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Featuring: Courtney De Ronde, Forge Financial
In episode 114, I sit down with Courtney De Ronde, CEO of Forge Financial and Management Consulting, to talk about the powerful intersection of financial visibility and leadership growth. Courtney shares her journey from CPA to strategic business advisor, and we dig into her Simple Scale Up System—a framework designed to help agency leaders evolve from scrappy doers to scalable CEOs.
We explore the importance of accurate revenue recognition, the dangers of relying too heavily on gut instincts, and the mindset shifts needed to lead at the next level. Courtney also gets candid about AI’s impact on the accounting industry and why embracing technology is a must—not a maybe. We wrap things up with some rapid-fire questions that reveal the human side of this numbers expert.
Key Bytes
• Courtney De Ronde has over 20 years of experience as a CPA.
• Understanding financial visibility is crucial for business growth.
• AI presents both challenges and opportunities in the CPA industry.
• The Simple Scale Up System focuses on scaling leaders and organizations.
• Leaders must shift from relying on instincts to leveraging insights.
• Cash flow issues often indicate deeper business problems.
• Delegation and trust are essential for scaling a business.
• Learning from others' failures can accelerate growth.
• Financial reporting should match revenue with related expenses.
• Things don't have to be perfect to be effective.Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Agency Bites and Guest Background
01:04 Courtney's Evolution from CPA to Business Leader
03:19 Understanding Financial Visibility and Coaching Services
04:12 Common Financial Red Flags in Service-Based Businesses
08:06 The Impact of AI on the CPA Industry
12:25 The Simple Scale Up System Framework
15:46 Shifting Mindsets: From Instincts to Insights
22:53 Challenges in Scaling Dependent Businesses
25:13 Rapid Fire Questions and Closing Thoughts
Courtney De Ronde is the CEO of Forge Financial & Management Consulting and the creator of the Simple ScaleUp System™. With over 20 years as a CPA and 15 years in business
leadership, Courtney specializes in guiding small businesses from startup to scaleup. She’s an expert in business intelligence, leadership, and corporate finance. We’re thrilled to have her share her insights on how you can achieve your most ambitious goals.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:05.102)
Welcome to Agency Bites, a podcast dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs thrive. I'm Steve Guberman from Agency Outside, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. Today, my guest is Courtney Durande. She's the CEO of Forge Financial and Management Consulting and the creator of Simple Scale Up System. With over 20 years as a CPA and 15 years in business leadership, Courtney specializes in guiding small businesses from startup to scale up. She's an expert in business intelligence, leadership,
and corporate finance. We're thrilled to have her share her insights on how you can achieve your most ambitious goals. Courtney, thanks for joining me.
Courtney De Ronde (00:40.916)
Thanks for having me, Steve. Glad to be here.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:42.988)
Yeah, I'm excited to dig into what you're doing. Before Hit and Record, you gave me kind of a download on the programs that you take business leaders through and how you help. And you started CPA work first and evolved and kind of take us through what was that evolution like for you and the core of your businesses now.
Courtney De Ronde (01:04.488)
Yeah, so like you said, I'm a CPA. I spent most of the early part of my career serving clients, small business owners, nonprofit leaders, and over time evolved into leadership and business ownership for myself and the firm. And so essentially have this perspective of serving all of these different clients, but then also firsthand experience of what it's really like when you're the leader.
when you're the owner. And so over time in my career, just had that opportunity to keep evolving and learning and growing myself. But then from a firm perspective, really realized how much we need to remain relevant to our clients. know, over the years, as things have come into play, like, you know, AI threatening, you know, tax preparation or bookkeeping or accounting, how do we stay relevant? And so we took this kind of
several years ago to launch into outsourced accounting, so virtual CFO controller bookkeeping services, along with an audit practice that we had been growing and establishing. So both of those service areas were very focused on.
essentially giving visibility on reliable financial information. So whether it's external reporting for an audit or internal for leaders, managers, owners, the overall purpose of that financial reporting is giving people stuff they can rely on and they can understand. The more we did that, the more we realized the better people got at understanding the implications of that financial visibility.
The money just kind of told the story of what was happening in the business and people needed more support to understand what to do about it. And so then we added our coaching and training services where we actually help them implement, execute, build, you know, all of these operational and leadership structures so that they can grow and scale themselves and their organization. So we still do the financial services. Absolutely. It's a big part of our business. And then we added the coaching and training to provide
Courtney De Ronde (03:14.325)
additional support and just remain relevant and helpful to the clients that we serve.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:19.576)
So similar to like FBICAA, you believe in following the money and follow the money, you get all the answers that can lead to everything else. But in this case, we're not looking for criminals necessarily. But I think there's so much value in when you uncover what's going on with the numbers, it points to the levers that you can pull to find efficiencies and find more money and help operationalize the business and things like that.
