How to think like a CFO when you're a founder with Thea Brook, CALMM

0:00Thea Brook:One of them which I see so often was scope creep. That is the entrepreneurial spark. That's the entrepreneurial brain and it's pure magic. Not everybody has it. And then beyond the one to two million mark, you can start to afford to bring those people in. But you've got to get from one to the other without them. And you go again, launch, grow, optimise, launch, grow, optimise. according to ONS only around four in ten businesses live to see their fifth birthday and the ones that do make it the bottleneck isn't the market it's the founder our guest today learned that the hard way Thea Brooke spent over a decade as a CFO scaling startups into tens of millions built her own restaurants and product brands and then ran the conventional playbook of working harder and growing faster straight into burnout and then a brain hemorrhage she rebuilt from scratch and founded Calm, which supports founder-led businesses with senior leadership brains on tap across strategy ops, marketing, people, finance and AI.

1:00Her blunt lesson, the skills that got you here are rarely the ones that are going to get you past here. Thea, welcome to How to Start Up. It is wonderful to have you on. I would love it if you could kick off with a brief introduction as to you and the business that you started.

1:15Thea Brook:Thank you for having me. I'm very excited for this conversation. I'm Thea Brooke. I'm a former CFO and three times founder and really now describing myself as a business growth expert, bringing those two things together in my background. And I run a business called Calm where we help founders scale from around two to 300k a year up to one to two million a year, that particular stretch. This is amazing because I think when you start a business, you are wearing all the hats and some hats you don't even know that you need to wear come your way I imagine the majority of people go into a startup without any CFO experience so what's the premise of Calm how does it help new startups and scale-ups I spent a couple of years supporting founders in scaling mainly with the former CFO had that brain on working with the founders but because I built business myself and have that broad experience naturally it just bleeds into everything and before you know it you're spending 60 % of the time talking about marketing and offers rather than anything to do with finance so it was a really interesting like full spectrum support that I was providing and one of the things I started to really notice was that you hit a certain point of business this point that we support through where the business gets quite complicated and you suddenly do need to be making quite expert decisions in finance as one area, but also team and operations and marketing.

2:46Thea Brook:But you're not at the point where you could bring those people into the business because you don't have the budget. And it's this really interesting piece of the journey. You don't really need it when you're just building up to six figures. You can just about cope with all the hats yourself. And then beyond the one to two million mark, you can start to afford to bring those people in, but you've got to get from one to the other without them. So the way I've structured Calm is that we effectively act as a plugin across those disciplines at a senior level in a way that founders can support at that stage of their journey.

3:20Thea Brook:So they get four of us covering everything, strategy, sales and marketing, finance, people in ops, AI now as well, obviously very important. And each of us has 10, 20 years of experience in our field and we're looking at their business and all discussing it together with the founder and really acting as that senior team with them to fill all the gaps as they scale. I would say it's somewhere between a board and a consultancy and the fractional. It's somewhere in the middle of those. So those people really know your business. They really know you and your goals and what you're trying to get to.

3:54Thea Brook:And they bring that experience and plug in with you. Every piece you hit of the growth journey, you need to decide what's really not working here about the team or don't feel like this offer's scaling and we need to look at why and understand the data behind it and what to do next rather than you sitting there as the founder which is what most people do when they go I need to figure this out and spend days locked in a room or never driving yourself mad trying to think of that when you haven't seen that across 20 companies before your career and you haven't spent hours and hours solving problems like that before so you're really putting yourself under so much strain expecting that you're going to be able to do all of those things by yourself and usually just sitting there going I really wish I had somebody that could just tell me the answer well and a trusted resource as well I often joke that I need to rename this podcast experience is what you get after you've needed it because if you knew the answer you'd know the answer but you don't and you're stressed and busy so having this support is incredible I love this so much.

4:57But going back a little bit into your past, your route from dancer to touring singer-songwriter into finance to CFO to founder, how has that combination shaped how you see business today?

