How to Rewire Your Working-Class Mindset

0:00When I say it like this, it's almost like it's so obvious, but you get a bit blinded sometimes, don't you, to go with a good opportunity. Welcome to Hitting the Ceiling, the show for entrepreneurs and leaders who refuse to let a ceiling become the end of their story. Kieran James did not come up through a traditional accounting firm. After building a training department for an accounting software company, he trained a successor, asked to move into a commercial role, and was refused.

0:28Then, an investor backed him with £50,000 and a blunt proposition. start a business and learn by doing. Stride then evolved through customer discovery into an outsourced finance company that now takes accountability for the full finance seat inside of organizations. Beneath the business is a more personal ceiling. Karen has deliberately designed a life around family, home education, elite age group triathlons, and freedom. His challenge is no longer simply building the company.

1:04It is deciding what must receive less of him so the right people and priorities can receive more. Kieran, welcome to Hitting the Ceiling. When did the thing that built the business start becoming the thing that was holding it back from growing? When you're growing a business, there's lots of things that hold it back, aren't there? There's bottlenecks that keep coming up and you keep realizing what's going on. So when we first started the business, it was actually my knowledge, walking into a space that I had no connections.

1:36You know, typically if somebody started a business, let's say it's like an accounting firm, they'd have somebody who knows how to do accounts. That would be their starting point. And they build around that with, I don't know how to get sales. So that's the bit I need to work out. We walked in going, we actually don't know what the business is going to be. That needs some evolution. We don't know what the customer is going to be. We don't know how we're going to deliver it.

1:55So every single variable of the business had to be identified. So I think that's the first thing is knowledge. How do I know what to do, where to do it? How do I choose the industry? All that kind of stuff. Then it became my mental space. I think that growing up in a relatively working class background, you know, my parents tell stories where they bulked our food out with oats to try and make it go further. But it gave me a scarcity mindset. And even now, I've talked to my wife about it this week.

2:24We were talking, you know, watching moments where I'm interacting with my kids with that scarcity mindset, because you grow up just with ingrained that there isn't abundance, there is a limited amount, and you need to be really careful about, And that affected everything from the way I priced in the business, the way I felt when we charged new customers for work up front that we would do as part of sort of like an onboarding phase, how I interacted with the team.

2:50So it went through everything. So the second was this side of things. And then from there, once I worked on myself, it became a lot more logistical. And I think the things that stopped us growing were, obviously, you've mentioned in the introduction around the franchise approach, thinking that we can scale quickly through a model like that without really de-risking or realizing that actually, if we go like that, it's going to cause a bit of an issue for the business.

3:17In your own words, can you really describe, which I think you did for scarcity, but if you could explain to our listener the difference in the mindsets of scarcity versus abundance and how you see that? Yeah, I think it's worth, because I think it will be more relevant doing it in two scenarios. So if we talk about in the home scenario, and I'll talk about the exact scenario that happens with me is, let's say you get a nice piece of food, maybe salmon and cream trees, croissants, whatever it is.

3:47you would let your, in my case, 11-year-old and 9-year-old go to the cupboard, help themselves to that. If they find that's something they wanted to have, because it's tasty, it's nice, you want good things for them. With the scarcity mindset, what you do is you go, oh, no, let's hold that for a special occasion, for the moment when it feels right to enjoy ourselves and have a moment with that. So that's at the home. In business, it comes about with prospects, feeding the need to fight for business, or to find the way that your solution matches their solution, rather than being really clear that your job is just to find a solution for them, whether that's you or some other thing else.

4:30It doesn't matter whether it's you. It's about you're just there to help people. I think even just subtle little things like that change the way that you interact in conversations. And I think that from a pricing perspective, the abundance thing came from a real understanding that when I started in business, I thought that good business was good value. I define good value as low cost. Yeah, cheaper. Cheaper, yeah. And that was such a locked in mindset.

4:55I think that it's really hard to change from that to go into suddenly going, actually, I need to add quite a bit of profit onto this because that gives me scope to over-service, deliver excellent stuff, capacity to pay my staff well, to pay myself well, because I deserve that, to get the best systems, rather than buying the cheapest of laptops, because you're like, well, I just need something to make do you go for the software that's going to make all this hardware that is going to make your team enjoy what they're doing and have a great experience in their working environment.

