From Accountant to CEO. The Future is Fractional

This week, I sat down with @Kat Wellum-Kent, Founder & CEO of @The Fractionals Group who left Practice to launch her business with just one client and a plan.

Some of my favourite takeaways from our conversation were:

✅ Recruiting “on the curve” vs hiring ahead of the work
✅ Building something that’s more than just you as a solo operator
✅ Making use of EOS and managing her own utilisation as a founder
✅ Why not every startup needs a full-time CFO, and how to spot when they do
✅ And growing a team without losing sight of what made the work fun in the first place

Kat’s honest about the challenges as well as the opportunities that she faced and is still facing, and I think anyone building a business, or just trying to shift towards having a more entrepreneurial mindset in business, will get something from this.

Transcript

Adam Cooper (00:01.516)

Okay, so today on the Fractional CFO show, I'm joined by Kat Wellum-Kent, the founder and CEO of the Fractionals Group, which brings high impact fractional leadership to growing businesses. So Kat, welcome to the show. How are doing today?

Kat Wellum-Kent (00:16.576)

I'm great, thank you very much for having me, Adam.

Adam Cooper (00:19.152)

Well, thank you very much for coming on. I'm really looking forward to this one, given the similarities in what we do. So this is going to be interesting. So I guess to start with, would you be able to give us a quick overview of how you got from, I think I saw you started out in Deloitte. So how you got from being an accountant in practice to launching the Fractionals Group.

Kat Wellum-Kent (00:37.966)

Yeah, of course. So I was probably a little bit of a strange child in the sense that I always wanted to be an accountant. So I went to university, did a degree in accounting and finance, did my ACA training contract with Deloitte and ended up staying there 16 years. So the first half of my career there was audit and then I moved into corporate finance when I got bored of some of the endless checklists that I was filling in as part of an auditor.

And I really loved the kind of fast-paced transactions deal environment. And then I decided to have a family and that lifestyle was difficult to manage with working in corporate finance. So moved to a smaller accountancy practice that worked with much.

earlier stage businesses, much smaller startups and scale ups. And that was when I realized that that was the environment I loved working in. And that actually there was a bit of a gap in the market for those businesses who were lacking, I guess the equivalent of like the internal finance teams I'd sort of I'd seen at Deloitte in those larger corporates. And that was where the idea for fractional finance came along, which was yet providing exactly those types of services. And then that

evolved into being the Fractionals group as we are now.

Adam Cooper (02:01.122)

Okay, excellent, excellent. And you mentioned there about the gap in the market you saw while you were working in the smaller startup environment. What specifically was it that made you think that the fractional group was what the market was looking for?

Kat Wellum-Kent (02:19.574)

Yeah, so I think when I was working with those businesses and when I was working with them in the guise of being an accountant for them, they were asking lots of questions or needing a service and support that the accountancy practice I was in wasn't set up to support. So the accountancy practice I worked in was great for kind of

the compliance side of things, tax planning, tax advice. But when it came to much more of the, I guess, getting under the hood of the business, really understanding the model, what was driving it, and thinking about what data they needed to be able to decide what they should do next, what needed to be improved. Those accountancy practices, the more traditional practices, weren't set up in the way that they could service and provide that support.

And I was then looking more broadly and I felt like actually a lot of accountancy practices were great at the compliance and tax but were missing this point. And I ended up chatting to someone I know who is based in Australia and she'd built a similar practice and kind of started maybe like 10 years earlier. So I kind of got the...

the guess all the hints and tips from her about like all the how she's grown it and I realized that actually I had the skill set I had the connections and and I more importantly that was the type of support that I loved giving to businesses and she could demonstrate to me that there was yeah it worked over there I could see that there was the need here so yeah we went ahead and we launched I had that meeting with her

in the summer of 2022, within two weeks, I'd set up the business, kind of started to set it up and handed in my notice and I had a six month notice period. So I had six months kind of working my notice at my accountancy, the accountancy practice I was working at whilst building out what I wanted at that point, fractional finance to look like. And then we launched in, January 23. And then since then have now more expanded into the fractional group because I could see clearly that

Adam Cooper (04:09.244)

Mm-hmm.

Kat Wellum-Kent (04:35.906)

this worked for finance and there were other elements, I guess, business units, departments in these businesses where they needed exactly the same kind of support. Yeah, so we're now rolling out across those units.

Adam Cooper (04:51.446)

Excellent, very exciting and interesting to hear that you got inspiration from abroad as I did actually. So think the Fractionals space is very much something that started outside of the UK but is now very much here so that's interesting.

Kat Wellum-Kent (05:05.676)

Yeah, did you start? Where did you get info from?

