Latest / Reframe First / Salvatore Tirabassi, Founder of CFO Pro Analytics | Fractional CFOs, Fast Fixes & Smarter Growth

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Salvatore Tirabassi, Founder of CFO Pro Analytics | Fractional CFOs, Fast Fixes & Smarter Growth · Reframe First

• Oleksij Rak: Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Reframe First. I'm Alexin, host of the podcast. Let me welcome our today's Salvador Terabasi, founder, managing director of C-Pop Analytics. Hi Salvador, great having you here. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, thanks for joining. Salvatore Tirabassi: Hey Alexi, how are you? It's good to see you. Oleksij Rak: From what I learned about the company and for services you provide, you're delivering the top-tier fractional C4 services, financial data, business analytics, and on top of that, there's a lot about efficiencies, automations, you actually have some quite impressive numbers in LinkedIn, like half a billion raised, 12 exits guided, and so on and so forth. So a lot. So could you tell us more about like... the company, the CFO ProAnalytics, maybe about yourself and like what the whole story is about. Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah. So, um, so, uh, you know, there's a whole market for CFO services. Um, I think globally, certainly in the, in the, in the U S, uh, and a lot of people just call it fractional CFO. Um, and, uh, that's one of the services that we provide. Uh, my, my view on it and kind of how I got to it is I was a growth equity investor. Oleksij Rak: Okay. you Salvatore Tirabassi: and venture capital investor for about 15 years. And then I became operator running the CFO function for a very high ⁓ growth ⁓ And I of all of that expertise into a services offering and had built a whole team around it so that we use my methodologies to deliver fractional CFO services Oleksij Rak: . . Salvatore Tirabassi: emerging businesses. These are businesses that have, three to a hundred million dollars of revenue. We come in as their permanent part-time solution. So we run the whole finance function for them and we become the main trusted advisor to the CEO or the owner. And then the other service that we offer is interim CFO. And that's where we go in for, you know, three to six months to fix specific issues. A lot of times we get called in by an owner or ⁓ investment banker who ⁓ working with an owner to sell the business. And run business like on a cash basis for a lot of years. Some of these could be fairly large, know, relatively speaking, but never really done the proper financial forecasting, API analysis. They may not have the correct accrual accounting. ⁓ You know, they're running it like on a tax basis. And when you go to serious buyers, can present them, you know, cash based numbers, you need to give them something that they can understand for their own investment analysis. And so we go in and fix all that stuff and build systems sometimes change systems, replace people. it just, it just depends on what the situation is. So we do those two things. Oleksij Rak: is it usually the moment of time when somebody calls you? Is it like a company going through some transformation or like what's that? When does it... Salvatore Tirabassi: ⁓ Yeah, I would say on the interim side, it's usually pretty clear. There's usually like a problem. ⁓ As I said, it's related to they want to sell the business or maybe they're doing an acquisition or they need to some financing. On fractional side, it's usually like Oleksij Rak: Yep. Salvatore Tirabassi: of concerns that the owner or the CEO has they know they have these questions and they don't have anybody on their team that can answer them. A lot of times it can be related to wanting to faster, they don't understand their customer acquisition costs and these are wrapped into the whole ⁓ system ⁓ of a financial operation. ⁓ So they may have like two or three things that they're thinking about. But when we start talking to them, we realize like, yeah, these two or three things are just an example of all these, this whole system that you need in order to run the business better. ⁓ come to us when there's things that they don't understand or they can't answer. ⁓ they could be things that are keeping them up at night, that they're really worried about. That's ⁓ generally. what happens when they for ⁓ like ours to try to help them. Oleksij Rak: How easy is it to sell this kind of service? My company tried to sell interim CTO service. So we're not financials, we're technicians. it was quite ⁓ to do that because people to this knowledge in house. And even if they facing life some really deep... ⁓ deep travels, deep issues, they still like more looking into knowledge in the house. ⁓ So building something inside rather than like outsourcing this kind of work. Because it's kind of executive position, like, you know, this is like decision-making position. Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah, I think us, it's, we're pretty hands consultants. So we really become part of the team. It's interesting. I don't know that I ever really thought about, do they want to own it in house? could tell you what the problem with it is in house is it's too expensive. So in finance, in finance, there's a lot of downtime. You know, if you, if you think you're going to just hire a really good CFO, who's going to do all this other work, you're mistaken, right? Because, you know, a CFO is usually used to having a team and then the team has overhead associated with it and downtime. And so if you're gonna build a whole finance function in New York City, for example, if you wanna hire a really good CFO, it's gonna cost you, know, for a mid-sized business, if you want like a really, really good person, it's gonna cost you at least like $400,000 a year. That's just for the CFO, right? Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Salvatore Tirabassi: And then that CFO needs support. So now 400 becomes 600 or 800 pretty easily, right? Depending on how big of a team they need. And we basically can deliver that whole function with different people on the team for a big discount. You know, it's probably like, you know, half of that cost or less. Oleksij Rak: You Okay. Salvatore Tirabassi: ⁓ and all the work that's done. And so, and we're, we accustomed to ⁓ working and efficiently. So, so that's really, I think that the trade that they make, right? It's a cost and value expertise, you know, to really kind of come and have immediate impact. Oleksij Rak: It's good to be safe here in New York City, I would say. Salvatore Tirabassi: Well, mean, yeah, I think it is. mean, think it's by the way, those rates are probably similar in other big cities around the United States. you know, if you're a business that's doing 20 or $30 million of revenue, you really could get that level person. from us on a fractional basis. Now all of a sudden getting somebody that's super and capable, very high level capability, who's ready to just deliver ⁓ immediately you and you're way money to get it done. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, it really makes sense. with regards to, like you mentioned that you're lighting, like ⁓ come over, you start with building the proper system, the proper function, ⁓ the finance function. And also like when we like were researching your business, team was, the way you build business, was about systematic approach. It was automation from day one, like ⁓ CRMs, automation on ⁓ local like the IPR. solutions. So could you tell us more about how you build this function ⁓ and what you do there to streamline all the... I mean both. Salvatore Tirabassi: You mean in my own business or do you mean with the clients? Both. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, for myself, running a services business. And so, you know, I built the business with a lot of automation in place from the beginning. So on marketing because I do have you know, a presence on LinkedIn and I do do original blog posting. ⁓ And on that side, I have a team of marketing people who manage my and help me come up with topics. And we leverage scheduling tools, ⁓ automations. We'll you know, we'll use for ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. you Salvatore Tirabassi: graphics and images, we'll use AI to come up with different, not topics, but different ideas about what we're gonna write about and kind of ⁓ help us kind of navigate to our original thoughts into something ⁓ is really gonna be impactful to the readers. ⁓ Oleksij Rak: There. Salvatore Tirabassi: So we use it for that type of stuff. then, ⁓ know, obviously an end-to-end CRM that works from the marketing funnel all the way to invoicing for me ⁓ time tracking is important. So we that. In fact, I've only been doing this for two years and I already changed my CRM once. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Salvatore Tirabassi: So I started out with one and I just switched to another one which is way more effective for like how I wanna grow the business. I started out, ⁓ CRM I started out with was called HoneyBook and I switched it to Go High Level which is a pretty ⁓ popular And then, On the service delivery side, we do use Claude in Excel, which is relatively new. ⁓ We use a called Coefficient, which ⁓ sits top of different data services like HubSpot or Salesforce, QuickBooks, and it allows to do data aggregation. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Okay. Salvatore Tirabassi: So those are the types of things that we do with the clients. What happens is heavily involved in their systems and we know a lot about different automations ⁓ how to connect systems. ⁓ we immediately advise them on like, you hey, ⁓ you to connect your CRM to, ⁓ know, even if as simple as like to this Google sheet so that Oleksij Rak: So. So. Salvatore Tirabassi: And we'll use like a or an end-to-end connection or a make connection. we'll say, ⁓ we need to have this data inside of your, inside of this Google Sheet so that we can use it and we don't have to keep going back and we just want it updated regularly. So we'll show them these small automations and ⁓ we'll implement them if they need us to it so that we can work more efficiently. ⁓ a big for me with the clients is like, innovations need to be like quick wins. ⁓ I don't want like some big project that is gonna take like a year to finish. We need to provide solutions that ⁓ very, very quick and can be implemented quickly so they could start seeing results. And then ⁓ they're up and running, if we wanna make improvements on them, we do like, it's almost like doing software versions, right? We're like, okay, we have, Oleksij Rak: Yeah. I'm going to walk you through some of the results. So, the first 10-point-1-0-0-0-0 Salvatore Tirabassi: Procedure number one that we fixed. This is the first version. It works. It's good enough. Maybe in like 10 weeks or something like that, we'll spend a little time and we'll upgrade it so that it does these other things. approach the problem like that. Oleksij Rak: Absolutely here. We're working with big clients also. For them, is like, if they plan it in a quarter, it's good. it's like in half a year, in a year's time. Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: And what I hear from you, you come over with these small improvements, especially since you are fractional C for all. So you are about finance. You see these small inefficiencies and can quickly fix them to streamline work and to make it more efficient. about them, what are typical ones that you implement for most of your clients? Besides, ⁓ don't know, like... putting some records in spreadsheets. Salvatore Tirabassi: you know, like a big one immediately is like the financial reporting automation. So want to do, we want to get them to a state where we can do budget actuals and trending. And on the client, we'll come up with like a different solution. ⁓ A of times it starts out in Excel ⁓ and use like maybe a data repository where we can ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Salvatore Tirabassi: put CSV files in, and then we'll build Power Query and Ingestion transformation layer for the data to go into a template. And then all you need to do is make sure the file's in the repository, you hit refresh, and it updates everything. That's a very simple ⁓ thing do, but it's very reliable. ⁓ And Oleksij Rak: Absolutely. Absolutely. Salvatore Tirabassi: It doesn't require building like amazing software. In fact, now you could just use Claude to code all of the Power Query code for you. You know, it'll just write all the code for you. And then you just say, I wanted to do this, this, this, and this. The files are in this location. know, I want to make sure that it auto refreshes or whatever, and it'll, it'll just do it all for you. So it speeds up the process. ⁓ be like immediate, you know, ⁓ by the first month, you would want to get that done. Another thing we might work on pretty quickly is helping they don't already have it or if it's like not well done, sort of analytics around their customer acquisition costs, marketing sales, ⁓ lifetime value of customers. ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Salvatore Tirabassi: And we'll build those either in a spreadsheet or in a Google Sheet or if use some kind of BI tool, we might build it in there. That would like something that's very important. So, and then move to like financial projections ⁓ after that. The reporting. Oleksij Rak: So. Salvatore Tirabassi: is really useful before the financial projections because when you do the reporting work, you really have to understand like what data do they have? What's the quality? ⁓ how can you use it in Excel some other tool? And then that is the basis for being able to build a projection. You could start with the projection first. Oleksij Rak: you Salvatore Tirabassi: and get to the same answer, but a lot of times when you're figuring out the reporting, you learn a lot about where everything is. And then that makes it easier for you to do the other Oleksij Rak: Yeah, and about the way of business and how they operate and stuff. Yeah, for sure. With regards to these small inefficiencies that you fix in first months, what do you think is the cost? Not the cost, but... What fraction of the margin do they lose in this inefficiency, usual? It's like... It's maybe not... Salvatore Tirabassi: ⁓ I don't know that it's really like margin related. mean, customer acquisition costs, yes, I can talk to you about that. I think in general, what we do is we give them visibility and we give them the ability to say, you know, are the questions you should be asking about your business. ⁓ and by the way, here are the answers. ⁓ And so it's not really like there's margin improvement. It's like all of a sudden they can see things that they didn't know before. You know, like I had a client recently where we built for their e-commerce business, we built a weekly forecasting tool where you put Google Meta spend into the model and it tells you Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Salvatore Tirabassi: based on historical numbers for this week with or without promotions. Here's how many sessions you should have. Here's where your conversion should be. Here's where your average order value is. Here's where your return should be. And then here's revenue, your contribution margin, your return on ad spend ⁓ ⁓ net return on ad spend, which factors in the cost of goods, right? Oleksij Rak: and you Salvatore Tirabassi: you know, prior to having that model, you know, they knew they were making money, but not they could put a number in and say, if we do, if we do this correctly this week, and the advertisers do what we want, the results should look like this. You know, it's very, very specific. So, so that that's like, also related to customer acquisition costs where we can't help them improve margins, you know, and that's a specific example in e-commerce in other businesses like B2B software or SaaS, you know, or B2C the customer acquisition cost modeling and understanding like, okay, if you put this much money in, how many customers do you have to get and what's the value of those customers and what's the payback on your marketing? Those places where you can immediately start changing the margin. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah. I was asking about margin because I a of interviews and discussions in travel industry and in travel industry they are really working on really thin margins. ⁓ Having margin, know, ⁓ the to having any margin at all ⁓ to some profits is like in operational efficiency. Salvatore Tirabassi: I just And margins, yeah. Oleksij Rak: And that's why any small inefficiency you have on a scale of volumes, it to some amount of margins that they can save. So yeah, but understand what you're saying. ⁓ Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah, think if you can figure out where to spend top of funnel in marketing, you can figure out how to spend more efficiently there, and order to know you need data and you need to see it week over week, what's working, what's not working. But then there's also the operating expenses that say in a travel related business where you're on thin margins, you need three analysts with Maybe you only need one. ⁓ Now of a sudden, you can get on an operating expense level better efficiency and also speed. You can turn over the work much more quickly. So those are places where you can try to improve the margin. I mean, AI is a great tool. It's unfortunately like... Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah. Salvatore Tirabassi: causing a lot of disruption the job market and changing the way people have to do things. ⁓ I've got my are all college age and ⁓ the market is very different for them ⁓ because all these changes ⁓ in entry level roles. So that's one of the negatives from a business owner standpoint. there's a lot of value you can get out of it. Oleksij Rak: You can, but on the other hand, all your competitors are also seeing that and they're also trying to jump in. ⁓ the same travel that I was ⁓ with recently, see that the margins are getting thinner ⁓ and why, ⁓ because trying to be more operational efficient. And that's they're trying to compete with price. and we'll see where it goes. ⁓ With regards to trends, first it's something new to hear from... Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: people from finance world that they... streams and so the world is changing. what do you see? Because automation, if it engineering, ⁓ job first. now everybody's doing that. ⁓ I just confirmation from you that you're also doing that with your company. What else do see? Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting. Some of the do-it-yourself capabilities that you can get from the data streaming services like Zapier, or even if you were in Office 365 and you use Power Automate, it's not that easy to get. the data streams to work, you do need to have, like if you want to do it yourself, you know, so like really understanding like the fields and the records and how they're going to work, you know, like, AI is helpful for that. If you just use a ⁓ like, you I personally use, I have both chat, GPT and Claude, but I tend to use Claude more, but for certain things, definitely chat, GPT works better, but it'll give you like the exact instructions of like how you should go about it. So it gives you the ability to do more DIY with the data streaming. But it's not like, it's not necessarily easy. If you think you're going to do it in five minutes, that's just not going to happen. Unless it's a very simple automation. Like I'll give you an example. I wanted to have an email come to my email inbox. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Salvatore Tirabassi: every morning at 5 a.m. That was just a digest of my calendar for the day. And, you know, I did it in Power Automate because I'm on Office 365. And it was shocking, like, Power Automate, because of how the data flows, it can give me, sometimes it's based on how the data is fed to it, it can give me Oleksij Rak: Okay. Salvatore Tirabassi: schedule digest in an email correctly chronologically. But most of the time it's kind of like section is correct and then the next section is incorrect. And spent hour or an hour a half with Claude and ChatGPT to help me figure out how it would work. And the conclusion was that Power Automate doesn't have a filter that allows you to do it chronologically. so I just left it the way it was and I know what the ⁓ is and all I need to see is like, what is my day gonna look like? I I could just go to my calendar, but I like, know, just ⁓ in morning, I clear out all my emails. I see one email, I just read through what's gonna happen for the day and then it sticks in my head better. But... ⁓ but it's not easy. And the point is it's not simple. You can do it yourself, but you have to be patient and it takes a little bit of learning. And I'm fairly technical, I can do all, just, ⁓ I want it and I have like an extra 15 or 20 minutes, I'll just DIY it. But ⁓ it's not straightforward. ⁓ And then like, Oleksij Rak: You can do it yourself. Salvatore Tirabassi: sometimes the connections could break for whatever reason. And then you're like, you know, you may have had an automation that you haven't looked at in a week and then you go there and you're like, what happened? It's not working. And then you got to like, it's, it's, it's, ⁓ got benefits it, but not without putting the work in. ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah. With regards to like breaking, yeah. Welcome to engineering world. Sorry. Things do break. Talking about industries, you mentioned that you work with like, work with e-commerce, with SaaS, with like probably some other industry. What are your main segments, ⁓ industry segments your clients that you work Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah. I we work in all industries. ⁓ Yeah, I think it's interesting. I have a blog that I did where I explained at a ⁓ basic level, nine business models. There's nine of them in terms of like, Oleksij Rak: Money is always money. Mm-hmm. Salvatore Tirabassi: getting the client, getting the money, paying your expenses and making, creating cashflow. And so you think about it, like, you you as an engineer, when you think about it, it's like, it's a system, right? And only nine of them. And so when you ⁓ when you're to a client and you wanna understand how they make money, that's really not, an industry specific knowledge that you need. Once you understand the different business models, you apply them anywhere. I think where the industry expertise comes in is, ⁓ know, related to... ⁓ Oleksij Rak: It's Salvatore Tirabassi: things like staffing, talent growth, competition and understanding how it's affecting their customer acquisition costs, things like that. And those things can be learned relatively quickly with the right people. But coming in and being effective from a financial standpoint is not necessarily like an industry related expertise. Oleksij Rak: you Salvatore Tirabassi: And the other thing too about those nine business models that I talked about, what's really interesting about those is like, once you understand them, you really understand lookalike models. Like you can understand why Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Salvatore Tirabassi: consumer packaged goods company is selling widgets, right? ⁓ can actually make the jump lifetime customer value ⁓ for somebody with business model? And it makes sense comparing it to like a SaaS business where the lifetime customer value is very obvious because it's recurring revenue. But ⁓ once you know two things, you actually see that they're actually similar in a way, even though they work differently. So you start to make connections and you become much more knowledgeable. And sometimes you can take ideas from one business model and apply them somewhere else where it's not obvious. Because you see a way of like doing KPIs or things in one model and you're like, you know what? I actually could do the same thing over here and I never really thought I could do that. Oleksij Rak: and Mm-hmm. That's a one. I need to read that article. it's, yeah, it really makes sense because like the difference, like different industries can behave in really similar ways. And yeah, I was trying to like move it towards like how Salvatore Tirabassi: Similar ways, yeah, 100%. 100%. Oleksij Rak: current market trends attaching like your customers, this industry is better. know. Maybe what like the most repetitive business models that you work with and how do you see it like them being affected over the last like year or two years of Salvatore Tirabassi: ⁓ yeah. No, You know, like a big ⁓ thing that has impacted some of my clients are the whole tariff situation in the US. You know, that was a ⁓ shock to the system. And ⁓ interestingly, think the trade court that the customs in the States knows how to issue refunds and they have to start giving all the money back. Which was, yeah, I mean, it was super interesting because when the original court ruling came out, everybody who was in the Supreme Court who doesn't understand the trade business, they didn't know that they were going to be. Oleksij Rak: But then the end users paid the money. Salvatore Tirabassi: able to issue the money and the refunds back and the trade judge looked at it he's like, ⁓ yeah, of course we have a whole system for doing this. But yeah, so ⁓ I the other trends really, ⁓ obviously applying AI is obviously like a big one. I think the... Duh. Changes in the hiring for people is something that definitely is affecting all kinds of businesses. Leaving aside the fact that there's the ability to, you end up being inundated with resumes when you're trying to hire people and being able to parse through that and know what's a good resume and what's not. that's like a big trend for a lot of my clients because they put new jobs out and then they have, you know, to figure out like, ⁓ my God, it's like a tidal wave of resumes. you know, these are not big businesses. So they don't have like a full ⁓ operation where it's all like automated. But ⁓ a big trend that they have to deal with as well. I say another one is, Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Salvatore Tirabassi: know, interest rates have been coming down. And so I think there's like a little bit more appetite for people to try to figure out if they can improve their financing costs. But