The subscriptions costing startups up to $15,000 a year

Hello Micholas, thanks for having me.

It's it's the story of my past eight years. I was really lucky to get into startup world, which is quite different than the regular business world. It's different mindset, different type of people, and it functions quite differently, which a lot of people who are in startup are watching us, they say yes, exactly. and I worked in that industry for about six years. And after my last venture with a startup called Athenian has ended, I had a a choice whether I go and find a job for myself or I start something of my own. And I was very lucky because my network reached out to me and said, you know what? We have couple of projects that you might be interested in to support. And so I got one project, they were like, We need some financial help. We need, you know, we have no idea how to run our finances. Can you just can you help us out? And then the second one came in and they like, we we need help. We have had this more of a senior bookkeeper doing our finances. They are standardized, but they're not giving us the right picture. Can you help us? And that's where I clearly saw there's a need for startups to work with financial people who understand how startups work and what they need, which is quite different from a standard business. And I talked with my partner who is also my co-founder. And we decided to open up EIM. We have now servicing eight startups on a regular basis, and we have about nine projects that kinda come and go depending on their need.

Well it's it's different from the first of all mindset. you see things differently. You you don't see things as they appear, you rather see things as something that you can improve, something that you can work on, and you're constantly looking for the problem to solve. And this mindset puts you Like it provides a different vibe. When you're talking to people who are in this industry, the the conversations are a bit different. You you kind of you don't really talk much about children or what you did shopping on the trips that you went on. It's more about what was the last problem that you saw, what was the really cool improvement that you have implemented, what are the other other people working on? It's again, it's it's this different kind of energy and you're always so energized. You're always your mind is always like pumping with ideas. And I love it because that's how my mind works. And I always thought that my mind is just racing, but in reality is I it's like I found a place where I belong, because that's how all other people are in this environment.

Say they don't understand it, I would say they leave it as something. I would say they leave it for the last, and then they face the consequences of dealing with a lot of pressure all at once. Where my methodologies we come in, we do it early on at a much more reasonable price, as opposed to doing it later for much more expensive. And I preach financial awareness. a lot of people who are in startup and we miss mostly deal with founders, they're all about I need to build my product, I need to sell, I need investors. But for the first and the second thing is you still need financial data for that, and you absolutely need financial data for the investors, right? So they're chasing on the product they're chasing to be unique, but they forget that you you need to account for it as well. And that's where we come in. We we try to make it easy and explain that finance is not scary. It's it's simple if you do it in a timely manner.

No, we're busy all the time.

As very accounting as it's gonna sound like. We always start with chart of the accounts. I know this is very sounds very boring, but it's kind of like a table of content in a book. It tells you right away I can spot a lot of problems right off the bat by just looking at the chart of the accounts, because it tells me do they Have they been following just the standard bookkeeping practices, or have they upgraded to the startup level of understanding what their financials tell them? because there are certain accounts that startups have to have, especially tech startups who we primarily deal with, in order to really understand how they are performing. And obviously those accounts are should be in chart of the accounts. If I see that they have just a standard chart of the accounts, you know, that that was pre-built in QuickBooks, I know there's a lot of work to do because first of all we have to not just create accounts, but then we need to start going through all of the transactions that they have had for the past whatever period we're working with and split them in the right places.

a hundred percent. Well, first of all, having regular financial awareness, like for example, you make sure that your month end is closed, that gives you a great opportunity to understand ROE on any of your actions. let's say that last month you started doing advertisement on Google. You have seen on sales side. That you have received 10 leads. Now you know that cost per lead. Now you can make a strategic financial and revenue decision saying, does that cost per lead really makes make sense? If it does, let's invest more. that's just one of the examples. Another example is understanding how much you're spending on a product. Is your is your spend on a product validates does it validate your pricing to the clients. Are are you actually getting revenue or are you just, you know, doing zero money, your z zero profit? because as a startup you don't really charge the market price. You usually start below that. And you need to really understand how much below are you? How much are you losing per every client? And where do you need to s when do you need to start having your pricing reviewed and increased. that's just the basic things. The second thing is if you're looking for investors, just having financial metrics in your head will get you like it can be either you get a meeting with an investor or be like, I just like investor think of somebody that he met in the event. because like that's the things that they ask. What is your gross profit margin? What is your abitta? What is your revenue? What is your ARR? If you cannot come up with it off the top of your head, they they don't really want to talk to you. If you can be like, my my ARR is this annual recurrent revenue for those who don't know, and and you are like excited about this number is. They'll be like, okay, that's the person I want to talk to. They have things under control. They want to talk to founders that have things under control. And I guess the last piece is yes, the control. You have control of your numbers. I have a lot of examples where we would come in and we start talking to founders, say, here's the financial review that we did, and we noticed that you're spending here and here and here. And they're like, What? I thought I cancelled it like a year ago. And we're like, well if you thought so that well you spent about a few thousand that you were not didn't know that you were spending. So and and that actually happens so often. We sometimes cut we can cut between two thousand to fifteen thousand of per per year just by going through like a list of subscriptions. Because people forget they subscribe for things. They forget where they left their credit card. And that's because they don't look at the financials. They have no idea. Like that's maybe $20, $30 that you spend on Chat GPT, that seems like nothing because it's per month. But when you look at your annual budget, that's actually becoming a more significant number. And yeah, it's