Adam Cooper (05:09.148)

from the States actually. it was sort of inspiration from over there and then, you know, chatting to a few people who'd done it over there and then it had just started. So I started at a similar time as yourself. So it had just started to become a thing over here, I think. So yeah, it was very much getting inspiration from the States and then trying to tap into whatever I could over here. But yeah, similar, similar time and growth trajectory, I think. And interested that you said that you...

Kat Wellum-Kent (05:10.626)

Yeah, okay, yeah.

Kat Wellum-Kent (05:33.464)

Mm.

Adam Cooper (05:36.204)

you handed your notice in and you had your six months notice. Presumably that helped you with that six months to sort of shortcut some of the pain that I felt personally when starting out cold. Were you able to really build up from scratch during that notice period or did you have to wait, you did a bit of research, but wait to properly launch both soft and properly launch after you'd finished at your previous role?

Kat Wellum-Kent (05:46.734)

you

Kat Wellum-Kent (06:02.872)

So what I did during that time was I guess a lot of the internal thinking about the business. thinking about how I wanted us to go to market, how I wanted us to, what services I wanted us to offer, how I wanted to kind of package them up, price them, what systems and processes I needed in the business. Because I knew from the start I always

had the ambition and wanted this business to be more than me delivering fractional CFO services as a one-man-band consultant. It was always gonna be a brand and a thing that was bigger than just me. So I spent a lot of that time building up all of those things. So when we first launched, if you looked at it from the outside, we had a lot of things and we're investing in parts of the business that we didn't need at that time, but...

I wanted us to kind of have all those foundations right from the start because I believed that that would allow us to grow faster. So when we launched, when I kind of, yeah, I finished at Christmas. I had my last paycheck in December and then I was kind of on my own. At that point, I had one paying client and that was a smallish paying client.

Adam Cooper (07:10.364)

Mm-hmm.

Kat Wellum-Kent (07:31.796)

nowhere near enough that was going to cover my salary and yeah and then grew from there.

Adam Cooper (07:39.438)

Excellent. Okay, that's great. And I love the fact that you started out with that grand plan in mind and we're investing for the future. That's interesting. And I guess, obviously having been in practice for 16 years, I think you said, there's a big mindset shift from moving from that to starting your own business and ultimately being a CEO of an expanding brand. So what's been the biggest shift in your mind that's...

since moving from employment to running your own thing and being the CEO.

Kat Wellum-Kent (08:10.868)

the biggest shift. always find these things hard to kind of figure out the one thing. I guess just taking a step back, think one of the, I always had the ambition of I wanted to run a business. So my plan when I was at that accountancy practice was I wanted to work my way up and become managing partner there. So I guess I always had the ambition and the desire to want to run a thing. And therefore I think I always thought quite

entrepreneurially and I think that's really helpful when working with clients in the way that we do to have that mindset. think that means we can deliver more value to them but in terms of the the biggest shift I oh I think as I'm looking at it through the lens of of now like a couple of years in and I think

I think the biggest shift is really transitioning from being like, I guess a doer to a leader. I got through a lot of what I did by just pushing really hard and working really hard and doing and managing, whereas now I have to lean into the skill of leading a lot more as opposed to managing or doing.

Adam Cooper (09:37.5)

Yeah, no, absolutely makes sense. I think that doesn't necessarily come so easily to accountants like ourselves where we're very much about sitting in front of the spreadsheet and working and working some more and working some more and working smartly, but also doing the work and really getting under the hood ourselves. And it takes a real mindset shift and self-discipline.

Kat Wellum-Kent (09:53.933)

Yeah.

Adam Cooper (10:04.678)

to step back and work on the business rather than in the business as the leader rather than the doer, as you say, so I can definitely relate.

Kat Wellum-Kent (10:08.654)

Mm-hmm.

Kat Wellum-Kent (10:13.036)

Yep. Yep, no.

Adam Cooper (10:14.524)

I'd be interested to dig in a little more into the model behind the business. Obviously, like we've said, that fractional services are fairly new to the UK, a bit longer in the tooth in Australia, as you say, and the US. So I don't think there's one right way of delivering and to paying clients. How do you deliver your services? How do you price them? And so I'd be interested to understand also how you

explain the value to potential clients who might not be so familiar in the UK with fractional services. They've obviously heard about it now, but might not be so familiar in terms of how to buy it. So how do you explain the value and sell your services?

