Brennan Durad, founder of Vessel Advisors, explains what fractional CFOs do: they look up and out at strategy while accountants keep their heads down in the books. They work with companies from pre-revenue to $100M in annual revenue, handling cash optimization, automation, and preparing businesses for exit by cleaning up financials and improving valuation.
Like, what's the real job of the cfo? Real job is to have insights that lead to recommendations that ultimately drive EBITDA or valuation.
Welcome to the Next Level Income show, where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the Next level. I'm your host, Chris Larson. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlevelincome.com. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address on. On today's episode, we have Brendan Durad. Brendan is the founder and CEO of Vessel Advisors. He is CFO, controller and accounting services company with over 40 professionals dedicated to empowering business owners with financial clarity and control. With over 10 years of experience as a fractional CFO, Brendan has personally served over 50 businesses representing close to a billion in combined annual revenue. And today we're going to dive into what services Vessel Advisors offers, what is a fractional CFO and how a fractional CFO could potentially help you. If you own your own business, you're looking to buy a business or you're looking to maximize the value as you exit a business. Brandon, welcome to the show.
Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Chris.
Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, in Next Level Income, we're always talking about, you know, investments, but really, you know, I just got off the phone with or call with another investor and I just said, hey, what are you doing? Kind of to optimize your taxes and your financial planning. And I know this isn't the sexiest thing in the world versus talking about investment opportunities that are out there, but I think what a lot of people don't realize, Brennan, is, you know, when you can save a dollar on taxes or save a dollar in your business, that dollar falls right to your bottom line. So I'm really excited for you to share a little bit more about what you and Vessel Advisors does. But before we do, I know we just shared a little bit about you in the intro here, but share a little bit more about your background, your history and how you started Vessel.
Yeah. Well, again, thanks for having me on. This is awesome. Yeah, a little bit of background. Vessel Advisors is a fractional cfo, controller and accounting services firm. So we act as that scalable back office when you're trying to make a decision on am I going to hire kind of a lower level, entry level person, ask them to do some high level things that doesn't Always work well or on the flip side, higher, more experienced individual and then asking them to do some more level things. Um, I, I got into this and started this company about eight years ago and it was coming out of a couple things, but one was working at a startup where oftentimes I felt like I needed to cut myself into a couple different pieces. CFO, controller, staff accountant, forecaster, you know, FP&A, as we call it, maybe some data science, maybe some visualization. And we only had so much budget, right. You're, you're a fast growing startup, the money's going to R and D and this is some other things. And I thought, man, if I could have a portion of each of these, it would probably go a lot better for, for everyone involved. And then the other is just, I think the shift, like right now in the last four or five years of a lot of accountants industry is a little impacted. And so the idea was, well, what if we could create a great solution for people that maybe want to work from home or that are high performers but are okay working remote and matching that up with really great companies that need the help but not nearly 10 hours a month, 50 hours a month, 20 hours a month. I got my background doing, I was an econ major and did a lot of accounting work coming out of school. So really exciting. But I, I had the fortunate blessing of working for a guy who was extremely entrepreneurial, also a cpa, which doesn't always go together. That's, you know, you kind of think of CPA and the, maybe all the stereotypes and you don't think of that. So that's the, that's kind of how we got started or how I got started very early on in accounting, got exposed to that. It's a kind of entrepreneurial finance and mindset of being able to really leverage accounting and financial planning in the business, specifically building pro formas, building scenarios and then actually reviewing those and comparing those and getting better, more and more aligned as the months and quarters go on.
Yeah, no, fantastic. And I might be a little unusual, but econ was my favorite class in my MBA program. So I loved it. I had an Austrian professor. Yeah, I had an Austrian professor. It was fantastic accent and everything. I found it, it was my highest grade, which I, because I just found it interesting to read the book and go through all that.
I'm have to recruit you. Be careful.
I don't think I'd make a good, a good accountant, but yeah, more of a hobby. But I know a lot of listeners, they're like I know what an accountant is. I know what a CPA does, I know what I do. And a lot of people hear about what a CFO does. But let's start with that. How's an accountant or how's a CFO different from an accountant? Brennan?
