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Stephanie Skryzowski, founder and CEO of 100 Degrees Consulting, didn't set out to run a bookkeeping and CFO firm — she set out to change the world through nonprofits. In this episode, she shares the full arc: from legal assistant in Times Square to fractional CFO in the field, and finally to building a fully remote team of 18 that serves mission-driven organizations across the globe. If you've ever wondered what disciplined niche focus, honest pricing, and one well-crafted cold email can do for a bookkeeping practice, this conversation is for you.
Stephanie's path into finance started at a small nonprofit working in post-war Afghanistan, where she found herself doing everything from stuffing envelopes to presenting financial statements to the board. She latched onto the finance piece — "I loved the bookkeeping, I loved making the debits and the credits balance" — and spent the next several years managing financials across seven countries before becoming a CFO. When she was ready to start a family and step off the international travel treadmill, she saw a gap: smaller nonprofits that needed a finance team but couldn't afford one full-time.
Stephanie built her first client base from scratch, sending over 100 targeted cold emails while still employed full-time. She used GuideStar — a public database of US nonprofits — to filter organizations by revenue size and mission, then checked each website to see if a finance team was already in place. If not, she wrote a personal note to the executive director. "I got like way less spam about 10 years ago," she jokes, but the real secret was specificity: a handcrafted message about why she cared about their work, and what she could offer. That effort produced her first four clients — two of whom are still with the firm nine years later.
Growing past four clients, Stephanie ran into the classic trap: no limits on what she'd do for clients, vague agreements, and a CFO habit of just handling everything. "I had very few boundaries for what I wouldn't do." Ironically, it was hiring other people that forced the issue — her team would flag requests that fell outside scope, prompting her to tighten up service agreements and define what the firm actually delivers. She also wishes she had invested in proper legal support earlier: contracts cobbled together from Google searches eventually cost her money she didn't need to lose.
Her staffing model evolved from a loose network of hourly contractors — each giving 10 to 15 hours a week — to a fully committed W-2 team. A turning point came when a business coach asked a simple question: "Why don't you just hire a manager?" That one hire, a non-client-serving role that felt like "pure overhead," changed the shape of the whole organization. It freed Stephanie to think like a CEO instead of staying buried in day-to-day client work. Today the firm has CFOs and bookkeepers in separate, clearly defined roles — because, as she learned, paying CFO rates for bookkeeping-level tasks is not a sustainable model.
For a period, 100 Degrees Consulting also served general small businesses — with none of the intentionality that had made the nonprofit side work. No specific niche, no defined revenue band, no deep passion for the work. "All of those things that I had learned in the beginning, I did not apply when we were growing the small business side." The firm eventually sold that portion of the business and returned its full focus to nonprofits. The lesson landed hard: the things that made the nonprofit practice successful — clarity of customer, genuine connection to mission, and specific expertise — don't transfer automatically to a new market unless you build them there too.
Stephanie Skryzowski is the founder and CEO of 100 Degrees Consulting, a fully remote financial strategy and bookkeeping firm dedicated exclusively to nonprofit organizations. With a background spanning international development finance and fractional CFO work across multiple countries, she has spent nearly a decade building a team that helps mission-driven organizations get their numbers right — so they can focus on doing the work that matters. She is based in the United States and leads a team of 18 across the country.