accounting and the language of entrepreneurship. As an accountant, he's a twenty-year CPA, CA, and as an entrepreneur, he's owned businesses in manufacturing, construction, cold storage, real estate, and now financial services.

Spencer is the best-selling author of Entrepreneur's, the surprising simple path to Financial Clarity, and he has also a high he's also a highly rated international speaker delivering engaging and actionable keynote presentations and workshops to the industry and members or membership organizations such as EO and TechVistage. To make accounting not suck, Spencer is now CEO and founder of Shift Financial Insights, providing ridiculously simple accounting and financial insights for businesses on the rise. Spencer, great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:52 – Spencer Sheinin

Let's do it. Looking forward to it.

01:53 – Gresham Harkless

Looking forward to it as well. So to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

02:01 – Spencer Sheinin

Yeah. I mean, my CEO story goes a ways back. As you mentioned, I am a CPA. I was doing it it used to be called the CA program in Canada. I did that, and I admit I was, like, physically nauseous every day. I hated accounting, and people who know me from those days are like, what? Do you have an accounting practice now? Like, they'll fall off their chair. And then I went into investment banking, and I felt equally ill. And it was, like, quite a fluke. I ended up doing a kinda little small real estate project here in Vancouver, and I got to be really good friends with the builder. And we just started talking, and we had a very similar, approach in life and business.

And I had a lot of the book smart, the accounting, the investment banking. He had a lot of business experience, but not a lot of kind of we'll call it the schooling side. And we just thought that was a really beautiful potential partnership, and we just decided kind of I don't want to say on a whim we talked about it a fair amount but we talked let's get into business together and we went out. We found our first business, which was a manufacturing business. And, for me, the acquisition, like, that's what I've been doing. I've been trained how to do those things.

And, we finished the deal, and I was like, well, now what? Like when you're an investor I was transactional. I was an investment banker. I was an accountant. Once the deal's done, you move on. And I remember walking in that first day and being like, what do I do? I didn't know what my job was. So I kind of got into being a CEO in a bit of a funny roundabout way. I mean, I intended to get into business, but I didn't even though I'm a CPA and an investment maker, I didn't know what it meant when I got into it at the time.

03:42 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That makes so much sense. Now I appreciate you, Sharon. It's so funny. And I almost feel like nowadays, it seems like everything evolves anyway. So even sometimes, when we have a set definition, it evolves, you know, just over time in different industries and in different types of positions.

03:54 – Spencer Sheinin

And I had no idea what I was up against. So I thought it was gonna be easy. Right? I was like, oh, I'll work hard. I'm a relatively smart guy. But, no, it was, it was ten times harder than I thought it was gonna be.

04:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That makes so much sense. So I guess I wanted to drill down a little bit more here, a little bit more on how, you know, that came into being the business came into being in your expertise, and how you're able to meld both of those accounting and entrepreneurship together.

04:18 – Spencer Sheinin

Yeah. So, I was an entrepreneur for about fifteen years. I had a few different businesses as you mentioned in the intro. And then realizing I wasn't in love with them, a lot of crazy things happened in my life where I just sort of ended up in a situation kinda like me and my partner. But, yeah, at first a few businesses later, I'm like, how did I get here? Sounds bizarre. But I also realized I wasn't intentional with what I was doing. And so I realized I wasn't happy in those businesses, and some of that was post two thousand and eight trauma. Some of that was, just recognizing that it wasn't my passion. I exited, and it took a year to figure out what I was doing. And during that time, I've been very involved with the Entrepreneurs Organization.

I was at a talk, and it was a finance speaker who's a brilliant guy, but frankly, over everybody's head. And everybody laughed because at one point, I corrected one of his formulas and everyone's like, I'm not even following it, but you're correcting them. And one of the guys at the table looked at me after and said, can you put this in my business for me? I know it's important, but I don't get it. And that was kind of my light bulb moment for Shift Financial where it's like, yeah. The problem here is the so what problem. Like, we all know it's important. We all know accounting is important. I don't wanna say all, but most of us hate it. I don't like the day-to-day of accounting, but what's so critical is the stories that are built that are buried in those numbers that even if you have a perfect set of books, you still can't, you still can't extract the story, the so what, the meaning. And so that's kind of what was the inspiration for what I'm doing now and bridging the gap.

Entrepreneurship is a language. Accounting is its language. I went to school for three years how to learn to speak that language and write and create. And so, you know, I see what I'm doing now. I feel super fortunate because I'm bridging this gap. I love working with entrepreneurs and CEOs. Bridge this gap between accounting and the struggle with accounting and making it the so what, the usable, and the story. So that's what that's what we do now.

