Carla Titus:
Thanks so much for having me, A.J. I’m excited about our conversation and we’ll promise to keep the geeking out to a minimum.
A.J. Lawrence:
Okay, well, that’s good for you. It’s my issue. I geek out way too much around this. I was going through your background and you know you’ve done some really cool things. You had a lot of that corporate sort of finance, step by step, working through some interesting, you know, through the sales aspect, the finance of sales, which I know I’ve worked with it. I’ve had clients, enterprise clients that had that. But it was still sort of like it was that quick reminder of like, oh, that’s right there is, when you look at large organizations, the concept of finance within the organization is so broken down into the different aspects of the corporation that you really do. You just don’t have a finance layer up top. You actually have it throughout an organization. Without going, as a side thing, could you kind of maybe just how did you get to moving towards then doing your own fractional CFO business?
Carla Titus:
Yeah, so my background is in corporate finance and tech and I was very lucky to spend a lot of my time growing my career through various different areas of a company and in the roles that I hold, from analysts all the way to senior controller to finance director. Just looking at the different areas like supply chain and hardware, technology and software and security and sales and marketing, which is what you mentioned last. And I realized how valuable some of that knowledge was and how little of that small business owners had access to, especially mid-sized companies that are already looking to grow into the next stage and don’t have what’s required for them to plan financially and have a successful plan in place to thrive to that growth stage they want to go to.So bringing in that corporate finance background to the small business owner that was missing some of this access to knowledge and expertise around forward looking because you know, a lot of them have a bookkeeper, they maybe have an accountant in place, but no one is doing the driving forward piece of proactively planning where the business is heading next. What do we want to accomplish? How will we get there? And what are the action steps we need to take in order to achieve those goals? So I found that there was a gap in the market for services that fractional CFOs could come close. And with my finance background incorporated, I felt that we had the expertise and skillsets that small businesses needed in order to be able to tap into that at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full time CFO on staff which they normally don’t need or even have the scope of work available to fulfill that kind of role yet.
A.J. Lawrence:
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That’s really cool. But how did you start first? Just sort of consult or did you, you know, because I know you’ve used the term we and I see you have people on your team and all that. How did that kind of progress from like, okay, I have the skill capability because for me it’s always that. I love that. Yeah. If you come from an execution of that as a marketer, you know, I know finance. Yeah. When you’re in that sort of, I can do this work to then having a business where I have other people also doing the work for clients. What was that sort of decision? How, you know, did you start right off with that or did you just say, oh, I like this, oh, I’m getting lots of clients? What was that process? Let me not lead you.~
Carla Titus:
Yes, that’s exactly how to start it. I just started consulting for some companies. We started to see some traction and results around the financial management and growth. We were able to, you know, help a company hit their seven figures and grow exponentially over one year period, which was really fast and furious. And I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but it was something that we were very proud of. As far as the results, we were able to get clients.So when I realized what we were capable of doing and that the skill sets were transferable, we started to develop a framework around how we support clients. And that’s when I was able to bring in a team that we were able to train on this framework to help clients understand how to think about finances and also help clients simplify the aspect of finance and manage it on their behalf so we can take this off their plate. As we brought in new team members, they were up to speed on our framework and were able to have the right conversations. We would show them how to set up a dashboard for the clients, make sure that they were having the right type of conversations. We had structures for every meeting and we were able to start identifying pain points and opportunities that we would work with clients on. And then all of our team is trained on that so they’re able to have a seamless path. And this didn’t happen overnight. It was a six year journey to get to where we’re at now, where we actually have a team serving clients. And it was because we had too much work and too many clients to help that needed support. And we wanted to make sure that we were able to help them out. So that’s how that evolved.
A.J. Lawrence:
No, I kind of guessed that because in looking at it, I’m familiar with that sort of like one to zero. Like, oh, I can do this. Oh, people like it if I help them. I got to do. But what I was very impressed when we were just chatting about what you’re doing, your use of we and the way you kind of talk about your team versus you in a breakdown indicates you’ve gone through a lot of the process of like how do you structure this? How do you have a capability? Where is this not just, you’re not just executing on this. Sorry, yeah, I was leading you into that because I was like, oh yeah. She’s thought about this process as it reflects on what it means for clients and specifically what it means for her organization. So that was pretty. I like that. I like that stuff. Let’s kind of jump in.
Carla Titus:
Thank you.
