Erica: Welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floor podcast, the podcast where we get real about the challenges women face in work, life, and leadership. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, HR executive, keynote speaker, and executive coach, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there.

Erica: Today's guest is tackling the core problem that trips up, I think, every ambitious entrepreneur I know, and that would be confusing business strategy with finance. If you're a CFO, you probably already get it. But what I love about this is that she's not just talking about creating budgets and following a spreadsheet. She is simplifying complex money talk and turning founders into confident financial leaders.

Erica: And let's be clear, just because you're a visionary and you set a great strategy and a vision, it doesn't always translate to the dollars. That's why we've got Danielle Hendon, who is the founder of Four Corners CFO, a firm dedicated to empowering small and mid market businesses with financial strategy. After years of experience in corporate finance, Danielle recognized this massive gap for entrepreneurs who are so brilliant and so amazing at their craft, but they're overwhelmed by the books. So she and her team provide the clarity, the forecasting, and the strategic decision support that drives sustainable profitable growth.

Erica: She understands this truth, that you can't lead where you don't look. Her mission is to help women founders stop leaving money on the table and fully step into the power of profit. Please welcome the financial strategist, the profit champion, Danielle Hendon. Danielle, welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Danielle: I am so good. Wow, what an intro. You are amazing. I cannot wait to talk more about this because so many business owners, especially women, would prefer to put our head in the sand, and we fly by the seat of our pants in our bank account. And that's just not the best way to run a business.

Erica: No, it's not. And so I'm really interested. You were corporate world girl doing that whole thing for so long, which also two snaps to that because there's not a ton of women in finance. I think the stat for female CFOs is like 17 percent. It's ridiculously low. And I know that because I had a female CFO. But what really shifted that transition for you? Give me your kind of come up story.

Danielle: Oh gosh, I was thrown in feet first. I will be the first to say I never thought I'd be an entrepreneur. My husband is the entrepreneurial spirit of the household, but life had different plans. I always think it's funny to say this, but I actually went to college to be a music major. I thought I was going to be an opera singer for a living. Then I had a professor who made us write all about the future of our career, and I realized I don't have friends in high places, and I'm going to be broke, and that doesn't sound fun. So I had friends in the business school and decided to give accounting a try. There is a weird, scientifically proven mesh between numbers and math and music and patterns, and I loved accounting. I loved everything about it, and kept going, got my CPA, went into public accounting like everybody does.

Danielle: I am here in the Houston area, so when I started a family and realized I don't want to be working public accounting hours, I landed in oil and gas. I was with an oil and gas firm for about a decade. They went through bankruptcy, and on the other side of it, I was running the audit department and getting the phone calls of, hey, we've got two people left, how do you want me to keep doing this. So we rewrote their processes and their controls over and over and over again for two years. Then the pandemic hit, and it was a chance to slow down in a way that Americans have never done. For me, it was a completely different perspective of parenting because at this time we now had two kids, both in school. My son is GT, which is gifted and talented here in Texas, but also severely ADHD.

Danielle: Hindsight, 2020, I don't think we would have survived if I didn't end up being at home running my business. But on this side of it, this workaholic mom was getting to know the parents and the teachers and the friends and all of the things that in corporate, we were about to hire a nanny to do. I realized I didn't want to give that up. There had to be a way to do what I love doing and be there for the people that I care about the most. That has been a through line for me with our clients and our team members, and we hire phenomenal people that are really good at what they do, but maybe they only do it for five hours a week. That's sort of how I launched into Four Corners CFO.

Erica: I love that. That was kind of the same thing for me with COVID. Yes, it was horrible, and a lot of bad things very much happened, but there was a lot of good that came out of that in the fact that so many women who never got to experience taking a step back from a high powered job that had them going all over the place, got to experience it a little differently. I know I got to get two and a half hours of my day back just from commuting alone. But there were some really unique opportunities that if you leaned into it and paid attention to the pulls you were getting, it was very much like, no, I've been exposed to this, I don't want to leave it. How can I be different? So I think that's really awesome. But when I think of finance and numbers and all the things, it gives me mad anxiety. I don't want to be thinking about it. What was it where you were like, wow, there are some blind spots out there that entrepreneurs are facing that they don't even know about?

Danielle: Okay, so I'm going to give a story first, and then I'll give blind spots. I had a very good friend. I'm a swim mom, my kids are swimmers. So we spend a lot of time with swim moms, and one of them ran her own business doing t shirts and stuff like that. I would ask her questions, like, hey, what are your sales, what are your profit margin, just conversationally, and she's like, Danielle, you're making me sweat, I can't talk about this. I was like, okay, so we've really got to figure out how we can get women to not, and I don't want to say afraid, because we're not afraid of the numbers, but to not judge themselves for the numbers, because I think that's what it really comes down to. A lot of women have a lot of guilt and judgment that surrounds those numbers, and it's easier to just say, hey, everything's going well or everything's not going well, I need to fix it, without getting into the details that feel like judgments on you. But at the end of the day, one of my favorite things to tell clients is when you write a budget, the goal of the budget is never actually to hit it. It's just a milestone that helps us understand what your numbers are doing.

