180. My Exact Tech Stack for Running a $1M firm

A complicated tech stack will make your life miserable as a fractional CFO. Every piece of tech that you add to your tech stack is another chance for something to go wrong and wreck your entire day, if not your week. That's why we keep our tech stack absurdly simple at my 7-figure fractional CFO firm. In fact, we stick to just 5 apps that are as powerful as they are practical.

In this video, I'll break down our entire tech stack in under 10 minutes so you can take what you need to build your own 7-figure firm. And no, none of these companies sponsor us. They're just apps that help us absolutely crush it as fractional CFOs, and I bet they'll do the same for you. Let's get started with number one, Ignition.

We love Ignition by firm. Ignition is a service that automates proposals, contracts, billing, and payments for professional service firms. It creates a polished, seamless client experience that leaves a great first impression. Nope, I'm not talking about generic templates here.

just a smooth, no-hassle experience that gives the client the sense that they're dealing with a professional. Now, it's true, there are plenty of lower-cost competitors in the market, so let me address the elephant in the room. Ignition is not cheap by any means. In fact, if you head over to their website, you'll see that it's like $230 a month for their pro package, which is the tier that my firm uses.

Now, that ain't nothing, and a lot of fractional CFOs will roll their eyes at that price tag, but listen, if you're billing your clients anywhere from $4,000 a month to $14,000 a month, on top of thousands of dollars for onboarding, I think it's more than worth it to pay $230 a month to give your buyers a no-hassle, no-headache experience when they sign with your firm. I mean, we're talking about one of the first experiences that a new client is going to have with you. Is this really where you want to cut costs to save a few bucks?

I prefer to give my new clients the best experience possible, and that's exactly what Ignition offers. It also makes our lives super easy behind the scenes. All of our accounts receivables are seamlessly handled within Ignition. And then it syncs with QuickBooks.

So once our client's invoice is generated and paid, it's automatically closed out. It keeps the books really, really clean. There's no extra steps. And we don't have to worry about sending out docusigns and creating invoices or chasing down payments.

All of those headaches literally go away with Ignition. So yes, I think it's worth the $230 a month to have that super high quality professional experience for our clients and have everything like automagically done for us on the backend. And that's why Ignition holds the first spot in our tech stack. Now, this next pick is literally going to ruffle a couple of feathers.

Number two on our tech stack is Google Workspace. Google Workspace is a productivity suite and a direct competitor to Microsoft Office or Microsoft 365. In the world of business, Google versus lame Microsoft is almost as heated as iPhone versus lame Android or Coke versus lame Pepsi. We choose Google at my firm for its ease of access and its simplicity when compared to Microsoft Office If you don know I from lower Alabama so simplicity tends to mean a lot to me In terms of access, Google blows Microsoft out of the water.

I mean, every client, co-worker, and freelancer that my firm has ever worked with has easy access to Google. But how many people have their Microsoft licenses up to date? Yeah, that's a giant headache that I'd rather leave back in 2005. While it's true that Microsoft does tend to have a more robust feature set, with that robust feature step comes a much steeper learning curve so that you can even get the benefits of those features.

Now, Microsoft has had decades to build complex features into its tools and it takes most people just way too long to learn those features anyway. On the flippity side, Google Sheets and Docs and Slides are very intuitive and easy for most users, especially those of us that are from the South. It's a lot easier for us to learn how to use those. And the documents are easy to share with anybody, from pretty much anywhere.

Most people out there already have a Gmail account, so there's no need to worry about subscriptions or signups or any of that jazz. What Google lacks in robust features, I think it more than makes up for in its ease of access and its simplicity. We love the seamless continuity and live updates across the workspace, and we use the apps almost every day. It's a mainstay in our workflow, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Speaking of seamless workflows, the next app is a lifesaver for fractional CFOs, and So number three on our list is Aircall. Aircall is a digital telephone platform. It's like a secondary cell phone with apps for Android, lame, and iPhone. Yay!

Aircall does everything that your iPhone might do already, like text messages and phone calls, but everything is recorded and logged, and it has an integration with HubSpot, which is coming up later on this list. This allows us easy access to every conversation that we have with our clients from the time that they're in our sales pipeline all the way through the entire relationship. Every text message, every phone call is recorded and transcribed. And what makes Aircall even cooler is that we can reassign inbound calls or texts to another CFO on the team.

And so if a CFO has to go on vacation or if there's an emergency, the client never loses continuity or communication. Now, you can probably tell by now that my firm values speed and ease of access, which is why Slack is number four on our list. Slack is a workspace and communication platform built for speed, which is perfect for fast-moving firms like yours. When compared to email, choosing Slack is a no-brainer.

It allows for instant back-and-forth communication without clogging inboxes, and it creates fewer bottlenecks as you wait for updates. On Slack, my team typically gets back to urgent messages with a couple of hours, and when you compare that to email that can take a day or longer, we're talking about two completely different levels of speed. Simply put, Slack leaves other communication tools in the dust. I'm talking to you, Microsoft Teams.

