How Fractional CFOs Actually Add Value with Jonathan Rosenzweig

Ultimately, any thesis needs to be simple. You should be able to explain a narrative in one sentence and back it up by 3 to 5 bullet points, which should include the differentiation, should include context, contextualize the narrative relative to the macro environment, relative to the competitive landscape, relative to the industry dynamics, relative to the company's history. But at the end of the day, if you can't explain a narrative in one sentence, then maybe back it up by 3 to 5 bullet points, it's too complicated. And if it's too complicated, people won't understand it. Welcome back to the New F Word podcast, where we talk finances in business. I'm your host, Colin Hewitt, founder and CEO at Float. We're so glad to be back for season 3, and this season we've got some great guests that are going to bring a ton of value. We'll be diving further into how fractional CFOs add value, what financial clarity actually looks like, on what systems and apps are leading the way. New guests, sharper conversations. Let's get into it. So today I'm joined by Jonathan Rosenzweig, uh, a globally seasoned finance leader who's worn almost every hat in the industry from top-ranked sell-side analyst and head of American equities research at Bulge Bracket Bank to CFO of a publicly traded SPAC, senior partner at a venture firm, and now a fractional CFO and advisor to innovative tech companies. Jonathan, it's really great to have you on the podcast. Colin, thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. How's the day going? Good. Excited to have this conversation. I think we were talking and we wanted to really get into the role of the CFO. You've obviously covered many different areas in this space, and I think a lot of people are coming into the CFO role through fractional, coming through head of finance. But, you know, you've seen it from lots of different angles, like what Maybe you should say a little bit about what you're, how you're working in that field at the moment. Like what's currently live for you in, in the work that you're doing? So currently I'm a fractional CFO, but I have a number of different kinds of roles. Currently I am a fractional CFO with one middle market growth company. I'm also a fractional CFO and senior partner with another company where I also play a role on an investing team. That's more of a venture capital type business. The other is more of an operating company. And then I have a consulting relationship with another firm as well that's less of a CFO kind of role. So playing, wearing multiple kinds of hats right now, but I enjoy that. I enjoy being able to experience different things, add value in different ways, learn new things all the time. That's one of the things that I find fun about being a fractional, uh, CFO slash consultant. And is this the first fractional role you've had, or have you had others in the past? This is the first time. These 3 opportunities are sort of my first experience doing something on a fractional basis. Anything else has always been more full-time dedicated, but I'm certainly enjoying that experience and getting a lot out of it. And how, like, tell us about how are you seeing the responsibilities differ in the fractional capacity? Does it feel like you're doing all the work but just in less time, or do you feel like it's a bit more relaxed, or how's that working out? I think you do have to be efficient. I think in a sense it requires a little bit more of acting like a leader because you really can't be as hands-on as you would want to be if you were full-time in the organization. You don't have the time, the expectations aren't the same. To some degree, They don't want you to do that. They're not paying you to do that. They're not paying you enough to do that. What they're really trying to do in this kind of a role is make sure that you understand what the team needs, help lead the team to where it needs to go. And like any kind of a leadership role, it's sort of like being a conductor of an orchestra. You understand what all the different instruments are and where they're out of tune, try to get them, you know, harmonized and in alignment and make sure that you're achieving what you want to achieve and getting to that that final song, right? So that's the way I think about the fractional CFO role is making sure I jump in, listening, understanding, observing what they really need, creating alignment with the team there to make sure that I'm delivering what's of value to them. And, you know, then kind of delivering and iterating constantly. How did you come across this role? Was it something that somebody— was it a connection or did you apply for it or how did that come about? The different roles that I'm— that I have right now, the 3 different roles, one of them started as a full-time role, uh, and we just kind of, uh, decided that we're doing things a little bit differently, and so that's now sort of a more fractional/part-time gig. The other, uh, is a company that I just knew for a very, very long time. I'd known the CEO, uh, since before he started the company, and I had a longstanding relationship with the company, had been talking to them for many years about their evolution, about the, uh, the things that were going well, the challenges that they were having. So I really kind of knew the company, although I didn't necessarily know the finance division. And the third is, and again, uh, which is the more consulting-oriented, uh, gig. That is one that