Wyatt’s team builds the infrastructure and the technology stack so that small companies can leverage the expert team and software employed by larger companies, at much lower costs. With a clear process, Till CFO makes it easy for company leadership to make strategic decisions and have confidence in the details. Improved automation and reporting are among the benefits, and their technology is AI native.
AI Native means that that AI agents can actually become co-workers; agentic workers do the analysis, data mining, and more to help a company leadership make good financial decisions. Till has a unique team with a CFO, controllers, analysts and data engineering as well. And perhaps even more unique, AI agents make hiring expensive, human, on-site experts no longer needed.
Till CFO also works with family offices. Each family office has unique needs, including many goals other than what is taught in business school. Making an impact in the work they do, helping family members be joyful, navigating difficult decisions, these are some of the goals of family offices. These metrics are outside traditional financial statements. Every family office is unique.
As a quick reminder, the Expert Network Team provides free consultations. We would love the opportunity to be of service to you or someone you care about. Just scroll the liner notes to contact one of our experts or today’s guest. And please share this podcast with anyone who you think might find it interesting.
As always, it is good to have an expert on your side.
The Expert Network Team provides a free consultation.
[00:00.7]
Welcome to the expert network team podcast.
[00:22.7]
Welcome to today's Expert Network Team podcast. Our Expert Network team today is Taylor Smith of Goodspeed Merrill. And am Nathan Merrill of Goodspeed Merrill. And we have a distinguished guest with us today.
[00:39.0]
We don't have any Carl. We don't know where Carl is. And and I am in the new Goodspeed Merrell offices in Dallas, Texas. So that's big news. That's, I think a first full disclosure that that's something that we're up to.
[00:58.7]
But Taylor, do you want to give us a quick intro to Wyatt and introduce our kind of topic of discussion today? Absolutely. So welcome Wyatt Stovall. Today's session is going to be a little different because this is my brother on today to join us.
[01:16.9]
So, so proud to have. Wait, wait, we don't have an anti nepotism rule with our podcast? Well, we were joking about that at the very start here. Like who else could we get on here but Wyatt. So glad to talk to you. Wyatt is part of the team who is building TIL cfo which is basically trying to fix the finance function for companies that are too big for just working off spreadsheets and not big enough to have a real quote unquote system.
[01:46.6]
So this is super interesting for me and for us and for our listeners because we live in the complex tax planning, compliance reporting world and so we run into the same problem over and over where data and finance and you know, control mechanisms, the layers just aren't built right.
[02:05.3]
Right. So Wyatt, please, we're so excited to chat with you. Give us a quick intro and tell us a little bit about what you guys are actually, you know, what are you building with Til? Sure, absolutely. Thanks for having me, sis.
[02:22.2]
Yeah. My name is Wyatt Stovall. I'm a CFO partner at Till cfo. We are technically a startup though all of us here have been doing this work for a long time. But Till was founded in the fall of 2024 with the intention of building an excellent organization that helps other companies, professionalize their finance function.
[02:44.6]
Let's say now that vision has transformed over the last year and we've had a lot more clarity, especially advancement in AI technology, which I'm sure we'll, we'll talk about a bit. But yeah, there's this middle ground that a lot, a lot of companies see scaling companies where you can start off kind of bootstrapping everything.
[03:06.3]
A founder led organization with Excel and a vision and that Gets you so far, you know, pretty far in some cases. And then you jump to the next or two phases beyond that and you're a billion dollar company and you have full in house finance team and systems and everything built out.
[03:24.9]
And so there's a phase in between those where there's an extreme amount of complexity, and there's new layers to organizations that have to be added in and there's just orders of magnitude of more complexity, as I said, of variables to work with and companies and vendors and all these different things and data to wrangle and.
[03:47.0]
But you don't quite have the balance sheet or P and L to support a $500,000 finance function. And so that was the, was and continues to be. The vision is to help companies bridge that gap. What's transformed is that we originally were setting out to create a really excellent, what you might call a fractional cfo, organization.
[04:10.2]
And you may or may not have run across that term in the industry. I'm sure you have. And that the big change and transition that we've experienced over the last really year is this clarity that the fractional CFO role has a kind of built in limitation in that a lot of companies think when you use a fractional cfo, what you're doing is you're outsourcing every aspect of finance, including, strategic finance.
