Season 2, Ep. 15 | Arena Transcript

More Elephant Intro

[00:00:38] Jason Rudman: My guest today founded her company in 2019 with a clear conviction—growing companies deserve experienced financial leadership long before they can justify a full-time CFO.

A current 2025 Inc 5000 Award List winner, number 409, it is my pleasure to invite Heather Tuason, CEO and founder of Arena to the latest More Elephant Podcast.

And it's been a minute. How are you?

[00:01:06] Heather Tuason: It has. I'm happy to be here, Jason. Thanks for the invitation.

[00:01:09] Jason Rudman: Thrilled. Watched your journey. Everybody that is listening to this will find out that we've bumped into each other more than once on this crazy journey called life.

I'm excited to get reacquainted with everything that you've been doing since the last time we spoke. Journey to entrepreneurship is a strange and interesting one. So before we get into Arena, Heather, take us back a bit. Everybody has an origin story, a journey—what got you to the point where entrepreneurship was your thing?

[00:01:37] Heather Tuason: I didn't actually have the path of being an entrepreneur from the start. I was just trying to make ends meet, get a job that paid the bills and I ended up in corporate America. Many people do.

And, I realized through a lot of my work in banking that I felt was an underserved segment and the large corporations I worked at wasn't able to serve them in the way that I felt like they needed to be served. I banged on the door, tried to introduce new products and services at banks that I worked with in the past. And when they said no over and over again I left and decided to first learn how to be a small business owner, because working at a big company was really hard to actually jump into the space of being the CEO, the HR person, the tech person, or all of it.

And so, after leaving corporate America, I joined a fintech that allowed me to step into all kinds of spaces that I was unqualified for, to be honest. And, I just did a lot of trial error, fell on my face a few times, picked myself back up and then felt confident enough in 2019 to start Arena.

And all of that came from just seeing the consistent gaps in solving a need in the market that I felt was huge.

[00:02:48] Jason Rudman: We'd like to start conversations, understanding where people grew up, what their origin story is. You're going to take us on a journey of entrepreneurship. Was there ever an entrepreneur in your family? How did you figure out that this was your path?

If you would take us back to when Heather was growing up, what were the things that you were interested in that were segues to your corporate career or where you find yourself now with Arena?

[00:03:15] Heather Tuason: So, I grew up in Southern Virginia. My parents were from Alabama and Memphis, Tennessee. They were wanting to get away from those areas to make more of themselves than could have been made where they are. My father was in the hospital system. He was the hospital administrator and my mom was a nutritionist and they both graduated from University of Alabama.

I grew up until I was about ten in Southern Virginia, then slowly moved to Northern Virginia as my father changed jobs.

They then got divorced when I was fifteen, which was pretty devastating, and I found myself having to help the family out. So I started working full-time when I was fifteen, When I turned fifteen, I moved. My Mom left my Dad and moved us to McLean, Virginia, where I worked at Domino's Pizza to pay the bills.

So, I was full-time student, I played on the McLean softball team for the high school but I worked full-time. And, I didn't really realize how bad things were getting until I arrived at work one day and my mom had come by and gotten my paycheck, and that happened over and over again.

So she didn't have a job, couldn't find a way and I was rolling pennies to put gas in the tank to deliver pizza. So that was a tough time, but it really taught me, I have to own the outcome. I've got to own my own destiny and I got to get out of this.

So, I ended up going to college. My Dad helped me pay for part of it and I paid the rest. And, I raised my sister during all of that because my Mom went into a deep depression.

My sister was four years younger. She now is a physician, so I'm super proud of her coming out of it as well. So we had a dark time but it really actually built a foundation of doing. And I think that's probably what allows me to dig in because if I have this mantra of, at least I've gotta dig in to understand it before I can hand it off to somebody to go execute and that's the formation of where I see it showing up in Arena.

[00:05:22] Jason Rudman: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that and being vulnerable. Our stories are very rarely linear. You're sharing something that I know a number of people who listen will identify with, struggle and challenge and coming out of it and being resilient.

