From Corporate to Consultant: An Inspiring Journey to Launching a Successful Virtual CFO Firm (Interview - Michelle Kvello)

Ever found yourself dreaming about trading in your corporate badge for the freedom of running your own consulting firm? If the answer is yes, then you're in the right place.

Today's episode features a candid conversation with Michelle Kvello, founder of Lantern Partners, who bravely embarked on such a journey. You're getting a front-row seat to her inspiring transition from a corporate job to launching a successful virtual CFO firm.

Imagine the excitement of building your own team and the thrill of growing your business. I'll take you through Michelle's compelling narrative as she shares how she chose the perfect players for her team and navigated the challenges of marketing.

We also delve into her unique program: Corporate to Consultant, designed to provide individuals with the tools they need to effortlessly shift from corporate roles to successful consulting. Hear about the transformative power of coaching as our very own Angela Marie Christian reveals how Michelle's guidance catalyzed her own leap into the world of virtual CFOs.

Let's be honest, starting a business isn't a walk in the park - it's fraught with fears and doubts. We dive headfirst into these concerns, discussing familiar roadblocks such as lacking a clear vision or grappling with sales. But fear not, we offer reassurances and guidance on how to tackle these obstacles head-on. This engaging conversation provides you with practical advice on valuing your worth, mastering the art of negotiation, and honing an authentic sales approach. Dive into the world of self-consulting, empowered and ready to make your mark.

Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn here.
Check out her Corporate to Consultant course here.
Read more about Michelle here. 

Michelle's bio: 

Michelle Kvello is the founder of Lantern Partners, a virtual CFO firm, working with founder CEOs of startups and scale ups. She has a personal love of driving entrepreneur success because early in her career she realised there was a need for founders to have access to good commercial and strategic financial support. Often the health and hygiene compliance work was sorted, but the missing piece of the puzzle
was the partnering support to help the business really grow. She founded Lantern Partners with the vision of being that partner. 

Last year she launched her Corporate to Consultant programme, a practical guide through the key building blocks in making a successful move. Think of it as your 10 year head start. 

Recently named one of the top 50 Women in Accounting (2021) and top 50 Small Bus

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to the 5D CFO podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to my guest today, michelle Covello, who is the founder of Lantern Partners, which is a virtual CFO firm working with founder CEOs of startups and scale-ups. She has a personal love of driving entrepreneur success because early in her career she realized there was a need for founders to have access to good commercial and strategic financial support. She was recently named one of the top 50 women in accounting and top 50 small business leaders. She is passionate about using her voice and her stories to support women in the industry, as well as small businesses and individuals moving from corporate roles into their consulting dream. We'll talk a little bit about her program, corporate to Consultant, which is a practical guide through the key building blocks in making a successful move. She hates the idea of people feeling stuck, whether professionally or in business, when information she shares could definitely unlock that, and I am a great testimony to her work because she has personally coached me through some of my blocks before I made the move from corporate to consultant. So let's get into it.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Hello and welcome to the 5D CFO podcast. My name is Angela Marie Christian and my mission is to help entrepreneurs and thought leaders rise to the 5D, where we can find wealth in all dimensions, in all areas of life, enjoy. So welcome to the show, michelle. I'm so excited to have you on.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Oh, it's so lovely to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:33

So, for the listeners, michelle and I met in a very serendipitous manner, I would say. I have a CFO client that I've had for about a year now who had found her on LinkedIn and said I should connect with her because he was thinking of expanding to Australia. Then Michelle and I got on the phone and I was just incredibly impressed with her background and how she made the leap from working in the corporate world to running her own virtual CFO firm. And at the time I was stuck in a corporate job I did not like, while also running a very, very small virtual CFO firm. But I was just working 10 plus hours a day doing all of this on top of being a mother, and it was just a lot.

Speaker 1: 2:16

So at the time I wasn't making enough to justify leaving my job.

Speaker 1: 2:23

So after my conversation with Michelle, I scheduled a coaching call with her and she helped me realize that I had actually been severely undercharging for my services, like so big yes, and she even gave me this really great tool to figure out like the minimum I should be charging to live the life I was wanting.

