Impactful Fractional Professionals - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode # 013

Growing a business is hard, but it does not have to be.

Once a week, we take a break from the hustle and bustle in business to talk about innovations and what's new in the C-suite. This is the Fractional C-Suite Retreat, and I'm Joseph Frost. Pull up a seat at the fire, grab a drink, smoke a cigar, and just join me as we relax, learn, and get inspired. This retreat is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow with better marketing strategy.

Today's guest is an industry thought leader. He is host of the Impactful Leadership Show podcast, is managing partner at Blackburn Capital Advisors, and his name is Greg McDonough. Greg, welcome to the show.

Joe, it's great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's great to have you too. It'll be a fun hour or so, so let's get it started right away. The question that I like to pose to my guests right off the bat is is around the idea of what do you think C-suites might be missing out today?

From your perspective, as you work with many different clients and C-suites, what do you see as an opportunity that they might not be seeing?

Yeah, it's a great question, Joe. And I think the top of the list is there's a tremendous amount of resources available to C-suite executives in the industry, either from expertise, experience, you name the discipline you think around your boardroom, your traditional boardroom, from HR to finance to marketing to PR. With the, with the great resignation, with entrepreneur thinking, there is again a tremendous amount of resources available for individuals managing teams, managing companies, managing organizations that really hasn't been tapped into to its greatest extent that it could be.

And are you thinking that's other executive-level resources or just resources in general, specialists at mid and lower levels?

You know, from where I approach it, right, I'm on the finance side, and so I tend to focus more on the executive level, but I certainly think there's resources available for the entire team, right? If it's things from Upwork or Fiverr or any of those types of resources of just getting your job done in a more efficient and effective way, it's certainly a resource for that middle management group. But from the executive perspective, and I, and I am passionate about this because prior to doing this type of work, I ran a business and I bought it out of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy process. And I remember just sitting there going crazy, going, I wish somebody could just help me with the answers, versus me at 2 o'clock in the morning Googling Chapter 11 bankruptcy process. And there was always resources at the high-end attorney level where you're spending the $1,000 an hour to get the advice, or you're doing it yourself. And I think where the opportunity is and where I'm trying to live is in that space where it's, hey, I've got— we've got experience. We want to love the work that we're doing. Um, you know, you build a team around you that— of expertise that will help you in, in times of need or, or opportunities.

Yeah, I believe that's the greatest opportunity.

Uh, I, I speak about that all the time. The greatest opportunity for entrepreneurs and C-suite execs today is taking advantage of the fractional specialists out there, the fractional executives that are available. They're on LinkedIn, they're in the market looking for work, and they want to do work this way fractionally, which is much more affordable, much more flexible, much more productive than a full-time hire at that level for most companies. Now, there's times when, you know, full-time hire is the right decision, but it's the biggest opportunity, I think, and I'm glad you see that from your perspective.

It's also what I've found, it's really hard, particularly for founders. I'm curious if you've run into this, to be able to do kind of that trust transfer because they've many times been doing a lot of that work themselves and frankly are probably pretty good at it. But for them to grow and scale their business, they've got to transfer that trust to somebody that they don't really know that well. And they're not hiring as a full-time, it is an outsider still.

So how have you seen that and how do you deal with that kind of trust transfer issue?

Yeah, certainly it's a huge issue. And I think it's the other challenge is time, right? To find somebody takes time. It's sort of like the hiring process, right? It's just another project for that C-suite executive to take on while doing all the other things. But back to your question around trust, the way I have gotten around that or built trust with my clients is identifying a very small initial project. You know, it could be a financial analysis, it could be work on PPP. There's a handful of things that I sort of dive into initially, that I, I scope, it's small, it's, you know, a handful of hours worth of work, there's a value proposition at the end for the client. And we execute on that. And when I deliver, it very quickly turns into another conversation around what other opportunities they're, they're seeing or struggling with, or things that are on their desk that, that they may want to take off their desk. And so again, back to your question, for, for me, the strategy has been, one, if it comes in as a warm referral, that's always the easiest. And then two, it's let's identify something that's manageable, that you will have a value out of regardless if we continue on a longer-term relationship. And let's start with that. And that's step one. And then step two is Okay, well, let's add a little bit more on step 3, a little bit more. And then, you know, the flexibility of, hey, if it's tax season and you're really busy sending information to your CPA, I could expand my time. And I think this is the other value that C-suites are missing with the fractional world is the fraction— your resource can ebb and flow depending on what your need is. So right now is tax season. And so I'm doing a lot of what I call grunt work for my clients so that they can stay focused on their business. And now when it comes, you know, April 15th, May 15th, that will, will, you know, retract, and then there'll be other things for me to focus on. But again, the value that we're bringing is that ebbing and flowing to the client's needs so that they can stay focused on their business and executing how they need to.

Yeah, yeah, it's a resource that they didn't used to have access to, and It's still something they don't know how to tap into.

