🤔 A Fractional CFO’s Day-to-Day Roadmap

Have you ever wondered what exactly a fractional CFO is?

Small businesses don’t always have the budget to hire a full finance team, but they still need payroll, accounting and financial planning support — just like their larger counterparts. To fill that need while remaining budget-conscious, many turn to outsourcing. Bringing in a dedicated finance and accounting partner gives business owners the ability to handle their finance function needs and speed up growth without the huge overhead cost.

That’s where fractional CFOs come in. Leveraging their strategic skills and financial frameworks, fractional CFOs can support small businesses with everything from basic accounting to long-term business growth trajectories. Whether part-time or full-time, there’s a lot financial professionals can learn from a day in the life of a fractional CFO.

Digging Deep into Data

Fractional CFO and The CFO Show guest Kendra James Anderson calls this the “back of house work” that any finance leader needs to do to be successful. Some of these tasks probably feel quite familiar; they’re what are typically thought of when one thinks of a finance function:

✅Evaluating financial statements 
✅Creating summaries based on cash flow trends
✅Using analytics to understand the logistics behind potential business decisions

For fractional CFOs, it doesn’t stop there. They get deep into the data with an end goal: to tease out the story the numbers are telling. Based on that story, the fractional CFO can offer their insights on:

Growth opportunities: Many business owners miss out on the growth opportunities that can be possible when their cash flow is properly managed. A fractional CFO can offer guidance on how to strategically approach an expansion or acquisition based on the numbers and trends before them.

Operations and strategy: Revenue is the end product of a business’s operations: product development, payroll, sales and so on. Those numbers all tell a story that can prompt your fractional CFO to offer strategic and operational guidance to help maximize every aspect of the business. 

Ongoing challenges: Every business has challenges, and now more than ever, weathering a financial storm takes finesse. Fractional CFOs are uniquely positioned to embed themselves within a small business and offer the support needed to prepare for lower-revenue months while still remaining profitable overall.

A New Definition of Financial Health

When it comes to ongoing financial stability, that concept has shifted markedly from pre- to post-pandemic days. While a company might have the same financial reserves now as it did pre-COVID-19, they might not feel as secure as it did back then.

While small businesses are often encouraged to save to remain financially solvent, there is not always extensive, specific, strategic guidance on how to do so. Investing in financial health is crucial for any business, especially smaller ones at the inflection point of growth.

Our conversation with Kendra brought about a wealth of knowledge for entrepreneurs, business owners and financial professionals aspiring to the CFO seat. The latest episode of The CFO Show is one you don’t want to miss.

In case you missed it…

When you think of professional sports teams, you probably don’t think about the CFO… but they’re essential to the strategic success of the franchise. What’s more, what happens on the books can impact what happens during the game, as James Suh, CFO of the Florida Panthers, shares in his conversation with The CFO Show.

What’s next…

The transformative potential of AI for finance teams is extraordinary, and CFOs need to educate themselves on how, where and when to adopt new technologies –– as well as what they can be doing ahead of adoption to prepare their organizations. The CFO Show speaks with Howard Dresner, Founder and Chief Research Officer a technologist, who actually coined the term.