Track 3: Introduction to Offering Forecasting Services to Your Accounting Firm Clients

Transcription:

Luke Templin (00:09):

That's not the slide. Here's a quick overview on what I plan on covering today. Again, we'll end with Q&A, but if you have a question that's burning that you want to get to throughout, just feel free to raise your hand and I'll try and get to you. So I'm Luke Templin. I have a fractional CFO business that I run as a lifestyle business. As you can see, I'm a huge golfer. Played at Torrey Pines this morning. Intentionally keep my firm small so I can play golf on Fridays. And it's one of the reasons why I love advisory because I'm not stuck behind the desk to deadlines. And then I also have a software company called Finn Daily that I'll show you that I use with clients and it's essentially a financial digest on iPilot. What I'm going to cover today is based on experience of being an actual private CFO, the experience I have learned throughout being within three CPA firms, running my own fractional CPA firm, and then there's a CFO group I belong to with people way more intelligent than I that I get the pleasure of picking their brain on forecasting.



(01:18):

And I'll share some of those insights with you for some background. Most of my clients are service-based professional services contractors, usually subcontractors. I have found personally my sweet spot to be a million in revenue and above. I have worked with smaller companies than that. Typically they're looking to raise funds kind of in a startup phase, but I have found from an investment standpoint, a million above usually makes sense. And then I also have a newsletter called the Cash Cache, and I share all my experiences. I've learned building different cast practices and advisory services and what I'm doing currently in my own fractional CFO firm.



(02:06):

Before we get started, if I start talking about a slide and I forget to change it, let me know because I'm changing slides in two spots. So before we get started, I love this quote because I am a procrastinating perfectionist. So I would go to conferences like this, be like, this stuff sounds awesome, and then I wouldn't do anything with it. And the only way I learned what I'm going to tell you today is I failed a lot doing it. And so I encourage you, whether it's this session or another session, just take one thing away and we have some time at the end to do that and try and put it in play and see how it works and whether you like it or not. So why do forecasting? I'll say, before you jump into forecasting, I highly recommend you have a conversation with your client and it's a real simple conversation to do.



(03:02):

When I was in the top 100 firm, we called 'em voice of customers, voice of client, and essentially it's getting with your top clients and having a conversation with them in regards to what they like that you're doing for them currently, what you can do better for them, and then what potentially are they missing that you could provide to them. And the lead in to the advisory space to me is asking them about their business goals. Most entrepreneurs I work with operate on something called EOS. So they have quarterly rocks that they're trying to accomplish throughout their business. And the more you can dive into what they're going to accomplish throughout the quarter or year and ask questions about that business plan, the more you're going to get insights into whether what I'm going to share today would work for 'em. And what you're listening for is they're looking to grow, they're looking to add new revenue lines, they're looking to add new locations, things like that.



(04:03):

Where I start to dig in is I start asking them questions about what uncertainties do you have with these plans? A lot of times what you're going to hear is we don't know when to hire. We don't know whether we should raise funds, whether it be debt or equity. And those are really good tells that your client is going to be open and receptive to doing advisory. And what I have found being within CPA firms is the bookkeeping side of things, the kind of compliance side of things like clients are doing that it's a necessary evil, it's after the fact. They really want to look at the future. They want to talk about what's driving the business forward and they get really excited about advisory. The beauty of forecasting some advisory stuff that I do as a fractional CFO is not as scalable as what forecasting is.



(04:52):

And the reason why is typically to hire someone like me, most fractional CFOs are six figures up in salary. But with forecasting, you can have senior level people doing the forecasting for your firms and you obviously can charge more, but the key is you never want to equate the providing advisory services to, it's taking us more time. So we have to charge more. You really want to focus on the value. You're helping them put together a plan on whether or not whatever decision they want to do, whether it's hire someone, add new equipment, expand, it gives them more certainty in that decision.



