Know Your Numbers with Nolan Bradbury

Nolan Bradbury 0:22
Yeah, I am a father, father to husband, so that’s where most of my time is, is focused, and where I try to create most of my energy from passion wise, love to play soccer, love being in the outdoors, which based out of Seattle, is great location to be doing a lot of that stuff. So wonderful in that standpoint. Professionally, I’m a CPA by trade, although I think there’s a stigma that comes with that that doesn’t really describe what I do. So I don’t prepare tax returns, which shocks a lot of people. Instead, I work with founders to help them use accounting to really grow and scale their business and understand why they maybe aren’t reachieving the results they want. But ultimately, we’re doing that not just to solve the business issues, but to ultimately help them realize the personal goals that they’ve set forth. Most people don’t start a business to run a business, but somewhere along the path, they usually find themselves in that situation, and we work with them to help make sure that the the personal goals, the family lifestyle that they’ve they want, is ultimately being achieved through the business. So that’s kind of how we approach things for people.

george grombacher 0:02
Noah Bradbury is the principal of Bradfield accounting. He is working to make accounting not suck by turning numbers into pathways for growth. Welcome to the show, Nolan,

Nolan Bradbury 0:13
thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.

george grombacher 0:15
Yeah, excited to have you on. Tell us a little about your personal lives, more about your work.

Nolan Bradbury 0:19
Why you do what you do?

george grombacher 1:32
How did you come to that? Because certainly when you’re in accounting school or whatever you want to school for you probably didn’t connect those dots. I

Nolan Bradbury 1:40
truth be told, I did not go to school for accounting, although I think a lot of people would probably tell you that if you gave them a true serum, I would just go to be a psychologist. I was really fascinated by the reason people do, what they do, why they make decisions they make or don’t make, in some cases, but ultimately, found myself going into accounting for a variety of reasons, and I’ve loved it and enjoyed it. And then when I left, I went into public accounting, which a lot of CPAs will do. But when you do that, you kind of either choose one or two tracks, you do what’s called audit, or you do tax. And so you want to know what audit is, basically the opposite of tax. So it’s it’s looking at financial statements and confirming they’re accurate and meaningful. Like, when you invest in companies, we’re the ones certifying that what you’re reviewing is meaningful and correct. And so I start on this path of like, what is data used for? Why do we use it? How do we use it? What are the decisions we draw from it? And through a path of working in public accounting and then ultimately in private, and taking a company public, and then ultimately shifting to working with founders and business owners of the last decade, what I found is that a lot of people, especially founders, as they’re scaling or in their business, don’t really use data. They drive the business through intuition and gut. And there’s a huge element of that that’s important in business. But fundamentally, I think if you’re ignoring what the data is telling you, you’re making unconscious decisions. Sometimes those can come back to bite you. And so the path that kind of led to that was, how do I help people use this information that I think they know is important but don’t use and ignore, in some cases, to to sort of bridge the gap on areas where they’re not maybe, otherwise intending,

george grombacher 3:25
yeah, yeah. I imagine that the majority of folks that you’re working with know how important it is, but they just, you know, it’s not that they don’t care, but there’s just, there’s just more, more, more more pressing, compelling things to them.

Nolan Bradbury 3:39
Yeah. I mean, human beings avoid things we don’t like. And there’s like, surveys out there that say, for most business owners, it accounting, finance, tax is the thing they like the least about running a business. So if you sort of do a equation, you substitute those things in, right? What we come up with is, like, we’re avoiding accounting because we don’t like it. I get that. I actually do understand that like it’s, you know, it’s an understandable thing, but like you said, they also acknowledge it’s important. So how do we help rectify that for them? So they it isn’t something they’re avoiding, but rather they can lean into and really find value in.

george grombacher 4:12
And so I love your tagline. You make it not suck by turning the numbers into into pathways for growth. So whether we’re paying attention or not, it’s telling the all of our metrics. They’re telling us some kind of a story.

Nolan Bradbury 4:30
Exactly. You know, I think when we start off a lot of business owners, they understand, oh, there’s financial statements. I have a profit and loss. I have a balance sheet. And that’s important, that you understand those and that you refer to those on occasion, but I’ll be honest, those are usually meant for other things. They’re usually meant for your tax returns and some other high level needs, maybe covenants with banks. But like you use the most important word I’ll call out there, the metrics. What are the things that really describe how your business operates to you? So when you look. Them, you have a good understanding of whether you’re directionally going the right way. And more often than not, financials are they’re looking backwards. And we want forward looking drivers. We want metrics that are telling us what is the leading indicator of what’s going to be happening next. And so identifying those right combination of numbers, the right relationship between numbers, helps business owners really get a key sense of is the thing, are the things I’m doing leading to the right outcomes? And if not, can I I’ve seen them quickly enough to make the right adjustments.

george grombacher 5:31
So if it’s not my my bottom line, what? What are the metrics that I’m not want to say, say me, but let’s just pretend it’s, it’s, it’s, I’m the founder that is doing all the things that you’re talking about, what ought I’d be paying attention to?

