When Do You Know When to Hire a Fractional CFO with Brennan de Raad at Vessel Advisors

Most founders end up as their own default CFO, buried in spreadsheets, cash flow, and pricing decisions. In this episode of Growth Think Tank, Gene Hammett talks with Brennan de Raad, founder of Vessel Advisors (No. 2,665 on the Inc. 5000). We explore the key signs that it's time to bring in strategic financial leadership, especially as your business grows beyond $5 million in revenue and the founder is still managing the finances. Gene sits down with Brennan De Raad of Vessel Advisors to discuss how fractional CFOs, controllers, and back-office accounting teams help businesses gain financial clarity, improve cash flow visibility, and make better decisions with actionable reporting. We also dive into how AI is transforming recurring finance tasks, the importance of tracking leading indicators alongside traditional financial metrics, and why weekly revenue, cash flow forecasts, and sales activity deserve closer attention. The conversation wraps up with a practical discussion on pricing strategy and gross margin, two of the most overlooked drivers of sustainable growth and profitability. Episode Highlights & Time Stamps 0:03 Fractional CFO Basics 4:23 AI in Finance 7:19 When to Hire a CFO 15:03 Tracking the Right Numbers 19:47 Pricing and Margin Blind Spots 24:32 Final CFO Takeaways Key Takeaways The $5M threshold: Once a business crosses roughly $5M in revenue, it's usually strong enough to benefit from a fractional CFO but not yet large enough to justify a $250K–$600K full-time hire. Warning signs it's time to hire: Financial reports stop making sense, revenue grows but cash stays tight, or the founder feels lost in a finance world they no longer fully understand. AI is reshaping finance functions: Platforms like QuickBooks, NetSuite, and Sage are building in native AI agents, while tools like Claude are cutting cash-flow forecasting projects from hours down to a fast, natural-language process. Fractional works at scale too: Vessel Advisors now supports companies north of $100M on a fractional basis, a shift from a decade ago when a $25M company "had to" have a full-time CFO. Track leading indicators, not just lagging ones: Trailing 4–6 week revenue, a 13-week rolling cash forecast, and sales activity metrics (like meetings booked) give founders earlier warning signs than a monthly P&L. The #1 hidden problem: Most companies haven't audited their actual pricing and gross margins in years; the deal they thought was a 35% margin project might really be closer to 4–12%. Time is the real cost: Founders who stay in spreadsheets they should have delegated aren't just losing hours; they're losing the deals, meetings, and strategic moves that would have grown the business faster. Pricing increases rarely cost you customers: One example shared: a 9% average price increase across the board resulted in customer gratitude, not attrition, once the founder finally acted. This episode is a must-listen for CEOs and executives looking to lead innovation with purpose, scale responsibly with AI, and build cultures where people feel empowered to think boldly and grow. Connect With Today's Guest Brennan De Raad is the Founder & CEO of Vessel Advisors. Vessel Advisors provides Fractional CFO, Controller, and Back-Office Accounting services for growing businesses, helping founders gain financial clarity, improve cash flow, and scale with confidence. How to Connect with Brennan De Raad: LinkedIn: Brennan De Raad https://www.linkedin.com/in/brennanderaad/ Company Website: Vessel Advisors https://vesseladvisors.com/ – to learn more about his work and platform

