CFO Services — Sounding Board Solutions
A CFO in your corner. Without the salary.
A business turning over $5 million needs the thinking a chief financial officer does. It cannot justify the $250,000 a chief financial officer costs.
That gap is what CFO work exists to fill. You buy the judgement, not the headcount. We deliver it through three levels, and most owners genuinely only need one of them.
Management reporting, a rolling forecast and a decision to discuss.
The labels
Fractional, virtual, outsourced.
Mostly the same thing.
The three terms are used interchangeably across the market, and the distinction people draw between them is more marketing than substance.
What actually matters is whether the person is senior enough to disagree with you, and whether they see your numbers often enough to be useful. Ask about that instead of the label.
- Virtual
Usually implies the work is done remotely.
- Fractional
Implies a defined slice of a senior person’s time, in or out of your office.
- Outsourced
Implies the whole finance function has been handed over, bookkeeping included.
Three levels
Most owners genuinely need only one of them.
You can buy less than the full engagement. The levels are a ladder, not a commitment, and most clients move between them as the business changes.
- The lightest touch
Mentoring
One-on-one guidance, support and accountability. You run the business; we’re the person you call before making the decision rather than after. Typically quarterly, structured around whatever is actually live rather than a fixed agenda.
Indicative from $1,000 per quarter - What most owners mean
CFO Advisory
Hands-on implementation. We build and maintain the financial infrastructure — cash flow forecasting, job or client-level profitability, pricing models, management reporting — and then sit in the decisions that run on it.
Indicative from $1,000 per month - Structured oversight
Board of Advice
A standing advisory board that meets on a set cycle, works to an agenda and papers, and holds the business to its own plan. Not a statutory board — no directors’ duties, no filings — but the discipline of one.
Price on application
What it costs
We publish a number, because not publishing one wastes your time.
Most firms won’t put a number on this page. We think that’s a mistake.
Fixed monthly or quarterly fee, agreed before we start — no hourly billing and no invoice that arrives as a surprise. What moves the number:
- Entities
How many are involved, and how they relate to each other.
- Data quality
Whether the underlying bookkeeping is reliable enough to build on.
- Frequency
How often we meet, and how much sits between those meetings.
- Starting point
Whether we’re building the reporting from scratch or maintaining something that already works.
A rough test
How to tell which level you need
Most businesses between $2 million and $10 million land on Level 2. Owners routinely under or overestimate which level they need, and we’ll tell you if you’re doing that.
- Level 1
You can answer “what was your gross margin last month” without looking it up, and you just want a sounding board for the big calls.
- Level 2
You can’t answer it, or the answer takes a week to produce, or you’ve never had job-level or client-level profitability.
- Level 3
You can answer it, the reporting works, and the questions have moved on to succession, sale readiness or a structural growth step.
The honest test
Is a CFO worth it?
Only if the decisions are big enough.
If a 3% pricing error across your book is worth $150,000 a year, the fee is a rounding error against the problem. If your business is small enough that the biggest financial decision this year is which accounting software to use, it isn’t.
Illustrative arithmetic: a 3% pricing shortfall on a $5m sales base equals $150,000 a year, before any cost or volume changes.
We’d rather tell you that in the first conversation than eighteen months in.
Included
What you actually get
A named person and a fixed fee, not a rotating team and an open meter.
- A named person
Not a rotating team. Izaak de Winter leads this work.
- Management reporting
The kind you can read without a translator.
- Rolling forecasting
Cash flow, updated as reality moves rather than once a quarter.
- Profitability
By job, client or service line — whichever one your business turns on.
- Someone in the room
For the decisions that matter, with the numbers already in front of them.
- A fixed fee
Agreed in advance, so the cost is never a surprise.
Familiar?
Signs you’ve outgrown what you’ve got
Not a sales list.
These are the things owners say in a first conversation, almost word for word, that tell us this work would pay for itself.
“I find out how the year went when my accountant tells me, eight months later.”
“I know we’re busy. I don’t know if we’re making money.”
“I can’t tell you which jobs or clients are profitable without doing a day’s work to find out.”
“I price by feel and hope it works out.”
“Every big decision, I make alone at eleven o’clock at night.”
“There’s money in the account, so I assume we’re fine.”
If two or three of those are familiar, the gap isn’t your accountant. It’s that nobody is doing the other job.
Getting started
The first ninety days
Almost every engagement starts the same way, because almost every business has the same problem underneath the presenting one.
- Month one — diagnosis
We get into the file, work out what the numbers are actually telling us, and find out how reliable they are. This is usually where we discover the reporting has been wrong in some quiet, consistent way for years.
- Month two — infrastructure
Building the reporting you should have had: a forecast, margins at the level your business actually turns on, and a monthly pack that takes ten minutes to read rather than an afternoon.
- Month three — useful
You have a baseline, a forecast, and enough history to see whether things are moving. From there it’s a rhythm rather than a project.
- Diagnosis
- Infrastructure
- Useful reporting
Month one: diagnosis. Month two: infrastructure. Month three: a useful baseline and forecast.
Owners often expect insight in week two. Honest answer: you’ll get observations early, but you won’t get much you can act on until the numbers are trustworthy.
Scope
What we don’t do
Worth being clear, because the term “CFO services” gets stretched a long way.
Bookkeeping ServicesSubject to capacity, so worth raising early if the file needs work.
- Not your bookkeeping
Not as part of this. If the underlying data is a mess, that gets fixed first, separately, either by your bookkeeper or by ours.
- Not financial product advice
We don’t recommend investments. That’s a licensing question and we stay on our side of it.
- Not capital raising or broking
We don’t raise capital or broker business sales. We’ll prepare you for both and work alongside whoever runs them.
Questions
Questions we get asked
How is this different from my accountant?
Frequency and direction. Your accountant looks backwards, once a year, to report accurately. This looks forwards, monthly, to decide. Both are necessary and they’re genuinely different jobs.
Do I have to be in Tasmania?
No. This work is done remotely for clients across Australia. The monthly rhythm matters far more than the postcode.
What if I need to stop?
Month to month after an initial period. The reporting we build stays yours either way — it’s in your file, not locked in ours.
Can I move between levels?
Yes, and most clients do. A business usually starts at Level 2 while the reporting gets built, then some step back to Level 1 once the infrastructure runs itself, and others step up to Level 3 as a transition approaches. The levels are a ladder, not a commitment.
Do you replace my accountant?
Only if you want us to. Plenty of clients keep their existing accountant for compliance and use us for the advisory layer. It works fine, as long as everyone knows who is doing what.
Start with a consultation
What’s actually going wrong, and which level would fix it.
A conversation about what’s actually going wrong, what level would fix it, and what that would cost. No charge, and no obligation.
Book a consultationBusiness AdvisoryHow this fits with the rest of the advisory work.