Episode 142: Let Your Geek Flag Fly: Find What You Love To "Nerd Out" On With Martin Zych, Jirav
Forget everything you think you know about productivity hacks. Today, we're diving deep into the unexpected habits of wildly successful people with Martin Zych, Founder and Chief Customer Experience Officer for Jirav. From weird sleep schedules to unconventional workspace setups, get ready to discover the surprising secrets that could unleash your inner nerd and unlock your hidden potential.
Drive efficient growth in your accounting and finance practice with Jirav’s all-in-one forecasting, budgeting, reporting, and dashboarding solution. Jirav automates financial planning and analysis and empowers firms to triple their advisory revenue by integrating general ledger, workforce, and non-financial data. As the preferred solution provider of CPA.com, Jirav is trusted by over 4,000 businesses and firms, thanks to our exceptional platform, training, and support.
To learn more about Jirav and their accounting firm partner program, visit jirav.com.
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Let Your Geek Flag Fly: Find What You Love To "Nerd Out" On With Martin Zych, Jirav
Welcome to this episode of Breaking Belief where I interview Martin Zych, the Founder of Jirav. He has had a career as a finance and accounting professional and specialized in high-growth tech companies. Previously, he was the Finance Director at Limeade and Zephyr Health and a controller at Atlas Accelerator CFO firm. He is set up dozens of finance functions and helped raise over $200 million in funding. He found a Jirav to build the tool he wished he'd had when he was growing companies.
He's a dad to kids and a fan of Seattle sports teams. He loves outdoor activities like hiking and snowboarding and you might even catch him to discussing financial strategies on a mountain trail. This interview with Martin was all about his upbringing as we discussed his journey from Poland to living the American dream as an entrepreneur. There are so many takeaways from the center of you that I think you will find and I hope that you will share this with your friends and peers that you think this would be helpful for.
This episode was sponsored by Jirav. Drive fishing growth in your accounting and financing practice with Jirav’s all-in-one forecasting budgeting, reporting, and dashboarding solution. Jirav automates financial planning and analysis and empowers firms to triple their advisory revenue by integrating general ledger, workforce, and non-financial data. As a preferred solution provider at CPA.com, Jirav is trusted by over 4,000 businesses and firms. Thanks to our exceptional platform, training, and support. To learn more about Jirav and their accounting firm partner program, visit Jirav.com. That is Jirav.com
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Background
Welcome to this episode of Breaking Beliefs. Today, I’m with Marin Zych, the founder and chief customer experience officer for Jirav. Martin, you want to give a little background on yourself before we get started.
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Some of the founders at Jirav. We are an all-in-one financial forecasting platform built for accounting and finance professionals typically supporting folks through like accounting firms or small mid-market businesses and a little background about myself. I have a finance degree and an accounting degree in accounting by trade.
Used to be a controller and would help small startups when it's like four guys in a dog and they have an idea and raise a million bucks and we work with them all these entrepreneurs and help them build up their business models and understand all the numbers and from that folks launched their business. I did that for many years and then eventually decided to build a tool to help kind of productize that and bring that out to the masses.
Awesome. For those of you that are controllers or CFOs is amazing what you've built. Love to get into your story. We're going to start from the beginning. In the beginning, being where you grow up. What did your parents do for their occupations?
Where I grew up I think even going to a step before that is kind of interesting. I was born in Europe and my parents had while my mom was pregnant gone to a political refugee camp. I popped out in a little Camp outside of Vienna in the early ‘80s and then we were leaving communism and pulling at the time. Then we ended up becoming political refugees, got into the US, and moved to Saint Louis, Missouri.
There a little kid and then I'd say home is Seattle though because that's where I really grew up from elementary through college and most of my family is there. Went to the University of Washington, did that Finance degree, and then did the little extra fifth year for accounting. Moved down to the Bay Area in 2013 and being in that kind of techie-go system was kind of fun. That startup lifestyle so learned a ton while there. Now, we are headquartered in Austin Texas where I moved out in 2020.
I want to go back to your parents. How did they get out of the refugee camp and even get to the US?
