The CFO Decision: Full-Time or Fractional?

Megan - 00:00:25: Today, my guest is Luke Boyenger. From witnessing the painful closure of a family business during his high school years, Luke was driven to master the art of successful business management. This early experience ignited a lifelong passion for business finance and led him to pursue a degree in accounting, secure his CPA license, and gain invaluable insights from global leaders during his tenure as an auditor at EY. In his roles as an auditor, a data analytics coach, and a director of accounting, he cultivated a robust knowledge base and a versatile skill set that bridges the crucial gap in understanding effective business operations. His diverse experience has equipped him with the tools to provide strategic oversight and actionable advice to business owners striving to avoid the pitfalls that once impacted his own family. He is dedicated to empowering small business owners to unlock their company's full potential. By evaluating and enhancing business models to align with strategic vision, implementing robust financial review processes to ensure month-to-month accountability, coaching on the establishment and pursuit of strategic long-term goals, providing expert advice on profit maximization, cash flow management, and sustainable growth. And as a fractional CFO, he is eager to apply his expertise to help businesses thrive. Luke, thank you very much for joining me on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

Luke - 00:02:22: Yeah, happy to be here.

Megan - 00:02:23: Today, our discussion focuses on building a finance team around a fractional CFO. And I'm really excited to hear more about this topic and to learn more about you and from you. So let's get started.

Luke - 00:02:36: Sounds great.

Megan - 00:02:37: First of all, you've had a diverse career journey from witnessing the closure of a family business to becoming a fractional CFO. How did your early experiences shape your approach to finance and leadership? And what personal values guide your work today?

Luke - 00:02:53: Yeah, great question. As you mentioned, in my early years, late teens, early 20s, I did have the painful experience of watching a family business go bankrupt, a business that my parents owned and operated. And yeah, not a fun experience. I would not advise anyone else to go through that, certainly, but a very educational one, to be sure. And one of the most significant things I learned from that experience is the significance of having all the right skill sets in the business. Not just the right people, but the right skill sets. And the skill set we lacked in our business was the accounting and finance skill set. There wasn't anyone in our family who really understood accounting and finance. And so we struggled to understand what our product cost us to make and deliver. And therefore, we struggled to price it effectively, where we were profitable enough to be able to be successful as a business. So the biggest lesson I learned is the significance of having all of the necessary skill sets in the business to give yourself the best chance of succeeding.

Megan - 00:04:06: And do you find that a lot of small businesses, that's where the lacking is in the finance and accounting?

Luke - 00:04:12: I would say so. Yeah. I've got to acknowledge my own bias in that sense, because I am an accounting and finance person. So naturally, I think it's super important. But if you think about the average business, someone usually starts a business because they're good at doing something or they're good at making something. And they can produce an excellent product that is desirable in the marketplace. They have that skill set. And usually when you understand your product really well, you can do a decent job of figuring out how to market and sell it at least well enough to build a decent business. So those skill sets usually exist across most businesses. But where the vast majority of businesses lack is in the accounting and finance skill set because it is very specialized and usually requires education to be able to obtain it. Meaning you probably needed to have gone to school to learn accounting and finance to really be able to fully understand it and do it correctly. And most business owners don't have that skill set or don't have anyone in their family or in their business with that skill set. And so they're kind of just limping along, doing the best they can without it.

Megan - 00:05:27: And before becoming a fractional CFO, you held various roles in finance and accounting, including at Ernst & Young and a company called Footprint. So looking back at your career, what moment or achievement are you most proud of? And how has it influenced your approach to building and leading finance teams today?

Luke - 00:05:47: Yeah, I would say when I was at Ernst & Young, they rolled out a new employee performance assessment program, I guess you could call it. And I mean, to be completely frank, it was poorly implemented and poorly, the training on it was done very poorly. So resulted in hundreds of thousands of employees in a global firm not having a clear understanding of how they're supposed to be assessing the performance of the people who report to them, which is a massive problem. And I was struggling to do the same thing like everybody else was. So I kind of just took it on myself to build an Excel-based macro-enabled tool that kind of bridged the gap between what they were wanting us to do and the guidance that we had been given that wasn't unclear. And by supplementing the process with this tool, we delivered a lot of clarity to the process and gave people the ability to understand how performance should be assessed across the firm. And that tool I built ended up being deployed across the firm globally because the firm saw the value in it and wanted everyone using it. So being able to create a tool to solve a problem in a global company kind of just showed me that you're capable of more than what you think you are if you're just willing to step up to the plate and try. And that companies need problem solvers. They need people who can see a problem, be creative, think outside the box and propose a solution that is effective.

