Episode 399: From Dot-Com Survivor to Fractional CFO

Corey KupferSalvatore Tirabassi is a seasoned CFO and also brings a 15-year background as a partner in growth equity and venture capital funds. As a fractional CFO, he brings a comprehensive background in financial strategy, financial modeling, analytics, data science, and capital raising. Over the course of 20 years, he has developed world-class expertise in strategic forecasting and capital management, significantly enhancing the financial operations of the businesses he partners with.

I mean, listen, this guy's a tenured CFO. I love the fact that Sal has a background in private equity and venture capital, so he brings something to the table on that end as well. Sal, welcome to DealQuest Podcast.

Salvatore TirabassiThank you for having me, great to be here.

Corey KupferSo listen, I want to get into all of that, what you're doing now as a CFO, what your background in private equity and VC, and how that influences what you do now. I know you work with companies that are finding funding and growing and exiting and acquiring and all that kind of good stuff.

But before we get to any of that, I want to take you back to when you were a little kid, maybe 8, 10, 12 years old. What did you want to be? Because I'm pretty sure that an outsourced CFO wasn't it back then, but you tell me.

Salvatore TirabassiI played a lot of sports. Probably when I was 12, I probably wanted to be a professional basketball player. It seemed like a cool thing to do. I went to a high school and played basketball in New York City, so it was very competitive with a lot of awesome players, so there was always the dream on everybody's mind.

Corey KupferYeah, I had that dream as well, and in my Brooklyn high school, it became very, very clear that the only sport that I could actually even make the team, and I actually lettered in, was bowling. But at 5'8", that was the limit of my ability, to be respectful.

Salvatore TirabassiWell, I'm 6'1", and my body type is really more probably suited for a hockey player than it is for a basketball player, so...

Corey KupferI love it. One other question, looking back, what was your first deal of any type? Could be early in your career, maybe there's something even younger, but anything you would consider a deal?

Salvatore TirabassiIt probably would have been when I came into the venture capital industry out of business school, because before that, I was in consulting and I sold some projects, probably, but nothing that I can remember. They weren't really deals. But the first big deal, and really interesting one that we did was, and this may be an interesting tangent to go into for the audience because it's related to the AI bubble, but when I graduated from business school, I got out and started working in August of 1999.

Corey KupferOkay.

Salvatore TirabassiAnd by March of 2000, everything had blown up. And I worked for a relatively new fund, which had raised two funds in a row, back-to-back, in a very short period of time through 1999. So they had a decent amount of capital. And they were deploying it, and they had a lot of exposure to this very tippy market.

But they were willing to continue backing their investments, and when a lot of the investors ran for the hills, they were willing to see what was left and double down into certain things. So the first deal that I did really there was this company called Gomez.

Which was, believe it or not, a SaaS company before people knew that's what the term was.

Corey KupferRight. The term wasn't even used back then, yeah.

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, it was not used back then. We always just referred to it as recurring revenue software, or services, or something like that.

And what Gomez did was, it's a very cool business model. They had these servers in data centers around the world, basically. And their clients would use the Gomez network to measure what the client's experience was going into their website.

Which, at the time, a lot of this was really new, but Amazon was one of their customers, and they wanted to know, when somebody's buying books, what's the latency? Is it something that's happening outside of our data center that's giving them a bad experience? Because they could only really see, based on where the technology was, within their control area, which was everything inside the data center and back into their systems. But if there were things, and the internet was still, I mean, it wasn't new at the time, but it wasn't what it is today.

Is this person taking 5 seconds to click through a shopping cart because of something that's on their side, or is it on our side? So anyway, Gomez had this service, and they would charge a monthly or annual fee, and all these companies were their clients. And that was one of the companies we bought, and we ended up selling it for, I think it got bought for $350 million in 2008, probably.

Corey KupferWow. That's a great example of how strategic deals can pay off over the long term when you stay disciplined and back real businesses through a downturn.

