Episode 37

The Evolution of Finance…as a Service (feat. Dan Gertrudes, CEO) | Co-Founder of GrowthLab FaaS | growthlabfinancial.com | Recorded November 8, 2021

Shout out to our sponsors this week:

Gusto's People Advisory and Karbon

“I didn’t fail out of the school of hard knocks, I’m still getting schooled in that school, it’s a hard knock life that we live…that’s the moral of this story”

0-10min

Figuring shit out at the ripe age of 38

Attributing equal parts luck and intention to our situations

What’s your tolerance to risk when investing in yourself

We as Americans have to keep up with ourselves and everyone around us as we fill the holes in our souls with more stuff…in the Economy built on Credit

Dan’s higher education journey of 3 schools to obtain 1 diploma

10-20min

Finance as a Function.

“[Dan] If I were you, I would probably never take on another bookkeeping business [at GrowthLab] unless they were an FP&A customer” - Ian @ Karbon

The hardest thing to sell to small businesses is Planning… it’s intangible, it’s hard to put a bookend on it

This notion of billable hours is nonsense, my challenge is how do we productize FP&A?

We need to stop having this ‘backward v forwards’ thinking conversation… planning is so back in vogue right now

“If accountants, CPAs, accounting firms can figure out this FP and a function, just like we all did 20 years ago with the cloud accounting. We're just going to become more of that trusted advisor. Like everybody talks about being the trusted advisor, but you're not a trusted advisor. If you're not on a cadence like if you're only talking to your customer once or twice a year, that's not a trusted advisor.” DG

“… and then I came across guys like Michael Ly, also not a CPA… and one of the first people I met that looked and felt a little bit more like us” DG

20-30min

“there are only two ways to make money, you leverage capital or you leverage people…we’re in the business of leveraging people” DG

Step 1 Technology and Leveraging our FP&A Function… shout out to Jirav

Step 2 Cadence and Implementing our FP&A Function… shout out to Karbon

Step 3 People and Executing our FP&A Function… shout out to our people at GrowthLab

“one thing that has kept me real is knowing that [people] leave Friday afternoon and you just don’t know if they’re coming back on Monday” DG

30-40min

“There needs to be continuity between each of the value streams…you need to replicate bookkeeping, accounting and FP&A…there needs to be a flow of information from left to right”

“my number one job as a people manager is to de-risk the people factor in what we do, which sounds totally counter-intuitive to everything we probably just talked to prior to this” DG

“I think you could argue that what you've done is you've created the processes first, before the pillar of people.” S²

The 3 Pillars of GrowthLab: Cadence, Rigor, and Team

40-50min

“if your margins aren’t great it’s either a pricing problem or a cost problem… or you’re just paying your people too much” DG

“The hourly billable model puts the onus on managing your gross margins on the customer. Fixed price, the onus is back on you as the vendor. And that's the challenge and it's very uncomfortable. It's an uncomfortable place for business owners or managers of accounting firms” DG

“We have to get uncomfortable sometimes to grow, right? A lot of growth comes from being uncomfortable and, for us to grow as an industry …we're all the change agents [in an industry fraught with money and inertia]” S²