Virtual CFO Revolution : How to Transform Your Business Finances for the AI Age

The virtual CFO Revolution, how to Transform Your Business finances for the AI age. Today we’re exploring game changing insights about modern financial leadership with the co-founders of Grow CFO, Debra and Jeremy Harris, who also happen to be married, and I’ve known them for many years. And I can tell you they’re genuine thought leaders who consistently give back.

To the broader and business community, you’ll discover why traditional accounting isn’t enough anymore in this day and age, and how virtual CFOs are driving business growth and the essential steps to prepare your finances for the AI revolution. If you are ready to move beyond managing the bank balance and want to dramatically increase your business value, this is an episode packed with practical strategies you can implement today.

So let’s dive in with my friends, Deb and Jeremy.

Hello everyone and welcome to a really exciting episode of Biz Bites. And I say that because I’ve had the privilege of knowing Deb and Jeremy for many years now, and we always have fun talk, talking together, and they’ve got an extraordinary business. And I wanted to share ev with the audience all about their business.

First of all, welcome to both of you. And why don’t we kick off with you, Jeremy, why don’t you introduce both of you and and what the business does. Sure. Thank you very much Elene. Thanks for having us. My name is Jeremy and I’m here with Deborah. We are co-founders and co-directors in a business.

We also happened to be, have been married for 33 years. And actually we did that first before we went into business together. So our business is we do virtual CFO as in chief financial officer, and we have a bookkeeping team to back that up as well. For me personally, I was around 25 years as a tax accountant.

Took me that long to figure out that tax accounting was not my thing. The kind of accounting that we do is more of about forward facing. More about what’s in the future for a business and how do we help a business to grow and improve. Deborah’s background is from a quantification point of view is hr and has had a lot of years in dealing with people, including our five children.

And and she really leads the people and the systems side of our business. There’s so much that we are going to explore in this, but I actually wanna start with, and I know it was a bit of a throwaway line about the fact that you started the business after you, you came together, but there aren’t I suppose there are a lot of people that go into business together in partnership.

It’s even more difficult to do it when you are married to that person and to make that decision even after you’ve been married for a little while, and to then do it. How do you, how did that impact the relationship in being able to pull that off? ’cause I, it’s not easy. I wanna take that one first, and I’m sure we’ve both got fruits on this.

I it’s really easy on a topic like this to make jokes about it. But there’s obviously like a real intentional and serious side to it as well. For me, being in a partnership in business with somebody else initially or with other people. Debra then came in and started working in our business over those years.

It became really clear to me that I wanted for us to be doing something together and that was a way to actually parallel our goals and our aspirations of what we wanted to do in business and the impact that we wanna make with our relationship and having fun doing it at the same time, and being able to do those things together instead of just every day.

Going apart and coming back together again and not having that common purpose. There’s there’s certainly times when it is a we need to be very present to the impact that business has on our relationship or the other way around as well. And and actually we’re probably both really of the same.

We, we approach it in a similar way where. We sometimes there’s no boundaries, but we actually know that we need to put boundaries in. But it, it hasn’t caused any disruption from my point of view. Are you to say the same thing, Jeff? It became very evident when Jeremy was coming home very he, he wasn’t loving his business and it was because he had a partner that didn’t necessarily agree.

With the same vision that he had for the business. And it’s typical in an accounting firm that a senior partner brings in junior partners, and then the senior partner leaves and the junior partners are stuck with each other. And while the other partner had his own thoughts and ideas, it wasn’t the same set of thoughts and ideas as what Jeremy had and what Jeremy wanted to run with.

That and the fact that I already knew that my husband was struggling with the fact that tax accounting is about as interesting as stabbing yourself repeatedly in the leg with a fork. And he really didn’t wanna do that anymore. And we had this belief that our, the accounting fraternity were letting down business owners, and by that they.

They would come to their tax accountant. And you’d get the financials for the year end often. After the end of the year. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Buys podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world?

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So come talk to us podcast done for you.com au. Details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites. So that, and the fact that I already knew that my husband was struggling with the fact that tax accounting is about as interesting as stabbing yourself repeatedly in the leg with a fork. And he really didn’t wanna do that anymore.

And we, we had this belief that our, the accounting fraternity were letting down business owners. And by that I mean they, they would come to their tax accountant and you’d get the financials for the year end, often, after the end of the year. And a great big tax bill and a great big invoice. And see you next year and you are left with thinking if I’ve made such a profit, where’s the money?