Part of the reason why we're doing this podcast and speaking about it is just to educate them that the resources out there, but then help a prospective founder or C-suite executive to tell them, in your opinion, what are the criteria they should be looking for? When they're trying to find a fractional professional, whether it be a CFO, CMO, CTO, whatever, what are some of the criteria they should be looking for? Do you have any guidance there?

Yeah, certainly. I think, and it goes back to your previous question, first criteria is trust, right? It's that relationship and how they're introduced to folks that do this type of work. You know, it's sort of the networking, sort of the LinkedIn profile. It's, you know, what other C-suite executives are doing. So I think, you know, to build that, as previously as a CEO, you know, the first question I guess to answer is, you know, is there an opportunity for me to maximize my performance or the business's performance in a certain criteria. And for some businesses over the next 6 to 12 months, it could be a marketing play, it could be a sales play, it could be a finance play. And depending on where you're trying to go shorter term, right, 6 to 12 months will probably identify where there's a gap in your, in your bench and your resources that hopefully will allow you to, to sort of whittle down to like, having a fractional person in every seat around your board table on day one is almost impossible to pull off, right? So it's almost what's most critical to your business, to your personal life right now, that you could get additional support to additional expertise, focus on that, ask around, do some LinkedIn, have some conversations. And really, at the end, for me, it comes down to a personality connection, right? It's, do I have the same values? Am I going to be passionate about my client? Is there going to be passionate about us being successful together.

Yeah.

I think the other issue is you just don't know if you need that fractional expertise for 3 months or 3 years. And so if you're short-term thinking, like, gosh, I just gotta solve this problem, leaping to a full fractional engagement may be too much of a leap. Whereas if you're long-term thinking, yeah, I know I need this filled for the next 3 years or for a longer period of time even than that, they might leap to a full-time person instead.

So this fractional position, it really lives in a unique place in the mind of the executives at the C-suite.

And what I've found is that the right fractional person, you can bring them in initially for 3 months, see how that works, expand that into a larger engagement because the right fractional team member is coming in already thinking 3 years out. But we'll take the 3-year approach or the 3-month approach to help get us all there faster and quicker.

That's right. The one thing I'd add to that, especially as a professional in this field, um, it's also important to, to have the mindset of— yeah, I'll answer that differently or make my point differently. Most of my assignments end because I found a full-time person to do a part of the role, right? And so like, I've come in and done very CFO type of work for a short stint. And at the end of that, we've identified that, hey, you really just need to outsource to bill.com and hire a bookkeeper and do this. And then let's check in once a quarter versus once a week, right? And so as a professional in the field, having that mindset that the long-term solution might not be you sitting there every week or having a phone call twice a month or whatever the case. That mindset's a challenge. And then I also find with my clients that the challenge of, well, Greg's going to be here forever and, and, you know, go from 1 day a month to 2 days a month to 30 days a month, and all of a sudden he's going to be my full-time person. And I have to step back and say, no, that's not, that's not what is beneficial for you. And I love our relationship But you want me to have my fingers in a lot of different clients so that we can share information.

Yeah, for sure. That's a good point because the, the purpose of our engagement also is likely the same. We want to, we want to exit with—

and I never thought about it as a portion of, of the work being full-time, but that's exactly what it is. It's not taking a full-time CMO or a fractional CMO and replacing them with a a full-time CMO. It's taking a fractional CMO that kind of builds the architecture, fills out where the whole— how to fill the holes.

And a full-time, you know, marketing specialist might be all you really need now that the plan's built. But then that quarterly or ongoing check-in—

that's right—

helps keep that plan in place. I like that analogy.

Um, so tell me, how did you get into this line of work? What were you doing that took you into fractional work?

Yeah, so, you know, great, interesting question. So I mentioned earlier my previous business, EEI Communications, we were a publishing services firm that I joined in probably 2006 as their CFO. And again, here's another role. You know, we're doing $6-7 million in revenue at the time, joined as their full-time CFO. And out of the 100% of my work, probably 20% of it was strategic, financial strategic, and the other 80% was making sure payroll gets run and AP gets done, very transactional, which was sort of my first introduction to like, well, this 80% I don't want to be doing and this 20% I'm really good at. But anyways, I ended up buying that business, as I said, through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy process. And through that life cycle, I struggled with finding the right resources at the right time. And, you know, we came out of the bankruptcy process, there was a success story there. I ultimately ended up selling the business after another economic impact and a little discussion with the bank. And I parted ways with the business and the employees went one way and I went another way because I truly saw a need and an opportunity for other types of businesses that were like mine to have the right support team around them when there's new opportunities, when there's challenges. And it isn't the traditional CPA law firm solution, right? It's not the by-the-hour big bill rate. It's, hey, there's people out there that, especially now with, you know, technology and working remote and being virtual across the world, that can lean in when needed. And so, again, my— I got into this because I saw a need for it. And then I developed a passion for doing things more efficient, efficiently, more effectively. I try to outsource everything in my life if I can.

