Straight answers about fractional CFO services

Onboarding is light. I read the trailing twelve months of financials, sit down with you long enough to understand how the business actually runs, and pick the two or three reporting gaps that need attention first. By the first sit-down I am working from your real numbers, not a generic template. If something time-sensitive is already on the calendar, the work moves to that pace, and I will tell you that on the discovery call.

After a brief onboarding window the engagement is month to month. The scope lives in a one-page document written in plain English so you know exactly what my scope of work is, and it gets revisited any time the business shifts. If you need to scale the work up, scale it down, or pause for a quarter, that is a conversation, not a contract dispute.

Bookkeeping stays where it is. Tax filing stays with your CPA. What I add is the read across both, turning the output into the calls you actually have to make about pricing, hiring, working capital, and capital allocation. The three roles cover different ground, and your existing team almost always finds the work cleaner once forecasting and tax planning are coordinated on a single calendar.

I do not write reports for a living. The work is to be inside the rhythm of how this business actually runs, to be reachable when a time-sensitive decision needs a fast read, and to carry the financial picture forward across years instead of handing it back at the end of a project. The relationship is open-ended on purpose. The point is durable judgment you can call on, not a deck you read once and shelve.

The owners I work with are typically owner-operated, somewhere in the single-million to low-eight-figure revenue range, and based around the Bay Area or up into Lake Tahoe. At that scale the financial questions have outgrown what a bookkeeper can answer, and a CFO on full salary is more weight than the business should carry yet. If you sit just above or below that range, a discovery call is the cleanest way to find out whether the fit is real.

I came up advising serial entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, so I have lived a wide swath of operating models from the inside, from product startups to professional service practices. The owner-operators I work with now come from a range of businesses, and the financial questions are more alike across industries than most owners expect. Where your business has real quirks, I learn them in the first month, and on the discovery call I will tell you straight where my experience runs deep and where I will be coming up the curve.

Project-based work happens when it makes sense. A clean financial model for a lender, a one-quarter cash turnaround, a structural look before a sale conversation. Bring me the goal and I will tell you whether a defined project is the right shape, or whether you are actually describing the start of an ongoing engagement.

Plenty of my work happens alongside an existing CFO. The most common version is that your CFO is operations-deep and you want a second set of eyes on tax planning, cash forecasting, and big-decision modeling. Sometimes it is a part-time CFO who needs more bandwidth, or a strong controller who is being asked to think above the close. The relationship is collaborative by design, the lines are clear, and I have no interest in stepping on someone who is already doing good work.

Engagements scale with the depth of the work, not a tiered menu. A lighter retainer covers a monthly review, the standing dashboards, and a coordinated tax and cash conversation. A deeper retainer adds more time inside the business, more modeling around the decisions on your two-quarter horizon, and more direct access between meetings. The right level depends on how complex the financial picture is and how much of the work you want me carrying versus translating for an existing team. I size it on the discovery call so you see the math before you decide.

Inside the first quarter you should see three things move: cash visibility that lets you answer the bank-balance question without guessing, a tax position that is being managed forward instead of patched in April, and a clearer picture of which products, customers, or services are actually paying you. Specific dollar outcomes depend on your starting point, and I will not promise a percentage I cannot back up. What I will promise is that the next ninety days will be planned, not guessed.

Honestly, most consulting engagements end before they earn their value. I have spent the last two decades close to dozens of entrepreneurs, watching outright failure and tremendous success at the same table, and that pattern recognition is hard to deliver in a deck. I am still here in month seven when the lease decision lands, in month fourteen when a key person resigns, in month twenty when a buyer comes calling. The compounding value is in continuity, in seeing the same business across enough cycles to know what is normal and what is a signal worth acting on.

Yes. The scope is written in pencil, not in stone. If you grow into a more complex financial picture, the retainer steps up to match. If a quiet quarter or a strategic pause makes sense, the retainer steps down. The principle is that the engagement should fit how the business actually runs, and that changes from year to year for the owners who get it done.