Three years ago, I was drowning. Seventy-hour weeks, one-third the clients of my peers, and a severe case of imposter syndrome. Today? I'm managing more clients than anyone else on my team in just 40 hours a week. The transformation didn't happen overnight, but it did happen.
The secret wasn't working harder - it was recognizing patterns. Every startup thinks their problems are unique, but after enough reps, you realize they're all variations on the same themes. Cash flow crisis? There are only about five root causes. Scaling challenges? Maybe ten common patterns. Once you internalize these patterns, what used to take hours takes minutes.
The real breakthrough came when I stopped trying to be a traditional CFO in a fractional role. Traditional CFOs can afford to be perfectionists - they have one company and unlimited time. Fractional CFOs need to be surgeons: get in, fix the critical issue, establish monitoring systems, and move on.
I built templates for everything. Financial models, KPI dashboards, board decks, fundraising materials - all customizable but starting from proven foundations. What used to take days of custom work now takes hours of intelligent modification.
But here's the thing about mastery: it's boring. When you can diagnose a startup's financial health in the first 30 minutes of a call, when you can predict their challenges three months out, when nothing surprises you anymore - that's when you know it's time for something new.
The itch started small. Reading about GPT-3, then GPT-4. Seeing patterns in my own work that felt increasingly automatable. Realizing that many of my insights came from pattern recognition that an AI could potentially replicate. The more efficient I became, the more I wondered: could AI do this?
Success in any field eventually becomes a trap. You get good, then you get comfortable, then you get bored. The only cure is to find the next mountain to climb. For me, that mountain is AI.