StartupCFO : Mark MacLeod

I began my career in public accounting, an industry that is all about “billable hours”. Your value is expressed in terms of how many hours you can bill. I have gone back to hourly billing a few times in my career, most recently doing interim CFO work for a bunch of startups. Likewise, many of the founders I meet working on startups have previously or are currently billing by the hour while they bootstrap their projects.

Here’s the thing about hourly billing: it doesn’t scale. There are 24 hours in a day and you need to sleep for a chunk of them. Also, clients don’t want time, they want results or value. So, there’s a disconnect between how you bill and the value you provide.

That’s definitely something we recognize at FreshBooks. We have a ton of customers who use us to track and invoice time. To help them go beyond time-based billing our co-founder Mike & Donald from our team have written a new book, Breaking the Time Barrier.

If you have ever struggled with how to earn more revenue from your consulting or service-based business, then this book is for you. It’s a quick read but you will walk away with actionable insights for your business. You can get it here.

For my second installment of the Founder to CEO series, I’m very pleased to share my conversations with Tobi from Shopify.

I have had the pleasure of working with Tobi and the Shopify team in the past. They are building a truly special, market-leading company. Tobi comes to Canada from Germany. Before co-founding Shopify, Tobi was active in many open source projects. The best known of which is the Ruby on Rails framework where Tobi served as a core team member.

As you will learn from this post, Tobi is probably the most brilliant high school dropout you will ever meet.

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The National Post published two articles (here and here) this week questioning the role / impact of Canada’s startup accelerator programs. In the first article The Post asks “Is Canada’s Accelerator Model Broken?”. In the next it goes on to say that “accelerators are failing to produce the next Hootsuite or Shopify“.

Having been deeply involved in FounderFuel, one of Canada’s leading accelerator programs, I’ve got some thoughts on this.

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Last week I wrote about the interviews and research I did on how founders become great CEOs. Given that I just joined his company, it’s only fitting that I kick off this series of posts with some thoughts from Mike McDerment, co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks.

Mike & FreshBooks don’t need much of an introduction – especially here in Canada. FreshBooks is the leading cloud accounting specialist for small business owners and one of Canada’s premier startups.

Each interview I did followed the same high level, open-ended questions (below). But as you can imagine, each founder took the discussion somewhere special and personal. So, what follows is not an interview transcript, but my notes on key elements, learnings and insights. Enjoy.

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