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you don't have a CFO, like you are the CFO, you know, as the founder, congratulations. You're also a whole bunch of other things, but what that means is that the business is limited in some cases. If you haven't been in that seat in another organization, or you haven't been the head of finance for the organization and understand, you know, forecasting, cash flow management, pricing, the things that a CFO worries about. Ultimately, making sure there's enough cash in the bank to cover everything and to cover expected loss and liabilities going forward. So I'd say somewhere around that $5 million mark makes a lot of sense to at least consider a fractional CFO. And what that means is that you've built a business that's large enough and strong enough to be somewhat successful, right? You, very few companies actually get to that level, but you're still too small to justify a full-time salary.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  You're not going to be spending a quarter million to $600,000 a year on a, on a full-time W2 CFO to come in and handle these things.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  If you're a founder who's built something real and now your business can't grow without you in the middle of everything, you're in the right place. I'm Gene Hammett. This is Growth Think Tank. Where founders who are ready to stop being the ceiling of their own company, come to think differently, lead better, and build a company that doesn't need them. This is the longest running leadership podcast in the world. Hundreds of Inc. 5000 CEOs have told their stories here. Let's get to work.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Today we talk about when do you need to hire a fractional CFO? Now, maybe you don't need to, but if you are spending a lot of your time doing finance-related stuff, when you should be leading the company, focused on the people problems, focused on coaching, focused on the next product, or maybe focused on growing revenue, but instead you spend more time in spreadsheets, well, that's a pretty good signal. Today we have the founder of Vessel Advisors. They are a fractional CFO company. They have made the Inc. list before and they really are impressive in what they've done, and the depth at which they have serviced clients. I share this with you because I really want you to understand.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  When I was talking with Brennan DeRod, he was unpacking a lot of the stuff that I think is really Basic and simple, but most of the time we're not doing it. And so inside today, he's talking about some of the mistakes that founders typically make and the, and the four times which you know, you should probably hire someone to help you as a fractional CFO. And you may not need one, a full-time CFO for a long time, depending on the size of your company and depending on the complexity of your finances, but a fractional CFO could be exactly what you need. My name is Gene Hammett. I'm a founder, coach, CEO, coach, and me and my team have been passionately working with companies that are founder dependent.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  If you have felt the, the stress, the load, the heaviness of making decisions and developing your people and wondering, do you have the right people? Then you're exactly who we designed our services for. And I say this to you because I'd love to connect with you. One of the things that I would love to give you a just a chance to step forward, we have created a new book for you, if you are founder dependent and it's called Get Founder Freedom. I'll put it up on the screen here. If you're listening in, then just go to getfounderfreedom.com and you can download a copy today, absolutely for free. And we'll even give you a chance to speak with me about your business if you qualify. And I share this with you because it is very simple book for you to understand, but it

• 3:22Speaker 02

  is the guide to having a higher value company, but it's also have a company that you have dreamed of. Just go to getfounderfreedom.com and download it today. Now here's the interview with Brendan. Hey Brendan, how are you?

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Doing great. How are you doing?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  I am fantastic. Excited to have you here today. We have a great episode planned. You're with Vessel Advisors. You've got an incredible company. Tell us a little bit about what you guys do.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, Vessel Advisors is a fractional CFO, controller and back office accounting service company. We're up to a team of a little over 80 people and get to serve clients all over the country, kind of in a five million and up revenue range. And it's, it's a fun, fun business to be in, helping business owners handle a lot of things sometimes that they don't want to, and then work on the strategy and financial side of businesses, especially as they're growing, either organically or through, through acquisition.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Well, I want to get to know a little bit what you're doing, but I'm gonna ask you through the lens of what's going on today. You mentioned AI before we hit recorder, and I'm throwing you a curveball because you don't know these questions. But how are companies using AI right now in their, in sense of their financials that they weren't able to use, let's say, a year ago?

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, great question. There's a couple. One is a lot of the existing platforms, say even QuickBooks, which is what a lot of small businesses are starting with, or other tools like NetSuite, Sage, Intact, those type of tools, they're building their own agents within them. So it's just leveraging what the, what the tool you already paid for, or maybe you're paying a little bit more for now because of the AI support, is providing you and trying to get the client to actually, one, be aware of that, and then two, use it. So that's, that's one, and that's kind of the low hanging fruit. Number two is, you know, tools like ChatGPT and others have been around for a couple of years, but really when Claude hit, I think it was like early February or maybe late January this year, it's kind of a tectonic shift in, in finance,