5:25And it's so subtle, but it's something that has, for me personally, taken quite, it took probably four or five years of the business before I came around to realizing that buying the best pair of boots is better than buying the cheapest pair of boots. And it's ultimately just a better way to live, right? Yeah, 100%. And I think, you know, I mean, the act right working, which the thing that really hit me was we were growing well in sales at one point.

5:44We had a great operating model. We knew we were lean and efficient. and we weren't paying our staff market rate. And I was like, something's wrong here. What are we doing wrong? So that kind of, you know, sometimes you need those moments, don't you? The sort of kicking the teeth to go, something doesn't add up here. Where are we going wrong in this model of what we're creating? Obviously, pricing was the answer in that scenario. And then when you think in contrast that scarcity mindset with an abundance mindset, When did you make that shift from recognizing one that you had a scarcity mindset?

6:15It is biological. We're all hardwired to operate from a scarcity perspective because to me, abundance is sort of earned. You got to go through the crucible of scarcity to understand abundance in the first place. What do you think about how you operate now? How does abundance thinking, abundance mindset come through with the way you're taking your business now? There's kind of two questions in there, I guess. The first question is, how does abundance mindset happen?

6:42The second is, how are we doing that now? So in terms of the first one, I think there's a decision you can make, but then there's also a journey. So the decision is, I'm going to be aware of this. I'm going to have a conscious effort. So for me, I do remember a moment where I made a decision and realized that I had that mindset because I was creating a proposal for a new prospect and, And I was putting the details out there and the numbers were the highest we'd ever quoted anyone.

7:08So then I was trying to find reasons to say to my other director at the time, this is why we should reduce the cost. And I realized it wasn't anything to do with what the customer wanted. It wasn't anything to do with what was right for delivering. It was all to do with me thinking, if I say that to the client at that number, I feel nervous that that's a high number. The reality was it was exactly the right number in the first place. Our pricing was absolutely fine, but this was even after we'd done some pricing changes.

7:36Our pricing was fine, but I was concerned that if I'd looked at that, or in reality... If I'd taken that to my dad and he looked at that, he would have gone, oh, that looks expensive. Actually, it was really like kind of linked in with this kind of stuff, right? So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is you kind of, even in that response, I've kind of explained that there's been a bit of a journey. And I think, so I think you can't just overnight just change something that is so fundamental to what you've grown up with.

8:00So I think you need to be on an evolution. And every time you make a decision, check those decisions. Is there an emotion coming into this that is not... logical. And I think that's what an integrator is for, right? Or other great directors in your leadership team, that they're going to come back and say, is that an emotional conversation there? Is that, you know, where's that coming from? And they're going to challenge those beliefs. So I think a healthy leadership team in this case can challenge those things as well and support in that as long as the whole leadership team doesn't have a scarcity mindset.

8:26In that case, it might be time to get somebody into the team that doesn't or non-execal to support that. Yeah, totally. And love that, that the leadership team is kind of holding up a mirror to you in a lot of ways saying, Hey, is this how we really want to operate? Is this how we really want to think? But still that takes a pretty sophisticated leadership team to go from scarcity to abundance because it's just pretty rare in the world. I'm not sure that very many people think in terms of abundance out of the box.

8:54I'm pretty sure they don't in fact. So that's gotta be a pretty high level leadership team. Again, I think it's been a journey. I think it's been training. But this kind of links really well into the whole CFO question as well, because actually many, many finance leaders have a scarcity mindset. More have than don't, actually, which sometimes in ways makes them a good finance person because they're going to always de-risk and hold things back. But in my team, we're now really focused on if we have a question like, we want to grow, how many people do we need?

9:28And the question is, okay, I think we're going to get X number of sales, which means we need this many people. And it's a really cautious approach, actually, to scaling. Whereas the other answer is, what would be the quickest way to scale? If money was no object, what actions would we take to scale the business? What would we do? What would we invest in? Who would we have in our team? How many clients do we think we could get if we could just throw whatever we wanted at this?

9:54And from that, create a plan backwards from that number and go, actually, now, okay, how can you obtain those resources from the right people, the right places? And obviously, with that CFO head on, the finance director kind of head on, it's okay. And how can we mitigate risk to do that journey? And so that we can give our business not just one step, but what's the biggest step we can take between here and where we need to be next. I think that's definitely been a journey.

