Behind the CXO Title: Chris Dardi on Building Something Bigger Than Himself

Anderson Williams: Welcome to Bigger. Stronger. Faster. the podcast exploring how Shore Capital Partners brings billion-dollar resources to the lower middle market space. In this episode, I talk with Chris Dardi, a graduate of the Shore Capital CXO Fellows program and at the time of recording the Chief Financial Officer at Behavioral Innovations, Chris has since become the Chief Operating Officer at BI. 

Chris describes his experiences in consulting and what he was looking for that drove him out of consulting back to business school and into the CXO Fellows Program. Chris says he wanted to build something. He wanted to be a part of something bigger. He wanted to have a lasting impact, as you’ll hear, he’s achieved resounding success in those aspirations. 

Chris shares what he had to learn and how he had to adjust as he took on a new role in a new industry and in a rapidly growing company that still had a ton to figure out. He talks about the importance of process, discipline, and adaptability in his successful transition into the CFO role and the critical support he had from the Shore Network to expedite his growth and development. 

Chris share’s insight on the role the CFO plays in the exit process and his key lessons learned from that experience. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he shares the most important advice he ever received, which was this. When you’re juggling a lot of balls like you do in a microcap business, make sure you know which ones are glass and which ones are rubber. 

Chris, will you just introduce yourself and share what you do and where you do it?  

Chris Dardi: Of course. So, I’m Chris Dardi. I am the Chief Financial Officer at Behavioral Innovations, which is a center-based provider of applied behavior analysis therapy, more commonly known as ABA therapy for children diagnosed with autism. We currently operate 90 clinics across three states.  

Anderson Williams: And how did you get involved in that business in the first place?  

Chris Dardi: It really kind of came down to probably my journey into the CXO Program, which I’ll kind of maybe jump into a little bit. So I started off my career as an accountant at KPMG working on financial due diligence for primarily private equity clients. 

And so what that really meant was that we would get engaged on a project, we’d jump in to kind of evaluate the financial health of a potential acquisition target. Really get to understand the business, understand their customer base, understand not only their risks, but what are the opportunities that might exist for our clients. 

In most cases, we’d develop a hundred day plan, and then once that was all done, we’d issue a report, we’d put it on the shelf and we’d go on to the next project. And I had a ton of fun doing that. Had a great team, loved the work. I was doing it. But as I started progressing my career, I got to the point where I really wanted to see what happened. 

If we gotta see that plan through, or like I’d love to be involved in executing on this great idea that we came up with. And that just wasn’t the role that I had at KPMG. And so that made me start thinking, okay, what do I want to do next? And I remember particularly one meeting that we were having with one of our clients who was the CFO of a chain of vet hospitals. 

And I just remember sitting across from him thinking, this is the coolest job ever. How do I get more involved or do something similar to him? And I had no clue at the time, but that was kind of what really started my journey to go to business school and then to eventually get connected with the Shore Capital team and join the CXO Program. 

Anderson Williams: What was it that was so cool about it? Do you remember? Like what was it that you were sitting there going, yeah, this feels like the thing. 

Chris Dardi: Because we were going through and typically we’re looking at like historical financials and talking about performance, and they had just gone through rapid growth. They had built this remarkable network of hospitals and over 200 that they had built from basically nothing.  

And it was just really cool to see the impact that they were able to have over a long period of time. And that was something for me that’d be really cool, I thought at the time, and I think reflecting back in BI and my experiences there, it’s definitely kind of been the case of being able to look back and say, wow, I built something, or at least was part of building something that was much bigger than myself and will have lasting impact well beyond me. 

And I just thought that doing something like that would be so awesome and would love to kind of figure out a way to get closer to doing that. And that’s kind of what sparked that journey for me.  

Anderson Williams: And was that idea of impact, what drew you to Behavioral Innovations in particular as you considered your CXO placement? Or talk us through a little bit about the industries you were considering or looking at as you considered placement from the CXO Program.  

Chris Dardi: I think maybe one thing just to level set on is, you know, when I joined the CXO Program, it was very different than the day. So I joined in 2019 and at the time when I joined, there was, you know, only one other CXO in place and there’s four of us that joined as part of like the first true cohort. And so it was less of like a broader, I think, matching process as is today, but it was more of a conversation with a Shore team around, Hey, what are some interesting businesses that might be a good fit? 

