Jim Roche - CPA, MBA, founder and principal of Robust Alternatives and MyCFO

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements radio show, programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicitor implies shall be extended to W four CY Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. Churchill said, those who failed to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Kevin Helenan believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com and now your host, Kevin Helenair. Thanks everybody for joining in today.

0:54 I'm Kevin Hallanan and welcome back to Winning Business TV and Radio. We're on W four C dot com. We're streaming live on talkfor tv dot com in addition to Facebook and that's at Winning Business Radio, and of course we're available in podcasts after the live show on many other platforms including YouTube, iHeartRadio, Spotify app well pretty much wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts were there. The mission of winning business radio and TV, as regular viewers and listeners know, is to offer insights and advice, really to help people avoid the mistakes of others. Right. That's to learn best practices, the how tos, the what toos, the what not tos, to be challenged and certainly and hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others. But you know, virtually every successful person that I've ever had a chance to talk to has had some form of failure in their lives and careers. Right, So while we all have to get our knees skinned once in a while, I'm driven to keep those scrapes from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history so we don't repeat it today. My guest is Jim Roach, CPA and MBA and founder and principle of Robust Alternatives. Here's Jim's bio in his thirty plus years of professional experience, Jim, I just called you old. Jim Roach has seen many companies that are successful within their industry, great products and great reputations. The founders are experts working in their business. What he has also observed however, is that far too many of those founders and leaders can't seem to find the time to work on their business. Jim understands that every hour a business owner spends tracking their business as an hour less spent growing and serving

2:25 their customers. Robust Alternatives consults owners and managers to discern key performance indicators and leading indicators for their specific business. When a system consistently captures, tracks, and reports on financial and non financial measures, owners and managers simply refer to a dashboard of activity and results to discern the health and direction of current operations. Growing profitable companies are constantly looking for creative ways to finance expanded working capital needs. Anticipating those needs and approaching the bank at the idea time is more art than science. Robust alternatives determines which lenders tend to lend to, which industries and key items to lenders need to get a deal approved. Jim's a CPA principle of robust alternatives assisting companies in designing and often redesigning their financial functions to discern, capture, and track progress on key matrices both financial and non financial. Robust alternatives delivers exceptional value as the chief financial officers, officer excuse me for companies and a growth or turnaround wind down mode. Additionally, Jim has been involved in high level tax planning and preparation for the last twenty years, where robust alternatives helped individuals and businesses minimize taxes to advanced planning and proper structure. Jim's focus is on manufacturing, distribution, and service sector sectors where he analyzes the interrelation between company and owner taxation. He received dis Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting from the USS from UMass Amherst and received as MBA from

3:58 Babson Graduate School Business. He founded his consulting and tax practice in ninety three. Prior to that, he has experience with a local two partner CPA firm, where experiences gained working side by side with a partner regional tax planning firm focusing on clients ranging from high income individuals to average American wagejourners and estate and trust returns. Much time was spent focusing on the tax impacts on business owners and their families, and a national CPA firm where his focus was accounting and business advisory services. Typical assignments range from serving as a permanent part time CFO, performing due diligence and acquisitions, implementing a strategic shift of a troubled company, preventing an auction of fixed assets by the secure lender while creating profitable operations.

4:42 He's a long standing member of the American Institute for Certified Public Accountants and the Massachusetts Society for Certified Public Accounants. He often delivers educational and entertaining speaking engagements on subjects like taxation, worker retention, motivation, leadership development, growth strategies, change management, planning, and goal achievement. And that's all the time we have today, just kidding. Jim's married to Wendy. They have twenty seven year old twin daughters, Chloe and Sabrina, a twenty four year old son, Blaine, and they resolve reside while in Franklin, mass Jim, welcome to Winning Business Radio and TV. Thanks for being here. Great, Thank you, Kevin. I appreciate the opportunity. And yes, it does make me sound old with all those you and me, both you and me, both brothers. All right, So first of all, let's get the important stuff out of the way. Tell us about Wendy. Yeah, so, so, Wendy is going to be thirty five year anniversary in October, right, stated three years before that, because you got to be sure.

5:34 She tells me not to state those stats everybody, because she says it makes her as well. And does she work? Does she does? She? Does she? Or does she have a career? Yeah? Yeah, she does so right now she works at the National Seating and Mobility, which is a national wheelchair company, and she supports their number one sales guy who will designed wheelchairs to to various people everywhere. That's very cool. And tell us about your kids. So the kids we've got. My daughter Sabrina is an ICU Hot Surgical ICU nurse at the Brigham Wow. Cool yep. My daughter Chloe is a yoga instructor of personal trainer and nutritionist. And my son Blaine is looking for a job as an engineer a New York City or the region my way, shameless plug. Tell us a little bit more about that, maybe get lucky. So, so Blaine is a Northeastern grad. His ideal job is a design engineer, but he's looking for some kind of engineering that gets them close to New York City. That's that's his key thing right now. All right, So if you if you know of anybody who might be looking for a gentleman like that, young guy like that. Jim's information is coming across the crawl, and you can reach out to me at kevinet Winning Business Radio dot com. Maybe we get lucky, all right, tell us about your background. You grew up in Foxboro, Massachusetts, home of the Patriots, now home of the Patriots. You bet you, you bet you so yes. I'm a product of public education Foxboro High it was a great place to grow up. We actually had a pretty big class relatively speaking.