[04:43.0]
So you're outsourcing not just bookkeeping and accounting transaction level, you know, accounting work and finance work, but you're also outsourcing that strategic finance. And we find that that's really not something that's scalable.
[04:58.4]
I mean, if you work in an organization with someone who's truly accountable for finance, that person is in every major meeting, they know every employee, they're in the facility, you know, they know the salespeople, they know the ops people, they know every aspect of the business and they are best equipped to make strategic decisions.
[05:16.8]
The biggest bottleneck that they have oftentimes is they don't have well structured, clean, trustworthy financial and operational data in order to make those strategic decisions. And so this analogy that we use is, it's kind of silly, but I think it's actually pretty apt is the analogy of the Iron man suit.
[05:37.1]
So if you take Tony Stark by himself, and he's a very impressive guy, really smart, wealthy, capable person, but when he puts on the Iron man suit, he's a superhero, right? And so the way we approach it is we're not here to replace your Tony Stark, your head of strategic finance, whether That's a CFO or a VP of finance or a COO in some cases with some of our clients, whoever's accountable for finance internally, we're not trying to replace that person.
[06:08.0]
It's more like augmenting them and leveraging systems, processes, data architecture, all of that to let them focus more on the highest leverage, you know, allocation there for a second.
[06:23.2]
Just to get definitional here. Can you give us some examples of what you mean by strategic? Just so folks listening can say, oh, that's what, that I need to have a person that, that does strategic decisions. What does that mean? Yeah, so strategic finance would be kind of the highest level of conceptual decision making that you would make in or in an organization.
[06:47.5]
So what, do we exist to do? Kind of it's like the highest level, but even a little bit below that is how are we going to allocate capital? Specifically from, from a finance perspective, we have this capital source, we have this product or service that we're offering.
[07:03.1]
And we have four pathways in front of us. We can hire more people, we can pay down debt, we can invest in a new product line, we can you know, sell this asset, we can buy this warehouse, whatever that is. Capital expenditures. Yeah. So to make it personal with me, so strategic, that the strategic person that you need with this intimate familiarity with businesses, for example with us, the person who would have vetted the idea of opening a Dallas office, change over in our enterprise, operating systems and, and the cost benefit analysis of doing that, working with tech people and that sort of thing, bringing in new practice groups, stuff like that is all strategic.
[07:46.2]
That's not something you would have the intimate knowledge of kind of goals, direction and aspirations of the business. And then so they're making those decisions and they bring it to you and you do what with them to help them. Yeah, so the, essentially what we do is underneath that strategic layer, we build this architecture.
[08:11.1]
So the team and the tech stack. So we have these different softwares that we partner with. Like Rillet for example, is a, is a really up and coming ERP system, which is an AI native ERP, basically a replacement for if you're on QuickBooks. This is one thing we do a lot is we move companies from QuickBooks to Rillet and then we use ramp for expense and AP management, stripe for billing and ar.
[08:35.6]
So that part of the job is implementing this modern tech stack because a lot of companies run into that too where they're like, I know I need something fresher than QuickBooks QuickBooks is. So what are they getting more. When you move them from QuickBooks to these other things, what are you enhancing?
[08:54.7]
Yeah, so the AI native systems like Rillet have, reporting for one. You're getting excellent level reporting, and the close process oftentimes gets cut to a fraction. So if you're in QuickBooks and you have a lot of, say, manual processes, things, living in like disparate Excel workbooks and spreadsheets and things, and then someone's job is to wrangle all that and try to make a closed financial statement for the month.
[09:22.5]
It might be the 21st of the month before you're looking at the previous month's books. Whereas with, with systems like this, there's, I can get into the weeds on the nerdy accounting stuff, but it's just like automated, prepaid schedules, things like that, that live in the system that, QuickBooks just doesn't have.
[09:41.7]
And you could close in, you know, one or two days at the beginning of the month because it's, it's always the AI agents within it are always, allocating transactions throughout the month and all that. So whenever the month ends, it's like 95% there already. And so that's one example.
