[Top Agency Series] Unlocking Agency Profitability Metrics With Brandon Kordower and Daniel Simon

 

Daniel Simon, Executive Vice President at Aura CFO, brings 30 years of C-suite experience and a wide-ranging background across investment banking, music, fine arts, marketing, e-commerce, education, and restaurant ownership. His versatile experience adds depth to the firm’s insights and services. Together, Brandon and Daniel lead a team dedicated to helping agencies avoid common financial missteps, increase profitability, and prepare for sustainable growth or acquisition.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:45] How Brandon Kordower built Aura CFO to deliver high-level financial expertise through fractional services
• [10:53] Why Daniel Simon believes people costs are the most critical factor in agency profitability
• [14:04] How time-tracking reveals hidden capacity and improves margins
• [16:49] Why chasing revenue without profit can put your agency at risk
• [20:18] How tracking service-level margins helps avoid costly mistakes
• [36:33] Why accrual accounting is critical for agencies ready to scale
• [41:49] Real-world changes agencies make after seeing the full financial picture
• [46:20] How audit-ready financials can pave the way to an eight-figure exit

In this episode…

Many agency owners struggle with financial clarity — confused cash flow, underutilized teams, and misleading revenue growth often stand in the way of maximum profitability. So how do top-performing agencies turn these challenges into sustainable, scalable success?

Brandon Kordower shares how shifting from basic bookkeeping to fractional CFO services can unlock powerful insights for growing agencies. Along with Daniel Simon, he breaks down why people costs are often the biggest lever — and the biggest risk — in agency finances. From tracking staff utilization to setting service-line margins, they emphasize the importance of moving to accrual accounting, avoiding the trap of revenue obsession, and following key benchmarks like 60% gross margin and keeping people costs below 55%.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Brandon Kordower, Founder and CEO of Aura CFO, a firm that helps marketing agencies scale profitably through fractional CFO services and strategic financial guidance, and Daniel Simon, Executive Vice President, to discuss how agency leaders can take control of their finances, scale smarter, and prepare for eight-figure exits. They share real-world stories, actionable metrics, and insights into the financial visibility every creative business needs to thrive.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Brandon Kordower on LinkedIn
• Daniel Simon on LinkedIn
• Aura CFO

Special Mention(s):

• “Entrepreneurial Lessons and Failures Building a $220M Empire With Tommy Mello” on Inspired Insider Podcast

Related episodes:

• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity — if you’re not watching your profitability, you can run into significant issues.”
• “The single largest internal cost of an advertising agency is people — if you miss that, your bottom line will suffer.”
• “You should be generating a minimum of a 60% gross margin; otherwise, you’re only creating a bigger issue for yourself.”
• “Having your accounting done properly is an investment into your business, not a cost.”
• “The companies that bring the highest valuation are those that can run successfully without the owner-founder’s involvement.”

Action steps:

1. Implement rigorous time-tracking for all staff: This addresses the challenge of overstaffing and underutilization that often erodes profitability.
2. Shift focus from top-line revenue to profitability: This counters the common mistake of chasing revenue at the expense of profit, which can lead to unsustainable growth or increased debt.
3. Adopt accrual accounting for clearer financial insights: This helps owners make better decisions and avoid misleading financial swings, especially as the business grows and contemplates selling or scaling.
4. Benchmark and monitor key financial metrics: Keeping a close eye on these benchmarks allows agencies to spot problems early and make informed adjustments, supporting sustainable and scalable growth.
5. Treat your business like it’s ready for due diligence: This not only prepares you for a potential acquisition or investment but also instills discipline and credibility that benefit decision-making and long-term value.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of InspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Brandon Kordower and Daniel Simon before I formally introduce both of you. They’re both with Aura CFO. You can check them out at AuraCFO.com. I always like to mention other episodes people should check out, since this is part of the top agency series. Some of the interesting agency owners I’ve had on Jason Swenk, who Brandon I know you know, he’s been on twice. One, he talks about how he built up his agency to eight figures and sold it. 

And then he has a group that serves agency owners as well. Check that out. Another one was Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey is the Second Bite Podcast. So he helps pair private equity with agency owners. Help sell agencies. Really? And actually it’s funny. You know, Aura CFO, they specialize in marketing agencies. I mean, they have service, lots of service professionals with what they do, which we’ll get into, but specifically niche into marketing agencies. 

And so, Todd niches in agencies and helps sell them. He’s got a great show, Second Bite Podcast. People can check it out. Another good one was Kevin Hourigan. Kevin Hourigan runs Spinutech and he’s had his agency since 1999. So it’s interesting to hear the landscape of obviously the agency world, but the internet and business throughout several decades at this point. So check those out and more on inspired Insider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25. We help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. 