And Behavioral Innovations was the first one that kind of came up as, you know, they have a need. Seems like it could be a really good fit for you, Chris, go meet the team, see if this is something you’re interested in. And at the time I knew a little bit about ABA therapy, but not a lot. And so I did a bunch of research before meeting with the team and really started falling in love with the idea and the mission that we were trying to do here. 

And then also just the opportunity in white space that existed in the market. And you know, just the need to have a provider who come in and help support these children in need. It just really felt like a really powerful mission. And from there I, you know, met the team and clicked with our leadership team there. Went down to meet the team in Dallas, convinced my wife that Dallas would be a great place for us to go move to and then the rest is history.  

Anderson Williams: And will you just pause for a moment and say a little bit more about BI for those who don’t know the technical terms of the kinds of services you provide, as well as just a sense of the market, as you mentioned, stepping into that particular market. 

Will you just give us a little bit of a snapshot of that?  

Chris Dardi: As a provider of ABA therapy, it’s intensive one-on-one therapy for children diagnosed with autism. Anywhere from 10 to 40 hours a week. We’ll have these kids in our centers. We’re working one-on-one where there is a therapist directly working with them on, you know, behavior reduction, skill acquisition, kind of everything to kind of get them prepared to ultimately graduate from our program with the goal of being able to go into a kindergarten class with neurotypical peers and be able to kind of be effective in communication.  

And so that’s really what a BI therapy is focused on. And so we’re dealing with children anywhere from 18 months to 10 years of age and really trying to help them develop the skills necessary to be independent and live a full life. 

Anderson Williams: As you stepped into that role from KPMG in the background and stepping into an early version of the CXO Program, what were the big transitions you felt like you had to make as you stepped in again to an individual company that you are now a part of and it wasn’t a project-based kind of construct and a company that does such important and intensive and highly personal work. 

Just any thoughts on. The transition, the mindset, the skillset that you had to develop to make that jump.  

Chris Dardi: Maybe it’s helpful to kind of give a little more context of what kind of business challenges we were also facing at the time, and so we’re maybe a little different than many of the other Shore businesses, is that we’re not out there trying to buy other ABA providers. 

You know, combine them together and build a larger company. We are going in on a grassroots basis, building up de novos. So we’re going out, we’re finding good sites, we’re signing leases, we’re hiring staff, we’re training employees. We’re bringing in BCBAs and we’re kind of growing those from the ground up. 

And so when I joined 2019, we are kind of just midway through that growth spurt. And so we, you know, Shore had invested in 2017 with 13 locations by the end of 2018, Behavioral Innovations at 18 and then in 2019 we opened 21 new locations to get to 39. And so when I joined, we had just opened our 29th location. 

And so we had really developed this like impressive, you know what we called our de novo playbook that allowed us. To really select great sites, figure out how to open them and start operating them. But what we hadn’t really fully yet developed was all the operational processes and systems and even the people kind of development on the backend that would be required to operate 39 locations at scale, which was significantly bigger than the organization had been two years earlier. 

And so a lot of the early challenges I came in were, how do we really kind of ingest this growth? Figure out a way to build structure around this and make sure that we could staff and kind of grow these clinics. And so that was kind of some of the big challenges that I faced early on.  

And I think from a mind shift standpoint, it’s coming in, you know, I had a lot of experience at KPMG before, but I had very little experience directly in healthcare. I had very little experience in any of the functional areas that we were kind of working in the business, and so a lot of it was just coming in with an open mindset, being a sponge and soaking up as much knowledge from everyone who was at the company who when I started, every single person knew more about the business than I did, and slowly developed that business knowledge as well as just figured out how to find ways to make people’s lives easier, create value, and kind of work towards that ultimate goal of helping the business scale. 

Anderson Williams: And it’s pretty safe to say even an early version of the CXO Program, that your role initially was probably just to go in and figure stuff out.  

Chris Dardi: Yeah.  

Anderson Williams: With that kind of rapid growth.  

Chris Dardi: My title was Chief Strategy Officer, but I think the role was actually like exactly what kind of our more typical CXO role was. Is come in, help the leadership team figure out what the biggest challenges are, and figure out a way to either help solve them plug gaps, or like create value through tackling the biggest problems that existed for the company today. 

Anderson Williams: So it sounded like a lot of those challenges and opportunities really with that kind of growth early in the de novo process were a lot of operational challenges. How did you make the transition into the CFO position and when did that happen, and give us a little bit of context for that.  

