[EO Orange County] Making Marketing Agencies More Profitable With Brandon Kordower & Daniel Simon

Brandon Kordower is the Founder and CEO of AURA Accounting Solutions, a firm that provides fractional CFO and controller services to help marketing agencies scale profitably. With deep expertise in financial strategy, Brandon has guided clients through transformative growth journeys resulting in multiple eight-figure exits. His data-driven approach empowers agencies to make confident, strategic decisions that boost margins and scalability. Through AURA, he continues to help agencies gain clarity, control, and consistent profitability.

Daniel Simon is the Executive VP at AURA. He has over 25 years of agency experience and 30 years in executive leadership, with a background spanning investment banking, music and fine arts, marketing communications, and restaurant ownership. Daniel’s broad experience allows him to bridge creative and financial strategy, helping agencies align vision with profitability. At AURA, he plays a key role in guiding teams toward high growth and operational excellence.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[07:09] Brandon Kordower explains how niching down supercharged AURA’s success
[10:43] Daniel Simon reveals how people costs quietly drain profits in many agencies
[13:54] Leveraging time tracking to boost staff utilization and profitability
[16:40] Why growing revenue without watching margins can put your agency at risk
[20:08] Ways to identify if your agency’s services are secretly bleeding cash
[23:47] The must-hit 60% gross margin benchmark for agencies
[36:23] How accrual accounting exposes the real story behind the numbers
[46:10] How audit-ready financials can make your eight-figure exit easy

In this episode…

Most agency owners are great at creative work. But when it comes to the financial side, things can get messy. Tracking revenue, profitability, and utilization often takes a back seat to client work and growth. The result? Revenue might rise, but profits stay flat or even shrink. So, what does it actually take to make a marketing agency sustainably profitable?

According to Brandon Kordower, a financial strategist for marketing agencies, profitability begins with clarity — specifically, understanding your numbers and how they connect to performance. He highlights that most agencies chase revenue without analyzing margins or capacity, creating hidden inefficiencies that erode profits. Daniel Simon adds that since people are an agency’s most significant cost and asset, leaders must measure utilization and time to make wiser staffing and pricing decisions.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Brandon Kordower, Founder and CEO, and Daniel Simon, Executive VP, at AURA Accounting Solutions, to discuss how marketing agencies can improve profitability through better financial practices. They explain the benefits of accrual accounting, the metrics every agency should monitor, and how minor adjustments can drastically impact margins. They also share lessons from helping clients achieve multimillion-dollar exits.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments

“Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity.”
“The assets are not in a warehouse; the assets are the people.”
“If you’re only focused on fueling top line and you’re not watching the margin, you end up in this situation where all that profit is just going to debt servicing.”
“Working on these things and making sure that you are maximizing the profitability is the biggest lever you have in the organization.”
“The companies that bring the highest valuation are those that can run successfully without the owner/founder’s involvement.”

Action Steps

Track time and utilization across your agency: Understanding how staff spend their time reveals actual capacity, prevents overstaffing, and maximizes profitability.
Focus on profit, not just revenue: Prioritizing margins over top-line growth ensures sustainable scaling and reduces debt-driven risk to your business.
Adopt accrual-based accounting: Recording revenue and expenses when earned or incurred provides a clearer picture of agency performance and stability.
Monitor people costs as a percentage of revenue: Keeping salaries, benefits, and bonuses below 55% of total revenue safeguards long-term financial health.
Standardize financial processes and reporting: Establishing consistent systems and metrics builds accuracy, credibility, and investor confidence during growth or acquisition.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:12

All right, Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Brandon Kordower and Daniel Simon before I formally introduce both of you. They’re both with AURA CFO. You can check them out at auracfo.com.

I always like to mention other episodes people should check out, since this is part of the top agency series. Some of the interesting agency owners I’ve had on Jason Swenk who? Brandon I know you know, he’s been on twice. One, he talks about how he built up his agency to eight figures and sold it. And then he has a group that serves agency owners as well.

Check that out. Another one was Todd Taskey. Todd is the Second Bite Podcast, Asked. So he helps pair private equity with agency owners. Helps sell agencies.

Really? And actually it’s funny. You know, our CFO, they specialize in marketing agencies. I mean, they have service lots of service professionals with what they do, which we’ll get into, but specifically niche into marketing agencies. And so, Todd, niches in agencies and helps sell them.

He’s got a great show, Second Bite Podcast. People can check it out. Another good one was Kevin Hourigan. Kevin Hourigan runs Spinutech and he’s had his agency since 1999. So it’s interesting to hear the landscape of obviously the agency world, but the internet and business throughout several decades at this point.

So check those out and more on inspired Insider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a few ways.

One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution of production. And number two, we’re an easy button for a company’s gifting. So we make gifting and staying top of mind. Your clients, partners, prospects, even your staff.

Simple, easy, and actually affordable. So you just give us a list of your people that you want, and we will send multiple gifts maybe every three, 4 or 5 months over the course of three, 4 or 5 years. Right. So we call ourselves, you know, Brandon and Danny, the magic elves that run in the background to make it easy for companies to build amazing relationships. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships.

I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships, and I personally, I found no better way to over the past decade to profile the people and companies I admire and send them sweet treats in the mail so anyone who’s is interested, go to rice.com or email support at rise25.com. I am super excited to introduce Brandon and Daniel. Brandon Kordower I’ll introduce you first. Brandon is the Founder and CEO of AURA CFO. They specialize in providing fractional comptrollers and CFO services to marketing agencies.

They have over 15 years of professional experience, and Brandon and his company help marketing agencies scale and become more profitable by understanding the value of accurate data around their decision making process and aura. We were talking before we hit record. Here they have clients successfully sell with eight figure exits, and their professional experience really ranges all over the place. They could be 500,000 revenue and they’ve served nine figure businesses as well. Daniel Simon, we’ll call.