There's this place that was set up and I guess it's been around for hundreds of years was what I heard like and they would help people in the early days. They have this camp that was set up that would help people trying to get out of all the ex-Soviet countries. They applied for visas all around the world to apply to like Australia and Canada and us and you've got a lottery for this stuff. We did that process and somehow we got the lottery to get into the US. Then they guided us in and we moved. My parents had just a couple of suitcases and then me as little baby when we came over.
How old were you?
Less than a year.
How long were they in the refugee camp?
Probably just about a year. I was there while in my mom's belly and then in a little bit after that.
Saint Louis was the lottery or did you have family or people that your parents knew there?
I think they pointed at the middle of the map and where is the big city because we've never been to America. I think this is in the middle. Let's just go from there and see what happens.
What were their occupations prior to leaving Poland?
Prior, they both worked in a hotel together. They were like the front desk folks. My mom speaks I think five or six languages. She knows German, Russian, English, Polish, and French. My dad knew a bunch too. Yeah, that's what they were doing in there. They had finished school for that originally.
Then when they came here, what did they end up doing?
The employers in the US would recognize their college degrees. They had to completely restart. My dad ended up working multiple jobs. He was like an AC repair guy and then a truck driver. Did everything you could do without knowing English too well. He knew English conversation but without a degree. Then he ended up redoing school. You can even say he was my college roommate because we were doing college at the same and he graduated college one year before I graduated.
That's cool. That's amazing. He just stuck with it all that time to make sure he graduated. That must have been inspiring for you.
Yeah, totally. It taught me a lot about hard work and perseverance and then he ended up finishing with an engineering degree and then went up the ranks at Boeing, designing airplanes, and doing a bunch of really cool stuff there.
What about your mom?
She got a degree in the biology field and then began working in a lab and as a scientist for the Department of Health. It was interesting one when COVID first started and there was like a little place out in the US that got the first kind of cases, her lab was the first ones that were like there's something going on and she saw all the trailers going around they were right there.
In your house, what was the primary language?
Polish.
You're conversational in Polish?
Yeah. I speak in Polish and then actually growing up, even though I grew up in the States, my parents made me finish eighth grade for Polish classes, read and write, and do all of that in Polish.
Were you part of a Polish community at all in Missouri or Seattle?
In Seattle, there's a pretty big Polish community. Yeah. There's this place called Dom Polski. I think I did Boy Scouts as a little kid and then they did choir stuff and then they have a little restaurant where you could eat pierogi on Fridays and Unity Center is pretty fun.
Did you have other siblings or you’re the only child?
Only child?
How did they end up going from Saint Louis to Seattle because he said that was the most would be our upbringing?
I think my dad had gotten it because he had started doing these like before the college stuff. He had started doing manufacturing kind of jobs. He ended up getting a job at a manufacturer that started making parts for Boeing. Then while he was there, that's one he started doing an Engineering degree to try to get more into it from that.
For you, when you were young, what were your hobbies or what were the things that you spent the most time on?
Define young like what age?
Any age. Your oldest memory. What was your favorite thing to do?
Getting Into Technology
In middle school, I started really getting into technology, and like computers were starting to come out and all of that and I remember making my first website in like 8th grade and I actually made a business out of it and it worked.
What was it?
Do you remember those old Nokia phones that had the green and like the two shades of green and you play Snake on them? I would get sheet music from the local music store and play rap songs on piano and you could download little mini files to make ringtone for it.
That’s amazing. That had been hard at the time.
It's pretty cool. Yeah, it’s really fun.
Where were you learning it?
Self-taught. I got an HTML book and then learned that and then looked at how websites were set up and just kind of iterated and this was the early days of the internet. I just kind of figured it out.
What got you so interested in the website? What was the start of that? Was it their website you saw?
I think I really wanted rap music on my cell phone. That was probably the first part of it.
Who was your favorite rapper?
Tupac. Do you have a favorite rapper?
I Love Heavy D but Marky Mark like went across hip hop and that but yeah for sure. Did you play music or was that part of your hobbies as well?
I did band in middle school, but I was like the trumpet but because of that kind of like he could read sheet music and figure it out from there.
Yeah. Okay. You start creating that, what did your parents do? Did they know you were doing it?
I put sponsors on the website and did the little banner ads. Then I remember I was in 8th grade, They're just like what's this internet thing? Sitting in front of this computer monitor. Then I started making like a couple of thousand bucks a month in 8th grade and I blew it all on I had like stacks and stacks of baseball cards and like candy in my room and I think three BMX bikes.
