Dan DeGolier joins Kevin Appleby on the GrowCFO Show to discuss the provision of fractional CFO Services. Dan is the founder at Ascent CFO Solutions. He discussed his background and career journey, including his experience in public accounting and working with venture-backed companies. He describes how his firm, Ascent CFO Solutions, has grown to include a team of 38 professionals who provide various financial services to clients, including capital raising and outsourced accounting.
Dan and Kevin discussed the challenges faced by companies in terms of fundraising, cash conservation, and revenue growth. They also talked about the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on their work, with Dan expressing cautious optimism about leveraging AI to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
Kevin and Dan discussed the implementation of automation in finance, explicitly using tools like Power BI to create customized dashboards for clients. They also emphasized the importance of understanding key performance indicators (KPIs) and cash flow management for businesses of different sizes.
Dan and Kevin discussed the importance of planning for a potential business exit and the benefits of working for a CFO firm. They emphasized the need for a thorough understanding of a company during the onboarding process and the ability to provide flexible and varied experiences for professionals.
In the conversation, Kevin and Dan discuss the importance of communication and time management skills in client interactions. They also mention the need for a diverse background and the use of screening tools like the CVI to find the right fit for the role of CFO.
Transcript
Kevin Appleby (00:12)
Grow CFO is where finance leaders grow together. Join thousands of like-minded professionals using Grow CFO to access the combined knowledge and experience of the finance leader community. You can join us today at Grow CFO of NET. Hello and welcome to the Grow CFO show. I’m your host, Kevin Appleby and today I’ve got a guest who’s a fractional CFO and has a very interesting career to tell us about and how he got there and some of the challenges he’s facing at the moment.
Dan DeGolier,, welcome to the Grow CFO show.
Dan DeGolier (00:45)
Thanks for having me, Kevin. Great to be here.
Kevin Appleby (00:47)
Done. Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Dan DeGolier (00:51)
Yeah, thanks for asking. I started Ascent CFO Solutions in 2011 as single fractional CFO firm. was working directly with several clients at a time and started scaling the firm in 2015. Saw an opportunity to create level of scale and support more clients than I could handle myself. Grown to 38 people. I’ll go back and give you some history. I started my career in public accounting with an international CPA firm by the name of BDO Seidman. They’re now known as BDO.
Kevin Appleby (01:20)
I qualified with BDO ⁓ Binder Hamlin, which is where the Binder part of BDO comes from.
Dan DeGolier (01:28)
Beautiful. So I was in the Denver office for about four years right out of school. Certainly enjoyed my time there and learned a lot. I did not want to spend my entire career in public accounting. I wanted to be part of helping companies grow and helping companies scale and innovate and do interesting things. So I was attracted to technology early on, joined a fairly early stage software company back in two, no, actually 97.
Through I was with an early stage venture-backed software company. It’s kind how I started cutting my teeth in the venture capital world. And yeah, most of my early career was in venture-backed companies and did take a departure from that and worked for a publicly traded, I was head of finance and administration for a publicly traded enterprise software company and worked in Sydney, Australia. So I got to work with a really great team there and learn a lot of, I was involved in sales operations in addition to being head of finance and administration.
And then in 2011, like I said, is when I started doing fractional CFO work and I haven’t looked back. We built an amazing team of 38 people from CFO down to senior accountants, got controllers, accounting managers, and financial analysts in the mix as well. And helping companies with all kinds of great things, helping them with capital raising, financial modeling, cashflow forecasting, and then we will outsource the accounting as well.
Kevin Appleby (02:48)
Fantastic. And we’ve got in Grow CFO a lot of members who are fractional CFOs, but the typical fractional CFO will be somebody who’s had a long career in corporate, decided to wind down a little bit and has very much got the shingle out as a solopreneur being CFO to two or three businesses in semi-retirement or leading into semi-retirement.