7:06 There were three hundred and sixty five kids in my graduating class from there. It was a typical blue collar upbringing from my perspective. And I was betwixting between whether I was this close to going into the Air Force. He was looking at truck driving school. I was looking at auto mechanics school, and I figured U massy Amherst had a lot to offer, so I'd find a major up there. And I went up as an undeclared major to U mass Amherst. And it took me two and a half years to actually get a major. I was a second semester junior before they finally let me into the School of Business, and my roommate was trying the same track and he had to go what's called bachelor's degree with individual concentration, so he got an accounting slash finance degree out of the College of Arts and Sciences. I got into the School of Business. His first semester was a little less stellar than mine, so I think I made the cut there and he did. Eisenberg.

7:59 That's a good school. Eisenberg was a very good school. And yeah, that was as you know, it's a city up there, and it's quite a big school. And then, of course my graduate work was at Babson, which was a complete three sixty and of course I had to go my first semester at Babson, I was trying to wave out of a class, so I had to go talk to the burs or the registrar or somebody. And my vision was, you mass, You're in a line for an hour and a half, tons of other people. And I get there and the burser comes out and says, oh, come into my office, and I sat down in a chair next to the desk and had a regular conversation, which is I guess thirty grand a year versus public school, it says that's all thirty grand back then, but back then, yeah, back then.

8:41 So what were your early interests and what made you choose accounting? So so so it was actually I had a bookkeeping teacher in high school, Missus Triacas. She was the typing teacher first back when there was actually typewriters, and she also taught bookkeeping, and so that just kind of clicked for me, and I said, you know, I understand that, and it made sense. And then, like I said, I got up to UMass and I wasn't sure where I was going, and I said, you know, that bookkeeping kind of enthralled me, and I jumped in my first accounting class up there, and again it just kind of clicked. So I started down that path. And then I quickly realized, well, you know, they say accounting is the language of business, and so if you understand accounting, you can jump into different businesses. And so I quickly got my mind set on taking the CPA track because I saw it as an opportunity to jump into a bunch of different industries as opposed to get pigeonholed into one industry and kind of, you know, living your career there. So it was a unique opportunity to see, you know, what people in different industries measure and how that can impact crossing industries, et cetera. So that that was exciting for me. That's cool. When did you know so right away CPA? My question was when did you know you wanted to be in PubL accounting? Did you know what that meant? Yeah? Yeah, So I didn't know what that meant, and it turned out to be exactly what I thought it meant.

10:09 So it was a chance to look at some taxes and like I said, a chance to look at a whole bunch of different industries. And so I was in the CPA world for I think it was about four and a half years, and then I jumped ship and went to this private company. And it was interesting there because that was my first view of the opportunity of a fractional CFO, which I didn't know it was called that then, But I just saw these two guys that were running this business for thirty years and had absolutely no systems in place. Wow. I mean one of my first conversations was who's your top ten customers? And they couldn't produce a piece of paper that showed me the top ten customers, and they knew off the top of the heads number one, two or three, but they couldn't produce a document that showed me who their customers were. The seventy year old. So there were two guys there. One was the engineer, one was the accounting function, and the seventy two year old accounting guy was involved in reconciling the bank statement every month. And these guys made money for thirty years, and I just think, geez, how much better would they have done if they had some numbers to guide them along the way. And so that's kind of where that kind of gelled and took place there. And during that time I also went back and got my graduate degree while I was working as well, so knights at Babson, And that was an invaluable experience because for a couple of reasons. One, you're working with people I was. I was about by the time I graduated, I was ten years of experience. But you're at school during the day learning theory, and then you can go I'm sorry,

11:41 at school a night learning theory, and you can go back during the day and practice that at the office if you will, and figure out, you know, what's real and what's what's just theoretical? So it was, and you're working with a bunch of other folks that are in the same spot that you know, you're on a project with somebody, and there the different industry and they're working full time as well. So it's there was an entrepreneurial focus on that grad degree as well, right you it was it was yep, yep, it was. He was entrepreneurial and entrepreneurial and entrepreneurial finance. So I took a lot of entrepreneurship courses and there was some great professors there. And again even the professors, a lot of them were adjunct professors that were running up business during the day, and some of them were full time professors that cashed out of their business and so so it was great that a lot of them had contacts and brought in people that were going through issues.

