Ep 56: CFO vs. Controller: Which Does Your Business Actually Need?

CFO vs Controller: What Does My Construction Business Actually Need?

Most construction business owners ask the wrong question when it comes to CFO vs controller, they ask what they can afford instead of what problem they’re actually trying to solve. The real answer has nothing to do with revenue size: a controller closes the books and reports what already happened, while a CFO uses that data to plan what happens next. On this episode of Construction Hot Takes, Greg Gorman (a former construction company CFO turned consultant) unpacks the LinkedIn firestorm sparked by his post arguing that some $10 million companies need a CFO, and plenty of others don’t.

Jeff Robertson presses Greg on where the line actually falls, and Greg lays it out plainly: a controller looks backward, tracking accounting and reporting facts. A CFO looks forward, modeling “what if” scenarios around growth, hiring, and risk. Neither role outranks the other, they solve different problems, and every construction business needs both functions covered, whether that’s one person wearing two hats or two separate hires.

The back half of the episode gets specific. Greg and Jeff read real LinkedIn comments from working CFOs and controllers, digging into why clean books are a prerequisite for strategy rather than a substitute for it, and why $10 million was never meant to be a magic threshold for who does or doesn’t need a financial strategist.

Watch the Episode

In This Episode

• Why “do you need a CFO” is the wrong question — and what to ask instead
• The real difference between a controller (backward-looking) and a CFO (forward-looking)
• Why $10 million in revenue is not a meaningful cutoff for hiring a CFO
• What a fractional CFO actually does for a smaller construction business
• Real LinkedIn reactions from working CFOs and controllers on where the line really falls

Episode Chapters

• 0:00 — Why Greg’s “you don’t need a CFO” LinkedIn post blew up
• 3:31 — Reframing the question: need it, not want it or afford it
• 4:39 — What a CFO actually does vs. what a controller does
• 8:13 — Every dollar in a small construction business carries risk
• 10:10 — The case for a fractional CFO
• 12:39 — Why “just give it to the controller” doesn’t work
• 13:37 — $10 million isn’t a magic number — you grow into the need
• 21:50 — The real distinction: it’s the role, not the title

Notable Quotes

“You need a CFO if you can identify the problem that hiring a CFO will solve for you.”
— Greg Gorman, 3:53

“A controller looks backwards. It’s scorekeeping — telling you what already happened a month after it happens.”
— Greg Gorman, 5:17

“Every dollar in a small business is fraught with risk.”
— Greg Gorman, 8:38

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my construction company need a CFO?

You need a CFO only if you can name the specific problem a CFO would solve — not because of your revenue size or budget. Former construction CFO Greg Gorman argues the real test is whether you need someone planning your financial future, not just someone recording what already happened.

What’s the difference between a CFO and a controller?

A controller looks backward: closing books, reconciling accounts, and reporting what already happened. A CFO looks forward: modeling growth scenarios, planning hires, and turning clean financial data into strategic decisions. Both roles matter — they simply solve different problems for a construction business.

How much revenue do I need before hiring a CFO?

There’s no magic revenue threshold. Construction companies at $7 million and $15 million can both need — or not need — a CFO, depending on whether they already have a reliable controller function and a real strategic-planning gap that a CFO would actually fill.

What does a fractional CFO do for a construction business?

A fractional CFO brings forward-looking financial strategy — growth planning, hiring decisions, risk modeling — without the cost of a full-time hire. It’s a cost-effective way for smaller construction companies to get strategist-level thinking on a part-time basis.

Why isn’t $10 million in revenue a good cutoff for hiring a CFO?

Every construction company grows into its own needs differently. A $10 million business with clean books and a specific strategic question may need a CFO, while a similarly sized company without that gap may not. The decision should follow the problem, not the revenue number.

Can a controller do the job of a CFO?

Not typically. A controller’s full-time job is producing accurate, closed books — that alone is demanding work. Layering forward-looking strategy on top of that role usually means neither job gets done well, which is why growing companies often end up hiring for both roles separately.

About the Hosts

Jeff Robertson: Vice President at Ascent Consulting. Jeff leads client-facing strategy conversations and focuses on how operations and finance work together as construction companies scale.
Gregory Gorman: Principal Senior Consultant at Ascent Consulting. Greg is a former construction company CFO who specializes in financial strategy, fractional CFO services, and the accounting foundation construction businesses are built on.

