Alright. So, everyone, I'm Gavin from Six Sides sales and marketing. Today, we've got Roman Galakoff, for Record Advisory. Why don't you introduce yourself, mate, and your two friends that you have inside of your head?
Roman Galikov:Okay. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Roman Galakoff. I am a cofounder at Recit Advisory.
Roman Galikov:We are an accounting and advisory firm, working with tech founders and investors, we offer a broad range of services from bookkeeping and accounting and compliance all the way to advisory board support, ultimately helping founders scale faster, make fewer mistakes and exit their companies successfully.
Gavin Tye:Mate, what a long winded introduction. Welcome. Welcome to the Six Sides, our B2B SaaS journey podcast. Mate, great to have you on board. I think you're our third guest.
Gavin Tye:Mitch is in Bali this week or actually recording early. So he's
Roman Galikov:Must be nice.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I know. He needs last week he was stressed, so he needs a bit of a bit of time off to get his head right. But Bali will
Roman Galikov:a whim too. That must be very nice to get off to Bali next week.
Gavin Tye:I think it lined up. I think maybe he was thinking about Bali. Bali got a bit envious about his holiday, and that contributed. But yeah. Mate, welcome.
Roman Galikov:Fair enough. Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here.
Gavin Tye:Mate, today, well, over the last, you know, twenty weeks, we've been speaking about our journey, of trying to build six sites. Right? We're we're documenting it for a few reasons. One, because people have short memories, and will forget. Two is you and I worked together for quite a long time at a previous job called Redeye.
Gavin Tye:And we wish I think you could you'd agree. We wish that we kept notes of that journey because it was really fun. Anyway, so that's the whole purpose of us doing this podcast. And we also wanna share some of the lessons, some of the things we learned going forward. And accounting is often overlooked.
Gavin Tye:You know? It's an afterthought. People who don't understand numbers just don't pay attention to it. So past you on here to try and shed some light on some things we should be considerate of and maybe others listening there to that maybe they should think about, and what's the consequence if they don't and stuff like that.
Roman Galikov:Yeah. Yeah. That's a it's a good point. Right? Accounting is kind of up there with legal advice.
Roman Galikov:Often founders just can't afford it, right? Or they can't afford quality advice. So, they sort of go for the cheaper option or they try to do a little bit of research themselves and DIY it. In the early stages, it's totally understandable because they're operating with no money and trying to do as much for themselves. Different people make different mistakes.
Roman Galikov:In the early stages, those mistakes may be fairly easy to correct. So, you have your chart of accounts set up incorrectly, you code transactions incorrectly, you ultimately maybe miss out on some of your early metrics, but it's all fixable. Think as long as founders understand that in order to give yourself the ability to make good decisions at scale, you need to have a good understanding of how your business actually performs. Pretty much the only way to get there is to have good numbers and have good accounting.
Gavin Tye:And does that start foundationally? Like if you get it right from day one or early days, that really transcends and makes a lot easier later as you grow, right, opposed to trying to go back and fix stuff?
Roman Galikov:Well, I think everyone, like I said, it's kind of you'll always have founders who will just try and do it themselves in the early days and maybe make a few mistakes. There's nothing wrong with that right? It's totally reasonable. And Redeye was I guess a great example of that right? By the time I joined there was already an institutional investor in the mix.
Roman Galikov:The company had existed for a couple of years. So a couple of years of history of legacy already existed that you effectively come in and do a bit of a cleanup with. And that's what we're seeing with our clients now. We come in at a point where they're finding some traction, they're confident that they can scale and grow that business, they're getting some interest from both investors and customers importantly, and we come in and effectively help them fix up those early mistakes. The earlier you do it, the easier it is.
Roman Galikov:Think that's probably the main takeaway. If you run a set of books that's complete mess for years and years, you miss out on those metrics because it's just not feasible to go through the cleanup exercise. But if you get a good handle on your numbers early, then you'll benefit from it in the long term.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Okay. Mate, so before we start talking about all this exciting stuff about numbers and and things like that, which keeps you awake at night, you love it. Totally. I'd love to why don't you share your journey?
Gavin Tye:Like because you have a Russian accent, and you've you've come over from Russia. Why don't you share your journey? Because I think it's really interesting. And then, we could talk a little bit how we know each other or got how met each other and, you know, the fun times we had there, a long table tennis tournament, a year long table tennis tournament. But, mate, tell us tell us about yourself because you don't often talk about it.
Roman Galikov:No. And I I kinda never never thought it was interesting. Right? It's only now that kinda I answer my kids' questions that I'm like, oh, yeah. My my childhood was a bit different to theirs.
Roman Galikov:Surprised to hear some of my answers. I grew up in Russia. I left when I was 17 after finishing high school. I was really lucky to have a chance to go to England. Wow.
Gavin Tye:Wow. Let me slow you there. Where in Russia did you grow up?
Roman Galikov:You just skipped I'll come back to it. I'll come back to it. We'll zero in. Let me just paint a high level timeline. So zero to 17 in Russia, 17 to 21 in England, and then 21 to 30 in Australia, then a couple of years in The US, and then we've been back for the last six years, seven years.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Okay.
Roman Galikov:So I would say half of my life has been spent in Australia and still hoping one day you'll accept me as equal, but One day. Where I grew up in Russia is it was a fairly small city. Think population of about 200,000 people. I don't know what an equivalent size Australian town Toowoomba, maybe Toowoomba.
Gavin Tye:No, that's way smaller. It's about 70,000 there. So you're looking at Northern North Coast Of New South Wales maybe, that region? Yeah.
Roman Galikov:I think the cities in Russia are a little bit different, right? But in Australia, everything is sort of fairly spread out. People live on a fair bit of land and houses with backyards and stuff. My city looked like you know, typical Soviet Russia blocks of rectangular buildings that house, you know, hundreds of apartments and they're organized in squares with stock standards, playgrounds in the middle, and those blocks are effectively kind of is how the city is constructed. Yep.
Roman Galikov:So that and I think that there was a a word for kind of a term for those suburbs. Were kind of sleeping suburbs, right? So people would effectively leave in the morning to go to the factories or offices to work and then come back to kind of sleep. Okay.
Gavin Tye:And what took you there? What made you grow up there? What took your parents there?
Roman Galikov:Know you just want to talk about the rockets and the grounds. I will share some strategic information. My dad studied jet engines at uni and then ended up joining the military as an officer in the rocket forces. And so the city where I grew up was one of the rocket forces hubs. So it was a geographically well placed city to effectively house rockets and missiles.
Gavin Tye:Okay.