5:10Thea Brook:I grew up very creative focused, for sure, like academic, but creative focused. I was always really into dance and music and those kind of things. I'd be saying maths and music go really hand in hand together yeah I was thinking about this the other day and when you learn music and dance actually from a young age you are learning structures so you're learning how steps and rhythms and all the patterns so you actually from a young age you're developing a very pattern focused brain I actually opened a dance school when I was 20 that was my first business I definitely had that entrepreneurial flair from young age I've got three sisters and I was the one who like if our dad said I'll give you a task and you can earn 20p for something my sisters would do it for five minutes and then go and do something fun I would be out there the whole day optimizing the system so I could earn as much money as possible from this task we joke about it now like sometimes my dad would come back and look at it and think Jesus what have you done so I opened a dance school felt like that's what was going to be what I was going to do wasn't earning very much from it in the beginning so I was doing an administrative role on the side and I just happened to be put into some finance work and happened to be really good at it and then was given a bit more of it and a bit more and then a job came up in London for the company I was working for and I was 19 and I think all that really happened was I went oh you want to pay me to move to central London to work in Comet Garden and right now I'm out in the sticks in countryside.

6:42Thea Brook:Yeah. Okay. I'll do that. Thinking probably I would move down there and then get back into the creative side. But I really fell in love with what I was doing with finance in business. So I really sat at the intersection of not in the core finance team, doing all the backward looking, recording the history of what's happened in finance. I was using those numbers to help the managers of the business understand what to do going forward. So really that commercial view of tying it back to the story. And that felt alive to me. It's storytelling and it's being able to then use that structure and the patterns and spot them and make change going forward.

7:17Thea Brook:And I could earn a lot more money doing that. And they put me through all my accountancy and it just kind of led me off down that path. I love this because every guest has said, get a good accountant, know your numbers, be okay with the rollercoaster. And some people are like, oh no, but I'm a creative. I don't want to touch a spreadsheet. It's like, without the numbers, you don't have a business. And I was going to ask, you've said before, in the early stages, a founder is the strategy. Talking about this tipping point when you need this extra support, what are the first signs that founders should look out for when that strategy is no longer working?

7:47Thea Brook:As you're growing, as you're building, more pieces of the puzzle come in. But as you figure out what works, you then build it up. I always like to think of building a business as, visualize it as a machine with all these different cogs so to begin with when you've just got to spend time in it and figure out what that cog is and how do I put it together and what does it connect to and you're you can kind of move between the hats because nothing's like really running yet and really going but once you start to connect them all up and things are really moving and then you start saying okay I need somebody else to come in and look after that cog and I need to this one's not working but I can't actually figure out why so I need to really spend time with it and diagnose it I think once the complexity under each of the hats builds up and you start having thoughts around, I should expand my team.

8:32Thea Brook:I should bring in more people to support me. Or you're starting to have thoughts around, I've got three offers now generating money for the business and I don't know which one of them I should put more energy into. Or I've got one offer and I'm promoting it via three different channels and I don't know which one of those I should spend more money in. I think anywhere where you're thinking about key investments to get you out of your capacity problem, that's the point where you need to start thinking, okay, we need to look at this holistically because I might hire somebody and it's going to solve that problem.

9:03Thea Brook:But it's actually, that's not the piece that would solve the bigger problem across the business right now. Because this is it. A lot of people said to me, be brilliant at one thing and walk into the room and solve that one problem. If you walk in and try and tell a client you can solve 20, they're not going to believe you. And I have given myself a two-year deadline to work out with my business. We do PR and podcasting. We could split that into two separate businesses. We teach people how to do their own PR or their own podcast, or we do it for them at a really high standard. Because I wanted to disrupt the market and do it a different way.

9:33And I believe that's the honest thing to do. But at what point should I sit down and be like, okay, I need someone to run that side of the business and I'm going to run this side. And then we're going to do paid search here and we're going to do marketing there and I felt it in my bones for a while and I'm like I'm just going to give myself a grace period to work out a sort of hiatus from trying to make a decision but the thought of being able to sit around a round table of experts and they can look at my numbers and look at the business and also work out what I want to do because a lot of people are you could do this you could do that but I don't want to so there's that part in there as well.

