Playbook Academy

Simple playbooks for massive growth. One powerful growth playbook, delivered every Saturday morning. Acquire the mindset, tools, learnings and habits of elite entrepreneurs.

Writer

Saucey

Saucey is the leading e-commerce, compliance and logistics provider to regulated retailers. Powering safer and more convenient experiences for customers and retailers. 

We work with regulated retailers across 1,200+ cities to drive additional revenues, customers and provide insights/tools to help them manage their store online. 

Saucey also powers some of the world's largest brands to connect with and understand their end consumers, including Diageo, AB-InBev, Bacardi, Coca Cola, Constellation and more.

Highlights:
-Millions of happy customers across the U.S.
-Grown from $0 to hundreds of millions in sales
-Sent customers to the Super Bowl, Olympics, Adult Summer Camp and more
-Driven hundred of millions in incremental revenue to independent retailers 
-Built smart appliances that auto re-order beer
-Channing Tatum, Nick Jonas and more have all been delivery drivers
-Launched dozens of new brands into target markets

Founder & CEO

ROARKE

Roarke is an unlimited Design & Web Development subscription for the world's most ambitious brands.

Used by SaaS companies, Startups, DTC brands, Agencies, Franchises, and high-growth businesses to unlock their potential online. Roarke supercharges the design and development process, helping companies move faster and bring big ideas to life seemingly overnight.

Partner

Hampton

Hampton is a private, highly vetted community of high growth founders, entrepreneurs, and CEO’s.

Founding Member

Emjay

Emjay is a leading omni-channel cannabis technology platform.

In it’s first two years:
-Hundreds of thousands of customers served
-6 M&A transactions
-Grew from $0 to 7-figures/month in 6 months
-First native iOS application to sell cannabis in the app-store

textPlus, Inc.

textPlus is one of the largest texting & calling apps with over 70M users.

I oversaw US marketing/growth, user acquisition and CRM through digital and traditional channels. Including being one of the first/largest advertisers on Facebook's native ads platform (brand new at the time). Acquired millions of new users/month, tracking performance, executing & reporting against key KPI’s, and identifying channels that brought in higher LTV customers.

Helped plan our international launch. Oversaw all creative for advertising, marketing campaigns, and the textPlus brand.

Lead our ad sales platform, securing $millions in ad revenue from some of the world's largest brands.

Separately split out a small 6-person team to build an ultra low-cost international calling platform. Took it from concept / design / telco contracts to launch in 2.5 months.

Marketing Director & Head of Partnerships

Jarvus (Acquired by textPlus)

(Acquired by TextPlus) Jarvus was an iOS app that let people capture life's moments with their friends and family. It would analyze the geo-tags and time-stamps in your iPhone's photo album, match you with Facebook friends that were in the same places at the same time, and easily create group albums using you and your friend's photos. 

You could apply beautiful filters, effects and stickers to your content, and upload/share the collective "memories" / albums on Jarvus or across your social accounts. 

Featured on Jimmy Fallon. Celebrities shared moments with their friends and fans. TextPlus tagged us in a post on Jarvus that they wanted to acquire the platform. The rest is history.

Coupeez Inc

Coupeez was an early online deals platform unlocking customer savings across local businesses.  

-Lead product design and built the iOS and Android applications (very early app-store days). This is what opened my eyes to how mobile was going to change every business in the world.
-Designed our UI & UX for web, iOS, and Android from scratch. 
-Curated categories of deals and onboarded thousands of local businesses throughout California to our marketplace.

Head of Product

Over the past decade, I've built three multimillion-dollar businesses while growing a family and raising four children.

I started with no resources, no connections, and didn’t have access to the playbooks that would have made the journey 10X easier. 

As a kid, I made money garden landscaping for families at church, manufacturing merchandise for private clubs, and then developing websites and running ad campaigns for local companies.

By 21, I was founding companies. In the decade since, I've:

➤ Generated $300M+ in revenue
➤ Built operations in 1,000+ U.S. cities
➤ Served over 3 million customers globally
➤ Helped grow hundreds of small businesses
➤ Raised $30M+ in capital from Angels, VCs, Private Equity, and Family Offices
➤ Successfully navigated both successful and failed multimillion-dollar acquisitions
➤ Been featured in leading publications like Forbes, Bloomberg, Entrepreneur, USA Today and more
➤ Worked with and advised the world's most iconic brands, including Diageo, Mars, Tesco, 7-Eleven, AB-InBev, Molson Coors, and Constellation

BUT, the journey was hard (harder than it needed to be).

