For a moment, take a trip back with me. I promise we won’t waste your time down memory lane for long, but imagine yourself in front of that prize counter, tickets in hand, hard-earned from hours of skeeball or whatever token lottery was your weapon of choice.
You there? Perfect. Now, look up at that top shelf — the one with what you really want. Or for ten-year-old you, what you needed.
What happens when those tickets don’t quite make their way up the prize ladder to where you needed them to be? Hopefully the person working the counter was kind enough to tell you to keep saving up and come back when you had enough. More realistically, you probably got a few eye rolls and some sarcastic comments about it being “just the way it works.”
You’ve come a long way from arcades and an assortment of must-have prizes that inevitably ended up in the trash can a month later. But there’s a ring of familiarity to a pattern you’ve probably noticed repeating itself long after skeeball became P&Ls and that token lottery became predicting the weather of your industry and finances.
Somewhere along the way — and don’t ask us why, because it makes no more sense to us than it does to you — some brilliant person decided that a Chief Financial Officer was a top-shelf prize. And unless you had pockets overflowing with tickets, doing without the high-level financial guidance you wanted, or needed, was “just the way it works.”
Then along came the word that should have existed from the start. Fractional.
You’ve got the records of what happened — your bookkeeper stays on top of that. Thanks to the controller you made room for, everything is organized and accurate. So here you stand at the counter with your eyes fixed on what now looks like. But what if you wanted some help thinking through how “where we are now” translates to “where we want to be”?
That’s got to be a top-shelf, forty-hours-a-week, paid-vacation, benefits, better-give-them-a-raise-because-they-know-exactly-how-things-have-been-going type of prize, right?
What if what you need is someone to do that thinking but at a fraction of the cost, for a fraction of the hours a full-time employee would require to show up? What if you just needed someone to think with you while you get things settled down? Or while you get things ramped up? What if the parts of your finances worth calling someone in on only make up a fraction of what it would cost to justify adding a full-time CFO salary to your payroll?
Yep. That's the fractional part of fractional CFO.
Having someone come in for what you need, when you need it, is real. It has a real title, and for many companies, real benefits. But how do you know if your company is one that would benefit from having a designated hitter on the team for when you need a little more batting power?
Let’s consider a few common scenarios. If any of these resonate, taking a closer look at how financial advising might fit into your framework could be worth a second glance.
Your demand is increasing. Staff have made it clear that the work is there — too much of it, opportunities for untapped potential. If you had more hands, the load would be more manageable for everyone and you could take things to the next level.
But what happens if that call to take things to the next level backfires? All those voices advocating for growth tend to go silent when you need them to weigh in on what that growth might cost you.
Before knocking over that first domino, wouldn't it be nice to think through the chain of effects before committing? Wouldn't it be nice to think it through with someone who held the financial picture so you could hold the operational?
That person is called a fractional CFO.
Anyone who has spent more than a day owning a business knows it's not always growth and sunshine. Sometimes things get a little dark. You've probably made it through quite a few dark spots — trudging through, doing what you always do… fixing things no one else shows up to fix… that's the job, right? Keeping things together so everyone else can do theirs.
But when life hands you the perfect storm of economic downturn, technology races, and a landscape no one is really sure how to navigate because the variables have outgrown the equation — trudging through starts to feel more like trying to free your feet from quicksand.
The person who translates how the financial ship gets patched up after the storm has blown your way — the extra set of eyes — the one who knows how those numbers can go from flooding your bottom line to keeping things afloat while you stay the course, or decide it's time to take things a few clicks in a different direction…
That person is called a fractional CFO.
“But my company is too small for something like this.”
We get that one a lot — as if using our services is some sort of ticket redemption at a counter always expecting more.
Having someone to help think through financial matters isn’t a prize you have to earn by growing into it. Having someone to help think through financial matters can be the tool you need to grow. So why would access to that advisory be exclusive to companies that — are in different stages of growth?
More importantly, a smaller or mid-sized company often experiences a greater need for sharp financial thinking, given the potential blowback from every call. When a Fortune 500 company makes one bad call, it might cost them a quarter — if things are bad. For a smaller company, that same call might take a year to dig back out of. Covering your bases isn’t a right exclusive to the large and complex.
Trust us. We know just how complex things can look long before the complexity becomes implied by head count, annual revenue, or market capitalization. Small companies don’t have “small” problems — not when those small problems involve the livelihood of the employees you feel responsible for and everything you worked hard for to get to where you are, wherever that falls on the “sizing scale.”
For those of you coming in from our services page — we made you a promise. We said we’d meet you where you are. Words are cheap when they sit on a call to action, and you know that better than anyone. Let’s talk about how those words translate for a few of our client types.
For some of our clients, what they need boils down to hours — a rundown of where things stand, where they’re heading, and what to keep an eye on. Some like to do a review like this once a quarter, just to have a “check-up” as it were. As much as we all hate physicals, when it comes to financial matters, knowing that your blood pressure is a little high or you might want to keep an eye on those cholesterol levels can make the difference between carrying on in the wrong direction or knowing exactly what to look for when you’re making those calls that sometimes keep you up at night.
Other clients are already in it. By the time you call for help, you’re long past the point of needing it — that one might as well translate to owning a company. We know how that is, because we aren’t just numbers people. We’re owners. We’ve been managers. We’ve been the person making those calls. We know what it’s like when the spreadsheets turn into faces and when the questions don’t always resolve cleanly.
For many clients, the need for advisory services is heavier in the beginning, while the helping hand catches up to where things stand. You aren’t signing a lease on a partnership you may or may not have need for down the road. When business-as-crossroads becomes business-as-usual again, we know our corner, and we have plenty to do there. You wouldn’t ask a lawyer to look at every email you send out daily, but you wouldn’t hesitate to call one in when the stakes are high. For a lot of our clients, we are that “stakes are high” ally.
The thing about being the ally that gets called when the stakes are high — you know what it looks like when things shift overnight. When the final straw breaks. When “we need to keep an eye on this” turns into “we need to turn this around, and it needs to happen yesterday.”
So no — we won’t be the mechanic who tells you that if you’d come in when the knocking sound started, things wouldn’t be so damaged. Because more often than not, we’ve found our clients are well aware of that knocking sound. But when every hour of the day is spent with the need for an operating vehicle, even one with a knock is better than one you have to do without.
Simply put, stopping to do repairs isn’t viable for most of our clients. Sometimes repairs aren’t even on the table — the new ride is on the way, and the old one just has to get by until it comes through. You don’t get to clear the slate so you can stop and think, and an engine with a knock doesn’t mean you can put things in park until you have the time to fix it.
So when we say there’s no judgment for whatever state of things we walk into — that’s not a professional courtesy. That’s just understanding how things look from the other side. That’s a perspective that might not be required for the numbers. But when those numbers become faces, that’s exactly the type of perspective that becomes make-or-break when it comes to thinking with you.
These examples might frame your situation to a T. More likely, they’ll feel almost right — with that final “but in my case” being the thing that almost holds you back. Don’t let it. Not when the fractional CFO sitting down to the table is one who knows the importance of shifting advisory services to the register you operate within — not asking you to shift to one that feels “almost right.”
That’s the whole idea. Not someone to take over. Not another face you have to manage. Not another set of numbers you have to interpret. Just someone to think it through with you, whatever it may be.
If that sounds like a prize worth having, come up to the counter. There's no sarcasm here — no tired expressions explaining the "rules" of who deserves what they need and how many tickets they have to hold to cash in for it. There's just an extra set of eyes — and an extra set of hands — to pitch in with whatever help your company's finances are asking for, even if figuring out what they're asking for is the only ask.