Unlocked with Kristyn Drennen

Do You Have Financial Data… or Financial Clarity?

• Kristyn Drennen

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At some point in every business, the question isn’t “can you manage the finances?”
It’s “should you still be the one doing it?”

In this conversation, Kristyn sits down with Ryan Baer of CFO Selections to unpack a pattern they both see every day: high-performing business owners who have successfully delegated nearly every function… except finance.

Not because they love it. Not because they’re the best at it.
But because it feels too important to let go.

The problem? What once worked becomes the very thing that limits growth, clouds decision-making, and quietly erodes the value of the business.

This episode challenges you to take an honest look at your finance seat and whether staying in it is truly serving your business anymore.

What You’ll Learn

  • Why so many business owners stay stuck in the finance seat longer than they should
  • The difference between having financial data and actually having clarity
  • How strong finance leadership turns numbers into simple, actionable decisions
  • The behavioral side of finance and why control is often the real issue
  • What “owner dependency” really looks like (and how it impacts value)
  • The most common blind spots when owners think they’re ready for an exit
  • How to identify the right level of financial support for your stage of growth
  • Why process, controls, and structure matter more than most reports
  • The real signals that it’s time to step out of the finance seat

The Hard Truth Most Owners Avoid

You didn’t build your business by accident.
But you may be holding it back without realizing it.

Many owners stay in the finance seat because:

  • “I’ve always done it this way”
  • “I don’t fully trust anyone else yet”
  • “I should understand this before I hand it off”

The Reality: 

If you can’t clearly explain what’s happening in your numbers and what to do about it, 
you’re not leading your business from a position of clarity. You’re reacting. Over time, that gap shows up in slower decisions, missed opportunities, and increased risk.

A Better Way to Think About It

The goal isn’t to remove yourself from your financials. It’s to elevate how they serve you. Great finance leadership doesn’t just produce reports. It answers three questions:

  • What’s happening?
  • Why is it happening?
  • What should we do next?

If your current setup isn’t doing that, it’s not a reporting issue—it’s a leadership gap.

Connect with Ryan Baer & CFO Selections

Resources & Next Steps

SPEAKER_01

Welcome to Unlocked, the podcast for leaders who choose less grind, more growth, and real freedom. So let me ask you something. If you disappeared from your business for 30 days, would it run or would it break in your absence? Today I'm joined by Ryan Baer of CFO Selections. He's a seasoned finance and operations executive with over 20 years of experience. He's advised companies, he's managed billions in capital, and he knows how to build the financial infrastructure that businesses need to scale and exit. Here's the truth most owners don't want to hear. You might be the biggest risk in your own business. So today we're going to unpack owner dependency, financial blind spots, and the gap between thinking your business is ready and actually being ready. Because if your business depends on you, it's not an asset, it's a job. And if you want to build something that's truly transferable, this conversation will challenge how you're operating today. Let's get into it. Well, Ryan, welcome. I am so grateful for the time that we have together today. And there's so much connection between what each of us do with our teams, you know, at Transform CXO. We work with business owners to build attractive, ready, transferable businesses. Now we do it from the COO seat, and your team does a lot of the same type of work, right? But specifically from that finance seat. So would love to just start there and have you talk a little bit about, you know, like what's that quick and dirty version of like what you do, uh what you and your team do for business owners.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, absolutely. Happy to dive in and thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited for this conversation. So at CFO Selections, we provide finance and accounting, consulting and recruiting for positions from bookkeeper up through CFO, and we engage in hands-on operational finance work on a fractional project or interim basis, or we also recruit finance and accounting talent as well, and exclusively finance and accounting talent. My role is an ambassador for our talent and our people, a builder and manager of relationships, and a facilitor, a facilitator and connector of resources. Um, so I build relationships specifically with those who are tangential to our clientele, CPAs, banks, consultants, investment banks, et cetera. And my role is to help them understand hey, when there is a need for your clients for our services, think about us. And conversely, when our clients have needs, we want to be able to introduce best-in-class service providers, uh, whether it be tax, audit work, bankers, fractional COOs, investment banks, et cetera.

