Season 2 | Episode 13: The Labor Cost Rule That Tells You If Your Business Is Profitable

Show Notes:

In this episode of C-Suite Secrets, Heather Parsons talks with fractional CFO Natalia Zacharin about her unorthodox road to entrepreneurship and the financial truths every business owner needs to hear.

Natalia shares how she launched her bookkeeping business in 2019 with no experience and one LinkedIn client, and how starting over later in life gave her the grit to push through imposter syndrome and build a real company. Then she and Heather get into the numbers: why roughly 90 percent of the books she inherits contain errors, why the balance sheet is where everything falls apart, and why cheap bookkeeping ends up costing far more than it saves.

They also cover the metrics every CEO should know cold, from the percentage of income report to keeping labor under 35 percent of gross revenue, plus why profit is fuel rather than greed. Natalia closes with a candid look at scaling, including the $500,000 she burned building a predictable sales machine and the hard lessons that came with it.

Bio:

Natalia Zacharin is the Founder of Zacharin Consulting, an award-winning accounting firm and Inc. 5000 honoree. She partners with founders of service businesses generating between $1 million and $30 million in annual revenue. Natalia specializes in elite fractional CFO services and strategic financial planning. She brings unmatched perspective to her advisory work, having personally scaled her own firm from a solo operation born out of poverty to a $3 million powerhouse in just five years.

Her core philosophy is simple: profit does not equal cash, and more sales will never fix broken systems. Natalia empowers entrepreneurs to use their financials as a forward-facing GPS rather than a backward-looking historical report. By helping leaders identify silent cash leaks, optimize pricing models, and forecast decisions six months in advance, she turns chaotic growth into sustainable profitability. Her proven frameworks build resilient companies that operate independently and ultimately become highly sellable assets.

To connect with our guest, click on the links below:

https://www.facebook.com/zacharinconsulting/

https://www.instagram.com/growyourbottomline/

www.linkedin.com/in/growyourbottomline

🎁Free Resource for listeners: https://zacharinconsulting.com/csuite/

TikTok: @zacharinconsulting

X/Twitter: nataliazacharin

Website: https://www.zacharinconsulting.com/

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-parsons-cfo/

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