EP 82 | Financial Clarity = Exit Power: Why Every Founder Must Know Their Financial Truth with Cody Price

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Welcome to the Exit Engine Podcast, episode 82. Welcome to the Exit Engine Podcast, where we help founders, owners, and entrepreneurs turn their businesses into assets buyers fight for. If you're looking to grow smarter, reduce risk, and ultimately exit stronger, then this is the show for you. I'm your host, Jo Stapleton, and with me, as always, is my partner in value and salability, Mr. John Kniff. Good morning, John.

Good morning, Jo.

John, you know, there's a proverb we love that says, be sure you know the condition of your flocks, give careful attention to your herds, and in business terms, know your numbers. And yet so many founders struggle with this, man. You're either buried in receipts, you're flying blind, you're stuck trusting incomplete reports. There's so much to this. And the reality is this is like most people's like least favorite subject.

Yeah. I mean, we've had clients where I don't know if it was on the first call. I think it was on the first call. I'm thinking of one person in particular. And before we really even, I think before I even introduced myself or right after I introduced myself, the person was like, I hate finance. I can't look at numbers. I don't, I don't want to do this. And we're like, okay, that's good. But it's so top of mind to people when they don't want to deal with it, to your point, that it comes out so early. We don't even have to ask the question. It's just, it's something that's volunteered.

That's true. But of course, there's a serious downside to that, right? Which is that if you're not paying attention to the numbers, if you don't have true financial visibility, and the reality is, again, this can come because you're either not paying attention to it, it's one thing. relying on software to be the only, you know, truth, right, is another one. And then also, you know, the reality is sometimes it's a matter of who's actually doing it and how you're reporting and exactly kind of what you're looking at. And so, you know, this kind of trifecta is what actually hurts businesses, especially in this $2 to $5 million revenue range, right?

And also, just one more thing, and when you— even when you rely on one person, you know, an accountant or a finance person, and you don't you don't sort of embrace and ask questions of that person, that is a really big problem. And I lived this when I was younger in a family business, and it was just a nightmare when you rely— again, you have an accountant, which is completely fine. You have a finance person that's outsourced, but you really need to ask them questions and verify what they're telling you to make sure that— you never know. You never know. You have a good accountant and a bad accountant that you need to stay on top of them and again, ask them the right questions about your business.

That's true. It's so hard to know who to trust, and it's so hard to know— again, the only way to know if your accounting is right is to have another accountant look at it, right? Like, the reality is, is that it's a very difficult thing to really know and to know if you're seeing the stuff you write. So today we're going to dive into one of the most overlooked but absolutely mission-critical elements of growing a business: your financial visibility. Not just taxes or accounting, but the day-to-day financial clarity that lets you make decisions, seize opportunities, and sleep at night. Knowing where your cash actually is. So we're going to talk with our guest today is going to be Cody Price from Price Family Bookkeeping. We'll get into that in a second. But first, John, let's talk about the new ExitEngine ecosystem we've just launched that we think is going to be a very valuable and important platform for those of you who care enough about their business and your own futures that you're going to want to learn and grow towards a successful exit.

It's everything and everyone you'll need to plan and execute a successful exit on your own terms and timeline. ExitEngine helps founders grow smarter and exit stronger by providing diagnostics, roadmaps, coaching, community, and advisory support that reduce risk, increase value, and make their business buyer-ready. It is the first exit planning ecosystem in the world, and you can start for free right now. Just go to www.myexitengine.com.

So, John, it's reported by founders that their least favorite part of running a business, right, is the financial aspect of it. Right? Not the, by the way, to be clear, not the making money part. We all love that, right? But it's the accounting part. It's the understanding where the money is, understanding profitability, understanding, you know, in many cases, especially when you're on your way to exit, EBITDA. It's about understanding really some of these more, these finer points around finance and understanding where money is going. We talk a lot on this podcast about about hidden value and profit leak, right? But these things are obviously essential, right? The keeping the books is the most important part, right, really of your financial underpinning of the business. So our guest today is on a mission to try to close that gap, okay, in terms of the— in the way in which people are actually doing this and helping them actually come to the rescue by kind of taking this on. Okay, so Cody Price, uh, is the founder of Price Family Bookkeeping, a nationwide virtual firm on a mission to empower business owners through exceptional bookkeeping and payroll services. Cody and his team bring clarity, calm, and control to entrepreneurs across industries, from agriculture and trucking to e-commerce, construction, real estate, and beyond. It's not just about balancing books, it's about giving founders the confidence to grow, the insight to make smart moves, and the foundation to eventually exit on their own terms. His firm specializes in helping owners truly understand the numbers driving their business, because when you know the financial condition of your business, you're not just compliant, you're powerful. So we're thrilled to have Cody Price on the show. Cody, welcome to the Exit Engine Podcast.

Joe, John, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Cody, it is. It's great. First of all, it's great to have you here. You know, obviously we spend a lot of time, you know, talking about the financial end of things, you know, around here. But it is, you know, as we said at the top of the show, it is an issue for people. I mean, almost every founder that we talk to has some kind of— gets verklempt when we start talking about, you know, the numbers, right? I mean, it's like they have insight, they're there, but I think a lot of people are obviously, you know, kind of, you know, always kind of concerned about whether things are right. But Before we talk about those specific things, talk to us a little bit about what inspired you to start Price Family Bookkeeping and your journey kind of through this kind of financial bookkeeping stuff.

Yeah, no. So my background's primarily in corporate sales, actually. So I'm a little bit of an oddball in the accounting space where I didn't come from the 20+ years of accounting experience and jumped right into doing my own thing, which has actually been largely a benefit because my perspective has been from working directly with business owners for years now. So in my sales career, I worked with your single owner-operator business all the way up to some of the largest conversations I was involved with. It was with a $3 billion corporation. So I've seen kind of the wide array of different structures, different situations, and majority of my career was always on the financial side of it, whether it was selling accounts payable systems or it was like primarily the industry I was in Primarily was in the trucking and logistics space. And so some of my career was actually on the fuel card side of things. And so I was always hitting some financial aspect of the clientele that I was working with. And so as far as what inspired me to, a lot of it was, I guess, in a way, call it opportunity from tragedy, if you will. I went through a season where after my dad passed away and really recognizing like, okay, I've had a great career up to that point within my corporate sales run. I was starting to get a little capped out, I guess, if I could say, where I'm a lot more of a strategic thinker. And sales had run its course to that point where I learned a ton from that experience, but I could tell it was time to move on. And after my dad passing away, that was really the— it forced me to stop and really reflect on, all right, what direction am I really wanting to go here? And I wanted to service clients at a higher level. I had certain things in mind on how we could do things that would be better served for the client and not just better served for our pockets, if that makes sense. And then wanting to move into the finance industry. My mind has always been more numbers-based, more— that's why I was an oddball in the sales world too, actually, because a lot of times those folks are— and I love salespeople, they're hilarious, but they are really, really good in what they do, but they're not super organized. Uh, by default. The best ones typically aren't. And I was always the person—

my—

the VPs or presidents I worked with, they always loved me because I would actually like take notes in the system and was super organized. And so it's just kind of funny finding my, my, my way into the space now.