Nolan Bradbury 5:48
Certainly, there’s an element of it, like, industry wise, right? Like it’s going to have an impact on what we’re looking at. But what I would say is, there’s an element of it that to make sure that it’s not too many metrics, right? Then it becomes white noise, and it starts to lose its meaning. So I usually tell people somewhere in the five ish ranges, me, is helpful. That’s least starting point wise, and we want to pick things that are maybe across the board. So what are some revenue related things? And it isn’t just what is total revenue, it’s what is the breakout of revenue by product or service that you’re offering? Maybe there’s a relationship live between, what is the what are the expenses that you’re spending on that are directly driving the revenue, and what is the relationship between that and what is the trend over time? Are you spending the same amount to get the same amount of revenue, or are you having to invest more to get the same amount or less, or so forth? Right? For a lot of business owners, a key piece is just knowing how much money they have in the bank. So what you know, as simple as it may sound like, how much cash you have on hand, or taking it to next level, understanding of the cash you have, how much is already accounted for. Like, what is your outflow going to look like in the preceding week month, and do you have enough to cover those? And then there are elements within that, like within the expense realm, like, how are you spending your money? Where is the distribution of your funds? How are you investing the cash that you do make back into the business? Is it going to all the same area? It’s not uncommon for us to see companies that have multiple products or offerings not understand how profitable each of those products and offerings are on a standalone basis. They see the aggregate total, but they don’t understand that the product maybe they’re investing least in is actually the thing that is the most profitable. And if they switch the way they’re allocating their resources, they might actually not have to do anything else other than make more money simply because of the way they’re allocating it. So I would say there’s this combination between revenue and expenses cash flow. Sometimes we pull in operational numbers sales leads, like, how quickly can you close a lead to understand, sort of what is the funnel look like for you? A lot of it is a function of how your business is runs and how it operates. But I would say those are some like high level areas that we typically see most in most cases,

george grombacher 7:58
got it and what is the discovery process look like? I’m sure that you’ve probably done this so many times that you can get a pretty good idea of somebody just by what they’re telling you and their industry. But how does it typically take shape?

Nolan Bradbury 8:13
Yeah, so you know, through no follow their own what we where we usually meet the client is they’re asking for something that they don’t usually need. So a common example is they may come to us and say, I need better bookkeeping, and that may be true, right? But what is, ultimately the the thing that they’re really asking for is like they’re asking for better bookkeeping, because something else and so what we really have to get to is not what is the symptom, but what is the disease that we need to treat, right? So when you say you need better bookkeeping, what does that really mean? Well, it usually means that they’re having difficulty making some type of strategic decision, right? And so it’s about understanding that and working with them to really get to the core of what it is that they are coming to you for I I often joke, although it is a serious question. One of the things I asked first when I talk to someone is, I know you don’t want to be here talking to me about this right now. So what is it that forced you to actually meet with me to talk about accounting? And that’s where we sort of dive into things really understanding, like, Hey, you are telling me this, but this is the thing that really is keeping you up at night. Let’s dig into that, and let’s drive through that piece. And through that process, what we’ll start to unveil is the limiting factors. Some of it is, you know, limitations that they put on themselves that are not real. Some of it is, there are just limitations the systems are using, and we have to start deciding, how do we want to best solve those? Given the situation?

george grombacher 9:40
I’m sure that, well, maybe is, is there ever a perfect solution? The current solution is, well, I wasn’t doing anything, and now I’m sitting here with you to have this conversation that not super excited about. And then it’s finding that just right, yeah, there’s some kind of a spectrum.

Nolan Bradbury 9:58
So I. I mean, as you can probably imagine, right there is this. The answer is never the same in terms of, like, what actually happens to fix the problem? Although I would say that it is usually a similar situation for most people, which is, we start to peel away the noise from the data, and we really core in on what are the things that are most critical. And as we do that. What often happens is that the founder or the person that is using this data to make decisions starts to have a better sense of, oh, this is actually meaningful. And I actually do see how this is helping me. And it’s this sort of slow, not slow, but can be sort of gradual transformation of basically, and it can be a literal leaning out and now leaning into the conversation, right? And so where I always know that I’ve got someone really interested is the questions go from what was my net income to a more specific question about, like, I see that marketing expense was this? Where did we spend that money? Like, who was that actually? What type of and what were we spending it on? And because when you start to get those types of questions, you’re getting the person actually like they’re interested in it now, right? They are. Now you’ve gotten them past the aversion that often exists up front, and when you’re able to do that, that’s a huge step towards this. I think one of the biggest problems that often exists, if I’m being honest, is, and this is not the client’s fault, just to be clear, it’s not the company’s fault, but they often are times coming to us because they’ve had a bad situation in the past. You know, the data that they’ve been provided previously, it wasn’t accurate, it wasn’t on time. Or the most common one is that the information that’s given to them is basically in a foreign language. Accountants are not great at talking to non accountants, like everything we give is assuming that you can understand the same language I hand but the reality is that’s not the case. And so one of the most important things we can do is meet our clients and companies at the level that they’re operating at. And I don’t mean like intelligence wise, I just mean like, where are you and what are you focused on? And let’s start there, because otherwise we’re out of alignment, and that’s always going to lead to sort of a disconnect