SPEAKER_01

That's a great recap. So when we go into a business for the first time, some of the things that we're commonly seeing are, you know, owners sitting in that finance seat still. And it's interesting, they've given up so many other pieces of that functional accountability chart, but they really tend to hang on to that finance seat in many cases. So we see that frequently. And I get it, it's like a it's a tough thing to turn the checkbook over. And um, sometimes we see a lot of creativity in how finance has been managed, shall we say? And that's okay. Like we're all doing the best we can with the knowledge that we have, but so many owners get pigeonholed into that finance seat and they almost like don't know how to get out of it. And it ends up being this thing that they are in that's kind of dragging their energy down because they don't necessarily have like a, you know, an MFA or a big finance background that they carried into this and it's more out of necessity. When you're going into a business for the first time and you see that dynamic of owner-led finance, what are some of the first things that you're you're looking at with that owner?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So it's interesting. Who likes to talk about how they manage their own money?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, no.

SPEAKER_00

Right? No, nobody wants to do that. I I we always hear that public speaking is the biggest fear, and we never really talk about talking about how you manage your own finances. I think, you know, when we come in, there is often a triggering event. And that triggering event is often because of the way the finance, uh, the owner has been managing the finances in the organization. It could be they broke a borrowing covenant or they found out, whoops, I actually don't have any cash and I have no idea why. Often what we find is there's some element of turnover that has been consistent. And hey, we lost, you know, we've been through four CFOs in five years. Well, whose fault really is that? Do you know how to hire a CFO? Do you know what a CFO actually looks like and actually does? The reality that we see is it's mostly behavioral. And you know, behavioral finance is a passion of mine. This is more psychological than anything else. But there is the element of control and the lack of understanding of what a finance professional actually does. And if you haven't done the work yourself, it's pretty difficult to ensure that you're hiring the best talent that matches the business needs. How would you know if what billbacks look like or what reconciliations look like if you've never really done them and seen them done the right way? So I think, you know, a part of what we do is right size the finance function to the needs of the organization and bring in talent that matches the size of the company, the sophistication of the company, which the owner really has never even been in a position to understand. And we're trying to fit help them figure out hey, you actually are not the best person to manage the finances of the company. And also, most importantly, it's not the best and highest use of your time.

SPEAKER_01

A couple of really interesting things that you bring up there. Like they, they, they don't know. They haven't seen it before, they haven't seen it done well, they haven't been close enough to it in maybe previous organizations that they did work in to really know what that could look like. It's making me think about one of the best engagements I ever worked in alongside a fractional CFO. And this guy was really talented in taking the numbers and basically translating them to English for us, right? Taking all the ones and zeros off the page. And he would step into our quarterly strategic planning sessions. We'd give him, we'd like carve out an hour in the day for him to come in on Zoom and he would go through this report that he had built to really reflect like the best operational data in the business that was driving the financial health. And he would come in and he'd say, Listen, what it boils down to is here's where you're strong. These are the things that are going well. Keep these things at this level. And then let's focus on these one or two metrics and we would connect it back to the operations of the business. And it was just like a really meaningful lever. The team all looked at it and went, oh, okay. So if we do five more, you know, of these every month or add 10 of this to the pipeline, then that will move this needle, you know, on this number down here downstream. And it's really difficult sometimes for team members, understandably, and even business owners, to look at the PL or the cash flow or the balance sheet and be able to connect the dots back to what am I doing here every day that actually makes a difference in the finances of the business? He was just really skilled in it. And uh I really appreciated his approach. And I think that's probably like one of the best examples of how we can work together. Because then as he's talking and basically showcasing like the story, the narrative, if you will, behind the data. You know, I think that was my opportunity to say, okay, gang, these are the key issues. Now what are we going to do about it? What needs to look different in the business? And then we can get that little steam engine going. So I just love the you know synergy that we get to have together on that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you bring up two really germane thoughts here. One is the gentleman who hired me onto this firm always uses this analogy in explaining the difference between an accountant and a CFO. He says, an accountant is a lot like a beat reporter. They go out, they interview people, they come back and they say, these are the facts, this is what happened. And a CFO is a lot more like an investigative journalist. This is what happened, this is how it happened, this is why it happened, and this is what we're gonna do about it. This is what it means next. And as you're talking about translating the numbers to what the story is, that really sort of resonates in my brain. You know, we're we're trying to ultimately take data and say what it means. Uh, the other thing that it brings up is I came up through JP Morgan and I went through two training cycles at JPM. One of the most important things I learned in my time there was explain it to me in six words. The notion is take something very complex, and we would be working with high levels of complexity routinely, and just drill it down to six words. Now, it doesn't need to be exactly six words. Once we get those six words, we can make a sentence out of it, or maybe three sentences. But you'll see often, and I found this personally, trying to explain something, you're writing paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs, and you read it back and go, how in the world am I going to understand this if I don't understand it? You know, if I if if the person I'm communicating it to would not understand it. So let's drill it down to brass tacks. And what does that really mean? And I think that a very shrewd finance professional should be able to communicate things in a way they're not condescending by any means, but just explain it to somebody in a language that they understand, not their own financial language.