Do you think that the leap into corporate America was that a safety decision? Given all of the relative, as you described this turmoil, and you working, studying, raising your sister, do you feel as though that was your way to just get some calmness or some safety around life?

[00:05:59] Heather Tuason: I think yes. I'll say two things that flight to safety there.

One was corporate America, something I knew could be stable. Provide me with benefits. The second is I married my husband really early. I got married when I was nineteen, and I met Juan, my husband at Domino's Pizza.

[00:06:19] Jason Rudman: The power of Dominoes. There's a story right there. Okay, so you met Juan at Dominoes and the safety element of corporate America. But at some point you're willing to cash in the chip

[00:06:35] Heather Tuason: Yes.

[00:06:36] Jason Rudman: of safety. Again, I remember when we first met, we were talking about a corporate role at a company that I was at. So at some point you decided that was no longer enough.

[00:06:47] Heather Tuason: When you get to a point in your career where you can see the gaps and that no one's filling them and no one's listening, and they don't see the value and the merit to the idea. This idea isn't genius. It is just solving a gap. And so I tried to build it while I was at Capital One, and the legal team said no. So I knew it was a great idea. I also knew what it took for businesses to be successful. I saw business loan applications day in and day out, and you could see the exact flaws and the reason for denial. And you're like, this is the answer. All you have to do are these three things and you'll be successful. And I wish I could share that, but as a someone in a bank sitting in that seat, I couldn't necessarily do that. That wasn't my place.

[00:07:33] Jason Rudman: So let's dive a little deep. What problem were you bumping into that eventually became the spark for the company and, was there a specific moment when you realized, okay, this isn't just annoying, it's actually fundamentally broken?

[00:07:45] Heather Tuason: I had always been serving commercial and small business financial needs through roles at banks. Starting from, while I was in college, I was a teller going all the way up to running small business at Capital One, where I learned a statistic that I was enamored with that had not changed in decades and it is that fifty percent of businesses fail by the time they get to their fifth year.

It’s stunning that all of the new ideas and the reasons people come to this country to create something of themselves and really become an entrepreneur in a lot of ways, half of them fail by the time they get to their fifth year, which is just when businesses are expecting to start making money.

I started to investigate a lot more when I was still in banking and it's a statistic that comes from the Census Bureau. They follow businesses from the time they're born to the time they're EIN or employee identification numbers expired.

So I started to do more homework in that space at Capital One, and ask the why—why did you fail? What were the key reasons why you decided to shut the doors?

A piece of that was cash flow; about 82% of businesses that failed cited cashflow is the reason why. What I started to figure out was they didn't have enough access to capital. They didn't collect from their customers. What exactly is it?

So, after leaving Capital One, I tripled down on that statistic to really better understand the why and what I discovered, after polling hundreds of businesses during the pandemic timeframe, was that about ninety percent don't even have a plan. They don't have a financial plan on how they're going to make money and how much money it's going to cost to make it.

They didn't have a path to follow. They were shooting from the hip in a lot of cases. So that's what started Arena and started testing a lot of concepts.

The first concept we tested completely failed. Flat on my face, lots of money in the toilet, failed. The concept called Arena Pay, and it was a cashflow platform. The intention behind it was to solve the same need, which was putting all your bills on a platform that then could be financed. Both the invoices that you send to your clients or customers and your accounts payable.

So that concept had some financing involved in it, there was lending to clients and it also had the bill pay component. Simultaneous to all that, there were some fintechs out there that had already had the idea and they just hadn't executed the lending component of that yet. One of those is bill.com, if you're familiar with them. 

[00:10:14] Jason Rudman: Yes. 

[00:10:15] Heather Tuason: The other thing I learned is I had a handful of beta customers on it, on the first edition. And they had lots of great feedback on how the user interface should work— I had lots of good feedback on, oh, I need a bigger line of credit and the actual lines of credit that they received.

But, at the end of the day, what they asked for, I couldn't deliver. They're like, this is all great, Heather, you've built a awesome thing that's needed in the marketplace, but I want you to do it. I don't want to be the one in the system. 

