Bookkeeper vs. Controller vs. CFO: Which One Does Your Business Actually Need? | FBO2BO EP6

Cleaned Transcript

Welcome to From Burnout to Bought Out, the podcast for business owners who are tired of being the hardest working, lowest paid employee in their own company. I’m Jon, joined as always by Ryan, and together we’ve spent years inside owner-run businesses helping founders go from running on fumes to running a business that actually runs without them.

Every episode, we break down the real problems nobody talks about—the burnout, the bottlenecks, the blind spots—and show you what it looks like to build a business that’s profitable, sellable, and doesn’t need you in the building every day to survive. Whether you’re grinding through a plateau, thinking about an exit, or just trying to take a vacation without your phone blowing up, you’re in the right place.

Let’s get into it.

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Jon: We have a guest, Brian. What’s going on? There’s somebody here who sounds almost like you, Ryan.

Brian: Hey, how’s it going? Good to be here.

Ryan: Great. Well, welcome. Yes, we’re glad to have you. Welcome to our little thing. We know our subscribers—there’s a grand total of three. It’s family members. So we thought we better invite somebody in so that they can share it with their family members and possibly double our listenership.

Brian: Yeah, I don’t think my family’s going to, so I’m not sure this will help out.

Jon: He’s the wrong guy then. We invited the wrong person. We need somebody with a large family.

Ryan: Well, he only has two LinkedIn followers, so that should have told us something.

Jon: Poor choice. Do your homework.

Brian: You’re getting the idea already.

Jon: Yes, you’re getting the idea already. This is how we roll in here. Loose and from the hip.

So, yeah, welcome. No, actually, honestly, super excited to have you. We’ve worked together for a while. Your skills that you bring to clients are fantastic. And I think the level of thinking and knowledge you can help raise the bar here with us two morons talking at each other on a regular basis. So you’ve already increased—

Ryan: You certainly can’t lower it.

Brian: I’ll fit right in.

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Ryan: So, Jon, what does Brian do for our listeners?

Jon: Oh, I have no idea. He does something based on numbers. He’s either a bookkeeper, a controller, or a CFO. He’s one of all those three things as far as I’m concerned because I’m often confused about what those three things do. Maybe we can—what do you do? Are you a controller or bookkeeper or CFO?

Brian: I am definitely not a controller or a bookkeeper. I’m a fractional CFO. So I don’t get bogged down into transactions. I’m not deep in making sure that the books are accurate and controls are in place. I’m more at the strategic level—looking forward, forecasting, helping people manage their finances and use their financials to achieve their business goals.

Jon: Well, I guess there is a difference. Ryan, maybe we should go into it in a little bit more detail.

Ryan: What a perfect segue that was.

Jon: I set that up. You know, I’ll take a little bit of the credit for setting that one up.

Ryan: Amazing.

Jon: No, Brian, seriously, great to have you. Lots of really good thinking you’re going to bring to this, and already the levels of handsomeness have increased.

Ryan: You shouldn’t lie to your podcast audience.

Jon: Yeah. Well, it’s only my parents, so—

Ryan: Yeah. Hopefully most of them are listening and they can’t verify that.

Jon: Fingers crossed.

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Jon: But yeah, I think we already started at the top, right? What is the difference between a bookkeeper, a controller, and a CFO? You immediately just kind of laid out where your head is at, where your thinking goes. But let’s dig in a little bit more. Gents, why don’t you kind of break out those different roles and how they help organizations so that owners have a clearer understanding of who focuses on what and the differences between them.

Ryan: So, Brian, I’ll let you go into more detail, but I think of a bookkeeper more like a historian, right? They record what happened—whether it’s beautiful, tragic, or occasionally fictional.

Brian: Yeah.

Ryan: They’re really focused on the transactional level. They’re kind of backwards looking. They’re looking back at the past—what did happen—and recording that.

And by the way, all these roles are vitally important. If you don’t have a good bookkeeper, then it’s going to be really hard to reconcile everything. And it’s going to be difficult for the CFO to have confidence that the numbers he’s using to make decisions on are useful. So they’re all very important roles, but the bookkeeper is really more backwards looking, recording history like you said, Ryan.

