Speaker 1: 0:00

Cut the tie to anything holding you back from success. Welcome to the Cut the Tie podcast. Hi, I'm your host, thomas Helfrich, and in each episode, we bring you real entrepreneurs that really overcame challenges on their journey to become successful. We look at the impact, the moment, how it affected everything in their lives. Follow us on Apple, spotify and YouTube. Now let's meet our guest on Cut the Tie podcast Today. I'm joined by Patrick Coggins. Patrick, how are you today?

Speaker 2: 0:28

I'm doing great, Thomas. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 0:31

Do you want to take a moment? Introduce yourself? You know who you are and what your business does.

Speaker 2: 0:34

Sure, absolutely so. I run a company called CFO's Domain. We founded that company in 2019. We do finance, executive search and consulting broadly for corporate accounting and finance positions. I've been doing it for well over 20 years. Time goes by quickly when you're having fun. Recently, we also co-founded a company. It's called Gen9 Leaders. It's a leadership advisory practice that pairs very well with CFO's domain and I can talk a little bit more about that a little bit later if appropriate. But that really gave us an opportunity to extend the range of value and impact that we were doing for our clients. And so I'm based here in Southern California, but the firm we run is National in Scope and we're having a lot of fun, doing it, love it.

Speaker 1: 1:15

I always ask people what's the power statement? Why do people pick you over your competition?

Speaker 2: 1:19

Absolutely so. There's a lot of search firms in the marketplace, as I'm sure you know right. You've interviewed, I'm sure, a few of them. What makes us different number one is we are specialized in finance. So I'm a former reformed accountant myself.

Speaker 2: 1:31

I worked in public accounting for a little bit right, and everybody that we hire either comes from accounting or has an extensive accounting and finance background.

Speaker 2: 1:37

And that's really really important because even as we see, ai tools come on to the scene around interviewing and helping to enable those things they're not specialized to get into the details and the mechanics around how one might build a financial model right. They don't have those qualifications to be able to have those conversations. So we are really good at what we do in curating and finding talent, but also how we screen talent and we also take a long-term orientation around what it is we do right. So it takes a long time to build these relationships. You know, and I would say, that the industry as a whole is full of a lot of larger organizations that like to hire people that are a couple of years removed from undergrad and ultimately they're in and out of the industry pretty quickly. It's a numbers game to them and it's very transactional, so you actually don't have the quality of relationships and interactions that you would otherwise get when you work with us versus some of those other firms in the marketplace.

Speaker 1: 2:28

In your space. People are the difference and when people say, hey, your differentiator can't be people, I'm like, yes, it can. It is the difference and, yes, everyone has their methodologies. But the example you're saying, I'll say it like if you work with, let's say, some of the bigger firms, the KPMGs, the whatever of the world, let's say and I'm not slamming them they're a great company, but they do put junior people into a situation where they're using a lot of hours and mentors to learn on your dime and where I think advantages you're describing just I come from a consulting world is to frame that the advantage I see for you guys specifically is that you're putting experienced people relative to where other firms would put very much so inexperienced people, and the value of that for a business is there's no waste. They know how to think, talk, ask the right questions and give you the right advisory and execution in less time. I mean I'm not trying to summarize your value proposition, but putting the better person in the right spot makes a difference for a business.

Speaker 2: 3:18

That's very well said, thomas. So really, again, there's two sides of our business right. There's the executive search, retain search practice side. There's the consulting offering right. So what you're speaking to is, yes, you're correct in that we can identify people who have industry specific, fortune 1000 experience, that have sat in the shoes of our clients before, and we can often deploy them at a rate that is a third to half the cost of what the big four might do as well. Right, so your total cost of ownership over that engagement in terms of getting that work done whether you're implementing a new financial system, acquiring a company or streamlining your month-end close process, we can get it done with somebody that will cost you significantly less and also bring in total more years of experience. Right, which helps you mitigate risk as well.

Speaker 1: 3:59

The other thing I would say, though, by the way, is that, just from a business standpoint, you shouldn't be charging less. Yeah, unless. I would say, though, by the way, is that just from a business standpoint, you shouldn't be charging less unless it's just a competitive advantage to win a client. Because the truth is, the value is there, and you might charge the same rate but have less people, and if they can't afford even that rate, then fine, maybe they're not your right clients, but I don't think you should have to charge less for your value. I'm a big person to know your value and know that, hey, we're as good as any one of those guys and we're competitively priced. So if it's a hundred bucks less an hour, I don't know, but if it's half, you're giving it away. Anyway, on your journey, I'm sure you faced things that you just had to let go people, situations, ways of thinking but what is the biggest tie you've had?