Chris Dardi: I think a lot of it was around kind of the opportunistic mindset that I had, and so I came in with some ideas of the things I wanted to do with the business, but I realized very quickly that the thoughts and ideas I had for the business didn’t actually line up with where our needs were. And so I kind of changed my mindset to be, okay, where can I plug in and add the most value?  

And so I started doing that across a couple different functions. The first thing I did was took over a patient access team. And so started kind of building that streamlined process because we had put all these locations in the ground, we didn’t really have a great way to get patients into the locations to start seeing services. And so that was one of the first things I did.  

And then from that, I had an opportunity to take over our prior authorizations team, which is. You know, tangential to the intake process, you can’t get into a center if you don’t have an authorization. And then prior authorization’s also very tangential to revenue cycle. And so we were in the process of in-house revenue cycle, we were coming across some challenges. And so I figured, okay, I think I kind of can figure this out. I don’t know anything about revenue cycle, but it’s related to the authorization process. It’s important to the business, so let’s go figure it out. 

And so I took over our revenue cycle function and so kind of just was taking on different aspects of the business. And then when the CFO role opened up, it made a lot of sense for me to try to jump into that next because I was already doing a lot of the things that were tangentially related to the role, just wasn’t doing finance and accounting. 

And so it made that process easier and so it was a lot of just luck and opportunity kind of coming together. And I’d say the one advice I’d have is like, you don’t necessarily know where the opportunities are gonna come in the CXO Program, but if you jump on the big ones that come, good things will come your way. 

Anderson Williams: I have to laugh because as you talk about that trajectory and that evolution, if someone had told you you were gonna have to grow and learn that much that fast before you started the job, would you have been like, oh Lord, no. That seems like way too much because that seems like a ton.  

Chris Dardi: It’s one of the things where it’s like you don’t really realize kind of all the things you’re doing, and I think looking back all the stuff that was breaking or going wrong together, it was like, I don’t know what I was thinking. 

Just kind of jumping on and doing it. But at some point you just keep moving and as long as you’re kind of continuing to lock and tackle, put things together and build from that, like next thing you know it, you’re kind of, you’re starting to walk, you’re starting to run, and then you’re kind of off to the races. 

Anderson Williams: And say a little bit about how that, I’ll just call it training and reality, prepared you to be a CFO. I think that there are some, perhaps misconceptions about the role the CFO plays. What did you learn in that process that made you a better CFO, a better finance leader on the back end of it?  

Chris Dardi: I think a lot of the skills that you learn as A CXO are running any function also apply to, you know, being the CFO, I think a lot of it’s all around being disciplined, having a process, whether that’s, you know, from financial forecasting, from cash management, like you gotta have a process, you gotta be disciplined, and you also gotta be able to adapt quickly when things don’t go the way you expect it. 

And so I think a lot of that just kind of approach I took to, you know, tackling problems as CXO translated really well as a CFO, and then I think that’s where the Shore ecosystem really helps. Whereas, you know, the CXO, there’s a lot of times things didn’t go the way I thought, or I wasn’t really sure what the next step was and that’s where having, you know, a cohort of peers who were tackling very similar problems, having the same type of challenges that I could talk to, you know, collaborate with, think through ideas. And have more confidence coming back to my company and being able to tackle those problems and knowing that, well, we were gonna find a solution. 

And the same thing is the case with the CFO role. There’s a lot of different things that come at you or changes or you know, you’re forecasting for something and the business changes or there’s a difference that happens and you gotta be ready to react. And having, you know, the CFO cohort as well at Shore, where there’s, you know, 40 plus other CFOs that you can go to and bounce ideas off of, think through, how are you guys handling these, whether it’s a software problem, people problem, like how do you think about forecasting cash in these scenarios? 

It’s just great to have someone else that you can bounce ideas off of and then come back to your business and run it with confidence.  

Anderson Williams: Well, I love the fact that I get to talk with you at this point and hear about the journey and all of the learning from 2019 and those early stages where so much is messy and changing and figuring stuff out. 

And for me anyway, as fun as it gets, but as challenging as it gets but then you’ve been there long enough now that Behavioral Innovations has become very successful, has had a very successful exit, and now you’re on the other side of an exit process, and so it’s like you see those gritty early days and now you’ve kind of come through to the other side of this process. 

Will you say a little bit about what that exit process was like from your position?  

Chris Dardi: I had a lot of experience, you know, going through deal processes and transactions when I was at KPMG, you know, I was on the other side of it, but I had a kind of a sense of what it would be like going through the process as a leader of one of the companies. 

