Navigating the Digital Space - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode # 011

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.

Hello, today's guest is an energetic and self-motivated leader, has a proven ability to build strong teams, has over 20 years of business experience, and is the president and founder at Impact CFO Services. Welcome, Scott Belt. How are you?

I'm good. I'm good. Bringing on the new year. Yeah, it's exciting, exciting stuff going on.

I remember 2021 was going to be the new year that everybody's looking forward to, but now it's 2022. So hopefully it really sets up for a lot of new stuff for us.

The grind continues. Yes, absolutely.

Well, thanks for being on the show. I wanted to just jump right in and ask the question I ask a lot of people, which is, in your capacity as a fractional CFO and owner of your business, what What are some of the opportunities that you see in the C-suite space that maybe the C-suites don't see themselves?

Well, one of the biggest things that's happened is the world got turned upside down in March of 2020. And we were thinking, as you mentioned, that 2021 was the year we were coming out of it. Well, Delta and Omicron had different plans for us. But along the way, we learned a lot about our economy as a whole and where we're going. We learned that the boomers don't like to be very much in the online space, which is where everybody plays now. With the mask mandate and vaccines and everything that The world is a different place, and you have to either learn to live in this new place or you don't. And there are a lot of opportunities because a lot of these established companies aren't making the pivot very well. So the companies, and specifically the leaders in the C-suites, have to be able to take advantage of that. And if you can take advantage of the pivot in the new world we live in, because the old world isn't coming back, A version of it might come back, but the old world as we knew it will not come back. If you can take advantage of the new world and the new way of doing business, you can be very successful because there is a percentage out there that can't or won't or has decided to just give up trying. And that is where the opportunities really lie, is to take over those companies or to take over that space that that company is voiding.

Do you see it as an opportunity that is like a pivot to a whole new business model or a whole new segment, or more of an evolution where you just got to do things that you've been doing just differently?

Probably a little bit of both. In our business in particular, we were specifically trying to stay out of the transactional bookkeeping space. And focus solely in the fractional CFO, fractional controller space. Well, employees themselves started to dictate how that work was being done at the smaller businesses. They wanted a 50% raise just to show up because the minimum wage, if you were competing against the federal government, was now $22 an hour. Well, unless you're paying $22 an hour, it pays more just to stay home. And we hear that a lot. Well, that's the reality we live in. Like it or love it or fight against it, whatever. That's the reality. So your full cycle $40,000 an hour bookkeeper is now an AR clerk asking $60,000 that says, I'm going to work remotely. Well, I need somebody on site. What is that going to look like? How am I going to get a competent person that's working on site? Well, our pivot came to, well, how do we find the opportunity to then give our clients what they need, which is somebody that can do transactional work at a rate that they can afford? Well, we happen to have some connections overseas, and now we're outsourcing a lot of our transactional work And we're having our controller supervise it, and our clients are getting better service for cheaper. And not only that, they get that— they get all their reports, everything's done on time, correctly, to the people that need it. Once we get in there and start looking at the CFO-level stuff, that is, um, we have a great baseline to know. Now we— now we're planning out where you're going, how you get in there, who you get in there with. Asking all those questions. But this was a business that I wasn't even looking at because it wasn't something that was on my radar. I couldn't give bookkeeping services for a rate that the clients could afford. Well, now I can. How? Why did that happen? COVID. That's why it happened. There's a lot of CPA firms out there that we're working with. Also, the older generation, they still can't— they're still trying to figure out how to file 2019 taxes or 2020 taxes. And it's just, we're just rolling into 2022. Why? Because they didn't know how to pivot to the online space. Well, if you can't pivot to the online space, you're a dying breed. Well, how do you, how do you work through that? Well, you figure out how to get everybody online, you figure out how you get your workforce to work online, and then you give them the flexibility to do their job when they can. Specifically, if you're a parent, Schools closed, daycares closed, everything closed. You had to find a new normal. And a lot of people just in the accounting space didn't want to find a new normal because they've been doing it for so long. So those are the, those are the type of opportunities that I'm talking about. Yeah. And they're everywhere.

