Episode 219 – Pierre Alexandre

Richard Matthews: (Check out an episode of The HERO Show here for a better idea on how to prep the template for this show https://youtu.be/1ehl-GqI1sE) ​[00:00:00] 

Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews, [00:01:00] and I have Pierre Alexandre on the line. Pierre, are you there?

Pierre Alexandre: Hi, Richard.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Glad to have you here. I know we were talking before we got started. You’re calling in from Portugal.

Pierre Alexandre: Yes, I am. Exactly, close to Lisbon. I’ve been going on and off, and living in the area for a couple of years now. Really enjoying the coastline…

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Are you? Yeah. Yeah. I’m on the coast of Florida. We’ve been, my son and I have been trying to learn to windsurf, so coast and being in warm areas during the winter is my favorite.

Pierre Alexandre: That’s where, when you have the best conditions.

Richard Matthews: Yep, exactly. So before we get too far into this, I’m gonna go through your bio and we’ll just, and then we’ll dive into your story. So first up, Pierre has over eight years of experience in transaction services and mergers and acquisitions, three of which have been entirely dedicated to the world of SaaS, which is software as a service and as a PWC alumni.

He worked on over 30 transactions in France and Australia. He’s a [00:02:00] spreadsheet diehard and his eloquence channel where he sells some of his Excel templates reach the number one most visited channel on the platform and his models are used by thousands of financial professionals. Pierre also regularly writes technical financial articles and is published on websites like Toptal, TechCrunch and MicroAcquire.

So, Pierre, with that introduction, sounds like you’ve got quite a storied history. Why don’t you tell us what it is that you’re known for? Right? What are your, what’s your business like? Who do you serve and what do you do for them?

Pierre Alexandre: Yeah. And thanks for the intro. Very good intros. So basically, I’ve been dedicating, as you said, to helping SaaS founders for the past three years with my business partner Ike, where we’re really trying to help them grow through efficient digital marketing, which is my business partner, you know, core strengths and through efficient management, financial management fundraising and selling.

So we do M and A and all of that, like the main thing I’ve been known for, and the main reason why my clients come to me are generally for [00:03:00] my Excel skills and my capacity to understand their business very quickly. That’s the main feedback that I’ve got received for the past three years is, well, I was generally impressed by how quickly you managed to understand the key areas of my business, the KPIs, and the main value drivers. And so if you put that together with Excel and modeling skills, then I managed to take ideas and turn them into financial models to help drive decisions, which is the main reason well why people try to work with *inaudible*.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Interesting. So for someone who is uneducated in the financial modeling space, right? One of the companies we run is a large e-commerce company. We do a couple million dollars a year in sales. How would financial modeling and excel, actually help us make decisions?

Pierre Alexandre: Yeah, so generally Excel, A.I. and modeling helps you in two different ways. Either you’re using it to look at the past and in your [00:04:00] historical performance and, and through that it’s going to help you understand where are your margin, where do you drive your run. So, it’s kinda a bridge from all the analytical tool that you can have that already tells you where your run you come from the geographical perspective.

Maybe, you know, you can have where a breakdown of your revenue base on the top of customer. And so if you use that raw data and you put it in a Excel sheets and you do the correct modeling to look at the data in a meaningful way to really try to understand specific trends and spec and specific insights.

Then that will tell you who your main customers are, where you’re generating the most money, and who you should basically target, which also allows you to understand better how you spend your money in marketing. Cause I guess you mainly drive traffic through either SEO or targeted marketing.

If you understand that, You understand the metrics that comes with it, which means how much it’s cost you to [00:05:00] get a customer and how much that customer is going to generate in term of revenue, and what your conversion rate is going to be from your traffic. If you can understand that, then you’ll become immediately better, you know, at investing your money in the features to drive more revenue. The second thing is in term of modeling is how do you model your forecast, your projections, right? So, that helps you make sure that you understand your own businesses. Just to be clear, a forecast. You are very unlikely to reach your forecast.

Everyone who does a business plan, who does projection, except if you’re really big companies and you have like a big visibility on how much money you’re gonna make and who your clients are. If you are more startup or younger companies, you are never going to hit your number. You’re going to above, you’re going to be below, but you’re never going to show your exact number.

But why it’s important is the way you model is [00:06:00] your current understanding of your business. You know that the input you design on are true. They’re going to translate into this exact output, right? So, for to, take your e-commerce for instance, you need to make sure that you understand how you generate traffic.

You need to understand how your people convert and once you get order, you need to understand how you manage your inventory. Whether you do drop shifting or not. You need to understand basically all your value chain, all your differ on cost associated with each of your sales and once you do that, then you won’t be caught off guard if you is an actual number of your input changes cause you are already able to understand and anticipate what the outputs are going to be based on those.

Richard Matthews: So it teaches you the relationships between the inputs and the outputs. So you could see things like, see problems before they happen, or you can sort of have, you [00:07:00] know, which knobs to turn to change the outputs.

Pierre Alexandre: Exactly. The best business case on that, or applied case is around your cash management. If you take the time to properly model how your cash evolve based on your revenue and your cost, then depending on how much you revenue you’re going to generate, you’re going to be able to focus more precisely how much cash you are going to have in your bank account.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, that’s really fascinating and sounds like it could be really powerful and I was like, just one of the things I was thinking about, it’d be really useful to know of all of our products that we have, which ones are the 80 20 as term in terms of like revenue drivers. Then if we could, I would imagine if you could know what those products are, we could take the rest of them off and just focus on the ones that are driving the most revenue.

