Michael King argues fractional CFOs don't need to offer tax strategies to scale. His firm charged $12,000 a year for tax work that took 6 to 10 hours, and he's reconsidering whether it's worth it. You can refer clients to specialists instead and still hit revenue targets with CFO services alone.
Questions this video answers
$12,000 per year
6–10 hours per year per client
About $1,000 per hour (implied)
$200,000 per year
$3,000 per month
Chapters
Hey, there. My name is Michael King. Welcome back to the Connected Accountant, where I talk about starting, scaling, and optimizing fractional CFO services. One of the hottest questions right now is, do you have to offer tax strategies as a part of your CFO services in order to successfully scale in 2022 or 2023? One of my coaching clients recently came to me wondering if she needed to offer tax strategies.
If you.
In her firm. The problem, she really doesn't want to offer tax strategies. This is the advice I gave her and my predicted impact that it's going to have on her firm's growth. Let's check it out.
My question is about taxes. So I do not do any taxes. I mean, I'm a cpa, but I don't. I've never dealt with taxes, never filed them. I pay somebody to do my taxes. I feel very, I don't know, held back with the CFO advisory services because I can't offer and I don't want to offer tax strategy. I just kind of wanted your two cents on that. Is that something I should, like, partner with some? Because everybody asks for tax strategy now. It's very common with almost every call that I'm on that people want tax strategy. I guess I just feel inadequate trying to offer CFO services if I don't feel confident in tax strategy.
That's a fair question. We were. How long until we offered tax strategy, Carlos? Four years or three years or something before we even touched it? Yeah, a long time. And honestly, we're. We've. Carlos and I have talked several times in the last three or four months about moving away from it. I'll just let you inside to some of the logic behind it, and then I'll circle back to answering your question. Really good margins on it, you know, relative to the time investment. You know, it's. You're looking at, you know, what would you say, Carlos? A year? Six to ten hours a year per client. And we charge 12,000 bucks, which is on the low end for tax strategies. 12,000 bucks a year for that. So, you know, we're making like $1,000 an hour on it, but at the end of the day, it's just more hours and heartache and stuff on stuff that we're not super passionate about. So it's like, yeah, we could offer it more, but we want to focus more on other things. Right now we're just in a season where we just don't feel like dealing with it anymore. So all that to kind of encourage you, if that's not something you want to do. Be okay with just telling your clients that that's not something you do and have someone in your pocket that you can refer them to. You know, I don't know that you even necessarily need to go so far as to say that you're partnering with somebody. You know, you might just say, hey, I know. You know, Ashley is in one of my. The groups I'm in. She seems to have her stuff together, and she seems great at tax strategies. Happy to connect the two of you via email, you know, and it doesn't have to be anything more involved with that. But, I mean, at the end of the day, I think the overarching message that we've got to be mindful of is we got into business to do our own thing and to do the kind of work we love to do. So try not to let external things pressure you into doing something that your heart just isn't in. That's where we end up getting burnt out and being resentful of the work and the clients and, you know, those kind of things. So I think 100%. Just be okay with that. And I'll tell you, you know, when you work through the math, because especially on the CFO side of things, what's your revenue goal for the year, roughly?
I mean, right now, it's pretty low. I'm switching from bookkeeping over to CFO kind of consulting. So like, 80. Yeah.
What would be a great year next year? Like, top line revenue?
200 is my goal.
So 200,000 a year. Everybody pay attention to this math. 200,000 for the year. Right. What does that come out to per month?
Like, 8,000.
16,000Amonth?
Yep. 16.
Okay. And what do you charge for CFO services?
I haven't locked in. I'm still trying to decide. I'm all in.
That's okay. Ballpark.
But 3,000. 3,000 is my Michael.
Okay. You literally need to find five people, five businesses in the whole world that are okay with you not offering tax strategies.
Yeah. It seems so easy. I mean, when I say it.
This is five.
Yeah.
It's just. You just need to find five. Right. And when I do that kind of math, it feels very liberating and freeing to me.
Yeah.
To realize, like, you don't have to be all things to all people. You've just got to be you to five. Right. And you're. And then you're knocking on the door of a quarter million bucks a year.
Yeah. Because I do. I want to fire all of my bookkeeping clients. Right. Now, but then there would be no revenue coming in. So.
Yeah, gotta pay that rent. Gotta pay that rent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So just like, five is really all you gotta do. Right? And so just remember, that's the cool thing about the CFO services is we don't. We don't have. It's not a volume play. It's a quality play. Right. So many businesses, you know, that charge 29 bucks a month, they gotta have 40,000 people a month, you know, paying for their subscription.
Yeah.
And I'm like, you know, you need five to make a quarter million bucks a year. So I think you're more than okay just doing cfo, not messing with tax strategy.
