Leveraging LinkedIn for Client Engagement and Growth (with Salvatore Tirabassi)

Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John.This episode is what I refer to as a showcase episode where I feature a bootstrapped entrepreneur and they briefly share their tips, tricks, tactics, techniques and tools that help them bootstrap their business and the successes and failures along the way.My hope is that each of these showcase episodes will provide at least one valuable takeaway that you can implement with right away in your own bootstrap business journey. Now onto the episode.

Hey, my name is Sal Tirabasi, I am a professional CFO and I started a business providing CFO services to emerging companies basically because I saw that there was an opening in the marketplace for emerging businesses not requiring a full time cfo which oftentimes is unaffordable.Or you sort of pick up somebody with the title of cfo, but they don't really have the background or experience and you end up overpaying for the capabilities and the supporting team that they need.And so with my background in venture capital and private equity and then as a cfo, I came up with a methodology that really is meant to serve emerging businesses through their life cycle until they can afford a full time CFO and a full staff.And that service has been really meeting the needs of all kinds of businesses, but especially founder owned and operated businesses that are between 3 and $100 million of revenue.Where we come in and provide service from the strategic CFO level all the way down into different areas of analytics, finance, accounting, audit management, et cetera.Generally the clients need bespoke services that are really designed to cater to their specific needs, starting from the CFO services level at the strategic level and then working our way downward. It's been a great service offering in the market and we've got a lot of happy clients.For me, one of the biggest drivers of being able to bootstrap a business was to get in and early to figure out your customer acquisition model and then be able to replicate that. So in the case of my business, I was fortunate enough to have a really good professional network and a good LinkedIn presence.Having been a partner in venture capital and private equity for about 15 years and then spending a decade as a CFO in a high growth business. I had a lot of contacts and relationships that were in emerging businesses, which really is my target market.And that enabled me to really get a number of leads in quickly and start to develop a service offering to meet my clients objectives.And then after that it's really a process of practicing the acquisition methodology and Also the client management methodology so that you can keep the clients happy and satisfied and figure out how to continue to improve your margin. Expand the scope of work that you're doing for the clients.Get your customer acquisition channel turning on more of a flywheel so in my case, aside from the professional network, LinkedIn activity is pretty important. I do a lot of regular commenting.I publish two to three blog posts a week on my to website as well as on LinkedIn, and that generates a lot of client engagement from just around the community of 5,000 plus followers that I have. And there's always new opportunities coming up on the horizon as a result of that.So once you have the customer acquisition model working, or at least turning in the right direction, that gives you really the opportunity to continue to build the business and bootstrap it. Because obviously client revenue is a critical source of funding for being able to bootstrap your business quickly and efficiently.The biggest success that I had in bootstrapping has been in being able to transition from a solopreneur business model, which I did for my first couple of clients, to one where now I actually have a team that works on my clients and gives me the ability to spend more time on marketing and customer acquisition.I was fortunate enough to have a good network of other fractional CFOs that I had gotten to know when I started my business, but also a good network of finance executives that I had worked in the past, many of whom were looking for part time opportunities and had kind of matured in their careers to where they really kind of wanted to work for themselves on a more flexible basis, which really fit well into my business model.And so being able to transition and find the individuals that I could bring onto my team to deliver my services more efficiently to my clients and not requiring all of my time so that I can spend on marketing was really the biggest success that I've had so far.I would say in terms of the biggest failure for bootstrapping, it's probably a work in progress in terms of expanding the customer acquisition channel. Right now it's very heavily dependent on my personal network and on LinkedIn, but I think that those really are not pure outbound channels.And having talked to a lot of fractional CFOs who have tried this, there is a lot of skepticism around outbound marketing and trying to identify and communicate with prospects who you're approaching with cold marketing communications. I've attempted a couple of things more as like tests and those honestly have not really worked out very well.But as with any marketing strategy, you really need to be very methodical and persistent with it over some period of time so that you could really prove out what's working and what's not and see if you can find a thread of opportunity that really works.And as it goes with entrepreneurs, you got a lot of work that you're doing in a lot of different areas and sometimes you can't really focus on the marketing piece, but that's a key priority for me in 2025. It's been great to be on this podcast.I think the perspective I have as a bootstrapped entrepreneur in the CFO services space, where I'm basically delivering strategic CFO services to other entrepreneurs, family owned businesses, founder owner operators, many of whom are bootstrapped, is a really interesting perspective for me to bring to the table. Tell you a little bit about how things have worked out for me.The core part of our business is really having been many of these situations across a variety of industries and being able to help different types of founders, owner operators and family owned businesses grow and achieve their goals is what we do for a living. And I'm sure I'm talking to a lot of those people right now through this podcast, so I'm super excited to hear from you all.If you ever want to find us, please visit us at cfoproanalytics. Com. That's cfoproanalytics.com hit us up on the contact page. We love talking to new businesses and hearing what you're up to and how we can help.

I hope you enjoyed that episode and were able to take away a valuable nugget of information that you can implement right away in your own business. If you feel your story would be valuable for the listeners of this show, please visit Frugal show guests.