The Profiles in Leadership series features conversations with organizational leadership experts to discuss important lessons they have learned and what “Hiring for Good” means to them. This series helps us better understand how leadership drives positive transformations and growth for people, organizations, and the world around us.
This episode features a conversation with Scott Belt, a finance Executive with over 25 years of business experience with a primary focus in leadership, finance, operations, system design/integration, and efficiency. He builds strong companies while focusing on employee and client satisfaction and profitability. His three companies create a single stop solution to support growing businesses with the right talent.
Quote: “I’m a farmer at heart, I like to help people/companies/things grow to reach their potential. At Impact we do that through the numbers; where have you been and where are you going. What is your vision, and how can we help you accomplish it.”
Scott’s Contact Information: Scott@impactcfos.com | 971-506-1238 | https://impactcfos.com/
Recording at: https://youtu.be/IzpOPncVWT4
Profiles in Leadership Transcript
Suzanne Hanifin: Well, good morning. This is Suzanne Hannifan with Acumen Executive Search, and we are so excited to have Scott Belt here with Impact CFO. And “Hiring for Good” is a podcast on leadership, and I asked Scott to be here, to be my guest. Not only is he a trusted adviser to Acumen, but he also has his own organization actually, and is co-owner of a few other organizations.
And, so, Scott, welcome! I’m glad you are here, and we’ll talk about your journey and how you became a business owner. So, I’ll just turn it over to you.
Yeah, yeah. So why don’t you share with us how you became a CPA working, you know, in a CPA firm to starting Impact and that whole journey?
Scott Belt: Well, it started long before that. I grew up on a farm here in Oregon, and that kind of instilled into me the sense of ownership, business ownership, and how what it takes to grow—crops, animals, people. And that was instilled in me at a very young age. And so, I decided I wanted to reach out at some point and own my own business, but I didn’t know how to do that.
So I went to college, became an accountant, and went and worked for a CPA firm. And one of my—one of my mentors along the way, she kept saying, “Why are we doing this audit? You have to be asking yourself why are we doing this audit.” And she was fantastic. Unfortunately, she got breast cancer and passed away. The person that came in behind her was like, “I don’t care why we’re doing the audit, we just need to do the audit.”
And that was a little—that took me back a little bit, and I didn’t feel like we were really helping those businesses. So, I left—I left public accounting and became a controller at another business in Oregon. And I just kept trying to help that business—how can we make that business better?
And ran into upper management, the C-suite, a few individuals that just wanted to make their careers better. I didn’t care about their careers; I only cared about the business. How do I make this business better?
So, I left that one and became the CFO of a local—it was a business for elder care. And we built and designed and developed our own buildings and then managed the process. And that was fantastic because I got to work inside of operations, marketing, sales, accounting, finance, building, development—all the different aspects of the business. And how important communication was between all of those departments and how the only way to succeed in the business is to have good information, a great vision, and how do you have a plan to get from where you are to where you’re going. That was a lot of fun, but at the end of the day, I was still working for somebody else. And I was—I wanted to help more businesses than just the one I was working with. So, I left that business and started Impact.
Along the way, I was, I just came, just be a CFO. How could I be a CFO and help a lot of businesses? What I soon figured out was there were a lot of business out there, small businesses that their accounting wasn’t any good—their numbers weren’t good. So, we were wasting a lot of time and energy getting the numbers correct so we could plan forward. Because if the numbers aren’t correct, you’re making decisions on bad information, which then in turn leads to bad decisions.
If it was good information, then you could make good, relevant, good clean forward-looking vision information. I was doing all this on a fractional basis. Then I had to start growing my team because I needed controllers, I needed bookkeepers—how could I move forward through that helping really helping businesses? And that was through the numbers. How do we look forward? Well, to look forward, you have to first look backward. You have to figure out where you are. Once you know where you are, then you have your vision to where you want to go, and you can help plan that. That’s how we got to Impact CFO Services.
Along the way, we realized that some of these businesses didn’t need fractional support; they needed full-time support. So, we started, we added the Impact Recruiting and the Harvester Talent that you mentioned earlier. So, I have business partners in those, but that’s really just to give people again, the talent to let them—let their businesses and let them find the business owners realize the vision that they’re aiming for. How do we help them do that? And that’s that’s what I wanted to do, and that’s how that’s why I started Impact CFO Services.
Suzanne Hanifin: No and you talk about these formative years and talked about you know, growing up on a farm and having a mentor. And, I think business owners, when they kind of pause and look back, they really go “Wow I really, there was certain moments that have changed my life.: Can you dive more into that aspect of, again, that switch of a fantastic leader and then working with one that was all about just getting it done?
