"Can't AI Just Do This?" Replay

Welcome and housekeeping

0:03Hello. Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm super glad that you're here. We are going to talk about AI in advisory work, and maybe not the way that you've heard it talked about 100 times over the last year or two. I really don't want this to be hypey. I don't have some fancy tool of the week. But I just want to answer for you a question that I hear a lot, which is, can't AI just do this, right? And I want to give you a picture of what could separate advisors who win with AI, from everyone else who might be drowning in average output. All right. So I really do want to leave you with at least one thing you can use this week and a clear way to think about AI. While people are trickling in, couple of housekeeping things. This is for CPE, okay? If you want CPE credit, you need to stay logged in for at least 50 minutes and answer at least three of the poll questions that we'll be running during the session.

1:15If you did request CPE when you first registered for this event, you will get your certificate. It'll come by email within 72 hours, and you'll also get a short evaluation later today. And questions are welcome at any time. Just drop them in the chat as we go, and we will answer them. I'll periodically pause and see if there are any questions that we want to address live. And we'll also address them in the chat. And a recording, you can look for a recording for this later today. By the way, go ahead and drop in the chat a hello. And I see the hellos already coming in from Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona. We just want to make sure everybody can hear and see the screens. So thanks you all for the hellos. And with that, why don't we get started?

Can't AI just do all of this now?

2:12All right, so this question, can't AI just do all of this now? I get this question every single day. Okay? I hear it, the way people say it is a little bit nervous, a little bit hopeful. I hear this from our members at The CFO Project. I hear this from prospects that we meet who are thinking about how they can add advisory to their business. I bet a lot of you have been asking yourself this question, right? Maybe you've used one of the main LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude, and you've had that moment where an answer comes back super confident, right? These things sound so smart, polished, but just a little bit wrong. Or maybe even so generic that it could've been written for anyone, which means that it's probably useful for no one, right? And so, this is what we're going to be talking about for the next 50 minutes or so. It's not really a question about AI, it's a question about you. What is the part of your work that can stay valuable when routine parts get automated, right?

3:26That is what we're going to be discussing today. Very quickly, for those of you who have not yet met me or seen me in one of our many webinars that we run, my name is Dyanna Salcedo, I'm the CEO of The CFO Project. I have spent more than 15 years in financial services. My career has started when I was on Wall Street, and then eventually I moved into wearing that head of finance hat for venture backed startups. And along the way, I even started my own CFO advisory firm where I work with small and growing businesses. So for those of you who are thinking about doing this, I've been there. I understand the challenges of starting a business, the questions you might have. And then just about a year ago now, actually, almost a year ago, I joined The CFO Project to help fulfill its mission, which is to eradicate small business failure, one trained CFO at a time. I absolutely love that mission. I love helping small businesses, and now I get to work with small business owners, CFOs, who then in turn help small businesses across not just the U.S., but across the world as well.

4:46All right, so that's me. Here's what you will walk away with today. First, really want to kind of draw a line in the sand. I want you to be able to very clearly understand where we think AI is commoditizing a lot of work and which parts we believe that it cannot touch. And it's an extremely important line to understand for accountants and bookkeepers, for our careers as we think about moving forward. Second is, the system. I want you to understand why AI produces mediocre output for most people who try to use it. And one structural thing that changes everything about the output that you see from your AI bot of choice. And then finally, a very simple test that you can use to evaluate any AI tool before it touches your practice. And I also have a real life example, an illustrated case study that'll walk you through some of the ways that we're going to talk about how we can use AI for advisory.

5:53And with that, Dave, let's go ahead and open our first poll. I would love to know where all of you are in the room today. Where are you with using AI in your client work? Maybe some of you haven't really tried it just yet. I know there's a lot of people who are hesitant to try AI. Some of you are experimenting but don't really have a consistent way yet. Some are using it regularly for some tasks, and some have built it into how they work each and every month. So go ahead and drop your answers to this question here. And just reviewing the polls here, I see that most of us are at least experimenting with the tools. So that's fantastic. And some of you are already using it regularly for some tasks. And don't worry, no matter where you answered in this poll, it's okay if you haven't used AI yet. You don't really need to be an expert. You need a system, as you're going to see, we will talk about, we're going to give you the foundation here. All right.

What AI can do, and what it can't

7:00So can't AI just do all of this now? Well, I think the short answer is yes and no. And that's the kind of whole premise of this is we are going to get the split right. Okay, so on the yes side, AI can absolutely do a lot of commoditized work. So transaction categorization, reconciliations, it can run financial statements very quickly. It can do variance reporting and any kind of standard reports, routine tax and bookkeeping production. It can read your documents now. So anything that you might categorize as commoditized, something that can be easily done, repeated, the work where the value is placed on being accurate and on time, AI can absolutely do that. And the economic reality is that accuracy and timeliness used to be how a lot of us as firm owners stood apart. We were never late and never wrong, and it was a great selling point, right? But AI now really does that work in minutes or seconds, and it gets cheaper every single month.

