113. Should Fractional CFOs Offer Bookkeeping? (The answer!)

Should fractional CFOs ever offer bookkeeping? That's the big question that I'm addressing today with my friend Matt Tate. Matt is the CEO of Decimal. Decimal is a bookkeeping firm that started just four years ago and they've already scaled up to over 650 clients. We're going to dive into the relationship that has to exist between a bookkeeper and a fractional cfo. And we're going to have some candid conversations about just hard lessons learned in business and how to solve problems as a CEO. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Matt Tate.

Matt, I want to start off with a very, very direct question. A lot of fractional CFOs offer the full suite. They're doing advisory, they're also doing bookkeeping, they're also doing taxes, they're doing all the compliance things.

Is that a mistake 100% of the time.

Tell me more.

Yeah, to me, when you're doing a professional service and building a professional services company, you have what I like to talk about as a core competency, something that you are uniquely good at. When you things that you're not uniquely good at that aren't your core competency, you start to dilute your efficacy and your value. And so you start doing things that a you aren't good at, which also tells your client that, hey, you're not really good at this. You're also not good at managing it. And these are all different skill sets. Some people have a good sales brain, they're really good at bringing in clients. Some people have a great advisory brain. Other people have a good tax brain. Very few people have the ability to have truly more than one core competency. And so as a business, when you start doing everything, you dilute the value of all of it. And so to me, it's one of the things that I've heard you talk a lot about on your podcasts and in your content, which is go vertical, find a good vertical and dive in and be specific about it. To me, what's equally as important there is find a skill set for which you are uniquely good at and go deep into that. The more you start going deep into other things, the more you start to generate what I like to tell my team is bad revenue. Revenue that doesn't have the value of what your highest best use is or your team's highest best use. So let's dive specifically into your question CFOs that start to think about doing bookkeeping or tax. When you are doing CFO work that is High level advisory stuff. That is truly high level thought. You are diving in with a client. You are thinking about their strategic needs and planning forward. When you start to look at the bookkeeping side, which is what decimal is uniquely good at, is what I like to call the financial operations and bookkeeping. When you start to do that type of stuff, you start to spend your time managing people and processes that are beneath that high level thought. And you also start to spend time managing people that are doing that. And it's a different skill set of management. You build out a team of fractional CFOs, you're managing a team of high level thinkers. You manage a team of bookkeepers, you're managing a bunch of process people. It's not good or bad. It's not a judgment on either. I love process people, but they're different people and they require different mechanics and different skill sets. And so you end up stealing from something that's good to try to apply it to something that you're maybe okay at. The other part of it too is, I mean, you and I have talked about this. When we grow our businesses, there are things that we find joy out of and things that we don't. I always joke that businesses hate bookkeeping, finance, hr, it. When it comes to most finance professionals and accounting professionals, what they truly dislike as well is thinking about, gosh, I got to clean those books up, I got to help them pay their bills. I got to do the cash, the bank wrecks. I got to, you know, all of the nitty gritty of the looking backwards. Accounting doesn't give you joy and make you happy. And so not only are you not good at it, your clients know you're not good at it because you've told them you're there for this. And, oh, I can throw this in. Or I've heard accounting firms say, like, it's my loss leader, well, guess what? As a business owner, I got to make sure I'm paying my bills, I'm getting paid, and I'm tracking it all, if nothing less than to stay in business and keep the IRS off my back. And you're telling me that's where you're losing money? Which means I, as a business owner know you're not valuing that. So to me, it's a combination of it's a bad business decision. It's also a bad kind of quality decision, and it's a bad quality of life decision. Does that answer your question?

It does. One thing that you said in there that really hit home with me That I hadn't even thought about before, Matt, is I used to be an engineer back in the day. And I learned not only was I a bad engineer, I was also a bad leader of engineers. I tend to be more of the strategy guy, the 30,000 Foot View guy, the high level guy. And just like you said with bookkeepers, engineers are process people. And one of the things that I learned, I value process. I have process in my business. I'm not a good manager of process people because I tend to be way up in the clouds. And what I learned as an engineering manager is that I wasn't leading well, because those process people need a leader that will get into the weeds around the process for them. And when I wouldn't do that, they felt unseen and unhurt. And so I realized like, I'm not the right person to lead process people because my eyes gloss over. I get bored when I get into the details. And I think there's a direct correlation. There's. It's like if you're going to offer the bookkeeping services and have bookkeepers, you need to be somebody that's passionate about process and get into the weeds with your team and if for no other reason, so that they feel seen and heard and valued or you're going to be frustrated and they're going to be frustrated.

