In today’s episode of CPG Insiders, Mark dives into the importance of assembling the right team, particularly focusing on the value of a fractional CFO for growing businesses. Joined by Paul Harrison, a seasoned fractional CFO with extensive experience in the consumer packaged goods industry, they discuss the critical role a CFO plays in managing finances, predicting cash flow needs, and avoiding costly mistakes.
Tune in to learn insights on how a fractional CFO can provide the expertise of a full-time CFO without the full-time cost, making it an ideal solution for startups and mid-sized companies.
Transcript
Mark Young (00:18)
Welcome everybody to another edition of CPG Insiders. I’m your host, Dr. Mark Young. And Justin is off today. So I will be trying to fill in duties without him here. So anybody who’s talked to us at the agency or you’re a regular listen to the program, oftentimes what you hear me talk about is assembling your team or as my coach, Dan Sullivan often says,
which is who’s not how. It’s not important to know how to do something. It’s important to know who can do something and how to find the right who’s for your how. Now, when you’re starting a company, which many of you have got substantial businesses and many of you are in the startup phases. When you’re in the startup phases, you’ve heard me say before or read stuff I’ve written where
I tell you that you need to assemble the best team you can assemble. And so you don’t save money on a discount lawyer. You don’t save money on a discount CPA. You don’t save money on a discount advertising consultant. And you find the people who have already done what you’re trying to do because in the world of consumer packaged goods, if you’re not from our industry,
There’s a very good chance without the right experts, you’re going to get a lot of bloody noses because a lot of people are going to take your money. That’s not just vendors, suppliers, consultants, that’s even the major retailers. So, but the downside is this, the downside is you can’t afford a CFO. You can’t.
afford a COO. You can’t afford all of these different positions, which is true. You can’t. And I have seen this played out. And by the way, I’ve seen this played out a number of ways. One of the ways that I see it played out is companies raise some money. So they go out and they raise several million dollars. We’ve got cash.
We go out and we hire an expensive CEO, COO, CMO, CFO, CIO. We have this entire C suite of management. We have zero sales, but we’ve got all kinds of $250,000 to $350,000 people on the payroll because we’ve got cash and we can burn cash. Those are the businesses that usually I find out run out of cash before they get any sales. The smart businesses don’t
go out and raise too much money, they raise enough money and they maniacally manage their costs and maniacally run their company so that they don’t let their expenses and their manufacturing costs and their business get out of hand. And they look for people who they can hire part of them. So you know that I’m a big supporter of the broker now.
Why do I love brokers so much? Well, the reason is because you pay a broker 5 % and a good broker, you have a broker at Walgreens, a broker at Walmart, that good broker will save you more than 5 % just in mistakes. Forget about the fact that they can get an appointment in a week and you can’t get one in two years. Forget about the fact that they golf with the buyer.
Forget the fact that they’ve already got 30 other successful products in that Walgreens store, which means Walgreens will take them seriously. We’ll set all that stuff aside. They will save you the 5 % being able to tell you what you shouldn’t say. See what you shouldn’t say. Yes, do. They’ll make you the money. Well, another category that I’m finding really fascinating and that is the fractional C suite candidate. I was talking to another friend of mine today.
who is just bought the URL, CIO.com. And he is actually running programs to teach fractional chief IT people, because that’s an expensive skillset that people need, but I don’t necessarily have the money or the need for a full-time person. Well, today we’re going to talk about the fractional CFO.
Paul Harrison (04:47)
⁓
Mark Young (05:04)
And again, I like this model. our guest is Paul Harrison. Paul’s a fractional CFO and he works in our space. He’s worked with all kinds of growth companies and major companies and largest retailers, including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Costco, Kroger, Aldi, Home Depot, and Amazon. He’s got an MBA from University of Virginia and a BA from Emory. And he has a CPA, but I don’t think you’re practicing as a CPA. more.
working as a CFO. So Paul, thanks for being with us here on CPG. Let’s start off so we can explain to people the role of a fractional CFO. First off, why do I need a CFO? Secondly, what would be the advantage to having a fractional CFO?
