Hiring Best Practices: What to Look for When Hiring a Part-Time CFO

July 11, 2019 by

Are you looking to hire a CFO that will oversee the financial side of your business?

As you start to consider what to look for in a CFO and who would be the best fit for your business, your first instinct might be to interview full-time candidates only. However, you’ll be missing out on the many benefits that qualified, part-time CFOs bring to the table.

The Benefits of Hiring a Part-Time CFO

Immediacy for Urgency

When the needs of a business are urgent, it is usually easier and quicker to hire a part-time employee to help out, instead of instigating a full-time position. Given the nature of their role, part-time CFOs can act quickly on fulfilling specific needs, whether it is identifying business pain points or ways to make the business more profitable. Although you may only request your part-time CFO to work once a week, they will be ready to help whenever you need them, and they are always just a call or email away.

Financial Leadership

Other than solving immediate challenges, a part-time CFO can also act as a strategic business partner and help grow your business in a sustainable way. For example, they can prepare financial forecasts, develop annual plans for revenues and expenses, and assess the competitive landscape and long-term cash flows. As a result, this would help free up any business owner’s time, so they can focus on other aspects of the business.

Affordability

Aside from solving a company’s short and long term goals, one of the biggest benefits of hiring a part-time CFO is that you can have access to an experienced CFO at a fraction of the cost of a full-time CFO. A full-time CFO delivers all the benefits of a part-time CFO but at an increased cost and financial commitment, and most SMEs do not require that skillset or experience every day of the week. Instead of investing in extra recruitment and hiring costs to find a full-time candidate, your business can reap the benefits of a part-time CFO who has practical, financial, and strategic skills to offer.

Flexible & Customizable Work

Flexibility is becoming more acceptable in today’s business landscape, allowing for part-time CFOs to fit right in with their varying schedules. Once you hire a part-time CFO, they will take on a variety of different tasks, based on what and when you need them for. Depending on the part-time CFO’s experience, they can also cater to different business markets and fulfill various needs. Overall, this results in an efficient solution for both parties, where clear roles and responsibilities are established and no time is wasted.

Open & Honest Dialogue

An advantageous quality that most part-time CFOs (and part-time employees in general) have is their ability to be candid with their employers. You can expect a qualified, part-time CFO to challenge you in ways that a full-time employee might feel uncomfortable doing. An employee’s honesty and transparency tend to lead to meaningful discussions that push businesses towards their goals and bring clarity in times of confusion. Since part-time CFOs are independent workers, you can also confide in them about any departmental issues you may be facing.

Expertise in Local and International Markets

Depending on your business needs, you may require a part time-CFO who is familiar with the local and international markets – companies such as the CFO Centre provide access to a network of local, national and international teams to support a diverse variety of needs that an individual CFO cannot offer. There are also over 60 experienced part-time CFO’s to choose from who have expertise in various sectors.

Finding A Suitable Candidate

There are many qualities to look for in a CFO, however, we have outlined some of the most important below:

Big Picture Thinking

A CFO who can see beyond the numbers would be a valuable asset to your company. This individual would be able to interpret data in a meaningful way and provide analysis that encourages positive growth for the company.

Communicative Team Player

Considering that a part-time CFO will not operate within a consistent schedule, they should be able to communicate often with others and provide extensive detail whenever necessary. It is also important that they are a team player who gets along with other employees, otherwise, they will not be able to work efficiently and successfully with your team.

Multi-Faceted Experience

To make the most of your part-time CFO’s skill set, you should consider how much experience they have with different companies and within various industries. Individuals with an impressive range of previous experience can provide valuable perspectives on different problems, strategies, and goals that other employees may fail to see.

Life-Long Learner

Ideally, your part-time CFO should be excited about building upon their skills and developing their career, to ensure that they stay up-to-date in their respective fields. Without this attitude, your business will not be able to grow and progress from a financial standpoint.

Interested in hiring a part-time CFO of your own? Browse our selection of Canada’s most qualified, part-time CFOs.

The importance of a business plan and how to create one – Part II

May 23, 2019 by

In our previous article, we have highlighted the importance of creating a business plan. In this article, we will focus on the key elements of a business plan, the sections it should contain and how a part-time CFO can help you to create your business plan and implement it.

The key elements of a business plan

The most important part of your business plan is its financial information. Your financial forecasts should include your cash flow predictions for the next 12 months or more. You’ll also need to provide monthly sales estimates and costs to prove the business has enough working capital or to show that you understand you need to arrange additional financing.