Kat Wellum-Kent (11:01.882)

So if I take a step back in terms of how we kind of how we package and price them and set things up, I think I think we do a couple of things that are.

different, I mean, obviously not unique, we, we talk about, offer like a full stack finance team. So we don't go to market just purely as a team of fractional CFOs. We say we're a full stack team. So we have kind of three levels of, of staff within our team. So we've got the CFOs who focus a lot more on the kind of strategic.

elements as you would expect. Then we've got like managers and our managers are split into two different types. So we've got finance managers and we've got FP &A managers, so financial planning analysis managers. And obviously the finance managers are more kind of backward looking in their approach and the tasks that they do and responsible for just making sure that everything day to day runs well in the finance team.

And then we've got the FP &A managers who are much more a, I guess, a kind of a support for the CFOs in terms of building the models, analyzing the data, helping the data packs, all of that kind of work that happens once the month ends been done or looking into the other systems and looking forward. And then we have finance assistants who are, I guess, for want of a better word, do a lot of the bookkeeping and the transaction processing. So.

We talk about it very much in the, if you look to a larger business who has got an established finance function, they would have all of those people in their business in that team in different guises. So that's what we offer. We package it up in a way that makes sense for where they are, where the client is now. And also we're set up in a way that can scale with them as they grow or as they enter some kind of transactional project phase.

Kat Wellum-Kent (13:06.446)

So that's one thing that we do a little bit differently in terms of our offering. The other thing that we are clear on in terms of our values and try and deliver as much as possible in terms of our pricing and packaging is we don't like day rates. We don't like being in two days a week. And the reason why we don't like that is for a couple of reasons. One, it's much more about

Adam Cooper (13:07.291)

Okay.

Kat Wellum-Kent (13:35.724)

that focuses on inputs and putting time in. We're much more focused on outputs and what we actually deliver in terms of the value. And I think also that goes down well with our ideal client who is often like a tech kind of tech service based business, something that's new and growing and scaling. They like different new ways of working. They're not a traditional kind of business.

So they aren't necessarily looking for like, we want a CFO in our business like Mondays and Thursdays. They want someone that's much more flexible. So moving away from the day rates allows us to be more flexible. So those are a couple of things that we do and just in terms of the packaging that is a bit different. But also in terms of moving away from the day rates, I think that's one of the reasons it's helped to scale because we're not tied to, okay, well, I've got

CFO in the business and he works or they work four days a week for us So that's two clients at two days a week and then they're full like if we're not selling days if we're selling output then and value then we can use those four days in a variety of different ways to deliver the value that our clients paying for and Yeah, that's that's that's a key point in how we how we go to market

And I think a lot of the clients that we are kind of sweet spot for clients that we work with are either clients that are just like thinking about doing a fundraise. So they've kind of got established and looking at raising or they have raised and are now got external investors and they know that they need to kind of step up the game both in terms of what the business is delivering like in terms

in terms of sticking and delivering to forecasts and budgets, but also in terms of the reporting that investors are expecting. So often they come to us and they know that there is not necessarily a big problem, sometimes there is, but they know that they need to make a change to deliver the next stage of growth within their business. And so they've already kind of understood about that model.

Kat Wellum-Kent (16:00.606)

it's a case of explaining why our way of offering it is the right fit for what they need.

Adam Cooper (16:10.076)

Okay, that's really interesting. you mentioned that your ideal client, you said there was tech or service based at the fundraise stage or thereafter. Do you have a of a size of client that you would typically not accept because they're either too small or too large? How do you think about size when it comes to approaching clients?

Kat Wellum-Kent (16:33.838)

I'd say we have no hard and fast rules. think it's well when they're at the smaller stage it's more about ambition and how quickly we think they're going to get there. So we've got some clients that are pre-revenue but they are ambitious, they've got a good team, they're looking to get somewhere and get somewhere fast in which case yeah we're happy to work with them because

we know we can add value that will help them get there. If it was a much smaller business, but they were happier kind of just doing what they're doing, then we're not the right fit for them because one, we're not gonna deliver the value that they need for it to make sense for them to be paying us. And also they aren't the types of clients that we get excited about working with. mean, there's nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with that model. It's just not what we as...

as finance professionals love. At that larger scale, again, it really varies on what they need and the business model, because I think often as they get larger, they will need more and more support. And I think it gets to the point where fractional doesn't work and they need an in-house finance function. So it could be that there's a particular project or something. We're talking to one.

Adam Cooper (17:48.934)

Mm.

Kat Wellum-Kent (18:00.942)

business at the moment where we're not going to be the long-term solution for them, but based on where they are now, we can do a series of projects for them that will get the finance function where it needs to be, and we can get clear on what that finance function needs to be such that they can then successfully recruit the right people into the business. At the moment, I think it's too tricky for them to get the right people in. So we can kind of be a bit of a stopgap as well.

