How To Survive and Thrive in Financial Crises With Ami Kassar

Ami Kassar: 10:41

I think when I came there, there were 500 or 600 employees at that point in the trajectory and Also a whole different suite of adventures. Probably I didn’t know what an internal audit department was, or regulators were or all kinds of things, and I started there helping them with their e-commerce, but over time moved to what was probably a more appropriate role for me running the innovation team. And that was an 8 or 9 year run and a great deal of lessons until, sadly or again, yes, it was sad for a lot of people and I wish it was for them. It hadn’t happened. The financial crisis of the late 90s came.

Yeah. And 2008 came and shit blew up. We were done before it was my turn to be let go, Which wasn’t a big surprise at all. I had to let 960 people help, let 960 people go, which was hands down the toughest professional thing I ever went through. And it wasn’t a big surprise. One Friday came and my turn came and I was let go by the bankruptcy trustees.

John Corcoran: 12:14

The bankruptcy. So literally just, you know, you go and let everyone go and then they turn the tables and it’s all right now you have to go.

Ami Kassar: 12:21

Yeah. I mean, literally about $1 billion of market cap disappeared, a million small businesses lost their credit, and about 1000 employees lost their jobs.

John Corcoran: 12:32

Wow. How many of those people did you have to lay off personally yourself?

Ami Kassar: 12:38

Maybe two dozen. But it was just being part of that. And the culture and feelings and the emotions and watching the mailman who had cancer get walked out the door. Who’s been delivering mail there for 15 years? Like a lot of brutal stuff.

John Corcoran: 12:52

Just so awful. So at this point, you’ve kind of got caught in the chaos, the aftermath of both the 2001 dotcom meltdown and now the 2008 financial crisis. Both of those kinds of we were caught in the crossfire.

Ami Kassar: 13:13

Is what it is baby cakes. And like some, some, some things are bigger than any one individual. And there’s some things that happen in life that no matter how smart or wise we think we are, we can’t control.

John Corcoran: 13:26

I have interviewed a lot of people in this show that have had those types of setbacks , like, you know, global meltdowns, financial crises, stuff like that, and they definitely make decisions after that, make changes in their business, or sometimes they don’t even realize it. Do you think that there are changes or there are things that you put in place, or decisions that you made with your current business that are based off of having been through those big financial meltdowns.

Ami Kassar: 13:53

I mean, I think so. So first of all, I think that the. Again, I always like to have a glass half empty or half full, like I would have never gone to do my I would have never left Advanta.

John Corcoran: 14:11

You would have stayed there.

Ami Kassar: 14:12

I had too much loyalty to the CEO, who’s a mentor of mine, and life was in many ways just too easy and too convenient. And so I look at all the learning. I’m sure that would have been a different learning track if I stayed there. But I look at all the learning I’ve had and being able to expose my family to over the last 15 years of doing MultiFunding. And I would never have had that if it fell apart. So while it was so sad for so many people and I feel that pain in a way it was a blessing for me at least, and for my own personal growth and my own.

John Corcoran: 14:58

So you’ve been chief innovation officer at a credit card company. The bankruptcy trustees let you go, and then like the very next day or that weekend, you decide to start MultiFunding. Where had the idea come from, or did it come in the aftermath of getting laid off?

Ami Kassar: 15:14

For the few months before I was laid off, there was the possibility that the company was going to reorganize, and if we reorganize, we needed a new business model. And so part of my job was to think about different scenarios about that. And clearly in the back of my head, I was thinking that I might be for the company or it might be for me. Okay. And so I definitely had this idea, and was working on it for some time, knowing it could go one way or the other.

Of, I think, maybe partially seeing the pain of so many businesses losing their credit and maybe not quite understanding what they were getting themselves in for, or why that was all happening to them. I think that I saw the possibility of them, perhaps. Of creating a resource where people could or a company or a service where people could come in in a totally transparent manner, find out their financing options and alternatives that were available to them, and then make sure that they were getting set up for the best possible solution. I think that was part of what appealed to me when I started MultiFunding.

John Corcoran: 16:44

And was the business model behind it. Innovative, or was it, you know, was it like a straightforward kind of service? The reason I asked that is because sometimes I see when people have been through, been burned before, then they end up craving something that isn’t innovative. And you’d have this innovative business model with Shop to Give. And then you had the experience with the credit card company, and then sometimes people go and they crave something that’s just straightforward. Simple, right? Like a very simple business model.

