EP051 - Marketing leadership best practices for the modern workplace with Kelly Schuknecht of Summit Virtual CFO
About the episode
This episode focuses on marketing leadership best practices for the modern workplace. Leading a creative team online and in the office is inherently different. Our guest, Kelly Schuknecht, has been leading teams for decades and working remotely for the last 16 years. Her experience with remote leadership is filled with insights, learnings, and great stories that can inspire other remote leaders to operate a better-performing marketing department online.
About the guest
Kelly Schuknecht is a marketing director at Summit Virtual CFO by Anders (Summit), specializing in Virtual CFO and advisory services. Having worked remotely for 16 years, Kelly is passionate about remote work and leadership. With over a decade of experience in remote team management, she advocates for remote work as a key to helping women advance in their careers.
Her leadership at Summit has contributed to massive growth, implementing content marketing strategies that tripled the company's revenue in less than five years. Kelly also writes, speaks, and coaches on marketing success, and in 2020, she developed a course for CPA firm owners, "The Virtual CFO Playbook," to share the successful strategies employed at Summit.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone. Welcome on the Leadership Anywhere podcast. We will talk a lot about marketing in a remote distributed environment and also marketing for CFOs and providing CFO services remotely. Plus it is really rare. So I'm working remotely for like more than 10 years and it's, I already feel like a dinosaur in most cases. I started pre zoom, pre pandemic, pre slack without all the tools and goodies that we have now to make ourselves and our work a little bit more easier in the remote work. But it's really rare when I actually can talk with someone who started way, not just some years, but like way before me working remotely. So my pleasure is to welcome you, Kelly Schucknecht CMO and CFO for Companies, You Will Tell Your Story. Tell me, how did you end up working remotely? And correct me 16 years ago.
16 years. Yes. Hi, Peter. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk with you about remote work and leadership to my favorite topics. Yeah, I started working remotely. It was 16 and a half years ago. And I remember it very well. I remember it very well because I was pregnant with my son. I actually had a 2 year old at the time. And so I had a two year old, I was pregnant, and I was just... desperate to stay home with my kids. I just, I hated my 30 minute commute in the city. I was in Denver at that time. I hated bringing my kids to daycare or my daughter at the time, to daycare and the thought of bringing another one to daycare, let alone like the cost of daycare. It was just I was barely bringing anything home after paying for that. But at the same time, we just couldn't afford to live on one income. I had to work. So I spent most of my pregnancy with my son looking for remote opportunities and that it wasn't even a thing like the word remote wasn't...
Like 16 years. That's what I wanted to say that. Yeah, I'm not even sure that we had the term remote work.
It wasn't. They would say work from home or work at home, and they have the little acronym, W. F. H. or whatever. And but those jobs were, they were hard to find. And back then we had so now we have UpWork. I think there was a period of time it was. Olance said before that it was elance and Odesk. Anyway, it was one of those, but it's basically like today's version of Upwork. I would just look for jobs on there. I would do, any kind of freelance work I could do. I was doing that on the side of my full time job. I would get up at four in the morning and do these tasks for companies and trying to find, yeah. And, then my daughter would get up, I'd get her to daycare, I'd go to work for the day, but I was like, just, I was just. I just knew there was a better way than going to work all day and leaving my kids with other people, for some people that's fine, but it just, I just hated it. So I lucked out. I found this job where I was able to just, it was the gig economy. I was just doing these tasks. I got my little in with this company and after just a few months, by the time my son was born. I was like, I can do this. I was able to quit my full time job, stay home with my kids. I would work when they were sleeping or, like during the day or at night or whatever. And I was actually bringing home more income than I would have if I was putting them in daycare and working, all day. So I had this little in and it was, I had no aspirations of doing anything. I was just like, I'm just gonna, do this little part time gig kind of thing. And have you ever read the book Running Remote by Leah Martin and Rob Rawson?
Yes.
So they have the, they have an annual conference called Running Remote and then they have a book. And that there was a quote in this book. I read it this year before I went to the conference in Portugal. I was like, I've got to read this before I go to the conference. And there was a quote in the book. It was remote work made us. And I was like circling that quote in the book. I was like this resonates with me more than any quote I've ever read. Because. remote work allowed me to do what I felt like I needed to do as a mom, to be a mom, to be with my kids, to focus on them. But I ended up having this really successful career that I wasn't even planning on, it was like, I became one of the first directors within the company that that I was working. So it was a kind of a startup. When I started there, it was a family owned company. And they needed a kind of a layer of management underneath them. So I became one of the first directors. And then after another year and a half, they were like, we really need more than that. So I became the vice president of the company, running the company for the family. And then overseeing everyone.
