How to Properly Track your Cashflow — Vinnie Fisher // Fully Accountable

Quotes

• “I had the great fortune of building most of my stuff. Usually, the problem is also my problem and the solution I am devising is a way to solve the problem I have. Fully Accountable was built inside my health supplement company, we were doing quite well and a mid 8-figure company and I got 11 people in my accounting department and nobody could tell in this high transaction business, broken down by affiliate what it costs to acquire the customer.” - Vinnie“So I thought I should fix it myself. In the process of fixing it, I learned things like, ‘Holy crap, I’m only profiting 8% at the bottom but I should be profiting 22%. All of that led to me fixing a problem I had in my relationship to the bottomline in the business. That’s what birthed Fully Accountable.” - Vinnie“As we’re seeing marketing being more integrated with sales, with customer success, we’re getting more data as marketers not only from lead to MQL, to hopefully, those convert to SALs. We don’t just get the customers and hand them off, now we’re responsible for driving bottomline results.”  - Ben “I was always consumed with driving growth revenue. I always think if we had more money, we could solve more problems. Back in 2012, I was walking up to a stage to receive the Marketer of the Year Award, I was walking with my partner and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be hilarious if this audience knew that we were more profitable when we were half the size.’ So one of the things I think is important, especially with the changes in direct-to-consumer, before we would spend every dollar buying eyeball digitally.” - Vinnie“Now that behavior has changed and people are buying digitally, I would say that margin is more important than ever in evaluating how you acquire customers.” - Vinnie“Most of the dashboards and technologies out there are measuring from click through to conversion. One of things I discovered was, your bank account matters a lot. So we measure from what is in the bank account backwards because those numbers may not be the same. What lands in your bank account doesn’t always line up.” - Vinnie“We go in the reverse fashion, we say, ‘here’s all the dollars, let’s track back to our metric of what our real acquisition cost is not trying to make an error deviation for what our click costs are. You can be 5% off on a number, well 5% change in your marketing spend or your roll-ads is a big deal.” - Vinnie“It was always my consternation when I dealt with my CFO or Controller. Understanding the cash flow and the P&L snapshot of a period of time. If I am handed a P&L for the month of October and if he handed that to me in November, it’s a snapshot of a certain amount of days, time, hours. Cash flow, deposits keep happening in and out. So I had to realize the difference between a cash flow statement and what’s really in cash vs. looking at a window of time based on normalizing my earnings against my expenses.” - Vinnie“42 cents of every dollar spent on the internet is markedly spent to acquire customers or re-acquire the customer you already have by re-engaging them. There’s a lot of ways that we as marketers spend in acquiring the customer and one of the problems is we’re spread out in too many channels and one of the reasons for that is this fear of missing out on a hot channel.” - Vinnie“The tighter we dial that in, the better we can get at cutting out channel envy and being in too many places. Acquisition cost by far, is the thing that a marketer needs the most to focus on. I think if they pay attention to their audience and tighten up who they spoke to, they can massively improve on those costs.” - Vinnie “It’s all about the audience. If your audience is 50+, you don’t need a Tik or a Tok or a Snap or a Snip. You probably need to be on Facebook. When you’re stretched on too many channels, that’s not how marketing people sounds like. The reality is, if you have a young audience and it’s a hip crowd, Instagram is a great place to be. Channels have relevance and while there’s some overlap, the reality is you need to understand the channel you live in as opposed to being there just because it’s cool.” - Vinnie“I sell a need not a want. I just have to accept that and the interesting thing in knowing the people I serve is that people under a need-based are doing searches for a service I provide. So AdWords or a search engine type methodology is a strong place for me to be. Now I have to pay more money for those clicks, and compete for those but the category of search is really strong for me so we put a lot of budget in search.” - Vinnie“For us, if someone is searching they are looking for information about a topic and they don’t want to be sold just yet. So we might drop them on to a content piece about the topic they are looking for then as they stick around with us, we’re going to give them some more opportunities to learn about that topic which will ultimately land on a suggestion to be on a sales session.” - Vinnie“Our ultimate goal is to drive the prospect to some form of communication where we can help you make a choice, we look for choices not buying decisions.” - Vinnie “Benchmarking is this idea of measuring yourself against yourself today, yesterday, a month ago, last year this time. That kind of thing. And then you can also benchmark against the industry you sit in. One of the things to measure in accounting finances is to know that the industry average of the customer is longer than three years.” - Vinnie“Here’s the problem with most of our fellow marketers. When we are measuring lifetime value (LTV) we should be measuring average order value plus re-up-rate because they’re not old enough to measure lifetime value yet. It’s a target, I recognize it but most businesses are youthful that LTV is secondary measurement. Maybe average order value and average engagement of re-order value is a better metric.” - Vinnie“When you start thinking about evaluating your marketing channels and associating backwards from the dollars of your customer value, not all marketing channels are responsible for the last click. There’s the concept of multi-touch attribution.” - Ben “I always call marketing art and a science. I think of accounting more specifically as a science than an art so now that we are blending the two of them and you’re calling it soft measurement, it does get a little confusing understanding what is actually driving marketing value and making sure that ties in all the way to the bottom line, so I guess there is some art to accounting as well.” - Ben