8:25And so accuracy and timeliness, it's now just the baseline. It's the price of entry. It is no longer a differentiator. So if the core of what you sell is that kind of commodity work, well, then I bet a lot of you are feeling the pressure that AI is your competitor, right? And all these tools that are being built, they're driving that price down, or at least setting a cap, right? If a typical client is paying somewhere between $300 and $500 a month for bookkeeping, AI is really putting pressure on that price point for folks. On the flip side, the judgment. AI cannot lead a client. It can't sit across from an owner who might be scared about making payroll and read what's really going on. It doesn't carry two years of context about that person's business, about their family, or their risk tolerance, the last three decisions that went sideways, right? It also cannot own a recommendation or be accountable when the owner asks: "What would you do if this was your business or your money?" Right?

9:41That's judgment. And judgment should not and cannot be delegated to a tool, right? And that judgment is exactly what clients will pay for. That's what they want, right? CFO advisors in our community charge an average of $2,000 a month per client for judgment. Okay, so you'll see, we're going to use AI to help us, but at the end of the day, somebody needs to sit across the table from that client and help guide them. All right, so what I want you to really take away from this is that AI is not going to make advisory work less, it's going to make it worth more. All right. So look at the dollar value here. What a small business client is worth in a year, you might charge $650, maybe a little bit more for a tax return. Maybe you've got a $4,800 a year bookkeeping client. But in CFO advisory, in that part that we know, at least right now, AI is not going to be taking over, especially not when you need to be sending reports to your lenders or the IRS every single year.

10:56There needs to be some human in the lead that's going to be making the quality of that service, the judgment that you provide worth more. Okay? So you can see the bar chart right there. Again, on average, our CFO advisors are charging $2,000 a month or $24,000 a year.

Why AI output feels generic

11:18So let's talk a little bit about why AI can disappoint so many people who try it on real work. Okay, so I feel like this is a universal experience. You open a powerful AI tool, you ask it a real question about a real client, and the answer comes back super polished, right? Very confident, well-written, but completely generic. Technically correct, but strategically useless, right? How many of you have experienced that kind of moment with your AI tool? Go ahead and drop a comment in the chat if that's something that you have experienced when you try to work with AI to help you through something, but it falls flat, right? It's not a broken tool. It's not you being bad at AI. What it is, is it's a powerful tool, but without a system. With no system, with no guardrails, without a narrow scope, the model has nothing to anchor to. So it reverts to the average of everything that it has ever read, and as we all know, these LLMs are trained on the internet, right?

12:35And on the books in the library. And so all it can do is provide the best average answer, right? The mediocre middle of the internet. Generic best practice and hedged both ways. It's so good at doing that. True for everyone and therefore decisive for no one. And you've seen these various forms of failure here, right? You've got a polished monthly summary, looks really pretty, but no one's making decisions from it. It's not helping anyone act. It offers an insight. Oh, man, that seems really interesting, but it misses context that you know in your head. So for example, you know that a client just landed a big account or is about to hire, and that explains away some insight that the model produces for you. Or maybe you get a tidy action plan. Again, well written, but it was produced by AI, so the client nods and really doesn't open it again. And in every case, AI does make you faster at producing things, but producing things has never been part of what changes a business, right?

13:51And so, the takeaway here is the problem has never been intelligence. The model is plenty smart. But really, we think, or we suggest to you that the model falls short on direction. It didn't know what mattered to you or to your client, in what order. It doesn't know what good looks like because it hasn't been told, right? So it's not that you need a smarter tool. It's a problem that requires a better-structured approach to using that tool. All right, and with that, let's go ahead and open up our second poll. You have a powerful AI tool, but its output feels generic. What is missing? Is it a better prompt? Is it a more powerful model? Is it a system, or is it more client data in prompt? Go ahead and get your answers to that poll in. And I'm seeing many of you have definitely chimed in about how AI has provided hallucinations, inaccurate information, answers that sound good but not useful.

15:18One attendee points out that, hey, if you give it specific info, it can make some interesting alterations. Absolutely, and as you'll see, that's going to be kind of what we propose here. But all right, looking at these poll responses, mixed answers. For those of you who answered a system for the tool to work within, that's what we're going for. That's what we're going to be talking about, how your AI tool, how your advisory work can be best supported by a system first, and then layered on with AI. And so for those of you who answered the other items, better prompting or more client data, you'll see really we're just going to roll that into the way we think about the system. So stay with me. Okay.

