Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / The AI-Powered CFO: How Salvatore Tirabassi is Disrupting Mid-Market Finance

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The AI-Powered CFO: How Salvatore Tirabassi is Disrupting Mid-Market Finance · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:04
  Clark really was like knowing that I had a product that and a service that people wanted to buy and that I could package it in the right way.
• 0:11
  There's a big difference between being the guy evaluating businesses and being the guy responsible for one.
• 0:19
  Today's guest, Sal Tarabassi lived both sides.
• 0:22
  He spent years as a high level finance exec and investor, then saw the gap.
• 0:28
  Mid market companies need real CFO horsepower.
• 0:31
  But hiring the full team is expensive and it usually comes too late.
• 0:36
  So Sal built CFO Pro plus analytics for businesses in the 3 million to 100 million dollar range.
• 0:43
  And he's scaling it with AI and offshore execution so owners get the benefit without the bloat.
• 0:50
  And yes, he breaks down the one thing too many owners learn the hard way.
• 0:55
  Profits do not equal cash flow.
• 0:58
  As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:04
  All right, Sal Tirabassi, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 1:08
  Hey, good to see you, Dave, Good to see you in person finally.
• 1:13
  Yeah, we connected a lot over online before this, so absolutely glad you could be here and we appreciate you taking the time.
• 1:19
  Yeah, of course, of course.
• 1:22
  So Sal, you are the founder of CFO Pro plus Analytics and you've spent over two decades at the highest levels of finance, from the halls of Harvard and Wharton to the high stakes world of growth equity.
• 1:38
  And now you're leading the charge in AI driven financial strategy.
• 1:42
  But before you were the guy helping CEOs navigate these, these massive financial decisions, what was that early spark where you realized that you were built for the world of business and entrepreneurship?
• 1:56
  I would say for me, it came on pretty gradually.
• 2:00
  I've been around entrepreneurs and emerging businesses for a long time as a growth equity investor, basically investing in new ideas and concepts, growing them, and then, you know, having them be built into larger companies that could be sold
• 2:20
  or go public.
• 2:21
  So I had a lot of familiarity with it.
• 2:24
  It's interesting when you're on the investing side of the table, you can relate a lot to what the entrepreneurs are doing, but actually being in that seat is a different mindset.
• 2:35
  I think for me, the spark was that I really saw a need in the marketplace based on conversations that I was having with entrepreneurs who needed services in, in the financial aspects of their business that I, I could
• 2:52
  help them with.
• 2:53
  And I had all this experience and actually build a whole package methodology around it and a way of doing it that's cost effective and really gives them good value.
• 3:03
  So once I figured out that that was really a thing that people wanted to spend money on, I just kind of just jumped into the entrepreneur seat and just kind of went with my gut on, you know, decisions
• 3:17
  about how am I going to guide this thing, how am I going to build my lead flow?
• 3:21
  Because I knew the product had a market, and it was just a question of, like, getting leads in, closing them, and then scaling the business.
• 3:31
  So I would say the spark really was like, knowing that I had a product that and a service that people wanted to buy and that I could package it in the right way.
• 3:40
  Let me tell you what actually happens with the knowledge that runs your business.
• 3:45
  Someone spends a week writing an sop.
• 3:48
  It goes in a binder.
• 3:50
  The binder goes on a shelf.
• 3:51
  And when a new hire has a question, they find the person who knows and they ask them.
• 3:57
  That's tribal knowledge.
• 3:58
  It's valuable, and it walks out the door every time someone leaves.
• 4:03
  With QuicklyDoc, you just film your experts doing the job.
• 4:07
  It takes five minutes.
• 4:09
  QuicklyDoc turns that into a professional, searchable documentation that your team can pull up right from their phone.
• 4:17
  So when someone searches how do I reset the controller?
• 4:21
  There's the answer straight from the person who actually knows.
• 4:25
  Film it once, reference it forever.
• 4:28
  Go to QuicklyDoc.com beyond for your free pilot and.
• 4:33
  And stop losing what your best people know.
• 4:36
  Okay.
• 4:36
  And once you had that aha Moment, sounds like you moved really quickly to just like so many people do.
• 4:43
  Almost.
• 4:43
  Ready, fire.
• 4:44
  Aim.
• 4:44
  In terms of getting it.
