176. How to Start a Fractional CFO Firm in 2026

If you can get these three things right, your fractional CFO firm will have everything in place for you to ramp up to a seven figure firm. In this video, I'm going to try to take everything I've learned from the last seven years of building my own fractional CFO firm and I'm going to condense it into a three part blueprint that I would follow if I was going to start a firm from scratch today. I call this framework the CFO Starter Blueprint. Let's dive in. The CFO Starter Blueprint has three levels. Level one of the blueprint is called the roadmap. The first step of the roadmap is defining our values. I think a lot of us know intuitively that we should define our values, but the reality is that very few of us take the time to even think about what our values are, and even fewer of us take the time to write our values out. Why is it that values on paper are so important? Well, what happens is if we're not intentional about knowing what's valuable to us, the types of things that are really important to us, we end up hiring people on our team that don't align with our values, and then we're not passionate about leading them. Or more importantly, we end up getting a roster full of clients that don't align with our values. And, and then we're not passionate about serving them. And what ends up happening is, is we build a business full of team members or vendors or clients that don't align with our values and we end up getting burned out. We don't have the passion and the fire and the energy and the joy that we need to build a business and to serve clients and lead people in the way that we need to to build the kind of business that we truly want. The second step in building out the roadmap is defining goals. Now, I put goals into two distinctly different buckets. I think about personal goals and I think about business goals. What most people do, if they think about goals at all, is they start with their business goals. But what ends up happening is if you build your business goals first, you end up building a business that you work for, rather than having a business that works for you. In other words, your life becomes subservient to the business goals rather than the business goals serving your life. And so I think it's so important that you define your personal goals first, like what's really important to you on a personal level, and then building your business around that so that your business actually works for you. When it comes to personal goals, I think of four different categories of personal goals, and each of these are really important. I think about family goals, lifestyle goals, income goals, and community goals. I've got an entire episode where I break down these four types of goals and how I think about setting those. So I won't get into those here, but I will put a link to that episode in the show notes below. Second, I think about business goals, and this is exactly what you think it is. I think about what do I need to do in the business so that my personal goals can become a reality. This is where I'm thinking about the revenue that I need to make, the profitability that I need to have, and the cash that I need the business to be able to produce so that I can hit my personal goals again. I've done a very deep dive into the math behind how I set each of these goals. In another episode, we'll be sure to link those below as well. My important thing that I really want you to remember is don't skip this step. Take the time to think through your personal goals and your business goals, or else you're just going to be kind of aimlessly wandering and there's no chance for you to actually have a roadmap for your firm. The next step in building my roadmap is figuring out the types of services that I want to offer in the price point that I'm going to offer those services at. When you have your business goals in place before you think about services and pricing, it really informs what you need to do from a pricing perspective. So if you know that you need to ultimately cash flow your family $10,000 a month and you only want to work 20, 30 hours in your business, maybe you want to work 40, 60, I don't know what that number is for you, but when you know like how many hours you want to work in your business and you know how much cash flow you need to be able to bring home, it really starts to inform what you need to charge for your services. And once you figure out what you need to charge for your services, you can build the service offering around that. So as you can see, as we're building this roadmap, everything is really building on each other from one step to the we have our values which inform our personal and our business goals. Once we have those goals, then we can figure out what do we need to charge for our clients and what kind of services do we need to offer to justify that price point. The next step in building out your roadmap is defining your niche. Now, a niche is just a fancy marketing term for who do you want to serve? And when it comes to niching, I think there's two things that you have to consider. Number one is, can they afford you? That's why it's so important to figure out first, what does your pricing need to be? Because the niche you go after, you've got to know that they can afford you. So as an example, if you have to charge $5,000 a month, that might tell you that the niche that you go after can't be coaches, consultants, and course creators that are only making 200 or $300,000 a year in revenue. It just doesn't work. So really think through when you're picking your niche. Can they afford you? The second thing that I like to think about is interest, experience and expertise. When picking your niece, really think through like, do I have any interest in working with these folks? Do I have the expertise and the experience that I can serve them at a level that is going to deliver the kind of value that I need to provide for the price point? Now, a lot of people will tell me, mike, I just don't know what niche I want to go after. And at