Megan - 00:07:24: And you mentioned before we started recording that you haven't always been an accountant. So talk to me a little bit about your career progression and how you got into the field of accounting.

Luke - 00:07:37: Yeah. So my grandpa owned a construction company when I was a kid, and I grew up mostly in high school working for him in his construction business. So I've got a background in construction. My parents bought a business when I was in high school. It was a machine shop. And so when I finished high school, I actually went to vocational college and studied computerized manufacturing. And was programming and operating computerized manufacturing equipment for my dad's business after high school. That business, though, ended up going bankrupt during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. And that's kind of when my interest started to pivot to accounting and finance, because I wanted to understand what's the right way to run a business that leads to it being successful over the long term. So I looked around and saw a whole bunch of other businesses that did not go bankrupt during the financial crisis. Now, I wanted to learn what was the difference between them and us? What did they do right that we got wrong that led to them surviving and us going bankrupt? And I knew the answer was in accounting and finance. So I went back to school when I was 24. Got my accounting degree when I was 27. Went to work for Ernst & Young, got my CPA license, spent six years doing financial statement audits for Fortune 500 companies, just really aggressively pursuing the knowledge and skill set I was looking for in the finance and accounting space. And Ernst & Young was a really interesting opportunity in that regard, because I got to go into the largest, most sophisticated, most successful companies in the world and get a little bit of a peek behind the curtain and then see, how are these companies using financial data to make strategic decisions about how they run a profitable business. And learned a lot of principles that I can now take and apply in helping smaller businesses achieve the same type of success, just on a scale that works for them.

Megan - 00:09:43: And today you have your own accounting firm as a fractional CFO, and it's called Cruzumi, correct?

Luke - 00:09:52: Yeah, yeah. Cruzumi CFO & Advisory is the name of the company. We don't necessarily call ourselves an accounting firm because a couple of things. To be an accounting firm, you have to really formally be registered as an accounting firm with the State Board of Accountancy, which we are not. Because we don't do any of the traditional accounting firm stuff in the sense that we're not doing bookkeeping, we're not doing tax returns. We're really just doing CFO services where we're filling the CFO seat for businesses on an outsourced basis. And while I am a CPA, what we do does not require a CPA license. So we're not structured as an accounting firm. We're really more structured as a consulting or advisory.

Megan - 00:10:37: Thank you for sharing that. What inspired you to kind of go out on your own and do this?

Luke - 00:10:42: I always knew I was going to be an entrepreneur. My grandparents were entrepreneurs. My parents were entrepreneurs. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. But I saw my grandpa run his business in such a way where he ended up having to work until he was 85 years old and then only closed his business because he had some health issues that prevented him from working anymore. And he didn't build a business with long-term value. So when he sold the business he spent 60 years building, its worth was the auction value of the assets of the business. And I saw my parents go bankrupt in a business. And so I saw enough to know I wanted to do it the right way. I wanted to know how do you build long-term success? How do you build value into a business so that a business can really be a life-changing, positive, generational wealth-building machine and not a curse or just a job that's a burden on your shoulders? So I was very intentional about doing and educating myself before jumping into entrepreneurship because I wanted to make sure I did it the right way.

Megan - 00:11:51: And today you share those lessons with your clients.

Luke - 00:11:54: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I have maybe a unique experience because I've seen the worst end of the spectrum of what happens when you don't get the stuff right. When you just guess and you hope for the best and you happen to be in a good economy, you can succeed for a while and be profitable and feel like you're doing well and on the right track. And not even recognize that you have a business that is one six-month recession away from bankruptcy. Because you haven't built strength into the business to be able to weather that type of storm. And it's not any fault of the business owner. They just don't know. They'll have the skillset. In the accounting and finance space to be able to recognize those types of threats and know how to prepare for it. And so that's what I do for my clients is we fill that gap.

Megan - 00:12:45: And as a Fractional CFO, what are the initial steps that you take when integrating into new organizations? And how do you assess the existing finance team structure and capabilities, if there even is one?

