#23: Justin McLoughlin (airCFO)

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:02:30]:

The experience of the clients is only as good as the people delivering the work, delivering the service, right? It's not like I came up with this idea, but it's like, take care of your people first and they'll take care of your clients. It's true. I don't jump into a client's payroll system or QuickBooks and answer their questions anymore. I mean, it's out of my hands. It's in the hands of our employees. So our goal we have plenty of work to do. Our goal is to really just kind of lean into this concept of just continuing to take care of our employees and just create a workplace that's where they want to be. That's why they're passionate to come to work every day.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:12]:

Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I'm your host Jeffrey Stern, and today we are exploring a company helping other people build their own companies. Justin McLaughlin is a Midwesterner who fell in love with the tech startup scene and turned entrepreneur when he realized that when other people start their own startups, that payroll, back office management, account reconciliation, taxes, and general accounting is not typically what the had in mind. So Justin started Air CFO to deliver those same entrepreneurs and other growing companies peace of mind by taking ownership of these accounting responsibilities, maintaining their books so they can focus on maintaining their business. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, from building a bootstrapped company to scaling a professional services organization, the future of work, the importance of taking care of your own employees, and of course, finance and accounting. I really enjoyed this conversation Land. I hope you all will as well. So I'd love to start with your story of entrepreneurship, if you will, how it is that you came to align yourself with the world of startups. Land what led you ultimately to start Air CFO?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:04:47]:

Yeah, for me it started back around 2011, so about ten years ago, and I was already about five years into a career in a much larger company. I was just kind of getting bored, honestly, in corporate America, trying to climb the ladder, and had a fellow Cleveland that started a company that he had already taken out west to San Francisco, and he invited me to join as maybe employee number 15, I think, and just be the first kind of biz ops business operations person. Land once I got out there and just kind of left behind corporate America, I just absolutely fell in love with the startup ecosystem and just everything it had to offer, from the fast pace to the idea of causing disruption in old legacy companies and just never looked back since. It's been ten years and never looked back. So I spent a couple of years there and decided after a couple of years I have family back here in Ohio. So decided after a couple of years to kind of come back home. I have a young family as well. And when I was leaving, essentially, the company had grown that point to probably about 40 or 50 employees, and we had A small Biz Ops team. And everything that I Was doing got absorbed by other people on the team. But nobody wanted to do accounting or taxes or payroll. So We Just kind of struck A deal that I could come back. This is 2013 or so. So this is before remote work was very popular, but we kind of struck a deal to just have me work essentially, like part time as a contractor doing kind of the back office things that are accounting, bookkeeping, payroll taxes. And that's really where the idea came from. That's where the idea was born.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:42]:

Yeah, it resonates a lot because a lot of what I do at my company is figuring out ways to make the experience of doing things that are mandatory, but that no one actually enjoys doing more enjoyable and easier to do. So I think a lot about how to make those undesirable experiences more desirable and that ability to take the unwanted required responsibility off someone else's plate is a powerful ability. It is, yeah. Okay, so you kind of stumble into this challenge. No one likes to do accounting, and those responsibilities kind of fall on your plate.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:07:21]:

At what point do you come to.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:23]:

The realization that there's a company in this idea?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:07:27]:

Yeah, when I took on that challenge, I really came back to Ohio, think Cleveland, thinking like, okay, I'm going to take a little bit of time of and then figure out what my next step is. And there was essentially three co founders at that company, and the each had just incredible networks of other entrepreneurs and other founders out west. And essentially, one by one, each one of the founders of the company it's called Apartment List, by the way, each one of the co founders of Apartment List just kind of connected me into some of the other founders that were facing the same issue, which is, hey, we're an early stage company. We've received outside investment. We have to act like a real grown up company and do things like payroll, land taxes, but we know that we're just too early, too small to justify hiring full time employees to do this. And like we said before, I don't want to figure it out. I don't want to figure out how to fill out a tax return, set up a payroll system, learn how to use QuickBooks. So slowly but surely through I would say through 24. You know, I so I really got started in the beginning of 2014, and then by the end of 2014, I probably had a dozen or so of these companies that were in that similar sense, and, yeah, the idea just kind of fell in my fell in my lap. I mean, there was no getting away from it, and it just made a lot of sense. Once I got more involved and realized that I could honestly just make a living doing this, it became pretty clear that I enjoyed the freedom of working for myself and helping just some really interesting companies. Yeah, absolutely.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:19]:

So as your own kind of personal book of business grew and you're thinking about sustaining yourself through this company, at what point do you realize, all right, maybe I need to hire some people and make a company of what I'm doing myself?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:09:36]:

Yeah, I made it the first year. Land a half as a solo consultant. Land then it was mid 2015 when I made my first hire. Really what I was looking for then was if you think about what we do, which is accounting and finance and tax, I have a pretty strong background in accounting, kind of what a controller does, but I was not great with some of what a CFO would do. CFO is kind of more of a strategic, forward looking person that might have studied finance in college as opposed to what I studied accounting. So I made my first hire in 2015, which was that other half being the finance side of what we did. So, yeah, that was the first hire. And then ever since the we've been hiring different consultants from accounting, finance, tax world, that we're piecing together a team that kind of focuses on those three main areas.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:36]:

So how would you describe Air CFO today as a company? What are the services that you're offering and what does the company look like?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:10:45]:

Yeah, in the simplest terms, we are a consulting company to early stage startups that are looking for a partner as it pertains to what some people might call some of the back office operations of a startup. So, again, it's bookkeeping and accounting taxes. We're also getting into what we call people advisory, which has to do with things like HR, payroll, benefits, and then we also layer in kind of that more strategic fractional CFO service. So that's what it is in its simplest terms, our vision as a company is to become just the best in class advisor to early stage startups and startup founders and become a premier workplace for startup minded financial professionals. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:37]:

So unlike a lot of your clients, though, who have this kind of venture backing, they've taken outside capital you thought about and went about growing Air CFO in a very different way. And I'd love to get your perspective just on building a bootstrapped company and why you did that. If you think about outside capital and working with all these companies that take in outside capital, just kind of the pros and cons of both kind of approaches from your perspective.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:12:03]:

Yeah, I think when I got started, I was pretty naive and certainly it was my first go around. Land I think that the general advice that I was hearing in the beginning was, you're a services company. Investors aren't going to be interested in you. A VC or an angel investor is not really going to be interested in a services based company. So I almost did it because I thought that was the only way to do it. Right, right. Just be bootstrapped and whatnot. And I think looking back, it was definitely the right decision for me, relatively speaking. I'm pretty conservative and in my opinion, there's something just sensible about starting a business that's going to be profitable, or at least revenue generating revenue from essentially day one, which is what we were. So it kind of lined up with my nature of being simple and sustainable and just sensible from that approach. But you're absolutely right. There's pros and cons. I mean, pros are sustainability that helps to recruit other people that want to join a startup but don't want to be worried that it's going to run out of money in six months or twelve months. So that's a huge pro. But yeah, certainly on the other side of the coin, the rocket ship growth, the hockey stick growth is a little harder to accomplish when we have such limited resources like we do. There are certain things I want to do, like today that I know realistically, because of limited resources, we're not going to be able to get to until 2022, for example, for next year. So there's pros and cons. But for me it definitely lines up with kind of my nature that makes.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:58]:

A lot of sense. I had a friend who worked for a company called Atrium, which was, in my mind, kind of building the Air CFO equivalent, but for lawyers and legal advice for startups. They have since kind of folded, but they took in a lot of venture capital upfront and I think the takeaway of their founder was to essentially not build a services company because it's harder to manage everyone involved. There's less of the technological efficiencies that you realize with software and some of the reward isn't there. But I think your perspective just makes a lot of sense. There's different goals and objectives from what's driving the business ultimately.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:14:44]:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, looking back five years or so, there was several players, even in our space that took on outside funding, took on venture capital. And when you do that, when you sign up to take on venture capital, you're essentially signing up to you have to go after that growth, you have to sign up for eventually exiting your company. And it can't be at the valuation multiple of a professional services company. It's got to be at the valuation multiple of a SaaS company. So you're forcing your hand a little bit when you sign up for that. Listen, there's companies for every atrium out there. There's another company in our space called Pilot, which just raised $100 million this year at over a billion dollar valuation. And they got started after we got started. So it can be done. It certainly can be done, but there's different ways to go about it, for sure. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:46]:

