From Founder to Exit. What Really Changes After Selling an Agency

In this episode of The Fractional CFO Show, Adam Cooper is joined by Elliott King, agency founder, digital marketing expert, and Managing Partner at FINN Partners, to explore the real journey from startup to exit.

Elliott shares honest insights on managing cash flow through growth, the shift from project to retainer revenue, and the financial discipline required to build a sellable agency.

They also dive into the realities of M&A, including due diligence, valuation drivers, and what actually changes after a sale.

Plus, a look at how AI, SEO, and owned media are reshaping digital marketing, and what agency founders should be doing now to stay competitive.

A must-listen for agency owners focused on growth, profitability, and long-term exit strategy.

Transcript

Adam Cooper (00:01.529)

Okay, so today I'm joined by Elliott King, digital marketing expert, agency founder, published author, and managing partner at FinPartners, one of the fastest growing global independent agencies. And Elliott's someone who's gone through that full journey from startup to sale, and built and sold his agency to a larger group a few years ago. So he's seen firsthand what that process is really about. So really looking forward to this one.

Elliott, welcome to the Fractional CFO show. How are doing today?

Elliott King (00:32.524)

Thank you Adam, yeah I'm doing great and I'm delighted to be here.

Adam Cooper (00:36.477)

Well, great to have you. Thanks for joining. I guess to kick us off, could you give us a brief description of your background? I saw that you studied to be a software engineer, so it'd be great to understand how you got from there to FinPartners. So if you could tell us a little bit about the journey.

Elliott King (00:51.982)

Yeah, sure. So without dating myself too much, I was born in the 70s. I was a child of the 80s and I was one of those kids that got hold of a very early stage computer when I was sort of seven or eight years old. That computer shipped with a big textbook that showed you how to code, but it didn't have enough games. So my motivation for

learning how to program as a child was so that I could create more games. A bit later I went to university to study software engineering, left university in the mid to late 90s when there was lots of opportunities for young programmers to dive in and do lots of software engineering. Some of you might remember the Millennium Bug, there lots of projects.

for big companies worldwide actually, so it allowed as well as you know lots of work around as you could travel around. So I found myself in Silicon Valley in the dot-com boom and bust era. So I was literally right in the heart of...

of the place where a lot of the big internet names that we know today were literally startups at the time. Google was a startup. In fact, Facebook hadn't even started when I was there in 99 and 2000, 2001. But so a lot of great experiences over there. And then a few years later, I teamed up with a school friend and we started an agency, grew the agency. And as you said, about

Five years ago now, we transitioned that agency into a larger agency group called FinPartners and that's where I find myself today.

Adam Cooper (02:30.761)

Amazing, amazing. It sounds like quite the journey. And so let's start at the agency stages. As you say, I think I saw that was called Mint Twist, I believe.

Elliott King (02:40.258)

That's right.

Adam Cooper (02:41.872)

in and that agency when you look back at it could you tell us a little bit about it sort of what was the problem that it was solving for clients I guess.

Elliott King (02:51.604)

Yeah, so I mentioned that I'd sort of done a fair amount of consulting work for, you know, I guess in my in my 20s. So what we what we were looking to do, and this was in about 2007.

was to help medium sized companies get online basically. And initially the agency started doing a lot of website design and development, like I say, for mid-sized companies. Most of the clients I've been working for before then had been very large international organizations. And...

And that was the problem we solved. But I suppose what really enabled the agency to be successful was we were very, very early into the SEO game. So what we were seeing is that we were building these websites for all sorts of companies in different sectors. And the website would be

up and running and that would be great. So then the clients would say, you know, what next? How do we, how do we actually drive more visitors to this site? And at the time there wasn't Google hadn't even started their advertising. There was no social media advertising. So from a digital perspective, the game was SEO. It was, it was little understood at the time, but because we were relatively technical people, we, we

we sort of taught ourselves how to do it. And we were one of the first agencies to become really quite successful at running it on behalf of clients, but also ourselves. And I suppose tagging on that service as well as providing a lot more value to our clients. It also enabled us to grow our own business. Not least because

Elliott King (04:34.978)

the of website design projects was fixed price sort of project fees, whereas an SEO service typically it's a retainer. it, I guess gave a lot more financial stability to our agency, which yeah, like I say, allowed us to progress and grow.

