From Despair to Data: Rebuilding a Life One Metric at a Time | Stories With Traction Podcast

SHOW NOTES:

In this powerful episode, Matt Zaun talks with Natalia Zacharin, founder of Zacharin Consulting—an “accounting firm on steroids.” They unpack how fractional CFOs turn messy books into strategic insight, why AI speeds analysis but never replaces human judgment, and how Natalia rebuilt her life (and business) from $7.10/hour to a multi-million-dollar firm.

 

In this episode, they cover:

✅ AI in finance (the truth) — great for speed and patterns; still needs humans to classify revenue vs. loans, deposits, and edge cases

✅ A trust case study — “400 calls a month” salesperson with zero sales; the numbers exposed fabricated activity

✅ Survival tactics when you feel stuck — slash to essentials, stack small wins, and re-engage your mind so you’re not trapped in a negative loop

✅ Why founders should sell more often — being in the sales process forces you to listen and shape services people actually want

...and much more!

 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors

 

Matt Zaun 

Natalia, welcome to the Stories of Attraction podcast.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Thanks, Matt. So great to be here.

 

Matt Zaun 

I'm so excited you're here. Your story is fascinating to me. So I really want to dive into your story.

But before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what you do. So can you give my listeners an understanding of what you do for your clients?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Sure. So we are a full-service accounting firm. But I like to say that we're an accounting firm on steroids.

We do all the usual bookkeeping. But we go beyond. So we do bookkeeping. But all of our bookkeeping clients are overseen by an in-house controller, which is a CPA level for technical accuracy.

So we do that extra step. We run payroll. But we don't have a bookkeeper running payroll. We have a payroll specialist running payroll with decades of payroll-specific experience.

And then we really specialize. As infractional CFO services, which help people to improve revenue, improve profit, understand how much cash in the bank they need, and to improve the value of their asset, which is the whole reason, I think, why you should even have a business, is to build an asset.

And then lastly, which is new, we do tax preparation and tax planning, tax strategy to reduce your tax liability safely and conservatively.

 

Matt Zaun 

So I've been hearing more and more about fractional CFO. Why do you think that that is not only here, but it's definitely going to be here in the future?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Do you foresee in the next year or two that it just continues to increase? Yes, I feel like it's really exploding as more and more people are understanding what it actually means.

That term is not as explainable or explicable as people think it is. So some people ask me, what is a fractional CFO?

And we really, what we do is we go in and we help analyze the business because to us, the business...

Looks like almost like a plumbing in a house. If you could do like an x-ray of a house and look at the plumbing, like where are the parts that are slow, where the parts that are stopped are not working, where's the bottleneck.

And so we take a look at everything and through the numbers and we can see where there are issues, where you're trending or where to improve.

And so it's really to the main goal is to improve profit and to be able to scale profitably and to build a sellable asset.

I like that picture of plumbing in the house.

 

Matt Zaun 

That really paints a picture for us. How are you utilizing AI technology now to figure out what's going on with those pipes, so to speak?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

So there's a lot. So AI is just making our job faster. We still have to look at every single transaction.

And, you know, when you have a lot of those companies that look, that say that they do it all AI and they can do your books for $200.

Well, they, a lot of them are still going out of business or they're. not doing very well because they have to have someone in the background.

They still have to have a human being looking at everything because AI doesn't know what everything is. So any money coming into the account isn't necessarily revenue.

Could be an investment. Could be a loan deposit. Could be a lot of different things. So we use AI to help find patterns of what works, and we see patterns of what works.

That's what's great about being fractional is that we work with a lot of different industries, a lot of different companies, and we start seeing patterns in the economy and patterns of mindset and patterns of what's working way before anybody else.

And we use AI a lot for helping us to formulate the statements and marketing and just to kind of help make things faster.

So for instance, I do a lot of presentations and I talk to entrepreneurs and webinars and presentations. So now I can create a presentation in like 30 minutes.

Whereas it would have taken me four hours a couple of years ago. Sure.

 

Matt Zaun 

So you mentioned patterns. What would be a pattern that you have seen that was shocking to one of your clients?