Pierre Alexandre: Exactly, and that’s part of the financial analysis. That’s also something that I do on a regular basis when I do financial due diligence. So for context, the financial due diligence is a very thorough [00:08:00] financial analysis of the historical financial statement of a company. In the context of a deal, when a buyer wants to buy out a company is they basically hire people like us to go there and do a full report on the financial stability and on financial performance of the company.

And so when we do that as part of this analysis, you know, to come back to what you were saying, an important one is how do people allocate costs? Cause generally you have certain fixed costs or even semi valuable costs. You know, think about your admin or even your digital marketing and those costs, you can allocate them in different ways throughout your product.

You could decide, like, take your marketing cost. You know, you could have a very simple approach and say, look, my marketing cost, I’m just going to divide them by the number of item I sold. But you can have another approach. You can know now my marketing cost I’m going to divide them based on the margin of each of my individual products.

Or you can [00:09:00] divide them based on the revenue for each product. No, you have different keys of allocation that we are going to show you a different profitability by product. So as a first step understanding how you allocate those costs to your product to calculate your margin and making sure it really makes sense is one of the key to make better decision to focus on the product actually the most profitable.

Richard Matthews: Makes sense. I’m ready to hire you, but we have to go through the rest of your story a little bit. But I mean, it sounds like kinda stuff that would be really valuable for the right types of companies. So, what I wanna talk about though, is how you got into this business, right? We talk on this show about your origin story, right?

Every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s a thing that made you into the hero you are today, and we wanna hear that story. Were you a bit, you know, were you a bit by a radio actor spider that made you wanna get into a financial modeling? Or were you, did you start in a job and eventually moved to becoming an entrepreneur in this space?

Basically, where did you [00:10:00] come?

Pierre Alexandre: Yeah, So born and raised in France. In case some of you didn’t pick it up from the accent. And honestly, from a fairly young age, I would say like 13 to to 14, I wanted to become a finance trader. But the reason why I wanted to become a trader because of the picture I had in my head of how you would be doing trading, at that stage in my head, I thought that you would be analyzing the geopolitical situation of the world, like making sure that you have all the data, that you track the news and being able, you know, to be smarter than anyone. When you see that the conflict arise in Venezuela, for instance, being able to say, oh look, the oil price is going to increase. What items are using oil? Oh, may, maybe pen. Pen are using oil because, you know, the ink is basically made of oil. So the price of pen is going to go up.

Oh, let’s buy the shares of a pen [00:11:00] company. You know, those type of things and I was kind of fascinating about that capacity to analyze, find information, analyzing, and link it to the potential outcome. However, when I grew up and I made it to business school, I quickly understood that trading nowadays was different.

It’s more a bunch of very smart mathematical genius, you know, creating algorithm. So I kind of looked at different ways to explore, you know, those analytical thinking. And so I started my career in private equity, which I really loved. Small cap private equity, doing investment in generalist companies.

And one thing leading to another, I had mentors there who advised me to go to PWC to really train myself and train my Excel in analytical skills. So that’s how I ended up in a deals *inaudible* and after working for five years there, you know, I decided that, It was time for me to become more independent.

Cuz during my time there, I also tried to start a [00:12:00] company on the side related to hypnosis. You know, like, it’s a whole different story, didn’t work out, but I still had that entrepreneurial spirit within me. So I decided to basically start as an independent contractor working fully remotely.

Timing was right. When I started there, I got contacted by Ike who had just started Horizon Capital and we really heated off, started working together. And from September, 2019 , to this day we’ve been growing the company and really trying to be both advisors, high level advisors, but also very entrepreneurs at core trying to launch side businesses on the side, having a podcast as well, and trying also to give back to the community and be part of it.

Richard Matthews: So what I wanna talk about is how that story, right, where you’ve gone from, you know, wanting to be in trading to getting into analytical thinking and then getting into actual financial modeling and starting a business in that career is, have you developed or have you discovered what [00:13:00] your superpower is in that space?

Right. Every iconic hero has their superpower, whether that’s, you know, their ability to call down thunder from the sky or super strength in the real world. Heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill you were born with or a skill that you’ve developed over the course of your career that really energizes all of your other skills.

Right? And the way I like to frame it, is if you look at all the things that you, all the skills that you’ve developed over the course of your life, there’s probably a common thread that sort of ties all those skills together where your superpower is. So with that framing, what do you think your superpower is in this whole mergers and acquisitions and financial modeling space?

Pierre Alexandre: Honestly my Excel skills, like without doubt. If we go a bit deeper, I could have seen myself becoming a developer. And so doing Excel stuff is kind of my way to get closer to the thinking and way of thinking of developers. Cause I remember even back, yeah, but back in school, even year after high school, I remember [00:14:00] the one class I totally made where like perfect score every time, was introduction to coding and to developments.

Then so, I pursue different studies. Even though like, I was always a bit interested, I learned different languages on the site, Python, C language, Java and every time I was really liking it. It’s just that, you know, when you decide to design your career, you can do everything at the same time.

