Most businesses leave their growth to chance, hoping their sales process clicks or their events spark engagement. I know, because I used to do the same.

As a sales leader and later a founder, I saw how outdated sales playbooks and underpowered event tools caused wasted opportunities, friction, and stalled growth. 

I was frustrated, because even talented teams and passionate communities couldn’t prove their true value.

That’s what drove me to rethink both challenges from first principles. I built Sales Market Fit to break sales down into something teachable and repeatable, and I co-founded SixSides to help leaders turn events into lasting communities. 

Along the way, I created DealBuddi, an AI sales coach to scale these frameworks and make them accessible to every SaaS founder and sales team.

Today, I help SaaS founders, sales leaders, and event communities simplify complexity, prove their value, and achieve growth. 

Whether it’s through smarter sales or stronger communities, my goal is simple: to ensure no business leaves their success to chance.

Gavin Tye

Former GE Capital Executive | I help founders and executives see what their financials aren’t telling them.

I spent 25 years inside the machine.

GE Capital. GE Vernova. NBCUniversal. Unilever. Structured finance, capital markets, project finance across Latin America. I was the CFO who sat across from banks, governments, and Fortune 500 boards and made the numbers make sense. I closed an $800 million power plant deal. I managed capital market teams and hundred-million-dollar sales budgets. I built financial models that moved real money in real markets.

I was good at it. For a long time, that was enough.

Then it wasn't.

I stayed almost eight years past the moment I knew I was done. Eight years of golden handcuffs, institutional momentum, and not having a single person in my corner who could help me think through what leaving actually looked like -- financially, strategically, personally.

When I finally left, I made mistakes. I jumped into a startup that looked great on paper and had no financial foundation underneath it. I learned the hard way that passion without financial intelligence is just expensive optimism. Then I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars learning the things corporate never taught me -- how to sell, how to communicate with conviction, how to walk into a room and make people feel what I knew to be true about their business.

That education nearly broke me. And it turned me into something rare: a former Fortune 500 CFO who can read your financials like a surgeon reads an MRI and sit across from you like a partner who actually gives a damn.

That's what I do now.

I work with a small number of founders and executives -- people who've already built something substantial and want a strategic partner with real financial depth. Not a coach. Not a consultant recycling frameworks. Not a bookkeeper calling themselves a fractional CFO. Someone who's been in the rooms, closed the deals, read the balance sheets, and came out the other side with a clear point of view about what actually matters.

If you're a founder past $1M who can feel that the way you got here won't get you to the next level, I can show you exactly where the growth is hiding and where the model breaks.

If you're an executive who knows you're meant for something bigger than the title on your business card, I've been where you are. I made the leap. I can help you think through yours.

I don't work with everyone. I'm selective about who I take on because the work only works when both sides are all in.

One conversation is all it takes to know if we're the right fit.

Cruz Gamboa

Most founders don’t go bankrupt overnight.

They bleed slowly.
From numbers they refused to look at.

Revenue looks good.
Growth feels exciting.
Ego feels validated.

But:

➡️ Cash flow is tight
➡️ Margins are thin
➡️ One client controls everything
➡️ Burn rate is “we’ll figure it out”

That’s how businesses die.

Not from lack of ambition.
From lack of financial discipline.

Here’s the cheat sheet I wish every founder read earlier.

Ignore red flags early → pay the price later.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

Your P&L Is Hiding the Real Problem.

Most founders check 3 things:

Revenue.
Profit.
Growth rate.

Then they relax.

That’s the mistake.

Because your P&L is a scoreboard.

Not a diagnosis.

And scoreboards don’t tell you why you’re winning,
or why you’re about to lose.

Here’s what it’s not showing you 👇

If revenue is growing but cash is tight…

You don’t have a profit problem.
You have a cash flow problem.

If sales are strong but margins are shrinking…

You don’t have a demand problem.
You have a pricing or delivery problem.

If profit exists but stress keeps increasing…

You don’t have a money problem.
You have an operational problem.

Most businesses don’t collapse overnight.

They erode slowly:

➡️ Slightly rising CAC
➡️ Slightly lower margins
➡️ Slightly higher payroll
➡️ Slightly longer collections

Small leaks.

Compounded monthly.

And because the P&L still “looks fine,”
no one panics.

Until they should have.

