In this episode of The Hero Show, we delve into the art and science of system building and how it can be harnessed to achieve success. Our guest highlights the unique skill of system building and emphasizes the importance of understanding how to create effective systems that can transform a small business into a big business. Whether it's bookkeeping systems, marketing systems, or employment systems, building effective systems is a critical aspect of growing a company.

Our guest, Nathan Jenson, has been helping small businesses drive profitability for over a decade by providing clients with clear insight into the metrics that drive performance. Through data-driven insights, businesses can identify the actions needed to improve profits and cash flow and achieve success.

However, system building is a unique skill that not everyone possesses, and many people don't realize its power in growing a business. Our guest shares practical tips on how to develop this skill and highlights the importance of getting someone in to help build effective systems.

Join us as we unleash the power of system building through data-driven insights and learn how it can transform your personal and professional life.

Hello, and welcome back to the Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews, and today I have [00:01:00] the pleasure of having Nathan Jenson on the line. Nathan, are you there?

I am here.

Awesome. So glad to have you here. Nathan, I know we were talking before, you're calling in from Utah in the middle of our yearly blizzard here in the US.

How's that going for you?

You know, not as bad as in the east. We've been reading the stories. We got a light snow. We can still drive. We can still, my son's out shoveling the walks right now, actually, so.

You didn't get the 50 inches of snow that Buffalo got. They had to shut down the whole city or whatever.

No, no, we could use it. Utah needs the water, but I don't know if I want it that badly yet.

Yeah. I was like, we're in Florida right now and, you know, I was hoping to skip winter this year by staying in Florida and it still got cold here. My pipes froze the other day and I was like, well, dang it.

That is crazy. Crazy Florida.

Yeah, so. It's definitely cold. So what I wanna do before we get too far into this is talk a little bit about who you are and then we'll get into your story.

So here's my question. Are you, and maybe I don't you'll talk about this. Are you talking like marketing KPIs, financial KPIs, all of the above. Like where is your expertise there in numbers?

So I'm first and foremost a management accountant. I actually graduated from college. I got a bachelor's degree in marketing and I sucked at it. I was not good in that space at all. I couldn't find a good job and I sort of stumbled into accounting and so, when I went back, I started doing some bookkeeping just cause I happened to know how to use QuickBooks.

So I took two classes and every day I would come back to work having been to that class. And I'm like, I had no idea you could do this with accounting. And I was like, I was energized. I'm like, there's so much information here. Right. And so for me anyway, that's kinda where it started. And I went deeper and deeper into accounting, obviously.

But for me, if you know your numbers and you know, the actions that those numbers tell you, you should take. Business becomes a very simple science, right? It's just, here's the number, here's the action. We just move forward. And so it may relate to marketing, it may relate to staffing and labor, it may relate to sales, it may relate to any part of the business.

For me, it's all in the numbers somewhere. And that's gonna tell us what we need to do.

That's amazing. So what I wanna start off with is, what is it that known for today? Right? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

But a lot of them opted to add on our CFO services as well. And that, for me, that's really where business gets exciting because a bookkeeper is kind of a necessary cost, right? You have to record stuff, you have to get those day-to-day things done. But you have the option of having a CFO or, you know, spending some money to improve your profitability.

And for the people who did that, it's so exciting for me to be able to go in and tell someone, Hey, based on this, you need to make this change and this change. And then see them do it, you know, make those changes and then they're making more money. It's very gratifying.

Yeah.

My first goal is to figure out how to make the company more profitable. And I was like, I've been looking at like, I think the first thing that I need to do is hire, and I don't know if the, what the right term is, but how to do what you're talking about.

Look at the numbers on sale.

Yeah.

How do we make this company more profitable than it is?

Yeah.

And as like because I, have the feeling just from looking at all the numbers, that we could probably double the profitability of the company and not change a whole lot. I don't know if that's true.

There's going to be things that are obvious. I like to well, and I'll obviously point those out, but I like to focus on just what is your, the day-to-day stuff. You don't have to have a big transaction, like a merger to be able to look at your numbers and say, okay, I've been running this business for three years, or at this level, why have I not become more profitable?

You've probably seen this, Richard, is there are a lot of companies who will double their revenue and not move their profit at all. Right.

And for me, I like going into a company like that who they're like, we're growing and growing, but nothing's really changing and finding those efficiencies in the numbers to say, here's why you're growing, but you're not making any more money and often you're working twice as hard.

Yeah . So there's a lot to learn on the financial side of growing a business.

Yeah. And the entrepreneurs are the dreamers and the visionaries who they have the big ideas.

Yeah. The big ideas, and we need to have people like you who come in and be like, Hey, here, let's look at the actual data. You're like, oh, that's a good thing to do.

Yeah. Yep.

So I wanna talk about your origin story, like how you got into the space of doing, you know a fractional CFO work, essentially.

Right. And you know, we talk on this show, every good comic book hero has an origin story. It's the thing that made them into the hero they are today, and we wanna hear that story. Were you bit, you know, by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into CFO or did you you know, starting a job and eventually become an entrepreneur?

Basically? How'd you get here?

Yeah, well, I wasn't bitten by a radioactive accountant. My,

Probably, that'd be unpleasant, I imagine.