that's still a little, ⁓ little early in the here, at least here in the United States, it's a little bit early in ⁓ trend. But if the rates keep coming down, it's going to be. It's definitely gonna be something that business, small and mid-sized businesses are gonna pay a lot more attention to. Oleksij Rak: Do expect rice to come down and like do you expect that like business will be as always again? Salvatore Tirabassi: It's time. Do I expect what? Oleksij Rak: That business will be as always again, as usual, like more money getting cheaper and willing. Salvatore Tirabassi: think there's definitely gonna be an opportunity for businesses who haven't really accessed debt financing to attempt to do that. all going to be related to like how rates come down. And if the borrowing costs get better, they'll start making moves to try to raise capital if they needed to grow or to run their business more efficiently. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. If there is something in your business that you could fix, with a snap of your fingers, what would it be terms of... Salvatore Tirabassi: ⁓ boy, in my own business? Oleksij Rak: Yeah, we will get to client's business also. you're already doing a lot of technical stuff and trying to streamline all these operational processes. ⁓ Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah, I would say I would say if I had the If I had some standardized technical implementation where data ingestion comes in and we have some standard procedures that we can get out of it that could cover 80 % of the clients. That would be somewhat interesting. I think the problem that I have with that is that I feel like every client is so different you, don't that you can create, or at least I can, a system that allows you to be able to just very rapidly go into a client, absorb a lot of financial information, and then produce ⁓ output that's ⁓ But that be great if I could find that. There's definitely tools. ⁓ that allow you to do it in different pieces. Like I think coefficient is like a product that probably is decent at that, but know, but requires time and effort to like really like turn that into a standard procedure, ⁓ which haven't really done yet because as I said, every client is so different. that we haven't had enough of a pattern recognition to be able to build something that we can use over and over again. know, if I had maybe three times as many clients, I might have that of like, how do we build efficiency because we keep seeing the same thing happen over and over again. Yeah. ⁓ Oleksij Rak: This kind of repetitive patterns and like, and yeah. And what stops you from doing building that? It's like lack of attention, of hands. ⁓ Salvatore Tirabassi: ⁓ Yeah, think, you know, every client gets run on its own P &L and, you know, we're trying to deliver a specific solution for that client. This type of investment would be more of like an overhead investment for me. And right now I've been ⁓ spending of my overhead on customer acquisition as opposed to ⁓ process Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Salvatore Tirabassi: that I can spread across all the clients. As I said, if I had lookalike problems across the clients, then that would be a better investment. But if I try to do it right now, it wouldn't be very efficient because I might solve it for one client, but then I can't reuse it somewhere else. That would be the challenge. But I had like triple the clients, I probably would have enough lookalikes where I would wanna try to figure out how to ⁓ do Oleksij Rak: Yeah. And what stands in the way of tripling the appliance? Salvatore Tirabassi: ⁓ It's just, you know, a funnel of leads, you know, having enough conversations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, I've grown very nicely. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. think we have enough. But we've seen like you're growing quite rapidly over like last year of time. Salvatore Tirabassi: It Yeah, I have, but it's a heavily referral-driven business model. referrals are hard to replicate. ⁓ all networking relationships. ⁓ And the lead can be pretty choppy as a result of that. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, I feel that because we have very, very similar problems. like not a problem, it's similar way of like customer acquisitions. And so, and what I understand, you're also doing a lot of like marketing and like speaking a lot ⁓ just to build that. ⁓ Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah, build, yeah, build out my profile and have people know me, but that's a long process. You know what I mean? So, so like, take time to meet people like you and do these interviews because I view it as like, it's a long-term process of like building a business over the long run. And so it's, I view it as like, yeah, I don't get an immediate return on investment, but an investment that I need to make in order to have a long-term that or strategy that works. Oleksij Rak: Absolutely. With regards to your clients, we were talking about your business, but the snap of your finger, if you could fix something in every client's business, ⁓ you step in and see the same repetitive problem ⁓ every client. I'm asking because maybe ⁓ as a software company can address ⁓ productize this kind of service. ⁓ Salvatore