Meaning, so you mentioned that picture. I really like it. So the plumbing in the house. And there are a lot of gorgeous homes, luxury homes, amazing homes, but there might be structural issues.

Maybe the pipes aren't working correctly. Maybe the roof is about ready to start leaking. Have you ever had a moment where you started peeling back different layers, the business thought everything was going great, and for whatever reason, you discovered certain patterns that were shocking?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

And if so, what would some of those patterns be? Yeah. So one of the patterns is really you can see by the numbers efficiency of your staff, which I find fascinating.

So depending on what numbers you're looking at, you can find a lot of if you're getting a return on that investment.

So your labor is going to be the most expensive resource that you're going to hire. They're also the most important for most business.

And, you know, product-based businesses might not need that, especially if they're drop shipping, but most businesses have some sort of labor or payroll or even contractors that they're paying for.

And you can tell by the percentages of revenue, of payroll to revenue, is it efficient in that industry? Where is it trending?

So if their revenue goes up, does payroll go up every single time? Maybe it shouldn't. Maybe it should stay flat.

Are people being really efficient? We can also see, for instance, in sales, sales is a great way to look at things.

Are the salespeople selling through the numbers? And if that's not even a payroll issue, that's how many calls are they making?

How many new deals are they closing? What does that look like? And so we can kind of start seeing, is it working and does it make sense?

And a lot of times we can pull something out like, this doesn't make sense. And we don't really know exactly what's happening, but then that's when the conversations start.

We actually had one time an IT company where he had a salesperson, and he was saying he was making 400 calls a month, and yet there were no sales for several months in a row.

And I said, that's just not possible. Like, just the numbers don't make sense. And he started digging in, and he asked his salesperson, you know, what was going on.

And the salesperson actually confided that he was making up the numbers. So, like, that was really surprising to that owner.

He really trusted this person. He had been working for him for years, and something fell flat. And without looking at the numbers, it's just data.

Without looking at the data, he would have never probably caught on to that for months.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow, that is wild.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

That is wild.

 

Matt Zaun 

What a breach of trust. My goodness. So you mentioned make sense, right, trying to figure out how to make sense of things.

One of the things I really like to do is I like to make sense of how someone got to where they are, right?

So in order to do so, I want to backtrack. I want to talk a little bit more about your story to try to make

So if we were to go back to your teen years, and if I were to ask you as a 13-year-old, what do you think your life will be, whatever the case may be, if I were to ask you at 13, what do you aspire to?

What are you interested in? What response would I have gotten back?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

I wanted to be an engineer when I was in my teens, and the reason I wanted to be an engineer, not because of any other reason, but all of the men in my family were, and no women.

And so I was like, I want to be the first woman engineer in my family. All of my uncles, my cousins, my dad, they were all engineers.

So that was my dream, and or be a ballerina. I know it's completely wild, but I was 13.

 

Matt Zaun 

That's awesome. right. So speaking of ballet, right? So that's no joke. My wife did ballet points for many, many years.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

And my gosh, I was a wrestler for 10 years. So very intensive.

 

Matt Zaun 

I could never. Never do point, right? Like, it's no joke. So it's funny. I think sometimes, like, people make fun of, like, ballerinas.

It is not a sport for weak people. I mean, my gosh, it takes physical and mental strength. So I just want to put that out there.

My wife would come home with bloody feet all the time.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

It is crazy. All right.

 

Matt Zaun 

So you wanted to be an engineer. So transition from, like, 13 through some of the school years, what were you into?

Athletics, any kind of extracurricular activity, anything that involved strategy, math, science?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

So my family were immigrants. I'm the first. I'm first generation American. And sports and those types of extracurricular activities were very, it wasn't the norm for them.

That's a very American type of thing, especially back then. Like, we're talking 40 years ago plus. So it was really not something that they were interested in.

But they were really interested in the arts and in music languages. So I went to school on Saturdays to learn a second language.

I actually learned Russian. And so I went to school basically from the age of seven to the age of 17 for 10 years.

And then I also took piano lessons, dance lessons. I knew I know how to ballroom dance. I call it the geisha upbringing.

So I had to know how to dance, how to speak languages, how to have – my mom wanted me to have a degree, but she did not want me to work.