Dan DeGolier (03:13)
lot of that we also see you know professionals who are earlier in their career and just want to have a flexibility and variety in the work they do and by working with multiple companies across multiple industries doing different types of strategic work we find we can attract a particular type of person who really is hungry for variety.
Kevin Appleby (03:32)
So you’ve got 38 people in your organization. Are they all working on a fractional basis or does some of those folk end up working pretty much full time at one client?
Dan DeGolier (03:43)
Once in a while, we’ll see situations where it’s more of an interim engagement as opposed to a fractional engagement. So interim define more three to nine months on a full-time basis as a company is going through a transition. Maybe they’re going through an exit or maybe they’re a larger company and they’re taking their time to find a full-time person. They want someone to sit in the chair and handle the work interim basis. everybody in my team is some are full-time, some are part-time. It’s an hourly model so people can have the flexibility they want. We have plenty of people.
with young families who want to have the flexibility to work a certain number of hours, maybe 25 or 30 hours a week, as opposed to 40 or 50. And so they get that variety and that flexibility with their schedule around their family time and things like that.
Kevin Appleby (04:24)
Roughly how many clients are you serving?
Dan DeGolier (04:26)
We’re close to a hundred. think we’re somewhere in the mid nineties right now, as far as total clients.
Kevin Appleby (04:31)
Typically, what sort of challenges are you seeing in those companies at the moment?
Dan DeGolier (04:36)
Yeah, well, mean, everyone’s read about what’s going on with fundraising right now. So venture-backed companies, it’s taking them longer to raise capital, valuations are down, diligence is up, which is probably a healthy thing overall for the investment community. We’re definitely seeing what everyone’s reading about that things are just taking a little bit longer and not everybody’s getting funded as quickly as they thought they would have a year and a half ago. They need to, so we’re seeing companies buckle down a little bit more and then preserve cash and be more disciplined with their spend.
Kevin Appleby (05:05)
Has that lack of cash coming through to you as the finance person, is that impacting on the work that you’re having to do? You’re having to work harder for that investment?
Dan DeGolier (05:16)
At times we’re having to just be more frugal with the, we’re performing for clients focusing on the, you know, maybe it is some cost cutting measures that we’re helping them with. Maybe it’s being more focused on that next raise and putting all the energy towards, towards the next raise of capital for venture backed companies. You know, we work with plenty of companies that are not venture backed as well. Companies that are, that are bootstrapped and maybe, maybe family owned, maybe multi-generational. And same thing, you still need to really have a hyper focus on cash.
Your revenue growth isn’t where you initially budgeted for. You need to be prepared to manage the runway that you do have and profits that you have if you’re from profitable companies. There’s definitely a lot more diligence and certain level of cash conservatism than there was a couple of years ago.
Kevin Appleby (06:02)
What about revenue growth? Do you think that’s still in the place it was or are you seeing a slowdown?
Dan DeGolier (06:07)
With our company or with our clients? It’s a mixed bag. Some companies are still scaling rapidly and have depending upon what market they’re in and what they’re performing. And other companies are definitely seeing a slowdown in revenue just, I think, just based upon overall economy and inflation, inflationary factors and things like that.
Kevin Appleby (06:25)
The other big challenge that we’re hearing a lot about at the moment is automation, artificial intelligence. And you’ve mentioned two of the things that we’re seeing as very big things within the growth CFO community at the moment in the lack of funds, the pressure of inflation. But the other big one that’s on everybody’s mind is how is all this new tech going to impact us? How are you seeing the new tech in your world?