Did you sell those eventually?
I don't know. They all busted.
You were literally an entrepreneur from an early age. Yeah. That what you were originally going to go to college to do was being computer science or how did you end up in finance and accounting?
The Entrepreneurial Kick
I always had this kind of entrepreneurial kick. Then my other part of growing up in high school, I was actually an AV nerd. I do like the student news and make videos and all of that. When I went to college, I was really good at math and got honors and good grades and all that but I really want to be this like 80%. Then I applied for film school but was delayed in USC film school. Then the business was like my backup because my Eastern European parents being like chattering you might get a good job and I was like, “No. I'm going to follow this thing.” I ended up not getting into film school. I guess I wasn't that good at it. Somehow on the business application, I got a perfect score on the entrance exam thing and they let me into a college from that.
Did you do loans or were your parents saving for this?
For college?
Yeah.
I got a scholarship. I got a scholarship for the first couple of years because I was in the top tier of all graduates and in high school and then was able to kind of get loans and stuff for the back half there.
Yeah. In my background, Russian immigrants, my grandparents were from Russia. To me, you've gone into entrepreneurship or start up but like just not knowing what's on the other side and taking that risk to come to another country not having the skills you don’t know anything about how to navigate things and there was no technology at the time. What did you learn from them with that?
There's this mindset of just being really stubborn and just you got your goal and just go for it. Then it's never a straight route. Don't just stand there. You gotta go for it. Be agile. Figure it out along the way. Generally, humans are capable of folks if you just put the energy to put one foot forward at a time and start going towards your goals there.
Yeah, because I think watching your dad take on all those different jobs, I'm sure he was getting frustrated as well so do that and you just have to stick with it to get to his goal. Did you know his goal was always to go to college again?
No. He worked two jobs. He worked crazy overtime all the time. Then he was doing that while my mom was finishing school. Then once she finished school, she helped more while he was trying to do stuff. I think it was very clear. He had a mission. He was like, I'm going to figure this out and he found something that he really liked and kind of nerd it out about. I mean on the manufacturing side and really that side. Once he finds something heard out about, it's easy to go all in on that.
Inner Nerd: Once you find something to nerd out about, it's easy to go all in on that.
Yeah. Just finding out what that thing is. When you were in business school, I mean that's really different than doing film. How are you feeling about it? Did you enjoy it?
Yeah, I loved it. I do like all the entrepreneurship classes. Math was always really easy for me. I was like that kid who did algebra and in middle school as well instead of high school math. Finance just kind of power breath through and it just came naturally on that side. I really loved all the different business as a degree. It’s so broad. There's all these different locations and getting a try a little bit of marketing, a little bit of finances. It's kind of cool.
Did you do anything with technology while you were in college?
I kept doing websites on the side and building some e-commerce sites and learning those kinds of things. Then I do my other kind of entrepreneurship kind of projects as well at my regular summer job, but I still do my own little businesses there, too. It just kept evolving and iterating on tons of these kinds of little website projects.
Whereas someone that sticks out to you is your favorite.
For entrepreneurship projects? The cool one was one summer. We did a hip-hop dance class. We hired some folks. It was like right in the beginning of reality TV where they had the different hip-hop dance competitions and stuff. We got one of the guys who got second place at it to be an instructor. Another professional choreographer. Then we just called all the dance teams at every Western Washington High School and got them all to come in. Got a couple hundred people that come sign up for this liquid popping dance class thing for boot camp. That was like one summer one. I'd say that's a lot better than flipping burgers at a restaurant.
Then on the other end of the spectrum and helped a friend of mine, his dad owned a window blind store and we built an e-commerce page where you can put in the dimensions of your windows and it could quote it. Because before, you'd always have to look up the person in the Yellow Pages and call him up. Some person would come to your house and measure all this stuff and it was a really manual process. Then we ended up doing this for his dad and then his dad’s sales like went through the roof and he became one of the best resellers or biggest ones in Seattle.
Were there any failures of the ones you tried that didn't work out?