Luke - 00:12:58: Yeah, great question. So we have a fairly detailed onboarding process. When we come into a business for the first time, we have a whole list of things that we are looking at to get us up to speed on the business where it is today. How's it structured? How's it running? How does it work? But also, where's it been? What's the journey that this business has been on? And what is that story telling us about where they're trying to go, and how we need to help them get there. So that's everything from assessing risk-related things like property insurance coverages, how their employee relationships are structured, compensation models. We're looking at everything and really assessing from a strategic and risk perspective. How is the company positioned and what are some of the gaps that need to be filled right out the gate? And oftentimes one of those things is the structure of the accounting team where a business owner comes to us and says, hey, I did $10 million in revenue last year, but I only did $100,000 of that profit. And I don't know why. Well, that's a huge problem. That's a really small net profit on $10 million in net revenue. So we've got some issues to solve. And we started digging into the accounting function. And what we oftentimes come to realize is the accounting function is the owner's sister-in-law who majored in French horn and doesn't know anything about accounting and finance, but she needed the job. And so the business owner hired her to be his bookkeeper. It's like, okay, so you've got a full-time bookkeeper in the business, but they don't actually have the skill set, the knowledge, the training, the experience to know how to do accounting the right way. So the business owner is trying to run a business off of bad accounting data that isn't telling him the information he needs to know to be able to understand how to run a profitable company. And so we're coming in and looking at the structure of that accounting team from a perspective of how big is the company and what roles should a company of that size have in its accounting function? Is it a small business that just needs one well-qualified bookkeeper and they're good to go? Or is this a $50 million company that needs a corporate controller, an accounting manager, an accounts payable team, and the works? And so we're looking at gaps and weaknesses in that structure from a positions in the business perspective, but then we're also assessing the skillset of each person sitting in those seats and saying, does the person that you've given a corporate controller title to actually have the qualification to do that job? And a lot of times we find that they don't. And so it's a process of either working with that person to get them the training that they need to become qualified. We're making recommendations to make some changes in some of those positions and get the right people in the right seats to really be able to support the business.

Megan - 00:15:48: And a lot of companies face the dilemma of choosing between a full-time CFO and a fractional CFO. So what are the key factors that companies should consider when making this decision?

Luke - 00:16:00: Excellent question. And the key factors are probably not what most people think that they are. I feel like there's a little bit of perception out there that full-time CFOs are for companies that can afford full-time CFOs. And fractional CFOs are for companies who can't afford full-time CFOs. And if that's the way you think about it, I would strongly encourage kind of rethinking how you are considering the role of a fractional in the marketplace. Because there's a lot of companies out there who could easily afford a full-time CFO. But that doesn't mean you have 40 hours a week worth of actual CFO work that needs to be done. Depending on the strategy of your company and what you have going on and what your growth model is. You might very well be a $100 million company that can easily get all of your CFO needs met by a fractional CFO. So to maybe put that in perspective, let's say there's two different $20 million companies. One of them, let's say they both want to grow to be $100 million companies. One of them wants to do that in a very short timeline. And they want to do it through acquisition. So they want to go out and acquire five companies a year and grow at an accelerated rate to get to 100 million faster. That company probably needs a full-time CFO because navigating five business acquisitions a year is going to require a lot of time from somebody with a highly advanced finance skill set like a CFO. And trying to do that with a fractional is just not going to be cost effective and it's probably not going to work for everyone. But you take another $20 million company who wants to become a $100 million company, but they want to do it through organic growth. They just want to grow organically at a 10% annual growth rate until they hit $100 million in revenue. They're not engaging in any complex transactions that are very time-consuming and require a high-level skill set. They can probably get all the way to $100 million in revenue with a fractional CFO and never needing to take on the expense of a full-time CFO because their strategy isn't one that requires that much CFO time in the business.

Megan - 00:18:09: And at Cruzumi, you specialize in the construction industry. So first, tell us a little bit about the unique challenges within this industry. And second, how can a fractional CFO provide unique value within the construction industry?

Luke - 00:18:26: Yeah, so our niche is construction. So the majority of our clients do end up being construction companies. We've got the skill set and the willingness to help businesses in any space, but certainly the construction industry is a space that we're a major player in. But in terms of how we add value to construction companies specifically, there are nuances in the construction industry that make it different than other industries. Things like job costing and whip recording and progress billing and things like that are things that don't exist in a lot of other industries. And so if you're not really experienced in the construction industry, you probably don't have an in-depth understanding of how those things work. And they become different levers that you can pull from a strategic perspective to help construction companies make progress. And what we usually find when companies bring us in and why they're struggling is because they also don't really understand the nuances of a construction accounting science, even though they're in the construction space. Going back to what we've talked about previously, the skill set is just not in the business. And so we come in and help them implement things like job costing, like web reporting that deliver a significantly advanced level of insight to the decision makers of the business in terms of how profitable they are. From a job costing perspective, we can tell you you've got three different types of work that you do. It's a lot easier to tell how profitable you are by each type of work. If you're making a 30% margin on one type of work and a 10% margin on another, then you know you either need to stop doing the one where you're only making 10% margin or figure out a way where you can increase your price and profitability on that type of work to be able to continue to do it. And companies are trying to operate without that level of insight right now, and it makes it a lot harder. And so we help deliver that additional insight that provides decision-making data to business owners to drive profitability and cash flow in the business.