You need to explain all assumptions in the business plan, with best and worst case scenarios. Detail the risks you’re likely to face and how they will be dealt with.

The Business Plan Sections

Executive Summary
The executive summary is usually the first section of any business plan and provides a condensed overview of what the business is and how you intend to reach your goals. If you’re seeking funding, you should detail the terms of the financing and the amount needed. It’s best to leave writing this section until after you’ve completed the rest. It should be less than 1,400 words.

Company description
This is like an extended elevator pitch. You need to explain your company history, business goals and how you satisfy the needs or wants of your market. You will also need to explain your competitive advantage.

Market analysis
You will also need to provide market analysis, size and expected growth as well as, industry participants, distribution patterns, competition and buying patterns, and your main competitors.

Organization and management
In this section, you need to detail your management team (and plans to fill any gaps within that team), your organizational structure, your Board of Directors, as well as a personal plan.

Service or product line
You need to describe your product or service and any associated copyright information or research and development activities.

Marketing and sales
You need to detail your marketing strategy (including pricing, promotion) and your sales strategy (including sales forecasts, programs, and techniques). Your costs, services, and support will also need to be included in this section.

Financial projections
This section outlines what you expect your business to achieve financially over the next three to five years. It needs to include your projected financial statements, expected cash flow and break-even analysis as well as key financial indicators and ratios. Don’t be tempted to overstate your numbers or expectations to obtain financing. It’s likely to harm rather than help you get that funding.

Funding request
If you plan to ask for a loan or capital, you need to include a formal funding request as part of your business plan. You need to include details of how much money you need now and how much you’ll need in the future.

How a part-time CFO can help you to create your business plan and implement it

The CFO Centre will provide you with a highly experienced senior CFO with ‘big business experience’ for a fraction of the cost of a full-time CFO. This means you will have:

One of Canada’s leading CFOs, working with you on a part-time basis
A local support team of the highest caliber CFOs
A national and internationally collaborative team of the top CFOs sharing best practice (the power of hundreds) Access to our national and international network of clients and partners

With all that support and expertise at your fingertips, you will achieve better results, faster. It means you’ll have more confidence and clarity when it comes to decision-making. After all, you’ll have access to expert help and advice whenever you need it.

In particular, your part-time CFO will work closely with you to develop your business plan and your timetable for implementation to:

Gain a full understanding of the business and its operating
Work through the existing strategic plan with you and make necessary changes to build a plan which clarifies how the company’s objectives can be realistically achieved.
Agree on milestones and break down the plan into annual and quarterly targets.
Conduct a fresh SWOT (Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, Threats) analysis, bringing the plan up to date.
Conduct a new PEST (Political, Economic, Social and Technological) analysis, bringing the plan up to date.
Carry out a full competitor analysis to understand in detail what is and isn’t working in the market.
Explore opportunities for effective market research to enable innovation and development of new products/ channels to market/operating procedures
Identify key players in the business
Identify skill gaps in the business
Agree financial incentive structures to retain and motivate key members of the team
Identify five key metrics for determining what the future course of the business should look like
Agree on the exit or succession strategy
Develop a clear, coherent message (vision/ mission/purpose) to staff and to customers
Work with the senior team to ensure individual department goals are aligned with the big picture strategy
Agree on a who/what/when set of objectives for all department heads
Implement accountability protocol for every member of staff
Determine methodology which allows the senior team to course correct periodically when a change in strategy is required
Agree on delegation of authority to department heads to spread responsibility across the business and to free up the CEO/business owners time
Create a feedback route so that strategic goals are regularly shared with staff
Develop a set of relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and a system which allows for regular (daily/ weekly/monthly/annual) monitoring and reporting
Develop a long-term efficient tax structure for the business and for key employees
Identify key outsource suppliers/advisors and, in particular, corporate finance contacts

This process will instill a deep feeling of confidence both within the senior team and throughout the rest of the business.

Conclusion

Installing an up to date business plan or ‘roadmap’ in your business will allow you to experience a sense of control, which may have been absent since the day you started your company.

The business plan (and the methodology for updating the business plan) will remove a significant amount of confusion from your operating procedures. There will always be challenges contained within new projects but you will have a proper framework against which all decision-making can take place.

The plan provides the blueprint for delegating responsibility to your team and allows you to create some space in your own environment to work on growing your business, with your part-time CFO as a constant guide and sounding board.

You will move out of the chaos and into a more serene working environment where each of the gears, which make up the bigger system, is able to move in harmony.

