For the past three weeks, we have been driving around the rural areas of Nevada. We were up in Elko, we were in Fernley, and Fallon. We spent the day in Virginia City. Last night we were in Minden. We aren’t done yet. Nevada is a huge state, and we will be all over it in the next few months.

I think it’s important to get to the people and see them in person. You learn a lot by being on the ground in a place rather than sitting at your desk. I remember my friend Dick Duchossois telling me to always inspect what you don’t expect.

When he was a tank destroyer captain in WW2, he didn’t inspect a battlefield beforehand, and it cost him dearly.

Here is what we have heard. Feel free to add your concerns in the comments.

• Development. Too much or too little? Some folks do not want development. Others are excited about the boom in precious metals and mining.

• Geothermal. Should Nevada build more, and where?

• Cryptocurrency. Everyone is interested in it, but few understand it.

• How do we pay for infrastructure improvements?

• Taxes. Decrease fees!

• Regulations. Decrease regulations. Nevada, despite being 0% tax is highly regulated.

• Very wary of Nevada Democrats mumbling they are moderates when in reality they aren’t. See what happened in Virginia.

• Education. Everyone wants school choice.

• Medical. How do we improve it?

• Cost of gasoline! What can we do to stop relying so much on California?

• Voter ID. Everyone, to a person, even Democrats I run into in rural counties, wants voter id. VOTE YES ON QUESTION 7 THIS NOVEMBER. Big tip of the hat to David Gibbs, who spearheaded the effort last election cycle and got over 70% approval, and is doing it again.

• No men in women’s sports. People all over the state want this to happen. They want it in law. You will have to show up and vote on it in November since Governor Lombardo put the issue on the ballot.

People are worried about the states’ finances. Nevada is a 0% tax state. They don’t mind paying sales tax, but don’t want it to be increased either.

There are things we can do on Day 1 in the treasurer’s office to bring some short-term relief. Longer term, we can modernize the office, professionalize the office, and create a lot of gains for taxpayers with little cash outlay.

Things are rapidly changing in finance. The next ten years will see big evolutions. If you haven’t gotten your hands dirty working with them as I have, Nevada will see another litany of missed opportunities like they have in the past several years.

Just staying the course will cost taxpayers money. Support us here: JeffCarterNV.com

My friend Chris Gandy and I were talking. Chris used to play in the NBA. We both went to Illinois, and he reached out to me the first time we met. We are both good networkers and crappy golfers. When I stand next to Chris, it looks like I am in a hole because he towers over me. For the record, I am 6’5”.

Chris recently became the president of NAIFA. He’s perfect for it. When you click the link to their site, you will see why. He and I have been concerned about people and finance for a long time. After we met, we sketched out a business plan to help athletes with finances. So many were going broke, and it shouldn’t have been happening. Once we saw the initial startup hurdles to the business, it made no sense to pursue it. There was no way to scale it.

As an athlete, you have a very limited time to put hay in the barn. Once it ends, it truly ends. A large percentage of them aren’t equipped with the skills necessary to make sure the hay stays in the barn.

One thing that always bugged Chris and me was the term “financial literacy”. Bleh. What is that? It’s ambiguous. Not quantifiable. As I have written here in the past, businesspeople hate non-quantifiable.

We like the term “financial empowerment”. It’s not quantifiable in the truest sense of quantifiable, but it is more actionable because you can more clearly define a mission and goal.

We talked a while about that.

Empowerment means giving someone the ability to be self-reliant.

That means if a person has no or a poor education, they can still be empowered. They aren’t helpless. Arthur Brooks writes about that in his book The Conservative Heart.

Financial empowerment is a core goal of what we will do if I get elected State Treasurer. Join the team here.

Tonight, I was at the Battle Born Republican Women event. Heidi Harris spoke. She talked about a lot of things, but what resonated with me is how the media (and people), just outright lie or shade the truth nowadays. It seems like they are doing it more than they used to.

I notice it in politics.

The effort to pass Voter ID in Congress is one example. Democrats are simply lying about voter identification. Almost 80% of America no matter what their party, what ethnicity they are, or even their sexual orientation, want it.

Why?

Because neither side trusts the other one, and Voter ID gives a modicum of trust in elections. In Nevada, we have question 7 on the ballot. Please show up and vote! It’s important. I know it is an off-year election, but passing it again will put it in the Nevada Constitution, and we won’t have to worry about Washington DC.