Adam Cooper (18:24.412)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, and for those kind of businesses, that's based on the number of people or the turnover or what is it that allows you to assess that they will need a full-time finance function and to help them with that transition.

Kat Wellum-Kent (18:42.926)

It's a combination of all of those factors. it's volume of transactions, it's complexity within the business model. It is, yeah, number of different entities, what they've got planned, a variety of different factors that I think will come together. I think it's really tricky to have like a hard and fast list because there's always going to be...

exceptions. You can have a business that's turning over 10 million but their business model is so straightforward and automated and processes that you don't actually need like someone in there. Yeah, like more than it would make sense for us to do and vice versa you could have a smaller business that yeah there's just some complexities in there because of the nature of the industry where actually you do need someone in. So well that's my experience. I don't know would you would you agree? Like how do you find

Adam Cooper (19:38.308)

yeah, think that's exactly the same. I think we have a kind of rule of thumb around the size of business that's either too small or too large, but there's always the exceptions. yeah, I think that's the beauty of what we do, as you say, which is you can make a decision to work with a particular business because something about that is great for you and is right for you, which might otherwise break the rules of a larger firm. And so that's the beauty of being slightly smaller and more nimble. So yeah, completely agree.

I'm interested there, you're obviously, as you said, you've come in to the Fractionals group, you're looking at expanding, you've got this model whereby you're not pricing on days, you're pricing on outputs, not inputs. How do you manage that? What systems, technologies, processes are helping you to maintain that quality, to sort of manage the capacity and plan?

to allow you to scale? there any sort of tips you can give to the audience? We've got a number of people looking to enter the fractional space. I think they'd be interested to hear, know, what is it that's helping you on your quite rapid growth?

Kat Wellum-Kent (20:48.526)

Okay, yeah, I mean, think we have systems and processes like they're gonna be 100%. Well, in our business, they don't work 100 % of the time. I mean, I'm trying to get you comfortable with like the 80-20 rule, like 80 % is good enough. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so that's something that I'm working on. But yeah, in terms of, I guess some of the systems and processes we've got, so when it...

comes to like winning a new client and building out that proposal, we use socket as a tool to help us kind of build up that package of services and therefore the price that sits alongside it. Now for each of those service offerings that we have within the proposal tool, we have an example kind of standard cost.

budget that sits behind it in Excel that says, okay, these people would deliver that service. This is the expected hours we would think that they would do and therefore it should be a profitable bit of work. When we win that project, then the CFO who is gonna be overall responsible for that project kind of tweaks that budget for anything that they know specifically about the business to make sure that we can still.

we've got a plan to deliver that work profitably. And then that budget gets reflected in our scheduling and timesheet system. So we use float, float resourcing, obviously not float cashflow forecasting. And that builds up a kind of a capacity plan forward looking of who should be doing what and how regularly.

to give an idea of how many hours people should be spending and then we do time sheets. Although we've got time sheets, I wouldn't say we're not like six minutes, we don't bill by them, we're not bothered. We mainly just use it as a tool to understand like what are people busy on and if they're not busy enough or too busy, and if they're too busy on clients, is that because we haven't got the process right? Is it because we haven't priced it right? Like what's going on?

Adam Cooper (22:53.02)

Yeah.

Kat Wellum-Kent (23:09.87)

to help us make a better decision. So yeah, then we use time sheets to inflate and then compare what we expected with what we actually delivered. And then in terms of managing those tasks that we're delivering and being clear on what those processes are, we use a tool called Xbert. So X and then Bert.

And we use that for a number of different things, but one is kind of a task management. And when we onboard, we put all the services that we're going to deliver in there. We've got templates, but what it allows us to do is although we've got templates of how we deliver a month end close or how we build a forecast, are for repetitive tasks, there's an easy way of overlaying client specific notes. So what it means is ideally like normally every

client would have a set team, but we've got all those notes in there such that if people are on holiday or need to cover or need to hand over or just remembering month to month or quarter to quarter if it's something that's infrequent, we've got those notes there to be able to see actually on this particular client that's how we do it. We've got an added step where we send out the pack to the board, but then we also send it out to the like internal management team and we do this thing with them and all that kind of stuff to help us.

Adam Cooper (24:33.976)

Mm.

Kat Wellum-Kent (24:37.462)

make sure that we're always delivering that quality, but also just make it easy for us so we don't have to remember all of the different things.

Adam Cooper (24:45.934)

Okay, excellent. Very, very well organized, Kat. I have to say that's impressive. I could see you spent that six months wisely in terms of setup. And I just, in terms of obviously you've grown quite quickly, are there any lessons that you can give around what you've learned for managing that growth at such pace? mean, you say you started out basically Jan 23, so we're what, two and a half years in.