We do that in a few ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability, and the full execution and production. And number two, we’re an easy button for a company’s gifting. So we make gifting and staying top of mind to your clients, partners, prospects, even your staff. Simple, easy, and actually affordable. So you just give us a list of your people that you want, and we will send multiple gifts maybe every three, 4 or 5 months over the course of three, 4 or 5 years. Right. 

So we call ourselves, you know, Brandon and Daniel, the magic elves that run in the background to make it easy for companies to build amazing relationships. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships, and personally, I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I admire and send them sweet treats in the mail. So anyone who’s interested go to Rise25.com or email [email protected]. I am super excited to introduce Brandon and Daniel. Brandon Kordower I’ll introduce you first. 

Brandon is the Founder and CEO of Aura CFO. They specialize in providing fractional controllers and CFO services to marketing agencies. They have over 15 years of professional experience, and Brandon and his company help marketing agencies scale and become more profitable by understanding the value of accurate data around their decision making process and Aura, we were talking before we hit record. Here they have clients successfully sell with eight figure exits, and their professional experience really ranges all over the place. 

They could be 500,000 revenue and they’ve served nine figure businesses as well. Daniel Simon, we’ll call. You know, Daniel, I know you play a lot where there are a lot of hats over there, but officially on the site, says Executive VP. But he brings over 25 years of age experience and 30 years in C-suite experience and has a really diverse background, including investment banking, music and the fine arts, and the marketing communications industry. Obviously, I also saw restaurant ownership there. I’m not sure what that’s about. Maybe we’ll get to that at some point. Personally, that seems super stressful to me in educational institutions and e-commerce, just to name a few. So both of you, thanks for joining me today.

Brandon Kordower 04:35

Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 04:36

Let’s start off with just talking about our Aura CFO. And what you do is you do that. I’m going to pull up the website so we can check it out.

Brandon Kordower 04:45

Yeah. So I founded Aura about eight years ago. And the idea was that I saw this shift moving more and more to fractional. There’s a lot of times where companies cannot afford to have the qualified talent that they need. And so what they end up doing typically is just hiring lower end individuals. And there’s two problems with that. Number one, often a full time equivalent is not needed in the business. Right to handle kind of the day to day. 

But what’s more important is that the level of quality suffers because you can only afford a person with maybe 1 to 2 years experience. And so you end up with this position where you’re getting low quality work. And so the idea behind Aura and doing fractional work is, hey, why don’t you work with professionals that have industry expertise part time as needed, and you can really elevate the quality of work that the client receives at a significant reduction in the price. And so ultimately, that was the vision behind Aura, and over time I have evolved into just working exclusively with professional service companies and even more niched into marketing agencies. 

And so we work with agencies that are getting to around $1 million in revenue. They’ve only ever worked with a bookkeeper. They have very basic accounting, which is, you know, good for filing their taxes, but that’s about it. There’s not a lot of good tangible value in the information they’re seeing. There are significant swings month to month where one month is a huge profit. The next month is a huge loss. And it doesn’t allow for a lot of analysis to determine if the business is moving in the right direction? 

And so by us bringing clients onto what’s called accrual accounting, where we can help get rid of some of those timing differences and margin swings and give a lot of valuable information to agencies to understand. Am I making the right margins in the right places? Am I scaling effectively? Do I have the right cash flow bandwidth to handle this growth? And so these are the types of things that we work with our clients to help them ultimately achieve their growth and scale effectively.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 07:00

You mentioned when you started, I’m curious about evolution. I want to talk about the evolution of the service side and then the evolution also of the niche side. Maybe start with the service side. When you first started, what did you think? Okay, I’m going to offer this service because I know you have a few services that you offer.

Brandon Kordower 07:19

Yeah. Great question. When I first started, the idea was to actually offer an outsourced accounting department. So the idea initially was, hey, we’re going to handle A to Z everything within the day to day needs of accounting. And what I found was that that wasn’t very scalable for us to be able to handle everything from accounts payable to receivable to. And so ultimately, we ended up shifting to just offering controller CFO work because I looked back and said, okay, what is the strategic value that we bring that is most needed? 

And the work that we bring is not easily, you know, replicated. It is easy to bring somebody in to handle basic data entry, to enter bills, to generate invoices that can be done by anybody without an accounting skill set requirement. The stuff we’re doing really requires five, ten plus years experience to do properly. And so that was the ultimate move was first to just find that, okay, controller CFO work is where we needed to focus. And then the next step in the evolution of the business was we were industry agnostic for many years. 

So I have experience in manufacturing, distribution, construction, and professional services obviously. And so what I found for my company was that in order for us to scale and grow, I needed to find one niche and just kind of narrow down into that niche. And so I laid out my clientele and I said, who is the, you know, of these different industries that I’m working in, who and what industry is best for Aura to grow? And so I ultimately decided that the advertising industry was the right one. And I came to that for three reasons. The first was that, you know, agency owners are creatives, right? These are highly emotionally intelligent people, very creative. 