SPEAKER_01

Such a great point. It's it's the whole like, how do you rate the news, right? You write it to a fourth grade reading level. And to your point, it's not to be condescending at all. It's to make it simple and understandable because when things are simple and understandable, we can move quicker. And often you're probably seeing the same thing. Our teams, they want to go. They don't want to sit and get a masterclass in in finance and accounting and all of those practices. They just want to like get the get the data so that they can do something about it and move forward. So I love that. So we're talking a lot about those practical things in the day-to-day operations of a finance seat. Let's pivot a little bit to companies that are maybe in pursuit of an exit at some point in time. You've got a business owner and they're thinking, hey, I need to make sure I'm sitting in this finance seat, but I don't know if I've got all my ducks in a row and I'm positioned well for entertaining even an offer if one came to me. Like, would I even know if my finances are in good shape or not? So when you're taking a look at a business for the first time and your team is brought in or you're placing a CFO in place, what are some of the key things? Let's narrow it to even just like, what are the the top three items that you analyze first to understand where the business is from a value perspective?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I'll I'll give you three. It could be 10, it could be one owner dependency, owner dependency, and owner dependency. Uh, if you are your business, your business is not sellable. And you know, what I want to see five years in advance is what is the plan to offload all of the owner's responsibilities in their entirety over time, right? How can we identify the right people to take on the right responsibilities over a staggered period of time so that at year four, the owner is not really doing anything? Um, and one of the best anecdotes I heard was from a gentleman who sold his business. And he said, at one point, I thought I was getting ready to sell, and I went out into the backwoods of Alaska. I had no way of being contacted by anyone. I was gone for a month, and we had some really big things in the pipeline. And I was gone for a month and I came back and everything was fine. And at that point, I knew I was ready to sell. So I think that's really the biggest key facet is getting the responsibilities in the hands of people who can do the job very well. So much of ownership and financial management is really based in the hard-rooted psychological notion of control. And if I don't do this, no one will. Well, if you don't give anybody a chance, you're not going to find out if anyone will. And if you don't give anybody a chance, does it that means someone else who's willing to buy the business can't do it either. Um, you can't be the only one who can do this. The reality is people build, run, sell businesses all day, every day, all over the world. And what you're doing is not necessarily unique in terms of the operations and financial management. You may have a great product, you may be doing something different, but in terms of the turning the wrenches and passing the bolts, nothing really is all that different. So getting it away from working in the business and working on the business is always the very first step in trying to get transaction ready, from my perspective.