[09:59.9]
But yeah. Will you define AI native for us? Because I think a lot of people at this point are familiar with the term AI and you know, they kind of have attached that to different apps or platforms or things of that nature. But you guys really are not just plugging in some systems and leveraging, you know, within your own team.
[10:20.0]
We use this, you know, platform and this software to do this X, Y and Z, tool or task. So can you just get in the weeds a little bit on what the AI native component is and how that shows up for you guys?
[10:37.4]
Because it's really more of an installation, internal framework building from what I understand. Yeah. So if you were to take just an individual as an example, if you're using ChatGPT or Claude or something, CLAUDE is our, language model of choice.
[10:55.2]
But it works for anyone. If you're using it to write an email or to like replace a Google search or something, that would be you using AI, but you're not. That's not a native, like that's not a workflow. You're just typing in something and it's rewriting an email or a text message or something.
[11:14.0]
The next level or a few levels above that would be, like you said, building an AI, native system where there's workflows and people involved, data flowing, all of it connected together, in a way that you can then plug in because it's only as good as the data.
[11:33.2]
Right. So data has to be clean and structured properly. And this is a big issue for, like I said, growing companies where everything's living in these disparate Excel spreadsheets. And one person maybe has knowledge of where all this stuff is, getting. Yes.
[11:49.0]
And that's a huge risk, especially, if you have one per. If you're a 10 million revenue business and you have one person that has all this institutional knowledge and they leave for whatever reason, you know, that's a huge potential structural problem. And so AI native is in one sense just having data flow into a unified architecture.
[12:09.7]
So we use a platform. We actually are working with Palantir right now. So. And Palantir has this. This is kind of what they specialize in, actually, is providing, this operational data, say architecture, unified data architecture.
[12:28.1]
Now they do that famously for really big companies for $100 million. We're obviously at the low end of their customer size, but the principle is the same for now. Yeah, we'll see if we get the $100 million contract, soon. But essentially the concept is all of these disparate data sources flow together into this singular architecture.
[12:50.9]
And then when that's the case, you can apply agentic technology, then you can apply AI to do actual work, which is different from rewriting a text message for you. It's actually actioning work in a system, actually doing something.
[13:08.7]
And then that's where you get to this kind of magic future that we're seeing unfold, which is AI as a co worker rather than just Augmenter. Yeah, so you do that with,
[13:25.1]
you call it Reel it. What's it called? Reel It R I L L E T. Okay, what other, what other, native AIs are you using to help folks get. Kind of enter the 21st century? Yeah, so the.
[13:40.8]
We have a. Several partnerships, but, AP and expense management platform called Ramp R mp. You may have seen they had a Super bowl commercial actually. So they've they've been up and coming, but obviously spending some money on marketing.
[13:57.7]
But they're far and away the best expense management platform I've used. So, like a lot of our clients will, Will migrate them from bill.com to ram, which Bill is popular with kind of smaller companies too, and they invest a ton in, in AI engineering and again, workflows and everything on their side.
[14:16.7]
And then that integrates really well with Real it and QuickBooks as well. I mean, and I don't want to imply that if you're on QuickBooks we won't work with you. That's not the case. But this is kind of like the, the future vision. Right. And then stripe. Stripe and relit have an excellent integration together for.
[14:34.5]
So that would be like AR and billing. And stripe. POS or what do you stripe? Yeah, it's like a payment processing platform, but it integrates with Rillet. So then all the transactions are coded automatically.
[14:50.9]
The revenue and cash collection and all that gets kind of dynamically captured and then rippling, which is an HR system. R, I, P, P, L I, N G. Rippling. So after you, after you've engaged with a company, I'm, I'm just trying to help people see perhaps the future of, of their finance department under an arrangement like you're building here.
[15:14.8]
How much is it? Is it weekly engagement, daily engagement? Like how do you engage with clients once you've got, got them all plugged into these AI tools, agents, that sort of thing? Yeah. So that's situational but generally speaking. Well, first off, we don't do an hourly engagement.
[15:31.7]
We do a fixed scoped engagement. So we scope the work very clearly, but then we have a fixed monthly price. So there's a lot of visibility into your costs. Which a lot of companies like. We also like it because it incentivizes us to be more efficient not to call out lawyers or anyone else who works hourly.