Megan - 00:20:32: And you talked about choosing between a fractional CFO and a full-time CFO. But at what stage in a company's growth is it appropriate to bring on the fractional CFO? What are the early signs that indicate that, yes, it's time for this fractional CFO to come on board and help?

Luke - 00:20:54: Yeah, great question. It's a bit of a moving target and it's a little hard to define across the board. So what I would say is you probably need to be doing at least a million in revenue before you're thinking about bringing in a Fractional CFO. And the reality is every single business in the world can benefit from having a CFO skill set in the business. So it's not necessarily a question of do you need it? Everybody needs it. Everybody needs that skill set to be able to achieve the goals that they want to achieve and grow at the rate that they want to be able to grow at. Fractional is just one way that you're able to get access to that skill set and typically a way to get access to it sooner than you traditionally and historically would have been able to. So it's more about, at what point does the cost of acquiring that skill set make sense in light of where the company is financially? So you talked about a construction company that's maybe only operating at a 10% net profit. If you're doing a million in revenue, you're only doing 100,000 net profit. You don't really want to turn around and give 75% of that to a fractional CFO. It doesn't make any sense. Whereas if you're a high profit industry, or maybe your net profits are 30, 40%. If you're doing a million in revenue, you're doing three or 400,000 in net profit. Okay, well, now 75,000-80,000 a year for fractional CFO maybe makes sense. So it kind of depends on your industry, how profitable you are, and at what point do you have enough net profit to justify bringing on the additional expense of a fractional CFO to accelerate the growth goals that you have for your business.

Megan - 00:22:35: And cash flow forecasting is critical in the construction industry due to the nature of project-based work. And I would also argue that cash flow forecasting is critical in any industry. So how do you approach mastering cash flow forecasting and what tools or strategies do you find most effective?

Luke - 00:22:54: Yeah, I think that, I don't know if I would say anybody ever really masters cash flow forecasting. And I think the goal is actually not to master it because there is no perfect answer in cash flow forecasting. There's no crystal ball. No one can see the future and know what's happening. And I think a lot of people look at cash flow forecasting and think, what a joke. Forecasting, you really think you can tell the future? What a waste of time. But that's not what it's about. Cash flow forecasting is about scenario planning. It's about giving yourself the best opportunity possible to anticipate the scenarios over the next six to 12 months that are most likely to happen so that you give yourself an opportunity to plan for any of them. For example, you can forecast a 10% increase in revenue, see how that impacts your free cash flow over the next 12 months, but also your cash ending balance over the next 12 months and plan accordingly. How are you going to leverage that additional cash flow in a way to accelerate growth in your business? But you can also do the opposite. You can forecast a 10% reduction in revenue over the next 12 months. Now it's just a different question. Now we have less cash flow than anticipated. What does that do to our monthly free cash flow? And what does that do to our monthly ending cash balance over the next 12 months? And what do we need to be thinking about doing as a business to respond to that strategically? So it's not really about mastering cash flow forecasting. I think it's more about just looking at a lot of different scenarios of what could happen and how do we respond to it. But some of the fundamentals to cash flow forecasting are accounting accuracy, because you're forecasting based on historical actuals informed by what you think is going to happen in the future. So we know how much we've spent on employees in the past. So when we're forecasting what wages are going to cost for the next 12 months, It's just a process of understanding the plan for the business. Are we planning to hire additional employees? Are we planning to lay employees off? What do we think is actually going to happen with wages over the next 12 months? And we plan based on that. But accurate accounting is super important because if you've got a GL account, call, let's say, telephone expense, for example. And you're looking at your monthly average over the last 12 months for telephone expense and using that forecast the next 12 months. But unbeknownst to you, all of your employee mileage reimbursements have also been getting coded to telephone expense, and you don't know it. Now you're trying to forecast using bad accounting data that's going to screw you up and your forecast isn't going to be accurate. So as a fundamental, the accounting has to be accurate. Or the forecast is not going to be accurate. The other piece to that is having some accuracy into when cash is going to come in the business. So either a sales forecast, or if you are in the construction industry, a WIP report that tells you these are the jobs we have on the books, when we're going to be doing them, when we're going to be billing on these jobs, and using that to make some reasonably accurate assumptions about when you're going to be collecting on those jobs going forward, so that you have your top line input into the cash flow forecast. So there's a few fundamentals that you need to get correct in terms of accurate accounting and a reasonably accurate guess at future revenues. But beyond that, it's really about scenario planning and allowing room for margin of error because you're never going to dial it in and have it absolutely perfect.