You actually use the CRM they provided to you?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I was like on it.

You're the— so you're the one.

You're the one.

Yep.

It's so funny you say that about salespeople not being organized because my, my background, I used to work with a lot of salespeople, franchise salespeople, and to get them to put a note into our CRM system, it will— or even to even take what they have on their yellow slips of paper and in the back of a napkin, literally in the back of napkins, to find out how the deal was going, it was torture.

Yeah, yeah, it really is. It was always— it was funny whenever I passed accounts over to other people or they were passed to others They always just said, man, these are great. I was able to pick up right where you left off. And then when I took accounts over from other people, it was just an absolute mess. And so—

That's great.

But no, it's been a great journey so far. We've learned a lot. We've had a lot of things organically positioned or how we've even structured our firm to where, again, the whole mindset was that— and I'll take a step back here. In the trucking industry, there's something called driver intent or carrier intent. And ultimately, it's just what's best for the client. So I've translated that within this realm too. So there's a great book called Redemptive Business that talks 2 things. One, these myths of business. One is that progress is always improvement, which, you know, we can look at the cell phone and recognize that's not— that's definitely not true.

Yeah.

Came with its own problems. And the second one is that maximizing short-term profits is the chief aim of any business. And there's truth to that, but it's not the full picture either, right? Because it lends itself to the question of, are we able to make decisions based upon our other convictions, even if it means less profitability in the short term, but does it lead to human flourishing? So our viewpoint with our firm is that All right, how can we service clients where it's in the best interest of them? Because from a bookkeeping standpoint, there is no fiduciary responsibility to be a bookkeeper. Anyone and their dog can be a bookkeeper today, and it's actually ridiculous. I wish there was a more stringent process to become a bookkeeper, and you can go and get certified. Our team members are certified and well experienced, but it's one of those things where clients come on board and their prior bookkeeper, we realized they had no idea what they were doing. They didn't have to, you know.

Yeah, we had a situation and they didn't— they never became a client, but we— they were a big business. They were like, I think they were about like $9 million and they were still using cash, um, cash accounting. And it was, it was right, that was my reaction too. It's like, look, okay, like, can you do that? That's fine. But, but okay, but what are the implications of that, right? To your point about like short-term profits and those types of things, there can be All sorts of implications of not using accrual-based accounting. We're getting sort of into details, but actually—

But actually, let's just for a second, okay, because I think this is actually something that we should actually touch really quickly. Okay, John, if you guys explain what the difference is between cash and accrual and why a $9 million business is using cash accounting is doing it wrong.

Yeah, so the— and I'm a simpleton in a way where I really Really try, and this is where I think my career in sales actually helped a lot, just being able to bring things down to a level where let's just have everybody understand it from the get-go. So cash versus accrual. Cash is just as if I'm handing you cash money right now in your hand as the exchange happened. Whereas if you're a business where you have, say, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and there's aging 30, 60, 90 days out, You got to be able to account for that in your accounts receivable, your accounts payable, in your reporting. From looking at your balance sheet, if you're running cash basis and say you've got— that's a $9 million company. If you've got half a million dollars that's just outstanding and you're expecting that money to come in, it really reduces your ability to look at your balance sheet, look at your reports and go, And make quality decisions for the next directions of your business. Because if you don't know those numbers, you also can't see, and you don't— you're not able to pull an aging report to see, wow, we have $150,000 that's actually 90 days past due. We actually need to go collect on this money. So it greatly reduces your visibility. And the name of the game with bookkeeping is you need to get the reports, the numbers, and the data on the reports to match what's happening in real life.

Right.

And so in order to do that, there's the middle point there is you got to filter it through an accounting software, but you also need— so you need to understand how to, I'll use this word, manipulate the accounting software to serve its purposes for your business. But you also need to understand the accounting principles that go into getting the right data. So for that person, they might've been a whiz at whatever accounting software they were using, But if they— it sounded like they didn't really understand the accounting principles that fed into that to understand, oh, we actually need to be on accrual because this is what it's going to look like on the reports. And then downstream, this is what's going to best serve the CPA team as well from a tax perspective. Because if your data on your reports, it serves a couple purposes. One, yes, it is. It's feedback for you to be able to make decisions as a business owner or as an executive team. So they need to be accurate for that purpose. Yes. But those numbers are the first line of defense for all of your other financial professionals downstream, whether it's your banking, your lending partner, your CPA team, primarily your wealth financial planners. So many different—

Your exit planners and your buyers eventually, right?

Exactly. Yeah. And so it greatly limits if those numbers are not accurate, if they don't match what's happening in real life, and they're not structured in a way that makes their jobs easier, it greatly reduces their ability to help you and maximize what they can do for you as well. So I know I extended your answer a little bit, but as far as like the AR/AP, it does feed so much into— or the accrual versus the cash basis. Once you get to a certain point, I mean, even depending on how you're structured too, there's a lot of times you're required to operate as an accrual basis.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And of course, that particular business— I know what John's talking about— is, you know, was the kind of business where they were very likely having aging receivables, right? And knowing that stuff and being able to count that in the stuff when they were going for— at the point they were going for loans and stuff like that was going to be important information.

And it was only— they were only limited by the bookkeeper, right? The bookkeeper wanted to do cash accounting. And the owner sort of assented because he wasn't— again, he's the people we were talking about in the intro, Joe. It's like he just wanted to deal with the business. He didn't want to deal with any of the accounting, the accounting software.

So yeah, yeah, it's crazy. And that's the whole point, right? It's to say that, look, this is why it's important. You hire a bookkeeper who only does cash accounting, right? I mean, that's the thing. And if you don't know what question to ask or how to say it or make sure that they're doing it right, I mean, you're This is your shit, man. You're the founder. You're the last, you're the last person. The buck stops with you. And if you're not, if you don't have, have the, at least a fundamental understanding of what's going on here, then how are you going to be able to ask questions and know what's right?

Right? Yeah. And Cody, let me ask you a question about the size of businesses and like, what, what is, if you, if you can think about like when, when you're taking on a new client, right? You're probably taking over from either an existing software or existing bookkeeper. What does that process look like when you're starting? You know, it's day one. and you start getting the reports, what are you and your team doing to onboard that client to your framework and software?

