CFO Chronicles: The Secrets Behind Success
Welcome to CFO Chronicles: The Secrets Behind Success, the ultimate podcast for Fractional CFOs and Accounting Firm owners who are eager to land more high-paying clients and elevate their businesses to new heights. Hosted by James Donovan from Nine Two Media, we specialize in helping financial professionals achieve their goals through innovative and effective marketing strategies.
In each episode, we dive deep into the world of finance and marketing, interviewing industry leaders who share their insider secrets and success stories. You'll gain access to unique marketing tactics specifically designed for Fractional CFOs and Accounting Firms, covering everything from lead generation and client acquisition to branding and digital presence.
Whether you're looking to refine your marketing approach or seeking inspiration from top financial experts, CFO Chronicles: The Secrets Behind Success is your go-to resource for actionable insights and proven strategies. Join us as we uncover the secrets behind thriving financial practices and help you unlock the full potential of your business.
Tune in and transform the way you attract and retain clients—one episode at a time.
CFO Chronicles: The Secrets Behind Success
What 7-Figure Firms Overlook (That’s Costing Them Thousands) — with Larry Levine
Where is your firm bleeding cash, and what can you do about it?
In this episode, James sits down with Larry Levine of P3 Cost Analysts, who works with companies doing $20M to $500M+ to recover tens (sometimes hundreds) of thousands in unnecessary expenses—without cutting staff, renegotiating client contracts, or sacrificing service quality.
You’ll learn:
- Why CFOs and controllers often miss cost-saving opportunities hiding in plain sight
- The most common “indirect” expenses that drain margin
- How to spot silent overcharges in waste, utilities, telco, and more
- Why Larry’s team only gets paid if you save money
If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re truly optimized—or just coasting on assumptions—this episode will make you think twice.
You've built something real. Now make sure you are keeping as much revenue as possible!
Feeling stuck in your growth? Discover how to elevate your marketing, personal brand, and sales approach to attract clients who value your expertise.
Ready to make a shift?
Book your strategy call today at accountingleadsnow.com
Welcome to CFO Chronicles the secrets behind success, the go-to podcast for fractional CFOs and accounting firm owners who want to attract more high-paying clients and increase their revenue. Hosted by James Donovan from Nine Two Media, this podcast dives into marketing strategies specifically designed for lead generation and client acquisition. In each episode, you'll hear from industry leaders sharing their success stories, and Today we're joined by a lady who's P3 Cost Analyst, a cost reduction firm.
Speaker 2:Larry, I'm so excited to have you on the show hearing about how P3 Cost Analyst helps out your clients, what you do for them, the value you bring to the marketplace and how you got into this space. So, larry, without further ado, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. This is very cool.
Speaker 2:Larry, let's go back a little bit before P3. What's your background before getting into this cost reduction firm?
Speaker 3:Sure, there's a little bit of a story here. So I graduated college so many years ago, but out of college I joined a series of high-tech firms. I'll call that part of my life Larry 1.0. I worked with a few name brand companies that you may recognize the names of now or the companies they became. I worked with Data General, which got purchased a few times and is now part of Dell. I work at Lucent Technologies, which is now part of Nokia, and a few other companies you did not hear about, you would not know about. And then in 2007 or so, after so many high-tech bubble bursts, I bought into a home care franchise in Massachusetts and I, with my business partners, ran that for 14 years. I'll call that part of my life Larry2.0. That ended during COVID in 2021. We sold the business back to our franchisor.
Speaker 3:My daughter was graduating college and was relocating to DC, and shortly after she graduated and moved to DC, I followed her. After I sold the business and moved to DC, I followed her after I sold the business. Of course, I followed her to what we call DMV DC, maryland, virginia. I'm like half an hour away from her, so I'm now in Maryland and shortly after I landed in Maryland. Following my daughter days to the area, I bought into p3 cost analysts as a franchisee providing, as you said, cost reduction services to our clients. We help them reduce their indirect vendor overcharges.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome. I'll need to change the intro then, because we're speaking with Larry Levine 3.0. Okay, cool.
Speaker 3:I'm happy to have that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, awesome. So tell me a little bit about the cost reduction world, because our background as a marketing firm working with a lot of tax planning, tax professionals, fractional CFOs a big part of what they do is expense reduction. You know strategies to reduce their taxable income. How much crossover is there from what fractional CFOs and tax planners are doing to you being a core cost reduction firm?