Megan - 00:26:35: And for companies aiming to grow profitably, what strategies would you recommend to assist in sustainable business growth while maintaining financial health? How do you invest in the future, but not spend too much? But how do you balance all of that?

Luke - 00:26:51: Yeah, then it's very difficult to balance. And when you get it wrong. You can really do harm to your business by overextending yourself. And so it's important to get it right, for sure. I see a lot of businesses taking on way too much debt to try to fund growth. And they end up with a debt service load that is such a high burden on cash flow that they struggle to keep enough cash in the business to be able to operate month to month. So it's really about getting the accurate accounting in place that you can use to have good forecasts and projections in place so that now you can start plugging in variables to test how does this decision impact my business? Where you can say, okay, we want to buy a building and increase our manufacturing capacity by purchasing some equipment, hiring some additional employees. You know what this cost is going to be and when you're going to incur it. You just plug it into your cashflow forecast and say, if I try to just pay cash for this whole thing, maybe I'm sitting on a pile of cash and this is what I want to do with it. I can put that into my cashflow forecast and see if I tried to just pay cash for this thing, what's that do to my cash balance over the next 12 months? Can I actually afford to do this? Are we going to start generating revenue and have that new expansion be cashflow positive soon enough? To be able to use our cash and not have to go out and get financing in the marketplace. And if the answer is no, then you start exploring financing opportunities and you plug the financing scenario into the cash flow forecast. Okay, now we don't have the big cash outlay up front to get this project up and going. We just have a monthly debt service payment that we need to forecast for. What does that do to our cash flow over the next 12 months? So again, it comes back to scenario planning, accurate accounting, cash flow forecasting to test decisions that you want to make in a relatively accurate financial model before you just go out into the market and start doing things.

Megan - 00:28:59: And how do you help your clients achieve financial clarity? What are the key metrics or processes that you are focusing on?

Luke - 00:29:07: Fundamentally, for most businesses, when we come in, it's getting to the basic fundamental metrics of gross margin and net profit. We have to start with mastering those because those are the two most important. And usually most business owners, I'm convinced after being in the finance space for over a decade, I am convinced that over 90% of business owners have never actually seen an accurate representation. Of their company's financial performance. Because so many businesses have so much bad accounting. Their financials aren't actually telling them the truth about how their business is performing. So when we very first come into a business, we're usually keeping it pretty simple and saying, hey, let's just get to accurate accounting so that we actually know what our true gross profit is and what our true net profit is. If we can get there in the first three months, now going forward, we can start layering in some additional KPIs and metrics that we can track that start informing us at a lower level of detail and give us some more additional decision-making power and ability. But if we don't even know accurately what our gross profit and net profit is, then trying to do other financial metrics and ratios and stuff like that is just a waste of time because it's not going to tell us anything meaningful.

Megan - 00:30:33: And beyond traditional financial reporting, what strategic management strategies should companies implement to improve their overall business performance? And how does a fractional CFO contribute to these strategies?

Luke - 00:30:46: Yeah, so stepping outside of kind of the finance and accounting space, there's, and kind of going back to lessons learned from my own family's bankruptcy that I alluded to previously, a big one is having the right people in the right seats across the organization. Even outside of accounting and finance, it's what are the roles that really should exist in the company for this company to operate effectively? Do we have all those roles in the company? And if so, do we have the right people in those roles? And getting some effective operating systems in place in terms of how we strategically manage business and team in terms of, are we even doing regular meetings with our key leadership people in the business? If we went to our key leaders in the business and said, what are the three most important strategic goals of our company over the next 12 months? And what are five of our core values as a company? Couldn't they answer those two questions? If not, we have a leadership problem in the business. And there are some quick and easy ways to address those problems by doing something like going out and bringing in an EOS implementer and implementing the entrepreneurial operating system in the business, which is just a system of leadership, effectively, that helps build those processes and procedures into the business to drive values and goal alignment across the team, make it super clear what everybody's responsibility is and how their performance will be tracked and monitored and what success looks like in light of what it is that we're all trying to achieve together as an organization. When you get really, really clear on those things and your whole team understands it and you have the right people in the right positions in the business, you've now created a business that's ready to thrive.

