Gain Clarity and Focus with the CALMER Framework

Megan - 00:00:18: Today, my guest is Susan Boles. Susan is a fractional CFO slash COO and business strategist for client-based businesses at Beyond Margins. She focuses on helping businesses get clear on their numbers and truly understand their inner workings at a deeper level so they can make decisions from a place of intention and purpose instead of panic. Susan has over a decade of experience as a CFO and COO, and she's on a mission to help founders build calm, sustainable businesses that punch above their weight. She's also the host of the Beyond Margins podcast, the show where we geek out about building a calm business with comfortable margins. Susan, thank you very much for joining me on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

Susan - 00:01:33: Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to chat.

Megan - 00:01:36: Yeah, to steal a quote from you, throughout your career, you've seen way too many business owners burn out or build businesses they want to burn down. And today, your purpose is to help business owners get clear on their numbers and to truly understand their inner workings at a deeper level so that they can make decisions from a place of intention and purpose instead of panic. And today, we're going to be talking about how to be a better business advisor and what that means to you and your clients. And I'm looking forward to learning about you and your experiences. So let's get started.

Susan - 00:02:12: Sounds good.

Megan - 00:02:12: First, if you can just give us an overview of your career path to date or how it is that you got to where you are now.

Susan - 00:02:20: Yeah, so mine is very long and windy. I like to call myself an accidental accountant because that was never what I thought I was going to be doing. I ended up in the CFO world, the accounting world. I kind of backed into it by way of technology. So I had my own business. And one of the things that I needed to be really good at was doing things very efficiently. So I was running businesses with my partner and also had day jobs. And my job was the whole back end of the business. So I was doing the accounting and all the technology and the software tools and payroll and HR and all of that stuff. But I had a full time job. So I really early leaned into technology. I was very early to, I guess, in the US to the zero ecosystem of apps and tools and really went down the rabbit hole of understanding, how APIs work and that sort of thing, because I needed to be able to automate a lot of my work because I wasn't there doing it. And that sort of led me in conjunction with being a data geek. I started my professional career as a data analyst. So I was in the world of data. I was the chief data officer for some universities. So the software plus the data plus my MBA basically led me to a role as the data analyst. I was a data and technology geek for a fractional CFO firm. So I was doing a lot of the software implementations, which led me to my own business, just doing software implementations, and professionally still working full time as a data geek, and then eventually as a CFO for a university. And so there's lots of data points that all conglomerated into what I do now. And I like to think that like each one of those experiences added on to the full context of who I am and what I do. But those are kind of like the high level bullet points.

Megan - 00:04:25: Yeah, it seems like you've had a lot of balls in here throughout your career.

Susan - 00:04:29: For sure. I am somebody who up until relatively recently was most of the first few decades of me owning a variety of businesses. I was doing at least two things.

Megan - 00:04:41: And Beyond Margins seems like not just a business venture for you, but a reflection of your own values and experiences. What was it that initially drew you to the idea of building a community centered around the concept of calm? And how has this journey impacted your own growth and development?

Susan - 00:04:59: Beyond Margins is a relatively new rebrand of my consulting company. So I rebranded the company about a year and a half ago. It's always been a consulting company, fractional CFO, that kind of thing. But it became Beyond Margins because of a very personal, unexpected sabbatical where about, I guess it was the fall of 2021, I was extremely burnt out. I was one of those people, like I said, I was going at 150% all the time, always doing at least two full-time jobs, basically. And I have a 12-year-old kiddo. So for the last decade plus, I've also been parenting and all the things that that entails and host the beginning of the pandemic. So my son was in second grade when the pandemic hit. And we did virtual school for the second half of second grade, and then the whole year of third grade. And that was me, doing all of the schooling and still trying to run business full-time. And that basically resulted in me having, I would call it almost catastrophic burnout. Like I literally could not work anymore. So I ended up essentially pausing the business for two years. I took referral work that came in, but I wasn't advertising. I wasn't doing any content. I paused my podcast. I paused my newsletter, all of those things. And what I thought was going to be six months ended up being two and a half years. And when I came back from that two and a half year break. It was, I realized coming back, I had to do something different. I could not keep doing what I was doing because it ends up in the same result. Eventually, I burn out. So I started looking for a way to do things more sustainably was really my like watchword was how do I do things in a sustainable way that doesn't eventually cause a burnout or cause me to want to burn down my business. So this idea of building a community around the idea of calm came out of that personal journey, that personal realization that I've done this a whole bunch of times where I built something and burnt out, had to build again and burnt out. And I didn't want to do that anymore. And calm became that idea about sustainability became calm. And that kind of translated into what became a new brand. What became a new ethos is really how I think about the concept of calm. And it had always been something that I talked about a lot with clients, but not something I managed to really put in place personally. It came out of a personal crisis that I think ultimately ended up someplace a lot better, calmer and more sustainable for me personally. But also having had that personal experience means that I really do understand what clients are going through. When they're in the same kind of place.