Speaker 2: 4:35

to cut, I would say quitting the W2 job and starting my own firm. I always had an entrepreneurial streak in me For a long time. I grew up wanting to play music for a living. That's what I wanted to do and I ran dual lives up until I was 28. So I used to work the corporate job, work my butt off, but then I would have After work. We would commute into North Hollywood. We had a lockout studio, the band would meet and we would rehearse to about 9, 10 o'clock at night. We'd go home, we'd do that four or five days a week and we'd do that consistently and eventually, when I hit a point I was 28, where I reached okay, I did some really fun and interesting.

Speaker 2: 5:10

Things Didn't quite get the traction we wanted. I went whole hog into my career and that had a lot of benefits. But five or six years after that now I'm in my 30s, my mid 30s I started to recognize that there was an opportunity here for me to do some of these things better if I own my own destiny, right, if I own my own firm. It wasn't just a desire to make more money or keep more of the margin. It was the ability to start over with a blank sheet of paper and say, hey look, these companies, they've been around for a while. They all suffer from like legacy IT sort of issues, right, their old technology stacks, and therefore every time they try to make a change it was a pain in the butt. No one trusted the data Everyone's running in Excel on the side. There's no collaboration between the groups, and so getting to do it over again allowed us the ability to build a custom developed stack on top of Salesforce, which allowed us to be able to track our candidate data much more efficiently, and that really attributed to a lot of our success. So that in and of itself was really really exciting to get the opportunity to kind of do that over again as well as to design, like when I used to work for my two former companies.

Speaker 2: 6:12

One company was they indexed too far out around kind of mission, vision, values, a purpose statement. They asked everybody to memorize all these things and while it was well-intentioned, it was a little bit too far out there. And then my next company was the opposite. I couldn't tell you what their mission was. Right, it was framed somewhere in a kitchen wall. Nobody knew what it was, nobody knew where it was. You know where it hung. And I realized in operating my own firm that we were sort of missing out on the ability to be a company purpose right and to have principles and frameworks and things that really mattered so we can maximize the output of our folks internally and help our clients. The ability to be able to sort of author that right and to kind of create that was really inspiring. So that's why we, you know, I think cutting the tie was the best thing I did in leaving my job.

Speaker 2: 6:55

But I will tell you it's the hardest thing because you know most people talk about. Well, you know I was laid off or you know it was a bad experience. I didn't like my boss or our company got acquired. So one door closes, the next one opens, that's great. I had the opposite experience. I was doing very well, I was making great money. The CEO would not let me leave. It was a really hard decision because I had a lot of success. But I realized that I was also missing out on a lot of opportunity.

Speaker 1: 7:18

Yeah, I mean, that is a tie to cut. I mean that's to leave. I was more in the layoff. I was making so much money at the time there's like no way I'm ever quitting this. And so the ideas of entrepreneurship, though, there they fade when you make a ton of money for somebody. But there's a moment when you're working and you're making lots of money, You're like I'll actually never get wealthy doing this, because you're like and you're like I was making, man, what's the exit? Like you know what else? The only way to do it is go on your own. So I appreciate it. Do you actually remember, though, the moment, the aha moment, when you're like I'm leaving, I'm definitely leaving?

Speaker 2: 7:56

I'm not sure if it was the moment that I found out we were getting acquired, but it was a private equity acquisition, so it's not like they still wanted us right to kind of hang on.

Speaker 2: 8:08

But the moment I found out that the deal was all about inked and that we were pretty close to the precipice of kind of moving on, I sort of knew I'll tell you what actually I've been feeling this way for a while, but I do remember a moment where it sort of solidified it for me.

Speaker 2: 8:22

I was sitting in the meeting room of a hotel where the new owners of our company, also PE, sponsored. I remember the CEO getting out of his chair and walking around the corner and putting his hand on my shoulder, trying to sort of compel me as to why I should stay. But I remember in that moment how uncomfortable and how like inauthentic that conversation was and how it felt and how the CEO just didn't really know a lot about me, right, or sort of what my future was, and wasn't really asking a lot of the right questions, so to speak, and I knew in that moment that it was time to go. They had done what they could to sort of get me to stay, but I, but I knew in the moment that I had outlived my time here and I needed to go climb a new mountain.

Speaker 1: 9:01

I love the instinct piece of that. Since the change, since cutting the tie and you've committed to it, describe the impact to your life, your family, your relationships. Yeah, Look.