The solution stack: system, tool, advisor

16:05So here's how I want to just kind of organize this idea here, right? And it's going to hold whatever you point AI, whether it's in your client work or in how you run your practice, really any way that you're using it, even the way you run your household, any way that you use AI. The idea is that a tool only compounds when it sits on top of a system. Okay? As a rule, not an opinion, right? If you have no system, you have no leverage. You just have a quicker way to an average answer, right? We were just talking about the mediocre middle. And so here's what that stack, we call it the solution stack, here's what that looks like. The system comes first. Okay, so the foundation layer of what you're building when you're building an advisory service has to be a system. Okay? When I say system, what I mean by that is a set of steps, a repeatable method that tells the AI what matters, in what order, and what good looks like for your client.

17:11By the way, you don't need AI to run a system, right? But everyone who's coming into advisory, we suggest that you absolutely have a system so that you can do work in a repeatable, scalable, consistent way. Right? This is the moat, and it has to come first. And it's a layer that a lot of people skip. And it's another reason why a lot of people stop. For some of us who've tried to stand up advisory in the past, maybe we don't know where to start. We don't know how to make it stick. We don't know how to protect our margins. Well, I would offer that you're missing a system. So if you can layer on or develop a system first, a lot of other things can fall into place, right? It's the foundation that everything stands on. Okay, the second layer. Now that we have a system, we can layer on an AI tool right on top, okay? And now, because you told it what matters, you told it where to look, in what order, right?

18:14You told it what good looks like. It will stop generating what some advisor somewhere might say, and it can start generating what you would say inside your methodology. The same model that everyone else has Okay? But a completely different output because it is anchored to your system and not to the blue ocean of the open internet. And then finally, in our solution stack, layer three, that's you, the advisor. Okay? The advisor must stay in the lead, okay? AI will accelerate. It's going to help you do things faster. It's going to help you do things sharper. But the advisor still ultimately decides what analysis goes out, what's printed on a page, judgment, the read on the room, the recommendation that you are willing to sign. None of that can be delegated. Right? The AI output is a starting point, but it's not the finished deliverable. You are in the lead. You are the pilot, and the AI tool is just your co-pilot.

19:27Right? And for a CFO advisor, layer one, that system, it's very specific. Right? The way that we teach CFO advisory at The CFO Project is a repeatable system that we run every single month with every single client in any industry. We call it the One Clear Path. The advisors get real leverage from AI when they have that layer underneath them. And the reason why a lot of professionals get slop is that they're trying to run their advisory business, or any business really, through AI, but they don't have that kind of systematic approach to how they run their business. And you've got a powerful tool, AI. Man, it is going to do wonders for you when you can point it at a good system, when you give it a good methodology. And so my question for you guys is, do you have a system for AI to stand on? Drop it in the chat. You guys got a system? Or are you doing what almost everyone is doing and pointing at an extremely capable tool that I want you all to be using, right, but you're pointing it at the internet, the blue ocean, and hoping it comes back with something great. Right? Do you have a system? All right.

The One Clear Path

20:50I mentioned a minute ago about our system at The CFO Project. It's helpful to kind of orient around our system because it's going to be how I show you later where we layer on AI, how we use our system as a foundation to where we then add AI. So we're not going to cover the system in depth, but at a high level, again, just to orient you. I mentioned the name, the One Clear Path, that underpins our advisory work. First and foremost, we set targets with our clients. So let's say you've got an advisory client. When you're onboarding that client or when you're at that annual renew at the end of the year, we're coming up on year-end, we're going to be reviewing the targets and setting new targets with our clients, and you're going to start with the owner's goal. In their words, by the way, we work with small businesses, small businesses doing between call it half a million and $5 million in revenue.

21:47Those business owners, they have goals that tie to their lives, like paying their kids' tuition in the fall, working fewer Saturdays, buying a new piece of equipment. Maybe they want to grow and they don't know how. Right? We need to understand the client's goals and then we can translate that into a set of cash flow targets. And we set targets at the driver level, as we'll see in a minute when we walk through an illustrative example. Secondly, we score it simply. So when you're doing advisory work with your clients, please don't hand them a 15-page set of financial reports or a [shocking?] BI dashboard. Your small business clients, they don't have the same language that you do. Your job is to help them translate those numbers. And so one of the things that we suggest that you do is keep it simple. We do a scoreboard, red, yellow, green, off track, at risk, or on track. You can come up with a simple check mark system, thumbs up, thumbs down.