I see people being disingenuous on the stump and on social media. Candidates are just being shady or outright lying.

Tonight, the other candidates at the forum were genuine. No malarky. I think everyone appreciated that.

When I gave my little two-minute talk, I mentioned that every piece of data could be verified on the internet independently. It wasn’t astroturf created by me. I didn’t create a Wikipedia page and then footnote it with things I wrote. I came from a place where your word was your bond. At both the CME and CBOT, that ethos permeated the business. We traded billions of dollars back and forth on a hand signal and a nod.

One of the most fun things about this campaign is calling old friends and people from my network. I love hearing about their lives and what they have been up to. I like hearing about their kids, sometimes their grandkids, and what they are doing. When I chat with old traders on the floor, we laugh a lot. One of the funniest things we laugh about is how neophytes look at the past and try to make stuff up. It’s abundantly clear they have no idea about the business.

One old trader and I were laughing about the time we both had a bad day. The spreads we had didn’t go our way. He said, “We lost millions, but at least we made many more millions.”

I think when you are running for office, you ought to be straight with voters. Don‘t try to be something you aren’t. Especially for a State Treasurer’s position. Why put a person in that job who shades the truth all the time, or just outright lies?

Startups are funny entities. In the beginning, there is only one title that matters. It’s “founder” or “co-founder”. They are responsible for everything. Startups don’t have the line and spoke command and control structures of a larger company.

It’s every person for themselves.

The CFO term is generally useless for startups until they transition to a different stage. The titles given to engineering, revenue, and operations are meaningful because they are actively engaged at a very early stage in propelling growth.

I have invested in lots and lots of startups. I have mentored many, many more. When it comes to the “books” part of the startup, there is a clear path they take. The first thing most do is QuickBooks. It’s simple double-entry accounting order entry. It’s fast, easy, and the stuff you can download and give to a CPA is easy. When companies used QuickBooks, it always gave me a chuckle since two of my friends were there at the inception of the company.

The startup will go along, and if things go well, revenue will increase. QuickBooks won’t be enough. They will need some help. That’s where you bring in a fractional CFO. Larry Levy was one we used. The startup world is full of them. The fractional person will get all the bank accounts, cost allocations, and books on a standardized system.

No startup wants to waste precious cash and equity to hire a full-time CFO until they absolutely have to. Engineering, operations, and sales are where they concentrate their resources.

Why?

Because they are under pressure to find product-market fit and grow. Finance is not a growth engine inside a company. The only time it happens is when you are raising capital and corporate finance. When it comes to rounds of capital is a longer-term strategy, you don’t need an internal finance person to sketch out for you.

It’s not until you hit around $10MM annual recurring revenue that you actually need a CFO type in-house. To tell you the truth, I have seen companies survive for long periods of time with good revenue growth simply outsourcing their finance and benefits departments.

However, at $10MM ARR, you have a real business. Your corporate board will want someone in place to take over. Having someone professionalize the organization is a good idea if you want to raise another slug of capital. Colloquially, we call it going from the hoodie and Red Bull stage to the suit and tie stage.

As that company continues to grow, the finance department will build out. If the company is lucky enough to grow very large where it can engage in an IPO, it falls on the CFO has to be able to build out a plan.

At CME, when we went public, we interviewed investment bankers and, after selecting two bookrunners, the CFO and CEO built the roadshow with their help. That got approval and input from the board.

A lot of startups I was invested in never made it to the “we need a CFO stage”. They had created valuable enough businesses to be bought by a bigger business.

There are CFOs out there who leapfrog from company to company. They are great at getting the books and the financial health of the company in great shape prior to a road show. They also have networks of employees, banks, and investment bankers that follow them from company to company. You can make a nice buck doing that if you are good at it.

If you see someone call themselves the “CFO” of an early-stage startup at Series A or earlier, run.

Last weekend, when we were in Lyon County, someone asked me why I didn’t consider running for Attorney General. I told them it was because I didn’t have a law degree. We had a good laugh at that. I don’t think anyone from either party should be AG without a law degree in any state.

If I ran for attorney general, I might shout out things like “I will lock up prisoners, fight crime, and back the blue.” Those are table-stakes positions for any Republican running for AG. If you were a Democrat, you might talk about “justice, protecting illegal aliens,” or something like that.

The Treasurer is the CFO of the state, and we ought to think about it that way. It is also the most non-partisan office in the state since it should focus on investing and return on investment, not partisan politics. Too many State Treasurers are using taxpayer money or the office for virtue signaling causes. That’s not right.

