Charts Everything, Even Love With Nick Jain | Ship's Log 18

Guest Quote

"Instinctual thinking is great when you're on a savanna running from a lion. It's not so great in the 21st century."

— Nick Jain 

Episode Summary

Nick Jain came to this conversation carrying credentials that would make most people nervous — Harvard MBA, top of his class, a decade in private equity, three company turnarounds including one he scaled past $100 million. But what comes through immediately is that the math never stays abstract with Nick. It shows up everywhere: in how he proposed to his wife, in how he chooses which poker hands to play, in how he sized up an investment against a senior colleague's instincts and held his ground.

The conversation moves through Nick's early encounter with academic failure in college, his two-part framework for making decisions under pressure, the HIPPO principle that quietly kills companies, and a genuinely fascinating breakdown of why elite poker is mostly about patience and folding — not bluffing. He's quick, clear, and unexpectedly funny, and the Battle Rap detour near the end of the episode is one of the show's better 'wait, what?' moments.

The episode closes with Nick sharing what Eagle Rock CFO Services is doing — delivering Fortune 500-grade financial analysis to businesses in the $5–50M range at a price point that actually makes sense. Six weeks old at recording. Already has customers. Worth watching.

Guest Bio

Nick Jain is the co-founder of Eagle Rock CFO Services, where he helps small businesses get elite financial guidance without the Fortune 500 price tag. He trained as a mathematician and physicist, earned his MBA from Harvard Business School — graduating top of his class — and spent a decade in private equity before leading turnarounds as CFO and CEO across trucking, software, and eCommerce. He now works with companies in the $5–50M range, bringing the same playbooks that drive large corporations down to a scale that growing businesses can actually use.

Guest Links

Website:  http://eaglerockcfo.com/
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmjain/
YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/@EagleRockCFOServices
Eagle Rock Podcast:  https://www.eaglerockcfo.com/podcast

Guest CTA

Listeners can book a free 30-minute strategy call where Nick reviews their financials and provides 2-3 actionable recommendations to improve profitability or cash flow — no strings attached.

Book your free call: https://www.eaglerockcfo.com/podcast

Who do you know who'd make a great guest for the show? Please let us know.
Email: info@projectcandor.com

Website:   https://www.projectcandor.com

Social Media

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YouTube:    https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectCandorPodcast

Transcript

Instincts Won't Save You in the 21st Century

Jeanne 0:02

Today I'm very pleased to have Nick Jain as the guest on Project Candor. Nick, welcome aboard. Thank you so much for having me, Jeanne. Really excited to be here. Great. You're the co-founder of Eagle Rock CFO

Intro

Jeanne 0:15

Services, where you help small, mid-sized businesses get elite financial guidance without the Fortune 500 price tag. You graduated top of your class from Harvard Business School, spent a decade in private equity, and have served as CFO and CEO during turnarounds across trucking, software, and e-commerce, including scaling one business past 100 million. Today you work with companies in the 5 to 50 million range, helping them run leaner and grow smarter, using the same playbooks big companies rely on. With all that being said, and that is some kind of credentials. It's such a pleasure to get to know you more.

Nick 0:56

Thank you so much for uh the introduction. I'm I'm blushing a little bit.

Jeanne 1:02

Yeah, the credentials are huge. And the just the thought of uh top of your class in Harvard, it's just amazing. Uh, not a lot of people can boast of that. So welcome. Thanks.

Nick Jain joins the conversation

Jeanne 1:15

So, what we'll do here today is um I'm gonna start out with some questions just to get a feel for who you are, because uh I have talked to you before, but the listeners don't know a lot about you. So we will start to ask some questions and uncover the candor within Nick. You good with that?

Nick 1:35

I am. Let's do this.

Jeanne 1:36

All righty. You spent your life in high-stakes environments, investing, turnarounds, decision making under pressure. Where did you first learn how you personally react when the pressure is real?

Nick 1:49

Oof. That is a hard one. Look, I think the first time that I honestly encountered adversity was in college. I, you know, I was fortunate to grow up in a stable family environment, not rich, but not poor either. So didn't really add a normal childhood. And showing up to college for the first time, you know, I was a smart kid doing well in school. And then I started encountering courses where I was struggling not just to get a good grade, but to like pass. And kind of the, you know, for lack of a better word, the emotional trauma of going from like being

First Encounter with Failure

Nick 2:19

really, really smart to not passing a class was incredibly challenging and stressful for me, right? Because you're going from like, hey, I'm the smartest person in the room to I can't pass a class. How dumb am I? It's it's a shattering of your ego and it makes you really, really stressed out. Or this made me very stressed out the first time I went through that. It's probably a like two or three month-long cycle of like just being stressed every day, not getting it, really struggling, thinking I'm the, you know, dumb and failing at life. Uh, my parents are paying tuition, all that stress is coming out, and just trying to persist through it and not and not totally screw up or give up for that matter.

