Adam Torres and Luke Boyenger discuss financial roadmaps.
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Show Notes:
What does it take to build a financial roadmap for your business? In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Luke Boyenger, Founder & CEO at Cruzumi CFO & Advisory. Explore Cruzumi CFO & Advisory and how his team is helping companies thrive.
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About Luke Boyenger
Luke is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) who specializes in working with commercial construction business owners to create lasting wealth. After earning a degree in accounting from Wichita State University, Luke spent seven years at Ernst & Young performing financial statement audits for some of the world’s largest companies.
Luke’s passion was always to use his knowledge of finance and accounting to help small businesses grow and prosper. With that goal in mind, he left the corporate world behind to start his own business focused on helping commercial construction companies overcome challenges and achieve profitability.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Luke Boyenger and he’s founder and CEO over at Krizumi CFO and advisory.
Luke, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Appreciate you having me on. All right, Luke. So this is one of my favorite topics. It’s talking about bringing in outsourced outsourced individuals and executives to really help you grow your business, to leverage what you’re doing. And for those that are out there building businesses, the entrepreneurs and executives watching this you’re going to want to stay tuned because presuming he’s doing some special things and we’ll get into that of course, but Luke, just to get us, get us kicked off.
We’ll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we call our mission matters minute. So Luke at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s what we do. Luke, what mission matters to you? The mission that really matters to us, Adam, is, is putting better quality data in front of business owners so that they understand how to drive profitability and cashflow in their business in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner.
And, and not having to just run a business. trusting their gut or how much cash they have in the bank and really adding a layer of comfort and peace of mind and confidence that they’re doing things the way they need to be doing to get where they want to go. Yeah, that’s great. Love bringing mission based individuals on here who are going to teach us things, who are going to give us advice.
tools and really help us along the way on our journey as entrepreneurs and business owners. So again, good to have you on. And I guess, I mean, I see, I see the word founder here. So have you, have you been an entrepreneur for a while? Did this, when, when did you start your entrepreneurial journey?
We’re in year three over here at Krizumi getting it up and going. So I, I spent a long time in, Public accounting and corporate America before doing this really trying to hone and develop the financial skillset that I needed to, to be able to do what I do now and about, you know, into my third year of the entrepreneurial journey.
Yeah. What about when you were younger? I’m curious. Did you ever have that itch or think that you’d be a business owner for me? I never, I never thought of it as like this idea of being an entrepreneur was something I kind of fell into. I always call myself an accidental entrepreneur. What, what about you?
Yeah, no, my, my grandpa was an entrepreneur, my dad was an entrepreneur. Ah, so it’s in the blood. So yeah, I mean, I, I always had entrepreneurial drive and aspirations, but I looked around my broader community and there were a lot of entrepreneurs in it and Yeah. I saw a lot of them either doing it really poorly, Or doing it in a way where they weren’t really getting the full value out of it.
My grand, my grandpa’s a great example of that. He ran a great business his entire life. Him and my grandma did well, and they made a lot of nice living for themselves. But when it came time for him to exit the business, it wasn’t worth it. Business was worth the auction value of the assets. Because the business knowledge and acumen to build a business that you can sell for real value when you’re ready to be done just wasn’t there.
So before I dove into being an entrepreneur myself, I wanted to go close that, that business expertise and financial skillset gap. Man, that’s such a smart thing to do. I feel like if more people did that, there might be a little bit less pain sometimes in the beginning. I’ll speak for myself on that one.
I thought because I was successful in corporate America that all of a sudden that that part was like, was guaranteed as an entrepreneur. So when I went out there to say, I got my bumps and bruises, man, that would be, that would be an understatement. But but that being said, that’s why companies like yours exist to help them.
Fill that gap for people. I didn’t, I didn’t know when I was going out in entrepreneurship, that companies like yours even existed. I was pretty naive to that whole piece of it in that whole world. I’m curious. So when you decided to kind of, I, these are my words, not yours. When you, when you, when you took the leap, when you dove off that cliff and decided to go out on your own, like, what was that like?
Yeah, it was. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d say necessarily intimidating or scary because we prepared for it. Yeah. We saved up. I get that from you, by the way. I get that from you. That’s why I said my words your support group, like did the people around you, were they like, Oh, okay. This makes sense.
Of course, Luke is going to go do this. Or did they, or they were, they like, kind of like, Oh, you’re gonna like give up your this and this that you’d already built. What? No, I don’t think anybody was super surprised by it. I mean, I’m, I’m kind of, uh, March the beat of my own drum. We do things my way kind of person anyways.
So the fact that I wanted to go and build something for myself, wasn’t really shocking to anybody, but no, we, my wife and I, we prepared for several years to do this. So we stockpiled cash and made sure we put ourselves in a good financial position. So when I stepped out into. Income zero we were ready for it.
