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(03:01) - What SEO Really Means

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Imaging USA

I'm Pat Miller, and this is The Professional Photographer Podcast. When you run a successful studio, you begin to bring in money. And as your studio becomes more and more successful, the care and feeding of your money begins to change. According to today's guest, there are five stages of success. And as you go through those five stages, you need different people on your money team. When do you have a bookkeeper? What about a CPA? When do you have a fractional CFO? What does a fractional CFO even do? Money team, I'm barely paying my credit card bill. Well, we gotta fix it. And Tricia M. Taitt knows what she's talking about. She's speaking at Imaging USA, and she's written the book Dancing with Numbers. And she's standing by to make sure that money works better for you in the business. We'll talk to Tricia next. Tricia, welcome to The Professional Photographer Podcast. How are you today?

I'm good. Thank you for having me here.

I'm excited to have you here. I've got a thousand questions for you, but I've had the pleasure of getting to know you a little bit. If someone hasn't met you yet, tell them who you are and what you do.

All right, so my three-second is, I am a Wall street refugee turned fractional CFO with Broadway credits. That's the spot.

Wow. I can't go any further. Broadway credits. Come on, lay that on me. That sounds exciting.

Yeah. So I am a finance girly through and through. I went to Wharton undergrad and Duke for my MBA, and I love spreadsheets and diving into spreadsheets. But my passion is in dance, and my professional hobbies is dance. And I've been a professional dancer, primarily in African dance and contemporary vernacular dance. And now, in an older body, I'm trying out modern, which anybody who's ever done modern jazz, it requires your feet to be exquisite, and it's just harder in an older body. But I love it, I enjoy it. And at some point in time, I would love to be back on Broadway. I did a Broadway tour with the musical Fela!, but at some point in time, I would love to do Broadway again. Maybe like Chicago or something like that.

Yeah, love that one. Is that a common thing that we just don't realize that people that love spreadsheets and numbers and math have these kinds of creative interests as well? Because that seems like maybe a unique blend or something that we don't hear about as much as we should.

Yeah, you probably don't hear about it as much as you should, because I didn't hear about it. I thought I was like this alien right brain, left brain person. But the more that I share that I have those two sides to me, the more that I meet people who also have those same things going on. So it's not as foreign as I thought it was.

You know, I have a theory for that. So we're just going to go down a rabbit hole here because I have a theory for that. My theory is people obviously like you, that are so smart, they have free brain space that they have to do something with, and they take that free brain space and they do something creative with it or they find something to be interested in. Because some of the most interesting people I find have so much free brain space that they get into things like dance and tap and all that different stuff. Maybe that explains it. Do you think that explains it?

I don't know. Well, I would take the credit on being smart. I appreciate that. I value it. I receive it. But I did hear an interesting statistic that humans probably use 20% of their brain capacity. So we're not using–and that might even be a high number–but we're not using most of our brain capacity in our lifetime. So there's more space for everyone to do more.

Well, that's inspiring and I appreciate it. And hopefully you're going to fill our free brain space because today we're going to talk about building a money team. And if a photographer is coming into this conversation cold, they're thinking, a money team. What do you mean by a money team?