And so that was a driving factor for us about switching it up and trying to start something new. So we started the CFO engagements within that business, but it became clear that the type of people we needed to do those engagements was completely different. So people who are trained to report on the past.

Not necessarily trained to forecast the future. So that was the big difference between the types of people we then had to engage in our new business. So we started it as a side hustle and rolled it out to its own business in June or July, 2019. And then and we also did what most people find completely strange is that even though Jeremy had been the main.

Partner in the accounting firm. We flipped it so that I was running as CEO across this business because I had the broader business experience and broader business skillset having done human resource development, but really it was part of a management degree. So I had more of a taste of those other things.

So whenever we do find ourselves. In that situation where you haven’t quite broken off for the day and you take that home with you. And for us, we work from home. So home is where everything happens. I’ll sometimes find myself walking out my office door and going, hi honey, I’m home. And it’s just it just breaks the energy, right?

And there might be no one else in the house, and I will still do that if I need to break the tension and break the energy and then move on to other things. I’m sure Jeremy’s got the recordings of you doing that while you’re at home alone, doesn’t want us being I hear what you’re saying too because I, I do that as well where I work from home and there has to be that break. And particularly for me, Fridays is the even bigger one where, my kids know when it’s Friday because they say dad’s in silly mode. But it’s a deliberate. Attempt to break that energy and to get out of work mode. ’cause it’s, and I think that’s the thing that, that’s also the interesting dynamic that you’ve got here is that you’re working from home as well.

So that is even tougher when it comes to, relationship and building and having those boundaries. Yeah. Can be, doesn’t have to be, it’s about how you set it up really. I think. I think we’re good at. Catching each other and catching ourselves. When we can feel that that something is starting to impact on our evening or on our personal relationship, we just, we can pause it and park it and pick it up at the right time.

I, just before we move on from all of this topic, I wanted to bring up something else that I know you guys do, because I remember you’ve told me about it before and I think is really fascinating is that because you’ve got this kind of reporting scenario you actually have your own kind of mini board meeting, don’t you?

Between the two of you? Yeah, we do. And sometimes that gets a little bit impacted and lately it’s we’ve struggled a bit to keep that rhythm up because the business is growing, but it’s just a matter of. Leaning in on checking in on each part of the business. So being mindful of the fact that you have to do it as though you are, if you go from that perspective, it’s as though you are on a board and you’re looking down from a height at what’s happening.

So you, I believe in, in, on and above. So in your business, you’re working as a worker on your business. You’re working as a manager. But above your business, you’re working as an investor and you’re looking at your business from an investment perspective. What does this investment need to make it progress further?

What does this investment need me to do in three to five years time? How much capital value there be in it? So it’s a different conversation, so it may, it needs its own space. And Anthony, to bring in a point that you’ve already highlighted about working from home. When we have that board meeting, we’ll go offsite as well.

’cause we think it’s important to do that in a different environment. I think what’s fascinating too, by what you just said, and Jerry, I want your perspective, is that what you are really doing with your business is what you’re doing with other people’s businesses, isn’t it? It’s, you’re taking that high level approach to really see where things are going and where they should be going.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. It’s, uh. Coming back to the core of what we do with virtual CFO and bookkeeping one of the things that we talk about is that tax accounting, which is what I used to do, is looking backwards, looking in the rear view mirror about the past. And that’s important.

Somebody has to do it. There’s compliance obligations to be met. And and actually one of the really liberating things for us in the last couple of years. Is to actually have our own tax accountant now. I feel like a real business owner because I’ve got a tax accountant, so I’m not doing it anymore myself.

So that is about the past. The virtual CFO is about the future. It is understanding what are the numbers telling us about a business and how does that help us to map the path forward. To help business owners to connect that into their goals and aspirations. What we found is that there was a missing piece, which is quite often before we could do our CFO work our analysis and our dashboards and our forecasting, we were held up by data that was out of date or just not correct.

So we added a bookkeeping element. And on that continuum where tax is about the past, CFO is about the future. Bookkeeping is about the present and that so our bookkeeping team is able to make sure that the numbers are right for our CFO team to then do their magic. And our CFOs don’t need to be doing bookkeeping work first before they can get into the CFO work.

So how closely do you then work with accountants then, who are. Jumping in I, I imagine as well, with a lot of these businesses. Yeah. Much more closely actually, than what we anticipated. From my time in as a tax accountant in that part of the industry, I had experienced a lot of, um, a lot of a trend towards doing more.

