00;00;00;02 - 00;00;23;09

Unknown

Welcome to the Profit First for Real Estate Investors podcast. This series is the simple CFO Case Files, where our CFOs break down real client scenarios, financial systems and practical decisions from inside the business. Enjoy the episode.

00;00;23;12 - 00;00;53;01

Unknown

Hey everyone! Kristina here, CEO and partner with simple CFO solutions. Welcome to the simple CFO podcast, where we're pulling back the curtain and we're interviewing our CFOs that actually do the work and talking about how we help real estate investments transform their businesses. So today we are here and we're going to welcome our guest, Tony Castronovo. Tony has been working with us since June of 2023, and just to shortly introduce him, Tony is committed to improving the businesses for all of his clients, no matter what it takes.

00;00;53;01 - 00;01;14;16

Unknown

Like he is, he is definitely one of our top notch CFOs. He's he maintains a great relationship with all clients, has had clients for. He can tell you I don't even know multiple years. He coaches them on business. He brings, you know, financial guidance every step of the way. And he's just made a huge impact, a simple CFO in general and all the clients that he works with.

00;01;14;17 - 00;01;35;23

Unknown

So Tony, thank you for being here with me today. Of course. Thank you for the great intro. All right. Well, now it's your turn real quick. Give us a 62nd version, 30 to 60 second version of. You know who you work with. We don't want names here, but, run through a couple of clients, you know? And what you've seen our systems be able to do for them.

00;01;35;25 - 00;02;01;17

Unknown

Absolutely. Yeah. And it's funny, I was, I was thinking earlier, you know, when people who aren't familiar with the space say, what do you do, like for a living? I'm like, what do I do? And really, what what I think the answer is, is, I provide financial coaching to real estate entrepreneurs. That's really what it comes down to.

00;02;01;19 - 00;02;25;20

Unknown

And we can talk about all the things that a CFO does or should do, could do, but that that's really what it boils down to. So we always start with, you know, trying to understand the numbers, right. Get get a background, get a lay of the land on somebody's financials. And then we really peel back, making sure we have the clarity so that we can make key decisions going forward.

00;02;25;22 - 00;03;03;26

Unknown

The people who I normally work with range anywhere from small, like just getting started. Most of them have left a corporate job with some still have another form of income or another business. But somebody could just be starting off to somebody who maybe has been doing this for 20 years and has multiple streams of, of income, different asset classes, from flipping to wholesaling to storage and land and construction and, you know, ranging anywhere from, say, half a million in revenue a year up to, you know, 20 to 25 million a year.

00;03;04;02 - 00;03;33;16

Unknown

That's usually the type of clients I work with. Okay. And you enjoy working with them, I know. And how many clients do you work with right now? Because I think you have a good load right now. I think actively I'm working with about 14. I've actually, I keep track of all those. Right. I'm a numbers guy, my CFO, but, I've worked with almost 50 clients since being a part of simple CFO.

00;03;33;19 - 00;03;55;04

Unknown

I think the the longest client has been with me about two and a half years. So, you know, people come and go is is they need someone to stay because they're just getting more and more value. They're getting more complex as their business evolves. Some have a situation, an issue that they're trying to solve. It bring us in.

00;03;55;04 - 00;04;23;10

Unknown

They get that help and then they they can kind of take it and run. So all across the board. Yeah, I see that. I always tell people I feel your pain on what do you do. You know, because, you know, there are some people that are like, why do you care what everyone does? But then when I say, I just say, like, I help people make money, then they kind of like it because I feel like, you know, you know, usually like down the street, like when businesses go out of business, you know, I'm like, well, they should have came to me.

00;04;23;10 - 00;04;46;17

Unknown

I could have kept them open. It's always a joke between me and my husband. So that's you. And I know we'll we'll probably go down this path. I don't want to, like, steer your agenda a little bit, but, you know, when you say I help people make money, you know, I think about, like, certain situations that I come in and can help.

00;04;46;19 - 00;05;16;22

Unknown

And I had a situation just this week with a client that she's been working for months with her CPA, trying to get payroll set up because she's an s-corp, and for compliance purposes, she has to be on payroll, but she never quite got it, and her CPA never quite got it. And what would always do is in December, she would get a big bonus and she really wouldn't get anything throughout the year.