(05:44):

So I started getting into forecasting, working for a landscaping operation, was doing a little over $15 million in revenue and it had been around for over 60 years. When I started, they had no forecast and they barely had financials. Part of the business, the majority of the business was retail. And the more and more I got into it, it was really hard to predict demand. It fluctuated a lot and forecasting actually wasn't a great fit for the company. So what we did instead of forecasting is we did what I call scenario planning. So one example was we had this nasty little bug come to town called the Emerald Ash Borer. And so essentially I put together analysis for the business owners on what it would look like to create a new service offering to go attack the bug. On paper, the offering looked great. It was a cash cow, it was recurring revenue, it was everything financially you wanted to see, but the owners decided that they did not want to pursue the service because it was not a core value fit.



(06:53):

And they instead wanted to educate customers on biodiversity and doing new tree plantings rather than attack a problem that inevitably was going to win. You were just prolonging the problem. And the reason I bring this up is this is where forecasting can kind of get tricky, especially for perfectionist, which are most accountants because it's part science, but it's also part art. So you might come up with this analysis that it makes sense from a financial perspective, but you also got to look at the different pieces of the business. For example here, core values, whether or not it was a fit. And the other reason I bring this up is I have found there are a lot of businesses out there that are doing absolutely nothing like this business has been around 60 years. They had no forecast, barely had financials. So you'll find with your clients, they're not doing anything today. So doing something is way better than nothing.



Audience Member 1 (08:03):

A quick question for you



Luke Templin (08:04):

Yeah.



Audience Member 1 (08:05):

So what do you tell a client that you want to give this new service, but they would say, well, I've survived 60 years, so why do I need it? Tell me again.



Luke Templin (08:13):

Yeah, yeah. So I will say there are some clients that you can't sell. I don't have it in here. What I would do in CPA firms is I have teasers and it would be going through and doing an analysis on the financials, like looking at revenue trends, looking at cost of goods sold trends. Usually what you'll find is they don't have financials that tell a story. And usually you'll find that there's some sort of trend, whether it be a cashflow, big spike in cashflow and just showing them that and having a conversation with them kind of as a way to lead into the conversation. But yeah, you're exactly right. You'll run into clients just like I've ran my business out of a bank account and that's all I need to do. I do have something in here I'll share with you that I use with a lot of clients when I don't do a forecast.



(09:07):

And I have found it be really helpful because to your point, a lot of business owners, owners are and have ran their businesses purely by looking at their checking account, which is a slippery slope. And some of 'em have been really successful doing it cash cows. So I'm in a CFO leadership group, it's 1500 CFOs across the country. I sent out a survey to 'em to get some insights onto what they're doing forecasting. So 39 of them responded and majority of them in professional services. And you can see they're quite large companies. One of the most interesting things I found is over 10% of 'em said they're not doing forecasting at all. I gave a similar presentation to to the local Omaha chapter where I'm from, and I think from what I gathered, 50% of them weren't doing forecast. And again, it's back to that point, those businesses are doing nothing now, so something is better than what they're doing now.



(10:11):

And in that survey, I asked them to give some advice, and I'm not going to go word for word on this, but the bottom one resonates a lot. It's not a science, it's an art. And most of us probably have some tendencies to getting things a hundred percent, and that makes a really good accountant. And that was a hurdle I had to get over to do forecasting. You're never going to be right with a forecast. I actually have stopped comparing forecast to actual because it just brought up too many questions. Again, it's an art, it's not a science, it's not going to be perfect. My team does monitor that in the background. We have found it's a really good tool, especially if you're tracking things like the pipeline in the backlog to see if invoices went out correctly. We have found multiple 10,000 plus invoices that didn't go out because we were tracking the background, what they said the backlog should be versus what actually happened in the p and l. And here is a couple more pieces of advice. The last one we've kind of hit on, we'll hit on a little bit more. I found this to be super relevant. I was talking to Randy a little bit about this earlier. Early in my career, I would throw everything at the wall at an entrepreneur and they'd just be like, woo. And I have found the more I can dumb things down, the more receptive to the information they will be.



