Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to another episode of Unscripted Small Business Today. Co host Jeremy Rivera is joined by Sal Tirabasi, a seasoned financial professional with over 24 years of experience. After earning degrees from Harvard and Wharton, Sal spent 15 years in venture capital before becoming a CFO in a high growth company where he found his passion for helping business owners take control of their financial futures. As the founder of CFO Pro plus Analytics, Sal offers virtual and fractional CFO services with a business owner first approach, helping clients turn their financial data into powerful tools for growth. In today's conversation, Jeremy and Sal discuss the role of fractional CFOs, how they provide high level financial strategy without the cost of a full time cfo and the growing importance of data analytics. They also explore the potential of AI and digital tools in transforming CFO services. If you're a business owner looking to elevate your financial strategy, this episode is full of valuable insight. Let's jump in.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted host. I'm here with Saltier Abbasi. Why don't you give yourself a quick introduction?
[00:01:16] Speaker C: Sure. Saltier Abbasi, I am a professional cfo. I run a CFO services practice called CFO Pro plus Analytics and we provide high quality financial strategy services from the CFO level through fpa, accounting audit if needed and bookkeeping to emerging businesses, typically companies that are founder or family owned, sometimes venture backed, between 3 and $100 million of revenue.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Okay, I saw on your site that it said fractional cfo. Is that just a fancy term for part time or does it mean something more to be.
[00:02:04] Speaker C: It's a word that has become pretty frequently used for kind of, I would say focused consulting services around a specific job. And so basically in our world what it means is it's permanent part time and we can come in as one person or in some instances, I've got clients that's got three people on the team and we're basically providing varying levels of the stack of services, always starting with strategic CFO services where we're working very closely with the owner or CEO of the business and we layer in services below that depending on what their needs are. But the objective for them is really that they get, you know, an A grade service for much less than having to build out a whole team on their own so they get right overhead.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: You don't have hr, you don't have Pam and HR vetting everybody on your team. You've got your own process.
[00:03:03] Speaker C: And we're meant to be there for the, for, you know, an extended period of time. You know, it could be a couple of years or more in some instances.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Got it. So it's a kind of an interesting thing because I don't think that existed a generation ago in businesses, you know, like you would have, I think.
[00:03:21] Speaker C: Well, believe it or not, I did meet, I have met a lot of fractional CFOs, and I met one who actually has been doing it pretty much for 18 years, which isn't like 40 years. But I think one thing that definitely has made the whole model much more viable is the whole advent of the communication systems that we now are accustomed to because of COVID Yeah. So now businesses all over the country, you know, can really go into sort of a national marketplace and try to find the right service provider for them that can do these specific jobs.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, that's an interesting point. That there's also like a cultural shift in business to be much more remote friendly. You know, when I was starting, you know, 17, 18 years ago, in, in work, in business, I'm like, you know, you got to drive in, you got to commute, and there's almost nobody that was remote unless they were like selling encyclopedias from their living room. So like seeing the, the evolution of the work from home movement kind of move back and give, kind of give back to businesses in a particular way.
[00:04:38] Speaker C: Yes. And I think for these more entrepreneur run businesses that are either bootstrapped or they're capitalized to a certain level, the level of flexibility just from the service itself because it is less expensive than full time. But you're getting, and I would argue you're getting a much better service.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:04] Speaker C: On average. Right.
But they're also, you know, able to save costs because it doesn't come with like, you know, all the other overhead. In this instance, it would be like office space.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: Right, sure. Yeah.
[00:05:21] Speaker C: You have that formula to make businesses more efficient. You know, it fits into that whole vein of new thinking that a lot of entrepreneurs have.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: Yeah. So with a outsourced or a fractional chief financial officer, like you're, are you, are you inundated with different, like, oh, I need to be on Slack. Oh, we use Asana. Oh, we use Microsoft Workspace. Are, are you consistent? Like, are you, do you have too many different types of communication platforms now that you're having to be in, expert in, in these systems?