Erica: So the goal of the budget is never to hit it. Would you also consider it kind of like a road map? Talk to me more about this, it feels like judgment.

Danielle: Especially for those of us that have come out of corporate, you feel like you should know these things. I'm smart, I should know how to do this. If things are going really well in your business, you probably don't feel like you need to look at the numbers. I would argue there's always a story being told, and you need to know what those are. But if things aren't going well, if the bank account's coming up too short, if you've got payroll to make, you feel responsible. You are responsible, I'm not going to lie. As business owners, we are responsible for what goes on in our business. But as women especially, we turn that into self criticism really, really fast. When realistically, it could be something going on with an employee, it could be something going on in the world, it could be all number of things, but if you're not looking at the numbers at all, you can't begin to understand that story and what is going on. You just immediately go to, this is my fault, the buck stops here, I should've done something different, but that's not going to help you move forward.

Erica: There's a sense of responsibility, and this not good enough feeling. We all want to be doing better, we all want higher revenue and higher profitability. And if we're not hitting those, especially as female entrepreneurs who've always been told those are things we can't really excel at, it exacerbates that core truth we believe, which in my world we call sticky floors, the limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors that keep you stuck. So all of that criticism and judgment centered around money, it's almost terrifying because we place so much of our worth on those numbers. That makes me think about financial confidence and how do we boost women's financial confidence?

Danielle: If nothing else happens after you listen to this podcast, if you can at least just go look at your numbers and figure out what you don't know. You are not meant to know it all. And if you're a business owner and you're trying to do your own books, you're wasting time and money. There are plenty of people out there to do it for very little money. You're not supposed to know the things that you don't know, you're supposed to have support to help you with the things that you don't know. If all you do is go look at those numbers and figure out what you don't know and talk to your bookkeeper, this entire podcast for me is a win.

Erica: We had another woman on here a little bit earlier, Steph Wagner, who wrote a book, but it's more so on the personal financial side of it. If you're listening to this and you're not a business owner, it doesn't really matter, take these same concepts and apply them to your personal financial situation. I remember when I was single, living paycheck to paycheck, trying to figure out if I could afford ramen noodles or two buck chuck wine. It was almost like cross my fingers and hope that I did. One of the things I really wanted to talk about was forecasting, because to me forecasting can sound so intimidating, but you say this is a critical leadership tool. So how do we master this skill of basic financial forecasting, and how does it give us the power to lead more courageously?

Danielle: I will start with mindset because everything starts there. You have to know that the budget isn't touching you, it is not a judgment of you. It is a quantified way of writing down your goals financially. At the time we are recording this, the world is expensive. If you wrote your budget six months ago and it said 500 dollars a month for groceries, I guarantee you're not hitting it. I think we spend 400 dollars a week with my kids at home. But it's not a judgment of you, it's a matter of the circumstances that you're in. When we don't hit the budget, whether personally or professionally, what we do with our clients is we say, okay, do we need to change the budget, which means we're changing our expectations, or do we need to make a change in the business. It doesn't have to be hard.

Danielle: I'm going to give an example because a lot of us are service based businesses. When it is service based, you are the revenue generating cost, or your people are. How many hours are you committing to that work, and how much should you be billing that work at, that's what your revenue should be. When we're working with attorneys, we sit down and say, even if you're flat fee or contingency, I don't care how you price what you price, but it's still an hour of work, and if you were to build that out hourly, you need to be making at least that much money. Your team has forty hours a week, let's say thirty of it's spent on billable work. How much money should that hour be worth, 100, 200, if you're an attorney it might be 500. Then we calculate how much revenue that means you could and should be making if everybody's doing what they need to be doing.

Danielle: Especially as women, I love flat fee, because it is the best way for you to get efficiency and value for the experience you and your team have. If you're doing things by the hour, as you get faster you're losing money, which is not how we want things to go. But if you're flat fee pricing, as you get faster you're actually making money because the team can do more of it. A lot of times, another one of those blind spots, especially as women, is we under price our services. We look at the hours going into it, and we don't look at the value coming out of it for our clients.

Erica: That's been something I have to come up against a lot in my keynote speaking business, because people ask what's the price for an hour talk versus a half hour talk, and it's the same because it took me the same amount of time to get here, fifteen plus years. It's hard because we equate time to money in our brains, so we expect other people to fall for that too. But I want to go back to this money mindset thing, because I think this is where so many women get tripped up, whether you're an entrepreneur or this is your personal finances. So many women say, I'm just not good at math and the finances piece of it. How do we work on breaking those money mindsets, and in your work, is that often where you start?

