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Have you ever wondered why you're not making more progress growing your fractional CFO firm? I've spent the last nine years generating millions of dollars in revenue in my firm, KFE Solutions, and I've helped hundreds of other fractional CFO firms generate millions of dollars of revenue as well. Along the way, I've found four concepts that take growing a fractional CFO firm from Mission Impossible to Easy Mode. So today I'm going to show you the same four concepts that I've discovered so that you can put your fractional CFO firm on Easy mode too. And you're going to want to pay attention to this episode because it's going to allow you to make more money in with less effort than you ever thought possible. Let's dive in. Concept number one for unlocking Easy Mode is to standardize and productize early on. It makes sense to offer highly customized services that are tailored to whatever a given client needs. I totally get it. You need revenue and they've got money. But it becomes a major roadblock as you try to scale. Think about it like this. Custom CFO services are like a baker who only makes these extravagant one of a kind wedding cakes. Each cake is a custom masterpiece, but the process is slow, it's expensive, and it's impossible to scale. The baker is constantly buried in new designs and can only take on a few clients at any given time. Productized CFO services are like a high end bakery with a signature cake menu. Like my favorite Nothing Bundt Cakes. Nothing Bundt Cakes is a national retailer of really high end bundt cakes. And here's a quick side note. If you've never had a cake from Nothing Bundt Cakes, you absolutely have to have one. They're amazing and they will change your life as long as you don't mind consuming 2,000 calories per serving. But what Nothing Bundt Cake has done is they offer these amazing cakes, but they only offer a select few. They've taken those select few and they've perfected recipes that are premium reliable and highly in demand. Their bakeries can serve literally hundreds of customers per day instead of just a handful a week, while maintaining the highest levels of quality, maximizing profitability and crushing margins. Standardizing and productizing your fractional CFO services clears those scalability roadblocks and it actually accelerates growth. Here's why. First, it reduces operational chaos. Without a standardized offering, every new client engagement feels like a brand new business requiring unique pricing, deliverables and processes. This creates inefficiencies, forces your team to reinvent the wheel each time and it makes it impossible to delegate effectively. Standardization simplifies service delivery, allowing you to focus on execution rather than reinvention. Second, it makes hiring and delegation so much easier. If every engagement is customized, only you can deliver the services effectively. When your offerings are standardized, you can create clear sops that allow other fractional CFOs, analysts or operations staff to execute the work, reducing dependency on high cost hard to find talent. Third, increases profitability and margins. Custom engagements more times than not lead to scope creep, unpredictable workloads, and inefficient use of resources. With standardized services, you can optimize pricing, build repeatable processes, and deliver high value work more efficiently, maximizing profit margins while reducing effort just like nothing Bundt cakes Finally, it reduces client dependency on you personally. If your services are completely customized, clients often feel like they need you specifically rather than your firm and your processes. This creates a bottleneck where you become indispens and while this really strokes your ego and makes you feel good, it's a recipe for no growth. Productizing your services shift the value from an individual you to a structured framework, making your firm more scalable and less reliant on any single person. Again, you. However, I can tell you that even if you have a standardized and productized CFO offering, it won't matter if you don't get this next part right. Which leads me into easy mode. Concept number two World Class Preparation Leads to World Class CFO Calls I get asked all the time how to keep clients more engaged on CFO calls. What to say to get clients to take more action, what to do to deliver a world class CFO call. And my answer is always the same. Prepare better. I mean, think about a world champion professional sports team. Champions don't just show up to games and win championships. Championships are won in the weight room. They're won on the practice field while watching game fields, during coaching sessions, during meals and through conditioning drills. Championships are won during preparation. Winning the championship is just the byproduct of great preparation. The same holds true for fractional CFOs. A world class monthly CFO call where your clients find extraordinary value highlighted by them taking action and actually moving their business forward. Those calls are made during the preparation for the monthly calls, not on the calls themselves. One of my one on one coaching clients was recently asking me during one of our sessions how long they should spend on preparing for their monthly CFO calls and I'm like I don't know, anywhere from three to four hours per client and they immediately responded completely mind blown. They're like three to four hours per client. What in the world are you doing for three to four hours? And my response was, how do you expect to deliver a great call if you're not spending three to four hours? And I suppose that naturally begs the question, what should you be doing to prepare for CFO calls? Well, when it comes to preparing for CFO calls, I think there's three levels to this. Novice, intermediate and expert. The novice level includes things like looking at the accounting and making sure there aren't any glaring errors. If you have any questions or feedback for the bookkeeper or the controller, you shoot off those emails and you get resolution before the CFO call. The novice level also includes doing the FP and a work and evaluating the finances. What's going right, what's going wrong, and what trends are you seeing? Then there's the intermediate level. It includes reviewing client goals and asking yourself what story you're seeing in the numbers relative to their goals, what needs to change and by when. What are the competing priorities that have to be resolved? Identifying not just the intermediate issues that have to be resolved, but also identifying the roadblocks and the potholes that are going to be coming in the next few quarters or years that are going to get in the way of the client accomplishing their big goals. The intermediate level also requires that you put together a narrative around what action items and tactical issues the client needs to address, prioritizing those action items and then tying all of those things back to the client's personal and business goals. Finally, there's the expert level. And to be honest with you, not many fractional CFOs ever unlock the expert level. But this is what it looks like. Once you have the other levels addressed, you should now be asking yourself questions like how do I need to show up for this call? What kind of energy and tone do I need to bring based on the client and the situation that they're in right now? What is my client's mindset likely to be like when I present them with the information and the strategies and the suggestions that I've got in store? Are they going to push back? Why? And if they do, how do I address that pushback? What do I need to do or say to get their buy in? What objections might they have if they do object, do I let it ride or do I double down on my thesis? This is the level of thought that very few fractional CFOs put into their preparation. But these are situations that we all end up facing during our client interactions. And what happens since we're not prepared? Well, we end up fumbling around and we don't get the outcomes that our clients desperately need. When you realize that the magic happens during the preparation, the actual CFO call gets significantly easier, your clients end up getting a ton more value, and you end up with customers that stick around longer and provide you with better referrals.