Salvatore TirabassiSo that was my first deal that was an interesting one.

Corey KupferI love it. And you mentioned the bubble, the AI bubble.

Salvatore TirabassiWe can save that conversation, but I have some thoughts about that, because a lot of people ask me, how is this different?

Corey KupferYeah, let's make sure we go there, but it's interesting, because obviously I was around those times as well, and it's making me reminisce. I'm sure plenty of our listeners were around, but plenty who actually didn't experience that, weren't around, or weren't old enough to be in business, so younger listeners. And it's really amazing to think about, yeah, because it was a real bubble, and the way they talk about AI now is the way they talked about .com back then.

Obviously, there are a lot of differences, and I remember those times, and I remember how much froth there was, and how many companies went down. And then it's funny that I'm thinking about this, having Amazon as a client in terms of where AWS ended up being later on.

Salvatore TirabassiVery standout.

Corey KupferAs a business that is for Amazon, right? The AWS. They don't even think about buying that type of service from anybody now.

Salvatore TirabassiThey've got probably 10 different ways that they could figure that out.

Corey KupferYeah, that's amazing. So that was your first deal. Basically it was business school, and you hopped into that world, huh?

Salvatore TirabassiYeah. And it was really the early stages of how venture capital and private equity were evolving into an alternative capital market.

Corey KupferYep.

Salvatore TirabassiI don't think people would have described it that way back then, but that's certainly what it's become.

Corey KupferYeah, so actually, that's a great topic. Talk about that evolution a little more. We're not talking about ancient history, I get it, you and I have been around for a minute, but the evolution and the things that people take for granted now, and the way that VC and private equity deals are done, it wasn't as clear back then in terms of the models, and in terms of even some of the terminology. Talk to me a little bit about your experience with that evolution. What was it like back then, and how has it evolved?

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, I think back then there were definitely the well-known names in Silicon Valley, because the venture industry had been around since the late 70s, so by 2000, you're already two decades in. But the size of the funds was not what it is today. The amount of capital they were trying to deploy was different. The maturity level of companies was probably a little more mature, and also it wasn't as tech-oriented, there were other things that were potentially big opportunities.

And then on the PE side, which at the time I wasn't as familiar with, I got more familiar with it as my career advanced. We were still in the early days in a lot of ways. There were the big buyout shops that would do leveraged buyouts, and corporate takeovers. And then in between, it was maybe a little bit more of a barbell market. It was big stuff and little stuff. But then, what happened over time was all of the other tiers of capital structuring got filled in with more professional management and more organized fundraising. So you had later-stage venture. Private equity market dropping down into being more buyout, not as debt-oriented leverage.

Then you started having the BDC market come around, and there were professional alternative lenders to the banks, so all of that filled out over that time frame. And then other things converged also into that market. For example, the asset-backed securitization market, which is what Mike Milken did, and the packaging of different types of loans into a portfolio and selling them off.

That was another layer that got introduced, and certain companies that were not huge could actually access that market and then get liquidity that way to build their businesses, so a lot happened over that time frame.

Corey KupferIt really did, and I think you're right, that access to capital in various ways, in that in-between space. And then you saw the development, even on the M&A side, right? You used to have the big investment banking shops, and then you had Main Street brokers, and that in-between level on the M&A side similarly filled in with more professional investment banks coming down market and things like that. The growth in M&A transactions across the middle market has been remarkable. So yeah, it's been an interesting evolution.

And then the other thing for the audience is, a lot of the stuff that we take for granted now, like you do a friends and family round, maybe you do an angel round, then there's a Series A, a Series B, a Series C, or you have safe notes, Y Combinator, a lot of that accepted practice or the journey, I'm not saying the elements weren't around, but it wasn't so systemized and standardized.