06:13 – Gresham Harkless

And so, you might have already touched on this, but I was gonna ask you for what I call your secret sauce. This could be for yourself or the business or a combination of both. What do you feel kinda sets you apart and makes you unique?

06:23 – Spencer Sheinin

Yeah. So, I mean, we do the bookkeeping and, you know, we are the outsourced accounting department, and I think there's a lot of those. To me, it's the it is the so what. We've developed our reporting software because I hate reporting software that comes out of accounting, software. And so we'll extract the data through our API, and then we'll present the information that makes the so what intuitive and easy to understand. So, it's a mix of data visualization and knowing which numbers to pull.

So if you're looking at the right numbers, you get punched in the face with what the story is telling you when it's done right. So that's what I look at as our secret sauce is the so what to make the decisions. You always hear accounts saying, oh, we'll do the accounting so you can make better decisions. You can only make the decisions if you've got that so what and you've got that story buried in the numbers.

07:11 – Gresham Harkless

Well, awesome. So, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this might be an app, a book, or a habit. Well, what's what makes you more effective and efficient?

07:21 – Spencer Sheinin

Yeah. This is one of my favorite topics, so I love that you're asking it. And I read a lot and I grab stuff, but I'll just share the one thing that I feel makes the biggest difference, and it's part of my morning routine. I'm sure you've talked to lots of guests about morning routines. And it's one element of the morning routine which is what's the one thing I can do that's gonna move the needle the most for my business, and what's the one thing I can do that's gonna move the needle for my most personally.

It can't be something that's already on a to-do list. It's actually about the creative process of, okay, where am I? Where am I feeling stuck? And how do I unlock this? And, eight, nine times out of ten, it's kind of a benign nothing. But every once in a while, there's just like, oh, how did I not see that? And then I'll action it. I leave a gap in my mornings with no unbooked where I go first, then I do those number one things. And every once in a while, that's like just a game shifter. And yeah. So that one thing, more than anything else I do, I think, moves the needle the most for me.

08:24 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. You might have already touched on this before, but this could be a piece of wisdom or a piece of advice that you might give yourself or if you were to hop into a time machine, you might tell a younger business self. I might tell a younger business self.

08:37 – Spencer Sheinin

I might tell a younger business self. I can either give a finance one or I can give a general one. Where would you like to go with that?

08:41 – Gresham Harkless

Let's go to the finance one.

08:43 – Spencer Sheinin

The finance one I did allude to. So for me, it's two major things, that I think completely open people's world from an empowerment standpoint. Number one is data visualization. Quick story, you know, through our API, when we're when we're talking to prospects, we often go to our API and I'll do a presentation like this is what your your data's is gonna look like. And I've had a couple of people, when I send it to them, saying, no. That's not right. And I'll ask them. I'll go, okay? Well, can you pull the data from me? Like, no. It is right. They had in their mind something, but because it wasn't in a data visualized format where they could intuitively and immediately understand it, they didn't they until they saw it, they're like, oh, that is right. Oh my god.

So data visualization, very simple line charts, pie charts. It doesn't have to be complicated. And then the other thing is focusing on those key levers starting with what is the number one lever that's most out of whack here and let's go solve that. Let's not worry about the two-thousand-dollar problem if we have a twenty-thousand-dollar problem. So, yeah, those are the two data visualization data visualization. I speak a lot. Every time I do a presentation, people are like, oh, yeah. This is the number one thing I have to do. And then two, it's shining a light on those levers. You get those two things right. Yeah. Your your your game your your your finance game will change immediately.

10:00 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. You can stake the world and take over the world from there. And I love that you mentioned that because I think especially as we kinda talked about a little bit, like, how people most people will look at finances. Often, when you see all those numbers, I imagine people just shut down or they glaze over or they don't wanna kinda deal with it. But to make that, you know, visualization, they're taking that data and make it making it, visualized allows that opportunity to see the picture, see the story probably a little bit better. And I imagine people are more likely to want to, as you said, you know, shine the light on those things that will move the needle forward.

10:29 – Spencer Sheinin

Well, it goes from being what I call a source of pain to a source of power. Where it's like you're kinda running away from it. But now it's like, okay. Give me the stuff because I can I know what to do with it now.

10:41 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And we have a little bit more time. So if you wanna give us the other nugget, that we would be more than grateful.

10:45 – Spencer Sheinin

Oh, cool. Yeah. I mean, for me in general, it has to do with passion. This is a bit of a cliche, but following my passion and for me, I don't love accounting, but I love analytics. I love strategy. I love that. So I ended up building a business around. K. Let's make the accounting not suck, and then let's do the important part of the accounting and finance department. And it took me a long time to sort of go through the pain. And so even in the places where you're unhappy or not enjoying what you're doing, or I did, I should say me when I wasn't enjoying it.