[00:06:00] Speaker C: Great question, and I'm going to answer it in a couple of different ways. So the first thing I'll mention is that I actually I have two blogs that I write. One is tirubasi.com which is a lot of analytics slash. Kind of like improving your effectiveness in execution at work.
And then I've got a CFO blog for my, my CFO Pro plus analytics website. But on my personal blog I wrote an article, a blog, I don't know, maybe it was like 12 weeks ago. Called from many messaging apps to one and I, I give a quick plug for this app that I've been using called Beeper.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:06:46] Speaker C: And you literally can have it on your desktop and on your phone. And I get all of my WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Telegram, Facebook messenger. Flat.
Yeah. All those messages come through one application.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Sal, Sal.
I am already learning. Like I have, you know, I got Discord, I got Slack, I've got Asana.
[00:07:16] Speaker C: And also there's a couple of things you can't do on like you can't do imessage on it, but all this other stuff anyway that's my.
Is like I would probably die without it.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: That's amazing.
[00:07:31] Speaker C: So that has had me a lot. Actually you can't do Microsoft Teams on it either, which is kind of a pain. Which leads me to kind of. The second thing I was going to say is I don't have a lot of requests for Slack. I have some, but mainly I have a lot of people on teams and Teams has done a reasonably good job of.
You kind of go in with one profile. Like I'll go in with my CFO Pro analytics.com profile.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:00] Speaker C: And I can get messages from everybody that has me in their domain somewhere else.
It gets a little squirrely when you're trying to log into a meeting and sometimes you got to switch the profile.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:14] Speaker C: But generally that kind of works, so.
But I haven't had to really like do anything a whole lot with like Google oriented shops. It's mainly Microsoft shops. I do have one client that's kind of Google centric, but they don't put a lot of messaging demands on me. They actually use my WhatsApp channel for client communications. I have one dedicated to them and then it's the type of business where I'm not required to use their email address.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:08:48] Speaker C: So one thing I would just mention is like for example, if you've got a client that is regulated under the HIPAA regulations, which are the healthcare regulations for data and information, which are extremely strict.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:03] Speaker C: When you pick up a client like that, you pretty much have to be on their platform so it creates another email box for you and that kind of stuff. But generally in other industries you don't have to do that.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:15] Speaker C: It's more of a cultural thing maybe where they're kind of like, hey, you're our permanent part time cfo. I'd like everybody to feel like you're on the team. Please use our email address. Sure. That makes total sense.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: That makes sense. So I'm interested to see is the, the analytics piece like as much as like a full blown SaaS, or is it more like the functionality of what you're doing goes beyond, you know, just the typical, you know, making sure that bills get paid and that you have the next quarter's projections for numbers. So what does the analytics side on the business on what does that piece mean in your business?
[00:09:54] Speaker C: Just a little bit of background of myself as I, in addition to having an mba, I also have a, a graduate degree in engineering and I'm fairly quantitative person. And when I became a professional cfo, I took on and have always enforced sort of this concept of one source of truth, all running through finance.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:10:19] Speaker C: And that's hard to do in very large organizations, but in these emerging businesses where they haven't quite figured it out, it's really easy to corral all the data. Not really easy, but the CFO really can corral all the data. And the analytics part of finance is not just strictly related to finance. It's also related to operational finance and predictive analytics like machine learning.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:10:41] Speaker C: And the rule is basically for me is like all data that is owned by the organization should be owned, cleaned and managed by one part of the organization. And my worldview is that it should be done by the finance team. So when I was a cfo, I had the biggest part of my team were operations analysts who were dedicated to specific areas of the business and would treat them like clients and say, hey, I'm your consultative analyst. I've got access to all the data. I'm going to show up at your staff meetings every week with all your KPIs, all the insights I can provide. And you don't have to worry about training me because I'm already in this awesome analytics department that's training me to be an amazing analyst for you. So when I left and did this CFO services business, I pretty quickly had clients who I saw had analytics needs. And what we do is we go in and we basically build them business intelligence platforms and then we'll operate those for them and provide them the analytical support that they need in order to use that data. So we're not just doing finance work, but if they want it, we can do this analytics work that delivers a whole other dimension of value to them, that at that size business, you don't want to necessarily take on the overhead. And we can come in and stand up the whole system for you, especially if you're in a Microsoft environment. Because we tend to be Power BI centric for a variety of reasons.
