Byron Wolfe on Working Smarter, Not Harder for Small Businesses | Ep. 299
In this episode of Money Talk with Tiff, Tiffany interviews Byron Wolfe, a CFO, to discover how small business owners can work smarter and not harder. They discuss the impact of hustle culture, the importance of maximizing profit over revenue, and strategies for outsourcing tasks to focus on your strengths.
Byron also shares insights on leveraging research and development tax credits to increase profitability. Tune in for priceless tips on optimizing your business’s financial health and freeing up time for what truly matters.
About Our Guest
Byron’s gift for translating the complexities of business financial principles with a focus on small businesses into easily understood communication has made him one of the most highly sought financial and business consultants. He is the Founder of CFO•AF, a financial services and business consulting firm specializing in industries ranging from construction to crypto. Byron is Chief Financial Officer for an INC 5000 company and is the fractional CFO of various companies with annual revenues from 3-25 Million. His certification in the Crypto, NFT, and the Metaverse space has led to many projects with DAOs and crypto companies and he is considered one of the first experts in crypto tax strategy.
Byron’s true passion lies in helping small business owners expand their financial reach and success through various tools like the R&D tax credits, proactive tax plans, creative funding and high contact financial management.
Connect with Byron
Website: https://www.cfoaf.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cfoaf
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_cfoaf/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/byron-a-wolfe-cpa/
Connect with Tiffany
Website: https://moneytalkwitht.com
Facebook: Money Talk With Tiff
Twitter: @moneytalkwitht
Instagram: @moneytalkwitht
LinkedIn: Tiffany Grant
Timestamps
[05:18] Replace disliked tasks, focus on strengths, delegate.
[08:52] Analyze spending to maximize profitability and productivity.
[11:30] Optimize percentages, maximize profit, increase revenue efficiently.
[15:01] Evaluate marketing spend based on return on investment.
[18:23] Investing in tech can lead to tax benefits.
[20:23] Research and development tax credits reduce taxes.
Key Takeaways
- Work-Life Balance: Reducing workload while being profitable.
- Outsourcing: Delegate tasks to focus on strengths.
- Profit Maximization: Focus on keeping more money.
- Business Efficiency: Getting more accomplished in less time.
- Expense Management: Understanding the impact of spending.
- R&D Tax Credits: Utilizing tax incentives for research.
- Fractional CFO Services: Professional financial guidance for businesses.
Copyright 2024 Money Talk With Tiff
Transcript
You know what it is. That's right. It's time to talk money with your
money nerd and financial coach. Now, tighten those purse
Speaker:strings and open those ears. It's the money talk with Tiff
Speaker:podcast. Hey,
everyone. I am super excited because I have Byron
Speaker:Wolf on the line now. Byron is a CFO, and he's here to
Speaker:talk to us about how we can work smarter and not
harder in our small businesses. So, hey, Byron, how are you?
Speaker:I'm great. Thank you for having me. This is exciting. I'm looking forward
Speaker:to this one, and. I'm looking forward to it, too. Before we hit record,
we were just having a ball. I was like, okay, we need to record
Speaker:the actual episode, but let's go ahead and hop
Speaker:right in for the people. Let's talk about how,
because hustle culture is real, and a lot of
Speaker:times people are like, oh, in order to make your small business
Speaker:work, you have to work hard. You have to hustle. You have to
work 60 hours, 80 hours, whatever the case may be.
Speaker:So I want to talk about how we can not work
Speaker:as hard, but still be more profitable. So what are some tips that
you have for us? Yeah, no, this is a great question. And
Speaker:as we go into 2024,
Speaker:AI is just blown up. 23 was the year of AI, right?
And so everybody's finding ways to get more
Speaker:accomplished. They're using AI, they're doing more.
Speaker:So the 40 hours work week that we used to
see five years pre Covid, ten years
Speaker:back, that doesn't exist anymore. The expectation is this,
Speaker:like 60, 80 hours work week just to keep up with
everybody else, because everybody's using Vas or using AI, they're
Speaker:using apps to be more productive. And so the
Speaker:expectation has gotten really high for the amount of work that we
need to put out. And so if we don't start concentrating on
Speaker:really trying to find real ways of reducing that
Speaker:workload, we're going to burn ourselves out. So I think that
the best thing you can do is to work smarter, not
Speaker:harder. If you're trying to outwork your competitor,
Speaker:you're just going to get exhausted. It's overwhelming.