Dan DeGolier (06:53)
Yeah, that’s a great question. We’re definitely, leaning into, well, outside of AI, we’ve been really leaning into sort of data visualization tools and solutions around that to help companies get real-time dashboards and things like that. Got several partners that we’re using to implement those solutions. When it comes to AI, I’m paying a lot of attention to it. Some companies have tried to automate accounting type things in the past and accuracy definitely suffers. I think that what I’m expecting to see over the next
12, 18 months or less is that some of the more routine tasks will become automated. AI will get smarter as it’s doing some accounting type work. It can very possibly be used in some forecasting type work as well, but I don’t think machines are going to replace us. think that the CFOs and the other professionals who use AI in their work to make them more effective and more efficient, I think are going to be successful. And I think there’s still a of mistakes made. mean, there’s a million examples out there about AI. ⁓
know, chat bots coming back with results that are just inaccurate. I there’s always going to be, want to always be careful to not just assume that whatever AI is creating is going to be accurate. But I think it’s going to transform the way all of us work in the coming months, months and years. It’s definitely evolving very rapidly and it’s exciting to be a part of. I think it’s important to not be intimidated by AI, but understand how you can leverage it yourself to be more effective.
Kevin Appleby (08:17)
Definitely. I’m enjoying leveraging it. And for instance, this podcast, as we speak at the moment, I’ve got my artificial intelligence note taker running in the background, which will very cleverly summarize our conversation into two or three paragraphs. You know, I don’t have to spend the half hour writing the show notes anymore that I used to have to do. And that to me is a great boon. I just need to say, has it spelt things properly? Has it accurately summarized that? Yeah, that’s not bad.
Good. Take that. That’s six paragraphs of text. Am I anywhere near the 300 words I need for these show notes yet?
Dan DeGolier (08:54)
It’s a lot faster to review it than to write it from scratch, right?
Kevin Appleby (08:57)
It is, and that to me is fantastic.
Dan DeGolier (08:59)
Did you hear that the AI that a chat bot passed the CPA exam recently? I forgot where I read that, but on the second try, chat GPT-4, I believe it was, passed the CPA exam. That’s a wake up call a little bit, isn’t it?
Kevin Appleby (09:10)
I can believe that.
Yeah, it is. And to be honest, we’ll use those sorts of chatbots to help write blog posts.
Dan DeGolier (09:21)
⁓ 100%.
Kevin Appleby (09:22)
You,
it doesn’t mean you rely on it a hundred percent. You don’t just give it the title and rely on it producing something. You’ve probably written an outline to start off with. What do you want to talk about? But it’s fantastic. The way you can put those subheadings into the chat machine, get something back and then craft it. takes all of that writer’s block. I’m not surprised that he can pass the CPA exam.
Dan DeGolier (09:44)
I’m wondering, Kevin, how, I guess a concern I have is when content starts to be written so ubiquitously by chatbots, does content become, how do you find good content? I mean, if an AI is writing a lot of what we see on blogs and newsletters and things like that, how do you find truly interesting, unique things? That is something that causes me a little concern. If now everybody on the planet can create
content every day, how do you find a good content?
Kevin Appleby (10:17)
That causes me concern as well. But I look at the flip side of that and think, hang on a minute. I can go ask Google a question on web search and I can get back 15, 20 results that sort of what I wanted, but not quite. Yeah. I go and ask the same question to chat GPT. It actually doesn’t give me a bad summary of what I wanted to get back.
Dan DeGolier (10:39)
And you can ask them follow up questions. I the natural language component of it is particularly interesting. Ask it a question, you get some stuff back. Okay, well now you want to drill down further into that. So the contextual nature of it and the natural language aspect of AI and the chat bots are particularly interesting to me.
Kevin Appleby (10:57)
thinking of whole thing at the moment as a chat GPT is more of a research assistant.
Dan DeGolier (11:02)
sure. Think about writing all these SEC reports and summarizing some of the accounting resource of the more esoteric accounting pronouncements. I think the opportunity is to use those chat bots to help you with writing the first draft of some of the reporting things. You still have to edit it. You still have to prove it. You still have to make sure it’s accurate, but it will definitely save time.
Kevin Appleby (11:25)
must admit that I’ve asked it technical questions and the hobby area that I’m interested in, I’ve asked it questions to write articles in that area and I’ve got back absolute drivel and rubbish.