A.J. Lawrence:
Let’s jump in on sort of looking at the value. Let’s talk about this. We generally talk about this entrepreneur in transition, this what I call a mid journey entrepreneur. Almost everything you go out there and talk about entrepreneurship is like, getting started, how do you rub the sticks together so fast that you are actually making money? You start something. Or B, you know, money, the Elon’s and you know, everyone makes. But the reality is one, when an entrepreneur in that sort of post 1 million mid 7-figure part of their journey, when they should start thinking about let’s not even say fractional CFO, but first start really putting more time and effort and focus on the finances of the business. What do you think is happening first and then what are the things that should be like early indicators to the entrepreneur that this is something that needs a little more attention?
Carla Titus:
Yeah, what’s happening is they’ve gotten this far by winging it without a plan and they’re starting to feel the pressure of, oh, this is high stakes now we got to pay attention. And also they have a lot of competing priorities because if they have a much larger team than they had before that they have to manage and pay attention to. So the finances fall through the wayside and they’re trying to manage based on their bank account balance but that is also not working because the complexities have grown and they need more information and they need more data to make decisions but they’re not getting it. So they’re trying to rely on their existing support, either a bookkeeper or accountant that is not the expert in this area.And they’re asking them the questions, can I afford this? Can I hire? How do I grow? What is our pricing structure? And the accountant is looking at them like, I do your taxes, maybe I do a little bit of this. But they really need someone that is either a controller or some access to a fractional CFO type role that is thinking forward looking, that is helping them craft that growth plan and path and also helping them avoid risk and identify opportunities.Are the right spending allocations happening? Do we need to reassess? Do we need to shift? Where do we need to invest more? It’s not always about cutting back. It’s about generating more revenue too. So do we pay our people the right way? Do you have the right margins for every offer? Like, we start to get these questions that are way more complex, that are tied to a lot of the moving pieces in the business and then becomes really complicated. So either business owners bury their head in the sand or they try to find some support wherever they can at an affordable rate, which is a whole nother part of, you know, the work that we do. Because we’re not cheap either.
A.J. Lawrence:
No, I remember a lot of that and yeah, you pay for the cheap. The way I always remembered it was you know when you’re early state, it’s just the financial accounting aspect. It’s like, I need to know if I have money, I need to know who I owe and who owes me and I need to pay my taxes. It’s only as we grew that I realized similar to marketing that there’s so much data that can help me make educated guesses of what would help me further grow. Moving to a managerial accounting structure, understanding the impacts of my cash flow, my cash collection cycle. I had that great experience where it was like growing, growing, growing. And even though I was growing, I was constantly cash poor and started working with Fractional CFO and Stu did this amazing job.And all of a sudden, six months in, I’m like, wait, it was taking us two and a half months to collect on our typical cash cycle and we moved it down to 28 days and it was just like, wow, we’re not making any more money but we have so much more money. Wait, what is this magic trick? What is this strange magic you bring to us? You’re demigod. But it is that kind of understanding that like, all right, I’m no longer, as the entrepreneur, I’m no longer worried about survival and sort of that, how can I keep moving pieces if I’m growing? All of sudden now, I have to hand off those like, okay, we got to make sure everything or the other factor was I realized we were in trouble when my payroll got larger than my emergency cash withdrawal from my credit cards. And I was like, oh, I can’t miss payroll. I have to have better systems because my backup plan. My backup plan. Yeah. So it is this increase in complexity, it is the rise of questions about how to move forward in an intelligent manner. We talk a lot about utilizing ways of putting the extra, you know, measure twice, cut once type of stuff, setting the foundation. What is that transition like when you work with an entrepreneur? What are the things that first start and how can they begin preparing to facilitate that?