Kat Wellum-Kent (24:49.838)

you

you

Kat Wellum-Kent (25:14.317)

Yeah.

Adam Cooper (25:15.0)

And I don't know, it sounds like you've got quite an established operation with the different levels and CFOs, finance managers, FP &A, et cetera. Any lessons from how you've been able to scale that you can pass on to other people just starting out?

Kat Wellum-Kent (25:30.35)

yeah, let's think of some good ones. So I think recruiting is always challenging for a number of reasons. One, like getting the right person into your business is always hard. But I think when we're delivering services like we deliver, the timing of when you recruit the people in is really tricky to manage. So...

my mentor kind of talked about this concept, you can hire at three points, you can hire before the curve, on the curve or after the curve and none of them are better than the others, it's just like, yeah. So you can hire in advance of winning the work, but obviously then you've got to the cost of that person's salary if they're coming on as an employee. You can hire on the curve, which requires an awful lot of skill to get that timing right of bringing them on board at the same time as you're winning the clients.

which I've found to be really tricky because you never know how long that kind of sales, like onboarding time is gonna take. And the same with recruiting and finding the right people. Or you can do after the curve, which means you've just got to cover the pain in the short term until they come into the business. But also I've found that that is a bit tricky because particularly when it comes to the CFO, clients want to know

who their CFO was gonna be and might want to meet them as part of the process. Now, if you haven't recruited them, that's gonna be quite tricky. So we've tried lots of different ways and I think it's just about being open to having those conversations. So we've got a bit of a bench, I guess, of CFOs, people who are already operating as a fractional CFO.

Adam Cooper (27:06.15)

Yeah.

Kat Wellum-Kent (27:24.874)

or interested in it who might be a good fit for us. And we just kind of keep in contact with them such that if we get a big opportunity, we can see if we can line the right person up to fit. We also have been open with bringing people on and saying, look, can we do it flexibly? Like, can we start off on like a day or two days and then ramp up as we win more work? So I think it's about, yeah, just.

being open about what you need and asking them what they need and see if you can find a common ground. I think when you get for us below that CFO level, it becomes a bit easier because there's generally more work at that level and the clients are less focused on who actually their person is at that level. And you can kind of manage it more between people in the background. So that's easier to do.

Adam Cooper (28:17.308)

Mm-hmm.

Kat Wellum-Kent (28:22.862)

But I would say in terms of recruiting, where I've gone wrong or where it's worked well is when I've prioritized hiring for, I call them power skills because I hate the phrase soft skills. It makes them sound like they're somehow less important. But like all of the attitude.

like commerciality, like interest in business, all of those kinds of things are much more important than, I guess, some of the technical knowledge because we can teach them that. And I think the other thing that's worked really well for us is recruiting from industry rather than recruiting from practice. I've found actually we've had a really great response to job ads because it appeals to

loads of people who started off in practice didn't like the feel of it, went into industry and I always say we're the best of both worlds because you get like to work with clients in the way that you do in industry but you get the variety of practice because you'll have more than one client and you're not just stuck in the same kind of regular routine of things that happen and that's worked quite well for us.

Adam Cooper (29:34.268)

Mm.

Adam Cooper (29:41.55)

Absolutely. That's really interesting. And I like your definition of power skills. I think that's particularly with the future and AI and how we're all going to work as finance professionals in five years, 10 years. think those power skills are increasingly important. So that's great to hear. I just have one question actually in terms of yourself. Obviously you started out with one paying client you mentioned. Are you still working on clients yourself? Are you now fully

working on rather than in the business, what's your own experience in terms of client work?

Kat Wellum-Kent (30:14.068)

no, I'm still very much in the client work. And I think I always will be to some extent because I do, I do really like it. My ideal is to get to the point where I've got a couple of clients, max two probably that I'm involved in purely at that strategic CFO level, but I'm definitely not there yet. It's funny at the start of the year,

we followed the entrepreneurial operating system model and we've been rolling out at various points to more and more of the team. And from the start of this year, we rolled out kind of like a scorecard, KPIs for our delivery team, so our client facing team. And one of the KPIs I set them, or we agreed on, was around my utilization. So although it's my metric, actually it's the team's...

the team collectively is responsible for keeping my utilization down. So at the moment we've set the target of 60 % but I want to get it down to about 40%. The other challenge with the 60 % utilization is it's 60 % of more hours than I want to work in a week. So actually like the number of hours I'm working on the client. If you took it to like a...

Adam Cooper (31:28.454)

I love that.

Kat Wellum-Kent (31:41.102)

like a 35 or 40 hour week, it would be a much higher number. It's just I'm doing more hours than would be ideal either. So we're trying to bring that down.