I know. Well, you mentioned a couple things that speaks to me, and we did something similar. We haven't really completely launched it, but we saw a lot of our clients were looking for part-time freelance marketing work, tactical, like someone to do their social media or some light design, and but not full-time. But those part-timers became much harder to find in the pandemic, much more expensive in the pandemic, and a lot less reliable because they're just going around. And that's probably the hardest position in marketing to fill is a 10-hour-a-week part-time marketing job, because you'll get a great person that'll last 3 months and you'll get a bad person and you can't get rid of— it's just a mess. So we did what you did. We have— we had been building our own team with overseas talent. And we realized, well, gosh, it's working great for us. It's helping us manage our client work from the back end. Why don't we offer this service to our clients?. And so we started placing full-time marketing professionals that are overseen by a CMO in a very tactical role. And it's opened up and there's a ton of value, even though they may only need 10 hours a week, the budget they had for 10 hours a week of a freelancer, it covers a full-time person overseas managed by a CMO. And so we fill up the other 30 hours with other proactive marketing work.

So Yeah, it's a great tool. You have somebody that's onshore here that's managing that relationship, but then all the detail work or the transactional work gets done somewhere else. And the clients, they don't know any difference. And all they want is a good product at the end of the day. And if they can hire somebody in-house, great, we'll help you find that person. Yeah, it's just not easy.

It's not easy. It's not easy. I was curious to know, do you have any of your— do you have any stories of your clients that have gone through an interesting innovation as a result of COVID or the pandemic? Have they found a new niche because of it or pivoted to a new area because of it? I was just curious if you got any of those examples that you might be able to think about at the top of your head or share.

No. Entrepreneurs, yes. But their business— well, one of my entrepreneurs owned a company, a coffee company. So they had— they were a roaster, just about ready to take off. They were going to try to fill to fill the vacuum left by Stumptown after their Peet's Coffee, coffee, uh, purchase. And we were growing, uh, added a second location, purchased a couple different locations. COVID hit, everything was shut down. And because of the shutdown, not only was the roasting business shut down because nobody was roasting coffee anymore, but the actual coffee houses themselves were shut down. Well, that business ended up going under at a great financial loss to everybody that was involved because it didn't matter. I mean, they were on the— they were growth, so there was— they were already a lot really risky. And COVID, it didn't matter how much money they threw at it, it wasn't going to help. Got out from that, and because of the shutdowns, he is now leading an organization that's going against— that's fighting for businesses and the citizens of Oregon, and he's started his own nonprofit to lobby against government overreach. So I don't know if that could be— I mean, that's a huge pivot. Going from an entrepreneur to being basically a politician and running up an advocacy organization that helps, that speaks for the small businesses that were shut down. And how many restaurants in Portland? I mean, we were restaurant— one of the biggest restaurant places in all of the United States, and over half of the restaurants went out of business and they're not coming back.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good story. I mean, the there are so many new opportunities. I know we had a lot of concern when the pandemic first started that we would lose a lot of our client base because our service is month to month and sometimes fractional or sometimes marketing is the first thing to go, let alone a fractional marketer. But we actually maintained all of our clients. And what we saw was we were very helpful in making those changes that they needed to make. Because when you think about it, it's just a marketing challenge. Like for us, the pandemic was just one big marketing event. And so now you just had to look at the market differently. People change, their habits change, their personalities change, their needs and wants change. So you kind of had to understand that. And then there was a lot different kind of way of doing business, different channels for connecting with people and online and Zoom and whatnot. So we, I remember just a couple of them stick out to me. We helped a dentist and so the dentist, They shut down right away. It was forced shutdown. You couldn't do anything. So within like 30 days, we spun up a teledental business for them. And what was really unique is they'd been thinking about it for a long time, but the software was expensive and operationally it would've been a mess. Well, they had a big gap and plenty of time to do something, but we found Google Voice was the tool that we used because it was already HIPAA compliant. I mean, it's just like there was no software to buy. It was Google Voice, it was there. So we were able to spin that up right away, help the dentist office recover some revenues during that time frame, and then launch a new service. We had a, a couple companies that were retailers and had always wanted to be online but never were online, so we were able to spin up quickly an online store So at least they could show off their product, but people could still drive through and pick it up through a drive, drop-off, pickup kind of thing. And some of those, that's become now their biggest revenue stream is this new online pack and pick type of thing. And so it's just a marketing challenge when you look at it from our lens. When you look at it as an entrepreneur, it's quite a bit different. It's your livelihood, it's your employees' livelihood. There's a lot of scary things going on.