Speaker 3:I think there's perhaps two or three answers there. So our experience is that most CFOs are interested in reducing costs for their direct expenses. They see their indirect expenses as being mostly fixed. We could talk about what that is Direct expenses for, let's say, an auto dealership group. Our cars is their service organization, might be the brand and the building that they're in. For a hotel group, the direct expenses tends to be beds and restaurants and the TVs in the rooms. But there's a series of indirect expenses that support the businesses, these businesses that most clients don't consider and they take for granted. That's the telephone systems, the utilities that keep the place warm or cool, the waste systems, the uniforms and linens, the vendor payment systems, property tax. I listed five and we support another five or six after that. Those are what we take care of and, as I said, most CFOs, while they want to reduce those expenses, I find that their focus tends to be more on the fixed, the direct expenses, and they see the indirect expenses as fixed and in fact they're not necessarily fixed.
Speaker 3:I think you asked how we work with and how we overlap with them. More often than not we ask our clients to see us as an extension of their teams, extension of their financial, an analyst team, extension of their procurement team, and we work on their behalf, negotiating with their vendors to reduce overcharges that should not be on their bills, on their invoices, to reduce rates that could perhaps be negotiated lower. When you as a business obtain waste services or telephone services or uniform services from any one of a number of vendors, you're offered a rate or a series of rates for these services and more often than not you accept them. If you don't accept them, you may want to try to renegotiate them by a few points. If it's $1,000 per whatever it is you're purchasing, you feel that you want to get a few points off and you ask can we get it for $900? More often than not the service provider is going to say yes, because there's still a large margin there. We know that because over the years we've created a benchmark database, a cost level benchmark database. So we know, on a service by service, sku by SKU, geography by geography basis, what the cost level is for each of those services, for waste services, for uniform services, and we're able to negotiate on their behalf to bring those rates down to those levels and affect a reduction of cost for the business On average 30% to 40% cost reduction for 90% of our clients.
Speaker 3:And our fee is a contingency-based fee. Our fee is contingent upon finding savings. If we cannot find savings, if for one reason or another you already have the best rate and that happens sometimes there is no fee for our services. But if we do negotiate your fee down from in the example that I just gave, you brought it down to $900, but maybe we brought it down to $500, saving you $400. We'll share in that fee 50-50. So we'll bill you, in that example, $200 a month for 36 or 60 months in exchange for negotiating that rate for you.
Speaker 2:That's awesome what I'm hearing is everything's negotiable and there's no real what's on the sticker. It doesn't mean that's the price and that kind of goes for anything.
Speaker 3:I've heard people go into Macy's and try to negotiate rates. Those are direct expenses there. But you're correct, Everything's negotiable.
Speaker 4:You just have to know how to negotiate.
Speaker 3:If you're my client and you're going to your waste provider to ask for lower rates beyond the $900 in that example, you're probably not going to get much. You're going to be told that's the rate. If you go to AT&T or Verizon or PacWest to try to renegotiate your telephone rates or your gas rates from your gas company, electricity, your copier rates from Sharp I'm not picking on anyone in particular's common name You're more than likely not going to get far. You may get someplace, but you're not going to get far more than likely not going to get far.
Speaker 2:You may get someplace, but you're not going to get far In some cases.
Speaker 3:I remember my first ever client, an eight location retail business in Massachusetts. We were able to bring their waste services down 75% and during the process he said to me I don't look at the bills, I just pay them. And even if he was looking at the bills, what is he looking for? He doesn't know what he's looking for. He doesn't have the cost level for that service, for that bin size, for that pickup frequency, for that geography. He doesn't have the knowledge of whether or not the fuel surcharge on his bill for the waste pickup is contractually allowed. He doesn't have the background of having worked at that vendor. So we're there, as I said, we're an extension of his financial analyst team with the background and that knowledge.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. What you're saying is, I feel like the most actionable item right now is to just I mean one. You need to learn how to negotiate, and chris voss has a great book never split the difference.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you're familiar with that one with that but just going going to your vendors and wherever all your expenses are and almost just playing around for a bit to see, okay, where, where can I save a couple points here? Because if you never ask, the answer is always no, but it's. It's very motivating what you're saying right now. How did you go from owning a home health care company to jumping into being a professional negotiator?
