Nicole Sithithavorn Full Interview Transcript
INTRODUCTION AND PATH TO CONSULTING
AJ: Welcome to this episode of the Thriving Through podcast. Today, my guest is Nicole Sithithavorn. Nicole, I'm so delighted to see you.
Nicole: Thank you so much, AJ! I appreciate you having me on.
AJ: The name of this podcast is called Thriving Through. Are you thriving in your consulting business?
Nicole: I like to think so, yes. Of course, that doesn't mean that I am always achieving every goal, or that I'm totally satisfied with everything that I'm doing, but yes, I think I'm thriving.
AJ: Wonderful. I like to hear that. So, tell me your path to being a self-employed consultant.
Nicole: Well, my company does CFO services, fractional CFO services, and prior to starting my consulting firm, I was a full-time CFO, as are many people who do this work. And I also owned another company at that time with two partners, which was not a consulting company, it was a direct-to-consumer business. It was completely different as far as the model, but that's what I was doing prior to starting this company. So, like a lot of consultants, obviously, I was offering what I do now, but I was doing it in a full-time capacity.
AJ: What made you decide to leave the corporate world and go out on your own?
Nicole: It was a combination of factors. So, our prior business, my partners and I, we sold that business a while ago now, in 2021, and then I was still on board for 2 years after that with the new owners. And throughout that experience, I just kind of decided that I did not want to be a full-time corporate CFO anymore. I wanted to be able to take what I knew about working in a little bit of a larger firm, not very large, but sort of a lower middle market firm, and help apply that to smaller businesses. Sometimes they're similar size, actually, lower middle market, that just haven't had the sort of strategic finance leadership that some more mature businesses have. So, I thought I could add value to them, and it sounded like it was going to be personally fulfilling to do that, so I just decided to go for it.
EARLY CHALLENGES AND THE NETWORKING LEARNING CURVE
AJ: Tell me a story or two about the biggest challenges you've faced building your practice, and how you've overcome them.
Nicole: Well, I feel like a lot of people that go into consulting on their own have done consulting before, for someone else possibly, or under another kind of an umbrella, but that was not my path. So I had never done any kind of consulting before I started this firm. And I had a very misguided belief that I was going to go out in the world and tell people what I was doing, and then they were going to hire me to do it for them. That's what I thought. And that was true to a limited degree, but I would say that in the very beginning, I really didn't have experience doing sort of B2B networking. I had experience doing industry networking, other people that were in my former industry, which is a very different environment than B2B networking that is supposed to result in consulting work. So I had to really get out of my shell. I'm a natural introverted person, so I had to get out of my shell, learn to go do that, and then discover that it probably wasn't going to as quickly allow me to ramp my business as I wanted. And then just had to start thinking about it. I had to learn to run a consulting firm, learn to generate the front end of that business, which is, I think, a big challenge for a lot of people. That's definitely been the biggest hurdle so far.
AJ: And when you say generate the front end, you mean generate the leads, be the rainmaker for the company?
Nicole: Yeah, just find the right people, find the people that needed what I was offering, kind of refine how I approached communicating about it to people. Being able to effectively describe it to people that were novices and really didn't understand what a strategic CFO does, do that quickly enough. It was a lot of that kind of stuff that was the challenge. It wasn't so much the actual work that I was doing for the clients. I would say that was my first big challenge in this endeavor.
AJ: And you're not alone. I think a lot of consultants get into being self-employed and don't realize that there's that huge piece of it. They get in, they say, I just want to work with clients. It's like, you first, you have to get them.
Nicole: Yeah. Who knew?
AJ: Most clients rely heavily on referrals on their existing network when they start. So it sounds like, did you go that route at the beginning, or did you go directly with networking, or what did you do within those first couple months, and how quickly did you determine that it wasn't going to get you where you want to go fast enough?
THE EVOLUTION OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY
Nicole: Well, I technically started this in December of 2023, and I was exceptionally not productive that month in doing things. I would say I really got started in January 2024, although I did announce it on LinkedIn to the 200 people I knew on LinkedIn at the time, and they did not buy anything from me at all. So, I did not target my former industry at all, or attempt to generate clients through connections in that industry. I did start doing a fair amount of local networking. I live in the DC metro area, so I started doing things like that. I started attending different groups, both in person and online. I joined a couple of them. I was trying to connect one-to-one with a whole bunch of different people all the time. It was like I was a full-time networker, really tiring to do.
