Perpetual Revenue: The Case For Adding Subscription Based Offers To Your Fractional CFO Firm

Building Predictability & Value Into Your Business

There is no greater expertise in demand by growing business owners than that of the CFO.

Fractional CFO's, you know you are the lifeblood of a growing enterprise, bringing the financial strategy and tactics intelligence so needed by founders.

But as you and your firm grows, and as time goes on in your engagement with clients, something happens.

Fractional fatigue sets in.

A tipping point of perceived value by the client and their monthly investment in you happens and the balance shifts.

Suddenly, you seem too high a price to pay.

This is a report I've heard from many business owners and Vistage members in our discussions about fractional CFOs - when to hire, who to hire, what to expect.

This is why, in an ever-more competitive market, having multiple and varied streams of revenue are essential for you to:

• demonstrate incomparable value to clients
• offer incentives for them to want to continue working with you beyond the norm.

It isn't enough to simply be great at what you do anymore.

The bar has been raised by the level of competition.

This causes a great deal of business concern for you because your business is a "sell one/do one" model.

You sell an engagement and then service an engagement.

It's great while it lasts but then you need to find the next engagement.

And you only earn when you or your CFOs are working.

For fractional CFO firms, this issue is partly resolved by having a team of service providers but

the sell one/do one issue still perplexes.

Happily, on the flip side, business owners may be ready after a certain period of time to end your current retainer engagement but they don't want to curtail their relationship and input from you entirely.

Enter a win-win opportunity for fractional CFOs, firms, and clients.

The productized subscription offer.

What is that?

Fractional CFO's have so many ways they can repackage their value to clients, ways that can be formatted in subscription based offers.

The benefits to the firm are many:

1. Predictable, incremental, recurring revenue
2. Low cost of client acquisition (they are already clients)
3. Greater stickiness of the client to your firm
4. Recurring revenue adds greater valuation to your firm (ask any business buyer)
5. Creating proprietary intellectual property and a competitive edge to your firm.

The win for the clients is also enormous.

They get your expertise in manageable formats that don't break their budget.

What would subscription-based offers look like for your firm?

Can you really offer subscriptions that would appeal to your clients and sell?

The Subscription Economy exploded with SaaS companies, then tangible products.

Now it is poised to boom in professional services (telemedicine, for example).

I've worked with many fractional CFOs at the scale up stage to help them find a way to expand their earning capacity but not require more of their time, or require adding employees.

This is a request that was music to my ears because I have always seen additional revenue opportunities beyond standard CFO retainer services:

Subscriptions that could provide:

• opportunity scenario planning,
• succession planning,
• employee hiring and compensation decision-making insight
• employee performance analysis support,
• financial literacy among leaders (a common problem with lots of embarrassment around this causes mistakes and poor decisions at the top levels),
• benchmarking,
• risk/compliance trends & reviews
• investor relations strategy
• financial training in specialized areas - M&A due diligence for example
• new channel distribution analysis,
• exit and sale readiness,
• international compliance trends,
• financial investor analyses

and many more.

There is a very good reason that business buyers always value companies with solid subscription recurring revenue models more than those without.

Fractional CFO firms hold the keys to any business' kingdom.

You have many more keys than may realize.

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We help fractional executive and consulting firms grow, scale, gain a competitive edge by adding recurring revenue subscription-based products.

(We're so bullish on recurring subscription-based revenue, we even designed and trained a custom GPT😊 )

If you're curious about how your firm could benefit from adding a subscription-based offer in addition to your standard services, let's chat.