A larger funding offer can feel like an easy decision. More cash means more runway, more hiring capacity, and more room to build. But what happens when the valuation attached to that check leaves your startup little room to miss its targets?
That question sits at the center of Burkland’s latest quarterly startup ecosystem discussion. For Episode 155 of Startup Success, Steve Lord, Burkland’s COO and Chief Knowledge Officer, joins us in the studio to talk about the funding patterns he’s seeing and how founders should prepare for 2027.
Steve sees reasons for optimism, particularly as investor interest expands into businesses using AI to solve problems in established industries. He also urges founders to take a closer look at the relationship between capital, valuation, and operating costs. A successful raise should support a business plan that still works when conditions change.
Start 2027 Fundraising Conversations Before You Need the Money
Steve advises founders considering a 2027 raise to bring those investor conversations forward.
His concern is that changes in interest rates and operating costs can take months to work through the economy. A startup assessing its funding options today may encounter a different environment when it actually needs to close a round.
The Federal Reserve raised its target interest rate range by a quarter percentage point in September 2026. At the time of recording, Steve anticipated further rate increases and explained why he believes higher capital costs could influence venture investment decisions over the coming months.
Higher rates can make lower-risk investments like bonds more attractive and raise the cost of borrowing. For founders, the implication is to give the fundraising process enough time to accommodate changes in investor appetite, diligence requirements, and deal terms.
“I might start having those conversations sooner than you might think you might need to, because it’s going to be a little bit of a different environment in, say, June of next year.”
— Steve Lord
Starting conversations early doesn’t mean accepting the first offer or launching a formal process immediately. It means understanding which investors are interested, what evidence they want to see, and how your operating plan lines up with their expectations.
Steve also flags a practical calendar consideration. In his experience, getting meetings with investors becomes harder after mid-November, with activity picking up again in January. Founders planning a near-term raise should account for holiday scheduling rather than assuming every remaining week of Q4 will be equally productive.
A Bigger Round Can Create a Harder Next Round
One of the clearest patterns Steve describes is the continued expansion of early-stage funding rounds. Some startups still struggle to attract interest, particularly in more traditional sectors. But when investors do engage, they may offer substantially more capital than the founder initially sought. Steve shares an example of a Burkland client pursuing a $100 million Series A. Although the financing has not closed, it illustrates the scale of some early-stage rounds he is seeing.
The important question is whether the additional capital supports the founder’s operating plan.
“Do I need this much capital now?” Steve asks.
There are two different risks to examine. At a lower valuation, a larger raise can require founders to sell more equity than they intended. At an aggressive valuation, the business may face a demanding performance hurdle before it can justify a higher price in its next round.
“The business has to execute on everything perfectly to justify an increase in the valuation that you started from.”
— Steve Lord
If growth falls short, the next financing could become a flat round, a down round, or an extension that buys time without delivering the progress the founder expected.
Steve suggests considering whether a smaller raise could fund meaningful milestones, allowing the company to return to investors later with stronger evidence and a potentially higher valuation. That approach also carries risk: another round may take longer than expected, and better terms are never guaranteed.
The decision depends on what the money will accomplish. Extra capital can be valuable when it supports a credible expansion plan or provides protection against a difficult funding market. It deserves more scrutiny when the company cannot clearly explain how it will deploy the funds or meet the expectations attached to them.
Before accepting a larger offer, connect the financing to your operating model. Compare dilution, runway, planned spending, and the milestones required for the next raise. An experienced fractional CFO can help founders evaluate those trade-offs before they become commitments.
AI Investment Is Expanding Into Practical Applications
Alongside his cautions, Steve identifies an encouraging development: investor interest in AI is broadening beyond companies whose core business is building models or providing compute.
He describes growing interest in AI-adjacent businesses, including robotics and AI-driven manufacturing. One example involves a company using AI to improve the recovery of metals from scrap.
These businesses apply AI to an existing operational problem. The value may come from faster production, fewer errors, or better resource recovery, rather than from selling AI technology itself.
For founders in those sectors, the opportunity is to explain the business impact clearly. An investor needs to understand what improves for the customer, how that improvement translates into revenue, and what it costs to deliver.
Steve remains optimistic about the potential for major AI IPOs to support broader market sentiment, while acknowledging that higher bond yields could draw capital away from equities. His outlook contains both possibilities: enthusiasm for important new technologies and caution about the financial conditions surrounding them.