She wanted me to have a degree so I could have a husband that I can talk to intelligently, but I would be a stay-at-home mom.

Because that's what it was about.

 

Matt Zaun 

Like we're talking – I grew up in the 70s, right, 70s and 80s. So that was a long time ago.

So things are a little different. Sure. So you mentioned immigrants. So I want to talk about like the immigrant story.

Why is it that immigrants from my perspective Like, just what I'm seeing, why is there so much grit? Why is the work ethic just through the roof?

What is it about the immigrant story coming to the U.S. where the work ethic is just so unbelievable?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

You know, that's a really good question, and I think it's a couple of things. So the first thing is I know that my family, my mom and dad met in the United States, but they went through so much hardship to get here.

Poverty and disease and danger and trying to get over, like, they actually escaped the U.S.S.R. back then, you know, in the middle of the night.

My mom escaped with her family. They just, they took one little tiny suitcase. They were actually very well to do.

My grandmother was a famous opera singer, and my grandfather was also an engineer. And they left in the middle of the night and just sewed a few of their jewels and a few of their coins in the inside.

And lapel of their coats and took one tiny little suitcase in the middle of the night and literally just escaped.

So they came here with nothing, not even the language. And they made themselves, they wanted to really live the American dream.

So they made something out of themselves and they worked extremely hard because they came with nothing. They didn't have the same education.

They couldn't even speak English. And then they became such huge patriots of the United States. My family is like when you sing the American anthem, they all cry.

They're huge patriots because we don't really know because we don't live in other countries. Or if we live in other countries, we live in other countries as Americans, which is very different.

It's a lot harder in a lot of other places. It's pretty good here. It's amazing to me.

 

Matt Zaun 

So actually a couple months ago, I took my entire family to Ellis Island. My wife and kids are there.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

We're trying to figure out like family tree and explaining to them. I have younger kids. 10 or 11, 10, and 7.

 

Matt Zaun 

So they're still fairly young. But just for them to see the pain that a lot of immigrants have gone through to get here with nothing and then make something of themselves, impact their communities, I think it was really eye-opening to them because often we take a lot for granted here in the U.S., for sure.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Definitely.

 

Matt Zaun 

There is someone listening to this episode, though, that they may be experiencing pain and they feel potentially hopeless. So you said making something from nothing.

Obviously, there's no magic formula or recipe, but if someone feels truly hopeless, they really do feel like they don't have financial resources, they don't have maybe a large network, what do they do?

What would you recommend that they do? How do they bottle up the grit that you have and figure out how to do something?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Yeah. And just because we came to the United States. And my parents did a good job and were, you know, pretty well to do like middle class.

I had and I was raised I went to college and I had a job I've had several times in my life where I fell into despair.

And I've been in poverty more than once as a single mom. So it happened to me actually twice. So I had to start from zero twice in my life as a 40 plus year old and then again at late literally at 50.

So I completely understand fear, despair, having nothing working out. I had health issues. I was financially didn't have anything.

I was afraid any second I'd be out on the street because I wouldn't be like I knew that everything I was doing was just Band-Aids, you know, credit cards up to the max, couldn't get another credit card, didn't have enough, wasn't making enough money.

And the one thing you can do is just keep moving forward. So I did a couple of things. The first thing was just to keep moving forward.

I knew that if I just I would a I of So the first time I was 42, I left my husband, who is abusive, by the way.

So I feel like I've seen it all at this point. So he was very abusive and scary. I left him.

He left me in financial disarray with a lot of debt. And I hadn't worked in six years. And all of my connections had expired, basically.

I was in sales before then. I reached out to everybody I knew. No one was hiring. No one was calling me back.

I couldn't get a job. It was 2012. The economy was actually in a really bad place for finding work.

And it was the first time that even you couldn't become a substitute teacher for the first time in the history of the schools in my area.

And they stopped. And I was looking for work at that point, trying to make $70,000, $80,000, then looking for work, making a lot less, and then asking for jobs as a waitress.

And I still couldn't get that job because I didn't have any experience being a waitress. So I landed a job at a little boutique store where I used to go shopping for $7.10 an hour.

And that was less than I made when I was 13 years old, to be honest. It was much less than I made.

