Avoid Financial Suicide: Protect Margins for Sustainable Growth with Larry Mandelberg

Freddy D: 00:02:37

Hey, Superfan superstar Freddie D. Here in this episode 136, we're joined by Larry Mandelberg. Larry's a seasoned entrepreneur whose family business roots stretch back over 150 years.

From fur trading in Canada to auto dealerships, machine shops in Nebraska. Over his own career, he's owned more than a dozen businesses across nine industries.

Gained rare firsthand perspective on what makes companies thrive or collapse.

He's the author of Businesses Don't Fail, they Commit Suicide, a book that unpacks how success itself can bring disruption and risk and how leaders can avoid the most common mistakes that cause companies to falter. Today, Larry dedicates his work to helping a leadership teams elevate their organizations, anticipate challenges and create sustainable success.

We're thrilled to dive into Larry's journey, his lessons from both failures and wins, and the timeless insights he brings to leaders navigating change.

Freddy D: 00:03:46

Welcome, Larry, to the Business Superfans podcast. Super excited to have you and bonjour moi cavou.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:03:54

It's my pleasure to be here as well. Bon song to you.

Freddy D: 00:03:57

A little fun there, just for our listeners, is that he's in the town of Bordeaux, which is where I was born. So it just makes it a unique coincidence. So super excited about that. Larry. You and I had a great conversation before we started recording.

Let's go back to the beginning and really, what's your backstory? We've got some similar backgrounds, which is really kind of ironic and coincidental, but let's go back to the beginning. What's the backstory?

Larry Mandelberg: 00:04:22

Okay, I love that question. That allows me to explain my personal strengths and my competitive edge. I like to say that I have 170 years of business experience.

business that started in the: 1850

My family not only was able to create a sustainable business, survived close to 200 years, but it also created a business that had to change and evolve as society and circumstances in which they operated changed and evolved.

I have a little bit of a different perspective on business and leadership and that's what I specialize in, is helping organizations, specifically leadership teams, create sustainable organizations that survive indefinitely. When I was a kid, I started working at eight years old. As you might imagine.

I'm sure many of your listeners that have been through this know exactly what I'm talking about. This business puts this roof over your head and it puts this food on your table.

If you're not going to school, you're going to be working well, it wasn't slave labor and I was happy to do it. I loved going down to the store and working. And it was an auto parts store, we sold auto parts, big machine shop.

But I was down there one day and my dad made this comment. He said, how in the world did we ever go from 0 automobile manufacturers to 300 automobile manufacturers down to 3 in 20 or 30 years?

he turn of the century in the: 1900

Not why did auto manufacturers fail, why does any business fail? I spent 23 years of my life doing primary research on that question.

I created a hypothesis, I built a construct, I developed a theory, and then I spent six years running that theory through proof of concept. And I've been practicing that for the last 20 years. I'm on it. Non recovering serial entrepreneur.

I do believe that entrepreneurship is an incurable disease. It's not a fatal disease, but like all incurable diseases, it has to be managed.

I've owned 13 different companies, counting the family owned business. Everything from candle making to a heavy construction equipment rental. As we were talking about.

d bought my first computer in: 1973

I just love helping businesses understand how to do business as good as they possibly can, which leads to sustainability. I'm a little different than most because I'm in a position where I don't need the money anymore.

So I still work, I still charge for my services, but I don't work for anybody and I only work part time. And part of why I like doing these shows is because I love to share the knowledge with as many people as possible. Because it's fun.

It's fun to give people insight into what they can do to make their business better. That's kind of your joy too. You're super fan, right? It's the same thing. It makes you feel good, it makes them feel good, it makes me feel good.

That's my thing is the business of doing business and I'm talking about it all the time.

Freddy D: 00:08:08

And absolutely love is fun when you see transformation taking place, especially within people. When I was selling manufacturing software in the 90s, one of my best customers, the IT manager, his aspiration was they were expanding.

They started out as a 40 man shop and I helped them get to over 120 people. Over several years.

But when he was going through a divorce, I was the guy that was at the bar with him, sitting there listening to all the stuff that he was going on. And that's how I created him into a super fan. That's a lifetime.

One of the owners of the company was originally from Sweden and would go back and forth from Sweden to Rockford, Illinois. And when I was in Sweden, I got invited to his house and stuff like that. So I really built those relationships.

And the reason I bring that up is to really emphasize what you're talking about is when a business is thriving because. Because you've helped them thrive. It's fun. It's really rewarding.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:09:21

Let me add to your story because as we talked before we started recording, there's a lot of common things between you and me and our histories. My clients start as clients and become friends or don't stay.

