We spoke with Deborah Harris, Co-Founder of Grow CFO about her entrepreneurial journey

How did you come across Genius Group and what inspired you to join the community?

My husband Jeremy and I attended an Entrepreneur Summit where Roger James Hamilton was a speaker and signed up for two programs - Crystal Circle and iLab. Later down the track, we provided some investor funds for the Genius Cafe in Sanur to help get the model up and running. I attended the Impact investor retreat at Tau Game Lodge where there were some initial conversations around purchasing the Lodge. At the retreat, we discussed ways that the funding could be raised. The following year, Jeremy was asked to be Chief Financial Officer of Entrepreneur Resorts and we helped get the resort group listed on the Tropex stock exchange. Our company and Jeremy as CFO have been working with Genius Group training their teams in financial mastery and providing courses through the Entrepreneur Summer School. We have also continued in Crystal Circle mentoring.

What was your experience in Crystal Circle?  Did the mentoring benefit you and your business? 

Prior to joining the genius group my husband and his business partner had a successful accounting practice. We were proactive in the accounting industry and early adopters of technology and could see the industry needed massive change to be solving the real problems for clients and not just completing tax forms. We had around 20 on the team both in Australia and internationally based.

Company Tax is something very few people are delighted to pay. The real problem businesses face is poor cash flow and an inability to translate their profits into business value. We wanted to shake things up and move away from completing tax forms as we knew that was being increasingly automated and provides no real value to the customer. We felt the entrepreneurial mindset had skipped the accounting industry even though there was an increasing plethora of platforms and software that made it readily available to advisors to translate numbers into actions for their customers. We believed an entrepreneurial approach would benefit us, our customers and our industry.

A few years into our journey with the Genius Group, we had built our virtual chief financial officer business as a side business which was of sufficient size for us to consider selling out of the accounting firm and focussing more on strategy development work at the CFO level. The greatest impact being our understanding of natural talents and working with them.

Where are you and your business at today and what are your future plans?

We were able to manage a strategic sale of the accounting practice and made our side business the main focus. Since doing this, our business has grown considerably, and our investment team has increased to enable us to fund and co-develop some of the world's best technologies. We are working with amazing entrepreneurs making a substantial difference in our world and actively working to address the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. We actively measure the impact we make - through our own philanthropy and through the growth of our customers.

We have recently seen a 49% uplift from the previous quarter, and the quarter just ended with Grow CFO actively supporting Genius Group as they listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE American: GNS).

We are regularly bringing great value to our customers and love it when a business owner says "I've been in business for 20 years and this is the first time I've ever really understood my numbers and what to do next." We believe that the number crunching side of the work will all be replaced by AI but the real difference we make is the confidence that someone who understands the numbers can interpret them into next actions... eventually, this too will be intelligence-driven and we aim to be part of that change. We now consider ourselves to be more of an education company than a financial services company.