Dan DeGolier (11:37)
Right. Yeah. And it’s getting better. It’s definitely not a hundred percent. It’s not ready for use in all cases, but it’s interesting how you can go through multiple revisions. can, you can add it have it change the tone. You can have it be more technical or less technical. Things like that are pretty interesting.
Kevin Appleby (11:52)
But thinking about automation, more general for finance, Dan, you talked about implementing dashboards for clients. Tell me a little bit more about that. Tell me what you’re doing.
Dan DeGolier (12:03)
Sure, you can take companies ERP system and their payroll system and their CRMs and you can give by using some of these tools, these solutions that we’re working with, can pull all those pieces in and then you can frame that any way you want. Now you still want to take the time to think, to really understand the business. What are the KPIs that really are driving your business? What are the biggest drivers? And then breaking those down into a way that’s more consumable for the C-suite.
Right, some folks might want to really understand the components of the pipeline. So you’ve got your CRM system in there. You’ve got, you want to understand some analysis around the spend and your variances to budget. You know, everything in visualized basis is what that looks like.
Kevin Appleby (12:46)
Typically, what sort of tools are you working with? What think the best solutions are at the moment?
Dan DeGolier (12:52)
Again, we’re using several different ones. Power BI is one that we like a lot. There’s a handful of others that we have at our disposal that we’ve been using. Some of them are more customized data solutions that have utilizing the software’s open APIs to pull those pieces in and have your sort of database that collects from various sources and then publishes them.
Kevin Appleby (13:15)
Certainly Power BI is one that we’re hearing a lot about and we’re getting a lot of members that perhaps haven’t been that familiar with it and want to know a lot more. So actually one of the things we’re doing at Grow CFO this summer is we’re launching a Power BI Bootcamp. A couple of big workshop sessions combined with a lot of online learning. So anybody listening to this, you want to know more about that, just go across the Grow CFO website and click on the programs tab and you’ll see the Power BI Bootcamp and there’s a…
Dan DeGolier (13:29)
great, wonderful.
Kevin Appleby (13:44)
There’s a brochure you can download. In fact, I’ll put a link to the brochure in the show notes. Other trends, Dan, what are you being asked by clients to potentially implement for them? And automation is a big thing at the moment.
Dan DeGolier (13:57)
I mean, I consistently, whether it’s this environment or whether it’s a more frothy capital markets environment, companies who take the time to understand their business realize just how critical cashflow is. Whether it’s a profitable, positive cashflow, closely held company, they still need to have really good visualization into what kind of distributions they can take and what kind of profits, what kind of cashflow they’re generating. And then companies that, as we mentioned earlier, companies that are maybe not growing as quickly as they had initially.
forecasted or budgeted for, they need to understand those cash flows. If they’re still spending to the level that they intended when they were going to grow 40 % and they’re not growing 40 % and they’re growing 10%, well, they need to be able to make adjustments and they need to be able to have those early warning systems. So I think we’re seeing companies who really want to have the headlights on, be able to really look out into the future and understand based upon the performance of their pipeline and the performance of their sales team, what does that do to their cash flows?
Kevin Appleby (14:59)
Absolutely. And you said earlier that looking at KPIs, having the right KPIs is very, very important. And we’re in a world, Dan, that there’s almost so much data these days that you get swamped by it. You get completely befuddled by it. How do you work out which bits of that data are the bits you should be looking at?
Dan DeGolier (15:06)
Absolutely.
The company’s different.
100 %
Yeah. I think you need to really break it down. What drives your growth? What drives your profits and break those down? it a particular segment of your pipeline? it particular gross margins on particular product lines? What is really driving that? Back that off one step at a time. Understand where does that pipeline come from? What are the cost components that drive that those gross margins and those various pieces? And it’s taking a
top level view and then just peeling back layer after layer after layer of the onion to understand what is driving and every company is going to be different.
Kevin Appleby (15:57)
Absolutely. And it’s probably saying the PNL account doesn’t give you the right information to do that.