I can remember one of my clients talking to me about his divorce that was upcoming and talking to me about his new girlfriend and his new marriage. These are relationships with people that you know and you care about that are built on business. And for me, I don't have a problem with that.

I love that we have that common foundation to stand on and to work on together, the business, but that we can get past the business when we've got the business taken care of and enjoy each other as human beings. That's exactly what's underneath your super fan kind of thing.

I don't think of it the same way you do, but in actual reality, you and I are doing the same thing.

Freddy D: 00:10:24

en I got in the tech world in: 1980

45 years later, we're still friends. We don't talk every day, but every so often we reach out to one another. Ironically, we started the same day and was like, who do you know here?

Nobody. I know nobody. Well, let's hang out together.

And then, ironically, he ended up being a roommate of mine because I had the townhouse and so he rented a room out of it. And every now and then for the holidays or whatever, we'll reach out and then catch up.

But yeah, those relationships, if you build them and do them right, their lifetime relationships. Let's go, Larry, into some of the things that you talk about. You wrote a book, basically, businesses don't fail, they commit suicide.

Let's talk a little Bit of, not necessarily the book right this second, but let's talk about some of the things that you've seen businesses do that where they are in a sense self sabotaging themselves.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:11:25

I can give you stories that resulted in failure and stories that resulted in turnaround in success.

One of the most poignant for me was a successful law firm that was doing in the nine figures of gross sales, a multi practice firm of about 200 people, about a hundred lawyers and 100 support staff. They were successful because they had practice areas in the private sector and practice areas in the public sector.

So they did a lot of government work and they did a lot of private sector work. The private sector work. Having done work with the government and the private sector, the private sector pays a lot more. Government is constrained.

Government has fixed bids, competitive bids. You don't get large dollars from the government. What you get is you get longevity.

You get long contracts, dependable revenue, not a lot of crap from the client. You have to jump through some hoops. But they're good clients. They're good clients, are dependable. They're people just like the others.

They this law firm, everybody in the for profit side, they were in the process of renewing their lease. They had two floors in one of the biggest buildings in Sacramento. They were renewing their lease. They were doing a strategic plan.

They hired me to do, to facilitate their strategic planning process. And all the people in the private sector side wanted to separate from the people on the public sector side.

They wanted the public sector people to not be in their space because they didn't make as much profit. But they still got the benefits of the AAA building and the fancy desks and the good location. But they were jealous.

They're like, those people are just making rich off of what we do and we can't make money off of them. They're not contributing their fair share.

We went through this whole strategic planning process and at the end of them I criticized them because they couldn't resolve the problem. I did everything I could to get them to resolve the problem. They were just too ego driven.

And I told them when they fired me on the spot at the end of that retreat, when I gave them my closing remarks and two years later they went bankrupt.

The problem that they didn't understand and they couldn't maintain their cash flow, they couldn't maintain their level of service, they couldn't maintain their revenue and the whole company. This was a company doing nine figures annually and in two years they were gone.

Freddy D: 00:13:49

Yeah, they shortsighted. They killed the golden goose, basically.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:13:53

And I told them this. I said, you don't understand. It's like the secretary, right? Why do you want to treat the secretary like a third world citizen?

The secretary is the person who answers the phone and greets everybody that walks in the door. That person touches every human being that's going to interface with your company before anybody else. Don't you want somebody good out there?

Don't you want somebody that's professional? Don't you want somebody that could put a good face on your company? What's wrong with you? Why do you treat these secretaries like they're dirt?

And they do. They pay them like they're dirt and they treat them like they're dirt.

Freddy D: 00:14:31

You bring me up a point that the way I want to word it is that's your front line.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:14:36

They're the director of First Impressions.

Freddy D: 00:14:38

It's a great name. I'm going to rent that from you.

But the thing is, when I worked with distributors or contractors, people would look at them as they're just distributors and they're just contractors. And I'm going, wait a minute, you're missing the whole ship by a galaxy.

Because that contractor is doing the interpreting, for example, going to the hospital, and they're providing a service in a given language. They're representing you. And if you say they should be grateful, we're giving them a job. No. No interpreter that speaks X language.

You don't have that business.

And your thing I talk about is, and I'm going to continue with what you're talking about with the receptionist is the reality is everybody in that organization is sales, okay? And the bottom line is if you, if you treat people poorly, their tonality is going to come across. I say this many times on the phone.