Yeah, question. So we talk about CFOs. Their job is to be the ones looking up and looking out. So that's the best visual I can give. Or maybe an accountant or even a controller who's more of that manager level that sits on top of different accountants. They're looking down, right? They're looking, they're focused on the monthly lows, precision, day to day activities, bill pay, technology processes, things that are going to make that machine work better. The CFO's job is up and look out. And generally they're coordinating with a CEO or, you know, a business owner who already has a vision and they're translating that into accounting speaker. They're, they're building the financial plan for that. Say, okay, I want to grow 3x in 5 years. Okay, well how, how does that actually work? Someone needs to be looking up, looking out, and then advising on that. So that's how we usually describe it. And then we think about staff accountants as really head down, precision focused. Right. Accuracy focused. They're each transaction, they're looking at documents or they're reviewing a lot of automation. Now in AI, the CFO is generally receiving those reports towards the end of the month and then actively working with the business owner throughout the month. What's changing in the business? Their time is best spent meeting with, in a large organization, different department heads, ideally weekly, but at least a couple times a month and trying to bring all that together to identify some things maybe that need to be optimized, changed, or best case, if you, if you find something that's working really well, you're looking up and looking out into that aligns. Right. Oftentimes we're the first one to identify it. Put the flag up and let the team know that they might work further investigation.
Yeah, I really like how you describe that looking up versus looking down because. Or looking forward even, right? Like kind of look looking forward and how to do that. And the world has changed a lot. You know, we have, you know, we have small businesses, we have medium large businesses, but we also have a lot of these, you know, entrepreneurs, you know, like myself, who are now working, you know, out of, out of a home office or a small office with a remote staff, which has become more and more popular because you can live in A great place like Asheville, Southern California is not too bad either as we were discussing with the weather out there. But what, you know, who do you find that typically benefits the most from this? Or what stage does a small business kind of enter the realm where they say, hey, I could really benefit because I know me, I'm like, I can't, I'm not going to hire a full time cfo. But fractional CFO that could come in a few hours a week or you know, several hours a month and really help out with this. What, what levels of business do you find really benefit from a fractional CFO service?
Yeah, I, as always, it depends. I would say always have at least the conversation because even in like a new business you might say a couple hours a week, you probably don't even need that. You probably want someone to come in for a short period of time, get to know the business and then it's maybe three to five hours a month. Right. It's a, is as our good Craig Valentine says, an outside eye on what's going on in your business. From that angle.
How? Right, right next to your right, right side of your head there. Who? Not how. That's a great, that's a great example of that.
How's there? Yep, I got Craig's 9 out of 10 over here too. Or 10, 11 out of 10.
11 out of 10. Whoa, don't let him hear you say that. Yeah, it's a number up. That's right. Yeah, I got his. Oh, here you go. Sorry. Quick shout out for Craig. He just, he was just on. Yeah, Craig and Dylan, do you want to do this? Yeah, let's do this man. Let's do this. So if you missed the episode. Oh, that's terrific. That's a whole stack. It's my pre ordering book and Ted is that has been nastic.
