The Best Way to Optimize Your Finance Firm in 2026 (That AI Misses)

I'm sitting here looking at a TV dinner realizing that I should be able to afford a hell of a lot more than just a TV dinner. If you've ever been in this spot as an accountant, bookkeeper or tax professional looking at a TV dinner when you think you should be having a five course meal, let me show you exactly how I would optimize a bookkeeping, tax or accounting firm. So I'm going to get that disgusting thing out of the way and I'm enrolled with exactly how to optimize a bookkeeping, tax and accounting firm. So hi, my name is Charles Laikoff. I'm a fractional cfo. I've been a fractional CFO for hundreds of clients and about hundreds of people start growing scale a fractional CFO offer and firm. So here's how it be able to take any existing firm and significantly grow it. There's four things you need to do in order to be able to grow a firm, right? So four things. So it's 1, 2, 3 and 4. The first one is you got to have something really good to sell. So you need a powerful offer. You need to have something really good to sell. You need to get in front of people and you need to close the deals at the right price. Now when we look at this, there's four things you have to do in order to grow your firm. Now the first thing is you need to have a powerful offer, right? Your dollars per hour earnings need to be significantly high if you offer professional services. Now, if you offer professional services, your thoughts are maybe it's bookkeeping, maybe it's tax, maybe it's accounting. If you're not earning at least 300 to 500 or even $1,000 an hour, it's not really scalable, right? If we're directly tied to the result of our work, if we're going to work for hours for trade hours for dollars, we might as well trade a little bit of hours for a lot of dollars. That's number one. Number two, it needs to be a high enough amount because we need to be able to, if you so choose, hire staff to put in there. And if you hire staff to put charge $500 an hour and you want to earn 250, well, you got to be able to pay your staff something decent. So you need to be able to support a margin to have other people. So you need a powerful offer. What I recommend actionable cfo. So I'm going to do F C, F O. So being a fractional cfo, simple. It's helping clients make more money, keep their money and understand their money. If you can do those, you can be a fractional CFO. We sell a $9,800 CFO intensively work with them a period for six weeks, for a couple hours a week for those six weeks. That's what I recommend you sell. If you want to learn more how to do that. We have other things that show you how to do that, but that's what I would sell them. So you got to have something to sell and you need to communicate it in a way that makes sense to them. So if you communicate a way that makes sense to them, which is all two extra cash flow, your profitability in 60 days, right? Or I'll take increase your take home pay by 20% in 60 days. You have to have a strong hook to get people to understand. Because if you say I do financial services, if I'm a, if I own an e commerce business, I don't know what financial services are. That's too esoteric. It needs to be a specific deliverable and promise. That's an offer or a package. So that's number one. Number two, we need to get in front of people. This here, right? This is marketing. So marketing is greater than referrals now marketing is greater than referrals. Here's why it's greater than referrals. Because you can't pull lever and get five more referrals tomorrow. Maybe you can do that on your email list or call some other people up, but you can only do that once. Well, what if you want another new appointment? A couple new appointments a week or a couple new appointments a day. You can't scale quickly doing that. So marketing brings in new people, right, Every single week. So if you didn't have a certain number of calls coming in because how do you grow your business, right? You get new calls, you, you have those calls, you turn those people into customers, you serve them and then you get to charge them as a result to do so. So you need to get significantly amount of new calls, right? So I would have a powerful offer, I would get in front of more people and then you need to close those deals, right? Your close rate on referrals should be about 80%. But your close rate on sales to strangers over the Internet, it's going to be significantly lower. There's no implied social capital exchange. They don't know you, they don't like you, they don't trust you, they're strangers. But guess what, there's a hell of a lot more strangers out there than there are people who know like and trust you. So after you've exhausted the pool of people who know like and trust you, you got to go to strangers. That's how you your close rate for those is going to be anywhere from 15 to 30% lower than that if you're bad, but greater than that if you're good. Now that's if they're full strangers who don't already know you and you don't make them jump through some elaborate scheme or hoop or prepay for something. It's like cold strangers booking appointment. So you need to get really good at closing deals. We have sales training, we have sales education on how to talk to the customer, how to ask for money at the end, how to close deals in one call instead of four. Because you have to have four calls for a client. If I show you how to get one call a day on your calendar, but it takes you four calls for each of those to turn those into a client. That goes from one one call a day, right? That's five calls a week. That goes into 20 calls a week. You immediately cut out half of your working time in a week just by signing on one or two clients because you have a four call close process instead of a one call close process. So we found we can literally cut the amount of work that you do down to a quarter by changing your sales process. So that's the last thing. The fourth thing is price. Right? A lot of business owners that we work with in the accounting and the bookkeeping world, they go through a portfolio optimization. When people sit with us, they're usually earning about 35 or more percent from a price increase, but they need to do in the right way. So price increase. We look at three things here. We look at the price that you're currently charging, the services you're offering, how long it takes you to deliver those services, and what is the cost either in your time or your staff's time in dollars to do those. And we run you through our signature portfolio optimization method. When we run you through our portfolio optimization method, one of the things that we help you do is we look at how much hours are your staff working? How many hours are you working? What is the cost of your staff? Is that in line with market? Do all these align? Are you hitting the specific margins and KPIs that you need? Because if you do a million dollars a year in revenue in your accounting firm, you should be able to take home half of that 500,000, right? If you do $100,000 in revenue, you probably should take home a little bit more than that because you probably have less staff. So if you're not hitting about a 50% take home operating income margin from your accounting firm, you probably have the wrong price. You need to go forward through a portfolio optimization. If you don' clients. You need our closed process installed in your business. You can't get in front of people for marketing. We'll show you how to get in front of clients for marketing online. And you need a powerful CFO offer and you don't know how to do that. We can show you how to offer fractional CFO services with AI. So those are the four things you need to do to grow your accounting firm. If you don't have those in place or looking to insert any of those in place, we have a whole bunch of teachings and trainings and education and programs and certifications that cover all that stuff. But I want to go over those are the four things that I would do if you installed me and you're like, charles, this is a brand new accounting firm. I'm going to give it to you. I could literally double the value of that business in six months running them through this process. It is rinse and repeated. It's the same process every time. But if you've never done it before, it can be challenging. I've done it for hundreds of other people and I've done it in my own firm. If you want to learn more about how we can do this for you, all you got to do is click the link, swipe up below, we'll go to the next page and we can show you exactly how we do this and you can speak to either me or my team and we can do this for you.