When to hire a fractional CFO
"You're losing $500 on every single deck you build." That's what I told a business owner who came to me convinced his million-dollar company was ready to double in size.
He wasn't expecting that. He thought he had a growth problem. He actually had a numbers problem — and he didn't even know it.
That's the thing about running a business past a certain size: you can be busy, profitable-looking, and completely blind to what's actually happening under the hood.
A lot of business owners have heard the term "fractional CFO" and still aren't totally sure what it means. So let me break it down simply, with a couple of real stories along the way.
You're likely too big to wing it with just a bookkeeper. But you're not quite at the stage where hiring a full-time CFO makes sense. That's exactly the gap a fractional CFO fills.
We're talking about companies typically with 1 to 50 employees, or $1 million to $20 million in revenue — real growth happening, real decisions being made, real money on the line. These are the businesses that need serious financial leadership but need it in a way that actually fits their size and budget.
I've seen what that looks like up close. A struggling doctors' group that couldn't make payroll turned things around and sold for a profit years later. A company that thought it needed better sales instead just needed someone to pick up the phone and fix bad invoices — that call recovered $100,000 in receivables sitting on the books, uncollected.
None of those were sales problems. They were clarity problems. And clarity is exactly what a fractional CFO brings to the table.
What you get is a seasoned financial mind at your table — someone who knows the questions to ask, the numbers to watch, and the warning signs to catch before they become expensive problems.
It's not a luxury. For a lot of the business owners I talk to, it's the single most impactful investment they've made.
If you've ever thought, "I wish I had someone I could trust with this stuff" — that's exactly the conversation I love having.
Rusty Fulling