Salvatore TirabassiYeah. I mean, even take things like safe notes and founder-friendly terms, that's relatively new. And as more founders became more experienced and were able to step back into the market, whether they were successful before or whether they weren't, they became more sophisticated about how they wanted to structure their deals. Not all financings were founder-friendly, of course, that was probably not the case back in the day. But the founders had a better sense of deal terms that would, one, give them good economics, but also, two, give them a little bit more freedom to be able to operate and run the business the way that they wanted to.

Corey KupferYeah. And then, obviously, as more players came in, there's more competition, which obviously helped that negotiating position as well for founders. Understanding deal structuring and knowing how to negotiate the right terms can make an enormous difference in outcomes. It's been a fascinating evolution over time, and people who weren't around may not realize how different it was back in the day.

I mean, I was involved with securitizations of loans at that time, the early mortgage-backed securities. We did a half a billion dollar shelf registration for the Dime Savings Bank back in the day, which was huge for that time. Now, half a billion, whatever, right? It was unprecedented, and even the banks who were securitizing those loans back then, their loan files were a mess. And then the underwriters were rejecting half of them, and the rating agencies were, that's part of what that securitization, that secondary market, actually triggered the banks to actually get better.

Salvatore TirabassiMore sophisticated.

Corey KupferYeah, more sophisticated, making sure they had all their T's crossed, I's dotted, and not missing endorsements or things like that, which you used to see. People now might be surprised at what a mess some of these loan files were back then, until the securitization market forced them to really get their act together.

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, and I think even on the data side of those types of assets, where there's a lot of recurring payments and trying to figure out what are your write-offs gonna be, what are your prepaids gonna be, in this day and age, it's relatively easy and straightforward to do, but back then, with old technology and old systems, it was probably pretty painful.

Corey KupferYeah, totally. All right, so tell us a little bit more about your journey. So we have you in the VC world, and you mentioned that you later moved over to private equity. Just move us along, tell us a little bit more about your experience.

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, so I mainly was always doing growth equity deals, in tech-enabled services, a lot of recurring revenue, a little bit of media. Then I moved over to the operating side and became a CFO. And basically then merged everything that I had learned as an investor and as a CFO into a principles-based approach to the CFO function that is very geared toward helping founders and family owners get best-of-breed capabilities that you would get from private equity-grade finance, and be able to leverage it in their own businesses, and to give it to them on a permanent part-time basis, so they don't really have to think about having to hire the whole team.

There is downtime in finance, and there is overhead associated with finance, and our model is really to package everything, deliver it with really good efficiency and technology, and make it very cost-effective for them, and we can obviously make a good profit on our side. But it's less expensive than them putting a full-time team together.

Corey KupferSure. Yeah, so I definitely want to delve into that some more as we go along, in terms of exactly what you're doing now, who your clients are. But before we go there, talk to me a little bit, I always love when I have people on who have been on, quote-unquote, both sides of the table, or been investor side, operator side, all that kind of stuff. And I'm always curious, so you have the VC perspective, private equity perspective, which is the investor side and different things, and then the operator perspective. Was there anything that surprised you, or that you learned, or that you had a different view when you got to the other side of the table as an operator?

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, I think as an investor operating at the board level, depending on the interest level of the person and how they perceive their business relationships, they may not have a really good view of what it's like to be inside the company on the day-to-day to make things happen. So I would say the big thing for me was really to understand effective leadership, real trade-offs that need to be made month-to-month in a business.

Dealing with crazy stuff that can just happen to the business, ranging from some HR-related matters to a massive snowstorm and people can't get to the office, and planning ahead for that. Or COVID is a great example of figuring out when to send people home permanently. So those types of decisions, you hear about them and participate in the decision-making to a certain degree. But when you're inside in the trenches, it's a lot different.

Corey KupferYeah, totally. You work with a number of different types of companies now, right? Are they mainly companies that are looking to be funded, or do you have clients that are not? Because one of my pet peeves is anything that's put out as standard wisdom that should apply to every company in the entrepreneurial space, right? Everybody's gonna scale and grow, everybody's gonna raise capital, whatever, right? And the truth is that the full majority of companies are never gonna raise equity capital. And frankly, a lot of them shouldn't. Certain ones definitely should.