Courtney De Ronde (03:27.657)
Bye.
Courtney De Ronde (03:47.047)
Yes, absolutely.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:48.99)
Is there are there things that you see that are just super commonalities in when you do this first financial audit on let's say any business because you work with all kinds of businesses that are said above a million or so in revenue. They're not in startup phase but they're in growth mode. What are like some of the more common things you see as like red flags. Here's something we need to fix.
Courtney De Ronde (04:11.817)
Yeah, one of the most common things that we see in service based businesses, we work with a lot of service based business. So I know your podcast, your audience is agencies. So agencies and other businesses that are providing services. One of the biggest challenges is this understanding of
When do you recognize revenue? So early on and when things are more simple, you might be using the cash basis of accounting where you're just recognizing revenue when you get paid, recognizing expenses when you pay them out and.
Often, the bigger you get and the more complex you get, you might be collecting money in advance, well in advance of when you deliver your services and all of sudden you get this kind of up and down flow of revenue and profitability that isn't really accurate.
because you need to match the revenue with the related expenses. And so that's usually one of the first things that we do with service-based businesses is help them understand this concept of recognizing revenue when you earn it, regardless of when you collect it, and matching it with the related expenses so you get an accurate, reliable picture of profitability. And that's one of the most common things that we see. Then once you get that right,
you can really see how profitable your services are rather than just tracking the flow of cash. Cash has its own level of importance, but when you're talking about profitability, you really need to be matching revenues with expenses. Deferred revenue comes into play oftentimes for service-based businesses.
Steve / Agency Outsight (05:48.088)
Yeah. So you're talking accrual versus cash. Is there a tipping point where you recommend only do accrual at some certain point?
Courtney De Ronde (05:52.755)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney De Ronde (05:57.706)
I think that it's really what's important is to recognize when it is causing your information to be misleading. So if a lot of your revenue is collected, clients pay you in the same month that you deliver the services, you're good. When you start getting to where somebody pays you 50 % down and 50 % at the end, and this project happens over three months,
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:05.422)
Okay.
Courtney De Ronde (06:27.399)
That's when you start to get this misleading information. And so I would really base it a lot off of, you know, looking at your billing practices. One of the things here's, kind of connected with the cashflow. Sometimes people have cashflow problems, right? That's just a symptom of something else going on in the business. But one of the tactics to employ to increase cashflow is to have business owners
change their payment terms, collect more upfront. So all of a sudden now we've solved the cash issue, but we've created skewed profitability. And so I would just be mindful of that. Is it spreading across months, different months? And are the dollars getting bigger to where it's just not helpful information when you're looking at the cash basis of accounting?
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:56.174)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:17.676)
Yeah, I guess it's very similar to so many agencies at the end of the year will get prepayment. know, clients will want to pay down their budgets before they lose their budget, before the calendar flips. Agencies are like, man, we just got whatever, 100 grand in the bank. Yeah, that's a liability at this point until you do the work. And so that perspective you're talking about. Yeah.
Courtney De Ronde (07:23.657)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney De Ronde (07:32.754)
Yes. Yes, exactly. Because I think and I think here's the here's the risk, Steve, with that is that we can feel confident and warm and fuzzy when we look at the bank balance, but we don't realize if we can't deliver on that service or if they cancel, depending on your terms, like you said, it is a liability. We have the cash, but we have an obligation to either deliver, which is going to cost us something at some point or to give it back if we can't.
It's not quite hours yet, even though it's sitting in the bank. And that's what can be so misleading for people.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:06.818)
Yeah. You mentioned something kind of earlier on that I'm super curious about because AI has impacted the marketing industry massively, like massive threats, but so much to embrace. And you mentioned embracing it for your industry. I'm curious from the CPA financial services industry, like how, what are the, what have the implications been? How are there threats on your side as well? Like, what are you guys seeing?