(11:45):

So in that survey I found 81% of these CFOs were using Excel or Google Sheets, and it's usually the first question I get, like, what tool are you using Luke? But if these CFOs that are doing multimillion dollar forecasting for multimillion dollar companies are using Excel and you know how to use Excel, you might as well start there. I will say the tool I'm currently using, I'm on tool number three, looking at tool number four. I currently use Fathom, which I'll show you here. I have been consulting with Live Flow on some templates. I'm a big simple numbers person, which I'll explain here in a little bit. And they just came out with an Excel plugin to QuickBooks, so I've been playing a little bit with theirs and giving them consultants or consulting on that. But again, Excel's really easy to use. There's downfalls to it. Obviously it doesn't automatically update and you can break it, but it's a good place to start and I still use it today, so I'm not going to walk through all of these, but this is where I recommend most people start. So when you have that conversation with the business owner on what their business goals are for the upcoming quarter, for the upcoming year, usually it's going to be around uncertainty. A lot of times it's going to be uncertainty on cashflow, it's going to be uncertainty on hiring people and sometimes unfortunately, uncertainty on firing people.



(13:19):

And so the first example I have up here seems really simplistic to us, but I have found this to be really good with subcontractors. And I always say, you got to remember your client probably took an accounting class 20 years ago. What we find is really basic is actually complex to them. And this concept comes from the power of one, which is in the book Scaling Up. And so by showing them what the change of margin by 5% does to their bottom line, I've actually gotten subcontractors to change how they price projects. Again, it seems super simple, but when you show 'em that a 5% increase drops 50,000 to the bottom line, they start to listen. If you're interested, the website on the left, cache.com, any of these templates I show are there, the power one is in there, but it's essentially if you make a 1% change to the seven levers that we as advisors can control, it shows the impact to that client's cashflow and p and l. And so there's a worksheet in there that comes from the book scaling up on those levers. And my favorite one is pricing. It's been shown that a 1% increase in pricing can drop 10% to the bottom line.



(14:55):

This might be a little hard to read, but again, it is out on the website if you want it. I use this with all my clients to start and sometimes I'll stop here. It's a very simple high level model and it is based on Greg Crabtree's Simple Numbers book. I don't know if anyone has read it, but he has two books. They're great. Greg is a big advocate of labor efficiency, which I deal with professional and trade service companies. So labor is their number one spend. And so these are essentially the metrics I use. There's three labor efficiency ratios. So the first one up top is DLER, which is direct labor, direct labor efficiency. So for every dollar I spend in direct labor, I should return X dollars in gross margin. Now this number will vary from company to company, and essentially what I'll do is I'll kind of plug and chug with a spreadsheet like this, but I know at the end of the day for a trade service company, I want to get to a net operating income percentage of 10% or above, and I typically know that I should see a contribution margin of 35% or above.



(16:18):

Now there'll be times I'll do this on the interim with a client as an assessment and they'll be way below. So I'm going to set those targets to what I think could be a reasonable gain in a quarter or a year, which is usually like 5% increase. So I'll kind of play around with those numbers based on what I'm seeing to get to what direct labor efficiencies should be. But usually around three is where I've seen it. Three and above is usually really good. So the next one is management labor efficiency. So for every dollar in management labor I spend, I should return X in contribution margin. And it's very similar to direct labor. There's no specific number you should hit. It varies company by company. But this one I found really important because most entrepreneurs doing over a million dollars, usually the place they're overspending is in management labor.



(17:15):

They hired someone with a C-suite tile they shouldn't have hired. And this is a good way of showing 'em that yeah, that person might not be the best fit right now for the size of business you are hard conversation to have, but in reality, it's what I see a lot of. And then the last one is overall labor efficiency. And this is where Greg Crabtree says for most industries it should be around $2. You can see in the example I have here, if you hit $2 in labor efficiency, you're dropping 27.5% to the bottom line. That's pretty good. So it probably could be lower in this scenario.



