GROWTH Is Holding You Back as a Virtual CFO

Hey there, numbers nerds. Welcome to the Connected Accountant, where we believe that as an owner of a bookkeeping, accounting, or fractional CFO firm, you should be making more money than you made when you work for somebody else. We believe that you should be serving clients that you love, and we believe that your personal life should direct your business, not the other way around. My name is Michael King, and I am the creator of the Connected Accountant. Today, I want to challenge the way that you think about growth in your business. But before I get into that, I want to share with you a couple of ways that I'm growing as a. As a person this year. First, I'm dedicating time to learning how to speak French. My wife and I are planning this amazing trip to Europe later this year, and I don't want to look like a knucklehead that only speaks American English. So I bought Rosetta Stone, and I'm gonna learn some French. I'm so glad that there's nobody in my office to hear me practicing, because it's really, really bad. I've also invested a lot of time and money in getting coaching and so that I can learn how to be a better leader this year. I want to learn how to lead my family better. I want to learn how to lead my business better. I want to learn how to lead my community better. And so I'm investing pretty heavily again in both terms of time and money in learning how to do that. And finally, I'm working really hard to only work four days a week by the middle of this year. It's been a goal of mine for a while, and I'm putting some things in place this year. I that are going to make that a reality, and I'm super excited. I'm also investing a lot of my time and efforts into going deeper in my community, serving and volunteering in my community and using some of the things that I've learned as a business owner to help underserved businesses have a bigger impact in their community as well. So I'm doing a lot of things this year to grow as a human being. But because of the resources, time, and money that I'm putting into that, and because of the fact that I'm investing a lot of time into growing a new business, the reality is I will probably make less money this year than I have for the last two or three years. And that's. That's okay by me. It's very intentional. It's very deliberate. But I bet if I asked you, even though I'm making Less money this year, Am I still experiencing growth? And my, my assumption is that probably most people would agree, yeah, you're doing a lot to grow this year, even though you're not making more money. What that has me thinking is, why don't we look at our businesses through a similar lens? You know, especially as numbers nerds, we tend to equate growth in our businesses only with top line or bottom line growth. You know, did you increase revenue enough this year? Did you increase your profitability, maybe your cash flows? And a lot of times when we don't hit whatever that arbitrary metric that we've set for our revenue growth or profitability growth, we start telling ourselves that our business isn't growing fast enough, that we're not doing enough, that we're not capable leaders inside of our business. But I would argue that there are other ways that your business can be growing and growing in a very healthy way that aren't directly tied to the top line or the bottom line. And so today, what I want to share with you is four different ways that I've seen that businesses can grow that aren't necessarily related directly to revenue or profitability. And hands down, revenue growth and profitability growth are absolutely a metric or a KPI to indicate that your business is growing or it's declining. But I would argue that it's not the only metric. And so today, I want to give you, like I said, four ideas that I would like you to consider when you're thinking about how your business is or isn't growing. So. So the first thing I want to share with you is that you could be investing heavily in building out processes and procedures in your business. I remember a year ago, my CFO firm, we didn't take on any new clients for six months because we were investing in processes and procedures. We wanted to become more efficient, we wanted to become more lean. And it cost us a significant amount of time and money to get our processes and procedures to where we thought they needed to be. And I know that that was a great indicator of growth for us, even though we didn't make more money, even though our client count didn't go up. So I do believe that investing in processes and procedures are one way that you can grow your company. The second lens to think through is what are you doing with your team? A lot of times we get to the point, especially we're just starting out, that we can only go so far in business by ourselves. And if we want to go to that next level, we've got to bring Somebody in to support us, somebody in on a team. Now, that could be another bookkeeper. It could be someone to do our tax prep paperwork, it could be a virtual assistant, it could be a podcast editor, it could be any number of things. But in order to go to the next level, we have to hit pause and grow our team. And so I want you to think about that. If you're investing a lot this year in building out your team, then that's all awesome. I think that's going to serve you really well. I think one day that will, and it should impact that revenue growth and the profitability growth. But in the short term, and it could take months, investing in your team may not have again, those numeric growth metrics associated with it. The third one I want you to think about is, are you growing your impact? And what I mean by that is, are you getting your message out to more people? Are you finding ways to serve your existing client base in a deeper or more meaningful way? A lot of times when we're able to do that, it doesn't always translate into revenue growth or profitability growth in the short term, and sometimes it doesn't translate into it in the long term. But if part of your heart, part of your reason for being in business is that you want to impact more people in a certain way, if you're doing that, then I would say absolutely, your business is growing. And the fourth idea that I'd like to leave you with today on an indicator of growth in your business is fulfillment. You know, a lot of times for us as people to get more fulfillment out of our business, it means working less hours or it means doing less work. In our business, it might mean serving fewer customers. And that enables us to be the type of spouse or partner or parent or community volunteer that we want to be. And when we're able to get more fulfillment out of life, sometimes that isn't a result of higher profits or higher revenue or more clients. And so I want you to think about how is your fulfillment, fulfillment going up or down over the next year. So again, before you beat yourself up because your revenue is not growing at the rate that you want it to, or your profitability or your cash flows, consider some of these other metrics that in my humble opinion, also indicate growth. And don't beat yourself up. Don't start telling yourself stories about, you know, you're a bad CEO because revenue isn't, isn't on, on the rise, or it's not keeping up with what all the other people on social media are saying that they're doing. There are numerous other ways to count growth in your life and in your business. Listen, if you want to be around a community of like minded bookkeepers, accountants, or fractional CFOs, other people that kind of think the same way that you and I think, I would encourage you to check out theconnectedaccountant.com we are a community of bookkeepers, accountants and fractional CFOs that share resources and ideas and referrals and tips and tricks. And I also go live once a month where I talk about things like we talked about today, but I go much deeper and I typically teach for 60 to 90 minutes. And you can try the Connected Accountant for just $1 for your first month. So head over to TheConnectedAccountant.com and check us out. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing you next week. Right. Sam.