• 4:46
  Getting it into motion and getting the company set up.
• 4:49
  Yeah, I, you know, I always had a little bit of consulting work that I always did kind of on the side, you know, through my career, but very, very minimal stuff, usually like friends of friends asking for favors
• 5:05
  to help them out with something.
• 5:07
  But this.
• 5:10
  What happened here was I had this idea, and I knew that I had a product market fit, and I quickly got a couple of customers on board.
• 5:22
  And then at that point, I had to really figure out, like, okay, what's the infrastructure going to look like behind this?
• 5:28
  So, like, figuring out my proposal system, invoicing and all that.
• 5:33
  And so I leveraged my business entity that I already had from the consulting work that I was doing previously and then could just, like, really insert into that structure an operating business that I was now growing, like, month
• 5:49
  after month with, like, new clients coming in and then adding people to my team.
• 5:55
  So I did, I did go pretty quickly to answer your question.
• 5:58
  But the way that I, I did it was a combination of stuff that I had kind of sitting on the shelf, not really being used, and then like, putting together the systems and the processes to actually build a
• 6:10
  real business.
• 6:12
  Okay, all right.
• 6:13
  And let's just go back in the.
• 6:14
  Journey there for a bit because you, you had some very high level education, you were drawn to finance.
• 6:19
  Right.
• 6:19
  You have expertise there and you had a corporate career for a number of years.
• 6:24
  Right.
• 6:25
  In terms of kind of learning that side, learning the business and as an actual CFO for a high growth company.
• 6:34
  Is that right?
• 6:36
  Yeah, yeah.
• 6:36
  So I did, you know, coming out of growth equity, I had the opportunity to kind of switch gears and go into an operating role.
• 6:48
  And I had a few different opportunities to do that.
• 6:52
  And one of the ones, the one that I jumped into was as a CFO in a, in a company that was high growth and, or wanted to be high growth.
• 7:02
  And I basically was the CFO of that business over this period of time where it grew from, you know, roughly 80 people to about a thousand people.
• 7:13
  And then I packaged all that, know how that I gained on that job with everything that I learned as an investor to basically say like, you know, for a founder or family owned business that's got, you know, call
• 7:28
  it 10 to 100 employees, 3 to $100 million of revenue, something like that, what's the CFO function that we can deliver as a service for them so they don't really have to think about how they're going to get
• 7:41
  that expertise and all of that know how going into that product came from Basically like the whole span of my career, even going all the way back to when I came out of college and I was a management
• 7:52
  consultant, all those skills that I learned from that are all packaged in kind of how we deliver the service.
• 7:59
  You know, you got to pay attention to things like project management, deliverables, you know, knowing how to ask the right questions, knowing how to like analyze things and present them back to entrepreneurs in ways that are efficient for
• 8:15
  them to understand and don't require them to have to spend a lot of time understanding what you're doing, showing them and instructing them to, to do and getting their feedback so that you can really produce a high quality
• 8:29
  interaction with them that really helps them push their business forward.
• 8:33
  Okay.
• 8:34
  Yeah.
• 8:34
  So I've heard other people even recommend too that people don't jump right into entrepreneurship maybe out of college or early on, in terms of get some experience in the workforce or really get, get, you know, employment experience just
• 8:49
  to understand the business working.
• 8:50
  But it sounds like too, that was invaluable, particularly that CFO role where you got to be in that seat where you scaled so rapidly and as part of that team, it sounds like that was a major part of
• 9:01
  the.
• 9:02
  Like you.
• 9:02
  For me specifically?
• 9:04
  Yeah.
• 9:04
  For.
• 9:04
  For what I do now, that was a key piece of the puzzle in the sense that going through all those repetitions as a CFO and understanding, like, what's efficient, what's not efficient, what have we done that added a
• 9:24
  lot of value and what was like a big waste of time going through those repetitions for the service that I offer now is important because it all gets factored into the approach that we take and that I.
• 9:41
  That our team really gets trained on delivering because our whole thing is, you know, when I talk to people who, like, kind of hear the elevator pitch on what we.
• 9:51
  What I do in this business that I started, I.
• 9:54
  Basically the way I describe it sometimes is I say we're a CFO service that's super high quality for less than it would cost for you to hire and build a team full time.