Speaker 3:No, so I will offer. Let me answer the last part first, and we may want to audit this, edit this out. I am not the negotiator, so I'm the role I, even though I'm a franchisee and I own my business and I'm reaching out to two hotel groups and multifamily communities and all of the other groups and on and on, I'm not doing the negotiation. The audit team, as I said before, we have a utility auditor, we have a set of waste auditors, we have uniform zoom auditors. We have on and on these guys, these being the guys that have worked at those companies before and have the daily access to the benchmark database. They are the ones doing the negotiation. I'm enabling the conversation, I'm as part of every conversation, but I don't have those live negotiation skills, the Chris Voss skills. I have some of them, but I'm not utilizing it with the vendors. I'm not communicating with the vendors.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's fair. I mean you're in the negotiating world let's call it or the negotiating industry. But how do you go from your past role for 14 years?
Speaker 3:Sure I can answer that question. It's a loaded question, so let's back up a little bit further. So for however many years prior to that 20-ish years, I was an individual contributor. I ran program management groups. I ran development groups. That was fun. More often than not, I delivered through an organization of people.
Speaker 3:My success was dependent on a group of people as well as myself. As I said, I left that industry in 2007 due to one or several high-tech bubble bursts, and 9-11 was a contributing factor in that as well. Back in 2001, five, six years prior to that. So when I bought into the home care agency, I joined with two other business partners. That team evolved over time, but I had business partners the entire time, and the thought process there was I have no more bosses, I work for myself, when, in fact, I work for them. I work for all my employees, I work for all their families, I work for all their clients. So I had 100 bosses and I felt I needed a little more.
Speaker 3:After 14 years of some successes and a lot of lessons learned, I felt that I wanted to be less dependent on business partners and dependent solely on myself and working with a team of other individuals Everybody at my business. Everybody at PEEF more often more than not most people at PEEF we are independent business owners, llcs, independent contractors, individual contributors, whatever it may be. We're working for ourselves and we're dependent on each other, but we're not within each other's businesses. So I think this model to try to put a bow on the answer here fits me better than having people, other business partners that I'm responsible to and for.
Speaker 2:Interesting and you're working with some pretty massive size businesses. I would say you mentioned before we hit the recording on average of 20 mil to 500 mil range, which is pretty big.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I mean the range itself, but also to be making half a billion dollars a year. That's not a small company. How do you find new clients to work with? Because I'm guessing this isn't facebook ads, because you're not. You're not finding businesses that large through, maybe, so that's a good question.
Speaker 3:We answered that part first. Um, businesses for the most part are not looking on facebook for their for for vendors to work with. Businesses may or may not be looking on Google AdWords. Businesses may or may not be looking for LinkedIn ads, but I find my leads because they're not clients yet, they're prospects. They turn into leads that turn into clients and it's a big funnel. Many prospects turn into a very small list of actual clients because not everybody believes they need our services. We could talk about that. Prospects are not at all difficult to find.
Speaker 3:If you're a part of the business and you have a passion for manufacturing, or if you have a passion for automobiles, or if you have a background in utilities, you know that space and you know how to pull up a list of automobile dealerships. Or you know how to pull up a list I mean I could do it right now a list of orthopedic surgeons, the top 100 orthopedic surgeon practices in the United States. It's easy to find those businesses and more often than not, it's easy to find the people that we reach out to the most, which is typically the CFO. The CFO is not looking for cost reduction. He knows who in his organization is looking for cost reduction and beyond the background and looking for lists driving down the street. If you want to drive through an office park and one of our services is small parcel shipping If you want to find businesses that have large, small parcel shipping, if you want to find businesses that have large, small parcel shipping expenses, just go into an office park and look for FedEx and UPS trucks.