AJ: Especially as an introvert. I mean, I hear you, and I think, oh, I'm an introvert also, and I think, oh my god, you must have been exhausted at the end of each day.
Nicole: I was exhausted. But I think it was a good experience because it gave me trial and error that was, I would say, lower stakes around being able to adequately describe what it was that I was doing to novices, because that was much harder than I thought it was going to be, which is because I was used to being in corporate America. I was used to being with people that understood what strategic finance is, and its purpose, and why it's important. And that is not the majority of business owners that I was meeting at the time. So that was, I would say, the first two to three actual months of activity, and I did get invited to more and more groups that contained more and more valuable contacts, so that was good. And I did take advantage of some of those, and I joined a variety of different groups by the spring of 2024, which was right when I started, essentially. And I got different project work, I started working with some clients on stuff, it was good. But it wasn't really exactly what I wanted to be doing either, and I used that time as well to sort of refine what I felt like my offering should be as far as retainer services, because we offer both project and retainer services. Most of our work is retainer. And I used that time talking with those different people to understand, really, what it was that I could offer to them, because a lot of the companies that we work with are dramatically smaller than my former company was. And so their needs are not exactly aligned with what I thought their needs might be. So that was good. I did that.
THE OUTBOUND EMAIL BREAKTHROUGH
Nicole: And then I started thinking about marketing. If you come from a direct-to-consumer world, you know you need to market. And it costs money, and there's different ways of going about it, and messaging, and targets, and all that stuff. So, in March of 2024, I connected with a company that has helped us do outbound email, and we started that with them in March, late March, and really sort of got going in April with outbound email marketing to targeted B2B recipients. And so that was sort of a game changer, I would say, because everyone knows it takes this time of networking to develop a network and contacts, and of course, that makes sense. People have to know you, they have to trust you, they have to understand what you do. And so, while I was doing that, we were also doing the outbound email, which was helpful. And then, of course, I had a website that I made myself on GoDaddy, so that was generating exactly zero leads for me, too.
AJ: And in those first couple months in the networking, you said you got a couple projects? Did you get, but not the kind of projects you really want to work on?
Nicole: Yeah, I would say they were projects I could do. They were a little bit more operational in nature, and then there were also some kind of small forecasting projects, like FP&A-style projects for startups, people trying to communicate value to bankers and people like that. So I did get projects like that, but we signed our first retainer client in May 2024, so until then, it was these smaller, sporadic projects.
AJ: And did that retainer client come from the outbound direct email?
Nicole: It did, yes.
AJ: So you got pretty quick return on your investment.
Nicole: Yep, we started, I think they started testing maybe the last week of March, and we had our first client from that effort start May 1st, so it was much more successful than I thought it was going to be.
AJ: And as I recall, you said when we talked earlier that 85% of your business came from outbound in 2024.
Nicole: Last year, it was around 75. That's true, yes.
MAKING OUTBOUND EMAIL WORK: MESSAGING AND TARGETING
AJ: What has been the biggest challenge in making outbound email work, and what surprised you about the process?
Nicole: Well, just like any marketing effort, it's who you target, and whether you can effectively message to them. And effectively messaging to them, I think, doesn't necessarily mean what people think it means. It means being able to send them a brief message that helps them to understand that you understand what they're going through. So we know who our ideal client is now, which I would tell you, in January of 2024, I thought I knew, but I did not know. I had had a lot more refining to do around that, but so we know, more or less, the needs of our ideal client. And so, when you're doing the outbound email, your target list has to be designed to be people that fit that ideal client description. So, if they are... they have to be the right size company. Like, the right revenue size, the right employee size, they have to be in industries that you know you can serve. And then there are several other factors that are really dependent on what you're offering, so I can't really... I can't give everyone a blueprint for how to do this.
AJ: Right.