Roman Galikov:So a lot of parents and dads of kids from my school and of my friends. Parents were in the military and so they would kind of work at these military bases that are 50 kilometers into the forest sort of thing. They're secrets, but all kids would know exactly where those objects were and exactly what they had then, why they were secret, etcetera, etcetera.
Gavin Tye:Yeah, right.
Roman Galikov:So it's pretty funny. And that show I didn't realize that was, unusual for people. I'm like, well, where does your government store rockets? Sure. If there's a town similar.
Roman Galikov:Right? Maybe not.
Gavin Tye:What an interesting like, from where you are now to that that time, like, what an interesting journey that that has been.
Roman Galikov:Yeah. I think it's a kind of because my my dad wasn't in the military all his life. He was there for a number of years, but then started his own business when I was young and kind of reasonable had success in business. But one thing that was always clear is that it's really, really difficult to build a business in Russia. Finding investors and getting funding is just a completely different landscape.
Roman Galikov:It's really wild. And I think he did everything he could to sort of help both me and my sister be in an environment where we can succeed without needing to, I guess, struggle, right? For lack of a better word.
Gavin Tye:And did that always involve leaving Russia when you could? That's what took you to
Roman Galikov:Yeah. I think he's planted the seed in my head fairly early that I should think broader. It's a fairly common practice in Russia to get into university is to bribe the admission office, right? To get yourself a spot because the education system, well at least twenty years ago, there were x number of free government subsidized spots. There were another number of partially subsidized spots.
Roman Galikov:And then there were kind of a few spots that were just full fee paying spots at universities. And one thing dad was kind of clear with me is he go through the process of kind of looking for officials to bribe to get me into a university. So he was like, It's up to you. You'll study wherever you want, but it's up to you to get in. Then he said well you know if you go and study in Germany it's both free right and you can get in but you need to know German.
Roman Galikov:So for a little while I went on a journey of study German right? Because I was like, fuck yeah, I'm going to go to live in Germany and study in Germany and I'll get out. So that idea of leaving Russia was kind of planted in my head when I was I don't know 15 and kind of got me excited. Was really excited about it But I didn't always know where I'd go. So, kind of Germany was one of the countries that I was really interested in for a while.
Roman Galikov:Then Czech Republic was one of the countries I was really interested in for a while and dad and I even went on
Gavin Tye:a
Roman Galikov:little recon mission together and his business partner's son ended up going to Czech Republic for a number of years and had a pretty good experience there. Then I was interested in going to Malta because one thing I sort of realized is that German language and Czech language is sort of how useful is it to invest the time in learning those languages. I thought I already had a bit of a base of basic English knowledge. So, English speaking countries were the most prosperous. So, I kind of started building a bit of a strategy of, okay, how do I get myself into an English speaking country?
Roman Galikov:And then Malta was one of those countries. Mom and dad went on a little recon mission there and came back saying, You're not fucking going to Malta to study. It's a party town.
Gavin Tye:Oh, did you think you'd get away with it or did you know? Did you know? No,
Roman Galikov:I had no idea. I had no idea. I just thought it was like, oh, knew Ridley and the kind of the official language there is English. So I was like, ticks the boxes, but it's just a touristy destination. So I was really lucky to end up, I guess going to England and mom and dad funded that part of journey, which was amazing.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Right. And then that led you to here in time from England to Australia?
Roman Galikov:Well, Australia wasn't on the cards until I was nearly done with uni because I have a sister, she's a little bit older. So, I left for England and she had her first child and was living a life in Russia, but then she got excited about leaving a better life as well. And she really discovered Australia and her and dad did a whole bunch of research into what it would be like to live in Australia, etcetera, etcetera. So, when I was still living in England, my sister came here to Brisbane And this kind of email exchange of photos is me in London, dark pubs, gray skies, cold weather, which I thought were fantastic. And then my sister's photos, Gold Coast, sandy beaches, ocean, Eagle Street Of Brisbane, beautiful and new.
Roman Galikov:And I was like, the hell? I made the wrong choice. I didn't know it got any better than London, right? I thought London was the absolute best place in the world. But then seeing what life is like in Australia, I got excited about coming here.
Roman Galikov:But we were a bit more strategic with how we came to Australia. We sort of approached the problem with the end goal in mind. So thinking what do we need to actually have in order to have the rights to live here indefinitely and start families here and to own property here and just kind of build a life here. And so we've kind of worked backwards. There was a skilled migration program, which I'm sure is still ongoing.
Roman Galikov:Accountants were on the shortage list. So we looked at each other and thought, hey, how hard can it be to become accountants? It can't be that hard. So, we found the cheapest university that's offered the shortest possible master's course that would give us the points on visa applications. So my sister and I enrolled in the same course and we did it together.
Roman Galikov:We're four years apart, but ended up going to uni together, which is pretty funny, but pretty cool. So I never really planned to become an accountant to be in the accounting world, but it just ended up happening, which I don't regret to be honest.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Well, it's handy because you started wreck it. It would be-
Roman Galikov:That's exactly right.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, Okay. And then you come to Australia, you met Nadia and then you've had two beautiful children and here you are.
Roman Galikov:Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And my wife is the most unfortunate Australian girl out there. She had a pretty cool first name and a normal Western last name.
Roman Galikov:She was Nadia White and now she's married me, she's got a proper immigrant name, Nadia Galakov.
Gavin Tye:She looks right. She looks a bit Russian eco ethnic, doesn't she?
Roman Galikov:Maybe she's adopted. I don't know.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Alright. So, mate, we met each other when we were at Redeye, which for people who don't know, was a startup that was established back around 02/2012. We met in 02/2015. It was a really special time working at Redeye, and, you know, we've all jokes aside, I think we've become really good friends.
Gavin Tye:And Yeah.
Roman Galikov:Well, I think I think when you ripped your pants was you know, we really bonded over that.
Gavin Tye:You can tell that story if you want. Was telling my kids about that story the other day. They thought it was really funny.
Roman Galikov:You've alluded to it before. Being a tech startup, we had a staple piece of office equipment being a table tennis. Some people played more than others. You and I probably played the most and played fairly well, right? But I think we got to a point where it's like, okay, we can't really be seen just like playing table tennis all the time because I was CFO, you were head of sales.
Roman Galikov:So we were in the leadership of the business. So we decided to cut back, right, on on table tennis, but still play. So we agreed that we'll play one game per day, but it would be like it counts. And so we're both sitting by a large window, like, and and, you know, imagine that an office building, you know, floor to ceiling window, and we had a a marker and we would literally kind of put a dash for every game. Gav and his score was on one side, my score was on the other side, and we started a year long tournament of counting who is a better table tennis player, right?