So I’ve never really managed to today develop that part. However, with Excel from the start, I’ve been kind of passionate about it. You know, trying to use that tool and see how you can optimize the outcome and the modeling to make it as efficient as possible and how to solve problems using that interface has always been fascinating too, to the point that more than once, I would work on an Excel problem and an Excel modeling, not necessarily find the solution, try to forget about it, go have dinner, go to [00:15:00] bed, and while I’m trying to fall asleep, then the solution just comes to me. I’m like, oh damn. Yeah, that’s exactly how I should be doing it. So, from a passion perspective, I really think that’s the core of my skills and I’ve been building my financial analysis skills and analytical skills on top of that core skills.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it’s interesting cuz the superpower of being able to make excel do what you want is a very niche skill, right? Not a lot of people have that and I know, because I’ve tried to hire for it before, like where I’ve tried to hire people are like, Hey, can you help me, you know, do this with this data?

If like someone like myself who like I know how to do a little bit of stuff in Excel, but I’m like, okay, this is beyond my skill level and I try to hire someone for that skill. It’s really hard to describe what it is you need and find someone who actually can understand it and be able to do that work.

Cuz it’s a very deep and wide, like set of knowledge that not a lot of people have, right? Most people are like, oh, Excel, I put my budget together in it, and like, that’s the [00:16:00] end, right? There’s so much you can do with it and there’s so much power there. It’s definitely an interesting superpower.

So my curiosity for you, is how do you market that skill? Because most people don’t understand what it is, like the depth of the knowledge that you have. They wouldn’t understand it if you showed it, until tell you, like showed them the outputs. Does that make sense? Like they don’t even know they need the output until you show it to ’em.

Yeah, and to be fair, so all my skills, the way I sell my skills are not fully focusing on the Excel part because if you’re start to do that, as you said, people don’t necessarily understand it. Sometimes they think it’s an overkill and to be fair, the set of my skills, not the render of my skills, goes way beyond Excel.

Okay. Okay. Because if you want to run the M and A process, Excel is great, but at the end of the day, you also need to be able to negotiate. You need to do project management, you need to understand financial structuring. You need to understand how to put together an I.M. and how [00:17:00] pitch company. So the wide range of skills that people are expecting from me when they hire me for M and A or other stuff goes beyond Excel.

However, to answer your question, when it comes to Excel, honestly the best way I found to showcase it kind of came to me from the outside. Like in 2019, just when I saw it as an independent contractor, I have a guy team demos who reached out to me, was like, Hey, I’ve basically started a platform on which you can sell Excel model, right?

Do you want to try it? I’m like, sure. You know, I had a couple of basic financial models that I had in mind that I knew that people were, would be happy to use, but I was not expecting like much from it. I just put a couple of templates there and man, I actually took off like my channel really took off to the point that it got the first one totally product driven because I haven’t done any communication around it.

To this day, I think I have like a thousand users of paid user who the templates or [00:18:00] CFOs financial analyst and all of that. From that, on top of actually selling the models, people started hiring me, because they like my models. They like I output. They were like Amex, I actually want like a proper tailor-made model.

Can we work together? And one of my longest clients that I’ve been with me almost from the start and repeatedly come back to me with new project and with whom I love working with, came from that platform. It was first eloquence user.

That’s awesome. So it’s definitely an interesting world to be in. So I wanna get to the next question. What I wanna talk about next is how, is the flip side of your superpower. So if your superpower is in this Excel and data modeling world, and you’ve used that to apply it to mergers and acquisitions and you know, helping CFOs understand their business, that kind of stuff, the flip side of that is your fatal flaw, right?

Every Superman, you know, has his kryptonite or wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad. You probably [00:19:00] have a flaw that’s held you back, right? That’s kept you from growing in your business? 

For me, I struggled with a couple of things. I struggled with perfectionism for a long time. I struggled with a lack of self-care, you know, I thought not sleeping would be a good idea once. That’s not a great idea. If you were wondering. But more important than what the fly is, is I wanna know how have you worked to overcome it so you could continue to grow. Right. And hopefully sharing your experience might help our listeners learn from that.

Pierre Alexandre: Yeah, I think like my main weaknesses top of mind, head would be the one you already mentioned. The fact that because I’ve been super analytical and very academic, I have a tendency to try to analyze fully a problem and trying to really understand, I don’t know, a market or understand a project and plan ahead of time before actually executing on it.

And the best way for me to overpass that was to get a business partner who is a total opposite of me, who is like, oh, we have an idea, let’s try to do it and for the past three years, I think the main thing that [00:20:00] my business partner brought to me, but also other people I met online in the SaaS industry, is that capacity to say *inaudible*. The advantage of online businesses is you can test them out for almost $0. You have an idea, just put together a landing page put together a mailing list, reach out to people and see if you can then play and instead of trying to work out how can I optimize my lending page? How can I have the best product?

How can I best present my services? Oh, did I think about my pricing right. No, I’ve more and more learned to just do it, because otherwise, you never stop and by the time you stop, even if your product is much better than anyone else, all the guys who’ve tried already, they’re landing their first clients and they already add ahead of you.

So, that’s one first thing. The second thing, is I think like as a it’s more on a, even on a personal level, I hate conflict. Right, [00:21:00] which so as long as the conversation stays objective, I’m really good at that, you know, at making argument, et cetera. But when it becomes really emotional and there is like a conflict and I feel like I may be at fault, that I really hate that on, on the human level.

So I’ve learned kinda to take a step back and also I think the most important things I’ve learned and, and still working on it, is I believe my main flow was in a situation of conflict, I would’ve a tendency to be more passive aggressive or two things that the only way you can respond to conflict and to attack was to attack back.

