Fractional CFO

The job, in one equation

If you're good, you already know this. What someone will pay for a company comes down to two numbers.

Most finance people work hard on earnings and put far less effort into the multiple. We want you working on both. That means helping our clients:

• Grow earnings. Contribution margin by channel and SKU, how much they can profitably spend on ads, pricing, inventory and cash.
• Grow the right way. Durable, organic growth with healthy customer economics, not growth bought by pouring money into Meta.
• Prove the quality of their earnings. Provable, contractual, repeatable. Good LTV, good margins. Ideally, economics in the top quartile of their industry.
• Take out risk. One retailer at 40% of revenue, one factory making most of the inventory, a founder who approves everything, books a buyer can't verify. Every one of those is a discount on the multiple, even if it never goes wrong.

We call the result a Bankable Brand: a business whose profit, cash and forecasts hold up when a lender, an investor, a buyer or the board tests them. That's what you'll build.

What founders hire us for

Here's what founders tell us on sales calls, in their words:

"Why am I doing the forensic accounting here? Why am I telling you my business?"

"They just kept on spending, but the margins weren't great. So we ended up in the negative for two, three months."

"I can see the numbers on spreadsheets. I need someone to tell me what this actually means."

Behind those lines are the same problems again and again: cash and inventory not planned together, ad spend with no margin limit, month-end reports that show up late, customer acquisition costs rising faster than the business can scale, and a lender or investor conversation coming that the numbers aren't ready for. One founder put what they wanted simply: "There's a cadence to the department, and I expect that whoever is going to be the leader in that department runs that cadence." That leader is you.

What you'll actually do

Our CFOs run the same operating system with every client. It has three moves.

Move	What you do with the founder
See	Map the funnel from traffic to repeat customer, with the money that survives each step. Build a one-page scorecard of the three or four numbers that decide their year. Name the risks.
Decide	Find the one constraint holding the whole business back. Put money and people where that constraint is, with a number behind every big yes. Keep a three-year model that's updated, not written once and forgotten.
Align	Every number that matters gets one owner. Every department head can say their goal for the quarter as a number. Then you run the rhythm: the weekly meeting, the monthly review, the quarter, the year.

When a number moves the wrong way, you don't just report it. You measure it, diagnose it, model the options and help the founder decide. An accountant stops after "measure". You don't.

Your first 10 days with a new client

By	What's done
Day 2	A profit tracker the founder can open every day
Day 5	The main constraint, named and sized
Day 7	The financial model
Day 10	The full audit of their growth economics, walked through with the founder

Over the next eight weeks you build out the full financial plan (revenue, COGS and purchasing, payroll and overheads, cash, the budget and the balance sheet, then a multi-year plan). By week twelve the client has department scorecards and a capital allocation framework, and the rhythm is running.

A normal week and month

• A weekly working session with each founder, plus the scorecard review: what's red, who owns it, what changes this week
• A monthly review of the close and the model with the founder, and a clear read on cash
• Decisions on the big questions: how much to spend on ads, when to buy inventory, whether they can afford that hire, how to fund growth
• Working with lenders, investors and boards, and preparing clients for a raise, a refinance, due diligence or a sale
• Reviewing and directing the work of the analysts and accountants on your clients

The other half of the job: trust

You can be completely right and still get ignored. Founders don't act on analysis. They act on people they trust. So we look for CFOs who become trusted advisors: someone the founder can lean on, think out loud with, and sometimes vent to. Some weeks it'll feel like you're running a therapy session.

We didn't guess at what makes that work. We've studied the books, and we've reviewed hundreds of our own client calls to see where our CFOs succeed and where they fall down. We're CFOs, so of course it's an equation:

• Credibility. You're at the top of the field in finance, modelling, accounting and strategy. We'll find out quickly in the hiring process.
• Reliability. You do what you said you'd do. You hand things in on time. If something is going to be late, you say so before it's late, not after. Our clients get same-day replies, and we guarantee it: if we miss one, we pay for it. The fastest way to lose a client here is to skip the weekly meeting.
• Intimacy. If this word scares you, this job probably isn't for you. We need you warm, caring and genuinely curious about the founder. Listen, understand their point of view, ask about their family, and build real rapport.
• Self-orientation. This is the one that divides everything above it. If you're focused on looking smart, protecting your hours or winning the argument, trust shrinks. We want servant leaders who put the client first.