Jeanne 2:57

That's amazing. You sound like me when I went to college. I was just top of class in high school. Then you get up to college and you're just like, what are these blue books? Why do I have to explain all this stuff? Where's the multiple choice? And then you don't know how to get through it. So uh I probably I probably didn't react as well as you did. But anyway, that's a really good and honest answer. Thank you so much. Another question I have is you trained as a mathematician and physicist before business. When you're facing a messy real-world decision, what actually shows up first for you? The equations are the instincts.

Nick 3:37

For me, I'm very much equations are mastered. Maybe not equations, but logic, right? I've tried to make no decision in life, including getting married based on instinct.

Jeanne 3:48

What? I'm shocked at that. That's the way I did it.

Nick 3:52

.There's a funny story where my, you know, now wife, then girlfriend, and I decided to uh make big life decisions based on a spreadsheet. Uh, this is like a decade ago. There's a long story behind that, uh, perhaps a little too long for today. But uh kind of I don't make decisions based on instincts for two reasons. Number one, I don't think I practically have good instincts or gut feel. Number one, as funny as that is to say. And number two, the actual research shows that people make terrible decisions

Equations vs. Instincts

Nick 4:18

under pressure based on instinct. You can read kind of Nobel lawyers who talk about type one and type two thinking. Instinctual thinking is great when you're on a savannah running from a lion. It's not so great in the 21st century. So for me, I really like trying to do two things when encountering stress or decisions in in the business world or professionally. Number one is try and remove myself from a stressful situation. So don't make those decisions where you have to negotiate in front of somebody live, you know, go come back in a day or two or think in a quiet room. And number two, think about something from first principle. So not what my heart says, but rather let's think about what the logical sequence of events or boundary conditions are and work within them. So very much you use the term equations. I think of it as logical sequences or or logicking something out. That's the way I approach, you know, almost any consequential decision in my personal or professional life.

Jeanne 5:08

Oh, that's a very nice way to look at it. I still had a list when I was deciding whether I'd marry my husband or not, and I ended up throwing that out because he wasn't taking the checks. But he's awesome.

Nick 5:21

So I had a uh professor in college, uh, Danny Blanchflower. His what he's famous for, or one of the two things he's famous for, is he tried to quantify happiness, right? And one of the things he quantified was um it's called the uh the economics of hedonics, which is the fancy word for happiness. And one of the things he quantified is what is the value of a happy marriage? And I may be misquoting him, but it's like adding $110,000 a year to your family income for having a happy marriage. That's pretty good. Yeah. So you could literally, you know, if if somebody's offering you $300,000, you should, you know, it's better than your marriage, but if somebody's offering you $50,000 a year for the rest of your life, you should take that happy marriage.

Jeanne 6:01

Okay. I never even thought about it that way. Uh money does not equate

The Economics of Happiness

Jeanne 6:08

in this formula for me. If he he'd have to be a nice person. Okay, so these are all fun comments. Um, when you step into a company doing 10, 20, 30 million dollars, what's the first signal you look for to know whether the business is steady or quietly taking on water?

Nick 6:28

There's two related things. Number one is literally what are the financials. Just look at the numbers. So how much money is the company making and how is that trending? That's number one. And number two is how are decisions being made? A lot of companies' decisions are made by what's called the HIPAA principle, which is the highest paid person in the organization, whether that be the CEO or basically whoever's the loudest makes the most money, most senior, most charismatic, whatever buzzword you want to use. And that's a terrible way to make good decisions, both at an executive level as well as an organization level. Good organizations make data-driven decisions. So the two kind of signals that a company is not well run are number one, it's losing money or making less money. And number two, decisions are made based on whoever is the loudest or most obnoxious person. And that is a bad way to run a company. Not just a company, it's a bad way to run really anything.