Ami Kassar: 17:18

Well, so I think the answer is yes and no. So we’re not. I didn’t go to do some high tech kind of fancy startup edge.

John Corcoran: 17:34

Yeah. Ahead of its time. Yeah.

Ami Kassar: 17:36

I didn’t go to do a startup where I needed to raise a lot of money to get it going, and it was to be a couple of years until you were maybe profitable and all that stuff. I didn’t do any of that. So yes, in some ways it was also conservative. And then on the other hand, in ways that I don’t think I even really appreciated, what we set out to do was extremely, extremely difficult.

John Corcoran: 18:06

How so? So actually and actually would probably be helpful is explaining what the model was then and what the model is now and what you do now.

Ami Kassar: 18:13

The core value of the model is the same that we wanted to provide a service where business owners and entrepreneurs could come and find the best possible lending solutions for them, and we could try to get them in the best possible solution. I mean, like in any startup, there were a couple fundamental challenges in the first six months. The first challenge is we thought we had a partner that already knew how to do all that, and so we were just going to be the lead gen engine for them and help them make the phone rings. But the reality is they didn’t know what the hell they were doing and we had to pull out of that. And the second challenge was when I started the business.

I started it with a guy who was my partner at, not my partner. He was one of my colleagues at Advanta for a couple of years working in our innovation team, and he was sort of the finance guy, and I was like, the marketing idea guy, and we were going to do this thing together until when it was 60 or 90 days after we started, he decided that he was going to go move back to to Austria, where he was from. So suddenly I didn’t have a partner, which in retrospect was probably a great blessing. And but at.

John Corcoran: 19:35

The time, it felt like a setback.

Ami Kassar: 19:37

Oh, it’s time. I was like, oh my God, what am I going to do here? Okay. And I didn’t have all that tech or that platform or all the lender relationships that I thought I had. And I tell people in the first year our revenue I think was $13,000. Wow. Okay. And I think it took 11 months before we closed our first transaction. And I think the first year we closed three transactions or something.

John Corcoran: 20:08

Wow. Well, it was. Also a historically bad economic environment, too.

Ami Kassar: 20:12

It was brutal. I mean, everything, but, like, I wasn’t going to fail and I and I weren’t going to go back and get a job. I just wasn’t going to do it. And we powered through it and have learned an incredible fortune. And the business has evolved and grown and morphed and pivoted here and there over years, over the years. But our core value of treating entrepreneurs like we would want to be treated very much lives in us and in our company culture today and hasn’t gone away.

John Corcoran: 20:54

Yeah. Looking back on it now, is there anything that you would have done differently if you were starting MultiFunding over again, given that you started in such a historically bad economic environment?

Ami Kassar: 21:03

I’ve never I’ve never really thought about it. It’s it’s I don’t know if I’m right or wrong and it’s just part of my mindset. I just move forward. I don’t I don’t I don’t go through a lot of could have, would have, should have. Like it’s life. And you know we keep learning. There’s things I probably would have done better or differently last week.

John Corcoran: 21:29

Yeah yeah yeah.

Ami Kassar: 21:31

I say if 51% of the Some of the decisions we make are good decisions. We’re probably doing pretty well.

John Corcoran: 21:39

Well, one decision that you made this year, which I want to highlight, is that you decided that we’re recording the end of 2024, but you decided earlier this year that something’s up with this economy. And it was a presidential election year, which is historically bad. You know, maybe at that point, some of the economic indicators, like the stock market, weren’t doing as well. Right now it’s at historic highs, but there was a lot of inflation and stuff like that. And so you made this decision to start a community for many of these companies that were struggling, many of which were clients of yours and you were working with.

So can you take me through that a little bit? It’s called the grit community. It’s within the Entrepreneurs Organization. I’ve been a member of it, and I’ve watched you just really, like, pour your heart out hard, heart out, and really be a resource for a very active community, which is not easy to create. So take me through a little bit how you decided to create this.

