Alright, I have an embarrassing secret to admit…
I don’t know how to cook.
How I’ve gotten through life this long is a miracle. Although outside of the culinary arts, I’ve found a recipe where I’ve found a lot of success. This recipe has allowed me to unlock growth for several $3M+ businesses as an entrepreneur and CEO.
Now I would be lying if I said this recipe was simple. Growing and scaling complex businesses is the number-one challenge for CEOs and CFOs. There are a ton of formidable challenges to doing so. I started my first company at 19, and I’ve made a ton of mistakes and learned a lot of tough lessons as a business executive over the years.
But I’ve learned that there are three key ingredients (or focus areas) that can help you become a master chef or as some of us like to be called: CEOs and CFOs.
- Building operational excellence
- Efficiently acquiring and retaining customers
- Optimizing for profitability and improving overall business health
Now before tackling this recipe, a great chef is nothing without being equipped with the right tools. Giving yourself and your team the right products and software is essential for a growing business.
I would like to tell you a bit about a new product on the block: Intuit Enterprise Suite. Intuit Enterprise Suite serves businesses that are struggling to efficiently stitch all of their tools and data together to understand how their business is performing.
The suite offers an AI-powered, robust business platform that brings together your financial, payroll, HR, marketing, and cash flow tools all in one place. It can help automate and streamline operations to help your business increase productivity and improve decision making.
1. Great tools are essential, but it’s important to set the right tone from the start when it comes to how your team operates.
Operational excellence wasn’t something that came naturally to me as a leader. I’ve always been super creative, loved problem solving, and worked hard. But running a successful company requires setting a vision that your team can rally behind, designing goals that ladder up into that vision, and constantly being in a state of continuous optimization of processes.
Years ago I was running a social media software company, and despite having some impressive first year growth, company growth had stalled. During the first year, things were growing so fast that I didn’t really take time to assign structure to our team when it came to goals and processes. We were past the point of just growing through initial word of mouth, and we needed to set clear goals with real metrics to measure our success.
I decided to implement an OKR framework, or Objectives and Key Results. This framework gave the team specific goals to achieve with measurable results, not just “growing revenue” or “acquiring new users.” This aligned the team better and held us to a new standard of productivity. We now had more transparency about the vision of the company and where we were headed. This produced a series of positive outcomes: We fostered a culture of innovation, improved communication across teams, and better allocated resources to the areas that were providing growth to the company.
This also helped us better realize what tools we needed to get the data and insights we needed to understand how the business was performing and continue to set impactful goals. But even more importantly, we figured out how to continue to scale and grow the company.
2. Now that you have your team organized, you need to do what every business requires the CEO and CFO to figure out—how to efficiently acquire and retain customers.
Have you ever seen someone try to swing at a pinata while blind-folded? It looks a bit ridiculous, right? Well, that’s what a business leader looks like while trying to acquire (or retain) customers without the right data and insights to make the right decisions.
Throughout my career, I’ve seen how having the right data insights can help define your target audience and provide more clarity as to which users bring the most lifetime value.
Having the right data is also like a super power to supercharge your marketing team, allowing them to personalize experiences for your users, improve search engine results (SEO), run powerful lookalike campaigns for your performance marketing, and know the right messaging that will resonate most with potential customers for brand marketing campaigns. More importantly, those insights can help you retain those customers, increase lifetime value, or even win back dormant or lost users.
You’re really cooking now—your team is operating at an all-time high, and you’re acquiring customers efficiently. So, what’s left? Well, any good chef also knows the importance of not being wasteful.
3. Let’s talk about optimizing your business for profitability and improving overall business health.
For some large corporations, money may seem like an infinite resource (spoiler alert: it’s not). Nevertheless, many readers running growing small- to medium-sized businesses or startups know that this is very much not the case. Also, smart CEOs and CFOs know that no matter how large the business may be, saving money and optimizing for profitability (or increased profitability) is key, especially in the macroeconomic environment we are seeing today.
Tools like Intuit Enterprise Suite are designed to help increase productivity and enhance profitability for your growing business with multi-entity accounting and management, revenue recognition, AI-powered FP&A. The suite also provides automation across your business, so you spend less time on manual processes and make faster decisions with AI-powered insights.
So okay chef… how are we looking?
You now have all the ingredients you need, and the right tools like Intuit Enterprise Suite to cook it to perfection.
Best of luck, and bon appetit.