Jeanne 7:17

Well, what happens if the person running the company

Reading a Company: First Signals

Jeanne 7:20

doesn't have that philosophy and doesn't see it the way you do? Like, let's look at the numbers, let's look at the performance, let's look at where you are. Uh, and they're like, I still want it this way. Because a $5 million company versus a $50 million company, $5 million is usually a single-owned person, right? So, how do you get through that kind of uh conflict and philosophy here?

Nick 7:42

Well, look, if you own your company and you have total control, you can do whatever you want within legal and ethical boundaries. There's nothing that can change you. But self-aware leaders, but there's kind of two butts there. Number one, self-aware leaders know that, hey, even if I'm an instinctual run person, I would want my lieutenant or my one of my lieutenants to be someone who's much more analytically oriented. And that's the opposite, too. If you're if you are a very analytically oriented person the way I am, I want someone who is much warmer and kind of thinks about the humanistic side of things to work alongside me to supplement the areas where I'm not really good. That's kind of number two. But really, as organizations get larger, one of two things happen. Number one, they stall out because you're basically bounded by the strengths and weaknesses and deficiencies of your leader, right? If the CEO only thinks in a certain way, he or she's not going to get past a certain stage unless they either grow themselves or supplement their strengths. Those who grow do one of two things. Number one, they find that supplementation, the skill set, or the board of directors for these larger companies demands that the CEO or you know, senior executive

What Happens When the Boss Won't Listen to Data

Nick 8:43

team has this more comprehensive skill set. And really, if you look at any large uh, you know, major corporation, whether American or otherwise, their CEOs tend to be very analytically oriented because the boards demand that they make good logical decisions, not decisions based on, you know, whether they woke up feeling good today.

Jeanne 9:00

Right. Or everybody's happy working there.

Nick 9:03

And yeah. You want happiness, right? You don't want to be a bad employer, you don't want to be rude to your employees. But at the end of the day, when you're responsible for 100 jobs or a thousand jobs or 10,000 jobs, you don't want that CEO making decisions based on whether they feel good or, you know, they don't you want you don't want them firing people because they just felt unhappy today or were in a mood. You want them to make that decision very, very thoughtfully because their decisions matter, right? Especially when you're running these larger organizations. Your decisions affect thousands or tens of thousands of people.

Jeanne 9:32

Absolutely. And you have brought um companies back from the brink. I know you have mentioned that you know to me earlier that you had one that you saved a lot of jobs, and that was very stressful, but it was very necessary. So, yeah, I see where you're coming from there. You said you like hard problems and clear answers. What's the moment in your career where the answer wasn't clear and you had to sit in that uncertainty longer than you wanted to?

Nick 10:00

No, there's a lot of questions I you know I've been uncertain about. I think the most challenging one was when I was working as an investor on Wall Street, I was asked to look at an investment where a very senior person said, Look, this is an overvalued company. We should avoid looking at it. And I looked at it and said, like, it this company is worth a lot, but they're a really, really good company that has built a better way to outcompete its competitors. And on one hand, I had somebody very senior, very successful, very rich, who's been doing it for much longer. I'm you know, a year into this job or six months into this job, and I don't know squat about this industry. On the other hand, I had some pretty good data showing that like these guys just have a fundamentally they look like the same as their two or three competitors, but they're fundamentally better. And that what required me to like kind of compare my data or you know, my analysis versus the instincts of someone who has been incredibly successful doing this for decades. That was, you know, many kind of two or three weeks of just thinking it through and making sure I had my I's dotted and T's crossed before I came with a kind of directly contradictory opinion to someone again, much, much more successful than me.

Jeanne 11:09

Very good. I wish I knew what that company was if you were selling stock.

Nick 11:14

Yeah, for obviously there's NDAs and stuff, so I can't talk about specific

The Hardest Call on Wall Street

Nick 11:18

companies.

Jeanne 11:18

Yes, I understand that totally. I'm just playing with you. But now we go into a little bit of a playful side of you because you said that you were a professional poker player. Not professional, but I'm good enough to be if I needed to be. Oh, okay, but you've played on the circuit and I have to know more. So for people who've never seen professional poker up close, which would be me, what does it actually feel like to sit at a table where every decision has real money and real consequences attached to it?