I’ve actually realized that the main flow in that strategy or situation was my response. Even if you get attacked, you have different ways to either deflect the conflict or to change the tone or to express what you want without attacking the other person or without being passive aggressive.

Richard Matthews: Right. 

Pierre Alexandre: [00:22:00] So approaching things in different ways, maybe asking, oh, look, I don’t really understand where that source of frustration is coming from. Is there something that I’ve done wrong? Is there something that triggers you for you to react like this? Cause from my perspective, I don’t think either my idea of my action would’ve triggered that.

So please let me know and by doing that, instead of just entering into ADAC mode, I think you can really improve both your business relationship and your personal relationships.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. So the two flaws essentially are one, the overanalyzing things to the point of not actually shipping product. And the second one is let’s just learning how to understand conflict and the first one on the overanalyzing and that’s the one I feel you very, very deeply on that cuz I struggled with that for a long time.

And it wasn’t until I had a mentor of mine, she told me that you know, perfection was the lowest standard you could strive for because it doesn’t exist. So you’re striving for [00:23:00] nothing. And it’s like a mind break moment where you’re like, oh, you’re right and I am striving for nothing. So what I need to strive for is getting to market.

And getting to market is a different goal and a more powerful goal. Because when you get to market, you can actually like see what works and what people are interested in actually solve problems for people. So…

Pierre Alexandre: True, very true.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Pierre Alexandre: Also I think it comes down to the fact that if you go to market, you will very likely get your first customers anyway. You know people who are really after your product and once you get your first customers, that’s also going to be your first feedback. And thanks to this feedback, you’re actually going to improve your product in a much better fashion that you would’ve done by trying to create a perfect item that may not even fit the need of your actual customer.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. So it, you know, you go from idea to client to finishing the development of your product. 

Yeah, so then it actually serves the people that you’re going for and on the conflict resolution side, I love your advice of being able to just [00:24:00] step back and sort of see the situation and ask like, Hey, you’re, I’m seeing this, but I’m not seeing it the same way you are, right?

Because for all of us, our perspective on the situation is our reality, and it really helps if you can step around the other side and get their perspective on what’s going on. And it really helps you understand how to resolve conflict when it comes up and resolving conflict. Like I said, you, we already mentioned your biggest weakness was not having someone who was gonna just do it, right?

So in order to really win, you have to have a team of people around you who can help shore up your weaknesses. And if you’re gonna have a team of people, you have to be able to work with them, right? You have to know how to, you know, work together and get a past conflict and you know, help each other succeed.

Pierre Alexandre: Yeah, and when it’s cause I was talking mostly about conflict externally, you know, with other parties or all, but conflict within your team is also very important to be able to end all and from conflict if you end all it well. Generally [00:25:00] that’s actually you can get a lot of good out of it.

Cause, sometimes people are not able to express what they want or what they need and the growth frustration and especially if you have a hierarchy, you know, their boss. They will have a tendency to not being able to express everything to you. Until the point where conflict will arise generally because of some things they haven’t told you before.

So when you get that conflict, instead of seeing it as a nuisance, potentially see that as a signal that something wrong and that maybe something is running deeper and the conflict can be ended if you handle it well, the right way to open up the conversation and solve conflict that and problem you didn’t even know you had in your organization.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely and there are opportunities to create more success.

Pierre Alexandre: True and thriving as an organization.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, exactly. So I wanna talk about your common enemy in your business, right? In the, in the world of financial modeling and mergers and acquisitions, right? [00:26:00] Every superhero has an arch nemesis, and that’s, it’s a thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world.

And so we like to put this in context of your clients, right? And so it’s a, generally speaking, it’s a mindset or it’s a flaw. That you’re constantly having to fight to overcome so that you can actually get them the result that they came to you for in the first place. Right. So what, what is the common enemy in either M and A or data modeling?

Pierre Alexandre: So the common enemy is valuation and expectation.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Especially in the past three years, like trying to do deals on that market where you had people asking for 10 times their revenue when they’re barely growing has been has been honestly a nightmare. So with everything that is going on right now, cause obviously the market is kind of stuff now investment are harder to get, money is harder to get, but at least all the valuation, expectation have come down to what we consider our more realistic level of valuations. But yeah, it’s super hard when you [00:27:00] start working with a founder because that’s their baby. Right? And also, what I truly believe is there is a huge bias on the market, cause if all the communication you can read from the press, from TechCrunch, for instance, they’re all about successful companies.

So of course, they are the companies that are going to raise money at the highest valuation that are going to sell at the ISSB and they’re super successful. So people have this in mind. And when they see HubSpot, when they see Profitwell, well, you know, selling for hundreds of millions, they feel like that’s their business, because that’s their baby and they believe that their business is, you know, the best business ever created.

They want the same type of multiples and so one of our job is to say, look, Totally understand, we are actually here to help you achieve the best outcome. We can even help you out try to do a valuation to have a more objective view of the valuation you can expect based on what you see on the markets.

But [00:28:00] at the end of the day, the one thing you need to remember is your business is worth only what someone else is ready to pay for it.

And our job is to be able to increase that number, but no one will be able to magically give you the number you are expecting if no one is ready to pay for it on the market.

Yeah. Yeah. And I know that firsthand, cause we’re in the process of trying to do an M and A right now and we’ve gotten to a no twice in the last year based on founders expectations of value versus real world value. We’re still working on that deal because we think there’s something there.

