'I Got Tired of Cleaning Up Accounting Messes': How Kristen Berdar Turned Her Frustration Into a Multimillion-Dollar Business

Summary

In this episode of Asking Good Questions, Edward Roske interviews Kristen Berdar, a partner at BST and Company, who has pioneered virtual accounting solutions. They discuss the transformation of finance and accounting, the challenges of traditional models, and the impact of technology and AI on the industry. Kristen shares her journey in identifying market opportunities, overcoming resistance to change, and the importance of upskilling in the face of AI advancements. The conversation also touches on generational perspectives on virtual services, the significance of cloud technology, and the future of financial governance.


Takeaways

• Kristen Berdar launched BST's virtual accounting solutions to address operational challenges in traditional accounting.
• COVID-19 accelerated the acceptance of remote accounting services.
• Younger generations are more receptive to hiring expertise remotely.
• Cloud technology is essential for modern accounting practices.
• AI can streamline processes but requires careful implementation to ensure data privacy.
• Financial governance can be enhanced through technology and multiple oversight layers.
• Integrating financial and non-financial data provides a comprehensive view for clients.
• Upskilling is crucial for finance professionals to adapt to AI advancements.
• Companies must balance daily operations with long-term technological goals.
• Building a strong peer network is vital for finance leaders.

Sound bites

"COVID excelled all of this"
"AI can help them do that"
"Find a really great peer group"


Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Virtual Accounting Solutions
01:06 The Epiphany Behind Virtual Accounting
04:35 Overcoming Resistance to Change
06:22 Generational Shifts in Financial Services
08:59 Leveraging Global Resources for Client Success
11:54 Technology Integration in Accounting
15:03 Enhancing Financial Governance with Technology
16:35 Integrating Financial and Non-Financial Data
18:06 The Future of Accounting and AI
23:43 AI's Impact on the Accounting Profession
27:29 Balancing Daily Operations with Long-Term Goals
29:20 Lightning Round: Quick Insights

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Transcript

Edward Roske (00:00) Hello and welcome to Asking Good Questions, the podcast where we dive into the transformation of finance and accounting through the lens of those amazing people leading that charge. I am your host, Edward Roske, as always attempting at least to ask the good questions in a world where business increasingly demands real-time financial insights without that overhead of having to build out an entire finance department.

My guest today has pioneered a solution that is disrupting traditional accounting and finance models. She launched BST's virtual accounting solutions seven years ago and has since scaled it to millions almost in annual revenue, serving clients ranging from major brands to nonprofits across multiple states in the US. She's been described as a visionary with an entrepreneurial mindset. She's changing how modern CFO services deliver value in the digital era.

Joining me today is Kristen Berdar, partner at BST and Company and the driving force behind their virtual accounting solutions division. Kristen, welcome to Asking Good Questions.

Kristen Berdar (01:06) Thank you so much for having me, Edward. It's a pleasure.

Edward Roske (01:09) Thank you. Kristen, we're going to start with a career pivot, which we're going to go back in the way back machine to you were an accounting professional and you were an established accounting professional and you decided to launch the virtual accounting solutions area at BST. What told you the market was ready for it? Did you see signals? Were there business pains you uncovered? Like, how did you figure out this is an opportunity to rethink how the world delivers accounting services?

Kristen Berdar (01:38) Yes, to all of that. I did have that epiphany. I had spent more than 20 years in our tax world, in our consulting world, in our audits. I just got tired one day about having to clean up our tax clients' books. They would come to us, they would need tax services, told us throughout the year that they were keeping current on items and then you would see their books at the end of the year and they were just a mess. They were incomplete, the bank accounts weren't reconciled. We were like, how are you managing your business on a day-to-day basis, to which they would respond, "Well, I call the bank and get a balance in the bank account." And we just decided that I had decided that enough was enough and I was going to help clients. I was missing the consulting piece of it that I had with my clients on more than an annual basis and I wanted to get back into that operational side and I wanted to help them from an operational standpoint so that they could really exponentially excel their businesses and grow.

Edward Roske (02:38) Well, I love the idea that companies can focus on what they're really good at. Traditionally doing a startup and trying to get from small to midsize to enter up market to enterprise, it required having to figure out how to do a good job in finance and accounting and HR and legal and IT and I don't know, staffing and hiring and termination, like you name it. And now we're actually at a world where we can say, let's go find people that are better at that, that are actually specialized.