Nick 11:48

Sure. So real life poker is incredibly stressful, even for good players. So that's number one, right? Whether you're playing for $300 in front of you, or uh, I've never played $30,000 in front of me, but I imagine that it's going to be, you know, equivalently, or if not more stressful. So that's number one, it's stressful, and you're being forced to make decisions often in, you know, 30 seconds or a minute that might cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. That's number one. Number two is, you know, if you ever watch poker on TV or on YouTube clips or whatever, they're showing you these like people making complex plays. Real professional poker is incredibly boring. You know, amateur poker players play about somewhere between 30 to 40 percent, uh sorry, 20 to 40 percent of hands. It sounds right, I'm playing one out of every five hands. Professional poker players are typically playing about one out of every 20 or one out of 30 hands. So most of the time, you're just sitting there giving up your hands and reading a book or listening to music or doing something else. So it's incredibly boring. You don't actually play much poker if you're playing poker well, which is uh which is fine. And then the third thing is look, poker has gone through a major evolution. If you think about kind of the stereotype of poker, it's very machisimo men with cowboy hats and like male ego. That is how poker was 30 or 40 years ago. Sometime in the early 2000s, people realized that poker is basically a game of math, and the kind of the generation of poker players, 2001 and onwards, are basically either formally trained mathematicians or informally. And by formally, I mean people with like PhDs in mathematics, physics, engineering, or conversely, somebody who may have dropped out of high school but has the combination of innate talent and train themselves on the math. So, like there's almost

What Professional Poker Actually Feels Like

Nick 13:27

totally elite poker players today that aren't in some way, shape, or form hardcore mathematicians, which is not the vision you know you have if you see movies or Hollywood or envision that stereo, you know, that stereotyped uh dark room with a bunch of men wearing cowboy hats and smoking. If you tried to play that style of poker today, you would be decimated and you know, you wouldn't have a house by tomorrow. You would lose so much money so quickly because you're just playing against people who are so much better at the modern game of poker, which is way, way harder to play than 20, 30 years ago.

Jeanne 13:56

Well, go back a minute when you said poker players don't play every hand, so they give up their cards. I don't understand that. You mean I thought um once you were in, you stayed in. Are you saying that they get it dealt to them, they don't like it, they're just they just lose the chip.

Nick 14:13

And well, you're doing two things. Um, so number one, you know, in a typical, if you're playing live poker, the dealer is giving out giving you about 25 hands an hour on average. Uh good poker player is maybe playing two to five of those hands an hour. So for 20 out of the 25 hands that the dealer is giving you, you're just folding them. You're not even playing at all. Okay, that's number one. And number two is you know, again, on TV or YouTube clips, if you ever see people are playing to what's called the river, the end of the hand. In actual good poker, a lot basically, even if you decide

The Math Game of Professional Poker

Nick 14:47

to play that hand, chances are you're gonna give up after the very first street or the very first set of cards is dealt. So people give up very, very easily because it often the math just doesn't make sense to continue.

Jeanne 14:59

Okay.

Nick 14:59

And that's something that people don't see because you imagine again on TV or in movies, if you remember Casino Royale, five people make it to the river, and you know, so people have got quads, straight flushes, uh, full houses, all these amazing hands. It is incredibly rare to see more than three people get to the river in any real game of poker, especially amongst good people. You're lucky to get, you know, two people to their turn.

Jeanne 15:23

Yeah, it is pretty flashy on TV. I mean, you got people coming around with drinks.

Nick 15:29

They're showing you the one out of the million hands that like actually, right? The the trunk is incredibly like real good poker is incredibly boring. It's a game of patience and ruthless risk management rather than of like ego and aggression.

Jeanne 15:44

Okay. Well, when you're playing poker, what's louder in your head? The math, the pattern recognition, or the read on people?

Nick 15:54

It's much more the math. Again, I know that I should only be playing three or four percent of hands. So it isn't, you know, when I started playing, I was playing, again, pretty poorly, and I thought, hey, I should be playing, you know, half the hands or a third of the hands every hour. And over time, that's come down to I really only should play the top, you know, what's called the top two or three percent of hands and in position. So for me, it's about kind of math, but I'm not, I don't have to redo the math every time because I just know the rules and I've simplified them down, saying, like, this is the types of situations I should play in. I should play when I'm in late position with the top five percent of hands, I should always race first in, I should squeeze, I kind of memorize these rules that are based on very fundamental mathematical principles. Really, about 90% of the game again from kind of mid-tiers onwards is really about mathematics and risk management. And about five or ten percent is about reading people. So all that poker tells and stuff, yes, it helps, but it only helps when you've mastered the fundamental risk management of the game.

Jeanne 16:52

Okay. Well, I'm not a poker player.