You know, Danny, I know you play a lot where a lot of hats over there, but officially on the site, says Executive VP. But he brings over 25 years of Asia experience and 30 years in C-suite experience and has really a diverse background, including investment banking, music and the fine arts, the marketing communications industry. Obviously, I saw also restaurant ownership is there. I’m not sure what that’s about. Maybe we’ll get to that at some point.

I would, I’d personally, that seems super stressful to me. An educational institutions and e-commerce, just to name a few. So both of you, thanks for joining me today.

Brandon Kordower: 04:25

Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:26

Let’s start off with just talk about AURA CFO. And what you do is you do that. I’m going to pull up the website so we can check it out.

Brandon Kordower: 04:35

Yeah. So founded AURA about eight years ago. And the idea was that I saw this shift moving more and more to fractional. There’s a lot of times a discrepancy where companies cannot afford to have the qualified talent that they need. And so what they end up doing typically it’s just hiring lower end individuals.

And there’s two problems with that. Number one. Often a full time equivalent is not needed in the business. Right to handle kind of the day to day. But what’s more important is that the level of quality suffers because you can only afford a person with maybe 1 to 2 years experience.

And so you end up with this position where you’re getting low quality work. And so the idea behind AURA and doing fractional work is, hey, why don’t you work with professionals that have industry expertise part time as needed, and you can really elevate the quality of work that the client receives at a significant reduction in the price. And so ultimately, that was the vision behind aura. And over time, I have evolved into just working exclusively with professional service companies and even more niched into marketing agencies. And so we work with agencies that are getting to around $1 million in revenue.

They’ve only ever worked with a bookkeeper. They have very basic accounting, which is, you know, good for filing their taxes, but that’s about it. There’s not a lot of good tangible value in the information they’re seeing. There are significant swings month to month where one month is a huge profit. The next month is a huge loss, and it doesn’t allow for a lot of analysis to determine is the business moving in the right direction.

And so by us bringing clients onto what’s called accrual accounting, where we can help get rid of some of those timing differences and margin swings and give a lot of valuable information to agencies to understand. Am I making the right margins in the right places? Am I scaling effectively? Do I have the right cash flow bandwidth to handle this growth? And so these are the types of things that we work with our clients to help them ultimately achieve their growth and scale effectively.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:50

You mentioned when you started I’m curious the evolution. I want to talk. The evolution of the service side and then the evolution also of the of the niche side. Maybe start with the service side when you first started. What did you think.

Okay I’m going to offer this service because I know you have a few services that you offer.

Brandon Kordower: 07:09

Yeah. Great questions. When I first started, the idea was to actually offer an outsourced accounting department. So the idea initially was, hey, we’re going to handle A to Z everything within the day to day needs of accounting. And what I found was that that wasn’t very scalable for us to be able to handle everything from accounts payable to, receivable to.

And so ultimately, we ended up shifting to just offering controller CFO work, because I looked back and said, okay, what is the strategic value that we bring that is most needed? And the work that we bring is not easily, you know, replicated? It is easy to bring somebody in to handle basic data entry, to enter bills, to generate invoices that can be done by anybody without an accounting skill set requirement. The stuff we’re doing really requires five, ten plus years of experience to do properly. And so that was the ultimate move was first to just find that, okay, controller CFO work is where we needed to focus.

And then the next step in the evolution of the business was we were industry agnostic for many years. So I have experience in manufacturing, distribution, construction, professional services obviously. And so what I found for my company was that in order for us to scale and grow, I needed to find one niche and just kind of narrow down into that niche. And so I laid out my clientele and I said, who is the, you know, of these different industries that I’m working in, who and what industry is best for AURA to grow. And so I ultimately decided that the advertising industry was the right one.

And I came to that for for three reasons. The first was that, you know, agency owners are creatives, right? These are highly emotionally intelligent people, very creative. And but what that typically means is that numbers are not their thing. They’re not into analyzing numbers.

So right off the bat I’m like, okay, competitive advantage right there. Right. They need help with the numbers. I can deliver help with the numbers. That was number one.

Number two was in order to do professional services accounting correctly. It actually does require a lot of expertise because there are a lot of timing differences that exist within the financials between when projects start and stop, when customers are paying you, when you have to pay your freelancers or your employees, and capturing those things and booking the accounting correctly actually requires expertise. It’s not something that a bookkeeper alone can do. So. Okay.

Strike two. And then my third strike was that I was actually mentoring with with Danny or Daniel at the time and ultimately said to myself, well, okay, why am I just mentoring with Danny? Why don’t we bring him into the organization where he can actually inject his wisdom and experience on us to help us better serve our clients, particularly with fractional CFO services? And so that’s how we ultimately kind of evolved to where we are today.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:19

Danny, I’d love for you to touch on you’ve seen a lot of businesses and agencies too. What are some of the big mistakes that you see agencies make?

Daniel Simon: 10:32

Sorry. Was that for me? For for.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:34

You? Yeah. And then Brandon, you can you can add any color for sure, but. Yeah. Danny, I’d love to hear what you what you see, what are the big mistakes agencies are making?

Daniel Simon: 10:43

Well in the agency business, in marketing communications in general, you know, people forget that the assets are not in a warehouse. There’s no inventory, the assets are the people, and the strength of the organization is the strength of the people within the organization. And if number one, you’re not focusing on that as your primary focus within the organization, both from making sure that your people are growing, that they have opportunities for growth and advancement, but also from an accounting and finance perspective, watching your bottom line in terms of how much people cost you add on to your books as a percentage of your revenue, then it’s very, very easy to over staff an agency and have issues with your bottom line. And if you don’t spend enough time really being aware of that and being aware of things like, for example, are my staff fully utilized? Do they have downtime?