• 5:16Speaker 00

  where all of a sudden, a lot of the, the things we needed and also the security that we needed, some of these problems that existed in the market got solved, or at least temporarily solved. And the power of Claude for businesses is massive. So maybe some examples there. Rather than building out a, you know, an Excel-based forecast, weekly or monthly or reforecasting, now run a lot of those things through Claude and it takes time. You gotta, you gotta kind of babysit it and validate it and test it. But the, the ability to do some of those things within a tool in a very natural language, like, hey, I need to know what my cash is, cash in hand is going to be in four weeks. Whereas in the past, that might have been a, you know, a five-hour project for accounting. Maybe now is, is, maybe it's a 10-hour project to get, to get the skill built out and handled.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  But it's now a much faster, you know, weekly process if, if the client's open to that. And I'd say too, the, just from a process perspective, A lot of tools that are coming out that are AI native, you know, so it's a tool called Campfire. There's others that are like accounting software that's AI native and it has some great features. It also doesn't have a lot of things that, you know, maybe a more sophisticated business or even a five, $10 million kind of growing business needs. So we're kind of watching that in the market. We've probably demoed personally 80, 70, 80 different AI tools in the last 12 months for accounting. And the reality is a lot of them are going in the right direction, but we wouldn't recommend it to a client yet for a variety of reasons. So that's kind of an overview of what I'm seeing, at least with our clients.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Thanks for that little insight into it. I think a lot of people want to know about agents and QuickBooks and Plaid. And there's some more things. And I imagine you guys are using it to better serve your clients. I'm not going to ask you about all the inner workings of this because I've got something burning on my mind here today. Most of the listeners here are probably founder CEOs of companies that are five to 20 million. And they're probably thinking about finances a lot more than they need to. They want to have access to dashboards. They want to have this. I mean, I was asked by a client today about, you know, the financial health of our company. I just want to see it in one snapshot. So when does a company need to hire a CFO?