Probably a couple, I think. We tried to be a Wholesale Distributor for a clothing brand like buying all this stuff wholesale and then it was like trying to set like do fashion shows at some bars and stuff and sell. Things like that. I can't hand combat to do that.
Lessons Learned From Early Businesses
Yeah. Because it's interesting like these first things that we end up doing in business and so forth like the lessons that we take from those. When you think about some of these early like fun side businesses you were doing. What were some of the lessons that you think you learn from that, that helped you later on?
I think the big ones are. I ended up learning a lot on B to B versus B to C business. B to C is it can be so massive. If you find this thing that catches fire and then just the universe pulls you into the next hot thing, it can also go very trend and it could just like go from being the hot stuff to absolutely nothing in a year. Then I ended up starting going more into that B to B side where I learned a lot like here is this thing everything takes time and then the value in a B to B business is I'd say a little bit less Voodoo and more leak. Once you figure out how to operationalize that, you can start stamping stuff out more regularly. I've been pretty much all B to B in my career ever since College and completed one from them there.
Yeah. Those are great little tests to kind of help guide your future. Did you ever dance? Did you have to do hip-hop dance yourself?
I tried to. Don't put me in a music video.
Because now that I know this. You sound like you're pretty much an expert on it, but maybe watching it.
Yeah, but that was half my lifetime ago. Now I'm a lot older so my moves went off and stuff.
When you finish college, what ended up being your next role?
I got a job as a project manager at a market research company. Do you ever do those online or seated things where you can fill out this online survey and get a gift card or whatever and you worked for a company that helped like do all the back end of that stuff? That was my first job out of college.
Then you were in finance when you were doing that?
I had data analytics in there because we're doing a lot of statistics on the data set. You say we would get Brands like Kroger or Kellogg's or whatever and say they want to launch a new thing and then you learn about these new products before they go to market and they say, “We want to test five cereal boxes and we need people in this demographic in these areas,” and we'd help run the whole project. Afterward, do some statistical analysis of like here's the ones that were better and worse, and make recommendations off of that.
When did you start taking on finance roles?
About a year into doing that. My boss goes he's like, “Martin, you got to finance degree in college, right?” He goes, “Does that mean you know how to use Excel?” and I’m like “Yeah.“ Then he's like, “I got a project for you.” He ended up asking me to do a lot of the internal analytics of the team. Start pulling together the data from all of the different customer projects that we're doing. Start working and building different pricing calculators off of that because you're building these quotes and we're doing like 100s of quotes a week for different companies of all these different demographic things figuring out are there patterns to like where is our population?
How do we optimize our margin? That's probably the first bit of finance plus there's technology in that and we build this like crazy giant Excel file that would scrape all these different sources. After about a year, they asked me to work with the engineers to productize this and actually build it into their ERP systems. That was a little bit of that like I know enough code to be dangerous, but if you try to give me a job as a coder, I'd be mediocre, probably engineer is pretty well, and we took that and we made it real and then that company ran with it from there.
When did Jirav come into play what was the beginning of that?
Let's see here. About three years after college, I had gotten a job then Microsoft just like a financial analyst for their field finance team. About six months in I was getting kind of curious though about doing something harder and I found this like a consulting gig that said like build financial models for start-ups. I started doing that like nights and weekends while I have my Microsoft gig and really quickly, I'd like fell in love with it.
Now, I was working with the CFO at the time at that firm kind of talked me through his framework of it and I can model anything in Excel. You name it. You can't stop me on that. Really quickly he was like, “We want to make you a controller at our firm.” Usually, to be a controller, you need to be 8 or 10 years out of school. I was like three years out of school and they made me like the youngest controller at the firm and ended up building all these tools and templates. Then teaching the other controllers how to do these Excel models that would do your three-way financials. That would do all your KPIsf and your metrics. At this firm, I got to work on so many cool companies while I was there.
Yeah. From that, you were like you wanted to take this and create your own products.
Then from that, I did a bunch of the financial modeling and I would say that's like the nucleus of what started on this thing. You waited on this modeling stuff and then I ended up joining one of those clients that from when it was four guys and a dog until it was a big company. Then I had the opportunity to move down to the Bay Area. I did that again. When I was there, that’s where I thought, there were three enterprise kind of tools that were doing and you’re financial modeling stuff in the cloud and the other one was on on the spreadsheets.