Yeah.

And so, you know, you got to kind of, you know, sing your own song when you need to.

Yeah, outsourcing has been around for a long time.

It's the fractional C-suite that relatively new, but the idea makes sense at whatever level you can execute it.

I was wondering, so your bankruptcy experience, what is that like? What is it like buying a business from bankruptcy and then trying to take it out of bankruptcy? That's fascinating to me. Why did you take on that challenge? That sounds like a lot.

Yeah, so in fact, I wrote a book about it. It's called The Turnaround, and you can find it on Amazon. The day it published, my mom bought a copy, and that was my leading sales day. But, you know, it's funny, like, looking back, things seem to be in a straight line and were there for— on purpose. But in the moment, to answer your question, I had no idea. Like, it was— I knew I was a finance person,, and I was good at leading a team. This company, I believed in it. I had a passion in it. I believed in the overall organization. And, you know, it wasn't just me that decided to take it into bankruptcy. It was, you know, the 2008, 2009 basically demolished our revenue. We had all kinds of leases and debt and real estate commitments. And the CEO at the time This was sort of like his last hurrah. And an attorney said, you know, you could take this into a bankruptcy. If you can come out the other end, you could take this into a bankruptcy process. And at the time, I'm like, you know what, I'm going to start looking for work. This is not going to last. And for something in me, this must be that entrepreneur, just said, you know what, I can figure this out. And if I could lead this team and the finance effort and all the process that goes around with the bankruptcy process, If I could handle that, it would reduce the legal fees. I'll be at the table when a decision needs to be made. And ultimately, that's what happened, right? So we managed through the process. I built a great relationship with our lender. We worked hand in hand on how to come out the other end. And then when it came to the ultimate sale, the auction at the end, you know, I was the leading contender for the business. And so I struck my check and the next day we're out of bankruptcy and we're kind of back to normal. The funny thing, funny story in that was the day after bankruptcy, coming out of bankruptcy, I had this fear in me. It's like, I'm not, this company isn't protected by the bankruptcy process anymore. And are we gonna just end up going down the same road that got us here versus when you're in, and granted everyone's looking at you, it's like you're in a fishbowl, right? You've got monthly reporting, it's all public record. Vendors are— it's chaos, but it's a process and the courts manage through it. But again, that day one, it was like, oh boy, I'm on my own again. It was interesting and it just touches on the feeling.

So what was the timeline from when we had to start talking about bankruptcy, then go through bankruptcy, then get out of bankruptcy, and then ultimately when did you exit after that?

Yeah, that's a great question. So we went in, so it's 2021 now. I ended up selling in '19. So we came out in 2016. I'm just going to reverse. So we went in in 2014. So 2008, 2009 hit the business hard. We managed through probably 4 years If I do my math, 4 or 5 years of just trying to manage vendors and payments and the rest of it. Ultimately, the landlord went after us, and so we filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2014. It was a 2-year process, so we came out in 2016, and then I ran it for 3 years. The trick for us was part of the bankruptcy agreement, was our principal and interest payments to the bank would escalate over time according to our forecast. As time went on, we didn't hit that forecast, and so the pressure with the bank started to build again. At the time, the team was small enough that we basically had a big parent conversation and said, "Hey, here are our options. Either we're going back into this again and we don't have the resources for it," Or, you know, here are some relationships that I have that would be interested in taking you on as a team. And let's just, you know, close the doors, basically.

But you found a strategic buyer that valued the team and what was there. That's right. That's right. Willing to take on the debt burden along with the team. That makes sense.

Well, so the debt— to be technical, that actually stayed with the company. And we shut down the business. Oh, okay. The team continued, and I have a relationship with that team and that organization that took on, and it was a friend of mine, right? And so by me separating from the business, there wasn't any foul play there, like, oh, we're just gonna rebrand and call ourselves something different, and we're now running this business. I completely separated from the organization and basically called the bank and my attorney and said, look, It is what it is. And it all kind of went away after a handful of months.

Yeah. Yeah. That's tough.

That's quite an experience though. You must learn a lot.

You understand a lot more about bankruptcy and the process than you probably ever wanted to.

Well, and it's also to your point, as a finance, fractional finance professional, It's one of my calling cards when I bring to the table, right? It's, hey, if you're thinking about a fractional CFO or financial management coach or whatever you want to call it, it's, hey, I've, I've been in your shoes, right? And we've gone through some difficult times. I've seen some great opportunities. I've done all these things. So let me take my expertise and experience and help apply it to your business or organization in a way that, that allows you to reach your goals. Yeah.

Do you go after some of that type of work specifically?

Turnaround companies?

I haven't yet. Yeah. You know, I would entertain it for sure. You know, there tends to be the, you know, the bigger players out there that go for the larger organizations that have it down to us because it does get very, very technical as well. Right. And so me managing something through a chapter, another bankruptcy process as an outsider, as an advisor, as I would imagine, would be different than, you know, living it every day inside. All that said, many of the clients I'm introduced to, or at least the prospects, tend to have some sort of, you know, black eye or bloody nose or something that, that needs some attention.