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Great question. I think there's a couple of ways to look at that. One is from just the time being spent by the usually a founder owner. So let's say it's, let's say they're at that three, four, five, six million dollar range. They may still be doing a lot of this themselves. They're, if they don't have it, we joke with clients. If you don't have a CFO, like you are the CFO, you know, as the founder, congratulations. You're also a whole bunch of other things, but what that means is that the business is limited in some cases. If you haven't been in that seat in another organization or you haven't been the head of finance for the organization and understand, you know, forecasting, cash flow management, pricing, the things that a CFO worries about. Ultimately, making sure there's enough cash in the bank to cover everything and to cover expected asset liabilities going forward.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  So I'd say somewhere around that $5 million mark makes a lot of sense to at least consider a fractional CFO. And what that means is that you've Built a business that's large enough and strong enough to to be somewhat successful, right? Very few companies actually get to that level, but you're still you're small to justify a full time salary. You're not going to be spending a quarter million to six hundred thousand dollars a year on a on a full time W two. You know CFO to come in and handle these things, but you can get maybe eighty ninety percent of the value of that in a very small portion of the time. So that's common. I think another thing that pops up for us a lot is when a client, you know, puts their hand up and says, hey, some just or a prospect says, I just. My financial reports don't make sense. This doesn't make sense to me anymore. I used to be able to kind of manage and understand. Inputs and if we sold this many deals, this is what we would have in the bank.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  That that that number is changing. Our revenue is going up, our profits kind of staying the same, or our revenue is going up and our cash just always seems too tight. The the often law statement that my CPA provides or that, you know, I have someone providing maybe once a quarter or once a year even. When they true everything up, you're showing I I made money, but you know, like, where's kind of where's my money? Where's where's the cash? That's that's a pretty common one as you grow, especially if you're going quickly. If you're going twenty percent or more a year, that's a that's a really common issue. And then, you know, I think too, what I hear a lot on introductory calls and my team does too is. Hey, I just I just don't know what I don't know about the accounting and finance team in the world that like this this whole world. I can manage it at one or two or five million even or at eight or at twelve or at fifteen million dollars.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  I I'm scared like I'm worried about payroll every week. I'm worried about payables, you know, getting out on time. I'm still involved in some of those, you know, decisions or I'm in those meetings every week. I really would just like to get, like you said, a report, a dashboard, maybe it's weekly, maybe it's daily, definitely monthly. I like to sit down with someone that knows what's going on here and can direct me or at least direct the conversation and do the right. Where are the insights for the recommendations or the dollar values of these different things that could be happening? And I think similar to, you know, somebody who's really good at product or really good at marketing or really good at something else. Bringing in that fractional professional could be really helpful. And I'll I'll end with this on that question. I used to think back ten years ago when we started vessel advisors with just me and a couple, a couple of people.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  That if you were doing if you're a business at twenty five million, you had to have a full time CFO like it would be crazy to not have a full time CFO. Well, you know, now we work with a lot of companies. North of a hundred million dollars and on a fractional basis and it works very well. It works actually better probably than than it did in the past. It's very task oriented, objective oriented, structured in a cadence of delivering that. And they don't have to keep that overhead cost, maybe that a business would, you know, in the past. And that's not for everybody, but just keep that in mind too, that whether you're looking at the fractional CFO market or full time market, a lot has evolved from a technology perspective that allows fractional teams to do a heck of a lot more than they could. Not just in the most recent AI, you know, like the last couple of years, but going back even five or 10 years.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  There's a lot we can do remotely and through technology now that we couldn't before.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Brendan, when you were talking about the time thing, one of the first things that thought about, I had a client of mine who literally came to me because he knows I interview a lot of CFOs or a lot of founders from fast growth companies. He was doing 10 million. He goes, I'm just curious, how do other CEOs use their time? And I was like, why do you ask? And he's like, well, I spend a lot of my time in spreadsheets. And I'm like, oh, well, let's talk about it. So we got on the phone and I was like, what kind of spreadsheets? $10 million, his business model was temporary hires. So in margins.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Spent all of his time in accounts receivable and cash flow as the CEO of a $10 million company. He would have been a very good candidate for a fractional CFO for sure.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  I say this story with you because I remember the solution because one of the things we do is it analyze where you're spending your time as a leader. And being really honest with yourself and saying, why haven't you let go of that yet? And I get this all the time with companies are growing. They want better view of their financials. They're doing something. They've got controllers and bookkeepers and accountants. But they spend more time trying to get a spreadsheet to look good and tie, you know, balance out. And not when we actually helped this client to it, they had someone manage the spreadsheets that he was managing. And he came back and he's like, I didn't think it'd work. So three months later, he goes, now I just look at the spreadsheet to make decisions. I don't manage it.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Yes, and what a freeing, what a freeing like moment that is too, because like we joke, we have a similar language around like, what are we going to fire ourselves from this quarter? You know, like in my role as leader of this organization, but also for our clients. And part of that is like highest to best use, what's your, if you're in, if a business like ours, there's billing rates or there's, you know, retainer rates. But in a lot of companies, you can't quantify it to the T. So we'll find some ways to do that. Or just say, hey, if assume everything that you were doing is $500 an hour, like or $300 an hour, pick a level that is going to push a lot of the work down to someone else. And then, you know, look at it a different way. I love what you're saying too about that because it kind of ties into the, like, I don't know what I don't know. It's like, this is just the way I've done it. I build the spreadsheet. I do this thing. The business needs cash.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  It's the most important thing. So I'm going to work on that rather than maybe zooming back out. And, you know, a service that we provide is an assessment sometimes where we look at people and process and technology and the people were saying like, what's their, what's their capacity in time to do this type of work? And what's their competency in terms of like their skill set, their background, what did they bring before they came to the company? And a lot of times that, that owner or CFO or even the, sorry, the owner or if they have an existing CFO or head of finances doing a lot of work that could be done by someone else very well, you know, within the organization, like, you know, preparing a cash flow summary or what's, what's cash going to look like for the next couple of weeks? It honestly could be automated, you know, with a couple tweaks, but they don't know that. So they're not aware of that. They don't know what they don't know.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  And so they just keep doing that for years after years, rather than saying, hey, those three hours I spend or five hours I spend every week on spreadsheet cash flow management. I could have gone out and closed two more deals, you know, or met with seven more clients or, you know, whatever the, the metric is, that's actually going to drive the business forward. They get stuck in where they are. And so maybe they stay at 10 million or they go from 10 to 10.5 and 10.5 to 11.5 rather than going from 10 to 12 or 10 to 15 in a very short period of time. And probably I, this is an assumption, but most CEOs that we work with and founders, they don't wake up in the morning and say, I want to, I want to get the spreadsheets. I want to, I want to manage cash today. I want to do like these things that are necessary, but not maybe driving the business forward from a sales perspective or a product perspective or a culture perspective.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  If you're listening to this show, chances are you're a founder who's built something significant, but you're still too deep in the day to day to see the path forward. That's exactly what the Founder Freedom Strategy Call is for. It's free. It's 30 minutes with me personally, and we'll pinpoint exactly what's keeping you stuck and what you need to do about it. Book your time with me at my personal URL, schedulewithjean.com. Now, back to the podcast.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Brendan, let's get a little more tactical with this because I'm running through some of the things and conversations with clients, and I had one today, literally. He knows his revenue. He knows the P and L, you know, by month. I don't know when he knows it, but he's like, I got some of these key things. When you're looking at clients, and I know you guys have a discovery process where you go deep into clients, you analyze all aspects of it. You were telling me all the things and my eyes were rolling back in my head because I'm like, oh, he's way more into the finance than I am. But what are the three to five numbers that most industries, because everyone's got different kind of models, but what are the three or five numbers that people should be tracking