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Episode Transcript

[0:00] Jeff: Good afternoon.

[0:00] Greg: Hello good afternoon.

[0:00] Jeff: How are you?

[0:00] Greg: I’m good.

[0:00] Jeff: So we’ve got a… we’ve got a fun one for you and I to cover. So I guess we… we discussed previously that… that we’d gotten some… there’s been some good interaction on LinkedIn. I think you’ve mentioned it before, and I’m not sure if we’ve mentioned it here yet, but there’s been some really good interaction on some posts you’ve made.

[0:25] Jeff: We actually took… we actually got some questions from… from listeners about specifically $5 to $10 million, you know, the smaller end of… of the growth scale, I’ll call it. And one of the questions that’s come up a lot that you… you’ve had some… some really nice interaction on LinkedIn about is: Do I need a CFO? Do I need a controller?

[0:46] Jeff: What… what’s the difference?

[0:46] Greg: Yeah.

[0:46] Jeff: So I thought, you know, that we could just bring those LinkedIn comments in here and you could address them and talk about them.

[0:46] Greg: Well, it’s exciting for me because I’ve never… between you and I, I’ve personally never gotten so many… so much feedback or so many, okay, likes or comments on anything ever in the history of my whole LinkedIn, which is for a long time now.

[1:07] Greg: So, and just to, I think, just remind everyone on a previous podcast, which hopefully you guys will go back and listen to, we… this came up because we were talking about, you know, companies of a certain size, right, under $10 million, that kind of small range. And we have plenty of those clients. We don’t, you know… we have some of those clients as well, and that’s… that’s part of our… that’s part of our wheelhouse.

[1:26] Greg: But one of the questions was: How do you scale a business that size? So that got me thinking about a future post, right, which I then made since our last recording session. And the post was… I commented on someone’s post that said, “You don’t need a CFO if you are under $10 million. It’s a waste of money. It’s a waste of time. You don’t do it.” Well, I have a very strong opinion about that as a former CFO of a construction company that started off in that less-than-$10-million range, right? We were a lot bigger over time, but we were that company.

[1:48] Greg: So I responded, and then I wrote my own posts. And those are the posts that kind of blew up. Okay. There’s never been as much engagement, and I think it’s because a lot of people feel strongly about what is a CFO.

[2:03] Jeff: They have a very particular idea about what a CFO is or is not.

[2:11] Greg: Yeah, exactly. What is a CFO? What is a CFO not? What does a small business need, and what does a small business not need? And when do you plan ahead for the future, and when do you live, you know, I guess live with what you have? So those are kind of the three areas of why I think the post had so much engagement—posts, because there were two, actually.

[2:33] Jeff: Well, you know, that makes a lot of sense to me because I think dealing with, working with the clients that we have over the past number of years and… and even some of our clients that, you know, don’t have a CFO or whatever, there’s this… I can speak for the, you know, kind of the… the operations guy.

[2:52] Jeff: Don’t have a business degree. My degree is kind of a quasi-management construction engineering thing. I didn’t understand really what a CFO was. And there’s some… there’s sort of some spooky magic around it. Like, that guy is super educated or that woman’s very super educated. She knows or he knows things I couldn’t possibly understand. I only have $10, $5 million, $7 million in revenue.

[3:17] Jeff: I can’t possibly have enough company to need that level of expertise, is perhaps one of the takes.

[3:23] Greg: No, I think that is the take. It’s the need for the CFO, not the “do I want him or her?”

[3:28] Jeff: Right.

[3:29] Greg: “Can I afford him?”

[3:30] Jeff: “Can you afford it?” That’s the thought.

[3:31] Greg: Yeah. Those are important points, and we should talk about that. But here’s how I’ll frame it. The question that I raised, or the… what I responded to was: Does a company… a $10 million construction company—and I don’t think it was a construction company, this works across the board, but we’re talking about construction here at Ascent—does a $10 million company need a CFO?

