all right well guys introduce yourself what's up hey guys I'm Samir i'm the CEO of H Highbeam hibbeam is a financial platform for consumer brands to manage cash flow and profitability what does that mean three things one access to the best financial products um two the automation to make them actually usable and three hopefully the intelligence to help you make better business decisions um and so you don't take my word for it I brought along one of our best customers uh Sib from Branch Furniture so I'll let Sib introduce himself nice hey I'm Sib i'm one of the founders of Brand we sell work products primarily office furniture some other cool things too and we sell to both consumers and businesses we've been around for guess six years now six and a halfish uh team of 70ish based in New York and Toronto we love Samir we love Highbeam and uh Toronto i used to live in Toronto there we go dude we're all going to be friends this is awesome as well i was born in Hamilton oh right on i'm going to do one better in front of me right now is a branch laptop stand these guys make the absolute greatest laptop stand okay so if you're listening to this right now you're like "Hey I need to look as handsome as Sean on my computer." Dude you guys really you know best-in-class i've looked at a bunch of them uh you guys are some of my favorites so um uh love that i actually should be using it right now it's super cool like we've not had anybody from furniture on the show uh and I think Sean knows this but like I grew up in a family where like we ran furniture retail stores like my grandparents did my mom did my uncles did [ __ ] at one point I like I worked in them um it's a hard ass business dude like this you You did not pick a great category like wallet sucks phone cases suck drink wear hard you just decided to like kick the hard bucket over the line and just go into [ __ ] territory like what we picked we we picked the Bulbasaur as our starting Pokemon yeah we made it as hard as possible no no there's there's pros and cons to the category but I feel like each of us has our own crosses to bear i know Sean you talk about the the wallets and the lack of repeatability sometimes but um yeah with Branch the the the B2B story was where we started and that didn't last very long with COVID consumer furniture is definitely tougher but we've made it work and and partly with with folks like Samir helping us but we can get into all that okay so yeah tell us tell us why and how you use Highbeam why did you pick it what does it do i'm going to be I'm going to be cards on the table i'm in the middle of onboarding i have a signed deal to work with Highbeam i'm paying for it i don't know if actually is it free you know tell me the whole [ __ ] product what What did I sign up for yeah love it um so I guess I'll start maybe with just a little context which is that you know we talked about furniture being a tough category right and I think that's part of why Branch has been kind of from the beginning very very concerned with profitability and efficiency and we're ventureback but we don't really run ourselves like a ventureback business we run like we're going to die every year because every year we've probably almost died at some point and so I think when we're thinking about our banking partners right that there's a couple of things that matter to us and kind of all of this is maybe in the shadow of the SBB stuff that happened a couple years ago as well one is we want like a reliable partner like we don't want to [ __ ] around with this you know if that's allowed to be said we said anything you're good yeah keep going we want a reliable partner we want a a counterparty that we can trust and so we're pretty skeptical right inherently of neo banks and kind of all these innovative blah blah blah solutions um but let's just say start step one reliable step two ideally we want a partner that is helping us do some of these basic optimizations for profitability with way less work and attention from our brand because we've got a lot to do just like you guys um and so kind of automating things like treasury management and like sweep stuff that we kind of did manually before how do we take that off our plates and still reap the benefit i guess the third thing that we were looking for is more of like a strategic partner right where banking is high stakes and working capital and treasury management and e-commerce in general is really high stakes and I think you guys have talked about this in various tweets and blog posts and and here on the podcast but sometimes if you mess up with a forecasting decision like you just find yourself in trouble way faster than you think and that's compounded when you're growing really fast maybe when you're a midsize brand you don't yet have the clout to negotiate those amazing terms with your suppliers and so how do we get a partner that is like kind of like a fractional CFO but we don't have to pay for a fractional CFO and maybe they can give us some of these insights in a more reliable and automated way when we're maybe going to run into trouble uh or see around a corner that we don't necessarily realize when we're making a big inventory purchase or decision so reliability I think tactical automation and then strategic partnership as that's like my three bullet framework for what we're looking for and I don't know Hibbeam was probably the only bank we have interviewed that we've ever talked to