[15:50.6]
But you know, it doesn't necessarily incentivize. Call them out. We're working that direction too. Yeah, we're past that value bills here. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that, so that. So the engagements may look a little bit different, but typically the CFO partners, we can't is meeting with them.
[16:07.9]
But when I say CFO partner also that's like CFO operational partner. If you go on our website, that's the term used. That's the person, this is my role. Who leads the engagement from the tills. From till. CFO side. So maybe every other week. If it's a company who needs a good amount of cash flow visibility, that would be a 13 week cash forecast.
[16:28.3]
Maybe every week. And then monthly financial review calls, maybe quarterly board meetings. Prep. Like board prep if there's a board involved. There isn't always, but sometimes there is. So bi weekly, weekly and then monthly and then a quarterly cadence is kind of how it's structured, but again depending on the scope and the deeds.
[16:48.3]
But you're like a four man operation though. So different from the kind of old school model of fractional CFO as a guy. Right. Who's with CFOs instead of. Right. So talk to us a little bit about those kind of key components for not just you and your you know, CFO operational partner but your, your analyst and your controller and your, what I find very interesting, your new, I think data AI data engineer who participates on projects too.
[17:23.9]
So it's very forward thinking. It, you know, this is just kind of a novel structure for looking at financial overhaul of a company. So will you tell us a little bit about those key players and kind of where those plug in on the you know, impact per project?
[17:43.9]
Yes. Yeah. So generally we think forward looking and backward looking. Those are kind of the two buckets conceptually. So the controller, the person who, that title, within our pod we call them pods, so pods of till employees assigned to supporting a strategic financial leader at one of our companies.
[18:04.1]
The controller's role is to lead the backward looking part of the business. So which is what controllers do at every organization. So transaction, you know, accounting, transaction level stuff, expense management. And then the CFO operating partner is within the tils pod is accountable for the forward looking things.
[18:25.7]
So modeling, forecasting, budgeting, anything that has to do with things that haven't happened yet. So supporting on the strategic side scenarios, you know, if we do this then what do the numbers look like? What's the capital allocation? What's the best capital allocation? If I do this versus that, and then respectively the accountant supports the controller, the analyst supports the CFO operating partner, the AI data engineer is a new one and we're basically kind of to bring up Palantir again.
[18:55.9]
Palantir has this aspect of their business model which is they have the, they're called forward deployed engineers where they send. And then we won't do it exactly like this of course, but they send their engineers on site to their clients and this is part of why the contracts are so expensive because they spend very, they send very expensive people on site to Airbus or whatever their clients are and they basically attack the problem and try to solve it.
[19:25.7]
Right. So what we have, we're, we're kind of shadowing that structure, where we also have assigned AI experts, you know and they're, they're software engineer, architecture experts, AI experts, that are assigned to our client engagements that essentially help bridge the gap between the financial expertise and then what's needed in terms of engineering and that we, we work together to, to build that for the client.
[19:52.7]
So, so, I'm going to try to piece this together again just to make sure I'm, I'm kind of comprehending what you're doing. And, and I think this is similar to how our firm works within the Advanced Tax Strategies group. If you're, you may be tasked as the, the CFO partner on an engagement, but you utilize the whole team to help support the client based on your various skill sets.
[20:18.9]
And that may be the whole team a part of the team or am I understanding that correctly? Yes, Yep, that's right. And Okay. And so at what stage do you think, I mean you kind of, you referred to the.
[20:39.6]
I'm going to take you back to the very beginning of the conversation where you're like, there's a point at which a founder led organization needs, I got to put it in my words, to get more sophisticated, more robust.
[20:53.4]
Financial modeling, data mining, that sort of thing. How, how do you communicate that to clients prospects? Like at what stage does, does what you do really drive value to what the client is experiencing?
[21:12.4]
Yeah. So our ideal profile falls. The revenue level would be like 10 to 50 million is essentially the range that we've identified. The range is kind of big because different industries have different levels of complexity at different revenue levels, but that's more or less where it lands.
[21:30.4]
If you use, and I hesitate to do this because things have changed so much, but kind of a popular heuristic for how much you should spend on a finance function would be like 3 to 5% a revenue. Right. And so if you take a $25 million business at 5%, that's a hundred thousand dollars a month.
