Greatest Hits: Redefining the Fractional CFO, with Elliott Gaspar

Speaker A: Hey folks, today is Elliot Gasper. Uh, Elliot was introduced to me recently and when we met, I just loved how passionate he is about the fractional finance space and especially helping others step in and engage with businesses they work with in the best way possible. We talk about the impact of AI on the role of the fractional CFO. Also how groups of fractional CFOs are forming organically to support and help each other learn. And we dig into how dyslexia can be a superpower and how problem solving, not reporting, is really the key and the next level of the CFO role. So much to get into today. Really encourage you to connect with Elliot and, uh, join his WhatsApp community, the fractional Finance Forum. And if you're listening to this before the 24th of March, join us for our upcoming webinar with Elliot. Uh, the link will be in the show notes. Enjoy. Welcome to the new F Word podcast, where we cut the fluff on business finances and lift the lid on the new F Word, the fractional finance revolution. It's a game changer for small businesses. I'm your host, Colin Hewitt, co founder of Float Cash Flow Management for Xero on QuickBooks. We believe that really understanding your business finances makes all the difference in the world. And having a strategic partner like a fractional CFO is the key to unlocking that. So join us as we dive into personal stories and actionable insights from forward thinking finance leaders and seasoned entrepreneurs to discover why fractional finance leaders have become an irreplaceable part of small business leadership. Hey, welcome back to another episode of the new F Word podcast. It's great to have Elliot Gaspar from OX consult with me today. Elliot, great to have you. How's it going?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's been going really well. I'm excited to be here, uh, and talk about fractional CFO as an industry, which is something I've got sort of really, really into. And I've been listening to your podcast and thought, you know, there's such a lot of great people coming through here that I just wanted my chance to add a bit of a voice and try and talk about something that I find interesting. So excited to dive into it.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, why don't we start there? So I, I know, you know, we connected. I think you've, you've recently moved into this, uh, space around fractional CFO work and I know you're really, you're jumping in with a real passion for it. Where did that come from? Tell me more.

Speaker B: It gives me a Chance to talk about a couple of things. One is why get into it and why do it? Right. So I sort of became a fractional CFO because I love problem solving. So that's my key driver throughout my whole career. Uh, problem solving is what I've done. And I think actually a fractional CFO services are a great problem. The industry as a whole is relatively young, or maybe it's not super young, but it's grown really recently to where it's sort of a LinkedIn buzzword now. Right. And um, I don't think yet the problem of how to deliver a quality value driven fractional CFO service has really been solved. So that's why my sort of passion and ability to talk about it and sort of the day in day out of being in that industry has kept me quite interested in in it. And I'll probably talk about the types of people that become a fractional CFO because I find this one of the problems. So in my experience there's three types of people that become a fractional CFO. The first are uh, incredibly experienced knowledgeable CFOs that are going towards the end of their career and they've spent their career in FTSE 100 companies, they've led very large organizations and been extremely successful and they sort of see fractional cfo, um, as a way to wind down towards retirement. And what you're going to get from that is they're going to turn up to your monthly quarterly board meeting, say something incredibly insightful and sort of leave and collect their check and that's their input. The second type of fractional CFO I've been seeing or worry about seeing more of early uh, stage accountants who are a bit fed up of working in somebody else's professional services firm. And they see that step to fractional CFO as a sort of a leapfrog to the job title they wanted. They're incredibly hardworking, they're very ambitious. But perhaps they've not had the industry experience or the breadth of experience yet that you would expect from a fractional cfo. And then there's the third type which I sort of count myself in and I think all really great fractional CFOs would sit in as well, which are hands on, practical problem solvers. A fractional cfo to me, my definition of that are ah, not people who are uh, just strategy, they don't just turn up to meetings. They are people who can build a 13 week cash flow forecast, they can construct a three statement financial model, they know how Xero works, they can connect Xero to Dext. They uh, are hands on people who will set up a process, design the process, bring an understanding of best fit in class and that's a fantastic service to have. And I think as a whole fractional cfo, uh, is just not well defined, it's not well understood, it's not well priced, it's, it's all out for the taking. And that's sort of why I've got quite into it as an industry.