Read it in a weekend and then bought a, bought a stack of them to give away. So. Yeah, but like you know, good example. We work with clients that are pre revenue startups all the way up to $100 million a year in revenue. So when you say like what's the ideal? It's more about having that optionality to drive, you know, that person, that person in maybe for a short period of time in a pre revenue startup or early stage business or if you're you know, looking at maybe a transaction, it's only a couple hours if you're just somebody to look at your model or to take a look at your thesis or your theory and advise. Okay, here's Directionally where I would take for startup that fundraising strategy or yeah for a, you know, property, you know to, to poke some holes and things we have, we've like private equity firms that'll come in and say hey we just want, we want you to do the financial due diligence. We'll take the, and the people and the management team and all that. We don't need to just be the, the eyes on, on this one piece. I would say generally you know, around that, that three to five million dollars a year in an business is when you, you probably can't, you can't afford to not be doing this anymore. Can't fake it till you make it too much anymore. And then man, you'd be amazed. We work with multiple hundred million dollar businesses right now over the course of vessel's history. It's not the most common but you'd be amazed when you get into a business they've just been executing at the level that they know how to. It's not that that's bad right. They're, that's more of like the optimize. They're, they're making you know, millions and millions of dollars a year. Tens of millions in some cases. Fantastic. Why don't you have somebody else come in and look for some of those basis points in each area. And you know oftentimes having business that size, we just, we just worked on one very common to find you know, a couple million dollars a year in savings just by diligently working through people process technology, really understanding the business and saying did you know you can do this? Did you know you can do that? Here's what it would take to execute on that. That's a, that's a two week project, that's a two year project. And then the business can sit in a position and go okay, I am going to self select into these three things and my team can do the first one and then you know, fraction cfo, I'd like you to do number two and three and then we'd like to plug in in six months. Right. And reevaluate. Yeah, connections are going. So it really gives that I think flexibility is probably the best way of describing it. And I would say don't shy away from sharing everything that's going on because this person is fractional has the benefit not only of having maybe 15, 20, 30 years of experience, the CFO in a full time role, but if they're working like in an organization like ours, they're probably working on three to five, maybe even three to six, seven different clients at the same time. And so we're, then we're. And we're trading across about 35 different CFOs, you know, best practices and learning. So doing this massive again, technology.
Think a brain trust. Yeah, yeah.
Brain. Yeah, yeah. That's a great way to put like I need, I need to write that down. Brain trust. Like you're getting so much more than the hour you're paying for or the monthly fee you're paying for because that's coming in and then you can also turn it off when it's done. And I think when you hire a C level person at any organization, there's just a cultural side of oh, if we're going to let go of somebody that, that size or that person leaves, there's just a cultural impact. Whereas if you're hiring fractional and you're hiring a consultant, it's. It's a lot easier to kind of again, scale it up and scale it back down.
Yeah, I never thought about it that way. So not only can you come in at an earlier stage company and scale with them, but you can actually provide some protection around that position because that's a huge disruption. We, we had, we had a disruption in one of our businesses last year where we had that Our, our, our CFO was pregnant and she decided, she's like, you know what, I'm out. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stay home and I can't do this anymore. And it left a big hole that we had to go back and, and took months, months and months to kind of go back. So that's.
CFO plays, plays a really big role in, usually in strategy. And then they also know how a lot of things work. They're. The CFO's job is to free up usually a business owner leadership team know that they do really well, which is not the financial side. They're out selling, building vision, you know, new product, you know, handling things that are out, out in front. And that's a really. Actually it's not an uncommon scenario that we walk into where the business owner knows, hey, in three months or in six months, I'm going to have position in this position. We want to use it as an opportunity to reevaluate like what are we doing well? What are we not doing well? How could we improve? Do we. Do we need that, that level or that title? Or is there a better mix of resources? And we do have a lot of work like that on assessments that I personally love because you get to get on site with a client for a few days. You get to meet not just your ship, but every accounting team member. You get a lot of feedback. You look at the technology and go, hey, did you know you could do these 12 things and probably have a better accounting operation? Same or less cost very frequently, at least within six months. Less cost, hoarding, you know, or whatever the thing is that that CEO wants, that's, that's been hard to get or, or difficult to get because it's not a priority. You know, that thing can be done. Those are fun, those are, those are rewarding engagements.
Yeah. And you know, not only, not only do you have the ability to come and kind of coach, coach the financial team, if you will, but like you said, you also have, you know, more of a breadth of knowledge. You know, I used to go in to, to surgeries and I've worked with a surgeon that might see that specific surgery once a year. And it was a kind of a crazy trauma surgery, but I'm seeing them every week or our team seeing them, you know, repeatedly. And you know, you're able to see these problems and I like that you're, you're, you probably solved this problem in some other business and be able to bring that, that knowledge and expertise to.
Do that playful that from. Yeah, exactly.
I know you and you and I were talking, you even help businesses optimize, like you mentioned, basis points. Like you said, hey, here's an opportunity where this business could earn a few more percentage points on their cash. For instance, can you go into, you know, some of these instances where you come into businesses and you know, maybe examples of low hanging fruit. Yeah, we're talking about, we're talking about a vehicle like, you know, utilizing business vehicles and those sorts of things, you know, and you can use that. But just any, any specific examples that you have a blow hanger?