10:18And that's not just for me. That's my whole leadership team has been on that journey of kind of going incremental to explosive. What's the thought process that has to happen to take us from one place to another? I think that scarcity breeds incremental. and abundance breeds leaps or strides as it were. Or strides, yeah, nicely done there. You know, you have an interesting start to your business, having someone say, hey, I need you to go start a business, go find product market fit, and here's some startup capital to go do that.

10:48Obviously you had experience in accounting, Tell me a little bit about that and what process did you use to discover and find product market fit for your market? Because you didn't have a product as far as I can tell when you got started. We had a hypothesis, which was in the UK, there's something called an umbrella company, which is where people who work part-time short shifts, they can get one employment for help with getting a mortgage, et cetera, going through this kind of agency.

11:20So that was our kind of hypothesis was, it's a very fast growing market. We've seen lots of people in it. Maybe that could be a model. So we started with that hazard hypothesis, but very quickly we realized that we didn't have any connections in that marketplace and We didn't know enough about it. And a really, really important thing that I learned early on was about market timing. In that market, the market had grown, had all the great opportunities of new startups.

11:43Then you'd had big incumbents come and have private equity investment. And then it started to consolidate in the marketplace. And suddenly now to enter that marketplace was a loss of cost. So we ended up in a place where if we wanted to go into that, unless we could get scale ridiculously quickly, 50k wasn't going to go very far in that journey, we would have had to have scaled up absolutely. We would have put probably five to 10 million into that to make it even make a dent in the market of what was going on.

12:12Although I started with a hypothesis, I would say I still spent far more than I should have. I call it part of my MBA, my on the ground MBA, which is we spent 96,000 pounds in the first year and we made three and a half in turnover. which is just about the biggest fail you can make when you're in a business that most people who start accounting firms, for example, or finance firms, they don't ever make a loss because they start as a profit and they just deliver the work themselves.

12:38But because I couldn't deliver the work, I effectively ran it like a tech startup with having investment, loads into every possible marketing strategy I could think of, email marketing, went to events, spoke at events, cold calls, door knock. I mean, I did everything, which was a great learning, but it wasn't so good from a balancing perspective on cost. And then I found something called the Lean Startup, which I would say is like a really nice precursor to the whole EOS side of things, which is when you, I think EOS works amazingly well when you know what you need to do to grow, you have an established business to scale.

13:19What I really like about the Lean Startup is you can know nothing. about your business. It's the process to just test that model and go, you know, there's a great book called The Mum Test, which talks about the ugly baby syndrome, which is, you know, when you have a baby and I've had two, they look beautiful. They're the most beautiful things in the world. And I would absolutely say 100% unequivocally, my kids were the most beautiful kids in the world, but not everyone else thinks the same as I do in that, right?

13:41And that's the, that's the idea. The Mum Test, that book is great about sort of helping you to identify what are the assumptions you're making that are actually for not founded on anything other than your own personal perspective and not your clients or potential prospects. So the journey with the Lean Startup, a tool particularly called the Business Model Canvas was really, really fantastic. And I use that a lot in the early days. I don't now use the Business Model Canvas as much, but I still use the principles from it when making new decisions.

14:12The idea of, We don't go out to market knowing everything. We go out to market testing our assumptions in that journey. And don't get caught up in the idea that you have to be so fixed when you start getting a new product or a new opportunity. In the UK, we've built a community for... people running on EOS to try and really get people to engage together. And that was entirely ran on the business model canvas process of just test, measure, see how people respond, get some feedback on the scorecard.

14:41And I'll put that back through so there's some EOS falling in as well. So it was... I think it's important that you identify when you go into a new market or a business that kind of assumption you're making that might damage you if you just hold them 100% true. At what point during that journey were you pretending that there wasn't a problem? You had to have seen it coming at some point. I think my integrator at the time saw it before I did, ironically.