(17:53):

The industries off the top of my head that it doesn't apply to are distribution, manufacturing, recruiting. But again, it's one of those things that'll all play around with this spreadsheet trying to hit the net operating income percentage and the contribution margin percentage I think the client should be at. And usually you can find these by Googling 'em or finding a benchmark group that has them. But I have found just showing this to clients and really discussing two things like if you want to hire somebody at whatever amount it is, you need to either grow revenue by X amount. And what I've found really effective is actually breaking it down by a number of units. So whether it's number of clients, number of patients seen, keep it as simple as possible because being able to monitor a number like this example is actually patients 67 is something that everyone in an organization can understand. Not everyone in an organization is going to get labor, labor efficiency. Some of my clients I will only use overall labor efficiency. And the reason for that is a lot of smaller entrepreneurs, I'll see, especially the business owner is doing a lot of both. They're doing management and direct labor. A lot of construction companies I see they're kind of blurring admin and direct labor together. So if that's the case, then I'll just use overall labor efficiency and I won't show both.



(19:45):

And so the thing I talked about earlier that I worked with Live Flow and Crabtree on is actually getting a template to where it's plug and play. So you can connect this to QuickBooks and what I have found with entrepreneurs, you're way better off showing them charts, which I'll show you what I use in my reports with Fathom than showing them a spreadsheet like I just showed you. And so this, you can see the labor efficiencies cut off, but it's charting kind of the trends of what's going on within the business



(20:20):

And it updates real life unlike the spreadsheet I just showed before. And one thing I forgot to hit on that you'll see in this example is I use rolling averages as well, and that's what that template does too. So I'll look at a 12 month, I'll look at a six month rolling average to kind of see where they're trending. You can see in the 12 month example, if a client came to me and they wanted to hire, I would go to 'em and say, Hey, you could hire someone for $2,500 a month. They would probably say, well, we want to hire someone that's making way more than $30,000 a year. And that's where this then can lead into a forecast. And it's like, okay, well if we're going to hire someone, let's say at a hundred thousand, how are we going to get there? Are we going to increase sales?



(21:02):

Are we going to go and get a loan from the bank, a working capital loan? Are we going to go to investors and raise equity? This is how that ends up leading into forecasting in the six months trend. You can see they actually need to make cuts. Now, I'm not going to go to my client and be like, yeah, you got to make $10,000 worth of payroll cuts. I'm, my next step is probably going to go look at OpEx. Is there anything we can cut there and have that conversation with them or putting a plan together with a forecast of taking on potentially investors or looking at ways to grow sales with them.



(21:47):

So I got this when I was an interim CFO for a $40 million plus heavy contractor, the entrepreneur that ran that business, he could care less to see financials as long as I got him this on a weekly basis. He loved it. And this was also the recommendation from the CFO because what I have found is that entrepreneurs so focused on that top number, they forget to see everything else. And my largest client, we look at this on a weekly basis and it's actually helped change his spending habits. He would just look at his bank account, oh, I have $175,000 in the bank, I think I should get a plane. And I was like, Oh My God, he ended up having two at one point. We're slowly getting rid of both, but off topic. But I have found putting this in front of an entrepreneur has been really effective. I will warn this is time intensive, but it's very valuable to charge accordingly.



(22:50):

And so this is why I created Fend Daily. So I use this with my smaller clients. It's not as intensive as doing the cash reporting, which is something I still do with my larger clients. But this you can set up in 10 minutes, connects to the bank account, connects to a QuickBooks file. So you can create these custom email templates that give them a snapshot on a daily, weekly, semi-monthly basis of essentially what's going on with their cashflow. I've also found this to be a really good accountability tool. I don't do bookkeeping in my firm. I typically partner with outsource bookkeepers and I'm not scared to get rid of 'em when they're not good. If a client comes to me with a bookkeeper, it's like I'm happy to work with him, but I've seen how this goes. So last month I actually had a client that fired their bookkeeper because of this email. He kept getting it and kept asking the same questions over and over, where's this invoice? Why has this invoice not been collected? And it came down to the bookkeeper wasn't doing her job.