Here’s what real operators track:

✓ Gross margin trends
✓ Cash runway (in months) 
✓ Revenue per employee
✓ CAC payback period
✓ Churn rate

Those numbers tell you where the fire is starting.

Revenue is vanity.
Profit is sanity.
Cash flow is survival.

Read your P&L.

But interrogate it harder.

Because the businesses that scale aren’t the ones with the best revenue.

They’re the ones who catch problems before they show up on the bottom line.

Your financial reports are perfect.

Clean P&L.
Accurate balance sheet.
Cash flow that ties out.

Yet decisions still feel slow, reactive, or unclear.

That’s because reports don’t create leverage.
Interpretation does.

Most founders read numbers like history.
High-performing operators read them like instructions.

Every metric should force a decision:
→ double down
→ fix fast
→ kill it

If nothing changes after reviewing your numbers,
you didn’t review them, you admired them.

This cheat sheet breaks down:

➡️ The questions that actually matter
➡️ The metrics that lie
➡️ And how to spot 1% changes that unlock outsized results

Save this before your next finance review.

undefined undefined

cruzgamboadrive

patagonia-solar-llc

Most people would’ve quit.
They didn’t.

➡️ 2003.

Waco, Texas.
No hype.
No capital.
No backup plan.

Chip and Joanna Gaines quit stable jobs to flip houses.

They slept on air mattresses.
Made $300 in some months.
Maxed credit cards.
Half-finished renovations.
Joanna pregnant.
Chip doing the labor himself.

Friends kept asking the same question losers ask winners early:
“When are you getting a real job?”

Here’s the part most people misunderstand.

They weren’t building houses.
They were building taste.
A repeatable look.
A clear point of view.
Something people could recognize without a logo.

While others chased bigger markets,
they stayed small.
Cheap.
Ignored.

That was the advantage.

A local producer didn’t care about their revenue.
He cared about their authenticity.

How they treated clients.
How they worked together.
How real it felt.

➡️ 2013.

HGTV launched Fixer Upper.

By season two:

5M viewers per episode.
#1 show on the network.

Then they did what confused everyone.

At the peak…
They walked away.

Because TV was attention.
Not leverage.

So they built Magnolia.
A shop.
A restaurant.
A platform.

They stayed in Waco.
Lower costs.
Total control.
The town became the moat.

Today:
1.2M+ visitors every year.
$750M+ valuation.

Lesson:

Don’t chase scale.
Earn trust first.
Don’t compete where everyone goes.
Dominate where no one is looking.

That’s how you turn $300 months
into a generational business.

#scalingup #growth #ceo #founder

Founder Stories

This guy bought one random car dealership.
Turned it into a $5B empire.

No fancy startup.
No venture capital.

Just one smart business move.

Terry Taylor started like most people in the auto industry:

Working inside dealerships.

Climbing the ladder.

But he realized something important:

No matter how hard you work…
You’re still building someone else’s business.

So in 1982, he bought his first dealership in Daytona Beach.

Most people would stop there.

He didn’t.

But the real genius wasn’t buying more dealerships.

It was how he structured them.

Instead of hiring managers, he:

• Gave them 20–25% equity
• Helped finance their buy-in
• Let them run the store

Now managers weren’t employees.

They were owners.

And owners think differently.

They protect profits.
They grow the business.
They care about reputation.

So scaling became easy.

1 dealership → 10 → 50 → 120+ dealerships

Today the network does $5B+ in revenue.

Simple lesson:

People work harder for ownership than salaries.

Build partners.
Not employees

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

Terry Taylor

Some people launch snacks.
Some create global empires from leftovers.

Arch West did the second.

➡️ 1960s. Disneyland.

Casa de Fritos. Tons of stale tortillas. Wasted daily.
A small vendor saw opportunity.
“Cut them into triangles. Fry them. Add some seasoning.”

No PR. No hype. No flashy launch.

Just execution.
Just obsession.
Just seeing value where others saw trash.

1966 → Plain Doritos, national launch.
1972 → Nacho Cheese.
From leftover tortillas → multibillion-dollar snack empire.

Scaling lesson:

Opportunities are everywhere. Most ignore them.
Those who see the leverage, execute relentlessly, and scale turn accidents into legends.

Some people chase attention.
Some quietly turn scraps into billions.