10:08And just because I can, and just because it's going to earn money, I could have very much scaled the retained side of the PR business, but I absolutely did not want to. And that would be the easy win. And if you wanted to scale a business and sell, I could have done that six years ago and made a lot of money, but that's not, oh, it makes me feel slightly ill thinking about it. So for you offering that service to founders, how easy is it for you to come in as a team and help them fix them, give them a good night's sleep?

10:32Thea Brook:I think the two things I heard you say, So there is a lot of people who will come in and when you hit that point as a business, they'll actually make it worse. Because what I see so often, and this boils my blood because there's so much of it, is people getting you to feel like the answer is outside of your business in somebody else's playbook or their journey. And a lot of people do operate from this perspective of, I did this and it worked, plug it into your business. or I've seen this work in your industry, plug it into your business. And yes, learning from other people's success stories is great.

11:09Thea Brook:It's always really helpful. But the thing that makes your business, it's going to make it strongest, it's going to get you the fastest path to growing with you feeling like you love it and you're really aligned to it is going to come from looking inside your business. Which is you, the founder, presumably your energy store and skill. Well, it's you, but it's also the pieces that have worked around you. So if we think, go back and think about all those cogs we were talking about, you need the people with the different disciplines to go, okay, I'm an expert in people and culture, or I'm an expert in marketing and funnels or finance or whichever bit it is and look at it and go, okay, this bit works really well, but you did it like three projects ago and you haven't done it again since.

11:53Thea Brook:So why are we not using this piece in the main machine. And we find all these floating parts of a business that actually have all the gold in them. They're all the bits that work well, and they just need to be brought together in a slightly different way. And then the whole machine works again really smoothly. So it's the looking in that's really important and just dusting off all the assets and bits that have happened, just then not been used properly. Well, I love this. It's so wonderful to hear. and I hope listeners will hear your point and walk away with this is that the answers they already have them it's already within their heart their brain their business their P &L it's just joining the dots and how exciting is that I've looked at over 250 businesses now I'm not up to date on the number and if a business and this does have to be once a business is over six figures because I think before that you are figuring out you need the data but if a business is doing probably upwards of 200k a year they absolutely have the pieces inside the business and they absolutely are sitting on a gold buy and it absolutely can scale even if they feel like they have hit a wall and they don't want to take it any further the other thing I was going to pick up on actually that you said which isn't it's interesting you saying about dropping your consulting piece of the business people think I can't do three things and a lot of people say to you you need to focus on the one thing you're doing too many things and you need to get rid of them.

13:20Thea Brook:And that's semi-true, but what's more true is that you need to do them one at a time. And I think a part of a business goes through three phases. I call first one launch, which is figuring out like who really needs this, what do they really need, all the product market fit piece. Then when we've got that, the next phase is grow and that's just taking that and accelerating it. And then the third phase I call optimize. And that's saying, okay, we've grown it and it's working and now we need to lock it in and make that secure and just let that be steady then once you've optimized the first piece and that's stable in the business and it's generating some profit and keeping people happy then on top of that you can build the next launch and you go again launch grow optimize launch grow optimize so you build all these different things in but you just have to do it in that structured way and the bit that always gets missed is the optimize phase.

14:12Thea Brook:So founders will launch something, get it right, get the product market fit, grow it, and then they'll hit the ceiling on the growth and think, this isn't the thing. This is not the offer. This is too hard. And so they go looking for the next thing to launch and they just let the other thing crumble behind them or they throw it completely out and start again. And I see so many of these situations and I think, no, let's just optimize that and lock it in and make it safe and secure and then it might not be what you want to do forever and it might you might not love it and you might be over it because it's not new and shiny anymore but let's just keep that asset in the business let's let it tick over get it like working like a machine and then let's launch the next thing it's so funny you say this because a i've got goosebumps but b the sunk costs the amount of effort that have gone in to start scale launch it and get it going to then walk away from it and be like no I'm onto something new and shiny and we are all guilty of that when you start a business you get addicted to that adrenaline of something else I can do something else and that kind of tigger effect of all this all that all this and you could very much do all of it at some point but if you're then walking away from all of that hard work that you put in year one year two year three oh god yeah we're gonna have to have a longer chat about this the thing is as well that is the entrepreneurial spark that's the entrepreneurial brain and it's It's pure magic.