[3:53] Greg: And the answer that I responded to was, “No. No, you do not.” And I pushed back and said, “Well, that is not true. There are plenty of $10 million companies where you do need a CFO.” Need, right? Not want, not… not “can afford.” And it was because I framed it around: You need a CFO if you have… if you can identify the problem that hiring a CFO will solve for you.

[4:21] Jeff: Okay.

[4:21] Greg: And that to me was the broadest framing of that question. And I’ll give you… so I’ll give you this example. I’ve always said this in my whole career: A CFO is a role that looks forward, that looks into the future. I think a little bit to your point, “What is a CFO?” that, you know, there’s spooky magic or whatever.

[4:39] Greg: I think there’s two ways to think about what a CFO is. There is the… there’s the strategist. There’s the person who kind of is in charge of the overall financial health of the company. And then there’s the people who think about it as, “Well, they’re the person who’s in charge of the accounting of the business.” And accounting is not what a CFO…

[4:58] Greg: Yeah, I’m not going to say “should do,” because it’s up to you, right? But it’s not typically what a CFO is in charge of. That’s a controller. And the… and the point of those posts online was to say, you don’t need a… you don’t need a CFO if you’re a small company, as long as you have a good controller.

[5:17] Greg: And that’s why I felt so strongly about it, and I think that’s what all the engagement came from. Because a controller looks backwards. A controller looks at the accounting—what has already happened.

[5:27] Jeff: The controller’s keeping score.

[5:30] Greg: Right, it’s scorekeeping, it’s tracking, it’s telling you what… what has already happened a month after it happens. They’re giving you the financial reports: How much money did we make, how much money did we lose, etc.

[5:40] Jeff: There’s no analysis. It’s just strictly reporting the news.

[5:43] Greg: There can be analysis if you have a good controller and that’s what the role needs, right? If you need someone to say like, “These… these are our financial reports for the month and this is what they mean.” But what a strategist does, a.k.a. a CFO, he… he or she takes that information, and not only strategizing about it and says, “Well, what… now that we know what the numbers are, let’s talk about what it means for the future of the business.”

[6:05] Jeff: Right.

[6:06] Greg: But it also allows someone to take the global picture of the entire organization—small, medium, or large, it doesn’t matter. A controller is going to do not much more than give you the facts as they…

[6:19] Jeff: Right.

[6:19] Greg: …as they occur. And as we’ve talked on plenty of podcasts or on plenty of episodes, sometimes that’s good news, sometimes it’s bad news. Sometimes the ops team likes the news, as they say that…

[6:31] Jeff: Sometimes they don’t understand the news.

[6:33] Greg: …you know that they don’t understand the news. Sometimes they say, “This news is terrible. I wish it was different.”

[6:36] Jeff: “I wish you didn’t know this news.”

[6:38] Greg: But it’s fact. But it should be factual data. A CFO doesn’t live in the factual world as much. A CFO lives in the “what if?” What if our books don’t improve…

[6:47] Jeff: Based on the fact?

[6:47] Greg: Yeah.

[6:47] Jeff: Let’s do some scenarios.

[6:51] Greg: Exactly. What… what if our accounting doesn’t get better? What… what should we do? What if we grow five times in the next… you know, what if we grow fivefold in the next two years? What should we do with that information? The controller is telling you you’re growing. The CFO is saying, “Now let’s figure out a plan for what to do about it.”

[7:10] Jeff: So I’ve got a couple of things about this. You just said two or three things that I want to hit. One is Adam and I did an episode… I don’t know when we did it, a month ago, it doesn’t matter, about specifically about strategic planning. And we talked about some of the basically… we talked about some of the… the barricades or the… the challenges that people find in why they may not plan their construction business strategically.

[7:39] Jeff: Think ahead and, you know, go through the process of… of an annual plan, a strategic planning, a four-year plan, a five-year plan, etc. So we talked through that a little bit and some of the… some of the things that get into people’s way. You’re making the argument that that’s very much the domain of a… of a CFO, at least from the financial standpoint of, “Here’s the… here’s our… here’s our… our desired future state, our dreams, our desires.”

[8:07] Jeff: And okay, let’s think about that from a financial point of view.

[8:13] Greg: Sure and you know, so if you think about what does the financial point of view mean, it doesn’t just mean are we making money or losing money, right? It can mean what’s your growth strategy.

