Building a Modern CFO Consultancy: How Kevin Gwynn White Scaled Exbo Group from the Ground Up

A lot of people who are really Type A and therefore start a company as a result tend to be perfectionists. And in this world, it's more important to move fast than to do everything perfectly accurate.

Welcome to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, a show where we interview high voltage entrepreneurs growing and scaling through e-commerce, real estate, and other wealth without Wall Street ventures, showing you the path to making your first or next million.

This is the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. If you are on the wrong podcast, this would be the chance to get off now and leave. But if you're here and you wanna talk about e-com, talk about business, wealth without Wall Street growth, maybe we don't wanna talk about crypto. Maybe we wanna talk about all kinds of things. Anything that we're gonna talk about is building to your first million in business, or maybe your second million depending upon where you are. So my guests, as always, are going to talk about those things in their life, how they got there and where we're going. And one of those gentlemen today, Kevin, is gonna talk a little bit about where he's been, where he's going, and the space that he works in.

I run a company called Expo Group and we're a, a financial service consultancy. Started my career at Ernst& Young and I worked there for a decade and then I, in their business advisor group and then the transaction services group, moved on to working for a venture capital fund that focused on sort of Series A, Series B investments. And then Expo Group really grew out of supporting that venture fund's portcos. Partners of the fund just sort of asked me to, to do that full-time. I said, great, 'cause it's worked really well. And now we really service companies from the venture stage all the way up to, you know, growth equity, like $50, $100 million are some of our larger clients. It's a mix and we're, we are the, the outsourced CFO for these companies or the outsourced controller in some cases with the smaller companies or the entire finance team. And then we also have another side of our business which focuses on, you know, transaction diligence, FDD, TDD, working with private equity funds themselves to actually buy companies. So yeah, it's been a journey. We bootstrapped. We're 54 people now spread across the US. I had an international office in India as well. And yeah, never took outside capital, just, you know, did the grind, right? We sold the work, did the work, sold the work, did the work, which is professional services, cash flow business. You can do that. But, you know, unlike software, e-com, when you might have an amazing hockey stick moment, you know, where you have tons of sales.

Yeah.

Because something went viral in e-com or because you just had a bunch of users sign up, the growth path in professional services is much more linear.

It's still more linear. You don't get to have the same phone moments we're having in the 4th quarter right now where we're watching brands go up like 5, 6, 20,000 a day, 60,000 a day.

Yeah, that's always— Cyber Monday doesn't really mean much to me.

No, it means a lot to us. We're watching some brands go like crazy. Uh, one of my partner brands is going up like 60,000 in one day. We're like, that's always fun to watch, you know?

Yeah. And then I have been in that situation. It's like, it's just so cool to watch them have that moment too.

It's a little bit of a thrill ride, you know? It has its moments of, you know, average sales over the year, but then there's those holidays and those sales and that stuff and you're like, woo, that's fun.

That's great.

Watch.

Yeah.

But you look, this, what you do is actually really important. Keeping the business profitable on the outsourced CFO side. What did you, you know, let's go back in time. Let's hit the Wayback Machine and tell me a story from your childhood that helped kind of define who you are now.

Oh man. You know, it's interesting. Like I think as a consultant, it's, you're, you're really sort of a, a jack of all trades. And you know, I think, I, I don't think that I was ever really good at one specific thing when I was a kid, but I was good at a lot of things and I had a lot of different interests. And, you know, going, going throughout college, I took a lot of leadership positions. I was captain of my fencing team. I was, I was a treasurer, treasury secretary of my fraternity. And so I just getting access to sort of those leadership opportunities, being in front of people, public speaking was a big thing about consulting, which I did quite a bit in college. It was just a culmination of a lot of things and, and getting good at a wide berth and it set me up for, definitely for success than at Ernst& Young. And then after I got enough experience there, actually being able to sell my own contracts and sell my own work.

Yeah. So a history of speaking, public speaking, learning how to manage money. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a piece. Yep.

Was that not a part of your normal family life?

