Jessica Nikolich

There’s a particular stage of business growth that looks like success from the outside—and feels like barely keeping up on the inside. Revenue is solid. You’ve got a team. You’re winning customers and closing deals. But somewhere between $10M and $50M in annual revenue, a lot of privately held companies hit a wall they didn’t see coming. Not a revenue wall. A financial infrastructure wall.

Most business owners I work with are smart, hardworking, and deeply invested in their companies. They’re also exhausted. Not because they lack ability — but because they’re spending the majority of their time reacting instead of leading.

The compliance skillset remains a non-negotiable for any non-profit CFO, without it you lose your tax-exempt status and the mission ends. But compliance is just the baseline. What non-profits need now is a different kind of financial leader — one who thinks like a for-profit CFO. One who understands unit economics, earned revenue strategy, and what it actually takes to build a financially resilient organization.