But I knew at that age that I wanted to start my own business. And I felt like in doing that there would be leverage. I felt like there would be you know, the potential for more freedom. And, I was just, driven to start a business. And so I started a window cleaning business, right? Doesn't take a ton of start-up know how to get going in something like that.

But I learned very quickly that knowing how to clean a window is not the same as knowing how to run a business. I hired staff, didn't know much about hiring people, but I knew I needed help. I took on some debt. I didn't know anything about finance at the time, and I just knew I needed some money to make payroll, things like that.

And at the time it was devastating, right? I was 20, 23 or 24, had continued going to school. So I'd gotten a little more college, but it was just, you know, it felt like a failure. It felt like a loser. I was, you know, I lost any financial head start that I may have had when my wife and I got married.

You know, I took that money, used it in my business, and it was gone. And so we were starting, kind of starting over and I felt like, oh, I've wasted this time, I've wasted this money. And I felt deep down that I was never going to be able to climb out of that place, right? That I, was never gonna have the success that I wanted because I'd hamstring myself so badly on that first experience.

So I'm in my late twenties. In fact, Richard, if I can share with you a low point for me, I was 28 years old. And I don't know if it was me or the job market at the time or what, but I, couldn't find a job. I, ended up taking a paper route at 28 years old.

Wow.

I remember thinking, okay, I had the same job when I was 12.

What am I doing wrong? Right. And so if you can imagine kind of that, pit of despair where it's like, am I just destined to, you know, be a failure, kind of be at this professional point my whole life? Well anyway, I went to school, got my bachelor's. Like I said, I was, I got my bachelor's in marketing, couldn't find a job, and even in marketing, even having a bachelor's degree that would pay me anything.

Lo and behold, there's a lot of people that need bookkeepers because there are not a lot of people that like to do bookkeeping. And so I picked up another job, and that was the guy who paid for me to go back to school. And once I went back to school, I fell in love with those classes. Like again, the managerial accounting and the cost accounting and just the insight, the decision making information that those, you know, those accounting principles could give a business owner.

And I knew very well because those were the principles that I had lacked when I had started my first two businesses. And if I'd had those skills, I may have done, you know, the story may have been different. But anyway, I went and I got my CMA, certified management accountants, went back to school, got my master's in forensic accounting.

Why am I gonna like walk away from this to try and start something new? So I stayed, with that businessing. A few years later, I sold it. Then about a year after that I started another one, which was bookkeeping, controllership, CFO and that's really where I've been ever since. And I just, you know, bookkeeping, like I said, it's kind of that necessary.

I don't know if I wanna say it's a necessary evil, but, it's necessary for businesses. Controllerships a necessary thing. But I really love when I'm able to get in that CFO space and say, look, change this, change this, change this. And boom, you're making money and you have cash in the bank.

That's a wonderful story. It reminds me of something I was listening to a book by Robert Kiyosaki, I think it's called, Who Took My Money, and he talks about the context of your working life. And you know, he's like, quarter one is, you know, from 20 to 30, quarter two is 30 to 40, quarter three is 30 to 40.

And where's, like, he might be doing it for like 45, but like quarter four is like from 45 to 60 or something like that. And he is like, and so it strikes me as like you went through like the first quarter of your working life, like getting pounded by the other team,

Yeah. Totally. Yes I did.

But it,

Yes. I did.

It doesn't have to end there, right? Like you still have the second quarter and the third quarter and the fourth quarter to recoup and make a comeback and really figure out how to get your financial life in order. And take the lessons you learned in the first quarter and, change it.

Yeah. And I tell you, Richard, there seriously was a point where I was resigned to being just like, okay, I'm gonna have the 40 hour week job making, you know, at best lower middle class income. That's just who I am. And it was sometime after I failed my first business, and I don't remember how long that lasted, but it was, you know, I had to get through the pain, get through the emotional side of things a little bit.

And that's what I found on my third business. Right. I sold my third one for more than I lost on my first two combined. So by my third one, I was ahead of the game. And then it just gets better from there.

Yeah, I was like you can fail a lot in business and once.

You're fine, right?

You're fine. You totally win once. It's one of those, the consistent effort pays in the entrepreneurship because you're exactly right. When you win, you can, for lack of a better term, you can win for good.

Yeah. No, that's totally right. And then when you win for good, the foundation that you're on at that point is an amazing place to start the next thing, or, you know, do whatever else is next in your life.

You can take bigger risks, right? And try for harder things. There's a reason why people like Elon Musk are starting businesses and buying businesses, doing things you know, he won for good a long time ago.

Yeah. No kidding.

He can do those kind of things cause he's got one, right? He's one for good for in his world. But that's the kind of thing that I was like, I just use him cause he's a big example that people know. But that happens all the times in business.

Yep.

People you know, try a couple of things fail.

I failed the first couple of things I did too, right?

Yeah. I think most of us do.

Yeah.

Yeah. But the thing is, it's not just about like getting to a secure financial place so you can then start your next business. I think it's getting to a good financial place, so then you can do what speaks to you, you know? I, so for example, I could go and start another bookkeeping business, but I don't love that piece of it anymore.

