Mick Unplugged - Suneera Madhani: From Immigrant Roots to Unicorn Success

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

Dive into this electrifying episode of Mick Unplugged as we sit down with trailblazer Suneera Madhani, the powerhouse entrepreneur who transformed a seismic idea into a multi-million dollar venture. Thriving on her mission to bridge gender disparities in leadership, she's empowering women globally to redefine success on their own terms. From revolutionizing the fintech landscape with her innovative business solutions to founding the impactful CEO School for aspiring women entrepreneurs, Suneera's journey is a testament to vision, resilience, and transformative leadership. Fasten your seatbelts as host Mick Hunt unpacks this whirlwind entrepreneurial saga, sparking inspiration and limitless potential! Takeaways: Authentic leadership and embracing your true self can transform not just your business but your life. Entrepreneurship is about execution, not just ideas. Build habits that align with your goals. Women's unique perspectives and empathy in leadership can fuel incredible success and innovation. Sound Bites: "You can't manifest your way to success; you have to take action every day." "There’s no such thing as a billion-dollar idea. It is a billion-dollar execution." "Decide if you're ready to get in the game—isn't it more fun to play than to watch from the sidelines?" Quote by Mick: "Think of solutions to problems people don't see yet. The game-changer entrepreneurs see the future before it arrives."   Connect & Discover Suneera LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suneeramadhani/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/suneeramadhani/ Website: https://suneeramadhani.com/   Follow Mick On: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mickunplugged/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mickunplugged/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIPaMel-Fb4zQmCSZDPHu4A LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mickhunt/ Website: https://www.mickhuntofficial.com Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mick-unplugged/  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Mick Unplugged, where we ignite potential and fuel purpose. Get ready for raw insights, bold moves, and game changing conversations. Buckle up. Here's Mick. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode of Mick Unplugged, and we've got an amazing one for you today. Our guest turned a groundbreaking idea into a multimillion dollar business. And now she's inspiring women worldwide to lead boldly.

She's the founder of the CEO school and is on a mission to close the gender gap in leadership by equipping women with the tools that they need to succeed on their own terms. Get ready for a conversation with the visionary, the empowering, the unstoppable, Orlando's finest, Senira Madani. Senira, how you doing today, dear? I'm doing great, Mick. Thank you so much for having me, and I loved the intro.

So I wish you could be my hype man, like always just hanging out wherever I, every room I walk into. We'll record it and you can just play it before you walk out. Done and done. There it is. There it is. So, Senera, so much that I want to get into.

And, you know, on Make Unplugged, we talk about your because, that thing that's deeper than your why, that's like your real purpose, your real reason to do what you do. And as someone who's an inspiration to many, what is Suneerah's because? What's that deeper than your why thing that keeps you doing what you do? Oh my goodness. I'm going to give you like the most basic answer. I wish it was so much bigger, but truthfully, it's my family. Like it's as simple as that. It's my family. I grew up as, you know, daughter of immigrants. My parents are Pakistani.

They immigrated to the States in the 70s and just didn't have opportunity back home. Both my parents weren't educated, so they came here for economic opportunity. I was born in Chicago. They met in Chicago and got married in Chicago. And it's a beautiful love story, but they worked, you know, extremely hard, just like most immigrants do. And their story is, you know, it's so inspirational of just not being educated, not having family, not having their resources to really then, you know, deciding that entrepreneurship is

the path to success for them. Because if you're not educated, there's not that many options for you to really have the American dream. And so I feel so grateful for their journey, the risks that they took. And my brother and I were for the beneficiaries of that. And their American dream was for that my brother and I would have an education, something that they didn't have, that we would have opportunity to be anything that we wanted to be and to live our lives to, you know, to our best. And so that was the American dream for my parents.