12:31 I remember this one guy. One course that was in was an entrepreneurial finance course, and the guy's name was Mendez, and so it was Mondays and about Mendez. And so first he came in and spoke to us about all the crappy was going through and he had people chasing him because he was in debt here because this financing deal fell through and uh. And so after he spoke to us every Monday, the professor would give us an update on Okay, now the sheriff is now the decease and desist on that. But it was it was quite interesting that you're looking at real lifestyle. Yeah, so you've had experience at small companies and large companies. I love your description of if I say this correctly, Leavehal and horwont yep yep. Labnthal and Horoat was the number nine back when they were a big eight back then. And yeah, so that that was the national experience, and it was it was unique in that most of the big firms, you're either a tax person or you're an accounting person. And they had what they called their small Business Advisory Department, which kept both under that same umbrella. My background before that, I was at a two person CPA firm. Then I was at a regional tax planning firm, and so I had a lot of good tax knowledge and to go the accounting route didn't make sense, but I liked accounting, so to blend the two of them. Labathal was perfect for that because you were doing both the corporate tax returns and the individual tax returns. And certainly if there's a flow through it to be like an escort for an LLC where the owner's taxes are impact by the business, it makes a whole lot of sense

14:01 to keep them together. And that's what labonbal did. But it was it was great because to go there and see some of the resources that a national firm has, and you know, the research departments and all that other kind of stuff, it was it was a great experience. All right, we're gonna pause right here. We're gonna take our first break. It's about a minute. We'll be right back with Jim Roach. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. Have you ever dreamt of being on the radio, Well, now it's your chance be a radio show guest on the number one ranked internet radio station and promote you and your business for free. Yes you heard it, free business advertising right here on W four cy dot com.

14:56 Call five six to one five zero six four zero three to one now to get booked on one of our shows. That's five six one five zero six four zero three one. Get your free advertising now and now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin helenan presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helena. We're back with Jim Roach, founder and CEO president all Things you Know, All Things Bossy of Robust Alternatives. What drove your decision to get the NBA?

15:50 What drove my decision to get the NBA. I mean, I really liked Babson and I really liked entrepreneurship, So I think it was more it was more of the drive to BAPS than it was for the NBA. You know, I small businesses and growing small businesses and trying to figure out how to fund small businesses. That was kind of all my background and Babson was a perfect fit for that, and so I think it was more about Babson than it was the degree. And I want you to tell folks with this being's finalists for the Douglas Prize, given to the top three graduate business plans produced at BABS and during an academic year, and tell us a little bit about the business plan. Noh, yeah, so that was there's a course called Entrepreneurship and the whole focus of the course is to write a business plan, and so it's a group of project. And so there were four people in our group, one of which you may know Kevin. A woman named Lisa Leveck who is a group leader of a provider's affinity group these days.

16:48 Lisa and I were in that group together, and actually I lost touch with her for probably ten years, and we ran into each other at a different networking event. But anyways, so the whole thing is you're submitting this this it's it's a class project, and all of the instructors get together and they grade these plans not just for your class grade, but to go into what they call the Douglas Prize. So there was a guy Douglas who promotes this, who funded this prize, and so all the graduate plans go in there, and then there are I forget how many finalists there were, but we'll say there was a half a dozen. My wife as like exaggerate, so let's say that was twenty and we were one hundreds, hundreds, hundreds, so so so it is everybody that rode a business plan that year. But then there's there's X number that get to present before a board of investors or whatnot, and and we made the final cut there and our presentation ended up being the top so the third prize there, and the feedback we got afterwards was it would have been better except we didn't say we were going to take over the world and roll this thing across the universe and yeah, yeah, so it was a whole lot of fun. It was quite a stressful project, so as as we see in many of our business projects. You know, you get to eighty five percent of your of your time allotment and you've only got twenty percent of the work done. You're like, oh, how is this going to come together? And then magically at the end it all comes together. And apparently we had a pretty good plan because yeah, we

18:22 ended up getting I believe it was three thousand I think it was ten to five and three one thousand dollars for plan. Yeah, and well I have it actually right here, this lovely little clock as well as Douglas Prize on the front there. But cool. Yeah, yes, that was nineteen ninety five and its still sitting right there on the shelf. Because it's kind of a cool thing. Love it all. Right, So in ninety three, you are currently working. You founded Robust Alternatives and my CFO while you're working full time. Did I get that right? Yeah? Yeah, And my CFO part came a little bit later, but yeah, okay, So tell us about Robust Alternatives and what was behind the founding of that organization. And as I said, you did it while you were working elsewhere. Yeah, yeah, So I was working elsewhere. I was. I was working in the company with the two gentlemen that worked at thirty years and we're trying to sell the company, and so, like I said, that was kind of the genesis. But it really started out as tax and business advisory so as to not obviously compete with my current employer. So I was doing some tax returns at night for business owners primarily, although business owners come along with a couple of owners and sometimes a mother as well and maybe a daughter. Right, So yeah, I started doing some tax returns because I had a whole lot of good tax experience and I wasn't in a tax firm anymore, so it seemed like a natural fit there. And then, like I said, this one company I was at these guys, after me being there and putting some systems in place for them, decided that they were going to try to

