Fractional CFO Services

A full-time CFO at scale-up level costs £120,000–£220,000 a year in the UK, USD 180,000–300,000 in the US, and comes with equity expectations on top. Most businesses between early revenue and roughly £/$10m turnover need the strategic thinking of a CFO but cannot justify the fixed cost — and hiring too early usually means hiring the wrong seniority for the actual work required.

A fractional CFO fills that gap. You get an experienced finance leader for a defined number of days per month — typically two to eight — sitting alongside your management team, owning the forecast, running the board pack, and translating the numbers into decisions about pricing, hiring, cash and capital.

Unlike a bookkeeper or a management accountant, a CFO is measured on the quality of the decisions the numbers enable — not on the accuracy of the ledger. Both matter; they are different jobs, and we scope our engagement so it is clear which is being asked for.

Cash. A rolling 13-week cash flow that is updated every week and reconciled to bank balances every Monday. Founders should never be surprised by a cash position; a competent CFO function removes that risk entirely.

Plan. An annual budget and a rolling 3-year model, refreshed every quarter, with scenarios for the two or three variables that actually move the business — sales pipeline conversion, headcount timing, gross margin, funding milestones.

Report. A monthly board pack with a one-page dashboard, commentary on variance to plan, cohort or unit economics where relevant, and a clear ask of the board for each decision on the agenda. No 40-page decks that nobody reads.

Deals. Fundraising, refinancing, acquisitions, disposals — the CFO owns the data room, the model, the diligence responses and the negotiation on financial terms alongside your legal advisors.

Investors do not just diligence the business; they diligence the finance function. A messy trial balance, an unreliable forecast or a founder who cannot answer a unit-economics question in a first meeting all reduce valuation — sometimes materially, sometimes fatally.

For clients preparing to raise, we run an investor-readiness sprint in the 8–12 weeks before the process opens: cleaning the historic numbers, restating them on a consistent revenue-recognition basis, building the model in the format investors expect, and preparing a data room that answers the standard diligence questions before they are asked.

During the raise we sit in investor meetings alongside the founder, run the process end-to-end where the founder wants to protect their time, and manage the diligence phase through to close. Post-close we set up the monthly investor reporting cadence and covenant tracking where debt is involved.

Once a business has product-market fit, the CFO's highest-leverage work is usually unit economics. What does a customer actually cost to acquire? What do they contribute in gross profit over their lifetime? How does that vary by channel, segment, product tier? Which cohorts are getting better and which are quietly getting worse?

We build cohort-based revenue and margin analysis into your monthly reporting so these questions have answers, not opinions. That feeds directly into pricing decisions, channel-mix decisions, and the question every scale-up eventually faces: are we growing profitably enough to slow down fundraising, or do we need to raise sooner to fund the next stage?

We start with a two-week diagnostic: we review your last twelve months of accounts, your current forecast if one exists, your management pack, and the top three decisions on the founder's mind. At the end of the two weeks we present a written findings note with a proposed engagement shape — days per month, deliverables, fee, and the specific outcomes we will be measured against in the first ninety days.

Ongoing engagements are month-to-month with a 30-day notice period on either side. There is no long lock-in. We deliberately size the engagement so that a full-time CFO hire, when the business is ready for one, is a clean handover rather than a difficult conversation — we help recruit the permanent CFO and hand over the systems we built.