Megan - 00:07:57: And I'm just curious, but how do you go about making those changes permanent and not falling back into bad habits?

Susan - 00:08:06: I think you have to rebuild from the ground up in a lot of cases. Expecting to be able to do the same level of workload or to do it in the same way and expecting different results is never really going to work. And I'm a big believer that you need to design the business intentionally that you want, whether that's around calm or more traditional goals like growth, that kind of thing. You have to intentionally look at every part of your business and use whatever your North Star is to guide you. So in the case of something like building towards a calmer business, that might require looking at how you are packaging and delivering your services so that you're not always working at 110, 120% capacity. You're aiming more for something like 50%. Because when you work at 50% capacity, there's always room for surge. Nothing is ever calm 100% of the time. We always have the unexpected happen. But when you build your business around expecting that there will be unexpected things, you are aiming for like a 50 to 60% capacity. So you always have. A good chunk of your time to respond to things that are urgent, things that pop up. And so sometimes the making the plan permanent requires actually rethinking structures inside of your business or just your approach to work in general.

Megan - 00:09:34: And what is it that you do on a daily basis to try and become a better advisor in the financial realm? And what does being better look like?

Susan - 00:09:44: For me, I'm a real believer that a lot of being a good advisor is being able to empathize with what your clients are going through. When it comes to the context of being a good advisor to business owners, you need to understand what they're going through. You need to understand that they don't have the same context that you do and your job is to help them understand what's happening. But also to be there as a sounding board, you need to be empathetic, they are dealing with a million different decisions. And sometimes they all feel really, really important. And I think that being a better advisor means helping them through that emotional journey, which I think is maybe a little bit unusual in terms of the financial realm. I think the skills that need to improve are the soft skills, the empathetic skills, the contextual skills, more so than, being able to build a really cool report. For me, where I am always trying to improve is paying attention to what's happening in the industries of the clients that I work with. If there's a downturn, if money is drying up, being really aware of that so that I can share that information with the clients. Sometimes just being able to say like, hey, you're not the only person going through this. Everybody in your industry is struggling with this right now, it can be a weight lifted for them. And so, I really view my role as kind of part trainer of I'm here to help them build the financial skills they need. I'm here to support them because finances can be really super emotional, especially when they're not going well. And that's where I tend to focus most of my training and kind of skill building is in that soft skills kind of arena.

Megan - 00:11:37: Yeah, it sounds like you're part financial advisor, part therapist.

Susan - 00:11:41: Sometimes it ends up feeling like that.

Megan - 00:11:44: And you've highlighted the importance of prioritizing calm and business operations and stating that calm is our KPI at Beyond Margins. So how do you integrate this philosophy into your role as a financial advisor? And what tangible benefits have you observed from prioritizing calm?

Susan - 00:12:03: When we are in a place of panic, when we are stressed out, when things aren't going well, kind of the first thing to go is critical decision-making. It can be really, really hard for business owners to be making critical choices when they are in a place of panic. By creating an environment where their business is generally pretty calm, generally we're cruising around 50 to 60% capacity, they are able to make better critical decisions. They're able to tap into those critical thinking skills. And I think it's underrated how valuable being able to make very thoughtful choices for your business is. So for me, when I'm integrating this with my work with clients, a lot of that comes to what are the actual KPIs we're measuring. For me, saying that calm is the new KPI isn't just a tagline. It's not just a nice thing to say. We're actually building key performance indicators that measure how calm your business is. Because the point of a KPI is to help you measure your progress towards a goal. And if the goal is calm, you probably need some different KPIs than we would traditionally think of measuring. And so that's one of the things that I work with clients is looking at what are their actual goals. And if calm is one of the goals that they are setting, what can we put in place? What measures can we track to make sure that we are actually making progress towards that goal of building a calmer business?

Megan - 00:13:42: And as you mentioned, you look at some non-traditional metrics. Along those lines, you emphasize the significance of emotional and scheduling margins. So can you elaborate on how considering these additional margins shape your approach to advising clients, particularly when it comes to navigating uncertain times?