Here's how Matt, our founder, puts it: "I'm not teaching you finance. You should already know how to talk to a lender. What separates CFOs here is client management: how you empathize with someone."

A good coach doesn't play the game for the founder. You make them better at deciding, until they need you less. That's also why they stay.

Who you'll work with

• Clients: founder-led ecommerce, DTC and consumer brands, mostly doing $3M to $150M in revenue, across the US, Canada, the UK, Europe and Australia. Think supplements, apparel, beauty, food and beverage, home goods.
• Engagements: some clients hire us as their fractional CFO, where you build the model and the rhythm with the founder and they learn to run it. Others hire us as their whole finance department, where you lead a small team and sit in the room when the bank, the investor or the buyer asks the hard questions. We also place CFOs in interim roles.
• Your portfolio: about 10 clients at full load, built up as you onboard. That works because analysts and accountants do the building and the close, so your time goes into the founder, not the spreadsheet.
• Your team: you won't be a lone contractor juggling a stack of clients. Senior and junior analysts build and maintain the models, and our accounting team (led by our Accounting Services Director) owns the close. You direct the work and own the relationship. You'll be trained and led directly by Matt.
• Our tools: we build and run AI agents in production. You'll get models, scorecards and call prep done faster than anywhere you've worked.

What you must have

• 10+ years in finance, including time as a CFO, VP Finance or head of FP&A in a growth company, or a PE, investment banking or transaction advisory background plus real operating experience
• Strong three-statement modelling. You can build a driver-based model from scratch and explain it to someone who hates spreadsheets
• You've sat across the table from lenders, investors or acquirers: a raise, a refinance, a quality of earnings review, due diligence or an exit
• You understand what drives a multiple, and you've helped a business improve one
• A record of founders and CEOs acting on your advice, not just receiving your reports
• Fluent business English, spoken and written. You'll be the voice in the room with founders, lenders and buyers
• The ability to coach and empathize. Warmth, patience, and the self-awareness to know when to stop talking and listen
• Based in the US, Canada, the UK or Europe, with good overlap with North American business hours

Nice to have

• Ecommerce, DTC or CPG experience: contribution margin, CAC and payback, cohorts, inventory and cash conversion, Shopify and Amazon
• CPA, CA, ACCA or CFA, or an MBA
• Experience running a weekly operating cadence (EOS, scorecards, L10s or similar)
• You've coached or managed analysts and accountants

This isn't for you if

• Your idea of the job is a monthly pack and a walkthrough of last month
• You'd rather be right than useful
• You need perfect books before you'll give an opinion
• Warmth with clients feels like a chore

What you'll get in return

• Senior-level pay benchmarked to your market. We're moving our CFOs to a partnership model, so your upside grows with the clients you serve. We share the numbers on the first call and put them in writing before anything else
• Fully remote work on a global team, with our HQ and a managing partner in Melbourne and team members across Canada, the US, England and Switzerland
• A team underneath you, and an operating system you can run with every client instead of reinventing it
• A portfolio of founders and brands that will teach you more in a year than most in-house seats do in five
• A real path to partner

How to apply

Apply through the posting with your CV. Here's what happens next:

• A short video (2 to 3 minutes). One question matters more than your CV: tell us about a time a founder changed their mind because of you. What was the number, and what did you say? The number shows us the finance half. What you said shows us the trust half.
• A call with our team about your background and how you work with founders
• A practical case. We give you an anonymized brand's numbers. You find the constraint, tell us what it's doing to the value of the business, and walk us through it as if we were the founder
• Meet Matt, our founder, then an offer

You'll hear back either way.