Courtney De Ronde (08:34.409)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, even I would say probably as far back as, you know, seven years ago, there was a lot of talk in our industry about AI taking over that you'd be able to, I know if you've ever heard anybody, this is probably just a CPA thing, but you know, you're to be able to file your tax return on a postcard eventually, a digital postcard, you know, and so a lot of people in our industry would get nervous about what that means for companies who that's a big part of their business.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:53.4)
Wow.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:59.086)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney De Ronde (09:02.577)
or the ability for bots to handle coding of transactions or different things like that in bookkeeping or accounting services. Even now, there are lots of companies out there that you can leverage their automation to do things like that. And so what we decided
probably, it was probably six years ago, in one of our, you know, three year visions back at the time, that we were going to embrace technology and leverage it instead of being afraid of it. And then we would try to find ways to use technology to be more efficient.
and allow our people more time and energy to go towards, excuse me, to go towards things like providing insights, translating all of this data into a meaningful story. So we leverage tools to make transaction coding more efficient and automated to create data visualizations like that. So we leverage these tools. So our team isn't spending all this time cranking out spreadsheets
and building formulas and that, they're leveraging the automated tools. And then what they do is look at that information and tell the business owner or the nonprofit leader, what does this mean? And what do you need to do about it? That's something that eventually I'm sure there will be components of AI that will be able to help. But so much of that insight is valuable because of their understanding of the business.
and that particular leader. And there's only so much information at this point you could update and upload in order to get that kind of insights and intelligence out of it. So that's been our stance is to take, to leverage those tools. One of the big challenges that we have to be mindful of in our industry.
Courtney De Ronde (10:58.279)
is confidentiality. And so that's one of our biggest kind of risk management things that we think about when we consider how and in what ways we can leverage AI. We're dealing with people's financial information, bank accounts, credit cards, all this information that we absolutely have to keep confidential. So that's the biggest thing that we that we weigh and measure. There's a lot of things that we could do. We just don't yet because we don't feel like there's enough security in place for us to feel comfortable with the risk.
Steve / Agency Outsight (10:59.65)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:28.92)
Yeah, I can understand that. mean, kind of the security and privacy and concern for their information going somewhere that you're not 100 % sure with. But I think it's the same. It's very parallel to what we're seeing the marketing industry is. Can we leverage these tools to take ideas, expand upon them, and then allow the humans to do more of the analysis, the interpretation, the storytelling, things like that. So I'm glad that it's not like you're all replaced by robots as the fears may be, but
You know, again, if it's not being embraced, then there's major problems. So I'm sure you've seen that with some of your competitors.
Courtney De Ronde (12:03.113)
Right. Yeah, I agree. think we just, yeah, we just have to look at it as another evolution of, you know, something we need to learn how to work with, just like we had, you know, when computers came on the scene, when the internet came on the scene, now AI, we have to learn how to coexist and leverage it or else we're going to be left behind, I think.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:25.484)
Yeah, so you have probably half a dozen or so frameworks that you use that we talked about and I've read on your website and scaling priorities, scalability, blueprint, business intelligence 101, shift to thrive, 10 mindset changes. So you're not just doing CPA stuff and I love that and you're helping take business owners from whether it's startup phase into a powerhouse or.
Courtney De Ronde (12:47.131)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:54.05)
giving them the tools that they need. so while we can't dig into all of them, I definitely want to kind of cherry pick and think about like, are some of the things that in these frameworks that you work with business owners on, what are some of like the more essential elements that we can deliver to agency owners that they can think about acting on today?
Courtney De Ronde (13:12.457)
Yeah, so overall our core framework is called the Simple Scale Up System and it's really designed to have a set of principles, practices, and tools. So things that change the way you think and change the way you actually function between the principles and the tools that help leaders and business owners to scale themselves.
Steve / Agency Outsight (13:26.414)
Mm-hmm. Right.
Courtney De Ronde (13:37.828)
and their organization. So I really believe and I've experienced it for myself that the growth of my business is going to be limited by the growth of me. So I've always got to be growing and developing faster than the business or I'm going to be the ceiling. So all of our tools, all of our principles are directed at either scaling the business owner, the leader, or the organization.
And then within that framework, we focus on four core areas of business. So we focus on financial intelligence, which is like you said earlier, following the money, trying to maximize profitability. Leadership intelligence is the second one. So that's really about organizing your people and your resources.
Productivity intelligence is the third one. In that productivity intelligence, we're really trying to mobilize the plans that we make. A lot of leaders and business owners are great at strategy and vision, but execution can be a struggle, especially execution aligned with the plans that we had versus just activity.
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:48.846)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney De Ronde (14:50.631)
And then the fourth one is human intelligence. Human intelligence is about optimizing individual performance. So leveraging people's gifts, strengths and abilities so that they're more effective and more fulfilled. So.