Yeah, so let me explain how we're structured a little bit because it feeds into this. And so we have 5 pillars of how we serve clients, how we work with our clients. The first piece primarily, and this is probably the most important, it's the biggest pain point we hear from clients, is just capacity that their provider has for them. And my dad was self-employed, actually. He was an owner-operator in the trucking industry. So his accountant, even you try to call her and it takes, you know, 2, 3 weeks to get her on the phone. And that was a major pain point for them. And that's actually extremely common because whoever you're calling, usually they're the people that are also doing the work behind the scenes and they can only do so much. They can only be so available for clients if they're doing everything in the books. So what we did is really almost from the get-go, we brought on a team, really accounting team in our back office that I facilitate all of our work through. And I am a huge fan of not being the smartest person in the room. And so they are well advanced even beyond me. Like I said, I didn't come from the accounting space. I know I'm limited to my own means, my own training, and from my experience. And so we brought on folks with, you know, they have the advanced accounting degrees, they've got multiple, multiple years of experience, small, mid, and some enterprise-level bookkeeping and accounting processes. And it greatly increased our capacity, one, for the level of work that we could do. And I'll call it the best practice work we can do on the one hand, but also it freed me up to be really available for clients. And this is really, really important because bookkeeping as a whole, it's 80% best practice and it's 20% nuance. And I need time to understand the complexities and the nuances of each individual client. So I know how to facilitate that work through our team. And so that's— and I'll come back to that here in just a second, but that's our first pillar is the relationship we can build and the time that I can spend with the client to really get a grasp on how are you operating today and do we need to flip things a little bit to where we get back to more of a best practice approach here. So the second pillar is just our flexibility. So flexibility between specifically industry and software. And so there's a lot of bookkeeping firms that they narrow themselves into, they only want to do QuickBooks or they only want to do Xero. And I get it, don't get me wrong. It does make for more efficiencies able to happen. But we have clients on QuickBooks Online, on QuickBooks Desktop, but also whether it's Xero or FreshBooks or Odoo as like an ERP system, right? We have multiple softwares. So we wanted to just stay industry and software agnostic. Primarily. So the third piece is the collaboration. Whenever we bring on a new client, I tell them, I want an introduction with your CPA. I need to understand from their viewpoint, how has this been going? Is it an absolute mess to do their taxes each year? Could we be doing things in our reporting procedures to make your job easier?

Yep.

So, and ideally, if we can, then it makes hopefully their service costs a little bit lower for the client too. So it's a win-win for everybody. And also, if there's other providers, whether it's the banking lending partner, whoever that needs those numbers, we want to be able to have that green light to have that collaboration with those folks.

Makes total sense.

Yeah. The 4th piece, and it's funny, I had a VP of a bank call me a couple months ago and I was explaining to him a little bit. I forget how he got our info, but reached out, just want to learn about us. And I went through all of this and I explained that point to him. And, uh, and he was super nice guy. He was pretty just calm-spoken the whole time, pretty melancholy. And I explained that piece to him and he, he really got lively there. And he says, wow, I've actually not heard of that. That is very refreshing that you would call me.

Yeah, yeah, to make my job easier, right? If you think about it, like, right, we're all working together for the client. If, if it's a nightmare for them to prepare the taxes based on your accounting procedures and software, like Hey man, let's change this. Like, let's not— we don't have to do this, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that feeds into our 4th point where we get a lot of clients come on who they are not particularly happy with their CPA. And there's some of them, they're like, yeah, I've been with the guy for 10+ years, he's great, you want to keep working with him. There's others that— and this is, I forget the exact stat, but I want to say it was over 70% of clients are shopping for new CPAs. Because a lot of CPAs are reactive. They're looking at prior years and they just do the filing and the prep and the filing. And not as many of them do the actual planning. They're not as proactive looking ahead 12 months, 5 years, et cetera.

Interesting.

And again, we'll look at the nuances of the business and go, hey, you might— like, I had a conversation here the other day with a lady. They have some agriculture, they've got rental properties, they've got a dental practice, and it's all like separate. And they're like, yeah, our CPA, they just kind of do filing, but we need more tax planning. We know we're leaving money on the table for the IRS. And, uh, but so that, that feeds into that 4th point of just having a roundtable of resources. So we have vetted relationships in our back pocket that we can, uh, extend to and we can introduce clients to. And I'm not a huge exclusive partnership guy. I don't think that's in the best interest of the client. Because everybody has their own partnership deal or percentage we'll pay for referral on. And that's great, but I don't make the decisions based off of that. I make it off of how good are you, and is one, yes, but 2 is how good of a person are you in terms of your character? And do I feel like you would best serve the client or is it just a money grab for you? So there's just kind of a mental checklist I go through in vetting relationships I can introduce people to. So that roundtable resources, that's huge. And that's not just for CPAs, but that's the tax planning piece, the wealth management piece, whether it's legal counsel, insurance, or risk mitigation, variety of different industries that we really just try to have a good network of relationships and be a connector for clients. And then as they grow, we can continue to feed in that relationship loop. And then that 5th piece is our pricing. And we do more of a scope-based pricing model. Typically bookkeeping firms, it's one of two things. They have what I call like a bucket pricing where option A, B, or C, take your pick. And that doesn't always turn out the best from the client's point of view because if they're in that mid-range, they might not, based on the scope of work they actually need, maybe they're paying more than what's actually necessary. But they're locked into these prices.

Right.

Or there's firms that charge hourly, and I'm also not a huge fan of that. I don't think that incentivizes the work very well because then any research that they do, they could just spend hours and hours on it. And so ours is based off of scope of work. We take a look at how many accounts do you have across your banks, your credit cards, your checking, or your lines of credit, your loans. What accounts are we reconciling? How many transactions are flowing through all of these accounts on a monthly basis that we're having a hand on? And how involved are we in payroll? How involved are we in the AP and AR? Do you have any sales tax liabilities, right? Are we going to be doing any 1099 filing for you? There's just all these factors that we take into play and we consider and we build our pricing around that. And so there's some clients, revenue isn't as big of an issue as far as They might be a $10 million company, but if they're some IT or data company and they get bulk payments from a separate software and it's just super simple bookkeeping, they're not going to be a $10,000 a month client. Right?

Yeah.

So it's strictly off of scope of work and we find that that best incentivizes us and it's best model for the clients. And we will also actually adjust over time. We'll do a review probably every 6 to 12 months depending on the growth of the company because businesses ebb and flow. So if they're in a growth mode in 6 months, if our scope has really increased, we're going to grow to accommodate that, right? Because our work is increasing. Now we are incentivized to be efficient because we work at scale. And so we may try to delay that as much as we can. And it might not increase like a 1-to-1 factor because as we build in efficiencies with their bookkeeping, The scope might go down because of our own efforts, you know.