00;05;16;24 - 00;05;51;08

Unknown

But for tax purposes, they just submitted the taxes and you know, everything was good. Really hard to plan a consistent sort of run rate for her business and for her personal expenses. So when we got it set up, she she was a little unique in the way that she has other streams of income. And so really, what she wanted payroll to be there for is pay her necessary taxes, but shove everything else into a 401 K and be left with net zero on a paycheck.

00;05;51;11 - 00;06;30;13

Unknown

But then after we got all that set up, she said, yeah, but I still need money to pay my bill. So we had to then go back and make sure she actually could still take draws. And we were planning for that and so forth. But it's just a little short story to say that these are real problems that happen every day, and especially when it's maybe a smaller business that doesn't have a big staff to support all of this and, you know, trying to just make sure that they're compliant, that they're planning, they're doing all the right things to run their business as well as their financial household.

00;06;30;15 - 00;06;46;17

Unknown

Yeah, yeah. And I will get into that. And, but one of the points that I will get into is like the difference between a CPA and a bookkeeper and a CFO, and how a CPAs aren't going to guide you if you say, hey, I want to do this. They're going to look at your taxes and how it relates, and they're going to tell you what to do, but there is no guidance there.

00;06;46;17 - 00;07;01;23

Unknown

So we will get into that, because that's such an important differentiator, because people come in and say, well, why do I need you? I already have a CPA, why do I need you already? I have a bookkeeper. So being able to differentiate what we actually do for them and the value that we can show them is is key.

00;07;01;27 - 00;07;22;29

Unknown

And no one, no one really sees that. So yeah. All right. So let's talk about, your first call with your clients. So clients come in and we always say we meet you where you are. So it doesn't matter what you're going through, what type of business you have, whether your books are a mess, whether they're, you know, really clean, whether you need a bookkeeper, whether you have a bookkeeper.

00;07;22;29 - 00;07;42;05

Unknown

But everyone comes to us because they have some type of financial pain, some type of worry, some type a need for that financial guidance. So talk through, what are the financial pains that you see. So what happens on your first call with a client. Yeah. So we we often refer to that first call as a battle plan call.

00;07;42;08 - 00;08;12;27

Unknown

And the idea behind that is we're trying to develop a plan so that subsequent meetings and activities that we kind of move down the roadmap with our bringing value and our plan, the methodical and so forth. And so really, what I'm trying to get that battle plan called to help me with is to understand all those pain points, challenges where they've been, where they are today, what's what's standing in their way of their biggest goal.

00;08;13;00 - 00;08;38;24

Unknown

And oftentimes it's that they're just really good at running their business, but they don't really know the numbers. And it's really hard because if you think about it, let's use a flipper. So you got maybe a half a dozen deals going at any one time, and you're selling stuff and money's coming in the bank account and you're out there buying stuff and you know, you live for the hand.

00;08;38;24 - 00;09;05;03

Unknown

You just want to get deals. Focus on the deal flow because more deals means bigger growth, right? That that's kind of what we always think. Yeah. But oftentimes when I peel back the curtain, I find that some of those deals, many of those deals aren't really profitable, but they don't know that because they see The wire come in from the title company and all looks good.

00;09;05;05 - 00;09;29;09

Unknown

Move on to the next one. Right. And sometimes the money's a little bit more and sometimes it's a little bit less. But they don't really see whether it was profitable unless they go deeper. Yeah. And so I, I love to go through that exercise and just stack their deals against each other and say, look here, all the things that cost you money to get these deals to the finish line.

00;09;29;12 - 00;09;55;10

Unknown

And let's let's basically reverse engineer your underwriting, because you should be focused on a certain gross margin that covers all your operating expenses and gives you the profits you're looking for. So your net income out of the business to be able to continue to grow and support your your family and all the things you want to do. But you have to reverse engineer that.

00;09;55;13 - 00;10;19;12

Unknown

And too many times it's, well, I can make it up. I just got to get the deal. If I don't get the deal, there's no chance I understand that, but sometimes a bad deal is worse than no deal. Yeah, and you time. You can't ever get back. That's right, that's right. So one of our CFOs actually, had it give me a definition a long time ago of financial clarity.

