Andrew Tucker from Practice Executive, one our Virtual CFO Playbook Course participants started his Virtual CFO practice from scratch and grew his clientele using the Summit CPA framework. In this episode, we sit down with our host and Director for Accounting/Virtual CFO, Jamie Nau and our CEO and Co-founder, Jody Grunden to discuss how he started, how we utilized his learnings and what challenges he faced and what helped him achieve his goals in a very short span of time.
"Back in November I was able to unveil practice executive, which is really something I created almost entirely from scratch based on the Summit Model and what I've been able to experience from you guys over the last few months." - Andrew Tucker
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Jamie Nau:. Hello everybody. Welcome to today's podcast. I'm Jamie Nau and joined once again by Jody Grunden. Our guest today is Andrew Tucker from Practice Executive. Very excited to have him here. Normally we wait for our course participants to graduate before we bring them on, but Jody's wanted to get Andrew on here. He's so interesting. It's so fascinating and he's really fun to talk to. So let's get him on here even though he's not all the way through., Andrew, I'd love for you to kind of introduce yourself and start a little bit about your background and kind of how you found our course and a bit about your company.
Andrew Tucker: Absolutely.
Jody Grunden: Before you do you have to tell people about your Harry Potter mark. He has like a big, huge line from the top of his forehead to his nose.
Andrew Tucker: I wish I had a great story. So everybody knows I play basketball a lot in the mornings. A scuffle broke out. But, no. My wife one morning before work a couple of days ago, she was like, oh, we have to vacuum behind my daughter's bed. I'm like, I have to get to a meeting as I'm rushing and try to move her bed out and I'm pushing the bed out. And all of a sudden, she has a floating shelf that I hit my head right smack in the middle of my forehead, and anybody that knows the forehead, it bleeds like crazy. So if you're on video and see this big mark on my head, that's exactly what happened. But I really appreciate you guys having me. But like you said it, my name is Andrew Tucker and I've been working specifically with dentists since 2014. So, it's kind of a different a unique background. I actually started law rather than accounting. So that was kind of where I first got my training and came out of law school in 2013. The joke I always make with my clients is that I didn't need much practice to be good at it. So I didn't practice for long. I shifted into financial planning and advising with a group that kind of had a national reputation with dentists and kind of on a bluff to get the job I said look, I really want a CPA. And I hadn't really thought a whole lot about it, but I said, you know, I wouldn't be opposed to it. Like I just knew in North Carolina, you have to be supervised by a CPA in order to be able to become one. So I did it and I think it's been helpful in my journey of being able to create a virtual CFO from that didn't come in with an accounting mentality. From day one I kind of knew what the tricks or the ways that I kind of came up with shortcuts to understand things that I didn't understand before I understood accounting and dusted a lot of those things off for my clients. So I parted ways with that firm back in 2019 and just due to some contractual reasons had to lay low for a little while. But back in November all of that was lifted and I was able to unveil Practice Executive, which is really something I created almost entirely from scratch based on the Summit model and what I've been able to experience from you guys over the last few months.
Jody Grunden: So it sounds like a true entrepreneur, right? You started in law, you went from a law firm to kind of a consulting thing another firm. Then you did your own practice a little bit, and then you came in and started this brand new practice in November and started it from scratch. Zero clients. Tell me your story from zero clients to now. I mean, it's only a couple months ago, so it's got to be a rough going I would think, or maybe not.
Andrew Tucker: Well, I had zero clients when we started, but I had a good contingency of people who said I don't know what's in store for you next, but I've enjoyed working with you. I feel like you've got a lot of answers conversations with your evaluator. We can slow play it. We can see where things go. So I am so blessed that I had a good, strong core group of people who whenever the time was right I was able to say, here's what we're doing. And thankfully, I had, you know, a good blueprint, a good framework for what it was going to look like that whenever I was able to give them the introduction, they looked at it and said, this is perfect. This is what you should have been doing all along. So I was able to start, we kind of made the promise that we'd have five spots because we knew onboarding would be intense and we would just kind of cycle five at a time until we found our capacity. I'd given myself 10 weeks to fill those first five spots and we filled them in the first two weeks. So very fortunate. It definitely helps a lot that there was a good plan in place. But I can't take full credit.