Well, yeah, it's interesting because so like those, those smaller clients that you mentioned with a, you know, vastly different business, right, agriculture, I can't remember the other things, but like that's much more difficult to, to service that client versus a large IT company with way more revenue, right? Because you're treat— you have to treat all of those, you know, trucking capital assets and all those things have to be treated sort of Distinctly, and they might have a lot of accounts coming through it, whereas that IT company is like bulk payments and it's sort of rote, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And then, so that's where I wanted to explain all of that because that feeds into your question of how do we essentially onboard? What does that process look like? It's very unique with each client because it depends on the engagement we have with them because sometimes they come on board and it's like, hey, I still want to partially be involved. We have a client that they still go in and create the invoices, any of the bills. They write a lot of checks. And so they are tasked with going in and actually writing the checks. And then we handle everything else downstream from that. So it's a little bit more of like a 50/50 effort with them. There's others that come on board. One of our largest clients, they're in the commercial real estate space. They've got over $20 million in equity within their portfolio. And Their prior CPA teams and their prior bookkeeping firm that they were using, who the owner of that firm was actually a CPA, surprisingly enough, they royally messed up this client's books and some of it hadn't been done for months actually. And so this was an effort to clean up all of 2024 and 2025. So it was a huge project and it was a full, hey, I need you to do everything. I have all of these files, I have all of these QuickBooks subscriptions, and working a lot with the CPA teams to get things turned back around. And so with that, it was a lot of our resources went to something like that. And so it just very much depends. That's where that nuance, like I need that time to understand what's the scope of the work, how involved are we going to be? And some of it is working with the existing staff member. We have a situation now where the existing staff member who's doing the bookkeeping is transitioning out. She's effectively retiring. And so it's working with her in a timeline to understand how are you functioning things today. And we're taking piece by piece off of her plate so that here really come January, our team is fully onboarded and taking everything on and going from there. So it's very custom with each situation.

Nice. Nice. Makes sense.

Interesting. Just want to circle back on one thing that you said that I think stands out that that our audience would be interested to hear, which, or to know, which is that, look, this, the redoing of the books over the last couple of years is not a small feat. OK? And I want to understand what, especially depending on the kind of company you are, obviously. But, you know, anytime that you can start doing this, start doing it now. OK? Wherever you are, do not wait longer if you're in a situation like that. Right, Jeff? Yeah.

And then just to jump in. But yeah, and it's so common, right? It's so common. And Cody can speak to this, but just from my my perspective, right? We, we go in there and we've seen all sorts of things. We've seen, we've seen assets booked as expenses, which is what WorldCom did a long time ago to create fraud. And that was— this, this case was not fraud. But like, we've seen all sorts of things where people clean up, you know, years and years of returns and years and years of— I shouldn't say returns— years and years of bookkeeping that was just done incorrectly. And it's a project. It'll cost you a little bit of money. But, but a firm like Cody's can go in there and help you get things right, right? The first rule of being in a hole, stop digging.

Yeah.

You're doing something wrong, you don't know what you're doing, stop and get someone like Cody's firm to help you because it's an invaluable resource for when you do want to sell the business. They're going to look back at these files, they're going to look back, they're going to, they're going to match your tax returns to your income statements you provide to them. If they don't match, that's like the first question that I used to ask when I was buying companies.

So, hey, I'm Joe Stapleton from the Exit Engine Podcast. Building a business is hard enough, right? Planning your exit shouldn't feel like another lonely, confusing project you have to figure out on your own. That's why we created Exit Engine. Exit Engine isn't just a software tool, it's an entire ecosystem designed to help founders engineer a successful exit. You'll get access to self-assessments, growth roadmaps, and a peer community where you can learn from other founders who've been in your shoes. You'll also find the guidance and expert resources you need to build a business that's actually worth buying and to do it without burning out. Imagine having the clarity to know what your business is worth, exactly where to focus to improve it, and the confidence to exit on your own terms, whether that's next year or a decade from now. You don't have to do this alone. You don't have to build a business alone. Join us and let's build your exit strategy together. Visit myexitengine.com to get started. That's myexitengine.com.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And to speak on that too, a lot of clients, uh, is the thought process is, well, I'll just amend, I'll just file it and amend. And Most CPAs that we've talked with, we've worked with, a lot of them don't like amending because then it throws some red flags on your— and puts some additional eyes on your business that you don't necessarily want, especially if your prior service providers have done things incorrectly, because then it falls on you. I mean, you are the king of your kingdom. You fall the full responsibility. It doesn't matter who your bookkeeper was. There's a gentleman I know who actually went through an audit here a year or 2 ago, and he expressed some of the frustration because it was his accountant that was handling a lot of the day-to-day. She didn't necessarily do anything wrong. She actually did a pretty good job, but they still ended up getting audited. They still had to go through this whole process. And he said 18 months of literally just basically hell for him because it was just so much back and forth. And the audit.

Yeah, and not knowing what was going to happen and what they were going to find and whatever. Because again, it's for the same reasons, right? If you, you, if you don't— this is so hard for people to be an expert in your business at every piece of the business, right? And if you're, if you are relying on software, if you're relying on— you have to rely on other people for so many things. And this particular area is that if you don't have— I had this, look, I, you know, I had, I had a I went bankrupt in a business, okay? And I've told the story before that, you know, and a lot of it was because I didn't actually have— I didn't have accurate and good bookkeeping. I didn't have anybody, you know, and I actually, I had hired someone to do that stuff who I thought was doing that stuff and then turned out they weren't doing that stuff.

Yeah.

Um, and because I was—

I—

because I was trusting them, uh, you know, it basically, you know, it, it set this, uh, you know, this company back. You know, it was— there was a whole, you know, I can't even And that's it. I could go into the details, the gory details, but suffice it to say, you know, it really ruined things. And not knowing who to trust and not knowing where to go. And so, you know, getting, being able to be able to have, I think, first of all, multiple conversations with multiple people out there, OK, to know, as John said, the first thing is first. Look, know that if this is not your area of strength and you are aware of it, stop right now. Stop digging right now, OK, and raise this up as an issue for 2026. Okay.

Yeah.