Paul Harrison (05:53)
Mark, thank you for having me on today. really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about the finance side and the fractional work that CFOs do because it is something I’m really passionate about. I’ve been doing this fractional work for about four years now. I used to be a CFO, as a fractional CFO, I really get to do the things that help.
founders and entrepreneurs who starting up. And so I love the work. And when I love the work that translates to the clients that I work with. why does it?
Mark Young (06:34)
remind people of something. you are, if your particular skill set is you are an entrepreneur or an inventor, and that’s my skill set, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a marketer, I’ve done some inventing, I’m a creative, I know how to read a balance sheet, I know how to read a P &L, I know how to read my numbers. That’s not who I am. So
For me to do that job, for me to decide I’m gonna be in charge of accounting means I’m going to put in 150 % effort to get a 50 % output. Or as Dan Sullivan says, when we get back to the who’s in the how’s that every one of us have unique abilities. Our job as entrepreneurs is to not figure out how we can do everything
It’s to find the other people who have the unique ability. I do not want to stare at a financial statement all day. Whereas you would love to stare at a financial statement all day and find things in it. I would go out of my mind if I had to do that. So this is a good example of who, not how again, and finding people as you were telling me how you love the work. If you’re an entrepreneur, accounting is not what you love.
I assure you, if you’re an entrepreneur, accounting is not the results of accounting you love, but the process of doing accounting is not something you love. sorry, that was a little bit of long break interrupting there, but so let’s get back to this. we’re talking about fractional CFO. Does that make sense for these kinds of companies and what size companies use fractional CFO?
Paul Harrison (08:24)
So I work with companies from zero revenue, so pre-revenue companies, all the way up to companies, you know, that have their products in all these major retailers. What the benefit I think of a fractional CFO, there a couple of main ones. One is
If your books are not in particularly good order, which a lot of entrepreneurs, they start out and they’re going hard and fast and trying to do it all themselves and may not have their books in particularly good order. One of the things a fractional CFO or infractional accountants that we have can do is come in and get the books in order. Because if your books are in order, it just lowers the financial chaos.
you can have surrounding you. If your books are in order you don’t have to pick up the phone when that vendor calls and say I don’t know why they didn’t write that check. Those payments are made as they should be made and the founder just doesn’t have to worry about that kind of stuff. So one of the things we
Mark Young (09:34)
example
of this really quick folks, had several months back, we had a, a tax audit. We had a state tax audit, state tax auditor came in, spent four days here, finally walked away and said, your books are the best I’ve ever seen. And you really don’t owe us anything. How much was that? Isn’t it? It was a sales tax audit.
Paul Harrison (09:53)
So unusual.
Mark Young (10:01)
But had we not been prepared for it, they would have find us and we would have ended up writing a big check.
Paul Harrison (10:10)
Right, if your books hadn’t been in order, then you would have been scrambling and you would have spent all your just dealing.
Mark Young (10:17)
And here’s the thing want people to understand. There’s a difference between someone who knows how to do data entry in QuickBooks, not that that isn’t a needed skill, but there’s a difference between I’ve got somebody in my office that, you know, knows how to do payables and receivables and put data into QuickBooks versus I have a CFO. Cause your job isn’t, I’m going to invoice.
customers. So maybe you could explain a little bit more. What’s the difference between a CFO and let’s say a bookkeeper?
Paul Harrison (10:56)
Yeah, so a bookkeeper is doing all those day-to-day transactions, making sure bills get paid, making sure the money, the checks that come in get in the bank, reconciling bank accounts, the day-to-day work of just making sure all those transactions happen. And it’s a really important function. And it’s a really important function to get right. The beauty is, today’s technology, if you’re using QuickBooks Online,
you can automate probably 75 % of bookkeeping using a lot of really interesting technological tools. But that base level daily transaction stuff really needs to get done and get done right. If that’s done, then my job as a CFO who’s advising you on some more strategic things, I can use that basic information to look back and help you understand
where things might have gone a little squirrely for him, I can help you look forward to anticipate things that you might be ready to run into or run up against. But that base level of information that the bookkeepers or the accountants are putting together, absolutely critical to being able to do that kind of forward and strategic looking work.