Ami Kassar: 22:42

So for the benefit of the listeners who might not be part of EO, John and I are both members of Entrepreneurs Organization, which is a nonprofit sort of helping entrepreneurs around the world, I think 18,000 members or something like that. Yeah. And. And I help a lot of people in the community. I think it’s like 15% of our business or something are people in the community. It’s certainly not why I do EO. I don’t do EO like to get business. It’s not my primary motivation. And I’ve just seen over the last year, more and more calls we get are from business owners in distress. And a lot of the time it’s super sad.

There’s really nothing we can do to help. And so I just felt that other than places in our forums that we have in EO, which may or may not be the right place to really help an entrepreneur in distress because of some of the rules of form that EO wasn’t, in my opinion, doing a good job at providing support and resources for businesses when they’re really in trouble. And my feeling is that 10 to 15% of the businesses in the US now with revenues under three, $5 million are in trouble. And I said, let’s see what happens. Let’s start immediately. It was like ten weeks ago and it wasn’t even called grit from the community named it grit at some point. And now the other freaking things, like almost 700 members and we’ve had like 20 or 25 learning events. It’s freaking nuts.

John Corcoran: 24:37

Yeah, it’s crazy to see that, you know, because I’ve, I’ve tried throughout my career to build little micro communities around different ideas and it’s not easy to do. So you definitely captured something. What do you do?

Ami Kassar: 24:53

My my I mean, it’s taking the life that I didn’t expect, which is okay. But clearly my raw intuition about a need for something was right.

John Corcoran: 25:03

Right. And what do you think it was? I mentioned a couple of different things: presidential election year inflation, stuff like that. But there’s a lot of different companies that are in there. So what do you think it is that was causing so many businesses to be in trouble right now? Is it me? What is it?

Ami Kassar: 25:18

I don’t think it’s I mean, first of all, everyone said to me, oh, it’s an election year. It’ll be better after the election. But we just ran a poll in their Less a day or two ago and said, is your business better now that the election is over or worse or the same? And I think 85% of the responders were like, it’s the same.

John Corcoran: 25:41

Yeah, well we are. This is ten days later, right? So maybe not very long.

Ami Kassar: 25:46

So maybe it’s yeah, too early or whatever. But I think we’re living through a perfect economic storm right now that in some ways I think is. And the smaller businesses get hit first. But yes, the election year has created uncertainty. I live in a swing state.

It’s been freaking awful. I just want them all. I was so happy when it was what I wanted irrespective of how I felt about the results. I was so happy when it was all over. But there are a couple of other things that I think are happening. For a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs, their Covid cash is drying up and a lot of money was pumped into different companies through different mechanisms.

And that, I think, in many respects, gave entrepreneurs a false sense of security. And when that money is up and done, suddenly you and you’ve lost that security blanket, suddenly you feel naked. Plus a tougher lending environment. It’s tougher to get people. It’s tougher to get loans today. It’s tougher to get cash flow loans. Interest rates are higher. Plus, in many respects, interest rates are just people’s expenses. Everyone’s expenses have gone up. Early stage SBA defaults are considerably up. And it’s complicated out there.

John Corcoran: 27:29

People need.

Ami Kassar: 27:30

Especially if it’s not their first rodeo through something like this. People need, I think, a lot of support to get through it.

John Corcoran: 27:43

That’s a lot of different factors you highlighted there.

Ami Kassar: 27:46

It impacts different people differently, right. Like some industries are hit harder than others. Yeah. You know, in our business we had our worst Q3 and as a quarter in our company that we had in like eight years now we seem to be climbing out of it. Okay. But it’s just but we’re also in financial services and interest rates could impact us harder. But it’s just brutal.

John Corcoran: 28:16

Yeah. Yeah. You definitely have a front row seat to what’s going on seeing these. You know how it’s affecting all these different businesses. Have you felt like your hands are tied either in terms of the business model or in terms of resources you have available to help the clients with? Or are you Guys?

Ami Kassar: 28:34

Sometimes when we can’t help, we can’t help. But like, I’m a big seller. I won’t put the last nail in someone’s coffin by putting them in a high interest loan. So sometimes it’s not money that’s going to fix it. You got to slash expenses and you got to redo your business model, and you got to hold on for the ride. So there are plenty of people out there offering you fast cash and 24 to 48 hours. And more often than not, that’s going to cause more damage than good.