At that point, I put them all through their paces. I implemented one of them for this big data company. It was cool. Once it was up and running, but it was way overkill. I was on a two-person Finance team doing this little startup that just raised some money and it felt like overkill. It felt like there's got to be a better way to do this. That was the tipping point where I told the CEO there I was like,” I want to do my own startup.” He's like, “That's awesome, go for it.” Then I set out to start you out there and that was eight almost nine years ago now
Did you initially get investors to get started or did you just did strapped it?
I'm a little bit of both. I went from I had like a really nice job. I just gotten like crazy salary all that stuff. Then right after I got that raise, I think three months later was when I quit my job to go start up. My parents said, “You're crazy,” like the conservative thing and then I put all my stuff in storage and I moved into a hacker house in San Francisco like a living place. Have you ever seen the show Silicon Valley?
Yeah.
Kind of like that. I had 35 roommates and everyone's cranking away on their own little ideas. It was pretty nuts but pretty interesting on that side. That was my kind of bootstrapping and trying to get the proof of concept going to get a couple of customers. I did have a co-founder who was the VP of engineering at that big data company as well and we were on a team together. He was also working on it and he and I just met at a coffee shop every day and cranking away until we got a little bit of traction. Then once we did that, we went through the route of getting Angel Investors and then a couple of years from BC from there.
I want to just quote on something you said about, I had this great salary and I left to do this. How do you feel about entrepreneurs what do you feel is kind of the makeup of an entrepreneur that's something that a lot of people want to do is leave a great job, and great money to go start over from something that there's no guarantee. What do you think that is that drives you but maybe wouldn't be for everybody?
Minimal Regret Framework
I think for me, there's this quote done by Jeff Bezos actually where I think it was called the minimal regret framework and it was like if you interview yourself when you're 80 years old and will you regret having made a certain decision or not? I think when I thought in my early 30s will I regret this thing when I'm 80 that I had this idea that I just went for it for a year and other works or not. My 80-year-old future self would have said go for it.
Some people are maybe risk averse to that but the biggest we're word of advice I have and I realized this in retrospect too is if you've got a fancy job then that means you're a smart person and you can always get another job. There's only a few times when you have that opportunity to have something that you're just so passionate about that you want to dive into and as long as you don't end up on the streets and you can kind of cover yourself for a year or two, I recommend just just go for it and see what happens from there.
Inner Nerd: There are only a few rare opportunities when you have the chance to pursue something you're passionate about. If you can ensure you won't be in financial hardship for a year or two, then take the leap and see what happens.
Yeah. Well like you said that you can nerd out on. Yeah because I think that's important as that you have a plan at least financially of how you're going to get through that time period to take that risk. That you're passionate enough to take that risk as well. It's not something like there's a little bit of a piece of intuition or gut that you just have to believe like your parents did that this is going to work. This is going to be just staying the course because the thing with being an entrepreneur is and I’m sure you have tons of stories on this. You have more pitfalls than wins many times. How have you stood that as you've gone through this process?
Thank God. There's that whole quote like when one door closes another one opens. If you're not facing those kinds of things, then maybe you're not pushing hard enough like you should be banging up against something and then you go figure out how to work around it. When you run into those pitfalls, that's I think the key part of that mindset.
Can you think of some along the way that you've had to persevere where you've hit that pitfall and then have to stick with the belief or intention that got you through it?
Yeah, I mean, I've had it happen many times while doing Jirav. I remember one that was pretty crazy was we were doing our series a round. It was February of 2020. I'm talking to investors and doing all this stuff. We had a bunch of people in due diligence looking at our data going okay. This is pretty cool. We already have customers and we're growing. Then all the lockdowns happen. Immediately overnight, everyone who was like so excited about this thing went sorry we are not to doing any new investments. We're only going to do our portfolio and we don't know what's going to happen.
It just whoops like a light switch to dark and what am I going to do? At that point, I was just like, okay. We're financial modeling. Yeah. I know exactly how much cash we have until June otherwise, we're dead. I was getting ready and I was like, “Okay, maybe I can like sell my house and do some other stuff and figure this out,” so it was dark for a little point.