Mark Young (12:20)
So you would be doing more stuff, less about, let’s make sure the bank deposit went out, and more about what is our real cost to manufacture this product? What are the areas that we could reduce our manufacturing costs? Could we come up with a better shipping vendor? Do we need to be in preparation to be able to go borrow money?
And what is that bank going to look for from us and things of that nature? Is that a better description of it?
Paul Harrison (12:55)
Exactly right. So I help a lot of clients with pricing. So pricing can be driven by the manufacturing costs. So we spend a lot of time looking at what manufacturing and product acquisition costs are, understanding the relationship of that to pricing. We also do a lot of looking out at what you’re understanding what your expense structure is today for your organization.
understanding how much cash you have, how do those two match up and helping you figure out, okay, based on the burn rate that I have today, I have enough cash to give me seven months, 12 months, 18 months, at which point I’m gonna have to raise some more money. So we try to do those kinds of strategic thinking along with the founders. If I can go back to that,
manufacturing side. find a lot of people think that they know all their product costs, but they really don’t know it all the way through. so it’s really, really critical to know the full cost of the product. I’ll tell you a story about a fellow I was working with this year. I started working with him. He said, hey, I’ve got a 50 % margin on my product. I thought, hey, that’s great.
You can make a very nice business with a 50 % margin. I said, tell me a little bit about your products. He said, well, our price is $10 and my ingredient cost is $5. 50 % margin. I said, no, the ingredient cost is 50%, right? So I said, well, once you have the ingredients, you make it yourself or what happens next? He oh, no, no, I’ve got
I got, I used to make it myself, but I’ve got somebody who makes it for me now. They, and they only charged me a buck to make it. Okay. A buck. So now my margins going from 50 to 40, one hit. Okay. Well, do you, do you put your product in a package? Oh yeah. Yeah. I’ve got a pouch. I’ve got a pouch. cost me a quarter. Pouch cost you a quarter. How much it costs for you to get the pouches? Oh, they charged me about 500 bucks.
house, I mean each one. Okay, there’s another nickel. By the time we’ve worked all the way down through all those costs, instead of 50 percent margin, he’s got about 20 percent margin and is still sitting in his warehouse.
Mark Young (15:38)
Yeah, that’s an unsurvivable margin.
Paul Harrison (15:41)
You do it. You can.
Mark Young (15:43)
We see that a lot. Honestly, Paul, you’d be surprised how many newer, younger clients come into us and we look at their product and what they’re selling it for. And we ask them what their costs are. And we immediately looked at them and say, okay, you’re just going to go broke because you don’t have the margin. But some of the stuff that you could do, here’s a couple of other areas where I see people miss. People come to us and we want to desperately get in Kroger. We want to get in Walmart.
And then I will ask them, well, do you have the funding to handle a Walmart order?
Well, what do I need? I’m like, well, let’s say your product is $10. There are 4,600 Walmart stores. If Walmart says we’ll take six pieces, that’s $60 per store times 4,600 stores. And you will need that same inventory to put in their warehouse. And then that same inventory in your warehouse, because they’re going to start giving you EDI compliant orders on week one that you have to replenish within a week.
And you will need to be able to carry that receivable until they start paying you. So all of sudden it’s like, you’re telling me I can’t even do Walmart if I don’t have three and a half million dollars? Correct. That is what I’m telling you.
Paul Harrison (17:02)
It takes a lot of cash to carry that inventory. You also have your raw materials inventory, your packaging inventory, all of that at scale.
Mark Young (17:13)
Right.
There’s raw materials that are in stock. So the beauty of having a CFO is a good CFO is going to look at the business. I’m assuming this what you’re doing. You’re going to look at the business today. You’re going to look at a 12 month projection, a 24 month projection, probably a three or a five year projection. And you’re going to be able to sit down with the owner and say, okay, let me tell you how much cash we need based on what you’re telling me we’re going to do.
