Part-Time or “Fractional” CFO Services

Growing businesses often reach a point where they need professional financial advice, but can't afford a full-time CFO or controller.

If you're fortunate enough to be in this position then we have the perfect solution for you. Our Part-Time CFO service gives you a professional financial manager who works with you to help guide your business to success.

The cost of hiring a full-time CFO can range from $100,000 to over $200,000 per year plus bonuses and benefits. Our Part-Time CFO services provides you with experienced support at a small fraction of that cost.

Here's what you get with our Part-Time CFO services:

• More time to focus on new services, new customers and other core business issues
• Better understanding of the financial side of your business. So you have less surprises and more control over the money
• Improved decision-making capabilities from clearly seeing the hard and true numbers of your business
• A readily available sounding board to help you with those tough business decisions and help you clarify your business plans
• The comfort from knowing that a professional is overseeing, protecting and constantly improving the financial side of your business
• A professional who establishes strong financial controls in your business to reduce employee theft and increase profits
• Training and managing your accounting staff
• Improved quality and timeliness of financial information
• Budget preparation and monitoring
• Profitability analysis by service or product line
• Tax saving strategies
• Trend analysis
• Assistance in defining long-range plans and the quantification of goals
• Cash management
• Liaison with bankers, attorneys, vendors, insurance agents, etc
• Assistance in obtaining financing from banks, including assistance with negotiations. Review/negotiation of insurance policies
• Development of company accounting procedure manuals
• Analysis of equipment purchases, expansions, etc.
• Mergers and acquisitions assistance
• Custom designed collection policies and procedures
• Interim CFO Services
• Strategy Development and Implementation
• Acquisition integration
• Modeling, forecasting and budgeting
• Equity and debt financing & recapitalizations
• Turnarounds and restructurings
• Attorney, CPA firm, insurance and bank relationships
• Board of Directors reporting / support
• Treasury and cash management
• Best practice policies and procedures
• Financial reporting and analysis

Strategic Business Planning

A Strategic Business Plan provides a roadmap for achieving the company’s purpose and direction, outlining the specifics of what needs to be done, when, how and by whom, keeping both management and staff focused on the tasks at hand to meet your strategic goals. Future aspirations are turned into specific tasks on a specific schedule. The Strategic Plan describes your company, its products, the competitive environment, management team, financial health, and business risks.

A strategic plan:

• Is the key to business success
• Prevents reactive stance, effectively predicts upcoming problems
• Defines priorities; communicates them effectively to management
• Establishes ambitious goals, strong identity and direction, understanding of uniqueness and value add for customers, clearly defining landmarks
• Helps you get the funding you require. Most lending institutions and private investors will not talk to you without a solid financial plan

A Strategic Plan is needed when:

• Maintaining a business in uncertain economic and competitive environments
• Expanding a current organization, product or service
• Starting a new venture, product or service
• Buying a new business, product or service
• Turning around a declining business

We'll lead a disciplined program that:

• 1. Assesses strengths, pinpoints weaknesses, identifies opportunities and minimizes risks. Meaningful objectives will be established to provide clarity of purpose so that you are clear what business the company is and is not in (more important).
• 2. Identifies and describes the target customer profile, features, advantages and benefits of what you are selling and substantiates that your plans are feasible by fully researching the need being filled with your business, new venture, product or service.
• 3. Develops marketing plans including full descriptions of targeted promotional campaigns with implementation timelines. Examines market conditions, the nature of your customers, as well as your competitors, sales potential, and projected results of your promotional campaigns. Without market intelligence the company lags in meeting customer expectations & misses opportunities for growth.
• 4. Develops internal infrastructure plans to support the execution of the strategic plan and growth. This includes organizational structure (who does what), business systems (how things get done), financial controls (how performance is continually monitored), including identifying the key players, skills, attitudes and expertise needed to achieve your goals.
• 5. Develops implementation plans including full descriptions of management systems, cost, vendors resources required and timelines.
• 6. Develops financial plans including projected startup costs, operating costs, revenue, profits, and break-even analysis for 3 to 5 years.
• 7. Establishes a cash flow forecast to understand when, where, and how your cash needs will occur. This includes identifying sources and plans for meeting your additional cash needs.
• 8. Formulates company milestones and measurable goals against which to monitor your progress and make course corrections. 

Your strategic plan will become a living document that will be tweaked over time as you discover assumptions were too conservative or aggressive, better/worse cost structures are negotiated than originally planned, your sales team is more successful than anticipated or are struggling, your products are better received or are over-priced, competitors enter or leave your space, market conditions change, etc., but you won’t be caught off guard or wonder what went wrong or right. You will be able to capitalize on your successes and mitigate your risks.