Tirabassi: ⁓ Yeah. That's a good question. Oleksij Rak: When you come over it, it repeats again and again and the same. Salvatore Tirabassi: You know what I think is what I this isn't like a snap of your finger but Oleksij Rak: It never is. Salvatore Tirabassi: What I think is an interesting model almost if you could ⁓ a help desk. tools helped us would be to me would be something like I know I need specific integration or something done. And have partner on call who can spin up a solution for me very quickly. It's like almost like very rapid prototyping a solution. You have access to the systems and then ⁓ you can just something really quick to like solve certain things. It's probably a difficult business model to implement. don't know how you would acquire customers for it. but that would be great if you had like an on-call, on-call data data extraction service that you just them up and say, Hey, I'm in my, ⁓ in these three systems I need this to happen. Can you just do it for me? Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah, that requires a certain level of partnership with interested parties and certain volumes to be... Yeah, to make sense. if it's here and there like once a month, know, ⁓ not a business one. Yeah, but that's a good one. So that's something new I didn't know about. Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah, you need to have B-Volume driven to be able to do it. Yeah, exactly. Oleksij Rak: Maybe with regards to your clients, what biggest trends, what other trends do you see that are touching them? Or maybe what do you see in the future? Where will it move and what will change in terms of finance structure, in terms of market trends? Salvatore Tirabassi: You know, curious to see ⁓ AI for marketing evolves over ⁓ There's definitely some good automations. I was just at some UGC automations for video ads. And I was surprised at what they were able to do. But the Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Salvatore Tirabassi: questions ultimately gonna be like, that really ⁓ engagement? Do consumers respond to it in the same way? Do start to recognize that it's not real true user generated content? ⁓ I think the price where those things are being delivered are gonna come down over time. So more people are gonna use them. And that's gonna make marketing Oleksij Rak: Okay. Salvatore Tirabassi: creation of marketing material more efficient and also the ability for you to test different things more efficiently. ⁓ Because you can create, you can do more choices and see which ones work. Oleksij Rak: So. Salvatore Tirabassi: So anybody that's a customer acquisition mode or has like an important part of their business is like repeatable customer acquisition and they have marketing budgets. That's gonna be an interesting trend. I what's gonna happen is companies that were previously too small to do a lot of testing. Oleksij Rak: you Salvatore Tirabassi: they're probably going to be able to do lot of that testing now different creatives. Oleksij Rak: You can do really a lot with a small team nowadays in terms of work positions, ⁓ outreach funnels. So yeah, if you can do. But ⁓ afraid ⁓ internet will be so much flooded with generated content that, you know, the... Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ Oleksij Rak: The attention to each piece of the content, the global attention to each piece of the content will be dropping dramatically. Less effort into each piece of content, but the amount of attention be smaller. Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah, yeah, yeah, or. Yeah, I'm curious. I don't know if that's necessarily true because the user Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Salvatore Tirabassi: is still gonna wanna engage for a certain amount of time. It's just what are they gonna choose to engage with? That's kind of the question. But yeah, there's a lot to think about there. Oleksij Rak: Definitely is. That was really great discussion. I promise to let you go faster. we wrap up, is there anything else you would like to add on top of what we discussed? Salvatore Tirabassi: no, I think there's some definitely some interesting topics to think about. you know, hopefully, you with a little bit of the finance lens, but also like just thinking about technology and marketing, you know, there's some good topics your audience to think about. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, I will definitely think over what we discussed with you and I hope we can like reiterate in half a year's time and see where it went. It's been really fast nowadays, so I don't know, maybe we should reiterate at some point. Yeah, thanks a lot, Salvatore, for joining and a lot for what you shared with us and good ⁓ for like, what you're doing. Salvatore Tirabassi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that would be great. Sounds good. Yeah, yeah and if anybody wants to us out our website is ⁓ cfoproanalytics.com you have my name right there and you can always find me on LinkedIn too. ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Yeah, we will link the website in the description of the video so anybody can check. So thanks a lot and have a great day. Salvatore Tirabassi: Great. Thanks, Alexa. Good seeing you. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, thanks.