[8:13] Jeff: Exactly, yeah.

[8:13] Greg: What is your hiring strategy? What is your retention strategy? What is your reduction strategy, right? All of those things are based on… I could put all of those into a financial camp.

[8:36] Greg: But if you ask someone, “Well, what does the CFO have to do with hiring new people?” Well, I’ll tell you: Can you afford to hire new people? What… what… what does a year from now look like if you have ten new salaries or three new salaries or whatever, right? And one of the things I put in that post that I wrote was every dollar in a small business is fraught with risk.

[8:58] Greg: Every dollar.

[8:58] Jeff: Yes.

[8:58] Greg: If you grow, if you hire, if you close a division, if you choose to do a new scope of work, if you buy a piece of equipment, if you give your, you know, if you give employees five days off instead of four days off a year, I mean, you know, every dollar matters there. And if you don’t have someone looking at the global idea of where you’re spending your dollars, then I… I think you could get into a little bit of trouble.

[9:27] Jeff: Well, not to sideline it to the strategic… strategic planning thing, but I think there’s a really interesting parallel there. Because one of the things that we identified as a… a fear, or something that gets in your way, or one’s way to… is… is it’s fear-based. It’s, “I either, a, I’m too tactical. I’m an engineer type of mind.

[9:49] Jeff: I don’t know how to think about five years out or even a year out. I don’t know how to do that.” It’s a skill you have to kind of… a muscle you got to work a little bit. But then the other piece of that is having… having some other skills to frame the problem and identify the risks. And that also is a muscle that you don’t flex—some people don’t flex as much, and so it’s underworked.

[10:10] Jeff: Having a CFO… or this makes a strong case, I would think, you know, for those smaller companies, for a fractional CFO to help them work through the overall business, maybe even strategic planning and so forth. Right?

[10:26] Greg: Yeah. That’s a good point. We didn’t… the posts didn’t really talk about fractional versus non-fractional. It was more sort of, “Do we… do we hire a CFO-type person?” Right. But it’s a good point. Fractional is… is equally valuable. That’s… that’s a little more cost-effective sometimes; that’s why people do it. But… but I want to go back to the point about like, kind of the strategy that you’re talking about there.

[10:47] Greg: There’s another part of this, which is—and back to what I said earlier about a controller versus CFO—clean books is kind of the point, right? Clean books, good data,

[11:00] Greg: Reconciled credit card statements, all the things that you think about, you know, are… mean it’s good, you know, good, closed, reconciled data. All of that comes from the controller, doesn’t it? You know, it doesn’t come from the… it doesn’t come from a CFO. So any kind of strategic decision about what we’re talking about—how to grow, what, you know, where to grow, what to do, what are our risks of growing, what are our risks of not growing—

[11:25] Greg: All of that has to come from somewhere. And kind of the message that I wanted to give in these posts was it’s got to come from somewhere, right? It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s got to be a CFO-titled person. But if you’re hiring a controller to do your accounting, that’s a full-time job. Yeah. Any, you know, any controllers out there listening to us now are going to say thank you for saying that, because a lot of times what happens is a controller…

[11:49] Jeff: …is it’s a full time and a half sometimes.

[11:50] Greg: Right, it’s a busy job. You know, sometimes people think that you can just give that strategy work, give the risk assessment work, give the, everything…

[12:01] Jeff: “You know books. You tell me what to do…

[12:02] Greg: You know what, you’re an accountant just tell me what… all of that means.” What a controller would say is, “I… it’s my job to close the books every month…

[12:08] Jeff: I can tell you that. I can tell you that it closes.

[12:11] Greg: I can tell you that we did it. I can tell you that I have everything. I can tell you that I reconciled everything. I can tell you that we, you know, checked every invoice and we paid our subs, etc. But I can’t necessarily tell you what’s going to happen in six months because I’m too busy doing what I’m… what I’ve got to do today and what I’ve got to do a month from now.”

[12:27] Greg: So I think your risk point is well-taken because it’s the risk of not having that role that is probably bigger than saying, “I can’t or don’t want a CFO,” right, is what I would say.

