The New F*Word

Colin (00:01)
Hey, Susan, how's it going?

Susan Boles (00:03)
Good, how are you?

Colin (00:05)
I'm very well, thank you. Welcome to the new F word, it's really great to have you.

Susan Boles (00:10)
Yeah, great to be here.

Colin (00:13)
Well, look, we are really fascinated by what we're perceiving as the rise of fractional roles and maybe it's something being in the UK that is newer to us and has been around and where you are for longer. So I'd love to hear how you got into it. What's your background? What do you do? Why don't you start there?

Susan Boles (00:33)
Yeah, yeah. So I'm Susan Bowles. I call myself a human-centered CFO and a business strategist, and I work primarily with client-based businesses at my firm Beyond Margins. So my real focus is helping founders build calmer businesses with comfortable margins. And I sort of accidentally ended up as a CFO. It was never what I set out to do. Early, like my early career, I started out as a data analyst

with financial data, just data. I was in higher ed doing, you know, institutional research, which is basically like counting students. I counted students in a lot of different ways. And that sort of led me down the path that became the CFO role. I joined a firm quickly after my MBA to be their like data and technology person, which is kind of an unusual role at a fractional CFO

if you think about it, financial data is just data. The whole point of a CFO role is just to interpret data and be able to tell the story of what's happening in a business based off of the finances. And so I sort of backed my way into an unexpected CFO role by way of data analysis and really software consulting because I did a lot of.

like software implementations at accounting firms. And so that sort of led me down the path of my own firm. And initially as a fractional COO, I'm a little unusual in that I've been on both the operations side of the house and the finance side of the house. So I started out as a fractional COO and was professionally still being a CFO like in my day job. And all of my work kept overlapping

I really don't think you can separate finances and operations. I think it's really difficult, at least for me. And realized that the stuff that I was really passionate about was the financial side of the house and less so the operations side of the house. And I guess about five years ago, I shifted from positioning myself as a COO to a CFO.

So, yeah, weird, windy, unusual path to get where I am now, for sure.

Colin (02:57)
No fast knitting. I love that. And because we, you know, we worked with our background in flow was we had a COO who did the CFO role. And I'm curious as to how you see those, you know, is it possible to split that 50-50 or do you tend to lean? Do you see people leaning one way or the other, like you're more numbers or you're more operational?

Susan Boles (03:06)
Mm-hmm.

I don't know that it's possible to split it 50-50. I think from a workload, if you're in a COO, CFO kind of combined role, almost inherently you end up spending the majority of your time's on the operations side of the house because that's just where a lot of the, that's where the people and the processes and all of those things sit. So I think if you're in a combined role, the finances often tends to take a little bit of a backseat just because

It's sort of a trailing indicator, right? The finances show you the result of what is happening on the operations side. So I think it is really powerful to have the roles combined, to have your operations person have that financial brain, the financial story, understand what's happening, kind of as the end result of their decisions. I think having those...

Um, kind of those brains combined is really powerful, um, from like a strategic perspective. But I think if you are combined, you almost inherently have to spend more time on the operations side of the house. Cause there's just, honestly, there's more to do on that side. Yeah.

Colin (04:29)
Yeah, there's more fires to put out. So what would your take be on what happens when you actually get somebody who's more focused on the numbers, then what do you feel that maybe offers a business?

Susan Boles (04:43)
I think the numbers are most powerful when informed by what is going on in the rest of the business, right? So the more your CFO understands what your goals are on the marketing side or what you're trying to do from a product or a services standpoint, like what you're thinking about offering, the better informed they are about all of the other areas of the business, the more

powerful strategy they can bring in, like can really be a very powerful strategic advisor to the other areas of the business. But I think one of the things that happens frequently, and I think it's too bad that it does, is we treat all of the different parts of the business as like silos. I like to say your business is an ecosystem. Any decision that you make in one area

And I think this happens frequently, especially in a fractional CFO role, is that the rest of the business, you're not there day to day, you're not there every single day and every single meeting, all of the different other areas of the business kind of treat the finances like off in a corner and forget to tell them what's happening. And I think where it is most powerful is when that...