Potential hazards will have been identified in advance and dealt with before they become unmanageable. You will be able to move from a culture of fire-fighting to a culture of fire-prevention and the benefits will be felt by each member of your team and most probably by your customers too.

The business plan is the first key to profitable growth!

Keys to Profitable Growth – Financial Reporting

February 13, 2019 by

Have you ever been so far off the grid – on a wilderness expedition, maybe – that your smartphone doesn’t know where you are? If you click on your “maps” app, your phone just shows you a blue dot, figuratively shrugs its shoulders and says, “You’re on the blue dot. But I have no clue what’s around you, where you’ve been or where you’re going.”

That uncomfortable “lost” feeling applies to more than just wilderness trekking. It can apply to your business – when you have no clear idea of which products or services are most profitable, how much you can afford to spend on new equipment, and whether you are on track to your goal (maybe, a comfortable retirement?).

So what’s the “maps app” for your business, so you can see how to get where you want to go? It’s your financial reporting system.

Financial Reporting – One Key to Profitable Growth

To be successful, you and your senior managers need regular access to accurate insights into your business. You need to be able to spot problems when they first emerge; measure and assess what’s working; identify and capitalize on opportunities, and recognize and manage threats.

When you know the reality of how your business is actually performing, you have a platform to confront the reality and can make decisions based on facts rather than speculation, bias and anecdotal evidence.

The importance of business reporting is twofold:

To have visibility into the future (knowing what is likely to happen around the corner).
To have retrospective visibility over past performance (that is, to analyze performance data and use it as a tool to course correct for the future).

A lot of businesses wait too long to introduce a proper business financial reporting structure. But without the right information collected in a timely way, effective analysis and robust planning is impossible.

Well-constructed business reports are the secret weapon for CEOs and business owners of ambitious growth companies. They will reveal how your company is performing and how far you are from reaching your goals.

Three key aspects to your financial GPS

While large companies have sophisticated financial systems tied to human resources metrics, production equipment, and inventory controls, you don’t need to get that elaborate – yet.

Start with mastery of three key financial statements:

The Balance Sheet
The Cash Flow Statement
The Profit and Loss Account

These reports can reveal such information as:

How effective your team is at controlling costs and deploying expenses to generate sales
Which of your products or services are the fastest growing and the most profitable
Your highest growth potential and most profitable customers
Where your break-even point is (how much sales the business needs to produce to cover all its costs)

Having all your business data at your fingertips means that you can spot gaps and weaknesses at a glance, have clear visibility over the future and course correct daily to ensure you are still en route to your destination.

Your company’s balance sheet: shows what your company owes and what it owes at a given time. It reveals:

The net value of your company (which is useful if you plan to raise capital to finance future growth, sell your business, etc.)
Current and long-term debt obligations
Asset management (how effectively you’re managing your assets) and liquidity ratios

Lenders, investors and potential customers can use your balance sheet to assess your company’s creditworthiness, as well as its stability and liquidity – indicating its ability to fund growth without resorting to outside financing.

Profit and loss account: while the balance sheet is like a still image posted to Instagram, the P&L account is more like a video. It is the main way businesses determine how well they’re performing over time.

This is the main tool businesses use to gauge their profitability. It shows how well (or not) your company performed over a particular period of time in terms of revenue, expenses and earnings.

The Profit and Loss Account reveals the steps you can take to increase profitability (for example, whether to focus on more profitable product lines or services or to cut unnecessary expenses).

Investors will use your Profit and Loss Account to assess the ability of a Company to generate cash from operations, service current financing obligations and assess the level of risk involved in extending additional credit or venture capital to your company.

Cash flow statement: reveals how your company spends its cash (cash outflows) and where the money comes from (cash inflows) during a period of time. It is divided into three sections related to your company’s business operations: cash flow from operations, financing, and investing transactions.

Essentially, the Cash Flow Statement reveals whether or not your company has the cash to cover its daily activities, pay bills on time and maintain a positive cash flow. It also helps you to determine whether you’ll need additional working capital to buy inventory or to fund seasonal fluctuations.

Interpret your key financial statements using ratios

To interpret and understand the numbers contained in your financial statements, you should use financial ratios. The ratios are computed from numbers taken from the Profit and Loss Account and the Balance Sheet.

They measure performance in percentage terms rather than raw numbers. This means you can compare your company’s performance with other businesses in your industry, with your previous results and with your projections. _

Typically, owners, managers, and stakeholders look at four categories of ratios to analyze a company’s performance:

Liquidity ratios – show your company’s ability to meet its financial obligations
Profitability ratios – help evaluate your company’s ability to generate a return on its resources
Leverage ratios – show how your business is using debt, relative to capital
Efficiency ratios – reveal how effectively your company is managing assets.