SPEAKER_01

I'm thinking about some of my clients, and I'm like, man, I think we need to put maybe a goal on our plan here for them to have not only like an emergency access only vacation or window of time or sabbatical like that, but I mean, boy, to go that to that extent where you truly you couldn't reach out if you wanted to. So you better get scrappy and figure it out, team. Yeah. Um, it would be interesting to know his journey up to that point because I would imagine it wasn't always like that, right? So just understanding those practical things that he put in place. Yeah, the owner dependency, even that language, I find is something that we have to start educating our clients on when they come to us. Um, especially when you look at many businesses being more lifestyle oriented, right? They're they were designed to create perhaps a lifestyle for the owner. And so they've created a scenario where they almost have to stay or they feel that to justify the money I'm taking out of the business, I have to stay in these seats. And so the shift there can take time. And it's really this uncoupling of them from each of the seats that they're sitting in. And that's the work that we love to do, obviously, coming in and helping them figure out how do we create a plan around that, put first things first, come into the business. And, you know, we do more than just even coaching and consulting. Like we take on lift. So we're taking burden from them. We're one of the things that they can, we're one of the places that they can kind of pass some of that work so that they can reduce their level of owner dependency and do it in a way that's a fractional cost, not, you know, a full, fully burdened salaried cost. So yeah, really good stuff there. Really good stuff. So um we're talking, we talked about the gentleman who went to Alaska. That was his like litmus test, right? Like, okay, we're ready. Have you ever had a company or have you seen dynamics where companies think that they're in this really great position to go to market, but they actually aren't. And what are the things that you see in the business in that moment that maybe are blind spots for them?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I'm gonna take it from a little bit of a different perspective, um, a similar story, but from the perspective of an investor who was being solicited for capital and thought the business was transaction ready. Uh, I was brought into a CFO role. It was my first time. I was uh in my late 30s, and was brought on by an individual who had a great business plan and said, I'm soliciting an equity investment for 35% stake, value the company in the eight figures. Well, this is really interesting, and they need some of my help for sure. Uh as it happened, and as we talk about transaction readiness, the owner of the business was involved in a fatal accident the first day of my job. Um, and he was airlifted, he survived, but um they effectively drove off a cliff in a in a side-by-side and someone lost their life. And of course, there was absolutely no plan whatsoever. Uh, through the course of this process, we engaged with a gentleman who was being solicited for capital, who was a very successful business owner, who had a very successful exit, and who'd already loaned the money uh the business pretty significant funds. And through those conversations, I got a little suspicious. So I said, let me take a real deep dive into what is going on in this business. And I spent an entire day auditing 3,000 lines of financial transactions, banks transactions, and I found that the business was a piggy bank for the owner. Um the personal expenses far and greatly exceeded anything justifiable by the by the business to an extent that it was laughable. I mean, Gucci, Hermes, Balenciaga, just this guy was going shopping on Rodeo Drive with business money, and the business was not worth that much.

SPEAKER_01

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00

So as you look at the gentleman who was being solicited capital for investment, he thought it was ready to go to scale, uh, was uh willing to put in millions of dollars. And I had to have the hard truth with him. Why do you think that this business is worth this amount of money that you're soliciting, let alone anything? And ultimately he had a uh come to the light moment where he realized the business is worth absolutely nothing through my not so gentle coaxing and found that he was being scammed. Um, the interesting thing of all of this story is uh we had parted ways. I got the heck out of there and you know, did my did my duty to inform and moved on. Years later, that gentleman called me, and of course I knew the nature of the call. And one of the things that he said, I'd been waiting for this forever. He said, You know, I've never not looked at the financials. I have always in all my business, he'd been in business for 50 some odd years, I'd always looked at the financials and said, You know, we'll call him John. Well, why? Why didn't you look at this? And he said, Because I met him at church and I trusted him.

SPEAKER_01

Wow.

SPEAKER_00

And it's such a terrible story, but it's one that I think everyone deserves to hear, both from the perspective of, hey, that can happen to you. Either you can have a critical injury that takes you out of the business, or you can be scammed by a person you really trust, no matter how much you trust them. Um, so that's the one that comes most to mind just in terms of transaction readiness, um, preparedness. And you have two very opposite sides of the spectrum, an individual who has no real financial management experience, who is just basically a con man, and a person who has all the financial management experience and business experience in the world who just could not open his eyes to see the reality of the situation.

