Advisory & CFO
Fractional CFO Services
Most businesses do not need a full-time CFO. Almost all of them need CFO thinking.
There is a stage most businesses reach where the numbers stop being a compliance exercise and start being a management problem.
You can see it coming. Revenue is growing but cash is tight. You are quoting work without really knowing your margin on it. A lender asks for a forecast and you assemble something over a weekend that you do not entirely believe. You are making six-figure decisions on instinct, because instinct is what you have.
Hiring a full-time CFO solves this and costs $180,000 to $300,000 a year plus equity. For most businesses in this position, that is not a rational trade.
What we actually do
We take on the finance leadership function on a fractional basis. In practice that means three things.
We build the model. A real budget, a rolling forecast that gets revised as reality lands, and a cash-flow runway you can look at and know how many months you have. Not a spreadsheet you open once a year — a live model that reflects the business as it is this month.
We sit in the decision. When you are weighing a hire, a piece of equipment, a lease, a line of credit, or an acquisition, we model it before you commit. What it does to cash. What it does to your covenant. What it looks like if revenue comes in fifteen percent under plan. You still make the call. You make it with the downside quantified.
We make you legible to third parties. Lenders, investors, insurers and buyers all read financial statements in a particular way. Businesses lose good terms — or lose deals entirely — because their reporting does not answer the questions those readers are asking. We prepare packages that do.
What makes ours different
Most fractional CFO firms are advisory-only. They arrive with a template, build a model on top of whatever your books happen to say, and leave the accuracy problem to someone else.
We are a CPA firm first. That means the same team maintaining your books, filing your returns and running your payroll is the team building your forecast. Nothing gets lost in the handoff, because there is no handoff. When the forecast says something surprising, we can go straight to the underlying transactions and find out why.
It also means tax is not an afterthought bolted on in December. Entity structure, owner compensation, timing of income and expense, and the shape of a deal are all part of the same conversation as the operating plan — because for a private business, they are the same conversation.
How an engagement starts
Every advisory engagement begins with a diagnostic. We look at your last two years, your current books, your entity structure and your reporting, and we come back with a written assessment of what is working and what is not.
Sometimes that assessment concludes that you do not need a fractional CFO yet — that what you need is clean monthly books and a tax plan, and we should talk again in a year. We would rather tell you that than sell you a retainer you will not get value from.
Common questions
How is this different from my bookkeeper or my accountant?
A bookkeeper records what happened. An accountant files what happened. A CFO helps you decide what happens next. We do all three, but the fractional CFO engagement is specifically about forward-looking decisions — pricing, capacity, capital, and risk.
How much of your time do we actually get?
A typical engagement is a standing monthly leadership meeting, a rolling forecast we maintain, and access in between when something comes up. Businesses in an acquisition or a lending process usually move to a heavier cadence for that period.
Do we have to move our bookkeeping to you?
Not necessarily, but it helps. CFO work depends entirely on the quality of the underlying books. If yours are reliable we will work with them; if they are not, we will tell you plainly and fix that first.
What size business is this appropriate for?
If you are asking whether you can afford a decision, or you have been surprised by your own cash position more than once, you are the right size. Below roughly $1M in revenue, the Essential plan is usually the honest answer.
Often paired with
Start the conversation
Tell us what the business is trying to do next.
An introductory call is thirty minutes and costs nothing. If we are not the right firm for what you need, we will say so and point you somewhere better.