Speaker 2: 9:08

I mean mostly good, some bad. On the good side, I have all the creative freedom in the world. I don't technically, on paper, report to somebody, but I am accountable to my business partner. I'm accountable to my employees. I'm accountable to my customers. Right, the buck stops with you when you run the business, but it's so interesting because I love technology so much, and when you think about a recruiting firm and a search firm, you normally don't think a lot about technology, but the fact is is as a differentiator internally for us. If we lean into how we leverage technology to make our job more efficient, so that we can get to candidates more quickly and we can keep in touch with them, at scale, we can be better than our competition. And so running my own business gives me the ability and the freedom to do those things, to implement those things. I love that part of it.

Speaker 2: 9:52

But on the other side of the equation, I mean you, especially in a service business, you need to be prepared for the fact that you're probably going to work. You know you're probably gonna work more hours, right, and depending upon what cycle you are in your life phase. For me, I started the business in 2019, when I had my daughter and you know she was an infant and I was learning how to adapt to that situation while also starting a business, and it was really, really hard and that first year was really tough. Like I would just be on the sleeping on the floor of my office and my wife would come in and take the baby and, like you know, she was up all night with the baby. She put the baby in my arms at like 3 am and it was like that kind of thing for a year and then of course we got through it and eventually you hire more people, you get stability, you learn from your mistakes, and so it is a net, net positive. But you better be prepared to work.

Speaker 1: 10:38

I mean, I tell people this if you're starting a business in your late thirties, forties and you're in the throes of you know I've done it as well, like you got mortgages now and you got kids get ready. You just complicated it even further, even if you're successful.

Speaker 1: 10:50

So it's a reality you're going to see that is not. You'll have a lot of free time, but you will be working way more because you won't be efficient, because you don't. You probably don't know what you're doing. I tell you, the easiest entrepreneurship if you can get your focus away from other things is definitely when you're just truly single, not even dating anyone. I think you can just fully focus on what that is. You'll probably get the most results at that point.

Speaker 2: 11:11

Totally agree.

Speaker 1: 11:12

I totally agree, I think grounding, though it might be good to have someone else that's supportive, like a spouse or someone else, whatever it is, a partner, I would say that could be. If you've got the right person that can enable that's probably your best case scenario is actually someone who could be emotional and actually give you a different perspective for support. But you had kids and mortgages and cars and God knows what else. You are complicating the hell out of your life.

Speaker 2: 11:33

Yeah, and it's a trade-off, right? I mean, a lot of this is dependent upon what business and sector you're going into. If you had a pathway in life where you're going to go work for a white combinator and go work for an accelerator and incubator, you're going to take in venture capital money, you can do that when you're younger, but statistically the odds of you being successful are lower due to the nature of that business and the fact that, quite frankly, you don't know that much. You might be really smart and you might've gone to a great school, but you don't. You have very limited years of experience, right, and you're just trying to work with mentors around you and go as fast as you can. And you're right when you, when you're single and you have no children, you can do the eight hour, 80 hour work weeks.

Speaker 2: 12:13

The trade-off when you're older and you've got those responsibilities is now you have a business that it's more bankable, there's less risk, you have a network, you know what you're doing, people trust you, you've grown a reputation and you have a little bit of money in the bank. I mean, we didn't take out any debt to fund our business. I mean our business, we don't owe it, we're not in anybody's pocket. These are all trade-offs, depending upon the kind of business you want to go into and where you're at.

Speaker 1: 12:38

Just be honest with yourself what you're getting into. I think it's the lesson there. I mean, speaking of lessons, how would you summarize, kind of your journey in the form of advice? What's the short 30 second? Here's my advice to anyone.

Speaker 2: 12:47

Plainly speaking, I think the best advice I got was you know, people are trying to figure out like what to chase, what to do, and there's so many options. Right, you really should chase something simply just excited about. I like that word excitement over passion. Passion feels a little bit more arbitrary, ambiguous to me. But if you just go back to sort of what made you excited as a kid, what makes you excited as an adult, just go do those things, pull on those threads, see if there's economic value there and see what comes from that. That's what I'd say.

Speaker 1: 13:12

It's the Venn diagram of passion or excitement, performance or capability to perform and impact. And impact can mean, like you help people, you can make money. There's Yep, you're a hundred percent should be in that focus. So if you have no market but you love it, you're not gonna probably make money or have any impact. And if you don't have any passion for it or excitement, or you don't have the ability to become really good at it or train yourself to be really good at it Like I love golf but I'll never get the performance high enough to make that then big enough to it's going to be, there's going to be a three bend bubble.

Speaker 1: 13:43

The point being is that that's where you should be right. In the middle of that, let's do some rapid fires. Who gives?

Speaker 2: 13:47

you inspiration. Elon Musk Very controversial figure right now, but if you were to step away from the political side of it, the guy is just amazing. He's one of our I mean next to Steve Jobs, who unfortunately is no longer with us. He's one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time. I mean you just think about how quickly his companies innovate, how fast they move what they're doing. Take the values out of it for a moment. I mean, what the guy has been able to do is just amazing.