How do you think about competition and differentiation in the market?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:15:50]:

I think about it every day. I think in the early days I was really focused on our competition and really focused on just small little things I could do to try to differentiate. When we first started, for example, we were set on what we call flat fee pricing, right? Like right out of the gate, telling a client from day one, you're going to pay exactly this much. So I've thought about it since day one. Currently, where we stand, what differentiates Air CFO? There's a couple of things. We stay really focused on our vertical. We stay really focused on our niche. We've been after it now for seven years. And we've gotten a lot of subject matter expertise in kind of our sandbox, so to speak, that is very helpful for the clients we help. We're a scalable solution. So we work with precede companies, two people, just an idea all the way up through exit. And the other thing that differentiates us is we take a small team approach, so we don't just have one person that's trying to be everything from your CFO to your accountant to your bookkeeper. We kind of present a small team to clients. So that's how I think about it from a kind of a product standpoint or a services standpoint. The other things that I think a lot about are how are we creating a differentiated workplace? There's just so much competition in our space for talent. I mean, we're literally competing against the behemoths that are like the giant consulting companies and the big four public accounting companies. But there wasn't a lot of barriers to entry when I got started in this space, and there's not a lot of barriers to entry today. So there's so many more kind of of these, like fractional accounting and fractional CFO firms popping up all the time. So it's something that we put a ton of effort and are very deliberate about when we try to build our culture, build kind of the employee experience at our CFO just to make sure that we can attract talent and B, retain it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:15]:

Right. That makes a lot of sense. What are some of those things that you've done?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:18:20]:

Well, from going back two years, almost two years now? We hired an experienced people operations manager. Little story here. Roughly two years ago, this is before the Pandemic, right, that we decided to go remote as a company. We were having a tough time finding all the talent we needed in just Cleveland, and we decided to go remote and just kind of didn't really think through all of the different aspects around building a remote company, building a remote culture where everything's done via video conferencing and whatnot. So we were very fortunate early on to kind of listen to the feedbacks from some of our remote employees that we needed to step up. We needed to do more to be deliberate about just creating a good employee experience. So we hired her name sky. We hired sky from she's down in Austin, Texas. And she came on to be kind of our first head of people and through some of the initiatives over the last it's been over a year and a half now that she's been putting in place everything from the very beginning of the employee lifecycle. When we're talking about recruiting and interviewing through onboarding, through performance reviews, I mean, literally all the way up through offboarding and kind of separating from employees. She's just taken a fine tooth comb to everything that we were doing and really put more of just a real lens to it and tried to find out kind of what are opportunities for improvement. It's a constant thing we work on, right? Just from rolling out more benefits to creating better ways to communicate with one another through slack land zoom and email land, just kind of writing a lot of standard procedures for how to kind of best work with each other, if that makes sense. Yeah, totally.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:28]:

There's some real prescience in there, some foresight, I imagine with what ultimately happened with the Pandemic is most companies transition to remote was this unnatural forced consequence that was not of any intention, but I imagine coming into it with an intention to that's the direction that you wanted to take the company. I imagine that is kind of a real differentiator over the last year and change.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:20:54]:

Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's definitely a little bit of luck there. I couldn't imagine at this point going back, trying to build a company and not having it be remote. There's been so many benefits, certainly some pain points in the beginning, but you're right, I mean, we were one of the fortunate few during the Pandemic that didn't really have to take those first few months to just try to adjust to the reality of being isolated. So we were very fortunate.

Jeffrey Stern [00:21:30]:

Yeah, that's pretty serendipitous. One of the topics that I wanted to get your perspective on is kind of more of a macro one. But one of the things that I've been thinking through a lot is this idea of the itemization of the firm. So there was this economist, Robert Coast, back in the 30s whose main idea was that the firm, the modern day company, exists because it's cheaper and easier to consolidate all of the necessary functions within a company than it is to find and coordinate people or service providers externally to do those functions on the market. And when he came up with this in the 30s, it was before the internet and these digital platforms which have since greatly reduced the cost to coordinate and it manifests in remote work and all these things that just weren't even possible before. So thinking about some kind of modern interpretation of the theory of the firm, it's now easier than ever and makes more sense than ever to really kind of outsource everything that historically had been in house and instead focus on your core competency as a company. And so to the extreme, that's like really outsourcing as much as you possibly can. Land I think that's kind of where it's cool to think about Air CFO with a very clearly defined core competency that others are explicitly outsourcing to. You so sorry for the very long winded premise there, but I'd love to get your perspective on that kind of idea. Land where you see that going, yeah.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:23:01]:

This is the idea that we exist upon, right? I mean, this is the very nature of why we exist. Land why we've helped over 200 startups at this point. It's something ten years ago, or not even ten years ago, five, six, seven years ago. When I first got started, there was a little bit of friction there already, right? I used to have conversations like, what do you mean you don't come to the office to shuffle papers and sign checks? When I first got started in Cleveland, I remember it was even a software company, like a venture backed software company that was like, well, okay, we'll work with you, but you have to come to the office two days a week. And that was just a little bit of a transition to almost like it was me by myself when I first started with them. Land it was almost like I was a part time employee on site. There's just been just a lot of movement in the last ten years. I think when I got started, I've not looked into this deeply, but I feel like the idea of outsourcing some of your development work overseas was catching on instead of especially in San Francisco, where it's super expensive, cost of labor outsourcing. Some of the dev work was kind of common. Land I feel like in the last five to ten years, the idea of outsourcing some of the other functions could be HR, could be recruiting, could be finance. Land accounting as a service has really started to catch on. And obviously I'm biased and I have a vested interest in this, but I don't see it going backwards. I only see this going further and further. And I remember when I started, I always thought, well, there's always going to be this point in time where eventually in a startup's life cycle, they have to fire us and hire a full time team. It's true to some extent, but at the same time, we're holding on longer and longer and longer with these companies. As they get bigger and bigger and bigger, they're just a lot more comfortable with this idea of kind of fractional expandable work as they need it on their needs, on their schedule.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:33]:

What's coming to mind is I'm thinking about it from this perspective of software as a service, specifically, where you have all these APIs that you can just toggle on and toggle down as your scale and requirements change over time. And it's this very seamless experience with that. I guess there's kind of two questions I have. One is you've talked about differentiation and competition from the perspective of maybe other service providers. But do you feel that there's a competition that you might face from technology itself in this space and then how you kind of grow with the companies that you're working with?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:26:10]:

For the first question, just as far as competition amongst software providers? Yeah, I think it would be naive of us to sit here as accountants and finance professionals thinking that software isn't going to just continue to kind of eat into the billable hours that we might provide today. It's already happening. Right. I think people got a little excited with artificial intelligence and invested in some companies in our space that have already since gone away that we're not there yet. Right. Feel like the idea even a couple of years ago was, oh, we're building a company to not just be your bookkeeper, but they'll replace any need that you have for an accountant or a bookkeeper. And we're not there yet, but we take a position that we think that over time, that will continue to eat into our work. And I feel like my job as a CEO is to just constantly keep pushing our team up into an advisor role and just cutting out that rote mechanical kind of data entry plugging and chugging bean counter as some of the phrases you hear about accountants and whatnot. I feel like my job is just continue to push us up into more of an advisory role. Because at the end of the day, I remember I was talking with the founder in our space that started one of these software companies, and he had something that was kind of insightful, and he was like at the end of the day, I think the accountants, the human element of what we do is always going to be there's always going to be demand for it. There's always going to be need for it. Because at the end of the day, someone's got to be accountable for all this, literally. And first time founders, early stage CEOs, they want the peace of mind knowing that there's somebody else, part of their team that is accountable and responsible at the end of the day, that the software isn't just going haywire and pumping out revenue numbers that are not accurate reflections of what's going on in the company. So I do think that we still have a long ways to go from software, and we invite it because I think there's always going to be a space for us in more of an advisory type role, if not as much as the commoditized bookkeeping and data processing that exists today. Right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:44]:

That component of it is kind of the race to the bottom.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:28:48]:

Yeah, I totally agree. What was the second question you had?