[21:52.2]
Right. And so, but a lot of companies would look at that and say that is way too much. And so basically what we're trying to say is you don't have to, you can have your CFO or your VP of finance, but you don't have to hire a controller, bookkeeper, FPA expert, you know, financial analyst, and pay for all those systems in house.
[22:12.1]
You can contract with us and then plug us in, basically. And as a fellow cost center services type person, you know, lawyers are often viewed as cost centers. Right. I suspect that you'd be able to present to someone how, even if they spent that $100,000 a month, that it drives additional efficiencies values.
[22:35.3]
It's not just a cost center. Correct. Right. And to be clear, we're not charging a hundred thousand dollars a month? No, I'm just saying if. Less than that, for sure. When people use those rules of thumbs, it's because if you're not concentrating expenses in those areas, you probably are losing.
[22:54.9]
You could be hemorrhaging money in those areas and so actually spending money. You know, we do a lot of tax planning. People who don't want to do tax planning because it costs some money, they're paying the government more than they need to, for sure. So we usually will yield a, higher ROI than people will ever pay us for our planning.
[23:14.0]
I suspect that it's similar to that with your organization as well. Yeah. So it's kind of like on one hand, you're avoiding fighting fires all the time, because fighting fires all the time is an extremely inefficient way for a founder or executive to use his or her time.
[23:31.7]
But once you get past just fighting fires, then it's about driving real value. So you could pick one decision. If your finance function is mature enough, your data is clean enough, you have the right people in place, and you make one really good decision on how to allocate capital.
[23:49.4]
You can pay for your whole finance function with one good decision. Now, that's not how you really want to drive a company. But I just mean in theory, you could make $2 million by making the right investment. Right risk adjusted, of course. But, so there's an opportunity cost in terms of what you avoid losing.
[24:09.6]
So if you pay for finance, for a good finance function, and you avoid the firefights you're paying to avoid all those costs that you would have incurred otherwise, trying to run everything out of Excel. But then you're also on the positive side, gaining a huge amount of value by just making the right decisions, which, people don't.
[24:26.6]
You know, if you make the wrong decisions over and over again, those things compound over time. And that's why a lot of companies struggle. Right. And I would, I would encourage listeners, if, if they're kind of trying to understand how applicable this is to them, to go and read a book by Dan Sullivan, Ben Hardy called who, who Not How.
[24:46.6]
And in that book, it really focuses on kind of keeping people in their highest and best use. And, and, and really does highlight how, when, when you're, if you're not a finance person, when you're spending your time doing finance stuff, you're losing, like, like you said, there's an opportunity cost there.
[25:08.3]
You could be out acquiring new clients, you could be, you know, exploring new markets. You could, you could be doing all sorts of things that you may be better at than trying to figure out if you're books tie out at the end of the month. And so getting a who like you guys into that function frees up a founder or a leader to go do things that are more important to the organization that are uniquely suited to that individual.
[25:35.8]
Yeah. What's interesting about entrepreneurs especially are in that early phase when, when you're 0 to 10 million, you can actually get really far on your, on your gut like a spreadsheet and your gut can actually go pretty far. It's really tricky to find where that inflection point happens where now you have to bring in someone else.
[25:57.7]
And it's not just in finance, it could be in anything, Operations, sales. You know, a founder led sales operation. Right. Is a huge part of how early stage companies work that cannot get you where you need to be. Like if you want to scale to a really high level, you have to have a sales function.
[26:16.8]
Right. So at what point do you go from founder led sales to a sales function? That's a very difficult time and a lot of times it's psychological and emotional for founders to give up those things. And so we, you know, our founders are multi time founders and you know, we pride ourselves on, understand we're also a family office backed organization.
[26:35.4]
So we feel like we're really close to the psychology of it especially and the people and what they're, the challenges they're dealing with. And so we try to help solve those things as well. But yeah, you're right, it is, it is definitely a, a trick. So you just said one of the magic words here and I did want to shift to this for a little bit.