But what surprises me, why it hasn't happened to this point, I'm thinking it's because, and I'm going to pigeonhole half of my viewers here, accountants are more traditionally oriented in their mindset. They think because this has worked really well and our job is governance and compliance and making sure everything adds up, we're gonna keep doing it that way. So what led you down that entrepreneurial path? Like what made you say, I've got a way I could restructure this and do it differently as opposed to playing it safe, doing the traditional conventional services route?

Kristen Berdar (03:41) I think at the time I was starting, outsourcing as a whole was starting to gain momentum within the accounting world. And so I had some good peers that I kind of leaned on a little bit with some ideas and said, this is what I'd like to do. Do you think this is going to fly? And I had a lot of support. I had support from my full partner group to move forward with my ideas and my thoughts. And as I was already a partner in my firm. So that being said, it comes with a little bit of entrepreneurial mindset to begin with. But I just saw a problem that I wanted to solve and wanted to go out there and help our clients and expand our services.

Edward Roske (04:19) Cool. So let's talk about any resistance that you faced. Is there still a segment of CEOs or CFOs that like the physical presence of an accounting team that just, I don't know, want to be able to look over and watch them reconcile something?

Kristen Berdar (04:35) Yeah, so definitely some resistance. A lot of bankers that I met with in the beginning too, where I have this great client and they need a lot of help and I would say, great, here's what I got. And they'd say, well, when you get it off the ground or when you do that, when you have some more clients and it's proven, give us a call back. And some business owners in the beginning were very used to their CFO, controller, accountant sitting in that office next to them. They wanted to provide oversight. They wanted to be able to call them into their office and ask questions. And that was not the business model. I wanted to be able to answer questions and help more than just the client that I could get to on a Monday and the client I could get to on a Tuesday or the staff could get to. So it really was very important to me that it be a flexible, virtual, not in somebody's office. I wanted them to use their real estate in their office for revenue generating, not overhead ideas. So there was a lot of resistance and actually COVID accelerated all of that. So when COVID came and shut the world down, they all realized that, hey, I can do this remotely and I can rely on the best of the best from a remote office and maybe I don't need them sitting next to me in my office. So I guess in hindsight, for as painful as COVID was for the world, it accelerated the business.

Edward Roske (05:54) Yeah, we're going to have this to our list of yet another good thing about pandemics that they do shove us away from one way of thinking into another way of thinking. It's really interesting and important to think that you did create this pre-COVID and to that point about resistance. Now it's obvious y'all don't need to be live within 50 miles of a corporate headquarters to be able to get something done. We can live anywhere we want, we can function, but then also that function doesn't have to remain in-house. It can go outside. Knowing that we now have a bunch of workers rising up, Gen Z who really have entered the workforce mostly since the start of pandemic, we have millennials who definitely picked up on those lessons very quickly. Is there a generational divide in the receptiveness towards virtual services like virtual financial services?

Kristen Berdar (06:45) Not anymore. No. I think beforehand, yes, absolutely. And I think the younger generations were more open to hiring somebody for expertise that they didn't have. And I think the more established business owners who kind of had those already established processes and policies weren't as open to somebody maybe not being there. But then as they got older in their career and wanted to turn their businesses over they definitely found value in the expertise that they could just hire outside of their office.

Edward Roske (07:19) Yes, my father passed away a few years ago, but he was a child of the mindset that if you are lucky enough to have a job, you should be there at the office before your boss arrives and you should stay until after your boss leaves. And I kind of wonder what would he think of this world where you can work from anywhere and are in some ways expected to like the availability.

I'm a Gen Xer and we all talked about work-life balance. It's a concept you Gen Z people go look it up. It's an antiquated term that basically meant I will do work from nine to five and I will do whatever I want from five to nine and neither of the two shall meet. And now we can check on our personal lives while we're at work. And while we're at home, we check our email and we find out how things are doing. With the virtual services world, does it expand availability? Like, does it make it so people can actually get an answer at, you know, after 5 p.m. or like on weekends? Or is it more of the traditional kind of everybody has to be in one place and it's really the nine to five type world?

