A client of mine was a founder doing around 350k a year. They had a whole finance team around them, but still couldn't tell you with any confidence what their numbers meant. I didn't question it at first. But I kept coming back to the same thought... how is this possible?
Because on paper, the setup looked ok. An accountant was doing the books, payroll, taxes, some projections, and ad hoc tasks. Too much overhead (imo) for some of the financial admin considering our low margins… but not terrible.
They also had a finance consultant doing projections, reporting, and sharing insights. Seemed worth the investment at first for the insights the founder wanted across the business.
Both had 1-1 calls with the founder and the plan was simple: The finance team would prep the founder before each of my leadership meetings with them so we could make business decisions and IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve) anything off-track.
But that's not what was happening.
My client would walk into leadership with the Scorecard numbers updated and nothing else to say. No interpretation. No questions. No flags. I was confused. I thought those 1-1 calls were supposed to leave them with something to bring into the room. At minimum, notes.
So I defaulted to being a translator. I'd take whatever reports got built, form an interpretation, and then simplify them for the founder. I'd tie everything back to our Rocks. Does this number mean we need to add a Rock next quarter? Does it tell us something about pricing? About a service line that's losing money? The translation step was the only reason any of the data got used for decision-making.
This was clearly a workaround, not a solution.
So I went back and watched a few of the recorded calls with the finance team to figure out what was going wrong. Here's what I saw.
For any founder who considers themselves "creative first," or who's said out loud that they feel like an artist cosplaying as a business owner, the language being used in those calls was basically a wall. The experts weren't effectively explaining things. They were performing expertise. The vocabulary felt like it was being used to prove they knew their stuff, not to make sure my client did.
Instead of admitting that nothing made sense, the founder did what most of us would do. They smiled and nodded. They'd heard it explained before. More than once. But hearing something and being able to recall it to share with others are very different things.
From my years teaching, I know how the brain actually recalls information. It needs a story. It needs connections. It needs to be tied to something that already matters to the learner. A clean report doesn't do any of that on its own. It just sits there, technically correct, and totally useless to the person who's supposed to use it.
I keep running into this with creative founders at this stage. The books might exist. The reports get generated. But the team is siloed already, they have no shared workflow, and no one responsible for translating the numbers and teaching founders how to use them.
If you've been sitting in similar meetings, smiling and nodding through a report you didn't really follow… you're not alone. But it’s probably time to rethink how your finance team is operating. If you want a thought partner, my DMs are open.
- Valentina, Mynt Collective Founder
📊 Bookkeeping is now part of how we work.
If you read the story above and recognized yourself in it, we designed this for you.
Bookkeeping is now a role option inside our Ops Retainer. You get clean books, but more importantly, every bookkeeping client also gets me as their Operations Strategist. So the books aren't just getting done in the background somewhere. We're sitting down together and tying what's in them back to the decisions you're making in your business.
Numbers are a language that most creative founders never got taught. We treat it that way, with a visual-first approach that's built for how creative brains take in information.
If you want a rough sense of what it'd run for your business, the estimate tool will get you a range: Ops Retainer Estimate Tool
📚 The Learning Lounge
A cozy corner where we share our latest insights from books, podcasts, videos, and articles.
The Ultimate Guide to Capacity Planning for Creative Agencies. Before you hire anyone, read this. It walks you through figuring out whether you actually have a headcount problem or a scope problem — because sometimes you don't need another person, you need better allocation of the people you've already got. Includes step-by-step frameworks for calculating real team availability and setting utilization targets that won't burn everyone out.
Scaling by "Delegation" Isn't Good Enough. Jason Cohen (founder of WP Engine) wrote this and it's been living in my head rent-free. His argument: delegation is still about you — you're just handing off the stuff you don't want to do so you can be more heroic. Real scaling means building a team that's genuinely better than you at things, and then getting out of their way. If you're the bottleneck on every project and "just need to delegate better," this'll challenge that framing.
Contract or Full-Time? A Hiring Guide for Creative Agencies. This is Pilot's no-fluff breakdown of when a contractor makes sense vs. when you actually need to commit to a full-time hire — written through an agency lens with real examples like bringing on a freelance motion designer for a one-off vs. hiring a content writer for your core service. If you've been defaulting to contractors because full-time feels scary, this'll help you think about it differently.
🎥 The Ops Studio Glow Up: Launching End of May
We’re giving The Ops Studio a major Glow Up and relaunching our YouTube channel at the end of May! We’re transforming the podcast into a full video series built for the creative agency founder who is done being the Chief Everything Officer.
We’re sharing actionable guidance on the structural problems holding you back—from figuring out if your next hire is the right one, to designing a team that lets you finally buy back your energy.
We believe operational stability creates creative freedom. This channel will help you build the infrastructure that makes that possible.
➡️ Subscribe to the Mynt Collective YouTube channel so you don't miss it.
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Mynt Musings is also published to LinkedIn. If that’s your preferred platform, feel free to subscribe there instead!
🗺️ Ways To Work With Us
A snapshot of ways we support small businesses. Know someone we could help? Share any of the links below.
Ops Audits: An Operational Audit that identifies bottlenecks and delivers a prioritized 90‑day plan with owners, dates, and quick wins.
Ops Retainers: Day-to-day support with the right roles on deck (Bookkeeping, Ops Manager, Executive Assistant, and more). We run the business, manage change, and unblock the team—roles can expand or shift as needs evolve.
Ops Builds: Design and implement right‑sized tools and workflows, document SOPs, train the team, and drive adoption so the system gets used.
💚 Full service ops for creative agencies.
Focus on big ideas, not busywork.