Matt Remuzzi’s CapForge Journey: From Dot-Com Crash Layoff to 90-Person Accounting Firm

Anthony Codispoti (00:01)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotaspodi and today’s guest is Matt Ramuzzi, founder and owner of CapForge, a bookkeeping and accounting firm based in Carlsbad, California. CapForge helps small and mid-sized businesses keep clear up-to-date financial records while offering tax strategy.

payroll and CFO style advice. They take the stress out of numbers so owners can focus on growth. The firm is known for its flat rate pricing, 24 hour response promise, and it proudly claims more five star reviews than almost any other bookkeeping company in the US. Matt launched CapForge in 2000 after a sudden layoff from the dot com crash.

What began as a solo consulting shop has grown to a team of more than 50 professionals serving clients nationwide. He holds a bachelor’s degree from UC San Diego and an MBA from San Diego State University. He is also a certified QuickBooks Pro Advisor and the author of the popular guide, QuickBooks Bookkeeping, the 10 most common mistakes everyone makes and how to fix them. Now, before we get into all that good stuff,

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All right, back to our guest today, the owner and founder of CatForge, Matt Ramazzi. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Matt – CapForge Inc (02:28)
thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Anthony Codispoti (02:31)
So Matt, what kind of work were you doing before CapForge?

Matt – CapForge Inc (02:34)
Well, before CapForge goes back a long ways, but the last job I had where I was an employee, I was working as a consultant for small businesses, helping them put together business plan financials and the written business plans to raise capital. This was in the dot com boom at the time, you know, venture companies were giving money to just about anybody who could attach dot com to the end of their name. Not unlike how now if you attach AI to your business, but

different story. ⁓ but yeah, I was working as a consultant. My company that I worked out was in turn venture backed and just wasn’t getting the traction as the.com boom turned into the.com bust. They stopped getting funding and I was laid off one day rehired as a contractor to finish projects and then summarily let go again, ⁓ shortly thereafter. But I knew there was still a lot of people out there that needed this help. They just couldn’t afford it. The rates.

you know, I was being billed out at as a consultant. So I went out and did it basically what I’d been doing before, but on my own at a rate that would make sense. You know, I could get clients myself and that was really what turned this into a 25 year long entrepreneur journey.

Anthony Codispoti (03:50)
So let’s go back to where you were first laid off and then brought in as a contractor and then let go again. When you got laid off the first time, what was that like? Was that incredibly stressful or did you, you knew you were gonna land as a consultant anyway so you felt all right?

Matt – CapForge Inc (04:10)
It was, I, they had already told me kind of, they were going to let me go on Friday and bring me back on Monday as a 10 99. So I knew I had, you know, a paycheck would continue, but I could already see the writing on the wall, right? This wasn’t going to be a long-term situation. They made it sound like maybe six more months. It turned out being to be three weeks. Uh, so what I had envisioned as a timeframe to figure out what to do with myself was much, much shorter than

I had thought originally. So, and I only graduated from the MBA program in May. I got laid off in ⁓ early September as an employee and late September as a contractor. So, I mean, I’d literally be in the workforce, not even six months, and I was out of a job. So it was nerve wracking.

Anthony Codispoti (05:00)
And so what were those first days and weeks like? know, somebody who’s not been through that before, most of us have, it’s incredibly stressful.

Matt – CapForge Inc (05:09)
It was, I was fortunate. I had always been taught from a young age to be physically, fiscally responsible. had a good amount of savings and I figured, you know, I knew that there are other people out there who needed what I knew how to do as limited as it was. And as young as I was at the time, I still had certain skills that were valuable in the market. And I figured, okay, I’ll give myself till January 1st. If I can come up with some clients, cool.

If I can’t be looking for a new job anyways, but this, I wanted to have my own business for years and years. I just never knew what it was going to be. Right. So this kind of got handed to me on a silver platter here. Now you’ve got a set of skills and you know how to find people out there who need these skills and they’re willing to pay for it. That sounds like a business. Let’s give it a try.

Anthony Codispoti (06:00)
⁓

that just tells me a lot about your mindset. When you talk about going through a layoff as having this handed to you on a silver platter, you saw the opportunity in it to, you know, become a business owner for the first time.

Matt – CapForge Inc (06:16)
Yes. Yes. I, like I said, I had wanted to be an entrepreneur from, you know, age of 12 or 13, right? I was always coming up with business ideas, but I didn’t have the confidence to pull it off. I felt, you know, huge sense of imposter syndrome. How am I going to go launch even though, you know, lawn care business? don’t mow the lawn at home. I don’t mow the family lawn. How am going to start a lawn care business? I don’t know how to run the lawnmower. So I never really was able to make that leap as much as I thought I wanted to until this

confluence of events, which I chose to look at as an opportunity, largely because I had that savings, right? I knew I wasn’t going to be out on the street. I wasn’t going to go hungry at the time. I wasn’t married. didn’t have a family or kids. So I said, this is, know, I can’t make it now. I should just give up this entrepreneur dream and go get a job. But this is the window of opportunity to give it a try.

Anthony Codispoti (07:10)
And so how did you go out and find the first client?

Matt – CapForge Inc (07:14)
I largely had a network of people I knew from the job I had been doing. So I just sent out a bunch of emails saying, Hey, I’m no longer with, you know, the consultant company, but I’m still working with people. You know, I’m saying optimistically, right? I’m still working with people who, you know, need this and I’m happy to engage, you know, directly. If you know anybody, here’s what I can do. Happy to, you know, meet and have a conversation and

people I’d worked with in the past, you knew me and you know, you know, so and so might be looking for that. Or I heard this person or honestly, some of the clients we’d turned down or had a conversation with at the consulting company where we’d quoted them $25,000 to do a business plan and financial projections. I went back to them and said, Hey, if you guys are still looking, you know, I’m out on my own now and I could do it for 7,500.

And I was going to be the one doing it anyway. And 7,500 was going to be what I would have made anyway. So you’re just kind of saving the margin on that. And they go, Oh my God, know, 25 didn’t make sense, but for 7,500, you know, let’s talk. So I was able to pick up three or four clients between getting laid off and the end of the year that gave me the, you know, the willpower to keep going and think that this could actually work.

