The Business Growth Podcast

Tim Krulia has been running Savvy CFO since 2009, back before fractional CFO was even a common term. In this conversation, he talks about why the firm built its own AI-powered platform instead of relying on manual reporting, and how a rough fight to recover fees for a client turned into a 12-chapter book with a free financial health scorecard attached.

Tim also gets into why word-of-mouth referrals don't stretch as far as they used to in a more crowded fractional CFO space, and how Savvy CFO is using the book as a front-end offer to build trust with a business owner before any sales conversation happens.

It's a good look at how a long-running CFO firm is adapting as the market around it gets more competitive.

Guest: Tim Krulia, President of Savvy CFO

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-krulia-77407525/

Website: https://savvycfo.com/

Host: Leonard De Beer

Helping fractional executive firms get more clients through strategic outreach

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-de-beer/

Aaron Hubka is a partner at CFO On Call, where he works with businesses on cash flow, growth strategy, and exit planning at the CFO level.

In this conversation, Aaron talks through how he actually uses AI day to day, from analyzing contracts to building investor decks with tools like Gen Spark, and where he still won't let it near the work: one on one advice.

The more useful part comes later. Aaron's spent the last few months building lead generation for his own fractional practice, separate from the firm he's part of. Cold email outbound didn't work for him. What did: warm LinkedIn outreach, consistent posting, and in-person networking groups around Melbourne, including one he co-founded this year.

He's also honest about the hardest part of fractional work: giving advice on a business you're only in one or two days a week, then watching decisions get made without you in the room.

A grounded conversation with someone doing the work and figuring out how to grow it at the same time.

Guest: Aaron Hubka, CFO On Call

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronhubka/

Host: Leonard De Beer

Helping fractional executive firms get more clients through strategic outreach

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-de-beer/

Ian Ranahan is COO of Finvisor, a back office services firm handling bookkeeping, payroll, HR, and fractional CFO work for startups from pre-seed through Series B and beyond. He talks about what actually stops founders from raising capital, and why a solid financial model and clear unit economics matter more than the pitch itself.

Ian also gets into how Finvisor is weaving AI into a 50-step close process, patching together tools like Ramp, Rippling, and Claude rather than looking for one system to do it all. He shares what a magic AI robot would do in his business if he could build it today, and where he thinks finance roles are actually headed as AI gets better at the repeatable work. A big piece of Finvisor's growth this year has come down to a dedicated quality division that's changed the kind of referrals coming in.

Good conversation on where AI is actually useful in finance, and where judgment still has to come from a person.

Guest: Ian Ranahan, COO of Finvisor

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-ranahan/

Website: https://finvisor.com/

Host: Leonard De Beer

Helping fractional executive firms get more clients through strategic outreach

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-de-beer/

Tim Krulia has been running Savvy CFO since 2009, back before fractional CFO was even a common term. In this conversation, he talks about why the firm built its own AI-powered platform instead of relying on manual reporting, and how a rough fight to recover fees for a client turned into a 12-chapter book with a free financial health scorecard attached.

Tim also gets into why word-of-mouth referrals don't stretch as far as they used to in a more crowded fractional CFO space, and how Savvy CFO is using the book as a front-end offer to build trust with a business owner before any sales conversation happens.

It's a good look at how a long-running CFO firm is adapting as the market around it gets more competitive.

Guest: Tim Krulia, President of Savvy CFO

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-krulia-77407525/

Website: https://savvycfo.com/

Host: Leonard De Beer

Helping fractional executive firms get more clients through strategic outreach

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-de-beer/

Jackson Pace is the founder of Refractional CFO, a firm that works exclusively with eye doctors, offering bookkeeping, tax, and advisory services built specifically around how optometry practices run. He explains how that focus came about almost by accident, after taking a CFO role inside an ophthalmology practice and realizing nobody was properly serving that niche.

Jackson talks about growing without a formal growth plan at first, then setting concrete targets once his team asked for one, going from a "road to 100" clients to doubling that goal more than once. Growth has come almost entirely through word of mouth and staying active in the associations and communities where his clients already spend time.

He also gets into the tension between growing a firm and protecting family time, including using his kids' sports practices as a hard stop that forces him out the door, and how reaching out to more experienced firm owners for advice has shaped how he runs the business.

If you're weighing whether to niche down or stay broad, this conversation lays out what that decision actually looks like in practice.

Guest: Jackson Pace, Refractional CFO

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcpace/

Host: Leonard De Beer

Helping fractional executive firms get more clients through strategic outreach

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-de-beer/

Ethan Bull is the president and co-founder of ProAssisting, a fractional executive assistant firm he runs with his wife Stephanie, both former high-level EAs who supported CEOs at companies like J.Crew and USA Films. In this episode he explains how they built a two-sided marketplace connecting experienced assistants with clients, and why they cap each assistant at three clients so the support stays high-touch rather than spread thin.

