Episode Introduction

In this insightful episode of The Cash Flow CFO Podcast, hosted by Pam Prior, I join the conversation to unpack how hidden relational trauma deeply influences entrepreneurs—especially high-achieving women—in the way they make decisions, relate to money, and ultimately build or sabotage their businesses. As a licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist, I bring a unique perspective on how unaddressed trauma can silently shape money patterns, risk tolerance, and leadership style, often without entrepreneurs even realizing it.

This episode is a blend of practical business wisdom and healing insight, designed to help entrepreneurs recognize and heal the unseen wounds that impact their financial success and emotional well-being. From understanding how early relational experiences impact decision-making, to embracing capital preservation and smart hiring practices, this conversation offers a roadmap for sustainable growth that honors both your business goals and your inner health. Whether you’re struggling with money blocks, leadership challenges, or simply want a deeper understanding of the emotional undercurrents in entrepreneurship, this episode will empower you to move forward with clarity and confidence.

Key Takeaways

• Hidden relational trauma shapes entrepreneurs’ relationships with money, influencing decisions that can either build or sabotage their businesses.
• Entrepreneurship requires grit and tenacity, but also an awareness of timing, luck, and the importance of standing in the game despite setbacks.
• Capital preservation after a business exit is crucial; living off the interest rather than principal protects long-term financial health and emotional stability.
• Hiring top talent, especially from international markets, can exponentially increase business output and create competitive advantage.
• Traditional hiring methods like resumes and interviews are insufficient; structured “fly traps” and paid trial projects reveal true candidate potential.
• The Pareto principle (80/20 rule) applies strongly to talent, where a small fraction of employees drive the majority of results.
• Healing hidden trauma supports healthier money patterns, better risk-taking, and more authentic leadership for sustainable business success.

Notable Quotes

“Hidden relational trauma shapes the way entrepreneurs make decisions, relate to money, and build—or sabotage—their businesses.”

“Money did not make me happy; it removed the distraction I had from my unhappiness. What I do love about money is that it makes me feel safe.”

“Every 7-figure business needs clear financial direction, and capital preservation is one of the most important strategies to protect your future.”

“Hiring is the most important entrepreneurial endeavor. If you can crack the talent code, there’s nothing left for you to do but let your team outrun you and make you money.”

“Most organizations repel top talent, especially as they grow bureaucratic. But paying 10% more than the market can yield 5 to 10 times the output.”

Topics Covered

• Hidden Trauma and Entrepreneurship: Exploring how early relational wounds unconsciously influence business decisions and money relationships.
• Risk, Timing, and Luck in Business: The critical roles of perseverance, market timing, and luck in entrepreneurial success and failure.
• Capital Preservation Post-Exit: Why maintaining financial safety through careful investment strategies is essential after selling a business.
• Talent Acquisition Strategies: Revolutionary hiring practices that go beyond resumes and interviews to find and retain top performers globally.
• The Pareto Principle in Hiring: Understanding the disproportionate impact of a few key employees on overall business performance.
• International Hiring Advantages: How accessing global talent pools can bring exceptional skills and dedication often overlooked in domestic hiring.
• Relational Trauma and Money Patterns: Identifying and healing the wounds that shape entrepreneurs’ financial behaviors and leadership styles.

Full Transcript

Andrea Jensen (Host): Hey everybody, this is Andrea Jensen from the Cashflow CFO, and you’re listening to the Cashflow CFO Podcast, the show that explores the financial side of running a business for people who want to maximize profitability and scale with confidence. If you want to make smart financial decisions based on data and put more of your hard-earned profits into your pocket, this is the podcast for you. This episode of the Cashflow CFO Podcast is brought to you by the Cashflow CFO. Did you know that on average, business owners have up to 84% of their personal net worth tied up in their business? Our virtual CPAs and CFOs, as well as accounting and bookkeeping experts, empower business owners just like you to make big leaps that help them maximize profitability and scale with confidence. Visit the cashflowcfo.com for more information, and thank you for listening.

Andrea Jensen (Host): Hey everyone, it’s Andrea, and our guest for today is Qasim. He is a serial entrepreneur who has built six, seven, and eight figure businesses, including two successful exits. He is the co-founder of Driven Mastermind, and last year he exited Solutions8, one of the world’s top Google ad agencies, and co-founded Pareto Talent, a company that is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs reclaim their time by matching them with world-class executive assistants. Welcome to the show.

Qasim: Andrea, thank you for having me. I really appreciate you.

Andrea Jensen (Host): Yeah, I’m excited to talk with you. I know you’ve got some good stuff that you are cooking up. You’ve got a book that you want to talk about, and it sounds like you have a wealth of information and experience in building and exiting businesses, which I know our audience always loves to hear about. So, tell me, how did you get started in the… It sounds like your first venture was in the digital marketing space. Is that correct?