Roman Galikov:So, I think that window looked pretty freaking epic.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I think you won at the end. It was like yeah. It was relatively easy. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:I think you won.
Roman Galikov:But it was close too. It was really close.
Gavin Tye:Yep. But during
Roman Galikov:one of those
Gavin Tye:games yeah. Go.
Roman Galikov:Yes. Yes. And then and then we obviously attended many trade shows and expos and exhibited at many. One of them was in a hometown of Brisbane. And I think did we need to grab something before we went to the expo?
Roman Galikov:We needed to grab something at the office. So we popped into the office and we're like, well, we're we're early. So why don't we have a quick game, right, before we head to the expo? And so took out blazes off and, you know, untucked our shirts or whatever and played a a pretty intense game of table tennis to the point that your your jeans had a had a
Gavin Tye:Massive rip.
Roman Galikov:Tear. Pretty, pretty massive rip.
Gavin Tye:It was then inside of the leg. It was from my it was, yeah. It was it just threw the whole day out. It was pretty embarrassing trying to even get to the cab. It was, yeah, it was it
Roman Galikov:was You you obviously had to had to be the guy at the expo. You drift your pants. That puts a a spanner in the works. What did you do? Did you have to go home to change?
Gavin Tye:Mhmm. I had to get a cab all the way home and change my pants, come all the way back in. Yeah. It was probably it was about two hours. It took a long time.
Gavin Tye:It was embarrassing. Yeah. And getting in a cab with a jacket tied around my waist. Yeah. Anyway.
Gavin Tye:Alright. Mate, we've now at twenty two minutes. We haven't even talked to thing about accounting. So
Roman Galikov:Yeah. We we spoke a lot about accounting. Don't make mistakes early, but if you do make mistakes early, it's okay. They can be fixed. I think that was the first key takeaway people are gonna
Gavin Tye:look for. And the second one is don't trust Roman because he doesn't want to be an accountant anyway. He just did it to get to Australia.
Roman Galikov:Yeah. He just paid reasonably well, and I just said, why not?
Gavin Tye:So you've gone on that journey since I've met you. What? You a CPA or a chartered accountant? And then
Roman Galikov:I was actually one very few accountants who have been both at one point or another. So I was chartered accountant for the first half of my career, but then became a CPA when I came back from The US. So, I'm currently CPA and record advisory as a CPA practice. What's the difference? Just to highlight like There really isn't much difference.
Roman Galikov:CPA Australia got a larger membership base than chartered accountants institutes. I think the CA Institute takes its roots from England and Europe. CPA, I think takes its roots from The US. STA is sometimes seen as a more common qualification for people in public practice although CPAs is just as prolific whereas CPA tend to be more focused on commerce. They're largely the same, right?
Roman Galikov:So if you're a CPA, you can pretty much do this exactly same thing and get exactly the same registrations as a CA. Okay.
Gavin Tye:So, mate, let's talk about startups now. Let's just change gears a little bit. What do you what are some of well, where do you wanna start when it comes to startups? What what do you think people who are listening, founders that are listening, what do they, if they don't take anything else away from today, what should they take away from our conversation?
Roman Galikov:Yeah. Good question. Right. And so, I think founders probably learn different lessons as they go through their journey, which is normal. Most of my experience has been with companies that had early funding, early customers, and a good level of confidence in their ability to succeed.
Roman Galikov:So, up until very recently, had very little experience in the kind of zero to one phase where you go from an idea to your first customers. But it's been a valuable experience because I think I've realized now much better that you really do learn different lessons at different phases. All founders know that it's not all rainbows and unicorns. It's ups and downs and it's challenging and you need to be flexible and be effectively have the ability to learn these different lessons in different stages. So kind of things that you learn early on, they won't even be relevant when you're at $10,000,000 ARR or beyond that.
Roman Galikov:And similar things that you learn at 10 mil are probably not relevant if you're at 100 mil. Think it's kind of key takeaways that founders need to be flexible but also kind of build in a way that allows for flexibility. So kind of processes and systems that you put in place solve the problem you have now and that you expect to have in the short term. But ultimately, I think you need to expect to rebuild your systems and processes as your business grows without damaging your business.
Gavin Tye:What are some of the common mistakes that you see people make in both early stage zero to one and then a little bit later?
Roman Galikov:Good question, right? And it's kind of, does the all encompassing cash flow management, right? Like people are not good at cash flow management. And I think you can talk a lot about that. Cash flow is just two sides to it or kind of more sides to it, but it's money coming in and money going out, right?
Roman Galikov:And you can try and manage both sides of that equation. And so, sort of money coming in is your customers, right? And maybe your lenders and your investors, but mostly your customers, right? And there is you've literally written courses and education programs about that side of things. Is really, really broad.
Roman Galikov:So, just saying like, oh, you've got to manage your revenue is so broad, doesn't even help. There's a lot of learnings that can be found there around what are your terms with customers? How good are you at collecting payments? How good are you at invoicing your customers? How sticky are your customers?
Roman Galikov:How good are you at bringing new customers? All that plays into ability to manage your cash inflows, right? So, that's really important. And ultimately, think in the early days where a startup is showing some promise and founders starting to invest in the early days, they expect a certain amount of cash to flow in but they fail to validate their idea really well. They fail to find product market fit quickly enough and ultimately their expectations of cash inflows are not met.
Roman Galikov:The outflows happen. And so, they run out of gas. They run out of juice. In the early days, it's not catastrophic. People just go and find jobs again and regroup and maybe tackle it again.
Roman Galikov:But having that period where you're come, start come out of juice, that really slows you down. So, having fair expectations of your inflows is important. But then similarly on your outflows, I found that I think are a little bit more clued on now than maybe ten, twenty years ago, right? We don't have to have offices straight away. People are pretty open to work in remotes.
Roman Galikov:Cloud and compute is pretty cheap so you don't have to buy a bunch of servers and racks and set it up if you're building a technology company. So it's all fairly reasonably priced. But again, hiring too soon can be quite damaging, right? Because damaging for your cash flow, right? Because cash flows out.
Roman Galikov:Doesn't flow in and boom, you're stuck without juice, without oxygen. So, finding that balance is really important. So, I feel like just saying, oh, cash flow management is important. It's like, I want to slap that person in the face and say, that is just so broad. It's like, you need to eat well.
Roman Galikov:Okay. What does that mean? You need to eat well. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.
Roman Galikov:Gotcha.