The commenter was business advisory work. And to be wanting to do more of that with clients. But meantime, there’s this competing increased pressure on compliance work because regulations keep on changing and also keep on increasing. The amount of regulation keeps on increasing and it’s challenging to fine team to be doing that.

So I think tax accountants are are probably as much short of time as they’ve ever been. So they haven’t been able to get to that CFO work. I have some ca the tax accountants that say, where we have a mutual client and they say, I’m glad that they’re finally getting somebody to help them with this because I’ve known that they need to, that somebody needs to.

For the most part we have really cooperative relationships with tax accountants and which is important because we need to be doing our different parts of it for the better for the client. That kind of managing collaboration relationships, that is difficult. And there’s lots of, there’s lots of things for people to navigate in business as well, particularly when you might encounter businesses that are going to come into a relationship like this, thinking that you are competing or trying to steal something from them when that’s not the case at all.

So Deb, how much is it education process, how much is a relationship building process? How open do they have to be? When you start finding those collaborations through clients? I always start from the client first and say, what is your expectation of what do you wanna see? What do you see as your ideal team?

So they can very clearly articulate to us who they wanna have in the picture. And if they say, I want this person to do the bookkeeping and that person to do the accounting, and you guys just come in and do the CFO, then that’s what we do. They know that we have the bookkeeping arm and we can help them, but we don’t poach.

And so we will then go I had a situation just yesterday where I make notes and explain to the other person, the other professional in this space what needed to happen. So they, I was actually literally just going in for a pitching engagement to help them pitch to a corporate. And that was the extent of our engagement.

And yet they have a tax accountant, they have bookkeepers and they have other business coaches there. And so I left notes for them to say, look, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing. This is how I’m doing it. I’ve adjusted this. I hope that’s okay. It shouldn’t impact any of your reporting. I checked on that.

So it’s just a professional courtesy more than anything to say, this is the space that we’re holding for this client and this is the reason why. And if people get upset about the fact that they think that we’re taking something from them, my response to that would be, why didn’t you offer it? Because I can only take a piece that no one else is doing.

If someone else was doing it and doing it well, the client would never come to me. They would go to the person who is their trusted advisor. So there’s some, there’s a disconnect there. It’s not me taking, it’s them not offering if there’s a disconnect at all. We do find sometimes that the reason they’re coming to us in the first place is because they’re not happy with the service they’ve been getting and that they’re planning to change and they just wanna know what the implications are going to be.

That can happen too. So it is a big challenge. Sometimes we find, especially in the bookkeeping space, we’ll sometimes find that the client’s file isn’t particularly, well done. Let’s just leave it that way. It’s a bit messy. Yeah. And problem is because of the clients wouldn’t necessarily know, would they?

Because you, they tend to hand over everything to the bookkeeper and assume that they know what they’re doing and live with what they’re doing because they, you don’t know any better until someone comes along and says, yeah. And I think you see that in lots of, I know personally, I’ve seen that in the marketing space where I had a client recently that came to me and showed me a.

A new branding that they’d had done. And I went, did you go to Upwork and get that? Like where did that come from? What was the, why did, what was the brief for that? Because that does not seem to make any sense for your brand at all. And that’s, it’s a difficult thing to navigate that, right?

To make people aware of, to aware that there is a problem. But there’s no need for it to be confrontational. It’s just training your own team. We can’t, there’s something like 350 small to medium sized bus, micro, smaller and medium sized businesses, 350 million on the face of the earth.

We can’t serve that many people. Come on, there’s plenty of real estate. There’s enough for everybody. We don’t need to be treading on all each other’s toes. I think what we find is that sometimes there’s a real gem out there doing work in a client’s file. If we need a new contractor to help us out and to, to white label to us that, that’s who we can ask.

So it, it can actually be a great way of finding new team too. I was gonna say, Jeremy, that’s an interesting approach as well that you guys have in that you start looking at. Where there are new opportunities, building from relationships, and even going to the point of acquiring other businesses that is correct.

Yes. And you’re almost giving me a segue there to talk about ai. But I think we’ll get to that. That, when I said before that we, we saw that the we, I talked about the continuum of the past and the future. The gap in the middle was the present. We identified a couple of years ago that one of our strategic opportunities would be to to acquire a business and that could be in the bookkeeping space.

So we had been doing some bookkeeping for our existing business owner clients before that, but it was really just to fill a gap. It was it was a much more. Strategic decision to actually have a whole bookkeeping team. And so we did that by acquiring an existing business, which then also gave us another group of business owners to talk to about the opportunities that that we can offer in the CFO services that we do as well, and the ways that we can help them to grow their business.