But it’s definitely like I understand that problem and I understand it more now than I did before, cause like I’ve heard it before, but once you’ve actually gone through it a few times and you see like, okay, yeah, that’s like, it’s legitimately a thing. People are like, no, my business is worth five, 10 times more than what the actual market value is.

And I think, I don’t know if it’s true or not, that they’re putting more value on the sweat equity that they put into the business than the market is willing to give for that sweat equity.[00:29:00] 

Very likely, yes. However, one way to overcome that if you’re not in the situation where evaluation expected are way above anything that you would be able to pay. Good thing is to understand the psychology of the people you are dealing with, because some people are totally stuck on the actual number.

You know, they want, I don’t know, they want 5 million for the business, but then they’re way more flexible on the structure and you as a buyer, if you offer 5 million upfront, it’s totally different than offering 5 million over say five years, depending on whether the business perform or not. That’s generally a good way to bridge the gap between the expectation of the seller and you as a buyer, because now you can basically say, look, your business is worth what you were asking for only if it delivers the numbers that you think it’s going to deliver. Now we are happy to pay that number, but only once you, we’ve proven that the business is going to deliver base on your forecast, [00:30:00] which is when an Earn-Out comes in pretty end.

Yeah, that’s actually where we’re at now is talking about an Earn-Out. So… 

Pierre Alexandre: Of course. 

Richard Matthews: That’s where you get to, but you don’t know that until you go through it. I probably should have hired you first. 

Pierre Alexandre: I mean, I’m always for hire. You know, we can, we can discuss after the podcast you it want.

Richard Matthews: It would’ve shortened the learning curve, so to speak. So I understand that as the common enemy. I wanna talk about the flip side of your common enemy. So if your common enemy is what you fight against, you’re driving force is what you fight for, right? So just like Spider-Man fights to save New York, or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information, what is it that you fight for in your business?

What’s your mission?

Pierre Alexandre: So the mission, depending on, again, on the engagement, my business is to optimize the value for my client. So if it comes to M and A is optimize the selling price, but not only, you know, because. I just touch base on the structure, right? But from, from a buyer perspective, trying to work out the best structure [00:31:00] for you to be able to close the deal, it also works as a way from the seller, from the seller perspective, different structure, based on their psychology and based on how much they believe in their business and what they want to achieve just by keeping the same price, by changing the structure, you can bring them much more value and a much better deal than what they had before hiring you. So, that’s the number one thing.

The number two things that I strive for in all my relationship, business relationship is to actually I have like great relationship on the human level. Cause that makes everything much better. And I do that in all the discovery calls. When I have prospective clients who ask me as they generally ask me, oh, why should we hire you?

I’m very straightforward with them. I’m like, I think the number one reason you should hire me, a many consultant or on the number one criteria to decide who you [00:32:00] want to work with is who you feel like you have the best human connection with, cause we’re going to spend a lot of time together.

We’re going to spend a lot of time chatting about subjects that are very important to you. And as a M and A advisor, generally, you are more than just a financial advisor. You, you become during the process. If you get that relationship, a personal advisor ,even for their personal life. Like where they, what they’re going to do with the money after, or what they should do with their key employees, how they should structure the deal and maybe share the value with the people who help out.

And sometimes they even there to share their fears and anxiety with you. Right? So, you are kind of they’re therapists in a sense. So, being able to make sure that you get along with your client or that your client get along with your advisors, I think is key and it makes the whole process so much better.

Like, I have a client right now, where sometimes texting is during the weekend about things that have [00:33:00] nothing to do with the deal. And every time I jump on the call with them, whether it’s business rating or not, I’m having the best time ever cause I really like them as persons and that makes me want to work even harder and to really get them the best deal.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of being a financial therapist too, kinda like I’m your financial therapist for this transaction and whatnot and yeah. When you can become friends with your clients, it makes a huge difference in how much joy you get doing the work.

Right? Because you know, when you get joy from your work, it’s less work and more life.

Pierre Alexandre: Exactly. True, but I may still financial therapist from, like maybe brand it and use that as a lending page or something.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Look like your financial therapist,

Pierre Alexandre: Yeah. I love it.

Richard Matthews: I mean, it makes sense for what it is that you’re doing and I know you talked about like from both perspectives, and I know like with the merger and acquisition we’re working on right now, I’m not trying to buy the business for less than it’s worth. I want to get it for like, I wanna pay as much for the business [00:34:00] as the business is worth.

Right? But no more and they want to sell the business for as much as it’s worth and no less. Right. And that’s where we’re getting, so it’s a mutually beneficial thing to have someone who can really help you do that.

Pierre Alexandre: True. And also another side positive, side effect, especially if you are trying to buy a business and that you are going to integrate the team and generally work with the seller for a while, having a third person in the middle, an intermediary. We can become the bad guy for you, you know, when you have a hard conversation or hard negotiation, there the other part is going to be angry at us, not at you. So you are being able to negotiate as hard as you can while, kind of, retaining the good relationship you have directly with the seller.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah, that fits right into that category of being the financial therapist, right? You can be the mediator. 

Pierre Alexandre: We’re also here to take the heat, even though, you know, [00:35:00] that’s not my favorite part of the job and it doesn’t have to come to that on every deal, but if you’re ever asked and it gets down to that, you know, good to have a intermediary for you.