One of the hardest parts about being a fractional CFO is figuring out how to build a scalable, profitable business model around it. Trying to figure out how to serve clients the best price at the highest level without having to work 60, 80 or even 100 hours a week. Over the last nine years of running my firm, I've cracked that code and I've put everything that I've learned into the CFO Academy. The CFO Academy is my flagship seven week course specifically designed to show you exactly how I run my fractional CFO firm. This is the no kidding behind the scenes processes, checklists and tools that my firm uses literally every day. The CFO Academy is broken down into seven playbooks where I cover everything from sales processes to new client onboarding. I also walk you through how to prepare for monthly client calls and how we handle project work. It's literally everything you need to run a profitable scalable fractional CFO firm.

If you're ready to start scaling your firm, charging more money and working fewer.

Hours, then click the link below to learn more. Or you can Text Academy to 1-469-515-8087 if you have any questions. And the best part is that it comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. If you don't love it, let my team know within 30 days and we'll refund every single penny. I can't wait to see you inside now.

While all that preparation is essential to having world class CFO calls, you can't prepare if you don't know this third Easy Mode concept, which is that you have to truly understand your clients Personal and business goals. Fractional CFOs do more than just analyze financials. They help business owners make better decisions that impact both their company and their personal financial future. So understanding a client's personal and business goals is critical for delivering value and ensuring long term success. And there are so many reasons why. But there's two that come up time and time again. First, business decisions are personal for business owners. For the vast majority of small and even medium sized business owners, their businesses aren't just a financial asset. It's their literal legacy. It's their passion, and more times than not, it's their primary source of income and wealth creation. In other words, their business decisions are deeply intertwined with their personal goals, such as retirement planning, lifestyle choices, and family security. A fractional CFO who only looks at the P and L without considering all of these additional factors risks offering advice that isn't aligned with the owner's priorities, which ends up with clients that churn, thus making your life much harder. Think about it like this. Let's say that you wanted to lose some weight and get in better shape, so you hire a personal trainer and pay them a ton of money to help you come up with a plan to help you achieve your goals. The day finally arrives where they're laying out the plan and the trainer looks at you and he says, okay, here's the plan. We're going to have you working out three times a day, seven days a week, and we're going to reduce your caloric intake to under 500 calories a day. I estimate that you'll hit your weight loss goals in about six weeks and you'd be like, oh my God, what? I'm going to work out three times a day and eat less than 500 calories? Yeah, sure, that plan could work in theory, but the plan isn't sustainable. You'd be starving all the time and you'd probably be miserable as well. And a tired and hungry fractional CFO gets hangry, and nobody wants a hangry fractional cfo.