22:48But keep it simple so that your client very quickly in a few seconds understands, "Oh, okay, we need to focus here. I see it's off track or it's at risk." And then finally, as a CFO advisor, you don't stop at handing over a report. You don't stop at handing over a forecast. You guide the client. Okay? So through our system, we're going to illuminate the drivers that are draining cash, and the owner brings the best ideas to move them. We're the guide. We're not an oracle. We don't have to have all the answers. We won't have all the answers. I like to remind our CFOs who get nervous about offering advice that you're here to illuminate the cash flow drivers. But I promise you, your clients, they know their businesses better than you do, they know their market conditions better than you do, and they know their industry better than you do. Okay? So your job is to show them, "Hey, we need to focus our efforts here because this particular driver is sucking cash out of the business.

23:51Client, what do you think we should do about this? How can your business operations change to support bringing more cash in the business?" All right, so that's a brief overview of a system that our CFOs follow every single month with every single client. Okay? And always like to remind us of the economics here. That system, it's designed to take you two to four hours a month, such that you're earning $2,000 per month per client. The effective hourly rate there, you can do the math in your head. At five clients, we're talking about recurring revenue at $120,000 a year. Right? That system, I just want to reiterate, the system and that guidance is what people pay for, not the reports. They want to know where to focus their businesses so that they can be successful and make that tuition payment, and work fewer Saturdays, and grow their business. And if you're helping them unlock cash in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, this monthly retainer is a drop in the bucket relative to that, okay?

Four moments to layer in AI

25:00All right, so that's our system. Now that we have our system now, okay, where can we layer in AI? Where can I add this powerful tool to help me in my business? Right? Not where does AI fit and treat it like this free-floating tool that you can just sprinkle anywhere. But I've got a system, and there are very specific, we call them moments, where you can use your AI to help you. So we're going to go through an illustrative example about all of these, but just to quickly go over them at a high level. Moment one is hypothesis setting. Okay? So in prep, in your prep work, AI can synthesize fragmented inputs. So if you're running through our system, you might have scoreboard trends. You've got your call notes because in our system, you'll meet every single month with your client, and so you'll have your call notes from every single one of those calls. You'll have the goals and the cash flow targets that you set with your clients.

26:10You'll understand their life goals. It's always important to remind them of what they're trying to achieve so they stay on track. You might have operational data from your client, maybe data from a CRM, certainly from the GL. And all of these different disparate sources of data is going to help you sharpen your hypothesis about what's going on in the business. And in AI, this is where it gets really powerful. Your AI tool can bring all that context together, and it can hold more context at once than at least I can in my mind. Okay? And so it just allows your tool to pull all these pieces together and start connecting dots in a way that I think is hard for a lot of us, or at least would just maybe take us longer and being really intentional about digging into that. Moment two, forecasting. This is an important role that really starts to differentiate your bookkeeping and accounting functions from a CFO.

27:19We look forward, not just backward. Right? And so with an AI tool, your system forecasts become so much sharper. It's not because the calculations are any better, although it can build a forecasting model in Excel for you quickly. But it's, again, because of that context layer. And it can understand, if you pull one driver, how does it impact another? Okay. And so that way you can run a forecast that's a lot sharper because it has all of that context, and it can draw all those connections a lot quicker than at least I can. Moment three, what if analysis, right? When a client asks a question. If I raise my prices, what happens? What if I take on this huge account? Well, now with the power of AI, we can model it across every driver that question touches at once. Okay, so that you can answer with a cash impact and not a generic qualitative response. Again, what if analysis, a huge part of a CFO advisor.

28:38And then finally, action planning. So AI, great use case for AI here. It can widen the menu of options tied to an objective that you set with your client so that the plan you build with your client comes with a fuller set of options, including a few that you might not have surfaced on your own. Okay. And so one thing I want you to notice that hopefully you can see here, but all four of these uses of AI, they help your client make a better decision. Okay? And all of these work because we have a system underneath telling AI what matters. Right? Remember the system we just walked through. We've got our clients' goals. In their words, we have their cash flow targets. We map those to 12 cash flow drivers. Okay. That's where it's going to focus. It's not going to focus on revenue or EBITDA or net income margins. It's going to look at our cash flow drivers. Most professionals don't have this kind of system running. And it's not for the lack of a tool. Again, right? Everyone has the same tools, but it's so important that you have a system for that tool to plug into. All right. Let me stop that description, and

Illustrative example: Cascade Landscaping

30:06let's go into an illustrative example here. So, and maybe you guys will recognize this example because it's a very common type of company that we might work with as small business CFOs. Cascade Landscaping does about $2.1 million in annual revenue. They've got 18 employees and about 70 recurring accounts. They started residential, but they've been adding to those commercial accounts over time. It hasn't been something they've necessarily been doing intentionally, but they're building those commercial accounts. The business owner senses that maybe something's off but can't name it. The owner knows commercial is growing but doesn't know what it's doing to the numbers. Something is off. I can't see what. That language, by the way, that something is off, I can't really tell, that is exactly what you're listening for, for your small business clients to know that they could use an advisor. So some of you right now might hear this type of pain point that your client is expressing.