SPEAKER_01

Wow. And I would imagine you could you could take church and replace that with my buddy from the golf club or my, you know, my brother's friend, or whatever. There's so many of those like relationships because I think people also like to do business with people who they feel that they know love and trust. And so it does create this false sense of um of comfort. Wow. Oh my goodness. Well, that's really interesting. Gosh, he was living a that was a luxury lifestyle brand for sure. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

A lot of big spending. Oh my gosh. Well, um, those things do happen. So, you know, business owners take some liberties with how they're spending the money in the business. Now, interestingly, do you see that more at a certain revenue level? Like, do you see that more at the sub five or or sub-10 versus the the 10 plus? Like, are there any patterns that you notice there?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's a great question. And intuitive.

SPEAKER_01

When do they outgrow that behavior? I guess. That's that's really the question I want to ask. When do you see a company kind of outgrow that?

SPEAKER_00

Um, when someone smacks them and says, hey, you can't do this because the IRS is not gonna like it very much. Um, you know, I I don't think that I can speak to a difference materially. I think that requires a pretty large sample set to say, hey, these people do it more than those. I would intuitively, though, suspect that, yes, sub 5 million, you're gonna see it quite a bit more than at 50. Um, and that's really more than anything the result of scrutiny from lending standpoints, from bringing in um, you know, high-level talent. You know, looking at my the example that I just gave, it was funny in having this conversation, seeing things online. And the conversation came up among some people. Well, he wasn't the business owner, clearly didn't know what he was doing because he didn't realize that he shouldn't have hired you. Of course, I'm gonna figure it out in five minutes. This is what I do. So I think there is an element of sophistication where as a business evolves and grows, they bump into a glass ceiling. And that may be falling down and hurting themselves, whatever it may be. Um, but as they start to scale up, they they run into pain points. And I would guess that if you really looked at them, they're probably at 5 million, 20 million, 50 million, 100 million, and something along those lines, where they're figuring out things the hard way. And ultimately their success or failure depends on their ability to navigate through that hardship. And I think a big element of that is understanding I don't know what I'm doing here. Let me get an expert involved.

SPEAKER_01

I appreciate that perspective. And I think it also kind of ties back to different companies need different things at different phases of their journey and stages of growth. So let's talk about just a general like I give you a PL for a$10 million company. What are some of the red flags that you're scanning for right out of the gate?

SPEAKER_00

Yep. Bottom line, um, are they profitable? Uh, you know, for me, and I'm a little bit different. I didn't come up through the accounting silo. I'm a financial analyst by background, came up through investment management. Looking at an income statement in isolation, I think it can only tell you so much, right? Are they profitable? And secondarily, I'm typically looking at margins, but they won't really tell you all that much. What I'm interested in is trends. So give me right now your PL, give me a PL from a year ago, two years ago, and three years ago, and let me understand what the trend looks like, what the variances look like, where the delta is. Anytime I'm diving into my role as a CFO previously, um, the second one for a real company, uh, in any given month, when I'm reporting financials, I'm putting it side by side against last month and saying where are the changes and what do they look like? And that's helping me dig into what happened and why. So if we look at things like margin erosion, expense inflation, either gross or net market. Margin, what the bottom line, the evolution of the bottom line looks like relative to revenue. Those are the things that I'm really interested in. What is the pattern of facts that evolves over time with the business? Is that pattern good? Is it bad? And what justifies those changes?