00;10;19;14 - 00;10;41;26

Unknown

He said, financial clarity is when your books can tell the story of your business without you having to narrate it. And I kind of took that to heart and said, if I just look at your books for the very first time, do I need you to explain it? Could you even explain it? Maybe you don't know some of the things in here.

00;10;42;02 - 00;11;02;01

Unknown

Or do we need to pull in your accountant, your bookkeeper? You know, if we can't just look at your books and a simple, clear, accurate picture, be able to understand what's going on in your business. We gotta focus on that first, because otherwise we just can't make good financial decisions. So would you say that their financial pain is just.

00;11;02;01 - 00;11;26;14

Unknown

They don't know what's going on? What's the time? Yeah, most of the time when I meet with somebody, the very first thing is I know I'm making money, but I don't know if I'm profitable or keeping it right. Yeah. All right. Awesome. So that's you know, that's really we see all kinds of things. Right. So we don't have enough time to go through the pains that people have.

00;11;26;14 - 00;11;47;24

Unknown

But that's kind of the bulk of it. They don't really know. And they need a good financial partner. So what is now here is you kind of touched on this a little bit early earlier, but again, like what makes us different than any accountant, bookkeeper or CPA that they've worked with before. So I view a lot of those things as tactical.

00;11;47;26 - 00;12;10;20

Unknown

Right. You got to have a CPA who knows the tax code and can help you hopefully save on taxes, staying within the guidance of of the tax code. Of course, you have to have a bookkeeper who knows how to categorize your transactions, put them in the right place, be able to take settlement statements recording properly your depreciation, all these things in your books.

00;12;10;23 - 00;12;37;03

Unknown

Right. We need compliance, we need accuracy and so forth or any good financial reports. But where I come in is I just kind of put the lens on and say, if we were in the C-suite, it doesn't matter how big the company is. Fortune 500 company down to, you know, solopreneur. We're sitting around a conference table in the C-suite, and we're trying to make decisions about what to do in the business.

00;12;37;06 - 00;13;03;01

Unknown

That's that's my role. And I have a financial lens. And maybe my my owner CEO is more of the decision maker. Sometimes they bring the operational lens to it. So they're the CEO. Oh, they're the CEO. So but I bring the financial lens. Yeah. And that's one hat that no owner should want to wear. I mean obviously we can wear it for our own business.

00;13;03;01 - 00;13;22;11

Unknown

Right. But no owner wants to wear the financial hat. I mean, how many times do we hear like I don't care, I don't want to see the numbers or I don't understand the numbers. And then we translate it in English for them. They don't know what it says. And we have a way of dumbing it down to where the CPA talks kind of over their head, because it's all tax talk and they don't get it.

00;13;22;11 - 00;13;46;28

Unknown

And we have a way of like creating that liaison and being able to help them understand what's really happening to. Absolutely. Yeah. I give you another example. Here's here's like the perfect situation for how to use me as a CFO. So earlier this week, one of my clients reached out to me and said, hey, we've been talking for weeks about how slow deal flow is.

00;13;47;01 - 00;14;07;15

Unknown

Guess what? It's all spring. It's spring now, it's March. And he said, I got six deals in front of me, and I currently have four deals that I'm trying to dispo and get off my plate. I want your help to figure out if we can buy these deals.

00;14;07;17 - 00;14;27;25

Unknown

And usually the lens that I put on it is it's not an if, it's how, how do we how do we safely buy those deals without putting strains on other parts of your business? Yeah, that's that's a good strategy meeting. So you know, like we have to do meetings with clients when they come in. So that's a good strategy meeting for them to choose.

00;14;27;27 - 00;14;57;13

Unknown

So that takes us to the next walks you right to the next step. So in the first 60 days all clients have, you know, first 60 days or we lay the foundation for them. So what we're actually doing in is client time is data cleanup account set up, setting baseline matrix rolling out profit first. Give me like a lay down of and you can pick a client of what you're doing in that first 60 days and how you're using the simple CFO process to actually, you know, translate into creating more clarity to their business.