Qasim: No, I’ve had over a hundred at-bats entrepreneurially. I’m the world’s greatest failure. I’ve tried everything. I love that. I had a company selling purified mercury. I’ve had a furniture store. I’ve had a medical and legal transcription business. I’ve tried web design, obviously consulting, every type of consulting you can imagine. I have taken so many swings. I once sat down and tried to write it all out, and I just couldn’t. It got depressing. But the digital thing, what is it, even a broken clock is right twice a day. I think I just lucked out in so many ways. What you’ll notice, I think, and feel free to test this assumption is that every marketer in my experience is actually a failed entrepreneur. So when you meet a digital marketer, what you’re really doing is you’re meeting somebody who failed in another business, but for some reason, the digital marketing thing was what they kind of got good at, and so they just became a marketer.

Andrea Jensen (Host): Interesting.

Qasim: Yeah, that’s…

Andrea Jensen (Host): Let me unpack that a little bit in my experience. There might be something to that because most people doing digital marketing, there’s an art and a science to it, and not everybody can crack that code. I know as a business owner myself, that’s something that I’m like, I just, I don’t, I can’t quite figure out how to do all of those things. So we pay people to do them for us, and they’re really good at it. So yeah, I love that. But I think what you said that’s the most important thing for everybody listening or watching is that you’ve had a few at-bats, and they didn’t all turn into home runs, but you’ve had the home runs as well. So it’s that tenacity, and it’s that grit to just keep going. And the timing of people go, oh, your first business was a success. Well, yeah, that might be true, but there’s the market demand. There’s so much in the timing of what you have and what the market needs. You could have the best thing in the world, but if that’s not what the market needs right now, you’re going to fall flat on your face.

Qasim: Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. Fun fact, I learned this very recently. I didn’t know it until somebody shared it with me, but Blockbuster came out with streaming way before Netflix.

Andrea Jensen (Host): Really?

Qasim: Can you believe that? They came out with streaming, and it didn’t fly. And so they put it by the wayside and considered it a failed experiment, and didn’t adhere to the timing lesson that you just spoke about, and then now look. It’s interesting the way that that works. It’s not about innovation. It’s about so many other things. So I think staying out on the field is maybe one of the most important entrepreneurial skills, like just willing to just stand out there and get rained on. Keep your hand on the stove, choose your analogy. But yeah, tenacity, stick with itness, grit, whatever we’re going to call it.

Andrea Jensen (Host): Yeah.

Qasim: And you know what? And I see from the seat that I sit in, we work with so many businesses, and we see finances, and we see, what’s the word I want to say? Risk tolerance of a business owner. We see, just we create so many of the what ifs. If this, then do this, if this, then do this. That’s one way that you can look at it to kind of give yourself the prevent failure, by having that site. But also, there’s just so much that goes into… You have to also just be, what’s the word I want to say? Calculated risks, I guess is a good way to put it, right? Because you could lose a pretty penny if you’re all in on something, but don’t have the data to back up all of those components you were just talking about.

Andrea Jensen (Host): Yeah, I like Jeff Bezos has this really extraordinary quote that I’m about to butcher, but he basically talks about entrepreneurship as the greatest gamble anybody’s ever been offered. Because unlike every other gamble, you can manage your downside risk, if you’re smart, and your upside risk is potentially limitless, which means you can swing, you know, a hundred times, a thousand times, a hundred thousand times. And if you miss 99% of the time, but you hit once, it can still work for you. And that tends to be the truth. It’s the classic Thomas Edison quote about 10,000 ways it didn’t work. Like you just need to just stay at it. And that’s been true in my life. When I made my exit, you know, I had a low eight figure exit I’m rich, which is fun. It’s, you know, money’s fun. And that’s why we play the game. And the thing that was funny about it is I don’t really claim that that was prowess. It was luck. I built the number one ranked Google ads agents in the world which I’m pretty proud of, but it wasn’t worth what they paid. I lucked out post COVID, the economy froze, private equity froze, IPOs froze. All of the real businesses that private equity usually buys took themselves off the market. So, you know, pegs love SAS and SAS wasn’t about to sell during a post COVID world because they didn’t know what was happening. So then they moved down to e-com, but e-commerce businesses realized like, wait a minute, I don’t know what’s going on. So they took themselves out of the market, but these private equity companies still, they had to deploy because they raised this money and they have to, like, they don’t, people don’t realize they don’t make money by making money. They make money by spending money. So they had to deploy. And so they went downstream to business or asset types that look like e-commerce or SAS, predictable recurring revenue, easy to evaluate, fits within their model. So all of a sudden overnight, I got 65 unsolicited offers.

Qasim: Wow.