(23:57):

Okay now into forecasting. So I've gone through the financial model on labor efficiency and the client wants to hire somebody or we are going to go get some equity. So I use Fathom to do this and I want to get something in front of that entrepreneur as quick as possible. And so in Fathom, they have what's called baselines. And what I have found to be the most effective is it will just take a three month or six month trend of what's been going on in the current financials and create a forecast like this. For seasonal clients like contractors or e-commerce, they have an option where if you do 12 months, you can do seasonal adjustments to factor in the spikes. So it's really quick way to get started. Once I do that, then I'll start adding in actuals. So the big one is employees is I tend to lean toward professional services because most salaries are fixed.



(25:01):

Now when I'm doing contractors and they have a bunch of hourly employees, I'm just going to look at what the last two to three months of payroll has been for those employees to put into the forecast. And this is again where people can get stuck. You want to get it perfect. I totally understand that that's how I was. But what I realized is if my client actually has a big enough problem where a Delta and hours matters, that shouldn't be an issue of the forecast, that should be the client mandating their staff can only work so many hours, can't put in overtime. So what Fathom allows you to do with these employees is they're called micro forecast. So I can have Jake as an employee and I can in one forecast show Jake staying employee and another forecast I can show us terminating Jake as an employee and then show how that impacts the cashflow with the client.



(26:03):

And then I'll add in other actuals. So another reason I like professional services, a lot of times they have recurring revenue. So we'll put in known projects into the forecast. And this is a lot of times where I'm helping clients, a lot of 'em don't have a backlog or they don't have a pipeline looking forward on what's going on. And so I'll work with them on creating that. Usually in Excel, some will put it in a CRM like Hubdoc, HubSpot, and we'll include that in the forecast as well. And then large fixed expenses like rent some software, but anything else, expense-wise, I'm just using those rolling three month averages. I've found it to be super effective and way easier than what you'll hear pushed to most accountants, which is called driver-based forecasting.



(26:56):

So the CFOs I surveyed, most of them were actually doing historical growth. So last year, gross 5%, very basic as well. There's in my Omaha chapter, the CFO of scooters is in there, which if you're not familiar with it, it's essentially the Midwest version of Starbucks. They're doing, I don't know, two to $3 million worth of revenue a year. And I had a discussion with him on this and he's like, Luke, we've tried everything. We've tried forecasting based on weather. And he was like, the most effective thing we have found is to look at prior year that week and add a percentage of growth to it. And he's got a team of I think three to four people doing forecasting and they're doing it on a weekly basis. And that guy's way smarter than me. So if he's keeping it that simple, made me feel a lot better about what I was doing.



(27:52):

So 19% of 'em are doing what I'm doing and moving average and digging through the hybrid approach, a lot of 'em, were really doing what I'm doing. They're doing the hybrid, they're doing an average and then putting in some known recurring stuff. What you'll see pushed a lot in industry, and it drives me nuts, is driver-based forecasting what's also known as multiple linear regression. Only 5% of people were doing that. It is a good fit in things like software where you have a really defined funnel to work through. So we have this many leads. We know our conversion rate, that conversion rate leads to X amount of sales. But I have found for the amount of effort you put in, it's not worth the effort. It's not as accurate.