Yeah, and when, when this happened and everything shut down, everybody's like, what's, what's it going to look like? And it, it was scary. And there's a lot of the things, uh, one of, one of the clients, uh, they were in the event space, so they build event, um, uh, what is it for the, uh, 3D, he always calls it Well, he didn't call it this before, our CFO. CES is a great example. So you build these booths, you build these huge structures. And so they would do that for several different businesses. And when those went away, there's nothing. I mean, their entire business model was shut down. What do you do? So he said, we had to pivot to go from 3D to the 2D space because you couldn't go out there. So how are you now building these events in a 2D space? With Meta, I guess it's going to go back to the 3D space, but they just had a pretty good CES show down there this month, I guess. But their biggest pivot was they had a strong balance sheet. I go back to the coffeehouses again. They didn't have a strong balance sheet. They were overleveraged. They were in growth mode. When you're overleveraged, you're going to go down quickly. But if you have a strong balance sheet and you have a good ownership group behind you and your entire industry shut down, you can now pivot to what are our competition? Maybe I can buy them for pennies on the dollar. And looking through the acquisitions at that direction. And they're coming out, they're going to come out of COVID way stronger than they were going into COVID because their competition is gone and they now have that 2D space that they can play in as well.

So yeah, I see that, that, that was particularly clear, I think, in some of the restaurants that you referenced earlier. The restaurants that had a strong balance sheet and could weather that initial storm were able to kind of maybe get the takeout business going again. They still had the financial wherewithal to stay. And I talked to a couple of business restaurant owners in town when they were going through it, it's like, they just gotta get through this next year or two. And that was their mindset. And if they have a balance sheet, they can do that. But if your business is month to month and you run outta cash, there's no option, you're just done. Um, so are those—

there was a business in Portland that, uh, called Pok Pok, um, and they was probably one of the biggest, uh, most popular restaurants in all of Portland, and they had just expanded from one location to 10 locations. They're no longer in existence anymore because they had just done that and they were exploding. But the problem is when you go that quickly, you're leveraged, and you could be the most popular place in town. It doesn't matter. Because the bank still needs to get paid. Your employees still need to get paid, and you have zero revenue coming in.

Is that some of the takeaways that you're able— that now as we come out of the pandemic, lessons learned as a fractional CFO, are those kind of— are those setting up conversations with clients differently as reasons to to save cash or look for becoming— having stronger balance sheets? How have you transitioned what you've learned into meaningful conversations with existing and future clients?

Well, it's still a risk profile, right? You're still looking at risk. And that's the biggest thing. It's interesting. When I, when I was going into public accounting out of school, one of the senior tax managers was leaving to take a CFO job for a construction company. And he came back into the office like a year later, and I was like, what's the biggest difference in public accounting versus the private accounting? He's like, all the stuff that you're worried about as a public accountant, specifically on the audit side, which is what I was, uh, because that rarely crosses your mind. Risk. You're all day, every day, you're thinking about risk. What is my risk profile? What is the risk of doing something and what's the risk of not doing something? And when you don't have a real downturn for a long time, the risk of a— what we just had in 2019 or 2020, I mean, that hadn't happened for 100 years. So it's not like that was on anybody's radar. Having a strong balance sheet, you could get away. I mean, going even into 2008 downturn, that hit a very small part of the economy, but it echoed throughout the whole economy. Those companies were way overleveraged and they took on way too much risk, but their risk didn't affect everybody else's risk. Well, now you go into 2020 and everything shuts down, Now, the risk of everybody not having a strong balance sheet was affected. Well, as you grow and want to take advantage of the new opportunities out there and the lack of services in a lot of areas, because those services went away because they went bankrupt, are you willing to take that much risk all over again? And the entrepreneurial spirit, it doesn't matter what the CFO says, the entrepreneur is going to do what the entrepreneur is going to do because they they don't see risk. They just kind of go. It's our job as CFOs to introduce, to tell them about it, to show them the risk and show them what just happened if they do this. But it's ultimately up to that entrepreneur to take that risk or not. And everything is through the lens of risk. And if your risk is you're going to have a really weak balance sheet, you have a huge opportunity on the back end if you make it through, And all the entrepreneurs hear is a huge opportunity.

Yeah, not the if you make it through.