So what I mean by work smarter, not harder, is we got to find
Speaker:ways to outsource some of the work that we do. We got to find
Speaker:ways to get more accomplished in a shorter period of
time, and we have to find ways to keep more
Speaker:money. So one of the things I talk about a lot of the time, and
Speaker:this is a little bit of a tangent, is that revenue is a brag
and profit is the real scoreboard. So if you're working
Speaker:your tail off to make a ton of money, but you're not keeping, but like
Speaker:a tiny, tiny piece of it, that's not going to be
long standing. If you're making a
Speaker:million dollars in revenue but you're taking home like 50 grand,
Speaker:you can go get a job and make a lot more money than that
$50,000 that you're keeping. So let's find a way.
Speaker:It's impressive. You're making a million dollars in revenue. That's a great number. It's
Speaker:a huge number. I love it. But let's find a way to keep as much
of that money as we can. So instead of 50 grand taken home,
Speaker:let's focus on increasing that to 100 or 200, right. Let's
Speaker:get those profit margins up. And so one of the best things we can do
is we need to look at what we are doing internally. What are
Speaker:you doing in your business, right. And then take those and
Speaker:divide those into the different tasks. So all of us have things
that we are really, really good at and we love or
Speaker:we hate. We have things that we're really, really bad at, but we love them
Speaker:or we hate them. So figure out what you're doing, right.
And then say, okay, I'm operations, I'm finance,
Speaker:I'm marketing, I'm tech, I'm sales. Like all of these
Speaker:out, build those out, those are positions. And you may be doing all of those
right now. I hope that you're not, but you may be doing all of those.
Speaker:A lot of us are. If you're an entrepreneur,
Speaker:you believe, well, I don't want to put this on everybody, but I know that
going up through this myself, I thought, I'm the best person for
Speaker:every job in my company, so I'm just going to do it all. Not
Speaker:sustainable, by the way. So find
the things that you're really good at and you enjoy. Those are
Speaker:easy. Let's set those aside. We're going to keep doing
Speaker:those. The things that you really dislike
but you're really good at. You probably need to hold on to
Speaker:those a little bit longer. Find the things that you're bad at,
Speaker:that you dislike. That's the first thing we're going to outsource.
Right. So I'm really bad at marketing. It's just not
Speaker:my arena. I'm not good at it.
Speaker:I want immediate results kind of guy. And marketing just doesn't work that way.
So I don't like it and I'm not good at it. So that's the
Speaker:first thing that I'm going to outsource. So we're going to outsource that to the
Speaker:best person possible, and then we're going to start to divide these things
out so that we have this amazing team that's really
Speaker:good at the things that they're really good at. And now you can focus
Speaker:on the things that you're really good at but that you really
love, or even those things that you're really good at but you don't
Speaker:necessarily love. Those are going to come later. We can replace those later. But let's
Speaker:get the things that you're bad at and you dislike first. The things that you
are bad at but you like
Speaker:for the business. Let's go ahead and get those replaced. Because just because
Speaker:you enjoy it doesn't mean that you need to keep doing something you're bad at.
And then the things that you necessarily are
Speaker:really good at and you also enjoy that should be what's left over,
Speaker:because that's how you're going to grow that business and make it exactly
what it is that it needs to be. What you had in mind when you
Speaker:started the business, you got to get back to those roots of, like, what did
Speaker:I want to do and how am I going to accomplish that? And that means
dividing some of those tasks out, finding the best team possible.
Speaker:You can't grow, you can't scale. You're not going to find success all by
Speaker:yourself. That's extremely rare. And I would argue half of the stories
you hear about these people that do it on their own probably had a massive
Speaker:team underneath them that they're just not willing to give the credit to. And
Speaker:it is what it is. So I think that that's huge.