Danielle: The very first thing we do with a client is look at their balance sheet, because your balance sheet is the basis for your financials, it's the foundation. If you don't have a good bookkeeper reconciling the books, you're not going to have a good basis to look at your P and L. From a mindset perspective, part of the reason we do balance sheet first is because many of us have been brought up in this risk averse, debt averse world. If you are carrying a bunch of credit card debt, which is absolutely normal if you're starting a business, it has a completely different mental load than a five year term loan. Your car loan might be a thousand plus a month, but that car loan is probably for fifty thousand dollars, and it doesn't feel nearly as heavy as a twenty thousand dollar credit card. Similarly, one of the first things we recommend to all business owners is to have a line of credit. If you don't have a line of credit and you're very debt averse, I have to have a conversation with that owner about why debt can actually be good in a business, and the benefit of a line of credit, especially in a time of need, so that you are not reaching for every single dollar that essentially means a bad decision in your business. All of that is mindset, and it gets baked into that very first meeting.

Erica: The way you put that, car loan versus credit card bill, I absolutely relate. I know I have a car bill to pay every month, but it doesn't bother me until I see my American Express bill. I love this. You work with both men and women, so do you notice any key differences when you're working with a female founder versus a male founder?

Danielle: I think female founders are far more self critical. We have more judgment against ourselves, and we tend to feel like the numbers are a judgment, and they absolutely are not. They are just a tool to help us make decisions. Whether it's debt or your financial statements or the budget, my biggest goal is to help make sure business owners understand how to use those tools and not judge themselves for it. If you don't have a budget and you don't have a path forward, I can almost guarantee you spiral in that black hole of what if. The budget gives you a place to be grounded and say, this is what we think is going to happen, and I don't have to worry about this black hole of the future.

Erica: Well, think about how many opportunities you'd be missing if you only relied on the money you had in your bank account at the time an opportunity hit. I speak from my own experience, because I have often lived from a place of, unless I have the money, I'm not going to spend it. And then something would come up and it'd be like, man, that would have been a great opportunity. I could have generated six leads at 10,000 each, which would have ten times paid over for the trip. I've heard men tend to view money like a river, it flows, it comes and it goes, whereas women tend to look at it more like a stagnant pond that dries up over time. Danielle, in starting your own business, what kind of sticky floors did you run into when it came to launching and moving your business forward?

Danielle: My go-to answer is hiring. You are only capable of so many hours a day, and as a business owner we wear so many hats. You cannot be generating revenue and wearing all of those hats in a way that makes for sustainable profit. The very first thing I will say is making sure you are paying yourself, because you're going to have to pay someone else to do that eventually. You have to pay people to get through the phase where they're training and learning the clients and not making money on day one yet, and that's where a line of credit, or being comfortable leaning into your credit card for a while, comes in. You have to be able to pay people to get through that phase, and you cannot grow without learning how to hire somebody. You hit a glass ceiling real fast.

Erica: My husband jokes that in that first year, he was like, I swear you quit your job to make another job.

Danielle: It was hard, and it's hard to let go. Especially as a type A personality, I had to figure out what can I let go of that isn't urgent or doesn't matter as much. Getting a VA on board to help with the administrative stuff was the first step for me. But seriously hiring that first revenue generating accountant, I was like, how do I do this, how do I train them, how do I get them to interact with the client, and it's not me. It's a wild ride to be on, but it is quite literally the only way you can grow and not lose your mind.

Erica: Ain't that the truth. I think delegation is a very hard thing for a lot of women, because we don't want to put a burden on anybody else, we often think it's just faster if I do it myself. You have to get comfortable letting the things that don't bring you joy go to somebody else, so you can stay in your zone of genius. Danielle, what else are you up to with Four Corners CFO, and how can people find you?

Danielle: We are always looking to talk to people, even if all you want is a discovery call and a consult. My goal is that you leave with something you can do even if that something isn't hiring us. You can find us on our website, four corners CFO, and we're going to have a landing page just for you guys, it'll be four corners CFO slash glass ceilings, because I want to make it really easy for anyone to reach out.

Erica: I love that, we'll make sure that link is in the show notes. Thank you, Danielle, for coming in and sharing your sticky floor story and talking about the importance of finances and knowing your numbers. I loved this: don't let money feel like a judgment, don't ever let it define your worth. So thank you, Danielle, for joining us. Now listen, if today's conversation lit a fire under you, here's your next move. Don't keep it to yourself, share this episode with a friend, drop a review, and let's keep the conversation going. Your potential is limitless, and the only thing standing in your way are those sticky floors. But you have the power to break through them. So go out there, take up some space, and let's shatter some ceilings together.