Young Han: Scaling Companies Without Sacrificing Personal Well-Being

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here. Bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio is my pleasure to introduce you to my guest today, Young Han, a fractional CFO and COO with thesis Group. Young is an entrepreneur and strategic finance leader who has helped shape shape the growth strategies of major brands including Starbucks, Apple, and Philz Coffee. He began his entrepreneurial journey early, co-founding a Korean restaurant at just 19 years old that generated more than $3 million in its first year. Today, young works with companies as a fractional executive, helping founders Simplify operations, build strong financial strategies and scale businesses in a way that supports both professional success and personal well-being. He’s also a strong advocate for what he calls work life integration, believing that personal health and family life should be designed into a business from the beginning. Young. Welcome to the show.

Young Han: Trisha, thank you so much for having me.

Trisha Stetzel: I’m so excited. And you know, I hadn’t even lined up your podcast. So that’s got to come in someplace during our conversation. So here’s what we’re going to start with. Tell us, okay, tell us more about you.

Young Han: Yeah. So I, um, I’ve been a serial entrepreneur my entire life and, uh, you know, grew up watching my dad as a small business owner and, uh, kind of planted the bug in my brain. And through that process, you know, you end up failing quite a bit. And so in between my entrepreneurial journeys, I’ve worked at a really great companies and learned a lot of different things. And now, you know, in my 40s, I moved my family from the San Francisco, California area to Austin, Texas, where we now just, um, yeah, live a little bit of a slower life. And I do consulting work and I use the experiences and skills that I’ve gained over the last 25 years building businesses to help other people build theirs.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, I love that. So can we talk a little bit about from a business perspective, strategic finance versus traditional finance? I think that’s going to be a really good topic for today.

Young Han: Yeah. I think that the, um, the, the value of a CFO and a finance person is evolving incredibly fast. And when you go to these CFO conferences, even in the last few years, the conversations are, are adapting very, very quickly because technology is moving so fast and it’s allowing us to do more with the data that we used to have. And so being able to understand a financial statement and build these cash flow trackers and, uh, doing these flex analyzes were almost specialized right to people that were very, very savvy about finance and sometimes even tax. But a lot of this stuff can be augmented through technology now. And so you still need someone that knows how to do it. So I’m not saying it’s absolved the people, but you definitely can do it a lot faster and a lot quicker. And so it does give room for the next wave of finance people to get from behind the scenes to front of the house. And that’s what we call strategic finance. And that’s really around like being more of a data architect and finance people are naturally good with numbers.

Young Han: And so if you can put, you know, financial models in place and start building assumptive models that show how the business could potentially grow even more, you’re taking someone that traditionally has been at the end of the month, we tell you where you sucked and where you messed up, and we just kind of slap your hand and then and then we go back into our office and say, don’t do that again next month, you know, and it’s already too late. And now we’re kind of like, hey, here’s some new ideas of how we can increase margins if we mix this product with this, this thing and this marketing tactic, we think we can generate an additional, you know, 12% of contribution margin or, you know, I mean, like we’re creating value. And so we’re starting to help grow the business through financial forecasting and modeling debt equity, leverage tactics, tax mitigation strategies. And so we’re becoming much more front of house and being data architects for the entire company, and then using our financial acumen to actually help it grow, not just tell them what they did wrong.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that. And as, uh, business owners, oftentimes we don’t even want to talk numbers except for tax time, right? It’s like, oh, now we have to produce all of these numbers and then the conversation is even worse. I love that. So can we talk about there’s a lot of, um, smaller business owners that listen to the show. Can we talk about this fractional piece? Because I think it’s really important for smaller business owners or business owners who have smaller businesses to know that they can still afford services like what you’re talking about.