It's crazy how you're like

we use it a lot. well, to your point of AI is not gonna be replacing people, I think it's kinda not accurate. I would say right now, if you look at the workforce, when the company is higher, they they don't even consider people who are not using AI. So I don't think AI will r fully replace people, but in order to be successful, you have to use it. It's kind of like back you know, 20 years ago, having a Microsoft Office experience was a must. You must know how to work with Word document. So it's the same thing. You must know how to work with AI in order to be able to find a job. Right? So that's that's where that's the reality of the job market right now. But in terms of how we use it internally, well we use it first of all for helping us with generating marketing content so for helping us publish all the articles online. we also use it to build we're working kinda on automated product structure for the future vision, I guess. and so it helps us process some of the work that we do faster. I would not say it does everything for us, it's not there yet, but that's the goal. the goal is to get it to the point where all we have to do is approve things and review things, not doing bookkeeping ourselves because it is capable of that. even at this point it is capable of doing a bunch of financial things on its own if you set it up correctly. that's a big if you set it up correctly. There's a lot of work that goes in there. It's not as easy. But I do see I do understand that if if our company is not gonna be using AI, we're gonna be left behind. We're not going to be able to survive more than maybe two, three years. So using AI gives us a competitive advantage.

I think the biggest use case that we have seen for so far, and it's actually not on the financial side. So we have the second side of the business where we help startups implement cybersecurity and maintain cybersecurity, mostly the administrative part. And so we find that if you know cybersecurity space, which you do, It has a lot of documents. You have to have a lot of policies, procedures, controls, supporting evidence, all of that in place. And that was the biggest successful use case of AI, where we used it to help us not just set those documents up. update them, review them, make sure that the consistency is there, the language is this is there. it was a lot of work even with AI, but I'm just thinking like imagine going through 60, 80, 100 of documents just by reading it, you will go crazy. I I I honestly do not know how people did it back in the day without AI. Because just reading that six, seven page document with that lang like plain language of how you should set up your computer, your workplace, how everything has to be run, it's it's very boring. Like your brain just not able to support that much of a tension span. And so having AI help you read those documents, manage them. is it was amazing, it it was great, like you feel empowered.

So with the company, and I think this would be actually applicable to a lot of service providers, we are going to move into AI supported sorry, AI support service. No, not that's not the right wording. AI backed service. so what it would what it looks like is we're gonna have a product which is AI-based product that would support us providing the service. And I think that's the only way for our company to really survive in and actually do something, become something, and not Just because AI is technically our competitor right now. you can use it for accounting, you can actually have AI do invoicing. I don't think you can do like all of the bookkeeping part, but it can do a lot of financial tasks already. And so then the question to us is of like what is the value of people working with us? And so we have to really now stand out and be like, Yes, AI can do things for you, but We are the experts. We know what you need. AI can only know what you need based on your input and you don't know what you need sometimes. Right? And so that's where like we're the experts, empowered by AI. We can do this for you. That's why you want to work with us. Because you're not just getting your books done, you're getting an analysis, you're getting business advice, you know what direction you're going in, going in.

Ha ha ha

there's several places. First of all, our website you can send a form. it has it it goes directly into my email. I'll I'll get that information. I'll be happy to chat with anybody. I don't always try to sell. for me the priority is always to have people succeed. And sometimes people reach out to me who are just thinking to start a business and I'll give them kind couple of pointers and they're good for the whole year by themselves and then they come back to me and they say I'm ready now to to to to hand this off to you. so that's one way. The second is LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn you can if you can just linked linked in my name, it will be really easy to find me. and yeah those are the two really easy ways to connect with me.

Well thank you for having me, Mikolas. I'm really happy we get to connect and to talk today.