Nick 16:56

Yeah, no, to be clear, when I play with my friends, I'm not doing any of that. Then I'm just you know drinking and eating pizza and I'm not trying to win 20 bucks off my friends, right? Okay. But when I'm not playing at the casino, or seriously, yes, like it is a you know, there I'm playing in a very, very kind of conservative but aggressive manner.

Jeanne 17:13

Okay. Well, let me ask a really personal question. When you were growing up, did you absolutely know what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Nick 17:23

Yes. In my uh first grade class, the teacher asked you to uh draw what you wanted to be growing up. And Peep, you know, I was growing up in a small kind of lower middle class farm town. So most people had firefighters, cops, teachers, nurses, kind of typical professions that you would see, right? I said I wanted to uh PhD in physics at the age of six. And by the way, my father's a janitor, my mom was at that time working in a factory, so I had no you know relatives in high sciences or academia. None of my classmates had that, but I I've told you that I could have told you that I wanted a you know very, very serious degree in the hard sciences and something mathematical, specifically physics at that point, which is what I ended up doing, albeit not to the PhD level.

Jeanne 18:00

Oh, that's just awesome. So, how did you draw your picture?

Nick 18:04

Uh, it was me wearing a lab coat, which by the way, physicists don't wear lab coats, but I didn't know this is a six-year-old. Uh yeah, it was me in a lab coat with uh like you know, PhD on the uh embroider and then lapel, which again, uh you know, I guess doctors have uh doctors still have lab coats with uh, you know, their names and MD. I did not realize that a physicist didn't.

Jeanne 18:23

Oh, that is just very that's very cute. When I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be, I I never could lock in on anything. So do you think a lot of your success is because you started early knowing you had a determination for what you wanted to do and what you wanted to achieve?

Nick 18:39

I wouldn't say I'm more determined than or more diligent than other people. I would say that I know what I'm really passionate about. I, you know, setting aside the advantages of being good at math and stuff, I like math. It's it's fun, it is entertaining. It it allows you to do really cool things that are just fun, right? You can draw beautiful pictures, you can understand music in a different way, you can think about the world in kind of really just interesting ways and understand the world. And I find that just fundamentally beautiful in an artistic sort of way. And so that has allowed me to persevere in some of these challenging circumstances that we discussed earlier on this uh recording. So yeah, I'm not more diligent or more effective or harder working than other people. I just have was very fortunate in life to discover something that I care about and find

Knowing What You Want at Age 6

Nick 19:23

very fun.

Jeanne 19:24

Oh, that's really great. Yeah, I'm not there with you. I didn't find that when I was young, and I still kind of you know like to try new things, but I am pretty passionate about meeting people and learning more about them. So now let's shift gears. Um, you know, we play a game here called Two Truths and a Lie. And it's a quick way to let different sides of someone show up. Before we get started with that, I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to show people what your stories were. The guest has provided me with three of his most unexpected stories. This episode is sponsored by Rebel 180, the home of brave pivots and fresh starts. Rebel 180 is all about helping you rediscover what's possible when you stop settling and start listening to that little tug inside that says, life can be different. Whether you're navigating a career shift, dreaming about a new direction, or standing at the crossroads wondering if it's time for your own 180-degree turn, Rebel 180 is a reminder you don't need permission to change your story. And now, as we open the door to our second sponsor, we're stepping into the world of tech. Simple socket print, the lightweight blazing fast label print solution designed for those who need reliability without the bloat. With version 1.5, you get instant printing in milliseconds, fully maintained print sequence, and automatic base 64 decoding all without needing print driver installs. If you're running SQL Server 2016 or newer, SimpleSocket Print 1.5 drops right in and gets to work. Keep your workflow simple, keep your label printing fast with Simple Socket Print. Thank you to our sponsors. So, Nick, uh, you provided me with these headlines. Number one, you can regularly find Nick building complex financial models or writing code on one computer screen with the other screen playing cartoons or old sitcoms. Don't tell me if that's true or lie. We're gonna go through all three of them. I'm gonna guess, and then you'll tell us the story behind them and tell us which one's the lie. Number two, while bored one weekend, Nick taught his one year old son how to deal him and two other people

Two Truths & A Lie

Jeanne 21:44

poker so they wouldn't have to deal the cards themselves. Uh, number three, Nick has hunted squirrels and used them to make a terribly spiced soup. So for me to guess, I looked at these several times. I'm guessing number two is the lie because I'm thinking one year old, you're smart, you got good genes, but uh can the one-year-old, you didn't say if it was a boy or a girl, uh, but can they their fingers actually handle cards enough to shuffle them and deal with them? I'm not sure. So I'm gonna say that's a lie. So don't tell me, but just start with number one and tell everybody what this is all about.

