Transitioning from being an employee to owning your own business is tough. It’s also scary. Because we are not sure which skills are the most important, decisions can be overwhelming. Planning can be overwhelming. Learning to put on the hat of the applicable role helps.
Entrepreneur Roles
We have discussed the roles of Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Customer Service Officer (CCO), Chief Operations Officer (COO) and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). We’ve thought about some familiar corporate roles and how to use them in our solorpreneur journey.
We’ve talked about stepping into the role of Chief Information Officer when needing to make goals and decisions related to technology.
We’ve talked about stepping into the role of Chief Customer Service Officer when needing to make goals and decisions related to our customers.
We’ve talked about stepping into the role of Chief Operations Officer when needing to make goals and decisions related to productivity.
We’ve also talked about stepping into the role of Chief Marketing Officer when needing to make goals and decisions related to increasing tribe size and brand reputation.
Chief Financial Officer
Let’s continue with the business owner who wants to start a service based business around beauty care. Her market is high school girls who wear makeup and attend homecoming and/or prom.
For our breakdown, the CFO is concerned with profitability but more importantly the role is concerned with tax compliance. When would she step into the role of Chief Financial Officer (CFO)?
Let’s say the business owner has decided to expand her service area to another county. High schools in other counties have a slightly different school calendar so she could possibly add 4 homecomings and 4 proms to her year.
Accounting
Our business owner runs the numbers and the added transportation expense and time needed to travel would be worth it. She also does what if scenarios to forecast a baseline, best case and worse case.
As she does research she realizes that the new county has a different tax rate that her current county. She thinks about this for a little while and realizes that she needs to be able to identify the county for all of her sales so that she can report them separately during tax time.
This also gives her more reason to make sure she has a good system in place to document sales, invoices and when she is paid.
She steps into the role of Chief Financial Officer to make sure her accounting is accurate and it helps her when she does her taxes.
Core Entrepreneurial Roles
We’ve discussed 5 of the 6 core entrepreneurial roles: CIO, CCO, COO, CMO and now the CFO. As you’ve seen all five have important goals and decisions to make and as I mentioned before, all care about what the other “chiefs” are doing.
But at the same time each realizes her area of responsibility and focuses on it so she makes decisions that are in the best of her department and reduces the chance of overwhelm.
What types of recent accounting related decisions have you made?
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