Kristen Berdar (08:24) They don't need to be in one place. We actually do have a few resources that are offshore that are utilized for tasks, but they are a part of our team. Our consultants, CFOs, strategists, business advisors are all local here. So it's an additional resource because as anybody in finance knows, the accounting professionals are dwindling and it is nice to see some of the numbers coming back up, but resources need to be utilized when the work is there. So we tend to look where we can to get qualified, good people. And then depending on the time zone for the client will depend on the services that are rendered but we usually have a pretty defined scope of what we're working on and we try to reiterate that we are not brain surgeons and that usually if we can't be reached for a half an hour or an hour that life, you know, nobody is going to pass away and it should be okay if we can't pay a vendor and we do our best to be proactive and make sure that the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted so that we don't get into that emergency. But we do have clients that close and have PE deals and they're going till all hours of the night and we make sure that we're available and can do what we can do for them.

Edward Roske (09:45) Let's talk about that going outside of the traditional, you know, one state, one location as companies scale up. So you serve clients, lost track of all the states like Texas, Georgia, Missouri, New York. But as you just mentioned, you also internally have resources outside of the United States. That gives you a multi-state, but also an awareness of kind of international issues that a lot of like localized departments, finance departments might miss.

What kind of global advice could you give to companies that are saying, well, we want to go beyond just one country. We want to start having people in other areas. What would you advise them to do to kind of get beyond that local mindset?

Kristen Berdar (10:27) Involve your tax accountant because the tax rules usually will override any other business purpose. But for us it was more client service. We wanted to be able to provide things overnight. So when we came in the next morning things were done and it shortened our service timing. So you just need to be aware of the companies you're using. Who's on the hook for all of the employees? Make sure they're trained. We vet them. So they, in essence, we get them through a partner firm that we have, so they're actually part of their firm, not ours, but they only work for us. We don't share them, we don't leverage them with other firms. They are part of our BST culture and they're a part of our BST team and they participate in our huddles. So we just treat them as an extension of our company.

Then I think you can be very successful at it. If you don't have any integration with them and you're not really speaking with them or you're sharing them and it's just one portion of a resource for them, I think in those situations you have a greater chance of failure.

Edward Roske (11:39) How do you keep people from different locations, different companies, different kind of operating models, technologically, how do you keep them connected? Is this a lot of really integrated traditional on-prem systems or using cloud technology?

Kristen Berdar (11:54) Everything we do is cloud-based within our department. I mean, our firm is not completely cloud-based, but we've been paperless for almost probably 20 years now, the firm itself. But virtual accounting solutions and all of our outsourcing teams are now, for the most part, 100% cloud-based. So we share, we have set technology stacks that we utilize to communicate with clients, to upload, download, request information. They can access their accounting software 24-7, seven days a week.

They just have a host of technology at their disposal that they might not be able to afford on their own if they needed to. We were able to leverage some pricing because of how we have that available to them. But we have weekly cashflow meetings with our clients, so we're constantly leveraging teams and leveraging, we use Box to collaborate and whatever our technology stack is, that's our best way to service them.

Edward Roske (12:52) Have you found just from a technology standpoint that the best solutions are the most sophisticated ones, the ones that are kind of pulling in all the various different aspects together, or the ones that are kind of targeted to solve fundamental pain points? Like you just mentioned, Teams, for instance, from communication, but clearly I'm not inside of Teams trying to enter debits and credits in my general ledger. So are you seeing the more broad technologies as what tends to be the winning ones or kind of more targeted point solutions?

Kristen Berdar (13:21) Well, when clients come on board from an outsourcing standpoint, we have a set stack. So we will use a Sage Intacct for like a general ledger or reporting dashboards or we'll use QuickBooks online, depending on the size of the client, the sophistication, the complexity of the client. We use Teams to have meetings or Zoom to have those collaboration meetings. So we're always on camera. One of my favorite lines with all of my staff is camera's on. Camera's on, eyes up, camera's on.

You know it helps to create that relationship with the clients if I'm just going to call on the phone and have a conversation. That's still better than an email probably but it's not like having a conversation and when we can't just get on a plane where it's not financially responsible to get on a plane and just go visit whenever every now and then it's a way for us to form that connection and to have that bond with our clients but it's mostly solving their pain points in being able to bring in some sort of technology that they might be able. We find the simpler the better to a certain degree. If we bring in a solution that they can't access or they don't know how to get around or go look at their financial data in, they're not going to use it, in which case it's just a waste. So we still need to have a way to communicate and get that financial data to them in the way that they can absorb it and they can understand it. And it's useful.

Edward Roske (14:39) I like the approach of simple and using technology to solve pain points. Are there additional things it's giving beyond that? They might not even know are existing pains. For instance, does it enhance financial governance? Does it reduce fraud? Does it give greater security? Are there things people are getting by leveraging technology that they didn't realize they were missing?

