Phil Wofford, Entrepreneur, Fractional CFO/COO, Business Coach, and owner of Scale and Thrive, is on a mission to help business owners scale profitably, improve operations, and build teams that run without them. 

We explore Phil’s entrepreneurial journey, including the successful exit of two healthcare clinics, and how he now supports other leaders through coaching and fractional leadership. He shares his Focus Time Framework, which helps owners regain control of their day by:Writing 3 top priorities above a line, 2–3 secondary tasks below it, and staying focused on what’s above the line. We also discuss how strategic financial oversight drives long-term profitability, what makes a business attractive to buyers, and why every owner should be asking what truly matters in life and business.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Phil Wofford, the owner of Scale and Thrive, who helps business owners scale, increase profitability, and build teams that run without them. Phil, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Well, great to have you here and great to talk about some of your frameworks and what you are doing as a coach, as a fractional CFO, COO, as an entrepreneur. So a lot to get into here. But let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it?

Yeah, my personal “Why” is

I just really enjoy using my experience and background to help business owners and CEO grow their business.
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Love it. So, you say that you like to drill in and see what prevents people from growing, being more profitable. What do you see as being the most common two or three things that is creating an obstacle for entrepreneurs, business owners?

Yeah, it’s kind of a two-pronged thing. Some businesses don’t understand their KPIs or their key performance indicators. And it may be that they just haven’t been exposed to it and they haven’t created those. In my world that I’ve operated in, those have always been really important items that we use to manage the business day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter. And then you have the other side, the business person that’s really into it and they want to measure everything. They have 48 components of KPIs and it just drives them and the staff crazy trying to keep up with that many.

When really there should be three to six really key things that we're keeping our eyes on,
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Yeah, that is true. And if you have too many KPIs, then essentially you diluted their power and then it just becomes noise. But if you have a few good ones, then you can really drive the business. And Jim Collins even talks about the profit per X having one big differentiating, and that’s going to be very powerful. Okay. So you’re an entrepreneur as well. And you’re in the process of exiting some clinics in Alaska that you created. Tell me a little bit about how that came about and what did you do there and why are you exiting?

Yeah, I’ve done many international startups and that led me to becoming a business coach and a fractional COO, fractional CFO. And a few years ago, my friend from kindergarten that we grew up together, we ran across the business opportunity in the healthcare field. And so we created a clinic here in the Atlanta area. And subsequently that led to a second one. And we exited the first one, middle of COVID, but we had started up the second one in the middle of COVID. And we just a few weeks ago, finally exited that clinic successfully. And so now I’m redoing and re-kicking off my coaching and consulting practices again, through all of that, that I’ve learned over the years. Again, it’s my chance to give back and really be effective for other business owners. Because really, I’ve been there and done that. I made that payroll every two weeks and struggled on these things and successful on these things. So I think

I bring a lot to the table for the business owner or the CEO.
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Yeah, definitely. And so it’s Atlanta, not Alaska. Sorry for my typo there.

Yeah.

All right. So let’s talk about your frameworks that you have developed as a coach, as an entrepreneur. And we talked specifically about time management and how important that is. You have a framework around that called Focus Time. So please tell me about what you see with time management that is the big obstacle for people and how does your framework help solve that?

Okay, if you’re a business owner, you probably know that a lot of times you’re running around putting out fires, what’s happening today, and so you really never get a chance to work on the business. It’s the whole thing working in the business instead of on the business. Well, a couple of frameworks that I’ve utilized with some of my coaching and consulting clients and personally as well. The first one I call the Above The Line method. And, basically,

what we're doing is taking a look at all the things we have to do today and really establishing those three top things that we need to get done that will move the business along toward our goals.
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So I’m always working and focusing on those items that are above the line on that little 3M note. And I take it and stick it somewhere on my monitor or on the wall because as I’m jumping around from things day to day, as I complete one, or if I do put out that fire, I can look back over at my list very easily and say, okay, let’s get back to that. So that concept has really helped me and some of the business owners I’ve worked with to really stay focused. The key is that focus time. As a business owner, you do have to put out some fires. But you need to schedule time with yourself every day to work on these focus items. So I put an item on my calendar every day that says focus time. Sometimes, it’s 30 minutes. Sometimes, it’s a couple of hours, if I know there’s really something important I got to get done and I treat it just like I’m meeting with someone else. But