Put it out there in the world right now and say, hey, look, I'm going to get a handle on this because nothing good is going to come from not doing it, right? In other words, this is— by the way, this is not about selling. And as we always say, John, right? I mean, exit planning here is not actually about selling tomorrow, right? It's about doing the work to be able to understand exactly what is happening in your business, especially after a long period of time where you— where, you know, we talk about the the tritus and the debris and all the things that are kind of under the bodies that are buried, you know, kind of under the waterline that you forgot about, right? And as you progress and as you watch top-line revenue, which is where everybody's eyes mostly are, and if you're smart, maybe you're looking at profitability, but the idea is that most people are like, if as long as I have revenue coming over the fence, everything seems to be okay, right? And we know, Cody, you can attest that that is not Yeah.

It's kind of like when you might see a vehicle, for example, polished up, looking great, fresh set of paint, and then you look under the hood and realize the engine is just like pack rats have been in it and chewing up the wires and everything. I mean, that's essentially the same analogy, right? You can look at the top line, looks great. You might be a $5 million company, but under the hood, if your profitability is negative, I mean, that's just not a great position. And I do want to mention this too. I've said this to multiple clients, especially as we get on consultations and get familiarized with each other and what's going on. The amount of shame that I hear from clients from the get-go, and I've literally had to pause conversations before and say, listen, there is no bookkeeping shame here. And a lot of financial professionals, I think this is where— I think this is a weakness, I think, at some points with financial professionals because they get A lot of them get so certified, so experienced, so much knowledge built up, it builds this wall of, I just know better and why don't you know better too?

Yeah.

And it's just like, all right, hold on. No bookkeeping shame here, whether it's you did it and you royally messed it up or somebody else you paid did it and they royally messed it up because there's a key phrase here, trust but verify. Trust but verify. And a lot of them, it is amazing how many folks will just willingly hand over the keys to their financial kingdom because somebody said that they're a bookkeeper and they're like, oh great, I need help, here you go. And so I tell them like, everyone has their own genius that they put out into the world. This happens to be ours and we're really good at it. Now, a lot of our clients, what they do for their business, I would not be good at that. I am not, that's not my game. So that's their level of genius and that's what they want to focus on. And so one of the things that I do a lot with consultations is I just kind of go through some things that they should be mindful of when they're vetting bookkeeping firms. And I tell them, like, even if you don't go with me, I want to make sure that you're still in a position to win with your business. You're working with a firm that is doing a good job. And so one of the first things I mentioned is ask your bookkeeper what they do for IT and data security. And this is a big one because again, there's no fiduciary responsibility. There's a lot of people who are bookkeepers as a title, but they don't necessarily have the back office infrastructure to say, yeah, like, we can— we're secure with our data and everything. We've got a Google Drive folder. It's like, okay, that's not securing your data.

That's not what I'm looking for.

Yeah. Right. And so, you know, like, for example, we have a managed service provider that we pay to ensure that we have the highest level of security we can. Because if— and it's funny, a lot of clients, they are very willing to just immediately send their tax return via email. Well, if your email isn't secured, if it's not encrypted, it's like that's kind of— that can be floating out there in the wind and you got to be very mindful. So be careful of IT and data security. Ask your bookkeeping firm that you're vetting, what do you have in place? Do you have anything in place? What are your procedures? Another main thing is, is there a segregation of duties with that bookkeeping firm internally? With our team, we have multiple members on our team to where The person who— and this is wise just even internally too. If somebody has a staff member doing bookkeeping, if it's one single person, that's a red flag for me. Because if the person is putting in bills and also making payments on those bills, that's where I read articles weekly, I kid you not, of people who go to jail who are the bookkeepers for companies that embezzled from those companies over a 3 to 5 year period.

So, we had like— All the time.

Every day you see articles like that. Yeah.

Yep.

See, if you're in charge of AR and AP, like to your point, that again, that's a red flag because you see all these articles where, oh, they created fictitious vendors. Like the— I always thought that the process for us to create a vendor at one of my old companies was like, oh my gosh, like the CFO has to approve every vendor. Like this seems crazy. And they had been burned. Some employee had set up a fake company and then just invoiced them like, okay, great. Created fake invoices and and they paid it for a year. It's like, oh my goodness! It's it's such a risk. And again, smaller companies, $100,000 here, $100,000 there. That's that's the difference between profitability and and and not making a profit.

Yeah, yeah. And it's and and typically it's the a lot of times and there's there's themes that I pick up when I read those articles. And a lot of times it's a family friend they that they brought in, or maybe it's somebody who they've gotten really close with. Especially if you're in that $2 to $5 million range. I mean, depending on the industry that you're in, you're still pretty close and pretty involved with each employee individually for the most part. And so, and if you're doing, you know, if you have the single person managing all the bookkeeping and you're very involved with them and you get to know these people really well, get to trust them, they become like family because they're helping you build your enterprise, right? They're your confidant because they see behind the screen of all the financials happening with the company. They know how much you pay yourself from your company, right? They know everything. And so, it's heartbreaking when 5 years in, you realize you've stolen half a million dollars from me. And it's like trust but verify. You need to have your checks and balances. They teach that in accounting, your checks and balances. You should have that with whoever you're working with too.

And so, the learning that goes on for each client, right? To your point, you seem to focus on certain on trucking and those types of things. But I can imagine that the learning when you take on a new client, learning how a particular industry, you know, utilizes the rules in accounting and must sort of follow those rules. I'm thinking like, you know, capital assets and software firms, how they sort of capitalize assets differently. It must be like a consistent sort of learning experience for you and your employees.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that comes to Back to what I was saying with the 80% best practice, 20% nuance. Majority of the time bringing on a new client, it's almost never in that ratio. It's almost always, a lot of times it's majority nuance, maybe 80% nuance, 20% best practice. And then we have to course correct a little bit. There's other times maybe it's 40%, 50% nuance and we need to start implementing some things. And it's Sometimes a slow process, just take it chunk by chunk depending on the situation. Other times it's, hey, this is actually going downhill fast. We need to course correct like now, depending on our timeline and taxes and everything else there too. But yeah, we do learn a lot and some of it goes beyond the numbers. And this is where I think a strength of ours is with my background, you work with a lot of people. Right. And you got to understand people, got to understand personalities, and you got to— this is a challenge for a lot of folks in accounting is that they're not people people, they're numbers people.

Right.

And, you know, anybody, as we grow, anybody that we hire to be a client-facing professional, that is on the top of the list. It's not how good are you at accounting. You need to know enough to be dangerous for sure, but the primary focus here is How are you with people? Because when we come into a company and we might be not just working with the owner, but we might have multiple parties that we are collaborating with and trying to figure out each piece of the process, like we're going through this right now actually with a company and figuring out each individual person's role. And you also understand the frustrations they have with each other.

Yeah.