And I think I probably underestimated just the level of difficulty and challenge that kind of goes into kind of all the way from the beginning and all the way to final closing and everything that’s involved in a transaction process. I was used to kind of the short diligence aspect of it, but it’s really, you know, for us it was a full nine month cycle from kind of start to finish to initial prep, pulling things together, having fireside chats, management meetings, going through diligence kind of, final closing items working through contract, and so it’s a really expansive process. 

As CFO you’re really the quarterback of that process while every functional leader has a role to play and is usually involved at some point in the process. But the CFO is really the one who’s kind of seen it all the way through. You’re working closely with the bankers on the financial model. You’re responsible for the financial statements that are driving the valuations and you’re the one that’s in the hot seat when you’re going through diligence meetings, you know, proving out the quality of those earnings. And so it was a really challenging, but also like insightful process to go through and see what that was like on the other side. 

Anderson Williams: I bet you had different empathy from your KPMG days and working on the other side of the process after living it.  

Chris Dardi: Yeah. Yeah, no, it was definitely interesting to, to be sitting on the other side, getting the diligence questions that I used to ask. But I definitely had more appreciation for some of the answers and some of the people I used to be grilling questions on. So, um, it was interesting to see that kind of come through full cycle.  

Anderson Williams: Any words of wisdom or advice specifically around that exit process that you would offer to someone who’s sitting in a sure CFO seat or is looking, aspiring to be in a sure CFO seat, which of course ends in an exit at some point. Any lessons learned from that to highlight? 

Chris Dardi: I think the biggest thing is that you really cannot be prepared enough for a process while you’re never gonna answer and be able to, you know, respond to a hundred percent of the questions that come through. But the more prepared you are, the more you can answer. The more you have an understanding of every single aspect of the business or can respond to it with data, the more streamlined that process will be and the more successful it will be as well. 

And so deal readiness doesn’t begin when we hire a banker. It begins well before that and for us, it was probably about a year before that that we started thinking about and really starting to prepare, okay, what does it mean to go through an exit process? What are the things that are gonna be important? What are the areas of the business that we want to focus on and improve before we go into that process? 

And I think that really helped us have a more streamlined process and successful exit than if we had started that when we hired a banker and tried to do it. At that point, ’cause it’s sometimes it’s just too late to be able to get all that stuff together and be able to tell the story you want to tell if you haven’t been working and running the business in a way that kind of lines up with that.  

Anderson Williams: Aside from the sort of diligence and preparation process, were there things that, the exit process, pressures or otherwise that happened to your team? That you had to navigate differently than you did in a sort of day-to-day work. How did that exit process impact them? And then how did it impact or require you to lead differently through that process? 

Chris Dardi: So the challenge of running a process when you’re spending, you know, full-time job is managing through this process, working with your banker, working with, you know, buy side diligence folk working with buyers is that you still have to run your business in the day to day, and you have to make sure that your business city numbers, because if the business starts to decline, that’s gonna affect the process. 

And so that is a really challenging thing to do. And we learned that kind of firsthand, that there’s just not enough time in the day to run the business the same way that you do outside of a process when a process is taking place. And so for us, we are really fortunate that we have really great N-2’s, which for us is the, you know, the layer right below the C-suite that could pick up kind of where we weren’t able to and drive the business.  

And so it’s really important that when you’re thinking about going to an exit process, that you have a really strong team underneath your C-suite that can help drive the day to day. And when the C-suite gets distracted with the deal process, the business still operates on its own. 

And so I had a great team that I leaned very heavily into. And you also, you know, through that process, really learn a lot about your team and what their capabilities are. And when you push and stretch them to do more, it’s. Always a great thing to see when they step up to the challenge and are able to deliver for you. 

Anderson Williams: You know, one of the things that becomes so clear and so important when you have the benefit of a portfolio like Shore of 50 odd companies, is the importance of the relationship between A CFO and A CEO. How would you define that relationship and how to make that relationship work most effectively through the regular day to day, but also through like the intensity of that kind of an exit process? 

Chris Dardi: I think relationship with the CEO is so important, and I think that’s for me, definitely a key factor to some of my success. The relationship that I’ve had with our CEO, I’d say it’s the same thing for a CXO as well. I think anyone who’s kind of in the C-suite, that relationship with your CEO is so important and so critical to success. 

Our CEO is a former CFO and we also just speak the same language and are on the same page so often that it’s been really beneficial to have him mentor me throughout my career. He is also one of the reasons that made that step to CFO so much easier is ’cause I knew I had a CEO that I could turn to and ask CFO type questions and get really good answers that would allow me to go back and be successful in my role. 