Well, I talk about it in my book Dancing with Numbers. Grow a financially healthy business and choreograph the life that you want. See dance is in there. I talk about every business at every stage in their growth life cycle should have certain people on their money team, right? To manage their business. We're talking about the business versus the person when you start. So there's five stages of a business's life cycle. There's the existence, right? You just started your business. There's the survival. So we're existing, but we're struggling a little bit to build traction and customers, consistent customers. There is success, there is growth, and there is maturity, right? In these five stages, there's a different financial strategy of focus. So in the beginning and all throughout your business, you got to pay taxes. So you have to make sure you have that CPA certified public accountant or enrolled agent, someone doing the accounting to make sure you're compliant with the federal government, with the state and your local taxes, right? So most People start off with a CPA. A lot of people keep that same CPA for a long time. As your business becomes more complicated, there's a lot more transactions, there's a lot more money coming in, money going out. You're paying different things, you're running payroll. You may even take on a loan or a credit card. You may take on investor capital. Somebody needs to be organizing all of those transactions into an accounting system under the accounting principles, so that you can look at a financial report and start to make decisions about your business. Now the person that starts to do that is typically a bookkeeper. Sometimes, your CPA can be your bookkeeper. But once your business gets to a certain stage, I believe that your bookkeeper should be somebody that's separate from the CPA, whether that's a full-time bookkeeper or, or a part-time bookkeeper. But I believe that person should be separate from the CPA. So the CPA provides a check and balance around tax time to make sure the numbers make sense. But the bookkeeper is with you more on a regular basis, monthly basis. They're probably doing the accounting, the bookkeeping. They're probably also helping you with payroll. They're probably helping you with invoicing and paying bills, you know, through ACH. So they're generally like a, they could be considered like a Director of Finance or they're overseeing your Accounting team. That's usually what a bookkeeper is doing. And so that's where you're in like your success phase. And you really need to understand how your financials are doing, how you're managing costs, how you're managing cash flow. Now when you get to like the growth and mature phase, you're really thinking about how do I strategically grow this business? You've generated some revenue, you've gotten to a place where probably you're profitable, and you're like, how do I take this business to the next level? How do I scale it? And now you have three or four different ideas for growth. And instead of just moving on intuition and gut, it's better that you have someone put some numbers around those ideas to help you figure out which direction makes most sense to go in, which one is going to be the most profitable direction. That's when you start to need a CFO, a Chief Financial Officer. And you don't need a full-time CFO once you get to maybe, I don't know, a million, 2 million, but you need somebody, a part time CFO to give you that level of strategic guidance. And then a CFO can also help you when you have to get access to capital. When you got to be ready for a lender or an investor, you need to make sure you have certain financials in a data room ready. You want somebody to help you communicate your narrative to other finance people because Finance is a completely different language, like learning Spanish or French. And so sometimes it's easier when a finance person is talking to another finance person. They understand how to communicate to each other. And then the other way that we can support as fractional CFOs, because I run a fractional CFO business, is with exit or any kind of merger and acquisition activity, again, that's in like the growth maturity stage. But if you're planning to exit your business, right, if you're growing and scaling the business with the intention of exiting, the first thing that a buyer is going to do is crack open the numbers. And what are you going to do if you don't have the financials ready, organized in a form that makes financial sense? Right? And so I'm sharing this with you and I think people need to add those different people as their business grows to their money team so that you're not waiting for a crisis in order to hire the right person. Because by then, it's more expensive for you to fix the problem and get things in order. And that's what I find. I find of a lot of prospective clients that come to us are trying to hire a fractional CFO or a bookkeeper or something like that when there's a crisis, when they're trying to get a loan and they realize, oh, my God, I can't get a loan. When their cash is a little smaller and they're like, I have cash flow issues. I don't know how to figure out what's going on in my business. Or they wake up tomorrow and they say, I'm tired, I'm done, I'm ready to retire. Well, it takes at least two to five years to really prepare your business and yourself for sale. And you want to make sure you optimize your company value for sale. And I firmly believe that one of the things you want to optimize in preparation for sale is your financial core. You want to make sure the systems are correct. You want to make sure you have the right people or persons managing your numbers. And you want to make sure you have all the financial reports and that you're looking profitable, you're looking cash flow positive, you're looking solvent, you're looking healthy as a business because who's going to be attracted to an entity that doesn't look like that, right? And so a good financial team, a good accounting team will really help business owners that want to grow, scale, and exit successfully. And that's what we do at Fincore. My company is Fincore. We're a fractional CFO and accounting services company and that's what we help growth minded, coachable business owners to do.

So let me ask a question to make sure I understand this. So the money team will evolve as we go through the five different stages of business. So I got that. The bookkeeper is where we would probably start. We would add in a CPA and then get to a CFO or fractional CFO. Does that sound right?

I'm going to reverse that. We all start with a CPA because we got to have a CPA. Uncle Sam wants their money, so we all start with a CPA. Then we'd add a bookkeeper. And sometimes the bookkeeper is also the accountant or within the accounting firm. That's how usually people start. But I believe so that there are checks and balances that at some point you're going to want your bookkeeper available to you monthly on a more regular basis and you're going to want them to do more things. So at some point, it's better to hire a bookkeeper that's separate from the CPA. The only third reason why I think that that is important is because I've heard from so many business owners who have a CPA or accountant that's also doing the bookkeeping. Whenever they're ready to look at their financials, they never have access to it because the CPA might keep the QuickBooks on their desktop. So the business owner doesn't have ready access to their financials. If they're going for a loan, a line of credit, they need their financials, they have to go to the CPA. The CPA takes two, three, six months to get them the financial reports that they need. And so I believe that every CEO should have ready access to their financials, whether it's QuickBooks or it's Xero or is it FreshBooks, whatever accounting system, they should have online ready access to their books.

So we have a CPA and then a bookkeeper and a fractional CFO eventually. How do we know when to go to the fractional CFO? Is that when we're facing a big decision, when we hit a certain dollar threshold? Both?