Right? The balance of The balance of knowing what's appropriate, what's not appropriate, because you're working with multiple parties and understanding, all right, here's the end goal. My client is the owner, but I'm also not trying to come in here and just scorch the earth with their other employees too. So there's a delicate balance.

Yeah. Telling them that their CFO is bad or something like that. It's like, no, like you have to work with all those people. And I guess that's another sort of related question is like, how many times are you working with like a CFO at the firm? Or because you're working with the owner as the client, right? But are they— do they have fractional CFOs to your typical clients? So just talk about that like a little bit is the sophistication level at the companies that you typically work with. Obviously it's not— it's different per client, but in general, what is that sophistication level in the company, in the people, not just the owner?

Yeah. I'd say with the range of that $2 to $5 million, I see a lot more like the fractional-based CFOs than the in-house. I think that's getting more and more popular, it seems like, especially in the last 5 to 10 years. And this is also another one of those areas, kind of the gray areas of everyone. I'll say it like this. With the increase of people doing fractional CFO work, just vet who you're working with. I spoke with a company the other day who they are essentially going to be a startup data company. And one of the things that they— or they are a startup data company, I should say. And one of the challenges that they've had is they've brought in people in the past to do their bookkeeping, but also the fractional CFO work. And how this guy described it to me as president of this company, he goes, they charge as if they're a CFO, but when it really came down to it, they weren't doing anything CFO related. And so just really vet, is it just a title or do they really have the experience to help me with the duties of a CFO specifically?

This is actually a great point, Cody, from your experience and kind of where you sit and the whole thing. What do you think should actually be the function and role of the CFO in an organization?

So the primary function, and to your point, there are multiple layers. You can have the controller, you can have the bookkeeper, you have the CFO. The primary function, if you're going to be at that level in that position, the primary is you are attached to the CEO, present owner, whoever, to help with clarity on direction, on forecasting, on Different modeling.

Moving forward.

Yeah. Moving forward, looking ahead, not necessarily being so far in the details, but with that being said, the details have to be correct, right? The reports, the numbers, they have to be correct. And so there's some people that they try to do both and it goes back to like, they have to be savvy enough to understand if they look at your financial reports, they gotta be able to read 'em for first of all, but they gotta understand like, all right, what do these mean? What indicators are happening? If I look back 3 years, where are we projected to go over the next handful of years? I think that's one of the primary pieces is it's a looking ahead viewpoint if you're going to be a fractional CFO.

Yeah. And also one of the things that we said when we dealt with a lot of CFOs and fractionals is that they have to understand the business drivers and the impact on the business. Right. So like, so If the business were to do well, what does that look like in the financials? And looking at a set of financials, what drove the results of this? Is it price? Is it volume? Is it geographic expansion? Those types of things are the things when I'm talking to CFOs, if the questions come up and they don't know the 4 or 5 metrics that drive the business. And I think of real estate, like, again, you know, volume in residential real estate, right? Volume, price, Commission splits. Those are the things that were the business drivers. And if you're in your industry, you don't— the CFO doesn't know that, she's really behind the 8-ball when trying to explain to the owner, okay, here's a set of results that happened. This is why it's going to be different in the future. And this is what this means for the stuff going forward. If they can't answer the question, that's bad.

Yeah, 100% agree. And I've had some people ask that, Hey, will you be able to do some modeling and budgeting for us and this, that, and the other? And I've ultimately said, and there's other folks like, hey, can you do our taxes and whatnot? I'm like, I'm not a CPA. I don't plan to be a CPA. But our lane, we stay in our lane.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of firms that will blend the tax piece and the bookkeeping together. And this is actually something I meant to mention earlier. It plays into this conversation now too, where A lot of firms try to blend in multiple things together, and really when it comes down to it, they've got one main function and then they've got add-on services. Most tax advisory firms, CPA firms, their main function is taxes, whether it's prep and filing, the planning, the advisory, whatever. And then an add-on service is bookkeeping. And typically any of the CPA firms that we've talked with, they're actually pretty happy to talk with a dedicated bookkeeping firm because they just get overflow work that they can't handle. And usually it's—

That is so interesting that you say that because frankly, I would've thought, I mean, when you say it the way you just said it, that they view it as an add-on service. That's interesting. But also the fact that they actually seek out people, companies like yours to do the day-to-day bookkeeping is really interesting to me.

Yeah. And it's one of those things, We more or less sought them out, out of opportunities of, hey, we need referral partners. And in the conversations, that's something I learned that a lot of them, their preference is they don't necessarily want to have to do the bookkeeping. If it's simple enough or depending on the client, most of them aren't going to do it as a standalone service. It's going to be, hey, I need to do your taxes. And if it's under these circumstances, then yeah, I'll do the bookkeeping too. But a lot of them, because I've had clients who are like, well, I'd almost rather have have it together. And I, you know, no problem with that, completely get it. One service provider, understand. However, here are some things to think about. We've had clients come on who their prior service provider was tax and bookkeeping together. And the challenge is that they were getting charged for not just the bookkeeping fee each month, but they split up essentially their tax advisory over the course of the 12 months.

Right.

So their service fee was just expensive. So for us to come in and do the bookkeeping, it literally was half their monthly cost they were paying that CPA. And then we were able to connect them with an industry-specific CPA that overall cost for accounting is going to be drastically lower than working with someone who did it together.

Interesting.

And the challenge with, if firms do things together like that, once the busy season hits with their core functions, so say with CPAs, their firms hit tax season. Yeah, yeah, it starts to backtrack. And so there's been multiple instances and stories that we've been told where the client's books have not been done for 3, 4, 5 months, and then they go back and clear it up. So you talk about a lack of clarity in a, in a 4 to 6 month period of time. If you're someone who you need that monthly, you're kind of in the dark for a few months. And if a big event happens in that, so it's just some things to think about. And so back to what you're saying with CFOs too, where If their primary function is CFO work and they've got a track record, they can really make a difference. And to your point, they know the indicators of your industry. They can come in and really speak to that and things that the owner doesn't even know to look for because of that prior experience, then amazing, right?