Adam Cooper (31:51.1)

Sounds very familiar. Sounds very familiar. Excellent. I'm interested because obviously the way you and I met was at Digital Accountancy Show. I heard you speak about EOS. And so how's that journey going? Because I know you were, this was a few months ago now, and you were talking about how you were intermittently rolling out, not following the sort of prescribed plan. So how's that all going?

Kat Wellum-Kent (32:00.067)

Yeah.

Kat Wellum-Kent (32:14.38)

Yeah, like we've always pretty much right from the get-go, we had it in the business in terms of setting the vision, having the of the meeting cadence to build traction in the business. That works really well. And now we've launched Fractional Human Resources, which is like the, I guess, the next business in the Fractional Group rollout. We've implemented that from the get-go and that's working really well to help.

keep us focused on maintaining momentum each quarter to deliver what we need to to build up to the bigger picture. So I think that element of it's working well. And then it's kind of rolling it out to the team in terms of the KPIs. And again, like it's, we don't follow it to the letter. We're not really strict on it, but we use it to the extent that we need to to drive change in the business. So.

For example, like having that scorecard for the team, we realized that we weren't hitting the KPI that we had around the percentage of tasks, client tasks that we wanted to complete on time. And because we then were tracking that and looking at it weekly, we could see the trends and then we could dive deeper into why that was happening. And actually,

it turned out that it was some systems issues in terms of how we'd set them up and things and a few tweaks to the process rather than us actually under delivering for clients. But now we've tweaked it and now we've got a better metric and then we can actually kind of see how we're performing. So I think with all of those things, the purpose of it is to, it's a tool to help you get to where you want to be faster, quicker, more efficiently, et cetera. So we, whenever we implement a part of it or

or think about it and use it is with that lens that we look through it rather than we need to follow it, like get the book out and follow it to the letter.

Adam Cooper (34:18.556)

Interesting, And are you... Oh sorry, go ahead.

Kat Wellum-Kent (34:20.046)

Are you... I was just gonna say, are you at US? Are you at US?

Adam Cooper (34:24.898)

No, but ever since I heard you on that panel, I've been looking at it. I've got the book. I've been reading it and it's definitely something that I'm considering. I think we're not quite there in terms of size. And so it's, and I know you on the panel, you said you started a bit earlier from the outset in the same way that you, you planned and invested for the future. I guess that was your, your, what you meant. We're, yeah, I think we haven't quite got there in terms of size and scale and team members yet.

Kat Wellum-Kent (34:29.687)

Okay.

Kat Wellum-Kent (34:46.849)

Mm.

Adam Cooper (34:54.362)

but definitely keen to put it into action, So I'll be keeping close eye on your LinkedIn posts and stuff like that to hear more about how you're getting on with it. One other sort final question on this bit and then move on to our final section, but just going, you mentioned obviously you've grown, you've got these different tiers and team members. How do you maintain culture? You something that I'm thinking about now with a remote team.

Kat Wellum-Kent (34:59.736)

Hahaha

Kat Wellum-Kent (35:04.066)

Yeah.

Adam Cooper (35:20.528)

We're growing, but we're not as, I don't think as large as you are. We've got remote, part-time, different countries. How do you build and maintain culture across the group? And I guess particularly now that you're expanding into other industries. So I'd love to hear a couple of tips there.

Kat Wellum-Kent (35:36.11)

Oh, that's a good one. Because I don't feel, not that we've got, I don't think there's anything wrong with our culture, but it's definitely something that I'm really conscious of. And I'm also conscious that when I first set up the business and thought about what I wanted the business to be, in terms of culture and values and all of those kinds of things, it was basically mine, because it was me. And now I feel like two and a half years in and with the team growing.

it's now like a separate thing to me, like it's got its own life to it. And I think it's really important to make sure that when you're talking about the culture and the values and how you want the business to feel for the people in it, understand that it is the, whatever you say on paper and set those things to be, it is the sum of all those individual people coming together that sets.

what actually is the culture in the business. So I think there's a really important thing around the recruiting and making sure you get the right people in. And then it's about trying to work out ways to still spend time together to interact. we have, well, we don't have quarterly. We have, our goal for this year is to meet up three times in person. So two of those will be, I guess, formal team days where we'll actually

think about business stuff and then do something fun. And then there'll be a Christmas thing, which will just be fun. And just think about the communication tools that you've got in place. Like whether that's Slack or Teams or whatever you do, just try and get some stuff going so that you do feel like you're all interacting with each other. We have different little sub group meetings for various things.

and they all have a business purpose, but we make sure that as part of that agenda, we're just catching up and spending time chatting to each other. But I'm very conscious of the culture piece and it's one of the benefits of having the Fractionals group because now we've got Fractional Human Resources and Carol, my co-founder on that is an amazing CPO and she is very big on culture and particularly in remote organizations or hybrid organizations.