Speaker 1: 2:43

So, with that information and I hadn't even shared this information with her yet I just felt so empowered. And so then a couple opportunities, smaller opportunities, presented themselves, and I would just each time state a higher rate and got comfortable with just slowly raising it. And I'm not quite at that rate that's my goal but I'm about 70% there, and I do feel that our coaching session absolutely gave me the confidence boost I was needing, because I did end up leaving my job and then, serendipitously, again two amazing opportunities came to me, one of them, through Michelle, that became my two biggest CFO clients and now my gross income is like almost quadrupled to what I was bringing in with my job. So thank you, michelle, for all of that, and I'm so glad I finally got to share it with you. Well, I've got goosebumps.

Speaker 2: 3:42

That's just so amazing Because, as you said, we hadn't actually had that conversation yet. But I am so God, I'm so proud of you for actually doing it. That's enormous. We didn't actually speak that long ago, right.

Speaker 1: 3:56

I feel like it was probably four to six months ago. And then I know, and I had all this stuff going on and I kept thinking like, oh, I need to share that with Michelle, and we kept, you know, rescheduling the podcast. I was like, oh, tell her eventually.

Speaker 2: 4:09

And then, yeah, so you would obviously just too busy doing fabulous things with your new business.

Speaker 1: 4:16

Yes, it's been, yeah, exciting. So thank you for that, so welcome. And so I would love for you to just talk about your background, what you were doing before you took that leap to consultant and what that like looked like.

Speaker 2: 4:33

Sure, so I have been running London Partners, which is a CFO advisory firm, for just over 10 years now. So I started gosh early 2012, let's call it. Before that I had trained with Big Four PWC in the UK and worked for, I think, around five years in the UK before I came to Australia. So I've been living in Australia for 20 years now. So my accent kind of floats between the two things. And I was working in corporate life in Australia for probably about eight years. I loved what I did. I worked with major and technology companies, really exciting companies working on the commercial finance side of things. So other you know some corporates refer to it as FPNA a lot of building business cases, working with the business, business partnering, helping them with very much that forward looking commercial and strategic finance advice but, in-house right and gosh, it had got to.

Speaker 2: 5:49

It had got to towards the end of, you know, 2011. And when I look back on it now, I'm not quite sure how I let it get as far as it did, because I was absolute toast. I tell this story, which every time I tell it, I was just like, wow, how did you think that was OK? Because I was, basically I was a frog. I was a frog that jumped in a pot of lovely bath water, kind of lukewarm, enjoying it, and the heat was getting turned up and up and up and you know, basically I was total frog soup.

Speaker 2: 6:27

And the story that I talk about is I was having what I now realize were panic attacks, and I would be driving home from work and I would go and drive into this particular tunnel on the way home from work and I would feel anyone who's had panic attacks kind of knows what that feeling is. It kind of starts starts kind of rising up, and the way I dealt with it is that I would just sit in my car and I would scream to kind of get all the adrenaline out, right, because that was like an adrenaline blade to get out and instead of going huh, this isn't like you know, this is objectively quite bad.

Speaker 2: 7:03

I should really do something about this. I was really proud of myself that I found this really cool trick to deal with stress on the way home and I was just like, wow, I'd normalised these feelings and this, you know what was pretty serious burnout when I looked back at it. And so when I actually left corporate and started you know what was a very baby version of what Lansing Partners is now. I had absolutely you know plan. I literally fell onto the pavement out of my, my corporate job, and so it took probably about six months of rebuilding myself and building a plan and figuring out how I was going to make this thing work. Because you know and I, it wasn't like I could do this as a side hustle. It wasn't like, you know, I have a partner at home who has a job, but I'd work in finance and my salary was the primary salary at home, was the reality of it. We didn't have kids at that stage, but we knew we wanted to have kids. Turns out, huge amounts of stress isn't really conducive to that whole thing happening, and so I knew that I had to replace that salary pretty damn quickly, and so it was actually that. You know, the pricing calculator that you were talking about was one of the things that helped me early on, because it helped me work out just objectively what I needed to charge. And then the other thing that I did I made a budget. That was this was the one thing I did before I quit. Actually, I made a budget called what's the worst that could happen. The file name was what is the worst that could happen, and I had my savings, I had our monthly expenses and you know what we could trim them by. And then I came up with it was my cash burn for my startup, basically. So it was how many months I had before I had to go back and get a quote, unquote proper job, and that gave me enough. Oh God, we're not going to be on the bread line in three months time. It gave me enough confidence to do it with the backup of. I knew I could get another corporate job. I just didn't want one. I really really didn't want one, and I will quite merely proclaim now that I'm pretty unemployable. I'm a real bad employee at this stage, but but yeah, so that's my story and so fast forward 10 years.