Bring them on. I think most people, okay, and I can speak for myself and in this whole thing, in the different businesses that I've owned, Then I think you're kind of like, you are looking for someone to be able to take this stuff on, right? Because it is so difficult to understand. It is— you are looking, you're expecting. And I think this is why, this is why it's so important to kind of like disambiguate the different levels of, of things that happen in this financial stream, right? Like the different roles. They— people think that they're hiring a CPA and think— they think that that's all that they have to do to take care of their books. And the CPA's job is really only a tax situation, right? The reason they have to be certified and they have to have a license and the whole thing is because they are essentially swearing that they— what they are reporting is the swear— is the truth about, you know, to the federal government, right? But then you've got— we've talked about a couple of things. Then you've got a book, you know, you've got bookkeeping, you've got accounting, right, which is different than just a certified— having a CPA. And then you've got We talked about the CFO, and then there's this role in there somewhere in the middle called a controller, right? Talk to us a little bit about these different kind of levels of things in the service and how this kind of all— how the stream all fits together. And obviously the size of your company matters and things like that, right? But you've got— we talked about the CFO. The CFO is supposed to be this kind of strategic resource, strategic financial resource that is a looking forward situation. How do we take what we know? What have we learned and how do I model it going forward? What are the things we should be looking for? What are the opportunities, the threats, the things like that? But what's the next level down as you go down from, you know, from in a financial department, you know, you go down from CFO?

Yeah, so I'll kind of speak to this, um, in a form of if I'm looking at a company that internally they have staff, uh, ideally they've got multiple team members who are on the lowest end of that rung who are the front line, right? They are— one side's creating the bills, the other side's paying the bills, right? They're— one side's creating the vendors, so on and so forth. So they're—

Accounts receivable, bringing in the, you know, taking in the invoicing, and accounts payable, paying the invoices that are coming in from outside vendors, right?

Yep. And a lot of times those roles, they might also do some of the actual day-to-day bookkeeping, or maybe you have a separate person who they're actually categorizing everything, making sure your reports are are getting structured the way that's needed. So that's more of your frontline folks. Your next rung up, like you said, it might be an accounting manager or they might just blend it into controller. I've seen different companies, they have their own titles or their own way that they structure this position. But by and large, if we're talking specifically for a controller standpoint, I view it in a very simple format. I view it as they're the intermediary between the two. So you've got your frontline employees, you've got your controller, you've got your CFO. Your CFO, that's your strategic advisory. They're not necessarily super in the day-to-day weeds. They just need the numbers and they're working a lot with the executive team. And then your controller is that hybrid where from their direction of the CFO, they're going to be able to facilitate that through the frontline members and understand like, what direction do we need to change? What pieces do we need to adjust? If the CFO has a question, he's not calling the person in accounts payable. He's going to call the controller. Hey, why are these numbers off? What is happening here? Right? So that's how I view it in a very simple format. Each company blends it a little bit differently, but that's how I view it.

And your work with entrepreneurs, Cody, like with startups and small businesses, like maybe that are looking to sell ourselves, because that's like our core audiences are people that are thinking about exits and it might be in 120 days, it might be in 2 years. So Talk a little bit about your work with founders and how you counsel them to either prepare their books or prepare their business for an eventual sale.

Well, and I've— so it's funny, I had a gentleman tell me, he's also in the mergers and acquisitions space, and this was probably about 6 months ago, and he made this comment that accounting, if you're looking to exit, accounting is the thing that kills the deal on the final yard line. And so the first thing we talk about is the length of time that, or the length back that somebody's going to look at your books. And a lot of times, and you guys know this more than everybody else, of course, too, seeing it, being in it day to day, you know how far back you go. And usually, correct me if I'm wrong, it's like a 3 to 5 year back minimum. At least 3.

Yeah. And we try to look for pre-pandemic stuff too. Right now, like, I always like to see the books for the last 3 years, let's call it that. And then I want to see 2019 too. And I think I'll probably end up doing that for a while because did the business change drastically during the pandemic? That's what I want to know. And what happened? Did they take— like, a lot of times, did they take a loan? Um, we'll see that too. Like, did they take a PPP loan or anything like that? I want to know what happened then. So yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And so that's the first factor that we talk about is, hey, if you're wanting to try to exit in 12 months, okay, well, let's look back 3 years. Are your books even in a position where you would even be looked at? If not, then we might need to move the target a little bit and then focus on from here on out, let's get things in an order to where— and probably start engaging in some conversations with folks like yourselves and your teams where you can add on some additional guidance. Because we— and that goes back to what I was saying earlier, our lane is bookkeeping.

Yeah.

And that collaboration piece and that roundtable resources, we want to pull in feedback from other experts because we can't be the expert in every aspect or facet of your business. We field a lot of those questions because we're the ones in the numbers day to day. But I'm very, very clear that I would rather have people much smarter than me in our back pocket that can feed into the feedback here, we can adjust the numbers accordingly. But based on the professional guidance of exit planners, of your CPA team, of your legal counsel, whoever, the numbers, we can adjust things as needed that makes sense for— So if things are a little bit in a mess right now and you're looking 3 years down the road, okay, well, how do we need to fix it now so then it's just a clock? 3 years later, we can reconvene the conversation and say, all right, we're in a great spot. Let's really start considering this now.

Yeah, it's an excellent point. I mean, the reality is that that's what we say, you know, that's what we— that our whole business, right, is basically looking under the waterline at that stuff and trying to figure out exactly where the problems are going to be and where the buyer, you know, through the buyer's eyes and what the buyer is going to see. And of course, obviously, the financial thing is the first thing. Not the last thing, right? Because it is obviously under— we have to know and understand and feel comfortable that the numbers are right before, right before you start, you know, putting that stuff out there into the world, right? Because the guys who are coming in, okay, to buy you are, you know, strategics are out there and they've got different levels of professionalism and different people working for them and the whole thing, and that can kind of run the gamut. But let me tell you something, a PE firm walks in there, okay, and they've got very, very high-paid people who are doing, you know, the kind of the very deep dive work looking at this stuff to make sure that it's right. And they will find this stuff and they will see it quickly. And the reality is too, is that there will be things that will be off that aren't really huge mistakes, but are things that are just going to actually call other things into question. And that's where the danger really lies. works, right? Because now you're— there's stuff there where you, you may not even know, you know, uh, exactly what they're gonna uncover because you haven't done the work of figuring out, knowing yourself. It's like, uh, we always talk about, you know, lawyers always know the answer to every question they ask, right, ahead of time.

Yeah.

Um, the same thing is true in this stuff. It's like you got to know exactly where you're headed, um, and because it will be discovered. And there are very few cases There are more cases where people will buy a company that's not great for other reasons. Okay, it'd be capability, it'll be market share. There's things like that, especially in a strategic way.

Does it matter the systems and tools, Cody, right? The systems and tools that they're using or that they want to use, they think they want to use. And I can imagine you're— I think you mentioned you're sort of tool agnostic, if you will, right? Is that fair to say?

Yeah, yeah, it's— yeah, we're completely agnostic with whatever software they feel is best. Now, with that being said, we will— if they come to us, they're on one software and they're like, hey, we're not a huge fan of this, we'd like to go to XYZ software instead, we're gonna say, great, if you want to, that's totally fine, but keep these things in mind. So as an example, so I'll just—

I'll go back.