Speaker 1: 14:13

I mean because of him, you're going to see electric cars and you'll then see changes to full grid of energy. Because of it, because of support that move. I mean you can hate him or whatever else, but for someone who can make effective change or do something, it's really undeniable. You don't like him, or maybe you cannot deny the fact. The guy has made change. What is the best business advice, though, you've ever received?

Speaker 2: 14:29

The best business advice don't ever get over leveraged. And if you're going to take out debt, just make sure there's an ROI there for you. If you don't have money, don't go on the vacation. But if you want to go fund your business and there's an ROI there, go take out some debt. That makes sense. Just make sure the cost of that debt is lower than your ROI. That's just make sure the cost of that debt is lower than your ROI. Yeah, that's great. I like it. Who gave that advice to you? Probably a number of people. I think my father gave it to me and then I heard it from somebody else as well.

Speaker 1: 14:53

What book for entrepreneurs is a must read?

Speaker 2: 14:55

Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Kim Scott worked for Google, for Apple. Early on in her career she observed rather shockingly dynamic conversations between Larry Page and Steve Jobs, between the employees. They would really dish it to the employees and the employees would dish it back to them. So what she did was she sort of reformulated that approach and she came up with this framework around radical candor and it's a great read. It was really successful in Silicon Valley. I don't know how broad based it got, but I recommend it's an easy read. It's a wonderful book If you want to learn how to address performance feedback. It's something that we've dived into because we've kind of evolved. We've expanded some teachings around that for our own advisory practice.

Speaker 1: 15:34

If you had to start over, what would you do differently when I started my company? Anytime, actually, you can pick the time and frame.

Speaker 2: 15:39

on that one, I probably would have gotten a mentor earlier in, because I think during the time that I was focusing on music so much, I was working hard in my day job. But I would have also gotten a mentor. I would have talked to more people. I would have networked more often. I realized later in my life, as I got a little bit wiser, that the quality of the people you have around you is just it's everything. I probably would have gotten my CPA just early in just to add a little bit of credibility around the knowledge base, around accounting and finance finance based on what I spent 20 years doing. That would have been helpful and I would have started my company with more people. Yes, that would have added to our costs, but I think it would have given us a bit of a springboard to go a little bit faster. Instead, we took more of a cautious approach and we were extremely lean.

Speaker 1: 16:20

I like that. I got a new book that I've ask you today and I did not. What would that question have been and how do you answer it?

Speaker 2: 16:33

What is the most important thing in building a high performance team? It's so. It's actually two things. Number one, it's psychological safety among the team. Right, so people can be honest, transparent, speak truth to power, innovate, take risks, take micro failures. The other thing is having a framework for how to have difficult conversations. Don't avoid conflict. Have the difficult conversation. Most people avoid it because they don't have a framework or a tool set on how to actually do that. If you have a framework, you can have those conversations, you can address performance, you can get much more quickly to vetting out the truth. To do you keep that employee, do you not? Are they going to improve? We have an issue in our relationship. We should sit down and address it. I need to bring this thing up with my friend. Whatever it is, have the conversation, but have a framework so you know what you're doing.

Speaker 1: 17:22

Thank you so much, patrick, for taking the time today. Shameless plug time for you, though. Who should get ahold of you, and how do they do that?

Speaker 2: 17:27

Certainly, if you work in accounting and finance if you happen to you're welcome to reach out. Obviously, we place accounting and finance professionals as we've talked about, so we'll see if there's any intersection there. If you happen to be an accounting finance leader and you've got people that report to you and you want us in your back pocket as a potential firm that you can work with, reach out as well. If you work for a company and you feel like the culture of your company is in the toilets, having issues or problems, reach out. We can walk you through what we do with our leadership advisory practice and see if there's any intersections of value there. Awesome, where do they go to do that? You can find me on LinkedIn. The name of my company is CFOs Domain.

Speaker 2: 18:02

I am on X at Patrick Jen, that's G-E-N nine, the number nine. So at Patrick Jen, that's G-E-N nine, the number nine. So at Patrick Jen, nine. If you want to reach out to me on X.

Speaker 1: 18:11

I appreciate it. We'll put the links in the show notes as well. Patrick, thank you for joining me today.

Speaker 2: 18:15

Thank you for having me, thomas, appreciate it Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 18:18

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Cut the Tie. Let's stay connected. Please hit that follow button on Apple, spotify or YouTube and, if you're ready to advance your entrepreneurial journey even further, join our free community at facebookcom. Slash groups, slash, cut the tie. Cut the tie to everything holding you back from success.