Richard Matthews: Absolutely. So I wanna talk about some of the practical things that make this business work for you. All right. I call this your hero’s tool belt, and just like every hero has their batter rings or web slingers or laser eyes. I wanna talk about the top one or two tools you couldn’t live without to do your job on a daily basis.

Could be anything from your notepad, your calendar to your Excel spreadsheets or something you use for your product delivery. Something you think is essential to getting your job done. What’s one of your top tools?

Pierre Alexandre: I mean, I think it’s been pretty clear that Excel is on top of my list, obviously PowerPoint as well. But the one thing that I’ve really liked you using the past few years is also the Google Drive version on your laptop. I think it’s been a game changer to be able to collaborate and still have the speed of use [00:36:00] as if the folder was on your computer.

Richard Matthews: That’s interesting. Yeah, So just outta curiosity, for the Excel stuff, are you actually using Microsoft Excel or are you using like Google Sheets and doing the same type of work in the cloud?

Pierre Alexandre: My Microsoft, Excel. Like, I’ve tried Google Sheet. I could do Google Sheet as well, but when you get to a certain level of Excel where basically I mostly use all the shortcuts that, that I can, most of the shortcuts don’t exist on Google Sheet. So my productivity when I work on Google Sheets is considerably, I mean, basically Google Sheet is a great tool, but more for pure collaborative kind of dashboard type of thing when you’re not trying to be too complicated about it or when you have a lot of people it.

Richard Matthews: Really manipulate data.

Pierre Alexandre: Yeah, for as far as I am concerned, given my level of proficiency in Excel, I’m way faster and more productive on Excel desktop.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, so you’re talking about the actual, just the drive sync where you can use the Excel spreadsheets and move them to [00:37:00] any other desktop like immediately essentially, cuz you’re working from the drive.

Pierre Alexandre: And all the documents, same thing with words and thing with PDF, basically I have the drive on my laptop in local. It’s synchronized automatically to our share drive. So, that mean that never have to open a Google sheet or Google a word, but if we want to turn to open it like this to do work altogether, no, well, we can’t.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite things about having the cuz we use a cloud drive for our stuff through Google Drive is that I can access it from my laptop or from my phone or from my tablet or like my cloud computer that’s up in a, a uber farm or like if you stop by a library somewhere and pop it open, you can get to a document whenever you need it.

It doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you remember your login. You can get documents anywhere, which is, well it’s wonderful. It’s very productive.

Pierre Alexandre: Well we used to have that back when I was working at PWC, but you know, that was [00:38:00] generally shared drive, that was hosted on server onsite and you needed kind of VPN to connect and I think that was, not in the cloud at all. The fact that Google managed to give that in the end of everyone and they can connect anywhere on the planet, I think is wonderful.

I mean, for my line of work is one of the best inventions of best breakthrough. They managed to come up in the past few years.

Richard Matthews: Yep. I completely agree. 

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And now back to the Hero show.

Richard Matthews: [00:40:00] So I want to talk a little bit about your own personal heroes, right? So every hero has their mentors, just like Frodo had Gandalf or Luke had Obi-Wan or Robert Kiyosaki’s rich Dad, or even Spider-Man had his Uncle Ben. Who were some of your heroes? Were they real life mentors, speakers, authors, maybe peers who were a couple years ahead of you, and how important have they been to what you’ve accomplished so far?

Pierre Alexandre: So maybe it will sound very cliche, but my first hero was and still he is my father. Cause basically he was a professional athlete has like strong values of determination, consistency in the work, but also honesty, respect of others and all those values. You know, even as I grew up and I became an adult myself, that I’ve always been holding them strong in my in my range of values that I think are important to have in life.

So, my father for first hero to other HEROs, I guess it’s more like all the great speakers that you have out there. So I know it could be controversial, but Anthony Robbins for [00:41:00] instance, I’m fascinated by how the guys managed to become so successful in his capacity to talk to people, bring the emotion out of it.

On top he use hypnosis, he use neurolinguistic programmings, which are techniques that I’ve started learning outta interest and pure curiosity. He master them. So I kind of understand what the guy went through and I can understand the power of the tool that the gay uses and for that I think it’s pretty good great. In that same way, one guy I can love listening to is Simon Sinek, cause the guy is so literate and I love how he express himself and I generally love most of the video I’ve watch, you know, how he use his knowledge and his understanding of society to apply to business principles, but also to to apply to personal development.

 I think, is one of the guy who has the best balance between exactly that, be [00:42:00] between how to apply principle to be successful in business, but never forget to be successful in your life and personal life before and foremost because at the end of the day, being happy and being in agreement with yourself, in tune with yourself is the most important target that you should have in life.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I agree and I hope at some point you know, when my children grow up as someone ever ask them, of who their heroes were, that they might respond that their dad was as well. Cause, that’s it’s one of my mentors growing up and the reason I asked this question actually is because of this mentor.

He said to me, he said, someday, your kids are gonna have a hero, and if you’re not worthy, it won’t be you. Right.. 

Pierre Alexandre: That’s Hard..

Richard Matthews: Cause, it hits hard and I didn’t have kids at the point, I was only like 17 and I was like, wow. It hit harder than I thought it would for a 17 year old kid who had no kids himself, but I was like, you’re right. If you don’t show up, Right. If you don’t [00:43:00] do the work to become worthy of being someone’s hero, they won’t choose you. Right? And so it’s just been an inspiration of mine throughout my whole life to just to show up and be worthy of the, oh, I’m gonna forget the word I’m going for here, of the influence that you might have in other people’s lives,

Pierre Alexandre: I think that’s a pretty good driver.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. Because you will influence other people, positively or negatively and I always just sort of imagined, I was like, Hey, am I going to be remembered as the hero or the villain?