• 15:43Speaker 02

  so they can make decisions in their company and know that they're on the right trajectory? Is that too much of a challenge for you?

• 15:49Speaker 00

  No, it's a great one. I'm just, my head's going back and forth between kind of what we would call lagging measurements. So you get to financials at the end of the month and kind of what happened and is that aligning to a plan versus what we call lead measurements, which are more typically weekly, in some cases even daily, like in e-comm where a lot of the data is flowing very, very quickly. And maybe we'll shift more to the lead side because it's more predictive as to how things are moving.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  I like that.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  So from a lead measurement side, you know, like we'll take a professional services business, or you could take a different industry. We want to know what our sales look like over a trailing, usually they're a four or six week period. So this is not going to tie out to the P and L, right? This is not going to tie out to any other kind of month end or quarter end report. This is just saying on the average, how have we been selling or what's the revenue been for that period of time? So in a services business, a trailing four week might be, you know, it's a $12 million a year revenue business, they should be trending at about, right? Right under a million dollars over that four week trail. And so it's an indicator if over the course of, let's say, we're looking at that number, you know, an eight week or 10 week or 13 week little table. If we're looking at that number and it's consistently over that that threshold, like we're hitting a million every single four weeks.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Okay, great. We're actually trying a little bit above the the norm because we're going to hit maybe 13 million this year. Um, but it also shows you quickly when that number drops. And then that executive team can come in and actually make a decision or say, hey, we need to spend some time on that this week. Like what happened last week and was it a data issue? Which often it is, was it an actual billing issue? Did we lose a major account? Like, did something happen? So it's a, it's an early indicator. Um, so revenue is is is great if you can, if you can be collecting it daily. In some cases, it could be hourly. Um, selfishly cash, so any client that we, you know, engage with is at a minimum going to have a 12 month forecast for cash. But many will do a 13 week, week to week forecast. And what that's meant to do, uh, is after you set it up, you're going to have some fixed costs. Like you're going to have your rent and your, your average payroll or your fixed payroll costs. If you, if you have some that are hourly and some that are, that are just fixed W two.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Uh, maybe insurance or the things that are in there, bury that down. And you start to get a pulse if you're looking at that every single week, again, over a couple, couple of months or a period of time. Uh, where cash, uh, what's the norm? What's, uh, seasonality is is big in some industries. That could be monthly, that could be once a year, that could be a couple of times a year. For retail, you know, it's often you get a ton of your sales are coming in about 45 days. So you gotta spend a lot of time prepping and planning for that. Um, but you want to know what you expected versus what is actually happening. Um, you know, from a, from a sales perspective, like a, like a, like a development pipeline. I'm really big on looking at where are the activities that drive sales? So it's not so much of how many proposals did we send? Or, you know, how many deals do we close? But what are some of those baseline activities?