Dan DeGolier (16:02)
The cashflow statement, think, is much more valuable to manage a business and the cashflow forecast in particular.
Kevin Appleby (16:09)
and knowing what exactly is driving the revenues coming into there and is driving the costs going out.
Dan DeGolier (16:15)
Yeah. Where are your leaks coming from? you have, keep a really close eye on collections. If you’re seeing your DSO start to creep up, get in front of that, manage your payables well, manage your inventory well. mean, inventory for a CPG company or product, consumer product company, managing your inventory is absolutely, absolutely critical when it comes to cash flows.
Kevin Appleby (16:34)
We’ve talked about you operating as a fractional CFO and having other fractional resources behind you. Right. What sort of size organization do you need to be before you start really benefiting from that level of service?
Dan DeGolier (16:51)
That’s a great question. think that we so we generally target companies between 2 million and 50 million in revenue is our general target. But we’ll take your companies on that are earlier, especially if they’re well backed or a lot of times it’s a serial entrepreneur, it’s somebody who’s had an exit before who wants to engage as much sooner than a first time entrepreneur. And I think it’s because they recognize the importance of doing it right to begin with. If they’re going to try to skimp too much in the early stages of the company and not have accurate financials.
you’re going to have to fix that later and it’s going to be more expensive in long run. That being said, I also don’t fault a company who wants to really skimp in the early days because they don’t know if they’re going to have a successful company. They’re not going to know if they’re ever going to have successful product market fit. So you have a product, thinking more technology companies here and software companies, until you know you have a product that people want to buy and you’ve proven that people are going to buy it, maybe it doesn’t necessarily make sense to spend a lot of money in the early days on
financial reporting significantly. But once, as soon as you hit that tipping point, when it’s like, okay, we have something here that people want to buy and we can deliver it to them, that’s generally when is the early stage when you want to engage. We’re generally engaging companies where they have reached an inflection point of some sort where the ways they’ve been doing things are no longer working for them. It’s usually because they have really identified product market fit and they’re starting to scale and they’re starting to see real revenues ramp up.
or they’ve proven to the investment community that they’re a viable business and they’ve raised a round of capital. And now it’s time to hit the gas and provide good reporting to those investors and to that board and to have really good KPIs and good financial models and forecasts.
Kevin Appleby (18:36)
Yeah,
I suppose it really is needing. don’t, if you don’t have those investors in some ways, you don’t need to produce the report to it because it’s a small business. I don’t think about growth CFO. We don’t need too much in the way of reporting because there’s very few of us. We know which clients we’ve been talking to. We know the upcoming events that we’ve got to fill. We know whether they’re full or not. There’s a gut feel that says, we doing all right or not? And you’re looking at the bank balancing. Yeah, there’s enough money in the bank.
But it’s once you’ve got those investors along, they’re questioning things, they’re challenging things, they want to be kept up to date. I can definitely see that inflection point.
Dan DeGolier (19:16)
And complexity, when you increase the complexity and you’re not having different service and product offerings, now you have to understand each of those product lines and what kind of gross margins are going to deliver in the long-term and short-term. And I think that’s when you need resource, like a fractional controller or CFO.
Kevin Appleby (19:36)
And I’ve definitely known from cost reduction exercises in the past. It’s very easy to over cost the simple and under cost the complex. Yeah. things wrong.
Dan DeGolier (19:47)
Right,
100%.
Kevin Appleby (19:51)
Yeah, yeah. But you talked about entrepreneurs who might have gone through an exit before coming along to you perhaps a little bit earlier than other companies. I guess that you’re helping those people potentially build a business for another exit.
Dan DeGolier (20:05)
Correct. Oftentimes.
Kevin Appleby (20:07)
How far ahead of an exit do think you’ve got to start planning properly?