John Corcoran: 29:10

Right, right. And it seems to me like that type of advisory services is not something that you monetize per se. Like, in other words, you’re not like you’re not a coaching business, right? You know.

Ami Kassar: 29:27

So we’re not we we. I mean, all of our business models have their quirks. Okay.

John Corcoran: 29:31

Yeah.

Ami Kassar: 29:32

I give away advice for free. Yeah. So this is my team. It’s okay. That’s part of that model.

We make. We do just fine. When we place loans and we broker loans. But I don’t I don’t ever really think twice. Twice about that.

John Corcoran: 29:53

Yeah. What are you thinking about the grit community? What has been like for you to watch this community come together and to watch these, you know, many entrepreneurs that you know personally, many of whom I’m sure you don’t know, the community has been growing really fast over the last few months. What has it been like for you being at the center of organizing that?

Ami Kassar: 30:18

I mean. I like it, but I think it’s intellectually stimulating. I like the member to member learning community. To me, it’s almost like a virtual unconference we’re running in there.

John Corcoran: 30:30

Yeah, it’s a good kind of comparison.

Ami Kassar: 30:33

Yeah. Yeah. So if I could drop all my other responsibilities and just play with that because I like the next new thing, I would do that. But that’s not life. I also am president of the Philadelphia chapter.

John Corcoran: 30:48

That’s oh my gosh. You’re president right. Now.

Ami Kassar: 30:50

Yeah. I’m finishing my second year and I have a company that’s having a tough time. We’ve just launched a whole bunch of new products that we’re super excited about and trying to figure that out. So bouncing, bouncing a lot of balls right now which is okay.

John Corcoran: 31:06

Right, right. And what role do you think that a community like this, it doesn’t have to be this one, but a community like this can play for businesses that are currently struggling.

Ami Kassar: 31:19

I mean, I think the community is going to evolve and grow and there’s a lot we can do with it. But I do think that businesses. Sometimes I need a hospital. Like, sometimes businesses just get sick. Yeah, sometimes for reasons that the founder or entrepreneur created, or sometimes for reasons that were just really out of their control.

And I do think we need a mechanism to provide those folks with support and help. And I have a feeling that grit is just in its first generation. Like Ennio, you’re supposed to after you’re done with the presidency, apply for regional council and these positions. And I’m not I’m not doing any of that crap. I’m just going to do grit.

John Corcoran: 32:10

Yeah. Well it certainly can use your support. So I thank you on behalf of other members of that community. It’s been really inspirational to see you step up and really like to give back to the community. So I just thank you for that.

Ami Kassar: 32:25

The more you give, the more you get. You know, one of my mentors who was an investor in Start to Give, who still is a friend of mine, and I hadn’t quite really understood what he meant. But when I was struggling with stuff to give, he would say to me, sometimes when you’re building a company, you’re going to be feel like you’re walking on a tightrope and you’re going to feel like you’re falling off, and you’ve got to do everything in your power to muster all your energy to try stand up and keep going again. And he would say to me, sometimes you’re going to feel that when you’re climbing down the hill. Sometimes it’s going to happen to you when you’re climbing up the hill.

I understood it about climbing down the hill. At that time, I never understood about climbing up the hill, but I always reflect back on that. And he’s absolutely right. And people also need to just find a place to take a deep breath and calm down and realize it’s going to be okay. But the one thing I’m super proud of about grit is we haven’t turned it into a bitching session. It’s not a it’s not a whining, complaining, or for me, community. It’s not that.

John Corcoran: 33:34

It’s very easy for communities like that to devolve into that.

Ami Kassar: 33:38

So it hasn’t, it hasn’t.

John Corcoran: 33:40

Yeah. I mean, do you think it’s anything you’ve done consciously?

Ami Kassar: 33:44

I mean, maybe it’s sort of like positive messages that pop up a couple times.

John Corcoran: 33:47

Do you share a lot of you personally with a lot of positive messages? So maybe it’s just the leader leading by example.

Ami Kassar: 33:54

Maybe. And if I saw that, I probably would try to stop it. And I don’t get to read everything in that thing and I but I try.

John Corcoran: 34:02

Yeah, yeah. And it’s hard to screen for that too. Like it’s not like you can screen people on the incoming and be like, oh, this person might post a really caustic negative message at some point six weeks from now. And so I’m not going to let them in.

