We recently connected with Natalie Cook and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Natalie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

I’ve taken a lot of risks in my life that have worked out very well including moving to South Korea to teach English first thing after college, marrying my husband 6 months after we met, having my 1st child in the middle of grad school while working a full-time job. To many, I appear 100% fearless when it comes to risk (not always the case- sometimes I’m just not going to change the laundry at night because there could be spider).

The biggest risk I took was quitting my corporate job, while 3 months pregnant with my 2nd child, and in August of 2020. Additionally, my husband – a general contractor – had only recently started a new company and was just starting to pick up recurring work after the state had shut down job sites for the prior 6 months. Financially, this was a massive risk for both of us. We could be without income for several months, we have two kids, and we have a mortgage–it was risky. It’s so hard to explain why, but we both agreed that we would make it work. Looking back, we both needed our backs against a wall to find the motivation to grow our companies. I had jobs that on paper were “recession proof” and cushy, but not fulfilling to me personally. I knew I needed to be doing something else and I was determined to figure it out.

Fast forward to February 2021 – I was about to give birth to my son. The week before, I had 3-4 calls with prospective clients and work I had to turn down! Fast forward to April 2021 – I finally was back to taking on clients and took on 1 project to postpone any formal childcare. June 2021 – I took on a second client and hired a part-time nanny for the summer, allowing me a few predictable work hours. By October 2021 I was at full capacity and looking for full-time childcare. Today, I have a full (& growing) client load, a small team. I’m currently on the lookout for another CFO to bring on and ways to continue to scale the business.

I’d say my risk-taking pays off. I love what I do, I love my clients, and I never dread going to work.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Prior to founding Copper8, I spent five and half years at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in grant-making, focusing on tech investments within K-12 & higher education, then transitioned into the corporate world as a finance manager at Starbucks. I hold Master of Business Administration from the University of Washington Foster School of Business with a focus on entrepreneurial finance and strategy. I’m a business super nerd and spend all my spare time thinking about financial strategy. At the start of my career, I didn’t think I would ever end up in finance, let alone be running a fractional CFO firm. The moment things changed for me was when I realized that good strategy = decision making and decision making requires good financial analysis and controls.

Copper8 Strategies is a boutique virtual CFO consulting firm guiding small and medium enterprises to financial sustainability. We primarily work with tech and CPG businesses between $500K to $15M in annual revenue. A good CFO increases net income by 1-15%! That’s crazy. It’s because we’re always look for strategies to increase revenue while increasing efficiency & reducing unnecessary costs. Our services include Fractional CFO Support, Project Based Analysis, and Coaching. We’ve also recently launched Finance Fight Club to provide our valuable strategic insight to business owners with less than $500K in annual revenue and will be building content, courses, and a blog in 2023.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I love this question because in some ways I’m still figuring out how to build my reputation in the market and in others I’ve come so far. When I started Copper8 in 2018, I didn’t have sales or marketing figured out or any personal brand. I quit and went into corporate finance because I thought I needed “a real job”. When finally committed to running my firm in 2020, I didn’t know how to build a reputation, but I did know how to be authentic. I kept that authenticity at the center of all my networking, sales, knowledge sharing, and LinkedIn posting. I always made a point of showing up as me and didn’t try to be anything different. Additionally, I always focused on serving my clients and producing high quality work that I was proud of so when the next prospect came along I had a happy client and work to show for it. Now I feel that I’ve built a reputation of being super smart, trustworthy, and strategic. Looking forward to 2023, I’m launching a blog for my Finance Fight Club brand that will be me (and a few friends) sharing my finance knowledge in an easy-to-follow way.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

When I got back to work after having my second child, I took work that came to me. It was easy to get the referrals and I was very (probably overly) flexible with scope. Several months later, having a lot more knowledge of my clients and where I wanted to go, I wanted to pivot into more structured CFO services. To do this, I had to make some tough decisions and let contracts go, not renew contracts, and stop taking on new work not fully aligned with future plans. It took be 3-4 months to make all the shifts. There was a gap between closing out past contracts and when new ones were coming in. One month, I was working on my forecast and looking at the next few months, I didn’t have a line of sight into my income. I thought I was going skip a month of personal income. It made me very nervous. But here’s the good news- within a week, I had a few leads and the month I thought I wouldn’t have an income turned into my most profitable month. Had I not done all the work to cut out the scopes that didn’t fit with the future strategy, I wouldn’t have had capacity to take on the new clients & projects and ultimately scale the business.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.copper8strategies.com/
• Instagram: @financefightclub
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/financefightclub
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cooknatalie/
• Twitter: @finfightclub
• Other: https://www.financefightclub.com/

Image Credits
Char Beck