Anthony Codispoti (08:31)
So three clients, I’m going to guess that wasn’t replacing your income, but at least it gave you the confidence to keep moving forward.

Matt – CapForge Inc (08:40)
Absolutely. And at that point I had a relatively low burn rate. was sharing an apartment with another guy. you know, my rent wasn’t that bad and I could get by on less than I had been making, which is why I was able to have the savings I had to give it a try in the first place. So, ⁓ yeah, it just gave me the idea that maybe I don’t have to run out and get a job. Maybe I can build this into something, which is what happened.

Anthony Codispoti (09:05)
And did you call

it cap forage right from the beginning?

Matt – CapForge Inc (09:08)
Yes, I was, ⁓ I actually originally the first name I came up with was entry point ventures. Cause I thought, I’m helping people get started. Entry point ventures make sense. Entrypointventures.com was available. but I was still in touch with a bunch of friends from the NBA program. So I thought, well, let me run it by some of them. And my good friend, Mike Bardon said, that’s the dumbest name I ever heard. He immediately made several rude comments around how that name could be. Misconstrued.

in a not safe for work fashion and things. as okay. So he said, you need a name like Xerox or Google. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s short. You can use it for anything. Cause who knows at five years from now you’ll be writing business plans. So I went back to the drawing boards. was playing with little parts of words. came up with cap forge, cap forge.com was available. I was like, that’s it. I’m not thinking about this anymore. I’m just going to grab that and I’ll fix it later.

Anthony Codispoti (10:04)
And so have you gone back and attached meaning to it now?

Matt – CapForge Inc (10:07)
Sometimes people kind of say, what does it mean? So I’ve backed into the idea that well, cap short for capital is money, right? For just to make, so it’s kind of make money cap for, you know, but really that had no part of my thought originally. I was just scrounging around for something short and meaningless that I could use.

Anthony Codispoti (10:18)
All right.

So this was started in what year specifically then? Okay, 2000, right when the bubble popped. And you went along for the first, I don’t know, 10, 12 years, you were doing primarily consulting work. How did this sort of evolve in the first few years?

Matt – CapForge Inc (10:31)
2000.

Yeah.

I was doing well, so it started out as consulting. What I learned in the first year of doing consulting was that I was frequently in an ethical conundrum, right? Because people were coming to me and saying, I want your help to raise capital to start a business. So, okay, great. Then they’d tell me their idea and I go, that’s a terrible idea. So you’re not going to be able to raise 10 cents with that idea. However, if I say that they’re not going to hire me, right? If I

So my line became, can help you write a business plan and create financial projections. But of course I can’t guarantee that you’re going to be able to raise funds with it, which to me was, okay, I’m caveatting this and I could sleep okay taking their money to create the plan, but I didn’t really like it, right? Because I couldn’t, I couldn’t give my honest opinion. I couldn’t give them real feedback.

if they were coming to me with these harebrained schemes to raise millions of dollars or I mean, it’s one thing to raise from institutional investors, which is going to be very difficult, but if they were taking it to raise money from friends and family, I have some level of responsibility, right? If I’m helping them get $500,000 out of grandma and grandpa and uncle Joe for some business that I think has a slim to no possibility of working. So how do I get out of that? What I

pivoted to was creating software so they could create their own business plan and their own financial projections, sort of a DIY software to let them create a business plan and financial projections. I pivoted to that and I started selling that online. It was the very early days of Google where if you put the right words in your headline, you would come up in the search results at the top, get a good amount of traffic.

Anthony Codispoti (12:24)
No.

Matt – CapForge Inc (12:34)
And for a number of years, I sold software rather than doing the individual consulting because I just felt like then you create whatever plan you want. I just gave you the tool.

Anthony Codispoti (12:43)
What was the software called?

Matt – CapForge Inc (12:45)
So I had one specifically focused on restaurants, which was restaurant funds. Then I had one specifically focused on getting SBA loans, which was sbakash.com. And then one for bars, which I think was called startabar.com.

Anthony Codispoti (13:03)
So was this like an early SaaS application or were people downloading this?

Matt – CapForge Inc (13:07)
It wasn’t,

it was not a subscription. It was just a here’s a package software. And really what it was, was Word templates with a bunch of pre-written sections and instructions on how to customize it.

a really complicated Excel multi-tab Excel spreadsheet that I’d built where they could just put in some basic assumptions and it would generate a P and L balance sheet cashflow statement for them. So they could then take it, it off, give it to the SBA or investors or whoever they were going to, ready to go. They didn’t need to know how to write a business plan or do financials. And it would give them that as an end result. And it was 99 bucks to buy the software. It was

I started out actually literally mailing I’d burn CDs, CD-ROMs and mail them and then I switched over to okay you can just download this that seems easier. course over the years I found some bootleg copies people were knocking them off and selling it on eBay and stuff and I was like my hard work what are you doing you filthy pirates.

Anthony Codispoti (13:52)
Yeah.

It’s painful. It’s so

common, though. Yeah.

Matt – CapForge Inc (14:13)
It’s

so much work went into that and then to see some clown selling it on eBay for half the legitimate price.

Anthony Codispoti (14:18)
And were you able

to make a living selling the software? Okay.

Matt – CapForge Inc (14:21)
Yes, I made quite

a good, I mean, was multi six figures annually, selling the software and providing some additional support. And then I had an ad on service. If you’ve written your business plan and financials you want me to review it, you know, for another 500 bucks, you could send it to me. I do your, do a review, give you feedback. Um, but yeah, that was actually a fantastic time in my life because I was still single at that point, but I could do this business literally from anywhere.

with very little effort. I traveled all over the world. I went on scuba diving trips. I did a bike ride from San Diego to Florida with a friend of mine. We rode our bicycles across the country. I mean, I just had a fantastic time living it up. What I didn’t do was future proof this business because as Google search results changed over time and you had to start buying sponsored results and so on and other people jumped into the market.

I did not keep up with it. I was resting on my laurels. So lesson learned the hard way. I should have been continually adding content and building a community and doing other things that I saw other people subsequently do and saying to myself, I should have been there. I was early in the game, but I did not keep it up. was having too much fun running around the world, traveling and seeing different countries and going on trips, but ⁓ no regrets, but it was great.

Anthony Codispoti (15:42)
So at what point did you have to pivot from that?