You know, do we have the tools to even track that information from a time sheet perspective and all the rest? You know, at the end of the day, the single largest internal cost of an advertising agency is people. And so in order to make sure the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is where agency leaders do not focus on that from a profitability perspective, and think that they can easily turn things around by tweaking other costs. The reality is, in most agencies, those are the costs should be no more than 25% of total revenue. And so being able to tweak that 25% and make a difference to your bottom line is, is really a fallacy.

And you really want to make sure that your focus is in the right place.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:49

So it’d be like, you know, like 80 over 20. Why’s someone has, like, software subscriptions and they’re trying to be like, hey, I want to we need to cut costs. They start looking at their software subscriptions opposed to the people side.

Daniel Simon: 13:01

Is that 100%, Jeremy? 100%. You know, yeah, you can cut that subscription, but that subscription is not going to take your, your, your bottom line margin up with any sort of significance to make a difference in the organization. You know. So yes, that that’s exactly the case. The 80 over 20 in that respect.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:23

I’m sure you talk to people and they don’t know what those things. I mean, that’s probably why they they call you. But you know, like I don’t you’re saying utilization and I don’t have any idea what that is. What are some of the ways that you help people figure these things out to be like, okay, I have no idea what my utilization rate is for my for my staff or or maybe they have a guest. They’ll give you an answer and like, well, let’s actually look at the data.

What are some of the metrics you’re looking at?

Daniel Simon: 13:54

Right. Yeah. So I mean, the first thing is making sure that everyone on your team is tracking their time. You know, if you know and at the at the early stages, it may be just as basic as tracking it in Excel or a word file or something like that. Obviously you would like a timesheet system that is incorporated in with your accounting system in in a best case scenario.

But you need to track time and you don’t track time because you want to basically be a watchdog over your staff. You track time to be able to say, well, Danny is only putting in 70% of his time that we have available into client work, and the other 30% is downtime. But we don’t know that because he’s not completing time sheets. And and the reality is that 30% could be used on other clients. And if we don’t know that well, we might go out and hire additional staff when the reality is we have that capacity within the organization.

So, you know, my metric and, you know, I’ve worked primarily my entire career in the marketing and communications industry with big US listed firms, and within those firms, they have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of verticals. And they have a lot of different companies, you know, and the metrics are pretty much the same, whether you’re dealing with, as you said earlier, a half, half $1 million agency or $100 million agency, you want to make sure that from a utilization perspective, at a minimum, you’ve got 80% and even higher than that in many instances, because if you’ve got an account person whose job is to work with clients, you could argue why should it be less than 100%? Except for those training, you know, opportunities within the company or a little bit of admin that they have to do. But at the end of the day, their job is to service the clients. And our job as leaders within the company and as financial controllers within, you know, as, as a fractional firm is to make sure that you have that data to be able to make informed decisions.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:15

You know, Brandon, what about what other mistakes do you see people making? Obviously, you know, people aren’t tracking time. Therefore, if you’re not tracking time, you can’t track utilization, which is the like. Dan, you were saying the biggest cost that agencies have, a lot of companies have what other mistakes or what other things are agencies not doing?

Brandon Kordower: 16:40

So I think the trap that a lot of agency owners fall into is just tracking top line revenue. They just focus on revenue growth. They say, okay, well, I’m at a million. I want to get to two next year. What do I do?

And all they’re focused on is bringing in new revenue without looking at any of the other costs. Unfortunately, what happens as a result of that is that you may be starting from an early place, not bringing in the right kind of business, and now you’re just amplifying the issue. So, you know, an example of this is Danny and I were talking about six months ago to a prospect, and he was doing around 5 million top line, which, you know, there’s a lot of agency owners that would be very, very happy to get to 5 million. Right. And it feels great to say I have a $5 million agency.

The problem was it was a $5 million agency that was only generating a 5% profit, so he was generating $250,000 profit. Okay. But in order to fuel his growth to 5 million, he took on a lot of debt. Right. Because in his mind, it was okay.

Well, I need to fuel this revenue growth. Let me bring in this money to invest into the business to fuel my top line. And if you’re only focused on fueling top line and you’re not watching the margin, you end up in this situation where now basically 5 million in top line, you have 5% profit, but all that profit is just going to debt servicing. So you really have nothing to show for it at the end of the day. I see this almost daily when I’m talking to prospects.

This is one of the biggest concerns that I have is that there’s this there’s this focus around I have this saying, which is revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. Okay. So yes, top line revenue growth is important. But if you’re not watching your profitability along with that, you can run into significant issues. And that, I would say, is probably one of the biggest things I see when I’m evaluating working with agency clients.

And probably 80 to 90% of those prospects I speak to are not really watching their figures. They’re not necessarily watching their utilization. They’re focused on I’m at X revenue and I want to get to X plus Y revenue by next year.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:09

I know one of the things when you’re looking at companies and you’re helping them, you have a dashboard. And you you know, you have these benchmark numbers. So I do want to talk about what you look at and what you help companies look at so they can make better decisions. And I remember like to your both your point. I had someone on Tommy Mello on the podcast who had a garage door, has a garage door company, and he built it to a $220 million company.

But early on, the revenue was growing. But they had a bunch of locations that were not profitable, even though the revenue is growing. And I know I remember in the conversation he’s like he asked one of his mentors, which I do. And the person was like, just shut down. This one, this one, this one, this one, and it’s an ego hit.

You know, he’s talking about an ego hit. But once he did that and became even more profitable, then he can grow faster. So even though the like you said, the top line was bigger with all those other locations, but the bottom line was was hurting in some of those areas.

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Brandon Kordower: 20:08

Well, and this happens a lot in the agency space because as an agency grows, they want to feel like, okay, I want to be full service to my clients. I want to offer a full suite of services. And so they start bringing on all these additional services without knowing am I am I even profitable offering these services? Am I am I losing money offering these services? And so once again, it kind of goes back to the why the time tracking is so important.