[26:55.4]
I suspect that you and Taylor had some discussion about what Taylor does and the type of work we do. But we're constantly setting up new air quote businesses in the form of family offices for affluent families and folks who have successful ex exits from business, that sort of thing.
[27:12.3]
Do you support those types of organizations given that you are founder backed or a, family office backed? Yes, definitely. With them I would put them in kind of two different buckets based on our client base because on one hand there's portfolio companies that need financial infrastructure and financial operations.
[27:33.8]
But then there's also what you might call the fund level for family offices where it's kind of like portfolio management and all the administrative work that goes with that. And the strategic decisions you have to make at the portfolio level, not just at The Portco level. Right. So we have our hands in both of those things.
[27:51.4]
And as I said, our founders are very intimately connected to the family office space in the US Especially, so it's kind of two wings of the same bird. But obviously the Portco is everything I've been talking about financial operations. The family office portfolio management side is really administration data.
[28:11.3]
You know, if you have dozens of LPs that you have to communicate in at certain, a certain cadence of the year and certain documentation, tax, compliance, all this stuff, we basically, we apply the same principles to that side of things as well. And, how would you recognizing you apply the same principles?
[28:32.8]
But what are operationally some of your. How you might approach a family office different than like you say, a port company or just an entrepreneur organization? Are there. Have you observed unique needs of a family office, given that its constituency is not necessarily investors or owners?
[28:53.0]
In every situation, it's family members and beneficiaries and things like that. Have, how have you observed uniqueness to how you deliver your services in that regard? You know, it's interesting if you go to business school, what they'll tell you is that, all businesses exist to maximize profit.
[29:15.5]
That's kind of a basic, like 101 business thing, which is, I don't think is really even accurate for business. I mean, it is in some sense, you know, they want to maximize cash flow or whatever. But if you actually talk to entrepreneurs, they care about a lot of other things besides maximizing the profit of their business.
[29:33.0]
They definitely care about that. But there's other. They want to impact people. They want their employees to have joy in their work, all these things. And so I find that that's true at the entrepreneurship level, it's kind of magnified. With the family offices, it's to a more extreme level because oftentimes they're thinking about impact.
[29:51.1]
We were talking before we started about, something that you guys know that's doing that's transitioned more to an impact rather than just business operations side of things. So we find that that is, there's a lot more focus put on that rather than just dollars and cents.
[30:08.4]
Of course, the dollars and cents matter a lot. So now the shorter answer is that we're kind of doing the same thing regardless, which is we're making sure all your T's are crossed and your eyes are dotted and everything's happening the way it needs to happen so that they can, as you said, be allocating their time toward, towards its highest and best use, which is not Necessarily profit maximization, but impact maximization.
[30:32.9]
At that stage. Our ROI is measured a little differently, perhaps in a, family organization rather than in a. But, you know, going back to. And I know this kind of takes us back a little bit, but I do want to address your point because as a founder of an organization, I can tell you, I mean, I agree with you, profit is important.
[30:55.7]
But I wouldn't say that when you're focusing on your people or the community or things like that, that those don't actually ultimately drive profit. That self interest is different than greed. When you're acting your self interest, you're actually doing things that don't have a, a profit, a dollar number attached to it in terms of where it hits the balance sheet.
[31:17.5]
But you're building an organization that has more durability, staying power, brand recognition, that sort of stuff. That is roi, that is not measured necessarily in terms of a direct return on the books, if you know what I mean.
[31:35.7]
Yeah. And if, I mean, if all your employees are finding joy in their work, they're more likely to stick around. More productive. Yeah, yeah. Be more productive. So there's definitely. If you want to be as maybe robotic as the business class textbooks are, then you would say that's a profit maximizing activity.
[31:52.9]
Which I think it largely is. Although a lot of big companies don't particularly care about that specific thing. You know, the big consulting firms and so forth, they just churn through people. Right. It's part of their business model. I think they don't want, they don't want everybody to rise to the level of partner because that would squeeze out partner profit.
[32:12.0]
Right. They, they need cogs and churners. Yeah. And burners. Right. I think one of the, the big differences that we see because oftentimes, you know, at least for the larger, more developed family offices, it might not be that we're constantly in communication with our client.
