Thriving In The Digital Age

Thriving In The Digital Age: Jordan Olivas and B2B Financing

July 08, 2024 Joe Crist Season 1 Episode 2

Jordan Olivas, co-founder of Harv, discusses the challenges faced by businesses in the current economic climate and the importance of access to liquidity. He emphasizes the need for businesses to optimize their processes and explore new payment methods to improve cash flow. Jordan also highlights the value of engaging with sales representatives and constantly seeking ways to improve and grow. He predicts that businesses will become more complex in their operations and that automation and account receivable solutions will play a crucial role in the future.
Businesses are facing liquidity challenges in the current economic climate, which affects their cash flow and ability to operate effectively.
Optimizing processes and exploring new payment methods can help businesses improve their cash flow and reduce the time spent on administrative tasks.
Engaging with sales representatives can provide valuable insights and opportunities for partnerships and growth.
Automation and account receivable solutions can streamline payment processes and improve efficiency for businesses.
Constantly seeking ways to improve and grow is essential for success in business.



Joe Crist (00:00)
Hello everyone and welcome to another exciting episode of Thriving in the Digital Age. Joining me today is Jordan Olivas, the co -founder of Harv, a B2B financing company. Jordan, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and what's the work you're doing.

Jordan Olivas (00:16)
Yeah, and Joe, thanks for having me. Yeah, one, really excited to be here and a bit more about my background and a bit more about the organization. So I spent my entire career in fintech, first on the acquiring side. So I've done everything from selling bill payment solutions. So thinking along the lines of you pay your utility bill online.

that portal software and physical bill print payment acceptance for utility companies and governments to actually building payment software. So the software that you interact with at the point of sale at a terminal inside of the store on online gateways, credit card issuing platforms, and was one of the first enterprise sales reps at Clarna, which one of the largest.

BNPLs in the country and in the world. I was an enterprise rep there and had opened the doors at major retailers like Forever 21 and Revolve Clothing and GameStop and others. And I've really targeted my career into the lending space for quite some time. So after that, I went and worked for a company called Charge After where we were a...

financing company that aggregated multiple lenders into a single application for Ecom. And so currently they work with companies like Wayfair, Home Depot, Lenovo to name a few, and then founded KissPay, which we are now rebranded as of Harv, really as of today. And we started as a buy not pay later company in Asia.

After a lot of turbulence in the region, we decided to start operating in the US and found a really good niche inside of B2B lending.

And we said, look, lending is happening here, but we don't really want to focus on that. We want to really be this financing company that comes out and provides access to capital to segments that typically aren't well serviced. So some of our core industries include solar, consumer packaged goods, power, sports, construction, and a number of other industries as well. We even have.

recruiting company, we have a SaaS company that leverages our software. But what we do is similar to the buy now, pay later model. We come in, give a company the ability to offer financing to their clients. We then say, hey, buyer of services or goods, you can pay us back in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days while we pay the seller upfront and in full with no risk of non -payment or late payment. So it allows people to have more access to liquidity.

while at the same time allowing us to interact with a lot of diverse sorts of organizations, which is really exciting. And we very quickly in our first month of this pilot, we ended up.

originating millions and it was a very quick start, which has been awesome to see. And so now we are really pushing into this model and have seen a lot of success. So really excited to be here and talk a bit more about what we're doing and about the industry as a whole and what people are experiencing when it comes.

terms with financing, whether it be as little as $500 or as much as a few million. We've seen a lot of really cool use cases and excited to chat a bit further.

Joe Crist (03:33)
Wow, Jordan, that is really interesting. You've been on quite a journey. So, you know, that brings up an interesting question. And since you have been in this space for so long, right? What challenges do you actually see like in this industry and also the industries you serve?

Jordan Olivas (03:46)
Yeah. So look, right now it's the economy is not, is, is, is not doing the greatest, right? I mean, look, the stock market seems to do an okay, but that's not real, real indication of consumer purchasing power. It's, it's, it's a bit delayed. It's a bit abstract.