And for quite a few of those, it’s the first time that someone had that kind of discussion with them. It’s been really interesting to. To define the boundaries, but also just to play with like I, I’ll call it bookkeeping plus. So beyond just keeping things reconciled and keeping it all in order, what are the little things that we can add that a bookkeeper can do because they’ve got the skills and the knowledge to do it, but that are really just super supercharging?

The information that the business owner gets. So that even if they’re not fully availing themselves of our CFO services, they’re starting to get better decision making information. Why us just going that little extra 1% or 5% in what we do in keeping, Deb, when you start acquiring businesses as well.

Then there’s the people issue and navigating that balance, right? And bringing new people into the business and familiarizing yourself with systems, them and you and finding that, how does that all work? That’s a, that’s in itself is quite a piece to navigate. Absolutely. That’s, it was a really big challenge too, because we run from a virtual headquarters, and so the, when you acquire a business, not everybody understands how to work remotely.

Not everybody wants to work remotely. We had to navigate that whole situation and it, we had we had attrition, we had all sorts of things happen. But we were able to stabilize it, settle it all down, and then just start to, to make sure that we had everything integrated well. We’re still we’re still looking at how we do our systems and processes.

I think we probably would never ever say that everything was all the systems and processes would all put to bed because with AI changing everything so rapidly, and particularly in our industry. We see this as a great opportunity for us and a great opportunity actually for AI to start doing some of the records management and that type of approach that knits everything in.

And I can see in the future that there will actually be. A level of AI that you can plug into a business and say, this is the golden record. This is how we want things to happen, and that it just goes out and grabs it from other places and brings the new acquisitions seamlessly into the fold. I think that would be an amazing development, and I’m sure that it’s something, I know I’ve been speaking to people already about that in that space, so it, there’s a lot that happens when you.

Bring on a new business and you learn sometimes from mistakes more than you learn from successes. And I think we had a few mistakes when we did it, but we definitely learned a lot about what we would do in the future if we did the same thing. We also learned about just, the types of business to bring in and what to look for and how to look for that.

We’d been doing mergers and acquisitions with some of our clients, so we were fairly much across what needed to happen, but some of the nuances of it were different with our industry, and so we just learned that quite grid of factions in the fire. One thing I’d add just on, on systems and processes, and I’ve seen this over many years of working with a lot of businesses, buying and selling businesses, as well as our own experience, is that, like it’s a common premise that the more systemized a business is, the more valuable it is because it will be giving a consistent output. Within that. There can be a system or a series of the system can be the actual piece of software that’s used, but it can also just be what is our approach and what is the way that we do things.

But within that, there can be subsystems. That are not that obvious initially without really digging deep, if there’s 10 team members, there might be 10 subsystems as in 10 different ways of doing the same thing within the overall system. And that, so that’s a real challenge to look for but is worth taking the time to look for because it makes a huge difference to the integration and to taking on that business.

And the other thing I’d add just on, ’cause we’re talking systems and people. Is so Deb, what is that quote that one of our mentors uses? Culture is the team. What product is to customer? So your client, if your client either loves or hates your product or somewhere near in between, your team either loves or hates the culture or they’re meh, somewhere in between.

And if you want to have a really great team, you need to have a really great culture.

That’s so important. And I think as well, I know that particularly and we’ve talked about it before outside of this podcast, but about remote teams as well, which are increasingly a thing for people. And that’s still, you still need to create that culture, even if people are.

Split all over the world, it doesn’t really matter. That’s still an important part of the business. Yeah, absolutely. And ours are distributed across we have a, someone dashboarding for us in Sri Lanka. We have team in India. We have team in the Philippines. We have team scattered across Australia.

So we bring them together in a virtual headquarters. They see each other every day. They can see. Who’s in the office, they can just go and knock on their other person’s office door. We try to bring that sense that it is just like you’re just knocking on some, knocking on a physical door because it just gives people that sense that they’re there and they belong, they’re inside the building.

That also gives them a sense of completion when they finish for the day that they exit the building so that they’ve. They can create that separation and it just runs in the background as a platform. But within that, we’ve been able to start using all of the AI that comes with that particular platform and developing our own AI and helping our team understand how to use AI assistance and AI agents.

So it’s been a real part of the progress for us. We were determined. I know myself as a leader. My role is to actually lead the way with ai because there’s a lot of fear around bookkeeping in particular. There’s AI agents out there now, AI overlays that you can put over it and see if it’s true and accurate.