george grombacher 12:02
that makes so much sense. And I think that that the language analogy helps me a lot to better understand that. And I can see where people, once they we don’t need to become fluent in it, but understand, okay, these are tools, and now I understand how to actually use this, or at least, I can see the potential of how using this can really benefit so that’ll cause me to get a little more interested in it, anymore more engaged.

Nolan Bradbury 12:27
Yeah, and you know, sometimes it’s as simple as changing the format, right? Like, if what you’re used to getting is a table or a chart, maybe you just need a quick summary, maybe a short loom video actually tells you more than anything else, right? So we always assume there’s this one size fits all for everyone. But we also, we all know that we’re different human beings, and we all learn different ways, and we all interpret things differently. So how do we like, how do we understand that better and communicate better? You know, the reality is that in a lot of cases, what someone has is not wrong, it’s just not useful. And so, you know, let’s start by making it more useful, and then decide if, like, once we understand it better, if it needs to be augmented at all.

george grombacher 13:10
What you just said, everything you said, certainly makes sense. And I’ve, I’ve, I work in personal finance, and I always ask people, How do you like to process information? Some people want to see a chart, some people want to see a graph, some people want to talk through it. So why would your industry be any different? And y’all ignore that at your own peril. And I imagine that the majority of you, not you, but people in your industry, probably blow right past that.

Nolan Bradbury 13:39
Yeah. I mean, I think there’s this idea, and I get it right, like in most people’s eyes, if something’s not broken, why fix it, right? But that ignores the fact that it probably is broken. And so we have an industry accounting. It’s not exactly on the cutting edge of evolution, let’s be honest, right? And, and so there’s this idea of, I can scale if everything is the same and I have to do the least amount of difference between each situation. So if I’m a larger accounting firm, or I’m trying to become a larger accounting firm, it’s easier for me to hit a button that produces the same report for every client. I understand that, right? Like I think we all get that component of it, but that isn’t what necessarily is best for your client. And I don’t mean that to besmirch the other accountants out there, but rather, if you have to understand, like, what is it that they want? If all they want is a financial statement, great, what you’re giving them is spot on. But if what they came to you for is analysis and better decision making, then you’re not actually solving the problem, right? And that comes back to, you know, we’re starting at and understand, like, what is your North Star? Like, what is it that we are trying to really get to the core of that? Like, is non negotiable for you to determine if what we’re if we’re being successful or not. And I think that that’s, that’s the piece that oftentimes gets overlooked in all of this. When

george grombacher 14:55
you ask a founder that, are they usually able to answer? That does,

Nolan Bradbury 15:00
yeah, no, but to be here, I laugh and you laugh, but, like, the reason they have they can’t answer it is because they’ve never been asked it before, which means they’ve never really taken the time to think about it, right? Like, the first time you’re asked a question that you’ve been asked, that’s if it’s first time you’ve asked it, you’re like, I need to think about that, right? Like, I have to process what is that actually asking me, right? So if the first time anyone’s ever asked you is today, like, what is it that actually is meaningful to you from a financial standpoint for your business? Like, you probably don’t have an answer, or we’re going to kind of work through it in that moment, or maybe you have pieces of it, but I would say that it’s usually months down the road until we actually have a concrete answer. One of the things I stress with clients is like, what we’re going to build for you, from a reporting standpoint, is it’s iterations we’re going to keep we’re going to keep doing it until it feels natural to you and that this is how it should be. And even when we reach that point, that doesn’t mean a year from now, it’s going to look the same way, or should look the same way. It needs to evolve with your business and your viewpoints and your analysis of the company.

george grombacher 16:06
It strikes me that this is, without question, a better way to do what you do, versus just creating the same report for everybody and hitting send and washing your hands and moving on to the next one. And anytime you start doing customized stuff, it becomes more time consuming and harder. So you made that decision, how come?