Founders should build their fundraising case around the strength of their own business rather than relying on a market-wide lift.
Build a 2027 Budget You Can Use to Make Decisions
For Steve, fundraising preparation and annual budgeting belong in the same conversation. The amount a startup needs to raise depends on the cost of reaching its next milestones.
He expects cost pressures to affect a wide range of expenses heading into 2027, from people and raw materials to software and compute. He also points to energy costs as a source of pressure that can spread through transportation, manufacturing, and other parts of the economy over time.
“What does it cost?” is the question Steve wants founders asking.
A useful budget gives a founder visibility into the company’s largest cost centers and how they might change over the next 12 months. Rolling this year’s spending forward without reviewing those assumptions can leave the business underprepared.
“If, as a CEO, you can’t put your finger on your biggest cost centers and what you think is going to happen to them in the next 12 months, you need to stop, and you need to get somebody who can help you with that, or you need to spend some time to become familiar with it.”
— Steve Lord
Start with the operating decisions that matter most: hiring, product development, customer acquisition, and the infrastructure needed to support growth. Then connect those decisions to a cash forecast that reflects when revenue is collected and expenses are paid.
Test the plan under less favorable conditions. If a funding round closes later, sales take longer, or a major expense rises, how much runway remains? Which investments can wait, and which are necessary to reach the milestones investors expect?
That work turns a budget into a tool for deciding when to hire, how much to raise, and when to adjust spending. It also gives founders a clearer explanation of how investor capital will be used.
Include SaaS Taxes in Your Year-End Preparation
The episode closes with a reminder that 2027 planning also needs to account for tax changes.
Beginning January 1, 2027, California and Colorado will expand sales and use tax coverage to include many remotely accessed prewritten software products, including SaaS. The rules differ by state, and product classification, nexus, exemptions, and customer or user location can affect the outcome.
For software buyers, the change may increase subscription costs or create a use tax obligation when a vendor does not collect tax. For SaaS sellers, it may require changes to registration, billing, collection, and filing processes.
Review material software purchases as part of your 2027 budget, and have a tax professional assess your obligations if your startup sells software into either state or buys software used there.
Connect Your Next Raise to Your Next Year of Execution
Steve’s Q3 update gives founders a practical reason to revisit their plans before year-end. Investor interest may be opening up in new sectors, while larger funding offers and changing costs make the details of each decision more consequential.
The preparation starts with a clear view of what your business needs to accomplish, what that will cost, and how much flexibility your cash position provides. Those answers should guide both the 2027 budget and the next fundraising conversation.
Burkland’s Fractional CFO team can help connect your financial model, funding strategy, and annual plan. Contact Burkland to discuss your startup’s next stage.
Listen to Episode 155 of Startup Success for the full conversation with Steve Lord.
Brenda Hernández Jaimes: Podcast Producer & Talent Coordinator, Ellas Media
Angela R. Chong: Audio Editor & Post-Production Producer, Amplify Podcasts
- Start investor conversations early if a 2027 raise is part of your plan. Funding conditions can change before today’s runway runs out.
- Evaluate funding offers against the milestones they will finance, the equity you will sell, and the expectations they create for your next round.
- Build your 2027 budget around realistic cost assumptions and test how slower growth or delayed funding would affect cash runway.
- Watch for investment opportunities in businesses applying AI to practical problems, including robotics and manufacturing.
- Review California and Colorado’s new SaaS tax rules before January 1, 2027, whether your startup buys software, sells it, or both.
Intro 00:01
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you’ll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest-growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.
Kate 00:19
Welcome to Startup Success, today we have one of our favorite guests in studio, Steve Lord, the Chief Knowledge Officer at Burkland, and one of our favorite guests is back to talk to us about Q3. I cannot believe, Steve, we are wrapping up Q3.
Steven Lord 00:36
I know,
Kate 00:37
Crazy, right?
Steven Lord 00:38
Can you believe it? Exactly.
Kate 00:40
Yeah.
Steven Lord 00:40
Thanks for having me back.
Kate 00:41
Oh, it’s always so great to talk to you. Let’s start where everyone’s mind is right now, and that’s interest rates.
Steven Lord 00:49
Oh yeah, that’s the topic du jour.
Kate 00:51
Yeah.