And so, that was my big aha wait a second, let's test that out too. I tested out a fractional CFO [Chief Financial Officer] on top of the platform that we built. And from there, I realized that, wow, the bigger need is actually the doer; the one who has the hands on the keyboard as well as the strategic insight to provide the CEO with help and direction of the company.

I started to do some more homework in the space, and what I realized is of the thirty three million businesses out there, with six million of them employing people, the financials are so important to the longevity of those companies, let alone the paychecks to the employees. And, if you don't have the finances right, it could be a disaster. That's what I believe is one of the main reasons we see that statistic that half of businesses fail early in their life cycle.

So from there, I started to double down on the CFO component. Another piece of that research was seeing exactly how many CFOs are out there. There are only about two hundred and seventy five thousand in the United States that identify as a CFO on LinkedIn. And I was like, wait a second—there's six million businesses that employ people and only two hundred and seventy five thousand CFOs eligible to help them, so we’ve got to solve this gap.

I started pivoting the company moving towards more in that direction of the human service component and fractional CFO services that could be more affordable for businesses.

[00:12:13] Jason Rudman: So the term fractional CFO, you could take us in many different directions, what's Arena trying to make easier or more democratized for the companies you work with?

And you started to talk about your customers or users who would say, Hey, why don't you just do it. What did they tell you about how they felt before Arena existed?

[00:12:35] Heather Tuason: Yeah, the customers, especially our beta customers, that gave us tons of wonderful feedback as we got going, were wearing multiple hats. I don't have the expertise either.

One of our core specialties is helping businesses that are so far away from finance construction or another kind of blue collar industry that doesn't naturally have the financial element to the founder. It just didn't come along with the training so to speak.

I feel getting someone who is an expert in that field from a financial perspective can certainly help them elevate their business over time and it's more accessible because you can have them on a fractional basis.

[00:13:14] Jason Rudman: So how does that fractional—does Arena cover bookkeeping, filings? If I were a company wanting to work with Arena, and I'm procuring fractional CFO services, how does the model work? How do I get engaged? Is it I choose between a smorgasbord of things?

[00:13:31] Heather Tuason: I call it like a matchmaking. So, once a prospective client comes to us to say that they're interested in fractional CFO services, we, of course explain all of our services, which do include accounting, bookkeeping, payroll, all kinds of financial operations.

We then start a matchmaking effort in a lot of ways. And it really is something that I would love to be able to automate, but it's not quite automated yet. Because, I believe that there's a set of matchmaking that is okay, the credentials line up, right? This is a construction CFO and this is a construction company. But there is this human element that is very hard to match unless you meet with the owners and you understand where their strengths, weaknesses, personalities are, and you want to be able to pair a CFO with them that can influence them.

The ultimate goal of a CFO is to be able to influence the direction of a company and if you can't influence the founder or the CEO, then you're really not carrying your weight.

[00:14:30] Jason Rudman: There are 275,000 CFOs; how do you source the talent?

[00:14:35] Heather Tuason: This is one thing I took—the best of breed from a corporation. I was at Capital One for ten years and one thing I really admired about them is the recruiting process. So, I adopted a lot of their similar tactics.

They put most of their candidates through a case study where they're presented with either an issue or set of information that they need to create a solution for. So, I did the same thing. I created a case study that our CFOs or candidates need to pass before they can move to the next phase in the process; only about two and a half percent pass.

And what's amazing to me is the people who pass the case are not the ones you think would in a lot of cases. I find that if they don't go through the case and you just align a CFO that has an Ivy League education, a big corporate resume, that isn't necessarily the best pairing for a small business because the best pairing is someone who can take them from where they're at to the next incremental step. Not necessarily meaning to take a small business that has three people to a thousand person company overnight, right?

You need to find somebody that is a best fit for the business's lifecycle stage and so that is hard to find. I have found some tactics during the interview process to start to tease that out. What I've discovered is that most CFOs have worked in other small businesses and worn multiple hats because oftentimes, a fractional CFO comes in and has to wear multiple hats. They sometimes step into the HR space, the sales space, and they need to be able to have influence in those spaces too.