Nicole: But the messaging is often a function of, I think, what your unique... I think people would say unique value proposition, but I think it's actually just what... whatever you are telling people that you do. So, we tell people we're strategic CFOs, they're gonna know what that means if they're familiar with it, but we also have to describe that in a way that makes it pretty clear what we're doing. And we also have to reach them at the right time in their life. So, the timing of when people need a strategic CFO is a challenge, right? So we're all dealing with that kind of timing
constraint when we're doing outbound email. I will say we are lucky, because we're CFOs, so we get to also reach out to CFOs and controllers sometimes, and that's a different kind of conversation. Like, if we reach out to people that are kind of doing finance and we say, hey, do you have enough capacity? And they're like, no, I don't. That's an easier sell a lot of the time. So we're lucky in that we can do that.
AJ: What kind of response rates, if I can just dig a little deeper, do you typically get, kind of on average?
Nicole: Well, so originally when we started, we could get open data, which we no longer can get without having too high of a rejection risk, so we don't get that anymore. But the response rates are low. I mean, we're talking 1-3% positive replies. And then from there, you have to get them to set meetings, and I don't really know what the rate is on that off the top of my head. It's varied, depending on the different targets, and we also have other ways of nurturing people that have positive replies, whether or not they set meetings, so sometimes we put a good amount of time into nurturing that before they set the meeting, but 1-3%, so you do have to have a pretty decently sized list. Like, you should not expect to send out 20 emails and get people to respond to you. That is not a reasonable expectation.
AJ: Do you feel like your outbound email is kind of a well-oiled machine at this point? You know that you have to have this many outbound emails sent to get this many responses to get this many meetings in a given month. Is it pretty predictable at this point?
Nicole: No. I would say no. I wish I could say yes to that, but no. Because we see ups and downs over time. I mean, last year, 2025, that was certainly true. You know, there's a lot of market conditions that are applicable that are making people more or less likely to respond. There's uncertainty in the world that people react to as well, so no, I don't think so. I think that you have to constantly be thinking about it, and revising your messaging, and thinking about your targets, and be ready to pivot when you need to. And I think you also really need to have a long-term outlook on it, because I will tell you that sometimes it takes a long time. So we have people that have been receiving our messages for several months before they actually set a meeting with us, or before they start with us. But at the same time, we've had quite a lot of people where they get our messages for 4 months, they finally set a meeting, and then 4 weeks later, we're working with them. So you cannot go into it with a short-term point of view. You have to go into it with the willingness to work on it, yourself or with whoever you're partnering with to make it happen, because it's not some kind of a magic set-it-and-forget-it formula that's just going to keep working forever without your involvement.
LEAD NURTURING AND DIVERSIFIED MARKETING CHANNELS
AJ: You also mentioned something that is equally important, is the lead nurturing. So, how do you do the lead nurturing of those ideal clients that have responded to you, but aren't ready to set a meeting?
Nicole: So, we have a biweekly newsletter that goes out, and it's not just to them. I know some people do different newsletters for different targets and different purposes, but ours is really just a single newsletter goes out every other week. And it just has sort of informational content that's beneficial for small business owners. There's a lot of different kinds of content. We also use it to announce certain events. If we're going to be at an event, or if we have a webinar or something coming up, we use it for that as well. But we just send those out every couple of weeks, and we send it out to prospects, we send it to our clients, we send it to networking contacts, we send it to everybody, and it's just a good way, I think, to remind them that we exist, and then we have had situations where people read something in it, and then they say, oh, I have a question about that, and then they set a meeting.
AJ: What else are you doing in the area of marketing?
Nicole: So, later last year, we made a couple more decisions to diversify, is how I would put it, our prospecting efforts. So, we also do LinkedIn prospecting now, targeted LinkedIn prospecting, different ways of doing that. We have different campaigns as well for that. And then we have a part-time business development person who also does marketing, just goes out to local events, and we are actually adding another person like that, too, that's part-time. So, I do networking. We have two part-time business development people that do networking in the traditional sense, in person, mostly. And then we do the LinkedIn prospecting, and we do outbound email. And then we did also do a new website over the summer that I think is just a little bit better at converting, so we have sort of SEO going on that. So we have a little bit of a strategy, I'd say, around marketing to get clients.