Scott Belt: Well, growing up we had—sports is very big in my family. And we had a lot of –I played football, basketball, baseball, soccer growing up. One of the—one of the lessons that I learned, and I had to learn it the hard way, which is you have to—you can’t lead by yelling at people. You have to—you have to give them a vision and help them realize that this is what we’re working towards. And football is a great example of this. We were playing in one game, and I was yelling at the offensive line to do something, and they were like, “Oh, fine. You don’t—you don’t want our help? Then we won’t help you.” And I didn’t make it three steps back before the other team tackled me. I got up and realized very quickly, no, this is a team game. We’re all in it together, and you cannot dictate—nobody’s going to follow you if you’re a dictator. So I had to, I had to—It was a sobering moment of, “How do you get, bring a team together?” By the end of the year that we were all working together, and we were a cohesive unit, but I had to learn that lesson.
Also, growing up on the farm, you you couldn’t ask somebody to do something that you weren’t willing to do yourself. So, those were the two real formative things that I grew up with. You had to bring people together; you couldn’t dictate. You had to show them what you’re doing and and and have empathy for what they’re going through. And to do that, you have to go do it yourself. A lot of times, people weren’t coming. You were out there, five miles from anywhere, and I’m 12 years old on a tractor—something breaks, and you’ve got to fix it. Well, when you’re having somebody else go out into the field to work, you have to realize that something might break, and they have to have the tools to do their job. If they don’t have the tools to do their job, they can’t do it. So that was something I learned very early on.
Suzanne Hanifin: No and I think it’s so fascinating. You’re talking again about these formative experiences, but you’re applying it every day in your business. And we take these values of really, who we are in the core of what we do and we implement it.
You’re in a really interesting space because not only do you have your own business with your own employees, but you also consult and help other organizations in their growth and their project, you know, their thier progressive— progression. There you go. Looking for—so what are those core values that you hold so dear, and how did you operationalize it again internally and externally?
Scott Belt: Well, the first thing is you have to have a vision. The core values come back to—I’m gonna go back a little bit. But, you have to have a vision to where you’re gonna go. And, once you have that vision, you have to hire people that want to execute on that vision. And then, once you have people who want to execute on the vision, then you have to give them the tools to do their job and get out of their way. So, hire the best people possible. If you hire the best people, you give them the tools, you give them the vision, and get everybody going in the same direction—you can accomplish anything. It doesn’t matter what it is.
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah you’re speaking my love language right there!
Scott Belt: But if you don’t give them the vision, and you hire yes-people, and you don’t give them the tools to do their job, you’re not going anywhere. So that’s the best thing I can say. Hire find the best person possible, and then give them the tools and the vision, and if you can do that, you’ll be successful.
Suzanne Hanifin: So, you know, it’s a little broad—the “best person possible.” When you hire, what characteristics do you look for as a team, you know, within your own team?
Scott Belt: I look for self-starters—people that are motivated. One of my favorite sayings is, “Success is dependent on effort.” It’s very simple, but you have to try. So are you self-motivated, do you, do you, or do you need somebody to start you in the morning? If you do, then you’re probably not going to be good on my team because I am not going to be a—I don’t, I am not a micromanager.
I try to make—hire people that want to execute on that vision. And they want to do it, and they’re and and I’m going to probably get in their way. So, I’m gonna, I’m gonna hire them and get out of their way. So, that’s one. Obviously, truthfulness and honesty—we’re in the trust business in accounting. So everything that we do is trustworthy. You have you have to gain their trust.
Suzanne, we’re in the ProVisors together, and one of those—that organization is about “know, like, trust.” Accounting is all about trust. If they don’t trust you, then you’re never going to be successful, and you can’t help them execute that. So once you get to that trust factor, then you can start bringing in everybody around you to help them grow and succeed. But if you don’t have that trust—so you have to hire trust and it’s—that’s hard. And so you have to really dig into the background of—of the person you’re hiring and find out are they are the type of person you want to hire.
And your question earlier was, “How do you hire the best person?” Well, accounting, there’s certain aspects of accounting that are easy. If you have a CPA license, you know accounting. Some organization has already said that you know accounting, so I don’t have to worry about that. Now, what have you done with it? And how have you applied that moving forward? And checking resumes and the people they’ve worked with and worked for—are they the type of person you want to hire? Are they going to help this organization move forward?
So that’s I guess that’s how I look for it—honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness—because that’s what they’re—that’s what people are hiring us for.