CFO person is really well informed as to what's going on. And I think that's where you can get the most powerful insights, you get the most value out of your work with them. And so I think the more you can integrate them into the day-to-day kind of operations or planning, the more powerful they can be as a strategic partner.

Colin (06:29)
Hmm. Yeah, makes so much sense. So, Susan, what would you say? How do you see the role evolving? How are you seeing a rise in like from your side and more people taking on fractional safeholds, have you seen more demand from it from your side or has it just always been the case or is it what's changed?

Susan Boles (06:52)
No, I think there's definitely a change. I think part of it is that, so when I started doing, you know, positioning myself, originally I called myself a virtual CFO. I didn't really talk about fractional because that wasn't the language. I was a fractional CFO, but I just didn't say that. It was, there was a big piece of my role that was educating people.

about the fact that CFOs can and should be in smaller businesses. It's not a role just for big enterprise style-y businesses. That having a CFO can be really powerful even in a very small business. And so at least five years ago or so, most of the time I had to...

tell people, I had to explain to people, you know, what's the role of the bookkeeper? What's the role of the accountant? Why would you need a CFO? What would you use them for? And I think over the last, you know, five years or so, both the business owners are more educated about that role existing, I think partially because fractional has become more commonplace, not just in finances, but in

part of the small business ecosystem now in a way that honestly it really wasn't true just a few years ago. So I think what we're seeing is partially more education on the part of business owners so they're going to look for fractional roles versus us having to be like hey you know that's a this is a thing that you can have. But I also think that I just

think the way businesses are structured now, especially small businesses, they don't need a full-time, they don't need a full-time anything for the most part, unless they're a really big business. A lot of the roles, it is very beneficial to have that C-suite level brain.

in your business, somebody who can fill that role from a strategic and experience perspective, but you don't need them there all day, every day. Sometimes you don't even need them there every month or every quarter, but it's still a beneficial role. And I think business owners are really starting to realize how powerful having somebody with a lot of expertise in their business, but not there every day can really be. So I think it's kind of a combination of things.

Colin (09:07)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think I was somebody was telling me the other day, you know, that, uh, is a statistic, like 40% of C-suite roles feel within 18 months. So if you think about the upheaval of, of trying to recruit for that role, and then as a full-time role, and then it doesn't work, it's gone after 18 months.

Susan Boles (09:38)
I buy that.

Colin (09:47)
You know, you can really see the kind of advantage for a business of getting a fractional role in that takes less time to recruit and, you know, less impact as well if it doesn't work out because, you know, you're maybe sort of dipping your toe in and finding out how is this going to work? What, you know, is this the right person for me? You know, certainly that's been our experience. Yeah. Hmm.

Susan Boles (10:00)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I would have to agree with that, yeah.

Colin (10:15)
And you mentioned a couple of different finance roles and it's something we're really interested in. At Float is, you know, what's the kind of dream team for you? What's your best experience of coming in? How many days would you be working a month? Who would you be working with? Like when have you seen it really? Maybe you can talk to different sizes and scales of business, but for a small business, for a medium growing business, what's been your experience?

Susan Boles (10:44)
So I have offered my services to a lot of different sized businesses and in a lot of different ways. And I think the way that you most commonly see it is like a monthly retainer. Like you are a fractional person and we're meeting every month and I'm sending you reports and you know, we're doing the normal things every month. And what I found was that the type of

businesses, at least that I work with. So I work with, you know, primarily service-based businesses, but not exclusively, but they all move at different paces. Every business has kind of its own pace. So some companies move super, super fast and they are really lean and mean and can do implementation really quickly. And some...

you know, their business is pretty slow and they don't have a lot of financial transactions or they don't have all that many clients. And what I found was that when I was offering my services as let's do this every single month, there were so many months that we just didn't have anything to do. You know, we were waiting for something that we had.