GROWTH BEYOND SOLO CONSULTING: BUILDING A TEAM
AJ: And is your business, after 2 years, is it where you expected it to be?
Nicole: I think that depends on when you ask me my expectations, actually. If you asked me that question before I started, I would say it is better than I expected it to be. If you asked me that question in late 2024, I would say it is not as good as I expected it to be. And, I think both of those things are okay. But yeah, it is more than what I thought, because when I started doing this, I really was intending to be a solo consultant, working by myself with clients, just keeping it simple and having this enjoyable work. But, that's not the case. I have a few other CFOs on my team, they work with clients. And, I think that's also good. It's different than I thought that it would be when I started, but it sort of got to the point where I would not have had time to do any kind of business development activities if I was serving all the clients myself. And then also, just recognizing the fact that I personally don't necessarily have the best experience to work with every client. So we have different people on our team that have some similar experience, and also different experience that can be more applicable to different kinds of clients that we meet. So both. It is better and less good than I thought it would be at the same time.
AJ: And so you had... you started with the intention of being solo, and then within less than a year, you brought on your first CFO, so you started to build that team. What was the specific sort of pivot point or decision point? What was happening in your business that made you realize that you needed to build a team?
Nicole: Well, when I started doing the outbound email, and of course I knew, because everyone had told me, that it was going to take a year or two before I started seeing referrals from networking at any kind of a regular cadence, and certainly to get ideal client kind of referrals, which has been true. I would agree that that is true. I decided, essentially, a few months after I started doing the emails, I was getting enough meetings coming through from that, that I thought, okay, I'm spending all this time networking, I'm getting meetings from this, by the end of the year, if I hadn't started getting somebody else, I thought I wasn't going to be able to take any more work, and then I was going to have to make this decision that I felt like was not a good decision to stop efforts, certainly stop things like outbound email that I was paying for, and scale down my networking a lot in order to allow me to do delivery work. And if I did that, then inevitably what was going to happen is that I'd have too much work, and then not enough work, and then have to restart. And I just think consistency in the prospecting effort is so important to get results that I really did not want to have to scale that back. Diversify, sure, but not scale back. So, because of that, I decided, okay, by the end of this year, I'm going to start looking for somebody to come on that can also do CFO work that would be a good fit to work with some clients. But then, fortunately, someone I knew kind of became available in the fall of 2024, so I just thought I would jump on it, basically, and try to convince him to come work with me. And I did.
AJ: And since then, how many other CFOs have you brought on? How big is your team?
Nicole: Yeah, so we still have him, I have two others, and then I have another one that is more focused on projects. So, we now have me plus 4 others, that are all kind of different in their focus, and different in the kinds of clients that they work with, although we do have some common industries, too, which is good, because it's important, when you're getting different referrals, getting leads, you want to be able to do that outbound marketing effectively to different targets. And then also, I need to feel like when I have someone, if I'm going to bring them in as a client, I need to feel like we do have the right fit for them. Because if we do not have the right fit for them, then I'm not going to take them, I'm going to refer them out. So we have had several situations like that, where I just didn't feel like we had the right fit, so I would try to help that person find something else, and sometimes it's not the right fit because we don't have the industry experience, and other times it's not the right fit because the level of engagement that they want is more significant than what will really work in our model. Like, for example, we don't do interim CFO engagements. We do fractional only, or projects. So, yeah, so it's worked well for that reason.
SYSTEMS AND STRUCTURE FOR CLIENT SUCCESS
AJ: When we talked earlier, you mentioned creating more structure around the early engagement period with clients, especially since a lot of your clients have never worked with someone like you before. Tell us more about what that structure looks like, and why you realized you needed it.
