📝Francis Costello and I have been perfecting playing the 📝Strategic CFO/COO Role for many successful companies. After leaving Ride100Percent.com, Francis quickly booked all his time with three clients.
We've both found many advantages to this approach:
- Very quick time to revenue
- Build equity in a portfolio of businesses
- Freedom and flexibility
And disadvantages:
- Clients want more time
- It inevitably ends in a job offer you can't refuse, and inevitably a job ends.
I have experienced this in building 📝BrightZen Systems from when I left 📝Second Life until now. (For more on this kind of portfolio career, see The Case for Being a Multi-Hyphenate.)
From a risk/reward perspective, the cash comp and a diversified portfolio of equity is hard to beat. But it's a treadmill. And I don't want to do this to find a job. I want to build a brand helping as many small businesses around the world as I can.
So...let's reimagine how this story ends.
The Legal Zoom of CFOs would build a network of vertical sites offering free financial models to small businesses, such as 📝Real Forecasting. The product experience would be mobile first: an app in which you connect the systems you use, and we normalize the data and present it back to you in an actionable way, with a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadence. We'd give you the basics for free.