Ryan: And a controller—I think that really sums it up. The controller is more like a referee, right? Make sure the rules are followed and the numbers are accurate. It’s also the person who tells you the thing you don’t want to hear, which is why most owners quietly resent them and secretly need them.

Brian: Yeah. And one of the most important roles of a controller is ensuring that the financial controls are in place—hence the name. Minimizing the opportunity for people to do things they shouldn’t be doing with the books.

Because if you don’t have those controls in place, a savvy bookkeeper can steal a lot from a business or hide a lot of things that should come to light that are really draining the company’s resources. Even if it’s not theft, it can be an inaccurate picture. So making sure that you’ve got different people booking transactions from the ones who are reviewing and approving things of that nature. It’s a critical role, and they sit in the middle as a referee, sort of.

Jon: Awesome. And so then the CFO role—and you said this at the outset—more strategic thinking. Embellish.

Ryan: The CFO is the strategist, Jon. Yeah, they’re looking forward, telling you what to do next. Multiple scenario plans. There’s plans A through Z on where we want to take the company.

You know, Mike Tyson said it best: “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” And so that’s what the CFO’s role is—to continue to strategize like that.

So sometimes the CFO says grow, sometimes the CFO says stop. And sometimes it’s “Stop spending $15K a month on your cousin’s consulting firm.”

Brian: Right. Or that great deal that you can take advantage of today, but it’s going to bleed out most of the cash from the business. That may not be the best choice. It looks like a savings, but sometimes you’ve got to be patient and say, “No, now’s not the right time—we’re going to hamper too many other things.”

And I think another thing the CFO needs to do—while they are financially focused—they really need good visibility across the organization and have a seat at the table in all the decision-making, so that they’re understanding what the needs of the operations are, what the marketing department’s trying to accomplish, what sales is doing. It needs to be a very collaborative role as well.

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Ryan: So, Jon, I think one of the biggest—excuse me, Jon. One of the things before we get off of this is that the biggest mistake that owners make is that they hire a bookkeeper—”I have an accountant” or whatever—and they’re expecting CFO-level insight.

That’s essentially hiring a receptionist and asking that person to run the company, and then getting mad when the company isn’t running.

Brian: Good point. Not being able to make the decisions, not having the information to be able to make the decisions they need to make. No, that’s exactly the point I was going to make.

You have to have a bookkeeper, right? You’ve got a business, you almost certainly have a bookkeeper, and you think that’s the limit of your financial requirements. But clearly there are levels beyond that—on the control side and the strategic side—that allow you to make much more informed decisions.

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Jon: So we’ve kind of covered off what’s missing if you just try to move your business forward with the bookkeeper themselves. Is there anything else they get when you start implementing CFO services?

Brian: I would say they start to identify some blind spots sometimes. For example, an owner-operator who deeply knows his business can operate on intuition a lot of times, but that intuition over time—as the environment changes around him—isn’t always as accurate as he thinks it is.

So, for example, a guy’s been in business 30 years and he’s running a plumbing business. He feels like when he bids these jobs, he’s making money, but he doesn’t really know.

And so saying, “Hey, we’ve got to do job costing. I know it seems like a pain in the butt. It seems like busy work. But that gives us actual real numbers at the end of the day that we can go back and look and say, ‘We bid this job for $10,000. We only made $500 profit on that.’ That doesn’t cover our overhead. We needed to make $4,000 to $6,000 on that.”

Identifying those blind spots where they just don’t understand the vital importance of some of these processes—that can have huge value as well. And a bookkeeper is probably not going to do that for you.

Jon: No. Exactly. That’s not something that—again, it’s after the fact, like you guys said at the outset.

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Jon: I mean, I know with the businesses we deal with, you’ve got to have this level of financial insight. Ryan, at what level do people need to start considering CFOs and that role?

Ryan: In my experience, it’s when you’re over a million dollars in annual sales. It’s no longer proof of concept. You have a legitimate business. And so that’s when you start thinking about it.

Now, the good news is there’s fractional CFOs and there’s full-time CFOs. And that’s something we’ll get into a little bit later in the episode.

But if you want to start growing your business profitably, that’s when you should start looking at bringing in a strategic leader in the financial realm—which Brian also alluded to—it’s not just finance. They should be knowing everything about operations and sales and marketing and how everything ties together.