Steven Lord 00:51
And it’s really important. I think people understand there’s a lot of press around it. There’s a lot of hype. There’s a lot of “sky is falling.” And I think it’s important to kind of look at what it really is. And what it really is is the bond market testing both the U.S. Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve. And in my experience watching interest rates for 30 years, more than that now, the bond market doesn’t lose. The bond market is a lot more powerful than anybody in Washington. So what’s really going on here is a battle of wills. The bond market investing world is anchoring off of things like record, like record since they started writing the number down, diesel prices, and imputing a higher cost of inflation, or higher cost of money in the future, which makes long-term bonds unattractive, right? Because I don’t want that yield to get eaten away by higher inflation. So they’re selling that stuff, and they’re saying to the Federal Reserve, “You need to boost short-term interest rates.” We got a little bit of an uptick. They gave a token quarter point. There’s going to be more. Unless some miracle happens and all of this stuff in the Middle East reverts, we’re going to have a much higher cost structure in the U.S. economy for several months. And we’ve talked about this on this show before, you know, figure six to eight months on the outside, or inside, rather, for the price of fuel today to work its way through the economy. Same with interest rate moves. It is not instantaneous. The bond market reacts, but the prices you and I are paying for things won’t really reflect today’s price for six or eight months at best. So even if magically tomorrow peace breaks out all over the place and all that fuel starts flowing through the Strait of Hormuz again, it’s still the middle of next year before we really see, you know, headline inflation pressure start to drop. So that changes a lot of the dynamic around the community that we care a lot about. Because what I’ve, we’ve talked about this before, several shows ago, but it’s worth bringing up again. Fundamentally, the venture capital ecosystem, to a somewhat lesser extent, the private equity one, but particularly VC, is a cyclical industry. People don’t think of it that way. They think of semiconductors and copper mines as cyclical, but money is very cyclical too, and it anchors off what is, what is the price of money? Interest rates, right? So, often VC is inversely cyclical. The higher the interest rates go, the more of a dampening effect that has on the VC ecosystem. So, I think one of the things that founders should be thinking about out there is that same six to eight month timeline is roughly where you start seeing the impact of interest rates, sharp interest rate rises happening. So I think, like, fundraising plans and talking to your investors about capital raising and the cost of that capital, what it’s going to look like, how you’re going to do it. You should, if you’re a founder listening to this and you’re thinking of your 2027 planning, I would pull that up a little bit. I might start having those conversations sooner than you might think you might need to, because it’s going to be a little bit of a different environment in, say, June of next year.
Kate 04:11
I’m really glad you flagged that, because I think before on this show, people have thought, “Okay, we’ll feel the impacts in six to eight months on pricing and things, but not so much the VC market.” So I’m glad you reminded us that we’ll feel it there too.
Steven Lord 04:27
It is a sine wave, like any other cyclical industry. It moves across time in a manner that’s often very reactive to macroeconomics, right? Because it is so capital intensive, and what drives capital movement but the price of money, which is interest rates. It all kind of, like, circles back. The other thing I think people should realize is the whole AI sector concentration that we’ve talked about on this show for, you know, seems like months and years on end. What we’re starting to see a little bit, and this is actually a good thing, is the sector is diffusing out a little bit. The more we’re learning about OpenAI, you know, we just saw the Anthropic IPO prospectus drop, and so we get a lot of sort of inside baseball around the cost pressures and how they’re beginning to think about that as a business. What we’re seeing more and more of, which is important to flag, is the VC ecosystem is beginning to be much more interested in AI-adjacent companies. So it is no longer just the folks that are, you know, selling GPUs and compute time. They’re also now beginning to look at adjacent sectors where AI is now becoming more of a toolset than the actual business itself. A good example would be robotics, right? Manufacturing. We’re seeing a lot of AI-driven manufacturing technology coming up, which is really pretty cool in terms of how long it takes things to actually get made and how much error rate they have. We have a client that we’re speaking with right now that is mostly looking at how to use AI to optimize the recovery of metals from scrap, right?
Kate 06:06
So cool.
Steven Lord 06:06
It’s really, and so, those are some of the things we’re seeing just in, like, the last six months, where companies that are there, they’re using AI, but they’re not a pure, like, AI company, they’re beginning to get interest and funding. So I’m really hopeful that the next six to eight months are going to show a widening environment for funding instead of, you know, what we’ve seen: just the same sort of core, you know, 25 or 30 companies getting funding after funding, and everybody else is kind of stuck.
Kate 06:36
That’s encouraging to hear. And do you still feel that those big IPOs are going to lift the market?
