Twenty five years into running Fulling Management and Accounting in Olathe, Kansas, Rusty Fulling has seen the full arc of small business pain. Owners projecting four million in sales who haven't taken a paycheck in months. Products that lose a hundred dollars every time they sell. The Ponzi shuffle of running new projects to cover old ones. Rusty's work as a fractional CFO is about pulling founders out of that cycle. In this conversation he also opens up about the hospital visit that pushed him to start his own firm and the mission trip that changed how he ran it.
What You'll Hear
- Why doubling sales won't fix a business that loses money on every product it sells
- The fractional CFO move that breaks the Ponzi cycle of funding old projects with new ones
- How a hospital visit and lunch with a colleague pushed Rusty to start his firm in 2000
- Why year ten felt like burnout, and the friend who said the mission is the business he already had
- The shift from hiring family and church friends to a real multi step interview process
- How DISC and the Working Genius model reshaped Rusty's team and sales conversations
- Going deep not wide with 15 to 20 new clients a year instead of running and gunning
- Celebrating milestones in the middle, including a stretch limo ride in downtown Kansas City
- Invest, incorporate, invite: the three part playbook for culture in a remote first company
Top line pride, bottom line pain
Rusty opens with the pattern he still sees every week. An owner announces their revenue is jumping from one million to two, or projecting four million for the year. Sounds like a win. Then Rusty asks a follow up and the real picture shows up. The owner hasn't taken a paycheck in months. Vendors are stacked up. Customers are slow to pay. Sometimes the product they are most excited about is losing a hundred dollars every time it goes out the door.
That is the gap between top line and bottom line, and it is where Fulling Management and Accounting spends most of its time. Rusty frames the firm's promise in three steps. Get clarity. Grow profits. Gain peace of mind. Peace of mind is the one that keeps owners up at night, and it is the one they talk about most after the engagement is underway.
Sam connects it to a former business where a partner was celebrated as a great salesman. The trick was that he was buying at X and selling at Y, and Y was lower than X. Rusty smiles and finishes the thought. You can run that kind of thing on credit cards for a while. You fund the materials for one project with the deposit from the next. Ponzi catches up with you eventually, though, and there is only so far that math can stretch. Bringing in a fractional CFO is often the moment someone finally says out loud that the cycle is not a business.
From Pioneer Hi Bred to Lotus 1 2 3
Rusty's path into accounting started on jobsites, not at a desk. His dad was an electrical contractor, so Rusty grew up digging ditches and pulling wire on new McDonald's restaurants and hotels. In high school he landed an internship doing bookkeeping at Pioneer Hi Bred, a big seed company in the farming industry. His reaction at the time is still vivid. He could not believe people got paid to work in an office.
College turned the glimpse into a direction. Business classes and accounting classes clicked. An internship at a petroleum company in Oklahoma City turned into three or four years of real experience, and one quirky advantage. Rusty knew how Lotus 1 2 3 worked before most of the team did. They treated him like the next Bill Gates for being the kid who understood spreadsheets.
His first job out of college was in Kansas City, at a property management company that was outsourcing its accounting and wanted to bring it in house. He handled both the books and a fair amount of the IT, including point to point networking in the dial up era. Years later he flipped the script entirely. The outsourced work he once pulled in house is exactly the work his firm now takes on for clients as a fractional back office.
Along the way he tried programming, web development, paper routes, and construction. None of them stuck the way numbers did, but Rusty credits all of it for giving him range. If you pick one path and never leave it, he says, you end up with a thinner set of stories to draw on when you are trying to help a business owner make sense of theirs.
The hospital visit that launched the firm
The Fulling Management and Accounting origin story is not a victory lap. It is a warning. Just before 2000, Rusty was working at a CPA firm, logging the kind of hours the industry treats as normal. The cost showed up in his body. He developed heartburn bad enough that he ended up in the hospital, with doctors floating the word cancer while they ran tests.
Coming out of that scare, he had lunch with a colleague who said something that landed hard. I can't believe you haven't started your own company. Rusty says he had not really considered it before, but the affirmation from someone he trusted was enough to spark the idea. In April 2000 he launched with three small clients and a bookkeeper he hired on day one.
Then came the quiet part. The firm went an entire year without signing a new client. On paper that sounds like a failure. Rusty's retelling is different. There was real freedom in it. He got time with his wife and with kids who were then three and five. The family ate closer to beans and rice than to steak, and some of that was planned, but even the unplanned parts came with a kind of calm. Nobody missed a paycheck, including the employee he had taken on.
Rusty offers a warning to listeners in that stage. Your body will tell you when something is off. He mentions a business leader who ended up in the ER with heart palpitations only to learn the real issue was that he had not slept well in eight months. Fatigue, depression, and constant illness are often the data showing up before the spreadsheet catches on.
Year ten, the mission trip, and a new trajectory
By year ten, Rusty was not where his original business plan said he would be. The hypothetical billion dollar version had not materialized, and he was drifting into a kind of low grade burnout. A mission trip to Honduras lit something up. Coming home, he and his wife talked seriously about selling everything and moving into full time missions work.
A friend in a peer group stopped him. Maybe the mission God has for you is the business he's already given you. Rusty calls it a snap of the fingers moment. Missions could happen through the business, not instead of it. From that point forward the curve of the company changed. He points to that conversation as the turning point from puttering along to intentional growth.