It still needs training. It’s not, you couldn’t just set and forget, but the thing about it is that. I don’t employ bookkeepers. I employ people who at the moment do bookkeeping. And there’s a distinction in that at some point they might not do bookkeeping, but if they’re really good people, I wanna keep them and I need to make sure they’re ready to do the next thing.

And that thing lights them up so that they don’t ever have to feel like they’re going to be redundant. So that’s part of leadership, as far as I’m concerned, is driving that, that space. And it’s a tough one, but I, it is an important one. It is an important distinction as well because, and sometimes of course, of the people that come to you and are working in a particular space don’t even realize that there’s opportunities that could be open to them to go somewhere else until they start experiencing it.

So I think it’s all part of a growth process. Yeah, definitely. Jeremy just coming back to the AI thing and seeing how much of that influence is going to be it’s, people would immediately think, oh, counting and, numbers and areas are probably not a great space for ai, but in fact.

Really a lot of automation. If we extend AI to being into that automation space has been happening in this space, almost leading what’s been happening in other areas. And so where is it going to go? That’s the question. And how much do people need to be doing in their business? It’s a very exciting space at the moment.

Very exciting. It’s so if we look at bookkeeping. There was a real revolution 15 years ago when zero came out QuickBooks Online and others similar to that. So cloud accounting, that’s all under the terminology of cloud accounting, but it’s been feeling like it hasn’t really advanced in that 15 years and more and more over the last few years I’ve been thinking.

And especially since we bought the bookkeeping business, I’ve been realizing how much human intervention is still required to get it right. It’s the automation is, the bank data comes into the system. There’s some suggestions, but it’s not that, it’s not smart in that sense of making sure that everything’s right.

I’ve shifted in the last couple of months from thinking, yeah, AI is on the horizon in our industry. To thinking it is here. There’s a couple of programs in particular that are really making a difference. They’re probably not quite there, but I think somewhere between, in the Australian market, somewhere between two months and six months from now, we will see what I would call robotic bookkeeping, where it is actually making the matches in the system, checking itself, getting it right, and continually learning as well as it goes.

And we’ll still lead the training. I. But that training will make it more and more reliable instead of it just being rules that can be subject to to, to human error or to change. So that’s one thing in, in the bookkeeping, in the CFO side of what we do one of the reasons that I sold my tax accounting firm eight years ago now, is that I had said to my team a couple of years before that Zero has changed what we do it, it’s.

What we do as accountants, as tax accountants is totally different now to what it was 10 years ago. Similar to the data is in the system for us. We’re not spending our time just data entering into the system. We’ve, and we’ve got live information. Let’s not kid ourselves that, that term I used before.

But business advisory can’t be automated in the future as well. There’s a code behind it. If I look at a set of financial statements and I say, oh, that Pat, there’s something wrong between those two numbers or those two crews of time, or, oh, I can see what’s wrong with the cash flow. Here’s what should happen next.

There’s a code behind that. There’s an algorithm that can be codified. When I said that 10 years ago, my team freaked out. So that was probably one of the things that under me to realize that I didn’t fit my team anymore and to sell the matter. I was sitting there, but. I was sitting around that table and it was the funniest moment around the board table and just watching everybody’s faces go white, just looking at, they just went that, no, that’s, that can’t happen.

What about our jobs? And it was interesting to see that beer back then, and I, it does make me wonder how they’re feeling now, but I think there’s two reasons why AI in this space is, the accounting is in the front runner. The first is because it comes with a discreet set of data, right?

There’s a right and a wrong. It’s easy to see the right and the wrong, the, so that can help train the majority of it. And then it’s just the nuances of personal preferences. So that’s the first thing. But what most people wouldn’t be aware of is the second thing, which is the bookkeepers probably touch more pieces of software.

Than just about any other profession with maybe the exception and maybe not even the exception of it providers. And the reason I say that is that, if you have a client load of 20, 30, 40 bookkeeping clients, you’ll have access to all sorts of things like PayPal and totally different CRMs from one thing to the other.

And that data usually has to be used for some purpose. Bookkeepers are actually in an ideal situation to take that forward. When I look at the CFO space, I think a lot of that is actually coaching in that hope, dreams, and aspirations and matching the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the business owner to the data that’s coming out of the business.

So that you can move them towards that. That’s still a little way off, but I think that to a certain extent it will be able to be codified or a set of questions can be asked that would get you in those positions. To get to where you needed to know, please excuse my, I didn’t turn off my calendar setting.