Megan - 00:32:43: And I'm sure you've touched on this a bit, but what are some of the common financial mistakes that you see your clients making? And how can these be avoided, first of all? And then secondly, how do you guide a finance team in addressing these pitfalls effectively?

Luke - 00:32:59: Yeah, I mean, by far the biggest mistake that I see businesses making, and it's not even close. Like this is number one and it's way ahead of everything else. It's the same mistake my family made, by the way, is not making a sufficient investment in financing an accountant. And trying to run your business based off of gut feelings and cash in the bank and copying your competitors and hoping that what they do works for you too. It just doesn't work. You've got to invest in high quality accounting and finance data that is telling you the truth about how your business is actually performing so that you are giving yourself the opportunity to make strategic decisions about how to improve your business going forward. Short of that, you will never feel comfortable with how your business is doing. And you are going to struggle to know whether or not you're profitable, to manage cash flow effectively. Business is going to feel like a burden. By far, the biggest mistake is not spending the amount of money necessary to get to good data so that you can make good decisions. I think that is definitely the number one mistake that I see companies make. And I think it's all because they just see it as a cost. But the reality is, whatever you spend getting that data, you should easily make up for on the profitability side of the business. By having good data to run your business more effectively. So if you go out and spend another $200,000 a year on your accounting team, you should absolutely expect to increase your net profitability by more than $200,000 simply through the level of increase clarity that those people will be able to deliver to you from a decision-making perspective. And that just goes back to what I said about what we do in our onboarding process in terms of assessing the current financing and accounting team. It's a function of looking at the type and size of business you have. And what roles should a company like that have in place to really be able to operate as effectively as they should from an accounting and finance perspective? And first, just start there. Recognize what roles should exist and then compare that to what roles you have in your company. Where do you have gaps? And where do you need to create some additional positions? Or potentially, where do you need to eliminate some positions because you're overstaffed at one particular level? You have more than you need. We see that happen sometimes too. So it's creating the structure of how the finance and accounting team should be set up. And once you understand what the structure should be, it's a process of looking at who you have in the business currently and what roles are they in. And just being really intellectually honest with yourself about the true capabilities of that person. Do we have somebody in the business that we're calling our CFO, for example, that is really doing work that is controller or accounting manager type of work? And if so, do we need to align them and their title with the work that they're actually doing and give them the title that actually makes sense and say, I'm sorry, you're not really a CFO, you're a controller. And this is the title that you're going to have going forward. And we need to bring in a true CFO skill set into the business. Or maybe it's the bookkeeper scenario where I know it's the owner's sister-in-law who knows nothing about accounting that's doing all the bookkeeping. Maybe that person can be better utilized somewhere else in the business. And we go out and find a true bookkeeper with a lot of knowledge and experience that can come and give us the skill set that we need for that particular seat in the business. So it's, I guess, to summarize, I think it's understanding what roles should exist and then making sure you have the right people in those roles.

Megan - 00:36:54: That's great advice. So last question, as the construction industry evolves, what emerging financial trends or challenges should these companies be aware of? And how can a fractional CFO help them navigate these challenges?

Luke - 00:37:11: Yeah, I think the biggest one is just better access to better systems. Technology is really playing a big role. Not even just in the construction industry, but certainly in the construction industry. In terms of the types of systems and applications that are available in the marketplace to streamline finance and accounting systems and processes where they're able to deliver way better value, much more timely than what traditional accounting systems are able to offer. So something like a QuickBooks desktop or QuickBooks Online, those products have been around for a really long time. And Intuit, the owner of those products, has attempted to keep up with the marketplace, but they're not great in the construction space. So there's a lot of new and emerging technologies that are coming up specifically for construction companies that help them better manage job costing, WIP reporting, cash flow, all that kind of stuff in a construction specific business. And understanding what those things are in the marketplace, what's available, and how to implement them in your business in a way that gives you a competitive advantage can really make a big difference in terms of outperforming your peers.

Megan - 00:38:25: Luke, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Luke - 00:38:28: You're welcome. Thank you for having me on. I enjoyed the conversation.

Megan - 00:38:31: 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. You've been listening to CFO Weekly presented by Personiv. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to hear all of our episodes. Want to learn more? Check out personiv.com. Thanks for listening.