And I still had a mortgage and I had a child and I had to pay for things. So it was extremely debilitating and humbling.

And I just knew that if I landed a job, I would land the next job and the next job and the next job.

So the first thing was just to get a job, even though it was at $7 an hour. That's less than most people make now.

That was minimum wage back then. And then the other thing was to try to live within my means. So that meant I had to cut everything out.

I couldn't spend $5,000 a month, even though my mortgage was at $2,000. So I stopped doing everything that wasn't necessary.

So coffee and tea, not necessary. Liquid soap, not necessary. Fabric softener, not necessary. There's a lot of not necessary things.

And it's extremely painful. But what we don't realize as people, we always think that this is our new normal, but it's not the new normal.

It's our new normal right now. It's not forever. And so cutting back significantly and keep trying to earn more while spending less, that combination can get you out of trouble a lot faster.

And it's not forever. It's really just at that moment.

 

Matt Zaun 

And so that's what you have to keep telling yourself. So you mentioned new normal right now, not forever. Did you truly believe that?

You were in that moment. You were in despair. You're hopeless. You have a child you're providing for, $7.10 an hour.

You're radically cutting out. I don't even know what I want to call it. A fabric softener, a luxury of life, but you're cutting everything out, right?

Like you're cutting down to the bone. Did you truly believe that that wasn't going to be your normal and that you were going to get past that and your future was as bright as it is today?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Did you actually believe that in that moment? No. At that moment, you live moment to moment. I'll be honest.

I didn't know what to think that was going to happen next year. When you're in that type of desperation, you're literally living moment to moment.

I had to lay in bed and just tell myself, don't even think about the next minute. Think about where you are at this second.

Because if I thought about the next minute, it was too scary. So it was that survival mode, you know, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like none of my needs are being met.

And I was also very ill at the time, too. I had a lot of health issues and I couldn't go to the doctor.

That was just not a thing. That was even a possibility. So. It was, it was just surviving, it was just getting through the day.

And that's all I thought about. So I didn't think about the first moments I thought this really stinks, because I actually came from a household where my husband was making a lot of money, and I was living comfortably to nothing.

And it was, it was very disruptive. And so going backwards to almost nothing was harder than, than I think starting at nothing.

And then once I was down to the bottom, and I kept thinking, where is the bottom, the bottom kept feeling like it was getting lower and lower and lower.

And where is the bottom? That bottom started pulling up as soon as I got that first job. And then the next job was at $12 an hour.

And then the next job was $50,000 in salary. And that's when I started actually improving my life. And that took, I would say, nine months.

I mean, that, when you have nothing, it's pretty significant.

 

Matt Zaun 

So when you were at your lowest of low, well, I I know if I'd say that. I don't know what your lowest to low was, but the moment I'm talking about is you making $7.10 an hour.

So when you were at that specific moment and everything else going on around you, the health challenges, family complications, all the stuff that you're mentioning, did that cut into the fabric of your identity?

Where were you from an identity perspective? What stories were you telling? I often believe that some of the most powerful stories we share are the ones we tell ourselves.

So what were you internally, what were the stories that you were telling yourself? That you're a fighter, that you're a survivor, that you have that immigrant story.

So you have the great, you come from a family that just pulls themselves up from the bootstraps. What stories were you telling yourself to kind of get you through this time?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

I think the story was, I'm not supposed to be here. Like what happened? I have a college degree. I did everything right.

I was loyal and faithful to my husband. I was like, I How am I even here? And I think because I didn't identify with that, that really helped also.

Like, this isn't me, and I need to figure it out. And it is something that can be figured out.

It might not be overnight. But I kept telling myself, you're not dumb. You're not the smartest person in the world, but you're not dumb.

Let's figure this out. And so I just, I started writing things down. And I think that's why we're so successful now as a firm, because it was all about financials for me also.

was all about numbers back then. I would literally create Excel spreadsheets of my life and see from day to day how things would change, either go down or go up.

And so I started really seeing what I needed on a very granular level. And at that point, the granular level was really important.

 

Matt Zaun

So I think it's wonderful that you're telling yourself you're not dumb, right? And that you don't Now, I mentioned that because you did bring up the story regarding your abuse, right?

