Focus. Perseverance. Drive. Kirk W. McLaren knew that he would build these qualities in Chung Moo Doe, the martial arts school he decided to join when he was a freshman in high school. But he couldn’t have imagined how he’d need to exercise them just to get in the door. “It was a particularly unique, intense school that required its pupils to earn the money for the classes themselves, without relying on their parents,” Kirk recounts today. “So I put my head together with my two buddies, Jerry and Alejandro, to figure out how we were going to do it.”
The boys lived in Texas, where the hot weather meant the lawns needed to be cut eight months out of the year. Like countless kids their age across America, they decided to make their fortune mowing lawns. But unlike most kids, Kirk and his friends decided to take their idea and run as far as they could with it.
Three years later, they had built a business of 75 employees, 1,500 customers, $1.2 million in annual revenue, and 12 percent profitability. “We focused on high densities within neighborhoods to maximize efficiency, so that each truck transported three crews of three people,” he recounts. “We had no formal knowledge about business concepts like return on assets, but we intuitively understood how to reduce our operating costs to get ahead. And we developed a system for marketing such that we actually made money for delivering our flyers. Our customer cost of acquisition was zero, so we could get as many customers as we wanted, and the systems allowed us to deliver superior customer service at market price.”
As Kirk and his friends approached graduation, family members helped coach and guide them through the process of valuing and selling the business. It went for $864 thousand, and Kirk found himself able to easily cover the cost of college. “That was a real high-five moment,” he recalls. “When we closed the deal and the money came into our bank accounts, it was like, wow! I love this country.”
Now the founder and CEO of Foresight CFO, Kirk and his team work to help businesses across the country achieve those high-five moments for themselves and their employees. He launched the company in 2010 after several successful growth and turnaround ventures cultivated his reputation in helping business owners identify and overcome financial roadblocks. And now, helping business owners understand the numbers between business decisions is ingrained in their approach. Many companies were still struggling in the wake of the financial crisis, which had disrupted their normal cycle of acquisition and delivery.
“I saw that small businesses often didn’t have the resources to bring in a top-talent CFO, nor did they have enough work to warrant a full-time hire for the role,” he recalls. “Foresight fills that role. We set our sights on becoming THE small business strategic financial management solution. I wanted to build a team of seasoned, expert CFOs and accountants that could learn from each other and use those lessons to the benefit of our clients. Our mission is to help business owners and their employees thrive, providing the foresight to see down the road and put things in context to enable better business decisions and providing the roadmap to achieve the goals they want to achieve for their business and their team. This way, business owners are making growth decision with foresight instead of gut instincts.”
Foresight serves small, privately-held, for-profit businesses that tend to range in size from $1 million to $20 million, though several clients exceed $100 million and some are pre-revenue start-ups. “From profitability, to cash flow, to growth plan decisions, to valuation, small businesses have their challenges,” Kirk points out. “Our CFOs work with business owners and leadership teams to address these challenges, and they’re driven by those high-five moments where they really nail it. We love when we can truly connect those individuals to the story the numbers tell us so they make better decisions that lead to tremendous success.”
Foresight is now a team of CFOs and accountants serving customers nationwide. It began scaling in earnest in 2014 when it created its Strategic Financial Management System™, a program that allows CFOs of various background operating in different business contexts to adapt its features to the unique needs of each customer with the benefit of proven approaches and an internal CFO peer network. CFOs can utilize the application to handle various stages of planning, budget profit modeling, and assessment at the outset of the year, then go into month-to-month implementation while monitoring financial results and year-end compliance work, allowing them to ditch buggy Excel forecasting tools for an automated application that allows them to easily assess the outcomes of small and large tweaks to a plan. “How would a client’s forecast look if we increased their production by five percent?” Kirk poses. “What if we reduced costs by one percent or expanded to a new geography or ramped up sales by thirty percent? Our program models the month-to-month profit impact for years, the effect on cash flow, and structural issues that might arise. In this way, we use budget profit modeling to help business leaders make better decisions by bringing the number story back to the operational requirements for implementation.”
The average CFO at Foresight has 25 years of experience and is responsible for a profit center, compensated by salary and a bonus percentage of their center’s performance. Each CFO supports between six and twelve clients, taking face-to-face meetings several times a year and conducting the rest of the work virtually. Each Foresight CFO completes a formal internal certification program that is constantly updated with the notes and observations of the company’s employees, ensuring that the materials are rapidly learning and evolving with the changing terrain of the various industries and sectors Foresight serves. This standardized yet agile methodology is allowing Foresight to expand its footprint nationwide. “We impact businesses by achieving clarity,” Kirk says. “We answer the question, where are we? Where’s the industry? How do we compare? Where are the opportunities to really be in the top percentile? With these answers, businesses can calibrate their plans and ensure they’re always on the best track.”