Speaker 2: 9:56

We operate with a team of CFOs across Australia. For those of your listeners that are familiar with Australia, I'm based in Sydney. Most of my, most of my team are based in Sydney, which is the largest city in Australia, but then I also have a CFO in Melbourne and one in Brisbane, which are two of the other capital cities. But we have clients all over Australia and we have a few internationally as well, and that remote first model has always worked well for us, even pre COVID, and I'm proud to say that my team are 80% female. Everybody works flexibly in terms of time and location.

Speaker 2: 10:39

It turns out I wasn't the only woman in a corporate world in a finance role that just went hey, this just isn't working for me. So that's been really beautiful that I've actually inadvertently been able to create this thing where and I'm just in awe of the women that work with me they are just these super smart, creative, ambitious, amazing women that just don't want to work with the corporate anymore because it just isn't serving them. Frankly, corporate should have them because their businesses would be better for it. But certainly this is possibly more of a pre COVID statement in the post but won't create an environment that makes that possible. I am quite hopeful. Some of those things are changing. It might change my recruitment pipeline, but it's slow. It's slow. In fact, one of the women that worked with me. I found her after she posted a diatribe on LinkedIn about the opportunities that corporates were missing out on by not creating decent, good quality part-time roles, and so I kind of tapped her on the shoulder and went, hey, there's another option.

Speaker 1: 12:02

So yeah, yeah, that was going to be my next question is because for a lot of entrepreneurs and for me, I made the leap and so I've made my first kind of. I have someone who I outsource a lot of the bookkeeping and kind of like data entry work too, so that I can focus on the higher level. But then how did it look for you when you started thinking about bringing in team? Did you? How long was it? Just you Like what did that? Who was your partner? Like what did that look like?

Speaker 2: 12:34

So my business has genuinely looked like quite a few different things within that kind of 10, 12 years that it's been operating. So, as I said, I started it before I had kids. I've now got a 10 year old and a seven year old and so, for the first gosh, what would it be? For the first half of the time the company's existed, it was largely just me, which, for anyone running those solo businesses there is nothing wrong with that. But it gave me the flexibility to organise my own work, organise my own time, pick my clients, figure out my business model, figure out my ideal clients, figure out all of the stuff that I talk about in corporate development. But it gave me the flexibility and I didn't want to build a business that I subsequently wanted to build, because that particular time in my life I needed something else for my business and for my work. I very much needed my work to support my life and kind of the. You know I really wanted a family. I know that's not for everyone, but for me it was important and the way I was running Land and Partners facilitated that. So that's what it looked like for around the first half, when my youngest went back into what I would call, went back into, started decent chunks of daycare. She was gosh. She must have been coming up to a year and I remember because the first I took a new client on and the first day I was supposed to show up at a board meeting I did show up to the board meeting. She had decided she wanted to wake up at 3am and was not going to sleep and this was on. You know there's, you know any of you listeners who her parents know you already got this is layering on top of quite broken sleep. Turned up to that board meeting I was like I'm not sure I know what my own name is, let alone being able to answer any other questions. So then I started thinking about my business in a different way. And what did I want my business to be now that you know I wasn't going to have any more children, I wasn't going to be in those kind of you know, maternity, you know early postnatal years. Again, what did I want this thing to be? And I had to kind of reimagine the business a little bit. It did generally become a very different business and I was talking to someone about this yesterday about kind of who should your first hire be, and I think it depends on your business.

Speaker 2: 15:17

You're saying that your first hire was outsourcing some of the kind of low level tasks, the data entry, those kind of things. For me, because my business was a very kind of pure CFO advisory, what I the first thing I wanted to do was clone myself. So the first thing I did was find another CFO that could engage with clients in the same way I could, because a lot of our work was not specifically task based. A lot of it really was kind of, you know, getting the information from the bookkeepers or the accountants, analyzing and giving advice, helping them structure new business ideas, building rate cards for them, those kind of things. So that was my first hire. I actually didn't get any administrative support support into the business. So my next two hires were actually. My next hire was marketing support and then it was administrative support. Marketing support because I knew I couldn't do marketing right Like this is not my wheelhouse, this is not what I know how to do.