Adam Cooper (04:52.262)

Nice. And in terms of the sort of the stage and the life cycle of the agency itself, at what point did you think that, you know, selling the business was a serious consideration rather than just sort of something, the theory of it, you know?

Elliott King (05:08.557)

Yeah, I think, you know, the agency went for sort of 15 years or so before we actually transitioned into Finn. And I suppose it was never really a real consideration until at least sort of, you know, nine or 10 years in. And if I'm completely honest, the reason it became a consideration was because we had several near-death experiences as an agency where...

you know, either external events, you know, or losing a big claims or two. You know, and I suppose once our agency was of a reasonably large what felt like to us a large size of sort of, you know, we got to 33 people, but once you're at, you know, anything over 15 people, then this monthly salary bill becomes very, very high. And so if you run into financial problems, you quite quickly get into a position where you think, my

God, are we going to do here? So I suppose after the first near-death experience we had as an agency, you suddenly start to consider the option of selling from a perspective of fear. And when you get through those sort of financial challenges and you're into a good place, then obviously you can think about it from a more positive perspective. Partnering up to a big agency can...

can provide lot of opportunities in terms of international expansion, terms of service diversification, sector diversification. It can be a great opportunity for the employees as well as the founders and all of those other more positive reasons, I guess.

Adam Cooper (06:48.808)

Yeah, of course. And you mentioned about the near death moments. I like the way you described that. It's very emotive and it rings true. But what did those periods teach you about yourself as a business owner, as a founder? What were the sort of main learnings that you took from those that then triggered your kind of the fear and the decision to move towards trying to sell?

Elliott King (06:53.838)

You

Elliott King (07:11.564)

I think from a personal perspective, I've always felt that resilience was a decent trait that I've had for a while. When I was young, I was a runner, was a middle distance runner and you have to be very...

You have to be very persistent and dedicated and to get through those sort of financial downturns as an agency or as owner of any business, you really do need to focus on what you need to do on a daily and weekly and monthly basis. And you just need to stick to it until you come out the other side. So from a personal perspective,

Yeah, it taught me that, yeah, I guess the benefits of being focused and resilient in the face of those sorts of challenges. I think from a business perspective, we definitely learned the value and benefits of managing and forecasting cash flow, which is something that we didn't fully appreciate in the early stages of running the agency.

Adam Cooper (08:15.336)

Absolutely. It's something I speak to owners about all the time, so it's interesting. And that was something that you saw. And I mean, that brings us on to some of the financials and financial perspectives that are often underestimated, I would say, by founders before they go into an M &A process. What would you say, alongside the cash flow forecasting, were there any other kind of financial blind spots?

that you had before entering the process, looking back on it.

Elliott King (08:49.623)

I think, yeah, look, there were many, many financial blind spots that we had along the journey. mean, when we started the agency, I mentioned that I was a programmer, my co-founder was also a programmer. So neither of us had, in truth, neither of us had particularly great business management knowledge, let alone financial management. So we learned lots of financial lessons, I suppose, along with cashflow.

other key ones were the benefits of, you know, repeat revenue as opposed to just relying on fixed prices, the benefits of having, you know, a diversified set of revenue sources, meaning, know, you don't just rely on one or two clients. And, you know, obviously, know, managing, managing your overheads and managing your direct costs and keeping

keeping those in the right ratios. We learned a trick that...

you know, a good financial target for an agency was 100,000 pounds per head of, so, you know, as a kind of rule of thumb, that seemed to work quite well. I have to say we never quite got there, but, you know, we always made sure we didn't drift too far away from that number, which kind of kept us in the right zone. And then look, to your question around the due diligence process, I think there are so many, many things that kind of come up in a process.

like that when you're when you're sort of selling your agency or business to you know to a buyer and I suppose one of the key things is just making sure you've got a good understanding of the financial nuances of your own business because

Elliott King (10:34.741)

really all of the details that are required are absolutely significant. But if you can kind of embed those within a kind of broader understanding of the financial health and direction of your business, then you can kind of case any detailed answer within a context that will provide the buyer with what they're looking for. Because if it's a good buyer, they're not looking to trip you up. They just want to reassure themselves that there's no sort of

skeletons in the cupboard so to speak and as long as there aren't you know that I think they'll forgive you know they'll forgive you know certain lapses and they don't expect all of the I's and T's to be crossed and dotted but what they do expect is for you to have a good handle of the yeah of the financial health of your business when you're selling it.