Oh yeah, there's budge. There's a bunch. So you know, in the last, like if we were talking three years ago, before interest rates were rising, your treasury management as a cfo, that job was for a small business there, there wasn't a lot you could do with, with minimal risk as rates started moving up. Right. All of our CFOs at Russell, part of the conversation was, okay, let's start. Any clients that are holding, you know, it could be 100 grand, it could be millions of dollars, whatever you're holding that you don't need in your operating account, but you're keeping, let's go ahead and set up brokerage accounts or a minimum of money Market, which they usually would already have. Right. A sweep. If, if your listeners aren't familiar with that, you know, it's just like a daily or it's an automated process. So a little lower than maybe a Treasury bill. That's an example of we could come in, even if they're doing a good job using the sweep, we could come in and find another, you know, probably 40 to 50 basis points in t bill rates. And at one point I think we were over five. And so we would have ladder bills or we would, you know, provide, have by 30, 60, 90. We'll look at a cash flow. They, you know, really very low likelihood you're going to need this. If you do, there's a slight discount, right. To, to point it back or a side risk to point it back. And that, you know, when you have millions of dollars or in some cases maybe had a client with around 8 or 9 million dollars of operating cash that was just sitting. No, it's again, no one's, no one's thinking about it. They're just the CFO that's in, the financial person that's in there is comfortable, right? They're like sweet. I have plenty of cash and I don't have to worry about. Yeah, but a good CFO is going to sit down and go, okay, what do we really need? And then can we move it, monitor it daily, weekly, you know, bi weekly and manage it. So that's a good example of adding a lot of value. You know, another one that we routinely do in professional service firms is the firm might not be measuring the utilization or the realization rate. So what that means is, you know, if you've got an employee and you need them to bill 50 hours a year, 1800 hours a year, 2000 hours a year, maybe at a law firm or a more aggressive firm or much higher at a, at a bid law firm. You know, there's, there's not a management monitoring system there. There is if you're at a huge firm because that's how they run their business. But it hasn't been set up. So we'll do what we call the retroactive 12 and the, and the forward looking 12. So active is everybody on the team and just a quick little heat map which is a color for each person for each week. And it's basically green, yellow, red. And if it's red. Right. That means that something was not, it's probably not the individual's fault in the team. It's probably a resourcing issue or a management issue. And so I'LL get the team together to understand that. And then we'll look out 12 weeks and say, you know, okay, the whole team is booked out for the next two weeks or six weeks or eight weeks. There's some level there that drives hiring decisions or says, hey, sales continues to grow the pipeline, or we're closing at a faster rate. We really need to accelerate hiring. You can use that tool and utilization to really optimize folks. And at a minimum, we usually move that needle. Say if the average was 65 or 70%, we're able to move that needle up, you know, 4, 5, 6 percentage points on the utilization, usually within 90 days. And what's cool about that? And like, bottom line, right. It's the same overhead. Absolutely lost. It's just again, outside eyes, somebody looking at it. And then I think a thing that a good CFO brings in a finance team is just consistency. Get your financials on the same day every month. Get your weekly reports on the same day and same time every month. Review them at the same cadence every. When you do that, you're looking and you'll get insights because you'll see when things are different because you'll just know intuitively after 6, 8, 10 weeks as a team, that doesn't look right. Right. Is it a data integrity issue? Probably not. After six or eight weeks, it's probably a, you know, an actual operational issue. So that's a good one for utilization. Yeah. And then on the technology side, you'd be amazed how many accounting departments aren't leveraging what they can. You know, maybe they're in cookbooks or they're in. Or they're in that suite of. It's a little bit larger organization in real estate, they're in yardi or mri, but they're not really leveraging the tools that they could be or the optimum that could be. And so we'll come in, assess that and say, hey, you know this thing that was taking you 10 minutes, five minutes, seven minutes per per invoice, per transaction.
Yeah.