Gavin Tye:So with the go back to the first point inflow, like money in. Right? Often as in my experience, and I'd love your insight on this is before it gets to a pinch and they're running out of money, there is indicators well before that things aren't working right and they people may not necessarily change or that they don't change quick enough. Like there are precursors to that happening. Right?
Gavin Tye:It doesn't just all of a sudden wake up and go, oops, I'm out of money.
Roman Galikov:Yeah. Right. I think different people have different risk appetites. So some people will take it all the way to the wire and some people will say, You know what? I want to have a little buffer in my personal bank account before I do anything.
Roman Galikov:So, I think it depends on the person, right? But you're absolutely right that there are indicators along the way. So, stating your expectations and being fairly frank with yourself to see like, am I actually meeting my own expectations? You don't have investors in the early days. You'll have a team hopefully, right?
Roman Galikov:But it's really just you meeting your own expectations and you can lie to yourself or you can say, okay, this is not working the way I thought it was going to work. I need to make a change.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Cause I balanced that when I was started my other business, Sales Market Fit, I was doing a day job for quite a long time and I was, it was just ended up, there was indicators that it was working, but it was only really getting the input was the output was only really what I was putting into it. Right. There's only certain amount I could do while working a full time job.
Gavin Tye:And I was like, woah, should I pull the trigger or shouldn't I? Like, otherwise I'm I'm wasting all this time. And, yes. And and then so I decided we decided, Mel and I said, okay, well, if we do it, I'm gonna put it out there. And if the if the world says I should do it, something will say, yeah, do it.
Gavin Tye:Anyway, got a couple of clients straight away. But it's a balance. Like, because I went from full time and we have a family, we have payments as every month. I've gotta try to meet that monthly, minimum monthly, expenses that we have as a household, let alone growing a business. And it's, some months we go under, but we try to shoot over most of the time.
Gavin Tye:And it's a it's a tough it's a tough thing to try to manage, especially when you got family commitments and, you know, you don't wanna end up on the street.
Roman Galikov:That's right. Hopefully, you'd kind of that again sort of speaks to a founder's tolerance for risk because you're spot on, right? It goes both ways. So, I think there are founders out there who will take it all the way to the wire and persevere and hopefully succeed. But then there are also founders who will see amazing success in their business but still retain their day job.
Roman Galikov:And you hear about these people quite a lot, especially now where they launch a SaaS product that takes off and they're able to sell it and market it and support it as a side hustle generating way above their actual day job level of income but they still retain their day jobs for that comfort. So I think there are two groups of people, right? No one gets it exactly right. Ultimately, it comes down to the level of risk that you are comfortable with. But one thing that you always need to be prepared of when you've taken the leap is it's going to take longer, it's going to cost more.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So one of the things with us at Six Sides is where Mitch had a app, and he's not obviously, you know he's not here.
Gavin Tye:I think you wanted to bag him out a little bit, but so feel free. Can do that. But we, Mitch got some early tractional feedback on the app, right, when he did this, LARACON event last year. And then we've rewritten he's rewritten it now, and we're due for our first event in August. And we've got we've got early traction.
Gavin Tye:We've got three paying clients. But during our evolution of the journey of rewriting it and market engagement, the how we're going to position it is evolving again. Like, it's it's the problem that we're tackling has gone up from an event. It goes a larger to a larger event. But we've taken the stepping stones of making sure we're getting traction.
Gavin Tye:We're not generating a huge amount of money. It's not massive. But so now we're dedicating time. And, yeah, it's been a real real it hasn't been a challenge. It would be a real challenge if we weren't taking any money and both of us working a full time.
Gavin Tye:It would be a completely different business. It'd be so much more risky. I don't think we could do it to be honest.
Roman Galikov:Yeah. You're in a really awesome position, both you and Mitch, that you can spend time on six sides and pursue six sides because it's an awesome idea and it needs to exist. But at the same time, you've got your other businesses that are keeping the lights on and giving you the freedom to to pursue it. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. That's right. How did you find like, kicking the can down the road, we will be successful and our other businesses will be successful. How do you see founders juggling their attention between two businesses and and and giving both the right amount of effort?
Roman Galikov:I I That's a good question, right? I think it depends on the stakeholders in those businesses. Because if you've got two businesses that you own outright and you answer to nobody, it's up to you. You do you, enjoy. That's great.
Roman Galikov:Congrats to you first of all, for being able to do it without help. But I think a lot of the time what happens is one business will need some funding, right? And therefore, you'll have complexities. So, you'll have some either lenders or investors involved that will have expectations of you as an operator and a founder. So for some founders, it becomes harder to juggle multiple when there are other stakeholders involved.
Roman Galikov:A lot of the time it'll be as simple as we're not going to fund this business if you are involved in anything else. So founders are forced to give up their safety nets and give up their day jobs to pursue this. And from an investor point of view, you want them to do everything possible to generate a return for you as the investor. From a founder point of view, you're taking on a bit of risk, but you've also got funding. So, I think there's a balance, right?
Roman Galikov:I think retaining as much ownership as possible is probably the key thing here. You lose control of your business because you dilute it, that's where you really kind of lose your ability to decide ultimately, right? So, you kind of become a glorified employee and not to mention that you miss out on some really important tax incentives on the way out. So I take it just maybe there we go. There's another takeaway.
Roman Galikov:Try not to dilute as much as possible. And that's probably a basic one, but it is that basic. If you can fund yourself through revenue, do that. If you can fund yourself through grants and tax incentives, do that. If you can borrow and pay back, do that.
Roman Galikov:And then if you can't do any of that, then equity investors are probably an option for you. Yeah, right. Hopefully.
Gavin Tye:So, you know our business or kind of where it is. What do you think we should be aware of?
Roman Galikov:Do I need to disclose that you're my clients? So I'm a little bit biased in how I speak of you?
Gavin Tye:You said I've asked three brilliant questions anyway, and then Six Eyes needs to exist. So I think it's been established that-
Roman Galikov:Oh, there we go. There we go. All right. Now I can be honest. People won't listen this far, so now I can actually be brutally honest.
Gavin Tye:Well, we're forty minutes in. So, yes, for complete transparency, you are our, accountant and, adviser, and really appreciate it. So I guess knowing where our business is in its early stages for the next twelve months, where do you think we should focus in in our financials and things like that if you are going to well, you are going to advise us? So
Roman Galikov:Yeah. I think what you're doing is exactly right. You're pursuing grant funding, you're pursuing customers and revenue. So I think without disclosing the numbers, having some cash inflows from customers this early on your journey is freaking awesome. And as much as you can keep doing that, you need to keep doing that.
