Welcome to Built by Margin, the podcast where strategy meets the spreadsheet. I'm your host, Laurie Chen fractional CFO and tax strategist, here to help you make smarter financial decisions, build a profitable business, and keep more of what you earn. Let's dive into the numbers that actually move the needle. Hey, everyone, welcome to Built by Margin, the show where we talk about what really drives business growth from cash flow to financial strategy. I'm your host, Laurie Chen here to cut through the noise and get straight through the financial heart of Scaling Smart. Today, I'm excited to sit down with Antonio Green, based in Detroit. He's an author, mortician and public speaker dedicated to helping small businesses grow through relationships and communication. His innovative approach played a pivotal role in modernizing the family business, culminating in the establishment of a new Northwest location, which opened in 2010 under his leadership. In 2021, Antonio became a published author with Talk to Me, Understanding the Millennial Mindset, which provides insights into how businesses can engage more effectively with the millennial generation. We're going to unpack today how Antonio grew his family business and how financial discipline played Yeah, let's start at the beginning. Take us back to the moment when you decided to take over the family business. What did that involve So for me, it was more of a natural progression. So I graduated from college. I went to school out of state. So moving back home, it was just kind of a natural thing to move in to go into the family business. I had finished mortuary school and that was the next step, but I couldn't just walk in and take over. So I had to be able to set the stage, really work in the business from the ground up. So I remember starting, literally answering the phones and helping put flowers in different rooms and kind of doing basic tasks and just working my way up in the business. So I want to make sure that you know the workers there because our employees, most of them had been there, I'd say 70% of them have been there since I was a kid so I'm walking around getting on their nerves getting in their way. But that's where I started so I knew I couldn't just come into the business and just call myself taking over I had to earn their respect. and get them to understand that I knew how to run the business. So literally working shoulder to shoulder with everybody in every department really helped me garner that respect over the years. And then it became a natural progression like, oh, we see the good thing that he can do and help us and help the business. And like I said, it came to that natural progression to be able to formally kind of take over and move into that I'd say it was a good, probably four years. Yeah, about four years. And then we built a new location from the ground up. And when we did that, I came over to our Northwest Chapel, and I came over and ran that location. So that was about three and a half, four years when I finished school. So, and even I know at that time a lot of people thought I was pretty green and didn't think I would be able to run a whole facility myself but I literally been working six days a week 12 hours a day since graduating from school so I definitely put in the work and understood. you know, where we were going with the business and what our vision was and how this new facility could help us reach our goals and still be open to learning along the way. I mean, I never stopped learning. Even now, being in the business 20 years now, I still never stop learning. There's always things I need to use, new tools That's great to hear. Wow. So you've been in the business for 20 years now. Yep, it's been 19 going on So every business has turbulence, whether that be from growth or scaling or financial. What was one early financial lesson you learned the hard way, perhaps when you took Um, so I think it would probably come with the building of our new location. And, you know, you have a construction budget. And, you know, you, of course, things are always gonna you have change orders that you're gonna go over budget a little bit. So we put in that contingency, but a lot of things that I wasn't prepared for. is some of the furnishings so when you have to furnish this you know 20,000 foot square foot funeral home some of the furnishings um no you can't just go to random department store and buy your couches and chairs you have to get commercial grade furnishings so this is you know something new that I was coming I had never purchased that grade of furniture before and realizing the cost is three and four times what you know you're buying for like residential properties. So that was definitely a hard lesson to learn and things that I wanted to do or pieces I thought would look nice I had to really cut back and figure out what we could do differently just because the expense of everything was just so much more than what I expected. And, and then also finding some interesting ways to for financing there was no conversations that I had with our bank and had to get a little creative on things we can do and kind of Robin Peter to pay Paul to at least get us open and then we can start you know generating some revenue once we get the doors open but I had a vision in mind I want to look a certain way from the get-go I didn't want to kind of hodgepodge or half do it. I wanted to be fully ready in my vision when we opened the door. So luckily we were able to do that and it's been So when it comes to a business like yours, you're generally going to the bank and getting loans. Have you ever gotten an SBA loan Yeah, luckily we had a good relationship with our bank and our corporate attorney. He's had a good relationship with the bank representatives. So, they were really willing to work with us. And by being in the inner city, we were able to really garner their support. I think they wanted So, um, we were good partners with them. They were good partners with us, or we were able to just leverage that relationship. And I think that goes well with any. When anybody can learn in business, especially when you're having to finance a project, is that relationship with your bank or with your broker that you're dealing with