Going to come across in their email, messaging, everything else, the choice of words that they pick. And you can't hide that. And the reality is, if you're calling up and somebody and they go, yeah, hi, this is so and so company.

You're going to go, what's wrong with this place? Something's not right. Versus you call somebody and go, hey, we're super excited you called. Completely different. The energy is different.

And positive energy is contagious. And so you're absolutely 100% correct. You need to treat those people as the brand ambassadors.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:16:19

I have to give credit where credit is due. My wife, a professional writer, and she did a lot of work in pr. She came up with a term, first Impressions. And so it's not mine, it's hers.

And what I used to tell people is your secretary is a director level executive.

You have to think of her or him as if they're a director level executive and treat them like that because they have access to more people that interact with your organization than almost anybody else in the organization. Almost every single person that interacts with your organization goes through them. Who else does that? Who else in your company interacts with?

Every single stakeholder, every vendor, every customer, every client, every employee, every family member, everybody. That's your director of first impressions. And some got it and some didn't.

Freddy D: 00:17:17

And that's one of the reasons in my book Creating Business Superfans, one of my quotes is people will crawl through broken glass for appreciation and recognition. Unfortunately, it's not given enough.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:17:27

Right. I got another good story for you about the failure or the turnaround. By the way, both of these stories are in my book.

It was a really great company that had fabulous growth, not hundreds of millions of dollars, but they were doing about 20 million, I believe. And this is all training and service work. They had grown over the past prior 20 years to about 50 employees.

Very successful, very profitable, and the environment changed. And for the very first time, they lost about $300,000. First loss they had since ever year one, they were profitable.

The year after that, they lost a half a million dollars. In the third year after those first two losses, they were on pace to lose $800,000.

And they called me in and I worked with the CEO and the leadership team. There were seven members of the leadership team.

And I took them, I stripped them down at the bare bones, I took them down to the ground level and I said, we're going to start at the very beginning and we built up. And what we found was that, and I'm being very coy about who it was for confidentiality reasons, I will say that's in the healthcare space.

And consequently, what we found was that their services were so valuable and so much in demand and in so much need. Not just demand, but need that they struggled to say no to anybody.

So what they did was they grew so big and so fast that their infrastructure couldn't handle the volume. Their volume outgrew their capacity. Two things happen. Three things happen.

First, they stopped getting paid because they stopped billing and they stopped chasing invoices to get paid. So their receivables exploded. Second, they couldn't get projects finished.

They could never get a project finished because the minute they got close to the end, they took people to the next project to get that one kicked off properly. And the other people couldn't ever get the last project tied off.

And the third problem was the quality of work started to decline because they were doing anything anybody asked. And what we did was we put walls on the sides of the sales team and said, these are the criteria for the customers you're going to take on.

If they don't meet this criteria, you're going to be out of business and you don't take them on. So this is a strict thing. We're going to fire everybody that doesn't meet this. The CEO didn't resist, but they resigned.

They knew they couldn't emotionally deal with that, so the CEO resigned. Two of the other members of the leadership team quit out of anger and disgust. I can't work for a company that's going to let people go.

And we can take, we can serve them, we can figure out a way to take care of them. Said you can't. What you're going to do is put yourselves out of business and then you won't be any good to anybody. So we did that.

We fired boatloads of climb. And this is not retail. This is all basically professional services.

By the end of that year that they started on track to lose 800,000, three turnovers in the leadership team, the staff turned over pretty substantially. By the end of that year, they broke even and they were profitable again the year after.

It can be done, but it requires an understanding of what I call organizational imperatives. Things that you simply cannot skip, sacrifice, or treat lightly if you want to be a sustainable, successful organization.

Freddy D: 00:21:15

Absolutely agree 100%, because I always preach is the fact that the sale isn't the signing of the paperwork. The sale is everything. After the paperwork, that's the sale, the contract signing. That's the easy part. I can do that my eyes closed.

But making sure that's exactly what you're talking about. They were handling too much business. They didn't have the SOPs in place to make sure it got completely done.

And then, yeah, you yank this guy off and then that guy off, and the worst thing you can possibly do is not finish the project, because that's right off the bat. Now you've gone from creating a super fan to creating the absolute opposite, because they're going to never do business with you again.

You burn that bridge, it's over. And so what you really did is you helped them kind of be specific.

And that's one of my other quotes that I have, is to be terrific, you need to be specific. And if you're specific, you'll be terrific.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:22:16

I like that.