Yes. And I just want to pause right there real quick
Speaker:because that was crucial for, you know,
Speaker:as money talk with Tiff was my baby for so long, I
was so scared to hand over some reins because I was like, oh,
Speaker:my gosh, they're not going to treat my baby right. But once I
Speaker:did, that was when I experienced the
most growth ever. So I can definitely
Speaker:vouch for what you're saying. For instance,
Speaker:I was not consistent with my podcast. Why? Because I didn't
like editing, so it would take me forever to edit. I
Speaker:didn't enjoy it, but I was like, this is something that has to be done.
Speaker:I sat there and edited every single episode until, like,
episode 70. And then I was like, you know what, tiffany?
Speaker:Now is the time. But when I hired an editor, oh, my
Speaker:gosh, the podcast skyrocketed. I'm able to stay consistent. Not
only that, now I do two episodes a week versus one.
Speaker:So when you said outsource, I cannot
Speaker:stress that enough either. Y'all get some people to help
you with some of these things that you do not like, it will make you
Speaker:grow tremendously. So with that being said, what
Speaker:other things should we be thinking about as a small business owner? To
work smarter, not harder. Yeah. So let's go into that
Speaker:revenue versus profit, because I think that that's one of the areas that a lot
Speaker:of people miss out on. So what I hear a lot, we'll talk
to businesses, and they say, I'm just not making enough money. And then,
Speaker:okay, well, what are you doing to increase that? What are you currently doing that
Speaker:we can work on? Well, we're out there. We're making more sales.
We're spending this money on marketing to bring more people in. And I'll tell
Speaker:them, I'm like, okay, well, that sounds like revenue. Those are the things you do
Speaker:to get more revenue in. What are you doing to increase your
profitability? And then there's usually crickets, and they're like,
Speaker:well, they'll come back to revenue or something.
Speaker:I'm like, no, specifically, what are we doing for profit?
We make sure that people don't spend too much money on their company
Speaker:cards. Okay. I mean, that's good, right? It's very generic,
Speaker:but what else are we doing? So we got to look at the in between.
So we know revenue is the money that comes in. We know profit is
Speaker:the money that we get to keep before taxes. And we'll get into that,
Speaker:too. But in between those two is your expenses. Like, what are
you doing in between? What are you spending that money on? And everybody
Speaker:hates the word budget. They hate the budget. I agree. I'm
Speaker:not a big fan of the budget, but I do think that you need to
look at the budget. You need to look at what you're spending so
Speaker:that you can maximize that profitability. Like,
Speaker:what's your return on the things that you're spending? And a lot of people
don't really think about that when I say, hey, what do you spend on
Speaker:office expenses? What are you spending on pens, paper, blah, blah, blah, blah?
Speaker:Oh, well, we tell them they can only spend up to this a month, a
week, whatever. Okay, cool. What's that based off of? What's your Roi
Speaker:on that? If they spend $1,000 a week on office
Speaker:supplies, how much more profit? How much more revenue does
that generate? I don't know. It's papers and pens. Well, you should
Speaker:know exactly what is going on within your company. If you're spending a
Speaker:dollar within your company, it needs to result in something more
productivity, more profitability, more revenue,
Speaker:more efficient systems, like everything should have a purpose.
Speaker:So you look at the big things and then I
like percentages because I don't like dollars, I like
Speaker:percentages. So when I look at it, and again, I admitted I'm horrible
Speaker:at marketing and I'm just not good at it, but I know it needs to
exist. So for me, looking at the dollars that I
Speaker:spend would be frustrating because I don't know where they're going.
Speaker:That's not something I'm really good at. But if I look at it as a
percentage, and I've set my mind frame right, I've
Speaker:looked at it, my mindset is, okay, I get it. I have to spend
Speaker:10% of my revenue in marketing if I'm going to continue to grow this
thing. And that's where we have found that's the maximum capacity
Speaker:at 10%. It's the maximum return on the dollars.