Speaker A: And and so yeah, so you're obviously you want to position yourself in that third category like how did you, how did you feel? Like how did you get there? Um, and what was the why not continue on in the uh, in the existing kind of traditional CFO capacity?

Speaker B: My career has been a sort of conclusion of not doing the average accountant's journey right. So a lot of accountants spend their whole career looking backwards and inwards and I've spent my whole career looking sort of outwards and forwards and that's just a function of the roles I've been very lucky to be in. I also didn't grow up through a professional services uh, company or industry. Like a lot of accountants will go, they'll do time in audit, they'll do time in whatever and they'll go through that professional services ladder. I, before being a fractional CFO was an in house accountant. That's where I've always been in the company, in the startup, in the team, solving the problems, putting in the systems, hiring the team and seeing that whole thing through. So it felt quite natural to then move on to great, I can grow a startup. I can see a startup go from Pre revenue to 400 million. I can see a startup raise hundreds of million of uh, pounds. I think I can bring that experience to fractional CFO services where smaller clients need a high quality hands on individual. And that's what I really enjoy doing because it gets me out of that being stuck in one place for too long where there's not a new challenge and not a new problem to solve. But also I'm bringing something slightly different. Where a lot of fractional CFOs are sort of accountancy practice owners who are trying to add value to their clients by turning into a cfo. Whereas I'm coming at it from actually being a CFO into therefore, uh, supporting just on a reduced timeline, on a reduced time basis to those clients. Does that make sense? Is that answering the question? Probably it does, I guess.

Speaker A: What do you think? Do you think that there's A role for that for some businesses? Or do you think that, you know, accountants should stop trying to provide, uh, those kind of advisory services? Or is there a place, did you see a place for them?

Speaker B: I, uh, do see a place for it. I don't. Not all businesses need the same thing. So my focus as a, uh, fractional CFO is very much in the scale up and startup community. High growth, founder led, the term I'm fan of is sort of the edge of chaos, right? Nobody really wants to be in chaos, but the edge of chaos is a really exciting and fun place to be and that's what I'm comfortable in. But not all businesses are like that. If you're an SME who's going through a good sustained period of growth, but you need something a bit more from your accountant than the tax return. I think there's a great space for accountancy practices to become really good business advisors and to step up into that advisory role. But I don't know if that's the same definition and I'm battling with this all the time. I don't know if it's the same definition as a fractional cfo. I've worked once in a professional services business, it was actually one that I ran and was the UK director of and we tried to do it all. We tried to do payroll, bookkeeping, tax returns, advisory services and called ourselves a fractional cfo. But when you're across everything like that, whether or not you have the time and the uh, functionality to really add value and avoid becoming what I termed is really just fractional Finance manager is what we became. Whereas a fraction of CFO should have that really in depth experience and value that they can add.

Speaker A: And with your trajectory, are you seeing Ox consult, is that your plan is to grow that into multiple CFOs? Would you bring in other people? Or do you see, is that very much further down the line or is that an immediate future?

