How Kathryn Moved Over to Offering Fractional CFO

All right, Catherine, I'm so excited to have you here. For those of you who don't know, hi, my name is Charles Lykoff. I own Profit Surge Group, and I also own a fractional CFO firm. I've helped a ton of fractional CFOs, bookkeepers, accountants, kind of grow their business. And here today I am with Katherine Davis. Catherine has a bunch of experience in the finance realm, is making that shift from bookkeeper to fractional cfo. And we've worked together for a little bit, and I want to bring her on to talk a little bit about our experience.

So.

So, Katherine, welcome.

Hey.

So do me a favor. Tell me a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your business, and what do you do?

So I basically started it as a side hustle to make a little bit more money bookkeeping. And then I started seeing patterns when I was helping in the banking industry. And so I went, you know what? I can help a lot more by running my own firm than where I was currently. So I switched to my own firm as a bookkeeper, literally last minute choice over a holiday weekend, mind you. And I just was like, you know what I'm going to do? It launched it, and I decided to go for it.

So how long you been doing that?

About a year and a half now.

Okay, so you've been doing bookkeeping about a year and a half. Question. How did you find us?

Actually, I saw a lot of your ads on Facebook, but I kind of ignored them for a while because I was learning, I'll be honest, because I was learning the bookkeeping side and making sure I understood that before I started. And then it just kind of kept on popping up and I'm like, you know what? I'm going to take the leap and go for it and see what happens.

Okay. Clearly we've been working together for a little bit. What was the problem you had prior to working with us here on some of the things that we've been doing together?

I didn't really have necessarily clarity on which direction I wanted to go with my own firm. I knew where I wanted to end up. I didn't know how to necessarily get there yet.

Okay, and when we talk about get there, what do you mean by that?

It's, I guess, the path that every business and entrepreneur takes to live their best life.

Okay. Right. Because we all kind of go a different direction. And what success means for me or for you or for somebody else. Right. Is a little bit different. I know. For you, was it something like, take.

Your weekends Back power back to your weekends.

Yes, power back to your. Power back to your weekends. Okay, what does that mean?

Basically, I know a lot of entrepreneurs tend to work during the weekends, especially in their business, not necessarily on their business. And so I like to be able to give my clients their time back so they don't have to work on the administrative side, the finances during the weekend when they're working on their strong point, which is what their business is, whether it's construction or plumbing or whatever it is that.

That makes a ton of sense. I find even sometimes I can get stuck on the weekend grind and I got to remind myself, like, oh, wait, we have systems and we have teams to do all that. And sometimes I just get so excited, like, oh, I want to knock this out. So finding that it's hard to find a work life balance because, like, we work to live. We live to work like, you know, finding that. And if you really love what you do, granted, you don't. No one loves everything that they do. You can love most of it, but no one loves everything that they do. So why did you choose to work with us instead of maybe anyone else out there?

I liked what you were presenting and I felt to take a chance. I felt I just needed to take a chance and go for it.

What do you mean take a chance? Do you mean like take a chance on yourself or.

Yes, take a chance on myself and expand my knowledge and expand my business so I can help my clients better so they can expand theirs.

Okay. Kind of like a receive so you can give to give to someone else. Was there anything in particular about working with us that really helped you?

One thing was the instant communication with Slack. Being able to have that where there, you know that if you have a question, you can ask it and you will eventually get back to us at any point because there's that instant communication and it's not getting lost in the weeds of thousands of emails.

Gotcha. So, like, I know that you and I have communicated back and forth on Slack, and if you're like, hey, we, what do you think about this? Right? I've been able to like, respond back like, you tagged me. I get in there and I respond back or Bree or, you know, say one of my teammates, like a technical thing, right? Like, we have people to cover you there. So it sounds like the idea that you. You feel supported in that direction. So I know we work together. And before the call, you and I were talking a little bit about, like your prior finance experience and you work with us in our program. To kind of sharpen your finance experience. Tell me, tell me a little bit about that. Was your financial knowledge before working with us?

So my financial knowledge was really school of hard knocks. I taught myself everything. I dug myself out of $80,000 worth of debt as a single mom making less than $45,000 a year at that time. And that's what taught me my basic finance, which is budgeting. I mean, that's really my extent of finance at that time. I just saw patterns as I was looking through statements in my banking industry.

So you were doing that.

Yeah.

Taught yourself bookkeeping.

Yes.

And then you came to us and you're like, I want to learn this fractional CFO thing.

Pretty much.

When you say it like that, it sounds crazy, but we've been working together for a while, going through the financial education. How do you feel about your ability to help a client make more money or save more money or explain their finances to them or give them financial clarity? Like, how do you feel about that now? Because I know before you probably had some school hard knocks, and we probably rounded out that and maybe sharpen the sword. How do you feel? How do you feel about that now compared to maybe, say, like before, I.

Was finally able to put the jigsaw puzzle together, understanding what I was seeing in the patterns of looking through their finances, Being able to understand the budget side of things, the bookkeeping side of things, and being able to balance that all out and actually present options for my clients that will actually help them save money, grow, invest everything in between.

Is there anything that, like, really stuck out to you? Like, something you're like, ooh, I really like this. As in maybe like, a skill or something we taught or something like that. Like, maybe, or you found more interesting.

Than others, the analytics behind the flow of the cash. In a business that is, like, my biggest. I love doing that. I love looking and seeing a problem and finding it and fixing it.

Of like a little. Little detective, right?

Yes, yes. But in the finance world.

Yeah. Yeah, I. I gotcha. So you worked with this for a little bit as a result of implementing all the stuff you've learned? Been working a while. I think you shared some of this before. Like, what was the outcome?

Just by changing a few things, not adding any new clients, I was able to grow income on my own self by $4,000. And then my newest client that just is signing up, I was able to present different options for them in a much better light and more confidently than I did before. Was able to present it in a way where they felt more confident in my abilities.

That's awesome. Where, where do you think you'd be now if you didn't kind of take action and start working with us?

I still feel like I'm winging it.

I mean, we're all, we're all winging it to some degree, right? If there's anyone watching that's on the fence about taking an opportunity to book a call or speak with us or attend one of our webinars, like, what would you say to them?

Say if you're looking for somebody that is, if you're looking to expand your knowledge and you need somebody that shows you the ropes, actually walks with you and gives you the path and walks with you in that path to sign up with you guys, because you're actually there in that corner yelling out the blind spots.

I appreciate that, Katherine. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here.

You're welcome.

All right.