Carla Titus:
Yeah, great question. So we right away start by utilizing our framework, which has five parts to financial management. One is cash. So if that is the top priority, as a top concern, we want to make sure we address it first. But we don’t necessarily put it in any particular order. We just want to make sure we cover all those five areas. So cash flow is one of them. Then is capacity. What is your team able to deliver? Are we at capacity? Do we need to hire? Are we above capacity? And everybody’s screaming for help and we should have hired three people two months ago and we just haven’t had the money or forgot or got too busy. We want to do planning to proactively start charting a different path forward because if what you’re doing is not working and it’s painful, we want to change it going forward to make it much more easeful and stay ahead of any things that might come up.Then we want to address pay because like you said, payroll is expensive. And oftentimes I see owners not getting paid because they are not watching the bottom line and they’re just paying everyone else. And now their business became a pass through entity for cash. Cash comes in and cash goes right out and there’s no profit. And then last but not least, and not the last important but probably the most important is profit, making sure the business is profitable to sustain long term growth. Because we know scaling a business costs money and people don’t realize how expensive it is until it hits them in the face with like those payroll costs and they don’t have a line of credit to access to continue to finance that growth. And then cash flow becomes a problem.And then we just kind of go back through the five areas and cycle through to make sure we address the priorities in each of them by bringing in plans, action plans on what do we need to do differently. How are we going to change that pattern as we hire more people? How are we going to finance that growth? And we do it before it becomes a problem. That way, we were not trying to catch up with a problem, which at times we get brought in to just deal with the problems that we have at hand that have been created because decisions got made without the proper data.
A.J. Lawrence:
There’s a lot to that. And I do remember, you know, a lot of that fun. So you’re coming in, looking at it, taking the cash, looking at the problems on plate, looking at the variables. You have your, you said your process, the five step. And this is what I’m curious. There are a lot of what I used to say and there are a gazillion processes out there, but it’s the actual following and the structure of implementing them and rinsing and repeating and learning from the different steps in those processes that the value is created. Because yeah, anyone can come up with a process. I literally had one of my great bosses once in a client meeting when the client is, well, what is your process from doing? Oh, we have a very time honored process called the PUMA process. And we use the Puma process repeatedly. It is our mainstay of how we do things. And I’m like sitting there behind him and I’m like, what is this? Why don’t I know this? Since I’m, you know, he’s the VP of whatever and this is my client. I have no idea I’ve ever heard of this. And the client’s like, and this is an older British gentleman and he’s got kind of did one of these and the client just kind of nodded their head, oh, good, good. And went on. And I’m like, what is the PULMA process? And he’s like, pulled out of my ass. I’m like, that’s exactly how our company works. Yeah, this is exactly our process. So moving from the POMA to a real process, I think bring so much more value. So you bring a process into place, you start bringing a cadence. Is this also sort of the types of things that you’re looking at? Because like I realized while the rough cash on hand and other things, those were more. I was realizing a lot of things I looked at as that zero to one entrepreneur were very trailing indicators. Yeah, there was a lot of things. Yeah, I was just like. And one, it was very much survival based, but it was very trailing. It was moving, working with a fractional CFO of moving towards sort of these leading indicators and then sort of learning from working with someone like yourself how these things could let me sort of make guesses of what could happen and what we should do based upon different situations that would occur, based upon our ability to understand the data. Let’s kind of dive into that. So you bring in this. You start with cat cash, which is great because that’s always the most fun. And, you know, I know for a fact one of the biggest things that happened with me was the co mingling of funds, because why not? And that’s a big problem. And, you know, I still have it my own sort of holding company. I’m like, every year I kind of say, stop co mingling funds, you know, and that’s like, they go to the gym every day.
Carla Titus:
Well, but if you had a personal trainer that was waiting for you to set up that appointment with them and you were not going to let them, you know, because maybe there’s a penalty for not showing up to your training. You will show up to your training and you will make it to Jim. And if you. Even if you don’t want to, because you’re not feeling it that day, which is a lot of us, right, and you’re not going to disappoint them, but you might choose to not show up to your finance meeting on your own because you’re like, I’ll look at that later, or procrastinate. So a lot of the work that we do, even with the strategy and the planning and the proactiveness, really hinges down on the accountability portion of what we help clients achieve. Because what gets measured gets managed. Therefore, we’re looking at the metrics, we’re looking at those leading indicators, we’re discussing and making decisions in those meetings by setting a proactive agenda on what we need to tackle, where we’re moving the needle in every meeting that we’re at. So we’re not just meeting for the sake of meeting. We’re actually coming in with an intention around solving problems or addressing issues, overcoming objections and obstacles that get in our way of achieving our goals. We also this like, look at, where are we at? Are we on track to meet the goals? Do we need to pivot and adjust? Because we are nowhere close what we expected we were going to do so we can get back on track, so that at the end of the year we’re not surprised by, oh, we missed our goals completely. We’re like, every month we know, are we on track, off track, what are the changes we need to do, which team needs to take on what responsibility in order for this to happen, who are we holding accountable? And that is the work I help my clients with because the numbers are just one part of what we do. But really, it’s a strategy that drives the growth of the company. And the setting the direction and adding the value that ultimately gets reflected in the bottom line of the company.