At what point did you have to pivot from the software into something else then?

Matt – CapForge Inc (15:48)
So in 2004 sales were still going strong, but I could see already that there was competition and it was declining. I prior to the NBA had a lot of experience in restaurants and I thought, you know, what would be the perfect restaurant to own would be a catering business because the biggest challenge in restaurants is knowing how many people to have on staff on any given night, how busy are we going to be and how much food to purchase? Cause again, don’t know how busy you’re going to be that man. If I had a catering business,

I’d know those two things months in advance. People prepay. I’d be the greatest thing ever. And as it happened, there was a catering business for sale in San Diego at that time. So I negotiated to buy it. I used an SBA loan, which I had, you know, knew how to get an SBA loan. and I acquired that and I ran that for four years and then I sold it in 2007, right before I got married. ⁓ and that was.

A great experience in acquiring an existing cash flowing business and building it. And it was a terrible experience in knowing why catering businesses were so hard. Yes, you food costs and labor costs ahead of time. But for what, you know, on a given Saturday, I might have eight events, right? So each event was just one of eight, two of eight, three of eight, right? But that three of eight event might be somebody’s wedding. They’re once in a lifetime experience that they’ll remember forever.

Right? So the pressure to perform and do an amazing job for that, even though it was just one of eight on a Saturday for me, I did not understand that environment, that pressure cooker I was signing up for in that business. So it was a good lesson, acquiring a business, growing a business, selling a business. I learned all those things, but I also learned something about what kind of businesses I didn’t want to be involved in going forward.

Anthony Codispoti (17:45)
And so you guys maybe drop the ball a couple of times on those weddings? Is that what I’m reading between the lines here?

Matt – CapForge Inc (17:51)
Well, yes, I mean, some things there’s, there’s so many factors in that because we would do look, you know, we had our catering kitchen, right? But the events would happen at locales all across San Diego County. So things would come up. A traffic accident blocks the catering truck from getting there or a flat tire, or somebody doesn’t show, or we had a fire in the kitchen one time. Right. And so

We didn’t often screw up, you know, deliver the wrong menu to the wrong location, although that happened occasionally and we had to fix that. ⁓ But it was more often just, you know, the things happened and as much as you’d say, well, you know, sure life happens, right? Things just don’t always go the way you plan. It’s very hard to tell that to a bride 45 minutes before everyone’s supposed to sit down and eat that. Hey, things happen.

Anthony Codispoti (18:47)
I’m sorry that

it happened on your day. Yeah.

Matt – CapForge Inc (18:50)
Right, I’m

sorry you’re the one that had happened too. You know, I know it’s no consolation that of the last 200 events, 197 of them went off without a hitch. So it was challenging. I sold that business in 2007.

Anthony Codispoti (19:01)
Yeah. So you you sold that business then?

Matt – CapForge Inc (19:08)
And then I thought, you know what, this is a great way to be an entrepreneur is I’ll just go and buy more businesses. I’ll improve them. I’ll improve the management. I’ll improve the cashflow profitability. Maybe some I’ll sell, maybe some I’ll keep. So I got my license to be a business broker because I thought the best way to find and buy businesses is to be a business broker. I’ll get first look at everything. ⁓ I’ll buy the ones I like and I’ll sell the ones that I don’t want for a commission. So win-win, I thought.

I started in January of 2008 and I did it for four years and I sold 36 businesses in that time and I never bought one.

I would always see the words. mean, a good portion of them I would have not had any interest in running anyway, but even the ones that were marginally interesting, I could just see the problems. I became more of a pessimist than I probably naturally was. Just I could see all the ways things would go wrong, the amount of work and hassle and headache. I would see when a buyer would buy one of these.

all the stress and the, you know, the amount of things they had to learn and take over and short order to be able to try and even get, you know, keep it at status quo, nevermind growing it. So that was a good learning experience. Along the way. What I also learned was almost all the small business owners I ever talked to had terrible books, right? Cause the first thing you do in business acquisition or as a business broker,

is you say, okay, let’s figure out how much this thing is worth. Let’s take a look at the financials and they go, yeah, the books, they’re six months behind or, you know, aunt may does them, she doesn’t really know QuickBooks, but I can’t fire her because she’s relative. There was always some story, right? The CPA only does it once a year or here there’s that shoe box full of receipts. Can you figure it out for me? Whatever, you know, was always, there was always a story. Bookkeeping, professional quality bookkeeping for small business seemed to be in short supply.

very few businesses had good quality up-to-date accurate books. And right about the end of 2011, I came across a business that was doing virtual bookkeeping. And up until that time, I’d always thought of bookkeeping because it seemed to be something where the bookkeeper would go to somebody’s office and sit in their office and go through their receipts and sit at their computer and do it all.

And I thought, don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be limited to San Diego. I don’t want to be in a limited market. I don’t want to be driving back and forth or even trying to staff for that job. So when I saw that there was somebody doing virtual bookkeeping, I thought, I don’t have to go to people’s offices. Now my market could be the whole US and the employees could be anywhere and the business, the customers could be anywhere. And this starts to look a lot more interesting.

And as it turned out, somebody else outbid me for that business. I actually attempted to buy that one. Somebody outbid me for it. So I thought, well, how hard would this be to just start? So I decided I’ll start it and I’ll see how it goes. If I pick up clients quickly, great. If it doesn’t really work out or I don’t like it, I’ll try something else. Turns out it worked out pretty well.

Anthony Codispoti (22:24)
So how did you pick up those first clients? And you resurrected the catforged name to do this under?

Matt – CapForge Inc (22:29)
I’d continued using CapForge for everything. So CapForge Inc owned the catering business, CapForge Inc owned the software business, CapForge Inc now owned the business brokering, ⁓ and now it became CapForge Inc, the accounting business. Those first few clients was sort of similar referrals and connections from business brokering people that I’d met along the way. Also back then, I don’t know if it still works now, I haven’t tried it in years and years, but Craigslist ads.

you know, for small business services, throw it in there. If you’re looking for a good bookkeeper, you know, give me a call. And then as soon as we started getting clients and they liked us, you know, referrals are huge. People ask other business owners, they know, who do you use for accounting? Who’s your bookkeeper?

and word gets around. I always, all my experience in restaurants and consulting and everything else, it was always a customer service focus. In accounting, customer service is like the bottom of the list of what most accounting firms focus on. So me coming to a customer service first made a good impression. We were able to get referrals, good reviews, and just build from there.