Jamie Nau: We’ve interviewed a lot of CFOs, both to hire at Summit and then within the course. I think you have two things going for you. One is a vertical, which I know we've talked a lot about on this podcast before and how you really have that area of expertise that you can come in and no one knows this area. Like we know this area and I think too, the thing you have is that you have that background outside of finance. I think that's really helpful for someone to come in and be like, hey, I am an accountant. I am a CPA but I've also done other things. So I think that really has to work for you. Can you talk a little bit about how that works and how has worked for you in selling?
Andrew Tucker: Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting because like, for us, we don't talk about costs and it makes sense because some people get into cost of services sold, you know, cost of goods sold is a very valuable metric for a lot of people. But for working with people in the service industry, it's a little, it's a little murky, it's a little difficult. So I just take it. And when I first started I said understanding these expenses it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to think about this is you know, costs of goods sold versus operating, et cetera. We looked at it and said, all right, what's purely variable? What is fixed? And then what's the stuff that's kind of hybridized. So, you know, for so much of industry we're taught labor's a variable expense, labor as part of cost of goods sold. But the reality is as the person answering your phones is a fixed income. And in the dental practice, whether you have a hundred thousand dollars of collections or $2 millions of collections, that person is a fixed expense. What's nice about that is I feel like tools like Jirav, which I know we both use, you know, things like that are really well inclined to help articulate that message. When we use our dashboards, we boil it down to just simplicity for sake of how we explain financial concepts to non-financial folks. I think that was a big part of it. Another cool thing about what we do too, is we get the chance to offer, and we're a little unique compared to I think a lot of other participants where we offer general counsel services. So like my afternoon today is going to be reviewing four different associate contracts that are going to go out to our partners in different doctors and our partner firms, which is nice because a lot of times that can be the biggest hang-up for growth and development for folks. So it's a little unique in that we get the chance to do things like that for our clients.
Jody Grunden: So you went from no clients at all and you met with that very first client averse prospect. You had a relationship with them prior to that. Tell me about that sales process. How did that actually go? Were you really nervous? Walk me through that.
Andrew Tucker: Yeah. So to say I was really nervous is probably an understatement. But what's nice is having the confidence of how things are priced. Having the confidence of being able to deliver to someone and say, look here's a spreadsheet. I think the biggest thing that people in service industries worry about is getting spot checked. It's kind of the old sitcom trope, where you pull up to the filling station and your car breaks down and you know, they ask how much it's going to cost to] fix your car. And they look at you and say how much. It's nice because it really, there are no multiple occasions. We have the chance to say, all right, well, what if we turn this on or turn this off? And then when the spreadsheet is the one that's dictating the price everybody knows that you've thought about it going into it. It truly is a set price, and people understand the value and expense for services. So that was the biggest thing for me. I feel weird calling it a security blanket, but I think that's what it was. It was very much so a security blanket to walk into the situation and go, all right, I know what our services are worth this. I know we're providing this value, having this tool to be able to demonstrate and toggle is a really helpful thing. We've kind of modified our tiers to where we've got for full blown virtual CFO, and then our intermediate step, rather than calling it comptroller, we call it a family office services because we do have that legal component. So if you are a practice owner who's really focused on driving growth and trying to get big fast or someone who's got a great revenue then you're more focused on family and generational wealth, and you just need someone to be able to focus more on kind of where everything is setting. And we don't manage investments. We've got an outside group that we collaborate with that we really enjoy partnering with on that. I think that's one of the things that's so nice about it. When someone looks at it they can decide what fits for them. I've always historically been maybe an over accommodating person and overly flexible person, and being able to have the buckets really helps for us to be able to drive what we're trying to deliver for our clients and create some standardization to it.
Jody Grunden: Yeah because I think that scope creep, I mean, because like you said, if you say you do everything and then all of a sudden you are doing everything, even things you would do exactly what you told them, right? And so when you break it out in the little buckets and they're like you had mentioned it makes it a lot easier and that sale, how much was that sale?
Andrew Tucker: So the way our pricing is, unless there's like ad-ons or something else kind of traditional the VCFO without cashflow planning and things like that, we charge about a thousand dollars a week. So about $52,000. And we've got people who kind of range all over the map, the larger they are, obviously the more expensive that is. But on average, we're somewhere around $52,000.
Jody Grunden: So out of your five clients, roughly $52,000 is your average is. That's great.
