When purpose driven entrepreneurs grow tired of spinning their wheels seemingly getting further away from things that actually matter to them, they call Dan Nicholson for help. After completing a prestigious fellowship and working for some of the largest, most successful companies in the world, Dan gave it all up and started his own firm where he was able to develop tools to help his clients and partners answer the one question all successful business owners are asking themselves “Am I going to be okay?” through his financial certainty methodologies. Financial Certainty is an unconventional way of looking at business growth. Instead of focusing on acquiring more, the focus is getting closer to the things that actually matter to the business owner/entrepreneur. The first step to eliminating entrepreneurial anxiety is decreasing the uncertainty around reaching your goals and Dan has developed the tools to do just that, including the “Certainty App” that helps small-to-medium sized business get the financial clarity they need to achieve the success they want.
Listen to this informative Publish Promote Profit episode with Dan Nicholson about explaining financial certainty with a book.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- Why people should re-engineer things to achieve the outcome they want.
- How people need to have a solvable equation to be able to fix things.
- How financial anxiety equals uncertainty times financial powerlessness.
- Why business owners shouldn’t be anchored to any one way of doing business.
- How having an unconventional title is a great conversation starter.
Connect with Dan:
Links Mentioned:
nthdegreecpas.com
Guest Contact Info:
Twitter
@NthDegreeCPAs
Facebook
facebook.com/NthDegreeCPAs
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/company/nth-degree-cpas-pllc
Connect with Rob:
Website
bestsellerpublishing.org
Twitter
@bspbooks
Instagram
Rob Kosberg:
Hey, welcome everybody. Rob Kosberg, here for the Promote, Profit, Publish podcast. Excited to be with you today with our guests, Dan Nicholson. I’m going to tell you a little bit about Dan. Dan fits what we do to a tee here. Not just because of his expertise, but how he uses publishing, a book that he has coming out, as well as a podcast and media that he’s been on to grow his platform and attract clients and make a difference in their lives. Dan’s a lifelong entrepreneur, relentlessly curious. I love that. And hopelessly, sarcastic. Good, then we’ll have some fun. After completing a prestigious fellowship and working for some of the largest, most successful companies in the world, Dan gave it all up, started his own firm, man after my own heart. Where he was able to develop tools to help his clients and partners answer the one question all successful business owners are asking themselves, am I going to be okay? Very good. Through his financial certainty methodologies.
Financial certainty is an unconventional way of looking at business growth. Instead of focusing on acquiring more, the focus is on getting closer to the things that actually matter to the business owner, entrepreneur. Love that. First step to eliminating entrepreneur anxiety is decreasing the uncertainty around reaching your goals, and Dan has developed the tools to do just that, including the Certainty App that helps small to medium-sized business, get the financial clarity that they need to achieve the success that they get. You have a book coming out called, Seeking Certainty, love that. And you host the Rigging the Game podcast. I love the name of that. Dan, great to you on. Thanks for taking some time with us.
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah. Super excited.
Rob Kosberg:
So tell me about Rigging the Game. Where did that name come from? And tell me about your sarcastic nature and how that fits into being a CPA.
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah, well I have this weird identity crisis where I have all these credentials that make me appear like I’m a CPA, but yet I actively try to avoid. I am a CPA, I have the license. But I actively avoid trying to be referred to as an accountant. I know my wife is annoyed with me. It’s like she had a bad dream or something last night, where I did something inappropriate. Where she introduces me to someone as an accountant. It’s like, “Ooh, I did something wrong because I’m in the dog house.”
Rob Kosberg:
Punishes you by telling people you’re an accountant.
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah, a few months back where everything is virtual. We had a parent teacher conference for my oldest first grade and of course, virtual. And in the back and forth and getting it scheduled, my wife’s says, “Oh yeah, Dan is an accountant. He owns an accounting firm.” I thought, “Hmm.” She knows I hate being referred to as an accountant, so I did something. I couldn’t figure out what that was.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it.
