Thank You · Black Box Business

27d • WINS

Thank You

I had a moment of clarity over the weekend and wanted to share my heartfelt gratitude.

For the past year, understanding our finances has been my biggest painpoint. We started scaling the business in a big way in March of last year, and we've been on this nonstop growth/scaling trajectory since. But every day since we started scaling - without fail - I felt the pressure of understanding our profitability and knowing that the growth wasn't necessarily profitable. We were scaling a business, but I couldn't read it clearly.

I felt totally lost. I didn't know if the growth was working, I couldn't tell good spend from bad, and I kept feeling like I needed an accounting degree just to keep up. I kept looking at our numbers and not understanding how to analyze them or take actionable steps to fix issues. I knew if we kept going the way we were, the business would look great in topline revenue but be upside down or mediocre in profitability, and I didn't know how to fix it. I'd been focused on this issue for a while and hadn't cracked the code, and it was chipping away at my confidence as a leader.

@James Morris

and

@Valerie Grandinetti

have broken that down in a way nobody else has. The Founders Day session, the profitability series and worksheets, and the Accounting 101 calls have completely shifted how I see the business. I'm now running daily cash flow reports and have a 13-week cash flow forecast. I've overhauled my month-end closeout process with Valerie and James's tips. I'm tracking KPIs with a profitability scorecard that actually tells me something about the health of the business. And I'm so happy to say that we've been consistently in the green on our cash flow planning. We now finally have a plan for turning around other painpoints in the company based on what the numbers are telling us.

PLUS we recently started our accountability calls with

@Casey Bernard

, and in just two sessions he's helped us rework our 2026 targets and address how we prioritize our time.

I'm writing this because I was finishing up James's profitability sessions over the weekend and had this aha moment: I feel WAY more equipped to lead this business now than I did six months ago. Tony caught me in the middle of this realization and heard about my whole epiphany, haha. The recent shift into doing deep dives on finances and operations has made such a huge difference in our business (thanks to

@Steve Rozenberg

@Chris Tighe

& the team for all the work on this!).

@James Morris

@Valerie Grandinetti

, thank you for giving me the tools I've been searching for. I really can't express what it means to me.

4 comments

Thank You