Those four areas are really the core areas of intelligence that are in the Simple Scale Up system and all the tools and principles center around those four things. Really helping to create a robust system and structure for moving yourself and the business from thinking and acting like you did in startup to thinking and acting the way you need to in order to scale and grow.
And so I'll kind of pause there and we can decide which direction you want to go down, but that's going to the overall core framework.
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:34.894)
Yeah, I love those four pillars. What do you think is the biggest element that holds a leader back from thinking and acting like a leader of a powerhouse?
Courtney De Ronde (15:46.942)
success thus far. So what you've done so far has led to a certain level of success. And so the temptation is to keep doubling down on what you did to get here. The problem with that is that the scale up phase, the growth phase, it's a whole nother level.
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:49.688)
Go on, what do you mean?
Courtney De Ronde (16:15.109)
It requires focusing on different things, functioning in different ways. Most of the time in that startup phase, the leader, the business owner, the founder is at the core of everything. They don't really need strong financial insights because they're aware of every transaction going through the bank account already. They touched it in some way.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:38.328)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney De Ronde (16:39.059)
They don't necessarily need to worry too much about organizing people because they've got a few key people who are there kind of right and left hand and they know everything that they're doing. They don't need to worry too much about productivity because they are core to everything happening and they can make sure and have their eye on what's going on. And from a human intelligence standpoint,
This one either they don't know anything about it, they haven't really thought about people's strengths and gifts, or they know so closely and deeply these people who they're working so directly with that they've automatically kind of built that. And so as you grow in scale, you become disconnected from all those things I mentioned. And you risk.
you know, either stagnating, getting stuck and kind of plateauing, or it kind of the business keeps growing and evolving. And it's no longer quite what you had in mind for it to become because you've lost connection to all of those different things. So I think that's, that's one of the big challenges is that we think that the things we did to get to this level are the things that we need to keep doing.
And really, that's basically what I call it in the framework is shifting from trusting your instincts to leveraging insights. So we don't ignore and abandon our instincts. Our guts are often very helpful, but they're most helpful when we're doing something we've already done because it's based on our experience and it's based on our emotions.
and our emotions are fickle and our experiences are just limited to what we've done. So when we're trying to do something we've never done before, take it from a million to 10 million and have all these other leaders and people and different things going on, we need to leverage the insights, information and intelligence from other people, other systems and tools, not just our own gut.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:39.424)
It's such a huge shift that leaders need to make to stop doing, you know, they're doing everything. you said, now I need to delegate trust, take the data back, make decisions based on the data, set the vision, reinforce the vision. they're, they're not doing the day-to-day work that they were doing and now they're, they're doing process and managing people. And so it's a huge mindset shift that.
Doesn't happen overnight. I'm sure you've seen it. I've seen it. It's frustrating when it doesn't happen as quick as leaders would hope it would. They're bumping their head trying to make decisions that they thought would be super simple. And you bring up a really valid point that it can't always be from the gut as much as it was when it's a million or less or a couple of people versus a dozen or 20 people. So yeah, big difference.
Courtney De Ronde (19:11.496)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney De Ronde (19:32.744)
Yeah, it really is. And I think that's what can be so discouraging is that when people get to this level, if they aren't aware of this big shift that needs to take place, they typically do one of two things. They either double down on their old strategies and try to keep suffering through and they get frustrated and it just feels hard.
Steve / Agency Outsight (19:58.605)
Mm-hmm.
Courtney De Ronde (19:58.814)
and like they're failing constantly. So that's one option is like keep on pressing on or, mm-hmm, or they quit, they give up. They're like, nevermind, I'm not doing this anymore. But really there is a third way and that's to just recognize, this is a whole different ball game. This is a whole new thing. It's supposed to be hard. It's supposed to require me to basically create a whole entire new job for myself.
that's what's required. not failing. I just didn't realize this is totally different. And then you start playing the new game. so, but oftentimes people don't recognize that's what's happening and they just keep plowing ahead or they give up.
Steve / Agency Outsight (20:43.374)
And because it's territory that's brand new to them, it behooves them to bring in a coach and say, help guide my mindset, help turn that into actionable, you know, things that I can do on a daily basis that'll help me make better decisions and get to the things that I want to achieve. At larger scale, there's a lot more on the line. There's a lot more that's being risked. And so to try and go it alone is just that, I don't know, more horrible of a decision, you know?