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:52]:

Yeah, no problem. The second question was about how you grow with your clients. You mentioned in some ways the goal might ultimately be to have your customers be successful enough that they maybe outgrow the need for air CFO. So how do you think about that transition?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:29:11]:

It used to be part of my sales pitch, which was like, hey, if you do your job and we do our job, you're going to have to fire us one day. Because right. Because you're going to get so big that it's just only going to make sense to bring this in house. What's happened over the last seven years and 200 plus clients is it's almost like a bell shaped curve where in the beginning, there's just not a lot to do right for a pre revenue one or two person startup. Just some basic compliance, some basic reporting keep us out of trouble when it comes to the IRS land our investors. And then as you find product market fit and you're working from like a seed stage up to a Series A, that's when our role becomes often the biggest. We're playing that role of a fractional CFO, helping a company figure out things like planning for their next fundraise or helping them set up an infrastructure to measure things like customer acquisition costs and lifetime value. And there's a lot land then I would say our peak in relationship is probably right around the Series A. At that point. We're covering everything from when I think of like a finance department at the top, you might have your CFO, and then under that you might have your accounting controller and your accountants. And then all the way further down you have your bookkeepers and your kind of clerks. And somewhere around the Series A is when we're kind of doing the full stack of everything and the past the Series A into the Series B. It depends on the company, of course. But a lot of times what we're seeing is they'll go and hire a CFO, a full time CFO, and usually they start at the top. Not always, but usually they'll start at the top. And what happens then is the first few times that happened to us, I was like, oh darn it, we're going to lose the client. That's it. Bittersweet. Good for them, bad for us. But what we've found is the CFOs, especially the experienced ones, the last thing they want to do is just completely build the finance department from ground up if things are working. So a lot of times they'll keep us on land. Maybe in the first year we obviously lose some of those strategic finance role. But maybe they still want us to stick around to do as. Almost like if you're familiar with finance, like an Fpna person, like financial planning and analysis, almost like an analyst under the CFO. And then they still want our accounting services and maybe even our tax services. So what we see over time is that it's much more of like a gradual decline from a full stack down to the point where we had a couple of companies that were over 200 employees. Where we were still involved doing just basic bookkeeping. At that point, we've built up so much kind of institutional knowledge about how things operate at that company because a lot of times we've been working with them for at this .345 years, I mean, our very first client that we ever have is still a client today. So we can work with clients for over five years.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:35]:

Yeah, I guess having the experience of working with so many startups and seeing them grow over time, what do you see as kind of the biggest mistakes early stage startups are making? Like the biggest financial mistakes, just mistakes across the board?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:32:50]:

Yeah, probably a lot of the same mistakes you read about. I don't think there's anything too unique about the companies we've worked with. That said, I think maybe a couple of specific examples. I've seen a lot of first time founders. Land co founders come right out of the gate at a precede stage, just call it an ideation stage. And I imagine in my mind they're like sitting around the table drinking, having a few beers, and it's like, we're going to start a company. All right, there's three of us. You get a third, you get a third, you get a third. And then they wake up the next morning and somebody's quitting their job to go at it full time. Other two are kind of like, well, let's think about this, I'm going to do it part time, right? And all of a sudden I've seen that where you kind of get locked into this one third, one third, one third split. And I'm just using the example of three people, right, this even split, where in reality one person might be shouldering a lot of the effort in their early years. And I've just seen that grow to be resentful. I've seen it go all the way to legal, get legal involved. Land I think there's other ways to go about doing that where maybe you have a goal of getting it to one third, one third, one third, but you create some kind of vesting schedule for the first few years. Land that way if one person really does go at it full bore, then he or she will get rewarded more than others. So I've seen that at the precede, at the seed stage, starting to attract capital, maybe you get your 1st 100,000 or half a million or a million. And one of the things we've seen is people are so eager to start spending that money. Land they just don't have the infrastructure in place to capture customer acquisition costs and properly attribute where they're getting their customers from compared to where they're spending their money. I've seen a lot of companies waste a lot of money on advertising in the early days because they don't have a proper tracking attribution system set up. And then last, I mean, the Series a size company. We're talking about a 2025 30 person company. A lot of times, just hiring and this is specific to MySpace, but just hiring one person, one full time employee as your finance department and expecting that person to cover everything from certainly I have a bias here, but having that one person cover everything from bookkeeping to payroll to invoicing and collections to being your fractional CFO. So I've seen a lot of people get burnt out doing that. And a lot of times what happens is a company has the budget to hire kind of a very junior person and the they're selling themselves short on more of like the strategic stuff or the stuff that you experienced person for or vice versa. You're paying somebody that is experienced that can do it all, but you're paying them $150,000 a year to pay bills, land run payroll, in reality is you can get somebody doing it at a lot less cost. And quite frankly, those people at that point in their career, they very rarely want to be kind of the person doing working in QuickBooks every day, for example.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:18]:

Right. I want to turn our lens a bit towards the future and get your perspective on where you kind of want to take Air CFO. One of the things I think is really cool about that I kind of admire about bootstrapped businesses, and especially one that you've been able to build to the size and stage that you have, is that you're really like the captain of your own ship at this point. You control the trim tabs, you're not beholden to the VCs and the SaaS valuations and all these other things that the companies, the startups, your customers have to think about when they're growing and you're captaining the ship. Land so where are you trying to take it as your 200 customers or so right now? Is it kind of a linear trajectory as you bring on more customers, you have to bring on more employees and just kind of higher level strategically. Where are you thinking about Air CFO in the future?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:37:13]:

Yeah, you're exactly right. I mean, that's definitely one of the biggest benefits of a bootstrap company is the control, right? Yeah. I don't have a board of directors that could get frustrated with me and decide to replace me. But that said, I definitely report to my team and my employees and there's no way that we're going to attract and retain the talent that we need to attract and retain to keep growing if they don't have kind of a sense of where this is going. So I do think about it a lot and we do talk about it a lot. Listen, I think from a size standpoint, we're roughly 25 employees now. Land like you said, about 100 and 2540 clients, I think on a regular basis, monthly basis. I don't see we're growing 50% to 75% year over year. It's not slowing down. We have clients on a waiting list right now so short term, next few years envision getting to hundreds of clients. We have an incredible leadership team and they're all kind of in it for the long term to keep building this. I think what we'll focus on most is there's two parts to it. There's two parts to our vision, the services and the client side and then creating a premier workplace for Air CFO. So my focus is very much on creating a premier workplace and creating kind of the future for accounting finance tax professionals, creating the future of a workplace for them. And I've heard a few of our employees use terms like use phrases like the almost feel like they're working for themselves when they work for us. I mean, there's an incredible amount of autonomy that we give our employees and they kind of like control their own kind of book of business. And I think people really like that. So we're going to lean into that more. We're really going to try to lean into this idea that we're creating an alternative career path for some of the best and brightest that are currently working in the best management consulting firms or the best big public accounting firms. Create an alternative career path for them. And the other question might be like, what's your exit strategy? We don't know yet. We don't know. Land we're not trying to put too much emphasis on that. Is it Stern million in revenue or 20 million in revenue? It's just not a huge point of emphasis for what we're doing. But we're committed to growing it. We're committed to just continuing to attract and work with a bunch of awesome founders and entrepreneurs. Land then on the other side of that, just create a workplace of engaged, passionate, motivated finance professionals that want to help startups.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:18]:

What resonates a lot with me about that is I think a lot of companies, startups, hold culture as something that's very important to them. But I think what's really cool about what you're doing is that if the people at the end of the day are kind of what you're differentiating your product on as a services provider, then focusing on culture as one of the core tenets of what you're doing is how you have to get the best people. It makes a lot of sense. I haven't thought about it from that perspective.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:40:52]:

Yeah, I mean, the experience of the clients is only as good as the people delivering the work, delivering the service. It's not like I came up with this idea, but it's like, take care of your people first and they'll take care of your clients. It's true. I don't jump into a client's payroll system or QuickBooks and answer their questions anymore. I mean, it's out of my hands. It's in the hands of our employees. So our goal, we have plenty of work to do. Our goal is to really just kind of lean into this concept of just continuing to take care of our employees and just create a workplace that's where they want to be. That's why they're passionate to come to work every day. I mean, it sounds super generic, but it's very true in our space.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:38]:

Yeah, I'm just curious, how many people at this point are Cleveland based versus remote?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:41:45]:

It's Dwindling. It's dwindling. Literally dwindling. I think it's probably out of 25. It's down to it's five or less. Yeah, we used to have about ten in Cleveland. When I say dwindling, I don't mean necessarily. They're leaving the company. Somebody just left for Austin, Texas, three months ago. Our VFA fellow is looking to relocate to Denver. So they're with the company still. But people are kind of exploring outside.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:18]:

Of Northeast Ohio as a Midwesterner, does it factor at all into your thinking, like, having a company here in Cleveland land? Obviously, we've spoken about the plethora of benefits that come from remote culture and all that, but I'm just curious your perspective on building a company here in Cleveland, but having it really be a remote company and how you reconcile those things or think about that.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:42:41]:

We'll always have our roots here. We always kind of look for those Midwestern sensibilities for the employees that we hire, even if they're spread out from Texas to Canada at this point and over to New York. But I think at this point, it's safe to say that we're a fully remote company. I will lay that in the beginning, we did try to run kind of this hybrid. We had an office in downtown. We had the downtown team, and then we had the remote team, and at least for us, that that wasn't working. Kind of that dichotomy or that, like, two different like building two different cultures was just not healthy for for us. We were way too small, and I know some bigger companies can pull that off, but we just didn't have the resources to try to do that. So, yeah, we operate fully remote. We do have kind of a lease and an incredible co working space called Limelight in Ohio City, where we essentially set the expectation with the people that are still in Cleveland, which is like, hey, if you want to get out of your house, you don't have to work from your home. You can go to the co working space. And there's, like, a small group. I think on average, we probably have one or two people out there. Yeah, I would say at this point we're fully remote, but we'll always have our ties to Cleveland land. I'm a Clevelander. I'm not going anywhere.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:05]:

Yeah, well, tying it tying it back to Cleveland one of the things that we kind of ask everyone on the show at this point, but painting a collective collage of not necessarily people's favorite things in Cleveland, but hidden gems, things that other people lay not necessarily know about with that. What are some of those for?

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:44:23]:

You. Yeah, I appreciate the question and I hope no one else has said this yet. Land I think you might find it funny. It's venture for America, the VFA. Community.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:36]:

Oh, wow.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:44:37]:

Land yeah. When I got started in 2014, I met my first fellow, I think it was 2015. He was working at one of our startups, one of our startup clients and just had no idea what it was about or anything like that. But when we made our first after we got to about four or five employees, we were essentially just all consultants. And we made our first hire in customer success. And that was our first interaction with VFA. I think that was probably back in 2017. And since then we've hired her name was Casey. She was fantastic. She's out in Portland, Oregon now. And then we hired Dan to help lead up growth in Biz Dev. But the community, aside from just hiring a couple of fellows, we've been involved with BFA, the Accelerator, which is here in Cleveland. If anyone wants to look at the accelerator and some of the companies that have come out of that, they've put out some incredible companies through the accelerator. Obviously, you're a former fellow yourself, so you're very familiar, but just an incredible network of young people that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to attract to Cleveland if there wasn't some mechanism like Venture for America that was essentially deliberately bringing kind of passionate, entrepreneurial, spirited, extremely competent and intelligent young people to come to our city. Land just participate in the journey. That is my startup. So hidden gem because I still think a lot of companies don't know about it. But at the same time, I think if you look at some of the awesome companies that we have that have come out of Cleveland recently, tech Elevator is one example. They've hired a few fellows, I believe. Land if you look at some of the successful companies that have come out of Cleveland in maybe the last five, six years, you wouldn't be surprised if a common thread is they had a few Venture for America fellows join the team. So we're super excited. We're hoping to hopefully add another fellow here potentially this year.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:48]:

All right, on. I appreciate the kind words and the plug there.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:46:53]:

It's true. It's very true.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:54]:

Well, awesome. Justin, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story today. I think there's a lot of really cool land different insights from this conversation than from some others. So I really appreciate it. So thank you.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:47:07]:

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:09]:

If people have any questions or things that the want to follow up with you about, where is the best place for them to reach you probably LinkedIn.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:47:18]:

Or just go to Aircfo.com. You'll find my mug somewhere on there with my email address. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:24]:

On the interwebs.

Justin McLoughlin (airCFO) [00:47:25]:

You got it. Yeah. Not big on Twitter or anything else. So just linked. I am very responsive on LinkedIn. You'll find me there.