Pierre Alexandre: Interesting.

Richard Matthews: It’s an interesting thought process and it’s actually something I say to my kids all the time too, whenever, you know, cuz they argue and do things like that and I’ll always, like, when my son is being mean to his sisters or something, I’ll always ask him. I was like, Hey, are you being the hero of the villain in the story right now? And it’s always it hits quick because they understand immediately, right? Because hero and villain is just a very simple like, understanding of like where you’re at. So anyways. 

Pierre Alexandre: To be fair. But if we had an extra three hours, we could dive into [00:44:00] the philosophy of that, but the reality is distinguishing between the hero and the villain may not be as straightforward as you would think.

Richard Matthews: Not at all.

Pierre Alexandre: Sure and actually the more you watch movies that, you know, really covers the origin story of the villains, the more you understand the fine line between, okay, what do we consider as villain and can we really judge the villains the same way that we would judge them if we didn’t have the origin story? So, and they like playing with the line between good and bad and who or how do you actually define what’s good and bad and how much of the context is needed to be able to apply that level of judgment to good and bad?

Richard Matthews: And that’s one of the other topics we talk about too, is how the more of someone’s story that you know, the more you fall in love with them, right? And yeah. And so [00:45:00] what’s interesting is and again, we could probably spend several episodes just talking about this philosophy, is that a lot of times your villains are villains because you don’t know their story. right? You don’t actually know what’s going on. And so when I talk about it with my kids we talk about things like, Hey, if you’re acting the villain, you’re not participating in the other person’s story the same way they are. And when you guys, because you’re not connecting, right?

 That’s where the issues come in and so a lot of times your perception of someone being a villain or being a hero has a lot to do with the interaction of the story between the two. But anyway, that’s like really deep stuff.

Pierre Alexandre: Yeah. And to a certain extent that kind of link back to what we were saying before, when you have a conflict with someone, when, like a situation arises where you feel like there is a villain within your organization or with a client or with the other part, maybe it’s because you don’t have the whole story and so it’s worth it to [00:46:00] not just see yourself as a good versus a villain, but trying to understand better the story of why that conflict arise to have a different perspective and help with conflict resolution.

Richard Matthews: Yep and that’s exactly why I asked the question, right? Are you being hero or the villain? Because, when you are the hero, your goal is to find out what the story is, to find out what’s going on. Anyways, there’s whole bits to that and then you can start solving conflicts that way and you realize that, you know, hey, maybe it doesn’t have to be negative. Maybe we can work together.

Pierre Alexandre: Very true.

Richard Matthews: So, I think that’s actually a really good place to sort of wrap our interview. But I do wanna talk about one more thing, which is your guiding principles, right? And it’s one of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code, right?

For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever puts ’em in Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview, you wanna talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you live your life by, maybe something you wish you knew when you first started out on your own hero’s journey.

Pierre Alexandre: Yeah. So I [00:47:00] do think those principles evolve with time. The more you measure, the more you refine. Like at this stage, I think one of my principals, it’s more personal. I have one also, which is more values that I apply to other people. But personally, I think is being very self-aware of how the things I do also impact myself and my wellbeing.

But because I think the more happy you are, the more well rested you are. The more in good shape you are, the better you are going to deliver. I can’t compare when I was working for P W C working sometimes 15 hours a day. Because sometimes they ask you to work until 2:00 AM for one week straight.

You start making a lot of mistakes, now that I’m taking more care about my sleep, you know, and being able to prioritize based on the level of urgency that my clients have. If not totally urgent, then I’m going to prioritize my sleep, to make sure that [00:48:00] I’m fully awake and fully functional when I actually dealing with the numbers and delivering the best quality possible.

In term of value, that has been a value that I’ve added for a long time is when I worked growing up. And you know what you hear from the movies what you hear, even when you are in business school, what you read in the press is generally a lot of entrepreneurs and I think that’s exactly why you started this podcast of showing the entrepreneurs as HEROs, CEOs are kind of seen as the bad guy in society. 

Richard Matthews: Exactly.

Pierre Alexandre: And generally, you know, success is always linked to the fact that, wow, those guys have been doing some dodgy things. They’re not stressed. They’re not honest, they don’t care about others, et cetera, et cetera. And I’ve heard a lot that business is business. You don’t have to have value in business, what counts is to be successful, that kind of thing.

I’ve always told myself, no, look, I want to be successful in business, but I want to be able to prove that you can be successful in business by [00:49:00] being honest, transparent and respectful of the people you work with and honest with your clients. So I’ve always tried to be as honest as possible and being able to prove that look, even by doing that and by being able to live with yourself.

Cause then you can sleep at night, you can still be successful in business.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree and you nailed it. The reason why I started this show a number of years ago is because of that cultural sort of, I think, misconception that entrepreneurs are villains and part of that is I think because the mainstream media tells stories that are on the extremes because stories that are on the extremes sell.

Right. Extreme stories sell and that’s why all of your books and TV shows and movies and everything, anytime they have an entrepreneur, it is some variation of entrepreneur pours oil on ducks for money. Right and the reality is, is that most [00:50:00] entrepreneurs, the overwhelming majority, in fact, are striving to solve problems in this world in the best way that they know how.