And so, yeah, you can, you can recognize that early on. Would you have done anything, looking back, different?

I just think about there was 4 or 5 years there, it sounds like, between when you got hit with the revenue crisis and before you finally got into the bankruptcy process. Would you, looking back, done any of that timeline or any of those decisions differently?

Certainly. The biggest would be to either to get into the bankruptcy process earlier. Because if we would have got into that process in, let's say, 2008, 2009, when that first economic hit really dinged our business, we would have had more cash in the bank, we'd have more revenue, more clients, more vendors who still wanted to work with us. You know, that time period between the '08-'09 economy shift When we actually filed, we probably lost another 40% of revenue and profitability. So again, back to your question, looking back, I would have entertained the bankruptcy process sooner, and even prior to that, made tougher decisions of cutting deep or letting go of a division or these hard decisions that you get really emotional about. Because people are involved, and rightfully so. I would've looked at that with a different lens, knowing what I know now, because ultimately at the end of the day, all of our vendors were happy. They weren't 100% happy, but they were pleased with the outcome. They continued to be paid even in the bankruptcy process. That was one of the learnings going through the process, that I didn't appreciate is, one, the clients still wanted to have work done. And so the fact that we were in a bankruptcy process or not in a bankruptcy process didn't really matter to the clients. And then, two, same with the vendors and the employees. I mean, these folks just wanted to get the work done. And for the vendors, you know, my conversation with them was, look, hey, we're a credit risk. We're a higher credit risk than we were before. So charge me more and I'm going to try to pass it on to the client. And if I can, great. And if I can't, I'll have to find some other margin somewhere else. But what was really shocking to me going through after the before and after filing was how much the team stayed together, how much the vendors wanted to continue to work, how much the clients still wanted services delivered. And knowing that after the fact would have made that decision of going into the process earlier, easier.

Interesting.

Gosh, it's fascinating. But that, that experience that you have with just that story, how valuable is that to a new client that hires you for a completely different reason?

But now because you're a fractional CFO, fractional finance person, you've got this expertise in finance, but you have this other expertise that you bring with you in those conversations that you can bring into the C-suite. Are so much more powerful than, you know, just a full-time do-it-yourself kind of accountant CFO type, right?

Right. Um, I think it's the driver. It's my driver. It's what's made— it's what makes me relatable to that C-suite person. It's I have similar stories, I've had those dark moments, I've put the payroll on my credit card. I've done these things that we all know we shouldn't do, but we do. And so as I tell those stories, it makes me relatable to the clients, and which then ultimately goes back to your question about building trust. So I think that experience allows me to build a trusting relationship with my clients quicker than if they found me on a billboard and sent an email to some info@ greg.com.

Yeah, for sure. What are some of the nuances of fractional work versus full-time work that clients, prospective clients, might not understand?

Yeah, well, let me answer that in a slightly different way. Um, one of the nuances for me, and especially early on, and if you know, I've only been in this for a handful of years, but it's a new and budding industry. It's really difficult to stop working, right? You're on a fractional basis, and let's say somebody's paying you for an eighth of your time, but you have no other clients. You're thinking about it, you're doing the work, it's just— you just want to execute. And then all of a sudden, that expectation happens. So this is answering your question. So then all of a sudden, you build that expectation with your client that, hey, Greg's gonna answer the phone every time I call. And then you fast forward 2 years, and I've got a portfolio of clients. And I'm not that— I can't be that responsive all the time. But that expectation was set. And so I guess the nuance for the— from the C-suite perspective is to have some understanding that, you know, it is a team effort, and there are other clients and they benefit from me having other clients because again, if I have— do an experience with an ERTC application with one client, I can bring that over to it and say, hey, have you thought about this? And so that cross-pollination is a real benefit to both, both organizations. Um, so back to your question, I think the nuance is, you know, the It's just around, I guess, managing expectations and turnaround. And, you know, very quickly, and I've had this with a handful of clients, they start looking at me as their full-time CFO. And it's like, wait a second, no, that's not what we signed up for. Or I had another client that thought I should be his investment banker. And I'm like, you can't do investment banking 2 hours a week. And so again, the expectations change from when you draft your scope of work to actually delivering your service to building your relationship. Um, and so, you know, keeping that all in check, uh, is really what keeps me up at night. It's like, oh, I'm not— I'm thinking about so-and-so and I should be doing this.

And, um, yeah, how do you set those expectations?