Young Han: Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that every business owner should have a fractional CFO. If you’re small and you don’t, um, you can’t afford it. You know, um, my, my, my recommendation would just say hire them for twice a year, just go over the numbers every six months or do one hour a quarter. And that’s probably less than a thousand bucks for someone decent to look at it. And it’s not, it’s not that you like need it, but it definitely will help you because they’ll look at the business differently from those numbers than you will, you know, just, um, running it as a function expert, the average small business owner, um, the vast majority of them start their business because they’re passionate about something or they’re really good at it. And, um, so much of it is not like you get to a certain scale and you can, you know, have your passion and function expertise guide you to a pretty good success, but you get capped out pretty quickly. And so you have to learn business to keep scaling. And so my recommendation is to bring these people in.

Young Han: And then the whole point of thesis, the thesis of thesis group, which is my outsource finance firm, um, that’s the name of it, is that we think that most companies don’t need a full time finance team anymore. We think as the technology keeps getting more robust and companies are more agile and adapting to the markets, we think most companies need moving finance tech so they don’t need a full time controller, a full time CFO, a full time accounting clerk. They sometimes need 30 hours of an accounting clerk, six hours of a modeler, four hours of a controller, and maybe six hours of a CFO. And so you’re able to fractionalize exactly what you need. So instead of paying like 6 or $700,000 a year in salaries, you could pay 150 and get exactly what you need to get you to the $20 million mark. And then you can custom fit that to the next level and the next level and the next level. It helps you grow faster by actually custom fitting it, and it’s a lot cheaper for you and a lot more efficient.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So lots of tech talk here. And I introduced you as a fractional CFO, fractional COO, but I also know that you’re a serial entrepreneur. Can we talk about all of the experience. I know you’re a finance guy and operations guy, but you also have a lot of business experience, not just the one experience when you’re 19. So let’s talk about that serial entrepreneur in you.

Young Han: Yeah, I, um, I’ve just been building businesses since I was 19 years old. I just can’t stop. And I love it. And, and even when I, um, even when I work at companies, I typically join startups so that I can continue to build companies and I end up working at places that are scaling or that are scaling or have high volatility. I just really like love, love the art of building business. It’s, it’s really fun for me. And, uh, yeah, so I’ve done a lot of random things. I, I helped, um, uh, expand Starbucks. Uh, I opened six new locations for them when they’re anti compete with Peet’s ended and we started opening up stores in California. I was part of that, um, launch process. So I helped open a bunch of stores for them. And then, um, when Apple retail launched, I was able to work at the first location. Steve Jobs location and be the manager for his retail location when it launched, which was really exciting experience because he used to come in once a month and then just did a ton of venture, so raised a lot of money to, you know, probably just under $300 million. I fundraised across a lot of different companies to, um, basically build a bunch of businesses at scale really fast. And so at Phil’s Coffee, I helped open 55 locations across the country in two years.

Young Han: So it’s not like we’re doing this over the course of 5 or 10 years. Everything is like venture capital is kind of weird. They give you money and they say, hey, I need you to, I’m going to give you like $12 million. I need you to spend it as fast as humanly possible. Test every possible situation you can as quickly as you can, and try to get this to be 100 X as fast as possible. And it’s a very different mindset. But the benefit of doing this venture route over and over and over again is that I’ve now experienced more business tactics than the average person, because I was forced to spend people’s money to go try to grow this as fast as humanly possible. So as long as you had two good reasons for why you did the tactic, the investors were very, very for it. Right. They wanted you to try everything. And so it’s hard. It’s hard to spend that kind of money that fast, but it does give you a lot of business experience very, very quickly. And then I did insurance technology. Excuse me. I have a little tickle in my throat. I did insurance technology, um, with machine learning. So we did actuarial work and we sold that company. And then, uh, most recently I built, um, robot baristas.

Young Han: Um, and so we did robotics and things like that. And then I kind of had a midlife crisis when I turned 40. And I just, I just felt like the hubris of, you know, traveling the country, not seeing my kids raising, you know, $16 million to go build robots. You know, it just, it just felt, I don’t know, something just fell apart in my soul. And I got really, really fat and overweight. And my wife’s like, this is very unattractive. We got to figure this out. And I just wasn’t happy. I should have been happy because it’s a cool job and it’s a cool role. And it was a fun product, but my value prop had changed. And so I quit, and I spent 2 or 3 months doing a lot of reading and interviewing people and soul searching and hit my midlife crisis pretty hard. And, and then the end result was that I just wanted to slow down. And so I packed up my family side and scene and moved to small town Texas, where we live in the country. Yeah, I live in a nice plot of land, and my girls pick up frogs and crickets in the backyard and in the in the creek. And we have a green belt, you know, ten acre green belt back there. It’s it’s beautiful.