• 10:07
  So you're basically getting all the meat without any of the fat, right?
• 10:11
  And so efficiency and giving them building blocks that are proven and aren't being experimented with are key aspects of that.
• 10:23
  So.
• 10:23
  And all of that ability to operate that way with these building blocks that, you know, work comes from years of experience.
• 10:31
  Now, if I had gone to be an entrepreneur in, you know, let's say, a healthcare business or something like that, as, like, you know, the know, how I would apply, there is.
• 10:42
  Is quite different.
• 10:43
  It'd be more generic.
• 10:44
  Right.
• 10:44
  It just so happens that in my business, it's, like, specifically tied to an expertise that I have.
• 10:52
  And so as a result of that, it all funnels into what we do today in our.
• 10:57
  In our services.
• 10:59
  Okay, all right.
• 11:01
  So you're doing.
• 11:03
  You have your corporate job, you're doing some work on the side.
• 11:06
  You realize that there's a need in the market for this, the CFO services, particularly with like, the.
• 11:13
  The niche.
• 11:13
  You said 10 to 100 employees, three to $100 million in revenue, where you say there's this gap in the market and people need these services, and you don't see a solution that's being delivered effectively.
• 11:24
  You realize you have the know how, the expertise, and there's a way to package this and make it a real business.
• 11:29
  And like you said, you get a couple custom customers right off the bat, and then you realize you've got something here and you start moving fast.
• 11:36
  So what does that process look like from there?
• 11:39
  Like, what happens next?
• 11:41
  So for me, I've really flipped into how do I build a business model on the back end.
• 11:53
  So in the back of the house that minimizes the amount of work that the back of the house requires so that I can keep going quickly with customer acquisition and service delivery.
• 12:06
  Because at the beginning it was just me.
• 12:09
  I mean within 60 days or 90 days of being just me, I already had like two other people working with me because I was, I had that much demand.
• 12:19
  But I focused on infrastructure in the back of the house.
• 12:24
  So I got a, I spent a weekend and I went through like six different CRM systems that I had a view of playing around with because they all let you have free trials and figuring out which ones out
• 12:40
  of the box required the least amount of work, but covered the biggest span of events in my customer's journey.
• 12:48
  So I spent a lot of time getting that set up.
• 12:51
  Like a good example is obviously the work that we do with the clients is confidential in nature.
• 13:00
  Do I want to be dragging and dropping and emailing and thinking about E signatures for non disclosure agreements, confidentiality agreements with my prospects?
• 13:13
  No, I don't want to spend any time on that.
• 13:17
  So a key part of my CRM was the minute I put a lead in, I can just press a button and it kicks off a fully filled out confidentiality agreement that I can sign and the client the prospect
• 13:31
  can sign.
• 13:32
  Right.
• 13:33
  It's all part of the stream.
• 13:35
  So I wanted all these little pieces of the, of the back of the house to be very, very efficient so I didn't have to think about them because I didn't want to have to track down 10 emails for
• 13:46
  confidentiality agreements with 10 prospects.
• 13:48
  I just wanted it running in the background and I didn't want to hire an assistant to have to think about it.
• 13:53
  So I did stuff like that.
• 13:56
  You know, obviously I got coming from where I come from, you know, making sure that my accounting system was all set up and you know, built out.
• 14:04
  You know, one of the first permanent people that I brought on to help me out was a bookkeeper because I also didn't want to have to deal with like doing my own accounting entries.
• 14:14
  So once I had enough cash flow coming in, I knew exactly what I was looking for and, and had a bookkeeper handling all of that for me.
• 14:25
  I think the other big thing that I spent a lot of time on actually by minimizing the time in the back of the housework that gave me a lot of time was working on the front end, which was
• 14:38
  building out a website, creating my own newsletter with, you know, basically bi weekly content and then really getting my LinkedIn profile to represent me as a thought leader for entrepreneurs.
• 14:55
  So I spent a lot of time working on that, and in order to do that efficiently, I hired.
• 15:02
  I used AI, and then I hired some offshore subcontractors who had the capabilities and the right amount of talent to be able to manage the website, edit my content when I gave it to them, and then be able
• 15:20
  to keep the LinkedIn on a calendar of, you know, representing me in the market with all these original ideas that were coming out of the business.
• 15:31
  So that.