Susan - 00:14:03: So a lot of the people that I work with also work with clients. I mostly work with service-based business owners, so a lot of agencies, consulting firms, those kinds of folks. And as we mentioned before, a lot of the times when you are working with clients, there's a big emotional labor as part of being inside their business and particularly inside their money. A lot of people have a lot of emotions around financial matters. And so being aware of how much bandwidth do you have for something like emotional labor, that can help you determine what kinds of services do you want to offer. So one-to-one services, high touch, high ticket, also are generally high levels of emotional labor. And so if you have a lot of emotional labor you have to do outside of work, so if you are a parent or a caregiver or in a relationship, all of those things take on some of that emotional margin, emotional bandwidth, and can influence what it feels like when you do the work you do with clients. One of the things I personally like to measure, one of the measures I have, is how does the day feel? And that sounds like squishy. It doesn't sound very much like a metric, but I have a rating scale of emojis, right? So I have five emojis, four emojis. You can pick whatever emoji you want. But at the end of every day, I track, how did the day feel? Did it feel easy? Did it feel hard? Did it feel like I was having an ideal day? And over the course of time, I can track how many, I basically created a rating scale to help me figure out if I'm getting closer to how an ideal workday feels like for me. And then I'm testing these kind of non-traditional KPIs, non-traditional measures. I also measure things like time off. I have a, I set one of my annual goals this year as taking 12 weeks off for this year, and I'm tracking it. That's another example of kind of a calmer metric that is tracking whether or not your day-to-day feels calm. Over time, when you track these things, you can still see, are you, making progress? Does it feel calmer? Where do you need to pay attention? Maybe a style of service that you've offered for a long time doesn't feel right anymore, or it feels like it's taking too much emotional bandwidth or too much of your live time. Maybe you need to shift more towards asynchronous time because that feels good right now. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity to develop these non-traditional metrics that help you figure out both on an internal perspective of like how does work feel to you, but also allow you to then share those skills that you build with your clients.

Megan - 00:16:52: And beyond the emotional ties people have with clients, just owning a business in general, it seems to be very emotional. How do you coach your clients to disconnect emotions to some degree?

Susan - 00:17:08: I don't think that we should be disconnecting the emotions. I think we should be acknowledging them, acknowledging that running a business is hard. It's exhausting. Some seasons are better and easier, and some seasons are just really difficult. And I think to ignore that does a disservice to the reality. At least for me with my clients, it's less about teaching them to disconnect from the emotions and more about let's acknowledge this. Let's acknowledge that this is a really difficulties in your business. And like I mentioned before, I can share that, hey, this is a really difficult season for your industry. Sometimes knowing that you're not alone in it, feeling hard can be really powerful and can get you out of that doom cycle in your brain where you're like, oh, everything's wrong and I'm messing up and I'm making all the wrong decisions. Realizing that it's hard for everybody right now can kind of allow you to give yourself a little bit of grace and realize that it's not you, it's systematic right now. And that can be really empowering.

Megan - 00:18:13: And you're the creator and host of the Beyond Margins podcast. So how do you leverage that podcast and the insights and strategies that are discussed on that podcast into actionable advice for your clients?

Susan - 00:18:28: For me, I designed the podcast to allow me to geek out about what I think is interesting or what I want to know more about. So I've kind of structured the podcast to help me get information. I need to be a better advisor. I'm interviewing people about their specific workflows or something that they've tried and what worked and what didn't. And those kinds of things, because it's specifically focused around finance and operations, really allows me to build episodes, to build content that then give me insight that then I can translate or use with my clients, not just as a resource to be able to point clients or potential clients to. I have 100 episodes plus at this point. So there's a lot of information out there. It's a really good tool for potential clients to hear about how I think or hear about how I approach something. But it also allows me to pick and choose who I want to interview based off of, are they doing something really interesting that I want to know more about? Because it applies to me or it applies to a potential client. I can go in and pluck those people out and hear their stories and ask them whatever questions I want. I really designed the show intentionally to give me insights and strategies that I can then apply with clients.

Megan - 00:19:55: And as we've discussed, you focus on helping businesses gain clarity on their numbers and make decisions from a place of intention and purpose. So can you share with our listeners some key strategies or frameworks that you use to empower your clients to be more effective in this arena?