Dan Nicholson:
I consider myself to be an entrepreneur and I happen to know a bunch about accounting and am a recovering people-pleaser and a recovering perfectionist. And in sort of the process of being both a people-pleaser and being a perfectionist that I used to think that if I just tried really hard and I did all the research that I would get the results. And what I realized more often than not, there wasn’t necessarily a direct correlation to effort and research and the outcome that you want. It’s actually understanding the way that the system works. Every system is perfectly designed to create the outcome that it’s generating. So if you know how the system works, then you can change the inputs to get the outcome that you want. So every system is rigged, in my opinion, it’s designed to get the outcome it’s getting. And so why don’t I just reverse engineer it so that I get the outcome that I want. So I’m not talking about people rigging the game, they think it’s something nefarious. It’s more about how do I make sure that I get the outcomes that I want, that I’m okay with.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. I have a buddy in the entrepreneurial space that loves to say to people that they should congratulate themselves because they are on the exact spot in their life that they have been working towards. And oftentimes, people hate that idea that they have actually created a system to be whatever they are. If they’re overweight, then that. If they’re not financially set, then they’re that. And so that’s the system, right?
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah. And I 100% align with that.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. I love that. I completely agree. I bet it offends some people, but you guys got to rig the system in your favor. That’s the whole idea.
Dan Nicholson:
That’s right. To me business is a sport. It’s a full contact sport. You make a lot of bets, right? It’s almost like gambling. And so, if you’re going to take all the risk, and usually when I do public speaking, I typically end like this, which is basically, if you’re going to take all the risk, you might as well play your game. Otherwise, what’s the point.
Rob Kosberg:
Right.
Dan Nicholson:
If you’re not getting the outcomes that you want, what’s the point. It’s time to take a step back and figure out, again, how to rig the game, how to re-engineer things to get what you want.
Rob Kosberg:
Absolutely love that, that’s very cool. Tell me, it’s interesting, you’re not a recovering CPA, but a CPA that doesn’t like to be referred to as an accountant, right?
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah.
Rob Kosberg:
So, tell me, you’ve obviously rigged your system in a way that fits for you. And so, tell me a little bit about what you do, how you do it, how you take the skills that you developed as a CPA and use them in such a way to really make a difference in business owners lives.
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah. I’m cursed with the need to constantly ask like why is this happening? This is like this constant narrative that exists inside. And so for the last, almost 11 years, one of my businesses is an accounting firm. So, ironic that I don’t like being called an accountant. What I realized, almost 11 years ago, is that 42,000 firms in the US if you have 10 people, you’re the 400 biggest firms. So almost everybody’s working with a team of one or two. Most accountants are basically archeologists. I say that lovingly, but they just dig up the past, right? They don’t spend any time on the future. The questions that almost every client and business owner is asking, if you’re an accountant, they’re asking you tax questions, or they’re asking you bookkeeping questions, but that’s not really why they’re asking you that. People want to pay less in tax because they want more cash and they want more cash because they want to pay for the things that they actually want. If someone was paying a bunch of taxes, but it was getting them exactly what they wanted, they would care less about paying taxes, right?
Rob Kosberg:
Right.
Dan Nicholson:
“I wrote a check to the IRS and I got the car back that I wanted.” Like, “Okay, cool.” Not as big of a deal. It’s that people feel like they’re not able to get closer to the things that they want. And so, that’s sort of been this issue that I’ve been scratching at which is, how do I help people get closer to the things that they want? What is it that’s really bothering them? It’s this feeling of uncertainty. I heard this equation a few years ago that helped me crystallize it. And it said, anxiety equals uncertainty times powerlessness. I was like, “Okay, there it is.” I’m a math nerd. I can drop in financial and go, financial anxiety equals financial uncertainty times financial powerlessness. And so that’s what I’m doing. I’m helping people get more certainty around their finances and have more power over their finances, so they have less financial anxiety. And by the way, every business decision is a financial decision. So, if I help them have less financial anxiety, they typically also just generally have less anxiety. Accounting tax is just a tool for helping people solve that equation and that’s the fun part to me.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. I’ve always thought, and of course I’ve heard this, so it’s not like I develop this myself. I have to remind myself sometimes and I think very strongly that, you know what? If money can solve your problem, then you don’t have a problem. Unless it’s so big that you don’t have enough money to solve it. But if money can solve it, then it’s a problem that is solvable. Most business owners, I think, struggle with that idea maybe because they don’t have the money or they’re operating in these small teams and are struggling with, as you said, gaining what it is that they really want from their business.