So in terms of your client base, you're working with both, and then, what is it that has it be appropriate for folks in terms of stage, in terms of industry, in terms of plans, to want to raise capital? And then talk to us about, obviously, very different types of capital you can raise. M&A deals and company acquisitions are also a form of deal-driven growth that tie closely to capital structure decisions. Private equity deals are very different than VC, and...

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, so most of our clients have some aspiration to raise funding, but it's not the way you might think about it in a traditional venture capital sense. We pitch our services to venture-backed companies as well, and that's a totally different mindset. It's like, I've got some institutional capital in, or I want to get some, and then it's really about selling a story and a vision that's very huge and can be one of very few winners inside of a venture capital portfolio.

But the bread and butter is family and founder-owned companies, and these are people with a lot of skin in the game. They have a lot of intuition about how their business works. They're not necessarily building some brave new world type of thing.

And we help them raise what I would call practical forms of capital. It could be, my receivables turns are reliable but slow, and I need to raise some sort of debt facility that's going to accelerate my ability to tap into those receivables and reinvest it in the business.

It could be, I've got a partner who wants to get out of the business, and we need to find an equity partner to come in and replace them, or are we making enough money that I can get a term loan on the business? Push all the proceeds to that partner, buy them out of the business.

It could be, I need a just a larger line of credit of some kind. I need to go from a half a million dollar line of credit to a million dollar line of credit. Help me figure that out. SBA loans are very common topics, so it tends to skew a little bit more on the debt side, except when there's a partner buyout or something like that.

And then there's the thought of selling the business, right? So I would say most clients are thinking they want to build value and generate a lot of cash flow, and then at some point sell it. So the capital requirements are always around, if they're not trying to solve some cash constraint or buying somebody out, then it's about investing in the business. I want to get these receivables coming in quicker with a line of credit, because I want to spend more on customer acquisition, or that kind of stuff.

So those are the types of things that we see. And we maintain a database of investors for every type of financial product that could potentially work for our clients, so that we know who to go to. And we also leverage, not so much bankers, but particularly on the debt side, they're more well-placed gatekeepers who have a lot of lender relationships, and they have a real good understanding of small and mid-sized businesses, like what types of credit do they actually need to have access to.

And those are good relationships and gatekeepers, because you could have quick conversations with them, size up what you're talking to them about, and then they usually have a handful of ideas for you.

Corey KupferYeah. So let's talk about the debt side of things, right? Because various types of debt financing, and you gave a great example, right, where you want to finance receivables to get cash in more quickly to increase your customer acquisition rates. But obviously, there are companies that run into trouble taking on debt. So what is the analysis of when it makes sense for a company to take on certain types of debt?

The classic conversation is, you shouldn't be constantly taking on debt just to finance operations, then you've got a business model problem. But obviously, if you can take on debt for specific purposes that help you grow, that's a different story. Ultimately it all comes back to understanding deal value and whether a given move truly strengthens the business. So you obviously help folks make these decisions. Should we take on debt? What are we going to use it for? What type of debt is best? What goes into that analysis for your clients?

Salvatore TirabassiReally, if it's going to grow the business, what we really want to try to understand are the unit economics of what they're going to invest in. So, if they get, let's just say for round numbers' sake, a million dollars of additional liquidity, and they want to invest that to grow the revenue, what we help them frame out is, for every dollar that you invest in customer acquisition, how long does it take to get the dollar plus the interest back?

And then, once you've gotten it back, what's the profit level that you're generating on that? And that helps frame out the just straight-up debt-to-profitability analysis.

Then, after that, we go a little bit deeper, and we really try to model it into the forecast so that we can show how the revenue and the profits that are coming in are going to support that debt, but also drop more cash flow. And it's always a question of, you're gonna have a dip in the cash flow until you start really growing, the classic J-curve. And you want to basically see how far down does that go, and do you have the liquidity to support yourself during that dip?

