Hire a Part Time CFO to Optimize Your Business

Sometimes in business, you have to take a hard look at the systems in place and determine what changes need to be made for success. However, if you target the wrong areas, you could be right back where you started or in an even deeper mess. SaaS Gurus takes a holistic approach to isolate the root cause of business issues and bottlenecks. This is key when you hire a part time CFO to optimize your business.

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Harmony is Key to Business Optimization

Optimization really comes down to creating harmony. For example, when you think about your body, if one part is not feeling well, it throws the entire system off. It doesn’t matter if you have a headache or back pain. If one part of your body is compromised, and it’s not working in harmony with the other parts of you, it will affect how you feel as a whole.

Businesses are no different. Let’s say marketing and sales are working great, but your delivery team is suboptimal. The customers aren’t happy with what they get, and they don’t tell their friends about it. This means you wouldn’t get business from word of mouth. Or worse yet, you have to spend time redoing the work you provided.

When it comes to business optimization, you want to confirm that every part of your organization is individually healthy. At the same time, you need to make sure each area is interacting with the other parts of the organization synergistically, because each area is interconnected.

Metrics for Success

SaaS Gurus looks at three specific metrics for business optimization:

• People
• Process  
• Technology and Tools

When considering these metrics, it’s important to ask yourself some questions. Do you have the right people on the bus and in the right seats? Are the right processes in place to allow people to get the most out of the work they’re putting in? Do people have the tools and technology needed to work efficiently?

When you apply that tripod of people, processes, and technology to every area of the organization, you’re setting your business up for success. This mindset allows you to discover roadblocks and monitor how your business areas interact with each other. That’s where you find friction in the machine where things aren’t meshing very well.

That’s how SaaS Gurus approaches business optimization. Rather than looking at one business area, we look at all of the areas and how they work with each other. Like a human body, you can’t just treat one part and expect the rest to be healthy.

Diagnose Business Issues

When you hire SaaS Gurus as a part-time CFO, our first step is diagnosis. We complete a system review to help diagnose issues within each business, including the back office.

It’s like visiting a new doctor. The physician typically sits down with you and reviews your history. What’s led up to where you are today? Then they go through a system review that covers your heart, lungs, blood pressure, and organ functions. We do the exact same thing for your business.

We utilize a checklist when we sit down with a prospective client for the first time and ask them to answer questions to help uncover the root cause of any business issues. That system review allows us to see patterns within your business. Our experience allows us to isolate those patterns and integrate processes, tools, and technology where needed.

Curate Systems That Allow Information to Flow

Information is everything. There isn’t a company that can run without applications, data acquisition, and other specifics communicated within the organization.

It is amazing how many times we assess a business and find out all their systems that provide information are siloed. In other words, their systems are not talking to each other or sharing data. Sales has their own CRM. Finance has its accounting system. Customer service has another customer success system. In the end, these all should be sharing the same information.

SaaS Gurus pinpoints where data isn’t flowing or being produced efficiently. We focus on the process and technology first. Then, we focus on the people and how we can help them best perform in their roles.

Determine the Cause, Not the Symptom

There are plenty of examples of where things can go wrong within a business. In manufacturing, a defective part could come down the line and be sent out to a customer who reports it. An error in code could cause software bugs that hinder the program’s processes in computer programming. In finance, invoices could be sent out with the wrong information and could result in you not capturing all the revenue that you should be.

To isolate those issues, hire a part time CFO who takes that holistic approach, provides a diagnosis and treats the root cause instead of the symptom. SaaS Gurus is always looking for really powerful leverage points where we can isolate the cause of an issue and correct it. A symptom is just the manifestation of the problem, not the cause. If you don’t understand fundamentally the cause of business issues, you’re not going to cure the problem.

Keep Reading: Michigan Fractional CFO Services That Take Chaos to Clarity

Anthony Nitsos, Founder and Fractional CFO

Anthony Nitsos elevates your financial strategy to meet challenges and drive your company value. Working with pre-seed to Series B stage SaaS startups, he ensures that founders have reliable metrics and a solid understanding of the true economics of their business to maximize valuation. He optimizes financial operations, sales operations, human resources operations, and risk management systems. He’s worked with various startups, including two unicorn exits.