Speaker:If we spend a little more, we can make a little bit more money, but
our return is less. If we spend less, we pull in less revenue, not
Speaker:as productive. We can maximize it out. So 10%, easy. This is
Speaker:how many revenue dollars are coming in. 10% of it's going to be spent in
marketing. I'm good to go. It doesn't bother me, the monetary, because
Speaker:I know I've worked out the key performance indicator for
Speaker:that. The metric, so as you will, is
10%. So now I can say 10% has to go to marketing
Speaker:and this can be as low as 1%. There's big companies out
Speaker:there and they're spending 1% on marketing. And that's where they found that that's
the maximum result of that. And you might
Speaker:say, well, 1% is nothing. I'm talking these are
Speaker:1020 $30 million revenue companies that
don't really need marketing necessarily. Most of their marketing
Speaker:goes to recruitment or brand awareness, not necessarily
Speaker:bringing in customers. So they're like construction companies or excavation
or something along those lines. So if you know what these percentages
Speaker:are, now we're looking at our percentages and we're just trying to keep
Speaker:those in the ranges that they need to be so that the end of the
story, at the end of the PNL, that profit number has
Speaker:been maximized. So if you're making that same million
Speaker:dollars in revenue and you're only making
50,000 if you can adjust these numbers in the middle, and
Speaker:now you're making 100,000, I say that's way
Speaker:easier to double the money that you take home, double your profitability,
than it is to go from $1 million to $2
Speaker:million, which, if you continue the way that you've been working,
Speaker:that's what you would need to do to take home $100,000
versus $50,000. So to me, way
Speaker:smarter. Let's look at what we're spending and let's maximize
Speaker:our profitability. First, I'm not saying never increase your
revenue, but when your profit is maximized and you're operating at peak
Speaker:efficiency now, every dollar you spend to increase your
Speaker:revenue is going to result in that many more dollars that you get to
keep in that profitability. Gotcha. Gotcha. So
Speaker:let's pause here for a minute, because first you said, p l
Speaker:just want to let the audience know that's a profit and loss statement.
So that shows what your profit is, what your losses are. It gives
Speaker:you a number at the bottom. Okay, so I just want to clear that up.
Speaker:And then also, how do we back into these
percentages? So if people are listening and they're like, okay, I get it, use
Speaker:percentages instead of dollars. But where are these percentages
Speaker:coming from? How do I calculate what percentage would work best for my
business? Yeah, no, 100%. And I think
Speaker:that you have to do some industry research first, find out kind
Speaker:of where the industry is, what makes sense for that
industry, and then you have to look at your own numbers. And
Speaker:so put it on an excel. If you don't have, like, quickbooks
Speaker:or zero or netsuite or any of the other ones, like whatever your
accounting system is, you can always download it into Excel. Or if you're working
Speaker:in Excel, you can just do it there. So you're going to take the dollars
Speaker:that you spend and you're going to divide it by your total revenue, and
that's going to give you your percentage of what you're spending in total
Speaker:revenue. And then those are the percentages we need to go on.
Speaker:And so I always tell people, you can't change a lot
of things and know what the impact is. Right. So you need to change one
Speaker:thing at a time to find out how it affects your
Speaker:business. So if you want to know, hey, if I
increase this or decrease this or whatever's going
Speaker:on in your expenses, do it one at a time because you need to know
Speaker:what the actual effect is. So let's stick with marketing.
If we increase our marketing spend, then we
Speaker:know what the revenue impact is on that particular
Speaker:item because we're doing everything else the same. So if we just increase our
marketing, then we know, okay, I doubled my marketing
Speaker:spend. So realistically I should be
Speaker:doubling my revenue, so to speak. Right. And that doesn't always work that way. But
let's just say that that's what it is. And so we double our marketing. We're
Speaker:looking for a double of our revenue. Well, if we don't see a Double, let's
Speaker:say we only see one and a half times. Okay, well, then
maybe above this particular level, we've
Speaker:maxed out the increase of what we can process,
Speaker:what we can do. If you've doubled your marketing and now your sales team
isn't able to close as many leads because you don't have the capacity. If
Speaker:you're selling a product, you don't have the product to sell. If you're selling a
Speaker:service, you don't have the labor to meet that demand, then
you've spent too much in marketing right now and you need to increase
Speaker:the staff or you've got to make your pipeline better so that you
Speaker:have more product to sell. Right. But we know what the results
are because we see the increase in demand. If we decrease that
Speaker:marketing, then it should be dollar for dollar, really with the
Speaker:revenue. If we don't, then, okay, well, now we don't need to spend
as much money because we decreased our marketing spend
Speaker:by 25%. But we only saw a small,
Speaker:maybe 5% drop in our revenue. Well, what's
the dollars? What's our return on it? If we know for every dollar we
Speaker:spend in marketing, we're bringing in an extra $10 in
Speaker:revenue, but our profit margin is 10%
so that every dollar we add in
Speaker:marketing, it creates that much more work.