And I feel so grateful for that. I, you know, we did both go to University of Florida. I was the first in my family to graduate from college. I got two degrees in finance and marketing, minor in leadership. So education was so important in our family that we were going to succeed. And I would have all the opportunities through that. And so my parents were just a huge influence in our lives, but I got to see my parents work really hard. We had small businesses from convenience stores, so very traditional businesses, and we had convenience stores,

but my parents worked their way from working in the convenience store to owning the convenience store to then building their small business empire. And it was, we were a middle-class, upper-middle-class family, but we just had this value system of family, hard work. We're at the dinner table every night. And I'm just so grateful for this opportunity.

And I think a lot of kids of immigrants, we don't take that for granted. And so you kind of have this pressure without like, it's not that my parents ever pressured us to become entrepreneurs, which I'll share with you like how my story ended up, but it was that feeling of like, I didn't wanna let any opportunity go to waste, right? Like I felt privileged to have opportunity.

And so I think with that naturally, I was just ambitious as a kid. Naturally, I got to see, I worked with my, like in my parents' businesses. Every weekend, you know, after school, my dad taught me how to do payroll at the age of 14. Like I was stocking shelves. And after school, my dad taught me how to do payroll at the age of 14. I was stocking shelves.

We had such an integrated work-life family dynamic. And so I learned a ton. And I look back as an entrepreneur now and I got my MBA. Growing up, I got my MBA. And post-college, I did go down the corporate path. I did go down the finance corporate path and ended up finding myself just seeing things in a way of like just through entrepreneurship and just wanting things to be better and wanting to solve problems and leading teams and being able to collect people around ideas to go

solve big challenges. And so I was in the payments industry after college, financial services, and I decided that there had to be a better way. I launched my first company at the age of 26. I took that company from just an idea to exiting north of a billion dollars. And we were the first, I keep saying we, my brother, my brother ended up joining that college. We ended up building the company together and scaled our first business together to over 400 employees. We raised from seed round capital to series D.

We sold private equity. We were the biggest exit in Orlando, let alone in Florida and became Unicorn founders. But really at such a young age, but we worked like we had this work ethic. We had this like the one team value system that we had as a family. And so it's just by why has always been my family and I'm in a family business because I work with my brother. And then after I became a mother and I have two young daughters, I have them wearing a shirt that says girls can do anything. It was, you know, it was real for me to ensure that my daughters have every opportunity.

My parents gave me the opportunity to have an education, but there were so many setbacks in my career. There was raising capital, but where minority founders, less than 2% of capital goes to women-founded companies still today. There were so many challenges and I got to experience things on all sides of this equation. And so that's where I got very passionate around supporting women and women in business and ensuring that we all have equal opportunity to do what we are worthy of doing.

And so being a girl mom is also my why. So it always goes back to my family. I love it. I love it. So there's so much that I want to unpack and unplug from what you, you said. And so let's start with the business idea, right? And so before we even get to selling it for over a billion, which you just kind of glossed over and said, yeah, I sold a company for a billion dollars and then I did this and this. So let's go back to what was this idea, Sinera? Yeah.

So I launched the first subscription-based credit card processing platform. So it's like, it's, it's fintech, it's, it's technical, but it's not payment processing is like you take credit cards at every business. 15 years ago, we were becoming more and more cashless as a society, and we didn't have a lot of options for payment processors. The banks primarily controlled your, like wherever you banked is the credit card terminal that would go in. And there wasn't a lot of innovation and technology around that piece of hardware.

And software had such a boom in, you know, what can we do with all of that data? So it really stems from, I had a financial background from university of Florida, I did do finance. I also understood small business. I understood how heavy these costs were for a small business. And there's so much data that's sitting in this black box. How do we empower the business to do more business

versus being a commodity for the small business? Or here's just like, I have to pay this fee in order to accept credit cards, but how do we actually take that data and help them earn more? And so that's really where the premise came from and the simplicity around it. There's a lot of in financial services, it's a big black box, the same guys at the top control it all and control the entire ecosystem. And once you learn it, I just saw so many ways that we could save small businesses money, that we can cut out so much of the middlemen. And so I went direct to Visa MasterCard to strike a deal to give subscription

based payments to all small businesses. So it was flat monthly subscription. And instead of the banks and everyone taking percentages on top, the small business just paid the direct wholesale rate with Visa MasterCard, Discovered, and American Express. So they saved a lot of money by not paying the extra percentages. And instead, we charged a flat monthly subscription based on their volume.