Adam Cooper (11:29.724)

Yeah, that's great advice and so true. If you've got a good understanding of those financial nuances of your business and you're speaking to a buyer who is there in good faith, then you're not going to go too far wrong. And I'd be interested just to dive into that in terms of there's the understanding and then there's the actual reporting and professionalism, I like to say, of the financial information that you've got and that you're preparing. How...

How ready were you from that perspective? How mature would you say that your reporting and your forecasting cashflow or otherwise needed to be before you entered those conversations with Fynn Partners and other potential acquirers?

Elliott King (12:12.94)

Yeah, look, it's a really, really good question. think...

The truth is, I would say, and I know this because I've obviously spoken to other agency owners who've sold their business. I've spoken to Fynn Partners who've acquired other businesses. And my understanding is that we were in a pretty good shape. And I have to say the reason for that probably is partly because of those near-death experiences I mentioned, because we had several over the years and we did learn from them. And the main lesson coming out of them was

you know, like I say, financial management of the business and in particular cashflow forecasting, but all of the rest of the stuff. So when we, when we did actually go through the &A process, we used an &A advisor who helped us to a certain extent, but because we already had a lot of those financial management processes, okay, they weren't perfect, but we had them running and they were working for us. That was a really great platform on which to enter that due diligence process. And yeah, like I said, I know.

from speaking to others that that isn't always the case. It doesn't mean that the deal would be derailed if you didn't have it in place but it would mean that you've got a lot more work during that process and it would also potentially impact the value and the price that you end up achieving.

Adam Cooper (13:37.842)

Yeah, no, that's really good advice. And I think in terms of there's also the distraction that it takes you away from the day to day. If you're having to spend all of your time preparing your financials on the fly while you're in those conversations, right? So having that in place beforehand, I think is good practice. that's super helpful. And I think just one thing that you said there about the due diligence, you know, that takes me onto our next section.

which is often a part that's not really known because people don't tend to talk about the challenging elements of due diligence and it can be a little bit boring, it can also be challenging and LinkedIn is more about the good news stories, right? It's more about post-sale, how much we made, we did afterwards, but the the due diligence process itself can catch you off guard. there anything during that process?

that surprised you, that caught you off guard, that you found particularly challenging, that you can let the audience know about.

Elliott King (14:41.09)

I think your point around how long and in depth and detailed it is, is a really good one. Because I of, you know, I mentioned earlier that, you know, perseverance...

and focus is an important skill in running a business and getting through challenging times. And you definitely need it in spades to get through a due diligence process. I think the other thing that we had in particular that had a massive impact was...

We agreed to the deal in principle a few months before Covid kicked off. So Covid came along and that was a massive curve ball. But in the end, you know, we got through it.

because both sides approached the thing in good faith and it delayed the whole process by about a year. The process had already taken nearly a year. So yeah, the time involved in due diligence, even if you don't have an impact like COVID, I think is significant. And yeah, you just got to be prepared for that.

Adam Cooper (15:51.432)

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's something that people often, they're not aware of, they're not prepared for is how long it's gonna be and how long it's gonna take you away from the day to day. So did you find that in terms of, you've got your cashflow forecasting and your reporting and what you're presenting to the potential acquirer, but then there's the ongoing operations and management and sales and day to day of running the business. Did you find it distracting? Did you find it?

Were you able to manage that okay? How did the day to day suffer or not during that sales process?

Elliott King (16:25.9)

I think that you're making a really good point there, Adam.