Some ratios will be more applicable to certain industries and businesses than others. If you provide a service rather than sell products, then ratios like return on assets and inventory turnover are unlikely to be relevant to your company whereas the receivables revenue is critical to your business operations.

It’s best to choose the five most relevant ratios to your business and track those as part of your monthly management operating plan.

Conclusion

The benefits of having regular access to high-quality financial management reports are far-reaching. Good reports reveal the efficiency (or otherwise) of the constituent parts of the business and enable you to deal with potential threats and take advantage of opportunities to grow your business.

The compound effect of making regular, quick and high-quality decisions based on a strong set of data and reports cannot be overestimated.

Understanding Business Risk – How to Avoid the Road to Ruin

September 4, 2018 by

Entrepreneurship means taking risks, such as launching new products, entering new markets, or using new processes. Because this involves uncertainty, there are always chances that things will go wrong.

Our experience at the CFO Centre has been that the most successful companies take the time to understand the downside of the risks they take, and then find a way to compensate for those downsides.

As the CFO Cente’s book “Scale Up” says, a lot of business owners spend an unhealthy amount of time worrying about what might go wrong, but don’t have a formal risk management framework in place. One of the most dangerous positions to be in is not knowing what might harm you. That’s why “Scale Up” suggests starting with a comprehensive risk analysis, to identify potential risks to your business.

This post talks about how you can understand the risks your company faces, and develop a way to manage those risks.

Why is business risk analysis important to you?

Business risk analysis is an essential part of the planning process. It reveals all the hidden hazards, which occupy the business owner’s mind on a subconscious level but which have not been carefully considered and documented on a conscious level.

Not understanding the risks your company faces can bring your company to its knees, as a 2011 report, ‘The Road to Ruin’ from Cass Business School revealed.

Alan Punter, a visiting Professor of Risk Finance at Cass Business School, said the result of a detailed analysis of 18 business crises during which enterprises failed revealed that directors were often unaware of the risks they faced.[1]

“Seven of the firms collapsed and three had to be rescued by the state while most of the rest suffered large losses and significant damage to their reputations,” he said.

“About 20 Chief Executives and Chairmen subsequently lost their jobs, and many Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) were removed or resigned in the aftermath of the crises. In almost all cases, the companies and/or board members personally were fined, and executives were given prison sentences in four cases.”

“One of our main goals was to identify whether these failures were random or had elements in common.”

“And our conclusion? To quote Paul Hopkin of Airmic, the Risk Management Association that commissioned the research: ‘This report makes clear that there is a pattern to the apparently disconnected circumstances that cause companies in completely different areas to fail. In simple terms, directors are too often blind to the risks they face.’”

A lot of business owners spend an unhealthy amount of their time worrying about what might go wrong but don’t have a formal risk management framework in place. It is dangerous not knowing what might go wrong.

What are the risks facing your business?

Business risks can be broken up into the following:

Strategic risks – risks that are associated with operating in a particular industry
Compliance risks – risks that are associated with the need to comply with laws and regulations.
Financial risks – risks that are associated with the financial structure of your business, the transactions your business makes, and the financial systems you have in place
Operational risks – risks that are associated with your business’ operational and administrative procedures.
Market/Environmental risks – external risks that a company has little control over such as major storms or natural disasters, the global financial crisis, changes in government legislation or policies.[2]

The ‘shoot, fire, aim’ approach favored by many entrepreneurs is great for making things happen quickly but often jeopardizes the long-term stability of the business.

What is needed is balance.

Once the business understands the risks, it means that it can move forward decisively and confidently. It’s hard to do this when there is a cloud of confusion hanging over the business.

Where to start?

You need to assess your business and identify potential risks. Once you understand the extent of possible risks, you will be able to develop cost-effective and realistic strategies for dealing with them. Consider your critical business activities, including your staff, key services and resources, and the things that could affect them (for example, illness, natural disaster, power failures, etc.). Doing this assessment will help you to work out which aspects of your business could not operate without.

Identify the risks

Look at your business plan and determine what you cannot do without and what type of incidents could have an adverse impact on those areas. Ask yourself whether the risks are internal or external. When, how, why and where are risks likely to occur in your business? Who might be affected or involved if an accident occurs?