But from day one, that was one of the things that worked really well, is we just clicked and had a good operational cadence, and one of the things that I suggest for anyone is just make sure you have a really defined kind of checkpoint and kind of cadence for communication with your CEO. So, me and Dino had biweekly check-ins, and we, for the most part, every two weeks for the, you know, five and a half years have been meeting to talk through this, where we’re kind of going through my list of here’s all the key priorities that I’m working on. 

Here’s the things that I see as the biggest risks. Here’s what I’m doing about this. What are your thoughts? But not only that. But here are the things that I’m not doing that either could be a problem because of X, Y, and Z, or I don’t think are a problem. I want to tackle this down the line, and kind of just roadmap that out with him of how I’m thinking about running my team, my function, and then get his feedback on agree with it, great, go with it, or, no, that’s gonna be a problem. We need to figure out how to solve this. And if that’s something that we have to take on, okay, what are the things we’ll deprioritize or how do we figure out how to solve this with other resources or through other means? And so that’s been a real helpful process that we’ve been running for the years I’ve been at BI. 

And that’s really kind of allowed us to, I think, be in sync when there’s so much going on. And also make sure that the most important things of the business are being tackled because there’s, you know, in microcap businesses, there’s just not enough time in the day to tackle every problem there is, but there is enough time to tackle the important things if you prioritize right. 

Anderson Williams: Yeah, I love that. I love just the reality of defining this ongoing conversation of reprioritization and trade-offs. It’s not just about execution, because in the microcap space, it’s always changing and you’re never gonna have enough time to do all the things you want to do. And that constant conversation of prioritization, reprioritization, trade-offs, if I do this, then we’re not gonna do that. 

We’re not doing this now, but that might not be a problem for the next two months, but by the next quarter, maybe it is. That just seems like such an important fundamental communication insight.  

Chris Dardi: Yeah, and I think the great thing about the CXO Program is that it really plugs you into these scenarios where you can take on challenges you’ve never done before, and a lot of times that involves a lot of risk. 

And the CXO Program kind of gives you this kind of safety net to take on outside risks that you would not do otherwise. Like there’s very few programs I think of where coming outta business school, I’ve been able to take on some of the kind of opportunities that I’ve had at BI. 

And I can tell you not everything was linear. I made a lot of mistakes, did a lot of things wrong, but I think the key to that is failing fast and you know, through that process, okay, we tried this, it didn’t work. What does that mean for how we’re tackling items two, three, and four? And if we’re gonna change our approach here, what does that mean for everything else we’re doing? 

Or hey, this went well, but the business needs have changed and that no longer makes a lot of sense to do. We need to pivot. And so just being able to be very adaptive to change, I think is key for the CXO Program. And I think the infrastructure of the program, I think gives us CXOs a lot of resources to identify that and be able to kind of bounce ideas off each other and see around the corner. 

There’s gonna be a challenge coming up or a hurdle that we’ll have to go through. How can we start preparing for that today?  

Anderson Williams: And what’s something you’ve learned being a CFO that you couldn’t have learned without being a CFO?  

Chris Dardi: I think the biggest thing is that cash is king, and especially in a microcap business, a lot of times we’re making a ton of investments into growth initiatives, but at the end of the day, cash is the true kind of barometer of where the business is going and also how to make sure that you’re able to payroll at the end of the day.  

And so that’s something kind of when I first took over that I had a lot of palpitations around because I didn’t have a great view of what cash was gonna look like and we had pretty large payrolls that I had to make sure were in the bank next week. And so that was something that I learned very quickly around how to think about that, how to manage it. But then I think I’ve become a better executive from being able to just think through the cash side of things, especially as we’re even today looking at how to make investments. 

Ultimately, what is that cash generation gonna look like? What does that mean from a debt and equity investment? And what does that mean for the overall business and the timing of different investments you wanna make? I think is just an important thing to understand as an executive.  

Anderson Williams: If you had a couple of points of advice to offer someone sitting in the CXO seat today, or someone who maybe isn’t in a CXO role but aspires to be a CFO at some point, or a young executive like yourself in any executive role in a company that’s growing like BI has grown, what advice would you offer? 

Chris Dardi: So I think the most important thing for someone thinking about stepping into, you know, utility player role at a microcap business is you missed a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take. There are gonna be a lot of opportunities that come up, some that might be very transparent, and some that might not be fully there on the surface level. 