Anthony Codispoti (23:38)
Nice. And so how has it evolved into today? Take us through the different services that you guys provide.

Matt – CapForge Inc (23:43)
So.

Yeah, when we started, I was only doing bookkeeping. ⁓ And that was true for many years. I got enough clients myself where I was doing the bookkeeping. I was doing everything, sales, admin, billing, everything. As soon as I had about a dozen clients, I hired a bookkeeper. said, OK, here’s what’s going to happen.

I’m going to go find clients. You’re going to do all the books. And that’s what we did. And then as soon as that person was kind of filled, I hired another person, another person. I think it was probably, I had four or five bookkeepers before we had anyone who was anything other than a bookkeeper. was still doing everything else. Sales, billing, admin, everything else, but we grew.

⁓ over the years just continuing to add more more bookkeeping clients. And then people said, Hey, can you also, you know, you’re doing a great job with the books. Can you also help me with payroll? Can you also help me with tax? So we figured out a way to help with payroll. I hired a CPA and then another CPA and another CPA so we could build our tax department and then started doing some advisory CFO work and so on. It was all led by demand from clients, right? It wasn’t

kind of inventing new services and then trying to market. was all, OK, I’ve got a demand base here already. Let’s not have them go somewhere else if we can provide it to them and add to the value, the overall aggregate average value of each client. So that’s what we’ve been doing.

Anthony Codispoti (25:21)
And so how many, what’s your head count like today? How many folks do you have?

Matt – CapForge Inc (25:25)
We’re at about 90, folks.

Anthony Codispoti (25:28)
and how many of those are bookkeepers versus payroll?

Matt – CapForge Inc (25:32)
So bookkeeping is still just because it’s that’s where we started. It’s still the predominant revenue stream. It’s probably 75 % is bookkeeping, 20 % tax and then 5 % other.

Anthony Codispoti (25:48)
Okay. And who do you serve? Like company size, industry, geography?

Matt – CapForge Inc (25:55)
So geography is really pretty much the entire US. think I’d have to go double check, but I’m pretty confident in saying we have a client, at least one client in all 50 states, including Alaska, including Hawaii, ⁓ you know, and all the, the continuous 48 ⁓ size and type is we’re pretty agnostic in that we have people who are, you know, solo practitioners, people like I was a one man consulting shop doing a

200, 300 K a year up to businesses doing 25 or $30 million a year. It’s more about whether or not they’ve gotten to a place where they need an in-house accountant. If they’ve gotten to that, then, you know, they often will transition us out. You know, Hey guys, appreciate everything you’ve done over the years. At this point though, it makes sense to bring this in-house. Hey, no argument for me. I get it. I appreciate all the years of business. If you know anyone else, great, you know, send them over, but

no hard feelings. mean, you’ve grown. That means you’ve been successful. I’m glad to have been part of it. ⁓ But, you know, there’s millions and millions literally of small businesses out there who need accounting help, but it doesn’t make sense to have somebody on staff doing that.

Anthony Codispoti (27:08)
So outside of the referrals, which is a really powerful source of new business for you guys, how else are clients finding you?

Matt – CapForge Inc (27:15)
Well, podcasts is a great way. I’ve been on a lot of podcasts and YouTube videos with various people. Also, the books that I’ve put out have helped and general content on the website, SEO draws traffic in. And then probably actually the second biggest source is partnering with people. We partner with business brokers as because I know well, for them to do their job, they need the

the sellers to have good financials. So a lot of times they’ll come to us and say, Hey, you know, Joe wants to sell his tire business, but he doesn’t have any books, you know, and I’d love to help them sell it, but we can’t do anything until we’ve got something to show a buyer. So great. We’ll do a project, catch up two, three years of the last books, file the back taxes and get him in shape. Now he’s gone from something he would have just had to close down to something he can sell for 500,000, 750,000, whatever the number is.

So partners like that who know what we do and we’re complimentary to what they’re trying to achieve are a great fit for us.

Anthony Codispoti (28:21)
Who else is a good partner for you besides business brokers?

Matt – CapForge Inc (28:24)
So ⁓ sometimes CPAs who don’t have an in-house bookkeeping solution will do the books and send those clients back to them for the taxes. ⁓ Sometimes software people, software integrations like… ⁓

There are software specific to people who own a Polati studios and yoga studios, right? They use a software called mind body. We happen to have a pretty good system for integrating mind body into QuickBooks and working with them. So if I know you’re a gym owner and you’re using a mind body as your, you know, POS system and client tracking system, then, you know, I’m a great fit to work with you on the accounting side, cause I can do that integration or law firms.

using certain law firm billing software and things like that. So really anybody that’s working with a number of small businesses, business coaches, right, are a great fit for us because it’s hard to be a coach. It’s hard for coaches to give good advice if they’re looking at the business to say, I don’t really know how you’re doing because you don’t know how you’re doing. So it’s hard for me to coach you. So let’s connect you with Matt. You can get your books in shape. Now we’re both looking at good, solid, accurate current numbers and we can both figure out a path forward for you.

Anthony Codispoti (29:36)
So how many books have you written, Matt?

Matt – CapForge Inc (29:38)
Up to the one you had mentioned in the intro and then there was a second one around specifically e-commerce bookkeeping. We have a lot of folks in the e-commerce space and they have specific challenges with their books. I’ve got a couple more in the works that haven’t quite launched yet, but ⁓ yeah, find I enjoy writing. So it’s not a struggle for me and it’s not strictly a marketing effort. kind of…

It helps me to think more clearly when I sit down and put thoughts to paper, organize it, put it in chapters. What do I want to get across? How do I want to help people? And then the byproduct of that is a book that then helps generate more interest.

Anthony Codispoti (30:20)
So the book that we mentioned in the intro, QuickBooks Bookkeeping, 10 most common mistakes everyone makes and how to fix them. Pull out one or two of those common mistakes. Highlight them for us.