That's like a dream scenario.
No, no aspirations of doing this, but it turned into like this great career path for me. And it allowed me to be there for my kids to go to their games to have that flexibility to pick them up from the bus stop to, and I just felt so lucky all of, all the time. My kids are grown now because this was 16 years ago. They're driving themselves now, but it just, I really felt lucky to have that dream scenario. So yeah, so that's my story.
And it's so interesting. So it's so interesting that that back then, again, like 16 years ago. I can't check right now, but but I can guess that the, one of the first books about remote work from 37 signals, the remote. Jason Fried.
Jason Fried. Yes.
Yeah. Anyway, he will be on a on this show a few weeks later now which is amazing. Yeah, one of the, old veterans of this whole thing.
Yeah.
I think that book came out around 2009 ish, but I'm guessing again, so I don't know. And I think the only book that we had as like a cultural reference point was obviously the Tim Ferriss book. The four hour work week which pretty much drove most of the remote work people to work remotely And that was telling a lot about who were the first people who actually worked remotely They were internet entrepreneurs and they are solopreneurs and like pretty much like entrepreneurship in general. But you did the very opposite of that. So you headed into employment obviously it was gig and gig driven, like most of that type of employment at that time. But still employment and it's, I think it's interesting that you had a normal, classic job but you still motivated to do even if it was a gig driven employment at that time, doing work remotely just because of the personal reasons. And that's super important. I think one of the key takeaways from the whole journey, which is amazing.
Yeah. And it was, so at first it was, that gig work, it was just doing these little tasks, but then it grew into, then I was working more and more. And then it became a full time job, but but even then, back then there, there weren't a lot of rules around remote work because it was so new. My job was basically the expectation was basically just do your work, like there was no, I wasn't working nine to five. I was working whenever it made sense for me to work, and that was okay. It could be 10 o'clock at night. It could be, 8 o'clock in the morning, whatever. And that flexibility was really key for me, and I think it is now. I think that's what we're starting to hear now is that, during the pandemic now, remote work became just common for everyone works remotely now in some sense. And people started working from home, but still having the very rigid expectations of being in the workplace. So you're working, 9 to 5 or whatever. That looks like you're on teams all day. You're available all the time. And I think that is really makes remote work really hard for people when we're not giving a real flexible environment, but we're actually just recreating the office like at home, it's goes against what remote work is about. In my mind, I think remote work is this mindset that we need to have. It's not just taking the office home.
This is so important statement, by the way and the great insight, but also don't forget I think that that you started as a gig worker then became a high profile freelancer. And by the way, we left out the story, which you will tell obviously later that now you're running teams and manager and like actual employee, which again, quote, unquote, is a classic type of employment that you have now. And that classic type of role. Yeah but because you started in a way I think your time management skills and preferences were obviously top notch from the very start. And for most of the people, I think again, we discussed it pre call that, that when people or I'm just coming to the show, but but just like talking with me about remote work, I always have this question that, okay, but when do you start? Did you start pre pandemic or during the pandemic? Because most of the people started during or after the pandemic because it was forced to go remote and forced to do you are forced to do iT's a totally different mindset, what compared to yours, because you personally chose to do that. And you pretty much built up a, like a time management skill cadence of work from the get go. And now you obviously enjoy the benefits of the flexibility and stuff like that, because you've made the conscious decision to do that. Others forced into the situation. So it's a different environment for others.
Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. And I can say, when I can say that flexibility is so important. You can work at whatever hours. The reality is I work basically an eight to four kind of schedule, right? Because when my kids were little, it was great to work at night when they were sleeping. Now, when they went to school, then it was like, now I want to work when they're in school. But the beauty of remote work, if it's done well, I think is that flexibility means that people, no matter what stage of life they're in or what they have going on in their life, they can weave that work in and out. But like you said if you're just. Forced into remote work and that wasn't a mindset that you had. It can be hard to juggle because you, you don't, you're not used to, to that kind of having that flexibility and having that kind of accountability to get your work done when you're also in your home. And, you have all these things pulling you away from work. Also, I had to like figure that out. When I was younger and, younger in my remote work journey that it was hard because, I had kids, I was home all day. My husband would come home from work. He's going to kill me for telling the story, but he would come home from work and be like are there dishes in the sink? Like, why is the laundry not done? He would get mad at me and I'm like, I'm juggling babies and working like, but the mindset back then 20 years or 15 years ago was if you worked from home, you weren't actually working, right? That's what people thought, yeah, like people would stop by and Hey, I can come anytime, right? Yeah, no, I don't think anyone had any concept that I was doing actual work.
Yes. And by the way, just like side note question, did you have a study or a dedicated room or you had a table?
It's always changed throughout the years. At first I was on the couch working, and then we made one of the bedrooms into a guest room slash. Yeah it's always just changed now. I actually, this is funny. So I actually have an office that's not at home, so I actually go to the office, but it's my own, it's like a coworking space where I'm like, I get out of the house I have teenage kids, right? So in the summer, like. People are in my house all over the place. I'm like, no, I'm not doing it. But that to me also, that's clever. It's the beauty of that flexibility. So I can come to my office anytime I want to and get out of my house or I can work at home and I have an office there and but yeah, it's
You are commuting to your own office, which is a little bit weird, but I understand now, seriously. One of the first decisions that I made so for the so many personal references, not sure that the audience enjoys but I don't know. It's my show so whatever. One of the first decisions that I made is that I had to study. So I started from like a table thingy and I had like a big apartment, so it wasn't a problem that to have a study, but I know I can figure it out. It's like, whatever you let's use that room for something else. And yeah, I decided to convert it into a study because it was just so great to just lock yourself into that space. And it was a mindset shift to me that, okay, I'm in this room. Now I'm in work mode. If I leave that room, I can safely switch within 10, 15 minutes back to like personal thing. And it also means that when I'm leaving that study to the kitchen to get coffee, I'm still at working because I'm going back. So don't talk to me. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
That's weird. I don't know. Yeah. People have these habits.
But isn't that's the great thing though, like you have these little, I think when you've worked remotely for a while, when it's not just like brand new to you, you learn these little tricks to like to shift your mind into work mode. And it could be, again, it could be late at night. It could be whatever time of day it is. It's just this is work mode.
And it's, yes, and it's fully personal. I talked to others that, for example, that they prefer doing deep creative work in cafes or co working spaces where there is buzz around them
Yeah, I can't do that at all.
Me neither. So I literally lock my study with the key when I do that. Yeah no, but like mentally, yeah mentally, mentally and But I'm totally fine to do anything like meetings, chatting, or like maintenance work in a coffee and stuff. So again, every, everyone is different.
Yeah.
But the beauty of this whole thing is that everyone is different, but because of the flexibility you can work on your own base and own preferences.
Yeah.
And since you started, and this is, by the way, all of the side examples and side notes that we had, the reason why I told that is that I want to address that one like big issue I think that we have today as a manager or as a leader of remote teams. You personally started as someone who either knew already your preferences and your skills around that or you had to adapt and learn on your own hard way. So you pretty much know how to manage yourself. Because you had to, otherwise you wouldn't be able to survive on that job market anyway. Now those who forced into that situation they didn't have that I wouldn't say luxury, but like time to figure out how they work properly or productively in a remote work environment. And I'm not just talking about like employees or team members, but also like managers and leaders. So tell me about the second phase of your journey because I think that's where things get a little bit more interesting in terms of like management styles. So now that you, what you're doing and how this whole thing helped you to learn new skills in remote work management, which you are using continuously today.