Here’s how much cash we need in the next 12 months or the next 18 months. Now what’s our source? Do we want to go to the bank? Great, let’s put together a bank package. So I’m assuming you’ll meet with a banker and find out what the banker’s criteria is and what are you looking for from us and put that package together.
Paul Harrison (18:03)
Yeah, we help identify those potential financing sources. You hit on something just now that I want to go back to. A lot of people, when they’re doing their projections, two years, one year, two years, five years, they project out their P &L. They say, ah, look, I’m making money, making money, making money. But not many people will go and project their balance sheet out. The balance sheet tells you,
when you’re gonna run out of cash. Because if you’re projecting your balance sheet, you’re gonna be projecting what your inventory is that you gotta have on hand. You’re gonna be projecting what your accounts receivable are. Because these folks aren’t gonna pay you the day you ship. They’re gonna pay you 30, 45 days after you ship. So you gotta carry that receivable. so you project your balance sheet the same way you project your P &L. Because that tells you how your cash
flow is going to work.
Mark Young (19:03)
A lot of people don’t understand you can be wildly profitable and cash broke.
Paul Harrison (19:08)
Absolutely.
Mark Young (19:10)
And you can be cash rich and be losing money.
Paul Harrison (19:14)
Absolutely there too. Yep.
Mark Young (19:16)
Both
of those things can happen, but most people don’t manage for both of those events. People have a tendency to manage cashflow and not manage profitability, or they focus on profitability and then they don’t manage cashflow.
Paul Harrison (19:33)
Exactly right. William, one of the things I like to do with my clients is, you know, we, have some clients where we’re doing a daily cash flow. Those are the clients where they don’t have, they’re tight on cash and they need to know every day. I have other clients where we have a weekly cash flow. We’re looking out 13 weeks all the time to still managing that short term cash flow. But the real one is that long-term cash flow. The one that’s looking out
six months a year, two years, five years, because that’s the one that’s going to give you the answer to when do I need to raise money? How much money do I need to raise? And you have to know those things before you really go out and what kind of money do you raise? So if you’ve got a lot of inventory and a lot of receivables, you can probably internally finance some of your growth with lines of credit, assets from banks.
If you don’t have some of those assets available to you, then you might have to go to the equity markets to get that type of financing. Depends on the type of business and kind of where you are in that business.
Mark Young (20:47)
In the CPG world, where are you seeing banks at currently when it comes to just receivable financing? Are they lending 50%, 60 %? What are they usually lending against those receivables?
Paul Harrison (21:01)
depending on how good they are, right?
Mark Young (21:03)
Walmart,
Walgreens, Kroger.
Paul Harrison (21:05)
Yeah, they’ll lend 80, 85 % on those. You can get a lot of financing receivables from those kinds of companies.
Mark Young (21:17)
Yeah, and I try to keep people away from factors if I can. Factoring is another model. In fact, I’ll let you explain the factoring for people. It’s a more expensive source of money.
Paul Harrison (21:30)
Yeah, the factoring is a more expensive source. Factoring is where you actually sell your receivables to a third party. And so once you’ve invoiced the customer, that invoice then becomes the property of the factor. And the factor, your customers no longer put money into your bank account. They put money into the factor’s bank account and then the factor will share, will give you that money.
⁓ once they’ve received it, but they have complete control of your receivables. if you’re a founder entrepreneur, really limits your flexibility once you kind of stepped over that line in the factory. Ideally, you…
Mark Young (22:15)
and
some money.
Paul Harrison (22:18)
that where you’re doing a borrowing base that you can finally install for receipts.
Mark Young (22:26)
So here’s the big thing, a good CFO right now, if I was to hire a top-notch, mid-level CFO on a permanent basis as an employee, what would my payroll cost probably look like for that person?
Paul Harrison (22:47)
The salary is going to be 350 and they’ll want a bonus and they’ll have benefits. So your out of pocket is going to be, you know, 425, 450 for a strong CFO in this space.
Mark Young (23:00)
Yeah, 350 was where I was going to guess it. was waiting to get your number, but 350 is the number I would anticipate. And then you’re probably going to have benefits and you’re to have bonuses and you’re going to have a car and all these other things that are going to be involved with it. What can someone expect in a fractional CFO? What kind of budget do they need to be able to have to be able to start having a fractional CFO?