[00:16:10] Jason Rudman: And so you're finding that extendability in the CFOs that are part of your network that they actually have to spread their wings and extend their scope beyond what they were initially hired to do. 

[00:16:23] Heather Tuason: Exactly.

[00:16:25] Jason Rudman: What part of the business took longer to figure out than you expected and why?

[00:16:30] Heather Tuason: I think letting go of the technology that I originally built was the hardest decision I've made so far because I had a lot of conviction to get it going. 

We had good customer feedback on it but it was very easy to see that there were other players in the market, well more advanced than we were and that we were not going to be able to compete in that space. The dollars it would take to continue to build it out were enormous and it would've been a fundraise, which is another thing as a founder, I've decided not to do.

So, decided not to go after VC money—I did do rounds of that to seek interest early on in the company and being a woman is really hard. 

[00:17:09] Jason Rudman: Yeah, let's talk about it. We have talked about that on the podcast frequently and, it's not always the same story, but it is variation on a theme.

So the conviction that you shared to say, I tried this and it's not my path, would you color your experience for the audience and what ultimately has led you to not pursue that path?

[00:17:32] Heather Tuason: Sure. Yeah. As a fintech company getting started, it was going to take millions of dollars to get a platform set up, get the right marketing engines and sales teams in place, et cetera, as well as the component of Arena Pay [that] was actually credit and lending.

Not only did a fundraise require getting VC capital in the equity format, it also required getting capital in a debt format so that we could lend that money out to clients. It created two facilities you needed and you always want to make sure [with] your debt facilities, you're not all in one basket, so you tend to get at least two to get started. 

So I had term sheets from debt providers at the onset of the pandemic and, at that point in time, we hit pause on the lending component of it, and the platform continued on. 

A couple of my experiences from that is that while it was a very well-perceived idea, it was solving for a problem that was very well known in the marketplace—that businesses failed because of cashflow— I was told over the course of fundraising, if you had a male CTO, we'd be fine with it. And I was just dumbfounded.

And it just took me so aback that still today, this was twenty twenty, still today, we're having this issue that I'm not competent enough, obviously, to go build a technology platform. I would need to have a male CTO.

Now, the person was kind about it, it was not like they were, I'm not investing in you, Heather, because I don't believe in you or your idea. It was that they felt like I needed something—so there could be, Hey, everybody has gaps, right—and he was willing to introduce me to potential CTOs that were male. So, when I asked about a female CTO, that's when I called his bluff, because as soon as I asked him about,  what do you think about a female CTO…?

I don't know any was his answer.

So that validated for me that it wasn't necessarily that I didn't have technology skill. And, I had just come from a fintech, by the way, where I was the Chief Product Officer. So it wasn't that at all. It was actually that he felt more comfortable investing in a company that had a male at the top of the food chain, so to speak, or org chart.

[00:19:49] Jason Rudman: And that is not a unique experience to your point. The reason I wanted you to talk about it. There's a variation on a theme that we've heard time and time again, and it's both incredibly frustrating...

[00:20:01] Heather Tuason: Yeah.

[00:20:01] Jason Rudman: …and is real. You're not the first person to come onto the podcast to say that I was advised to take a man into the room in order to continue the conversation. That's a surprise on some level, I think.

Once you stepped into the founder CEO role, what surprised you most about yourself once you stepped into that role?

[00:20:21] Heather Tuason: It continues to work for and against me. I'm a doer. 

I like to do, so as I'm getting the company off the ground, it surprised me that I had enough aptitude to go build the marketing platforms, build the technology platforms, and I enjoyed it. I threw myself into the doing part. I feel like, at certain points in time, I should have said I need to hire an expert now. It's time to hire an expert instead of just continuing on with, for instance, marketing's a great example of this.