You know, it's funny. I think my father was a CIO in business for a long time. And so, You know, business and money was always a topic of conversation. But I actually, in college, I, my degree actually is in accounting. And I think that that just understanding sort of the debits and credits and how a P&L is constructed is really tremendously valuable information when I started my company and actually started to grow it and make sure it was profitable. It wasn't just doing simple arithmetic. It was understanding working capital. I mean, a challenge in professional services is you sell the work and you pay all the salaries to do the work, and then you collect the invoice 45 days later, right? And so, you know, e-com faces that problem. Procurement, you know, you're buying— You're buying product. Inventory upfront, and then you gotta sell later, right? So like, there's, there's this whole cost. So just understanding cash needs, you know, my accounting and finance background was sort of invaluable in that. And so, you know, if you're out there and you've got an accounting background, but you're, you're charismatic enough to go out and, and sell work, then Consider starting your own practice.

Yeah, consider starting your own practice or hire the people to do those things that you're not good at. Hence, I have an accounting firm and a bookkeeper. Uh, I keep chart of accounts and everything done right. And then we do our audits and, you know, my partner handles a lot of that because he's very good at that. He's our CFO and his, you know, his detail-oriented tactical brain deals with that. Mine kind of goes, um, I was like, give me the summary. I'll take the CSV file and throw it up at Claude and then I'll just add Claude, ask Claude a bunch of questions. about the finances and ask it for visuals. And I can really get a good picture on, you know, where the brands are at, which is kind of where I like to see the top end of the ship. You know, if you're running the business, you can't always be running the business.

100%. I always say it's like, you know, people worry, especially when I was younger, this too, like you worry about your weaknesses a lot. And as I got where I realized that I just lean into my strengths as hard as possible, and then I hire people to cover my weaknesses. And that's the Fastest way to get good at stuff as an organization is just lean into what you're good at.

Yeah. That, that's a skillset in its own right though, isn't it?

I think so. What do you mean? Like, uh, in terms of just identifying what your strengths are and making sure—

Well, yeah. I mean, uh, or being willing to listen to it or accept it. You know, they say the mentor will appear when the student is ready, right?

Yeah.

And I think, you know, for years I didn't want to get help in my business when I started it and when I got off the ground and got things going. It was like, well, I need to learn and understand all this. And I still didn't have a great way of coping with the things I didn't do well.

Yeah. Well, I agree. And I made some of those mistakes. I think like, especially early on when I didn't have the resources that I have now in terms of just like being able to have enough capital on my balance sheet to go out and hire a new person who's an expert in something that I wasn't good at. Yeah. I would just do my best to actually cover those weaknesses, but I'd just do a poor job, right? Like, to your point, I think a lot of people try and do that with their accounting and finances and they get themselves in hot water later on because They may not have gone out early enough to hire an expert.

Yeah. Well, that's true. And we then gotta trust. And then the problem that comes with amateurs in the business world, being one once upon a time myself, 17 years ago, it's like you don't know who to trust. So you just get somebody in place who you believe is gonna do the right job, and then you don't know enough about what they should be doing or how they should be doing it. And then you end in, in the HR management circle of death, uh, which is trying to find, hire, and train correctly, and then vet those people and then find out they don't work. And then eventually you figure out, which I'm sure you know now, the hire fast, fire fast methodology.

Oh man.

Yeah. Tell me about, have you dealt with that in your past?

Yeah, no, I mean, what you're saying is really resonating. Uh, when we, when we got to maybe 20 employees, that was a pretty hard hump to get over, right?

Yeah.

We grew really quickly. We kind of hit that point. And the reason was, is that I had to create a structure where we had a lot of competent, experienced middle managers, right? Who really understood Exactly to your point, you know how to run their different organizations. In the beginning, you just don't have that. You're you're it's a hub and spoke system where you know you have one really good technician and you might just have a bunch of or at least for us we had a bunch of junior resources that were supporting a couple key people and that that might get you to fifteen people sixteen people in in my world but if you're going to get to fifty a hundred you have to be able to actually create layers of confident people and. If you have any turnover, that makes that a lot longer. So exactly to your point, like identifying if people are strong early on and then if someone's really dragging along and, you know, they're, they're sort of not able to perform at the level that you expected. Yeah, the, the, the best thing that we learned to do is just say, hey, this isn't working out very quickly because, you know, the, the, you won't be able to grow a whole team around those people. And anytime that's the case, like it's a bit of a nonstarter and they're slowing you down, right? This person essentially just becomes somebody who's sitting there and is working day in and day out, but they're not growing. And so it definitely, it definitely slows the firm down.

Well, it does.

And I think Jobs had understood that in terms of the scale at which he was growing in Apple and stuff. And he finally found out in his own way. And I think some of us have learned this in our own way, that the operators became the best managers and they were the ones who didn't want to be the managers because they knew that they were the one that could do it. And so they're like, well, they're the best managers to do the job because they knew exactly how it was supposed to be done.