I've known for, again, a comp— the company I've known for a long time. It's a bigger company, but it is a, a relationship, a fairly senior relationship inside that company that I've again had for many, many, many years. So they had a need and I had some capacity to help them out. So we found there was a good opportunity for me to add value for them. I mean, some people would say if some people are in that in-between point of deciding whether to hire a fractional CFO or full-time, like, what would be your advice there? When do you feel like a company needs to make that transition? That's a great question. I think a fractional CFO, I think, is good for a few circumstances. One, if a company is small and growing and can't really afford that full-time CFO, but they know they need to develop a certain level of sophistication. Often I hear from companies that, you know, we really need to develop a better financial narrative. We need to be able to interface more effectively with investors. We need to have a model. We don't really have a model or not one that's very effective. These are reasons why for a young company, a fractional CFO can be of value. Sometimes a fractional CFO can also be of value if the company is trying to figure out where it wants to go, what it wants to be. You know, they're not sure if they're headed toward an exit. They're not sure if they want to shift their business in a particular direction. So it's sort of that transitional phase of a company. Another reason it might be valuable for a company to use a fractional is if they just feel they kind of have something that's more project-oriented. They need to figure out a solution to a problem. They're having issues resolving the roles on their finance team or the efficiency on their finance team. They just need to solve that problem and then they feel like they don't need it anymore or their, their cash flow is an issue and they need to resolve that or they need to put— institute an FP&A practice and they just want to get it started. So sometimes companies just need somebody to help them fix a problem or get something started, and that can be a use for a fractional CFO as well. Full-time CFO, you know, when you really need somebody, the finance team on an ongoing basis to do all those functions on an ongoing basis and just having a controller or an accounting manager and a billing and collections team, that's not going to be enough. You need somebody to lead the practice be a face for the company on an ongoing basis, deliver that narrative, oversee the team. That's when you go for the full-time CFO. That makes sense. Uh, who do you typically interface with in the company? You know, are you— do you have— do the companies you're working with have a controller that you're, you know, you check in with and they do the— you know, you're, you're advising them, or are you doing a lot of all the types of work? How do you split that? The company where I'm a sort of straight-on traditional fractional CFO, I report into the COO and I work very closely with him. I work closely with the CEO as needed. My day-to-day would be more with the COO. I work very closely with everybody on the finance team, but I also work closely with the head of sales, certain account managers, senior account and relationship managers. So I really— the people that in a CFO function you'd want to have that interaction with, that alignment with I try to have that interaction with even as a fractional because I need to understand the needs of the organization and to solve problems. Issues will come up, you know, we'll see, you know, a challenge in one area or the other and we just, we just try to work together. And I need to make sure I know the people, different players in the organization that can be valuable to address those kind of issues and work with them closely. And some of these folks I've known from the past and some of them I haven't. Sometimes too, you just on an ongoing basis, you need to have relationships across the organization. So any CFO needs to have a relationship with the head of sales. And so that's not necessarily on an issue-by-issue basis. That's just on an ongoing basis. When you're closing months and quarters, you need to have that dialogue with sales and understand what's going on. So yeah, so the, the day-to-day relationship is with the COO and of course the people in the finance team, but I'm always broadening out, trying to make sure that I've got those relationships with people that are going to be important for me to interact with and have alignment with over the course of the engagement. And who, who do you have in the finance team? What sort of roles are there? The finance team, like most organizations, you know, you're going to have an accounting manager, you're going to have billing and collections, you're going to have FP&A. And so, and then there are some support team members as part of that as well. I can't get into too much detail about the organization itself, but Generally speaking, this particular organization is what you would normally expect in an organization, right, where you have your accounting team that also handles payables. You have your billing and collections, which handles receivables. You have your FP&A, which is handling a whole bunch of different things, modeling, analytics, and all different kinds of things. And collectively, we work together as a team and we work, as I said, very closely with sales. Sales operations is not part of finance, but obviously we work very closely with