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

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

Brandon KordowerBrandon 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 SimonDaniel 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.

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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

  1. Track time and utilization across your agency: Understanding how staff spend their time reveals actual capacity, prevents overstaffing, and maximizes profitability.
  2. Focus on profit, not just revenue: Prioritizing margins over top-line growth ensures sustainable scaling and reduces debt-driven risk to your business.
  3. Adopt accrual-based accounting: Recording revenue and expenses when earned or incurred provides a clearer picture of agency performance and stability.
  4. Monitor people costs as a percentage of revenue: Keeping salaries, benefits, and bonuses below 55% of total revenue safeguards long-term financial health.
  5. 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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