Because time tracking One on one is yes, you should know where your staff is putting their hours into clients. And then what I would call kind of the 201 version of time tracking is okay, we know when we’re working on a certain client, but then what service we’re providing for that client, because you should be able to see the different suite of service offerings you’re providing, see the margin for those different service offerings to make sure that you are making the right amount of profit, because it could be that you’re losing money in certain places, but you’re continuing to double down and offer servicing. That only is going to exacerbate or or hurt the issue. If cash flow is an issue or if profitability is an issue. So when we’re evaluating a client, one of the first things I like to start with is, okay, are we making money doing what we’re offering now because you want to start with that?

Are you making the right amount of margin offering what you’re currently offering to your clients? Because if you’re not, We have to start with the root of the issue, because it doesn’t matter how much revenue grows, we’re only going to create a bigger and bigger issue for ourselves. So the first question is are you generating enough margin? And so what we need to do is we need to look at time tracking data, or we need to even if the time tracking data isn’t there. Okay.

Let’s start at least with estimates. We need something to start with. And then let’s make sure are we making the right margin in this. And you know, for a professional service business, you want to have a minimum of a 60% gross margin. So gross margin is revenue minus your direct costs.

In this case direct costs would be your, you know, people costs. And you have that number gives you a gross profit. Gross profit divided by revenue is margin. It’s a percentage. You should be generating a minimum of a 60% margin.

Ideally you try to push that to 70 or 80% because as the business grows as well, you will need to make significant investments into the organization. You will have to build a leadership team. you will have to build sales and marketing. Your overhead costs are only going to increase, so you need more and more profits to be able to reinvest back into the agency. And so kind of step one is to make sure are you making the right amount of money offering the services you currently are.

And if the answer is yes great. Okay. Then let’s get things aligned. If it’s not, then we need to figure out how to fix the root issue, which is either the offer or there is too much time going into something, or we’re not pricing accordingly. But you start there because if you don’t address the root issue, there’s no point in, you know, cutting costs, growing revenue.

You’re only going to dig yourself deeper into a hole.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:18

So you mentioned one benchmark that you look at is it should be 60% gross margin or more. What what other. And it’s funny because like do you step in at that point. Like okay it could be an offer issue. It could be a, be because there’s so, you know, a pricing issue and you could discover that.

But are you typically making giving advice on that sometimes or you’re just giving them the options of here’s some things to look at.

Brandon Kordower: 23:47

So we are here to advise on what this is, what the information is telling us. So we are looking at the data. We are compiling the data. And this is what the data is providing to us now from there can we advise. Absolutely.

But at the end of the day, we are not the ones running the business, right? We are the ones that are kind of compiling the data and then bringing you the facts. Right. So we are the fiduciaries that are third parties that are coming to you and say, hey, look, we’re analyzing the data and this is what the data is showing us. Now, some people choose to take that information and to make changes within the organization.

I suggest that I suggest using this information To run a better business. Some people don’t. And it’s not to say that the business won’t continue to grow, it’s just that here are the best practices, right? And here, here’s what the information is telling us. So if you’d like to follow best practices on growing your agency well based on industry experience and knowledge and the data, here are some changes that we recommend.

Daniel Simon: 24:58

Yeah. But if I can just add to that, I mean, we are also offering CFO advisory services. So to your to your question, Jeremy, you know, should a client, you know, wish to expand upon that, in addition to the data, we have the ability to step in and say, let’s delve into this and find out why your gross margin is only 45 or 50%. Let’s do a little bit of homework and see what we can do to correct that. And what are the ways that we can get yourself into a better position as far as that particular parameter is concerned. So the core business is definitely, as Brandon has highlighted.

But we have that capability as well. And we have people on board who can work with clients in that respect.

Brandon Kordower: 25:46

And just to, you know, give an example of why this is so important. If you have $1 million agency that’s generating a 60% margin, and if you can move that million dollar agency from a 60% to a 70% margin, you effectively add 56% increase to the bottom line. And so that and I’m sorry, not even the bottom line, 56% increase in gross profit, which adds even more amplification to the bottom line. And so while some people are not liking to focus on these things because it’s not sexy, right, they’d rather be doing client work, or they’d rather be just focusing on business development, working on these things, and making sure that you are maximizing the profitability on the types of services you provide. This is the biggest lever you have in the organization to adding significant profitability to the bottom line, and then you choose how you use that profitability.

Do you want to take more distributions? Do you want to reinvest that back into the business? It gives you the freedom and flexibility to use it as you wish. But I really advise anyone running a business to run this business as efficiently and as profitably as possible, and then give yourself the flexibility of what do you want to do with that additional money that the business is generating? If you’re not into profit, great.

Reinvest that back into the organization, into bonuses, and to, you know, providing more benefits to your employees. Or if you know that you need to make sales and marketing investments great, this will give you more fuel to to add to that growth, right. So there’s so many reasons why profitability should be the number one focus, and particularly when it comes to service margin that’s on the services you’re providing your clients.

Daniel Simon: 27:35

And forgive me if I can just add one more thing to that. So one of the things we often see and I just want to focus on Brandon’s, you know, reinforcement of profitability is that smaller agencies and, you know, founders of small agencies, they often come in and say, you know what? I’m not going to pay myself a market salary right now. I’m going to take 50% of what a real CEO should earn. And at the end of the day, it may boost up their profitability in the early days a little bit more.

But the reality is they’re kidding themselves because that’s not the true market cost of running that business. And so their profitability is artificially inflated in that respect. And then down the line, if you’re looking at a divestiture or an acquisition or something like that, well, any sort of company that’s going to target you is going to say, well, wait a second, Jeremy. You’ve only been paying yourself 50% of what a normal CEO. You know, I’m not going to, you know, I need to adjust the price of the company based on that because your profitability is inaccurate effectively.