them. Sales management, we work very closely with. So a broad group. And roughly how big— I mean, that's obviously, that sounds like a great team. Roughly how many people are like, what size of company do you have to be to when you start having that scale of a team supporting you? Again, I don't want to get into too much detail about the company itself, but suffice to say, this is a company that has been around for, I'm going to say, 15 years or so, 10 to 15 years, let's call it. Uh, and, um, The company has grown quite nicely. It's got a lot of revenue and the company has a large customer base with large institutional customers who have been with the company for a long time and they're rapidly expanding their customer base from what has been traditionally more of an institutional customer base to more of a consumer base going forward. Sounds great. Sounds like it's doing really well. I think I'd be interested to know what type of software, you know, have you found that is it typically onto an enterprise software like a NetSuite? And do you have a whole, like, raft of other products that you're bringing in? Have you seen any change in that area in the, in the past couple of years? Again, I do have to be careful about talking specifically about the company that I work with, but let's just sort of say in a general sense, you know, the experience that I've had, you know, working with an ERP system like NetSuite, working with an FP&A solution can be very valuable. And that's something really first starting to get my hands a little bit dirty on, you know, working with an FP&A solution to move from having a model that's a series of spreadsheets, which can be, you know, for a smaller organization, much more appropriate for as an organization gets larger, much more unwieldy to something that is more efficient and allows for more automation within the finance practice. Makes it easier to get to your month-end closes and quarterly closes, makes it easier to find information, makes it easier to do scenario analysis. Analysis, makes it easier to do planning and budgeting. So that's one of the transitions that, that I've been working on and doing, frankly, for the first time. But that FP&A software can make a real difference. I spent a lot of time looking at a variety of FP&A vendors, and so you get a good sense of what's out there, the different scale, different capabilities, the pluses and minuses. So we're in the process of moving forward on some of that. Nice. So that's a lot of demos, a lot of— do you get— do you do demos of the live data, or do you Do you just sort of have a look at what they're, what's on their website? How's it been the procurement process gone for that? You start generally with a pretty basic demo and you start with what are the needs of the organization? What is it that the organization's trying to achieve? And then what are the capabilities of those different, what are the capabilities of those different solutions and how do they meet those needs? And what extra bells and whistles do they provide? So for example, some are very Excel-based, some are more web-based. If I have a team that is used to working in Excel and now going to do something, ask them to do something that's completely web-based, that may be more challenging. But if I also don't provide a web-based solution, they may be losing some capability. So you have to weigh all that and determine what's really the best solution that's going to meet the team where they are, but also help them grow and add a lot more value to their processes. And so I started with demos for myself. I looked at about 10 or a dozen different FP&A solutions. And then once I've done that, I then think about what the team needs, talk to the team about it, gave them a list of all the different capabilities and created a spreadsheet of the different solutions and the costs and all that. And then I get feedback from them. And then when they say, well, okay, these 2 or 3 are of the most interest, then I get a shortlist together and I put those 2 or 3 in front of the broader team and start getting more feedback. Then you're having more advanced demos to go along with it, and then ultimately you make a decision and you can move forward. So that's generally the process that I follow. That sounds very thorough. And yeah, I think obviously it's interesting because some of the large vendors have been dominating for quite a while. I don't know if you're aware of some of the new kind of NetSuite competitors that are popping up, some of the AI-driven focused platforms. Some of the names are just, uh, escaping me, but, uh, called GeoLentry, new one coming up very recently. Light is another one, Puzzle, Campfire. I don't know if you've come across any of those, but do you feel like there's a, a need to— they're going to do well in the market? Do you think everybody's just going to end up on sticking in NetSuite for the ubiquity of that? I don't have enough knowledge of or information to talk specifically about those solutions. What I can say is, I guess, two things. One, when companies integrate with an ERP system, it's a big deal to make a change. I even remember from the days of being a stock analyst and managing stock analysts when you had public companies that would go through a change. Often big changes in ERP systems led to disruptions in business and to the point where it can make a material difference to stocks. Companies would miss expectations because they were in the process of converting ERP systems and it would be detrimental