Lori Shao is the Founder and CEO of Finli, a simplified payment platform for family-centric businesses. Lori is a financial services industry veteran of 17 years and a mother of two kids.
In April 2019, she decided to quit her day job at JPMorgan and create a platform to power neighborhood businesses for the changing world.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Lori’s background, why she started Finli, and how being in Grid110 helped her business
- How Lori realized she could have an impact on family-centered businesses
- Common challenges small business owners face when growing their businesses
- Lori talks about the intake process for small businesses joining her platform and how she has been helping them during the current health pandemic
- The transition from brick and mortar schools to online teaching for small businesses
- How Lori and Finli have been making a difference in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement
- How Lori built her core founding team for Finli
- Lori talks about her strategies when competing against top industry players for great talent
- How Finli’s mission motivates its employees to continue working at the company
- Where to learn more about Lori Shao and Finli
In this episode…
While working in the banking industry, Lori Shao realized that most family-run small and medium-sized businesses that operated in neighborhood schools and studios were struggling. They didn’t have adequate tools, software, or automation to cater to their specific needs. Why? Mostly because there tend to be barriers associated with providing technology and software solutions for micro-businesses.
Lori decided to fill that gap and help lift these businesses for one simple reason: they help build their communities.
In this episode of Elevate Hire, Lori Shao, the Founder and CEO of Finli, talks with Greg Toroosian about her work in helping family-centered businesses thrive. Lori talks about the history of Finli, building her team, common challenges family-centered businesses face, and how she has been making a difference in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Elevate Hire, a talent acquisition firm which provides leadership and senior level recruiting services for early-stage companies. Elevate Hire also offers advisory and consultancy services for select clients.
Elevate Hire was founded by Greg Toroosian after more than a decade in the Talent Acquisition space, working with startups, globally recognized brands and recruiting agencies, because I found that too many early-stage companies were struggling to recruit and retain top talent during crucial times of growth.
Because recruitment and talent retainment are keys to having a successful company in today’s fast-paced economy, Elevate Hire is committed to helping you recruit the right top tier talent, at the right time, can differentiate the most successful companies from the rest of their field.
If your company needs assistance with talent search, hiring process improvements, choosing and implementing recruiting tools, team training, or if you’re in need of an advisor, get in touch with us today to find out how we can make this work so that you can start building the company of your dreams.
Click this link to learn more about us and the services that we can provide for you and your company.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
Welcome to the Elevate Hire podcast where CEOs, founders and executives of early stage companies talk through their experiences and building teams.
Greg Toroosian 0:16
Greg Toroosian here, Founder of Elevate Hire and host of the Elevate Hire podcast where I talk with CEOs, founders and executives about the challenges and successes they’ve had, while recruiting for their teams. In this episode, we will be discussing founder career pivots, starting a company with limited financial resources, hiring for purpose driven service companies compared to companies focused on the bottom line, and we’ll get first time founder insights to building a team from scratch. This episode is brought to you by Elevate Hire, a talent acquisition advisory consultancy and execution firm who recruit leadership and senior level team members for early stage and rapidly growing companies. We believe that recruiting and retaining talent is key to having a successful company in today’s fast moving and rapidly changing economy. able to recruit the right top talent at the right time can differentiate the most successful companies from the rest of their field. If your company needs assistance, recruiting key team members improves your hiring processes, structuring and training your team. Or if you need an advisor then we can help. For more details visit elevatehire.com.
My guest today is Lori Shao, the Founder and CEO of Finli, a simplified payments platform for family centric businesses. Her background prior to founding Finli has been in banking where she worked with top firms including JP Morgan Chase and Silicon Valley Bank. Welcome to the show. Lori.
Lori Shao 1:34
Thank you for having me.
Greg Toroosian 1:35
Yeah, thank you for making the time. I know you guys have been super busy. I know we’ve rescheduled a couple of times as well. Especially with everything going on right now. I really want to dive in actually a little bit to what you and the team have been doing to support Black Lives Matter and having an impact in your own way. But first, if you can, I’d like to pass it over to you to just give us a background on yourself. Often, your career and how you actually got to the point of founding Finli.
Lori Shao 2:04
So I am a first generation immigrant, you know, but I’ve always grown up thinking about how to solve the world’s biggest problems. You know, I’ve always been one who is able to identify the challenges that gaps out there. So I feel like entrepreneurship is in my blood. Right? It’s some it’s just a part of my DNA. But as a first generation immigrants, you know, coming in, coming to the US from, from China, what has been ingrained in my mind is, you know, the path to success, like what do you need to do to become a successful individual or professional, which is you go to school, after you go to school, you know, you apply to a really large corporation, and you work your way up, right? And so, and that’s what I’ve done, and that’s actually how I got into banking and I was stuck in a bank. industry for 18 years and yeah, through this entire 18 years I thought to myself Why am I not happy? Like what is going to motivate me to really go above and beyond because I know my capabilities should be a lot more than what I am bringing to the table now you know and there there are moments in time in my career that I felt like that weighed on the team I felt just not motivated I felt not you know, in tune with what I was supposed to do and and over the course of you know, my career in banking, I’ve asked for many things you know, because I didn’t know what was satisfied that need so I you know, negotiate salaries I hopped from, from bank to bank, I thought from position to position. You know, I I tried to negotiate, you know, like work life balance and working remotely online. That time, you know, there’s a lot that I asked for, because I didn’t know what would truly make me happy and inspired and motivated to be the best me. Right and the workforce.
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