Oh, I think 100%. And by the way, I totally empathize with the not being a good engineer or engineering manager because I like to joke that I'm a recovering attorney first. So I've been there in that total career trajectory as well. But I think you've hit the nail on the head, which is I love process. I love design, designing out processes that help small businesses. What I love even more than that is designing out a very scalable process that allows our company to service thousands of other companies, which is also a problem that you run into when you think about do I do CFO services and do I do the bookkeeping or tax scale becomes a problem when you're talking about high level services. And you kind of hit this, which is you scale people. When you're doing CFO services, you are scaling people and you are scaling that brain power for that high level thought. For me, when I, when I scale process, when I scale bookkeeping and financial operations, a massive component of that is people. But what makes it scalable and the quality consistently great is creating umbrella policies and processes that allow that to continue with not just one or two or ten, but a thousand or more.

Matt, one of the things that really stuck out for me from our time together in Indianapolis a few weeks ago is that you have a very clear, I would go so far as to say, obsession with systemization and processing everything out. Why is that? Where does that come from?

Everybody deserves an exceptional experience, period. And to me the only way to do that while scaling is to create scalable processes and to look at it in very minute detail. The other part of that too is in order to create truly scalable, exceptional services, you have to have a team that loves doing it. You have to have a team that finds joy in what they get to accomplish. And so creating truly scalable processes and truly getting into the details lets me give them joy in what they're doing and take away the hard parts, take away the parts they don't want to do, and put those into a more scalable machine. To me, technology is great as a tool for making relationships better. It's not an end all for doing it.

What is your philosophy on depth of process? I've kind of seen two schools of thought on this, Matt, and I'd really love to hear where you land on it. One school of thought is, hey look, you know, we should go into this with this expectation that we've got competent professionals and so our processes are more like bullet points or a checklist. Competent professional could sit down and execute against to do it the decimal way. The other school of thought on like the other end of the spectrum is like no, no, we're, we're in there with like screenshots and it's a step by step kind of thing. And when you take that approach, processes tend to be much more robust. But by virtue of that they're, you know, 10, 20, 30 times longer. So where do you land and why on that, on that spectrum, Matt, I.

Would say right in the middle of them. Which is ironic. I don't think I fall into either camp. And here's what I mean by that. I think if you want to tell me to go bake a cake, I am incapable of doing it without following very specific instructions. I have a sister in law who give her a couple of ingredients and she comes out with something fantastic. What I find is that most people can do what I do, which is follow directions and achieve success. Very few people can truly do what she does, which is take a couple of ingredients and come up with something amazing. So when I look at processes, to me I start with the KISS principle. Keep it simple and when you keep it simple, but make sure that you're taking care of the end Output. The goal is the output. So how do we get consistently quality output in achievement? That could be quality books and financial reporting. That could be quality bill pay, quality invoicing. Whatever you look at, you build backwards from there. What is the simplest, most effective process for consistent output? Over the years, we've had great members of our team. What I find is that people fall into two categories. When they have an accounting background, they are great accountants or they're great process people. And I very rarely find people that have both. And so I love to give the great accountants a very clear, simple process to follow. Business owners. I'll go back to this like, you get to be at a super cool place for business owners because you're driving their strategy forward and you're helping them make more money. I'm literally doing the stuff that they hate doing, but they know they have to. If I'm going to get them to do that, I have to make it super easy. And if I'm going to get them to change it, I have to show them why. It's going to either save them time or money, and hopefully both. So to me, it's. It's really that combination. And I find anytime people swing the pendulum, and I would say in life in general, the ends tend to be wrong. The middle has a tendency to be the most correct. I think I. I totally split the difference here. And that's like a politician's answer, but I think it's truly the right one.

You're a lawyer. That's what I expected. Recovering recovery lawyer. One of the things that really impresses me about decimal and it stands out far different from, I would go so far as to say any other bookkeeping or accounting firm that I've ever gotten into the weeds with, is your relentless obsession to monitoring client communications in response times. I've found that that's probably the number one gripe that most people have with their bookkeeper or their accountants. It's like I can't get them to answer me back, but you guys have gone hard the other direction. Why is that obsession part of your company's DNA? How do you do it and what do you see as kind of the outcome of that?