I have been doing marketing since the onset of the company. I have hired somebody to do some content management or something to that effect along the way. It wasn't until year six that I decided to get a CMO. And so now, I'm starting to really think about, okay, I need expertise. I can't do this all. I can't be the generalist anymore. I need to get some specialists in to take it to the next level because it's exactly what we advise businesses to do and I need to take my own advice sometimes.

[00:21:19] Jason Rudman: And that's hard. That's hard. What was the trigger point for moving from a content specialist to CMO? Was it you were at scale? 

[00:21:27] Heather Tuason: It was twofold. So, the first piece of it was I hired a sales team in twenty twenty-five; for the first time really serious about it.

And at that point, I realized I was doing all their support because they need marketing collateral for this event, that event or this purpose and I was creating it. And I'm like, it's a little flip-flopped.

The second thing is that I needed some additional time in my weekly schedule because my parents moved in with me and the tactical piece was worth every penny of having somebody come in and help with something that they're more of an expert at than I am.

So it was a win-win because I got an expert in—yes, I'm paying for it—but I am now able to be with my parents anytime they need me to be there.

[00:22:12] Jason Rudman: The balance is important, right? Life continues to life or we continue to have to be adults.

If we zoom out, what do you think most people misunderstand about the space that your company operates in?

[00:22:26] Heather Tuason: I think most people don't think they need it being a business owner. I think they think I've got it.

When you aren't focused on the financial growth of a company twenty-four-seven and you're talking to clients and customers, working on marketing campaigns, developing the product, producing the product or service and getting it out the door, you aren't focused on finance, that is not the front and center thing that you think about day in and day out.

Can I hire another person or not? Should I do a marketing campaign or not? Should I buy the inventory because it's on sale or not? All of those things are not top of mind, but when you have somebody that has that top of mind for you, it gives you extra leverage. It's so much extra leverage to have somebody looking out for you in that regard as well as tracking the performance of your company.

[00:23:13] Jason Rudman: Yeah. So as a founder or CEO, and again, you and I met each other when I'm still in the corporate cocoon, How has your leadership style evolved as the company has grown?

[00:23:25] Heather Tuason: So, we are a hundred percent remote still. I ask everybody, every year after the pandemic, Hey, you guys wanna get together in an office?

And, the answer is no. They love it. They love the remote aspect of it. So we've had to do a lot of work around some of our core values, Trust is our main core value and really being remote, it's an extra effort in a lot of ways. A lot of ways.

[00:23:49] Jason Rudman: That's great. Trust. Trust is important. We come from corporate entities that have values and they put them on the wall and they live and breathe them. As you've built the company, beyond trust, incredibly important, what values are non-negotiable for you?

[00:24:04] Heather Tuason: Our core values are trust, confidence and competence. So confidence in each other because we have to lean on each other in a remote aspect of the team, as well as we need to have confidence that we can deliver to our clients. So we're not going to sign up for something we can't deliver.

If someone comes to us and asks for a particular expertise and we don't actually have it, we actually say no to that client.

And competence: continuously educating ourselves on the best practices to help businesses grow and having a platform of CFOs that can lean on each other through times that they maybe haven't seen before. They can tap into the network or the company's methodology to support businesses.

They have that network and support system around them so they can gain that competence over time.

So, those are the three core values, and then the Arena component of it is formulated on Teddy Roosevelt's speech—The Man in the Arena—which I absolutely love.

[00:24:59] Jason Rudman: All right, so let's talk about that. I love, I think everybody thinks that we script these within an inch of our life. Everybody listening here will appreciate that we generally knew the conversation we wanted to have. And I have written down, why the name Arena?

So, it is connected to Teddy Roosevelt, but expound on that just a little bit in terms of why that was important to you as you were building the company?

[00:25:19] Heather Tuason: Sure. The Man in the Arena speech is part of a much larger speech called the Citizens of the Republic. It is from nineteen ten [1910]. He [Roosevelt] had just lost reelection, was down and out, and was touring the world, was speaking in front of some sophisticated audience in an arena in Paris.