That should take 30 seconds. That should take 10 seconds. That should be a sample size at the end of the month because everything can be automated through this app. And again, going back to our assessment kind of service and structure that can be stack ranked against everything else. So, yeah, you can do that, but it's a low value. It's not going to do that much in the short term. But if a CFO is looking at your business and you go, I'm going to grow. I want to grow 3x in five years, 2x in two years, 3x in one year. If you're early stage startup, we want to invest in those technologies early so that we're not trying to throw additional headcount or stress out the existing team for months and months while we wait to make a decision.
I love that. And one of the things we've seen, I mean, AI is just amazing at how fast it's progressing. And we're able to have, you know, like my executive assistant, she's been able to utilize AI to help supplement her and figure out things or editing our podcast, pulling out clips and all these things. I use it to help with my editing for my weekly emails. So what are you seeing on the accounting on the financial side in terms of AI and how that can help with some of the scaling and cost reductions?
Yeah, so one, when people ask me this question, oh, it's been there for a while in lighter forms. Right. So a lot of the transaction matching and things that have been going on really far, maybe even 10 years, going back to early versions of folks probably know Bill.com, which is now Bill, and different expense card automation tools, their data and they're saying, okay, well if you went to this restaurant or you went to this, you spent on this product 97.2% of all businesses in our system, you know, here, or put it to this account, they're going to default it to that account. And then again, the accountant's job is to come in and make that change. And then usually once you do that once for that vendor, it's done forever, unless you need to put it like to a job code or like a testing system. And so that's been around for a long time. So I think what's crazy is most people have not a lot of those tools. And that's, that's what we'll, we'll start with. We'll say let's, let's get. I think what's exciting in the AI space, we spend a lot of time just trying to keep up with it and our team's constantly in the apps that everyone's using. But from the accounting side, we're trying to match and understand the security piece of it because there's so much principle. There's also this risk right there. There's a big article, I think about a month ago in the Wall Street Journal about, you know, financials being uploaded to one of these tools and then being turned over to another completely separate party. And the results, right. So they're, they're feeding it and There are private versions, but to the extent that we know or don't know, that's the risk side of AI right now. But once that's released, once that's solved, and again at the enterprise level, it probably is beyond, beyond our, our typical size. But once that's solved, I think the opportunity is massive because the things that you're doing as a CFO really is you're doing trend analysis and then you're trying to determine like, what's the, what's the story, what's different, what's changing? And then what does that mean? And over time, if we can leverage these tools to say, write those reports. Right. Hey, consume all these different statements and write the summary, or better yet, you know, have the insight. I mean, we can teach a lot of these things. Just like, what's the AI tool? Some of these folks we've worked with have created their own little bots. So like, you know, you feed it your own.
We've done that.
Yeah. Or your own way. Yeah. Of working. And so that's, that's the angles that we've been trying to investigate and learn. And our sample size isn't quite big enough to make it too meaningful yet. But over time it will grow. And the idea is, okay, generally for all of our CFOs, like, how would we handle this as vessel and then how would we specifically handle it, know, with the individual team and hopefully with. That does over a long term, democratizes, you know, the information and that, that kind of brain trust into almost its own little agent going forward. But we'll, we'll see. That's, that's in the future.
No, I love it. I mean, we've been, I've been uploading all my content into a Chris GPT, so you can go in there and search for that. And it's funny because I still have, you know, I've got longtime listeners of the podcast and they'll say, oh, you should do a podcast on this. And it's like, I did that four years ago, you know, so now they can go in there, they can say, hey, do you have any podcasts on senior housing, for instance, or CFOs? And yeah, it's right there on our website. It says, ask me a question there in the bottom. Right. But yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty wild. Yeah, I think eventually they'll be able to do my podcast for me. It'll be, you'll be sitting here talking to like, Max Headroom back in the day. You Might be a little young for that, but you, you can.
Well, so it's funny you mentioned that we as a, as a team, we've looked at, um, you know, marketing for our, our business. Interesting. It's a high trust business, but believe it or not, I, I don't love doing a whole bunch of like, video or, you know, doing the content. I'm getting used to that. One of the things that the marketing company that we're working with, it showed me was he's like, it's not quite there yet, but it's like we can almost recreate. We can definitely recreate your voice and then the image or the, you know, the, like your, your personal image is in process and the ones that exist, like you can pick from hundreds or thousands, thousands of people that maybe look similar or don't, but it's just a little. But man, it is close. Like when I'm watching these, it's like, you know, every fourth second you kind of notice something isn't quite human, but, you know, give it again, give it a year or two. So, yeah, maybe our, maybe our bots will be having this conversation.