Jon: Yeah, we do that on a regular basis. In fact, we’re right in the middle of one, Brian, where we’re planning a full marketing plan and we’re just going back and forth in terms of numbers and growth projections, pulling marketing budgets together because it’s got to fit within it. And if you didn’t have oversight into what I want to spend on marketing, then you’re not able to plug that into the forecast and growth doesn’t happen, right? So it’s a cohesive kind of system.

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Jon: Brian, what are some markers of decisions that people are making in businesses that really say, “Okay, a CFO should be on this or should be included in those decisions”?

Brian: I think a couple things that I would say are indicators:

One, when you’re—like Ryan said—you’ve gotten past the proof of concept and now you’re saying, “Let’s scale this.” It’s not as hard, especially if you’ve built a good reputation in your proof of concept. It’s not as hard to scale—just grow from a million dollars to $4 million.

What’s a lot more difficult is to do that and maintain profitability—or even increase your profitability as you do that. So that would be one thing: when you’re ready to scale.

Another is when you’re starting to make significant capital investments. That’s going to take some foresight and some planning.

Those are a couple of the big things that I would say. I’m sure Ryan’s got some other stuff he would call out.

Ryan: Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that owners need to address is when they’re sitting at 3:17 in the morning at their kitchen table trying to decipher their numbers.

And they’re playing the CFO because their bookkeeper can’t explain their numbers to them. They only know that this bean goes into this pile.

And so not only do you have to look at numbers backwards, present, and then roll them forward and how they relate to every aspect of your business—when you are wearing all those hats as an owner and it’s all in your brain, that’s the time you need to bring in strategic leadership. That’s the time you need to bring in a CFO.

Brian: Yeah. And if your business is super busy but you’re not generating cash—like you’re always running short on cash—you probably need a CFO.

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[Sponsor Break: Napco Painters parody]

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Jon: There was something important you said, Ryan. The pain point, right? There’s a squeeze sometimes. And if you’re feeling that squeeze at all—whether it’s at 3:17 in the morning or any other time—if you’re feeling that squeeze, then you absolutely need advice to help get out of it.

Like we talked about the treadmill, we’ve talked about cash issues, we’ve talked about CPAs, etc. And really that’s the difference between strategy and emergency, right? Being able to plan your way out of it.

But a CFO—I mean, it sounds expensive. Can businesses afford CFOs? A lot of business owners think six-figure salaries. And obviously we’re a fractional organization. How does that work?

Ryan: Well, fractional is the whole reason why we exist, right? You have senior talent at a fraction of the cost because you’re kind of leasing a full-time person amongst other companies.

So at $1 million, $2 million, $10 million, $20 million in annual sales, you don’t need the full force of a full-time CFO. You don’t need somebody working for you 40 hours a week or 60 hours a week. You need the brainpower. You need somebody who’s going to set up the systems and the plans and be a part of your team, but doesn’t have to be sitting next to you in the next office.

That allows companies that are smaller to afford a chunk of the price. Typical full-time CFOs can run $200,000, $500,000, $750,000 depending on your niche, your industry, your size—with stock options and the whole shebang.

Whereas fractional folks—they might need to be present for a couple meetings, present your cash flow, do your financials, develop your scenarios, your forecasting, all that kind of stuff. And it only takes them a few hours a week. But it feels like you get a full-time CFO.

Brian: Yep. As long as you’ve got them when you need them. Don’t overpay for somebody full-time that’s going to cost you 10 to 15 times more than what you can get a good fractional CFO for that will meet your needs.

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Ryan: And I think there’s a distinction too. Well, what do I get with a fractional CFO? It depends on your fractional CFO.

There are transactional CFOs out there where you get 10 hours at a time, no more, no less. That’s a month or whatever. Or it’s project-based—”Okay, I’ll do this project for you and then out you go.”

Whereas we do embedded, right? Where we don’t really care about the time. We care about the value that’s being brought. We care about the output that’s being done. We care about the objectives being attained.

Embedded is something completely different where you consider them as part of your C-suite, whereas a transactional CFO will be, “Well, we need some high-level work, but that’s about it.” They don’t talk to your tax accountant. They don’t help your controller lift their skills up. Those kinds of things.

