Tricia M. Taitt calls herself a “Wall Street refugee turned fractional CEO with Broadway credits.” Her MBA from Duke University, her devotion to spreadsheets, and her professional dance experience each play major roles in her finance business, her book, her appearance on the “Professional Photographer” podcast, and her Imaging USA 2026 class. Her diverse background reflects her many interests and her intent to use as much of her brain capacity as possible, she says. “There’s more space for everyone to do more.”

For business owners, including photographers, that “more” means tapping additional professionals to focus on the finances of your business, she explains. In her book, “Dancing with Numbers: Grow a Financially Healthy Business and Choreograph the Life You Want” (New Degree Press), Taitt explains five stages in the lifecycle of a business and the “money team” necessary for each stage. The stages are:

1. Existence
2. Survival
3. Success
4. Growth
5. Maturity 

“In these five stages,” she says on the podcast, “there’s a different financial strategy of focus.”

At the minimum, particularly in the first two stages, you need a certified public accountant (CPA) or enrolled agent (EA) to ensure you are complying with all federal and state tax laws, Taitt advises. “As your business becomes more complicated, there’s a lot more transactions, there’s a lot more money coming in, money going out,” she says, such as paying for equipment, perhaps hiring employees and running payroll, and maybe taking on a loan, credit card, or investor capital. “Somebody needs to be organizing all of those transactions into an accounting system under the accounting principles, so that you can look at a financial report and start to make decisions about your business.”

This Success stage is where you may want to consider a new player on your money team: a bookkeeper. Sometimes, a CPA can be a bookkeeper, but Taitt advises separating the two positions because the bookkeeper would handle the day-to-day and monthly tasks. “The CPA provides a check and balance around tax time to make sure the numbers make sense,” she explains, “but the bookkeeper is with you more on a regular basis.”

When a business hits stages four and five, and is profitable (around $1 million to $2 million, according to Taitt) and ready to scale and grow, consider a fractional chief financial officer (CFO). This strategic professional will take your ideas and help you move forward, she says. “Instead of just moving on intuition and gut, it’s better that you have someone put some numbers around those ideas to help you figure out which direction makes most sense to go in, which one is going to be the most profitable direction.” A CFO also helps if you are looking for lenders or investors in your business and you need certain financial information at the ready, she explains, since numbers are typically not a photographer’s specialty. “You want somebody to help you communicate your narrative to other finance people because finance is a completely different language, like learning Spanish or French,” Taitt says. “Sometimes, it’s easier when a finance person is talking to another finance person. They understand how to communicate with each other.”

As your business flows through various stages, it’s important to identify your money team before you have questions or problems, such as cash flow issues or a suspicion of fraud, “because by then,” Taitt says, “it’s more expensive for you to fix the problem and get things in order.” She calls having finances and financial systems in order a business’s “financial core,” and named her 10-year-old fractional CFO and accounting company Fincore to reflect that philosophy. “I think that a lot of people get held back from growth or experience constrained performance because of their lack of awareness around their numbers and lack of comfort around their numbers,” she says. “... I believe that everyone needs to work on strengthening their financial core … because we believe that you need a strong financial core to be at peak performance, in the same way that dancers and athletes need a strong physical core to be at peak performance.”

That is another reason business owners should separate accounting from finance, which she says are two separate functions. “The average person who is not in the world of business does not realize that,” she says during the podcast, “and a finance person needs accounting to be right in order for us to do our job.” She compares the process to Lego bricks: “You cannot build the house unless you have the right pieces. Accounting are the pieces,” she adds. “Everything you do, from buying a pencil to paying a credit card to paying yourself as the business owner, everything shows up on the financial statements. Accounting is responsible for putting every action into a bucket according to these principles and standards.”

Finance professionals, Taitt explains, are “more imaginative and creative.” They will ask questions that help business owners dive deep into their systems. “We will take those financial reports and we’ll say, ‘What are these numbers telling us about this business? Where is it strong? Where is it weak? Where are there areas of improvement?’ … And then from that starting point, if we’re thinking for the future, finance people typically come up with assumptions. … If you want to grow to X number or X profit in three years, what are some of the revenue assumptions we need to make? What are some expense assumptions? How are we going to leverage debt to finance from a cash flow perspective if there’s no profit? So, a finance person takes the numbers that you have in your hand and leverages their imagination.”

Finances can be scary for business owners, and entrepreneurship is hard, Taitt acknowledges, so she sometimes asks clients to consider their earliest childhood memories around money. Though not a therapist, Taitt says she speaks often about shifting your mindset about finances from anxiety to empowerment. In fact, that is what her company and her book are about. “My whole motto is, I want business owners to have a fun, engaging, exciting, empowering relationship with their numbers so they can dance with their numbers. How do you feel when you dance?” she asks. “You might feel hesitant at first, but eventually it feels good, especially when you practice over and over.”

Melanie Lasoff Levs is director of publications.