Scaling a business by 200% sounds exciting—but rapid growth can expose weak systems, strain cash flow, and create financial challenges that can quickly turn momentum into chaos. In this episode of Build It to Billions, Brett Swarts sits down with Matt Putra, Founder and Managing Partner of Eightx, to explore how entrepreneurs can scale aggressively while building the financial infrastructure needed to support sustainable growth.
Matt shares insights from his experience as a CFO and financial strategist, including how founders can improve forecasting, manage cash flow, understand the numbers that truly drive their business, and prepare for the next stage of growth. Whether you’re scaling toward your first eight figures or positioning your company for a future exit, this conversation reveals how stronger financial discipline can help you grow without breaking the business you’ve worked so hard to build.
Episode Highlights Here:
Intro
Before we jump into this episode, I want to invite you to join our community to help you become a better steward, scale to billions, and ultimately give more or all of it away. All I want
you to do is to click the subscribe button right now. I love your support. It’s incredible to see your comments, and we’re just getting started. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you. Thank you so much for subscribing; it means the world to me.
Brett
Welcome to the Build it to Billions podcast, where we’ve got successful entrepreneurs and investors on their journey from millions to billions. We believe the key to scaling and compounding your wealth in life starts every single day with the mindset and practice of stewardship over ownership and applying billionaire biblical principles. Our ultimate goals help you scale and compound your wealth in life, so you can give more all the way to help MVPs. My name is Brett Swarts. Each and every episode, we’re joined by the world’s top entrepreneurs, investors, millionaires, or billionaires, and they share their secrets and insights with us, so we can all level up and make a bigger impact. Hey, we’re also streaming on Capital Gains Tax Solutions podcast and YouTube channels. So, if you have a large exit coming up above a million dollars, make sure you check us out at CapitalGainsTaxSolutions.com. I’m excited about our next guest. He’s out of Canada, and he isa Canadian entrepreneur, finance executive, and the founder of 8x, a fractional CFO and financial advisory firm that helps e-commerce, consumer packaged goods, and SaaS businesses improve their financial performance. He has extensive experience in corporate finance and private equity, and he has advised companies on financial planning, cash flow management, forecasting, profitability, and strategic growth. Before founding ADX, he served as a group chief financial officer, where he was involved in investment transactions tolling approximately $500 million and so much more. Please welcome to the show with me, Matt Putra. Matt, how we doing?
Matt
I’m great, man. Good to meet you.
Brett
Absolutely. And if our listeners continue for the first time, would you give us just a little bit more about your story and your current focus?
Matt
Well, yeah. So, I mean, you said it well. You covered most of it, but I think I left corporate predominantly because, like, probably some of us that are listening, I was commuting three
hours a day, and I didn’t have dinners at home with the kids for like about two years mid during the week, and then during COVID we started working from home, of course. And I was like, “Oh my God, this is what I’m missing. So, I told them, “Hey, after this is all over, I’m not going to go back. And they’re like, “Yes, we’re going back full time. And I was like, “Okay, I quit. So, so then I just quit and started doing this, and it’s been a lot of fun, stress, and getting grayer hairs now as an entrepreneur than I was before. But it’s all good.
Brett
I love it. And tell us a little bit about your passion for helping businesses understand their numbers and get clear on how to grow, and just what an operational CFO is compared to
maybe just an accounting CFO.
Matt
Yeah, so for me, my very first client was a friend, and I the first day we worked together, I built a bit of a forecast and I showed them their financial statements, and I was like, “Oh, this means this, and they go, “Oh my God! Like, wow, we know so much about our business, and then we through the work, we found some savings, found some opportunities, ended up paying for myself like you know many times over, and they made a bunch more money, and that for me was really fun, and it’s still what I like the most about the job today. Even though we have a much bigger team and we work across continents, like for me, my favorite days are where I’m with clients, solving problems. Today we talked about how we get the whole team aligned around the goals. So that’s the difference between us. Is we’re not just going to send you report. We’re not just going to talk about math. We’re also going to talk about the upstream because what I always say is revenue and profit are downstream of many decisions, and we need to look upstream at your reporting structure, how you make decisions, how’s the team managed, all that stuff.
Brett
Okay, excellent. And so, let’s dive in right into that. So, what is the I guess the number one mindset to be able to understand the upstream and and to kind of reverse engineer it so people are making sure they’re putting the right amount of dollars in the right places.
Matt
Sure, I have learned a lot from many people, Alex Rosie and Ezra Firestone and a bunch of people from this, but really like revenue and profit is a is an outcome of a bunch of stuff you do before that. At its simplest, if you think of a sales funnel, you have you know leads and calls and materials and proposals, and then at the end of that, you have closes. Well, you can materially affect the closes by working at various parts of that funnel, right? So, if you want, you get more leads, you get more closes. But also, if you have better processes between lead to close, you can just get. Closes without more leads, and so, but that that holds true with a lot of other things. Even though it becomes more abstract, like for example, are you doing quarterly goal setting? Are you having weekly team meetings to keep the team aligned? Those things correlate with.
Outro
So, if you like this little short clip of the interview I just did, click over here to watch the fullinterview, and please don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks so much, everybody.
Watch the episode here:
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About Matt Putra
Matt Putra is the Founder and Managing Partner of Eightx, a fractional CFO and financial strategy firm that helps growing eCommerce, CPG, and consumer brands scale with stronger financial systems and smarter decision-making. With a background in private equity and corporate finance, Matt brings deep expertise in cash flow management, forecasting, profitability, capital allocation, and preparing businesses for growth and successful exits.
Through Eightx, Matt works with entrepreneurs to turn complex financial data into clear, actionable strategies. He is also the host of the Do the Math podcast, where he shares practical financial insights designed to help founders build more profitable, resilient, and valuable companies.
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