So just wanted to add that to that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:48

Yeah. To replace that person, especially if they’re leaving, we’re going to have to hire someone at double the potentially or whatever it is.

Brandon Kordower: 28:56

Yeah. And to add even one more thing. And then Jeremy, I promise you can take over because we could call you all day. Keep going.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:02

I’ll just sit back and relax, you guys.

Brandon Kordower: 29:04

No, no, no. Because just because of how important this stuff is. Because especially what happens, especially for a very small agency where the owner of the agency is wearing many, many hats. They’ll fool themselves into thinking they’re more profitable than they are. And so they start to double down on on bringing in more work. But the problem is, once they have to start replacing themselves with staff to handle that work, That’s where the profitability completely erodes.

And so just going back to making sure if you’re factoring your time into providing the service offering at what you should be charging for providing those services, are you still generating that, that 60% margin minimum? I think it’s particularly for any small agency, even if they’re a solopreneur agency that has no staff or freelancers, they should all be doing this analysis, because without this analysis, they’re not going to be able to grow a business.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:59

What are some of the other. So 60% gross margin, I guess I kind of consider you I picture you like kind of doctors for people’s business. Like you go to the doctor, they take the blood work and you’re like, listen, you’re pre-diabetic or whatever. You’re you’re like barely profitable or whatever. The analogy is there.

And like, listen, you’re going to, you know, die a slow death if you don’t exercise or start eating right. And like, it’s kind of like, okay, Pricing and offer. And they could choose to. Okay. No, you just die a slow death and not exercise or whatever it is.

I mean, you give them the options or stop eating, you know, steak every single night of the week. I like steak, but it’s probably not good every single night. And that’s kind of what I visualize you doing for these. You’re bringing kind of the data. I mean, like, here’s the changes you need to make and then you’re looking at the data, obviously.

So 60% gross margin is kind of a benchmark metric. What’s what are some others.

Brandon Kordower: 31:00

So Danny do you want to.

Daniel Simon: 31:03

So I’ll jump right into it Jeremy. So simply because I’m going to follow up on what I said earlier, which is about people, probably the biggest metric that we advise our clients on that they should be focusing on is people costs and people costs as a percentage of your revenue. Now, when we talk about people costs, people often forget what really makes up people costs. It’s not only the salary, it’s the tax component. It’s the IRA contributions, it’s the bonuses, it’s the medical insurance and anything that is related to our staff as a cost that an agency puts forward is related to people costs.

And throughout my career, as I said earlier, I worked in a lot of holding companies. But at the end of the day, the metric that has worked for agencies, small and large, is you should not really be adding more than 55% of your revenue against your as people costs, which then would leave you with the second metric, which is you can spend 25% of your revenue on all of your other costs, whether that’s travel, whether that’s meals, whether that’s training sessions, you know, subscriptions Options and, you know, paying for my internet and newspaper subscriptions, etc.. And so that leaves you with the 20% profit margin. And those are the metrics that we generally advise our clients on in terms of what they should be looking for. And as Brandon said, as our accountants go through and evaluate, you know, the finances of our clients and discover that the metrics don’t match up with that, then we give them reasons as to why it should.

And even in an instance where a client is at 55%, but say all of the other ancillary costs are less than 25, say they were at 15 producing a 30% profit margin. Should you be taking that 10%? We’re not investing in the ancillary costs and put it into people. No you shouldn’t. Okay.

You should really be looking at that to reinvest in the company for growth in other areas. So it’s really important. Those are really the key metrics. And you know you know I’ve been in the marketing industry for 35 years. You know, and started a long, long time ago back in 1990.

And you know, I don’t see that changing very much from the day I started until today.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:49

Brandon. Anything else? And you’re in.

Brandon Kordower: 33:53

So what I would emphasize around these metrics is it sounds at a basic level, it sounds like, great, I’m just going to add up my people costs every month. I’m going to look at my operating expenses. And the reason where we come into the picture is that you need to be looking at these things with the understanding of how much is my true people cost this month. Okay, so let me give an example. If you are an agency that’s providing project based work.

You don’t want to look at what did you invoice your clients this month necessarily? You need to look at what work was performed in this month. How much revenue did we generate based on the work and services that we provided, not what our customers paid us or what we invoiced? Because if we have a very large invoice and we, you know, asked for a 50% deposit up front and we book all that revenue and it just makes us look hunky dory this month because we have all this artificial revenue. We haven’t even performed the services yet.

So when you’re looking at these things, when you’re looking at revenue and your costs, you need to be looking at, okay, what was the service I provided this month? What was my revenue I generated there, and then what was my cost on that service? Because if you’re providing direct labor, that’s for this month’s work. You can recognize that. But if you’re doing work on stuff you can’t recognize yet, well, those people cost shouldn’t be there.

And that’s where the sophistication comes in of tracking and measuring these things. And we’re deep in spreadsheets and reconciliations, looking at time tracking data and other data to actually correct the revenue, to say, okay, it doesn’t matter what you invoice your clients. Here’s the actual revenue recognition this month. Here’s the actual costs. And then we trickle that down to then provide this information to say, okay, where do you go against your people costs and your operating costs?

Because if you just take these metrics that we’re talking about and you’re not looking at the accounting properly, it’s not going to give you valuable information because you’re going to notice significant swings. Month one month your people cost may be 40%, but the next month it might be 80%. And you can’t run a business when you have that kind of volatility month to month.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:06

I know we are going to talk about cash versus accrual. This kind of, you know, goes into that I don’t know if you want to show we were talking about this before we hit record. And you you have something I figured it’d be cool to see something visual. Do you want to bring that up and talk about it?

Brandon Kordower: 36:23

Absolutely. Yeah. So here is an example of this is the same agency with the same data. It’s just how is the data being presented. So on the right side we have cash basis.