Paul Harrison (23:28)
So our kind of minimum starting place is billings of about $5,000 a month. So that’s $60,000 a year of costs. And so for that $5,000 a month, you’ll get 15 to 20 hours a month of CFO or controller kind of expertise. And that’s for a small company,
that really just needs CFO expertise on really specific things, that’s more than enough time. For me to spend four to five weeks with somebody who’s in that startup phase, we can make a lot of progress with a lot of things at that level.
Mark Young (24:15)
and what you have to think of here.
You’re not getting a $50,000 bookkeeper. You’re getting a $400,000 financial expert. And you’re just getting so many hours a month. But if you’re in, if you’re a smaller company, if you’re a, you know, a zero to $5 million, zero to $10 million company, you probably don’t need 40 hours a week of a high level CFO. You probably need
some time with that CFO every week or two, and then you need a good bookkeeping staff. But that CFO would also become the supervisor of that bookkeeping staff too, wouldn’t they?
Paul Harrison (25:00)
They would, absolutely. Yeah. If you were to hire a CFO, say you’re between zero and 10 million and you hire a full-time CFO, what’s that person going to do? Because there’s not enough CFO level.
Mark Young (25:18)
Not that much money there to count.
Paul Harrison (25:21)
Right, yeah, so they’re going to end up either kind of going downstream and doing some bookkeeping to kind of see his…
Mark Young (25:31)
Which is a ridiculous use of that time.
Paul Harrison (25:34)
they’re just going to get bored and go on and do something else or they’ll just sit back and be happy and take the you know take the money and enjoy a nice lifestyle there.
Mark Young (25:46)
The good thing is though, when you have that high level CFO skill, if you’re an entrepreneur who doesn’t have an accounting background, your bookkeeper can bury you either deliberately or accidentally, not always with malice. And I always try to tell people never assigned to malice what can be explained with incompetency. But
If you’re not an accounting person, your bookkeeper can get you upside down very fast just by doing bad entries or wrong charts of accounts or things of that nature that they just didn’t understand. But a CPA, a CFO is going to review everything that that bookkeeper is doing and correct that bookkeeper and teach that bookkeeper or replace that bookkeeper so that those books are in order, right?
Paul Harrison (26:41)
Exactly right. Yeah. So the way we work at Ascent is we have a full stack of accounting professionals. So we have fractional CFOs. We have fractional controllers. We have fractional accounting managers, and we have fractional accountants. So when we go into an engagement, we might use four hours a week of CFO time. We might use eight hours a week of an accounting manager or a controller time.
maybe 10 hours a week of an accountant’s time. And that’s plenty of time to really make the books hung for a company and their founder. Most of the founders I’ve worked with, and you probably have the same experience, they know their number. They just know them, right? They know their numbers. And so when they see financial statements come out of book books online,
They’re looking at them to kind of confirm what they already know. And when those financial statements are just jacked up because of poor bookkeeping or no bookkeeping, then it throws confusion into their brain and they’re not, they start to distrust their own understanding of where they are financially.
Mark Young (27:59)
I’ll you the other thing good CFO does, that most people don’t give enough credit to until they’ve been at business for a while. And that is a good CFO will have your books in order so that when it is time to go to your CPA to do the taxes at the end of the year, the CPA doesn’t have a lot of work to do. So now your CPA bills go down because you handed the CPA
a prepared set of statements that the CPA can audit and do your taxes and be done with. So in some cases, you’ll save money in that area. Another place where CFO can be helpful, and this is once you start to make some money, is, and I’m assuming you do this, a good CFO will help you manage your cash and figure out how to make money off of your cash on hand.
Paul Harrison (28:55)
Absolutely. I have a couple of clients who have that terrible problem of, you know, what do we do? What do we do with this cash that we have? So, you know, there are lot of opportunities for it. One is, you know, if you’re borrowing money and you have cash, there are some ways you can use that cash to reduce your borrowing costs. Sometimes just by having the cash, the bank will give you a lower rates on whatever lines and borrowing that you have.