15:37Thea Brook:Not everybody has it. And I think it's so special. People who see those gaps in their brain immediately starts thinking about, we could do this and this is the solution. And they can visualize something that's not there and make it real. I love that I have it. I love seeing it in other people. the key part I think is recognizing and this is great for anybody early stage starting a business or later stage is recognizing you want to be a business owner and part of being a business owner is entrepreneurial thinking but being an entrepreneur and being entrepreneurial is not at the top of the picture being a business owner is at the top of the picture and I think we've just been through this era of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneur and it's also sexy and flashy and it's just so talked about and fully glamorized and I really want people to see that having entrepreneurial spirits and thinking and a brain is a really important piece of the puzzle of building a business but it's not the whole thing.

16:45My next question for you is holding the visionary seat and the operator seat at the same time comes at a cost because that having to think big picture whatever your business is but also the operator you're ordering the post-its you're hiring and firing you're doing pnl what does that actually cost the founder in the business and in themselves

17:06Thea Brook:it starts to cost at a certain point and it's around the same point that we're talking about i actually i have a whole youtube on this i always take like new founders i work with through this because it's really important for them to understand because founders beat themselves up about this a lot, I see. So in that, I describe, if you picture a circle, in the middle of the circle, we've got the why. So this is where everything's driven from. At the top, then the first thing that happens from that, comes out of it, is the what. So all the ideas around what we should do, right? The thing that we all wake up with in the morning, the to-do list.

17:40Thea Brook:From there, it goes around to the who. So as soon as we've got the what list, we start thinking who, who do I need to bring into this? who are my customers going to be, who are my partners. Then we go around to the when and where and start thinking about all the logistics of it and eventually at the how, actually the detail of how we're going to make it happen. And this whole thing has to close constantly. And we're doing it all the time in business. We have the bigger one for our whole business, but then we might have one around launching a new offer or whatever it might be, tiny, big. We just constantly going through these loops.

18:09Thea Brook:And the top half of it, the why, the what, and the who is all the visionary energy so that's the kind of catalyst getting all new things activated and moving and then the when where and the how is all the operator energy around the other sphere and when in that early stage when the business is less complicated and you've got a bit more breathing room and you're not juggling as many things you can just about like your natural zone is to push through that visionary bit you love it that's when you feel amazing and you're like oh yes I'm making progress and I'm doing these great things and then that is such a slog because you're not sitting in a natural operator seat.

18:46Thea Brook:Weirdly, even if you've been an operator in your career. So I've spent my career as an operator being CFO of finance and ops, but when I'm running my business, I'm the visionary. So my natural seat is visionary. So even I have to really push myself through the operator zone because in that environment, I need to hold the visionary energy. So you just keep hitting these bumps. Everything feels really hard through the operator zone. And what typically happens is you hit a bump, you start to feel rubbish. You start to feel like you're not making progress you're not doing things and another what catches your eye at the top of the loop and you go oh I could do something about that and I can make progress here and so you go and do that and you feel great because you can fly through that again and then you do it again and then you do it again and this is how you end up with loads of loops open not feeling like you're making progress your brain can't switch off and you suddenly start to feel like really rubbish and overwhelmed and that's the point where you just have to recognize I can't but the business is so complex now that I can't hold both seats at the same time and you you generally really need to bring in the support through the operator zone at that point.

19:51This makes so much sense and for you I know that we chatted about this before but you have had a brain hemorrhage in your past haven't you?