Dan DeGolier (20:11)
I tell people to run their company like they’re never going to sell it, but always be ready to sell your company. Because as a private company, you don’t have to be accountable to the, the, the wall street analysts and the quarter, you know, the quarterly reporting and analysts reviews. So you can invest in the R and D and the, and the growth of the company invest in growth at the same time, you never know when somebody might approach you. And I think it’s important to always be prepared. We suggest as soon as we engage with a client, we.
make sure that they’re ready for that, that we’re ready to populate a data room in case it becomes appropriate, that somebody comes knocking on the door and they want to be ready. ⁓ Having all components of that have things in the cloud so you can populate a data room quickly is very important. And a lot of that comes back to financials, right? Having really clear forecasts that you know you can hit, being able to predict your growth, predict your profits, and have really accurate financials that are audit ready. I mean, a lot of our…
Well, in early stage companies don’t have to have audited financials, but they still be in accordance with GAAP and have accurate financials, cruel basis financials that give you a lot more insight into the performance of your company than cash-based financials.
Kevin Appleby (21:22)
Dan, tell me a little bit more about the team and why it would appeal to somebody to come along and work for the sort of CFO firm that you operate.
Dan DeGolier (21:33)
I touched on it little bit earlier. It’s, think we’ve put flexibility and variety on the careers page. It’s a headline on our team, on our careers page, because it really does, it affords an opportunity for somebody to, who has the right DNA, the right mindset to get so much experience in a shorter amount of time. If you’re working as a full-time accounting manager at one company, you’re going to be doing pretty much the same thing month after month. If you are,
an accounting manager or controller or whatever role at a fractional CFO firm, you’re gonna work across multiple industries. You’re gonna work with multiple CFOs, multiple CEOs, multiple companies. And ⁓ I described it once as it’s like putting your career on hyperdrive a little bit. Get the chance to really see different things, be involved in different things. Take a CFO for example, they might be helping a company do a fundraising for a SaaS company on Monday.
And then on Tuesday, they may be working with a manufacturing company to negotiating a bank line. And then on Wednesday, they’re working with a professional services firm, helping, looking at their utilization models and cashflow models. So there’s a lot of variety and flexibility that you can get as a professional, whether you’re early in your career as a, out of a CPA firm or accounting degree in your, and you have a senior accountant level experience, or whether you’re a CFO who’s
been in the seat for 20 or 30 years and can add a lot of value to a client with your experience and your insight into what a company needs for growth and how the company navigates challenges. There’s a tremendous amount of variety that you get. The flexible schedule is also really interesting, right? If you want to work at 25 or a lot in some firms like ours, if you…
want to work a 25 or 30 hour week schedule and you only want to take on reclients, that can work for in some cases.
Kevin Appleby (23:32)
I love that phrase you use, put your career on hyperdrive. think that’s fantastic. I’d always looked at fractional CFO as something that somebody with a lot of experience that they gained decided to do for a lifestyle reason or whatever. I’d never really looked at the CFO firm as having those more junior folk in earlier stages of career.
I really do see how that’s potentially a benefit. But thinking back to my own career, I learned a lot by really getting to know the business in the early stages, getting to know the people in the business. And you’re doing that because you were working with them five days a week. Yeah. When you’re working with say two or three clients, do you manage to build up that same level?
of understanding in relationships.
Dan DeGolier (24:33)
That’s an awesome question. No, that’s really critical. We take the time that when the CFO first engages with a new client, we oftentimes will start what we call an assessment phase. We’re going to do a really deep dive with that company. We’re going to spend a lot of time with them, a couple of days a week for a couple of months, going very deep with them and getting our arms around the entire business. We’re going to understand their cap table. We’re going to understand all their historical financials, all their gross margins by product line, by SKU in some cases.
we’re going to review their vendor contracts and the customer contract and any banking relationships. At least we’re going to just be sponges and absorb all we can about that company and really take the time to understand it as part of our onboarding. And then coming out of that assessment phase, we’ll oftentimes make a recommendation. So we’ll make a recommendation about the existing team. Maybe they have a really good accounting manager or controller who needs more oversight.
who needs more mentoring, needs some process improvement. So we will come up with really clear recommendations on what we think the engagement would look like going forward. As a fractional CFOs, we’re working with companies oftentimes for multiple years on a part-time basis. We may engage several people. might have a CFO and a controller and a senior accountant all engaging with that team. But that assessment phase, that first assessment allows us to…
understand the business very thoroughly and then make a recommendation on sort of processes and who belongs where and give them a clear budget on the team that they’d be working with.