Yeah, they don't hear the if you make it through.

So I find that, that's an interesting, uh, point you make. Um, do you— and I'll ask this question, I'll give you my answer. Do you see a difference in risk levels between entrepreneurs that you work with?

It depends on their business in the industry. Um, if you— employees that, that start a business because they think they are the best at what they do and they don't work well with bosses— me, um, I wanted to grow a business and I was going to take on a lot of risk because I was very confident in what I did. However, I'm still an accountant at heart. And I was only going to take on so much risk. I wasn't going to hire a huge team because I knew I couldn't afford it. Well, other people, they start down that path and they just start hiring and start buying equipment or doing a lot of different things that they see will help grow their business, but without the idea of that's way too much risk. I had a business owner that was in the roofing. He had been a very successful, uh, roofing, um, in sales. So he went out and sold, uh, commercial roofs. He's like, I can do this on my own. And so he started down the path of starting his own business and being a commercial roofer. Well, I got introduced to him and I was like, okay, well, you need to make sure you set up your systems correctly to make sure you pay your people correctly. And if it's a government contract, you have your Davis Bacon wages that you're paying and everything. He's like, you're too expensive, maybe next year. A couple years rolled around, I actually met him at a networking event and he was going through bankruptcy because he didn't set up any of these controls. He was like, I am going— I'm willing to take on these risks. Well, that happens, and it's an entrepreneurial nightmare. This is why only 20% of new businesses make it to year 5, and of those, only 20% of those make it to year 10. And it's a lot of risk.

Do you work with entrepreneurs or different larger size businesses?

Our mix has always been in the, in the $2 to $20 million range. Okay. We, with our new model of being able to take on transactional work, that's now pushing that $2 million down. The whole idea behind the $2 million, and I think you mentioned in our conversation earlier that you kind of started that $5 million, is you can have all of the projects or structure that you want to put in place to help them get to their ultimate 10, 20-year goal. But if they don't have the resources to execute on any of them, you have just hindered their ability to grow because now you've taken cash resource away from them and time resource away with your meetings and what you're thinking that they need to execute on, and they don't have the ability to do it. As a CFO, that, that pains me. And so I really didn't want to play in that smaller space because I felt that I was hurting companies more than I was helping them because of limited resources. Now, a fully funded company, a startup that has a huge cash backing, that's different because they have the ability to grow quickly. With our new bookkeeping model, now we can help companies see where they're at. And when they're ready to take that next step and use the fractional services on a long-term basis, then we can introduce that. On the other side, we now push that number up to $50 million because we really think we can help companies in that space that don't need a full-time person. One, because there's just a lack of good CFOs out there, uh, because of what I mentioned earlier about the COVID and the boomers retiring and not one is playing the space, and the Xers and the millennials aren't ready to take over those roles yet. And so how do you, how do you bridge that gap? And that's a fractional role is a great space to do that, where you can use your resources elsewhere.

Yeah, that makes sense. One of the questions I always like to ask fractional CFOs, from a marketing lens, we get the question often, like, what is the ROI on marketing? And how do I budget? And it's a tricky answer. Because there's not always a lot of clear variables and metrics to help with that answer. But how do you give guidance to businesses on what they should budget for marketing? And how should they measure ROI?

That's a tricky one. Back in— back when I was a full-time CFO, last company, we finally hired a marketing person in-house. Looking back, hindsight being what it is, and knowing the fractional space that I live in now, it really should have been a fractional person. But he came to me and said, what's my budget? And I was like, you're asking the wrong person. You look in the mirror. What do you want it to be? Because as, as the CFO, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you, what we can afford. And what we can afford is going to dictate on what you want to do and how well you can grow our message and, and drive sales through the marketing. So I want to see what you can do, and I want to see what you think it's going to accomplish, and I want to see how you, how you plan on measuring your success. And once I see that, then I can put that into a larger package and say whether we can afford this or not afford this, and can we scale it up or scale it down. But starting with what's the budget— no, no, that's the wrong answer. That's the wrong question. You got to tell me what you want to do and how you're going to measure it. Because sales, marketing and sales is the lifeblood of every business. And when the economy starts taking a turn for the worse, The last person you want to sit as to get rid of is those two people. Maybe your accountant to make sure you're still accounting for what you have going on. But I mean, you have to drive sales because without that, and your marketing team is trying to figure out how to drive sales.

