WHY DOES MY BUSINESS NEED A BUSINESS GUIDE

Climbing a mountain, rowing a boat, or riding a bus – business strategists love metaphors about travel. It makes sense. Scaling new heights, reaching new destinations, finding new ways to cover familiar ground – these are the kinds of goals that inspire a visionary CEO and their team to get out of bed in the morning, put one foot in front of the other, and continue forward, no matter what obstacle they encounter.  
Any good traveler knows: you can pack the fullest suitcase, read the thickest guidebook, and study the most detailed map, but the best way to ensure a satisfying trip is to bring a trusted guide along with you. That doesn’t mean someone who has traveled the exact route before, just an expert traveler in their own right who shares your values and can orient themselves to your environment.  
As a Virtual CFO , I appreciate thinking about the figure of the guide: Our job is to help business owners look – and move – forward through financial forecasting. We put our expertise in service of their vision, which means providing tested tools and strategies to best fit their unique situation.  
So, it was especially insightful for me to sit down with Peter Van Nest to talk about what it means to be that trusted figure on someone else’s journey. A Pinnacle Guide who started his career in the med tech space, Peter works in a similar capacity to a COO. Using Pinnacle’s “Five ‘Ps’: People + Purpose + Playbook + Performance = Profits,” he helps growing businesses chart their unique course forward, until they’ve internalized all his lessons and transition him off the team.  
Peter is the first to acknowledge there are so many business frameworks out there, so many tools and books and programs that promise to exponentially increase growth. So why does any one framework perform better than the other? How do you know where to start in selecting one?  
For Peter, it comes down to relationships: A guide and a business owner have to understand each other’s ‘why’ so that they can look forward together to figure out how to chart a course in whatever direction means success for the company.  
Here’s what we discussed.