31:17They're not saying, "Hey, I need a CFO." They're saying, "Something's off, I don't understand why." That's the kind of cue that you should be stepping in as an advisor, okay? But in this case, you already are the CFO advisor for Cascade. You run your scoreboard for the month. You see that revenue is on track, cool. Payroll is green. But cost of sales is at risk. It's running at about 63% versus the target that we've set with our client at 58%. And also, days to get paid is creeping up, so also yellow. And another thing I want you to notice here is nothing's screaming red. Right? Revenue looks good, payroll looks good, and we've got a few things in yellow. But five-point cost of sales, that drift there, that kind of it's going off target there, is real money leaking out of the business, and it's hidden in a blended number. Right? Cost of sales is not just one thing, but it's a blended number.

32:25And so, all right, what can we do to help our client? We've got our system. It's helping us understand what we need to look at. Let's dig in. All right. So moment one, hypothesis, right? Your monthly meetings with your client or your monthly work with your client is going to start with actual values from their financials, okay? So you're going to feed your AI tool, your secure AI tool, we'll get into that in a minute, three things. You're going to feed it your scoreboard trends, where cost of sales, and days to get paid have been flagged. You're going to feed recent call notes with your client. And in those call notes, you're going to be picking up on this context that we've got more commercial business. And that's important because your tool can dig into that. And then you're also going to feed it your client's job log, where they're recording jobs by type, residential, commercial quotes, and whatnot.

33:31And what the tool here finds is that, oh, okay, well, new accounts, man, it's really shifted from 40% commercial to 67% commercial. That's huge. And it is what is dragging that blended cost of sales. Okay? It's what's causing that to rise steadily because the commercial work has completely different unit economics. It requires more equipment per visit. You're going to get more material variance, maybe more standby labor. And that's why you're seeing cost of sales go up. If you're a really great analyst, and I was, that's my background, you can do this work. You could have figured that out. But what's great here is that you can just feed your AI tool a few pieces of data, including those call notes which are so important to kind of figure out where to dig in and come up with this kind of a hypothesis of where to look into with your clients within seconds, right? And AI only found that because the system again told it where to look.

34:44You handed it the right inputs. If you strip that system out, you're going to get a nice summary, but it's not going to find that shift mix based on just the financial statements alone, right? So you really need to express the system. Okay, forecasting. Right? CFOs look forward, not just backward. And so in our system, we build a forecast every single month, and AI can make it sharper and help us model impact across a bunch of levers at once. And so here we can run a forecast that says, hey, if trends hold the way they are right now, we're going to be $145,000 short of our cash flow target by the end of the year. But we can run a couple of other things here. If we re-quote the lowest margin commercial accounts, if we can reprice those, we can maybe try to get $85,000 back. Or if we reroute crews and scheduling, maybe we can get $70,000 back. But you're able to kind of really quickly spin up a forecast based on a couple of key drivers and see what the impact is, right?

36:07And so with forecasting, again, very powerful. I'm going to spin that up for you very quickly and allow you to model all the levers and not just guess here. What if analysis. Started a little bit of this on the last slide. But when I think about what if analysis, I'm thinking also not just about kind of forecasting and kind of... I think in the hypothesis of forecasting phase, you're not quite yet with your client. Now I'm talking about when you're with your client, maybe you've already gone over the scoreboard, but now they want to make some decisions, right? Real operational and strategic decisions, and they will pick up the phone and call their CFO. They always do. They want to know what is the financial impact of a decision before they commit. And so AI speed of modeling is going to make what makes running those, what is very practical. So again, let's say your client asks you, "What if I hire a commercial crew lead?" Okay.

37:12Let me take that back. And you run that through your tool, and a couple of insights are surfaced here. One is that, well, we could hire a commercial crew lead at $95,000, but that's a cost. That's not going to necessarily drive margin. It only pays back if we are able to actually realize margin improvements. And so let's calculate the breakeven. We need three margin points to be cash neutral. And by month seven, it'll be three margin points or [1.5 past year?]. Right? And it didn't necessarily answer, should I hire that person? That's not the job. That's not what we're trying to do as CFO advisors either, right? Remember what I said earlier, you don't have to have all the answers. What you're doing is you are modeling, showing how these different drivers move and giving your client a picture of what this means. Okay, well, this is a cost, not a lever. Do you believe that you can drive this kind of margin expansion within this time?