Jamie Nau: Yes. You're doing a really good price point. I think that that's one of the value that hopefully get people listening to this podcast. And part of the courses is I think the common mistake for many business owners is to start off cheap, right? Like I've worked with clients before and they're like it’s just doors opening. So I'm going to reduce my prices and I'm going to have these really low, low prices. Then it's really hard to go up from there. I think understanding your worth and coming into that first meeting and those first couple of conversations and understanding your worth is worth your weight in gold because now you understand that and you're only going to go up from there. Again $52,000 a client is a really great starting point. I think the other thing you talked about there is the pricing schedule. I think you're going to love that as you grow, because I know that Jody is an awesome salesman, but like, it's pretty easy to give that spreadsheet to anybody within the firm and say, hey. Go make a sell for us.
Andrew Tucker: Yeah, it's funny because that's my thought when I first saw it. I thought to myself, this is the perfect sales tool for an accountant. This is a sales tool for an accountant to develop that confidence. One thing I personally experienced is the existential crisis of being so overwhelmed that you don't know how you're going to get back to everyone, and not just on a busy season perspective. It felt like I was you're playing whack-a-mole. The traditional method of things is very Tetris space invaders. It’s let's play this game until it moves so fast. You're predetermined to fail. I kind of preface it to the folks who I've kind of rolled over is, hey, I want to be everything for a few rather than being a little for a lot, because I would rather have the at death relationship. Our biggest challenge we had was helping people understand who we may had more of a skilled relationship with in the past, understand exactly how intense and in-depth this really would be. They get it, they see it. They love it and nobody has been unhappy. We've tried to keep a lot of transparency while we're getting everybody onboarded because five at a time is a lot. That's pretty much what we're solely dedicated to right now.
Jody Grunden: Yeah. You said a couple things there that that really drives it home. The transparency is something that we've always from day one taken as a gospel type of thing. I think the more transparent you are with people, employees, clients, the better off things go. Transparency can't get you in trouble. Like transparency with the pricing guide, you pop it up and here's the story versus giving them a price the next day through an email. They're like, how did you get that? You know, is it because I'm a doctor or is it because I make a ton of money, you know, is that why I'm getting priced this? I truly believe transparency is the way to go really with just about everything in life. The other thing is the pricing guide is designed specifically for accountants. You’re a hundred percent right there. I was doing most of the sales at that point. So when we designed it, we wanted it design so anybody can scope it out and come up with the exact same number. If I gave a prospect to Andrew, you'd be able to scope it out identical to, and with Jamie, same thing. So in the event that one of our CFOs is working with a client and let's say that they didn't want us do any kind of back office accounting, but maybe their bookkeeper stepped aside for some reason and they want us to jump in and maybe do the bookkeeping or the accounts payable or something like that. Then at that point, the CFO can comprise it all by themselves because they can pop that same spreadsheet open. It makes it nice for the client. It makes it nice for the company and it really takes away a lot of the extra admin costs that you might have in any other way or any other approach. Then the other, the last thing you said was that the working with a few versus many. It’s kind of funny. Well, it's not funny. I spoke with a CPA for a very reputable CPA firm, a gentleman's doing a great job and we're talking about, you know, I think roughly $6 - $7 million in revenue and I'm like, how many clients do you have? And he's like, I have about 700 clients. I'm like, oh my god, 700. And I go, because we're like a $9 million firm, going to be about $11 million this year and we've got about 150 clients. So I would much rather work with 150 clients than 700 clients any day of the week, you know? Because it's all those different interruptions that you get from the more clients you have. Eventually you can't handle it because you're putting out fires all the time. With fewer clients, you've got that option to really kind of focus in on it and really deliver an outstanding service. That's the key there because the name of the game is building profits to where it's really giving that outstanding service to the clients so that your reputation continues to build. Then you can continue to bring clients on because they're super satisfied. That's where went with our model and your model now is that their attention rate is super important. And so, you know, we've got a 94% retention rate. I'm sure you'll imagine that it'll probably be even higher for you at first because the fewer clients you'll grow and you want to make sure you're maintaining that. And really the only reason people leaving is because they're selling right now, that's the perfect reason for someone to leave. And so that's the kind of the end goal. So, there's a lot of great points with that comment.
Andrew Tucker: No, it's funny you mentioned that because I had someone, you know, dental sales are hot right now. Like particularly larger practices. I mean, we're talking $20 - $30 million in some cases like things that you didn't dream were possible in dentistry a decade ago. And I had somebody and they were kind of counting on working with us and just didn't get the chance to because they sold and she was like, oh, I hate that we're not going to be able to work with you in this way. And I was like, are you kidding me? I get to tell you I helped you sell your business for $20 million. That's the message. That's better. That's better publicity than anything. We'll still be pals. You're on the Christmas card list. Call me whenever you want. But that's almost better.