19:58Thea Brook:Yeah three years ago. When you're looking back at that were there warning signs that you could have seen before did it come out of nowhere what for you would you've done differently about that or if anything or was it a blessing in disguise now you're through it and out the other end definitely that definitely sounds weird to say it it's one of my favorite things that's ever happened in my life having a brain hemorrhage is one of the favorite things I don't wow I try and find ways to think how can I transfer what that kind of experience does for a human to other people without them having to go through a near-death experience.

20:36Very much taking it for the team. Yeah.

20:38Thea Brook:We get so few opportunities to have our reality completely questioned. It just felt for me, if you have a table full of things, somebody just wiped the table off. So everything that I'd been carrying around, worries and anxieties and fears and how I thought about myself, and it's just all gone. It's like you just get to start from scratch again at the age of 39, which you don't get that opportunity very often right so I'm very grateful to the whole experience I am there weren't any warning signs it came completely out of the blue I had an aneurysm the burst that I didn't know I had could have formed the day before it could have been there when I was born they never know with that kind of thing I was very lucky it actually it opened and bled and then closed itself again.

21:29Thea Brook:So that's part of why I was so lucky and recovered so well was that it didn't just keep bleeding out. Four months before it happened, I came out of my last business and I was so burnt out, so burnt out. I knew that I'd been carrying a lot of stress for a long time, but it wasn't until I stepped out of it and had the opportunity to try and unwind and rest and recover that I realized how burnout I was and I don't necessarily actually think that's connected to having the brain hemorrhage because there's no direct correlation between stress and a hemorrhage if the stress causes persistent high blood pressure and you don't manage it then the persistent high blood pressure can cause it I've never really had a problem with blood pressure so I like to think it wasn't connected but it is a bit too much of a coincidence that it happened four months after that god and it's your body I've had it every friend I know started a business how that your body will send you physical alarm bells to be like you're not listening to your brain stop and I'm going to make you stop because you're not listening but it's scary I think how much founders are willing to sacrifice themselves for their business oh absolutely yeah my my body gave me warning signs in so many other ways through that particular business.

22:48Thea Brook:I put on quite a bit of weight. Actually, like my gut just didn't work well. So I was constantly bloated, like constantly battling and going back to the doctors and trying to figure out what was up with my stomach and then couldn't shift weight as a result of it, which has never been the case for me in my life. I've always had such a good metabolism and gut. That was completely out the window. It was just ruined. I got virus after virus. At one point I had like scarlet fever and then I had something else and then I had something else and I think you just get really good at dealing with the next level of stress or tiredness or illness and then that becomes your new norm and so then when the next thing comes along it feels like oh gosh this is more but then you get used to that and that becomes the norm and then the next bit you just don't realize how much you're carrying in your body and just as a side we do have an episode on breath work with jamie clements it just we did a whole health and wellness series and that was our most popular download it's a season of the whole podcast because people it's a mobility nutrition sleep breath work meditation imposter syndrome all of those things because if you're not operating your business can't and i think once i had covid i think for the third time and i was doing the team zoom call from bed and sam and my team's like do you know you're still in bed in your pajamas this is as good as it's going to get guys otherwise i'm not dialing in do you want us to do the call without you and I'm like no it's fine I was like I should have just let them get on with it but those things where you feel like you can't let go with that in mind and this topic about how to be the CFO of your own business how can you start to extricate yourself from your day-to-day like how can you start to let the business run without you doing every single little bit of it we're taking a quick 30 second break from this episode to ask are you thinking of starting your own podcast if so this is great news because we run a course that will train you how to produce your own podcast yourself this course is for people who do not want to outsource and pay someone else to do it you want to learn how to do it yourself we teach you everything that you need to get up and running with your own podcast show and so much more just dm us at hello at fallowfield mason to book your spot the very first thing that has to happen is getting some kind of capacity back for the founder and the founders we start working with it blows their mind that we start talking about that first because they're like we need to fix the business first and then I get the capacity and we always say no we need to and we will get your capacity back first because everything we want to do that follows that's going to get the business working better without the founder get more profit running more financial breathing room as much as calendar breathing room and mental breathing room all the things the founder is going to need to make decisions just what we were just talking about then you can't operate as a good business owner if everything's shut down like we know so much more about how the brain works now when we're in that fight or flight mode everything just narrows in a window of tolerance i learned you have a everyone has a window tolerance and it can expand and it get really tight we know that when we do things like relax and we go on holiday or sometimes you just have on those days where you take a break and you go for a walk and you suddenly feel all the ideas flowing and it's because you know that nervous system's all calmed down and we feel like we can think properly so we have to get that capacity somehow even if it's 10 capacity back into a founder so that they can start thinking clearly because what we're going to be doing is we're going to be looking at the business and saying let's look at what all the data is telling us what's working what's not working where's the profit coming from what's driving more growth already how do we put these pieces together what do you really want from this business like where do you want it to go like we don't want to build a plan until we know what you're targeting some people want a five ten million business some people want an exit other people want to stop at 400 or 500k a year and just live a really nice life and be able to clock off at three every day like even being able to answer that question what do you really want they need to be in a good state where their creativity is opened up and they can answer that question so it it really will start with getting capacity and the way we do that which i always recommend to people is you need to time track to the minute for a couple of weeks a week if you can't stomach two weeks but two weeks is what gives us like tracking nutrition on my fitness pal you actually know what you're eating rather than guessing so time track we use toggle i love toggle we use toggle too it's perfect and as you can do a free level and you can set it up and we get people to track by department and then under two tags strategic or operational.