And we want to just size that up, right? Because you can't really make the decision without it. And there's different ways to skin the cat. It doesn't need to be a massive spreadsheet analysis, although generally when we get involved, if we're at the stage where we've built you a forecast, we're building you a forecast that has an extreme level of precision on drivers.

And we can tell you, if this moves 3%, this is gonna happen. If these two things move by 3%, this is gonna happen. But if you don't have that level of sophistication, there's always a quicker way to do it. But once we have that done, then we have things we can actually talk about and make decisions on.

Corey KupferYeah, and I mean, listen, for me, what you do is so crucial because as companies become more mature, they definitely understand some of these impacts. Smaller companies, I'm surprised sometimes at how much companies grow without really understanding their numbers and having them as not just a static report, but as a real significant part of business strategy decisions.

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, I mean, we see it all the time. The gut instinct and the intuition that they have about their business works, but at a certain point, they start to realize there's certain things that they don't know and haven't really, or are just starting to think about. And wouldn't it be nice if I knew what was behind that curtain, I would be able to do so much more. And that's either that type of mindset that gets us a phone call, or it's liquidity issues. And that's where the intuition was good enough to a certain point. And now it's not good enough anymore.

Corey KupferYeah. Either because the market's changed, the industry's changed, or you've just gotten to a point where the classic, what got us here won't get us there. You just can't do it that way at the next level of growth, or even with the existing team, or the existing system.

So for the business owners out there, if you don't have a really quality CFO, obviously, if you're at the size to have somebody in-house, that's fine, or the outsourced model that Sal provides is so crucial for companies that don't need somebody full-time, but need that kind of strategic partnership, which is the way I always look at it. And I know it made a huge difference in my business when we moved from having a bookkeeper and accountant to a real CFO service. Analyzing cash flow, and we could say, hey, we're thinking about spending this money on marketing, or we're gonna hire another attorney who's gonna do that, where are we at? Can you model it out for us? What happens in the worst-case scenario? All that kind of stuff.

So yeah, it's super crucial. You had mentioned, let me jump in, we'll come back to something, but you had mentioned something I want to make sure we don't forget to cover, because I think it's interesting, which is this conversation of the AI bubble, whether there's a bubble, what's going on, and how does it compare to that dot-com experience? Because I guess there are a couple of camps, right? There's people who may have some PTSD from the dot-com bubble, and there are people who weren't around during the dot-com bubble and may not, on the flip side, take any of the lessons from it. So you raised this topic, I think it's a fun one. What is applicable and non-applicable? What do you think?

Salvatore TirabassiI wrote a blog post on this, and the topics that came to mind for me in that blog post, and I'll talk about here, basically that the capital markets are fundamentally different than they were back then. And some of the main highlights are, back then, there was this whole category of investment banks that took very small companies public.

And so the public markets, NASDAQ in particular, had a lot of small companies, and at the time, they were taking companies with no or very little revenue public. And that created a lot of stock portfolio impact to individual investors who could access those investments.

And because the infrastructure wasn't built out in the internet yet, and there were a lot of changes coming, and things were moving very quickly, there was almost like you were having venture capital-level exposure at a certain tier of the market. And once that became very thin ice to walk on, the rest of the market was just gonna respond after that.

Today, all of that risk is not really present as much in the public markets. It's much more in private, with private asset managers, like venture capital funds, or different types of portfolios that you won't see.

And so, I think the thin ice that everything's standing on is not standing on top of those types of companies, at least with respect to the public markets. Because when we think about the bubble and a crash, you're always talking about the public markets. So it's not that there can't be a bubble popping. But if it happens, I think it's more likely to happen inside of private assets that we don't see as much, where there's a lot more risk.