Nicole: So, I think this is something that I naturally do, in the way I approach clients, but when you have different people, everybody is not naturally the same, shockingly, because they're different people. So, we have to have a little bit of an early structure for a few reasons. Number one, we have to get to know them. And we have to get to know the other members of the management team, so we need to have some structure around that. Second reason is because we cannot assume that we know anything about their finance structure, or that they know about their finance structure. So we have to do a fair amount of discovery around everything to do with their finance structure. So that involves the team, how individual people's scopes are, what their internal controls are, what kind of principles they're using in finance, like revenue and cost recognition principles. We have to do a lot of discovery around all that stuff, so that way we can try to proactively find problems with it, and just asking questions is not enough to actually adequately do that. We do the, primarily, those are the two reasons, but then the third reason is because when we join a client, we are a strategic CFO, so what we see ourselves as is a partner to our clients, and partners need to have trust, they need to have kind of an authentic relationship that's built on that trust.
Nicole: And we need to get to know them as people. We need to get to know how they think about things. We need to get to know what kind of situations they really... like, what they're really trying to do in their business, right? And I think that being able to understand people and read people is, kind of obviously a CFO skill that you need to have, but that skill is something that's not, probably, easy for everyone to execute effectively. And it's one of the reasons why I say that I think we need people that have had operating company experience, because this is not the same as putting together a model and presenting it in PowerPoint to somebody. This is actually talking with people and understanding people and understanding when there are changes that they need to make in their business. And then, having the confidence to bring up that kind of stuff, and we have to be able to do it in a way that's non-threatening, and that they can hear us, and then we have to hear them, too. So there's just been a lot, a different variety of situations where that has been more or less challenging with different clients. And I will tell you that we do try to do some pre-screening stuff, and yet it's hard. It's hard to get that kind of information. It's not like a questionnaire situation. We do have a questionnaire.
AJ: What happens if you get into an agreement and then you find out the client is not going to involve you to the degree you feel you need to be involved?
Nicole: There's a gray area of that, so I think it really depends on how significant that is, but our engagements with our clients, we really have only an early, short-term commitment period with them, so there are times when it doesn't work out. And then there are also times where we learn to work together very successfully. And then there's some times where, I mean, we don't necessarily have to be involved in everything. So, if they have an HR leader, I don't have to be involved in every HR conversation. If they have an operations leader, I don't have to be involved in every operations conversation. But then we have other clients where they don't have those people, and we do need to take charge a little more in those areas. So it's pretty highly variable, even though we do have reasonably standard ways of working with people. I don't know if other consultants experience that or not, but I think they probably do.
FUTURE VISION AND STRATEGIC GROWTH
AJ: I want to switch and look to the future. Where do you see your business in the next 3 to 5 years?
Nicole: Well, I think we will keep adding to our team. It is not that easy to find people to be CFOs on my team, because I have criteria for them that is robust. They have to have, obviously, they have to be financially capable. They have to be able to lead teams. They have to have enough executive presence and confidence to be able to fulfill all that stuff I just said. And they have to have operating company strategic financial leadership experience. They cannot just have worked in sort of a finance firm only doing finance, or only doing FP&A. That's not really the kind of experience they need to help this size of company to move forward. And I'd also say that people that have only worked in exceptionally large enterprises have a very difficult time understanding the challenges facing some of the smaller and lower-middle market businesses that are just not the same as they are in much larger companies, like, for example, access to capital. Much different in those different kinds of environments. So, obviously my business has a capacity concern just like every other business has, and my capacity concern is having qualified staff. So I have to balance, I have to balance having the right staff, having them available enough to be able to deal with whoever we have coming in, and then also keeping them busy enough. So, that's the struggle, and it's going to be a balance, certainly for 3 to 5 years, or forever, probably, into the future. But I don't really see us changing the kind of work we do very much. A lot of firms that are like mine also offer other kinds of finance. They offer bookkeeping, or payroll, or tax, and things like that. I don't see us really ever expanding into that kind of an offering. I think we should stay focused on our strategic CFO work. So it's mostly about getting CFOs that are highly competent and ready to take on the client engagements, being intentional about their industry experience, and how they can work with our ecosystem to serve our clients well. And then being intentional about the upfront part of the business. How do we prospect those people? How do we meet them? And the truth is that that's an ever-evolving situation, and we have to be ready to evolve with it, too.
Nicole: And then, of course, we do have some admin support as well, which I think I didn't mention when we talked about the CFOs, but we have some admin support in having an adequate, but not too much admin support. So, I mean, it's just the same stuff, same stuff over and over, and a lot of the same stuff we deal with for our clients, too.