Dan Nicholson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). If you think about Google Maps, for example, we have to put in our starting destination and our final destination, otherwise the directions are wrong, right? If one of those two is incorrect. The nefarious thing that business owners do is that they start a business or businesses with this initial objective that they want. Maybe to make more and not have to work in a job any longer, maybe it’s some sort of legacy thing. But they skip fully defining the final destination. What are the things I’m really trying to fund? They might build a really cool vision board, but the problem is with the vision board that’s still not a solvable equation, right? What we really need to do is take our vision board and take all those things and turn it into an equation, give it a date, give it a dollar value, right?
If I want financial security, there’s a dollar value to that, there’s a date that I want to achieve it by. 10 more hours per week, there’s a dollar value to that, there’s a date that you could achieve it by. And so we want to take all of that stuff and make it a solvable equation, because then we can figure out how much more we actually need to make. And once we know that, then we can stop with the whole more as the answer to everything.
Rob Kosberg:
Right.
Dan Nicholson:
More clients is not necessarily the answer if you want more free time with your kids, we can go on and on about that. But the problem is that, the vision board either never gets made or never gets turned into a solvable equation and so then you’re always trying to solve it with just trying to do more.
Rob Kosberg:
Love that. Tell me, it sounds like that’s kind of the beginning of your program, or at least one of your programs. Give me the steps. So you try to define the equation or help the entrepreneur, doesn’t even have to be an entrepreneur, anybody needs to have a destination. So you try to define the destination. What are the steps of this process?
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah. So you mentioned in my bio, the Certainty App. I built this in part for people to be able to have a tool to create what I call their unique wealth algorithm. They’re taking your vision board and turning it into a solvable equation. Step one, is understanding, we’re trying to get closer. Closer is greater than more. So every action or business exists to serve us, it should get us closer to the things we want. So step one is, let’s write out all of our priorities and I bucket them into core priorities and preference-based priorities. Core are the things everyone has, pay off debt, fund reserves, fund retirement. Or if you’re an entrepreneur you don’t say retirement, you say, “I want to have enough, so I don’t have to work.” It doesn’t mean that I will. They also call that equity money, but I don’t know if that’s appropriate for you. So you got the core priorities, and then you got the preference-based priorities, the things that are unique to you. Whether that’s more free time, maybe that’s a second home, boats-
Rob Kosberg:
Travel.
Dan Nicholson:
… travel, pay for your kid’s college, weddings, whatever it may be. There’s no right or wrong. The biggest hurdle in dealing with entrepreneurs is they try and solve problems as if they’re buying it. But you can’t go Google, should I grow my business? You could get a bunch of articles, but you’re not going to get necessarily the right answer. There’s a little bit of rewiring and that’s why I wrote the book, to give people a different operating system. Create the app, is to try and show people there’s a different operating system for how we process issues. We’re going to buy us closer over more.
You asked me a question, should I hire someone? I go to, is that going to get you closer to what you want, right? And let’s go through the math to figure that out, but is it going to get you closer or further away? And so we define all of those steps. We put a date and a dollar value, and then what we want to do is look at what do we have now? What are our current assets? What are our current bills? What’s our current cashflow look like? Then we’re basically doing the Google Maps thing to go, “Okay, based off where we want to go and where we’re at now, how long is it going to take us to get there? Can we fund everything in the way that we’ve defined.” Once we’ve done that, then we can figure out how to optimize, right?
So to me, once we’ve done the math and we go, “Okay, well, through your tax planning, I can help you save 50 grand, a hundred grand a year. How much does that cut off from the timeline to get you to the final destination?” Maybe that solves the entire problem, if so, awesome. Sometimes that’s the case, sometimes it isn’t. Then we look at, “Okay, we’ve done the tax optimization, we’ve done reconfiguration of your expenses, so on and so forth, then how much more in sales do we need to generate, right? People do the opposite of that. When the answer is not readily invert, do the opposite. Sales isn’t necessary, we always just go, “I need more marketing.”
Rob Kosberg:
Income.
Dan Nicholson:
But what if we did the opposite? What if we just optimize what we have now, saw how far away we are, and then back solve for how much more we actually need to make?