Then we ended up doing a webinar called Forecasting through COVID and 2,000 people signed up for this thing and it was like we broke the webinar software and they had like another thing. Then a couple of other VCs who were selling diligence were like they saw this and go. Okay. This is a tailwind for these guys, like everyone has to, and what we realized every company in the world was forced to read and forecast their business in March of 2020 and it actually became the really big driving force for a lot of what we do.
Isn’t that amazing how something that is so unforeseen comes into play and you can find good in it?
It's completely crazy but yeah that's exactly. One door closed and another opened and it all worked out.
Yeah, how much do you in your head think about watching your father and your mom like when you're going through these struggles as an entrepreneur?
It's like in my DNA now. I just see them and they never complained about it ever as a kid. We just got to work hard and they pushed me. I got a minus in school. What went wrong? Why didn't you get an A? They just pushed hard and persevered in that grit was really important there.
Yeah, I think that example of that is all that always sticks with you and your system of like yeah, they got through this I can figure this out or get to the next step and kind of step back. Now, going from a small company that you started and growing. Now, you're getting put in the position of being a leader versus the person created in the creation of the product. What was the shift for you as you started hiring staff and having to manage people's careers?
From Individual Contributor To Manager
When you move from kind of an individual contributor to being a manager, it's a completely different mindset and pretty Jirav. I was a director of finance managed a staff accountant and an ARAP person and maybe an analyst. Now, it's like dozens of people overboard me and caring about their livelihood. It's hard but I think I learned a lot because the startup that I joined was the four guys and a dog little thing that grew.
It was actually in the health and wellness space like corporate wellness space. It was all about work-life balance and team engagement and like having that, what gives you energy at work. That DNA I think even though I was just doing finance they’re there sitting shotgun with the CEO as he's building that platform. It influenced me to grow this company and make sure I care about that for our team. That culture has permeated through the whole staff here, and I think we've got a great mojo and vibe from that.
What are some things you implemented from that as far as making sure that that would work for your culture?
A key one is like I've told so many employees that if we ever feel like a corporate bureaucracy kind of a thing and you feel like you're in an office space, you're allowed to just straight up tell me and I will do everything I can to make that not happen anymore because I don't want it to feel like work and I think it's about helping people find the right spot of where you're feeling like you're in the Zone on like your skill and like where you want to grow. You're pushing yourself just enough that you're developing and that you're never feeling stagnant. I'm always really careful about that. That people always have this path for upward progression.
Inner Nerd: Push yourself just enough to keep developing and avoid feeling stagnant.
Yeah. How do you get people to move from just doing the same thing every day to wanting to push themselves because not everybody is designed that way?
A lot of times, I love asking people this question which is like if you had a time machine, what would you tell yourself a year ago or when you first started the job? Then the learnings that people kind of share from that, show how introspective they are and what that things weren't always perfect and we go well, think about that now your future self two years from now, what's the time machine you wish you would tell yourself? If we could do one thing to make your life easier or your job more efficient or that next path, what would it be? Try to figure out opportunities where people can do some interesting projects beyond just the day-to-day stuff.
If you had a time machine, what would you tell yourself when you started Jirav?
I'm looking at it all the time and it depends on how far back we go as well.
Let’s start from the beginning like right when you were starting.
I think day one, we built a very robust app and I think getting stuff out earlier out in the market is getting that user feedback because it would be like as a finance person, you're like, okay, I need all the bells and whistles and you need to do all these things that Excel does. In reality, if you're not embarrassed by your first product, that means you've shifted to late and just getting it out in there, getting it hands are real users. Work off of that feedback. Just keep iterating fast on that side because I think it took a couple of years of building before we really had a good number of customers on there.
Isn't that kind of the finance accounting way of thinking that we got to get this right? We got to make it perfect first. What about your future self? If you could talk to your future self in five years.
My focus now is I'm doing everything I can to like the things that give me energy are the customer journey and product. I've been, shifting my role even to like to take all the administrative stuff of having a bigger company off my plate and like do everything I can to just keep building the product that I wish I had in my day job. As long as that's what I'm doing that gives me energy every day and I'm really passionate. Keep doing that while, having a great place to work that a lot of people are happy about. I think that's a success.
Inner Nerd: As long as what you’re doing gives you energy every day and you’re passionate about it, keep doing that.