[32:28.8]
Like typically we, we're in coordination with the cfo, you know, the, the quarterback, as they say. And I think what is a little different in working with family office enterprise versus institutional enterprise is all of those relationships, including ours as legal, including yours as cfo, those are so much more intimate within the family office space than they are when you, you're working with the small business who's, you know, developing widgets or things.
[33:02.1]
Like, it feels different because there's that skin in the game with family capital and the accountability even feels different. It's not that at the end of the day, you're doing a different job. But what I've found, and it might be similar for you guys, is like when you're in there in these emotional conversations where you're having to ask difficult questions or work through an obstacle with the family or decide hey, do we need to get out of this investment, we made a bad decision.
[33:30.6]
Those sorts of things can feel a little bit more, I don't know, they feel a bit heavier sometimes when you have these more involved relationships with families just versus their business because this is, you know, the intersection of both, you know, is that something that you guys do?
[33:51.1]
You see that on your end and you know, how do you navigate that compared to your more Mid Market, 10 to $50 million small business owner? Yeah. And I would say even the 10 to $50 million businesses, you don't get away from that.
[34:09.9]
Those are almost like single entity family offices. You know, for a lot of those entrepreneurs it's kind of their, their baby. The company is they end up running a lot of their family stuff through it. Right, wrong or otherwise. Yes, and usually wrong.
[34:25.6]
But but that they do do use it as a de facto which is why the cfo, when they sell the business almost always becomes their head of family office. Yes. And the, the numbers, the money touches everything. So sometimes people will, or it's like a running joke in finance that the controller knows everything.
[34:45.9]
The controller of the company knows everything because everything that happens in the business is reflected in the numbers somehow. And whoever's looking at those numbers knows everything. And so, and that's an intimate level of knowledge at the company level and that always overlaps with the personal side and we do have to scope that.
[35:03.3]
And just to be clear, like I'm not helping you with your personal taxes, I'm not equipped to do that. It's not, you know, someone else has to do that but it always, that always stuff always comes up. Now then with the family offices, again that's to a more extreme degree because it is families and is you know, different tensions maybe in some circumstances with company, you know, different family members wanting to do something, others not wanting to do something.
[35:28.7]
And so that's where we are experienced especially again our founders family office background really is helpful because it's experiential and we put a lot of emphasis on being able to have those important conversations while having the right boundaries in place.
[35:44.6]
But just respecting people's, their situation, their emotional well being, whatever that may be when it comes to their money. Because again that's one of the most intimate things that Touches every aspect of your life. That's great.
[36:02.6]
Well, kind of as a closing thought, I want to throw this out to you. Maybe, you, you mentioned how since you guys founded this organization, that AI has, or what I'm interpreting is that a high has kind of, affected how you built your or evolved your business model in terms of services you provide, how they're delivered, that sort of thing.
[36:34.5]
And, one of the things I personally recognize and believe is we're still on the cusp of that. If you were to look into your crystal ball and take us out a couple of years, how do you see, how do you see your continued evolution?
[36:55.4]
Like, where do you see your, Your, industry or your organization going? Yeah, yeah. This is a constant topic of conversation internally, as you can imagine. Yeah, so the, the models, if you look at Claude chatgpt, the.
[37:13.8]
Not just the level of advancement, but the speed of advancement has been accelerating. Like the first derivative. Right. The acceleration has been going up too, over the last, really the last six months. So if you extrapolate that out, you can imagine this future where these language models are so incredibly powerful that they can action, like I was saying earlier, actioning workflows, like doing tasks, at an extremely efficient degree.
[37:41.7]
So the question, I think the core question is where do humans fit into that? If you're a maxer, like an AI maxer, like my boss, our CEO, our co founder, Bo Weathersby, is. He'll tell you that he thinks this is basically like the Industrial Revolution level, like scale of transformation.
[38:00.3]
But even if you're not at that level of maxing AI stuff, you're still seeing a fundamental transformation of the way work is done. And so the question is, what still exists and what shape is that in. In the next few years? The way we think about it is there's no replacement for human judgment when a decision is not.
[38:24.7]
Clearly it's not deterministic. Right. If there's a truly probabilistic outcome and a human just has to make. Like I was saying earlier, the founders can run a company off their gut and spreadsheets. AI doesn't replicate just the gut intuition of a human being.