I'm meeting myself, looking at my three focus items and picking those to work through.
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Yeah, that’s very important because it’s so easy to get caught up in the hurly burly of the day to day and just try to put those fires out. And then you get exhausted and you get distracted perhaps afterward. And then you’re just drenched in water and you’re not building the capacity of this business to be bigger and more profitable in the future. So I love that how you kind of get this mind trigger to refocus on those two or three priorities that are going to help you long term. May not be urgent, but important.

Right, and the business owner may say, well, how do I decide what’s important? What are those three things? Well, the second part of this method is ABCD time. And so I have my owners or CEOs keep a log for three days, five days, 10 days of all the different things they worked on, I have them classify them into A, B, C, D. And with A being the top priorities, B’s kind of middle level, C’s a little bit low, and D is really those things that you really shouldn’t be working on anyway. Delegate it to somebody or design it out of your process. And if they’ll take that little journal and look at it after that time period, I bet they’re going to find that they spent a lot of time on those C and D level activities that they could have delegated, when really, if they would refocus that now back onto the A’s and B’s, those things that really move the business forward, they’re really going to become much more productive in their company. And they can push that right on down the line to their managers or their supervisors and have them do the same thing. And again, those D-level activities with the automation we have nowadays, we can design out those, decide not to do them, maybe they’re not really necessary.

So that's another way that I teach to decide what goes on that Above The Line method.
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Yeah. Why do you think people act like that? Is it because they are not aware that they don’t focus on the right things, or they are just not organized enough to create the delegation, to find that person to delegate to, or customize the process?

Some people are not organized, but honestly, nowadays, we are so bombarded with information. It comes from everywhere. And I’m kind of a pack rat with information myself. I see something, I think, oh, I need to remember that, or I need to go take a look at that. And so I store it away somewhere or make a link to it. And a year from now, I look at it, I think, oh my goodness, what was that? So we allow those, what do we call them, shiny objects to pop up during the day. It catches our attention, or a squirrel. And with the information that we have available to us now, it’s just overload. So we need to think about, again, getting back to that first thing I said,

what is really important for us to run our business and focus on those.
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Yeah, it does. I think the challenge is that, again, how do you keep so many different things in mind? And it’s fine to delegate to AI, but you still have to stay organized and your bandwidth has to cover all those things. And so there’s big debate going on whether AI is going to eliminate a lot of jobs and people will be unemployed. I personally don’t believe it because you need to organize the AI. It would get overwhelming without people who can manage it. But it’s kind of digressed there. Okay, so these are great frameworks. Make sure that you keep those priorities. Some people call them Rocks or OKRs for that quarter that you want to accomplish and make sure that you build focus time into your schedule for them and you refocus them after the fires are out.

The ABCD time approach, which is about delegation. So delegate all the non 20% items that don’t really move the needle and don’t get caught up with it. Now let’s switch gears and talk about your experiences as a fractional CFO. A lot of people are employing fractional CFOs. It’s a growing area and if you can’t afford at a CFO level, finance person, maybe you can have them fractionally in their business. So what should these fractionals be focused on? Sometimes I know that they get to do low level stuff like bookkeeping and invoicing and stuff like that. What in your experience is the most important for a fractional CFO to direct their focus on?