[12:39] Jeff: Well, quite often we come… you know, we… we encounter clients in this… in this revenue range on the smaller end, usually, for sure. But even, you know, we get closer to $10 million. You’ve got… you have a bookkeeper.

[12:39] Greg: Yeah.

[12:39] Jeff: You have, you know, maybe it’s basically a, you know, it’s a one-person shop with a bookkeeper, maybe even a fractional bookkeeper, or maybe it’s their spouse. Quite often, I…

[13:05] Greg: Well, I was going to say, if you started at your kitchen table, to turn a phrase, which a lot of our clients have started in their garage or whatever, it’s a mom, it’s a spouse, it’s a best friend doing your books. It’s a fractional person you found online. And so you just keep that going. Your $1 million turns into $3 million, three turns into six, six turns into ten.

[13:27] Greg: And you keep all that the same because that’s like, you know, that’s all you’ve ever known. Sure. Right? In a way, I think the $10 million number is not a magic number. It doesn’t mean…

[13:37] Jeff: No, of course not.

[13:38] Greg: Right. It’s a revenue number. But every $10 million business—not every one, but most $10 million businesses, unless you got a $10 million contract—every $10 million business was at one point a $1 million business or a $3 million business, right? You grow… you grew into that $10 million number, and therefore you have to evolve with it. And, you know, my point was evolving to what you need or… or determining, do you have a growth problem or a strategy problem that you need to tackle?

[14:09] Jeff: Sure.

[14:09] Greg: Growing into that need for that is why you bring on a strategist, which is what a CFO…

[14:16] Jeff: And to make a strong argument for a sec: We have… we have you on, you know, on staff, as we say, that has that… that it’s a particular passion of yours. But you’ve… you’ve… you’ve sat in that seat. You grew a business…

[14:32] Greg: Yes.

[14:32] Jeff: …from essentially zero…

[14:32] Greg: Yeah, small to large. And I was acting in… another reason that I can speak to this…

[14:37] Jeff: You wore a couple hats in that regard.

[14:39] Greg: I did that role. I did the bookkeeper and controller and hiring an outside CPA firm to help, and thinking about strategy. So that’s why I know when I was $10 million in that role, I knew what we needed. And I don’t think you can blanket an entire revenue size by saying yes or no, right? Like you can’t say because you’re $10 million, you don’t need this.

[15:04] Greg: I think it’s very much dependent on what you’re trying to be.

[15:04] Jeff: Yeah.

[15:04] Greg: And that was my point about you have to, one, you have to identify the problem. You have to… you have to know how to solve it. If solving your problem is hiring a strategist or a CFO, then do that. If your problem is not that, then don’t hire a CFO.

[15:23] Greg: There’s no rules

[15:23] Jeff: Sure.

[15:23] Greg: …but… but that was the point. One of the cool things about this whole experience has been that we got a lot… I got a lot of comments…

[15:23] Jeff: Yeah.

[15:23] Greg: …on these posts—a lot more than I’ve ever gotten. And I thought… we thought it would be fun to maybe read some of them.

[15:37] Jeff: Yeah. So I’ve got… I’ve got, I think, maybe five or six here. Yeah. So I’m going to… I’m going to throw these at you.

[15:43] Greg: And just to be… just for more fun, I actually did not go back and reread them. I mean, I read all of them online. I didn’t read which ones we were going to have, so it’s going to be fun to hear these. And I think… I think people on LinkedIn are very educated, and we all follow our, you know, everyone follows us, and… and it’s fun to read what our… it’s… it’s fun to read what our posts inspire.

[16:03] Jeff: So I’ve got a… I’ve got several. Most of these, or if not all of them, are some sort of a CFO-type person—either provide fractional CFO services or at the CFO level of a company or something like that. So, and I’m going to… I’m going to give some shout-outs. We appreciate everybody who does interact with our posts on LinkedIn.

[16:24] Jeff: So, swing by the office and we’ll get you a piece of candy or something out of the prize closet, I guess.

[16:31] Greg: And we hope they’re listening.

[16:32] Jeff: Right? Right, yeah. If you’re not listening, you should be. And like… and like and subscribe. Rick Smith says, “$10 million needs quality accounting and a skilled fractional CFO to layer on quality and advise the CEO or the board, in whatever case there may be, about improving operations and managing growth. Most of my clients are in the $7 million to $15 million revenue range, and this is the structure that works.”