Matt – CapForge Inc (30:31)
So one of the most common mistakes that people do is they don’t reconcile their books, right? They will go, they’ll get QuickBooks online, they’ll connect their bank account or their credit card account. It’ll start pulling transactions in and they’ll just start throwing them into, that was office supplies, that was rent, that was marketing, which is a good start. But if you don’t then pull up the statement for that bank account, start with the starting balance, make sure that’s correct. Go through each.

transaction, make sure it’s on the statement and then come up with the right ending balance that’s on the bank statement. It’s very easy for stuff to get missed, go in the wrong spot or that software integration that seems so handy might have missed a handful of transactions. It glitched or paused or something happened or it pulled the same transaction in two or three times by accident or once in a while something that was supposed to come in as 123 came in as 132.

If you never reconcile, if you never do that second step and comparing the transactions to the statement to make sure they’re right, what happens over time is it’s more and more wrong. You have more and more garbage transactions, missing transactions, duplicate transactions in there. And now while you feel like, I’ve spent all this time doing my books, you’re actually looking at incorrect values. So that’s something we frequently see people skipping that step because they don’t know how to do it. It seems complicated if you’ve never done it, but

The result is you end up looking at bad data.

Anthony Codispoti (31:58)
Yeah, that reconciling it, you know, one of the things I think that you guys are really known for is this three times accuracy check process, you’ve got human oversight, you’re combining it with AI. Can you talk a little bit more about how this process works?

Matt – CapForge Inc (32:13)
Yeah, every set of books we do is looked at by two people every month. There’s the primary person doing it and a second person that reviews the first person’s entries just to make sure nothing got overlooked. And then with my background in putting together software to look at numbers, we also built something even before AI was a big thing and we’ve since layered in additional AI.

that goes through and does the kind of checks that it would take a person hours, but takes the AI and the software seconds to do. And it’s things like ⁓ looking to see if there’s multiple vendors who are probably most likely the same vendor. Sometimes you’ll have somebody will put in, know,

Anthony Kodaspati and then somebody also put in Tony Kodaspati and then somebody also put in a Kodaspati and it’s really all the same person right and all should be going to the same place and it should all be condensed into one but because different people at different times saw it put it in differently didn’t realize there was already an entry for that. ⁓ You know now you end up with.

with mistakes and the software is very good at finding that kind of stuff, which would take a person. said they could find it, of course, but it might take them an hour of looking through to realize what’s going on where the software finds it in seconds. So we go through everything with those three checks every month. So that way, by the time you get to the end of the year, it’s tax time. If there’s anything to clean up, it’s one or two minor things. It’s not, boy, we have a year’s worth of garbage to.

sort through here to get this right.

Anthony Codispoti (33:49)
And at that point, it’s trying to tap into your memory bank to be like, what was that? What was that for? Yeah. You’re taking care of this stuff as you go along. And you got, you know, two human beings and the AI checking it. And we were just talking before about some of the common mistakes, you know, reference to your, your, one of your books that you wrote, Matt, what is maybe a really unusual mistake that you saw somebody make? And how’d you help them through it?

Matt – CapForge Inc (34:16)
More unusual mistakes, probably things like misunderstanding, for example, how an asset works versus an expense. They’ll buy, let’s say, an expensive laptop. And they’ll think, well, that’s an asset. I’m going to have it for more than a year. They’ll put it on the balance sheet. But then it never gets recaptured as an expense. So they overpay their taxes as result. They could have written it off. It just didn’t get captured right.

So they’re using Google or chat GPT to try to help them do bookkeeping rather than using somebody who’s an actual professional in it. And it ends up, you know, it’s a fixable mistake. It’s not that big a deal, but they’re, trying to overthink the process. They’re getting the information somewhat right, but it ends up getting, giving them a bad result. So, I mean, there’s no shortage of ways that people mess up their books. ⁓ and, and usually to their own detriment, unfortunately.

Anthony Codispoti (35:17)
So we mentioned in the intro about this 24 hour response time that you promised. Did I get that correct?

Matt – CapForge Inc (35:24)
That is correct. ⁓ If you email us today, you’ll hear back today, nine times out of 10, but the latest you’re going to hear back is by tomorrow at or before the time that you emailed us today. Communication is the single biggest thing that I think we get judged on. Any accounting firm gets judged on and most of them honestly fall pretty short, right? Because if you think about it,

people aren’t hiring us because they’re tax experts and they’re just checking our work, right? They just want to see if we know what they know. They’re hiring us because they don’t know about this stuff. So honestly, we could do a terrible job on their tax return. They wouldn’t necessarily know, but they know, did they get back to me quickly? Did they answer my questions? Were they in, was it understandable answers in plain English or were they throwing a lot of tax jargon at me? Were they kind of…

you know, rude and condescending because I’m not a tax expert, but I wanted to ask them how these things work. So what we get judged on is how well we respond, how quickly we respond, how thoroughly respond, how friendly and helpful we are. Right? So I want to make sure we’re 10 out of 10 on all that stuff. Then yes, we’re also going to hire amazing smart tax folks and bookkeeping folks who can do a great job on the actual work. But the clients who hire us, that’s really not what their criteria is.

Right? You would think it would be, but it’s, it’s really how well they work with us. And that’s why I think a lot of accounting firms say, Hey, I’m great at tax. I’m great at bookkeeping. Why do I have to, you know, talk to this guy who doesn’t know anything about it? Right? I did great work. You should just trust me. I sent him his tax return. Why does he keep bugging me?

Anthony Codispoti (37:04)
You know, and there’s so many industries where if people would just layer in a little bit of customer service, their business would take off to the moon just through word of mouth. ⁓ And it occurs to me, having recently transitioned from an accounting experience that was like what you’re talking about, that is certainly one industry. ⁓ Trades is another one. You know,

get a plumber to show up at my house or an electrician to come on time. It’s, you know, just just that bit of communication is a big differentiator. And I wonder if that’s a big part of the reason why you guys, as we said in the intro, have almost more positive reviews than any other bookkeeper in the country. How do you guys go about that?

Matt – CapForge Inc (37:51)
Yeah, I mean, it’s a point of pride for us. But I think it’s not because we’ve done anything amazing on the bookkeeping and tax side. Again, I think we do a great job. Our numbers are accurate. But there’s a lot of people who can do accurate books and provide accurate taxes. But as I mentioned, I come to this business from years in the restaurant world and years of customer service where that was the big differentiator.