So someone was clearly not treating you well, right? So to put it, and I'm sorry to bring this up, but I know there is someone listening that they may be going through a similar experience that you went through, and they are telling themselves that they're dumb because of the experience that someone else, an aggressor, has put on them the victim.

So if that is someone's internal story, what words of wisdom would you give to that person?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Yeah, and I went through that too. So I stayed, I think, in the marriage for a lot longer because I was being manipulated that this was my doing.

It was my fault. That he had to yell at me and had to do these things because I wasn't listening to him.

I'm like, those are all like big red flags. Isolating me from family and friends, telling me that, you know, embarrassment.

He cursing me in front of people, like all the things, and then it became like very threatening also. So when he realized that I was getting a heads up and I was like, this isn't working for me, he started threatening me.

And so I was afraid for my life. And I realized that I was staying with him because I was afraid of what he would do if I would leave.

And then I realized why? That's crazy to stay with someone because you're afraid to leave them. Like I was afraid he was going to kill me.

Um, so yeah, I, I just, um, I had a, I was planning on leaving him. was 39 years old and then I had a stroke.

Like I said, I had all the things I had a stroke. And I think that actually changed things because then I, then I went into survival mode of I, um, this is going to kill me.

And my daughter, I can't leave my daughter to this fate. So I think the mother instinct kicked in more than anything else.

But I have to start making ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Plans to get out of this. And then, of course, he made it extremely painful for me to do so financially.

And there were like, there was a lot going on, you know, the divorce took years, and then he kept coming after me and trying to take my child away.

And like, this had been an ongoing thing for like 10 years. But it was just, I knew that I had to survive for my daughter, even if I wasn't believing in myself.

for a long time, I didn't believe in myself. And I did think I was ugly, stupid, old, unreliable. I don't belong here.

I had like all those thoughts in my mind for a long time. But I had to keep fighting those thoughts, because I didn't want my daughter to live like that.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow. How old was your daughter at the time?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

She was in fourth grade. So what does that mean? Oh, gosh, not eight, nine, eight or nine.

 

Matt Zaun 

My daughter's in fifth grade.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

So

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow. Okay. So you finally got that job. You had mentioned $7,000, $10,000 an hour to $12,000 an hour to $50,000 annually.

And then where did you go from there? So you're making $50,000, I guess at that moment, you're thinking big bucks, right?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

You finally made it. Where did you go from there?

 

Matt Zaun 

Yeah.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

And actually, when I was making a $7,000 and $12,000 an hour, I was getting a little bit of child support and alimony.

And then it was so funny, because then he stopped paying me child support, and I didn't go after him, because I was terrified of him.

So I wanted to make it without, like, I did not want to have anything to do with him whatsoever.

So at $50,000, I started as an invoicing clerk. So I was just doing invoicing for a company. And I decided that I'm going to approach the guy who's my boss and say, what else do you need me to do?

Anything you need to do, I can figure it out and do it. Just give it to me. So I started doing that with my boss, the direct manager to me, and asking him for more and more responsibility.

So he kept giving me more. And apparently, I'm good at technology and software and numbers. And I never knew I was, because I never knew I was good at anything, because I was told, especially when I was married, I wasn't good at anything.

So apparently, I was really good at some of these things. So I went to the CFO at one point, and started asking him, you know, what can I do?

What more can you give me? And I became close to the CFO because of that. And he was a great guy.

And at one point, he fired the controller. And I found out and I walked into his office that morning and said, whatever she was doing for you, just give it to me and I'll figure it out.

This is like a huge company. So he gave me like more things. Now, obviously, I'm not going to be a controller.

I'm an invoicing clerk. Um, but, um, but he believed in me and he just gave me stuff. And I was like, I don't know if I'm doing this right or not, but I'm just going to figure it out and just work on it and do it.

The great thing is that nowadays we've got Google and YouTube and like all these things that you can look up.

So, and that's kind of what I was doing. And that worked really well for a while. And when I told him, I said, look, I'd really like to be in sales.

I used to be in sales rather than in the invoicing clerk. Can you move me into sales? And he offered me a $25,000 raise of a 50% raise to stay.