Speaker 2: 16:26

I love writing. I've always written content in the very early days of London partners, partly as a BD, because I'm marketing strategy. I used to write for a business online business publication quite a lot, so I was one of their regular columnists and that's still right all of my own content but I didn't know how to strategize it. I certainly didn't know how to you know the value of communicating through an email newsletter, for example, which is still a really powerful way of talking to your network.

Speaker 2: 17:00

I think you know LinkedIn wasn't a thing when I started, or wasn't really the thing it is now. So I needed someone to strategize that for me and also, frankly, I needed someone to push me because for me, that level of visibility felt really. I found it really really hard and anyone that follows me on LinkedIn now will that will sound quite bizarre because I seem to be talking all the time on LinkedIn, but it took a really long time to get comfortable with that and I needed someone to push me. And then the second, the third hire I did was an EA, and that took me a long time as well, because I think there was a little bit of my brain that went who are you?

Speaker 2: 17:43

to have an admin assistant Like, oh my goodness, who even are you? And I still feel a bit weird sometimes when I'm because she organizes my diary and she does all sorts of you know amazing things to kind of keep me, me organized. And I still feel a bit weird sometimes when I say, oh, my EA, we chat. Yeah my gosh, who even are you? But it. But you know, and you know this is after running a business for 10 years and you know, to anyone out there that's kind of going oh my goodness, you know, these people are doing different things, bigger things. We all struggle with the same kind of chip, but the different challenges that everybody's got their own blockers and their own obstacles. So so, yeah.

Speaker 2: 18:25

And the other thing, although this wasn't a hire, I also invested in business coaching for myself and that was a real game changer. Yeah, so, yes. So that's how it grew to the thing it kind of is now. And the business is now about to do, I feel, like another quantum leap, because it's reached another stage in its evolution. I think you know we have our businesses don't stay the same. They go through evolutions and for a variety of different reasons. Either, you know, you're not structured to scale or you know what have different business objectives, you have different life objectives, so you do need to keep reviewing that stuff, I think.

Speaker 1: 19:08

Yeah, Wow, that's so helpful to hear and I think some people feel like in such a hurry to be like, Okay, now I need to hire a team, so it's so nice, Like it's a real. I kind of like took a sigh of relief. I'm like, Okay, I can take my time and just kind of like figure it out and get a good solid understanding, like you said, of where I want the business to go, what I want my life to look like, and then expand like that's such a smart way to grow. So thank you for that.

Speaker 2: 19:35

I think the only other thing I'd add to that, you know, I think and I include LinkedIn in social media right, but link, you know, social media and even just conversations with other people like you, only get the highlights, you get the filtered bits, and I think it is so easy to get caught up with what you should be doing as opposed to what is right for you and your business.

Speaker 1: 19:59

Yeah, absolutely. And so from your coaching perspective, when you're coaching other people like me, do you see, like what typically holds people back I mean, I can kind of guess, but I'd love to hear your answer is, what holds people back the most when it comes to like taking that leap? And yeah, like what percentage? Would you say like never actually take the leap and just take the advice but then kind of not take the leap?

Speaker 2: 20:26

Okay, this. This is interesting actually, because I used to joke that the reason why I created corporate consultant is over the years I have so many people being referred to me through my network. So someone who knows me and the work I do will have someone in their network or a friend who kind of wants to do the same thing and they say I'll go talk to Michelle. And then I used to joke that I had about 90% strike rate of having that conversation and then the person deciding no, thank you, I would, I'm going to stay in my corporate job.

Speaker 2: 20:59

And I was like I don't get it Because I'm so enthusiastic about this and I think it's such a brilliant thing to be doing. Like what is it? And I think that, particularly if you're an early stage in the journey, it can feel really overwhelming, and that's why I kind of created this sort of like step by step. This is the how to guide to actually do it In terms of the key things that hold people back. I think it's a combination of I'll do the practical stuff first, because the reality is and I hate coaches that just sell the dream of you can do it, you can do it. The practicality is the vast majority of us need to make money to live, to pay the rent, to support the small humans we might have at home, to have the odd cup of coffee outside of the house. You can't look past that right, and I think that thought of oh my God, if I leave this secure corporate job, I'm going to go from whatever my salary is now to zero and I just can't do that. So this is why I talk about the what's the worst that could happen budget, because you need to know what your safety net is and you need to know what your contingencies are and you need to actually start looking at these things properly, because it's like those three things that wake you up at 3am in the morning. Once you start shining a light on them and once you actually really start looking at them, you can start making a plan and most of the time it gets a lot less scary.

