The 3 Specific Reasons our CFO Advisory Firm Was a Huge Success

In this episode of the CFO Report, host Adam Lean sits down with Jeff Prager to reveal the three key reasons their CFO advisory firm achieved massive success. With years of experience guiding businesses toward financial clarity and profitability, Adam and Jeff break down the specific strategies that helped them stand out in a competitive market. Whether you're running an advisory firm or any business looking to scale, these insights will give you a framework for long-term success.

Tune in as they discuss the importance of financial visibility, strategic forecasting, and advisory services that go beyond just bookkeeping. Jeff shares firsthand experiences and actionable takeaways that any business owner or CFO can implement right away. If you're looking to elevate your financial strategy and grow your firm, this is an episode you don’t want to miss!

At The CFO Project, we help financial professionals like you master the skills that truly matter—guiding business owners to generate consistent positive cash flow and grow their businesses. If you’re ready to stop doubting yourself and start making an impact, check out our free trainings and resources at TheCFOProject.com. And if you want hands-on mentorship, explore our Done-With-You program. Hit subscribe and turn on notifications so you don’t miss future videos, and let’s help more businesses succeed together!

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Transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:10:20
Unknown
In this episode of the CFO project podcast, we talk about the three specific reasons our CFO advisory firm was a huge success.

00:00:18:18 - 00:00:42:05
Unknown
Welcome to the CFO project podcast. Today, we're talking all about the three specific reasons our CFO advisory firm was a huge success. To help you with the discussion, I've invited Jeff Prager, the co-founder of our original CFO advisory firm, and of course, the co-founder of the CFO project. Jeff, welcome to the show.

00:00:42:07 - 00:01:02:06
Unknown
All right, so to recap for anybody that's listening that that doesn't already know, Jeff and I started, we met and then we started our own CFO advisory firm separately. We had owned a CFO advisory firm in our own right. I've been doing it probably for 8 or 10 years, and Jeff has been doing it for what, since the 80s.

00:01:02:06 - 00:01:30:22
Unknown
Right? Yeah. Oh, man. Okay. So together, you know, Jeff and I met, and we realized that we have a lot, a lot of of of commonalities. And our CFO advisor from a lot of the philosophy of how we operate and how we think about, meeting with clients and advising them was similar. So we thought, why don't we join together and create a good, a really good CFO advisory firm?

00:01:30:22 - 00:01:54:21
Unknown
So that's what we did. And then we got to capacity. I mean, our firm took off. We couldn't take on any more clients. And that morphed later on into us training other accountants and bookkeepers and tax professionals on on what we did. So in this episode, we're going to talk about the three specific reasons why we feel that our CFO advisory firm was such a huge success.

00:01:54:23 - 00:01:57:19
Unknown
So you ready, Jeff?

00:01:57:19 - 00:02:23:18
Unknown
Okay, so the first thing that we feel was the specific reason why our CFO advisory firm was such a huge success was because we sold what we call a Productized CFO Advisory Service, where we give our clients a specific set of deliverables with an unambiguous fee structure. In other words, we sell our CFO service like a grocery store would sell toothpaste.

00:02:23:19 - 00:02:48:19
Unknown
It's on the shelf. Everybody who buys the toothpaste knows why they're buying it. What it is, what we'll do for them, and how much it cost. And that's exactly how we present our services. So, Jeff, what are your what are your thoughts on that?

00:03:16:23 - 00:03:35:00
Unknown
Yeah.

00:03:35:02 - 00:04:18:01
Unknown
Yeah.

00:04:18:03 - 00:04:22:07
Unknown
Yeah.

00:04:22:09 - 00:04:45:06
Unknown
Yeah. To me, I completely agree. And to me, I've noticed from. Because I'm. I feel like, you know, as a, as a business owner and, and doing marketing, you have to observe people. You have to observe your prospects. You have to observe your, your clients. And one thing that I've observed over the years is that people don't like a lot of choice.

00:04:45:08 - 00:05:17:22
Unknown
It's a it's a, you know, that term cognitive load. We can't put so much choice on them and make them think about a lot of different things that they're not confident they really understand. Most people don't know what a CFO service is. Most people don't know how to price it. So we have to make it super clear to a prospect or a business owner as to why they would even buy this service, what they'll get from it, what we'll do for them, and then make it very clear the price point and say, do you want it or not?

00:05:18:00 - 00:05:27:13
Unknown
And we found that most people wanted it. If you presented it the right way.