Young Han: Yeah, it’s very slow and it’s nice. And then, um, I just started consulting and, and I’ll wrap up the story here, but I started consulting for work because I had these skills and people would pay me and so I could optimize for time. And I did that. And because I was helping so many companies at the same time, I started realizing that 75% of the businesses were the same. And so there’s only 25%. That was, in my opinion, that’s different in each company. And I was like kind of fascinated by this. And so I started reading EOS and E-myth and all these other operational business operation systems books. And I liked them. I liked them a lot. And obviously I gleaned a lot of um, um, tactics from them and they were definitely muses for me, but I built my own operating system and started documenting that 75% that was the same. And then it allowed me to double my client load because I could help them faster with less time, because I had an operating system that was taking care of 75%. And then, um, that was really good. And I started making a lot of money and, um, it was really fascinating. And then I had a friend that had a small business and she said, I heard you’re doing consulting, can you help me? And I said, hey, I don’t, um, I don’t work with small businesses.

Young Han: I work with venture backed companies because you can’t afford my rate. And she said, listen, I’ve been doing this thing for seven years. I’m going to either stop doing it because I’m not making enough to like retire or live great, but I’m making enough to keep going and it sucks. I’ve been seven years doing this, so you’re either going to help me or I’m going to shut this down. I’m like, I’ll just help you pro bono. And so I helped her pro bono, and I just met with her an hour a week and then ran it through the operating system. It works faster in small business than it does in venture backed companies. And she made $1 million in nine months. Wow. And, uh, and then I’m like, wait, is this. So then she starts referring me to people and I’m like, hey, I’m not a small business coach. And she’s like, I’m not. I’m not telling them about you. But if I’m out there buying real estate and like new cars, my friends that are small business owners are going to ask me what I’m doing, right. And so I took on four more clients and did the same thing and got all the way up to eight and helped them all make $1 million in annual revenue in less than a year.

Young Han: And I was like, wow, this system works incredibly well with small business. And then I was worried that it was my good looks and charm. So I, you know, could be. So I hired you never know. You never know. So I hired two young ladies that have never owned a business. One was, you know, in their late 20s. One was early 30s, trained them on the operating system, gave them four clients each. They took a lot longer. They took like a year and a half, but they were able to do it as well. So I’m like, wow. So it does work. And then the last, the last test I wanted to do was to see if this works was, um, test it on myself. So four years ago, I started a pool cleaning company and, um, and it made $1 million. In nine months, we’re on track to doing $6 million in our fifth year of business. And, um, I’ve just been on a tear. I’ve been opening five businesses a year using this operating system. I have a 70% success rate to get it to $1 million in annual revenue. And I have half a dozen businesses that have hit that, and two of them that do over 5 million. And I did this all in the last four years. Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: That’s fantastic. Oh my gosh, I have so many more questions.

Speaker 4: All right.

Trisha Stetzel: Uh, before we go on, I know people already want to know a little more about you want to connect with you what? Where’s the best place for people to find young Han?

