Kristina and I run a virtual CFO practice called Stoneforge. She started it in 2016, I joined in 2020, and we've been working with small and mid-sized businesses on their financial strategy ever since. That work is still running today.
In 2021, in the middle of COVID, we acquired a bookkeeping firm. We doubled it — staff, clients, revenue, profit, enterprise value — and sold it two and a half years later. We did everything right according to the standard playbook: accurate books, responsive service, competitive pricing.
And it was inside that bookkeeping firm where I saw something that changed how I think about this entire industry.
I'd sit in on the monthly review meetings with our bookkeepers. These were sessions we'd charge a few hundred dollars for, where a bookkeeper would walk a client through their monthly results. The data was always solid. The books were clean. But the bookkeeper would start at the beginning and drive through the report line by line, point by point, with no differentiation between what mattered and what didn't. The client would nod, say thank you, and go back to running their business with exactly zero new information they could act on.
The problem was never the quality of the work. It was that by the time the data had been pulled, the report had been built, the errors had been checked and the document had been formatted, there was no capacity left for the conversation that would have turned all of that analysis into something useful. The mechanical work consumed the time and energy that should have gone into advisory.
I watched this pattern play out with our own team, with our own clients, in a firm we controlled. And I saw the same thing happening in every bookkeeping practice and vCFO engagement we came across. The people were capable. The analysis was there. But the delivery system — the process of getting from raw financial data to a client who actually understands what's happening in their business — was broken.
Meanwhile, the market was shifting underneath all of us. The platforms are building direct services that compete with the firms that use them. AI is making DIY bookkeeping feel accessible to business owners who would have hired a professional three years ago. Offshore labour is structurally cheaper for compliance work. And clients are starting to question why they're paying professional rates for work they increasingly see as something technology should handle.
None of that means the profession is dying. It means the part of the profession that most firms built their revenue around — compliance work, the monthly recording, reconciling and reporting of past financial data — is being commoditised. Advisory is where the value is moving. Most people in the industry already know this. The problem is that nobody has a credible, systematic way to make the transition without either burning out or gutting their existing client base in the process.
That's what this newsletter is about.
Every week I'm going to share the specific frameworks, lessons and mistakes that came out of running Stoneforge, acquiring and selling the bookkeeping firm, and now building Baifokal — an advisory delivery system designed to automate the mechanical work that sits between financial analysis and client-ready insight.
How to figure out where your time is actually going and what that tells you about your advisory capacity. Why "just add advisory" is terrible advice when you're already working sixty hours a week on compliance. What clients actually want from their financial reports — and what they're getting instead. The five-year disruption cycle that's already underway and where we are on the timeline. How to systematically create the space for advisory conversations without hiring more people or dropping clients.
I'm not writing this from the outside looking in. I'm writing it from inside a practice that's still running, alongside a product we're building to solve the exact problem I'm describing. Some weeks the newsletter will be about frameworks. Some weeks it will be about what we're learning as we build. All of it will be specific to this industry and grounded in what I've actually seen work.
If you're a bookkeeper, fractional CFO or CPA firm doing monthly compliance work and you're trying to figure out where advisory fits — or whether it's even possible given the reality of your current workload — this is for you.
I'd genuinely like to hear where you are in the transition. Hit reply and tell me — even if the answer is "I haven't started and I'm not sure I believe any of this." That's a perfectly reasonable starting point, and it's more or less where I was when I first started paying attention to this.
Until next time,
