BUSINESS ADVISORY

As your outsourced CFO and financial chair, our role is to help develop a financial path that aligns with your vision and goals. In our business we make our business vision a reality with quarterly, monthly, and weekly KPIs within each major department (Sales/Marketing, Operations, & Finance). To get there, we have a very structured process that we go through. Read more about that process below.

Phase 1

The Entrepreneurial Journey starts as just an idea. Most entrepreneurs like to implement their ideas quickly right out of the gate. However, they oftentimes do not realize that they are about to embark on a journey that feels a lot like a roller coaster.

First, they execute, fail, fail, succeed, fail, iterate, grow, hire, micromanage, fail, learn, recruit, build, learn, grow, rinse, repeat.

Phase 2

This is where our team of CFOs & management consultants comes in to play. As entrepreneurs ourselves, we learn through our mistakes and successes, and we teach through the lessons we’ve learned.

Through our personal growth in Phase 1, we as entrepreneurs understand our personal limitations and increasingly bank on the value of the TEAM around us.

Which of the words listed in the initial Phase 1 sentence resonate most with your journey?

For Trevor, our Chief Entrepreneurial Officer, it’s micromanaging. He has always known that this was a weakness of his, hindering his business’s growth, and he consciously and consistently puts systems and accountabilities in place to keep this at bay.

To succeed in Phase 2, we have to empower and support the team around us. We call this:

Management Engineering

We focus on Management Engineering through a very Financial Lens. As an outsourced Chief Financial Officer (CFO), we help execute our vision through a very strict and structured Entrepreneurial Operating System called EOS. It’s extremely important to note that an organization’s financial chair must coordinate with all parts of your organization in both goal setting and ongoing accountability. We execute this through annual retreats, quarterly goal-setting, monthly KPIs, weekly scorecards, and daily huddles.

If you want to succeed through the ups and downs of this entrepreneurial journey, we must intentionally build a true organization that runs interdependently with the vision of the Chief Entrepreneurial Officer.

Let’s Dive Into Our Typical CFO Advisory Client Journey

Step 1: Vision - Taking The Blinders Off

By the time you are in Phase 2 of the Entrepreneurial Journey, most teams have already experienced their share fair of ups and downs. It’s now time to get laser-focused on success. Many times entrepreneurs want to dive directly into financial forecasting and projections. However, if you truly want to advance your company efficiently, we can’t start there just yet.

Before we can start forecasting, we need to have a clear vision of who you are, where you are, and where you want to be.

We need to walk you through the importance of establishing and identifying your organization’s core values, core focus, long-term goals and identify what makes your company unique. This must be established early on because it lays the foundation for the next steps we’ll need.

Step 2: People - Having The Right People In The Right Seats

Once you have a crystal clear organizational vision and goals in place, you then need to have clarity as to who is responsible for executing these goals.

When organizations are in their early stages, they typically do not have the capital to have a different person fill every seat in their accountability chart. The result is that people will wear multiple, different hats and we find teams constantly stepping on each other’s toes.

To have accountability and clarity within each other’s roles and responsibilities is imperative for success, as everyone needs to have their own scorecards and KPIs (key performing indicators).

Step 3: Data - Increasing Safety In Numbers

Now that you have identified who is responsible for what roles and their impact on your vision for your organization, you now need a way to measure the pulse of your business accurately.

Traditionally business owners primarily rely on their P&L – profit and loss statements to indicate their organization’s health and assist with Financial Forecasting. The main issue with this approach is that when you review these metrics at your quarterly or annual meetings, it is too late to make effective adjustments.

So to become a more agile organization, we help you create activity-based measurable scorecards that can quickly help you gauge how your business is doing.

Step 4: Issues - Removing Indecisive Tendencies

When you have a clear vision, the right people in place, and measurable activity data, you will soon begin to uncover issues that you had no idea were a factor. Organizational issues operate a lot like fungi; they flourish in darkness and diminish in brightness.

Everyone has issues; it’s a normal aspect of life. However, effective business owners do not run away from their issues. Instead, they lean into their desire to resolve them efficiently. We will help you create an organization where you tackle issues as they arise to remove the obstacle that can inevitably hold you back.

Before you can discuss and solve the issues, you first have to identify the root cause because oftentimes the problem brought to the table is only a symptom of a deeper issue.

Step 5: Process - Documenting Your Way Of Doing Things

Once you have an organization where everyone shares your vision and utilizes measurable data to uncover growth hindering issues, it’s time to create consistency. Consistency is a huge key to any organization’s success because, with consistency, you are able to identify areas that can be fine-tuned. It also helps cultivate transparency and accountability.

To create consistency, you have to have simple, documented core processes that are followed by all. When everyone in your organization follows these processes, it becomes much easier for managers to manage, uncover, and solve issues. When you systematize transparent core processes, your organization will become more scalable because you can efficiently increase your customer reach.

Step 6: Traction - Gaining Traction

Mastering organizational traction essentially means that you are making your vision your reality. Traction can only occur now that you have a clear vision, the right team in the right seats, data management, efficient issue solving, and everyone in your organization follows your documented way of doing things.

We are here to help you bridge the gap between your vision and your execution. We understand that building a culture of accountability within an organization can feel uncomfortable at first, but accountability is an essential part of gaining and maintaining traction.

GAIN TRACTION IN YOUR FIRM

Join Our Traction Mastermind Groups

We understand every business is unique and resides along the road map of the entrepreneurial journey, whether as a start-up or as an existing business. Let’s talk about ways to solve issues you are having.