Freddy D: 00:22:17

That's what you help them do, is you help them become specific on this is how you're going to go after that market. The rest you're going to say, sorry, not in our wheelhouse. And that's how you transform that company.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:22:30

Let me put that into my lingo, my tribal lingo. What I call that is clarity and purpose. So clarity of purpose for me, and that's one of those three organizational demanding. Right.

You just cannot be successful without clarity of purpose. But clarity of purpose doesn't say enough. It's not complete enough.

You need to understand what that means, because it means knowing the value of what you're delivering, knowing who it's valuable for, understanding how you get that value to them, understanding what your long term goal is after you deliver that value and understanding the culture of the organization that you want to be running operations. How do you want people to treat each other?

Because if you're going to be dedicated to a purpose, you have to be on the same page, philosophically, culturally, ethically. And what I call it is, I call it clarity of purpose.

And once you understand the value you deliver and who that value is for, who finds value in that value, immediately you can say, this is who we do business with and this is not. It becomes very clear.

Freddy D: 00:23:53

And so you gotta get everybody in sync. This is the vision, this is the goal. And so what you're doing is, here's the clarity, here's the purpose. All right, go and get everybody going.

And once that team gets synchronized, those boats just scream through the water.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:24:10

Absolutely. We're fans of each other's approaches.

Freddy D: 00:24:14

Yeah. So let's get into your book a little bit. Let's talk about the book.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:24:17

Okay, I love that.

Freddy D: 00:24:18

What made you write the book and what's in the book?

Larry Mandelberg: 00:24:20

Well, what made me write the book was I got the answer. And I thought, in the world am I going to share this with people? I can't do it by myself. The world is too big.

If I can at least create a vehicle to share this information with people, then other people can get it and I don't have to be involved. So I deliver this information through books, through webinars, through podcasts, through training, through coaching, through consulting.

Any way I can get this information out when it's not a profit motive, when you're not doing it for a buck, people approach you a little differently. They see the sincerity and they listen to you a little better. Because that's all I want to do. My dream is a world with no help wanted ads.

What that means is that everybody that has a job, everybody that wants a job, has a job and loves it and loves their boss, and everybody that has employees treats them properly, treats them fairly and enjoys them and likes them and wants to be there working with them. So you have a group of people all working towards a common purpose. That's part of that clarity of purpose.

You have to have a goal that's bigger than any one per person. You have to have a goal bigger than any one person. A goal big enough that you have to have a group of people to do it.

One of my clients in one of the companies I was involved with for decades is a company whose purpose is to change the way education works in America. Now, that's not the exact statement, but that's the shorthand. Because they realize that education doesn't work worth a damn in the United States.

Our educational system drops every single year on a global scale. And that's disastrous. The only thing a democracy requires for sustainability is an educated electorate. We don't have an educated electorate anymore.

How does one person change education? You can't. You need a team. And we're right back to the secretary.

If you don't have every single person in that organization singing the same tune, looking for the same goals, and trying to take care of the same people in the same way and deliver quality so they can get to that next big picture thing they want, and they know they have to do it as a team. You ain't got a business, I tell.

Freddy D: 00:26:49

People, is that it starts off with leadership. It transcends to the team, the employees, it transcends to the contractors. And then if you're dealing with suppliers, it deals with the suppliers.

If you got distributors, it affects distributors. If you got complimentary businesses, okay, those are got to be part of the equation. And nobody ever thinks about ancillary businesses.

But the reality is they're part of the equation as well. Absolutely. So I say that's the whole stakeholder example.

And so now I say imagine 15% of your stakeholders, everybody in that equation, promoting your business because they love the way you treat them and everything else. What's going to happen in your business? Explode. Gonna only go one way. It's gonna explode. Yeah.

I've had one person on the show that was talked about that, and it was that he would go out to lunch with his supplier every now and then and send out birthday cards and things like that. When the pandemic hit, he needed 500 laptops like that. Everybody was going to the supplier for laptops. And guess who got his laptops first? He did.

Because he went above and beyond to build that relationship and maintain that relationship. It really doesn't cost a lot of money.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:28:12

It doesn't cost any money. Right.

Freddy D: 00:28:14

It's just recognizing when people on their birthdays and customers on their birthdays, suppliers on their birthdays for the holidays. American Thanksgiving says that's the best time to express gratitude, AKA giving thanks, is the reverse of Thanksgiving. That's the best time.

And that's where usually I send out a card to my customers and say, hey, thank you so much. I appreciate. Because of you, we've helped been successful, et cetera, et cetera.