I do love the CFO piece, the advisory piece. And so that's what I'm focusing because just because I can, and that's what I want.

You're like, you know what I wanna do? I wanna be fractional CFO for businesses that I enjoy working with, and I wanna see their value survive. And if they had a CFO they could and they could thrive. Right. That's a message.

Yeah.

Right.

When you're starting new and you don't have much to stand on, you take anybody and you extend terms and you do whatever you have to do to get the business in the door and to be able to say, you know what?

I just don't feel like this is a good fit. I don't think we're gonna work well together. I think, you know, maybe here's even two or three other people you could work with besides me. I think you should try them. That is the most liberating thing of all.

Absolutely. I run a full service podcasting agency, right? So we do content marketing and help people really get their message out and build strategic influence which is super fun. And I have a rule that if people don't say, shut up and take my money, that I don't work with them, because like, that's the way I want my relationships to be, right?

I want to be at that level where they're like, yep, that's amazing. That's exactly what I need in my business.

Yeah.

If that's not they want, then we're not a good fit.

Perfect example.

You can choose that.

Yeah. And then you do business for a long time and it's a profitable relationship for both parties. You're not like worried the client's gonna go away because you're not providing what they need. You are what they need.

Yeah. Because when you tell them, it was like, Hey, the problem we solve and here's how we solve it. And they go, yep, shut up. Take my money. You're like, oh, that's a good place to be in. Right. And I remember, you know, 10, 15 years ago, being in that spot where I was like, people be like, can you do this?

And I'd be like, maybe. Right. I can learn, I can figure it out.

I can figure out

If it means yes, then I'll figure it out.

Absolutely.

That's a much different place to be in than we're at now. So, yeah. And a lot of that comes from, well, failing a lot.

My, one of my favorite books is Think and Grow Rich, and he's got what, 11 chapters or 13 chapters or something where he explains a principle of getting rich. And I can boil that book down into kind of one idea and that you just, you become obsessed with whatever it is, right? Whether it's, you know, success in your business or in finding money.

Some other way is you think about it a lot and you keep going and you keep going, you keep thinking about it and you, you talk about it. And as long, like if it's always top of mind and it's always what you're driving towards, you're going to find a way. It's going to, you know, might be hard. You might fail sometimes, but if you just keep at it, you will get there.

Yeah. It's the whole concept of just like success really is about not giving up.

And it's like, I wish it was more complicated than that, but it's really not.

Right. It's simple, but it's not easy. Right. It's like.

Yeah.

Just keep going. Right?

Maybe at some point you need to lay down and lick your wounds and take a paper route for a bit.

But get,

I didn't do that, but it was a very humbling experience for me, for sure.

Yeah. I was like, I did something similar. Mine was a different, I took a different route, but I realized that I was not a great business owner.

A marketing agency, we were doing good work. I was getting good results for my clients, but what I was doing a good job of is running a business.

Right, yeah.

I didn't, know how to do the finances and I didn't know how to do the delegation, and I didn't know how to do both the service delivery and the marketing at the same time. So I would be like, do marketing until I got a client and then stop the marketing and then that client would be, finish their contract and I have to go back to marketing.

So I was bad at the business part.

Yeah.

And I was direct reporting to the president of the company and sitting on the sea level executive table with a bunch of other really successful people. And I spent 18 months with them just learning how they run a business. And it was clear about that with them. I was like, I'm coming here to one, knock your socks up with my marketing skills, but also like I make no bones about it.

I'm learning from you how you run a business because I don't know how. And I spent 18 months with them and 10X their lead flow on the marketing side, cause that's my skillset. And then, you know, every week I sat down with president of the company and learned why he makes the decisions he does with hiring and firing and how he talks to the other people in his team and how he gets them to do the things that he wants and how he delegates and why they delegate and all those kinds of things.

You do have to know stuff, don't you? You know, one of the great opportunities that I had is having worked with so many clients is I have learned so much. I've watched, you know, over 50 people run a business. Some of them are amazing at it, some of them were terrible at it. And it's so great to see the different examples, to be able to compare and just kind of, you know, not judge or critique, but just kind of silently take notes and be like, okay, I wanna be like that guy.

Yeah of work. Right? I don't wanna be like that guy. Why in the world if he do that? That doesn't, that was a bad outcome. I'm glad it's his money, not mine. But yeah, so to be able to see business after business after business. This last company I sold, actually about half our client think were marketing companies.

And watching other people and learning from other people is probably the best way to do that.

Yeah. I said there's two ways you can learn things, right? You can either stick your hand on the fire and learn that it's hot, or you can watch your brother stick his hand on the fire and learn that it's hot from him. It's like you can get the lesson both ways. One of them is more painful than the other. Might stick longer though.

It might stick. Yeah. Well the memories I have from failing my first business are so burned into my mind. I'll be honest, if you ask me, Hey, would you go back and change it? You know, change what you did? I don't know if I would, because I learned so much. It was so painful and I wouldn't wanna do it again.

But the failure, truly what?

But you wouldn't change it if you had the opportunity.

So.

Was painful, but yeah.

What I wanna talk about next, is the superpowers that you might have developed over the course of your career. Right? So every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that's their fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky, or you know, super strength.