#scalingup #ceo #founder #businesslessons

Doritos

Most people think billion-dollar companies start with experts.

Crumbl Cookies started with two tech guys who had never baked a cookie.

In 2017, they noticed something simple:
Cookies were America’s favorite dessert, but the category hadn’t evolved.
So they focused on a few key moves:

▶ Perfected one cookie first
▶ Kept the menu simple (1 classic + 4 rotating flavors)
▶ Turned weekly flavor drops into social media events

That simple strategy turned a 900 sq ft store and $10K into

✅ 800+ locations
✅ 1M cookies sold daily
✅ $1B+ valuation

They didn’t win by doing more.
They won by focusing on the few decisions that drive everything.

That’s true in finance too.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, go to scalingcfo.io
Take the free assessments and see exactly where to focus first.

Crumbl Cookies

Some people build loud brands.
Some build legendary ones in silence.

Michele Ferrero did the second.

➡️ 1924. Alba, Italy.

A small pastry shop. Almost bankrupt.
A father gone too soon.
A 24-year-old forced to take responsibility.

No press.
No hype.
No spotlight.

Just obsession.

He worked like an alchemist.
Formulas locked away.
Factories run with discipline.
Focus so sharp it scared distractions away.

1964 → Nutella
1968 → Kinder Chocolate
1974 → Kinder Surprise

Not just chocolate.
An experience.

A chocolatier quietly became one of the world’s largest toy creators.

But the real genius wasn’t just the products.
It was the culture.

➡️ No interviews
➡️ No politics
➡️ No yachts
➡️ No show-off wealth

Instead:

✓ Free buses for employees
✓ Above-average wages
✓ Summer camps for kids
✓ Generations of families hired together

He built belonging before it became a leadership buzzword.

Michele understood something many still miss:

Loyalty isn’t bought with bonuses.
It’s earned through care.

Iconic products don’t come from marketing noise.

They come from:

➡️ Absolute focus
➡️ Strategic silence
➡️ Obsession with the user experience

➡️ 2015. Monte Carlo.

He passed away at 89.
He left behind €23 billion.
And brands the world grew up with.

Proof that you don’t need to chase attention
to build something unforgettable.

Sometimes, the quiet builders win the longest.
#scalingup #ceo #founder

No alternative text description for this image

Growing companies don’t stall because of the market.

They stall because the CEO doesn’t scale.

Here are the real 3 mistakes:

1.⁠ ⁠The Founder Stays the Hero

You’re still:

➡️ Approving everything
➡️ Solving every problem
➡️ Closing every big deal
➡️ Fixing every fire

You built the business by being the best operator.

But scaling requires becoming the best architect.

If you’re still the hero, you’re the bottleneck.

2.⁠ ⁠No One Owns the Outcomes

Titles don’t equal accountability.

If revenue drops, who owns it?
If churn spikes, who owns it?
If margins shrink, who owns it?

If the answer isn’t ONE name, you don’t have ownership.

You have collaboration theater.

3.⁠ ⁠They Confuse Activity with Leverage

More hires.
More meetings.
More tools.
More initiatives.

But no single constraint identified.

Scaling is constraint removal.

Find the bottleneck.
Attack it.
Repeat.

That’s it.

Growth doesn’t require more effort.

It requires:

➡️ Better structure
➡️ Clear ownership
➡️ Founder evolution

Most businesses don’t hit a ceiling.

The founder does.
#scaling #CEO #growth #founders

Most “profitable” companies are one bad month away from dying.

Here’s why.

Profit is an opinion.
Cash is oxygen.

You can look profitable on paper and still miss payroll.
I’ve seen businesses doing 7 figures collapse because one client paid late.

Revenue doesn’t matter if:

• It’s delayed
• It’s unpredictable
• It’s already spent in your head

Growth makes this worse.

You hire early.
Lock in fixed costs.
Sign long-term tools.
Upgrade lifestyle.

Now your burn is permanent…
…but your income isn’t.

That’s the trap.

Another hard truth:
If the founder steps away and sales stop, you don’t have a business.
You have a high-stress job with employees.

Margins won’t save you.
Busy won’t save you.
Brand won’t save you.

Only cash flow will.

Simple rules that keep companies alive:

• Collect faster than you spend
• Keep fixed costs boring
• Build 3–6 months of runway
• Systems before scaling
• Liquidity before vanity growth

The strongest businesses aren’t the loudest.