Yeah.

Even if they didn't have all the management experience.

Yeah, it's true. It is funny though. It's such a different skill set in management. I think like, you know, some of our younger employees that are getting to that phase where they might be, you know, very, very good at financial modeling, very good at valuation, excellent at sitting down and answering a board of directors' questions. But then you give them a team and, you know, they really have to switch their brain from doing things the way they want to coaching people to do the things they want to. And so Replicating yourself is a skill, a totally new skillset to a lot of people. And if you're committed and you're really good at it, I think, you know, as Jobs was saying is exactly right, is that those folks really are the best managers over time. I have noticed though, you know, it really, you really have to, as people are entering that phase of their career, they're, you know, under a lot of coaching to understand like, it might take you 1 hour to do something, but if it takes your direct report 3 hours and they don't do it as well, it's still better. The latter is still better for your direct report to do it and review their work and help them get better. And not just take the fastest route.

Well, and that's a tough lesson to learn in business, isn't it? As you grow and try to trust people and get them into a position, you have to realize that maybe sometimes your skills and capacity, it's as being the leader and why you took the risk and put the money up and started the company is very different than the people who get involved, uh, at the different levels. I learned that personally through rounding up employees in our company earlier, only to find that, well, I didn't want more employees. That's just a vanity metric in my head. Turned into a real big vanity metric.

That's right. Yeah. It's, it's all, you know, it's, it's, I think tougher in, in my world because the, the, what you are selling is actually to people.

Yeah.

So like, we, we really have to scale. But yeah, it's not, I wouldn't say it's a feature, right? Like we just, we have a heavy, a heavy payroll load because we have to, because those people are doing the work. But yeah, I've seen, you know—

Well, you can't make it a feature, it becomes a commodity.

Yeah, exactly. But I, I, on, on the e-commerce side, I see $50, $60 million companies and It could be 8 employees, right?

And they're crushing it.

Oh yeah, dude, absolutely. We can have multi-7, 8-figure companies ran by one guy running 3 of them.

Yeah.

Once you set up the systems of automation today, you don't have to have a huge operations team. You don't need a warehouse and don't need a bunch of employees, which is what it became very fascinating. Just the last 5 years, some of that capacity has finally grown to, to put us into that position. Um, and having a former warehouse with employees, I can tell you it's much better on this side of the fence.

It's nice.

It's awesome.

Yeah, you're not hiring warehouse staff anymore, right?

Or they're not sexually harassing each other and threatening law enforcement. You know, there's that kind of crap, right? I've dealt with that on this side. I have dealt with all levels of those employees. I've even dealt with this stupid stuff on the high-end management consultants when we were billing $250 an hour. I'm like, you're a jerk. Like, you get billed at this rate, you shouldn't do this. You don't travel like that. You don't bill these expenses. You don't act that way in front of the client. Like, Man, how do you not know that?

Yeah.

At this rate. Seriously? So I just ditched all that. And now I just say, you know, employees are vanity metrics. Especially after 2020, I'm sure you ran into this, right?

Oh, definitely. And it's interesting, like we, you know, certain positions, having, getting a full-time employee that's really good at certain things is extremely expensive. And I think actually the reason Expo's done well is because You can hire someone on a fractional basis. And in our case, like let's say you wanna hire a fractional CFO who's— you hire someone, they have 8 years experience, they've been on in the last 3 months, 30 board meetings, right? Just working for Exco Group. And you can hire a fractional person that has that skillset for way cheaper than you're able to, than you would have to hire a full-time employee. And so that's, those are a lot of options now too, is like if you get very senior seasoned people, who understand what they're doing. You don't have to deal with, in as many cases as you did, I think, 10 years ago, the W-2 load that you have to now because you can sort of hire these fractional positions, you know, pay people as contractors, and you have a lot more flexibility in terms of the relationship with them. Like, you can sort of end it if you want to. There's obligations. So yeah, I've seen more and more people trying to actually minimize the amount of people they're hiring just because of how much complexity that brings.

Scale and capacity.