Roman Galikov:And you'll see signals of traction smack you in the face when you launch properly. You'll naturally start spending more time on six sides when customers demand it. But with that demand will come cash flow and that's your business. So I feel like both you and Mitch are kind of on really awesome journey now that's you've got your other businesses supporting you and you've got customers. And at the same time, you're pursuing this with risk but not putting your houses on the line, which is I think is really wise.
Gavin Tye:Yep. So I think, so for people who have listened before is, who people have listened before, sorry, have known that we put in a an expressions of interest for a grant, and we just got feedback yesterday that we've made it to the next round. So and I think
Roman Galikov:that I think I it's your advisers that actually put you onto that grant. I can't remember who it was.
Gavin Tye:We had another adviser before you.
Roman Galikov:But It was me. Just
Gavin Tye:But in saying the signals, like, I think we're looking for signals at the moment to make sure we're going in the right direction. And, that grant is a very good signal that we are because what we're trying to do in our mission has resonated with them and their feedback to us about how to improve it. I haven't showed it to you, but I I I don't think I've showed it to you, but I will show you what their feedback was. And I was like, yeah. It makes complete sense with our strategy, and it's even how we're engaging with the market.
Gavin Tye:We were kinda doing that anyway, and they've picked up on that. So Yep. Yeah. And it's I think if you
Roman Galikov:Oh, exactly right.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Look out for signals in the world. And there was a good podcast the other day, on oh, who was it? It was I'll have a look at who it was. Diary of a CEO.
Gavin Tye:And he was talking about signals and noise. Look out for the signals and ignore the noise. But it was one of the guys from shark tank. It was amazing. So, yeah, it's, that's what we're gonna try to leverage as much as we can is not not is bootstrap it and and get access to, grants and things like that.
Roman Galikov:Yeah. So I your customers will love seeing that too, right? That you're getting support and it's kind of broadly liked and recognized. There's good marketing there too.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yep. Thanks. That's a good point. Now talk to me about incentives and equity or equity within a business and and shares.
Gavin Tye:You know, Mitch and I fifty fifty in this in the business, and, we want that. But how does equity and all that change when you bring employees on and all that kind of stuff? What what should we know about it? Because I don't know much about it at all.
Roman Galikov:So so that's I think you've just dropped something in there that's really quite important. You're fiftyfifty because that's what you want. And so, that's really important for founders. Yes, there are templates. Yes, there are I guess rules of thumb, but ultimately it's your business.
Roman Galikov:Do what you want. Don't be guided. Well, I mean be guided, but don't be locked into what other people have done. It's not always right. What Uber or Google has done in the early days may not be what you need to be doing, right?
Roman Galikov:So, there's a million ways of approaching this. With founders kind of in the early days, if you've incorporated which most startups do and should do, you can either split your equity at the time of incorporation or if a company already exists, you can go on a path of founder vesting schedules, right? Where it can help, but again, it's not always right for everybody, right? It basically helps you avoid a situation where things go wrong or bad halfway through the journey and then one founder still wants to pursue it, the other one doesn't, right? So, it kind of adjusting schedules can help you navigate through those challenges and effectively enable one of the founders to continue without the other one and sort of separate in a way that doesn't hurt the business.
Roman Galikov:So What I mean by saying herd the business is your ability to win future funding, right? So, sometimes equity effectiveness, it's your cap table. So your cap table includes everybody who owns equity in your business and on what terms and what protections they may have. It is not uncommon for startups to go through a series of transactions or series of exercises with their equity that lands them with a cap table that is ultimately not attractive for an investor. An investor would look at it and say, it's a mess.
Roman Galikov:Sort this ad before I can come in. I'm not putting my money into this messy bucket.
Gavin Tye:So what creates that messiness? Is it desperation, lack of attention, just circumstance?
Roman Galikov:It's probably all of the above. It depends on the business. If they've got their back against the wall at a certain part of the journey and they need to go out and find some funding and they take a down round that affects existing investors.
Gavin Tye:What's a down round?
Roman Galikov:Down round is where you raise capital from an investor and agree to protect them from a decline in your valuation in a future round. So say you raise money at you say your startup is worth $10,000,000 you give your investor that protection and then for whatever reason you have to raise money at a $5,000,000 valuation later. What the protection for investor does is gives them an automatic top up of equity. So, they maintain the value of their investments, but that comes at a cost of you being diluted. And depending on the severity of the down rounds, you can just get diluted to a point that you are losing control of the company.
Roman Galikov:That's just one example. Another example could be could be which potentially could be a situation with Six Sides if you guys decide to go your own ways but your equity is fully vested and you're in the shares. You become a bit of a passenger in that company, right? So when an investor comes in and says, Oh, well, let's say Mitch is out there in three years' time trying to fund a next phase of growth for Six Sides and you're sitting there as a 50% passive shareholder, an investor would look at it and say, no, unless Gav is actually out there in the trenches as well selling and working and being active, we're not going to fund Gav's wealth creation. Know what mean?
Roman Galikov:Sure. So, there's a couple of situations where cap table can become really messy, right? Another way is, and you again alluded to that is employee equity. So, there are so many ways you can structure an employee share option plan and people can be really, really creative with them. That can also come at a cost of ambiguity on the cap table, which may come back to bite you if you're out there trying to raise some capital at a later point in time.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Right. So why is the what is the preference over we're trying to bootstrap. Right? We're trying to maintain control, I think, or or raising capital.
Gavin Tye:You know? To me, I think we're gonna come to
Roman Galikov:You'll do a friend and family around from the likes of Pricket Advisory.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Right. Okay. So that like, I'm thinking right. So we we've got different extenuating circumstances where Mitch has a couple of businesses.
Gavin Tye:I have a business and a two businesses now plus plus six sides. That's gonna be unattractive to, you know, other investors. Right? So we may not have any option but to do just to bootstrap it. Right?
Gavin Tye:So, But what is the drawbacks and advantages, I guess?
Roman Galikov:Potentially. Right? Unless you give your investors some skin in the game in your other businesses as well. What you guys are building is, I guess there's not too much synergy between the businesses, right? Mitch's is software development, yours is strategy consulting.
Roman Galikov:So they're different businesses. You think about how you actually bring it into one group. And how do you give an investor confidence that you're able to generate revenue as a group and effectively give them skin in the game and let them invest in the group? That way you can pursue I guess your other business ideas, right? Because ultimately, if they're valid businesses, you should not give them up and you would not give them up, right?
Roman Galikov:If they're good businesses, they're good businesses. You either sell them and kind of exit from those businesses that way or you wrap them into the new group. Wrapping them into the new group may be a little bit too complicated for many investors here. If they're going to invest, they're investing in your core strategy. Yep.