In the real world heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or that you developed over time that energize all your other skills, right? And this superpower is what sets you apart, allows you to help your people slay their villains, come on top of their journeys.

And the way that I like to frame it is, if you look at all the skills that you developed over the course of your career, there's probably a common thread that you see coming up time and time again that are tying all those skills together that sort of energize everything else.

Mm-hmm.

With that framing , what do yo think your superpower is?

And it's that simple. Just what are the numbers telling me to do? And from, for me to be able to interpret that is, I guess that's, that's my first superpower. And I'll give you an example. When I sold my business and I was training the new team on how I did things, the one of the key people taking over my position.

And who, you know, she'd meet regularly with the clients and say, here's what we're seeing in your numbers and here's what you should do about it. And so forth. She had been in accounting for, I wanna say about 10 years, mostly in tax. And the need that she had to keep coming back to me to say, okay, now here's what I'm seeing, but I don't know what to tell them to do.

Yeah.

it's not.

That's a powerful skill.

Like I've been in it so long, it's obvious to me, right?

But to other people they really need to think about it. They really need to understand it and, and maybe hear it again and again. Anyway, second thing, second superpower is bookkeeping processes. I'm very good at understanding. What we're collecting the data for in the first place, right? Cause I'm always thinking about the reporting piece and how do we set up a system and not just get a good person, but how do we actually set up a system so the bookkeeping is done efficiently and it's timely and it's correct, and it's easy to take the data from QuickBooks or wherever and report on those.

So developing a bookkeeping process to get to that data for me is 95% of the battle. And so I've gotten really good at creating those kinds of systems.

That's really interesting. I like the first one where you're talking about like, it's a skillset you've developed in accounting.

So and that's interesting. But I think the second one is actually a more potent skill, and I'll tell you the reason why. And the reason why is, I think as a CEO.

One of the most important C-level like CEO level jobs is understanding the systems behind the business, and build the systems. And if you can build the systems and build the documentation, build the teams and everything that build the systems, the systems are what run the business. That's what separates a small B business from a big B business

Yeah.

And that I think it's such a unique skill and not a lot of people realize either that they have it or how to develop it or how you get someone in that can help you build those systems. But it's such an skill to actually growing a company.

Yeah. So for most people we call you know, systems or processes. In accounting, there's actually a specific term for it. We call it internal controls. And an internal control is something you set up that says, this is how we do the work. Right? It's done, you know, it's in a policy and procedures manual or it's in a software that requires it be done a certain way.

You've gotta have those controls. Cause even with good people, if you get to the point, just as an example where you have two accountants in your office, you know, maybe bookkeeper and controller, and if they're both great at their jobs, both have wildly different ideas of how things should be categorized.

You've gotta have both.

Yeah, absolutely. So I like both of those as superpowers, but systems building is, man, it's such an overlooked and misunderstood. A skillset and superpowers.

See, and I don't know how to build a business without those systems. I'll tell you what we use, it was very simple and we used multiple software products, but we used one called Asana, which is like a project management system. And it was essentially just a really. Robust to-do list, right? So when you're keeping somebody's books, you wanna make sure they're reconciled frequently.

I don't know how you'd do it without them. We use click up, similar kind of thing to Asana to run our podcasting agency. And it's like, you know, new episode comes in and it creates a task and, you know, it gets assigned to the right person. And each episode has a whole subset of all the things that need to, you know, need to happen to it, including customer communication and guest communications and, you know, the video editor's work and the audio editors work and the transcriber's work and the written editor's work and the graphic design work, all of it is just, it's all listed and put together and like, when it needs to happen and how it needs to happen.

And communication all happens at one place. I don't know how it without the systems, because

No.

you wouldn't be able to scale.

Yeah. And that's what it is. It's scalability. You cannot grow past a certain point if it's all reliant on the business owner to make sure everything's happening. Right.

Yeah,

And I don't necessarily have to die from getting hit by the bus, but like I spent a few months in the hospital, will I come back to a business that's still growing and thriving or not?

yeah,

that's where I'm looking at. You know, my business still doesn't pass the bus test. I'm working on.

Yeah. But let's

I need to put in place.

Sure, but it doesn't have to be a bus, right? It's if you ever wanna sell your business, if you ever wanna retire, if you ever want to step into a less involved role, the only way to do that is with building good systems.

Yeah. And it's I was like, I know if you're selling the business, they have something they call, what do they call, I think it's called the golden handcuffs. It's like you get paid well for your business, but you're still stuck cause you have to help the new business owner run the business cause you don't

Yeah.

Put in place.

You have to teach them all the systems. You have to

Mm-hmm.

into them.

Right. And that's, you know what, I think that there's no way to win there because if you help them grow the business, you're sitting there for three years thinking those profits could have been mine.

And if they just sort of stay stagnant, I'm sure it's not a very pleasant situation in being there.

Yeah. It's like a no win. So like, build systems, because if you ever wanna sell your business, it's gonna be vital.

Yeah. Absolutely.

The flip side of your superpower, right? So if your superpower is the building the systems and knowing what to do in the accounting world, the flip side of that is, you know, every, every Superman has their kryptonite.