Adam Cooper (37:51.17)

Hehe.

Kat Wellum-Kent (38:03.406)

I'm hoping that she can give us loads of suggestions and help us kind of, yeah, build out a really rich, strong culture that reflects, yeah, how we all want to work.

Adam Cooper (38:16.764)

I certainly see why you went into that industry. You've got the benefits of having a very strong HR function in-house. That's great. And that actually is a nice segue, and that's really useful actually to hear about your journey on culture. And I'm interested, obviously you've gone from the finance to the HR. Are there other industries? What's the future for the Fractionals Group? Are there other service areas that you think are next for Fractional disruption, I guess?

Kat Wellum-Kent (38:24.737)

Yeah.

Kat Wellum-Kent (38:46.606)

Yeah, so we've got a master plan of seven in total and I wanted to get to seven. Well, no, no, no, that's fine. It gets a bit blurry at various points. Like I can see the next two quite clearly and then it becomes a bit more vague. I got to seven because, well, for one, I just happened to write seven down and I said, that's the colours of the rainbow.

Adam Cooper (38:55.132)

You don't have to share your master plan, that's fine. I understand.

Kat Wellum-Kent (39:15.276)

so I could have each of the different logos being a different colour of the rainbow and I was like that works quite well so let's have seven. So whatever happens I'll get to seven so then my rainbow is complete. But yeah, HR just made sense to me because there's a lot of... it's a... fractional HR market is one that's advancing well in the same way that finance is. I think it...

Adam Cooper (39:20.294)

Nice.

Kat Wellum-Kent (39:43.754)

lends itself to it. think there's a really strong overlap in organizations between finance and HR anyway, so it being number two made a lot of sense from that perspective. But I always knew that in terms of the rollout of which ones I go the order of them, there would be some flexibility in that because it would be driven by me finding the right co-founder to launch that business with because I can't

Finance I can do, like I understand finance, that's my background. Any of the other ones I do, I am not an expert in, so I need to be partnering with the right person who knows that sector really well, who can understand our model and want to deliver their discipline in a similar way to our model. Yeah, and I think that will be the...

that will be the determining factor in terms of the order and also the timing to some part, like when I can come across the right person who I think would be a good fit and who also wants to deliver it in that way and not just not be a fractional CXO, whatever the X is, but also want to run their own business. Because I think that that's a key component of the people I'm looking for.

Adam Cooper (41:03.548)

Mm.

Kat Wellum-Kent (41:08.874)

But I think like there's, if you don't, if you spend a little bit of time on LinkedIn, there are like fractional HR, fractional CPOs, fractional CMOs, fractional COOs, there are so fractional CSOs, there's just like fractional seems to be growing a lot. And I know the algorithm will present me with a lot of fractional because that's where I play. But yeah, it seems to be a very...

Adam Cooper (41:09.659)

Yeah.

Kat Wellum-Kent (41:37.102)

much more common phrase than it was a few years ago when we were first looking at it in the UK. It was talked about but I think not in the same way and also there was like part-time or virtual or outsourced and things but it seems like Fractional has kind of made a real push for like that's actually the way of working rather than any of those other titles. That's what I'm seeing.

Adam Cooper (41:44.144)

Yeah.

Adam Cooper (42:01.137)

Yeah.

Yeah, no, I would agree with that. think also COVID played a big part and the fact that you've got people who are more comfortable working in a hybrid, remote fashion, both on the client side and supplier side, it makes a lot of sense for people to move into that space. So no, definitely seeing the same thing. That's really interesting. Thank you.

Kat Wellum-Kent (42:08.483)

Mm-hmm.

Kat Wellum-Kent (42:21.612)

Yeah, and I think also, also like just with, I think you mentioned it earlier, but like technology, AI, automation, all of these kinds of things, a lot of roles that historically you may needed to have someone in your business working full-time or four days a week or something that was much more, a much bigger time commitment.

using these tools and things, people can deliver a lot more on a kind of a fractional basis, especially if they've got the support underneath. So I think that's a big component of it as well.

Adam Cooper (43:02.832)

Yeah, and that was actually nice segue there, Kat, onto my final question in this part, which is just about the future of work. you mentioned about the AI tools. You're obviously working with a lot of young tech savvy companies, as you mentioned. How do they feel about that versus some of the more traditional finance roles? You mentioned about bookkeeping, you mentioned about finance management, FP &A, those...