Speaker B: It's possible. The big question I think a lot of fractional CFOs are, uh, talking about, and you'll see it in the communities, you'll see it in the chats, is how do I get beyond just me, right, just myself and grow to others? Because by definition of being a fractional CFO is sort of personal, right? You have to be able to work with that company, you have to have a good relationship with the founders and the board because not every conversation is going to be comfortable. Um, you have to have a pretty in depth understanding of their commercial aims. You can't just Rock up once a month and then leave again? You have to really be part of the team as their fractional cfo. So then the question is, or do I just hire other people to work as fractional CFOs within OX consult? And, um, do you train them to do sales and marketing? Because by and large accountants aren't great at sales and marketing. So do you train them on that bit and let them have their own clients and we sort of work as a team? Don't know. It's possible. I struggle to see how the fees work and how everybody's happy in that situation. The other way you do is you go back down in breadth. Right. So a lot of accountancy firms work up to offering fractional CFO services. Can you start at fractional CFO services and work back down to accountancy and bookkeeping? Uh, and payroll would be hard. I've led that sort of company. It was difficult. The third option, which I am very keen to explore and I think a lot of the late bit of 2025 will be spent exploring how do you just share skills and resources? There are a lot of fractional CFOs, I think there must be a lot of fractional finance managers and there must be a lot of fractional FCs and bookkeepers out there in the UK and abroad. So how do we get sort of a partnership going where my background's in high growth fundraising, team structuring systems, it's not in international tax advisory. Right. So if I found another fractional CFO that does have that background, can I bring them into the business when I need them and how I need them so that we're sort of learning and, um, using each other's resources and grow in that way? That's interesting and something I do want to explore a bit more once. Once, uh, I've got my own sort of cash flow sorted and a bit more sustainable, then maybe we move on to looking at how you grow in a sustainable way without losing that value.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And it does, it does feel like we're still early days in this, in this community, like more people are coming in, more businesses becoming aware. Uh, so I think it's, it's an industry that's going to really grow for the next couple of years and yeah, you could find yourself becoming, you know, needing to expand and needing to add or like you say, you might, uh, you might find that you, you know, that that creates more problems as well. So I guess it really depends on what, uh, your appetite is. But, but we're seeing People, you know, even on this podcast, go down, you know, go different, go in different directions on that one.

Speaker B: And I think there will be a period of experimentation. I think that's what's so exciting about the fractional CFO industry is that it hasn't been solved. There's not a playbook of this is how you grow the fractional CFO business. I'll start on page one. I get some M clients. On page two, I do the next thing right, because there are lots of people trying lots of different things. And some people are going to get this right and really grow a firm that means something and adds value, um, which I think is really interesting to do. I'd like to be one of those people. I don't know how I'm going to work it out. Um, I'm still trying to work up to a set of services, uh, and descriptions that I think really work because we sort of didn't touch on it yet. But that's the other problem of fractional CFO is people don't even know what it means. Right. Colin, you're doing a fantastic piece of work through this podcast of really diving into, uh, what it means to be a fractional cfo. But unless my clients have listened to this podcast, the first question is, I don't even know what fractional CFO is. Can you talk to that? Talk to me about that a little bit as well. So solving for that, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's definitely coming up. I'm seeing that come up more, um, on some of the posts I'm doing. You know, somebody said the other day, you know, how do you. Can anybody just give themselves the fractional CFO label as just another, Another term for somebody who can come in and do your, you know, give some sort of financial advice? And obviously, you know, in, in other areas, you wouldn't do. You know, you wouldn't. I mean, it probably does happen in other, um, fractional roles too. But, you know, there's. I was chatting to somebody on, on this podcast, um, who was saying that they're, they're seeing a real demand for fractional CEOs, which was surprising to me. I hadn't heard of that before, but it's for technical businesses that are, uh, looking for, you know, they want somebody else to come and step into that fundraising role or that dealing with the board and just want to crack on with the product. Uh, but you wouldn't really bring somebody in to be a fractional CEO unless they really had CEO experience, actual CEO experience of running a company dealing With a board raising money, you just wouldn't really think about it. But I think people would bring in a CMO or a CFO maybe and uh, you wouldn't ask them question, have you ever been a cfo or what qualifies you? And it's trying to educate people into that. That rule of this is why I qualify for this, for this specific job that you need me to do.

