"I'm burning out! My firm is starting to grow, but my workdays are getting crazy. Is this how life will be now that I'm a Fractional CFO?"

This is something I hear all the time and it's something I struggled with in my own firm as well.

As Fractional CFOs, we're juggling a ton of competing priorities, from finding clients to onboarding clients to serving clients to managing vendors.

You don't have to work yourself to death - you need to create leverage.

But figuring out the best tools for creating leverage can take a ton of time (and money), so I've gone ahead and done the legwork for you.

Here are the 6 resources I've found that have given me the most leverage in my firm so I can get my time back.

My Favorite Time Saving Tools 

1. EAs

Nope, not an Enrolled Agent but an Executive Assistant.

For a long time, I (incorrectly) thought an EA would just be handling my calendar and inbox. Sure, they can handle those things, but you're leaving so much potential value on the table if that's all you delegate to them.  

Dan Martell's book and Michael Hyatt's book Your World Class Assistant do sufficient deep dives into the value a great EA should bring and how to leverage that value. 

You should read both of these books.  

If I had to pick the most impactful value propositions a great EA brings to the table, they would be organization, prioritization, and accountability.  

In other words, they help you get your life together!  

A good EA will unlock a significant amount of time for you.

2. Automations

Once I had 4 or 5 clients, I found myself spending upwards of 20 hours a month just preparing CFO Reports for our clients! 

Downloading data from QBO into a CSV.

Cleaning up the CSV.

Importing the CSV.

Making charts.

Then graphs.

Ugh!

Doing this was NOT how I wanted to spend my life.

I spent a few months testing various tools that would shortcircuit this process. There are quite a few out there, but we ultimately landed on G-Accon because we use Google Sheets for our CFO Reports.

G-Accon is a data connector between QBO and Google Sheets. It fully automates the process of creating our client-facing CFO Reports! G-Accon saves my firm about 40 hours per month.

If you prefer Excel, there are similar data connectors out there that will work great for your firm.

3. Project Management

For me, project management platforms are a lot like taking NyQuil:

I DESPISE using it at the moment, but I'm always glad I did.

The reality is that you'll end up wasting a ton of time and missing deliverables if you don't invest in a project management platform. I've even found this to be true for solopreneurs.

There's too much to manage by memory, especially when considering client work and internal projects.

If you're anything like me, you end up forgetting deadlines and deliverables until the very last minute - then you end up working on nights and weekends to get things done (usually half-assed at that).

And if you ever start building a team (W2 or 1099), a PM platform is non-negotiable.

My firm used Karbon for quite a while. Honestly, we'd probably still be using it today if we didn't have multiple companies that all need project management. It's built for finance and accounting firms. Fractional CFO firms also work well.

Instead of Karbon, my companies use ClickUp.

4. Bookkeeping

I know a few of you will send passionately written emails back to me on this, but my firm doesn't offer bookkeeping. In fact, we don't even do our own bookkeeping!

We don't offer bookkeeping primarily because, well, I don't want to.

We don't do our own books because of time. My time (and my team's time) has more leverage if we invest it in other activities.

I bet the same is true for you.

If you're looking for someone to handle your books (or your clients' books, for that matter!), then check out Decimal.com.

5. Systems 

There are a lot of systems out there that promise to save entrepreneurs a bunch of time and money.

I've tried many of them.

Most are just distractions.  

That's why my firm keeps its tech stack really simple.

One system that I've found has an AMAZING ROI in terms of time and money is Ignition. 

Ignition does a couple of key things that save me a ton of time:

1. When I sign a new client, Ignition sends out the proposal, including the NDAs and Terms and Conditions. It's all templated (but customizable when needed).
2. Ignition handles the digital signatures on the proposals.
3. Ignition automatically imports the new customer into QBO.
4. Ignition automatically creates invoices for us.
5. Ignition automatically processes payments for us.
6. Ignition automatically syncs all this for us to QuickBooks.

Dead simple.

6. Community

I had some big challenges with new client onboarding last year.  

It was taking forever to get access to the financials (which slowed us down tremendously). New clients were immediately pushing boundaries with scope. Some new clients weren't engaged during our first few meetings.

Just a lot going wrong.

I posted about it in a Fractional CFO community that I'm in. Two of the other firm owners chimed in to tell me about how they do these new-client orientation calls prior to onboarding. They shared the details about what they do and how they do it.  

We implemented our version of the orientation call and saw immediate results.

Today, our orientation call is a key part of our new client experience, and those issues we faced have all but disappeared.

That one suggestion saved me dozens of hours of trial-and-error while I tried to figure out how to solve those issues. It probably saved us a few clients as well.

All because of community.

If you're not in a community of Fractional CFOs, check out THIS ONE.