that was a real shot at doing all three with us we designed this only for consumer brands right so people ask like why would you build a financial platform no other financial platform is really vertical specific like your bank banks everyone your credit card does goes for everyone like why build a financial platform specific for consumer brands i think consumer brand finances are one quite difficult you have like unit skew economics you have tons of daily inflows and outflows and so the using the financial products just to be able to automate them to actually get value from them is difficult just give an example on the treasury side like most people run their business out of a 0% checking account right and that's not a big deal if you're running you know variable inflows and outflows you can move money back and forth but what we realized for most 8 figure and 9 figure consumer brands if we could just give them a 2 and 12% checking account a 4% instant liquidity high yield account a line of credit and automate the money in between the movement daily like that's worth $100,000 to someone to be able to do yourself because of the fact that you have all this money coming in and out every day different than a services business or a tech business so we'll go build a solution to try to automate that for this specific use case and provide that which hopefully adds value it's the same thing we've tried to do across forecasting and cash modeling and all that and by focusing on one vertical we hope we can add value to Sean you in the future on things like how can I get a live cash flow forecast that's reliable that helps me make better decisions on what can I do with my cash can I make it more use more effectively and like the small things that add up once you have a business of that scale it's hundreds of thousands of dollars yeah but but can I can I just add one more thing like I think something that's important is that you guys also nail the basics right like I'm not logging into SB's client portal anymore and that itself like God bless you know our friends at SPB but that is worth a lot right there it's a clean interface $3 million of FDIC insurance and gives us a lot of peace of mind right like it's it's the foundation I think to getting us started and starting to take advantage of some of these other amazing services that you guys offer like the cash flow management the auto sweeps into the high yield accounts but it starts with like you guys have a rockolid basic product right and I think from there we start to get even more excited about the additional functionality that exists sean I I don't know about you but like the interesting thing to me is uh when I talk to a lot of like sort of call it like 10 million to 30 or $40 million brands banking sucks like this is is sort of like when they get over bitching and moaning about advertising they it's inevitably you wind up in a like hey how do you guys get a line of credit or how how do you guys like my bank is an [ __ ] what do I do it it is like one of it's like the telkom of consumer you know like they just banks exist to just not be liked it's like they're in the business of dissatisfaction no look and um we have been talking to Hibbeam for a while right and so you know our banking here's here's Sean Frank's banking journey okay we have a Mercury account which you know we we do with whatever for like small inflows outflows most of our money just actually sits inside of a Chase account so I'm probably sitting with I mean it's it's multiple millions if not $10 million just sitting in a Chase account earning zero dollars and getting Chase to give me a line of credit took like eight years of working with them right like I was on a call with them you know yesterday and they're like "Sean we are so happy to announce you are officially a small mid-market customer." And I'm like "Jesus Christ man like you have all of my money i've been with you for 10 years and like you're you're still calling me small uh and you know we've been talking to Highbeam and I have a VP of finance his name is Arist and he I always [ __ ] at him that I think we have too many people on the finance team and I personally do all of our 13week cash flow forecasts so every Friday I'm in there individually pulling all of our statements from all of our accounts who we own money everything and Eric comes to me and he goes "Sean Hibbeam can do all of that and we could probably get rid of an accountant." So I'm like "Damn dude sign me up i cannot wait we have a sevenperson accounting team right now i would I would love to get to a mean six but with that being said Smeir am I do I pay for this like what what actually is the product people sign up for yeah so it's a great question there's two products there's all of the banking features and automation associated with the banking and that comes for free so we only work with customers of a certain size and larger which is why we can do the best-in-class service and all the things the big banks for whatever reason don't think you're big enough for so you have someone's cell phone number to call all those things so the banking and the automation associated with is free what we're now triing for free as well is the AI intelligence layer so the cash scenario modeling forecasting which you have a four month free trial for so the that's set up with is part of the intelligence layer to say can that add enough value where you don't have to