Do you feel your 80-year-old self would be happy with the way you've taken this path?
In another dimension in the future where you already exist, he is smiling at that. Yes.
Shouldn't have been a hip-hop dancer after all that you found the right path.
Yeah.
I’d like to end the interview with just some of the fire questions, so pick a category: family and friends, money, spiritual or health.
Spirit.
Things or actions I don't have that I want?
More time in the day.
Things or actions I do have that I want to keep?
I think I try to bring a bit of humor and fun into work. Like we've got this one of our kind of values that are companies let your geek flag fly. We want to just keep that going for as much as we can and I've actually got a personal goal around the humor side, but I don't know if I'm not talking about that in the rapid-fire or not.
You're not.
Am I allowed to?
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm signing up for a stand-up comedy class. In the end, you get to do a bit at a bar for comedy thing and I'd like to do it one of these conferences like and it just does a whole stand-up comedy thing on like accounting and finance. I think it'd be kind of fun.
I want to be there for it. You have to let me know and you can wrap it. Things or actions I don't have that I don't want?
Things or actions I don’t have that I don’t want, negativity. I try to purge that, meditate, and don't let it bog you down because that just slows you down.
Do you meditate every day?
Try to.
When do you typically do it in your day?
Have you heard of red light therapy?
No.
It's like these red lights that shoot infrared beams at you and help stimulate your mitochondria that make your skin better and your muscles feel good and that's like 20 minutes a day. I've got my eyes closed and I got a B in front of this thing and it like helps after a workout like loosens everything up and that's also like just quiet time, because you have to have these blackout goggles with the red light thing on. It's like the perfect time to just zen myself.
Things or actions that I do have that I don't want?
To analyze a bit. I'm a planner like planning on an app. Sometimes you need to go where the universe takes you and just kind of go with the flow and I'm getting a lot better at that and I'm cognizant of it but I do tend to historically overanalyze stuff.
I think that's good if you're running a finance app. Many great stories you shared and so appreciate you doing this today. Is there anything you want to make sure the audience walks away with that we haven't discussed or you just want to hone in on?
Finding What You’re Passionate About Is Key
As you're thinking about your day-to-day, your work-life balance, and what you do in your companies and your firms and clients you're working with. I think finding that thing that gives you energy and passion is really key. Then sometimes you might not fully know it but think about like what what will make you happy over time and what are your goals. Just let that kind of permeate and think about that. Then from that, set your path to start working towards it and go one step at a time off of that and life is productive as you're moving towards those kinds of goals and being in and making sure you set time to kind of think through those as really key.
I think that's so important what drives your decisions rather than the other way around. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate you sharing your story. I'm sure so many people are going to take some lessons away from today as well.
Thanks a lot for having me.
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For my Mindful Moments with this interview with Martin. It begins with this immigration journey. This journey of his parents who were refugees in Poland and made their way to the United States landed in St. Louis, Missouri where Martin grew up. Watching his parents take their occupations and strive for an education here in the United States, their hard work, their perseverance, all the things that they had to do in order to accomplish having English as a second language.
Now as a child, I think we forget how impressionable we are when we're watching these things that are parents are doing and working so hard and the effect that has on our own inner drive and also seeing that as well. That whole immigrant generation. As we get further and further away from it, it's important that we can continue those lessons of hard work and striving to be better and striving for that American dream that so many of them who came here risk their lives the come here as well and really come here with nothing.
As we get further from seeing those kinds of examples in our lives. It's harder for our children and future generations to understand just how fortunate we are to be able to create these lives that we have in not only our careers but with our families, our friends, and the freedoms that we are able to enjoy. It also leads to that feeling of entrepreneurship. It is the same kind of striving to be better and dealing with the hard times but not giving up not quitting then an entrepreneur needs.
I think many people from the outside can look at an entrepreneur and think that they have this freedom and they can do anything that they want. Any entrepreneur will tell you how hard every single day is that in order to achieve this purpose this dream that you have just like an immigrant, there are probably more failures or hard days than good days, and you have to hold on to those good days in order for those days that things aren't working out to be able to persevere through it, to assess it, to start over, and think about what are the things you need to pivot or change to still achieve that dream that you have.