So I typically–and by the way, I'm going to say that there are other people that you can add to the money team, but it depends on your type of business. So let me answer your question and then talk about the additional people. So, to answer your question directly, I believe that a business is ready for a fractional CFO, I'm seeing typically within the $1 to $2 million mark. They're starting to be ready and also can afford. Right? I want to make sure that people are not like sinking their ship trying to afford a fractional CFO. But at that stage is when business owners are like solidified in the product or service they're selling. They have some repeat customers. They probably have a team that they're working with. So there's a little more complexity. They probably have a bunch of projects or they're selling various different products and SKUs in different channels. They may have assets that they've invested in also in the business. So there's a bit more complexity. And now they're trying to grow to the next level. A new location, new geography, add a technology. There's something bigger in terms of their growth and scale that requires understanding how the current business has been performing. And then is that business prepared to take on the next level of growth? Because growth sucks cash. And so whether you have to have someone help you figure out are you going to pay for it yourself? Is the business going to pay for it? If it's not, are we going to go to lenders, are we going to go to alternative lenders, are we going to go to investors? And those three different parties want three different things. And you want to make sure that you have the projections, the current financial strength, and someone to help you communicate your narrative. So that's usually what is going on in the business at that time. And also, business owners are ready to expand their team. So the first question they start to ask themselves is, okay, I want to grow in these areas. How can I grow? But then two is how can I afford or can I afford to hire additional people or senior people? Now, your business is so complex. Now you need a director of. Right? And then when you start to hire those people, those are like big five-figure, six-figure people. So now the business owner wants to know, can my payroll afford that? That's usually when I start to hear that question. One of the bigger challenges. That and preparing for growth because they're going for some sort of access to capital.

Learning more about the later stages of a money team, fractional CFOs in particular. It's fascinating to me that a fractional CFO may give guidance or input on what to do next based off the facts of these are the dollars that are coming in. These are the things that we're seeing in the numbers as opposed to here's a coach or a consultant that might have ideas or opinions. Like it seems like the CFO is working with their hands on the data. Like this is what the numbers are showing us. This might be the right way forward. It just seems like two different ways of making a future decision. It's really interesting.

Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I do want to clarify something. We have been in business for 10 years, coming up in February. I have noticed in the past five years, a lot of other non-finance people saying they're fractional CFOs, right? So I find more CPAs and more bookkeepers saying they're fractional CFOs. And I've gotten complaints from business owners that they're not in a strategic, forward-thinking mindset. So I want to clarify. Accounting and Finance are two different subject matters, right? And they're two different functions. And the average person who is not in the world of business does not realize that, and a Finance person needs accounting to be right in order for us to do our job. Think of Legos, the building blocks of a Lego. You cannot build the house unless you have the right pieces. Accounting are the pieces. Everything you do within a business shows up on a financial statement. Everything you do, from buying a pencil to paying a credit card, to paying yourself as the business owner. Everything shows up on the financial statements. Accounting is responsible for putting every action into a bucket according to these principles and standards. That is accounting. And then it produces these reports. So accountants typically deal with the past and the present. The data that you have in front of you. That's the mind frame they come from. Finance people are more imaginative and creative. So we will take those financial reports and we'll say, what's the tea leaves tell us? What are these numbers telling us about this business? Where is it strong? Where is it weak? Where are there areas of improvement? Where do I need additional information? Because this number over here doesn't make sense. This trend doesn't make sense. I need to ask additional questions. We're a little more investigatory into the numbers. And then from that starting point, if we're thinking for the future, finance people typically come up with the assumptions. What are the revenue assumptions? If you want to Grow to X number or X profit in three years, what are some of the revenue assumptions we need to make? What are some expense assumptions? How are we going to leverage debt in order to finance from a cash flow perspective, this thing if there's no profit? So, a finance person takes the numbers that you have in your hand and leverages their imagination and not random things, right? We come up with some guess, some educated guesses on what future can look like, and we discuss it with the business owner. It is really important to have a business plan in order for a CFO to really do their job. A projection is a numerical representation of your plan. So if I ask the business owner, okay, where do you want to be next year? And they are at 3 million, they're like, okay, I want to be at 6 million. I go, how do you want to get there? And they don't know. I have no place to start. I can't put assumptions around I don't know. But if you're like, okay, we're going to go to this customer segment and we think we could get 50% of that market, and we're going to open a location and we think we could get 20%, now we have something to work with, you know? So that is the difference between a Finance person and Accounting person. So what I would tell everyone out there, when you are interviewing for a fractional CFO–I just explained when you are ripe for a fractional CFO–but when you're hiring a fractional CFO, ask them their experience not in accounting, audit, and tax. Ask them their experience in finance, in projections, in growing a business, in growth and scaling of business. Ask them about their experience doing that, doing projections. Because then they will get more clarity on is this really a fractional CFO or is this an accounting person that's just going to give me advice on the numbers I have in my hand? Clear.