They’re the ones that can survive a bad month without panicking.

That’s real leverage.

Stop treating video like content.

That’s why it’s not making you money.

I was in Austin and went to Aleric Heck’s “Video Authority” book launch at Self Publishing.com.

I expected marketing fluff.
I got a mental reset.

Aleric built Ad Outreach into an 8-figure company from a college dorm.

No VC babysitters.
No Silicon Valley permission.
Just execution.

Here’s the mistake I see founders make with video:

They post to be seen.
Not to be useful.

Views become the goal.
Virality becomes the metric.
Sales become the mystery.

Aleric’s framework is the opposite:

If someone doesn’t buy from you, they should still feel stupid NOT to follow you.

Give so much value that:

➡️ They trust you
➡️ They respect you
➡️ They assume you’re expensive

Counterintuitive part?

The more you give away, the more you make.

Because trust compounds faster than attention.

This is leverage.

You record once.
It sells for you while you sleep.
While you work.
While you scale.

But only if you do it right.

Here is one of the pearls I took away from his talk...

One test Aleric shared wrecked most “AI content strategies”:

In the lecture, he talked about a split-test they ran at his firm:

✓ Full AI videos
✓ Talking head
✓ AI hook + real human

The winner? Hybrid. By a landslide.

Full AI lost.

Why?

AI gets attention.
Humans get trust.
Trust gets money.

Tools multiply.
They don’t replace.

Your face.
Your voice.
Your thinking.

That’s the asset.

If you’re a coach, consultant, or expert business doing $1M–$10M and video isn’t part of your growth system…

You’re choosing slow growth.

Not because video is magic.
Because leverage is.

Read Video Authority.
It’s not theory.
It’s a playbook.

Congrats on the launch, Aleric Heck.🔥🤝

If you want the exact framework behind this, not opinions, not theory,
Aleric put the full system in Video Authority.

👉 https://lnkd.in/eN7v7eqi

#sclaing #founder #ceo #growth

$30,000 → $7 BILLION.
No hype. No fluff. Just strategy.

Dennis Washington was 30, broke, and borrowing $30k from a Caterpillar dealer.

He bought one bulldozer and started doing construction in Montana.

Within 5 years? He was the largest contractor in the state.

But he didn’t stop there.

He asked a simple question:
"Where is everyone running from?"

Then he built a formula:

✅ Buy failing businesses that everyone else ignores.
✅ Fix the basics cut costs, improve management, unlock cash flow.
✅ Use the profits to buy the next one.
✅ Repeat.

First test: a worthless copper mine.
Bought for $15M → $100M profits in 3 years.

Next: a struggling global construction firm, merged it → Washington Group International → sold for $2.6B.

Now? Real estate, aviation, railroads, marine services… a $7B empire all from turning broken things into cash.

Most people run from broken businesses. Dennis Washington built a $7B empire fixing them.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

Dennis Washington

What’s one AI tool you wish existed, But still doesn’t?

Share your thoughts!

I will share more in about a week.

Best

Cruz

#scalingup #growth #ceo

graphical user interface, text, application

Power of One Cash Flow Hack!

“1% changes that multiply profits”

Most businesses chase “big moves.”
The real winners? They obsess over tiny tweaks that stack.

➡️ Increase Revenue

✓ +1% Price → Big EBIT jump
✓ +1% Volume → More cash in the bank
✓ Upsell/Cross-sell → Little effort, huge gain

➡️ Cut Costs

✓ -1% COGS → Direct profit hit
✓ Trim overhead → Kill inefficiency
✓ Better processes → Faster & cheaper

➡️ Optimize Capital

✓ Collect faster → Cash now
✓ Reduce inventory → Liquidity unlocked
✓ Extend payables → Stronger cash position

➡️ Track & Multiply

✓ Measure every 1% → See compounding magic
✓ 1% here, 1% there → exponential growth

Truth: 

Small tweaks everywhere > chasing “big moves.”

👉 If you want to see where your biggest 1% opportunities are, check out scalingcfo.io

Take the free assessments and find out exactly where to focus first.

The trillion-dollar scoreboard isn’t just impressive.

It’s a warning. ⚠️

AI is no longer a feature.
It’s infrastructure.

Distribution beats product.
Platforms compress margins.
Specialisation scales faster than breadth.

