In this episode of the CFO project podcast, we discuss how to be a strategic CFO.

Welcome to the CFO project podcast. Today we're talking all about how to be a strategic CFO to help me with the discussion. I've invited a fellow CFO and a fellow CFO, member of the CFO project, Karina Thomas, to the show. Karina is the profit strategist CFO with Ever Life Accounting Group. Karina, welcome to the show. Thank you, Adam, for having me.

I'm super excited to get started. And so, you know, talk to you a little bit. Yes. So I mean, I, I always like talking to CFO project members because I mean, it's just we we are all passionate about what we do. We want to help business owners, we and everything that comes through to you. I mean, everything that you do in the CFO project, you've you've recently, it's everybody listening.

Karina has started a YouTube channel where she post videos for business owners to help them have a successful business. And then you just posted we have a wins a wins board where members post wins. You just posted that you took on your largest client for CFO services at three, a little over $3,000 a month. Yeah. Gratulations. Thank you.

Very exciting. The exciting part is to, you know, help another business owner to be able to succeed and exactly what it is that they want to do, their goals, the things that they want to accomplish at doing that using numbers. So, that's that's the best part, you know, to seeing them to be able to grow. Yeah, absolutely.

And by the way, for everyone listening, what's your YouTube channel. So they are YouTube channel is ever life accounting group. So they can definitely go like subscribe share follow us. We put out a lot of educational information for entrepreneurs specifically. Okay. Excellent. Well, we'll put a link in the show notes to that. So create let me ask you why did you become a CFO in the first place?

So, became a CFO because initially, in my mind, before I came across the CFO project, I'm thinking that I'm kind of doing what it is that I'm already coming to the CFO project for, you know, CFO, CFO type work. Trying to for each client, I'm creating reports, pertaining to them specifically. And I keep having to reinvent the wheel.

So I'm like, okay, I need a process to be able to help guide these clients even more because, yeah, we're doing bookkeeping, we're doing taxes. But this is old information. So I'm trying to help them to be able to really grow their business. So that's the reason why I'm like, okay, when I seen you guys's, program, I'm like, this is perfect because it gives my clients the tools that they need to be able to grow.

And it's a system where we can kind of scale. Yeah, I love that. You know, when I started offering advisory service CFO Advisory Services about nine years ago, the the first few clients that I got, I would do this exact same thing you were talking about. Like I would say, all right, well, let's look at your balance sheet and then I'll, I would give them all kinds of ratio analysis and right, and all these things.

But I could and this is what I met with my clients in person. Like every, every one of my clients was in person. But I could visibly see their, their face check out, you know. Right, right. Yeah. Like they're like, and and then it just bothered me so much because, like you, I wanted to help them.

And I realized they don't care about right past as much as we think they should. They just want me to tell them what to do to have a better future. Right. Exactly. They you know, a lot of times they think that they're stressed because maybe their books are not in the best shape or, you know, taxes. But really the problem is moving forward.

They just going day to day blindly. So, a lot of them don't know that they have that problem. And so you kind of talk to them and then that's what you discover. That's exactly their problem. They want a system. They want somebody to talk to, somebody to walk with them. So that's what I come across a lot.

Yeah, absolutely. I remember one time the, the, I had a client that was in the mitigation restoration place space. So when somebody's house flooded, they came in and, you know, made sure it didn't destroy the whole house. But anyways, I had, up until this certain point, I met with him on a monthly basis. Him and his wife and I explained the number the past, basically, and they weren't really making any progress.

But the moment the the moment I decided to stop talking about the past as much and focus on the future, I remember vividly in that meeting, both of him and his wife started talking way more than they normally did in these meetings because I would ask them forward looking questions like, how can I said, you know, I can't remember the specifics, but I said something like, you know, you have a you got 100 leads last week, how many?

But you only close 12 of them. What would it take to get you to close four more? Right. And that was the conversation that started them being able to talk. So now they're more engaged in a in this meeting. And at the end of the meeting I never forget he said this felt like a therapy session. Yeah, I think that's very true with a lot of clients that I talked to.