kind of trumps all because there's things that. that they'll get creative with if they like you. I know there's something they just can't do because there's laws in place, but there are creative ways, there's things they can do that they may not tell or may not give you preview to. So I think that good Got it. And so for a business like yours, is there a lot of capital assets on the books? I would think that there would be, you would own a So the building itself, but a lot of times, depending on the funeral home, a lot of your equipment is going to be leased. So it's not necessarily owned. So it wouldn't be that asset per se, because you're leasing it. A lot of places, a lot of funeral homes like to do that because of the tax write-offs and tax incentives with leases that come into place rather than purchasing. But with us being at such a high volume funeral home, a lot of our equipment is purchased because we use it so often, so the leases would not be affordable for us. think that we need to turn over quickly and we need to have new vehicles like the cars and limos. Yeah, we do lease those, but then there are a lot of vehicles that we do purchase that we use more on Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, I was curious how many assets you had and if you were doing more of a leasing model, which sounds like you are. Okay, that's great to know. Okay, so digging more into your origin story. You published a book in 2021. It's called talk to me understanding the millennial mindset. Can you talk a little bit about what let what inspires you to write that book and how that has impacted you So a lot of it was like I was saying earlier about the relationship. So when I came into the business, I couldn't just take over. I had to show those employees, the tenured staff, that I wasn't this little pipsqueak running around anymore and that I could actually run a business. So that's kind of what I kind of started off the premise of the book is just showing how If you are in a family business or if you're even if you're just young and coming into a business you can't have that persona of I know everything you've got to be willing to learn you've got to eat a little crow sometimes and be willing to take a step back. So that was kind of the premise of the book, but where I really focus in on is the millennial generation and how we are so different as employees to work with. So a lot of times when I was at different trade shows or at conventions, and I'm talking with some of the older, you know, directors and people in the industry. And I kept hearing for over and over for years and like all those damn millennials we don't know what to do with them like we don't want to work or I can't motivate them to do this I can't get them to do that. So, the book really shows how to properly motivate those in the millennial generation. I break the generation into two different segments because if you're an older millennial like I am. then you're going to work a lot differently than you are some of the younger millennials who were born in the late 90s. So it's a bad difference and probably the biggest difference amongst generations right now on how the millennials operate. So I break that down in the book and give you tips and tricks on how to work with millennials and what age group they fall in Got it. Okay. That's awesome. Where Yep. It's on Amazon. If you just talk to me, understanding a millennial mindset, or you can just Google Antonio green, talk Okay, great. Uh, it's nice to meet an author on this Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a quick read. It's only like 55 pages to real easy read. Great. Let's talk about growth and scaling. So what are ways that your business has grown, especially in the last three to five years? And when did you realize it was time to pull So, so early on, like I said, when we spearheaded that new construction, it was the, biggest funeral home, new construction wise, in the history of Detroit. I don't think there's been a bigger funeral home that's been built from the ground up that we did. So we were preparing ourselves for growth, you know, 15 years ago when we built the new location. But in the last three to five years, well, in the last five years, we had the COVID-19 pandemic. And by being a funeral home owner, you know, outside of healthcare workers, we were the next hit hardest. So you've got record number of cases of deaths. And we're in Detroit. So Detroit is like the epicenter, like outside of New York, we like one of the first and hardest to get hit outside of New York. So we had to deal with that, you know, that issue. And How do you deal with staffing because we had staff that were out either some were sick or some were just scared to come out they had already put the stay at home provisions in place and even though we were required workers that we still had to come into work a lot of the staff. you know, was scared because nobody knew at the time. This was like March of 2020. So like I said, it's really, we were the epicenter and nobody in the country knew what to do or what was going on or how do you prevent this. There were all kinds of misinformation about how to prevent the spread and things like that. So we were working with about 40% of our staff with experiencing a record number of cases that we had to deal with. So being able to just strategize on a daily basis with the staff that was here Okay, this is what we've got to do you know here's the the list of things for the day that we've got to get done and everybody just buckle down and got it done so um. That was that that taught us a lot. It taught us basically that we could get through anything. There wasn't any challenge that we couldn't overcome by going through that. And I think that prepared us for the growth that we're going to see. We're doing things now that are very different. We're adopting AI as far as on our website. We've got a fully live AI chat bot that can help families answer questions and anything that they need information wise it can walk them right through that so we're one of the first in our industry to have that. So we're doing a lot of things now to set us up for even more growth. We've made an acquisition in the last two years, which we had never done