19:56 sell the company. And me and the guy that I work for, who was technically the accounting manager, but he was more like an operations guy. He really didn't know any accounting at all. He was a finance background. He was a shop guy. So he and I decided, Hey, let's put a bid in and try to buy this company. And so actually back up, so the company was approached by a Nasdaq traded It was an adhesive manufacturing company, and so there was a company locktight down in Connecticut that was interested in us, and they went down the path doing the due diligence and trying to buy us, and then they had a reorg and so they prolled everything off the table and stopped doing any acquisitions. And then me and like I said, my boss, decided, let's try to put this thing together.

20:41 And we ended up getting Bank Boston to give us a subordinated loan, and we were looking for a senior lender and some other money. And the general manager, who was both of our bosses at the time, was trying to do the deal himself, and he ended up doing the deal before we did and made it clear he didn't want to play with us. So it was a whole lot of good experience. But like I said, that was kind of the genesis of these guys ran this company for thirty years with no information. Let's see what we're out there about. Getting some part time CFO help into these companies on a fractional basis. That's kind of the genesis of my CFO side of you know, robust alternatives, like I said, started out more as a tax planning and business advisory and morphed into the CFO.

21:27 Also during that time, you became an associate excuse me, assistant director for B and I Business Network International, heavily involved in networking to grow business through word of mouth. Describe that describe B and I for those that aren't familiar, and that assistant director role. Yeah, So B and I was a great spot for businesses to meet other businesses, get referrals. Their whole tagline was no like and trust. So of course you're going to know somebody if you're going to give them some business, and you're gonna like them if you're going to give them business. And once you get that trust, thing going and you hear feedback from other people, it kind of really takes off. So at the time, the woman that owned the franchise in the region, it was relatively small and there was probably only maybe a dozen assistant directors on the team, and it grew tremendously from there. So at the at the zenith, I had seven groups that I was overseeing just as a very part time thing, and so it was kind of crazy. But there are groups that get together once a week and like I said, they get to know like and trust each other. They give a little commercial every week and they passed business between each other, or they listen for other people that made need businesses. And so for me it was it was great as a as a as a CPA at the time, I really had my tax practice more than the cfo's thing going in there, and everybody needs a CPA, everybody that's getting in the business and business to business was my focus, and so it was a great spot for a me to get business and then b for me

22:59 to meet other people like yourself. You know, I might have clients that need help with their sales department and I don't do any of that stuff. And if I know somebody that does it, and we're both talking to the same prospects. It makes a whole lot of sense for B and I to do that. And it was a great business model because they didn't have any salespeople. The people in the chapter were the salespeople. I'll look around and I'll say, all right, I need a good lawyer, I need a good sales consultant, I need a good HR And I go out and find those people, convince them to join to give B and I money, which eventually gives me money. So it's it was a great model because it's very circular in nations circuits and so so yeah, it worked great. And I was on the regional team the way I said, working for the woman that owns the owned if she's sold out, but owned the franchise for about six and a half years, and I met a boatload of people, and I got some good exposure myself, and it taught me a whole lot about speaking professionally and presentation skills as well as networking skills. And that's where you and I met originally. That's where we met originally, exactly exactly, Yeah, And because of that, I got out to Chambers and you were pretty big in the Norwood Chamber at the time. Yeah, it got me some great exposure and invaluable experience. So you also co founded a company as cfo amfonol Ardent Concepts. You were there for I think you're LinkedIn showed about fifteen years.