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. I love that. Coming off this crazy year that we’ve all experienced. We decided back in March of last year, as a company, Best Seller Publishing, to pretty drastically cut our advertising and marketing. And in fact, last year we cut it by about a half a million bucks. I made more money last year, with less sales, but not significantly less. Our sales dropped five to 10%, but because of that $500,000 cut in marketing, I put more money in my pocket even given the nuttiness of the last 12 months. And I think that’s a great example. Of course, I backed into and stumbled into it. I probably should have looked at the Certainty App and had a conversation with you, maybe I would’ve done it a long time ago. So I love that. I am prove in that putting right there.
Dan Nicholson:
Awesome. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that. That’s a really good example of how we, I call it naming the puppies. Have you ever adopted a puppy before, or?
Rob Kosberg:
Oh, my dog is right behind me. I love my dogs.
Dan Nicholson:
So, if you go down to adopt a puppy or you look at Petfinder, or something like that, and you see the one that you want and you give it a name. Like that’s your puppy, right? You’re not leaving. What’s your dog’s name?
Rob Kosberg:
Bob.
Dan Nicholson:
I love that. I love either serious names or ridiculous names. Bob is awesome. Our dog’s name is Pickles.
Rob Kosberg:
Nice. Love it.
Dan Nicholson:
But you give that dog a name, like you’re not leaving without that dog.
Rob Kosberg:
Oh, no.
Dan Nicholson:
That’s your dog, right? Bob is coming home, Pickles is coming home with you, that’s your dog. We have so many puppies in our business. Those ideas that we had, things we bought, investments that we’ve made, that maybe become ours and we get anchored to them and we can’t let them go and it ends up costing us more. I have this whole process called cashflow engineering that I do for our clients in sort of once a quarter going. We’re basically looking for, it sounds bad when you carry the analogy through, where all the puppies you have in your business.
Rob Kosberg:
That we can get rid of. Oh no, you’re getting rid of the puppies, Dan.
Dan Nicholson:
We’re getting rid of the puppies, the metaphorical puppies. But we have so many of them and it can be a good example of that, where if you hold this for a long time, it was essential, but is it still essential? And what is the data actually telling us? We strategize next to you without actually compiling and analyzing.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. No, I love that. Like I said, I’m a marketing person by nature. Obviously that served me very well in my business, but it also, being the entrepreneur that I am, I always do the ADD thing and I’ve got 11 different ideas for new ads and new campaigns and I had all of this fat and fluff. We cut it because we didn’t know what would happen when the pandemic first hit. We cut 40,000 in a month and I’m like, “Wow, we made about the same number of sales. Let’s cut it again next month to see what happens.” And before you know it, we’re like, Geez, all of this was fat. All of these were my puppy projects, using your analogy, that weren’t really amounting to any real dollars in the company.
Dan Nicholson:
Correct. Yep.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. Love that. Let shift gears for just a second, there’s kind of two phases to this. There’s, what’s your magic and what do you do? And I love the stuff that you do. But then there’s also, how do you do it for yourself? More specifically, Publish, Promote, Profit, the name of the podcast is, how are you using content, your books, your podcast, your appearances, et cetera, to make yourself more famous, right? Hit the thought leadership celebrity and attract people into your business. Talk to me a little bit about that because you do do a number of things to get your message out there.
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah. When I first started the accounting firm, about 11 years ago, I went to a bunch of networking events. And I found that if I just introduce myself as… Some people are like, “What do you do?” I’d say, “Oh, I want an accounting firm.” It was like I just introduced myself as the most boring person in the room. Like, “Okay, cool. Got it. You’re super boring. I’m going to go find somebody else because there’s like an hour this networking event.”
Rob Kosberg:
Right.
Dan Nicholson:
So I realized that I needed to do something different. And so I started introducing myself as a non-conventional accountant, or I would say businessperson. Either one people would be like, “What is a non-conventional accountant or businessperson?” People would just laugh because they’re like, “That’s the most generic thing I’ve ever heard? Like, businessperson.” You mentioned the fellowship in my bio, when I did the fellowship of the board writing all the accounting standards, it’s just out of college. The board is in Norwalk, Connecticut, which is right outside of Greenwich. It’s like the second richest County in the US. Not a lot in 22 year olds, so the dating scene also it’s pretty grim, right? You go out and you tell someone you’re writing an accounting standard. It’s probably the least marketable thing, right?