Speaker 2: 22:39

Okay, but that financial fear completely understandably holds a lot of people back. The thing I would say to that is let's just have a bit of a reality check about the security of a corporate job and how easily you can let go from that corporate job. You can be working for the most wonderful company in the world but, like it or not, that company is going to look after their company's interest first at the end of the day, particularly when we're going through tough economic times, which we are going through now. There are definitely some green shoes, but it's been a pretty tough few years right, and I think a lot of people now have kind of come to that realisation because it's happened to them, if not once, twice, three times now through no fault of their own right. So let's just have that reality check. Your financials are a lot more controllable when you're controlling them.

Speaker 2: 23:36

The other thing that I think holds people back. Is that that kind of little gremlin that gets in your head that goes this is not for me, this is for other people. Other people get to do this, I don't get to do this. Who the hell am I? Sorry, and I think that's a really noisy voice for all of us, and I think that's why I talk so much about the need for support networks when you're starting out in this journey and a lot of people that have worked in corporate most of their lives don't have a support network of people that are actually running their own businesses, because and I have this saying don't ask the advice of someone who hasn't been where you want to go.

Speaker 2: 24:29

Okay, and what that means is your circle of kind of trusted people, your current support network. They've been working within corporate life and, whether they like it or whether they don't like it, they're there and they've chosen to be there and they don't want to do the thing that you're doing, maybe because they think it's really risky. They're worried about you, they want you to be safe, they want you to be happy and they don't think you going over there and doing that thing is going to make you safe or happy, and I think that it is really important not to listen too much to those people because they don't have the advice that's relevant to you at this point in your career journey, your life journey. I think that's probably the two biggest things that hold people back. And then I think people that the other sort of subset I get, if you think about the people that have ever once entertained this notion you've got the people that entertained the notion and then just didn't make the leap. You've got the people that sort of kind of put a little toe in the water and then found it was way too cold and there might have been a couple of sharks in there and then ran back to their corporate job.

Speaker 2: 25:47

I think there's a couple of main reasons there.

Speaker 2: 25:49

I think that a lot of it's still support network, but I think the two main things there is that they didn't figure out before they jumped why they were jumping, what they wanted to create in their consulting career, what was important to them. And I think if you are not really clear about what it is you want to change and this new career, business or life that you want to create, what that is and what success all looks like to you not to anyone else, to you it is. You know you don't have enough of a framework around that, those really scary feelings and that kind of rollercoaster you don't want to inevitably go through because you don't have this anchor of this is what I'm moving towards and I think the other you know the practical one is with a lot of people who have worked within corporate life that the biggest new factor is around that sort of sales and development. And you know it feels a bit like sitting yourself up on a supermarket shelf and you're like, please tell me, please tell me.

Speaker 2: 27:02

And it's a really weird feeling and, I think, getting comfortable with that and figuring out a way that you can do it authentically, because I think sometimes when people think about that, they're like, oh God, I've got to make like a 20 cold calls a day and this is the only way I'm going to be able to run my business, which is complete nonsense. You know, cold calling has its place, but I can tell you I've never done it. Figure out how you're going to bring in work and you have to do it Like I'm sorry, there is no way that you're not going to be doing sales in this. Maybe this is where I put people off, but sales doesn't have to be this scary, horrible kind of, you know, aggressive thing. But that's what I think sends the two things that send people who have made those tentative steps out running back.

Speaker 1: 27:56

Yeah, yeah, now, that's so true, and it's funny that you said that, because just today, so when I left my corporate job, I also realized I was living in a very expensive home that I was renting with my kids I'm a single mom and everything kind of worked out where I had this opportunity to actually move home with my parents who would help with the kids, and that taking that leap with scary, but I did both at the same time and it just like put me in this totally. I feel like a parallel universe and the clients just kind of showed up. But my mom, who was, you know, worked for the government her whole life, she doesn't understand what I'm doing. So today she overheard me on a marketing call. I have a marketing coach who's kind of helping me with the wording, because I'm definitely not trained in sales and marketing.

