#160 - Natalia Zacharin: Master Your Numbers, Fix Your Books & Build a Profitable, Scalable Business

0:00 You can't hire for what you want to be in six months. You have to be the business that you are today. Welcome back for another great episode. We're going to keep this one tight and short because we know the moment that we start talking about CFOs and finances on business, we have a tendency to get bored. However, what I'm going to tell you is that Natalia today is going to make sure that we are not bored about this subject.

0:43 So, we have the CEO of Zachary and consulting. She helps business owners turn their numbers into strategy, clarity, and confidence. She's grown her firm from a small startup into a multimillion dollar business, earning a spot on the Inc 5000 list. Beyond bookkeeping and accounting, Natalia teaches entrepreneurs, which is a ton of us, how to think strategically about cashflow, profitability, and scaling their business with intention. Natalia, welcome to the show. It is great to have you here. Thank you so much, Mark. I'm super excited to be here. I'm excited to have you turn what's a boring and sometimes mind numbing part of our business.

1:24 And it's the, I'm, you gotta have it. You have to understand the finances and the cashflow, but at times it wears us out. Those of us that are salespeople and we have these visions for our lives and we have all this charisma. It's like, do not slow me down to deal with all that. But then you're here to rescue us and say, if you don't get that together, you're not going to be able to fulfill your vision and your dream. So this thing started for you, I believe in 2019. That's, yes, correct. You are a self-taught, what's become a brilliant financial mind helping entrepreneurs and business owners. How the heck have you become a self-taught expert in this area in just six short years?

2:04 think it's a combination of uh that door opened for me and I opened it. The opportunity presented itself. I was desperate to change my life. I wasn't getting opportunities in the corporate world. In fact, I was getting demoted and struggling to make ends meet and I got sick of the struggle. um And then I just start seeing, uh I think it's the way my brain works also. So some of us, are wired to see things differently and I can see patterns in numbers. So numbers to me are almost like a plumbing in a household. Seeing like where things are a little bit stuck, where things are slow, where things are flowing really well.

2:47 So for me, it's almost like a picture in my mind when I see numbers. And you said, I'm going to open the door. and I'm gonna open the door. And I did not know that what the opportunity was going to be. I was just kind of like, well, you know, I can move in this direction and see what happens and just put one foot ahead of the other and kind of see what happens. And I never really had any expectations. And I think that's why I wasn't, and I think that's why I continued because I didn't have all these huge expectations. I had no idea what was gonna happen. So I was very open to it. So how did you convince yourself to get started and keep going though if you didn't have expectations? So I was being demoted in my job and I was looking for other opportunities and no one was hiring.

3:33 I couldn't even get an interview. At that time, I was in my late 40s, single mom. I had been struggling on and off financially. And I met this guy who is now my fiance and he owns his own accounting firm. And I'm sitting with him in a coffee shop and he says to me, Why don't you start your own business and it never even occurred to me as an option never I'd have been a W to my entire life and it wasn't even something like you know, like if you're a chef and you're Fantastic at cooking it makes sense that maybe you want to open up a restaurant So I was never an accountant. I had no experience. I was a salesperson a million years ago for Reynolds That was like 30 years ago now and then I was a stay-at-home mom for several years and then I was an invoicing clerk So exciting!

4:20 And he said, why don't you start your own business? And I said, doing what? And he said, well, how about bookkeeping? And I thought, hey, you know, like I could figure out bookkeeping and just sell it on the side and make some extra cash. And that's kind of where the idea started was I just thought it'd be a side gig to make a little bit extra money. So tell us that transition then from the side gig to then having this idea that I see this potential and what it can really be. This can only be a full-time career, my job, but look, maybe how it'll change my life. What happened because so many people do start with a side gig or a side hustle, but they find it almost impossible mentally to have this jumping off point. I knew that I would have to give up my job.

5:03 um I was still working full time. I was working on getting clients and working through this little eight week program on how to start your own business. Cause I didn't know anything about starting businesses. So I would do that in the night and the evenings, weekends at lunch hour. So basically I was working a lot more than I ever had before and making less. And it got to the point. mid-year where I wasn't making enough to have a jumping off point, but I was overwhelmed that I couldn't do both anymore. And so I had actually listened to a friend who had, was giving a lecture and she was a recovering meth addict.