And so what's happening right now is that liquidity is an all -time low. So what does that actually mean? Liquidity is really anything that you can think of in terms of cash flow. So you'll see a lot of institutional banks that would typically offer lending. For example, in the power sports space, they would offer what they call floor plans to dealers saying, hey, you can buy a unit and you can keep it on stock for six months, 12 months. And then if you offer a consumer financing,

work out well. Well, the problem is, is that because consumers are really cash strapped at the moment, people are pulling out and they tie those consumer plans to these floor plans on the B2B side, giving credits and financing terms to businesses as really as a loss leader. So when the consumer side comes under pressure, not only do they lose the consumer financing, they lose their line of credit as well, which is just detrimental. And we've seen this in solar, we've seen this in CPG, we've seen it in

Power shorts, we've seen it everywhere. And many companies today offer net terms in -house, right? We're gonna, hey, yeah, we're sending an invoice out. We're gonna pay in 30 days. And we talked to many businesses and well, I haven't had any, no, I've only had one default in 20 years. I've been operating that term for forever. But say, well, that's fine. But how many times have you come close to missing payroll because a client has paid you in 45 days, 60 days, 75 days?

Right. And if it's a lot of stress on you, it's not just that it's the, you know, do you have to get a line of credit from somewhere that's going to be really expensive to borrow from? Are you, just having to miss out on some good opportunities? Cause you don't have the cashflow to be able to operate. And the answer is always, well, yes, that's happened every other month for as long as I've been in business. And it's, it's, it's really, it's an interesting conversation. And so we're seeing that businesses don't have access to cashflow.

And where they used to be able to get payment upfront or in 30 days are now stretching to 60 and 90. And it's creating a real drain on those businesses. And so I think what we're seeing in the market is that now more so than ever.

Maybe since, since 08, there has been a huge amount of liquidity crisis and people know that it's there. They feel the effects, but I don't think they realize to the extent of how bad it is. And unfortunately, a lot of these businesses are ones bearing the front of this issue.

Joe Crist (06:32)
You know, that makes me think of like the, not just the business being impacted, but these are people's families too, right? If the business is struggling to operate, that means the employees are probably stressing out too. It's like, is everything going to be okay? Right? And obviously you have...

Jordan Olivas (06:46)
Yeah, exactly. It has so many downstream effects, you know, that, you know, for example, we were like, well, you know, like to give you an example. So for us, we'll charge an average of like 1 .6 % to like two and a half percent. So the average is 2%. So I don't want to pay 2 % for, for this cashflow thing. And it's like, well, that's 2 % of your margin, but if you're

If you go to business, it's irrelevant, right? Not including all the stress. If you lose an employee, it's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars to retrain the replacement. It's going to strain relationships that you have with your vendors because since you can't make payroll, you have to delay paying your vendors. So it's this massive trickle down effect that goes far beyond really anything else. And what we're seeing is at a time where people are asking for discounts more than ever and really negotiating on margins, getting thin.

At the same time, the larger problem is not actually whether or not is the business viable? Does the business have cash to operate today? And that question is becoming more and more prevalent as time moves on. I think we're going to be in this for at least 18 to 24 months. So it's a tough time. It's cyclical, right? We'll always come out of it. But right now, we find that the timing seems to be superb.

Joe Crist (08:03)
Yeah, I mean, thankfully companies like, you know, Harv exists, right, to actually help alleviate this because I'm just imagining also taking care of my employees too, where it's like, I want to make sure everyone is actually gets the money they need so they can support their family so they can pay their bills, right? I mean, the downstream effects, right, that is a very stressful thing to deal with and in an economy right now, there's so much uncertainty, right?

Jordan Olivas (08:29)
There is, there is, and it compounds, right? What people don't understand is in this human nature, I think most people like to look at things in a vacuum, right? They say, hey, it's 2%, it's 2 % of my margin, it's gone. And it's not, once again, just about that cash flow or even the pricing or anything else.