Nick 22:25

Sure. So since I would, you know, got graduated from college, I've always liked having a dual monitor setup, right? So I've had two screens on my computer, whether it be a laptop, desktop, whatever. And on one screen, you know, um doing some hardcore work, whatever that is, reading documents, building models, writing code. And on the other screen, I'll be watching just something for fun, right? Something mindless like Seinfeld playing, cartoons when I was a kid, just something mindless playing on the left-hand side screen. Uh so that's number one. Uh any questions, comments? Uh, yeah. So um, what cartoons did you watch when you were a kid? My favorite were some of the Japanese anime things, so like Gundam Wing or Dragon Ball. Um, you know, pretty much all teenage boys were watching that back when I was growing up in the in the 90s and early 2000s. Yeah, or Seinfeld, Scrubs, some of the, you know, other things like that.

Jeanne 23:15

Oh, okay. Okay. Well, go on to story two. I don't have any more questions on one.

Nick 23:21

Yeah, so um, about for the last four or five years, on and off, I've been running a monthly poker game, which you know, everybody buys in for $20, we pay for 25-50 cents, and I pay for the beer and pizza. So I end up losing money even if I win the poker game. And look, it's it's annoying that you know you you you want to be chatting with your buddies, and so you know, no one wants to deal, right? Because dealing requires focus and requires you to like have both hands so you can't be drinking, uh, you can't be drinking or eating pizza. So um my son's just lying around doing nothing. So I'm like, let's get him involved and let's teach him how to deal cards so that we don't have to.

Jeanne 23:57

He's one year's old. Yes, he is. And your wife said, Okay, that's a good skill for him to learn.

Nick 24:06

At one. My wife said I could teach him poker, I'm just not allowed to take him to into a casino. Okay, which is a perfectly uh acceptable uh boundary.

Jeanne 24:16

Right. I don't think they would let him well, they might. I don't know.

Nick 24:19

They definitely there I've definitely seen some kids who should not be in a casino be in a casino, and i I I feel honestly kind of bad.

Jeanne 24:26

Like okay. So how did he do with was he fast enough? Was anybody complaining?

Nick 24:34

Well, so he's a one-year-old, he's pretty slow, right? Sometimes he turns over the carts, and so you know that's part of the penalty. If like if you if you if we want to be lazy, not do it ourselves, you have to deal with a bad dealer. Okay. It's a free dealer.

Jeanne 24:48

Alrighty. Well, I bet it was more fun for the your friends to watch him doing it than whether it was effective or accurate.

Nick 25:00

Indeed.

Jeanne 25:01

How about number three? Because that one takes me back to the Beverly Hillbillies and Granny cooking up some possum stew. What was this about?

Nick 25:11

Okay, so I grew up in um not quite rural, but let's say a little a farm town in Canada. Um, throughout my kind of well, really for my entire childhood, uh, up until I graduated high school. And hunting was a thing there, right? People hunted all sorts of things, whether it be deer or etc. And in I think fifth or sixth grade, they taught us how to make this. Um it was all it was like a Native American or uh type of boomerang thingy, that you have two weights attached to a string and you throw it and it just wraps around almost like a cowboy lasso, uh, except you're there's no rope on the other side, it just wraps around uh small animals and traps them. So, like for rabbits and squirrels. And so we went and we built we learned how to build these when I was uh six or seven years old in class. And then sometime when we were like 15 or 16 years old, I was camping with a friend, and we uh we were like, okay, let's go try this thing out that we learned 10 years ago. So we made them uh with some rocks and string that we lying around and went to go hunt squirrel. We tried for four or five hours, caught one squirrel, and then you know, decided to see figure out what squirrel would taste like. How old were you?

Jeanne 26:17

About 15 or 16. And so, okay, let's see how squirrel tastes. So you knew how to skin the squirrel, cut the innards.

Nick 26:25

Yeah, so I mean, my my friend's dad was a hunter, so he knew how to uh like skin, you know, he hunted other animals. I don't think he'd ever done, yeah. I don't think he'd ever done squirrel before, but you know, he did the skinning part of us and figured out how to get the meat off. We watched uh with fascination.

Jeanne 26:40

Okay. Well, what's the spicy stuff about? What terribly spicy?