and disruptive, and then the stocks would be affected. Those are public companies. It's different than private, but the same concept holds true. It's, it's not easy to make those kinds of changes. It's disruptive. And so companies have to really believe that there is a need need and that they're going to get something meaningful out of it that they can't solve in some kind of a simpler way. Not to say that, that it won't over time be the right thing for companies to do. Again, I'm not as knowledgeable in those solutions as I probably should be, but it's a process and that's going to take a lot of time for companies to feel that need. Newer companies that are coming up the curve are going to be more inclined to, before they implement a more sophisticated ERP, to take that risk and to put something in place that's more new and more modern. So I think that's where you'll see it. The other thing that I would just say is, you know, on the other hand, automation, leveraging AI capabilities in whatever way you can is gonna be and is increasingly important. Automation makes a huge difference in terms of freeing people up to spend the time on the things where they can add the most value. I know a lot of people talk about automation and AI as something that's gonna eliminate a lot of jobs, and in some cases, of course it will. But in many cases, what it does is it takes rote mundane tasks and it has the AI do it, or some automation solution do that for you, and it frees you up to focus more on the value-added insights, analyzing data, contextualizing, doing the things that it's harder for an AI to do because it doesn't have the experience, doesn't have the history, doesn't have— it's not looking as broadly as a human being. Being might. There's also specific tasks that an AI can be very helpful with. It can be helpful with know your client. It can be helpful with risk and controls. It can be helpful with data analysis. It can be helpful with all different kinds of, of things. So that to me, there is a lot that we can get from putting automation processes and AI into finance organizations, even though whether or not it should be the foundation of an ERP is maybe a different question. Yeah, we will see what happens there. But you touched on something there in terms of telling the story or crafting the narrative of the numbers. One thing I wanted to ask you was, do you have any examples of how CFOs can craft a narrative in a way that maybe has— that changes the direction? You know, obviously we're not talking about changing the numbers, but talk about how the narrative, a simple, a change can make a difference in that world. It's a great question. I think maybe a good way to give an example of that is there was a company that I was talking to that it was trying to focus on a niche technology, uh, very sophisticated technology that would accomplish something fairly unique. It was AI-oriented. It was an expensive technology that would be sold to hospitals, and the CEO had a real strong vision for what he wanted the message to be. And for what that narrative should be. But sales was going out with a somewhat different message, and there was a frustration building internally about, certainly from management, that, hey, there's a message going on here that's different than what I'm sharing. And that created turmoil. It created turmoil internally. It created some issues with customers. It created some angst, you know, among various constituencies. So an important lesson from that, it's, you know, and you'll keep hearing me use this word, right? It's alignment. That when it comes to creating a narrative, there always has to be alignment. Certainly, you know, at the very highest levels of the organization, the management team and the board, but also among investors, understanding what investors expect, what investors want, what investors will digest. There has to be the alignment as well with the customer side of the equation. Doesn't necessarily mean that there's the exact same narrative being given to the customers that are being given to the investors. They're different audiences, but the general nucleus of that narrative has to be the same. And then on top of that, the delivery can be a little bit different. And I think in that particular situation that I highlighted, that's an example where that nucleus was not quite solid enough, and so it was really splintered and that created a lot of problems. Ultimately, any thesis needs to be simple. A narrative should be— you should be able to explain a narrative in one sentence and back it up by 3 to 5 bullet points, which should include the differentiation, should include context, contextualize the narrative relative to the macro environment, relative to the competitive landscape, relative to the industry dynamics, relative to the company's history. But at the end of the day, if you can't explain a narrative in one sentence and then maybe back it up by 3 to 5 bullet points, it's too complicated. And if it's too complicated, people won't understand it. That's not a good narrative. At the end of the day, a narrative has to be something that investors can digest. It's not only what you want the narrative to be, it's what investors will accept as a narrative. And so you always have to think about it that way. I think that's really helpful. And certainly, you know, I can imagine that can be applied across board meetings, you know, internally with the team. How often do you think that narrative changes? Is it typically set for quarter or a year, or