Suzanne Hanifin: Absolutely, absolutely. So, when you walk into a client and they need whether it’s an interim person or somebody full-time you know, there, how do you build that trust with your clients to where you’re saying, “This is the person for you?”
Scott Belt: That’s a hard one because a lot of times we walk into it, and person—the business owners don’t know what they want or they don’t know what they need. They know what they want, but they don’t know what they need. And a lot of times, we’re having to educate them on the roles. They say, “Oh yeah, a CPA is a CFO.” No, a CPA is, at best, a controller. A CPA does taxes, they do audits, they look backward—what have you done—and then they report on how they—how you’ve done through the compliance arm of the audit or the tax return.
A controller actually does more than that because they’re looking at policies and procedures and controls. And how does the information get into your general ledger? How do you then report out?
It’s not just an audit of the three statements of your balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow—or your tax return, whether that’s a 1040 personal, a 990 nonprofit, or any number of other C or S corp returns.
They’re in there saying, “What management reports do we need?” Because what does the management report need? You also have operational information that comes into these reports. You have marketing and sales information that comes into these reports. You have financial—obviously financial information that comes in the reports. Then, you give these reports out to your management, your executive team, your investors, the line people—and all of these reports look different. Now, the underlying information is all the same, but the—how you present that information to different sets of people is different because their education level on the information is different.
Am I’ll going to tell you what. The—the person that’s in marketing sales doesn’t care about the balance sheet. They don’t. They want to know how they’re doing against their budget.
And—and so, getting the right information to the right people at the right time is is that—and then your CFO—that’s your forward-looking arm.
If—if you have “CPA” in your title, you’re probably not going to be a very good CFO. And the reason is you’ve been taught your entire life to look backward. At school— at when you got hired at a CPA firm, you’ve got all your training is all looking backward……what is—how do we get that tax return information in there? How do you get that—that audit completed? It’s all backwards. Then you’re managing. You’re—you’re reviewing everything that looks backwards. How is that CPA going to know how to look forward—all the “what ifs” scenarios that you’re looking at the risk management?
I talked to an audit partner at Moss Adams once. I said, “Hey, this is what we do,” and she looked at my CFO list. She goes, “Yeah, the first like three, I think I can do. Then, you—I get to risk management—I’ve never looked—I don’t know what this is.” This is an audit partner “I don’t know what this is.”
And then—all the “what if” scenarios—well, that’s what a CFO does day in and day out. They look forward. They take information that’s backwards, yes, but they look forward.
And that’s—that’s a weird trick of the brain—to be able to go from looking backwards to looking forward. When people get into their stressful situations—I learned this from a communications class one time—in stressful situations, you go back to what— what is comfortable, what you’re comfortable in.
Well, in business, is the same way. When you get into a stressful situation, you’re going to revert back to what’s comfortable for you.Well if your comfortable is looking backwards, but your business owner demands that you’re looking forward, that’s not going to get—you’re not going to be doing what the business owner needs and wants you to do—especially in the fractional situation where you’re only there a day a week. You’re not even there full-time. So, they need you to be looking forward. So, when we go in and find the business owner, the first thing I have to do is say, “Do you need a CFO, or do you need a controller?”
Once we’ve figured out what role they need, then we can start having the conversation of who’s going to fill this role and what type of person do you need in that role.
Is it a construction company where everybody they work with is short and to the point? Or is this a nonprofit where if you’re short and to the point, you’re going to ruffle feathers very quickly? What type of communication style is that person going to have? Because communication is king. While you can know the numbers inside and out, it really matters how you tell that patient they have cancer.
Suzanne Hanifin:Yeah, again, you’re speaking my language of fit and culture. And how do you really understand that culture to find that right person?
So, here you are, Scott—again, your services Impact CFO, interim, you know, full-time, contract. You do a lot for many different organizations.
When you walk into a business owner, what advice would you give a business owner on really—besides needing to understand what they need for—for a person or a position—but what other advice would you give that person?
Scott Belt: Well, I ask them what their vision is. Like, what are you aiming for? Like what—what is your end goal that you’re—you’re—that you want—do you want to sell your company? Do you want to pass it down to your kids? Do you want to just keep growing it and find out what happens? Is it a lifestyle business where you’re the owner-operator, and you’re very happy being an owner-operator? That’s—that your top line is around $3 million, your bottom line is around $400,000, and you just want to keep doing that for the next 10 years? All right, we can help you do that. Do you want to take that business and grow it—10x it over the next 10 years? Well is—how—what does that look like? Tell me what 10 years looks like. And then we line that out and then we say take the steps backwards. How are you going to get there? Are you really making $400,000 a year, or you got $400,000 in cash because each year you pull out $400,000 off your line, and now it’s $2 million? You’re not actually making $400,000; you’re breaking even, and you’re living off your line of credit. So, what is it that you need? Is your information good that you’re using to make these decisions off of?