5:43 And she was talking about just burning the bridges of the past and moving forward and how the universe will align with you. And I was like, well, that sounds a little bit woo woo, but I don't really have any other options. So I'm just going to go ahead and quit my job and try to do this a hundred percent of the time. Because if I can get a couple of clients by doing this part-time, I should be able to get a couple more clients and at least make ends meet doing this full time. And so in August, 2019, then month I turned 50, I quit my job and I, by November, I tripled my client load, which wasn't a lot. It was only 12. But it sounds like a lot when I say tripled.

6:24 Well, upon, but before that, know, two or three months before that 12 was a lot. 12, yes, 12 was the difference between me being able to pay mortgage and my expenses and not being able to pay them. So it just, took six months to really figure out, can I do this? Can I sell and will someone buy from me? And then when I started getting that confidence that it's possible and I just have to get better at closing people and that's just a skill then I went all in. Yeah. You know, that place that you were at when you asked yourself, can I? See now you already knew that you were already capable and you could.

7:09 What do you think happened in our lives? We'll get into the minutia of the business, but what, there's so many people that are asking the same question. Can I, and what I know so often and I'm like, well, of course you can. What happened then? did that change for you at 50? Because I know you said you didn't have any other option, but here's how I know you did. Maybe your brain said you didn't, but you could have accepted just continuous repetitive positions being in employee places. True. I think part of it was I was tired of struggling and I wanted to thrive. And I was like, if I can't figure this out now, I'm getting to the point where I'm never gonna figure it out.

7:54 So this is it. And I didn't want to struggle anymore. I had been struggling for years. So I'd been single mom since 2012. So it had been a long haul of my mom helping me and because I couldn't make my mortgage payment and my mortgage was cheaper than getting an apartment and my house was falling apart around me because I couldn't afford to hire anybody to fix it. And so it was just this ongoing where like if the dog got sick and it cost me 500 bucks, that was six months of paying $500 off if I could. And I was just tired of this struggle. And I really was like, I need to figure this out. And if I can't figure it out and I didn't ever, and I know a lot of people are like, well, why didn't you marry someone with money?

8:38 I didn't feel like that was an option because it came out of a bad marriage. I wanted to do it myself. you. Um, what would you go back and tell in 2012 and 13 in the beginning of that single mom moment? Do you think that you needed to travel that journey all the way through to 2019 and all that struggle, or would you now go back then and tell that Natalia something? I think I needed to go through that struggle to get to where I am today. I can see the path now from everything that I've been through to now and how that's helped develop who I am.

9:19 But I think the one thing that I would tell myself going backwards is to believe more in myself. I always had feelings that I could do more and I could figure out more. But the world and people will keep saying, no, you can't, no, you can't until you just say, yes, I can and you just do it. All right, and now we're here in 2025, giving this to advice to all us business owners that have books that are a mess and a disaster. Oh yes, I know they have books that are mess and a disaster because about 95 % of new clients have books that are a mess and a disaster. Um, how does that first conversation go when you reach out to someone, whether you're prospecting them or they find out about you through a referral, um, the best ones are the referrals, right?

10:02 Um, but where does that conversation start? I start by asking them what's been going on and what are their challenges and why are they talking to me? Because that's a great way to start any kind of sales call. Because sales is psychological, it's not intuitive. you do want to dig in and understand what their needs are um and then fill in with what you have the solution. um So it's always like where you've been and where do you want to go? And most... Most of the people that we talk to have no idea financially where they stand. And even if they have good financials, they have no idea how to interpret those to better their situation or to get to the next level.

10:49 Do you find you hear these same repetitive categorized problems? Like when you ask the question, you already now know like here's the two or three things that are going to come. I a hundred percent know when I'm asking the question, what the answer will be at this point. I've talked to thousands of people at this point. Um, and I'm still in sales. love sales. do have a sales team, but I'm still in sales. So I love having my pulse on what's happening out there with, um, entrepreneurs with business owners and, um, and explaining to them that they, even if they decide not to work with us, like here's the way it should be. If you work with someone else. So I don't need you to work with us, but I want you to know what your next steps are so you can make better decisions.