One of my clients we've been working, and she's seen a 25% growth within her homecare agency. I love homecare agencies. And one thing I do notice when we do our meetings and I'm talking we're on we're on the zoom for like 1 to 3 hours. Well, we're getting things actually done. And it's like therapy for her and it's helping her move forward within her business as well.

Everybody listening. If you haven't already, sign up for our five minute weekly email with practical tips for accountants and bookkeepers to escape the accountants trap, go to the CFO project.com/newsletter. So let me ask you keynote this concept called strategic CFO. You talk about that a lot. What do you mean by being a strategic CFO versus essentially a CFO that that just is a numbers person, right?

As a strategic CFO? Because in order to be, in my eyes, in order to be a CFO, you have to be strategic. Everything you do within your business, it has to be strategic. You have to plan behind it. And then when you're planning behind it, you're looking at facts and figures. The facts within a business is numbers. So without numbers you don't have facts.

So that's why I say strategic because we need a distinctive plan or what we're going to do to attack this or this, whatever the problem is in the business, whatever driver we're looking at, we need a plan for it. So that's why I say strategic. Yeah. I mean, I completely agree. We have to remember everybody listening. That's in the accounting bookkeeping space that one that has a desire to help business owners.

And whether you're a CFO advisor already, we all have to remember that everything that a business owner does impacts cash flow. Yeah. Cash flow is a fact. Yeah. It's it's one fact I and you could you could almost you can almost adjust anything on the balance sheet. Accept cash I mean right. If you think about it it's the it's the one fact, but it's the one thing that a business lives or dies on.

So our job as CFO advisors to help our clients generate more cash flow, that will literally solve every problem in a client's business. And, and, and I just feel like a lot of non, non financial business advisors. So like a traditional business coach or generic generic business coach, I think they do a disservice to their clients because they don't understand the numbers themselves like cash flow and how the decisions, the advice they give will impact a client's cash flow.

So how can you give advice when you don't understand the how the numbers specifically cash flows impacted? Which is why I think we as accountants and CPAs and bookkeepers are the best people to advise business owners, right? I agree with that because I've seen coaches and you know, they have a specific talent, you know, and what they do, you know, maybe it's marketing talent, you know, which is great.

But when it comes down to what we do is holistic. We're looking at the entire picture. I don't have a one size fits all. What's the problem in your business? What's your goals? What are you trying to accomplish. And that's what we do. Yeah. And I think that's a good point you just brought up because that is the the being a strategic CFO helps a client accomplish something.

So in order to accomplish something, you need a strategy. Yeah. You can't just blindly look at the past and without knowing having a strategy and saying, here's where to go. Well, how do you know where to go when you don't know what the client wants? You know, is it businesses going looking for numbers and other drivers that impact numbers?

Right. Hey, they're at a lean with the CFO project podcast. Are you an employed accountant or bookkeeper that would like to start an advisory service on the side? Well, we have a free training for you called Side Hustle CFO. We will show you how to start a business on the side offering CFO and advisory services to small business owners.

We conduct this training every Friday at 3:00 pm eastern and 12:00 pm Pacific. Go to the CFO project.com and click on Free trainings to register. What have you found in your experience that clients really want? Like what are some things that clients really want from their business that you'll help them formulate a strategy to get to? Okay, from what I've seen, clients really want someone.

Of course, to walk with them. But when it comes to growing, you know they want to take on more clients. How do they do that? So they need they want specific plans on how to increase their leads. Right. How to close more leads, how to hire better staff, how to hire more staff. All these things are very strategic.

One of my clients, she, went and actually did an ad or Facebook right, with her home care agency, and she thought putting the ad out there was going to actually help bring in her staff, which it could have, not against it, but she was paying for it. But, me and my husband, because he does all the marketing business we showed her, he really told her way to do it without having to pay for ad, and she has been having leads come in for the last 2 to 3 weeks.

Filling up her her waiting list for for staff. So, it's just a strategy behind. What are you doing? You know? Yeah. So that's true in my business owners, you know, without somebody like you and her husband in that client's life, they're. They're going to struggle. I mean, they want they crave somebody like all of us to help them.