And then also finding ways to invest that cash, whether it’s in just money earning, you know, interest type accounts, or what’s the best way to invest that cash in my business? Because within the business, there are also ways to invest that cash that can give you a much bigger return than by having it sit in a bank or a savings account somewhere.
Mark Young (29:47)
Now in my company, tell me if you think we’re doing things wrong or not. We’re taking some of the excess cash and we’re laddering T-bills.
Paul Harrison (29:58)
Well, that’s a thing to do. You know how much cash you have and what your future needs are. Know that if you know the timing of those future needs and laddering the T-bills or other investments like that, make sure that that cash is available for you when you know you need it and still get a pretty good rate of return in today’s world with virtually no risk on that money.
Mark Young (30:27)
Yeah, we’re picking up 5 % or something like that. And when I say ladder T-bills, folks, what that means is we have T-bills that come due or give us the money back in increments of like 30, 60, 90, 120, 180 days. So essentially every 30 to 60 days, a piece of our money became mature, which means we get the interest and we can go take the cash if we need it.
If we don’t need it, we can ladder it back in to another T-bill because, we don’t need that cash for 60 more days. Well, we’ve got another T-bill that size, which is going to come up in 60 days. Now we’ve got the cash over there. We’ll take that cash and we’ll go make more money with this cash. And at the end of the day, is it that big of a profit margin in your money?
Um, depends what’s cash you have on hand. You got a million dollars sitting around. You might be able to pick up another 40, $50,000 on that money, which is better than $0.
Paul Harrison (31:38)
And when you’re running a business, you’re looking at every little detail. Well, that’s a little detail too, right? You’ve got that cash sitting there and it’s not earning anything, that’s zero. A little detail can change it from earning zero to earning 5%. And it’s how tuned in you are to your business that makes you
Mark Young (32:06)
think
of cash right now with an inflation environment, cash is actually a devaluing asset.
Paul Harrison (32:12)
We did.
Right? Exactly right.
Mark Young (32:19)
Right,
because it’s going to be worth 3 % less at the end of the year than when you started it. So you’ve got something that I’m going to ask you about that was in your notes, it is Warren Buffett talks about the margin of safety when he makes an investment. And we were just talking off here before you came on about Warren Buffett just bailed out on Apple, most of his Apple stock. And we’ll get your opinion of that.
What do you mean by Warren Buffett’s margin of safety?
Paul Harrison (32:51)
So Warren Buffett, when he goes into an investment, he’s worked all his numbers, right? And he knows what he thinks the return is going to be on that investment. So in addition to that, he builds in a big margin of safety. So if my numbers are wrong or the economy changes or whatever happens, even if it gets really bad, I’m still OK. And so
If you apply that to the CPG world, if you’re building up what your pricing is going to be based on your cost structure, you’ve got to build in a pretty good size margin of safety. Because I’ll give you an example. I was working with a company and Madagascar vanilla was a very important ingredient for us. Well, something happened in Madagascar.
And Madagascar vanilla went just crazy through the roof for several months. And so our cost structure changed just like that. If we had not built in margin of safety into our pricing, we would have been upside down just immediately and upside down for months with really no way to get out of that.
when we’re building pricing in the CPG world, it can’t be squeaky. You have to have plenty of margin in there to be able to deal with those crazy bumps that are going to happen. You’ve had them happen, Mark. I’ve had them happen. You know they’re going to happen. You just got to be prepared to go through them.
Mark Young (34:36)
A lot of people are shocked when I tell them that our goal number for cost versus final retail is usually a minimum of five to one. So we’re usually telling people if you have a $10 product on the shelf at Walmart, your landed cost needs to be two bucks.
Paul Harrison (34:57)
Yep.
Mark Young (34:58)
And that does not net you a massive income because we look at that 10 bucks, Walmart is going to take 32 to 40 of it. Your broker is going to take 5%. If you’ve got a master broker, they’re going to get 3%. Your bank’s taking 3 % for funding. Your advertising is going to be 15 to 20%. You start rolling that number down and it’s like, wow, I’ve got 8 % left at the end of the year on a 5 % margin.
