Kurtis Hanni

Christian, Husband, Father, Golfer || Helping businesses maximize cash & profit at @bisoncfo || Writing about SMB finances weekly:

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

There’s a special kind of frustration that only founders understand.

You’re working harder than ever.
The business is bigger than ever.
And somehow… you’re not making more money.
That’s not a motivation problem.

There can be a lot of reasons for this, and in today's podcast, I spoke to Nick Anderson about the origin of his: gross margins.

Margin erosion is quiet. It hides inside:
• Pricing decisions
• Compensation structures
• Delivery inefficiencies
• Shiny-object initiatives
• Vendor creep

In Nick's case, he inherited a model that was broken... margins too tight so that scaling the business would make their problems worse, not better.

In our episode with Nick, we unpack:
Fixing gross margin at OneAccord.
The fallout.
The hard decisions.
And the operating discipline required to build a more profitable second version of the company.

If you’re a $1M+ revenue service business and growth feels hard and less profitable than it should…

This one’s for you.

Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts:
YouTube: https://t.co/EJr3QhEVmS
Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/yac1q9rGde
Spotify: https://t.co/5f8KJVJhEG

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

@maruoportus That is the point… it shouldn’t only be updated once a month.

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

The average business makes around 250,000 significant decisions a year (give or take a few 😂).

Most get made with the same amount of thought as what you'll have for lunch.

Compare that to how often you actually look at your financials. Maybe 12 times a year, if the close happens on time.

So, if my numbers hold… roughly 249,988 of those decisions happen without accurate or timely financial data behind them.

Closing that gap means having a short list of numbers you review weekly, so you have good data on hand at the moment you're actually deciding.

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

@Dorf_Jonathan "trust us bro" metrics are the best 😂

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

Data doesn’t lie, except when we intentionally lie (cherry pick) with data.

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

Yeah, we don’t have base packages that high, so custom.

Some items include managing an internal team, ops meetings, additional meetings with CEO/board, and sometimes even building things/designing processes.

We have one north of $10k on a business south of $10M revenue. But others that large are businesses of $30-75 million.

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

You can outsource the work, but you can’t outsource the decision-making.

As a business owner, you need to understand your financials well enough to turn the data into good decisions.

Your CFO should coach you through that process, not become the person you depend on for every answer.

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

It's amazing how quickly fitness leaves you.

Between my foot injury in May, then a back injury 3-4 weeks ago, a walk this evening felt like a foreign experience.

To think back, just a few months ago I was running 10+ miles every Saturday.

It's a great reminder: if you're worried about the sprint, it's easy to allow setbacks to turn into a permanent thing.

But if you're focused on the full timescale of life, a setback is pretty much irrelevant.

In the moment, it's hard, but the reality is, you just gotta keep moving forward. Then, over the scale of years, the progress is there.

This works not only in fitness, but in business.

It's easy to get frustrated in the moment.

Zoom out!

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

@FrontierBDesign Sometimes I wonder too 😂

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

What if the businesses you admire for being "strategic" aren't smarter than everyone else? What if they're just more consistent about a rhythm nobody sees?

I'd bet on the second one every time.

Strategy that only lives in a planning document once a year is a wish with a deadline.

The business owners who actually execute are the ones who cascade that plan down to something reviewed weekly, where every number traces back to the goals they set out to achieve.

That's a better system.

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

@theryanjamesmil 💯

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

@FrontierBDesign Feel this 😂

Multiple holidays I’ve been working only to realize midday “o wait, today’s a holiday?”

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

Accounting and finance are moving from a people-heavy model to a software-driven one, and that could dramatically lower the cost of high-quality financial insight for SMBs.

As more businesses outsource their accounting functions, smaller companies will gain access to the kind of financial data and intelligence that was once reserved for much larger organizations.

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

I've dealt with bad hires, a partnership that was misaligned, and situations that felt like a step backward at the time.

I'm grateful I don't have a long list of failures. Part of that is because being an introvert made me a careful observer, someone who noticed problems early instead of missing them.

None of that made me immune to the hard stuff. It just meant I'd already practiced staying level when things got messy.

You don't avoid every hit running a business.

You build the ability to keep moving after one lands.

That's true for the business owners I work with too. The ones who hold up under pressure are the ones who saw them coming early enough to stay calm.

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

@UltraRunner26 123 average heart beat is so funny

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

The CPA who only does your taxes is not your financial strategist.

A good CPA will tell you this themselves if you ask directly.

The problem is most owners never ask.

They assume tax season conversations are strategy conversations.

So capital decisions get made based on tax consequences and without thinking about your larger plan.

Annual goals get set without a financial model behind them.

Keep your CPA doing the taxes. I’m sure they’re crushing it. But also, know they’re just doing one part.

If you want strategy help, send me a DM.

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

@CarlisleCFO I hadn't really thought about the legal comparison much, but I can totally see that.

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

The future of SMB accounting isn’t “automate everything,” it’s having accounting experts manage the automation and AI layer.

As the tech stack gets more powerful and complex, businesses can get better financial outcomes at a lower cost than relying on a generalist in-house role to manage it all.

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

@TheNathanRuff What are you doing for tech stack?

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

@rockylalvani Yup 100%!

[Kurtis Hanni @KurtisHanni]

I had a client who lost more than half their revenue in a single week.

That sentence alone sounds like a crisis story. In this case, it wasn't, and that's the actual point.

The founder didn't panic. There was no emergency all-hands meeting, no scramble to cut everything at once.

The protocols for this type of event had already been set up and planned out. Everybody knew what to do if a major revenue source disappeared.

They were able to think through which costs flex first, what the cash runway looks like at reduced revenue, and which decisions needed to happen in week one versus month one.

Compare that to a different client, a good operator, who had one down month and reacted by firing two members of the marketing team immediately.

That decision felt responsible in the moment, but it ended up reducing their capacity and damaging morale on a team that was already stretched thin, and the revenue dip turned out to be temporary.

One business had a plan for the bad month before it happened. The other was making its plan in real time, under stress, with incomplete information.