Sorry, my ding dong, Mel. Yeah. What I was going to ask Jeremy as well is how much do people need to be on top of it themselves versus needing to rely, or having people like yourselves that are gonna come into a business and take care of it for them. Because I think that’s the hardest part about AI at the moment.

Lots of people have dabbled in, chat. GPT has got the name, but there are versions there, all that have dabbled with it as far as particularly content is concerned. But actually making it work for your business and doing things, it’s hard because you also need to be on top of some of these areas.

So is it gonna take someone like yourself coming in and doing that, or do you think it’s going to be things that people will just sign up for? I think there’s a short, medium and long term answer to that. And I’ll deal with long term. First we dunno what it looks like in the long term. So who knows where it could go in the short term.

There is, there somebody with the right skills needs to be training the ai and we view it that these AI tools will be another team member for us. And we’ll spend the time just helping it to learn. And just like in, in the way that probably lots of us use chat GPT, now it gets better the more it learn, the more that you teach it.

So it’ll be the same same approach there. For both bookkeeping and CFO services that we do. In the medium term, I think it is about the opportunities for accountants and bookkeepers to transform their role into much more of a people connection business. Which for some accountants and bookkeepers will actually be against their natural energy.

So maybe a challenge, but, the, I go back to something that, that one of my mentors highlighted many years ago, really forecasting what we’re seeing now when he said that and we’ve both quoted this in different ways in on this call already, that the role of the accountant in the future is to connect to under someone who understands the numbers and to connect those numbers to the goals and aspirations of business owner.

It becomes a a a personal connection, a personal understanding of what that business owner wants to achieve, and then to partner with them in taking the data that’s being automated to, to use that to make decisions. I think there’ll be a blend of the technology and the human. That’s what I call the medium term there, and that’s the opportunity to evolve.

Yeah, I can see there being two roles in businesses. Quite commonly there’ll be the role of someone that is looking out for what is the latest AI and reviewing things because the, it’s moving so quickly. So what you choose today, in six months time, you may need a different choice. And then there’s the person that’s going to be implementing and making sure that.

Whatever is happening in the business is doing that. But the, I think I wanna bring it back to you. Just to finish off this part of the discussion is just to bring it back to the systems that you talked about in the beginning. Of course, the important thing is you’ve gotta get the systems right.

’cause if the systems are wrong, all the AI is gonna do is ex is exaggerate the problems. That’s right. And you, in the previous question you were saying. Will we see business owners trying to do it themselves basically versus what would our role be? So there will be for sure business owners who identify AI tools and then just try to implement it themselves in the same way that there’s business owners who now do their own bookkeeping.

Some will do it well and some won’t. I think the outcome will be very similar. The, and the opportunity is to. To just get it right with that little bit of help, extra help from someone who understands both the fundamental principles and the technology. I think there’s a real reason why you wouldn’t want to leave.

Leave it for too long before you explore this as a, an opportunity though, and it comes back to the capital value of your business because. Within the next three to five years, there’ll be those that have and those that have it. And if you’re looking to explore maybe an exit in that time, and you are one of the ones that has, suddenly your capital value will be greatly appreciated in the marketplace compared to the capital value of a business that doesn’t have that.

In an industry where you might get three times the revenue of your clients, you might get 10 times the revenue if you’ve got. AI overlay and integrated throughout your whole business. Because people will look to come in and go, someone else has worked all this out for me. I’ll jump on that.

So if it’s in your inclination to explore it, that would be what I would say is a really key fundamental thing to reason why you might wanna do it sooner rather than later so that you’re not one of the. Later adopters and that you’re in that space, that you can actually get a really good market value for your business if you’re looking to exit.

And I think that there’s a lot of different approaches to AI at what I would say is AI makes you ask a better question because if you’re not getting the right answer, it’s likely that it’s because you’ve asked a question that was too broad without context. If you, if that’s what’s happening with your ai, it’s probably also happening with your team.

You’re probably still not doing it there either. And what’s even interesting is a comparison to that. So I’ve got an AI tool that I’m using that is, I guess an aggregator maybe is the right way to, to describe it, where you can actually choose from multiples. And which one you want to do. And what I’ve found as well is it’s not only whether you’ve asked the right question, but whether you’ve asked the right AI the question.

So sometimes it’s, and it’s a bit like people where you could ask a question to two different people. I. Exactly the same way and get two completely different responses. And I think you, you have to understand that the ais are also wired differently for different reasons. And so sometimes, I had one yesterday where I was asking a question and I asked it three or four different ways and I was still getting exactly the same response.