What we try to talk to businesses is we really say, Hey, look, if you have an outstanding invoice, like not even talking about the vendor strain that your vendors, cause you can't pay them your payroll, your stress, think about the amount of hours you have to spend on the other side of it, even for the good payments where how many hours are you spending following up? How many hours are you spending talking to your employee to ask them to follow up?

trying to manage the cashflow. So if you have a bad month in terms of cashflow, you very easily could be spending 10 hours. So if you value your time at $100 an hour, you value your employee's time at $50 an hour, let's assume, with taxes and benefits and everything else, you talk to your accountant internally at the rate of $150 an hour, if you have an outside accountant for $200 an hour, you're spending $300 an hour, right?

10 months or 10 hours a month, you're essentially billing $3 ,000 and it's not sustainable, right? Plus all the other factors. And I think when you look at what a small business has to do, right? It's the last thing anybody wants to do. And so I think you're gonna start seeing a lot of businesses outside of what we're doing. I think you're gonna see a lot of businesses really starting to become more...

Complex in terms of their thought process not if I just brought a good product and service. They're gonna start realizing that Hey, I don't want to pay for that hundred dollar a month software

And then I realized, holy crap, that saves me five hours a month. It's definitely worth it. Right. They're going to start, I think business are really going to start optimizing, not just their spend, but they're actually going to start optimizing their, really their daily use of time. And I think that's going to be, I think it's going to be a big change in a good way. I think we're going to start seeing that now more, more so than ever.

Joe Crist (10:46)
Yeah, Jordan, you bring up a lot of really interesting points. And the one thing I want to ask you, I think the audience would greatly appreciate it because we're all feeling this right now. What solutions or opportunities are out there that people can actually start looking into that to really alleviate this? It's felt by everybody.

Jordan Olivas (11:03)
Yeah, so I'm going to talk about not really what Harv's experience, I'm going to talk a bit more broadly about my experience. So in the world of payments, it's just very generic, right? And we're not talking someone calling you to say, hey, I'll lower your credit card fees. I'm talking really strategically at a higher level of what are payments, right? Well, payment is the last step.

in converting a sale, right? That could be true in B2B sales, door knocking, it could be true in direct to consumer sales, or there's in every aspect. And so you spend all this time, this money on marketing and sales and product development and graphic design, everything else that's involved to get the customer to that point. And if you fail on the payment, that's a massive sum cost that you should not be trying to bear. Now, when you look at

I love to look at e -commerce sites and everyone is saying, well, my business is different. I'm like, no, it's not. Like it's, it's different. Yes, of course. But human psychology stays the same, right? Whether you're a buyer from a business or a buyer as a consumer, you go online and if you have a 1 % conversion rate on your e -commerce site, that's a terrible conversion rate.

just by adding additional payment, they say, well, I accept credit card. That's all they need, right? I remember when I've sold credit solutions into multiple companies. That's all they need. Why would they have a credit card? What does it matter? It's like, well, a large portion of the country does not have a credit card. A lot of their Macs have their credit cards. People just don't like to use them because they've got a bad connotation, right? So they just use debit cards. And so you need to find ways to lessen what we call the friction, right?

Friction in payments, in a perfect world, there's 0 % friction, which means any customer that comes onto your site and lands on that page, on that payment page, is going to convert into a customer. Same with the sales process. So by offering new types of payment methods, I'm not talking about just us. I'm saying if you're direct to consumer, you're not offering Sezzle, which is a phenomenal buy -not -pay -later company.

on your e -comm site, you're kind of insane, right? Like there's literally no, well, it's, it cost me 5 % and instead of my credit card processing of 2 .5%, I'm like, yes, but they're going to convert way more effectively than credit card. Not only that, but there are people who buy on Sezzle are going to spend more money and they're going to have a higher repeat purchase rate. So I'm talking about going back to what I was saying earlier, right? Which is talking about becoming more complex as a business is not talking about

you know, adding one to processes or buying a bunch of stuff. It's just really thinking about beyond just the actual transaction of the product that you have and understanding the core psychology around buying as a business is going to make a big, big difference. And this is where people say, loyalty plans. I implemented a loyalty plan and I've really enjoyed it. But it doesn't really do much.