• 15:31
  That's where I.
• 15:32
  I focused in.
• 15:33
  And then the leads were coming in, you know, really through referrals.
• 15:39
  And so then I had a whole process for handling that, which was, you know, leveraging my CRM, but also just making sure I had a good calendaring system.
• 15:47
  So those are the kinds of things that I thought about, because for me, it was all about maximizing the amount of time I could spend with the clients and with prospects.
• 15:58
  Okay, all right.
• 16:00
  So you spent a lot of time on the front end, just in terms of, I guess, engineering this efficiency and these systems and these processes with the understanding you were going to scale, you're going to have many clients,
• 16:12
  you're going to want to have your time free to spend doing what you do in your zone of genius with the CFO services and not have to worry about, I guess, just the more tactical type of things, or
• 16:28
  like you said, chasing down emails for an NDA and all that type of thing.
• 16:33
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 16:34
  And having an efficient process for invoicing, an efficient process for signing contracts with clients, you know, and.
• 16:45
  And so then I.
• 16:46
  I always added a few tools to the mix, you know, which.
• 16:49
  Which I think could be beneficial to people who are in B2B services that might be listening to your podcast.
• 16:57
  But, you know, like a.
• 17:01
  A meeting recorder, an AI meeting recorder is, like, indispensable for me.
• 17:05
  Right.
• 17:05
  I don't show up to meetings anymore and take notes.
• 17:09
  I just listen and talk.
• 17:11
  And my meeting recorder captures everything, you know, provided that sometimes people don't want the recorder, in which case I have to switch to paper or, you know, typing on my computer.
• 17:21
  But 99% of the time, they're okay with the recorder, and we capture all the notes, and then that gives me the ability to really, like, you know, move much more quickly.
• 17:31
  So that's like another key tool for a consultant to be able to use.
• 17:40
  Absolutely, yeah.
• 17:41
  And it's interesting, too, because I'm sure you see examples of this.
• 17:44
  I know I do.
• 17:45
  Engaging with different people, whether vendors, service providers, or whoever, where there's founders, maybe that are doing, you know, founders wear many hats.
• 17:53
  Right.
• 17:53
  And particularly with the bootstrap business, you're doing a lot of different things in many different areas.
• 17:58
  And so often you see them overworked or behind schedule and not meeting deadlines, and probably very, very much so, because maybe some of these systems that they have aren't running as efficiently as they could.
• 18:11
  But it sounds like you took a lot of time to make sure that that was handled on the front end.
• 18:16
  Yeah.
• 18:17
  My view is that automation, and especially now with AI, but just automation in general and the variety of tools that are available to enable you to do your work more efficiently, it takes a little bit of planning up
• 18:36
  front, but once you, once you're locked and loaded on those, it just like pays dividends, you know, forever.
• 18:46
  You know, I mean, I have, you know, probably like a dozen small subscriptions that I pay for that are equivalent to having, like.
• 18:57
  Like there's almost no work for an assistant to do around me because I have all these little tools that take care of all this stuff, you know.
• 19:07
  All right.
• 19:09
  Yeah.
• 19:09
  And I would recommend that to other entrepreneurs who, like, need efficiency and they don't know where they're, you know, they may not understand, like, where they're losing their time and what's keeping them behind, but there's, there's a lot
• 19:23
  of stuff out there that you could, you could leverage.
• 19:27
  Okay.
• 19:28
  Any couple of your favorites you want to list out for people listening.
• 19:32
  Well, I just.
• 19:33
  Some, some, some people have been teasing me about this one, but I just started using this application called Calendar Bridge, and it, the main reason that I use it is that it's an AI assistant that has its own
• 19:53
  email address, and I copy it whenever somebody's asking me to set up a meeting.
• 19:59
  You know, a lot of people send out calendly links, and I, I have those as well.
• 20:04
  And occasionally I will use those in certain situations, but I find with my.
• 20:08
  With clients and prospects, to say to them, hey, look at my calendar and find a time to meet me is a little impersonal.
• 20:17
  So I, Calendar Bridge has this assistant that's an AI agent, and I send an email and say, hey, Dave, thanks so much for the Beyond Fulfillment interview.
• 20:31
  I really appreciate it.
• 20:34
  Let's connect again in like six weeks and just catch up on that topic that we wanted to talk about.
