Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Juan Manuel Barrero. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Juan Manuel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the most important things we can do as business owners is ensure that our customers feel appreciated. What’s something you’ve done or seen a business owner do to help a customer feel valued?

Our customers are startup founders. At Lazo, we know that, in the early stages, a founder’s attention should be on traction, culture, and product development. Everything else is slowing the company down and serving as a distraction from where a founder adds the most value. It’s their vision, not their management skills, that drives the organization forward.

At the same time, their attention is sometimes demanded elsewhere: legal requirements, bookkeeping, tax filings, financial projections, investor relations, etc. These are all essential tasks. But they are outside the founders’ sweet spot, where they can add the most value.

Showing founders that we understand the importance of these back office responsibilities and, at the same time, telling them that we can team up, and do these tasks for them, is how we show them that we appreciate them.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My story begins in Trenque Lauquen, a small town in the agricultural pampas of Argentina. My father is an accountant and has a professional service firm for agribusiness companies there. So, naturally, I grew up expecting to follow in his steps.

At 26, I wanted to become an entrepreneur but didn’t know much about startups. I only had a degree and some experience in accounting, tax & finance, and I am a father with a small agribusiness accounting firm in my hometown. So I told my dad we would create Argentina’s most important agribusiness consulting firm. And WE DID IT.

Unfortunately, I was too ambitious for him, and one day my dad told me, “Son, I cannot follow you anymore.” So we decided to split.

At that time, I started to feel that “traditional” wasn’t for me. Agribusiness is my identity. It takes me back to Trenque Lauquen, with all my friends and beautiful experiences. But I started to feel a fire inside, asking for more. And that is why I decided to shift my focus to startups.

I understood startups are the future, and they became my passion. Founders are achievers; founders are dreamers. So, I created CFOstartup, the first professional service company for startups in Argentina, and then expanded to Latin America.

But again, at a certain point, we were growing too fast, without technology, processes, and the right people, a recipe for disaster. Eventually, it got too out of control, and we crashed. It was a terrible time for me, as we had to lay off many team members I was deeply fond of.

Luckily my wife, Andrea, was there to support me. Together, we started over, trying to correct previous mistakes. We tried again, and we did it! She is now the CEO of CFOstartup. Together with the right team, we became the #1 professional service company for startups in Latin America.

As for me, after a while, I realized that the professional services model was not for me because I wanted to create something bigger and transcend. So, after over 12 years of helping over 700 startups in Latam, I decided to move to Miami and create Lazo, a tech-based company.

Lazo is a One Stop Finance Shop for founders. Our platform solves all their legal, tax, bookkeeping, and financial pains with technology and automation, saving up to 85% of their time on back-office tasks.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

Finding a co-founder is quite an art, and there’s no one unique way to go by it. But there is one core characteristic that any founders’ team should have: complementarity. And that is what we have at Lazo. Our differences make the team stronger.

Lucas, my co-founder, and CPO, was Lazo’s first employee.

Lazo is organized around the EO System, created by Gino Wickman. And one of the core themes in this methodology is that one individual assumes the role of visionary (in our case, me) and the other the role of the integrator (Lucas).

And this doesn’t mean that one is better than the other; quite the opposite. It means that each has different goals, roles, and responsibilities. I knew our’s was a solution deeply needed in the market and had an extensive network created over many years working with founders and investors in Latino America. But I needed someone to help me finish the job and channel my energy. And as we started as a bootstrapped company with no external funding until very recently, we would need an all-hands-on-deck approach for a long time.

When Lucas started working with me as Lazo’s first employee, he immediately proved himself a natural leader. Someone with excellent capabilities to organize workflow, incorporate others’ opinions and compress the visionary’s ideas into a strategy with measurable weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual goals for everyone. We clicked almost instantly. That is the magic of the Visionary + Integrator methodology in the EOS. One can only have success with the help of the other.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I’ve always tried to help others in the startup ecosystem grow. And the way I instinctively do that is by sharing my story, experience, and knowledge with others. Social media is just the means to that end.

I feel compelled to help other founders and offer advice when asked. Mainly because others have done that for me; why shouldn’t I? And that is also why, at its core, Lazo is a community-driven startup.

As Latinxs in the US, we understand the importance of helping and supporting each other and being generous with our time. Life always comes around and what you give away for free usually comes back with extra value.

Lazo is part of that effort, and that’s why we recently launched Lazo Academy (which you can visit at lazo.us/academy). It’s a place where founders at a very early stage can find free resources, information, and tips on how to begin the startup journey, what to consider in terms of costs, how to create business models projections, how to develop financial dashboards, how to incorporate a company in the US, how to pay taxes, etc. We still have a lot of writing to do. But slowly, we are adding more and more articles.

I also encourage everyone at Lazo to get involved in Mentorship. We even have a mentorship program for Venture Capital firms, in which any startup in the portfolio of one of our Venture Partners can fill out a form and have a mentor assigned to them. During that hour, they can juggle ideas and take advice from seasoned lawyers, tax planners, or fractional CFOs for free.

To answer your question, I don’t think building an audience should be the end game. Your audience is a consequence. My advice is that your focus should not be on having others bring value to you, but to make sure you bring value to others.

Contact Info:

• Website: lazo.us
• Instagram: lazo.us_
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juanmanuelbarrero/
• Twitter: LazoUS

Image Credits
Andrea Marzullo