Kirk’s skill and acumen in business were first fostered long ago while growing up in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, where his mother was a school teacher and his father was a regional sales executive who sold optical equipment like microscopes and grinding machines. He remembers his father’s passion for community involvement, even temperament, and willingness to drive six hours to be at Kirk’s baseball games. “He was the top sales executive in the country for his business multiple times, but he never talked about that,” Kirk recalls. “When he came home in the evenings, he was just dad.”
His mother always fought for what she believed in, especially when it came to education and the wellbeing of children. She routinely led the charge for community improvements, spurring projects to fix the playground or initiate the use of chlorine in pools. “My parents lived by a philosophy of simplicity,” Kirk recalls. “They lived modestly and just focused on raising my older brother, younger sister, and me. I had a very stable childhood without any trauma.”
Kirk’s childhood was characterized by a sense of freedom, where days were spent playing outside. Though the games weren’t always the most responsible, and sometimes included train jumping, homework always got done without a moment’s discussion, and Kirk did well in his coursework and hardly ever missed a day of school. Slightly introverted, he had a group of close friends and ran track in high school. “While I definitely wasn’t the kid who was friends with everyone, I still remember the time the student body voted to send me on a trip to Washington, DC,” he says. “It was a contest held by our Congressional representative, and I had to go around to different classes giving a presentation on why I wanted to go. I was really honored to win the popular vote even though most kids didn’t know me.”
It was an incremental but important step forward in Kirk’s development as a leader. So, too, was his participation in Civil Air Patrol beginning in his freshman year of high school. In war time, the group patrols the coast with civilian aircraft, and in peace, it responds to small engine aircraft crashes and distress calls. The commitment included leadership programs at Lackland and Kirtland Air Force Bases.
More than anything else, however, Kirk’s high school experience was defined by his lawn mowing business. He, Jerry, and Alejandro mowed their first lawns as freshmen in high school, and by the end of that school year, they began hiring their first employees. Alejandro’s mother, Sharon, had a business background, and she proved instrumental in guiding the boys through the process of incorporating, getting an accountant, paying sales tax, and making sure their employees were properly certified. “Looking back, I think she did a lot more for us than I understood at the time,” Kirk says. “She had this old IBM computer that she used to develop a program to help us route customers and print out the order lists for the trucks.”
Kirk and his friends invested in five trucks and leased a house and five acres of land, which they used to operate the business and store their equipment. “It was a fast three years with so much going on, but my partners and I never fought,” Kirk recounts. “They both went on to become corporate lawyers, and we’re all successful now.”
The company was known for its reliable, quality service, and the three boys were known for the smart, scrappy way they ran their business. They caught the attention of the owner of a competing lawn business, and when he offered to buy them out, the boys saw it as the perfect exit. “It was a beautiful business, but at the end of the day, we knew the world had other things in store for us,” Kirk says. “Sharon helped us with the valuation, the price, and the contract, and we said goodbye to our first great business venture.”
With that, Kirk began his college career at Texas A&M, where he thought he might pursue an interest in physical therapy sparked by the medical training he underwent for the Civil Air Patrol. “Growing up, I didn’t have much mentoring when it came to career fields, so I didn’t know what was right for me,” he recalls. “But after that first lab, I knew physical therapy wasn’t a good match.” Nor was the university as a whole. Accustomed to the dynamic, fast-paced, challenging climate of his high school days, the relatively conservative and even-tempered environment at Texas A&M didn’t captivate his enthusiasm.
After three semesters, Kirk acknowledged the reality that he wanted to do something other than school. He had always been fiercely patriotic, so he enlisted in the army, much to his parents’ dismay. “It was the First Gulf War, and I had been deeply influenced watching Rambo while growing up,” he says with a smile. “I loved the culture, the sacrifice, the intensity. In the military, I got to put together a team to work through tough challenges. People came from all over, and it doesn’t matter who you are.”
The ground war was long over by the time Kirk finished basic and advanced training, so he was assigned to the Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to work with injured veterans and families. After several months in that capacity, he was transitioned into hospital ward management, where his talents were put to work handling operations and logistics. He finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland University College night program, with a focus on business. He then earned an International Business and Trade certificate at Georgetown University and an MBA from the Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University.