Jon: And that includes a cadence of discussion, right?

Ryan: Yes, absolutely.

Brian: Yeah, speaking for us, we consider ourselves part of their leadership team—just like all the other leaders in the organization. So it matters to us how their business does at the end of the day. That’s the way we view our work.

Ryan: And I literally—beware of what you’re going to get when a fractional CFO brings over the scope of work and it says, “I will respond to your emails within 72 hours.”

Here’s my scope and here’s what I don’t do—and there’s a longer list of “don’t do” versus what they do. Whereas what Brian said is, we have boundaries, of course, like every good company and employee should have. But we’re answering things within minutes or hours. Those are the things that matter.

Jon: At 3:17 a.m. We’re up.

Ryan: Actually, it’d be 3:17 p.m., Jon. Boundaries again.

Jon: Right. We just fret at 3:17 a.m. and 12 hours later you get your response.

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Jon: Yeah. And the experience is key as well, right? Dealing with very senior people that have done this in multiple organizations. When you present a problem and you’ve got a bunch of experience to back it up, then you can solve that problem a lot more quickly.

Inventory systems, etc. Understanding how to solve particular problems in manufacturing, service-based industries, home services—having seen it over and over again. And then you don’t just get somebody who’s viscerally invested—like, I don’t sleep if we have client problems going on. That’s not keeping the client at arm’s length. But you get a ton of experience to solve those things as well.

Brian: Yeah. It feels like every client is an MBA basically, and you get to take what you learn from Client A and help Client C, and vice versa. It’s a lot of cross-pollination that’s very valuable.

Whereas I don’t know if I were just an embedded full-time CFO at an organization, I think I would miss that aspect.

Jon: Yeah, totally.

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Jon: Brian, let’s dig in a little bit. With you stepping in as the CFO in an organization, what is generally the biggest mistake owners make when they try and figure out which of these roles they need?

Brian: I would say—and we alluded to it earlier—prior to bringing us in, the biggest mistake was: “I’ve got somebody to do my books. My finances are handled.” Like, that’s the end of it.

Because they’ve got a bookkeeper and they feel like it’s all good now. Finance—check.

And they’re missing that strategic voice, the perspective, someone to ask the tough questions and challenge them on—like we talked about, job costing, for example. That’s a big one that a lot of companies don’t employ but could unearth a lot of value. It could create a lot of additional dollars to the bottom line by doing that.

So I would say that’s the biggest thing: underestimating the value of that role and underresourcing it before they bring us in.

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Jon: Brian, let me ask you a specific question. Within the Synergy Hacked methodology, where does the CFO sit? How does it—because we’ve talked about these roles an awful lot, the seven pillars—where does CFO fit within it?

Brian: The CFO function is the nervous system of the whole operation. You’ve got cash, profit, people, growth. Every other lever runs through it.

Every decision that is made through the company—whether it’s marketing, operations, logistics, whatever that might be—it tugs at dollars. Dollars spent, dollars earned. So it’s the nervous system.

And when it’s not working, you get twitches, you get weird pain, you get Charlie horses at 3:17 a.m. for no reason. But it’s the same body—the same business.

When we come into the business, we assess what financial function actually exists versus what the owner thinks exists. So “My bookkeeper has been great for 20 years. Everything’s fine.” We go in there and it’s like, “Okay, we’ve spotted some issues that we can work on.”

Or owners are used to getting their books done 3 months late, and so they’re constantly looking backwards and never really able to look forward with good information.

So we work with the internal staff. We’re not in there to replace them. We’re there to provide them guidance on how to improve the insight and make it very clear to the powers that be—the leadership team, the owners—about where they stand with real-time information.

For the first time, they can open their eyes and see the forest for the trees—and whether their gut is right or not.

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Jon: Okay, guys. Let’s get tactical. If an owner is listening right now and trying to figure out which role they actually need, what are the questions they should be asking themselves?

Brian: First thing: Are you making decisions based on gut feel, or are you basing it on your actual financial data? That’s a big tell.

Also, if an investor or a banker is asking you financial questions and you’ve got to “get back to them,” then you probably need a CFO to help you fill that role.