15:12We'd implemented EOS. We were probably about 18 months into implementing EOS when this opportunity came up. And as a visionary, I saw... opportunity revenue wise but didn't see the opportunity in terms of what builds a great business so i would say that you know we i did mitigate some of those risks you know we're already learning that we needed to do that so pricing was already starting to change etc there was a couple of things we just didn't cater for so first thing is that the data we got was going to be a mess so we spent you know that was going to be a lot of effort second is the relationship between the franchisor and their like the and managing director of business the and the team and that person and the front and the rest of the team and the franchisees there was a couple of things that were very subtle but they were it was clearly frustrations but in that within the kind of the setup i think In hindsight, it was kind of obvious that we were going to have some challenges taking that client on, even if we had just one of them, because of this discrepancy between this person who made the decision and the person who we were trying to deliver to, who was not the same person.

16:24Right. You know, it's great. The idea of being mandated to go somewhere. But when you think about, you know, a lot, some of these, these people, you know, their businesses where their, their mum was doing the accounts for them and suddenly they had to pay for it. You know, it's that, I guess in a way, despite I've talked about the lean startup, you know, if you actually really understood your client, you'd go, would I want somebody to tell me I had to change my account over to somebody else and for me to pay more money?

16:49When I say it like this, it's almost like it's so obvious. But you get a bit blinded sometimes, don't you, to a goal, but good opportunities. You know, Warren Buffett is a great example of somebody who clarifies this so well. He says, he talks about the 20, he says, how do you prioritize? He says, well, take your 20 best opportunities. Now, fill those down to five opportunities. I'm paraphrasing here. And then he says, now pick the top three opportunities that you're going to do.

17:13Okay, now just do opportunity one and avoid opportunity two and three with everything you've got. You deliberately choose not to do the second, third opportunity because they'll be the distractors from the first opportunity. I think the opportunity to grow was there, but I was distracted by all these other components of it I thought were good. I didn't focus on the number one thing, which is build a great long-term business. So I think the moment that we realized, it actually dawned on me, it was probably too late.

17:41It was the moment where they said, we're selling out or we've been sold rather because we get told after the fact we've been sold and instantly your alarm bells go off going, right. Are the rules the same or is this going to change things in that journey? I guess one of the lessons we've learned from that is, and not just because we don't really deal with too many franchisors nowadays, is when you're going to work with a client, Understand, especially at a high level like we do, when you're understanding their leadership team, is there a healthy dynamic within that team?

18:12Because don't expect you to be able to fix that. You need to be coming into a team that you can fit into well, but you're not the answer to a healthy leadership team. You're the answer to the product or service you're dealing with. I think that's a learning curve from it. you of course had customer concentration risk there and with a franchisor you think oh i actually work for 100 businesses not one but at the same time you kind of just work for one you end up with a huge level of concentration risk there as well what have you stopped doing now that you used to feel was absolutely essential to the growth of the business.

18:48And tell me about the process of letting go, of delegating and elevating, kind of stepping back from you being the central decision maker. Yeah, I think, you know, even when you don't deliver the main work, I still ended up getting to the point where, it didn't take me very long to be able to learn all the things that we needed to do and why they were important, how to deliver it and start looking at the nuances of tax and stuff around it. So, you know, we always, I was always engaged in that because I do have an analytical personality, which means, I know in hindsight, I shouldn't have, but I had a bit of a control thing where I was wanting to make sure things were right.

19:25First thing I found quite easy to let go of, though, was team leadership. You know, I consider myself to be probably a good, somebody who's good at rallying people around a cause or an idea, but not necessarily the person who's going to manage and hold somebody accountable. I realized that there was somebody else in my business who was better than me at that. So that was the first thing. I did hire ahead of time somebody that could come into our leadership team and add maturity and experience and things that probably beyond what we could really afford at the time.

19:55But I knew it would make a good difference. And it did. As the journey has gone on, I've been able to release quite a lot. You know, our finance, even our own finances, I've released that to one of our team, which is, you know, that's a big deal for somebody who's those finance. as I did by the end of it, by this process. So I released that and I've also stepped down from doing operations. At the moment, I ended up, last year I was in just... visionary and sales or growth.

20:22We call it sales and marketing growth for the business. I have actually since taken back the integrator seat, but because I think this is quite an important thing in that it's not, and it's not for everything. It's a, um, in the timing of our growth and where we are, we, the person in that seat became the right person in the wrong seat. So we've adjusted as a business and we are on our issues just ready to remove me out again, back into that integrator, away from that integrator seat as quick as possible.