Kristen Berdar (15:03) Absolutely. So when people come to us for outsourcing services, we have no less than two people, maybe even three people on an account. Whereas if they were going to go out and hire somebody and use those same dollars, they might need, they might get one person. They might not even get a whole person, they might just get a part-time person. So we give them multiple sets of eyes, multiple oversight. We bring in bill pay software that has approvals in it, that has some AI built right into it from a coding standpoint. It can look for multiple invoices with the same number. We can see kind of what they've historically what they've paid within those softwares. So it definitely offers a lot of new, a new level of sophistication for them that they might not have had on their own and definitely provide some oversight so that the days of having a solo bookkeeper that had bank authority and check signing authority and could wire money to anybody they want to really shouldn't exist anymore.

Edward Roske (16:10) Yeah, it's never a good thing when your second set of eyes is also your own set of eyes. So even for the honest people, it's better to have those multiple levels of checks and balance all fully integrated. Speaking of integrated, so one of the functions of finance and accounting now seems to be taking data from multiple places and saying kind of how does that relate? So not just, this is what's on the income statement balance sheet, cashflow, and that's it, but how does our sales data affect that? Maybe we can look at more detailed sales or detailed marketing or detailed HR data. Are you being brought in to that kind of helping integrate data question?

Kristen Berdar (16:49) We are, it's not an everyday occurrence, but we are on our more sophisticated clients. So we do track some statistical accounts. Our software tracks both financial and non-financial data. So we will track like one of our national brands, Benjamin Moore paints. We'll track gallons of paint sold. We'll track different things from their POS system and bring them in and give them a non-financial KPI dashboard as well. So they can have everything in one place for them.

Edward Roske (17:17) Awesome. I want to talk about the future, but before we do that, we will take a quick break to hear from today's episode sponsor. We are always very appreciative of them. They're leading the future of artificial intelligence, Caprus AI.

Welcome back. I hope that that brief word from our sponsor was not only informative, but motivated you to maybe want to try them because producing these episodes is a great deal of expense and effort, and we appreciate them for handling the costs. Back to our guest for today, Kristen, during the break, we were talking about how accounting and finance, in some cases, even internally, we need to figure out how to adopt those technologies. Like what can we do looking forward?

What I'm noticing is the lines are blurring between the traditional accounting world, the traditional finance world, broader business intelligence. As we look towards 2026 and beyond, do you see those boundaries being as clear as they historically were? The debits, the credits, the closing, the consolidation is solely the role of accounting, the budgeting, the planning, the analysis is solely the role of finance. The looking for trends and dashboards is solely the role of business intelligence. Do you see that either inside of your company or externally? Do you see those boundaries blurring?

Kristen Berdar (19:09) I do see those boundaries blurring, especially in small to mid-size companies. I think the larger companies that are running SAP and Oracle and the publicly traded companies, like the GEs of the world, will always have an FP&A department and they'll always have their analysts. I think that the blurring of the lines and the advisory solutions that CPA firms like myself can offer our clients in that dual role allows those smaller companies to have access to analytics and analysis and expertise now at their fingertips that they might not have had before.

Edward Roske (19:48) So let's talk about where it's going. We have AI, obviously it's not five years off anymore. It's happening every day and changing us every day. Let's start by talking about what you're doing internally when you, within your company, within your virtual accounting area. What are some of the ways that you are using AI or that you're looking at using AI?

Kristen Berdar (20:12) We're always looking to use AI wherever we can. It helps us to streamline our processes. It helps us be more efficient. That said, we are a CPA firm. We do have a higher level of standards. We have a lot of privacy issues with social security numbers and the tax department, everything else.

Edward Roske (20:29) You probably also don't want AI hallucinating and making up numbers. I totally understand.

Kristen Berdar (20:32) Right. We also have to look at the credibility of what we're doing. We have some paid services. We have partnerships with some AI companies where they handle a lot of, a good portion of the month-end process for us. We're still in a beta testing phase for us, but we are liking what we see. But obviously, we need companies that have their appropriate SOC certifications. We can't commingle client data. We can't, when you think of AI and the world of AI, AI learns artificial intelligence from all of the data points of all of the information that's dumped into it. So the more you can dump into it, the faster it learns, the better it gets. Well, we need individual silos for every single client. You can't have client A learning from client B in the data world. So it takes a little bit more structure and a little bit more time. So patience takes a lot of patience to figure out what the right path is. But we are beta testing some software right now that we really like.