By watching his father, it's just so embedded in him of not only working as hard as his father did but also achieving his college degree and being able to go on for that as well as his mom as well. We talked about his hobbies and he discussed that when he was little he was already enamored with websites learning HTML and really starting to make his first websites. His parents were actually concerned about the fact that he was spending so much time out of the computer. I really like this to a lot of parents who feel that way about video games too.
Every single person has a different brain. The way our brains develop, the way we innovate, the way we learn is different. It's important for us to step back and understand that, like Martin's example, he spent that time experimenting trying out new ring tones first phone or figuring out how to do different websites and so forth so early on. Later, he was able to start making money at a very early age. That career journey actually taught him about the difference between going to market to consumer and going to market business-to-business.
I think that's a really important lesson, what are your strengths? How is what you deliver whether it's a service or a product is it better to sell to another business or is it better to sell one consumer or customer at a time? It's a completely different way to go to market and it is those lessons we learn along the way to decide where is it that we are most successful. What are the passions that I have that would meet that market that I want to gear my business toward?
We talked about how he even got into being able to create a product like Jirav and it was really his background in finance and working in the tech industry and as a CFO for all these new up-and-coming text startups and going to text startups himself and trying to think about whether there was a better way to be able to do the things that he did and Excel and in other tools and be able to create that and more for CFOs and whether you're a fractional CFO, whether you're a CFO within a business to unlock the financial statements.
I think this is such an important thing of tools like this that we understand that it actually takes our knowledge further. That it doesn't take us backward by not doing the Excel spreadsheet. If we're able to gain more information and a quicker amount of time, it allows us to ask deeper questions to get more involved with the client and really help our clients or internally in a business as well. I think it's really important that we don't forget what it is that we are trying to accomplish. It's not necessarily the data crunching and the numbers in Excel. We might enjoy doing that.
At the end of the day, if we are able to utilize a tool that can leave all those hours and hours behind so that we can spend our time on the right things. It is incredible what is out there today to be able to unlock this information for businesses for our clients. It's just amazing. These types of things that Martin's done have really revolutionized the profession and the way we deliver work. I think a really important thing that we talked about in running a company like this going from a startup and growing the company through different investments, areas that we want to achieve, and also growing with people.
We have to go from a subject matter expert to actually what drives those other people through the hard times that we talked about in small business so that they don't get distracted. They don't feel deflated as well. When we talked about how important it was to have these values in our business, we talked about how he really develops a culture where he says, “Let your geek flag fly,” that whatever your unique gift you're making sure that in the work that you do that you are able to do that.
I think that was a really good question that he was asking people as he met with them to make sure that their work didn't feel like work and that they were not feeling stagnant. Making sure that even if someone is excited this year that next year they're still excited about that work one of the questions that he asked was what would you tell yourself a year ago? What would your future self tell you now? I think both of those questions are really important.
We make sure that we are always in our zone that we're in our flow and we're able to achieve the work and life of our dreams. I hope you enjoyed this interview with Martin. I know I enjoyed the discussion so many takeaways on just really driving yourself having a dream and just not giving up on it and continuing on that path and what's next making sure that you're always in that zone and excited about the things that you are doing.
This episode was sponsored by Jirav. Drive efficient growth in your accounting and finance practice with Jirav’s all-in-one forecasting, budgeting, reporting, and dashboarding solution. Jirav automates financial planning and analysis and empowers firms to triple their advisory revenue by integrating general ledger, workforce, and non-financial data. As the preferred solution provider of CPA.com, Jirav is trusted by over 4,000 businesses and firms, thanks to our exceptional platform, training, and support. To learn more about Jirav and their accounting firm partner program, visit Jirav.com.
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About Martin Zych
Martin Zych, the founder of Jirav, is a career finance & accounting professional, specializing in high-growth tech companies. Previously he was Finance Director at Limeade and Zephyr Health and a Controller at Atlas Accelerator CFO firm. He has set up dozens of finance functions and helped raise over $200 million in funding. He founded Jirav to build the tool he wished he’d had available for him during his whole career as a Controller / Finance Director at high growth companies. He’s dad to two kids and a fan of Seattle sports teams. He loves outdoor activities like hiking and snowboarding, and you might even catch him discussing financial strategies on a mountain trail!