SPEAKER_01

Awesome. That's really helpful. Really, really useful. And what other reports are really critical to be looking at? Obviously, everyone goes to the PL. That's like gut reaction, right? To go to the PL. But what are some of the other things that you're looking at as indications of good like financial hygiene and health in the organization?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think process and procedure for me is really the biggest one. Um, and that's not in a report, right? That's in internal controls and policy. Who has access to what? Where are the checks and balances? Where do they lie? Uh, interestingly enough, we just had a friend of mine and a friend of the firm presenting to us yesterday, and they do managed IT and managed security services. We got a lot into AI and fraud and things of that nature. And the sub-100 million dollar annual revenue business, specifically that 50 or the$5 to$50 million annual revenue range, is a target. And the fraud is getting so sophisticated and the AI is getting so sophisticated, and they're learning patience. That's the biggest thing. They'll get into a business, in some way, infiltrate, and they'll sit, wait for three months, six months, look at things, figure things out who's who, what's going on, take data, and only pounce when they feel that they're in a really strong position to actually win the battle from their perspective and commit, you know, get away with some element of fraud. And how can businesses put a process in place to ensure that there is a safeguard against that? Those are the things that I think are really what at the end of the day are the biggest downside risk. And uh, as a finance professional, I've always said we look at managing risk first. What is your catastrophic risk? Okay, let's try to eliminate that catastrophic risk. Beyond that, though, you know, if we're looking at uh reports data, I think it's really important to come up with specific dashboards or KPIs that are germane to the business. Uh, it's so industry specific. And pairing with a really good finance professional is going to help extrapolate through that process what should your KPIs be? What do we need to be caring about in this business? I don't think you can take a dashboard of just about any business and then translate it to another one, even if it's in the exact same industry. Um, we're gonna care about different things at the end of the day. And the stage at which the business is is going to be really critical in determining what those KPIs should look like.

SPEAKER_01

I appreciate you bringing that up too. Uh a lot of the work that we do, we we use the you know entrepreneurial operating system language of scorecards, right? So it's very much getting that weekly leadership team scorecard, a handful of you know, 80% leading indicator data that we can be laser focused on, keep it, you know, keep it green, is what we say, right? Keep it above above goal every single week and be relentless in addressing the things that are not in the green that are that are red for us and below bar. And ideally, those things are always connecting back to those lagging outcomes that we see on, you know, on things like the PL. So um I think that's that's a really also like that's a hard thread for teams to figure out on their own, to figure out like how do we reverse engineer from our PL all the way back into what are those basic processes that we should be executing to what extent every single week to ensure we get the thing coming out on the other side of the machine over here? Yeah. And I think that's where a really good finance professional with an operational mindset can be just an exceptional partner. Let's go back to a bit of, you know, we're giving business owners some things to think about right now. They're thinking about their business. What are some of those indicator lights where, you know, the founder goes, oh gosh, I'm probably no longer the right person to be owning the finance function anymore? What are some of the indicators that you often see them go, like, oh, because I'm seeing this, this, and this? And can they self-identify that?

SPEAKER_00

Can they? Sure. Do they? Not often in my experience. Um, you know, it goes back to the triggering elements of bringing in a finance professional. And we're such an interesting um offering because we really do bridge that gap of, hey, you probably you either have not invested in the finance function or you've tried to do it and it hasn't worked because you don't know how to. Um, we bring an expertise to our clients in that we're all corporate finance professionals by background internally. We know what good people look like and we know what a properly running function looks like. So when we come in, it there is usually a triggering event of some point. And it as we discussed, it could be, yeah, I'm on my fifth person in this role, or you know, my tax accountant says, Hey, I'm gonna fire you if you don't give me better data because I just can't work with you. Your banker is saying, Hey, look, you really need help. You're not lendable, you may not be bankable, we may have to call the loan. And and in many cases, it takes more than one time. I think there is an element of obstinance and success bias. You know, we see many business owners will say, Well, I got this far without uh, you know, a CFO as an example, and I'm just fine. And we're saying, no, you got this far despite yourself. You probably could be further along the lines if you actually brought in really good talent. And with respect to business owners, you know, people have blinders on. They are focused on what is in front of them, revenue generation, and playing whack-a-mole and putting out fires. And one of the biggest challenges that I see business owners are so strongly focused on revenue generation and not building out the finance function to support that revenue generation. I always equate it to being on the third floor and working on the roof when your finance function is downstairs, going, hey, we're still framing and doing foundational work down here. You're way, way, way ahead of us. And by the way, if you keep on building, we're gonna collapse under the weight a bit. So it all comes back to aligning the function with the sophistication of the needs of the business. And at the end of the day, that is something that is frankly pretty difficult to understand and often takes committing. You know, if you are a$50 million annual revenue company, your bank should probably not be 1-800 Capital One and your accountant should not be Jim's CPA down the street who also does car repair at the same time. We build relationships with service providers who are best in class and serve the client at that level. And we start to flesh out what looks like a de facto advisory board of people who are all telling the business owner the same thing. If I tell a business owner something, they might not listen. But if they've got four people that they know and trust and are experts all saying the same thing, a lot more likely to say, okay, that's probably good advice.