Roman Galikov:If you say, Hey, we're also doing a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of this and a bit of that, they just say, I know you guys, you're going to lose focus.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because one of the things where, we've been talking about Mitch and myself is yes, we have these different interests, different businesses, but there's some synergies. We're trying to actually get the tech stack to line up to be the same. Mitch isn't part of my businesses, other businesses, and but we're trying to figure out if that would work.
Gavin Tye:But we're trying to actually get the executive I have a theory, a hypothesis. We get the executive team right where Mitch and I are the executive team. And if we're both okay in that, we get the tech stacks right, we get the sales and marketing and go to market approach is very similar, then we we're just we can have similar lessons and, you know, we can use one thing from another or lessons to apply to both businesses and they become more efficient together. So we're trying to figure out how that plays out in time. There's some complexity with six sides against Deal Buddy.
Gavin Tye:Deal Buddy is an AI platform. Six sides isn't, which is another skill set that we need to figure out. But, yeah, we're trying to get alignment and that would make sense to maybe bring them into a group over time, which I think opens up something else again. Right? You get the business processes right, can be something else in the future again.
Gavin Tye:So
Roman Galikov:it can. Right? It's just kind of it'll come down to your ability to run all of the businesses, all of the units with needed focus. There are plenty of large groups of businesses out there that do many different things like say GE, right? They do lots of different things and they seem to be doing okay.
Roman Galikov:Yeah. Yeah. So you don't have to have a business that just does one thing, right? It will come down to your ability to actually manage it and drive it the focus.
Gavin Tye:Yep. So scaling from scaling a start up from going from a start up to a scale up, you know, when do people start thinking about taking on their first employee and what advice do you give them? And what I guess it's hard to say what order because every business is different. But what what have you seen some mistakes people make, and what do you advise people to do in that scenario taking on their employees new employees?
Roman Galikov:That's a that's a really good one. Right? It's probably from a from a
Gavin Tye:some before? That's four good questions.
Roman Galikov:Is is that right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. You've been saying it. That's a really good I really appreciate it. Well, I've turned this into a highlight reel. Yep.
Roman Galikov:I I think you should. Yeah. That's a really good idea. You're really handsome.
Gavin Tye:Thank you for those of you who can't
Roman Galikov:see me. It's it's your back backwards hat. It's like a time machine. It's making you younger.
Gavin Tye:Mate, that's a good segue that we are on YouTube if you want to switch over to YouTube.
Roman Galikov:Oh, you should. Two handsome roosters. This question is close to home, right? Because in my other business, I think I've made that mistake of hiring too soon. Well, I don't think I know I've made that mistake of hiring too soon.
Roman Galikov:And it puts a lot of financial stress on your business. You need to have a good level of confidence that you're generating sufficient cash flow to maintain it, right? I'm not saying be profitable when you hire, right? You don't need to be profitable but have a good runway and plan for it that things will take longer, they'll cost more. So, when you're bringing a person in expecting things to just skyrocket, it's not going to happen.
Roman Galikov:So again, and we've seen it with hires at later stages in companies as well as early stages. So not always your first employee, right? You just need to pare back your expectations of what outputs will actually be generated by your employee. And it's actually, I was on a call earlier today, a young founder and I actually spoke about it as well, where he is fairly honest or fairly, I guess, clear in how he's thinking about it. He's not expecting an employee to have the same level of output as his because he's not an owner, he's an employee.
Roman Galikov:But also, he's expecting that a significant portion of his own time will go towards managing that employee. Right? So, I think you need to really kind of think about that every time you hire. Cost is the cost. That's pretty clear, right?
Roman Galikov:The salary, occupancy, on costs, all that spend. But in terms of outputs, I think you need to have really fair expectations of outputs and also make an allowance for yourself personally to manage that employee and actually invest to achieve that fair output expectation.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Because I see even like a salesperson, right? 120, 100, 150 k, call it $10 a month, right, with on cost.
Roman Galikov:That's for me.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. So until until you're actually generating $10,000 a month in sales, that doesn't include a founder's wage, which has gotta be almost that again. So so $200 a year, like, that's a really difficult that's a difficult hurdle to overcome, especially if it's a bad hire and they don't get the right support. You could use ten months worth of revenue. Right?
Gavin Tye:Like
Roman Galikov:Yes. The high hires that have a revenue target are probably the even more challenging ones, right? Because people end up paying more for them. And we've seen salespeople being hired on really, I guess, significant salaries, right? Because they interview well, they have had success in the past.
Roman Galikov:And so, the expectation of their output is high. It's like, oh, I'll pay these hundreds of thousands of dollars because I expect they'll generate that back and pay for themselves. But we've seen it many times where one, it takes a long time for a salesperson to ramp up and become effective. And there are many instances where that salesperson goes through your ramp period and just doesn't ramp, And so, you have to make it separate, that money is gone and there's no way to recoup it. So, that's a little bit different from making an investment decision in product, for example.
Roman Galikov:So, product is let's spend $500,000 on building this piece of functionality because we believe that it'll make us more sticky with our customers. It'll create an opportunity for us to enter this market. The business case exists, right? It will still take longer and cost more but at least you're approaching it from a project point of view. Salespeople are different.
Roman Galikov:And then another type of I guess employment cost is cost to maintain your revenue, right? So, it's customer success, it's technical support. There are really rules of thumbs that you should follow depending on your industry. In SaaS, your business needs to generate 80% gross margin in its growth phases. That means you only have 20% of your revenue to spend on your infrastructure and your customer success.
Roman Galikov:Don't kind of make that work.
Gavin Tye:Okay.
Roman Galikov:Right? Otherwise, your unit economics will just not stack up and you'll just end up eating your own tail kind of thing. So, keeping an eye on the unit economics is important as you hire. But what I'm trying to say is you always want to have confidence that you're ready to hire, right? You've got all the right signals and you're fitting the metrics to hire.
Roman Galikov:You still need to sort of pair it back to to allow for some risk.
Gavin Tye:So okay. So you talked about salespeople, product, and customer success. Can we go through each one of those individually? So I've got some thoughts on that. So, I do think customer salespeople are really risky when you don't have the strategy.
Gavin Tye:Right? And I'm only I guess I'm saying that because I help build strategy, but there's another reason for that is if you're paying someone like a an enterprise pipeline, a sales cycle could be twelve months. Right? And then so most people would naturally think that you're if I pay someone who's $2.20, that'd be worth it. And value does not necessarily cost doesn't necessarily equate to value.