38:18Okay? And that's again, what that client is paying for. Okay, well, let's talk about this, right? Does this hold up? Do I believe that this can actually work operationally? And then we have the action planning. Again, I love this. This is, by the way, this guiding your client part, there's a lot of folks out there and teams out there who stop at just delivering a forecast or maybe some trends analysis or some KPIs, but how do you get your client to act on that? That's what we teach at The CFO Project. It's really powerful, and it's exactly what clients want. They want guidance. They don't want just reports. They're not going to pay you for just reports. They're going to pay you for this guidance. And so now we have an objective. Our system points to an objective. Our system says, hey, we need to look at the cost of sales. That is what is dragging on cash. We need to lower the commercial cost of sales.

39:18That's the objective. That's what you as a CFO advisor bring. Then you go to your client, and you ask, "How can we affect this driver?" Okay. And you might work with your client to come up with a bunch of ideas, and you can bring AI-generated ideas. Again, it's going to have a lot of context about your client, about their business. Maybe they brought up other ideas in the past that you can resurface. Maybe you have other clients that do commercial and/or residential landscaping. So now it's got even fuller context on an industry that you specialize in. And this is a great use case of kind of let's look at what the rest of the Internet is suggesting that we do as commercial landscapers. And so you and your client, you come up with ideas on your own, and then you've got some AI-generated ideas like requoting the top four accounts or auditing commercial economics, introducing a new pricing tier, hiring a commercial crew lead, renegotiating equipment maintenance.

40:24But ultimately, it is important that the client sets the path. Okay? But you're bringing, again, the objective. You're bringing ideas. You are the sounding board for your client. And then in this illustrative example, they might pick, okay, we're going to requote the top four commercial accounts, and we're going to run an audit to see if there's anything that we can be doing, where there are sub-drivers that we could be pulling. While we're doing that, we're going to defer the hire, and we're going to take that AI idea of renegotiating the equipment maintenance contract. That's a good idea, AI, right? And this is exactly how these conversations with your clients go. It's not meant to be, again, you have some crystal ball or some magic answer. You're working with your client. You're going to document the path forward that they have set for themselves, and that will be where you start next month's meeting. [You're not going to have it to go?] Okay?

41:30And in our example here, 60 days later, Cascade, they quoted those top four accounts. They were able to recover $48,000 in annualized margin. Two of those accounts accepted the requoting. Okay, got it. This is what we have to pay. Understood. One negotiated, also a great outcome. Let's find a path forward that works for both of us. And one client ultimately decided to leave. In this case, maybe you're fine with that because you need to work with a more profitable client, right? And there's always even more clients to go get. The audit finds $22,000 in margin by finding 20% drive time waste on the commercial routes. That is exactly the waste that the what if was betting on. And then the client also ultimately decides to promote a senior crew lead to that commercial role with a 10% pay bump, which, by the way, there's already higher trust there. That's going to be lower cost than going out and hiring a new manager in the market.

42:41And it has very little ramp-up time, right? Because that crew member is already part of the team. So you as a CFO advisor and your client have found about $70,000 a year recovered through this analysis, through this monthly system that you follow with your client. The scoreboard is moving back toward green. The client made all these decisions, right? And AI helped you just kind of sharpen your approach to your meeting. And a reminder, if your client is paying you $24,000 a year, but they recovered $70,000 in margin, that is a trade that they are going to make every single day. All right. Let's do our next poll. A new AI tool gets pitched to you. What best decides if it helps your advisory business? Is it that it runs on the newest model? Is it that it's cheaper? Is it that it helps make better decisions? Or is it that calendar integration that we always prioritize? All right. And I'm just looking at some of the answers.

44:00I know I was prompting you all to drop some stuff in the polls when we were doing throughout the presentation to drop some stuff in the chat, so just seeing your response is fantastic. All right. We do have a question from the chat. Are we communicating the use of AI in all these decisions with your client? Great question. Yeah, absolutely. I see no reason to hide it, and I think your clients will like, I also don't know that you necessarily need to actively promote it, but certainly no reason to hide it and certainly disclosure. I think a lot of your clients probably want disclosure around certain tools you're using, so I think it's a fair question. All right. Okay. So

One test for any AI tool

45:02the test I mentioned, right, for an AI tool. Let's say you're evaluating a new AI tool. That poll question we were just talking about. I think that the one test for any AI tool that claims to help you in your advisory work, and there's a lot of them out there, I would ask, of this tool, does it help my client make a better decision? Is everything we just went through, the way we're using AI as CFO advisors? Absolutely, it helps my client make a better decision, right? Every one of those four moments ended with a client making a better decision or at least having a little bit more information or a few other ideas so that they can make that better decision. Okay? And so there are plenty of tools out there, by the way, that will help you in terms of productivity, right? They might help you with workflow automation or something like that, but that is a different question. When you're talking about how to use AI in advisory, I really want you to be thinking about the tools that you choose to use as ones that help your clients make better decisions. Because there's a lot of tools out there who are promising a lot of things, and you want it to be really helping you become that better trusted advisor.

