A fractional CFO warns against two goal-setting traps: building spreadsheet models you'll never use, and chasing revenue numbers without strategy. After working with over 100 firm owners, they share a seven-step process that actually works.
As fractional CFOs, we are world class at putting financial goals and financial strategies in place for our clients. But the reality is, when it comes to our own firms, a lot of times we leave a lot on the table. Now that I've worked with over 100 firm owners, I kind of see two big things happening. One, people will drastically over complicate the process of figuring out their own financial goals. You'll spend days or even weeks on end deep in the spreadsheets, putting together these complex models. But if we're being honest with each other, those projects never really come to an end. And it ends up being a drastic time suck. And it ends up being something that we don't actually use to implement in our business and to move our firms forward. More commonly though, I see firm owners taking the other extreme. They'll pick a vanity based revenue number and then they go out and they just try to do everything they can to fill up enough business to hit that million dollar goal. But because there's no strategy behind it, they end up burning out and not hitting those goals. So how exactly should you go about setting a financial strategy for your firm? Well, over the last six and a half years of building and scaling my own firm, I've actually boiled this process down to a super simple but highly effective seven step process.