They’re legitimately trying to be superheroes. That’s why we have this story and to your first point, the energy, right? It’s something that I’ve sort of started to realize as I’ve gotten older is that your, you know, we talk all the time about time being your most precious resource cuz it’s not renewable.

And that’s true, but at the same time, you’re energy that you have to show up in the time that you have is just as precious and yeah, your sleep, the quality of people that you’re hanging out with, your health, all of it sort of impacts your energy.

And I have gotten to a point where I’ve started to judge what I’m going to do and not going to do based on how I think it’s going to impact my energy levels. Because I think that’s it’s incredibly important. And so I’m glad I’m not alone in that.

Pierre Alexandre: No, and you know what, again, if you’re trying to take that whole [00:51:00] philosophy and apply it in a business perspective, I think it’s a great way for you to know what you want to subcontract and to de delegate. Because you know, like a lot of people especially when they’re growing a business, lot of them, especially when they’re, when they’re smart and they’re driven and that they’re baby, they struggle to delegate and generally what distinguished people who are super successful to the people are successful, but can kind of plateau, is the ability to delegate. So now if you start using that philosophy of, okay, what drives my energy and what take energy from me, then you can separate all the tasks you don’t really want to do and put to xray forth to delegate your task and focus only on the things that brings you energy up.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Stuff that brings you joy. All right. It’s Marie Kondo, right? Does this bring me joy or does it not bring me joy? If it doesn’t bring you joy, have someone else do it because someone else, it will bring them joy.

Pierre Alexandre: [00:52:00] Exactly. Everyone is different and the key is to find the people who are motivated and passionate about the things that you don’t want to do. I know a lot of people don’t want to do Excel, so that’s why I’m super happy to be passionate about that because at least I’m getting joy where a lot of, just want someone to do it for them.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. That is fantastic and I love that. I love that whole philosophy and I think that’s a great place to wrap our interview. But I do have one thing that I finish all my interviews off. I call it the Heroes Challenge. And the Heroes Challenge is just a way for us to get access to stories we might not otherwise find on our own.

Cuz not everyone is out there doing the podcast rounds like you and I might do. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story on our show?

The person that comes to mind for you.

Pierre Alexandre: First person that comes to mind is actually a guy I’ve met online during a networking event. I think over a year and a half ago and since that day, we’ve been talking on the phone once a week. So I really love [00:53:00] interacting with that guy and I think you, you would too. It’s Michael Greenberg. The guy is an entrepreneur.

He loves to think and have conversation about society, about business, about basically everything interesting, could be wellbeing, could be business plan, could be business *inaudible*. Yeah, he’s really an entrepreneur at heart. He’s also an investor on the side. He has a podcast right now.

He’s building up *inaudible* business and we’re constantly talking about either society or business within, on a weekly basis. So, I think it would be a good and great addition to the podcast if you want.

Richard Matthews: Awesome, can maybe we come up. If we can reach out and maybe get an introduction, maybe we can get him on the show. We get some of our best stories that way. And if he’s into click up, I’ve just recently fallen in love with Click up for our business, so maybe I’ll learn something from him.

But, you know, in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism. So, now I guess on this show, is where can people find you? Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak and say, Hey Pierre, I’d love [00:54:00] to get your help with our financial modeling, our merger and acquisition.

But more importantly than where is who are the right types of people to reach out and actually raise their hands and say, Hey, I need your help.

Pierre Alexandre: Okay, but the best way to reach out to me could be on my LinkedIn profile. So Pierre Alexandre HEURTEBIZE, I think you, you will include it in…

Richard Matthews: We’ll link the… 

Pierre Alexandre: Somewhere, right? Cause I know people are always struggling with my last name anyway. They can also go on the horizencapital.com website. Horizen, E N, not zed, or o n common misconception and mistake.

And, they can reach out either through the phone or also reach out by email at Pierre, pierre@horizen capital.com. 

Richard Matthews: Awesome. 

Pierre Alexandre: I mean, sure. The best people are generally entrepreneurs either trying to grow their business need some help with their digital marketing, their SEO in particular and conversion rates.

People are looking to do M and A, either acquire. New businesses for [00:55:00] themselves or they are trying to sell and want to help to run their process. Or simply people who want help designing their business, plan their forecast for the next five years, or need a financial model or any needs they might have for the business.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thank you very much for that. We’ll make sure we get the links into the Description below so people can click on ’em and get there. And thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. Pierre, it has been fascinating to just hear your perspectives and especially in just the world of financial modeling in Excel and that kind of stuff is not a very common thing we get to hear about on on this show.

So thank you for that and my last little question for you, so you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before we hit this stop record.

Pierre Alexandre: But first, thanks a lot for inviting me on the podcast and I really enjoy like having that conversation. I like that perspective of trying to ask questions through the lens of super hero. So, thanks a lot for that, word of wisdom, I think. Don’t underestimate, the [00:56:00] choice in life based on what makes you happy, it’s really good, you know, to build your career, to get mentors and but I think it’s very important to do something that excites you because if you focusing on that first and and that you apply all the good principle, but to some things that you like doing, everything will become much easier and that’s how you’re going to attract clients and that’s how you’re going to be successful and happy.

Richard Matthews: I agree. Thank you very much, Pierre. I appreciate your thoughts and your wisdom today. 

Pierre Alexandre: So thanks Richard.