So if they did a million dollars in volume, this was your subscription. So it was like a capped subscription. And our exchange was that we were going to provide awesome software and tools to help grow their business. So that was the founding of a company. It was stacks was my first business. I mean, there's so much to unpack to share kind of 10 years of the how, right? Like I didn't, I didn't go to CEO school. I had never raised capital before. I was 25 years old with no money in my bank account to go talk to, how do I even get a meeting to go get a sponsor bank?

So a lot there that we won't be able to cover in 30 minutes here today. But the thing that I always share with every entrepreneur is why not? So I think I think that like, there's so many barriers to like when we have big ideas or like we can do the things we are mindset is what stops us from even putting our first foot forward. And so the success over the last 10 years only came from me showing up every day, putting one foot in front of the other, and then solving today's problem. We overcomplicate, you know, we have to be there at the end. But if you just bite that elephant, like one bite at a time, that's how I was able to go build it.

And I know it's very easy to say post it's done. It was a lot of hard work. I didn't have the network. I didn't go to an Ivy League school. I'm not pale male or still and I'm at a golf club, or I have this network that I can rely on. And so if I can do it, I really do believe that anyone can have a big idea and go execute. Even if it's a small idea, even if it's just

whatever the idea is, just uncap yourself. I didn't know I could go build a million dollar business, let alone a billion dollar one. And if I had thought about it that it was going to be a billion dollar business, I don't know if I would have gotten started. I just wanted to go solve a problem. And if I had thought about it, that it was going to be a billion dollar business, I don't know if I would have gotten started. I just wanted to go solve a problem. And I got really excited about solving the problem for my customer. And every day I put the right people around me to help me solve that problem. And so

that was the journey with Stacks. And it was beautiful. I've learned so much in my own self and my own journey as a leader, in my own journey as an entrepreneur and a CEO. And I'm at it again. So my brother and I are building our next FinTech called Worth. And so we're building the business credit score now, which I'll share with you in a minute. But we're back at it because we love solving problems.

And there's so many problems in our space. And I do believe in an equitable financial landscape for everyone. And now that I've been on both sides, I can't unsee what I see. And so someone's got to go solve it. And it has to be us. So if you have something you're passionate about, and then you have to go, you see a problem, don't be the one that's complaining about it. Be the one that's doing something about it and be that action taker. Senor, we have so much in common. that's doing something about it and be that action taker. Sunir, we have so much in common. I own multiple businesses. And that is also my journey is to not only just solve problems, but provide solutions for the problem that people don't see yet.

And to me, that's the game changer is when, yeah, you might think of this as a problem and we're going to solve this today. But let me show you where this is actually going and where the future is, because that's how you get the investors. That's how you get the VC, because it's like, oh crap. Not only did we not see that, but now that you've shown us what you just said, we can't unsee that this is where the world is going or this is where things are. And so for every entrepreneur,

everyone that's thinking about starting a business, like literally think of solutions to problems people don't see. Because if you just solve a today's problem, there's thousands of you, right? And then you're competing with the other thousands of you. What most people don't see and the entrepreneurs that get it right,

they see the problem that's 10 years from now that we can start solving today, or we can see the solution that you're gonna need in five years, even though you don't see it today. And to me, Suneer, and I wanna get your feedback on this, or your insights on this, it's not just mindset, right?

Everybody can think. Most people keep it up here. But what Suneer did was put action behind it and built the habits to do that. So Suneer, how do you go from mindset, if you're an entrepreneur, to actually putting things in place? I love this question. I do believe like you can't manifest your way to success. Like you have to take action every day. So I fully support that. But I do think that the mindset part is that that's a huge part of it too, especially as a woman.