It's like, okay. What am I learning from this and how can then I apply it in a different way where I'm not gonna hate it? I have a team that does the bookkeeping, the accounting, the controllers, all of that's handled and we've got great people and then I get to do the part I love. So, life by design, how do I create, how I wanna live, do what I do. I love working with entrepreneurs. It's so energetic.

I mean, that you do what you do for the same reason. Right? The energy, the enthusiasm, that entrepreneurs can change the world. Right? I'm here to help them through their financial blind spot. So passion, passion, passion. Where's the source of passion? And if I'm not in a place of passion, how do I spin what I'm doing? What's the number one thing I can do in the morning to go from a place of not being in a passion to a place of passion?

11:58 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That's extremely powerful. I love that you, you know, explained that and then broke that down because I think so many times like you said, if you don't love numbers or don't love accounting or whatever it might be, you might say, I want no parts of running an accounting business. But in reality, if you drill down and understand what your true passion is, the source of your passion as you said so well, you start to realize that maybe it is bridging the gap. Maybe you don't love it because you're you have, a gift or an opportunity that can change that industry. So I love that you, you know, share that and, of course, that you're doing that in your business as well.

12:30 – Spencer Sheinin

And sometimes you have to go through the curse of excellence to get there, you know. Yeah. The curse of excellence is, so, you know, you're good at it, but you hate it. And, I had to go through a lot of that to get to finding what I love to do. So Yeah. It's a journey.

12:45 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. And I'm a big believer in it. Action will lead you there. So as far as you are taking that action and then looking at that action and seeing, does it work or does it not work and continue to take action towards that. That's where those things come from.

12:57 – Spencer Sheinin

Yeah. Agreed.

12:59 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Spencer, truly appreciate that. And I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So, Spencer, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:11 – Spencer Sheinin

Yeah. I love it. I love that question too. You know, I believe as a CEO, I have an opportunity to change the world. Whether that's the small corner of my world by helping a few other entrepreneurs, having a great place to work, or whatever it is, this is my opportunity to contribute to the world. And I think that's both a responsibility and an obligation of a CEO to do things positively. And so for me, Simon Sinek, I believe entrepreneurs can change the world, and my role is to help them through their financial blind spot. It's a gift that I have. It's a gift that I can give the world. And if one of the entrepreneurs I support does something positive for the world, then that's my way of sort of multiplying myself out.

13:50 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I love that. I love the word responsibility, and definitely, we don't hear the word enough obligation. And I think that when we are giving, you know, certain gifts, we do and can help empower people and give them that opportunity to be in their zone of genius. That allows us to make a huge impact in our specific way. And I think if we all can lean into that and do that just as you, you know, said so well and are doing so well, then that's something where the world can watch out. Love it.

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Spencer, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you, get a copy of the book, find out about all the awesome things you're working

14:32 – Spencer Sheinin

Yeah. Thanks. And, I mean, I'd like to offer your listeners a gift. If anybody's interested in actually me, reading their financials to them, sucking the data into our API, it does have to be QuickBooks online. But if you are interested, send me a message. Spencer at shift financial dot co. Depending on how many get, I'll do one or two. I won't do everybody. It's a bunch of work on my end. But I'm happy to do that as a gift to you, Gresham, to your listeners as a thank you for having me. Spencer at shift financial dot co, not dot com, dot co. Somebody bought the dot com and is holding it ransom, and I refuse to pay for it.

And, yeah, the book Entrepreneurs, you can look it up on Amazon. It's kind of anywhere where you'd buy your book. Unfortunately, there's not an audio version. That's only because there's so much data visualization in there. It was hard to bridge that gap. And then, shipfinancial.co, you'll find more data. There's a bunch of free downloads and resources. There's a sample of a case study I did live with somebody where they moved from a three to a ten in empowerment in fifteen minutes.

So there's a bunch of free resources. We just launched our breakeven calculator, another free resource where it's like if you wanna figure out what do I need to sell to breakeven, what if I hire new staff, there's a bunch of scenarios you can put through there. So a bunch of free resources. Everybody's, free to use. And if you think I can help you out and help you get from a source of pain to a source of power, Spencer@Shipfinancial.co. Always happy to chat.

15:50 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Spencer. We will have the links and information in the show notes. And I love that, a source of pain to a source of power. And I think anybody who's running a business that wants to do it, especially to get control and opportunity and to be more in control of everything that they're doing, I love that you're helping that happen from a financial standpoint because it's a huge bedrock to how you're able to be successful. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for the free offer and all the awesome things you're doing. I hope you have a great rest day.

16:16 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.