Speaker 1: 28:49

And I got off and she just was like well, what about your job? You're going to, you know, shouldn't you be working? And she like doesn't understand, that's working. Yeah, exactly, I'm like this is part of my job. I need to know how to communicate, you know, in a way that will reach people, because I tend to way over talk and make it more complicated and sounding than it that it needs to be. And so at first I kind of got a little frustrated with her and she said I'm just trying to understand. And then I was like, okay, she's just doesn't understand, she doesn't get it, she's never done this, you know. So it is true, but if I had listened to her, you know she would have wanted me to just stay on the corporate path. So I think, yeah, you just have to kind of block that out sometimes.

Speaker 2: 29:33

She's your mom. She wants to keep you safe. She loves you. It's like coming from the best place, right, but it's not the decision for you.

Speaker 1: 29:40

Yeah, exactly, so that was a good point, for sure. And speaking of like undervaluing ourselves, when I, it's so weird because in my corporate position, for example and I'm sure other people can relate, you know I was making a really good salary, six figure salary, but then, when it came to creating my rates for clients, I, as you saw, they were very low at first, and so it's just kind of an interesting thing and I'm just wondering if you see that as a common thing or or what you might say about that.

Speaker 2: 30:15

I mean it's a really common thing. One, and it's driven by two things. One, I think, when people do the math in terms of what they're and let's say we're kind of trying to work out an hourly rate, which with a lot of services, businesses and I know value pricing is very important. But I think that's almost kind of at the second stage. You've got to figure out how much you need to a little bit kind of trade your time for money, because that's the first very grounding exercise and then you can lay it on top of that, the value pricing. But I think when you're trying to do your hourly rate initially, what a lot of people make the mistake of doing is saying, okay, well, this is my salary, this is what I earn in corporate. I'm going to divide that by the number of hours in the week that I'm going to work 38, 40, whatever you want to call it and that is my hourly rate. And that's a massive mistake because that doesn't and I know the US is different holiday than my background in Australia and the UK but you need to work in. Hey, you cannot work for 365 days a year or 260 if you take out the weekends, right, you can't do that because you will fry and, hey, you might get sick and you're going to have to spend time on learning how to do certain things with your business, marketing processes, structure. When you get a team managing your team, you're going to have to spend time out there selling, doing business development. All those things will chip away at the amount of time you are actually going to be billable and that can be a huge chunk of time, right, and I think that's the first reason people are undercharge in terms of their hourly rate.

Speaker 2: 32:16

I think the second reason is, if you think about a corporate environment, how many of us are comfortable going and asking for a raise, negotiating their salary?

Speaker 2: 32:28

We should all be getting better at it in a corporate environment as well.

Speaker 2: 32:31

But when you're working for yourself, when you're negotiating with clients, you're effectively negotiating your pay and having to have that really uncomfortable conversation and trying not to internalize a client, not having the right budget for you as you not being worth what you are saying you're worth and it's a. I hate speaking in gender generalizations, but I do think it's more of a problem for women than it is for men. So, having this conversation last week actually about the amount of we there's a lot of conversation about the unpaid labor that women do, but also, even if you extend that to work scenario, the women that are volunteering for certain things within a corporate environment, the women that are sitting on, the proportion of women that are sitting on, say, not-for-profit, unpaid board positions funny enough, they're the boards that have gender balance, because so I think that it really hits us in a different way. We feel like we are helping our clients. Therefore, there's this weird well, we shouldn't be charging our value to do that, because we have to help.

Speaker 2: 33:44

I've got better at doing that over the years, but I still have to and honestly, the best trick that I did was I negotiated my rates as if I was negotiating them for someone else. I had to take me out the equation. I had to, whether it was feeling like I was negotiating it for a team member or a third person, or hey, if you cut your rates by 20%, that's the kids not going to, you know, whatever holiday camp they wanna go to, because you just gave it to that guy over there. It's like when you think about it, when you reframe it in those ways, you're just like what are you doing?

Speaker 1: 34:22

Yeah, why would?