Now think about problems that require collaboration between two or three different people in multiple time zones What are the odds that you can get all three people to collaborate in real time through like an email chain Close to zero in my experience But Slack makes that kind of teamwork possible on a daily basis And when you extend that over a year and we talking about a very dramatic decrease in productivity. On top of all that, Slack keeps threads extremely well organized.

Now, maybe you're a legitimate sociopath and you love email. I don't know. But in my experience, email chains quickly devolve into a disorganized and unruly hellscape, especially when the dreaded reply-all is used. If you ever want to piss me off, reply-all on an email that I'm on and just watch me just get furious.

Slack eliminates those headaches by keeping everything well-structured and easily searchable. If you need to find something from an old thread, you just pop in a keyword from that conversation into the search bar and it'll pop right up. Slack also allows you to DM somebody from one-on-one conversations, and it lets you create and customize channels on the fly for group collaboration. Privacy settings also allow you to choose if a channel is public or private, which makes it very easy to work with everybody from leadership to freelancers all in one platform.

If your firm is still using email or Teams as the main form of communication and you want to pick up your work rate, I strongly recommend that you check out Slack. Now, this final item on our tech stack costs more than everything else on the list combined. In fact, it costs more than 10 times that amount. But the crazy part is, I think that it's totally worth it, especially as your firm starts to scale.

And that final piece of tech is HubSpot. HubSpot is a customer relationship management tool, or a CRM for short. And a good CRM tracks and logs everything across the entire customer lifecycle. And to maximize value, you want your CRM to be as robust as possible.

And that's exactly why I've chosen to use HubSpot. For us, it keeps everything in an all-in-one platform. I mean, it houses everything from our website to our marketing communications and every piece of customer data that we could ever want. The entire client lifecycle lives inside of HubSpot from the moment that somebody becomes a lead all the way through the discovery calls and the sales calls and onboarding and beyond.

And every email and Zoom call, it's right at our fingertips inside of HubSpot. And because it syncs directly with Aircall, that's the phone system we talked about earlier, we can see every text message and every phone call right there inside HubSpot. It's extremely powerful and it just makes life so much easier for our fractional CFOs and our leadership team. Once again, I'll say it out loud, like the elephant in the room here is the price tag.

For the particular feature set and combination of modules that we're on, HubSpot's $20,000 a year and it's easily the most expensive piece of tech stack on this list. But for my firm, it's worth every penny and more and I'm gonna tell you a very real story that happened several years ago That really highlights why this is essential, especially if you're adding more fractional CFOs to your team So a couple of years ago I had a fractional CFO on my team who had just a tragedy happen inside of his family there was a death of somebody very close to him And understandably so he had to leave suddenly and just dropped everything It wasn't something anybody could have anticipated.

And honestly, I would have dropped everything if that happened to me as well. But as the firm owner, I was left scrambling, trying to pick up the pieces to make sure that his clients had everything that they needed to stay successful. And it was an absolute nightmare because the information was scattered across a dozen different channels and I just couldn't find access to everything. I mean, there were comms within hundreds of email chains.

He had his cell phone, his Zoom account, different chat accounts. Communications were everywhere and it made it impossible for me to figure out what was going on with any one client so that I had a prayer of supporting them. And from that moment on, I decided that we had to get a CRM and we picked HubSpot a couple months later to make sure that something like this never happens again. I mean, think about it.

A single client is typically worth at least $50,000 a year for most firms. And they can be much worth much more than that as you move up the fractional CFO ladder. And so if HubSpot saves us from losing just one client of that size, like the one in that story that I just shared, it more than pays for itself. And so yeah, $20,000 is a lot of money, but we consider it a $20,000 insurance policy that's well worth the price tag.

Now listen, if you're a smaller firm, you might want to wait until So you're making north of like half a million dollars on your way to a million dollars to switch over to something as robust as HubSpot. But something tells me that if you're this deep into the fractional CFO rabbit hole and watching all of this content, you're going to need to make the switch sooner than later. I can tell you that in the year and a half or so that we've had HubSpot now, my firm has never once regretted adding HubSpot to our tech stack.

And that's it. I mean, really, that is all the tech that we use to run our million dollar firm. There's really no need to complicate things beyond that. And any piece of tech that somebody recommends to me is met with extreme skepticism.

I mean, the default answer is no, unless you can prove to me why it's an absolute essential. Not because it doesn't work, but because every new app threatens the harmony created by these five apps. That harmony that's rooted in simplicity. And you know the saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

In summary, my team uses Ignition. We use Google. Why? because Microsoft sucks just like Android and Pepsi.

We use Aircall, Slack, and HubSpot. Feel free to share your tech stack recommendations down below in the comments. And check out the link in description if you wanna join Inner Circle. That's my private community where fractional CFOs, just like you, come inside to share tips like these every single day.

All right, my friends, I hope you found this episode helpful. If you did, it would mean the world to me if you would leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening to this episode. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back right here next week. I'll see you then.