Like I have very little adoption. It's like, well, it's not about just, you can't just offer rewards, right? You can't just offer rewards. For example, like I've done some consulting with TransformCo, which is the owner of like Sears and whatnot. They've got this phenomenal loyalty platform that is just basically a giant data science software, right? For enterprise. And the problem is it's really about understanding your customer on a very fine level.

You can't just plop in a payment method. You can't just plop in a new loyalty program. It doesn't work like that. When you actually optimize on loyalty using data to drive your decisions, you'll find out that, hey,

Instead of offering 30 % off to everybody on this day, why don't I just offer 30 % off to this, to 20 % of the company, of the customers, 20 % of this other group and 10 % to the rest. So now you've dropped your cost of customer acquisition down to a much lower rate, right? Simply by understanding your customer on a data -driven perspective, because you can say, hey, this customer base is extremely loyal. If I give them any discount, they'll buy. Hey, if I give, if I throw them in a free hot, which cost me five bucks, they're going to spend $300. That's way more cost effective than just offering a discount, right? So becoming

more complex as a business is really understanding your customers on a deeper level and trying to understand where am I having friction at? Right? Is it the top of the funnel? Is it the bottom of the funnel? And how can I introduce things that are customer conversion tools and not just, you've seen the term or heard the term at least, you know, shelf wear, right? Where you buy software, use it once, twice, and it sits there for a year and you keep paying for it.

You don't need a lot of tools. You need to find a few tools that work really, really well for you and you need to actually implement them, understand them, read the docs, go to the webinars, understand what it is. That type of stuff is going to drive your business to a whole other level. And I'm not talking just for payments, right? It's finding those few things that work well for your business, focusing on those and doing things really, really well.

I will tell you as someone who's obviously biased in the payments world, focusing on your end of the funnel is effective. If you go out and you say, I want to double my customer base, top of funnel, you have to double your sales and marketing costs. It's math. You have to, assuming that's optimized. If I go on the bottom of the funnel and say, I'm going to increase my conversion rate at the bottom of the funnel, hell, 20%.

That's going to be a lot less expensive and provide way more value than anyplace else. Right. And that's where I think people have to start getting more complex and how they think about their business. It's once again, where is that friction? Where am I losing them at? And how can I implement things to smoothen that journey?

Joe Crist (16:47)
You bring up an interesting point here, and this is something I've dealt with a lot with my own clients. When it comes to process design, a lot of companies become very dependent on technology. They want the quote unquote best in class solution when that's really not realistic to their needs. A big part of solving these problems is actually understanding your process, understanding your customers, and finding the right tool that fits the job at the moment. Because obviously as you begin to grow, then

Your needs will change and then the actual software solutions and the process solutions you're going to implement are going to change with it. But that's a very, very critical point, right? If you do want to improve it, you need to really understand the process and the technology you're using. And as you said before, read it, understand what you're actually doing and then apply. And that does save you money. It not only saves you money, but also increases revenue too, because now it's like, hey, we are building a better process that is now augmented with the right tooling.

Jordan Olivas (17:35)
you

Yep, exactly. I always like to say everything in life can be related back to business and vice versa, like in sports, right? I love to play pickleball. I'm a fanatic. It's got me addicted. I've been playing like a year and a half and I'm very much attuned to watching what paddles people are playing with. You'll see some brand new players that go out and drop $300 on a paddle and they'll go and buy it. Like, this isn't working. I'm going to buy another one and then drop it like $300 on a paddle.