That’s the first question—what are your current internal resources that—that you have because one of the—one of the bad sides of growing a business from 5 million to 50 million is, is the team that got you to $5 million unfortunately it’s probably not going to be the same team that get you to $50 million. Because there’s going to be a lot of great people that might have the controller title that is that’s probably just an accounting manager that we need to move them over and replace their title. And can they do that, do they want to do that. Because they don’t have the ability to take the company to the next level. What are the internal resources that you have currently? Are you on QuickBooks Online? Well, that’s—that’s a great software, but it’s not going to get you to $50 million. You’re probably going to need to move over something like Intact or Sage Intact or uh Net Suite or something like that. What’s your reporting structure? What—what’s your banking relationships? I love OnPoint. If you’re an OnPoint or a credit union and they are—they’re—they’re doing your business banking, that’s fantastic. But guess what? They’re not going to be the company—the bank that’s going to help you get to $50 million because they’re a credit union. They—credit unions have certain handcuffs on them that banks don’t and you need to find the correct banking relationship. Your tax CPA. Does that tax CPA know what a business growth plan looks like? Are they going to get in your way because they’re only looking at saving you taxes year in year out? When in in fact you need to show on your tax return that you’re making money so you can get that loan so you can open that new facility. Is everybody pulling on the same—rope in the same direction. And so all of these are type of questions—it’s like what does that business owner want their business to look like now? What are the resources that you need to take that next step? And there’s a lot of—there’s a lot of steps along the way. And it’s it’s a fun process to go through.
Suzanne Hanifin: And—and really rewarding, isn’t it. I—you know, again doing this for as long as we’ve been doing it and you see how really with the vision and the right people, the right goals, it’s amazing what an organization and an owner can do.
Scott Belt: Yeah!
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah. Looking back Scott on your life, you know, what advice would you give your 20-year-old self or the person you’re mentoring?
Scott Belt: You know, I—I’ve been thinking about this question for a while. I—I go on walks every night—without any headphones to kind of clear my brain. Because—I think we need that—and the—and the—the funniest one that came to mind was—to—to sit and interview at a big eight, you need a 3.3 GPA. That would have been good for my—my adviser, my freshman year in college, to tell me because when I walked in with a 3.25 and they say, “Oh you can’t sit for an interview with the big 8.” That would have been good information to have because that .05—would have made a big difference in coming out of college. But—I would probably say network. Build your network—more. Take more chances. I’m an accountant at heart, which, we’re risk adverse. But you’re in your 20s. Go have—go have fun. Party less. Drink less. Exploring.
Suzanne Hanifin: I—yes I could probably take that advice also. No this has been great and we always end our questions o—on Hiring for Good. I mean this is a podcast on leadership. So what does hiring for good mean for you?
Scott Belt: I would say hiring for good means for me and I—I’ve said this several times, is find the right people. Give them the tools to do their job and get out of their way. Because that vision that you’re all aiming for without the right people, it—you can’t accomplish it—even the—even the—our great Titans, self-made people of the—the Zuckerberg’s, or the—the Musks, or the Microsoft people. All those people.
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah Bill Gates.
Scott Belt: Yeah. Bill Gates. They all had good visions, but they all surrounded themselves with the right people to help them get there. And without the right people your vision is that is—that. Just a vision. You’ll never accomplish anything without it. And so hiring for good is hiring the the right people for the good of either your company or the company that you’re—you’re trying to support. And then supporting them.
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah and I’m gonna go back and I’m gonna reiterate something that you said that really hit home to me. Hiring for good and the right person is not necessarily A Yes Man either. It’s something can challenge, can—can again, help those move—move the—the progression forward.
Scott Belt: Yeah if I—if I wanted an echo chamber I would just hire myself. I don’t want to do that. I need to have somebody that challenges your thoughts. Challenges your perspective. Because that makes everybody better.
Suzanne Hanifin: Absolutely. Well Scott, I cannot thank you enough for being here, joining us in this conversation. And all of your contact information will be provided at the end here. But truly, any Finance, accounting questions that you have, needs that you may have, reach out to Scott Impact CFO. Thank you very much. Scott Belt: Thank you again.