Security guardrails

46:21I saw a question in the chat about security, and so let's talk about that now. The moment your client data touches an AI tool, your standard of care does not change. So we have three suggested guardrails. Now there's 20 more, there are other guidelines that you can go out there and take a look at. But the few that we want you to keep top of mind. First is secure the inputs. You don't want to put client financials and names into tools that are going to train on what you feed them. So like any other tool that you might use, you want to make sure that you're using an enterprise tier, that they have no train terms, private configurations. Exactly how you should be checking out any other tools, make sure you're doing the same thing with your AI tools. Second, I definitely do not recommend that you ask the model to do math. Large language models are the right tool for narrative pattern spotting, brainstorming, and even writing code and formulas.

47:25So I do recommend that you use tools like Claude for Excel or Copilot in Excel. Why? Because Claude is not actually doing two plus two for you. It's going to write the formula for you. It's very good at doing coding, and it can write Excel formulas that you can then audit and make sure that the math is being done correctly. And then finally, we mentioned this before, but AI is giving you a starting point. Your judgment and your client context are going to turn that into advice. You sign the deliverable, the tool doesn't. Okay? The tools can change, et cetera, but your duty of care does not. Okay, so hopefully that answers the question about security. You just want to be super careful. Okay.

Why you're best positioned

48:20So we started with can AI do this all? And we said, hey, it can do some things on the compliance side, some things in the commoditized space. But it's not going to be able to replace the advisory role. Okay? And I firmly believe that. We, of course, believe that. We built this whole business around advisory. Who is positioned to offer this kind of advisory service? And I just want to take a moment to really hopefully convince you all that you, the financial professionals already in the room with your clients, are the best positioned, that AI can't manufacture, as we've discussed, and that no outside consultant or fractional executive split 10 ways should step in for your clients. Okay? One is you already have trust, right? If you've got a book of clients or you're working with clients at your company, they trust you. You've been working with them for years, and it's the reason they keep coming back to you.

49:27All right? So you are perfectly in the best spot. Any outside consultant is not going to earn that trust for several months, if not years. You've got access to the books and the real data. For a lot of you, you're already closing them, you're preparing the numbers. Okay? And that is huge. It doesn't require any onboarding that an external consultant would have to do. And then finally, context. You know about how this business runs. You know about seasonality, you know about their plans to make that big strategic hire. You just know so much more that, again, the tools are not going to necessarily have that kind of context, and certainly not an outside consultant. And that all took you years to build that rapport and that relationship with your client. AI is available to everyone cheaply. Okay, so I really think the only thing that's standing between you and a real advisory practice is that AI makes it more powerful to have, and that you can use AI to be more powerful, is the system for the AI to stand on.

50:29Okay, that's all you need. You don't need another credential. You don't need to go... It's not a talent thing. You have all the technical chops today. You've got these three things right here: trust, access, and context. If you've got a system and a great AI tool, you're going to thrive in advisory.

Three things to take with you

50:52All right, so three things to take with you. We can start wrapping up here shortly. One is kind of that line in the sand. AI is taking over your compliance work, but it cannot take the judgment work. And a system coupled with AI is going to keep you relevant and rewarded. Okay? The rule, the tool is only going to compound with a system. You need to pick a system first and then point your AI at it. And then finally, before you adopt one more AI tool, run it through that test. Does it help your clients make better decisions? Right? Because that's going to make you and your service more valuable. Last poll of the day, what is your biggest barrier between you and a real advisory practice? Not an AI question. Are you offering advisory? If not, why not? Okay, is it skills? Is it that you don't have a process? Is it identity? That's a big one we see a lot. You don't see yourself in advisory. Is it time and capacity?

51:56Okay, I see the answers coming in now. To those of you who are responding that you think you don't have the skill, I really hope that what I just walked you through really helped. Think about that. You have the technical skills. Nothing we walked through required you to know anything other than you already know. You know how to read financial statements. Okay? You understand how cash moves through a business. All you need is a system to organize it, and be able to tell your client what that means in a narrative form, in words that they understand, that ties it to their life goals. Okay? For those of you who don't have a system, well, we're going to talk a little bit about that in a minute. For those of you who don't see yourself as an advisor, I get that. We do a lot of mindset training at The CFO Project. So the thing I just want to leave you with here, kind of bringing it back, all the way back.