hire that extra analyst where you can get that free cash flow kind of sorry 13 cash flow statement automated that comes as part of essentially a SAS fee which is what you're paying for but again only if it has enough value where it's adding enough stuff so that you can say this is worth what that is does that make sense to answer your question yeah yeah so so day one I'm getting a free bank account like like any other bank account i'm putting my money in there i'm running transactions and you guys are like "We're better than everything out there because we're built specifically for e-commerce and we're going to give you a return on the cash sitting in here right chase just lends it out for mortgages and I don't get any piece of that but they're like "Hey you're going to be getting at least 2% right off the top on that right?" Actually probably higher than that so what's interesting is like the banks had like record profits in 2024 partly because there's this If you're Microsoft and you have a 100 person treasury team you're doing this manually but if we can do it at for scale for eight and nine figure brands exactly what you said which is like you have two and a half% in your checking account but the automated sweeps to say I want to maintain a balance of whatever you want and then move automatically that money to a 4% savings account and if you get above a certain threshold sweep that out to my JP Morgan money market account or whatever that might be so now suddenly you have this tiered system where on autopilot your money just works for you right and you have in the right place at the right time the same thing on lending i don't think people you know either people have a lot of money or they have a lot of debt um people don't realize sometimes how much they're spending on interest right the way in our opinion to mitigate that is just like you do it for your yield you can do the same thing on your interest like if you have a line of credit that you can automate the movement between then you can have a line of credit and a checking account it automatically pulls down right when you need it pays back when you don't and then you can do that with another third line an assetbased lender or a bank line of credit or whatever you want so you automate your yield minimize your interest and that's usually worth quite a bit the juice is worth the squeeze for any business that's over $5 million dude yeah look and I think people should really understand this whole sweeps idea because it took me a long time to to come around to it i'm like I have money in my bank like what where is it going they're like to a different bank that pays automatically but you just say hey always keep a million dollars in fresh cash right like I need a million dollars to cover daily expenses well what am I doing i have I literally have an extra five million then because I keep about five million in treasuries i have whatever $6 million in my cash on hand account and they're like "Okay Sean you don't need all that cash let's earn it quickly with whatever 4% 8% whatever right and yeah do it smart and if it goes automatically back and forth it's all FDIC insured it sounds pretty good how come how come the big banks don't get do this to me they just don't have to well the the answer before they have record profits you know the the less facitious answer is I think they don't for whatever reason they don't care at all the small midm market which is kind of crazy to me to think about you as a small mid market but they they just are in the wholesale business so if you're JP Morgan and you have a trillion dollar balance sheet or whatever their balance sheet is like they honestly compete on regulation and kind of size they are not competing just like the Telos like you mentioned Matt they're not competing on customer service and the best product to the customers like it's gotten so skewed that the big banks don't have to compete on products and service like when was the last time you heard someone say that there's any difference in products and services from any of the banks right you name it Bank of America Chase whoever it might be right they just don't have to compete on that and so for the first time we believe now that we can compete and win on things like customer service and product and making you money and you know there's other great companies out there that have started to do this like Brex and Mercury and Ramp but we believe if you really focus on the needs of this specific segment you can actually build products that are for this segment and that's I think the big difference yeah well you know the advantage of being at city is they might give you $60 trillion dollars so if you're not going to go through I heard that they take it back though i'm pretty sure they got it back they got it back yeah no no it makes a ton of sense and also we've seen that there can be really good venture outcomes in this space right like you know ramp $13 billion valuation tackling the credit card first and I think it does makes a lot more sense to be like "No we're going to tackle the bank account first you guys eventually roll out a great credit card product or whatever else but like actually making nobody likes their bank it's always a horrible experience so actually making that that seamless is awesome i'm really excited for this AI layer thing rolling out that's really what pushed me over the edge cuz after this podcast ends I have