Spent the entire morning so with the COO/Executive Vice President of the Family Wealth Planning Institute Laura Lee Sparks and our bookkeeper.
Here’s what’s weird. I help other people take control of their financial future and yet doing it for myself and my business is completely draining.
I’m more of a big picture person. The nitty gritty details of where this $1.08 was spent or that $252 came from is more detail than I have the attention and patience for. And yet, it’s critically important.
It’s also important to know what you are good at and what you are not and find team members who compensate for your shortcomings. That’s why I have Laura Lee – she’s strong where I’m weak.
It may seem funny that someone who bills herself as a financial and legal expert is drained by the details of financial management. That’s actually why I’m such a good person to teach you about it. I know how important it is to have personal and business financial systems set up for my own personal experience. If I don’t have it set up the right way, I mess it up. You can learn from my mistakes … and save yourself big bucks in trial and error!
A big point of awareness for me was that if I was going to build an empire, I needed to start putting together the resources and the team to support an empire. That means spending money on a bookkeeper, maybe even a controller, and at least a part-time CFO.
Here are some of the resources I’ve found particularly helpful:
Bruce Maxwell – great CFO who will work with you where you are and on what you need. He will build you an amazingly comprehensive financial model in less than one day.
Manifest Management – this company will take you through a ten week program and at the end of it you’ll know what to track, how to track it and be managing your numbers in ways you never even knew possible. Take their free business evaluation and see if you need them.
By the end of our 90-minute call with the bookkeeper, I’m so grateful to have Laura Lee on board to deal with most of this. She’s going to be setting up a new chart of accounts that ties our income to expenses and we are going to start seeing our percentages and variances from budget each month.
Good stuff, but 90 minutes of this kind of detail work is exhausting for me.
Katie, my favorite CNBC producer, called me this morning and asked me if I was available Thursday. They are doing a show on Retirement in the 21st Century. Fortunately, Thursday is the one day I am available. Yay!
Now to come up with a topic …