00;14;57;16 - 00;15;30;20

Unknown

Yeah. So in in those first 60 days, I'm doing a few things. I'm doing what I call financial clarity assessment, where I'm going through their books and I'm creating observations, asking questions. I'm making some recommendations based on what I see. And I take kind of three different perspectives on that. First and foremost is accuracy. If I see something that just doesn't look accurate and need to point that out, I'm looking for simplicity because we're simple CFO, right?

00;15;30;23 - 00;15;51;20

Unknown

We don't need complex books. We need to be able to have a simple story. And I'm looking for cleanliness. I just want to make sure we don't have a lot of extraneous things that are red herrings. We don't need to be chasing after. So I complete a financial clarity assessment. And that's not just a one time exercise. It's it's an activity.

00;15;51;25 - 00;16;24;28

Unknown

I start by going through the books and I prepare a bit of a report. Then I sit down with my owner and we go through and I explain essentially what it's for, some of the obvious things we might just be able to check them off real quick. Oh, yeah. You know, I know why we did that. And then other things we say, okay, we need to engage your bookkeeper or maybe your CPA, and I'll facilitate a meeting with those people to be able to get the answers, make the corrections, start getting the books cleaner and more accurate.

00;16;25;01 - 00;16;50;05

Unknown

That's a whole thread that starts working while I'm starting to shift into the other thread, which is more the financial freedom path and that is profit first and usually. And some of these things start to converge here, because what happens is I start by doing what I call, a p FAQ, which is an acronym for profit first Assessment and Roll out plan.

00;16;50;08 - 00;17;13;00

Unknown

And so I look at their revenue for the last couple of years and look at their cost of goods sold. We call this pass through in in profit first terminology. Basically. What's the revenue that's not really your revenue. You're holding it for somebody else. But it's all part of, you know, your gross profit calculation or real revenue and profit first terms.

00;17;13;02 - 00;17;39;16

Unknown

And then I look at the overhead. How much are we spending just to run the business. And oftentimes what I see is very common is we don't have enough gross profit to cover all of our overhead, to have profits, to save for income taxes, to do all these great things. And so the next piece of that is what we call an expense analysis.

00;17;39;19 - 00;18;08;11

Unknown

So I go through and list all of the overhead expenses and what the run rate has been over the last 12 months. And then I sit down with my owner and I say, let's work through this. How can we reduce some of these expenses? And I really try to stay away from just making an academic spreadsheet exercise. But if somebody says, oh yeah, we can reduce our, property insurance by 20%.

00;18;08;14 - 00;18;15;01

Unknown

Okay, what are we going to do? What's the action? So I can hold you accountable?

00;18;15;03 - 00;18;39;19

Unknown

Yep. All right. And then next up E because I got first for 60 days. And if we want to roll out five the first there's different pieces. So how do you and and that's kind of expenses are important right. But you don't know where they're going all the time. So there's specific expenses for specific things. And that's a conversation because I know we've done it before.

00;18;39;19 - 00;19;05;13

Unknown

And it's like oh no, I need all those expenses. No, I need that. No, I need that. And it's very difficult to get in the mind of like this is why it's important. So walk through like a little bit of like why it's important and how you translate, you know, those next steps with them. Well, I think why it's important is if the only purpose your business has is to stay in business, it's not serving you right.

00;19;05;13 - 00;19;30;26

Unknown

If all you do is bring in revenue, take care of all your your cost of goods sold, pass through and pay your overhead expenses and you're left with nothing. Why are you doing this? All right. So when we say profit first, that's what we mean, right? We need to have profit first and then kind of back in and reverse engineer into the other aspects.

00;19;30;28 - 00;20;01;08

Unknown

Right. So if we want, say, 10% profit in our business and we can't currently afford that, then reducing overhead expenses is a great way to make room for profits. That's that's one. And then the other way I like to come at it is maybe our gross profit margins are just too thin. We don't have enough juice in in the squeeze to be able to cover for some of our overhead.

00;20;01;11 - 00;20;26;07

Unknown

And that's where we get into how are we underwriting deals? Are we are we getting a 10% gross margin or 30% gross margin? That really makes a difference when you start stacking on a dozen deals in a year and trying to cover, you know, all your advertising and marketing and your payroll and all that, right? And still have space.