You can be up and running with a business intelligence system in like six weeks with some really good information coming out of it.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: So is that like using a data lake, like through tableau or tap clicks for analytics?
[00:12:31] Speaker C: Like so tableau would be sort of the equivalent of Power bi.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:12:36] Speaker C: And the data lake can be a formal data lake. It could be a hodgepodge of repositories. Power BI doesn't care. Okay, you just say connect this, connect this, connect this and then we can stand up a data model. You know, that works. Now if the client has like hundreds of millions of rows of data, then we would probably want to address the data lake piece first.
And also you don't really want to be touching their production systems that are running the business.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:12] Speaker C: So you also can in some instances, depending on where the data's come from, you may want to just have an a once a day replication of it. So you're using day old data which is probably good enough for most applications.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:27] Speaker C: And then overnight it'll just refresh so you're not touching any systems that they need to use in the day to day things can happen in the background. But, but to answer your question, the data lake sort of sits underneath the BI applications which are looker is the Google one. Tableau is I guess is that Salesforce now?
[00:13:50] Speaker B: I think so.
[00:13:51] Speaker C: The BI is Microsoft.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: That's awesome.
I used to work for Tapclicks and Raven Tools, so have a little bit of familiarity on the analytics side. So I was kind of interested to see like how deep your, your skill set goes in that direction.
So when you're coming on as a fractional cfo, like what are the first, like five priorities? Or maybe that's too much. What are your top three priorities when you're, when you're coming on with a new client?
[00:14:26] Speaker C: Okay, so if you're just focusing on the CFO services, typically they have some sort of financial planning issue, generally speaking that they're grappling with. And that can be in the form of cash flow management. It can be in the form of I need better forecasting, I need to know what's going to happen in the next 90 days. So I'm not cash stressed or Worried about that, but I just need to know what's going to happen in the next 90 days. So it's usually like somewhere in that zone.
And in order to be able to deliver that efficiently, one of the first things we do is we go in and we really just scrub through the bookkeeping part of it. And I use another tool to do that called Bunker, which allows me to just kind of get a quick look at the financials. Typically these people are in QuickBooks or NetSuite and bunker plugs in. We can look at a lot of the data. We get a sense of like, how clean is this? Do they have really good organization of their financial accounts? And the reason we look at the, that historical stuff is because for the planning piece, which is really the most powerful part of the whole offering, when this is what they're looking for, you need to make sure that you're able to tie out what, when, when, when the actuals actually happen, you want to make sure you can match them up to the template that you're using for the forecasting or for the cash flow planning.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:07] Speaker C: And so just seeing how messy that is, which a lot of times it is, gives us one main thing that we need to know. So we know that when we're, when we're building this model and we're trying to show you budget versus actuals, we know how difficult the actuals are to extract and be able to tie into the overall financial forecast. That's one. The second most important thing is we really got to sit down and spend a lot of time with the key areas of the business to understand mechanically how the business works. Sometimes they've got some version of a financial forecast in there and we'll look at that, but then we'll build our own because we build a driver based model that, that basically unifies monthly budgeting with long term forecasting. So you should only have our best practices. You should only have one financial model and it should serve all your purposes. It should give you your monthly budget, it should give you your long range forecast, it should be what you share with your board, with your investors, and it should have the ability to flex so that you can show upside, stress cases and you're just operating in one system. So that, that requires really understanding the mechanics of the business. How do they acquire customers, how do they market, what do salespeople get paid, how do they service their customers, what do they spend on product development? And you got to put that all in. That can be somewhat time consuming to gather the information. But once you, if you've got really good Excel modelers, it can take a few weeks to get a really good draft of a model going. So that's kind of the second thing.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:44] Speaker C: And then the third thing that I really zero in on is strategically, where is the executive team's mind headed?