Young Han: So the easiest way is to go to always han.com. That’s always Han. The plural. Always. Han is my last name, han.com. And that’s basically a play on words. It’s just saying I’m always on because I believe in integrated life. So that’s kind of my personal page and it kind of takes you where you need need to go. If you want to have me speak or you want to work with me because you’re a small business or you’re a mid market company want me to be your fractional CFO? It’ll guide you to all the different businesses that I own. But if you’re a small business owner and most of your listeners are small business owners, I would just go to owners dot club, owners dot club, and that’s my small business operating system coaching business. And that’s where we try to help people learn this operating system. And we have a free community. You can just join for free and we do monthly coaching and group and mass. We have all the templates, all my videos, like it’s all free. I’m like, I’m trying to write a book so I can give it away for free because I’m trying to help more and more people use the same operating system to help them grow their business. And if you want me to do it, obviously we charge you. But, um, if you don’t, if you can’t afford it, just join the club for free and I’ll give you all the stuff and you can kind of guide yourself through it. There’s plenty of people have done it and, and have worked their way up to $1 million. Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: You’re amazing. Thank you for sharing all of that. And I.

Speaker 4: Can’t wait to.

Trisha Stetzel: Hear, uh, folks who are listening today, who all’s joining. I want to know you guys just comment in the in the comments below the show. Let’s talk about work life integration. I think that’s really important. Part of your story was I can’t do this anymore. I have to shift. I’m in a different part of my life and my values have have changed. So one kind of, how did you know that? Like you had this, you wake up one morning and your wife said, you can’t look like that or act like that anymore. Was what was it that had you shift? And then how do you integrate?

Young Han: Yeah, I mean, I think the big there’s a, there’s a couple of things, but I’ll only share one big epiphany and just know that there’s a lot more robust thought that went into it. And I don’t want you to undercut the value of the one thing, but it was really around this concept of like protecting time, right? So I was doing what everyone says. All the gurus say, I turn off my phone and do not disturb from 5 to 7, and I’m there for my family and, and I’m completely dedicated and, and I tried that and it’s super, super important to do that. And I think it’s very valuable practice. But I started to realize as I was blocking off these perfect time slots, I would have a argument with my wife and my sales day, even though I would like switch gears and I knew it was going to be fine and we were going to make up, it’ll be fine, right? But, um, but I’m like in my sales days or in my work days, it was still like 5 or 10% in the back of my mind. And so maybe I sold a little better. Maybe, maybe I sold a little less better. But it was hanging there and I knew it was there. And if I had a bad work day, even though I was in dedicated time with my kids and I was like, I gotta calm my brain and let’s focus on the kids, I couldn’t help but have that 10% of worry in the back of my mind. And so was I really being that perfectly qualitative for them? And then I just gave me a huge, like epiphany saying, like, we’re humans, we’re not binary robots, we’re not perfect.

Young Han: That’s like literally the most insane thing for you to think that like, you could go do this. And I’m like, you can’t be 100% just on a switch of a clock that’s like, that’s the most insane thing to think. And so if you know, you can’t be perfect at it, then why are you trying to achieve something that is not efficient? So the the inverse of that was the most efficient thing is to embrace the imperfectness of the human nature and try to integrate those two things together. And so what that means for me is I just do the best that I can with what I have versus trying to be this perfect person. That’s like, no, these two hours are dedicated to working out. And these two hours are dedicated to my wife for a date night. And it’s just, it doesn’t work. And so if it has to adapt, you just address the situation. You use the information you have, you work with your family, you work with your partners and your team members. You make decisions on the fly, and you just do the best that you can with the information that you have, and you just integrate. And it requires a lot more transparency. It requires a lot more vulnerability. But if you can pull it off, it’s fascinating. And I’ll give you one funny output. I, I’ve always hated conferencing because when I go to conferences, I typically like, I mean, I’m by myself, crappy food, lonely hotel rooms and, and you’re really working like, I don’t know, like six hours a day, maybe for because the conference floor is not really that big of a deal.