Jody Grunden: I one hundred percent agree. We tell people that all the time. If you could go through and listen to all of our webinars that we put out there because we put tons out there, right? Tons of material. If you can grow your business without ever having to engage us to help us that to me, is 10 times better than having, you know, taking the next step and pay for us to help you out. Those are great stories and we get that all the time, especially in the creative agency space. We're like, hey, we took your formulas. We did all this. You guys really helped us and got us through a bad period of time, or gave us clarity on how things work.
Jamie Nau: I was going to say, I did a sales call the other day with someone that was just too small for us. They own a two or three person agency and it's just right. But they listened to some of our podcasts so I was like, send me your stuff. I'll take a quick look at it and see if you're on the right track, and just to gain a really good relationship with them. So to Jody's point that feels really good. It’s not taking a ton of my time to look at a spreadsheet and make sure that they're applying the metrics correctly and that they're looking at everything right.
Andrew Tucker: To me that's the value of being a thought leader. I am really appreciative with all the information I took from Summit. I couldn't agree more. Being a thought leader is essential, and you're going to give away a lot of information to a lot of people who never have any intention of using it and that's okay because really what you're doing is you're making a contribution to the community that you're servicing. And what you are going to do is for the people who are the right fit and for the people who are, there's no doubt in my mind, I can give generic advice all day long. And my generic advice is fantastic. I'm not going to pull any punches or pretend like it's not. I know that it's really good. But I know that if I can get ahold of someone's specific situation, the generic advice isn't even close to how good it can be. If people find value in I awesome. And if people don't find value in that, that's not a problem because at the end of the day, you got to focus on the people who want to be with you. You know? I think that's the one thing that really attracted me so much to Summit in the beginning.
Jody Grunden: For sure. Can we kind of touch base on that thought leadership, you know, thought leadership, you can be a thought leader by writing books, writing articles, kind of providing education to people, doing speaking engagements, you know, there's a lot of different ways to do it. What are some of the ways that you've really kind of put yourself out there as a thought leader in the dentistry area?
Andrew Tucker: Yeah. Before we could travel and speak. I did a lot of speaking, so it was very fortunate that I had the chance to get picked up by some of the larger dental shows. I've spoken at the ADA before, the American Dental Association, the American Association of Orthodontics, a lot of different regional conferences. So there's one in the Southeast called the HIM and that I have been spoken at and a few others. So that was one of the biggest ways. The firm where I came from did a regular newsletter for folks. It was actually subscription-based and had a pretty decent following. That’s been really the PR angle. I have historically been writing articles. So I've had the chance, I think I've had 30 or 40 articles published in dental economics, which is a larger trade publication. The shift now for me is going to be a YouTube. I've had an interest in, fascination in YouTube content development for a long time. And just, you know, my time in the penalty box where I couldn't go out there and advertise and market for what I wanted to do. So I spent a lot of time sharpening my ax thinking about what do I want to get out there and what I want to do? So that's going to be kind of the next evolution. You know, Jamie, you were talking about that smaller firm. That's the biggest struggle I have today is that there's a lot of younger doctors who need help, and they need direction and guidance and to find a way where if you can create, and this is to me what the brilliance of the of the courses for Summit, if you can find a way to interact with someone for 16 total hours, but 15 of that's prerecorded and is customized, that is a great use of everyone's time and a great use of everyone's resources. You can much more affordably share that 15 hours with people. It's basically a cost sharing arrangement at the time and resources it takes to record, and then you've got your customization to it. So that's really the next step for me. I've had a great career in dentistry, helping young doctors in particular. Figuring out, do I want to own? Do I want to associate somewhere else? Then if I do want to own, do I need to buy my own thing or do I need to build it? But selfishly, that's the next crop of who's going to become VCFO clients. I don't want to freeze them out or ignore them or not find a way to help them. So kind of the goal there is to expand that thought leadership kind of outside of maybe who my core demographic is for a client and make sure that we're able to kind of deliver valuable insights for everybody in the whole spectrum.
Jamie Nau: Yeah. I think it's a great point. I think nowadays, you know, I know whatever I have a question, I don't go to Google. I go to YouTube, right? Like if I have a question, whether it's about like a software or about like a tool or even like an accounting principle, I'll just go to YouTube and look it up. Listening to someone talk about it and be able to demonstrate on the video is just so much easier than having to sit down and read an article. I think that's just the very common place for people to go. I think you're hitting the nail on the head. Just to have that resource on the YouTube search list, and making sure you have those keywords correctly is going to be key.
