Speaker 2 (00:01)
Welcome Gershon to another episode here with growth through positivity. We’re so excited to be at this point already and have you on our show. We got to know each other a little bit off line and here we are bringing your services and your expertise to all of our followers on LinkedIn. So Gershon, introduce who you are and what is it that you do.

Speaker 1 (00:24)
All right, happy to be here. Thanks, Ellie. Thanks for having me on the show. ⁓ I’m the founder of Imperial Advisory. We’re a fractional CFO and financial consulting firm. CFO stands for Chief Financial Officer. And what we do is we go into businesses that need help on the CFO side. So we sometimes work for CFOs. We’re building up that side of the business. And the core of our business is

working as a part-time CFO for businesses that don’t have one.

Speaker 2 (00:56)
Very good, very good. So I want to touch on a point in regards to obviously who would be your ideal customer, but I also want to touch on a point in the sense of fractional. When would someone take a fractional or why would he take someone that’s fractional? And maybe we should explain to the audience a little bit of what is a fractional.

Speaker 1 (01:17)
Sure. So let’s start with explaining what fractional is. Fractional is similar to part-time. So it’s you get a fraction of a CFO. You get a CFO, a highly qualified, in our case, highly qualified, experienced CFO who’s been a CFO for a long time. And you just get them for part of the time. They’re often

available. Obviously they have multiple clients. They’re not necessarily available every minute of every day, but they’re available throughout the week. Even if you only generally work with them on Mondays, they’ll typically be available throughout the week. And you you have a CFO, you’re just the size business doesn’t necessarily need that as a full time role. And so you get to take advantage of high level of expertise for much lower cost.

Speaker 2 (02:12)
Good. So I think you cut out a little bit of this. I’m just going to repeat what he said. A fractional is not that you’re getting lesser of a quality, but it’s just that you don’t need the full time. So instead of being 40 plus hours a week, you’re running a smaller operation or a smaller project and you want someone to step in and guide you and help you specific to this person’s expertise. That’s what Gershon is able to offer. So Gershon, I know that you have two parts of it in the sense of the fractional CFO.

and some other roles where you come in in regards to financial budgeting or forecasting and projections. Let’s touch on that a little bit in regards to when would someone want to use those services and how important are those services.

Speaker 1 (03:00)
Sure. So In a very large company, you’ll have a CFO, the chief financial officer role will be a full-time role, but that role will typically be managing multiple departments, multiple department heads. there’s accounting, which deals with a lot of making sure you have the data, making sure it’s accurate. There’s treasury. It’s a whole function that deals with cash management, dealing with investors, banks, et cetera.

you’ll often have an FP &A department, Financial Planning and Analysis Department, which really ties finance, accounting, even operations, ties it all together into meaningful analysis, planning, et cetera. And when you get to companies that are a little bit smaller, let’s say a $50 million company, might have a full-time CFO, but might have nobody working for them doing financial planning and analysis. That’s where

our financial planning and analysis offering comes in. Even if there is a full-time CFO, often they’ll benefit from speaking with us and hiring us to help, whether it’s with building the function for them, for a growing company that wants to have the function, ⁓ or just doing it for them on a part-time basis. Maybe it’s not a full-time role, it’s something that they need, that’s where our financial planning and analysis offering can come in and help.

Speaker 2 (04:26)
Excellent. And I just want to share here with our audience. Many of you know already a new career that I’ve joined as an EOS implementer. So I get to actually talk about this planning and all of these needs with CFOs or sometimes the visionary in regards to when it comes to clarifying their vision. You know, they have this great idea of doing something or getting somewhere. And this planning and forecasting is such an important piece.

of getting clarity to really understand what is it that I’m going to need in order to achieve that. And that’s where it comes in. ⁓ When I see in my companies that I’m working with and so many people that I talk to. that’s excellent. Very, very important for people to realize the role aspect within the function of the CFO. You may have a great CFO, but he’s overwhelmed with the day to day when it comes to budgeting, forecasting and the analysis stuff.

That’s where they can reach out to you. tell me something that the audience would be wowed in the sense that you have overcome in the growth of your company. I know that you had a past career, you went on your own. Tell me a little bit of how that happened. I believe that you’re a team of six or eight right now and you have a partner involved. Tell us how that came about a little bit in the sense of the growth.

Speaker 1 (05:55)
⁓ okay. I mean, I used to work in the bond business. I was both an investment banker and I worked at a couple of issuers and I used to get consulting work on the side. And at a certain point it was clear that my job wasn’t going to work out. And I really enjoyed the consulting work instead of going to look for another role in the bond world where I had a lot of experience. decided to go and try and build up the consulting side.

⁓ initially it was working with family friends, friends from Yeshiva, people who had businesses that needed help. And what I really enjoyed about working with these closely held businesses rather than let’s say billion dollar bond deals was that there was nobody else helping them. Like they were paying me, they were paying me out of their next family vacation because they saw that what I was doing was making a big difference in their business. I saw it anyway, I really.

enjoyed it and I decided I wanted to build it up. So with my wife’s blessing, I decided to start marketing and you took the leap. instead of going and looking for another corporate job, you know, with a clear defined path, eventually I met pretty quickly. Actually, I met a fellow who became my partner and he was a

Speaker 2 (07:03)
as they call it.