00:05:27:15 - 00:05:34:16
Unknown
Yeah.

00:05:34:18 - 00:05:49:06
Unknown
Yes. Yes. Right.

00:05:56:06 - 00:06:01:14
Unknown
Yeah.

00:06:01:16 - 00:06:29:05
Unknown
Yes. Yes. In language that I can understand. And and you brought up a good point. Those things that you just mentioned like forecasting and tax planning and budgeting and all that ratio analysis. Those are features of our service, not necessarily benefits. And people buy based on the benefit that it will get them, not necessarily the features. For example, you go to the store to buy a a drill.

00:06:29:05 - 00:06:47:14
Unknown
the people buying the drill just want the benefit of having the drill, meaning they'll get a hole in a wall so they can hang a picture. That's the benefit. Whereas the feature of a drill might be, you know, the the material the drill is made up of in the type of, you know, the the specific look and feel of the drill.

00:06:47:14 - 00:06:56:03
Unknown
And it's like, who cares? I just want the end result.

00:06:56:05 - 00:07:03:16
Unknown
Yeah.

00:07:03:18 - 00:07:10:02
Unknown
Yeah.

00:07:10:04 - 00:07:27:12
Unknown
Right. Right. Personally I'm not I'm so not handy with tools that when I need something in the wall, I just. I would prefer somebody else does. Just give me the hole in the wall. I don't want to do it. I don't even know what I'm looking at. Have I'm doing that. But, but but the point. That's still a valid point.

00:07:27:13 - 00:08:05:04
Unknown
I just want the end result. I don't care how it gets there. If I do it myself, I. If I use a tool, if I hire somebody, it doesn't matter. I just want the end result. And business owners want the end result and the end result being a growing and successful business. And they want somebody just to tell them how to do that.

00:08:15:23 - 00:08:20:20
Unknown
Yeah.

00:08:20:22 - 00:08:30:02
Unknown
Wow.

00:08:30:04 - 00:08:45:16
Unknown
Oh.

00:08:45:18 - 00:08:45:22
Unknown
Yeah,

00:08:45:22 - 00:08:56:20
Unknown
Everybody listening. If you haven't already, sign up for our five minute weekly email with practical tips for accountants and bookkeepers to escape the accountants trap. Go to the CFO project.com/newsletter.

00:08:56:20 - 00:09:16:11
Unknown
The second specific reason our CFO advisory firm was a huge success was that we spent the majority of our time helping our clients take action rather than do what most CFOs and frankly, a lot of accountants and bookkeepers do and just talk about numbers.

00:09:16:13 - 00:09:41:13
Unknown
Why is that so important?

00:09:41:15 - 00:09:44:05
Unknown
For you.

00:09:44:07 - 00:10:00:01
Unknown
Right.

00:10:00:03 - 00:10:11:06
Unknown
Yeah.

00:10:11:08 - 00:10:13:14
Unknown
Yeah.

00:10:37:19 - 00:10:56:18
Unknown
Yeah.

00:10:56:20 - 00:11:22:16
Unknown
That's right. Yeah. You brought up a good point. Business owners are not accountants. They don't want to be accountants. And unfortunately, a lot of financial professionals talk to them like they are accountants. Some accounting reports, like the balance sheet. You know, those are not business managerial reports. They're accounting reports. But the other thing that I think is that I think is super important is that we have to remember that our clients are not our employees.

00:11:22:18 - 00:11:26:18
Unknown
They don't have to do what we say. At the same time,

00:11:26:18 - 00:11:42:19
Unknown
we will fail at being a good CFO and fail at doing our job of helping our clients grow. If our client doesn't take some action in their business because they're the ones that has to do something in order to get their business to grow. We're just advising them on what to do.

00:11:43:01 - 00:12:30:03
Unknown
But if they don't take the action, then their business will grow, which means will fail. So we have to be able to get good at getting our clients take action, which means we have to explain things in a language that they understand and is so motivating that they will want to take action. I mean, yes, that you have to motivate a client and, and and that's why we always we, we always explain to CFOs that we're training or, you know, accounting and bookkeepers and tax professionals that we're training, that every business owner has a different reason why they started a business, that every business on earth, every business owner on earth, has their own specific

00:12:30:03 - 00:12:35:19
Unknown
reason. We need to find out what that is, because that is the thing that is going to motivate them.