to go pull that manually i'm not on Highbeam yet so I'm really excited to like just get that every single day sent to me we're we're we're super excited about it and we've been doing a lot of work here to basically what's happened is your financial data is scattered across the enterprise as you know right you have your credit card data you have your QuickBooks data you have your Shopify sales data it's all in like 10 different places so first is get that together and clean that so you have a foundation in one place in real time and that's a lot of the work we did and then now how do you get access to that data both in a live Google sheet of 13 cash flow statement but also now you can access that through LMS or AI or other ways so how do we go and launch now these kind of AI agents essentially to access that data that can also then move the money and that's really the exciting part because we can do that understanding this specific need so the treasury thing we mentioned about like AI being able to move that money back and forth but also doing basic scenario analysis so with our AI launch that's coming out we should be able to have you ask a question like you know what would happen if my return rate on my top selling skew spiked by 5% what's the impact on cash now we might not we might have to ask a few more questions and kind of go through it but we're very close to actually giving you a 95% accurate answer for those like quick quick tell me this tell me this tell me this because we have access to the accurate data and that I think really becomes the gamecher for like could we give you a tool where you can literally log in and ask those questions that are top of mind either for recall because you need that number right away or you want to do a quick scenario analysis or whatever they might be so you have to talk to your finance team it's like an AI FPNA person is that exactly right so we're calling it you you eventually solve the biggest and most annoying operational problem that probably all of us have which is inventory forecasting right than even the multi-billion dollar brand exactly scenario analysis because it's fundamentally uncertain right you can do your best but we have to draft up all these scenarios manually right now and everyone does it in spreadsheets apple still does it in a spreadsheet and so that's true actually like they're still doing FPNA in a giant spreadsheet so Well now I get why David went is is working with you guys this is this is pretty cool man well I only have one question when okay you guys like dude I moved to British Columbia from Burlington so like we are like cousins here man like we were very close okay when can I actually get this in Canada like I'm still a Canadian company I bank with TD I don't have when do I get the cool toys you know we've we've we've been asked that a lot as a as a Canadian it hurts me to say no time soon but if you have a US entity where we're we're the bagg for you but I it's just Canadian banks are even worse than US banks when it comes to this stuff which is hard to buy now as you know yeah oh no no no you got got you yeah totally and so not quite yet although you know the AI layer we can pull the data from the Canadian banks so there might be a world in which you can get access to your AI analyst actually not in the notsodistant future but um not anytime soon is the unfortunate answer on the banking side all right well dude this is a long-standing tradition of uh really smart Canadian operators making stuff for Americans so from from from Shopify to Pila case to now Highbeam um but Samir I you know before we end this you said this is only available for certain size businesses so who who can benefit from this right now who is like the actual customer that can save money or make money using these tools so any business with over a million dollars of sales we're happy to talk to and on board and the reason we set that threshold is because we want to make sure that we provide the services out of the gate that makes them successful so if you have over a million dollar sales and you're omni channel consumer brand basically someone with physical goods that you're selling primarily online but also on retailer or wholesale you're in a sweet spot um anyone from $10 million in sales onwards we would do a lot more with a free assessment and kind of a lot of the bells and whistles around triing the AI giving you a dedicated manage uh relationship management person giving you a dedicated implementation person and that's a large part of what we're trying to do here is take all of those janky manual spreadsheets that everyone has and make sure that we can use our data to automate those and then use those to go drive better business decisions so that requires a lot of investment on our side but we think that you know anyone from a million dollars onwards we're happy to make that investment to try to make it happen um and that's kind of how we work with consumer brands in general well dude I mean that's everybody listening right now so all 20,000 of you you know uh David from uh I guess he's the president of Highbeam now so I guess you're you're the guy you get to hang out with every day he told me that I'll be making over $300,000 a year for free from the Treasury sweeps thing so is that typical well you have a lot more cash than some have sitting in your checking 0% checking account but it's not it's not atypical to have hundreds of