A.J. Lawrence:
Okay, so this is a good thing. I think strategy becomes a very difficult thing for entrepreneurs is because we can talk objectives, goals, strategy, tactics. I know from a client point of view, it becomes very, you know, it’s like, I’m so blah, blah, blah, this and this. But then when I get into the meat of it, a lot of times I have goals and objectives, I have strategies, there’s tactics. And the alignment isn’t always as clean as it should be because they’re either moving or, you know, I have a horrible tendency of saying the same thing differently every time I say it. So I think I’m fine. My team kind of looks at me and says, so you changed everything? And I’m like, no, no, no, it’s the same thing. And they’re like, but you just said. And I’m like, okay, let’s talk with setting the strategies, because I think this is something. If you come from a finance, it’s like you either get it or not. So if, like, I know entrepreneurs have come from the finance side of the business, boom, it’s there. But then it’s the execution that, you know, all of a sudden it’s like, wait, how do you do Blah, blah, blah. But I know entrepreneurs who come from the execution side coming. All of a sudden it’s like, how do I make finances other than hitting, saying I’m gon number or, you know, oh, yeah, we’re going to grow by 20%. It’s like, that means nothing. Why? How? So let’s kind of talk. How do you help an entrepreneur utilize finance within the concept of driving their strategy?
Carla Titus:
Yeah. So we’re going to look at past historical data and present data to inform what we have been able to achieve. But we don’t end there. Right. We use that as a proof of concept. Okay. You were able to get 10 clients to pay you X or a hundred thousand clients to pay you Y. So now we know what our baseline is as we decide what the growth rate will be. We need to also plug in numbers to say we need another hundred clients paying us x amount of money for us to materialize that 20% of growth. And so it’s not about just putting numbers up on the wall. Anyone can do that. But it’s really what are the actions and things that need to be true in order for us to hit those that 20% growth that we want to achieve. And it could be 20%, it could be any number, but you got to do the granular breakdown on how does that growth happen. And maybe it’s clients, maybe it’s products, maybe subscribers, signups, whatever your business model is that drives growth. Then the next question is, what are marketing investments we’re going to make that will help us attain those hundred clients that need to pay us that extra amount of money? And also what are we doing to retain current clients to make sure we’re not leaking on the back end of our efforts all the work that we’re putting in to grow? Because you might want to grow, but if everyone else leaves, then you’re just net neutral back to where you started. So then you align the marketing spend to allocate to achieve those hundred clients to come in the door at certain times, times, periods of time during the year which you plan out financially. I need 20 clients in Q1, 20 clients in Q2, and so on. So that now it becomes really clear who needs to go achieve those goals. Now who’s responsible for getting those clients in the door and getting them signed up and then outreaching probably more like a thousand people to get the 20 that you need. So now we have metrics, we have goals, we have actionable steps that every team member will own or the CEO or whoever is in charge to ensure that that 20% growth happens. So that’s how the numbers actually come together and make sense in a comprehensive financial plan, not just a pie in the sky number strategy someone threw out there just because they wanted to grow.
A.J. Lawrence:
See, this is what I really like because it really gets into sort of resource allocation. And this is one of the things like coming from a marketing and sales. What I realized early on. Yeah. And I was a developer. Yeah, I started off well, way, way, way back. I actually had a chemistry degree. So maybe this was, you know, and you did synthesis, retrosynthesis and you had multiple steps and you had different catalysts and things that had to be added in at different levels and how, you know, and how precise you were kind of had an impact on the quality of whatever you were building. Building. Great. And my chemistry degree professor, or my old chemistry professor was like, what? It’s come on, it’s 35 years since I had to deal anything. But back to the point, when you look at it from as you grow as an entrepreneur, you realize yes. There are so many little spots along your relationship, relationship with clients, from a sales to retainer, even just to creating advocates where they’re going to tell other people in the business about you that you can put effort in, but you only have finite resources, time, money, capital, whatever. The different aspects are. So understanding not just what you have, so then you can allocate, but then understanding the potential impact of each of those steps is where I think a lot of this magic came. And I know when I first started realizing that, okay, there were infinite steps thing, but I would kind of condense it to 20 ways of looking at a client life cycle, I kind of was like, oh yeah, I’ll just allocate across the board. And then I was like, oh, I only have so many people, oh, I have to pay this. Okay, okay, okay. You know, and then working, I started getting a better understanding of like, okay, if I have these things and I’m looking at this idea of what I’m trying to achieve, a return on capital, a return on investment, whatever, the internal thing that we started working on, it was like, oh, if I focus to that, that becomes a clearer indicator of where I should be focusing on than if I’m just saying, well, if I can double the amount of advocates I have within my client base, okay, and then how do I get more people into my funnel and how do I shorten that sales cycle from four months to two months? You know, it was like all random individual pieces looking at a financial ratio that we were basically a variation of how much money I was able to keep. It allowed me to really just focus on the highest impact and rinse and repeat. And it was a very, took a lot of noise out of that decision making process as you guide people into this. You know, you’re showing them all these pieces. How do you get them to understand that like to come to Jesus moment? How do you bring them to that?