Susan - 00:20:13: Yeah, totally. I have a standard framework called the Framework 5, where it's really looking at what are the elements, of a calmer business. So C, it's an acronym, the calmer is an acronym. So C is for care and community in that I think that calmer businesses start from a foundation of caring, not just for the people in the business, but also the people around the business. So your team, yourself, your clients, your community, I think starting from an intention to care for all of those people inherently leads to a calmer business. A is talking about aligned actions. So if you are intending to have a calmer business, you need to align your policies, your benefits, your work design, how you approach work needs to be aligned with that intention of building a calmer business. L is for learning because none of this is a straightforward process. It's always iterative. It's always an experiment. See what works, see what doesn't. Iterate, improve over time. M is for margins. We've talked about that. I'm a big believer that building margins in a lot of different areas of your business is a critical piece. Basically, you want to be operating at 50 to 60% in all different areas of margin, whether that is emotional margins, like we talked about capacity margins in terms of how much your workload looks like. Financial margins are important too, but most people pay attention to those. E is for your ecosystem. So the systems, tools, resources that you have can help you contribute to building something calmer. And R is for rest and resilience because resting builds resilience. And in a calm business, rest should be kind of a given. It should be built in because it's a critical piece of any kind of sustainable workload.

Megan - 00:22:05: And do you have any tips on tools or technologies that have helped you personally to make your life easier?

Susan - 00:22:16: I could geek out on that all day. For me, having a really solid project management system has been critical. I use ClickUp, so it is part database and part task management. But basically everything in my business exists in one place, which is incredibly powerful because when I'm onboarding new team members, there's one place to go. There's one place to know what kind of work you're doing. It helps me plan out capacity. It has a lot of capabilities when it comes to capacity planning. And so probably ClickUp plus a tool like Zapier, which is automation platform. Almost everything in my business runs through a lot of those two. And they are the two most powerful tools I have to remove unnecessary tasks, automate them, or make them a little bit more straightforward.

Megan - 00:23:05: Thank you for sharing. And obviously the pandemic presented unprecedented challenges for businesses across the globe. What lessons about resiliency and adaptability did the pandemic teach you?

Susan - 00:23:19: I think there's probably two. The first is that, idea of operating at 50 or 60% being a sustainable level. I think the pandemic and kind of the subsequent chaos taught a lot of people that we didn't really have any surge capacity, whether that was from a personal scheduling standpoint, a work scheduling standpoint, we were all generally operating well over 100%. And when that's true, and there are unprecedented challenges, because wouldn't we all love to be living in precedent at times these days, you need to have that surge, you have to have a plan to handle the unexpected, because it's always going to happen, you're never really going to be able to avoid and have everything go exactly according to plan all the time. And the next best thing is to plan for the plan to go off the rail. So I do things like one day a week, I have a buffer day. So I don't plan any work on Fridays. Fridays are what I consider to be a deload day. So I'm doing my weekly review. I am closing any open loops. I go clean out my inbox. If there's any undone tasks for that week that I can wrap up, I'll just do a quick work sprint and clean it off my to-do list. I'll plan my work week for next week. But then if nothing has spilled over from the previous week, I just take Friday off. So Friday, I intentionally one day a week have a plan. To handle unexpected things that come up during the week. And that helps it so I don't get overwhelmed. It's essentially building in a 20% buffer into my week that sometimes I use and sometimes I don't. The other thing I think that the pandemic taught us is that I'm not sure about other people, but up to that point, I hadn't ever really been advising clients that you should plan for everything to stop. We planned on things to slow down and three to six months worth of cash, yada, yada, yada. But I don't know that anybody had a scenario where literally for some people, revenue came to a screeching halt immediately with no warning and no idea when it was going to come back. So I have certainly gotten a lot more conservative in terms of recommending cash buffers, recommending work buffers, more diversification, that sort of thing. From a financial perspective, because we all learned kind of a painful lesson there.

Megan - 00:25:54: It was definitely unprecedented. For those of us who are still blessed enough to be able to work from home, it can be a blessing and a bit of a curse. Do you have any tips on disconnecting from a work day?

Susan - 00:26:09: I had to build some pretty strong boundaries around that. I am a work from home. I love working from home. I could never go back to like in person or couldn't do it. But it did require me to set up some pretty strong boundaries because it's so easy for it to just blend into the rest of the day. Especially if you don't have an external influence. Your kids coming home from school or your partner coming home from work outside the house kind of thing, which can sometimes lend itself to regular structures where like, oh, that's the trigger that I use to disconnect. But for me, my partner also works from home. My kiddo goes to school pretty close. So we don't have a lot of those. But for me, I decided to set the boundaries of I don't work on the weekends. Anytime that I shut down on Friday after my deload day and that's it. I don't turn it back on. I don't. Sometimes I'll check email if I'm expecting something to come in. But for the most part, it's just at the end of the day on Friday, I'm done. And I also have that built into the end of the work day, too. So when my son gets home from school, that's the end. I pretty much plan my work day to end. And when they do, and I have some end of the day routines and end of the week routines that allow me to kind of put a capper on. That's the last thing I do. And then after that, it's done. It definitely took some, I rode over those boundaries personally quite a few times before I figured out how to hold to them. But those are the ones I set that basically I look for a routine that I can build in either at the beginning or the end of when I want that boundary to be. And I try to build a routine around that. I'm somebody who I do really well with routines. I love routines. So if I can create a habit that is the end and kind of a transition between work and not work, that's what works best for me.