Yeah, yeah, it is. It's a tough question. There's no easy answer. And every industry is different. And then every company is different within an industry. From a budgeting standpoint, that's the hardest one. What's, what's the right budget? The way we approach it—

I'm a CFO, I'm not a marketing person. So you tell me what you think it should be. I'll tell you whether it's reasonable or not. But I've— but I can't give you the answer. Yeah, exactly.

And the way we approach it is we try it, we start with what's a client lifetime value? Like, what's a client worth to you? And if a client's worth $100,000 lifetime value or $1,000 lifetime value, you know, what is the investment you would make to get a new client? If you want a 10-to-1 return on your investment and you pay $1,000 for a $10,000 client or $10,000 for a $100,000 client, then we can use those rough parameters to help establish budgets and a framework for budgeting. 'Cause if you need to add 10 more clients and they're $100,000 each, and that's $1 million in new revenue or lifetime revenue, could you spend $100,000 this year to go add that client work? Or do you spend $50,000? But that at least puts the budgeting conversation in a way that many business owners can get right away. Like, that makes sense. But lifetime value then becomes a conversation which is unique also, Because a lifetime value client takes in how many years they'll be on, what's your retention rate. Some things it's easy to measure lifetime value, but others it's a little more guessing. But those are the right conversations to be having with your marketing people around budgeting and frameworks and client value. Not how much budget do I have and where should I go spend it? Because that's where agencies start. Oh, you've got $100,000 this year. I think we should do AdWords. Why? Because it pays me the most margin, or whatever, you know, there's never a lot of thought that goes into that. When the first question from a marketer is, what's your budget? You should probably turn around and run.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that, that, that relationship didn't end well. Yeah. That, that, that business. Yeah. And not all marketing is transferable. That's the other one. So I— you see all these, um, fly-by-night, uh, marketing people. It's like, what was your expertise? And I was like, I do a little bit of everything. It's like, okay, yeah, it's not good. Uh, it's not a good answer. And then you hear, uh, uh, well, what do you think about, um, Facebook ads or Google ads? Do they work for everybody? Oh yeah, they're great for everybody. Okay, I'm gonna just turn around and run now. Because no, they're not good for everybody. They're good for some people and they work for some people, but there's a lot of— like in my industry, you put out a Facebook ad on fractional CFO. One, what the hell does that mean? Most of the people say, what's a CFO? Can you, can you dumb it down? And what do you mean by— is that temporary? Is that a project? What is a fraction? So there's just a lot of explanations. And I'm sure a good marketing team could probably crack that widget. But I am not that person. And just throwing in, throwing that, throwing that statement out there. I just like, I know where to put you. And it means run away.

Yeah, you're the runaway file.

Yeah.

So you've been doing this fractional thing for several years. What do you think some of the unique differences are for a company to have access to a fractional CMO versus a full-time CMO?

Well, the fractional versus— I'll just talk about it from the CFO perspective. When you're full-time inside of a company, it's— you're there more, you're immersed in it. And you get to, you get to live, breathe, and feel the culture on a day-in, day-out basis. And you get to take the temperature of the room always. You also get pulled into the politic of the company, and for its good and bad. And there's a lot more I think you can do as a full-time person because of all the little things that you don't get when you're fractional. That being said, a company has to be— for us, for a full-time CFO that's only functioning as a CFO, not a CFO and a controller, just only as a CFO— there's a lot of dynamics and moving pieces inside of an organization that would have to be required to fill up the full-time person of the CFO. I mean, there's got to be a lot of moving parts parts and a lot of change that's going to be happening. Otherwise, you get— you're— you end up being the head of IT, and then you're the head of HR, and you oversee, uh, maybe marketing and sales, and then you have your accounting function that you're doing. You get pulled in a whole many different directions that none of them is what the CFO should be doing, which is where are we going, how are we getting there, who are we getting there with, what are the risks along the way, What are the resources we need to get there? Those are the things that you should be focusing on a day-in, day-out basis. Company's got to be a certain size and a certain complexity to fill up a full-time CFO's role, job. Now, I think you can do a better job if you're in it full-time, but that's really expensive for a company. Now, you can get 80% of that with a fractional at a lot less of a cost because you're only there when you're needed and you're not there full-time. You're only there 4 hours a month, 8 hours a month, 8 hours a week, 16 hours a week, whatever that is dictated. And you're only there to do the CFO-level job and you're only getting paid to do the CFO-level job, not manage, I don't know, the cooking staff at an elder care or something, whatever. I mean, you throw it out there.

