Taking Action Now: Understanding The Numbers With Greg Levine

Our next guest helps entrepreneurs and business owners who struggle with preparing for taxes and clarifying the profitability of their accounts. He’s an expert in QuickBooks and also known as the Action Now CFO. He’s an accountant by trade and his real focus is helping his clients and customers who are business owners gain financial clarity and rapid business growth. He’s the Founder and Host of Your Personal CFO Podcast and author of Mental Toughness 101: Gained the Edge Over Your Competition Now!. Please welcome, Greg Levine. 

Thanks for having me. 

Thanks so much for being on the show. You can find Greg at ActionNowCFO.com. Greg, would you give our readers a little bit about your background and your focus? 

I’ve worked as an accountant for fifteen years or so. I’ve got to caution you, you did say I’m a CPA, I’m not a CPA, but I have worked as an accountant and multiple accounting roles for quite a while. I’ve worked with many different client types. A lot of real estate and I work with a bunch of other small and medium-sized companies with their accounting work and also as a fractional CFO. I come in around once a month or so and help people strategize, look at their financials and understand where they stand so they can make good strategic decisions moving forward. 

It’s needed for the entrepreneur and business owner who many, like myself, tend to go a million miles an hour in 100 different directions. Having someone who can look at your numbers and help you focus on where are the numbers going, how are you strategizing and preparing, how you’re taking advantage of different tax incentives to make sure that this train continues to move forward in a productive way. 

With that, before your success as an educator with your podcast with what you do now at Action Now CFO, think back when you were a kid, what kind of gifts were you given and how did that shape how you help others? Those gifts could be your personality traits or the strength that you had as a kid or certain things that helped shape who you are. What gifts were they and how do they help how you shape others? 

I hope that I was raised with patience because you need a lot of patience when you’re working with people and numbers. That is something that doesn’t always come easy with people. They don’t always want to want to sit there and analyze their financials. They want to keep going and moving. Sometimes they wonder what you’re doing with their bank statements and sitting there with their accountants with QuickBooks or whatever it is. They want to keep moving and find the next deal, but I try to be there and say, “Why don’t we look at the numbers and what you work on will be more strategically sound and you’ll make better decisions?” Sometimes that patience which hopefully, maybe something that I was given, comes in handy. 

Tell me more about that patience. Do you have brothers and sisters growing up? 

Two older sisters. 

Were your older sisters, patient or not patient? I want to get a feel for, is this a general Levine family patience or is it, “No, Greg was the one who always more patient?” 

Some more patient than others. 

The point of this is we’re all given certain gifts by God and by our families. We’re empowered with these gifts and it should be used to help bless others. The gift of patience was a theme. Was it something where your mom or your parents said, “Greg was always a patient kid?” Was that always a theme of you growing up or was this something that you had to develop? 

I don’t know. I was pretty laid back growing up. That’s my makeup. 

That’s who you are. Most of the time, that’s the truth. For the driving fast entrepreneur, patience is probably one of their least strengths. To compliment them, especially the numbers and the details and having patience is a top quality that I would want in a personal CFO. What’s the most rewarding part of what you do to help others? 

What I love to do when I do my fractional part-time interim CFO work, however you want to call it, is having these good conversations with the business owner. We hash out some good ideas, look at their financials and their business in a way that they typically aren’t doing. By having these conversations that bring out things that they wouldn’t have seen otherwise and helps them to grow their businesses in ways they hadn’t been thinking about is a great feeling. It’s something that I’m proud of and I thoroughly enjoy the work. 

It’s bringing those a-ha moments or those enlightening parts where you’re showing in the numbers and the strategy. You’re also connecting the two and helping them turn the light bulb on for that part that they weren’t seeing or unaware of. Tell us about this journey. You said you worked with CPAs. You were in that industry and in that world. Tell me about the shift when you said, “This would be a good niche for me given my skillset and knowledge to help people in this way.” Walk me through what got you started of Action Now CFO. 

When I decided to go to the accounting route, I want to do something in business and I want a specific trade. Accounting landed in the way that I wanted to go with my career. I got interested in business coaching. I did a certification program in business coaching and I enjoyed it. From there, I was trying to figure out a way to combine my accounting and my coaching skills together into a service. My CFO work is a combination of my accounting and my coaching background. It’s understanding the numbers and helping people to facilitate those thoughts and strategic actions is where the coaching comes in as well. That’s exactly where the company was founded upon. Once I wanted to hone in on that focus and started to bring in clients, that’s how it worked. 

Combining coaching with the numbers and consulting all in one and you said, “I want to launch this,” and here you are. Walk me through what a typical client maybe looks like. What are their annual revenues, number of employees and, “Now is a good time to hire someone like yourself to help with that?” Can you give me a good fit for you and what that looks like? 

A great fit is somewhere around $1 million in revenue per year, but where it typically comes in is they already have an accountant on staff, but they can’t afford somebody that is let’s say a full-time CFO. They have somebody that gets their financials in check all the time, and they want someone with a little bit higher level of accounting skills to come in once or a few times a month to help them at a higher level to take those numbers and make strategic changes with them. 