Speaker B: Yes. And I think that's another thing that is so important in the industry and um, so often Talked about on LinkedIn and then no one ever lives by it, right. Is that uh, so many people talk about the most important thing is skill, attitude, experience. And yet I'm still day to day battling against industry experience being the top requirement. Right. Founders will sort of talk about openly about the uh, best thing about startups is that we focus on your ability to solve a problem, not your background. But then when it comes to a finance function, there seems to still really be this barrier of have you worked in our specific B2B SaaS VET technology for horses before? I'm like, no, surprisingly not. What I have done is I've grown a company to 400 million of revenue. I have the fundraise, $600 million worth of funding. I have grown teams, I have all of these stepping points and you can sort of point to the life cycle of a startup or a high growth scale up and ask them 10 questions and you'll be able to pinpoint the problems because most of them are not unique. Right. You go through relatively similar growing pains on that journey. And the key thing is therefore you want your fractional CFO to be someone who's been there, done that, we've solved this problem, we've moved on ahead of it. Right. Which is, and I sort of buy the industry argument for stuff like a CMO. How do I market my B2B SaaS horse vet technology? Maybe you do need somebody who knows how to do that. Do you need your CFO to m know that? Possibly not really. And so that's one of those things, the disparity between what LinkedIn tells you people are looking for and what people are actually looking for when you sit on a goal with them horses for

Speaker A: courses, they might say,

Speaker B: well, exactly. I didn't even see the pun in front of me. I could have used it.

Speaker A: Uh, I know, it was just right there. It was right there. Um, but yeah, I mean, to suit, I mean raising 400 million or 600 million and getting a company to 400 million revenue, that's something that you know, not a lot of people get to do in their career. You know, what, what's been, how were those experiences? Did you, um, was it stressful? Like what was your favorite part? I'd love to know a bit more about that.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, it's um, the numbers slightly cheating because a lot of my background's in private equity backed companies. So the fundraising tickets are just very large fundraising rounds. Right. But it is a lot to raise $600 million and that's been a mix of private equity debt and VC funding. It is stressful. It's never not stressful to go through that. And I certainly feel like the last 10 years have been, have felt like 20 years, um, to go through it. But I consider myself really lucky. I seem to have built a career out of being in the right place at the right time, where my particular skill set's been helpful. And I remember some parts of my career have not been as fun. Sometimes you do need to just put in a lot of work, a lot of hours. You know, when I was working with private equity backed businesses, I was working a very high number of hours. You know, 70 hours a week would be sort of the common bit. And you find yourself in really silly situations. You know, we would have, on Fridays we would be trying to organize calls between the shareholders and the new funders and whatever and we'd be on the call saying, okay, can you do a call at 6pm No, I can't make it. Oh, uh, can you do seven? No, can you do eight? No. Before you know it, you're agreeing to a scheduled call at midnight, right? Yes, I'll log in at midnight and we'll talk about it. And that was the sort of the world that I was in for several years. And that was quite stressful. I learned a huge amount M. I don't know if I call it the fun period. It was a time where I've learned just a huge amount from different people, from incredibly clever people. Not maybe people I'd want to work with again, but people who really shared knowledge and we did a lot together. And I've taken that passion for sort of working hard, solving problems, bringing in funding forward in the remainder, uh, of my career. Even though I'm now trying to institute more rules of no, I'm not going to be working 70 or 80 hours a week. I'm unlikely to be scheduling calls at midnight. Part of that might be I now have children where I didn't before. Um, part of me is now I'm just getting older and I Just can't do it. Um, and part of me is just recognizing being a bit more respectful of health and mental health and trying to rest when you can. What's been fun growing accountants are people who like to, in general terms we stay internal, we look at screens, we work with spreadsheets. And what I've really enjoyed about working in startups and growing my um, own fractional CFO firm, um, is I can spend my time talking about marketing, I can do sales, I can get out and meet people, I can talk with founders who are doing really genuinely interesting businesses that I have got a passion about and I don't have to spend my time talking about the next fat return and that's what I've really enjoyed.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's definitely some people, and I was probably one of these people as well that it's sometimes just being able to be exposed to. I remember having that one out in the agency which was you're getting so many different business models that you're exposed to, you know, design, we were designing brands and websites and you know, one from one week to the next you're just experiencing all these different industries that you wouldn't get if you were sort of stuck in, in the one role. Ah. And the one company for, for that long. So uh, I totally, that resonates with me. I mean what I was going to ask you what when you speak to startups, what are they? What do you see them getting wrong? You know with the coming in without any, often any financial experience like what are the typical things that you, mistakes you see, you know you can really help quickly with and sort things out.