in the history of the company. So we're, we're growing and we're growing fast, but that the times during the pandemic, I think really set us in a place where we know we can do more and we know how to achieve it. Wow. Do you have someone on your team that's helping you with the financials? Or do you have an accountant? Do you have a CFO? Do you outsource that? Uh, we do outsource it and that we've kind of done that for years. Uh, we haven't, we're never really had an internal CFO. We've always outsourced it. So we've got a good local accounting firm that, um, that even goes through our bills and they can find anomalies. Like we've had issues before where somebody sends you like a fake bill and they'll rather than just cutting the check, they'll realize that, Hey, we've never paid this vendor before, or the address is different. Let's look into this and either they'll call or they'll learn us and we'll call. So yeah, those kind of things have really helped us stay on top of things because there's nothing more damaging to a business as fraud, whether that's internal, like internal staff, like embezzlement, or if it can be external, like if you're having to deal with things like that, those spoof or spam mails, or they dupe you into paying a bill that's not a real bill. So I think that's important, especially for businesses for our size, to have that in place when we don't have time as the executive to go through every piece of mail and review the bills and things like that. When you've got somebody on your team, whether it's in-house or outsource, to go through the bills and make sure things line up and they can point out if there are spikes in spending with certain That's great. Yeah, I'm glad you touched on the idea of having internal controls in your business. Definitely having controls to detect fraud is something that a lot of businesses overlook, especially when it comes to the finance and accounting function, right? You got to make sure that your employees are not stealing. You have, you know, the risk from outside parties. Now, do you think that because of the industry that you're in, that you're more a target for these external threats? Is that the reason why you're No, I think it's just blanket. Like a lot of what I've seen, especially by mail, it's just stuff they just send. You can tell it's math mail, just whoever they might send out, you know, 50,000 pieces of mail. And if 10 people bite on it some kind of way, then it was worth their while. So that's what I've seen. And kind of like email now where you're getting all these spam emails or the phishing emails that just try to click a link just to get some kind of information from you. So So I kind of that's what I've seen to adjust the physical postal mail is just fishing scams. And I think that's just going out on a blanket basis but that I do see there are things that are customized I've seen new things in fishing. where they will, and this could be AI generated, but it sounds nice. It's like the email that somebody sends saying, hey, I've had a loss and I want X, Y, and Z done at the service. They give out all these parameters of how they want the service done and then they say, oh, but I'm emailing you because I'm out at sea right now and I don't have a cellular signal. Well, I just have to communicate by email, but if you can tell me you know what I need to do to pay and then you could tell like this doesn't sound right. And then also you talk to other people in the industry and sure enough everybody's gotten that same email. Wow, yeah, the crazy things that people come up with that are like scammers, it's pretty ridiculous when you think about it, the different kinds of ideas and schemes they come up with. So I'm glad you're bringing up some of these examples so that other people can be aware of Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I would say if people would spend half the amount of energy to do things on a legal or up and up basis, you could make a whole lot more money to try to scam people. Yeah. Well, let's talk more about the numbers. So you have you have an accountant on board outsourced. Sounds like they're doing a pretty good job for you. Was there ever a moment when the numbers that you were given, you felt like it was something that you didn't want to hear? Like, was there any any times when you got a financial report that that was negative or Yeah, I mean, there's always, you know, in business, you're going to have good times and bad times. So, and there's times where we kind of know before the numbers even come out, because you know how busy or not busy you've been. So, you know, when you get last quarter's number, and you know, like, well, I know it's kind of slow. So, and you can see the bank account. So, you got to know what those numbers would be like. But there's times where it's even worse than what you thought. So, I think being able to but you have to know your numbers that's the thing so if you know your numbers you can react to it like you can't just sit there and be sad about it and just pouting you know cry about what am I going to do you've got to be active so you've got to be proactive rather than reactive so if you can see that there's a slowdown then you've got to do things ahead of time to be able to jump on top of it so if you know you're going to have a down quarter you're already working on things for the next quarter to grow your revenue And that's going to be different for every industry, every type of business. But knowing your numbers and being able to stay on top of them and get ahead of the game is what's going to help your business thrive Yeah, I think it's great that you touched on being proactive versus reactive, especially when it comes to your financials. Well, when you think about profitability versus growth, are you more in the camp of reinvesting every dollar back into your business? Or are you more cash reserve cautious? I think we've got a mix of both. We do reinvest everything into the business, but we know we've got to have some type of cash reserves because, especially in our business, there's not a lot sometimes you can do to grow revenue. There's certain times of the year where the death rate is slower and you just can't do anything about it. You