Courtney De Ronde (21:11.023)
Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah, it's like I a lot of times I'll tell our coaching clients Sometimes you need a map. Sometimes you need a guide. Sometimes you need both and so I do strongly believe that we learn the most from our own failures
But sometimes we can learn quite a lot from someone else's failure. And so we don't have to suffer all of these lessons on our own. And just because, even if you implemented every tool and principle and practice in the simple scale up system, that doesn't mean you're never going to mess up or fail.
But you should be able to recognize it and pivot much more quickly than if you had access to none of this information without the map. And then when you've got a guide, when you've got a coach, when you've got a community of other peers going through a program like this with you, that also speeds up your learning and your ability to learn from your mistakes and from others.
Steve / Agency Outsight (22:17.56)
Yeah, there's no solution that's gonna make it mistake free. Mistakes are great lesson learners, know, great ways to learn lessons. And so maybe we'll make fewer mistakes or smaller mistakes, less expensive mistakes, things like that. They're gonna happen. So yeah, there's no framework, I don't think, that's gonna make it, and most people that are looking to grow a business, scale it, grow it, whatever you wanna, they know they're taking a risk. They know there's gonna be some screw ups. How do I learn from it and move on?
Are there types of businesses in your experience that, well, yes, they can grow. They're not necessarily scalable.
Courtney De Ronde (22:53.801)
think that it's really hard to scale a business that is very dependent on certain specific individual people or their
influencer or persona. know, if everybody had to be coached by me, if everybody had to have their financial insights from me, then eventually I can't get any bigger than my own capacity. So that's a big thing is just recognizing that in order to grow and scale, we have to be able to
expand what we can do to other people. We have to be able to delegate and trust people and develop them. And so I think that can be a big challenge is when it's so dependent on one person or a couple of people's core knowledge, expertise, ability to deliver.
And those businesses can exist and be what they are. There's nothing wrong with that kind of a business, but that's going to prevent you from scaling. And it's also going to impact the value that somebody would pay you for an exit from that business. And that might be completely fine in what you want. But if you want to scale it, you have to be able to take your knowledge, like I did, by creating the Simple Scale Up system. The reason I created the framework was to extract all the knowledge and experience and tools that I'd been using to grow different
divisions and areas of our business and put it into a framework that I can teach and share, other people can teach and share. It requires, you know, steps like that in order to get past that ceiling.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:30.52)
Yeah, that's the limitation is the people involved. so as owners want to grow a business, if they want it to actually grow, they have to systematize things, put the right people in place, get themselves hands off. Typically the last element there is owner led sales and getting the owner out of the flywheel of new business. That's typically the last part of it, but it mostly ties back to them, their personality, their relationships.
the personality that they've tied themselves to with the agency personality and needing to kind of rework that so that it can grow and scale without them. So yeah, valid point. want to shift gears real quick to kind of wrap things up with a few random rapid fire questions for you. The first is what's one of the most ridiculous client requests that you've ever received?
Courtney De Ronde (25:13.029)
Okay.
Courtney De Ronde (25:19.337)
You know, this one, this is kind of a sad one. We had we had a client request a male on their account rather than a female. And I was like, sorry. We're probably just not the right fit. Yeah, that was to me pretty ridiculous. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:33.975)
Interesting.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:38.124)
Yeah, I'd say, okay. With a masseuse I could understand that, with certain things, but a CPA, yeah, whatever, more power. If you had an extra hour in your day, how would you spend it?
Courtney De Ronde (25:49.586)
Hmm, an extra hour in my day. Probably reading or listening to something I love to learn. That's one of my top five CliftonStrengths and that's usually how I spend my free time is listening to a podcast or an audio book or learning something new.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:08.13)
Love that. And then finally, a piece of business advice or a piece of life advice we'll say for younger Courtney.
Courtney De Ronde (26:16.129)
so if I could give myself younger Courtney advice, I, yeah, I wish I would have recognized and learned earlier that things don't have to be perfect to be good. I'm, I'm a perfectionist and prover personality, Enneagram one, if you're familiar with that. And I spent a lot of time thinking things, you know, had to be just so, before I realized that that's just never going to be attained. So that would be.
that advice, learn that faster.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:47.406)
that really valuable touches me too Courtney thank you so much for joining me appreciate your experience and sharing it with our listeners we'll share your contact info in the show notes so if people want to check out your firm or any of your frameworks or any of the information that you have there they can click through to the website so thank you again
Courtney De Ronde (27:07.988)
That's great. Thanks so much for having me, Steve. I appreciate it.