00:12:35:19 - 00:12:40:12
Unknown
I mean, you think about somebody that wants to lose a bunch of weight

00:12:40:12 - 00:13:01:00
Unknown
the best way to help somebody lose weight is to constantly focus them on why they want to lose the weight in the first place, because then when times get tough and when things get hard, it's easier to motivate somebody by showing them why they started in the first place.

00:13:01:02 - 00:13:23:00
Unknown
Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I have a.

00:13:23:02 - 00:13:42:20
Unknown
Right. And even if all those things are true, they don't know what to do with that information. Like you say, your margins are up, or we need to cut expenses or we need to. Your ratio at this particular ratio analysis is, is not where I want it to be. Okay. Well great. What do I do now and then the account.

00:13:42:20 - 00:14:13:21
Unknown
It's like right, right. And the account it's like well I don't I don't really know. Go figure it out because the accountant has so much time. The stack of tax returns I got to do and and it's like the, the clients left frustrate it. They don't know what to do.

00:14:31:02 - 00:14:42:12
Unknown
Yeah.

00:14:42:14 - 00:14:43:01
Unknown
Right.

00:14:43:01 - 00:15:04:10
Unknown
I, I firmly believe that as a business owner would rather they're accountant or bookkeeper or tax professional, advise them on how to have a better future rather than just being a recorder of the past. Even though recording the past is necessary because you got to do the books and and process the tax returns.

00:15:04:11 - 00:15:23:15
Unknown
That's a necessary evil. But business owners would rather you, the professional, the financial professional in their life, help them have a better tomorrow and they'll pay way more for that. All right. So.

00:15:23:15 - 00:15:37:14
Unknown
the study could be off base, but I think it's sort of true. The average accountant the United States makes around 90 grand a year, which if you take the hours, the amount of hours that accountant works on a given year, it works out to be about $42 an hour.

00:15:37:14 - 00:15:48:22
Unknown
I mean, that's crazy for the amount of experience and training and education that an accountant and bookkeeper and tax professional has. It's too low.

00:15:48:22 - 00:16:13:22
Unknown
third reason our CFO advisory firm was a huge success, is that we created systems for everything. We systematized our business, we systematized the way we got leads. We systematized the way we converted those leads to paying clients. And of course, we systematized what we did to provide a CFO advisory service. Everything was based on systems.

00:16:13:23 - 00:16:40:05
Unknown
Why is that so important?

00:17:13:06 - 00:17:32:16
Unknown
Yeah.

00:17:32:18 - 00:17:46:07
Unknown
Yeah. Yeah.

00:17:46:09 - 00:17:56:10
Unknown
Totally. Yeah.

00:17:56:12 - 00:18:26:04
Unknown
That's right.

00:18:26:06 - 00:18:28:07
Unknown
Yeah.

00:18:28:07 - 00:19:06:04
Unknown
a major impact. You know, and, you know, the other benefit of systems is that you are now transformed. If you adopt systems in your business, you're transforming from owning a job to owning it. But a business that is an asset that that is valuable with or without you because you're running your business systems, because the definition of a system is is something is, you know, this replicable process that you could train somebody on and they can run the process, which means the business doesn't rely on you anymore.

00:19:06:06 - 00:19:28:07
Unknown
You can hire people to run parts of the system. Yeah. Or all the parts of the system, you know. And and now you are. You are now what? What? Michael Gerber in his book The Imet, calls an entrepreneur. Sure. Instead of what he feels that most business owners are, especially in the tax and bookkeeping and accounting profession. He calls them technicians, meaning the business owner.

00:19:28:07 - 00:19:53:07
Unknown
Even though they own a business. They are. They are the business. They're doing the work. They're the technician. He says that in order to really have a business, a scalable and growing and valuable, you've got to go from being the technician to being the manager, technicians to then being the entrepreneur, where you employ technicians and managers of technicians and he says that the number one way to do that is systems.

00:19:53:09 - 00:20:09:01
Unknown
And that's precisely what we did in our our firm.

00:20:09:03 - 00:20:22:05
Unknown
Yeah.

00:20:22:07 - 00:20:26:11
Unknown
Yeah.

00:20:26:13 - 00:20:42:09
Unknown
Yeah.

00:20:42:11 - 00:20:57:09
Unknown
Yeah.

00:21:01:18 - 00:21:26:01
Unknown
Yeah.

00:21:26:03 - 00:21:29:22
Unknown
Yeah.

00:21:30:00 - 00:21:52:14
Unknown
No, no, I'm agreeing with you. It's like we need a we need to work. To live instead of living to work.

