Your Business Is Easier to Steal From Than You Think
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What warning does Dave give about handing money to your first bookkeeper?
Can you imagine being the first person Dave Ramsey hired to keep books, write checks? Yeah, I might have micromanaged that person. Guess what? She still works on our team almost 30 years later because I got a great hire. When we first started Ramsey Solutions, I did everything. I answered the phones, I taught the classes, I sold the product, and yes, I kept the books, because that's what small business owners do. We're the CEO, the chief everything officer. And then we hired our first bookkeeper. I remember thinking, man, this is it. I've made it. Somebody else is gonna handle all these stinking details, and I can breathe a little. Here's the thing, though. When someone else touches the money for the first time, your business changes forever.
because you're transferring trust. And one thing I learned early on that saved us a lot of pain later in this, trust without guardrails isn't trust, it's irresponsible. I realized pretty quickly that if I didn't put systems around how to handle the money, I wasn't protecting anyone, not the business, not the team member handling it, and not myself. I was just hoping everything would work out, and hope is not a strategy. So on today's episode, Entrez Leadership's head coach, John Falcons, is sitting down with Ramsey Solutions CFO, Jeff Williams, to talk about how to safeguard your business from internal theft and why putting the right systems in place protects not just your money, but also your people and your peace of mind.
Let's get to it.
Well, Jeff, thanks for being here today. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Good to be here. Thanks for the invite. So as the CFO, what comes to mind for you when you see stories in the news about small businesses getting embezzled from?
The thing that comes to mind to me is just how fixable that is. You don't have to overthink much to put controls in place to make sure that never happens because it's I mean, cash is your most stealable asset. It's the most liquid thing you have. And so that should have the most safeguards around it and a very, very few people's hands in it.
Yeah, we hear about it more commonly than, well, first of all, than I wish we heard about it. And more than people would expect. And in fact, we picked up a news story where this lady, Rita Crunwell, she was the comptroller for this town in Illinois for over 23 years. Government funds. Yeah, government funds. Yeah, she's embezzling the tax money into her personal account. $53 million. So I know you talked a little bit about putting controls in place and you've got your own stories where it's not just people actively embezzling, but just mishandling funds. I know you've come across some of our clients at events too. Tell me a little bit about that. What have you heard from them?
Yeah, I was at an event last year and Had a meeting there, got finished with the meeting, and I saw these two guys waiting for me. And so they're like, we need to talk to you. And I'm like, okay. So I sit down with them and they started sharing just the difficulties that they were going through because they were in a place to where their bookkeeper, the main person with their hands on all of the money was their mother. Now, the father had passed away and they were taking over the business from, and I mean, the mother was like in her 70s. It wasn't that her skills were fading or anything, but they were just kind of limited as to what they could do. And they absolutely trusted their mother. And they could never fathom trusting anybody else with that level of responsibility as much as they've trusted their mother.
So there was something they didn't have to worry about. Mm-hmm. Until now. And so they were asking me, what do we do? How should we think about that? And I'm like, well, you can't fire your mother. She's got to be on board with this so she can train people. But you've got to find somebody. Either you two guys have got to do it, one of you, or you've got to find somebody that you can trust who won't go the route of that lady in Dixon, Illinois, so that you don't end up a story like that.
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