• 20:40
  And the assistant will read the email.
• 20:43
  It knows who you are, it knows what my calendar is, and it'll go six weeks out and send an email to you and says, hey, Dave, I just got the email from Sal.
• 20:53
  Here's what his schedule looks like six weeks from now.
• 20:58
  Pick one of these times and I'll send you an invite.
• 21:02
  And it's, it's literally like a human doing it, but it's, it's all AI.
• 21:07
  So calendar bridges.
• 21:08
  I'm a big fan of it.
• 21:10
  I use it every day.
• 21:12
  Okay.
• 21:15
  What'S, what's another one that I use?
• 21:17
  Well, I use Claude a lot for anything that requires any extensive amount of writing.
• 21:28
  So when I'm reviewing meeting notes, preparing proposals, drafting blog posts, I, I use Claude a lot for writing.
• 21:44
  So that's like another great monthly subscription that I have.
• 21:49
  You know, it really expedites the amount of written work that I can do in a short period of time.
• 21:55
  I mean, I, I have to review all the stuff myself, but if I need something done quickly or I just need a draft or an outline, I can just kind of go in there and you know, even set
• 22:05
  up meeting agendas, that kind of stuff.
• 22:08
  Those, those would be two.
• 22:09
  I have, I have lots more, but I don't want to take over the.
• 22:14
  I got you.
• 22:15
  Okay, appreciate that.
• 22:16
  Yeah.
• 22:17
  And so you brought up AI.
• 22:18
  So I mean, let's talk about that too because you're a big proponent of how AI can be used now in terms of financial reporting and just within the, I guess the, the CFO realm and those functions.
• 22:33
  Can you just talk more about your thoughts on that and kind of how, what your company does in terms using that for, for business?
• 22:41
  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's still really early days in terms of like doing anything like accounting entries and stuff like that related to the financials.
• 22:57
  Where the AI comes in handy is now you see it more on the financial reporting side.
• 23:02
  It's a little bit more well baked because it can, the AI will read the results and come up with its own analysis or discussion.
• 23:12
  I find them that saves some time in the sense of like, it just gives you a couple of highlights that you can kind of quickly put together.
• 23:24
  But, but in general, I think we're still kind of really in the early innings of it.
• 23:30
  And the key thing is that if you're going to use tools like that, you always need.
• 23:37
  You know, the AI doesn't really have like the real world context and it might learn some of that over time, but the real world context for the business might be much more important than what the numbers are actually
• 23:52
  saying.
• 23:52
  So for example, you know, you might do a financial report that says, oh, we spend like a hundred thousand dollars more on marketing this month or something.
• 24:01
  Like that, and that may look like, you know, a big increase in cost to like an AI agent that doesn't really understand the context.
• 24:12
  But you as the CFO will know like, oh yeah, of course we spent a hundred thousand dollars more because this is the month where we change the marketing and we're going to do all these new things.
• 24:22
  Right.
• 24:23
  And so the AI doesn't really have awareness of that when it's operating inside of its little box.
• 24:31
  So you know, you as the, as the CFO really need to provide the inter, ultimately like the highest level interpretation and, and be able to explain that to the client and also tell them, you know, good, bad or
• 24:49
  indifferent on, on whatever it is that you're looking at.
• 24:53
  Where I find on the finance side it is, is, is really more Automation tools are very, really valuable these days.
• 25:04
  So for example, if a client has a marketing database with a certain amount of information that you know, if you connect it to the financial information, you can produce some really important reports that discuss the effectiveness of marketing,
• 25:21
  for example, or the effectiveness of your sales team.
• 25:25
  There are automations and connections that you can make between these different databases that are more off the shelf these days.
• 25:31
  You don't need to be a developer to be able to use them.
• 25:36
  So you know, something like a zapier, especially with its new AI model where it'll try to build the whole connection for you, really takes a lot of the tech out of it and allows you as a, a solo
• 25:52
  or under resourced finance person to really connect information better.
• 25:57
  That's kind of like a more important step for us right now compared to just using the AI.
• 26:04
  Okay, all right, and so let's talk about the scaling process of the company too.
• 26:09
  Right?
• 26:09
  Because like you said, you put all these automations in place.
• 26:12
  You really worked hard on the front end in terms of the marketing and all that.
