We built the first AI CFO and nobody wanted it

Yeah, thanks for having me, Micholas. I appreciate it. Nice to be here.

Yeah, well, I I started my firm in January of twenty one. and it's been going great. It's going well since then. I've been working in leading accounting teams for 25 years now, I think, which which is a long time, a quarter of a century. And you know, I've developed a a good reputation prior to starting my firm. I think I can I'm really good at identifying what businesses are struggling with and what they need and just cutting to the chase. And so my reputation here in in Los Angeles became you know, maybe a a founder started a business. It grew a little bit too fast. And so I was the guy they would call in to kind of fix things up and get them on track so they could kind of get to that next level and have that that infrastructure. so in a nutshell, that's that's how it all started.

Yeah, well, I, you know, I started the firm because I knew I knew what the problems were in the industry. And I'd hired accounting consultants before. And I don't even use the word consultants. And let me just even back up for a moment because my firm, like a lot of businesses, when you start your company, it's often something very different in the beginning than it is in present day. And for me, that's been over five years. So there's definitely been some changes. So when I started the firm, Astero Group, we were CFO services, but we also did some bookkeeping. We did some senior accounting. We white gloves some tax work. And when you hear, you know, the noise out there telling you to niche down to figure out what your niche is, I thought in the beginning that meant what industry do we work with? Should we work just with, you know, SaaS companies or just tech companies? But it took me a bit to learn that niching down for us meant on the services we provide. So skipping ahead to today, we don't touch bookkeeping. We don't touch controller work. We don't touch tax. We just do really specifically CFO advisory work, looking ahead, helping founders and co-founders, you know, achieve what they're trying to achieve. And we do a really excellent job at that service specifically. So when we get into, you know, a lot of firms are, you know, they have long agreements, like you said, or they have timesheets or things like that. It it sort of focuses the individual, especially if they work for a firm, to focus on billing hours and and filling up their their clock and all that sort of stuff so they can get their bonuses. So we don't have any of that. we specifically focus on making clients happy. I don't care if our CFOs are on the beach working, you know, I don't care if they whatever time they want to take off, I don't care how much they work, less is more actually, as long as the clients are happy and they're delivering value. And because clients can you know, get rid of us anytime they want. that gives them the flexibility, one, to skip up perhaps to a higher monthly plan, if if the resources or or the needs require it, but it forces us to deliver value, which is a win for for everyone.

Yeah, so we well, we were one of the first companies. It was myself and a developer in Germany to put together one of the world's first AI CFOs. And I was very proud of it, and it turned out to be a big flop. There was really not much interest, and to me that's not a failure. We you know, we created something cool, we put it out there, it didn't work, it's a learning, but you know the The big thing with with what it was, we trained it and I trained it so that it didn't paint a rosy picture. if there was bad news, it would give you the bad news. It didn't invent variables. So all these important things when a founder especially is feeding information into an LLM that they need to know. but I don't think that gap between what exists in a typical $20 a month LLM and truth. That gap is not big enough to make most founders want to jump over and pay for a separate tool and have this other standalone app. So we realized that, and that's cool. And then last weekend, actually, we haven't even launched it yet. It's been very quiet, but we took the training that we gave to that AI CFO for a sterile group and we put it into Slack. And so now our clients, we're just rolling this out to our clients and our future clients, they all get a dedicated Slack channel. their human CFOs in there and their AI CFOs in there. So when a founder wants to just, you know, maybe a three in the morning question or they just want to ask something quick to their AI CFO, they tag their E AI CFO. In this case, her name is Cindy. So at Cindy, you know, here's my question, blah, blah, blah. But all that data lives in that same channel. So the human CFO can see it. If Cindy thinks you know there's something that she doesn't know, or it's not a it's a better question for the human CFO. Show loop in the human CFO and that data just grows and grows. And so now we're not talking about a separate app. We're not talking about opening this to the world. We're just at at no extra cost. This is something our clients now can enjoy. And it everyone wins. It's there if they wanted to use it. It helps the human CFO because they're seeing these conversations. It's not happening in a separate silo. And it's been really great. And then You know, my vision ultimately on this, you know, in in my industry, after a year or two, you have clients who graduate through your system and they bring the CFO role in-house. And that's great. We love losing customers and losing the revenue, but it's awesome when they win, of course. And so in this case, my hope is that some of them enjoy, you know, all of this history and data and the AI CFO that they have, and they want to continue with that. So although we might part ways, you know, with the human CFO and and wave goodbye to the client, we can sort of become a tech company in that in that situation, they can continue on with their Slack Estero CFO. So that's that's the plan.

