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Welcome to The Brief

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I started Johnson Strategic Advisory because too many founders I talked to were running real businesses with the financial sophistication of a college side hustle. Not because they're careless. The gap between "I can read a P&L" and "I can model a Series A" is wider than most people admit, and nobody walks you across it.

The Brief is where I write down the things I keep saying in client calls. If you're a founder, an operator, or a finance lead at a growth-stage company, this is for you.

What you'll find here

Posts will mostly cover three areas.

  1. Strategic finance: building a model that survives contact with reality, deciding what to measure, knowing when your unit economics are lying to you.
  2. Fundraising: what investors actually want to see, the diligence questions that catch founders flat-footed, and what "raise-ready" really means.
  3. Systems and ops: how to set up your finance stack so it scales past the first ten employees without constant firefighting.

I'll also occasionally write about LATAM expansion, since I work with companies on both sides of the border and the playbook is genuinely different.

What you won't find here

  • Listicles built around SEO keywords
  • Generic advice about "the importance of cash flow"
  • AI-written filler dressed up as insight

The bar is simple: would I send this post to a client who's paying me $400 an hour? If not, it doesn't go up.

A quick orientation

If you're new to the site, here's what's worth knowing.

  • The CFO Toolkit is a free interactive tool that lets you stress-test your runway and burn under different scenarios.
  • The Raise-Ready Scorecard takes about 4 minutes and tells you, honestly, whether you're ready to talk to investors.
  • If you want to skip the tools and just talk, book a 30-minute call. No pitch deck required.

On format

Posts run 800 to 2,000 words usually. Cadence is roughly weekly, never on a schedule. Inline links instead of academic citations. Code blocks when the math matters.

When the math matters, expect to see something like this:

Burn Multiple = Net Burn / Net New ARR

If you burned $500K last quarter and added $250K of net new ARR,
your burn multiple is 2.0x. Acceptable for early-stage,
concerning once you've raised a Series A.

Italics get used sparingly, when I'm signaling "this is the part most people miss." Same for bold. Both lose their meaning if every other word is screaming.

Why subscribe

You can subscribe via RSS if that's still your thing (it's still mine). I don't have a newsletter yet because I haven't figured out how to write one without it feeling performative.

If a post is useful, share it with a founder who'd benefit. That's the whole growth strategy.

Thanks for reading. The next posts dig into the questions I keep getting from founders. Picking your first finance hire (the post most founders need before they hire a fractional CFO). Building a model that survives diligence. Knowing when your unit economics are lying to you. Roughly weekly cadence.