But the big, giant companies that are holding up the market or really driving the value of the market right now, if they drop 15-20% as a result of something, it's not like back in 2000, when a high-flying company, like, I don't know, Ask Jeeves or something like that, was maybe doing $100 or $200 million of revenue, let's just say, and then the market tanks on them. That's way different than the market tanking on Nvidia, in my view.

Corey KupferYeah, I mean, the market caps were nothing compared to where they are now, and the access to capital was so different.

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, I think also the composition of the S&P 500 was dramatically different. In fact, I believe that out of the top 20 companies from 2000, the only one that's still in the top 20 right now is Microsoft.

Corey KupferRight. Wild. So, before I talk a little bit more about specifically your business, anything just generally that you're seeing? I mean, I've been doing this, I've been around a long time, you've been around a while, and I feel like it's always interesting times. People say, oh, there's a lot going on. We already talked about the dot-com bust. You talked about this other company selling in 2008, which is great timing, right, before the GFC. There's been so many ups and downs in the market, we've been through COVID, we've been through people talking about tariffs, they talk about interest rates, it feels like it's always something.

But there are a lot of different factors floating around now, some that people would interpret positive or negative for business growth. My experience is there's a lot of money out there. Anything that you're just seeing that would be interesting in the marketplace, or trends, or things that you're observing?

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, I mean, I think a big thing for me, as far as the trend goes, is how is hiring gonna change for companies with AI. It's really related to companies having the ability to adopt certain models of applying AI in their businesses to make some practical changes. But they also then have to grapple with the fact that they do need building blocks of people where talent's being groomed and grown over time, if they want to continue to expand their businesses.

And so I think the big trend for me that I look at is, how are they making decisions about entry-level, early-career employees in comparison to leveraging more AI in their business, because they can't necessarily do without the trainees who are gonna grow up in the business. And I think it affects more the larger knowledge-based organizations, like banks, insurance companies, law firms.

I'm also curious about the credit markets, the private credit markets, and whether there's some issues in there. If you ever listen to CNBC, they from time to time have segments on, is the private credit market a house of cards and all this? I do think that if some of that did unwind, it would definitely put pressure on different parts of the market, and potentially trickle down to more Main Street types of businesses, like the kinds of clients that we have. That one is also one that I'm kind of wondering about. I think there's a lot of sophistication in terms of the asset allocation models that they run in those types of businesses. But still, at the same time, a lot of money has gone out. And at some point, that's gotta get paid back. And how is that going to get refinanced?

Corey KupferYeah, love those two observations. These are the kinds of M&A strategy considerations that business owners need to be thinking about even if they're not in the middle of a transaction right now. So, in terms of your clients and your business, you gave us some criteria, right? Most of them are in need of some sort of capital, whether it's debt or equity. But in terms of industries, in terms of geography, in terms of size, tell us a little bit more about who your ideal client is, the kind of companies that you serve.

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, we're mainly working with businesses that are, call it $3 to $100 million of revenue, and they generally have, on the lower end, they may have a bookkeeper. On the higher end, they may have an accountant or a controller-level person.

They could have also a transitional situation where they've got a CFO, but they've got a bigger vision of what it's supposed to look like. And so it may be a CFO in title, but it's not really at the level of our people. And they can't necessarily afford that on a full-time basis.

And they have a lot of questions. They may have liquidity issues, they may have capital raising, they may be thinking about succession planning, selling the business in the future. And we come in and basically help build out and supply the financial infrastructure that they need on a very value-driven basis to get them to where they need to go.

And that means that we don't really have an industry focus. It's really a situational thing. And I have another blog that I wrote that just went out, I think it went out this week. There are 9 fundamental business models. Mechanically, when you think about revenue and cash flow, and what's in between that sandwich, there's only 9 real business models. So you don't need to be an industry genius to understand how a carpet manufacturer is different from a rug retailer store. Those are two totally different businesses. They're selling more or less the same product, but they're at different parts of the value chain, and their models are totally not the same.