I then changed it to a different, AI got exactly the response I wanted. It was just the wrong ai. Yeah. And I think that’s part of the learning curve. Yeah. We spent a lot of time, I’ve spent. Nearly two years now, training a digital twin. So that it’s been preloaded with all of our 10 year goals, 5, 3, 2, 1, and an understanding of our complete organization chart and understanding of our complete every part of the business and what it needs to do and how it feeds into the next thing.

And so by spending that time, it’s got a very strong context of what I wanna get out. So if I need to go and get. Bio written, I can tell it what the bio is for, and then we go backwards and forwards and asks me a few questions to see what do I need next? Like why is it important? What is the context of that thing that you need the bio for?

And it gives it to me well crafted for that. So it’s actually speeding things up a lot now, but it was a matter of really training it. So having five kids. If you want them to be able to tie their shoelaces, you have to just keep going. They have to keep I was gonna say, were you want, were you wondering where the AI was a few years ago when you had five kids at home?

I was too busy to wonder.

I’ll just wanted to ask you as well in the last pub, but a couple of things I wanted to ask you about to finish things up, but. One is just in terms of recognizing who needs the services that you guys off offer, because it’s, whereas accounting, bookkeeping, yeah. We know we need taxes done, we need our regular stuff.

Being done from the bookkeeper kind of makes sense to most people, but often the term CFO has been something that has generally been associated with larger companies. So when you’re in a smaller business, you. What do I need this kind of service for? So tell me who can benefit from services like yours?

Common things that we see are businesses that are managing by the cash balance in the bank. That is their key key decision making metric or their key indicator at least, of how they’re going. And then often the driver of action. The cash balance goes down. So they chase up their accounts receivable.

If they have a cash receivable, the cash balance goes up. They spend some money on marketing or decide to get a new hire. So that’s one thing. Another thing is business owners who look at their profit loss, see a profit at the bottom of the page and don’t see that in the bank account and wonder why there’s a difference and just never understand why there’s a difference.

’cause no one’s ever told it. The third one is we often hear business owners talk about they feel like they’re flying blind. They just don’t have the data that they know they need and should have to be making the right decisions. A lot of what we do is actually starts with education and and one of the things that really lights us up is to have a session with a business owner where we explain those things the.

The how to pull and push the levers of cash flow to really make a difference and how to understand why is there a difference between profit and cash flow. When we have a business owner that says, I’ve been in business for 10 years, nobody’s ever told me that. Now I finally get it. That’s one of the things that we really love to do.

Which it’s gonna jump me to the last question I’m gonna ask. I’m gonna come back to it ’cause it needs to be the last question of you. We asked about a heart moment, but I did just want to bring in one other, one other topic here that’s dear to all of our hearts is the idea of being a business for good.

And I’ve interviewed Paul Dunn, who we know and love on the program in the past, but I wanted to talk to you about how that’s made a difference for you just because of how you feel about it the difference that it makes in the way you go about things, because it’s such a. It’s easy to talk about the idea of a business for good, but actually doing something and demonstrating you’re doing it and bringing that to people.

It’s such a buzz, isn’t it? Yeah, there’s it. It’s so powerful that it should be through everything that you do, and I think the reason why I was talking about how many small businesses there are on the face of the earth speaks to our why. It’s because half of those businesses will employ other families as well as that, the business owner has a family, but they’ll, half of those will employ other people as well.

And when you unpack the statistics of that one in five of those bus, so that 60% of them in the next five years will go out of business, which is a terrible statistic, right? It’s that’s about 2 billion people. Impacted by small businesses, small, medium, and micro businesses closing in the next five years, 2 billion people.

And so when you’ve put that in the context of someone’s family livelihood it’s scary, right? It’s scary for those families that they don’t know how they’re gonna feed their kids and sometimes it is spouses working together and that’s everything they own gone. And one of the top five reasons is poor cash flow.

It’s stupid ’cause it’s something we can do something about. And so I find it really powerful to have that conversation with people, to say that this is why we do what we do. We are passionate about fixing this problem and we’re passionate about fixing it for the other people who are out there that the heroes in our community there they might be a tradie, but they take on an apprentice.

That’s someone’s kid. That’s someone’s kid who needs a job. They’re the allied health professionals that get people able to work. Again. They’re the it might be some it might be a guy in marketing, but he’s also coaching the local footy team. And we can have this amazing impact if we just stop and think about who the, who’s are in our life.