Speaker 2: 34:22

you do that Right and so whatever it takes to get you and the more you do it, the more comfortable you feel about it right, it's like everything. So that's what I think really kind of drives those particular problems and they are a problem. You aren't the only person I've spoken to and I've seen their rates and gone. No, no, no, no, no, no. You need to double that and it's you know, and it isn't an overnight thing is it's not like kind of leave a conversation and tomorrow you're doing, you're saying you're now up to about 70% of what you should. You should reason if you'd be charging, but you'll get there.

Speaker 1: 35:03

But it's a process, yeah, exactly, and I just I kind of like what I did is I either went up like five or $10 with each new quote, even for people who I didn't end up working with. Each time I moved up a little bit it was like my nervous system regulated to that amount and then I was able to. You know, until I got up to I'm now double what I was charging before, but it's still. I still have a little ways to go, so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Yeah, no, that's amazing.

Speaker 2: 35:33

Yeah, because this stuff isn't easy, right, and that's why you need the support frameworks around you and the people that are trying to do, or have done, the same thing that you've done. I mean, that's why you know, say, getting that business coach on for myself, and my business coach has a business coach right you know, no matter what your experience is in the field, we all need help right and you know and we need someone to push us right.

Speaker 2: 36:03

It is uncomfortable. These are not easy things to do, yeah, but it is so worth it.

Speaker 1: 36:09

Yeah, definitely, and so I know you offer both coaching and then you have a course called Corporate to Consultant, where you do offer coaching in there too. So can you talk a little bit about those services and who might be a good fit?

Speaker 2: 36:22

Sure, sure.

Speaker 2: 36:23

So Corporate to Consultant is a self-paced online course and what that does is takes you it's kind of, but I describe it as a guidebook, right?

Speaker 2: 36:33

It's the guidebook to help you transition from a corporate role into consulting and in that course I will step through, you know, the seven kind of key steps to actually successfully transition through, and that's the key right. You want to successfully do this, and so there are modules there which will kind of take you through all these steps. There is homework, because you know the homework's important, and so the homework includes a bunch of things, including what Angela was talking about in terms of the pricing calculator. We also spend time talking about your ideal client, because that is such a key step when you start going out and being a consultant, and I, you know I could talk for half an hour on this and I do in the course, but you know, identifying who your key client is is the key to unlocking, being successful in this. In the course as well, I kind of go through five pitfalls, and one of those pitfalls is really kind of just not defining that ideal client and thinking.

Speaker 2: 37:43

I can do all of these things.

Speaker 2: 37:45

I know you can do all of these things, but if you try and talk to all of the people, you will talk to no one.

Speaker 2: 37:51

Yeah, so we have the modules, which are videos which you can watch or you can just listen to. There is the homework, and then there is also the option at the end to level up and to have an hour's coaching with me and then two half hour accountability sessions, and then I do offer kind of a vote one-on-one and coaching programs which are separate to that. But I do encourage everybody to do the corporate consultant first, even if they think they want to do the ongoing, because that's how you're going to get the most juice out of this, because all of the things that I've learned in the last 10 years put them all in the course and they're all the questions that people ask me. So, instead of kind of chewing up the hour of one-on-one coaching, just go and look at it, absorb all of that information first and do the work, and then you will come with those initial questions being answered, but then a whole bunch more, and so that's why I've structured it the way I've structured it.

Speaker 1: 38:59

Yeah, that makes sense, and I'm actually going to take your course and then I will link it in the show notes for anybody else who wants to do it with me with the accountability buddies.

Speaker 2: 39:09

Yeah, accountability buddies, they're so important.

Speaker 1: 39:13

Yeah, absolutely, and then just, we just have a little bit of time left, so I just had a couple other questions from a different perspective, if that's okay For those who are listening and who maybe haven't heard of a virtual CFO, what would you say? What? Maybe they have a business. At what point do you usually recommend to people to bring in a virtual or fractional CFO?