52:50Can't AI just do this now? AI is going to take over the compliance work, that categorization, the reconciliations, et cetera. It's still extremely valuable work. Not saying that it's not. It's just that the pressure on what you're going to be able to charge for that is going to get cheaper every single month. So if it's a core value of what you sell, you got to keep your eyes wide open about that. But professionals who couple advisory with AI, they're not going to get replaced by it. They can be a lot more relevant and better rewarded because their value is going to be moving to that judgment space. Okay? And I know a lot of you care about your small business clients. We do. We want to eradicate small business failure. And so I recommend that you all learn to use AI to help you become advisors to your clients.

Three paths from here

53:38And so with that, I think we have three paths from here. You could do nothing. I hope that's not you. I hope that you will do something to start implementing AI and building advisory. Two, you can do it yourself. I hope some of you do. Like we said, just come up with a system, a methodology. We gave you some ideas of how we do it. Setting targets, having a visual, very easy to understand scoreboard, and having a monthly meeting where you can actually guide your client. Or you can do it with us, right? If you lack the time or the systems, maybe you don't want to reinvent it from scratch or network, right? Like we have an active network here. Maybe you consider joining The CFO Project. Let me just spend a few minutes here and explain to you how we help you launch your own CFO advisory service, okay? We're going to provide you a complete CFO advisory system and the support for an entire year while you build.

54:34All right? So first and foremost, you're going to get those frameworks, those systems, right? We walked through an abbreviated version of our One Clear Path, but that's the structure. That's what you're delivering every single month to your client. That's what they pay that $2,000 a month fee for. Okay? We're not going to stop there. We're also going to give you systems for how to find clients. We have three proven lead generation strategies, and also how to close them in a way that doesn't feel like sales. We call it the four-step conversion process, and it starts with four mini steps, real conversations that lead to an easy yes. We're going to give you everything you need from the tools perspective, workbooks, templates, so you don't have to build from scratch. Right now, we are in the process of rolling out our new CFO Client Center. It's an AI-powered software tool that's going to do even more of all that back-end work for you, and allow you to layer on AI in those four moments, right?

55:32That's happening right now. We're rolling that out right now. Coaching. Some of you said that identity and mindset is a challenge. Everybody who comes through The CFO Project joins a peer roundtable that meets weekly Okay, that's the accountability part, those weekly check-ins. It's led by an executive coach, an ICF certified executive coach who's going to help you overcome any mindset challenges, and a CFO mentor. A thriving CFO's been part of our program for years, so they can help you navigate the real-world scenarios that they've seen. You'll have access to the community. You're not in this alone. Entrepreneurship is hard. Building a business is hard. We got 500 people in our network, a vibrant community forum. And then lastly, momentum. Even after you get that first, second, third client, we want you to continue growing your revenue and sharpening your skills long after you launch your business.

56:22And so we do things like live events. We do master classes like this one every single month just for our members, workshops, you name it. And we work with sole proprietors and firms so that we have a solution for you. All right. So if you are ready to build a system that makes AI work for you, book a call. Book a call with one of our enrollment advisors. They're going to show you exactly how to start a CFO advisory business. They're going to build you a custom blueprint for how you can build that business. You'll learn about how the program works, the investment options, and our money-back guarantee. We stand behind our systems, and so we do have a money-back guarantee. They can tell you all about that. All right.

Q&A

57:12What questions do you all have? Okay, I see somebody here in the chat is saying, "Hey, I already offer advisory services. I need to automate bookkeeping and spreadsheet to scale and have simpler reporting." Exactly. Right? And we talked a little bit about the tool, how you analyze a tool. There's plenty of tools out there that can help you with workflow automations, and we're not suggesting you don't use those. I think those are great ways to create capacity. But when you're going into advisory, definitely have a tool that is going to help your clients make better decisions. Those are two different things that you're measuring there. Where do you find the information re: AI learns... I'm not sure I understand your question. So if you have a minute, you can type that in. We have a question about price. I think your next best step, honestly, just to book a call because we have a few different options depending on the package that you're going to be choosing.

58:16There's financing and stuff. So if you just book a call, it won't take long. There should be spots available this week. You can get on, learn a little bit more, and get that blueprint that they're going to build for you. Someone asked, "Was it an actual case study?" No, it wasn't a specific case study, but it was a case study that we absolutely hear plenty of. We hear from all of our hundreds of CFOs over the years, and we've heard plenty of case studies. So it's definitely inspired by ones that we actually hear and work on every day and recommend that our CFOs follow that kind of process every single day. All right. We are at the top of the hour. If you do have any unanswered questions, you can reach out to us, again, schedule a call, shoot us an email, and we will get back to you. So thank you all very much for joining us. Have an awesome week. Hope to see you at our next training. Thank you.

This transcript was generated from the session recording and lightly edited for readability. Timestamps are approximate. Words in brackets with a question mark, like [this?], are our best guess where the audio was unclear. The Cascade Landscaping example is illustrative, not a specific client case study.