(28:48):

Okay? So my process, I'm typically meeting with clients on a monthly recorded basis to go over the forecast and we'll bring in critical employees when needed. So if we're looking at a backlog or a pipeline, we'll bring in a sales leader to do that. Don't necessarily need to do that, especially if you're doing the rolling averages. And then I have found it best to only show three to six months worth of the actual forecast. So the graph up here on the right is a chart that is embedded in my Fathom reports. So I do this for revenue, cost of sales, operating expenses and cashflow. So I don't know if you can see it, you can't see it on this screen. There's a gray line at December, which is, or no, November. There's a gray line. So everything to the right is the forecast. Everything to the left is the actual, what I like about Fathom is that that black line in the middle is a 12 month rolling average. I really wish they had three and six months there, but they don't. That's another reason I've looked at live flow because live flow does have three and six months, which I've found to be a better way to look at trends.



(30:03):

So I'm only showing the owner three to six months, typically three months, unless I'm seeing something in a backlog or pipeline, like a big drop in sales that I want to talk about during that meeting, I will put in the tool, especially if the client is going to get bank financing or looking to have investors, I'll put a longer tail in the actual tool. But I have found that if I go over that, it just overwhelms the owner. So typically only my team's looking at that information and we're trying to keep the conversation very pointed in that template as well. And there's an article too that I've written in my newsletter. It kind of walks through my agenda that I use with clients. I've modeled it off USSL 10 meeting. And so it's starting the meeting with what's top of mind, then talking about what happened in the past. And the majority of the meeting is focused on a forecast. The article I have talks about, you don't necessarily need to forecast to start that way. You can just start with a conversation about again, what the future business plans are and then go from there.



(31:23):

So I found it interesting. The CFOs I interviewed are surveyed. Were doing a lot longer terms of forecast. And I think the reason without digging into that is a lot of them, because their larger businesses are backed by capital and they need to do longer forecast, I typically find banks want to see three years and investors want to see five years. And the other thing I thought was really interesting is most of them were updating it quarterly rather than monthly. And I've done that at times. When I go in and I see a client that I think needs forecasting, I'll put together, I use tier pricing. And so I'll put together a package that's got quarterly updates and that's got monthly updates to kind of differentiate the two packages. All right, before we go to the bar or Q&A, key takeaways. So the big one, thank you.



(32:32):

So the big one is have the conversation first. There's been so many times where I'm like, yes, my client needs this, I've done it. And then I'm like, oh, they really don't like this. So have that conversation about what's coming up in the business, what are their goals, what are they hoping to do with the business in the future? And sometimes their answer might be like, we're just trying to maintain this for a lifestyle. We really don't want to do anything with it. They're not going to be a fit for this type of stuff. But those conversations will lead to uncertainty. We're uncertain about how our cashflow is going to be. We want to hire, but we don't know when or we don't know how to fund it. We want to expand, we want to add revenue lines. So when you start hearing that, that's when you can use those templates.



(33:25):

Start simple, do it very high level, and then slowly work your way into forecasting. The last thing I will say is remember to, you want to provide more value. You want to focus on the value you're providing, not the more hours you're putting into it. And then what I alluded to at the beginning of the presentation, and I'm terrible at this myself, I get excited about all these different things I learned in a conference and I'll do nothing about it. What I have found to be effective is to take one action item. And that could simply be buying Simple Numbers book, and Greg does not pay me for that, or it could be going to download the templates, but putting it on my calendar and actually scheduling it next week, I have found to be super effective of actually taking action on some of this stuff. Again, I would've never have learned any of this by just sitting around reading books. I had to try it and I had to fail doing it. That's all I got. So I'll open up to questions or feel free to go to the bar. Start here. Yeah.



Audience Member 2 (34:37):

You also alluded to this, but how do you charge for how you price it?



Luke Templin (34:41):

Yeah. Okay. So you ask, how do I charge for this so that I could do a whole another presentation on, I'm a big proponent of value billing, which I know is squishy. So the way I look at it is you got to develop a floor price. So a floor price is whoever your team is doing this, whether it's a pod for me, it's me individually with an analyst behind me and figuring out how many clients I can take on. So for me personally, I say eight. I've seen fractional CFOs, kind of 10 clients is a sweet spot. I've seen some really successful ones get closer to 20, but they also burn through a lot of people. And so it's figuring out, okay, me and this analyst, we're going to handle eight people. How much money do I want to make? How much time do I want to have off what margins I want to and kind of work backwards into a monthly fixed price.