And people want to know that they've been provided a positive impact to you as well, because otherwise you're denying them the fact that you're being successful because of them.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:28:51

I want to tell you more about the book, but I want to tell you a little story first. This is one of those grand slam home runs that you get every once in a while.

I had mentioned to you before that we were a vendor for Microsoft, and we were one of the top 30 international solution providers internationally. And the only reason I know that is because we were invited to the PGA tournament back in the 90s.

They invited the top 30 firms internationally and we were invited. That's how I know that we did work with their alpha team and we did work with Microsoft consulting. So we had a very intimate relationship with them.

We had great expertise. Most people don't really understand what Microsoft is. Microsoft is a licensing company. Most people think they're a software company.

Microsoft is not a software company. They're a licensing company. That's their money, selling licenses.

One day I called the guy who was the head of Northern California and I said, who are you sending on these sales calls? He said, I'm sending my sales team.

I said, what do you do when you go on these sales calls and you end up with a bunch of technical people in the sales call who ask your sales team questions that they don't know the answers to? He says, it's a shitty deal because we can't answer. We got to go find a text somewhere. We got to tie somebody up.

We got to get the answer back to him. It disrupts the whole flow of the process. I said, why don't you stop sending your salespeople to these meetings and let me send my engineers?

My engineers are salespeople. Everybody in my organization is a salesperson.

These engineers understand where opportunity lies and what the client can do to make their business better with technology. These guys know how to talk to these salespeople. Let me send them all. I got apps. They you send me business, I'll take care of those sales.

So they called me up two days later and said, we have a meeting in Carson, Nevada, which is the capital of Nevada, and we've got every state agency, IT department coming to that meeting. And they're considering replacing their complete 100% novell shop. They're considering putting Windows NT throughout the entire state.

Can you have somebody there on Saturday? I said, absolutely. We sent the guy there Saturday. He closed the deal. No Microsoft people were there. He closed the sale from that day.

For the next 12 months, I monitored it. Microsoft referred $1 million worth of labor sales to us. 1 million million.

Cost me 300 bucks to send my guy some gas, a couple of meals in a hotel room, and I got $1 million the next 12 months. Do you think we had a good relationship with the state of Nevada and with Microsoft? There's your superfan.

For me, it's just a different way of selling. I love those stories because everybody wins. It doesn't have to be about money.

It can be about everybody has a need, and if we can't all win, then something's wrong.

Freddy D: 00:32:05

Totally agree.

Freddy D: 00:32:06

So let's get into the book here.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:32:08

An organization that isn't growing is dying. There is no stasis. Some people argue that. I'm happy to argue it don't need to do it here.

But the premise is that if you're not growing, you're dying, which means you have to be in a constant state of growth. And the most expensive thing a company can do is grow. There's nothing more expensive.

It has to be profitable growth, or at least it has to be growth that has a source of funding in the case of nonprofits or in the case of the public sector.

Because this, what my research uncovered, works in the educational system, it works in private sector, it works in the government, it works in nonprofits. I've used it in the placement of orphan children.

I've used it with a federal house member who had offices in multiple places trying to get his organization to be more cohesive. It starts with that. And growth creates change. Change is the catalyst, causes the problem.

And the problem occurs when leadership doesn't have firsthand experience dealing with the change. So they make decisions that are not always in the best interest of the organization.

And when those interests are really detrimental, it kills the organization. So how do you stop it? Organizations live in three States of maturity, youth, adolescence, and adulthood.

It's an element of what's known as corporate life cycle theory. Youth is narrow and shallow experience.

We're not talking expertise, we're not talking knowledge, we're not talking anything but hands on, been there, done that. Youth, narrow, shallow, you can't get out of that without clarity of purpose. That's the first operational imperative.

The next stage is adolescent, still narrow, but deep experience. Because you've been doing it for a while over time and you've grown and you've gotten some experience, but it's still narrow.

The operational imperative in adolescence is consistency of performance. If you can't perform consistently, you can't make commitments to anybody.

Not your customers, not your employees, not your vendors, not your neighbors. And it has nothing to do with quality. It has everything to do about being able to say this is what we're going to do, and then doing it.

It's not that BS about under promise, over deliver. That's fine if you can. But let's start with the simple stuff. Make a commitment, fulfill it. The third stage is adulthood.

And that's where you get broad experience and deep experience. Because the longer you're in business, the more you realize how all these other organizations in your world affect you.

And you learn how to deal with the government, how to deal with insurance, and how to deal with the other shops in your area. And the critical operational imperative in adulthood is engagement of people. I call it the three Ps. Purpose, Performance, Engagement of people.