• 18:29Speaker 00

  Let's say you have a sales team of five people or three people. Um, how many reps of, you know, calls, meetings, lunches, you know, events? Like what's, what's the, what's the metric that drives, um, drives business? And starting to monitor that at a, at a high level. Um, for us, you know, at Vessel, um, we like to look at meetings booked. Right? So when someone's actually put their hand up, the introduction's made, that doesn't always generate a meeting. When the meeting's booked, that's an indicator for us on a weekly basis. If we have a certain number. We're going to be able to hit our our target for the year. So there are maybe three to start. I will say it is usually more industry specific. So we work across all industries. We have six that we focus deeply on and each of those we have best practices and playbooks for. And that's the idea is that when you come into a business, you want, if you're hiring a CFO or someone else,

• 19:13Speaker 00

  you have someone who knows that industry and isn't learning it for the first time with you. They've been doing it for, in our case, many of our CFOs for 20, 30 years. And quickly say, yeah, we're going to get rid of these things. We're going to add these things and we're going to start measuring it weekly and so hopefully that's helpful.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  It is helpful and I love the fact that you took it away from just broadness and you looked into the leading. Because it's one of the things that a lot of people don't think about. They look at that revenue and even profit is a lagging measure. But you look at the the specific elements that are leading. Let's, as we wrap up today, Brendan, I'm really kind of curious around, you do all these discoveries with clients and you find problems. You find things that are missing. What are the things that you wish that founders really took more serious look at? Because they don't even realize, they don't know what they don't know about the numbers and what they're missing. What would you say is the things that they really, you wish you could kind of whisper in their ear and say,

• 20:14Speaker 02

  this is what you really need to be paying paying attention to?

• 20:18Speaker 00

  It's going to sound really simple, but it happens almost every time where the client has not really evaluated their pricing and their margin. For you would not believe how long. This is not just a year. It's oftentimes multiple years or ever. And their assumption is that their gross profit is a certain amount every time they're outselling. And there's no accounting, there's no detailed kind of process to review what's their actual gross margin on our project. So let's say it's a construction company, you know, they're targeting a 35% gross margin in their estimating process. They win the bid, everything looks good. You know, by the end of it, they're they're at 4%, you know, they're at 12% or that 15% even. Like, none of those are good. None of those even really cover overhead costs, you know, in most, most companies.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  And so that lack of visibility or like lack of information is a is a huge issue. And I think not, it's often, it's important, but it's not urgent to them. And it's also a bit of a project to try to, you know, let's say you've got a $15 million, $100 million company. Making those changes as a project, that's a, that's a multi-quarter project of implementing some software or getting everyone kind of rolling in the same direction. It's not something you just turn, turn around. If you're at five million and you've got maybe a dozen projects, that's a much, much more manageable, you know, project, saying like a professional services firm where you're talking hours and there's no, there's no real material cost, but that's the biggest one. And then creating a cadence for that each year, like it's okay to raise your prices every year. That's, that's normal. And you go to, I go to In-N-Out way too much, you know, and they do a great job of keeping prices down, but even they have, you know,