That had that, you had to have some butterflies though, man, when you get to income zero, right? Like, don’t tell me you were all right with that one. Cause no matter how much mentally, I don’t care what you had in the bank, just that feeling of like, you didn’t get that, that transfer you’re used to. Had to be something, at least the first one.
Yeah, I’m not, not in months one, two or three, but when you get into months, four, five, six, and you still don’t have any revenue coming into your business and you’re still building, you’re still trying to get it off the ground, you start to get a little nervous for sure. Yeah. Yeah, so and the reason I ask these questions is because I always find it interesting, especially based on, you know, where you’re, where you’re, where you were at in corporate, you went out, you went into public and now you’re helping other business owners.
To me, I always feel like it’s, it’s helpful, like when you can empathize or you know what, Some people are going through, and I think you have a unique vantage point having worked with so many companies and seeing so many kind of like behind the scenes of what takes place. And so I guess before we go any further and I got a bunch more to go into, but let’s just maybe give us an overview of presuming overall CFO and advisory and what you do.
Yeah. So we’re a fractional CFO firm. We’re not a CPA firm, so we, we stay very much in the CFO lane. We don’t do any of the traditional. CPA firm stuff. We’re not going to do your bookkeeping. We’re not going to do your tax return. We’re not tax strategists. We’re fractional CFOs and fractional CFOs only.
And that just means that we provide CFO services to businesses on that source basis at a level that makes sense for them. So if you need a CFO skillset in your business, You don’t need 40 hours a week Yeah. Worth of CFO work. You don’t have to go hire a full-time CFO for 300 grand a year. Yeah. You can come buy as much CFO as you need from us instead, and get that skillset set in a much more economic manner.
Yeah. And, and just to circle back to what you said, so you’re not replacing a c PA or an internal bookkeeper or anything that you don’t even, it’s not a competing interest. You’re, you’re an added benefit to that. I’m, I’m understanding that correct. Right. Absolutely. 100%. And for those that haven’t, I feel like most of the people that you’re, that you’re targeting and, or helping, as you mentioned, maybe they don’t need a full time CFO yet.
If you’re in that particular situation, then it’s possible that you don’t even know what kind of the benefits of having a CFO are, because you’ve had maybe your CPA, who’s pretty good or great, whatever you’ve had your bookkeeper and then you have yourself and maybe you’re upskilling constantly, but maybe go a little bit further.
further into just the benefits of, for those that have been like, because for some that watch, this is going to be the first time they’re thinking about, Oh, wait a minute, I can actually afford a CFO that level of like, well, what does that even mean? Let’s start, let’s start kind of basic. Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s a great place to start because I talked to a lot of business owners who have full time CFOs in their business right now.
So they say, well, we don’t need what you do because we already have a CFO. And I say, well, do you have anybody in your business who does? Budgets, projections, forecasts, cashflow forecasting, anybody that’s building the strategic financial roadmap to get you from where you are today to where you want to be in the future.
And so often they’ll say, no, we don’t have anybody that does that, but we have a full time CFO. And it’s because a lot of people with the full time CFO title out there in companies are actually really just doing accounting. They’re recording. They get, and they get pulled into that sometimes into the operational side, even if they necessarily, even if they have the skillset.
It’s just, you know, companies are growing and, and I’m guilty. Like you got your finance person, you just start dumping things on them, right? Yeah. And then all of a sudden the CFOs doing stuff that somebody else should be doing, even if they have the skillset continue. I just wanted to kind of stick that together.
Yeah, no, you’re right. That, that absolutely happens. We, and we do see that sometimes, but I would say more often, we just see people who don’t have a CFO skillset, somehow inherited a CFO title, and they’re not doing any CFO work. Oh, that’s where we come in. We have the CFO skillset. We’re not taking over the accounting.
We’re not processing the transactions. We’re not paying the bills. We are doing the true CFO level skillset. How do you inherit that title? I’m curious, like, how does that even happen? Maybe you were promoted up through to it or like you were hired outside or maybe like, how does that even happen? I’m just, it’s interesting to me to see from your, from your vantage point.
There’s a number of ways it happens. Sometimes it’s an employee that is a really good accountant in the business and a highly valuable team member that goes to the business owner and says, I really want the title of CFO and I’m not going to be happy unless I get it. And they say, okay, well, I don’t care.
Here you go. Here’s the title. I got it. Now go back and. Keep doing accounting. That’s fair. That’s fair. Go ahead. That definitely happens. But there’s also, I think just a large lack of understanding of what the CFO is actually supposed to do. And you know, most business owners aren’t experts in the different types of roles within an accounting and finance section in a business.