You know, for me, it's— there's a couple things. One is the statement of work, right? And that as tends to feel very legalese at the beginning and kind of you're getting off on the wrong foot because you want this trusted relationship and you want to be buddies and the rest of it. But at the end of the day, when we revisit what are the 4 things that we're going to be doing and at what frequency, it just makes it black and white. And so that's really, really helpful. Second to that is I build a rhythm, right? So it's every 2 weeks, at Thursday at 4 o'clock, we're going to have a 15-minute conversation. And the work sort of gets centered around those touchpoints. And the fact that they know that there's a touchpoint coming up allows them to sort of, you know, not send me an email every 25 minutes, you know, again, it's kind of, it puts, puts the relationship into a rhythm. And that rhythm Uh, helps somewhat with the scope conversation. And then all at the end of the day, it's really having an honest, like if I get through a couple months and it's twice the workload, it's just a conversation. It's like, hey Joe, look, here's the value that I'm driving and we're creating working together. You know, it's off sync from what you're paying. And so let's either rescope or talk about where else this stuff could get done. And it's usually the, hey, yeah, no problem. I see if I'm delivering value, there tends to be no issue around the scope conversation.

Right?

Yeah, if you can, you know, in your world, well, I don't know, might not be much different. In our world, it's value is a little bit harder to clearly identify the value of a marketer. You know, there's, there's not as much ROI, black and white number metric drivers, or some, But it can be somewhat subjective. So those conversations happen frequently with our CMOs to make sure we're always clear on expectations, on track with milestones and priorities that we're establishing together. We, we actually plan quarterly that way and adjust scopes on a quarterly basis intentionally because we know that early in the engagement something's a priority, but 6 weeks later, it's come, you know, changes 180 degrees. But, uh, right, at least we can intentionally set those expectations quarterly. That's kind of our approach.

Yeah. And I think, you know, going back to another question you had around, um, maybe it's around the nuance question, you know, to that— to your point, I hustle for my clients, and I know, I suspect you hustle for your clients, and I think I hustle much more than an employee does. And again, nothing against full-time employees, right? They're great. Economy's awesome, go for it. But at the end of the day, every quarter when I'm up for renewal, I know, hey, I'm up, I gotta put my best on again. And every time I'm interacting with a client, I gotta show that I'm delivering value, because at the end of the day, they could just say, you know what, after this go around, we're We're going to change scope, we're going to change direction, we're going to hire somebody full-time. And so I think by having fractional professionals around you, those professionals are hustling more so— and I'm speculating here, but probably hustling more so than an employee that's coming in at 9, leaving at 6, doing the job, making sure that the trains are run on time. For, for us, right, it's We gotta perform, and, or we don't get our next gig, or we don't get our extension, or, and so there's a different level, I think, of intimacy there, um, that really benefits the, the C-suite executive.

Yeah, I agree completely.

I think fractional can be more productive than full-time, just, and part of it is you only have a few hours a day or a week to give to a a particular client, you have to be more productive. You have to focus on the bigger priority items because you just don't have— you can't take all that filler work. And I think that's a big deal. That dollar-for-dollar exchange is much higher when you look at the productivity as well as the fractional nature of things.

Right. Yeah. It's like that last day before you go on vacation and all of a sudden you've gotten 4 days worth of work done in 25 minutes. We operate in that world every day. It's like, hey, we got to get to the punchline and keep this thing moving.

Yep.

What's your— as a fractional, do you have any—

you don't have to name names, but do you have any difficult clients or a bad engagement that you got involved in that didn't work out?

Yeah, the one I mentioned. Was the one that we started as a fractional CFO assignment. And I should have saw the red flag on this early because we started negotiating my price right off the beginning. And he's like, I'm a startup, and what about this? And I came up with this creative idea of deferring some of my fee that would be paid off in an equity. Anyway, long story. But where that went south, that relationship with— and I'm still friends with the entrepreneur. Where that one went south is when we started needing to raise money. I have experience in that, but I'm not an investment banker, because that's a special type of animal. But I said, "Hey, you know what? I'll reach out to this small group of potential investors that you know, that you have relationships with, and then I'll bird dog the process." He heard that as I was going to do a full time investment banking sort of effort that comes with a success fee and all the bells and whistles. And after about a month of me not sending him my call list every week and going through the marketing program and coming up with a book and the rest of it, he got very sour in the mouth. And, you know, I said, you know what, this isn't worth it. Good luck. Let's stay in touch. But yeah, it was painful at the time. It's probably the only heated conversation I've had with a client about scope, because he went one way and I was going another. And I was hearing what he was saying as a criticism of my work. And that put me over the edge. And I've had some reflection about it later. But it was not a fun experience.

Yeah. It's hard honing in on that right target client is, as a fractional professional, I think it's really an important thing to try to figure out early on in your career, in your practice. We have almost a dozen CMOs, and each of them has a different ideal client, different size, different type of business. Geography plays a little bit into it. Personalities play a lot into it.

And so the industry, industry play into that, not as it does a little, not as much business model, maybe more like B2B versus B2C versus SaaS is a little more applicable.

But industry, our most of our CMOs have a pretty diverse set of industries they've worked with at that high strategic level, you can kind of cross over pretty easily. Um, but from time to time there's a focus, like someone really wants to stay in government, uh, IT work as an example. But, um, she's taken work outside of that just, just, just as easily.