So why, I think is a couple of different things. One, it is a personal mission of mine to show people respect by being responsive. And having grown up in a law firm and then working my way through technology companies and then working my way through accounting, what I find is what you said, which is generally in professional services, people are not nearly as responsive as they should. Be. And I don't know how you define correct levels of responsiveness, but at the very least, it's acknowledge. I exist and acknowledge when you think that you're going to have what I need. Those are two things that I think are essential to creating a great relationship. But as much as I hear professional services firms, accounting, consulting, law, whatever, talk about and train people on it, they never actually do it, or they do it for a day or a week and then it falls off. And part of it's not their fault. They get busy. They are the output that is created from this. But you forget that the relationship exists. There was a great book that my business coach gave me that was, it's about professional services firms. And he told me, he goes, you're going to hate 80% of this book and 20% is gold. And he was right. It was way too in the weeds for me on running a professional services firm and billable hours and stuff like that. But one of the things that it really talked about was that as a professional services firm or a professional services provider, most people forget that the output that they generate is only a small portion of the value that their client will realize from the relationship. So if I'm a bookkeeper, doing the bookkeeping is only a small portion of the value my client is going to derive from the whole engagement. That's tough to think about when your entire life is about putting that output out there. And so to me, creating a system that allows for that to be better and doing it better is, I think, really, really important. And I think it's forgotten. It's talked about, but it's only talked about in a lip service type way most of the time. The other side of it too is, look, we're all fallible. We will make mistakes. My team does thousands of transactions, tens of thousands of transactions at this point a day. We are going to make a mistake. That's okay. When we do make a mistake, our clients will give us grace if we've developed a great relationship with them. And you develop great relationships with your clients by being responsive, showing them respect, and really trying to scale that service. And so that's what from day one, Jacob, my co founder and I defined, as we said, this is going to be one of our defining characteristics is responsiveness. So we took that and as you know, like you have one or two people or it's just you, you can do that, that's great. Then you start to scale and you're like, all right, now I got to teach other people to do it then all of a sudden, four years later, decimals at 91 people. And I can't just tell everybody what to do. We've got to create systems and processes and reporting and dashboards and all that stuff. So when we started to scale, we decided we were going to put a system in place internally and a technology stack in place internally. That allowed us to measure and track responsiveness. We've always had an SLA of an under 2 hour response time and an under 24 hour handle time if possible. If it's a larger project, then at very least we want to make sure that we've scoped it out and given people an appropriate idea of when they can expect to receive what they're getting. So we used Front is a tool that we use for it's. It does a couple of things for us. It's a shared inbox. So it means that you get an email and rather than having to forward it on to me, you can just tag me in it. We can chat about that email in the system. It's fantastic. I get less than a dozen emails from my team every year, which if you think about it in the scope of our business world is pretty crazy. But what it also does is it tracks response times. So I'm able to look at a dashboard, my team leads are able to look at a dashboard, my COO is able to look at a dashboard that tells us who's sending the most emails, who's receiving the most emails, what is their average response time. And so we're able to actually start to track that and to train our team. One of the ways that we scale successfully good services is by managing off of a dashboard. We create good relationships, but we start our week by looking how are we doing on accuracy, how are we doing on responsiveness, how are we doing on escalations, how are we doing on all of these kind of KPIs and pushing that down to continue to create effective output and great relationships. So we've systematized and scaled that process. Part of it's looking at things like, I think there are great things that tech can take from professional services and great things professional services can take from tech. One of the things that, and you and I have talked about this, that tech does really well is they think of ticketing. When we get a customer support request, it creates a ticket that then has an SLA around how do I respond to it? And so creating this entire process, training a team to do it and then managing off that dashboard allows us to constantly iterate and improve while also hitting quality at the same time. There was a third part to your question I think I totally missed. But I think that hit the first two.

I think we got all of it. It's why the obsession? How do you manage it? I'm curious. You're at 6, 700 clients now and you've been growing pretty quickly. What mistakes or lessons did you learn in early days around communication and response times that you've kind of built around as a result of those mistakes?

Sometimes I take for granted that my parents taught me how to use good manners. And so we actually do kind of a manners training with people where it's like, just say please, say hi, say thank you, use your manners in an email. We also started training in say sorry. It's kind of a lesson I learned being married for 13 years, which is I start with I'm sorry and then I work backwards of what Like I find it's really great when I start with I'm sorry when my wife gives me that look. Then we do that in business. Hey, I don't know if it was our problem, but I'm really sorry you're dealing with this. I'm really sorry that you've seen that. I'm really sorry that happened. Let me look into it. Just the acts of just using your manners and starting to train that into people. The other thing we did is we, by using a shared inbox, it allows us to read each other's emails. And so we've created a system where if somebody's sending an email, it's tough, a lot of times they're going to have somebody else just, hey, will you give a quick look, make sure it's a good email. We've created that kind of humble culture where people are willing to work together and as you grow, you kind of default into certain hierarchies. And some of that's good, some of that's bad. In a remote environment, using that type of connectedness, the biggest thing that we've learned is we don't make assumptions. We make trainings that help people do better and systems that make it easier. And so that's the biggest thing is anytime you make an assumption, my mom always told me it makes a you know what out of you and me. And in business it's the same thing. And so we've stopped making assumptions or trying to tear down our assumptions and building trainings and systems that make it easier for people to achieve what they should.