There you go. Yeah, that's. Let's not get too carried away, but that's pretty wild. And one of the other things we talked about, Brennan, you guys, and you kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but you also help companies prepare for exit to optimize valuations in terms of exit do. And you don't have to, you know, speak of specifics, but maybe you can share a little bit about, you know, how your team does that or maybe an example of exit default. So.
Got it. Those are fun. So in our, in our initial assessments, if the company says, hey, our intention is. Or where they get introduced to us, because their intention is to sell within a short period of time, a relatively short period of time, let's say, you know, six to six months, to two years. We're going to route our us from an accounting lens, from a finance lens. And that's going to be driven on a couple of things. We want to get through financial due diligence successfully. You got to kind of the business owner has to put themselves in the shoes of their buyer and really their analyst. There's going to be an analyst in there who's poking at everything. So we want to ensure that you have 24 months of clean financial statements. We're going to go back through really line by line at the, at the general ledger level and identify all those. And then we also want to forecast out for you at 12 months, you'd be surprised how many companies are getting ready to sell. Don't really have a strong even two or three year forecast. Maybe they have a one year. So we'll start with the one year and extrapolate that out a bit. Our job is to also sit between the investment banker and, and the client for a period of time. So we're preparing them for some of those conversations. We're not actually them to market. We're not a broker, dealer or doing any of that work. But our job is to ensure that their operations are working. The other thing that's really, really key in a sale, what are called add backs. And so we want to identify in those prior 24 months what was the business spending on maybe that weren't completely, you know, business expenses or like in a small, you know, you might take as an owner of a, like a single owner or two owners, you might take a deduction for tax or you might do something that's tax advantageous. That's actually not great in is for your, your earnings, right? Your, your EBITDA or your net profit.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Your business, your business is generally going to be valued on that in some, some areas. It's different industries different. Let's just say 90% are going to be evaluated on a multiple of EBITDA. And so we want to drive historically a narrative, a conversation with that future buyer and saying yes, it was this number but really it was a higher number because of this, this and this.
And we could show you the paying their brother in law or something. Some. Yeah, yeah.
Family members, autos, you know, other types of toys, you know, marketing expenses, things that you know are, are maybe superfluous that weren't necessary or you know, you can, you can clearly. Okay, this is really what's driving revenue. So it's that mindset though, that CFO's mindset and really a controller's mindset who comes in and works through a checklist to say I think we can add back, you know, sometimes it's 5, 10, 15% to your bottom line. And if you're huge, anywhere from usually like a 4x on the low end to maybe a 10 or 12, 13x on the high end, that's real money and it's going to, you know, make a big difference in the transaction. And then on a go forward basis I would say or preparing them to start thinking like they're going to be in the transaction. So what that means is right now maybe they set a budget and it's a Hope it's a, it's. I think we'll get there. Once you move into a transaction, you need to hit your numbers, you know, or you need to be within 90 to 110% of your number. Top line, bottom line. So we want to predictability and kind of force that, that discipline into the entrepreneur or into the lead up leadership team if it's a little bit bigger company and say hey we mid month, here's why we should be uncomfortable. In the past we weren't, but we should be uncomfortable because if this was during the transaction, this could have a material effect on the buyer made an out or wanting to retrade or change, you know, change some terms or change some pricing or extend the team out, you know, another year beyond what they had already agreed to. So those are, those are really a dynamic. I would also say, you know, run your business like you're going to sell your business. You don't have to, no, no one has to sell it, but run it like you're going to sell it because then you're constantly using that discipline mentality and making objective decisions as though maybe in a year or two someone was going to sell.
Yeah, no, that's massive. And like you said, not only are you getting that money to the bottom line, but if you're selling in the near future, you're getting a multiple of that. So you save 10% that could be worth another 50% on that. Which is, yeah, that's fun. I see smiling because that, that is fun.