Um, I'm curious, Joe, on that, you said you have a handful of CMOs. Did you start as your own CMO and then you've grown that into a CMO Infrastructure business?

Yeah, essentially.

That's how— Did you all band together at some point in time just to share resources and marketing costs, I guess?

So our business model started with when I met my business partner, Jay.

He was a marketing consultant, kind of essentially a fractional CMO, but was way too much in the weeds. The scope was always creeping into from build a strategy to, okay, now jump on social media and do 10 posts this week and that 80/20, really those tactical things he didn't want to do. And I happen to own a video production company. And so I was on the vendor side of things trying to find the clients for the video work we do. But most businesses that didn't have a strategic marketer didn't understand how to implement video within their business. And so I would I had that frustration.

So when we were comparing notes and talking about the market, we realized there was an opportunity to do two things.

One is help business owners that don't have access to strategic talent get it in a fractional way and help fractional professionals or consultants that were too much in the weeds to develop a real practice at the strategic level. And so we borrowed the, you know, what we'd seen work well in fractional CFO space and applied it to the fractional CMO space. And, and then I did practice for a couple years with clients. So did Jay, as we built and tweaked our model, built our proven process and frameworks and tools and resources. And then as we started to add more CMOs to our team, I backed away from practice work more to developing our, our infrastructure and our team and supporting them. And that's, that's our model. And so I had the chance to be in the business as a CMO, but also now helping other CMOs build their practices. And then we started the Fractional Professionals Association as a way to extend everybody's reach and, and learn from each other, because the challenges that CFOs have, CMOs have, but then there might be some unique ones that CFOs have that CMOs don't, but we can learn from one another, grow each other's individual practices. And that's what kind of led me into this podcast, which is to start interviewing all sorts of fractional professionals out there, understand what they're, they're doing that's working and, and help them tell the story about the fractional opportunity for C-suites.

Sure.

Spending—

I'm flipping, I'm flipping the podcast on you by asking questions. But my other question is, um, right, there's transactional work, right? I would assume within your CMO umbrella that your clients probably ask you to do. So for me, one of mine is, hey, can you also do my bookkeeping? And I don't have a bench of bookkeepers or you know, I've got relationships out there and I tend to turn away from that business. But I've always contemplated like, when is the right time to actually incorporate that into my service offering, either through a partnership or through another fractional bookkeeper, whatever you want to call it. So I'm curious how you handle the downstream work that comes out of the strategic work that you and your CMOs do.

Yeah, that's a great question. We went into this at the very beginning with, with a mindset that we did not want to do any like agency work. We felt that that would potentially keep us from being truly fiduciary, and we'd seen many fractional CMO imposters out there that were really just agencies, you know, fronting a person to build a strategy to use more of their agency services, and we didn't want to be that.

Business.

So intentionally, we started building just partners that do that downstream work, people that we trust that we can bring into the relationship. We can get that work done more effectively and more cost-effective than most agencies can. So when we get into an engagement, that's one of the reasons why people hire us is because they know we're not going to try to sell them anything. We don't have other services. It's truly, we're going to build your strategy, we oversee its execution. But we also have the execution people as partners, people we can bring in, and we direct— we have those partners direct bill the client. So we're not a middleman, we don't upcharge that, that's part of our service offering. So that's been in our DNA from day one, and I think that's served us well.

There is a little bit of crossover.

We realize that When you think of agency work like creative design, copywriting, managing ad spend, that's work that we don't want to do. But then there was a lot of administrative project management, kind of like more marketing coordinator work that we, we do already for our clients. We have full-time marketing coordinators that work with us that support our CMOs, but there started being a bigger demand on that person. Like, Oh, can I just have 10 hours a week of that person to do this work? And it wasn't necessarily creative agency type work, it was just more administrative behind the scenes.

And we didn't have a solution for that.

And so we've been investigating that and now we're preparing to release what we call our marketing MVP, which is a full-time marketing specialist that's not necessarily a designer or creative agency type person, but a full-time person that is overseen by the CMO. And we call that a marketing MVP. So it's a way for our CMOs to add some resources to their clients' teams and a way for clients to access just, just tactical work overseen by a CMO. But it's still not design, copy. It's the other stuff that a lot of clients, a lot of companies need, that we felt was a little bit of a hybrid of some additional services, but not but staying pure to not being an agency.

