# Emily Jachimiak

Emily Jachimiak advises small-business owners on finance, including cash flow, owner pay, bookkeeping, and the numbers they need to make business decisions. Jachimiak describes reviewing financial metrics with fractional CFO clients.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/emily-jachimiak/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilyjachimiak
- LinkedIn followers: 3,093
- Based on 12 dated posts, latest 2026-10-06

## Summary

Useful for explaining owner pay, cash flow, and when small-business owners should bring in finance help.

- Best for: A fractional CFO or small-business advisory firm targeting owners past $100,000 in revenue.
- Not for: An enterprise finance platform selling to controllers, treasurers, or FP&A teams in mid-market or public companies.
- Check first: Ask to see the five monthly numbers carousel and Excel template before contacting them.

### Takeaways

- Set a baseline owner draw, treat it as a fixed expense, and build it into break-even.
- If break-even cannot cover the owner draw, the problem may be pricing or margins.
- Owners bring in finance help about 18 months too late, often after crossing $100,000 revenue.

## Main ideas

- **Pay the owner a real number and treat it as a fixed expense**: Jachimiak argues against the common habit of reinvesting everything and paying yourself from whatever is left over, on the grounds that "enough left over" almost never arrives on its own: expenses expand to meet available cash and growth creates new costs. The fix is a set of mechanics rather than a mindset. Set a baseline owner draw that is real and non-negotiable and treat it like a fixed expense. Build that draw into the break-even calculation. Separate personal and business accounts completely, because when the money sits in one account it gets spent on the business by default. Review the draw quarterly, not annually.
- **Hiring finance help is a cost question, not a compliance question**: Jachimiak says owners bring in a dedicated finance professional about 18 months too late, after the books get messy, and pay premium rates for cleanup that prevention would have cost roughly half as much. They name $100,000 in annual revenue as the trigger—not because the IRS cares, but because the cost of getting finance wrong starts to outweigh the cost of getting it right. Four situations warrant help: hiring employees or contractors, when payroll tax, 1099 filings and workers’ comp carry penalty risks; making decisions on instinct, such as being unable to state gross margin for the quarter without digging through accounting software; considering an entity change, such as LLC to S Corp; and raising capital or borrowing.
- **In a small business, the numbers are the work**: Jachimiak contrasts nine years running IPOs with a first small-business client who stumped them in about twenty minutes. On Wall Street, the numbers arrive reconciled, footnoted and checked by three people, leaving the job of deciding what they mean. In small-business finance, the numbers are the work. Three lessons had to be learned or unlearned: precision isn’t the goal; there’s no controller, treasurer or FP&A team to share the work, and the owner is also selling and answering the phone; and the real question is almost never the one being asked. The discipline that carried over is asking what has to be true for a number to hold.
- **Visibility matters more than financial sophistication**: The premise: owners who make confident decisions aren’t necessarily smarter about finance; they have better visibility. Five numbers checked monthly tell you more than a full day reviewing reports because they show what’s working, where cash is leaking and whether the growth being chased is profitable. Most owners check their bank balance and revenue, which Jachimiak treats as a starting point, not a dashboard. They say these are the five numbers they review with every fractional CFO client in the first 30 days.
- **Confusing a bookkeeper with an accountant is expensive in both directions**: Jachimiak separates two jobs owners routinely mix up. A bookkeeper handles recurring, methodical work—categorizing transactions, monthly bank reconciliation, invoices and payments, and payroll sync—estimated at roughly 10 to 15 hours a month for most small businesses, at $50 to $150 an hour or $300 to $1,500 a month, depending on volume. An accountant or CPA handles strategic, episodic work—tax strategy, entity structure, year-end filings and audit response—estimated at 10 to 30 hours across the year at $150 to $400 an hour, concentrated around tax season. Their rule of thumb: most businesses past $100,000 in revenue need both, just not in equal measure.