[00:17:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:53] Speaker C: Why are the things that we're working on important to them?
And how do we create even better versions of what they were expecting so that it really gives them more operating leverage as they're trying to figure out what they're going to do with the business? So that's where you get into more strategic planning, priority planning, understanding. Like, is this an organization that does a lot of whipsawing? They can't make up their minds?
How do we guide them into a planning process and a meeting cadence that gets them really much more focused and committed to certain priorities? Or is this an organization that's pretty organized on that front? They just need better data.
It's going to be somewhere in between those two bookends.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:43] Speaker C: And those are really the three things. So it's like, what does the accounting look like? Understand the business so we can build a great forecast or cash flow management tool if that's what they need. And then strategically, what are their main priorities and how do they manage them?
[00:19:00] Speaker B: So, having come in on different ships, have you.
I'm sure you have NDAs, so you can't, like, name names, but have you ever been asked to join a sinking ship and not been able to pull it out of its crash dive? And what did you learn from. From the Hindenburg?
[00:19:22] Speaker C: I. I had one situation where the entrepreneur was way out over his skis in terms of how he had allocated capital assets, and it made him sort of asset rich and cash poor.
But that was combined with a pretty complicated set of books that really made cash management very, very challenging.
And so in that instance, we tried to clean up the books, but the cash pressure was really quite strong as we sort of move through the engagement. And really my view was, hey, you don't really need us. What you really need to do is start shedding some assets and worry about just getting. Spend your time and resources on getting more cash into the business by selling some things.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:32] Speaker C: And the CFO function is going to be kind of an expensive layer that you don't really need to spend the money on right now, because what you need to do is like, you bought too many things, you need to sell some of them and retrench. And then, you know, then. Then you got to go back and hit, hit it hard with all of your financial planning and do it in a much more thoughtful way. So that, that has happened to me.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:01] Speaker C: And we, you know, we, you know, we ended up not working on the engagement. And the, the advice that, that we gave them a number of times before we left was get some help here to start selling some of these things. Figure out what it is you want to sell and how quickly you can get it done.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: So out of the terms of like scale of small to large, like where's the bottom tier of engagements? Like the smallest type of business that you work with and in that weight class, you know, because like if you're featherweight, the advice you get from your coach is very different from a boxer at a heavyweight division. So down at the flyweight, how, how low do you go in terms of who you, you work with and who you think could benefit from a fractional cfo?
And at that weight class, how does the game change? What's your objective with that class?
[00:22:01] Speaker C: Yeah, so there's kind of two examples of like the featherweight that I, that I'll give one is just bootstrapped featherweight where they, maybe they've got less than you know, 3 million of revenue. I think it's pretty challenging to afford our level of service. It might be more like, and we don't really do this though for an interesting business. We could probably do it for somebody, you know, hey, just buy a few hours a month.
Let us, you know, we'll help you pick a good bookkeeper, get your bookkeeping done by a few hours a month. We'll do a little financial review with you. That would be sort of a lightweight kind of project.