You know what really blew my mind was I went into, I was in oil and gas for a while doing high-tech stuff, building and innovating some stuff and spent a lot of time at Oklahoma City and went into this nondescript looking, you know, relatively nice building in Oklahoma City and walked through the doors and, you know, there's not much there. It's an office complex with 2 stories. And we go back and there's this, again, nondescript looking door with like the number on it and everything. And we open the door and you go into this really kind of like blasé affair. You know, office, few cubicles, couple window offices. That's it. It's a pipeline management company.

Yeah.

Right.

Right. That's it.

Yeah. With like 7 people doing like $8 billion a year. And I'm like, you've gotta be kidding me. Like once I finally recognized that, like it blew the doors off my mind. Like my scarcity thinking and limiting mindset just kind of went, it's like, you gotta be kidding me.

A water shock. Well, yeah, 100%.

I'm like, you've gotta be kidding me. It just absolutely wrecked my brain from that point on. I was like, okay, I'm thinking too small here. I'm not thinking about the right systems. I'm not thinking out the right process. I either need to get in oil and gas or figure out how to, you know, do that through tech. And literally, and so what, you know, and I think you appreciate this too, when I went into the, the world of e-com, it's like, well, we have systems and, you know, information that's moving at the speed of light and it's growing, you know, exponentially fast.

Yeah.

And, and now you're seeing these systems that were doing a few thousand products a day, doing a few thousand a minute to, you know, doing 10,000 a minute now. And I'm like, holy cow, just the speed at which you can reach people online now is quite insane for some of these business models and the virality of that product or market or segment. You now have hypergrowth problems. Yeah.

No, it's interesting. Like, and all of that scaling can happen behind the scenes in a lot of cases. I'm sure if you describe how even managing ads worked to someone 35 years ago, it was just like, completely incomprehensible.

Try like, 13 and a half years ago.

Yeah.

I was uploading ads in spreadsheets, okay, with creative lines in the spreadsheet flat file that told the creative and everything in it. And then we would throw it up to a system and the guy would take and put it on a server in a mobile facility somewhere and then run that out. And it was like, well, I wanna spend $500. Well, you don't get to stop it. Like you spent the $500, you spent the $1,000. It's like, it, it's gone. Like, well, now we get to see what we did. And yeah, people are pushing buttons and arguing about YouTube and Facebook and Meta ads and TikTok. I'm like, you have no idea the power you have at your fingertips right now to reach people. Yeah. And it's just the speed at which you can move now is insane. But yeah, once upon a time, yeah, Hail Mary pass. Let's see how it goes. Maybe it wins, maybe it doesn't. I don't know. Just let it go. Let it fly. When the books on your back shelf, I assume you read them all, or are they just vanity books again on the shelf?

They're vanity books. No, I'm kidding. I, I very much want you to read them. Some of them are like, I don't know, I'm trying to speak in my microphone and look at the books at the same time.

Yeah.

A lot of them, a lot of them were textbooks and they come from business school. Like, I'm the kind of person where if I don't know how to do something or I've never done it before, before I even talk to anybody and ask questions, the first thing I do is read a textbook. I know it's really boring, but like the first time I had to do an independent valuation, I had done a ton of financial due diligence at my last, in my last life at Ernst Young. I had done a ton of consulting, but I hadn't really done intangible asset valuation. I got asked to do it. I'm like, I wonder if I can do this. And so I just bought a textbook, sort of read through it and practiced a couple of problems. Then once I do that, I will then try to find an expert to be like, okay, here's how I'd approach this. Is this right? But yeah, I'm a, I'm a pretty big nerd when it comes to just like—

I'm not against books, shameless plug.

Yeah.

Or that, you know, are readable and executable. I was curious, is there one of them in particular that you would take something from and maybe glean something from somebody, you know, listening to this right now?

Uh, I think the most recent one I read that I think I really enjoyed was, was Reorg, which is a, a book written by, you know, a bunch of former McKinsey consultants. And I was doing this in the midst of reorganizing my business. The way my business used to work is on the, on the, we call the corporate side, which is the fractional CFO and accounting piece. The accounting and the finance, the FP&A parts of that department were actually separated in separate teams. And so I actually had my accounting group down in Atlanta, and I had my FP&A group up in New York. But an early lesson I had as I, as the business was scaling very quickly was that ultimately, if the accountants weren't reporting to the, the people who were sort of the acting CFOs and interfacing the client, then what would happen is if there was an accounting problem, the client would go back to the FP&A resource and hold them accountable. They'd be like, hey, you know, why is this thing messed up or why do we have this big adjustment? While at the same time, that accounting team didn't really directly report into that FP&A group and that caused huge problems. It was fine for when we started and we needed to scale fast and delineate responsibilities quickly to different groups so that we could just add clients. Very, very quickly though, as the business scaled, that didn't work anymore.