So at that point, and then I was making like 75 grand, um, a couple like that was happened for like a year or two.

And then he left the company when he left the company, that's when things started going downward for me again.

Um, and I believe that the new CFO, uh, I never was able to establish the same kind of relationship with him.

And he was younger than me at that point. I was getting closer to 50. They were. were trying to get a younger workforce in, and they started demoting me slowly.

And that actually was killing me because I had always worked so hard and took on so much more responsibility that getting demoted and degrading my salary was actually really, really upsetting for me.

But in hindsight, it was actually a blessing because if I had stayed there, would have been just like staying there and kind of like living a mediocre life, right?

I would have just been okay, but it forced me to start thinking about alternatives. And so they demoted me, and I think in 2018, 19 was when they got me down to like 40,000.

And that is poverty levels for a family in the state of Maryland. So I couldn't even get into, I couldn't even get real health insurance.

I had to go on Medicaid, which is very annoying. So I started looking for the work. No one was interviewing, no one was biting, and at that point, I met my now fiancé, and I'm sitting with him in a cafe, and he said, why don't you start your own business in late 2018, and I was like, doing what?

This is ridiculous. I don't know what I would do, and he said, why not accounting, bookkeeping, and I thought about it for a little while.

He sent me this little course on how to start your own business, and so I started looking at that course each evening, on weekends, at lunchtime, like every minute that I had to spare, I started going through this course, and by January, as I was wrapping up the course, it said to send out this big email campaign to your LinkedIn connections and see if anybody wants to do business with you, and someone called me, and I got my first client, and I closed my first client, and I had no idea how to do bookkeeping.

All right, so there's so much to unpack with what you said.

 

Matt Zaun 

right, so let's, I just, I want to go back to, you said something that I think is important, and I want to understand.

And the mindset of this. So you did mention word for word, you said there were times that you felt ugly, old, stupid.

So I'm guessing you are thinking these thoughts while you're at your house or your home at that moment. But then also you said when you're at work, you figured it out, right?

So you have the CFO, you were doing all these different things, you're grinding, right? Like you're working very hard.

The controller left, you're like, I'll figure it out, right? So then through all of that, you get a 50% raise from $50,000 to $75,000.

So here's what I want to talk about is you had an element of negativity while you were at home.

You're speaking, I mean, those are severe words, right? You're internalizing all of these different things on you're here, right?

You're less than, if you will. But then for whatever reason, when you're at work, it's almost like... you became a different person.

That was the figure it out person. So why do you think that there were almost two lives going on where you're a go-getter, you're a doer, you can get stuff done, you could figure it out, but then also internalizing, you know, I'm stupid, I'm old, I'm all these different things.

Just explain that to me a little bit more.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Yeah, it's really weird. I think that we, a lot of us do it just because we're a go-getter and we work really hard.

And I think a lot of times go-getters that work really hard always in the back of their minds somewhere.

They think that they're still lazy. I still think like every day, did I do enough today? And I fall into that trap.

So it is almost like living a double life. For me, I loved going to work because everything was just crashing and burning.

was like a dumpster fire in my entire life. My dad was dying at this point too. My ex kept coming after me for something.

kept getting like all these subpoenas. He says he- He was sending subpoenas to my work. It was just like, it was insane.

And so this dumpster fire that I have going on. Meanwhile, my kid is now in middle school, and she's also starting to have issues with kids, and like, this is now affecting her.

And so I go to work, and it was like my safe space, where I can compartmentalize, forget everything else that I was doing, everything else that was going on in my life, and just work and just grind.

And I found, it was always meditative for me. I found that it was, it was, I know it sounds crazy, but going to work for me was relaxing, compared to the rest of my life.

And it was the only constant. And there was consistency, there was routine, it was constant. And I wasn't allowed to think about all these things, because then I couldn't perform.

So I had to shut it all off. And I think that's what helped.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow. It's like, it's just wild. Occupational therapy, there is such a thing.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Like, I almost feel like sometimes when we're really struggling, maybe we're not in ofирован好anted month, my Interesting. All right, say that again.

 

Matt Zaun 

So often when we're struggling, we're not engaged enough in something?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Sometimes. I'm not saying everything. And like, you know, mental illness is real. And I knew that I was suffering with depression, suicidal thoughts, like all the things.