11:34 When people ask you advice, like if I were to ask you three or four questions, is the context necessary on the category of sales volume of a business? Is it like zero to a million, a million to two million, two to five million? Or do you give different answers about strategy based upon those segments? Or does it all apply generally for everyone? There are certain metrics that are universal. uh Revenue is the metric that drives everything else. And if you want to grow revenue and improve profit and improve cash in the bank, usually that has something to do with the revenue also. So a lot of the metrics are based on that, but every industry is very different. the strategies that we would tell, for instance, uh a restaurant owner or a pharmaceutical business owner, is going to be different than someone who owns a marketing agency.

12:27 Very different. Why is that? Because the generation, the margins, the cash flow, it all comes differently? Is that why? Yes, because some businesses, like if you're in a service-based business, you don't really have cost of goods sold. And the cost of goods sold is really going to drive the strategy differently. For instance, like a restaurant will have a very high cost of goods sold. Also, a restaurant will have a lower labor cost, but a service-based agency will have a higher labor cost. So all those things play into where we want them to be. Now, I don't like industry standards. the friends in the typical counting firm grows eight percent a year and they are about twenty percent profitability and i'm like that's blow that out of the water.

13:14 I don't look at benchmarks i want us to blow those benchmarks out of the water. Is the first step asking someone what your problem is, but then the second step is it asking like, what are your goals? Does that matter? Like, what do you want to do? What do you want to do? That always matters. The exit strategy or the strategy of like what we're going to do in the next couple of years is really, really important. Like, do you want to sell this? Is it sellable? Is it something that you can create as an asset? That's going to make a really big difference in what we're planning on doing and also what services we want. So for instance, if you're just self-employed, like if you are a heart surgeon and you are basically self-employed, you're 1099 and you don't really need any employees, you're not going to...

13:58 hire other heart surgeons, that's just what you do, but you have your own LLC, that's a totally different model and that's not sellable. um But you can still build wealth. Whereas if you're building and scaling a company with employees and they keep reproducing what you're doing, um for instance, like, I don't know, in an IT firm, uh then that could be a sellable asset. And maybe you wanna sell it in a couple of years, maybe you don't. but it's good to start working on what does that look like to make it sellable because that's going to make a healthier business also and a more profitable business. We all like profit. Yeah, we all want to build wealth.

14:39 thing. Yeah. Yep. And you need profit. You need profit to do that. Um, if you were going to start a different business for everything that you've seen over these past six years, if you weren't going to have your accounting and accounting consulting firm, if you weren't going to be a financial coach, what business would you start? Oh, I would actually start a landscaping business. am a plant fool. I, uh, so in my past life or, uh, or my, uh, my second life, I feel like I live nine lives because I'm, uh, uh, I love what I do here, but I also have hobbies and other things that I really enjoy doing. And one of them is plants. And, um, I wanted to be a master.

15:21 I was a master gardener for quite a bit of time and I wanted to work as a landscape designer. Uh, and then I. I was accepted into George Mason University um when I was a single mom, but I decided to opt out because in the years that it would have taken me to get that degree and then there's no certainty or guarantee that you're even going to make a lot of money, I had to go right into just working. So I'd go back and open up a landscaping firm. um So what do we do then to tell people to chase their passion? There's we're not I'm not Sam. It's a question. It's like hey would your advice be to chase your passion or not? Yes, I don't know if, so some people say chase your passion, the money will come.

16:05 I don't know if I believe that this wasn't my passion. I chased it to build something to help me survive. And now it's become my passion. So you don't necessarily have to be passionate about something. You can become passionate about it. I'm a true believer of that. And I don't know if everybody's passion is going to make them money, but there are strategies to make money. And so you're gonna have to do things that maybe are counterintuitive or you don't like doing if you want to be a business owner and if you want to be successful. We all have to do the things that we're uncomfortable with and get out of our comfort zone. And it's usually the things that we're the least comfortable with and we really don't wanna do that are most important things to do. So passion helps to get over that.

16:47 Give me a strategy then to make money. strategy to make money, I would say you have to have a market that wants what you're selling. product market fit. Yes. Yes. And don't worry about competition. My goodness. Everybody with a computer can be an accountant and they are these days. If there's a barrier to entry, certainly helps, but then you will also have that barrier to overcome. And usually the barrier to entry is either going to be education or money. um So that could cost you a lot of money and you're starting.