Luckily, we had a good advisor who was saying the same thing is like, during this process, during the due diligence, during the sales process, during the, you know, the courting of the of potential buyers, all of that can take a very long time. But it's really, really important that you maintain the focus on running and growing your business. Because if you take your your eye off the bull there, then it's going to impact impact the sale process buyers want to see in the main that certainly from agency.

they want to see a growing agency. They want to see a healthy growing agency in most cases. And so if you do take your eye off the ball, especially for small agencies, it's going to show up in the numbers at some stage. So to answer your question, yes, we did find it challenging. I suppose being an agency owner, you should be quite used to juggling lots and lots of different objectives and prioritise priorities and sort of compartmentalise

mentalizing, I guess, your day and your nights. And that was the approach that I took. I essentially had a day job of running the agency and I was always involved in customer management and sales and new business. And that really was my day job. And then by evenings, by the night, I would be working on the sales process and the due diligence process.

Adam Cooper (17:52.518)

I love that way of framing it, that two job approach. You basically never sleep. that makes a lot of sense. And so let's move on to kind of what happens after you put pen to paper and after the deal was done. What genuinely changed on that day one after a sale? What happened? What changed and what didn't change in terms of your day to day?

Elliott King (17:55.232)

Yeah, No.

Elliott King (18:20.629)

It's a really interesting question, this one, and I sort of had this conversation with a few people over the years, because on some level, on a personal level, and from a kind of, you know, from a family perspective, I suppose, it's a huge change, because you go from being a business owner to an employee. And that, you know, emotionally, that's

that's a big feeling. Obviously, you know, the money aspect is a big feeling. I think for me and my family, wasn't so much the money, although the money was great. There was also a feeling of having made it, of having, you know, successfully started an agency, but also landed it into a great place where it can...

go off and flourish and become something even better and bigger. And that was a feeling of completion, I guess, that was positive. So from a personal perspective, it was quite a big thing. But from an actual day-to-day job perspective, I quite quickly realized that hardly anything changed because the way that certainly the

the acquisition that we were involved in with Finn worked was I was expected to carry on running the business and growing the business and managing the business really in a very, very similar way to before. The only, I guess, operational things that changed were things around HR, you know, and...

and payments to employees, invoicing to clients, I had less direct control over those components. But yeah, in a funny way, the actual job didn't change very much.

Adam Cooper (20:22.886)

No, that's interesting. And actually quite unusual, I think, in terms of like the stories that I hear from people, business owners becoming employees, as you mentioned there, that cultural shift is often quite challenging. going from being the owner to an employee, being the decision maker to potentially having that decision-making shift, because you're no longer an independent, you've got to get sign off, as you say, maybe HR, payments or whatever, that can be...

a challenge for some entrepreneurs to deal with. Did you, you didn't see any of that? You were comfortable or was there any kind of underlying loss of control feeling in those early days?

Elliott King (21:07.629)

Yeah, I think it's a really good question and I think it does come down to your individual personality and I suppose, look, I recognise some of those feelings.

and you know and maybe over over time it's been sort of I'm actually still in an earn out it's a six-year earn out we're five years into it and I suppose there are occasionally days when I look back you know wistfully at the at the time when when you know when I had full full control and and you know didn't need to go and get sign off to do things but I also at the same time remember those more challenging days right you know I mentioned those near-death experiences now

once you're involved in a much larger agency, does, you know, hopefully, and certainly in the case of Finn, it comes with the benefits of a lot more financial stability. So you still have challenges, you still have issues that you need to deal with, but they're not.

they don't kind of endanger you know essentially your family and your entire life to a certain extent in the same way as they might do when you're you know an agency founder and it's and literally everything is on you so I suppose that there's a trade-off isn't there and for me I was I was and still am comfortable with that trade-off it's not to say that you don't miss the good old days of you know being the agency owner that can you know that can just run with things

in whatever way you think best.

Adam Cooper (22:40.712)

Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And you say, as you say, it's that trade-off and it's great that you're comfortable with that and particularly given the length of the earn out. So that's great. That's great. And let's focus on, you mentioned before about sort of the shift from project revenue to retainer revenue. And that's something that a lot of agency owners are looking at as they're thinking about selling. It's making that.

