Read time: 2:47 minutes 

To grow your fractional CFO firm, you have to invest time in business development.

Biz dev? Ain't nobody got time for that.

I know! You're busy doing, you know, actual CFO work! Where are you supposed to find time to actually go get new clients? 

Your struggle is real. 

And honestly, I think it's a good thing if you find yourself in this situation. Because that means you've gone out, found clients, and you're doing the work. 

That means that the business thing you've built is working! 

Now we've got to find some time in your schedule so you can go out and find more clients and continue scaling.

Today, I'm going to share my top 3 hacks for creating time for biz dev (that don't require you to work more hours!).

Let's dive in.

Hack #1

Start by documenting your key processes and procedures. 

Before I continue, let me take a moment to plead with the 83% of you that are reading this and thinking: 

"Yeah, yeah Mike. Processes and procedures. I've heard you say it a million times. I don't even have anyone else on my team so I don't need processes or procedures yet. Let's move on to the next hack please." 

This is faulty logic and you're wasting time and money because of it.

Yes - getting processes documented will be vital once you decide to grow your team. But it's also true that documenting key processes helps you identify ways to become more efficient NOW. It forces you to evaluate your thinking and helps you identify gaps in what you're doing.

(Fun fact: we're doing a deep dive on which processes to document AND how to document them at The CFO Accelerator LIVE!) 

I don't want you to document all the silly little things you do. Go for the heavy hitters.

The most impactful process I've ever documented was how I evaluate financials and prepare CFO reports.

Start there.

Hack #2

The second hack that is SO worth the investment is researching ways you can automate your workflows.

Not only will automating your workflows create time for you, but it can also reduce errors.

But where should you start with workflow automation? 

I started by looking at the most tedious and time consuming work my firm did each month. For fractional CFO work, that is almost always going to be CFO report generation. It's also the work that is most prone to error.

Fortunately I found G-Accon which has been a life saver. 

Here's the short and sweet on how we use it: 
1. We created a template for our CFO report in Google Sheets.
2. We installed G-Accon to connect QBO to Google Sheets.
3. G-Accon now automagically pulls the data from QBO and updates each of our clients' CFO reports.
4. We do a quick QA to make sure everything is in order and we're on to our next task.

How important is this automation for us? 

We did time logging and found that G-Accon saved us just over 40 HOURS - every month.

You can do a lot of biz dev with 40 extra hours a month.

Hack #3

I have found that hiring a world class assistant can be the most impactful ways to free up time.

I've heard them referred to as VAs (virtual assistants) and EAs (executive assistants). I'm not sure that there's a difference - it's likely just branding but idk. I'm going to refer to them as EAs for the rest of this edition.

Yes, an EA can help with some of the more obvious things like: 

Calendaring
Customer service
Email management
Non-technical tasks

And those things will certainly free up some time. 

But I want you to work with a world class EA! A world class EA will provide much more than that. 

Michael Hyatt has a GREAT book called Your World-Class Assistant that does a deep dive into what a great EA can and should do. 

In my experience, a great EA will help you prioritize and hold you accountable. 

Prioritization and accountability create more time and space for me than anything else I have invested in.

(HUGE shout out to Gretchen Dauzat for helping me keep it together every single day!) 

The good news is that an EA could be a PT 1099 role if you're just getting started.

Look, I know that finding time to do business development is tough. You're super busy doing important work. 

But I also know that you have some missing hours hidden in your days - and using these 3 hacks will unlock a good chunk of it.

Your coach, 
Michael King