Yeah. Yeah. So I mentioned that, that job that I found 16 years ago. I Was so lucky to find it. I was so happy to have that opportunity and I learned so much. But after 10 years it was time I was ready for something new. Around that time, it was probably. Maybe a couple of years before that 10 year mark I discovered companies like buffer and read the book remote by Jason Fried that we mentioned earlier, and was learning that there was these remote companies out there that were doing it really well. I guess I just started like dreaming of a better work environment. And I knew there was companies out there that had, just great treated employees really well. They had flexible all these fun benefits and, things that were just unlimited paid time off, all these cool things. And I was dreaming of this other world. I Actually, I left my job like really had no idea what I was going to do. Peter I like dove off the deep end was like, I don't know. Two weeks later I went to this remote work conference. And I happened to meet the man who ended up being my boss but didn't know it at the time. I hung out with this guy, with a bunch of people, but we were talking remote work for the week. And a couple of weeks later, he asked me to help him. He had written a book and wanted to help publishing it. And that was actually my first job wasn't publishing. Had this connection over his book and ended up he was like, Hey, can you do this for me? Can you basically can you do these things with my marketing department? They didn't really have much of a marketing department at that time. And so he wanted me at first to like proofread blog posts and I'm like, sure. Yeah, I was willing to do whatever, I'm like, sure I can, I'll do anything. So it started basically inching my way into the marketing department, became the marketing manager, then became the marketing director at that time we were a 4 million company. We have now we're now so it's five years now since then, and we're now a 12 million department of a bigger firm. So we actually we provide virtual CFO services and we merged with a firm last year that is a more traditional accounting firm, but we merged because the virtual CFO services that we provide are the wave of the future for accounting and they really wanted that in house. So yeah, so my team, I grew my team from, I was 1 to now I have what do I have 3 full time employees on my team, but we also have a number of independent contractors who we work with. So probably a total of about 10 of us on the team. So it's grown tremendously in 5 years. The company and my team itself. And I love managing people and leading people. I think I say those two words cause I think there's a difference between managing and leading. I like to say managing people, but really I love leadership. I love talking about leadership. I love learning from my experiences and applying them to my team and working with my team and helping them grow and seeing that happen. So yeah, that's where I am now managing this team. We are, so I mentioned that the people, so we're the four of us that are full time employees are in every time zone in the United States. One of them is actually in Canada, but pacific time zone and then our contractors. We have several in the Philippines. So we spread like every time zone. There is multiple time zones. Yeah. Yeah.
From the morning till the night.
Yeah, and it's hardest for our, let's see, one, two, we have three people in the Philippines, so it's hardest for them because the reality is they have to be available during the U S business hours because the rest of us are here. But they, they handle it. I know it's hard for them.
But you're sitting in a comfortable position, by the way in the mountain time zone, right? So as you are in a. Middle of the U. S.
I'm in the middle.
Yeah. It's nice. It's a nice situation. And this is a great story. And did you meet with your with your team at all ever? Or obviously you started without knowing.
Yeah. Yeah. So I hired everyone remotely. But we, so we have two retreats a year. So we get together, different places, so we would we actually next month we're going to St. Louis. In May, we were in Scottsdale, Arizona. And then my team, we also do a training together. So we just went to the inbound conference earlier this month in September in Boston. So we get together. I guess that's about three times a year. I really find that time very valuable for us. So in our Philippines team members hopefully we're working on getting their visas right now. It's really hard in the Philippines to get that. So we're working on getting that so they can also join us. But right now it's just those of us who are in the U. S. and Canada. Yeah, we get together and it's just for a few days at a time, but it really helps us, I think, get stronger as a team and get closer to each other, get to know each other personally and that carries over into how we interact with each other day to day remotely.
And have you had I thought that you will say that by the way it's really valuable to meet with each other even though you are remote and also a lot of remote companies have a like insane amount of travel budget just because, they need to know each other a little better. What I'm trying to get as well is that again you learn most of the skills of managing your time, managing yourself on the go, because you had to in a remote environment. Most of the team members without giving any personal information or like he says, but have you had that feeling that because you learn that organically because you had to how can you support or help others to learn that skill? Because it is such a valuable thing and often disregarded as, yeah, you manage your time and whatever. You're obviously flexible because you're working remotely. But I think one of the key issues that we have during remote management is that we assume that people can work remotely.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's not the case. Certain people can, of course but not everyone is capable in a self management type of way.
