The most expensive engineer at a $1M SaaS is usually the founder.
We kept pushing a key hire to "next quarter." Our fractional CFO added the cost of waiting to the model.
We hired 6 months sooner.
Reply "model" for the hire-vs-wait sheet.
@2CommaInvestor I stopped focusing on days and looked at weeks instead. Answering the question on Friday afternoon based on the total performance. Not an hour of two of progress.
Most business owners I know can tell you their sales, but not whether they can afford their next hire.
A fractional CFO fixed that for a friend of mine. He showed them which jobs actually make money, when cash gets tight, and how to get a bank line before they needed it.
They hired 6 months sooner than planned.
Want an intro?
@HeyAliux Spend time cold calling to find the big problem that people are willing to pay for. Charge them and deliver manually or charge them for the waitlist.
Every founder I talk to has the same tools. Same models. Same copilots. Same agents shipping the same "10x" output.
Outside of AI, what is your companyโs greatest edge?
Mastery takes roughly 10,000 hours of focused practice. That's five years of full-time work, plus the mistakes, the late nights, and the scar tissue that come with it.
Here's the good news: you don't have to earn those hours yourself. Especially not in a subject you care nothing about.
Your best customer might be your most expensive one.
Here's a question most founders get wrong:
Which of your customers or products actually loses you money?
Your accounting system tracks revenue by customer.
It doesn't track cost by customer.