10 Lessons in 10 Years

What building Agile Advisors taught me about business, people, and knowing when to get out of your own way

By Sue Mulligan, Founder & CEO, Agile Advisors

Ten years ago, I was sitting across from my second client ever, a hedge fund guy, sharp as a tack, and he said something that changed everything.

"Sue," he said, "you are never going to make real money being a one-woman shop. The only way to build something is to get people underneath you. Build the pyramid."

I won't pretend I loved hearing that. He was right, though. I hired a senior accountant. Then another. Then a CFO. Within a few years, what had started on a soccer field (literally, a client approached me during a nail-biting ten year-old's game) had become a real company.

Agile Advisors is now a team of 30, predominantly women, many of whom were told, as I once was, that they weren't hireable after time away from the workforce. We've helped companies raise capital, avoid financial disasters, and build the kind of books that make investors say yes.

Ten years is a long time. Long enough to make a lot of mistakes, learn a lot of hard lessons, and occasionally be right about something. Here's what I'd tell myself if I could go back, and what I'd tell any founder who'll listen.

01. Relationships are everything. Take the meeting.

Early on, I met with anyone who would talk to me. A VC I admired told me his rule: he never turns down a meeting. "People helped me along the way," he said. "I'm going to do the same."

That stuck with me. I've had meetings I almost cancelled, the person seemed like a long shot, not quite the right fit, and they ended up sending me my best clients, or becoming one themselves. One guy I met through an incubator seemed like he might be looking for work. Turned out he was quietly acquiring three companies and needed someone to handle all the M&A.

You simply cannot know. Go to the meeting. Be generous with your time. It comes back around, usually when you're least expecting it.

02. You will make mistakes. The goal is to get more right than wrong.

I once had a client who owed us money, not a small amount. I went after it. He escalated to the VC who had referred him to us. The VC told me to write it off. I did, and then that VC went cold on us entirely.

What I missed was that in a referral driven business, you're not just in a relationship with your client. You're in a relationship with everyone who trusted you enough to send them. I should have picked up the phone before it ever got to that point.

I don't love telling that story. It made me a better operator, though.

03. Your team is the business. Treat them like it.

A CFO or controller takes real time to find, train, and embed in a client's most sensitive financial operations. When they leave, it's disruptive for everyone.

I've had team members stay with me for years because they feel respected, because the work fits their lives, because they know what they contribute matters. I've also learned, sometimes painfully, what happens when you hire fast and wrong.

Loyalty is built quietly, over time, through small consistent choices. It's also lost the same way.

04. Women are held to a different standard. So we hold ourselves to a higher one.

I've had a client question a $5,000 bill by saying it was "a lot of money from a bunch of stay at home moms” and a female manager on my very first day back from maternity leave whisper, "Don't let people see you leaving this early," at 5pm, after a day I spent mostly trying not to cry.

These aren't just my stories. Four in ten women reported experiencing microaggressions, harassment, or both at work in 2024. Women are often evaluated based on proven results, while men are promoted based on perceived potential. Research out of the University of Toronto found that women must outperform men to receive similar evaluations and recognition, because men are generally expected to be more competent by default. Studies also show that women are judged against more criteria than men in hiring decisions, evaluated not just on competence but on morality and social behavior, and a weakness in any single dimension is enough to cost them the role.

Women are harder on women. Men underestimate women. The bar is genuinely different, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.

I've found the only real move is to be so good, so reliable, so indispensable that the bias never gets a foothold. Is that fair? No. Does it work? Yes.

"You can be as smart as you want. If you can't make people want to take your advice, though, you're not getting anywhere in a service business."

05. Walk away from the wrong client before they walk all over you.

Early on I took any client I could get. I didn't care how small, how messy, how misaligned. I'd figure it out.

I stopped doing that when I realized a bad engagement doesn't just hurt your team, it hurts your reputation. In a referral-driven business, your reputation is everything. One unhappy client can quietly cost you ten future ones.

Now, I'd rather turn down revenue than do a job I'm not proud of. That's a hard mindset shift when you're building. The clients who've stayed with us longest are the ones we chose carefully, and they chose us back.

06. Your kids are watching. Build something they can be proud of.

My middle daughter was a junior in high school during the Women's March. She posted that her mom wasn't marching but was creating change by doing. She was making a difference, not holding a sign. I loved her just a little bit more that day. It is a privilege and an honor to impact women’s lives this way - something my daughters and I take very seriously.

I've also been offered client work I personally couldn't stand behind. My kids were in high school at the time. I turned it down. You can't tell your kids to act with integrity and build your business differently. They are always watching, and listening, especially when you work from home.

The business you build is a lesson your family lives with every day.

07. Businesses don't fail from bad ideas. They fail because they run out of cash.

I've seen brilliant founders, genuinely smart and visionary people, run their companies into the ground because they didn't know their burn rate. Not approximately. At all.

I walked into one engagement as CFO and within weeks could see the business had maybe six months of runway left without a life line. The CEO resigned. They didn't know their numbers.

A great product doesn't keep payroll running. Know your cash position. Know your burn rate. Know your runway. Fuzziness on any of these is how companies die.

08. If you're raising capital, your projections will get ripped apart. Be ready.

Two of my early clients, ShipBob and FourKites, both of whom went on to become unicorns in the Chicago market, raised their Series B with Bain. I was the one defending the numbers.

I got a call on a Saturday, sitting in a mall parking lot, from a Harvard MBA who wanted to go line by line. He wanted to disregard one of our revenue assumptions and revenue stream. We went back and forth and he eventually agreed.

I could have that argument because I knew those projections cold and understood the business — and that's the only reason it went my way. Series B due diligence is not a formality. Prepare like it's a final exam, because it is.

09. Know when to get out of your own way.

About seven years ago, I was diagnosed with lupus. I was in pain, struggling to work, and genuinely unsure what came next. My husband, a man who looks at life with a glass half full, looked at me and said: "Your mouth works. Go sell."

He wasn't wrong, and I didn't argue.

I stepped back from the transactional CFO work and leaned fully into what I'm good at: relationships, business development, managing the team. The accounting depth on my staff is better than mine, and honestly, that's exactly how I want it.

The smartest thing I ever did for this business was stop trying to be the best at everything in it.

10. While an MBA is valuable, there’s no substitute for real world experience.

I don't have a formal MBA. What I have is ten years of jumping between an HR issue, a 401(k) compliance question, a tax problem, a sales call, and a VC conversation, sometimes all in the same afternoon.

Moms are exceptional at this kind of context-switching. The project management, the relationship juggling, the ability to hold five things in your head at once: these are real, transferable skills. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Corporate America told me I wasn't hirable after a decade at home. So I built the company I wanted to work for. Ten years later, I'm still here. We're just getting started.

If there's a through-line in all of this, it's that the best things that happened to this business happened because of other people: a client who gave me honest advice, a VC who took my meeting, a team who showed up every day, a daughter who reminded me what I was building and why.

Build the relationships. Know your numbers. Get out of your own way.

Don't let anyone tell you you're not hirable.

Sue Mulligan is the Founder & CEO of Agile Advisors, an outsourced accounting and finance firm specializing in venture-backed startups and entrepreneur-led acquisitions. She started the company ten years ago on a soccer field, of course, and has since grown it into a team of 30, predominantly women returning to the workforce. Agile Advisors is based in Chicago.