thousands of dollars of value um like 3400,000 at a business your size is not atypical that is completely accurate this is free money and this to be super clear how the free money is generated it goes from a FDIC insured bank account to a different higher yield FDIC so let me just walk you through it exactly so there's no confusion because it's a good point people like why wait a minute why is this why does exist so most people you're running in a 0% checking account your business daytoday and that's because the banks have decided that that's a good number that people should accept there's no fundamental reason why it should be so first of all the money comes in from the day it hits the bank account you're making 2.5% now that will be swept to a high yield account that's a savings account at say 4% every day automatically and if you want to then sweep it again every day or every week to a money market account or a treasury account or whatever else account you want you can set that up as well so the way the FDIC insurance works is so that that's kind of the sweep process that make sense and so you're earning basically instead of saying "Oh I'll let my money pile up in the 0% checking account until it's at 5 million then once a quarter I'll look at it and say like shoot I should move this money out." Now you're moving it out every day and the forecasting helps you be confident that you always have access to enough cash at enough points in time so that's the sweep part the FDIC insurance part is is important to understand so every account in the US has by default $250,000 of FDIC insurance that is the federal government guarantees that your money up to $250,000 if the bank fails in the unlikely event the federal government will make available to you the next day right so that is kind of the baseline protection that every bank account has what we do is we are able to offer much higher than that through a process called intraank sweeps so this is what large customers do which is they basically split your deposits into 250k tanches and overnight those to different banks and reconstitute it so by doing the stacking essentially all your money is FDIC insured which is a big unlock to be feel you know safe sleep well at night to know that your entire cash balance is FDIC insured so that is the mechanism where for larger companies we start at 3 million but we've gone all the way up to 100 million that you can go and make sure that you have FDIC insurance on your entire cash at all points in time did that answer your question Sean yeah yeah look I'm going to I'm going to explain it back to all the the other smooth brains out there in operators world so what they're saying is right now I have I'm just going to say $5 million sitting in a 0% Chase bank account and it's actually worse than 0% because they charge me fees every time I every time I use it so that that bank account isn't staying flat it's going down and let's say in a typical twoe period I probably need access to $2 million right so I have $3 million extra in just bonus money that literally just sits in bank account makes me feel better and what you guys are saying is hey look we're going to take that $3 million and we're going to put that into a minimum of two and a half% uh a annual you know uh yield on that up to four may maybe you can get five and a half if you get something crazy you know you market it's all insured or whatever but then we're going to say it's $2.5 million we're going to take that into 10 equal sums of a quarter million and spread that in 10 separate bank accounts that all have your name on it you have access to and you're still earning that yield it's still insured uh and you're you're it's either going to sit in your bank account or you can make it some money for you and I so there's two reasons why I signed up with Highbeam number well three number one I like David i asked him to be on my board one time so I really like him i think he's a great operator uh number two I really am looking forward to this uh automated AI future if AI has taken over coding it makes a ton of sense for it to take over finance right like these are verifiable facts so like it should be able to you know bounce off and balance those things right and then number three I would love to make a free $300,000 so I'll let you guys know my experience with Highbeam in the next couple of weeks amazing right on well guys this was super great it was nice to like get the full like unpack on everything yeah and then last thing um plug on how people can um can access H Highbeam so we do have a special deal on hibbeam.co/operate co/operators that'll be live to give people a fourmonth access to the free AI features so people can log in try it out try out the AI analyst try out the AI treasury try out the AI bookkeeping and if it adds value of course we're love to chat with them but we'll make that available for free to all listeners as well you guys heard it here first you want free AI more AI in your business potentially save $300,000 or getting free money go to highbeam.co/operators and then Sib on your side how can I get 10% off my next uh laptop stand uh branchfern.comoperators which is a link I'm gonna create right after this session all right so if you want awesome next generation banking or potentially some really cool you know wooden furniture operators the place to go man thank you guys for being here thanks so much guys appreciate it [Music]