17:28 below zero at that point to overcome whatever you've had to do in that barrier of entry. So you do have to consider that. But if there's no barrier of entry, meaning you could just pick up a computer, learn a couple of things, and become a bookkeeper, which a lot of people do, then there's a lot of competition. But then you have to, the only way to be successful in that is to really understand your value and understand what problems there are out there so that you're a solution for them. So you are a financial coach. What does your brain tell you that responsibility and that role is? That responsibility is a couple of things.

18:09 I truly believe that a financial coach or uh it's a fractional CFO, everything is led by the numbers. The numbers just tell us a story of what's happening and, and give us a measurement of success. It just gives us data. That's all it is, right? It's just data. And, uh, there's a couple of things that go into that. The numbers are really important. The data is really important. The trend is really important, but also we talk about mindset. And we talk about focus because as a business owner, you are getting pulled in a million different directions and understanding and validating that this is going to be the most important step that you need to do to make the biggest impact and having someone that helps to focus you in and pull really back in to do that and maybe do the uncomfortable thing like reaching out to people.

18:57 That's where the coaching comes from also. So you know, lot of therapy, what are you talking about? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so you invoked a fractional CFO, right? Cause that that's what you are in a combination of financial coach and all the other things building your business. Give us a simplistic way to understand for the business owner that's struggling with books and thinking they need some accounting help. What is a fractional CFO? Because they're probably not making enough right now. to pay a full-time CFO. That's a very expensive role inside of a company. And then what is a fractional CFO? And then we can talk about, then how do we know when we need to go from a fractional CFO to a true in-house on-site CFO?

19:40 Yes. So let's actually start with the true uh full-time onsite CFO. A business that's getting over 10 million in gross revenue, uh obviously it's going to also depend on your profit because it's a very expensive position. But that's when we start getting close to wanting to have an in-house financial department, including at that point probably a controller. And as you get over 15 or 20 million, you want to definitely have a CFO. because that person is going to get you to that next level. The problem with being a CEO or being the owner is that you can't do everything and you will have to do everything in the beginning, but as you grow and scale, there's gonna be people between you and your other people that you have now to keep building you up and getting you to that next level.

20:26 In the interim, because not all of us can go from zero to 10 million overnight, and some of us never do, it's a very, very, very small percentage that do, But in the interim, you have someone that's on a fractional level, meaning that it's not a full-time employee. It's not an employee at all. It's a contractor, so you don't have to pay benefits or taxes. And instead of paying an over $200,000 to $250,000 salary and up for a CFO, you're now paying a teeny tiny percentage of that. When does it make sense to hire a fractional CFO? that depends a lot on where you're headed.

21:09 So I'd say if you're at a million dollars and up, that's always a good time. If you are smaller than that, but you are scaling, then you can hire sooner. So we're actually seeing people hiring us sooner and sooner, earlier and earlier. I have a couple of clients in a $350,000 gross revenue range. And then we also have clients up through 35 million in gross revenue range too. The great thing about having a fractional CFO that you don't have when you're hiring someone in-house is that they get to see a lot of different companies in different industries and they start seeing patterns of what works. Instead of just being stuck in one industry and one company for multiple years, we can start seeing what's happening in the economy and the mindsets and the strategies that are working across multiple people in multiple industries.

22:00 And so we start working on those patterns. And I think that's what makes us better and better and better at what we do. On your internal meetings for your team, um are there some consistent themes about mistakes that you see business owners continuously making? Yes, first of all, hiring up uh the problem with hiring a bad bookkeeper or someone that doesn't really know how to do bookkeeping well is that the business owner doesn't know. They don't know how to read their financials, so they won't know the financials are wrong. that is the foundation of everything. If you don't have good financials or up to date consistently up to date financials, you can't make decisions. You just can't. You're kind of making decisions on a hunch rather than on data.

22:44 And, and as we know, hunches can be really emotional. they, um, you'll, you'll look at the cash in the bank and you think you're doing great. And then in a week, your cash is all gone. You're like, happened? That's not a good indicator. Um, so there's no planning involved. Um, so that's one of the things is, is not having a good or consistent bookkeeping. Um, another thing is, I think entrepreneurs or business owners don't understand that they're that profit and cash are two different things. Um, they, they do impact one another, but they're completely different. So you can show like a $200,000 profit and only have 5,000 in the bank. And you're like, what happened?