And, was really speaking to everyone pointing at his flaws and everyone kind of saying, talking down like, Hey, you weren't worth it anyway, type speak. And it was, really getting away from the ones who actually are in the arena day in and day out, really getting dusted and marred as part of the speech and actually trying something new, trying something different. And, there's no point in pointing your finger out of them because you're not doing it yourself is the essence of the speech.

And I did bring a prop today.

[00:26:13] Jason Rudman: I'd love it. 

[00:26:13] Heather Tuason: I have The Man in the Arena speech.

[00:26:15] Jason Rudman: Yes. The speech is framed and clearly is incredibly important to everybody that's listening to this incredibly important to Heather and the journey that her business is on. So I love that.

You’ve gotta be in the fight and you're gonna be in the arena.

So if the arena is successful in the way you envision, what's different in the world, say five years from now?

[00:26:38] Heather Tuason: My goal is to move the needle on half of businesses failing by their fifth year. I would like to have a significant impact on that. I want ideas that people have to come to fruition and live past that longevity of five years and failing. That has been my goal for a few decades now. But it is certainly my goal with Arena.

[00:26:58] Jason Rudman: So with that as a goal on the hard days, what keeps you going?

[00:27:04] Heather Tuason: My team and my customers, the clients, they need us.

[00:27:08] Jason Rudman: What's a typical customer like? I don't want you to name names, but could you describe for us a typical customer and again, connecting it to that outcome that you're looking for, which is to help a company with longevity?

[00:27:22] Heather Tuason: Sure. I'll talk you through a tech company that we've had for a number of years.

We first helped them and this is what I did to continue to test the fractional CFO concept— we helped clients, anybody, for free to apply for PPP funding and get forgiven. It was our test and learn into the space of being a fractional CFO.

Filling out the forms, it was amazing. Filling out the forms was difficult for business owners. They didn't know what number to put in which field to get the maximum amount from the government. And so, we definitely performed a lot of those during twenty twenty and the subsequent PPP funding.

We got full forgiveness for all of our clients, and we had one tech company in particular that was along that journey with us. We basically saved their company; they would have completely gone under. They were a tech company that provided onsite IT support for school systems.

And so, we got them through PPP round one and round two, and then we helped them reposition their company to the Zoom age and getting Zoom in classrooms. 

And now, here we are, a number of years and a number of contracts and acquisitions later, and they're looking for an exit. They're ready to retire, and we're finding suitors for them. So it's like the perfect business journey for a CFO. In addition to that, we have now taken on all of their accounting as well, and we do all their bill pay and payroll, et cetera.

[00:28:43] Jason Rudman:. That's amazing. because the idea will likely live on with a different set of people building it.

We talked earlier about automation, so I wanted to come back to that. And in this seemingly everyday changing world that we're in, where something new with AI is happening, the latest version of Claude. I don't know if you're tracking, but there's a whole series of conversations going on about the revolution that's about to come, if it's not already here.

How do you think about the impact of AI, generative AI, agentic AI on your business and the customers that you serve?

[00:29:19] Heather Tuason: Yeah, we've done a lot of testing. I'd like to think that we're a little more progressive in the finance space in testing and learning. We do get our client's permission, of course, as we do that. And everything's on a closed platform as we test anything.

I'm seeing tremendous value in AI supporting the tactical, more repetitive activities that we support businesses with. For instance, every month, we produce a monthly business review for our clients. It's their forecast versus their actuals and key performance indicators that are specific to their industry and a lot of that now can be automated which is wonderful because it allows the CFO to be more strategic. So, the amount of strategic time that they get with their client is much more meaningful. 

Where do you want to be in five years? You having the conversations with a client on taking them to the next level and then going to actually expand their business to a new state, a new area or a new product line— that is the space where CFOs really want to be, the good ones anyway.

[00:30:22] Jason Rudman: What's a lesson from this journey that you wish more founders talked about openly?

[00:30:29] Heather Tuason: I would say being an owner operator, there are so many people out there with phenomenal ideas, but unwilling to do the execution of it and unwilling to take the time and energy  to build a business that people want to come work for and come buy from.