this point, it's completely okay if you're unsure who you want to work with. I would say pick one, two, maybe three industries that you want to get your feet wet with and go after them, work with them for six months or a year and see if you can't narrow it down at that point. But I think it's important in the roadmap level to really be thinking about, who do I want to niche down, who do I want to serve? Because it's going to inform so many things later, like what type of skills people on your team need to have. It's going to help you get processes and procedures and systems and automation in place, which are going to help you scale when you get to level three of the blueprint later on. The last step in getting your roadmap in place is building out your CFO report. This is going to be the report that's kind of your headquarters for every CFO call you have with every single client. This is going to basically be a walkthrough of the KPIs, the metrics, the forecast, the projections, and the goals that you want to go over with your clients every single month. Level two of the CFO starter blueprint, I call the roof. We're not trying to do anything crazy here. We're just trying to get enough clients in the door that we can afford to keep a roof over our head and keep the lights on. It's all about getting your first three clients. Here's how I do it. The first thing that I would do is build an extremely basic website. I'm not talking about spending tens of thousands of dollars on a beautiful website with amazing copy and the best branding that you've ever seen. I'm talking about a DIY website that has a couple fundamental elements on it. First, I'm looking for something that's going to say very clearly what I do, who I do it for, and how I serve them. It's going to have a section where they can fill out a form to contact me if they want to learn more. And it's going to have links to my social media accounts. The next thing that I would do is I would identify 20 to 30 events that are happening in my local area over the next six months. I'm thinking about things like conferences, networking events, chamber of commerce events, Rotary Club events. I'm really looking for anywhere that my ideal client, the people that are in my niche, might be hanging out. Now, here's the important thing. You're going to make the list. You're going to register to the events, you're going to go to the events. But you can't just sit in the back of the room with your arms crossed. You can't be that boring accountant wallflower. You got to get out and you got to meet people, you got to shake hands. You've got to get to know people, you've got to look for opportunities to serve. Everything hinges on this. And the third and final thing that I'm doing here is I'm trying, like laser focused, to identify three new clients. Three people that I could charge at least $3,000 a month to, that I could serve to kick things off. The cool thing about $3,000 a month is that puts about $100,000 in my pocket per year. That's enough money that I can keep the lights on and keep a roof over my head. The third and final step that I would follow in the CFO starter blueprint, I call the ramp. This is where we're really ramping up. We're scaling up our firm so that we can start to build a real business around our CFO services. The first step of the ramp phase is dialing in processes and procedures. Now that you've had three clients, you've been working with them for a little while. I want you to think through what are the core processes the core things that you do as a fractional CFO that are required for you to deliver your service. And I want you to start documenting those procedures. This is so important because you've got to have processes and procedures and not just for consistency and efficiency, but when you're ready to hire a team, if you don't have those core processes and procedures, they're going to come on and not know what to do or they're going to just make things up and you're going to get frustrated because they're not doing things your way. So really, at this point, it's so imperative that you really take some time every single week to start getting those three, four or five core fundamental processes and procedures in place. Don't skip this. The next thing you need to think about are automations. And when it comes to automations, those are the software platforms that you can incorporate into your business that make your life so much easier, more streamlined and less prone to errors. The automations that I love to use in my firm are Giacon and Ignition. GICON is so important because it connects QuickBooks to to our CFO report and automatically generates those reports every single month. It literally saves my team 40 hours per month per CFO. The other automation that I love is Ignition. Ignition handles all of my contracts, all of my invoicing and all of my billing. This takes a ton of work off of my admin assistants so that they can focus on other higher value things and there's no likelihood of them goofing it up. There's a lot of different automation platforms out there. I've tried almost all of them. I can say most of them aren't worth their time, but if you can find two or three or four that are just vital to your tech stack, they will be worth their weight in gold. It's at this point that I know that I'm ready to think about going out and building a team. I'm ready to go and find world class fractional CFOs to come and join my firm to help me scale and achieve the big goals that I've set for myself. Again, three parts to this CFO starter blueprint. Number one, you're going to want to get the roadmap in place. Step two, you're going to want to make sure you've got the roof over your head. In step three, it's time to start scaling. All right, my friends, I hope you found this episode helpful. If you did, it would mean the world to me if you would leave a five star review on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening to this episode. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back right here next week. I'll see you then.