Give me a couple of examples of those higher-level thoughts or discussions that you’re having that perhaps the clients are coming in and these are the top 1, 2 or 3 where your value surges forward. 

The main big thing I like is getting a P&L that is month by month. We look at the month-by-month P&L, which is something that the business owner has not done on their own. When you take that P&L month by month, you get to see the trends and differences. Why is this month like that? Why did this month produce this and why are there changes? We can dive in and look at why the changes happen. By analyzing, the reasons for this, that’s where the magic happens because each change is a conversation. You can take it from there and you can set goals around making sure that whatever was negative, we can change it into a positive and figuring out how we can do that in a sound and methodical method. 

You’re taking the month-by-month P&L versus an annual P&L, and digging into the changes and deciphering what went well, what went wrong and how would we either correct or improve. That makes a whole lot of sense to me because it’s more real-time and focused, versus a year at a time. 

When you take the P&L at the end of the year, it’s going to do a little bit but it’s not going to be that much. The more you do it, the more change and positive benefit you get out of it. It’s your business. If you don’t know the numbers, it’s not smart. If you’re going to look at it once a year, you’re looking at your bank balance throughout the year, but what does that going to give you? Sure, you’re making a little bit more money here and there, but wouldn’t it be a lot nicer to know exactly why this is happening so you can take it and make even bigger profound changes? 

I’ve heard a saying, “When the ‘why’ gets clear and big enough, the ‘how’ gets easy.” That’s part of what you can do with those numbers as you dig in and get the clarity on what’s happening and why they’re going the way they’re going. It can spur motivation and inspiration to do to change the ‘how’ to improve those even more. You look at the numbers is one. Month-to-month numbers is one but what would the second type of thing where you’d say, “You probably need to work on X?” 

One thing that I always like to bring up in our conversations is how the operations are moving. A lot of times, that brings out good conversation because there are holes in a flow in the business. Although this isn’t necessarily a financial matter, it develops into one. Something else that I like to talk about is the organizational flow and where there might be holes and where we can improve all the processes in the company. That’s something that I like to bring up as often as possible maybe once every call at least or once a month. I always find that it brings a lot of benefits because there’s always a hole in a process that can be improved. 

You’re going the overall operations. You’re looking for any holes that you can plug or anything else you can make smoother. If you could do it the first time or fix an issue that’s slowing things up and make it maybe automated or make it consistent. You don’t have to worry about that again and you can keep moving forward with the bigger picture. Maybe you can share an example. If there are people that you’ve helped out, bringing it to life is good where you could say you help this type of company out that had this much revenue and with your services, they were able to improve X, Y and Z. Do you have any case studies that you could share with us? 

One example that stands out for me was when I was working with this one company and they had sent all their accounting work overseas. The people that were doing the accounting work was an absolute disaster, to be honest with you. I can’t remember how many months behind and all the transactions were classified incorrectly. It was a complete mess. I remember coming in there and I had to hire a whole team to get it cleaned up. I remember getting to the point where we were finally steady again was a satisfying example. Getting to that point and seeing the difference in the owners once their financials were back in order, organized and they didn’t have to feel so nervous with their client base was a transformative experience to be a part of that process. It not only transformed the business, but it transformed the lives of the owners because they had financials that were clear. They could function in a positive and normal way, which had been lacking for quite a while as they had these other people doing their books. 

They’ve escaped feeling nervous and also got peace of mind as soon as the numbers were cleaned up and were clearer. As much as possible, having predictable tax, income and expenses moving forward are so important. It’s like cleaning out your closet, car or office. You can organize, declutter and get a clear plan that helps free up your brain and energy. The margin inside your brain is what I like to call it. What does all this cost? How do you determine your cost? If someone’s interested and they say, “Greg, I’m interested.” Is it customized based upon their needs or do you have a set fee structure? How does someone pay for this? 

It’s $350 for a month of service. When you pay $350, we’ll do a once a month phone call and the client has the ability to get in touch with me throughout the month to help them. It’s not a one-off call. It’s throughout the month service. They pay the $350 and that’s the service. If it’s a little more customized, it’s on an hourly rate. We can come up with the hourly depending on the kind of service that they want. 

It’s $350 a month, in general, and they get at least one meeting per month plus access to you. If it’s a little more customized, you might be a little bit different. Let’s shift a little bit here to capital gains tax. Part of the focus of this show is helping people create and preserve more wealth by clarifying capital gains tax deferral options such as the 1031 exchange, Deferred Sales Trust, Delaware, statutory trust and others. Are you helping people when it comes to either reducing taxes or deferring capital gains taxes? Are there any insights or strategies that you like to use? 

I like to help them and make sure that they’re optimizing as many deductions as I know that they can use and they’re also optimizing the deductions. That’s my big thing. If their tax strategy is to produce as much as possible, then we’re doing everything we can to make that happen. A lot of times that’s the goal. However, sometimes that’s not the goal. Sometimes they want to show that they’re in the process of selling their business or something and there’s a time when they want to show that the business is being profitable. It depends on the strategy of the business and takes it from there. 

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