And just at a high level what is the difference between cash and accrual. Cash is I am looking at my bank statements and I’m seeing money come in. I’m recording it as income, I’m seeing money leaving and I’m recording it as an expense. And so the problem when you’re running a business just off cash basis and this is all small businesses mostly use cash. And it’s great for for getting your taxes done.

It’s also great for being able to manipulate the data. Right. Because if you’re getting to the end of the year, you say, oh man, I need to ramp up my expenses so that I can reduce my, you know, what my taxable income is. And so what you end up doing is you end up skewing your financial data because you can’t really rely on that. So what we do is we’re when you correct and put revenues and expenses in the proper place.

Now you go to a place where when you’re looking at accrual, now things are tying together nicely. When your revenue is going up, so is your gross profit. And therefore your net income should also maybe be going up too, right? Those things are all aligned. Whereas on cash basis you can see there are months where things don’t make sense.

There are months where my revenue is going up, but my profit is going down. How is that make sense? It doesn’t. Right. And so this is an example of why having proper, accurate data is so important to the decision making process for business owners, because it allows them to see the data unmanipulated.

And then to determine, okay, based on what we’re seeing, how do we then what what should we do to goal set or to, you know, continue to enhance the business whether it’s through revenue, growth, profitability, etc.?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:15

What about Danny? Danny. Anything else on that on your end?

Daniel Simon: 38:20

No, I think Brandon captured that really well. I think, you know, a cash basis is good for start up companies, but once you get to a certain level, you really want to go on to accrual based accounting because and, you know, do acquisitions get done of companies that are on a cash basis? I’m sure they do. I’ve never been involved in any, but I’m sure they do. But it’s going to give the acquirer a much better sense and a better understanding of the organization when a company is doing their books on an accrual basis.

So that’s all I would add to that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:57

I want to understand a little bit about why people come to you. What are the issues they’re having. And they’re, you know, was an agency in government contracting. I don’t know if you want to talk about that scenario because it’s probably a common scenario.

Brandon Kordower: 39:12

Yeah, yeah. So basically, you know, a lot of clients come to us when things aren’t making sense, or the business isn’t doing well, or they’ve they’ve scratched their head enough to try to figure out what is the issue here. And so with this client that started with us around almost a year ago, they came to us when they thought that everything was looking great on their financials, but they saw that they had a backlog of work and they just weren’t making sense of how that reflects what’s on the financial statements. And so their cash basis showed really, really, really strong because they had all these deposits that they were recording as income. But now they had to service all this work.

And so, you know, we came in and kind of clean things up to give a roadmap of, okay, once we actually clean everything up, oh, we have a problem now, which is that we’re not generating enough margin in providing the work that we are. We need to make some tweaks. And so through that process of sitting down, evaluating, working with their CEO, you know, really taking the time and effort to analyze this data. They’ve now been able to turn it around significantly to where, you know, Ebit margins went from being in the red to now being above 20%. And this is what we want to see is that we’re doing this work.

And then there’s actionable takeaways that companies can take in order to enhance the bottom line. If, you know, if we’re doing this work and then nothing’s being done from it, well, there’s much cheaper options. You know, just work with a bookkeeper alone. Right. We’re really here to help companies that are looking to, you know, that really have a growth mindset, want to take their business to the next level and understand that they need some subject matter expertise to help them get there.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:03

I’m wondering you mentioned actionable takeaways, and both of you can chime in, you know, with the different metrics you’re seeing, what are some of those actions that you’ve seen agencies take, right? So you talked about they maybe changed their pricing. You’re like your pricing is too low. You’re not profitable here right. Or they change their offer.

What other actions. I imagine people have to make staff changes too based on what they’re seeing. What are some of the actions you’ve seen agencies have to take based on what you find?

Brandon Kordower: 41:39

Danny, do you have any that come top of mind?

Daniel Simon: 41:42

Again, I’m I’m going to sound like a broken record, but people is the biggest one it takes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:47

I’m a slow learner. It will take me five times for you to say it, so keep repeating it, I love it.

Daniel Simon: 41:52

You know. I mean, the reality is, is you can easily over staff your business if you don’t have proper data and information, and if you overstep your business, you’re going to find out about that from your numbers very, very quickly. You know, so I think that’s certainly one of them. I also remember, you know. Related. I suppose you asked Brandon before about why do clients come to AURA?

You know, Brandon and I had a meeting sometime last year with a client that talked to us about a desire to potentially sell in X number of years. And so we spoke with that client and the founder, and the CEO was on the call. And we asked the CEO, who was also the CFO, about the profitability of the company. And the person told us, oh, we we’re at zero every month is what they told us. Our profit is zero every month.

And we said exactly zero. And they said yes. And we said, how is that possible? They said, well, whatever cash is left over, we just pay it out to ourselves. Okay.

That’s not accounting, okay? That’s not tracking the performance of your company. And so we said, look, you’re going to have to change the way you’re looking at your company if you’re looking at an acquisition or a sale, because no one’s going to touch you. If that’s the response that you’re going to give them in terms of how profitable your organization is. So you know that that really is is something, again, you know, related to to your question there, Jeremy.

But for me, the biggest action is taking action on people, you know, whether it’s going from not tracking time to tracking time or tracking time, but not utilizing the data, and then really delving into the data and saying, okay, well, Danny is only 80% utilized, but he’s our key account guy. What’s that other 20% of Danny’s time? And how can we utilize that better? Because the reality is I’m paying Danny $100 a month. Whether he produces 80% against clients or he produces 100% against clients, you know, his salary doesn’t change.

It’s a fixed cost for me. And so, you know, just being able to have data at your fingertips to be able to make decisions, educated decisions, and having the expertise, you know, and guidance from people at AURA to be able to, you know, direct you in the right direction, I think is really important.