I think that women and men just have different natural thinking tendencies and we are very much in our head as a species. Like we are very much in our head. We stop ourselves. We're huge perfectionists. I'm going to reread an email a hundred thousand times before I hit send, right? The good enough concept is not in our brain as women. And so I do really emphasize that the mindset part of it,

like we do have to, I think men are more prone to trying and failing and it's okay and they'll get back up. We are very afraid of failure and it's definitely a mindset shift. So the first thing I think is also just taking action, but knowing that it's okay to fail. So you're not gonna get it right on the first try.

And it's a series of actions. And that's the consistency part of execution. A huge part of what every message that I share, you know, there's no such thing as a billion dollar idea. It is a billion dollar execution. Every day is execution and steps to take action. I think you have to make a decision. You like draw a line in the sand and you're like, am I an action taker or am I not? Okay. And you have to mentally, if you're getting ready to like, are you ready

to play or are you not? Are you going to sit on the sidelines? So there's two kinds of people in this world that the ones that are going to be in the arena and the ones that are going to sit and watch from the seats. And I know the kind of person that I am and I want to be and I want to play. I want to be in the arena. I know I'm going to go down. I know I'm going to have to get back up. I might not win, but it is a decision that you have to make to say, am I in it or am I not?

So that's step number one, I think of taking action. And then once you've made the commitment, now you're in the game, baby. Like now you can't, you can't go and like call it quits and go back and like sit on the seat. You're not sitting on the bench. You've made a commitment to play. And so with that, I really do think there's a huge conversions between sports and business. And although I'm not like, I'm the worst athlete physically, I'm five feet tall. I have no athletic ability, but I do feel like from a mindset standpoint, right? Like it's playing the game. Like you have to take the shots. You have to put in the time to practice. You have to show up like all of the world's greatest players.

They're waking up early. They're grinding. They're putting in the work and they're working as a team. They're taking care of their body and nutrition work and they're working as a team. They're taking care of their body and nutrition. It's all of the things. And so it's deciding like, I'm in it, I'm going to take action and then deciding what is that course, what is that path for you for success? And every single day, I'm super proud, even after exit. What's interesting is like, you kind of decided the person, that's why entrepreneurs are serial entrepreneurs. So it's not, we're not motivated by the money

because if it was the money that we could have been done, right? So I could have been done at the first miss, I could have been done and I could be retired and I could not be doing that and do whatever I want in my day. I've chosen to be in that arena. I'm ready to solve the next problem. I'm not motivated by the money or the ego or the six. I'm motivated to play. That's what is exciting. I wanna win. I wanna win championships.

I wanna be the best. I want to solve these problems. So I'm showing up even every day with action, even when I don't have to be. That's part of your DNA that it becomes and it's part of your natural core. So I think it starts with good habits of truthfully waking up, right? Like how do you wake up?

What your morning routines are like, how you take care of yourself physically. Like I think all of those things also play into account of how you show up as an entrepreneur or as a business leader and how you take care of your mind, your physical body and like your home even is a reflection of like your execution ability as a CEO. Totally agree, totally agree. So let's talk about what you're doing now, right? So again, Suneera didn't just stop,

she is a serial entrepreneur. And so now you're creating other things and you're solving other problems and providing new solutions. So let's talk about this. Yeah. So the FinTech space, I mean, I think it's really sexy, but it's not a consumer product. It's software. We have a personal credit score that determines our financial well-being or standardizes our

financial health as a consumer. As a small business, you don't really have a standardized business credit score. So when we are as small business owners, applying for a loan, opening up a business banking account, getting a credit card, if I pull up my phone right now, all of us can go and get an Apple credit card on our personal device. And by the time this conversation is over, I can walk down the street and tap my phone and take a transaction under Senera Madani. But if I do the same process under Senera Madani LLC, I can't complete this application. I have to submit three years of tax returns. I. I can't complete this application. I have to submit three years of tax returns. I have to submit my P&L. I have to connect my banking. I have to do a bank verification letter. I have to go get all of this stuff. And now