00;20;26;10 - 00;20;51;06

Unknown

So I'll say this too. I know you know the classic profit. First, if somebody were to read the book, we talk about profit and oftentimes tax savings and owner compensation. Those are the three key owner benefits. But where I like to this is kind of a fun exercise where I like to start designing profit first with my clients is what else is there?

00;20;51;09 - 00;21;14;14

Unknown

Is there there's something else you want your business to help you do? And a couple examples are I have a client that wants to put 10% of his gross profits to charity every year. So we we save for that. We have an allocation for charity. In his profit first process, I had a client that he called it the Shiny Object Account.

00;21;14;17 - 00;21;40;05

Unknown

He wanted to have a dedicated allocation and bank account so that he could go pursue other business ventures without worrying about impacting the core operations of his main business. Just a couple examples. Yeah, I like that because it allows us to get creative, the owner gets creative, and then, you know, you find they're more more thankful when they're allowed to step outside the box.

00;21;40;05 - 00;21;56;15

Unknown

And that was really one of my questions. You totally answered it without even me saying it is the DIY, right? Because everyone's like, oh yeah, I read the book, I did it myself and we've had people come to us before that said, oh, I already implemented profit first, and then we look at it and right now you kind of did.

00;21;56;15 - 00;22;17;05

Unknown

But you know, you you have to do it the, the efforts there. Right? You're trying to make sure that you put the money aside and you open those accounts. But it really is not a one size fits all. So I like how you're going into, you know, certain clients and certain examples and how they're actually, you know, start to do those allocations and what really is important to their business.

00;22;17;05 - 00;22;33;04

Unknown

And, you know, having a CFO really puts you in tune with what they really want because some people don't even know what they want. And I'm sure if you've seen that before, where they have no idea, but you can talk them through it and then they kind of like, yeah, you know what? That is what I want. Yeah.

00;22;33;04 - 00;22;53;08

Unknown

And sometimes it's not, set it and forget it. Right. Things happen throughout the year, you know like great example is. So I'm working with my client in the first 60 days, we got everything kind of laid out. The books are getting cleaned up. We have profit first design. We set up the bank accounts. We're running profit first.

00;22;53;10 - 00;23;05;14

Unknown

And then a month later he said, hey, I'm thinking about joining this mastermind and it's going to cost $40,000. Can I afford that?

00;23;05;16 - 00;23;30;13

Unknown

That's kind of a pretty big, you know, a wrench in the works, right? Yeah. So the answer is always yes. It's just how when. So we figured out how to make it happen. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's important to them. So it was important because it was going to change kind of how he was doing business and hopefully for the better.

00;23;30;15 - 00;23;50;15

Unknown

Yeah. That's awesome. And it's it's good too because it's not what they can. They can do it on their own. Right. But then when you have someone behind you, you can't not do it. Right. Dwayne. Coming through us because we truly use our systems put into place and walk them through it. So walk me through. So we have the simple CFO dashboard.

00;23;50;17 - 00;24;09;18

Unknown

And there's a lot of tabs, right? We talk about how many tabs there are. We don't need to share those with every client. But it's all things that we need as a CFO to talk through. What are you tracking using the dashboard and how does it actually help you and the client make decisions? And you can give me a specific example too.

00;24;09;21 - 00;24;44;27

Unknown

So there's probably maybe 2 or 3 areas in the dashboard that I spend a lot of time on. One, one I never really knew was going to bring value to clients until it did. And that that's something that's essentially a account level financial modeling tool. Okay. So we implement profit first. We have all these different bank accounts and then we've projected based on maybe the last two years or maybe a forecast for this year, how much revenue is going to come in.

00;24;45;00 - 00;25;34;00

Unknown

But you know how this works. Flipping wholesaling sometimes even rentals is chunky. It doesn't just happen textbook right. So what what brings a lot of value like in this case about the $40,000 is let's look at what's coming in maybe the next three, four months, if we can see that far out into the future. And then let's figure out if we put money in certain accounts, what the balances look like across the whole set of accounts, everyone to have enough in the owner's comp account to pay myself every single month and not have to worry that it's running a little bit lean next month if we don't put more in there.