Carla Titus:
Well, a lot of the work we do with clients is scenario planning, which is what you describe, right? What are the, the variables levers we pull? Can we adjust the conversion rate on sales percentage to improve it so we don’t have to have so many people touch points. But more qualified leads convert faster, which means more cash in the door quicker. And we’re able to now afford to hire people that we need to support that and make sure that we have a good profit margin at the end of the day after we are covering all the expenses. And so we show them, we go through the modeling and say, here’s a scenario of if this happens and this improved by X. Now you can see how much more money will have available. That frees up the cash to be able to bring in this new hire that you need to service this new contracts and still have profit left at the end of the day. So assuming all that is true and you know, there’s a lot of variables, you know, when it comes to compensation, people might ask for a higher salary than you had expected or planned for. We’ll, you know, assess for that too as we go through and benchmark to make sure we’re at the right level. But you start to kind of work through those variables and you start to adjust them as you start to get information. So now you’re like, am I still profitable? Am I profitable enough? Do I still move forward with this is still viable as a decision. But you just take all that, you know, confusion out of the way because you’re not having to figure out, well, where am I getting the clients and how am I hiring? It’s like, no, when you get this many clients, you hire this one person at this rate and then we know how much profit we’ll have because we’ll have the cash flow coming in. And then if you need to make a marketing investment to make that happen, then we want to comprehend that into the plan as well so that we’re not caught by surprise that marketing expenses increased to bring in this new clients to come to bear or that the sales team needed training to get that conversion rate working better for them. So this is where strategy meets execution. And we’re really the value starts to come in with, which is what you were describing as an example of when you start to see fractional CFOs come into the function. This is the kind of thinking and the kind of guidance you should be getting from your fractional CFO on how to make results happen in the business. And there’s no guarantee that those will happen. But at least we have a plan and we’re going to stick to it and we’re going to do the best we can can to stay on track to that plan. And that’s where it takes the wing in it or the hope. You know, it’s not a strategy kind of out of the equation. And then it takes away the lack of execution being a problem because now you’re sticking to the plan and going through the actions needed to get those results that you’re looking for.
A.J. Lawrence:
Let’s take that step back. We’ve just talked about the value you get. You know, we talked about your process we talked where you kind of bring people in once they come in and start working with you, we talked about some of the value. How should. Because I know like. And once again as we were chatting, chatting earlier before we started recording, it was a different day. I started looking 15, 16 years ago for a fractional CFO. And one the concept of fractional was much more sort of that next step, that eight figure type business, more than sort of the mid sevens that we’re starting to see. As you do fractionals come down and kind of expand into the different types of businesses that are out there. And I see special specialist in E commerce or you know, even AI now, but still kind of talking what is it that you suggest that an entrepreneur looking at realizing that they’ve hit this complexity issue, they’re kind of looking to kind of take that next step, what should they be looking for? Obviously there’s that kind of how you feel with the person, but I think a lot of times without understanding the real underlying value and what makes a good relationship between a fractional CFO and the entrepreneur, you can get sold more. I know early on and still to this day I can get sold if I’m not very careful focusing on what I’m looking for.