Yeah, there's so many fractional— I shouldn't say that. There's so many full-time C-level people that are wearing multiple hats because they just don't have really the need for the full-time function that they're in.

Yeah, yeah, we see. And then you get burnout and you get turnover because it's like, I just want to be a CFO, can I just be a CFO? Or I just want to be a CMO, I just want— and then you have to do all these other things, you're like, I don't want to be here anymore. And then you get turnover. Yes.

So what would be 3, 3 criteria that you would recommend a client or prospect or business owner to look for when choosing a fractional CMO to add to their— or sorry, C-level person or CFO to add to their team? There's 3 criteria you think that's important.

I would say if they're— if you're requiring industry-specific Be careful of that. Because you may think your industry is very specific, but at the C-level, it might not be. Now, it might be, but it might not be also. So be careful of being so industry-specific in it, because a really talented person that's coming from, let's say, technology, a huge IT experience. And then they want to introduce them into a marketing or a manufacturing, there might be a lot of crossover that you just don't realize, and you're, and you're cutting them off. Also, do they have the bandwidth and the drive to want to work as a fractional person? And that's hard to measure, but are— do they— are they looking out for their company, or are they looking out for your company? And that's another big one that gets lost. It's like people talk a good game about how good their company is. Their company is irrelevant. My company, I am the one that's hiring you. My company is the most important. You need to make sure that I'm your focus when you're working for me. And then also, what is your ability to scale? Like, Coming in, I have 4 hours a week for a fractional role that I have right now. Okay, is this hours 1 to 4, so I'm your only client, or is this hours 56 to 60?

What—

where are— where am I on that scale? And is it just you, or do you have a team behind you? Because if you have a team behind you, that's great. But if you— if it's only you and your not ability to scale, I only have as much time as you are awake and breathing. So that would be it. Those areas, and then obviously just check references, because what people say in an interview and what they've actually done are two different things.

Yeah, I think the reference check is important. It's easy to overlook that. Oh, it's a fractional, they're month to month, I don't really have to go through that process. But why wouldn't you? It's—

you—

I, I always recommend that clients or prospects, they treat a fractional like a full-time hire. Go through the exact same process as you would go to select a full-time person, even though they're fractional, because they're going to have a full-time equivalent role in your business.

And one of the long term too. I mean, this is— you're hiring this person to be with you for years, not just like a few months. Absolutely.

And I think the one thing that people forget about is the cultural fit, and how easy it is to hire somebody to check all the boxes. But if you don't check the core value cultural fit, and they get in, they start working in, and there's— they're, they're outside the organization, but they're working every day with, with other members inside the organization. And if they're not a cultural fit, it'll, it'll it'll hurt things and you may not even see it until it's too late.

So I think that's the one. One of the things about in the C-suite is, and it's very specific to the CFO world, is trust. Because you're turning over a lot of stuff to that CFO. And there's, I mean, I'm in the trust business. If you don't trust us, then you're not going to turn over certain aspects of it and we can't do our job. So how do you build that? And that is really hard. And that, that's got to come from just either years of experience and, and having a good background and good connections that are referring you, or a good list of referrals that will refer, that will speak positively of you, and then a client list that will Um, it'll vouch for you.

Yeah, yeah, that, that makes a ton of sense. So let's switch gears a little bit. What do you like to do for fun, Scott?

Well, right now I have an 8 and a 9-year-old. The 9-year-old will be 10 soon, so it's whatever, uh, whatever sport that they're into right now. What are they into? Um, well, we're We're moving into— I got baseball tryouts on the 5th and 6th and softball tryouts on the 27th of February. Getting out skiing, golfing with my son this weekend and my father. So yeah, and travel. Unfortunately, our trip over Christmas got canceled. Due to COVID and canceling of flights. But at least we got canceled while we were still home instead of in an airport somewhere hours and hours away. Yeah, that was a benefit. But yeah, I mean, just going out and living the outside life. We're from Oregon, so we love the outdoors.