00:21:52:14 - 00:22:24:00
Unknown
And I think it's key that, you know, that we develop systems. And, of course, these are systems that we teach everybody in the CFO project, but systems to get leads. I mean, we have several what we call strategies. And then for each strategy to get leads, there's multiple tactics. So we recommend that that a accountant bookkeeper, a CFO, a CFO or tax professional, whoever's in the CFO project just learn pay, learn all the strategies first and then pick one to focus on and then follow the steps.

00:22:24:02 - 00:22:49:12
Unknown
That's a system. You just follow the steps step by step. We call them playbooks. Just follow the playbook step by step to get at least three clients using that one system. Then maybe if you want go to another system or another system, or keep working the same system, it doesn't matter. But now you have a system, a replicable, replicated whole system way to get leads.

00:22:49:14 - 00:23:08:07
Unknown
And then once you get leads coming in, convert those leads to paying clients using a system. Because we've been doing this for a long time in our we have over, you know, 900 people that have gone through our program. We've fine tuned how to get a lead to become a high paying CFO client that that's paying on average, $2,000 a month.

00:23:08:10 - 00:23:28:11
Unknown
Every year we conduct a survey to our members. And according to the last survey, the members reported a 57% conversion rate, meaning if they proposed a CFO advisory service to two people, they would get at least one every single time.

00:23:28:13 - 00:23:58:21
Unknown
That's huge. But it's because they're using systems that we fine tuned that work. And then of course, systems to provide the CFO service so that every new client you bring on doesn't feel like you have, a new part time job where you have to customize an engagement. You're doing the same process with every client. The clients don't know it's the same process because the way the system works, you're providing very specific and different, deliverables to each client.

00:23:58:23 - 00:24:25:22
Unknown
But. But you're using a system to do that, which means you can get somebody to help you on your team. You can you can get somebody on your team to completely take over that particular client. And then somebody else can step in if needed, because you're using systems.

00:24:26:00 - 00:24:34:04
Unknown
Right.

00:24:34:06 - 00:24:50:09
Unknown
Yeah.

00:24:50:11 - 00:25:22:02
Unknown
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and that's exhausting. And I'm a I'm a self-proclaimed introvert, and I can't I do I would hate doing that, but I've had success personally selling without thinking that I'm selling, because if I might, just like you said, if I myself, people respond to that, people respond to somebody that that appears confident in what they're selling, that can also help them get what they want because business owners need the help.

00:25:22:04 - 00:25:39:16
Unknown
They respond to that. And I did it all without selling. And I know you do the same thing and our members do the same thing. Well, Jeff, this has been a fantastic discussion. Just to recap, the three things that we did was first, we sold a product as safe, a service where we give our client specific set of deliverables with an unambiguous fee structure.

00:25:39:16 - 00:26:01:23
Unknown
We made it simple. Number two, we spent the majority of our time helping our clients take action rather than do what most CFOs or fractional CFOs do and just talk about numbers. And three, we created systems for everything, systems to get lead systems to convert those leads to paying clients, and systems to provide a CFO advisory service that got results.

00:26:02:00 - 00:26:38:09
Unknown
Any any last words before we close?

00:26:38:11 - 00:26:48:08
Unknown
Yeah. Yeah.

00:26:48:10 - 00:26:56:08
Unknown
Yeah.

00:26:56:10 - 00:27:14:03
Unknown
Yeah. For me. Yeah. And for me, it's more fun. I mean, versus what I did when I was an accountant. Way more interesting and impactful work.

00:27:14:05 - 00:27:17:06
Unknown
Well.

00:27:17:08 - 00:27:42:11
Unknown
Yeah, absolutely. Well, everybody listening. Thank you so much for spending the last few minutes with us. As we talked about the reasons why our CFO advisory firm was a success. And if if this is you, if this is somebody if you could see yourself offering CFO advisor services, whether you're a self-employed accountant or bookkeeper or employed accounting or tax professional, and you would like to offer advisory services to business owners, that's what we do.

00:27:42:12 - 00:28:05:20
Unknown
We help you become a really good CFO, advisor, and we teach you all the systems so that you can basically have a business in a box, a turnkey system. And so if you would like to learn more about that, just go to the CFO project.com. So the CFO project, I currently have a bunch of free trainings and resources and calculators and other tools on our website.

00:28:05:22 - 00:28:13:21
Unknown
Check us out. And thank you so much for listening and we hope to see you again next time on the CFO project podcast. Bye for now.