In Nevada, anyone can run for State Treasurer. “Joe Schmo”, who can’t balance his checkbook and whose own personal finances are in shambles, can run for Treasurer.

I mean, I think a Treasurer ought to, at a minimum, have demonstrated skills in finance or accounting, like an undergraduate or graduate degree in the field, a professional designation like a CPA or SEC license, or maybe even be an accredited investor, which is an SEC-defined term of minimum requirements for what is considered a sophisticated investor. (Accredited investor = minimum net worth of $1 million excluding real estate, minimum personal income level of 200K or $300k when combined with a spouse, or SEC licensed.)

I do not think it is fair to give on-the-job training and place a politician in an office for which they would be unqualified in the private sector. Sometimes the voters can make this determination, but often in these high-skilled elective offices, it is easy for career candidates to sound the part and slip into the role. After all, if you aren’t accredited, it is highly doubtful you have engaged in any difficult or high finance in your life.

For the treasurer, there are policies that inexperienced people often parrot, which reveal that they don’t understand the true nature of the job. They’ll say, “I will protect the state’s credit rating”. Or, “I will be a watchdog.”

They have no quantifiable track record of doing it. That dog doesn’t hunt.

Duh. I don’t care what party you are from; as treasurer, you’d better be doing that. It’s in the job description that anyone can look up on the internet. How are you going to protect the state’s credit rating? Are you going to beat on the desks of the ratings agencies and yell at them if they give you a downgrade? For what it’s worth, they generally don’t take kindly to that sort of thing. Ratings are based on a complex set of financial, economic, and demographic criteria – not a political sales pitch from a novice.

Finance is about numbers, not words. It’s about flows, trends, and forecasting.

The biggest challenge for the Nevada treasurer’s office is managing two multi-billion-dollar investment portfolios, including a $9.5 billion General Fund portfolio and a $2.7 billion local government pooled investment portfolio. How you do that affects everything else.

You wouldn’t let an inexperienced person with no exposure to finance run your retirement, would you? Would you want someone with no financial (just sales) experience to be the CFO of your company? Why would you consider backing anyone for State Treasurer who had no experience?

That’s why I wrote this post. If you haven’t read it, go back and read it.

That post shows how a treasurer with real-world experience can save taxpayers millions at little to no cost to them. No real risk either.

Treasuries work better for taxpayers when pros are involved. They bring a network and professionalism to the position. They not only put taxpayers first, but they also know how to execute their fiduciary responsibility to make sure it happens.

Treasurers I have networked with were all actively engaged in sophisticated finance before running for treasurer. They weren’t just shopping for an office. They all agree that there should be some basic minimum standards for the office. Taxpayers are under too much pressure. They cannot afford to have an inexperienced person leading the financial part of their state.

I guarantee you this: anything I say about my track record is searchable and quantifiable. It’s not hot air or some general unprovable point. I think that is the biggest difference that people who had a career before politics bring to the table. We had to put our money where our mouth was and got our heads cut off if we didn’t.

Virtually every businessperson I know hates politics because it is not measurable, objective, and there is no accountability. There are a lot of charlatans who participate. Remember, businesspeople in the C-suite were in a position to do something. If you weren’t ever in elected office, you never had power, so you couldn’t do anything. If the chessboard moved, it was because there was a person moving the pieces, not an article or a post.

Believe me, there are many charlatans out there. Especially the perpetual candidates and career pols. We are all sick of them. I hear that a lot out on the campaign trail.

Business people are concrete. At least the successful ones are.

When I say I bring an international network of financial professionals to the table, you can see a bunch of them here. When I talk about my past in finance, you can see some of it here, here, or here. Yes, Trump’s administration actually called me up and then asked me to be a representative. It’s not a fake endorsement. I respect voters too much to shade the truth or lie to them. Getting elected isn’t worth compromising your integrity.

The hard part is modernizing the treasury. The hard part is updating software. The hard part is figuring out how to professionalize the treasury and the management piece. The hard part is taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves. The hard part is integrating the valuable innovations that have recently come into finance, and the innovations that will come. You have to know what is real innovation from snake oil, and unless you participated in that world, you will surely screw it up.

Or, you will do nothing and lope along, letting time tick by.

Both outcomes hurt the taxpayers who cannot afford to be abused anymore.