You mentioned that you have 90 some odd team members. Us outside of the us as you have grown, what have you learned about how to build a deliberate culture? Your model is a little bit hybrid. You've got some people local to you, some of your team members are local. Other people are all over the world. How have you built culture intentionally in that virtual slash, a little bit in person environment?

We've got 91 people in five countries in 26 states. So I have four or five people in Indianapolis with me. But. But our largest cluster of people is about 20 in Salt Lake City. And that's because we were lucky enough to make a really cool acquisition of some amazing people. And they had an office. First thing we did was shut that office down and tell them you're working from home now and life gets more flexible. You know, the pandemic changed things for everybody. For us, we had already made the decision to go remote. What we've learned by building a remote only team is you have to be intentional about everything you do. Just had lunch with a CEO friend of mine and I joked, I said, hey, you've got a great culture, but you totally lazily built it because everybody was in an office and having fun. During all the craziness. When you don't have an office, those water cooler moments or those lunches that people have, they don't occur. So you have to create the space and the shared work environment to be able to do it. So what we've done is we've created a really great set of values. And one of them that kind of. It's not a true value of decimal, but something that stitches it all together is gratitude. Where we are grateful when people display the decimal values, we talk about them them heavily. We thank people for doing them, we reward them for it. We share the pain. The other part of it is we've just created depth. You know, very few people, when they truly ask you like, how are you doing? Do they really mean like, hey man, how are you doing? We try to ask that question really meaningfully so that when people have problems, when people need help. We just ran a GoFundMe campaign for one of our employees in the Philippines whose husband needed an emergency surgery. And we said, you know what? Everybody wants to get together. She's amazing. We're all going to band together and help her. The team over there helped send food, we helped donate, and we just wanted to create that type of cohesive team environment. I always struggled to use family in a business sense, but a team, I think can have a lot of those same qualities. And that's what we've really tried to do and just giving people space. Look, we push our team hard. As you said, we've grown. I mean, we started four years ago and it was just my co founder Jacob and I in a room. And now we have 91 employees, over 600 businesses, 650 businesses we work with. And we're not slowing down.

One of the things that I've noticed that's really a requisite if you're going to have a business built around systems and processes and procedures is a strict adherence to scope of work in your mind. Where does the bookkeeper, accountant scope of work end and where does a fractional CFO scope of work begin?

We look backwards. And so when you start looking forwards, that's where a fractional CFO is a great partner.

Partner.

It's one of the reasons why one of the first things we did in our first couple of months of starting decimal was begin a partner program. And you guys are great partners. There's a lot we can't do. I'm not going to tap dance out of my core competency. I want to find great partners so that when we do the backwards stuff, when we do today, and I view decimal and financial operations and bookkeeping as today backwards, hey, we're going to help you pay your bills, we're going to help you get paid, we're going to help you track what happened. When you start thinking about a budget, when you start thinking about forward projections, when you start thinking about all of that strategic forward looking, that's where a CFO comes in handy. For us, we're the process team. We are the look backwards team and we're the make sure your business is running today team.

One of the important words that you said in there that I think is critically important is partnership. A lot of times I see bookkeepers and fractional CFOs operating siloed and then the bookkeeper's frustrated, the fractional CFO is frustrated, and more importantly the customer, the client. It ends up being really frustrated. From a bookkeeper's perspective or from an accounting firm's perspective, Matt, how can a fractional CFO best set up the bookkeeper for success? What does that look like? What do you need from my audience so that you can help the client win?