So I would say businessperson or something, “What is that?” So I realized that I had to number one, differentiate myself in some way where people weren’t already pre-framed to some notion and then find a way to get my content out there in a way that people would listen to it. And so podcasts, and speaking engagements, and then creating kind of an ecosystem around the book were all things that I started doing to differentiate myself. So I have these silly things like naming the puppy or something that I call the Two Oreo Principle, which is actually just about compound interest. But if I say, “Let me tell you about compound interest.” He’s like, “I could not be less interested in that.” But if I say, “Let me tell you about my Two Oreo principle.” Most people like Oreos.
Rob Kosberg:
Oh, whatcha got?
Dan Nicholson:
So the way I’ve tried to amplify, I can get to more people. So the old networking, face-to-face, that’s a pretty slow process and it’s pretty hit or miss. So I can build the same types of relationships through content creation, as long as I convey things where it makes it clear that I’m different. The more that I talk about being an accountant, the more that I talk about taxes and I use conventional terms, the more people tune me out. The more that I rebrand things basically. So I have a whole set of principles, concepts. They’re just a rebrand on concepts that you already know about just with a story behind it, so that’s sort of been my approach at it. All was informed by dating just out of college and then starting a business and having the same outcomes where people were like, “Got it. You’re pretty boring.” I said, “No, I’m only kind of boring. I’m not really boring. Just kind of boring. Give me a shot here.”
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. I love your take on things, very unique. I’m sure it’s attractive to people. Give me some results like, how does your podcast help you with your business? Do you send people through a funnel of sorts? Are you on a regular basis being contacted on social media. “Hey I need your help.” “Hey, I heard the Two Oreo principle. I want to have a conversation about it.” What’s all that look like?
Dan Nicholson:
It’s sort of a flywheel where it all builds on itself an intersects. I try to be on a few shows a month. Sometimes it’s a push to do it in a concentrated period of time if I have something coming out, just to create a momentum. My ad spend is a video view ad spend, and-
Rob Kosberg:
Then retargeting.
Dan Nicholson:
Right. Exactly. So someone will watch typically three different videos that I have before I’ll make any sort of offer to them. My kind of people will listen to the longer form, three to five minute videos, longer episodes. I just offer a bunch of value, but it’s my own version and it’s something slightly different and then I’ll make the offer.
Rob Kosberg:
Tell me about your offers. Like what kind of offer are you making? Is it a free giveaway or is it something you’re selling after they watch your videos?
Dan Nicholson:
Good question. So I have the accounting firm at the Nth Degree CPAs.
Rob Kosberg:
Yep.
Dan Nicholson:
And then I have a business called Certainty U, which is a bunch of digital products that teach the operating systems and teach some of the strategies, some of which are tax strategies as well. It’s basically a digital product business. It also owns the certification program that we just launched, where you can become a certified certainty advisor, basically to know how to use my methodologies and it’s not just accounting specific. People want to hire a marketing person who’s going to help them get closer to the things that they want. They want to hire a systems engineer, that’s going to get you closer to the things that you want. And then I have the app. So those are my main businesses and they actually all are interconnected, right?
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, they feed on one another.
Dan Nicholson:
Yep, exactly. So if you come into Certainty U, and you watch some of this stuff, eventually you buy the app because you want to implement it. And then at some point you raise your hand and say, “Can you just do it for me with your CPA firm?” Or you come in with the CPA firm and I say, “Hey, for us to best serve you. I need to get you set up on the app. And Oh, by the way, here’s some other courses and trainings and stuff that we do that amplify us working together in our CPA firm.” And so on and so forth. So they’re all interconnected, it’s basically an ecosystem ultimately around the idea of certainty. Typically, I push people into Certainty U, cheaper products, we have a bunch of free resources and so a lot of folks may either get a free resource or one of our cheaper products. It says, $7 or $49 product. And then they will show up to some of our live Q&A’s and then graduate to our more expensive program and then eventually they buy the app and become a client. So typically pushing people through my paid advertising into Certainty U.