Right. And that was really a key part of the experience. You want to make the experience as easy and frictionless and, and expectation meeting as possible for those clients. And to the extent that you don’t, they’re not going to be super happy and they’re going to be susceptible to switching to someone else who treats them better, who they vibe with more. They feel like is a better experience. Not even if you’re doing amazing tax work, right?

they’re not necessarily cognizant of that piece of it. They don’t know what they don’t know about what you are or aren’t doing for them technically on the tax return, but they know if you’re a jerk or not, that’s how they’re going to decide who they go with. So, you know, it’s a big part of my ethos here and management philosophy is not just to hire people who are good at their job, but they’re also nice people, partly because I have to spend 40 hours a week with them. Right. So I don’t want to spend time with jerks.

But I certainly know that my clients don’t want to spend time with jerks either. They want to work with people who are nice and friendly and helpful and trying to work in their best interest. And that’s what comes across. That’s why we get really good reviews. That’s why people refer us to other people because they’ve had a good experience here. And that’s the fundamental reason I think we’ve been really successful. Cause I put that not…

not to the exclusion of everything else, but equally weighted with doing a good job professionally is providing a great customer experience.

Anthony Codispoti (39:49)
What’s the employee breakdown like? What percentage of folks are in a centralized office versus distributed?

Matt – CapForge Inc (39:56)
Well, pre 2020, it was almost everybody was in office. We had a handful of people who were remote. Today, there’s six of us in the office out of the 90 or so folks. it is really, were, everything we do is cloud based and digital to begin with. We were not a kind of firm that printed everything out and stuck it in a big filing cabinet somewhere. So making the transition to letting folks go remote wasn’t

hard from a technical standpoint, it was very easy. It was a little challenging for me because I was used to being able to pull everyone into a big meeting room and kind of give a State of the Union address and get feedback in real time and everything else. It was an adjustment for me to learn how to manage a team that I couldn’t get in front of directly. ⁓ But.

It’s been a really net net has been a great thing for us because now when I want to find the very best bookkeeper that I can find for our next hire, I have the entire US as my hiring pool. So it doesn’t matter if they’re in West Virginia or Wyoming or Florida or Seattle, right? I can find them, hire them and make them part of the team. Whereas before I was limited to people within driving distance of the office.

Anthony Codispoti (41:09)
much bigger pool that you can draw from. What does the future of CapForge look like? Any new growth plans, new services? What are you guys thinking?

Matt – CapForge Inc (41:18)
Yeah, I mean, I think the next initiative for us is really to branch out our footprint. So right now, although we’re remotely distributed team, all the sales efforts really still are generated here at the San Diego Carlsbad office. What I’d love to have is people placed.

in other places, somebody in LA, somebody in Dallas, somebody in New York, et cetera, who was sort of an outpost for marketing, sales, and lead generation in those areas. All the work still done by the remote team, nothing would change there. But I think to the extent we want to continue to grow, we need to have a physical presence in more locations on that business development side.

Anthony Codispoti (42:04)
Okay. Where do you think the future of the industry is heading? What do you think were the big changes that are coming?

Matt – CapForge Inc (42:12)
I think, I mean, obviously it’s impossible not to see the impact of AI already. And what’s harder to judge is how quickly and how deeply that’s going to take over some of the things that we do. There’s no question that there will be some help. We’re already using it to some degree. ⁓ But I think fundamentally the clients are still gonna wanna interact with people.

right? Unless the clients are robots, right? Then I don’t think the service providers can be robots. ⁓ So I think it will evolve a bit over time, the amount of time that we spend doing some of the work we do now. But I think what it’s going to allow us to do is have a given bookkeeper, a given CPA have more clients.

because they can spend more time with those clients because they’re spending less time doing some of the entries and data and reconciliation work that they’re doing now. But I don’t foresee a place where people are going to be satisfied with just entering their questions into a chat box and not being able to interact with a person.

and have that comfort and confidence that comes with human to human interaction for something as complicated and impactful as taxes and accounting.

Anthony Codispoti (43:34)
Well, I think probably everybody listening has had an experience where they’ve interacted with a pretty good AI chatbot, you know, in a different service provider’s website that they go to. Even as good as they have become, it’s still not a replacement for talking to a human. There’s so many times where my end result is still send me to a human. Like we didn’t drill down into the nuance of my question. That’s what you’re talking about.

Matt – CapForge Inc (44:00)
Yeah, I think that’s what’s happening. And I think there are a lot of old school accounting firms still out there. The guys that are still printing everything out, doing it all on paper, mailing people stuff, getting, you know, here’s my fax number, that kind of stuff. I think those guys, a lot of them are either just going to end up retiring and closing up shop or getting bought out by the next generation who are going to then convert them and kind of get them up to speed.

You know, the ones that don’t want to change or resistant to change are going to eventually have to either step aside or, you know, learn to adapt. I think the direction of this industry is tech forward, but it’s not all tech. It’s going to be a blend.

Anthony Codispoti (44:44)
Yeah, the tech is going to allow more of that human interaction. People spend less time sort of double checking those entries and more time being able to talk about strategy and that kind of a thing. Yeah. Let’s shift gears, Matt. I would be interested to hear about a big serious challenge that you’ve overcome in your life and how you got through that.

Matt – CapForge Inc (45:07)
Yeah, you had prompted me to think about it earlier. ⁓ I mean, a couple of things come to mind on the business side. One of the early challenges we had, this was probably three years into the business. ⁓ So at that point, I probably had six or seven employees and a good number of clients. I was the sole source of income for my family at that point. And ⁓

One of the employees opened an email they shouldn’t have opened and we essentially became the victims of ransomware. They got a hold of all of our files and threatened to delete everything without, if they didn’t get a significant pay and basically wipe me out for the year size payment as a result. And of course, it happened at about 11 in the morning.

And by five o’clock that night, I mean, I was, I was devastated. hadn’t, I had no idea how to resolve this because, know, we can call the FBI, call whoever you want. Nobody’s going to be able to fix it in the amount of time that they’ve given you to respond to this. There’s no way I’m going to be able to go back to every single client. I mean, I could have, but the idea of going to every single client and saying, Hey, we’ve had a data breach. Hackers have all your data. I don’t have control of it anymore.