Wonder woman can't remove her bracelets of victory without going mad. You probably have a flaw that's held you back in your business, something you've struggled with. For me, it was a couple of things. I struggled with perfectionism for a long time, right? Where I was like, if it's not perfect, I can't go to market with it.

And so it kept me from shipping, right? It kept me from actually getting things to market. I also struggled with lack of self-care, which mostly brought itself out in my relationship to time and boundaries with clients where I was like, you know, maybe I'll do better work if I work 90 hours a week instead of, you know, 40.

I think, gosh, I could probably give you a lot of things that I'm not good at. One of the things I struggled specifically though as a business owner was just my pride. I, in my first business, I wanted to prove to the world that I was smart enough and good enough, and I did this all on my own.

And there were times where I deliberately didn't ask for help because I wanted to be able to say, I'm self-made right. And that didn't work out very well. And what I've done to overcome that is one, first I recognized that good business owners always have advisors, other people who help them. People who, I mean, nobody.

And so, just for me, just being willing to ask for other people for help and recognize and be, you know, admit that I have weaknesses is kind of the first thing. Second one is when I tell people I'm an accountant, most people think tax right away. I don't do tax. I've never done tax. I never want to do tax.

For, and there's a couple reasons for that maybe, but one is tax is very law based, right? The, IRS or state tax commission can, you know, the laws may change and they've gotta enforce laws differently from year to year. We see new tax laws all the time. The kind of accounting that I do is principles based.

And so I'm able to focus on those things, but because I'm very focused on those things people wanna ask me a tax question, Hey, can I deduct this? Or should we do this other thing to you know, sale on taxes? I have no idea. I'm not the guy you wanna talk to about that. And I guess I shore that up by using a CPA.

I have CPA do my own taxes.

Yeah, that's interesting. I really like where you're going with the first flaw you mentioned the being self-made.

yeah.

It's interesting because I think, and I don't know how we change this, but there's this cultural perception that there's something uniquely powerful about being self-made, which is weird cause it's not true.

That should be our goal. I'm like it one, it's not any fun to be self-made and you're not going to be completely self-made.

No, it's

self-made. It's verging on traumatizing. And I was like, but community made, it's fun and you can be profitable and it's less stressful. And, you know, the whole rising tide raises all ships kind of thing.

Like community made much better than self-made.

You know what I have, this is one thing that most people don't understand when they either decide to become an entrepreneur or look at someone else who is an entrepreneur. Is they don't understand how lonely it often is. And so, you know, I've joined networking groups and things like that just to have a community of people who understand kind of what I'm going through when I'm having trouble at work.

Your, other colleagues, your peers celebrate when you do well to try and do it on your own. It's harder, it's lonelier and it honestly doesn't pay as well. So, yeah use a mastermind group.

Mastermind, be community made. My man, getting into a mastermind group was one of the best decisions I made in my business.

It what?

Yeah, and I, like I can't even tell you how much of a difference that's made. Actually I can aleast 6xat this point.

At least, 6x

At least 6x.

And it's going to get bigger and better. And a lot of the decisions and the things that we do, I can attribute directly back to specific conversations and things we've talked about in that mastermind group. So anyways,

that's a plug for, you know, getting into a community of some sort in your business.

Yeah, absolutely.

And to educate the market on the things. And I was like, when you said a whole bunch of things that are all terms that I was like, oh man, I want to know what those mean. Right? Where you said break even point and cost. I can't even know what they were, but you said all of them it like very,

Cost, volume, profit analysis.

I was like, I don't know what a cost, volume, profit analysis it is, but I want to know what a cost, volume, profit analysis is and how I should be doing them on my business and who I should hire to do them. Like if you don't have a podcast talking about that stuff yet, you should, there's my shameless plug for the day

You know what? I don't know that talking about accounting on a podcast is going to do super well. Maybe it is more, visually thing.

But the principles that could be really interesting. I was like, the only reason I was just thinking that is I was like, cause I don't know those things. Don't even have a framework for what is a cost, volume, profit analysis.

And I would love to things.

And if you do that, how does that affect sales? Right? Do our sales go up? If we drop our price, do they go up enough to improve our bottom line overall? Because you could drop your price and make more sales and still not make as much money, right? So, but it's those kind, it looks at those plays between the volume of sales, the cost of the product, price of the product, et

a supplement company for a number of years, and we were selling, you know, a traditional, I don't know, sounds like a rule that an accountant would've made up is like, Hey, it costs you $7 to fully land the product. You should sell it for $14.

Right. It's just double the margins.

So I kept raising it and I got to $35 on that product and our sales doubled. They doubled.

Really? It's kinda counterintuitive isn't it.

Yeah. So it's an interesting thing. I don't know how that, but it's the kind of thing that would fall under that cost, profit analysis.

cost of volume,

absolutely. Hey, can I tell you a quick story since you mentioned a supplement company? So one of my first jobs after I became a certified management accountant was with a supplement company. And they had multiple sales channels. They had retail, they had wholesale, they had a like custom made bulk product division.

And I went in and showed him my numbers and showed them my analysis. And I said, if you stop doing this and get rid of the resources associated with it, your profits will go up about $4,000 a month. I'm like, you don't have to sell that off. Sell the division or whatever. Just stop, right?

