How Much Time Does a Business Owner Need Spend to Make an Outsourced CFO Work?

One of the most frequent questions we get from business owners interested in an outsourced CFO is “what amount of time do I need to commit to make this work?”

Our objective with the owners of the businesses we work with is simple:

We want you to know everything and doing nothing.

Step 1 starts with asking you, before you even invest a single dollar or a minute of your time, your desired scope, and goals when you get the services of an outsourced CFO. Based on our experience most of the time, we will not get that kind of information from the head of finance, the head of sales and marketing, or the general manager. Only business owners and CEOs can best tell us what objectives they want to achieve from our partnership. We need business owners to understand this from the onset.

After the initial step with you defining the objectives and goals, you can relax, hence “do nothing” while we buckle down to the serious business of Step 2: analyzing your financials from a performance perspective and the underlying processes of your finance and operations team. Then we will present to you our findings and recommendations. This we call the Initial Review.

Based on the Initial Review, we will ask you if you agree or if there are changes you wish to make and insights which need to be added. We will work with your team to make the necessary changes, again without you having to do anything more. Then we go to the next stage of implementation, both knowledge and experience tell us most of the time we will not require anything from the business owner.

This is because we will get your team involved. We will work with your finance team, your operations group, and your sales and marketing team. We won’t use your time as business owners while we undertake this process unless we believe it will be beneficial.

Step 3 involves reporting and communicating with you on an ongoing basis post Initial Review and we are in the “business as usual” stage. We will utilize both formal and informal channels for this stage. The pillar of this is the consistency in the timing of reports we will provide to you, most likely, monthly but we do have clients we report to bi-monthly, or even quarterly meetings.

The informal reporting involves ad-hoc communications which may be project-based, or in graver situations, when a crisis arises that needs to be resolved and communications become urgent. These informal reporting and communications may simply be in the form of an afternoon call or an evening email, depending on the nature or gravity of the concerns involved.

Otherwise, you will not be bothered because as an outsourced CFO, our goal is consistent from start to finish and that is for you to know everything, while you do nothing and leave everything to us.