Speaker B: Yeah, it is a really good question. It sort of comes back to what I was saying. You know, if you ask sort of 10 questions about the state of your, the stage of your growth, you sort of will know the problems that they're likely to have. I'll probably split my answer into two bits. There's behavioral issues that tend to go on in early stage, um, founder led companies and then there's technical problems as well or system led problems. Saying if we take that first one, the behavioural problems, it's treating a finance function or a CFO function as a cost to the business rather than as a value to the business. So don't get me wrong, your cost of bookkeeping and tax returns are a cost, right? They're uh, the cost of compliance. You are legally required to keep detailed records and file them. A company's house with hmrc. So that is a cost centre, uh, a Proper, helpful CFO is a value. It's the same thing that you wouldn't call. Founders are unlikely to describe their marketing team as just a cost center. Uh, they're a value added activity the same way that a fractional CFO is. And that I think is a behavioral shift. It's a reason that the majority of my clients, either second time or third time founders or in some other way sophisticated, they've been in business a long time, they've made plenty of mistakes before. They have a background in corporate finance, whatever it might be. They have that appreciation that you uh, need to take finance seriously. It will save you time in your fundraising round, it will save you falling out of board levels. We've both been around a lot of startups. You are very aware of the strain and stresses that can develop on a board meeting when a founder, uh, or the senior team can't answer questions. What is uh, our cac? What do we expect the LTV of our client, of our customers to be? What's our cash position going to be in six months if I change the price? If this project is delayed by six months, what happens to it? And if founders can't answer those questions in a meaningful and sort of convincing way, trust is eroded at the board and a CFO should be there to be your partner to say, hey, we have set up the way and you'll see this as sort of my branding and my direction that I've sort of pivoted to all over my LinkedIn is data driven decisions. And that's important because you want to join these meetings sounding like you understand your own startup, you understand your own customers. And when we talk about finance as fractional CFOs, we're not talking about the movement in the bank account, we're talking about the commercial drivers that affect our business. So what are our customers doing? What's our churn rates? What happens if these projects get delayed? And tying all of those things together to the actual numbers, right. And that sort of I think behaviorally can be difficult for first time founders to overcome. And then technical sort of system behavior I think is the rush of growing sort of necessitates sort of moving faster than your systems are keeping up with. So you know, we expanded to the US but we forgot to set up a company or we, we are uh, using up all this money but no one's really known what it's for, so it's just coded as other for the last two years and now we have to unpick it all. You know, that sort of the bedrock of really good bookkeeping. And people will say, Elliot, fractional CFOs aren't bookkeepers. You shouldn't be doing that. Most companies that I go into, even though they're doing 10, 20 million in turnover, there's still a whole raft of bookkeeping day to day problems to sort first before you can start to add value. Because that problem of quality garbage information into the process will lead to garbage conclusions. The first thing we want to do is get high quality data into our process so we can get high quality decisions out, uh, the other side as well. Absolutely, yeah. Oh, oh.

Speaker A: Makes so much sense. I think one of the things that I like about some of the things I've seen you writing about is that you're really kind of trying to understand the tech and lead from that point of view. I'd be curious to know like what are you seeing changing in the tech and where, where do you feel like that can make a big difference in, in startups? You know, you've uh, obviously worked in larger companies but you can do a lot more now with the tech, you know, with, in a smaller company. Where, what do you, yeah, where do you see that going?

