Common questions
If your question is not here, book a free Financial Clarity Session and ask me directly. No pitch, just answers.
Basics
An experienced chief financial officer who works with your business on a part-time, ongoing basis rather than as a full-time employee. You get the financial strategy, the forecasting and the executive judgment at a fraction of the cost.
A senior financial partner in your corner, without the $150K to $300K salary, benefits and overhead that a full-time seat carries.
Your bookkeeper records what already happened: transactions, categorizations, reconciliations. They keep the books tidy.
Your CPA reports on what happened and keeps you compliant. Statements, tax returns. Both are looking backwards, correctly.
A CFO takes that history and uses it to plan forward: cash flow forecasting, growth modeling, hiring decisions, pricing.
RightHand CFO works alongside your existing accountant and bookkeeper rather than instead of them. At the Foundation level we handle the bookkeeping too, so one partner has all of it.
Large companies have CFOs because financial clarity produces better decisions, and that is as true for a $2M service business as for a $200M corporation.
Smaller businesses often need the thinking more urgently, not less. There is no finance department to catch a mistake, model a scenario, or flag a cash problem while it is still small. A fractional CFO fills that gap at a price that fits the stage you are actually at.
How it works
A free thirty-minute conversation. I review the current state of your financial data and ask about your goals, your friction points, and the decisions you are trying to make.
By the end of it you have three things: an honest assessment of your financial health, a clear recommendation of which engagement fits, and a flat monthly price. No obligation to proceed.
The first ninety days are the most intensive. Three steps.
The Diagnostic. We scrub your books for integrity. Bad data produces bad forecasts, so this comes first and you hear plainly what I find.
The Model. We build your twelve-month rolling cash flow forecast. From then on, every major move runs through it before you commit.
The Partnership. Executive sessions, ongoing access, and monthly reporting you can actually read. The work turns proactive instead of reactive.
Foundation. Your books are handled, your statements are delivered by the 10th of the following month, and you get a plain-language summary with any flags or observations.
Fractional CFO. All of the above, plus a sixty-minute executive session where we review the forecast, work through whatever decisions are on your plate, and update your KPI dashboard. You also have direct access to me between sessions.
Is this right for me
Service businesses doing $1M to $10M in annual revenue is where this works best. Below that, Foundation can still make sense if you are growing toward $1M and want clean books from the start. Above $10M the CFO scope usually widens, so that is worth a conversation rather than an assumption.
No. Messy books are the most common starting point, which is exactly why step one is a full data integrity review. The cleanup is part of onboarding.
If you are more than three to six months behind, that catch-up work gets folded into your quoted price up front, so there is no surprise invoice later.
Yes. We engage at the CFO level only and work alongside your current bookkeeper. I will want to review the quality of the data before building a forecast on it, but you do not have to disturb a relationship that is working.
Service businesses: contractors and home services, specialty trades and field service, consulting and professional services, marketing and creative agencies, technology consultancies, and financial advisory firms. Clients have included tree services, wealth management firms and specialty contractors.
The common thread is not the industry. It is revenue that arrives in contracts and projects rather than a level monthly subscription, which is the pattern a forecast is built to solve. If you are product-based, in manufacturing or in retail, reach out anyway and I will tell you honestly whether this fits.
Pricing
Foundation, which is bookkeeping and financial statements, starts at $750 a month. Fractional CFO starts at $1,850 a month. Both are flat monthly fees. No hourly billing and no variable charges.
Your exact rate is quoted at your Clarity Session once I have looked at your books, and it is fixed for twelve months from there. Businesses with higher transaction volumes or more entities price above the starting rate.
Engagements begin with a three-month onboarding commitment. Those first ninety days are the labor-intensive part: scrubbing data, building the forecast, learning your business. After that you are month-to-month with thirty days written notice.
It is structured that way because the onboarding investment is real on my side, and because three months is the minimum honest window for either of us to judge whether it is working.
Yes, and most clients do. Starting at Foundation is good sequencing rather than a compromise: clean books first makes the forecasting materially more accurate. Upgrading is seamless, with no new onboarding fee and no disruption.
Day to day
Less than you are spending now. Once onboarded, most CFO clients spend sixty to ninety minutes a month in executive sessions, and get back the hours they used to spend staring at reports they did not fully trust.
During the first ninety days, expect a few hours to gather documents and answer questions while we build the foundation.
Primarily QuickBooks Online. If you are on something else, say so on the call. I have worked in Xero and we can talk through options. You will not be required to switch platforms as a condition of working together.
Me. RightHand CFO is deliberately small so that every client gets CFO-level attention rather than a hand-off. Your sessions are with me and your between-session access is to me.
A full-time seat makes financial sense at one of three milestones: you are planning or executing a major financial event such as an acquisition or a debt facility; you are consistently above $15M to $20M in revenue with complex daily demands; or you have high-risk internal financial functions that need dedicated oversight.
Below those thresholds, a full-time hire usually means paying $200K+ for someone doing perhaps $100K of strategic work and filling the rest of the week with bookkeeping they are overqualified for. Most service businesses between $1M and $10M never need one.
Not always, and this surprises almost every owner who looks at it properly for the first time. High-revenue clients often consume disproportionate team time, invite scope creep, and require specialized labor that erodes the margin. A client paying you $200K a year can be less profitable than one paying $80K if the first takes three times the hours.
One of the first things a CFO engagement produces is true profitability by client: revenue, minus direct labor, minus direct expenses. It reliably turns up one or two accounts that are quietly anchoring the business. Once you know which, you can reprice, rescope, or point that capacity at better work.
A free thirty-minute call with me. Nothing to prepare. Show up with your questions and a rough sense of where the business is.
I will ask about your current financial setup, the decisions you are weighing, and what is actually on your mind. By the end you will have an honest read on your financial health, a clear sense of which engagement fits, and a flat monthly price if you want to go forward. No pitch and no obligation. The goal is that you leave with at least one thing you can act on whether we work together or not.
CFO clients reach me by phone or email between sessions. If the decision needs a new model or a scenario run, I turn that around inside twenty-four to forty-eight business hours rather than making you wait for the next session.
Book a free thirty-minute call and ask me directly. You will get straight answers, not a sales pitch.
No contracts to sign. No homework beforehand. Bring your questions.