Assess your processes

Evaluate your work processes (use inspections, checklists, and flow charts). Identify each step in your processes and think about the associated risks. What would stop each step from happening? How would that affect the rest of the process?

Analyzing the level of risk

Once you’ve identified risks relating to your business, you’ll need to analyze their likelihood and consequences, and then come up with options for managing them. You need to separate small risks that may be acceptable from significant risks that must be managed immediately.

You need to consider:

How important each activity is to your business
The amount of control you have over the risk
Potential losses to your business
The benefits or opportunities presented by the risk

Conclusion

By managing the company’s risk profile and the risk profiles of the shareholders the whole business can be brought into alignment and can operate as a unit rather than as a set of individual parts.

This is actually one of the most critical roles in any business and your part-time CFO will support and guide you through the process.

At the CFO Centre, our CFOs have an intimate understanding of every conceivable risk that growing businesses face. This means that we can help you build a much stronger business by knowing how to navigate through the growth stages of the business cycle confident that you are equipped to meet the challenges as they present themselves.

It is never possible to eliminate all risks in a business, but it is possible to create a framework and implement systems which lower your exposure to risk. That, in turn, allows you to focus primarily on growing your business.

Knowing that you have a framework in place to mitigate risk means that you can free up time and mental energy.

Lower your risk today

Let one of The CFO Centre’s part-time CFOs help you with business risk analysis. To book your free one-to-one call with one of our part-time CFOs just click here.

[1] ‘The Road to Ruin’, Punter, Alan, Financial Director, www.financialdirector.co.uk, Aug 18, 2011

[2] Source: https://toolkit.smallbiz.nsw.gov.au

Become a world class leader with a strategic plan

March 27, 2017 by

By Chris Carl
Regional Director at The CFO Centre

A part-time CFO is to an SME what a doctor, a physical trainer, and a world-class coach is to a superstar athlete. The superstar athlete will always be good – but they will only be great if they are healthy (the doctor makes sure of that), they are in great physical shape (the trainer takes care of that) and that they can compete at a world-class level (the world-class coach takes care of that). In a business setting, the CFO Centre refers to these same three levels of conditioning as Business Support (being healthy), Operational Skills (getting in great physical shape), and Strategic Planning (competing at a world class level).

The highly experienced and successful part-time CFOs from The CFO Centre can help make a company flourish in every respect. From increased profitability, to growth through financing or mergers and acquisitions, to increased happiness in the C-suite and all employees, a part-time CFO can literally help perform miracles. But, these results can only be achieved through sound business practices and a great strategic plan. A successful experienced CFO, that costs only a fraction of a full-time CFO, can make all of these happen.

This article (part 4 of 4) discusses developing and implementing a Strategic Plan to make your company able to compete in any market.

Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Strategic Planning

In our final comparison to becoming a world-class athlete, regardless of how strong an athlete you may be, you will never compete at a world-champion level without a great coach. That coach helps you develop your plan to get to the top of the podium – from taking stock of where you stand today, to figuring out what actions might hurt you if not attended to, to laying out a timetable to achieve each part of your overall goal. That coach ensures that you have all of the right resources around you that you will need to win that championship, he/she does a lot more than sit on the sidelines and clap when you perform well.

In business terms, to be able to achieve all of your business goals, (and maybe some you thought were beyond your wildest dreams) you need a Strategic Plan. Don’t confuse this with a wish list. A Strategic Plan involves setting very high goals but it also requires taking stock of your current situation, identifying the risks you need to overcome to achieve your goals, a step-by-step path and resources required to get you there, and a definitive timetable for each step to make sure it all happens. Once in place, it also requires execution.

At The CFO Centre, we believe the highest value we can bring to any client is to help them develop, and execute a “Strategic Plan” that takes the company well beyond what the CEO even thought possible. By following the path of the four key elements, a part-time CFO will bring financial abundance to the company. At the CFO Centre, we define these 4 key elements as:

Strategic Planning can sound lofty and somewhat irrelevant to a company that is in the trenches every day just fighting to survive. But it is exactly what the company needs to get them out of the trenches and on to a much better playing field. A Strategic Plan is like a roadmap and without one, the company will wander aimlessly without direction. And when communicated properly, it helps great alignment and purpose within an organization.

For example, one company I worked with as an investor had world-class technology to help other companies optimize cleanliness and environmental compliance in a manufacturing setting. The small management team was very strong and had great breadth between technical, marketing and financial experience and skill. And while they knew they had a world-class technology, they could not generate the marketing and sales dollars sufficient for them to access and educate the larger customers they desired. By selling to smaller customers, their unit sizes were smaller and they had to keep prices (and therefore margins) low just to be able to make the sale. The result: they were losing money or barely breaking even month after month and year after year.