And the ground reality is they just have to use what they have and really understand the mechanics behind what that pedal does. Is it a power pedal? Is it a control pedal? Where am I placing my shots? That's it, right? It's all about the level of skill and time you put into refining that craft and understanding, hey, what type of player am I? Am I a really good player at the net?

or in the kitchen and what about the baseline? Where can I really zone in when I'm good at? And he is, me not buying a new paddle. Maybe it's a new pair of shoes to where I'm not twisting my ankle and I can move a bit quicker. Or maybe it's, Hey, I really want to work on hitting my, hitting my drop shots. You know, so it's the same process, right? It's picking out that one thing you're really, really good at really refining it or maybe saying, Hey, what am I not good at? And just being all your effort. I'm just really understanding what's the one tool I can use to implement to make that just a bit more effective.

Joe Crist (19:10)
That's a really great point, I think. Really revisiting the basics of like an understanding who you are, right? Who you are as a person, as an operator, but also who you are as a company and where your strengths lie, but also where you're not strong and really visiting that. You know, that was so fascinating and I feel like you have like so much insight into this. So when actually comes to the future of this industry, right? And the also the industries you serve, like,

Jordan Olivas (19:24)
Exactly.

Joe Crist (19:38)
What do you see? You mentioned before that we're gonna be in this, like it's maybe downturn or this challenging economy for a couple more months, well, 18 months or so. How do you see it being over in the future, right? Is it gonna get worse? Does it get better? Or how do you see this?

Jordan Olivas (19:58)
Yeah, I think, you know, going back to my initial point, right, where people are going to be, the business is going to become more complex and how they operate, at least the good ones, right? I do see, you know, when we talk about our product, we're at our core, we're not really a financing company, we're an account receivable automation platform, meaning we can automate everything from cart. Because they'll say, I just want to send out invoices using just your platform for...

things I need to offer terms for. And that's how it starts. And then we say, well, look, you have 150 customers you're collecting from every month, every month. How many of those are you following up with? How many of those are you trying to reconcile? It's a huge pain, but they don't really, it's a pain, but is there an accountant does it or whoever else does it for us, we're kind of saying, no, like let us handle your account receivable automation. Like you let it, we're a really good tool. If you let us be your tool.

Let us know your card payments, your ACH, your wires. So you get one payment in per day. Everything's reconciliation. You get a reconciliation file and everything is nice and clean. I think that's where you're going to find, once again, what tools are you using outside even what we're doing. We're going to see, I think, a lot of people, I hope to see at least good businesses start spending more time with the tools they have.

understanding what is it they offer. Cause I mean, you'll, you'll, you develop a, you have developed multiple platforms in my career and you know, you create all these features, but you know, only 20 % of it is used by 80 % of the people. Right. But when you find out like, you know, what you'll call a power user, right. Real understanding. I would say like, if you want, I'm going to pay for a consultant and come and do this. I need to pay for this training, the seminar to go learn X, X, Y, Z about the industry. No, no, no, no, no. Call the sales rep.

for the industry you want to learn about and say, I just want to learn about your company, I want to learn about the industry, can you sit down for two hours? That sales rep will give you the most concise, straightforward, knowledgeable bits of information you're going to receive for free. Right? And if you, like, obviously don't waste their time, like you want to at least have a legitimate reason to be talking to them, you don't want to waste their time, just out of respect. But a sales rep...

I come from sales. I've been a VP of sales. I've been a direct contributor. But if you're a good sales rep, you are a consultant. You have to understand the industry. You have to understand the technology. What are the trends? Where are things going? Obviously, you're going to get ones that give, I don't want to be in sales. Sales, in my mind, had a very negative connotation. But that's not.

true sales, like true sales is becoming a master, like in your domain. And, you know, I love talking to other sales reps in other industries, like the amount of things that you learn is just insane. Cause they're close to the revenue. The closer you are to the revenue, right. The more you get to get to get the frontline experience of what's happening. And so, you know, I think in terms of change, what I'd like to see is more people engaging those reps instead of, you know, ignoring them. When I get it, when I get a cold call,

especially on the B2B side, right? I'll say, you got 30 seconds, pitch me. And I'll tell you whether or not I think it's a good idea to chat or not. And that's converted into some deals. That's converted into some great partnerships. But it's interesting how many people are willing to blow off those type of scenarios. Yet at the same time, they're struggling to make payroll. And there's somebody there that, yeah, they want to sell them something. You're going to be wrong. But they may have some good insight, made good referrals. Salespeople are connectors.