AJ: So, 2 years, how big is your team now?
Nicole: It is 7 people, 7 people on my team, including me. So, you know, that's quite different than I thought it would be when I started. It's quite different than I thought it would be even a year ago. But it's good. I'm excited about it, and I'm excited to add to the team when... when the right people come along and when the volume is appropriate for doing that.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION: MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING
AJ: I want to switch and talk about a couple things. What is one book that has influenced how you think about work or life, and why?
Nicole: I mean, there's a lot of books that have influenced me, but there's one that, I think, influenced me the most, which is "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. It's a short book. It's not an onerous read. So, the reason why I think this is so valuable is because it talks about taking agency and control and your ability to control how you react to situations around you. So, while you cannot control everything in your environment, you can always control how you respond to it. And I think that that is generally a good thing to know and practice in your life, but certainly as a consulting person, it is very valuable. So, if you haven't read it, I would recommend it. It's a very short book.
AJ: I have not read it, but one of my favorite quotes is the one that is attributed to Viktor Frankl from that book. That, between stimulus and reaction, there is a space.
Nicole: Yes.
AJ: And that space is where we have the freedom to pause.
Nicole: That's amazing.
AJ: Yeah. Taking a beat.
Nicole: And the pause can be of varying lengths, I would say, too. I think that's helpful in, actually, in consulting work, when you're talking to your clients. And they say something, I mean, sometimes I say, I just need to spend a little time thinking about this before I respond, because you can be surprised by things that are happening around you, you need to consider more, but also, it prevents you from assigning your meaning to something they're saying, I think. Sometimes they might say something, and I attach it to a meaning that is not what they meant. So I often respond by asking a few more follow-up questions to make sure that we are on the same page about what we're talking about before we move forward. So, yes. Valuable resource.
FINAL ADVICE: CHOOSING THE RIGHT ROOMS
AJ: What is one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you started?
Nicole: I would say that to consider the rooms you are in, and how you need to spend your time when it comes to networking, because I found myself in rooms where the people were very nice, and I enjoyed them very much, and yet they were not necessarily the rooms I should have been in that were valuable in what my purpose was. So I do feel like I spent a lot of time early on, and when I say early on, I particularly mean within the first 5 or 6 months, that I should not have devoted so much time to, and I could have devoted that time differently.
AJ: Looking back, do you think you could have, if you had known that, would you have done things any differently? Would it...
Nicole: I don't know. I should say yes. However, I also think that being in those rooms, which I described as lower stakes, was important, because then, when I got to the higher stakes area, I was more prepared to be the person I needed to be to have success. So, I think that that might not be true for someone else. Someone else is probably better than me at that part. And they probably did not need the practice in those lower-stakes environments that I did need. So I don't know if I would have changed it.
AJ: And you said earlier that a lot of that did help you refine who you work with and your messaging. So...
Nicole: Yeah, it did. For me, for what we do, organizations do need to be of a certain size, really, to be the right fit. And I would say that gaining context on what exceptionally small organizations need might not be so valuable for me in understanding what the ones that are a little bit larger need. And that's more relevant to my business. But, it's all learning. It's all learning experience, and like I said, I was a complete novice to this consulting when I started, so I probably needed a little more practice than someone who was less of a novice.
AJ: Well, most consultants are novices like you, unless they come out of the consulting business, they're coming out of corporate with a subject matter expertise and not consulting or marketing expertise.
Nicole: Yes. Yes.
CONNECTING WITH NICOLE
AJ: And now we're going to wrap up with the single most important question. How can listeners connect with you if they want to learn more about you and your work?
Nicole: Well, you can find us online. Our website is very easy to find, it is yc.partners, no .com, just yc.partners, and on that website, obviously, you can find out what we do, and you can book time on my calendar if you wanted to connect.
AJ: Wonderful. I will put the link to that website and also to your LinkedIn profile on the show notes.
Nicole: Yes.
AJ: And with that, thank you so much, Nicole, for being my guest on the podcast today, and for all of you listening out there, keep thriving through.
Nicole: Thank you!