No, it helps a lot. You look so excited when you had that imaginary scenario of something to work with. Oh, I got something to work with. You must love doing this for people.

I do, I do. So there's a book that I read called the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. Love that, great book. So there are a couple of books that I like because, you know, they said some profound stuff in there. But anyway, he has an exercise and he basically talks about the four zones where we kind of live and exist, right? And it's the zone of incompetence, the zone of competence, zone of excellence, and then a zone of genius. And his whole point of his book is try to get to the zone of genius. Like you want to work in your zone of genius. And I did the exercise and you can google the exercise in the four quadrants. And when I did the exercise, my zone of excellence is in dissecting spreadsheets and looking at numbers and analyzing like what do the tea leaves say? I really like that. And to me it reminds me of like when I was a kid doing a 250- or 500-piece puzzle because you're trying to figure out where the pieces go and what fits and problem solving. Right? That's in my zone of excellence. Zone of competence, I could do book–can I do bookkeeping? Yes. This doesn't challenge me. But my zone of genius is in teaching and empowering business owners. And that's why I do a lot of speaking around financial management. That's why I will be speaking to those at Imaging conference. But I'm able to take a language like finance and make it digestible and make it, you know, a little more fun, which is why my whole motto is I want business owners to have a fun, engaging, exciting, empowering relationship with their numbers so they can dance with their numbers. Right? How do you feel when you dance? You might feel hesitant at first, but eventually it feels good, especially when you practice over and over. So yeah, there is excitement.

But not all business owners feel that way. Some don't want to look at the numbers, some avoid them, some believe it's nothing but bad things or expense. They don't really embrace maybe the opportunity in the numbers. I would imagine that's a part of your teaching to help them shift their mindset around the numbers and money in general.

So it's interesting. So I would never call myself a money mindset coach or a therapist. In fact, there's a whole group of people out there called financial therapists. There is Financial Therapy Association by the way. I happen to know the current president of Financial Therapy Association. So if that is your thing and you have is-ness so struggles, challenges, disruptive money beliefs, then I would recommend, you know, searching for financial therapists. But I do speak empowerment. I do encourage people to get educated around their numbers. I believe honestly that a lot of business owners, there are many things that could hold us back because entrepreneurship is hard. Right? And we all don't come in here with all the skills that we need, and it's not our favorite thing to do. I remember sales wasn't my favorite thing to do. But you're the CEO, like you got to get over yourself, you got to do the thing. But I think that a lot of people get held back from growth or experience constrained performance because of their lack of awareness around their numbers and lack of comfort around their numbers. So whatever you gotta do to get out of that ugly place, if you have a poor relationship to your numbers, I believe that everyone needs to work on strengthening their financial core and that, you know, our company Fincore is short for financial core, because we believe that you need a strong financial core to be at peak performance in the same way that dancers and athletes need a strong physical core to be at peak performance. Now some people are great at sales, like that is their thing. But you could be great at sales and bring in a lot of top line revenue, but then that revenue does not trickle down to the bottom line. You end up spending a bunch of revenue. Cash is flowing out, cash is leaking everywhere. You brought in the money; you're not really sure how you spent the money. I don't know how many business owners, I hear like, we made 2 million, a million, half a million dollars. I don't know where all the money went. Like, how do you not know where the money went? That's because you're not paying attention to the other numbers that are important. Revenue is not the only number to pay attention to. So I know everyone does, they pay attention to revenue. I think it's important. They pay attention to their bank account. Yes, that's important. But those two things alone do not tell you how your business is doing. So I would encourage people to get my book, get into some financial education classes, get with a financial therapist, whatever you need to do to enlighten your mindset and shift your mindset and your curiosity around numbers. I implore and encourage everyone to do. In fact, I do this LinkedIn Live monthly and I interview business owners who are like self-proclaimed non numbers people and they've grown multi-million dollar businesses or they've sold their business. And for every person I asked this question because I asked the business owners that I interviewed for my book, there's like 20 business owner stories in my book. I asked them, what was your earliest childhood memory around money? What was the lesson and who taught it to you? And a lot of people never really think about what they learned about money in their childhood and how that is impacting their current thinking around money. You did not just start a business. And all of a sudden I don't really like looking at my numbers, I don't like looking at my statements like that didn't just happen upon you. Somewhere along the line, you got negative messaging around numbers and money. And many times it is from childhood, and I heard from a financial therapist that by seven years old, our mindset around money is formed by seven.