27:30Thea Brook:So we can see how much you're doing the doing versus doing the thinking. And then we can look at the picture and go, okay, here's what's going on with you. And hang on, you have this VA that's not being used fully, but we could give them those three things. And then we might actually just need to drop this piece altogether right now because it's not producing the results that you want. And through a bit of Tetris-ing, we can always show a founder, or they usually see it for themselves once we're looking at it. Okay, this is how we We aim to get half a day a week back into completely clear so you can not open a single thing and just get some strategic thinking time a day if possible.

28:02Thea Brook:But that's where it has to start. You have to do that piece first and then start getting tactical around what you're going to do with that time. But this is great because most people think, right, I have to hire someone or I have to work less. And actually, no, you've just got to know your calendar and know your workload and then block time to go for a four hour walk. Because you're right, every time you get up and go, I've just got to put my laptop down and go for a break, that's when you've problem solved all of the things. It's actually really good, effective work. Yeah, absolutely. And that I just need to hire someone is what so many people default to when they're feeling this way.

28:37Thea Brook:And you're always making that decision from one, the basis of probably more of a fear based mind. So you're not really thinking more creatively, bigger picture, but also without having the data that you need, not just the time data, but then looking at okay what what's the business going to need three months from now or six months from now this is today's problem but am I actually hiring somebody that is not going to fit again in three months but this is the other thing is that hiring people is the not the worst part of the job that's an awful thing to say but it's the hardest and it often goes wrong and people are people and they have opinions they can be late they might not do a good job they so hiring is a really big decision it is a big decision and pretty much every founder I know hates hiring until they start to get it right.