20:53However, what it's allowed us to do in that process is something that I've been finding really, really hard over the last, because we're over a decade old now, which is to try and step out of the sales seat. So we're actually in the process now of moving the team so that I will step out of the sales seat over the next six months, which from a founder's perspective, I think is quite a it's always more, especially as a visionary who's very self-focused, it's probably one of the hardest roles.

21:15So I think once that's through in the next six months, and we've began that process, you know, the integrator role, although it's difficult to hire for, for me to let go is actually a lot easier because we've had a process like that before, it's in place. So I think we're on an ebb and flowing journey is probably the right thing to say with that. And a journey that's I find it quite easy to let go. And I don't like to do the stuff that's the day-to-day keeping things going kind of stuff.

21:40But equally, part of that abundance mindset and some of the learnings around that is also realizing sometimes where you are in a season where your business needs a certain type of person. Actually, I read Mark Winter's visionary book, and that's what led me to that decision, because it kind of talks about the right type of integrator for the right timing of business. And the difference between, you know, perhaps somebody who can support you with the role out of EOS within the business and can structure things and be part of like leading the operations versus somebody who's going to be the commercial head who's going to make decisions that are going to be high-risk decisions to move the business forward.

22:12I'm still on the learning curve is probably the best way to put that, Mark. I think it's interesting too. If you're familiar with an article that Paul Graham wrote, he talks about founder mode versus manager mode. And that sometimes in those growth trajectories, the leadership of the business, the founder, the visionary, has to go into founder mode versus manager mode. And I think it's useful to talk about it in terms of, as Mark Winters talks about it, who wrote Rocket Fuel, which is all about that visionary and integrator relationship.

22:46You gotta find the three-part puzzle piece and it's gotta fit, right? You gotta fit with each other and you gotta fit with the business itself. And anytime any of that gets out of whack, it's just not going to work. It's almost like a relationship, a marriage, and where one person is growing and the other one isn't, that creates lots and lots of conflict. And I think the same is true for that visionary integrator relationship and the business relationship, where if the business is growing and it's starting to take off, which clearly yours is, both the visionary and integrator have to be able to grow at the same speed and pace as the business with each other.

23:35And with the business simultaneously, otherwise you might no longer be the visionary for the business or the right fit visionary. And your integrator puzzle piece might not be the right fit for you or for the business. Or in some scenarios, the integrator can actually keep up with the business, but the visionary can't. And so then you have to swap that out. So if you think about it in those three-part puzzles, as you're growing and scaling, you do have to flip to founder mode if your integrator can't keep up with you or with the business itself.

24:08And so you're kind of managing this three legs of that stool at the same time as you grow. And I think that founder mode versus manager mode is just kind of a good way to, think about it, that you have to flip that switch at certain points in time in order for the business to keep growing and for you to serve customers well, et cetera. I think you mentioned about Rocket Fuel. Obviously, I've mentioned about the visionary book. There's another good book called Second in Command as well, which is between the three of them, they've given me a good understanding of.

24:42you know, if you say as a visionary, what you think is you think I'm going to get an integrator, they're going to come in and they're going to solve all my problems and they'll just do everything. And like, it almost like the picture is almost painted that they'll just know what to do. And what I realized is the integrator role is just as important a role to define really clearly as any other role. In fact, far, far more important to define what your strengths as a visionary are.

25:04So what is the complementary strengths of the integrator you need? What things, you know, that are you in terms of your business and the stage you're at in the next 24 months what do you what do you need that integrator to primarily do because obviously interest can get involved in everything they can do lots of you know they can manage many different projects and get involved in all these special things actually fundamentally what do you need do you need them to do between here and the next point And to really just make sure that that role is focused entirely on just solving those challenges as their primary.

25:36They can do other stuff if they've got more time, but like those, you know, it's first things first type moment. And I think that's a learning I've been on in that journey as well. So you have a pretty unique business model. You were mentioning the umbrella company and the fractional leadership, which is really the core of your business. What are your thoughts about the fractional leadership as an industry? I think understanding the fractional industries.