24:25 Tell us about that company and what that process of starting that company look like. Yeah, absolutely, so it was called and it was called the Ardent Concepts at the time, and Anfanol the Sense bought them out. But yeah, we started this company. It was the main guy. My favorite type of company. You get an engineer and you get a salesperson together, and if they started a company, they need me. They need those two guys know how to spend money and don't know how to track it and how to control it. And so that's exactly what happened. So there was the two guys there. Gordon was the engineer, Steve was the sales guy. Steve actually side note went to Northeastern Business School and me, Gordon and Steve did a business plan competition there and I think he came in fourth or so there with his business plan. So that was a completely different business. Wharton was a crazy engineer, that has I don't know, ninety seven patents to his name these days, everything from he had a buddy in high school that was, I believe, a quadriplegic, and so he developed this wheelchair that had a racket system so the guy could recline and he can sit back up again. And that was his first patent. And the company that we did the business plan for was a dental flossing device that we almost sold to Gortech, which makes the glide floss, but then nine to eleven hit just about then and they were anything so that. But so then Gordon went out to California and got into the semiconductor industry out there, and he's literally tinkering in

26:00 his basement. Came up with his wire that had some properties, electrical properties that was needed in the industry. And you know, this is a good part about being an account I can talk about what this guy's talking about, but I have no idea if I'm making any sense. But I can count the number of pins that we produce and tell you how much they cous. So he came up with this wire that he thought was the best things in sliced bread, and so he got a patent on that and he decided to move back to the East coast here because Steve and I were on the East coast and we launched this company and we were in a one room office and it was a manufacturer. And so we had this cycle tester, which is basically this thing that goes to all day long to test how many revolutions you can get out of this pin. So that's running in the corner over there, and Steve's in the corner over here trying to make sales calls with this thing. In a way, we had an air compressor down there. It was a nightmare that we convinced the landlord to let us put the air compression of down in the basement, but we had to run the hose out the window and around the fun It's your classic entrepreneurial company and so and then of course, the first product we produced didn't do anything that we wanted it to do, so we had to scrap that and start all over again. And entrepreneurs, Yeah, yeah, We convinced a bank to give us some money and we went to our first trade show and worked it from the ile in as they say, and the people that paid for their boots don't particularly like

27:30 that. We had a gym bag of product, and we actually got whisked into some pretty big boots there and people were looking at our stuff saying, all right, this is pretty interesting, and we get some traction there. And so then we morphed and made a different product and then started to sell, and then we made another product and that started to sell. And that was my one of my classic CFO roles is, you know, I started off as the guy that set up the bookkeeping system because it was me, Steve and Gordon, and then slowly I backfilled, and I move up the chain, and we hire people and I helped train them, and I move up the chain until I move out of a job. And so it got to the point where it grew they needed their own full time CFO, and I helped them replace me, and of course I was still a founding shareholder, so that did okay with me, and I wanted to see the company succeed, and lo and behold, we were in it too. Our game plan was, you know, we think seven years and we'll right off into the sunset, and seven years into it, we thinking, you seven years and we'll right off into the sunset. And then sun's still coming up though.

28:36 Took us more than seven years right off into the sunset. But yeah, we finally half and all came along and said, hey, we like this technology and we want to buy you guys. So they ended up buying the company. All right, that's good timing right there. We're going to take our second break right here. About another minute, we'll be back with Jim Roach. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helena on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. The yp dot com website is your local search engine. If you're looking for a good restaurant, it can help you find the right one nearby with ratings and reviews.

29:19 Or if your car breaks down, you can use the YP app to find the closest repair shop. Or maybe you're just looking for something to do on a Friday night. While it has great local coupons for all sorts of things in your area, no matter what, when or where. If you're looking for something, YP local search can help you find it. So go to YP dot com or download the app to search local, find local, and save local and Now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helenan presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helen Yeah, welcome back with Jim Roach.

30:07 He is the founder, he's the CPA MBA founder and principle of Robust Alternatives and my CFO Jim. Before we move on to Robust Alternatives and a deeper dive there, what was your most important lesson learned? Probably a lot of them, but something that sticks out on your mind from ardent concepts, that whole experience. So I think the most important lesson there was understand That's where I really understood that people outside their lane don't understand what's outside their lane. You know, we ended up at the time, we had probably about fifteen employees, and I said to one of my co founders, I said, geez, you know, we really need to get a retirement plan in here. And my co founder looked at me and says, what are you talking about? This place is my retirement plan? So I see other people over there, yeah, And so just you know, I was so locked into that interested and they were so low into their area of expertise, So yeah, figuring out that, Yeah, people aren't always on the same page and sometimes I have to bring them along slowly. That's good, that's good.

31:08 All right, tell us about robust alternatives and we'll get there. But my CFO also, Yeah, So right now my practice is probably well fifty percent what I call traditional taxes, traditional CPA taxes and financial statements and the other fifty percent. And the part I've really been growing as of late is my CFO where I'll jump in and be a CFO on a fractional basis, and that has a huge range of projects, if you will. I've got one client right now that I'm probably spending ten to twelve hours a week with and probably will be for the next year, year and a half or so. I've got other projects where I'll jump in and put a budget in place at the beginning of the year for a company and then go away and maybe come back quarterly and review budget versus actuals. And I've got other companies where I'll set up their initial bookkeeping system and they have either a spouse or a bookkeeper that are going to operate that on a day to day basis, and I'll come back and tweak it as needed basis, so it really can be just a small project based thing, or it can be a full deep dive into completely realigning things. I have a lot of companies that I show up to where they'll have maybe even an accounting manager level person in place, but that person is spending ninety percent of the time doing the lower level bookkeeping work.

