Hello, and welcome to the exit presented by Flipup, the number one platform to buy and sell online businesses.

Flipup manages over a billion in deal value annually, and combines expert buy and sell side advisory with its market leading valuation tool,

deal room, off market offering, market insights, and an AI based deal by deal matching engine. Now for the exit.

The exit is a 30 minute podcast featuring awesome entrepreneurs who have been there and they have done it.

The exit talks to operators who have bought and sold businesses of all different sizes. You learn how they did it, why they did it, and get exposure to the world of exits.

It's a world occupied by a small few, but accessible to many on this episode of the exit. I sit down with Maria head and grin.

A massive fantastic entrepreneur and investor that has been really emphasizing and focusing on bridging the gap and helping women get more into venture capital and business.

We talked about her starting with bigger companies all the way down to smaller companies that she really loves and enjoys working with, and just the impact of working with a smaller company.

We dig into what you can do when you're going out and raising money from venture capital investors and the types of things you can do to be prepared.

Preparing your business for scale ability is one thing that Maria emphasizes in the interview, and I think it's really important for all the women out there that are listening to this episode that it is a there's going to be barriers, there's going to be biases and things like that.

A educational gap that everyone is working on and that education is king, and I really liked that that was something that Maria talked about and even offline we talked even more about how people can educate themselves on the data that's proving that it's more powerful to be a diverse organization and women run companies are just a powerhouse.

So without further ado, let's sit down here on the exit and talk to Maria head and grin.

All right, I am here with Maria head and grin and she is a board pro senior advisor and an amazing angel investor. How's it going Maria?

I'm pretty good how are you doing great doing great I'm excited to really get into all the success that you've had but before we do let's talk about your background what got you into business from the start.

That's interesting question because I actually started out in school as a humanist so I studied languages like Greek and Latin and what have you and and then ended up in finance so it's kind of old but I figured out that I think numbers are a language to me so I very humbly call myself the business whisperer.

So numbers is just another way of it's another language and it tells how the business is communicating how it feels and you don't want needs to be done basically.

So I think that's why I got into it. It's my own sort of analysis.

Very cool so let's talk a little bit about your journey you know to CFO and CEO in the C suite and how you really kind of started to help guide companies through exiting because this is a unique episode where we really are kind of unpacking how the preparedness of exits work so I'd love to understand a little bit about your journey there.

So predominantly majority of my career up until a number of years ago was in finance so I was a finance leader in CFO of the different companies and and the latest operational role I had was CEO of a company and I if you look at the kind of companies I worked for some people they do a career of working for large or in large corporations as they sort of climb the corporation.

But I actually did the opposite journey in the sense that I work for smaller and smaller businesses started with the really big mature ERP companies and then every time I changed it was slightly smaller and it's because I just really thrive in that environment that pays the innovation that never knowing what's going to happen.

You know what you started to the door in the morning and shorter decision making processes and just much more straightforward you know politics.

So I think that has been a thread I worked on.

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