I'd like to see more people talk with salespeople and realize how much value there is in just running through that process.

Joe Crist (23:44)
That is very good advice. I've never thought about that approach before. You're right. Salespeople are very plugged into their company. They understand what's going on, but they're also there to communicate with you. They're there to generate leads and build relationships. By doing that, they build relationships with you and potentially you become a customer of theirs. I love that. I think that's great advice.

When it comes to, I guess, the economy, right? When there's obviously a lot of what we're dealing with now is people can't make their payments. Do you see this getting worse or better?

Jordan Olivas (24:20)
Yeah, we're still a bit away from the bottoming out, right? You know, consumers do have some savings left. I think we'll, it's an election year. So there's a lot of things in flux. They're gonna try to make the economy as rosy as possible, like on its hinge through the end of the year. And then next year we'll kind of see what happens, right? But I think, you know, the reality is that humans by nature want to consume more resources than they have, right? It's, it's.

just the way it is.

And so I think in terms of payments, people are always going to look for new innovative ways to make a payment, whether it be crypto, whether it be financing, whether it be credit card, debit card, wallet. Like right now the big thing is account to account transfers, which is a really interesting topic because it lowers costs of doing business. But then you're taking away a customer's ability to, it's about the form factor, right? So I can do an account to account payment that's

but my favorite example is when I worked for a company that did a lot of work in tokenization and encryption for cards. So you know that little chip, the EMV chip on a credit card or a debit card. Yep, for years, you know, people just kept swiping the cards because there are lots, even when they made the conversion over, you could do it. Really it took adoption when they enforced it.

Joe Crist (25:35)
Yeah.

Jordan Olivas (25:47)
Right? As in merchants, if you don't, if you do swipe the card, you still can, but it's called liability shift. You're liable. They're basically all chargebacks, right? Like they, it's the liability shifted to them, right? it was a huge push. And then same thing with the same company did a lot of work on tokenization for Apple pay.

And so I remember when Apple Pay first came out, I was like, wow, it's going to be adopt so fast. It's so cool. Right. And before COVID, I think topped out seven to 11 % adoption. That's it. It was insane. Right. It's crazy. Right. And then when COVID hit, boom, like, I don't know what the option for, for wallet payment is now everyone uses it. Right. So it's a very common thing. But what I'm trying to get at is, is that human nature is very, they don't like change. Right.

And so getting someone to change the way that they operate is very difficult. But the people that are willing to change and able to change quickly are the ones that typically do really well, right? Not just because they have the latest and greatest, but because they're always have that open mind to how things are changing. So if you're looking at payment methods,

I think it's, it's, it lesser is a, once again, talk to a sales rep, they're going to tell you, right? talk to others in your industry, they're going to tell you like what the best starting place, but actually understanding is you may have five products that all look the same, but there's always something that wants, right? What is it that works well for you? A B tests. And then that takes a lot of time, but it can be as simple as, Hey, I have an e -comm store. I'm going to test Sezzle versus Klarna. Right. I'm going to see it, but do a 50, 50 % split tests. How people get this, they have to get this.

or do 30 days, 30 days, whatever it may be. Test and see how it works. As someone who's been in the payment space for a long time, I know for a fact that offering terms will drive not only more frequent sales, but better repeat customers, and also higher average order values in the B2B space. There was even a Harvard study that said there was a 5 % increase in customer retention, as well as a 12 %

plus increase in gross profit from offering terms. So to just say, well, I've always done it this way, it's worked fine. It's just a very close -minded way of thinking. And I'm not saying your business is gonna go down if you don't do it. But once again, be open to new ideas. Unless you are working 10 hours a week and your business is still growing and you're going on vacation every month,

Be open, right? To new ideas, right? I'm not talking about just payments wise. It's everything that you're doing, right? There's probably a better way, right? I always like say, at the end of the week, at the end of the day, whatever time you want to look at, write down what you did for the day and write down three things. Where did you spend your most time? Where did you spend your least amount of time? And what were the top three things you hated doing?