Nick 26:44

Well, just just like none of us were good cooks. Not and the friend's dad plus the the two of us were not good cooks. So we just threw in whatever spices were in our camping year to, you know, so that it wouldn't just be squirrel meat and water.

Jeanne 26:56

Okay. Well, I did look it up yesterday, but I didn't write the names down. But there were two presidents that like squirrel soup. So I was that's like, well, I guess it's the it is a thing. One of them actually used to cook it up and serve it to his uh at his rallies. I should know the name, but I don't have it. But I said, okay, well, that one probably could be true. But that gizmo you made, I'm not sure about that. So in Canada, I didn't did I get that you were from Canada?

Nick 27:26

I don't know. Uh I've been in the US now for 20 just over just under 21 years. Um, but yeah, I I grew up in Canada until I was about 18. Well, India till I was five and Canada until I was 18.

Jeanne 27:38

Okay. Man of the world. Canada, that's cold.

Nick 27:42

Uh not Vancouver. So the the I I was very fortunate to grow up in the like one secretly, well, then it was secret, but the the secret part of Canada, which is Vancouver, winters don't drop below like 35 would be a very, very cold day in the Vancouver area. So it very rarely drops below freezing, and in the summers doesn't usually go above 80. So it's like very temperate year-round, cloudy and gray, unfortunately. So you get like three or four days of cloud a week, but you know, not cold at all. Uh, it was a beautifully kept secret. Somebody figured this out about 15 years ago, and property values have gone up enormous amount. It's like New York rent, it's like New York real estate prices without the New York incomes.

Jeanne 28:22

Oh, well, Florida prices are going up too. So this is a good kept secret. So I'm not gonna talk happy about it. I don't want the secret to go. All right. So now that I've guessed, I guess too. Did you you reveal which one is the lie?

Nick 28:41

So you did guess correctly. A one my one-year-old can hold cards, but he neither has the mental capacity nor the physical dexterity to deal cards.

Jeanne 28:50

Okay, I thought that was a big stretch. If you'd said like three or four, maybe, but uh, even then.

Nick 28:56

I but I tried to tell a compelling wraparound story around it so that it's you know.

Jeanne 29:01

Yeah, it was good. I I liked it. But uh number one, uh, you also kind of told me you like battle rap, so I'm gonna throw that out there. Do you what do you like about battle rap? Is that true? Or was that it is true, yeah.

Nick 29:15

So um uh I, you know, when I was watching Eight Mile like 15 or 20 years ago, I was listening to clips on YouTube, and then I realized that it's not just something that happens in a movie, it's an actual, like, you know, not sport, but let's say a uh competitive thing, hobby, right? And so I uh YouTube started showing me clips, and I realized these people are incredibly talented lyricists, right? They're not just yelling at insults at each other and swearing, but rather they, you know, especially over the last decade or so, battle rap has evolved into very, very intricate wordplay with puns and like, you know, multiple verses that are going on to it that are touching on the same theme in different dimensions. And kind of the lower level battle rap you see is just insulting somebody and making kind of horrible marks or remarks about them. But the elite levels, the people who are winning kind of the national and international competitions, they're extraordinarily talented writers and performers because you have to be good at the writing side of it because you're writing these verses and poetry, but then you also have incredible stage presence uh and and quick thinking. Uh so yeah, I've enjoyed it because it is funny, it's entertaining, and shows an incredible level of wordplay uh that you know I enjoy listening to.

Jeanne 30:21

Oh, nice. But this also goes along with your brain is functioning very highly in numbers, and uh, you know, sometimes I hear rap and I can't catch everything they're saying because it's going very, very, very, very fast.

Nick 30:35

So battle rap, they're usually not rapping too fast, right? Because they're they're wanting the puns to land. It's it's much were much more like spoken word or like or traditional poetry, really.

Jeanne 30:45

Oh, okay. So it's probably it's probably like it took me a while to understand Shakespeare. So I don't understand the lingo in some rap, so I kind of skip it. Oh, that's good. Yeah, it shows you have a lot of interesting hobbies, that's for sure. Well, I wonder if you had anything else you wanted to talk about with your company um before we go into how that people can get in touch with you. But this has been a lot of fun.