(35:43):

And then I look at pricing as a dial. So if I only have four clients, I'm going to be probably putting proposals together at that floor price, but if I'm getting closer to that eight, I'm going to start cranking up that dial and I'm going to start figuring out ways that I can justify my value. My go-to as a fractional CFO is my job is to increase profitability. I say I can typically try and increase profitability three to 5%. And then looking at what does three to 5% equate to in business value. So if I increase a business three to 5%, what's the multiple in that industry? I'm not going to go all the way up to that, but I know now, okay, I'm somewhere between my floor price and the value creation I'm going to do for this. Yeah, but I could go on and on for hours on that in the back.



Audience Member 1 (36:40):

Is there a resource that you go to help your landscape client that you had on what the pricing should be look like or the terms?



Luke Templin (36:50):

Yeah, so you ask, is there a resource I go to figure out pricing or what the terms should look like? I haven't found a great one. I kind of have an idea where pricing in my market is at, and then I'm looking at, I'm essentially backing into pricing from a margin standpoint is a very similar exercise to what I just talked about, is figuring out, and it is a good exercise to do with contractors, is figuring out how much that person or that team is costing and then marking up two or three times kind of back into what margin should be and look at it that way. And what I found with contractors is they're really leery on increasing prices because all their competitors have been charging the same price. And the question I like to ask is, what do you do different than your competitor? And I find it really interesting. I get a long list of items when I ask that question, and then I'm like, but you should charge the same as your competitor. And that's when the wheel starts spinning. Anyone else? Yes. What



Audience Member 3 (38:05):

Was the name of the author of Inc.



Luke Templin (38:09):

Greg Crabtree. So she asked the author of Simple Numbers, Greg Crabtree, super interesting guy. He's an entrepreneur organization with me. And the core of entrepreneur organization is you're essentially having a mastermind with eight business owners. You're not allowed to sell to them. And he asked one question to them all, would you rehire your accountant or refer your accountant? Something around that line. Every single one of them said no. So he took that opportunity to figure out why. And that was the premise of his first book. Anyone else? Or is it time to go to the bar?



(38:54):

I really like whiskey, Randy, you know this.



Audience Member 4 (38:58):

Who wants to go to the bar Worse? Us or



Luke Templin (38:59):

You? Anyone else in the back?



Audience Member 5 (39:07):

How would you approach someone who you would never know? You would never talk to? How you



Luke Templin (39:13):

Approach it? That's a hard one I have found. So I kind of market myself to accountants and I market myself to business owners, and I've never really gone down a deep niche. Most of what I do on the fractional business, the fractional CFO business is old school marketing. It's connecting with people in my community and getting warm leads. Most of my clients come from Nebraska. I've had a few outside and it's been a combination of people within my network in Omaha or Nebraska have referred me to them. And then sometimes connecting with other accountants. I've gotten referrals that way as well. But doing advisory work, I saw something once and I can't find it. That essentially what we do as a profession, not necessarily advisor, but being an accountant, being a trusted advisor of the numbers is probably one of the second highest, most trusted professions next to doctor. So it can be done. Summit CPA was really good at niching toward marketing agencies and the way they did that was going to conferences, marketing conferences and speaking. But if you're not super niched, it's old school marketing, in my opinion. Anyone else? I appreciate everyone. Yes. Randy,



Audience Member 6 (40:50):

What kind of whiskey do you like?



Luke Templin (40:52):

Bourbon. Bourbon, all kinds of bourbon. Anything in the Buffalo Trace Tree. I appreciate you all attending. If you see me at the bar or at the conference or the golf course, feel free to come up and chat. I'm happy to dive deeper on any of these topics.