Kevin Appleby (26:05)
Right, so there’s a really intensive piece at the start of the assignment. Get that.
Dan DeGolier (26:11)
Yeah, we’ve got to carve out that time, right? So we don’t want to, it’d be difficult. We don’t want a CFO taking on two new clients the same week because there’s going to be a lot of deep immersion into it in that initial phase. Now, once we get through the first 90 days and the company’s not enough doing a fundraise or not doing something, preparing for an exit, things like that, then those hours we usually settle into a nice cadence of maybe a day, two days a week. And then they can, they can take on that next client and start getting them into that sort of.
Happy place.
Kevin Appleby (26:41)
Right, yeah, okay. That would allow the CFO to get on top of things. What about the things you discover are gonna mean you’re gonna have to bring in some more junior people to support the CFO potentially? FP &A type skills and so on. How do you onboard people in those sorts of roles into multiple clients?
Dan DeGolier (27:06)
Yeah, it’s somewhat the same. It’s a little bit lighter lift, but it’s a similar process, right? You want them to, they’re generally going to be reporting to that CFO. They’re purely doing accounting level transactions. There’s probably not as much immersion, but yeah, you’re right. If they’re on the FP &A side, they still need to really understand the various components of that model so they can really build out the assumptions and build out that model in a way that can drive something as accurate as possible.
Kevin Appleby (27:37)
How do you find the interaction with the client on a person-to-person level work?
Dan DeGolier (27:41)
Yeah. So that’s another absolutely critical piece. That’s something we screen for a lot when we’re hiring is that we need to find CFOs and others who are incredibly good at time management and very good at communication. They can’t just be a great, you know, technical CFO who’s used to, who only, who’s kind of singular focus. They need to be able to communicate expectations around deadlines. They need to under promise and over deliver.
And so that means being very clear for clients asking for some, from a communication standpoint, email, voicemail, Slack, text message, all those, you have to have kind of an expectation of what, and incorporate that into your own work style. So if you’re in a board meeting on Tuesday, you probably need to set your out of office or you need to let other clients know who also have things that are pretty urgent, let them know that you’re in board meeting and you know, on Tuesday morning. So you’re going to be getting back to them Tuesday afternoon.
But it’s all about communication and being highly responsive to clients. And in some cases, if you are heads down on something really critical, you need to let that client know that when you’ll get back to them, I’ll get back to you in the morning and I’ll research that or forward that message to the financial analyst who can maybe at a first pass at it. So there’s a lot of, it’s not for everyone. There is definitely a need to be an exceptional communicator and be exceptionally well-organized because you don’t just have one boss. You might have
five or six bosses, you have the CEO at the various client companies.
Kevin Appleby (29:13)
I know in my own background is management consulting and find some of the time you’ve been working on a big project with a single client, but there will be times when there are smaller projects and you’re handling more than one client at once. And my experience is that either none of those multiple bosses are shouting for anything or they all shout at the same time.
Dan DeGolier (29:36)
Everyone wants on the same day. So that’s where that communication comes in.
Kevin Appleby (29:40)
Definitely take some communication.
Dan DeGolier (29:42)
Yeah,
yeah. Again, it’s not for everyone. Some people just, it’s not what they’re cut out to do.
Kevin Appleby (29:48)
So it has to be a particular type of person. If you’re outgoing, a great communicator, you love variation in what you do, you don’t like routine, then this is probably for you.