Think two things. Partnership is a true shared experience. And when we run into fractional CFOs that want to hop into meetings, when we're doing a financial close meeting, or when we're doing a quarterly review meeting, or when we're doing a weekly whatever, that Ends up being when we're on there with a fractional cfo, when a fractional CFO will ask us, hey, do you have five minutes just to chat about this? We love it because that means we are sharing a relationship to improve life for the client. When we run into fractional CFOs that or accounting firms that, hey, you as a bookkeeper are less than me, I'm going to tell you everything to do or I'm going to blame everything on you. That's not a good partnership. We don't want to do it ourselves. We're not going to do it. But we do kind of run into that general feeling of being less than. And to me, everybody's equal. We're all providing an extreme value and if we can do it together, that's best. Best for you, best for us, and more importantly, best for the client. So to me, that's the number one most important thing is really taking the time. Establish what are the good working relationships? How do we do it best? How do we do it best by client? How do we do it best for you? We have some fractional CFOs that'll say, Hey, I want you to get my client the their books on the 20th. I'm going to tell them the 20th is totally fine because you're really going to get them to me by the 12th. And I want to be able to review them before you get them to the client. That's a great working relationship. We came to a great decision. It's slower than we like to usually close the books, but hey, if it works better for the client, five days means the nothing.

I found that where those things go south, you hit on this, Matt, is when there is no communication, like that's normally when the relationships get soured. And so that's why for us, part of our onboarding process is having an introduction call with the bookkeeper with a new client. So we say, hey, we want an introduction to the bookkeeper. And what's important for us is, hey, we want to understand what your scope of work is. What are your deliverables? What are those closeout dates? And then we want to share with you what it is that we're doing. What are our deliverables? What's our scope of so that you can help set us up for success. And I just don't see that conversation happening enough in our industry. It tends to be siloed and then everybody gets pissed off. And that's, to me, where the blame game starts coming in. While the bookkeeper didn't do this, the bookkeeper didn't do that. And I'm like, did you ever take the time to communicate to the bookkeeper what you're doing and what you need? Did you ever bother to ask them what they need? And typically the answer I get is like, well, no. You know, we sent an email off that one time four months ago and we never heard back. And so you start getting the finger pointing. The other thing that you said that really resonates with me, Matt, that honestly it pisses me off, is the arrogance that comes from a lot of people because of a particular title as a vendor. Oh, I'm the fractional cfo. And thou shalt bow before me on my golden or my ivory tower of fractional cfo. And I'm like, do you not realize that you are dead in the water if your bookkeeper, the bookkeeper on the team's not doing a great job in setting you up for success? I'm like, you should really be grateful and thankful that you've got a bookkeeper there that's doing it. Otherwise your value as a fractional CFO is zero. And so I would just, I would encourage anyone listening to this if, if, if you catch yourself with that little bit of snoot about you in, in where you are in relations to a bookkeeper, an accountant, a cpa, an HR manager, a CMO, or anybody else, you need to check yourself because we all need each other's help to be successful, to make the client successful. Soapbox complete.

Oh, I'm. Dude, I'm right up there with you. Takes me a few more steps to get up with you, but I totally agree. Partnership should be a two way street. One of the things that you mentioned that just kind of tickled something in my mind too is scope is exceptionally important, except if you very intentionally determined to break it slightly. What I mean by that is having an extra call occasionally with a fractional CFO or with a bookkeeper just to check in, do a relationship check, or hey, let's handle this together. That may be slightly out of scope, but it makes the rest of the revenue the rest of the relationship better because you strategically made a decision to do something slightly out of it. Where I find that some people struggle in scope creep is when they become so rigid that they refuse to do some of the right things to make everything easier and better down the road. Sometimes we'll lose a little bit of money on implementation because we took extra time to understand a process. Here's what we all know. Bookkeeping is the end point of a bunch of operational processes. CFO work forward looking strategic planning is the end point of what bookkeeping provides that data. You need good data in for the opportunity for good data out. Bad data in guarantees bad data out. So looking at that full ecosystem of the data and the data flow and being able to take some extra time to make sure the downstream effects are fixed for the better upstream consistent quality, I think is also important to consider.

Matt, what's the biggest problem you have in your business right now?

Gosh, that's a great question. I think the biggest problem that I have in my business is I'm impatient and change takes time. And that to me is always going to be one of our biggest problems as entrepreneurs is sometimes we're able to see what the future is going to look like. But we're very tough in getting there. There we know how to get there, but we can be miserable human beings as we push our team or want to go faster or, you know, really want to determine what are the right processes to do it. I would love to be able to jump forward and get everybody to move at my pace, but the reality is that doesn't happen. And so my impatience is a problem.

Sometimes I want to take that a little deeper. If you're willing to go, how has that played out in a real way inside your business? What kind of problems has that created? Matt?