Andrea Jensen (Host): Just sitting around being, you know what I mean? Like crazy, just overwhelming. And I picked one soft bank back. They’d just gotten a hundred million dollar check with a mandate to purchase agencies. And I’m just the luckiest guy in the whole wide world. And what’s funny about it is, you know, I was playing hot potato because I gave them my hot potato. And nine months later, Google rolls out a campaign type that effectively nullifies the value of agencies. And they grew the agency from 200 clients to 130, you know, but I got my money. So I was, and had they not come out of the woodwork the way that the buyers did, I would have been the one holding the bag there. I would have had to lay people off. And, you know, instead we had this trust, this kitty. I was able to keep people employed two years longer than would have been likely or possible.

Qasim: Yeah, it was super cool. But I think the lesson is, if you’re listening, stick it out, you know, like it’s sad because there’s, I think there’s far less science than there is just pure dumb luck. You know, just get out there and be Forrest Gump and be too stupid to fail.

Andrea Jensen (Host): Yeah, don’t have the ego and don’t have the embarrassment if it doesn’t work, you know, pick up what you’ve learned from that failure because every single time at every swing at bat, you’re gonna learn something. Carry it to the next, carry it to the next. You’re compounding that, you know, education that you can’t get anywhere else other than just trying.

Qasim: Yeah, yeah, you’re absolutely right. Yeah, very cool. Well, I love that. And I think I will do a whole episode on what you just said about private equity because people don’t realize that, you know, they have to deploy those funds within a certain amount of time or they’re gonna, you know, be in trouble. And so when you get, because I’ve had those moments too where all of a sudden my inbox is just flooded with, oh, we wanna buy an accounting firm. Oh, we wanna buy an accounting firm, you know, and then it’ll be quiet for a while. And then the flood of, you know, the emails again and then it’s quiet. And so you can pick up on these cycles, right? If you’re paying attention or if you’re, you know, know how it works. So I think that’s really something that’s not talked about enough in the entrepreneurial world as well, unless you’re used to doing, you know, M&A transactions and things like that. So we see a lot of that activity from what we do and how we support our clients. So very cool.

Andrea Jensen (Host): So tell me, you had your big win. What’d you do? Off to a deserted island to just enjoy all your riches?

Qasim: I got a really good advice. I’m friends with a guy named Brandon Turner. Brandon, he’s famous in the real estate world. He was the host of the BiggerPockets podcast. If you go to Amazon and look at the top 10 bestselling books on real estate investment, he wrote seven of them. Wow. So he’s a really, really brilliant human, but he’s relevant to the discussion because he ends up seeing more post exits than anybody because he helps people place money, right? And so if you made an exit, you find Brandon, you give him your money, he invests it for you. He’s brilliant, kind, humble, generous. I love him. And he told me, he actually kind of manhandled me a little bit. He’s like, look, I’ll tell you what to do post exit. exit because the post-exit world, and you’ve probably seen this as much as anybody, Andrea, it’s the most dangerous epoch for an entrepreneur. You’re far more likely post-exit to get a divorce, commit suicide, develop an addiction, lose friendships. It’s actually really catastrophically damaging in a lot of ways and so what Brandon told me was, you’re not allowed to do anything for a year. Don’t make any major decisions, don’t even deploy your capital. Just take a year. I did that. I took a year and I have a mastermind with some friends so that’s easy. That’s very accessible. It’s three days a quarter, but other than that, I traveled around. I got two little boys and tried to figure out who I was and still have failed at nailing that, but it was the best advice that I’ve ever gotten because it really protected me from just jumping right back into the fray, which I think would have been catastrophically damaging and even post-exit, you shouldn’t give poor people money because we think we’re investors and so I’ve started all this stuff and I’m overwhelmed by it all, but if I hadn’t taken that year, I think it would have been much, much, much worse.

Andrea Jensen (Host): To our listeners, just remember, don’t invest. You don’t need to deploy. Don’t put it in T-bills or something like just an S&P index fund, just capital preservation, take a year off and then when you come back around, you’ll be clear-headed and maybe a little bit more capable to make those decisions. The thing that’s funny about money is I thought I was a welfare baby and welfare babies think money is going to make them happy and money did not make me happy at all. It actually, interestingly, it removed the distraction that I had from my unhappiness. I was working 80 hours a week for 20 years and so I had something to focus on and as soon as that went away, I was like, oh, no, I’m miserable. Not because of that, but maybe even in spite of it and that was, now to give credit where credit’s due, the thing that I do love about money is I feel safe. You know, like I feel and I think everybody deserves that. So I feel like I always know where my next meal is going to come from. I live in a house that’s two standard deviations beneath my tax bracket. I drive a 40-year-old Honda. Like, I didn’t go and do the