Kat Wellum-Kent (43:17.358)

Mm.

Adam Cooper (43:30.556)

areas of your business, do you get any pushback from clients? Are you promoting AI as part of your workflows as a way of getting around that? What's your experience of dealing with some of the tech firms who are trying to build companies with one or very few people and utilizing fractional services that maybe can and should eventually be rolled up into that?

Kat Wellum-Kent (43:58.272)

think so what I know finance the best so I'm to talk to it through the lens of finance but from speaking to experts in other areas I think it's I think it's common amongst all of those areas I think I think for people that aren't experts in those areas they think that AI automation can do a lot more than it can do I think when you're in it you know and understand the complexities of

some of the things that need to happen and whilst tech from where tech is now it can help a lot it can't negate the need for a person like it's not at that level yet you can get agents to do steps of a process but you can't get an agent to I mean I've not seen an AI agent that could run a month-end process like they could do various different bits of a month-end process potentially

But they couldn't just do the whole thing end to end because there's too many complexities to it. That's obviously the way that we're going, but we're not there yet. So I think there is a bit of an education piece there around what tech can do now and what you need a person for. And I think the other, in terms of how we talk about it, a phrase that we are using across the different businesses is

tech enabled, human centric. Like I don't think you can get away from the importance of people and their knowledge and experience and what they can bring. Tech can definitely help with the implementation of that knowledge. And I think it can also help with like research and a variety of different things, but having someone who knows the topic.

or knows the problem is incredibly beneficial. Like an example, I was doing some work with a client around, this is a very specific finance thing, but I think it highlights the point around like share options and share option charges in their accounts that were about to be audited. And chat could help a lot with that. Like in terms of looking at the...

Kat Wellum-Kent (46:23.212)

documents and in terms of yeah helping with the calculations and what stuff what should be done but because I knew a lot more about the topic it gave me some answers and I'm like I don't think that's right so I asked a better question and it completely changed the answer but if you're not if you don't know the right questions to ask you will easily just get the wrong the wrong answers so you still need that human with that experience to make sure that the right questions are getting asked and sense checking things.

Adam Cooper (46:53.892)

Yeah, no, 100 % agree. think that's quite a personal question because I've obviously come across that myself and so was interested to hear your thoughts but exactly the same approach and thinking from my side. So that's really helpful. Thank you. So that takes us on to what I call our business book bonus section. And this is a section of the podcast where you could share a book or a podcast or some other content that's really helped you.

Kat Wellum-Kent (47:00.706)

You

Kat Wellum-Kent (47:13.408)

You

Adam Cooper (47:21.102)

on your journey and that you'd recommend to the audience. So could you, is there something that you'd like to recommend to the audience,

Kat Wellum-Kent (47:27.822)

So I think we've already touched on it, I, Traction, which is the book that explains EOS, I found really useful and I refer to that like regularly. I've got like a hard copy next to my desk and I'll often just look through it. And both that, that is both from our business, but also I find it really helpful to help support clients as well. And linked with that, there's a book called Get a Grip that

is more of a story of how someone's implemented traction, which I found a really useful way of putting some of the theory into practice and a way of saying it. And then the other book I would throw in the mix around that point I mentioned earlier about really becoming a leader and leaning into that is a book called Turn the Ship Around by David Marquette. He was a nuclear submarine captain.

and he was assigned, he was like top in his class and he got assigned basically the worst boat in the US Navy and it was around how he turned that ship around in terms of from being one of the worst performing to one of the best, but all around like leadership tools and techniques and I really loved that as a book in terms of just talking through each of the different concepts and the impact that it had.

Adam Cooper (48:49.462)

Those are great, so three great recommendations there. We'll put links to those in the show notes, thank you. And I guess before we wrap up, is there anything that we haven't covered today that you'd like to add or if not, where can people find you and find out more about what's going on at the Fractionals group?

Kat Wellum-Kent (49:05.102)

I think we've kind of covered, yeah, we've covered a lot. I don't think I've got anything extra to add. But yeah, in terms of finding me, I am on LinkedIn a decent amount. So please come and find me there. So yeah, find me as Catwin and Kent or any of our companies. So there's the Fractionals group, Fractionals Finance and Fractionals Human Resources, depending on which, if any of those you are more or less interested in.

Yeah, and if you've read it, if you've listened to this and yeah, got any feedback, please just drop me a DM on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear what you think.

Adam Cooper (49:41.464)

Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you so much, Kat, for your time. Thanks for joining me today on the Fractional CFO Show. Been a real pleasure. And yeah, thank you for your insight, your perspective and your time.

Kat Wellum-Kent (49:51.406)

No worries, thanks for having me Adam.