like as a small business, I need so many financial tools. The reason why that experience for a consumer, even though it's the same scenario, because there's standardization of how there's like a North Star, they're like, okay, here's your credit score, here's her W-2 approved, versus in the business front, we haven't standardized the way we look at businesses. And so we're building, you know, for a credit worth, we're building the worth score. So we're building, you know, the business credit score so that we can create standardization on how a business should be viewed as a business, not just like the human

that runs the business. So even when I submit my application, it's still on my personal credit. It's all my personal name. And so there's a huge gap right now in just onboarding for customers. It's just a bad onboarding experience as a small business owner when I go to a bank, when I go get a loan, when I go get whatever. That's the premise of what we're solving is this underwriting solution. But the big thing that I'm solving for though is the fact that right now we have humans

making decisions about other humans. That shouldn't be the case. Humans are taking a look at the application and they're like, oh, this is Suneera Madani. Where is she from? They're not thinking it. They're subconscious and there's unconscious bias that exists. We need to standardize the way financial health of a business is told, not based on the human behind them. And so although we're solving a really awesome software way to go help all the banks and Chase Bank and Bank of America and all the big guys to help them onboard their customers faster.

Do it where a lens of like it's a more consumer like experience. It's accurate. It gives them the 360 profile. The guys that they love it, right? Everyone that controls it, they want that better experience. But in our hearts, what we're solving for is if we solve for that, we create an equal playing field for everyone. We create an equal playing field for every small business to actually have credit worth

based on the worth of their business, not on who they are individually or what they look like or what their socioeconomic past is. And so that's really what worth is about and why I'm so excited to go build again and our team and just to go build again in our team and just to go solve this problem. Although it's an enterprise solution we're solving for the big fintechs and the financial ecosystem, the deep mission, when we solve for it, not if, when we solve for it, will create a much more equitable landscape.

That's what we're all about. Well, as a business owner, I cannot wait. Because the scenario that you described is absolutely correct. It's like, OK, you need three years of these returns, and then you need all of your P&Ls. And then sometimes you have to explain that. Because businesses, right? Like sometimes we make business decisions.

And so I might have purposely taken a loss in year two to have an amazing year three. And like those things that you have to explain, it's like, goodness, like are you, you're explaining things to non-business owners sometimes. And it's like, I need you to understand how business truly operates. No, it's really cool. I'm really excited. So, Suneera. Yeah, I am too. So, you know, I applaud you for the work that you currently do and have always done for women, right? For women, whether they're business owners,

whether they're leaders, whether they're leaders in their community, leaders in their households, right? Talk to us a little bit about CEO School and where that passion came from and all the amazing things that you are doing personally for women. I feel like CEO School is my heart.

I love supporting women. It honestly, in 2020, I launched a podcast called CEO School because I didn't go to CEO School. And I learned the stat that less than 2% of female founders ever break 1 million in revenue. I was probably at the point where I was north of like 12 million in the business for at that time. I'm still scaling the business.

I had never looked up or ever thought to myself like, oh, you know, I raised venture capital. I did the things, but I didn't know that I was truly this anomaly, like anomaly in this ecosystem. I truly was clueless in that because I was so heads down in what I was building. And when I looked up and with my network, I started to meet so many other awesome like women and business owners and entrepreneurs. And they're like, I kept getting invited for coffees or for like to fermenter chats. And there's only so much how many, you know, where I can share. Here's how I did this. Here's where my knowledge is.

Here's how I was able to go meet the investor. Here's how I applied to pitch competitions. Here's how I like skirted into that network room that I wasn't invited to. And then I ended up getting this deal done. Right. So there's this like, there's this business playbook and conversation that I think men naturally have had for so long, whether it's on the golf course or whether it's at stadiums or at the games or at poker nights, women, I mean, we're new to the workplace.