I knew that I was suffering with that, not because I had mental illness, but because I had a situation that was making me suffer, which is different, right?

Right. So having a situation that's making you suffer, it's a lot easier than to say, I can compartmentalize that and find something normal in my life.

Before that, when I was married, I would go out into the garden and I became an avid gardener. a master gardener, a master naturalist.

I would, you know, be outside because that's where I found my Zen, my meditation. And it's still hard physical labor out in the garden.

And now at work, hard mental labor, but I have. I've loved working in some way, either physically or mentally or both.

And so having to go to a job, even if I didn't always love the job, it just gave me normalcy.

Everybody else seemed pretty normal there compared to my life. Wow.

 

Matt Zaun 

Yeah, I can understand that. Wow. All right. So then we get to 2018 and you, I believe you mentioned you were at a cafe with your now fiance and you were prompted to start your own business.

So you're going on Google, you're trying to figure out like anything that you, everything you possibly can about accounting.

And then you did what you had mentioned regarding the LinkedIn piece. You're sending out messages. You finally land your first client.

And then I'm guessing that was a pretty celebratory day, right? You landed a client. What was going through your head when that happened?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

That you can do this, you can build on this? Take us through that. Well, my fiance was great. He was so supportive.

He's, this is his fifth business that he owns now. So he. I think I got lucky. But also, if I had met him maybe five years ago, I don't know if I would have been open to do anything.

I was just desperate. I wanted to fix the problem. And I didn't know how to fix the problem. So I was trying anything.

And he was very supportive. And he was like, yeah, just do this. And here's a little course on how to start your own business.

And if I had a question, he would answer it. And of course, I was trying really hard not to bug him.

It was a new relationship. So I didn't want to mess up the relationship. But at the same time, I was like, trying to do something differently.

And we laugh about it now, because I said to him, what did you think I was going to do?

He sent me that when he told me to start my own business. He's like, I don't know, but I didn't think you were gonna do much.

So I land my first client. And it was like, yay, and then panic. I'm like, I don't even have an engagement letter.

I didn't take the credit card payment. I completely screwed. I up on my pricing. I did a full four.

40 hours of like a cleanup job, because as soon as I got his accounting, and I started comparing that to YouTube videos, because I didn't know how to do bookkeeping.

So I started comparing it to YouTube videos. I was like, there's something significantly and seriously wrong. There's a lot of negatives here.

And then I used, there's, there's so much out there. Hector Garcia is actually has a great cleanup YouTube video.

So I'd go, I'd listen to like one phrase of what he would say, put it on pause and then figure out what I was doing in the book.

So I did this entire huge job for free, basically, and just started charging him for like the monthly stuff, but I didn't charge him anything for cleaning it up.

Because I didn't even know I needed to do that at that time. So and that's normal. When you start a business, you're gonna lose a lot of money in the beginning until you figure things out.

And that's totally okay. But he's still my client, which is crazy. Awesome.

 

Matt Zaun 

Yeah.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

And I just, you know, just started working with him. And then a couple months later, I got another client.

It was slow. It took me eight months to get four clients, not even enough to cover my mortgage payment.

But at that point, it was getting too much to still commute, work full time, and start and try to, you know, build a business.

And like my first thought was, I'm just going to do something on the side. And then that quickly became where it was overwhelming and not enough money to do on the side.

Too much time, not enough money. I'm still a single mom. have to spend time with my child. have to do homework.

have to get home at a certain time. I have to put her to bed, all the things. So in August, the month I turned 50, in August 2019, I waltzed in and turned in my computer and said bye to my job, figuring I'm going all in, which was another huge risk.

But I figured at that point, I'm just going to, like, I'm going to have to figure it out. I got four clients.

I'll need to figure it out. And by November. November, I closed another eight clients. had 11 clients by then, and by January 2020, I was making more money than I ever had in my life.

Still not a lot, but I was making about $100,000. So before I hit record, did I hear you correct that you said you brought in a million dollars before you actually had a logo and a website?

Did I hear that correct? $2 million.