25:59Yeah. quite important because I don't think everybody always understands it because they always, a lot of people see it as fractional leadership. Actually, fractional has been personal assistants. It's been part-time help over using Fiverr. So there's been freelance, that kind of freelance support for a long period of time. So I think the change that's happening is at the leadership level or at key strategic positions, people are being more comfortable going, actually, let's find somebody who is exceptional.

26:27We just want a piece of them, not all of them. And I think that there's a lot of moving parts that have made that so far, get to where we are, but also will continue to do that. What we're trying to achieve and what we're trying to see more of is a fractional function, not just a fractional leader. So rather than just say, we're going to do the finance leadership, they realize the importance of the other stuff, which is, you know, how does the data get into the business?

26:51How's that organized, structured, the systems, the technology, all that kind of thing. So that's where we're trying to separate into that. So that's an interesting model. And that's one thing that's evolving. To your other point, about five years ago, if you spoke to most fractional finance people globally, they'd probably say, my limit is somewhere between a 1 million and a 5 million turnover, whatever currency, US dollars, euros, pounds, doesn't matter, about the same sort of number.

27:16Whereas now we're already getting somewhere closer to $2. 20 million at the moment in terms of what that's capable of. I think going forward, what we'll find is people will engage in fractional leadership up to 50, you know, maybe even more than that million or upwards, because what we're finding is we're finding because of technology, because of AI, the scope that what a leader can achieve within that smaller space of time is significantly greater.

27:38There's a lot more connect connectivity because, you know, we went about 10 years ago through a big data boom where people started to put their data together, which has a supported, uh, AI rollout and being able to use that data in wise ways. So if a business understands its asset in data and then understands how to use that with AI and pull the information and analyze the information, a leader can make strategic decisions without having to do all that background work.

28:04They can be more in the conversation, in the story, in the decision-making process than all the stuff that happens behind it. So I think there's a lot of moving parts happening. And obviously in certain geographies like the UK where leadership is, or hiring is becoming more high risk. I think people will, because of that ability to remove them from the business is a lot harder. I think that you'll find those anywhere like that will also grow even quicker because they'll be spurred on by that decision.

28:35I think people are also getting a bit smarter about protecting the asset. You know, people have seen businesses go up suddenly lose. And I think a lot of businesses now are going, okay, I've got an asset. How do I keep this asset, this business that I've created? And one of the ways to do that, especially businesses, maybe because we're in a bit of an echo chamber on the US, especially businesses on the US, you tend to be more thinking, okay, how can I remove, keep your personal dependency from that business?

28:59And having something like fractional allows you to have perhaps multiple people or have somebody in the team that has a little bit of extra knowledge in certain areas. For example, like a fractional finance leader, but also a fractional manager in the finance rather than having somebody doing both roles. And those sorts of decisions help a business to be able to de-risk from somebody deciding that they want to move ship. So there's a lot of moving parts there.

29:21It is interesting as it's harder to employ people. It's harder to remove employment when you have it. I think humans are just like electricity and water. We move to the path of least resistance. If you put up a bunch of resistance for hiring and firing, then we're just going to do something a little bit different than hiring and firing. Yeah. That essentially gets the same thing, but avoids all the friction to it. You just see this happening. And I think that's part of like you kind of squeeze it and it just takes off with the fractional leadership and just the concept.

29:54As you said, being a consultant, giving, working for multiple organizations at once is nothing new. But at this level and at this scale itself. and the ability for people to have access to top talent without having the money to pay for them full time. It's just a unique thing that I don't think ever existed before. And yes, I think it is enabled by technology. Our model probably wouldn't have been able to be developed 10 years ago because I don't think the market would have been ready for a model like ours.

30:25You know, Fractional has always been very self-employed. There are organizations that deal with Fractional and they tend to have their Fractional team as subcontractors. Our model is an employed model. So all of our team that we place into businesses, they're Fractional, but they're our employees. And that's quite important because it's a different type of person. than the person who's going to go and be self-employed. Most self-employed people, they might not be as entrepreneurial as somebody growing a large business, but they tend to have an entrepreneurial spark at least in them because they have to do a bit of sales to sell themselves to somebody.

30:55They've got to do a bit as well as being able to do the service that they're delivering. A marketing strategist has to sell their consultancy and deliver a marketing strategy. Whereas models like ours that are arising now, You can find somebody who's a specialist in their industry, you know, in ours it's CFO, but perhaps they might not be the person who tries to, wants to sell. So it almost, these models like this are opening the market up to almost a new type of person in that space as well.