Who are the people that are our customers, and how can we better influence them? Then I like to think too, I’m a global citizen first, so this isn’t just happening in my country. This is happening in every country around the world that there’s these businesses going out of business, and it’s really sad.

And so it’s something that I really wanted to do something about. So we aligned with B one G one Business for Good, and we, it was actually deliberately the very, very first expense of this business. Because that was how important it was for us. And we have had our children on different study tours with B one G one.

We’ve taken them over to Cambodia. One of our children actually decided she wanted to go to one in Kenya by herself, and she went and did that so she could meet other business owners with this philanthropic mind frame that it wasn’t just all about them and how much they could get. Actually, if you spend some time giving, you actually receive so much more yourself.

And it’s just a really lovely expression of who we are. And it’s probably what, it’s just as much an expression of our business as it is us personally. I love that it’s such a great way to encapsulate the importance of all of that. And I feel the same way as well, and it’s, and.

B one, G one is such an important part of my business, but of many of the businesses, that you and I both know and we’ll include in the show notes as we always do, we link to B one G one, so people want to know a little bit more. They can check that out. But just before we wrap up, the final question that I have.

And I’d be interested to know whether it’s different for both of you or whether it’s the same. So I’ll ask you Jeremy first, ’cause you started alluding to it, what is the at heart moment that businesses have when they start working with you that you wish more people will realize they were going to have and so they would come flocking to you in the future?

It’s so I, I gave that example before of. Somebody who has been in business going through those sort of struggles that I described, and they’ve been on a session with us where they actually get it and they don’t feel dumb as a business owner they don’t feel dumb for not understanding why the cash in the bank is not there when it shows they’re making a profit and they feel empowered because they have the.

The understanding of how to make that different going forward. It’s it’s, there’s moments almost every day when a business owner has been holding onto a problem that they’ve got for a long time. And it might be that their bookkeeping is behind and there are a couple of basses behind, or that they just don’t get how to get the information outta the system.

When they hand that over and have someone working with them to solve that problem and to get that understanding, they feel like the weight is lifted off their shoulders. And they actually say that to us which is very rewarding to, to hear. And and then at a higher level, as a business grows and expands, it’s the ahas they have around, how they work together with their team. And ’cause some of what we do is almost like a mentoring role for the finance team, but for the broader team as well. And and just helping them to understand if I choose that example, how the finance team works with the rest of the team.

Sometimes they’re a bit of a silo, but through some mentoring and some of the strategies that, that we have. They actually feel a part of the bigger team and feel like they can make an impact. I love that. So what about you, Deb? Any difference? Slightly Yes. I, but I love that too. I think that it’s very true.

I think for me it’s the calm. So by that sometimes business owners are like those circus acrobats that have the sticks and the plates up on top, and they’re so busy spinning every stick because they’ve been told. You’ve gotta go on Instagram, you’ve gotta have your Facebook leads, you’ve gotta have Google ads.

Where’s your Google This search rankings? Where’s where’s the customers? You’ve gotta have a good customer journey. You’ve gotta have all of your service and your delivery and they’re trying to make the money go round. All these different things. All these things. And it’s frantic, it feels frantic even as I say it, but when you can actually hone them in on the three things they need to do next and to focus down.

To that, it just takes, suddenly, it just takes the crazy out. And I think that’s the nicest aha moment. And when they start to get the pattern of that, and you see the results from the pattern of that, and we’ve had some clients where they were turning over maybe 20,000 in a month, and they actually accelerated up to, I think, 2 million a month.

In that period of time they just learnt the pattern and it’s so satisfying and it’s really satisfying to, we graduate clients by graduating. There’s a point where they become too big for us and it’s amazing. That just lights me up. To graduated client means that they’ve accelerated through all the services that we can offer.

We’ve helped them train their new. Finance team, they have a new CFO in store. Everything’s set up for them to succeed. The CFO knows how to communicate to the business owner in a way that the business owner can understand, or that’s a really powerful thing to actually bring about, and it starts at the smallest place, which is just understanding the numbers.

So powerful, so good. I love all of that. We could talk for hours. We’ve already talked for hours before in the past, and it’s been an absolute joy to talk to both of you on Biz Bytes. Thank you so much for being part of the program. Thank you Anthony and Blake. Great to meet with you. Of course we will include all the details, how to get in touch with you both.

Fire the show notes so people pay attention to that. There are lots of great things in there and for everyone listening in, don’t forget to subscribe and get ready for the next episode of the Bites. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

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