Speaker 1 (07:24)
tired CFO, was around 60 years old and repeat that.

Speaker 2 (07:30)
You cut out repeat how many how many years were you in business when you took on that partner?

Speaker 1 (07:37)
So I met my partner a few months after starting and he became a partner probably a year and a half or two years in. We worked together a little bit first then he became, he is no longer here but ⁓ I have a new partner and we’re still friends with the old partner and we ultimately built up and now we’ve got six CFOs, one high level FP &A person who’s actually my other partner building up the other side of the business.

Speaker 2 (08:01)
Very nice, very nice. So tell us a little bit of where you see your practice in three years. What’s your piece of your vision in three years from today?

Speaker 1 (08:13)
In three years from today, I see us as having a much larger team working not just with CFOs, not just with CEOs, but also with a lot of CFOs. see that side of the business growing. And also I see us being a platform where CFOs who want to build out their business can join us. Whereas right now we have CFOs and

We bring a lot of the business to our CFOs. The firm brings a lot of business. think in order to grow, we’re going to have to get other CFOs who have books of business or who are looking to grow their own book and have the means and the method, but want to join a team. I think that’s going to be a big part of our growth going forward.

Speaker 2 (08:56)
Can I ask you to touch a little bit on the culture in regards to what is it or who is it that you’re looking for? Who would be that perfect candidate in regards to culture, not skill?

Speaker 1 (09:07)
Sure. ⁓ The culture is really a few things. It’s help first. We like helping people. We like helping our clients. We help our clients with all sorts of things. We’re not going to be their head of sales, but if they need a head of sales, we want to be the ones they call and ask for that introduction. I do a lot of networking. have other people on the team who do networking. we want to be able to bring all sorts of resources to our clients, personal.

business, whatever they need. So we really try to help our clients a lot. It’s more than just finance, even though that’s our main one. That’s why they hire us, but that’s not all they get two not necessarily in this order. ⁓ honesty, people who are honest, you know, say the truth. It’s important for us. It’s important for our clients. It’s not always comfortable to hear the truth, but if people won’t tell you the truth, how are you supposed to improve? ⁓ and another thing that we have,

in our company that that’s very important is we respect people’s lives. We want our clients to have lives. want our teammates to have lives. Work has to get done. And sometimes there’s deadlines. And I’m not saying no one ever works late. But I certainly do and have. But I don’t advertise it. I send out my emails 8 AM the next morning. I tell Google, send out my, because I don’t want, if I’m working at night,

That happens to be what has to happen today. But I don’t want the pressure to be on other people. we try to spread that. We want people to enjoy life, enjoy their family, enjoy all the other things there are. It’s not just about business.

Speaker 2 (10:47)
Excellent, excellent. So Gershon just touched on three of their core values, which is their culture. And if you find yourself to be the right fit, reach out to him. If you’re in the CFO or looking to become a fractional and joining his network, number one, number two, I can vouch for Gershon that he has that help first because we met on LinkedIn and then we mutually understood that my services, your services can benefit each other’s

Clients or people down the road little did I know that I’m gonna launch this type of podcast But that’s where I got to see that help first ⁓ Culture and core value of yours so definitely something that I can Recognize and others should recognize as well. So here we are at the end of the podcast quick three questions ⁓ What was the best book you read?

Speaker 1 (11:42)
⁓ Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference is a really great book that I, I enjoy and I go back to it and stories are great. I listened to his podcasts as well.

Speaker 2 (11:55)
Okay, very good. we’ll let the audience know now that there’s a good possibility that we’re to put together a workshop with Chris Voss coming up in March of 2023. So when we’re talking about sometimes you have to do long-term predictions, we’re already in the works. Hopefully everything works out. So great choice of a book. I read it as well. It’s a phenomenal, phenomenal book, not just for salespeople, but CEOs and COOs in regards to really understanding

⁓ human energy and negotiations and all of that. So I’m not going to go through the whole book in two seconds. What was your longest vacation in your current ⁓ company that you were able to take to be disconnected?

Speaker 1 (12:39)
So about about a year ago, I went on a family trip with my wife’s family. We went away for about two weeks. I did take my laptop with me and I had a couple of meetings, but I was I was not working most of the time. I wasn’t I wasn’t working if I needed to take care of something I would but I would say that that that was a success. We’re not we’re not all the way there yet. But the fact that the business ran work happened sales calls all sorts of stuff. ⁓

think that that was a very good thing. I’m very happy.

Speaker 2 (13:12)
Excellent, excellent. Thank you so much for coming on as a guest. If anybody that’s watching this podcast would like to be a guest, please reach out to me right here on LinkedIn and I’ll be happy to get you on and have you be a part of it. For all those that have listened, please share it, comment, like it, spread the word. Let’s spread the positivity. Let’s help each other, get clients, engage with clients, offer our services to others so that we can grow and be positive.

Thank you so much Gershon for coming on. We look forward to having you back.

Speaker 1 (13:46)
Thanks, Sally.

Speaker 2 (13:47)
Be well.