And and I, you know, you pointed out the, you know, leads and close converting those leads and and things like that. That's not on the PNL, that's not on the balance sheet. Right. I think a lot of account is focused way too much on those financial reports. They are financial. They're accounting reports. They're not business managerial reports. Yeah, I agree.

I do want to say one more thing. Not to cut you off. When before I was, with the CFO project. Right. Strategically, I would look at the PNL statement and I'm trying to get these ratio analysis and things, and I'm like, okay, what's the benchmark for the restaurant industry, for this industry, looking at other companies. But now it's like, okay, let's let's mark against your company, your own company, let's benchmark against that.

So I just said that to say, like the numbers do not tell you everything. You can't get everything that you need just from a PNL or a balance sheet. There's things in between that that's missing, you know, it which is very important. Advisor, CFO, advisor who deals with numbers and can look at your entire business is so important to your business.

I mean, just like you need insurance, for your home, you need a CFO, you need an advisor for your business is necessary. Yeah. Absolutely. And you need an advisor. Like you said, that focus is on the strategy, not just the numbers. So somebody that can look at the entire business from a from a sort of a, a holistic lens, instead of just looking at it from a numbers lens.

Well, for example, lawyers, lawyers are really good at looking at the business just through a legal lens. And they don't understand. I think they probably do understand. They just don't care a lot of times how how the what they want impacts other parts of the business because they're looking, which is fine. That's what lawyers do. They want to protect you.

For example, I had a lawyer one time when I was, you know, about six years ago, looking at the agreement that I gave to clients, the CFO agreement that I gave to clients when they joined. And back then my agreement was basically a one page agreement. Well, this lawyer wanted to turn it into like a nine page document with all this legalese and all this stuff.

And it's like it's I told her I can there's no way I could give this to a client, a prospect sign it. And she's like, well, this is the perfect the best way to protect yourself. It's like, well, the she's looking at just the legal ends. And so business owners want somebody, they can look at the big picture of everything, not just the numbers.

Right? Right. Figure out how to move the business for. Because the end of the day, that's what the business owner wants. Like you said, they want to have a business that's growing and successful. Exactly. Yeah, I know I do. I want to have a business as grown, as successful and the right people on my team to help. Got me.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, and their business ownership we all have to remember is lonely. I mean, yeah, it's there's not that many people business owners can turn to for help, but but the one person in their life that they would like to turn to is their financial person, right, as opposed to a keeper because. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.

I was just going to say I have, a lot of entrepreneurs when they talk to me, it's because they have nobody to talk to. They don't have, you know, family and friends don't understand. You know, I know when they start they business. It was just them pushing it because they believed in it. They saw the vision.

Nobody else did. So it's just them. So they need a sounding board. It's very true. How is your practice changed since adopting sort of the systemized way we we teach, you know, the methodologies we teach and the CFO approach. How is your your business changed so our business has changed drastically because when I have more time with my family, so I'm not bogged down in the office, we were really focused on taxes and bookkeeping, hundreds of clients.

It is just it just kept me away from my family. I mean, I'm in here constantly. And then, you know, we hire, we add on to our team. But, you know, it's been a lot of work, but I was just focusing on advisory or growing someone else's business to put them in the position that they desire to be in it.

Saying so much times I want to say I'm done today by 330 in the office. I'm done today by 330. So is giving my time back is allow me to be able to scale, to talk to different types of people. When it comes to this side of business, when you're dealing with, you know, CFO and advisory. Yeah, I just think it's more impactful to the client because you're you're impacting real people who have real issues, who are employing real people.

So we have this ripple effect through our communities and, and the businesses that we impact. But also your work life balance, you know, is is dramatically improved. Do you still offer accounting services? So we do still offer accounting services. One thing that the CFO project helped me do was lead. I know where to lead with Ali, with advisory, with CFO, and then if they need other things, we can accommodate that.