how do you think about that? So I think you have to think about the long term and the short term as sort of intersecting circles. You always want to have a North Star, which is your definition of success. It is your longer-term narrative. It's your vision for the company. But you always have to be mindful that there are tactical needs. The environment is always changing. Things happen. You have to act when things happen. You have to be thoughtful. You have to be in alignment with the people around you, but you also have to be decisive. And when, when you do take those more tactical actions, you have to think about what is the impact to my longer-term vision. And just because something is gonna impact the longer-term vision doesn't mean you don't do it, but you do want to be mindful of the impact that it's gonna have because if you have two choices, both of which could solve a problem, one of which is more consistent with your long-term vision, one of which is not, you generally want to go the direction of the one that's consistent. But sometimes you don't have that option. And when you don't have that option, sometimes it also means you have to reassess that vision. Visions are— they're important, they're long-term, but they're not permanent fixtures. Sometimes you have to be flexible there as well. So I think of them like intersecting circles. And sometimes the vision is here, the tactical is here,, but at times they come together and you have to figure out how to engage with them as, uh, things that are interrelated. In a great company, you know, there's often— we've been following a, a book recently called The Advantage by a guy called Patrick D'Anestione. I don't know if you come across it, but he talks about the kind of cadence of having, um, quarterly senior team meetup and, uh, you know, an annual offsite. Do you typically get involved in that level? Do you feel like as a fractional you can challenge, you can and, you know, or do you tend to sit back? How's the dynamic when you're in that fractional capacity? I actually think as a fractional, it is your job to challenge. I don't think a fractional— if you're gonna handle some tasks as a bookkeeper or an accounting manager, that's one thing. To me, that's a little different than being a fractional CFO, right? To me, if you're a fractional CFO, you're there to question practices, to make sure that they're right, But you do so in a way where you understand and observe first. To your point about quarterly meetings and all of that, one of the things that I endeavor to be a part of, and in fact I try to lead, is a weekly meeting with the finance team. And it's just, and particularly the leaders of the finance team to make sure that everybody is thinking about, okay, here's all the things that we need to be working on. On. Give us the updates. First of all, every week, what are the numbers? Where do we stand? Particularly in things like balance sheet and cash flow. How are those coming in relative to where we'd expect them? And if they're off, why are they off? Doesn't mean there's anything wrong necessarily, but we just want to understand why. And if we need to course correct, what do we need to be doing? If we have a variety of initiatives that the team is working on, give us an update. If there are problems, things that you want feedback on, The COO is on these, is in these meetings. I'm in these meetings. People can give you feedback. Sometimes we have the head of sales join those meetings and we always have sales operations joining those meetings. So using those opportunities to get the team together to make sure that everybody's on the same page is important. And I think it's important for the fractional CFO to be a part of it and where appropriate to lead it. And that doesn't mean that the fractional CFO is doing everything. You can't do everything. And it's important to delegate and not micromanage because at the end of the day, you're not a part part of the organization. They have to do that work, but it's important for you to make sure that the processes are working the way that they should as that fractional CFO. And you, you touch on the team and spending time with the team. How much of your role is to try and identify, is there, are people in the team not performing, or, you know, we need to recruit or expand? You know, how much time do you spend, typically spend in that space? I think every role is going to be different and And I think if you're in a role where it is important to have those relationships with the team and make sure, uh, that the team is structured as it should be, or that the relationships are what they should be, or that they're performing the way that they should be, you have to keep in mind the role that you're playing, right? You're not a full-time manager. These people don't report into you, at least in the cases that I've been involved in. Uh, but yet you can make an impact and you can be helpful in that way. And so I've got a lot of leadership experience. I try to use that leadership experience. What does that What do you mean? You do delegate, you don't micromanage. What do you try to do? You try to help people plan, think about the things that need to get done, uh, make sure that they're developing plans for themselves and for their team. Make sure you're looking at those plans, making sure they make sense, just making sure that those plans get done. It's then holding people accountable. If you said you were gonna do something, did it get done? And if it didn't get done, why? And