Carla Titus:
Yeah, I think it’s important that as business owners are looking for a fractional CFO that they ask for. What is their expertise and background and experience working with the size, type of business industry, any knowledge they can bring, if they have background from corporate, you, you know there’s really great training that happens in corporate for all of us that have been through that, that can really benefit small businesses. But you need to know how to adapt those tools and knowledge and expertise to apply it to the small business they should be asking for. How do they approach their relationship with the owner? Like in our case we are really big on trust and becoming a business partner with the owner and making sure that we have a good partnership and that we tell our clients flat out there is work you’re going to have to do. If you’re just looking to delegate and advocate decision making, that is not us. And that will not work in a partnership because we’re here to help you drive value. That doesn’t mean you get to just walk away and sit in a corner and like forget about us. Like you got to oversee the work, partner with us in conversations because there’s a lot of the strategies we need to decide with your help. And ultimately the CEO is in the decision making position, not us. We’re here to advise, influence Consultants Bold guide as a trusted partner advisor. But we are not here to make those decisions for them. So sometimes owners will make the decisions regardless of the implications, and we’ll go through the implications and consequences of their decisions and they still will choose to go that direction, which we have to live with as a cfo. And when they complain later, the things don’t look good, we’re like, well, remember that one decision we made back then? Yeah. Remember the consequences? Yeah. Here we are. And that’s okay because it’s their business, they get to the side. But you know, we get to proactively bring up concerns and areas of focus. But that cannot happen if you don’t develop a trusted business partnership with your client. And that’s what I’m looking to create with our clients as a fractional cfo. Much more than being transactional or throwing dashboards at you or percentage allocations like a lot of other CFOs might be doing, or they’re saying they’re CFOs, but they don’t really have that expertise or experience that comes with doing the job. It’s really easy to, to get just confused by so many options and offerings out there. So making sure that your CFO is also bringing you the financial analysis, they’re actually doing the work. Like a lot of the work we do is we come in and set up a dashboard for our clients so that they know in a snapshot financially, how well are they performing against our goals. Right. That is work we take on on behalf of our clients. We’re not asking them to hire someone in house to do the financial analysis needed for us to support them. And this is a lot of the things I see with higher level CFOs. They’re just here to advise. They get on the call, they tell you everything they need you to do, and then you got to go figure out how to do it. Which just puts more pressure on the business where if you hire a full finance team that comes in with their analysts or controller and such, we’re able to take on that work and do it on your behalf and then bring and present you insights, ideas, suggestions, and the analysis that goes into the decision making of the work. So there’s just a spectrum of CFOs out there nowadays. Everything from your bookkeeper upgraded to a CFO to actual CFOs that been doing this for, for 20 plus years and everything in between. So just being careful of like, who are you bringing in? Are they still helping you achieve goals? Are they working for you? In that business partnership, or they’re just very transactional, sending you information and saying, figure it out on your own.
A.J. Lawrence:
You talked about the work that you want to see from a partner, that you want a client who’s going to work. I would like to kind of talk about, like, what is going to for the entrepreneur? How can you get the most value? One of the things I had a lot of difficulty was I didn’t care so much about the bookkeeping aspect aspects. And so early on, bookkeeping was sloppy or it got taken advantage. A couple, not a couple once early on, they did a couple of things. It was one person did a couple things because I wasn’t really paying attention and kind of moving. Where I found the value is when we moved from that sort of reporting aspect of finance to sort of that thinking, learning aspect, the managerial. And I was always looking for ways that I could work better with the. This part driving him a little crazy because I always was using terminology and thought process. They was like, that’s not how we do things. I just always remember him saying, that’s not how we do things. That’s not something. But here, let’s talk about that. So I was driving him crazy. How can an entrepreneur really create the most value? Because yes, it’s finding the right partner, it’s finding the right firm based upon the right fractional cfo, based upon where they are in their situation, their resources, their time and their business model, et cetera, et cetera. But once you have that, what are some things that you really see create outsized value within the relationship? What entrepreneurs are kind of doing that. What do you see?
