Fractional & Interim CFO Services

The honest taxonomy: a fractional CFO is ongoing, part-time senior leadership, a standing fraction of a CFO’s attention (typically a day or two a week) for a company whose complexity warrants the judgment but not the headcount; an interim CFO is temporary, often near-full-time coverage of a gap, a departure, a leave, the space between firing and hiring, where continuity of the close, the audit, and the lender relationships matters more than strategy-building; and an outsourced CFO is the function delivered by a firm rather than an individual, which is really a statement about depth of bench: the CFO plus the controller and analyst support behind it, from one provider. The fit test is three questions: is the need ongoing or bounded, is it judgment-hours or coverage-hours, and does the work beneath the CFO also need staffing? Most growth companies land on fractional; most transitions land on interim; companies with no finance team at all land on outsourced. We run all three shapes, which is precisely why we will tell you which one you actually need.

What we do: We run the three-question fit test with you and scope the engagement to the shape you actually need.

The CFO owns the questions where judgment moves money: cash and runway, the forecast, the levers, and the honest date the money runs out; capital strategy, when to raise, from whom, on what instrument, and what the debt markets will actually offer; the banking and lender relationships, covenants negotiated and then managed; pricing, margin, and unit economics, the analytical work behind the two or three decisions a year that change the P&L; board and investor reporting, the pack, the narrative, and the credibility both create; and building the function beneath, hiring and directing the controller and FP&A layers rather than performing them. What the role does not own: transaction processing, the close mechanics, and reconciliations, which is controller work, and buying CFO hours to do it means paying CFO rates for bookkeeping. A well-scoped fractional engagement is nearly all judgment hours, which is why a day a week can genuinely carry a company.

What we do: We define the role in the engagement letter, judgment work owned, controller work routed where it belongs.

The reliable inflection points: a first institutional raise or credit facility, where the counterparty’s diligence expects finance leadership to exist; board formation, which creates a standing audience for reporting that must be built once and defended quarterly; crossing the complexity thresholds, multiple entities, multiple revenue streams, inventory, foreign operations, where owner-operator finance stops scaling; an approaching transaction, sale, acquisition, or eventually a filing, whose diligence will grade the finance function itself; and lender or covenant events, where reporting obligations carry real penalties. The pattern across all five: the trigger is external scrutiny. Companies rarely need a CFO to run themselves; they need one when someone with money starts asking questions, and the cheapest time to put a CFO in place is one quarter before that someone shows up, not one quarter after.

What we do: We put a CFO in place one quarter before the scrutiny arrives, with the reporting and relationships built ahead of the ask.

Interim coverage follows a defined playbook from day one. The first two weeks: secure the mechanics, the close calendar, the banking access, the reporting obligations and their dates, and a knowledge download from the departing CFO if one is available. The standing period: run the role for real, the close reviewed, the board pack delivered, the audit and lender relationships held personally rather than left to drift, and the judgment calls made rather than deferred to a future hire, because six months of deferred decisions is its own crisis. The search period: we support the hiring without running it, scoping the role honestly (often the departure reveals the company needed a different role than it had), assessing finalists’ technical depth, and building the onboarding file that makes the new CFO productive in weeks. The handoff: a structured, documented transition. Interim done well is measured by what did not happen: no missed filing, no surprised lender, no audit that stalled, and a successor who inherited a running function.

What we do: We run the interim playbook: mechanics secured in two weeks, the role held for real, and the successor onboarded from working files.

The signals you have outgrown fractional: the judgment questions arrive daily rather than weekly (capital markets activity, M&A in motion, a filing on the horizon), the organization needs a present executive, not a scheduled one, for recruiting, culture, and cross-functional weight, and the finance team beneath has grown to where managing it is itself a full-time job. When the signals fire, the fractional engagement converts into its own succession plan: we scope the full-time role from the actual work performed (a far better job spec than a template), support the search and technical assessment, and structure a transition quarter, the incoming CFO onboarded by the people who ran the role, with the memos, models, and relationship files handed over as working documents rather than records the new CFO has to reconstruct. Many engagements then step down rather than end, retaining the technical accounting or transaction support layer while the new CFO owns the role, which is the arrangement working as designed.

What we do: We scope the full-time role from the actual work, support the search, and run the transition quarter.

The full-time comparison, done honestly: a market CFO costs salary plus bonus plus equity plus benefits plus the recruiting fee, a fully loaded figure that for most growth companies lands well into the mid six figures annually, against a fractional retainer typically a quarter to a third of that for the judgment layer most companies actually need at their stage. What the retainer buys: a fixed weekly cadence (standing leadership presence, not on-call hours), defined ownership of the reporting calendar and the external relationships, and surge capacity for the events, raises, audits, transactions, priced as scoped additions rather than surprises. The mechanics that make it work: real system and banking access from day one, a direct line to the board (a CFO without direct board access cannot function as one), and clean boundaries with your audit firm, since independence rules mean your auditors cannot hold this role, which is exactly why firms like ours, standing outside the audit, can. The model fails when the scope is vague, so we define it in the engagement letter: the cadence, the deliverables, the decision rights, and the exit.

What we do: We define the cadence, deliverables, decision rights, and exit in writing, because the model works on definition.