23:25 And that is a consistent question that I have of like, we're showing that we're profitable and I all these taxes now, but I don't have any cash. And that could be for several reasons. Usually it's because it's not on the profit and loss. Um, so the cash. is actually showing on the cash flow statement or on the balance sheet. I know we might be getting a little boring right now. No, go into it. Yeah. But basically that's like, you have gold credit card debt? Do you have a bunch of loans and you're paying principal on those loans? um Are you taking distributions out? um And so all of those little things add up or personal expenses even that are going through the business, all those little things add up and that's where your cash is going. And then cash flow.

24:07 it's actually something you might have more control over than you think. That's basically the money going in as opposed to the money going out. So what you want to do is improve or increase the money coming in your revenue. Can you get that faster? Can you make it as a subscription? Can you have, you know, do on receipt? Can you just take their payment method and charge them when you're done? Like how can you improve your cash coming in and then your cash going out? How can you slow that down? And that doesn't necessarily mean um decreasing your expenses but sometimes that means can you have terms with some of your vendors that you can slow down cash so you have an opportunity to pay a little bit later or instead of paying something off right away using debt to your advantage.

24:49 So there's like a lot and that's why it's so confusing. There's a lot of like little leavers that just you could just tweak that lever just a tiny bit and it'll make a really big difference. wild, it? Because you can be talking about the same money coming in and all this kind of goes into cash flow management, does it not? cash flow management and then looking at one of the other biggest things that I see all the time is too much labor cost and the revenue can't sustain it. That happens over and over and over again. What happens there? How's the labor cost? How's that become outpaced on the revenue coming in? ah That is going to be for several different reasons. Reason number one, your pricing is not in scope.

25:29 So your pricing is not good enough. It's not high enough. Maybe you're doing extra things that weren't even in the engagement. Maybe you're not charging enough for whatever you're doing. Maybe you're selling something, you're not charging enough. You have to look at your gross profit. there's a lot of... you start at the top line, like is it a pricing problem? Or maybe you don't have enough revenue, enough clients coming in. Um, that's, that could be one of the problems. Another problem could be not having the right fit in the, in the right seat. Uh, people talk about that a lot, but as a small business owner, you're, you have to, you don't have an, you know, you can't just hire people because it was your, um, son's girlfriend and you're trying to help them out or something like that.

26:13 You have to hire people that are extremely efficient, really good at what they do and very productive. And so if that. If your pricing is good, but your labor cost is too high, that could be an efficiency problem, even if they're salaried. So it doesn't matter if they're hourly employees or salaried. If they're not getting the job done quickly, accurately, and efficiently, that's going to drive up your labor cost also, because they can't get the job done as quickly as someone else. So those are just a couple of things that we look at. And we're not human resources specialists, and that's definitely not something that I want to get into. But we can see in the numbers that there's a problem here and that's where that conversation starts. And through that conversation is where we start getting into the nitty gritty of what is actually happening.

27:00 How far out have you found that forecasting is really practical and pragmatic? Like how far out? We have these quotes of three years, five years, seven years, but man, a lot of things change and they change fast. I think three years, five years, seven years is good to know like what's your goal and your stretch goal. I eh don't know if you can actually forecast that far out. It depends on the industry. Like if you're in manufacturing and maybe that is the, or if you have a uh sales cycle that takes a year to close, then you probably want to forecast further out. Most of us have a very quick sales cycle and we don't have manufacturing that we have to wait for. uh So. I would say forecasting for 12 months is probably sufficient.

27:43 What we want to see is in three to six months, if something happens, like you lose your biggest client or you hire this new person, what happens in three to six months that either improves or decreases your profit or your cash so that now you have time that if you can see you run out of cash, now you have time to make changes before you run out of cash. How often these plans you put together with your clients, how often do they follow the path and they come to fruition the way that they were thought or intended? think it depends on the person. So we've had where we have a plan and the plan is you need to hire because you can't scale and you told me you want to scale.

28:31 like if you're telling me you want to do this, that's going to be the plan. So we meet every single month and you're not hiring and you're not scaling and you have all these excuses. I'm going to call you out on that or my CFO is going to call you out on that. And is that what you really want? So there's sometimes that, but If they're following the plan, tell me, I want to grow a million dollars next year. We plan that out, taking into consideration any kind of seasonality. uh You know, what is the average client cost? How many clients do they need? How can we make it more predictable? What does the marketing look like? Are we getting a return? How many people are they talking to? How many leads do they have? How many are they closing? Like those are all numbers and all data. So we can actually plan that out.