Steven Lord 06:43
Yes, all else being equal. What I worry a little bit about is the interest rate construct that we have is kind of a wild card when it comes to liquidity in the equity market, right? Broadly speaking, higher interest rates are not accompanied by rising stock markets, because they tend to pull capital, right? Because, like, why would I take a risk with an Open AI or an Anthropic IPO when I can go get 5.3% in a 10-year Treasury bond and go back to sleep, right? The other thing to think about, too, is the broader equity market is very good at adjusting to long-form changes in structure, like interest rates. But what it’s not that good at doing is adapting to very rapid, high-delta, short-term moves: spikes, crashes, things like that. And what we’re seeing in the Treasury market is a spike, right? So will that help draw liquidity away from the equity market at a time when these IPOs are coming and demand a tremendous amount of liquidity, right, like, what do they really need? I think at the end of the day, it’s probably fine, and my original premise holds, because these companies represent truly, like, the next 30 years of technology, right? So investors need to be there. If you’re an institutional money manager and you don’t get an allocation on the Anthropic IPO, then your boss is going to have a conversation with you, right? Like, “What do you mean you didn’t buy this IPO? Are you crazy?” It’s like not buying Google back when it IPOed. So there is still that, and I do think that there’s some optimism there. What I worry about more is this sort of macro reset because of the rates. And look, the famous “they,” with a capital T, have really boxed themselves into a corner. Diesel fuel is in everything. It runs the tractors that harvest our food. It runs the trucks that deliver all that stuff to Walmart. It runs the machines, the generators. I mean, it’s in everything. And that’s where we’re going to see it.
Kate 08:50
So you think that rates may continue to rise?
Steven Lord 08:54
Yes. In particular, I think the benchmark rates.What we have right now is a very steep curve. We have long-term interest rates very high and rising, and we have short-term rates kind of locked by the Federal Reserve, and that’s what the bond market and the Fed and the Treasury Secretary are fighting about. It’s because what the bond market is telling you is that those shorter-term interest rates, three months, six months, one year, everything that anchors off of the discount rate, the Fed’s discount rate, that has to go higher, right? And inflation alone is demanding that it has to go higher. So that’s really what we’re going to see. I think we’re going to see at least a couple more. As much as I really didn’t think we were going to be here this soon, we are going to see a couple more rate hikes.
Kate 09:36
No, we didn’t. And I remember talking about how maybe the political landscape might play a factor, and we do have an election.
Steven Lord 09:48
Well, the problem with the election is, while I do think that you could see a lot of volatility around it, and some positions reversing, and maybe some trading opportunities there, there is not a lot of policy decisions that are going to happen that will reverse this what we’re talking about, quickly, right? Because of that six-to-eight-month lag, which really can sometimes take even longer than that. On the good news side of the ledger, which is also going to speak to somewhat higher rates, probably, is the economy actually continues to be pretty resilient through all of this, believe it or not. So far, right? What we want to worry about is what, in the macro sense, we call demand destruction, right? So take an airline. An airline is flying, there’s something like 9,000 airframes that are flying around the United States right now, airlines that are more than 20 years old. So that means those are older engines that are much less fuel efficient. The cost of fuel is skyrocketing and airline margins are thin, so do they start taking those airplanes out of service? Do consumers start flying less because the airlines are passing the price of that higher fuel through airline tickets, right. That’s demand destruction. And that could be problematic, again, six to eight months down the road, where we start seeing, tensionally, the economy start to sputter a little bit. Right now it’s fine. It’s able to withstand this. But I never really worry about right now when it comes to this stuff. It’s always what’s going to happen that is so important.
Kate 11:19
It’s so true. Every time we talk, you talk about that six to eight month window, and you realize how critical that is.
Steven Lord 11:26
I wish we had not been sort of whipsawed by so many of these exogenous things. Every time we get together, we talk about what I would love to see happen and what I think is going to happen, and then something happens, like, I don’t know, we start a war with Iran, and now, all of a sudden, all of that kind of goes out the window, and you have to adjust the expectations based on the ground truth that you see. Right.
Kate 11:47
Right. Right.
Steven Lord 11:48
The flip side to it, from a founder’s perspective, is if you can, if you can raise money now, you can operate and grow your business with the cost of capital that you’re going to be dealing with, you’re going to have a lot of operational leverage when that cost of capital drops, right? So, if you can do it now, and you can raise money over the next six to eight months in spite of this sort of construct, then when that, it’s always cyclical, right? When that phase passes and we return to an era of lower inflation and potentially lower rates, your business will actually be very well, you know, constructed or plumbed to handle a low cost of capital, because you’re actually built for high tide when the tide’s actually lower now, right?