Absolutely. Yeah I've seen that a lot. So I think when, early in my remote work journey people would go how can I get a job like that, and I hired people that I knew thinking everyone just was like me and everyone can just manage this and, it's easy and I would hire people and it wouldn't work out. And I would, of course and I think, one of the, one of the things that you hear a lot, like one of the arguments against remote work is like, how do you know people are working? Like they, you have to get them into the office to see that they're working. And even in a remote environment, when people are not working it, you feel it things aren't getting done. I just actually recently my team, we hired somebody and, we gave them all the tools that they needed. Here's all your, tasks. Here's your procedures. Here's, a couple of days go by. We don't hear anything. We check in and we realize, oh, he's missing these procedures or this login information or something. And we realize that was our fault. We get that to him. a Few more days go by, we're like, okay, still nothing's getting checked off. Even the little things aren't getting checked off the list. So we check in with him again. And, it's more, things that just whatever, for whatever reason, things aren't clear to him or whatever. And after a few days, we're like, okay, can you start telling us what you're doing every day? Every day, just list out like, and I'm not trying to micromanage, but just help me understand what's happening here because, I, maybe there's more of a learning curve than I realize, or maybe there's more work on your plate than I realize, or, whatever. So we asked him to start outlining things and, took us a couple weeks and we're like, Oh no, nope. It's just not, he's not working. He's not doing things, and so you, you figured out, but I, so I think there's that, but that's not everybody. And then I think there's people like me and like you, who just, are pretty good at managing our time and it came easy for us. And then there's those people in between where, sometimes I have to coach people through, how to I'm big on like time blocking, so I'll coach people through time blocking their schedule so that they they have time in the day to get to the tasks that they know that they need to do. Or we talk about, the flexibility of you need to leave at three o'clock No, no problem, and, but, these things that need to get done, like, how can we make sure they get done? And, just coaching people around those things. I think my team's all really good at it. I don't have, fortunately, I don't have to worry about it, but I think there's some coaching that, that you could do as a leader and just making sure that people have, some of it is like the tools that they need, but also just I don't know that coaching around, like what to focus their time and energy on. And one of the things I'm big on looking at results. To me, like I said, I don't micromanage people. That specific example might've sounded a little like micromanaging, you have to get, sometimes you got to get.
I want to clarify and maybe that's helpful for you, but sorry, and you feel less bad about yourself, but I think, like in all the cases, in most leadership practices, I think micromanagement has their place or its place. And it's when people are doing something wrong. If a project is lacking, if the delivery is not there, the results are not there I think it's worth to look into the why, and the micromanagement might be a little bit more like around reporting. I think that's, that would be like a good angle, but once that, to understand where is the block, of course. So that again, the micromanagement goal is to understand where is the block, where people are blocked once that it's done micromanagement can step back and, you can support others to actually do their best work.
Yeah. But with my team, I really try to focus on results. So I don't care how you do the work, when you do the work, we look at, we set numbers we actually just set our dates to start looking at numbers for next year. So we got that on the calendar. So we have goals for every area that of the work that they do. And then that's what we look at. I don't care, How you approach this, but everyone knows what the goal is for the whole team and how the work they do contributes to that goal. And then that's what we look at, so every week we're looking at, how much closer are we to that goal? What are our numbers? I shouldn't say every week, but every month we do a stats review. And that's how you get people focused on the thing you want them focused on, right? What I'm very results driven. I want to be looking at those numbers. And again, I don't care how you do your job. It's let's look at how we're, impacting these numbers and how we can all get there together.
Do you think that's super relevant, by the way, do you think that it's leaders or managers or whatever responsibility to figure out those numbers and make sure that those numbers are understood or internalized, shall we say, by the team members or or you can leave it to the teams as well like it's a collaborative.
I'm very collaborative. So for, yeah. My style is we do that together. And of course, as a leader, if they're going, let's say we want our trying to think of a number I can throw out there, but let's say, so one of the things we do is we do a lot of content marketing. If we're looking at getting our content, getting articles into a number of different sites throughout the year, let's say our goal is, we want one every month on a different site, right? A new site that would be linking back to our website. And if somebody said to me like I think we should just knock that down to two, as a leader, I'm going to go no, let's talk about that. And we talk about why, nobody's ever going to do that, but, so it's collaborative, but of course, I'm going to push them to, I'm always going to push them to set goals high. I'm just a believer in having really high goals. I know people have sometimes a reaction to that but that doesn't seem feel realistic. Like we might not hit that. Yeah. It's like shooting for the moon, right? Like you might not hit that, but you might get pretty darn close or you might hit it and surprise yourself. But let's put goals on the board that are really pushing us and making us, strive to hit those goals. And we all grow through that. So yeah I don't know if I answered your question.