Gavin Tye:And you have to be able to sustain in my opinion, a salesperson does not get up to speed or get close to getting up to speed till they have two times the length of sale. So if it's twelve months, you need to be able to sustain them for two years because it takes a long time for opportunities to come up. So that already is at $4.40 a year. And then, if without support, like that's a big hit to take. Oh, it's crazy.
Gavin Tye:Right?
Roman Galikov:It just shows how hard enterprise software space is. Right? And that's that's a that's a barrier, to entry.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Correct.
Roman Galikov:In the enterprise space.
Gavin Tye:And that's why I think founders need to control own that space because they're always gonna be in a business. Sure. They can't devote a 100% of their time to it, but they can take chunks of time out and offload that to people like marketing or say sales development reps or other parts of the process there that they can take some chunks out so they can do more value added tasks and then try to replicate and learn, learn those processes and turn them in SOPs so it's not a loss. The other part is I wanna get your opinion on you said they spend $500,000 on product. How many people run a business case to say, hey.
Gavin Tye:If we're gonna spend a $100,000 on this feature or $500,000, we anticipate that we can generate $2,000,000 or $5,000,000 from it and then actually put that into their strategy about proving narrow why on it? How many people go down to that level in your experience?
Roman Galikov:I think probably all founders go through that. Right? There's it's revenue is one. It depends on the the it depends on the business you're Right? Yeah.
Roman Galikov:Yeah. Instead of saying that I'm going to start a barbershop and buy stairs and mirrors and stuff, right? That's my investments in kind of
Gavin Tye:capital
Roman Galikov:investments. You're generating some enterprise value there, but really you're just generating ability to generate cash flow, right? So it's a guess a cash business. With software it's very different. Right?
Roman Galikov:Because you're building enterprise value as well as revenue. So I think different founders will approach it a little bit different. But say if you're going to build something and spend 500,000 building it And let's say sort of within a couple of years, you can take that product to let's say $300 of right? If the business is structured well, right? In terms of has reasonable amount of sales and marketing, has reasonable amount of support, can operate and becomes a good healthy business, then that business is worth say, multiple of eight, right?
Roman Galikov:A couple of million bucks. If you think about it, you've invested $500 to generate a business that's worth a couple of $100. That's worth a couple of million dollars. That's a great outcome, right? If you're able to sell it and exit.
Gavin Tye:So maybe my maybe I'm a little bit I didn't structure that quite right. So but let's say, yes, you spend 500 k on a on on a on a platform, but there's options of building a module or building a feature that goes, it's gonna cost 50 k. Do you think they'd go and go go down to that granular level and say, oh, if we build this feature for 50 k, we could get an extra 500? Do you think most people
Roman Galikov:I think they find a way to justify it. Right? It's that types of analysis are often based on assumption upon an assumption upon a belief and a gut feel. So Yeah, they'll put forwards I guess their thinking to their stakeholders, to their boards, but how accurate are those assumptions does the enterprise risk. That's exactly why the shareholders get the returns because they take those unreasonable level of risk, right?
Roman Galikov:Nobody really knows. If you have a founder who is really good at articulating their business case and is a good founder, they'll just freaking convince the people around them that it's a great idea, right? And they'll make it happen. But hopefully, a good founder will also make the other part of it happen, which is put the right people in the right places and find the right customers and capture the right audience and ultimately create value for the shareholders. So, I feel like it sort of goes hand in hand.
Roman Galikov:But if you think about it, these investment decisions that are ultimately kind of made first by the investors coming in and then at the same time by founders deploying that capital in their businesses, the risk profiles are really, really high. So, when venture capital firms build portfolios, they know full well that a significant part of that portfolio will just disappear, just completely disappear, nothing returning. Then a portion of that portfolio will return normal returns, right? So, they'll just kind of build good businesses and there'll be normal returns. And then only a small portion of that portfolio will generate outsized returns for the fund.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Gotcha. The last point was you said eightytwenty rule. So the hypothesis here is let's just say we're generating $30,000 a month, then we should only be spending 6 k. Is that 6 k on which is 20% on salaries for Mitch and I or to have software, all that stuff, the back end hiring staff needs, all that kind of stuff should be within that $6,000
Roman Galikov:Let me run you through, I guess, a P and L for a SaaS business. Also, where you are now, you're effectively pre launch, right? Don't get too wrapped up on the benchmarks. You're not hitting benchmarks. You're just getting that's totally fine.
Roman Galikov:But as you start to find traction and operate more towards being at scale, going from top to bottom on your P and L, you will have your recurring revenue right? That is recognized in line with accounting standards. So, that's different from what you're invoicing, right? So, if you've invoiced $6,000 but it's for a six month subscription, that's $1,000 per month. So when I'm saying revenue, that's kind of the $1,000 for the month.
Roman Galikov:Then if you're operating at scale or close or you're starting to measure your metrics, then below is your cost of good salt, which affects your gross margin and that for a SaaS business is really cost of infrastructure as well as cost of your customer success and tools that your customer success people use. So that's mostly is your cost of goods sold. You can be more granular but there's limited benefit in doing so. Then that gives you your gross margin. So that's what you should be generating 80% or hopefully higher on gross margin level.
Roman Galikov:Then going further into expenses is you have a section for your sales and marketing, which is exactly self explanatory. So it's both employment costs, but also your spend on sales related travel, events, expos, paid marketing, digital marketing, all that stuff. It just needs to be in a bucket because it will help you determine what your customer acquisition cost is. That's really important. It just will help you understand whether your spend in sales and marketing is generating reasonable outcomes.
Roman Galikov:Then you've got your R and D spend. R and D spend is again important because it takes longer to generate return and that's all those bets that you're saying kind of do they go through a level of analysis? Yes. But ultimately, if the board and the founder are keen to do it, they'll do it, right? They just place all these bets and there's all these bits of functionality that they decide to build on this journey.
Roman Galikov:Some of them take off and get used, some of them don't. But you know the spend is there. You to identify it. There are two opportunities there that exist. One is some of that spend can be capitalized.
Roman Galikov:So you can and should recognize part of it on your balance sheet which affects your bottom line profitability. But then the other thing is keeping track of it can help you get a better outcome at year end, especially in Australia where we have R and D tax incentive if you're eligible. So I think having that analysis done throughout the year can be helpful. And then last but not least is your general and admin, right? And that's your staff amenities, Christmas parties, all that stuff that you obviously as a founder try and keep as small as possible.
Roman Galikov:You manage general costs. But that's largely your P and L from revenue to EBITDA. Right? Then kind of your EBITDA is what your earnings are and then that gets affected by your interest expenses, tax expenses, depreciation and amortization to give you your bottom line net profit.