Your people have to feel and believe that they are a critical component of your organization.

Freddy D: 00:35:31

Absolutely.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:35:32

It's that simple. How you do it is complicated, but it's that simple. So you have to create those three things.

One more thing, and I'm giving you the absolute tenderloin part of the book is one more piece to this, and that is how does growth happen? How do you evolve? How does an organization mature?

Because as you might expect, the behavior of a youth is different than the behavior of an adolescent and the different than the behavior of an adult. Just like human beings. And that's why this works, is because it's all based on humans. And every organization is based on humanity.

So the way you evolve through these stages of maturity is what I call the arc of success. And here's the way it works. It starts with somebody has an idea and you try it and it works. When you get an idea that works, it creates growth.

And when you get growth, it creates complexity. And when you get complexity, you have to create rules to maintain and manage the complexity.

And when you create rules to manage the complexity, you have a loss to flexibility. And when you lose flexibility, you have a culture shift. So it's idea, success, growth, complexity, rules, loss of flexibility, culture shift.

And when a business person sees this and I have graphs and I lay this all out in a way that makes sense, they go, oh, my God, I never thought about it that way. Because that's what happens. You get successful and you have to put rules. And people say, I don't want to do that. We didn't have to do that before.

Why can't we do it the way we used to? It was successful. It's how we got here. Yeah, but it isn't how you're going to stay here. You have to change. That's what this book is all about.

It's about the pitfalls of success and why clarity of purpose, consistency of performance and engagement of people is important. The benefits, how they benefit you, how to create it and how to implement it and how to maintain it, how to keep it alive.

That's my book and the subtitle, businesses Don't Fail, they commit Suicide. That's to get your attention.

That's for the people walking down the book, flipping through the screen on Amazon to go, whoa, that's an interesting title. How to Survive Success and Thrive in Good Times and bad. Because I tell you, there are restaurants that thrived through Covid.

There are some organizations that kicked butt before, during and after Covid. And it's doable. People say to me all the time, what about natural disasters like Covid? I'm like, wait a minute. The. The boss is the boss for a reason.

The boss is responsible for the health and welfare of that organization. It's the boss's job to be prepared for anything.

That's why we have disaster recovery exercises in large corporate environments so that we don't have a problem if all of the it fails or if the building collapses or if a disaster hits us. That's why they do that. Somebody's got to be responsible. You just can't say nobody's responsible.

So I say, no business ever failed due to external factors. Ever. That's my shtick, Freddie. That's my shtick and I'm sticking with it.

Freddy D: 00:38:58

Great insight for our listeners. And as we get closer to the end here, how can people find you? Larry?

Larry Mandelberg: 00:39:05

It's actually pretty easy. If you can remember the suicide. Businesses don't fail. Even businesses don't fail. Just go online and do a Google search for businesses don't fail.

We're all over the place. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Store. If you can remember my last name, Mandelberg. I'm all over the Internet.

There's a website, businessesdontfail.com and the main site is Mandelberg Biz. It's not easy to remember, but if you can remember, businesses don't fail, you can find me very easily.

Freddy D: 00:39:40

Well, we'll make sure that's in the show notes so that makes it easy for listeners to find.

And it's been a great conversation and we definitely would love to have you on the show again down the road because you and I could probably talk on this stuff for hours.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:39:54

You got that right.

Freddy D: 00:39:56

All right, thank you for your time.

Larry Mandelberg: 00:39:58

Thank you. Pleasure.

Freddy D: 00:40:00

Wow.

Freddy D: 00:40:01

What a powerful conversation with Larry Mandelberg. In this episode, we tapped into the F pillar finance, protect margins and cash flow.

That's all about strengthening your financial foundation so you can scale confidently and sustainably. Larry reminded us that without disciplined financial systems, even the best strategy can collapse.

His perspective on turning complexity into clarity is a wake up call for every leader. So here's your review one area of your business where money is leaking and put a safeguard in place this week.

You'll gain confidence, stability and the freedom to invest in real growth. And remember, one action, one stakeholder, one super fan closer. Until next time, keep building your business. Super fans, thank you for listening.

And know this, when you do, freedom follows.

Outro: 00:41:06

We hope you took away some useful knowledge from today's episode of the Business Super Superfans podcast. The path to success relies on taking action. So go over to businesssuperfans.com and get your hands on the book.

If you haven't already, join the accelerator community and take that first step in generating a team of passionate supporters for your business. Join us on the next episode as we continue guiding you on your journey to achieve flourishing success in business.