By 1996, Kirk finished his service and enrolled full-time in an International Relations and Economics masters program at Johns Hopkins University. It required fluency in a second language, so Kirk raced through the academics portion at an accelerated pace and then spent a year living in Venezuela. There, he taught English, learned Spanish, and met a captivating woman named Nayarit. “I went to Venezuela with only a backpack and came back with a wife,” he laughs. With $200 to his name, Kirk bought two wedding rings at a pawn shop for $100 each, and the pair got married in Austin, Texas in secret. “My parents had a heart attack when we told them,” says Kirk. “But it was absolutely the right thing to do. We’ve been married nineteen years, and she’s been there with me through it all. Through the ups and downs, she’s always had confidence in me that I’d figure out what I needed to do.”
Kirk and Nayarit started their lives together with nothing, moving to the DC metropolitan area so he could take a job as a Revenue Assurance Manager for a small telephone company in Bethesda. Many years later, Kirk would help that business owner sell the same company.
In 1999, he took a position as Senior Financial Analyst at NetCom Solutions International, a global telecom and data networks company operating out of Chantilly, Virginia. He helped build the business from $75 million to $275 million and then left as the dotcom bubble burst, taking a position as the Senior Finance Manager at the Universal Service Administrative Company managing the Universal Service Fund. “The $6 billion fund was created after the breakup of AT&T’s monopoly, when the company was no longer incentivized to harmonize service prices between rural and urban areas,” he recounts. “So telecom companies paid into this fund which helped deploy telephone and internet services to underserved areas. They asked me to jump into that and figure it out, becoming the director.”
After three years in that capacity, Kirk had gotten the project functioning smoothly, so he decided to seek a new challenge. In 2005, he was brought on by a for-profit management company for education nonprofits providing experiential programs for high school students. Through the next five years, he helped grow the company both organically and through acquisition from $35 million to $127 million in top line revenue, serving around 50,000 students across the nation that year. “It was a defining experience to have the opportunity to work with such a confident and dedicated team of people,” Kirk recalls. “Something about that environment was incredibly collaborative, and everyone felt free to express different ideas and learn from each other. The management team would meet, and even though many of us were like oil and water, we worked so well and openly together that we’d all come away thinking differently. Not every environment has that level of collaboration, and I try to mirror that with Foresight today.”
In 2009, Kirk was recognized by SmartCEO Magazine with a SmartCPA Award. By the time the company was sold in 2010, Kirk had been promoted to VP of Finance, essentially filling the CFO role. This paved the way for launching Foresight, marrying his entrepreneurial spirit with his excellence in finance to build a business providing classic service with a cutting-edge twist. The company then had a watershed moment in 2014 when Kirk became a financial management lecturer at the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies. “I had to convey complex concepts to students without a finance background, and learned how to break them down into teachable units,” he recounts. “I learned how to simplify and explain the logic of it. We now employ those same techniques with the management teams we work with, teaching them how to use a budget profit model to read a story and see a breakthrough. Learning how to communicate in this way has become invaluable.”
As a leader, Kirk is simple and deliberate. He coaches his team of CFOs through tasks and transactions they never thought they’d be a part of, ensuring that they’re learning and growing as experts. “If you’ve done your homework and made the best decision possible with your analysis, I’m okay if you make a mistake,” Kirk says. “But you have to do good work, and you have to learn from it. I have very high standards and can’t stand laziness.”
In advising young people entering the working world today, Kirk stresses the importance of giving each endeavor your all. “Don’t hold anything back,” he says. “Invest yourself fully, and be smart and deliberate. Think through things, but don’t be afraid of failure. If you go to work for somebody, put everything you have into it.” These values are imparted through the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, an organization that teaches entrepreneurship to students at schools with high dropout rates. “These kids come up with phenomenal products and compete at the local, regional, and national levels,” he says. “They learn that they’re capable of doing things—starting businesses, employing people, promoting, selling, succeeding. It’s a powerful lesson that really fits our narrative, so I enjoy supporting them.”
For his own kids—one son in high school, and another at West Point—he has always aimed to be a pillar of support. When his oldest son set his heart on attending a Catholic high school that was an hour and a half drive from their home when the traffic was light, Kirk and Nayarit committed to making the sprawling commute for three long years. Then, when their younger son wanted to go to the same school, they put their home up for rent and bought a townhouse behind the school.
Now, every morning, Kirk makes the short walk from that townhouse to the community gym, where he exercises to center himself for the day ahead. And on the way out, he always takes a moment of intentionality to observe the tree that stands in the middle of the walkway. “From season to season, and even with the passage of a single day, it changes,” he says. “Today it was a beautiful green summer tree thriving in the sunlight. Other times it’s rich with color, or bare in the cold, or wet with rain. The sky behind it is always changing too. It reminds me that things are in constant motion, guided by something that’s bigger than all of us. There’s a grander purpose out there, and I am humbled to consider it every morning before diving into the day, working toward that next high-five moment.”
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