But you don't need to know specific things about the carpet industry or the rug retail industry to be able to be effective with them on a financial basis. So we don't really pitch anybody on industry. If we've got some industry skill sets to match, we try to bring them into the situation, for sure, it's always helpful.

But it's industry agnostic, it's in that $3 to $100 million range, and it's really becoming the trusted advisor to the owner, founder, whoever's running the business.

And then, as a side product to that, which is very similar, but different needs, we get called in by investment banks that are prepping for sale. And the company's at the stage where they want to do a transaction, but they're no different than our other clients. They just have their pain point as a transaction in mind, and we come in and do a bunch of work. Sometimes, also, we'll be brought in by a private equity fund that has already done the acquisition, and they don't really like the finance operation. They may have gotten sold a much more sophisticated version of what's actually there, and then we come in and can fix that for them.

Those are projects that are probably 3 to 6 months long, depending. The other stuff that we do with the founders directly, we basically are their team. You don't need anybody else, we just take care of it, sort of roll with the punches. We price that on a fixed price basis, so they have a lot of predictability on what it's going to cost them.

Corey KupferLove it. I assume the way things work with technology nowadays, you probably have clients all over. It's not geographically concentrated, right?

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, we have clients all over. We've got some clients that are fully remote themselves, and our team is, a lot of us are in the New York City area, but I've got people all over the country. Makes it good to find talent. It's a lot more flexible that way.

Corey KupferYeah, I think that's been a big change. We've hired attorneys all over the country, because we've been running remotely since 2015, actually. Believe it or not. Back then I didn't talk about it much, but it was just that, frankly, I had split off, I had rolled into another firm, and then took my team back out, and I said to the existing team, I was planning on, it was in New York, I was planning on getting my place in California, I knew I wouldn't be in the office all the time.

And I said, what do you think about trying to do this remote? And they were like, we'll give it 6 months, and if it's horrible, we'll go get an office. And then, 10, 11 years later, and when COVID hit, we didn't miss a beat. We were already fully remote. And it's really given us this ability to hire, we just hired an attorney in Maryland, we have somebody in Michigan, we're talking to somebody in California. It's really opened up the talent pool, especially if they can work remotely.

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, same for us.

Corey KupferSo people want to find out more about you and the business, where should they go?

Salvatore TirabassiSo our website is CFOProAnalytics.com. You could also find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn, and there's a lot of good content there that I post, and you can check out the blog right on our website.

And we've got some cool tools on there, if you're doing some cap table analysis, or want to compare loan options for your business, there's some quick calculators there that you can use, and we also have a CFO assessment tool on there where you can go in and follow some questions in a question form, and it'll give you a sense of where do you stand in terms of your needs. So there's some cool stuff on there to play around with.

Corey KupferSounds great. And folks, if you're a business leader who wants to share your own deal-making journey, go to [beaguestondealquest.com](https://beaguestondealquest.com/) and apply to be a guest on an upcoming episode. We'd love to hear from you.

Sal, my final question on the podcast is always about my highest value in life, which is freedom. And for me, that means everything from freedom around the world for people from oppression, to why I've been an entrepreneur for decades and haven't had a boss. What does freedom mean to you, and how does it impact your life and business?

Salvatore TirabassiYeah, freedom for me is really having the time to do things that I enjoy. Which are, spending time with my family. Gonna take a trip out to London. Both of my sons are out in London right now.

And I think about also just the opportunity that the economy in general can give people, young adults. I think about young adults a lot these days because of AI, and because of the ages of my kids, and how the world is gonna change so dramatically for them. And having them have the freedom to make some choices, to have good careers and families and whatever else it is that they want to do that makes them happy. And it doesn't just apply when I think about it with respect to my own family, but also just the population in general. Those are the kinds of things I think about.

Corey KupferLove that. Salvatore Tirabassi, thanks for being such a great guest on the DealQuest Podcast.

Salvatore TirabassiI appreciate your time, Corey. Thanks for having me on.