You kind of have to dig in and figure out that it’s an opportunity, but the way that you continue to grow and get successive opportunities, you know, at a company is. Figuring out where there’s opportunity, taking that opportunity. It may not be exactly what you want to do. It may not be the most glamorous, it also may not be the most visible. 

But ultimately, if you go in and you solve the biggest problems for the company, you’ll get the recognition for it. It’ll come and they’ll also open up the next door for you. So the CXO Program kind of opens up a lot of doors, but it’s up to you to walk through it. And then when that next door opens up, you gotta keep walking through those doors. 

It may not be the exact door that you think, but ultimately it’ll get you where you want to go or get you somewhere that’s pretty exciting.  

Anderson Williams: What’s the best advice you ever got?  

Chris Dardi: The best advice I ever got probably came pretty early on from the CXO Program. It was probably one of our first CXO calls and it was more of a framework than maybe specific advice. But I have to give Tom Smithberg credit for this ’cause he’s the one who told me. 

But he’s the one who kind of shared the idea of the glass versus rubber ball. Scenario, and I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that, but when you’re juggling a bunch of balls, and especially in any job you’re doing, some of them are glass balls that if you let it drop and break, there’s no coming back like that’s over. 

Some of them are also rubber balls, and so when that drops, it’s gonna come back up and so when you’re trying to prioritize across dozens of different things where you can only do half or a quarter of them, it’s important to figure out what are the things that absolutely have to get done that you can’t let drop or at least have to keep up in the air. And what are the things that if you let it slip or it drops, it’s not gonna matter because you can pick it back up at the right time and go.  

And so that’s something that I’ve kind of taken with every single kind of scenario. And every day when I’m thinking about what am I gonna tackle is what are the things that are gonna break and what are the things that are gonna bounce? 

And I think having a framework to understand that is the only way that you can prevent yourself from getting overwhelmed in a role like this, because you’re never gonna get to inbox zero. I think my inbox is like 50,000 at this point. And once you accept that and figure out, I’m not gonna get inbox zero, but I’m gonna have my priority inbox at zero, I think you’re, you’ll set yourself up for more success. 

Anderson Williams: So how did the process of working with Shore and being a part of the Shore portfolio, as well as being a part of the CXO Program, prepare you for life after Shore with another private equity group?  

Chris Dardi: That’s a great question. And I think it all comes down to discipline and process. Shore is very big about having a very focused process and plan and you know, hope is not a strategy. It’s, it’s really around how do you make sure that you’re really driving the business forward and you have quantitative ways to measure that and plan for that and set goals. And so I think we have this operational rhythm that kind of came out of being in Shores hold period for almost seven years. And as we’ve now transitioned into new private equity ownership, we already have all those muscles built. 

And so when it comes to what is our weekly cadence, how are we thinking about board presentations, how are we talking about projecting the business and pivoting when things change, how are we going through kind of. Our, you know, monthly operating reports with our regional leaders to identify opportunity in our, you know, operational metrics. 

We already have all that muscles and infrastructure and so it’s been really helpful because we had that playbook already and we have a great new financial sponsor that we’ve been working with who really just attached onto that process and said, this works great for us. Like, we don’t want to get in the way of you guys running the business. You guys are thinking about. All the right things.  

So let’s, how can we help you guys continue to grow and continue to push that mission and build on top of that, versus I think if we hadn’t had that level of discipline as a company of our size, it’s very easy that we could have entered into this new partnership and had to kind of start over at Square one of, okay, you guys aren’t thinking about cash the right way. 

You guys don’t have really like a board meeting process that really creates value or allows the right dialogue to happen. And so I think all that structure and infrastructure that was put in place with sho. While it sometimes is definitely very challenging when we’re dealing with some of the issues in the business and having to also kind of think through some of these backend processes. 

But looking back like we would be in a much different place today if we hadn’t been so disciplined and sure hadn’t pushed us to be really the best company that we could be. And that’s something that we’ve been able to now build on kind of in this next stage of our growth. 

Anderson Williams: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure and check out our other Bigger. Stronger. Faster. episodes specifically highlighting the CXO Fellows Program as well as other CXO Fellows profiles at www.shorecp.university/podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts. This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners and recorded in the Andrew Malone Podcast Studio with story and narration by Anderson Williams. Recording and editing by Austin Johnson. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. Sound design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks. 

Special thanks to Chris Dardi.  

This podcast is The Property of Shore Capital Partners, LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the Terms of Use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.