[17:01] Greg: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think the point that he’s making is… $7 million… if someone believes that $10 million is too small, they would also probably believe that $7 million is too small. Rick’s saying it’s not. That’s… that’s, I think, the takeaway from this: It’s not about the revenue number. It’s about the need that they need to fill, the problem they need to solve.

[17:24] Greg: If they need someone who has a background in being a CFO for a construction company, who understands what those challenges are, then that’s the role you go hire.

[17:33] Jeff: Great. Perfect. So the next one is Maria Tsiaousis. I… I apologize, Maria, if I got your name mispronounced there.

[17:45] Greg: It was a very good guess, though. That’s not it.

[17:47] Jeff: Okay. Can you pronounce that?

[17:49] Greg: No.

[17:49] Jeff: Okay.

[17:50] Greg: But the way you spelled it, that… that would be it.

[17:52] Jeff: …be it. She says, “This one resonated with me because I’ve seen firsthand how finance leaders sometimes end up doing everything except the role they were actually hired for. The finance leads…” The finance lead, excuse me, “…ends up stuck chasing collections, cleaning reports, fixing, monitoring… fixing and monitoring files, and bridging gaps across teams just to keep things moving.”

[18:17] Greg: Exactly. So that’s the point we were talking about right before we started reading these, you know, reading the comments. I think in a certain-sized business—we’ll just pick the $10 million number, sure, that’s what we’re talking about, the sub-$10-million annual revenue number—you do get roped into a lot of hats, you know, especially on the accounting team.

[18:35] Greg: You’re paying bills, you’re doing collections, you’re trying to close the books. And you might have the president of the company saying, “Oh, by the way, I need a five-year plan from you.” Well, when am I going to do a five-year plan? I’m actually trying to… I’m actually trying to, you know, send the month’s billings out, right?

[18:51] Greg: Also I think that’s back to the point I made before: Know… know the problem you’re trying to solve, hire for that problem. Perfect, right.

[19:00] Jeff: The next one, this is another CPA, Felicitas Gia.

[19:08] Greg: Okay. Still, good guesses.

[19:10] Jeff: I’m trying.

[19:11] Greg: They’re not right.They’re close.

[19:11] Jeff: Yeah again, I just blanket apology if I… if I butcher the name. “If reporting is unreliable or workflows are fragmented, even strong CFOs end up compensating operationally instead of leading strategically.” That’s a really strong statement. “The companies that are getting the most value usually define the decision-making outcomes they want first, then build the finance structure around that.”

[19:38] Jeff: That’s exactly what you were saying.

[19:39] Greg: Yeah, I think… I think what he’s saying, too, is that—and I keep using the word strategist, that’s not all the CFO does—but if… if you go back to my earlier point about a CFO looks forward, a controller looks backward, neither is more important than the other, neither is better than the other, and neither is, you know, should be looked at in any kind of way other than a CFO has to look into the future and take… take the data and take the information and do something about it for the betterment of the company.

[20:11] Greg: A controller has to ensure that the data that he or she is presenting is accurate, but it’s already happened. There’s not much more to do about that.

[20:19] Jeff: So here’s my takeaway with both of these last two comments, and this touches something that you and I have kind of a running series on about how operations and finance work together. There’s some friction…they’re working together…

[20:19] Greg: Hopefully they do, hopefully they better.

[20:19] Jeff: But these two things, these… both of these statements absolutely highlight those conversations. Because what they’re saying is if there’s not an operational, strong process…

[20:19] Greg: Yes.

[20:45] Jeff: …working, then the finance lead, whatever their title happens to be, ends up filling gaps and not doing the job they should be doing, which… which is thinking strategically. Both of them say that in their own way. If you don’t have strong… your data likely is not strong because it’s coming from the field, from operations, in a funky way or inconsistently or something.

[21:07] Greg: Right. Or like we’ve talked about in the past, you know, the monthly accounting operations meeting that we have talked about more than once on this podcast, how important it is to have engagement between the accounting, yes, and the operations team. If… if the operations team is giving incomplete data to the controller, who’s then taking that information and putting it into the financial statements, how in the world could anyone then take that bad information and use it to strategize, much less…

[21:35] Greg: …you know, like you said, the title doesn’t matter. It’s the role is what we’re talking about.