Young Han: And then the actual sessions, they’re cool. But like, I’m really going for a handful of really important meetings. And then the rest of the time I’m just by myself. And so I went to a conference and I brought my youngest daughter with me, and I put on a blue ocean pool service shirt on her. I bought her a badge, I bought her a tech conference ticket. And so we’re walking the conference floor together, you know, checking out the vendors. And like, everyone thought she was super cute and it was awesome. And then for the meetings that I went to, I just gave her some crayons and a paper and then an iPad, and she just just did whatever she needed to do for 4 or 5 hours. Every single private equity fund manager, every single investor, every single person I met with was like, wait, you can do that? And I’m like, do you do you care? And they’re like, I don’t care. I want to bring my kid next year. I didn’t know we could do that. I’m like, I’m doing it. I don’t care. As long as you don’t care, I don’t care. Why don’t you bring your kid next year? We’ll all do it together. Like, why? What is she going to learn in the third grade that she won’t learn interacting with business? And I just like in my mind, it’s like, that’s what I mean by life integration is like, let’s just like, stop thinking about it as this binary thing and just try to like, be the best that we can with what we have, knowing that we’re imperfect. That’s what I.

Trisha Stetzel: Think the best of what we have. I love that, I think it’s fantastic. So I think right now would be a really good time to talk about your podcast girl. Dad, can we for a minute tell me about it?

Young Han: Yeah. So I, um, I, well, I will be very vulnerable and I’ll tell you, it’s kind of crass, but I, I love, um, making money. It’s one of my favorite things to do in life. It’s like literally the thing that fills my soul and fills my heart and wakes me up in the middle of the night going, how am I going to make more money? Like I literally lied. And I, I know you’re not supposed to say that in our, in our American culture, but I, I freaking love it. That’s just who I am, you know, and I just, I really, really embrace that, that, uh, art and, and act and science of making money really just like inspires and spurs me and motivates me. And, um, I had my first kid and for the first time ever, I love something more than money. And I was just like, wow, this is so weird. It’s like felt so weird. And it was just very hard for me to process. And then I was like struggling with it. And I started to like, you know, optimize for time so I could spend more time with her and lower my professional career. And then over like 2 or 3 months, I started to get like sad and like kind of depressed again. And then I started realizing that’s not good either. And so I’m like, if I can love two things. And so, and I just got to figure out how I can, you know, be a great dad and be a great person that makes a lot of money. And I’m like sitting there trying to figure this out. And I’m like, why am I trying to figure this out? There’s so many rich people out there that are parents that, you know, I should just ask them.

Young Han: And so I messaged all my richest mentors and friends that were most successful, you know, like PE fund managers, VCs, you know, investment bankers, uh, you know, politicians, uh, I just, I just started interviewing them and just the, the output of what they said was so wide and varied from like they outsourced everything to maximize quality of time to people that have slowed down their career, to spend more time at different stages and then everything in between. And it was fascinating just to see how, how rich people process that time constraint. And I was like, this is a fascinating topic. And so I started telling my friends about it. And then everyone had a visceral reaction to what these people were saying, you should never do that, or you should do that and this and that. And I’m like, I think I have a show. And so I was like, twofold. One is I think it’s entertaining. And then two, it’s fun for me to learn from other successful people how they navigate it. And so it’s less about, you know, doing it for entertainment value. It’s really just for me to learn how to make more money and still be a great dad. That’s it. Yeah. It’s my personal journey to like, learn how people do it. And then it has changed how I live. Because like, I’m not saying I believe in everything everyone says, but there are significant moments where I’m like, that is an incredible way to think about life and parenting and business. And and so it’s been very helpful for me to be, um, integrate my passion for business and money and, uh, dad hood.

Trisha Stetzel: Well, I love that. All right. If you guys are interested, you can find girl dad on whatever channel you happen to be listening to your podcasts on.

Young Han: Yeah, it’s the girl. Dad show. The girl. Dad show. Yeah. Mhm.

Trisha Stetzel: Uh, okay. So as we kind of get to the back end of our conversation. Young, you, um, I’m going to use the words failing forward. I’m going to do full circle. We started with you’ve learned from your failures as well as your successes. So what failure taught you? What did failure teach you that success never could?