But honestly, I rather have partners. I like the idea of partners to do that because when I focus strictly on your business, I mean, we can just excel from there. We can grow it, you know, faster. So yeah. Yeah, yeah, I agree to when you say partners, you mean other accountants that you give work to? Yeah, like other bookkeepers, other people who do taxes.

So we have partners for that where, you know, we can send the client elsewhere to get their taxes done, and we focus on their advisory. Yeah, that's that's essentially what I did. I know there's a lot of people in our, in the CFO project that do accounting or bookkeeping and CFO advisory, but I've personally I've only done CFO advisory.

And then I would I would outsource the work or confirm that we're kind of what you're talking about to other people. In fact, what am I, one of my big best referral sources? It was the CPA firm, a large CPA firm. They didn't want to do advisory. They only want to do tax prep, audit, attestation work. So they would send me clients.

And it was this nice partnership and yeah, know I would send them clients that they needed tax work. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. Yeah. It's an ecosystem. I mean we offer all that but I would rather outsource instead of have because, you know, it's a lot of liability when you're in this industry, a lot of insurance and things you got to take into consideration.

So if you can outsource, you're building relationships with other entrepreneurs as well too. They're growing their business. You're growing your business, and the client is happy. Absolutely. You know it. You know, you brought up liability. You know, you're right. Tax prep bookkeeping, attestation, all that has a lot of liability, which you almost need to have, you know, professional liability insurance, advisory services is totally different.

There's almost no liability because we're not doing anything on behalf of the client. We're advising. Yes, we're simply advising. And they can take the advice. We're not we're not signing checks on their behalf. Yep. Doing anything in their in and making decisions for them. Is it revising? I mean obviously I do think you need insurance though. But yeah, the point is it's it's it's there's there's almost no liability because of that, which is a nice part as well.

Yeah I love that part a lot because I'm like, okay, you're not regulated by the IRS, you know, by the state. So it's like, okay, this makes more sense. And we're making a difference in your life right away. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely I it that part is my favorite part about this whole thing because we you're right. We are making a difference right away.

Even if and I've said this before, even if you don't make a measurable impact, meaning they can't see results on on the cash flow, even if you're not doing that, you're giving your client a peace of mind, which is immeasurable. For real. I'm so serious. It really is. Instead of dealing with all the information, they know that they got somebody.

My client, she calls me all the time. She has somebody she can talk to. You know? She don't understand something. Hey, what do you think? You know what I mean? That's that's important to have in business, especially when you're not used to having it and you're actually building by yourself, right? Yeah. I had this client one time that was actually making.

I mean, I'm not exaggerating. He was cash flowing $1 million a month with his business. And and at first I'm thinking, why would he even be seeking me out? Like, what's his problem? He has, like, you know, he's making a ton of money, but it turns out he's not a numbers person. And he wanted somebody on his team that could just tell him if things are going well or things are not going.

He just wanted this confidant, this, this sort of thing. I was I was almost like a crutch that he was able to lean on for, for just moral support, which I was happy to charge him to do that. But, you know, and I met with him on a regular basis. We met every month and we just talked and he loved it so much.

So it just this, this, this sort of idea that where this somebody is confidant, their guide, they're their sounding board that's that that's looking at their business through an objective lean not not a subjective lens. You know what I mean? We're taking the rose colored glasses off that they they look at their business through because they are it's very personal to them.

Yeah. It is it's very personal. They don't be one to share. You really, really have to know, like and trust you because it's very near and dear to them. So it's very important that they, you know, exceed and excel and grow in their business. Yeah, absolutely. So Corina, final thoughts with what is the one piece of advice you would give to somebody that's thinking about becoming a CFO advisor?

The one piece of advice I would give them is to just do it, go ahead and do it is going to change how you think even when it comes to your business. So just do it. You need a plan, a system. Systems are easier to work with. They're easier to deal with. So just stop wasting time and do it.

Yeah love it. Thank you. Create us so much for being on the show today. Of course. Thank you, Adam, so much for having me. And everybody listening. If you haven't already, sign up for our five minute weekly email with practical tips just for accountants and bookkeepers to escape the accountants trap, go to the CFO project.com/newsletter. See you next time on the CFO project podcast.