[38:42.1]
Yeah. It also doesn't make decisions. And I don't know if people. Again, if you're a real maxer, maybe you think it will be able to do this, but Claude doesn't make decisions. Even if we are on a cusp of things right now, it can, and we're not fully where we will be in a few Years tell you answers.
[38:58.1]
It can't tell you what to do, though. It won't. Yeah, it'll give you. It'll even give you judgment. It'll give you a recommendation. But that's not a replica or that's not a replacement for someone who has industry knowledge. So basically what we do is we, we know what good looks like.
[39:14.7]
So this is a big thing that's important. This is important in the legal field. Every field that's going to have AI touch it, which is basically every field. If you're the person who can see the AI's output and determine if it looks good or not and what to check and what needs to be right in order for it to be right, that's where we think work is going.
[39:34.9]
So it's more like orchestrating AI workflows is how we think about it. So for us, that would be in the finance world. The legal field, of course, would also be, go in that direction under this model.
[39:50.0]
The question that I don't have the answer to that is kind of concerning. Is the entry level work. What happens to that? To the entry level financial analyst or the entry level bookkeeper? If all the repeatable deterministic workflows are being replaced at a thousand times the productivity level by AI, then.
[40:10.9]
Well, it's like you're saying the new skills are critical thinking, judgment, intuition, ethics, morals, values, those sorts of things. They're not teaching that in schools. Yes. So there will be a lag definitely over this next generation.
[40:27.9]
They're teaching you how to do things, not how to, And I would even add to that, innovate. And maybe AI actually gets to the point of innovation, which is to recognize where there's a need and it comes up with a, A solution, it develops.
[40:43.3]
Yeah. If you look at even the public school system, it's very much still structurally in the 19th century. Oh, 100. Don't even get me going there. We homeschool, don't quiet, don't do this. That's a, That's a rabbit hole.
[41:01.6]
We can go down some other time. Not on the podcast, but. No, the. The but. But it does highlight that the problem we're going to be facing is the education system is not designed to maximize readiness for an AI economy.
[41:22.3]
Right. Because it is an industrial model, period, full stop. That's even stale today, let alone, ten years from now. That was still in the 80s. Yes, sorry. So if you have kids now, as Taylor and I both have young children, so that, what do you do to equip them for the future.
[41:42.4]
You don't teach them how to do tasks, you teach them how to think and about like you said, more intuition, how to ask proper questions, how to think about problems, much more observe like higher level conception.
[42:00.0]
History for example would be a huge area of study. We need to study history more so we can recognize patterns and, and writing too. I mean writing, I think writing is, is thinking. That's a term that maybe I don't remember where I heard that, but writing is just applied thinking, being able to structure thoughts in a certain way because that helps.
[42:22.3]
As I said, if your job is orchestrating AI workflows in whatever industry you're in, you have to be able to think clearly. So instruct your thoughts clearly. So the education system, yeah, it's certainly not teaching kids to do that.
[42:37.5]
I think education will transform fundamentally too, with all this technology as well, once you get the unions out of it. But again, this has been great. No, I really appreciate you coming in and kind of showing us not only what you guys are doing but how impactful some of these things we're hearing about are in that process.
[43:02.3]
You know, a lot of people, when they think of businesses they I think a lot of folks are unaware how much of our economy is still Main street economy is these 5 to 50 million dollar businesses and they don't have teams of programmers, AI experts, that sort of thing.
[43:23.7]
And so coming across folks like yourself who do have both subject matter expertise and understand the tools and how they can be deployed is, is invaluable for that sector of, of our economy, for those types of clients that we work with. So really appreciate you taking the time.
[43:41.1]
Yeah, I mean there are a lot of companies that think I need to be doing AI and I'm not and I don't even know where to start. We think there's a huge, A, huge, you know, range of companies that we could help do that. So that's what we're excited to be doing. Excellent. Well, I'm sure the future is going to be bright for you guys and glad, glad we were able to take this time.
[44:01.6]
So thank you very much. Thank you. Good job. Good to see you brother. Next words, in the words of Carl Frank, create a beautiful day.
[44:17.0]
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