Let's be honest, right. It's been less than a hundred years that we've actually been in the workforce, less than 50 years that we've been able to even open up a bank account that we don't have to sign, like we don't have to have somebody else sign for us. We are now entering this arena, right? But without that support, without the team, without the network. And so I felt like that was really needed in the conversations around success. Like it wasn't, there's not gatekeeping. It's just how do we get more information to say, this is how we do it. This is how I was able to learn from somebody else or somebody else doesn't have to make those mistakes that I made. And so that was

really the start of where CEO school came about was it started as a podcast. I was bringing the community. These conversations were happening on LinkedIn and on Instagram and on social and we're like, let's bring these conversations and learn from actual women who have made it to what we call the 2% club. So women who have not the how I built this and we've, we have some amazing stories of like the biggest successful entrepreneurs, but what about the woman who has crossed that $7 million point in her business and she's a service based agency? What about that e-commerce shop that like? How do we actually take tactical advice from women who've been there? And to be honest, my entire career,

I was trying, I call myself a man in a skirt. So I was like always trying to fit in to the voice club and it's not my fault. It's just what was there. And I wanted to, just now with human tendency to want to be at the table. And I realized that I lost so much of my authentic femininity. I lost so much of like, what makes me really special. My like natural instincts, my empathy, how I lead is different. I have two male co-founders and I felt like I was trying to be something that I wasn't just to kind of fit into this mold. And really when the success of the company took off

was when I was, after I became a mother, after I leaned into my own leadership and who Suneera was, not what Suneera was trying to be and emulate. And so I feel like with the armor off, I feel like I was able to, when I could show up authentically as myself and lead in my energy,

things really started to shift for me and for the company. And so I've just really encouraged that for women to not try to fit the molds. And those are the conversations that were just that weren't taking place. And so CEO school started as a podcast. It's going to be five years this March of 2025. So it started during the pandemic. I'm super proud of it. We have the best conversations with the most genuine women, mothers, entrepreneurs, leaders, just movers and shakers.

And it's vulnerable. And if you're an entrepreneur and you're a female entrepreneur scaling your business, you're not alone and you've got an awesome community there that you can tap into. And so it's a podcast. And then with the demand of the podcast, they wanted more. And then the digital community forms that we have a digital community that gets together every Tuesday. So we have like sessions every Tuesday at lunchtime. And so we've got founders club, and then we have millionaire founders club for the seven figure and above. So it's an incredible space and it's filled with hearts. Amazing. Suneera, you're doing so much. And like I said, I applaud you for the human that you are, the things that you're doing for people, the soul that you have, the visionary that you are, just so many amazing things that Suneera does and that the person that Suneera is just

thankful for who you are thankful that you took some time with our community today. So where can people follow and find you? I'm so grateful, Mick, that you have the show and that people are listening to be a better version of themselves. Like if we can have a world of that, that this is exactly what the world needs. Whether wherever you are in your journey, like just that, taking that action to listen, put yourself in positivity, surround yourself with like-minded individuals

that are here for growth. Those are the kind, those are my people and those are the kind of people that I wanna be around. And so thank you for all that you do. That's what our little corner of the internet is too. So come find me, come say hi. I'm on social media so you can find me at Suneera Madani. So first name, last name, S-U-N-E-E-R-A, Suneera Madani.

And I'm sure you'll link everything. So you can find me on socials and then you can find me through my social. You can kind of find CEO school, you can find worth, you can find all the things. So follow me on social and come say hi. If you listen to this episode, I'd love to hear your biggest takeaways and have a conversation with you. Senera, thank you so much. Love you for all that you do.

Anytime you want to be back on, you know that we're just a message away. So I appreciate you dear. All right. Thank you so much. Bye everyone. Bye, Mick. Thank you for tuning in to Mick Unplugged. Keep pushing your limits, embracing your purpose and chasing greatness. Until next time, stay unstoppable.