You know, as we've grown, I have an amazing leadership team, team of very experienced people and what they're very good at sometimes is filtering my feedback down a level or two, but still providing me with an opportunity to coach and spend. I love people. So spending time with our managers and directors, I absolutely love it. Doing it in a way that helps build them up is better than doing it in a way that has me coaching backwards. I am not good at this, that and people take my feedback because I'm the CEO in a way that I have to do that. I have to over prioritize what Matt said over what my boss said. And that's not the case and I didn't mean it that way and I'm really bad at that. But when I'm coaching them up. So finding the right outlet for me to spend time and coach people up has been a good filter. And having the right team and the right people with the right skill set to then help manage that process down and be that filter I found to be very helpful for us. And as we've grown, it's taken some guess and check, let's say I Mean, look, when you hire 91 people over the course of four years, realistically, we hired more than 91 to get to the 91 we have today. And so it's been a process.

I learned that lesson in the Navy, and then I don't have any time since then is the team gets bigger as the boss or the CEO or whatever. It's really easy if you're not careful to make a recommendation or just to even ask a question. Hey, oh, yeah. Have you guys ever thought about painting the wall blue? Just a random question, and then next thing you know, like, everyone's dropped everything that they're doing. And it's like Mike said, the wall's got to be blue. Stop what you're doing. You're like, what the heck? I was just. It was just a random question. I was just having to, you know, shoot in the breeze with you. So you've really got to be careful with. With those even just questions that you ask and make sure that the expectations like, hey, I don't want you to do anything with this. I was just having a conversation with you. It's more than once I've turned around and seen the wake of my questions or suggestions, and I'm like, oops, I gotta be careful with that.

My COO had to create a rule, and we've had to train everybody on this rule, including me, which is I am not allowed to give people work. I have to direct work through. And if they hop into a meeting with me and I give them work, they have to check with Michael to make sure that it's actually what they should be doing. And so it's. It's this mental key we've had to train into people, is, if you think Matt gave you work, check with me. Because chances are Matt didn't really try to give you work. Or if he did, he's already filtered it through me, and I'm going to tell you to do it. But we've had to work on that because you're right is what I've noticed. When you grow as fast as we have, my job has changed dramatically every six months. And when you develop a growing organization, your job, and you're seeing this today with your jobs, your job changes, what is needed from you changes, and how you have to give and take changes. And very few of us, and I'm not in this group, are really good at doing that ahead of time. We usually don't realize it till we made a mistake and have to admit to everybody, I'm sorry, from now on I'll do this.

Matt. One of the big lessons that I've learned in the last year or two is that as as a executive of two growing businesses, in my case, or as an owner, as a CEO, just like you just mentioned, you get to these new stages. And with every new stage, I've recognized that in some way, and sometimes in many ways, I have to become the beginner again. That new stage has presented new challenges. It demands new skill sets. It requires new things from me. And in order for me to grow into and through that, I've got to be okay with the fact that I'm a beginner in some way, shape or form. Again, I have to be okay with the fact that I'm going to make mistakes. There's going to be problems that come from it. My question for you is, in this season of business that you're in now, with the scaling or whatever the case may be, in what ways are you finding yourself to be a beginner?

I'm always a beginner. If you do business long enough, you learn how humbling life is and how humbling business is. And you're right, you have to change and you have to be willing to admit you are wrong. And those are things that I didn't grow up emotionally thinking were that important. Growing up as an athlete and doing all that stuff, I was, you know, I'm, I'm great. At some point in your life, you look yourself in the mirror and you say, this facade I've built for myself is only partially true.

True.

Here's what the real me is. One of the things that I've been doing a lot of is, is truly figuring out who I am and how I want to lead my team. And I figured if I do that well, it will help me be more successful leading my company. It'll help me be more successful as a parent and as a husband and as a friend. And the more I try to kind of silo that and not actually be willing to dive deep, deep, the harder and more isolating it is. So for me, truly getting into an understanding all the emotions of running business, there are some amazing parts. Anybody? All of your fractional CFOs, you start a business, it sucks. It is freaking hard. But there's just that little bit. If you truly like entrepreneurship, that will keep you coming back every single day. And then you'll get bigger and bigger parts of joy. But then the roller coaster always goes down too, and you're going to have hard things. Life happens. So for me, I've realized there's a lot I don't know. I hired people that are. I have a COO who's run more companies than I have. He is way more skilled than I am at truly managing a team. I have a business partner that's smarter than I'll ever be, surrounded myself with people that make me better and cover my flaws and then I openly admit to people that I want to get better. And when I make mistakes and one part of my self discovery is I'm starting to talk to more CEOs. I've started doing some coaching of, hey, this life is isolating. It's okay, let's talk about it. There are a lot of people that are sitting out there wondering, am I alone in this? And I don't think they should be. Our mission at decimal is to make it easier to be a small business. My company does that by helping take over one of the painful parts that you have to do. Let's help you operate. Let's help make sure you can pay your bills, get paid and track it all. Me personally, I want to help make it easier for you, for me, for other CEOs that just feel like life sucks sometimes and that's okay. Or, gosh, I need somebody to celebrate with because I can't fully celebrate this with my team because I don't know what impression they're going to get from the whole thing. So like that's. That was a little bit of a rambling answer, but I think there's a lot packed into those questions.