Cash Flow Management

GAAP may be necessary, but cash is king. Without cash, you are out of business. We’ll provide cash management tools, analysis and financial reporting that will:

• Help to obtain an appropriate line of credit
• Accelerate cash collections
• Provide effective collection policies
• Determine payment policies
• Help obtain the maximum rate of return on your idle cash

Evaluating New Business Opportunities

New business opportunities can be the key to your company's growth, but leaping blindly into an entrepreneurial "adventure" can be a costly mistake. Growth Management Strategies can help you take a planned approach to your new business effort. We'll provide the up-front analysis that can:

• Tell you if you're financially strong enough to make the move
• Plan your investment, budgeting funds when they will be needed and identifying their source
• Project when your venture will be profitable
• Identify your personnel needs
• Establish meaningful objectives
• Structure your overall business plan

Special Projects

How many times has that special project been put off for months or never been done at all? Growth Management Strategies gives you the personnel and expertise to define and manage a special project from inception to fruition without interrupting your day-to-day business activities. With Growth Management Strategies, your special project will:

• Be our most important activity. Work proceeds at a maximum pace and our energy is not siphoned off by competing responsibilities.
• Have clearly defined objectives set in advance of any work beginning. This avoids costly "wheel spinning" and "false starts" that can result from inexperienced project management.
• Be conducted with an executive management point of view. Its long-term effect on the bottom line and organization will be evaluated objectively.
• Be done right the first time. You won’t need to pay someone again to re-implement something that was done poorly due to lack of planning, experience, expertise or change management. That may be why you are hiring us…because something wasn’t done right the first time.

Information Systems

The key to developing the best possible information system is to know what a company needs to effectively manage the business, maintain financial controls/information and be automated where humans are inefficient or make errors. We offer that level of expertise, plus the practical experience of having architected and overseen the initial installation and evolution of advanced information system for growing multi-state, multi-national companies. Using Growth Management Strategies to manage the adoption or evolution of information systems or automation brings a task force leader who has experience:

• Overseeing numerous upgrades from existing systems to new systems, re-implemented poorly implemented systems, implemented new functionality or systems, integrated systems that don’t “talk” to each other and automated manual, labor intensive, error prone processes.
• Analyzing the cost of implementation and maintenance compared to continuing with recurring people costs while considering the benefit to the operation and its credibility before recommending changes.
• Managing both technical and human concerns.

Incentive Compensation Plans

Motivating an organization is a complex art. While companies work hard at getting the most from their employees, they often lose track of the role that compensation plays in motivation. Ironically, a traditional view of compensation for managers can inadvertently create a structure in opposition to the desired management goals. Working with Growth Management Strategies on compensation programs:

• Provides an objective, unbiased view of the compensation program
• Allows the company's operating goals to be reflected at the center of the compensation plan
• Will help you integrate your performance evaluation process with execution of company goals
• Brings a familiarity with successful, incentive-based compensation plans used at other companies

Business Process Reviews

Most companies define their organizations in a hierarchical pyramid, putting their CEO at the top with all other positions shown by rank. However, when they attempt to view the process of serving their customers, a very different corporate structure emerges. This is the structure of their business process. We help companies better define their business process to match their business objectives. In doing so, we help clients:

• Review procedures from their customer's perspective
• Develop policies and practices which grow from the need to serve the customer, not the organization or personalities
• Track business processes from attracting an order, through meeting the customer's need, collections, financial reporting and everything in between. We assess how work flows from department to department
• Eliminate breakdowns, roadblocks, lapses in responsibility, bottlenecks, redundancy of effort and inefficiencies created by an organizational structure that doesn’t support the best business processes

Financial Modeling

We can develop models that you will use to better manage your working capital. Using these models can help improve your:

• Business Decisions
• Cash Management
• Inventory Management
• Investment in Capital Expenditures

Measurement Programs

We can structure performance measurement programs that will help you to:

• Be on top of leading indicators of challenges that are developing in order to prepare, adjust or prevent
• Determine the real costs of running your business
• Understand how you are making money
• Identify opportunities to maximize your profit
• Adjust your strategies to capitalize on strengths or make course corrections

Expense Reduction Programs

We will work with your organization to develop expense reduction programs. Our efforts can help you identify:

• Redundant operations
• Wasteful practices
• Over-staffed functions
• Lost Purchasing Opportunities
• Erroneous vendor billing

Training

We'll help your in-house finance and accounting staff achieve a higher level of performance. Growth Management Strategies will:

• Teach skills and procedures that can be employed everyday to improve your operation
• Help you identify staff members who can be developed for higher level financial and accounting activities
• Teach monthly close procedures that will improve timeliness and accuracy of financial reporting, reduce audit or outside CPA fees and allow more time for value added analysis

Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestitures

During periods of growth or downsizing, companies face unique challenges and opportunities. Our experience with mergers, acquisitions and divestitures allows us to help you:

• Analyze the real value of the company being acquired
• Project cost reductions through elimination of duplicated functions
• Create practical financial models
• Identify hidden challenges and costs
• Handle the human aspect of these transactions
• Work with an attorney to structure the deal to your best advantage

Funds Acquisition

We can help you with obtaining funds for growth or survival. Growth Management Strategies offers expertise in:

• Developing or strengthening banking relationships
• Working with venture capital companies
• Raising private equity

Risk Management Programs

All companies face common liabilities. Others have special needs that are unique to their operation. Growth Management Strategies can help you assess your risk management requirements. We can work with your broker or insurance consultant to:

• Choose the best insurer
• Develop comprehensive insurance programs, without over-insuring
• Identify cost-saving practices which eliminate or reduce insurance expenses
• Implement fraud prevention and detection policies and procedures