This is the one that people know the most.

Yeah.

There's still a lot of businesses on QuickBooks Desktop and Intuit side of things. They, every year they're increasing their prices, they're minimizing their support. They want to push people off of desktop onto online. And, uh, you know, so this is a, this is one of the most conversations we have in regards to tools is that we talk to people like, hey, you wanna be, you wanna be on desktop? Totally fine. Like we can service that. No big deal. Just keep this in mind. If you're looking ahead in the next 5 years, It's already expensive. It will continue to get more and more and more expensive. Yes, it has certain capabilities that the online, it's just functionally structured a little bit differently.

Right.

But if you're looking 5 years from now, your growth rate, where you're wanting to be in the timeframe, how expensive you're willing to actually pay for accounting software, and it's going to get less and less and less support on that front too. So it may make more sense to adjust course now while you're still a little bit smaller compared to 5 years from now. Things are a little bit simpler compared to 5 years from now. And we can, we can assist in that transition to another accounting software.

Yeah, because they're going to deprecate it at some point. It's like people who still want to get the newspaper delivered, right? Like getting the newspaper delivered is like outrageous. And also like buying magazines on the rack. Like I was somewhere and I can't remember where I was, but I saw like the price of a magazine that still comes out on a weekly. It was insanity. It was like, Okay, they've made the decision that they're like, look, you want to buy this? We'll let you buy it, but it's going to cost you an arm and a leg because we're not selling any more of these. The same thing they're doing with desktop is they want to move everyone online because their cost of sales goes way down and their cost of support goes way down when they're just servicing that online.

It's a SaaS company, right? That's what they want to be. And it's a, you know, I make it once, I sell it multiple times and the whole thing. Again, the software thing isn't crazy different than that, but the support The operating system.

So true.

Things that go on, right? This is Larry Ellis's dream coming true, right? I mean, yeah, everything's gonna be in the cloud, um, and it's happening. Yeah.

Yeah. And Cody, where, you know, I can't believe we reached, you know, pretty, pretty close to the end here. I do want to ask you a question about where, where's the best place if someone wants to get in touch with you or your firm? Where's the best place to get in touch with you about talking to you about your services, hearing about more about the 5 pillars and how they can work with Yeah, absolutely.

So our website, pricefamilybookkeeping.com. They can also email me. It's just my first name. And so Cody, Cody@pricefamilybookkeeping.com. They can shoot me a note, go on our website, they can fill out the contact section and submit a request and we can get back with them that way. It'll be me reaching out to them. Again, my role primarily is client-facing. So I'm the one doing the consultations. I'm the one that's understanding the nuances. I'm their point of contact. As we grow, the long-term kind of view here, even as we grow and we bring on more folks to be client-facing, at least for a while, it's still going to be me that's going to be the initial point of contact and facilitating the relationships of, all right, here is your main person that you can call, text, email, and they'll get back with you within the same day. Right? So that's That's our focus point. But here, definitely within the next couple years even, I'm still gonna be the person that is— I'm in the weeds with you. Like, you're gonna be the one talking to me. So great.

It's awesome. Well, Cody Price, thank you so much for being on the Exit Engine Podcast. We really appreciate it. We covered a lot today. There is clarity around your numbers, guys, right? It's not just good accounting. This is leadership. Okay, and I think what Cody was pointing out today is that it's okay. There's no shame in not knowing. Okay, don't listen to the— we've all talked to those accountants and the whole thing, and this is what, you know, I've been through this myself, where they're gonna judge you. They're gonna, you know, they're gonna say that you've been doing things wrong. They're gonna go, oh my God, because they've got all this experience and you don't have any. But the reality is that, you know, Cody's setting up, at least, is it— I can— we can only speak for Cody— is setting up a safe place, okay, where you guys can can understand that this is something that it's okay that you don't know this stuff because, you know, here's people who do. So the reality is, like any other decision that you guys are making in your business, right, the leadership aspect of this is to be able to get over yourself, get over your fear, get over your shame, and be able to actually reach out to somebody to try to make sure that you're getting clarity around this stuff, right, Jon?

So true, so true. You know, like, look, again, I love the no shame part of it. It's You know, again, when you're in a hole, stop digging. Reach out to companies. Reach out to Cody, frankly. Reach out to Cody because, you know, the way that he laid out how he operates with clients is— I mean, it's superb, right? There's 5 pillars. There's a segregation of duties. And he's very focused on bookkeeping, right? He's going to do that very well. And he doesn't get distracted by CPA services and all those other things. He does what he does well, and he has a team of people that work with him and sound like they do a great job.

So I love the consultative aspect of it too. I think that's something that seems to be missing in this kind of, like, you know, very transactional thing that happens. People are expecting to, you know, do a specific job, but I mean, the whole thing of being able to getting in and understanding the specific business and the nuance, you know, because there is nuance in every business, you know?

Yeah.

Um, hey, look, if you're a founder that's been flying blind, feeling overwhelmed, right, just too busy to dig in the numbers, guys, this is the episode. This is your nudge, okay? This is the universe telling you it's time, right, to get up, take a look at this stuff, and make sure that you really have insight and clarity into what's happening inside your books. Um, guys, uh, Cody, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. We really appreciate it. Um, and, uh, we will talk to you very soon. There's more to come with Cody, I'm sure, down the line. Guys, we appreciate you as audience members. What we'd like you to do though, okay, is I want— we want you to take the next step. Listen to this podcast today. This is great. Take this as your sign to go right now to myexitengine.com, right? Get through. There's a video of me there. Listen to that video. Follow the instructions. Get started today on thinking about where you're headed from an exit trajectory. Okay, this doesn't mean you're selling today. This just means that what you're doing is trying to take control of your own business destiny, understand exactly where you can go, start creating options, start creating, you know, a platform from which you can actually create this asset that's going to be able to be transferable, that's going to be able to bring you, you know, the true freedom that you really wanted when you started the business in the first place.

So true. So true.

So, do me a favor, okay? Take this episode, like it, subscribe to us here wherever you're listening to this, on Apple, on Spotify, wherever you're listening to. Share it with a business owner that you love, right? This is something that we are— we have dedicated ourselves to doing this. We have an episode every single week if you're new to us, and you can find— and you're going to listen to all these different people from all these different aspects of business talk about the importance of understanding and getting your business kind of, you know, into a place where we can actually, you know, put it together and get it on the market as an asset one day when you're ready, right? In any case, thanks again, everybody, for listening to the ExitEngine Podcast, and we will talk to you guys very, very soon. Thanks, John.

Thanks, Joe.