Speaker 3:If you want to find businesses that have large waste expenses, go into an office park to see who has the waste vendors, the green bins, the blue bins in the back of the malls. Vendors the green bins, the blue bins in the back of the malls. It's go through a go through a shopping mall and there are probably 50 brands there that are manufacturers that have manufacturing expenses, that are retailers that have retail expenses and because of that and these manufacturers are shipping to probably 300 retail locations they have FedEx and UPS expenses. So, okay, you know you got the brand. You go through the mall, you get 50, 100 of these brands and now you go to their main website or any one of a number of tools, find the CFO, find the president, find the chief procurement officer or somebody and try to make a connection. No shortage of hundreds of thousands of millions of businesses out there that can use cost reduction.
Speaker 2:It's very creative the way you're speaking about, just like the signs to look for and, like you know, one plus one equals two. If you see this, then it means that and you keep going. You mentioned again before we hit record that that a lot of firms don't think they need cost reduction but you guys come in on a contingency basis. Essentially, the offer is we're going to help you guys save a ton of money and until we do, you don't pay us anything. Who's saying no to that? That sounds like a pretty no-brainer offer.
Speaker 3:The groups that say no to us initially, and sometimes forever, are those groups that have financial analysts, slash AP, slash procurement teams that are responsible for this. And there's a perhaps controversial opinion here, a piece of a mindset, that I'm paying. I'm the CFO, I'm paying this team to do their job. They're doing their job. I'm paying them hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to do the job. Why do I need to bring you in? They're doing their job. So the question I ask the most is how are they compensated for their findings? We're compensated dollar for dollar for everything we find. If you said, if there's no findings, there's no fee, and the more findings, the more fee for us. So are they being compensated for their findings? Do they have a background? Does your accounts payable person that pays the waste bills, utility bills? Have they worked at Waste Management or Public Services, at&t, whatever your utility service is? Do they know how to negotiate on their behalf? Do they have the contract in front of them? The contract is typically not with AP. The contract is with the procurement team. Sometimes the AP team has it. Are they studying every invoice to verify that the invoice is contractually valid? Do they have access to cost level data. So that's the argument we go through the conversation we go through with the client, with the CFO if they will have that conversation with us at all about why what they're doing is not as effective as what we and a few other competitors can do.
Speaker 3:Sometimes it comes back it's too good to be true, or I'm not willing to pay you 50% Again. If you brought it down from $1,000 to $900, I could bring it down to $500, saving you $400. I'm not willing to pay you $200 for saving that, but in the meantime you're paying them $400. You're paying them 100% indefinitely, but you only have to pay us 50%, $200 for 36 or 60 months. There's two service levels. We could talk about that. Sometimes we're able to convince them of that to move forward with us. Sometimes it's just you know we are the best negotiators in the world. There's nobody does about this that clients. This is how I hear the argument coming back from clients. We know how to negotiate. This is what we do for a living. Um, we already have the best rates.
Speaker 2:I've been doing this for 30 years, probably not yeah, it sounds like there's probably a bit of ego at play, which, to a certain degree, could be fair. I mean, like you said, we already have a full team in place. We're paying. Maybe you don't even want that like the curtain to be revealed of oh my goodness, I've been paying this much money to people and they haven't been doing their job, so we know that we don't.
Speaker 3:You and I had a pre-interview. For any of us listening to this. I did not say the word ego to you, but that is the word that is what I use when I talk to my peers. There's an ego involved, Whether our clients want to admit it or not. My feeling is that more often than not, ego gets in the way of doing the right thing for the business. In some cases, there are employees that don't have a vested interest in the business. That's why I reach out to the CFO or the president or somebody that's been installed with a fair amount of equity in the business.
Speaker 3:I get the sense. This is true also when I'm dealing with government organizations. It's not my money, it's taxpayer money, so it's fine. Well, I was recently dealing a little bit of a sore point with myself. I was recently dealing with a very large government-related organization paying I'll try to be a little vague $3 million a year for a service that we felt comfortable. We were able to renegotiate to 20% or more cost reduction, and even at 10% it's still a large win for them and they moved forward. That's pretty far along the path Reviewing our contract, saying it's illegal. But they chose to go another path which is not going to be anywhere near as effective, but it might have been easier. There are options. There are many options.