Yeah.

And so I read that book to just get a sense of like how you approach a reorganization. And at the time, I think, I mean, we had, I don't know, 30 or 40 employees. So it wasn't a, you know, this crazy enterprise thing. However, it has a lot of good ideas about thinking about how you structure things, thinking about accountability alignment, and also how important organization is internally to your strategy. I don't think I had fully appreciated that until I read that book, is if you want to be really, really good at one thing, who reports to who within your organization and how it's structured Really, really matters, right? So like if you look at certain businesses, a utility company, they're going to be organized by region, of course, right? Because the people who go out and sell are very on a regional basis. Someone's covering the Northeast or whatever it is. At Expo Group, we sell nationwide and we work, you know, we're usually working remote for our clients. So it would make no sense as my sales function began to scale to organize it regionally, right? Like you might think that because you've heard it at other organizations. But you really, the structure of your organization internally really needs to follow what your external strategy is. And so that book does a really good job giving you very concrete examples of how that actually works in practice.

Yeah. Reading and practice and application are kind of different things we talk about here, right? I mean, in terms of you and I, we're practical applicators who might have read things, but actually executed it, even imperfectly, going out and doing it, which I think is a key component of what we're talking about here today is actually executing it, failing up, failing, you know, not failing out in the process to get where you're at. Is there any one maybe key takeaway you would give to somebody today who's in the entrepreneurial space or maybe wanting to get into it? Maybe a key life lesson you wanna drop on 'em?

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I've thought about this and I'm sure I have lots of tidbits of advice, but I think what's interesting about my job is that, you know, over the last 6 years we've created this boutique consulting company and we are always reporting to the COO or the CEO in a lot of cases. In some cases, the much bigger companies, they do an internal CFO they're reporting to, who is an FP&A team. But that means that we've seen tons and tons of operators. And over a 6-year period, it's a lot of times have a feedback loop to sort of understand what characteristics make people really successful.

Yeah.

And other folks who might be really smart, but just trip over their own feet. I would say that, and this advice I think is really targeted toward companies that are getting started. And so I would call it some $20 million revenue and that's 0 to 20, right? Like even in the very, very beginning before they know anything, which is a lot of people who are really type A and therefore start a company as a result, tend to be perfectionists. And in, in this world, it's more important to move fast than to do everything perfectly accurate.

Right.

Now you can't, now you can't, you know, be way off your bullseye, right? So what I always tell my team is, is what I really am looking for is constant A-minuses, right? Like a, a B-plus is kind of unacceptable, but an A-plus also isn't helpful all the time because if you, If it takes you 10 hours to get from 0 to A- and another 10 hours to get from A- to A+, you know, you're better off going and doing more work at a very high bar that's sufficient than spending all of your time agonizing over one thing. And that's one particular area where I've seen probably the most frequently, you know, people who have unbelievable pedigrees and coming from sort of bigger enterprises, That's where I see them get tripped up because the resources are so limited in the beginning of these companies as you're scaling them.

Yeah.

That trying to be perfectionist and spend the type of work that you would if you were working at, you know, a blue chip Fortune 500 on stuff that you're working at a startup, like, is the absolute wrong mentality. And the people who know what's important to focus on and what stuff is a distraction, You know, that's, those are the people that I find to be really successful more.

Yeah. Good stuff. Guys, we're talking with Kevin White from Expo Group. If you are in the CFO financial space, you need some support and help, maybe you want to put some guidestones around and guidelines around making informed decisions with your information, your data, you guys want to check them out for sure. If you're in the venture side as well, check out what they're doing over there. We've been talking about building businesses, vanity metrics, non-vanity metrics, growth, And of course, what it takes to actually become an entrepreneur, which I think has been a fantastic conversation today for me. Uh, thanks for joining me on this one, Kevin.

I appreciate you, brother. Thanks for having me, Neil. Appreciate it.

All right, guys, as always, like, share, comment, engage, help us beat big tech. Snide comments are welcome on YouTube too, because it just helps the algorithm. Don't care, just put something in there. And of course, always like and subscribe and put this content out. If you know somebody who needs to hear this today, who might benefit from it, please share that with them. As always, we'll be back later on with another episode soon, guys. Take care.

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