32:31 And I'll look at that and put a proposal in place where we can replace that person with a little bit of my time and some lower level clerks, and they'll have more full time, full time people available to them at a lower overall cost. And that seems to make a whole lot of sense, because that accounting manager can't scale up for investor meetings or for bank presentations and that sort of thing, and like I said, they're spending ninety percent of their time doing the wrong thing. One of the one of the things that many of my companies haven't common is they run what's called the EOS entrepreneurial operatings. And one of their big things is you know, right people in the right seats and so in the and when I've described you know, you might have a great person, but they're just in way too high a seat relative to the needs of the company there, so so that that just doesn't make sense. I mean, no fault of theirs. They don't have the skills and the experience to be strategic right, to make forward making decisions versus forward backward looking right exactly exactly the thing. And so yeah, so we'll replace some of those. On the other hand, you know, I'll end up putting myself out of a job, and in some companies that are successful, and that's kind of a win win, But then there's other companies that like this one gentleman that I actually just saw this weekend. I worked with him for twenty five years. He at one point ended up owning three Golds gyms franchises. And again he was kind of a project based thing. You know,

34:01 Hi'd or have a target that he wants to acquire and jump in into a whole bunch of due diligence, would run some modeling, would get him a new bank loan if that's needed, would set up the bookkeeping and help train a new bookkeeper. That's what he needed, and then I back off until he decides now he's going to double his footprint, and he gets into a big building project and then I back off, and then he blows his budget and I got to jump back in and do some work. So yeah, it's really can be project based for an extended period of time. And like I said, it's been twenty five years with this guy. He moved down to West Palm Beach area about eighteen months or so ago, and he's got a new partner down there, and he's largely focusing on that partner's business.

34:45 So he finally found somebody local. But he's been in three different businesses and he brought me along to each of them. I'd help him buy in and I'll help him sell on the way out and everything in between. Excellent talk about your team. Yeah, so my team right now. So we do have a bookkeeping division as well, So we have Diane is kind of our office manager and our bookkeeper extraordinaire. She eight years ago was a retiring school teacher. She has a Mathew teaching background, and she just needed to get out of the teaching profession because of a whole lot of issues going on in that industry these days. And she was very tended of eight years ago. And now she's like the chief cup and battle washer she can pass off work and know which of our bookkeepers are going to be able to handle it, help them figure it out, flag us when there's issues that we need the clients input on, and so she's great with that side of the division.

35:40 We have one, two, we have three. One is a work at home mom bookkeeper, and she's trying to leave us, and I don't want her to leave us because she again, she's not a bookkeeper, which I didn't realize until she worked for me for about a year and a half, because she is meticulous. She's just got that mind that she's I'll let go of this nickel and she'll find it. And come to find out, she's a school adjustment counselor and her youngest just turned six and he's in the school system and she's trying to get back in there, and I don't want to let her go. So our work from home a bookkeeper and she does a couple of quick books online projects for so. So beyond that is myself and a partner, uh and then there are two other tax specialists and and that's that's the whole crew. My partner also has a payroll company which is out and I still call it Oxford. But the town that Treehouse Brewing is in Central Mass, Central Man, Yeah, by wester exactly, Central Mass, up by the up by West. Yeah, that's uh. And are there others that work with you on the my c FO side or is that the same team? So that's the same team. Yeah, same team.

36:54 So who are your typical clients? So? So I do like inventory a right, So I deal with manufacturers. I deal with distributors. I also deal in construction, which isn't really inventory, but they're taking parts and making different parts. So the whole accounting function is a little complicated. And that's what I love, you know, that being set them all over the place. I've got the guy that I mentioned that had the three Golds gym franchises. So so it's really everywhere in between. But if I had a dial in, I would say, yeah, give me some inventory, give me some construction. And that's where I love to play. So how does your client know that they need you? Well, I mean at what stage?

37:34 You know, what, what's happening, what's going on? Yeah, So so oftentimes they'll come to me when they realize they don't really understand their numbers, they don't have a regular set of reporting, which getting back and talking about EOS, that's what I love about EOS is they have a weekly check in and you kind of track numbers over time, and if you pick the night right numbers to track, you'll kind of understand where your business is going. Leading indicators talk about leading indicators exactly exactly, and they're not always financial either. You know, they can be number of down hours on a machine, which which can be a highlighted problem. So that's typically that that they don't know where they're going or something new is coming up. You know, they try to buy a different business. And I had a new client come to me that their bank was about to throw them out because they never revolved their line of credit, like, well, I don't miss a payment.

