Trusting my pizza – Leaning on the fundamentals of my lifelong career learnings to stay the course in business.

Taking the leap

In the five years since I started Fife Avenue Partners, I have been drinking from the proverbial firehose. My focus has been largely execution, execution, and more execution. Sometime in the fall of 2017 after spending the Labor Day weekend wallowing in self-pity about what to do next after an unexpected end to my big four accounting career, my husband gave me somewhat of an ultimatum. He told me to start my own business because he believed I had all the ingredients to run a successful business. I wondered out loud what kind of business I would start and how. With the kind of clarity and nonchalance he always seems to have he suggested that I start serving emerging venture capital fund managers. He had seen enough to know there was market appetite for back-office services supporting emerging VC managers and knew where the gaps where. I immediately went to legal zoom and registered my new company on the 10th of October.

Trust yourself and the process

The last five years have comprised of a lot of learning, falling, getting up, relearning, staying the course and trusting my pizza. In skiing as in life, one must trust their fundamentals. I learned to ski as an adult. After many falls and “eating it”, I realized that I fell because I had lost faith in my fundamental skill/ability to stop safely and regroup. My first skiing coach who my family nicknamed Mr. Wonderful, had taught us that if you have the confidence to stop safely you will never be afraid to go down the slope no matter how steep. The same is true in business. Throughout my career I had learned a tremendous amount about running a business but didn’t fully appreciate the lessons I had learned. When it came to running my own business, I doubted myself often. Several times my husband had the unenviable task of reminding me of the things I already knew. When things didn’t go as planned, he would remind me to revisit our processes. ?I am sharing my story with the hope that a woman sitting on the fence about going it alone can find courage. ?Five years ago when I wrote about going solo, I had no idea what was in store and I am writing now to share what I have since learned.

The business of building

From the outset, I was sure that the biggest challenge about starting my own business was going to be finding clients. I fretted about where I would meet them, if I would need to advertise, where I would find the budget to advertise and whether I would know how to sell my services. Finding clients turned out to be the least of my concerns because by the 3rd week of March 2018, three months after officially launching, we had signed on two clients that helped pay for all our software startup costs. The greatest lesson from those early months was to never underestimate your network. A former boss helped finesse our prospect deck. An old colleague helped brainstorm my ideas over lunch and then helped us land one of our first clients. The first two clients helped us iterate our services and improve on what we thought would be our offering. They also referred four more clients so by the end of 2020 we were up to seven clients. In the years since, we have listened to client feedback to help us refine our processes and meet the diverse service needs of our clients. We have been cautious about our growth to ensure we have the bandwidth to continue providing great service.

In those early days, we decided that to scale we would need robust and task relevant software. We licensed Dynamo for our partnership accounting and investor portal software, bill.com to facilitate client bill payments and 1password for storing sensitive passwords for all the client access platforms that we use. In the last year, we have partnered with other service providers such as Ark Platform and Flow Inc to provide our clients the flexibility they need to manager their LP interface. Our client count is now up to 19 with just over 1B in assets under management.

Our service offerings have evolved but the goal has always been to provide our clients the solutions that best match their needs. In addition to fund accounting, we assist our clients with a whole range of services. We ensure audit and tax preparation work is handled fluidly on behalf of the client. Many of our clients have domestic, foreign and institutional LPs so we are always mindful of the sensitivities of these relationships. We lead the client’s efforts in sourcing and evaluating service providers on behalf of the client when asked. We have helped our clients document policies, complete regulatory fillings or open new banking relationships. Our number one goal is to take as much off our clients’ plates as possible while keeping our annual fees predictable and fixed.

People and building for the long haul

The hardest part about running the business turned out to be people. Recruiting, retaining, and keeping people motivated turned out to be the most challenging aspect of running the business. My background working for the accounting firms meant I placed and still do, a lot of value on documentation of processes and training. This helped us with continuity of client services as my poor hiring methods in the early days resulted in poor quality hires who failed to deliver the standard of quality, we expected of ourselves. I spent many hours redoing work before I realized I was the common denominator in all the failed hires, so something needed to change. I pulled my head out of the sand and designed what seemed like a basic practical test that all the hires needed to take, it was a gamechanger. The test was designed to evaluate how a candidate responded to the issues that had become a common occurrence among our failed hires. We were remote first before ‘’remote first” was a thing and this presented unique challenges that I had not been fully prepared to handle. I am excited that we now have a much more robust process that has since helped us to not only identify the right team members but to also set the tone for new hires about our work culture and help them be prepared. The team has been our greatest asset in our quest to delight our clients. I am proud of how far we have come as a team.

Today, I could not be prouder of the quality of service we have provided our clients as our client referrals have been responsible for the bulk of our growth. I am learning to trust the process and continue to do what I feel so passionately about which is creating opportunities for emerging Venture Capital managers and our staff, hand-in-hand. We consider ourselves to be a crucial part of our client’s internal team and have never hesitated to roll up our sleeves and provide support. Happy Fifth Birthday to us! I am looking forward to many years of high-quality services to our clients.

I am grateful to Laura Smoliar for the time she spent proofreading this article. She was my very first client and has worked tirelessly to support me in my personal and business journey.