Nolan Bradbury 16:27
At the end of the day, as I this is a professional thing, when I went through my career, and I sort of had those stops along the way, the thing that always pushed me the next stop was that I felt like I was producing a necessary evil the thing I was doing, it’s not that it wasn’t needed, but it was only needed. It wasn’t wanted. And so like, for me, it was about like I actually, and maybe this goes back to the psychology component of it, like I actually do want to help people. Like the thing I am most passionate about is helping people, and it just so happens that accounting is the tool I use to do that, right? And so for me, it’s a no brainer. I don’t want 1000 clients that are just easily snapping stuff out to them. I’d much rather have a smaller amount of them that I can have a real relationship with and be able to provide real, meaningful data to that, to me, is a much more like satisfactory or satisfying, excuse me, satisfying like experience from a professional standpoint.

george grombacher 17:20
Yeah, I certainly appreciate that. You do not want to just be producing and the reproducing a necessary evil. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for excitement in the morning and jumping out of bed Exactly.

Nolan Bradbury 17:33
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, you know it’s, it’s, uh, I No, day is the same, but that’s the beauty of it. It’s not Joe Versus the Volcano, to use a very old, dated reference. Oh,

george grombacher 17:46
it’s such a good movie. Those of you have not seen Joe Versus the Volcano, you are welcome. Nolan just turned you on to an absolute classic, right there. So probably

Nolan Bradbury 17:55
more true today than it was back then, to be honest. Yeah, probably that’s

george grombacher 17:59
probably way ahead of, way ahead of its time, or really, really early, you know, yeah, or late rather, yeah, late. Anyway, I think everybody understands what I’m trying to say. I I’ve spent it’s, it’s life is full, full of fun timing and stuff like that. I’ve been thinking a lot about just how to make better decisions, and reading about and studying the Eisenhower matrix, and just it’s always trying to find the highest and best use of our resources. And certainly it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re trying to do, too. And I feel like when you go through this, and people that are hearing this like, oh, this sounds like a lot of extra work, and it’s an upfront investment, but when you get through it, when you get on that back end and you better understand and appreciate everything, I bet that you’re saving so much time.

Nolan Bradbury 18:54
Yeah, you know, I get the one of the things I always try to quantify for people up front is like, what is like, what is your real investment from a time standpoint, right? Like, you’re a founder, this is, like, the last thing you need is more homework, right? And so one of the things I try to stress with them is you’re not going to show up to a meeting with me and they walk away. Is okay, here’s a bunch of things you need to go do. Now, there are some things that only you can do, right? And that I need your help with that. But the objective really, is that you get to show up and be you, and you get to ask the questions that you maybe weren’t able to ask before, because a lot of this stuff is being taken off of your plate. So from our standpoint, it’s not an the objective is not to just create a bunch of busy work, or even just create a bunch of work. It’s to make sure that what you have is being utilized the most optimum way. And to your point, when you do that, you not only save yourself time now, but you are definitely saving yourself time down the road, right? The most expensive tax is the dumb tax, right? When you don’t know that you’ve done something and you have to pay the penalty for it down the road, like, that’s not the one you need to be incurring. So how do we make sure that, like, we avoid those in situations, and that we understand that five. Want again, I’ll I stress this with the clients all the time, is we want you making conscious decisions, unconscious decisions, right? I’m okay if you choose to do something other than what the data I have tells you you should do. That’s fine. If you feel like, Hey, I understand this is what it says. But my gut says that there’s this component that can’t be quantified, quantified that I want to go with this way. Great, that’s okay. But what we can’t have is you not knowing the data says this, And you choosing something else instead, because now you you’ve been completely blinded to knowing what the information is, and so that’s where we want to make sure we avoid people getting to

george grombacher 20:35
love it. Well, no Nolan, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? Where could founders engage with you?

Nolan Bradbury 20:45
Yeah. So you can find me on LinkedIn, very creatively. The handle is Nolan Bradbury. And then you can find us online on our website@bradfieldco.com, so Bradfield co.com if you’d like to connect with us, there’s a contact form in there. You’re not going to get spammed. You’re not going to sign up for a newsletter. We’re not going to add you to a CRM. Believe it or not, you’re just going to get a response from a human being asking if you’d like to get some help with some stuff, as weird as that sounds. So if you want to reach out, happy to talk with you, see if there’s something we can do to help, and whether it’s us or someone else, we’ll do the best to give you some advice and some feedback that will help you outstanding

george grombacher 21:21
Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did, show Nolan your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. Go to Brad field, Bradfield co com and check out everything that no one’s been talking about. And reach out, shoot them a message, find them on LinkedIn, and take that first step in figuring out if Nolan’s approach is the right one for you to get to where you want to go. Thanks again, Nolan,

Nolan Bradbury 21:48
thanks for having me

george grombacher 21:49
until next time. Remember do your part by doing your best. You.

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.