Brandon Kordower: 44:26

Well, and absolutely. And what I would add to that is, Jeremy, I know you and I are both members of EO or Entrepreneurs Organization, and one of the big takeaways I have gotten from EO is to think strategically. And so I think the best practices that I’ve learned through EO, I also try to instill in my clients as well, because it’s one thing to just take action or to be working in the business, and it’s a whole other thing to be working on the business, which is so important to have kind of a strategy and to constantly be thinking about tomorrow versus just being in the today. So I think when it comes to kind of that strategic advisement or guidance, you know, taking what I’ve learned and being able to assist clients as well, I think has been really beneficial both for them and for me. And I know that EO has been indispensable as far as kind of help me level up as an entrepreneur as well.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:28

I have a few more questions I realized were four minutes over the time, I don’t know if either of you have to go and have a meeting, but I want to be respectful of that. I knew this conversation would flow, but the you know, Brandon, you know, Dan, you mentioned the when people are thinking of selling, that’s another thing that people are like, we need to get our financials in order even more because it’s going to be under a magnifying glass essentially. And we were chatting before we recorded Brandon about there was an eight figure exit. They had a three year plan, and then that just required a very short phone call because of what you did. Talk a little bit about that scenario.

Brandon Kordower: 46:10

Yeah. So this client came to us with the understanding that they had a 36 month exit horizon. They knew that they wanted to exit, and they knew their stuff was a mess. And they knew that going through due diligence, there’s going to be a three year lookback. And at a minimum, they wanted to have those things cleaned.

Well, they were correct. Their stuff was a mess. We were able to come in and clean that up and correct it, though. And one of the things that happens by also having accuracy in your data. Number one, it gives you the ability and the information to run a better business.

But also when this information goes out externally, the receiving end of it, whether it’s a bank, whether it’s an investor, you know, they’re going to be able to tell right away if there’s some sophistication injected into these financials. Our chief accounting officer came from a half billion dollar company. Right. So and all of the clients that we work with, we have what I like to call audit ready financials, meaning we’re doing supporting schedules and documentation for all of the journal entries that we’re posting. Anything that we’re booking, there’s a reconciliation or a backup to show this is why we’re making this booking.

Okay, so it’s not just arbitrary entries. There’s things to tie back so we can so somebody could follow the logic of what’s being done. And in the case of this client, sure enough, about three years later after engaging with us, they did go into due diligence and part of due diligence was us supplying all of that, supporting documentation for every month that we were preparing the financials. And the extent of our involvement on that exit was a one 15 minute phone call with the other side. And I’ve seen this happen many times.

And the reason for this is because when they see professionalism and when they see the certain caliber of how the work is being performed, the guard comes down. Okay. They see okay, these they were working with professionals that know what they’re doing. Because the reality is a lot of times they’re not used to that. They’re used to seeing, you know, lower quality work.

And so they need to prod and poke at it to uncover inconsistencies. And so it’s an investment. I like to think of us as an investment into your business, not a cost. Because whether you’re looking to increase the bottom line, whether you’re looking to get the maximum amount of value possible upon an exit one day, having your accounting done properly is going to help you in either scenario. And I think it just speaks to the importance of conveying professionalism not only to your clients, but then also to your bank and to any other third parties that are reviewing your information.

You create a lot of credibility through those financial statements.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:06

I’d love to talk about the what you know. And you’ve seen a lot of this. Both of you. Danny, you specifically in your career is with the holding companies is what is a potential acquire looking for. So they’re looking you give them everything.

What are they actually looking for?

Daniel Simon: 49:25

Yeah. Great question. Well, I mean, the first thing an acquirer is going to look for is, is that business fit in with me? Is it going to fill gaps? Is it going to add something that I already have. So every company that makes an acquisition is going to have a strategy behind that acquisition.

You know when you go out and you’re thinking about acquisitions, well, there are many options. You can build something internally and do it organically, or you can go out and buy it, or you can just, you know, pray that something’s just going to come along and all of a sudden things are going to change. But when you’re looking at buying something, you know, you want to make sure that what you’re adding into your portfolio is filling gaps in what currently exists. Because if all you’re doing is duplicating what you have and not providing anything new to your offer, then you have to question, well, why are you making that acquisition in the first place? Now, one of the reasons you might make that acquisition in that example is, and this is a rule that I always followed, is that any target company that I’m going to look at, I want to be margin accretive to my organization being the buyer of the company.

So, for example, if I’m currently looking to buy a company and my company’s at a 20% margin, and the company I’m looking at is at a 5% margin, and by combining our two companies together, I’d go down to a 10% margin. Well, is that the right business decision? You know, similar to what Brandon said earlier, you know, it may increase my revenue, but it’s certainly not increasing my profitability. So I want to make sure that I’m margin accretive. I want to make sure that the company I’m looking at is margin accretive.

I want to make sure that it’s not going to put a strain on my resources in terms of bringing bringing them into the fold and into my organization. So I think that’s really important. As you evaluate whether or not you’re going to make an acquisition, you know, and look at a company in terms of coming on board, I think that’s really important. Brandon, I don’t know if you want to add anything on to that.

Brandon Kordower: 51:41

Yeah. What I would just say too, is that, you know, the companies that bring the highest valuation are those companies that can run successfully without the owner founder’s involvement. And so it goes back to that, you know, your business should be generating 20%, including your cost of being within the Organization being the CEO, because really, you should be able to step back and replace yourself with a competent CEO. And it’s still a profitable company that’s generating margin. And ultimately, to the extent that you can delegate enough away within the organization so that it runs, every department can run without this.

The founder’s involvement are those companies that bring about the largest valuation, because they understand that the business isn’t directly tied to the founder. And, you know, the business doesn’t rely on the founder. So I would say that for those agencies looking to exit, that’s an important strategic objective is to make sure, how do I have this business run successfully without my day to day involvement? And on top of that, I would say that typically, you know, multiples tend to go up around the 5 million with a million in EBITDA mark. I would say companies at that size and greater start to get larger multiples beyond 4 to 5 of EBITDA, at least just in my experience.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 53:08

Danny, we were talking before we hit record about, you know, you were mentioning filling gaps in strategic acquisitions. There was one in Vietnam. It sounded interesting. You want to talk about that?