Elliott King (22:49.75)

Yeah.

Adam Cooper (23:08.422)

that shift from project to retainers. How transformational was that, do you think, in the end result? that, know, was that, it was obviously a decision driven by those near-death experiences and driven by the SEO market that you were in, but in terms of from a pure sale perspective, how attractive was the business as a result of that mix of project versus retainer?

Elliott King (23:34.861)

I mean, I would say from our buyers, from Finn's perspective and probably any similar buyer, the reason it's so attractive is the predictability.

you know, I, you know, obviously I work for Fin now. So when, when I would look at an acquisition from a Fin perspective, if you're paying a lot of money for an agency, there's probably a strategic objective, but also you want the financials to make, make sense at the same time. And so, you know, you want to be able to, to feel comfortable that those revenues that are getting today are still going to be there and hopefully much higher, you know, in two, three, four years time. and, and so having that

those retainers, even if they're sort of annual or even if they're monthly rolling, it just adds to that layer of comfort. So I think I think from that perspective from a buyer, it's certainly really important. But, you know, as you correctly said, from a mint twist perspective in the very early days when we were just essentially going from project to project, even though we were a much smaller agency than we eventually became, in some ways, we probably had more financial challenges in those

early days and it was an impediment to growth really the project-based work and as soon as we got the retainers going obviously first and foremost it has to work for the client but if it's working for the client then invariably it's going to work for your agency because you can

not guarantee but you can stay with much more certainty that you're going to get you know x you know thousand pounds on this particular day of the month which means that you can cover all of your direct costs and salary bill you know typically being one of the bigger ones with with much more certainty than you would otherwise be able to do do it and then that that becomes a foundation for for more growth and more growth.

Adam Cooper (25:29.01)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's something that I always speak with my clients who are thinking about selling or not even thinking about selling, but it's that building your business to potentially sell and making sure you're structuring it in that way. It carries you through those near death moments. And then when you get to that stage of trying to sort put it on the market, you're in a good position. One thing...

Yeah, I'd be interested in is obviously you talked about the revenue mix and you've talked about, you know, project versus retainer revenues. Were there any other KPIs, key performance indicators, you know, financial or non-financial that were really important as you prepare to sell, you know, whether that was from a M &A advisor perspective or from Fynn Partners or other potential acquirers, were there any other metrics that really

caught you by surprise or that were a real focus, again, you could give as advice to anyone in a similar boat.

Elliott King (26:26.221)

Yeah, I think the other metric that was really important for us.

from a selling the business perspective, but also from a growing the business perspective, as well as looking to have, I think we ended up 70 % of our revenue was retainer based and 30 % was project based. And that came from a point where, at one stage it was 100 % project based. And for a long time, the majority was project based. And as soon as we got to over 50 % retainer, then we became much more stable. So that was a really key one. And then the other one that goes hand in hand with that.

was the average client value. So for a long time in the early stages we had a really really large number of clients but there was a massive long tail of very very low value clients and I think

once we benchmarked, I think it was something like our top 20 % of clients gave us 80 % of our revenue, meaning we had 80 % of our clients only giving us very small amounts of revenue. And once we set a KPI to sort of benchmark what we felt was a minimum annual revenue, whether that was from retainers or projects or a mixture of both, then we were able to put our focus on, I guess,

the most valuable clients to us and invest in those relationships. And in some cases, politely move away from clients that weren't such a good fit. It wasn't a good fit for us, therefore it doesn't work for them either. So it's kind of a mutual thing. And so, yeah, I guess the average annual client value was a seriously important KPI.

Adam Cooper (28:12.008)

Excellent, that's really useful. That's really useful. so it's just changing tack slightly and sort of going into the area, your area of expertise around SEO and be interested, given where we are in 2026 and the buzz around AI doesn't seem to be slowing down in any way, shape or form. I'd be interested in your view on how that's changing your world, know, changing how is it changing how you think about SEO, how you think about...

the agency model from a Fynn Partners perspective or more broadly, given the changes that AI is making to operations, to marketing, to the full gamut of business. What are your thoughts on that?