Can you please give it to me again, but to a different system that, you know, doesn’t like, there’s just no, it was, it was, I don’t even, I mean, I was in the depths of despair. I saw everything I’d worked all that time for built up, just evaporating. ⁓ And it was, ⁓ you know, I was just, I was just gutted. I don’t know. I, there’s no words for it.

how upset and how devastated I was. How did I let this happen? Why didn’t I have better protections? Ask yourself a million questions. What could I have done differently? Of course, you want to be upset with the person who did it, it wasn’t, obviously they didn’t do it maliciously. The person on my team that allowed them in, wasn’t, you get mad, but it’s too late. That doesn’t, that solves nothing. doesn’t, they already felt completely devastated by it.

So as it turned out, the person who had originally set up our IT had, unbeknownst to me at the time, set up a backup system that was sheltered from what the hacker had been able to get into. And so,

By about eight o’clock the next morning, we figured out that we in fact were able to a copy of a safe copy of everything we had up to that point. And we’re able to change everything over, moved everything to a different server, updated all the passwords and everything else sort of behind the scenes while I was still emailing them and saying, well, I’m trying to get the money together. Don’t do anything yet. Please give me some more time. But in the behind the scenes, we’re, you know.

shifting everything over and by about noon that next day, I was able to tell them, know, hey, you know what, I’m not going to pay it. And other words, right? Don’t get into everything I needed to say. ⁓ And we were able to restore everything and keep everything. And, ⁓ you know, they essentially walked away with nothing and we were able to continue doing business. And of course, you know,

re-tripled our efforts to harden all our systems and firewall everything else. But I mean, that was about 24 hours of the worst hours of my life. you know, the financial loss was one thing, but that really was a far backseat to the idea that I was going to have to lay off all my employees. I was going to have to let all my clients know, you know, I just, I was just imagining the worst of the worst of how bad this thing was going to be or

Anthony Codispoti (49:00)
Wow.

Matt – CapForge Inc (49:26)
you know, idea, well, maybe you pay them, but did they then release the files or did they go, ha ha, how about, know, just kidding, send another, you know, payment or or we’re back in 48 hours to do it again.

Anthony Codispoti (49:37)
Yeah, somebody like that isn’t particularly scrupulous or trustworthy.

Matt – CapForge Inc (49:40)
Right,

why would they honor their word? You have zero leverage if you make the payment and then they decide not to do anything anyway or ask for more or who knows what. So it worked out the best possible way it could have worked out, but between finding out and it working out, know, I, cool.

Anthony Codispoti (50:02)
What a roller coaster. And then,

was there any downside? Did the ⁓ client’s data get leaked on the dark web somehow, or was there any fallout from that?

Matt – CapForge Inc (50:13)
We informed all the clients once we had everything secure that we had been hacked and we advised them, you know, here’s the precautions we recommend you take. you know, we got a lot of emails saying, thanks for letting us know. We’ll, do those things. got a few emails saying, did you let that happen? And what, you know, I think a couple of people canceled. ⁓ I mean, you know, what I, that’s their right, right? I can’t be angry at them about that. And

All in all, it was much better by miles than I could have expected at the time that I found out about it. But ⁓ like I said, we’ve since completely overhauled our system. I think it’s one of those things you just don’t think it’s going to happen to you until it happens. And then you realize, now it’s too late to wish I’d done more.

Anthony Codispoti (51:04)
And how crazy that, what was this, some developer that had created a backup of your system that you weren’t even aware of at the time.

Matt – CapForge Inc (51:10)
Yeah, yeah,

he, you know, he kind of just said, I do that for everyone normally. And I guess I didn’t mention it to you. And, know, it’s just a good idea. know, well, thank God, thank God you did right. If you need to bill me for that, go ahead. That’s fine. ⁓ So, but I mean, he just as easily could have never have done that. Or it was just, I

Anthony Codispoti (51:23)
It was a fabulous idea.

Yeah. Wow.

Matt – CapForge Inc (51:39)
I wasn’t necessarily thinking about calling him at the outset just because I was just in the midst of this, how do I solve this, you know, how do I solve this problem? Not necessarily, you know, ⁓ well, maybe I should see if somebody else has a back. That didn’t occur to me at all.

Anthony Codispoti (51:56)
Why did you

reach out to that person?

Matt – CapForge Inc (52:00)
I think I was just kind of going through all the scenarios and who could possibly help with this. And I reached out to him and I didn’t. The original reaching out wasn’t to see if there was a way to say, but it was really more about, you know, can we find out more about who these guys are? Is there a way to figure out? Can we do something? we like, did he have any experience with this kind of situation? He’s the one who said, well, maybe we should, you know, let’s see if we’ve got the backup.

It’s a backup. What backup? What are you talking about? Backup.

Anthony Codispoti (52:30)
Hacker.

That was the

most beautiful word you’d ever heard.

Matt – CapForge Inc (52:36)
I guess that is fantastic news if there’s a back end. Don’t get my hopes up though. Check first then. So I, you know, I, I talked to small business owners, entrepreneurs all the time and I always look, it’s never a straight path from A to B, right? There’s always, there’s going to be twists turns, you know, you’re going to take one step forward and 17 steps back, you know, on different occasions, you’re going to run into walls.

It’s, you know, no matter how anyone that shows you or tells you about overnight success story, right? Instant disbelief because probably they’ve been doing it for 10 or 12 years and probably they’ve had all kinds of fails along the way. The more it looks like overnight success, the less likely it is that had anything to do with.

Anthony Codispoti (53:27)
Yeah, you have no idea what toiling has been going on behind the scenes, what agony and stress the person’s been enduring. You just see suddenly they come to light in your world and you think, wow, how did they do that so fast? They did it from years of grinding behind the scenes.

Matt – CapForge Inc (53:45)
Yes, exactly. There’s there’s a story there. I guarantee it, right? They tried that business six other times. It didn’t work the seventh time they took everything they learned from the first six times and made it look like, it’s so easy, right? But now there’s YouTube videos and shorts and tick tock thing, you know, like, ⁓ start a business work from the beach on a laptop half an hour a day, you know, easy, passive income. No, none of that’s true. I don’t care who’s telling you or what the story is. It’s not how the real

Anthony Codispoti (54:15)
I’m so glad you shared that message. Let’s shift gears again. Tell us what your superpower is, Matt.