Speaker B: I do have an interest in tech and thank you for, you know, for recognizing. I try within my LinkedIn and within my writing communication to, to sort of balance all the things that I find interesting. My degree is in computer science, but I started way back when I started. I was a terrible computer scientist before I became an accountant, so that now I can officially be the most boring person at every dinner party.

Speaker A: Me too. I'm a computer science background as well.

Speaker B: So I do uh, and I have always had a passion for the technology and I've done systems projects from a couple of grand dippers on again up to. I've done system projects with a couple of million pounds as the, as the budget. So I try to bring that through. And what I'm seeing as a trend I think is the industry's going slightly wrong. A lot of what I'm seeing is using generative AI, these outputs to replace the cfo. Like they're trying to say, okay, I'm going to take all this information from your banking and your Xero and your Dexter whatever and your emails and I'm going to create really good quality board reports for you and a lot. And um, I know some of the people doing this, they're incredibly clever people who are really trying to do the right thing. I don't think that's where the value is. And this might be what I decide at the beginning of 2026 is where I want to spend my efforts is I think the right use of the AI is at the lower levels of the finance function. What we want to do is, I just said I spend a fair bit of time talking about bookkeeping problems. I don't want to do that. I have to do that so I can get good quality information into the decision making process. And I don't see a lot of people putting AI to use to do high quality bookkeeping. Here's the contracts our clients sign. Can you as the AI go through that contract, design the bookkeeping, design the journals. A big change that startups go through at a certain size is they'll go from what we call cash accounting to accruals accounting. That's going to suddenly involve all sorts of month end journals. You'd have to understand contract terms, you have to understand value, you have to understand what the movements on the balance sheet should be. And it is prescriptive. There are rules, there are regulations, there are ah, ways of doing this that are well understood and I think that's a fantastic place for AI to have an impact, to become your AI finance manager and bookkeeper so that CFOs can have quality information they rely on without having to spend lots of money on people. And that would uh, unlock quite a lot of growth in startups. And I think maybe that is the way you would grow a fractional firm, um, by saying, you know what, we're going to use the people to do the fractional bit but we're going to develop the tools that are AI agents that are going to replace the day to day bookkeeping with and um, free people up to really add value instead. So that I really like.

Speaker A: Have you seen anybody uh, moving into that? Like is there anything you've seen that looks like they're moving in that direction?

Speaker B: I yet to be convinced that there's a system that deals with the problem of bad information. There's not relying still on some person coding the journals correctly, knowing the customers correctly, taking the data out of HubSpot correctly and putting it in. They sort of are uh, predicated on the idea that the day to day bookkeeping is right. I think I could be wrong. There could be lots of tools. Maybe after this comes out I'm going to get bombarded on my LinkedIn with what are you talking about Elliot? My tool does this perfectly. Please buy our service. I don't know, I haven't seen it. I had a quick go as you Might imagine. I asked ChatGPT about this last week and it's given me some tools to look at. Very excited to get stuck into them, um, and see if they really solve that problem. But the majority of the chatter I see is about we're going to do reporting, you know, CFO levels of. You're going to have a little widget pop up on your website and you can ask it, please tell me about my exposure to cash flow risks in the next six months. But I don't think that's the right use of AI.

Speaker A: Uh, sort of, kind of wrapping up. You mentioned that you see fractional CFOs coming together, um, in communities to sort of share knowledge. I know you started a WhatsApp group community that, that, you know, looks like it's thriving. Um, love to hear a bit more about why you did that and what, you know, what surprised you about what you find in the process.

