Running a business is rarely easy. Change is the new normal and this brings its own challenges.

If you are running a business and there is significant change, these are the sort of signs to look out for that could mean that a fractional FD/CFO is for you:

Experiencing financial challenges

This is a worrying and distracting time for an owner manager and usually necessitates regular and robust cash flow management and managing creditor expectations; getting this wrong is not really an option. Having someone on the team who has experience of managing this sort of situation is invaluable.

Managing through periods of change – perhaps growth or consolidation

As businesses scale up, roles change. Moving from a culture of being managed by a small number of people to a team management structure can be painful.

Acquisitions

Again, a period of change and unless you have done this before you are in new territory. Help identifying possible targets, running the due diligence (DD), instructing legals, arranging funding for the transaction and integration post-acquisition will again be made a lot easier if members of your team have been there, seen it, done it.

Exiting your business

At some point you will need to consider how to exit your business – the same business that you have built up over a number of years and invested a lot of time, effort and money in to. This time, you need to make sure that the finances of your business are telling the right story to be worth the best money.

But before then, you need to work out what you are trying to achieve; perhaps it is to maximise cash in your personal bank account, or maybe you want to preserve the jobs of a team who have been loyal to you over all those years. This will influence how you sell and who you sell to.

What better way to have look after the finances of your business than by trusting someone with deep experience and who can be called upon when needed?

While we are at it, let’s face up to some of the jargon flying around and decode it:

What’s in a word?

While others might seek to dress this up as something very complicated, really it is not. And here’s why:

A ‘Finance Director’ (FD) is basically the same as a ‘Chief Financial Officer’ (CFO) – we will use the hybrid term “FD/CFO” meaning the same thing.
‘Part time’ means the same as ‘fractional’, or, indeed, ‘plural’ – we will keep up with the times and use the buzzy “fractional”.
‘Interim’ is usually doing something on a project basis – typically for a finite and limited time.

We have distilled our thinking down into a series of brief articles which, again at the risk of making assumptions, seek to address the questions that you will have about how best to manage your finance function – and if you are not asking these questions, then could we perhaps suggest that you should be asking them? Try these 3 articles for starters:

Don’t let your limited resources hamper the growth of your business. The benefits of working with a fractional FD/CFO are clear and with them as part of your management team you will be able to make informed decisions based on real data and, ultimately, be able to sleep easy at night knowing that that bit of the business that you may not fully understand is in safe hands.

About Tectona

Tectona Partnership helps business owners sleep at night by embedding one of our 18 commercially minded FD/CFOs in your management team.

Very often, a part time (or fractional) FD/CFO is the most effective solution.

We make sure you have the necessary management information and strategic insight to make informed decisions and reduce risk; and we will absolutely tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it.