at the end of the day, again, they're not gonna report to me, but everybody around them's gonna know if something didn't get done. And in part, that's why you have these weekly meetings, because you're always looking to see what do we say we do and where, where are we with it. Then there's communication. There's the communication of those team meetings and making sure things are happening and making sure people are talking to each other about what they're working on, etc. There's also the one-on-one communication that you have to have with individuals. And it is amazing what people will tell you one-on-one that they won't tell you in a group setting. They'll tell you things that are bothering them. They'll tell you why they may have reacted a certain way to something. They'll tell you about what they want in their role. They'll tell you about what doesn't seem to be working well that they were afraid to mention in a group meeting. They'll tell you about ideas that they may want to get fixed. So having that communication really, really important. As a fractional CFO, you gotta make sure you're staying on top of the status of everything, and particularly of things that you know are important to the organization. People have a lot on their plate, and especially the smaller you go in organizations, the more everybody has on their plate. And so it's hard for everybody to keep track of everything that's going on. One thing you can do to add value as a fractional CFO is to help them keep track and make sure that things continue to move along. And the last thing I would say is, as a fractional, when you're leading a team and working with a team, is it's easy to say, well, that's somebody else's role, so they know the numbers. That can be a big mistake. You really want to make sure you understand the numbers, understand what's going on with the numbers, because at the end of the day, if you're going to be a fractional CFO, people are going to want to make sure that you understand what's going on. And it's hard to do that if you don't really have a command of the numbers. It's part of your credit. That all sounds amazing. It sounds like you're running a pretty tight ship and you've obviously got the experience and the hard-fought experience to do that. I'm wondering, like, where do you see teams getting it wrong? Because— like, where are the biggest things that you've had to, you know, you've seen again and again, like, we need to sort this out, or, and, you know, I can see this happening. What are the typical things that you would just say to companies that are, that need to sort this out? That's a pretty broad question. That's a good question. And I see it on a number of levels. So let's start with personnel. Sometimes people have, they don't think about the seats correctly, so they deal with people that they have in the company and they say, well, this person will handle that role, this person will handle the other role. They're not really thinking about what are the roles we need to have. You should generally start not with the people, but with the roles. Figure out what are the roles that you need and taking into account the context of the organization, what the organization does, how big is the organization, what can the organization afford? Think about the roles that you should have and then think about what are the right ways to fill them. And sometimes that's what the people you have and sometimes it's not. Sometimes you need to hire new people. People. Sometimes you just don't have the right people and you need to say, you know what I mean, you need to make a change. So you think of the roles first and then you think of the right people to go into those roles. There's also sometimes people don't think about, let's talk about the modeling. Sometimes people don't think about how do I manage my, my numbers, right? How do I forecast my business? Think about looking around corners. Think about the future. People often think about the model as just a formality that's needed to satisfy investors. It's not, it's fundamental to your narrative. It's fundament— should be fundamental to the vision you have for the company. It's fundamental to managing risk because how could you possibly think about all the risks that could be out there if you're not thinking about what your numbers might look like and bookending the, the negatives and the positives. So a mistake I sometimes see is people often wait too long to start thinking about a model and really building building robust forecasts, and as part of that, doing some scenario analysis. Sometimes people focus too much on a— we can talk more about this, but sometimes people focus too much on a point forecast and not enough of the bookends of the scenarios around that. I think those are some of the things. Then sometimes it's processes that you find people make mistakes with as well. It's often easier for people to just say, I'll outwork a problem, I'll take more time and solve a problem through manual tasks, rather than saying, is there something wrong with the process I've got here? Could the process be better? Could we me more of it to solve problems. And maybe it takes a little bit longer, and maybe because I took a little bit more time, something is going to go by the wayside. Some numbers aren't going to be quite as we want them. But if everybody's in alignment around what you're trying to do, that, hey, it's going to take a little bit more time to achieve what we want, but we're going to be better because we're going to be more