"I don't know what's going on in my business. I'm barely making enough money to support my bills."

That's what Maria told me before we dug into her financial information together.

Maria runs a graphic design business, and she has a real gift for it. She came to me because her cash was tight and she couldn't figure out why. She had been in business for ten years, built a multi six figure business completely from referrals and word of mouth, and was amazing at what she and her team did. Clients came to her because of her eye, her instincts, the way she and her team could take a brand and make it feel exactly right. She didn't actually know she wasn't profitable, because she wasn't looking. All she knew was that money felt tight, and she couldn't understand why.

Naturally, being a CFO, I know the answers can usually be found in the financial information. It tells a story that many women business owners don't know how to read, which makes sense, since no one ever taught them. Maria was a creative and numbers were not her jam. Not to mention, no one had ever shown her how to understand this part of her business, and she was always afraid to look, let alone ask a question about it. Even when she did look, it read like a foreign language to her, numbers on a screen that meant nothing next to the work she actually understood, the work she was good at. So she avoided it, month after month, trusting that if the business felt busy, it must be working. After all, her CPA and bookkeeper had everything covered, or so she thought anyway.

So we started with the first place I like to look, pricing, because that's the place most business owners struggle with, especially when they have a team. They often think if they just charge a little bit more than what they pay their team member, they'll land on a little profit. What business owners don't always understand is that adding just a little bit more to what you pay your team member isn't enough. They often forget to cover all of their own time. The time it takes to project manage, to do sales and marketing for that team member's workload, to manage that team member, to review that team member's work, all of it has to be accounted for too. So that's where we started with Maria too. Her hourly rate for that team member's work actually seemed to be in line, so we knew we needed to dig further.

Then after further analyzing her financial information together, we got to the bottom of her profitability mystery. Her team member was being paid as a full time employee but was only billing twenty hours a week. Maria was covering a full time paycheck for part time output, and that gap was quietly eating her profit every single month. That's a huge problem, and it explained the lack of profitability completely. Together we set a new minimum, thirty billable hours a week, and that one change alone corrected the imbalance.

Sounds simple, doesn't it, but it wasn't. Once we knew what needed to change, Maria was worried about talking to her employee about it. She had to help her employee understand that being accountable for those hours mattered for both of them, for the business's ability to keep growing at all. It was a hard conversation Maria had to have, and I coached her through every part of it. This is where being a coach and a CFO gives me an advantage over most in my lane. Not only can I help uncover the problem, I can help with the emotional side of fixing it too.

When Maria finally had that conversation, she came back changed. She told me it went so much better than she expected, and that her employee actually appreciated the clarity of knowing exactly what was expected of her. Maria stopped avoiding the hard conversations after that. She stepped into her business differently, not just as the talented designer who built it, but as the CEO who was beginning to understand it. That shift changed everything for her.

One of the reasons I love what I do is that the answers always start in the financial information, but this work is never only about the numbers, it's about who you become once you finally know them. If you're not looking at your financial information, not analyzing what's underneath it and understanding the story it's telling you, you're not only missing valuable information, you're missing the chance to fully step into who you already are as a CEO.

If you're afraid you're missing something in your business, or you know it's finally time to start understanding your financial information and owning your identity as a CEO, that's exactly what we work through together in my live experience called Where Is All My Money Going. https://www.audreyfaustconsulting.com/money. Join me at my next one.