Entrepreneur, Father and Financial Strategist
As a CEO or owner of a growing company, your business feels busy, you seem to be making money and you want to hire more people. But can you? How can you know with 100% confidence whether you can afford to hire another person…or not? How fast do they have to ramp up? What happens […]
Agency or service-based businesses commonly struggle with leaky profitability. These issues are eminently fixable and don’t need to spell bankruptcy. This article series examines five mistakes I see 95% of agency-type businesses make in their accounting. (Links to other parts in this series are at the end of this article.) You want to be able […]
Is your company’s profitability leaky? Ask yourself this: Can you see exactly how and where to improve it? This series of articles is examining five common mistakes that service-based businesses or agency-type firms make in tracking their profitability — mistakes that limit their ability to see and fix those numbers. (Agencies are companies for which […]
I’ve witnessed too many service-based businesses shut down their operations because the owners just could not make ends meet. The most common problem? Little visibility to profitability. I’d estimate that about 90% out of the 20 agency businesses we work with exhibit one or more of the 5 main issues. In this series of articles, […]
“Do I really need a CFO right now? My company is so small. I’m still figuring out my business. What would a CFO even do for me?” Every week, I hear these questions. Over the past 15 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of early-stage and growth-stage companies, and I’ve held the position of CFO myself. […]
SaaS and subscription business models are increasingly more pervasive each day. Benefits and conveniences are high for customers: they subscribe to a cloud-based service that is updated and maintained for them. Netflix or Office 365 are SaaS, as are subscription-based physical services such as BirchBox or Dollar Shave Club. But the accounting and analysis can […]
As Edward Demings, the famous management consultant, once said, “In God we trust. All others bring data.” Getting (and digesting) good data is key to running your company wisely and well. For our new clients, typically high-growth startups, one of the first things we do is to put together a comprehensive financial reporting package. I […]
As both a business owner and as a CFO, I’ve worked with dozens of early-stage startup and growth companies. These business owners and entrepreneurs often ask me what I do for my company’s financial and operational reporting. What do I look at? And why do I look at it? Companies vary significantly in their reporting […]
I’m often asked by early-stage startups, “What processes do we need to formalize? What apps should we get to start out?” If you’re ready to build some financial accounting structure, I recommend these five apps to build your back-office tech stack. All provide three benefits: They scale with you as you grow, They are low-cost […]
Two different startup owners recently called me with this same question. “Do I need a valuation to set the sale price for my company?” Good question. Valuations can be expensive—not something you want to mess around with if you don’t need to. And it makes sense to assume that having a reported business value would […]