Elliott King (28:55.597)

Yeah, I mean, you and I, we're talking in the preparation for this, that obviously AI is touching almost every area of every person's life, personal business and all the rest of it. So, it's impacting obviously in so many ways. I think from an SEO perspective, it's really interesting for us because,

SEO as we sort of discussed has been a key skill of the agency and of the teams I look after and you know, FinPartners has an exceptionally strong global SEO team. So because they've they've they're so good, they've obviously been ahead of this AI trend. And the SEO team that I work with were looking at the impact of AI.

before it was even fashionable for us to talk about. So many, years ago, certainly pre-2022, the SEO team were benchmarking the impact of LLMs and the potential for AI to disrupt the SEO space. And I think in the main, where we are now in 2026,

what we're seeing is an increasing number of what we called like top of the funnel searches. So those like informational queries that you might make if you're looking for, for example, a, you know, a winter sun destination for your holiday, you might start.

talking about what are the best winter sun destinations in Europe or near Europe to go to. What are the, you know, and then, and then as you find out a bit more information, you would sort of dig down and get a bit more specific about a particular country, about a particular hotel or a particular, you know, beach resort or whatever it is. And what we're finding is those top of the funnel searches that used to happen in Google and people used to be researching on websites, they're actually

Elliott King (30:59.392)

replacing that with having conversations without inside LLMs. So what we're seeing is the the number of the average number of visits to an average website is actually dropping because people replacing visits to a website with conversations on an LLM. So from an SEO perspective, it changes the game a little bit because it's not that the content on the website is not important because it it is equally important potentially even more so because the LLMs are providing the

answers to the questions that people are asking inside those chatbots based on information they're drawing from the websites. Now the trade-off is that they are drawing on information from our website, from our business or organization or brand website, then the LLMs will also cite the our website, meaning that if the user is interested and wants to...

go a bit deeper into the conversation. They've typically provided the opportunity to click through onto the website. So from an SEO perspective, the journey becomes chat bots at the top of the funnel and then websites at the bottom of the funnel. So I mentioned that website visits are dropping, but website conversions are still the same. So the SEO game has changed.

The name has changed. So people are referring to as geo, which is generative engine optimization or AIO or AI search. And there's probably a few other words, but from an SEO perspective, we consider it as visibility optimization, if you like. And we're actually toying with changing the name of the service, but for a long time now incorporating.

AI search has been a component of SEO and it's driving massive change in this particular niche.

Adam Cooper (32:50.48)

Nice, we do love an acronym, don't we? AIO, GEO, SEO. But no, that's really helpful and very clear. And are you finding that you're recommending to your clients to change their content strategies, you know, in terms of to ensure, you know, whereas before, as you say, there was more focus on driving visits to get that same number of conversions. If the focus is now on a reduced number of visits and

Elliott King (32:53.102)

Yeah.

Adam Cooper (33:19.547)

ensuring that you're more visible to chatbots. Does that change content strategy and how you're building the websites or you're recommending clients build their websites?

Elliott King (33:30.274)

Yeah, it's a really good question. I would say it's definitely changed it. It's not a revolution, I would say. It's more an evolution. So a lot of the best practices that were true for SEO five or 10 years ago are still true for optimizing for LLMs. there's an adjustment in focus. In terms of the websites, question about websites.

The website still needs to be built in a very user friendly and be technically sound and all the rest of it. And the content needs to be visible to the robots. In terms of the content strategy, I would say video and audio content podcasts like this YouTube videos always were important, but they're even more important than ever. The LLMs know how to read all of the podcasts.

platforms, know how to read YouTube, Google owns YouTube. And not only do they know how to read these places, but they provide or they regard these sources of information as very, very highly credible, mainly because they're being developed by very credible people like yourself, Adam, but also because the actual content is real people having real conversations.