Ethan also talks about how prospective clients are increasingly finding ProAssisting by asking Claude and ChatGPT who the best firm in their space is, and how that's pushed the business into answer engine and generative engine optimization, alongside the SEO work they'd already been doing for years. He explains why paid ads never moved the needle for them in a commoditized market, and why referrals and organic search have done more of the heavy lifting.

He also shares his take on where fractional work fits as AI reshapes how businesses hire, and why he thinks judgment and context are becoming more valuable, not less.

If you're thinking about how AI is changing the way your ideal clients find you, this one's worth a listen.

Guest: Ethan Bull, ProAssisting

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanbull/

Host: Leonard De Beer

Helping fractional executive firms get more clients through strategic outreach

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-de-beer/

Lucas Meadowcroft is the co-founder and CEO of CROFTI, an AI automation firm working mostly in construction and manufacturing. In this episode he talks about building one of the earliest AI platforms a decade ago, years before ChatGPT existed, raising capital, and eventually having to shut it down because the market simply wasn't ready.

He's now applying those lessons at CROFTI, including a project building a business from scratch designed to hit $10 million in revenue with zero employees, using AI to handle everything from site data capture to invoicing.

Lucas also shares how he built a Claude-powered LinkedIn agent that filters his messages and books meetings automatically, cutting out a lot of the noise that used to eat up his day.

This one's a good listen if you want to see what AI automation actually looks like inside a business, not just in theory.

Guest: Lucas Meadowcroft, CROFTI

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasmeadowcroft/

Host: Leonard De Beer

Helping fractional executive firms get more clients through strategic outreach

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-de-beer/

Richard Triggs runs Arete Executive, a retained executive search firm based in Brisbane that headhunts white collar executives across Australia. In this episode he breaks down performance-based hiring, a method built on the idea that past performance predicts future performance, and walks through how his team maps a client's competitors, identifies people who are excelling but not job hunting, and pitches them the opportunity directly.

Richard also talks about assessing cultural fit before a candidate ever meets the client. His approach: put the hiring CEO on his podcast and let candidates hear directly from them what the business and the role are really like, rather than taking his word for it.

He shares how the business has weathered the GFC, a mining downturn, COVID, and a business partnership that didn't work out, and why staying industry agnostic has kept Arete steady through all of it. He also gets into how he's using Claude day to day, from summarising his inbox to running a virtual CFO function.

If you're building a firm around trust and relationships rather than job ads, there's a lot here worth taking note of.

Guest: Richard Triggs, Arete Executive

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardtriggs/

Host: Leonard De Beer

Helping fractional executive firms get more clients through strategic outreach

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-de-beer/

Ed Siragusa runs Succentrix Business Advisors, a CFO and tax planning firm that also handles accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll for small business owners. In this episode he walks through the structural mistakes he sees most often. Partners without an operating agreement. An LLC running payroll when it should be an S corp. Small oversights that turn into expensive problems two or three years down the line.

He also explains why he's targeting the cannabis industry this year. Federal tax law won't let dispensaries write off basic costs like payroll or rent, so cost accounting becomes critical, and most big firms won't go near that client base at all.

Ed talks about how Succentrix has grown almost entirely through referral partnerships with attorneys and financial advisors, why he's now adding educational content to that mix, and how he's using AI inside the firm for client emails and lead screening.

If you're a fractional CFO or advisor thinking about client structure, or where the next growth opportunity is, this one's worth a listen.

Guest: Ed Siragusa, Succentrix Business Advisors

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edgardosiragusa/

Host: Leonard De Beer

Helping fractional executive firms get more clients through strategic outreach

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-de-beer/

Most fractional firms live and die by referrals. Chelsie, VP of Business Development at CFO Share, flipped that ratio: about 75% of her clients now come from paid advertising, only 25% from referrals.

In this episode, she explains why that split happened. Being fully remote across the US made staying "top of mind" in a referral network hard, so she leaned into SEO, Google Ads, and targeted keywords instead, including using negative keywords to filter out people who were never going to convert (like anyone searching for "free funding"). She's also just started experimenting with ChatGPT's new advertising tools, one of the first cohorts of smaller businesses able to access it.

Chelsie also breaks down how she gets non-accounting clients to actually understand their own financials, using a mechanic's "green, yellow, red" diagnostic as the analogy, and why she's now investing more in referral relationships too, not because ads didn't work, but because a referred lead still closes easier than almost anything else.

Guest: Chelsie Kugler

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chelsie-kugler/

Host: Leonard De Beer

Helping fractional executive firms get more clients through strategic outreach

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-de-beer/