Just stop what you're doing. And I was there for about four years. And over those four years, he never would stop doing that. You know, shut down that sales channel. Because that's the one that his ego was most tied up in. He's one of those business owners I learned a lot from, but more about what I didn't wanna do or didn't wanna be.

But anyway, it's, yeah, for me, those numbers, it gave us a very clear path forward. Right? We need to stop what we're doing over here.

And it's a mindset or it's a flaw that they have, that you have to constantly fight to overcome. So you can actually get them the outcome that they came to you for in the first place. And if you know you had your magic wand and with client signs on the dotted liner, you could just pop 'em on the head with magic wand and not have to deal with this arch nemesis.

What is that in your world?

Gosh. And there's maybe a couple of those too. The first thing that comes to mind is they simply often, and maybe it's before they're a client, but they don't often see the value in having the knowledge that I can provide. Right. And maybe that speaks more to my ability to sell what I do rather than their ability to understand it.

It's not a necessary expense or necessary evil. It's actually an investment. There is. You are going to make more money by. Spending this money in the first place, listening to me and doing what I tell you.

Yeah, so that goes right back to what you were talking about before as people associating accounting with tax filing, right? Which is part of that necessary thing.

Yeah, tax filing or bookkeeping. Right. Just like, Hey, we have to pay someone to do this job that doesn't produce any revenue.

Oh yeah.

You start running into like, what do you call them, like roadblocks or running into to glass ceilings, so to speak. A lot of times, and I've heard this from a number of people who are very successful, they're like, Hey, when you run into a, when you run into these glass barriers, it's generally in one of two areas.

It's either in marketing and that's where you start to get into the understanding that like, hey, having a CFO, someone who understands the strategy of money, is really a powerful force.

They've been very aggressive, I guess at promoting the CFO as a strategic partner job. Not just someone who's like tracking the money, but someone who's very involved in the strategy of the business. And I adhere it out that, you know, take on it very much is the CFO should be involved at the ground level and any major decision in the company.

In small businesses. Usually what that looks like is, Hey, is it we need to hire somebody? Do we have funds to hire? What happens if we hire somebody in doing some of those you know, forecasting analysis saying, okay, if we hire somebody now at this rate, here's what happens to our profit for the rest of the year.

Are we okay with that? Or how can we mitigate maybe some of that expense? Too often I see business owners make a decision and then go to the accounting department and say, Hey, we've decided to do this, just so you know. And then the accounting department's having to figure out, Hey, do we have money to pay for it?

Yeah, which makes more sense in my head. But you know, it's also the, I wonder how much is part of the as you're growing, right? When you're hiring people and bringing people onto the team, the accountant is not the first person you think of as the next person I need to add to my payroll, right?

A lot of times you think I could help,

For sure.

With service delivery, I need to help with marketing, or I need help with whatever. Like, it's not generally I want to increase revenue as I'm growing. I need to hire an accountant. that's I talking about.

And one of the frustrations I had with my last business was we actually had a lot of people who wanted to work with us, but just couldn't afford it. Right? A fractional CFO tends to be kind of expensive because of the specialized knowledge. And so that's why with my new business, I've done everything I can to automate that analysis process so that we can get people in for a lot less than, you know, $350 an hour to do some advising.

So through software mostly, and through some training, We give people a way to have their numbers, and not even just their numbers, but like graphs and charts and targets and so forth on a dashboard right in front of them where they can say, oh, here's exactly where I'm at. Oh, can I hire somebody?

I mean, it's at their fingertips. So my goal there, I guess to overcome that nemesis is to automate as much as I can in that data analysis so that the price of entry is a lot lower than it is more traditionally.

What's your mission?

It, so I don't have a mission statement person. I probably should. But I think it honestly goes back to the kid really that I was, when I started my first business, and if I had someone there saying, Hey, just this, you know, change this, tweak this, tweak this, and you'll be all set. I wanna see other people who are, you know, in that situation I was, but then have someone whispering in their saying, Hey, you need to change this, and then you'll be in really good shape.

And like, I think I said earlier, is just seeing someone make a good decision in their business based on information that I provided them, that's very gratifying, you know, to see my client successful, it means I'm successful.

Thanks.

So, I want to talk about your tool belt, right? You know, it's practical portion of the show. Every superhero has their tool belts with their, you know, batterings and web slingers and magical laser eyes or whatever, right? I wanna talk about the top one or two tools you couldn't live without in your business.

Could be anything for your notepad, you use for notes. Could be your calendar, could be something you use for marketing, something you use for your product delivery or your project management. something that you go to every single day that you think is essential to running your business?

So I like Asana as I mentioned earlier. It keeps me, it just makes sure that I know what I need to do and what it needs to be done. And it includes instructions on how to do it so I don't have to rethink every single process every time. So that's probably my number one. I'm thinking to the business that I just sold, to be honest with you.

Oh, I, well, gosh, I don't know if I can recommend this one either. We use LastPass for passwords cause as an accountant you have hundreds, maybe even thousands of passwords for multiple clients. But they just had a data breach, so who knows, maybe that's not a great one.