One of the questions or one of the ideas that I wasn't even aware of of until years into business, the idea of embracing the role of the beginner and being okay with that, letting my ego just be uncomfortable with the fact that I'm going to suck at something and the fact that I suck at it isn't a problem. It's a necessary part of the journey towards mastery and into breaking through to the next level and just knowing, I think that as long as you're in business and honestly it's probably a proxy for life if you want to grow and if you're willing to grow, then you're going to have to be okay being the beginner at each stage of your life and that's it's part of the process, not a problem that's unique to you.

Well, let me add a caveat to what you said because I agree with all of it. I find a defining characteristic of people who are successful being entrepreneurs just in an individual role, is being curious. Because if you're going to be a beginner, you have to be curious about figuring out how to not be a beginner. And that's why I have have CEO groups I'm part of. I have a CEO coach. I love reading, I love talking to people like you that have done things that I've never done because I'm curious about learning how to get better and also how to decrease the time as a beginner at each new stage. So I agree with you. 100.

What have you learned about sales?

My first job in tech. I left the law firm and I got a job and I got into sales. I love, love sales. I love selling to people. To me it is building a relationship and getting people to trust you and getting people to trust that you have a solution to their pain. When you're in your role, you're selling in multiple directions every single day. You are selling to your prospects or clients. You are selling to your team. I'm selling to investors, I'm selling to my wife, I'm selling to my kids. So I'm selling in a multi dimensional way every single day. I'm also selling to myself. Is this a good idea? Is this strategy I have there? To me it's, it's a conversation that you're having and you have to have the courage to be able to do it authentically. One of my first companies I ran, I took my sales team to a car dealership and I said, hey, we're going to sneak in the side door. My grandpa ran a car dealership for years when I was growing up. And I said, I want you to listen to how all these car dealers, how they, you know, shoot the shit and talk together. And then we're going to leave, we're going to walk in the front door. I want you to notice how their demeanor, how their tone and how everything about them changes compared to how they were talking. Because I wanted them to see what inauthentic sales was as a counter to what I wanted them to do, which is be yourself. You're selling, you, you know, you, you've done it in every stage of your life and everybody has done sales. Sales to some people, particularly in professional services, feels like this mountain I have to climb from for the first time. When they don't realize that they're standing on another mountaintop that's exactly the same and it's just a different one that they have to figure out. That to me is sales.

Do you think that it's important for a CEO, whether it's a solopreneur or got a team of 5, 10, 50 or 100 to at least in some way take on that role or that identity that I am a salesperson.

If you want to start a business, put that hat on. You will never take it off. You are a salesperson. You will be a salesperson, period.

What advice or encouragement would you give to somebody that says, I'm not a salesperson. So what do I do?

Well, we just mentioned earlier, be curious. Go learn how to do it. There's a lot of stuff out there. The other thing is, is I don't know about you, but I can't tell you how many times my wife and kids have walked in on me practicing my sales pitch in a mirror. I mean, it actually works. And now you have zoom or loom or whatever you want to use to video yourself practicing. And, and I would recommend practicing practice is essential to progressing towards better. And I would also, you and I have kind of talked about this a little bit too, is when I hired new salespeople at times I would have them practice on prospects that probably weren't totally qualified for decimal because it just got them a real person. I'd have them practice with decimal clients. I'd call up buddies of mine and say, hey, got a favor. Can you do 30 minutes with my new sales guy? Let him sell you on decimal. I know you're already a client. I'm not going to give you a discount for it, but consider it a favor to me. You have to wear that hat. I gave a talk to some new tech entrepreneurs a couple of years ago and I told them, I said, hey, every company I've started, I've personally sold the first one to one and a half million dollars of revenue because by then I had learned enough to train somebody else how to do it. Hiring salespeople too early in an entrepreneurial journey is guaranteed to fail because they will not learn as quickly as you will. You need to learn enough to train somebody how to do it if you don't truly want to do it yourself.