SPEAKER_01

Those are all really good examples. And I would imagine every owner can kind of see a piece of themselves inside of any of those dynamics. So as business owners, our responsibility, like turning up the volume and really being like listening, really looking at like what are what are the feedback points that I'm getting about how I'm owning this seat? Um, the language that we use would be like, do you fully get want and have capacity to own this seat the way it needs to be owned for this business to be successful? And oftentimes, not maliciously, like I always assume positive intent, but the owner, you know, well, they they take on this mantle of, well, I'm the owner. This is my business. I'm gonna occupy that finance seat. And it is a really hard thing for them to let go of. So being willing to hear what others are saying and really take yourself out of it and look at what could be possible in the business if I vacated this seat and put the right person in there. Now, to that point, how do I know what the right person is? So we have many of our clients that come to us and they they know. So they they are self-aware, they've heard the feedback, they're seeing I'm not the right person anymore. I've outgrown this seat or this seat has outgrown me as the leader in the seat, but I'm not sure what I need. And that's where I think it can be really confusing because their brain might go, I need a CFO, but then a CFO may be operating at a level that is not exactly what they need functionally from that finance seat as well. So, how does your team help business owners decipher all the options and figuring out what they really need from their finance seed?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's a great question. And I completely agree with you. I think from our perspective, we're really looking at fundamentally what gap analysis. Um, you know, we are not an outsourced model. We're not saying, hey, give us your finance function, we're gonna send it to the Philippines and they're gonna do the work, you're gonna report once a month. We are a staff augmentation model that meets companies where they're at. So when we conduct intake, we're looking at what are the needs of the business holistically from the function and what is being produced today. Um, and where are those gaps? So we can, you know, and we see title misalignment very often. We see very regularly, I need a CFO and I just need a good accountant. Um, and could be vice versa. Hey, I I just need a bookkeeper, and you're going, no, you really need a high-level controller or something along those lines. Um, so you know, having been there and done that and having the understanding of roles and responsibilities just inherent to our team, I think is really helpful. We all have the expertise, but also just seeing what the business looks like today and what it really should look like and trying to fill those holes. Um, very often it's just one role. Uh I'll give an example. I had a someone who was just came to my attention the other day and came to me with, well, we have an APAR person, and we really just need someone to do monthly reporting, uh, reconciliations, and consolidations work. And we don't think that's a full-time role, we think it's a part-time role, right? I I tend to agree. Um, now they came back to me with, I think this is 20 hours a week, and I'm going, I think it's about 12 hours a week, um, because they have not seen what that level of talent looks like, who's focused exclusively on the work as opposed to maybe getting some water cooler time, maybe being involved in company meetings, maybe playing a little bit of Tetris or a long lunch, which we see a little bit often, more often with employees and consultants. But we can come up with a wide range of solutions that effectively look like a flywheel for the business evolution over time. If today you need a fractional bookkeeper, tomorrow you might need a full-time bookkeeper. Hey, we can do both. Let's get you that full-time bookkeeper. Now you need a fractional accountant. Well, we can do that as well. And maybe, okay, you got a little behind or something happened. Now you just need a project accountant in additional to your fractional accountant. Now it's some time to go hire a full-time accountant. Okay, well, now we're a fractional controller and project controller or conducting an assessment via CFO. The ability to plug and play talent to the needs of the organization is the value proposition at the end of the day that we bring to the table.