[21:39] Jeff: Yes. That’s a very good point…

[21:40] Greg: We’re talking about the role of a financial strategist or a head of the financial strategy of the business, as opposed to someone who is responsible for the accounting of the business.

[21:50] Jeff: I like that framing a lot, because of going back to my original statement about CFO sounds like Gandalf—it sounds very magical and… and… and something that I can’t… I can’t understand. So I like… I like the way you just framed that. I think that that… that makes it a lot more easier for me personally to understand. Oh yeah, it’s the financial strategist. They might have a little different title.

[22:08] Greg: I’m glad you said that because I think that is… those are the points I was really trying to get across with these posts—that you could call it a CFO, and if you… if you’re getting hung up on the phrase, yeah, I mean, think about how many… how many of our clients, the head of the firm, whatever he or she can be, the president, the owner, the founder, the… there’s… there’s eight or nine words. We don’t… I don’t care what that… what they’re called. We know that they’re the person who’s in charge of the business. Call this person whatever you want. Call them CFO, call them a financial strategist. What we’re talking about is, you know, the head of that team who’s responsible for financial strategy. That’s great.

[22:36] Jeff: Perfect. So you have an international following, because these names are killing me. I… they’re getting… Rick Smith… we started there…

[22:36] Greg: We started of…we started easy we going harder now.

[22:36] Jeff: It was… I was… I was killing it. Sandro Romakoa. Okay, I cannot do the pronunciation right.

[22:53] Jeff: “Companies that clearly separate the controller function (clean books, fast close, reliable data) from the CFO function (structure, decision support, strategic alignment) scale their finance operations far more effectively. Getting that accounting foundation right isn’t…” Getting that foundation right isn’t a workaround; it’s a prerequisite. I think that is exactly what has been… it’s just repeating what you were saying.

[23:30] Greg: Yeah. And like I said, if we could leave people with one thought on this, you know, on this topic, it’s that they are different roles. We go back to the word “role,” right?

[23:42] Greg: These are different roles, and therefore they do different things. And if you need both, hire both. If you don’t need both… if you don’t need both roles, if you don’t need both parts of that business—you don’t need clean, accurate books and strategy—then don’t hire both roles.

[24:07] Greg: But if you do, right, you know, as you grow from $1 million to $10 million, $10 million on, absolutely do not be afraid to hire that strategist role and call him a CFO, or call him or her whatever you want to call them.

[24:21] Jeff: Yeah, perfect. Well, I want to thank… I want to close this little section. I want to thank everybody for the engagement. I thank them for Greg, actually. It’s really your… but thank you for the engagement. That’s exactly the kind of conversation we want to bring out in these podcasts and the engagement we have on LinkedIn. We… this is precisely why we do this, is we want to have that engagement. And our… our BHAG—Big Hairy Audacious Goal—here at Ascent is to just raise the bar in the industry, period.

[24:54] Jeff: We don’t… we don’t put any qualification on that. We just want to make the industry a little bit better, and we think a large part of that is engagement with you, the listener, and on LinkedIn and getting these things talked about so there’s better understanding.

[25:08] Greg: I could not agree more.

[25:11] Jeff: Do you have anything to close with, perhaps, or do…

[25:13] Greg: No, I just wanna say that that was great. And I want to say that I wholeheartedly agree, and I love this engagement of these posts, because it means a lot to me as a former CFO who’s now a consultant. But it also proves to me that our industry and our sector and the work that we do really matters to people.

[25:30] Greg: People are engaged in wanting their businesses, you know, to be better, to be more scalable, to be healthier. And I think all the comments that that, you know, that was only a few of what we got. But yes, all of the comments were really trying to help people do what we’re trying to do, which is how do you make your business better, stronger and healthier.

[25:50] Greg: And that’s what we are here to talk about.

[25:52] Jeff: Awesome. Well, that’ll do it for today’s episode. Thanks for listening. And please like and subscribe. You can find us wherever you find your podcasts, I’m told, and we look forward to seeing you again soon. Thanks.