Daniel Simon: 53:19

No. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, Jeremy, as you stated up front, you know, I spent 25 years of my career working in the Asia Pacific region in this industry. And, you know, we had an opportunity to sell our one of our businesses in Vietnam.

And actually, the company that was looking to buy the the business had no advertising experience, didn’t know anything about advertising whatsoever. And so when I was sitting down with him to discuss the reason he would consider acquiring such a company, I said, you know, where are the synergies? What’s coming up? Maybe I’m missing something. I don’t understand enough about your business, so maybe you can explain a little bit more so it will come a lot clearer.

And this other company was in the distribution business and they were just distributing products, you know, all over the country from, you know, small little villages to the big towns of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. And, and this gentleman saw tremendous synergies in terms of using advertising to promote his business, also to show his clients, because he’s working with massively huge clients, you know, with a lot of different product lines and basically have a way into those clients to then offer marketing services as well. So, you know, this was an example of, you know, a particular acquisition or a divestiture in my case. But the company that made the acquisition, you know, coming in with, in my mind, no synergies, but this gentleman who was an entrepreneur saw tremendous number of synergies and it ended up being very successful for him. So again, it’s a matter of thinking outside of the box and not necessarily you know, he this was his gap and this is what he felt was important to him.

And so we went through and we sold the company and he did very well.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 55:20

It’s like it was doing well without advertising. Think of it with and then he can offer that as a service as well.

Daniel Simon: 55:25

100%.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 55:26

Interesting. I have one last question for both of you. First of all, thanks for sharing the knowledge, the lessons, the journey. It’s always really enlightening for me to hear because this is something that is not my strength and it’s not something I like to do. So I like how you explain it and people can check out AURA CFO.

Com as I mentioned, you are a CFO. Com to learn more. My last question is just some lessons you learned from a mentor or colleague, right? And so Brandon, from your end maybe some some lessons you learned from Danny. And then Danny, you could think about on your end some of your mentors, colleagues and what you’ve learned.

So, Brandon.

Brandon Kordower: 56:11

Well, geez, what haven’t I learned from Danny? You know, I think Danny helped me understand the importance of processes. I think when, you know, entrepreneurs a lot of times want to be entrepreneurs because they want to throw up a middle finger to the corporate world, right? They want to say, I want to do something different. I’m going to be rock and roll.

I’m going to do things a different way. But there’s a lot of great lessons that come from the corporate world. And one of those is processes and having consistency around those processes, because to the extent that an organization can create efficiencies and processes, it makes it much more scalable. And so I would say that’s definitely one of the biggest takeaways that Danny has helped advise me in before even coming on was to understand the importance of creating some structure and processes and how that aligns to the big picture growth and how it makes it that much easier. Going back to finding a niche, because when we were servicing many different industry types, well, when we would onboard a new client, we would all of a sudden now we would have to learn that new client’s ways, how that accounting type and oh, okay.

Do we have somebody on the team that has expertise in that type of accounting? Now working with agencies, everybody on the team is an agency expert at this point. And so and we have the processes down so that it makes it much easier for us to onboard new clients and for us to grow as an organization. So what I love about the agency world, even, is that professional services is the same. Whether you’re an accounting firm, an agency, a you know, an architect or an engineer.

There’s a lot of great lessons and takeaways. And I’m constantly learning new things as I listen to podcasts and go to conferences such as elevate, where, you know, you and I met in person. Jeremy, I’m mentioning Jason again. You know, I think this idea of like leveling up, getting this information and then but using it. Right.

It’s one thing to go and to take it all down and to write it on a notepad and never look at it again. It’s another to actually sit down and now start to execute on some of the the lessons learned.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 58:27

Love it. Danny, what about you?

Daniel Simon: 58:30

Yeah, I had to think about this. And and the only thing that comes to mind is that when I was first asked to move to Hong Kong, I was living in New York, working in the advertising industry, and my boss said, hey, guess what? You’re going to go run Asia-Pacific for the company and live in Hong Kong. And you know, this, this was my mentor. This was the guy who taught me everything I know, you know, to date in this industry And my biggest concern was that while I was a good accountant, I probably wasn’t the best accountant.

Okay. But I knew what I was doing and I said, you know, okay, boss, you know, you know, this is my concern. He said, don’t worry about that. He said, the reason I’m sending you over there is because you have an incredibly sharp business mind and you know how to look at things, you know, outside of the numbers and then combine them together with the numbers, okay? And that’s what I thrive on.

And it’s funny, you mentioned at the outset of our discussion today about my background. So both of my parents were schoolteachers, and they told me to never follow in their footsteps simply because I would never make any money. And I listened to them. But at the same time, I like to sell myself as a financial executive with the heart of a schoolteacher, because I was raised by two school teachers. And, you know, I really understand.

And, you know, it’s not just about the numbers, it’s about understanding people and understanding what makes organizations tick. And again, for the last time on this podcast, I’m going to talk about people. People are our biggest asset in this industry. And if you don’t understand people and you don’t have an open mind to be able to have open discussions and really listen, you know it, then then you won’t succeed. So I succeeded in my job because of that mentor and really believing in me.

And ironically, I built up my accounting skills from good to better and better and better, you know, over the years. So that would be the story that I’d leave you with Jeremy.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:00:31

I love it, first of all, thank you both. Everyone check out auracfo.com to learn more and we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks everyone.

Brandon Kordower: 1:00:38

Thank you

Daniel Simon: 1:00:39

Thanks, Jeremy.

Outro: 1:00:40

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