Yes, since I serve in dual roles sometimes as both the COO and the CFO, I come at it from a little bit different angle in that looking at it from the CFO seat, I try to look into the overall business, the operations, sales, everything, and try to find the linkages that affect my profits and my cashflow. Because if I can, again, it kind of goes back to the KPIs, but if I can find the linkages, I can help my organization with those day-to-day decisions. Because my theory is, and in practice I’ve seen it, those day-to-day decisions affect your profitability. You just might not see it for 30, 60, 90 days. As a CFO, if I can study cash flow, profits, our assets and liabilities, and how they’re stacking up, and relate those back to both the strategic decisions and the tactical decisions that we’re making day by day, then we now have some framework to teach or to learn from our organization that helps us manage day by day. Because I’ve been in organizations where I’ve been the head of operations or whatever, and because I had the financial background, I knew my decision was going to have a bad effect on cash flow here in six weeks. And we all intuitively sort of know that, but sometimes we don’t know the formula. And I like to try to get at something that gives us a rule of thumb, all those sort of things that helps the CEO, COO, CFO make day-to-day decisions that will help our financial status. Make sense?

Yeah. Can you give an example what would that look like?

Yeah, let’s say the purchasing folks are thinking about buying a new piece of equipment. Okay, well, it’s going to affect our productivity, which helps our profits and our operating parameters. So that’s a positive. On the negative side, we’ve got to pay for that piece of equipment. So in those negotiations, if I can get a long-term payback or payment for that piece of equipment, then I can spread that across maybe even several years. And so that affects my cash flow. It helps my cash flow the longer term I can get. So those are the types of things. I mean, that’s a simple one that most purchasing people do get, especially if you’re buying major equipment. But those sort of things would be one in the purchasing area, but for a CFO, they need to be a part of that. An accountant might not be a part of that, but looking at it from the CFO lens, you need to know those things that are going on because it will affect that long-term profitability, your cash flow, and the CFO may be the person that has to go and find the financing to accomplish that.

Yeah, I find it so often that small to medium-sized companies, they don’t have a good finance function. They hire a CFO, and then the CFO gets stuck into low level detail work, accounting work, and then they lose that distance from the problem so that they no longer can look at it strategically now. Do you find this being the case?

Yeah, often they get pigeonholed into, oh, they’re just the bookkeeper or they oversee the accounting people. And really, they’re an important resource. They should be looked at that, added that way. There’s a reason why there’s a C in front of the CFO. They’re a part of the C-suite. And they need to be a part of the decision-making and the advisement to the company on how those things affect profitability. Because if we don’t have profitability, we’re not going to be around very long.

Yeah, and it’s so important to read the P&L, a balance sheet, and sometimes the CEO, if they don’t have the background, the financial background, they may not be able to get enough information out of those financial statements or even realize how important they are to maintain. Then they’re going to miss the big picture. They want to see what’s coming up and the company could get in trouble.

Yeah, and the CFO can really provide a lens into that magical, mysterious cashflow type of situation because if they’re using accrual accounting, sometimes that doesn’t really show you what’s happening cash-wise. It shows you profit and losses on paper, but I much prefer the cash flow method of accounting because then I can see how things are actually coming in and going out and how those day-to-day decisions affect that.

Yeah, I guess both of them are important because if you don’t have the accruals, then you’re not going to see your gross profit margins, how it evolves and how you can improve it. And it’s more, more granular, but definitely you need to see your cash situation a few months in advance so that you can prepare for any crunches and manage things. Did you find that being on top of the numbers really helped you with the exits of these medical clinics in Atlanta?

Oh yeah, absolutely, because I know the fine details and all the moving parts. So yeah, it was tremendously helpful.

And investors, they are looking for profit in the future, so they really want to understand the numbers to see whether they can produce them.

Yeah, and because I understood the numbers so well, again, I handle both operations and financials, but because I knew how all the different things work together, I was able to put together a great exit package. And that’s one of the challenges for a CFO that’s looking for the company to do an exit, is getting together all the information that’s needed by the buyer. And guess what? It changes. You start off on one thing and you know it may take a year to exit. Well, every month, they want an update. And things change and guess what? Ah, I need to buy this piece of capital equipment. That wasn’t in the equation when we first started talking. So now I’ve got to put a new lease in here. How’s that going to affect our cash flow and those sorts of things? So those are challenges. But again, one of the things I work with company owners are those that are getting the baby boomers are getting on up there and wanting to exit. I can help them plan that and put together a good package for a potential buyer. And a business that can run itself, that has good financials, good operating practices, that’s worth more on the multiplier on the exit versus one that’s just getting by with the owner running everything.