Wow.

So a good starting place for anyone listening to this for you to think about, why do I feel the way I feel around money and numbers if it's a negative thing? Very good starting places. Think back to your earliest memories of money. And most people can think about it, like right away. The story comes in their head. What was the messaging, what was the lesson, and who taught it to you? And then the next step is bring that thought forward. And where is that same mindset and thought pattern showing up in your business and in your life? And you might make a connective dot.

Yeah.

And I did this exercise with somebody. We were talking about financial leadership, something. And I went off topic because I just felt like this woman needed like a little bit of a therapy session. Again, I am not a financial therapist or a money mindset coach. But I felt she, like she needed a little support. And I asked her the question, and she got very vulnerable in the space, and there were other supportive business owners there, other women there. And then I can see her drop into that age and what the story was. And I told her to talk about it. And as she talked about, she was like, I never connected the dots between that and this. Right? The issue was, I don't like to see the financial reports because I'm scared I'm going to see ups and downs. Business has ups and downs. That's what it does. Right? But how you interpret that is going to be impacted by what your mindset is around things. So somewhere in her childhood, she saw ups and downs with money and her parents, and the impact that had on the family and her mom or whatever. Right? So she's bringing that forward into her business. And so she has some negative thoughts around numbers going up and down and seeing ups and downs. And I'm like, at some point, hopefully you work towards detaching that past feeling from what a business normally does, which is go up and down financially.

If this part of the conversation has you going, yes, yes, that's how I–yes, and you want to have a better relationship with your numbers, you need to come see Tricia at Imaging USA. Tell us about your talk for the Bridging The Gap series because we're gonna. You're gonna cover this stuff. It's gonna be great.

Yeah, I'm gonna cover some of this. There's so much that I can cover. But the topic is dancing with numbers, right? So we're gonna talk about five ways. Maybe I'll throw in a bonus or two, but five ways that business owners can dance with their numbers. And I'm gonna give just some practical advice. But now, talking to you, I think I might have to throw a mindset thing in there.

Oh, yeah, I think.

I think I might have to throw a mindset point in there. So, yeah, how can you get to dancing with your numbers if you don't already do that? Oh, and here's something that I often hear. Well, I'm good at math, so I understand the math. So I don't understand why this is so hard. Well, listen, if I had majored in Math at the University of Pennsylvania, my GPA would have been way better than it was. But I majored in Finance, and like I said before, Finance is completely different language than Math. Completely different.

If we don't want to wait till imaging to learn from you, how do we get a copy of the book?

You can get a copy of the book on Amazon. I also narrated it on Audible. For those of you who, like me, prefer to listen on long drives and, you know, hear the inflection in the voice and things like that, it's on Audible. That's how you can get the book. There's also an e-book. So, like, there's different versions. Some people like the hardcover versus the soft cover. I got all the versions for you because I was like, if I'm going to write a book and this is it, we're going to do all the forms and all the versions, but if they want to, you know, reach me, connect with me, I'm also on Instagram. We're on Instagram @fincorestrong. That's fin, like Fincore, like financial core, @fincorestrong. And then on LinkedIn, it's just my name, Tricia M. Taitt. It has a unique spelling, so you might want to watch this video in order to get the spelling. But I am on LinkedIn.

Great conversation. Can't wait to see you at Imaging. Tricia, thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Thank you very much. And I look forward to seeing everyone. Oh, last thing. My website, fincorestrong.com. I don't know how I forgot that. I look forward to seeing you all in Nashville.

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Professional Photographer Podcast. Now do us a favor, leave a comment on the show and tell us what Trisha said that made you go, huh? Okay, now I know what that means. Or hey, Trisha, I'm still confused about the thing. That's what the comment section is all about. Also, we'd love it if you would like and subscribe to the show so you don't miss an episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. One more thing, if you're not yet a member of Professional Photographers of America, you are truly missing out. PPA offers incredible resources like equipment insurance, top-notch education, and a supportive community of photographers ready to help you succeed. It's perfect for photographers who are serious about growing their business in a sustainable and profitable way. At PPA, you belong here. Discover more about membership at ppa.com. That's ppa.com. I'm Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community and your host of the show. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you right here next time. Take care.