efficient, we're going to have better processes, and ultimately everybody will be happy. Generally, you can, you can create alignment around that kind of a decision. Going back, you said something about The point forecast versus the— there was something scenario. Yeah. Talk about that. There's an expression I like, and I'm not going to do it justice, but the expression is the only thing that's certain in this life is uncertainty, right? When you have a point forecast, it is by definition going to be wrong. It is the chances of you getting something exactly right from the revenue down to the EBITDA or the EPS, whatever it is, is very close to zero. It's very hard to do that. So what you're doing is you're taking a collection of assumptions and then you're seeing how do those assumptions play out. And that's what you should do. I mean, it's not to say that it's wrong. A point number, a point estimate, point forecast is the right thing to do, but it's by definition going to be wrong. So what you want to do is you want to create a set of intervals around it, confidence interval around it. If I'm going to be wrong in the downside, where's my high degree of confidence that it's not going to be lower than X? And okay, on the upside, I may be above my point estimate. What's the upside potential and where do I have a high degree of confidence? It's not likely to go above that, right? And you kind of look at that range. What does that do for you? It gives you a broader purview. It allows you to think about— it allows you to look around corners, think about risks. It allows you to plan. If I'm thinking more about what could go wrong, I'm more likely to plan for what could go wrong. I'm less likely to be surprised. Preparation is a big part of it. Now, I've seen companies that have, for example, a long selling cycle, and the selling cycle ends up being more of a challenge for them than they think. So they're burning more and more cash. Well, if you're not thinking about the scenario of what happens if my sales cycle's longer than I anticipate and I burn more cash, eventually you just run outta cash. But there may be other solutions to that if you think in advance, right? So having that That forethought and that planning can go a very long way, and that's why scenario analysis can be very beneficial. Makes so much sense. If you could give one underrated piece of advice to an emerging fractional CFO or somebody who wants to step into that space, how would you talk to them about how to step into, and maybe in a position where you are now, you know, like what do they need to do to get there? What would be your advice? The very first thing is listen and observe. All of us go into, we all go into most things with some kind of bias, right? We have life experiences, we have professional experiences, we have context from where we live, all of that. Often the first impulse is to go in and say, well, here's what I would do, or here's what I think is wrong. And that's often a big mistake. First of all, turns people off when you're new to an organization, you're not a permanent employee. It's sort of the worst thing that you can do. And I've made that mistake in my career. I'm not gonna say— so this is a lesson I learned the hard way earlier in my career professionally as a manager. But the important thing is to listen and observe first. Really try to understand the needs of the organization. Get to know the people. Hear them out. Understand what they think is going on, what they think is wrong, what they think needs to be fixed. I'm gonna go back to that word alignment. Create alignment, alignment of understanding of what needs to be addressed, alignment of what the solution is, what the solutions might be, then deliver. Okay. And when you solve one problem, then just keep iterating that process. Listen and observe, create alignment, deliver, and iterate again. To me, that is the way you step into any kind of a new role, and particularly one that's a fractional CFO type role. I think that's a really, a really great way to finish. Maybe if I had to pick one final question, you know, what's one hard truth about leadership that's been the biggest part of your, your journey to internalize? I think for me, the hardest part to internalize has been to trust others to do the work and to hold them accountable for it, but not to try to do everything yourself. It is part of my nature, just personally, I'm exposing here, it's part of my nature to want to do everything, to want to dive in deep, to get to know the details, to just get stuff done. Done. I'm a get stuff done kind of guy. But sometimes that impulse can lead to mistakes. That— because the better thing to do is to say other people really need to, uh, be able to take on the task. Other people need to learn and grow too. If I'm taking on things that really they can learn to do, then I'm not helping them grow. That's, for me, is an impulse that I have to hold back. And I've really tried through my career to learn to grow by delegating not micromanaging, making sure that other people feel like they can learn and grow in their careers. So that would be my, my answer. That's fantastic. That resonates a lot actually. Thank you, Jonathan. This has been so helpful. I think we've covered a lot of ground and I really appreciate the insights and wisdom that you've brought. And yeah, thank you again for coming on. Colin, I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you for having me. Thank you. 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.