All of our AP software that we use has some AI built into it on the coding side to help be more efficient. So we've been using that for years actually that's been around. So it gets better every quarter when new releases come out it gets better. Our general ledger software has some co-pilot functionality built into it where it's identifying outliers and if something happens and it's not in the standard practice of what that client is, it will flag it and say hey somebody should look at this. So I think it's coming and it's coming or it's already here and it's getting better. But we can't take a 600 page sale document that I've signed an NDA for and upload into some AI software and say summarize. So we still have we still have some old-fashioned reading to do sometimes and for privacy and security sake and we'll continue to look out for the best interest of our clients whenever that's possible.

Edward Roske (22:23) Well, and you've hit on a few of the concerns that are being addressed right now in the world of AI. Clearly we have data privacy, silo isolation of information. We have the PII side, personal identifiable information. Do we really want to be putting social security numbers or healthcare information out there? There are some historical problems that are almost gone now. Things like hallucinations, if you actually give it your data and use things like retrieval, augmented generation, it'll give you the correct answers now. But we still have to trust but verify, if I may quote Ronald Reagan, we have to be able to make sure that these indeed are the correct results. And there's a human that has to be involved. And I think that's part of what you're doing is even if that human is not there on the client side, the human is there at your organization to go, does this actually make sense? Like, are these numbers still rational? Do the books do indeed tie in if the system tells me that they do?

What are looking ahead we know some of the concerns and there are other concerns looking ahead to the point of maybe we all end up jobless maybe we don't have people coming you know into finance because they go one day that's going to be replaced how do you see AI being disruptive in either a good way or a bad way looking ahead in accounting and finance.

Kristen Berdar (23:43) I don't necessarily see it interrupting accounting and finance in a bad way. I've always been a glass half full kind of person too though and I think that it pressures us and it challenges us, really is the better word, to upskill our people faster, to take a look at our curriculums in colleges, to figure out how to get those entry level people advisory faster. We can't just say, hey in 10 years after you've done all of these steps you will then be ready to be a senior manager in accounting. That doesn't fly these days. We have to figure out how to get them to where they need to be much faster. And I think AI can help them do that, but they do have to understand theory. So I think it challenges the colleges to teach better theory so that they can play those what-if scenarios and they know when something and help identify when something's not the way that we would expect it to be.

Edward Roske (24:39) So it's an excellent point. And there's a level of critical thinking. We have to look and make sure everything makes sense. You also make a good point about AI can speed things up. It can definitely enhance the situation that we're in right now. And it can scale. We can rather than have to throw more humans at it as our business gets twice as big or hire twice as many services, we can have AI step in. But in addition to the enhancement side, the speed up side that AI applies, do you see it? Are there any financial functions you just see being completely reinvented? Like how we think about it entirely changes with AI.

Kristen Berdar (25:14) I do, I think because you're always gonna have a business person, like my clients, right, are really good at what they do. And they're not doing accounting. And you can't have a successful business without monitoring your finances and looking at your return on your investment and trying to look at how your business is making money and what is your profitability. And if the chances are, somebody's whatever widget or product or service they're providing. They need to be providing that service and they need to rely on those experts to provide them the rest of it. Now AI will help me, can help them get answers, but they need somebody to teach them what those answers mean and they need somebody that they can bounce ideas off of. I mean, you can only have so many one-sided conversations with Siri. I think it's nice, it's great, Claude is great. I use Claude almost every day in my life.

But not necessarily for client work, I mean, it helps me streamline my life and it helps me streamline a lot of things, but it's not necessarily, I think their time is better spent focusing on their revenue generating products and some of their profits should be utilized for those services that they don't have time to learn. Are they smart enough to learn it? Absolutely, right? Their chances are that they've developed some product that they're marketing, they're looking to solve a solution, I am sure that they could get to where they need to be. The question will be how many hours out of the day is that going to take and what could they be doing with their time and how much do they value their time versus having a reliable accounting professional in their pocket.

Edward Roske (26:54) Well, in terms of that journey, they have to balance what they need to do every single day with what those longer term goals are, where they've got to say, we know we need to get to an AI driven world. We know we need to get to a world where all of our services are handled for us. So we can focus on either driving revenue or fulfilling revenue. How do, how should companies balance that? How much attention should they be paying to just achieving everyday goals and hoping the long-term takes care of itself versus those long-term business goals, like being more AI driven, being less people powered.