Being the owner operator is, it's a skill set in of its own and you can have ten ideas in your lifetime that are viable, but if you can't build it, then it's not happening.

I do think that has been a huge learning that I didn't realize how valuable, I am an operator, I am more of an operator than an entrepreneur and I find that if I didn't have that skill, I don't think Arena would be here.

[00:31:10] Jason Rudman: It's the power of the doer, as you said. What's the one question you're asking yourself right now as a founder?

[00:31:17] Heather Tuason: How big do I wanna be?

[00:31:19] Jason Rudman: Ooh. Alright. So let's pull that thread. So does that get back to the tension between your very deliberate decision of not taking VC money? Do you feel that limits you and within that limit you're trying to figure out what the upper boundary of that is, or is it something else? 

[00:31:37] Heather Tuason: That's a good question. I think it's a lot of things. Number one—I see founders, they also get many term sheets, and I see what happens to founders and their own equity in their company. And, I have some core principles that our CFOs share; every founder, of course, makes their own decision. You have to be fully aware of fast forwarding five or ten years of what that does to your dilution. So the practical way of thinking about that. 

And then, I agree with you: you know, my next move for growth would be putting sales folks in every major city and to do that, I would need substantial capital. So do I want to go do that or do I want to incrementally grow? That's an inflection point for me right now.

The second piece is I am really seeing a lot of personal value in being with my parents and I don't know if I want to sign up for the nationwide airplane hop from city to city to build this out. So I'm taking it a little easy right now in that regard.

It might be the right answer, it might not, I guess I'll find out. There are many firms that come after us all the time for acquisition and most of those acquisition deals are we're gonna combine companies together and have you run it. And, I don't know if I want to do that. So, it's more of a personal inflection point on how big I want to be because I can see the path to get there.

Once you're in it and you can see the path from one million to two million, two million to five million, five million to ten million, you can see the path to get to the next ten million and the future a hundred million, right?

But is that where I want to spend my time personally at this point in my family life? So that's the other thing working around the direction of the company…

[00:33:24] Jason Rudman: As we've said, I think at least once, you're adulting. We should also acknowledge that you are a parent and what do you think this journey has demonstrated for your kids?

And you were vulnerable enough to share how you grew up—I know enough to know that's how you and Juan have crafted a different experience for your kids—what would you hope or what do you believe they've taken away from seeing you put your efforts into standing up a company and solving a problem that needs to be solved?

[00:33:58] Heather Tuason: I hope they feel like they are competent and confident enough to do that earlier in their life than I was because I had this flight to safety and that safety lasted a long time at corporate America.

I have more freedom being a business owner. I have more passion being a business owner and I want to see that in my kids for sure. Do they wanna take on a fractional CFO and accounting firm? I don't know. We'll see, but I do hope—I have a couple engineers.

My youngest is an engineer and he wants to start his own, he wants to be an entrepreneur out of the gate, and that gives me a lot of pride.

[00:34:37] Jason Rudman: Yeah. And I think the world that we're in right now, I think just sets that up to be even more of a reality. I was having a conversation with a couple of parents, and kids are twelve and ten...I'm assuming college is still a thing?

[00:34:49] Heather Tuason: Yeah. Do they need it? 

[00:34:50] Jason Rudman: Once our 10-year-old actually graduates, the way it's moving, who knows what's going to happen in five years time.

Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you. How do people learn more about Arena, about what you're doing, get in touch? How best to connect with you? 

[00:35:02] Heather Tuason: Our website is arena cfo.com and my LinkedIn profile you can find by searching Heather Tuason.

[00:35:10] Jason Rudman: And we will make sure that we add that to the show notes. This has been awesome. Thank you. 

What I'm left with is tenacity, resilience, and we're never too old to actually shoot for the moon. Appreciate you taking the time. It's so amazing to reconnect and we'll continue to look forward to all of the great things that Arena is going to continue to do.

[00:35:32] Heather Tuason: Thank you Jason. It was wonderful being here.

[00:35:34] Jason Rudman: Appreciate it. 

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