Rob Kosberg:
Love it. Now the book’s not out yet, but obviously it’s coming out. You have a plan for the book. So how are you going to use the book to grow your business, to attract clients, et cetera? What’s your plan right now?
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah. So initially we did a pre-sale of the book and sold about 2,500 copies. We used a tool called Publishizer, we actually set the platform records for most sales. I wouldn’t be living up to my name or my brand of Rigging the Game if I didn’t rig the game to make sure that we have-
Rob Kosberg:
The book did well.
Dan Nicholson:
… momentum on the book. You know way more about this than I do, so I’m probably speaking out of depth. But I’m using the book in a few different angles. One is an authority piece. Ultimately, though I want to teach people the methodologies. How do you create sustained financial certainty? Because then you’re going to want to use the app or my CPA firm. I really try to push people to the app. So I actually built Certainty U when I started writing the book because I wanted to sell the app.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah.
Dan Nicholson:
The app is a long-term home run play, potentially. I’m trying to get enough momentum on the book for people to know about what we’re doing, so they’re going to want to use the app.
Rob Kosberg:
Love it. I’m sure you’ve seen free plus shipping funnels, that would be a great strategy. What’s the cost of the app?
Dan Nicholson:
Right now it’s 97 bucks for a year.
Rob Kosberg:
So you could run a free plus shipping funnel, get people into the front end of your book. Books free, $7.95 for shipping. Then you can do a number of upsells. 97 bucks for a year, as one of your upsells that directly connects to the content of book is not that difficult a sale. It’s a great add on, plus you have a lot of other content that you could offer. Obviously, an audio version of the book is a great upsell. My Publish Promote Profit book funnel, we’ve done about $3 million in the last 14 to 16 months just in that one funnel. Of course, that’s not selling books. Although, we have pushed probably 20,000 books in that period of time, but it’s all the backend. Our courses, but primarily our Done For You services, which is, I guess, akin to your accounting. If you haven’t thought about that, you totally should, it would be a great fit for you.
Dan Nicholson:
That’s awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, my pleasure. I know it would work. It’s a great offer with the stuff that you’re doing. And the app sounds exciting. I’m actually going to go on and get it myself. So you’ll have to tell us where to get it and all of that.
Dan Nicholson:
Sure.
Rob Kosberg:
If that’s where you want people to go, then that’s a place they should. And I bet from the standpoint of getting a great degree of being able to do it yourself, the app must… Maybe take a minute and describe what the app is and what I’m going to engage with when I go buy it after this podcast.
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah. So the idea of the app is that it’s, as far as I know, the first app of its kind that connects your personal priorities and finances with your businesses. So step one is defining your unique wealth algorithm, one of the things you’re trying to fund. So setting up all those priorities, your core priorities, your preference-based priorities, connecting your bank accounts and different assets, cashflow. So you can see in a dashboard, am I getting closer or further away from funding all those priorities. In other words can I hit those targets and if not, how much additional cash do I need to make each year to be able to hit those dates. And if you change the dates or you add new priorities. Maybe you thought you wanted a half a million dollar house, now you want a $750,000 house. How does that change how much you need to make? That’s the personal side.
And then on the business side you connect, and these are new things that we’re rolling out, connect your businesses. And you can see how implementing some of the strategies, re-engineering your cashflow, so on and so forth will generate more cash for you and by having more cash, how does that impact your timelines, your dashboard, your priorities.
Rob Kosberg:
Love that.
Dan Nicholson:
So if connect in showing the changes tweaks you make to business, is it actually getting you closer to funding those priorities. We think they are, but maybe they’re not. So you’ll be able to see line items of how the changes impacted your timeline.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. I’m sorry. I’m excited about it. I love the idea. Obviously, look, I have financial advisors, I have a CPA I’ve worked with for a long time and I have a pretty successful multi-million dollar business. But taking the time to really figure out, “Okay, what do I want?” I’m 56, so I’m not a kid. So, “Okay, you know what?” I’m not looking to retire or sell everything, but you do want to have a deadline on some of this stuff, right?