When I met them through a fellow investor, I found a team that was capable, very focused on getting the job done, and who really knew exactly what they wanted in the long term. BUT, they were stuck in a low margin rut and couldn’t find a way out. So I suggested we take a few more hours out of their life for a few weeks and develop a Strategic Plan.

This plan had to be real, but it also had to lay out a path for them to get to point that they could be selling this amazing equipment to the large customers who needed it most. We sat down and recorded all of the possible goals (crazy ones and real ones), and we looked at all the things that could stop us. While there were many small issues we solved, or developed a plan for, in this process, one of the best examples of how a great Strategic Plan could work was in deciding how to increase product awareness and sales to the desired customers.

Everyone at the company felt that they needed to bring on a couple of top-notch sales people who could cover the continent. The problem was that, just like a full time CFO, highly qualified experienced sales people are expensive to employ full-time and for this company the selling process could take up to a year. That was an added overhead the company just could not afford. So instead we looked to how we could leverage the skills of others and decided that if we could possibly find distributors who already sell products to our desired large customers, maybe they could be our conduits to sales.

So we laid out a plan, and a timetable (the most critical element is that you MUST have a timetable). We decided that we wanted a distributor in 50 States and 12 provinces. I suggested to the team that we set a goal of 1 year to achieve this and I was almost laughed out of the room. “Impossible” they said. But, not wanting to leave and still wanting to become an investor, I asked them not to think about it as 50 new distributors in the US and 12 in Canada a year, but rather 4 distributors in the US and 1 in Canada each month. I suggested that by breaking this seemingly insurmountable plan down into bite sized pieces that not only might we get there, we might just get there faster than we think.

After much debate, not only did we agree to give this a try, but with everyone being so busy we asked everyone on the team to contribute just a little bit. That meant sharing our plan with other customers and contacts, getting on line to research who might be out there, and start making calls. The admin assistant of the company drove the process by recording and organizing everyone’s efforts and new contacts daily, and by doing lots of outreach on her own as well. The team developed financial terms that were good for the distributor that would also be great for the company, and the sales manager found a draft Distributor Agreement that was only 2 pages and had the lawyer sign off.

In month one we signed off on 2 of the 5 that was our goal, and in month 2 we got 4 of 5. The numbers increased every month and by the end of month 10 we had a distributor in all 50 States and 12 provinces in Canada. We achieved this “unachievable goal” in 10 months instead of the year – even when the team thought getting it done in a year was impossible.

The result of setting the strategic goal to eastablish a network of Distributors was the company increased the value of the average sale from $20,000 per sale to $125,000, margins increased from 20% per sale to almost 50%, and the customer profile went from a privately owned business with under $5 million in sales to 80% of customers now being listed on the Fortune 500 – and three of them on the Dow 30.

To be fair, there were lots of fits and starts to get to this point, and there were times that it all seemed like it would come crashing down. But, by having that strategic plan to keep going back to and to measure themselves by, and by having a month to month plan of something achievable rather than a one year plan that seemed impossible, the Company did achieve what seemed like impossible goals. And today the same team is still working their butts off to continue growing the company – but they smile a lot more than they used to – and they know their now larger paychecks can be cashed.

There are dozens of stories like this from our CFOs at the CFO Centre. Strategic Planning may seem like fluff when you can barely make payroll next Friday. But in reality, a strategic plan is exactly the tool that a company with great products or services needs. Whether you are barely breaking even, or making millions in profit, EVERY company will grow and improve with a well developed, and well executed, Strategic Plan. The part-time CFO is the perfect resource to help an already busy team make this happen.

____________________________________

Chris Carl has a 30-year career growing manufacturing based companies with novel technologies both as start-ups and within Fortune 500 companies. Having held both CFO and CEO roles, he has raised a combined $500 million in debt, mezzanine and equity financing in private and public companies listed in Canada, the US and Europe.

The CFO Centre provides highly experienced, part-time CFOs to small and mid-market organizations at a fraction of the cost of a full-time CFO. We are committed to helping companies work through complex financial issues, in order to maximize profit and provide senior financial leadership.

Our global team has over 400 CFOs across 13 countries; our services include business and strategic plan development, financial reporting, cash flow management, internal control, risk assessment and mitigation, training and development, and negotiations.

www.thecfocentre.ca
1-800-918-1906 or email: [email protected]