31:20It's the person who can be technically great in their role, but doesn't have to be the person who wants to be an entrepreneur in that journey. So that's why I think there's capacity for more people in the market because of that. And I have to think that you are in a competitive industry. There's lots of pre-existing consulting firms and things like that. And it makes me wonder, what does your team do? What does your business do from your business model perspective that your industry thinks is just totally out there?

31:50Well, I think there's a couple of things. The first thing is actually our principle that we run through stuff, which is my background is not from accounting first. So we're not trying to be accountants first. And I keep banging this on with our team over and over again. You know, you've seen our values as one of the lines under our values, which is we're not here to be accountants. We're here to provide financial clarity, which means we don't care what this business looks like.

32:13What we care is, are we having the outcome of, that we need to have for the person in front of us. And that's why we've created our financial clarity index, which is like a tool to be able to analyze whether we're actually achieving what we said we're going to achieve for somebody. You know, it's not about, although we do do accounting as part of what we do, we're really outsourced finance and outsourced financial clarity. So it's going, okay, you're a leader.

32:37What do you need to know to make great business decisions from the finance function? What finance information do you need? And how do we connect that with the rest of the business? And that means that if AI comes in and starts taking over and we all need to be experts in AI and technology, that's not a problem. If we become a technology business and we're building software that delivers technology, financial clarity. That's not a problem. If we're all accountants, that's not a problem.

33:01If we're FDs, CFOs, it doesn't really matter what we do. What matters is the problem we're trying to solve. And I think that's, it's a subtle, it's a really important way because it changes the way you run your business. So I think that's the first thing. I think the second thing in our model is that employment, which I said, you know, we've chosen to employ. It's higher risk for us as a business, but we've realized that what it gives us is access to a pool of people that other people aren't accessing.

33:23So there's a benefit from a recruitment perspective, but there's also an element of us being able to control the full function. So rather than just saying we're going to be senior leaders, and if you've got a team below that, that's great. We'll try and talk to them and interact in some way. We're saying outsource your finance function and we'll control all parts of it. Do they have financial clarity? Do they have meaningful analytics within the business?

33:58Are their people, systems, and processes appropriate and suitable for the business and its plans? And is the quality of the data and the inputs and the infrastructure behind it good enough? And that means it allows us, it's something that we're, because we're so honed in on that, It allows us to, A, productize it in a way that other people can't. B, it allows us to direct our staff in a different way than trying to just tick a compliance box on getting your taxes, returning, whatever.

34:29But also we get to control the whole outcome of what we're trying to give, which is financial clarity. I think lots of other people are, you know, they're great at giving reports. And there's some great firms out there and they're great at giving strategy, but it's hard sometimes to control the whole funnel of that. And I think I've seen marketing, the reason I talk about marketing a couple of times, because I've seen the same, I haven't seen the model in finance, but I've seen the model in other marketing agencies where marketing agencies will say, I'm going to do your entire marketing outfit and I'll do your SEO here.

34:53We'll do your, you know, your event management here. We'll do this here. And somebody, you know, an organization will outsource the full function with leadership and everything included. And so I think that's the bit we're kind of learning from other parts of the fractional model and bringing it into the finance one. All right, Kieran, last question before we conclude here. What one thing, if you'd done it two years earlier, would have changed everything?

35:19I think if we'd spent more time when we first implemented EOS... on really honing in on our target market instead of kind of muddling through and figuring it out as we went along. If we'd spent more time just really putting exercise into that, I think that would have been fantastic. And it would have really helped us to move there quicker and make decisions quicker and bank our eggs on the right horses. We'll say we'll buy money on the right horses.

35:50That's the one. All right, Kieran, sounds good. Thanks for being our guest today. And till next time. Thanks, Mark. If this conversation gave you something to think about, I'd love to keep that going. I write a newsletter called Clarity Break Thoughts, where I share simple ideas, questions, and reminders to help you step back, think clearly, and lead with more intention. You can subscribe at eosworldwide.com slash clarity break thoughts. Again, that's eosworldwide.com slash clarity break thoughts.