Yeah, and by the way, content marketing it's people tend to think at least non marketers tend to think that it's a, fancy creative way of work and whatever. It's an assembly line. And because it's an assembly line of slightly creative output it is a very well measurable activity of any kind of team. So yeah, I agree that you should measure the results and not the task list. So I think that's one of the key goals that sometimes the project management ends up being a status report on how we are on the tasks and what did we work on. If you are working on tasks that are not relevant or they're not pushing to the goal then you are just doing busy work without results. So that's important. Tell me more about the CFO stuff. The reason why I want to talk about that is that in the around three or four years ago I started to notice this trend or whatever. That most remote work or most type of work that can, could be done remotely were around either obviously development, so like software engineering but also like marketing and doing content and very loosely connected around marketing related tasks and marketing related work, but not really much about legal, finance, the classic type of office work, shall we say? And now around three to four years ago, especially a little bit more pandemic but definitely during and after the pandemic, people started to notice that, okay, so actually I do legal stuff. I do finance stuff. Everything that I do is around a spreadsheet or a document anyway, why should I be in the office? And now those kinds of activities can be done a hundred percent remotely. And the most distributed companies now employ remote CFOs, finance managers and stuff like that. So have you seen this trend as well?
Yeah so my company I mentioned I'm the director of marketing. My company is a virtual CFO now. I told you pre show this gets into a the whole other story, but so...
Let's tell the audience, I asked you what would be the title how I should introduce yourself and you told me I wouldn't say like a one hour long story. No, it wasn't that long. No. But, and I said, okay, that's that's freaking complex. So yeah. I will let you to explain. Yeah. During the show. So please explain.
It used to be a lot easier. I could just say I'm the director of marketing for a virtual CFO firm, right? We are, we were a virtual CFO firm and we were fully remote and providing virtual CFO services for companies primarily digital agencies all over the United States and Canada, mainly. We went through a merger last year with a traditional accounting firm. So now we are, the traditional accounting firm actually has an office. So now it's weird because I have said for 16 years that I work in a fully remote company. Now I actually work in a hybrid company, technically, because the firm, it has a brick and mortar office in St. Louis and, but my whole team of about, yeah, Close to 100 people is all fully remote. We're fully remote. The firm, the overall firm is not. The overall firm provides traditional accounting services. We provide advisory virtual CFO services. So we've actually done that for it's been, what, 10, 10 to 12 years. I think it was 2011, possibly when we signed our first virtual CFO client. So we have done that for a long time. Fractional services are now becoming more and more common, more popular because companies are realizing that they can hire these fractional service providers, whether it be marketing, finance what's another big one that is HR, things like that. So they can hire those types of services for a lot cheaper than hiring an in house CMO or CFO or whatever that looks like, it but get that advisory that that high level person that's basically part of their team, even if it's just part time. Yeah, we've been doing that for a long time.
And sorry to stop you. But yeah, I have to respond to that, that the why companies are doing it because it's very cost effective. So yeah, just like myself I'm doing that service as well if you want to hold to someone who has 20 or more years of experience in growth and marketing You have to pay like a insane amount of money to get that talent. But if you are doing it fractionally, it means that, it's very cost effective for for the company to and to be honest, let's face it, and I'm allowed to say this, I think and in most growing companies, you don't need a full time CFO. You don't need a full time HR officer, whatever it is. You don't need a full time marketer in most of the cases like C level, at least. You need someone who designs the strategy, managing the whole financial structure that you have, but you cannot really offer time amount of workload to these people at that stage.
Yeah. That's so we have this the clients that come to us, are typically in this in between stage of I can't have my mom or my aunt or my cousin or whatever, doing my books anymore. Like we've grown past that.
Or the local, sorry to stop you again, or the local accountant who can do the books for like really small businesses in the local area. But when, but we are working, we are just a 10 people team, but we are working distributed with companies around the whole state or different continents as well, sometimes. I have no idea how to do invoicing in a global scale. That accountant from local also doesn't know. So we need to do something a little bit more up level.
Yeah, exactly. So it's I, we need more, but we can't hire a 400, 000 a year CFO to work for, but we can't pay for Deloitte yeah. So we have, our clients are usually like starting at maybe 2 million to 20 million. Beyond that, they're ready to hire a CFO or, they already have kind of in house resources. But it provides, those fractional services provide a really good resource to companies that are growing, but aren't, aren't at that level yet to have those in house resources. So yeah. Yeah that's what we do. And all of us are remote. So that my whole team, my team, but like the whole, the virtual CFO team like I said, it's maybe 80 people are all fully remote and have been since 2011 or 2013, somewhere in there. And everyone works remotely all over the United States.