Got it. You know, you answering that question made me think of back to your, I think your first question around, maybe it was your second question around, you know, why, how does a C-level person identify where they may or may not need fractional support? And what came to mind was if there's a project on your plate You're a C-level person and there's a pro— let's say it's taxes. We'll do it in finance because that's easy for me. So I know business owners hate dealing with their CPA and their taxes and collecting all the information and asking, answering all those questions about like, why did you spend $10 on whatever, a hot dog? Those projects that have to get done that you hate doing or hate managing is probably a number one contender for a fractional person to step in. Yeah, I do a lot of work with interior designers and they hate dealing with their finances and they don't like dealing with their cash flow, but it's a necessity. It's a necessity in their business because the lights will get turned off. They, by working through me or with me, it allows them just to take a bite size of the information that they need to so they can make business decisions. And they've got the comfort that they know that somebody who's professional and has experience is looking over that project that they don't want to do. So back to your original question, I would see a fractional person being very beneficial to a project that you don't want to do, but you have to do. You know, it could be marketing for another example. Like, I don't— I appreciate marketing. I don't know how to do it. And by reaching out to you, I'd probably— what would've collapsed a lot of headache and time and wasted resources because you can get to the finish line much faster than I can and vice versa. So anyway, just rethinking that question.

Yeah, and marketing is one of those— what marketing is interesting because a lot of founders particularly are really good at marketing their business because they started it, they know the product or service better than anybody. And they know the competition next to the customer better than anybody, and they know their customers really well.

So they're good marketers. By definition, that's what marketing is, right?

But they get to a point in their business where that mindshare that marketing is taking up is better off given to somebody else so that they can move on to build more growth and more visionary work for the business. But it's so hard to find somebody that they think is as good as them that they can trust. And that's the hurdle that we're always trying to figure out how to overcome for clients is we have a core value that says, you know, trust the process, value the expertise. And that was one of our core values 6 or 7 years ago. And it's never more apparent than when I talk to a founder who has been doing all the marketing of their business and now brings us in for the first 60, 90 days. I've got to beat in their heads, you have to trust our process because it works. You have to value the expertise of the person that's executing. And they're going to do something maybe differently than you would, but there's a reason for that. And owners that can do that, and founders and C-suite executives that can allow that to happen are very successful. We have really long-term engagement. And those that can't get over that, those are very short-term, right? And I find it especially difficult when it's a fractional person than a full-time, because I think when somebody's ready to make that full-time investment, they're ready to completely let it go. But when they're bringing in a fractional, it's still hard to let that go. There's still this, this love-hate relationship with, with clients that we have that just don't want to let go of that marketing.

And yeah, it's control.

Yeah, control and ego, right?

Yeah.

But that's our, that's our challenge. And this, it's the CMO's job to build that relationship and that trusted relationship and show that expertise and add value. And we feel it's our job to build the processes and the systems to make sure that's an easier trust transfer, and that the value is much more apparent.

That's good stuff.

So what do you like to do outside of, uh, finance personally?

Yeah, so I'm a triathlete. Um, my wife and I have— she's done 10 full-distance Ironman triathlons. I've done 7. Wow. We do them together. Um, our kids think it's normal. We, we blog on a, on a stale website called triathlonparents.com. Um, but it's been our passion really for the last probably 10 years. Gives us the balance, gives us the exercise, allows us to drink a little bit more wine at night. So that on the hobby front, and then I just, I love being a father. I'm a father of two girls, Sasha and Simone. Sasha's 12, Simone's 9. And, you know, taking this entrepreneurial mindset and trying to feed it into their day-to-day life of how they think and see the world and make opportunities and It's, there's something there for me that just gets me going. Um, yeah. So those are a couple of the hobbies.

Uh, do the girls, uh, participate at some level in, in the triathlons, either like a fun run or swim or bike or anything along the way?

Usually they'll do, um, the, the IronKids event the day before. And it's more that we're forcing them to do it than they want to. Uh, but they're both heavy into swimming. Uh, which is how I started in this. So, you know, I was a swimmer basically all through high school, um, and then picked up swimming again when my wife was training for her first Ironman. And so for me, that was the segue into triathlon. And if you talk to most triathletes or every most wannabe triathletes, their biggest fear is the pool and the swimming. Um, so hopefully that's a big checkbox for them to do these, right? I'd love, you know, 4 or 5 years, I guess it would be 6, 7 years from now to be toeing the line with one of my daughters at a race. And it'd just be, it'd be fun. It's fun to see them on the court. Like one of the reasons I love doing these things with Monique, my wife, um, it's just trying to anticipate where I'm going to see her on the bike course. For example, you're just sitting on the bike for 7 hours and you're going over this course twice. At some point in time you should cross each other. And granted, we start at different times and we're at different speeds, but it's just that anticipation. It takes a lot of the pain away.

Yeah. It takes your mind off the pain a bit.

That's right. Uh, I, I, those triathlons are amazing. Uh, I mean, Ironman for sure are just, it's insane what you guys go through. Um, there was a speaker I saw once, I think he was called, I think he called himself the Iron Cowboy. Have you heard of this guy?

I've seen him. I've read his book.

50 Ironmans in 50 days in 50 states. 50 states.

Insane.

And to hear him speak about, about that experience, you know, he started in—

I think they started in Hawaii, then they went to Alaska, and then they kind of worked their way across.

That, you know, you finish the Ironman in Hawaii and then you got to get on a plane and you got to hydrate and you got to get ready because tomorrow morning you're starting the one in Alaska.