SPEAKER_01

I love how you're using that bridge of fractional as well, and then helping the client identify when they have that actual need for the full-time person, because that can be really tricky for them to figure out, or they may not be financially ready. Like they need the higher level of talent, but they can't afford necessarily that level of talent on a full-time basis. But to your point, that's why we shine as well with our clients. We're incentivized to create maximum value and impact inside of the scoped engagement that we have. And we don't do all the time wasting stuff either. Absolutely. So it's cost efficient, you're getting a higher level of talent. And then the other thing we often find, I've talked about this before on the show. We're usually the ones raising our hand and saying it's time for us to start looking for the full-time person that will backfill our functionality here. We often see it before the business owner does. And that's useful because we also know how long it takes to get a great person in place. And we can support with the hiring and vetting of that and getting them onboarded and trained into the seat as well. So we kind of like we're the bridge to the full time, and then we kind of ramp our way out and get that person stabilized in the seat. And I love that y'all have a similar approach because I think it's one that sometimes business owners, you know, they either don't know about fractional staffing as an option, or they're just not sure how it would look and how to manage that. So when companies like yours and mine can take on the burden of managing that strategy, I think that is also, it creates all that peace of mind, right? And also reduces owner dependency on them having to figure out those pieces as well.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. But and I love that you said you'll raise your hand and say, hey, it's time to fight find a full-time role. We will as well. And for us, it's pretty easy math. You know, once you're using our resources for three days a week, time to go hire someone. Um, it it's just that straightforward. Um, but you know, I love our ability to say, hey, not only go hire someone, but just like you, we've been in this seat now for however long it's been. And who is going to have a better perspective on what the role looks like than the person who's actually been doing the work?

SPEAKER_01

Agreed completely. And I think we've given the audience a lot to think about today. I'm sure people are taking notes, they're chewing on like their business and thinking about how some of these dynamics look inside of their four walls. And I would imagine that this can feel overwhelming. And so let's try and simplify it as we kind of close things out today. So for the business owner who's listening that may feel a bit overwhelmed by what to do next with their finance function, what would you recommend is like the first one or two steps that they take?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think honest self-evaluation, self-assessment of am I really great at everything that I do? You know, holistically, what are my what do I think my responsibilities are? And am I great at all of them? Am I willing to take good advice? I've said for a very long time now that the hardest thing to give away for free is good advice. People just don't seem to want to take it. Um, and I think there is an element of it to, okay, well, surely if it's really valuable, then I have to pay for it. But I think with what you do and what we do, you know, fundamentally we are advisors at the end of the day. And we don't sell, we're not in the business to put a square peg in round hole. Uh, if we can help, we're going to engage in the right way based on our best perspective and input. And I think that, you know, being a business owner as you grow, understanding your pain points and seeking advice from trusted individuals, having them refer you to people they've worked with and just having being open to honest conversations and being honest with the people that you are talking with. Obviously, do your vetting, um, do your research and your diligence, find out who you're talking to. But at the end of the day, you know, we find that relying on people who are the best at what they do is a lot easier than trying to do it yourself.

SPEAKER_01

Well said. We're gonna wrap things up there. If someone's interested in getting in touch with Ryan Bear at CFO Selection, we'll have all of his contact information in the show notes. And Ryan, thanks for a great conversation today. It's been really fun to get your perspective, and I'm excited to see how we continue working together moving forward.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks, Kristen. This is wonderful. I really appreciate your time and the opportunity and looking forward to it as well.

SPEAKER_01

Thanks for joining us for a great conversation today. And if something in there kind of hit a nerve with you, great. That usually means there's something in your business that needs your attention. The reality is most owners wait for a triggering event before they fix that finance function. And by then, it can be really expensive and frustrating. So here's the power move. Take an honest look at where you're still holding control and ask yourself, is it actually serving the business? If you want to support building a business that's ready, attractive, and transferable, that's exactly what we do. You can also find Ryan's information for CFO selections in the show notes, along with ways to connect with him so that you can get clarity on your own financial readiness. If you got value from this conversation, send it to another business owner who may need to hear it as well. We'll see you next time.