Dan DeGolier (30:04)
Right. Yeah. I would say if you are, you tend to be a thirsty or hungry person, you love to absorb knowledge. You love to learn multiple industries because we work across all kinds of industries, right? We’re working with, with SAS companies, manufacturing, e-commerce, professional services, healthcare, real estate construction. In some cases, more significant client may really want to have somebody with a certain level of experience there, but that person, if they have multiple clients,
are going to be working across different industries. And so we also look for people who do have wider range of background where they’ve worked across industries and not just been purely in energy or healthcare or something like that their entire career. They’ve got a more diverse background.
Kevin Appleby (30:48)
That’s kind of preempting my next question. You talked about having to screen. Do you screening for diverse background? How do you go about screening for that right kind of communication time management skills? When a lot of the people, guess, coming to you will have been used to being in that single client environment, that single client probably being their employer. They’re in a multiple client environment. How do you avoid making those higher mistakes?
because they could potentially be very expensive.
Dan DeGolier (31:19)
We ask a lot of questions. also use a tool called the CBI, the Core Values Index from, I think it’s from Taylor Protocols, which kind of people, it kind of looks at people across merchant, innovator, builder, and banker. And we kind of know who fits, who fits well based upon the results of that. There are certain things, CFO, we’re looking for a particular sort of structure of what that CBI result is. And similarly an accountant or a controller.
also looking for a particular kind of set. it doesn’t mean we screen people out entirely because they’re CBI, but once we get the CBI, we’re gonna have a conversation. So if if a CFO is low on merchants and merchants get their energy from relationships and building trust and things like that. So if they’re gonna show up as a low merchant, then we’re gonna have, I’m gonna have a discussion or my team is gonna have a discussion, understand how are they going to overcome their bias towards being a strong banker or builder.
Kevin Appleby (32:16)
Now the interesting thing here, we mentioned earlier about Chatbot managed to pass the CPA exams. No way a Chatbot could get through that screen, is there?
Dan DeGolier (32:26)
It would be interesting. It would be very fascinating to see if it is, it’s not exactly a personality test, but it does show how you orient and it’s very subjective. yeah, have any idea how that would, how that.
Kevin Appleby (32:39)
We’re looking at the future CFO program more so the first-time CFOs and realizing that their biggest challenges are coming to terms with everything that they didn’t learn to pass their CPA exams or whatever their equivalent is in the country they’re from. That’s the challenge here. You only learn the basics in those exams. You only kind of get the ticket to the game.
Dan DeGolier (33:07)
purely academic, right?
Kevin Appleby (33:08)
is purely academic. It’s the lowest entry level. It’s not the thing that gets you all the way to the top.
Dan DeGolier (33:16)
The human skills are very important in communication skills and the ability to develop trust and really ask that again, peel back those layers of the onion and go back and understand the intricacies of what’s driving a company.
Kevin Appleby (33:31)
Yeah. So thinking about all of that, Dan, and you clearly come on quite a journey, a finance journey, an entrepreneurial journey to where you are now. Thinking back, what would you tell that younger version of yourself that was kind of striving to go for that very first CFO role?
Dan DeGolier (33:49)
Be yourself, take your time. Don’t be reactive. know, take the time to understand, take the time to, to really go deep. And whether that’s with, that’s with a team and understanding, understanding your CEO, but also with understanding those business drivers again, that’s just critical. mean, there’s plenty of people who put together KPI reports that aren’t helpful because they’re not tracking the right things. really, really take the time to understand and realize that companies are run by people.
And so you’ve got to create relationships and trust.
Kevin Appleby (34:22)
Absolutely. Some fantastic things to close the conversation with. Look at the detail, build great relationships, understand the business and understand the people that manage it. Dan, thank you for being this week’s guest on the Grow CFO show.
Dan DeGolier (34:39)
My absolute pleasure, Kevin. Thanks for having me on.
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