Carla Titus:
The entrepreneurs are getting the most value of the type of services we provide are the ones that are reaching out to discuss decisions before they make them. And that might feel like, oh, are you just like getting permission from your CFO to do? It’s like, no. We’re thinking about what might happen, how this fits in the strategy, what this might alter in the financial plan. Before we make the decision. The decision might have already been made, but we want to make sure that we bring in that perspective to the CEO to say, hey, have you thought about this? 10 things that are a problem if we go that way. And they’re like, oh, I didn’t. And so then we say, let’s go research plan for that, make sure we have the money for it before you go forward with that decision. We’re not saying you can make that decision. We’re just saying, what are the consequences of that decision plan for them. Have Everything lined up and ready to go so you can move forward the decision with confidence. No, that everything else will be taken care of because we already thought about it, or saying, hey, this is going to really derail us. Do you really want to go that way and really rethink what are the options we have on how that decision can take shape? And sometimes it’s not a no, it’s just a yes and or yes. But can we look at it differently or can we do half of that, not the full thing, and really assessing the options that the owner honestly sometimes didn’t even think about were an option and then bringing that perspective to them and say, have you thought about just hiring part time hourly? They’re like, oh, I thought I needed full time all the time. And we’re like, well, for this scope of work, could we make it work with part time for now? And they’re like, oh, yeah, I didn’t think about that. Let’s try it and make sure that that works for the team and that over time, maybe we evolve that role to full time, you know, once we have the scope and the work for them instead of just paying all this overhead for nothing. And those are the kind of things that we want them to bring to us. Not again to get permission, but to just think about what they forgot to consider in the decision making that we are able to catch before they make that decision so we can better prepare and know that we also can afford it before they go do that thing. And then all of a sudden we have a cash flow issue that we unintentionally created. Even though we build cash Runway, sometimes they get to eat into that if the wrong decision is made. Because, you know, once you’re in it, you kind of just pay for it. So we want to avoid some of that risk ahead of time.
A.J. Lawrence:
All right, cool. What do you consider your sort of secret sauce and the type of fractional CFO services you bring to the table?
Carla Titus:
It’s developing that personalized, customized support. For my clients. We don’t do the cookie cutter thing. We do not go for volume. We’re very much quality based and value based on everything we offer to clients. We do not overload our stuff on purpose because we want them to have availability to the clients. When things come up, they can call us and reach us and know that they’re going to be cared for in the moments they needed the most. Which is very unexpected because sometimes things just happen. And as much as we plan for everything, sometimes just things come out of nowhere. And you were like, oh, great. Now we got to deal with that problem. And we want our team available to address those concerns with our clients, not have to wait a week or two weeks to get a call or get on the calendar because they need a response today or right now. And they need to jump on a call tomorrow maybe to have a quick chat about that problem they need to solve and make a decision on. And we’re able to quickly put an analysis together to help them address that concern. So to us, that customized support, that accessibility, that communication, you know, that’s always flowing. It’s really important because that’s where we get to build Trust with our CEOs and partners that are entrusting us with their financial, which is, you know, really intimate side of the business that not a lot of people get to access. So we take that responsibility very seriously in how we provide services. We’re always looking at ways that we can improve our quality of support and retention efforts for our clients because that means we’re delivering more value every way that we can. And we continue to learn ways that we can bring more value to them for the needs of the business because they continue to grow. As, you know, businesses are going to continue to move forward. And ideally, we’re growing with them because we’re able to continue to be that trusted partner that helps them on that next stage of growth and then some.
A.J. Lawrence:
Well, thank you, Carla. What’s the best way someone can learn more about what you’re doing? Go reach out to you, ask questions, get a feel for what Wealth and Worth Within does.
Carla Titus:
Yeah. So you can find us on our website at wealthworthwithin.com. There’s a let’s chat or let’s get started button. You can book a call to speak to a fractional CFO if you’re looking to hire one. And if you want to follow along, we put a lot of free educational content. We just want people to get better at managing their money and their business so they can stay in business longer and hire more people. So you can follow on our newsletter on our website or following us on social media at Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn at Wealth Worth Within.
A.J. Lawrence:
Great. We’ll make sure we have that in the show notes that we send it out in the email when this episode comes out and we’ll put it in our socials. Carla, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really do appreciate it. This is a lot of fun.
Carla Titus:
Thanks for having me. I appreciate I had so much fun sharing all of the work that we do and hopefully other businesses can consider getting the support they need in their journey.
A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah. And as someone who has gone through this process, it’s one of those things where I really should have done it much earlier in my growth cycle. And I understand very much from the entrepreneur, it’s the cost worry xyz. But the value generated was much more than the cost structure. I undertook to work with one and that was 15 plus years ago. I’m not saying Carla is cheap or anything, but I do think the environment of how you can work with a fractional CFO has changed. Any fractional is. I do a lot of fractional CMO work. I think the structures have changed so much over the past 10 years. So if you are looking at your company and dealing with complexity within, understanding your finances, wanting to move from that sort of, I can keep my fingers on every lid, we can do this, to let me start understanding what the future could bring based upon what this is. Go check out Wealth and Worth Within. Carla would be definitely a great person to work with. I think you would get a lot of value. So go check it out. And hey, thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. It was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to the next episode. All right, everyone, talk soon. Bye-bye.