29:13 And then every month we look at it. And if they tell me, I want to have an average of 25 calls a month and they only hit 20. Now we know that we need to go down the line and look at the marketing and see what's going on there or down the line and see like maybe that is seasonal and next month they're going to have 35 calls because it will fluctuate. But overall, it's really been helpful. We had a client that lost over a million dollars and I think it was like 1.5 million dollars like overnight in business because one of their bigger clients merged with another client and they left them as a marketing agency. And so the plan was, what do we need to do to do damage control?

29:54 Because yes, you can make up a million dollars, but it's going to take a while. And right now you've got all these people that you're paying and all these expenses that you have. And how do we do damage control so you don't end up being in the hole? $120,000 a month service service income just going away Going away. And the biggest thing is that was a uh marketing agency. So was a lot of labor. We had to go through every single person and cut them and have a skeleton crew because you can't hire for what you want to be in six months. You have to be the business that you are today with taking into consideration where you want to be in six months. And that's really painful.

30:35 And that's why like people need a lot of support and things will fluctuate over time. So. there's going to be different things that pop up that people need help with and support with. So you chose one of the most difficult things, if not the most difficult avenue to help and work with business owners on. Probably, I'll tell you why I chose it. So I remember the story, I was like, yeah, I can do bookkeeping. I didn't know how to do bookkeeping. I sold my first client. I sent out like a LinkedIn message and someone responded and I talked to him and he closed. And then I was like, shoot, now I need to learn bookkeeping. I went on YouTube and I taught myself bookkeeping.

31:16 He's still a client. One of my favorite clients still. And what... uh happened was when I was doing all those sales calls, again, product market fit, right? I'm asking these questions, you know, what do they do to evaluate profitability? Do they have any financials? And they're like, well, the bookkeeping is, you know, great, I need that, but I don't understand what to do when I have my financials. And so that was a recurring question over and over again, like I need to improve my profit. I don't have enough cash. I need to know what I need to do. Like when I, when can I hire someone? What does that look like? And so all these questions kept coming up. in 2021, January, 2021, so two years exactly from the day that I got the first client, I rolled out the CFO engagement.

32:05 And the way I learned was through my own business. I truly believe in hiring coaches and masterminds. And I do that all throughout my life because if you want to get from point A to point B, the fastest way to get there is to have someone to show you. Um, and that's what the CFO engagement also does. So I have my own masterminds also that I go to, um, learning a lot, reading a lot, uh, and, building my own business as well. Um, and was I great in 2021 when I first started? No, but I still was better than who was hiring me. Cause I was really focused on that. Um, and now, and now I'd say we're actually really great at it. It's been, you know, we're five years in, uh, four years and four years.

32:49 Yeah. you, there's these, all these stats about businesses surviving beyond three and beyond five, you get over five. You're pretty much here to stay. Yes, even though you might not feel like it sometimes, but yes. The good news is, is you actually have a, a, a true choice then. Yes, it's no longer a matter of I need to make money because I need to survive. Now it's I want to build this because we're making a difference. There you go. Are there times when you don't accept and hire a client? Yes, if they're really rude or unprofessional, that's happened really rare, but it has happened, I'd say less than 1%.

33:30 Usually we've already hired them, didn't know we gave them a chance and then they're just screaming at us. It's not worth it to do that. With taking into consideration that most people that start businesses are gonna be a very high A type. person that's gonna be kind of emotional, taxes and money is very triggering, they need to get things done and they're gonna be a little bit short sometimes. So that's fine, I mean, like that happens um and they're gonna be more assertive than the average person. And so we already, know that, but someone that's really rude or mean or uses foul language is like screaming at us like, you know, life's too short. Go find someone else. go through that.

34:10 Um, when, when you have friends that you take the CFO hat off and the financial coach, financial coach hat off if you can, and you go to one shore, you're having a glass of wine and they ask you, they say, Hey, I really want to start a business. What advice do you have for me? They're not asking you just as the CFO brain or just, but just in general, like, should I? A hundred percent entrepreneurship is not for everybody. So I would say first, you're going to be making less money and working more than you ever have in your entire life for probably the first one to two years.