Well, I noticed you said skiing and golfing in the same sentence. Where are you golfing in Portland, around Portland area, in this, at this time of year? Is it, uh, you taking a plane or is there actually warm enough golf around?

Oh no, we golf, uh, we golf 365 here. Really? Some days, yeah, some days, uh, the end of, the end of, uh, December, early January was a bit rough because of the, uh, the snow and the amount of rain. So you gotta take time off, but we have really good drainage So it just takes a couple days and the courses dry up pretty quick. Central Oregon is high desert, so as long as there's not snow on the course, you can play it.

Okay, I didn't know that. I just assumed the location in Northwest, it was, it was as cold as it is in Nebraska this time, which is— we're, we're 10 degrees.

You guys are colder than we are.

It's, it's, it's cold here, that's for sure. Yeah.

Um, so that's cool. Uh, one of the guys I listened to on the radio, he, he always talks about, uh, growing up in Salina, Kansas. He's like, you couldn't— you can't golf in the winter. He goes, I can golf year-round here. You may have to put your rain clothes on, but you still can golf.

Yeah, you're probably done golfing here. You'll be lucky to get some golf in in November. Uh, the most of the courses are closing down, but you might sneak a day or two in on a public course. And then for sure not December, January, February. Then March, end of March, you start getting to golf again. Uh, so it's a short season.

Yeah, no, we get, we got year-round here.

It's great.

Yeah.

Um, I got 4 kids and, uh, one of them is post-college, 2 in college, and one at home. But I remember the 9 and 10-year-old, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of fun activities you go to, but you're, you're chauffeuring quite a bit, uh, from event to event to event.

Yeah, I got, uh, gymnastics on Tuesday, and then as soon as the, the baseball starts up, we'll We'll be getting baseball, softball going on. And yeah, I had some buddies that wanted to go on a guys' weekend and I'm like, I'm coaching, I can't. I don't know when the games are. So April, May, June are out. Yeah.

I think that's one of the benefits about being a fractional professional. And then, you know, you and I as entrepreneurs, owners of fractional professional firms, is that although you're really on demand all the time because you have clients, you can create your own schedule so that you can do things like take off time to go to a kid's event. You're in control of your own schedule, even though it's massively busy. And I think that's one of the values of being fractional is that you can do that. And many of the fractional professionals I talk to are so practitioners that are just out there, and they love that switch from corporate, you know, full-time, on-demand, no control or very little control, to I can, I can determine when I'm going to meet with my clients and when I'm not and work my life into my work a little bit better that way. Do you see that, uh, in your world quite a bit?

Yeah, uh, my controllers actually that I hired, they're, uh, They were all moms that were CPAs, and they wanted to be able to either work— one of them started at 32, the other one started at 32, and one started at 30. Now they're— one's full-time, one's 32, one's 24. And that's all depending on where their kids were. They were very highly qualified CPAs that, uh, that took time off to have kids. They wanted to re-enter the workforce. Course, or they wanted to have a little bit more flexibility. So we actually going into COVID, we already had everybody at their home offices. So that did— that really didn't change very much. The biggest change was how old were their kids, and were their daycares or their schools open or closed. And that was the biggest variance in whether they could continue the hours they were working, or we had to find other solutions. And That flexibility, I mean, my kind of how I got started on this journey was I was in the hospital after my son was born. And I was talking to my dad about why he remained on the family farm, as opposed to my mom was always pushing him, hey, you graduated with an ag degree, why aren't you working somewhere else? Else? He's like, because I wanted to have time with my family and I wanted to do the things that made me happy. And I wanted to be the coach and I wanted to hunt and I wanted to fish and I want to do all those things. I couldn't do it if I was going to work for somebody else. Get back to the office on that Monday. And let's just say the meeting with the CEO didn't go well. You want to know why I wasn't— why I didn't have the financials done and kicked me out of a meeting that I was running? My wife and son had just been in the hospital for a week in ICU. I didn't need to do that. I didn't need to be a part of that. What I needed to do was to have a life, have fun, have Enjoy the time with my family. And I quit on the spot and said, no, you can have this. I'm done. Uh, but that, that gave me the opportunity to say, now what do I want to do? I don't want to be a cog in somebody else's wheel. I want to be able to have a life and enjoy it and not work 60 hours a week and get crap from the owners that don't care about me. But that was, that was big. That got started me on my journey because I wanted to have that time. I wanted to be able to be the coach. I wanted to be able to take my, my, my daughter to gymnastics. And I want to have the time to go out and have time to enjoy it, to enjoy it all. And the business has taken some turns and it is risk. Entrepreneurial risk is different than ownership or employee risk and balancing those things and making sure that you have the opportunity to still do all those things. I mean, you started this company when your kids were in high school or middle school. I mean, you're, you're staring down college, she's like, I think I'm gonna start my own business now. I mean, there's a lot to go on. I mean, I, my, my first son was born and it's like, oh yeah, I'm gonna quit my job and do and figure it out. So there's entrepreneurs, we're crazy people. At the same time, we're also, we know we're confident in what we do and we're confident because we know we can help other business owners grow and succeed. And then you start surrounding yourselves with competent, great fractional people that you can start plugging into businesses. And I found that my greatest skill is connecting great employees, great fractional people with great business owners. And we're all on the same page and we can hire and fire each other if we don't get along. And that's the— you can move quickly. Hire slowly, fire quickly. And hire great people and get out of their way. Don't micromanage them. Yeah. And people that, that love that fractional life really love it. And those that don't, they're— you have to make sure that you find people that love the fractional life because, like you said, you're always on, but you can manage the always on. Yep.