Speaker 3:Clients can work with group purchasing organizations, gpos, and sometimes they can negotiate rates on their own and they're thinking that's easier. In some cases go through a GPO or a pre-negotiated rate, state level rate for services. In most states, services for any government entity, whether it be schools or the city government for electricity, for copiers, for cleaning, for any kind of services are negotiated in advance. So the particular entity can choose to take that off the shelf at that point quote unquote discounted rate rather than running their own RFP. That is easier, for sure, than running your own RFP, but we could work with you to run that RFP and taking it off off your hands entirely and get you even a better rate 20, 10, 20, 30%. And if you're talking about if you're talking about spending only $50,000 or something, saving $500 is not worth anybody's time. But if you're spending 3 million a year and I could save you three hundred thousand or more, yeah, that to me seems like a large amount of money.
Speaker 2:but when you're dealing with an umpteen billion dollar entity, um, and it's not my money, it's not their money and they're not equity in the business.
Speaker 3:It's a challenge, so you hit a little bit of a nerve there, but that's. I'm glad I actually put it out there that's good.
Speaker 2:Good, that's good. Okay, so last question for you, larry, and probably maybe a tricky one to answer, but an actionable step somebody could take to one start going to their vendors, whatever the size of the company is. But maybe a piece of advice to tip the scales in their favor on the negotiating side of things well, I was going to say this before.
Speaker 3:So I mentioned by saying I'm. We started by talking about the 20 million to 50 million a million dollar business. Far below 20 million dollars they're not. The business is not spending enough for us to get engaged and we're not going to spend the time. We have minimums on each of our categories. But the business themselves should go back to the vendors. And I mean, even if they're spending $500 a year, the vendor doesn't really know room. But if they're spending a few thousand dollars a year for waste services, for uniforms, linens, but which may be, but they may be below a service, ask it doesn't have to ask. Ask for ask it doesn't have to ask. Ask for 20% discount in exchange for renegotiating a five-year contract.
Speaker 3:Be on top of your invoice. Sometimes you just don't have the background, as I mentioned, to know what should be on the invoice, what should be on the contract or not. But the businesses that are larger, they often don't have the time. They're running their business. They're probably. You know, in today's economy more and more businesses are trying to do more with less and they just don't have the time to worry about midline expenses. If they do, if they do have the time, do what I suggested about the small businesses Study up on what the rates are. If you can Study up on what your contract looks like on what the rates are, if you can study up on what your contract looks like, educate the AP team to be looking at the invoices in the contract to verify that in fact, what they're being invoiced for is correct, and then, of course, as I mentioned, try to renegotiate rates. You may get a few points off of that. If you can't or you don't have the time, here I am.
Speaker 2:Perfect, that's what a great close. How can people get in touch with you then to continue this conversation? Sure I'm assuming you'll put something at the bottom of the screen that gives my conversation get in touch with you and hopefully save a ton of money. Larry, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this. There's so much knowledge and value here and it's motivated me to go look at where our expenses are and try to shave off a couple of bucks here and there for the exact same thing you're already getting.
Speaker 3:I'll go as far as to say and feel free to edit this out that if you can refer any business to me, or anybody here can refer any business to me, I'd be more than happy to pay referral fees. So, even if you don't have the business and the expenses directly, if you know people who do and can make these introductions and I can help them, I'll help you as well.
Speaker 2:There we go. If that's not enough of a reason to reach out to Larry, I don't know what is. Larry, thanks again for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Thanks, James. I appreciate the time. Thank you.
Speaker 4:Thanks for tuning in to this episode of CFO Chronicles the secrets behind success. I hope you found value in today's conversation. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. If you enjoyed today's discussion, please rate and review the show. It helps others discover the insights we share here. Second, if you're ready to take your business to the next level and attract the high-end clients you deserve, head over to accountingleadsnowcom or click the link in the show notes to book your strategy. Call. It's time to position yourself as the advisor your clients need. And don't forget you can connect with me on LinkedIn to stay up to date on what's happening in the world of accounting and financial growth. We've got more exciting topics coming up, so stay tuned for the next episode of CFO Chronicles. Until then, keep pushing forward. Your growth is just one strategic move away.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to CFO Chronicles the secrets behind success. We hope today's episode provided valuable strategies to help you attract more high-paying clients. Be sure to subscribe, follow and share with fellow professionals. Connect with us on LinkedIn and leave a review or comment to join the conversation. Your feedback helps us bring you the best insights in finance and marketing. Until next time, keep striving for success and unlocking your business's potential.