That's, that, that's where you really add value for a client in a, in a CFO seat. You know, we, we joke in terms like what's the real job of the cfo? Yeah, real job is to have insights that lead to recommendations that ultimately either drive EBITDA or valuation. Right. They're, they're enterprise value focused, long term focused. Then maybe everyone else is just head down trying to, you know, sales is trying to hit their monthly or quarterly number. Marketing is trying, you know, these KPIs. The CFO's job is to say what's this business going to be worth? And three years if the goal is to sell. And are we, you know, maybe not all revenue is equal. Right. Not all margin is equal. Like how are we moving the levers of the business for that Future buyer in 2, 3, 4, 5 years?
I love that. As we wrap up here, Bren, I want to, I want to kind of have a little fun and you know, kind of look at the current political landscape, the economic landscape. You know, we may have some new tax code changes coming. You know, kind of what's your, what's your general take on, on the way the economy is going, how you're counseling your business is preparing for potential. I'm hoping we get some beneficial bonus depreciation, add back, add backs in for real estate and certain things like that. Yeah. What, what, what are you seeing out there? What, what, what are you hearing from your business clients and, and what are you sharing with them is we're in this, you know, fairly dynamic environment currently with some of the changes that, that are.
Absolutely. Yeah, it's data dynamic is the word I would say going back to last year and then through to now last year a lot of people holding, a lot of people taking, if we give them a low, moderate, high scenario kind of taking the safer scenario. Once was finished, we saw a surge of people moving more into the hey, I'm, I'm bullish. At least the business owners. Yeah, I'm bullish.
I heard a lot of that.
You know, I think over the last, we're talking today on, in late March certainly the, you know, probably the most dynamic trade environment at least I've done certainly my professional lifetime and no one knows exactly what's going on which creates that silk. And to slow things down for certain types of businesses, I would say clients, E Comm especially that are, that are importing, you know even some, some local businesses that are making some decisions. It's, it's impact. So it's kind of shifted I think in those industries to where we're, you know, RCFO will be more conservative say in the manufacturing space. But that can go both ways. You know, if you're, if you're developing bolts and I'm in Southern California and we have in the Inland Empire here a lot of manufacturing businesses, you know, family owned manufacturing businesses that see big opportunity. We've, we've got other industrial businesses that say hey if, if the tariffs increase, you know by 4% to say China, that's the break even for you know, this major customer I have and they actually want to shift the business to us. So we're like in a, in a good way, we're scared you're just double our business this year. But that also like we're, we're taking some risk and if those tariffs pull back or they go away, then that capitalist changes again. They don't want to scale right away for, for only a year, only two years or a short period of time. So making those capex decisions I think is Is, has become much more dynamic in the professional services world, in the software world, in our, I mean, even our nonprofits. Like, it's been kind of gangbusters. I'd say January was the busiest month we've seen. All of our companies, even for us as a business, people coming in and saying, how do we want. We need help, you know, navigating and navigating this growth. So I say it's kind of, it's a mixed bag and I hope that we get to a point where we just have decided what the, you know, decide the rules of the game again or reset the rules of the game from, from a tariff and, and cost perspective and that allows everything to, to reset. Then, then the CFO can sit back and, okay, now I can actually model it and not need to do these up and down scenario plans. So we, we like black and white. You know, as a accountant, right, like, tell me what tools are and then we'll, we'll work around them. But the, the environment right now is, I would say, you know, it's dynamic and it's not as good say as it was in like November, December, January, when I think there was a little optimism that gets kind of pulled back and, or a little bit more open. See.
Yeah, no, and it's, it's a great time. If you're listening and you're saying, hey, I got some changes going on in my business, I need another set of eyes, Brennan's group, Vessel Advisors would be a terrific resource for you there. Or if you're looking to buy a business. That thought popped into my head as well. And you might take, take a look and look through that. That'd be terrific. So, Brennan, always enjoy our conversations. Thanks for coming on today again. Brennan Durad with Vessel Advisors. Thanks so much for your time.
Yeah, thanks Chris. Thanks for having me.
Hey, Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to gift you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a free. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple podcasts.