Yeah, I love your story and congrats and kudos for coming to that realization early. I think what's interesting is today there's a lot more people that came to that realization over the last few years because of what we went through. And it clicked that there's so much more than just showing up for a paycheck, you know, the health and family. And that's why we're in the midst of the great resignation. People are just realizing, I don't have to do this anymore. I can do it differently. And the world's opened up virtually and hybrid and remote, and it's a really, you know, going full circle. There's a lot of opportunity out there today for companies to embrace this sea change and individuals to work in it. And that's where the fractional, I think, leadership space is the greatest opportunity for businesses today, is to understand that value There's a plethora of talent, and there are some nuances, and they have to do, like you had mentioned, the criteria. They got to be really clear about who they hire, but it's a huge opportunity, and we're seeing more and more people taking advantage of it.

Yeah, and the biggest thing is, as an employer, how are you taking care of your people? Because I know here at Impact My people is my business. If, if I don't take care of them and give them the resources to grow and succeed, then they're going to leave. And how does that affect my clients? Yeah, it's devastating. And I'm probably not going to have that client anymore. So I have to make sure that I'm taking really good care of my employees. And, and I think business owners, a lot of times it's a transactional relationship. And it's like, no, no, no, you guys are a family, you're a team, you guys are doing this together. Nobody's— there's not— nobody on the team is more important than anybody else on the team. And everybody has to pull all their own weight. And you have to take care of your good people. And you're going to find some duds along the way. And you got to get rid of those quickly, because Cancer spreads quickly. And taking care of your people, and that's what one of the highlights of the Great Resignation is. A lot of employers weren't taking care of their people. And it might not even be their own fault. There might be like, there's not enough people, I have all this work to do, we have to just grind through it. And that goes poorly when you don't, when you don't at least acknowledge, acknowledge that fact with your employees and give them and show them the roadmap. Look, I know it's tough right now, but this is the roadmap that we're doing, and we're doing everything we can to hire people to alleviate the stress. Anyway, that's me pontificating.

Yeah, well, that's great. Well, I've really enjoyed our conversation, and thanks for taking time. I appreciate it quite a bit.

Hey, I really love, love that you're doing this and just helping other, uh, whether business owners themselves or other C-suite people that, uh, to get you introduced to other fractional people out there. Yeah. And what we do.

Well, thank you. And what's the best way for people to contact you if they heard something that they sparked their interest, or if they just want to get in touch? What's the best way?

Well, they can go to our website at impactcfos.com, or they can just call me directly. It's Scott, um, at 971-506-1238, or Scott at impactcfos.com. Um, any, any of those ways. I mean, you can find all that on our website too.

Yeah, and we'll have that in the show notes so everybody can easily access it. But, uh, well, I think that's it. That's great. I appreciate your time and Thanks to all our listeners, and we'll connect more offline.

Yeah, yeah, this is great. I really appreciate this. This has been fun.

All right, signing off.

Thanks, Scott.

Thank you. 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.