like plan to be implemented, or we were waiting for results of an experiment, or there were just a lot of months where I'm like, cool, everything's good, yep. They'd be like, yeah, everything's good. Oh, okay. And we just kind of look at each other during our monthly meetings. And so one of the ways that I kind of decided to deal with that is to, I have kind of two...

ways that I work, I do an intensive, which is essentially like a project-based engagement where we're doing, we're addressing one particular concern because most companies, you know, especially on the smaller side, they need a CFO brain at some sort of growth inflection point. Like that is the most common point at which they are looking for a CFO. Either they have hit some sort of capacity ceiling or some kind of growth ceiling, and they're not really quite sure what to do.

to get over it, right? So the intensive works in a way that we figure out what we're gonna do about that particular challenge. And because it's project-based, they can go away, they can implement at whatever pace that makes sense for them, and then come back for another intensive when they're ready. And the other way that I decided to kind of handle this pacing issue is that most of my engagement work pretty flexibly.

So there's a bucket of hours that is kind of aligned to the level of support that we think is gonna make sense. And they can use them whenever they want in whatever increments they want to really be able to be responsive to that trigger. They need a CFO when they need a CFO and then most of the time they don't. And so I think that's a unique challenge.

with something like a CFO where, you know, the traditional role is we're doing reporting and we're meeting every month. And I think sometimes it's a struggle to continue to provide value when the story that we're telling is, yep, that's the same as last month.

Colin (14:00)
Yeah, yeah. Well that really resonates because you don't, you know, you don't want to be feeling like you're just hanging around, not doing anything, but at the same time, then there, then if you don't have that on hand, you know, when you really need it, you know, that's the point that can trip you up and it's maybe too late. Yeah. I think that's really cool.

Susan Boles (14:15)
That's the point. Yeah, and so I really like it being like on demand because that's how most smaller businesses actually need to interact with, honestly, most of their fractional roles. I don't know that there, other than like the fractional COO role, which rarely ends up being all that fractional, to be honest. I think most fractional roles, you don't need them there all the time. You know them there as and when you...

Colin (14:28)
Hmm.

Mm.

Susan Boles (14:44)
actually do need them and have a challenge to address.

Colin (14:46)
Yeah. And what about rules that you might have more consistently in like a bookkeeper or a financial operator, something like that? Would you recommend businesses have something like that?

Susan Boles (15:00)
Oh, for sure. So to me, the way that I see most of the team working is normally, uh, they either, when, when folks come to me, they either have a bookkeeper or they're looking for a new bookkeeper. Um, and they usually have a tax advisor. And I think those are kind of the three kind of legs of the stool is you need a really good bookkeeper so that you have good data. Cause without a good bookkeeper, you don't have good data. And then you can't understand what's happening. You can't tell the story. Cause there's no, there's no information to base.

story on and you need a good tax advisor partially because I don't want to touch it. Like it's a really important role and please don't make me do it. But I think having those three roles in really any business will cover most of your bases and also provide you with kind of each of the successive levels of kind of a comprehensive financial picture.

Colin (15:30)
Mm.

Yeah, totally.

Hmm. Yeah, I love it. And so let's talk about cashflow and who, out of those people, who, who is responsible for doing the cashflow? One of the things we find is, you know, often the business owner doesn't, they're not sure how to do it. They've never done it before. Or the, you know, their CPA or their accountant isn't close enough to the business and their bookkeeper sometimes isn't sure either. Is that my role? Is that my responsibility? You know, where, where do you see that? How does that work in an ideal way from your point of view?