00;25;34;03 - 00;26;07;18

Unknown

Or what about my overhead? I've got an extra expense coming up in April. Can I afford to cover that? Well, I have enough contingency. So basically being able to model this and make decisions before the money even comes in the door, what we're going to do with it, right, that that's been immensely valuable for, for all my clients, what I always track is budget versus actuals KPIs, looking at variances, we don't necessarily go line by line.

00;26;07;20 - 00;26;32;11

Unknown

We look at what what are the big outliers? We were 60% over budget on payroll this month. Oh well there was three payroll periods and not two. No problem. Right. But let's make sure that that's not something that surprises us. Yeah. Right. So so we're always looking at that. And that's a great way to get away from just textbook.

00;26;32;11 - 00;26;56;21

Unknown

If we do an expense analysis and my client says I'm going to cut 20% off property insurance, and then we start tracking it and we're not saving 20%. It's it's accountability. Definitely. You know, budgets actual is it what's the point in budgeting if you're not tracking it now? You can write anything you want down in a forecast or budget.

00;26;56;21 - 00;27;37;06

Unknown

But if you're not actually having and meeting or going through that every month, then you have no idea what's fun. You have no idea whether you're on track or if what you actually said in the beginning came to you. That's right, that's right. I think also, and this is especially helpful for folks that are doing flipping, wholesaling, is it's kind of a long name, but let's just simplify and call it a cash flow position calculator, essentially having all of your deals in one place, and you can see where every deal is and sort of the life cycle, how much the rehab is going to cost you, what the holding costs are, the holding time

00;27;37;06 - 00;28;01;21

Unknown

and so forth. So you can see all the money that's planned to go out the door and when. And then we start looking at the other side, okay, the RV, if we put 50 K into the renovation, we can get the RV up to whatever. 320 here's the loan, here's our closing costs or commissions and so forth. Everything on the back end.

00;28;01;23 - 00;28;28;17

Unknown

So we know what that check or wire is going to look like when we get to the title company. And we can probably because, you know, we're tracking this and we have some history and insight into the business, we can get an idea of when that money's going to come in. So you see all the money going out, all the money that's coming in and that gives some peace of mind on the overall cash flow and where there's going to be strains in the business.

00;28;28;17 - 00;28;50;20

Unknown

And maybe we need to shift a little bit and wholesale this deal instead of flip it. Maybe because we don't have the rehab dollars, all of that becomes very transparent. Yeah. Julie is planning looking ahead, which is what you know, what we do. We look ahead. We don't look behind and wrap up issues that already happened. That's what the other bookkeeper and CPAs are for.

00;28;50;22 - 00;29;14;28

Unknown

All right. So let's wrap it up. If you had to pick one client success story that demonstrates our simple CFO system is fully working, has worked full transformation. What is that client like? What? How did they come in a simple CFO. What did you do in the first 60 days? How did you implement it? What did you see them you know, not walk away with because you're probably still working with them.

00;29;15;00 - 00;29;21;24

Unknown

But you know, how did it how did they feel now as opposed to when they came?

00;29;21;27 - 00;29;48;18

Unknown

So I'm going to go with, a client. He if I could come up with the key ingredients that makes a successful relationship, right? Not just a successful client, but this is a relationship, a partnership. I have a client that came in and he was doing flipping and wholesaling. Essentially. He had a few rentals. Still has them, but that's not really his main line of work.

00;29;48;21 - 00;30;15;13

Unknown

He has a goal to maybe add one rental, a year, maybe get a little bit of depreciation, a couple of taxes. But essentially he loves flipping houses. But he came in, he had a partner and the partner actually was a friend long before a partner. And so having me involved was a good way for him to understand his numbers.

00;30;15;15 - 00;30;42;29

Unknown

On how much split his partner was getting, the work his partner was doing, and whether there was something off on that situation. I'll fast forward. Ultimately, he ended the partnership. The partner was totally happy with it. The partner still receives money, just in a different form and a way of like finder's fees and commissions and so forth. But everybody's happy now.