And every day The pain, he said, that your body feels, that your mind feels it before your body, you know, I guess, you know, mind feels it before the body really needs you to stop doing. So you can work through the pain even though your mind's telling you one thing, your body's telling you a different. I have a lot of respect.

I saw him speak probably 2 years ago now, pre-pandemic, and I think he asked the audience if anyone has done an Ironman or triathlon or something. And so I raised my hand and I think he tried to call me out on it and he's like, which ones have you done? And luckily I was able to list them all off. But, um, yeah, just seeing some of the photographs of his toes and hearing a story about falling asleep on the bike and crashing.

And I mean, oh yeah.

I mean, I can't walk for 3 weeks after a race. I couldn't imagine. Granted, you see him, right? He's so physically fit and as well trained. And so, but yeah, it's incredible feat. And it also, the team it takes around him for him to accomplish that, right? So who's covering the family? Who's paying the bills? Who's, you know, and so it's not just one man's pioneering because, you know, he's got a wife and kids and a mortgage and the rest of it. And so, I think the real story behind that is, um, around the infrastructure that it takes. And we have it too for us to do these races, right? We live close to my parents on purpose.

Yeah.

Um, cause it takes a village to get somebody to achieve that type of goal. Um, which there's some underlying meaning there for sure.

Yeah. I think I'd be like a fractional Ironman athlete. Let's give me like 6 miles on the bike.

That's my, that's, that's about my speed. I could do that. I can do that 50 days in a row, I think, but do nothing else.

Yeah. But nothing else. Yeah, for sure.

It's sleep, 6 miles of sleep.

Um, so when do you have an Ironman coming up?

So the next one on the calendar is in July in Spain.

Oh wow.

And this has been on the calendar pre-pandemic, and they've moved it twice. We deferred last year, um, so that's the one that we're training for at the moment. But with Omicron and the rest of it, we— I'm not sure we'll, we'll actually get this one done this year, but next year for sure.

Yeah, that, that would be fun to go to a, a, you know, big, big destination event that you can kind of plan maybe some pre-vacation or post-vacation around it a little bit.

Yeah. And that's normally what we've done. It's, you know, my parents come, we've been to Germany, we've been to Switzerland, we've been to, you know, around the world really. And it's a week or 10-day vacation afterwards. And, you know, it's, it makes all the training really worth it. Yeah.

Um, I had a friend that was traveling, which was I don't know if it was Ironman, it might have been the half Ironman. Anyway, she'd been training for a big Ironman event or similar, and it's actually a client, and it was a couple years ago. It's probably like right in the middle of COVID and they canceled her event like a week before. Like, she had been all ready to go, and so she just went to the gym and did it. Like, ran the whatever miles on the treadmill, swam the whatever miles on the—

she's like, I'm doing this thing because I've been training my butt off And, um, she did it all in the gym, which is pretty fast.

Yeah. Really impressive. I went through a phase of doing an urban Ironman, I called it, where I would similarly would leave from my house or go to the pool, do my swim, jump on my bike and do this loop for 7 hours or whatever it would take, have all my nutrition in my car. And then it was like, hmm, I'll just wait a year for the race. Cause, cause on race day, like having the support there and the aid stations and professionals and like, it's It takes a lot of the, I don't know, the difficulty of the day off the table, knowing that, you know, every mile on the run, there's going to be somebody there with water and food and snacks and flat Coke. And it's, it helps, helps you get to the finish line for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah. Doing it all in one day on your own.

But yeah. And we've all done things we've never thought we would do because of COVID which is amazing.

True.

But we're hopefully coming out on the other side of that now. Knock on wood. Well, hey, I've had a great time, Greg, talking to you about all sorts of stuff today. I appreciate your time and your expertise and getting to know you a little bit more and flipping the tables on me.

Yeah, Joe, I appreciate that. It's been a real pleasure. Yeah, exciting, exciting topic for sure.

What would be the best way for someone to reach out to you?

We'll have some of the general contact information in the show notes, but anything specific, email, LinkedIn, website, what do you prefer?

Yeah, so LinkedIn is probably the best. So it's just Gregory McDonough, and my LinkedIn profile should pop up. If you want to catch me on the email, it's gmcdonough@blackburncap.com. But, uh, yeah, I'd love to continue the conversation with anyone who's interested and you never know where those relationships end up going.

Yeah, for sure.

Well, we'll make sure we have that in detail in the show notes.

And for all those listeners out there, reach out to Greg if you want to learn more about what he does or more about, um, the truck, you know, running an Ironman.

Uh, I'm sure he'll share both with you and, uh, as he did me.

So thanks again. Greg, appreciate it.

It's my pleasure.

And that's a wrap.

There's another successful episode of the Fractional C-Suite Retreat. See our show notes and more episodes at fractionalcsuitretreat.com. This podcast is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow, save time and money with better marketing strategy and fractional execution. Visit them at yourcmo.com, yourcmo.com, spelled wrong on purpose.