Ami Kassar: 34:16

It’s not I mean, I’m there to be a curator.

John Corcoran: 34:19

Yeah.

Ami Kassar: 34:21

I don’t want to police it.

John Corcoran: 34:22

Yeah.

Ami Kassar: 34:24

Like every once, once every two weeks. I’m like, don’t freaking solicit here because I’m not feel like listening to complaints. And don’t get me annoyed.

John Corcoran: 34:31

Like I.

Ami Kassar: 34:33

Don’t want to be the police here. I just want this to be healthy.

John Corcoran: 34:36

Yeah.

John Corcoran: 34:37

Well, I think it’s a great example whether people listening to this are in EO or not. It’s a great example of if you look back on your career, you look back at surviving the.com meltdown, surviving the 2008 great financial crisis. And then this time we got this economic uncertainty. And the way that you reacted now compared to those is very different. Right. Like you, you knew that you valued having community around you and you also stepped up and as you said, give to get right. You like to organize things. And I hope that you’re getting a lot out of it in return. I suspect that you are. I hope that you are, because I think that’s a great way to take control of your destiny.

Ami Kassar: 35:17

I’m sure I am. But if I’m getting satisfaction from helping people too, that’s fine with me.

John Corcoran: 35:23

Yeah. I mean, you just mentioned a second ago one of your mentors and investors and Shop to Give, which is a great segue to my final question, which is my gratitude question. I’m a big fan of giving my guests just the space to acknowledge people that have been with them in their journey. Maybe it’s a past investor, maybe it’s a peer, maybe it’s a contemporary, maybe it’s a mentor. Anyone in particular that you want to shout out and thank for helping you?

Ami Kassar: 35:48

I don’t feel like I have to name them because they know who they are, but there always will be a handful of people in your life, personally or professionally, who will have an incredible impact on you. You’ll just feel really close to them or they will have. At some point, they will help you through a pivot or a conversation that will really help you a lot. And I mean, one story of it I told today on another podcast I did actually for AmiSights with Natalia, who’s you should have her on. She’s amazing from the grit community.

John Corcoran: 36:34

Sure.

Ami Kassar: 36:35

And I told her a story about during the pandemic, we would do with the scaling up coaches, a lot of exercises just in small groups just to help entrepreneurs keep going. And we did at one point, the one page personal plan. And a friend of mine, Mike Brady, who’s the former president of the Philly chapter, said to me, he’s like, Ami. You don’t give a shit if you help someone get their next loan. I know you need to close loans to keep your lights on, but your passion in life is to help entrepreneurs. That’s your passion. And no one had ever really said that to me before. And that conversation really retriggered my life. It really helped me think about it differently.

The conversation I was telling you about earlier, and I always often think about my dad. And sometimes when he was alive, he would, especially when I was starting MultiFunding, he was nervous, wreck about my business model and I wasn’t making enough money and this and that and the other. But he taught me. We took care of eyeballs and we took care of businesses. So there’s not the same. He was dealing with people’s eyesight. We’re dealing with people’s livelihoods. But those same values that he taught me, he taught me how to treat patients. That’s how we treat entrepreneurs.

John Corcoran: 38:14

And is that the inspiration for AmiSights?

Ami Kassar: 38:19

Oh, AmiSights as a whole other thing. I mean, I have.

John Corcoran: 38:23

I mean, just the name that you use the word sights in there.

Ami Kassar: 38:26

Oh, no, it’s that’s I don’t know how we named it, but during the pandemic, we were doing daily, daily updates to the community about PGP and IDL and IRC.

John Corcoran: 38:37

There might have been something subconscious going on there and choosing that name, though.

Ami Kassar: 38:41

It’d be. You know, I never didn’t think about that, but that’s good.

John Corcoran: 38:45

Yeah. Because you’re looking forward to it. You’re not looking back.

Ami Kassar: 38:47

Yeah, exactly.

John Corcoran: 38:48

Awesome Ami. This is great. Where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you and learn more about MultiFunding?

Ami Kassar: 38:53

Multifunding.com or amisights.com.

John Corcoran: 38:56

Awesome. Thanks so much.

Ami Kassar: 38:58

Appreciate you buddy.

Outro: 39:02

Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.