Profit By Design: 72: Little Known Secrets to Building a Profitable Business

72: Little Known Secrets to Building a Profitable Business

Jan 23, 2020

In keeping with the theme of “Designing for Profit in 2020”, Dr. Sabrina sits down with her guest, Christine Rico, to shed some light on things that we may not be thinking about in our business that have a pretty significant impact on whether or not we’re building a profitable, sustainable business.

Christine Rico is a good friend and colleague of Dr. Sabrina. She is the owner of CFO On Speed Dial and a fellow Profit First Professional. Christine is a financial consultant, business growth expert, and social entrepreneur who got her start in financial management while keeping the books for Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, NY more than 20 years ago. The Cooperative was then a start-up and is now the country’s largest worker-owned business. At CFO On Speed Dial, Christine and her team help business owners set and reach financial goals and build companies that are making healthy, sustainable food products, installing renewable energy systems, and growing high-impact consulting businesses. Christine works with companies to improve profitability, craft expansion plans grounded in the company’s overall goals and vision, and get the cash that businesses need to grow. She is on a mission to close the gender-revenue gap by helping women-owned companies accelerate growth.

Show Highlights:

Christine and Dr. Sabrina discuss a recent blog post of Christine’s, which celebrates growth in the number of companies owned by women but highlights the appalling percentage of revenue that these women-owned companies bring in. This is what she calls the “Gender Revenue Gap”.
Growing your company in incremental steps for the short term may be reality, but you have to know where you’re going.
If you don’t have a big dream that you’re aiming for, it’s really hard to get outside of the day-to-day and what you think you can accomplish next.
What is your big dream?
What impact would it have if your business is bigger?
Christine shares her vision and the impact she hopes for with CFO on Speed Dial.
Christine recommends reading Profit First by Mike Michalowicz for structure in how you think about cash in your business and gives an overview of her five fundamentals needed in order to move to the next level in business.
Dr. Sabrina shares her own personal story about her introduction to the Profit First philosophy.
The distinction between social impact and charitable giving and some ways we might be thinking about these in our business.
Ideas on how to measure impact.
Christine describes the role of a CFO.
Checklist of infrastructure needed to scale a business.