The Traditional Accounting Model is Failing You

Two years ago, I rebranded to The Profitability Project. Our tagline was “Not Your Dad’s CPA” — and it turned into the perfect line for us, because I don’t believe the traditional accounting model is actually doing small business owners any good.

Here’s what I mean by that.

Right now, every accounting firm is slapping the word “advisory” on their website and calling it a new service. It sounds impressive. It sounds like more than bookkeeping and taxes. But almost nobody defines what’s actually inside it, which means you have no way of knowing whether the “advisory” you’re being sold is the real thing or just a rebrand of a quarterly check-in call.

So here’s the difference between me and most of those firms: I offer eight specific things as part of advisory (or fractional CFO work), and I can actually name every one of them.

I didn’t pull this list out of a marketing deck. It’s built on almost ten years of fractional CFO experience, five years of corporate experience before that, and over 200 businesses whose financial issues I’ve personally worked through. It’s also built on the last year of genuinely deep research into why small business owners can’t seem to reach profitability, no matter how hard they’re working. I’ve been hired by fairly large companies specifically to coach other CPAs on how to offer advisory services that actually move the needle for their clients — not just services that sound good on a website.

Here’s what we actually offer, outside of the traditional accounting work like bookkeeping and taxes:

1. Forecasting

2. Cash management

3. Tax planning

4. Setting up your financial processes

5. Pricing evaluation and revaluation

6. Margin control

7. Debt planning

8. Money mindset

And within those eight categories, there are a lot of sub-categories nobody expects to hear from an accountant. I’ve helped businesses raise capital. I’ve helped businesses build out full financial models. I’ve helped businesses get their internal team under control so they can actually run profitably. Some of it is just consulting, plainly. The list goes on further than most people assume “advisory” could possibly go.

If you’re a small business owner, and what you’ve been calling “financial education” is really just receiving a profit and loss statement once a quarter and being told to review it — you are missing out on the thing that’s actually going to make your business profitable.

A P&L is data. Advisory is what happens with that data, and to the person looking at it. Both halves matter. Most firms are only delivering one.