• 21:43Speaker 00

  doubled over the last, you know, seven, eight, nine years. In other cases, you know, clients are looking at that and the owners just assume that they have a profit margin that actually doesn't exist. So a big part of our job is to assess what's actually going on or take a sample of, of projects and deals and say you're, you know, you thought it was 42, it's actually 33, you know, part of your cash constraint that's been consistent is, so it's going on and these things aren't getting booked. And this is why it's, it's living over here, you know, on a balance sheet or on some other account. Uh, let's fix it. Let's get it going and then let's make some decisions based on that. And like you, like you said, it's kind of showing up at a call or at a meeting as a CEO and being able to receive a report, hear some insights and recommendations, have a discussion for a half hour, hour is a high, high value use of that CEO and founder's time. Uh, but they didn't have to prepare any

• 22:26Speaker 00

  of it. They didn't have to get it there. They can ask questions. And then if there's something that needs to be followed up on, they now have the team to go follow up on it and actually find the answer and, and report that back. So, um, yeah, that's what I would say. It's probably like a pricing and gross profit margin structure of what is envisioned when something's sold versus what the reality on the field looks like.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  I needed you in my back pocket probably two years ago when one of my clients goes, I just can't raise prices because of this, that and the other. And my question back to, and I'm not even a finance person. I'm just the, you know, executive coach and founder coach. And I was like, well, are there a set of products? Cause I know all of your raw inventory has increased. They, they produce their products. Are there a set of products that you have not raised the prices and your, but your inventory you know, has eaten into your margin and probably even cost you money. And he goes, probably. And he wasn't even willing to do the work to raise the prices on those things. I did finally get him to do it because we talked about being proactive. And then finally this past year, he raised everything across the

• 23:26Speaker 02

  board. Average was about nine percent. And when he came back with his customers and you, you can probably appreciate this. They actually thanked him for raising the prices. We, we appreciate you keeping it low for so long. But no one left, no one said, oh, my gosh, you can't do this. They said, you're still cheaper than your competitors.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah. Which is a whole nother conversation about estimating and pricing. It's like, if you're winning everything, there's probably a problem. Like, it doesn't, like, you're probably well under market and there might be a problem in six months or eight months when these projects are all complete. But yeah, and again, it's just, it's a different perspective of the CFO's job is like, we're not coming in to have to handle sales and marketing and people and ops and culture and all the things in the business. Where our focus is right here. So we get to zoom in, provide that insight. And then the business owner, like, you know, you just said, they can decide, is this worth making the changes? Is this worth making an adjustment? I think that's what a good CFO does is they, or otherwise, is they, they bring the right things framed in the language that the business owner or the founder understands, and can hopefully quantify it as well to make a decision.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Brendan, it's been great to have you here on the podcast and I love the insights, you know, just talking about when do you need to hire a fractional CFO? So I think you answered that really well and gave us some insight around it. So thank you for, for sharing your wisdom.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you for having me. It's been great.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Wow, what a great conversation to talk about. When do you need to hire a CFO or fractional CFO? When I was deciding to have Brendan on the show, I was, I was really looking for someone to, to serve a lot of our clients who are spending too much time in the finances, in the weeds of the, the business instead of working on the business. And so I brought Brendan in here to have that conversation and hopefully it was helpful. But I will also tell you, if you are spending a lot of your time doing these financial stuff, maybe it's more of a leadership issue that needs to be addressed. First, I believe in what Brendan and Vessel Advisors is doing with his clients, but leadership is the core foundation.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  And if that's not right, none of this other stuff will, will actually provide the benefit. And it really is a quick conversation for us to get to know each other. So if you download getfounderfreedom.com and you qualify, you will have a chance to have that conversation with me. Just go to getfounderfreedom.com and you can download it today. When you think of growth and you think of leadership, think of Growth Think Tank. As always, keep with courage. We'll see you next time.