## Work to read

- [Owner pay: set a baseline draw and build it into break-even](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emilyjachimiak_most-business-owners-pay-themselves-last-activity-7486448364679745538-T60Q)
- [What nine years of IPOs taught — and what small-business finance taught back](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emilyjachimiak_nine-years-running-ipos-and-my-first-small-activity-7503063846979448833-oo0R)
- [Bookkeeper or accountant: who you actually need](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emilyjachimiak_most-business-owners-hire-an-accountant-when-activity-7478175877772640256-IvXi)
- [The $100,000 trigger: when to hire finance help](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emilyjachimiak_most-business-owners-hire-a-dedicated-finance-activity-7475159979893739521-6yUx)
- [Five monthly numbers, delivered as a carousel and a template](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emilyjachimiak_5-monthly-numbers-your-business-should-know-activity-7506094983284744194-MoCF)

## Partnerships

No partnership, sponsorship, or paid-collaboration formats are documented in the material reviewed for Emily Jachimiak. The five full posts available show how Jachimiak communicates with small-business owners, not how a brand would sponsor or co-produce content with them. What the posts do show is a direct-response style of audience call: Jachimiak closes several posts by asking readers to send a direct message or leave a comment in exchange for a resource, such as "DM me CFO" for a description of owner compensation structures, or "Comment TRACKER" for a monthly-numbers spreadsheet template. A brand planning a paid engagement should read these as signals of how Jachimiak prefers to work with an audience — a specific, narrowly framed ask tied to one deliverable — rather than as an offer to sponsors. No media kit, rate card, sponsorship policy, disclosure practice, production specification, usage-rights term, or inquiry page is among the sources provided, so none of those operational requirements can be stated. Treat the formats list as genuinely empty for this evidence set: it means no partnership format is documented here, not that Jachimiak declines partnerships. Confirming how Jachimiak handles paid brand work would require a sponsor or partnership page, a disclosure on a sponsored post, or the creator's own statement, none of which is in hand.

## Alternatives

- Jeff Fearn: Jeff Fearn is the stronger choice for a campaign about building the finance seat rather than explaining finance to owners: who to hire as bookkeeper, staff accountant, or controller, and how to structure and recruit that person. Two full posts work through the same buyer question Emily Jachimiak addresses—who an owner should bring in—but at the level of role design, with scope and cost laid out for each layer: bookkeeping hours at roughly $750 to $2,000 a month for early-stage operators; a staff accountant for businesses around $5M to $20M with payroll and operating complexity; and a controller for multi-entity, debt-covenant, or investor-backed businesses. The argument that a controller doing bookkeeper work is an expensive mistake, and the proposed fractional fix—a controller for strategic work plus part-time bookkeeping for day-to-day tasks—give firms selling CFO or controllership services a clear case to make to the middle of the market.
- Renée S.: Renée S. is the better pick for campaigns focused on bookkeeping operations: what a monthly bookkeeping service should include, what to ask before hiring a bookkeeper, and whether to keep or replace accounting software. One full post lists seven hiring questions covering scope of service, close timing, reports, communication, confidentiality, CPA handoff, and who performs versus reviews the work. It also notes that the lowest price is not the best value. The other compares QuickBooks with FreshBooks, Zoho Books, and Wave, and lists factors that should drive a switch: entity count, bank and card connections, reconciliation and reporting needs, payroll and 1099 requirements, CPA access, and historical-data portability. Both offer a practical hook for a firm whose product or audience sits at the bookkeeping end. The first post also uses the gated-resource pattern seen in Emily Jachimiak’s posts: an 18-question Bookkeeper Interview Guide with warning signs, note pages, and a candidate comparison scorecard, available by message or email. A sponsoring firm could use the same mechanic.
- Nic Barbagallo: Nic Barbagallo fits campaigns targeting consumer-goods or contractor businesses in roughly the $1M to $35M range, or firms making the case for owners to buy controllership and bookkeeping before a fractional CFO. One full post argues that most growing consumer brands at that stage have a bookkeeping and controllership problem wearing a CFO costume: margins leak through landed cost, inventory accounting is off, and the close takes three weeks. Clean, on-time financials come before strategy. The other post states the offer plainly—clean books, a real monthly close, and numbers turned into decisions on pricing, hiring, and cash—and defines what the business is not: the tax preparer or a replacement for the bookkeeper, but the layer between finished books and knowing what to do with them. Both show how to position against an oversized CFO hire, a useful argument for firms selling a smaller engagement first.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/