34:51 Uh, you have to be come almost obsessed with it to survive. And, um, and you have to keep learning and you have to get really, really, really good at sales. And. What occurs in my brain though, is that how many people do you interact with? Doesn't matter if they're running their own business or if they're an employee, how many people want to improve and change their life? What percentage do you think? I think it's a very low percentage. Now it feels like it's a higher percentage because my life revolves around working with business owners and entrepreneurs and masterminds.

35:35 So they do want to improve because they're in those groups. But before I became an entrepreneur, I felt like I was the outlier and no one got me. And people were like, you're so intense. Why are you so intense all the time? It's so annoying. I can't help that I'm intense because if I'm going to do something, I'm going to be all in. But what do you know what that percentage is? I think it's really low. Yeah, I don't know. I just wanted to get, know, your perspective from all these different people in different places and we're all in different locales. I just know that I see there's a lot of people that they feel stuck. Just in life, right? And I think you've running, but they feel stuck. They feel like they don't have the opportunity that they wish they had. Um, they do look around and they, they're comparing themselves and they think other people are living better lives than them.

36:19 So I'm not saying that they're willing to do the necessary work to change your life, but that was just, that's, that's interesting that. How many people actually think that they want to improve their lives? You don't think it's a big percentage. I don't think it's a big percentage. think a lot of people don't they have excuses or stories that they tell themselves. So when I look at, I just came back from my mastermind. I go every once in a while to their in-person training and they have it up on the screen that 95 % of business owners won't double year over year. And why, and then there's like this huge list of excuses. have children that I need to spend time with.

36:59 have a spouse. I have to, I have health issues. I don't have the money. I don't have the time. I don't know how to do this. Yeah. I didn't have any advantage either, to be honest. None of us have an advantage. have, some of us are a little bit better at some things than others, but most of us don't really have any advantages. Certainly not across the board. And the difference is that the person who gets level. is uh they're more self-aware, I think. They don't allow those stories to hold them back. They know that they are the only common denominator in every choice that they've ever made in their life. And they are very consistent um and have maybe even a tougher skin with uh getting yelled at, getting nos all the time, having to figure things out.

37:51 So none of us really truly have an advantage. And if you think someone did, they actually did not have that advantage. They just kept trying and trying and going and then iterating, right? Like looking at what they did and looking at without judgment and understanding how can they improve that. So good. So tell us who, um, Natalia's ideal client is as you're growing your business. And if you say you don't have an ideal client, we're for all of them. Okay. Right. But who, uh, did you give a high five to your team and you're like, all right, we're executing our goals. Who's your ideal client? So for bookkeeping anybody, right? Everybody needs bookkeeping. For fractional CFO services, I would say typically if you're at half a million and up, definitely if you're at a million and up and if you're planning on scaling, you really want to, scaling, not just scaling, but improving.

38:42 uh Let's call it improving. Improving your profit, understanding your numbers at a much deeper level and understanding. what next steps you want to take every single month in your business uh and having someone holding you accountable. So if that's you, we would love to work with you and really help you to understand and move forward faster. And honestly, some people hire coaches and us together because we're a little bit different. We are strictly very, very uh numbers oriented. We're looking at the money, right? We're looking at the numbers. whereas other coaches don't look at the numbers as deeply as we do. um But it's, yeah, I think that any of those would be great.

39:28 What's your moment you're going to leave us with? What big statement you're like, I'm going to go on this podcast and I want to leave them with this idea of you, the human, your business. Like what's your, what's your final message that if it's the last time we'd hear from you, even though some are probably going to call you. Yes. So first I wanted to tell your audience that we do have a special page just for them. So we'll leave that. I'll send that to you so you have that in your notes. Awesome. To check that out because there's some giveaways there also and how to get in touch with us. But we actually talked about this before we started recording was that quote that I read as a child that still sticks with me. And I don't remember the exact words, but it was something to the effect of if only the birds with the best voices sang, the forest would be silent.

40:11 And so You don't have to be fantastic about uh or like the expert in what you do. You become the expert over time and then just do it. It's action. It's just keep doing it and keep moving forward. Even if it's just one tiny step ahead, don't get overwhelmed. Break it up into little steps and just keep moving forward. Thank you for that message. Have an awesome day. Thanks for joining us. Natalia Zacharin. We're going to tag in, give you all the love and all the things, but thanks for doing what you do and spending a little bit of time to make us a little bit better today. Thank you so much for having me, Mark. was really nice to get to know you. Thank you.