I’ve faced many of the things you don't think about when starting a company:

→ Fought off (and won) predatory lawsuits
→ Closed a Seed round days after my wedding
→ Negotiated with demanding government agencies
→ Worked with lobbyists to introduce or change legislation
→ Raised a Series A while in the hospital for my first son's birth
→ Navigated a failed multi-million dollar merger while my daughter was born
→ Survived near-extinction events where we had single-digit weeks or days to save the company

Personal interests: Boxing, strength training, being in the ocean, spending quality time with my wife Danielle and our four little ones.

———

👋 Follow me for daily tips on mindset, systems, lifestyle design, and high-growth habits.

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Chris Vaughn

Frak Finance

Owner-Operator: Fractional Finance Services for the SMB community

Falcon Fest LLC

Portfolio:
Quicket Solutions https://www.quicketsolutions.com/qs/
Puttshack https://www.puttshack.com/
Gumroad https://gumroad.com/
Elude https://elude.co/
Aktivate https://www.aktivate.com/
Miso Robotics  https://misorobotics.com/

Investor

Jetson

Where Marketing  & Technology Intersect. Are you looking to improve your sales? Data Driven Marketing might be the answer. Our methods increase our client's profitability or your money back. 

We are a team that previous built (coded) entire customer data and engagement tech stacks. We realized though the real value was monitoring and reporting performance, creative ideation, and providing best in class tech stacks off the shelves. We found more joy working with people than selling to people.

Our mission is to add $10,000,000 of incremental profits to pay you and your teams. 

Our Reporting and Analysis service is at the core of our data-driven marketing company. We understand the significance of accurate and comprehensive insights in today's fast-paced business landscape. With our Reporting and Analysis service, we meticulously collect, analyze, and interpret data to empower our clients with actionable information. We go beyond mere data aggregation, transforming raw numbers into meaningful reports and visualizations that reveal valuable patterns, trends, and opportunities. Our team of skilled analysts utilizes cutting-edge tools and techniques to uncover key metrics, identify target audiences, evaluate campaign performance, and measure ROI.

Founder

Zebra

Zebra believes there should be no grey area in real-estate. We offer real-estate property management and brokerage services.

McRealty Partners

McRealty Partners offered real-estate brokerage services. As experts in multi-family asset valuation, we helped our clients transact over $30,000,000 in the first 3 years of operations. We are extremely proud of the successful company we built.

Co-Founder

Fixer

• Built financial model – all financial statements, projections, and cash burn.
• Explored and modeled customer acquisition channels – SEO, social campaigns, content marketing, earned and paid media.
• Worked on business development through corporate partnerships and enterprise clients.

Venture Capital Lab

William Blair

Associate – Energy, Global Services, Real Estate, and Telecom

• Built and managed relationships with private and public CEOs and CFOs, and provided capital markets advice.

Associate

Creganna Medical

• Provided financial analysis to CFO on various internal projects to help streamline decision making.

Corporate Finance Intern

Fractional CFO for SMBs

Helping people buy and sell businesses via nickhuber.com Thanks for checking out my profile. 

If you're here, it's probably because you've recognized a problem with your business finances or you’re looking to scale and grow your operations and seeking solutions.

I hope I can be helpful and have the opportunity to add value to your business.

I believe you don't need to be a big company to benefit from a fractional CFO. Proper guidance is what sets most businesses up for success.

Whether you started from scratch, just acquired a business, have been operating for years, or are still searching, getting expert help for financial consultancy is always the right choice.

It is better to move with certainty than hope when you’re doing business and that's the essence of the fractional finance movement: delivering impact to specific problems business owners face without the long term commitment.

How can I help you? 

I specialize in SMBs, SaaS, and Ecommerce.

Here are my most common services:

-Fractional CFO Advisory
-Bookkeeping
-Accounting & Audit Readiness
-M&A & Valuation
-Human Resources
-Risk Advisory
-Tax Strategy

𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐩?

Schedule a Complimentary 15-Minute consultation at www.calendly.com/tom-ihk/intro

Tom Dillon, CFA

Last week reminded me of something we all say but rarely practice: balance matters.

I started the week on Main Street Summit meeting founders, operators, and people actually building things. 

No ego. No buzzwords. Just real conversations about challenges, decisions, and the stuff that actually moves businesses forward. 

I left those meetings energized.

Midweek I drove out to the family farm to bow hunt.

No Wi-Fi. No Slack. No “quick calls.”

Just Peace.

Trying to track a moving target with a bow forces a different kind of focus. 