Speaker 2: 39:39

Sure, and I might actually talk through some of those terms. First because when, and because it's interesting that you kind of mentioned fractional. Fractional is a word that is actually being used a lot in this industry at the moment, and not just for CFOs, but across the whole of the C-suite. When I first started the business like fractional wasn't a word, and I think it came out the US and the UK first and it's very much in Australia now as well, and the whole idea is that for a small business a small but growing business you're not yet at the stage where it is either economically worthwhile or is right for your business to bring in a full-time CFO. However, what got you here is not going to get you there in terms of a business, and a lot of the investment that businesses do absolutely correctly in the early days of business is get the what I call the health and hygiene stuff right. So do I have numbers regularly coming into my GL. It's scary how often people only look at numbers on a quarterly basis. Don't know how you run a business like that. Am I getting paid? Am I paying the people I'm supposed to be paying, whether that's payroll, whether that's suppliers and am I staying compliant from a tax and financially legal perspective. Those are absolutely the things you've got to get in place. But then there comes a point when you really want to scale the business, when you need what a CFO will bring. And what a CFO brings is the forward-looking lens. So that's looking at your financial data and eliciting the stories from that data. So what is the story that those numbers are telling you about your business and do you like that story and is that story going to take you in the direction you want to go in? Have you identified what your goals are from a business perspective? But those business goals filter down into a financial plan. Don't make the financial plan and then kind of go well, we've got a financial plan, so these must be our goals. That's the wrong way around to do it. Set your goals and then the story of those goals will be in your financial plan and that's what your CFO will help elicit for you the stage of business that you will be at when those kind of things start keeping you up at night.

Speaker 2: 42:10

I think there's two kinds of businesses Our CFO advisory business. We are generally with the businesses for a period of time and that's generally because they're fast-growing businesses. There are other businesses that stay in that point for decades and they still need that CFO advice. But generally what I find for the businesses that we work with the founders that we're working with they are trying to scale their business and so they really need to put metrics around their business to help them scale, and that is what a CFO will help you do.

Speaker 2: 42:47

And essentially, when we're working with clients, we're helping them to do generally one of three things we are helping them prepare their business for sale, sometimes we're helping them expand overseas, and a lot of the time we are just helping them crack that tricky problem of scale.

Speaker 2: 43:06

And all those three things involve putting in place the same financial building blocks and advice and support, because if you want to do any of those three things, your business cannot be found or reliant. What we find with the vast majority of small businesses is they are very reliant on the founder, and we have a lot of tired founders coming to us and what we help them do is to get their business to a stage where it isn't reliant on them, where they don't have to be intimately involved in every single facet of their business, including their finances, in order to run their business and it's really stepping out of that operational role as a business owner into a really an owner role within the business. So that's where we help and that's really the commonality that we see between all the founders that we work with.

Speaker 1: 44:03

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and thank you for that. And so, for those who are listening, if they want to find you, where's the best to follow you? I know you have a great newsletter on LinkedIn. Is there anywhere else that you would like to mention? And then I will drop it all in the show notes as well.

Speaker 2: 44:22

Sure. So a great place to find me is on LinkedIn. I hang out there a lot and you'll find me, michelle Cabello, cfo. For those of you starting your own business, do know that you can change that little reference at the top. Then I am also on Instagram, michelle Cabello, and my website is wwwlondonpartnerscomau for the CFO advisory business and corporateconsultantcomau to find out more about the course and to sign up if you feel like it's right for you.

Speaker 1: 44:59

Great. Thank you so much. Is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap up?

Speaker 2: 45:05

I don't think so. Look, we've talked a lot about that kind of moment of making the leap from corporate to consultant. But you know and the point I'm going to make is also really relevant to any business owners that might be out there in different fields I talk a lot about support networks, and I belong to a business networking group myself, full of business owners at a similar stage, some slightly younger in terms of business age and some slightly ahead. They are so critical to the success of your business. None of us can do this on our own. I know we feel like we maybe should have to, or we can, sure, but it's nowhere near as fun or as productive as doing it with a great support network behind you.

Speaker 1: 45:59

Yeah, absolutely, I think that's so important. I've always found anything I'm doing. It's always nice to have a little group of support. Even in my marketing coaching, there's a little group of us who are doing it together and then we can ask each other questions and bounce ideas off. So, yeah, that's such a great point. Thank you, Thanks. Oh, it's been so nice talking to you. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for listening to the 5D CFO podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it and tag me on social media. You can find me at Angela Marie Christian on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. If you haven't purchased my bestselling book Manifestation Mastery yet, it's priced at $0.99 on Amazon for the Kindle version.