That's a huge misconception that I see a lot of people have is they say, I'm not a sales gal or I'm not a sales guy. I'm going to just go hire somebody. They bring that person in before there's a playbook, before there's an understanding of the client and their needs and their pain points and the value that you bring. And then the salesperson ends up floundering because there's no way that they're going to have an Opportunity, enough time, like, you're not going to be able to compensate them long enough for them to figure it out. And the truth is, most salespeople are good at executing on the playbook, not at creating the playbook. And so if you bring somebody in, like a VP of Sales or a CRO, you're going to have to pay them. So, like, you're not going to be able to afford them because it's going to take them so long to put it together. So I agree with you 100%. You've got to be. And I think you're directionally correct, too, on the number it's million million five in sales really needs to be done by the CEO. I mean, my firm's been around eight years now, and we were talking about this before with the interview. I'm just now at the point where I can kind of start handing it off. And I've learned a lot on how to do that quicker. So my second company, we're two years in over a million or actually at a million and a half in revenue now, now I'm able to hand it off, but it's still, interestingly, that, you know, million and a half margin. And we're just now talking about how do we. How do we handle. Hand the sales off. But I agree with everything you said, Matt. I think that you've got to be willing to take on that identity that it's not that I'm not a salesperson, it's I'm a salesperson that happens to suck right now. And then the two things that I think is important that you pointed out, I'm going to reiterate it. One is be curious, study it, learn it. But number two, you got to get reps. There is no sales language or formula or script that you're going to learn and then be immediately great at sales with. You've got to just get in the game and get on the sales calls, talk to prospects that, you know you're not going to take their business or that, you know, aren't a good fit in those early days just to get the reps. And so I think it's a really important blending of the studying and the practice. That's where you can go from I'm a salesperson that sucks today to I'm a mildly competent salesperson to I'm a good enough salesperson with a playbook that I can now hire somebody to come in and replace me. I think that's the journey.

I agree. And don't overlearn. You'll learn way more doing. And some people that haven't done that, they think, I'm gonna make it all the way through this learning. I'm gonna make it through the other learning. And it's the freezing of inaction and momentum is so success is so much a byproduct of just movement, moving forward, moving backwards, moving forwards. And I think that that's also really important is just go timebox yourself and just go. Because I call it the field of dreams entrepreneur. So many people start a business with that theory of, if I build it, they will come, and that never happens. But it's fun to learn. No, I wish it did, but I'd start way more businesses if that worked out.

One of the biggest frustrations, Matt, that fractional CFOs have with new clients is I would go. Almost invariably, you get a new client, you start to onboard, you realize the books are trash. There's somewhere between not great and really bad. And if a fractional CFO doesn't get that buttoned up relatively quickly, they're not able to do their thing. And so one of the questions I get all the time is like, hey, what do I do if I find a client that's got got really bad books? And my answer now is like, well, we just go straight to decimal. We go straight to decimal. You've got the onboarding process dialed in. You can get the books workable pretty fast. If somebody's listening to this and they're like, gosh, I need somebody that's totally operationalized and systematized this somebody I can trust to, to work with me while I'm onboarding the clients. How do they reach out to you to. To see if you're a good fit for their clients?

So it's easy. Decimal.com go on there. Or Mitchell, with two Ls@decimal.com leads our sales team. He would love to talk. And the great thing about Mitchell is he started running our operations team and he's got that accounting background. And we would love to help. My goal in these partnerships, our goal is to put you in a position to be successful and to do it as quickly as we can, because we both know that that's exactly what these fractional CFOs need. And so we'd love to help. We want to do the operational stuff without tap dancing on your core competency, because it'll never be ours.

We'll drop the link to Mitchell's email address and to decimal in the comments below. Matt, thanks so much for being here today, man. I appreciate you taking the time, dude.

It was awesome. I really appreciate the time, and this has been a great partnership and we really enjoy working with you and the whole team.

All right, that's it for this week's episode of the CFO Report. If you'd like to connect with Matt and his team at decimal, we've included all of the contact information in the description below. But if you're a fractional CFO and you're looking to scale your firm, if you're looking to scale your impact and you need help with things like sales, with things like marketing and prospecting, I want to invite you to join me in Dallas, Texas, May 15th through 17th for the CFO Accelerator Live. Go to the cfoacceleratorlive.com or click the link in the description below to learn more. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back here next week, my friends. I'll see you then.

Sat.