And so someone comes to them and says, Hey, you’re a, you’re a, you’re a 10 million company and you don’t have a CFO. You need a CFO. You got to get a CFO. Oh crap. I got to get a CFO. Hey, you, you’re my CFO now. Okay. Got that done. Now we’re good to go. The org chart, right? For the org. Exactly. So you can throw titles around without actually getting the skills that you need, and that doesn’t really solve the problem.
Yeah. And so now you have now let’s take it a step further. So now they may have a CFO that’s entitled or otherwise. And so now you come in and you’re approaching this from a different angle. Like what are some of the benefits of, of what you’re doing and how does that help businesses? Yeah. So when you get a real CFO skill set in the business and you have somebody who is consistently every single month updating, Budgets and projections and forecasts and enforcing the strategic conversation with the business owner around the financial plan, what are the goals we’re trying to achieve and how are we deploying resources within the company to go out and achieve those goals?
Are we actually using our capital in ways that are moving us towards progress in achieving and achieving our goals, or are we just blowing money on shiny things that come up every month? Because there’s money in the bank and we can’t, and no one’s, no one’s forcing accountability. No, one’s challenging the spending plan or the budget.
So we’re able to drive progress on the goals that the owners have for their business by keeping them focused on deploying resources within the business that are aligned with those strategic goals. So that they actually go out and achieve what it is that they want. And I know that one of your one of your specializations or one of your industries, even though you can work with many, so I think you’re pretty agnostic there, like, correct me if I’m wrong, but one of them is is construction.
So maybe kind of give us a flavor of kind of what, what are some differentiators? Like what makes working with your company a little bit different? Yeah, we, yeah, you’re right. We’re, we’re fairly agnostic in the sense that we’ll work with most businesses in most industries. Yeah. But we are particularly good at construction and manufacturing, and most of our clients tend to come out of the construction and manufacturing.
Industries. So what’s unique about working with us is that we are very focused on construction and manufacturing. We have a lot of experience in those industries. We understand them well, we know how they work and we know how to drive progress. In those businesses, whereas a lot of CFO firms are working with businesses in a hundred different industries.
And they’re not necessarily an expert that any of them, they’re kind of a generalist at all of them. And what you really want in your business is a expert who has a deep understanding of your industry and knows how to drive progress within it. But what’s also different about us is I wasn’t always an accountant.
I wasn’t always a CPA. I haven’t always done CFO services. I didn’t even start my financial career path until I was 24. And I pretty much had a job since I was 14. Yeah. So I spent the first decade of my life basically doing hands on. Entrepreneurial blue collar type of work working my grandpa’s construction business, working in my dad’s machine shop, I’ve built a manufacturing process from the ground up in my dad’s company.
I’ve been in a ditch full of water at 3 AM, pitching up, fixing a water mains of the people of the local city. Wake up to a running water in the morning. I know what it looks like to go and do the type of work that these businesses are doing, I’ve done it myself. So when you combine that with. Over a decade of financial expertise work with.
Some of the world’s most sophisticated companies, you get a CFO firm. That’s really well positioned to actually be able to deliver value to its clients. What are the, and you mentioned you were, can work with many industries and I understand the specialty, but what are the, typically the sizes of companies that you find get the most value?
And in answering that maybe kind of throw out there and maybe unpack a little bit more of the fractional model side of it. Yeah. So we’re. We’re generally working with businesses in the five to 50 million revenue range. We’ve, we’ve found that tends to be a pretty good fit. Smaller than 5 million in revenue.
It’s, it’s too hard for us to earn our keep. There’s just not enough meat on the bone for us to go and find cost savings and profitability improvements that are far in excess of what we charge, which is what we ultimately want to do. Yeah. So we prefer working with companies doing at least 5 million in revenue.
And the sky’s really the limit there. It really, some people think that you get a full time CFO as soon as you can afford it. That fractional CFOs are for companies that can’t afford full time CFOs. Yeah. And I would say that’s not the right perspective to have. The right perspective to have is how much CFO do I need for the state of business that I’m in?
You might be a hundred million dollar company. That’s just growing organically 10 percent year over year with a really simple business model. And you may only have 5 to 10 hours a week worth of actual CFO work that needs to be done. Can you afford a full time CFO? Sure, you can probably afford a dozen of them.
But that doesn’t mean you need them. So, go buy what you need, not what you can afford. And that’s really where the fractional model comes into play. It’s not about what you can afford. It’s about buying only as much as you require and that are wasting money on a super expensive employee. And then making them do a bunch of low level crappy work that we talked about earlier that a 60, 000 a year employee could do.
Yeah. Does the I, one of the things I like about the fractional model is the kind of like the cross learning. So even if you had a full time CEO in, in, you know, in house, even if they’re doing just CFO work and they’re, it’s properly managed and everything else. The, the bottom line is there’s still, you know, within that picture within that one company and sure, they may go to a conference a couple of times a year.