Speaker:But we're OnLy getting a one dollars return.
Well, that doesn't RealLy make a lot of sense. You don't want to work harder
Speaker:to literally have the exact same return. I spent a dollar AnD
Speaker:I made a dollar. That's a bad mix. Like, I don't want to do extra
work to break even. If I spend a dollar, I want to be able to
Speaker:keep $2. Making an extra ten doesn't really
Speaker:help us if we're going to spend nine of that $10
and we're still back to the same dollar we started with, I don't want to
Speaker:work harder for the same money. I want to work harder to make more money.
Speaker:And so I want to see that marketing spend be a return
on the profit, not on the revenue. I want to see a return in the
Speaker:profit realm that exceeds what I spend. I want to spend
Speaker:a dollar. I want to make $2 or $3 or $5, right? I don't want
to make the same dollar. That DOEsn't make any sense. You're not going to
Speaker:get ahead doing that. So that's really what I'm talking about is
Speaker:looking at those percentages, affecting them one at a time, affect your
marketing spend, see what happens, affect your labor. If you're bringing in more
Speaker:people, how does that affect the revenue? How does it affect the profitability?
Speaker:If I'm going to change out my product, I'm going to add a new product
line and we need to look at what that product is doing.
Speaker:If that product is popular and it's outselling other products, that's
Speaker:amazing. Like, okay, now we need to focus more attention on that
particular product because that product has a higher profit margin. And
Speaker:maybe you sell a lot more of another product, but the profit
Speaker:margin is horrible. You sell
10,000 of these products to make
Speaker:$10,000, but I can sell 1000 of these other
Speaker:products and I make 20,000. I want to sell the thousand. I want to
make more money with less work. And that's what I'm talking about when I talk
Speaker:about smarter, not harder. Yes. And I
Speaker:feel like I'm sitting in the church pews right now
and you know how the pastor is up there and just calling all your cards
Speaker:and I'm just like, wow, I have a lot of work to do
Speaker:because I know my technology spend is
up there because that is what I spend on. And
Speaker:yeah, I just have a lot of sitting down and looking at my numbers and
Speaker:figuring out these percentages that you're talking about.
So I completely agree and
Speaker:I do feel called out right now. But it's okay.
Speaker:Here's the great thing about tech, and I'm going to go super tangent,
so ride with me on this one. So here's the beauty of spending money
Speaker:like on software development or any of these tech things that are coming into
Speaker:play when you spend those monies in your business. You
spend the money in your business to create new processes.
Speaker:If you're experimenting with things and creating
Speaker:new things that are available to your clients, better ways of serving your clients, your
customers, all that stuff, all that stuff can be
Speaker:redeemed for research and development tax credits. So when
Speaker:we're talking about that profit number, there's one more thing underneath that profit,
and that's your profit. After taxes.
Speaker:So if you make government takes 40k away
Speaker:from you, then you get to keep 60k. That
stinks. I would much rather
Speaker:make some tax benefits
Speaker:and keep as much of that 100k as I can. If instead of
paying 40k in taxes, maybe you pay five k. Well, now you got to keep
Speaker:ninety five k. And that's way better than sixty k.
Speaker:So you mean to tell me all these
years of this tech addiction that I have, I could be
Speaker:writing that off as a tax credit in R and D? And R and D
Speaker:you all is research and development. So do tell me more about
this r and D tax credit. Yeah, no, I love it.