Matt – CapForge Inc (54:23)
I think my superpower is being able to delegate. I know a ton of business owners who have a lot of trouble letting go, right? They may hire people, they may build a team, but still every decision, anything bigger than what size paperclip to buy has to get run by them, right? They have a very hard time of letting any of the real decision making or any of the real ⁓ power leave their hands.

And I get it, right? What got us here a lot of times is wanting to do everything the best we can and feeling like nobody’s going to own it like I own it. Nobody’s going to treat it like I treat it. But as much as that may be somewhat true, right? You’re by the same token, you’re really handicapping yourself. If you can’t build a team, if you can’t empower people to, to make their own decisions, be responsible, take ownership themselves.

So I think one of the things I’ve been good at even from the early days is allowing other people to, let me show you how I do it. If you come up with a better way, great. I will never say, no, no, you got to do it my way. If you come up with a way that works better, that gets there faster or cheaper or does a better job at it, great. I’m going to learn from you now. I don’t know. I don’t claim that I know everything and I don’t claim that I have to have my hand in everything. I’m happy to let other people.

take it and run with it. And as long as, you know, we have put some guard rails in there and we kind of know we’re on the same page as far as the goals, then I’m happy to let them go. And so I think that’s what’s enabled us to get to the size that we get to. think a lot of people stall at four or five, six employees in a business that’s $750,000 a million a year or something, because that’s as much as they can do with still keeping their arms around it.

And they just, they just don’t see a way that they can let some of these decisions go and empower people off. let him, you know, he’s going to know too much. He’s going to go start his own thing. Well, maybe, maybe not, but you know, that’s not probably a good reason to not show them how to do certain things or try to keep information hidden and things. So I think my superpower is finding really talented, ambitious people and giving them the ability to go and, and build. And we both benefit.

They benefit, I benefit, the team benefits.

Anthony Codispoti (56:51)
Was that a natural thing for you or did you have some growing pains in being able to let go of certain elements of your business?

Matt – CapForge Inc (57:01)
I think it’s something I’ve always known has been important and I’ve always ⁓ tried to do that. I think I had some good mentors very early in my career and in the restaurant world where I was a manager and the mentors I had that taught me how to be a good manager. was always like, you can’t be promoted up if there’s not somebody to replace you. Right? So by not training someone under you to take over what you can do, you can’t then move up.

And that resonated with me and it makes sense. I want people to cross train. want them to grow in their position. I want them to be able to do more because if I say, Hey, look, this is your job and this is all it’s ever going to be. And I’m never going to train you to do anything else. You’re never going to have the opportunity to grow. How motivated are they going to be to stay right? As soon as they’ve kind of maxed it out. So I want them to do more. I want to do the last to me, the definition of a really successful business owner is someone who could be gone for a month.

and it wouldn’t make any difference, right? The business would continue to have sales and grow and bills would get paid and everything would run smoothly. The business owner’s gone for a month. A lot of businesses, you’re like, I was out for Friday and things fell apart. Three days to put it back together. I was out for six hours. To me, that’s a sign that, you you need to do better at building up your team and empowering them to do more and not being, don’t be the cog in the wheel.

that’s key to the whole thing. Because then you can never take a day off. You can never go on vacation. You can never even be out sick, right? You’re just stuck because you’ve set it up in such a way that you’re the gatekeeper for everything that matters.

Anthony Codispoti (58:44)
You know, to continue to grow a successful business through all of these challenges, mindset is critically important. How do you keep the right mindset? Do you have some habits in your day? Get you started, keep you on track.

Matt – CapForge Inc (59:02)
I think what I’ve learned over 25 years and it certainly hasn’t come, it certainly wasn’t there in the early days. And even now I still sometimes struggle with it. But I think the idea that I keep in mind is nothing is ever as good as it seems. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems. All you can do is try to improve a little bit every day. We’re not looking for home runs. We’re looking for a little improvement every day. And if you do that,

By the end of the year, looks like three or four home runs, right? Aggregated together, but a little bit of improvement every day. What did we do yesterday that we can do better today? Or what, you know, what was a problem yesterday we can fix for today forward and stuff like a hacker coming and stealing all your data. That was a pretty dark day. So most days after that feel like, no, yeah, some bad things. You know, it wasn’t that bad. Wasn’t as bad as that. And on the flip side, you know, there’s been places, days where

how we got, you know, three or four new agreements in this big client, this great referral. Okay. But you know, let’s, we don’t want to hang our hat on that and rest on our laurels like I did in the past with the software and kind of got too excited to ahead of myself every day is, know, just trying to improve a little bit, improve a little bit, grow a little bit and not let any one thing get us too excited or too depressed. Cause today’s gonna, you know, tomorrow’s gonna come.

like it or not, right? And it’s going to be another day and we’re just going to keep on trucking.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:31)
I like that incremental improvements. How can we get better every day? Matt, I’ve just got one more question for you today. But before I ask it, ⁓ excuse me, I want to do three quick things. First of all, anybody who wants to get in touch with Matt or his company, capforge.com is the place to go. There’s a contact form on there. They’ve got a phone number, email, everything you need to know to get in touch with capforge.com.

⁓ Also, as a reminder, if you want to be the hero advisor that shows your clients how to get their employees access to therapists, doctors and prescription meds that as paradoxical as it seems, actually increases the company’s net profits, reach out to us at adbackbenefits.com. Finally, if you are enjoying the show today, a quick comment or review on your favorite podcast app goes a long way towards helping others discover our show. So thank you for taking a quick moment to do that right now.

All right, last question for you, Matt. A year from now, what is one very specific thing that you hope to be celebrated?

Matt – CapForge Inc (1:01:35)
A year from now, if plans go as they’re supposed to, we should be celebrating our 100th employee hired. ⁓ That would be very exciting to me because it means that we’ve been growing, that we’ve been hitting targets, that we’ve been adding clients, that people have continued to be happy with our service and referred their friends to us. I would be super excited to get to that milestone. That would be fantastic.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:02)
Love it. We’ll check back in in 12 months to see how that’s coming along. Matt Ramuzzi from CapForge. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate you.

Matt – CapForge Inc (1:02:13)
Thank you for having me. It’s been great.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:16)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.