Nick 31:12

Yeah, I'll I'll just give a quick shout-out for what we do. So we built a we launched EagleRock CFO literally six weeks ago. And so we're new into this. We have customers already, which is nice. But we're what we did was look, if you want to hire an elite consulting firm to look at your business, it's gonna cost you between give or take about a half a million dollars a month. That makes sense if you're a Fortune 500 company making a billion dollars. It doesn't make sense if you're a $20 million company because half a million dollars for one month of work might be your entire year's profits. So our idea was

Battle Rap and Wordplay

Nick 31:42

hey, can we give that level of service and analysis and insight to a small business? And the only way you could do that is by cutting the price a lot. And the way we did it is we built a bunch of technology, some traditional technology and some AI technology that does 90, 95% of the work for us. So what that means is instead of spending uh 200 hours trying to analyze and understand your business, we can do that in an hour or two, which means that instead of charging half a million dollars a month, we can charge you 3,500 bucks, which all of a sudden makes it much, much more affordable. So there's other people out there that are taking the similar approach, but kind of the the advancement of technology has now made it possible to deliver these incredible, this incredible level of analytical insight at a price point that opens up the market really for you know smaller businesses. And so that's what we're trying to do. We built some pretty cool technology. And, you know, based on the the small number of clients we have so far, we are doing we're we're saving them a lot of money and helping them make more money for a price they can afford, which is which is fun. And we're getting to solve really cool problems along the way.

Jeanne 32:44

You do seem really excited about it and happy. And so that's uh amazing because a lot of small businesses they struggle, struggle, struggle, and then uh know the closure rate of small businesses is is very high, you know, when they launch and then try to gain some traction. So you're helping them overcome that. I think that's fantastic. I hate seeing businesses close, and we have a lot that open here and close pretty quickly. You go back to look at them and what happened to that shop that I like to shop in, or what happened to this restaurant, or what happened to that? So um, yeah, that's an exciting business and in a very much needed one. Thank you. So I'm going to um to share my screen again and show you how you can get in touch with um Nick for the folks watching and for listening, you can kind of you know just talk through your contact information. So I'll let you take it away.

Eagle Rock CFO: Fortune 500 Analysis for $20M Companies

Nick 33:43

Sure. Um, yeah. So the the best way to contact me personally is via LinkedIn. I'm super responsive there. Oh, and the then the other way is uh if you go to egorockcfo.com, that's our website. And if you type egorockcfo.com slash podcast, we'll actually provide any small business owner that's between five to fifty million dollars of revenue a free half hour consultation where we'll take a look through your data, we won't charge you anything, and we will actually give you one or two things that you will can use to become more profitable literally next week, specific to your business.

Jeanne 34:13

Awesome. So any other words of wisdom for the listeners?

Nick 34:17

I don't know if it's a word of wisdom, but I I think it'll you know bring joy to anybody's life if they try and learn something, doing something new and fun in in the next month, whether that be reading a book, whether that be learning how to cook, something that you're bad at, and and you should still go try, right? Learning something new or doing something new, right? Eating a food, like my neighbor and I were talking about eating chocolate covered crickets earlier this morning. Oh my god. I've never done that. I was like, okay, let's let's go try it.

Jeanne 34:40

Oh well, you know, that's good words of wisdom because I wrote a children's book a while back ago, and basically the character in the book uh was just trying all kinds of things because they they wanted to do a hula, they went to Hawaii, did a hula, they wanted to play the piano, they sang, did uh ate Chinese food, you know, just different things. It's like that is so important because I still learn things and still try things as old as old as I am. But I don't want to say it like that. But you know, the older you the more you grow, you know, a lot of people say it's time for me to stop. I don't want to do anything anymore. I don't want to try anything new. I don't want to eat the snails. I still haven't eaten them. But uh who knows? I could.

Nick 35:25

I have. They're okay. It's you mostly taste the butter, honestly. So you don't even taste the snake.

Jeanne 35:31

Yeah, it's a conduit for your butter, like somebody used to say in the South. So it's like biscuits are just a conduit for my butter. Slap it on. Oh, it's just been uh really fun, Nick, to get to know you more. And I know you're gonna have lots of customers because people will like to work with people like you that just are super smart and knowledgeable, but yet are a real person behind the scenes. So thank you so much. And for the listeners, I hope you join next time. And until then, I wish you smooth sailing. Thanks for joining me on Project Candor, where the doors are open, the stories are unexpected, and the treasure is always real. If today's episode made you laugh or think, follow the show and share it with your crew. Otherwise, I might just make you swab the deck. I'm Jeanne Andersen, your Admiral of the Unexpected. See you on the next voyage.