And the giants NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple aren’t just companies anymore.

They’re rails.

If you’re a $1M–$10M founder, here’s the real play:

➡️ Build on top of giants, don’t compete with them.
➡️ Own your audience, don’t rent it.
➡️ Go narrow, dominate a micro-niche.
➡️ Push recurring revenue.
➡️ Move faster than anyone with a board meeting.

The economy is consolidating at the top.

But execution speed is still decentralised.

That’s your edge.

If you're building between $1–$10M and want to scale intelligently, not just aggressively

Come to the workshop → https://lnkd.in/efBiFQRg

I keep having the same conversation.

Founder calls me. Revenue is up -- sometimes way up. 

But they're taking home less than when the business was half the size. 

They hired the consultants. They wrote the plan. They pushed harder on sales. And somehow the business keeps snapping back to the same number like a rubber band.

After sitting across from enough of these founders, I started seeing the pattern. It comes down to three things nobody wants to talk about -- and none of them have anything to do with selling more.

I broke it all down in this week's newsletter.
#scalingup #founders #growth #CEO

I talk to a lot of founders. Like, a LOT. And something keeps coming up that I can't ignore anymore. Almost every conversation -- doesn't matter what 

Open article: The 3 things nobody tells you about getting stuck by Cruz Gamboa • 5 min read

The 3 things nobody tells you about getting stuck

99% of founders do this backwards.

They try to scale a business
that no one has proven they want.

Then they try to sell a business
that only works because they exist.

Here’s the real order:

1. Start
Don’t build the product.
Sell it first.

If no one pays, it’s not a business.
It’s a fantasy.

2. Scale
Do less. Better.
One offer. One audience. One channel.

Systemize everything.
If it needs you to survive, it’s not scalable.

3. Sell
Buyers don’t pay for hype.
They pay for predictable cash flow.

Clean books.
Recurring revenue.
Low founder dependency.

Start with proof.
Scale with systems.
Exit with leverage.

That’s how you build something that prints money, not something that prints stress.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

Most people saw a ping pong table.

Max Koehler saw a business.

In 2019, he noticed something strange:

Table tennis is one of the most played sports in the world,
but in U.S. cities there were very few places to play regularly.

Most founders would open a traditional club.

Max built PingPod instead.

Small glass studios.
Open 24/7.
Booked entirely through an app.
No staff. No front desk.

But the real genius?

A camera above every table.

Every rally gets recorded.
One tap → instant replay → share on social.

Players created the content.
The content created the marketing.

Clips went viral.
Bookings exploded.

Today PingPod is valued around $40–60M.

All from one simple observation.

The best founders don’t just build products.
They build systems that grow themselves. 🚀

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, go to
scalingcfo.io

Take the free assessments and see exactly where to focus first.

#scalingup #founders #CEO

Max Koehler

Most founders don’t fail overnight.

They bleed slowly.
From decisions they ignored.
From processes they never set.
From metrics they refused to measure.

Revenue looks fine. Growth feels exciting. Ego feels validated.

But underneath:

➡️ Decisions get delayed → chaos spreads
➡️ Processes depend on you → hero culture burns out
➡️ Metrics are “nice to have” → guesswork rules
➡️ Accountability is optional → everyone points fingers

That’s how scaling dies.

Not from lack of ambition.
From lack of rules.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.
#scalingup #founders #ceo

Most founders don’t have a growth problem.
They have a focus problem.

Their dashboards are full.
Their results are not.

Tracking more KPIs doesn’t make you smarter.

It just gives you more ways to avoid the hard decision.

Here’s how serious founders think about metrics:

If a number doesn’t change what you do this week,
it doesn’t belong on your dashboard.

That’s why the only startup metrics that actually matter answer 4 questions:

1. Is demand growing?
2. Are customers staying?
3. Are they paying more over time?
4. Are we running out of cash before we figure it out?

Everything else is noise.

The best operators I’ve seen track 5–7 metrics max.
They review them weekly.
And they tie each metric to a clear action.

Everyone tracks KPIs.
Very few track the right ones.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io.

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

taplio

The Battle

Gavin Tye

Cruz Gamboa

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreCruz Gamboa's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Gavin Tye

Cruz Gamboa

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Cruz Gamboa's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreCruz Gamboa's LinkedIn Performance