And what that typically means is that numbers are not their thing. They’re not into analyzing numbers. So right off the bat I’m like, okay, competitive advantage right there. Right. They need help with the numbers. I can deliver help with the numbers. That was number one. Number two was in order to do professional services accounting correctly. It actually does require a lot of expertise because there are a lot of timing differences that exist within the financials between when projects start and stop, when customers are paying you, when you have to pay your freelancers or your employees, and capturing those things and booking the accounting correctly actually requires expertise. 

It’s not something that a bookkeeper alone can do. So okay. Strike two. And then my third strike was that I was actually mentoring Danny or Daniel at the time and ultimately said to myself, well, okay, why am I just mentoring Danny? Why don’t we bring him into the organization where he can actually inject his wisdom and experience on us to help us better serve our clients, particularly with fractional CFO services? And so that’s how we ultimately kind of evolve to where we are today.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 10:29

Yeah. I’d love for you to touch on you’ve seen a lot of businesses and agencies too. What are some of the big mistakes that you see agencies make?

Brandon Kordower

Sorry. Was that for me or for you?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 10:44

Yeah. And then, Brandon, you can add any color for sure, but. Yeah. Danny, I’d love to hear what you see? What are the big mistakes agencies are making?

Daniel Simon 10:53

Well, in the agency business, in marketing communications in general, you know, people forget that the assets are not in a warehouse. There’s no inventory. The assets are the people. And the strength of the organization is the strength of the people within the organization. And if number one, you’re not focusing on that as your primary focus within the organization, both from making sure that your people are growing, that they have opportunities for growth and advancement, but also from an accounting and finance perspective, watching your bottom line in terms of how much people cost you add on to your books as a percentage of your revenue, then it’s very, very easy to overstaff an agency and have issues with your bottom line.

And if you don’t spend enough time really being aware of that and being aware of things like, for example, are my staff fully utilized? Do they have downtime? You know, do we have the tools to even track that information from a time sheet perspective and all the rest? You know, at the end of the day, the single largest internal cost of an advertising agency is people. And so in order to make sure the biggest mistakes I’ve seen are where agency leaders do not focus on that from a profitability perspective, and think that they can easily turn things around by tweaking other costs. The reality is, in most agencies. Those costs should be no more than 25% of total revenue. And so being able to tweak that 25% and make a difference to your bottom line is, is really a fallacy. And you really want to make sure that your focus is in the right place.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 12:59

So it’d be like, you know, like 80, 20 wise, someone has like software subscriptions and they’re trying to be like, hey, I want to we need to cut costs. And they start looking at their software subscriptions as opposed to the people’s side.

Daniel Simon 13:11

100%, Jeremy. 100%, you know, yeah, you can cut that subscription, but that subscription is not going to take your, your, your bottom line margin up with any sort of significance to make a difference in the organization, you know. So yes, that’s exactly the case. 80 over 20 in that respect.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:33

I’m sure you talk to people and they don’t know what those things are. I mean, that’s probably why they call you. But you know, like I don’t you’re saying utilization and I don’t have any idea what that is. What are some of the ways that you help people figure these things out to be like, okay, I have no idea what my utilization rate is for my staff or, or maybe they have a guess. They’ll give you an answer and like, well, let’s actually look at the data. What are some of the metrics you’re looking at?

Daniel Simon 14:04

Right. Yeah. So I mean the first thing is making sure that everyone on your team is tracking their time. You know, if you don’t. And at the early stages, it may be just as basic as tracking it in Excel or a word file or something like that. Obviously you would like a time sheet system that is incorporated in with your accounting system in a best case scenario, but you need to track time and you don’t track time because you want to basically be a watchdog over your staff. You track time to be able to say, well, Danny is only putting in 70% of his time that we have available into client work, and the other 30% is downtime. But we don’t know that because he’s not completing time sheets. 

And the reality is that 30% could be used on other clients. And if we don’t know that, well, we might go out and hire additional staff when the reality is we have that capacity within the organization. So, you know, my metric and, you know, I’ve worked primarily my entire career in the marketing and communications industry with big US listed firms, and within those firms, they have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of verticals. And they have a lot of different companies, you know, and the metrics are pretty much the same, whether you’re dealing with, as you said earlier, half, half $1 million agency or $100 million agency, you want to make sure that from a utilization perspective, at a minimum. 

You’ve got 80% and even higher than that in many instances, because if you’ve got an account person whose job is to work with clients, you could argue, why should it be less than 100% except for those training, you know, opportunities within the company or a little bit of admin that they have to do. But at the end of the day, their job is to service the clients and our job as leaders within the company and as financial controllers within, you know, as, as a fractional firm is to make sure that you have that data to be able to make informed decisions.

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