We recently connected with Candus Hinderer and Carrie Ferroukhi, founders of Arcus Advisors, a fast-growing, women-owned, accounting consulting firm and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Candus and Carrie, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
Our mission is to help our clients get home to their families. That may come as a surprise coming from an accounting consulting firm, but in the end, when we really thought about it, that is truly our WHY.
Being in the accounting profession, it is a well-known fact that due to immovable deadlines, we work a significant amount of hours that many times leads to shortened vacations, missed big events and minimal holidays. In our many years of experience, we know the reasons for this are simple – inefficient processes and ineffective hiring.
If you hire the right people and develop the right processes from startup, the accounting team does not have to pay the price of late nights to fix issues that have been improperly recorded. Instead, with the company’s departments working together, the information will be accurate and also reported sooner so that leadership can make informed decisions, being a win-win for the team and the company.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Sure, we have similar, almost identical professional backgrounds — we both have accounting degrees and started our careers with Big 4 public accounting firms in Houston, Texas. Carrie was with Andersen and Candus was with Deloitte. We did our 3+ years in the audit group and then leapt into corporate, Centerpoint Energy and Shell Trading Gas & Power, respectfully. During this time, Enron and Anderson blew up the accounting industry due to their financial shenanigans which created laws prohibiting the public accounting firms from auditing the clients who they also consulted for. Thus, boutique consulting firms popped up and started recruiting former auditors to fill their ranks.
We met at one of those firms and really hit it off — especially around our approach to client service and innovative process improvement. We were always looking for ways to make a job easier, faster and more accurate for our clients and that is what we do for our current Private Equity-backed clients. These companies are filled with inspiring entrepreneurs who are looking to increase their bottom line but their accounting and finance departments may be lacking.
Our experienced senior-level consultants will work alongside a client’s management and audit teams to get the company’s accounting and finance function aligned and modernized so they can achieve the company’s goals.
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
One of our favorite stories is how we closed our first sale together at our former firm. A CFO for a growing company asked us and other firms he knew to propose on a project converting them from US GAAP to IFRS (US Accounting standards to International Accounting standards). We had never made a pitch before, and we are accountants, so our personalities are not known for “selling”. He didn’t want a presentation, only a conversation as to our experience and why he should hire us. We were able to convey our expertise in the area as well as our ability to dig in and add value immediately working as a liaison with his audit firm. After the pitch, we thanked him for his time and asked about next steps.
Without pausing he said for us to send him an engagement letter and we could get started. We were absolutely blown away but remained calm in his office. We remained calm walking out of the building and to our car. Once we were safely inside the car we screamed and high-fived! Loudly!
The feeling you get when you win a project is beyond explanation. It really fueled us to know that this was something we wanted to continue to do and do it together.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
By far, the book that has helped us most to start and manage our business is Traction by Gino Wickman. This book will take you step by step on how to successfully manage and grow your company. We rely on its tenants heavily. It is the basis for the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) which is a practical method for achieving business success.
Each year, we set our 10-yr, 3-yr, 1-yr and quarterly goals and have a “Level 10” meeting every Tuesday morning to go through the action items related to our quarterly goals. If something isn’t working, we know that quickly and either reassign or reassess. It works brilliantly to keep us focused on working ON the business instead of just IN the business.
Contact Info:
- Website: arcusadvisors.com