Dan Nicholson:
Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s not to say that those deadlines are fixed, the reality is that we move the goalposts. Someone might think that, “Oh, this is all that I need. I’ve got it.” And then six months, I call it voting with your money. I went through this exercise on numerous times with one person in particular who told me, “Oh, my number one priority is that I want to pay off my family farm. I want to pay it off.” “Okay, cool.” We go through the whole exercise of optimization and we show her, “Okay, here we can actually generate enough cash, redirect what you are going to pay to the IRS. You can pay off your farm. So let’s execute that.” She said, “Well, actually what I want to do is move to California.” Cool. No right or wrong, but the exercise of actually getting your priorities and then showing you how you can fund it, then you have to actually vote with your money and take the next step, gives you that clarity of what you really want.
Rob Kosberg:
Right.
Dan Nicholson:
If we know, and sometimes we’re right. But more times than not, when we actually go to cash the check we realized that’s not what I want to do after all.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah.
Dan Nicholson:
So being able to see it and visualize it is key.
Rob Kosberg:
Dan, great stuff on both ends. I love what you’re doing to drive growth for your business. I love what your business is as well. Very, very needed. Most entrepreneurs are like herding cats. I’m sure you know that better than me. So tell us where can people get the app? Where can they learn more about you? Where do you want to direct us?
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah, shockingly, I was able to get the domain, certaintyapp.com.
Rob Kosberg:
Nice.
Dan Nicholson:
If you want the app, certaintyapp.com is the place to go. A ton of new features coming out, some I’m really excited about. You think on virtual lines bank accounts where you can take one account, but make it look like you’ve got five or six based off risk buckets. We’re trying to do something like Profit First. It’s a more efficient way to do it without opening 20 accounts. So a bunch of stuff, go in there.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. I got a buddy that does Profit First and he’s just so annoyed by having to have so many bank accounts rolling at the same time and quite honestly, that’s why I chose not to do it, so that’s good.
Dan Nicholson:
I’ve got my own angle on it. I call it dynamic bank accounts. And the idea is that you set specific rules for how much you want to have in those accounts. I want to have three times average payroll and so then as your payroll goes up to that amount, you need to have a reserve, that target goes up. And so then you can use the app and these rules to figure out, how much can I actually afford. And so, if I’m underfunded in my payroll reserve maybe I can’t afford to hire someone right now. So I’m trying to do two things. I’m trying to use virtual bank accounts for decision-making, there’s something called the mental accounting bias that says, if we don’t do this, we’re going to violate basic economic principles. So trying to use the reserves or the virtualized accounts to tell me what I can and can’t afford to do, and also for it to prevent bad things from happening. So it tells me not to do something before I do it.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. You won’t prevent bad things.
Dan Nicholson:
Yeah. Profit First is one of those things where you have to be super disciplined about it, otherwise the bad things will happen.
Rob Kosberg:
Right.
Dan Nicholson:
That’s not necessarily a system that’s perfectly designed to create the outcomes that you want.
Rob Kosberg:
Right. Since most entrepreneurs are not perfectly disciplined with things.
Dan Nicholson:
You look at something like Kolbe A Index, if you’re familiar.
Rob Kosberg:
I am, yeah.
Dan Nicholson:
Most entrepreneurs are not high on Follow Thru and high on Fact Finder.
Rob Kosberg:
No.
Dan Nicholson:
They are high on Quick Start or maybe Implementation. Well, guess who tends to do really well at Profit First, people who are really high Follow Thru or high Fact-Finders. Not most entrepreneurs, super rigid structure. So you got to meet people at their point of need, design a system based off their disposition, otherwise they’ll feel a bunch of shame because, “I should be able to do this. Everyone else is doing it.” Well no, this system just doesn’t work for you due to differences.
Rob Kosberg:
Love it. Great stuff, my friend. Thank you. So certaintyapp.com. Anything else you want to give them, or is that the best place for all of us to start?
Dan Nicholson:
You can go to Certainty U as well, we got a bunch of free resources there.
Rob Kosberg:
Great. certaintyu.com, certaintyapp.com. Love it. Hey, thanks for taking some time with us. Great insights. Love your sarcastic wit and I’m going to check out your podcast too. Thanks brother. Appreciate it.
Dan Nicholson:
My pleasure.