That's the big one for now. I think you know, we're gonna work this one and see how it goes. you know, founders, everyone's always gonna use their own AI in their own way and their own LLMs. And I think that's great and that's fine. Our CFOs certainly do. our CFOs will be using this tool as well for some of their analysis and to, you know, help them do their job better. Again, because it's it's trained not to invent variables and and there's certain specific trainings that we gave to it, but for now, no, we're gonna be we're gonna be going full steam with this. And I'm I'm confident in everything's telling me so far, it's gonna be a a win.

Love it. Yeah, and I I'm not super strict with the CFOs. So, you know, different levels of experience and comfort and some people are a little more manual. Our tech stack includes a note taker as well and and and meetings all get categorized on what they are, what it's for. and of course all the transcripts get analyzed. not by me. I'm not I'm not analyzing conversations with CFOs and their their clients, but the data's there if they want it to. What else? I just had another one that came to mind. besides the note taker, I don't know, it'll come to me in a little bit. But yeah, you know, we it's on the reporting side. So we we have special tools for the reporting piece that help us with the analysis and digest a lot of information, especially comparative analysis. You know, you could you don't need a CFO necessarily to dive into five or ten years of history to come up with trends when you can have. you know, a tool do that. So it's heavily ingrained in what we do. But if you were to ask our clients, they would feel it's a very human exchange or experience with our CFOs. And that's how I want to keep it. that trust piece, that human piece is what's so special about the CFO and advisory role. And that's not changing anytime soon. And I I'm a huge proponent of everywhere technology is going. And I I wanted to continue at the pace that it's going at, but that trust, that human piece Is what we put in front of our clients.

Ooh gosh, that's a good question. When you're building, listen to the feedback of the people that you're building it for early and iterate quickly, but at the same time, you need to follow follow your passion. I I'm trying to think or the passion of the direction of what you're trying to build in the first place. And there was a quote, and I'm gonna totally screw it up here, but it was from Henry Ford and it was basically saying, you know, if he had asked people what they wanted before there were cars, they would have said they wanted faster horses and they wouldn't have said, we want the car. And so that reminds me of, you know, anyone who's building something, especially when it's really new, is that you want to think about you know, th there's always that careful balance between having a good idea and having it out there, and at what point do you start. realizing, you know, if even if you keep trying and trying, it's not gonna work. And there is that moment. And you hear every successful person and every success story, they they failed like crazy. And then they just they had they hit the tip of the mountain moment and then they just fell and it was just success and this this snowball. But there it there are some ideas, of course. The reality is, although it's you know, you don't hear people say this often where it is time to retire. And so that's how I felt with our first AI CFO. I I realized it was time to Retire it and do this other version of it, which now I think is going to be very successful. So, back to your question, what would I tell younger Jim? I'm thinking of that question just in terms of kind of starting a business and what that looks like. And I think it's it's following your initial vision as hard and as aggressively as you can to the point that it's still making sense what you're trying to do, and you still have. true belief that that it will work and and ultimately nothing else matters if it's not benefiting others.

Yeah, two places. I mean we're online. asteroid.com. So a s t e ro group dot com is the Astero Group website. My personal hub, and anyone's welcome to reach out, I I'll I'll respond in you know personally is I am jimmiller dot com. So I am jimmiller dot com. No hyphens or spaces or any of that. And yeah, from there, those are kind of my hubs that link to everywhere else. Everything everything that's

Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Miclas.