29:22Thea Brook:And then they love hiring. Oh, it's the best and the worst part of the job. I've said that for years because I've had the best and some people who have not been the best, but you know it's like the one, you know when they're exceptional and change your day. I had one colleague once who was exceptional, Sam, who's with the business for four years. I'll never forget this. He messaged saying, I've looked at your diary. I've seen the deadlines. I've seen the clients' emails that have come in. I've draft written what I think you might want to say to them because I think I know you it was almost like an AI and I was like this is incredible and he said just because I know you're on the tube for the next half an hour and you'll have moments at the stations where you'll get wi-fi you can copy and paste my drafts and tweak rather than have to write from scratch I was like thank you hallelujah yeah so when you get the thing is though he set the bar very high now so damn it that's interesting as well because you there are ways to take that magic of that person and not let it just be chance that you try and find those unicorn people who are like you can germinate it throughout the team yeah and this is where I think again it's going back to the patterns that my data analytical brain and we have that with the other senior experts on my team they will always be looking for but what why why did that really work with that person what was it that they were doing and how do we find more people like that or find people who have the potential to be like that and get them to understand that is what that's what sets the bar high and that's how to behave and so then we can almost start to manufacture it ourselves a bit within it but it starts from that analytical looking at okay what's driving that underneath it well as a comms person i am obsessed with numbers and i rarely get to go near them and people like but you're in pr what's the matter about the numbers like no you don't understand they are everything and for you you're saying that the 40k is hiding in a founder's pnl could you expand a little bit on that yeah i find so much money in people's pnls i love it it's one of your favorite pieces of the job i love when the light bulb goes on when you take a founder from not feeling comfortable looking at their numbers not even really knowing where to get embarrassed about it as well because ignorance is not bliss yeah if anybody's listening to this and they feel embarrassed about it don't one of my one of my rules in entrepreneurship is just be the idiot and put your hand up and say i don't know this i love playing the idiot it's so common it's almost every founder that i start working with at this stage that particular example where i found 40k it's a very exciting one because obviously game-changing money in a business it actually came down to three different things one of them was what we were just talking about with team so there was senior people in the team and more junior people obviously costing the business very different amounts of money and when we did the time tracking exercise the senior people who could do very good revenue generating work in the business were bogged down by a lot of things that the more junior people in the business could do So we just, again, the whole Tetris thing of looking at it more company-wide, what does it really take for this business to run well, to grow, to create happy client experiences, and just shuffled things around.

32:41Thea Brook:And that freed up capacity for the higher revenue generating people to take on more projects that were currently on hold. So it could kind of open up that revenue stream more, which is amazing. One of them which I see so often was scope creep. because it wasn't being tracked so there's often a niggly feeling that like we quoted this thinking this is how it's going to go and I think we're doing a bit more but it's fine because we just want the client to be happy and it'll stop and it'll move and there's this niggly thought of what's going on oh and as a service-based business time is money time is money but the vast majority of people don't track it in that way they just don't right they think yeah we are doing about what we said we would so it's fine and in this particular example we looked project by project tracked what was going against it and there was one project in particular that was like there's not really any profit coming out the bottom of this which defeats the object of doing this project we had a conversation about it there what they were doing for them was different but it was really needed and the client wanted it and I said just take that conversation back to the client to your client and they were really nervous to do it so thinking no because we've agreed to do it and And this is what happens.

33:55Thea Brook:We as founders think that's our reputation and we've said we can do it and I don't want them to know we can't do it. I said, just give it a go. Just see what they say. And they presented, this is what we're doing. This is what we quoted for. This is what we'd like to be actually doing if we reflected it properly. And they signed off on 24 ,000 of billing. No problem. Oh, yeah. Okay, we can see you're doing something different. Here's an extra 24 ,000. So they didn't change anything about how they were working. They were already doing the work. They just weren't billing for it. So that, like, huge impact.

34:25I don't know why or how it dropped for me the penny, but I go back and say, I'd be thrilled to do this work for you. We can absolutely execute it in three weeks. It sits outside of scope, so it will come in at a contingency fee of X. And the word contingency fee is my favourite ever thing because in a service-based business, we are paid for our time to try. And that's great, and we get 50 % up front. But if they ask us to do something else, and because they're excited to work with it, they see the results, like, oh, they want to do this. and it's typically you're working with a client is they're not a founder and it isn't their budget it's the business's budget and you have to have the balls to say oh yeah of course but it's going to cost this much more because it's a separate scope and i think it's particularly prevalent in female founders oh no but i just want them to like me and i need a case study and maybe fairly early on great do some stuff to get some great testimonials but don't work for free it just pains me to witness this.

35:18And on that, most founders you meet are focused on revenue. What should they be looking at instead? Is it margins, people cost ratios, something else?