• 26:16
  I mean, how's the company grown, you know, in the, in the last, you know, the last several years as you've been, as you've been scaling it out?
• 26:24
  Yeah, so I've been doing it for a couple of years and we added 10 clients last year.
• 26:37
  Mind you, it's, we're at the beginning of 2026.
• 26:40
  So that was like pretty much like the beginning of my second full year.
• 26:46
  Over that period added 10 clients, I added five finance team members to the, to the firm who work on a variety of different clients.
• 27:00
  I grew my LinkedIn followers from like 2500 to like 7500.
• 27:11
  So much, much bigger audience on LinkedIn to you know, review our our content and we launched a new product segment as well.
• 27:24
  So and this we got pulled into and it was kind of a natural fit for us.
• 27:29
  But the service that I started the business with is, is generally in the market.
• 27:35
  It's called Fractional cfo.
• 27:38
  And what we do is we're basically your permanent part time finance function, right?
• 27:43
  We get paid, you know, a flat monthly fee and we deliver all these services month in, month out and we're there to more or less act like a, a full time resource.
• 27:57
  So you're not counting the hours or worrying about like what's the bill going to be at the end of the month.
• 28:02
  But we're doing it on a part time basis.
• 28:06
  And then in the middle of last year through a couple of relation, two different relationships actually came from two different directions.
• 28:14
  We were asked to do interim CFO work and interim CFO work is full time or almost full time on a temporary basis where you're going in to really solve problems for people.
• 28:30
  And so that as part of the scale.
• 28:31
  And we launched that new product set.
• 28:33
  So now we have like team members that are working on the permanent part time stuff as fractionals and then they also kind of dip into this temporary full time work when, when it becomes available.
• 28:48
  And usually the way we do it is we put two people on the temporary full time assignments to really help the client get the wheel spinning because they usually need to fix things quickly and sometimes they're really big
• 28:59
  problems, you know, that people are like sweating over.
• 29:03
  So, so yeah, so that's pretty much what the scaling's been like so far.
• 29:07
  My goal this year is to add 14 clients.
• 29:11
  So, you know, 40%, you know, contract growth over the growth from last year.
• 29:18
  Maybe I'll do better than that.
• 29:20
  I'm not sure, you know, I might adjust my expectations, you know, over the course of this year.
• 29:26
  I just started a whole new marketing strategy that is, you know, trying to just bring in new names that aren't part of my referral network.
• 29:40
  So that's a whole part of the strategy for growing the client count this year.
• 29:45
  Okay, and so let's talk about that too because again, you're, you're a couple years in, right?
• 29:49
  And you're, you're the face of the company and you're doing the founder led selling.
• 29:54
  So how, how important do you think that is?
• 29:57
  Being that this is your like your baby, right?
• 30:00
  And like you don't have a ton of customers, right?
• 30:03
  Like you said like 10, you know, 10 customers last time last year.
• 30:08
  So you work with them very Closely.
• 30:10
  And these are 3 to 100 million dollar companies right in that range.
• 30:14
  So how important do you think it is for you as a young company to be selling as the founder versus maybe outsourcing that to someone else?
• 30:23
  No, I think that's really important probably for a lot of businesses.
• 30:29
  But for me and, and, and there are people on my team who really want to get into the selling process.
• 30:36
  In fact, I've got a call, I think right after this one where one of someone on my team basically has like two new leads that they brought in and they want to be part of the sale process.
• 30:47
  So at some point you can kind of start, you know, training people on how to do the selling.
• 30:55
  But I think it's important for the founder at the beginning to be pretty heavily involved.
• 30:58
  You really need to understand why is the client buying, what are their pain points, Especially in our business, because every client's different.
• 31:07
  So you want to customize, you're customizing a service for them.
• 31:13
  And also like showing up to the sales meetings with a, you know, full capability of knowledge that makes the client feel comfortable that you can really get this done.
• 31:29
  That's another part of another reason why the founder is important at these early stages.
• 31:34
  But again, at a certain point you have to scale out of that and you can start to introduce new faces into the selling process.
• 31:42
  And I'm just attempting that this year for the first time.
• 31:48
  Okay.
• 31:48
  All right.