Gavin Tye:So, EBITDA, explain, I've never quite got my head around EBITDA.
Roman Galikov:EBITDA stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization. Okay.
Gavin Tye:Right. So, it's all of that minus everything.
Roman Galikov:Yep. So, that's right. Say you've generated revenue, take off all expenses apart from interest, depreciation, amortization and tax, that's your EBITDA.
Gavin Tye:Okay. Amortization, what's amortization?
Roman Galikov:Amortization is similar to depreciation. It's a decline in value of certain parts of your assets. So, assets will amortize over time.
Gavin Tye:Yeah, right. Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. So, I'm just thinking about my other business deal buddy just said how that reflects into this because it's yeah, that's interesting.
Roman Galikov:So that's where good accounting is important, right? Because there are many, many metrics that are used in SaaS. Reality is different people define those metrics differently and calculate them slightly differently. So for an investor coming in, a lot of the time it's kind of the trick for them is, okay, let's see how creative these people are in their definition of monthly recurring revenue. It's like monthly recurring revenue seems pretty simple, right?
Roman Galikov:But you'd be amazed that out of 10 founders, there'll be 10 different variations of what our monthly recurring revenue is. So, it helps you have your numbers structured and presented in a way that is so clear that an investor can come in and see okay it's clear as to how you're approaching your recurring revenue calculation. It's clear as to how you're approaching your customer acquisition cost calculations, lifetime value and churn calculations. That ultimately drives all those metrics that can inform an investor as to whether your business is sustainable, ultimately profitable or not and whether they can generate return on investment that they put money in.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Gotcha. Mate, we've almost knocked out an hour of 20. We're not far off it. So you've started don't you tell us about what you started with record advisory?
Gavin Tye:And because I've I've learned a lot on what you just said. I'll talk about I'm gonna make some notes and talk about this with you later. But what you decided to start record advisory. Tell us about it.
Roman Galikov:So, Rekord Advisory is myself and co founder of our previous company, Redeye, Wayne Girard. We're an accounting firm and an advisory firm as well. So I think we're approaching I guess this problem of accounting from a different angle. There are many, many accounting firms out there that offer stock standard accounting advice. I think what we are understanding and realizing is that it's not actually enough for founders to just offer year end financials and compliance.
Roman Galikov:You need to be a bit more strategic and a bit more supportive on the journey that spans all the way from your idea is good or bad and sort of how do you validate that idea all the way to okay, we've built business that's really valuable. How do we exit from that business? How do we take some money off the table and generate a bit of liquidity so we can again keep going maybe and take this business even further? All these things that we've experienced along the way at Redeye will help us support founders that are going through their journey as well. So, we offer accounting, we offer accounting almost in context of your journey, right?
Roman Galikov:So, not just accounting for the sake of accounting and compliance. It's the right advice at the right time depending on where you are in your journey. And so, exciting to launch it. It's exciting to partner with Wayne again after working together for so many years. We've got our public practice certificates issued literally yesterday.
Roman Galikov:Congratulations. Thank you. So we're one step closer to opening our doors as CPA practice, ASIC registered agents, BAS agents and sort of have the, I guess, the right team to support both accounting of founders but also help them ultimately achieve better outcomes. The other really important component of that is that while we're supporting founders and tech companies, we're also supporting investors because the two and two are very much intertwined and it makes a lot of sense to support both. Founders at the end of their journey as founders often become investors and they often make the best investors.
Roman Galikov:So we want to support them on that part of the journey as well to make sure that they're able to access investments that are appropriate and interesting, but at the same time connect them with founders that are looking to grow their businesses. I'm trying to be very careful with my language so I don't trip any FSL issues, which we will be licensed as well soon.
Gavin Tye:I guess you'd be planning on doing obviously, this is your first podcast under a record advisor. You'd be doing a lot of value adding activities like webinars and stuff, I'm going to imagine. If not, I'm going to advise you should do it because you have a wealth of knowledge to give. Where's the best place people can find you and follow you? Be on LinkedIn, would it?
Roman Galikov:LinkedIn. Yep. Roman Gallicoff. Put that in the show notes as well. Yep.
Roman Galikov:Yep. Or go straight to rekitadvisory.com.au. Rekit is r e c I t. And there's a way to reach out to us directly through the website.
Gavin Tye:Yep. I can see your mate, it's a nice looking website.
Roman Galikov:Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's all DIY.
Gavin Tye:Mate, I can tell. Was being sarcastic.
Roman Galikov:Oh, thank you. No. Mate,
Gavin Tye:is there anything before we go, before we wrap up that people should know? Is there any question that I should ask you that I haven't?
Roman Galikov:I think sort of going back to the idea and the purpose of this podcast, right? Is to create this, I guess, record of the Six Eye journey that you and Mitch are on, I think it's important to note that you've surrounded yourself with good advisors, right? And you clearly invite some of your awesome people to your podcast. I just want to congratulate you on that.
Gavin Tye:That's hilarious. That was a good way to end it. Oh, before we end it, had one more question. Did you ever go to work with your dad in the missile business?
Roman Galikov:They didn't call it at the missile business. Yeah. Yeah. Tons of time. Of course.
Roman Galikov:Because the officers would get picked up by these military vans, right? Where they pick up, I don't know, a dozen of officers and then drive to the military base. And yeah, if it's school holidays or something like that, I'd just jump into the van and go hang out for the day. But it was pretty cool because they'd have forklifts and it was pretty fun. Not to mention actual missiles.
Roman Galikov:I never saw a missile. If that was the question, I never saw an actual missile.
Gavin Tye:Oh, you didn't? No, that was what I was getting at. Yeah.
Roman Galikov:No. The reason I didn't see one is they kept underground. So it's literally forests, And then the ground opens up and then the missile is deployed. So a lot of the work that they did on those military bases was underground.
Gavin Tye:Okay. Interesting.
Roman Galikov:Massive infrastructure.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Mate, thank you so much. It's been fun. I've learned a heap about particularly what stood out for me is how to structure a SaaS business with and the cost of, you know, the eighty twenty rule with, I never quite understood about, understood that. You've given me some food for thought.
Gavin Tye:I'm glad that you think we're on the right track, though. You have a biased opinion. But, mate, I really appreciate you giving up your time, and I wish you all the best with record advisory for anyone who's listening. Roman's one of my best mates, and, his advice has been, you know, been fantastic. So
Roman Galikov:Thanks, man. Really appreciate it.
Gavin Tye:Thanks for being on the on the our B2B SaaS journey podcast, mate.
Roman Galikov:Nice.
Gavin Tye:Alright. See you later. Bye.