But, but once you get over like 5 million of revenue and you know, you're spending, you know, $120,000 a year on a professional part time finance function is really worth a lot worth its weight in gold. I mean you can't view it as a cost center. And a lot of entrepreneur owners who don't have venture capital get that pretty quickly because they know they're basically making it happen every week on their, through their own cash flow that they really have bootstrapped and built this business around. So they understand like, hey, if somebody can help me understand this cash flywheel better. Yeah, it's actually going to make me more successful.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:46] Speaker C: And I think at about the 5 million in revenue range, you should, you should really be thinking about it. You may want to think about it sooner and kind of maybe find somebody who can do a scale down service.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:58] Speaker C: And I think it goes all the way up to like 100 million of revenue, you know, and then maybe at that level the CFO service takes on more of a consultative role and it's not as hands on, but it's really more strategic finance. Because even at that level you may not be able to afford a full time CFO who has seen as many things as we've seen.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:20] Speaker C: And so we have a lot of value to add at that high end also. But the other on the low, just to go back to the low end, the feather featherweight metaphor that you used, you also then have the venture backed companies that are in that category.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:35] Speaker C: And that is less about managing the cash and making the financial flywheel turn and it's more about providing them with really good planning and insight so that they can look extremely professional and have good insights coming out of whatever it is that they're in their stage of development that they're trying to figure out and that becomes a little bit more strategic and less tactical. You know, there's some modeling in there, but it's definitely thinking through things about what's the messaging going to be to investors, what's the data that you have to back it up.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:18] Speaker C: And those entrepreneurs, I think are more selective in deciding whether they're going to use a fractional CFO or not. Especially if they don't have a lot of transactions happening in the business.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: Right.
[00:25:35] Speaker C: So that one is, you know, a little bit more flavor of strategy and getting a lot of insights is probably more kind of what they're looking for.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Yeah. Because they're wanting to appear, you know, as a solid of investment as possible to make their next, next seed pressure.
[00:25:55] Speaker C: Because usually they've raised all this money. Now when they want to go out and raise a new round of funding, then you know, there's a whole other set of issues they have to face.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:04] Speaker C: And you having a fractional CFO in before that happens is going to make you way more effective when you go out and try to raise more money.
[00:26:13] Speaker B: That, that makes sense. I'd been with a company where, while they were definitely in that, that race for next round and trying to ask for, oh, hey, they need these okrs and we need these financials. Like what's your plan? What's your forecast for SEO? Because I, I have got it, you know, the SEO background. And so they're asking me to forecast the next year's worth of potential organic growth. I'm like, okay, I guess I can try to do that. There's some questions as to like methodology on that, I'm curious how, how, how changing market like the marketing technology that we've seen and you know, different fields 10 has impacted these companies that you're working with. Like is it open season? Like is is are there a lot more opportunities when it comes to digital marketing having a, a bigger impact on the company or what role does that play and how do you interact with that on the CFO side?
[00:27:25] Speaker C: Yeah, well, digital marketing is, is big for any business.
I think what is great about the, you know, the, the era of the like that's kind of opened up in the last three years is I feel like there are many more cost effective tools that can make your digital marketing more streamlined, efficient and measurable.
And I'm thinking of like tools as simple as like Zapier, which can automate some workflows for you where you don't have to involve it. You can pull in Google data campaigns, connect them with data from your CRM, put them, then push those into some sort of a data repository that you can then use some business intelligence on. These are things that have become more self serve over time. I think there's certain types of people that can gravitate to, to that and design solutions for themselves around it. But you know, for entrepreneurs, you know, if you, if you have you know, four, four hours on a weekend, there's a lot of really interesting stuff that you can do to create some small systems that will make you more scalable and, and measurable. The other part of digital that I think is, you know, that everybody's talking about now are the LLM models and AI. You know, I think that in terms of content generation, you know, you still need I think a human editor depending on, you know, what it is that you need to do. But in terms of like putting together things like production calendar ideation of topics, putting together content outlines for things that you want to write about, you know, thinking into the future about where things might be going. You can use the LLMs to generate all types of work product that you can then craft into like something bigger and better and it increases the velocity. But the other part of digital marketing that I want to touch on is you know, because I use anthropic and chatgpt and perplexity in, in my own business and I don't really go to search engines anymore.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:30:04] Speaker C: And I think that that has a whole implication of like, well where are the ads going to go?
[00:30:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:12] Speaker C: You know, and you know, Google I think has done a smart thing which is trying to Embed Gemini into the search engine.
[00:30:21] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:30:22] Speaker C: That's, I think, a good first step, but I think it's going to have to get more sophisticated than that to really make the ad dollars that they're generating more applicable to what the. How the audience is looking for information. That's going to be a big change that we're going to see over the next couple of years.