And the clients are open to work with. With a C level finance executive, I'm just, because yes, we are saying this as a statement as it is given. And it's obviously a normal thing to do, but you are trusting someone with your money or your company money, which is, I cannot really imagine more like closer to your chest as a CEO of a small growing company than your revenue or like numbers. And you're trusting that with someone who you never met personally.
Yeah.
And you probably signed some vague paper online with that person and a service agreement and whatever. And that's it. And yes, people are actually doing that. Yeah. Interesting.
Yeah and I'll say, though, we do a lot of we do a lot of thought leadership, education events, things like that. So people, even though they don't, they've never met us, many people who sign on with us, maybe have never met us in person. But they know us really well. People can see our content online. And they'll come to us. They already know things about, they'll meet with a CFO or the when they do their consultation, whatever they will have already known a lot about that person because of our, we do a lot of video. That was one of the things that I, when I came on five years ago, I recognized that the accounting industry Didn't do video, like if they were doing a PowerPoint presentation and it was recorded, it was just the PowerPoint. There was no faces. And so I developed our YouTube channel and said, we're doing video. And we started videoing everything. And so we have video just so people see us and they know us. And so I think that's really important from a marketing, not that we're talking marketing today, from a marketing strategy is people get to know you like you with your podcast too.
It's really resonates with me by the way, because I spent five years in an IP consulting company like legal. So we actually work with startup companies providing IP services for them in the U S. And yeah, so I met with a lot of lawyers and legal people. And I think it's like close relationship with the accountant and and and bookkeeping and finance world. Very conservative. And in terms of marketing and how they communicate. Yes. Video, Oh my God, that would be hilarious if they would do any kind of video, but they did rarely did websites. So it's like the, the basic elements were missing from the marketing mix. So I understand it's changed a little bit now, of course. Things have to grow up a little bit because, everybody's doing it online but yeah, I understand. And you also mentioned one keyword, which actually caught my eye or ear the digital agencies. So you are working with digital agencies. And what I'm trying to get there is that I think a lot of people are providing services for digital agencies now remotely. Not just you as a CFO service, but I don't know sales, marketing, and other stuff. What I found and that's again, a hypothesis that agencies are because they are flexible in terms of how they work anyway. Like how their work is done in like delivering the work that they do anyway they are more open to new cutting edge stuff like for example hiring a CFO remotely, is it something that you see or why the digital agents, why not providing to virtual CFO services to laundry companies or I don't know.
Yeah, bad example, but yeah, just yeah, actually, digital agencies, most I don't know if I could say most, I don't have the stats on it, but I would guess that most of our clients are also remote they are distributed, they have run that way for a long time. And like you said they're open to that because it's just normal for them. So yeah, that, that's a big piece of it. We're also yeah. We are currently working on adding some additional industries that we work with, one of them being cannabis, which also fits in that..
Colorado.
In that bucket of yeah, I'm in Colorado, but yeah, no our cannabis niche leader is down in Texas. But he knows.
Is it legal there?
I don't know but he knows the industry, and it doesn't matter because our clients are all over the country but also an industry that's very open to new things and new ways of doing things. And obviously so yeah, I think, but digital agencies for sure. Most of our clients, actually our first client was Lullabot which is a digital agency, they started out of Rhode Island, but they were fully remote forever. So when we first met them in 2011, I think that's where our CEO went, this is cool. And I want to do this. And so we that's set him. So we actually learned the remote work world from digital agencies and from our clients. And then we were able to apply that to our firm and how to make it work.
Interesting. Interesting. And I think you, you are right. Those companies who are for example, my clientele is more for B2B technology and they are usually remote as well, or at least distributed in some sense. Because they have to not everyone can travel to sales pitches at offices anymore. B2B is very well driven obviously with sales classic one. And yeah, you're right. Most of the industries that are open in generally, they are more open to work a little bit more remotely. Just to wrap things up a little bit. Let's address the management and the leadership difference. And with that, can you share like a couple of tips on how to manage or lead, sorry remote teams successfully?