Yeah, if it’s not self-managing, I mean, no one wants to buy a headache. People want a business that runs preferably without the owner, because if they have to buy the owner, they won’t be able to pay the owner. The owner might not sell it even, and it’s just a mess. So they want to buy a money making machine that works. They don’t have to touch it if they don’t want to. Some sellers think that the buyer want to reshape the business. Not necessarily. They might just want something that makes money for them.

Yeah, I have an example of that I can share with you. I had someone on LinkedIn hit me up and said, here’s my situation. What do you think I could get from my company? And after I looked at their financials and saw that they were really the key person along with a couple of technicians, and I said, you don’t have a business, you have a job. And it’s hard to sell a job to someone else. Exactly what you were saying.

Yeah. So how did you guys engineer this medical clinic so that they became self-managing?

Yeah, we were very lucky in that we had some close relatives that had some experience that applied and they studied on afterwards. But we became a certified clinic for one thing, which forced us to put SOPs in place, have procedures in place. And really, the only two pieces that the owners ran were, again, the financials and some of the marketing stuff, and we were easily replaced. I’m actually still doing some transition work, but more and more is being turned over to the other team because this buyer had their own teams to do that. So I’m just in the transition part of it. So again, having that business that really runs itself, the people in place that don’t depend on the owner, makes for a much easier exit.

Oh yeah, definitely. So as a final question, what do you think is the most important question an entrepreneur should be asking themselves?

Yeah, I thought a lot about that. And I think the question is, the same questions we all ask ourselves is, what’s really important in my life? And because an entrepreneur can get really tied up in the time that the company takes. So as an entrepreneur, I have to ask myself, what’s really important? Is it my family? Is it the work? Is it building wealth? What is it? And be clear on that so that I can have some sort of balance and that I can explain to my family why I’m working on weekends. It’s to get us a better life or whatever that definition is. But there’s another key component of that too, is your health as you get a little bit older as well. So it’s taking a step back and saying, what am I really doing? What’s really important to me? And what am I trying to accomplish for me and my family?

That's important to know because those should be guiding principles as you build and grow your business and exit your business as well.
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Yeah, and that can change over time. So when you’re in your 30s or 40s, you might have a different vision of what you want from your business than when you’re in your late 50s. Your perspective changes, maybe that making this big billion dollar business is not as important anymore as to have a meaningful venture and good relationships and a good family time. So definitely it’s a very good question to ask.

Yeah. And you are 100% right. The view changes as we drive down that road and down that path. And so we have to have that reflection time periodically. For some people, it’s every year. For some people, it’s every two or three years. And life happens and it changes our vision. Just as you were saying, things happen in our life and what we thought we were going to do, that’s not important anymore. Other things are.

Yeah, which is a good thing. All right. So if people would like to learn more about what you do, how you could help them and would like to chat you up or learn more about what you do, where can they find information? How can they reach out to you?

Of course, on LinkedIn, Phil Wofford, you can do the search for me or if you go to philwofford.com, you’ll see some of my offerings and my contact information there.

All right. So Phil Wofford, the owner of Scale and Thrive, entrepreneur, fractional CFO, fractional CEO, coach, can really help you grow your business, scale it, figure out what the bottlenecks are, help you manage your time better with his Focus Time framework and other frameworks. So, Phil, thanks for coming and sharing your goodies with our listeners. And if you enjoyed this, then please follow us on YouTube, give us a review on Apple Podcasts and stay tuned because every week we have an interesting entrepreneur sharing their most cherished frameworks with us. Thanks for coming, Phil, and thanks for listening.