[00:30:42] Speaker B: So, like, looking at Perplexity, you know, there are, you know, I was able to take last month a client's Google search console data and give the PDF to Perplexity and ask, hey, can you give me, you know, five bullet points based off of the trends you see in these data points?
And it came back with something that seemed like it was reasonable. I think there is a level of trust that we have to give, that we are assigning.
Yeah, there's a certain amount of trust implicit in that entire process, while at the same time knowing that that same GPT model, if you ask it for New York Times articles from this authority will give you a list of authors. They may not exist, or they might not have written those articles, or those articles might not exist, but it did tell you that they did exist. So. Yeah, well, another thing that you need.
[00:31:43] Speaker C: To be careful of too is like, the chat sessions matter in terms of what information the LLM is retaining on your behalf.
[00:31:53] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:31:54] Speaker C: So for example, like, if you have a chat session, like I have one chat session in Claude, which is anthropic, that I just call technical support.
And, and I'm like, if I. If, like, something's not working for me and like, you know, I don't know, I'm trying to, like, what would be a good example?
I don't know, I'm trying to like, convert some sort of QuickBooks report to Google Sheets or something like that.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:23] Speaker C: And I, and I drop it in there, you know, that's in the, in the technical support thread. So it's giving me like, you know, good info. But if I went to the technical support thread and threw in like, hey, remember me? I'm this fractional CFO and I want to, I need a, I need an outline for a blog article about these topics. Yeah, you're mixing the awareness that the LLM has and you just need to be cognizant of that. So I always, you know, make sure I go in and pick which chat stream I want to use that's got the historical awareness of kind of like what the general topic is. Otherwise you could veer off into certain areas that end up with really strange answers.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: That is a very functional, functional piece of advice for sure.
And different too because I was just talking on my other podcast, Unscripted SEO with Mike Buckbee, whose Noah Toa platform kind of does the opposite side because now we are seeing LLMs that are search powered. You know, you've got Perplexity which is search powered GPT you can search on the web and certainly, you know, Copilot from Microsoft, they're connected to the web and they're, you know, pulling from indexes to answer these questions. So instead of just relying on the training set and information.
So I'm curious as far as like in the CFO world, so which is.
[00:33:59] Speaker C: All in the news the last couple of days is has the search. You can actually specifically tell it like there's a button on it where you say xyz, I want this. And then you click search and then it'll, it'll go out and gather and pull back. But yeah, sorry I cut you off.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: No, no, this is a good point because I am sure with the pace of this, like this podcast is going to be a little bit dated in a month or two because we'll be talking about things that. Oh yeah, of course it does that.
But in the CFO realm, like there is that uncertainty. But it does seem like maybe there are some basic tasks that you could use those type of tools to assist you with.
Are there any that you've found functional or reliable that you can, you can always check. You got, you got to do your due diligence and can't trust the machines and got to have your hammer ready to smash your laptop at any point.
[00:34:59] Speaker C: But I have some quick ones that I could throw out there. I mean, so we do a lot of work in Power BI and in Excel we get a pretty complicated function functions.
And you could just go to the LLM and say, hey, I, I need to do XYZ function in Excel. You know, give me, you know, for any series of, of text. Give me the, give me the, give me the, the code. The formula that'll always pick the third word in the, in the, in the cell.
You know what I mean? And so those left right mid functions are extremely complicated. They've got like all these little, you know, but that would be an example. You just go there, you know, it, it sets itself to say pretend A2 is, is the cell you want and then it gives you the formula. So for stuff like that, it's super handy. You know, you don't have to sit there and think through the formula, you know, whatever you want to do.
[00:35:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:00] Speaker C: And you can build it yourself, but why bother?
[00:36:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:05] Speaker C: Another one is complicated accounting transactions where I might say something like, you know, I want to, I want to follow ASC606 guidelines, which is like how you do recurring revenue for businesses. It's very applicable to SaaS businesses.
