Startup Bookkeeping & Fractional CFO services @ Margin® | CPA | Former VP, Controller @ Everly Health | Big Commerce | Q2 Holdings | PwC
Austin, TX
Joined July 2022
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A brief intro for anyone new to following me:
- I'm a CPA (I don't do taxes 😉)
- After working in Big 4 (PwC), auditing public companies, I spent a decade doing corporate finance/accounting for high growth startups (most recently as an executive for a digital health unicorn)
- I've helped companies IPO, acquire & integrate other businesses, and raise $100s of millions in equity and debt financing
- I've built finance/accounting teams and processes from scratch, helping companies scale <$10 million in revenues to $100s of millions in revenue (helped 1 business go from $6M to >$400M)
- I started Margin to provide high quality bookkeeping, fractional CFO, and fractional controller services to SMBs and startups (infusing everything we do with the best practices I learned throughout my career)
- I mostly post about accounting & finance for small businesses with the goal of providing useful content to help SMB owners navigate their own finance/accounting
Time for me to say goodbye…
…to this X account.
And start from scratch with a new one.
If you’ve followed my journey, you know I built (and recently sold) Margin CFO.
And now it’s time for me to build again.
Would love for any to follow along if interested @mattmcmichen
My take on this weekend's fight with tax twitter and a founder who replaced his accountant with AI:
To my fellow CPAs - instead of responding with judgment, how about curiosity?
Your outrage is baseless and telling.
Maybe you could actually learn from him if you took the time.
My thoughts on personal agents:
Just because we can, doesn't mean we should.
It may *feel* like a no-brainer to delegate every menial task in our lives, but at what point does this become too much?
And at what cost?
We're giving up some of what it means to be human.
My thoughts on personal agents (Muse, Dot, GrokBot, Instinct):
GrokBot - I like their platform the best, my brain just likes the idea of individualized/specialized agents better than having one main agent. Still using GrokBot mainly for scraping X and content analytics but that's about it.
Instinct - absolutely love it. Super proactive, incredibly smart and because it lives in imessage it's the least amount of friction for me to use which I think is key for adoption
Muse - set it up, tried it for 5 mins and haven't touched it since. Wanted to use it for FB marketplace listing management but it cant auto-reply (you have to manually approve each reply) so that pretty much killed that only use case for me
Dot - loving it so far, it has its flaws (can feel a little clunky, not clear on how to edit its system prompt/custom instructions) but I'm bullish on the OpenAI ecosystem and use Codex as my daily driver so this will be the one I use the most.
Basically, using Instinct for personal stuff (travel bookings, reservations, etc.) and Dot for quick business tasks then Codex for just about everything else aside from content which I use Claude for (Opus 5.5 is a fantastic writing model).
Here's an unexpected take:
You could scale an SMB from $0 to $1M using just a 13 week cash forecast.
I'll go one further and say, all else equal, someone using a 13 week cash forecast regularly to make financial decisions could out perform someone using their monthly P&L.
How efficient is AI really making me if I'm spending ALL of my time playing with every new thing that comes out EVERY DAY.
I couldn't be more excited to announce that Margin is joining forces with Washington Avenue Advisors.
What started as nothing but a computer and a dream has grown into something I’m incredibly proud of.
I’m looking forward to what we build together from here!
Planning my X comeback. Some incredibly exciting news to announce (coming soon).
I'm sure the algo will bury this for my absence, so to the 10 who see it...stay tuned.
Posted on LI that I'd share a free 13-week cash forecast with SMB OWNERS who needed help getting started.
Post blew up and so did my inbox. Only problem?
It was all finance pros and other fractional CFOs asking for my template.
Maybe I'm selling to the wrong audience.
Making finance useful to SMB owners isn’t complicated.
They don’t need a CFO building dashboards with 50 KPIs.
What they DO need is simple:
• A clear view of how the business is performing
• Guidance on what to do about it
And you can get there with these 3 things:
Is the SMB crowd still active on here?
Been off X for a while and trying to get back into the swing of it. Seems like a different place.
There are only 2 kinds of SMB owners:
(1) Those who know their numbers
(2) Those who will soon know the number 0
It's harsh, but true.
If you don't understand your margins, your cash flow, your NWC...you're guessing.
And guessing is how good businesses run out of money.
Here’s a Friday treat: a confession 𝘢𝘯𝘥 some advice.
I spent most of my corporate finance career thinking the most valuable reports for a CEO came from the month-end financial package.
I was wrong.
Now that I run my own business, I see it clearly...
Nothing beats a rolling forecast/financial model and a 13-week cash forecast.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I use both almost daily. They’ve informed every financial decision I’ve made at Margin. I’d be lost without them.
I love receiving feedback/validation of all kinds, but my favorite is when a client's investor asks if they can intro us to others in their portfolio.
It's also a great reminder that our value isn't simply from enlightening our clients but also in the level of trust we help them establish with their investors.
If I could go back in time to when I was auditing public companies at PwC, knowing what I know now...
I’d dig deep, deep into the balance sheets. Almost every error in a financial statement can be traced to a balance sheet account.
Here's your weekly reminder that cash flow is the single most important concept for your business.
If you're not a finance person, that's okay. You don't need to know all the fancy ratios and metrics.
But you do need to know cash flow.
Forecast it. Track it. Improve it.
Do those 3, and you'll be ahead of 90% of business owners.