And if we're talking about business content like this, it's specialist people having specialist conversations. the LLMs are prioritizing these sources of information because remember, although we call it artificial intelligence, it's not actually intelligent. It's just really, really good processing information from other intelligent people that are having those conversations. The interesting thing is a lot of people talk about AI produced content.

Now, you produced, you try, if we tried to produce a podcast like this and we just asked Gemini or chat GPT to create the content and then we turned it into audio and we put it up onto the podcast platforms. The LLMs would recognize that it was AI with that is AI and it would it would demote that content because it's not it's not truly intelligent people having truly specialist conversations. So it's it's the production of

Elliott King (35:45.622)

of this type of informational content on video and audio channels is an exceptionally powerful way to get your brand mentioned on the LLMs.

Adam Cooper (35:57.32)

that's super helpful and yeah quite reassuring actually so that's great and I guess just changing tack slightly before we move on to our final business book bonus section I just wanted to sort of see if we could rewind the clock I guess and there's a lot of you know small business owners agency founders who are earlier in the journey you know what would you tell them what would you tell yourself you know if you were starting your agency now

Elliott King (36:01.485)

Yeah, yeah.

Adam Cooper (36:25.928)

What would you, one lesson or one thing that you would do differently from what you've done based on your experience, what could you tell them?

Elliott King (36:36.002)

Yeah, mean, I'm not just saying this because we're on the Fractional CFO show, but I honestly think that a kind of finance 101 understanding at the start, ideally before you start any business, incredibly helpful. And then as and when you can afford it, having the right finance manager, finance advisor, fractional CFO,

They can be worth their weight in gold because not only do they set you up to be able to sell your agency or business but probably more importantly than that it gives you a Platform and a foundation on which you can be more secure in your in your own understanding of your financial You know position someone told me once that cash for a business is like oxygen and If you run out of oxygen you die

And if you run out of cash, you die. They told the same person told me a business doesn't fail because it has too many costs or not enough clients or not enough, you know, not enough, anything. It fails because it physically comp doesn't have the cash to pay the bills that, you know, that are being presented to it. And when you run out of cash, your business dies.

Adam Cooper (37:59.464)

That's great advice, Elliot. I couldn't agree more, as you'd expect. And I think, yeah, just to go back to what you were saying before, having that financial health within the business and that security and knowledge of what you're doing, whether that's through yourself or through an advisor or an expert, helps you avoid those kind of near-death experiences that you referenced at the outset. So I think definitely good advice there.

Excellent, and then just moving on to our final section, which is our business book bonus section, and this is where our guests recommend a book or a podcast or some other piece of content that's particularly helped them in their careers. So Elliot, is there anything that you would say has been particularly influential in your career that you'd want to recommend to the listeners?

Elliott King (38:47.894)

Yeah, I mean, there's there's so many things to choose from here. So I plumped for a classic book. It's called How to Win Friends and Influence People. probably heard of it. Look, you read the book and it's one of those books you kind of you read it and you sort of think, well, I knew that I knew this and I knew that. But it's just full of just wisdom of the ages. It was written by someone called Dale Carnegie quite a long time ago. But I think for any

Adam Cooper (38:57.96)

Yeah.

Elliott King (39:16.738)

business person that has to interact with customers, it's gold.

Adam Cooper (39:21.884)

It absolutely is, couldn't agree more. Proper nuggets and gems of insight there, which in this age of AI, going back to what we're talking about, those relationships, that ability to communicate with people is never more valuable. So, great recommendation and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. So, before we wrap up, you could just leave us with a few words of where people can find you, learn more about the work that you're doing over at FIM Partners. Just give us a few parting thoughts.

Elliott King (39:51.98)

Yeah, so look, my name's Elliot King, it's two Ls and two Ts. And if you Google me, you'll find my personal website, which is a update now, but you'll also find links to my profile at Finn Partners. I'm on LinkedIn, and if anyone wants to connect with me on LinkedIn, I'll accept your connection. And I'll look forward to chatting with you there.

Adam Cooper (40:14.522)

Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Elliot, for joining me today on the Fractional CFO Show. Really appreciate your insights, your perspective, and your time. Thank you.

Elliott King (40:22.434)

Thank you, Adam.