Not the productivity-hack kind. The kind that reminds you to slow down and breathe.

By Friday I figured the week had already peaked.

Then a client called: “Come hit golf balls at the PGA Superstore.”

I showed up and my cousin was in the hitting bay right next to us. 

Total coincidence. 

We spent hours laughing, catching up, and just being present.

Zero agenda.
Zero optimization.
 
Just real life.

And here’s what hit me:

Founders do not build great companies by isolating themselves.

They build them through connection.

The ideas that change things don’t always come from staring at a screen.

Sometimes they show up when you step away and make space for life to happen.

P.S When was the last time you stepped away long enough to give life room to surprise you?

#event #life #work #balance #connections

In my first year as a fractional CFO, I worked with a founder who treated budgeting like a checkbox.

He signed off the annual budget in December.

Then didn’t look at it again until April.

By then, it was too late.

→ Revenue was 30% under plan.
→ Marketing had spent nearly 2x their allocation.
→ Burn rate was climbing.

And the worst part?

Nobody noticed.

There was no process in place to monitor performance against the plan.

No review cadence.
No reforecasting.
No accountability.

That engagement changed how I work forever.

I started using a simple 90-day rule with every client:

→ Review the budget quarterly
→ Reforecast using actual results
→ Realign with leadership before it’s too late

Why quarterly?

Because business changes too fast for annual planning alone.

→ New hires
→ Pricing changes
→ Missed sales goals
→ Unexpected churn
→ Market shifts

You can’t set your budget once a year and expect it to stay relevant.

A budget is not a one-time event.

It’s a living tool.

One that should evolve as your business evolves.

If you're not reviewing it every 90 days, you're not really managing the business.

You’re hoping.

And hope isn’t a strategy.

If your team is still operating off a January plan, it’s time to change that.

P.S My DMs are open if you want to build a budgeting process that actually drives decisions.

#budgeting #finance #newyear #SMB

A few weeks ago, I watched a great business almost die on the negotiation table.

The buyer had $500K.

The seller wanted $2M.

The business was printing $800K in EBITDA.

Every lender said no.

Not because the business wasn’t solid.

But because it didn’t fit the bank’s checklist.

Too much nuance. Too much complexity.

Traditional financing wants 25–30% down and clean, audited books.

Most founders don’t have both.

So the deal stalled. The buyer was ready to walk. The seller was furious.

But here’s the truth:

Good businesses fail to sell all the time because the structure doesn’t match reality.

So we rebuilt the deal from the ground up.

Here’s how it closed:

→ Buyer put in $300K upfront (about 15%)
→ Seller financed $1M over 5 years at 6%
→ Final $700K tied to performance over 3 years
→ Seller stayed on as advisor for 12 months at $10K/month

That’s it.

Suddenly, everyone breathed again.

The seller got cash, upside, and control over their legacy.

The buyer got mentorship, breathing room, and a clean path forward.

The deal closed in 45 days.

No tricks. No shortcuts.

Just structure that matched incentives.

This is what most people miss about “creative financing.”

It’s not creativity for creativity’s sake.

It’s aligning the goals of two people who actually want the same thing.

A deal that works.

A business that survives the handoff.

And a future that doesn’t collapse under bad terms.

If you’re selling or buying a small business, the question isn’t “Can the bank finance it?”

It’s “Can the structure align incentives?”

That’s the difference between a deal that dies and a deal that endures.

P.S. What deal have you seen fall apart just because the structure wasn’t right?

#SMB #finance #negotiations #deals

Most buyers don’t know how to reach out to business owners, and that’s where so many good deals die.

A rushed message, a weird opener, or sounding even slightly like a mass email… and the owner checks out. Not because they’re not interested, but because the approach wasn’t right.

If you don’t want to lose a solid deal before the conversation even starts, listen to Keith Seebeck. He’ll fast-track your search and help you get your outreach right from day one.

And if you want the outreach playbook and the HBS case study we use, just message me and I’ll send it over.

#finance #m&a #bootcamp #eta

Everyone says they’re “hunting for deals,” but honestly… the best ones never hit your inbox. 

You miss one good off-market opportunity, and the opportunity cost stings way more than people admit.

Keith Seebeck talks about this in the video from ETA Bootcamp.

If you don’t want to waste months chasing random leads or waiting for brokers to remember you exist, just reach out to Keith. He’ll cut the search time in half and actually get real deals in front of you.

And if you want the playbook we use plus the HBS case study, just message me. I’ll send it over.

#etabootcamp #deals #searchers

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Tom Dillon, CFA

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