Susan Boles (16:29)
I mean, for me and for my clients, it's usually my role. I find that using the cashflow forecast is a really useful discussion tool because you can use it as a way to figure out the impact of specific decisions you might be considering. Like you could use it to see like a real tangible number. Like one of my favorite parts about the float software particularly is like the day.

when you run out of money, you can actually create scenarios and see how that date changes. And that's really tangible for business owners. Like that's a really, that's something that they can absorb in a way that I think a lot of the more complicated financial reports kind of just go over their head. They're like, I don't understand why I need this, but they do understand, here's when you're gonna run out of money. They get that.

And so for me, cashflow is using a cashflow forecast is normally my best entry point into both training business owners into how the financial side of their business is actually working. But it's also such a great tool for them to bring up decisions that they're thinking about, bring up stuff that's going on in their business. And so for me,

cashflow forecasting is a super critical tool of me engaging with my clients. And I think you're right. I think, you know, tax folks are really, really good at taxes, but they don't necessarily have the touch points or the...

entrepreneurial experience to be able to serve as that like really good strategic advisor when it comes to businesses. When it comes to taxes and being proactive around tax planning, sure. But when it comes to should I hire this person, should I not hire this person? What happens if I launch this product and it completely tanks? Like, they're just not well equipped for those specific kinds of...

discussions because they don't have the frame of reference. And honestly, for most tax people, that's not where they're, they're not that interested in it. And I think for bookkeepers, you know, their role is kind of, at least in my opinion, the keeper of the data. Their job is to make sure that the information gets into the accounting systems so that we know what's happening. But yeah, they're not necessarily equipped or have the experience to be able to do

Colin (18:35)
Hmm.

Susan Boles (18:55)
interpretation of that data. And so I think where it's best positioned and most powerfully positioned is with a CFO and that our role as CFOs is to train the business owner and make sure that they are educated to be able to understand what's happening there.

Colin (18:57)
Yeah.

Yeah, makes so much sense. So what, I'd love to know more about your tech stack then. So are you QuickBooks, are you Xero or something else or what do you use for that?

Susan Boles (19:26)
I have always been hardcore zero. I reluctantly use QuickBooks, but I was very, very early from the US perspective to the zero ecosystem. I think I started using zero 10 years ago. It was with like one of my first businesses personally, because...

Colin (19:30)
Right, wow.

Susan Boles (19:47)
Honestly, I think it was the only thing that integrated with the booking tool I was trying to use. And so I went down the zero rabbit hole. And actually when I started my company, it was as an integrator, which is the person that basically, connects software tools together, but it was eight years ago and nobody knew what that was in the US. So I have always been a huge zero fan and reluctantly use QuickBooks.

Colin (20:08)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And what else, do you use Float for your short term cash flow and do you have another program you use for longer term like three way forecasting or is that Excel or?

Susan Boles (20:27)
Nope, I use float because honestly, I think it is the most applicable and understandable for most of the business owners. It's super easy for me to actually use with my clients because it just pulls their data in and I don't really have to do much in terms of like data entry. And for the purposes of almost every business owner I've ever worked with, it's enough. They don't really need super complex forecasts.

Or long-term forecasts, because in most of the businesses I work with, you know, which are like under $10 million, the business is changing so rapidly, like stuff changes so fast, that anything outside of about 12 months doesn't really matter.

because stuff is gonna change 10 times before we even get to that point. So for me, I keep my tech stack really, really simple. And float is the primary tool that I use when I'm working with clients.

Colin (21:16)
Yeah.

That's great to hear. That was really good to hear. I, yeah, I suppose initially for us, you know, we, we sort of thought when we went out to this CFO market that we might get a little bit of a, oh, you know, it's not, it's not a three way forecasting solution. We need something more complicated. So we kind of, you know, it took us a long time to get there, but, but I think you're right. We're finding people saying, well, sometimes I'll need to pull together a

you know, a more complex model for some scenario, like a funding round or something like that. But on the whole, actually the best, it's like the best camera you have is the one in your pocket and the best forecast inclusion is the one that's the most accurate, right? So that seems to be what we're hearing back, which is surprising from our side. We thought it would be maybe, you know, it would have to, it would be a sort of a solution, but not the only solution. So that's really interesting to hear what you're saying.

