Fractional CFO for Small Business

Specializing in Planning, Analysis, & Managerial Accounting

A company with 500 employees has someone whose whole job is turning numbers into decisions. You have a bookkeeper, a tax preparer, and a gap in between.

I work in that gap

Western North Carolina — 100 businesses — before and after Helene

Here’s what I mean. You drive an hour out and an hour back. The invoice covers the time your customer was in the car. A $300 job and a $9,000 job take up the same slot on the same schedule. Payroll runs on Friday whether or not the deposit cleared. Your biggest customer pays in sixty days. Your supplier gets paid when it’s ordered. The busiest month you’ve ever had, and you still don’t know if you made money on it. Your bookkeeper is good. You still don’t know if you can afford to hire or not.

That’s your business. Your books show a different one.

Your books were built to file taxes and keep track of money and they’re probably great at it.

I work from the first one

Two owners told me the same thing this year, and they run businesses that have nothing in common.

One of them runs a practice out of a space she doesn’t control, and somewhere in the middle of our conversation she said she wasn’t sure how they weren’t in debt at this point.

The other one runs a transportation business. She came in to our latest session braced for bad news and instead, she found out that the changes she made are working, slowly, but they’re working.

Nothing was wrong with either business. Neither owner could see where she actually stood, so they assumed the worst. This is neither a failure of attention or effort on their part. It’s the most common thing I find.

I've worked with almost 100 businesses here in Western North Carolina, before and after Helene, and I joke about once a week that when you've seen one company's financials, you've seen one company's financials. I've seen paper notebooks and I've seen QuickBooks so clean it's a pleasure to open. What I have not seen is an owner who wasn't trying their hardest.

Here's the thing. There is a big difference between your books being clean and having the information you need to run your business. Clean books are still hiding what matters most for small businesses here, and that's the part I work on.

Working with Thrive Strategy LAB, you get what you need to make decisions in units that you already count in - a trip, a job, a session, a clean, a jar, a candle - because those units are how you make decisions.

  • A price that counts all three legs of the trip, not just the one that ends up on the invoice

  • What a single unit costs to produce with the overhead in it. One came out to $6.43.

  • The number of projects sitting in the queue that means it's time to hire

  • A hire expressed as twelve annual enrollments, which turns a leap into a sequence

  • What you'll make next year if you change nothing, and what it would take to beat that

Lenders, funders, and business support organizations -

I do this work at portfolio scale [For lenders, funders, & business support organizations]

Writing about finance and capital in place based businesses

What We Pay For - the impact of cost and value - on Substack