Speaker B: Yeah, we did. So I launched, um, it's called the Fractional Finance Forum. Uh, we launched a few weeks back and it's been going really well. So We've now got 60 fractional CFOs in our, in our WhatsApp community. Pretty active. It's been a fantastic way to sort of learn about what other people are doing, what their skills are, you know. And I was talking about how do you grow that fractional CFO firm and is it by leaning on others that have got experience? And the Fractional CFO forum, sorry, the Fractional Finance Forum has been a really good way to see that people will do that, they will happily share information. And we've had, I think, two days into it, two of the members of the forum jumped on a call together to discuss a problem that one of them was having. And it was just free advice and friendly information. Just today, earlier, uh, today I've jumped on a call with one of them to talk through cap tables and how that works in a sort of an ASA scenario so we can share that information. That's been really, really nice. And just as we've touched on throughout this call, the problems of how do you grow, how do you scale? So having 60 of us all together where we can talk about that is really, really good. So it's just there to share data, ah, share information, talk about the struggles. Um, if somebody wants to ask about marketing practices or they don't know much about international structuring, whatever it is, we can all come together. What does it grow into? I don't know. Hopefully it continues to be a supportive space for fractional Finance professionals to come together where they don't have to act professional. One thing I think as a finance, if you're a qualified accountant, you're expected to always present yourself really knowledgeably, really professionally. So having a space where you don't have to, you can just ask questions, say you don't know something and no one's going to mind, I think that's really important. My next mission with it is to find non CFO fractional finance professionals. There must be fractional finance managers, fractional tax accountants out there operating in the uk and I would love to see more of those and talk to them about how they do their business and to have them join the fractional finance forum as well. That would be fantastic.

Speaker A: That sounds really interesting. Yeah, that could be the next subgroup, um, to emerge from that. But yeah, um, I think it's really, really powerful and obviously larger networks like the CFO center and other groups would maybe have that organically. But you're almost creating this as the, this is the kind of grassroots movement of that uh, where people can just share and um, save so much time as well. Because you don't. We do go to the communities rather than Google now I think to try and find out like, just tell me what apps are you using or tell me, you know, who do, you know, who's an expert in this. And we value, put so much value on those personal recommendations. It just saves so much time. Uh, so I think there's a huge, because those are gonna, I see huge value coming from that group.

Speaker B: Yeah. And next week I want the value in those groups, I think is a really important point. Right. And I, I want to find out how we harness that. So from next week I'm going to try and see if we can find a way to properly record the knowledge if there's a good app recommendation, if there's a good service partner recommendation. If someone's talking, do we have a list of this somewhere that we can sort of build over time in terms of like, you know, here's the CFO playbook of the tech stack, the service partners, the whatever, the whatever it is we've been discussing so that we're actually collecting data and creating something valuable that all of us can access.

Speaker A: I think that could be the next AI solution, you know, to have an AI bot join uh, your, your WhatsApp group and then be able to like ask a questions and it would, it would, you know, be able to reference things because it is one of the things, you know, like, I don't think I think, I don't think we're going to see an app that replaces ah, AI because nobody wants to join another app. You know, even, even Telegram for me is like too, too far, you know, uh, to go because I don't want to have to open up another app and check and get notifications and. But, you know, WhatsApp's always there and it's part of your life. Um, it's just that, you know, it has flaws in terms of, you know, when you join a conversation and you're, you, there's people been in it before, you can't see the history. So.

Speaker B: Yes. So if there's any developers listening, we need an AI bot that can join WhatsApp and just monitor and extract the data from valuable WhatsApp groups and not

Speaker A: send it to China. And uh, and not send it.

Speaker B: I don't, I, I, my understanding is that WhatsApp's encrypted end to end. So I don't know how a bot gets in there to read the information, but I'm sure, yeah, it would be, that would be a good use case of AI. Right.

Speaker A: Another thing that just, you know, in sort of closing, one of the things we talked about beforehand was, you know, I know as a child you were diagnosed as having dyslexia and you find yourself in a finance role. You, I think you said to me that another. A, uh, teacher told me that you'd be a terrible employee. You know, what, what would you say to people that are kind of, maybe they're very early in their career and they're starting out and they're not sure that they have what it takes to be in a financial role. How have you found it?