What was the worst part of your day? Was it putting a deck together? Was it reconciling something? Was it dealing with customer support issues? Start there, right? And my view is like, if I have to do this for five hours every single week or even a month, and my time is valued at $100 an hour, if I can find something that is less than $500 a month, then I should probably look at that solution, right?

Start there. It'll lead to your stress, forget more time. And it's just a good ROI, right? Start looking at things. It's part of business is struggling, right? If you don't struggle, you don't like to struggle. You probably shouldn't be in business, but to just accept that that's the way it is, is a very stressful and unneeded way of doing things.

Joe Crist (29:22)
I agree. I think that's phenomenal advice for anyone in business, no matter if you're starting or you're growing or you're already established.

You know, it makes me think, right? So you obviously have so much to offer, you know, other than that.

Jordan Olivas (29:40)
I like to think so. I mean, my wife thinks so. I mean, she's married to me for like 11 years now, so I hope so. But no, I mean, look, at the end of the day, I like to talk to people. I like to get to know people. I like to, you know, I love to be in that level of chaos where it's just, I like to struggle. Like, I just love it. Like, I...

You know, growing up, even now I'm like huge anime fan and I told my dad, I have a daughter and I was like, Hey, like you really, I don't want to watch this. I'm like, no, but it's about struggling. It's about overcoming. Like your, your challenges, no matter what you're set with in life. It's about just constantly pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. I love that struggle. I love that constant, just like improvement. And it's, you know, I, to me, it drives a lot of people and saying, I get it. Like I'm, I can be very annoying because I like that. Not everyone's wired like that.

But I just, I love that constant iteration of just improving yourself. And the, look, the hardest thing about being human is looking yourself in the mirror and being honest with yourself. I struggle with it. Everyone struggles with it, but the more you do it, I said, told my daughter, I said, look, instead of watching this on YouTube, I told my son, instead of watching this stuff on YouTube, go watch a video about how to be a better singer. I said, well, I can already sing well.

Well, that's the, those are the type of people that don't succeed in life, right? It's, it's the ones that realize how far they have to go. I say, I, if I'm lucky, I know maybe 1 % of what there is to know about payments and lending. Maybe, maybe, maybe. And that's a lot of knowledge. But I mean, I talked to, one of the product managers at a firm earlier today, and we just had a blast talking about the industry. I learned so much in a 30 minute call.

It was just so much fun. And I love talking to people or especially experts in the space because they just, they have a niche that's just different than mine. And I just love to eat that stuff up. It's, it's, it's really a really eye opening experience.

Joe Crist (31:41)
and it makes you smarter, right? Listening to people from other perspectives, right? And also their struggles too and how they learn.

Jordan Olivas (31:49)
Yeah, I've got this one product guy at Harve that loves to call me out on my shit. He just like, during like, what's wrong with you? We can't do this, this is too much. This is not how it works. And I think he'd probably get fired from a lot of companies because he is so vocal about it. But he has the same passion that I have about the company and he wants it the best and he's a smart guy.

and he just, he pushes back and I love, love experiencing that. And sometimes that comes off the wrong way to a lot of people, but you know, if you kind of accept that for what it is that we're all on the same page and my co -founder, right. You know, there's many times I don't want to do something. He's like, Jordan, you have to do this. Like you can't just keep pushing this up. And so like, I like people that can just be as straightforward as I am and, you know, realize that it's not a personal attack on you. Right. And if anything, more people have like that around you.

the better and that's why I love doing what I'm doing.

Joe Crist (32:50)
to live by. But Jordan, I do want to say thank you for coming out. We are at the end of the show. So everyone, Jordan will leave us. Great person to talk to, loved having the guests and to the audience, I appreciate you tuning in. And next week, tune in for another exciting episode of Thriving the Digital Age. Thanks, everybody.

Jordan Olivas (33:11)
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.


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