• 31:49
  And so Sal, if people, businesses out there listening are in that range, 10 to 100 employees, 3 to 100 million dollar in revenue, and they're having some issues in terms of, you know, the, the CFO function or their
• 32:04
  finances.
• 32:05
  I mean, just talk, tell them again specifically what problems you solve and then how they can find you on.
• 32:11
  Yeah, sure.
• 32:12
  So I know I said 10 to 100 employees.
• 32:14
  It's really more like 10 to 200, sometimes even 300.
• 32:22
  And the revenues are really in that 3 to $100 million range.
• 32:26
  So that's a pretty accurate number.
• 32:28
  But we are doing two main things for clients.
• 32:34
  You're a family or founder owned business.
• 32:36
  You don't really have a real finance function.
• 32:39
  You may not really understand how to use a finance function.
• 32:42
  For a long time.
• 32:43
  You've thought of it as like bookkeeping, bank reconciliations, tax accounting.
• 32:51
  But you're realizing that you're always struggling with knowing where your cash is.
• 33:00
  Profits don't equal cash flow.
• 33:04
  You want to grow, you don't, you don't really know where to invest.
• 33:09
  You may need to raise capital.
• 33:10
  You may have the opportunity to Raise some debt or some equity.
• 33:17
  You may have to do some sort of business transformation in your, in your company and you want to have financial expertise on board.
• 33:26
  Those are the things where we come in as like the regular, your permanent part time cfo and we help you navigate those things.
• 33:33
  In all of our clients, we're, you know, probably the number one advice advisor provider to the owner of the business or the CEO once we step in there, because we see everything, we hear everything, we have really honest
• 33:53
  conversations with them and we're really there to help them make their businesses better.
• 33:58
  So that's one aspect of it.
• 33:59
  The other aspect of it, which for founders and families is they really want to get ready to sell the company.
• 34:09
  And in that case, it's not so much a permanent part time role, it might be a temporary full time role or a temporary near full time role where they really want to have financial expertise in the business to
• 34:24
  help them get things in order so that when they go sell the business, everything looks great and very understandable to the potential buyers.
• 34:34
  And I can't underest, under, understate that at all.
• 34:39
  I mean, it's when you go and you want to try to sell a business, if you can show up to your meetings with really nice looking financials with a story behind it and the ability to answer, you know,
• 34:52
  99% of the questions without having to like, go back and figure it out, you come across as like a top tier management team that buyers really want to invest in or, or, or buy the company from.
• 35:10
  And so that's the other aspect of our business is that interim CFO work.
• 35:16
  I'm kind of describing in a way that makes it maybe more understandable for entrepreneurs and business owners who might be listening to the podcast.
• 35:27
  But there's a whole other set of things that we do under that interim work, which is more problem solving.
• 35:33
  It may not be related to a sale, but we also kind of handle that stuff.
• 35:38
  Okay.
• 35:38
  All right.
• 35:39
  And if people want to find you online, Sal, what's the best way they can?
• 35:41
  Yes, CFO pro analytics.com and you can schedule an appointment right there if you want to have a quick chat with us.
• 35:51
  And then also you can easily find me on LinkedIn.
• 35:55
  Just look up CFO Salter Basi or just Salvatore Tirabasi and you'll find me.
• 36:03
  You can pretty easily find me by just putting my name in a Google search too.
• 36:07
  Okay.
• 36:08
  And we love talking to owners and, and founders of businesses.
• 36:13
  I mean, we get a lot out of the initial conversations and we like to give a lot of free advice.
• 36:19
  So it's not, you know, we don't show up to meetings thinking that, you know, we're there to close the sale.
• 36:24
  We're really there to like listen and kind of show them that we've got knowledge and know how that can be beneficial to them.
• 36:31
  And the way that we do that is we start advising them from the, you know, first discussion and then if we can, if there's something for us to do with them on a, on an ongoing basis for fees.
• 36:41
  Great.
• 36:44
  Okay.
• 36:45
  All right.
• 36:45
  We will link all that in the show notes as well.
• 36:47
  So any entrepreneurs that want some free financial advice initially, at least they could, they can reach out to Sal and then see where it goes from there.
• 36:57
  Okay.
• 36:57
  Well, Sal, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this valuable wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 37:03
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 37:04
  Thanks, Dave.
• 37:05
  Really nice meeting you.
• 37:06
  I appreciate it.