Andrew Tucker: Yeah, it's the golden era of content creation. YouTube. A lot of people think that they've missed the boat, but you know, when you can go online a little bit of a tangent, when you can go online and a guy who literally pulls off road vehicles out of holes, and has a million followers on YouTube and releases videos three times a week that has 300,000 views of dedicated viewers it's crazy.
Jody Grunden: In the course we talk about this all the time and Jamie, you and I talked about it meeting about the pipeline. That’s one where we have a complete section about pipelines. What does that mean to you?.
Andrew Tucker: So, you know, it's, it's interesting because I think this is a hard thing for folks in dentistry to wrap their head around and that is they're salespeople. They like, they do, they're responsible for selling. They have something that they can provide the world and that thing costs money. And there's a lot of people who do it and they want to make the argument that they're the best person to be able to do that for them. So one thing that we really like is to back into establish some parameters like when we look at utilization rate utilization rate for us is how busy is a doctor compared to how busy do they want to be? And depending on the specialty that kind of depends on how we measure that from a dollar perspective. You know, what the role of insurance is in that practice can oftentimes dictate what we measure that as is a dollar. But we spend a little time really getting our hands dirty and understanding quantifications of in terms of a dollar per, per day. So then from there, what we do is we kind of backtrack into tying into how we interface this with threads. We use plugins with a lot of the practice management software’s and we'll scrape data. So my favorites whenever someone's on a cloud-based practice management software and we can actually just get a log in and pull the info. But we pull those things and get them in a CSV and put them into Google docs. We're working on a way to automate that.. And then we use that in order to be able to start to build out how many new patients are they getting, which is based on a certain exam code that the client has inside of the dental practice. How many new patients are we getting? And then how has that impact and the revenue per day that a doctor has, and then kind of extrapolating out that ratio. We figure out how many new patients do we need in order to be able to achieve that result. And then we back into every step of the way with that number. So from there, if we know that we need 30 new patients a day, and we know that we need 50% of the treatment that you prescribed to people , we know that we need 15 patients to accept treatment. And then we know that 50% of the patients that you PR that you recommend treatment do are going to accept it. Then we need 30 new patients. And then from there, if we know someone calls the office there's an 80% chance that they're going to schedule an exam. We know that we need 36 or something, whatever that works out to be phone calls. And then from there, we know that if we get a 10% call rate, 5% call rate on the advertising we know how many marketing impressions that we need to make and kind of depending on the size of the enterprise. If they have like a third party vendor working with them for marketing we'll help them with that stuff. If they have a dedicated marketing employee, we'll kind of fold that into what they're going to do. That's one of the KPIs that they're responsible for us being able to keep track of those impressions. And that's where it kind of gets a little difficult. It's a little bit more tangible and you can wrap your hands around it when the phone rings. But the impressions, that's something we kind of piloted late last year. Obviously this is stuff we've been tinkering with for a long time, but integrated. It's worked relatively well, to be able to identify. So, and then there's, you know, then it turns into what kind of treatment do we want, like for orthodontists, it's pretty easy. If there people are showing up to get their teeth straightened, but for a general dentist, you can have a Medicaid dentist, you can have a general dentist who's a major cosmetic restoration person and there they have the same training, but not necessarily the same practice. And that's where it kind of gets more customized.
Jamie Nau: Awesome. Well I can definitely tell you, we got a lot out of this. You got a lot out of the course and that's what we hope for people that take the course get too. Jody, any final thoughts from you?
Jody Grunden: No, it's been, it's been great getting to know you for sure. Andrew, you're a fresh of breath air for sure. We tell people not everybody's made out for being CFO. You’ve got to have that personality. I don't know if you need to have the industry knowledge right out of the gate, but you need to develop that industry knowledge you need to learn. And to be a thought leader, you need to get out there and write articles and do all this stuff. I think from what I understand you've done really everything to position yourself extremely well for success. You're seeing that right out of the gate with five new clients and averaging $50,000 plus per client That's outstanding. We'll definitely have you on in a few months to see where you're at with.
Andrew Tucker: Absolutely. I would love that. I really appreciate the time that you guys gave me today. It was a good conversation. I had a ton of fun and I look forward to being back.
Jamie Nau: Cool. Yeah. Thanks Andrew, and for those listening enjoy this podcast.