 Happy Thursday everyone. Welcome to Geeks R Sexy. I'm Jason LaDuke from Evil Genius Leadership Consultants. Here with you on the fourth Thursday of the month taking over from Michelle Davis on the Geeks R Sexy show. We've got three wonderful guests in a panel discussion for you today. We're gonna jump right into that. But before I talk to our first guest Ari, I want to talk about our sponsor 5amglobal. They do a lot of great different stuff. You may know them as a marketing and PR company, but something that they're really great as is event production. So if you are having an event or you need some help putting together an event because you feel like you need to do an event, connect with Sean Willis and our team at 5amglobal to help you line up your speakers. They'll help you do your marketing. They'll help you get your word out about your event, but connect with 5amglobal if you're doing an event and need some help with your event production. Now that we're through the formalities, our first guest is Ari Handley. She's originally from Kansas and a graduate of the University of Kansas. What's interesting about her because this is a business show about Las Vegas, so already on two counts here, it didn't make a cut. She actually has a degree in Spanish language and literature and I want to learn a little bit more about that when we get to that part of the show, but you're here in Las Vegas now doing business development for our company called Now CFO. Did I get that right? Because I've been doing it backwards all week in my world. So welcome to the show. Tell us all about Now CFO and how you ended up here in Las Vegas working for them. Now CFO started out in 2005 in Salt Lake City and it is an outsourced operational accounting firm. So we helped small to large businesses with anything from bookkeeping all the way to CFO strategizing on an hourly basis with no contracts, which is something that's very different. We're really just helping out the businesses because they don't have the budget to actually hire a full-time bookkeeper or full-time CFO or controller and we just want to make sure that they have that help still while they're growing their business. Yeah, I think that's really important because the traditional way of doing things is put our firm on retainer and we'll handle all your stuff for you whether that takes us two hours a month to do your stuff because it's really simple or whether that takes us five hundred hours a month and so what you guys have done is created something really scalable for someone who may be a solopreneur or someone who's got a pretty complicated small to medium-sized business with lots of moving pieces and one of your core principles at Now CFO and I love this when we sat down and had coffee a couple weeks ago but also as I was reviewing the literature on the website about Now CFO is that financial visibility equals business decisions and how do you help with financial visibility but how does that help your clients, the business owners you help, how does that help them make smarter decisions? Yeah, so a lot of the clients that we help you know we go in there we ask them about you know simple questions like how much revenue you're making sometimes they don't even know how much revenue they're making which is scary because you know if you don't know how much money is coming in then you don't really know how much money you're able to spend to keep growing your business. So how we bring that visibility is making sure first that they're bookkeeping it's done correctly so they're everyday accounting is done correctly as well as bringing them cash forecast so that they can actually just look at it every day on dashboard as well and as well as that we make sure that they're using the right accounting systems because that's another thing that we see is that we go into a business we ask them okay well where's this and they go well it's in this accounting but then we keep this other thing over here and we're pulling our information from this Excel sheet and then we mix it all up and we're like you know there's one system that can do everything and then you can actually have more visibility over your financials without having to look at so many different places and make sure that you're looking and it's there is one system and it's not your online banking you know bank account statement or Excel or Excel Excel is a great product but it doesn't do that you know you gotta know what you're doing to use Excel but I run into that with clients in my business all the time where they don't know their numbers and we talk about how important is to know your numbers in business they don't know their numbers the only number they know is their bank balance at the end of every day when they look and and that's a number that's good to know but it doesn't tell you the whole story about your business and I love the focus you guys have on revenue and starting with let's let's understand your bookkeeping let's understand what's coming in and what's going out the gazintas and gazadas as we would have said in flight testing yeah and and and then figure out what comes next yeah so one of the biggest things that we do also is bring them a 13 week like forecasting because of 13 weeks a lot can happen but sometimes we see hey in 13 weeks you're actually gonna be out of cash did you know that and we bring this up to them because one of the scariest things as an owner of a business is not being able to pay your yourself as well as your employees so we try to make sure that we bring those things up to them so that 13 weeks before that happens they can start making sure that they fix that before it is actually a problem for them okay as well and and so what are some of the services you offer that help them do that help them make those decisions help them look at the future yeah so we have a controller and then CFO level so controller is going to give you those dashboards so that you can actually have information in front of you and they will explain it to you because we know a lot of people go into business and they don't have that financial background so we want to make sure that they actually know how to read those statements as well because hey if we're not the ones helping you that day we still want you to be knowledgeable so we let them know how to read those statements and then also they get to talk to a person that has about 10 to 15 years at least an experience of being a CFO and other large company and they get to talk to them and they get to you know put together what their goals are so we like to ask where do you see this company going where do you want it to be going and then we put a plan together with them to make sure that they're hitting those goals I think that's great too because a lot of business owners aren't thinking about their exit down the road or being bought by another company or doing or doing an IPO they just have something that they're good at and they want to share that with the world may want to make some money doing that it's for a lot of businesses owners are but you're helping them you're giving them that advice of what do you want to do with this someday because there's different paths to that and you guys can help them do that all right so let's get let's get to it how does having a degree in Spanish and Spanish language help you with what you're doing you've had a wide varied career of doing business but that's a lot of what you've done how does that help you with business and help you with with the bringing in business for CFO and for now CFO yeah definitely so I am Spanish was my first language I spoke it since I was a baby and I didn't know how to read or write it so that was a really big challenge for me and I knew I wanted to be in the business world but I couldn't put that on my resume I didn't know how to read or write so that's why I made that my degree but then I've worked in many companies where they weren't really focusing on you know the demographic that only spoke Spanish and only felt comfortable also speaking Spanish so you know there's a lot of people who live here in Vegas who know how to speak English but when they're talking about technical stuff like their finances and things like that they're more comfortable talking in Spanish and that's where I bring in you know the help to bring in clients and helping them out because I want them to know that there is someone out there that is able to help them in their language which is Spanish sometimes which is great especially here in the Southwest and I think that's something that's happening all over the country but here in the Southwest we have a lot of we have a lot of people who their first language even though they might speak English really well their first language is Spanish yes so that's great so all right so now CFO who are you looking to connect with how can we help you yeah definitely so I'm really wanting to connect with you know people who are wanting to build a business for themselves because I feel like a lot of people have that passion and they want to help people with that so they build that business I want to help them build a great business that's financially stable and that is has a plan to grow and keep growing as well as you know those medium businesses also that are hitting that plateau that they keep making this revenue over and over again and they're looking to see how they can make more so we love to strategize with them and see how we can help them get off that plateau so that they can you know expand their business and grow it maybe by expanding it to another location or just growing it in that one location but maybe adding some more products to it okay great financial information to help make smart decisions yes right so if you're looking for some help with your finances or you're looking to grow maybe you fit that plateau or you want to grow and you want to do it sustainably that's what I've heard in that it's not just growth for growth sake it's growth sustainably for a successful business five ten twenty years down the road connect up with Ari how can our viewers connect with you um either by calling me through my cell phone which I mean I can give up here at 702-960-6212 and that's my direct line for my cell phone for now CFO or through my email address was just a hand leak at now CFO.com and we'll get all that up on the show notes for you on the website so you guys don't have to remember that so thank you for being here we're gonna have Ari back in about half an hour for our panel discussion and we're gonna bring Jess Haran in in just a second so stick with us Jess Haran from Original Cocktail Club is gonna be here I'm Jason Leduc this is Geeks are Sexy stay right here