A CPA told me why her firm wasn't growing. Somewhere in the middle of it, almost as an aside, she said:
"Over the years, the numbers tell the story."
Both her parents were CPAs. She grew up at a dinner table where numbers were the conversation. That sentence is her entire brand, and she didn't know it. She'd spent twenty minutes telling me she was "detail-oriented." Then she told me the truth by accident.
Founders know their story. They just don't know it's a story.
Two things I was never supposed to be at once.
I have a degree in fine art. I paint. It's not a hobby it's how I see.
I also ran my own Registered Investment Advisory firm, then went internal as Chief Compliance Officer at Nationwide Financial. Series 6, 7, 24, 53, 63, 65. ChFC and CAP.
People used to ask which one was the real me......... They were the same one.
A P&L is a self-portrait. Show me twelve months of a company's numbers and I'll tell you what the founder is afraid of.
There is art in the finances. There is structure in the art. I stopped choosing a long time ago.
Then I became the bottleneck.
I've built companies. In every one, I was the only person who sold, the only one who talked to clients, the only one who knew why anything worked.
I've had the February with the empty pipeline and the empty account. I've done the math on payroll on a Thursday night.
I wasn't a bad operator. I was a bottleneck who kept getting rescued by my own hustle so I never fixed what was actually broken. That's the trap. It isn't laziness. It's competence, misapplied.
Why trades.
Nobody becomes an electrician for the paperwork. They get into it for the craft. Then they start a company to do it their own way and the company takes the craft away from them.
Sometimes it looks like a cash-flow problem. It almost never is. It's a system problem wearing a cash-flow costume and the founder is too busy surviving it to get ten feet back and see the shape of it. That's the ten feet. That's what I do.
Wealth is time. Freedom. Room to think.
I spent years watching people build financial statements. I know what money is at the end of a process.
It's a receipt.
Plenty of founders are pulling good numbers and still trapped. Still working sixty hours. Still the only one who knows why anything works. They have the money. They don't have the wealth.
That's what the system is for. Not to make you rich. To give you back the thing you started the company to get.
What I won't do.
I won't tell you what you want to hear. If the problem is you, I'll say so.
I won't sell you leads. You need to stop dropping the ones you have.
I won't be your agency. I build the system, then hand you the keys or appointment an Admin to your account.
Wealthy Palette.
A palette is where an artist mixes what they already have into something nobody's seen. Everything you need is already on it. You just need the system that turns it into a company. -Sandra Carlisle, Founder of Wealthy Palette