38:25 Well that's not what a line of credit is for. That's more permanent financing and need a loan for that. But so they don't understand that the difference is there of permanent financing versus temporary financing. And you know, the receivables go out, the loan goes up, receivals paid, the loan goes down. That's what a bank likes to see. And a lot of people have the mentality that I haven't missed a payment. Well that's that's not exactly what they're looking for. So so that's certainly a cause for them to get me involved. I've got a lot of clients that grow out of the tax side of things into the CMO side of things. You know, things are going along swimmingly. Like I said, maybe they need a new loan. Maybe they don't understand the way the bank looks at their debt service coverage ratios and they think they're fat and happy. But while they just pulled out a big distribution for the new boat that they wanted to buy, it didn't realize that's going to impact the way the bank looks at them. So all those kinds of things are reasons people want to want to engage me. So they're going to acquire, they want to be acquired. They have growth plans, specific instances like that where they need much better what reporting story to tell exactly exactly.

39:37 So I had one client that they launched a business and for probably six to nine months it was not profitable, and they had a bank loan involved. They became profitable, and I'm looking at the numbers and I'm thinking, all right, we need to double this line of credit. And the owner comes to me and says, all right, so we're profitable. Now we can tell the banker to go pound sand right. No, what are you talking about. We're building inventory, we're building receivables. No, we need the bank now more than ever. And he just had no concept. And so you know, as as you know, Kevin Cash is king and you tell the bank to pound sand just as you need a whole lot of money. Yeah, that's gonna be a problem. That's gonna be a problem. So geography doesn't matter so much for you anymore. It doesn't. It doesn't.

40:22 Although I do like to be face to face, you know, Like I said, even though I'm told I have a face for radio, I think face to face, you know, there's something when you can go visit and see exactly how things flow. But but it isn't a constraint, certainly as it has been in the past. But I'm guessing most of your clients are Massachusetts or New England. Yeah, yeah, it's so. When I started this in earnest to my CFO, my girls were three or four, and I was working for a company in Natick that most of their clients were well their biggest group of clients was in Salt Lake City, and then they had a bunch on the West coast, and I was jumping on a plane weights often. And yeah, when my kids were little, I decided, you know what, an hour and a half drive is the most I want to do. And so yeah, I had some down in mash Pee, I had some up in Seabrook, New Hampshire, and not a whole lot out west, surprisingly enough. But but but yeah, that was kind of my my croux. I didn't want to be on airplanes. And now my kids have grown and they're getting on airplanes, and here I am still.

41:23 I don't know how that happened. I was I travel more now the kids are older, but I didn't want to be a road warrior. I did some travel, but not so much that it kept me away from stuff so good. I was able to find a good balance there. What in your mind makes a good client, So so ideally the best client they have to take advice. You know, if I'm going to give you some advice, and you don't have to take it all the time, you have to listen to it, you have to understand it, and and you have to want it, so so if they take advice. I actually have a checklist of all new clients I look at, and the number one there is they gonna be nice people. You know, life is just too short to be dealing with people that are miserable all the time, and it's just it's just not what I want as so, so it's somebody who's nice, it's somebody who takes advice. Is somebody really for me who's building a team? You know, if I'm going to be your fractional CFO, I mean you've got to have a team in there. You know, if you're a solorepreneur, you might be a great tax client if you're a higher earner and you need some of the tax advice, but you're certainly not that CFO. You're not growing the team. You're trying to do a lifestyle business or you know, you're you're you're fat and happy and it figured out how to be a one man show that gives you what you need. But if you're building a team and if you're trying to go places with your business, that's kind of where where I want to be. So a typical engagement on the my CFO side looks like what. So it typically starts off as a project based thing and and we figure out what somebody needs. So so right now I'm dealing with a

42:55 guy that they don't have much structure in their whole in toy. They need different part numbers, they need kind of a nested system. They kind of have one off part numbers all over the place depending on what they buy, and it's hard to control. So so for them, I'm going in and starting with this inventory project. I can see that they've got a whole bunch of other things that they need a whole lot of help with that they don't even know they need a whole lot of help with. You know, this is going to help them get control of the gross profit that grows. Profit is going to lead into the well, how can we plan future grows profit? You know, how can we do? They don't even have a budget in place for their business, which a lot of I see a lot of times that that, you know, your typical small business owner is just looking at my beating last year. That's good, Well, you need a budget, especially if you're going in different directions. You know, what did you plan to do? Did you do it? If not? Why not?