Speaker:We all know that we can write off the business expenses
Speaker:against our revenue and that leaves us the profit at the bottom, which
is good. But that big profit number that you have, hopefully it's big,
Speaker:right? That profit number that you have, the government comes and they say, hey, I
Speaker:want 20%, 30%, 40% of that
money. And the government, they're the gang you don't mess with.
Speaker:If they say they want your money, you pay the money. Not worth writing
Speaker:them on that. So then you give that money over. And then whatever's left over
is what you get to keep. The beauty of the research and development tax credit.
Speaker:And there's other tax credits out there. I'm specifically talking about research and development here.
Speaker:But the research and development, that's a dollar for
dollar reduction of those particular
Speaker:taxes. And so if you spent however many dollars on
Speaker:research and development, there's a calculation that has to go in there
to calculate that r and D tax credit. But when you're looking
Speaker:at that profit number at the bottom and it says, hey, you guys owe us
Speaker:$40,000, then you come back and you say, hey, well,
we did research and development, and here's our expenses, here's
Speaker:our structure, here's our tax form that shows that we have
Speaker:$40,000 in research and development tax credits. And the
government literally takes that as a coupon, so to
Speaker:speak. And they say, okay, cool. Instead of paying us
Speaker:$40,000, we're going to accept this tax form that shows you
spent x dollars that resulted in
Speaker:$40,000 in research and development tax credits. And
Speaker:so they're going to stamp your taxes paid in
full. And that 100k that you made, that you would have normally given the government
Speaker:$40,000, you get the little stamp paid in full and you get to
Speaker:keep all $100,000 that you made,
you get to keep because you offset it with these tax
Speaker:credits. So you literally increased your profit margin by
Speaker:40% by paying attention to what you spent
and making sure that you maximize those tax credits, specifically
Speaker:in this case, in the research and development space. Very
Speaker:cool. And it sounds like
it's kind of complicated.
Speaker:It sounds really complicated. But that's
Speaker:why you're here, and that's why a fractional CFO is important.
So if anybody's listening and they were interested in
Speaker:finding out more about these r and D tax credits or finding
Speaker:out more about how they can make more in their business
without working harder, how could they find you? They
Speaker:can go straight to the website. Our full
Speaker:disclosure, don't go to TIFF's website before you go to ours
because ours is nowhere near as cool as hers is.
Speaker:But we do have a website.
Speaker:I will look at mine first and then maybe go to
TIFF's so you can be like, okay, so that's how you do a website.
Speaker:We do have one. It's not bad. Just comparison.
Speaker:We have a website, CFoaf, so chief financial
officer, CFO and then aF. So
Speaker:cfoaf.com. Or you can find me on all the social
Speaker:medias. I probably need to post more kitten
and puppy videos that I get some traction because people
Speaker:don't want to watch me talk about finances as much as they want to watch
Speaker:puppies. But I get it. I also like to watch puppies.
But on all the social media platforms are probably the easiest way is just to
Speaker:go to the website and we have a link there. You can set up a
Speaker:chat with me, somebody on the team. We have some data
on some of these tax credits and some of the things that we talk about
Speaker:on here. There's a link to. We have some
Speaker:courses and some stuff on there. But yeah, the website is probably the
easiest, best way to find. Yes, yes.
Speaker:And guys, I did not pay Byron to say that, so just
Speaker:FYI. But if you didn't catch all of that, I'll
make sure to have everything in the show notes for you because this is some
Speaker:good information. I plan on digging in because you all know I
Speaker:have a tech addiction and now I can fully fund
it. But thank you so much,
Speaker:Byron, for coming on the show today, and I appreciate all the
Speaker:gems that you dropped for me and my audience, and I hope you have a
wonderful rest of your day. Thank you so much for having me. I had a
Speaker:blast. Bye. Thank
Speaker:you for listening, joining and being a part of the Money Talk with TIFF podcast
this week. You can check Tiff out every Thursday for a new Money talk
Speaker:podcast. But if you just can't wait until next week, you can listen to
Speaker:previous podcast
episodes@moneytalkwitht.com or
Speaker:follow TIFF on all social media platforms at
Speaker:moneytalkwitht. Until next time, spend wise
by spending less than you make a word to the money wise is
Speaker:always sufficient.