Kristen Berdar (27:30) Well, I think that depends on the industry and the business. Depending, like from that standpoint, but from a finance standpoint, we will never get away from trying to be good leaders for our people and upskill our people and spend that face time with them. They don't need to be shoulder to shoulder. They don't need to be physically sitting next to me, but we do need to invest in the next generation and we do need to invest in the next level and the next generation of accountants that come through the door. We still have a very robust intern program that comes through the firm. I think, as far as the clients go, they just, we work with them on their budgets, we work with them on their long range goals, depending on how we can break those down into smaller bite-sized pieces will depend on what that ratio is. From a firm standpoint, we do quarterly strategic planning to identify the areas that the firm needs to be looking at, and depending on what department that is and how we're going to look at that we have an innovation committee, we have a technology committee, and so we are always looking to better the resources and to actually make it easier to do business and make it easier or not only make it easier to do business with us but also make it easier to work here. I mean accountants are known for their time sheets. How do we not make time sheets part of our daily? In my area when I started Virtual Accounting Solutions I don't bill anything by the hour.

Everything I do is a value-based bill and I try to, that way it challenges my associates and the controllers to work smarter. If you have X number of clients on your plate and you can get those done in six hours instead of nine hours, great, more power to you. So that's kind of where we challenge them to work smarter and to always be providing value to take time away from our families, I really hope that we're providing value to our clients.

Edward Roske (29:21) Excellent. Speaking of time, let's move to our lightning round. So Kristen, this is going to be really fast time. So quick questions, brief responses, whatever random thing occurs to you.

Kristen Berdar (29:28) Okay.

Edward Roske (29:33) OK, first question. Most underrated financial metric for, let's just say, small to mid-sized businesses.

Kristen Berdar (29:41) Probably your revenue per person in a service based business.

Edward Roske (29:46) I like it because far too much is done at like an aggregate level. And I also like expenses per person, like on a departmental level. Very good. One financial technology tool you can't live without.

Kristen Berdar (29:58) My project management tool. We use Asana.

Edward Roske (30:01) Very good. For far too many people, the answer is Excel and has been since 1995, but I like that answer. Most common financial misstep that you see businesses make.

Kristen Berdar (30:10) Trying to think that they can do everything themselves and they don't actually invest in their business by leveraging expertise from others.

Edward Roske (30:19) One skill that has become more important for accountants in the last five years and one skill that has become less important for accountants in the last five years.

Kristen Berdar (30:27) Analytics are more important than ever, especially in trying to figure out AI. Less important: bank reconciliations because AI does a lot of them.

Edward Roske (30:38) Excellent. Yeah. AI and technology is really good at figuring out if number A looks like number B. And if you think about it, it's kind of like how cave people did it. Like, does this rock look like this rock? I don't know why humans ever thought that should be our jobs. I'm so glad computers are doing it. Let's do two non-financial questions. Most valuable non-accounting knowledge that has benefited your career.

Kristen Berdar (31:08) Smile and say thank you.

Edward Roske (31:10) And final question, nonfiction book recommendation.

Kristen Berdar (31:15) So right now I'm listening to Reality Based Leadership by Cy Wakeman.

Edward Roske (31:21) Excellent. Kristen, it has been really illuminating to hear about your journey, how you've gone from the traditional accounting world, pioneering virtual financial and accounting services, how you are leveraging technology, how you can transform how those businesses understand and use their financial data. But before we wrap up, I always like to offer information to the next generation. So what is one piece of advice that you'd give to finance leaders who are just beginning to modernize their approach to finance.

Kristen Berdar (31:53) I would say find a really great peer group to belong to. We're all willing to share. We're all willing to talk about our failures and try not to repeat those. But if you have a really great support group around you, that's key.

Edward Roske (32:07) Can't think of a better way to end. Thank you, Kristen, for joining us on Asking Good Questions. Thanks to our sponsor, Caprus AI, for supporting this episode. To our listeners who are always really good at liking and subscribing, we appreciate you tuning in. If this is your first time hearing the podcast, you can follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, whatever your favorite podcast platform is. You can even find us on LinkedIn and at askinggoodquestions.co Kristen, thank you.

Kristen Berdar (32:35) Thank you.

Edward Roske (32:37) And then everybody until next time, keep asking good questions.