Young Han: It teaches you more than success. It teaches you everything. I don’t think you really learn much from success, to be honest with you. You just learn what works for you. Um, but failure teaches you tactics, technical skills. It teaches you market conditions. It teaches you your palette, your plate breadth and bandwidth, your values. I mean failures, failures, the mechanism to learn. And very fortunately, I grew up in Silicon Valley. And so, I mean, I didn’t realize it was unique until I left it. But I mean, it’s kind of weird there where like now it’s weird to me there, but it was very normal there. But like, if you’re not failing, you’re, you’re considered not successful. And so it was really interesting to come out of that bubble because the rest of the country doesn’t look at the world like that, you know, and everyone’s very afraid to fail. And in Silicon Valley, it’s almost looked down upon. If you don’t fail, I mean, it’s easier to even get investor money if you’ve had a couple failures. Like it’s, it’s everything is geared towards failing. And so for me, I think failure is a great, great, um, lesson and a great learning mechanism. And I will tell you that like I am building businesses at scale and I’m probably failing more businesses in the last four years than most people do in their life.

Young Han: I have 14 successful businesses, but it’s not like I hit 100 home runs. I mean, I’m at a 67% success rate, so imagine how much money I lost and how many people I’ve hurt because I hired them and I had to shut the business down. You know what I mean? Like that’s a lot of emotional torture, pain and struggle. And, and if you’re, if your listeners are business owners, they know how emotional that is. You know, they know how hard it is to shut down a business or let people go that, that rely on this to live. And, and yeah, I’ve done that at scale. I mean, I’ve, I’ve failed a lot of businesses in the last four years, let alone my entire career. So I don’t know if that’s helpful or not. But my favorite saying is to people that always ask me, like, I don’t want to fail or the way that you operate makes me fail because that’s what I tell people. The operating system that I will teach you is all about failing forward. How can you fail forward as fast as humanly possible at your human possibility skill set? Right? And so that’s the that’s how the operating system works. That’s entirely the foundation of it. It’s just teaching you how to fail forward as fast as possible to get to this conclusion the fastest.

Young Han: That will make you the most money. But the thing I always tell people is, listen, I have failed more than the average person. And I will tell you right now, my mom still loves me. Like who cares? Who cares? You know what I mean? Like, that’s just the way you gotta think about it. Like, at the end of the day, who do you really care? You know, that that you failed. And if your mom still loves you, what else do you need? Like just go for it. And so that’s my favorite thing, you know, and just, just don’t worry about it. The core people in your life will love you. They’ll still be there for you. They’re not going to like, they’re not going to be upset with you or, or beat you up over it. They, I mean, they may beat you. My mom does make me make fun of me about it, but that’s like tough love, right? But like, um, she still loves me. There’s no change in her love for me as her son and her kid. And she still appreciates me and loves me. She just wants me to be happy and healthy. Like she just doesn’t care about any of that. And so fail as I fail, like who cares? I, I, I can tackle the world again as long as my mom keeps loving me.

Trisha Stetzel: Mhm. I oh my gosh. So, uh, y’all listening that are recovering perfectionists or would like to be. You know what? It’s okay to fail. Especially if your mom still loves you.

Young Han: Exactly. Exactly. Well, it’s also funny that you said perfectionist because if I can add one more note. I mean, part of the operating system is to not be perfect at anything. It’s actually to be mediocre at everything until you get to about 3 to $4 million in annual revenue. You being perfect at anything in your small business pre like 4 million is hugely inefficient. You want to be absolutely the like the most mediocre you can be at everything. Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: Love that. Okay, my friend, tell the audience where they can find you again and then we’ll wrap up.

Young Han: Okay, so if you want to find me to know everything, like my podcast or all the companies, it’s always on.com. And if you’re a small business owner, that’s like sub 5 million. You go to owners dot club.

Trisha Stetzel: Fantastic. Thank you so much for being with me today. This is so much fun.

Young Han: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. I apologize if I talk too fast, I know.

Trisha Stetzel: No, not at all. We crammed a lot into a short show, which I love and so much value, and I really appreciate your time today.

Young Han: That’s amazing. Thank you so much for having me.

Trisha Stetzel: All right guys, that’s all the time we have for today. If you found value in this conversation that I had with you today, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, veteran or Houston leader ready to grow. And be sure to follow, rate and review the show. It does help us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business. Your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.