00;30;42;29 - 00;31;06;18

Unknown

I think I saved a friendship. And here's the thing. If they weren't feeling right about what was going on, eventually that would have percolated to the top. But what's really a key ingredient is my client puts in the work. So we we leave every meeting with a set of action items. Some are for me, some are for the clock.

00;31;06;20 - 00;31;28;23

Unknown

And of course I'm going to get mine done because it's all about accountability. But when my client kicks the can down the road and doesn't do their part, that's where things start to lose momentum and then the value of the relationship just just suffers over that. So this client puts in the work. He communicates with me, I got this done.

00;31;28;23 - 00;31;53;26

Unknown

We don't have to wait to do things only in the meetings. So we have a certain set of meetings that are part of a client's package. But we can be doing work behind the scenes as much as we need to, to keep moving the ball down the field. All right. So that's that's kind of, you know, what I would say is a good recipe for a solid relationship and where the value comes from is putting in the work.

00;31;53;28 - 00;32;15;00

Unknown

And, I'll take as much of it as possible. But sometimes I do need a client to, to do a few things. Right. I think more often than sometimes because is their business, right. They know it best. So the idea is to take the financial headache off of them and let them do what they do best. So they have to understand that they they will have action items.

00;32;15;00 - 00;32;31;19

Unknown

You will play a part in this. You will need to be dialed in. So I like that you touched on that because that is important, right? Because if you're not dialed in, like we want to help you 100% and there are some people that come in that aren't dialed in, and over time they become dialed in because of the value you're able to show them.

00;32;31;24 - 00;32;57;15

Unknown

And they're like, oh, okay, I need to do X, Y, and Z and kind of turns around. Did this specific client, was he able to increase his revenue, profit? What he pays himself, anything else? He is doing really well right now. We will see because this change just went into effect with a partnership, I guess, about maybe 60 days ago.

00;32;57;17 - 00;33;21;24

Unknown

So we'll start seeing some of the improvements over time on that. And it's not that the partner was dragging the business down, but it definitely impacted his margins. And he was having to buy really deep deals to cover for extra margin that he doesn't have to. So naturally he's going to have better deal flow because of that. So I think it's really going to make an impact.

00;33;21;27 - 00;33;53;25

Unknown

Awesome. I like that example because it shows a true partnership and not just numbers. All right. Yeah. Absolutely. Yep. Yeah. Awesome. Well thank you Tony for being here and walking us through the simple CFO system, how you work with your clients I mean, this is exactly what we do every single day with every single client. So, well, you can leave us with one word that you would say if someone struggling, if someone you know thinks that this sounds great, what would you tell them?

00;33;53;25 - 00;34;27;08

Unknown

What are what are maybe five words you would tell them right now? Oh yeah. Thanks for that. Because one more word might be, 5%. I would just say that, you know, real estate business, no matter what kind of real estate business, it's tough. And especially if you're newer or maybe solopreneur just getting started. It it seems great on TV and, you know, on paper, but there's lots of, I guess, obstacles along the way.

00;34;27;10 - 00;34;49;11

Unknown

And having somebody in your corner who can take that financial lens and put it on your business, I think is just essential to have in your C-suite. Awesome. All right. So a good financial lens. So if you're listening right now and thinking this is great, I make good revenue. No idea where cash is going. I pay myself I'm so busy I don't know, but I'm broke.

00;34;49;14 - 00;35;05;05

Unknown

And you just want to improve your business overall. Just know that you're not alone. We work with many, many, many clients just like you. We fixed it. We worked with you. And you don't have to do it alone. So you can head over to simple cfo.com for a discovery call. And let's get you the clarity you deserve.

00;35;05;05 - 00;35;21;13

Unknown

And thank you, Tony, for being here. And we'll see you all in the next episode. Thanks for listening to the simple CFO Case Files and the Profit First for Real Estate Investors podcast. If you found this helpful, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss our guest interviews featuring other real estate investors and our Profit first chats with David Richter.

00;35;21;15 - 00;35;28;07

Unknown

If you're ready to bring clarity and structure to the finances in your business, visit profit RBI. Com to apply for a free financial discovery, call with our team.