So for me,

Why project management at the top of your list?

It goes back to the processes. That's when I started my first business that was profitable. Okay? Not the window clean one, but my first bookkeeping business, I was able to build that business because my processes were better. As one example, I went into a company, his part-time bookkeeper quit.

We'll use you. And no kidding. Most weeks I was in there for about three hours. And part of the secret to my success was because I knew I had this list of things that I had to do on my, you know, project management list. I would go in, I'd go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and I was done. And I would leave.

And I wasn't sitting there for 17 more hours throughout the week trying to find something to make myself look busy or fill my time. It's like I just, I had a good system. Cause the bookkeeping took three hours a week. It didn't take 20 hours a week.

So, and then you realize you can separate your work from your time and then start getting paid for the output.

Yeah. And not only that, but I was able to increase what he got. Like I was able to give him reports that she wasn't giving him because of my specialized knowledge. In that same amount of time. So when you can go in and charge the same and then add value on top of it, it's just kind of a slam dunk.

Yeah, no doubt.

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And now back to the Hero show.

talk a little bit about your own personal heroes, right? Every hero has their mentors and it's like Freto had Gand for Luke had Obi-Wan, we won. Or Robert Kak had his rich Dad, or even Spider-Man had his Uncle Ben. Who are some of your heroes?

Were they real life mentors, speakers, authors, maybe peers who are a couple years ahead of you, and how important were they to what you have accomplished so far?

When I left and I went to Brazil, and two years in Brazil was the most growing experience I think I've ever had in my life. Hardest thing I've ever done. And each mission has a president, right? And it was actually my mission president as I was about to come home. He would, me know, sits down with each missionary and gives them counsel and advice as they sort of start their adult life.

And I'll never forget what he said to me, he give you the context, in Brazil often you'll see people with a wheelbarrow in the street full of yucca roots. It's kinda like a potato.

Right? Not a glamorous job, doesn't make very much money. But it's how some people made their living. And he said, I would rather sell Ma Cachette. In the street outta the wheelbarrow, then work for somebody else. And up to that point, I don't think I'd ever seriously considered, like seriously considered starting my own business.

But when he said that, it just struck me like nothing ever had. And so that's when I came home and I got a job, but I'm like, okay, I've gotta figure out how to start a business. And that's when I started reading business books and looking for opportunities. And it's, you know, it's funny he wasn't, you know, he didn't provide an example, I didn't really know much about his business life.

But he was an important person in my life at the time. And for him to say those simple words I just put that I in my head and that was enough to change the whole course of my life.

That's true.

Those couple of words change the whole course of my life. And they still to this day, are something I think about all the time. And if you wait till you're ready, you'll never do anything because, and it's something I've learned over the course of time. You didn't say this, but because it's the act of doing that makes you ready to do things that makes you ready.

Yeah.

So have to get actually in motion and do things.

A hundred

life Changing. Couple of words.

Yeah. Now, and I think it's, you know, I consider that when, because now that I've got some experience and I you know, there's 20 year olds and 30 year olds maybe listening to this, who are younger than me, who might say, think, oh, does he know everything? And is he, you know, I'm gonna hang on every word.

Yeah. I was like, you were one of the things I tell people now because I was that 20 year old kid who was like, by the time I'm 25, I'll be rich and famous,

Yeah.

Cause I'm gonna run a business and I'm gonna be successful. And what I've realized over the course of 20 years doing this is that it is less. If it's worth doing, it's worth dedicating 10 years of your life too.

At least if not more. Right? 10, 20 years of your life too. If it's worth doing, it's worth dedicating 10 years of your life too. And it's amazing how you can go from brand new to world class in any area if you're willing to put 10 years of your life into it.

It's true because most people aren't willing to do that.

Yeah.

If you will not give up, you can become world class. And that's not even like pulling your strings like legitimately one of the best in the world at what you do.

Yeah.

And that's when you start to see the power in your business and your ability to grow systems and build things and get attention is when you become world class. So,

Yep, I agree. Richard.

Yeah. Well that leads me to my last and my favorite question, which is your guiding principles, right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever puts him in Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up, let's talk about the one or two principles you use regularly in your life.

Maybe something you wish you had known when you failed your first business at 20.

So one, I have to be someone that somebody can trust. That's like, they call it table stakes, right? That's, just to get started. But then two, and this is more from me personally, is just the idea of individual empowerment, is I think every person has the control over their own life, their own destiny.

And I read, I'll be honest, it frustrates me a little bit, Richard, I read too much economic news, and it's very easy to find so many people who are complaining that. Their boss or their job is not fair to them. It's not helping them get to where they wanna be. And I wanna say, well then just quit. Start your own business.

Right. And that authoritative role stays with us up through, at least through the end of high school, where we have to rely on somebody else for our mobility, our freedom, or whatever. And when we get into a job, I think a lot of us keep that mentality that there's this person who's an authority figure over me, and I can only go as high as far as they'll let me.

And it drives me a little crazy that people think, Hey, my boss is the one that's keeping me down. And that's not true at all. If you don't like your boss or you don't like your job, quit, do something else. There's no one keeping you there except yourselves.