Speaker B: Yeah, and I'm pleased we bring it up because it's another part that I'm passionate about is who gets into the finance career and how do you help young people sort of grow into something they'd be fantastic at? And, um, so to set the senior. I was extremely lucky that my dyslexia was diagnosed extremely early on in my, um, childhood. A lot of people will get through to university, whatever without the diagnosis. I was very fortunate that my parents and my school picked up on it and a lot of extra support was, you know, most of my memory of school is spending my lunchtimes in extra lessons trying to learn how to write properly. But it was great that it was picked up very early. And I hear a lot of people saying, I can't be an accountant because I'm dyslexic. I can't do an office job because I'm dyslexic. And it's not true. And it's something that I think we ingrain into people, that if you're dyslexic, you can't be academic, you can't be smart. Dyslexia has nothing to do with how smart you are. It has something to do with how well you process visual information, uh, which, uh, to me is the superpower. Right. My career is built on the ability to problem solve. That's what's always happened. People can't fix something, they end up asking me m to come out and fix it. And it seems to be linked directly to my dyslexia in that I seem to think through problems and solutions in a slightly different way to neurotypical individuals. And I'm able to tie all those pieces together. So I might take twice as long to write your email then. My ability to actually solve a problem and move on is tightly linked to that dyslexia. And you'll find a lot of dyslexics talk about that and they can see the solution. So we had a situation in a Treasury control. We had a very complicated group structure. We had dozens of bank accounts. Lots of things were going on. And, um, we had bank covenants in place. You have multiple banks involved. There's a huge restriction on how you move cash around the company at that point. And the problem statement was we don't know how to get cash from bank account A to bank account D, which is where it needs to be. This is a huge problem. But the solution, to me at least, seemed extremely obvious. Right? And you sort of think to yourself, well, am I making this up? Is it not that simple? Why isn't it somebody else putting their hand up and saying about it? And it was, here's the solution. We move from A to B to C to D. We just do each step in time and we solve the problem one step at a time. And. And it comes through. So it becomes a bit of a power to be able to do that. And it just seems sort of obvious to. So I would say to anybody who feels the same, the way you grow in a career is to be the person who knows how to fix something and to come through and good on that. Right? So that if you can do that and if dyslexia helps you do that, it doesn't matter that you're bad at writing emails. That's not what's going to get you through your career. If someone can rely on you, if they Say, you know what? Colin's always going to be my person. If there's a problem, he knows what to do about it. That will get you much further. So just talk to anybody who's listening and think that is the most important thing to take away from it. Don't worry about your English grades.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: I have to be careful because my wife's a teacher, so I can't say that too much. But don't worry, I did terribly in school. It was not my forte. It's not an environment I've thrived in and I'm pleased and happy with how my career turned out afterwards. So don't let your performance at school dictate what happens afterwards.

Speaker A: Fantastic. That's a great, um, note to finish on, Elliot, thank you so much for joining us. We'll drop a note to how people can join the Fractional Finance forum and, uh, that's open to anybody and LinkedIn is probably the best place to connect with you as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, find me on LinkedIn. It's relatively active. Please do drop me a message. I try to look at, um, them as much as possible, so please do reach out.

Speaker A: Brilliant.

Speaker B: Elliot, Great to chat, Colin, it's been fantastic. Thank you. Thanks. And we'll catch up soon.

Speaker A: Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the new F Word. I hope you enjoyed it. Remember, expert financial advice shouldn't be limited to those with just big budgets. You can access the same level of advice for a fraction of the costs thanks to this fractional revolution. I believe that every growing business needs to know how much a game changer this can be. So if you love the episode, please consider subscribing to the show. It'll help us keep doing what we're passionate about. And feel free to share this episode with others who might find it useful. Finally, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn. See you in the next one.