So when someone comes in, know, I’ve got 50 % margin. We’re usually telling them, well, you’re in trouble. Even if you’ve got a real 50 % margin, you’re in trouble. You’re not going to make it on now.
Paul Harrison (35:41)
And you know, I was going to say, know, the channel selection, know, the channel that you’re choosing to put your product in has a big impact on your margin also. got all these channels. You’ve got your traditional grocery channel, your distributors that might be taking it to lots of places. You’ve got club channel, you’ve got the private label grocery channel, your direct, you know,
Mark Young (35:43)
Go ahead.
Paul Harrison (36:10)
your own websites, your direct channels, your online behemoth channels. Each one of those channels has its own cost structure built in there that you just, you have to understand when you go into it. None of them are free and easy.
Mark Young (36:28)
I like doing three cashflow analysis. And I learned this a long, long time ago when I was a very young business person in my twenties. And, I had a consultant and a friend back then who taught me how to do this. So we always did a possible probable and preferable cashflow.
Paul Harrison (36:46)
Grrr!
Mark Young (36:48)
Preferable is the one that everybody wants to do. This is what we hope is going to happen. Then we would do one that we would say probable. And this is probably what’s really going to happen. So preferable we’ll call the best case scenario. Probable we’ll call, yeah, this is probably more realistic. Possible is the, okay, the economy crashed. My ingredient cost just went up. I just had a strike.
It’s what could go wrong. And now how do we take those mistakes? How do we take those black swans into account? And what’s our survival plan when that happens? Do you do something similar to that with your clients?
Paul Harrison (37:36)
Absolutely. when we build our projections, we do a similar thing. We may not use those same words as you do, but you, course, a lot of founders, they want to see what’s up, how good, how well can I do, right? So you show them that. And then you show them, here’s really where we think we’re going to end up. And then you show them, OK, if this tweaks in a negative way for us, here’s why.
Mark Young (38:04)
hell in a hand basket model.
Paul Harrison (38:06)
Yeah, because it’s usually based on cash, right? What’s the impact on cash for each of those? And if you’re hell in a handbasket model says you’re going to be out of cash six months after something like that happens, maybe you don’t go get your bank financing based on that. you have a plan that when you see these things start to happen in your business,
you know you’ve got to begin preparing for the implications of that possibility, whether it’s reducing your over rent costs, finding some way to improve your margins above what you were expecting, reducing the working capital that you have in the business or going and getting some additional financing. There are a lot of ways to do it. And by building that kind of scenario, it forces you to go through that in your brain and think about, okay, what happens if those bad things happen?
Mark Young (39:05)
Yeah. And sometimes as entrepreneurs, let’s say you, say you lost a point of distribution and you just lost $2 million worth of sales. Entrepreneurs by their nature are slow to cut the expenses because they’re always so positive and forward thinking. Well, we’ll find a replacement for it. But if you’ve got a CFO in place, CFO is going to come back and say, you know what? We’ve got three people we have to get rid of here. We’ve got to do this. We’ve got to do that.
because that’s the reality of what we’re having. So the CFO is a good way to get a dose of reality to people who are otherwise always wearing rose colored glasses and being optimistic. And that’s what we are. That’s what I am. I understand that. I’m one of the most optimistic people people ever meet. believe anything I set my mind to, I can go out and do it. Does that always happen? Doesn’t always happen, but it’s happened enough that I believe it.
Paul Harrison (40:03)
Right. You have a feel for it now. But you’re right, there are lot of with a lot of entrepreneurs with the rose colored glasses. So the way I help entrepreneurs and founders with that is we have a routine, I’ll call it routine financial deck and cadence that we have. So every month we’re going through these same materials.
And some people say, well, that might get boring. Well, the benefit of going through that boringness is that when something happens, you’re so familiar with that information that everybody can see it. So you’re going along month month, month to month, and everything just clicking. And then you get to that next month, that $2 million drops out. You can look at those materials that you’re very familiar with, that you’ve become very familiar with over time.