can dump more money into marketing to maybe grow some business that way, but overall, only certain amount of people that we can service, so we can't control when they're going to pass them and the death rates going to increase or not. So there are certain industries like ours where really no matter what you do, at least in the short term, you're not going to be able to grow revenue or increase revenue right away. Now there's definitely things that you can put in place, you know, increasing customer satisfaction, you know, Increasing your staff morale, those types of things will grow the business eventually, because you're going to provide a better service. But in the short term, sometimes you just can't do anything right now to grow revenue. So whatever you can do to get lean and prepare yourself to just get through tougher times, you can think about that ahead of time. And then when you see that coming, then you just When it comes to deciding how much cash to have on reserve, are you generally looking at like number of months of OPEX and payroll, like your fixed fixed costs plus your, your payroll, or are you calculating it another way? Are you calculating like as a percentage of revenue? How do you, how do Yeah, usually what I do is based on our monthly take a month's worth of operating expenses, or even a quarter's worth of operating expenses and then plan for that. So, you know, I know my payroll, I know those fixed overhead type things that the bills, the more the things I know I'm going to have to pay, all that goes into the equation. And I know, all right, this is what the bills are going to look like. This is what Approximate revenue might be in a slower time. So is there anything that we need to prepare for to do now? Like, and I see that shortfall coming ahead of time where, okay, well, maybe we need to look at increasing prices now to be able to give us a little bit more cushion for when that leaner time I see. OK, so you are doing quite a bit of financial planning and analysis on a monthly basis in order to keep up with the Yeah, yeah, I think you have to and even if it's a quarterly basis, I mean, I look at the numbers on a monthly basis, but definitely planning wise. I think a quarterly plan is kind of what what my what my actions are, I always keep that in mind. So if I know, like I said, for the next quarter, if I have to plan to do something different, then Are there any financial tools that you use that you recommend to Um, so really, and it's not really a financial tool, but using Claude or chat has really been my best friend in the last year by being able to take and I know some people are not going to be uncomfortable putting some of your financials into that. But if you've got the paid version, and you have the privacy things on, you know, I, I don't see an issue with that. Or you can even go further and you can take some of these large language models and take them offline and you have your own large language model secured on your own server. So you could go that far. I know some of the enterprise models will do that. But I mean, small business, I don't see right now what If there's any harm if you have the privacy settings on just be able to dump that into like chat GPT and let it analyze I mean these things have gotten so smart just over the last 12 months that you can really have it analyze your financials and give you feedback on where the holes that I may not be seeing. If you give me 3 ideas of a plan to increase revenue, what based on these projections, where might we be based on these numbers project where we might be in the next year or 2. So, I mean, you could run so many different scenarios through it and opens your eyes to things that you may not be aware of. That's a great idea. Using these tools, AI tools, to run your financial planning through. That's really interesting. So financial planning is very much forward-looking. As you look forward, what's next for your business? Are you looking to expand further, add new services or products, or just focusing on optimizing Um, definitely optimizing. So that's in the last 12 to 18 months. That's what I've been working on is really optimizing and putting in processes to make sure that everything is really tight. And then, like, for future growth in the next 3 to 5 years, then I do see us making additional acquisitions and using those process that we've tightened up and duplicating those over to the acquisition. So we know we've Our business is 106 years old. We've run it successfully. We're running it even better now. We've got, like I said, processes tight. So let's duplicate that over and seeing how we can replicate the success to Great. Yeah. It sounds like you guys have great processes and systems already in place. Absolutely. Yeah. OK. So last round of questions, I just I have some very short questions, quick answers only. Uh, one Uh, right now would be Dan Awesome. One of my favorites. Um, next question, cash Uh, cash. I'm sorry, accrual, accrual, accrual. But I'm sorry, it's supposed to rapid fire, but depends on your business. If you're dealing with a small business under half a million cash, Yeah, absolutely. That's what I recommend as well. One thing a business owner Ethics, ethics Great. What's the most underrated financial metric I'm sure they're underrated. I think Okay, yeah, get it. And then last question, if I think some kind of COO or CMO role. I do like the marketing aspect of business or running just operations. I do enjoy that. So if I wasn't in the family business, I think that's what I could foresee is running some type of a Okay, well, there you go. Well, Antonio, this has been a really fun conversation and packed with a lot of financial insights. Thanks for pulling back the curtain on what it really means to grow a business and stay financially grounded. For our listeners, if you liked this episode, please make sure to subscribe and leave a review. It helps more entrepreneurs and business owners find the show. So until next time, keep your vision high and your margins higher. This is Built By Margin. Thanks for tuning in to Built by Margin. If you're ready to turn insights into income, subscribe and join me each week as we break down the numbers behind smart business growth. I'm