The second most common reason that I.

Found that you have to understand your client's personal goals is because you absolutely have to align their financial strategy with things like exit planning and growth plan. I mean, it only makes sense. A business owner that's looking to sell in five years will need a very different financial strategy than one that's planning to build a multi generational company or somebody that's seeking to fund personal investments through business profits and free cash flow. If a client wants to exit, you might focus on EBITDA optimization, valuation growth, and clean financials so that they can get that sexy, sexy multiple at the time of sale. If they want to scale aggressively, cash flow management and funding strategies become significantly more important. There are a ton of other reasons why you want to make sure that your strategies are in alignment with the owner's personal goals and business goals. But I can tell you that it's so easy to lose track of that alignment. Don't allow that to happen. I've done it before and it results in one Less client every single time. The fourth concept that puts running a fractional CFO firm on easy mode is bigger clients pay more. In fact, bigger clients don't just pay more, they play bigger, they think bigger and they need a fractional CFO who can do the same. The other day I'm on one of my monthly inner circle calls. And inner circle, for those of you that don't know, is my monthly group coaching program where I teach for about an hour and then I do an hour or so of Q and A with the people that are on the call. And one of the fractional CFOs recently was asking me how to get out of having so many accounting conversations and super tactical conversations with their clients. So a little backstory on this fractional cfo. Before she started her firm, she was a full time CFO of a mid 8 figure E COM company. So her background is in creating big strategies and solving big problems. She told me on the call, I really just want to spend like, I don't know, 95% of my time on strategic conversations. I really just don't want to have those in the weeds bookkeeping chats. I want to talk growth strategy and I want to help companies do big things. The problem that she was facing is that she's working with companies that are in the 1 to $3 million range as a fractional CFO compared to the bigger 8 figure company where she was a full time CFO. My advice to her was very simple. Start working with bigger clients. It's kind of like swimming in a kiddie pool versus swimming in the ocean. Working with small clients is like swimming in that kiddie pool. It's crowded, it's shallow, and it's full of splashing. You spend all of your time avoiding getting splashed instead of actually swimming. Working with bigger clients, on the other hand, that's like swimming in the open ocean. There's more depth, there's more room to move, and there's more opportunity to navigate at a higher level. If you want to stop having accounting and tactical conversations, stop swimming in the kiddie pool now. I love working with larger clients and I've actually found three primary reasons why I lean in this direction. Number one, higher revenue clients can afford premium CFO services, while smaller businesses tend to have cash flow constraints, which makes it hard for them to afford those ongoing CFO services, which leads to price sensitivity, shorter engagements and higher churn. Larger businesses understand the value of strategic financial leadership and they have the budget to invest in high ticket CFO services. This allows you to charge higher fees with longer term engagement, which reduces the pressure to constantly acquire new clients. The second reason is that working for larger clients tends to be more impactful in strategic work. Higher revenue companies have more complex financial needs. I mean, they're talking about things like management of cash flow at scale, preparing for PE firms, M&A or an IPO. They're looking at structuring, tax efficient compensation and exit strategy. Sometimes they're talking about succession planning. This creates more opportunities for strategic high value advisory work rather than just financial cleanup or basic forecasting. When you're working on these types of challenges, your credibility goes up and it makes you indispensable. Finally, large clients tend to mean increased client retention and stability. The math is simple. Lower revenue businesses are more volatile, period. Low revenue clients are way more susceptible to cash flow issues that lead them to cutting costs, including their fractional CFO due to their very predictable downturns in their economic situation. On the other hand, higher revenue companies tend to have more stability, more stable revenue streams leading to less cash drama, longer engagements, and lower client churns. Remember, bigger clients don't just pay more, they play bigger, they think bigger. And they need a fractional CFO who can do the same. In fact, last year when I realized just how much easier running a fractional CFO firm got when I worked with huge clients, it resulted in me completely changing everything about how I sell fractional CFO services. If you'd like to rip off my entire sales strategy, I've included a link to that episode in the description below.

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.

You.

I'll see you then.