And you can see exactly what the impact of that $2 million drop is.
Mark Young (41:05)
Profitability should never be boring.
Paul Harrison (41:09)
Sorry, I shouldn’t use that word. Yeah, but you get in a cadence of going through those numbers and you understand that information and you really understand it down in its bones. And when you get that, you can react to things that happen.
Mark Young (41:24)
Now, how does somebody look into getting a fractional CFO? I I’m assuming they can call you. What’s the process?
Paul Harrison (41:33)
So in our case, you can contact me directly. And so I’m Paul at AscentCFO.com, easy enough. There are other fractional CFO firms out there. Our firm has been doing this a long time. Our founder, Dan DeGoglie, has been doing fractional CFO work for 20 years, before the word fractional ever went in front of any sweet, sweet people.
Our firm has about 50 professionals, about half of whom are CFOs and the other half are controllers and accounting managers and accountants. So when you’re looking for a fractional CFO, you could either get a, what I’ll call a single shingle fractional CFO. And so that’s a person who’s out there on their own. They’re a sole practitioner and they’re out, they might have five or six clients. but they’re the person in their firm. That’s a choice, and in some cases, that’s the right choice for businesses. Other choice is a fractional firm that has CFOs and controllers and accountants and accounting managers. And so I like our model because we can apply the right resource to the need. So if I come into a client and their books are just whack, know, jacked up. They don’t want to pay me to go in and clean those books up. We have controllers and accounting managers who are just, they’re better at it than I am. So not only are they less expensive, they’re better at it than I am. So we apply those resources to get the books cleaned up. And then that gives me the information that I can use to help the entrepreneur to move forward. So when someone’s looking for
fractional CFO help. That’s a that’s a choice they can make. It’s a single shingle kind of person who they know that you know they’re getting that CFO for all whatever they need or more of a full stack firm that has different resources to apply.
Mark Young (43:42)
Now what’s the URL for your website? Is it ascentcfo.com?
Paul Harrison (43:46)
AscentCFO.com
Mark Young (43:48)
Ascent, so A-S-C-E-N-T, CFO.com. And we’ll put that in the show notes, everybody, if you want to find Paul. And if somebody wants to talk to you, can they go there and request Paul Harrison, if they want to talk to you?
Paul Harrison (43:53)
Correct.
Absolutely can. Yeah, my bio is on there so they can go in and look and see some of the experience that I have and reach out through the contact information that’s on the website and reach me that way.
Mark Young (44:17)
Well, terrific. Paul, thanks for being with us here on CPG Insiders. And folks go to the website, ascentscfo.com. Again, as I said, this is part of building your winning team. This is part of the who’s not the how’s. And sometimes you actually have to find the right who to even know what the how is. Sometimes we don’t even know what the how’s are.
Anyways, if you enjoyed today’s show, please make sure you leave us five star review wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’d be so kind, if you are not subscribed into the podcast, click the button and subscribe, then you won’t miss any episodes. And it’ll help us get the show out to more people. And actually this show, it’s amazing. This show is, think in the top three in the country for shows about consumer packaged goods. Good for you. some reason.
Paul Harrison (45:11)
Ehem.
Mark Young (45:12)
I don’t know why, Paul, but there’s a lot of people out there trying to learn how to get into the consumer packaged goods business. And that’s what we’re just trying to do here. Just trying to bring them good content every month that they can use. That’s it for today, Paul. Thanks for being with us.
Paul Harrison (45:27)
I’m too. Thank you for your good work. I really appreciate what you do on this podcast.
Mark Young (45:33)
I appreciate that. And folks we’ll see you on the next episode of CPG Insiders. If you’re looking to greatly increase sales on your CPG product, don’t hesitate to contact us at Jekyll and Hyde Advertising and Marketing. By the way, the only advertising agency with a guaranteed result. Just go to JekyllHydeAgency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800-500-4210.
Contact Us
Questions or business inquiries regarding our part-time CFO, finance and accounting services are welcome at: info@ascentcfo.com