 

Matt Zaun 

$2 million. So you hit $2 million before a logo and a website. Okay. So I just want people to hear that because I think often we get hung up on such minor details.

We forget what truly matters. I just, I want everyone to hear that. Okay. So paint a picture for where you are today.

We talked a lot about destitute, poverty. So where are you today? Give us the picture of where your business is right now.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Yeah. Crazy. So last year to 2024, we ended up at over 2 million in sales. We have 12. 12.

Employees at this point. I have a salesperson now. I still do sales with the salesperson. We kept, what was great about doing my own sales for all that time is that I really started listening to what people wanted.

And that's where all of these other services were born and why we do things the way we do things.

Because a lot of times I talked to an entrepreneur and they'd say, I just really don't understand what my numbers mean or what I need to do to change things.

So I started really learning and focusing on fractional CFO services. Everything is out there that you can learn. I do know now, because we have a personality testing and use consultants, I'm actually wired to learn things and to take risks.

So not everybody's wired to do that, and that's totally fine. But, so we've got 12 employees. We do fractional CFO services.

We have people, and I feel like if I think backwards. Where I came from, I have folks that run companies that are upwards of $30 million that use us as their CFOs and look and want my advice, which to me, I think is still kind of crazy, but we can see patterns of what's really working and also we practice what we preach.

So I've been able to build our firm and scale higher appropriately, be profitable, know exactly how much cash I need, what's trending, I do my own projections, and that's what we do for clients as well.

So yeah, we just keep growing. We hit the Inc. 5,000 for this year. We have grown 525% over three years.

Only a numbers person would really know that.

 

Matt Zaun

So good job. That's awesome. Fantastic.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Yeah, I'm sorry.

 

Matt Zaun 

Go ahead.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

No, that was it. Yeah. And so it's been insane, but now we've gotten... My deal is now that I need to hire people that are even better than me and just keep hiring the best and the best and the best, and that's what we do.

 

Matt Zaun 

We just keep hiring really good people. That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for sharing your story, for being so vulnerable with us.

Really appreciate it. I appreciate this conversation. A lot of takeaways. Anyways, there's three in particular that I really appreciate you mentioning.

The first is when you said keep moving forward. You need to take one step at a time. You mentioned that moment to moment.

I think that's so important. It's one thing to say it. It's another thing to actually do it. So anyone out there that is going through tremendous pain right now, just one step at a time.

Really important. The second thing you said, I think there's a lot to this. I'm looking at this more from like a philosophical perspective, and there's an element of just understanding the psychology behind this.

But sometimes when you're struggling, or sometimes when you're struggling, you're not engaged enough. Right. So that really, it got me to think about how when we struggle, is there something that we're doing that can pull us out of that space?

Right. And I think that's so important that we don't just continue to have a mind loop of that negativity, that desperation.

Like, what else can we do to get outside that?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Because we desperately need a little bit of relaxation. You had mentioned working hard at work for you was that relaxation, right?

 

Matt Zaun 

But something outside of that situation we're currently going through. And then the third and final piece that I don't want people to miss is you said being engaged in the sales process forced you to listen to what people wanted.

I think this is so important because I work with so many CEOs that they don't want to do sales, right?

Like, they hire other people to do that. They maybe want to be a little bit involved in, like, the process and from, like, sitting-at-a-table conversation perspective, but they don't actually want to be engaged and do that.

But yet, they'll try to build products and services that... So I think it's really important to, yes, we need to be great speakers.

I think communication, strategic storytelling is incredibly important. That's why I'm so passionate about what I do. But there's also something to said on listening to people to really try to figure out what exactly do they want.

So I think those three nuggets were really important. Thank you so much. I appreciate the conversation. If someone wants to get more information on you, what you do, or they want to reach out to you for your services, where's the best place they can go to get that information?

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Sure. So we created a page specifically for your audience. It's under ZacharinConsulting.com slash S as in stories with traction, S-W-T.

So stories with traction. I love it.

 

Matt Zaun 

Thank you so much. I appreciate you doing that. I will include that link in the show notes. People could just click and go from there.

 

Natalia Zacharin (Zacharin Consulting)

Thank you again. I really appreciate this conversation. Thank you so much, Matt. was great.