No. It's like if you don't like your job, change it.

Change it.

It's like you don't even have to leave to change it. I was like, if, if you're the kind of person who shows up and was like, you know what? I can make this better. I could help improve the processes, I could change this.

I could make this company more profitable if we did X, Y, and Z, and then go do it. Don't even ask for permission. Just make it happen.

Yeah.

Cause you know, they need more people who are willing to step do it. And you know what they do? They reward people who do that.

Invoice clients earn payroll, right? Just get the basics done within, I wanna say like six months. They said, Nath, we want you to be like the CFO can you like, give us a lot more time and fill this role of CFO. And what I see with a lot of entry level people and even somewhat above entry level is their biggest complaint is that they think there's no upward mobility.

If you're in a 5,000 person company, sorry.

become unignorable.

Oh, totally. If you're in a huge company with 5,000 people, you're totally ignorable. Even if you are world class, you're just a tiny piece. In a small business, there is so much upward mobility and so quickly for people who are really good at what they do.

So for me, getting back to your question, each person really is in control of their own destiny. If you're not happy where you're get more education, gain more skills, watch a lot of YouTube, that's gonna train whatever you gotta do, you can control what happens next.

if get paid in direct proportion to it, increase the value that you're bringing, right? With the skills, the knowledge, the willingness to show up, right? You know how hard it is to get people to show up nowadays as to someone who hires people regularly. It's so hard to get people to just show up.

And if you'll just show up, you're already, you're halfway through.

No doubt. Oh yeah. It feels like you're on the same page with me. It seriously makes me infuriated when people complain about, you know, I'm not paid enough. I don't have, you know, again, my boss isn't doing enough for me. It's like, there was a time when your boss would pay you to show up to work, and that was it.

And now we've got all these benefits and there's more coming all the time. And my boss was responsible for this and this and this in my life. Like, why don't you be responsible for your life? Anyway, that's, maybe that's over the top. It drives me crazy.

Yeah.

great way to wrap our interview. But I do finish every interview with a simple challenge.

I call it the Heroes Challenge. And I do this to help get access to stories I might not otherwise find on my own. Cause not everyone is out doing the podcasts, you know, guests speaking like you and I might be doing.

Yeah.

Do you have someone in your life or in your network who you think has a cool entrepreneurial story?

And I bet you do cause of what you do. Who are they?

Yeah, I probably have a lot.

First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story on our show? The first person that comes to mind for you.

Oh, crap. For, it's funny, two people came to mind. One is really good and one would be like, here's how I drove my business to the ground. He wouldn't come on, I don't think, but a friend of mine named Adam when and it's, I'll share, it's this client that I still have. When I started with him five years ago, he and his business partner at the time, one of the first things they said to me was, Nath, we don't know anything about accounting.

And for them to just be like, tell us what we don't know. There's probably a lot we don't know. Please tell us all of it and we'll learn as we go. It was an amazing and refreshing client to work with because of that attitude.

That's awesome, man. Hopefully we can get an introduction, get them on the show and hear their story. But like I feel that like deep, because that's like when I think about accounting, I'm like, first off, I have almost no desire to learn accounting. But at the same time, like there's so much I don't know that I know I need to know that.

Like, that would be the first question I would ask is like, I don't know the questions to ask you. So tell like what are the questions I need to know to ask so I can ask them? Well, and because as a leader of the company, I need to know how to ask the good questions

It's like, I think we're profitable. The numbers say we're profitable, but it doesn't feel like it. And then working with those clients to help them understand the basics of understanding where the money goes and why it doesn't show up in their bank account, even though it's on the profit loss statement.

It's fun for me to educate the clients when they're ready for it.

Awesome. Well, I love that and hopefully we can get Adam to come on and tell his story. But you know, in comic books there's always the crowd of people at the end of the end of the story cheer and clap for their for their work. So as we close, our analogous to that is where can people find you if they want your help, where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak?

And I think more importantly than where is who are the right types of people to actually flip the switch and say, Hey, you know what, Nath, I would love to get you to come over and help us with our accounting.

It just gives, again, this is what I talked about earlier, gives people the access to their numbers in visual form, like in a chart all the time, right in front of them with some very detailed information that will suggest certain changes that they can make. Who would benefit from it. Let me tell you who would not benefit from it.

So if you've got that first employer, maybe first couple even I think it'd be worth a conversation at least. But yeah, what we'd love to do is, you know, plug your accounting software into our tool. Set up a dashboard for you and then go through the dashboard with you to show you what it means, what it tells you, here's how it's gonna help you make decisions to make your business more profitable.

So again, it's zerotocfo.com and I enjoy talking with people about their businesses, so feel free to book a call.

I think we're gonna be contact again for too long. I'm in the middle of an M and A, on that stuff that I know that's one of the problems that we have. So probably be talking more cause I've actively looking for people to help me solve that problem. So if you're in that same boat right?

And you're looking to figure out how to make your accounting work for you and return, create a return, I think that's a great place to start. So thank you Nath, for coming on and sharing your story today. I really appreciate it. Do you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before I hit this stop record button?

Yeah, never give up. Thank you very much Nath. Appreciate your time.

Thank you, Richard.

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