Everything shouldn’t land on you. If you’re the bottleneck, you’re going to be the most expensive CFO you can have. It’s much better to outsource that to someone else and focus on the things you need to be focused on to run the business effectively.

Ryan: I’ve got a couple here.

One is: Do I know my cash position 3 months out? If the answer is no, then you need a CFO. If the answer is “roughly,” you need a CFO. If the answer is “my wife handles that,” you need a lot more things.

Jon: Need a marriage counselor and a CFO.

Ryan: That’s right.

Do I trust my monthly financial statements without second-guessing them? If you’re second-guessing them, one of two things is true: your controller is wrong, or you are. Both of those need fixing.

Are the transactions getting categorized today, next week, or 3 months from now? If the answer is not “on time,” then you need a new bookkeeper. I’d start there.

So I’d start at the bottom and work my way up. You can’t have strategy without accuracy, and you can’t have accuracy without clean data. Crap in, crap out. So let’s get clean data before we even start addressing it.

Jon: I see what you did.

Ryan: I caught the reference that time.

Jon: Yeah. Like our podcast—crap in, crap out.

Ryan: That’s right.

Jon: To all those five listeners out there, I apologize for John.

Ryan: We went over our numbers. We’re in double digits, baby. Lofty heights.

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Jon: All right. Last question for both of you. If someone is going to make one move this week after hearing this, what should it be?

Ryan: Think about the last three financial decisions over $25,000 you made and ask yourself: Did I use real data, or did I wing it?

If you winged it even once, you already know the answer. It’s not the answer you wanted, but it’s the honest answer.

And I think you honestly have to assess who’s actually doing the CFO work in your business right now. If the answer is “me at 3:17 a.m. in a t-shirt I’ve had since college,” that’s your signal.

And the other one is: Why keep procrastinating over this? You know the answer. Just do it.

Brian: I would say book a 30-minute call with a fractional CFO—either one of ours or anyone’s—but ask for a diagnostic call, not a sales call.

Like Ryan mentioned earlier, listen for if they’re focused on limiting scope instead of describing the value they’ll bring. That’s a red flag.

But if they do a good job of that diagnostic call, you’ll probably learn more in 30 minutes than you have from your last six months of financial statements.

And lastly, if you’ve been calling your bookkeeper your “finance team,” stop doing that and take the step that—like Brian said—deep down you know you need to make.

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Jon: Awesome. Okay, great episode, fellas. Ryan, as always, why don’t you put a bow on it. What’s the takeaway here, and then we’ll wrap up.

Ryan: Yeah, the takeaway is that if your finance strategy is “my bookkeeper sends me a PDF and I open it when I’m feeling brave,” you don’t have a finance strategy. You have a monthly panic attack with a file name.

Bookkeepers record the past. Controllers protect the present. CFOs design the future.

Get all three—or keep getting surprised by your own business. Your call.

Jon: Excellent.

Brian, thanks so much for joining. Awesome.

Brian: My pleasure.

Jon: Yeah. Thank you, Brian. Good time.

Ryan: Where can people reach you, Brian?

Brian: Yeah, you can reach me through Synergy’s website: wearesynergysolutions.com.

Jon: Excellent. He’s the good-looking one.

Ryan: You mock me. We’re going to AI Ryan out for all the videos, right? It’ll be Ryan’s voice, but it’ll be Brian’s face. Maybe we’ll get triple-digit viewers at that point.

Brian: I doubt that. Face for radio.

Jon: Brian will just keep watching himself over and over again.

Ryan: There’s that.

Jon: All right. Awesome. Thanks, fellas. That’s a wrap.

Brian: Thank you.

Ryan: Bye.

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That’ll do it for this episode of From Burnt Out to Bought Out. If anything we talked about today hit home, do us a favor—share this episode with another owner who needs to hear it. And if you’re sitting there thinking, “They’re talking about me,” good. That’s the first step.

Head to the show notes and book a free triage call with our team. No pitch, no pressure, just a real conversation about where you are and what’s possible.

You can also find us on LinkedIn and at wearesynergysolutions.com. New episodes drop every week.

Until next time, stop running the treadmill and start building something you can actually sell.