Susan Boles (22:03)
You just don't need it.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting because most of the accounting technology on the market was designed by accountants, which it

Colin (22:33)
Hmm.

Susan Boles (22:36)
at least on the surface seems like that would make sense. But the problem is that business owners and accountants think about their finances really, really differently. And that if you are working directly with business owners and your goal is to serve them as a strategic partner, you have to meet them where they are, not hand them the world's most complex forecast that they're like.

Colin (22:46)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Boles (23:00)
I, okay, great, this is super overwhelming and I don't know what to do with this. And I think one of the issues that is, I think is cool to see it kind of change over the last few years is that we as CFOs, as accountants, we are trying to meet business owners.

Colin (23:01)
Yeah.

Susan Boles (23:18)
where they are instead of just sending them the world's most complicated reports every month and thinking that is delivering value. We're realizing that the value is in our expert our expertise our interpretation of those pieces of information but that more complicated is not more valuable.

Colin (23:40)
Yeah, I love that. And that's been our approach as well. You know, we're not we weren't approaching this from an accounting point of view. I'm a business owner. I wanted to build something that made sense to me. And that, yeah, ultimately, you know, we realised that a lot of accounting is the idea that it's produced for tax purposes. And that's not really thinking about what does the business owner need to see to understand their finances. And when you look at it from that point of view, you come to

Susan Boles (23:47)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Colin (24:07)
sometimes very different conclusions as to what a business owner really needs. And well, look, it's been amazing talking to you. I would love, why don't we leave it with, is there any final thoughts you want to say maybe to other people that are watching this that are thinking about becoming like moving from a full-time CFO into a fractional role or from a business owner that's thinking about hiring a fractional role for the first time.

Susan Boles (24:12)
Oh yeah, totally.

So I think if you are thinking about moving from a full-time role into a fractional role, the thing that will serve you the best is figuring out how to get the entrepreneurial perspective. A lot of CFOs coming out of big...

corporations or that kind of role, you don't have the down and dirty experience of like, what is a business owner thinking? What do they care about? You know, you're used to your value is reporting, your value is actually showing the numbers, but when you're in a fractional role, you're inherently working with smaller businesses. And for them, the value is being able to understand where are they and how can you help

interpret the information so that they can make better decisions for their business. Your job is as a strategic partner. And I think the place where most kind of traditional accountants, CFO-y kind of people are weakest is on that business owner side because they don't have a lot of experience. They haven't necessarily owned a business and the businesses that they're working with are really different. And so I think from a...

know, transitional role, that's where you could be the most powerful, is getting that kind of experience. And for, you know, folks who are thinking about hiring a fractional CFO, I think, again, that's the most powerful part. The place where you're going to get the most value is using your CFO as a strategic partner, as a thought partner, and keep them in the loop.

make sure that they know what they, what's going on in your business. I always like to tell my clients, like you are the expert in your business and you have to be the one to tell me what's going on because I don't know unless I'm in the loop and I can't help support you or help you grow or help you navigate difficult decisions. If I don't...

if I don't have the full picture. So I think really making sure that they are in the loop, not just about your finances, but about what is going on in the rest of your business.

Colin (26:50)
That's such good advice. Thank you so much, Susan. And where can people find you if they're looking to, and you've got a great website, by the way, where people go.

Susan Boles (26:57)
Oh, thanks. So my website is beyondmargins.com. I am most frequently on LinkedIn. So it's at the Susan Bowles, because there's a Susan Bowles who's an author who stole all of my handles. So I'm on LinkedIn pretty much every day. Hit me up. And

They could also listen to my podcast, which is about to relaunch here in May called Beyond Margins. So you can find that wherever they listen to podcasts.

Colin (27:28)
Well, thanks so much for coming on. This has been me Colin Hewitt and Susan Bowles. Thanks for joining us on the new F Word.

Susan Boles (27:37)
Thanks.