services
Give yourself a fighting chance in business. If your financial management is weak, you’re sabotaging yourself and your chances for success. Our business finance consulting can help.
Are you making decisions based on facts or feelings? Are you bankable? Could you pass due diligence by a lender, investor or buyer?
Are you well versed in accounting, in reading financial statements, and making sense of the numbers? Are you expert at staffing your accounting department? Establishing strong internal controls? Designing a proper reporting package and KPI dashboard?
Does your accounting leadership work with other managers to drive down costs? Do you even have a target net margin you want to hit to get a good return on your time and capital in the business?
If these aren’t in place, you don’t have great financial management and need the help of a business finance coach. As a business finance expert, I evaluate your accounting and finance department to identify its strengths and weakness. I then prioritize the steps needed to shore up your weaknesses and together, we implement them.
A CFO consultant is someone who was likely a CPA auditor in public accounting who then became controller and CFO of different companies, both large and small. Because they’ve managed all the moving parts of accounting departments, they are ideal for managing your finance department part-time.
An outsourced financial advisor will be the architect of your accounting function, designing your financial statements and reporting package, analyzing your numbers, managing and mentoring your staff, getting you financing, shepherding you through due diligence when financing or selling your company, optimizing your tax structure and being a key strategic advisor to you.
Without these financial essentials, you’ll be running your company blindfolded. You won’t see trends and be able to change course in time, and you’ll likely be spinning your wheels on activities that aren’t doing anything for your bottom line and your company’s valuation.
And, you may have to put more money into the business without knowing why. If you wait too long to get to the root cause, you may not be able to raise capital in time to save your company. A financial consultant will give you objective feedback and ask good questions that prompt you to think in a way you wouldn’t on your own.
If your business and industry are declining, and you’re putting more and more money into the business, you may be too invested in your business, its name and a host of other things to objectively determine what to do. A financial adviser will be more objective than you about what to do.
The biggest mistake I see entrepreneurs make is not getting a CFO to correctly set their accounting staff and processes in place. Too many business owners ignore their financial statements and accounting department. They put up with sub-par performance thinking they know their business so well that they don’t need a great finance department.
The result is that they overpay taxes, don’t see cash flow problems coming, chase unprofitable sales, don’t control costs, are sitting ducks for theft, and much more. They work harder, not smarter.
Their families put up with their sleepless nights, capital risk, and stress. With the right CFO consultant’s advice, you’ll make informed decisions from facts, not feelings, and put your company and family in a less risky position.
A great finance coach will put the right pieces of your financial puzzle in place. Robert Band is a business finance consultant with over 30 years of experience as a CPA and CFO. He’s been CFO consultant to many companies across many industries. In fact, there’s not much he hasn’t seen in his career. See some of his case studies below.
Robert serves clients in Denver, Colorado, Miami, Florida and across the United States. If your accounting and finance department isn’t as described above, you’d be well advised to have Robert evaluate it for you and put the right pieces in place.
He’ll guide you to where you need to be and give you peace of mind and control over your business.
Reach out to him now
Financial consultant case studies
A $40 million company with the wrong CFO couldn’t grow until it fixed its Accounting department. The books and accounts payable were behind. They needed to refinance debt but couldn’t, given the state of their finances. They needed reliable financial analysis and weekly cash flow projections and KPI’s but didn’t have the right person to set those up. And they needed better accounting staff. Their COO was thinking about leading Accounting for a while, but he also was chomping at the bit to grow the business by strengthening automation, sales, and inventory management. As his business finance coach, I informed him that if he took the helm of Accounting, he’d get sucked so deep into it that he’s have little time for anything else. I directed him to a CFO consultant who was more experienced at running finance departments and knew how to fix the problems. I also steered him to the RIGHT headhunter and sales consultant. Now their accounting and sales departments are structured properly and well run and the COO can now devote his time to the things that will enable the rapid growth he knows is possible.
The founder of a marketing firm who grew his marketing business, wearing all the hats along the way, sought my business finance advice. He was bringing in clients, directing the work to be done, doing the billing, collections and the books, and a lot more. With the arrival of his first baby, he realized he needed help. I advised him to outsource those tasks that weren’t the highest and best use of his time. Accounting was one such area. I steered him to the right part-time bookkeeper and a top CPA for his tax planning. Now his books are caught up, he’s buying an office condo with the tax advice of his new CPA, and he’s hyper-focused on his clients and more importantly, on his new baby.
An entrepreneur had made a fortune over her 20 years in business but her industry had recently changed rapidly and she started to burn cash, so much so that in 1 ½ years, she put $1 million back into her company, a lot of which was drawn from her IRA, which cost her taxes and penalties on that money. I analyzed her financial statements and posed a lot of questions which made her think through many issues. It became clear to her that her business wasn’t going to return to profitability and that she should shut it down. She was so emotionally invested in her company, its name and employees that without an objective business finance coach to make her see the reality of her situation, she might have lost much of the wealth she had built up over that 20 years. Luckily, she did the right thing and is now happily in a new business.
An $8 million technology company had a controller who was trying to implement NetSuite software while running day-to-day Accounting operations. The NetSuite software implementation wasn’t moving fast enough and the license cost and cost of not using it was costing the company dearly. As their finance expert, I evaluated their Accounting staff and processes and identified the root causes of their problems, one of which was that their controller wasn’t going to get NetSuite implemented on top of his regular duties. I steered them to a proven NetSuite consultant who pulled the NetSuite implementation across the finish line. Now the company is getting its money’s worth of reports tailored to its business in a way they never had before, and their closing process is much more efficient as a result.
The CFO of a tech company was self-taught in finance and accounting and reached out for CFO mentorship. Her company wanted to raise $2 million dollars to finance the marketing of its software and in a few years, sell the company. She had never been through a capital raise or sale of a company. Having been a CFO consultant and business coach for many years, I informed her of what she needed to prepare for investor and buyer due diligence. I paired her with a CFO Consultant who mentored her. Together, they made their books GAAP compliant and got through an audit, recapitalized the company by converting debt to equity, documented their transaction processes and controls, created financial projections, and structured a deal with the investor.
The CEO of a technology company was tired of running his company without financial information and knew he needed to shore up his accounting department. He has a junior bookkeeper who enters transactions in the books and an outside CPA who closes the books. The problem is that the CPA hasn’t been in in months, so the books are way behind. And now that it’s tax season, the CPA doesn’t have time to complete the cleanup. So not only will the results for the year just ended not be available soon, but it could be months into the new year before his books are current. As his financial advisor, I convinced him that time was of the essence to get a handle on the numbers and introduced him to a qualified bookkeeper to clean up his books at a bill rate much cheaper than his CPA’s. I also steered him to a new CPA to do his taxes. So now he has the right accounting team and can make informed decisions, save more in taxes and be more profitable.