That reframing shows up in how Rusty serves today. He has travelled with World Vision, including a trip to Ethiopia to visit the team drilling wells for clean water, work he and his clients have raised money toward for years. It also shaped the firm's rhythm at home. The company does group service events, raises money for clean water as a team, and builds community work into its annual gatherings in Kansas City.
Sam lands on the same theme from his own angle. His takeaway for any founder is that the mission has to be bigger than the task, because the hard parts do not get done without it. Rusty agrees and pushes it one step further. The mission has to be more than a number and more than self. If it serves others, the owner tends to get lifted too.
Hiring, firing, and the move from family to fit
Rusty is candid about what his early hiring looked like. His wife would fill in as a receptionist. He hired his brother's contacts and the people he went to church with, basically anyone who seemed trustworthy. There was almost no screening on whether the person could do the role or fit the culture. The result was a lot of part time turnover and a leader who had not yet learned how to lead.
Today the process looks nothing like that. The firm runs a multi step interview, usually inside a two week window, with clear criteria for role fit, culture fit, and communication style. Once someone is hired, the first ninety days are very deliberate. They use success statements, short sentences a team member should be able to say at 30, 60, and 90 days. Things like, I have mastered this task, or I am now leading this process. If someone cannot say it at the right mark, the conversation happens early.
Sam pushes on the hardest question in hiring. How do you know when to keep coaching and when to accept that it is not a fit? Rusty's honest answer is that a lot of the early separations came from leadership gaps on his side, not character gaps in the employee. Better interviews, better onboarding, and better language about what the role actually requires have pushed his retention far past where it was in the first decade.
He also leans hard on assessments. DISC is the firm's go to for communication style, giving the team a shared vocabulary for how different people want to receive information. The Working Genius model from Patrick Lencioni helped them sort the team by work style, including a realization that Rusty himself was the outlier on galvanizing, the part of the work that rallies a team up the hill. Rather than force him into a different lane, the team promoted a COO to run day to day operations. That visionary and integrator split freed Rusty to do the work he is wired for and gave someone else a role that fit them just as well.
Go deep not wide, and sell to communication styles
Fulling Management and Accounting does not try to win a thousand clients. Rusty says 15 to 20 new clients a year is a healthy pace, with average engagements running four to five years and some stretching the full 25. That cadence shapes everything about how they market and sell. There is no running and gunning, no one week onboarding of strangers. Relationships come first, usually through peer groups and long running business advisory round tables.
The sales conversation itself is filtered by communication style. Rusty will walk a prospect through DISC before an engagement begins. High D prospects want fast, direct, price and terms. High I prospects want the personal story and time to connect. High C prospects want detail, documentation, and a month to think. Knowing which one is in front of you keeps a salesperson from taking it personally when a deal does not close in the room.
Sam extends the picture. In B2B, a single meeting can have a high D, a high I, and a high C all sitting at the same table. The job becomes sorting out who actually needs to be there for which stage. Let the D leave once the terms are clear. Keep the I for relationship. Walk the C through the paperwork. It is the kind of read that rarely gets taught explicitly in sales training, but saves deals that would otherwise stall.
Rusty will also tell a prospect directly when the fit is off. If someone's style is extreme enough that his team will struggle to serve them well, he says so. He frames it not as a cop out but as stewardship of both sides. Running a fractional CFO practice as a long term relationship means you cannot afford to bring on a client you will resent in 18 months.
Remote since 2020, and the three part culture playbook
The firm went fully remote during COVID in 2020 and never invited the team back to the office. That makes culture a design problem, not an accident of being in the same building. Rusty describes three commitments the company built to keep people connected.
Invest in your team weekly. Every team member joins a staff meeting that includes shout outs from coworkers and from clients. Rusty quotes a line he picked up recently. Encouragement is the adrenaline of the soul. Simple and specific public thanks, he says, is one of the cheapest and most powerful tools a remote leader has.
Incorporate fun and service. They run virtual parties he was skeptical of at first, including scavenger hunts that pull in kids and spouses. They also pair the fun with service. The team has run a virtual 6K for World Vision to raise money for clean water, and they build group volunteering into the calendar.
Invite everyone in town. Once a year the team flies into Kansas City for a three day event. There is family time, strategic planning, and a community service day at a local charity. It is not a sales offsite dressed up as team building. It is a deliberate investment in being a team that happens to live all over the country.
Rusty also pushes owners to celebrate in the middle of a run, not just at the start and end. He tells a story from an earlier era of the company when he rented a stretch limo and took the team to a big lunch in downtown Kansas City to mark a milestone. Years later, team members still bring it up. The lesson is that big wins deserve disproportionate celebration, because the middle of the work is where motivation usually dies.
About Rusty Fulling
Rusty Fulling is the founder and CEO of Fulling Management and Accounting in Olathe, Kansas. He launched the firm in April 2000 after a hospital scare pushed him out of a long hours CPA job. Fulling Management and Accounting provides fractional CFO, accounting, and bookkeeping work with a stated promise to help business leaders get clarity, grow profits, and gain peace of mind. The team is about 20 people, working remotely across the United States. Fulling Management and Accounting