The Hidden Risk Sinking Growing Companies | With Dan Pascone and Michael Higgins | Podcast #37

Michael Higgins runs Mindful Finance, a corporate training practice built around one specific gap: the “non-financial decision maker,” people running operations, sales, HR, or a plant floor who never studied accounting but make decisions every day that move a company's numbers. He's been doing this work since 1997, nearly three decades, for companies ranging from General Motors and Verizon to a $36 billion steel company and dozens of $10 million to $30 million family businesses.

He didn't start as a finance trainer. After about two decades in corporate training, he left to run a water, fire, and flood restoration company with his brother. That business is where he learned, the hard way, the lesson his entire practice is now built on.

In year one, Michael's restoration company brought in about $300,000 in revenue at a 15% profit margin. Year two, it doubled to roughly $600,000, holding that same 15% margin. Year three, on pace to clear $1.2 million, the company ran out of cash and the business collapsed within about six months, despite being profitable on paper the entire time.

His own diagnosis, worked out afterward with his brother: he didn't understand finance. He was good at running crews and keeping customers happy. What he missed was how fast a growing company can outrun its own cash: receivables that come in slower than payroll goes out, work in progress that ties up cash before it's billed, expansion costs hitting before the revenue they're supposed to fund arrives.

A healthy income statement told him everything was fine. The bank account told a different story, and by the time he was reading it correctly, the business was gone. For a plain-English breakdown of why this happens to growing companies, Chase's guide to cash flow versus profit is a good primer.

Michael says the most common thing he hears from owners and executives before he starts training their teams is some version of, “my managers just don't care about the numbers.” After 27 years of this work, he says he's never once found that to be true. What looks like disengagement in a financial review is almost always fear of looking uninformed in front of peers, not indifference.

His explanation: someone with a financial background already has, in his words, the “neural pathways” built for the language of a P&L. A plant manager or HR director who spent a career becoming excellent at something else has to build those pathways from scratch, and most companies never give them the time or the real numbers to do it. He's seen the label attached to non-financial managers get personal: at one $3 billion dairy company, operations staff called the HR managers “picnic planners” until Michael's training group ran them through the same numbers everyone else in the room was using.

Michael abandoned the traditional multi-day finance bootcamp about fifteen years ago. In its place, he runs Zoom-based programs spread over six to seven months, roughly 30 hours total, the same total time as a three-and-a-half day seminar, but broken into pieces people can actually absorb between sessions.

The sequence matters. He starts with the income statement, reformatted with a simple red-and-green system so managers can see at a glance what needs attention and what's working, and always built from the company's own financials, not a generic example like Apple's annual report. Only once a group is confident there does he introduce the balance sheet, and cash flow comes last, by his account the hardest of the three for non-financial managers to internalize.

Every participant also picks a real KPI in their own area (cost per unit, days sales outstanding, hours per job) and uses a calculator tool to track the dollar impact of moving it. For supervisors and superintendents below that level, he runs a shorter four-hour version called “Everybody Make a Difference.”

The instinct is to assume the financial literacy gap sits at the top, with owners or CFOs. Michael's experience points the other way. CEOs and finance teams already speak the language of the P&L. The real exposure sits one or two levels down, with the plant managers, project leads, and sales and HR directors whose day-to-day calls on pricing, staffing, and collections move the actual cash number long before it ever shows up in a quarterly report.

We see a version of the same blind spot in our own client conversations. Plenty of business owners and executives who can hold their own in a P&L review at the office have never turned that same scrutiny on their personal finances: a household cash flow they've never mapped, a concentration in company stock they've never stress-tested, a savings rate they're assuming rather than measuring. Thirteen financial mistakes high earners make often trace back to exactly this: confident operators who never built the same financial discipline into their own numbers that they expect from their teams.

Michael shares two client stories he uses to make the ROI case tangible. The first: Fiore & Sons, a Denver construction company, brought him in while $1.2 million in the red. By the end of the first year of training, the company was $1.5 million in the black. The second: a senior manager at a large construction firm, impeccable at his job but with no finance background, finally understood how the numbers connected to his team's daily work with customers. He and his group found about $2 million in cash flow improvements simply by collecting receivables faster.

These are Michael's own client accounts, not figures Tailored Wealth has independently verified, and they illustrate a pattern rather than a guarantee: understanding the numbers doesn't just prevent disasters, it surfaces real money that was already sitting on the table.

Asked what he'd tell his younger self, Michael didn't hesitate: “Don't put all your financial eggs in one basket.” He was talking about betting everything on one restoration company. Dan's response in the conversation applies just as directly to our own clients: business owners and executives who hold a large share of their net worth in one company's stock, whether through RSUs, options, a concentrated retirement plan match, or ownership of the business itself, are carrying the exact same risk in a different form.

We see this constantly with equity compensation, and it's usually one of the first conversations we have with executives after a large liquidity event or vest. The lesson is the same whether it comes from a corporate finance trainer or a fiduciary advisor: concentration you haven't measured is a risk you're carrying without knowing it.

Michael's entire practice starts with the same premise ours does: you can't manage what you don't measure, and cash flow is where that starts. In our Life-Driven Planning process, the six-phase framework we build every client plan around, cash flow management is deliberately phase one, before portfolio construction, before tax strategy, before anything else. The reasoning is identical to Michael's: a plan built on numbers you don't actually understand, whether that's a company's P&L or your own household cash flow, is a plan built on guesswork.

If you've never mapped your own numbers the way Michael teaches his clients to map theirs, a real financial plan starts well before a portfolio allocation, and it's worth doing before your next equity vest or bonus, not after.

This episode is written more for business owners and leadership teams thinking about how to build financial literacy across their organization than for someone focused purely on personal wealth. If you run or lead a company and recognize the “picnic planner” dynamic on your own team, Michael's approach is worth a direct look.

It also lands squarely on Tailored Wealth's own audience: 40s and 50s corporate executives and business owners with complex compensation, often meaningful equity or ownership stakes, and household income north of $500,000. If you can run a confident P&L review at the office but have never mapped your own cash flow with the same rigor, or you're carrying concentration in company stock you haven't stress-tested, this episode is worth watching twice: once for your business, once for your own household balance sheet.

If today's conversation has you rethinking how well you actually understand your own cash flow, or how concentrated your net worth is in one company's stock, that's exactly the kind of question worth working through with a fiduciary advisor. Book a free Wealth Strategy Call and we'll look at your income, your equity, and your liquidity together: no product pitch, just a clear-eyed conversation about your hybrid retirement.