Sure. They may keep up with the news. They may do some other things and they may be great at what they do, but unless you’re kind of in the, in companies, in many companies, and unless you’ve seen, you know, many, many, many different cases and different studies, like some of that. Cross learning that just, I feel like it just happens organically.
Like, can you, can you speak on that a little bit? Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Adam. You go, you go hire a full time CFO, you have a CFO who is working with you and you only, and sure they’re going to bring some past experience with them from other companies, but you’re still getting a relatively limited range of experience.
Whereas when you work with a fractional fractional CFO is probably working with. Anywhere between five and 10 different companies at any given point in time. And they are, they’re learning and seeing what’s happening in the broader market, not even just necessarily in your region, but across the U S even what’s happening in the broader economy, what are other companies doing, what are our strategies that can be deployed and bringing that, that deep well of knowledge and resource and experience that they’re getting from working with a lot of different companies that you get to tap into.
When somebody’s out there shopping for a outsourced CFO firm, what are some you want to tackle that question? Like, what is you want to tackle that question? Like, what is people should be careful of? People should be careful of
in the fractional CFO. Particularly like a financial, like a financial, like, exactly, like, exactly. Really anybody can just wake up one morning and decide that they’re a fractional CFO and start offering fractional CFO services. Wow. And it happens. I mean, I see people pop up on LinkedIn, fractional CFO, and I go look at their LinkedIn profile.
It’s like, Oh, okay. They were a high school volleyball coach for 10 years, and then they were a life coach for three years, and now they’re a fractional CFO. Got it. Like does the background does their experience, does the qualification that they put on display demonstrate a level of ability and skillset that says they’re probably going to be able to help you with the particular problems that you’re looking to solve in your business, which.
I mean, Hey, if you’re running a business that desperately needs a volleyball coaching, then they might be the person for you, but I don’t know very many businesses that need that. So look at their background, look at their experience, look at their, their credentials. Is there anything that says they’re probably qualified to be able to help you with the types of challenges that you’re looking to solve?
And a big red flag I see oftentimes is There’ll be someone that you can tell they’re clearly, they’ve been, they’ve clearly been around for a while, but you go look at their LinkedIn profile, their fractional CFO, they’ve been a fractional CFO for six months and all the rest of their history is non existent.
They don’t show anything that they were doing before they were a fractional CFO. You go look at my LinkedIn profile. My entire work history is in there because I’m proud of it. Transcribed I’m proud of the things that I’ve done because I believe that everything I’ve done up to this point in my life has in some way trained me, educated me or qualified me to be doing what I’m doing now, whether it was the time I spent in corporate America, the time I spent in public accounting, auditing fortune 500 companies.
My time working with my grandpa and his construction business, my dad and his manufacturing company, like it’s all relevant experience that’s led to me doing what I’m doing now. And I’m proud of it. So I put it on display. When you see people not putting it on display, it’s probably because they know that their background doesn’t in any way support what they’re doing now.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, Luke, man, this has been fun having you on the show and learning more about your business, what you do, how you’re helping business owners. I just have to ask, I mean, what we’re going into as we’re doing, shooting this live. We’re going into where we’re in December, 2024, man, 2025 coming up.
What, what’s next? What’s next for you? What’s next for the business? Yeah. We have big growth goals for 2025. We. I started this business in particular. I could have, I could have really started any business and I chose to do fractional CFO because I had a skillset that I knew was valuable to other business owners.
And like I said, when I was looking around earlier in life and saying, Hey, I want to be an entrepreneur, but I want to do it right. Yeah, well, I want to go help entrepreneurs do it. Right. I want to help entrepreneurs maximize their value I want to help them have strong cash flow and then run a business That’s a dream and not a nightmare and that is actually building The legacy that they want to leap for themselves.
You know, this is, this is the Mission Matters Podcast. Podcast, and we’re on a mission. This is not about us making as much money to enrich ourselves as humanly possible. Mm. We are on a mission to help business owners. I’m very passionate about that. And we want to grow, not necessarily because we just wanna make more money though I’m not gonna lie, I’m an entrepreneur.
I wanna make more money just like everyone else, but that’s not the fire that fuels me. The fire that fuels me is we want to help businesses. And we want to grow because we want to help more. Luke, how do people reach out and how do they follow up and how do they learn more? Yeah, we have a website at cruzumi.
com. They can find more information about us on there. I’m very active on LinkedIn. You can look me up on there. Luke Boyinger, not a super common name. Should be pretty easy to find. Either of those are great platforms to reach out to me. I’m very responsive. So if you reach out, I’ll definitely. I’ll definitely contact you.
Wonderful. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll put the links in the show notes so you can just click on them and head right on over and speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is the daily show each and every day.
We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Luke, man. Appreciate all you do. Thanks again for coming on. Absolutely. Thank you. Oh, you do. Thanks again for coming on. Absolutely.
Thank you, Adam. It was a pleasure to be on.