Kate 12:33
That makes a lot of sense. That’s a good thing to point out. And talk about fundraising a little bit right now, because you mentioned something that was, you know, good to hear about AI adjacency for companies. What has fundraising been like in Q3 that you’ve seen?
Steven Lord 12:51
So what we see is continued up-sizing of early-stage rounds when they happen. We still do see, you know, startups struggling to get interest from VCs when they’re in maybe a more traditional sector, right? But when they do get that interest, partially because of all the dry capital that the VCs have, we see a continued trend toward larger rounds earlier. So, you know, that started a few years ago, really after the pandemic, but it’s really just continued now. We are working with a client right now that is raising $100 million Series A.
Kate 13:30
Wow, that’s like unheard of.
Steven Lord 13:33
Unheard of, right? Now, I mean, they’re working on it. I don’t know if they’re going to get it, right? So that’s another whole story. But there is a broad push upward. If you’re a founder, your series seed is now probably north 5 to 15 really,. When I was a puppy, that was an A, right? It was big A, right? Inflation shows up in really weird places. That is one of them, right? Capital is now expensive, so people want to use more of it in different places. So rounds are up-sizing. One thing to caution founders, though, be careful about that. Remember, a VC wants to get the capital in their bank account to work, and if they’ve identified you as one they want to bet on, there is a tendency right now for them to try to cram as much money down your neck as they can do, right? That may not be – it may be fine. It may be a great thing. It may be wonderful. It may not be in your best interest as a founder. So you really have to stop and think a little bit about it. Do I need this much capital now, or would it be maybe smarter to take less now, build the business, get the revenue, get the product out, get all the numbers going up and to the right, and then go back to that same VC in a year or 18 months and sell the difference at a higher valuation, right? Because we have seen this movie a couple times. Was it during the, the crypto craze where, you know, a little company, my proverbial three kids and a laptop, they go out and they raise some ungodly amount of money, and then they can never raise again because their cap table is now upside down. So, just word of caution there. Just because your VC is shoving a ton of money at you doesn’t mean you probably want to take it or should. Stop, think, call, I don’t know, a very experienced fractional CFO to get their take on whether or not you should be taking that much capital in at a low valuation, because it matters down the road when you’re going to sell the business.
Kate 15:29
That’s something really interesting to point out that I don’t think a lot of founders think about. You know, typically it’s just, like, the chase for the big check.
Steven Lord 15:38
Right. Getting in as much money, and there’s something to that. I don’t want to sound like that’s not a valid strategy. As a young startup boot founder, I was in the same boat. I would take money. I would have handed out, you know, flyers at the bus station if it meant that I got money. But there’s a risk there, and I just, after doing this for a long time, I think it’s important that founders take a breath. Stop. Ask themselves, “Well, why is the VC shoving extra money to me? I’m trying to raise a $10 or $15 million seed round, and they want to give me $35 million.” There’s a reason for that, and you have to stop and ask yourself, is the trade-off going to be worth it? Because they’re going to want to buy you at a value. Two things are going to happen. You’re going to sell more of the company than you want to at a low valuation. Or, they’re going to oversubscribe you at that low valuation and push the value up to a place where it’s going to be very hard for you to raise again, right. The business has to execute on everything perfectly to justify an increase in the valuation that you started from. We’ve seen that a lot. And now they’re screwed, for that lack of a better scientific term, right? Yeah. Now, really hard time going out and raising at a 70 or 80 or $100 million valuation because they raised 30, already too high, right?
Kate 16:57
That is so true. They have to execute really perfectly.
Steven Lord 17:02
Right. And that’s one of the reasons why last year and into this year we saw so many flat, down, you know, extension rounds, seed pluses, and all that. Because the best they could do was raise at the same valuation they raised two years ago, because they overraised at that value. Better would have been to raise half that money at half the val, execute pretty well, and then show everybody how you’re going up into the right. Raise the other half at the higher valuation. Founder sells less equity, and they’re able to get a further runway for the business.
Kate 17:34
Yeah, excellent point. That’s super helpful. Anything else you can share for founders listening as we wrap up, you know, Q3 and head into the final quarter of this year?
