How to Build a Strategy for Your CFO Firm (Part 3 of 3)

Hey there. My name is Michael King. Welcome back to the Connected Accountant where I talk about starting, scaling and optimizing fractional CFO services. Today we're diving into part three of a three part series where I'm talking about all things CFO strategies. Today I'm going to dive in and I'm going to walk you through how I think about setting quarterly objectives and monthly goals in my firm. But before we get into that, I want to make sure that you've watched part one and part two of this series because they're so important in helping you figure out those specific objectives and goals. As a reminder, in part one, we talked about the importance of setting personal goals in your firm before you get into business goals. When you set your business goals first, you end up burning out, working a ton of hours, not making good money. A lot of resentment comes in and relationships can suffer. In step two or part two of this series, I talked about the process that I used to walk through setting financial goals. At the end of step two, you should know exactly how many hours a month you need to be working, how many clients you need to be serving, and how much you need to be charging per client per month on average. Once you've got all that, now we can jump into part three where we talk about setting specific goals and objectives. Now, for me, setting specific goals and objectives is really important. Important because if I don't have laser focus, I tend to work on a lot of things and not make a lot of progress on any of them. And so that means that I end up working a lot of hours, putting a lot of money and effort towards various projects, but they never seem to get completed and they definitely aren't moving my business forward. Over the years, I've come up with a process that helps me determine which goals and objectives I need to focus on. But more importantly, I know that those goals and objectives are the right things at the right time and that they're going to move my business forward. So how do I set those goals and objectives? Well, at a high level, I first consider the three buckets of my business. I'm going to get into those in just a minute. Then I use those to set quarterly objectives and I use those to set monthly goals. Let's go into just a little bit more detail. What are those three buckets that I'm referring to? Well, the first bucket is what I call sms. SMS stands for sales, marketing and services. Under the SMS buckets are things like sales or my sales process. How exactly is it that I'm selling my services and my converting enough leads into closed business. I'm thinking about business development and marketing. I'm thinking about how do I get the word out into the market about my firm and all the amazing things that we can do. I'm also thinking about pricing. Am I priced right for the ICA that I'm going after? And I'm also considering scope of work over time. As your business grows, as your ICA changes, your scope of work will likely change. So in that first bucket sms, I'm thinking about pricing, scope of work, sales process and business development. Now I have a ton of resources that can help you in these areas. I'm going to include links to those below, but the one I want to make sure that you're aware of is my free sales training where I walk through the eight step CFO sales process that I use to close all of my clients. I'll be sure to include a link to that below. Be sure to check it out if you haven't already. The next bucket that I consider is operations. Now when I think about operations, I'm thinking about things like processes and procedures, I'm thinking about things like automations, I'm thinking about things like my tech stack. Now again, if you haven't seen my processes and procedures video, I'll include a link to that below. And if you haven't seen the 10 must have tech stack items for a fractional CFO firm, I'll include a link to those below as well. But when I'm thinking about operations, these are the things that need to be in place in order for me to deliver my CFO services to my client every single month. The third bucket that I consider is team. Under team, I'm thinking about things like hiring, I'm thinking about things like maybe firing, I'm thinking about things like managing, and I'm thinking about things like leading. So with these three buckets in mind, the next step in the process for me is I think back to those goals that I had set previously, those financial goals. And I think what is the biggest gap? What is when I think of these three buckets, which of these three buckets is the biggest gap or hurdle that's keeping me from achieving those goals? Here's an example. Maybe you have your price super dialed in for your ica. When you get people on the phone, you're able to close them down and you've got honestly more leads than you could ever hope to handle. In that case, SMS isn't your problem. Let's also assume that Once you get clients in the door, you're able to deliver service to them at a high level every single month. They are absolutely loving what you do. You likely don't have a problem with processes, procedures, automations and tech stack. So ops isn't the bucket you should be focused on. Maybe in this example you reach realize you're just at a point where you need to have more available working hours every month, but you can't work more hours and you've already dialed in all of your automations and tech stack. So maybe the thing for you, it's time to hire additional help in your firm. So for the next quarter, your bucket that you would focus on is your team. So the first thing I do is I think about where is that gap that I need to focus on over the next three months? And I set that as a quarterly objective. So in this case we're going to focus on team. The next thing I do is every single month in that quarter I think of one or two very specific, specific goals that I can focus on for that month that is going to help me remove that overall bucket gap or hurdle from my business. So in this example we're focused on building our team. So maybe the first thing that I'm doing next month, my one or two goals that I might set are really focused on creating a job description for the work that I need and getting that job description posted. That's the thing that I'm going to focus on next month. At the end of the month, if I've accomplished that very specific goal for the second month of the quarter, I'm going to set a new goal. And so in this example, maybe the second month's goal is to get that job posting out there and to interview five people. At the end of the month I'm going to go back and evaluate, did I get the job posting out there? Did I interview those people? Maybe for that third month your goal is to hire somebody and get them onboard. Once the quarter is over, I go back to the drawing board. I'm considering the three buckets. Now I have somebody new on my team. So maybe now as you get into the next quarter you're like, okay, my team is super dialed in. Processes and procedures are hitting well. But now that I've got this new person on my team, I'm realizing I don't have as many leads or as many new clients as I thought I could get. So perhaps for your second quarter you should go back and focus on SMS now. And so if it's an issue with leads, maybe for that first month you're focused on marketing and business development and you're going to set some specific goals that are going to help bring more leads in the door. So the process is continuous. It's always working. One of the things that I've learned after six and a half, almost seven years in business now, is that you're going to always remove bottlenecks or hurdles. And as soon as you do that, that is just going to be like by nature of the beast, creating a new bottleneck or hurdle in one of those other buckets. So it's a continuous process and evolution. I of the biggest mistakes when it comes to goal setting, and this was true for me too, is lacking that clarity around those three buckets and around those specific goals. Because if you're anything like me, you work really hard and you're really smart. So it's not that you don't normally have any goals, you're normally working towards something. But when you don't have that laser focus, when you're not like driven for that particular mission. A lot of times we start a lot of things, we don't finish all of those things. And the ones that we do finish, they're not really tied towards something that's going to deliberately move the business forward. And so again, we end up wasting a lot of time, we waste a lot of money and we end up burning out. Today I to really celebrate you and cheerlead you for taking the time to go through and put a deliberate strategy in place for your firm. Like I've said before, I think this is the best time ever to be in the fractional CFO space, I think it's going to absolutely explode. And because of the fact you're going through this work right now to put the right building blocks in place, I know that you're going to be a thought leader in the industry and you're going to be here for the long haul. All right, that's it for the three part series on CFO strategies. I can't wait to see you right back here next week. I'll see you then. My friends. It.