[00:36:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:26] Speaker C: And I've got a specific recurring transaction that happens in the middle of the month. How do I handle, how should I handle accrued revenue before I send the bill out? Yeah, and you can put that in there. And, and for something like that, I usually go to like two or three different GPTs because, you know, I know a lot about accounting, but I'm not a cpa and so I want to compare cross reference and cross reference and just make sure that they kind of make sense. Yeah, Sometimes you do that to check other people's work. Sometimes there's like something new that's happening and you want to make sure that when you do talk to the accountants on the team that you've got, you can have a good guided conversation on it. That would be another example. Other cool thing that I do is, you know, I do have to put together a lot of presentations and reports.
And one great thing that I love is I can go to any previous report that I've written for a client. Instead of like finding the source data for a specific chart, as long as the chart has numbers on the data points, I can just take a screenshot of it and upload it to ChatGPT and it'll reproduce it in a table for me.
[00:37:47] Speaker B: Wow, that is killer.
[00:37:49] Speaker C: And paste it into Excel and I just keep going, you know, like, that's.
[00:37:54] Speaker B: A fantastic shortcut because I've run into that of like, oh, I put this data here in this format and now I gotta find the original Excel sheet and try to copy and paste and.
[00:38:06] Speaker C: Yeah, the trick is that whenever you make new tables, whenever you make new charts, always select the feature where it includes the data point for each bar or whatever. Because what the GPT looks for in order to rebuild table, give it an XY axis with no numbers, but just on the, on the access. Yeah, it doesn't, I haven't gotten it to work where it can say, it can infer like, oh, this bar is this high, therefore the number must be this. I haven't, I think there's a way to do that. I just haven't figured it out. So.
[00:38:40] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:38:41] Speaker C: Yeah, third party data, like you go on the web and like, you just, you know, like, oh, this is an interesting data point regarding where my industry's going. Yeah, copy, paste, get the data and then reproduce it and footnote where you got it from. And you can do it in your own colors and all that kind of stuff.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: So that's legit. That's. That's another. That's the third solid action item. So as a kind of wrapping up here, what question would you like me to have asked so that you can answer it?
[00:39:15] Speaker C: Oh, wow.
I would say, you know, one thing is, like, what's the. Maybe the most satisfying part of the CFO services when we deliver them?
And the. For me, it's really seeing that the client is getting really good information that they know is new to them and very actionable, and it changes the way they want to think about things.
You know, it's sort of like giving them, you know, the most satisfying thing is you give them an aha. Moment.
[00:40:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:06] Speaker C: And it. And it really changes the way they think about things. And they're, you know, those are the times where I feel like we really add the most value. And they're, you know, extremely appreciative of it. And it really, like, elevates the business relationship to another level because you build a certain type of trust through that experience with them because they realize, like, you know, you did all this work in the background and you came up with these, like, critical insights that may be completely opposed to their perception. Yeah, they could be completely validating their perceptions and, you know, or somewhere in between, but they get a lot of value out of it. And that really is probably the most satisfying post part of the work that we do.
[00:40:56] Speaker B: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, Sal. Where can people find you? Are you on socials?
Instagram, TikTok. Oh, wait, TikTok's gone.
[00:41:09] Speaker C: I'm on LinkedIn. If you just look up Sal Tiero Bossi, you can find me. I've got the other social channels, but, you know, they're really more for distributing my content.
[00:41:21] Speaker B: Right, Fair enough.
[00:41:23] Speaker C: You know, you can go to my. My website for business is cfoproanalytics.com and I do have a. I do publish my more technical SL. Fun topics on substack. So that's salvator.substack.com and you can. You can find me there. And fantastic newsletter. It's free. You know, I'm out every couple of weeks with some topic that hopefully interests most people who want to subscribe, but I haven't gotten that many complaints or unsubscribed. So I guess that's good.
[00:42:01] Speaker B: Awesome. I'll make sure to add that to the show notes for anybody. Thanks so much for your time, Sal.
[00:42:06] Speaker C: Yeah, appreciate it. It was great meeting you. Thank you.