Steven Lord 17:47
Yeah, I think for founders, two things. This is heading, you know, starting and heading into fundraising season. Figure you’ve got until mid-November to get in front of the people that you want to get into. After that, it’s going to be hard to get meetings, and then it picks up again in January and goes really into April, May, June, somewhere in there. Okay. Second thing is, if you’re a founder and you have a business and you’re trucking along, you need to be thinking about budgeting for next year. Of the years that we’ve been talking, this is probably the fall that I think it’s going to matter the most, because of the price and pressure that’s going to be on virtually everything a company is going to buy, from its people to its products to its components, raw materials, compute, like, you name it. It is all going to start going up between now and the beginning of next year. So you have to budget for that. You have to be conservative. Remember, I said one of the most important things a founder needs to be asking is, “What does it cost?” And that is really going to be a key question heading into next year.
Kate 18:50
Yeah, that’s a good point, and that’s something that a lot of startups don’t take as seriously. You know, you’re just kind of going quarter by quarter, but I think that’s a really good thing to flag.
Steven Lord 19:02
I mean, said bluntly, a founder, a CEO that doesn’t know, at least high-level, what the expense footprint of their business looks like, is a CEO that’s not really running their company. So you really do. It doesn’t. It’s not fun. I get it. A lot of founders would rather go code, or they’d rather develop, or they’d rather sell, or do all these other things than this. But ultimately, the business is the business, and if you’re, as a CEO, you can’t put your finger on your biggest cost centers and what you think is going to happen to them in the next 12 months, you need to stop, and you need to get somebody who can help you with that, or you need to spend some time to become familiar with it.
Kate 19:41
Absolutely. I mean, that’s what, you know, is making the machine go. You have to have your pulse on that. Yeah. As we wrap up, you are not the head of our tax team, but there is, I just wanted to mention this and flag this because we’ve been talking about it at Burkland, this SaaS tax change in California and Colorado, that’s coming. If you could just give a brief overview for the listeners.
Steven Lord 20:07
So this is important, if you’re a company and you have a SaaS product and you are selling to people who are even remotely located, or you have nexus in California, this is a big deal, because SaaS did not used to be taxable, sales tax-wise, in the state of California. Now it will be, so that’s a really big deal. Really, really, really big deal. Anyone listening to this thing, take my word for it. You do not want to be on the wrong side of states like California, New York, Texas, Georgia, Washington when it comes to sales tax. They will make your life miserable if you’re not figured, if you haven’t been doing this right. So that’s going to change as of January 1st. That doesn’t affect 2025 or 2026 sales tax, obviously. But going forward, it will mean, depending on how your business is, that you need to be reporting for sales tax on a product that you might not have thought of as taxable before this. So it really does require some attention between now and then to make sure that you’re squared away and you’re not going to be surprised in, I don’t know, April from a nasty letter from the state saying, “Oh, by the way, you didn’t pay all this stuff, and now you have all these fines you have to deal with.”
Kate 21:19
Yes, thank you for flagging that. I highly recommend that those listening that are impacted, we have a good blog up about it. You know, Steve gave you a good overview of what’s coming.
Steven Lord 21:31
It’s really important. Like, I can’t stress this enough. If you are a founder and you think you may be going revenue positive, as soon as, and this is true for any state you’re in, as soon as someone buys your thing that’s not related to you, married to you, being paid by you, like, somehow unrelated to your business, when they’re actual bona fide customer and they buy your thing, the next thing you do is call somebody about sales tax. Trust me, right?. Make sure you have that figured. Until you’re revenue positive, it doesn’t matter. A CEO who, by the way, is liable for trust taxes, which is payroll tax and sales tax, CEO pierces the corporate veil. You’re on the hook. So it’s in your own best interest to make sure your sales tax is squared away.
Kate 22:15
Yes, so true.
Steven Lord 22:17
Sorry to be scary, like, but it’s really important.
Kate 22:21
It’s so important. That’s an area you cannot ignore. Yeah, Steve, what a quarter! Thank you for breaking it down again for us. Always great to have you on the show. Before we know it, you’ll be here to talk about wrapping up the year.
Steven Lord 22:39
Oh my God! Crazy. Thanks for having me. I always love these chats.
Kate 22:42
They’re great. Thank you so much, Steve.
Outro 22:46
You’ve been listening to Startup Success. To make sure you don’t miss out on future episodes, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. Like what you hear? Tap the number of stars you think the show deserves in Apple Podcasts. For more tools and resources for your own startup success. Check out BurklandAssociates.com. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.