Megan - 00:28:02: And what advice do you have for CFOs looking to broaden their focus beyond purely financial considerations and incorporate some of these ideas?

Susan - 00:28:12: I am a big believer that one of the most powerful things somebody on who's been historically just on the finance side of things can do is either get some entrepreneurial experience. So if you are someone who isn't a firm owner, start a business, hang out in somebody else's business, see what happens in the role of a business owner so that you can be. More empathetic and more understanding to what they're actually going through, because it's a really different mindset than just looking at the finances. When you're in a purely financial role, you're looking at the finances as meaning this is a financial, you're looking at it as numbers. But business owners don't look at it as numbers. They look at it as, what does this tell me about what I'm supposed to do next? They look at it as the story that your finance, or they should, look at it as the story that your finances are telling you, that then helps you make decisions for your business. It's contextual information. It's not the be all end all. And I think sometimes folks who've only been on the finance side of things can kind of get lost in the sauce in the numbers, because the numbers have meaning. It's data. It's not just a number. And I think the other thing that can be really powerful if you have the opportunity to do it is to spend some time on the operations side of a business. Because again, that can give you a lot of information about how the logistics of how businesses run, the nuances of all the different parts and pieces that are moving, and again, help you understand the ecosystem that is a business. Nothing happens in isolation. If you want to make changes on the financial side of the house, usually you're going to have to make different choices operationally. Choosing to cut a cost is actually a decision that impacts some other area of the business, whether that's marketing choices, or HR choices, or operations choices, even something as simple as deciding to eliminate a software has implications in some other area of the business. So anything that you can do to gain skills and kind of visibility on the intricacies of how different areas of the business interact, I think can be really powerful for helping people be better advisors to businesses.

Megan - 00:30:29: And you've created a community, for service-based business owners who crave calm. So how do you foster collaboration and knowledge sharing within this community? And what role do you see it playing in shaping the future of financial leadership?

Susan - 00:30:45: So I'm a big believer that community is really important, particularly if you have a client-based business, where a lot of that is who you know, what your referral network looks like, what kind of partners you have. And in that kind of industry, a rising tide really raises all boats. The better one does, and if we are in the context of a community, that can pull us all up. And I think there's room for everybody. I personally have been supported by fellow business owners through my entire entrepreneurial journey. I think it's a really critical piece to have peers who can help you brainstorm, who can help you, who can refer business to you, who can help get you out of your head when you're in that doom cycle, and who are really smart business owners in their own right. I like surrounding myself with people who know, who are really smart, who are experts in what they do. And I think that being able to share that knowledge amongst a community really helps us. And there's this other added aspect of when you are trying to build something calmer, that's inherently a little bit at odds with our current cultural environment, a lot of the messages we get as business owners are grow, grow, grow, hustle, hustle, hustle. You have to be working harder. And sometimes it's really hard to block that out. And when you are surrounding yourself with people who are also trying to do the same thing, who are also trying to build calm businesses or more equitable businesses, having people around you who are trying to build the same thing can help give you some other voices to counteract all the hustle and growth, sometimes toxic information that we get.

Megan - 00:32:36: Yeah, I'm curious to know, do you think that this is generational? Do you see this declining as we get towards Gen Z?

Susan - 00:32:45: I think it's only going to get more so. I do think there is an aspect to it from a generational perspective. And certainly a lot of people would say this is a very Millennial aesthetic. But I actually think that future generations are only going to lean more so into separation between your work and your identity. Previous generations, who you are and what you do is almost the same thing. So when you see folks retire, they really struggle because all of a sudden this huge portion of their identity has just disappeared. And they have to redefine who they are outside of the context of work. And I think some of the younger generations are doing a better job of that up front. Partially just because they don't have the same opportunities that earlier generation did in terms of work advancement or career opportunities. The current economic climate, it's just not there. Not to mention the older generations just aren't retiring. So there's not as much in terms of career progression. And I think that inherently is leading to more of a separation generally from who you are as a person and what you do is something separate from that. Not necessarily as integrated. So I really think future generations are only going to lean more into that, not less.

Megan - 00:34:06: Susan, thanks for sharing that. And thank you so much for being my guest today.

Susan - 00:34:10: Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun.

Megan - 00:34:12: Yeah. I really enjoyed speaking with you, and thanks for finding the time to be here with us today to share your experience and knowledge. And I wish you all the best. And to all of our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care.