Yeah, I actually, so I have three quick tips, right? So three, here's the three P's of leading remote teams to success in my mind. First of all, personalize. And we talked about this a little bit, but letting people set their own schedules, have autonomy over their work not Micromanaging their time or their work, but letting them personalize their own work environment. Two, performance. We talked about that a lot. The focusing on the results and how to track those rather than getting into the details of what people are doing, but focus everyone on kind of the get the eye on the prize kind of thing. And three is potential, and we didn't talk much about this, but I think it's important as a leader in a remote environment to focus on your team's personal development. So this is really important to me because that, the time that I talked about the company that I was in for 10 years there was no focus on that after 10 years. I realized I had no network. I had no real training. I had done my job really well, but I was very isolated and that's a big problem in remote work. You have to people can feel very isolated. Had that experience too, by the way, so I understand. Yeah, it's really important to me to always be learning and to always make sure that my team is learning as well. If they say they want to learn about something, or they want to get better in a certain way, I say, okay what can we do? Can we go to a training together? Can we read a book together? It doesn't have to be together either, but, can you, are there courses you can take? I push them to put time on their calendar to learn and grow all the time. And I think that is really important because when you are working remotely or maybe in your little silo, you're in your study all by yourself, you got the door locked, you're doing your work and you can forget that you need to be growing and to be you always need to be current on what's out there. You know what's new and learning new things. So I think that's really important to focus on the potential of your team and helping them become better versions of themselves all the time.
It's beautiful. Tell me one more thing that you always turn back into that into the statement of difference between a manager and the leader. And yeah, So many explanations about the differences, but I would love to hear yours.
Yeah. Okay. So I was working on this link. It just was so fresh in my mind because I was working on this post for LinkedIn. And I was thinking about one of my experiences which was so many years ago I had a manager. I don't know if you use Outlook, but in Outlook, there's this function where you can turn off your send receive. So you can make it so you don't get bothered with any new emails. If you send things, they just go in your outbox and they stay there until you turn it back on. And it was a trick I used to use on the weekends. So I could get caught up on my inbox and get everything, get through everything, send out emails, but I wouldn't get anything back because nobody was getting it until Monday morning. That was, it was saved my sanity. But my boss at the time used to turn off her send receive during the day and without fail on Friday afternoons, She would open it up and I would get 20 emails from her at four o'clock on Friday. Some of them were marked, high importance. Some of them were, give me this information ASAP, and here it is four o'clock on Friday.
On a Friday, by the way.
Yes. Oh, I'm telling you, I'm like scarred from it. Like I, I remember it so well because we would be going to happy hour and I would be, I can tell. Yes. I have these, I know I got to do this, and I'd have to work over the weekend to get caught up. And it made me think, it was like that's management, right? So managing people, you can, put your urgency on them. You can create this environment of you need to do these things for me and I don't care about, your time. And not that all managers are bad or management is bad, but that's a manager, not a leader, right? A leader is respectful of people's time and their And everything about them, right? I want my team to grow. I want them to I don't want them to resent me on a Friday afternoon. I want them to take Friday afternoon and go and enjoy themselves. I want them to take a PTO day when they need a break, right? It's not about me and my needs. It's about us as a team. And I mentioned I'm very collaborative. So I want my team to be working together and to be supporting each other and everything. So to me, that's the difference between a manager and a leader.
It's interesting that it all comes from a personal or at least I think it all comes from a personal motivation, right? Yeah. So although you love to work because you always worked at the very start you mentioned that you had your classic job and also the gig and and remote work two or three different roles at the same time while having kids, by the way. I have no idea when you slept, by the way and but still the intrinsic motivation was there that you wanted to feel better. As a person have more time has more freedom. And if that motivation was there, why wouldn't you give that opportunity to your team as well? And that's super important. I think, yeah, that's amazing. Cool. Thank you for coming here. Thank you for your time. How people can reach you.
Yeah. Best way to reach me is LinkedIn. So I love LinkedIn and connecting with people there. My LinkedIn is my name, Kelly Schuknecth and I'm sure you'll have that in the show notes, because I would imagine most people will not be able to spell it, but it will be in the show notes for you.
You don't need to spell it. It will be linked in the show notes after the episode airs. Yes. And also to the link to the to the company as well.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Kelly.
Thanks, Peter. This was so much fun.