43:50 Is you know, should we plan to do that again next year. That's what a budget drives drives for me. So I do a whole lot of budgeting processes with my clients. And then, like I said, it can either roll from there. They'll decide all right, we're good for now, you know, we don't need you for a while, and I'll go away and still do the tax returns and still be in touch with them and jump back into the next project. Very cool, all right, I switch gears a little bit. You spent eleven years as a member of the finance committee for your town' that's service right. Talk about that role and why you felt it was important to do that. Yeah, Well, so at the time they were looking for people and I had some financial abilities, so I decided, hey, let me jump in there. And it was the first couple of years were incredibly eye opening. You know, coming at it from a business perspective, you can't do that in a lot of cases. And I'll tell you why, because you know, I'm looking at the town's got a budget problem. With a business, your revenue trails off, well, demand trails off. You let go of some people you know in a town, and especially in Franklin. Our budget. We were lucky that for years over forty percent of our budget came directly from the state because we were growing in the formulas they have all that kind of stuff, And so the state has a slowdown, some of that revenue goes away, but demand doesn't go away.

45:09 The same number of kids to educate, you get the same number of ambulance calls. You probably have more police calls because you're in a recession and guys get busy when things slow down. And it was just a total mind shift for me that I had no idea how to look at this thing. And then the second thing was I heard from a lot of people that haven't been involved in how can we be needing more money? Look at all these big houses that we're building. And if you do the math there, you know, let's say the average house in Franklin pays eight grand in real estate taxes, and so let's talk about a big house. Let's say they pay twelve thousand dollars in real estate taxes. Well, they're a big house. They probably have more than two kids in there. But let's say they only have two kids in there. Each kid costs fourteen thousand dollars a year to educate, So they're paying twelve grand. You got two kids at fourteen, we're already losing money. And it's just mind And then you've got the you know, the roads and the DPW and the police and the fire and so it was. It was absolutely mind boggling. It was good because Franklin is technically a city, and cities don't often have finance committees. They're more of a town type of thing. And in a town, the finance committee gets very involved in town meeting and actually presenting the finances, and people throw out different proposals and you got to run and change things. In a city, you have a town administrator. And we had this guy, Jeff Nutting for all the years I was there, and he was here for probably twenty five years, and he knew he knew state law incredibly well, he knew finance is pretty good, and he was kind of principal in starting the whole budget

46:44 process. I think the finance committee was invaluable because there were a couple of times he tried to pull a fast one on us and you know, throw throw a bone with somebody that he needed to throw a bone to, and it just didn't make any financial sense, and so we called them on the carpet a couple of times. I called them on the carpet a couple of times, and it's it's one of those checks and balances in government that I think is needed. And like you said, yeah it was service, and yeah it was. It was a lot of work at times. In six of those eleven years I was chair of the committee, and there's there's a whole lot of hard decisions to go in there from from a people standpoint as well. So what it was, I'm sure I didn't make friends with everybody in that role, but you know, it's my job to tell the truth there, and that's that's what I do. Well done. Who in the viewing and listening audiences, Jim, should reach out to you and why?

47:31 Well, so, certainly I think people that are trying to get connected. You know, I think you and I are involved in a networking group Provisors, that has senior level advisors, and if you're looking to meet people in that realm to help you grow your business, I mean, I think that's that's key, which going back to as you mentioned, might be and I d's I try to let all my clients know that. You know, I'm connected with everybody, and so if you need something, you know, call me first. And so I actually had this little old lady call me. She was going to her fiftieth class reunion, and the conversation was like this. She called me up and says, Hey, I know you know everybody, and you told me to call you first. So I'm looking for somebody that does wine glass etching and some photography for my fiftieth reunion. And I knew both those people, and the time lead time is too short for the etching guy, but the photographer made some money at her fiftieth nice reunion.

48:25 But that's how it works, right Yeah. And for me, I mean, they're calling me when I don't have my handout. I'm just trying to do them a favor, and so it makes me more valuable from that perspective. That's so so yeah, anybody that wants to get connected and anybody that needs your services too. Jim, thank you so much. I know you're really busy. You made it through the most one of the busiest times of yr year, so good for you. But I know you're busy. I really appreciate the time. Fantastic thank you for having me on Kevin you bet, and thanks everybody for watching and listening. This is a show about business and often business challenges. If you've got concerns about the growth of your company, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook or LinkedIn at Winning Business Radio. You can drop me a note. I always say. One of my many email addresses is Kevin at Winning Business Radio dot com. We are here every Monday. Stay tuned for next week will be Monday, May sixth.

49:15 We'll do it all again. Until then, this is Kevin Helenan. You've been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host, Kevin Helenan. If you missed any part of this episode, the podcast is available on Talk for Podcasting and iHeartRadio. For more information and questions, go to Winning Business Radio dot com or check us out on social media. Tune in again next week and every Monday at four pm Eastern Time to listen live to Winning Business Radio on W four CY Radio W four cy dot com. Until then, let's succeed where others have failed and win in business with Kevin Helenan and Winning Business Radio.